There are plenty of short people who make good money too.
I'm a 5'6" male (while I did grow up in a very poor household, my height isn't the result of not drinking enough milk or whatever--It's the simple genetic result of one of my great grandparents being a "4' tall Cree indian", as my brother tells it). "Despite" this, I am quite successful in my own business as well as in professional business, and I'd say that my yearly income is in the top 1% (I'm not even remotely bragging, but this relates directly to this article).
Having said that, this article is right on the money, at least as a statistical whole -- If you are short, just as if you are female, black, overweight, or you have a mole in the wrong place, or you have bad hair, or a bad name, you have to work that much harder to succeed because of society stereotypes and sheep-like behaviour (and you'll constantly be defending your "difference" : What is the one thing that the media made the number one point about Perot as a presidential candidate?). It's for this reason that statistically taller people make more money on a whole, though it can't directly be applied to a single sample. On the flip side if you are 6'2", regardless of perhaps being a total moron you'll be ushered into the management fast track -- The Dilbert cartoon is hilarious, but horribly correct. I am in no way disparaging tall people (nothing of the sort), but the reality is that the more you look like a prototypical "manager" you look, the less ability you have to actually have to fill that role.
I've oft wondered why this particular stereotype (that taller people are more capable) exists - tall often correlates with weaker as a humorous paradox, so there is no genetic advantage from a combat perspective (if that were important in boardrooms. Of course don't tell tall people that-it's amazing how many 6'6" weaklings fancy themselves real strong men). There is no correlation between height and intelligence, either. I have a few theories about this, though:
-Shorter people generally have more of a self-confidence issue, and of course in the professional industry the number one success predicate is the ability to have absolutely no self-doubts and an overwhelming "I am God" mentality. You'll more likely find that among the 6'6"ers (as you can see in this discussion)
-A lot of "old boy's club" have a sports mentality, and the "leaders" on the hockey, football, whatever, were generally larger males.
Now I have to get to work on the recently released Halo for the PC fighting my ringworld phobia. I may get over the vehicle with mounted heavy weaponry phobia simultaneously.
You must have broker into one of our "Microsoft-fanatic" meetings where we all get together and discuss what our approach to the next issue will be, didn't you? I mean surely that is the case, rather than there being tens of thousands of people posting on here, all with different beliefs and perceptions.
Ah, the balloon was a classic, and was a great instruction in binary as one replaced the bitmask with their own derivative. Along with that tutorial, I spent countless hours typing in pages of code from Compute! magazine -- this was before I had a tape drive -- though often the result was a hard system lock for whatever reason because of a random typo that made it past the primitive checksum test. Perhaps because everything was so fresh and new, it really does have a overly rosey element in my memory : I remember near halloween all of the computer mags were full of type-in halloween games or effects. Good times.
Skype is VoIP using a P2P network for optimizing transmissions
Read and parroting the ad copy are we? Here's the thing, though
a) P2P "optimization" techniques are inappropriate to attempt to apply to VoIP (except for perhaps conference calls) - No one else can fill in parts of your source stream, so any "advanced" routing is trying to rebuild IP. I see a lot of nonsense intended for the uninformed on their page (reads like a miracle cure), but it just doesn't sound right. So to conclude, VoIP has a non-shareable stream, and requires close to zero latency...yeah, shares a lot with file sharing software.
b) Oooh, they derive directory lists and online statuses from the Kazaa network. Wow, that had to save at least a couple of hours of development. Brilliant.
c) This leaves the whole gamut of goofy, you know, voice over IP requirements.
See, I see "I haven't read the article" and bells start going off in my head, saying that this person probably has no clue what they're talking about.
Funny, those bells go off in my head fairly consistently, just as it did with your post.
You mean IP (i.e. the protocol)? Yeah, it's a great P2P technology.
I haven't read the article, or even more than skimmed the summary, but seeing "P2P" and "Kazaa" remotely near "VoIP" had the "wrong!" buttons going off in my head: Is someone shoehorning onto a technology to get proximity credibility ("ooh, that Kazaa is great, so that VoIP solution must be awesome!"). Peer-to-Peer file transfer solutions seem to have perilously little in common with voice-over-IP, apart from the previously mentioned IP underpinnings.
Well, that's the beauty of p2p - there are no "big, expensive servers".
The most successful "P2P" services use centralized indexing or arbitration (and even the "decentralized" services often do. Many bitorrent sites have gone offline because the bandwidth required simply to be a tracker was overwhelming).
"If they did that, how long would it be before another network popped up to replace them? Hours?"...and how long before the replacements start trying to justify their business plan by hypothesizing that after they've built marketshare, then they'll cash in and charge subscriptions? If you have any sort of centralization on big, expensive servers (btw: Even bitorrent has such central demands), you will have to find a way to charge directly (no, tip jars wouldn't work) or indirectly. We all know that the indirect methods, such as advertisements/banners/popups, get worked around quite quickly.
Hmm..what are his credentials that he knows so much about copyright law, fair use, and the US legal system?
What are the credentials of the countless Slashbots that give their interpretation of copyright laws in every DMCA-related article (of which there are countless)?
Neither being a high-school dropout or CS graduate with honors implies any knowledge, professionally or casually, of copyright law, fair use, or the US legal system. Of course neither does it preclude such knowledge, as you seem to be implying.
As opposed to who? Himself? He presents no cost or risk analysis of anything either, including diversity, or any of the arguments that he is trying to put forward.
Refuting an opposing position with facts, when the opposing position is factless, is often futile and counterproductive -- you end up giving credence to that which deserves none. If he critiques their analysis because of a dearth of facts, then take it at that: He doesn't have to present his own to call bullshit to theirs.
Obviously this guy's angle is "defend Microsoft". By the same token you can find countless pundits whose angle is the opposite position -- attack Microsoft -- and every article they author is a perpetual diatribe "exposing" the evil that is Microsoft (many such pieces are linked on Slashdot regularly).
I'm neither for or against this guy or his article (I didn't read it -- sounds like a another factless bunch of tripe. I felt the same way about the similar anti-Microsoft article that got the sheep excited a few days ago.
Right now a lot of people can look into your credit record... and you can be sure that in the future a lot of people will be able to look into your debit record.
In Canada I am fairly sure that your transactions with credit cards are private, and all that is on your credit record, that is outside of your credit card comapny, is your balances, and your payment history. Whether that $3000 was spend on hookers or charity donations isn't known to any but your credit card company and yourself (unless you let others read your mail). Even then, the only transaction they get, again this may only be Canada, is the bulk sum and the merchant - they don't know what you purchased.
I didn't know Tim Hortons refuses debit card but they are certainly right. I hate selfish people who think it's ok to make 10 person wait longer in line because they don't want to take 2 minutes to go to the ATM.
I have my card swiped, PIN in, and payment authorized in about 5 seconds, which is less time it takes for you to get the proper bills, them to make change, etc. Of course there are some people who are horribly slow at this process, just as there are people who are slow with cash transactions (strangely almost always women -- that's just an observation I've noticed) who wait until confronted with the total to decide that it's time to pull up their purse/wallet, open it and scrounge the proper amount). I suspect that Tim Hortons real problem is that the Interac consortium charges a service fee on every transaction, so when people are paying for $1.00 transactions it really doesn't make sense.
I'm not overly concerned about that (so the Watchers know that I like thai food...mmmmm spring rolls), however to assauge such fears, and to speed the process for some transactions, electronic cash cards, similar to phone cards, are coming to the market -- the only barrier is getting a common nationwide standard. Paper money is approaching retirement.
The subject line was hyperbole, but really it is getting there. My current spending habits are that >95% of my monthly spending is totally electronic, and the remainder will be electronic soon enough (delivery. Most delivery drivers are being equipped with wireless debit pads for using your bank debit card at your door). At any average store or restaurant, overwhelmingly patrons are paying by debit card rather than dealing with cash and all of the change issues (especially here in Canada where up to two dollars are change - the bulk of change that can be acquired in a day of using paper currency is staggering...literally). The exception to this rule is Tim Hortons, a ridiculously popular coffee shop that refuses debit cards for speed issues.
"What they are doing is saying to themselves "40x1GB files will fit", which is incorrect."
Yet what is on the box -- which is virtually always denoted with an indication that it is metric, quite contrary to your claims that they are insinuating binary mega values and hoping to defraud customers -- and what you can actually store often varies, sometimes dramatically, anyways, at no fault of the hard drive manufacturer because of allocation slack, directory space, etc.
In any case, what has been pointed out quite a few times on here already, the harddrive manufacturers are actually correct in using GB to denote a billion bytes, with GiB indicating the binary value.
"In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice."
This is all so absolutely ridiculous. Firstly, about 99% of people on the streets, including most computer users, aren't mentally calculating the power of 2 capacities when you say that a hard-drive has 40GB, or a memory module has 512MB -- Instead they mentally have an awareness that 40GB is "big, but 80GB is better", and "512MB is good". I highly doubt they're going to get their shiney new drive, and DRATS! - they have 42949672960 of virus filled emails to fit in there, but instead they only got 40000000000.
Secondly, hard drive manufacturers, as a general rule, have used the power of 10 rule since before I first became interested in computers about 18 years ago - this is the standard, and if you haven't read the byline "GB refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes" then you just haven't been looking.
This whole campaign is just contrived and attention seeking nonsense. I suspect that someone just finished their "Computers 101" course, and they think they've discovered an amazing fraud being perpetrated upon the public by those dastardly harddrive manufacturers.
" so, from what this article is saying, lets add more steps and go the complicated way. Thats not what needs to happen."
This is exactly what the article seems to be saying -- the author is trying to make lemonade out of lemons that a lack of functionality entails.
This article is generally clueless, and often contradictory, claptrap. It's hardly surprizing that it was "published" on the Register. Let me summarize the article:
-Linux is more secure because it has less features, forcing the user through more steps to accomplish what they are trying to do, thereby weeding out the clueless.
-Linux is more secure because most clueful admins run as non-root, while most Windows boxes run as admins. Of course when user friendliness comes into play, users end up running as root too (Lindows).
-Windows sucks because it pushes code and component reuse, such as the use of Internet Explorer as the HTML rendering engine in Outlook and Outlook Express. This is unlike Linux, oh except for Konquerer and Mozilla that both use modern software reuse, but they're better anyways.
What is the point of this article? If he simply wants to say "Linux users in general are more clueful", or "lack of features keep out the clueless", or "Linux software is just written better", then he could just say that. Instead it's some ramblings that don't add up. Real security is something like the sandboxed Java or.NET environments, not the fact that your email client is telnet and you don't know how chmod works.
so why not just scrap the -R format and put all future effort into +R
By the same token, why not scrap the +R format, and put all future effort in -R?
I doubt dual-layer will take off - Single-layer already has a slow enough adoption, despite the fact that drives are about $130, and disks can be had for less than $2 or so each. Dual-layer, as a nature of the beast, will cost considerably more, and it only offers 2x the capacity (and I really don't mind switching discs every two hours if encoding video on them) -- if it was blue laser or something, and offered 8x the capacity, then that would be a different story, but for 2x the capacity I doubt many will be spending the premium.
As a sidenote, and contrary to what I said above, at DVD quality video, a single-layer DVD is really only an hour of video (and hence a dual-layer is about two hours). To expand that out requires either advanced codecs that won't play in most DVD players, or degraded quality.
I admit, that's exactly what I did. Putting "please don't wipe out our server" is unbelievably counterproductive, and I think it was just someone covering their ass if some peers came for blood after a thrashing-- "But...I said please don't wipe out our server! I figured they'd all get in touch with each other and draw straws as to who would visit!"
Its because most people don't get off their lazy ass once every couple of years, learn a little bit about whats going on in politics, and then vote. Barely more than 50% of the people in this country vote in presidential elections, and far fewer vote for state and local elections
I hear this a lot and I really find it to be absurdly ridiculous -- the results at the polls generally mesh very closely with a random sampling of potential voters (including those who don't bother voting). The reason, of course, is that lethargy and inaction crosses all political lines, so apart from special cases where there is a highly motivated voter cross section, generally you can stay home and watch Oprah because you know the guy who'll cancel your vote is probably doing the same.
The real problem with countries like the US and Canada is because we largely use a "first past the post" voting which really does mean that many votes are wasted -- If your candidate is polling at 20%, you quite literally are pissing in the wind wasting an afternoon to head to a polling station. The solution, of course, is proportional representation (where even though Joe Republican got 39% of the votes for a rider versus the 35% for the second place guy, it isn't 100% representation for Republicans and 0% for everyone else). Given that the two big parties run the show and set the rules (really one big party in Canada), I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.
Democracy is ruled by the majority - if you're in the minority (in this case people who understand or care about computers), you don't matter. If 51% of a the US (or substantially less, if there are at least 3 major candidates for political offices) wants to enslave the other 49%, they can.
This is logical if 51% of the people had exactly the same opinions and views, and the other 49% held opposing opinions. In reality, though, we're all a complex mesh of opinions and perspectives. Everyone is a minority in the minority of their opinions, and a majority in a few, and there are few overlaps*.
Secondly, most democracies have basic fundamental rights as a sacred realm that the tyranny of the majority can't impose themselves into (generally). Of course then you get people who just don't get the point, so sure of the righteousness of their own platform, so they try to supercede silly things like basic rights misunderstanding the whole premise (such as the separation of church and statement, which plays out in the US all of the time). This sort of thing is happening in Canada: Our Supreme Court has declared that based upon our basic rights dictated in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the government cannot dictate that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, and a marriage of man-man or woman-woman must be honoured in civic matters (which comes back to the whole church and state thing). How does the far right respond? By calling for the use of the Notwithstanding Clause, basically trumping basic rights and defeating the whole point.
Slashdot Mirror
There are plenty of short people who make good money too.
I'm a 5'6" male (while I did grow up in a very poor household, my height isn't the result of not drinking enough milk or whatever--It's the simple genetic result of one of my great grandparents being a "4' tall Cree indian", as my brother tells it). "Despite" this, I am quite successful in my own business as well as in professional business, and I'd say that my yearly income is in the top 1% (I'm not even remotely bragging, but this relates directly to this article).
Having said that, this article is right on the money, at least as a statistical whole -- If you are short, just as if you are female, black, overweight, or you have a mole in the wrong place, or you have bad hair, or a bad name, you have to work that much harder to succeed because of society stereotypes and sheep-like behaviour (and you'll constantly be defending your "difference" : What is the one thing that the media made the number one point about Perot as a presidential candidate?). It's for this reason that statistically taller people make more money on a whole, though it can't directly be applied to a single sample. On the flip side if you are 6'2", regardless of perhaps being a total moron you'll be ushered into the management fast track -- The Dilbert cartoon is hilarious, but horribly correct. I am in no way disparaging tall people (nothing of the sort), but the reality is that the more you look like a prototypical "manager" you look, the less ability you have to actually have to fill that role.
I've oft wondered why this particular stereotype (that taller people are more capable) exists - tall often correlates with weaker as a humorous paradox, so there is no genetic advantage from a combat perspective (if that were important in boardrooms. Of course don't tell tall people that-it's amazing how many 6'6" weaklings fancy themselves real strong men). There is no correlation between height and intelligence, either. I have a few theories about this, though:
-Shorter people generally have more of a self-confidence issue, and of course in the professional industry the number one success predicate is the ability to have absolutely no self-doubts and an overwhelming "I am God" mentality. You'll more likely find that among the 6'6"ers (as you can see in this discussion)
-A lot of "old boy's club" have a sports mentality, and the "leaders" on the hockey, football, whatever, were generally larger males.
Now I have to get to work on the recently released Halo for the PC fighting my ringworld phobia. I may get over the vehicle with mounted heavy weaponry phobia simultaneously.
You must have broker into one of our "Microsoft-fanatic" meetings where we all get together and discuss what our approach to the next issue will be, didn't you? I mean surely that is the case, rather than there being tens of thousands of people posting on here, all with different beliefs and perceptions.
Ah, the balloon was a classic, and was a great instruction in binary as one replaced the bitmask with their own derivative. Along with that tutorial, I spent countless hours typing in pages of code from Compute! magazine -- this was before I had a tape drive -- though often the result was a hard system lock for whatever reason because of a random typo that made it past the primitive checksum test. Perhaps because everything was so fresh and new, it really does have a overly rosey element in my memory : I remember near halloween all of the computer mags were full of type-in halloween games or effects. Good times.
VoIP is a P2P thing anyway, it just doesn't big-up the P2Pness of it all. SIP is a P2P protocol as is H323.
Huh? No IP is a peer to peer protocol. Beyond that people are often trying to reinvent the wheel.
Skype is VoIP using a P2P network for optimizing transmissions
Read and parroting the ad copy are we? Here's the thing, though
a) P2P "optimization" techniques are inappropriate to attempt to apply to VoIP (except for perhaps conference calls) - No one else can fill in parts of your source stream, so any "advanced" routing is trying to rebuild IP. I see a lot of nonsense intended for the uninformed on their page (reads like a miracle cure), but it just doesn't sound right. So to conclude, VoIP has a non-shareable stream, and requires close to zero latency...yeah, shares a lot with file sharing software.
b) Oooh, they derive directory lists and online statuses from the Kazaa network. Wow, that had to save at least a couple of hours of development. Brilliant.
c) This leaves the whole gamut of goofy, you know, voice over IP requirements.
See, I see "I haven't read the article" and bells start going off in my head, saying that this person probably has no clue what they're talking about.
Funny, those bells go off in my head fairly consistently, just as it did with your post.
VoIP using P2P technology is a great idea
You mean IP (i.e. the protocol)? Yeah, it's a great P2P technology.
I haven't read the article, or even more than skimmed the summary, but seeing "P2P" and "Kazaa" remotely near "VoIP" had the "wrong!" buttons going off in my head: Is someone shoehorning onto a technology to get proximity credibility ("ooh, that Kazaa is great, so that VoIP solution must be awesome!"). Peer-to-Peer file transfer solutions seem to have perilously little in common with voice-over-IP, apart from the previously mentioned IP underpinnings.
Well, that's the beauty of p2p - there are no "big, expensive servers".
The most successful "P2P" services use centralized indexing or arbitration (and even the "decentralized" services often do. Many bitorrent sites have gone offline because the bandwidth required simply to be a tracker was overwhelming).
"If they did that, how long would it be before another network popped up to replace them? Hours?" ...and how long before the replacements start trying to justify their business plan by hypothesizing that after they've built marketshare, then they'll cash in and charge subscriptions? If you have any sort of centralization on big, expensive servers (btw: Even bitorrent has such central demands), you will have to find a way to charge directly (no, tip jars wouldn't work) or indirectly. We all know that the indirect methods, such as advertisements/banners/popups, get worked around quite quickly.
Hmm..what are his credentials that he knows so much about copyright law, fair use, and the US legal system?
What are the credentials of the countless Slashbots that give their interpretation of copyright laws in every DMCA-related article (of which there are countless)?
Neither being a high-school dropout or CS graduate with honors implies any knowledge, professionally or casually, of copyright law, fair use, or the US legal system. Of course neither does it preclude such knowledge, as you seem to be implying.
As opposed to who? Himself? He presents no cost or risk analysis of anything either, including diversity, or any of the arguments that he is trying to put forward.
Refuting an opposing position with facts, when the opposing position is factless, is often futile and counterproductive -- you end up giving credence to that which deserves none. If he critiques their analysis because of a dearth of facts, then take it at that: He doesn't have to present his own to call bullshit to theirs.
Obviously this guy's angle is "defend Microsoft". By the same token you can find countless pundits whose angle is the opposite position -- attack Microsoft -- and every article they author is a perpetual diatribe "exposing" the evil that is Microsoft (many such pieces are linked on Slashdot regularly).
I'm neither for or against this guy or his article (I didn't read it -- sounds like a another factless bunch of tripe. I felt the same way about the similar anti-Microsoft article that got the sheep excited a few days ago.
Right now a lot of people can look into your credit record... and you can be sure that in the future a lot of people will be able to look into your debit record.
In Canada I am fairly sure that your transactions with credit cards are private, and all that is on your credit record, that is outside of your credit card comapny, is your balances, and your payment history. Whether that $3000 was spend on hookers or charity donations isn't known to any but your credit card company and yourself (unless you let others read your mail). Even then, the only transaction they get, again this may only be Canada, is the bulk sum and the merchant - they don't know what you purchased.
I didn't know Tim Hortons refuses debit card but they are certainly right. I hate selfish people who think it's ok to make 10 person wait longer in line because they don't want to take 2 minutes to go to the ATM.
I have my card swiped, PIN in, and payment authorized in about 5 seconds, which is less time it takes for you to get the proper bills, them to make change, etc. Of course there are some people who are horribly slow at this process, just as there are people who are slow with cash transactions (strangely almost always women -- that's just an observation I've noticed) who wait until confronted with the total to decide that it's time to pull up their purse/wallet, open it and scrounge the proper amount). I suspect that Tim Hortons real problem is that the Interac consortium charges a service fee on every transaction, so when people are paying for $1.00 transactions it really doesn't make sense.
I'm not overly concerned about that (so the Watchers know that I like thai food...mmmmm spring rolls), however to assauge such fears, and to speed the process for some transactions, electronic cash cards, similar to phone cards, are coming to the market -- the only barrier is getting a common nationwide standard. Paper money is approaching retirement.
The subject line was hyperbole, but really it is getting there. My current spending habits are that >95% of my monthly spending is totally electronic, and the remainder will be electronic soon enough (delivery. Most delivery drivers are being equipped with wireless debit pads for using your bank debit card at your door). At any average store or restaurant, overwhelmingly patrons are paying by debit card rather than dealing with cash and all of the change issues (especially here in Canada where up to two dollars are change - the bulk of change that can be acquired in a day of using paper currency is staggering...literally). The exception to this rule is Tim Hortons, a ridiculously popular coffee shop that refuses debit cards for speed issues.
"What they are doing is saying to themselves "40x1GB files will fit", which is incorrect."
Yet what is on the box -- which is virtually always denoted with an indication that it is metric, quite contrary to your claims that they are insinuating binary mega values and hoping to defraud customers -- and what you can actually store often varies, sometimes dramatically, anyways, at no fault of the hard drive manufacturer because of allocation slack, directory space, etc.
In any case, what has been pointed out quite a few times on here already, the harddrive manufacturers are actually correct in using GB to denote a billion bytes, with GiB indicating the binary value.
"In reality it seems that they want to sell product with decimal G capacities but have customers believe they are buying disk with conventionally calculated capacity and hoping that no one would notice."
This is all so absolutely ridiculous. Firstly, about 99% of people on the streets, including most computer users, aren't mentally calculating the power of 2 capacities when you say that a hard-drive has 40GB, or a memory module has 512MB -- Instead they mentally have an awareness that 40GB is "big, but 80GB is better", and "512MB is good". I highly doubt they're going to get their shiney new drive, and DRATS! - they have 42949672960 of virus filled emails to fit in there, but instead they only got 40000000000.
Secondly, hard drive manufacturers, as a general rule, have used the power of 10 rule since before I first became interested in computers about 18 years ago - this is the standard, and if you haven't read the byline "GB refers to 1,000,000,000 bytes" then you just haven't been looking.
This whole campaign is just contrived and attention seeking nonsense. I suspect that someone just finished their "Computers 101" course, and they think they've discovered an amazing fraud being perpetrated upon the public by those dastardly harddrive manufacturers.
Would you mind prividing the model numbers of those two drives?
I'd seriously rather be in the company of my trained attack rabbit (codename: BunBun) than any 10 geeks with AK-47's.
Watch out for the bunnies with guns.
" so, from what this article is saying, lets add more steps and go the complicated way. Thats not what needs to happen."
.NET environments, not the fact that your email client is telnet and you don't know how chmod works.
This is exactly what the article seems to be saying -- the author is trying to make lemonade out of lemons that a lack of functionality entails.
This article is generally clueless, and often contradictory, claptrap. It's hardly surprizing that it was "published" on the Register. Let me summarize the article:
-Linux is more secure because it has less features, forcing the user through more steps to accomplish what they are trying to do, thereby weeding out the clueless.
-Linux is more secure because most clueful admins run as non-root, while most Windows boxes run as admins. Of course when user friendliness comes into play, users end up running as root too (Lindows).
-Windows sucks because it pushes code and component reuse, such as the use of Internet Explorer as the HTML rendering engine in Outlook and Outlook Express. This is unlike Linux, oh except for Konquerer and Mozilla that both use modern software reuse, but they're better anyways.
What is the point of this article? If he simply wants to say "Linux users in general are more clueful", or "lack of features keep out the clueless", or "Linux software is just written better", then he could just say that. Instead it's some ramblings that don't add up. Real security is something like the sandboxed Java or
I've seen quite a few shops advertising DVD burners for $179 CDN, which is around $135.00 US.
so why not just scrap the -R format and put all future effort into +R
By the same token, why not scrap the +R format, and put all future effort in -R?
I doubt dual-layer will take off - Single-layer already has a slow enough adoption, despite the fact that drives are about $130, and disks can be had for less than $2 or so each. Dual-layer, as a nature of the beast, will cost considerably more, and it only offers 2x the capacity (and I really don't mind switching discs every two hours if encoding video on them) -- if it was blue laser or something, and offered 8x the capacity, then that would be a different story, but for 2x the capacity I doubt many will be spending the premium.
As a sidenote, and contrary to what I said above, at DVD quality video, a single-layer DVD is really only an hour of video (and hence a dual-layer is about two hours). To expand that out requires either advanced codecs that won't play in most DVD players, or degraded quality.
I admit, that's exactly what I did. Putting "please don't wipe out our server" is unbelievably counterproductive, and I think it was just someone covering their ass if some peers came for blood after a thrashing-- "But...I said please don't wipe out our server! I figured they'd all get in touch with each other and draw straws as to who would visit!"
Its because most people don't get off their lazy ass once every couple of years, learn a little bit about whats going on in politics, and then vote. Barely more than 50% of the people in this country vote in presidential elections, and far fewer vote for state and local elections
I hear this a lot and I really find it to be absurdly ridiculous -- the results at the polls generally mesh very closely with a random sampling of potential voters (including those who don't bother voting). The reason, of course, is that lethargy and inaction crosses all political lines, so apart from special cases where there is a highly motivated voter cross section, generally you can stay home and watch Oprah because you know the guy who'll cancel your vote is probably doing the same.
The real problem with countries like the US and Canada is because we largely use a "first past the post" voting which really does mean that many votes are wasted -- If your candidate is polling at 20%, you quite literally are pissing in the wind wasting an afternoon to head to a polling station. The solution, of course, is proportional representation (where even though Joe Republican got 39% of the votes for a rider versus the 35% for the second place guy, it isn't 100% representation for Republicans and 0% for everyone else). Given that the two big parties run the show and set the rules (really one big party in Canada), I doubt we'll see that anytime soon.
I'd say an ocean of separation probably played a bigger role.
Democracy is ruled by the majority - if you're in the minority (in this case people who understand or care about computers), you don't matter. If 51% of a the US (or substantially less, if there are at least 3 major candidates for political offices) wants to enslave the other 49%, they can.
This is logical if 51% of the people had exactly the same opinions and views, and the other 49% held opposing opinions. In reality, though, we're all a complex mesh of opinions and perspectives. Everyone is a minority in the minority of their opinions, and a majority in a few, and there are few overlaps*.
Secondly, most democracies have basic fundamental rights as a sacred realm that the tyranny of the majority can't impose themselves into (generally). Of course then you get people who just don't get the point, so sure of the righteousness of their own platform, so they try to supercede silly things like basic rights misunderstanding the whole premise (such as the separation of church and statement, which plays out in the US all of the time). This sort of thing is happening in Canada: Our Supreme Court has declared that based upon our basic rights dictated in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the government cannot dictate that marriage is a union of a man and a woman, and a marriage of man-man or woman-woman must be honoured in civic matters (which comes back to the whole church and state thing). How does the far right respond? By calling for the use of the Notwithstanding Clause, basically trumping basic rights and defeating the whole point.