The bing results also have 5 (I counted) results titled, in one way or another, "why are macs so expensive?" on the front page. Another 5 on the second page... and not one result about why windows is so expensive.
People thought they were buying a perpetual license. I may not listen to every song i've ever purchased for ever and ever, but there are some songs I listen to that I will always listen back on fondly.
All music on the iTunes store, at least in the USA, is 100% DRM free now. If you purchased DRM'd music from iTunes in the past, you can pay $0.30 per track to upgrade it, to no DRM and 256kbps from 128kbps if the track is currently selling in the store.
Movies, music videos, TV shows, other video clips, and audio books are not 100% DRM free.
The judicial branch is most certainly reliant on the executive and legislative branches:
The president selects his nomination for supreme court and congress has to confirm that judge. So, both the executive and legislative branch has a say in the judicial.
Also, the executive branch has a similar power to the judicial in that they can pick and choose which laws they want to enforce, much in the same way that the legislative can pick and choose which laws to hold unconstitutional. Go through any state or cities old laws and you will find some real silly ones. For example, in North Carolina, it's illegal to sing off key. The executive branch (governor appointed District Attorneys) chooses not to enforce that law, so they have effectively done the same thing as the judicial branch: Strike down a law.
The legislative branch has similar power over the executive and judicial: The executive can't enforce a law that doesn't exist. The judicial can't rule on a law that doesn't exist.
It's not a perfect system, but it does what it's supposed to well: Make it damned hard to enforce a law.
Some other examples of "legislating from the bench": The end of slavery, A woman's right to vote, Countless free speech cases including protecting books of adult nature, insulting someone with words, etc. In other words, the courts are there to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Women were oppressed by not being able to vote, hold public office, etc. Slavery is obvious who was oppressing who. And, at the time, the few people who enjoyed books of an adult nature were protected by the courts from the majority of people who thought they were indecent.
And yes, the courts must continue to "legislate from the bench" because people try to apply their same broken logic to new concepts. For example, there have been cases against news papers because "their constitutional protection doesn't apply to the internet", cases arguing that bloggers aren't members of the press and don't deserve 1st amendment protection, etc.
The reality is: The world is a changing place. There are legal challenges in place today that the founding fathers never could have DREAMED of when they wrote the constitution. This means that in order to protect the constitution, as they are required to do so by their oaths of office, they have to interpret the spirit of the constitution on cases that the constitution couldn't possibly have taken in to account for. No it is not perfect, as the judges are only human. But ultimately, I think they get it right more often than they get it wrong. As long as they do their job, to judge the fairness and equal application of law to everyone, as well as can be expected then I am happy.
if it's one of the toilets that don't have a tank, you can turn off the valve to the toilet and remove the key needed to turn it back on. Toilet won't flush then.
If Stephen Hawking says something about physics, do you require a citation from him? Nielson is recognized as one of the leading experts in his field.
Yes! I would! I would want to see the research that lead him to his conclusion in physics. Or, more specifically, I would want another physicist to look at his research and give his validation to say that it's sound.
I can assure you that Microsoft gives no real discounts to their volume licensors for OS's or Office products:
ALL volume licenses of desktop Windows are ALL upgrade licenses. Finally, the volume licenses cost about the same as the OEM license on New Egg did. So you need an OEM license anyway, and the volume license costs as much again.
Office Volume Licenses were actually MORE expensive than the equivalent full retail licenses. The only thing the office Volume Licenses would have gotten me over full retail was that there would be one key to manage...so keeping track of who used what key wouldn't have to be done. I can assure you that working in a small business environment as I do (100 people) the CEO would not see the benefit of paying an extra $50-$100 per license. All I did was keep a word file with every key, and put our asset tag numbers, date, and office version next to each one. Anytime a computer was taken out of service, i'd free up it's entry in the key file. I periodically audit the keys to make sure I don't miss one.
That solution certainly isn't scalable, but would work up until about 200 people or so.
Apple completed their intel transition in August of 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_intel_transition). It will be september when Snow Leopard is released. This will be full 3 years from the last Power PC processor shipped by apple.
Eventually, apple will have to stop updating the old platform so that they can move forward and advance their current one. I consider 3 years to be the useful lifespan of a computer.
The intel transition was ANNOUNCED in June of 2005 and started in January of 2006. Anyone who bought an Apple after June of 2005 knew that the Power PC platform was just declared dead and should have expected this day to come. That's over 4 full years from the announced "End of Life" for the platform. I think the Power PC drop is expected and very reasonable, if not overdue.
Nope. My safe deposit at the bank costs me $30 a year. It's 5 x 3 x 18. I can stack drives 3 high and 3 deep...for 9 drives in the vault...and still have room for padding on all 6 sides sides to keep them safe.
For $10 per year more ($40 total) I can get a 10 x 3 x 18...I can now store them 2 wide, 3 high, and 3 deep for 18 drives.
for another $15 per year more ($55 total), I can get a 10 x 5 x 18... I can now store them 2 wide, 5 high, and 3 deep for 30 drives.
for $100 per year total, I can get a 10 x 10 x 18... I can now store them 2 wide, 10 high, and 3 deep for 60 drives.
This was the case for Macs since ATLEAST the Mac Plus. I remember having to do this. You could, infact, delay boot by holding down the mouse button, because the computer was trying to eject a disk that wasn't in the drive.
I don't consider this a bad thing... Everyone is trying to squeeze every minute out of every day...going to bed later, waking up earlier. It's unhealthy.
Wouldn't the laws of supply & demand dictate that this would cause the prices to go up? It's not like they are magically going to manufacture 3 times as many TVs...more people want to buy the same number of TVs, so prices would go up.
I don't think that this is a frivolous lawsuit, but...
They do have some things to try to prevent abuse of the legal system...It's called Anti-SLAPP (Anti- Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). AFAIK it's only in California, but other states may have adopted similar statutes...
Basically, you can't file a suit unless you have a good reason. If a defendant raises the SLAPP defense, then the plaintiff has the burden to prove that they can at least make a 1/2 way decent case...they basically have to tell the judge the basic premise of their case. If they can't, then it's an immediate dismissal, and the plaintiff has to pay the defendant's legal costs, plus statutory damages. SLAPP defense can be raised early, before the actual trial, and is meant to limit legal costs for defending a frivolous lawsuit, as well as provide a disincentive for actually filing one.
IANAL, and this is just my understanding of it. Some details may be wrong, but you get the basic idea.
Your plan of keeping gas cars is flawed in the fact that the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is, despite "100 years of development", horribly inefficient. Your average ICE gets about 20% energy efficiency, whereas your average electric engine gets about 81%.
An electric generator is about 60% efficient in generating electricity. This means that using oil at the power plant to power your electric car, you are getting 60% x 81% = 49% energy efficiency with an electric car.
If you were generating electricity to power those electric cars with the same oil that you would be powering your gas cars, you'd be using 2/5 the oil to do it.
2/3 of all US oil consumption comes from transportation. If we use 3/5 less oil on our transportation, that saves us about 40% of all of our oil consumption. Do you know what would happen to the price of a barrel of oil if we were using 40% less than we are now? Even if the price were to stay the same, if we started using 40% less oil, that would mean we would be saving $1 billion to the Arabs EVERY DAY (at $125/barrel).
Also, there are other efficiencies about electric cars that aren't readily obvious:
1) You no longer need to transport oil to every nook and cranny of the US...Just build a few pipelines to the power plants and you're no longer burning oil to DRIVE it to 10,000 different places.
2) You can install regenerative braking in to your electric cars, quite inexpensively since they already have the electric engine and giant battery, to further increase their energy efficiency.
3) You can install solar panels on the roof to charge your batteries as you drive, or while it sits in the parking lot at work. And since we already have an electric engine and giant battery, it's not a whole lot more to do this.
I bet if we install regenerative braking and solar panels in to an electric car, you'll likely make them self-sustaining with only minimal need to draw from the power grid...essentially making them near "free" to operate.
Electric cars are also very simple machines...no more oil changes, minimal maintenance, much simpler engine cooling systems. No more fuel pumps, spark plugs to replace, exhaust systems...all gone! This should make them much cheaper to build and maintain. Just a battery, much simpler engine, and a transmission.
Solar panels and regenerative braking would likely burn up some of the savings, but I bet if we start mass-producing these things, 100% electric cars will cost about the same or less as your average gas-powered car.
how about the fact that fully electric cars cost about $2.82 in electricity to go 100 miles? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Running_costs).
I drive a car that gets a very healthy 30 miles per gallon, and my 10 gallon tank costs me $40 to fill up and go 300 miles...The same 300 miles in an electric car would cost me $9.
As far as travel range, the wikipedia article I linked above mentions that cars running on newer lithium-ion batteries are going 250-300 miles per charge..about just as much as a regular tank of gas.
I wonder if this has something to do with the penny stock spams...you know, spammers send a bunch of emails promoting a penny stock so the price goes up, then they sell the stock while it's up...
Perhaps, they bought a bunch of oil, sent out a spam about Iran being invaded to get speculators to buy oil, driving the price up, and then cash in?
They finally filled in the ???
1. Buy oil 2. Send out Spam saying Iran has been invaded. 3. Speculators buy on the "news" (formerly ???) 4. Profit!
...and that if you were truly concerned for the welfare of prostitutes you would make it legal, so they could run to the police to report crimes without worrying about being thrown in jail.
and so you could regulate it so that you could make it safe (regular drug and STD Testing, enforced condom usage, safe locations for the prostitutes to do it...perhaps with body guards incase things get a little rough...etc.) MOST of the problems commonly associated with prostitution are directly or indirectly a result of it being illegal and unregulated. The only issue with prostitution that I can think of, off the top of my head, that isn't a result of it's being made illegal would be the religious and moral implications.
The carriers can do this simply because the majority of people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs. All the major carrier's text messaging packages are pretty much the same across the board...might be different with sprint now, but they are very much a wild card right now. People really only compare minutes and the base monthly charge.
The people who care about text messaging already have the texting packages...The people who get hit with the $0.20 per message fee are the people who don't care about text messaging...they don't care what the per message fee is, because "i'll never use it". But then someone who uses a LOT of text messages start sending them racking up the victi...I mean customer's bill.
No one at comcast is paying for unlimited. You are paying for a pipe that can burst up to 6mbps or whatever rate.
It's just now there is a policy that tells you what their limit is, and how much you pay for going over it...
So you aren't paying for "unlimited"...They are now being upfront and saying, you are paying for 6mbps up to 250GB per month. If you go over 250gb then here is what it costs you.
First people were complaining that there was some mysterious cap that they would kill your service is you exceeded it...Now people are complaining that they are being upfront about what the cap is...Despite the fact that the bandwidth cap is about 10 times MORE than necessary for even a "moderate" user.
I'm sorry, but if you are downloading 3 hours of HDTV every day then you don't qualify as a "regular" or "moderate" user...You are a power user, and if you have bigger bandwidth needs, then you should pay for it.
Slashdot Mirror
The bing results also have 5 (I counted) results titled, in one way or another, "why are macs so expensive?" on the front page. Another 5 on the second page... and not one result about why windows is so expensive.
People thought they were buying a perpetual license. I may not listen to every song i've ever purchased for ever and ever, but there are some songs I listen to that I will always listen back on fondly.
All music on the iTunes store, at least in the USA, is 100% DRM free now. If you purchased DRM'd music from iTunes in the past, you can pay $0.30 per track to upgrade it, to no DRM and 256kbps from 128kbps if the track is currently selling in the store.
Movies, music videos, TV shows, other video clips, and audio books are not 100% DRM free.
The judicial branch is most certainly reliant on the executive and legislative branches:
The president selects his nomination for supreme court and congress has to confirm that judge. So, both the executive and legislative branch has a say in the judicial.
Also, the executive branch has a similar power to the judicial in that they can pick and choose which laws they want to enforce, much in the same way that the legislative can pick and choose which laws to hold unconstitutional. Go through any state or cities old laws and you will find some real silly ones. For example, in North Carolina, it's illegal to sing off key. The executive branch (governor appointed District Attorneys) chooses not to enforce that law, so they have effectively done the same thing as the judicial branch: Strike down a law.
The legislative branch has similar power over the executive and judicial: The executive can't enforce a law that doesn't exist. The judicial can't rule on a law that doesn't exist.
It's not a perfect system, but it does what it's supposed to well: Make it damned hard to enforce a law.
Some other examples of "legislating from the bench": The end of slavery, A woman's right to vote, Countless free speech cases including protecting books of adult nature, insulting someone with words, etc. In other words, the courts are there to protect the minority from the tyranny of the majority. Women were oppressed by not being able to vote, hold public office, etc. Slavery is obvious who was oppressing who. And, at the time, the few people who enjoyed books of an adult nature were protected by the courts from the majority of people who thought they were indecent.
And yes, the courts must continue to "legislate from the bench" because people try to apply their same broken logic to new concepts. For example, there have been cases against news papers because "their constitutional protection doesn't apply to the internet", cases arguing that bloggers aren't members of the press and don't deserve 1st amendment protection, etc.
The reality is: The world is a changing place. There are legal challenges in place today that the founding fathers never could have DREAMED of when they wrote the constitution. This means that in order to protect the constitution, as they are required to do so by their oaths of office, they have to interpret the spirit of the constitution on cases that the constitution couldn't possibly have taken in to account for. No it is not perfect, as the judges are only human. But ultimately, I think they get it right more often than they get it wrong. As long as they do their job, to judge the fairness and equal application of law to everyone, as well as can be expected then I am happy.
http://www.ubcd4win.com/
Windows booting from a read-only CD drive. I use it often.
In NTFS, you can specify the block size when you format the disk.
if it's one of the toilets that don't have a tank, you can turn off the valve to the toilet and remove the key needed to turn it back on. Toilet won't flush then.
If Stephen Hawking says something about physics, do you require a citation from him? Nielson is recognized as one of the leading experts in his field.
Yes! I would! I would want to see the research that lead him to his conclusion in physics. Or, more specifically, I would want another physicist to look at his research and give his validation to say that it's sound.
I can assure you that Microsoft gives no real discounts to their volume licensors for OS's or Office products:
ALL volume licenses of desktop Windows are ALL upgrade licenses. Finally, the volume licenses cost about the same as the OEM license on New Egg did. So you need an OEM license anyway, and the volume license costs as much again.
Office Volume Licenses were actually MORE expensive than the equivalent full retail licenses. The only thing the office Volume Licenses would have gotten me over full retail was that there would be one key to manage...so keeping track of who used what key wouldn't have to be done. I can assure you that working in a small business environment as I do (100 people) the CEO would not see the benefit of paying an extra $50-$100 per license. All I did was keep a word file with every key, and put our asset tag numbers, date, and office version next to each one. Anytime a computer was taken out of service, i'd free up it's entry in the key file. I periodically audit the keys to make sure I don't miss one.
That solution certainly isn't scalable, but would work up until about 200 people or so.
Apple completed their intel transition in August of 2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_intel_transition). It will be september when Snow Leopard is released. This will be full 3 years from the last Power PC processor shipped by apple.
Eventually, apple will have to stop updating the old platform so that they can move forward and advance their current one. I consider 3 years to be the useful lifespan of a computer.
The intel transition was ANNOUNCED in June of 2005 and started in January of 2006. Anyone who bought an Apple after June of 2005 knew that the Power PC platform was just declared dead and should have expected this day to come. That's over 4 full years from the announced "End of Life" for the platform. I think the Power PC drop is expected and very reasonable, if not overdue.
Your example is a unique case where the numbers just so happen to work out:
A counter example:
5 readings:
0.6 0.7 0.5 0.9 1.0
Proper average:
(0.6 + 0.7 + 0.5 + 0.9 + 1.0) / 5 = 3.7 / 5 = 0.74
Average as computed by the machine:
(0.6 + 0.7) / 2 = 0.65
(0.65 + 0.5) / 2 = 0.575
(0.575 + 0.9) / 2 = 0.7375
(0.7375 + 1) / 2 = 0.86875
The machine would likely round up that final calculation to 0.87.
The difference between 0.74 and 0.87, in many cases is "Have a nice day, sir" and "Time for the full body cavity search, sir".
Nope. My safe deposit at the bank costs me $30 a year. It's 5 x 3 x 18. I can stack drives 3 high and 3 deep...for 9 drives in the vault...and still have room for padding on all 6 sides sides to keep them safe.
For $10 per year more ($40 total) I can get a 10 x 3 x 18...I can now store them 2 wide, 3 high, and 3 deep for 18 drives.
for another $15 per year more ($55 total), I can get a 10 x 5 x 18... I can now store them 2 wide, 5 high, and 3 deep for 30 drives.
for $100 per year total, I can get a 10 x 10 x 18... I can now store them 2 wide, 10 high, and 3 deep for 60 drives.
The cheapest netflix plan is $9/mo or $108/yr.
This was the case for Macs since ATLEAST the Mac Plus. I remember having to do this. You could, infact, delay boot by holding down the mouse button, because the computer was trying to eject a disk that wasn't in the drive.
I don't consider this a bad thing... Everyone is trying to squeeze every minute out of every day...going to bed later, waking up earlier. It's unhealthy.
The answer is to create more minutes in the day!
Defamation of character. These people think SHE is calling them. They are pretending to be her by calling "from" her number.
It's to the point where SHE is getting harassed and getting death threats. I think a judge would allow the discovery.
you're forgetting the difference between GB and Gb (bytes vs. bits). there are 8 Gb in 1 GB.
If the connection is 1Gbps: 30 GB * 8 GB/Gb = 240 Gb, which is 240 seconds. 240 seconds is 4 minutes.
Wouldn't the laws of supply & demand dictate that this would cause the prices to go up? It's not like they are magically going to manufacture 3 times as many TVs...more people want to buy the same number of TVs, so prices would go up.
I don't think that this is a frivolous lawsuit, but...
They do have some things to try to prevent abuse of the legal system...It's called Anti-SLAPP (Anti- Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation). AFAIK it's only in California, but other states may have adopted similar statutes...
Basically, you can't file a suit unless you have a good reason. If a defendant raises the SLAPP defense, then the plaintiff has the burden to prove that they can at least make a 1/2 way decent case...they basically have to tell the judge the basic premise of their case. If they can't, then it's an immediate dismissal, and the plaintiff has to pay the defendant's legal costs, plus statutory damages. SLAPP defense can be raised early, before the actual trial, and is meant to limit legal costs for defending a frivolous lawsuit, as well as provide a disincentive for actually filing one.
IANAL, and this is just my understanding of it. Some details may be wrong, but you get the basic idea.
I dunno about down the career down the drain...The man is like 82...it's more like a forced retirement, with a free retirement home security package!
Your plan of keeping gas cars is flawed in the fact that the Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) is, despite "100 years of development", horribly inefficient. Your average ICE gets about 20% energy efficiency, whereas your average electric engine gets about 81%.
An electric generator is about 60% efficient in generating electricity. This means that using oil at the power plant to power your electric car, you are getting 60% x 81% = 49% energy efficiency with an electric car.
If you were generating electricity to power those electric cars with the same oil that you would be powering your gas cars, you'd be using 2/5 the oil to do it.
2/3 of all US oil consumption comes from transportation. If we use 3/5 less oil on our transportation, that saves us about 40% of all of our oil consumption. Do you know what would happen to the price of a barrel of oil if we were using 40% less than we are now? Even if the price were to stay the same, if we started using 40% less oil, that would mean we would be saving $1 billion to the Arabs EVERY DAY (at $125/barrel).
Also, there are other efficiencies about electric cars that aren't readily obvious:
1) You no longer need to transport oil to every nook and cranny of the US...Just build a few pipelines to the power plants and you're no longer burning oil to DRIVE it to 10,000 different places.
2) You can install regenerative braking in to your electric cars, quite inexpensively since they already have the electric engine and giant battery, to further increase their energy efficiency.
3) You can install solar panels on the roof to charge your batteries as you drive, or while it sits in the parking lot at work. And since we already have an electric engine and giant battery, it's not a whole lot more to do this.
I bet if we install regenerative braking and solar panels in to an electric car, you'll likely make them self-sustaining with only minimal need to draw from the power grid...essentially making them near "free" to operate.
Electric cars are also very simple machines...no more oil changes, minimal maintenance, much simpler engine cooling systems. No more fuel pumps, spark plugs to replace, exhaust systems...all gone! This should make them much cheaper to build and maintain. Just a battery, much simpler engine, and a transmission.
Solar panels and regenerative braking would likely burn up some of the savings, but I bet if we start mass-producing these things, 100% electric cars will cost about the same or less as your average gas-powered car.
how about the fact that fully electric cars cost about $2.82 in electricity to go 100 miles? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_car#Running_costs).
I drive a car that gets a very healthy 30 miles per gallon, and my 10 gallon tank costs me $40 to fill up and go 300 miles...The same 300 miles in an electric car would cost me $9.
As far as travel range, the wikipedia article I linked above mentions that cars running on newer lithium-ion batteries are going 250-300 miles per charge..about just as much as a regular tank of gas.
I wonder if this has something to do with the penny stock spams...you know, spammers send a bunch of emails promoting a penny stock so the price goes up, then they sell the stock while it's up...
Perhaps, they bought a bunch of oil, sent out a spam about Iran being invaded to get speculators to buy oil, driving the price up, and then cash in?
They finally filled in the ???
1. Buy oil
2. Send out Spam saying Iran has been invaded.
3. Speculators buy on the "news" (formerly ???)
4. Profit!
...and that if you were truly concerned for the welfare of prostitutes you would make it legal, so they could run to the police to report crimes without worrying about being thrown in jail.
and so you could regulate it so that you could make it safe (regular drug and STD Testing, enforced condom usage, safe locations for the prostitutes to do it...perhaps with body guards incase things get a little rough...etc.) MOST of the problems commonly associated with prostitution are directly or indirectly a result of it being illegal and unregulated. The only issue with prostitution that I can think of, off the top of my head, that isn't a result of it's being made illegal would be the religious and moral implications.
The carriers can do this simply because the majority of people don't shop for their cell phone plans based on the text messaging costs. All the major carrier's text messaging packages are pretty much the same across the board...might be different with sprint now, but they are very much a wild card right now. People really only compare minutes and the base monthly charge.
The people who care about text messaging already have the texting packages...The people who get hit with the $0.20 per message fee are the people who don't care about text messaging...they don't care what the per message fee is, because "i'll never use it". But then someone who uses a LOT of text messages start sending them racking up the victi...I mean customer's bill.
No one at comcast is paying for unlimited. You are paying for a pipe that can burst up to 6mbps or whatever rate.
It's just now there is a policy that tells you what their limit is, and how much you pay for going over it...
So you aren't paying for "unlimited"...They are now being upfront and saying, you are paying for 6mbps up to 250GB per month. If you go over 250gb then here is what it costs you.
First people were complaining that there was some mysterious cap that they would kill your service is you exceeded it...Now people are complaining that they are being upfront about what the cap is...Despite the fact that the bandwidth cap is about 10 times MORE than necessary for even a "moderate" user.
I'm sorry, but if you are downloading 3 hours of HDTV every day then you don't qualify as a "regular" or "moderate" user...You are a power user, and if you have bigger bandwidth needs, then you should pay for it.