As long as they aren't stereotypes I'm 100% behind EA. i heard they went a little overboard in the Dragon Age one though, but as we have seen it takes awhile for writers to learn how to write characters they are not familiar with. Just look at how blacks and asians went from bad stereotypes (breakfast at Tiffanys, step n fetchit) to make them really REALLY white (The Cosby show) to now they are just written as people.
Personally I'll be glad when all the bible thumpers STFU and leave everyone else alone. you don't believe in it? that's cool but STFU and get out of my face, I don't believe in a sky bully but you don't see me trying to ban YOUR ass now do ya? Every time I run into one of these "Stick 'em back in the closet!" types I simply remind them that it was THEIR churches that were saying "Stick them niggers in the back of the bus!" in the 50s and using the "Curse of Ham" as an excuse. You can excuse pretty much any hateful behavior you want by using one of the three major "good books" and the quicker they STFU and leave those that don't believe like them alone the better IMHO.
Why are you trying to make this into a left VS right issue? I said the GOVERNMENT, not any party, and all the tax breaks and other initiatives for "green tech" were there under Bush as well, they weren't pushed as hard is all.
And the problem with the batteries is EVERY study I've seen on them involves them being kept in a climate controlled garage when not in use. tell me do YOU have a climate controlled garage? i bet you don't, hell I don't know a single person that actually does. Have you ever stuck a LiOn battery in a hot car? notice how the battery wasn't worth shit afterwards? its not rocket science, LiOn batteries don't respond well to extremes in heat and cold, which is why we use lead Acid batteries to start cars. Now figure in several hundreds pounds of liOn being out in 114F summer heat or 8 degree F winters, how long do YOU think they will last?
And thanks, i knew it was tata or tanto or something, but the rest of the point is spot on. if you want to lower the gas usage for America you HAVE to give the working poor a vehicle that is dependable, cheap, and cheap on gas. Not a single one of their "green" vehicles currently comes close and without the government propping them up they won't either, simply because the battery tech wasn't there. As another poster put it we are trying to build a 747 in 1908 and we simply don't have the technology. A MUCH better use of our resources would be 45MPG+ 4 cyl cars that cost less than $10K, and then give a "cash for clunkers' kinda deal to get those that can't afford even $10K out of all those old Fords and Chevys. This is something we could build NOW without any major breakthroughs in tech, and not only could we build it but it could truly become the "people's car" with whole industries springing up around to provide everything from customization to repair. better IMHO than wasting billions on an electric car that few will be able to afford and even fewer will be able to afford battery replacement.
I predict in less than 6 years the majority of these all electric cars will be in the dump because when people find out the true battery replacement costs and find that no car lot will give them shit for trade in if it needs new batteries they will just toss the things and move on. this isn't a right or left issue, this is the government trying to force the market to go in a direct where it isn't economically feasible to do so and will fail, just as every other attempt has. When the tech is there the market WILL move, but you can't force it when the tech just isn't ready.
Heat radiates very quickly through fur, which is why you don't see squirrels dropping dead in the summer. I'm sure if you looked at the thermal image of the squirrels tail it looks like a bed red blob with the heat being spread pretty quickly to the fur.
Sadly not, don't forget that all those blown caps in the early 00s was due to corporate espionage, they stole only part of the formula and tried to "fill in the blank" and got it wrong, causing untold losses from prematurely blown boards.
Also what you are advocating is basically a form of "race to the bottom" which as we have seen really only gets you garbage. There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.
If a company can't make any money from their tech because it'll be stolen they just won't invest in any R&D that costs any real money which gets you a race to the bottom where everyone is making the same shit, just using shittier and shittier parts. See all the cheap ass Android tablets for an example and i'm sure most would agree that the vast majority are absolute garbage, totally designed for the dump, and are just a complete waste.
I'm a Trace Elliot man myself (pre-Peavey of course) but I always respected the Marshall Major. I got to play through one a few times and while it was damned near impossible to get a true clean sound out of those tubes (one of the reasons i love my solid state trace, satanically loud while staying truly clean) the Major had this "growl" to it, really hard to describe if you haven't played one. Paired with a Fender P-Bass they were monsters, back breakers and a bitch to move (tubes are naturally fussy) but man it did have a sweet sound.
RIP oh inventor of THE badass guitar tone, hell I doubt there was a band in the 70s or 80s that didn't use your amps to get their lead tones.
Well you have to figure in the fluff of the tail which means most strikes unless the snake hits dead solid perfect all he is gonna get is a mouth full of fur. if you have ever seen a squirrel's tail up close it really is just this little thin string, much like a rat's tail, and it only looks big because of the way the fur poofs out.
So it makes sense, give the snake a fast moving target that severely cuts down his chances of actually getting a strike and of course once it has struck the squirrel has time to scamper off. Just another case of the classic predator and prey evolution at work.
Am I the only one that hears all this crap from Monsanto and thinks of that scene from Omen II where Thorn industries head was talking about controlling the entire world food supply? Ya know there is evil, and there is insanely over the top evil and i think we would all agree that Monsanto fits in the later category.
What amazes me is how the government has become such blatant whores they don't even pretend to give a shit anymore, how sad is it i gotta hope the Chinese or the EU or SOMEBODY puts a halt to them, because we in the USA sure ain't gonna say shit, hell by the time the MSM get done blowing Monsanto they'll have all the TV viewers thinking they are just a bunch of cute and cuddly kittens..
Not to mention the average buyer of a Volt has a yearly income of $171,000 which is pretty damned far from average and certainly isn't gonna "change America" anymore than the Tesla did.
For all those that think electric is the future, are you willing to pay say...60% taxes? because that is what you'll have to do so that the government can basically afford to give electric cars to the working poor. in my area the average car driven by the working poor is a mid 90s, some even older. you can offer tax breaks all you want, they won't bite because they simply can't afford the payments, not to mention replacing those batteries for $17k+ in less than 5 years because they can't afford a climate controlled garage to put them in.
Pretty much every "solution" short of fossil fuels has been a total failure, the costs are too high or the solution simply doesn't exist. i LMAO every time Al Gore talks about how we should all "just use public transport" when he knows damn ed good and well most of the south where he is from doesn't HAVE public transport and it would cost billions to build and run which the states don't have.
Sadly the Volt is a perfect example of what happens when the government gets involved, a vehicle that is too expensive for the vast majority even after being subsidized up the ass. every time the government gets involved its worse, just look at the SUV which was created by CAFE killing the station wagons which sucked a hell of a lot less gas than an Explorer.
If the government wanted to get involved what we need is something like that tanto or whatever that Indian car is called, small, cheap, and good on gas. offer something like that for say $5K and then offer a cash for clunkers style deal and you'd be amazed how much our gas usage goes down as all the poor folks trade in their old hogs for something cheap and easy. but that wouldn't be "green" enough i suppose.
What you might as well have posted is "If Santa was real then we'd all have free money for Xmas!" because just as there has NEVER been a true communist state neither has their been a true capitalist one either. i could print scandal after scandal involving bribes and kickbacks going all the way back to the founding fathers.
If you want to argue that on a purely hypothetical island the system works sure, but i'd argue that on the purely hypothetical island next to it communism works too, see the problem? The only way for the "invisible hand' to work would be to reset everyone back to zero and make this a true meritocracy but the old money simply isn't gonna allow that. Even your invisible hand can't stop what inevitably happens which is consolidation until you end up with monopolies.
In the end insurance is like water, power, and cable, the incredible cost of entry will make sure you only have a handful and all they have to do is make sure they raise THEIR prices when the other guys do. Anybody that doesn't you crush with a leveraged buyout or a merger. in an era where literally millisecond trades can allow billionaires to leech untold power expecting a "true" free market to function is simply fantasy. Oh and I couldn't care less about Krugman, he's not my cup o' tea.
Actually runs just fine, complete with Avast, 3 tabs open in dragon AND downloading a video, next FUD? And I would argue a 2004 Sempron is even worse than a P4 because the Athlon arch is MUCH more sensitive to lack of cache than the P4, only the Cedar mill Celerons perform worse and those are REALLY cache gimped.
Oh and as i've heard so much on the Linux forums if Win 7 is gobbling 2+ Gb? Then "Ur doin it wrong" because even on my 6 core with all the bling cranked it only sucks 1.5Gb and that's including having over a half a dozen apps in the taskbar including steam. Maybe they run shitty apps like Norton at work?
And just FYI but "set tops and routers" are made by actual corps that aren't gonna give a rat's ass what some guy cooked up in his basement, and I'd say a good 99% of the population ain't gonna give a rat's ass if you can run linux on your router. You see most of us actually buy a product that does what we want it to so we DON'T have to spend hours fucking with the damned thing! i know its a concept, but surprisingly it works.
Again just another article that makes linux look like a tinker toy for geeks with nothing to do on a Saturday night. Hell if y'all find that so damned interesting maybe i should post the videos of the guy running Win 7 on a PII or the guy that managed to upgrade from 1.0-7, obviously that is just amazing!
I don't even think they'd need to buy some startups short term, just advertise what they have! Anybody try yahoo Games? they have a ton of games that are really fun, but nobody knows about them, they have some nice shows, hell they have a lot of nice things that nobody knows about. Now how are you gonna get people to use something when it is buried as a teeny tiny widget in the bottom left corner of the screen?
They need to have someone redesign the portal so that different apps get highlighted each day, maybe have little contests to get people to try them. hell that is what MSFT did with their Bing rewards and after giving it a spin i find i prefer their image search.
But you have to let people know a thing exists and give them a reason to try it, hell buy up a dozen iPads and a dozen iPhones and have a contest a week and those that try their services (while being logged into their yahoo of course) get put in the drawing. They've got tons of services that are nice, its just nobody ever sees them.
Actually they already bought half of what they wanted for quite cheap, which was the yahoo searches, and when yahoo finishes flaming out I'm sure they'll pick up the other half for a song, which is yahoo mail which is currently the #1 webmail when it comes to unique currently in use accounts. i do agree that he is probably damned glad he didn't buy the whole thing as his offer was made before the bubble burst and why pay more than you have to?
Your "facts" change nothing and are nothing but an attempt to gloss over the facts. here let me spell them out, 1.-you have a VERY limited budget for space, 2.-You have two, possibly three planets in our own solar system where life might be found, 3.- There are a lot of resources out there that could be VERY useful to the human race in the near future.
So give us ONE reason, just one mind you, as to why your statistical analysis should take precedent over these things much nearer to earth, that we can actually reach in our lifetimes?
Hell if we had unlimited budgets i'd say go for it, hell personally i'd kill off half the crap the military blows cash on and build our entire economy on space and high tech, but sadly that ain't reality. reality is NASA has a VERY limited budget with which to work and frankly your pet project has VERY little use outside number crunching. Sorry friend but we have to prioritize our spending and other space projects need it more than you and can produce results we can use.
Hell he gave one as an example, which just FYI but this one was given 65 years. This social retard hadn't actually left his lair since 1997 (this was in 2008) and was so agoraphobic they had to tase him to get him out the lair. Just like he said there is NO way in hell that person could be a threat to a child as one has to actually go outside to get a child and he wouldn't ever leave the lair but we get to pay $175k a year for the rest of his life.
Oh and to the sicko that suggested that they'll be shanked in prison so we won't pay for them? they automatically get solitary now after a couple of lawsuits, that an extra $60k a year. Frankly this "war on CP" is only making the privatized prison owners rich and giving prosecutors numbers to run on for elected office, that's all. he says the budget they have for field work is a bad joke and without field work ALL you are gonna catch is social retards.
Small Claims court. When it isn't worth paying crazy lawyer money filing yourself in small claims court is cheap and most corps would rather just cut a check for $5k than to pay the costs of flying someone to wherever you are and dealing with it. Also small claims court judges aren't bowled over by legalese bullshit and basically just want the facts. you tell what happened, they tell their side, and most judges go by what is reasonable and I'd say handing your domains over to someone else without contacting you (I'm sure they had your cell number right?) would probably be seen as unreasonable.
I hate to break the news to ya but pretty much ALL the cablecos are doing this, they just don't talk about it. I use the cableco's VOIP? No cap, I use Vonage? counts against the cap. Same goes for movies, shows, hell anything. if I use what they want me to? Don't count. if i use what they don't? Counts.
I don't see how anyone can argue this isn't classic bundling and antitrust but considering our entire government is now as corrupt as any banana republic I doubt anybody will say or do shit. Actually i have a little more respect for the banana repubs, at least there the common man can bribe judges too, here its only megacorps.
Sadly I have a friend who works for the state busting CP and he'd probably agree with ya. he says all they bust anymore are social retards because they are easy to catch while they won't be catching shit for actual child predators because the state hates spending a dime on actual field work. he says the social retards are nothing but loser porn addicts sitting in their basements that wouldn't touch anybody but themselves and if you threw a nekkid kid into their lair they'd just screech and hide in the corner, yet we all get to pay millions to house them for decades, all so some prosecutor can yank some huge number out for the presses which helps when he wants to run for office. Isn't the US justice system fun?
While I'm glad the EU still has some teeth (we sold out the DoJ years ago, hell they might as well wear hooker boots and stand on street corners now) I'm kinda divided on cases like this. I mean as long as they didn't "pull a Rambus" and went behind everyone's backs with the patents why can't they charge what they want? Nobody forced anyone to decide to stick their tech into a standard did they? It seems like the moral of the story is don't stick things you don't own into the standards.
If they had signed a RAND agreement and THEN tried to get money that is a different story, that's "pulling a Rambus" but from the looks of TFA they offered RAND and got basically told to fuck right off. If I own a patent and you don't pay you damned right I'm gonna shut you down, so how is this ANY different? If something is patented you pay or you don't use it, its just that simple. If the EU wants to abolish all patents in their jurisdiction then they should just do so, otherwise this does kinda feel like picking and choosing.
Because Linux is a fiddly PITA? Seriously dude i could teach my 19 year old in 3 weeks how to run an entire office using GPOs with WinServer, its intuitive as hell. Its all laid out nice and neat with objects and groups, very easy to follow trees, hell it couldn't be simpler.
Now try to replace the control you get from AD+GPOs+Exchange+Sharepoint with a Linux server, you can't do it. What you'll get is a kludge of different apps written by different groups that don't even speak to one another and don't give a shit if their itch scratching breaks the other apps, and that is if you are lucky, if not one or more of the apps will end up abandoned on Freshmeat because the developer just got tired of dealing with it.
Linux is GREAT in certain roles, don't get me wrong. its great in HPCs, great in embedded, and makes damned good webservers which is why MSFT added support because there are plenty that run LAMP, but it is NOT good to replace WinServer when it comes to managing WinDesktops and frankly its not a good desktop in and of itself, it will cost you more than its worth in the amount of time it costs you trying to get up to the same level of integration and control that you have with WinServer plus WinDesktop.
This is why as a retailer and one who supports several SMBs I've quit even messing with Linux anymore, it really doesn't let you come out ahead unless you don't attach a price to your time which i do. Maybe if you were on salary, where it didn't matter how many hours you blow?
Considering my local Craigslist is filled with brand new $100 netbooks, and even new netbooks at the local Wally world is just $200...why would I care? I can get two or three easily for the cost of a single iPad! That don't count the docks, keyboards, and other crap most folks add to an iPad.
To me this smells more than a little bit like Cult of Mac evangelism, trying to get new converts to their religion. I have a lot of customers that bought pads including iPads, know what they are used for? Either really expensive digital picture frames or as a video player, that's it.
Not saying pads can't be useful, but its a seriously niche market and most of what pads are being used for can be covered by a decent smartphone or a netbook. The ONLY two places i have seen pads be the smarter choice over phones and netbooks is in warehousing and medical, in warehouses for inventory and medical for charting but those are two REALLY niche areas. But if anybody thinks a 7 year old is gonna baby that $500+ iPad boy you don't know 7 year olds, that thing will be trashed in 2 months if you are lucky.
I REALLY hate to be a party pooper but....why? Frankly our engine tech hasn't really evolved since Nazis were using them to drop V2s on london so even if we find a bazillion worlds out there our pathetic tech means that even if we sent a generation ship you are talking tens of thousands of years before we could even get there, much less any chance of turning around if you find its just a big rock without the ability to sustain life.
Personally while I think its great they are keeping it going, simply because its a sunk cost and therefor wasteful to just toss it when it could be doing useful work, i think we have better uses for our limited space budgets than looking for planets a bazillion light years away. After all we have two, possibly three, places where we might find life in our very own solar system not to mention we should probably be looking ahead to when our supplies start to run low and should be mapping what resources are where for the possibility of future mining.
Like I said, really glad they are not just pulling the plug as long as its got power, but I just don't think other than using this until its used up that we should be devoting any real resources to this when we have no way to even get to our outer planets in any reasonable amount of time, much less leave the system. Hell even sending a "Is there anybody there?" message to most of these at the speed of light would be on the order of hundreds or even thousands of years.
But sadly the problem is that is EXACTLY what often happens, they become fancy electronic babysitters. I have gone in houses where there isn't a single book, not a one, but they make sure the kid has an X360 or PS3 because that keeps little Billy out of their hair.
As for the tablet i don't see anything the tablet could do that a cheap netbook or desktop could do, except maybe cost more. in the end its not about the tech, its about actually stimulating the child's mind, really interacting with them instead of just handing them some more technocrap and sending them to their rooms.
I had mine build their own desktops, showing them along the way what each piece was and explaining how it worked, I loaded up modding tools to show them how code was translated into what they saw on the screen, etc and now while the oldest has many friends that are having to take remedial computer classes he gets extra points being a TA and helping show the others how to properly research on the net. its not the tech, its actually spending time with the kids that counts.
I think the Helix song will work better in this case...Gimme an F..I..N..E..whats ya got? FINE!, and what we gonna do? FINE YOU!
BTW you know you're old if you actually remember that song, sadly I saw the title and it instantly popped into my head. Hell I heard them playing AC/DC on the muzak channel at the local Walmart the other day, you know you're old when the "subversive' music you grew up on is now played for shoppers at the Wally World.
Well when we have feds go after librarians for lists of who checked out books, we have constitution free zones that cover 30% of Americans and NDAA which states they can lock you away with ZERO trial if they stick the right label on you? I'm sorry but this librarian is hopelessly naive if she thinks all this wouldn't end up on someone's list somewhere. Remember it is NOT paranoia if they really are out to get you and everything we have seen from PATRIOT on up would bear out the assumption that if you don't get in line and wave the flag like a good drone you can end up on somebody's list.
I'm just glad my grandfather and his brothers who fought the Nazis in WWII aren't here to see this crap, hell you could probably power the entire southern USA by wrapping them in copper as i'm sure they are spinning like tops in their graves.
Uhhh...haven't run windows in many years I take it? Win 7 runs just fine on a circa 2004 Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM, I know this because i'm running it. it don't have aero but then again you ain't getting the bling bling on a Linux system with a lousy IGP.
But hey if you want to waste your time reading about a guy that made Linux run like hammered shit on a VCR remote, that's cool, but frankly articles like this does NOT make Linux look good, it makes it look like a toy for geekers to fiddle with. i mean I can post youtube Videos of a guy getting Win 7 to run on a Pentium II but seriously who cares? Hell there is even a guy who managed to upgrade every single version of Windows from 1.0 to Win 7 and the thing actually runs but again kinda pointless.
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As long as they aren't stereotypes I'm 100% behind EA. i heard they went a little overboard in the Dragon Age one though, but as we have seen it takes awhile for writers to learn how to write characters they are not familiar with. Just look at how blacks and asians went from bad stereotypes (breakfast at Tiffanys, step n fetchit) to make them really REALLY white (The Cosby show) to now they are just written as people.
Personally I'll be glad when all the bible thumpers STFU and leave everyone else alone. you don't believe in it? that's cool but STFU and get out of my face, I don't believe in a sky bully but you don't see me trying to ban YOUR ass now do ya? Every time I run into one of these "Stick 'em back in the closet!" types I simply remind them that it was THEIR churches that were saying "Stick them niggers in the back of the bus!" in the 50s and using the "Curse of Ham" as an excuse. You can excuse pretty much any hateful behavior you want by using one of the three major "good books" and the quicker they STFU and leave those that don't believe like them alone the better IMHO.
Why are you trying to make this into a left VS right issue? I said the GOVERNMENT, not any party, and all the tax breaks and other initiatives for "green tech" were there under Bush as well, they weren't pushed as hard is all.
And the problem with the batteries is EVERY study I've seen on them involves them being kept in a climate controlled garage when not in use. tell me do YOU have a climate controlled garage? i bet you don't, hell I don't know a single person that actually does. Have you ever stuck a LiOn battery in a hot car? notice how the battery wasn't worth shit afterwards? its not rocket science, LiOn batteries don't respond well to extremes in heat and cold, which is why we use lead Acid batteries to start cars. Now figure in several hundreds pounds of liOn being out in 114F summer heat or 8 degree F winters, how long do YOU think they will last?
And thanks, i knew it was tata or tanto or something, but the rest of the point is spot on. if you want to lower the gas usage for America you HAVE to give the working poor a vehicle that is dependable, cheap, and cheap on gas. Not a single one of their "green" vehicles currently comes close and without the government propping them up they won't either, simply because the battery tech wasn't there. As another poster put it we are trying to build a 747 in 1908 and we simply don't have the technology. A MUCH better use of our resources would be 45MPG+ 4 cyl cars that cost less than $10K, and then give a "cash for clunkers' kinda deal to get those that can't afford even $10K out of all those old Fords and Chevys. This is something we could build NOW without any major breakthroughs in tech, and not only could we build it but it could truly become the "people's car" with whole industries springing up around to provide everything from customization to repair. better IMHO than wasting billions on an electric car that few will be able to afford and even fewer will be able to afford battery replacement.
I predict in less than 6 years the majority of these all electric cars will be in the dump because when people find out the true battery replacement costs and find that no car lot will give them shit for trade in if it needs new batteries they will just toss the things and move on. this isn't a right or left issue, this is the government trying to force the market to go in a direct where it isn't economically feasible to do so and will fail, just as every other attempt has. When the tech is there the market WILL move, but you can't force it when the tech just isn't ready.
Heat radiates very quickly through fur, which is why you don't see squirrels dropping dead in the summer. I'm sure if you looked at the thermal image of the squirrels tail it looks like a bed red blob with the heat being spread pretty quickly to the fur.
Sadly not, don't forget that all those blown caps in the early 00s was due to corporate espionage, they stole only part of the formula and tried to "fill in the blank" and got it wrong, causing untold losses from prematurely blown boards.
Also what you are advocating is basically a form of "race to the bottom" which as we have seen really only gets you garbage. There is a reason why a PC I build for a customer lasts so long it gets passed down to several family members while that $300 Dell special gets shitcanned 3 weeks after the warranty is gone, and that is because of quality parts. I make sure i have the best parts, from solid caps to high quality fans, whereas the Dell uses the cheapest shit they can get their hands on.
If a company can't make any money from their tech because it'll be stolen they just won't invest in any R&D that costs any real money which gets you a race to the bottom where everyone is making the same shit, just using shittier and shittier parts. See all the cheap ass Android tablets for an example and i'm sure most would agree that the vast majority are absolute garbage, totally designed for the dump, and are just a complete waste.
I'm a Trace Elliot man myself (pre-Peavey of course) but I always respected the Marshall Major. I got to play through one a few times and while it was damned near impossible to get a true clean sound out of those tubes (one of the reasons i love my solid state trace, satanically loud while staying truly clean) the Major had this "growl" to it, really hard to describe if you haven't played one. Paired with a Fender P-Bass they were monsters, back breakers and a bitch to move (tubes are naturally fussy) but man it did have a sweet sound.
RIP oh inventor of THE badass guitar tone, hell I doubt there was a band in the 70s or 80s that didn't use your amps to get their lead tones.
Well you have to figure in the fluff of the tail which means most strikes unless the snake hits dead solid perfect all he is gonna get is a mouth full of fur. if you have ever seen a squirrel's tail up close it really is just this little thin string, much like a rat's tail, and it only looks big because of the way the fur poofs out.
So it makes sense, give the snake a fast moving target that severely cuts down his chances of actually getting a strike and of course once it has struck the squirrel has time to scamper off. Just another case of the classic predator and prey evolution at work.
Am I the only one that hears all this crap from Monsanto and thinks of that scene from Omen II where Thorn industries head was talking about controlling the entire world food supply? Ya know there is evil, and there is insanely over the top evil and i think we would all agree that Monsanto fits in the later category.
What amazes me is how the government has become such blatant whores they don't even pretend to give a shit anymore, how sad is it i gotta hope the Chinese or the EU or SOMEBODY puts a halt to them, because we in the USA sure ain't gonna say shit, hell by the time the MSM get done blowing Monsanto they'll have all the TV viewers thinking they are just a bunch of cute and cuddly kittens..
Not to mention the average buyer of a Volt has a yearly income of $171,000 which is pretty damned far from average and certainly isn't gonna "change America" anymore than the Tesla did.
For all those that think electric is the future, are you willing to pay say...60% taxes? because that is what you'll have to do so that the government can basically afford to give electric cars to the working poor. in my area the average car driven by the working poor is a mid 90s, some even older. you can offer tax breaks all you want, they won't bite because they simply can't afford the payments, not to mention replacing those batteries for $17k+ in less than 5 years because they can't afford a climate controlled garage to put them in.
Pretty much every "solution" short of fossil fuels has been a total failure, the costs are too high or the solution simply doesn't exist. i LMAO every time Al Gore talks about how we should all "just use public transport" when he knows damn ed good and well most of the south where he is from doesn't HAVE public transport and it would cost billions to build and run which the states don't have.
Sadly the Volt is a perfect example of what happens when the government gets involved, a vehicle that is too expensive for the vast majority even after being subsidized up the ass. every time the government gets involved its worse, just look at the SUV which was created by CAFE killing the station wagons which sucked a hell of a lot less gas than an Explorer.
If the government wanted to get involved what we need is something like that tanto or whatever that Indian car is called, small, cheap, and good on gas. offer something like that for say $5K and then offer a cash for clunkers style deal and you'd be amazed how much our gas usage goes down as all the poor folks trade in their old hogs for something cheap and easy. but that wouldn't be "green" enough i suppose.
What you might as well have posted is "If Santa was real then we'd all have free money for Xmas!" because just as there has NEVER been a true communist state neither has their been a true capitalist one either. i could print scandal after scandal involving bribes and kickbacks going all the way back to the founding fathers.
If you want to argue that on a purely hypothetical island the system works sure, but i'd argue that on the purely hypothetical island next to it communism works too, see the problem? The only way for the "invisible hand' to work would be to reset everyone back to zero and make this a true meritocracy but the old money simply isn't gonna allow that. Even your invisible hand can't stop what inevitably happens which is consolidation until you end up with monopolies.
In the end insurance is like water, power, and cable, the incredible cost of entry will make sure you only have a handful and all they have to do is make sure they raise THEIR prices when the other guys do. Anybody that doesn't you crush with a leveraged buyout or a merger. in an era where literally millisecond trades can allow billionaires to leech untold power expecting a "true" free market to function is simply fantasy. Oh and I couldn't care less about Krugman, he's not my cup o' tea.
Actually runs just fine, complete with Avast, 3 tabs open in dragon AND downloading a video, next FUD? And I would argue a 2004 Sempron is even worse than a P4 because the Athlon arch is MUCH more sensitive to lack of cache than the P4, only the Cedar mill Celerons perform worse and those are REALLY cache gimped.
Oh and as i've heard so much on the Linux forums if Win 7 is gobbling 2+ Gb? Then "Ur doin it wrong" because even on my 6 core with all the bling cranked it only sucks 1.5Gb and that's including having over a half a dozen apps in the taskbar including steam. Maybe they run shitty apps like Norton at work?
And just FYI but "set tops and routers" are made by actual corps that aren't gonna give a rat's ass what some guy cooked up in his basement, and I'd say a good 99% of the population ain't gonna give a rat's ass if you can run linux on your router. You see most of us actually buy a product that does what we want it to so we DON'T have to spend hours fucking with the damned thing! i know its a concept, but surprisingly it works.
Again just another article that makes linux look like a tinker toy for geeks with nothing to do on a Saturday night. Hell if y'all find that so damned interesting maybe i should post the videos of the guy running Win 7 on a PII or the guy that managed to upgrade from 1.0-7, obviously that is just amazing!
I don't even think they'd need to buy some startups short term, just advertise what they have! Anybody try yahoo Games? they have a ton of games that are really fun, but nobody knows about them, they have some nice shows, hell they have a lot of nice things that nobody knows about. Now how are you gonna get people to use something when it is buried as a teeny tiny widget in the bottom left corner of the screen?
They need to have someone redesign the portal so that different apps get highlighted each day, maybe have little contests to get people to try them. hell that is what MSFT did with their Bing rewards and after giving it a spin i find i prefer their image search.
But you have to let people know a thing exists and give them a reason to try it, hell buy up a dozen iPads and a dozen iPhones and have a contest a week and those that try their services (while being logged into their yahoo of course) get put in the drawing. They've got tons of services that are nice, its just nobody ever sees them.
Actually they already bought half of what they wanted for quite cheap, which was the yahoo searches, and when yahoo finishes flaming out I'm sure they'll pick up the other half for a song, which is yahoo mail which is currently the #1 webmail when it comes to unique currently in use accounts. i do agree that he is probably damned glad he didn't buy the whole thing as his offer was made before the bubble burst and why pay more than you have to?
Your "facts" change nothing and are nothing but an attempt to gloss over the facts. here let me spell them out, 1.-you have a VERY limited budget for space, 2.-You have two, possibly three planets in our own solar system where life might be found, 3.- There are a lot of resources out there that could be VERY useful to the human race in the near future.
So give us ONE reason, just one mind you, as to why your statistical analysis should take precedent over these things much nearer to earth, that we can actually reach in our lifetimes?
Hell if we had unlimited budgets i'd say go for it, hell personally i'd kill off half the crap the military blows cash on and build our entire economy on space and high tech, but sadly that ain't reality. reality is NASA has a VERY limited budget with which to work and frankly your pet project has VERY little use outside number crunching. Sorry friend but we have to prioritize our spending and other space projects need it more than you and can produce results we can use.
Hell he gave one as an example, which just FYI but this one was given 65 years. This social retard hadn't actually left his lair since 1997 (this was in 2008) and was so agoraphobic they had to tase him to get him out the lair. Just like he said there is NO way in hell that person could be a threat to a child as one has to actually go outside to get a child and he wouldn't ever leave the lair but we get to pay $175k a year for the rest of his life.
Oh and to the sicko that suggested that they'll be shanked in prison so we won't pay for them? they automatically get solitary now after a couple of lawsuits, that an extra $60k a year. Frankly this "war on CP" is only making the privatized prison owners rich and giving prosecutors numbers to run on for elected office, that's all. he says the budget they have for field work is a bad joke and without field work ALL you are gonna catch is social retards.
Small Claims court. When it isn't worth paying crazy lawyer money filing yourself in small claims court is cheap and most corps would rather just cut a check for $5k than to pay the costs of flying someone to wherever you are and dealing with it. Also small claims court judges aren't bowled over by legalese bullshit and basically just want the facts. you tell what happened, they tell their side, and most judges go by what is reasonable and I'd say handing your domains over to someone else without contacting you (I'm sure they had your cell number right?) would probably be seen as unreasonable.
I hate to break the news to ya but pretty much ALL the cablecos are doing this, they just don't talk about it. I use the cableco's VOIP? No cap, I use Vonage? counts against the cap. Same goes for movies, shows, hell anything. if I use what they want me to? Don't count. if i use what they don't? Counts.
I don't see how anyone can argue this isn't classic bundling and antitrust but considering our entire government is now as corrupt as any banana republic I doubt anybody will say or do shit. Actually i have a little more respect for the banana repubs, at least there the common man can bribe judges too, here its only megacorps.
Sadly I have a friend who works for the state busting CP and he'd probably agree with ya. he says all they bust anymore are social retards because they are easy to catch while they won't be catching shit for actual child predators because the state hates spending a dime on actual field work. he says the social retards are nothing but loser porn addicts sitting in their basements that wouldn't touch anybody but themselves and if you threw a nekkid kid into their lair they'd just screech and hide in the corner, yet we all get to pay millions to house them for decades, all so some prosecutor can yank some huge number out for the presses which helps when he wants to run for office. Isn't the US justice system fun?
While I'm glad the EU still has some teeth (we sold out the DoJ years ago, hell they might as well wear hooker boots and stand on street corners now) I'm kinda divided on cases like this. I mean as long as they didn't "pull a Rambus" and went behind everyone's backs with the patents why can't they charge what they want? Nobody forced anyone to decide to stick their tech into a standard did they? It seems like the moral of the story is don't stick things you don't own into the standards.
If they had signed a RAND agreement and THEN tried to get money that is a different story, that's "pulling a Rambus" but from the looks of TFA they offered RAND and got basically told to fuck right off. If I own a patent and you don't pay you damned right I'm gonna shut you down, so how is this ANY different? If something is patented you pay or you don't use it, its just that simple. If the EU wants to abolish all patents in their jurisdiction then they should just do so, otherwise this does kinda feel like picking and choosing.
Because Linux is a fiddly PITA? Seriously dude i could teach my 19 year old in 3 weeks how to run an entire office using GPOs with WinServer, its intuitive as hell. Its all laid out nice and neat with objects and groups, very easy to follow trees, hell it couldn't be simpler.
Now try to replace the control you get from AD+GPOs+Exchange+Sharepoint with a Linux server, you can't do it. What you'll get is a kludge of different apps written by different groups that don't even speak to one another and don't give a shit if their itch scratching breaks the other apps, and that is if you are lucky, if not one or more of the apps will end up abandoned on Freshmeat because the developer just got tired of dealing with it.
Linux is GREAT in certain roles, don't get me wrong. its great in HPCs, great in embedded, and makes damned good webservers which is why MSFT added support because there are plenty that run LAMP, but it is NOT good to replace WinServer when it comes to managing WinDesktops and frankly its not a good desktop in and of itself, it will cost you more than its worth in the amount of time it costs you trying to get up to the same level of integration and control that you have with WinServer plus WinDesktop.
This is why as a retailer and one who supports several SMBs I've quit even messing with Linux anymore, it really doesn't let you come out ahead unless you don't attach a price to your time which i do. Maybe if you were on salary, where it didn't matter how many hours you blow?
Considering my local Craigslist is filled with brand new $100 netbooks, and even new netbooks at the local Wally world is just $200...why would I care? I can get two or three easily for the cost of a single iPad! That don't count the docks, keyboards, and other crap most folks add to an iPad.
To me this smells more than a little bit like Cult of Mac evangelism, trying to get new converts to their religion. I have a lot of customers that bought pads including iPads, know what they are used for? Either really expensive digital picture frames or as a video player, that's it.
Not saying pads can't be useful, but its a seriously niche market and most of what pads are being used for can be covered by a decent smartphone or a netbook. The ONLY two places i have seen pads be the smarter choice over phones and netbooks is in warehousing and medical, in warehouses for inventory and medical for charting but those are two REALLY niche areas. But if anybody thinks a 7 year old is gonna baby that $500+ iPad boy you don't know 7 year olds, that thing will be trashed in 2 months if you are lucky.
I REALLY hate to be a party pooper but....why? Frankly our engine tech hasn't really evolved since Nazis were using them to drop V2s on london so even if we find a bazillion worlds out there our pathetic tech means that even if we sent a generation ship you are talking tens of thousands of years before we could even get there, much less any chance of turning around if you find its just a big rock without the ability to sustain life.
Personally while I think its great they are keeping it going, simply because its a sunk cost and therefor wasteful to just toss it when it could be doing useful work, i think we have better uses for our limited space budgets than looking for planets a bazillion light years away. After all we have two, possibly three, places where we might find life in our very own solar system not to mention we should probably be looking ahead to when our supplies start to run low and should be mapping what resources are where for the possibility of future mining.
Like I said, really glad they are not just pulling the plug as long as its got power, but I just don't think other than using this until its used up that we should be devoting any real resources to this when we have no way to even get to our outer planets in any reasonable amount of time, much less leave the system. Hell even sending a "Is there anybody there?" message to most of these at the speed of light would be on the order of hundreds or even thousands of years.
But sadly the problem is that is EXACTLY what often happens, they become fancy electronic babysitters. I have gone in houses where there isn't a single book, not a one, but they make sure the kid has an X360 or PS3 because that keeps little Billy out of their hair.
As for the tablet i don't see anything the tablet could do that a cheap netbook or desktop could do, except maybe cost more. in the end its not about the tech, its about actually stimulating the child's mind, really interacting with them instead of just handing them some more technocrap and sending them to their rooms.
I had mine build their own desktops, showing them along the way what each piece was and explaining how it worked, I loaded up modding tools to show them how code was translated into what they saw on the screen, etc and now while the oldest has many friends that are having to take remedial computer classes he gets extra points being a TA and helping show the others how to properly research on the net. its not the tech, its actually spending time with the kids that counts.
I think the Helix song will work better in this case...Gimme an F..I..N..E..whats ya got? FINE!, and what we gonna do? FINE YOU!
BTW you know you're old if you actually remember that song, sadly I saw the title and it instantly popped into my head. Hell I heard them playing AC/DC on the muzak channel at the local Walmart the other day, you know you're old when the "subversive' music you grew up on is now played for shoppers at the Wally World.
Well when we have feds go after librarians for lists of who checked out books, we have constitution free zones that cover 30% of Americans and NDAA which states they can lock you away with ZERO trial if they stick the right label on you? I'm sorry but this librarian is hopelessly naive if she thinks all this wouldn't end up on someone's list somewhere. Remember it is NOT paranoia if they really are out to get you and everything we have seen from PATRIOT on up would bear out the assumption that if you don't get in line and wave the flag like a good drone you can end up on somebody's list.
I'm just glad my grandfather and his brothers who fought the Nazis in WWII aren't here to see this crap, hell you could probably power the entire southern USA by wrapping them in copper as i'm sure they are spinning like tops in their graves.
Uhhh...haven't run windows in many years I take it? Win 7 runs just fine on a circa 2004 Sempron with 1.5Gb of RAM, I know this because i'm running it. it don't have aero but then again you ain't getting the bling bling on a Linux system with a lousy IGP.
But hey if you want to waste your time reading about a guy that made Linux run like hammered shit on a VCR remote, that's cool, but frankly articles like this does NOT make Linux look good, it makes it look like a toy for geekers to fiddle with. i mean I can post youtube Videos of a guy getting Win 7 to run on a Pentium II but seriously who cares? Hell there is even a guy who managed to upgrade every single version of Windows from 1.0 to Win 7 and the thing actually runs but again kinda pointless.