I think the purpose of invitations is to allow time for adjustments and tuning and adding resources to the hosting environment, not malice or a desire to make people beg.
Much like invitations are used to make sure every guest gets a seat and a piece of cake at the party....
I've been thinking along the same lines. It is a generalisation of course every fate is different, but I think many people growing up today in the western world seem less happy, more cynical and depressed, unable to focus etc. Basically the symptoms you describe.
I also agree it's related to having it too easy when they (we) were young. Many were born into a high standard of living and nothing was hard until they moved out of their parents home. Life was good then suddenly gets dramatically worse (Not bad, in any objective way of measuring it, but worse than they are used to.)
Compare this to their parents, who grew up from the 40s to the 80s. From the hardships of life in the 40s to the luxury of the 80s they managed to increase their quality of life little by little throughout their entire lives ending up with houses, fine cars, big salaries and stable employment. To see this progress year by year is motivating and makes people happy.
People today often struggle to reach the same standard they had when they were living at home, let alone seeing some consistent improvement. They are fighting to get "back to even", basically. You work for years in order to pay down on a house half the size of the one you grew up in, if you can even dream of affording a house at all. You save for years to go to some exotic place you already visited several times with your parents. Having a stable job in the area where you grew up and all your childhood friends still live is a fantasy, most of your co-workers are basically strangers and so on. All the things the world has to offer - you did most of them already and watched the rest in Cinemascope. The experiences are clichés before you even get there.
There are other factors as well of course, general lack of honest interaction with people, information overload, companies so large that you become anonymous, etc etc, but I think this is a big part of it. Simply put, there are many more rich people having to deal with becoming poorer today than it used to be. People are reaching goals lower than their expectations. This has always been depressing, so a certain percentage of people will be depressed by it, for a while.
No totalitarian regime should ever possess nukes or any weapon of mass destruction for that matter.
Totalitarian regimes take actions based on the impulses of a single person, and nukes can destroy the world. Destroying the world should be a committee decision at the very least.
You are right, I was unclear. Since the topic is psychopaths I had that "subcategory" of criminals in mind. I'm talking about people who kill for the sake of killing, not people who do it out of desperation.
That said, I don't think your examples are very good. Policemen don't intend to kill in the line of duty, they intend to incapacitate criminals and prevent crimes. They are aware of and may be okay with the idea that this might kill the criminal, but that is not their main intent. (If it is, they are psychos and should be dealt with as described.;))
Similarly a person who kills in self defense does not primarily intend to kill, he intends to protect himself.
The only category of people who can legally intend to kill are in the military, and even then only during war.
Anyone who kills another person intentionally is insane. Any rapist is also insane. In my opinion it doesn't matter. Cold-blooded murderers and rapists need special treatments, for the good of society. So for these crimes I propose:
Whether the behaviour is caused by genetics or experiences or whatever else, a society should deal with this efficiently. Remove the offenders from society, publicly and permanently, so that this becomes a social incentive for other potential criminals. Add the threat of severe punishment to the "soup" of genes, experiences and whatever else causes a behaviour. It might help.
Even if it doesn't help, the ones that already have committed the crime and proven themselves to be (voluntarily or otherwise) a threat to society are put away so they can't commit crimes again. They also can't spawn or traumatically raise more people who might also be more genetically and socially inclined to commit these types of crimes.
As an added bonus, the relatives of victims might feel some slight comfort and be able to move on in their own lives knowing that the creep that ruined their life is gone for good.
If genes makes someone a serial killer or rapist, he had a tough break in life but it should not matter in a criminal trial. If they caused him to be a kleptomaniac he will get help, but not when his disease causes physical and emotional trauma in other humans. These others have a disease as well, caused by him, so he has to go.
Consider this:
Governments are funding oil exploration and new oil wells, at the same time as they are increasing the tax on car fuels, adding congestion taxes and whatnot.
In other words, they are pumping more and more oil from the ground, and making sure that the sheep that voted for them are paying the maximum possible for each drop!
Why don't they help the environment for real by closing oil wells, or making it cost-prohibitive to extract it? Oil that isn't extracted can't be burnt!
Every drop of oil in the ground will be burnt, the politicians are not trying to stop it, they are just arguing about the price.
Likewise, ethanol exists as an alternative fuel only because there is money and votes to be made from it.
Using ethanol as a car fuel the way it is done today is WORSE for the environment than burning oil. But claiming otherwise sure sells a lot of new "green" cars, and you get a fine-looking reason to put extra taxes on anyone who can't afford one!
The politicians and corporations have suckered millions of people into "upgrading" their cars to monstrosities with abysmal mileage compared to other alternatives, and it has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to improve nature.
I am glad that this scam is finally starting to fail.
Just as I thought the entire world had gone crazy, a small glimmer of hope! The genuine care for the environment that people have is being made into a religion, with a hierarchy of money grabbing priests and cardinals in every political party...tax this, tax that - level the forests, just pay the tax for it! Somebody is actually selling the right to create carbon dioxide...it is so stupid I can't believe it is really happening. Toxic waste pouring into rivers, whaling, levelling the rain forests - these are real environmental issues that have completely disappeared from the agenda because of this windmill of a problem, the huge money-circus called "global warming".
I fear that when people wake up and realise how they have been fooled, if they ever do, environmental causes will suffer for generations.
My machine is a dv9380, I got it before the geforce 8600s were released. Since then yes, the macs have been upgraded, but so have the hp 9000 series. The 9500 series have a geforce 8600 option and they start at just over 1000 usd. They are all 17". The 17" macbook pro starts at 2799! I won't claim that the $1000 hp is equivalent to the 2799 mac, but it's still a core2duo machine with a 17" screen. When configured with a geforce 8600, 2.2ghz core 2 duo and 2 gigs of ram the HP is still below 1800. It lacks 0.2 ghz compared to the mac but it has two disks, a great feature the mac doesn't have. It has a media center, remote control, every connection the mac has.
What a PC doesn't have is the innovative magnetic connector, the polish, the feel, the end-to-end system integration, the OS, and all those things. that's the selling point for the mac, not the overpriced hardware components. I love macs, I'd buy one if I could spare the money. Macs are premium computers and therefore they have a premium price, it's dead simple. Praise the mac for the great features it does have, there's not need to invent stuff and lie.
I just got a HP with a 17" screen, not one but two hard drives, 160 gigs each, firewire, card reader, hdmi out, lightscribe dvd burner, nvidia 7600 graphics, core2duo, 2 gigs of ram. It even pulsates in hibernate mode;)
It cost from 600 to 1k less than a macbook pro, even before adding stuff to try and match the HP specs. Desktop machines are even worse, you can easily find stuff that just blow the macs away.
This is a cold hard fact: No macs are ever a very good value, if all you care about is the hardware components. Buy something else if that is all you care about. You are just throwing money away otherwise.
Now, the flipside is that as a complete package, and considering the design, the software and the whole experience, they can be more than worth the premium for some people. These people care about more than the components. (Some of them don't realise it though...)
still nothing compared to the number of scientists who DO buy the global warming argument You mean scientists who have been bought BY it?;)
I need someone to explain 2 things before accepting this global warming thing:
It is a fact that the earth has been significantly warmer and significantly colder than it is today, several times. Why do we believe that human released Co2 is causing it this time around? What caused it the previous times? Is anything we do even slightly relevant, compared to whatever it is that is causing these cycles?
Why are politicians taxing cars and gasoline while funding searches for MORE OIL? Seriously, if politicians wanted to fight global warming instead of just getting more money from the good hearted sheep they govern, they could just allow less oil and gas to be extracted from the ground, couldn't they?
The day that a computer can organize my documents and email better than I can is the day I quit the IT field. I'm not saying you shouldn't trust a PC to do that, but I'm fairly well convinced that at current, a human can do it better. Directory names and file names are nice and one should structure them well, but they are not chiseled into the drive platters. They are just primitive metadata tags that lets the computer manage your files for you. Being able to "tag" a file with tons of relevant info or locate it by contents is just a more advanced way of doing it.
Let's say you have a picture of your family taken at christmas with your digital ixus camera - do you store it under a directory tree signifying "Christmas", "YYYY-MM-DD", "Family", "(Name of family member)" or even "Ixus"? Or you have a tune by the beatles, so you logically go to your beatles folder and look for the album where the song is from, right? But if you don't know which album, you have to look in each album folder.
With an indexed system (a decent one yet to be realized, the desktop searchers are just hacks) you could make a "folder" called "xmas" and have all your christmas images be available under it. Some of the same images would also be visible under a folder named say, "family". But you are still organizing the information, and letting the computer take care of the details. Just like you are now.
Not in the US. Ethanol is cheaper Isn't that mostly because the US already has a lot of corn fields and they are subsidised? If you want to argue using financials then you can't currently beat pumping dinosaur oil from the ground. Looking at available facts, it seems to me that biodiesel production should be vastly cheaper than ethanol for any country on earth once the crops and production facilities are in place.
[Ethanol gallons/acre from] Sugarcane in Louisiana: 555 Biodiesel gallons/acre from Chinese tallow in louisiana: 699 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel) (Don't forget that with the engines available today this gives mileage equivalent to over 1400 gallons of ethanol).
You also left out algae, with a yield of 10000 gallons per acre and the ability to be grown almost anywhere. As far as I can determine based on the facts available, there is no good reason to choose ethanol over biodiesel as a strategy to get rid of fossil fuel dependancy. Unless you are in the ethanol, sugar or corn business, that is. Yet ethanol is all the rage. I guess the corn/ethanol/sugar lobby is strong...
It varies by crop, but you can produce biodiesel from just about anything. Biodiesel is ridiculously superior to ethanol for a number of reasons. Let's assume that you can produce the same amount of ethanol per acre, while spending the same amount of energy to do so, as with biodiesel. From what I can gather, both these statements are untrue, but just to drive the point home let's assume all things in production are equal.
Using engines for sale in dealerships today, one gallon of biodiesel gives over twice the mileage compared to a gallon of ethanol. This fact alone makes ethanol half as good as biodiesel, ie you need twice the land or twice the energy to produce the equivalent amount.
But there is even more to consider:
Most every car manufacturer (even the big 3) makes a diesel engine for almost all their cars, so you can pick whatever model you want and just get the diesel version. Some of these models are not sold in the US, true, but they exist, it is just a matter of shipping cars to dealerships and wait for people to upgrade.
Gasoline-powered cars don't run on pure ethanol either, so no matter what replacement fuel you decide on, you will need to upgrade your car. People do this every 5-10 years anyway, so it's not an issue. In many countries diesels already outnumber gasolines.
Now, even without the environment angle, making gasolene from normal, fossil oil is also a high-energy process, and the resulting gasolene gives half the mileage compared to normal fossil diesel. The last 5-10 years has seen a develpment of the diesel engine that has obsoleted the gasoline engine. People just need to contemporise, and peak-oil would be a non-issue.;)
Why not biodiesel, which works in all current diesel engines, and is much easier, cheaper and energy efficient (compared to ethanol) to produce?
Long story short, you can get vastly more biodiesel per acre of land than you can ethanol, the diesel will run your engine for (at least) twice as long compared to ethanol, and you don't need a specially built environment-engine to run it. Almost any car model has a diesel engine option already.
So why is everybody talking about ethanol? Why do ethanol cars get Eco-benefits? (Your own conspiracy theory goes here).
I like linux today, but I absolutely loved it back in '95. I loved it all through the 90s actually, because it was damn impressive what it managed to do. In '95 a Linux machine with X and a basic wm was way cooler and for certain things much more useful than a DOS and windows 3.11 machine. For as long as windows 9x was the norm, linux was a very impressive alternative and you had plenty of resons to laugh at the common windowses at the time. They felt like toys in comparison.
However, there was never a good reason to laugh at NT. I think the biggest blow so far to Linux was the switch MS made with XP. No longer any windows 9x. Every PC now sells with "Windows NT 2001". There is almost nothing you can do in Linux that you can't also do in XP, but the reverse is just not true. Windows has always had a lot of capabilities that Linux lacked of course (games, apps, drivers) but prior to XP there was also a ton of things Linux could do that Windows 9x could not.
XP and most apps that run under it today are stable, the filesystem is advanced and mature, multiprocessor support and multitasking is top-notch, just about any application, service, programming language or even unix shell is available for XP. There are very few technical reasons to switch from XP to anything else.
I think Linux has a way to go, but the good news is that it is never sitting still. Even Debian releases new versions more often than MS these days.;-)
No it doesn't. Windows media player can play DVDs only if you have a separate DVD playing app installed. Of course, 99% of all pc's sold with Windows today do come with DVD players preinstalled, and most DVD burners, graphic cards and motherboards have a player bundled. So it might feel like it comes with Windows.
In contrast of course, most Linux distros haven't got a legally clear way to play DVD's, (I don't actually know if there is a legal way available at all?) so your point about it needing the same ease of use still stands. Same goes for a lot of things under Linux, DVD playback is just a small example.
Re:Woz and Jobs
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I, Woz
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· Score: 2, Interesting
2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
I don't think that's true really, they just had different visions. Bills vision from a while back has been "a computer on every desk and in every home" and that has certainly happened, and almost all of those computers are running Windows.
Jobs and Gates are different kinds of geniuses, but I agree that they are probably both much more rare than the Wozniak kind of genius. There are a lot of techies so skilled at something it feels like they can control it with their minds, but who - like Woz apparently - think about getting a job in a small room in a corporate concrete bunker rather than changing the world.
I agree that Apple has changed, but I don't think they have changed in the direction of becoming a general OS provider. Apple is in many ways an oddball company, but in the end they have to follow certain economic rules. I am sure that Apple has the brains to make OS X become an alternative to Windows on generic hardware, but I don't see how Apple as a corporation can see any benefits in doing so. Competing with Microsoft in the OS arena is an enormous risk for a very slim chance at any substantial profits. On the other hand, continuing business as usual while also selling some premium priced hardware to Windows users is all benefits and no risk. At least in the short run.
First of all I don't think Apple can do it - they have an OS that works on a ridiculously small percentage of the possible hardware combinations out there. This will not change magically.
Secondly, Apple is not a software company, they make all their money selling hardware. If their OS could run on any hardware and tons of mac-heads buy the OS only, they would lose their hardware sales.
Jobs killed the Mac clone business for a reason, that reason is not gone. Apple fights the hackers that port the OS to other machines, but provide free bootcamp in response to the hackers that try to run other OS's on their machines. The strategy seems pretty clear.
Re:Apple is going to make a killing...
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Going To Boot Camp
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· Score: 1
No one buys a Mac for the hardware. Apple blathers on and on about how they're a hardware company, but that's bull. They're a software company,
I believe the direct opposite is true. Apple is undisputedly a hardware company as they make no money whatsoever selling software except to people who own their hardware. They make good software, yes, but they do so only in order to sell more hardware. Even if OSX was the holy grail of software perfection and superior to everything else for all purposes (it is not, for many reasons, some of which you mention yourself), Apple would still be a hardware company.
No one is going to buy a Mac now to run Windows on it.
Why not? People buy Sony laptops, IBM/Lenovo laptops, not just the cheapest-possible-laptops. If Apple makes great hardware for Windows to run on, why would people not buy it? People who are just slightly curious about MacOS can now buy Apple hardware for a little premium and try it out, and if they don't like it they have paid a little more than they had to for a nice machine.
The whole point of a Mac is NOT to run Windows. No, that's the whole point of Linux (Kidding! I love Linux! Really!) The Mac platform has it's own merits, and I hope most of it's users use it because it's a Mac, not because it's "anything but windows".
You might not believe it, but I know people who have bought Macs, used them for a good while, only to find out that they prefer Windows after all. MacOS was not superior, for them. Not everyone is equal, not everyone has the same needs, and MacOS is not the best choice for everyone.
I do agree about the main point though, I think this is far from the end of Apple. It could, maybe, possibly, be the beginning of the end of MacOS. Back when MacOS was a pile of crap compared to anything else, it was the fact that you _had_ to run it on your Mac that kept it alive. Should Vista or any future Windows (or Linux) release happen to be clearly better than MacOS, people will have options.
For the first time ever Apple is in the wintel pc market. If they get just the tiniest fraction of that market, it means a massive increase in sales for them. Huge profit boost. It won't be completely wall-street-official until the next macos release I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of macs running mostly windows soon outnumbers the ones running mainly macOS. Look at itunes/ipod sales before and after they became available for Windows.
I wouldn't really trust Honda to build my Ferrari... Me neither, what's the fun in having a Ferrari that just works?:P How can you work your Ferrari into a conversation if you can't go "Had to take the Ferrari to the 'shop for a tuneup". ("Tuneup" meaning "Get the light switch to turn on the lights, not open the freggin windows");)
I agree that it is expensive but the price of a hard drive doesn't matter. No medium compares well to the price of hard drives, but they have a different purpose than optical media or tapes. I would rather have a 20-pocket case of blueray discs in my laptop bag or bank box than a 500 gig disk. Compare with dual-layer DVDs, backup tapes and such. Still expensive, but not that bad.
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I think the purpose of invitations is to allow time for adjustments and tuning and adding resources to the hosting environment, not malice or a desire to make people beg.
Much like invitations are used to make sure every guest gets a seat and a piece of cake at the party....
I've been thinking along the same lines. It is a generalisation of course every fate is different, but I think many people growing up today in the western world seem less happy, more cynical and depressed, unable to focus etc. Basically the symptoms you describe.
I also agree it's related to having it too easy when they (we) were young. Many were born into a high standard of living and nothing was hard until they moved out of their parents home. Life was good then suddenly gets dramatically worse (Not bad, in any objective way of measuring it, but worse than they are used to.)
Compare this to their parents, who grew up from the 40s to the 80s. From the hardships of life in the 40s to the luxury of the 80s they managed to increase their quality of life little by little throughout their entire lives ending up with houses, fine cars, big salaries and stable employment. To see this progress year by year is motivating and makes people happy.
People today often struggle to reach the same standard they had when they were living at home, let alone seeing some consistent improvement. They are fighting to get "back to even", basically. You work for years in order to pay down on a house half the size of the one you grew up in, if you can even dream of affording a house at all. You save for years to go to some exotic place you already visited several times with your parents. Having a stable job in the area where you grew up and all your childhood friends still live is a fantasy, most of your co-workers are basically strangers and so on. All the things the world has to offer - you did most of them already and watched the rest in Cinemascope. The experiences are clichés before you even get there.
There are other factors as well of course, general lack of honest interaction with people, information overload, companies so large that you become anonymous, etc etc, but I think this is a big part of it. Simply put, there are many more rich people having to deal with becoming poorer today than it used to be. People are reaching goals lower than their expectations. This has always been depressing, so a certain percentage of people will be depressed by it, for a while.
No totalitarian regime should ever possess nukes or any weapon of mass destruction for that matter. Totalitarian regimes take actions based on the impulses of a single person, and nukes can destroy the world. Destroying the world should be a committee decision at the very least.
You are right, I was unclear. Since the topic is psychopaths I had that "subcategory" of criminals in mind. I'm talking about people who kill for the sake of killing, not people who do it out of desperation.
;))
That said, I don't think your examples are very good. Policemen don't intend to kill in the line of duty, they intend to incapacitate criminals and prevent crimes. They are aware of and may be okay with the idea that this might kill the criminal, but that is not their main intent. (If it is, they are psychos and should be dealt with as described.
Similarly a person who kills in self defense does not primarily intend to kill, he intends to protect himself. The only category of people who can legally intend to kill are in the military, and even then only during war.
Anyone who kills another person intentionally is insane. Any rapist is also insane. In my opinion it doesn't matter. Cold-blooded murderers and rapists need special treatments, for the good of society. So for these crimes I propose:
Whether the behaviour is caused by genetics or experiences or whatever else, a society should deal with this efficiently. Remove the offenders from society, publicly and permanently, so that this becomes a social incentive for other potential criminals. Add the threat of severe punishment to the "soup" of genes, experiences and whatever else causes a behaviour. It might help.
Even if it doesn't help, the ones that already have committed the crime and proven themselves to be (voluntarily or otherwise) a threat to society are put away so they can't commit crimes again. They also can't spawn or traumatically raise more people who might also be more genetically and socially inclined to commit these types of crimes.
As an added bonus, the relatives of victims might feel some slight comfort and be able to move on in their own lives knowing that the creep that ruined their life is gone for good.
If genes makes someone a serial killer or rapist, he had a tough break in life but it should not matter in a criminal trial. If they caused him to be a kleptomaniac he will get help, but not when his disease causes physical and emotional trauma in other humans. These others have a disease as well, caused by him, so he has to go.
Consider this:
Governments are funding oil exploration and new oil wells, at the same time as they are increasing the tax on car fuels, adding congestion taxes and whatnot.
In other words, they are pumping more and more oil from the ground, and making sure that the sheep that voted for them are paying the maximum possible for each drop!
Why don't they help the environment for real by closing oil wells, or making it cost-prohibitive to extract it? Oil that isn't extracted can't be burnt!
Every drop of oil in the ground will be burnt, the politicians are not trying to stop it, they are just arguing about the price.
Likewise, ethanol exists as an alternative fuel only because there is money and votes to be made from it.
Using ethanol as a car fuel the way it is done today is WORSE for the environment than burning oil. But claiming otherwise sure sells a lot of new "green" cars, and you get a fine-looking reason to put extra taxes on anyone who can't afford one!
The politicians and corporations have suckered millions of people into "upgrading" their cars to monstrosities with abysmal mileage compared to other alternatives, and it has absolutely nothing to do with wanting to improve nature. I am glad that this scam is finally starting to fail.
Just as I thought the entire world had gone crazy, a small glimmer of hope! The genuine care for the environment that people have is being made into a religion, with a hierarchy of money grabbing priests and cardinals in every political party...tax this, tax that - level the forests, just pay the tax for it!
Somebody is actually selling the right to create carbon dioxide...it is so stupid I can't believe it is really happening.
Toxic waste pouring into rivers, whaling, levelling the rain forests - these are real environmental issues that have completely disappeared from the agenda because of this windmill of a problem, the huge money-circus called "global warming".
I fear that when people wake up and realise how they have been fooled, if they ever do, environmental causes will suffer for generations.
You get a warning that it is not supported but you can still install and run it.
My machine is a dv9380, I got it before the geforce 8600s were released. Since then yes, the macs have been upgraded, but so have the hp 9000 series. The 9500 series have a geforce 8600 option and they start at just over 1000 usd. They are all 17". The 17" macbook pro starts at 2799!
I won't claim that the $1000 hp is equivalent to the 2799 mac, but it's still a core2duo machine with a 17" screen. When configured with a geforce 8600, 2.2ghz core 2 duo and 2 gigs of ram the HP is still below 1800. It lacks 0.2 ghz compared to the mac but it has two disks, a great feature the mac doesn't have. It has a media center, remote control, every connection the mac has.
What a PC doesn't have is the innovative magnetic connector, the polish, the feel, the end-to-end system integration, the OS, and all those things. that's the selling point for the mac, not the overpriced hardware components.
I love macs, I'd buy one if I could spare the money. Macs are premium computers and therefore they have a premium price, it's dead simple. Praise the mac for the great features it does have, there's not need to invent stuff and lie.
I just got a HP with a 17" screen, not one but two hard drives, 160 gigs each, firewire, card reader, hdmi out, lightscribe dvd burner, nvidia 7600 graphics, core2duo, 2 gigs of ram. It even pulsates in hibernate mode ;)
It cost from 600 to 1k less than a macbook pro, even before adding stuff to try and match the HP specs. Desktop machines are even worse, you can easily find stuff that just blow the macs away.
This is a cold hard fact: No macs are ever a very good value, if all you care about is the hardware components. Buy something else if that is all you care about. You are just throwing money away otherwise.
Now, the flipside is that as a complete package, and considering the design, the software and the whole experience, they can be more than worth the premium for some people. These people care about more than the components. (Some of them don't realise it though...)
You mean scientists who have been bought BY it?
I need someone to explain 2 things before accepting this global warming thing:
Directory names and file names are nice and one should structure them well, but they are not chiseled into the drive platters. They are just primitive metadata tags that lets the computer manage your files for you. Being able to "tag" a file with tons of relevant info or locate it by contents is just a more advanced way of doing it.
Let's say you have a picture of your family taken at christmas with your digital ixus camera - do you store it under a directory tree signifying "Christmas", "YYYY-MM-DD", "Family", "(Name of family member)" or even "Ixus"? Or you have a tune by the beatles, so you logically go to your beatles folder and look for the album where the song is from, right? But if you don't know which album, you have to look in each album folder.
With an indexed system (a decent one yet to be realized, the desktop searchers are just hacks) you could make a "folder" called "xmas" and have all your christmas images be available under it. Some of the same images would also be visible under a folder named say, "family".
But you are still organizing the information, and letting the computer take care of the details. Just like you are now.
Not in the US. Ethanol is cheaper
Isn't that mostly because the US already has a lot of corn fields and they are subsidised? If you want to argue using financials then you can't currently beat pumping dinosaur oil from the ground. Looking at available facts, it seems to me that biodiesel production should be vastly cheaper than ethanol for any country on earth once the crops and production facilities are in place.
[Ethanol gallons/acre from] Sugarcane in Louisiana: 555
Biodiesel gallons/acre from Chinese tallow in louisiana: 699 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biodiesel) (Don't forget that with the engines available today this gives mileage equivalent to over 1400 gallons of ethanol).
You also left out algae, with a yield of 10000 gallons per acre and the ability to be grown almost anywhere.
As far as I can determine based on the facts available, there is no good reason to choose ethanol over biodiesel as a strategy to get rid of fossil fuel dependancy. Unless you are in the ethanol, sugar or corn business, that is. Yet ethanol is all the rage. I guess the corn/ethanol/sugar lobby is strong...
It varies by crop, but you can produce biodiesel from just about anything. Biodiesel is ridiculously superior to ethanol for a number of reasons.
;)
Let's assume that you can produce the same amount of ethanol per acre, while spending the same amount of energy to do so, as with biodiesel. From what I can gather, both these statements are untrue, but just to drive the point home let's assume all things in production are equal.
Using engines for sale in dealerships today, one gallon of biodiesel gives over twice the mileage compared to a gallon of ethanol. This fact alone makes ethanol half as good as biodiesel, ie you need twice the land or twice the energy to produce the equivalent amount.
But there is even more to consider:
Most every car manufacturer (even the big 3) makes a diesel engine for almost all their cars, so you can pick whatever model you want and just get the diesel version. Some of these models are not sold in the US, true, but they exist, it is just a matter of shipping cars to dealerships and wait for people to upgrade.
Gasoline-powered cars don't run on pure ethanol either, so no matter what replacement fuel you decide on, you will need to upgrade your car. People do this every 5-10 years anyway, so it's not an issue. In many countries diesels already outnumber gasolines.
Now, even without the environment angle, making gasolene from normal, fossil oil is also a high-energy process, and the resulting gasolene gives half the mileage compared to normal fossil diesel. The last 5-10 years has seen a develpment of the diesel engine that has obsoleted the gasoline engine. People just need to contemporise, and peak-oil would be a non-issue.
Why not biodiesel, which works in all current diesel engines, and is much easier, cheaper and energy efficient (compared to ethanol) to produce? Long story short, you can get vastly more biodiesel per acre of land than you can ethanol, the diesel will run your engine for (at least) twice as long compared to ethanol, and you don't need a specially built environment-engine to run it. Almost any car model has a diesel engine option already. So why is everybody talking about ethanol? Why do ethanol cars get Eco-benefits? (Your own conspiracy theory goes here).
the controversial Imagine Constraint Token
The movie studios have been using that one for ages already...;-)
I like linux today, but I absolutely loved it back in '95. I loved it all through the 90s actually, because it was damn impressive what it managed to do. In '95 a Linux machine with X and a basic wm was way cooler and for certain things much more useful than a DOS and windows 3.11 machine. For as long as windows 9x was the norm, linux was a very impressive alternative and you had plenty of resons to laugh at the common windowses at the time. They felt like toys in comparison.
;-)
However, there was never a good reason to laugh at NT. I think the biggest blow so far to Linux was the switch MS made with XP. No longer any windows 9x. Every PC now sells with "Windows NT 2001". There is almost nothing you can do in Linux that you can't also do in XP, but the reverse is just not true. Windows has always had a lot of capabilities that Linux lacked of course (games, apps, drivers) but prior to XP there was also a ton of things Linux could do that Windows 9x could not.
XP and most apps that run under it today are stable, the filesystem is advanced and mature, multiprocessor support and multitasking is top-notch, just about any application, service, programming language or even unix shell is available for XP. There are very few technical reasons to switch from XP to anything else.
I think Linux has a way to go, but the good news is that it is never sitting still. Even Debian releases new versions more often than MS these days.
No it doesn't. Windows media player can play DVDs only if you have a separate DVD playing app installed. Of course, 99% of all pc's sold with Windows today do come with DVD players preinstalled, and most DVD burners, graphic cards and motherboards have a player bundled. So it might feel like it comes with Windows.
In contrast of course, most Linux distros haven't got a legally clear way to play DVD's, (I don't actually know if there is a legal way available at all?) so your point about it needing the same ease of use still stands. Same goes for a lot of things under Linux, DVD playback is just a small example.
2) Bill Gates doesn't hold a visionary candle to Jobs
I don't think that's true really, they just had different visions. Bills vision from a while back has been "a computer on every desk and in every home" and that has certainly happened, and almost all of those computers are running Windows.
Jobs and Gates are different kinds of geniuses, but I agree that they are probably both much more rare than the Wozniak kind of genius. There are a lot of techies so skilled at something it feels like they can control it with their minds, but who - like Woz apparently - think about getting a job in a small room in a corporate concrete bunker rather than changing the world.
I agree that Apple has changed, but I don't think they have changed in the direction of becoming a general OS provider.
Apple is in many ways an oddball company, but in the end they have to follow certain economic rules. I am sure that Apple has the brains to make OS X become an alternative to Windows on generic hardware, but I don't see how Apple as a corporation can see any benefits in doing so. Competing with Microsoft in the OS arena is an enormous risk for a very slim chance at any substantial profits. On the other hand, continuing business as usual while also selling some premium priced hardware to Windows users is all benefits and no risk. At least in the short run.
First of all I don't think Apple can do it - they have an OS that works on a ridiculously small percentage of the possible hardware combinations out there. This will not change magically.
Secondly, Apple is not a software company, they make all their money selling hardware. If their OS could run on any hardware and tons of mac-heads buy the OS only, they would lose their hardware sales.
Jobs killed the Mac clone business for a reason, that reason is not gone. Apple fights the hackers that port the OS to other machines, but provide free bootcamp in response to the hackers that try to run other OS's on their machines. The strategy seems pretty clear.
No one buys a Mac for the hardware. Apple blathers on and on about how they're a hardware company, but that's bull. They're a software company,
I believe the direct opposite is true. Apple is undisputedly a hardware company as they make no money whatsoever selling software except to people who own their hardware. They make good software, yes, but they do so only in order to sell more hardware. Even if OSX was the holy grail of software perfection and superior to everything else for all purposes (it is not, for many reasons, some of which you mention yourself), Apple would still be a hardware company.
No one is going to buy a Mac now to run Windows on it.
Why not? People buy Sony laptops, IBM/Lenovo laptops, not just the cheapest-possible-laptops. If Apple makes great hardware for Windows to run on, why would people not buy it? People who are just slightly curious about MacOS can now buy Apple hardware for a little premium and try it out, and if they don't like it they have paid a little more than they had to for a nice machine.
The whole point of a Mac is NOT to run Windows. No, that's the whole point of Linux (Kidding! I love Linux! Really!)
The Mac platform has it's own merits, and I hope most of it's users use it because it's a Mac, not because it's "anything but windows".
You might not believe it, but I know people who have bought Macs, used them for a good while, only to find out that they prefer Windows after all. MacOS was not superior, for them. Not everyone is equal, not everyone has the same needs, and MacOS is not the best choice for everyone.
I do agree about the main point though, I think this is far from the end of Apple. It could, maybe, possibly, be the beginning of the end of MacOS. Back when MacOS was a pile of crap compared to anything else, it was the fact that you _had_ to run it on your Mac that kept it alive. Should Vista or any future Windows (or Linux) release happen to be clearly better than MacOS, people will have options.
For the first time ever Apple is in the wintel pc market. If they get just the tiniest fraction of that market, it means a massive increase in sales for them. Huge profit boost.
It won't be completely wall-street-official until the next macos release I guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if the amount of macs running mostly windows soon outnumbers the ones running mainly macOS. Look at itunes/ipod sales before and after they became available for Windows.
I wouldn't really trust Honda to build my Ferrari... :P ;)
Me neither, what's the fun in having a Ferrari that just works?
How can you work your Ferrari into a conversation if you can't go "Had to take the Ferrari to the 'shop for a tuneup". ("Tuneup" meaning "Get the light switch to turn on the lights, not open the freggin windows")
I agree that it is expensive but the price of a hard drive doesn't matter. No medium compares well to the price of hard drives, but they have a different purpose than optical media or tapes. I would rather have a 20-pocket case of blueray discs in my laptop bag or bank box than a 500 gig disk.
Compare with dual-layer DVDs, backup tapes and such. Still expensive, but not that bad.