Another related issue is portraying really bad safty practises. Don Johnson did one a couple of decades ago that annoyed gun buffs. On a 1911.45 he opened the breach by hooking a finger inside the trigger guard and around the front covering the slide rod then squeezing. It opens the breach but it leaves your finger inside the trigger guard and one near the barrel. One slip and at best you get a severely burned finger and at worst you can only count to nine. The joke was it only works on the stock short rod guns, the trick doesn't work if you have a competition gun with a full length rod. The wantabe Dirty Harrys were all asking for 1911s with short rods. The gun stores were all trying to explain the danger but the wantabes thought the coolness factor was more important. The Hollywood force has a huge influence on the weakminded.
Physics wouldn't allow it unless the light travelled 1/300 the distance. Gas wouldn't do it but within known physics it could happen with severely warped space. No laws are broken if the distance is shortened. Obviously that isn't what happened in this case.
Lawsuits can easily be dragged out for five to ten years with appeals and such. By then the damage has hopefully been done. It's a common abuse of the law everyone knows about but nothing is being done to correct. Remember the antitrust convinction with Microsoft? That died of old age. They've got an army of bored lawyers that live to play this game.
I'm curious if you've tried it? I find most people that dislike Macs and OSX haven't used them much. Most people that have find them addictive. The primary advantage is fewer hassles. It takes little or no configuring and updating and upgrading are painless. If you feel the need to fiddle then you are stuck with Windows and Linux but if you are into computers to use software with the fewest hassles then Mac wins hands down. There are also a lot of handy utilities built into the OS. I'm a sucker for widgets and I have dozens I can call up with one mouse click. Leopard looks amazing and has some intensely cool functions built in. For pure productivity there's no comparing the two. For hardware Mac is stunning. Yes you can't build your own system but I find with PCs it takes a while to settle them in. With a Mac it's called an "on" button. I upgraded the memory on mine and I didn't have to crack the case to do it. The pro towers are even more stunning. You can install secondary hard drives by opening the case and sliding them in. There are three words for Mac simple, painless and fun. For Windows I'd say complicated, annoying and a hassle. I've got three machines on my desk. Two are PCs and one is a Mac. The Mac is just more fun to use and far less stressful. If you approach Macs as a Mac hater you'll have a bad experience but if you sit down at one for an hour and just have some fun I think you'll be shocked. No one is trying to make you change religions here it's just a computer. The hardest thing I find is when I switch back to the PCs is remembering to be paranoid about viruses and spyware. I have a whole ritual involving Spybot and taking deep breathes when I down load files. Not to mention running defrag on a regular basis. The hard part is I do none of that with the Mac so I have to remind myself I'm on a PC now so I have to be careful and remember to do my maintainence.
Funny you should mention Flat Earthers. Is your stance that CO2 doesn't affect temperatures? The point is environmental factors normally balance out so change is gradual. this change is very sudden. Climatology and geology aren't like astrology they are legitimate sciences. There's been a very detailed study of temperatures based on information gathered from ice core samples. They go back over a million years and this rise in CO2 is not normal and the only other likely cause would be a lot of volcanic activity. There hasn't been enough to account for the increase but there are a hell of a lot of coal fired power plants and cars out there spewing out CO2. Do you believe the good CO2 fairy removes manmade CO2 from the environment? I understand you don't want to change your lifestyle but it will change because climate change will force a change. Food prices will go up, energy prices will go up. There will be droughts and the coastline will change. We're already seeing a radical increase in bad weather costing tens of billions a year and this is just the begining. Nature is clearing her throat. You say what if you're right? Well here's food for thought, what if the scientists are right and you are wrong? The worst thing that happens if you are right and we make the changes suggested is we get cleaner air and we're actually prepared for oil running out. If you're wrong and we do nothing it's a massive disaster and billions will suffer. Personally I'd rather take the opinions of people educated in the field than some one that isn't. I'm assuming you aren't a climatologist since none of them debate humans are responsible for global warming. Next time you hear a would be climatologist claim it's all a scam check to make sure they are what they claim to be and find out who pays them. You might be surprised to find they aren't educated in the field and happen to be paid by the oil companies. There is no debate among legitimate scientist only among the Flat Earthers.
The polar bears would prefer not to wait until you're satisfied that it can't be anything else. Don't care about polar bears? The Arctic is being called the canary in the coal mine. Let's say you're in that proverbial coal mine when the canary drops dead? Now do you wait for a second opinion or do you leave the mine? The arctic is an 800lb carnary right now so you may want to pay attention.
I think there is a massive potential for fixating on stories like this to rationalize continuing bad behavior. I've heard gaps in the fossil record being used as a reason to throw out Evolution as the source of life and replace it with the Bible. Solar cycles are well known and do vary. The cycles do cause temperature change. So does volcanic activity. To accept this as the cause we have to ignore the fact that the temperature change has mirrored increases in CO2. CO2 does cause a rise in temperature. No one is really debating that yet there is a lot of other possible causes being pushed. The other things will contribute to increases but they always have. This spike in temperatures is unpresidented and so are the levels of CO2. At no time in traceable history has the CO2 spiked this fast. The source is obvious. We're pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the environment. Playing smoke and mirrors won't make that go away. We know what CO2 and temperatures have been like on Earth. What we don't know is what the poles of Mars have been like over the last few hundred let alone few thousand years. This is likely a normal retreat of polar ice which will reverse in five, ten or a hundred years. We can't let possible secondary causes distract from the real cause, us. It's very dangerous to take the position that we won't do anything until we can eliminate all other possible causes. Remember five years ago it was only crackpots that believed in global warming. Now the biggest naysayer the US President has admited to global warming. That's a massive turnaround. The problem is while we debate causes we are approaching a point of no return. We may have already gotten there. We know CO2 is damaging the environment and that isn't being debated. Better to play it safe and radically cut CO2 production. Right now the debate is about spending billions. In twenty five to fifty years the numbers will be in the trillions. Take your pick, SUVs or most of the coastal property in the world including most of the inhabitated part of Florida. And that's just one side effect of global warming. Believe it or not there are worse ones. Let's say we got word that an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting in 25 years and it would devastate the coast and throw us into nuclear winter killing most life on earth. Now would you say to wait until we are sure even if we won't know until the year before? Or would you say to prepare? The effects of global warming potentially are as severe as an asteroid strike and yet there is no debate about it hitting the only debate is about the size of the global warming asteroid. Do you want to take the chance it's a dinosaur killer or do you want to do something about it while you can?
For using the terms Winter Wonderland and Reindeer Games. He's appealing based on prior art but it doesn't look good for the jolly ole boy. Guess some government officials can look forward to coal in their stockings.
Give Haliburton a multibillion dollar contract to clean up the spill! Their plan to build a tower of money to reach the space station is brilliant and we need to reward that kind of visionary thinking.
Fraud. Highly illegal and despicable. They need a serious fine and to be forced to give refunds to buyers. Companies do it because they generally get away with it. If they knew they'd be hit hard for it they wouldn't do it. It's as simple as that. People need to be fired and I'm not talking the salespeople but the execs that are behind this scam. And it is a scam.
Not entirely true. They are selling you a machine a radically discounted price for a specific use, gaming. They aren't selling a general use computer. They are ineffect giving you a gaming machine at a bargin price so they limit what you are permitted to do with it to avoid competing with themselves. If most people tried to mod out their game stations to turn them into desktops as well then it could potentially cut into their desktop business and force them to charge full price for the game boxes making the gaming machine unsellable. Most aren't going to the trouble to get an underpowered machine and risk killing an expensive Xbox. Ultimately it's about geeks points and little else. The machines just aren't suitable for a desktop.
I've been planning a move to the north east but I have to say a big hesitation is not having a local Fires Electronics. The closest would be 1,000 miles away. We've got two in the area now. I rarely go but it's a massive help having them. It's tough ordering every cable and component off the web. When I build a new machine 75% of it I buy off Newegg but the remaining odds and ends I get from Fries. It's mostly that their motherboard selection leans on the side of the consumer and they only stock a few prolevel motherboards. Most of the components are priced pretty well but I can still save a few bucks off the web. I did learn my lesson about going with the very cheapest. I got a workstation video card shipped to me in a box slightly bigger than the card. It arrived bent and took me two months to get my money back. Saving a couple of extra dollars just isn't worth it.
The Raliens have managed to clone all the original stars. In 18 years they'll be able to do Star Fleet academy with all the original actors! Next thing to tackle is a time machine so the fans don't have to wait nearly two decades for the new series. Paramount is so confident that time travel will be perfected that they have scehduled the premiere of the new series for this Fall.
"Maybe if we preinstalled Linux we could save our cusomers money and reduce overall cost? We could even install Open Office so the computers come with a preinstalled office suite at no additional cost. The computers would be more stable and safer from viruses. The added competition would force Microsoft to make actual improvements to their software and OS! We could bring on a new age of stable, cheap and secure OSs and software!"
I can see Corporations more inclined to switch than consumers. The added security alone could save a lot. People talk about the learning curve in a migration but there's a minimal learning curve with Mac. The migration from PC is pretty smooth. It's more jarring going from Mac to PC. I can see the added headaches of Vista being a reason to switch. The constant prompts has me considering a Mac shift again. Given the power of the new servers I can see Mac being very attractive to businesses. Also something that is rarely mentioned is low maintainence on Macs. I push a lot of files around and find myself doing regular maintainence like Defragging. Generally it takes a while to settle in a PC. I found with Mac it involved plugging it in and allowing it to update the software. After that once a month it prompts me for updates. Pretty painless. Consumers may feel married to their software and PCs but businesses are interested in efficency. It may be a big reason for Microsoft backing off from Mac support, they see a real threat in the business world.
No matter your opinion of copyright law transporting illegal goods is illegal, otherwise drug mules wouldn't be prosecuted. Is it the same? Of coarse not it's an extreme example. Say person "A" steals government secrets while person "B" transports information to person "C". By the law they are all at fault. It really doesn't matter how the information is transferred. Service providers aren't at fault because they aren't aware or involved directly in the specific transfer. I'm not going to weigh in on the right or wrong aspect of copyright but so long as the laws are what they are you can't provide copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.
IPhone does have nice intergrated map support. This is likely to be a trend in part to protect their hardware and network as well as to protect profits of their own products that the other apps might compete with. I think the iPhone is positioned well to eventually accept 3rd party desktop apps. It may be a generation or two but I think people are radically underestimating the potential of the iPhone. The primary limitation will be CPU power since they are stuck using lower power chips to extend battery life. Still leaves open using office apps and even some modest graphic applications. At it's core the iPhone is a PDA on some serious steriods using a full OS.
I agree on the overstating of efficency. Odds are the process has been known for years how to make the bulbs more efficent but chances are it would make them more expensive resulting in fewer sales so they never moved ahead with the technology. The hands down winner though are LED bulbs. They use little power and have insanely long lives and don't suffer from surge shock like filament bulbs and even flourecent. The problem is obviously cost. It'll drop but it's hard to say how much and how fast. They are already being used in hard to reach areas to avoid the labor expense of replacement.
I noticed several responders mentioning taxes and such. It's a mindset we have to be careful of. There's an attitude I noticed with a lot of SUV drivers that they'd prefer to pay a tax and keep driving the beasts. The problem is we need to get them off the road period not just tax them. There was an argument made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that we'll need more coal plants for all the electric cars. Well here's a little food for thought. If all the incandescents were changed to compact florescents not only could every home in amercia charge their electric cars without needing more plants and their electric bills would actually go down. Electric lights are still the biggest single use of electricity in this country.
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Another related issue is portraying really bad safty practises. Don Johnson did one a couple of decades ago that annoyed gun buffs. On a 1911 .45 he opened the breach by hooking a finger inside the trigger guard and around the front covering the slide rod then squeezing. It opens the breach but it leaves your finger inside the trigger guard and one near the barrel. One slip and at best you get a severely burned finger and at worst you can only count to nine. The joke was it only works on the stock short rod guns, the trick doesn't work if you have a competition gun with a full length rod. The wantabe Dirty Harrys were all asking for 1911s with short rods. The gun stores were all trying to explain the danger but the wantabes thought the coolness factor was more important. The Hollywood force has a huge influence on the weakminded.
Physics wouldn't allow it unless the light travelled 1/300 the distance. Gas wouldn't do it but within known physics it could happen with severely warped space. No laws are broken if the distance is shortened. Obviously that isn't what happened in this case.
Lawsuits can easily be dragged out for five to ten years with appeals and such. By then the damage has hopefully been done. It's a common abuse of the law everyone knows about but nothing is being done to correct. Remember the antitrust convinction with Microsoft? That died of old age. They've got an army of bored lawyers that live to play this game.
Thanks you.
I'm curious if you've tried it? I find most people that dislike Macs and OSX haven't used them much. Most people that have find them addictive. The primary advantage is fewer hassles. It takes little or no configuring and updating and upgrading are painless. If you feel the need to fiddle then you are stuck with Windows and Linux but if you are into computers to use software with the fewest hassles then Mac wins hands down. There are also a lot of handy utilities built into the OS. I'm a sucker for widgets and I have dozens I can call up with one mouse click. Leopard looks amazing and has some intensely cool functions built in. For pure productivity there's no comparing the two. For hardware Mac is stunning. Yes you can't build your own system but I find with PCs it takes a while to settle them in. With a Mac it's called an "on" button. I upgraded the memory on mine and I didn't have to crack the case to do it. The pro towers are even more stunning. You can install secondary hard drives by opening the case and sliding them in. There are three words for Mac simple, painless and fun. For Windows I'd say complicated, annoying and a hassle. I've got three machines on my desk. Two are PCs and one is a Mac. The Mac is just more fun to use and far less stressful. If you approach Macs as a Mac hater you'll have a bad experience but if you sit down at one for an hour and just have some fun I think you'll be shocked. No one is trying to make you change religions here it's just a computer. The hardest thing I find is when I switch back to the PCs is remembering to be paranoid about viruses and spyware. I have a whole ritual involving Spybot and taking deep breathes when I down load files. Not to mention running defrag on a regular basis. The hard part is I do none of that with the Mac so I have to remind myself I'm on a PC now so I have to be careful and remember to do my maintainence.
It'd be nice to see Microsoft bent over the desk for once. They've had customers bent over the desk for years.
Funny you should mention Flat Earthers. Is your stance that CO2 doesn't affect temperatures? The point is environmental factors normally balance out so change is gradual. this change is very sudden. Climatology and geology aren't like astrology they are legitimate sciences. There's been a very detailed study of temperatures based on information gathered from ice core samples. They go back over a million years and this rise in CO2 is not normal and the only other likely cause would be a lot of volcanic activity. There hasn't been enough to account for the increase but there are a hell of a lot of coal fired power plants and cars out there spewing out CO2. Do you believe the good CO2 fairy removes manmade CO2 from the environment? I understand you don't want to change your lifestyle but it will change because climate change will force a change. Food prices will go up, energy prices will go up. There will be droughts and the coastline will change. We're already seeing a radical increase in bad weather costing tens of billions a year and this is just the begining. Nature is clearing her throat. You say what if you're right? Well here's food for thought, what if the scientists are right and you are wrong? The worst thing that happens if you are right and we make the changes suggested is we get cleaner air and we're actually prepared for oil running out. If you're wrong and we do nothing it's a massive disaster and billions will suffer. Personally I'd rather take the opinions of people educated in the field than some one that isn't. I'm assuming you aren't a climatologist since none of them debate humans are responsible for global warming. Next time you hear a would be climatologist claim it's all a scam check to make sure they are what they claim to be and find out who pays them. You might be surprised to find they aren't educated in the field and happen to be paid by the oil companies. There is no debate among legitimate scientist only among the Flat Earthers.
The polar bears would prefer not to wait until you're satisfied that it can't be anything else. Don't care about polar bears? The Arctic is being called the canary in the coal mine. Let's say you're in that proverbial coal mine when the canary drops dead? Now do you wait for a second opinion or do you leave the mine? The arctic is an 800lb carnary right now so you may want to pay attention.
I think there is a massive potential for fixating on stories like this to rationalize continuing bad behavior. I've heard gaps in the fossil record being used as a reason to throw out Evolution as the source of life and replace it with the Bible. Solar cycles are well known and do vary. The cycles do cause temperature change. So does volcanic activity. To accept this as the cause we have to ignore the fact that the temperature change has mirrored increases in CO2. CO2 does cause a rise in temperature. No one is really debating that yet there is a lot of other possible causes being pushed. The other things will contribute to increases but they always have. This spike in temperatures is unpresidented and so are the levels of CO2. At no time in traceable history has the CO2 spiked this fast. The source is obvious. We're pumping billions of tons of CO2 into the environment. Playing smoke and mirrors won't make that go away. We know what CO2 and temperatures have been like on Earth. What we don't know is what the poles of Mars have been like over the last few hundred let alone few thousand years. This is likely a normal retreat of polar ice which will reverse in five, ten or a hundred years. We can't let possible secondary causes distract from the real cause, us. It's very dangerous to take the position that we won't do anything until we can eliminate all other possible causes. Remember five years ago it was only crackpots that believed in global warming. Now the biggest naysayer the US President has admited to global warming. That's a massive turnaround. The problem is while we debate causes we are approaching a point of no return. We may have already gotten there. We know CO2 is damaging the environment and that isn't being debated. Better to play it safe and radically cut CO2 production. Right now the debate is about spending billions. In twenty five to fifty years the numbers will be in the trillions. Take your pick, SUVs or most of the coastal property in the world including most of the inhabitated part of Florida. And that's just one side effect of global warming. Believe it or not there are worse ones. Let's say we got word that an asteroid had a 50/50 chance of hitting in 25 years and it would devastate the coast and throw us into nuclear winter killing most life on earth. Now would you say to wait until we are sure even if we won't know until the year before? Or would you say to prepare? The effects of global warming potentially are as severe as an asteroid strike and yet there is no debate about it hitting the only debate is about the size of the global warming asteroid. Do you want to take the chance it's a dinosaur killer or do you want to do something about it while you can?
For using the terms Winter Wonderland and Reindeer Games. He's appealing based on prior art but it doesn't look good for the jolly ole boy. Guess some government officials can look forward to coal in their stockings.
Give Haliburton a multibillion dollar contract to clean up the spill! Their plan to build a tower of money to reach the space station is brilliant and we need to reward that kind of visionary thinking.
Fraud. Highly illegal and despicable. They need a serious fine and to be forced to give refunds to buyers. Companies do it because they generally get away with it. If they knew they'd be hit hard for it they wouldn't do it. It's as simple as that. People need to be fired and I'm not talking the salespeople but the execs that are behind this scam. And it is a scam.
Technically it's the moon pulling it's weight.
Not exactly. Linux lacks the annoying prompts and security. You get what you pay for...wait a minute, scratch that.
than Vista.
It's okay so long as you don't mind having your images watermarked with a Head ON ad.
Not entirely true. They are selling you a machine a radically discounted price for a specific use, gaming. They aren't selling a general use computer. They are ineffect giving you a gaming machine at a bargin price so they limit what you are permitted to do with it to avoid competing with themselves. If most people tried to mod out their game stations to turn them into desktops as well then it could potentially cut into their desktop business and force them to charge full price for the game boxes making the gaming machine unsellable. Most aren't going to the trouble to get an underpowered machine and risk killing an expensive Xbox. Ultimately it's about geeks points and little else. The machines just aren't suitable for a desktop.
I've been planning a move to the north east but I have to say a big hesitation is not having a local Fires Electronics. The closest would be 1,000 miles away. We've got two in the area now. I rarely go but it's a massive help having them. It's tough ordering every cable and component off the web. When I build a new machine 75% of it I buy off Newegg but the remaining odds and ends I get from Fries. It's mostly that their motherboard selection leans on the side of the consumer and they only stock a few prolevel motherboards. Most of the components are priced pretty well but I can still save a few bucks off the web. I did learn my lesson about going with the very cheapest. I got a workstation video card shipped to me in a box slightly bigger than the card. It arrived bent and took me two months to get my money back. Saving a couple of extra dollars just isn't worth it.
The Raliens have managed to clone all the original stars. In 18 years they'll be able to do Star Fleet academy with all the original actors! Next thing to tackle is a time machine so the fans don't have to wait nearly two decades for the new series. Paramount is so confident that time travel will be perfected that they have scehduled the premiere of the new series for this Fall.
"Nawwww!"
I can see Corporations more inclined to switch than consumers. The added security alone could save a lot. People talk about the learning curve in a migration but there's a minimal learning curve with Mac. The migration from PC is pretty smooth. It's more jarring going from Mac to PC. I can see the added headaches of Vista being a reason to switch. The constant prompts has me considering a Mac shift again. Given the power of the new servers I can see Mac being very attractive to businesses. Also something that is rarely mentioned is low maintainence on Macs. I push a lot of files around and find myself doing regular maintainence like Defragging. Generally it takes a while to settle in a PC. I found with Mac it involved plugging it in and allowing it to update the software. After that once a month it prompts me for updates. Pretty painless. Consumers may feel married to their software and PCs but businesses are interested in efficency. It may be a big reason for Microsoft backing off from Mac support, they see a real threat in the business world.
No matter your opinion of copyright law transporting illegal goods is illegal, otherwise drug mules wouldn't be prosecuted. Is it the same? Of coarse not it's an extreme example. Say person "A" steals government secrets while person "B" transports information to person "C". By the law they are all at fault. It really doesn't matter how the information is transferred. Service providers aren't at fault because they aren't aware or involved directly in the specific transfer. I'm not going to weigh in on the right or wrong aspect of copyright but so long as the laws are what they are you can't provide copyrighted material without the permission of the copyright holder.
IPhone does have nice intergrated map support. This is likely to be a trend in part to protect their hardware and network as well as to protect profits of their own products that the other apps might compete with. I think the iPhone is positioned well to eventually accept 3rd party desktop apps. It may be a generation or two but I think people are radically underestimating the potential of the iPhone. The primary limitation will be CPU power since they are stuck using lower power chips to extend battery life. Still leaves open using office apps and even some modest graphic applications. At it's core the iPhone is a PDA on some serious steriods using a full OS.
I noticed several responders mentioning taxes and such. It's a mindset we have to be careful of. There's an attitude I noticed with a lot of SUV drivers that they'd prefer to pay a tax and keep driving the beasts. The problem is we need to get them off the road period not just tax them. There was an argument made in Who Killed the Electric Car? that we'll need more coal plants for all the electric cars. Well here's a little food for thought. If all the incandescents were changed to compact florescents not only could every home in amercia charge their electric cars without needing more plants and their electric bills would actually go down. Electric lights are still the biggest single use of electricity in this country.
Some of the older machines were found to be flashing Burma Shave logos so the problem has been around a long time.