So, you are telling me that the target market for the Nexus One are people with multiple cutting edge cell phones? That would explain why sales are so low, but then raises the question, why would any company want a market that small?
I confess, I don't really follow your second sentence... Are you saying that iPhones sell for more than the cost of the phone plus early termination fee? A quick check on ebay suggests this may be true, but I'm not sure how that ties into switching to T-Mobile.
Now that you mention it, replacing letters makes things so much clearer now! But now I can't tell the difference between companies and products. So actually, no, you're obfuscating things for no gain whatsoever.
The answer to your question is, as you say, "Easy". They shouldn't have had HTC make the phone! But then you clearly think it's better to have made a phone that no one wants than not to have tried at all. The Nexus One is undeniably a mistake, plain and simple; its sales are all the proof one needs. The fact that this outcome was obvious from the beginning is what makes it a stupid mistake. But maybe sales will pick up, given time? I am sure they'll start selling more once the Desire and Incredible hit US markets.
Why are you substituting letters for everything? Is it supposed to make your point clearer? Look, it's not a discount if your product is the only one that isn't discounted. That's tantamount to a stupid tax. So yes, it is stupid to release a top-of-line product into a market in which your product is the only one with a stupid tax. But then, Google actually isn't the only company to sell phones this way. Nokia also does this with their high-end phones, and it hasn't exactly done them any favors in NA.
I guess, if you absolutely cannot wait until your contract is up, then yes, you have to buy an unlocked phone. On the other hand, if you are close enough to the end of your contract, you are generally better off just paying the $75 early upgrade fee and getting a subsidized device.
WRT "freeing the device from the carrier" that is all and well, but you aren't describing the Nexus One. You can buy the T-Mobile one, or you can buy the AT&T one. And then you're stuck with that carrier (as long as you want to keep using your $530 unlocked Nexus One), not to mention that neither of them work on Sprint or Verizon.
So, no. The real benefit of an unlocked phone is that if you travel internationally often, you can buy a prepaid sim card and not have to pay roaming charges.
Google's idea is stupid because the costs aren't just up front. If you buy the AT&T Nexus One, then you will pay the same service rates as everyone else. Basically, you will be subsidizing everyone else's phones. If you must have a Nexus One, that is fine, but I myself find it difficult to justify the astronomical cost compared to similar devices. If the service plans sans contract were less, then I'd have some incentive to buy the Nexus One, or even to hold onto my old phone. But since I'm going to end up paying the same amount anyway, I sign the contract and get a new phone for free every 2 years instead.
Actually, I do care that Wal-mart doesn't sell porn. I care more about that then the fact that Apple doesn't sell porn. I don't have an iPhone, and I don't plan on buying one, and since Steve Jobs is so fanatical about keeping developers from making cross-platform applications on the iPhone, it doesn't really affect me much. HOWEVER, most games (and probably other media as well) need to be carried by Wal-mart to be profitable, and so they will self-censor however they must in order to be sold in there. So, even though I don't shop at Wal-mart, the media I consume is still affected by Wal-mart's policies. I fail to see how this is better than iTunes. I can make another analogy with Texas and textbooks, if you want.
Ok. I suspected that one might be closer than the other films. So that's, what? 2 out of the 9 films nominally "based" on PKD's stories? My point still stands.
While I agree with you, I don't see what this has to do with PKD and the movies nominally based on his stories. Total Recall has almost nothing to do with We'll Remember it for You Wholesale. Most of the movie occurs after the short story has already ended, and the few bits that overlap with the movie are changed substantially. Minority Report (the film) has the opposite moral of the short story it's based on. The only PKD-sourced movie I've seen that is remotely close to the source material is Screamer (though, I will note that I haven't seen Paycheck or Imposter, and I haven't read A Scanner Darkly).
I think it's more likely that the two aforementioned reasons are the most important: for marketing and also to cover their asses (cf the Terminator and Harlan Ellison's credit).
Assuming you didn't just pull that "90%" figure out of your ass, who cares? They obviously don't, and it's not my privacy they're dicking with. Besides, it's not like Google and every other search engine out there doesn't already store and analyze search queries (indexed by IP address). Is it that big a problem that Google or Bing or whatever knows what you are about to search for before you hit the enter key?
Wouldn't you rather pay $300 for a device that can also run all the applications you love?
... No? Why would I want to pay 50% more for the shitty experience of using the applications I love on a tiny, low-res screen, when I have an actual computer for that? I want an internet appliance for using the internet, and it had better be priced like a small appliance. The only reason to have an appliance with a full-blown desktop OS is so that I can use the internet browser I love instead IE. Except, oh wait, that browser is designed for a desktop computer, so it still sucks monkey balls. That said, I am well-aware of the fact that I am extraordinarily strange and that nothing I want is what other people want, so I am guessing that most people actually do want to pay 50% more for the shitty experience of using the applications the love on a tiny, low-res screen with a tiny, finger-cramping keyboard.
Tell him that for $200 he can get color, better sunlight readability, 10" display in the same form-factor, multi-day battery life in e-book mode, and a real OS with web browsing, e-mail and more [...]
They won't sell it for that much. Even the Acer the GP was talking about doesn't sell for $200 (Newegg sells them for $350). I would be surprised if they sold something like this for less than $400; I think $500 is more likely given the pricing of competition. And so the actual comparison for Joe Sixpack is this: A) e-book reader with 166dpi e-ink display, week-long battery life, 3G book store, readable in sunlight, or B) netbook with 120dpi screen only viewable dim light, 3 hour battery life, wifi, with a real OS, but good luck using any desktop apps on that tiny-ass screen. What I see are two products that provide completely different things; one is for reading books anywhere, the other is a little computer, with all of the attendant pros and cons.
That could be a problem for android, but the guy you're replying to was talking about desktop distros. That problem was solved before most people had ever heard of linux.
Lets calibrate your experience. Have you, or people that you know, been admitted to, attend, or have attended PhD programs in technical subjects in top 25 universities?
I do. Most of my friends either have PhDs or are working on one. You don't need to be smart to get a PhD. Most people I know with PhDs, are not, in fact, what I would consider smart. Importantly, however, they aren't stupid. I haven't met any idiot PhDs yet. The most important factor in getting that PhD is motivation (or persistence, call it what you will), and that is what the PhD signifies. It shows you have what it takes to finish the job. If you can show that you can get the job done without getting a PhD (and I know some of those too), you can still be successful (though perhaps somewhat less so in research). Like you said, the degree only helps you on that first job.
I know that ogg isn't an encoder, but I have not seen anything else in that container, so I sort of convolve them. A lot of people seem to do this. It doesn't help that the file extension they've settled on is 'ogg' (should be 'ogv' something like that).
You are right, it's not a wavelet encoder. I don't know why I thought it was...
This was the first thing that occurred to me. OGG is a wavelet encoder, so it artifacts in a completely different way than MP3 does. That and 160kbps should be pretty transparent with most encoders on most samples anyway...
If I could bother to get a restraining order against someone I would sure as fuck bother to unfriend them. No reason to still be friends with someone you have a restraining order against.
First, on-topic: I think the heart-rate monitor is just to help kids (ok, and possibly instructors too) know how hard their hearts are working. I doubt this data will be stored. If it were, I might be concerned, but I would be really surprised if they did.
Now for the off-topic stuff. That's an awful analogy. Here's a better one (it's still awful, though, don't get me wrong). You have car insurance, and suppose you now wreck your car. Or someone else wrecks it for you. Or maybe a hurricane wrecks your car. It doesn't really matter. Your car gets wrecked, somehow, which may or may not be your "fault". And this is a weird kind of wreckage where, even after you take it to the mechanic, it wrecks itself constantly, even if you don't drive it anywhere. Now suppose you lose your insurance, because the car insurance company keeps raising your premiums, since, well, your car keeps wrecking itself (although, I'm not sure that "insurance" is the right word for whatever it is this company is providing at this point). Or maybe you lose your job because you can't get to work in your shitty car anymore, and that's how you lose your insurance (oddly enough, provided by your employer). So you need to get new insurance. But you can't get any, 'cause your car has a pre-existing problem which you cannot permanently fix, and what insurance company in their right mind would insure someone with a permanent problem? Explain to me how this system is fair.
See, the answer is that, for health insurance to work it needs to be mandatory (to ensure that healthy people subsidize unhealthy people), insurance companies must provide service regardless of current health conditions, and their pricing must be uniform (i.e., not depend on current health conditions). Anything else is not "insurance", but rather simply a different way of making people pay for their own medical expenses (which, I am sure, most libertarians would be completely happy with, but that is neither here nor there).
Notice that whether it's public or private is irrelevant, as long as those three conditions are met. Also notice that the whole point of insurance is that lucky people pay to make sure that unlucky people do not suffer catastrophic financial ruin, on the off chance that they too might become unlucky in the future. I guess a figure of note here is that 65% of personal bankruptcies involve high medical bills. Here's another quote from that blog:
A 2006 survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health found that 25% of cancer patients and their families had used up "all or most" of their savings paying for treatment; 11% said they had been unable to get health insurance again afterwards; 6% said they had actually lost their insurance *because of having cancer*.
That is not how I had it explained to me. The Economist made it sound like Google was going to manage it like a cable TV provider. You pay Google a nominal subscription fee (say, $15/month), and they let you read anything to which they have access. The blog mentioned that they would allow for micropayments on top of that, but the money would primarily be in the form of a subscription service.
It's not new. There is a balloon class at the University of Washington. They launch a weather balloon with "payloads" designed (sort of, anyway) and built by students from an airport in the middle of nowhere (well, Central Washington) at the end of the class. The professors handle telemetry, which no doubt costs more than $150, but since the bandwidth is so low, they can't telemeter images anyway, so recovery is required. Incidentally, every payload has been recovered so far.
Three or four years ago, an ambitious student that knew a bit more than most about digital electronics strapped a camera onto the payload just for shits and giggles (yes, self-powered and rigged to trigger every minute or so). The images he got back were pretty amazing, so after that the professors started offering extra credit for cameras, and every year at least one group gets a good set of pictures. In fact, last year they got one on the way up of an airplane that came a bit closer than it should have.
The reason why no one has heard of this before is because no one thinks it's interesting enough to tell the press about; except MIT students, who apparently think that everything they do is hot shit.
The fella I replied to said that he uses FAT32 on any HDDs that are shared between Windows and Linux. We weren't talking about thumb drives. Also, I have no idea how you got the impression that I don't know about or use journaling filesystems on linux. I left the number off because on linux it's ext3, but under Windows it's ext2 (none of the Windows drivers support journaling); I assumed that people wouldn't think I was using ext1, but I guess maybe I shouldn't assume these sorts of things.
As someone already mentioned NTFS is better. I'd feel naked using a non-journaling filesystem... On the other hand, I've never had any permissions problems using ext under Windows, but I don't share this computer with anyone else.
Selling anything to anyone is not harming them as long as the ingredients listed are the true ingredients.
I don't agree that as long as you list the true ingredients everything is peaches and cream, but nevermind that for now. You are illustrating my point here fairly well. If the rule is "an eye for an eye" what does that mean here? You say that, instead of an eye for an eye, you meant "that the punishment should fit the crime and should be decided upon on an individual basis by a jury of peers." Are you saying that one's punishment should depend on the demographics and psychology of a particular jury? And they would just think up, out of thin air a proper punishment, without any sort of regulation? If you think that there should be regulation, then how is that different than having the law say what the punishment should be for particular crimes? There are as many holes your suggestion as there are in our current system. Assuming people will approach their own punishment in a fair and rational way is extraordinarily naïve and thinking that defendants should not have any say in their own trials is just as silly.
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Ok, well then I was confused when you said "switch".
So, you are telling me that the target market for the Nexus One are people with multiple cutting edge cell phones? That would explain why sales are so low, but then raises the question, why would any company want a market that small?
I confess, I don't really follow your second sentence ... Are you saying that iPhones sell for more than the cost of the phone plus early termination fee? A quick check on ebay suggests this may be true, but I'm not sure how that ties into switching to T-Mobile.
Now that you mention it, replacing letters makes things so much clearer now! But now I can't tell the difference between companies and products. So actually, no, you're obfuscating things for no gain whatsoever.
The answer to your question is, as you say, "Easy". They shouldn't have had HTC make the phone! But then you clearly think it's better to have made a phone that no one wants than not to have tried at all. The Nexus One is undeniably a mistake, plain and simple; its sales are all the proof one needs. The fact that this outcome was obvious from the beginning is what makes it a stupid mistake. But maybe sales will pick up, given time? I am sure they'll start selling more once the Desire and Incredible hit US markets.
Why are you substituting letters for everything? Is it supposed to make your point clearer? Look, it's not a discount if your product is the only one that isn't discounted. That's tantamount to a stupid tax. So yes, it is stupid to release a top-of-line product into a market in which your product is the only one with a stupid tax. But then, Google actually isn't the only company to sell phones this way. Nokia also does this with their high-end phones, and it hasn't exactly done them any favors in NA.
I guess, if you absolutely cannot wait until your contract is up, then yes, you have to buy an unlocked phone. On the other hand, if you are close enough to the end of your contract, you are generally better off just paying the $75 early upgrade fee and getting a subsidized device.
WRT "freeing the device from the carrier" that is all and well, but you aren't describing the Nexus One. You can buy the T-Mobile one, or you can buy the AT&T one. And then you're stuck with that carrier (as long as you want to keep using your $530 unlocked Nexus One), not to mention that neither of them work on Sprint or Verizon.
So, no. The real benefit of an unlocked phone is that if you travel internationally often, you can buy a prepaid sim card and not have to pay roaming charges.
It was Google's idea to release the Nexus One, and that idea is stupid because only T-Mobile discounts rates.
Google's idea is stupid because the costs aren't just up front. If you buy the AT&T Nexus One, then you will pay the same service rates as everyone else. Basically, you will be subsidizing everyone else's phones. If you must have a Nexus One, that is fine, but I myself find it difficult to justify the astronomical cost compared to similar devices. If the service plans sans contract were less, then I'd have some incentive to buy the Nexus One, or even to hold onto my old phone. But since I'm going to end up paying the same amount anyway, I sign the contract and get a new phone for free every 2 years instead.
even if they are convicted, nothing will happen? Besides, if my Backflip is any indication, Google's so-called monopoly is not worth very much.
Actually, I do care that Wal-mart doesn't sell porn. I care more about that then the fact that Apple doesn't sell porn. I don't have an iPhone, and I don't plan on buying one, and since Steve Jobs is so fanatical about keeping developers from making cross-platform applications on the iPhone, it doesn't really affect me much. HOWEVER, most games (and probably other media as well) need to be carried by Wal-mart to be profitable, and so they will self-censor however they must in order to be sold in there. So, even though I don't shop at Wal-mart, the media I consume is still affected by Wal-mart's policies. I fail to see how this is better than iTunes. I can make another analogy with Texas and textbooks, if you want.
Ok. I suspected that one might be closer than the other films. So that's, what? 2 out of the 9 films nominally "based" on PKD's stories? My point still stands.
While I agree with you, I don't see what this has to do with PKD and the movies nominally based on his stories. Total Recall has almost nothing to do with We'll Remember it for You Wholesale. Most of the movie occurs after the short story has already ended, and the few bits that overlap with the movie are changed substantially. Minority Report (the film) has the opposite moral of the short story it's based on. The only PKD-sourced movie I've seen that is remotely close to the source material is Screamer (though, I will note that I haven't seen Paycheck or Imposter, and I haven't read A Scanner Darkly).
I think it's more likely that the two aforementioned reasons are the most important: for marketing and also to cover their asses (cf the Terminator and Harlan Ellison's credit).
Assuming you didn't just pull that "90%" figure out of your ass, who cares? They obviously don't, and it's not my privacy they're dicking with. Besides, it's not like Google and every other search engine out there doesn't already store and analyze search queries (indexed by IP address). Is it that big a problem that Google or Bing or whatever knows what you are about to search for before you hit the enter key?
... No? Why would I want to pay 50% more for the shitty experience of using the applications I love on a tiny, low-res screen, when I have an actual computer for that? I want an internet appliance for using the internet, and it had better be priced like a small appliance. The only reason to have an appliance with a full-blown desktop OS is so that I can use the internet browser I love instead IE. Except, oh wait, that browser is designed for a desktop computer, so it still sucks monkey balls. That said, I am well-aware of the fact that I am extraordinarily strange and that nothing I want is what other people want, so I am guessing that most people actually do want to pay 50% more for the shitty experience of using the applications the love on a tiny, low-res screen with a tiny, finger-cramping keyboard.
They won't sell it for that much. Even the Acer the GP was talking about doesn't sell for $200 (Newegg sells them for $350). I would be surprised if they sold something like this for less than $400; I think $500 is more likely given the pricing of competition. And so the actual comparison for Joe Sixpack is this: A) e-book reader with 166dpi e-ink display, week-long battery life, 3G book store, readable in sunlight, or B) netbook with 120dpi screen only viewable dim light, 3 hour battery life, wifi, with a real OS, but good luck using any desktop apps on that tiny-ass screen. What I see are two products that provide completely different things; one is for reading books anywhere, the other is a little computer, with all of the attendant pros and cons.
That could be a problem for android, but the guy you're replying to was talking about desktop distros. That problem was solved before most people had ever heard of linux.
I do. Most of my friends either have PhDs or are working on one. You don't need to be smart to get a PhD. Most people I know with PhDs, are not, in fact, what I would consider smart. Importantly, however, they aren't stupid. I haven't met any idiot PhDs yet. The most important factor in getting that PhD is motivation (or persistence, call it what you will), and that is what the PhD signifies. It shows you have what it takes to finish the job. If you can show that you can get the job done without getting a PhD (and I know some of those too), you can still be successful (though perhaps somewhat less so in research). Like you said, the degree only helps you on that first job.
Are you saying that scientists are blue collar?
I know that ogg isn't an encoder, but I have not seen anything else in that container, so I sort of convolve them. A lot of people seem to do this. It doesn't help that the file extension they've settled on is 'ogg' (should be 'ogv' something like that).
You are right, it's not a wavelet encoder. I don't know why I thought it was ...
This was the first thing that occurred to me. OGG is a wavelet encoder, so it artifacts in a completely different way than MP3 does. That and 160kbps should be pretty transparent with most encoders on most samples anyway ...
If I could bother to get a restraining order against someone I would sure as fuck bother to unfriend them. No reason to still be friends with someone you have a restraining order against.
First, on-topic: I think the heart-rate monitor is just to help kids (ok, and possibly instructors too) know how hard their hearts are working. I doubt this data will be stored. If it were, I might be concerned, but I would be really surprised if they did.
Now for the off-topic stuff. That's an awful analogy. Here's a better one (it's still awful, though, don't get me wrong). You have car insurance, and suppose you now wreck your car. Or someone else wrecks it for you. Or maybe a hurricane wrecks your car. It doesn't really matter. Your car gets wrecked, somehow, which may or may not be your "fault". And this is a weird kind of wreckage where, even after you take it to the mechanic, it wrecks itself constantly, even if you don't drive it anywhere. Now suppose you lose your insurance, because the car insurance company keeps raising your premiums, since, well, your car keeps wrecking itself (although, I'm not sure that "insurance" is the right word for whatever it is this company is providing at this point). Or maybe you lose your job because you can't get to work in your shitty car anymore, and that's how you lose your insurance (oddly enough, provided by your employer). So you need to get new insurance. But you can't get any, 'cause your car has a pre-existing problem which you cannot permanently fix, and what insurance company in their right mind would insure someone with a permanent problem? Explain to me how this system is fair.
See, the answer is that, for health insurance to work it needs to be mandatory (to ensure that healthy people subsidize unhealthy people), insurance companies must provide service regardless of current health conditions, and their pricing must be uniform (i.e., not depend on current health conditions). Anything else is not "insurance", but rather simply a different way of making people pay for their own medical expenses (which, I am sure, most libertarians would be completely happy with, but that is neither here nor there).
Notice that whether it's public or private is irrelevant, as long as those three conditions are met. Also notice that the whole point of insurance is that lucky people pay to make sure that unlucky people do not suffer catastrophic financial ruin, on the off chance that they too might become unlucky in the future. I guess a figure of note here is that 65% of personal bankruptcies involve high medical bills. Here's another quote from that blog:
That is not how I had it explained to me. The Economist made it sound like Google was going to manage it like a cable TV provider. You pay Google a nominal subscription fee (say, $15/month), and they let you read anything to which they have access. The blog mentioned that they would allow for micropayments on top of that, but the money would primarily be in the form of a subscription service.
It's not new. There is a balloon class at the University of Washington. They launch a weather balloon with "payloads" designed (sort of, anyway) and built by students from an airport in the middle of nowhere (well, Central Washington) at the end of the class. The professors handle telemetry, which no doubt costs more than $150, but since the bandwidth is so low, they can't telemeter images anyway, so recovery is required. Incidentally, every payload has been recovered so far. Three or four years ago, an ambitious student that knew a bit more than most about digital electronics strapped a camera onto the payload just for shits and giggles (yes, self-powered and rigged to trigger every minute or so). The images he got back were pretty amazing, so after that the professors started offering extra credit for cameras, and every year at least one group gets a good set of pictures. In fact, last year they got one on the way up of an airplane that came a bit closer than it should have. The reason why no one has heard of this before is because no one thinks it's interesting enough to tell the press about; except MIT students, who apparently think that everything they do is hot shit.
The fella I replied to said that he uses FAT32 on any HDDs that are shared between Windows and Linux. We weren't talking about thumb drives. Also, I have no idea how you got the impression that I don't know about or use journaling filesystems on linux. I left the number off because on linux it's ext3, but under Windows it's ext2 (none of the Windows drivers support journaling); I assumed that people wouldn't think I was using ext1, but I guess maybe I shouldn't assume these sorts of things.
As someone already mentioned NTFS is better. I'd feel naked using a non-journaling filesystem ... On the other hand, I've never had any permissions problems using ext under Windows, but I don't share this computer with anyone else.
I don't agree that as long as you list the true ingredients everything is peaches and cream, but nevermind that for now. You are illustrating my point here fairly well. If the rule is "an eye for an eye" what does that mean here? You say that, instead of an eye for an eye, you meant "that the punishment should fit the crime and should be decided upon on an individual basis by a jury of peers." Are you saying that one's punishment should depend on the demographics and psychology of a particular jury? And they would just think up, out of thin air a proper punishment, without any sort of regulation? If you think that there should be regulation, then how is that different than having the law say what the punishment should be for particular crimes? There are as many holes your suggestion as there are in our current system. Assuming people will approach their own punishment in a fair and rational way is extraordinarily naïve and thinking that defendants should not have any say in their own trials is just as silly.