The text book prices in USA are outrageous, and there is severe conflict of interest in profs recommending books and getting kick backs from the publisher.
Here's the problem: You live in a country where you can make lots of money working at MacDonalds, and your parents could be on a six digit income. Then there is a kid in China who worked for $300 a month at Foxconn to save up money to go to university. That kid in China can't afford to pay US prices because he or she isn't paid a US salary, so the identical book sells for a lot less in China.
And some smartass thinks they should be able to buy books in China, priced to be bought by kids who worked hard for $300 a month at Foxconn, and be able to sell them for the same money plus a generous markup to rich kids in the USA.
Precisely Bruce Willi's point when he wants to leave his music collection to his daughters (computerworld, cnn [cnn.com] dailymail [dailymail.co.uk] yahoo [yahoo.com]).
It was a hoax, but the point is quite valid that a famous movie star with a keen interest in music (Bruce Willis has actually recorded music to his name) could easily have a music collection that he paid $100,000 or $200,000 for. And there is no sensible reason why his children should be able to inherit that collection if it was all CDs, but not if it was all dutifully paid for downloads.
And _anybody_ who likes music a lot and is not very rich could easily have $20,000 worth of legally paid for music.
"But my ex-husband is going to kill me! Please, get me out of here!"
In that scenario, if anything bad happens, it's the fault of the ex-husband. And how exactly is this scenario different from being in trouble while having an empty tank. If you want to be able to use your car to get away from violent husbands you need to keep your car in working order.
It is perfectly possible for someone extremely competent in C++ to write code that someone else, with an equal level of knowledge and experience, can't make heads or tails of without some serious review time.
That person would be extremely competent in C++, but totally incompetent in software development. And yes, I've seen some of those.
I have written bits of C++ code (not many) that are totally non-obvious and hard to understand. But only if I had a very good reason, and only with documentation added why this was done and how it works.
The Soviet Union had very low crime. Repressive dictatorships with police/enforcers on every corner tend to have low crime.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's obviously easy for a dictatorship to have a _reported_ crime rate that is exactly as high or as low as the dictator wishes; but changing the actual crime rate is a lot harder.
Well, if I was prime minister in Britain, this is how I would change gun and weapons laws: Everyone is allowed to carry weapons. But when you carry a weapon, you have to be polite. Someone unarmed can call you a motherf***er with very little consequence; if someone armed with a weapon does the same thing, they go straight to jail. If you are not happy with the way things are going in a shop and shout at the sales person, that's Ok if you are unarmed. Shouting at a sales person while carrying a weapon = automatic jail sentence. Complaining about bad service in a restaurant? Don't do it while carrying a weapon. Doing anything that could be seen as threatening another person while carrying a weapon = automatic jail sentence.
Yes, I think that would be a very polite society. Except for those not carrying weapons, they could be as rude and impolite as they want.
Some of those 25-line programs are not so good either. If you really think students write good code, get a job as a TA and grade some assignments.
Here's a seven liner published at thedailywtf.com. Some presumably professional programmer managed to write a function removing space characters at the end of a string with worst case quadratic runtime, linear stack usage, a possible crash, and incorrect results in border cases.
What if Apple stops manufacturing a connector that works on old models, forcing buyers to discard their entire device and buy a new one?
That's what you have consumer protection laws for. In the EU, when you buy a product it has to be free of defects for a reasonable amount of time. Not being able to buy a replacement for a broken charger for example would be a pretty big defect. Actually, it might be normal for a charger to break after some time, but not being able to buy a new one would not be normal.
I do not understand how society could even function if you cannot at least quote with citations someone else without breaking the law.
That's not really a problem. I don't think I _ever_ used a quote from a CD or a DVD that I bought. The problem is that you break the law (apparently) by ripping any music onto your computer, and then putting it on your iPod. Which people have been doing for years and years and years. And "people" includes every single MP except for the most technical retarded, and every single judge in the country except for the most technical retarded.
First, they want to change laws that make basically everybody in the UK a criminal. It seems that when you buy a CD, ripping it onto your Mac makes you a criminal, downloading it onto your iPod makes you a criminal again. Same when you download music from Amazon and put that onto your iPod (or your Android phone, doesn't make a difference). Clearly if everyone went to jail who did that, then the only ones left outside would be half a dozen pensioners. (On the other hand, if all those criminals who happen to be judges were taken to court first, then the whole thing wouldn't work).
The other thing that the government wants is to make it easier for businesses to use other people's work. Like take the works of some professional photographer, remove all the metadata, and then voila! you can't find out anymore who created it, so businesses are now free to use it.
So fine, Apple has designed a novel powering device with a non-standard connector. But what sort of intellectual property protection mechanism is Apple using to protect others from offering the same functionality at a reduced price? Is Apple's desire to make more profits more of a priority to protect, rather than the desire of customers to obtain low cost products?
I don't think Apple minds if people get low cost products. But Apple _does_ mind if people buy low cost products to plug into their iPhones or iPads, the cheap product doesn't work, and Apple gets the complaints. That's what the licensing is about. It seems that the project starter couldn't convince Apple that he would sell things that people won't complain about to Apple.
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism [wikipedia.org] sex offenders have a recidivism rate of 5.3% (or 43% when considering any crime rather then sex crimes) compared with 68% for non-sex crime recidivism.
Rape has a very low conviction rate. Are you counting how many people are convicted again, or how many people commit a crime again? For crimes with low conviction rate, the first rate would be artificially lower.
For only $550M, why didn't Google buy the patents? That's pocket change for them (even for Sergey personally), and I'm sure Android infringes on one or more of the patents. Google could indemnify all Android manufacturers and software developers.
That's very simple: If Google/Apple owned these patents, they could probably blackmail Apple/Google into paying say $1bn for patent licensing. So now we do the maths: If Apple/Google lets Google/Apple buy the patents, it will cost them $1bn. That means, it would be better for Apple/Google to spend $1.99 bn themselves, because then they get $1bn from Google/Apple, and it costs them only $990 million. Still, they lose almost $1bn. By co-operating, the total cost is $550 million, shared between 12 companies. That's an awful lot cheaper.
I'm proud to say that my solution to preventing this from happening is to never place a literal last in a condition, instead it always goes first like: if (1 = i)
My solution is to turn on all sensible warnings in Clang, and set "warnings = errors". if (i = 1) won't compile, and neither will if ((i == 1)). Hope you can figure out why the second one gives a warning. That solution is much better than writing code that is hard to read.
Bullshit. While Intel does occasionally bin processors into lower speeds to fulfill quotas and such, often times those processors are binned lower because they can't pass the QA process at their full speed. But they can pass the QA process when running at a lower speed. These processors were meant to be the same as the more expensive line, but due to minor defects can't run stably or reliably at the higher speed. Or at least not enough for Intel to sell them at full speed.
According to an Intel employee who posted this years ago, sometimes you get complete wafers that work fine at a lower speed and not at all at the intended speed, but you also get chips where a tiny amount of transistors don't work at the intended speed. The second type is the problem for overclockers. These chips will run at high speed most of the time, and only very rarely will they go wrong.
When your 8 year old kid is killed in a school shooting feel free to let people walk around you, while your burrying them, yelling that your kid is burning in hell eternally. Till then maybe you should show a little compassion for the people it's actually happend to.
I promise when some madman takes an automatic gun and lots of ammunition, visits the Westboro Baptist Church and kills every single one of these f***ers, I won't be gloating.
Meh - seems like a ridiculous standard to hold any GPS provider to - "I want turn by turn directions, and for you to redirect me when I make a wrong turn, but I don't want you to know where I'm located or where I'm headed". I guess it could be implemented, but if that's the European standard, it seems a bit silly to me. Whatever.
It's not "I don't want you to know where I'm located". It's "I don't want you to store that the location I give you is mine. I also don't want you to store that the location I gave you today was given to you by the same person that gave you a different location yesterday, so that you can't correlate different locations".
One guy in Scottsdale collected >30 tickets without having to pay because he wore a gorilla mask when he drove past the cameras. He admitted to owning the car and the mask, but denied being at the wheel and no one could prove that he was behind the wheel when the photos were snapped.
In Germany, he could and would have been ordered to keep a diary of who is driving his car at what times. So for the next ticket they would check his diary, and either the diary says who was driving and the driver is fined, or he is fined for not keeping the diary.
My mother was driving through baltimore a few years back. A couple weeks later a red light camera ticket came in the mail. My parents paid it, only to have it show up again in their mailbox. At first they were really mad that the city screwed up and sent multiple tickets, even though the first payment went through....then they realized the timestamp was about 10 minutes later than the first. Yep, my mother accidentally ran the same stoplight twice in a row because she was lost...
Don't know if the story is true... Guy drives along at 50 miles in a 50 mile zone past a speeding camera... and the camera flashes. That can't be right so he turns around, checks that he goes exactly 50, and again the camera flashes. Next week he gets a letter with two photos and two tickets. Police officer writes: "One of our speeding cameras was set incorrectly to 30 miles per hour instead of 50, so it took photos of almost everybody. Now we don't know how this happened, but we have _two_ photos clearly showing that you are driving without a seatbelt, so here are two tickets..."
Will he be issued a diplomatic passport if he does become a senator?
I don't think foreign politicians, included elected politicians, have any special legal state anywhere outside their own country. It's diplomates, embassy employees etc.
Where he'll stay just long enough for Swedish authorities to cover their collective asses before he's turned over to the US for lyn^W^W^W*W*Wtrial.
I don't know Swedish law. German law is quite clear: If you are extradited from country X to Germany, (1) you can only be taken to court for whatever claims were made against you in the extradition request, and (2) you have the right to be returned to country X. So if this was between the UK and Germany and not UK and Sweden, he could be extradited to Germany, maybe put to jail for some time, and then he would have the absolute right to be returned to the UK when he leaves jail.
Who modded this informative?? A significant percentage of gift cards are never redeemed, more than enough to cover the retailers cut and then some.
Gift cards are not redeemed because it is often impractical, and they are forgotten. With iTunes gift cards, either you have an iTunes account or you don't. If you don't, you _know_ that you are not going to use the gift card, so you give it to someone who uses it. If you do, you add the gift card to your iTunes account and the money is used when you buy stuff.
You also seem to be confused by the words "gift card". When I buy iTunes gift cards, they are not gifts. I buy them for myself whenever they are offered with a discount, because that way I get an instant 20% rebate off all iTunes purchases. Lots of people buy gift cards for themselves for that reason. And if you ask people what they would like as a Christmas or birthday present, _nobody_ will say "gift cards for shop xxx" because cash is just better, but many will say "iTunes Gift cards" because that means the money will be used to buy apps, books and music (while cash might be spent on day to day things).
You claim that if you buy a gift card in a store, the store takes a "generous" cut. This is not the case. I am in a position where I order these gift cards for a large retail chain in the US. The margins on gift cards are 1 to 2 percent. So for that $50 gift card, the store profits 50 cents to a dollar. I wouldn't call that generous at all. The only reason we sell them is because people tend to not come in and only buy gift cards, they tend to also pick up greeting cards (a HUGE profit center, percentage wise) and other gift-related items at the same time.
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One of the most ironic parts of Atlas Shrugged is...
Any mention of "Atlas Shrugged" makes your post invalid.
The text book prices in USA are outrageous, and there is severe conflict of interest in profs recommending books and getting kick backs from the publisher.
Here's the problem: You live in a country where you can make lots of money working at MacDonalds, and your parents could be on a six digit income. Then there is a kid in China who worked for $300 a month at Foxconn to save up money to go to university. That kid in China can't afford to pay US prices because he or she isn't paid a US salary, so the identical book sells for a lot less in China.
And some smartass thinks they should be able to buy books in China, priced to be bought by kids who worked hard for $300 a month at Foxconn, and be able to sell them for the same money plus a generous markup to rich kids in the USA.
Precisely Bruce Willi's point when he wants to leave his music collection to his daughters (computerworld, cnn [cnn.com] dailymail [dailymail.co.uk] yahoo [yahoo.com]).
It was a hoax, but the point is quite valid that a famous movie star with a keen interest in music (Bruce Willis has actually recorded music to his name) could easily have a music collection that he paid $100,000 or $200,000 for. And there is no sensible reason why his children should be able to inherit that collection if it was all CDs, but not if it was all dutifully paid for downloads.
And _anybody_ who likes music a lot and is not very rich could easily have $20,000 worth of legally paid for music.
"But my ex-husband is going to kill me! Please, get me out of here!"
In that scenario, if anything bad happens, it's the fault of the ex-husband. And how exactly is this scenario different from being in trouble while having an empty tank. If you want to be able to use your car to get away from violent husbands you need to keep your car in working order.
It is perfectly possible for someone extremely competent in C++ to write code that someone else, with an equal level of knowledge and experience, can't make heads or tails of without some serious review time.
That person would be extremely competent in C++, but totally incompetent in software development. And yes, I've seen some of those.
I have written bits of C++ code (not many) that are totally non-obvious and hard to understand. But only if I had a very good reason, and only with documentation added why this was done and how it works.
The Soviet Union had very low crime. Repressive dictatorships with police/enforcers on every corner tend to have low crime.
I wouldn't be so sure. It's obviously easy for a dictatorship to have a _reported_ crime rate that is exactly as high or as low as the dictator wishes; but changing the actual crime rate is a lot harder.
An armed society is a polite society.
Well, if I was prime minister in Britain, this is how I would change gun and weapons laws: Everyone is allowed to carry weapons. But when you carry a weapon, you have to be polite. Someone unarmed can call you a motherf***er with very little consequence; if someone armed with a weapon does the same thing, they go straight to jail. If you are not happy with the way things are going in a shop and shout at the sales person, that's Ok if you are unarmed. Shouting at a sales person while carrying a weapon = automatic jail sentence. Complaining about bad service in a restaurant? Don't do it while carrying a weapon. Doing anything that could be seen as threatening another person while carrying a weapon = automatic jail sentence.
Yes, I think that would be a very polite society. Except for those not carrying weapons, they could be as rude and impolite as they want.
Some of those 25-line programs are not so good either. If you really think students write good code, get a job as a TA and grade some assignments.
Here's a seven liner published at thedailywtf.com. Some presumably professional programmer managed to write a function removing space characters at the end of a string with worst case quadratic runtime, linear stack usage, a possible crash, and incorrect results in border cases.
char *trim_right(char *str)
{
int len = strlen(str) - 1;
if(len == 0 || str[len] != ' ') return str;
str[strlen(str)-1] = '\0';
return trim_right(str);
}
What if Apple stops manufacturing a connector that works on old models, forcing buyers to discard their entire device and buy a new one?
That's what you have consumer protection laws for. In the EU, when you buy a product it has to be free of defects for a reasonable amount of time. Not being able to buy a replacement for a broken charger for example would be a pretty big defect. Actually, it might be normal for a charger to break after some time, but not being able to buy a new one would not be normal.
I do not understand how society could even function if you cannot at least quote with citations someone else without breaking the law.
That's not really a problem. I don't think I _ever_ used a quote from a CD or a DVD that I bought. The problem is that you break the law (apparently) by ripping any music onto your computer, and then putting it on your iPod. Which people have been doing for years and years and years. And "people" includes every single MP except for the most technical retarded, and every single judge in the country except for the most technical retarded.
First, they want to change laws that make basically everybody in the UK a criminal. It seems that when you buy a CD, ripping it onto your Mac makes you a criminal, downloading it onto your iPod makes you a criminal again. Same when you download music from Amazon and put that onto your iPod (or your Android phone, doesn't make a difference). Clearly if everyone went to jail who did that, then the only ones left outside would be half a dozen pensioners. (On the other hand, if all those criminals who happen to be judges were taken to court first, then the whole thing wouldn't work).
The other thing that the government wants is to make it easier for businesses to use other people's work. Like take the works of some professional photographer, remove all the metadata, and then voila! you can't find out anymore who created it, so businesses are now free to use it.
So fine, Apple has designed a novel powering device with a non-standard connector. But what sort of intellectual property protection mechanism is Apple using to protect others from offering the same functionality at a reduced price? Is Apple's desire to make more profits more of a priority to protect, rather than the desire of customers to obtain low cost products?
I don't think Apple minds if people get low cost products. But Apple _does_ mind if people buy low cost products to plug into their iPhones or iPads, the cheap product doesn't work, and Apple gets the complaints. That's what the licensing is about. It seems that the project starter couldn't convince Apple that he would sell things that people won't complain about to Apple.
Number one: not everyone has a computer in the UK believe it or not, particularly the over 40's.
But everyone on benefits has an iPhone, so what's your argument?
According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_offender#Recidivism [wikipedia.org] sex offenders have a recidivism rate of 5.3% (or 43% when considering any crime rather then sex crimes) compared with 68% for non-sex crime recidivism.
Rape has a very low conviction rate. Are you counting how many people are convicted again, or how many people commit a crime again? For crimes with low conviction rate, the first rate would be artificially lower.
For only $550M, why didn't Google buy the patents? That's pocket change for them (even for Sergey personally), and I'm sure Android infringes on one or more of the patents. Google could indemnify all Android manufacturers and software developers.
That's very simple: If Google/Apple owned these patents, they could probably blackmail Apple/Google into paying say $1bn for patent licensing. So now we do the maths: If Apple/Google lets Google/Apple buy the patents, it will cost them $1bn. That means, it would be better for Apple/Google to spend $1.99 bn themselves, because then they get $1bn from Google/Apple, and it costs them only $990 million. Still, they lose almost $1bn. By co-operating, the total cost is $550 million, shared between 12 companies. That's an awful lot cheaper.
I'm proud to say that my solution to preventing this from happening is to never place a literal last in a condition, instead it always goes first like: if (1 = i)
My solution is to turn on all sensible warnings in Clang, and set "warnings = errors". if (i = 1) won't compile, and neither will if ((i == 1)). Hope you can figure out why the second one gives a warning. That solution is much better than writing code that is hard to read.
Bullshit. While Intel does occasionally bin processors into lower speeds to fulfill quotas and such, often times those processors are binned lower because they can't pass the QA process at their full speed. But they can pass the QA process when running at a lower speed. These processors were meant to be the same as the more expensive line, but due to minor defects can't run stably or reliably at the higher speed. Or at least not enough for Intel to sell them at full speed.
According to an Intel employee who posted this years ago, sometimes you get complete wafers that work fine at a lower speed and not at all at the intended speed, but you also get chips where a tiny amount of transistors don't work at the intended speed. The second type is the problem for overclockers. These chips will run at high speed most of the time, and only very rarely will they go wrong.
When your 8 year old kid is killed in a school shooting feel free to let people walk around you, while your burrying them, yelling that your kid is burning in hell eternally. Till then maybe you should show a little compassion for the people it's actually happend to.
I promise when some madman takes an automatic gun and lots of ammunition, visits the Westboro Baptist Church and kills every single one of these f***ers, I won't be gloating.
Meh - seems like a ridiculous standard to hold any GPS provider to - "I want turn by turn directions, and for you to redirect me when I make a wrong turn, but I don't want you to know where I'm located or where I'm headed". I guess it could be implemented, but if that's the European standard, it seems a bit silly to me. Whatever.
It's not "I don't want you to know where I'm located". It's "I don't want you to store that the location I give you is mine. I also don't want you to store that the location I gave you today was given to you by the same person that gave you a different location yesterday, so that you can't correlate different locations".
One guy in Scottsdale collected >30 tickets without having to pay because he wore a gorilla mask when he drove past the cameras. He admitted to owning the car and the mask, but denied being at the wheel and no one could prove that he was behind the wheel when the photos were snapped.
In Germany, he could and would have been ordered to keep a diary of who is driving his car at what times. So for the next ticket they would check his diary, and either the diary says who was driving and the driver is fined, or he is fined for not keeping the diary.
My mother was driving through baltimore a few years back. A couple weeks later a red light camera ticket came in the mail. My parents paid it, only to have it show up again in their mailbox. At first they were really mad that the city screwed up and sent multiple tickets, even though the first payment went through....then they realized the timestamp was about 10 minutes later than the first. Yep, my mother accidentally ran the same stoplight twice in a row because she was lost...
Don't know if the story is true... Guy drives along at 50 miles in a 50 mile zone past a speeding camera... and the camera flashes. That can't be right so he turns around, checks that he goes exactly 50, and again the camera flashes. Next week he gets a letter with two photos and two tickets. Police officer writes: "One of our speeding cameras was set incorrectly to 30 miles per hour instead of 50, so it took photos of almost everybody. Now we don't know how this happened, but we have _two_ photos clearly showing that you are driving without a seatbelt, so here are two tickets..."
Will he be issued a diplomatic passport if he does become a senator?
I don't think foreign politicians, included elected politicians, have any special legal state anywhere outside their own country. It's diplomates, embassy employees etc.
Where he'll stay just long enough for Swedish authorities to cover their collective asses before he's turned over to the US for lyn^W^W^W*W*Wtrial.
I don't know Swedish law. German law is quite clear: If you are extradited from country X to Germany, (1) you can only be taken to court for whatever claims were made against you in the extradition request, and (2) you have the right to be returned to country X. So if this was between the UK and Germany and not UK and Sweden, he could be extradited to Germany, maybe put to jail for some time, and then he would have the absolute right to be returned to the UK when he leaves jail.
Who modded this informative?? A significant percentage of gift cards are never redeemed, more than enough to cover the retailers cut and then some.
Gift cards are not redeemed because it is often impractical, and they are forgotten. With iTunes gift cards, either you have an iTunes account or you don't. If you don't, you _know_ that you are not going to use the gift card, so you give it to someone who uses it. If you do, you add the gift card to your iTunes account and the money is used when you buy stuff.
You also seem to be confused by the words "gift card". When I buy iTunes gift cards, they are not gifts. I buy them for myself whenever they are offered with a discount, because that way I get an instant 20% rebate off all iTunes purchases. Lots of people buy gift cards for themselves for that reason. And if you ask people what they would like as a Christmas or birthday present, _nobody_ will say "gift cards for shop xxx" because cash is just better, but many will say "iTunes Gift cards" because that means the money will be used to buy apps, books and music (while cash might be spent on day to day things).
You claim that if you buy a gift card in a store, the store takes a "generous" cut. This is not the case. I am in a position where I order these gift cards for a large retail chain in the US. The margins on gift cards are 1 to 2 percent. So for that $50 gift card, the store profits 50 cents to a dollar. I wouldn't call that generous at all. The only reason we sell them is because people tend to not come in and only buy gift cards, they tend to also pick up greeting cards (a HUGE profit center, percentage wise) and other gift-related items at the same time.
So how can Boots sell a £25 gift card for £20?