Irrelevant for the purposes of a discussion about HD-DVD and Blu-ray, as the TV you link to does not include the required HDCP connection. Care to try again?
No, the Windows GUI is based around the concept of each window being discrete, whereas the OS X GUI is based around the concept of groups of windows belonging to applications.
Yes, and this was just my point. It's not just an issue of interface semantics. Windows are not discrete, no matter how much Windows pretends they are; they do in fact belong to applications. Thus closing a Windows window may or may not cause the corresponding application to terminate, and there is no way of knowing whether that has indeed occurred (unless you know where to look in Task Manager). This is often unimportant but occasionally crucial information.
The average user would never find expose... you have to set it up in the control panel before you can use it anyway (and newbies would take one look at that screen, go 'ooo scary' and forget about it. For anyone who really needed that level of feedback it's wasted.
I'm not really sure what your point is here, but (1) Expose is turned on by default; and (2) I (not a newbie) find the visual feedback helpful. Why do you think it's "wasted"?
(personally I just wish they'd spend that amount of care with finder - when you close an OSX app it doesn't close.. you have to right click on the taskbar and select 'close'. The visual feedback for this is abysmal - an easily missed black mark on the icon. I've often seen OSX machines of friends with nearly every application still running & them complaining it's slow...)
Yeah, some people don't seem to get that, but I consider it a user education issue more than anything else -- people have been trained by Windows to behave a certain way, and the fact that Macs do it a different way doesn't make it worse.
IMHO, the Mac way is better, even though it isn't ideal. Windows spends a lot of effort trying to convey the illusion that there is a 1-1 correspondence between processes and open windows, but that is NOT the case. You made this mistake yourself -- you said "when you close an OSX app it doesn't close" when you meant "when you close an OSX window it doesn't close the app." Well, it doesn't close the app on Windows, either; for instance, there may be a stray popup that causes your web browser to stay open, which is dangerous for well documented reasons. The difference is that on a Mac it's easier to tell at a glance if the app is running.
You're right, I'd intended my post to be less argumentative than it ended up coming out. (Damn not being able to edit. Oh well.) I didn't "forget" to include packaging and handling costs; the claim was that they "lose money on postage" after five a month and I wanted to see how likely that was. But I suppose "postage" in this context could be understood to include packaging and preparation.
They probably do lose money after 5/month on their $10 customers. But what percentage of Netflix customers are on the $10 plan? I doubt highly that they lose money on $15 customers (their standard plan) that rent more than five.
Netflix loses money on postage for households that rent more than five a month.
As much as I like Netflix (I'm a subscriber, and have never had any of the problems that others are reporting), this is just propaganda. The total weight of the DVD plus packaging is less than an ounce. (You can Google this if you don't believe me, or just weigh a DVD.) So using rate and standards information from the USPS web site:
* When Netflix sends out a DVD, it costs them $.371 for the presorted first class, non-automation rate. I believe this mail is ineligible for automation rates because a DVD is too rigid, but at any rate, this can be verified by looking at a Netflix package; it says "presorted" but doesn't have any other markings that would indicate a lower rate.
* When you send a DVD back to Netflix, I'm almost certain that they're using the high-volume business reply mail rate, though I don't have first-hand knowledge about this. This saves them $.54 per piece but costs them an extra $500 a year; I'd think this tradeoff would be well worth it for them. So the cost to them is $.50 per piece.
So this gives us a total cost of $.871 in postage round trip per DVD they send out. Netflix charges a minimum of $10 a month per customer, so for one of these customers they would have to send out 12 DVDs a month before they lose money on postage. Given the natural turnaround time involved, it would be hard for someone on the $10 plan (one out at a time) to rent more than that in a month anyway.
Of course, they do have other costs. Maybe their overhead is high enough that they lose money on a customer if they rent more than five a month. But not much of that money they're losing is actually for postage.
It's probably also why "Cars" was looking to be a piece of crap - since the movie was simply being done to fulfill a contractual obligation, Pixar would phoen it in, and Disney could choke on their contract.
That would be an exceedingly stupid thing for Pixar to do. Assume that this deal with Disney hadn't gone through, and that Pixar has to negoitiate a new contract with another distributor. If Cars turns out to be a flop, Pixar would be left in a position of weakness exactly when it most needs strength, to get good terms on its new contract. Why would they do that?
I've always been under the impression that the standard metric of a company's "size" is its annual revenue, not profit or market cap. In which case Dell is, of course, much larger than Apple.
The AutoplayAudioCD and AutoplayDVD options control, respectively, whether to open a music player when an audio CD is inserted or a DVD player when a DVD is inserted. OS X has never supported autostart or any other scheme for automatically executing arbitrary code on insert of a CD.
If I equate [typing an admin password] with installing stuff, and all I've done is put a CD in to play the damn thing, I'd be pretty curious as to why...
Just as importantly, Macs will never run an application just because you've inserted a CD. There was once an autorun feature, but they eliminated it in OS X because of the OBVIOUS security issues involved.
So, although there is some concern that CD manufacturers will try to get you to install their DRM in order to play the CD on your computer (e.g., by corrupting the audio data on the CD), they do have to convince you to run the installer yourself. It doesn't happen automatically.
Finally, just about ANY mouse is going to require this software to make use of the fourth and fifth buttons, because mouse makers don't make their own Mac drivers.
Well, it's true that some mouse makers don't make their own Mac drivers, but the big ones do: Microsoft, Logitech, Kensington.
That said, you're right that these "drivers" are pretty much unnecessary. Any USB mouse will work fine on a Mac; the only real issue is that in Mac OS X, buttons 4 and higher can only be used for Exposé and Dashboard commands. These drivers (or something like USB Overdrive) let you assign other commands to those buttons.
Light rail is being paid for radically differently. The cost to build the monorail (exclusive of financing) isn't all that bad: IF you had the same financing THEN it would look better. Of course, we live in a world where light rail is getting breaks the monorail can only dream of....and highways get financing rail can only dream of. That monorail junk bond plan really was the pits though, yes.
I said this in a previous post, but I think the monorail's inability to get favorable financing is due more to fiscal mismanagement than anything else. Seattle Monorail Project is getting much less revenue than anticipated, and it's not really enough to build the line they wanted to build. When something similar happened to Sound Transit, they stopped, figured out what they COULD do with the money they were getting, and did it. But that's not SMP's style. They'd rather stick their heads in the sand, blazing forth while pretending nothing is wrong. THAT is why they couldn't get good credit (IMHO).
I don't want to sound like a Sound Transit cheerleader -- they've had big problems of their own, and haven't come close to delivering on their original promises. But SMP makes ST look like geniuses of government management.
Unless the airport you are going to is Boeing Field (which currently has exactly 0 major airlines) then, good luck carrying your bags from the (currently planned) light rail terminus to SeaTac airport. Personally I wouldn't want to carry my bags that many miles but then many people are in better shape than I.
The currently planned light rail terminus is at SeaTac airport. The airport segment will open ~6 months after the rest of the line. (Or so Sound Transit says.)
BTW: My car tabs, just for the monorail, cost 20x more than the year before. I STILL want to see the darn thing get built.
Me too, don't get me wrong. What I really want is to see SMP disbanded and the project given to one of our other transit agencies. (Really people, did we need ANOTHER transit authority?) Metro and ST aren't perfect, but with either of them at least there'd be a good probability of the monorail actually getting built.
It sounds like you're not a fan of the Seattle Monorail Project
I understand how you would get that impression, but I did vote for the monorail all four previous times it was on the ballot. I haven't decided whether I will vote for it this time. It depends on what, exactly, is on the ballot, and the extent to which I feel I can trust them to deliver on their promises. I have serious doubts about the leadership of this project, particularly because they refuse to back off from their wildly optimistic assumptions about the growth of their tax revenues (which notably are much higher than Sound Transit's growth assumptions).
Light rail's route through the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla is about gentrification, not transit. Not enough people need to make that commute to make either solution cost effective, neither monorail or light rail. People in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla, by large measure, do not shop downtown or at Northgate and don't fly that often. I'd be really surprised if any significent portion of the residents there worked downtown too. Not a slight, just demographics.
I used to live in Rainier Valley and I can tell you that the 7 and 42 buses downtown were often very crowded. It's just not true that people there don't want to go north. I can't speak from experience about Tukwila, but I would be surprised if there weren't demand for relatively high-speed transit from there to Seattle.
The airlines are attempting to flee the airport for Boeing field even as we're adding a third runway for them too, that puts them right next to the Rainier Valley, you could make that with a $2 taxi ride.
Well, I would imagine that more people need to get from downtown to the airports (and vice versa) than from Rainier Valley.
The only cost effective solution is lots of smaller busses operating in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla.
Again, I can't speak about Tukwila from experience, but more busses is not going to help much in Rainier Valley, because the roads on which the busses travel from there to downtown are so crowded (and in such poor condition) that the existing bus service is completely incapable of keeping any regular schedule whatsoever. On route 7, which was supposed to come every 10 minutes, it was not at all uncommon to see no busses for half an hour and then (literally) two or three in a row. More busses is not going to help that.
In the monorai's favor, it does address two very heavy routes, it would address West Seattle (there's really only one route there and back)to downtown and Ballard to downtown along 15th.
I agree that West Seattle desperately needs better transit. Ballard is already pretty well covered by busses as far as I can tell (but probably someone who lives there will come out and disagree with me).
On the surface this appears correct, but the vast majority of the $11.4 billion you quote is for interest on those bonds, not the actual cost.
You seem to have something against Sound Transit, so you are unlikely to believe their estimates, but ST claims that their $2.4 billion figure includes the cost of financing the project. You can't say that the $9 billion just doesn't matter because it's interest and not principal.
The high interest cost is a direct result of the opponents of the project, who realize that one effective method of stopping the project is to spread FUD through the finincal institutions that might help to underwrite the project. Fear of lawsuit and court challenge is what has turned an otherwise solid municipal bond at low interest into a junk bond at high interest.
I would be very interested in some documentation for this claim, if you have any. If you don't, it seems more likely to me that the high interest rates are because of SMP's documented track record of constantly overestimating their revenues (leading to severe budget shortfalls), as well as their future revenue projections which the consensus seems to be are much too optimistic.
I seem to recall that building monorail is 1/10 the cost per mile.... I think the overall budget for the 14 mile light rail project is something like $2.4 Billion. The city officials love it.... You couldn't kill the light rail project any more than you could kill the "big dig" in Boston... It's all about pork.... That's exactly why I like the monorail and hate the light rail. Light rail is going to be 10 times more expensive and doesn't even span a major traffic route! Nothing's getting solved here in Seattle by building it and nobody's going to use it.
Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article) Light rail: $2.4 billion / 14 miles (your figures, corroborated by Sound Transit)
So... how, exactly, is light rail 10 times more expensive per mile?
And how does the light rail line, which runs along I-5, not "span a major traffic route"? Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?
And those four times we voted for the monorail? That was before anybody knew that the monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.
Atleast the Dell comes standard with expansion slots that allow you to upgrade the video card at any time.
Wrong -- cheap Dells (like the one linked) don't have an AGP slot. So you're stuck with the piss poor integrated graphics forever.
The Radeon 9200 was actually a big selling point for me. I know it's pretty slow compared to a lot of cards out there, but it sure as hell beats what you get on comparably priced branded PCs.
If I write some software for people to use, but I don't (can't) distribute it, why did I create it? When I said "making", I was speaking practically. If they can't distribute a product, they are effectively prohibited from making that product (at least, it becomes pointless for them to do so).
You are perfectly free to create and distribute any software you please. Even software that can be used for copyright infrigement (as long as it has a substantial non-infringing use). You just can't distribute it "with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement." Really, how hard is that to understand?
You have to remember that this is on Grokster's motion for summary judgment, meaning that they consider all evidence in the light most favorable to MGM. The legal question here is whether MGM has alleged enough evidence to hold a trial. The Court did not decide Grokster's guilt; only that MGM's evidence was not so insubstantial that the case should be thrown out. This is where those points that you so quickly dismiss come in:
They actively sought out ex-napster users
In the light most favorable to MGM, a reasonable person could infer that this meant they were intending to market their product for the purposes of copyright infringement, since it is well known (and legally established) the the vast majority of Napster's users were committing copyright infringment.
They left out any way to monitor the people who used the software
This point comes with a footnote:
"Of course, in the absence of other evidence of intent, a court would be unable to find contributory infringement liability merely based on a failure to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement, if the device otherwise was capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Such a holding would tread too close to the Sony safe harbor."
They displayed ads in the software
Again, they note that this is not enough by itself, but combined with other evidence it could show their intent to drive ad sales by encouraging infringing uses.
As for the rest of your post, your other quotes are from the part of the decision where they recite the history of the case and has nothing at all to do with the reasoning of their decision. And your assertion that
What the court is saying is that if the Sony case had been set in 2005 and the device in question was a DVR, Sony would have lost. The fact of things being digital is evidently enough to change things from hunkd-dory to bad, bad, bad. "Time-shifting" was what most people used VCR's for (well, there wasn't much in the way of recordable high-quality movies on TV at the time). That term would be "Piracy" in a 2005/DVR case against sony, evidently, solely due to more available content.
is, to be blunt, just plain idiotic if you'd actually read the opinion. The majority and both concurrences cite Sony favorably, and in particular its holding the time-shifting is a legitimate fair use.
Microsoft bought Connectix (authors of the VirtualPC software that lets Macs emulate Wintel boxes) and then quickly dropped their main product for no readily aparrent reason (other than pure spite).... This leaves Apple with a VirtualPC shaped hole in their 'switch' marketing campaign.
Really? I guess my mind must be playing tricks on me; I was sure I had a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 7.0 on my Mac...
In case you really wanted to know, it seems that the bill passed unanimously through both houses of the Florida legislature, so this really did have the support of those pesky liberals.
No, in fact it is rented from Cuba (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.
That was the position of the Bush administration, but the Supreme Court disagrees. Six out of nine justices rejected that argument, holding that alien prisoners at Guantanamo do have the right to challenge their imprisonment by filing a habeas petition in federal court.
a huge, costly government agency that produces lots of nice animations, small droids and very, very little substance
NASA is involved with a whole lot of substantial research; you just need to look beyond the manned program to see it. Things like Gravity Probe B, the Mars rovers, Cassini-Huygens, Hubble, Chandra, etc. do far more to advance actual science than Apollo (or any other manned mission, for that matter) ever did -- and at far lower cost.
I mourn with you the loss of the spirit of adventure embodied in Apollo, but really, I think what NASA is doing today (except in the manned program) is far more important.
As you say, way too late for anyone to read this, but hey, nothing better to do...
The cutoff date for Power Macs is January 1999, when the blue-and-white G3 was introduced.
Ah, you're right. My mistake.
And the cutoff date for iMacs is a little more complicated than you make it sound--while there were iMacs without FireWire made until about February 2001, I'm reasonably sure that all except the low-end model had had FireWire for quite some time before that.
Well, that's exactly what I said (with a different spin): iMacs made before February 2001, except the iMac DV, which was first released October 1999. (As I understand it, the iMac DV was identical to other iMacs made at the time except the DV had Firewire and a VGA out port for mirroring.)
I hope you're right about the Rage 128, but IMO if they'd meant to say "Rage 128 or better," they'd have said it. Apple's installers have unabashedly checked explicitly for compliance with their system requirements before, and I don't see any reason why they'd suddenly change their minds. It seems to me that this is Apple's way of getting people to buy a new Mac every 5 years or so, and not for any legitimate technical reason.
Also don't forget how long Apple supports computers for - ten years or so I think (which is a lot of models).
That was once true, but you may not be aware of how aggressively Apple has been discontinuing support for old models. Tiger's system requirements specify that it only runs on Macs with built-in Firewire. (Which makes a whole hell of a lot of sense, eh?) In particular, none of these models will run Tiger:
Power Macs made before January 2000 (these didn't run Panther, either) Powerbooks made before February 2000 iBooks made before September 2000 iMacs made before February 2001 (except the iMac DV)
So we have models slightly more than four years old no longer supported by Apple. And NO model more than five years old (plus a few months) is supported! I'm as much a fanboy as the next person (I have two Macs), but this scares me, because I often use my machines for longer than that. I got my Powerbook in January 2003, and apparently half its useful life is already gone. Say what you will about Microsoft, but XP will easily run on machines significantly older than 4-5 years.
I'm really surprised this issue hasn't gotten more attention. Those friends of yours running OS X on vintage machines will soon be a thing of the past.
Slashdot Mirror
Ah, nothing brightens my morning like a little fanboy bickering about which completely arbitrary label to apply to a certain game console.
RCA 52" Widescreen Projection HDTV, HD52W59 $ 894 USD
Irrelevant for the purposes of a discussion about HD-DVD and Blu-ray, as the TV you link to does not include the required HDCP connection. Care to try again?
I downloaded something like 1.8 Gigs of "high quality" MP3s from usenet one night, and they are just not worth my time.
Yes, I realize that I'm picky, but MP3s are worse sonically than analog cassette tapes.
You do understand that downloading random files from Usenet is not a reliable indicator of the quality of a particular codec, right?
No, the Windows GUI is based around the concept of each window being discrete, whereas the OS X GUI is based around the concept of groups of windows belonging to applications.
Yes, and this was just my point. It's not just an issue of interface semantics. Windows are not discrete, no matter how much Windows pretends they are; they do in fact belong to applications. Thus closing a Windows window may or may not cause the corresponding application to terminate, and there is no way of knowing whether that has indeed occurred (unless you know where to look in Task Manager). This is often unimportant but occasionally crucial information.
The average user would never find expose... you have to set it up in the control panel before you can use it anyway (and newbies would take one look at that screen, go 'ooo scary' and forget about it. For anyone who really needed that level of feedback it's wasted.
I'm not really sure what your point is here, but (1) Expose is turned on by default; and (2) I (not a newbie) find the visual feedback helpful. Why do you think it's "wasted"?
(personally I just wish they'd spend that amount of care with finder - when you close an OSX app it doesn't close.. you have to right click on the taskbar and select 'close'. The visual feedback for this is abysmal - an easily missed black mark on the icon. I've often seen OSX machines of friends with nearly every application still running & them complaining it's slow...)
Yeah, some people don't seem to get that, but I consider it a user education issue more than anything else -- people have been trained by Windows to behave a certain way, and the fact that Macs do it a different way doesn't make it worse.
IMHO, the Mac way is better, even though it isn't ideal. Windows spends a lot of effort trying to convey the illusion that there is a 1-1 correspondence between processes and open windows, but that is NOT the case. You made this mistake yourself -- you said "when you close an OSX app it doesn't close" when you meant "when you close an OSX window it doesn't close the app." Well, it doesn't close the app on Windows, either; for instance, there may be a stray popup that causes your web browser to stay open, which is dangerous for well documented reasons. The difference is that on a Mac it's easier to tell at a glance if the app is running.
You're right, I'd intended my post to be less argumentative than it ended up coming out. (Damn not being able to edit. Oh well.) I didn't "forget" to include packaging and handling costs; the claim was that they "lose money on postage" after five a month and I wanted to see how likely that was. But I suppose "postage" in this context could be understood to include packaging and preparation.
They probably do lose money after 5/month on their $10 customers. But what percentage of Netflix customers are on the $10 plan? I doubt highly that they lose money on $15 customers (their standard plan) that rent more than five.
Netflix loses money on postage for households that rent more than five a month.
As much as I like Netflix (I'm a subscriber, and have never had any of the problems that others are reporting), this is just propaganda. The total weight of the DVD plus packaging is less than an ounce. (You can Google this if you don't believe me, or just weigh a DVD.) So using rate and standards information from the USPS web site:
* When Netflix sends out a DVD, it costs them $.371 for the presorted first class, non-automation rate. I believe this mail is ineligible for automation rates because a DVD is too rigid, but at any rate, this can be verified by looking at a Netflix package; it says "presorted" but doesn't have any other markings that would indicate a lower rate.
* When you send a DVD back to Netflix, I'm almost certain that they're using the high-volume business reply mail rate, though I don't have first-hand knowledge about this. This saves them $.54 per piece but costs them an extra $500 a year; I'd think this tradeoff would be well worth it for them. So the cost to them is $.50 per piece.
So this gives us a total cost of $.871 in postage round trip per DVD they send out. Netflix charges a minimum of $10 a month per customer, so for one of these customers they would have to send out 12 DVDs a month before they lose money on postage. Given the natural turnaround time involved, it would be hard for someone on the $10 plan (one out at a time) to rent more than that in a month anyway.
Of course, they do have other costs. Maybe their overhead is high enough that they lose money on a customer if they rent more than five a month. But not much of that money they're losing is actually for postage.
It's probably also why "Cars" was looking to be a piece of crap - since the movie was simply being done to fulfill a contractual obligation, Pixar would phoen it in, and Disney could choke on their contract.
That would be an exceedingly stupid thing for Pixar to do. Assume that this deal with Disney hadn't gone through, and that Pixar has to negoitiate a new contract with another distributor. If Cars turns out to be a flop, Pixar would be left in a position of weakness exactly when it most needs strength, to get good terms on its new contract. Why would they do that?
I've always been under the impression that the standard metric of a company's "size" is its annual revenue, not profit or market cap. In which case Dell is, of course, much larger than Apple.
The AutoplayAudioCD and AutoplayDVD options control, respectively, whether to open a music player when an audio CD is inserted or a DVD player when a DVD is inserted. OS X has never supported autostart or any other scheme for automatically executing arbitrary code on insert of a CD.
If I equate [typing an admin password] with installing stuff, and all I've done is put a CD in to play the damn thing, I'd be pretty curious as to why...
Just as importantly, Macs will never run an application just because you've inserted a CD. There was once an autorun feature, but they eliminated it in OS X because of the OBVIOUS security issues involved.
So, although there is some concern that CD manufacturers will try to get you to install their DRM in order to play the CD on your computer (e.g., by corrupting the audio data on the CD), they do have to convince you to run the installer yourself. It doesn't happen automatically.
Finally, just about ANY mouse is going to require this software to make use of the fourth and fifth buttons, because mouse makers don't make their own Mac drivers.
Well, it's true that some mouse makers don't make their own Mac drivers, but the big ones do: Microsoft, Logitech, Kensington.
That said, you're right that these "drivers" are pretty much unnecessary. Any USB mouse will work fine on a Mac; the only real issue is that in Mac OS X, buttons 4 and higher can only be used for Exposé and Dashboard commands. These drivers (or something like USB Overdrive) let you assign other commands to those buttons.
Light rail is being paid for radically differently. The cost to build the monorail (exclusive of financing) isn't all that bad: IF you had the same financing THEN it would look better. Of course, we live in a world where light rail is getting breaks the monorail can only dream of....and highways get financing rail can only dream of. That monorail junk bond plan really was the pits though, yes.
I said this in a previous post, but I think the monorail's inability to get favorable financing is due more to fiscal mismanagement than anything else. Seattle Monorail Project is getting much less revenue than anticipated, and it's not really enough to build the line they wanted to build. When something similar happened to Sound Transit, they stopped, figured out what they COULD do with the money they were getting, and did it. But that's not SMP's style. They'd rather stick their heads in the sand, blazing forth while pretending nothing is wrong. THAT is why they couldn't get good credit (IMHO).
I don't want to sound like a Sound Transit cheerleader -- they've had big problems of their own, and haven't come close to delivering on their original promises. But SMP makes ST look like geniuses of government management.
Unless the airport you are going to is Boeing Field (which currently has exactly 0 major airlines) then, good luck carrying your bags from the (currently planned) light rail terminus to SeaTac airport. Personally I wouldn't want to carry my bags that many miles but then many people are in better shape than I.
The currently planned light rail terminus is at SeaTac airport. The airport segment will open ~6 months after the rest of the line. (Or so Sound Transit says.)
BTW: My car tabs, just for the monorail, cost 20x more than the year before. I STILL want to see the darn thing get built.
Me too, don't get me wrong. What I really want is to see SMP disbanded and the project given to one of our other transit agencies. (Really people, did we need ANOTHER transit authority?) Metro and ST aren't perfect, but with either of them at least there'd be a good probability of the monorail actually getting built.
It sounds like you're not a fan of the Seattle Monorail Project
I understand how you would get that impression, but I did vote for the monorail all four previous times it was on the ballot. I haven't decided whether I will vote for it this time. It depends on what, exactly, is on the ballot, and the extent to which I feel I can trust them to deliver on their promises. I have serious doubts about the leadership of this project, particularly because they refuse to back off from their wildly optimistic assumptions about the growth of their tax revenues (which notably are much higher than Sound Transit's growth assumptions).
Light rail's route through the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla is about gentrification, not transit. Not enough people need to make that commute to make either solution cost effective, neither monorail or light rail. People in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla, by large measure, do not shop downtown or at Northgate and don't fly that often. I'd be really surprised if any significent portion of the residents there worked downtown too. Not a slight, just demographics.
I used to live in Rainier Valley and I can tell you that the 7 and 42 buses downtown were often very crowded. It's just not true that people there don't want to go north. I can't speak from experience about Tukwila, but I would be surprised if there weren't demand for relatively high-speed transit from there to Seattle.
The airlines are attempting to flee the airport for Boeing field even as we're adding a third runway for them too, that puts them right next to the Rainier Valley, you could make that with a $2 taxi ride.
Well, I would imagine that more people need to get from downtown to the airports (and vice versa) than from Rainier Valley.
The only cost effective solution is lots of smaller busses operating in the Rainier Valley and Tukwilla.
Again, I can't speak about Tukwila from experience, but more busses is not going to help much in Rainier Valley, because the roads on which the busses travel from there to downtown are so crowded (and in such poor condition) that the existing bus service is completely incapable of keeping any regular schedule whatsoever. On route 7, which was supposed to come every 10 minutes, it was not at all uncommon to see no busses for half an hour and then (literally) two or three in a row. More busses is not going to help that.
In the monorai's favor, it does address two very heavy routes, it would address West Seattle (there's really only one route there and back)to downtown and Ballard to downtown along 15th.
I agree that West Seattle desperately needs better transit. Ballard is already pretty well covered by busses as far as I can tell (but probably someone who lives there will come out and disagree with me).
On the surface this appears correct, but the vast majority of the $11.4 billion you quote is for interest on those bonds, not the actual cost.
You seem to have something against Sound Transit, so you are unlikely to believe their estimates, but ST claims that their $2.4 billion figure includes the cost of financing the project. You can't say that the $9 billion just doesn't matter because it's interest and not principal.
The high interest cost is a direct result of the opponents of the project, who realize that one effective method of stopping the project is to spread FUD through the finincal institutions that might help to underwrite the project. Fear of lawsuit and court challenge is what has turned an otherwise solid municipal bond at low interest into a junk bond at high interest.
I would be very interested in some documentation for this claim, if you have any. If you don't, it seems more likely to me that the high interest rates are because of SMP's documented track record of constantly overestimating their revenues (leading to severe budget shortfalls), as well as their future revenue projections which the consensus seems to be are much too optimistic.
Fur
[most of long anti-light rail diatribe deleted]
... I think the overall budget for the 14 mile light rail project is something like $2.4 Billion. The city officials love it.... You couldn't kill the light rail project any more than you could kill the "big dig" in Boston... It's all about pork.... That's exactly why I like the monorail and hate the light rail. Light rail is going to be 10 times more expensive and doesn't even span a major traffic route! Nothing's getting solved here in Seattle by building it and nobody's going to use it.
... how, exactly, is light rail 10 times more expensive per mile?
I seem to recall that building monorail is 1/10 the cost per mile.
Monorail: $11.4 billion / 14 miles (SMP's June financing plan, see this Seattle P-I article)
Light rail: $2.4 billion / 14 miles (your figures, corroborated by Sound Transit)
So
And how does the light rail line, which runs along I-5, not "span a major traffic route"? Do you really think that nobody in Rainier Valley or Tukwila needs to commute to downtown Seattle, or that nobody needs to get to or from the airports?
And those four times we voted for the monorail? That was before anybody knew that the monorail officials were planning on paying for the line by selling 50-year junk bonds.
Kozmo's back
Um, yeah, if you happen to be within a few blocks of their headquarters in Manhattan. This is not Kozmo, it's an extremely limited variant.
Sigh.. I miss Kozmo so.
Atleast the Dell comes standard with expansion slots that allow you to upgrade the video card at any time.
Wrong -- cheap Dells (like the one linked) don't have an AGP slot. So you're stuck with the piss poor integrated graphics forever.
The Radeon 9200 was actually a big selling point for me. I know it's pretty slow compared to a lot of cards out there, but it sure as hell beats what you get on comparably priced branded PCs.
If I write some software for people to use, but I don't (can't) distribute it, why did I create it? When I said "making", I was speaking practically. If they can't distribute a product, they are effectively prohibited from making that product (at least, it becomes pointless for them to do so).
You are perfectly free to create and distribute any software you please. Even software that can be used for copyright infrigement (as long as it has a substantial non-infringing use). You just can't distribute it "with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright, as shown by clear expression or other affirmative steps taken to foster infringement." Really, how hard is that to understand?
You have to remember that this is on Grokster's motion for summary judgment, meaning that they consider all evidence in the light most favorable to MGM. The legal question here is whether MGM has alleged enough evidence to hold a trial. The Court did not decide Grokster's guilt; only that MGM's evidence was not so insubstantial that the case should be thrown out. This is where those points that you so quickly dismiss come in:
They actively sought out ex-napster users
In the light most favorable to MGM, a reasonable person could infer that this meant they were intending to market their product for the purposes of copyright infringement, since it is well known (and legally established) the the vast majority of Napster's users were committing copyright infringment.
They left out any way to monitor the people who used the software
This point comes with a footnote:
"Of course, in the absence of other evidence of intent, a court would be unable to find contributory infringement liability merely based on a failure to take affirmative steps to prevent infringement, if the device otherwise was capable of substantial noninfringing uses. Such a holding would tread too close to the Sony safe harbor."
They displayed ads in the software
Again, they note that this is not enough by itself, but combined with other evidence it could show their intent to drive ad sales by encouraging infringing uses.
As for the rest of your post, your other quotes are from the part of the decision where they recite the history of the case and has nothing at all to do with the reasoning of their decision. And your assertion that
What the court is saying is that if the Sony case had been set in 2005 and the device in question was a DVR, Sony would have lost. The fact of things being digital is evidently enough to change things from hunkd-dory to bad, bad, bad. "Time-shifting" was what most people used VCR's for (well, there wasn't much in the way of recordable high-quality movies on TV at the time). That term would be "Piracy" in a 2005/DVR case against sony, evidently, solely due to more available content.
is, to be blunt, just plain idiotic if you'd actually read the opinion. The majority and both concurrences cite Sony favorably, and in particular its holding the time-shifting is a legitimate fair use.
Microsoft bought Connectix (authors of the VirtualPC software that lets Macs emulate Wintel boxes) and then quickly dropped their main product for no readily aparrent reason (other than pure spite). ... This leaves Apple with a VirtualPC shaped hole in their 'switch' marketing campaign.
Really? I guess my mind must be playing tricks on me; I was sure I had a copy of Microsoft Virtual PC 7.0 on my Mac...
In case you really wanted to know, it seems that the bill passed unanimously through both houses of the Florida legislature, so this really did have the support of those pesky liberals.
l ls&Submenu=1&BI_Mode=ViewBillInfo&Billnum=1877&Yea r=2005
Source: http://www.flsenate.gov/session/index.cfm?Mode=Bi
No, in fact it is rented from Cuba (even though they refuse the payment) and the U.S. government's position is that it is therefore foreign soil and not subject to U.S. laws or Constitution.
That was the position of the Bush administration, but the Supreme Court disagrees. Six out of nine justices rejected that argument, holding that alien prisoners at Guantanamo do have the right to challenge their imprisonment by filing a habeas petition in federal court.
a huge, costly government agency that produces lots of nice animations, small droids and very, very little substance
NASA is involved with a whole lot of substantial research; you just need to look beyond the manned program to see it. Things like Gravity Probe B, the Mars rovers, Cassini-Huygens, Hubble, Chandra, etc. do far more to advance actual science than Apollo (or any other manned mission, for that matter) ever did -- and at far lower cost.
I mourn with you the loss of the spirit of adventure embodied in Apollo, but really, I think what NASA is doing today (except in the manned program) is far more important.
As you say, way too late for anyone to read this, but hey, nothing better to do...
The cutoff date for Power Macs is January 1999, when the blue-and-white G3 was introduced.
Ah, you're right. My mistake.
And the cutoff date for iMacs is a little more complicated than you make it sound--while there were iMacs without FireWire made until about February 2001, I'm reasonably sure that all except the low-end model had had FireWire for quite some time before that.
Well, that's exactly what I said (with a different spin): iMacs made before February 2001, except the iMac DV, which was first released October 1999. (As I understand it, the iMac DV was identical to other iMacs made at the time except the DV had Firewire and a VGA out port for mirroring.)
I hope you're right about the Rage 128, but IMO if they'd meant to say "Rage 128 or better," they'd have said it. Apple's installers have unabashedly checked explicitly for compliance with their system requirements before, and I don't see any reason why they'd suddenly change their minds. It seems to me that this is Apple's way of getting people to buy a new Mac every 5 years or so, and not for any legitimate technical reason.
Also don't forget how long Apple supports computers for - ten years or so I think (which is a lot of models).
That was once true, but you may not be aware of how aggressively Apple has been discontinuing support for old models. Tiger's system requirements specify that it only runs on Macs with built-in Firewire. (Which makes a whole hell of a lot of sense, eh?) In particular, none of these models will run Tiger:
Power Macs made before January 2000 (these didn't run Panther, either)
Powerbooks made before February 2000
iBooks made before September 2000
iMacs made before February 2001 (except the iMac DV)
So we have models slightly more than four years old no longer supported by Apple. And NO model more than five years old (plus a few months) is supported! I'm as much a fanboy as the next person (I have two Macs), but this scares me, because I often use my machines for longer than that. I got my Powerbook in January 2003, and apparently half its useful life is already gone. Say what you will about Microsoft, but XP will easily run on machines significantly older than 4-5 years.
I'm really surprised this issue hasn't gotten more attention. Those friends of yours running OS X on vintage machines will soon be a thing of the past.