Is intolerance of other viewpoints always wrong? I can't see how saying "yes, in your viewpoint 2+2 = 369" and "That's OK, you're entitled to your viewpoint."
I mean, sure, have a viewpoint, but the above example, the viewpoint is flat out *wrong*. And I don't see how being tolerant of that is helpful or itself better than just saying "That is incorrect, 2+2 does not equal 369 but 2+2=4."
Also, why would challenging viewpoints you disagree with be intolerant? Just screaming at each other is not terribly useful, but is debate wrong?
That may well be, but the part I don't get is what a bank needs to do that would possibly break any browser, including Lynx (assuming it does SSL)... I mean, they don't need to be Facebook as pointed out above. They need to basically display some tables, and have a few HTML forms for payments or web based mail/customer service contacts. What else do they need to do?
Heck, especially with on-line banking and the threats, I would think the simplest, least scripty least dynamic etc site would be by far the best, for security and for load over SSL...
Well, I'm not sure it's even that. I would argue that, at least in the US, the $2-$5 range is the "Do I want it?" range. The way I've always understood micro payments was more along the range of electricity costs/charges. I.e. most people in the US aren't interested in tracking if 5 extra minutes of TV that night are going to raise their electricity bill. And on down...
Electricity where I live has ranged about $0.14 per kw/h and so for minutes, it's so low to be lost in the noise generally. My twist florescent lightbulb eats ~ 20 watts. It costs *something* to run for 10 minutes, but I have no idea how much, nor do I really care. I expect this is where the micropayment people want to be for charge per web page.
For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book
I see, my misunderstanding. Yes, the value of the novel is the same, but the value of the packaging is not - so in the "real world" or the place where you *cannot* buy just the information, the total value of what you get when you supposedly buy the "novel" as a PDF(and again, here, I mean more than the information, this includes the intrinsic value of the paper or the contested decline in value of the DRM) is, I think objectively less than the book. Doubly so if the PDF has DRM.
Well, yes, but so is slashdot or streams of the daily show or youtube etc... And they are usually less likely to get you fired. Heck, if you get on a forum or blog about something vaguely related to your job, you might get away with even claiming it's work related!
Wow, you do have bad luck. I do like to have a spare on hand of a near identical machine (may have less RAM and HDs cause we'll swap them in from the one with the broken mobo for instance). My experiences with HP and IBM so far have always lived up to their claims, but I've only had desktop systems go bad. One was fixed that day with a new HD, the other the next day with a new motherboard. Both times the tech got it right with the right part on hand. But Dell always likes to argue with me because I haven't paid them money and taken a test to prove to them I can tell when a video card or RAM chip has gone bad . . .
That said, no vendor is great with "flaky" machines, though usually if they die in a 2 minute period it shows up in their testing and they do fix it - it's the random, unexplained memory errors every month that are pretty hard to get anything done with when memtest and their testing tools all show the memory OK... And when the spare does it too, you know it's got to be something in the design vs your OS build and nothings going to fix that for you.
Mmmm, that may very well be true. I'm not suggesting spending $40k for a single server necessarily, but that spending $5k isn't unreasonable and $10k shouldn't be out of the question - depending of course on what you want to do with it. I don't generally recommend building your own now adays, unless your time isn't very valuable. I've had too many experiences where components "should" work together when researching online where they don't in reality, and especially if it's one of the hard to track down instabilities, you'll quickly spend $10k in time trying to get that $1k server to work properly.
Also, I've found out the hard way that you can't necessarily get parts swapped out quickly from a component vendor - so now you are keeping more spares in stock (not that you don't want a spare, but if it takes a month to turn around a bad HD, you now probably need 10 in stock) which costs storage space, tracking etc...
Finally, I think going from say, 50 $1k servers to 3 $10k redundant servers for virtualization say, can make a lot of sense for cooling and power and space reasons. It depends on your environment, but it often takes a while to rebuild a server from scratch so you don't necessarily want one HD failing killing the server. I don't generally want the server to be down for an hour because the PSU burned up.
If you are doing clustering where it auto fails over that's fine, but then you've just increased your redundancy to the whole box which I generally think is a good idea where feasible, but setting up a decent cluster often requires a SAN and doesn't necessarily work for everything until you are all the way to VMs with auto failover and then your slightly more expensive server looks like a good middle ground, or it does to me... YMMV of course.
Oh, and Dell - that probably was your problem right there - I can attest that at the $6k level we also have odd errors and reboots and OS hangs that we don't see on similar HP, IBM or local vendors systems. I know some people like Dell, but I have bad Dell Karma or something and they end up being trouble for me.
Mmm, redundant good hardware for servers though - You usually want redundant power and cooling and some hot-swap of disks at least, unless you can cluster everything...
True, but I'm objecting to the statement made that it is obvious that a PDF ought to cost the same as a book. I think I've shown at least some objective reasons why there is less intrinsic value in a PDF compared to a book, precisely because you're not getting a physical item - the packaging of the desired information is far less and costs far less, so it seems that the overall value of the package plus the desired good ought to be less.
because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong. Well, if I had all the same rights with a PDF as I do with a book, then maybe it's wrong. But it's far from obvious. First, a PDF requires I have other resources to use it, a book I can just open up and read - I don't need to provide electricity, a computer or reader, etc. I can re-sell the book, often I can't resell the PDF so there's a direct lessening of value. I often got back 20% of my textbook value on selling it back at the end of the class, and for fiction I can get back some amount from a used book store, or via Amazon etc. With a book I can use it to prop up a table leg or make an impromptu stand for something. Can't do it with a PDF. Heck, in an emergency, I could burn the book for heat - can't do that with a PDF.
So, yes, a PDF does have less intrinsic value than a book from my point of view.
I haven't read Door into Summer, but the review on Amazon makes it sound like it is much more about Time Travel than it is about "dead-heading" or the societal changes from being able to back up your brain like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is...
I don't know how much this actually has to do with coming up with *new* stuff, but as far as I can tell GMail basically owns webmail now, Youtube is basically *the* video streaming site, and Google Maps as stated elsewhere is quite the contender in that arena. And Google News seems to be big enough as an aggregator to get the various media companies suing,talking and thinking about it, whereas, say, slashdot doesn't...
Of course, you have to have the sense to understand that not all news is reliable, and to read every story with a certain degree of skepticism. This problem is really helped by the ease with which one can pick out keywords and feed them to a news-search site to get multiple versions of the story with different biases. I've actually been rather disappointed with trying that on several different news stories recently. They all seemed to be very slightly changed version of the same text, if not just cut and paste of the AP or Reuters copy. I think this has helped show that not many news sources actually even add spin to a story that isn't really big headline news and instead we could get by for probably 90% of news with AP and Reuters and not actually have anything change with regard to content.
You know, I used to really think that things that last "forever" were a good idea "all the time". Then I read the sci-fi book by John Ringo called "A hymn before battle". This had little to do with the story, but the general concept was a race that did make everything by master craftsmen and cost so much you had to mortgage them for ~ 150 years to pay for them, but part and parcel, they had a full warranty for the entire payment time and would last generally forever after they were paid for.
For some products and devices that would be great, but not for everything. The race was pretty much technologically stagnant.
Now, out of Sci-Fi for a minute. There are many things that wear out and have to be replaced that I wish I could just buy a better product. For instance, my charcoal grill rusted through and I had to buy a new one. Charcoal hasn't really changed for quite some time, and if the thing could be built to last outside for more than maybe 6 years, it would be great. I'd love to have it last decades. This holds for other items as well, such as a tractor wagon or wheelbarrow.
What it isn't so great for is things that could become demonstrably better somewhat frequently. For instance, I have a clothes steamer that I use to remove light wrinkles from clothes. I bought it about 3 years ago and it was fine. The issue is that it has a water reservoir that it heats up to create steam. This takes ~10 minutes to generate any steam at all and ~ 15 minutes to really get going. Then, it will shut off the heating element periodically to save power or prevent overheating... The problem is this basically shuts off the steam too. So I get 15-20 seconds of steam and 45 seconds of cool-down time.
I just bought a replacement steamer. It's a newer technology that uses some sort of pressurized system. It creates steam in 40 seconds and it's continuous. Now, the old one isn't broken, but I'm sure glad I didn't have a mortgage for x years for a "better built" one so I couldn't upgrade.
Another example is I have an Oreck Vacuum that I bought 2 years ago. It has a 21 year warranty. I see no reason to expect it won't last that long with them yearly (for free) cleaning it up and replacing any parts that are bad. But there are already new models that look prettier (aesthetics are important to many people, if not really to me) and have new features like UV lights on the bottom to kill germs. I don't personally think these features are or would be worth upgrading, but I put a lot of money into the existing vacuum and so wouldn't upgrade for a long time. In 10 more years I might well have to drop the existing investment that would work fine due to great maintenance, but is so far behind technologically I really want the new features.
One existing example is I have a ~ 6 year old Motorolla cell phone. It works fine, and I can replace the battery every 2 years or so for about $5 including shipping. It's strongly built and probably will continue to work for a few more years. However, it is absolutely blown away in functionality and uses by, say, an iPhone or Droid.
Finally, consider Cars. You already have ~5year loans to purchase one now. So look at how invested we are in oil to keep running our economy - wars etc because we can't get people to easily upgrade to a hybrid en-masse due to the cost and expected lifetime of most cars, which is over 10 years now on average, and I certainly see a lot of people going for 20 years. But people with a 20 year old car not only likely pollute more and require more gas, but don't have major safety features like anti-lock breaks, air bags, traction control, electronic stability control not to mention things like cruise control, back up cameras, auto-parallel parking, etc that are either standard or available on many cars now.
I don't like disposable junk, but there are good reasons to allow for reasonable cycles of new technology. I don't think it's a great idea to artificially try and freeze or slow down new tech either.
I'm not sure about reasonable, but it always seems to me that it's a little bit crazy to make the experience *worse* for paying customers than for people who pirate the game/program. Actually, I'm really getting to hate various activation/licensing schemes anyway because they often seem to get needlessly complicated (well, I'm diverging to work here) - and so if at all possible I only want to get site licensed, freeware or OSS so as to not increase the pain of my licensing management.
To go further OT, why oh why do companies that provide/require network license servers also require you to provide a serial or code on install rather than the server IP?
Seeing as I use Opera, do other users find that Firefox often can't re-open the tabs after a crash? I'm actually amazed how often it can't open the tabs. Is Chrome that bad also? Opera just about never loses the session, and if it did, there's a backed up session file you can go to to get it back.
Hmmm, ok, so pacifist isn't the term you like. What would you call someone who isn't interested in being an agressor? That is, while I certainly would defend myself or my family, I can't think of any situation where it would be OK with me to be an attacker that someone else had to defend against.
The whole model is predicated on the printer being *very* cheap compared to the ink. If as you say it's cheaper to buy a new printer than the 1st party ink, why would you buy the first party ink? Even if you can only do one cartridge of the cheaper 3rd party ink before needing a new printer, it makes economic sense to do that.
If you're printing photos, do you really need to do it at home? I've found that going to a professional printer (could be Wal-Mart) looks better on better paper FAR cheaper than I could ever get an inkjet at home to do. Now, the last time I tried was in 2004 when I gave up on inkjets for my use, but I had a decent ($140 epson photo) printer and ink and some $1 per sheet photo paper. It was close to a "real" photo (compared to developed film). But it cost me somewhere around $2.50 a photo by the time I dealt with cleaning the heads, misprints, running out of ink halfway through a print etc. And this was for 4x6" photos. For $2 a photo I can get 8x10" mailed to me on fujifilm paper. 4x6" were under $0.20 each. And, I didn't have to clean up, fight with the printer etc.
For everything else(except photo), laser seems to be equal or better than inkjets. It's faster, you can get auto-duplex, it never dries out or cloggs, and even the crappy starter toners last for an amazing number of pages - ~1500. Try getting that out of a standard inkjet. And that's just the crappy starter toner. "Real refills" last for ~3000 pages on the tiny samsung lasers they sell in Best Buy. Real laser printers (ones that cost maybe $400 or more) can often get ~ 7500 pages or more out of a $100 toner cartridge. You're likely to want an upgrade in the technology (at home) before you need new toner on most of these printers. Now, yes, they do cost a bit more, but you *never* spend time "aligning the heads, cleaning the heads, swabbing the heads"...
Is it SSH encrypted? Here I am being a pendant again, but I'm pretty sure most browsers (save some firefox extension probably) aren't using SSH for anything. You're probably thinking of TLS, the successor of SSL.
There was a time when the Internet was not synonymous with the WWW
It still isn't, unless you're particularly clueless. I'm pretty sure just about everyone has heard, for instance, of P2P apps, e-mail and IM, which as far as I can tell *aren't* WWW. Although, that's horribly misunderstanding the entire domain name system anyway - I could certainly have a server at www.myserver.com that didn't run a web server and instead was an FTP server. It'd be kind of odd and against convention, but hey, I could be a "rebel".
Well... It's a) faster b) doesn't involve telling google about *every* site I go to (unless I use chrome I guess) c) I also see one page less of ads d) I'm less vulnerable to google gaming and ending up on some other website (there's still DNS poisoning I guess)
There's also the benefit of understanding what a web address is and where it goes...
Slashdot Mirror
Is intolerance of other viewpoints always wrong? I can't see how saying "yes, in your viewpoint 2+2 = 369" and "That's OK, you're entitled to your viewpoint."
I mean, sure, have a viewpoint, but the above example, the viewpoint is flat out *wrong*. And I don't see how being tolerant of that is helpful or itself better than just saying "That is incorrect, 2+2 does not equal 369 but 2+2=4."
Also, why would challenging viewpoints you disagree with be intolerant? Just screaming at each other is not terribly useful, but is debate wrong?
That may well be, but the part I don't get is what a bank needs to do that would possibly break any browser, including Lynx (assuming it does SSL)... I mean, they don't need to be Facebook as pointed out above. They need to basically display some tables, and have a few HTML forms for payments or web based mail/customer service contacts. What else do they need to do?
Heck, especially with on-line banking and the threats, I would think the simplest, least scripty least dynamic etc site would be by far the best, for security and for load over SSL...
Well, I'm not sure it's even that. I would argue that, at least in the US, the $2-$5 range is the "Do I want it?" range. The way I've always understood micro payments was more along the range of electricity costs/charges. I.e. most people in the US aren't interested in tracking if 5 extra minutes of TV that night are going to raise their electricity bill. And on down...
Electricity where I live has ranged about $0.14 per kw/h and so for minutes, it's so low to be lost in the noise generally. My twist florescent lightbulb eats ~ 20 watts. It costs *something* to run for 10 minutes, but I have no idea how much, nor do I really care. I expect this is where the micropayment people want to be for charge per web page.
Your use sounds exactly like a Wiki page to me? If you've already got a Wiki (We do), what would a wave add?
For you to say that the value of a novel is suddenly less because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book
I see, my misunderstanding. Yes, the value of the novel is the same, but the value of the packaging is not - so in the "real world" or the place where you *cannot* buy just the information, the total value of what you get when you supposedly buy the "novel" as a PDF(and again, here, I mean more than the information, this includes the intrinsic value of the paper or the contested decline in value of the DRM) is, I think objectively less than the book. Doubly so if the PDF has DRM.
Well, yes, but so is slashdot or streams of the daily show or youtube etc... And they are usually less likely to get you fired. Heck, if you get on a forum or blog about something vaguely related to your job, you might get away with even claiming it's work related!
Wow, you do have bad luck. I do like to have a spare on hand of a near identical machine (may have less RAM and HDs cause we'll swap them in from the one with the broken mobo for instance). My experiences with HP and IBM so far have always lived up to their claims, but I've only had desktop systems go bad. One was fixed that day with a new HD, the other the next day with a new motherboard. Both times the tech got it right with the right part on hand. But Dell always likes to argue with me because I haven't paid them money and taken a test to prove to them I can tell when a video card or RAM chip has gone bad . . .
That said, no vendor is great with "flaky" machines, though usually if they die in a 2 minute period it shows up in their testing and they do fix it - it's the random, unexplained memory errors every month that are pretty hard to get anything done with when memtest and their testing tools all show the memory OK... And when the spare does it too, you know it's got to be something in the design vs your OS build and nothings going to fix that for you.
Mmmm, that may very well be true. I'm not suggesting spending $40k for a single server necessarily, but that spending $5k isn't unreasonable and $10k shouldn't be out of the question - depending of course on what you want to do with it. I don't generally recommend building your own now adays, unless your time isn't very valuable. I've had too many experiences where components "should" work together when researching online where they don't in reality, and especially if it's one of the hard to track down instabilities, you'll quickly spend $10k in time trying to get that $1k server to work properly.
Also, I've found out the hard way that you can't necessarily get parts swapped out quickly from a component vendor - so now you are keeping more spares in stock (not that you don't want a spare, but if it takes a month to turn around a bad HD, you now probably need 10 in stock) which costs storage space, tracking etc...
Finally, I think going from say, 50 $1k servers to 3 $10k redundant servers for virtualization say, can make a lot of sense for cooling and power and space reasons. It depends on your environment, but it often takes a while to rebuild a server from scratch so you don't necessarily want one HD failing killing the server. I don't generally want the server to be down for an hour because the PSU burned up.
If you are doing clustering where it auto fails over that's fine, but then you've just increased your redundancy to the whole box which I generally think is a good idea where feasible, but setting up a decent cluster often requires a SAN and doesn't necessarily work for everything until you are all the way to VMs with auto failover and then your slightly more expensive server looks like a good middle ground, or it does to me... YMMV of course.
Oh, and Dell - that probably was your problem right there - I can attest that at the $6k level we also have odd errors and reboots and OS hangs that we don't see on similar HP, IBM or local vendors systems. I know some people like Dell, but I have bad Dell Karma or something and they end up being trouble for me.
Mmm, redundant good hardware for servers though - You usually want redundant power and cooling and some hot-swap of disks at least, unless you can cluster everything...
True, but I'm objecting to the statement made that it is obvious that a PDF ought to cost the same as a book. I think I've shown at least some objective reasons why there is less intrinsic value in a PDF compared to a book, precisely because you're not getting a physical item - the packaging of the desired information is far less and costs far less, so it seems that the overall value of the package plus the desired good ought to be less.
because I bought it as a PDF rather than a book, is obviously wrong.
Well, if I had all the same rights with a PDF as I do with a book, then maybe it's wrong. But it's far from obvious. First, a PDF requires I have other resources to use it, a book I can just open up and read - I don't need to provide electricity, a computer or reader, etc. I can re-sell the book, often I can't resell the PDF so there's a direct lessening of value. I often got back 20% of my textbook value on selling it back at the end of the class, and for fiction I can get back some amount from a used book store, or via Amazon etc. With a book I can use it to prop up a table leg or make an impromptu stand for something. Can't do it with a PDF. Heck, in an emergency, I could burn the book for heat - can't do that with a PDF.
So, yes, a PDF does have less intrinsic value than a book from my point of view.
I haven't read Door into Summer, but the review on Amazon makes it sound like it is much more about Time Travel than it is about "dead-heading" or the societal changes from being able to back up your brain like Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom is...
Same with Diet Coke - though I prefer canned to plastic bottle taste. I very rarely see glass bottles so I can't really comment on that.
I don't know how much this actually has to do with coming up with *new* stuff, but as far as I can tell GMail basically owns webmail now, Youtube is basically *the* video streaming site, and Google Maps as stated elsewhere is quite the contender in that arena. And Google News seems to be big enough as an aggregator to get the various media companies suing,talking and thinking about it, whereas, say, slashdot doesn't...
Of course, you have to have the sense to understand that not all news is reliable, and to read every story with a certain degree of skepticism. This problem is really helped by the ease with which one can pick out keywords and feed them to a news-search site to get multiple versions of the story with different biases.
I've actually been rather disappointed with trying that on several different news stories recently. They all seemed to be very slightly changed version of the same text, if not just cut and paste of the AP or Reuters copy. I think this has helped show that not many news sources actually even add spin to a story that isn't really big headline news and instead we could get by for probably 90% of news with AP and Reuters and not actually have anything change with regard to content.
You know, I used to really think that things that last "forever" were a good idea "all the time". Then I read the sci-fi book by John Ringo called "A hymn before battle". This had little to do with the story, but the general concept was a race that did make everything by master craftsmen and cost so much you had to mortgage them for ~ 150 years to pay for them, but part and parcel, they had a full warranty for the entire payment time and would last generally forever after they were paid for.
For some products and devices that would be great, but not for everything. The race was pretty much technologically stagnant.
Now, out of Sci-Fi for a minute. There are many things that wear out and have to be replaced that I wish I could just buy a better product. For instance, my charcoal grill rusted through and I had to buy a new one. Charcoal hasn't really changed for quite some time, and if the thing could be built to last outside for more than maybe 6 years, it would be great. I'd love to have it last decades. This holds for other items as well, such as a tractor wagon or wheelbarrow.
What it isn't so great for is things that could become demonstrably better somewhat frequently. For instance, I have a clothes steamer that I use to remove light wrinkles from clothes. I bought it about 3 years ago and it was fine. The issue is that it has a water reservoir that it heats up to create steam. This takes ~10 minutes to generate any steam at all and ~ 15 minutes to really get going. Then, it will shut off the heating element periodically to save power or prevent overheating... The problem is this basically shuts off the steam too. So I get 15-20 seconds of steam and 45 seconds of cool-down time.
I just bought a replacement steamer. It's a newer technology that uses some sort of pressurized system. It creates steam in 40 seconds and it's continuous. Now, the old one isn't broken, but I'm sure glad I didn't have a mortgage for x years for a "better built" one so I couldn't upgrade.
Another example is I have an Oreck Vacuum that I bought 2 years ago. It has a 21 year warranty. I see no reason to expect it won't last that long with them yearly (for free) cleaning it up and replacing any parts that are bad. But there are already new models that look prettier (aesthetics are important to many people, if not really to me) and have new features like UV lights on the bottom to kill germs. I don't personally think these features are or would be worth upgrading, but I put a lot of money into the existing vacuum and so wouldn't upgrade for a long time. In 10 more years I might well have to drop the existing investment that would work fine due to great maintenance, but is so far behind technologically I really want the new features.
One existing example is I have a ~ 6 year old Motorolla cell phone. It works fine, and I can replace the battery every 2 years or so for about $5 including shipping. It's strongly built and probably will continue to work for a few more years. However, it is absolutely blown away in functionality and uses by, say, an iPhone or Droid.
Finally, consider Cars. You already have ~5year loans to purchase one now. So look at how invested we are in oil to keep running our economy - wars etc because we can't get people to easily upgrade to a hybrid en-masse due to the cost and expected lifetime of most cars, which is over 10 years now on average, and I certainly see a lot of people going for 20 years. But people with a 20 year old car not only likely pollute more and require more gas, but don't have major safety features like anti-lock breaks, air bags, traction control, electronic stability control not to mention things like cruise control, back up cameras, auto-parallel parking, etc that are either standard or available on many cars now.
I don't like disposable junk, but there are good reasons to allow for reasonable cycles of new technology. I don't think it's a great idea to artificially try and freeze or slow down new tech either.
I'm not sure about reasonable, but it always seems to me that it's a little bit crazy to make the experience *worse* for paying customers than for people who pirate the game/program. Actually, I'm really getting to hate various activation/licensing schemes anyway because they often seem to get needlessly complicated (well, I'm diverging to work here) - and so if at all possible I only want to get site licensed, freeware or OSS so as to not increase the pain of my licensing management.
To go further OT, why oh why do companies that provide/require network license servers also require you to provide a serial or code on install rather than the server IP?
Seeing as I use Opera, do other users find that Firefox often can't re-open the tabs after a crash? I'm actually amazed how often it can't open the tabs. Is Chrome that bad also? Opera just about never loses the session, and if it did, there's a backed up session file you can go to to get it back.
Hmmm, ok, so pacifist isn't the term you like. What would you call someone who isn't interested in being an agressor? That is, while I certainly would defend myself or my family, I can't think of any situation where it would be OK with me to be an attacker that someone else had to defend against.
The whole model is predicated on the printer being *very* cheap compared to the ink. If as you say it's cheaper to buy a new printer than the 1st party ink, why would you buy the first party ink? Even if you can only do one cartridge of the cheaper 3rd party ink before needing a new printer, it makes economic sense to do that.
I don't know about current practices, but Epson at least would let you use 3rd party ink carts...
If you're printing photos, do you really need to do it at home? I've found that going to a professional printer (could be Wal-Mart) looks better on better paper FAR cheaper than I could ever get an inkjet at home to do. Now, the last time I tried was in 2004 when I gave up on inkjets for my use, but I had a decent ($140 epson photo) printer and ink and some $1 per sheet photo paper. It was close to a "real" photo (compared to developed film). But it cost me somewhere around $2.50 a photo by the time I dealt with cleaning the heads, misprints, running out of ink halfway through a print etc. And this was for 4x6" photos. For $2 a photo I can get 8x10" mailed to me on fujifilm paper. 4x6" were under $0.20 each. And, I didn't have to clean up, fight with the printer etc.
For everything else(except photo), laser seems to be equal or better than inkjets. It's faster, you can get auto-duplex, it never dries out or cloggs, and even the crappy starter toners last for an amazing number of pages - ~1500. Try getting that out of a standard inkjet. And that's just the crappy starter toner. "Real refills" last for ~3000 pages on the tiny samsung lasers they sell in Best Buy. Real laser printers (ones that cost maybe $400 or more) can often get ~ 7500 pages or more out of a $100 toner cartridge. You're likely to want an upgrade in the technology (at home) before you need new toner on most of these printers. Now, yes, they do cost a bit more, but you *never* spend time "aligning the heads, cleaning the heads, swabbing the heads"...
Is it SSH encrypted?
Here I am being a pendant again, but I'm pretty sure most browsers (save some firefox extension probably) aren't using SSH for anything. You're probably thinking of TLS, the successor of SSL.
There was a time when the Internet was not synonymous with the WWW
It still isn't, unless you're particularly clueless. I'm pretty sure just about everyone has heard, for instance, of P2P apps, e-mail and IM, which as far as I can tell *aren't* WWW. Although, that's horribly misunderstanding the entire domain name system anyway - I could certainly have a server at www.myserver.com that didn't run a web server and instead was an FTP server. It'd be kind of odd and against convention, but hey, I could be a "rebel".
Well... It's
a) faster
b) doesn't involve telling google about *every* site I go to (unless I use chrome I guess)
c) I also see one page less of ads
d) I'm less vulnerable to google gaming and ending up on some other website (there's still DNS poisoning I guess)
There's also the benefit of understanding what a web address is and where it goes...