Apple sells to the individual, of which you are correct in that not everybody has the kind of disposible income that Apple demands.
Microsoft sells to businesses. Businesses are interested in price-to-performance and utility, not popularity.
And because of this, Apple will never come close to Microsoft in terms of popularity. People may learn on a Mac, but the majority will work on Windows. Which means most business software is written for Windows, which means businesses will stick with Windows as they upgrade. This, compounded with the fact that Windows machines are cheaper, means that most people will buy Windows machines at home.
A select few industries still use Macs, because they were established that way. However, even those are slowly going to Windows, as more and more of the industry-specific programs get ported to Windows for marketshare purposes. The Windows monoculture is a positive feedback loop.
Windows isn't infalliable. But Apple is not the answer, though OSX may otherwise be.
Except that, ever since the 1984 debacle, Amazon's trustworthiness, especially in regards to the Kindle, has been slowly eroding away. I'm definitely waiting to see what Amazon does. If they do hand it over, deleting all of the personal data in my account may be worth considering.
True, it would've been inevitable. But it wouldn't be as pervasive as it is becoming, had the ads not been getting more and more annoying.
It's like referral spoofing. There are sites that forbid access without the proper referral string. And there's an extension on Firefox that lets people spoof their referral string. But that's not a particularly popular extension, because only a very small minority is inconvenienced by the problem and has a need to spoof referral string.
It's not about gun control, it's about gun education. I don't want just anybody to be carrying a gun, just as I don't want a random joe to be driving a bus. Guns are dangerous. When I see one out, I want to be assured that it's being operated by somebody who knows what they're doing.
I believe in the 2nd amendment, and I believe in the ability to legally carry and use weapons. In fact, it bothers me that carrying a concealed weapon can land someone in prison. But I don't believe that guns should be unregulated. I do believe they should be as common as cars, but at the same time, I also believe that the barrier to entry to drive should be much higher than it is now (periodic retests, mental and physical examinations, more "grades" of drivers, etc.). Make the gun exam hard. Make it so difficult only a few people in a thousand can pass. And make it so that only those people would be allowed to carry guns, law enforcement, military, or otherwise.
I don't care for the limitation of other less lethal weapons though, even though such laws do exist. And it's funny how nobody complains about knife laws, when the 2nd amendment encompasses all arms, not just or only firearms.
This may be modded funny, but it's a pretty good idea nonetheless. It's like a task list with the ability to log progress and generate reports And if you don't like your spouse's complaint, just do what the Mozilla devs do and close it as a feature.
But it's perfect for things that both of you recognize need improvement. Imagine being able to point to the chart and say, "See, honey? I'm improving! My garbage take-out time has decreased by 20% over the past 3 weeks. If this trend continues, it'll only take me 2 minutes to take out the garbage by October."
China doesn't have the same values about IP as the US does. But they pay for tangibles, i.e. material property and skilled labor. Construction projects are built with US and European equipment and managed by US and European contractors. So they do pay for intellectual property, just not in the same way.
Why don't you complain about the consumerism and runaway consumption that's the cause of the trade deficit in the first place? That's a far bigger problem, because so long as that mentality pervades, then there'll always be a trade deficit with some manufacturing country.
China might be a totalitarian government, but they still have to pretend to care.
No, they have to care. Otherwise, there'll be unrest all over, and the minority groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans will take advantage of the situation to cause more problems. Local governments aren't necessarily subject to the same restrictions as the central government, but if things start getting too ridiculous, the low-level politicans in charge will pay.
There are two sides to the human mind, the thinking side, and the instinctive side. If we act purely on instinct, you are right that we do not have a choice. We are biologically wired a certain way, and hence, when presented with a situation, we will react predictably. On the other hand, this viewpoint ignores the thinking side. The thinking side of the human mind considers the action, weighs the consequences, and then decides whether to follow through.
A pedophile does not have to abuse children, just as a person inclined to speed doesn't have to go 150 MPH or whatever the computer limiter is nowadays. In the latter case (because the former is a little more complicated), the person may instead choose to go 80, because the chances of getting a ticket are a lot less than going 150. That is a choice. And the same person may choose instead to go the speed limit (65, say), to not risk getting a ticket. That's also a choice. Or, the person may choose not to drive long distances and take mass transportation instead. These are all choices.
So it's too easy to write everything off as biological, or even as environmental. Yes, these play a huge role in the choices we make. However, it doesn't mean that our actions are somehow automated. It's like saying those with mild autism cannot integrate into society. They can. It takes work. Those with severe autism, I think, can too. But in that case, it takes far more work to get them to integrate into society. And likely, it's time and energy that others simply aren't willing to spend for one person. Choosing takes work. It takes work to recognize choice, and it takes work to choose with a near-objective mind.
But what you say is probably applicable to the majority of the people in the world, who go about their lives without thinking about what they're doing. Perhaps only a few people totaling no more than a thousand out of the 6 billion truly has choice, and among them, only a few people actually have free will. But that's not because the other 5.999999 billion people cannot choose, or cannot recognize choice. They just choose to do things the easy way.
Considering that kidney-like structures are present in fish and likely present in primitive fish as well, I think it's the other way around. It's far more likely that because we have two kidneys, we never evolved the ability to continue to live without it.
What we know are generalities. We know the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around the Earth via a mechanism called "gravity." Our knowledge of specifics is incomplete, to unstate the matter. We don't know what "gravity" actually is.
This is a good example of why, when people scoff at alternative medicine as junk because there's no scientific proof, I can only think that they are short-sighted and closed-minded. Certainly, there's a lot of mystical fluff, and it's generally less reliable than scientific medicine (but it's equally as reliable in the hands of a skilled practitioner). But there's a whole body of real, actual knowledge that's being marginalized, and for what? Ignorance. Instead of saying, "we don't know how it works, but we accept that there's something behind it," people say, "we don't know how it works, so it must not work."
I apologize for ranting, but it always bothers me when certain knowledge is hailed as being "new" and a "discovery" or "breakthrough" when it's been around for centuries, just not in the accepted, scientific form.
Not quite. MITM applies to the interception of communications without either side knowing. That is, the players are Alice, Bob, and Eve. On the other hand, fake ATM's outright take the place of the receiver So you think you're talking to Bob, when it's actually Mallory at the other end. This is an authentication problem, made much more difficult because it is the user that needs to do the authentication instead of the service.
I've been wondering about this. After all, the human brain is not much more than a glorified rules engine. We learn by imitation, and we improve through reasoning (calculation). Computers are obviously capable of the latter, but nobody's managed to get the former quite right.
This is because computers are very precise--or really, as precise as the floating point unit allows them to be. That is to say, they can perfectly duplicate information. This means that their observations are very precise. But they have trouble improvising upon the gathered information. They cannot extrapolate from specific to general and interpolate back to specific again. Humans, on the other hand, do this naturally. And we make a largely unconscious decision to switch from storing generic to specific and vice versa, as well as when to access the generic and when to access the specific.
Lacking this ability, what computers are "observing" is very precise as well. And the only human activity that fits this even remotely is speech. Words are point data, or zero-dimensional. Most words have one particular meaning, and that's about it. Granted, there are the occasional "fruit flies like a banana" which have multiple dimensional properties, but only one meaning is correct in a conversation, and even humans require context to determine the meaning of the statement (the presence of a secondary meaning implies the statement is a joke or a pun, which is to say that computers and people that fail to recognize this have no sense of humor). But barring wordplay, it's trivial to apply rules (grammar) to words and produce meaningful output. It's the same as plugging in numbers for variables.
But for things that are even one-dimensional, you'll very quickly get too much data, which will slow down the decision processing significantly. 1.00000001 is 1.0 for a human, but for a computer, both are stored as separate data. It's possible to round (generalize) the values and store only that, but it's very difficult to go back to a specific.
Don't even start about two-dimensional, which is what FPS AI's would require (yes, there's a third dimension in FPS, but AI paths are reducible to two dimensions+commands). And human brains have a hard enough time with three dimensions, computers don't stand a chance.
The very existence of the satellites is probably a secret. It's not a very good one, as most people who are interested the photos probably already can guess how powerful current magnification technology is, but it's still a secret.
I'm also guessing there are even more powerful satellites up there, likely resolving to inches, since there are security ramifications to revealing these images alone (it'd be pretty bad if 1m resolution was the most powerful satellite camera, and the government just confirmed its existence). However, since the scientists aren't interested in photos of ice that resolve to less than 1 meter, there's no reason to even bring them up.
These things are subject to intense scrutiny because of their high profile. If PETA had their way, it'd be illegal to kill rats with anything other than rat poison that slowly puts them to sleep. Hell, they'd make it illegal to step on bugs if they could.
It's absurd. The entire concept of ethical treatment of animals is absurd, especially when we don't even ethically treat each other most of the time. Tell me how animal fighting is illegal, but underground fighting is not (only the gambling is). Tell me why I can eat pigs, cows, and sheep, rabbits, and deer, but dogs and cats somehow are exempted (not that they're any good to eat after being vaccinated). But some very loud, opinionated, and mostly illogical people got their 5 minutes on the soapbox, and this is the result when lots of far more sensible people do their best to avoid getting hit by the bullshit coming out of their mouthes.
Since this case is probably going to be appealed to the highest level that will admit it, I hope the defense is reading/. and your post. What you've written might not be a legal defense, but it is a moral one.
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It's just a mistake of east versus west. You couldn't possibly expect the editorial staff here to know the difference.
You'd have to know Chinese to get the joke though.
Apple sells to the individual, of which you are correct in that not everybody has the kind of disposible income that Apple demands.
Microsoft sells to businesses. Businesses are interested in price-to-performance and utility, not popularity.
And because of this, Apple will never come close to Microsoft in terms of popularity. People may learn on a Mac, but the majority will work on Windows. Which means most business software is written for Windows, which means businesses will stick with Windows as they upgrade. This, compounded with the fact that Windows machines are cheaper, means that most people will buy Windows machines at home.
A select few industries still use Macs, because they were established that way. However, even those are slowly going to Windows, as more and more of the industry-specific programs get ported to Windows for marketshare purposes. The Windows monoculture is a positive feedback loop.
Windows isn't infalliable. But Apple is not the answer, though OSX may otherwise be.
Apple has a patent on that.
Except that, ever since the 1984 debacle, Amazon's trustworthiness, especially in regards to the Kindle, has been slowly eroding away. I'm definitely waiting to see what Amazon does. If they do hand it over, deleting all of the personal data in my account may be worth considering.
No, great minds just think alike. Or annoyed ones anyway.
True, it would've been inevitable. But it wouldn't be as pervasive as it is becoming, had the ads not been getting more and more annoying.
It's like referral spoofing. There are sites that forbid access without the proper referral string. And there's an extension on Firefox that lets people spoof their referral string. But that's not a particularly popular extension, because only a very small minority is inconvenienced by the problem and has a need to spoof referral string.
Were people ever so delusional that they actually thought they could trust Microsoft at all? This was a huge case of the norm, not of the exception.
Not quite. Their cover-up only applies to this one query. If you search using a different set of terms, you'll see biased results again.
It's not about gun control, it's about gun education. I don't want just anybody to be carrying a gun, just as I don't want a random joe to be driving a bus. Guns are dangerous. When I see one out, I want to be assured that it's being operated by somebody who knows what they're doing.
I believe in the 2nd amendment, and I believe in the ability to legally carry and use weapons. In fact, it bothers me that carrying a concealed weapon can land someone in prison. But I don't believe that guns should be unregulated. I do believe they should be as common as cars, but at the same time, I also believe that the barrier to entry to drive should be much higher than it is now (periodic retests, mental and physical examinations, more "grades" of drivers, etc.). Make the gun exam hard. Make it so difficult only a few people in a thousand can pass. And make it so that only those people would be allowed to carry guns, law enforcement, military, or otherwise.
I don't care for the limitation of other less lethal weapons though, even though such laws do exist. And it's funny how nobody complains about knife laws, when the 2nd amendment encompasses all arms, not just or only firearms.
Really? Informative? Wow. The mods today are either really desperate, or really clueless. Or both.
I believe that's the second and third rule too.
This may be modded funny, but it's a pretty good idea nonetheless. It's like a task list with the ability to log progress and generate reports And if you don't like your spouse's complaint, just do what the Mozilla devs do and close it as a feature.
But it's perfect for things that both of you recognize need improvement. Imagine being able to point to the chart and say, "See, honey? I'm improving! My garbage take-out time has decreased by 20% over the past 3 weeks. If this trend continues, it'll only take me 2 minutes to take out the garbage by October."
no reasons to hate the Chinese for being Chinese.
But then how will people justify their xenophobia?
China doesn't have the same values about IP as the US does. But they pay for tangibles, i.e. material property and skilled labor. Construction projects are built with US and European equipment and managed by US and European contractors. So they do pay for intellectual property, just not in the same way.
Why don't you complain about the consumerism and runaway consumption that's the cause of the trade deficit in the first place? That's a far bigger problem, because so long as that mentality pervades, then there'll always be a trade deficit with some manufacturing country.
China might be a totalitarian government, but they still have to pretend to care.
No, they have to care. Otherwise, there'll be unrest all over, and the minority groups like the Uyghurs and Tibetans will take advantage of the situation to cause more problems. Local governments aren't necessarily subject to the same restrictions as the central government, but if things start getting too ridiculous, the low-level politicans in charge will pay.
A nice rear is a plus. The waist on the other hand...
There are two sides to the human mind, the thinking side, and the instinctive side. If we act purely on instinct, you are right that we do not have a choice. We are biologically wired a certain way, and hence, when presented with a situation, we will react predictably. On the other hand, this viewpoint ignores the thinking side. The thinking side of the human mind considers the action, weighs the consequences, and then decides whether to follow through.
A pedophile does not have to abuse children, just as a person inclined to speed doesn't have to go 150 MPH or whatever the computer limiter is nowadays. In the latter case (because the former is a little more complicated), the person may instead choose to go 80, because the chances of getting a ticket are a lot less than going 150. That is a choice. And the same person may choose instead to go the speed limit (65, say), to not risk getting a ticket. That's also a choice. Or, the person may choose not to drive long distances and take mass transportation instead. These are all choices.
So it's too easy to write everything off as biological, or even as environmental. Yes, these play a huge role in the choices we make. However, it doesn't mean that our actions are somehow automated. It's like saying those with mild autism cannot integrate into society. They can. It takes work. Those with severe autism, I think, can too. But in that case, it takes far more work to get them to integrate into society. And likely, it's time and energy that others simply aren't willing to spend for one person. Choosing takes work. It takes work to recognize choice, and it takes work to choose with a near-objective mind.
But what you say is probably applicable to the majority of the people in the world, who go about their lives without thinking about what they're doing. Perhaps only a few people totaling no more than a thousand out of the 6 billion truly has choice, and among them, only a few people actually have free will. But that's not because the other 5.999999 billion people cannot choose, or cannot recognize choice. They just choose to do things the easy way.
Considering that kidney-like structures are present in fish and likely present in primitive fish as well, I think it's the other way around. It's far more likely that because we have two kidneys, we never evolved the ability to continue to live without it.
What we know are generalities. We know the Earth revolves around the sun and the moon revolves around the Earth via a mechanism called "gravity." Our knowledge of specifics is incomplete, to unstate the matter. We don't know what "gravity" actually is.
This is a good example of why, when people scoff at alternative medicine as junk because there's no scientific proof, I can only think that they are short-sighted and closed-minded. Certainly, there's a lot of mystical fluff, and it's generally less reliable than scientific medicine (but it's equally as reliable in the hands of a skilled practitioner). But there's a whole body of real, actual knowledge that's being marginalized, and for what? Ignorance. Instead of saying, "we don't know how it works, but we accept that there's something behind it," people say, "we don't know how it works, so it must not work."
I apologize for ranting, but it always bothers me when certain knowledge is hailed as being "new" and a "discovery" or "breakthrough" when it's been around for centuries, just not in the accepted, scientific form.
Not quite. MITM applies to the interception of communications without either side knowing. That is, the players are Alice, Bob, and Eve. On the other hand, fake ATM's outright take the place of the receiver So you think you're talking to Bob, when it's actually Mallory at the other end. This is an authentication problem, made much more difficult because it is the user that needs to do the authentication instead of the service.
I've been wondering about this. After all, the human brain is not much more than a glorified rules engine. We learn by imitation, and we improve through reasoning (calculation). Computers are obviously capable of the latter, but nobody's managed to get the former quite right.
This is because computers are very precise--or really, as precise as the floating point unit allows them to be. That is to say, they can perfectly duplicate information. This means that their observations are very precise. But they have trouble improvising upon the gathered information. They cannot extrapolate from specific to general and interpolate back to specific again. Humans, on the other hand, do this naturally. And we make a largely unconscious decision to switch from storing generic to specific and vice versa, as well as when to access the generic and when to access the specific.
Lacking this ability, what computers are "observing" is very precise as well. And the only human activity that fits this even remotely is speech. Words are point data, or zero-dimensional. Most words have one particular meaning, and that's about it. Granted, there are the occasional "fruit flies like a banana" which have multiple dimensional properties, but only one meaning is correct in a conversation, and even humans require context to determine the meaning of the statement (the presence of a secondary meaning implies the statement is a joke or a pun, which is to say that computers and people that fail to recognize this have no sense of humor). But barring wordplay, it's trivial to apply rules (grammar) to words and produce meaningful output. It's the same as plugging in numbers for variables.
But for things that are even one-dimensional, you'll very quickly get too much data, which will slow down the decision processing significantly. 1.00000001 is 1.0 for a human, but for a computer, both are stored as separate data. It's possible to round (generalize) the values and store only that, but it's very difficult to go back to a specific.
Don't even start about two-dimensional, which is what FPS AI's would require (yes, there's a third dimension in FPS, but AI paths are reducible to two dimensions+commands). And human brains have a hard enough time with three dimensions, computers don't stand a chance.
The very existence of the satellites is probably a secret. It's not a very good one, as most people who are interested the photos probably already can guess how powerful current magnification technology is, but it's still a secret.
I'm also guessing there are even more powerful satellites up there, likely resolving to inches, since there are security ramifications to revealing these images alone (it'd be pretty bad if 1m resolution was the most powerful satellite camera, and the government just confirmed its existence). However, since the scientists aren't interested in photos of ice that resolve to less than 1 meter, there's no reason to even bring them up.
These things are subject to intense scrutiny because of their high profile. If PETA had their way, it'd be illegal to kill rats with anything other than rat poison that slowly puts them to sleep. Hell, they'd make it illegal to step on bugs if they could.
It's absurd. The entire concept of ethical treatment of animals is absurd, especially when we don't even ethically treat each other most of the time. Tell me how animal fighting is illegal, but underground fighting is not (only the gambling is). Tell me why I can eat pigs, cows, and sheep, rabbits, and deer, but dogs and cats somehow are exempted (not that they're any good to eat after being vaccinated). But some very loud, opinionated, and mostly illogical people got their 5 minutes on the soapbox, and this is the result when lots of far more sensible people do their best to avoid getting hit by the bullshit coming out of their mouthes.
Now with green diode lasers we will eventually have TVs using lasers to draw our images.
And soon afterwards, we won't have to worry about buying new television sets, because we'll all have holes in our retinas the size of our eyeballs.
Since this case is probably going to be appealed to the highest level that will admit it, I hope the defense is reading /. and your post. What you've written might not be a legal defense, but it is a moral one.