Bush claims he's spreading "freedom and democracy" (or 'Freeman Moxy' as he calls it) around the world, but it appears there must be only a finite quantity as he seems hell bent on reducing it at home.
Oh well, he only has eighteen months left before he's kicked out on his arse (or ass). What ticks me off - well, apart from everything, and the fact that apathy allows him to get away with it - is that those of us who live in other friendly western nations such as Australia and the UK also have to live with the consequences of his tiny intellect and we don't get to vote for/against him. Our own leaders are little more than "me too" lickspittles without the backbone to say "no more!". Until recently there was no electable opposition with an aganda worth a flying fig, but things are changing. I think the political landscape is going to look very different two years from now - roll on that day!
Americans - when even your best friends are telling you that you stink, don't you think it's about time you started taking the problem seriously?
Unfortunately the analysis on that linked site is misleading, because the graphics clearly are generated by a computer program that is not simulating the antialiasing filter ahead of the A to D. Naturally without any filtering at all, the results are awful, and that is what the graphics there show. Also, what is displayed is the post A to D sample-and-hold waveform which isn't what you would be hearing. If you applied a suitable analogue filter to the waveforms on that site, you would see in fact a correctly recovered sinewave as long as the harmonic components > Nyquist frequency are strictly removed prior to conversion.
There's really no need for these patronising quotation marks. I'm a 45 year old electronics engineer - I was designing digital audio systems when you were still a zygote.
the real point is: do we need fast cars when in urban scapes you slow to a crawl? Perhaps a non-efficient, slow, non-polluting engine is better than one efficient, fast, polluting one when you're running at 18mph...
I think you're right. But steam is even less appropriate in that case. An electric motor is just as efficient whatever speed it runs at, and uses no more power than it needs to for the torque it is required to produce. So even at 18mph an electric motor can be >90% efficient, whereas IC or any other piston-in-a-cylinder or turbine only really works at peak efficiency at one particular speed, usually a high one. So you start with a lossy inefficient power plant and to make it practical for ordinary speeds you add gears, clutches, differentials, throttling mechanisms, etc, all of which incur further losses. Doesn't make sense does it?
Lest my comment be misunderstood (and this being slashdot that's not just inevitable, it's practically compulsory) I'm talking about steam efficiency when used for automotive transportation. The best steam locomotives reached about 25% efficiency. The big problem is that efficiency is related to the temperature difference "across" the engine so you either need to get the steam really, really hot or have a cold reservoir that has a very, very high capacity. Both of these things are compromised severely in a platform that also has to move, haul carriages, people, etc. A stationary power station doesn't have this limitation so efficiencies reached can be a lot higher.
As for doing it because it's fun, that's reasonable, as long as that is the stated reason. Not everything has to further mankind's progress; fun/curiosity/because it's there are valid too. Hell, I work on pointless projects for fun myself sometimes, as my website will attest. But the article etc. seem in some way to be earnestly suggesting that this is a valid automotive technology. It's not. An electric vehicle even if ultimately powered by a coal fired and steam-driven turbine is still going to be twice as efficient as this.
There's a difference between a 22KHz sine wave, square wave, sawtooth wave, etc. which you're not going to capture by sampling at the Nyquist frequency (Personally: I think this is the reason why vinyl sounds better than digital).
Personally, you're wrong. The SHAPE of a waveform is caused by the frequency components it comprises. That's called Fourier's Theorem. If you strip away all of the higher harmonics that cause a waveform to look square in the time domain, you get a sinewave at the fundamental frequency. All periodic waveforms are built up from sinewaves of various frequencies (harmonics) and amplitudes, but all of these components are at a higher frequency than the fundamental. So a 22kHz sinewave is the same as a 22kHz squarewave that has been filtered to remove all the higher components. And the next highest component of a squarewave is at twice the fundamental, or 44kHz.
I will concede is that practical real-world filters can be poor, and any harmonic that leaks through to the A to D conversion stage produces aliasing artifacts well down in the audible range that do sound terrible. So the filter ahead of the A to D is the most important thing in the system in most respects. Making a really good filter in the analogue domain is hard, which is why oversampling to 96kHz is a popular solution - not because there are any genuine audio components above 22kHz that really matter, but because it allows a simpler/more effective filter to be used (after all, it has so much more space to work with between 22 kHz and 96 kHz as opposed to 22 kHz and 44 kHz, and more space means it can be less steep and therefore has less phase distortion and 'smearing') and the resulting digitised audio will sound a lot better. The problem with this argument is that professional audio equipment does this as a matter of course, so the aliasing isn't (or shouldn't be) there on the CD, even though it is subsequently downsampled to 16 bits and 44.1 kHz. And the reason that professional gear uses 24 bits or more for the amplitude is both to give it headroom and to provide enough resolution to preserve quality while doing mathematical processing on the samples. Same reason you use long integers instead of shorts when you know you'll be multiplying them together, even though the eventual result will still fit in a short. By the time it's finally mastered to a CD, 16 bits and 44.1 kHz should be adequate for excellent fidelity PLAYBACK. So those claiming that CDs sound worse than LPs are either deluding themselves, or are really hearing the result of poor workmanship in the mastering.
On that last point, if you listen to a very high quality label CD like, e.g. Deutsche Gramophon, and the lastest poptart commodity release, I think you'll hear a difference. The theory and best practice of CD technology is sound; what isn't is the actual practice in many cases (i.e over-compression, excessive effects processing, way too many downmixes that stretch even 24-bit resolution beyond what it can reasonably do). In other words maybe what you're hearing on a bad CD are rounding errors in the processing, and nothing to do with the original sampling. It's another case of where the music machine doesn't really care about the "consumer" of the "product", they just want your money.
The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.
Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.
What's the point of this? Steam reached the peak of its development for transportation in the 1920s. Thermodynamically you can't do much better than 25% efficiency and that's with all the technology you can muster. More typically you only get 10%. The focus for engineers should be transportation that doubles car efficiency to 60 - 70%. Not halves it.
Microsoft has between 15 and 20 patents on moving the cursor around (look it up)
Which is laughable. When Bill G first saw the Mac prototype (or possibly Lisa), he asked "So, what kinda hardware are you using to do that?" [moving the cursor around the screen]. Stifling their smirks, Bill Atkinson and friends simply said: "Errr, we're not".
But the new DST is probably here to stay -- letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy.
The Macintosh has provided me with little but frustration. The system locks up due to application errors more than XP does. I'm running mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Photoshop has been pretty reliable, but the other two applications both manage to lock the machine up to the point where a cold boot is necessary on a semi-regular basis based on how much I am using the system.
Have you considered there could be something wrong with it? I use a Dual 1.25 GHz G4 "Quicksilver" Mac with 10.3.9 and those exact same three apps day-in, day-out, and the system is rock solid. It's also in no way "dog slow" despite being two generations of processor behind. There are times that I feel it could be faster for certain particular operations, but by and large it doesn't get in my way. Now our workflows are probably very different, but nevertheless you might want to consider that perhaps what you're witnessing isn't normal.
Besides the lack of stability, there are also issues with inconsistency. I won't belabor this too much because I've gone over it frequently in the past, but there are no less than three visual styles used (Mail, iTunes, and everything else) and even menus are inconsistent. In some cases if you click a submenu in a context menu, it opens the submenu. In some cases you must hover to open it, because clicking will actually close the menu. What gives?
Some aspects of Mac OS X are annoyingly inconsistent - no argument there. I wish Apple would come up with a unified look and stick to it. With menus though, I don't find what you're reporting - they seem to work the same for me. Again, maybe it's something wrong with your system? Menus on Mac work in two ways - the "click once to open, again to select" method (like windows) and the "click-drag-release" method that it inherited from the original Mac OS. Sometimes if you are slow in releasing the mouse on a click, it drops into the second mode of operation which, if you're not expecting it, can be confusing. I don't know offhand if there's a way to tweak that delay time, but if so, it might help you.
It's foolish to try to recompress the data--even in AAC format--because new information will be discarded, and the quality will be even less (probably far less) than the original AAC file.
What new information? You can't make something out of nothng, so when the AAC was converted back to CD Audio, it did this by creating samples from the AAC stream. Thus, that information was in the AAC stream. When it's recompressed back, these created samples will, by and large, be seen as redundant and removed again. So while it's not an exact mirror image of the deconversion process, for the same or higher bitrate, the quality loss is actually far less than you'd imagine. Thus, the bulk of the quality loss is incurred only on the first encoding to AAC, and much less on subsequent ones.
I've re-ripped AAC/Fairplay tracks to CD and back to MP3 and provided one sticks to the same or better bitrate (and use a decent encoder such as LAME), the quality loss is all but inaudible on most kinds of music.
Must be fun seeing the world in black and white. No-one mentioned rape until you did. Obviously there are some very serious transgressions that are occasionally committed, and they are, quite rightly, criminalised and vilified.
You say that some paedophiles are "harmless". So already you're dividing the spectrum of related offences into two parts, apparently with nothing in between. It goes from a harmless old man drooling outside the schoolyard to child rape. Newsflash: there is a sliding scale here. Grey. Not black and white. So the question is where you draw the line. My view is that we, as a society, draw the line far too low - probably because of the fear that if "low levels" of paedophilia are tolerated, it's a slippery slope. That may be the case, I'm not saying it's necessarily an easy problem to solve. But the thrust of my argument is that society's attitude currently does more harm than good TO THE VICTIMS.
If some lecherous swimming coach gets his kicks by letting his hand slip across the backsides of those in his charge, that might seem pretty odious to any right-thinking onlooker. It might make the recipient feel a little uncomfortable, but at that stage, no real harm has been done. Where the real harm kicks in in many cases of this kind is the shock, horror reaction of everyone else - the victim then feels it necessary to show the "proper" degree of trauma that is obviously expected of them. That's where a great deal of harm has truly been done. So I'm not talking about rape or other serious assault - I'm talking about the much vaster majority of stuff that happens which could, and possibly should, be brushed off.
And just to make it clear: I'm not suggesting that child pornography should be tolerated either. Clearly those who are drawn to this kind of material need to know it's wrong. But let's be honest with ourselves - that, for some, is a great deal of its attraction. Thus my other point. I'm not saying there are easy answers, but currently the problem is being made worse by those who assume they're on the moral high ground by getting their panties in a wad every time some sad old judge turns up with kiddy porn on his laptop. This attitude is making a mountain out of molehill for the vast majority of victims of minor molestation (not rape, which I never suggested) which is in turn doing even more harm to them.
What's worse? A kid gets his ass touched up, feels a little weirded out, forgets about it. Or kid gets his ass touched up, feels weirded out, complains, one by one his parents, teachers, social workers, police, uncle tom cobley and all throw up their hands in horror, make him feel like a irredeemably terrible thing has happened to him, drag him through scores of police and social services interviews, court hearings, etc, then in all probability, go around for ever after not mentioning "that terrible business". The result? Crushing guilt, self-hatred, and the possible beginnings of a vicious circle of further abuse. Cleary the cure is worse than the disease.
Paedophiles are this century's witches. Burn them, buuuuurn theeem!!!
I find child molesters as obnoxious as the next person, but let's get it into perspective. There are actually many worse things. And frankly, society's attitude to the phenomenon is making the problem many times worse, by a) stigmatising the victims into believing that an irredeemably great harm has befallen them, and b) by making the crime so beyond the pale that it actually becomes attractive to those people that need to seek out that kind of thrill.
Hard is it may be for many to stomach, the problem would go away a lot faster if we all just said: "meh."
No matter how vmware & parallels dress it up, the problem here is not legality, but fear of reprisals from Apple.
Yes, because actions Apple might take that are not "legal" include a jolly good wrist-slapping, custard-pie flanning, or going round and kicking their office cat.
I get 65*2*sqrt(2)=91, but forget if that's even the right way to calculate it
Correct, but only for sinusoidal waveform. Inverters are probably not (very) sinusoidal, so may be generating higher spikes. That said I doubt there's much current/power behind them - so it will give you a bit of a tingle but hardly likely to kill.
When the mac ownes more than 35% of the desktop market, that will change
Incorrect. OS X is more secure because Unix is more secure. Not 100% secure, granted, but good enough that even a reversal of market share compared with Windows wouldn't bring about a reversal in share of viruses. In any case, Macs will never have 35% of the market so it's purely academic. Windows lusers are welcome to the crap they consider acceptable; those of us who aspire to something better have it, thanks very much.
Slashdot Mirror
God must have put it there just to drive fundamentalists crazy ;-)
Bush claims he's spreading "freedom and democracy" (or 'Freeman Moxy' as he calls it) around the world, but it appears there must be only a finite quantity as he seems hell bent on reducing it at home.
Oh well, he only has eighteen months left before he's kicked out on his arse (or ass). What ticks me off - well, apart from everything, and the fact that apathy allows him to get away with it - is that those of us who live in other friendly western nations such as Australia and the UK also have to live with the consequences of his tiny intellect and we don't get to vote for/against him. Our own leaders are little more than "me too" lickspittles without the backbone to say "no more!". Until recently there was no electable opposition with an aganda worth a flying fig, but things are changing. I think the political landscape is going to look very different two years from now - roll on that day!
Americans - when even your best friends are telling you that you stink, don't you think it's about time you started taking the problem seriously?
Unfortunately the analysis on that linked site is misleading, because the graphics clearly are generated by a computer program that is not simulating the antialiasing filter ahead of the A to D. Naturally without any filtering at all, the results are awful, and that is what the graphics there show. Also, what is displayed is the post A to D sample-and-hold waveform which isn't what you would be hearing. If you applied a suitable analogue filter to the waveforms on that site, you would see in fact a correctly recovered sinewave as long as the harmonic components > Nyquist frequency are strictly removed prior to conversion.
All of this creates what's called "aliasing."
There's really no need for these patronising quotation marks. I'm a 45 year old electronics engineer - I was designing digital audio systems when you were still a zygote.
the real point is: do we need fast cars when in urban scapes you slow to a crawl? Perhaps a non-efficient, slow, non-polluting engine is better than one efficient, fast, polluting one when you're running at 18mph...
I think you're right. But steam is even less appropriate in that case. An electric motor is just as efficient whatever speed it runs at, and uses no more power than it needs to for the torque it is required to produce. So even at 18mph an electric motor can be >90% efficient, whereas IC or any other piston-in-a-cylinder or turbine only really works at peak efficiency at one particular speed, usually a high one. So you start with a lossy inefficient power plant and to make it practical for ordinary speeds you add gears, clutches, differentials, throttling mechanisms, etc, all of which incur further losses. Doesn't make sense does it?
Lest my comment be misunderstood (and this being slashdot that's not just inevitable, it's practically compulsory) I'm talking about steam efficiency when used for automotive transportation. The best steam locomotives reached about 25% efficiency. The big problem is that efficiency is related to the temperature difference "across" the engine so you either need to get the steam really, really hot or have a cold reservoir that has a very, very high capacity. Both of these things are compromised severely in a platform that also has to move, haul carriages, people, etc. A stationary power station doesn't have this limitation so efficiencies reached can be a lot higher.
As for doing it because it's fun, that's reasonable, as long as that is the stated reason. Not everything has to further mankind's progress; fun/curiosity/because it's there are valid too. Hell, I work on pointless projects for fun myself sometimes, as my website will attest. But the article etc. seem in some way to be earnestly suggesting that this is a valid automotive technology. It's not. An electric vehicle even if ultimately powered by a coal fired and steam-driven turbine is still going to be twice as efficient as this.
There's a difference between a 22KHz sine wave, square wave, sawtooth wave, etc. which you're not going to capture by sampling at the Nyquist frequency (Personally: I think this is the reason why vinyl sounds better than digital).
Personally, you're wrong. The SHAPE of a waveform is caused by the frequency components it comprises. That's called Fourier's Theorem. If you strip away all of the higher harmonics that cause a waveform to look square in the time domain, you get a sinewave at the fundamental frequency. All periodic waveforms are built up from sinewaves of various frequencies (harmonics) and amplitudes, but all of these components are at a higher frequency than the fundamental. So a 22kHz sinewave is the same as a 22kHz squarewave that has been filtered to remove all the higher components. And the next highest component of a squarewave is at twice the fundamental, or 44kHz.
I will concede is that practical real-world filters can be poor, and any harmonic that leaks through to the A to D conversion stage produces aliasing artifacts well down in the audible range that do sound terrible. So the filter ahead of the A to D is the most important thing in the system in most respects. Making a really good filter in the analogue domain is hard, which is why oversampling to 96kHz is a popular solution - not because there are any genuine audio components above 22kHz that really matter, but because it allows a simpler/more effective filter to be used (after all, it has so much more space to work with between 22 kHz and 96 kHz as opposed to 22 kHz and 44 kHz, and more space means it can be less steep and therefore has less phase distortion and 'smearing') and the resulting digitised audio will sound a lot better. The problem with this argument is that professional audio equipment does this as a matter of course, so the aliasing isn't (or shouldn't be) there on the CD, even though it is subsequently downsampled to 16 bits and 44.1 kHz. And the reason that professional gear uses 24 bits or more for the amplitude is both to give it headroom and to provide enough resolution to preserve quality while doing mathematical processing on the samples. Same reason you use long integers instead of shorts when you know you'll be multiplying them together, even though the eventual result will still fit in a short. By the time it's finally mastered to a CD, 16 bits and 44.1 kHz should be adequate for excellent fidelity PLAYBACK. So those claiming that CDs sound worse than LPs are either deluding themselves, or are really hearing the result of poor workmanship in the mastering.
On that last point, if you listen to a very high quality label CD like, e.g. Deutsche Gramophon, and the lastest poptart commodity release, I think you'll hear a difference. The theory and best practice of CD technology is sound; what isn't is the actual practice in many cases (i.e over-compression, excessive effects processing, way too many downmixes that stretch even 24-bit resolution beyond what it can reasonably do). In other words maybe what you're hearing on a bad CD are rounding errors in the processing, and nothing to do with the original sampling. It's another case of where the music machine doesn't really care about the "consumer" of the "product", they just want your money.
Thats why I am saying that deafness or hearing disability will set in at a lower age than was seen in the previous gen. Got it?
And that affects the next generation... how again?
The digitization of the analog signal is what destroys information, resulting in distortion when the analog is reconstructed later.
Are you honestly claiming that you can hear frequencies higher than 22.050 kHz? Or noise components below -96dB? CDs may have poor sound in practice for all sorts of reasons, but the basic sampling of the analogue original is not one of them. Careless, thoughtless production and over-processing I can all too readily believe in, but not problems with the essential theory at the heart of it.
Except it was Monty Python. strange women...
What's the point of this? Steam reached the peak of its development for transportation in the 1920s. Thermodynamically you can't do much better than 25% efficiency and that's with all the technology you can muster. More typically you only get 10%. The focus for engineers should be transportation that doubles car efficiency to 60 - 70%. Not halves it.
Microsoft has between 15 and 20 patents on moving the cursor around (look it up)
Which is laughable. When Bill G first saw the Mac prototype (or possibly Lisa), he asked "So, what kinda hardware are you using to do that?" [moving the cursor around the screen]. Stifling their smirks, Bill Atkinson and friends simply said: "Errr, we're not".
...flogging a dead horse
...is the phrase that springs to mind:
But the new DST is probably here to stay -- letting the bill expire would mean re-patching a lot of systems again next year. So much for saving energy.
"The only intuitive interface is the nipple. Everything else is learned."
And even that isn't true - newborns have to be taught how to find, latch on correctly and suck. Some never manage and have to be bottle-fed. True.
The Macintosh has provided me with little but frustration. The system locks up due to application errors more than XP does. I'm running mostly Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. Photoshop has been pretty reliable, but the other two applications both manage to lock the machine up to the point where a cold boot is necessary on a semi-regular basis based on how much I am using the system.
.
Have you considered there could be something wrong with it? I use a Dual 1.25 GHz G4 "Quicksilver" Mac with 10.3.9 and those exact same three apps day-in, day-out, and the system is rock solid. It's also in no way "dog slow" despite being two generations of processor behind. There are times that I feel it could be faster for certain particular operations, but by and large it doesn't get in my way. Now our workflows are probably very different, but nevertheless you might want to consider that perhaps what you're witnessing isn't normal
Besides the lack of stability, there are also issues with inconsistency. I won't belabor this too much because I've gone over it frequently in the past, but there are no less than three visual styles used (Mail, iTunes, and everything else) and even menus are inconsistent. In some cases if you click a submenu in a context menu, it opens the submenu. In some cases you must hover to open it, because clicking will actually close the menu. What gives?
Some aspects of Mac OS X are annoyingly inconsistent - no argument there. I wish Apple would come up with a unified look and stick to it. With menus though, I don't find what you're reporting - they seem to work the same for me. Again, maybe it's something wrong with your system? Menus on Mac work in two ways - the "click once to open, again to select" method (like windows) and the "click-drag-release" method that it inherited from the original Mac OS. Sometimes if you are slow in releasing the mouse on a click, it drops into the second mode of operation which, if you're not expecting it, can be confusing. I don't know offhand if there's a way to tweak that delay time, but if so, it might help you.
It's foolish to try to recompress the data--even in AAC format--because new information will be discarded, and the quality will be even less (probably far less) than the original AAC file.
What new information? You can't make something out of nothng, so when the AAC was converted back to CD Audio, it did this by creating samples from the AAC stream. Thus, that information was in the AAC stream. When it's recompressed back, these created samples will, by and large, be seen as redundant and removed again. So while it's not an exact mirror image of the deconversion process, for the same or higher bitrate, the quality loss is actually far less than you'd imagine. Thus, the bulk of the quality loss is incurred only on the first encoding to AAC, and much less on subsequent ones.
I've re-ripped AAC/Fairplay tracks to CD and back to MP3 and provided one sticks to the same or better bitrate (and use a decent encoder such as LAME), the quality loss is all but inaudible on most kinds of music.
Must be fun seeing the world in black and white. No-one mentioned rape until you did. Obviously there are some very serious transgressions that are occasionally committed, and they are, quite rightly, criminalised and vilified.
You say that some paedophiles are "harmless". So already you're dividing the spectrum of related offences into two parts, apparently with nothing in between. It goes from a harmless old man drooling outside the schoolyard to child rape. Newsflash: there is a sliding scale here. Grey. Not black and white. So the question is where you draw the line. My view is that we, as a society, draw the line far too low - probably because of the fear that if "low levels" of paedophilia are tolerated, it's a slippery slope. That may be the case, I'm not saying it's necessarily an easy problem to solve. But the thrust of my argument is that society's attitude currently does more harm than good TO THE VICTIMS.
If some lecherous swimming coach gets his kicks by letting his hand slip across the backsides of those in his charge, that might seem pretty odious to any right-thinking onlooker. It might make the recipient feel a little uncomfortable, but at that stage, no real harm has been done. Where the real harm kicks in in many cases of this kind is the shock, horror reaction of everyone else - the victim then feels it necessary to show the "proper" degree of trauma that is obviously expected of them. That's where a great deal of harm has truly been done. So I'm not talking about rape or other serious assault - I'm talking about the much vaster majority of stuff that happens which could, and possibly should, be brushed off.
And just to make it clear: I'm not suggesting that child pornography should be tolerated either. Clearly those who are drawn to this kind of material need to know it's wrong. But let's be honest with ourselves - that, for some, is a great deal of its attraction. Thus my other point. I'm not saying there are easy answers, but currently the problem is being made worse by those who assume they're on the moral high ground by getting their panties in a wad every time some sad old judge turns up with kiddy porn on his laptop. This attitude is making a mountain out of molehill for the vast majority of victims of minor molestation (not rape, which I never suggested) which is in turn doing even more harm to them.
What's worse? A kid gets his ass touched up, feels a little weirded out, forgets about it. Or kid gets his ass touched up, feels weirded out, complains, one by one his parents, teachers, social workers, police, uncle tom cobley and all throw up their hands in horror, make him feel like a irredeemably terrible thing has happened to him, drag him through scores of police and social services interviews, court hearings, etc, then in all probability, go around for ever after not mentioning "that terrible business". The result? Crushing guilt, self-hatred, and the possible beginnings of a vicious circle of further abuse. Cleary the cure is worse than the disease.
Yeah? And what do you actually KNOW about it? I mean, experienced, at first hand?
Or are you simply jerking your knees like everyone else?
Paedophiles are this century's witches. Burn them, buuuuurn theeem!!!
I find child molesters as obnoxious as the next person, but let's get it into perspective. There are actually many worse things. And frankly, society's attitude to the phenomenon is making the problem many times worse, by a) stigmatising the victims into believing that an irredeemably great harm has befallen them, and b) by making the crime so beyond the pale that it actually becomes attractive to those people that need to seek out that kind of thrill.
Hard is it may be for many to stomach, the problem would go away a lot faster if we all just said: "meh."
No matter how vmware & parallels dress it up, the problem here is not legality, but fear of reprisals from Apple.
Yes, because actions Apple might take that are not "legal" include a jolly good wrist-slapping, custard-pie flanning, or going round and kicking their office cat.
I get 65*2*sqrt(2)=91, but forget if that's even the right way to calculate it
Correct, but only for sinusoidal waveform. Inverters are probably not (very) sinusoidal, so may be generating higher spikes. That said I doubt there's much current/power behind them - so it will give you a bit of a tingle but hardly likely to kill.
fundamental aspects of the law such as "accusation is not conviction."
Hmmm, indeed. Two words: Guantanamo Bay.
When the mac ownes more than 35% of the desktop market, that will change
Incorrect. OS X is more secure because Unix is more secure. Not 100% secure, granted, but good enough that even a reversal of market share compared with Windows wouldn't bring about a reversal in share of viruses. In any case, Macs will never have 35% of the market so it's purely academic. Windows lusers are welcome to the crap they consider acceptable; those of us who aspire to something better have it, thanks very much.
I wonder how many times she said that before she actually did... Or perhaps that should be "Oh god, I'm dying for a wii!"