So really, if all of these mega corporations were somehow forced to pay every last penny of tax that they were legally bound to pay, then governments would be receiving massive cash injections via those taxes.
At the moment it certainly does feel like the common people get taxed on income, fuel, alcohol, houses, tobacco, and anything else that the government can think of taxing people for, and that those taxes get increased every year because the government is always short of cash and needs a bit of a boost.
Wouldn't it sort of fix the problem if megacorps were paying the taxes they owed? Purely hypothetically of course, because i'm aware that government would never _lower_ taxes on fuel just because they were now receiving massive tax monies from megacorps. Hell, they'd probably just keep raising them at the same pace anyway.
And who doesn't believe that the tax system is totally corrupt anyway? Massive sums are probably siphoned off, hidden away, spent on items the public would deem questionable at best. I mean, i've never heard of any transparent statistics that are completely accountable for, and could easily be verified by the general public like say:
we have 9 million people working in City. The income tax from these people was £X in 2012, Fuel tax income to the government was £X etc. Total tax income to the government in 2012 was £X. We spent it on:
transport ------------ £X bus maintenance £X roadworks in Cities 1,2,3
healthcare ------------- £X hospital building maintenance at City1 general hospital £X etc
you get the idea. Seriously, if anyone knows that these statistics exist in black and white for any government, please say so.
Getting into politics and climbing the ladder of political success is in my eyes an ancient human mechanism of gaining power, influence and personal wealth. There is no place in that mechanism for pure altruism, or the concept of "for the good of the people". Sure, the money does get spent on public infrastructure to a large-ish degree, but that is out of neccessity for keeping the balance of power within the political elite, so that the mob does not rise. The concept of altruistic government seems to only exist in Star Trek.
But seriously, there are a lot of misconceptions in the comments on this. So much ignorance flying around it's quite scary.
We went through IVF because it just wasn't happening after 5 yrs of trying. Got one child out of it, delivered by c-section, which, I may add, is something that you really shouldn't look at, because you sort of go into a mild form of shock seeing your wife split open across the belly. It goes against what you think of as a normal sight. I wouldn't recommend looking.
I am extrmely grateful for IVF and wouldn't have children without it, but the entire process leads me to believe that there is a lot of room for corruption and immoral decisions within that industry. It doesn't surprise me that it's a massive industry to be in.
It cost the state 25,000 SEK per treatment, and we had 3 treatments. We didn't pay a penny for this because we we're referred by the doctor, but the _private_ clinic was getting that money for each try. Then if it still doesn't work, but you've got embryos left over from a previous try, you can pay 10,000 SEK to have one or perhaps two of them implanted. I think these clinics are sitting on a goldmine. Squirt in an embryo without care for the first two goes, so it misscarriages (sod the emotional distress of the couple), then you can be more careful on the third go, and get the full 75.000 SEK from the state. I'm not saying this happens, but with the amount of corruption in the world, it is certainly not an impossibility.
Some people I know weren't successful after 3 tries, and had to continue out of their own pocket for another 3 tries. 105.000 SEK total. Slightly cheaper than adopting a chinese baby girl. Which brings me onto another pet peeve: Many people can shoot out bebbies like it's going out of fashion, but you have trouble getting pregnant and it's going to cost you a small fortune for the _privilege_ of adopting. Another corrupt industry. Last time I checked, you can adopt from China for 130.000-150.000 SEK. It makes adoptive parents very happy, and im truly happy for them, but I think they subconciously wipe over the fact that what they are paying is an immoral amount of money. Anyone out there who's adpoted who wants to comment on that?
Going back to IVF; the thing that you worry about (being a true member of the tin-foil hat brigade) is that they don't destroy the left-over embryos that you don't use, and perform other research on them. But that's just the paranoia speaking. But they were quite blasé with certain things, and especially lax with sending the bills for keeping our 13 remaining embryos in the freezer for 2 years, which gave an impression of it not being a tightly run ship.
Virginia is in the south, right? That there headline is called "eye-for-an-eye-racism-reply", directed at the people who thought this was a good idea.
disclaimer: im white european.
To begin with, irrespective of social background, I think we can all agree that all humans have more or less the same potential. I think this obvious fact was maybe to obvious to make it into the comments, but still has to be said. Granted, some with tougher backgrounds might have to work harder at it, but our brain capacity is mostly within the same ballpark. Ranking based on race is just beyond idiotic.
Secondly, they don't specify what disabled means. If i've lost both legs, do I not have to score as high. ffs.
Disclaimer 2: im not disabled, and don't have a chip on my shoulder.... unless it involves human dumbasses, from any country.
I moved out of the UK 13 yrs ago, and im no longer part of the daily culture, but I get surprised at how far my homeland has gone in terms of nanny state/police state/big brother.
How did we get to this stage? Is it Camerons gov. that has done the damge, or did blair set the groundwork? I used to take great pride in my nationality, but this is one conversational topic where you hesitate in admitting your British.
In your book, The God Delusion, you state that it is unnecessary to respect other peoples religions, but I saw an interview with you on the Norwegian talk show Skavlan not too long ago, where you said the opposite, which surprised me quite a lot, as you were certainly not shy about telling the Killers lead singer that his (mormon) religion was a sham.
Has your opinion changed? Perhaps in light of the recent aggressive reactions in the middle east to events in the west, or do you still hold true to your original standpoint in the book, that we are basically 'enabling' people by giving their religion respect?
What is it with this trend of "the younger they start the better"! In Sweden kids don't start learning how to read or write until they are 7 yrs old. Heck, he's 6 and it's basically still daycare! Im a brit but ive certainly come around to the idea that it's not that big a deal that they don't start school at 5 yrs old like in the UK. I see that even Swedes manage to get PhD's and that Sweden is generally well respected as far as international science goes. I suppose it didn't hurt them that they started later than other countries?
To finish, let me point you to a talk by my current hero: Ken Robinson, who raises some very significant points about our educational model:
No-one knows what happens after death, apart from the dead. Even near-death experiences could be the brains last ditch attempt at freaking out and hallucinating. Nothing to say those were not made-up experiences. And those that say they experienced the same after-life event? Could be just a common occurence of the human brain going into shutdown mode, just like it's common for us to wee when our bladders become full.
And for all we know, the after-life may well be the next stage in... something, and if you solved the mortality "problem" you might just be missing out on something.
We're all going to die, and i'm sure we'll all find out what happens at that point.
The thing with facebook is that people throw out their pics and comments, but there is very little social obligation to reply, and many replies become sound bites written on a smart phone, whilst your friend was on the train, or just about to go to bed. It's not interacting with your friends in the same sense as interacting in person is, and there is no social requirement to listen to, and respond to, what your friend is saying in any meaningful fashion.
It's a superficial way of interacting. It _can_ be a good complement for sharing content, like pics, videos etc, that gets discussed when you later meet up or talk on the phone, but really, it's not as great as some people would have you believe. And all the facebook proponents are just hyping the latest fad which is social networking. Hopefully, in a few years, all the hype will calm down and people will be saner about how they use this tool as a social complement and stop posting every inane thing they can think of.
I'd like to know what their infrastructure looks like for storing that 1GB/s.
I was at OpenWorld in 2003 and they had some guy there from CERN giving a talk about how they were using Oracle9i (I read later that they upgraded to 10g, but no-doubt they upgrade to later versions relatively quickly), and he did mention that petabyte/s buzzword. It would be very interesting to know how it was all implemented, and how they manage to write 1GB/s to disk. Must be some serious RAC clustering going on, and some serious disk bandwidth capacity, but I wonder when they purge the data. After all, 1GB/s is going to require massive storage, and if you've gone with one of the big boys for storage like NetApp then it won't only be their research that could be termed as 'astronomical'.
hey I get this all the time. moved to non-english speaking country 12 yrs ago, and almost no-one corrected me when after I became more or less understandable. It's just because they don't want to offend you, or can't be bothered to correct you because it would interrupt the flow of conversation. In most cases it's unconscious.
agreed. All you hear is navy seals this and navy seals that. SAS has always been the best special forces in the world. Because they combine physical and mental fitness instead of producing grunts that can do tactics.
Is SBS just a lame attempt at aping SAS by the way, or do the marines really have the same calibre?
Is this the beginning of the end of traditional manufacturing? I wonder what the cost savings are of printing objects instead of manually assembling them on a production line. It seems as though printing has the potential to be much more efficient than traditional methods. Here's wishing for Star Treks future of instant item manufacturing.
If CERN needs a new Oracle DBA, im available for hire:) Can you imagine the amount of money they're going to be pumping into CERN now when they made the discovery? If you thought they had a huge grant before, then that'll probably pale in comparison to the coming years.
agreed. im using an Apple TV2 which I had to jailbreak, and install xbmc on. it only plays 720p, and is a tad slow due to underpowered hardware.
If Q can do 1080p and multichannel 24/192 audio and only draw 10W, doesn't require massive fiddling to get xbmc on it, and hopefully, with the hardware spec, lets xbmc interface flow smoothly, then ill drop my atv2 immediately.
Not to be offensive or anything, but does anyone know of similar "cut the cord" options for Europeans? Because everything i've read so far applies to the US and I live in Scandinavia. I've got a home server Gbit to my media centre with a jailbroken ATV2 running XBMC Eden, an Xbox360 for streaming 1080p movies, so streaming movie rentals are completely covered, and a satellite subscription, but I honestly cannot think of a user friendly way to cut the cord that would be acceptable for tech-un-savvy family members!
I could do without most of the crap on TV, but the national channels in HD are not available unless you have some kind of satellite/cable subscription. Plus, I love NatGeo and Discovery and the BBC channels. If I could get those channels through XBMC then I would be able to get rid of my satellite subscription. Note that free TV via antenna is not an option, because although you can get some of the free channels, they are not HD, and you only get channels 1,2 & 4 for free, whilst the other 2 big "national" channels (which aren't really free) are channels 3 & 5, and I would lose them if I just stuck an antenna on my house.
Things seem to be very different for you people in the US... It seems like "national basic channels" is not really an issue for those cutting the cord?
I suspect that part of the problem may be that because we don't have Netflix or Hulu over here, and whilst there may be some add-ons to xbmc that let you watch certain programmes from the national channels, it may involve a big change in interface we use to watch tv that neither my family nor myself or accustomed to: pressing channel 1 on the remote versus starting ATV-->starting xbmc-->choosing add-on from Videos-->choosing a program manually. Channel flicking and putting on the TV for background watching, are too ingrained.
In other words, two guys spent just a year (wtf?) developing a database engine that manages to run queries in memory very fast, just like other database engines that can run in memory (that probably took teams of engineers more than a year to build). I wonder if they had time to write some transaction consistency code, because im pretty sure a 6yr old can make a program that inserts data into memory pointers.
Do they commit, or is "memory" a new form of "the cloud... maan!"? Maybe they commit to the cloud? Fire and forget?
this assumes you have a room that allows you to place the speakers so that you can get good stereo imaging by placing the speakers correctly. Plus like the guy below me said, you can higher the volume of the centre to get clearer speech.
Plus, whilst I agree that many films don't have anything interesting coming out of the rears, some films rely on them quite a bit, and do give a more submersive atmosphere.
Honestly, how could the US possibly extradite him at this point? Can you imagine how that would look? Assange has been saying since the whole thing began that this is an attempt to get him to the US, and the public debate and media coverage has made him a household name. If, after all this, he finally gets sent to Sweden, and then the US extradites him, can you imagine the public outcry that this would cause on an international level? Could the US deal with that? I mean, it makes several countries governments look like they've been played for fools.
But I understand Assanges position: If I were him, I wouldn't be waiting for any public outcry: I wouldn't want to land in the US hands in the first place, so go asylum papers!
But this is all assuming that he isn't guilty of course. And I personally believe that at this stage it's goddamn impossible to assert whether he's guilty or being setup. But he _may really believe_ that he is being setup, and that _may_ be a complete fallacy!
I have satellite subscription for 288 SEK/month, and they have ~15 channels of HD including the "base channels". Apple TV 2 jailbroken with xbmc 11, and an Xbox360/kinect for games and movie rentals. I can rent movies on ATV2 as well (but only in 720p). All hooked up to Gbit LAN/24Mbit broadband.
I long for the day when I can cancel my satellite sub. but it's probably never going to happen, because I won't be able to get the same channels on the net, esp. in HD unless something revolutionary happens to the Swedish market.
ATV is fantastic... when jailbroken. I use xbmc for photos/music/tv/movies on my server. torrents fill the gaps my satellite sub. doesn't give. One thing I noticed with movie rentals between xbox and ATV is that Xbox has a really great library of films and new releases compared to ATV, and the interface for Zune Marketplace is way, way ahead of Apples, but it costs slightly more to rent from Zune and the Microsoft credit thingy is a bit cumbersome compared to just having your apple account debited.
Now if either Microsft or Apple decided to start providing "channels" of tv shows, in whatever format, PLUS national channels on the net I would be a very happy man, and could cut my satellite in an instant. Everything I read on this site refers to the US market where you can get tv shows via Netflix or Apple, but here in Sweden (and the rest of Europe for that matter), Netflix doesn't work, apart from in the UK, and Apple doesn't do TV rentals via iTunes outside of the US which sucks big time.
I'm not really sure why we need ddr4 over ddr3? I mean for the average geek, the cpu is never fast enough, and the hard drive is never fast enough. I don't think i've once thought, in the last 10 years: "hey, wow, my memory is so slow doing this task, I wish it was much faster".
I think I can happily live with ddr3 for the next several years, just keep giving me cheaper and fast cpu's and discs.
So whilst the global work force pay massive taxes (I pay 50% above a certain level), Corporations in America (and likely many other countries) only have to pay 35% in *theory*? And in effect, much much less due to these practices?
It's probably always been like this since people knew how to make money, and governments taxed the populace (but I wasn't alive them to be upset about it, and I am now).
I can't possibly imagine that this will ever change either. Really, there should be a thing against paying more tax than your employer has to pay.
me too. spent a lot of cash on midrange system. I am quite deaf in one ear and other one isnt perfect, _but_ I can still tell a difference in quality when playing CD's on my fantastic Pioneer DV-656 player DVD/sacd/dvd-audio that is 12 yrs old compared to the crappy (music wise) Sony BDP bluray player I bought 6 months ago.
Pioneer must have much better dac, and I use analogue cables to the receiver whereas Sony player is using hdmi cable.
But honestly, biggest problem i have is room acoustics. Got all this great gear, and it's probably reaching 20% of it's potential in my living room.
Slashdot Mirror
So really, if all of these mega corporations were somehow forced to pay every last penny of tax that they were legally bound to pay, then governments would be receiving massive cash injections via those taxes.
At the moment it certainly does feel like the common people get taxed on income, fuel, alcohol, houses, tobacco, and anything else that the government can think of taxing people for, and that those taxes get increased every year because the government is always short of cash and needs a bit of a boost.
Wouldn't it sort of fix the problem if megacorps were paying the taxes they owed? Purely hypothetically of course, because i'm aware that government would never _lower_ taxes on fuel just because they were now receiving massive tax monies from megacorps. Hell, they'd probably just keep raising them at the same pace anyway.
And who doesn't believe that the tax system is totally corrupt anyway? Massive sums are probably siphoned off, hidden away, spent on items the public would deem questionable at best. I mean, i've never heard of any transparent statistics that are completely accountable for, and could easily be verified by the general public like say:
we have 9 million people working in City. The income tax from these people was £X in 2012, Fuel tax income to the government was £X etc.
Total tax income to the government in 2012 was £X.
We spent it on:
transport
------------
£X bus maintenance
£X roadworks in Cities 1,2,3
healthcare
-------------
£X hospital building maintenance at City1 general hospital
£X etc
you get the idea. Seriously, if anyone knows that these statistics exist in black and white for any government, please say so.
Getting into politics and climbing the ladder of political success is in my eyes an ancient human mechanism of gaining power, influence and personal wealth. There is no place in that mechanism for pure altruism, or the concept of "for the good of the people". Sure, the money does get spent on public infrastructure to a large-ish degree, but that is out of neccessity for keeping the balance of power within the political elite, so that the mob does not rise. The concept of altruistic government seems to only exist in Star Trek.
Religious pun intentional.
But seriously, there are a lot of misconceptions in the comments on this. So much ignorance flying around it's quite scary.
We went through IVF because it just wasn't happening after 5 yrs of trying. Got one child out of it, delivered by c-section, which, I may add, is something that you really shouldn't look at, because you sort of go into a mild form of shock seeing your wife split open across the belly. It goes against what you think of as a normal sight. I wouldn't recommend looking.
I am extrmely grateful for IVF and wouldn't have children without it, but the entire process leads me to believe that there is a lot of room for corruption and immoral decisions within that industry. It doesn't surprise me that it's a massive industry to be in.
It cost the state 25,000 SEK per treatment, and we had 3 treatments. We didn't pay a penny for this because we we're referred by the doctor, but the _private_ clinic was getting that money for each try. Then if it still doesn't work, but you've got embryos left over from a previous try, you can pay 10,000 SEK to have one or perhaps two of them implanted. I think these clinics are sitting on a goldmine. Squirt in an embryo without care for the first two goes, so it misscarriages (sod the emotional distress of the couple), then you can be more careful on the third go, and get the full 75.000 SEK from the state. I'm not saying this happens, but with the amount of corruption in the world, it is certainly not an impossibility.
Some people I know weren't successful after 3 tries, and had to continue out of their own pocket for another 3 tries. 105.000 SEK total. Slightly cheaper than adopting a chinese baby girl. Which brings me onto another pet peeve: Many people can shoot out bebbies like it's going out of fashion, but you have trouble getting pregnant and it's going to cost you a small fortune for the _privilege_ of adopting. Another corrupt industry. Last time I checked, you can adopt from China for 130.000-150.000 SEK. It makes adoptive parents very happy, and im truly happy for them, but I think they subconciously wipe over the fact that what they are paying is an immoral amount of money. Anyone out there who's adpoted who wants to comment on that?
Going back to IVF; the thing that you worry about (being a true member of the tin-foil hat brigade) is that they don't destroy the left-over embryos that you don't use, and perform other research on them. But that's just the paranoia speaking. But they were quite blasé with certain things, and especially lax with sending the bills for keeping our 13 remaining embryos in the freezer for 2 years, which gave an impression of it not being a tightly run ship.
Only workaround would be to require everyone to have an IQ of 100 or above to be permitted to procreate.
But that's not politically correct.
I'd like to sign up for the Swedish procreation initiative!
Virginia is in the south, right? That there headline is called "eye-for-an-eye-racism-reply", directed at the people who thought this was a good idea.
disclaimer: im white european.
To begin with, irrespective of social background, I think we can all agree that all humans have more or less the same potential. I think this obvious fact was maybe to obvious to make it into the comments, but still has to be said. Granted, some with tougher backgrounds might have to work harder at it, but our brain capacity is mostly within the same ballpark. Ranking based on race is just beyond idiotic.
Secondly, they don't specify what disabled means. If i've lost both legs, do I not have to score as high. ffs.
Disclaimer 2: im not disabled, and don't have a chip on my shoulder.... unless it involves human dumbasses, from any country.
I moved out of the UK 13 yrs ago, and im no longer part of the daily culture, but I get surprised at how far my homeland has gone in terms of nanny state/police state/big brother.
How did we get to this stage? Is it Camerons gov. that has done the damge, or did blair set the groundwork? I used to take great pride in my nationality, but this is one conversational topic where you hesitate in admitting your British.
In your book, The God Delusion, you state that it is unnecessary to respect other peoples religions, but I saw an interview with you on the Norwegian talk show Skavlan not too long ago, where you said the opposite, which surprised me quite a lot, as you were certainly not shy about telling the Killers lead singer that his (mormon) religion was a sham.
Has your opinion changed? Perhaps in light of the recent aggressive reactions in the middle east to events in the west, or do you still hold true to your original standpoint in the book, that we are basically 'enabling' people by giving their religion respect?
What is it with this trend of "the younger they start the better"! In Sweden kids don't start learning how to read or write until they are 7 yrs old. Heck, he's 6 and it's basically still daycare! Im a brit but ive certainly come around to the idea that it's not that big a deal that they don't start school at 5 yrs old like in the UK. I see that even Swedes manage to get PhD's and that Sweden is generally well respected as far as international science goes. I suppose it didn't hurt them that they started later than other countries?
To finish, let me point you to a talk by my current hero: Ken Robinson, who raises some very significant points about our educational model:
http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html
bah. what kind of serious drug cartel doesn't have a website. -1 for them!
No-one knows what happens after death, apart from the dead. Even near-death experiences could be the brains last ditch attempt at freaking out and hallucinating. Nothing to say those were not made-up experiences. And those that say they experienced the same after-life event? Could be just a common occurence of the human brain going into shutdown mode, just like it's common for us to wee when our bladders become full.
And for all we know, the after-life may well be the next stage in ... something, and if you solved the mortality "problem" you might just be missing out on something.
We're all going to die, and i'm sure we'll all find out what happens at that point.
The thing with facebook is that people throw out their pics and comments, but there is very little social obligation to reply, and many replies become sound bites written on a smart phone, whilst your friend was on the train, or just about to go to bed. It's not interacting with your friends in the same sense as interacting in person is, and there is no social requirement to listen to, and respond to, what your friend is saying in any meaningful fashion.
It's a superficial way of interacting. It _can_ be a good complement for sharing content, like pics, videos etc, that gets discussed when you later meet up or talk on the phone, but really, it's not as great as some people would have you believe. And all the facebook proponents are just hyping the latest fad which is social networking. Hopefully, in a few years, all the hype will calm down and people will be saner about how they use this tool as a social complement and stop posting every inane thing they can think of.
I'd like to know what their infrastructure looks like for storing that 1GB/s.
I was at OpenWorld in 2003 and they had some guy there from CERN giving a talk about how they were using Oracle9i (I read later that they upgraded to 10g, but no-doubt they upgrade to later versions relatively quickly), and he did mention that petabyte/s buzzword. It would be very interesting to know how it was all implemented, and how they manage to write 1GB/s to disk. Must be some serious RAC clustering going on, and some serious disk bandwidth capacity, but I wonder when they purge the data. After all, 1GB/s is going to require massive storage, and if you've gone with one of the big boys for storage like NetApp then it won't only be their research that could be termed as 'astronomical'.
hey I get this all the time. moved to non-english speaking country 12 yrs ago, and almost no-one corrected me when after I became more or less understandable. It's just because they don't want to offend you, or can't be bothered to correct you because it would interrupt the flow of conversation. In most cases it's unconscious.
agreed. All you hear is navy seals this and navy seals that. SAS has always been the best special forces in the world. Because they combine physical and mental fitness instead of producing grunts that can do tactics.
Is SBS just a lame attempt at aping SAS by the way, or do the marines really have the same calibre?
Retaining IT staff within the organisation is akin to buying a house... It's a long-term investment, and a much better alternative than renting.
Is this the beginning of the end of traditional manufacturing? I wonder what the cost savings are of printing objects instead of manually assembling them on a production line. It seems as though printing has the potential to be much more efficient than traditional methods. Here's wishing for Star Treks future of instant item manufacturing.
If CERN needs a new Oracle DBA, im available for hire :) Can you imagine the amount of money they're going to be pumping into CERN now when they made the discovery? If you thought they had a huge grant before, then that'll probably pale in comparison to the coming years.
agreed. im using an Apple TV2 which I had to jailbreak, and install xbmc on. it only plays 720p, and is a tad slow due to underpowered hardware.
If Q can do 1080p and multichannel 24/192 audio and only draw 10W, doesn't require massive fiddling to get xbmc on it, and hopefully, with the hardware spec, lets xbmc interface flow smoothly, then ill drop my atv2 immediately.
Not to be offensive or anything, but does anyone know of similar "cut the cord" options for Europeans? Because everything i've read so far applies to the US and I live in Scandinavia. I've got a home server Gbit to my media centre with a jailbroken ATV2 running XBMC Eden, an Xbox360 for streaming 1080p movies, so streaming movie rentals are completely covered, and a satellite subscription, but I honestly cannot think of a user friendly way to cut the cord that would be acceptable for tech-un-savvy family members!
I could do without most of the crap on TV, but the national channels in HD are not available unless you have some kind of satellite/cable subscription. Plus, I love NatGeo and Discovery and the BBC channels. If I could get those channels through XBMC then I would be able to get rid of my satellite subscription. Note that free TV via antenna is not an option, because although you can get some of the free channels, they are not HD, and you only get channels 1,2 & 4 for free, whilst the other 2 big "national" channels (which aren't really free) are channels 3 & 5, and I would lose them if I just stuck an antenna on my house.
Things seem to be very different for you people in the US... It seems like "national basic channels" is not really an issue for those cutting the cord?
I suspect that part of the problem may be that because we don't have Netflix or Hulu over here, and whilst there may be some add-ons to xbmc that let you watch certain programmes from the national channels, it may involve a big change in interface we use to watch tv that neither my family nor myself or accustomed to: pressing channel 1 on the remote versus starting ATV-->starting xbmc-->choosing add-on from Videos-->choosing a program manually. Channel flicking and putting on the TV for background watching, are too ingrained.
In other words, two guys spent just a year (wtf?) developing a database engine that manages to run queries in memory very fast, just like other database engines that can run in memory (that probably took teams of engineers more than a year to build). I wonder if they had time to write some transaction consistency code, because im pretty sure a 6yr old can make a program that inserts data into memory pointers.
Do they commit, or is "memory" a new form of "the cloud ... maan!"? Maybe they commit to the cloud? Fire and forget?
this assumes you have a room that allows you to place the speakers so that you can get good stereo imaging by placing the speakers correctly. Plus like the guy below me said, you can higher the volume of the centre to get clearer speech.
Plus, whilst I agree that many films don't have anything interesting coming out of the rears, some films rely on them quite a bit, and do give a more submersive atmosphere.
Honestly, how could the US possibly extradite him at this point? Can you imagine how that would look? Assange has been saying since the whole thing began that this is an attempt to get him to the US, and the public debate and media coverage has made him a household name. If, after all this, he finally gets sent to Sweden, and then the US extradites him, can you imagine the public outcry that this would cause on an international level? Could the US deal with that? I mean, it makes several countries governments look like they've been played for fools.
But I understand Assanges position: If I were him, I wouldn't be waiting for any public outcry: I wouldn't want to land in the US hands in the first place, so go asylum papers!
But this is all assuming that he isn't guilty of course. And I personally believe that at this stage it's goddamn impossible to assert whether he's guilty or being setup. But he _may really believe_ that he is being setup, and that _may_ be a complete fallacy!
I have satellite subscription for 288 SEK/month, and they have ~15 channels of HD including the "base channels". Apple TV 2 jailbroken with xbmc 11, and an Xbox360/kinect for games and movie rentals. I can rent movies on ATV2 as well (but only in 720p). All hooked up to Gbit LAN/24Mbit broadband.
I long for the day when I can cancel my satellite sub. but it's probably never going to happen, because I won't be able to get the same channels on the net, esp. in HD unless something revolutionary happens to the Swedish market.
ATV is fantastic... when jailbroken. I use xbmc for photos/music/tv/movies on my server. torrents fill the gaps my satellite sub. doesn't give. One thing I noticed with movie rentals between xbox and ATV is that Xbox has a really great library of films and new releases compared to ATV, and the interface for Zune Marketplace is way, way ahead of Apples, but it costs slightly more to rent from Zune and the Microsoft credit thingy is a bit cumbersome compared to just having your apple account debited.
Now if either Microsft or Apple decided to start providing "channels" of tv shows, in whatever format, PLUS national channels on the net I would be a very happy man, and could cut my satellite in an instant. Everything I read on this site refers to the US market where you can get tv shows via Netflix or Apple, but here in Sweden (and the rest of Europe for that matter), Netflix doesn't work, apart from in the UK, and Apple doesn't do TV rentals via iTunes outside of the US which sucks big time.
I'm not really sure why we need ddr4 over ddr3? I mean for the average geek, the cpu is never fast enough, and the hard drive is never fast enough. I don't think i've once thought, in the last 10 years: "hey, wow, my memory is so slow doing this task, I wish it was much faster".
I think I can happily live with ddr3 for the next several years, just keep giving me cheaper and fast cpu's and discs.
So whilst the global work force pay massive taxes (I pay 50% above a certain level), Corporations in America (and likely many other countries) only have to pay 35% in *theory*? And in effect, much much less due to these practices?
It's probably always been like this since people knew how to make money, and governments taxed the populace (but I wasn't alive them to be upset about it, and I am now).
I can't possibly imagine that this will ever change either. Really, there should be a thing against paying more tax than your employer has to pay.
me too. spent a lot of cash on midrange system. I am quite deaf in one ear and other one isnt perfect, _but_ I can still tell a difference in quality when playing CD's on my fantastic Pioneer DV-656 player DVD/sacd/dvd-audio that is 12 yrs old compared to the crappy (music wise) Sony BDP bluray player I bought 6 months ago.
Pioneer must have much better dac, and I use analogue cables to the receiver whereas Sony player is using hdmi cable.
But honestly, biggest problem i have is room acoustics. Got all this great gear, and it's probably reaching 20% of it's potential in my living room.