I can only pray for the day I can stop putting stuff like this into my css
/**fix for stupid old internet exploder**/
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='pics/Gasworks-1024x454.jpg',sizingMethod='scale');
-ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='pics/Gasworks-1024x454.jpg',sizingMethod='scale');
But since I have to even with IE9/10 because of the proliferation of the crappy ass IE's that they've produced in the past, I'm not going to be overwhelmed by the fact that they have finally started to get it right. Started I say IE10 320 vs Chrome 457.
As a tmobile subscriber I thought it worth mentioning that the cost of my galaxy s2 was tacked on to my phone bill at a rate of $15/month, and only until the phone itself was paid off. Tmobile doesn't maintain the payment on the phone subsidy after the phone has been paid off. They plan I got for me and my wife was $50/month per person, for unlimited everything. That comes out to a $130/month payment.. now reduced to $100+tax. I was paying AT&T nearly $200/month for far less and I continued to pay the phone subsidy even though I had purchased my nexus one outright.
As soon as delayed people in Iran or the US start using holy books to justify wars or other idiocies, religion has lost its claim to be merely an innocent bystander.
Fixed that for you. It would be nice if people would start being more sensitive to the disabilities of others..
The case you are making only makes sense if Chevy was claiming trade dress on using four wheels..or if Coke was claiming trade dress on having a bottle with a tapered neck. The heart of the issue is that what they are claiming as trade dress is the very basic of functional ergonomic aspects of a smart phone. There are not a lot of different ways to make a phone. The screen is a rectangle, and has a bezel to hold the glass in place.
There are MANY ways to make a tablet that don't consist primarily of a black rectangle with parallel sides and a bezel of a certain width and with chrome trim
Sure it could be a round tablet.. so I suppose Ford could make round cars, but they wouldn't fit on the road any better than a web page would fit in a round tablet. The rectangle is the only obvious choice for the shape of a tablet. That is why every fictional tablet, prior to the advent of real tablets, were rectangular. That is what is known as "obviousness".
The problem people have with what apple is doing is not because they are trying to protect their brilliant invention of the rectangular tablet, but because they are simply using their recently acquired wealth to attempt to stifle any potential competition.
As a long time blender user, I can tell you that it is quite possible to get realistic results while compositing in blender. If you don't like the results you can use Mentalray or one of many rendering alternatives.
Having a bit more experience with the software I can tell you without trying to sound like a fanboy that the problem you (and I) see with this film is a product of the new cycles rendering system. Depending on how long you let it run it can give very good results. My experience with it is that it takes quite a lot of render cycles (that is not a reuse of the name, it is a description of the render process) to get rid of the grainy look in the renders. What it looks like they did in the film is was cheat the render time for each frame down to what they thought they might be able to get away with once the vector blur for compositing in the footage was added. It looks like the spec/shadow/ambient occlusion has been washed out. It gives it that realtime game feel and doesn't sit in the scene well at all.
But if you have been doing CG for a while you should know that there is almost always a way to get things to look right. So it should be easy to understand that this is not a result of the software itself, but a combination of an experimental renderer and perhaps some bad decisions on the part of the artist.
I liked the "Lost Fleet" series because of it's use of actual naval tactics, and basic understanding of how things should work.. there are a few holes but at least very entertaining and not so far out there that it it makes you shake your head and laugh all the time.
However if we are talking about star carriers and at least well thought out science then you have to include the "Star Carrier" series by Ian Douglass. I love the way he drops fighters on entering the star system having them accelerate at near c and striking the enemy just behind the light coming from the fleet. I also think he spent a lot more time thinking about how an Alcubierre drive might work and the ways in which it would be used in combat.
Apple's touch is currently better. I find Android systems (including mine) as having much more trouble figuring out what my touches are supposed to do
You obviously have a much more involved relationship with your phone's than most people have. Which is fine but I wouldn't want any kids reading about it.
Really doesn't matter to me since I had to sign up on a waiting list six months ago, then wait ten weeks after payment for shipment then just recently received an email stating that the order would be delayed. If I can't get the first revision a second one is simply meaningless to me.
For those of you who can't find the review section..
Fast-thinking entrepreneur Tyler Vernon exploits the literally universal appeal of maple syrup to make a fortune, defies the Horvath, and reveals his ideas for keeping Earth safe, but intergalactic war threatens to derail his plan
the juror says they debated the prior art, then he says they "skipped that one". Hmm. He does not say they failed to consider prior art.
Neither does he say that they used "any" prior art in their deliberations. Ilagan (the jury foreman) simply explained to them all "his experience" with patent law. (never explains how he came up with that). Then they all agreed that Samsung infringed and filled out the appropriate boxes.
"It didn't dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day," Ilagan said. "We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated, but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple.
"In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down."...
"Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel. But we took our time. We didn't rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated."
Notice that he mentioned the "flatscreen with the Bezel" as a violation of "trade dress". The jury even found the Mytouch 4g as infringing, which has a slide out keyboard, multiple buttons.. well here take a look at the faces yourself. They look nothing alike.
So the jury took two days to answer 700 questions and read pages of jury instructions.. ok fine they are just that good. They why did the jury foreman say this..
"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."
When the jury instructions clearly state. ( Final Jury Instruction No. 35)
The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.
The instructions were clear on "not punishing the infringer". So why does he say that they were "trying to send a message", if it wasn't meant as punishment.
Rather, Apple has sued Samsung for combining so many visual and behavioral elements from the iPhone and iPad that they have obviously ripped off the design.
Do you have any link to documents that back that up? here (pdf) is the actual Apple filing. Reading it tells us that, although Apple is attempting to imply what you are saying, the actual court case comes down to their design patents. i.e. "rectangle with rounded corners" not the combination of behavioural elements from the iPhone/iPad as you are claiming.
As people have noted here many times, there are plenty of smart phones created before the advent of the iPhone with many of the same elements that the iPhone later came out with. Everyone was talking about what direction the smart phone would go, and it seemed obvious to most even at that time, that the full screen phone was what was going to happen. LG Prada
What really seems unfair about this to me is that where Samsung spent years and billions of dollars in R&D to help develop cell phone standards like 3g, Apple has not added anything to the development of cell phone standards and even refuses to negotiate with Samsung for any sort of payment for those patents. Meanwhile Apple wants Samsung to pay literally all of their profits to Apple for "allegedly" using their design patent (rounded corners).
As I said before, my wife is an SLP. She works with children that have communications issues. Many children with Downs Syndrome, or acute autism do not have the developmental ability to comprehend or learn sign language. The pictures are much easier to understand and for many of them it is the only way that they can learn to communicate. The boards are customized by the SLP to fit the child's needs and will only show them things they can understand and or learn. That is why they are so valuable.
My wife is a speech language pathologist. Years ago I remember looking at a Prentke Romich tablet she brought home to customize the interface for a student. I couldn't help but think how simple it was for a device that cost around $3k. Just for the basic version from there they go up to nearly $10k.(yes I know there is a bit into putting together the icon sets and sounds.. I'm speaking relatively) Prentke Romich sells to hospitals, and other major medical institutions that have need for such a device, and can afford it, they do not sell to individuals per se, simply because the average family cannot afford one. They charge a lot of money for them. I very much doubt they are concerned with the "actual" needs of people as much as they are their pocket book.
You should have read the article before posting. I'll help you out by simplifying it. Basically all of the technology CSIRO used is not just old, but decades old. They claim that they put it all together, but a working device built in the 80's was demonstrated at the hearing in east texas... in east texas where no one stands a chance.. the compainies in question decided to cut a deal before any verdict was given.. but really CSIRO looks very, very much like the kind of techtard patent troll that makes most people wonder what the patent system is really for...
It's easy to understand that people like you were not around at the beggining of this century in the US. When people worked 6 10hour days a week for minimal wages. It wasn't modernization that stopped the practice. It was people on the streets demanding it. Unions and a lot of violence and heartace.
People in China don't have that option. Unions are illegal, and there is no recourse for poor working conditions. There is no reason to believe in fact that things will ever change over there, or that we will ever be able to compete with the near slave labor conditions in their factories.
Your assertion as to why manufacturing phones in China is more cost effective, is baseless and speculative at best. The Chinese workers are not going to be able to stand up for themselves legally and anyone with half a brain knows it.
On a side note I can't help but notice that this thread has been carpeted with one sided moderation on the issue. Makes me wonder...
The problem here is not with how to make a wheel/axle combo, and you are both probably right, a solid wheel/axle combo under a slotted bushing is the most likely way to build a cart. However the real issue is not how to create the axle or the bushing or putting the wheel on the axle. It's creating the wheel itself. With only stones, you aren't going to be making a spoked wheel. A flat wheel made of a tree cut out, again is difficult without a metal saw. They didn't go buy planks at the store and nail them together, so they had to cut it out of a solid piece of wood. Not exactly impossible to do with stone, but very, very difficult. One must take into account the amount of labor saved by building the device vs the amount of labor it takes to make it. No one is going to want to spend the time to pound out round wooden wheels with a sharp rock given the amount of time it would take. A purpose made blade that you could use to accurately cut away at a piece of wood with out splitting the grain would more than likely be incumbent upon the wheel creators to possess.
We're told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA's Origin) to be loaded up.
So basically it's going to be a Steam branded PC...
I hear you. When we bought our house I was careful to make sure the payment was well within my budget. Though I do know plenty of people that didn't. It wasn't that they were gaming anyone, or that they were stupid in a most cases. It was just the system that allowed them to make these awful bets and the loan brokers and realters that convinced them it was a good idea.
Let me put it this way, my brother bought a commercial building in 2004 for about 375k.. he took out a baloon payment loan. Initially the payments were well within his budget. Then when the baloon payment came due in 2006, he refinanced the building which was then values at about 500k. He used the equity to get a reasonable interest rate, and was able to bring the total monthly payment down to well within his budget. He wasn't the only person doing this. Lots and lots of people were doing that, and lots more were bying and reselling the homes that they had bought while being completely in the red. I would like to fault them, but the fact is, they weren't wrong. Lots of people were doing it, and lots of people made staggering amounts of money off of it.
The thing is that the banks knew that this bubble couldn't sustain itself. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the skyrocketing cost of housing couldn't go on for ever. Wages weren't increasing, and inflation didn't rationalize it. But the banks just kept continuing to invest in it, and people kept taking the easy no money down loans to try to make their dreams come true. Most people just assumed that they banks knew what they were doing, and that was the big lie that led everyone on.
As a long time user of KDE.. I would like second your remorse for the loss of Konqueror as an all in one platform. Back when Gnome was just a sparkle in some dev's eye. The then KDE developers and dreamers were stuck on this vision of creating something seamless that would reach across all techdom and bring to the user everthing that was on the system, on the web, and in your hardware. The idea was to do what Plan9 was trying to do, but make it all seamless to the user. The one thing I liked about KDE was the one thing that so many people decided that they hated. Instead of one way of doing things, they decided to make nearly every way you wanted to do something work. It would take me more time than I care to mention to explain what I mean.. lets just say that if you were trying to figure out how to do something, you didn't have to go far. KDE handed everything to you. In the end if you knew your way around the system it made just about every task simple and fast. Gnome was just the same old padagrym of menu/app/menu file browser/web browser. All seperate.
I still have an emense amount of hope for Plasma Active... that is the first really hopeful change I've seen in any OS in ages.
have no doubt that I'd never, ever work in one, or let anyone I cared about work in one. At the same time, I'm not convinced they're not a big step up for the average Chinese person.
That is easily one of the most racist statements I've read today. It's OKbecause they are Chinese?
Are Chinese so much a lesser person that what would be horrible working conditions to you should be just fine for them? ...get with the twentieth century pal, we left that mentality a hundred years ago.
No one is arguing that there are not worse sweatshops out there. No on is arguing that other companies don't use said "worse sweatshops". But your complete denail that anything is wrong with the way your favorite phone company is doing business is at best self decieving and at worst contemptable. Apple is in the news for poor labor conditions. If we ignore it and say it's OK then you are just giving a green flag to any other business that wants to use sudo-slave labor to produce their product.
It isn't really free will if you have to choose between doing what someone else tells you and death. I wouldn't consider jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a choice.. just a reality. If god/government/mugger in an alley, are telling me I have to do something or die.. it's not free choice.
Slashdot Mirror
I can only pray for the day I can stop putting stuff like this into my css
/**fix for stupid old internet exploder**/
filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='pics/Gasworks-1024x454.jpg',sizingMethod='scale');
-ms-filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.AlphaImageLoader(src='pics/Gasworks-1024x454.jpg',sizingMethod='scale');
But since I have to even with IE9/10 because of the proliferation of the crappy ass IE's that they've produced in the past, I'm not going to be overwhelmed by the fact that they have finally started to get it right. Started I say IE10 320 vs Chrome 457.
As a tmobile subscriber I thought it worth mentioning that the cost of my galaxy s2 was tacked on to my phone bill at a rate of $15/month, and only until the phone itself was paid off. Tmobile doesn't maintain the payment on the phone subsidy after the phone has been paid off. They plan I got for me and my wife was $50/month per person, for unlimited everything. That comes out to a $130/month payment.. now reduced to $100+tax. I was paying AT&T nearly $200/month for far less and I continued to pay the phone subsidy even though I had purchased my nexus one outright.
As soon as delayed people in Iran or the US start using holy books to justify wars or other idiocies, religion has lost its claim to be merely an innocent bystander.
Fixed that for you. It would be nice if people would start being more sensitive to the disabilities of others..
The case you are making only makes sense if Chevy was claiming trade dress on using four wheels..or if Coke was claiming trade dress on having a bottle with a tapered neck. The heart of the issue is that what they are claiming as trade dress is the very basic of functional ergonomic aspects of a smart phone. There are not a lot of different ways to make a phone. The screen is a rectangle, and has a bezel to hold the glass in place.
There are MANY ways to make a tablet that don't consist primarily of a black rectangle with parallel sides and a bezel of a certain width and with chrome trim
Sure it could be a round tablet.. so I suppose Ford could make round cars, but they wouldn't fit on the road any better than a web page would fit in a round tablet. The rectangle is the only obvious choice for the shape of a tablet. That is why every fictional tablet, prior to the advent of real tablets, were rectangular. That is what is known as "obviousness".
The problem people have with what apple is doing is not because they are trying to protect their brilliant invention of the rectangular tablet, but because they are simply using their recently acquired wealth to attempt to stifle any potential competition.
As a long time blender user, I can tell you that it is quite possible to get realistic results while compositing in blender. If you don't like the results you can use Mentalray or one of many rendering alternatives.
Having a bit more experience with the software I can tell you without trying to sound like a fanboy that the problem you (and I) see with this film is a product of the new cycles rendering system. Depending on how long you let it run it can give very good results. My experience with it is that it takes quite a lot of render cycles (that is not a reuse of the name, it is a description of the render process) to get rid of the grainy look in the renders. What it looks like they did in the film is was cheat the render time for each frame down to what they thought they might be able to get away with once the vector blur for compositing in the footage was added. It looks like the spec/shadow/ambient occlusion has been washed out. It gives it that realtime game feel and doesn't sit in the scene well at all.
But if you have been doing CG for a while you should know that there is almost always a way to get things to look right. So it should be easy to understand that this is not a result of the software itself, but a combination of an experimental renderer and perhaps some bad decisions on the part of the artist.
I liked the "Lost Fleet" series because of it's use of actual naval tactics, and basic understanding of how things should work.. there are a few holes but at least very entertaining and not so far out there that it it makes you shake your head and laugh all the time.
However if we are talking about star carriers and at least well thought out science then you have to include the "Star Carrier" series by Ian Douglass. I love the way he drops fighters on entering the star system having them accelerate at near c and striking the enemy just behind the light coming from the fleet. I also think he spent a lot more time thinking about how an Alcubierre drive might work and the ways in which it would be used in combat.
Apple's touch is currently better. I find Android systems (including mine) as having much more trouble figuring out what my touches are supposed to do
You obviously have a much more involved relationship with your phone's than most people have. Which is fine but I wouldn't want any kids reading about it.
Really doesn't matter to me since I had to sign up on a waiting list six months ago, then wait ten weeks after payment for shipment then just recently received an email stating that the order would be delayed. If I can't get the first revision a second one is simply meaningless to me.
this really sounds like it could be the plot to a really bad science fiction book.. oh ya that's right.
http://www.amazon.com/Live-Free-Die-Troy-Rising/dp/1439133328
For those of you who can't find the review section..
Fast-thinking entrepreneur Tyler Vernon exploits the literally universal appeal of maple syrup to make a fortune, defies the Horvath, and reveals his ideas for keeping Earth safe, but intergalactic war threatens to derail his plan
the juror says they debated the prior art, then he says they "skipped that one". Hmm. He does not say they failed to consider prior art.
Neither does he say that they used "any" prior art in their deliberations. Ilagan (the jury foreman) simply explained to them all "his experience" with patent law. (never explains how he came up with that). Then they all agreed that Samsung infringed and filled out the appropriate boxes.
"It didn't dawn on us [that we agreed that Samsung had infringed] on the first day," Ilagan said. "We were debating heavily, especially about the patents on bounce back and pinch-to-zoom. Apple said they owned patents, but we were debating about the prior art [about the same technology that Samsung said existed before the iPhone debuted]. [Velvin Hogan] was jury foreman. He had experience. He owned patents himself. In the beginning the debate was heated, but it was still civil. Hogan holds patents, so he took us through his experience. After that it was easier. After we debated that first patent -- what was prior art --because we had a hard time believing there was no prior art, that there wasn't something out there before Apple. "In fact we skipped that one," Ilagan continued, "so we could go on faster. It was bogging us down." ...
"Once you determine that Samsung violated the patents," Ilagan said, "it's easy to just go down those different [Samsung] products because it was all the same. Like the trade dress, once you determine Samsung violated the trade dress, the flatscreen with the Bezel...then you go down the products to see if it had a bezel. But we took our time. We didn't rush. We had a debate before we made a decision. Sometimes it was getting heated."
Notice that he mentioned the "flatscreen with the Bezel" as a violation of "trade dress". The jury even found the Mytouch 4g as infringing, which has a slide out keyboard, multiple buttons.. well here take a look at the faces yourself. They look nothing alike.
So the jury took two days to answer 700 questions and read pages of jury instructions.. ok fine they are just that good. They why did the jury foreman say this..
"We wanted to make sure the message we sent was not just a slap on the wrist," Hogan said. "We wanted to make sure it was sufficiently high to be painful, but not unreasonable."
When the jury instructions clearly state. ( Final Jury Instruction No. 35)
The amount of those damages must be adequate to compensate the patent holder for the infringement. A damages award should put the patent holder in approximately the financial position it would have been in had the infringement not occurred, but in no event may the damages award be less than a reasonable royalty. You should keep in mind that the damages you award are meant to compensate the patent holder and not to punish an infringer.
The instructions were clear on "not punishing the infringer". So why does he say that they were "trying to send a message", if it wasn't meant as punishment.
Rather, Apple has sued Samsung for combining so many visual and behavioral elements from the iPhone and iPad that they have obviously ripped off the design.
Do you have any link to documents that back that up?
here (pdf) is the actual Apple filing. Reading it tells us that, although Apple is attempting to imply what you are saying, the actual court case comes down to their design patents. i.e. "rectangle with rounded corners" not the combination of behavioural elements from the iPhone/iPad as you are claiming.
As people have noted here many times, there are plenty of smart phones created before the advent of the iPhone with many of the same elements that the iPhone later came out with. Everyone was talking about what direction the smart phone would go, and it seemed obvious to most even at that time, that the full screen phone was what was going to happen. LG Prada
What really seems unfair about this to me is that where Samsung spent years and billions of dollars in R&D to help develop cell phone standards like 3g, Apple has not added anything to the development of cell phone standards and even refuses to negotiate with Samsung for any sort of payment for those patents. Meanwhile Apple wants Samsung to pay literally all of their profits to Apple for "allegedly" using their design patent (rounded corners).
As I said before, my wife is an SLP. She works with children that have communications issues. Many children with Downs Syndrome, or acute autism do not have the developmental ability to comprehend or learn sign language. The pictures are much easier to understand and for many of them it is the only way that they can learn to communicate. The boards are customized by the SLP to fit the child's needs and will only show them things they can understand and or learn. That is why they are so valuable.
My wife is a speech language pathologist. Years ago I remember looking at a Prentke Romich tablet she brought home to customize the interface for a student. I couldn't help but think how simple it was for a device that cost around $3k. Just for the basic version from there they go up to nearly $10k.(yes I know there is a bit into putting together the icon sets and sounds.. I'm speaking relatively) Prentke Romich sells to hospitals, and other major medical institutions that have need for such a device, and can afford it, they do not sell to individuals per se, simply because the average family cannot afford one. They charge a lot of money for them. I very much doubt they are concerned with the "actual" needs of people as much as they are their pocket book.
You should have read the article before posting. I'll help you out by simplifying it. Basically all of the technology CSIRO used is not just old, but decades old. They claim that they put it all together, but a working device built in the 80's was demonstrated at the hearing in east texas... in east texas where no one stands a chance.. the compainies in question decided to cut a deal before any verdict was given.. but really CSIRO looks very, very much like the kind of techtard patent troll that makes most people wonder what the patent system is really for...
Just read the article..
It's easy to understand that people like you were not around at the beggining of this century in the US. When people worked 6 10hour days a week for minimal wages. It wasn't modernization that stopped the practice. It was people on the streets demanding it. Unions and a lot of violence and heartace.
People in China don't have that option. Unions are illegal, and there is no recourse for poor working conditions. There is no reason to believe in fact that things will ever change over there, or that we will ever be able to compete with the near slave labor conditions in their factories.
Your assertion as to why manufacturing phones in China is more cost effective, is baseless and speculative at best. The Chinese workers are not going to be able to stand up for themselves legally and anyone with half a brain knows it.
On a side note I can't help but notice that this thread has been carpeted with one sided moderation on the issue. Makes me wonder...
The problem here is not with how to make a wheel/axle combo, and you are both probably right, a solid wheel/axle combo under a slotted bushing is the most likely way to build a cart. However the real issue is not how to create the axle or the bushing or putting the wheel on the axle. It's creating the wheel itself. With only stones, you aren't going to be making a spoked wheel. A flat wheel made of a tree cut out, again is difficult without a metal saw. They didn't go buy planks at the store and nail them together, so they had to cut it out of a solid piece of wood. Not exactly impossible to do with stone, but very, very difficult. One must take into account the amount of labor saved by building the device vs the amount of labor it takes to make it. No one is going to want to spend the time to pound out round wooden wheels with a sharp rock given the amount of time it would take. A purpose made blade that you could use to accurately cut away at a piece of wood with out splitting the grain would more than likely be incumbent upon the wheel creators to possess.
We're told that the basic specs of the Steam Box include a Core i7 CPU, 8GB of RAM, and an NVIDIA GPU. The devices will be able to run any standard PC titles, and will also allow for rival gaming services (like EA's Origin) to be loaded up.
So basically it's going to be a Steam branded PC...
I hear you. When we bought our house I was careful to make sure the payment was well within my budget. Though I do know plenty of people that didn't. It wasn't that they were gaming anyone, or that they were stupid in a most cases. It was just the system that allowed them to make these awful bets and the loan brokers and realters that convinced them it was a good idea.
Let me put it this way, my brother bought a commercial building in 2004 for about 375k.. he took out a baloon payment loan. Initially the payments were well within his budget. Then when the baloon payment came due in 2006, he refinanced the building which was then values at about 500k. He used the equity to get a reasonable interest rate, and was able to bring the total monthly payment down to well within his budget. He wasn't the only person doing this. Lots and lots of people were doing that, and lots more were bying and reselling the homes that they had bought while being completely in the red. I would like to fault them, but the fact is, they weren't wrong. Lots of people were doing it, and lots of people made staggering amounts of money off of it.
The thing is that the banks knew that this bubble couldn't sustain itself. It seemed pretty obvious to me that the skyrocketing cost of housing couldn't go on for ever. Wages weren't increasing, and inflation didn't rationalize it. But the banks just kept continuing to invest in it, and people kept taking the easy no money down loans to try to make their dreams come true. Most people just assumed that they banks knew what they were doing, and that was the big lie that led everyone on.
OMFG!! Not miniseries.. anything but that!!
As a long time user of KDE.. I would like second your remorse for the loss of Konqueror as an all in one platform. Back when Gnome was just a sparkle in some dev's eye. The then KDE developers and dreamers were stuck on this vision of creating something seamless that would reach across all techdom and bring to the user everthing that was on the system, on the web, and in your hardware. The idea was to do what Plan9 was trying to do, but make it all seamless to the user. The one thing I liked about KDE was the one thing that so many people decided that they hated. Instead of one way of doing things, they decided to make nearly every way you wanted to do something work. It would take me more time than I care to mention to explain what I mean.. lets just say that if you were trying to figure out how to do something, you didn't have to go far. KDE handed everything to you. In the end if you knew your way around the system it made just about every task simple and fast. Gnome was just the same old padagrym of menu/app/menu file browser/web browser. All seperate.
I still have an emense amount of hope for Plasma Active... that is the first really hopeful change I've seen in any OS in ages.
Oh, my freaking god.. someone gets it!!!
Bravo.. my dear man bravo.. (hands clapping)..
have no doubt that I'd never, ever work in one, or let anyone I cared about work in one. At the same time, I'm not convinced they're not a big step up for the average Chinese person.
That is easily one of the most racist statements I've read today. It's OK because they are Chinese?
...get with the twentieth century pal, we left that mentality a hundred years ago.
Are Chinese so much a lesser person that what would be horrible working conditions to you should be just fine for them?
No one is arguing that there are not worse sweatshops out there. No on is arguing that other companies don't use said "worse sweatshops". But your complete denail that anything is wrong with the way your favorite phone company is doing business is at best self decieving and at worst contemptable. Apple is in the news for poor labor conditions. If we ignore it and say it's OK then you are just giving a green flag to any other business that wants to use sudo-slave labor to produce their product.
..and you don't have a better haircut than me..
That was before we found out he was really a space alien.. did the sequel bother anyone else as badly as it did me?
It isn't really free will if you have to choose between doing what someone else tells you and death. I wouldn't consider jumping off a cliff or not jumping off a choice.. just a reality. If god/government/mugger in an alley, are telling me I have to do something or die.. it's not free choice.