Yeah, but when you do eventually get a large (>720i, of any size) TV, do you really want to re-buy your library of DVDs just to see them at full-res? Or would you rather have the money you would've spent on all those disks sitting in a bank account, earning interest, waiting for you to buy the by-then cheap whatever-the-format-happens-to-be?
I don't have very many DVDs, and I haven't bought any since 2005, but of the ones I do have, I've watched fewer than half more than two times. IOW, I'd have saved quite a bit of moolah by merely renting more than half the titles I own instead of buying them.
this format might seem a little too "modern" or "excessive" to you,
Quite the contrary. Not modern enough. I'm really, really hoping that 50G : 4 hours, MPEG 2 (or even h.264) doesn't somehow get established as the standard precisely because I *can* see the difference, and it's sad. It's just not quite enough.
But what disappoints me even more is that Blu-ray and HD-DVD were always going to be transition formats: we needed a new storage medium to make the digital & HD jump, but the technology wasn't quite there to do HD full justice. Which is why I expect better formats to come out before blu-ray really takes hold.
And here's the important quote:
If you compare _good_ DVDs played with a _good_ upscaler such as the Reon chip, with blu-ray, both playing on a well calibrated system in which the above mistakes are not made, the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is night and day. Especially on large displays.
What you're saying here is that it's nearly impossible to see a well set-up system before you buy. You have to buy the stuff sight-unseen and set it up yourself, and even then you won't really have a reference to compare your work to.
There's no way I'm even going to buy a display under those circumstances, because I'm sure as heck not going to be able to take my "well-configured" player into the store and connect it to a few displays to see what they're supposed to look like.
When it's easy enough for the stores that specialize in electronic equipment to set up properly, I'll think about buying one. Until then, all you early adopters can blog about how great your experience (that no one else can duplicate) is.
From what I've seen in the stores, I'm really not impressed. Either they're not using the compression properly, or the bitrates are lower than they should be, but every HD display in every best buy, circuit city, etc. type store I've been in has shown quite a few, serious compression artifacts.
Also, the last time I went to the sony store and played "HD or just big-screen" I had a fair bit of trouble telling the difference. Whether that's from them using a poor signal or my poor eyes, or what, I don't know. But I was definitely disappointed.
But you can't hear the higher bitrate. CDs are already at the limit of human aural capacity.
The sampling rate is 44 kHz, just above the nyquist limit for 20kHz, widely declared to be the upper limit of human hearing. (of course, that doesn't tell the whole picture. The ability to hear isn't a square function that drops at 20kHz. It tapers to nothing at near 20kHz.
And.. I'm not sure how they go about calculating the limits on sample size, but 65,536 discrete levels seems like a lot to me.
Further, the equipment for even reproducing that sound, even if you could hear the difference, was simply not common.
If they wanted to sell "dvd versions" of CDs, they should have done it by providing more content. Like, more songs (or whole discographies, even), music videos, different versions of the same songs (mp3, flac, or something drm'd for you to put on your music player) different versions of the same songs (acoustic, etc). Interviews with the band. Lyrics. Tour schedules. Other promotional material.
There's probably a whole myriad of things they could've added to 'em without actually having to produce any new music.
You're better off just waiting. Rent only during the transition: your DVDs are obsolete. They've been obsolete for a couple years now, the only question is when, not if they'll be supplanted.
I mean, yeah there are some movies you'll want to watch a couple times, but are there very many that you'll want to watch multiple times between now and when BDs cost what DVDs cost? (or, heck, between now and when media comes full circle and BDs are replaced by cartridges?)
I've done it. I might do it again, probably not this year, though. Now, granted, when I did it we had the mechanical lever machines where were absolutely horrible (much, much worse than touch-screens. They were talking about switching to touch-screens, but went with scantron-type in my district.) The absolute worst thing about the day was, after telling people going in to only pull the curtain-lever when they're ready to lock in their votes, having to then tell a few people who just wanted help (and either hadn't paid attention or hadn't understood the instructions) that they'd already voted.
Except, and here's the problem I have with that idea:
Why would Democratic counties (as in, predominantly democratic party leaning, that is) choose to be involved in a conspiracy to enrich a company that was accused at the time of planning to manipulate the election in favor of Republicans?
For in the first case if you have on additional criterion that you know Which 20% are going to fail, you can set up another, parallel system happens to have a very specific, different 20% of cases of failure and have a 100% missile shield.
Wheras in the second case, the best you can do is additional layers in series to filter out 80% of the remaining each time.
Obviously, we're ignoring the case where only one missile defense system would be an option because it's not the case where you would only be limited to one hard drive for any other than fiscal reasons.
Of course, there's an obvious and easy solution to this: heterogeneous ages.
After six months, replace the first disk whether it needs it or not. (or shorter or longer period depending on the ratio of "disks that can fail safely" to "disks in the array" and how long you desire between complete disk refreshment cycles) Then, replace the next disk after another six months. Continue indefinitely.
Drive size inflation is handled by buying disks that are integral-stripe-units larger each time and, when all disks have enough additional capacity (basically after one complete cycle, and every upgrade following), growing the array to fill the disks. There will always be (n-1) disks with "wasted" space, but it's a small price to pay for fault tolerance.
If you have failures requiring unscheduled rebuilding, then you make whatever corrections are necessary to re-establish the original level redundancy and spacing.
(also, after nearly one complete cycle, you can use the used disks (and one new one) to establish an additional array without the bootstrapping)
I suppose that could be the reason, but a far more compelling reason is redundancy. Of course that presumes competence in the decision makers, but the argument goes like this:
You don't ever want a nuclear weapon to go off where you don't want it to go off. If it blows up in the factory, or gets launched and blows up over the enemy you didn't actually have yet, it's very bad for you. i.e. you want it to have an extremely low false-positive rate. So you optimize the design for failure.
But when you do need nukes, you need them to take out the target. You can mitigate a high false-negative rate with redundancy. If 4/5 bombs shake themselves into dudiness, but you send fifty-six bombs, you've got your five 9s of reliability right there.
So the proper strategy would be to have an overwhelming abundance of easily disabled bombs. (and you need to design your over-abundance around the end-of-life expected failure rate)
Humans at all levels make mistakes, and are sloppy. And lack of resources encourages sloppiness. For example, when I worked at an election, one year, I was told, You're a _party_, for the purposes of helping people in the booths. The problem was that while I was technically "independent" that didn't mean that I was in any way sympathetic with the party I was "assigned" to represent (which I did to the best of my ability anyway, by not trying to influence anyone's vote who needed help, as was expected)
Anyway, the point is that in heavily monochromatic counties, it's going to be difficult to find enough workers of even the the two main parties, and it's very seductive for administrators to play fast and loose with the rules and hope that the opposites they're assigning are more concerned with fairness than party loyalty. And that's assuming that the administrators themselves aren't interested in influencing things.
At this point, I usually point out that the counties in FL that asked for (and received) the Diebold machines were heavily of one particular party, and that the Elections Supervisor is itself an elected position. A position that is technically supposed to be "non-partisan," but given the demographics (and human nature) it would be difficult to find someone interested enough in politics to apply for the thankless position who wasn't partisan, AND someone in those counties who wasn't partisan toward a specific party AND that the electorate would even recognize partisanship that favors their own thinking AND that they'd vote against it.
Humans are guaranteed to make mistakes, and make them regardless of whether a ballot is well-formed or not. Machines should, in theory, only ever make the same kind of mistakes (so the mistakes should be easily caught, eventually). Obviously, they're a lot faster than people are, and that time costs money. Unless all your vote-counters are volunteers, but then you'll find it very difficult to recruit people who are both A) proficient and B) don't have an agenda.
What the hell is wrong with machine counting?
Heck, with the advances in cryptography, and the ubiquitous network availability, what would be wrong with internet voting (in principle)? We ought to practice this stuff, because the internet also gives us the opportunity for much more direct democracy. The main barrier to having say, a weekly referendum is information availability and communication delay, which the Internet soundly pummels on both counts. I mean, you still need a congress, but why not restructure things to take back some of their power when the technology is available to do so?
My point is that there is a *lot* of wasted space. Even if you wanted to keep all of the same markup, verbatim, you'd be much better off compressing it before sending it down the line, bandwidth wise. (CSS are probably static enough to require very little server overhead)
In a sense, we've got a glut of bandwidth.
Sure, $.02/kb is steep for bandwidth hogging uses, but many uses have a fair bit of fluff that can be cut out, and if you have a burning desire for the remainder, I'd suggest getting one of the "unliminted" plans rather than paying a la carte.
Yeah, but where does all the food end up. And what's your friend going to spend all that money on, anyway? not food from you, that's for sure, because your friend's cheap food resulted in you abandoning your food-growing efforts.
People forget that money and wealth are not the same thing. This is one of the things that makes economics harder than it looks. You have to take a holistic approach to understanding, and it's extremely easy to get caught up in one aspect and misunderstand its overall effects on public welfare.
Alimony, for when, she doesn't love you, but she does love your money.
I'm sure it's probably repulsive to you, but does the law allow you to get anything in return for that dough? I mean, you should be able to claim that you got used to the lifestyle of having someone cook and clean* for you, and of course, "maritals."
*assuming she did those things. But regardless, whatever she did do (and it had to be something, or your marriage was pretty lopsided), you'd grown accustomed to, right? I mean, if you're going to send money as if you were still married, then she should do some things for you as if you were still married, too, right?
It seems weird to me that a person can have a claim on another person's money just based on the fact that other person used to give them money.
3 years = 2 moore's cycles. You're talking about a relative depreciation to 25% of the original "value" (in terms of relative capability) If your cell batteries degrade by 75% or suddenly, there were batters 4x better, you'd probably consider them pretty much disposable as well.
And after only ~5 years, you're talking about an order of magnitude increase in relative capability, for the same price.
So yeah, consumers probably should consider computers to be 3-5 year disposable items. In fact, for any given computer budget, I'd wager it's better in terms of integrated "relative" capability (as measured, potentially, in "months of bragging rights over your friends) to buy lower quartile (price-wise) machines more frequently (as in, spending the same total amount of money over time, but in smaller pieces). Like, maybe even as frequent as once per Moore.
Ahh, but Dell computers genuinely are decent deals, by virtue of the razor-thin margins. People interested in bragging rights buy Alienware, and it doesn't look like terrible machinery from the specs, but it's not "the best" you can get, and it's far from "the best deal" you can get.
The last time I priced a machine from them, I could get equivalent performance for literally half of the price by building it myself. At least, as long as my definition of "performance" didn't include, "really cool looking, glowy case"
I don't know what a "serious gamer" would be interested in, (performance? Showing off how much money they have?) but when I was at my closest to that category, I wouldn't have given Alienware more than two thoughts. It's not at all very much different from the "million dollar laptop" that turned out to be a $3k laptop with a half million dollars "worth" of diamonds and precious stones glued on.
I think it's a kind of hero worship. "Corporate Saviors," I believe they were called in the 80s or 90s.
It's a kind of narcissism to believe that it takes these special people to run your company, you have to get just the right person, someone who's done it before, even if they were a spectacular failure. Besides, look at the severance packages.. the companies must have believed in them to offer them that much...
But it's not all that different from the idea of the box-office superstar. As if only a few people making $20million a picture are capable of making good films. Precisely when it's just the opposite: a movie star will get people in the seats opening night, and maybe save a poor film, but a good movie will get people in the seats five weeks later and establish the body puppets associated with it as "movie stars."
Anyway, my point is that there are talented, capable people waiting in the wings in every field, and you might just be able to get great performance *and* save on salaries by expanding the scope of your talent search. I hope you're listening, shareholders meetings and Hollywood producers.
Meh. Surf through a proxy that renders the page internally to get the location of text boxes, then strips the markup and flows ascii text approximately into said boxes using tabs as needed (or sans tabs, even).
I'll never understand why short one-page text files should occupy tens of kilobytes.
Nor are the airwaves "free" -- they're a natural resource that the government claims ownership of. Use of them is rented out under certain conditions, which is how the FCC can get around the First Amendment. Well, they shouldn't be free, because spectrum is a limited resource. A resource with uses ranging from communication, t oastronomy, to literally "ranging." And, unfortunately, possible health ramifications as well. Of course this brings to mind the important question of who owns them.
If you set it up as individual ownership of all emissions within volume surrounding your person or property, liability would prevent any useful transmissions. Because uses of the spectrum are so very.. useful, we need a way divide it up and address everyone's competing uses and concerns.
I'm willing to cede my rights to some kind of central agency for that return, although I think that "selling" rather than "leasing" of spectrum is a little presumptive of our collective continued willingness to cede those rights to a controlling agency. IOW, the FCC doesn't own the rights to sell, except within a specific (though currently open-ended) window of time.
Further, although they claim otherwise, and enforce it by legislative fiat, they no justification for any policy on passive receivers. Any radiation that passes through your person, you ought to be able to intercept and process however you like. (this really irked me in the 90s, when cell phone companies pushed for "privacy" laws to prevent people from listing to their in-the-clear, analog phones, rather than properly encrypting their customers' conversations. Not because I wanted to listen in, but because they were seriously misrepresenting their customers' privacy. If you make it criminal to own a scanner, only criminals will have scanners.)
It's a one-time fee, so it reduces the debt. The deficit is an ongoing problem where \dot{\$}_{out} > \dot{\$}_{in}
\dot{\$} \neq \$
Since the government is incapable of investing (by the nature of tax-supported government), you can't use the time-value of money to annuitize a lump-sum payment, either. So in no way does $ become d$/dt for government.
If you learn to touch type, you pretty much eliminate the threat of shoulder surfing (except from well-positioned cameras, but your company should be worrying about that, not you)
More importantly, it is absurd to think that someone can't take your biometric bits from you. In fact, there's no bit of you that can't be removed with a sharp enough knife.* If you were in such a situation, wouldn't it be better to be able to just tell them your password, (or your "distress code password), rather than force them to cut things you'd rather not have cut?
*ok, it would probably be difficult to remove dental impressions in a way that would be portable with just a sharp knife. But would you really want to have to bite into an authenticator every time you walked away from your computer for five minutes?
Software patents "being silly" is only "common sense" if the software is only part of the control system of some larger, device. General purpose computers turn all that on its head, because software isn't just the control system for the product, it IS the product.
Now, you could make an argument that it still shouldn't be patentable (but do you really think copyright is preferable? 20 years vs. effectively indefinite, that's a great choice) or even be protected IP at all. But in that world, software would exist basically gratis, only as a means to sell more hardware, everyone would pay for everything, rather than just the bits they needed, and hardware companies would only commission just enough to drive more hardware sales.
And, economically, it's a very poor position. Software can be produced independently from the hardware, therefore it should be produced independently from the hardware, in order to commoditize both.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, but when you do eventually get a large (>720i, of any size) TV, do you really want to re-buy your library of DVDs just to see them at full-res? Or would you rather have the money you would've spent on all those disks sitting in a bank account, earning interest, waiting for you to buy the by-then cheap whatever-the-format-happens-to-be?
I don't have very many DVDs, and I haven't bought any since 2005, but of the ones I do have, I've watched fewer than half more than two times. IOW, I'd have saved quite a bit of moolah by merely renting more than half the titles I own instead of buying them.
Quite the contrary. Not modern enough. I'm really, really hoping that 50G : 4 hours, MPEG 2 (or even h.264) doesn't somehow get established as the standard precisely because I *can* see the difference, and it's sad. It's just not quite enough.
But what disappoints me even more is that Blu-ray and HD-DVD were always going to be transition formats: we needed a new storage medium to make the digital & HD jump, but the technology wasn't quite there to do HD full justice. Which is why I expect better formats to come out before blu-ray really takes hold.
And here's the important quote:
What you're saying here is that it's nearly impossible to see a well set-up system before you buy. You have to buy the stuff sight-unseen and set it up yourself, and even then you won't really have a reference to compare your work to.
There's no way I'm even going to buy a display under those circumstances, because I'm sure as heck not going to be able to take my "well-configured" player into the store and connect it to a few displays to see what they're supposed to look like.
When it's easy enough for the stores that specialize in electronic equipment to set up properly, I'll think about buying one. Until then, all you early adopters can blog about how great your experience (that no one else can duplicate) is.
From what I've seen in the stores, I'm really not impressed. Either they're not using the compression properly, or the bitrates are lower than they should be, but every HD display in every best buy, circuit city, etc. type store I've been in has shown quite a few, serious compression artifacts.
Also, the last time I went to the sony store and played "HD or just big-screen" I had a fair bit of trouble telling the difference. Whether that's from them using a poor signal or my poor eyes, or what, I don't know. But I was definitely disappointed.
But you can't hear the higher bitrate. CDs are already at the limit of human aural capacity.
The sampling rate is 44 kHz, just above the nyquist limit for 20kHz, widely declared to be the upper limit of human hearing. (of course, that doesn't tell the whole picture. The ability to hear isn't a square function that drops at 20kHz. It tapers to nothing at near 20kHz.
And.. I'm not sure how they go about calculating the limits on sample size, but 65,536 discrete levels seems like a lot to me.
Further, the equipment for even reproducing that sound, even if you could hear the difference, was simply not common.
If they wanted to sell "dvd versions" of CDs, they should have done it by providing more content. Like, more songs (or whole discographies, even), music videos, different versions of the same songs (mp3, flac, or something drm'd for you to put on your music player) different versions of the same songs (acoustic, etc). Interviews with the band. Lyrics. Tour schedules. Other promotional material.
There's probably a whole myriad of things they could've added to 'em without actually having to produce any new music.
You're better off just waiting. Rent only during the transition: your DVDs are obsolete. They've been obsolete for a couple years now, the only question is when, not if they'll be supplanted.
I mean, yeah there are some movies you'll want to watch a couple times, but are there very many that you'll want to watch multiple times between now and when BDs cost what DVDs cost? (or, heck, between now and when media comes full circle and BDs are replaced by cartridges?)
Isn't she a little short for a storm trooper?
I've done it. I might do it again, probably not this year, though. Now, granted, when I did it we had the mechanical lever machines where were absolutely horrible (much, much worse than touch-screens. They were talking about switching to touch-screens, but went with scantron-type in my district.) The absolute worst thing about the day was, after telling people going in to only pull the curtain-lever when they're ready to lock in their votes, having to then tell a few people who just wanted help (and either hadn't paid attention or hadn't understood the instructions) that they'd already voted.
Except, and here's the problem I have with that idea:
Why would Democratic counties (as in, predominantly democratic party leaning, that is) choose to be involved in a conspiracy to enrich a company that was accused at the time of planning to manipulate the election in favor of Republicans?
They are, but it's not a good mapping to the GP.
For in the first case if you have on additional criterion that you know Which 20% are going to fail, you can set up another, parallel system happens to have a very specific, different 20% of cases of failure and have a 100% missile shield.
Wheras in the second case, the best you can do is additional layers in series to filter out 80% of the remaining each time.
Obviously, we're ignoring the case where only one missile defense system would be an option because it's not the case where you would only be limited to one hard drive for any other than fiscal reasons.
Of course, there's an obvious and easy solution to this: heterogeneous ages.
After six months, replace the first disk whether it needs it or not. (or shorter or longer period depending on the ratio of "disks that can fail safely" to "disks in the array" and how long you desire between complete disk refreshment cycles) Then, replace the next disk after another six months. Continue indefinitely.
Drive size inflation is handled by buying disks that are integral-stripe-units larger each time and, when all disks have enough additional capacity (basically after one complete cycle, and every upgrade following), growing the array to fill the disks. There will always be (n-1) disks with "wasted" space, but it's a small price to pay for fault tolerance.
If you have failures requiring unscheduled rebuilding, then you make whatever corrections are necessary to re-establish the original level redundancy and spacing.
(also, after nearly one complete cycle, you can use the used disks (and one new one) to establish an additional array without the bootstrapping)
I suppose that could be the reason, but a far more compelling reason is redundancy. Of course that presumes competence in the decision makers, but the argument goes like this:
You don't ever want a nuclear weapon to go off where you don't want it to go off. If it blows up in the factory, or gets launched and blows up over the enemy you didn't actually have yet, it's very bad for you. i.e. you want it to have an extremely low false-positive rate. So you optimize the design for failure.
But when you do need nukes, you need them to take out the target. You can mitigate a high false-negative rate with redundancy. If 4/5 bombs shake themselves into dudiness, but you send fifty-six bombs, you've got your five 9s of reliability right there.
So the proper strategy would be to have an overwhelming abundance of easily disabled bombs. (and you need to design your over-abundance around the end-of-life expected failure rate)
Humans at all levels make mistakes, and are sloppy. And lack of resources encourages sloppiness. For example, when I worked at an election, one year, I was told, You're a _party_, for the purposes of helping people in the booths. The problem was that while I was technically "independent" that didn't mean that I was in any way sympathetic with the party I was "assigned" to represent (which I did to the best of my ability anyway, by not trying to influence anyone's vote who needed help, as was expected)
Anyway, the point is that in heavily monochromatic counties, it's going to be difficult to find enough workers of even the the two main parties, and it's very seductive for administrators to play fast and loose with the rules and hope that the opposites they're assigning are more concerned with fairness than party loyalty. And that's assuming that the administrators themselves aren't interested in influencing things.
At this point, I usually point out that the counties in FL that asked for (and received) the Diebold machines were heavily of one particular party, and that the Elections Supervisor is itself an elected position. A position that is technically supposed to be "non-partisan," but given the demographics (and human nature) it would be difficult to find someone interested enough in politics to apply for the thankless position who wasn't partisan, AND someone in those counties who wasn't partisan toward a specific party AND that the electorate would even recognize partisanship that favors their own thinking AND that they'd vote against it.
Consistency, speed, and cost.
Humans are guaranteed to make mistakes, and make them regardless of whether a ballot is well-formed or not. Machines should, in theory, only ever make the same kind of mistakes (so the mistakes should be easily caught, eventually). Obviously, they're a lot faster than people are, and that time costs money. Unless all your vote-counters are volunteers, but then you'll find it very difficult to recruit people who are both A) proficient and B) don't have an agenda.
What the hell is wrong with machine counting?
Heck, with the advances in cryptography, and the ubiquitous network availability, what would be wrong with internet voting (in principle)? We ought to practice this stuff, because the internet also gives us the opportunity for much more direct democracy. The main barrier to having say, a weekly referendum is information availability and communication delay, which the Internet soundly pummels on both counts. I mean, you still need a congress, but why not restructure things to take back some of their power when the technology is available to do so?
My point is that there is a *lot* of wasted space. Even if you wanted to keep all of the same markup, verbatim, you'd be much better off compressing it before sending it down the line, bandwidth wise. (CSS are probably static enough to require very little server overhead)
In a sense, we've got a glut of bandwidth.
Sure, $.02/kb is steep for bandwidth hogging uses, but many uses have a fair bit of fluff that can be cut out, and if you have a burning desire for the remainder, I'd suggest getting one of the "unliminted" plans rather than paying a la carte.
Yeah, but where does all the food end up. And what's your friend going to spend all that money on, anyway? not food from you, that's for sure, because your friend's cheap food resulted in you abandoning your food-growing efforts.
People forget that money and wealth are not the same thing. This is one of the things that makes economics harder than it looks. You have to take a holistic approach to understanding, and it's extremely easy to get caught up in one aspect and misunderstand its overall effects on public welfare.
Alimony, for when, she doesn't love you, but she does love your money.
I'm sure it's probably repulsive to you, but does the law allow you to get anything in return for that dough? I mean, you should be able to claim that you got used to the lifestyle of having someone cook and clean* for you, and of course, "maritals."
*assuming she did those things. But regardless, whatever she did do (and it had to be something, or your marriage was pretty lopsided), you'd grown accustomed to, right? I mean, if you're going to send money as if you were still married, then she should do some things for you as if you were still married, too, right?
It seems weird to me that a person can have a claim on another person's money just based on the fact that other person used to give them money.
3 years = 2 moore's cycles. You're talking about a relative depreciation to 25% of the original "value" (in terms of relative capability) If your cell batteries degrade by 75% or suddenly, there were batters 4x better, you'd probably consider them pretty much disposable as well.
And after only ~5 years, you're talking about an order of magnitude increase in relative capability, for the same price.
So yeah, consumers probably should consider computers to be 3-5 year disposable items. In fact, for any given computer budget, I'd wager it's better in terms of integrated "relative" capability (as measured, potentially, in "months of bragging rights over your friends) to buy lower quartile (price-wise) machines more frequently (as in, spending the same total amount of money over time, but in smaller pieces). Like, maybe even as frequent as once per Moore.
Ahh, but Dell computers genuinely are decent deals, by virtue of the razor-thin margins. People interested in bragging rights buy Alienware, and it doesn't look like terrible machinery from the specs, but it's not "the best" you can get, and it's far from "the best deal" you can get.
The last time I priced a machine from them, I could get equivalent performance for literally half of the price by building it myself. At least, as long as my definition of "performance" didn't include, "really cool looking, glowy case"
I don't know what a "serious gamer" would be interested in, (performance? Showing off how much money they have?) but when I was at my closest to that category, I wouldn't have given Alienware more than two thoughts. It's not at all very much different from the "million dollar laptop" that turned out to be a $3k laptop with a half million dollars "worth" of diamonds and precious stones glued on.
I think it's a kind of hero worship. "Corporate Saviors," I believe they were called in the 80s or 90s.
It's a kind of narcissism to believe that it takes these special people to run your company, you have to get just the right person, someone who's done it before, even if they were a spectacular failure. Besides, look at the severance packages.. the companies must have believed in them to offer them that much...
But it's not all that different from the idea of the box-office superstar. As if only a few people making $20million a picture are capable of making good films. Precisely when it's just the opposite: a movie star will get people in the seats opening night, and maybe save a poor film, but a good movie will get people in the seats five weeks later and establish the body puppets associated with it as "movie stars."
Anyway, my point is that there are talented, capable people waiting in the wings in every field, and you might just be able to get great performance *and* save on salaries by expanding the scope of your talent search. I hope you're listening, shareholders meetings and Hollywood producers.
Meh. Surf through a proxy that renders the page internally to get the location of text boxes, then strips the markup and flows ascii text approximately into said boxes using tabs as needed (or sans tabs, even).
I'll never understand why short one-page text files should occupy tens of kilobytes.
If you set it up as individual ownership of all emissions within volume surrounding your person or property, liability would prevent any useful transmissions. Because uses of the spectrum are so very.. useful, we need a way divide it up and address everyone's competing uses and concerns.
I'm willing to cede my rights to some kind of central agency for that return, although I think that "selling" rather than "leasing" of spectrum is a little presumptive of our collective continued willingness to cede those rights to a controlling agency. IOW, the FCC doesn't own the rights to sell, except within a specific (though currently open-ended) window of time.
Further, although they claim otherwise, and enforce it by legislative fiat, they no justification for any policy on passive receivers. Any radiation that passes through your person, you ought to be able to intercept and process however you like. (this really irked me in the 90s, when cell phone companies pushed for "privacy" laws to prevent people from listing to their in-the-clear, analog phones, rather than properly encrypting their customers' conversations. Not because I wanted to listen in, but because they were seriously misrepresenting their customers' privacy. If you make it criminal to own a scanner, only criminals will have scanners.)
It's a one-time fee, so it reduces the debt. The deficit is an ongoing problem where \dot{\$}_{out} > \dot{\$}_{in}
\dot{\$} \neq \$
Since the government is incapable of investing (by the nature of tax-supported government), you can't use the time-value of money to annuitize a lump-sum payment, either. So in no way does $ become d$/dt for government.
If you learn to touch type, you pretty much eliminate the threat of shoulder surfing (except from well-positioned cameras, but your company should be worrying about that, not you)
More importantly, it is absurd to think that someone can't take your biometric bits from you. In fact, there's no bit of you that can't be removed with a sharp enough knife.* If you were in such a situation, wouldn't it be better to be able to just tell them your password, (or your "distress code password), rather than force them to cut things you'd rather not have cut?
*ok, it would probably be difficult to remove dental impressions in a way that would be portable with just a sharp knife. But would you really want to have to bite into an authenticator every time you walked away from your computer for five minutes?
Software patents "being silly" is only "common sense" if the software is only part of the control system of some larger, device. General purpose computers turn all that on its head, because software isn't just the control system for the product, it IS the product.
Now, you could make an argument that it still shouldn't be patentable (but do you really think copyright is preferable? 20 years vs. effectively indefinite, that's a great choice) or even be protected IP at all. But in that world, software would exist basically gratis, only as a means to sell more hardware, everyone would pay for everything, rather than just the bits they needed, and hardware companies would only commission just enough to drive more hardware sales.
And, economically, it's a very poor position. Software can be produced independently from the hardware, therefore it should be produced independently from the hardware, in order to commoditize both.
Doesn't the picture kind of look like the juice-man? Or more generally, "Active old guy, excited about stuff, selling nearly worthless Ronco trinkets"