While I think they are technically true, A lot of average consumers aren't interested in buying a bulky desktop system to replace the dying one when a tablet or laptop will suit their needs just fine.
Agreed.
Power users, gamers and other enthusiasts aren't a significant part of the desktop market.
Also agreed. They are a small but important market. (Not to mention profitable.)
But businesses are a huge part of the desktop market. HUGE. So my parents aren't replacing their old tower... big deal.. the business down the street just rolled out 8 new desktops. The bank I deal with just ordered over 100. A small dentists office practice just ordered 3 desktops. Another company I work with is finishing its Windows 7 rollout, and has new desktops arriving by the pallet.
The old windows tower in the kitchen or basement or home office may be dying out in homes that lack a gamer/power-user that wants more than a laptop, but the desktop isn't going anywhere yet.
Precisely. Its useful to some people, like any other website -- including slashdot.
But every brand under the sun isn't begging me to "like", it and idiots i barely know aren't asking me why i don't have an account because they want to spam me with their life. Its not getting integrated into apps and games.
They make people buy a little higher and sell a little lower than they might have, so I'd think there's be little or no net effect on stock values
In simple terms. If a stock were to be valued at 100, it costs me 101 to buy it, and you get 99 to sell it.
That $2 didn't come out of nowhere. I had to pay extra to buy it. You didn't get as much to sell it. And you can't turn around and buy a $100 stock, because you've only got $99. Of course that's a bit facetious, but in aggregate its true.
In aggregate, they are literally siphoning money into their pockets out of the people who own the stock. That's money we don't have to reinvest.
Having much larger brokerage commissions didn't seem to collapse the stock market before computerization.
Yes that was a drag on the market too. But the difference there is that they were genuinely adding value and performing a necessary service. HFT are just leeches. Paying someone something to actually execute transactions is necessary.
Cite? I'm seeing Apple hitting barely 10% in the US. (And its much lower everywhere else), and that includes home pcs. The enterprise is far less accepting of Apple (because it doesn't integrate as well, and crucial applications like... accounting are still missing... )
But they skim 0.1% or whatever from every transaction on the stock, not just your transaction. Thus they are leeching value out of the stock itself, whether you are trading it actively or not.
They are pulling billions, out of the stock market as profit for themselves. They aren't creating value, and there's no such thing as free money.
Actually, there's proof of this that gets posted nearly every time this topic gets brought up, but 1) I'm at work and 2) there's more pressing nonsense to address in your post.
Said proof is unconvincing. I've seen it. Its an opinion at best, a source of argument that invites further investigation... but its not proof. But why argue about it, I've already stipulated for the sake of this conversation I'll accept it as true.
1) Suicides are their own fault
Therefore what?
Suicides go down as access to guns goes down. Their are plenty of other ways to kill oneself, but if you take away the guns a lot people just don't go with it. Guns make it too easy.
and idiots are perfectly capable of having accidents with other devices.
Yes. So what? People have accidents with ladders, why don't we take away peoples ladders, right? Is that your argument here? Guns are a lot more dangerous than ladders, and people aren't just shooting themselves, they are shooting others. Its comparatively rare for a ladder accident to kill innocent bystanders.
Plus we don't have nearly the same degree of a problem of irresponsible people buying ladders, and leaving them around the house unattended. It happens and its a problem, but its a much smaller problem. Children are more fascinated by playing with guns and emulating their favorite action heros than playing with ladders and emulating their favorite roofers. Lets focus on the big problems. If you can get gun deaths below ladder deaths or even into the same ballpark we'll come back and revisit the ladder issue if you like.
and is also not "crime", therefore making this objection irrelevant to the stated position against which you argue.
How so? Fixating on gun crime would be the irrelevant case, because I've already stipulated to the premise that it goes down. So obviously I'm not concerned about gun-control from the crime aspect, just the other gun deaths aspect.
2) Nobody is suggesting "giving" ANYBODY guns
You say tomato. I say tomato. If you feel like having a spasm over the phrase "giving them guns" vs "letting anybody get a gun" feel free to consider the substitution made.
just preserving the right of individuals to arm themselves for personal defense.
Or for any other whackadoodle reason they want one. since if you refuse to even do a background check I have no reason to believe they are concerned about personal defense.
No, it's just redefining "legal gun ownership" to cover a smaller and smaller area of the population
Who should be allowed to have a gun that won't be allowed to have a gun if there are mandatory background checks at gun shows?
with no benefit to society at great personal cost
The benefit to society is clear, and nobody who should be allowed to have a gun is losing their gun... so whose great personal cost are you referring to? Are you seriously arguing that society is better off letting a drunk idiot who shoots at passing cars have easy access to guns isn't worth the great personal cost that if he ever gets cornered alone in an alley he'll only be allowed to use mace, a baseball bat, and knives to defend himself?
Responsible gun owners aren't under attack here.
Which side has the red herring here?
Your side.
So what happens when whatever personality proclivity you posses gets labeled by the current dominant political paradigm as "crazy" or "dangerous", and you get redefined as someone not "responsible" enough to be "granted" the "privilege" of firearm ownership?
Is that something you are worried about? Maybe you are dangerous and crazy? I'm not worried about it, just as I'm not the least bit worried my right to own or drive a car is at any risk.
When the government decides to start trying to deny guns to reasonable responsible people I'll join your side. But they aren't. Its not even close. Your defending the rights of lunatics and idiots to be a
amazon is easy: cloud computing, cloud storage etc. Microsoft's Azure stuff has lot less mind share, and is generally behind.
facebook? I dunno... ownership of the account. Most heavily used Single-signon gateway. (Surprised gmail and hotmail/outlook didn't get there first... microsoft tried 'passport' years ago after all. Or maybe Facebook as more valuable web portal or competitor for advertising?
Personally I just wish Facebook would get myspaced and the sooner the better, or better still for 'social networking' sites as a category to just burn itself out.
So in the absence of something that will work, your suggestion to do something that won't work, but will have significant negative effects is superior to doing nothing at all?
What? A ban on assault weapons?
The gun-advocate claims a ban won't have any effect because few crimes are committed with them. So it would prevent a few crimes, or lower some of them down to being committed with lesser weapons. That seems like a postive effect.
Few crimes may be perpetrated with them, but even fewer crimes are prevented with them. Nobody hunts with them.
What do you need one for? What are the "significant negative effects"?
That said, I'm not really in favor of a full on outright ban of them. But I'd have no issues if there significant obstacles to getting a permit for one, and significant rules on where and how it was used and transported.
Moreover banning assault weapons is just one proposal. And perhaps that one should be defeated. Why do you also object to background checks at gun shows and private sales? Or firearms registration and licensing? Why do you object to limits on magazine size?
Do you still not see why people who value their 2nd amendment rights object to gun control?
Not really. Gun control is compatible with second amendment rights.
in the "IT security" world, the average "researcher" is a "hacker", but we aren't allowed to use that word anymore without going to jail, so now everything is under "security researcher" regardless of how professional it is.
Pretty much like how bloggers have decided to hide out under the 'journalist' umbrella after blogger came to mean 'person with narcissism, brain diarrhea, and the internet'. Now they are watering down the meaning of jouralism, but the word still has some shreds of credibility.
Why wouldn't he? An investor isn't trying to time the market that narrowly, so he'll pull as close to a real-time quote he can get confirm its still in the region he was looking for and submit the order.
your order will be executed at the price which it is originally entered.
Actually, if you set a limit price on an order, it should close at the asking price if the asking price is lower. Of course that NEVER happens, because the HFT guys or the banks themselves benefit from any arbitrage it can find there.
The thing to remember is that there isn't really a set price. The stock is traded on several markets at once (publicly) and then a lot of stuff happens in so-called dark-pools, which are private markets internal to the banks etc or otherwise outside of regulation. The price of a stock is not uniform -- it has different values in different markets, and the HFT guys are constantly trying to find (or even create) and then profit from any difference.
There is no good reason for any of this to exist. Any profit they take (and they take billions) is literally stolen from the legitimate buyers and sellers.
There is no reason the stock market needs nanosecond resolutions. All the trades could be matched and executed as a batch once a second, or even a minute.
Arguments for liquidity are ridiculous. Nobody has liquidity requirements at the nano-second scale. If I need to sell some stock, its a non issue if it takes a few minutes rather than being instantaneous.
If you actually invest (like the GP said) and don't speculate, the odds are still in your favor.
The odds are still in our favor, but the HFT assholes are skimming from us when we do buy and sell.
Things like 'getting information 2 seconds earlier' do not affect investors, they affect speculators.
They affect us, in that our transactions, although infrequent and slow, are still getting skimmed from. If I place an order for McDonads shares, some HFT ass is going to see that order coming, and bid up the price a few fractions of a cent, and then sell into my order. And I'm out a few cents or a few bucks depending on the size of the order.
In the grand scheme of things, my portfolios performance is going to be driven by the economy and the real performance of the companies I'm invested in. But whatever my portfolios performance was it -shoud- have been another fraction of a percent better that was skimmed off by the HFT garbage.
Shit, we better get background checks before you can buy one.
FFS are you serious?
Purchasing a car absolutely requires all kinds of paperwork to be registered with the government.
Plus where I live at least:
You need to pass a test before you can drive at all -- and that legally requires a licensed sober alert driver with years of experience to be in the passenger seat. Then you need to pass another test because you can drive alone (and that's still just probationary) you need to pass a 3rd test before you are actually considered a fully licensed driver. The majority of applicants do not pass all 3 tests the first time they are taken, and there are mandatory waiting periods between taking the successive tests or even retaking them.
Oh, and you want to drive a big truck or a motorcycle? Yeah, now those require additional tests.
All that, and you need to also meet minimal physical abilities too - in particular you can't be blind. And if you have various physical disabilities you may have to equip your vehicle with additional safety or control features to compensate.
And if you drive badly enough, they can take away your license to drive. Require you to take additional classes or tests, and in the case of drunk driving may require you to attach a breathalyser to your ignition.
Oh shit, there are some really scary looking cars on the road, we better ban them, they might cause even more accidents.
Protruding spikes and such actually are illegal. Not to mention the extremely rigorous saftey testing all cars are subject too. Not to mention all the legally mandated safety requirements. Plus, again, where I live, you must routinely have your car inspected for safety and emissions compliance. You can be issued a citation for having non-functioning indicator lights - you are legally required to maintain and service the vehicle. And there are all sorts of situations where a service garage cannot release a car back to you if it is deemed to be too unsafe.
Are you SURE a car analogy was your brightest idea?
1) Modern Windows is based on NT. NT was built with networking in mind. Modern windows rebuilt the entire network stack with Vista so what was true for Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 just doesn't have any bearing on current reality at all.
2) Windows didn't start out with permissions. But NT added them, and with Vista onwards, things have gotten substantially better.
3) This simply isn't true. You can install windows server without the UI now. The UI is separate from the rest of the system. The only reason you can't with the desktop editions is that there would be zero point except as as academic feat.
4) Mounting it is automatic, nothing else is. And this can be turned off quite easily via policy. Several linux distros now mount media automatically too, by default.
The 2012 retina macbooks include an HDMI port (in addition to mini displayport)... I assume the 2013 ones do too.
Yep looks like they do. Nice to see apple got this right finally.
Most projectors i've encountered recently only had VGA, with a small handful using HDMI.
The older ones are VGA only, pretty much anything recent is VGA+HDMI. But most reasonably equipped offices that have an older VGA one have the vga-hdmi adapter in the meeting room or on the projector cart, or whatever, since most new laptops are hdmi now. But almost nobody has a "mini-displayport to anything" adapter handy, unless its a mac shop you are visiting.
How many people are regularly flashing firmware on network devices or configuring access points? These are niche requirements, the vast majority of apple customers will never be doing such things.
I like how you omitted the scenario where people might need to use their computer for anything at an office with a wired-only network. Is that an obscure "niche" requirement too? Of course not.
As for the other admittedly more niche items, we're talking about the macbook pro. The top tier product for pro users, because pro users do pro things. That's why they bought pro products.
A "pro" laptop without an ethernet port is like a "pro" truck without four wheel drive.
And for a device like the macbook air, the case isn't even thick enough to put an ethernet or dvi socket on it...
Nobody is asking for DVI on anything. And no Ethernet on the air is acceptable.. its the AIR, not the PRO.
Its fine for there to be products that aren't suitable for some customers. But apple's lineup is so restrictive at this point that it doesn't have products suitable for a LOT of customers. I would run a mac desktop if they made a tower that made the slightest bit of sense, but they don't. A relative ended up building a hackintosh for his home office because the available mac options are demented. But I can't do even that in a business environment.
And now the laptops are getting worse.
You want IT to support people running macs, then IT needs to be able to run macs. And for the last decade the macbook pro's have been really good IT laptops -- unix based, able to run X, decent graphics and ports. The mini-dvi and the mini-displayport have been a long running annoyance, but they finally add HDMI. Plus I had to give up a matte screen for "ooo glossy" the last iteration, and then this iteration they've knocked off ethernet which is even more annoying.
I've encountered situations where someone with a non apple laptop was unable to connect to a projector too, for exactly the same reason. In fact, there's some laptops these days which don't include any video out capability whatsoever.
Yeah, the lowest grade consumer junk. Or the absolute most extreme approaches to being a tablet. Neither would be the pro workhorse stuff.
Fortunately, Apple has finally come around with installing HDMI on the pro. But at the cost of ethernet its one step forwards 2 steps backwards.
Apple needs "pro" products for professionals and enthusiasts. Quite bluntly, although apple desktop marketshare has been ticking up, I beleive they are actually losing ground in the pro markets. Creatives and IT admins, etc are starting to switch off because you can do quad monitors on a pc desktop with 10TB of storage inexpensively*, or because ethernet in a laptop is too important to be relegated to a dongle, and other big gaps in apples product lines.
Yes, yes, in the big shops, you don't need 10TB locally, because you've got a big fancy SAN, etc... but tons of them are small independent home-office types, and a desktop tower with 3+ screens, 32GB of RAM, a fast i7, and a pile of hard drives is well under $2000.
Ok. Lets assume that this were true. (There's no proof of this, but I'm not even interested in having that argument. Lets just assume, for the sake of argument that the presence of educated and responsible gun owners reduces crime.)
That's fine. Lets have those.
But what about uneducated irresponsible idiots? What about the clinically depressed? What about convicted violent felons? Does giving them guns reduce crime? Gun suicides and gun accidents skyrocket with legal ownership.
Virtually all the proposed gun legislation out there would not take away legal gun ownership anyway, so spasming over that is a red herring.
Gun advocates aren't waging a war to be able to own guns. They're figting a war against 'background checks' and paperwork for sales at gun shows and on craigslist. They're fighting so that even the most deranged lunatic or depressed idiot or convicted violent felon can buy a gun legally without so much as any one saying "maybe that guy shouldn't have a gun".
The whole mockery of the gun-advocate isn't because they have a legitimate argument about crime, or the 2nd amendment -- because they do have a legitimate argument to make. But there's no reason a confirmed idiot who has a history of getting drunk and shooting at passing cars should be able to get a gun as easily as a box of instant noodles.
If he thought things through and legitimately cared about his own well being and freedom, he would have scrubbed them himself as Snowden has.
You don't know what Snowden has done. You don't know what is in his 'insurance' torrent. You don't know who he may have shared the keys with in the event that he is disappeared.
Its actually pretty probable that Snowden has unredacted originals.
If the Guardian hadn't leaked the key it had been entrusted, Manning's leaks would have come out gradually and all properly scrubbed as well.
The worst you can say with any credibility is that Snowden is smarter than Manning. And well.. duh... Manning was a college dropout who enlisted in the army, and had the rank of private. Snowden was an NSA contractor with post grad university.
Manning was driven to act by his conscious over what he saw. That's good enough for me to exempt him from punishment. The fact that he's not a genius and made naive mistakes? Really --?
The phrase "trying to buy a name as a good guy" comes across as a criticism to me. Specially, I read it you essentially you saying:
"He is trying to whitewash his legacy. And we need to call him out on it so that his attempt to 'buy' a good name is defeated. He should go down in history for the bad things he has done, not the good things he did afterwards to try distract us from the bad."
That's pretty cynical. It might be true. But I've got no reason to believe he's not genuinely interested in doing good for its own sake, rather than just whitewashing his legacy.
And it sounds like BB is perfectly willing to allow this to happen, likely so they can have the illusion that there are in fact apps for the platform.
Its a mind bogglingly stupid numbers game. The reality is that 100,000 or 2,000,000 apps in an app store is a completely worthless indication.
Their was guy who won "every game on steam" back in 2011 has ~1800 games. Now I'm sure there are dozens (even hundreds?) of titles added since then. But still we're capping out at 2500 titles.
Now that's certainly not every game ever made, and it certainly leaves out some first class titles as well, and its just games not 'apps' (maps, messaging, note taking, document editing, cloud storage access, etc etc etc etc...)
But it gives you sense of the scale of a 'big app store' that REALLY has honest to goodness curation.
So realistically there are probably quite a bit less than 20,000 "real" apps. And if you took out the games, and just looked at the productivity stuff people needed the number of titles that anyone actually cares about likely numbers in the low hundreds.
So 100,000 apps? A million? Two million? Its all mostly just truly worthless garbage.
An app store with the right apps could be "fully stocked" and "compelling" with more than everything its customer base would really need or want or care about with as few as 500-1500 apps.
he neglected to scrub the names of innocents from the cables and files he released, potentially threatening people in the US and abroad.
Except it wasn't him that really botched that. Everything was encrypted and was supposed to get scrubbed to protect the innocent before any thing was actually released. Some journalist -- from the Gaurdian iirc, inadvertantly leaked the encryption key.
I'm fine with my organs being reused. It's this business of being killed beforehand that I would object to. The way you put it implies that getting executed for something I didn't do is not that objectionable provided my organs aren't harvested.
No, he's saying the motivation to have you killed beforehand is driven by the potential to harvest your organs. Remove that potential, and you remove the motive, and you don't get executed in the first place.
He's not saying it will remove every instance where someone is killed for something they didn't do, but it will remove every instance where someone is killed for something they didn't do to get at the organs.
Imagine having to make a rational decision as to the benefits and costs of continued existence,
What costs? What benefits? How is the valuation of them anything but completely subjective and arbitrary? Maybe they are right, and most of us just have unrealistically optimistic outlooks exaggerating the benefits and downplaying the costs.
Most people, aside from the very aged and the very depressed would value continued existence quite highly.
Most people watch reality TV or sports or both. I won't go anywhere near either. Do I have a mental condition that should be treated with medication?
Is that sort of concern really a sign of a healthy mind?
Would you describe the people running government or wall street as having healthy minds? Do they lack sufficient empathy? Are they too self-centered and greedy? They are literalyl destroying society... lets medicate that out of them.
I mean we'll medicate a 9 year old who finds school unengaging, and we'll medicate someone who thinks winter is a bit depressing, but the sociopathic tendancies and unhinged greed that drive wallstreet and government? That's healthy?
To anyone whose had a friend or relative or even themselves been saved by medication from suicide, I do not mean to offend you.
But I get REALLY leery about deciding to fix other people's mental state to some arbitrary point of 'normal'. On the one hand I recognize that there absolutely are illnesses out there, but on the other I'm skeptical of anyone who says they are the authority on what someone should think? And basing anything simply on what is 'normal' lacks validity. Look only to 19th century diagnosis of 'hysteria'...
And today? Don't like Football? Enjoy math too much? Distrust authority? Value your privacy? Lets fix you right up. Is that far fetched?
xcom, the one that came out on the xbox this year is out for iOS
Pointless. The game is great, the mods make it even better.
But the ios version, and xbox version, I imagine miss out on all that, cost more, and have fewer interface options, and a much smaller screen.
Honestly, I think the PC is making a comeback. Mobile gaming is huge, but its huge for mobile... when your at home and can choose, the PC gives you a hell of a lot more.
Anyone can post a message to a public forum from anywhere, encrypted with my public key, and signed with their private key. That message is secure and anonymous -- to everyone but me.
Only I can decrypt the message, and once having done that I can verify who its from.
I can reply on the same forum from anywhere encrypting with the recipients public key, and signed with my private key.
Infiltrating the forum itself is pretty worthless. They don't have the keys to anything.
The only problem is the key exchange, which pretty much needs to be done in person.
Slashdot Mirror
While I think they are technically true, A lot of average consumers aren't interested in buying a bulky desktop system to replace the dying one when a tablet or laptop will suit their needs just fine.
Agreed.
Power users, gamers and other enthusiasts aren't a significant part of the desktop market.
Also agreed. They are a small but important market. (Not to mention profitable.)
But businesses are a huge part of the desktop market. HUGE. So my parents aren't replacing their old tower... big deal.. the business down the street just rolled out 8 new desktops. The bank I deal with just ordered over 100. A small dentists office practice just ordered 3 desktops. Another company I work with is finishing its Windows 7 rollout, and has new desktops arriving by the pallet.
The old windows tower in the kitchen or basement or home office may be dying out in homes that lack a gamer/power-user that wants more than a laptop, but the desktop isn't going anywhere yet.
Precisely. Its useful to some people, like any other website -- including slashdot.
But every brand under the sun isn't begging me to "like", it and idiots i barely know aren't asking me why i don't have an account because they want to spam me with their life. Its not getting integrated into apps and games.
They make people buy a little higher and sell a little lower than they might have, so I'd think there's be little or no net effect on stock values
In simple terms. If a stock were to be valued at 100, it costs me 101 to buy it, and you get 99 to sell it.
That $2 didn't come out of nowhere. I had to pay extra to buy it. You didn't get as much to sell it. And you can't turn around and buy a $100 stock, because you've only got $99. Of course that's a bit facetious, but in aggregate its true.
In aggregate, they are literally siphoning money into their pockets out of the people who own the stock. That's money we don't have to reinvest.
Having much larger brokerage commissions didn't seem to collapse the stock market before computerization.
Yes that was a drag on the market too. But the difference there
is that they were genuinely adding value and performing a necessary service. HFT are just leeches. Paying someone something to actually execute transactions is necessary.
Wrong on both counts.
Cite? I'm seeing Apple hitting barely 10% in the US. (And its much lower everywhere else), and that includes home pcs. The enterprise is far less accepting of Apple (because it doesn't integrate as well, and crucial applications like... accounting are still missing... )
But they skim 0.1% or whatever from every transaction on the stock, not just your transaction. Thus they are leeching value out of the stock itself, whether you are trading it actively or not.
They are pulling billions, out of the stock market as profit for themselves. They aren't creating value, and there's no such thing as free money.
Actually, there's proof of this that gets posted nearly every time this topic gets brought up, but 1) I'm at work and 2) there's more pressing nonsense to address in your post.
Said proof is unconvincing. I've seen it. Its an opinion at best, a source of argument that invites further investigation... but its not proof. But why argue about it, I've already stipulated for the sake of this conversation I'll accept it as true.
1) Suicides are their own fault
Therefore what?
Suicides go down as access to guns goes down. Their are plenty of other ways to kill oneself, but if you take away the guns a lot people just don't go with it. Guns make it too easy.
and idiots are perfectly capable of having accidents with other devices.
Yes. So what? People have accidents with ladders, why don't we take away peoples ladders, right? Is that your argument here? Guns are a lot more dangerous than ladders, and people aren't just shooting themselves, they are shooting others. Its comparatively rare for a ladder accident to kill innocent bystanders.
Plus we don't have nearly the same degree of a problem of irresponsible people buying ladders, and leaving them around the house unattended. It happens and its a problem, but its a much smaller problem. Children are more fascinated by playing with guns and emulating their favorite action heros than playing with ladders and emulating their favorite roofers. Lets focus on the big problems. If you can get gun deaths below ladder deaths or even into the same ballpark we'll come back and revisit the ladder issue if you like.
and is also not "crime", therefore making this objection irrelevant to the stated position against which you argue.
How so? Fixating on gun crime would be the irrelevant case, because I've already stipulated to the premise that it goes down. So obviously I'm not concerned about gun-control from the crime aspect, just the other gun deaths aspect.
2) Nobody is suggesting "giving" ANYBODY guns
You say tomato. I say tomato. If you feel like having a spasm over the phrase "giving them guns" vs "letting anybody get a gun" feel free to consider the substitution made.
just preserving the right of individuals to arm themselves for personal defense.
Or for any other whackadoodle reason they want one. since if you refuse to even do a background check I have no reason to believe they are concerned about personal defense.
No, it's just redefining "legal gun ownership" to cover a smaller and smaller area of the population
Who should be allowed to have a gun that won't be allowed to have a gun if there are mandatory background checks at gun shows?
with no benefit to society at great personal cost
The benefit to society is clear, and nobody who should be allowed to have a gun is losing their gun... so whose great personal cost are you referring to? Are you seriously arguing that society is better off letting a drunk idiot who shoots at passing cars have easy access to guns isn't worth the great personal cost that if he ever gets cornered alone in an alley he'll only be allowed to use mace, a baseball bat, and knives to defend himself?
Responsible gun owners aren't under attack here.
Which side has the red herring here?
Your side.
So what happens when whatever personality proclivity you posses gets labeled by the current dominant political paradigm as "crazy" or "dangerous", and you get redefined as someone not "responsible" enough to be "granted" the "privilege" of firearm ownership?
Is that something you are worried about? Maybe you are dangerous and crazy? I'm not worried about it, just as I'm not the least bit worried my right to own or drive a car is at any risk.
When the government decides to start trying to deny guns to reasonable responsible people I'll join your side. But they aren't. Its not even close. Your defending the rights of lunatics and idiots to be a
amazon is easy: cloud computing, cloud storage etc. Microsoft's Azure stuff has lot less mind share, and is generally behind.
facebook? I dunno... ownership of the account. Most heavily used Single-signon gateway. (Surprised gmail and hotmail/outlook didn't get there first... microsoft tried 'passport' years ago after all. Or maybe Facebook as more valuable web portal or competitor for advertising?
Personally I just wish Facebook would get myspaced and the sooner the better, or better still for 'social networking' sites as a category to just burn itself out.
xkcd pretty much nailed it:
http://xkcd.com/1239/
So in the absence of something that will work, your suggestion to do something that won't work, but will have significant negative effects is superior to doing nothing at all?
What? A ban on assault weapons?
The gun-advocate claims a ban won't have any effect because few crimes are committed with them. So it would prevent a few crimes, or lower some of them down to being committed with lesser weapons. That seems like a postive effect.
Few crimes may be perpetrated with them, but even fewer crimes are prevented with them. Nobody hunts with them.
What do you need one for? What are the "significant negative effects"?
That said, I'm not really in favor of a full on outright ban of them. But I'd have no issues if there significant obstacles to getting a permit for one, and significant rules on where and how it was used and transported.
Moreover banning assault weapons is just one proposal. And perhaps that one should be defeated. Why do you also object to background checks at gun shows and private sales? Or firearms registration and licensing? Why do you object to limits on magazine size?
Do you still not see why people who value their 2nd amendment rights object to gun control?
Not really. Gun control is compatible with second amendment rights.
in the "IT security" world, the average "researcher" is a "hacker", but we aren't allowed to use that word anymore without going to jail, so now everything is under "security researcher" regardless of how professional it is.
Pretty much like how bloggers have decided to hide out under the 'journalist' umbrella after blogger came to mean 'person with narcissism, brain diarrhea, and the internet'. Now they are watering down the meaning of jouralism, but the word still has some shreds of credibility.
Virtually all proposed gun legislation would not make a difference in gun crimes..
So propose something that would make a difference. I'm willing to hear you out.
I think you have it backwards.
Unless you are entering an at-market order
Why wouldn't he? An investor isn't trying to time the market that narrowly, so he'll pull as close to a real-time quote he can get confirm its still in the region he was looking for and submit the order.
your order will be executed at the price which it is originally entered.
Actually, if you set a limit price on an order, it should close at the asking price if the asking price is lower. Of course that NEVER happens, because the HFT guys or the banks themselves benefit from any arbitrage it can find there.
The thing to remember is that there isn't really a set price. The stock is traded on several markets at once (publicly) and then a lot of stuff happens in so-called dark-pools, which are private markets internal to the banks etc or otherwise outside of regulation. The price of a stock is not uniform -- it has different values in different markets, and the HFT guys are constantly trying to find (or even create) and then profit from any difference.
There is no good reason for any of this to exist. Any profit they take (and they take billions) is literally stolen from the legitimate buyers and sellers.
There is no reason the stock market needs nanosecond resolutions. All the trades could be matched and executed as a batch once a second, or even a minute.
Arguments for liquidity are ridiculous. Nobody has liquidity requirements at the nano-second scale. If I need to sell some stock, its a non issue if it takes a few minutes rather than being instantaneous.
If you actually invest (like the GP said) and don't speculate, the odds are still in your favor.
The odds are still in our favor, but the HFT assholes are skimming from us when we do buy and sell.
Things like 'getting information 2 seconds earlier' do not affect investors, they affect speculators.
They affect us, in that our transactions, although infrequent and slow, are still getting skimmed from. If I place an order for McDonads shares, some HFT ass is going to see that order coming, and bid up the price a few fractions of a cent, and then sell into my order. And I'm out a few cents or a few bucks depending on the size of the order.
In the grand scheme of things, my portfolios performance is going to be driven by the economy and the real performance of the companies I'm invested in. But whatever my portfolios performance was it -shoud- have been another fraction of a percent better that was skimmed off by the HFT garbage.
I am still "affected" by it.
Shit, we better get background checks before you can buy one.
FFS are you serious?
Purchasing a car absolutely requires all kinds of paperwork to be registered with the government.
Plus where I live at least:
You need to pass a test before you can drive at all -- and that legally requires a licensed sober alert driver with years of experience to be in the passenger seat. Then you need to pass another test because you can drive alone (and that's still just probationary) you need to pass a 3rd test before you are actually considered a fully licensed driver. The majority of applicants do not pass all 3 tests the first time they are taken, and there are mandatory waiting periods between taking the successive tests or even retaking them.
Oh, and you want to drive a big truck or a motorcycle? Yeah, now those require additional tests.
All that, and you need to also meet minimal physical abilities too - in particular you can't be blind. And if you have various physical disabilities you may have to equip your vehicle with additional safety or control features to compensate.
And if you drive badly enough, they can take away your license to drive. Require you to take additional classes or tests, and in the case of drunk driving may require you to attach a breathalyser to your ignition.
Oh shit, there are some really scary looking cars on the road, we better ban them, they might cause even more accidents.
Protruding spikes and such actually are illegal. Not to mention the extremely rigorous saftey testing all cars are subject too. Not to mention all the legally mandated safety requirements. Plus, again, where I live, you must routinely have your car inspected for safety and emissions compliance. You can be issued a citation for having non-functioning indicator lights - you are legally required to maintain and service the vehicle. And there are all sorts of situations where a service garage cannot release a car back to you if it is deemed to be too unsafe.
Are you SURE a car analogy was your brightest idea?
1) Modern Windows is based on NT. NT was built with networking in mind. Modern windows rebuilt the entire network stack with Vista so what was true for Windows 3.1 / 95 / 98 just doesn't have any bearing on current reality at all.
2) Windows didn't start out with permissions. But NT added them, and with Vista onwards, things have gotten substantially better.
3) This simply isn't true. You can install windows server without the UI now. The UI is separate from the rest of the system. The only reason you can't with the desktop editions is that there would be zero point except as as academic feat.
4) Mounting it is automatic, nothing else is. And this can be turned off quite easily via policy. Several linux distros now mount media automatically too, by default.
That enough to start with?
Keep going. So far you've got bupkiss.
The 2012 retina macbooks include an HDMI port (in addition to mini displayport)... I assume the 2013 ones do too.
Yep looks like they do. Nice to see apple got this right finally.
Most projectors i've encountered recently only had VGA, with a small handful using HDMI.
The older ones are VGA only, pretty much anything recent is VGA+HDMI. But most reasonably equipped offices that have an older VGA one have the vga-hdmi adapter in the meeting room or on the projector cart, or whatever, since most new laptops are hdmi now. But almost nobody has a "mini-displayport to anything" adapter handy, unless its a mac shop you are visiting.
How many people are regularly flashing firmware on network devices or configuring access points? These are niche requirements, the vast majority of apple customers will never be doing such things.
I like how you omitted the scenario where people might need to use their computer for anything at an office with a wired-only network. Is that an obscure "niche" requirement too? Of course not.
As for the other admittedly more niche items, we're talking about the macbook pro. The top tier product for pro users, because pro users do pro things. That's why they bought pro products.
A "pro" laptop without an ethernet port is like a "pro" truck without four wheel drive.
And for a device like the macbook air, the case isn't even thick enough to put an ethernet or dvi socket on it...
Nobody is asking for DVI on anything. And no Ethernet on the air is acceptable.. its the AIR, not the PRO.
Its fine for there to be products that aren't suitable for some customers. But apple's lineup is so restrictive at this point that it doesn't have products suitable for a LOT of customers. I would run a mac desktop if they made a tower that made the slightest bit of sense, but they don't. A relative ended up building a hackintosh for his home office because the available mac options are demented. But I can't do even that in a business environment.
And now the laptops are getting worse.
You want IT to support people running macs, then IT needs to be able to run macs. And for the last decade the macbook pro's have been really good IT laptops -- unix based, able to run X, decent graphics and ports. The mini-dvi and the mini-displayport have been a long running annoyance, but they finally add HDMI. Plus I had to give up a matte screen for "ooo glossy" the last iteration, and then this iteration they've knocked off ethernet which is even more annoying.
I've encountered situations where someone with a non apple laptop was unable to connect to a projector too, for exactly the same reason. In fact, there's some laptops these days which don't include any video out capability whatsoever.
Yeah, the lowest grade consumer junk. Or the absolute most extreme approaches to being a tablet. Neither would be the pro workhorse stuff.
Fortunately, Apple has finally come around with installing HDMI on the pro. But at the cost of ethernet its one step forwards 2 steps backwards.
Apple needs "pro" products for professionals and enthusiasts. Quite bluntly, although apple desktop marketshare has been ticking up, I beleive they are actually losing ground in the pro markets. Creatives and IT admins, etc are starting to switch off because you can do quad monitors on a pc desktop with 10TB of storage inexpensively*, or because ethernet in a laptop is too important to be relegated to a dongle, and other big gaps in apples product lines.
Yes, yes, in the big shops, you don't need 10TB locally, because you've got a big fancy SAN, etc... but tons of them are small independent home-office types, and a desktop tower with 3+ screens, 32GB of RAM, a fast i7, and a pile of hard drives is well under $2000.
Legal ownership of guns reduces crime.
Ok. Lets assume that this were true. (There's no proof of this, but I'm not even interested in having that argument. Lets just assume, for the sake of argument that the presence of educated and responsible gun owners reduces crime.)
That's fine. Lets have those.
But what about uneducated irresponsible idiots? What about the clinically depressed? What about convicted violent felons? Does giving them guns reduce crime? Gun suicides and gun accidents skyrocket with legal ownership.
Virtually all the proposed gun legislation out there would not take away legal gun ownership anyway, so spasming over that is a red herring.
Gun advocates aren't waging a war to be able to own guns. They're figting a war against 'background checks' and paperwork for sales at gun shows and on craigslist. They're fighting so that even the most deranged lunatic or depressed idiot or convicted violent felon can buy a gun legally without so much as any one saying "maybe that guy shouldn't have a gun".
The whole mockery of the gun-advocate isn't because they have a legitimate argument about crime, or the 2nd amendment -- because they do have a legitimate argument to make. But there's no reason a confirmed idiot who has a history of getting drunk and shooting at passing cars should be able to get a gun as easily as a box of instant noodles.
If he thought things through and legitimately cared about his own well being and freedom, he would have scrubbed them himself as Snowden has.
You don't know what Snowden has done. You don't know what is in his 'insurance' torrent. You don't know who he may have shared the keys with in the event that he is disappeared.
Its actually pretty probable that Snowden has unredacted originals.
If the Guardian hadn't leaked the key it had been entrusted, Manning's leaks would have come out gradually and all properly scrubbed as well.
The worst you can say with any credibility is that Snowden is smarter than Manning. And well.. duh... Manning was a college dropout who enlisted in the army, and had the rank of private. Snowden was an NSA contractor with post grad university.
Manning was driven to act by his conscious over what he saw. That's good enough for me to exempt him from punishment. The fact that he's not a genius and made naive mistakes? Really --?
The phrase "trying to buy a name as a good guy" comes across as a criticism to me. Specially, I read it you essentially you saying:
"He is trying to whitewash his legacy. And we need to call him out on it so that his attempt to 'buy' a good name is defeated. He should go down in history for the bad things he has done, not the good things he did afterwards to try distract us from the bad."
That's pretty cynical. It might be true. But I've got no reason to believe he's not genuinely interested in doing good for its own sake, rather than just whitewashing his legacy.
And it sounds like BB is perfectly willing to allow this to happen, likely so they can have the illusion that there are in fact apps for the platform.
Its a mind bogglingly stupid numbers game. The reality is that 100,000 or 2,000,000 apps in an app store is a completely worthless indication.
Their was guy who won "every game on steam" back in 2011 has ~1800 games. Now I'm sure there are dozens (even hundreds?) of titles added since then. But still we're capping out at 2500 titles.
Now that's certainly not every game ever made, and it certainly leaves out some first class titles as well, and its just games not 'apps' (maps, messaging, note taking, document editing, cloud storage access, etc etc etc etc...)
But it gives you sense of the scale of a 'big app store' that REALLY has honest to goodness curation.
So realistically there are probably quite a bit less than 20,000 "real" apps. And if you took out the games, and just looked at the productivity stuff people needed the number of titles that anyone actually cares about likely numbers in the low hundreds.
So 100,000 apps? A million? Two million? Its all mostly just truly worthless garbage.
An app store with the right apps could be "fully stocked" and "compelling" with more than everything its customer base would really need or want or care about with as few as 500-1500 apps.
Bill Gates is trying to buy a name as a good guy
Its pretty hard to find fault with a motivation that amounts to seeking forgiveness by doing the most good you can do.
he neglected to scrub the names of innocents from the cables and files he released, potentially threatening people in the US and abroad.
Except it wasn't him that really botched that. Everything was encrypted and was supposed to get scrubbed to protect the innocent before any thing was actually released. Some journalist -- from the Gaurdian iirc, inadvertantly leaked the encryption key.
I'm fine with my organs being reused. It's this business of being killed beforehand that I would object to. The way you put it implies that getting executed for something I didn't do is not that objectionable provided my organs aren't harvested.
No, he's saying the motivation to have you killed beforehand is driven by the potential to harvest your organs. Remove that potential, and you remove the motive, and you don't get executed in the first place.
He's not saying it will remove every instance where someone is killed for something they didn't do, but it will remove every instance where someone is killed for something they didn't do to get at the organs.
Imagine having to make a rational decision as to the benefits and costs of continued existence,
What costs? What benefits? How is the valuation of them anything but completely subjective and arbitrary? Maybe they are right, and most of us just have unrealistically optimistic outlooks exaggerating the benefits and downplaying the costs.
Most people, aside from the very aged and the very depressed would value continued existence quite highly.
Most people watch reality TV or sports or both. I won't go anywhere near either. Do I have a mental condition that should be treated with medication?
Is that sort of concern really a sign of a healthy mind?
Would you describe the people running government or wall street as having healthy minds? Do they lack sufficient empathy? Are they too self-centered and greedy? They are literalyl destroying society... lets medicate that out of them.
I mean we'll medicate a 9 year old who finds school unengaging, and we'll medicate someone who thinks winter is a bit depressing, but the sociopathic tendancies and unhinged greed that drive wallstreet and government? That's healthy?
To anyone whose had a friend or relative or even themselves been saved by medication from suicide, I do not mean to offend you.
But I get REALLY leery about deciding to fix other people's mental state to some arbitrary point of 'normal'. On the one hand I recognize that there absolutely are illnesses out there, but on the other I'm skeptical of anyone who says they are the authority on what someone should think? And basing anything simply on what is 'normal' lacks validity. Look only to 19th century diagnosis of 'hysteria'...
And today? Don't like Football? Enjoy math too much? Distrust authority? Value your privacy? Lets fix you right up. Is that far fetched?
I say its not far fetched enough. :(
xcom, the one that came out on the xbox this year is out for iOS
Pointless. The game is great, the mods make it even better.
But the ios version, and xbox version, I imagine miss out on all that, cost more, and have fewer interface options, and a much smaller screen.
Honestly, I think the PC is making a comeback. Mobile gaming is huge, but its huge for mobile... when your at home and can choose, the PC gives you a hell of a lot more.
Anyone can post a message to a public forum from anywhere, encrypted with my public key, and signed with their private key. That message is secure and anonymous -- to everyone but me.
Only I can decrypt the message, and once having done that I can verify who its from.
I can reply on the same forum from anywhere encrypting with the recipients public key, and signed with my private key.
Infiltrating the forum itself is pretty worthless. They don't have the keys to anything.
The only problem is the key exchange, which pretty much needs to be done in person.