I'd say for a laptop that's probably not too inaccurate. Mac laptops are very good - the are good PC laptops out there but there are a lot of crappy ones that will break in 2 years too.
For desktops? I don't think Macs are particularly more long lived there.
FWIW my main system that I'm typing this on I built back in 2009 and its still doing everything I need. I've did the Newegg window shopping several times where I build a new system but before actually finishing the sale I back out because I have to admit - aside from some faster video encodes and the like I probably won't even be able to tell the difference between the new and old systems.
My apologies - I actually misread the data in the original article. Those 45 homicides from 1870 to 1885 was actually the combined number from Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell.
There are some interesting applications of everything being a computer (ie, security systems, the NEST thermostats and smoke detectors), but honestly there just doesn't seem to be a need for any and everything to have a computer attached to it.
Computers are amazing tools granted, but simply tacking one on doesn't always "improve" something.
Granted, I will say that I have enjoyed tinkering with my Raspberry Pi(s), but they mostly just serve as cheap XBMC boxes.
Honestly, this may be a good thing. Maybe I'm being a bit naive, but the number (and ridiculousness) of analogies and/or metaphor in science television programming lately has been getting crazy. Its hard to fight against the anti-intellectual mindset when every time the general populace sees a scientist on TV they're explaining something using yet another ridiculous metaphor.
Just explain the concept. A CGI model as a visual aid works well. If the viewer doesn't understand they likely wouldn't do any better with a metaphor.
Yes but as the OP pointed out - there are very few crimes committed per year with rifles of ANY TYPE. Even the scary black military looking "assault rifles" that Piers Morgan loves to complain about. The simple fact is that whether its fully automatic, semi-automatic, bolt action, or whatever - very few crimes are committed with rifles.
I'm not in favor of restrictions on handguns either, but worrying about so called "assault rifles" is indeed an absolute waste of time.
McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 3025 (2010), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined whether the Second Amendment applies to the individual states. The Court held that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" protected by the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applies to the states.
I'd say because "gun control" tends to be a a polarizing topic amongst nerds. Far more people tend to have strong opinions on the issue (either for OR against) than the general populace, so hence most gun control topics get a lot of support here.
Remember that guns are indeed technology, and the legal situation around the restriction and sale of a technology is of great interest to technophiles.
I think you'll find that the murder rate (RATE - not total which was much lower) was actually lower during the "wild" west than it is today.
The reality is that the the "wild" west is mostly an invention of the mid-20th century movie industry that took a handful of historical events and portrayed it such that people think that it was completely normal for the town to be shot up.
Its a little of both (and I say that as an avid hunter).
I eat what I kill, and several deer in the freezer per year go a long ways in lowering how much meat I need to actually buy at the grocery store. Still, even hunting on a budget, the time commitment is still pretty steep. When you account for days when you see nothing and straight up scouting time, each deer taken is probably a 12-15 hour time commitment. With the idea that "time is money" I'm certainly not coming out ahead there, but I do actually enjoy the challenge and process of going out hunting, so it is indeed a recreational/sport activity as well.
I'd compare it to working a 2nd job - its pays a little but not much, but I enjoy it enough that I keep working.
The only exception is Thrones. HBO's refusal to let that out via alternative means in a timely manner is probably costing them. However, fans of the show will soon buy it on blu-ray when it eventually hits the shelves.
I haven't figured out why they won't just sell you an HBO Go subscription as a separate entity. They have a digital content distribution system in place. It has support on many different devices. Yet they still require that you buy their channel through a cable/satellite provider and THEN get access to it.
Why not just have an HBO Go subscription for $10/month? They can cut out the middle man (cable companies) and get a lot more customers that only do internet based TV.
I suppose that's a "feature", but Linux sure seemed primitive to me a few years ago when I discovered what an ordeal it was to read a floppy disk: with Windows, you just put it into the drive and it worked. I assume the same ordeal holds true today for USB sticks on Linux. (Ever wonder why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" always seems to be in the future, Linus?
Um - I plug a USB stick into my Linux computer and an icon pops up on the desktop named "USB Drive" (or whatever name it has) that I can double click and do whatever I need.
I'm guessing that if you were actually trying to read an honest to goodness floppy disk it was more than a "few years ago". Linux has come a long way. The "year of Linux on the desktop" was 5 years ago for me.
Of course my parents called me to come look at their (Windows) computer a while back because it wasn't acting quite right, and I was reminded of the headache of spyware and malware. I had forgotten such things existed while using Linux.
XBMC works great for playing random files. I've actually used it in several versions (original Xbox, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, and Ouya - running on Apple TV was the best - closely followed by Raspberry Pi).
I don't really mind a lot of these devices that want to connect you to services like Netflix, Hulu, etc, but just being able to point the thing to a USB drive or network share and play plain old downloaded files is a must for me.
Not by that much, and honestly I can't say that I care. I downloaded tons of Steam games on my 1Mbps connection but I mostly bought Steam games when they were on sale - I had no desire to play them immediately - I just wanted them for when I got around to it. Buy it, start the download, and then when I'm ready to play the game (which might be weeks later - I'm busy with OTHER games right now) its ready.
Read all the sentences in the post - not just the first. As stated, shipping always needs to be paid for, but shipping on a tablet shouldn't exceed $8 (and realistically will be closer to $5). Over $20 and that's not shipping - that's just moving major parts of the cost from one highly visible line item to another to make something look cheaper.
I've had real maple syrup, and I'll admit that it tastes better, but it certainly doesn't taste better ENOUGH to warrant costing about 16x as much as the cheap stuff.
Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).
The Mass Market variety aren't really designed to last. They're meant to be read once or twice (if ever) and if they tear up after that just toss them.
If you're buying a book for a collection you want to buy a higher quality version.
That said - I'm not sure why they charge what they do for the better versions. Barnes and noble puts out very good quality hard-cover versions of some public domain books for less than $10. That's generally less than the price difference between the MMPB and the hardcover version of most books, so you're actually paying a lot more than just the additional materials cost there.
Granted, shipping usually isn't free (even when listed as such it's built into the price of the item), but a $20+ shipping price is just a lie. They're building most of the item price into the shipping price to make it look cheaper.
Yes the 4.3" device is actually $35 shipped but at that size I consider that a touch screen media player rather than a "tablet".
The problem is that SOMEONE will do that, but usually for most classes you don't just need a random textbook on the subject - you need a specific one that is normally chosen by the professor. Sometimes they have "incentives" to mandate a textbook from a certain publisher or sometimes they make a book that they wrote the mandatory textbook so that they get all the royalties.
I ended up buying a lot of my books at Half.com back when I was in school because I could get them cheaper used there (just had to make do without the book for the first week or so of class while I waited for it to come in). I also could generally sell my used books there for more than the campus bookstore was offering.
Amen. Until I moved 7 months ago I was on 1Mbps for the last 10 years, and actually - it ain't that bad. File downloads go a bit slower naturally and some video streaming stuff didn't work great (Youtube worked fine though), but in general web browsing was absolutely fine at that speed and online gaming wasn't an issue either.
When I moved to my current home my local ISP has a host of plans available - from a minimum of 10Mbps to a max of 110Mbps. I took the bottom plan at 10Mbps and I've still not found any major reason to go faster. Don't get me wrong I'm a big techie and spend tons of time on my computer, but I haven't yet found a need for some of the crazy internet speeds available these days.
You normally only have a limited timeframe (2 months or so) to do a chargeback. Most people who had these purchases revoked likely bought this content in a previous year (as stated, Amazon started selling this in 2011).
The chargeback option likely isn't going to be that useful. Not to mention executing a chargeback can lead to a lot of merchants blacklisting you.
A response I've seen to this argument is, "the majority of the population don't murder and rape. So, we don't need those laws on the books about these crimes then?"
Think of it this way. People fall into three categories for any given action:
Group 1: Will not do something whether its illegal or not. Group 2: Will not do something if its illegal. If no law exists, they will. Group 3: Will do something whether its illegal or not.
Laws aren't needed for group 1 and don't affect group 3. So really group 2 is what a law is focusing on. The people that fall into group 2 for murder and rape is small but the number is non-zero. Keeping and enforcing laws against those things helps keep people safe by deterring the people in that group.
With gun laws, again, group 2 is again the only group affected, but group 2 is only a danger if they fall into group 3 for a more serious crime, which is virtually never going to happen. Nobody who is going to commit rape/murder/robbery/etc is going to have second thoughts about breaking a gun law. Ergo, if you're in group 3 for a violent crime you'll be in group 3 for the gun law and hence unaffected by it.
Its often said that "Well, gun laws at least make guns harder to obtain.", but as I said earlier in the Unites States there are more guns than people. We rank #1 in the world for guns per capita. From Gunpolicy.org the ratio of guns to people here in private hands is 101.05:100, with 34.4% of all households containing at least one gun. Estimates are 110 million rifles, 86 million shotguns, and 114 million handguns. There is no mandatory registration in the US. You could declare gun ownership completely illegal tomorrow and there's still enough guns that it'd be dirt simple getting ahold of one for over a century.
Even that is ignoring the fact that with things like 3D printing guns are getting easier to make at home, and even before that they weren't rocket science - people have been making some form of hand-held gun for ~800 years or so with pretty basic tools, and even what we'd consider to be a fairly modern gun can be made with simple and cheap tools (drill presses, files, etc).
You're simply not going to put the genie back in the bottle here.
That criminals would be undeterred by a law is a given for all laws and regulations. The key is the law-abiding who won't willfully participate in such activities. That and having a mechanism to punish the ones you do catch.
You will never stop everybody with a law, that is well known. That isn't a requirement for us to have laws though.
Of course not. You have to look at what you're trying to prevent however. Murder is against the law, and rightfully so, but that's because the actual act being outlawed is exactly what you want to prevent. Once a murder has occurred grave harm (literally) has already occurred to another party. Same with theft. Same with rape. Same with assault.
See, all those things are directly harmful to another individual. Making laws against them certainly won't ever stop such crimes from being committed at all, but it will reduce the frequency.
The issue with plastic guns (or gun laws in general) is that the very act of having a gun isn't harmful. You can do harmful things with it, but just having one doesn't cause any harm in and of itself. The people that would use those guns to harm another person are already willing to break laws to do so - laws with much stiffer legal consequences.
Think of the number of guns in the US. There are more guns in this country than there are people. The VAST majority of them are never used in a harmful way, and the vast majority of gun owners are law abiding citizens. Passing gun laws affects most of them (because most of them actually follow the laws), but it does nothing for the tiny fraction of them that do not adhere to the law anyways, and those were the ones you really needed to worry about.
Its not that laws in general are useless - merely that laws that exist solely as an attempt to keep someone from breaking another law are useless.
Not all games are available on PC. The latest Halo's have not been. Nothing by Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us). A lot of Square Enix's titles are not (a lot of JRPG's in general actually).
I love gaming on my PC - particularly with Steam sales making many games pretty much dirt cheap, and I just plug in a wired XB360 controller to my PC and get console controls for most of them. That said, there's still a lot of titles that simply aren't available there. For those you need emulation (or to just buy the system - which IMHO is the preferable solution).
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I'd say for a laptop that's probably not too inaccurate. Mac laptops are very good - the are good PC laptops out there but there are a lot of crappy ones that will break in 2 years too.
For desktops? I don't think Macs are particularly more long lived there.
FWIW my main system that I'm typing this on I built back in 2009 and its still doing everything I need. I've did the Newegg window shopping several times where I build a new system but before actually finishing the sale I back out because I have to admit - aside from some faster video encodes and the like I probably won't even be able to tell the difference between the new and old systems.
My apologies - I actually misread the data in the original article. Those 45 homicides from 1870 to 1885 was actually the combined number from Abilene, Ellsworth, Wichita, Dodge City, and Caldwell.
There are some interesting applications of everything being a computer (ie, security systems, the NEST thermostats and smoke detectors), but honestly there just doesn't seem to be a need for any and everything to have a computer attached to it.
Computers are amazing tools granted, but simply tacking one on doesn't always "improve" something.
Granted, I will say that I have enjoyed tinkering with my Raspberry Pi(s), but they mostly just serve as cheap XBMC boxes.
Honestly, this may be a good thing. Maybe I'm being a bit naive, but the number (and ridiculousness) of analogies and/or metaphor in science television programming lately has been getting crazy. Its hard to fight against the anti-intellectual mindset when every time the general populace sees a scientist on TV they're explaining something using yet another ridiculous metaphor.
Just explain the concept. A CGI model as a visual aid works well. If the viewer doesn't understand they likely wouldn't do any better with a metaphor.
Yes but as the OP pointed out - there are very few crimes committed per year with rifles of ANY TYPE. Even the scary black military looking "assault rifles" that Piers Morgan loves to complain about. The simple fact is that whether its fully automatic, semi-automatic, bolt action, or whatever - very few crimes are committed with rifles.
I'm not in favor of restrictions on handguns either, but worrying about so called "assault rifles" is indeed an absolute waste of time.
McDonald vs Chicago (2010) offered a different interpretation (and the more recent decision takes precedence).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonald_v._Chicago
Specifically:
McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 3025 (2010), is a landmark decision of the Supreme Court of the United States that determined whether the Second Amendment applies to the individual states. The Court held that the right of an individual to "keep and bear arms" protected by the Second Amendment is incorporated by the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment and applies to the states.
I'd say because "gun control" tends to be a a polarizing topic amongst nerds. Far more people tend to have strong opinions on the issue (either for OR against) than the general populace, so hence most gun control topics get a lot of support here.
Remember that guns are indeed technology, and the legal situation around the restriction and sale of a technology is of great interest to technophiles.
I think you'll find that the murder rate (RATE - not total which was much lower) was actually lower during the "wild" west than it is today.
The reality is that the the "wild" west is mostly an invention of the mid-20th century movie industry that took a handful of historical events and portrayed it such that people think that it was completely normal for the town to be shot up.
As a matter of fact specifically in Dodge City as you mention from 1870 to 1885 there were a total of 45 homicides, putting the murder rate at 1 per 100k people.
http://www.examiner.com/article/dispelling-the-myth-of-the-wild-west
The current murder rate as of 2010 is 4.8 per 100k for the overall country and is much higher than that in some urban areas.
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/2010/crime-in-the-u.s.-2010/tables/10tbl01.xls
The simple fact is that the "wild" west wasn't as wild as you'd believe.
Seeing your gripe at Asimov's article I am very curious... What are your predictions for 2064?
The Year of Linux on the Desktop?
Its a little of both (and I say that as an avid hunter).
I eat what I kill, and several deer in the freezer per year go a long ways in lowering how much meat I need to actually buy at the grocery store. Still, even hunting on a budget, the time commitment is still pretty steep. When you account for days when you see nothing and straight up scouting time, each deer taken is probably a 12-15 hour time commitment. With the idea that "time is money" I'm certainly not coming out ahead there, but I do actually enjoy the challenge and process of going out hunting, so it is indeed a recreational/sport activity as well.
I'd compare it to working a 2nd job - its pays a little but not much, but I enjoy it enough that I keep working.
The only exception is Thrones. HBO's refusal to let that out via alternative means in a timely manner is probably costing them. However, fans of the show will soon buy it on blu-ray when it eventually hits the shelves.
I haven't figured out why they won't just sell you an HBO Go subscription as a separate entity. They have a digital content distribution system in place. It has support on many different devices. Yet they still require that you buy their channel through a cable/satellite provider and THEN get access to it.
Why not just have an HBO Go subscription for $10/month? They can cut out the middle man (cable companies) and get a lot more customers that only do internet based TV.
I suppose that's a "feature", but Linux sure seemed primitive to me a few years ago when I discovered what an ordeal it was to read a floppy disk: with Windows, you just put it into the drive and it worked. I assume the same ordeal holds true today for USB sticks on Linux. (Ever wonder why "The Year of the Linux Desktop" always seems to be in the future, Linus?
Um - I plug a USB stick into my Linux computer and an icon pops up on the desktop named "USB Drive" (or whatever name it has) that I can double click and do whatever I need.
I'm guessing that if you were actually trying to read an honest to goodness floppy disk it was more than a "few years ago". Linux has come a long way. The "year of Linux on the desktop" was 5 years ago for me.
Of course my parents called me to come look at their (Windows) computer a while back because it wasn't acting quite right, and I was reminded of the headache of spyware and malware. I had forgotten such things existed while using Linux.
XBMC works great for playing random files. I've actually used it in several versions (original Xbox, Apple TV, Raspberry Pi, and Ouya - running on Apple TV was the best - closely followed by Raspberry Pi).
I don't really mind a lot of these devices that want to connect you to services like Netflix, Hulu, etc, but just being able to point the thing to a USB drive or network share and play plain old downloaded files is a must for me.
Not by that much, and honestly I can't say that I care. I downloaded tons of Steam games on my 1Mbps connection but I mostly bought Steam games when they were on sale - I had no desire to play them immediately - I just wanted them for when I got around to it. Buy it, start the download, and then when I'm ready to play the game (which might be weeks later - I'm busy with OTHER games right now) its ready.
Read all the sentences in the post - not just the first. As stated, shipping always needs to be paid for, but shipping on a tablet shouldn't exceed $8 (and realistically will be closer to $5). Over $20 and that's not shipping - that's just moving major parts of the cost from one highly visible line item to another to make something look cheaper.
Unless you're downloading from a BBS using ZModem, you can actually do other things while your computer downloads a game.
I've had real maple syrup, and I'll admit that it tastes better, but it certainly doesn't taste better ENOUGH to warrant costing about 16x as much as the cheap stuff.
Regular paperbacks are generally of noticeably higher quality than "Mass Market Paperbacks" (which are the small-ish versions sold in most supermarkets and such).
The Mass Market variety aren't really designed to last. They're meant to be read once or twice (if ever) and if they tear up after that just toss them.
If you're buying a book for a collection you want to buy a higher quality version.
That said - I'm not sure why they charge what they do for the better versions. Barnes and noble puts out very good quality hard-cover versions of some public domain books for less than $10. That's generally less than the price difference between the MMPB and the hardcover version of most books, so you're actually paying a lot more than just the additional materials cost there.
That "$44" tablet has a shipping price of $23.
Granted, shipping usually isn't free (even when listed as such it's built into the price of the item), but a $20+ shipping price is just a lie. They're building most of the item price into the shipping price to make it look cheaper.
Yes the 4.3" device is actually $35 shipped but at that size I consider that a touch screen media player rather than a "tablet".
The problem is that SOMEONE will do that, but usually for most classes you don't just need a random textbook on the subject - you need a specific one that is normally chosen by the professor. Sometimes they have "incentives" to mandate a textbook from a certain publisher or sometimes they make a book that they wrote the mandatory textbook so that they get all the royalties.
I ended up buying a lot of my books at Half.com back when I was in school because I could get them cheaper used there (just had to make do without the book for the first week or so of class while I waited for it to come in). I also could generally sell my used books there for more than the campus bookstore was offering.
Amen. Until I moved 7 months ago I was on 1Mbps for the last 10 years, and actually - it ain't that bad. File downloads go a bit slower naturally and some video streaming stuff didn't work great (Youtube worked fine though), but in general web browsing was absolutely fine at that speed and online gaming wasn't an issue either.
When I moved to my current home my local ISP has a host of plans available - from a minimum of 10Mbps to a max of 110Mbps. I took the bottom plan at 10Mbps and I've still not found any major reason to go faster. Don't get me wrong I'm a big techie and spend tons of time on my computer, but I haven't yet found a need for some of the crazy internet speeds available these days.
You normally only have a limited timeframe (2 months or so) to do a chargeback. Most people who had these purchases revoked likely bought this content in a previous year (as stated, Amazon started selling this in 2011).
The chargeback option likely isn't going to be that useful. Not to mention executing a chargeback can lead to a lot of merchants blacklisting you.
A response I've seen to this argument is, "the majority of the population don't murder and rape. So, we don't need those laws on the books about these crimes then?"
Think of it this way. People fall into three categories for any given action:
Group 1: Will not do something whether its illegal or not.
Group 2: Will not do something if its illegal. If no law exists, they will.
Group 3: Will do something whether its illegal or not.
Laws aren't needed for group 1 and don't affect group 3. So really group 2 is what a law is focusing on. The people that fall into group 2 for murder and rape is small but the number is non-zero. Keeping and enforcing laws against those things helps keep people safe by deterring the people in that group.
With gun laws, again, group 2 is again the only group affected, but group 2 is only a danger if they fall into group 3 for a more serious crime, which is virtually never going to happen. Nobody who is going to commit rape/murder/robbery/etc is going to have second thoughts about breaking a gun law. Ergo, if you're in group 3 for a violent crime you'll be in group 3 for the gun law and hence unaffected by it.
Its often said that "Well, gun laws at least make guns harder to obtain.", but as I said earlier in the Unites States there are more guns than people. We rank #1 in the world for guns per capita. From Gunpolicy.org the ratio of guns to people here in private hands is 101.05:100, with 34.4% of all households containing at least one gun. Estimates are 110 million rifles, 86 million shotguns, and 114 million handguns. There is no mandatory registration in the US. You could declare gun ownership completely illegal tomorrow and there's still enough guns that it'd be dirt simple getting ahold of one for over a century.
Even that is ignoring the fact that with things like 3D printing guns are getting easier to make at home, and even before that they weren't rocket science - people have been making some form of hand-held gun for ~800 years or so with pretty basic tools, and even what we'd consider to be a fairly modern gun can be made with simple and cheap tools (drill presses, files, etc).
You're simply not going to put the genie back in the bottle here.
That criminals would be undeterred by a law is a given for all laws and regulations. The key is the law-abiding who won't willfully participate in such activities. That and having a mechanism to punish the ones you do catch.
You will never stop everybody with a law, that is well known. That isn't a requirement for us to have laws though.
Of course not. You have to look at what you're trying to prevent however. Murder is against the law, and rightfully so, but that's because the actual act being outlawed is exactly what you want to prevent. Once a murder has occurred grave harm (literally) has already occurred to another party. Same with theft. Same with rape. Same with assault.
See, all those things are directly harmful to another individual. Making laws against them certainly won't ever stop such crimes from being committed at all, but it will reduce the frequency.
The issue with plastic guns (or gun laws in general) is that the very act of having a gun isn't harmful. You can do harmful things with it, but just having one doesn't cause any harm in and of itself. The people that would use those guns to harm another person are already willing to break laws to do so - laws with much stiffer legal consequences.
Think of the number of guns in the US. There are more guns in this country than there are people. The VAST majority of them are never used in a harmful way, and the vast majority of gun owners are law abiding citizens. Passing gun laws affects most of them (because most of them actually follow the laws), but it does nothing for the tiny fraction of them that do not adhere to the law anyways, and those were the ones you really needed to worry about.
Its not that laws in general are useless - merely that laws that exist solely as an attempt to keep someone from breaking another law are useless.
Not all games are available on PC. The latest Halo's have not been. Nothing by Naughty Dog (Uncharted, The Last of Us). A lot of Square Enix's titles are not (a lot of JRPG's in general actually).
I love gaming on my PC - particularly with Steam sales making many games pretty much dirt cheap, and I just plug in a wired XB360 controller to my PC and get console controls for most of them. That said, there's still a lot of titles that simply aren't available there. For those you need emulation (or to just buy the system - which IMHO is the preferable solution).