AFAIK Bush doesn't have anything to do with the X-Prize.
The X-Prize Foundation was founded in 1996, according to their web site
The commercialization of space has been ongoing for some time now. Maybe satellites aren't as glamorous as manned missions, but probably a lot more commercially lucrative.
However, if this leads to more creative practical uses of space, then I am in full support. Solar satellites with microwave power transmission, anyone?
What in the hell? Green does NOT mean living in a thatched hut eating berries. If 6 billion people reverted to hunter/gatherer the planet would be stripped bare in less than a year. No green wants that.
For F's Sake people, use your brains and quit spouting propaganda at each other.
Green means finding a technological solution to the fossil fuel problem (finite supply, source of pollutants). There is absolutely no reason to think that a hydrogen powered SUV is in any way a step backwards.
Green means putting solar on your roof and becoming energy self sufficient. Maybe even sell surplus back to the grid. (yes I am aware of the pollutants that solar manufacturing potentially represents, however a) its localized and controllable, b) advances over time will lead to reductions in the pollutants, as scale of economy increases)
Green means finding a technology solution to feeding our children without destroying the land that we grow it on (or perhaps you think that the Dust Bowl was good for our moral fiber?) The answer here is not patented genetically modified foods, which can't be seeded from the previous year's crop and require exorbitant licensing fees to biotech companies.
Green means encouraging/funding zero population growth (i.e. replacement births). Yes this is "family planning". In most nations of the world family planning means just that, planning how many children to conceive - or rather how many NOT to conceive. But to bass ackward U.S. conservatives all they see is 'abortion' when they hear family planning. Sheesh.
Green means smart progress, yet people like you spout your bullsh*t anytime you are confronted by the idea that change can be good. No no! Protect my comfortable status quo! Never mind that even if we did nothing, eventually it will be changed for us by the laws of physics!
Sorry for the rant, mods do with me what you will..
Re:Wait... so you're telling me...
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The problem is that the energy produced in the U.S. is largely from burning greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Therefore
a) we're a big part of the current problem (rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere)
b) we're setting a bad example for the developing nations, who want the same standard of living as us
c) we're passing up an opportunity, something uncharacteristic of Americans. If we are smart we will start investing heavily in R&D into alternative energy so that we can then sell what we discover to everyone else. The american auto makers would be a good place to start, they are going to get their asses handed to them (for the umpteenth time) by the Japanese and Germans, who are both taking fuel cell research seriously.
Instead we're sticking our heads in the sand and listening to corporate bought "scientific" studies that question man made global warming when there really isn't much question among honest scientists. And then the conservative media (radio etc.) pick up on this and brainwash millions into believing there is no problem. (Sorry to bring politics into this but it is strange to me that the party of Teddy Roosevelt - who practically invented conservation politics - is being so thick headed about this problem)
You are either for DRM technology, or you are against it. I am against it.
And therefore you have 2 choices, to subscribe to the iTMS or not.
It is NOT ethical to subscribe to the iTMS (and thus, agree to the EULA) with the full intent of violating what you are agreeing to. Same deal as GPL violators.
If Apple is one of the good guys (i.e. supporting true fair use and consumer rights) then at some point they will have satisfied whatever their minimum level of due diligence is and go to the RIAA and say 'we tried to stamp it out, I guess we'll just have to live with it'.
If on the other hand Apple does not support fair use and consumer rights, then they will keep suing.
I suspect however that if Apple doesn't fix this then the RIAA will kill their deal with Apple, leaving WiMP and Real as our only major outlets for legitimate digital music. Ugh. This is one situation where one really hopes that the reality distortion field us up to full power (when Apple goes into the conference room to negotiate with the syndica^W RIAA)
In point of fact I just want digital distribution of music, and I'm willing to pay a fair price for a fast, reliable service, with consistent quality of product. You don't get fast, reliable, or consistent quality on the P2P networks. This is the key differentiator IMHO. I don't want DRM, the RIAA wants DRM. FairPlay DRM was workable for me (I understand that reasonable people can differ over what level of DRM they can live with, however.) If Apple wants to treat me as the customer, they will give me what I want. If Apple wants to treat me as an eyeball and the RIAA as their customer, then screw 'em.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. The only digital music I have I either ripped from CDs that I own or bought from iTunes. I'm a pretty avid user of ITMS but if they hike prices, that will be it for me: if I can't hear it live I will stick to NPR or what's already in my collection.
And they wonder why their sales have been declining for years. Hello, screw & sue your own customers long enough, and you won't be able to sell iced tea in the middle of the sahara!
You've established that you want individuals to stop watering their lawns, taking showers, and flushing toilets
WTH? I never said any such thing. I water my lawn, take showers, and flush the toilet after every use.
If you look at the paper that I cite, you'll see that domestic water usage even in NA, which is much higher than other regions, is still a fraction of agricultural and industrial water usage.
And yes I do think they are "greedy corporate types". If you try to get companies to pay their fair share instead of being subsidized by the public's taxes and service infrastructure (yours and mine), they will simply relocate to another state that is foolishly willing to subsidize them. They play one state against the other, one municipality against the other in order to feed at the corporate welfare trough. The phrase "race to the bottom" was not originally coined in reference to offshoring, after all.
Hey if you like subsidizing them, why don't you just write them a check instead of letting them leech from the public.
Most of the output of any municipal water system goes to industrial uses. So if you want to rattle your little libertarian saber, rattle it at the corporate types who are using your subsidized water supply, and who will threaten to move their business if you increase rates.
Industrial usage is 782 m^3 per capita per year in North America. Contrast that with the next highest region, Europe with 385, or about half. Anyone think Europe is not a developed region that is competitive with NA? Still think its all about controlling people?
Domestic water usage is a fraction of industrial and agricultural usage. According to this study, in North America domestic water consumption is 167 m^3/year per capita. Industrial is 782 and agricultural is a whopping 912. Conservation programs are important for all sectors, but agricultural and industrial more so.
Note the disparity in industrial and agricultural water consumption between NA and even other developed parts of the world like Europe.
The salt can go back into the sea. And the fresh water that is created by de-salination eventually ends up back in the sea as well, so overall salinity stays the same. In fact you can just mix it into the output of the water treatment facility to avoid localized increased salinity.
I was an engineer at Apple in the mid- to late-nineties when rumors were rampant that Sun would buy Apple. Scott McNealy was once quoted as saying that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space.
My, how things have changed!:-P
Not that Apple didn't deserve criticism in that era (I worked for a successful project that is still underway, however) but there were some damn fine people there that didn't deserve to be ridiculed.
Pardon me while I enjoy a certain amount of schadenfreud at Sun's expense.
And yes I feel terrible for the Sun people that were let go, its a rough market right now and they are (as I am) just pawns to the powers that be, that don't have any compunction about playing with peoples' livelihoods. I have no ill will towards the workers at all, just toward their executives.
'The people' is a concept originating in the social philosophies of the enlightenment, the intellectual background that the framers were drawing from when they created the constitution. It could be re-phrased 'the common good' and certainly doesn't mean every last individual. If it did, then "We the People..." couldn't have held true at the time it was written given that africans and women were not treated equally.
The author of a work is assumed to have already gotten the benefit from his creation upon the act of creation. A composer composes a piece of music and then plays it. The creative act is the reward. The copyright system was intended to encourage authors and artists to release their works to the public rather than keeping them hidden away, by providing a mechanism to extract revenue from it for a limited time. The motivation for this is not to enrich the author, but to enrich the people (aka the common good).
Saying that "a law that does not serve the author... does not serve the people" is to conflate an individual or individuals with the common good.
Believe me I have spent the entirety of my 12 year career creating copyrighted works and then selling them, I understand the benefits that accrue to copyright holders (and their employees). My wealth (however moderate) is not the intent of the copyright system, merely a happy byproduct.
Some other parts of your reply that I will take issue with:
really important ones that are responsible for the creation - the act of creation makes one more important than others?
creation of the content - content is filler, it originated in a vacuum of artistic integrity solely for the purpose of being sold; manufactured. Art is created for art's sake.
The question is, does RESTRICTING fair use make MORE money or LESS money?
You've got the question backwards. The point of copyright is to further the people's interest by encouraging the creation of new works. So long as copyright is providing enough incentive to entice people to create more art, then the system is working as intended.
It isn't the copyright system's purpose to maximize profits for creators, but merely to ensure that there is just enough - and no more - commercial advantage to keep them producing more art.
Somehow, somewhere along the way popular perception changed to the idea that copyright serves the author. Not so, it always was about the people's interest.
Q: How many File Systems do you have to choose from with OSX? A: One, HFS+ (or two if you count HFS, both of which are terrible)
You also have the option of UFS..
Q: How portable is the cocoa framework? A: oh yeah, its not at all..
GNUstep?
Q: How many vendor's do you have to choose from if the one you're with takes a direction that you don't like or can't work with? A: None.
Make sure your data is in portable formats? If your current vendor changes directions, you'll be in the same boat, right? I mean, how certain are you about anything, after all?
Anyways, I'm not saying OS X is for everyone, I just don't see why your points should stop someone from using it. How is HFS+ really limiting your "Free as in Freedom"?
In my 12 years of commercial software experience (commercial OS and video systems development) I've worked with a number of MIT grads. The average MIT grad is not smarter than the average geek with a C.S. or engineering degree from any other decent university.
Are they smart? Yes. Smarter than everyone else? Not usually, although they often think they are. On the down side, you have to deal with "when I was at MIT yadda yadda. MIT yadda yadda. Did I mention that I went to MIT? Oh, by the way, MIT". You don't get nearly that kind of inflated ego or name dropping from any of the other well known tech universities.
Sorry to call you fellows (and ladies) out on this, but please, ratchet down the MIT-worship a notch. Yes you go/went to a great school. So did a lot of other people.
This gaming 'requirement' is going to put a significant damper on 3d gaming on PCs if consoles can grab multiplayer gaming correctly.
And modding.. and input devices.. and high resolution (greater than 1024x768, which is my minimum).. and a willingness to design games for adults rather than 12 year olds (in other words, turn based strategy etc. and yes I do want nice graphics with my turn based strategy, the two are not mutually exclusive)
Face it, the two are fundamentally different experiences, always have been, and probably always will be. I remember participating in my first consoles vs. pc gaming argument 25 years ago, and the arguments on both sides haven't really changed.
This isn't about best of all worlds, this is about doing a valid comparison of 4 popular video codecs. All I'm saying is that if you want to compare the Sorenson3, DivX 5.1, WMV9, and MPEG4 video codecs, you should use comparable settings for each, e.g. 2-pass encoding and VBR.
Hell there *are* free MPEG-4 encoders that are better than Apple's encoder, e.g. ffmpeg.
Sorenson Pro (which has 2-pass and VBR encoding) isn't available in the $30 QTPro package. Use Sorenson Squeeze or MediaCleaner.
Also, QuickTime's MPEG-4 encoder is not the best MPEG-4 encoder out there. But there are better ones available, and of course MPEG-4 being a standard, the output of those other tools will be playable in QT Player.
So to make the comparison valid, both in terms of encoding speed an quality, some other tool should've been used.
I'd like to hear from someone that has switched over to GNUMail, the open source Mail.app workalike. Is it stable? How does it stack up to other open source mail readers?
Instead of designing high weight, full featured laptops, someone should build a portable PC that has 2 parts: an extremely lightweight and flexible keyboard/trackpad/LCD part that resembles a laptop and is tethered (with a SINGLE cable) to a computing unit that is designed to fit in a backpack - maybe even build it right into a custom made pack.
Make the computer use standard components - say 1 PCI and 1 AGP slot, but stacked on top of each other so that the overall thickness stays as low as possible.
Give me 6-8 hours of battery life and make the pack comfortable (read: hip belt) and leave a compartment for carrying other junk.
16 pounds really isn't bad at all when carried properly, but most people put laptops in shoulder bags which are just about the worst way to carry a lot of weight for any amount of time.
I agree, mostly, but I'm an engineer as you (probably?) are. We see the practicality and functionality of google for what it is, and don't need the bells and whistles and all those other things that might make it "cool".
Actually, good user experience design is supposed to place practicality above bells and whistles. The problem is that so many UE experts are really designer/artists and not really UE experts.
Having said that, engineers aren't usually the best UE designers either, because what is practical to an engineer is often inscrutable to a normal user. Imagine a color chooser box that took hex values for R G and B color components. Very handy for a developer but awful for a user. You see bad design all the time from engineers *and* (graphic) designers.
>You're missing a subtle point in antitrust law. It is retrospective. That is, once you are declared a monopoly, you can be punished for things that were perfectly legal when you actually did them.and there is no way for a company to tell in advance of doing "X" if a judge will subsequently make that decision. Antitrust law moves the goalposts.Historically, the only true monopolies are the ones supported by governmentstyping "Microsoft is a monopoly" needs to get their dictionary out, since "mono" means "one".
Actually, the legal definition of "monopoly" doesn't require that there be no competitors in the market. See again IBM.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK Bush doesn't have anything to do with the X-Prize.
The X-Prize Foundation was founded in 1996, according to their web site
The commercialization of space has been ongoing for some time now. Maybe satellites aren't as glamorous as manned missions, but probably a lot more commercially lucrative.
However, if this leads to more creative practical uses of space, then I am in full support. Solar satellites with microwave power transmission, anyone?
What in the hell? Green does NOT mean living in a thatched hut eating berries. If 6 billion people reverted to hunter/gatherer the planet would be stripped bare in less than a year. No green wants that.
For F's Sake people, use your brains and quit spouting propaganda at each other.
Green means finding a technological solution to the fossil fuel problem (finite supply, source of pollutants). There is absolutely no reason to think that a hydrogen powered SUV is in any way a step backwards.
Green means putting solar on your roof and becoming energy self sufficient. Maybe even sell surplus back to the grid. (yes I am aware of the pollutants that solar manufacturing potentially represents, however a) its localized and controllable, b) advances over time will lead to reductions in the pollutants, as scale of economy increases)
Green means finding a technology solution to feeding our children without destroying the land that we grow it on (or perhaps you think that the Dust Bowl was good for our moral fiber?) The answer here is not patented genetically modified foods, which can't be seeded from the previous year's crop and require exorbitant licensing fees to biotech companies.
Green means encouraging/funding zero population growth (i.e. replacement births). Yes this is "family planning". In most nations of the world family planning means just that, planning how many children to conceive - or rather how many NOT to conceive. But to bass ackward U.S. conservatives all they see is 'abortion' when they hear family planning. Sheesh.
Green means smart progress, yet people like you spout your bullsh*t anytime you are confronted by the idea that change can be good. No no! Protect my comfortable status quo! Never mind that even if we did nothing, eventually it will be changed for us by the laws of physics!
Sorry for the rant, mods do with me what you will..
The problem is that the energy produced in the U.S. is largely from burning greenhouse gas emitting fossil fuels. Therefore
a) we're a big part of the current problem (rise of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere)
b) we're setting a bad example for the developing nations, who want the same standard of living as us
c) we're passing up an opportunity, something uncharacteristic of Americans. If we are smart we will start investing heavily in R&D into alternative energy so that we can then sell what we discover to everyone else. The american auto makers would be a good place to start, they are going to get their asses handed to them (for the umpteenth time) by the Japanese and Germans, who are both taking fuel cell research seriously.
Instead we're sticking our heads in the sand and listening to corporate bought "scientific" studies that question man made global warming when there really isn't much question among honest scientists. And then the conservative media (radio etc.) pick up on this and brainwash millions into believing there is no problem. (Sorry to bring politics into this but it is strange to me that the party of Teddy Roosevelt - who practically invented conservation politics - is being so thick headed about this problem)
You are either for DRM technology, or you are against it. I am against it.
And therefore you have 2 choices, to subscribe to the iTMS or not.
It is NOT ethical to subscribe to the iTMS (and thus, agree to the EULA) with the full intent of violating what you are agreeing to. Same deal as GPL violators.
If Apple is one of the good guys (i.e. supporting true fair use and consumer rights) then at some point they will have satisfied whatever their minimum level of due diligence is and go to the RIAA and say 'we tried to stamp it out, I guess we'll just have to live with it'.
If on the other hand Apple does not support fair use and consumer rights, then they will keep suing.
I suspect however that if Apple doesn't fix this then the RIAA will kill their deal with Apple, leaving WiMP and Real as our only major outlets for legitimate digital music. Ugh. This is one situation where one really hopes that the reality distortion field us up to full power (when Apple goes into the conference room to negotiate with the syndica^W RIAA)
In point of fact I just want digital distribution of music, and I'm willing to pay a fair price for a fast, reliable service, with consistent quality of product. You don't get fast, reliable, or consistent quality on the P2P networks. This is the key differentiator IMHO. I don't want DRM, the RIAA wants DRM. FairPlay DRM was workable for me (I understand that reasonable people can differ over what level of DRM they can live with, however.) If Apple wants to treat me as the customer, they will give me what I want. If Apple wants to treat me as an eyeball and the RIAA as their customer, then screw 'em.
Yep, I'm in the same boat. The only digital music I have I either ripped from CDs that I own or bought from iTunes. I'm a pretty avid user of ITMS but if they hike prices, that will be it for me: if I can't hear it live I will stick to NPR or what's already in my collection.
And they wonder why their sales have been declining for years. Hello, screw & sue your own customers long enough, and you won't be able to sell iced tea in the middle of the sahara!
You've established that you want individuals to stop watering their lawns, taking showers, and flushing toilets
WTH? I never said any such thing. I water my lawn, take showers, and flush the toilet after every use.
If you look at the paper that I cite, you'll see that domestic water usage even in NA, which is much higher than other regions, is still a fraction of agricultural and industrial water usage.
And yes I do think they are "greedy corporate types". If you try to get companies to pay their fair share instead of being subsidized by the public's taxes and service infrastructure (yours and mine), they will simply relocate to another state that is foolishly willing to subsidize them. They play one state against the other, one municipality against the other in order to feed at the corporate welfare trough. The phrase "race to the bottom" was not originally coined in reference to offshoring, after all.
Hey if you like subsidizing them, why don't you just write them a check instead of letting them leech from the public.
Most of the output of any municipal water system goes to industrial uses. So if you want to rattle your little libertarian saber, rattle it at the corporate types who are using your subsidized water supply, and who will threaten to move their business if you increase rates.
Industrial usage is 782 m^3 per capita per year in North America. Contrast that with the next highest region, Europe with 385, or about half. Anyone think Europe is not a developed region that is competitive with NA? Still think its all about controlling people?
Domestic water usage is a fraction of industrial and agricultural usage. According to this study, in North America domestic water consumption is 167 m^3/year per capita. Industrial is 782 and agricultural is a whopping 912. Conservation programs are important for all sectors, but agricultural and industrial more so.
Note the disparity in industrial and agricultural water consumption between NA and even other developed parts of the world like Europe.
The salt can go back into the sea. And the fresh water that is created by de-salination eventually ends up back in the sea as well, so overall salinity stays the same. In fact you can just mix it into the output of the water treatment facility to avoid localized increased salinity.
I was an engineer at Apple in the mid- to late-nineties when rumors were rampant that Sun would buy Apple. Scott McNealy was once quoted as saying that the only reason he would want Apple was for the office space.
:-P
My, how things have changed!
Not that Apple didn't deserve criticism in that era (I worked for a successful project that is still underway, however) but there were some damn fine people there that didn't deserve to be ridiculed.
Pardon me while I enjoy a certain amount of schadenfreud at Sun's expense.
And yes I feel terrible for the Sun people that were let go, its a rough market right now and they are (as I am) just pawns to the powers that be, that don't have any compunction about playing with peoples' livelihoods. I have no ill will towards the workers at all, just toward their executives.
Is freedom really celebrated in India?
'The people' is a concept originating in the social philosophies of the enlightenment, the intellectual background that the framers were drawing from when they created the constitution. It could be re-phrased 'the common good' and certainly doesn't mean every last individual. If it did, then "We the People..." couldn't have held true at the time it was written given that africans and women were not treated equally.
The author of a work is assumed to have already gotten the benefit from his creation upon the act of creation. A composer composes a piece of music and then plays it. The creative act is the reward. The copyright system was intended to encourage authors and artists to release their works to the public rather than keeping them hidden away, by providing a mechanism to extract revenue from it for a limited time. The motivation for this is not to enrich the author, but to enrich the people (aka the common good).
Saying that "a law that does not serve the author... does not serve the people" is to conflate an individual or individuals with the common good.
Believe me I have spent the entirety of my 12 year career creating copyrighted works and then selling them, I understand the benefits that accrue to copyright holders (and their employees). My wealth (however moderate) is not the intent of the copyright system, merely a happy byproduct.
Some other parts of your reply that I will take issue with:
really important ones that are responsible for the creation - the act of creation makes one more important than others?
creation of the content - content is filler, it originated in a vacuum of artistic integrity solely for the purpose of being sold; manufactured. Art is created for art's sake.
You've got the question backwards. The point of copyright is to further the people's interest by encouraging the creation of new works. So long as copyright is providing enough incentive to entice people to create more art, then the system is working as intended.
It isn't the copyright system's purpose to maximize profits for creators, but merely to ensure that there is just enough - and no more - commercial advantage to keep them producing more art.
Somehow, somewhere along the way popular perception changed to the idea that copyright serves the author. Not so, it always was about the people's interest.
Q: How many File Systems do you have to choose from with OSX?
A: One, HFS+ (or two if you count HFS, both of which are terrible)
You also have the option of UFS..
Q: How portable is the cocoa framework?
A: oh yeah, its not at all..
GNUstep?
Q: How many vendor's do you have to choose from if the one you're with takes a direction that you don't like or can't work with?
A: None.
Make sure your data is in portable formats? If your current vendor changes directions, you'll be in the same boat, right? I mean, how certain are you about anything, after all?
Anyways, I'm not saying OS X is for everyone, I just don't see why your points should stop someone from using it. How is HFS+ really limiting your "Free as in Freedom"?
In my 12 years of commercial software experience (commercial OS and video systems development) I've worked with a number of MIT grads. The average MIT grad is not smarter than the average geek with a C.S. or engineering degree from any other decent university.
Are they smart? Yes. Smarter than everyone else? Not usually, although they often think they are. On the down side, you have to deal with "when I was at MIT yadda yadda. MIT yadda yadda. Did I mention that I went to MIT? Oh, by the way, MIT". You don't get nearly that kind of inflated ego or name dropping from any of the other well known tech universities.
Sorry to call you fellows (and ladies) out on this, but please, ratchet down the MIT-worship a notch. Yes you go/went to a great school. So did a lot of other people.
Israel has a large amount of hothouse agriculture
Chris Cooper deserves an Oscar... but his character in Adaptation was terrific.
He has won an oscar, for his role in Adaptation in fact.
This gaming 'requirement' is going to put a significant damper on 3d gaming on PCs if consoles can grab multiplayer gaming correctly.
And modding.. and input devices.. and high resolution (greater than 1024x768, which is my minimum).. and a willingness to design games for adults rather than 12 year olds (in other words, turn based strategy etc. and yes I do want nice graphics with my turn based strategy, the two are not mutually exclusive)
Face it, the two are fundamentally different experiences, always have been, and probably always will be. I remember participating in my first consoles vs. pc gaming argument 25 years ago, and the arguments on both sides haven't really changed.
This isn't about best of all worlds, this is about doing a valid comparison of 4 popular video codecs. All I'm saying is that if you want to compare the Sorenson3, DivX 5.1, WMV9, and MPEG4 video codecs, you should use comparable settings for each, e.g. 2-pass encoding and VBR.
Hell there *are* free MPEG-4 encoders that are better than Apple's encoder, e.g. ffmpeg.
Sorenson Pro (which has 2-pass and VBR encoding) isn't available in the $30 QTPro package. Use Sorenson Squeeze or MediaCleaner.
Also, QuickTime's MPEG-4 encoder is not the best MPEG-4 encoder out there. But there are better ones available, and of course MPEG-4 being a standard, the output of those other tools will be playable in QT Player.
So to make the comparison valid, both in terms of encoding speed an quality, some other tool should've been used.
I'd like to hear from someone that has switched over to GNUMail, the open source Mail.app workalike. Is it stable? How does it stack up to other open source mail readers?
Instead of designing high weight, full featured laptops, someone should build a portable PC that has 2 parts: an extremely lightweight and flexible keyboard/trackpad/LCD part that resembles a laptop and is tethered (with a SINGLE cable) to a computing unit that is designed to fit in a backpack - maybe even build it right into a custom made pack.
Make the computer use standard components - say 1 PCI and 1 AGP slot, but stacked on top of each other so that the overall thickness stays as low as possible.
Give me 6-8 hours of battery life and make the pack comfortable (read: hip belt) and leave a compartment for carrying other junk.
16 pounds really isn't bad at all when carried properly, but most people put laptops in shoulder bags which are just about the worst way to carry a lot of weight for any amount of time.
Actually, good user experience design is supposed to place practicality above bells and whistles. The problem is that so many UE experts are really designer/artists and not really UE experts.
Having said that, engineers aren't usually the best UE designers either, because what is practical to an engineer is often inscrutable to a normal user. Imagine a color chooser box that took hex values for R G and B color components. Very handy for a developer but awful for a user. You see bad design all the time from engineers *and* (graphic) designers.
>You're missing a subtle point in antitrust law. It is retrospective. That is, once you are declared a monopoly, you can be punished for things that were perfectly legal when you actually did them.and there is no way for a company to tell in advance of doing "X" if a judge will subsequently make that decision. Antitrust law moves the goalposts.Historically, the only true monopolies are the ones supported by governmentstyping "Microsoft is a monopoly" needs to get their dictionary out, since "mono" means "one".
Actually, the legal definition of "monopoly" doesn't require that there be no competitors in the market. See again IBM.