You're mistaken in thinking that privacy is better part of liberty. No, liberty is only liberty when it doesn't matter who knows or doesn't know what you are doing. Its our liberty that makes the US different from the autocratic regimes which rule many countries in the world. Every government is listening; only some let you do what you choose regardless.
Is that why gay people had better lie about my sexual orientation if they want to apply for a job within the US army, NASA or the US government? Is that why people can have their lives ruined if the government should find out you are sharing music, smoking pot etc? And don't even get me started about "enemy combatants"...
The government makes the laws, the police investigate/arrest people suspected of breaking it, and the courts decide if someone should be punished. So why the fuck is the government about to decide if the telcos should be punished or not? Even if they made a law to give them imunity, surely that should apply only to future wrongdoings... Retroactively changing the law is only acceptable under very exceptional circumstances. Of course, these days retroactively raising the income tax could probably be justified as "national security", so it is not as if it is surprising...
What is happening is that you are paying for the phone by taking out a loan, and then that loan gets repaid over 18 or 12 months in the form of fees that are higher than they are at other companies where you do not get a phone. This may be a good deal, and it should be evaluated the same as any other kind of loan. It is certainly not free!
You managed the first sentence, now read the rest of the post to understand what he was actually complaining about. Basically:
Regular phone: You pay up fornt OR you get a locked contract. iPhone: You pay up front AND you get a locked contract.
Now, if the up-front price of the iPhone was lower than other phones, then you could argue that they just use a different payment plan. However, the iPhone is more expensive AND binds you to a less favourable contract. I.e, its already horrific price tag is even worse than it appears.
You can't generalise about the outcome of future predictions. If you could, I could save the world by claiming we will eradicate all diseases in 50 years time. As we have no flying cars, a generalisation would lead us to beleive we would in fact find dramatic new medical techniques as a result, unfortunately reality doesn't work that way. Having said that, I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong.
The Beatles catalog would be available on CDs imported by Chinese corporations, and downloadable from countries where bandwidth is cheap. That whimpering sound you heard might not be Yoko softly crying in anguish, but the slow death of the USA's information-driven economy.
It IS downloadable from countries where bandwidth is cheap. The "IP driven economy" is as large a bubble as the dot.com one. Sure, it will take longer before it burts, but when it does the rats that are American companies will flee the sinking ship, seeking harbour in China and India. Restricting innovation because you are afraid of Chinese and Indian competition is like peeing in your pants. Soon the warmth is gone and you're left with a really bad mess.
Wasn't there a guy in Ohio who found a cheap, rapid way to turn water into hydrogen and made a water powered ICE? Anyone have a clue why we're not taking advantage of that invention? Or have I just recalled some old hoax?
The energy needed to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen is equal to what is released when they combine again ( this follows directly from conservation of energy ). Thus this would only be useful in that you could charge the thing with hydrogen, which has a much better energy/weight ratio than ellectric batteries. The catch is that gaseous hydrogen also has an absolutely abysmall energy/volume ratio, so unless you pressurise it greatly ( requires energy ) , cool it down to liquid temperatures ( requires energy ) or store it using some chemical reaction ( at which point you have a device very similar to an ellectric battery ), it will be far too bulky to be used in cars. Modern batteries also have a lot lower heat-loss than hydrogen fuel cells, making them more efficient.
So on average you make about $0.47 per download ? How much do you normally get from a record company? Your problem seems to be popularity rather than average donation size.
Please remember that in computing, nothing new has been invented since 1970.
Oh really?
A NeXTcube was used by Berners-Lee as the world's first web server and also to write the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, in 1990. By Christmas 1990, Berners-Lee had built all the tools necessary for a working Web:[4] the first web browser (which was a web editor as well), the first web server, and the first web pages[5] which described the project itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_World_Wide_Web
Grim state? At least the majority of *our* population are literate for a start.
Maybe it's because I'm Swedish and not an expert on English grammar, but doesn't your fine language use "is" when the subject is singular? I.e, "our population is literate"?
Red Hat probably realises that people using CentOS are people who may just like it so much they they come back for more, and since they don't make their money on the software, but rather supporting it, CentOS just means more potential customers in the long run...
Some companies are control freaks who prefer to sue potential customers, Red Hat has picked a slightly more sane aproach.
So, back during the cold war the fear of nuclear attacks leads the US to develop the internet, which reroutes around faults automatically. The result is a communications network which allows citizens across the world to communicate and obtain information without the need to rely on a few media companies.
Now, in order to get an advantage on the battlefield they are developing a network which will allow nodes to communicate without the need to rely on a single physical access point. Be afraid Verizon, be VERY afraid...
Of course, in reality they will just get the FCC to restrict it to death somehow, or patent it out of existence.
Not to mention Microsoft would certainly file an anti-trust suit.
You seriously think what Microsoft wants right now is to set a legal precedent saying acquisition of third parties could be an anti-trust matter? That's about as likely as RMS winning a swim-suit contest and then flying home on his patented GM-pig.
One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement.
In any case they have done a lot of good work. Copyleft vs OSS ideology disputes aside. ; )
That isn't actually as insane an idea as it may sound. In climates where the outdoor temperature is lower than the body temperature you could theoretically convert a fraction of the thermal energy that flows out of the body into electricity. Of course, the second law of thermodynamics limit the efficiency of the conversion, so you wouldn't get a whole lot of energy out of it unless it was REALLY cold outside, so a battery or flexible solar cells in the fabric would probably be preferable.
Then of course we have my favourite. Nuclear! Will have to work out a good way to incorporate it into equipment. A miniature RTG could be feasible I guess. You would need a good insulator to get a high conversion efficiency thou. Bremsstrahlung and/or gamma emission may be an issue too...
Sure, but no matter how many cores you have it won't speed up an algorithm where every step depends on the previous one. Perhaps you can increase the size of the instruction set and perform a more complicated instruction in fewer clock cycles, but at the end of the day, everything else held constant the clock cycle obviously has a huge impact on performance.
What it boils down to is "what is the cheapest way for us to crank up performance here?". If some of your engineers come up with a way to increase the clock frequency 3-4 times without too many disadvantages, you're going to go for it. It isn't a matter of weather multiple cores are better than rapid clock frequencies, it is a matter of which improvement provides the most benefit, with the fewest disadvantages, at the lowest price. Some times it will be cheaper and easier to add a core or two, some times it will be to ramp up the clock frequency.
This bomb didn't do apocalyptic damage because it only lasted for a brief amount of time.
It was detonated hundreds of meters into the air, yet the mere radiation melted the rock bellow it to glass, the dust cloud penetrated the cloud cover, the electromagnetic pulse disturbed radio transmissions in Australia, and the shock-wave could still be measured on its third pass around the world. Had it been detonated at full power it would have released more radioactive fallout than Soviet's entire history of nuclear testing. Sure, maybe the single shot didn't quite qualify as "apocalyptic" but build a few hundred of those things and you start getting close... This was a weapon with a destructive power that could quite correctly be described as having biblical proportions.
I always thought with nuclear weapons, that really after a certain size there were precious little point is making it more powerful.
You got that right. This is why modern weapons don't even go above one megaton. Instead you load multiple warheads that are "only" a few hundred kilotons into a single missile. Of course, this is pretty much overkill as well, because quite frankly, a "small" number of warheads will be quite sufficient as a deterrent. The chance that somebody will attack you if they know they will get 50 nukes flying right back at them is not very much greater than if they are going to get 400 nukes back in their face. Now, to put this into perspective, the US has more than 5000 warheads in service, and more than 9000 stockpiled. Russia has close to 6000 in service, and 16000 stockpiled. The UK has 750 in service, France has 350, and China some 130. India has about 80, Pakistan about 10, and Israel is suspected to have between 100-300.
Thus in total there are some 10.000 warheads in service in the world, which works out to about 100 nukes per country. As anybody with half a brain can see, this is absolutely silly. The larger nuclear powers could cut their arsenals by a factor of 10, and they would still have several hundred nukes in service as a deterrent.
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Is that why gay people had better lie about my sexual orientation if they want to apply for a job within the US army, NASA or the US government? Is that why people can have their lives ruined if the government should find out you are sharing music, smoking pot etc? And don't even get me started about "enemy combatants"
Pffft, I'm Swedish , and our language sounds nothing like that, *bork* *bork* *bork*.
The government makes the laws, the police investigate/arrest people suspected of breaking it, and the courts decide if someone should be punished. So why the fuck is the government about to decide if the telcos should be punished or not? Even if they made a law to give them imunity, surely that should apply only to future wrongdoings... Retroactively changing the law is only acceptable under very exceptional circumstances. Of course, these days retroactively raising the income tax could probably be justified as "national security", so it is not as if it is surprising...
You managed the first sentence, now read the rest of the post to understand what he was actually complaining about. Basically:
Regular phone: You pay up fornt OR you get a locked contract.
iPhone: You pay up front AND you get a locked contract.
Now, if the up-front price of the iPhone was lower than other phones, then you could argue that they just use a different payment plan. However, the iPhone is more expensive AND binds you to a less favourable contract. I.e, its already horrific price tag is even worse than it appears.
You can't generalise about the outcome of future predictions. If you could, I could save the world by claiming we will eradicate all diseases in 50 years time. As we have no flying cars, a generalisation would lead us to beleive we would in fact find dramatic new medical techniques as a result, unfortunately reality doesn't work that way. Having said that, I'd love for somebody to prove me wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Socket_5.jpg
It works for stero systems too.
It IS downloadable from countries where bandwidth is cheap. The "IP driven economy" is as large a bubble as the dot.com one. Sure, it will take longer before it burts, but when it does the rats that are American companies will flee the sinking ship, seeking harbour in China and India. Restricting innovation because you are afraid of Chinese and Indian competition is like peeing in your pants. Soon the warmth is gone and you're left with a really bad mess.
The energy needed to separate the water into hydrogen and oxygen is equal to what is released when they combine again ( this follows directly from conservation of energy ). Thus this would only be useful in that you could charge the thing with hydrogen, which has a much better energy/weight ratio than ellectric batteries. The catch is that gaseous hydrogen also has an absolutely abysmall energy/volume ratio, so unless you pressurise it greatly ( requires energy ) , cool it down to liquid temperatures ( requires energy ) or store it using some chemical reaction ( at which point you have a device very similar to an ellectric battery ), it will be far too bulky to be used in cars. Modern batteries also have a lot lower heat-loss than hydrogen fuel cells, making them more efficient.
That is USD, not CAD.
So on average you make about $0.47 per download ? How much do you normally get from a record company? Your problem seems to be popularity rather than average donation size.
Please tag this apropriately : )
Better yet, lets show peopel the damn picture:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:CO2_per_capita_per_country.png
There you go, emissions, per capita, of the whole world. Nicely colour coded. Lets see the neo-cons try to weasel out of that one.
You may also want some of the CSI image analysis software which support zooming beyond the image resolution. ; )
Red Hat probably realises that people using CentOS are people who may just like it so much they they come back for more, and since they don't make their money on the software, but rather supporting it, CentOS just means more potential customers in the long run...
Some companies are control freaks who prefer to sue potential customers, Red Hat has picked a slightly more sane aproach.
So, back during the cold war the fear of nuclear attacks leads the US to develop the internet, which reroutes around faults automatically. The result is a communications network which allows citizens across the world to communicate and obtain information without the need to rely on a few media companies.
Now, in order to get an advantage on the battlefield they are developing a network which will allow nodes to communicate without the need to rely on a single physical access point. Be afraid Verizon, be VERY afraid...
Of course, in reality they will just get the FCC to restrict it to death somehow, or patent it out of existence.
You seriously think what Microsoft wants right now is to set a legal precedent saying acquisition of third parties could be an anti-trust matter? That's about as likely as RMS winning a swim-suit contest and then flying home on his patented GM-pig.
Pirate bay doesn't distribute any games. They only provide information about places that do.
One of the things that has put me of OpenBSD is the need to compile from source if you want to use the stable branch. I realise this is partially due to limited resources and priorities, but I would argue that this is probably one area where there is room for improvement.
In any case they have done a lot of good work. Copyleft vs OSS ideology disputes aside. ; )
That isn't actually as insane an idea as it may sound. In climates where the outdoor temperature is lower than the body temperature you could theoretically convert a fraction of the thermal energy that flows out of the body into electricity. Of course, the second law of thermodynamics limit the efficiency of the conversion, so you wouldn't get a whole lot of energy out of it unless it was REALLY cold outside, so a battery or flexible solar cells in the fabric would probably be preferable.
Then of course we have my favourite. Nuclear! Will have to work out a good way to incorporate it into equipment. A miniature RTG could be feasible I guess. You would need a good insulator to get a high conversion efficiency thou. Bremsstrahlung and/or gamma emission may be an issue too...
Sure, but no matter how many cores you have it won't speed up an algorithm where every step depends on the previous one. Perhaps you can increase the size of the instruction set and perform a more complicated instruction in fewer clock cycles, but at the end of the day, everything else held constant the clock cycle obviously has a huge impact on performance.
What it boils down to is "what is the cheapest way for us to crank up performance here?". If some of your engineers come up with a way to increase the clock frequency 3-4 times without too many disadvantages, you're going to go for it. It isn't a matter of weather multiple cores are better than rapid clock frequencies, it is a matter of which improvement provides the most benefit, with the fewest disadvantages, at the lowest price. Some times it will be cheaper and easier to add a core or two, some times it will be to ramp up the clock frequency.
It was detonated hundreds of meters into the air, yet the mere radiation melted the rock bellow it to glass, the dust cloud penetrated the cloud cover, the electromagnetic pulse disturbed radio transmissions in Australia, and the shock-wave could still be measured on its third pass around the world. Had it been detonated at full power it would have released more radioactive fallout than Soviet's entire history of nuclear testing. Sure, maybe the single shot didn't quite qualify as "apocalyptic" but build a few hundred of those things and you start getting close... This was a weapon with a destructive power that could quite correctly be described as having biblical proportions.
You got that right. This is why modern weapons don't even go above one megaton. Instead you load multiple warheads that are "only" a few hundred kilotons into a single missile. Of course, this is pretty much overkill as well, because quite frankly, a "small" number of warheads will be quite sufficient as a deterrent. The chance that somebody will attack you if they know they will get 50 nukes flying right back at them is not very much greater than if they are going to get 400 nukes back in their face. Now, to put this into perspective, the US has more than 5000 warheads in service, and more than 9000 stockpiled. Russia has close to 6000 in service, and 16000 stockpiled. The UK has 750 in service, France has 350, and China some 130. India has about 80, Pakistan about 10, and Israel is suspected to have between 100-300.
Thus in total there are some 10.000 warheads in service in the world, which works out to about 100 nukes per country. As anybody with half a brain can see, this is absolutely silly. The larger nuclear powers could cut their arsenals by a factor of 10, and they would still have several hundred nukes in service as a deterrent.