...I'd imagine basic rules of economics and capitalism are at work here
They are, but, see, the retail price for medical devices isn't set where the supply and demand curves meet, because most people don't buy them, their "health insurance" pays for it. The retail price exists to satisfy the demands of "insurance" plans (whether private sector or government-run) for large discounts off the retail price. If you're buying privately, you're the guy who walks into the discount furniture store on the one day of the year they aren't having a "40, 50, 60, 70 percent or more!" sale.
Probably. Arsenic is toxic to us because of its chemical similarity to phosphorous. It reacts enough like phosphorous to get pulled into various reactions in our cells, and then enough differently to make the processes fail. In an organism that used arsenic instead of phosphorous, phosphorous would cause the same trouble.
Computer analogy -- In the old Eastern Bloc, clones of Western chips were reportedly made using "metric inches" of 25 millimeters instead of American inches of 25.4 mm. This worked fine electrically and mechanically when all the gear you were using was made to the same spec, but if you unknowingly tried to put a Western-made chip on 1/10th inch spacing into an Eastern Bloc socket on 2.5 mm spacing, or vice-versa, the incompatibility could cause failures. Similarly, it might be possible to build a cellular chemistry using arsenic instead of phosphorous. But if you put arsenic into a creature built with phosphorous or vice-versa, you're likely going to have failures as the cell unknowingly plugs the wrong element in.
Well, in the case of the Martian gravity well, because you can get additional CHON for your habitat without having to ship it across a few million kilometers of space first. Inefficiencies in recycling and losses due to accident are a lot less serious when you can draw replacements directly from the immediate environment.
But even with this water, no, the Moon still doesn't make any sense compared to orbital space.
the ecosystem to support such a change is the hard part. Can you get access to all your data, etc., from your docked mobile? That's gonna be the key.
And it's going to be why it doesn't happen for a LOOOOONG time. In the US, Wireless gives you a choice of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Wired gives you choice of your phone company or cable company. None beat having your data local, and as long as you're keeping a machine around with your data on it, why not pay ~$50 more so it can drive your keyboard, video, and monitor without plugging in your mobile?
Microsoft has expressed no interest in supporting HTML5 at all in Internet Explorer. It's been made very clear that Firefox will not support patent-and-royalty encumbered H.264. Opera joins Mozilla in its hostility to H.264. "It plays on Safari and Chrome" is not a compelling sales pitch on either side of the creator-viewer divide.
On the other hand, Flash? The plugin is already ubiquitous; Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris all have Flash 10, and it works with both NPAPI and ActiveX browsers. It's been used for years, and there's masses of content already developed for it, so the need for it isn't going away any time soon.
Hmm? You certainly can "just 'get' a copy of" OS X. Amazon keeps offering me it for $24.99, with free shipping on an order over $25. Nobody checks to see if you own a Mac before they ship it to you.
"Wheel of reincarnation" is the entry in the Jargon File; term "coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968"
If there was an Apple Store within two hundred miles of where I live, I might actually give a damn about Apple Store service. In the meantime, I'm not particularly tempted to pay a premium on what I buy to benefit you.
if you just don't want everyone to take your sister for a ride then WEP is fine.
Exactly!
WEP is just a low fence with a No Trespassing sign. It doesn't physically stop people, but it lets them know that I'd like to keep my bandwidth to myself, thanks.
Then it's a good thing that copyright isn't indefinite then, isn't it? You might not like the length of time copyright runs, but that doesn't change the fact that there is, indeed, a time limit to it.
A limit set in 1978 that, in 1998, was extended by twenty years. Indefinite on the installment plan is still indefinite.
Well, all the idiots who blatantly blundered this particular intervention and unnecessarily fled back to Earth will get fired, at least. But eventual corporate victory is assured, since the next mission will have people who are aware of Project Thor and how it can wipe out the Na'Vi with no defense or counterattack possible.
As I watched the human colonists column off to leave Pandora, I was thinking, "In a few years an automated drone will arrive in orbit to bathe the Na'Vi villages in a neutron death-ray and solve the problem forever."
You have an orbital position, right? So you drop inert objects on the heads of the Na'Vi at orbital velocities. The Na'Vi die without any possibility of the weapon malfunctioning, and without the Na'Vi having any ability to defend or counterattack.
McDonald's has higher beef standards for its products than the federal government does for school lunches, and the school lunch standards are higher than those for supermarket sale.
I am sure the American view of a free way of life means a corporate monopoly on the tourism industry, corporate corruption of the politicians to serve their needs, the creation of class inequality, and "servant" status for the natives like in most of the tropical destinations Americans go to.
Because the Cuban governmental monopoly on the tourism industry, corrupt politicians enriching themselves at the direct expense of the people, vast inequality between the nomenklatura and ordinary peasants, and forced labor in the sugarcane fields for schoolchildren is so much better.....
In two cases, a one-party dictatorship took control of an island with a history of colonial exploitation and an agriculture-based economy. It happens that both islands are at about the same latitude, and both are subject to tropical cyclones. In both cases, the island was off the coast of a country ideologically hostile to it, which imposed a thorough embargo on its goods. In both cases the island received support from a superpower for three decades, which then was seriously reduced.
Socialism has left one poor, and it has no imminent prospects of democratization. Capitalism has made the other one wealthy, and it completed a full transition to multi-party democracy thirteen years ago.
Never mind the grammar (I can hardly believe that I'm saying that), I thought that operating systems were designed to work with the processor(s). When did it get to be the other way around?
Lots of apps for IBM mainframes are per-processor licensed. This caused a problem for IBM in trying to sell mainframes to run hybrid workloads; the customer would say, "But those extra processors to run Apache on Linux are costing me money in licensing fees on my mainframe apps. It's cheaper for me to buy a smaller mainframe and a bunch of PCs."
So IBM put together a bunch of processors, hardware-identical with normal mainframe processors, but including extra microcode that limits them to running Java/XML (z Application Assist Processor) or Linux (the Integrated Facility for Linux). These units don't count as processors for purposes of licensing mainframe apps, since they can't run mainframe apps.
Google is big enough to just buy or create their own newspaper.
And how!
Gannett (GCI) has a market capitalization of $2.44 billion. It owns 85 US and 17 UK dailies, over 850 US and 200 UK non-dailies, and 23 US television stations. The New York Times Company (NYT) has a market capitalization of $1.27 billion. It owns 17 dailies and 1 weekly, plus About.com and various other assets. The McClatchy Company (MNI) has a market capitalization of $0.252 billion. It owns 31 dailies. GateHouse Media (GHSE) has a market capitalization of $0.012 billion. It owns 91 dailies, 294 weeklies, and 121 shoppers. E. W. Scripps Company (SSP) has a market capitalization of $0.34 billion. It owns 15 newspapers and 10 television stations. Lee Enterprises (LEE) has a market capitalization of $0.167 billion. It owns 49 dailies, has a joint interest in 5 more, and operates about 300 weeklies and specialty papers. Media General (MEG) has a market capitalization of $0.202 billion. It owns 24 daily newspapers, 250 other publications, and 19 television stations. A. H. Belo (AHC) has a market capitalization of $0.098 billion. It owns 3 relatively large dailies and a few minor publications.
Google has $21 billion cash on-hand, as of its last quarterly report, enough to buy all the above four times over and still have billions left.
If you start with the concept of inalienable rights, the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", then wouldn't any wrongful execution, being intentional deprivation of a person's life, violate his inalienable right?
Sure. But so would any wrongful imprisonment, being intentional deprivation of a person's liberty, violate his inalienable right. Wrongfully arresting the guy for the crime already is a violation of his inalienable rights by depriving him of his liberty. Demanding 100% perfection before any act that might deny an inalienable right means no law enforcement whatsoever.
(The same type of problem undercuts the often-made "if it's wrong for an individual to do it, it's wrong for the state to do it" argument against the death penalty. Because the logic of that applies just as fully to the fact that it's not allowed for an individual to take somebody prisoner with force or the threat thereof, lock them in restraints, and imprison them behind bars.)
If a computer maker doesn't like the licensing terms for Windows, they're free to negotiate with Microsoft different terms for distributing Windows. Until then, they owe the refund under the terms of their license to distribute Windows. It's pretty basic.
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...I'd imagine basic rules of economics and capitalism are at work here
They are, but, see, the retail price for medical devices isn't set where the supply and demand curves meet, because most people don't buy them, their "health insurance" pays for it. The retail price exists to satisfy the demands of "insurance" plans (whether private sector or government-run) for large discounts off the retail price. If you're buying privately, you're the guy who walks into the discount furniture store on the one day of the year they aren't having a "40, 50, 60, 70 percent or more!" sale.
Probably. Arsenic is toxic to us because of its chemical similarity to phosphorous. It reacts enough like phosphorous to get pulled into various reactions in our cells, and then enough differently to make the processes fail. In an organism that used arsenic instead of phosphorous, phosphorous would cause the same trouble.
Computer analogy -- In the old Eastern Bloc, clones of Western chips were reportedly made using "metric inches" of 25 millimeters instead of American inches of 25.4 mm. This worked fine electrically and mechanically when all the gear you were using was made to the same spec, but if you unknowingly tried to put a Western-made chip on 1/10th inch spacing into an Eastern Bloc socket on 2.5 mm spacing, or vice-versa, the incompatibility could cause failures. Similarly, it might be possible to build a cellular chemistry using arsenic instead of phosphorous. But if you put arsenic into a creature built with phosphorous or vice-versa, you're likely going to have failures as the cell unknowingly plugs the wrong element in.
Well, in the case of the Martian gravity well, because you can get additional CHON for your habitat without having to ship it across a few million kilometers of space first. Inefficiencies in recycling and losses due to accident are a lot less serious when you can draw replacements directly from the immediate environment.
But even with this water, no, the Moon still doesn't make any sense compared to orbital space.
the ecosystem to support such a change is the hard part. Can you get access to all your data, etc., from your docked mobile? That's gonna be the key.
And it's going to be why it doesn't happen for a LOOOOONG time. In the US, Wireless gives you a choice of AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or T-Mobile. Wired gives you choice of your phone company or cable company. None beat having your data local, and as long as you're keeping a machine around with your data on it, why not pay ~$50 more so it can drive your keyboard, video, and monitor without plugging in your mobile?
I agree, they should use the Australian flag, with the traditional boot kicking a bare arse.
If HTML5 is built into every browser,
Pretty damn big "if", there.
Microsoft has expressed no interest in supporting HTML5 at all in Internet Explorer. It's been made very clear that Firefox will not support patent-and-royalty encumbered H.264. Opera joins Mozilla in its hostility to H.264. "It plays on Safari and Chrome" is not a compelling sales pitch on either side of the creator-viewer divide.
On the other hand, Flash? The plugin is already ubiquitous; Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, and Solaris all have Flash 10, and it works with both NPAPI and ActiveX browsers. It's been used for years, and there's masses of content already developed for it, so the need for it isn't going away any time soon.
Hmm? You certainly can "just 'get' a copy of" OS X. Amazon keeps offering me it for $24.99, with free shipping on an order over $25. Nobody checks to see if you own a Mac before they ship it to you.
Um, no. The bug was introduced in Windows NT 3.1, and has remained in the NT line ever since. Windows 7 is very much still built on the NT codebase.
If it isn't Free, it isn't a standard, it's just a racket.
"Wheel of reincarnation" is the entry in the Jargon File; term "coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors, Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968"
If there was an Apple Store within two hundred miles of where I live, I might actually give a damn about Apple Store service. In the meantime, I'm not particularly tempted to pay a premium on what I buy to benefit you.
if you just don't want everyone to take your sister for a ride then WEP is fine.
Exactly!
WEP is just a low fence with a No Trespassing sign. It doesn't physically stop people, but it lets them know that I'd like to keep my bandwidth to myself, thanks.
Then it's a good thing that copyright isn't indefinite then, isn't it? You might not like the length of time copyright runs, but that doesn't change the fact that there is, indeed, a time limit to it.
A limit set in 1978 that, in 1998, was extended by twenty years. Indefinite on the installment plan is still indefinite.
The WTO doesn't levy fines, it authorizes retaliatory tariffs. You know what that sort of thing does to an export-based economy?
Who's printed as the copyright holder in the book itself?
Well, all the idiots who blatantly blundered this particular intervention and unnecessarily fled back to Earth will get fired, at least. But eventual corporate victory is assured, since the next mission will have people who are aware of Project Thor and how it can wipe out the Na'Vi with no defense or counterattack possible.
As I watched the human colonists column off to leave Pandora, I was thinking, "In a few years an automated drone will arrive in orbit to bathe the Na'Vi villages in a neutron death-ray and solve the problem forever."
You have an orbital position, right? So you drop inert objects on the heads of the Na'Vi at orbital velocities. The Na'Vi die without any possibility of the weapon malfunctioning, and without the Na'Vi having any ability to defend or counterattack.
And now that it will never happen
Hah! Somebody will buy the rights to the game and try it again. The Amiga Saga taught me that much.
McDonald's has higher beef standards for its products than the federal government does for school lunches, and the school lunch standards are higher than those for supermarket sale.
Taiwan, sir, Taiwan.
I am sure the American view of a free way of life means a corporate monopoly on the tourism industry, corporate corruption of the politicians to serve their needs, the creation of class inequality, and "servant" status for the natives like in most of the tropical destinations Americans go to.
Because the Cuban governmental monopoly on the tourism industry, corrupt politicians enriching themselves at the direct expense of the people, vast inequality between the nomenklatura and ordinary peasants, and forced labor in the sugarcane fields for schoolchildren is so much better. ....
In two cases, a one-party dictatorship took control of an island with a history of colonial exploitation and an agriculture-based economy. It happens that both islands are at about the same latitude, and both are subject to tropical cyclones. In both cases, the island was off the coast of a country ideologically hostile to it, which imposed a thorough embargo on its goods. In both cases the island received support from a superpower for three decades, which then was seriously reduced.
Socialism has left one poor, and it has no imminent prospects of democratization. Capitalism has made the other one wealthy, and it completed a full transition to multi-party democracy thirteen years ago.
Never mind the grammar (I can hardly believe that I'm saying that), I thought that operating systems were designed to work with the processor(s). When did it get to be the other way around?
Lots of apps for IBM mainframes are per-processor licensed. This caused a problem for IBM in trying to sell mainframes to run hybrid workloads; the customer would say, "But those extra processors to run Apache on Linux are costing me money in licensing fees on my mainframe apps. It's cheaper for me to buy a smaller mainframe and a bunch of PCs."
So IBM put together a bunch of processors, hardware-identical with normal mainframe processors, but including extra microcode that limits them to running Java/XML (z Application Assist Processor) or Linux (the Integrated Facility for Linux). These units don't count as processors for purposes of licensing mainframe apps, since they can't run mainframe apps.
Google is big enough to just buy or create their own newspaper.
And how!
Gannett (GCI) has a market capitalization of $2.44 billion. It owns 85 US and 17 UK dailies, over 850 US and 200 UK non-dailies, and 23 US television stations.
The New York Times Company (NYT) has a market capitalization of $1.27 billion. It owns 17 dailies and 1 weekly, plus About.com and various other assets.
The McClatchy Company (MNI) has a market capitalization of $0.252 billion. It owns 31 dailies.
GateHouse Media (GHSE) has a market capitalization of $0.012 billion. It owns 91 dailies, 294 weeklies, and 121 shoppers.
E. W. Scripps Company (SSP) has a market capitalization of $0.34 billion. It owns 15 newspapers and 10 television stations.
Lee Enterprises (LEE) has a market capitalization of $0.167 billion. It owns 49 dailies, has a joint interest in 5 more, and operates about 300 weeklies and specialty papers.
Media General (MEG) has a market capitalization of $0.202 billion. It owns 24 daily newspapers, 250 other publications, and 19 television stations.
A. H. Belo (AHC) has a market capitalization of $0.098 billion. It owns 3 relatively large dailies and a few minor publications.
Google has $21 billion cash on-hand, as of its last quarterly report, enough to buy all the above four times over and still have billions left.
If you start with the concept of inalienable rights, the famous "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness", then wouldn't any wrongful execution, being intentional deprivation of a person's life, violate his inalienable right?
Sure. But so would any wrongful imprisonment, being intentional deprivation of a person's liberty, violate his inalienable right. Wrongfully arresting the guy for the crime already is a violation of his inalienable rights by depriving him of his liberty. Demanding 100% perfection before any act that might deny an inalienable right means no law enforcement whatsoever.
(The same type of problem undercuts the often-made "if it's wrong for an individual to do it, it's wrong for the state to do it" argument against the death penalty. Because the logic of that applies just as fully to the fact that it's not allowed for an individual to take somebody prisoner with force or the threat thereof, lock them in restraints, and imprison them behind bars.)
If a computer maker doesn't like the licensing terms for Windows, they're free to negotiate with Microsoft different terms for distributing Windows. Until then, they owe the refund under the terms of their license to distribute Windows. It's pretty basic.