While I'm not going to enjoy paying the CA sales tax it will at least narrow the gap that makes it so hard for brick and mortar shops to compete with online giants like Amazon.
There are many arguments to be made about why mail order sales should be taxed, but "leveling the playing field" is the worst one I've heard. Your "brick and mortar" stores are made out to be the underdogs in this story, but do you know who will be the biggest benefactor of a nationwide Internet Sales Tax? Walmart, and Best Buy. In that order. Not mom and pop down the street.
Politicians like to argue that their states are losing tax revenue due to Internet shopping. Which is a flat-out lie, because it's simply money that they never had in the first place. (It's the same reasoning that the record industry uses when they claim to be losing billions of dollars every year to "piracy.")
What's more: they can never quite articulate what the supposed Internet Tax would be for, exactly. The way a sales tax works is: you walk into a store and buy something and a certain percentage of the sale goes to the state to pay for roads, schools, general infrastructure that everyone in the state gets to use and enjoy. If I buy a $200 gadget from Amazon and pay $15 on top of that, who does it go to and what does it go towards? Nobody has been able to answer these questions to my satisfaction. All they can muster is some lament about supporting local business.
Besides, you already pay a tax on items you buy over the Internet: it's called shipping. When I buy an item online, I pay a fee above and beyond the marked retail price of the item[2]. That fee is the money charged by the shipping company to deliver the item to my door. Because the shipping company by necessity operates in every state, they end up paying taxes (including gas and sales taxes) to every state that's even tangentially involved in the transaction.
(I'm deliberately ignoring the use tax for now, except to say that mail order sales are covered by it and states need to figure out how to enforce it on their citizens rather than retailers which aren't even in the state.)
Finally, there are just as many small Internet businesses trying to get off the ground as there are small brick-and-mortal retailers. I just bought $80 worth of grill parts from a business that posted a picture and short bio of all eight employees on their "about" page. Should they be punished with a "fairness tax" just because they sell their merchandise online as well?
Many people buy produce at farmers markets to support local business, why shouldn't the same apply to buying electronics, books and everything else.
I know it might be a difficult concept to grasp, but bear with me: produce is not the same as electronics, books, and everything else.
Make sense? No? Well, electronics, books, and everything else are generally produced in large quantities in the poorer parts of the world. Produce can be too, but most people are willing to pay more for a perishable product which is invariably fresher and therefore of higher quality. If I'm interested in purchasing a book, I'm going to get the same book no matter whether I buy it from Aunt Nelly's Book and Flower Botique around the block or from Amazon.
Now if you want to pay more for the book because you particularly enjoy going to Aunt Nelly's and chit-chatting about the weather, more power to you. I wouldn't ask to take that away from you. But as for myself, I don't care about any of that stuff, I just want to buy my book with the least hassle possible.
The price? The price honestly doesn't matter as much as most people think it does. There is not this huge difference between online and physical retailers that most people assume is there. Yes, prices online do tend to be better, but not by much and definitely not by as much after you figure in shipping. The reason people shop online is because it's dead fucking simple: sit down at your computer, find
I question the wisdom of simply making it more expensive for people to commute. Some people (like myself) live in areas that have been decimated by the recession. There are not a lot of job opportunities for me any more where I live, so I had to take a job 70 miles away. I currently spend around $20 a day in gas alone and expect that to rise to more than $25 per day in the coming summer months. (I would love to move closer, but again thanks to the recession, I'm way underwater on my mortgage and would have to take out a loan just to sell my current house.)
Bottom line: if it gets much more expensive for me to commute, then I have to quit my current well-paying job and settle for something closer that pays half as much. That will mean that I will contribute less to the struggling economy, pay half as much in income taxes, and my contributions in terms of existing gas taxes will drop back down to nothing.
Sure, I could buy a hybrid or electric vehicle to offset the commute costs, but right now they aren't significantly more economical when all is said and done. They get better MPG, but their long-term reliability is unknown. (Will the battery pack last as long as the car?) As far as "greenness" goes, a plug-in electric or hybird in my area simply means I would be burning less highly refined gasoline and more unprocessed coal at the power station 2 miles down the road.
High transportation costs are also beating up the tourism industry where a lot of smaller businesses and local governments get their revenue. I have lots of friends and family who love to travel. But when you have to budget $1,000 just for food and gas on a week-long road trip, you keep a lot of the fixed- and lower-income earners at home, doing nothing.
Although I firmly believe that we need to end our dependence on fossil fuels, the transition to renewable, non-pollutant energy resources needs to be done with care. Destroying the economic power of the lower and middle classes by making it impossible to travel and commute is not the way to do it.
It's hard to believe that it took them until 2.6.36 (October 2010) to even get the domU support in there. Either Xen development proceeds at a snail's pace or the project is run by people who don't want to fit into the guidelines for code submitted to the kernel. Either way I can only see KVM running ahead in leaps and bounds while Xen struggles with getting into the kernel, and people struggle to get Xen installed.
Xen was originally not accepted into the kernel because it was basically delivered as a huge monolithic patch that touched too many different parts of the kernel and had an external dependency as well. (The hypervisor.) KVM came along, promised to do the same thing with much less code and without external dependencies and was accepted into the mainline kernel before it was really even all that stable.
From what I'm lead to understand there are still prominent mainline kernel developers who believe that there is no good reason to have two functionally similar (but completely independent and incompatible) virtualization systems in the kernel.
I put it to you: when is bribery ever a good thing?
There is no such thing as a good bribe because the person who accepts the bribe always had the option of acting (or not acting) for free out of some sense of moral or ethical responsibility. (At which point it ceases to be a bribe.) A bribe offer says, "I know you're supposed to do X, but I want to secretly pay you to do Y instead." Bribery is by definition a form of corruption.
Unspeakable atrocities occur every day on the African continent. Entire villages wiped out, people tortured, shot, and raped. The stories fill the BBC airwaves, but the western world doesn't lift a finger to help because we don't meddle in a sovereign nation's own civil war.
When revolution struck Egypt and Mubarak refused to step down, U.S. leaders refused even to discuss the situation and signalled that they had no intention of getting involved no matter which way the struggle went. As soon as the same thing happened in Libya, prior to any violence, the U.S. president declared that "all options are on the table." I guess it makes a difference when it's an oil-exporting sovereign nation's civil war.
Don't get me wrong, I abhor violence and don't want to see anyone suffer. But the hypocrisy here is staggering.
Having to pay a rental fee for every phone in your home every month because you were not allowed to own your own phone wasn't exactly a great thing.
Interesting that we're back to that now with cell phones. Sure, most providers will let you activate your own phone, but not after much wailing and gnashing of teeth because the salesman doesn't get a commission on selling plans, only on selling phones.
No, it's not just you. The Android market UI experience really is that bad.
Usually, Google are the ones to look at a competitor's product and say, "hey, how can we do this better?" For whatever reason Android's killer feature, the Android Market, was basically copied from Apple's App store. Rather than give users better tools to find useful apps, they just did what the App Store did.
So I've been watching this fracas for a week now and nobody has yet asked the most obvious question:
Where are the robots?
This is Japan we're talking about for crying out loud. Around the world, Japan is known for two things: robots and tentacle porn. It's unlikely that the tentacle porn is going to offer much in the way of assistance at this point, but god damn, where are all the robots in this nation's time of crisis? The media keeps talking about how the spent fuel in the cooling pools is going to explode and rain nuclear hellfire down upon the huddled masses because nobody can get in close enough to add water to the pools without sterilizing their weak human genitals and/or dying. For fuck's sake, in case you haven't realized, robots don't give a single shit about radiation. Since this is Japan we're talking about, a significant portion of their robotic population probably has genitals too but if those get irradiated, all that will happen is a new genre of hentai will be born.
Japan, I urge you, look upon your library of millions of low-budget films and bring to fruition the event they have foretold: use your technologically superior robots to save the human race. Do it for your people. Do it for the world. Do it for tentacle porn.
This is a nice story and all, but I was hoping to see photos of Hemos and CmdrTaco at Lucasfilm, not two random old fogies hanging around next to Yoda.
I don't think it's just you. I live less than a mile from the power plant, in a neighborhood and house with good wiring. Our lights never dim. The voltage and frequency is spot-on according to my Kill-A-Watt. Every time I buy a CFL, I gravitate towards the ones with an advertised 7-year life span and every time they fail in six months to a year. I've lived in this house for 6 years and don't have a single CFL that I haven't replaced 2-3 times. There doesn't seem to be any quality difference between bargain-priced CFLs and the more expensive name brand ones.
I fully believe the claim that CFLs are more efficient than incandescent bulbs. But either they're being manufactured poorly or they simply can't be made to last any longer than an average incandescent bulb.
I bought an N800 a few years back because it was most portable and semi-capable Linux-based computer at the time. It did many things very well, but it did the important things (web browser, video, email) poorly.
My biggest gripe was that, after the device was sold and the necessary source code released, there was really nothing in the way of community help from Nokia. The firmware and applications were developed in secret and released infrequently. There was an official website, but community-hosted forums were where the real action was happening. And aside from a kludgy SDK, there was little help for third-party developers.
At one of my previous jobs, we ran ZFS on Solaris in a financial enterprise environment and never had a single problem with it. Mind you, the entire Unix administration team hated just about every other aspect of Solaris (we only used it because we were stuck with the hardware), but for logical volume management, ZFS is leaps and bounds better than any other filesystem on Solaris.
They focused on portsâ"a laptop's interfaces to the world around itâ"including the familiar USB port, the less-common PCMCIA Type II card slot, the smaller ExpressCard slot, WiFi, and Firewire. No laptop would have all of these
As an example of how out of touch with reality some people are, in 2009, a Pew Research Poll that was conducted in order to study perceived media bias actually found that 14% of people though that Fox News was mostly liberal. How could someone even come up with such a conclusion?
Easy, 28% of the people they surveyed were too busy with their lives to follow politics and half of them got the answer wrong.
Prime-time TV crime dramas. These shows contain some of the most violent, disturbing themes and imagery I've ever seen: Some unlucky bloke gets decapitated by an out-of-control steel beam. Bad guy #1 shoots bad guy #2 full of blood-oozing bullet holes and kicks him off a pier. And then pan into a full shot of a rotting corpse on a autopsy table. This is all within the first 5 minutes of one episode.
But put the same thing in a video game and it's going to corrupt the children.
I am against all forms of censorship. Shielding kids from disturbing content is the parents' responsibility. However, if they're going to ban violent video games, I insist that they also ban the same content in all broadcast and cable television shows because such content is not only much more lifelike, it's also a lot easier for children to access. All they have to do is turn on the TV, whereas a violent video game must be purchased by someone...
You would be shocked how much of the third world (or the middle east, anyway) live in shacks with no running water but have cheap (or free, once the equipment is paid for) satellite TV for news and entertainment. This charity is trying to do the same thing, but with Internet access.
The big barrier is that transmitting satellite dishes are more expensive than receiving ones, and computers are more expensive than TVs. But perhaps not hugely more expensive and hopefully not for long.
There's a world of difference between Cisco hardware and Linksys-branded Cisco hardware. Their Linksys kit is all aimed at low-end home and small office use. Practically everything else they sell is aimed at the enterprise, hence the cost. The Linksys hardware has little to no actual relation to enterprise Cisco gear. All they share is a name.
Planning/marketing departments of corporations are filled with mba grads who have been taught to shove a product to public from the maximum price they think they can pay. and hence, depending on their self-judgment, they decide what the selling price of any product should be.
So companies do their homework to evaluate market conditions and develop a product strategy before selling something. And that's bad, how?
since all corporations employ the same mindset
There's a factually incorrect statement if I ever saw one. Yes, *many* corporations tend to organize, manage, and run themselves using similar methodologies but ultimately no two companies are exactly alike. (And by the way, not all businesses are corporations.) Would you say Apple and Dell employ the same mindset? As corporations, they're structured similarly and they both make money the same way. They operate in the same markets, probably even have similar suppliers, partners, and business relationships. But you can't deny that their "mindsets" (strategies) are remarkably different.
all look to each other, adopt similar price points, and then start thinking that that is a correct price point.
There is no such thing as a "correct" price point. The price *paid* for a given item is whatever the buyer decides the item is worth to them. The power ultimately lies with the consumer to decide whether or not he or she will buy said item for the offered price. Sometimes negotiation is possible, sometimes not. Granted, there are things in civilized society that we must pay for and have little say in its price (gasoline to get to work, electricity and gas for heating our homes). But if you want to grumble about that $60 video game, it does no good to be doing it whilst handing your credit card to the cashier.
products are produced/sold up to that point. more products are not produced and sold, because that would decrease the 'optimum' point. naturally, as a result, as you can understand too, the 'mass production/competition aspects of capitalism, goes out of the door.
No, it is not anti-capitalist or anti-competitive for a company to control its own supply chain.
what we are seeing here, is the retort of a corporate man, who is used to corporations determining the price points (even unknowingly) instead of public. had there not been internet, this industry would - if we take gaming for example - just continue forcing a 'reality' which says that a 'decent' game should be worth $40-60. thanks to internet, even if the industry doesnt want to, competition enters the scene. corporate world, naturally, is unable to understand or stomach the situation and is threatened.
Yeah, Fils-Aime is being a douchebag here. But consumers still bought enough games to make the video game industry grow to overtake Hollywood in terms of revenue. What's interesting is that when I was a gamer (mid 90's, 16-bit era), new games were $40-$60 then too. So the current generation of gamers is paying something like 37% less than I was, and still whining about it.
The Internet was actually designed to be distributed... true story.... Right now the Internet has these choke points because theres no reason other than FUD not to have it that way.
No, it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that. The Internet as we know it has a minimum of three "choke-points" that prevent the Internet from ever being a fully distributed network:
1. Backbones, which are so incredibly expensive to deploy and maintain that only governments and large telecommunications companies can afford to have them. Mesh networks are by definition much slower and and more inefficient than a star-topology network and cannot scale globally given current state of the art in technology. And if they could, there's a whole world of reliability and security questions to be answered.
2. DNS. In theory, DNS can be decentralized when zone authorities don't overlap. In practice, almost everybody "subscribes" only to the root zone, which is controlled by ICANN.
3. IP address space. IPs are assigned by central authorities, to ISPs, and then to users. All of this is tracked and logged somewhere, so your IP is effectively your signature around the net, even if the IP changes frequently. When my web server logs a page view from a given IP address at a given time, there's a very good chance that I could root out the specific human behind that mouse click given enough motivation and/or money and/or influence. Point is, if you can be tracked, you can be censored or otherwise denied access to the network.
Believe it or not it is entirely possible for the Internet to be used over terrestrial radio... in fact... it can be done by 'amateurs'! In fact... it already is!
Radio will never be an acceptable way to route around physical Internet connections permanently because the bandwidth is inherently much lower. And even if it wasn't, the ability to communicate with any decent distance requires a license which happens to be granted by the government. The license comes with content restrictions as well (only non-commercial traffic is allowed, no obscene language, etc).
Replacing the Internet as it currently stands is not feasible. The only logical way to keep the Internet open and free in the long term is to demand from our governments laws which guarantee online privacy, freedom of speech, and bona-fide net neutrality at the same time that we invest in tools and technologies that empowers users to protect themselves.
One downside to continually removing functionality from X and putting it into the kernel is that X becomes far less capable on non-Linux platforms. The BSDs, Solaris, even Darwin have benefited from OS-independent hardware support in X.
Also, I remember a time when Linux kernel and X developers derided Microsoft for integrating their kernel and graphics layers so tightly...
I've seen kids from very religious households go in all different directions with respect to religions. It seems very unlikely that there's anything like a genetic "predisposition" to religion.
It's been my unscientific observation that a significant percentage of people who were exposed to a lot of religion as children grow up to be atheists. Of the only two people I know personally who are "out of the closet" atheists, one is the son of a baptist minister, the other came from a strict Salt Lake Mormon family.
This is as opposed to your everyday "hobbyist" Christians who go to church once in awhile, will gladly tell you that they're Christian when quizzed, but couldn't even name half the books of the Bible. Fewer of them seem to become atheist. Maybe it's just a lot easier to accept religion when you have only a vague understanding of what it is you're supposed to be worshipping.
My DSL bill from a local provider already costs me a little more than twice what it would for an AT&T DSL line of the same speed and slightly less than a basic Comcast cable internet connection that's six times faster.
I gladly pay more because I know that they don't oversubscribe, they don't have any sort of bandwidth caps or limits, and they never throttle or block certain kinds of traffic. (Although they will prioritize VoIP if you tag your packets correctly.) I can host web servers in my house, and I can even grab more than one public IP from their CO router if I want. They don't serve me ad-laden portal pages for DNS names that don't exist. When I call them up for support, I talk to someone who works and lives close by. They don't care much what I do with my slice of pipe to the Internet, as long as nobody else on the Internet complains to them about me. And, so far as I'm aware, they're not trying to sell "fast lanes" to any content providers.
This should be everybody's experience with the Internet and I'm lucky that I live in an area with a ma-and-pop ISP that actually cares about their customers. I don't know what I'll do for Internet access if they go out of business or if I move out of town.
Slashdot Mirror
There are many arguments to be made about why mail order sales should be taxed, but "leveling the playing field" is the worst one I've heard. Your "brick and mortar" stores are made out to be the underdogs in this story, but do you know who will be the biggest benefactor of a nationwide Internet Sales Tax? Walmart, and Best Buy. In that order. Not mom and pop down the street.
Politicians like to argue that their states are losing tax revenue due to Internet shopping. Which is a flat-out lie, because it's simply money that they never had in the first place. (It's the same reasoning that the record industry uses when they claim to be losing billions of dollars every year to "piracy.")
What's more: they can never quite articulate what the supposed Internet Tax would be for, exactly. The way a sales tax works is: you walk into a store and buy something and a certain percentage of the sale goes to the state to pay for roads, schools, general infrastructure that everyone in the state gets to use and enjoy. If I buy a $200 gadget from Amazon and pay $15 on top of that, who does it go to and what does it go towards? Nobody has been able to answer these questions to my satisfaction. All they can muster is some lament about supporting local business.
Besides, you already pay a tax on items you buy over the Internet: it's called shipping. When I buy an item online, I pay a fee above and beyond the marked retail price of the item[2]. That fee is the money charged by the shipping company to deliver the item to my door. Because the shipping company by necessity operates in every state, they end up paying taxes (including gas and sales taxes) to every state that's even tangentially involved in the transaction.
(I'm deliberately ignoring the use tax for now, except to say that mail order sales are covered by it and states need to figure out how to enforce it on their citizens rather than retailers which aren't even in the state.)
Finally, there are just as many small Internet businesses trying to get off the ground as there are small brick-and-mortal retailers. I just bought $80 worth of grill parts from a business that posted a picture and short bio of all eight employees on their "about" page. Should they be punished with a "fairness tax" just because they sell their merchandise online as well?
I know it might be a difficult concept to grasp, but bear with me: produce is not the same as electronics, books, and everything else.
Make sense? No? Well, electronics, books, and everything else are generally produced in large quantities in the poorer parts of the world. Produce can be too, but most people are willing to pay more for a perishable product which is invariably fresher and therefore of higher quality. If I'm interested in purchasing a book, I'm going to get the same book no matter whether I buy it from Aunt Nelly's Book and Flower Botique around the block or from Amazon.
Now if you want to pay more for the book because you particularly enjoy going to Aunt Nelly's and chit-chatting about the weather, more power to you. I wouldn't ask to take that away from you. But as for myself, I don't care about any of that stuff, I just want to buy my book with the least hassle possible.
The price? The price honestly doesn't matter as much as most people think it does. There is not this huge difference between online and physical retailers that most people assume is there. Yes, prices online do tend to be better, but not by much and definitely not by as much after you figure in shipping. The reason people shop online is because it's dead fucking simple: sit down at your computer, find
I question the wisdom of simply making it more expensive for people to commute. Some people (like myself) live in areas that have been decimated by the recession. There are not a lot of job opportunities for me any more where I live, so I had to take a job 70 miles away. I currently spend around $20 a day in gas alone and expect that to rise to more than $25 per day in the coming summer months. (I would love to move closer, but again thanks to the recession, I'm way underwater on my mortgage and would have to take out a loan just to sell my current house.)
Bottom line: if it gets much more expensive for me to commute, then I have to quit my current well-paying job and settle for something closer that pays half as much. That will mean that I will contribute less to the struggling economy, pay half as much in income taxes, and my contributions in terms of existing gas taxes will drop back down to nothing.
Sure, I could buy a hybrid or electric vehicle to offset the commute costs, but right now they aren't significantly more economical when all is said and done. They get better MPG, but their long-term reliability is unknown. (Will the battery pack last as long as the car?) As far as "greenness" goes, a plug-in electric or hybird in my area simply means I would be burning less highly refined gasoline and more unprocessed coal at the power station 2 miles down the road.
High transportation costs are also beating up the tourism industry where a lot of smaller businesses and local governments get their revenue. I have lots of friends and family who love to travel. But when you have to budget $1,000 just for food and gas on a week-long road trip, you keep a lot of the fixed- and lower-income earners at home, doing nothing.
Although I firmly believe that we need to end our dependence on fossil fuels, the transition to renewable, non-pollutant energy resources needs to be done with care. Destroying the economic power of the lower and middle classes by making it impossible to travel and commute is not the way to do it.
Xen was originally not accepted into the kernel because it was basically delivered as a huge monolithic patch that touched too many different parts of the kernel and had an external dependency as well. (The hypervisor.) KVM came along, promised to do the same thing with much less code and without external dependencies and was accepted into the mainline kernel before it was really even all that stable.
From what I'm lead to understand there are still prominent mainline kernel developers who believe that there is no good reason to have two functionally similar (but completely independent and incompatible) virtualization systems in the kernel.
I put it to you: when is bribery ever a good thing?
There is no such thing as a good bribe because the person who accepts the bribe always had the option of acting (or not acting) for free out of some sense of moral or ethical responsibility. (At which point it ceases to be a bribe.) A bribe offer says, "I know you're supposed to do X, but I want to secretly pay you to do Y instead." Bribery is by definition a form of corruption.
Unspeakable atrocities occur every day on the African continent. Entire villages wiped out, people tortured, shot, and raped. The stories fill the BBC airwaves, but the western world doesn't lift a finger to help because we don't meddle in a sovereign nation's own civil war.
When revolution struck Egypt and Mubarak refused to step down, U.S. leaders refused even to discuss the situation and signalled that they had no intention of getting involved no matter which way the struggle went. As soon as the same thing happened in Libya, prior to any violence, the U.S. president declared that "all options are on the table." I guess it makes a difference when it's an oil-exporting sovereign nation's civil war.
Don't get me wrong, I abhor violence and don't want to see anyone suffer. But the hypocrisy here is staggering.
You've been waiting like 10 years to use that, haven't you?
I ask this in all sincerity: What is a "gooze"? It's not a typo because you said it twice and Google sure doesn't seem to know...
Interesting that we're back to that now with cell phones. Sure, most providers will let you activate your own phone, but not after much wailing and gnashing of teeth because the salesman doesn't get a commission on selling plans, only on selling phones.
No, it's not just you. The Android market UI experience really is that bad.
Usually, Google are the ones to look at a competitor's product and say, "hey, how can we do this better?" For whatever reason Android's killer feature, the Android Market, was basically copied from Apple's App store. Rather than give users better tools to find useful apps, they just did what the App Store did.
So I've been watching this fracas for a week now and nobody has yet asked the most obvious question:
Where are the robots?
This is Japan we're talking about for crying out loud. Around the world, Japan is known for two things: robots and tentacle porn. It's unlikely that the tentacle porn is going to offer much in the way of assistance at this point, but god damn, where are all the robots in this nation's time of crisis? The media keeps talking about how the spent fuel in the cooling pools is going to explode and rain nuclear hellfire down upon the huddled masses because nobody can get in close enough to add water to the pools without sterilizing their weak human genitals and/or dying. For fuck's sake, in case you haven't realized, robots don't give a single shit about radiation. Since this is Japan we're talking about, a significant portion of their robotic population probably has genitals too but if those get irradiated, all that will happen is a new genre of hentai will be born.
Japan, I urge you, look upon your library of millions of low-budget films and bring to fruition the event they have foretold: use your technologically superior robots to save the human race. Do it for your people. Do it for the world. Do it for tentacle porn.
This is a nice story and all, but I was hoping to see photos of Hemos and CmdrTaco at Lucasfilm, not two random old fogies hanging around next to Yoda.
I don't think it's just you. I live less than a mile from the power plant, in a neighborhood and house with good wiring. Our lights never dim. The voltage and frequency is spot-on according to my Kill-A-Watt. Every time I buy a CFL, I gravitate towards the ones with an advertised 7-year life span and every time they fail in six months to a year. I've lived in this house for 6 years and don't have a single CFL that I haven't replaced 2-3 times. There doesn't seem to be any quality difference between bargain-priced CFLs and the more expensive name brand ones.
I fully believe the claim that CFLs are more efficient than incandescent bulbs. But either they're being manufactured poorly or they simply can't be made to last any longer than an average incandescent bulb.
I bought an N800 a few years back because it was most portable and semi-capable Linux-based computer at the time. It did many things very well, but it did the important things (web browser, video, email) poorly.
My biggest gripe was that, after the device was sold and the necessary source code released, there was really nothing in the way of community help from Nokia. The firmware and applications were developed in secret and released infrequently. There was an official website, but community-hosted forums were where the real action was happening. And aside from a kludgy SDK, there was little help for third-party developers.
At one of my previous jobs, we ran ZFS on Solaris in a financial enterprise environment and never had a single problem with it. Mind you, the entire Unix administration team hated just about every other aspect of Solaris (we only used it because we were stuck with the hardware), but for logical volume management, ZFS is leaps and bounds better than any other filesystem on Solaris.
Funny, my Thinkpad does.
Easy, 28% of the people they surveyed were too busy with their lives to follow politics and half of them got the answer wrong.
... you mean it's possible to sue other countries in a U.S. federal court? Is there anyone you can't sue in the U.S.?
Prime-time TV crime dramas. These shows contain some of the most violent, disturbing themes and imagery I've ever seen: Some unlucky bloke gets decapitated by an out-of-control steel beam. Bad guy #1 shoots bad guy #2 full of blood-oozing bullet holes and kicks him off a pier. And then pan into a full shot of a rotting corpse on a autopsy table. This is all within the first 5 minutes of one episode.
But put the same thing in a video game and it's going to corrupt the children.
I am against all forms of censorship. Shielding kids from disturbing content is the parents' responsibility. However, if they're going to ban violent video games, I insist that they also ban the same content in all broadcast and cable television shows because such content is not only much more lifelike, it's also a lot easier for children to access. All they have to do is turn on the TV, whereas a violent video game must be purchased by someone...
You would be shocked how much of the third world (or the middle east, anyway) live in shacks with no running water but have cheap (or free, once the equipment is paid for) satellite TV for news and entertainment. This charity is trying to do the same thing, but with Internet access.
The big barrier is that transmitting satellite dishes are more expensive than receiving ones, and computers are more expensive than TVs. But perhaps not hugely more expensive and hopefully not for long.
There's a world of difference between Cisco hardware and Linksys-branded Cisco hardware. Their Linksys kit is all aimed at low-end home and small office use. Practically everything else they sell is aimed at the enterprise, hence the cost. The Linksys hardware has little to no actual relation to enterprise Cisco gear. All they share is a name.
So companies do their homework to evaluate market conditions and develop a product strategy before selling something. And that's bad, how?
There's a factually incorrect statement if I ever saw one. Yes, *many* corporations tend to organize, manage, and run themselves using similar methodologies but ultimately no two companies are exactly alike. (And by the way, not all businesses are corporations.) Would you say Apple and Dell employ the same mindset? As corporations, they're structured similarly and they both make money the same way. They operate in the same markets, probably even have similar suppliers, partners, and business relationships. But you can't deny that their "mindsets" (strategies) are remarkably different.
There is no such thing as a "correct" price point. The price *paid* for a given item is whatever the buyer decides the item is worth to them. The power ultimately lies with the consumer to decide whether or not he or she will buy said item for the offered price. Sometimes negotiation is possible, sometimes not. Granted, there are things in civilized society that we must pay for and have little say in its price (gasoline to get to work, electricity and gas for heating our homes). But if you want to grumble about that $60 video game, it does no good to be doing it whilst handing your credit card to the cashier.
No, it is not anti-capitalist or anti-competitive for a company to control its own supply chain.
Yeah, Fils-Aime is being a douchebag here. But consumers still bought enough games to make the video game industry grow to overtake Hollywood in terms of revenue. What's interesting is that when I was a gamer (mid 90's, 16-bit era), new games were $40-$60 then too. So the current generation of gamers is paying something like 37% less than I was, and still whining about it.
No, it's actually quite a bit more complicated than that. The Internet as we know it has a minimum of three "choke-points" that prevent the Internet from ever being a fully distributed network:
1. Backbones, which are so incredibly expensive to deploy and maintain that only governments and large telecommunications companies can afford to have them. Mesh networks are by definition much slower and and more inefficient than a star-topology network and cannot scale globally given current state of the art in technology. And if they could, there's a whole world of reliability and security questions to be answered.
2. DNS. In theory, DNS can be decentralized when zone authorities don't overlap. In practice, almost everybody "subscribes" only to the root zone, which is controlled by ICANN.
3. IP address space. IPs are assigned by central authorities, to ISPs, and then to users. All of this is tracked and logged somewhere, so your IP is effectively your signature around the net, even if the IP changes frequently. When my web server logs a page view from a given IP address at a given time, there's a very good chance that I could root out the specific human behind that mouse click given enough motivation and/or money and/or influence. Point is, if you can be tracked, you can be censored or otherwise denied access to the network.
Radio will never be an acceptable way to route around physical Internet connections permanently because the bandwidth is inherently much lower. And even if it wasn't, the ability to communicate with any decent distance requires a license which happens to be granted by the government. The license comes with content restrictions as well (only non-commercial traffic is allowed, no obscene language, etc).
Replacing the Internet as it currently stands is not feasible. The only logical way to keep the Internet open and free in the long term is to demand from our governments laws which guarantee online privacy, freedom of speech, and bona-fide net neutrality at the same time that we invest in tools and technologies that empowers users to protect themselves.
One downside to continually removing functionality from X and putting it into the kernel is that X becomes far less capable on non-Linux platforms. The BSDs, Solaris, even Darwin have benefited from OS-independent hardware support in X.
Also, I remember a time when Linux kernel and X developers derided Microsoft for integrating their kernel and graphics layers so tightly...
It's been my unscientific observation that a significant percentage of people who were exposed to a lot of religion as children grow up to be atheists. Of the only two people I know personally who are "out of the closet" atheists, one is the son of a baptist minister, the other came from a strict Salt Lake Mormon family.
This is as opposed to your everyday "hobbyist" Christians who go to church once in awhile, will gladly tell you that they're Christian when quizzed, but couldn't even name half the books of the Bible. Fewer of them seem to become atheist. Maybe it's just a lot easier to accept religion when you have only a vague understanding of what it is you're supposed to be worshipping.
My DSL bill from a local provider already costs me a little more than twice what it would for an AT&T DSL line of the same speed and slightly less than a basic Comcast cable internet connection that's six times faster.
I gladly pay more because I know that they don't oversubscribe, they don't have any sort of bandwidth caps or limits, and they never throttle or block certain kinds of traffic. (Although they will prioritize VoIP if you tag your packets correctly.) I can host web servers in my house, and I can even grab more than one public IP from their CO router if I want. They don't serve me ad-laden portal pages for DNS names that don't exist. When I call them up for support, I talk to someone who works and lives close by. They don't care much what I do with my slice of pipe to the Internet, as long as nobody else on the Internet complains to them about me. And, so far as I'm aware, they're not trying to sell "fast lanes" to any content providers.
This should be everybody's experience with the Internet and I'm lucky that I live in an area with a ma-and-pop ISP that actually cares about their customers. I don't know what I'll do for Internet access if they go out of business or if I move out of town.