Java has lost to C#, dotNet and whatever Microsoft vaporware-du-jour.
Uh... what? How is.NET "vaporware?" It *exists*, dude. My company has been using it for a couple of years now, and making good money selling ASP.NET web apps written in C#.
Did someone change the definition of "vaporware" while I wasn't looking?
Ironically, computer programs are the one area in life where free things are often better than expensive alternatives.
I respectfully disagree. I would replace "often" with "rarely."
Best server OS? BSD. Best Web server? Apache.
Best graphics editing suite? Adobe Photoshop. Best office suite? Microsoft Office. Best database backend? Tough call, but none of the front runners are (capital-F) Free.
And I would respectfully submit that even your assertion that Apache is the "best web server" is weakening by the day, as more and more business rely on interactive web presences, and turn to the easily-developed-and-deployed.NET platform, rather than the clunky, kludgy PHP solutions of old.
Sure, if I just want to put up some static pages, Apache is the best. However, the web is evolving faster than Apache, and virtually everyone wants MORE than that now.
Yes, I know exactly what you're saying, and I'm saying you guys are being too uptight with the use of the words. Common convention supports my argument that people commonly employ much stronger words to describe a relatively less severe act. For example, my native/white man "raping" the land example. In actuality, it wasn't "raping" the land, it was stealing it and polluting it. "Rape" is a much more severe, violent, invasive crime. Theft and pollution are comparitively "softer" crimes.
So don't get all bent out of shape when people do the same thing with copyright infringement.
It is not piracy. Piracy involves boarding and stealing ships in the sea with the casual murder of people.
It's called copyright infringement. Escape the common (publicity induced and totally unfair) misconceptions...
It's called a "metaphor."
When the natives complain about the white man raping their land, the white man didn't actually rape the land. It's a metaphor.
When they say that Kazaa is the bastard son of Napster, they don't mean that Napster, as a company, somehow copulated with another company, producing an offspring company, then denied ever having sex with the first company at all. It's a metaphor.
When you burn a CD, there is no flame involved. It's a metaphor.
When you surf the web, there is no actual surfing involved. It's a metaphor.
When you pirate music/software, you are not actually running around with a parrot, an eyepatch, and a pegleg, boarding ships and stealing software. It's a metaphor.
Think outside the box a little, instead of blindly latching on to the watered-down, pre-approved things that you're allowed to rebel against.
(Note that I'm not implying there there is an actual box involved, that you're actually blind, that there are any latches involved, or that anyone has actually sprayed water onto anything).
Then again I wonder if they are producing this crap for girls KNOWING guys are watching less.
You've unknowingly hit on a very fascinating sub-world of advertising, the "target demographic." If you want to know who the networks think are watching, then pay attention to the commercials. This is actually one of my morbid curiosities. I sometimes get a kick out of flipping to some outrageous, twisted show, just to see the commercials and see who the network thinks is watching. Sometimes its funny, sometimes its scary.
For example. What kind of commercials do you see during "The Apprentice?" I would think that a show like that would appeal to men, so I would expect to see manly commercials. Yet if you notice, you'll see that there are a surprisingly high number of commercials for feminine hygiene products, cleaning products (whose commercials always feature women, exclusively, by the way - so much for equal contributions in the home and eliminating stereotypes, eh? Where are the men in those commercials? At work? Is that what we're supposed to conclude?), and vaccuum cleaners.
Now flip over to SpikeTV. I guarantee you'll never see a maxipad commercial there.:) However, you do notice some other disturbing things. Pay attention during the "Power Block" on Spike. Of course, you see commercials for car products, tools, and whatever, but notice the way the commercials are pitched. Lots of special effects, shouting, and flashing lights. The same type of visual stimulation you'd use to capture a child's attention, or people with short attention spans and stunted maturity. Even more disturbingly, you see an unusually high concentration of commercials for credit counseling. Apparently, SpikeTV thinks its viewers are young, poor, hyperactive males with little earning power. In order to afford the expensive "car-toys" on their shows and commercials, they offer them credit and bankruptcy help. Hmm. And we wonder why the country's average personal debt load is so frighteningly high. They are pushing a culture of borrowing and short term vision for immediate gratification.
Finally, one last, even more revealing example. I was home sick from work the other day, and had the TV on. To entertain my little voyeuristic interest, I had it on FOX for a while. Examining FOX's target demographic is among the most easiest, funniest, and scariest, all rolled into one. You can immediately tell that FOX caters to the heavily conservative, religious audience, with low income and a very gossipy nature. The shows they run during the daytime are trashy talk shows and court "reality" shows with lots of yelling. The commercials are even more revealing. Lawyers come on once or twice every commercial break asking if you've been injured. Apparently, if you've been hurt, even through your own stupid fault, they'll find someone else to blame (and, of course, to sue).
Scads of credit counseling/consolidation commercials. Lots of ads pitching trade school or diploma programs. Apparently, the demographic that is home during the weekdays, watching FOX is poor, uneducated, conservative, voyueristic, and looking to get rich quick.
I don't do it often, but when I do watch TV, I enjoy trying to read between the lines and see what networks and advertisers really think of their viewers. It can be quite enlightening.
I make most of my small ($100) purchases with cash. How do bar codes and scanners make me traceable for those?
Cash has serial numbers. Unless you found it on the street, you probably got that cash from a bank machine, which you accessed using your personal bank card. So they knew you had that cash. And when you guy anything electronic, they have serial numbers, so they could track that and even know which individual DVD player you bought, even though you paid cash.
You see, all you tin-foil-hatters out there, the technology already exists to track you, if they really wanted to. But they're not. Not to that degree. You're not that important. I know it's sad, but companies, for the most part, don't care what you do every waking moment of the day. They only care about habitual big spenders, or people like you when it comes time to buy something expensive. RFID isn't going to change anything.
Why? Isn't it a good thing? Why should they waste time, money, and paper sending me flyers telling me Tampax is on sale? Wouldn't I rather get coupons for steak? (Yes!)
I do not want marketers to know anything more than they already do about my online browsing habits, or worse, my personal hygene and dietary preferences,including what kind of cereal my three year old eats...
What if they used that info to send you coupons for the right brand of cereal? If your kid eats Cheerios, and they send you coupons for Shreddies (but your neighbor got the Cheerios coupons), wouldn't you rather get "targeted marketing" that could save you money, instead of random marketing for crap you don't use?
That's absurd. RFIDs are passive, meaning they have very, very short range (a few inches, couple feet at most). To "scan" a house from the street, you'd need an enormous transmitter/receiver combo, which would generate a tremendous amount of RF noise that would be sure to be noticed in a neighborhood.
Secondly, even if you did manage to get the RFID tag number, how exactly would you "check a UPC database?" FYI, these tags are not like UPC codes. UPC codes are not unique. The first 5 (4?) digits of a UPC code identify the manufacturer, the remaining 5 identify the product. For example, 78492 means "GE", and 87369 means "Washing Machine, model GE T705" (warning: completely fake data, for illustrative purposes only). That info is not that hard to find.
But with RFID, however, each individual washing machine has its own number. So if you scanned a house with an RFID-embedded TV, you'd get a number back, something like 823657489101048392733583323634. I suppose its possible that some of the digits in there would designate a publicly-available manufacturer (so you'd know that whatever you just scanned, it's a "Toshiba" something-or-other), but you wouldn't know whether it was a bigscreen plasma TV, or an alarm clock, unless you had access to Toshiba's private database, which you would not.
"I'm sure it could be hacked into," you say, but OK, if you're rich enough to drive around a neighborhood with a massive, expensive RFID transmitter/receiver, and savvy enough to break into company databases, why are you bothering to steal TV's? Why not break into their Credit Card database instead of their Product database, and save yourself some hassle? Or better yet, wouldn't someone like that likely already be gainfully employed?
The circuits are hardcoded. They cannot be reprogrammed anymore than a light switch can be reprogrammed. They are simply a series of digits burned into silicon, hooked up to an antenna.
Honestly how much does it cost to press a CD these days?
A fraction of a cent, when done in bulk.
Deciding the specific permutation of the 6,000,000,000 bits to press onto that CD, however, costs considerably more (on the order of hundreds of millions).
I suppose, they could simply randomly press all possible combinations of those bits, of which there are 2^6e9 possibilities (a number which I apparently don't have enough RAM to compute), and according to the "million monkeys at a million typewriters" postulate, one of those CDs will be a perfectly functioning copy of Office XP. Another one will be Longhorn (a surefire strategy to deliver ahead of schedule, perhaps?).
Your shortsighted perspective ignores the R&D costs that go into developing the software that goes onto those CDs.
Shame on the RIAA for suing students! They could at least go after people who can afford the court fees.
This is kind of a catch-22. Those who can afford court fees typically can afford to pay for their music, and thus, don't tend to steal (oops, I mean "infringe") their music off of the Internet. Also, people with jobs that pay well enough to allow them to afford lawyers usually tend to be better educated, and more upstanding citizens, and know it's wrong to steal (oops, there I go again) stuff you didn't pay for.
So the reason it seems like the RIAA is only suing poor, young students is because those tend to be the people with morals loose enough to allow them to justify taking things without paying for them, and whose income is too low for them to actually legitimately acquire all the bling (oops, I mean posessions) that MTV says they should have, to get women.
[Re: Is Apple abusing its power by bunding media software with their OS?]
IF apple were a monopoly then yes. But they aren't and therefore they don't.
WTF are you smoking? Are you seriously going to sit there and tell us, with a straight face, that Microsoft is a monopoly, but Apple isn't?
Holy geez man. What colour is the sky in your world? Microsoft makes an OS, some development tools, and an office suite. Apple makes the entire computer, and vigourously repels anyone who tries to sell the same system. I can buy a PC from Dell, Compaq, Gateway, IBM, or about a billion clone shops. Where can I buy a Mac? Apple. That's it. My PC can run lots of different OS's (though, granted, most people choose to run Windows on theirs). What are my options if I buy a Mac? OS X. What if I'd like to try a different OS on my Mac? Can I get a Mac without an OS? Nope.
Oh my Lord. How friggin' brainwashed does one have to be to honestly believe that Microsoft is a monopoly, and Apple isn't? Microsoft doesn't even make computers for crying out loud. Just an OS! Apple is far, far more of a monopoly than Microsoft.
What they have been convicted of is of leveraging that monopoly to gain an unfair advantage in other markets. Namely, the media player market.
What "media player market?" Is there a version of Windows Media Player that costs money? All they're doing is giving stuff away. They bundled IE not to get us hooked and jack up the prices, but because an OS should come with a browser. IE is free (as in beer). MediaPlayer is free.
Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of people who want to have their cake and eat it too. If Microsoft sold a stripped-down, bare-bones OS, people would rip on them for being such tightwads. "Richest software company on the planet, and won't even give us a friggin' media player." So instead, they bundle stuff. Stuff that should come with an OS. And we still rip on them.
I read an article the other day that blamed Microsoft for all these virus attacks. The author was incensed, and fumed that Microsoft "should include built-in antivirus software with the OS, with automatically-updating virus definitions. That would fix all these virus problems." I thought to myself, "Sure, and at the same time, they'd be sued into oblivion by Norton, Symantec, and anyone else in the anti-virus business."
To be honest, I think an OS should include anti-virus software. Also, all of the following:
Web browser.
Email client.
Media player that handles all popular formats, both audio and video.
Anti-virus software.
Zipping/unzipping software.
Disk management and compression utilities.
Basic word processor.
Basic imaging software.
And probably a bunch more I can't think of off the top of my head. I expect to be able to install an OS and actually do something with the computer. Am I alone here?
about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness
That number is too high. There are varying degrees of colour-blindness. I'm red-green colour blind (legally), but can tell the difference, except under very specific circumstances, such as dim lights, far away, or when the shades are very close (like those damn pictures with all the coloured bubbles, and the numbers in them). In fact, I didn't even know I was colour blind until I was 16, and took a comprehensive medical exam for my pilot's license.
Some form of colour blindness affects roughly 10% of males in North America (substantially fewer women), and only a fraction of those are the red-green variety, and of those who are of the red-green variety (myself included), most are still able to function normally and can distinguish between contrasting shades of red and green with little or no problem.
For example "Deviates from a sphere with at most 1%". I think that'll do it for me.
That would rule out Earth as a planet (and several others, including all of the gas planets). Technically, Earth is an "oblate spheroid." Nowhere near a perfect sphere. You can blame the fact that we're spinning, and thus, bulging at the equator.
We rename our current planet Mars, and everyone is happy.
Especially Bush, as following through on his promise to "put a man on Mars" just got a whole lot cheaper, and the bulk of that $1 trillion can just go straight to Haliburton without even having to be laundered through the usual defense contractors!
Yeah, yeah, "flamebait," I know. I was going for "funny." See you at -1, mods.
Hint: The consumer isn't doing much consuming if he doesn't have a job. If the consumer isn't doing much consuming then the economy will eventually die.
Here's another Hint: There are consumers outside of USAmerica.
Well, maybe not everyone believes in it that strongly, but personally when I do believe in something I stand by that belief through thick and thin.
Really? So, if you were the CEO of a gaming company, you'd conduct 100% of development locally, using USAmerican citizen developers? You'd compete against other companies, who do take advantage of outsourcing, and who products games just as good or better than yours, but priced 20% lower? You'd drive your company into the ground, to make a point? You'd let all your developers lose their jobs? Watch your stock price fall through the floor as investors realized you were on a suicidal, kamikaze run, and let your employees retirement and pension funds vaporize?
Let's see how much money they make when they wipe out the American middle class.
*Sigh* You see, that's the big part of your problem, right there. The US thinks they're the center of the world. "Who's going to buy their products when the American middle class is wiped out," you ask? Oh gee, I don't know, how about THE REST OF THE FRIGGIN' WORLD???? I know, I was shocked when I found out too, but apparently, there are HUNDREDS of other countries out there, and many of them can even afford to buy some of our products!
Don't you see it? These CEOs/visionaries/risk-takers/leeches/whatever-you- want-to-call-them are using cheap labor in other countries to increase their profits, while selling it anywhere they can (hint: not just USAmerica). So you get these guys building products in Malaysia, selling to Europe, while living in one of the best places in the world to live, when you're affluent.
How exactly are they "shooting themselves in the foot?" So far, it seems to be working out pretty well, seeing as they actually are rich. Do you think maybe, just maybe, they know more about making money and milking this system than you do?
I don't want ANYBODY to be classified for ANY REASON.
Aw, what a nice, pretty, rainbow-filled utopia you must live in.
Buddy, out here in a little place called "reality," law enforcement only has limited resources. Sure, it would be great if we could quickly and efficiently perform complete background checks and body-cavity searches on every person boarding every flight, everywhere. THAT would help reduce (but not eliminate) hijackings. But we don't have the people or the money to do that. So officials have to apply some intuition, training, and judgement.
If there are two people coming through your checkpoint, and you only have time to do a thorough check on one of them, which one would you scrutinize? The 65-year-old woman traveling on a shorthaul flight on a round-trip ticket, who keeps talking about her grandkids, or the 24-year old Arab guy who's got a cross-country, one-way ticket, traveling alone, who isn't saying much?
Now, of course, there's a 99.999% chance that both of them are harmless. By those odds, you could let them both through with no checks. But your job is to protect the other people on that plane, and the people on the ground. So who do you check? The Arab guy. Is that racial profiling? You bet it is. Is that wrong? Arguably. But the way to make it "right" would be to quadruple the funding and screen everyone with the same thoroughness. Until that happens, they're going to continue making judgement calls, and as long as I'm getting on the plane with grandma and Mohammed, I'm happy to let them choose who to scrutinize.
It's not pretty, but it's reality. It's a lot better than the alternative. The fair approach would be to screen everybody, or nobody. Since "nobody" is way too risky in this Post-911 World(TM), and "everybody" is simply practically impossible, they have to do the best job they can with the resources available. If they randomly selected who to screen, they'd be wasting their time screening people like grandma I just described, who is only a 0.0001% risk. Sure, the Arab guy might only be a 0.0005% risk, but comparably, their resources are better spent screening him.
If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction.
Actually, it would do much, much more damage if it hit the water than if it hit land. If it were to hit land, it would completely destroy a (relatively) small area, killing up to a few thousand people (depending on the population density of where it hit).
If it were to hit water, on the other hand, the resulting wave would potentially wipe out hundreds of kilometers of shoreline on either side of the ocean, killing far more people and destroying much more property. Also, there would be a delay of several minutes, or even hours (depending on where it hit) between impact in the ocean and the actual tidal waves hitting the shore. Imagine the panic as millions of people tried to flee the shoreline areas. The deaths, injury, and destruction from that panic alone would rival the toll of a land-bound impact, before the tidal wave even arrived!
Slashdot Mirror
Java has lost to C#, dotNet and whatever Microsoft vaporware-du-jour.
.NET "vaporware?" It *exists*, dude. My company has been using it for a couple of years now, and making good money selling ASP.NET web apps written in C#.
Uh... what? How is
Did someone change the definition of "vaporware" while I wasn't looking?
Ironically, computer programs are the one area in life where free things are often better than expensive alternatives.
.NET platform, rather than the clunky, kludgy PHP solutions of old.
I respectfully disagree. I would replace "often" with "rarely."
Best server OS? BSD. Best Web server? Apache.
Best graphics editing suite? Adobe Photoshop. Best office suite? Microsoft Office. Best database backend? Tough call, but none of the front runners are (capital-F) Free.
And I would respectfully submit that even your assertion that Apache is the "best web server" is weakening by the day, as more and more business rely on interactive web presences, and turn to the easily-developed-and-deployed
Sure, if I just want to put up some static pages, Apache is the best. However, the web is evolving faster than Apache, and virtually everyone wants MORE than that now.
They could simply tax what it's worth, instead of what you paid for it.
Works for property taxes, doesn't it?
Yes, I know exactly what you're saying, and I'm saying you guys are being too uptight with the use of the words. Common convention supports my argument that people commonly employ much stronger words to describe a relatively less severe act. For example, my native/white man "raping" the land example. In actuality, it wasn't "raping" the land, it was stealing it and polluting it. "Rape" is a much more severe, violent, invasive crime. Theft and pollution are comparitively "softer" crimes.
So don't get all bent out of shape when people do the same thing with copyright infringement.
It is not piracy. Piracy involves boarding and stealing ships in the sea with the casual murder of people.
It's called copyright infringement. Escape the common (publicity induced and totally unfair) misconceptions...
It's called a "metaphor."
When the natives complain about the white man raping their land, the white man didn't actually rape the land. It's a metaphor.
When they say that Kazaa is the bastard son of Napster, they don't mean that Napster, as a company, somehow copulated with another company, producing an offspring company, then denied ever having sex with the first company at all. It's a metaphor.
When you burn a CD, there is no flame involved. It's a metaphor.
When you surf the web, there is no actual surfing involved. It's a metaphor.
When you pirate music/software, you are not actually running around with a parrot, an eyepatch, and a pegleg, boarding ships and stealing software. It's a metaphor.
Think outside the box a little, instead of blindly latching on to the watered-down, pre-approved things that you're allowed to rebel against.
(Note that I'm not implying there there is an actual box involved, that you're actually blind, that there are any latches involved, or that anyone has actually sprayed water onto anything).
Then again I wonder if they are producing this crap for girls KNOWING guys are watching less.
:) However, you do notice some other disturbing things. Pay attention during the "Power Block" on Spike. Of course, you see commercials for car products, tools, and whatever, but notice the way the commercials are pitched. Lots of special effects, shouting, and flashing lights. The same type of visual stimulation you'd use to capture a child's attention, or people with short attention spans and stunted maturity. Even more disturbingly, you see an unusually high concentration of commercials for credit counseling. Apparently, SpikeTV thinks its viewers are young, poor, hyperactive males with little earning power. In order to afford the expensive "car-toys" on their shows and commercials, they offer them credit and bankruptcy help. Hmm. And we wonder why the country's average personal debt load is so frighteningly high. They are pushing a culture of borrowing and short term vision for immediate gratification.
You've unknowingly hit on a very fascinating sub-world of advertising, the "target demographic." If you want to know who the networks think are watching, then pay attention to the commercials. This is actually one of my morbid curiosities. I sometimes get a kick out of flipping to some outrageous, twisted show, just to see the commercials and see who the network thinks is watching. Sometimes its funny, sometimes its scary.
For example. What kind of commercials do you see during "The Apprentice?" I would think that a show like that would appeal to men, so I would expect to see manly commercials. Yet if you notice, you'll see that there are a surprisingly high number of commercials for feminine hygiene products, cleaning products (whose commercials always feature women, exclusively, by the way - so much for equal contributions in the home and eliminating stereotypes, eh? Where are the men in those commercials? At work? Is that what we're supposed to conclude?), and vaccuum cleaners.
Now flip over to SpikeTV. I guarantee you'll never see a maxipad commercial there.
Finally, one last, even more revealing example. I was home sick from work the other day, and had the TV on. To entertain my little voyeuristic interest, I had it on FOX for a while. Examining FOX's target demographic is among the most easiest, funniest, and scariest, all rolled into one. You can immediately tell that FOX caters to the heavily conservative, religious audience, with low income and a very gossipy nature. The shows they run during the daytime are trashy talk shows and court "reality" shows with lots of yelling. The commercials are even more revealing. Lawyers come on once or twice every commercial break asking if you've been injured. Apparently, if you've been hurt, even through your own stupid fault, they'll find someone else to blame (and, of course, to sue).
Scads of credit counseling/consolidation commercials. Lots of ads pitching trade school or diploma programs. Apparently, the demographic that is home during the weekdays, watching FOX is poor, uneducated, conservative, voyueristic, and looking to get rich quick.
I don't do it often, but when I do watch TV, I enjoy trying to read between the lines and see what networks and advertisers really think of their viewers. It can be quite enlightening.
Shameless Onion plug.
I make most of my small ($100) purchases with cash. How do bar codes and scanners make me traceable for those?
Cash has serial numbers. Unless you found it on the street, you probably got that cash from a bank machine, which you accessed using your personal bank card. So they knew you had that cash. And when you guy anything electronic, they have serial numbers, so they could track that and even know which individual DVD player you bought, even though you paid cash.
You see, all you tin-foil-hatters out there, the technology already exists to track you, if they really wanted to. But they're not. Not to that degree. You're not that important. I know it's sad, but companies, for the most part, don't care what you do every waking moment of the day. They only care about habitual big spenders, or people like you when it comes time to buy something expensive. RFID isn't going to change anything.
I'm concerned about targeted marketing.
Why? Isn't it a good thing? Why should they waste time, money, and paper sending me flyers telling me Tampax is on sale? Wouldn't I rather get coupons for steak? (Yes!)
I do not want marketers to know anything more than they already do about my online browsing habits, or worse, my personal hygene and dietary preferences,including what kind of cereal my three year old eats...
What if they used that info to send you coupons for the right brand of cereal? If your kid eats Cheerios, and they send you coupons for Shreddies (but your neighbor got the Cheerios coupons), wouldn't you rather get "targeted marketing" that could save you money, instead of random marketing for crap you don't use?
That's absurd. RFIDs are passive, meaning they have very, very short range (a few inches, couple feet at most). To "scan" a house from the street, you'd need an enormous transmitter/receiver combo, which would generate a tremendous amount of RF noise that would be sure to be noticed in a neighborhood.
Secondly, even if you did manage to get the RFID tag number, how exactly would you "check a UPC database?" FYI, these tags are not like UPC codes. UPC codes are not unique. The first 5 (4?) digits of a UPC code identify the manufacturer, the remaining 5 identify the product. For example, 78492 means "GE", and 87369 means "Washing Machine, model GE T705" (warning: completely fake data, for illustrative purposes only). That info is not that hard to find.
But with RFID, however, each individual washing machine has its own number. So if you scanned a house with an RFID-embedded TV, you'd get a number back, something like 823657489101048392733583323634. I suppose its possible that some of the digits in there would designate a publicly-available manufacturer (so you'd know that whatever you just scanned, it's a "Toshiba" something-or-other), but you wouldn't know whether it was a bigscreen plasma TV, or an alarm clock, unless you had access to Toshiba's private database, which you would not.
"I'm sure it could be hacked into," you say, but OK, if you're rich enough to drive around a neighborhood with a massive, expensive RFID transmitter/receiver, and savvy enough to break into company databases, why are you bothering to steal TV's? Why not break into their Credit Card database instead of their Product database, and save yourself some hassle? Or better yet, wouldn't someone like that likely already be gainfully employed?
The circuits are hardcoded. They cannot be reprogrammed anymore than a light switch can be reprogrammed. They are simply a series of digits burned into silicon, hooked up to an antenna.
It should also be noted that he never game money till after the trial began.
I'm sorry, but that's simply utterly, factually incorrect bullsh*t that reveals what a blind, rabid, "foaming-at-the-mouth" zealot you actually are.
Honestly how much does it cost to press a CD these days?
A fraction of a cent, when done in bulk.
Deciding the specific permutation of the 6,000,000,000 bits to press onto that CD, however, costs considerably more (on the order of hundreds of millions).
I suppose, they could simply randomly press all possible combinations of those bits, of which there are 2^6e9 possibilities (a number which I apparently don't have enough RAM to compute), and according to the "million monkeys at a million typewriters" postulate, one of those CDs will be a perfectly functioning copy of Office XP. Another one will be Longhorn (a surefire strategy to deliver ahead of schedule, perhaps?).
Your shortsighted perspective ignores the R&D costs that go into developing the software that goes onto those CDs.
Shame on the RIAA for suing students! They could at least go after people who can afford the court fees.
This is kind of a catch-22. Those who can afford court fees typically can afford to pay for their music, and thus, don't tend to steal (oops, I mean "infringe") their music off of the Internet. Also, people with jobs that pay well enough to allow them to afford lawyers usually tend to be better educated, and more upstanding citizens, and know it's wrong to steal (oops, there I go again) stuff you didn't pay for.
So the reason it seems like the RIAA is only suing poor, young students is because those tend to be the people with morals loose enough to allow them to justify taking things without paying for them, and whose income is too low for them to actually legitimately acquire all the bling (oops, I mean posessions) that MTV says they should have, to get women.
[Re: Is Apple abusing its power by bunding media software with their OS?]
IF apple were a monopoly then yes. But they aren't and therefore they don't.
WTF are you smoking? Are you seriously going to sit there and tell us, with a straight face, that Microsoft is a monopoly, but Apple isn't?
Holy geez man. What colour is the sky in your world? Microsoft makes an OS, some development tools, and an office suite. Apple makes the entire computer, and vigourously repels anyone who tries to sell the same system. I can buy a PC from Dell, Compaq, Gateway, IBM, or about a billion clone shops. Where can I buy a Mac? Apple. That's it. My PC can run lots of different OS's (though, granted, most people choose to run Windows on theirs). What are my options if I buy a Mac? OS X. What if I'd like to try a different OS on my Mac? Can I get a Mac without an OS? Nope.
Oh my Lord. How friggin' brainwashed does one have to be to honestly believe that Microsoft is a monopoly, and Apple isn't? Microsoft doesn't even make computers for crying out loud. Just an OS! Apple is far, far more of a monopoly than Microsoft.
What "media player market?" Is there a version of Windows Media Player that costs money? All they're doing is giving stuff away. They bundled IE not to get us hooked and jack up the prices, but because an OS should come with a browser. IE is free (as in beer). MediaPlayer is free.
Frankly, I'm getting a little tired of people who want to have their cake and eat it too. If Microsoft sold a stripped-down, bare-bones OS, people would rip on them for being such tightwads. "Richest software company on the planet, and won't even give us a friggin' media player." So instead, they bundle stuff. Stuff that should come with an OS. And we still rip on them.
I read an article the other day that blamed Microsoft for all these virus attacks. The author was incensed, and fumed that Microsoft "should include built-in antivirus software with the OS, with automatically-updating virus definitions. That would fix all these virus problems." I thought to myself, "Sure, and at the same time, they'd be sued into oblivion by Norton, Symantec, and anyone else in the anti-virus business."
To be honest, I think an OS should include anti-virus software. Also, all of the following:
And probably a bunch more I can't think of off the top of my head. I expect to be able to install an OS and actually do something with the computer. Am I alone here?
about 5% of the population cannot distinguish green from red due to red/green color-blindness
That number is too high. There are varying degrees of colour-blindness. I'm red-green colour blind (legally), but can tell the difference, except under very specific circumstances, such as dim lights, far away, or when the shades are very close (like those damn pictures with all the coloured bubbles, and the numbers in them). In fact, I didn't even know I was colour blind until I was 16, and took a comprehensive medical exam for my pilot's license.
Some form of colour blindness affects roughly 10% of males in North America (substantially fewer women), and only a fraction of those are the red-green variety, and of those who are of the red-green variety (myself included), most are still able to function normally and can distinguish between contrasting shades of red and green with little or no problem.
For example "Deviates from a sphere with at most 1%". I think that'll do it for me.
That would rule out Earth as a planet (and several others, including all of the gas planets). Technically, Earth is an "oblate spheroid." Nowhere near a perfect sphere. You can blame the fact that we're spinning, and thus, bulging at the equator.
We rename our current planet Mars, and everyone is happy.
Especially Bush, as following through on his promise to "put a man on Mars" just got a whole lot cheaper, and the bulk of that $1 trillion can just go straight to Haliburton without even having to be laundered through the usual defense contractors!
Yeah, yeah, "flamebait," I know. I was going for "funny." See you at -1, mods.
Hint: The consumer isn't doing much consuming if he doesn't have a job. If the consumer isn't doing much consuming then the economy will eventually die.
Here's another Hint: There are consumers outside of USAmerica.
a $2800 Gibson (which will ALWAYS have buyers)
Funny... As I recall, they said a similar thing about eCommerce web portals about 5 years ago.
Well, maybe not everyone believes in it that strongly, but personally when I do believe in something I stand by that belief through thick and thin.
Really? So, if you were the CEO of a gaming company, you'd conduct 100% of development locally, using USAmerican citizen developers? You'd compete against other companies, who do take advantage of outsourcing, and who products games just as good or better than yours, but priced 20% lower? You'd drive your company into the ground, to make a point? You'd let all your developers lose their jobs? Watch your stock price fall through the floor as investors realized you were on a suicidal, kamikaze run, and let your employees retirement and pension funds vaporize?
Just to make a point? Would you really?
Let's see how much money they make when they wipe out the American middle class.
- want-to-call-them are using cheap labor in other countries to increase their profits, while selling it anywhere they can (hint: not just USAmerica). So you get these guys building products in Malaysia, selling to Europe, while living in one of the best places in the world to live, when you're affluent.
*Sigh* You see, that's the big part of your problem, right there. The US thinks they're the center of the world. "Who's going to buy their products when the American middle class is wiped out," you ask? Oh gee, I don't know, how about THE REST OF THE FRIGGIN' WORLD???? I know, I was shocked when I found out too, but apparently, there are HUNDREDS of other countries out there, and many of them can even afford to buy some of our products!
Don't you see it? These CEOs/visionaries/risk-takers/leeches/whatever-you
How exactly are they "shooting themselves in the foot?" So far, it seems to be working out pretty well, seeing as they actually are rich. Do you think maybe, just maybe, they know more about making money and milking this system than you do?
I don't want ANYBODY to be classified for ANY REASON.
Aw, what a nice, pretty, rainbow-filled utopia you must live in.
Buddy, out here in a little place called "reality," law enforcement only has limited resources. Sure, it would be great if we could quickly and efficiently perform complete background checks and body-cavity searches on every person boarding every flight, everywhere. THAT would help reduce (but not eliminate) hijackings. But we don't have the people or the money to do that. So officials have to apply some intuition, training, and judgement.
If there are two people coming through your checkpoint, and you only have time to do a thorough check on one of them, which one would you scrutinize? The 65-year-old woman traveling on a shorthaul flight on a round-trip ticket, who keeps talking about her grandkids, or the 24-year old Arab guy who's got a cross-country, one-way ticket, traveling alone, who isn't saying much?
Now, of course, there's a 99.999% chance that both of them are harmless. By those odds, you could let them both through with no checks. But your job is to protect the other people on that plane, and the people on the ground. So who do you check? The Arab guy. Is that racial profiling? You bet it is. Is that wrong? Arguably. But the way to make it "right" would be to quadruple the funding and screen everyone with the same thoroughness. Until that happens, they're going to continue making judgement calls, and as long as I'm getting on the plane with grandma and Mohammed, I'm happy to let them choose who to scrutinize.
It's not pretty, but it's reality. It's a lot better than the alternative. The fair approach would be to screen everybody, or nobody. Since "nobody" is way too risky in this Post-911 World(TM), and "everybody" is simply practically impossible, they have to do the best job they can with the resources available. If they randomly selected who to screen, they'd be wasting their time screening people like grandma I just described, who is only a 0.0001% risk. Sure, the Arab guy might only be a 0.0005% risk, but comparably, their resources are better spent screening him.
If this bad boy were to hit over the ocean, probably not much, but over land, it could cause serious local destruction.
Actually, it would do much, much more damage if it hit the water than if it hit land. If it were to hit land, it would completely destroy a (relatively) small area, killing up to a few thousand people (depending on the population density of where it hit).
If it were to hit water, on the other hand, the resulting wave would potentially wipe out hundreds of kilometers of shoreline on either side of the ocean, killing far more people and destroying much more property. Also, there would be a delay of several minutes, or even hours (depending on where it hit) between impact in the ocean and the actual tidal waves hitting the shore. Imagine the panic as millions of people tried to flee the shoreline areas. The deaths, injury, and destruction from that panic alone would rival the toll of a land-bound impact, before the tidal wave even arrived!