Music isn't a production-line widget. Real costs have always been a tiny fraction of the price. Accordingly, since most of the cost of music is the licensing, you would expect the price to increase over time, not decrease.
In real dollars, a single track for $1.29 is a steal over the per-track price of a single from nearly any point in the history of music sales. For reference, $1.29 today is about $2.50 in 1990 dollars. And that's not even counting the convenience of shopping from home or the availability of previews to avoid the obviously bad tunes. Once upon a time not that long ago, a track from a 45 cost the same as a gallon of milk. Now that milk is $3 and the music is $1.29. The price of milk really isn't affected by anything but inflation (if anything, there are more dairy cows today than back then and they produce more milk thanks to hormones). You'd expect them to track more closely in price.
And just to help you out, since you can't handle the simple task of using a dictionary to look up words, here's the official definition of racism from someone who's not an angry, bitter, and pedantic Slashdotter:
"the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or to another race or races.
"prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism [ed. that's you!] directed against members of a different race based on such a belief."
I know it hurts that your point about "everything being racist" is dulled, but there was neither an anthropological or a biological discussion ongoing, so suck it up and go home.
Racism doesn't have to be contained within a single species, even using a biological definition. Why? Because species are contained within a nested taxonomy, and so any subordinating division can be used to describe such prejudice. Human belief in superiority to plants is kingdomist, but it's also speciesist and racist and everything all the way up from there because there are no HORIZONTAL bounds in the taxonomy. Should speciesist be confined to species of the same family? Can speciesist describe species of different kingdoms altogether? Your objection is noted, but it's absurd and immaterial.
Definition 8, dictionary.com: "8. a natural kind of living creature: the race of fishes."
OED, "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or feature" (common feature: their species) or "(in nontechnical discourse) each of the major divisions of living creatures."
Do you honestly not know how to use a dictionary? Race (2) n. is the one you want.
Again, race is not a term in English discourse with a technical definition. I purposely used it to avoid pedanticism regarding "speciesism" or "orderism" or "genusism" or fuck, "kingdomism" because the word detracts from the point. You simply cannot accept that your absurd correction doesn't change anything, and your pompously superior attitude isn't getting you anywhere.
That would also work, but no, I don't draw a distinction in discourse. It prioritizes the human race over others. There is no biological meaning to "race" and I prefer it to "species" because using a term like "speciesist" then invites pedanticism about whether it's actually phylumism or orderism or other nonsense.
Race is an encompassing term that was intended to evade the technical discourse. Obviously, it didn't work.
It's not intellectual laziness. Consult a dictionary and look up the word "race." It's both in the OED and even dictionary.com (definition 8).
I'm not getting pissy. You're the one that chose to adopt an erroneous definition to the word. Yes, "race" has a dual meaning, and yes, it's a loaded concept. If you're really going to claim that the OED uses the word wrong, have fun with that on the authority of...your brain.
So wait. You can use Newegg to buy parts for a whole computer, but you can't just buy a video card and RAM for a Mac Pro? Sounds like someone wasn't going to buy a Mac in the first place.
If you want "standard" RAM (FB-DIMMs *are* standard RAM for Xeons), I guess you're using something pre-Woodcrest or a Core 2-based system.
its the most commonly sold type of desktop machine in the personal computing market. Commonly sold, yes; commonly used, no. The people pining for an expandable Mac just remind me of the old complaints when they started adding peripherals to the motherboard. I used to be one of those people. Today, we're over it. Network, audio, I/O, even graphics are all expected to be included in the package. There are some users (gamers and geeks, frankly) who want to add in a better sound card or video card but want the bottom line to be as low as possible. There are lots of people who don't actually care about expandability but don't like the iMac because the display's included.
Of course, what they're missing is that they're the minority, and it's cheaper for everyone if they include the display. It adds less to the cost of the machine than buying a Dell monitor on special. If people want to add a large, expensive, second display to it, they should feel free. When you're getting a good 20" display for barely $100, making a multimonitor setup uncannily cheap, it's just sort of whiny to complain. Would you really keep a cheap midrange monitor around for more than five years? If you're buying an expensive monitor, keep it around. The built-in one is a nearly free bonus (say $1500 for the iMac and $500 for a decent monitor better than the one they give you--$100 is just 5% of your expenditure).
If you do, that means you upgrade your computer compulsively anyway. Sell the iMac (they make decent returns even after two years), and the difference in resale value alone will more than cover being saddled with an "undesired" built-in display.
2x4 1.86GHz CPUs != 2x2 2.66GHz CPUs. I'd rather have the latter any day, and I don't intend on buying a Mac Pro.
Even beyond that, the case is not comparable (Mac Pro cases are expensive, heavy, and sturdy), the motherboard used in the Mac Pro is an Intel (at substantially higher cost), the RAM has custom heat spreaders and is certainly of a higher grade than Kingston, and EACH of the base Mac Pro's two Woodcrest Xeons are $719.99.
So with equivalent processors, even with your other errors ignored, you've still got a ~$2300 base system. Retail markup and OEM overhead alone accounts for the difference, not to mention the software included. Your exercise simply proves that the Mac Pro is competitively priced.
I just feel that Apple is gouging you on the price of addons
Of course they are. That's what all computer manufacturers do. It's always been cheaper to add your own RAM and hard drives, regardless of what brand of computer you buy. I'd hardly take it as evidence of a problem at Apple.
This also happens with printers, car stereo upgrades (or hell, transmission upgrades), TV service packages, tickets to concerts, and home appliances.
Are humans so superior that orcas can't kill us? Of course not. Granted, they don't have much in the way of weapons, and they can't get to us on land. But you make my point exactly--what if the fight is unsuccessful? Do we not deserve human rights because we lost "the war" with aliens with superior weapons and defensive capabilities?
Some people are so far in the box that they can't process an idea beyond their concrete experience. It doesn't matter whether they have bio-organic armor or even freaking Star Trek-style shields. Superior race. Capable of doing to us what we do to primates and other animals on the same scale. Role reversal. It's not that difficult a concept to grasp.
That's not really an issue. Even if we had unequivocable proof that a being was sentient, there's no guarantee that we'd label them as such. A superior race could simply choose to label humans as "not sentient" because like all definitions, sentience is an artificial construct built to suit its users.
No, that was a Constitutional suspension in wartime, and those provisions were restored immediately after.
The only thing the commenter could be referring to is the Military Commissions Act and President Bush, which has been used to detain CITIZENS without charge, trial, or access to attorney in violation of both their fifth and fourteenth amendment rights.
What's particularly sad is that you are probably some guy sending money to help cats while 5 blocks away there is a ghetto. I am not speaking about some far away country, just ask yourself when is the last time you gave 0.1% of your salary to bums in the street.
While completely irrelevant, I'd wager quite a bit of money that I contribute a greater amount to charity annually than you do. Yes, that includes services for humans and surprisingly, not a single penny for cats. I've never given 0.1% of my salary to a bum on the street. When's the last time YOU gave a bum over $100? How about even just $50? Five blocks away, furthermore, would put you in a golf course, a university campus, or a supermarket. None of those qualify as ghettoes.
You seem not too bad about being narrow minded. I never said that you should not give rights to animals.
Right here, buddy: "Clean in front of your own door before to look at other's." In other words, if there are humans in need, animals deserve nothing. That's not the way it should be. Further, please don't confuse my comments with the fictional characterization in your head. Nowhere did I state or imply that animals deserve all the same rights as humans, nor does an animal's natural survival instinct and lack of reasoning faculty preclude it from protections. Children, the mentally handicapped, and the comatose have rights, no to mention the large number of just-plain-morons.
The better question is, "if we encounter a superior race, are all the jackasses here willing to accept being killed for sport and used in experiments without legal protection?"
After all, if lesser creatures don't deserve any kind of respect, then logically we wouldn't if there were clearly superior beings. We'd be pretty annoyed if we were drugged or killed for fighting back, I'd imagine.
Just because we haven't solved the biggest problems doesn't mean all the others should be ignored. Should we stop trying to cure AIDs because we haven't killed cancer, and people in Africa will die of cancer instead? Of course not.
Why shouldn't animals be afforded the right to exist in a suitable environment, free from molestation and protected from harm? Nobody's saying they should get to vote, but what makes humans deserving of protection from harm and not anyone else?
How can you say that an animal would "never give you the same rights"? Have you experience on a planet where humans are livestock and dolphins run the show? We should protect the environment and wildlife precisely because we're the only ones who CAN and simultaneously pose the greatest harm to them.
They do mean things. In this case, they're regions. Regions which can contain train tracks. Unless you interpret "East Coast network" to mean "blanket the entire east side of the country in train tracks--every square inch" then you're wrong, and if that is your interpretation, you're being pedantic in a way not supported by reality.
The Acela runs on an East Coast network. It does not cover the entire East Coast, nor would it be expected to.
So in other words, you just said the same thing as the Swedish poster, but in a disparaging way. Way to go.
Both California and the East Coast could benefit from a high speed train. No one said anything about covering the entire longitudinal distance of the East Coast in tracks, or lining extreme northern California and the Imperial Valley.
Actually, discrete long-haul flights (4 to 7 hours) are scheduled no more than twice daily. Planes are almost never in the air more than 16 hours out of a given day. In other words, a JFK-SFO flight will fly to California and back in a day (on a hypothetical symmetric route, which is somewhat uncommon). A plane going LAX-Sydney will fly there and then sit overnight for service, cleaning, and inspection.
It's the continuing flights that are more interesting (the ones that fly JFK-ORD-ATL-DFW-LAX), since the turnaround on those tends to be faster.
Your point still stands that 10 flights a day for any commercial airliner is absurd. I've never heard of any aircraft bigger than an Embraer exceeding six flights in a single day.
Slashdot Mirror
Music isn't a production-line widget. Real costs have always been a tiny fraction of the price. Accordingly, since most of the cost of music is the licensing, you would expect the price to increase over time, not decrease.
In real dollars, a single track for $1.29 is a steal over the per-track price of a single from nearly any point in the history of music sales. For reference, $1.29 today is about $2.50 in 1990 dollars. And that's not even counting the convenience of shopping from home or the availability of previews to avoid the obviously bad tunes. Once upon a time not that long ago, a track from a 45 cost the same as a gallon of milk. Now that milk is $3 and the music is $1.29. The price of milk really isn't affected by anything but inflation (if anything, there are more dairy cows today than back then and they produce more milk thanks to hormones). You'd expect them to track more closely in price.
Somebody needs a humor firmware update, compiled with some new sarcasm and "average joe" satire modules.
And just to help you out, since you can't handle the simple task of using a dictionary to look up words, here's the official definition of racism from someone who's not an angry, bitter, and pedantic Slashdotter:
"the belief that all members of each race possess characteristics or abilities specific to that race, esp. so as to distinguish it as inferior or to another race or races.
"prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism [ed. that's you!] directed against members of a different race based on such a belief."
I know it hurts that your point about "everything being racist" is dulled, but there was neither an anthropological or a biological discussion ongoing, so suck it up and go home.
Racism doesn't have to be contained within a single species, even using a biological definition. Why? Because species are contained within a nested taxonomy, and so any subordinating division can be used to describe such prejudice. Human belief in superiority to plants is kingdomist, but it's also speciesist and racist and everything all the way up from there because there are no HORIZONTAL bounds in the taxonomy. Should speciesist be confined to species of the same family? Can speciesist describe species of different kingdoms altogether? Your objection is noted, but it's absurd and immaterial.
Definition 8, dictionary.com: "8. a natural kind of living creature: the race of fishes."
OED, "a group or set of people or things with a common feature or feature" (common feature: their species) or "(in nontechnical discourse) each of the major divisions of living creatures."
Do you honestly not know how to use a dictionary? Race (2) n. is the one you want.
Again, race is not a term in English discourse with a technical definition. I purposely used it to avoid pedanticism regarding "speciesism" or "orderism" or "genusism" or fuck, "kingdomism" because the word detracts from the point. You simply cannot accept that your absurd correction doesn't change anything, and your pompously superior attitude isn't getting you anywhere.
That would also work, but no, I don't draw a distinction in discourse. It prioritizes the human race over others. There is no biological meaning to "race" and I prefer it to "species" because using a term like "speciesist" then invites pedanticism about whether it's actually phylumism or orderism or other nonsense.
Race is an encompassing term that was intended to evade the technical discourse. Obviously, it didn't work.
It's not intellectual laziness. Consult a dictionary and look up the word "race." It's both in the OED and even dictionary.com (definition 8).
I'm not getting pissy. You're the one that chose to adopt an erroneous definition to the word. Yes, "race" has a dual meaning, and yes, it's a loaded concept. If you're really going to claim that the OED uses the word wrong, have fun with that on the authority of...your brain.
So wait. You can use Newegg to buy parts for a whole computer, but you can't just buy a video card and RAM for a Mac Pro? Sounds like someone wasn't going to buy a Mac in the first place.
If you want "standard" RAM (FB-DIMMs *are* standard RAM for Xeons), I guess you're using something pre-Woodcrest or a Core 2-based system.
Commonly sold, yes; commonly used, no. The people pining for an expandable Mac just remind me of the old complaints when they started adding peripherals to the motherboard. I used to be one of those people. Today, we're over it. Network, audio, I/O, even graphics are all expected to be included in the package. There are some users (gamers and geeks, frankly) who want to add in a better sound card or video card but want the bottom line to be as low as possible. There are lots of people who don't actually care about expandability but don't like the iMac because the display's included.
Of course, what they're missing is that they're the minority, and it's cheaper for everyone if they include the display. It adds less to the cost of the machine than buying a Dell monitor on special. If people want to add a large, expensive, second display to it, they should feel free. When you're getting a good 20" display for barely $100, making a multimonitor setup uncannily cheap, it's just sort of whiny to complain. Would you really keep a cheap midrange monitor around for more than five years? If you're buying an expensive monitor, keep it around. The built-in one is a nearly free bonus (say $1500 for the iMac and $500 for a decent monitor better than the one they give you--$100 is just 5% of your expenditure).
If you do, that means you upgrade your computer compulsively anyway. Sell the iMac (they make decent returns even after two years), and the difference in resale value alone will more than cover being saddled with an "undesired" built-in display.
2x4 1.86GHz CPUs != 2x2 2.66GHz CPUs. I'd rather have the latter any day, and I don't intend on buying a Mac Pro.
Even beyond that, the case is not comparable (Mac Pro cases are expensive, heavy, and sturdy), the motherboard used in the Mac Pro is an Intel (at substantially higher cost), the RAM has custom heat spreaders and is certainly of a higher grade than Kingston, and EACH of the base Mac Pro's two Woodcrest Xeons are $719.99.
So with equivalent processors, even with your other errors ignored, you've still got a ~$2300 base system. Retail markup and OEM overhead alone accounts for the difference, not to mention the software included. Your exercise simply proves that the Mac Pro is competitively priced.
Of course they are. That's what all computer manufacturers do. It's always been cheaper to add your own RAM and hard drives, regardless of what brand of computer you buy. I'd hardly take it as evidence of a problem at Apple.
This also happens with printers, car stereo upgrades (or hell, transmission upgrades), TV service packages, tickets to concerts, and home appliances.
Are humans so superior that orcas can't kill us? Of course not. Granted, they don't have much in the way of weapons, and they can't get to us on land. But you make my point exactly--what if the fight is unsuccessful? Do we not deserve human rights because we lost "the war" with aliens with superior weapons and defensive capabilities?
Some people are so far in the box that they can't process an idea beyond their concrete experience. It doesn't matter whether they have bio-organic armor or even freaking Star Trek-style shields. Superior race. Capable of doing to us what we do to primates and other animals on the same scale. Role reversal. It's not that difficult a concept to grasp.
That's not really an issue. Even if we had unequivocable proof that a being was sentient, there's no guarantee that we'd label them as such. A superior race could simply choose to label humans as "not sentient" because like all definitions, sentience is an artificial construct built to suit its users.
No, that was a Constitutional suspension in wartime, and those provisions were restored immediately after.
The only thing the commenter could be referring to is the Military Commissions Act and President Bush, which has been used to detain CITIZENS without charge, trial, or access to attorney in violation of both their fifth and fourteenth amendment rights.
I wonder what your pedantic little brain does to "human race," then.
While completely irrelevant, I'd wager quite a bit of money that I contribute a greater amount to charity annually than you do. Yes, that includes services for humans and surprisingly, not a single penny for cats. I've never given 0.1% of my salary to a bum on the street. When's the last time YOU gave a bum over $100? How about even just $50? Five blocks away, furthermore, would put you in a golf course, a university campus, or a supermarket. None of those qualify as ghettoes.
You seem not too bad about being narrow minded. I never said that you should not give rights to animals.
Right here, buddy: "Clean in front of your own door before to look at other's." In other words, if there are humans in need, animals deserve nothing. That's not the way it should be. Further, please don't confuse my comments with the fictional characterization in your head. Nowhere did I state or imply that animals deserve all the same rights as humans, nor does an animal's natural survival instinct and lack of reasoning faculty preclude it from protections. Children, the mentally handicapped, and the comatose have rights, no to mention the large number of just-plain-morons.
Huh. For a website full of computer programmers, you'd think that syntax would be well-entrenched. Too bad the brain doesn't halt on compiling errors.
The better question is, "if we encounter a superior race, are all the jackasses here willing to accept being killed for sport and used in experiments without legal protection?"
After all, if lesser creatures don't deserve any kind of respect, then logically we wouldn't if there were clearly superior beings. We'd be pretty annoyed if we were drugged or killed for fighting back, I'd imagine.
What's particularly sad is your narrow vision.
Just because we haven't solved the biggest problems doesn't mean all the others should be ignored. Should we stop trying to cure AIDs because we haven't killed cancer, and people in Africa will die of cancer instead? Of course not.
Why shouldn't animals be afforded the right to exist in a suitable environment, free from molestation and protected from harm? Nobody's saying they should get to vote, but what makes humans deserving of protection from harm and not anyone else?
How can you say that an animal would "never give you the same rights"? Have you experience on a planet where humans are livestock and dolphins run the show? We should protect the environment and wildlife precisely because we're the only ones who CAN and simultaneously pose the greatest harm to them.
Former?
The name's racist. Animals deserve many of the protections and guarantees embodied in what we call "human rights."
All it means is that the category needs to be renamed.
They do mean things. In this case, they're regions. Regions which can contain train tracks. Unless you interpret "East Coast network" to mean "blanket the entire east side of the country in train tracks--every square inch" then you're wrong, and if that is your interpretation, you're being pedantic in a way not supported by reality.
The Acela runs on an East Coast network. It does not cover the entire East Coast, nor would it be expected to.
You cannot change the ranking of the products. Voting is for commentary purposes only.
So in other words, you just said the same thing as the Swedish poster, but in a disparaging way. Way to go.
Both California and the East Coast could benefit from a high speed train. No one said anything about covering the entire longitudinal distance of the East Coast in tracks, or lining extreme northern California and the Imperial Valley.
Actually, discrete long-haul flights (4 to 7 hours) are scheduled no more than twice daily. Planes are almost never in the air more than 16 hours out of a given day. In other words, a JFK-SFO flight will fly to California and back in a day (on a hypothetical symmetric route, which is somewhat uncommon). A plane going LAX-Sydney will fly there and then sit overnight for service, cleaning, and inspection.
It's the continuing flights that are more interesting (the ones that fly JFK-ORD-ATL-DFW-LAX), since the turnaround on those tends to be faster.
Your point still stands that 10 flights a day for any commercial airliner is absurd. I've never heard of any aircraft bigger than an Embraer exceeding six flights in a single day.
Notice that none of those airlines are US airlines? (NWA and Virgin have made similar announcements, but no implementation).
The big deal is the relaxing of FARs regarding commercial wireless services on passenger aircraft.