Re:An even better solution...
on
DRM Helmet
·
· Score: 5, Informative
"Bill Gates and this organization are hoarding thousands of priceless historical photographs and keeping them locked up away from prying eyes."
That is such garbage (or a pretty good troll). Bill purchased the Bettman Archive, true. But Corbis has preserved the collection through custom storage at the Iron Mountain facility. The collection was literally disintegrating at it's former home. They've also made more than twice as many (so far) images available as were ever available previously. (And only a few hundred prints account for over 70% of the requested images. People keep asking for the same things.) They are digitizing the collection but it's a huge task. And if you don't want the watermark, buy the print! It's that simple. Access to the archive is not as open as it once was. But if it hadn't been moved to Iron Mountain, it would be lost forever. The low temperature and correct humidity of Iron Mountain will preserve the collection indefinitely so that more and more of it can be known.
(spoken) Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown, And things seem hard or tough, And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft, (sung) And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at 900 miles an hour. It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned, The sun that is the source of all our power. Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see, Are moving at a million miles a day, In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour, Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars; It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side; It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick, But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide. We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point, We go 'round every two hundred million years; And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions In this amazing and expanding universe.
(waltz)
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding, In all of the directions it can whiz; As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know, Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is. So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth; And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
"There is a market for DSL, wireless, and Cable. The government does not need to stick their foot into this market to make it work. As Adam Smith said, the 'invisible hand' will give these people their last mile connectivity."
I grant I haven't read all of Adam Smith, but I don't recall anything about "last mile connectivity." That was a joke.
"It IS NOT, repeat IS NOT governments job to force the economy into any position what so ever. If a company can figure out how to make these connections profitable they will, thanks to the 'invisible hand', and the company wins, the consumer wins, the economy wins, and it was all done without a negative effect. So how simple that works.
The government cannot help but "force the economy." It is, after all, a huge consumer. This demand helps shape the market. Now there is of course a difference between consuming pencils and gasoline and nuclear triggers on the one hand and planning an economy on the other. But the government has a role there too. The government's job should be to serve its citizenry. If that means that markets do not operate with maximal efficiency, who cares? "The market" is just an abstract concept, a tool that helps us understand how parts of the economy function. It is not something to be a slave to.
I do not understand this obsession of deeply ideological Libertarians with the capital-M Market. It seems as though it is their deity and that cost efficiency is the only axis on which they measure morality. The logical conclusion of such single mindedness is that if one cent more wealth, in aggregate, will be created by my gutting you like a fish, I am morally obligated to do it. Obviously (I trust and hope) this isn't what Libertarians really want but the most ideological ones don't seem to have any appreciation of nuance.
If no one can figure out a way to make last mile connections profitably, no one will build them. And no amount of "leave it to the market" mantra will change that. But if people want the connection, why shouldn't the government change the regulatory environment to make it profitable for companies to do so? This is just changing the ground rules for the market. Market forces themselves still exist. Is it possible that the government will do something so stupid that they will make things much worse? Of course. But they might also be able to make the change so that the effects aren't so bad. Does that mean that some person or company will incur costs that they wouldn't have otherwise? Yes it does. But again, so what? Money is not the only value. It is merely the easiest to calculate.
"I sit through 8 hours of school every day, I learn nothing."
Have you tried staying awake? (cue rimshot)
Yeah, it was a cheap shot but I couldn't believe no one had taken it yet.
And speaking of the futility of trying to teach people, I once had the pleasure of arguing with an entire lecture hall that it was the Miranda decision, not "Memoranda." Well, they were mostly English majors. Ba-dum bum.
"What's the difference between what Amazon are doing, and what many car sales firms are doing (other than the cost, of course...). Plenty of car firms sell nearly new cars right next to the brand new ones."
Oh, I don't know. Maybe the fact that Amazon doesn't actually create the products they facilitate the sale of, used or new. Maybe the fact that used car sales are an essential component of marketing new cars (the trade-in market). So much so that many manufacturers have their own "certified" used car programs (Honda's and Mercede's being the most prominent right now).
I think you are misreading the chart. The large wedge is the entire universe of copywritten stuff that would have entered the public domain if no extensions had been granted. The areas under the saw-tooth do not mean that PD stuff was returned to copywirght status. Rather, the total area under the saw-tooth is the stuff that is actually available under PD. Maybe 25% of what it "should" be.
We're pretty far off on a tangent here so I'm not going to quote your response. I figure you remember.
"Unconscionability" could conceivably allow the court to find that a writing satisfying the statute of frauds was not required for the enforcement of a contract concerning real property. Unconscionability can let a court do anything. But it is a high standard. The article certainly doesn't reveal anything about the wife's behavior that would so "shock the conscience" as to obviate the writing requirement. It reveals nothing at all about her behavior.
Property Law was a long time ago but I don't recall a single case where unconscionability was used to enforce a contract against an individual who did not themselves contribute to the unconscionable action. It is easy to imagine that someone negotiating with a husband would reasonably believe the husband's assurances that he spoke for the wife as well. But frankly it is even easier for me to believe that someone buying an extremely expensive home would know that a writing is a key requirement for enforcing such contracts.
I suspect that the article is leaving out important details. Most likely IMO, is that the emails help show how the plaintiff acted in reliance on the contract to his detriment. There are lots of cases where this additional, detrimental reliance is sufficient to get around the statute of frauds.
The part of the article that is odd is that the court appears to think that the email between the husband-owner and the buyer was sufficient to bind the wife-owner because she is referred to.
How is this odd? Marriage laws frequently consider a married couple to be legally equivalent to any other kind of legal partnership... If this was the argument used no longer they lost the case.
By a "legal partnership" I assume you mean those entities that the law regards as a "person" suchas a corporation, partnership, etc. A married couple is composed of two persons (since wives are no longer chattel). What I meant by "odd" was that it is almost certain that the husband cannot commit the wife to the transaction without her consent. Because of the Statute of Frauds, that consent will have to be by a signed writing or it is unenfoceable. The judge, according to the article, seems to think that the wife's written consent is not necessary. If that's true, the case is a moderately interesting bit of cyberlaw but a critical bit of family and real property law.
Contracts never need to be in writing. However, enforcing contracts is another matter. Real esate contracts are unenforceable unless they are in writing and signed. This is called the Statute of Frauds (i.e. certain kinds of contracts, including real estate, must be in writing if you want to be able to force the other party to abide by the terms of the contract in court). The part of the article that is odd is that the court appears to think that the email between the husband-owner and the buyer was sufficient to bind the wife-owner because she is referred to. That goes against the Statute of Frauds because the entire point of it is to make the agreement explicit rather than implicit. If there is nothng explicit to show her acquiescence to the agreement and she does co-own the property, I'll be stunned if this court or, more to the point, an appeals court finds that an enforceable contract exists.
"I wasn't aware that throwing rocks through shop windows and fighting with police was considered 'peaceful' by some. In that assumption, I erred."
How does this exercise in deliberate obtuseness get moderted "insightful"? The parent to your post (which although intemperate is not a "troll" as it has been moderated) asserted that the majority of the "anti-globalization protesters" were peaceful and that only a few individuals ("randoms" in the words of the parent) were violent.
Your response to that was to misrepresent what was said. You are correct that Microsoft's business practices are not the same as as what happened on September 11. By that same token, exercising free speech rights by participating in protests where some people cause property damage and/or fight with the police is not the same as what happened on September 11 either. They are not on even the same continuum. When you implied they were similar, you were the one trolling.
How much are you willing to pay to live in a society where people worse off than you don't hunt you down for food? Don't you think it would be cheaper to spend some of your money on wealth redistribution rather than all of your money on fortress housing, private security, and corpse removal? Isn't it nice to be able to go outside with little to fear from the destitute other than annoying begging and unpleasant odors?
Social welfare programs are incredibly cheap compared to the economic costs of going without. Is there a single country in the world without a social welfare system that you would want to live in for more than a month? What sounds like more fun: Discussing the minutes of the Federalist Society in some income tax (if not protection money) free fiefdom of subsaharan Africa or discussing the features of the latest Nokia phone while drinking aquavit with heavilly taxed Scandinavian babes?
And as you sound like a capital L Libertarian, don't you believe that the capital M Market should decide these things? Apparently, the market for governments has decided that a minimal safety net is a good thing to have. Deal.
I love Rabbit of Seville but What's Opera, Doc? is better.
True story: One evening at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-80s I was waling accross campus. The student orientation program (SOAR) was going on at Union South. For entertainment, they had a showing of the original (i.e. with Adam West) Batman movie. Before that, however, they showed What's Opera, Doc?.
Every single incoming freshman, regardless of race, creed, color, or any of that other BS, enthusiastically sang "Kill the wabbit. Kill the WABBIT. KILL the WABBIT."
And people say there's no common cultural heritage anymore.
(OTOH, my favorite WB Chuck Jones cartoon is Duck dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century.)
"Consider: someone is at the grocery store. The automatic door fails to open; they walk into a pane of glass. Do they attempt to open the door manually? NO. Stupid people."
You shouldn't be mean just because Bart sold his soul and couldn't open the door to the Kwik-E-Mart.
D'OH! I did forget the motherboard and that the DVD was a burner . . . Say $225 for an MPX motherboard and $400 for a CD+RW/DVD burner, subtract the $175 I speced for the other drive, add the 10% and I *now* get about $2,750. Which is pretty close to the Mac, but with three times the storage, twice the RAM, and faster CPUs.
As someone pointed out in an earlier response, the dual Xeon (a server-class CPU) at 2.2 is an absurd comparison to the G3 at 1.0.
In addition, Dell charges about $75 (after shipping) more for the RAM than you could get it for on the open market.
But the big problem is that you've chosen to spec out a Dell WORKSTATION. The ATI Fire GL2 is a (relatively) high end workstation card. It is intended for serious workstation applications, not games. It sucks at Quake. And it is an extra $611 from Dell.
When you spec out a Dell Dimension with P4 2.2, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HD, GeForce3 Ti 200 video card, CD+RW/DVD combo, nic, modem, Win XP Pro, 1 year warranty, and no bundled office suite, It comes out to $1,977. Plus you can actually get it now.
If you built your own (which, of course, you cannot do with a Mac), you could create a dual AthlonMP 1900 ($267/CPU), 2x512 MB PC2100 RAM ($113/stick), 2x120 GB WD 7200 RPM HD ($220/drive), CD+RW/DVD (~$175), Audigy sound ($50 - $150 depending on features, I'm assuming $100), GeForce3 Ti 200 ($143, $278 for Ti 500 which isn't worth it in my estimation), $300 for a good case and cooling (just a guess) and $130 for a Windoze that recognizes both CPUs. Assume 10% for shipping (should be much less than that) and doodads and I get $2,252. And it would rip the doors off the Mac.
Mind you, I think the GeForce4 is very cool and I'm putting off building my next PC until they're available and reviewed. But there is still a large premium to be paid for Mac hardware.
"Just give me a god damned pipe and stay the hell out of my business."
Let's examine this, shall we?
"I'm sure someone will respond and say something like "yeah, but it's in their best interest financially to do this".
Nice straw man. I especially like the hat.
"I don't give a shit about their bottom line. I am a pissed off customer. My gas company doesn't care which rooms I heat. My water company doesn't care what flavor kool-aid I make."
Of course the gas company cares which rooms you heat. They gave you a "god damned pipe." But guess what? Different rooms and different people have different heating requirements. That's why they charge you by the cubic foot. And your water company probably charges by the 1000 gallons.
"I pay for 128k upstream bandwidth and goddamit I expect it.
Given your self-righteousness and your termination from AT&T, I'm guessing you didn't realy "pay for 128k upstream." More likely, you paid for a consumer service that gave you "up to" some amount of bandwidth (so when it goes to 5k they don't owe you anything since 5 is "up to" 128) and contained various restrictions in the TOS about what you could and could not do with the connection.
If you want the ISP to provide "a god damned pipe and stay the hell out of my business," then that is what you should purchase. Had you bought business service, you would not have been cut off. Don't complain that you didn't get what you didn't pay for. It's boring.
I couldn't agree more. In a similar vein, I removed the turn signals from my car. I get.0000047% improved performance and, after all, what good are signals? I know where I'm going.
"[. ..] I consider lawyers to inherently be intellectual whores [. ..]."
Meaning they sell what they think? Sure. What do you sell? Plasma? ; )
"Why is it that laws need to be so complex that you need to consult a lawyer in the first place?"
Laws are complicated in large part because people are complicated. Given the number of people, their diverse desires and fears, the myriad (and often difficult to predict) consequences of their interactions, a diverse body of law is required to balance interests. A truly simple legal code would be "Might makes right." It's almost elegant in its simplicity. But it might not produce the sort of outcomes you want. (Yes, yes. The law usually favors the powerful, politicians are bought, and it will always be thus. It doesn't matter because a simple code is always worse for the weak. Look at the proponents of the "flat tax" for an example.)
My main beef is that many on/. assume the law is a useless construction. The legal stories on/. are either "Moron Patents Wheel" or "Brain-Sucking Law Department has Hacker Executed, Children Sold." But I think they lack any sense of nuance. Where is the "Attorneys Skillfully Craft Transaction Allowing Open Source Company Access to the Public Markets That, By the Way, Would Not Exist if not for Complicated Laws that let People Engage in Transactions With People They've Never Met Much Less Know" story? OK. The headline needs work but you get my drift.
Life is complicated. The law embraces that complexity and attempts to apply order to it. It doesn't simplify your life but it does provide a handle by which to grasp it.
"They *shouldn't* be, and true standards do not evolve much, if at all.
"Imagine if a kilogram was 2.2lb one day, then 4.3lb the next. Not much of a "standard", is it?"
Of course, the "standard" of the kilogram evolves too. As posted on Slashdot six weeks ago, NIST is seeking an electronic kilogram rather than a hunk of metal.
Saying something changed doesn't indicate if it got better or worse. Merely that it is different. I think the purpose of a standard is to enable people to know that if they want to accomplish X, following steps 1, 2, . . . n will do that. But if they want to do Y or if there is a better way to do X, the standard needs to change. The point of having standards is to do other things. If all you care about is the standard, you can just use tautologies: "A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."
Slashdot Mirror
Here and here.
That is such garbage (or a pretty good troll). Bill purchased the Bettman Archive, true. But Corbis has preserved the collection through custom storage at the Iron Mountain facility. The collection was literally disintegrating at it's former home. They've also made more than twice as many (so far) images available as were ever available previously. (And only a few hundred prints account for over 70% of the requested images. People keep asking for the same things.) They are digitizing the collection but it's a huge task. And if you don't want the watermark, buy the print! It's that simple. Access to the archive is not as open as it once was. But if it hadn't been moved to Iron Mountain, it would be lost forever. The low temperature and correct humidity of Iron Mountain will preserve the collection indefinitely so that more and more of it can be known.
It's Empire City Subway, a subsidiary of what is now Verizon.
Obligatory Python lyric:
(spoken)
Whenever life gets you down, Mrs. Brown,
And things seem hard or tough,
And people are stupid, obnoxious or daft,
(sung)
And you feel that you've had quite eno-o-o-o-o-ough,
Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at 900 miles an hour.
It's orbiting at 19 miles a second, so it's reckoned,
The sun that is the source of all our power.
Now the sun, and you and me, and all the stars that we can see,
Are moving at a million miles a day,
In the outer spiral arm, at 40,000 miles an hour,
Of a galaxy we call the Milky Way.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars;
It's a hundred thousand light-years side to side;
It bulges in the middle sixteen thousand light-years thick,
But out by us it's just three thousand light-years wide.
We're thirty thousand light-years from Galactic Central Point,
We go 'round every two hundred million years;
And our galaxy itself is one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.
(waltz)
Our universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding,
In all of the directions it can whiz;
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth;
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth!
I grant I haven't read all of Adam Smith, but I don't recall anything about "last mile connectivity." That was a joke.
"It IS NOT, repeat IS NOT governments job to force the economy into any position what so ever. If a company can figure out how to make these connections profitable they will, thanks to the 'invisible hand', and the company wins, the consumer wins, the economy wins, and it was all done without a negative effect. So how simple that works.
The government cannot help but "force the economy." It is, after all, a huge consumer. This demand helps shape the market. Now there is of course a difference between consuming pencils and gasoline and nuclear triggers on the one hand and planning an economy on the other. But the government has a role there too. The government's job should be to serve its citizenry. If that means that markets do not operate with maximal efficiency, who cares? "The market" is just an abstract concept, a tool that helps us understand how parts of the economy function. It is not something to be a slave to.
I do not understand this obsession of deeply ideological Libertarians with the capital-M Market. It seems as though it is their deity and that cost efficiency is the only axis on which they measure morality. The logical conclusion of such single mindedness is that if one cent more wealth, in aggregate, will be created by my gutting you like a fish, I am morally obligated to do it. Obviously (I trust and hope) this isn't what Libertarians really want but the most ideological ones don't seem to have any appreciation of nuance.
If no one can figure out a way to make last mile connections profitably, no one will build them. And no amount of "leave it to the market" mantra will change that. But if people want the connection, why shouldn't the government change the regulatory environment to make it profitable for companies to do so? This is just changing the ground rules for the market. Market forces themselves still exist. Is it possible that the government will do something so stupid that they will make things much worse? Of course. But they might also be able to make the change so that the effects aren't so bad. Does that mean that some person or company will incur costs that they wouldn't have otherwise? Yes it does. But again, so what? Money is not the only value. It is merely the easiest to calculate.
Have you tried staying awake? (cue rimshot)
Yeah, it was a cheap shot but I couldn't believe no one had taken it yet.
And speaking of the futility of trying to teach people, I once had the pleasure of arguing with an entire lecture hall that it was the Miranda decision, not "Memoranda." Well, they were mostly English majors. Ba-dum bum.
Oh, I don't know. Maybe the fact that Amazon doesn't actually create the products they facilitate the sale of, used or new. Maybe the fact that used car sales are an essential component of marketing new cars (the trade-in market). So much so that many manufacturers have their own "certified" used car programs (Honda's and Mercede's being the most prominent right now).
I think you are misreading the chart. The large wedge is the entire universe of copywritten stuff that would have entered the public domain if no extensions had been granted. The areas under the saw-tooth do not mean that PD stuff was returned to copywirght status. Rather, the total area under the saw-tooth is the stuff that is actually available under PD. Maybe 25% of what it "should" be.
We're pretty far off on a tangent here so I'm not going to quote your response. I figure you remember.
"Unconscionability" could conceivably allow the court to find that a writing satisfying the statute of frauds was not required for the enforcement of a contract concerning real property. Unconscionability can let a court do anything. But it is a high standard. The article certainly doesn't reveal anything about the wife's behavior that would so "shock the conscience" as to obviate the writing requirement. It reveals nothing at all about her behavior.
Property Law was a long time ago but I don't recall a single case where unconscionability was used to enforce a contract against an individual who did not themselves contribute to the unconscionable action. It is easy to imagine that someone negotiating with a husband would reasonably believe the husband's assurances that he spoke for the wife as well. But frankly it is even easier for me to believe that someone buying an extremely expensive home would know that a writing is a key requirement for enforcing such contracts.
I suspect that the article is leaving out important details. Most likely IMO, is that the emails help show how the plaintiff acted in reliance on the contract to his detriment. There are lots of cases where this additional, detrimental reliance is sufficient to get around the statute of frauds.
By a "legal partnership" I assume you mean those entities that the law regards as a "person" suchas a corporation, partnership, etc. A married couple is composed of two persons (since wives are no longer chattel). What I meant by "odd" was that it is almost certain that the husband cannot commit the wife to the transaction without her consent. Because of the Statute of Frauds, that consent will have to be by a signed writing or it is unenfoceable. The judge, according to the article, seems to think that the wife's written consent is not necessary. If that's true, the case is a moderately interesting bit of cyberlaw but a critical bit of family and real property law.
Contracts never need to be in writing. However, enforcing contracts is another matter. Real esate contracts are unenforceable unless they are in writing and signed. This is called the Statute of Frauds (i.e. certain kinds of contracts, including real estate, must be in writing if you want to be able to force the other party to abide by the terms of the contract in court). The part of the article that is odd is that the court appears to think that the email between the husband-owner and the buyer was sufficient to bind the wife-owner because she is referred to. That goes against the Statute of Frauds because the entire point of it is to make the agreement explicit rather than implicit. If there is nothng explicit to show her acquiescence to the agreement and she does co-own the property, I'll be stunned if this court or, more to the point, an appeals court finds that an enforceable contract exists.
Was this in Wisconsin? I still call them Tyme machines too. An acquaintance of mine calls them "Puke-a-bucks."
How does this exercise in deliberate obtuseness get moderted "insightful"? The parent to your post (which although intemperate is not a "troll" as it has been moderated) asserted that the majority of the "anti-globalization protesters" were peaceful and that only a few individuals ("randoms" in the words of the parent) were violent.
Your response to that was to misrepresent what was said. You are correct that Microsoft's business practices are not the same as as what happened on September 11. By that same token, exercising free speech rights by participating in protests where some people cause property damage and/or fight with the police is not the same as what happened on September 11 either. They are not on even the same continuum. When you implied they were similar, you were the one trolling.
"They can't treat our pledges like that. Only WE can treat our pledges like that."h
Look at it this way:
How much are you willing to pay to live in a society where people worse off than you don't hunt you down for food? Don't you think it would be cheaper to spend some of your money on wealth redistribution rather than all of your money on fortress housing, private security, and corpse removal? Isn't it nice to be able to go outside with little to fear from the destitute other than annoying begging and unpleasant odors?
Social welfare programs are incredibly cheap compared to the economic costs of going without. Is there a single country in the world without a social welfare system that you would want to live in for more than a month? What sounds like more fun: Discussing the minutes of the Federalist Society in some income tax (if not protection money) free fiefdom of subsaharan Africa or discussing the features of the latest Nokia phone while drinking aquavit with heavilly taxed Scandinavian babes?
And as you sound like a capital L Libertarian, don't you believe that the capital M Market should decide these things? Apparently, the market for governments has decided that a minimal safety net is a good thing to have. Deal.
True story: One evening at the University of Wisconsin in the mid-80s I was waling accross campus. The student orientation program (SOAR) was going on at Union South. For entertainment, they had a showing of the original (i.e. with Adam West) Batman movie. Before that, however, they showed What's Opera, Doc?.
Every single incoming freshman, regardless of race, creed, color, or any of that other BS, enthusiastically sang "Kill the wabbit. Kill the WABBIT. KILL the WABBIT."
And people say there's no common cultural heritage anymore.
(OTOH, my favorite WB Chuck Jones cartoon is Duck dodgers in the 24 1/2 Century.)
You shouldn't be mean just because Bart sold his soul and couldn't open the door to the Kwik-E-Mart.
D'OH! I did forget the motherboard and that the DVD was a burner . . . Say $225 for an MPX motherboard and $400 for a CD+RW/DVD burner, subtract the $175 I speced for the other drive, add the 10% and I *now* get about $2,750. Which is pretty close to the Mac, but with three times the storage, twice the RAM, and faster CPUs.
As someone pointed out in an earlier response, the dual Xeon (a server-class CPU) at 2.2 is an absurd comparison to the G3 at 1.0.
In addition, Dell charges about $75 (after shipping) more for the RAM than you could get it for on the open market.
But the big problem is that you've chosen to spec out a Dell WORKSTATION. The ATI Fire GL2 is a (relatively) high end workstation card. It is intended for serious workstation applications, not games. It sucks at Quake. And it is an extra $611 from Dell.
When you spec out a Dell Dimension with P4 2.2, 512 MB RAM, 80 GB HD, GeForce3 Ti 200 video card, CD+RW/DVD combo, nic, modem, Win XP Pro, 1 year warranty, and no bundled office suite, It comes out to $1,977. Plus you can actually get it now.
If you built your own (which, of course, you cannot do with a Mac), you could create a dual AthlonMP 1900 ($267/CPU), 2x512 MB PC2100 RAM ($113/stick), 2x120 GB WD 7200 RPM HD ($220/drive), CD+RW/DVD (~$175), Audigy sound ($50 - $150 depending on features, I'm assuming $100), GeForce3 Ti 200 ($143, $278 for Ti 500 which isn't worth it in my estimation), $300 for a good case and cooling (just a guess) and $130 for a Windoze that recognizes both CPUs. Assume 10% for shipping (should be much less than that) and doodads and I get $2,252. And it would rip the doors off the Mac.
Mind you, I think the GeForce4 is very cool and I'm putting off building my next PC until they're available and reviewed. But there is still a large premium to be paid for Mac hardware.
Let's examine this, shall we?
Nice straw man. I especially like the hat.
Of course the gas company cares which rooms you heat. They gave you a "god damned pipe." But guess what? Different rooms and different people have different heating requirements. That's why they charge you by the cubic foot. And your water company probably charges by the 1000 gallons.
Given your self-righteousness and your termination from AT&T, I'm guessing you didn't realy "pay for 128k upstream." More likely, you paid for a consumer service that gave you "up to" some amount of bandwidth (so when it goes to 5k they don't owe you anything since 5 is "up to" 128) and contained various restrictions in the TOS about what you could and could not do with the connection.
If you want the ISP to provide "a god damned pipe and stay the hell out of my business," then that is what you should purchase. Had you bought business service, you would not have been cut off. Don't complain that you didn't get what you didn't pay for. It's boring.
I couldn't agree more. In a similar vein, I removed the turn signals from my car. I get .0000047% improved performance and, after all, what good are signals? I know where I'm going.
Meaning they sell what they think? Sure. What do you sell? Plasma? ; )
Laws are complicated in large part because people are complicated. Given the number of people, their diverse desires and fears, the myriad (and often difficult to predict) consequences of their interactions, a diverse body of law is required to balance interests. A truly simple legal code would be "Might makes right." It's almost elegant in its simplicity. But it might not produce the sort of outcomes you want. (Yes, yes. The law usually favors the powerful, politicians are bought, and it will always be thus. It doesn't matter because a simple code is always worse for the weak. Look at the proponents of the "flat tax" for an example.)
My main beef is that many on /. assume the law is a useless construction. The legal stories on /. are either "Moron Patents Wheel" or "Brain-Sucking Law Department has Hacker Executed, Children Sold." But I think they lack any sense of nuance. Where is the "Attorneys Skillfully Craft Transaction Allowing Open Source Company Access to the Public Markets That, By the Way, Would Not Exist if not for Complicated Laws that let People Engage in Transactions With People They've Never Met Much Less Know" story? OK. The headline needs work but you get my drift.
Life is complicated. The law embraces that complexity and attempts to apply order to it. It doesn't simplify your life but it does provide a handle by which to grasp it.
Of course, the "standard" of the kilogram evolves too. As posted on Slashdot six weeks ago, NIST is seeking an electronic kilogram rather than a hunk of metal.
Saying something changed doesn't indicate if it got better or worse. Merely that it is different. I think the purpose of a standard is to enable people to know that if they want to accomplish X, following steps 1, 2, . . . n will do that. But if they want to do Y or if there is a better way to do X, the standard needs to change. The point of having standards is to do other things. If all you care about is the standard, you can just use tautologies: "A light year is the distance traveled by light in a year."
80 gig hard drives are less than $2 per gig. The cheapest RAM is at least 50 times that expensive. Look at Price Watch and see for yourself.
Good point. That would definitely help. It's hard (sometimes) to separate market failures from market perversions.