I find that quite hard to believe given that a tailpipe can effectively turn into a small potato cannon during ignition. What did the snow do, grab a blowtorch and weld the damn thing shut? Had he considered that cars often don't like starting in extreme cold?
Snow tires are a plus, but they do nothing to remove the incompetency of other drivers. I've lived in New England long enough to know when it's only safe to drive 15mph on the highway, but that's not going to stop some jackass from careening into me.
But I'd still take it over hurricanes any day, and that's after having lost power for a week and sustaining non-trivial damage after the ice storm that occurred this time last year.
No, he's making the point that ignoring problems for other people until they directly affect you is a terribly stupid idea. Slippery slope, and all that.
I'm all for paranoia about our new "papers, please" overlords, but automated anti-fraud systems implemented by credit card companies couldn't be less related if they tried.
On the contrary, I'd be happy to see my tax dollars used to support and improve software that I can then access and use for free. We all benefit both directly (better software) and indirectly (donors that we're funding able to accomplish their required tasks).
For the requisite car analogy, think roads. My tax dollars being used to support FOSS is like improving most roads, whereas my tax dollars being used to support proprietary software is akin to improving toll roads. In both situations the roads are better, but in the latter case I have to pay to make use of the improvements.
Every indication is that SS is going to be completely dried up well before you or I reach retirement age. A very low-risk 401(k) is almost certainly going to do better than 0, and in the long run, most of the higher-risk investments will probably do so as well. No guarantees, but that's life. As it stands now, paying into social security is quite literally as effective as flushing your money down the toilet. Hell, even savings bonds are a better investment - and they won't even match inflation.
I happen to be going down a MUCH higher risk/reward route (probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more than even the riskiest 401k), but I've got plenty of time to deal with it if things don't work out. And I'll know the results within five years, which is all the better if it takes a turn for the worse since I'll still have a good 40 years to figure it out.
Granted, most people would treat the "extra" income that they'd have if they didn't have to pay into SS as just that - extra income. Suffice to say, it probably wouldn't go towards a retirement fund. But you're still better off putting that money towards a new TV than dumping it into a black hole.
As you can see from the 2000 and 2004 elections, the voters respond much better to emotional messages (particularly the emotion known as 'fear' as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney know too well) than they do to something as mundane as logic.
Are you suggesting that "change you can believe in" is based in logic rather than emotion?
This issue is NOT specific to one political party.
Software isn't like cranking widgets. You've got to spend time getting people up to speed with the codebase, ensuring that their resume wasn't full of crap and that they actually know how to code, etc. Subcontractors, freelancers, and other people that in general don't get benefits are only going to make sense if it's an ongoing 10-20hrs/wk of work or something in that range - not so much for a new hire, but too much and/or frequent to screw over your salaried employees with forced overtime.
Except that IE8 is perfectly capable of emulating both IE6's and IE7's standards-noncompliance modes, in addition to rendering in a proper (albeit lacking some newer features) standards-compliant mode.
There's no excuse. There's less than 250 hours left in this DECADE, so Win2k isn't a valid argument in my books.
Which would be very relevant if Facebook was doing heavy number-crunching. The only numbers on the site are comment and friend counts, which isn't especially taxing work (especially since it's all de-normalized). The majority of FB is database activity and transforming that into HTML and JSON. If you want to place blame for inefficiency, MySQL would probably be your best bet.
1280x720 on a phone? Yeah, right. There's no point to that much resolution on a handheld device - your eyes simply can't resolve the additional detail.
I personally find 3.5" to be a great display size as it's easily handheld and pocketable, but obviously that's a matter of opinion.
5GB a month really is quite aggressive usage on a cell phone. My iPhone (original 2G 2007 model) reports under 2GB of cell bandwidth usage since I bought it. Now I have my doubts as to how accurate that reading is, but even if it was off by an order of magnitude that would still be well under a gig a month.
That being said, I almost never stream video, and audio is almost as rare (and I'm frequently within range of WiFi). That bandwidth goes mostly towards email and web browsing. I suspect if I could tether the phone that would change drastically.
Is it now? IANAL, but I believe that so long as you have paid for the book in question and you're not distributing that material, you're at liberty to do just that. The DMCA need not apply, as books a) aren't digital and b) aren't copy-protected.
But again, IANAL. And as it's past 2am, I can't be bothered to do any research.
Apple's solution to updates definitely isn't "buy a new phone". I'm happily using the original iPhone (y'know, the $600 one from 2007) and continue to get regular software updates.
I'm sure Apple would prefer for me to buy a new phone, but by ensuring my continued happiness, they've massively increased the chance that I'll stick with them when I decide to upgrade.
And without the price of a full-size notebook. You get what you pay for. Honestly, I'm astonished that they can pack a battery that powerful into a machine of that price.
All of Apple's notebooks at least are in fact machined from a single slab of aluminum. I'd bet other manufacturers have adopted similar "unibody" approaches with their high-end systems. And while the $1100 I paid for my MBP13" is decidedly a premium price, it was damn well worth it for my needs.
Manufacturers are in no way required to lower their prices according to their costs. So long as people are paying the current prices, their costs could drop to zero and they'd still be idiotic to lower MSRP by a cent. If people are paying $1700, then it's worth at least $1700 to them - it's not like basic necessities where you have to pay whatever the price is in order to survive.
Of course I'd like lower prices, along with the rest of the world. But if the market is willing to bear your price, the last thing you should do is lower it.
Also, working with aluminum tends to be more of a process. Plastic can be injection molded, where aluminum (as far as I'm aware) needs to be machined in some way or another.
For plenty of people, it would be worth the extra $20 or so. The issue is that the manufacturers would treat it as a premium product (and rightly so), and probably tack $100 or more onto the price. Not that it doesn't work - look at Apple - but when your target market is looking to buy the cheapest computer they can find, it's not really an especially logical move. Hardware margins are already paper-thin, so you can put money on them either cutting costs wherever possible or charging a huge premium for something that only adds a few bucks to actual costs.
Since - by definition - netbooks are not premium computers in any sense of the word, you can expect them to remain plastic for the foreseeable future.
It seems that these days, looking at what congress-critters are most fervently trying to make illegal is the easiest way to find out what kind of activities they partake in on the weekends.
That took all of one second to find in an md5 lookup database. And thirty seconds for me to realize that I could have looked two lines higher to see it in plaintext next to your userid.:wallbash:
Slashdot Mirror
I find that quite hard to believe given that a tailpipe can effectively turn into a small potato cannon during ignition. What did the snow do, grab a blowtorch and weld the damn thing shut? Had he considered that cars often don't like starting in extreme cold?
Snow tires are a plus, but they do nothing to remove the incompetency of other drivers. I've lived in New England long enough to know when it's only safe to drive 15mph on the highway, but that's not going to stop some jackass from careening into me.
But I'd still take it over hurricanes any day, and that's after having lost power for a week and sustaining non-trivial damage after the ice storm that occurred this time last year.
It should still work if you treat the unknown as a stop sign. You just have to be a bit more cautious than usual when proceeding.
No, he's making the point that ignoring problems for other people until they directly affect you is a terribly stupid idea. Slippery slope, and all that.
If I can't be expected to understand the laws as a normal human, then I can't reasonably be expected to follow them either.
I'm all for paranoia about our new "papers, please" overlords, but automated anti-fraud systems implemented by credit card companies couldn't be less related if they tried.
On the contrary, I'd be happy to see my tax dollars used to support and improve software that I can then access and use for free. We all benefit both directly (better software) and indirectly (donors that we're funding able to accomplish their required tasks).
For the requisite car analogy, think roads. My tax dollars being used to support FOSS is like improving most roads, whereas my tax dollars being used to support proprietary software is akin to improving toll roads. In both situations the roads are better, but in the latter case I have to pay to make use of the improvements.
Every indication is that SS is going to be completely dried up well before you or I reach retirement age. A very low-risk 401(k) is almost certainly going to do better than 0, and in the long run, most of the higher-risk investments will probably do so as well. No guarantees, but that's life. As it stands now, paying into social security is quite literally as effective as flushing your money down the toilet. Hell, even savings bonds are a better investment - and they won't even match inflation.
I happen to be going down a MUCH higher risk/reward route (probably 2-3 orders of magnitude more than even the riskiest 401k), but I've got plenty of time to deal with it if things don't work out. And I'll know the results within five years, which is all the better if it takes a turn for the worse since I'll still have a good 40 years to figure it out.
Granted, most people would treat the "extra" income that they'd have if they didn't have to pay into SS as just that - extra income. Suffice to say, it probably wouldn't go towards a retirement fund. But you're still better off putting that money towards a new TV than dumping it into a black hole.
As you can see from the 2000 and 2004 elections, the voters respond much better to emotional messages (particularly the emotion known as 'fear' as Karl Rove and Dick Cheney know too well) than they do to something as mundane as logic.
Are you suggesting that "change you can believe in" is based in logic rather than emotion?
This issue is NOT specific to one political party.
For the record, i can't RTFA from where i'm posting.
Well of course not. This is Slashdot, after all.
Software isn't like cranking widgets. You've got to spend time getting people up to speed with the codebase, ensuring that their resume wasn't full of crap and that they actually know how to code, etc. Subcontractors, freelancers, and other people that in general don't get benefits are only going to make sense if it's an ongoing 10-20hrs/wk of work or something in that range - not so much for a new hire, but too much and/or frequent to screw over your salaried employees with forced overtime.
Except that IE8 is perfectly capable of emulating both IE6's and IE7's standards-noncompliance modes, in addition to rendering in a proper (albeit lacking some newer features) standards-compliant mode.
There's no excuse. There's less than 250 hours left in this DECADE, so Win2k isn't a valid argument in my books.
Which would be very relevant if Facebook was doing heavy number-crunching. The only numbers on the site are comment and friend counts, which isn't especially taxing work (especially since it's all de-normalized). The majority of FB is database activity and transforming that into HTML and JSON. If you want to place blame for inefficiency, MySQL would probably be your best bet.
1280x720 on a phone? Yeah, right. There's no point to that much resolution on a handheld device - your eyes simply can't resolve the additional detail.
I personally find 3.5" to be a great display size as it's easily handheld and pocketable, but obviously that's a matter of opinion.
5GB a month really is quite aggressive usage on a cell phone. My iPhone (original 2G 2007 model) reports under 2GB of cell bandwidth usage since I bought it. Now I have my doubts as to how accurate that reading is, but even if it was off by an order of magnitude that would still be well under a gig a month.
That being said, I almost never stream video, and audio is almost as rare (and I'm frequently within range of WiFi). That bandwidth goes mostly towards email and web browsing. I suspect if I could tether the phone that would change drastically.
Is it now? IANAL, but I believe that so long as you have paid for the book in question and you're not distributing that material, you're at liberty to do just that. The DMCA need not apply, as books a) aren't digital and b) aren't copy-protected.
But again, IANAL. And as it's past 2am, I can't be bothered to do any research.
If I can stick a radio into a TI-89 and make it speak CDMA, let me make phone calls with it.
You know most phones have a calculator app built in already, right?
Apple's solution to updates definitely isn't "buy a new phone". I'm happily using the original iPhone (y'know, the $600 one from 2007) and continue to get regular software updates.
I'm sure Apple would prefer for me to buy a new phone, but by ensuring my continued happiness, they've massively increased the chance that I'll stick with them when I decide to upgrade.
And without the price of a full-size notebook. You get what you pay for. Honestly, I'm astonished that they can pack a battery that powerful into a machine of that price.
All of Apple's notebooks at least are in fact machined from a single slab of aluminum. I'd bet other manufacturers have adopted similar "unibody" approaches with their high-end systems. And while the $1100 I paid for my MBP13" is decidedly a premium price, it was damn well worth it for my needs.
Manufacturers are in no way required to lower their prices according to their costs. So long as people are paying the current prices, their costs could drop to zero and they'd still be idiotic to lower MSRP by a cent. If people are paying $1700, then it's worth at least $1700 to them - it's not like basic necessities where you have to pay whatever the price is in order to survive.
Of course I'd like lower prices, along with the rest of the world. But if the market is willing to bear your price, the last thing you should do is lower it.
Hardly anything > 0
Also, working with aluminum tends to be more of a process. Plastic can be injection molded, where aluminum (as far as I'm aware) needs to be machined in some way or another.
For plenty of people, it would be worth the extra $20 or so. The issue is that the manufacturers would treat it as a premium product (and rightly so), and probably tack $100 or more onto the price. Not that it doesn't work - look at Apple - but when your target market is looking to buy the cheapest computer they can find, it's not really an especially logical move. Hardware margins are already paper-thin, so you can put money on them either cutting costs wherever possible or charging a huge premium for something that only adds a few bucks to actual costs.
Since - by definition - netbooks are not premium computers in any sense of the word, you can expect them to remain plastic for the foreseeable future.
And Slashdot still collectively wonders why it can't get laid.
And in Soviet Russia, 13 GPUs supercompute using you!
(Is that the smell of burning Karma?)
It seems that these days, looking at what congress-critters are most fervently trying to make illegal is the easiest way to find out what kind of activities they partake in on the weekends.
The sad part is that's only about 20% joking.
That took all of one second to find in an md5 lookup database. And thirty seconds for me to realize that I could have looked two lines higher to see it in plaintext next to your userid. :wallbash: