It isn't sales tax - it's not having to pay property tax, or salespeople, or operating expenses on retail stores scattered all over the country. A few percent sales tax is nothing when Amazon regularly discounts *everything* 10%-20% off MSRP.
It affects me because the one near my house had the best computer book selection I've ever seen. Seriously - they had at least two dozen racks of computer books, divided up into fine-grained categories - algorithms, graphics programming, MS languages, C, Basic, MacOS, Windows, Unix, Embedded, etc...
Another location, not too far away, has an incredible magazine selection. They carry scholarly journals, foreign language magazines, specialty art and architecture magazines, two racks of newspapers from every major city in the US. During it's short publication run it's the only store I've seen that carried Blacklisted! 411 - a very obscure 2600-style hacker mag.
It's more or less the same thing. You have to root the thing to jailbreak it, usually.
The tablet manufacturers seem to be a lot nicer about this. PanDigital released the source to their Android-based readers, and Archos lets you do pretty much anything you want with their Android-based PMP's and tablets.
It's awesome! Instead of having a robot figure out what you want to watch, you can go into this store and they have all kinds of movies and games, and humans who can tell you what's good to watch! Plus, if you get two older (in other words, good) movies, you get to rent one free! Three movies for $2! I know that's a lot to watch, so I just rip them onto my MythTV box and watch them whenever I want, then delete them when I'm done.
$8/month streaming only - great for hopping around when I don't know what to watch.
$1/DVD rental at the video store at the end of my block for DVDs. I don't think I watch more than one or two movies at a month, anyways.
Done! That, plus the 20 ATSC channels I get with my new roof-mount antenna, and I'm saving $30/month from not having a cable bill. The antenna will pay for itself in two months.
> Unless it gets "lost" in another fire or other misfortune.
It was already lost once from a museum. What makes this next museum so special that it won't get lost again?
> No - there's a 3rd option. It is recovered and placed back in public stewardship where it belongs.
It was already in "public stewardship" and it was lost. Heck, the last museum failed twice - once in making sure it didn't burn down, and once in not recovering it's artifacts. Ditto my last question.
And, yes, I think it should be in a museum. But this guy picked it up from the garbage fair and square. It's his now. Unless the government can make a *really* compelling argument that he shouldn't have it - like it's infected with deadly moon cooties or something - it should be his.
Currently on my wrist - a Timex Ingersoll reproduction with grosgrain band. Purchased about five years ago. Even tells the date.
Either wear a cheap, simple analog, or something vintage and cool - a 60's Rolex or Omega, or mechanical Seiko. Those can be had for a few hundred used, and will last decades.
I'm not making stuff up, it's really a problem they have. Think about it - what material maintains it's optical clarity even after being blasted by sand? Diamond, maybe?
"Without constant cleaning, the Daggett Solar 2 power tower heliostats degraded in quality as the mirrors became sand-blasted. This ended up reducing the efficiency of the system, and it produced less electricity than hoped (Romero-Alvarez and Zarza 2007). Developers wanting to build these delicate systems in the harsh desert may not be taking this into consideration."
Because it isn't private info - it's just data on what kinds prescriptions are filled, they aren't tied to individual people.
The first amendment issue comes in because the data is already publicly available. The state was saying that companies weren't allowed to use it to gather marketing information.
That's a common misconception about the profitability of the Prius and Insight. They do make make gross profits on those cars - that is cost above the cost of building them. Gross profits don't factor in development costs, though, which are a significant portion of the total cost of making a car. Since these were basically brand-new platforms, most analysts think that they have only recently started making a net profit on those vehicles, if at all.
The largest immediate benefit from these vehicles are skewing their CAFE averages so they can sell very profitable SUVs.
So, it's pretty commonplace for a company to stop selling their only product to "get ready" to go into production on their next, sole product? That's an incredibly weird way of doing business.
I guess they can coast on their stacks of cash raised by VC and their IPO, but they are going to have to produce something more mass-market, and quickly. Automotive development burns through cash really fast.
Building a really good, innovative car that costs $100,000 is easy. Lots of car companies do it.
Building a really good, innovative car that costs $25,000 is incredibly difficult to near impossible.
It's rumored that Toyota and Honda have been selling their hybrids at a loss, mainly to keep their CAFE average in conformance as they were selling more SUVs. A small start-up can't afford to do cost-shifting like that.
Magnetic Hard Drive Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture Transistorized DRAM Relational databases Virtual machine operating systems DES encryption Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
The biggest hurdle in designing something like the web is to get everybody to agree on standards. HTTP/HTML - that's 90% of the battle, and infinitely better than 30% of websites only working on flash, 20% only working on silverlight, 15% on XML/XSLT, 15% on PDF...
Slashdot Mirror
It isn't sales tax - it's not having to pay property tax, or salespeople, or operating expenses on retail stores scattered all over the country. A few percent sales tax is nothing when Amazon regularly discounts *everything* 10%-20% off MSRP.
It affects me because the one near my house had the best computer book selection I've ever seen. Seriously - they had at least two dozen racks of computer books, divided up into fine-grained categories - algorithms, graphics programming, MS languages, C, Basic, MacOS, Windows, Unix, Embedded, etc...
Another location, not too far away, has an incredible magazine selection. They carry scholarly journals, foreign language magazines, specialty art and architecture magazines, two racks of newspapers from every major city in the US. During it's short publication run it's the only store I've seen that carried Blacklisted! 411 - a very obscure 2600-style hacker mag.
I'll miss 'em.
Hey - I wrote this comment with LILO.
Maybe he was getting confused with OpenFirmware - a firmware bootstrapper that lets you write bootloaders, or just about any other app, in Forth.
Er, probably not...
It's more or less the same thing. You have to root the thing to jailbreak it, usually.
The tablet manufacturers seem to be a lot nicer about this. PanDigital released the source to their Android-based readers, and Archos lets you do pretty much anything you want with their Android-based PMP's and tablets.
It's awesome! Instead of having a robot figure out what you want to watch, you can go into this store and they have all kinds of movies and games, and humans who can tell you what's good to watch! Plus, if you get two older (in other words, good) movies, you get to rent one free! Three movies for $2! I know that's a lot to watch, so I just rip them onto my MythTV box and watch them whenever I want, then delete them when I'm done.
Er, no. I was paying $8/month for streaming only, and I still am.
One DVD + Streaming used to be $10/month - that's not the plan I had.
$8/month streaming only - great for hopping around when I don't know what to watch.
$1/DVD rental at the video store at the end of my block for DVDs. I don't think I watch more than one or two movies at a month, anyways.
Done! That, plus the 20 ATSC channels I get with my new roof-mount antenna, and I'm saving $30/month from not having a cable bill. The antenna will pay for itself in two months.
> Unless it gets "lost" in another fire or other misfortune.
It was already lost once from a museum. What makes this next museum so special that it won't get lost again?
> No - there's a 3rd option. It is recovered and placed back in public stewardship where it belongs.
It was already in "public stewardship" and it was lost. Heck, the last museum failed twice - once in making sure it didn't burn down, and once in not recovering it's artifacts. Ditto my last question.
And, yes, I think it should be in a museum. But this guy picked it up from the garbage fair and square. It's his now. Unless the government can make a *really* compelling argument that he shouldn't have it - like it's infected with deadly moon cooties or something - it should be his.
You aren't allowed to implement HDCP on anything but HDMI
You can do HDCP over DVI and DisplayPort.
Currently on my wrist - a Timex Ingersoll reproduction with grosgrain band. Purchased about five years ago. Even tells the date.
Either wear a cheap, simple analog, or something vintage and cool - a 60's Rolex or Omega, or mechanical Seiko. Those can be had for a few hundred used, and will last decades.
Most of the new "fancy" watches are garbage.
I'm not making stuff up, it's really a problem they have. Think about it - what material maintains it's optical clarity even after being blasted by sand? Diamond, maybe?
"Without constant cleaning, the Daggett Solar 2 power tower heliostats degraded in quality as the mirrors became sand-blasted. This ended up reducing the efficiency of the system, and it produced less electricity than hoped (Romero-Alvarez and Zarza 2007). Developers wanting to build these delicate systems in the harsh desert may not be taking this into consideration."
http://www.basinandrangewatch.org/Ivanp-FSADEIS-summary.html
I think that salt thermal-storage collectors are a great idea. The problem I have with non-PV collectors in general is:
1 - They tend to use large arrays of mirrors
2 - They are usually located in the desert
3 - Mirrors don't last long in the desert
I've yet to see a cost breakdown on replacement of these huge mirror arrays.
Um, what are the first ten amendments to the constitution called again? Bill of... something....
California, New York and New Jersey only make up about 20% of the population.
The list above says whether or not the carrier is an MVNO or reseller. I'm guesstimating half are MVNO's. That's still a fair bit of competition.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_wireless_communications_service_providers
Just because they don't have stores on every street corner doesn't mean there aren't a hundred different wireless providers to choose from.
1. Those who need it. Dumb fuckers who should not be allowed onto the internet at all ever. (Hope the make the wall bigger for them.)
You mean iOS devices don't have an unrestricted web browser? Weird, I must be using some sort of alternative universe iPod touch...
Because it isn't private info - it's just data on what kinds prescriptions are filled, they aren't tied to individual people.
The first amendment issue comes in because the data is already publicly available. The state was saying that companies weren't allowed to use it to gather marketing information.
That's a common misconception about the profitability of the Prius and Insight. They do make make gross profits on those cars - that is cost above the cost of building them. Gross profits don't factor in development costs, though, which are a significant portion of the total cost of making a car. Since these were basically brand-new platforms, most analysts think that they have only recently started making a net profit on those vehicles, if at all.
The largest immediate benefit from these vehicles are skewing their CAFE averages so they can sell very profitable SUVs.
So, it's pretty commonplace for a company to stop selling their only product to "get ready" to go into production on their next, sole product? That's an incredibly weird way of doing business.
I guess they can coast on their stacks of cash raised by VC and their IPO, but they are going to have to produce something more mass-market, and quickly. Automotive development burns through cash really fast.
+1.
Building a really good, innovative car that costs $100,000 is easy. Lots of car companies do it.
Building a really good, innovative car that costs $25,000 is incredibly difficult to near impossible.
It's rumored that Toyota and Honda have been selling their hybrids at a loss, mainly to keep their CAFE average in conformance as they were selling more SUVs. A small start-up can't afford to do cost-shifting like that.
On a portable, multifunction device. I think that bit matters.
Or if you count those funky HP programmable mega-calculators from the mid 70's.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HP_9800_series_desktop_computers
Hey, it fits on a desktop :)
IBM *did* invent a few other things:
Magnetic Hard Drive
Reduced Operating Instruction Set architecture
Transistorized DRAM
Relational databases
Virtual machine operating systems
DES encryption
Scanning tunneling microscope
To name a tiny fraction. So, they do have some bragging rights.
The web sucks, except for everything else.
The biggest hurdle in designing something like the web is to get everybody to agree on standards. HTTP/HTML - that's 90% of the battle, and infinitely better than 30% of websites only working on flash, 20% only working on silverlight, 15% on XML/XSLT, 15% on PDF...