I just have to say I'm glad I'm not the only one that calls it a Fisher Price interface. Half the time I say that about a fresh XP install and I get strange looks or surprised laughs. That is really my only major complaint about XP (beyond the standard MS issues that have plagued every version of Windows) and it is easy to revert back to a simple interface. I fail to see where MS is going with their Office 2007 and Vista nonsense...they tout how expensive it is to relearn an interface as reason not to switch from MS products, and then they have retarded blind monkeys redesign all of their interfaces. I loathe Office 2007 ribbon shit.
That is my biggest love on the Linux systems is that I can tweak my UI to be exactly as I want it to make me the most productive, and my biggest bitch is when I do an upgrade that defaults to new settings or undoes all of my tweakings. Thankfully my interest in tinkering generally overrides my frustration in having to go retweak new settings. MS doesn't make for a very good tinker friendly UI.
I would also point out, as no one ever here does. That there ARE indeed two sides to every story. It amuses me that anytime the opposing party tries to get any of their story out it turns into frothing mouthed shouting about how they are evil and trying to haxor the wiki. Just because you don't agree with their side of the story does not mean that they are lying all the time. I hate to break it to everyone here, but the folks that actually work in these positions are actually likely to have additional information as well. When you get into that everyone is a puppet mentality and you just stomp and shout and wimper...well...it just makes you a puppet for the other side, congrats...just hope that you have strings attached rather than someones hand up your ass like a muppet.
That said, I don't really agree with a lot of what is going on. But let us stop for a minute. Fake press releases, people tossing softball pitch questions to Bush for an easy win answer, and all of the White House trickery that has been going on is FAR worse than some government employees going to wiki and editing things. To be honest, it is probably not even related to some super secret evil order to go forth and edit wiki. It probably is a bunch of people just doing their job sick of frothing mouthed knee jerk asshats screaming about how they are all evil and should go to hell/jail/die/whatever. Once again...reality check folks...there really are bad people in the world trying to kill eachother for not so legitimate reasons, and many of them did wind up in Gitmo. This isn't to say that innocent people didn't get grabbed too, or that we are even handling the situation correctly, just that there really are psychotic killers that are locked up there and that we need to find a better solution than "turn em all loose" or "keep everyone locked up forever".
Uhm...there is an economics lesson here. If there wasn't such an insane profit margin on it then nowhere near as much of it would be produced. When you make it more profitable to grow legitimate crops (corn, wheat, etc) on the same land then that is what will be grown. But the war on drugs makes it insanely profitable to grow drugs on any piece of land. If the drugs weren't so valuable the CIA/DEA/FBI wouldn't be able to make so much money and have so much influence from moving them about.
If you spend $10 growing cocaine vs $10 growing corn, and you can sell the cocaine for $40,000 and the corn for $30 what are you going to grow? Now lets undo this disaster war on drugs shit. Now You can sell the cocaine for $30 or the corn for $30. But there are FAR more buyers for corn than cocaine...guess what you will grow.
Well...unfortunately welcome to the wild wild world of classifications. There is no way to really verify that there isn't additional classified material concerning the plane. This is going to remain true of almost all military related things. Hypothetically things may have been denied in closed rooms with foreign governments based on the capabilities and limitations of a particular device (not limiting this to just aircraft). If it was released later that those capabilities DID exist at the time it could easily lead to sticky situations.
In terms of the summary my more immediate concern was for the people rather than the aircraft itself. A big part of the speed/heat problem is friction, and that friction is drastically reduced at very high altitudes. I have had the pleasure to visit the Aviation Museum in Macon GA near Robins AFB. They have parts of the flight suit that the crew had to wear. It is a very thick rubber suit pressure thing. Now if you have been a flyer recently...imagine big bubba taking up 2 seats dealing with the physiological challenges of traveling at high speed at high altitude. I imagine that will open a whole world of liabilities.
Except that in their deal to purchase IE from its original owner they promised a cut of the profits from its sale. MS signed the contract and then said "oh by the way, we will be giving it out for free. So lets see 25% of 0 is 0 so we owe you 0! Thank you for doing business with Microsoft"
My same day surgery where I spent a grand total of 10 hours in the hospital from checkin to check out would have cost over $20,000 without insurance. Now, say the insurance cost isn't subsidised by an employer and we will go ahead and skip the adjustment for age as it tends to grow to a disturbing level. Those 65 years of healthy you talk about would cost me approximately $780,000 to the insurance company. So there seems to be a pretty unbalanced pay/benefit here that you are complaining about. Now, I will also remind you that even in a privitized system you are subsidizing the patients who don't pay anyways, but you are subsidizing them at corporate profits level.
I think most of the people that scream at socialist health care have never bothered to really dig deep into what goes on here in privatized healthcare land. Hospitals cannot turn people away for not having insurance (good thing IMHO). However, this means that I could go in, get expensive treatment, and then go bankrupt and leave the premium paying members to foot my bill. Emergency Rooms are even worse because of the higher operating costs. So here in privatized healthcare land, by purchasing insurance you joined the pseudo-socialist healthcare system because you are subsidizing everyone else who refuses to buy insurance. I for one would prefer to pay the taxes as they should be less than the insurance premium because it is spread across everyone. It would also undo the mess that is "benefits" in hiring packages. I am certain there are drawbacks in socialist healthcare as well, and I think the proper solution is somewhere between privatized and socialized, but we seem to have taken the worst of both worlds and then wave our flag about how it is the best.
Here is another great story on insurance coverage. We may not have the worst, but we clearly do not have the best.
I wish I could mod you up. I am unnerved by the UAV surveillance of the public that is becomming all the rage, but the leap into "Don't laze me bro!" is a bit far fetched.
1. Can I get more (something we are having a shortage of) before we sent it to (some other place). Is nowhere near the same as the two emotional examples you tried to equate what I said to.
2. That is funny. While I agree that what many US companies are doing overseas is abhorrent, I was pretty sure the bombing countries into the stone age on a "Crusade" with little justification and supporting terrorists and the like is what gave us the bad image. I mean, I always assumed the deals like Iran Contra, or training terrorists to fight soviets, or standing up crazy murderous dictators to stop communism is where things really fell apart.
600,000 dead in Iraq doesn't even begin to compare to 20,000 dead in Bhopal India.
3. I seriously hope you aren't trying to say Chavez and Castro are good guys. I hate to break it to you but the ultra leftist crowd is quite capable of the same level of horrific evil that the "capitalist dogs" are. Spend some time talking to people who escaped the U.S.S.R about that one.
Americans like yourself amuse me to no end. Don't fool yourself, this China business is nothing more than a petty distraction from our own transition to a surveillance society. Why are they making noise about Yahoo and a few journalists instead of the huge number of chemical companies operating dirty overseas? I hate to break it to you buddy, but what good are you going to do for the world while being waterboarded in gitmo for speaking highly of leftist wack jobs? How does a doctor treat patients while he is sick with pneumonia? If we can't keep our own nation healthy and free then we cannot begin to fix the things you complain about. If we cannot protect our freedom, corruption in our government will continue to thrive and allow the things like what you complain about to continue unchecked.
Why can't we get a law passed that says companies can't do that here?! I mean seriously, not to be cold, but I don't give a crap about Yahoo or anyone turning over data on chinese dissidents to chinese authorities when there is nothing stoping them from turning over the data on US dissidents to US authorities. Christ, they are even trying to grant the telcos immunity for doing that here in the US while trying to prevent it in china. WTF? Can I please get a little more concern for the rights, privacy, and freedom of our own damned citizens before we go off pretending to be dudly do right elsewhere? This world police shit is what keeps getting us in trouble in the first place.
Shit, I would even go so far as to argue that a working copy of Windows makes it worth less. So maybe we can brick a system by installing Windows. If it is Vista then we can call it pebbles since it doesn't even have the value of a brick at that point.
As I gather from the history of this, is that Bush made his little lets go to Mars speech, the Bush lackies in NASA did a hack n slash job on other projects to provide for their glorious leader and now congress is saying "hold your fucking horses and lets finish the things we started". This is coupled with a little bit of "we don't want to send people into space, we have had enough disasters". Now demonstrating the same ingorance you seem to be mocking...you somehow equate this to America tells the planet what they can or can't do. Yes...they are discussing an worldwide ban on humans on Mars in the US Congress...because it would be WAY to damn difficult to read that they are discussing banning funding for projects that have a sole purpose of sending a man to Mars...remember kiddies...kneejerk lefties act before thinking just as much as kneejerk righties...both sound equally assinine and this is why we will be perpetually stuck with both.
As would your medical insurance company. They will know that you have it and drop your ass before you get expensive, or maybe just hike your rates through the roof for the potential development. Seems fair right?
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The PS3/Xbox thing is entirely different in that the money is made off of derivitive goods. The comparison of selling below mfg cost for books would only apply if the real money was in a secondary good required to make the book usable. The PS3/Xbox thing is more comparable to the razor/blade issue than it is the digital goods thing.
Specifically in a case like e-books, if they can't sell it at a price that will turn a profit, then the product simply goes away and will not be produced. I am just tired of the whining about digital good X should cost 10% of the normal good because its digital argument. It is a load of crap put forth by whiners that have a horrid grasp of economics. Do you really think that 90% of the cost of your physical book is the physical materials? Go look at the price of a 300 page college text and tell me with a straight face that the price has much of anything to do with the materials used and not the content.
The New York Times v. Sullivan determined the public's right to free speech overrides the public officials desire to not be defamed UNLESS they can prove that the indvidual was acting with malice.
Well unfortunately for you, rational thought was declared a "thought crime" already. Please report to a processing center where we can waterboard the intelligence right out of you. They are after all "gathering intelligence" right?
In all seriousness its depressing to see this trite on front page like this. Talk about lost credibility. I frequently point people to the more technical/science related articles on what the government or megacorps may be up to and then this kind of insanity shows up. I am all for supporting sane, measured, RATIONAL attempts at combating terrorism. Big brother methods of the right and head in the sand methods of the left are both incedibly unappealing.
So members of government are only allowed to do it to each other? Or be paid members of the media? Please... Plenty of false accusations to go around...
Well I was afraid people would latch onto the bandwidth thing. So...do you know of a data center anywhere that only pays for usage? Most that I know of have multiple redundant big pipes that cost large amounts of money regardless if there are 1s or 0s traveling up and down. I will also point out what kind of cost nightmare the Telcos can make this if they get their way. Also consider that none of these are likely to be sent in plain text files and are likely to be sent in a heavier format. You are also comparing 2 minutes worth of content at $0.99 vs an entire books worth of content, and as I said the largest portion of the cost is not the distribution, it is in what is on the media. The same reason you can get a blank CD for squat but a music CD costs considerably more. (even the non RIAA shaftings) I can tell you if I were a writer or a musician and people wanted to pay me for a few pennies over the cost of my work I would tell them to go write the book/music themselves.
I don't doubt digital distribution costs less, but having worked on enough of that gear and seen the contracts and the digits behind the $ for data centers and associated support... It isn't the "almost free" that people seem to think it is. People associate digital distribution with the $30/month they pay for residential surface.
There is tons of evidence that they made it to the US. Google around for it. They have found evidence as far in as Oklahoma. And they most certainly did beat that lost fool thinking he found India.
Re:not so much pricing of the unit, as the content
on
Hands-On With The Kindle
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
All I can say is take an economics class. You aren't entirely off base, but a good microeconomics class will pretty much explain why it is as it is and why your points aren't entirely accurate. But the key point is that you seem to think that you are paying more for the materials than the content and also ignoring the costs of servers/bandwidth/etc. If I were to open my own "Sahara" book store and sell every e-book for $1 how long do you think it would be before I went under from having smoking servers, angry employees wanting to get paid, and a disgustingly large electric and bandwidth bill? The "e" part only takes out one tiny slice of the cost...the actual printing...which is pretty small over a large enough production. You are still paying an author, a publisher, a retailer, and all the associated employees in getting the book from draft to print and all the marketing in between.
I agree that the price of ebooks will likely come down as the demand for them increases, but I doubt they will get to be as cheap as you want them.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because we know that all of those science geeks didn't grow up on those very same fictional works.
I just have to say I'm glad I'm not the only one that calls it a Fisher Price interface. Half the time I say that about a fresh XP install and I get strange looks or surprised laughs. That is really my only major complaint about XP (beyond the standard MS issues that have plagued every version of Windows) and it is easy to revert back to a simple interface. I fail to see where MS is going with their Office 2007 and Vista nonsense...they tout how expensive it is to relearn an interface as reason not to switch from MS products, and then they have retarded blind monkeys redesign all of their interfaces. I loathe Office 2007 ribbon shit.
That is my biggest love on the Linux systems is that I can tweak my UI to be exactly as I want it to make me the most productive, and my biggest bitch is when I do an upgrade that defaults to new settings or undoes all of my tweakings. Thankfully my interest in tinkering generally overrides my frustration in having to go retweak new settings. MS doesn't make for a very good tinker friendly UI.
I would also point out, as no one ever here does. That there ARE indeed two sides to every story. It amuses me that anytime the opposing party tries to get any of their story out it turns into frothing mouthed shouting about how they are evil and trying to haxor the wiki. Just because you don't agree with their side of the story does not mean that they are lying all the time. I hate to break it to everyone here, but the folks that actually work in these positions are actually likely to have additional information as well. When you get into that everyone is a puppet mentality and you just stomp and shout and wimper...well...it just makes you a puppet for the other side, congrats...just hope that you have strings attached rather than someones hand up your ass like a muppet.
That said, I don't really agree with a lot of what is going on. But let us stop for a minute. Fake press releases, people tossing softball pitch questions to Bush for an easy win answer, and all of the White House trickery that has been going on is FAR worse than some government employees going to wiki and editing things. To be honest, it is probably not even related to some super secret evil order to go forth and edit wiki. It probably is a bunch of people just doing their job sick of frothing mouthed knee jerk asshats screaming about how they are all evil and should go to hell/jail/die/whatever. Once again...reality check folks...there really are bad people in the world trying to kill eachother for not so legitimate reasons, and many of them did wind up in Gitmo. This isn't to say that innocent people didn't get grabbed too, or that we are even handling the situation correctly, just that there really are psychotic killers that are locked up there and that we need to find a better solution than "turn em all loose" or "keep everyone locked up forever".
Uhm...there is an economics lesson here. If there wasn't such an insane profit margin on it then nowhere near as much of it would be produced. When you make it more profitable to grow legitimate crops (corn, wheat, etc) on the same land then that is what will be grown. But the war on drugs makes it insanely profitable to grow drugs on any piece of land. If the drugs weren't so valuable the CIA/DEA/FBI wouldn't be able to make so much money and have so much influence from moving them about.
If you spend $10 growing cocaine vs $10 growing corn, and you can sell the cocaine for $40,000 and the corn for $30 what are you going to grow? Now lets undo this disaster war on drugs shit. Now You can sell the cocaine for $30 or the corn for $30. But there are FAR more buyers for corn than cocaine...guess what you will grow.
know their knot!
Well...unfortunately welcome to the wild wild world of classifications. There is no way to really verify that there isn't additional classified material concerning the plane. This is going to remain true of almost all military related things. Hypothetically things may have been denied in closed rooms with foreign governments based on the capabilities and limitations of a particular device (not limiting this to just aircraft). If it was released later that those capabilities DID exist at the time it could easily lead to sticky situations.
In terms of the summary my more immediate concern was for the people rather than the aircraft itself. A big part of the speed/heat problem is friction, and that friction is drastically reduced at very high altitudes. I have had the pleasure to visit the Aviation Museum in Macon GA near Robins AFB. They have parts of the flight suit that the crew had to wear. It is a very thick rubber suit pressure thing. Now if you have been a flyer recently...imagine big bubba taking up 2 seats dealing with the physiological challenges of traveling at high speed at high altitude. I imagine that will open a whole world of liabilities.
Fireworks being fired from weather balloons. Case closed. Don't ask any more questions.
Chicken Nano-Soup for the Soul I think would have probably been better. Lines up a bit more with the normal title and the story. You fail at funny.
Except that in their deal to purchase IE from its original owner they promised a cut of the profits from its sale. MS signed the contract and then said "oh by the way, we will be giving it out for free. So lets see 25% of 0 is 0 so we owe you 0! Thank you for doing business with Microsoft"
My same day surgery where I spent a grand total of 10 hours in the hospital from checkin to check out would have cost over $20,000 without insurance. Now, say the insurance cost isn't subsidised by an employer and we will go ahead and skip the adjustment for age as it tends to grow to a disturbing level. Those 65 years of healthy you talk about would cost me approximately $780,000 to the insurance company. So there seems to be a pretty unbalanced pay/benefit here that you are complaining about. Now, I will also remind you that even in a privitized system you are subsidizing the patients who don't pay anyways, but you are subsidizing them at corporate profits level.
I think most of the people that scream at socialist health care have never bothered to really dig deep into what goes on here in privatized healthcare land. Hospitals cannot turn people away for not having insurance (good thing IMHO). However, this means that I could go in, get expensive treatment, and then go bankrupt and leave the premium paying members to foot my bill. Emergency Rooms are even worse because of the higher operating costs. So here in privatized healthcare land, by purchasing insurance you joined the pseudo-socialist healthcare system because you are subsidizing everyone else who refuses to buy insurance. I for one would prefer to pay the taxes as they should be less than the insurance premium because it is spread across everyone. It would also undo the mess that is "benefits" in hiring packages. I am certain there are drawbacks in socialist healthcare as well, and I think the proper solution is somewhere between privatized and socialized, but we seem to have taken the worst of both worlds and then wave our flag about how it is the best.
Here is another great story on insurance coverage. We may not have the worst, but we clearly do not have the best.
I wish I could mod you up. I am unnerved by the UAV surveillance of the public that is becomming all the rage, but the leap into "Don't laze me bro!" is a bit far fetched.
Nice try.
1. Can I get more (something we are having a shortage of) before we sent it to (some other place). Is nowhere near the same as the two emotional examples you tried to equate what I said to.
2. That is funny. While I agree that what many US companies are doing overseas is abhorrent, I was pretty sure the bombing countries into the stone age on a "Crusade" with little justification and supporting terrorists and the like is what gave us the bad image. I mean, I always assumed the deals like Iran Contra, or training terrorists to fight soviets, or standing up crazy murderous dictators to stop communism is where things really fell apart. 600,000 dead in Iraq doesn't even begin to compare to 20,000 dead in Bhopal India.
3. I seriously hope you aren't trying to say Chavez and Castro are good guys. I hate to break it to you but the ultra leftist crowd is quite capable of the same level of horrific evil that the "capitalist dogs" are. Spend some time talking to people who escaped the U.S.S.R about that one.
Americans like yourself amuse me to no end. Don't fool yourself, this China business is nothing more than a petty distraction from our own transition to a surveillance society. Why are they making noise about Yahoo and a few journalists instead of the huge number of chemical companies operating dirty overseas? I hate to break it to you buddy, but what good are you going to do for the world while being waterboarded in gitmo for speaking highly of leftist wack jobs? How does a doctor treat patients while he is sick with pneumonia? If we can't keep our own nation healthy and free then we cannot begin to fix the things you complain about. If we cannot protect our freedom, corruption in our government will continue to thrive and allow the things like what you complain about to continue unchecked.
Why can't we get a law passed that says companies can't do that here?! I mean seriously, not to be cold, but I don't give a crap about Yahoo or anyone turning over data on chinese dissidents to chinese authorities when there is nothing stoping them from turning over the data on US dissidents to US authorities. Christ, they are even trying to grant the telcos immunity for doing that here in the US while trying to prevent it in china. WTF? Can I please get a little more concern for the rights, privacy, and freedom of our own damned citizens before we go off pretending to be dudly do right elsewhere? This world police shit is what keeps getting us in trouble in the first place.
Shit, I would even go so far as to argue that a working copy of Windows makes it worth less. So maybe we can brick a system by installing Windows. If it is Vista then we can call it pebbles since it doesn't even have the value of a brick at that point.
As I gather from the history of this, is that Bush made his little lets go to Mars speech, the Bush lackies in NASA did a hack n slash job on other projects to provide for their glorious leader and now congress is saying "hold your fucking horses and lets finish the things we started". This is coupled with a little bit of "we don't want to send people into space, we have had enough disasters". Now demonstrating the same ingorance you seem to be mocking...you somehow equate this to America tells the planet what they can or can't do. Yes...they are discussing an worldwide ban on humans on Mars in the US Congress...because it would be WAY to damn difficult to read that they are discussing banning funding for projects that have a sole purpose of sending a man to Mars...remember kiddies...kneejerk lefties act before thinking just as much as kneejerk righties...both sound equally assinine and this is why we will be perpetually stuck with both.
As would your medical insurance company. They will know that you have it and drop your ass before you get expensive, or maybe just hike your rates through the roof for the potential development. Seems fair right?
I'm not sure what you are trying to say. The PS3/Xbox thing is entirely different in that the money is made off of derivitive goods. The comparison of selling below mfg cost for books would only apply if the real money was in a secondary good required to make the book usable. The PS3/Xbox thing is more comparable to the razor/blade issue than it is the digital goods thing.
Specifically in a case like e-books, if they can't sell it at a price that will turn a profit, then the product simply goes away and will not be produced. I am just tired of the whining about digital good X should cost 10% of the normal good because its digital argument. It is a load of crap put forth by whiners that have a horrid grasp of economics. Do you really think that 90% of the cost of your physical book is the physical materials? Go look at the price of a 300 page college text and tell me with a straight face that the price has much of anything to do with the materials used and not the content.
The New York Times v. Sullivan determined the public's right to free speech overrides the public officials desire to not be defamed UNLESS they can prove that the indvidual was acting with malice.
Well unfortunately for you, rational thought was declared a "thought crime" already. Please report to a processing center where we can waterboard the intelligence right out of you. They are after all "gathering intelligence" right?
In all seriousness its depressing to see this trite on front page like this. Talk about lost credibility. I frequently point people to the more technical/science related articles on what the government or megacorps may be up to and then this kind of insanity shows up. I am all for supporting sane, measured, RATIONAL attempts at combating terrorism. Big brother methods of the right and head in the sand methods of the left are both incedibly unappealing.
So members of government are only allowed to do it to each other? Or be paid members of the media? Please... Plenty of false accusations to go around...
Seems to me that is the "right to privacy". The ability to question the government without reprisal like this and all that...
Well I was afraid people would latch onto the bandwidth thing. So...do you know of a data center anywhere that only pays for usage? Most that I know of have multiple redundant big pipes that cost large amounts of money regardless if there are 1s or 0s traveling up and down. I will also point out what kind of cost nightmare the Telcos can make this if they get their way. Also consider that none of these are likely to be sent in plain text files and are likely to be sent in a heavier format. You are also comparing 2 minutes worth of content at $0.99 vs an entire books worth of content, and as I said the largest portion of the cost is not the distribution, it is in what is on the media. The same reason you can get a blank CD for squat but a music CD costs considerably more. (even the non RIAA shaftings) I can tell you if I were a writer or a musician and people wanted to pay me for a few pennies over the cost of my work I would tell them to go write the book/music themselves.
I don't doubt digital distribution costs less, but having worked on enough of that gear and seen the contracts and the digits behind the $ for data centers and associated support... It isn't the "almost free" that people seem to think it is. People associate digital distribution with the $30/month they pay for residential surface.
From what I have read they track what you have purchased and can redownload previously purchased books.
There is tons of evidence that they made it to the US. Google around for it. They have found evidence as far in as Oklahoma. And they most certainly did beat that lost fool thinking he found India.
All I can say is take an economics class. You aren't entirely off base, but a good microeconomics class will pretty much explain why it is as it is and why your points aren't entirely accurate. But the key point is that you seem to think that you are paying more for the materials than the content and also ignoring the costs of servers/bandwidth/etc. If I were to open my own "Sahara" book store and sell every e-book for $1 how long do you think it would be before I went under from having smoking servers, angry employees wanting to get paid, and a disgustingly large electric and bandwidth bill? The "e" part only takes out one tiny slice of the cost...the actual printing...which is pretty small over a large enough production. You are still paying an author, a publisher, a retailer, and all the associated employees in getting the book from draft to print and all the marketing in between.
I agree that the price of ebooks will likely come down as the demand for them increases, but I doubt they will get to be as cheap as you want them.