With the use of adapters, it doesn't matter if it has a 1/8" stereo jack- as long as you have an adapter for whatever item you have that will convert to 1/8"
That's true, but if they just left is as "with wires you can connect it to any other audio source" it leaves it ambiguous as to the 'sort' of connection. A 1/8" stero jack tells us its a regular old two-channel analog connection, and conjures up images of exactly the sort of devices this was intended for.
And while you are right the exact format of that connector doesn't matter as its easy to adapt from 1/4", or stereo RCA, to 1/8" but the "2-channel analog" is important.
It tells me my ipod won't dock with it (although i can run a connection from the headphone jack). It tells me I can't plug a usb or fireware mass storage device loaded with mp3s into it, or the optical outputs from my dvd player, or digital coax, etc, etc.
I'm sure if you ask software companies that are members of the BSA on the record, they would say that zero is the amount of piracy they would like to see.
Of course zero is what they "would like to see". What they would like to see is every man woman and child on the face of the planet buy a licensed copy, or better yet... 2 licenced copies.
Ask them a more meaningful question like:
What you you prefer: a) Selling 1000 units with 0% piracy. b) Selling 2000 units with 1% piracy. c) Selling 10,000 units with 5% piracy. d) Monopolizing the market to the point that no one even seriously looks at your competitors product (say ~100,000 units) but with 23% piracy.
It goes without saying that if they could monopolize the market with no piracy they'd pick that. But what if that isn't an option?
100,000 units is a lot more 1000. And the 18% piracy -- sure it would be better if you could monopolize and have that at zero. But you'll happily take the 18% hit to monopolize the market... Indeed, once you've monopolized the market -- THEN maybe focus on piracy. (Sound familiar? Its the Microsoft approach.)
I've *personally* worked with software that required continual online license monitoring; hardware dongles and "online server-side functionality (subscription web services)" (To ensure that a pirated copy would be missing key functionality). There is no question in my mind whatsoever that it would have sold more units if ensuring zero piracy hadn't been such a priority. And not just because of the hassle the software's anti-piracy measures imposed, but because I'm certain that there are a lot of people who would have bought it - but who never got to try it out.
The trouble with "copyright education" will depend on the actual curriculum.
It would be fair teach, copyright history, what the law currently states, and then to discuss the merits and flaws of granting that artificial monopoly to content creators, finally summarizing it all up with how fair use fits in.
I could handle that... hell I would welcome that.
But I think we're far more likely to see a curriculum written by the MPAA/RIAA, where class would start by running that moronic "copying a movie is like stealing someones bicycle" commercials they are running in theaters, and then going down hill from there.
Re:Yup as long as Dell isn't doing it
on
OSx86 Cracked Again
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You make it sound like there is a contradiction. There really isn't one.
A certain level of piracy is good for a product. The real "cost" is low as the people doing it wouldn't have bought anything anyway, and if they are coming away with positive impressions of the product its effectively advertising. You could almost write it off as an expense.
Widespread piracy on the otherhand damages the product, as it directly negatively impacts on the companies bottom line. So no one in software development is going to advocate piracy, but well know that a little bit "in the right places" will actually help sales.
A kid who pirates Citrix Metaframe Server for his home will be comfortable recommending it when he's an IT consultant, a web developer with a pirated copy of photoshop on his home PC will never try the Gimp, thus helping protecting Adobe's lock on the legal copy at work. And his 10 year old kid will use that pirated copy of photoshop too when he draws moustaches on the family photos -- perpetuating the brand lock in.
Ditto MS Office... if everyone suddenly had to decide between buying a $500 copy of MSOffice, or trying OO.org oo.org adoption would take off, and once they're using it at home, it will start making in roads at work, as people realize that they could save $25,000 on MS Office licenses by not having a full blown copy of office on every desk where all its doing on most of them is writing to-do lists, resume's, and the odd memo.
But too much piracy is a 'bad thing'. I'd say that once the piracy extends past the "reasonable fair use" threshold its moved into 'bad' territory.
Oh, and drunk drivers do have a positive effect on making roads safer. We wouldn't have organizations like MADD etc working to promote driver education, dry grads, parent involvement with their teenagers, and whatnot were it not for drunk drivers. Unfortunately, unlike piracy, the cost of even a single drunk driving incident is far too high to say that any benefits are worth it.
That's the difference. The -cost- of limited piracy is negligible. If people couldn't pirate they simply wouldn't use it. So nobody is really harmed by it -- as long as it stays at that scale.
First its not like they are losing money. You can't lose a sale you wouldn't have made... these people probably aren't even paying for their Windows OS either. And on some level, its better for Apple for them to be using a pirated copy of OS X over a pirated copy of XP.
"Its money in their pocket", because people who *don't* have a Mac and would never have bought one will give OS X a test run. This may translate to dividends down the road when this person buys their next computer, a Mac, for the first time. Or maybe they'll suggest their mom buy a new mini, etc, etc (because they'll feel its the better OS for Mom, and they know how to support it if Mom runs into a snag.)
Its only going to hurt Apple's bottom line if pirated OS X becomes pervasive enough to actually cost them sales. I think its far more likely that a little piracy will actually help Apple's bottom line.
One of the items you listed, Singing Happy Birthday at a company, isn't even legislated. That is a matter of company policy, and if you have a problem with that, blame the company HR department, not the government.
You must mean the company policy that says don't do illegal stuff, like "copyright infringement".
"Happy Birthday" is a copyprotected song. Playing it, or performing it (including singing it) by a company is infringement. This is why all those chain restaurants now sing those stupid "new happy birthday" songs instead of the original. (Small restaurants often still sing the original, because they aren't 'corporateized' enough to know of the risk, or are willing to accept the risk of a complain. The chains however, are large enough and legally savvy enough to fear a lawsuit.
If a group of employees spontaneously got together and sung it to another employee in the lunchroom it would probably squeak by as fair use.
But if the company "sponsored" it -- e.g. by buying a cake, assembling the staff, and leading them through the tune -- (a la the scene in Office Space) they could be liable for copyright infringement.
It is in the bicep region, not the forehead or right hand;
Note to Satan, avoid foreheads or right hands. The left hand, biceps, or chin are all good canditates - any suspician that it might be the mark of the beast can be easily "proved" to be otherwise this way.
It is not a name nor the number 666
Note to Satan, send flowers to John - he's really got them fixated on the sixes, but we could totally slide this in by using sevens. Hey, have you heard about those new fangled RFIDs? You can even read them by remote!!
Fairly large displays can be used to show HDTV or movies.\
HDTV screensavers any way.
Because in this imaginary future HD-movies will be so wrapped up in legal and technological protections that the signal will not be passed by any electronics over 4 feet away from the physical disk, making remote viewing screens impossible.
In related fake-future-news, the projection market collapsed when it became impractical to view hdtv movies. Mounting the player on the ceiling next to the projector was just inconvenient and then their was still the legal grey area surrounding the fact that the actual screen was 10 feet away.
OS X Tiger? After all, there's "OS X" and there is "OS X".
If you've got Tiger go into System Profiler, under hardware, under Graphics/Displays take a look and you'll see a couple lines like:
Core Image: Not Supported Quartz Extreme: Not Supported
If it says note supported then, you are missing out on some of the effects (blurs, ripples, etc), and/or the gpu accelerated speed and fluidity that OS X has on higher end systems.
OS X has a less obvious 'fall back' path on older hardware. If you don't have Core Image and/or Quartz extreme some of it is emulated in software, and some of the effects are just dropped or simplified.
This is because OS X has evolved numerous times over the last few years; the evolution of its UI is easier to degrade gracefully. Plus, most of the changes since OS X 10.0 have been subtle; no grand re-visioning of the desktop since the OS 9 to OS X transition.
Vista, on the other hand, is doing one of those big transitions now. Imagine if we were to transition to a fully modern OS 10.4 from OS 9 *today* do you think Apple would have bothered supporting G3/and old G4 systems that couldn't do all its accelerated effects? Or would they have just drawn the line in the sand and said you must be above this mark for OS X? I think the latter. Its only because they had already written OS X's base UI for this older hardware that they bother to continue supporting it.
ALL mail providers scan your e-mail - Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL. . . you've got to be the only one on/. to not know that - come on!
Most scan, analyze, and discard. Not scan, analyze, index, correlate, and store forever.
I don't use hotmail, yahoo, or AOL either. And I don't think most "telco carrier" isps scan for much more than viruses and spam.
And Google Desktop doesn't send your documents to Google if you tell it not to.
True. But then I lose out on the features. I do want the features. I just don't want my data on Googles servers. I want the tools to index my data, I do not want to give my data to someone else to index -- especially via a very one-sided "EULA" that does NOTHING to protect ME or my data (is it even *my* data anymore?), should something bad(tm) happen.
Actually, while determining context might be hard, "playing it safe is easy". And many advanced 'profiling for ads' methods simply look for negativity (negative words like "hate", "loathe", "piece of shit" and so forth and avoid keywords in proximity... just in case.
So if all you right is "I HATE my fscking XBOX" instead of seeing an ad for an xbox accessory, it'll show you something else, despite xbox being a "found keyword".
Secondly, this data isn't going anywhere, and google will still have your messages 10 years out, 20 years, 50 years...
Don's foil hat...
Who knows what they can accomplish with that THEN. And if 50 years from now a repressive regime is looking for people to "watch", being able to subpoena and scan decades of history on you including your email, IM chats, googlePhone transcripts, web surfing habits, not to mention any documents you had on your PC in that period.
Perhaps you downloaded the anarchists cookbook in highschool out of curiosity...or spent a week reading about Hitler, and discussed it with your friends... hit enough keywords and you'll get the "treatment".
I want a convenient search accross computers feature. I'd use it.
I don't want google storing my documents, readily availble for someone to abuse, or for the government to demand access to sidestepping me.
I don't want google using my email, word docs, etc to profile me for adversising. It bugs me. I don't use gmail. I wouldn't mind using google tools to organize my info, I'd even buy or subscribe to a product from them that did so, but I'd like to keep it on my computer(s) thank you very much.
So... what software can I use that will let me do this on my own network, using my own servers. Why aren't more people emulating google's features with a paid product model instead of an free but with advertising/profiling model? I can't be the only one who'd pay to use a gmail that -didn't- scan my email, a google desktop that -doesn't- send my documents to google, etc, etc...
Apple has spotlight... what does windows have aside from that useless dog and google desktop? Does linux do well here?
Why is the crap of the 1970 and 1980s considered "classic" today?
The nostalgia trip; Regardless of whether the music was intrinsically good it still conjures up our past, at least for those of us who lived through it. We're all familiar with the example of being transported to childhood with the smell of baking bread, for example. Same with music.
I have oddball memory associations with all manner 'utter crap' music. Friends, parties, dates, stags, road trips, summer vacation, concerts, etc etc...pop is the soundtrack to our lives. Listening to it we relive bits of it.
Hell, its even true for songs I despised at the time. I hated "Don't Worry be happy" when it was big, but hearing it now is a nostalgia trip; I seem to have fond memories of hating it.;)
Does this definition make it impossible to move along the y axis because then the slope of our movement would be dy/dy? No. but it does say that if you move along the y axis your slope will be a constant.
That's a good insightful argument backed up by some godawful math.:)
The function for slope will be a simple constant for *any* linear function.
A linear function can be expressed as: f(x) = mx + b Its slope is the derivative: f'(x) = m which is simply the constant m, (and if m happens to be zero the line is horizontal.)
The case of a vertical line is special because it isn't a linear function. Hell, it isn't even a function. It has no defined slope at all.
That doesn't mean vertical lines can't exist, of course, merely that its nonsensical to try and determine their slope on the xy axes.
Similarly, as you said, it doesn't mean that time travel is impossible any more than vertical lines are impossible, just that the usual equations for velocity aren't applicable.
Seeing as the thread tangent was about fundies in WoW, that is why they are the subject of my post. I'm sure there are any number of intolerant idiots out there who aren't fundies but I'm not talking about them.
As to your stated (and unstated) opinions about having to see unlovable asses, hairy tongue-kissing men, dwarf necrophila, and troll/elf gang bangs -- relax.
You CAN'T see any of this stuff in the game anyways.
They're model ken dolls. They don't even let you take their shorts off. So who cares if they get to gether. The most they can do is talk. Can you handle them talking in public?? In a game with an 'ignore' command, no less?
I doubt it. Paladin's cast spells. They also revive the dead. (From a fundies point of a view the difference between a paladin and a necro would be pretty hard to even see really)
Unless Paladin's are somehow a Mutant-Solidier-Jesus but then its probably blasphemy to even roleplay wandering around the countryside impersonating their messiah on a mission of murder.)
I'm also pretty sure God (a la the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost) isn't in WoW, meanwhile an entire pantheon of fantasy gods ARE... so just who is this paladin worshipping?
(The reason we didn't need COPYRIGHT LAW for so long was that it was so damn hard to COPY THINGS. Duh.)
Lucky you weren't around for the dawn of email.. you'd probably have criminalized it for cutting into USPS profits.
(The reason we didn't need the POSTAL-SERVICE-PROTECTION-PATRIOT-FREEDOM law for so long was that it was so damn hard to deliver all your mail by yourself. Duh!)
I've always wondered what a staunch fundamentalist christian is doing playing a game with people pretending to be undead necromancers worshipping made up God's, wandering the countryside killing others.
Seems as out of place as an AA meeting in a liquor store.
Whatever you may think humans have done to the planet, it's gone through much bigger changes before we were ever here.
We weren't here then. We wouldn't have survived if we were. We aere here now. We will do what we can to survive.
How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?
First, we're not even sure that nature is actually taking its course, that we haven't knocked it off course.
Second, when push comes to shove we want to live on a habitable earth. Perhaps in a "hippy" utopia that could be accomplished simply by being environmentally responsible, but that might not be the case in the real world.
Hell we KNOW we're not exactly being evironmentally friendly. But regardless of WHY its happening -- if the planet is heading for a 10,000 year ice age that will cover 2/3rds the earth in a mile thick block of ice utterly devastating humanity then it doesn't matter if that's what nature has in store for us or if its the bed we've made for ourselves. Either way it would be time to shove back as best we can.
A little research to theorize HOW to push back isn't a bad idea.
Everytime I see a business with an AOL email address they lose credibility with me, just like people with the same. I see them as not very tech saavy.
Sure I'd blink if a web designer or network installer handed me a business card with an aol address.
But is there a reason you demand 'tech savvy' from your butcher, baker, fishmonger, home daycare operator, pet groomer, the workshop down the road that rebuilds radiater cores, the local scrapyard, and so forth?
And lets face it a lot of businesses did start with an aol address, and even if they don't need it anymore many do need to keep it around or risk losing a block of clients/contacts. They many not print it on their cards anymore, but they'll still have the AOL software around on their computers to be scoffed at by DSL tech support technicians:)
I don't disagree that a monopoly ending due to a patent expiration would lower prices. But an 'ideal capitalism' wouldn't have those. Inelastic demand leads to increased prices because the market 'knows' that increasing the price has no effect on unit sales and thus leads to greater profits.
Coupling inelastic demand with the end of a state supported monopoly, and then ending that monopoly doesn't really serve as a counter example to the theory, merely a more complicated situation in which prices can drop despite inelastic demand.
Finally, in many (most?) pill cases, the demand really isn't that inelastic. Doctor's are often selecting between several competing prescriptions. If several prescriptions appear equally effective Doctor's will choose cheaper avenues to lower the burden on patients (at least those without suitable insurance). Such that once a patent expires, the demand for a generic affordable version will bounce up.
I concede I'm oversimplifying, but not as much as you seem to think.
What would the competition charge him?
Nearly the same. Almost all he has. *Everyone* knows that this guy will pay that, there's really no reason for anyone to charge much less than that amount.
The supply and demand curves don't work properly for (life/death) medicine.
The demand side of medical procedures is invariate with no substitutable product. A person who needs a triple bypass needs a triple bypass. He will not consume more of them or less of them based on price. He will not get a kidney transplant if that's cheaper this week. Meanwhile people who don't need them will not buy them at any price.
The supply side doesn't really have to adapt. Sure if some rogue like Dr. Nick [simpsons] started showing up and doing discount surgery it could force a market response... but that's not an ideal capitalism because Dr. Nick isn't maximizing his profits.
The farmer's at a farmers market are in a vastly different position. They are acutely aware that their produce is deteriorating daily, and if the price of carrots is collectively sky high people will just buy celery or yams or whatever that week/month/year.
--
As to the elderly being passed on kidney transplants: Good point. Although I'm curious whether its really the limited supply of kidneys that's responsible for the elderly being passed over. (After all, the risk of dying from the surgery is non-trivial. If we had an extra kidney would the doctors recommend she risk the operation? I'm not so sure they would.) The liver scenario you present I'm not familiar with, and can't comment on.
Slashdot Mirror
With the use of adapters, it doesn't matter if it has a 1/8" stereo jack- as long as you have an adapter for whatever item you have that will convert to 1/8"
That's true, but if they just left is as "with wires you can connect it to any other audio source" it leaves it ambiguous as to the 'sort' of connection. A 1/8" stero jack tells us its a regular old two-channel analog connection, and conjures up images of exactly the sort of devices this was intended for.
And while you are right the exact format of that connector doesn't matter as its easy to adapt from 1/4", or stereo RCA, to 1/8" but the "2-channel analog" is important.
It tells me my ipod won't dock with it (although i can run a connection from the headphone jack). It tells me I can't plug a usb or fireware mass storage device loaded with mp3s into it, or the optical outputs from my dvd player, or digital coax, etc, etc.
Again, you have no evidence to back up unsupported assertions
0 sales
http://www.google.com/search?&q=piracy%20boosts%2
I'm sure if you ask software companies that are members of the BSA on the record, they would say that zero is the amount of piracy they would like to see.
Of course zero is what they "would like to see". What they would like to see is every man woman and child on the face of the planet buy a licensed copy, or better yet... 2 licenced copies.
Ask them a more meaningful question like:
What you you prefer:
a) Selling 1000 units with 0% piracy.
b) Selling 2000 units with 1% piracy.
c) Selling 10,000 units with 5% piracy.
d) Monopolizing the market to the point that no one even seriously looks at your competitors product (say ~100,000 units) but with 23% piracy.
It goes without saying that if they could monopolize the market with no piracy they'd pick that. But what if that isn't an option?
100,000 units is a lot more 1000. And the 18% piracy -- sure it would be better if you could monopolize and have that at zero. But you'll happily take the 18% hit to monopolize the market... Indeed, once you've monopolized the market -- THEN maybe focus on piracy. (Sound familiar? Its the Microsoft approach.)
I've *personally* worked with software that required continual online license monitoring; hardware dongles and "online server-side functionality (subscription web services)" (To ensure that a pirated copy would be missing key functionality). There is no question in my mind whatsoever that it would have sold more units if ensuring zero piracy hadn't been such a priority. And not just because of the hassle the software's anti-piracy measures imposed, but because I'm certain that there are a lot of people who would have bought it - but who never got to try it out.
The trouble with "copyright education" will depend on the actual curriculum.
It would be fair teach, copyright history, what the law currently states, and then to discuss the merits and flaws of granting that artificial monopoly to content creators, finally summarizing it all up with how fair use fits in.
I could handle that... hell I would welcome that.
But I think we're far more likely to see a curriculum written by the MPAA/RIAA, where class would start by running that moronic "copying a movie is like stealing someones bicycle" commercials they are running in theaters, and then going down hill from there.
You make it sound like there is a contradiction. There really isn't one.
... if everyone suddenly had to decide between buying a $500 copy of MSOffice, or trying OO.org oo.org adoption would take off, and once they're using it at home, it will start making in roads at work, as people realize that they could save $25,000 on MS Office licenses by not having a full blown copy of office on every desk where all its doing on most of them is writing to-do lists, resume's, and the odd memo.
A certain level of piracy is good for a product. The real "cost" is low as the people doing it wouldn't have bought anything anyway, and if they are coming away with positive impressions of the product its effectively advertising. You could almost write it off as an expense.
Widespread piracy on the otherhand damages the product, as it directly negatively impacts on the companies bottom line. So no one in software development is going to advocate piracy, but well know that a little bit "in the right places" will actually help sales.
A kid who pirates Citrix Metaframe Server for his home will be comfortable recommending it when he's an IT consultant, a web developer with a pirated copy of photoshop on his home PC will never try the Gimp, thus helping protecting Adobe's lock on the legal copy at work. And his 10 year old kid will use that pirated copy of photoshop too when he draws moustaches on the family photos -- perpetuating the brand lock in.
Ditto MS Office
But too much piracy is a 'bad thing'. I'd say that once the piracy extends past the "reasonable fair use" threshold its moved into 'bad' territory.
Oh, and drunk drivers do have a positive effect on making roads safer. We wouldn't have organizations like MADD etc working to promote driver education, dry grads, parent involvement with their teenagers, and whatnot were it not for drunk drivers. Unfortunately, unlike piracy, the cost of even a single drunk driving incident is far too high to say that any benefits are worth it.
That's the difference. The -cost- of limited piracy is negligible. If people couldn't pirate they simply wouldn't use it. So nobody is really harmed by it -- as long as it stays at that scale.
First its not like they are losing money. You can't lose a sale you wouldn't have made ... these people probably aren't even paying for their Windows OS either. And on some level, its better for Apple for them to be using a pirated copy of OS X over a pirated copy of XP.
"Its money in their pocket", because people who *don't* have a Mac and would never have bought one will give OS X a test run. This may translate to dividends down the road when this person buys their next computer, a Mac, for the first time. Or maybe they'll suggest their mom buy a new mini, etc, etc (because they'll feel its the better OS for Mom, and they know how to support it if Mom runs into a snag.)
Its only going to hurt Apple's bottom line if pirated OS X becomes pervasive enough to actually cost them sales. I think its far more likely that a little piracy will actually help Apple's bottom line.
One of the items you listed, Singing Happy Birthday at a company, isn't even legislated. That is a matter of company policy, and if you have a problem with that, blame the company HR department, not the government.
You must mean the company policy that says don't do illegal stuff, like "copyright infringement".
"Happy Birthday" is a copyprotected song. Playing it, or performing it (including singing it) by a company is infringement. This is why all those chain restaurants now sing those stupid "new happy birthday" songs instead of the original. (Small restaurants often still sing the original, because they aren't 'corporateized' enough to know of the risk, or are willing to accept the risk of a complain. The chains however, are large enough and legally savvy enough to fear a lawsuit.
If a group of employees spontaneously got together and sung it to another employee in the lunchroom it would probably squeak by as fair use.
But if the company "sponsored" it -- e.g. by buying a cake, assembling the staff, and leading them through the tune -- (a la the scene in Office Space) they could be liable for copyright infringement.
It is in the bicep region, not the forehead or right hand;
Note to Satan, avoid foreheads or right hands. The left hand, biceps, or chin are all good canditates - any suspician that it might be the mark of the beast can be easily "proved" to be otherwise this way.
It is not a name nor the number 666
Note to Satan, send flowers to John - he's really got them fixated on the sixes, but we could totally slide this in by using sevens. Hey, have you heard about those new fangled RFIDs? You can even read them by remote!!
Fairly large displays can be used to show HDTV or movies.\
HDTV screensavers any way.
Because in this imaginary future HD-movies will be so wrapped up in legal and technological protections that the signal will not be passed by any electronics over 4 feet away from the physical disk, making remote viewing screens impossible.
In related fake-future-news, the projection market collapsed when it became impractical to view hdtv movies. Mounting the player on the ceiling next to the projector was just inconvenient and then their was still the legal grey area surrounding the fact that the actual screen was 10 feet away.
=p
I'm running OSX on an old Imac G3 450.
OS X Tiger? After all, there's "OS X" and there is "OS X".
If you've got Tiger go into System Profiler, under hardware, under Graphics/Displays take a look and you'll see a couple lines like:
Core Image: Not Supported
Quartz Extreme: Not Supported
If it says note supported then, you are missing out on some of the effects (blurs, ripples, etc), and/or the gpu accelerated speed and fluidity that OS X has on higher end systems.
OS X has a less obvious 'fall back' path on older hardware. If you don't have Core Image and/or Quartz extreme some of it is emulated in software, and some of the effects are just dropped or simplified.
This is because OS X has evolved numerous times over the last few years; the evolution of its UI is easier to degrade gracefully. Plus, most of the changes since OS X 10.0 have been subtle; no grand re-visioning of the desktop since the OS 9 to OS X transition.
Vista, on the other hand, is doing one of those big transitions now. Imagine if we were to transition to a fully modern OS 10.4 from OS 9 *today* do you think Apple would have bothered supporting G3/and old G4 systems that couldn't do all its accelerated effects? Or would they have just drawn the line in the sand and said you must be above this mark for OS X? I think the latter. Its only because they had already written OS X's base UI for this older hardware that they bother to continue supporting it.
Without a visual difference, casual computer users (ie- not us) would unlikely notice any benefit of Vista over XP.
:)
Without a visual difference I'm not sure there's much left even for -us- to notice much benefit of Vista over XP.
ALL mail providers scan your e-mail - Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL. . . you've got to be the only one on /. to not know that - come on!
Most scan, analyze, and discard. Not scan, analyze, index, correlate, and store forever.
I don't use hotmail, yahoo, or AOL either. And I don't think most "telco carrier" isps scan for much more than viruses and spam.
And Google Desktop doesn't send your documents to Google if you tell it not to.
True. But then I lose out on the features. I do want the features. I just don't want my data on Googles servers. I want the tools to index my data, I do not want to give my data to someone else to index -- especially via a very one-sided "EULA" that does NOTHING to protect ME or my data (is it even *my* data anymore?), should something bad(tm) happen.
Information is Power and Power Corrupts.
Actually, while determining context might be hard, "playing it safe is easy". And many advanced 'profiling for ads' methods simply look for negativity (negative words like "hate", "loathe", "piece of shit" and so forth and avoid keywords in proximity... just in case.
So if all you right is "I HATE my fscking XBOX" instead of seeing an ad for an xbox accessory, it'll show you something else, despite xbox being a "found keyword".
Secondly, this data isn't going anywhere, and google will still have your messages 10 years out, 20 years, 50 years...
Don's foil hat...
Who knows what they can accomplish with that THEN. And if 50 years from now a repressive regime is looking for people to "watch", being able to subpoena and scan decades of history on you including your email, IM chats, googlePhone transcripts, web surfing habits, not to mention any documents you had on your PC in that period.
Perhaps you downloaded the anarchists cookbook in highschool out of curiosity...or spent a week reading about Hitler, and discussed it with your friends... hit enough keywords and you'll get the "treatment".
What I'd like is an alternative!
I want a convenient search accross computers feature. I'd use it.
I don't want google storing my documents, readily availble for someone to abuse, or for the government to demand access to sidestepping me.
I don't want google using my email, word docs, etc to profile me for adversising. It bugs me. I don't use gmail. I wouldn't mind using google tools to organize my info, I'd even buy or subscribe to a product from them that did so, but I'd like to keep it on my computer(s) thank you very much.
So... what software can I use that will let me do this on my own network, using my own servers. Why aren't more people emulating google's features with a paid product model instead of an free but with advertising/profiling model? I can't be the only one who'd pay to use a gmail that -didn't- scan my email, a google desktop that -doesn't- send my documents to google, etc, etc...
Apple has spotlight... what does windows have aside from that useless dog and google desktop? Does linux do well here?
Why is the crap of the 1970 and 1980s considered "classic" today?
;)
The nostalgia trip; Regardless of whether the music was intrinsically good it still conjures up our past, at least for those of us who lived through it. We're all familiar with the example of being transported to childhood with the smell of baking bread, for example. Same with music.
I have oddball memory associations with all manner 'utter crap' music. Friends, parties, dates, stags, road trips, summer vacation, concerts, etc etc...pop is the soundtrack to our lives. Listening to it we relive bits of it.
Hell, its even true for songs I despised at the time. I hated "Don't Worry be happy" when it was big, but hearing it now is a nostalgia trip; I seem to have fond memories of hating it.
My Viewsonic VP930b lcd has 1 DVI and 2 VGA (d-Sub) inputs, I can switch between them with the push of a button.
I'd be stunned if there aren't already dual DVI input LCD panels out there.
For those of you who are "monitor input challenged" yet find cable swapping unbearable buy a switch...either a vga or dvi video switch or even a KVM.
Does this definition make it impossible to move along the y axis because then the slope of our movement would be dy/dy? No. but it does say that if you move along the y axis your slope will be a constant.
:)
That's a good insightful argument backed up by some godawful math.
The function for slope will be a simple constant for *any* linear function.
A linear function can be expressed as:
f(x) = mx + b
Its slope is the derivative:
f'(x) = m
which is simply the constant m, (and if m happens to be zero the line is horizontal.)
The case of a vertical line is special because it isn't a linear function. Hell, it isn't even a function. It has no defined slope at all.
That doesn't mean vertical lines can't exist, of course, merely that its nonsensical to try and determine their slope on the xy axes.
Similarly, as you said, it doesn't mean that time travel is impossible any more than vertical lines are impossible, just that the usual equations for velocity aren't applicable.
Seeing as the thread tangent was about fundies in WoW, that is why they are the subject of my post. I'm sure there are any number of intolerant idiots out there who aren't fundies but I'm not talking about them.
As to your stated (and unstated) opinions about having to see unlovable asses, hairy tongue-kissing men, dwarf necrophila, and troll/elf gang bangs -- relax.
You CAN'T see any of this stuff in the game anyways.
They're model ken dolls. They don't even let you take their shorts off. So who cares if they get to gether. The most they can do is talk. Can you handle them talking in public?? In a game with an 'ignore' command, no less?
I doubt it. Paladin's cast spells. They also revive the dead. (From a fundies point of a view the difference between a paladin and a necro would be pretty hard to even see really)
Unless Paladin's are somehow a Mutant-Solidier-Jesus but then its probably blasphemy to even roleplay wandering around the countryside impersonating their messiah on a mission of murder.)
I'm also pretty sure God (a la the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost) isn't in WoW, meanwhile an entire pantheon of fantasy gods ARE... so just who is this paladin worshipping?
(The reason we didn't need COPYRIGHT LAW for so long was that it was so damn hard to COPY THINGS. Duh.)
Lucky you weren't around for the dawn of email.. you'd probably have criminalized it for cutting into USPS profits.
(The reason we didn't need the POSTAL-SERVICE-PROTECTION-PATRIOT-FREEDOM law for so long was that it was so damn hard to deliver all your mail by yourself. Duh!)
I've always wondered what a staunch fundamentalist christian is doing playing a game with people pretending to be undead necromancers worshipping made up God's, wandering the countryside killing others.
Seems as out of place as an AA meeting in a liquor store.
No that was "xXx" not "XXX"... completely different.
Whatever you may think humans have done to the planet, it's gone through much bigger changes before we were ever here.
We weren't here then. We wouldn't have survived if we were.
We aere here now. We will do what we can to survive.
How about we let nature take its course and we worry about changing ourselves instead of the planet?
First, we're not even sure that nature is actually taking its course, that we haven't knocked it off course.
Second, when push comes to shove we want to live on a habitable earth. Perhaps in a "hippy" utopia that could be accomplished simply by being environmentally responsible, but that might not be the case in the real world.
Hell we KNOW we're not exactly being evironmentally friendly. But regardless of WHY its happening -- if the planet is heading for a 10,000 year ice age that will cover 2/3rds the earth in a mile thick block of ice utterly devastating humanity then it doesn't matter if that's what nature has in store for us or if its the bed we've made for ourselves. Either way it would be time to shove back as best we can.
A little research to theorize HOW to push back isn't a bad idea.
Everytime I see a business with an AOL email address they lose credibility with me, just like people with the same. I see them as not very tech saavy.
:)
Sure I'd blink if a web designer or network installer handed me a business card with an aol address.
But is there a reason you demand 'tech savvy' from your butcher, baker, fishmonger, home daycare operator, pet groomer, the workshop down the road that rebuilds radiater cores, the local scrapyard, and so forth?
And lets face it a lot of businesses did start with an aol address, and even if they don't need it anymore many do need to keep it around or risk losing a block of clients/contacts. They many not print it on their cards anymore, but they'll still have the AOL software around on their computers to be scoffed at by DSL tech support technicians
I don't disagree that a monopoly ending due to a patent expiration would lower prices. But an 'ideal capitalism' wouldn't have those. Inelastic demand leads to increased prices because the market 'knows' that increasing the price has no effect on unit sales and thus leads to greater profits.
Coupling inelastic demand with the end of a state supported monopoly, and then ending that monopoly doesn't really serve as a counter example to the theory, merely a more complicated situation in which prices can drop despite inelastic demand.
Finally, in many (most?) pill cases, the demand really isn't that inelastic. Doctor's are often selecting between several competing prescriptions. If several prescriptions appear equally effective Doctor's will choose cheaper avenues to lower the burden on patients (at least those without suitable insurance). Such that once a patent expires, the demand for a generic affordable version will bounce up.
I concede I'm oversimplifying, but not as much as you seem to think.
What would the competition charge him?
Nearly the same. Almost all he has. *Everyone* knows that this guy will pay that, there's really no reason for anyone to charge much less than that amount.
The supply and demand curves don't work properly for (life/death) medicine.
The demand side of medical procedures is invariate with no substitutable product. A person who needs a triple bypass needs a triple bypass. He will not consume more of them or less of them based on price. He will not get a kidney transplant if that's cheaper this week. Meanwhile people who don't need them will not buy them at any price.
The supply side doesn't really have to adapt. Sure if some rogue like Dr. Nick [simpsons] started showing up and doing discount surgery it could force a market response... but that's not an ideal capitalism because Dr. Nick isn't maximizing his profits.
The farmer's at a farmers market are in a vastly different position. They are acutely aware that their produce is deteriorating daily, and if the price of carrots is collectively sky high people will just buy celery or yams or whatever that week/month/year.
--
As to the elderly being passed on kidney transplants: Good point. Although I'm curious whether its really the limited supply of kidneys that's responsible for the elderly being passed over. (After all, the risk of dying from the surgery is non-trivial. If we had an extra kidney would the doctors recommend she risk the operation? I'm not so sure they would.) The liver scenario you present I'm not familiar with, and can't comment on.