No, they are not torture or genocide. Genocide is the "deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group". Animals are neither national, racial, political, or cultural, unless we identify them as such, and we have a word for that - it's called "personalization". In order to have a national, racial, political, or cultural identity, you have to be aware of that identity, and, at least beyond a basic pack identity in certain animals, they're not. Besides, the animals as a group aren't being exterminated; if they were, those slaughterhouses would close pretty quick. Torture? Nah - we're not doing it to be cruel, for punishment, or for information. We're just being efficient. If it was more efficient to be nicer, we would be. Heck, "free range" is getting quite popular and profitable - expect to see more of it.
Animals are food. We kill them and eat them. This idea that we need to treat them nicely before we kill them seems a little odd, considering how the end result is always the same. I agree that killing animals needlessly is wrong - it's wasteful, if nothing else. I also don't want to unduly stress them - it ruins the meat. This is why I don't mind getting my food from factories; they're efficient, they're usually cleaner than the wide outdoors (mad cow notwithstanding), and, when you're doing a factory farm, you're using a lot less land to produce the same amount of meat, which saves more room for other things.
Everyone thought Apple was crazy when they released the iPod at the price point they released it at, too. You'd be amazed how much people will pay for something that's "cool" and still "works".
As for your other objections:
1) You need a data services contract.
2) You need a contract from one supplier.
These, I suspect, are both compromises with AT&T/Cingular so they could push this phone out to market. That said, a data services contract isn't that onerous for someone that's used to paying $0.99 for a ring tone or a wallpaper. Again, this isn't geared towards professionals that know all about these devices - it's geared towards novices that are interested in these devices but find your normal fare on this front to be too "stuffy", "worklike", or just plain "complicated". In that vein, having it set up to run on wireless networks as well as the data service provider complicates things because now they have to care whether there's a WiFi spot around or not.
Let me put it another way:
I once had someone who just got a laptop come up to me and ask me if they could get on the Internet with it. "Of course," I said. They then said that they heard that laptops can access "wireless Internet". "Yep," I said, "you just have to be near a hotspot." I then had to spend the next hour explaining hotspots and why they couldn't just pop open their laptop in their house and magically get an Internet connection. At the end, they said, "Well, that's just false advertising," and walked away dejectedly. These are the people that the iPhone is meant to pick up - they don't know about hotspots and, most importantly, they don't want to know about hotspots. They want it to just work.
3) And you need to register yourself with iTunes store.
Considering how it's being advertised as an "iPod with a phone", well, that kind of makes sense. Odds are, if you're getting an iPhone, you probably already have an iPod, in which case you probably already have an iTunes account. Plus, given a choice between Cellphone A that runs through Cingular/Verizon/Sprint/CC Wireless/Tracphone/Virgin Mobile/whomever that has to cough up $0.99 for a ringtone or a wallpaper and $0.99 for a full length of music and, oh, you can get wallpapers for free off the Internet, well, which one are you going to pick?
Again, the iPhone is not geared towards us. If you want something with all the bells and whistles imaginable, you don't want this phone. If you want something that runs an open, free operating system, you don't want this phone. If you want something that gives you tons of choices about everything, including how you get your data, what applications you can run on it, how you get music to and from it, etc., you don't want this phone. On the other hand, if you don't want to have to care about how to get music on there, if you don't want to have to care how to get it hooked up to the Internet, and if you don't care about a bunch of bells and whistles so long as the device in your hand does what you want it to do, which isn't much, you might want an iPhone... unless you text message a lot, in which case you probably will want nothing to do with its clear, non-tactile screen. Eek.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple came out with a different iPhone model with a physical keyboard of some sort, though, especially if iPhone 1.0 does reasonably well. I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple managed to squirm out of the exclusivity arrangements with AT&T at some point, though that would require another provider to work with Apple on the new mail system; for all we know, AT&T might have been the only provider willing to work with Apple on that. If so, assuming the iPhone does well, don't be too surprised if other providers start saying, "Hey, we'll do that out-of-order mail system," at which point we'll not only see iPhones being available for other providers but probably also see other phones taking advantage of that feature.
I was talking about this with a coworker of mine, and we decided something:
The iPhone is not meant to compete against the Blackberry or Windows Mobile phones of the world. The iPhone is not for business customers. Instead, it's for home users that want similar basic functionality to a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device (something that handles e-mail, browses the web on an easy-to-read display, that sort of thing) but don't want it to feel like a "work" phone. Consequently, Exchange support is unnecessary, as is anything beyond basic calendaring and the like. If it can play a few mini-games, so much the better. It doesn't have support for a bunch of third-party plugins? Oh well - the home user won't need them anyways.
Now, what my coworker and I couldn't agree on was how many home users actually want that, and the reason for that is because this market segment has never been touched. Consequently, I'm curious to see how big the "I want a PDA but not for work" market really is.
Instead of taxing fuel, why not tax tires? We could tax them based on cost and provide a nominal tax break for used tires, such that:
New tires: X% of sale price
Used tires: (X/2)% of used sale price
This would have the following advantages:
1. Used tires would be a credible option for poorer people, so the tax would be less regressive.
2. All road-worthy motor vehicles require tires to operate. Most municipalities ban tracked vehicles on public roads since they tear up pavement. Since tire purchasing is directly proportional to the life of the tire, and since the life of a tire is directly proportional to the amount you use it (either in years or in mileage), this would serve as a "use tax" on roads, save for the rare person that buys a car and lets it sit for years at a time.
3. Larger tires are common on larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and cost more than smaller tires, so they would have a greater tax $-wise than smaller tires.
4. Older vehicles traditionally used smaller tires than newer vehicles, so someone putting tires on the '76 Ford LTD they drive out of desperation will pay less tax money than someone putting tires on their brand new Hummer H2, even though they get comparable gas mileage. This would further "progressivize" the tax.
Actually, in Europe, they base gas mileage on liters used per 100 km; in other words, instead of looking at "miles per gallon", they look at "gallons per mile" or the metric equivalent.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use the sale of counterfeit CDs to raise revenue and launder money.
Also, in other news...
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use computers running Microsoft Windows to track their resources and finances.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use oxygen as part of their metabolic processes.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use explosives to blow things up.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use water to hydrate themselves.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use coffee and other stimulants to stay awake in the morning.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use exercise equipment to stay in shape.
If you don't want to be like organized criminal gangs or terrorist groups, you better stop selling counterfeit CDs, running Microsoft Windows, breathing, using explosives, drinking, caffeinating, or exercising RIGHT NOW!
That is why we hate you. Cut that crap already. Sure, you fought against Hitler, but was it decisive? I don't know, and you neither.
Was it decisive? Yeah, actually, it was. Is the Nazi party in control of Germany? No. Are the Fascists in charge of Italy? No. Is the military in control of Japan? No. Looks like we're three for three.
Please read about the Second World War. About how Soviet attacked Finland, and the 10-to-1 kill ratio. That was the reason that the United States intervened, as someone else showed that the Red Army was not so good as it appeared. If you do not understand the scale of that accomplishment, pretend that Florida is a country you need to invade, and you fail at it.
Actually, the US was quite anti-Soviet during the Soviet-Finnish invasion, in part because of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. The country which royally got screwed in all of this was Finland because they dared to fight our "allies" after Hitler double-crossed Stalin and supported Finnish resistance against the Soviet military. By the way, how did France and Britain do against the Soviets during that war? Oh, that's right - they did nothing. Outstanding. In fact, if memory serves, France ended up collapsing faster than they did against the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War and the British led the greatest amphibious evacuation of an area in Dunkirk - being in the record books for the biggest retreat is not something to be proud of, y'know.
Now consider Germany who got subdued when Russia, USA, England and France ganged up on them. What about when France, Germany and England gangs up on somebody else?
Oh, you mean like in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the Europeans let a nice little genocide proceed before the US finally decided it was time to show up? Or how about Rwanda, where the French openly supported the bad guys? Of the three countries you just listed, England is the only one to actually win a war within recent memory, and that was against Argentina. Also, France did distressingly little in World War II, at least in any organized sense. They certainly didn't do any more than the Polish or any of the other Nazi-occupied countries did against their occupiers. Read up on the Polish resistance some time - they contributed more troops than every country in the war, save for the Soviets, Americans, and the British.
Look, don't get me wrong - I'm not a flag-waving pro-USA kind of guy here, but you guys need to get honest with yourselves here. Your population is declining, you have a bunch of Muslim immigrants that you don't know what to do with, and a welfare state that you guys love to hate but can't bring yourselves to kill off before it completely chokes your economies. Fix your own problems, then talk to us about ours. We'll be busy talking about our own problems here since, well, shoot, we're Americans - we don't care about your problems or the problems of anyone else in the world unless they become our problems, right?
Patent: A patent is a set of exclusive rights granted by a state to a patentee (the inventor or assignee) for a fixed period of time in exchange for the regulated, public disclosure of certain details of a device, method, process or composition of matter (substance) (known as an invention) which is new, inventive, and useful or industrially applicable.
Mickey Mouse is neither a device, method, process, or composition of matter.
Mickey Mouse is almost certainly copyrighted. According to US copyright law, all works before 1923 are in the public domain - Mickey Mouse, however, was created in 1928, so Disney has almost certainly renewed a few times since then. Plus, I'm not sure, but since they change how Mickey Mouse looks every so often to reflect changes in technology (black & white to color to digital, etc.), the original copyright on Mickey Mouse might expire in the next few years, but that might only be for "Steamboat Willy" Mickey Mouse. Like I said, though, I'm not sure about that one.
Trademark: A trademark or trade mark[1] is a distinctive sign or indicator of some kind which is used by an individual, business organization or other legal entity to uniquely identify the source of its products and/or services to consumers, and to distinguish its products or services from those of other entities. A trademark is a type of intellectual property, and typically comprises a name, word, phrase, logo, symbol, design, image, or a combination of these elements. There is also a range of non-conventional trademarks comprising marks which do not fall into these standard categories.
It's entirely possible that Mickey Mouse could be a trademark for Disney, considering the amount of merchandise and advertising material he's on. Trademarks last until either the creator stops using them or until they become "generic" (think "Kleenex" for "facial tissue", "Xerox" for "copy", etc.). So, if you want Mickey Mouse to stop being a trademark, the easiest way to do it is to generify Mickey Mouse and start using his name as a general verb/noun for any talking mouse with a high-pitched voice.
I can't speak about the rest, but I can overcome #1 rather quickly with a couple of free options:
CutePDF - The basic version is free as in beer; I've used this quite successfully on Office 2000-2003 documents, as well as Visio diagrams. It creates a virtual printer that you print your document to.
PDFCreator - A quick Google search found this Sourceforge project that is GPL'd and was at least reasonably active last year. I've never tried it, but it appears the concept is similar to CutePDF.
Keep in mind that both of these products can print just about anything, including Office documents. Also, as for #3, it's my understanding that Office has a number of collaboration tools specifically to address situations like this, at least from Office 2003 and on. I haven't had the pleasure of working with them, so I'm not entirely sure how well they work. I have used Google Docs and it has a rather nifty collaboration package, however, that seems to mimic the functionality you're describing, with the ability to roll back to previous versions of a document and the like.
Except the other half of your sum there:
+ (Odds of accident)*(respective odds and costs of: Killing oneself + Killing one's friend + Killing someone else + Going to jail for doing any of the last two) ... is non-zero even when you're sober. So, in fact, the odds are more like the difference between the odds of an accident when you're sober and all its related consequences subtracted from the (presumably) greater odds of those things when you're drunk. Consequently, if you're feeling really pedantic, the real sum would look something like:
$100 vs. ((Avg. Cost of DUI)*(Odds of Getting Caught) + (Odds of accident-Odds of accident while sober under the same road conditions)*(respective odds and costs of: Killing oneself + Killing one's friend + Killing someone else + Going to jail for doing any of the last two - same odds while sober)
Because of this, there are at least two possible conclusions that can be drawn from your statement:
1. Don't drive whether you're drunk or not - the odds of killing yourself or someone else are non-zero in either case. In fact, leaving the house is probably a bad idea today.
2. Don't drive if you're drunk and the odds of getting into an accident are sufficiently high enough to deter you from driving or your friends from letting you drive.
For what it's worth, I think driving drunk is a bad idea no matter how the odds look - there's just too much that can go wrong. That said, there's a big difference between driving drunk from a club downtown where you have to drive through city traffic and driving drunk from a bar in the middle of nowhere; neither is good, but one clearly has less favorable odds than the other.
I'll start this off by saying I'm part of the pro-legalization camp.
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
Of course that's not a victimless crime. The crime here is child abuse and neglect, which is not victimless.
People dealing drugs to others, even when the others haven't been shown how dangerous the drugs are, is a victimless crime. The people who recieved the drugs certainly weren't hurt!
It's a little difficult to accurately gauge the efficacy and dangers of a drug when, as schedule 1 drugs, it's very, very difficult to research them. That said, making a drug illegal will not solve the issue you've raised here. As our experience with alcohol and tobacco has shown, if you want to publicize the dangers of a drug, the best way is to legalize it and use the taxes raised by it to educate the public about the dangers of it.
When people cant think properly because they've taken too many drugs, or can't afford what they a mentally or physically dependant on, and rob/kill others for drug money, its a victimless crime. The people robbed/killed certainly weren't hurt.
Hypothetically, if I were mentally dependent on World of Warcraft, stayed up for 48 hours straight playing it, found out I didn't have enough money to maintain the subscription because I lost my job, so concluded that I should rob a liquor store to satisfy my dependency, would that mean we should ban World of Warcraft? Of course not. Now, I understand the concept of chemical dependence, but there's a big leap between "Wow, I need this substance in my body" and "Wow, I think I should go kill someone for it." When people make that leap, prosecute them for that. Until then, they haven't done anything wrong.
At this point, I will point out that I'm not necessarily a fan of legalizing all drugs for OTC purposes. I do think opiates should be prescription-only (too difficult for a person to reliably self-dose), and drugs that are addictive that lead to severe bodily harm after constant use are definitely a concern (meth, LSD, PCP, etc.). Then again, tobacco would fall under that category, and alcohol can, too, if it's abused enough - that's the problem with drawing the line in the sand there. I do think that marijuana should probably be legal; I don't think it's a particularly healthy drug, but it isn't any worse than anything else we have legalized.
On the networking component side, I've had decent luck with SMC switches, though, of course, HP's switches are really nice, too (hence why they cost so much). On the router side, Cisco is great if you can afford it, but for a place with 50 people, it's probably overkill. I've had tolerable luck with Netgear ProSafe firewall/routers, but they can be really simplistic. Sonicwall makes some easy-to-use, versatile firewall/routers, but I'm not a big fan of their per-connection licensing scheme. Fortinet makes some competitively priced mid-range firewall/routers with decent anti-virus scanning abilities, which is nice, and they're incredibly flexible. I've even been able to configure them to connect to Windows servers using LDAP and control user access to the Internet through them, which is pretty nice, and their routers are SIP-aware, which is handy if you plan on doing any in-house VoIP work. However, that flexibility comes at a price - they are REALLY quirky. Be ready for a serious learning curve if you've never dealt with one before.
One key point with many locals is they don't necessarily build their own machines; a lot of them will go through a whitebox vendor like Equus or Columbus Micro, among others. Having dealt with both of them, I can offer the following advice:
1. Avoid Equus. Their servers are crap. I've spent the past six months doing little but rebuilding ones that lost their RAID controllers and hard drives due to poor ventilation. Also, their PCs are substandard as well, with poor fit & finish (their buttons would stick, onboard network card would flake out, etc.).
2. Columbus Micro is okay as long as you're not in a hurry. This makes them decent for cheap PCs, but servers are a different matter. They like to ship everything ground by default, which means that, unless you have some spare equipment lying around, you're looking at serious downtime on the server side.
Both just put together Intel boxes - Intel motherboards, Intel RAID cards (rebranded LSI, in other words), etc. etc. etc. You get what you pay for. I have had decent luck with Supermicros, but haven't seen a new one in a couple of years.
If you're in the US, a great place to get some decent deals on software is Techsoup. In my experience, even Microsoft licensing is ridiculously affordable; I was able to fully license a server running Windows 2003 Standard and Exchange 2003 with 30 User CALs for each for under well under $1000 total. Even Office Professional is currently running $20/license there. The catch is that you usually have to have a 501(c)(3), among other things, and it takes a little while to get through their paperwork, but it's definitely worth it. Also, CDW-G is your friend; that's a great way to get hardware on the cheap, as well as any software that you can't find or get on Techsoup.
This brings up an interesting point - make sure that whatever you get is something you and your client can work on. If you only know Microsoft, fine - get Microsoft. You'll spend a little more than you would if you had to go the open source route, but, with their non-profit rates, you're not going to go broke doing it. If the only thing the staff of the non-profit knows is Microsoft, keep in mind that many of them are probably volunteers - if you make it difficult (read: unfamiliar) for them to work, they may just stop working. Of course, if you can competently maintain a cheaper platform, whatever that might be, and it doesn't get in the way of the non-profit's ability to get work done and keep volunteers, go for it - non-profits love saving money any chance they get. In the end, most of the same rules apply as in the 'real' world - communicate with them, let them know what you're doing, why you're doing it, and make sure they're comfortable enough with your solution to accept it.
Okay, I'm missing something here.
You're looking for ZFS. It's in OpenSolaris, BSD 7.x, and Mac OS X 10.5.
1. Let's see here... BSD proper only got as far as version 4.4, at which point it split off into various trunks. You might be referring to FreeBSD, however, which is looking to integrate ZFS into Version 7.
2. So far, ZFS on Mac OS X 10.5 is mentioned on rumor sites; granted, I understand that Apple must be slipping them into their developer builds for the rumor sites to be as hungry as they are, but that's no guarantee it's going to make an appearance in the final product.
My point here is that, in the process of listing systems that are ZFS-capable, you managed to throw out one OS that only exists on paper (FreeBSD 7) and an OS that won't be publicly available until October and which may or may not have ZFS support, depending on the whims of Steve Jobs.
Please keep in mind that I'm not knocking ZFS. From what information I've picked up, it looks great. However, it's a little hypocritical when people here knock Microsoft on their vaporware database-driven filesystem and then proceed to say that you can get a really good file system on operating systems that don't exist, especially when you could've stopped at "OpenSolaris" and saved a whole truckload of credibility right there.
Depending on the office, it's frequently much cheaper than that. For example, in Nevada, the rates go from $500 to run for US Senator to $0 for any office that does not receive compensation.
No third party gets >1% of the vote in most federal elections consistently since more than that can swing an election in either direction if the election is close enough. You'll occasionally have a third party get well above that in certain circumstances (not a close race, no competition from the other party, strong dissatisfaction with both candidates a la Bush/Clinton '92) but the momentum rarely lasts.
1. What's your threshold? Set it at "get 5% of the votes" and you knock out every single third party in the country, at least most years. Set it at "get 1% of the votes" and you get close enough to sneak the Libertarians and Greens in on some years, with the American Independent Party showing up once in a while... but who's writing this law? Right - the major two parties. Never mind. Besides, TV isn't the only advertising medium in the world - you're reading this on one media right now.
2. More regulations = more loopholes. Don't want your congress(wo)men having dinner with lobbyists? No problem - ban dinners with lobbyists. What happens? More appetizers. Take your financing restriction. Does it restrict groups of multiple people (think non-profit organizations, PACs, and the like)? No - not any more than the current laws do, provided, of course, that this organization isn't considered a corporation or a union. Ah, but of course - make it where the only legal campaign contributions are those from individuals. Okay, no problem; you didn't restrict how many candidates a person can donate to, so this is easy enough to circumvent. Just have a party send in a bunch of candidates for a position whose job is to grab dollars and advertise for the main candidate ("Vote for my opponent! I approve this message."). I'm sure there are far more clever ways to work around it than that. Even if there aren't, with the stakes as high as they are, people will just resort to illegal ways to distribute money. Think of it like DRM - if I want a [good|good={music, drugs, politicians, etc.}] and it's ridiculously complicated to get one legally, will I just not get it or will I find some illegal means to get it? Depends on how badly I want it. Of course, if enough people want a politician bad enough, all politicians will be corrupt, which, of course, just leads to my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged:
"Did you really think we want those laws observed?" said Dr. Ferris. "We want them to be broken. You'd better get it straight that it's not a bunch of boy scouts you're up against... We're after power and we mean it... There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced or objectively interpreted - and you create a nation of law-breakers - and then you cash in on guilt. Now that's the system, Mr. Reardon, that's the game, and once you understand it, you'll be much easier to deal with." ('Atlas Shrugged' 1957)
Where am I going with that? Easy - if a group of politicians find a politician that gets in their way, or even a group of politicians, they can just start smearing them by showing they receive illegal campaign contributions...
The real irony is that the 17th Amendment was passed to reduce corruption - since state legislatures were cheaper to buy than the federal legislature, it was rather easy to bribe enough people in the state to elect the Senator you wanted and have that Senator represent your interests. Also, I don't know about your state legislature, but mine (Nevada) can hardly figure out what city it should meet in on a regular basis, much less determine something like which senator we should ship to Washington. Think of a Supreme Court Justice opening and the political wrangling that goes into that to see what kind of delays and mishaps might occur.
Right - which is precisely why cars can now last over 100,000 miles with minimal maintenance (and still under warranty) whereas when they were "simpler" you were lucky if you could get more than a 12,000 mile warranty and 100,000 miles was the practical end of life for a car.
Look, I prefer to work on simpler cars, too - it's nice knowing what each and every part is on my '64 Chevy C-10 because there are only maybe 10 parts under the hood, not including all the parts in the engine block. I also know we use much, much, MUCH better materials in our cars now than we did 40 years ago - better metals, better lubricants, and, hey, check it out... antifreeze! That said, I don't miss carburetors, I can live without manual choke, I'm very happy that anti-knocking and anti-pinging systems are in place on newer engines, synchromesh is glorious, and there's something to be said for being able to sit immediately behind a car and not smell overwhelming amounts of unburnt hydrocarbons.
Actually, Brussels is the capitol of Belgium; if you read the first line of the article...
Last month, two Belgian publications reported that the Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen's allegations of rape -- in Second Life. ... you might've been able to infer that Brussels is, in fact, in Belgium.
I suspect the bigger question here is whether having a large gap between rich and poor is bad, provided everyone's needs are met? In a country like India where the poor are starving and have absolutely no prayer of not being poor, the gap between rich and poor is a big problem. In the USA, however, the basic needs are met, at least 98% of the time - most everyone has a roof over their heads, most everyone has food, most everyone has equal access to a basic education, etc. This is why the rich-poor gap and the issue of what "poor" means in different countries aren't orthogonal - they tie very closely together.
Note that this does not mean the US should stop looking at the remaining 2% and figure out what's wrong and what we can do about it.
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No, they are not torture or genocide. Genocide is the "deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group". Animals are neither national, racial, political, or cultural, unless we identify them as such, and we have a word for that - it's called "personalization". In order to have a national, racial, political, or cultural identity, you have to be aware of that identity, and, at least beyond a basic pack identity in certain animals, they're not. Besides, the animals as a group aren't being exterminated; if they were, those slaughterhouses would close pretty quick. Torture? Nah - we're not doing it to be cruel, for punishment, or for information. We're just being efficient. If it was more efficient to be nicer, we would be. Heck, "free range" is getting quite popular and profitable - expect to see more of it.
Animals are food. We kill them and eat them. This idea that we need to treat them nicely before we kill them seems a little odd, considering how the end result is always the same. I agree that killing animals needlessly is wrong - it's wasteful, if nothing else. I also don't want to unduly stress them - it ruins the meat. This is why I don't mind getting my food from factories; they're efficient, they're usually cleaner than the wide outdoors (mad cow notwithstanding), and, when you're doing a factory farm, you're using a lot less land to produce the same amount of meat, which saves more room for other things.
As for your other objections:
1) You need a data services contract.
2) You need a contract from one supplier.
These, I suspect, are both compromises with AT&T/Cingular so they could push this phone out to market. That said, a data services contract isn't that onerous for someone that's used to paying $0.99 for a ring tone or a wallpaper. Again, this isn't geared towards professionals that know all about these devices - it's geared towards novices that are interested in these devices but find your normal fare on this front to be too "stuffy", "worklike", or just plain "complicated". In that vein, having it set up to run on wireless networks as well as the data service provider complicates things because now they have to care whether there's a WiFi spot around or not.
Let me put it another way:
I once had someone who just got a laptop come up to me and ask me if they could get on the Internet with it. "Of course," I said. They then said that they heard that laptops can access "wireless Internet". "Yep," I said, "you just have to be near a hotspot." I then had to spend the next hour explaining hotspots and why they couldn't just pop open their laptop in their house and magically get an Internet connection. At the end, they said, "Well, that's just false advertising," and walked away dejectedly. These are the people that the iPhone is meant to pick up - they don't know about hotspots and, most importantly, they don't want to know about hotspots. They want it to just work.
3) And you need to register yourself with iTunes store.
Considering how it's being advertised as an "iPod with a phone", well, that kind of makes sense. Odds are, if you're getting an iPhone, you probably already have an iPod, in which case you probably already have an iTunes account. Plus, given a choice between Cellphone A that runs through Cingular/Verizon/Sprint/CC Wireless/Tracphone/Virgin Mobile/whomever that has to cough up $0.99 for a ringtone or a wallpaper and $0.99 for a full length of music and, oh, you can get wallpapers for free off the Internet, well, which one are you going to pick?
Again, the iPhone is not geared towards us. If you want something with all the bells and whistles imaginable, you don't want this phone. If you want something that runs an open, free operating system, you don't want this phone. If you want something that gives you tons of choices about everything, including how you get your data, what applications you can run on it, how you get music to and from it, etc., you don't want this phone. On the other hand, if you don't want to have to care about how to get music on there, if you don't want to have to care how to get it hooked up to the Internet, and if you don't care about a bunch of bells and whistles so long as the device in your hand does what you want it to do, which isn't much, you might want an iPhone... unless you text message a lot, in which case you probably will want nothing to do with its clear, non-tactile screen. Eek.
I wouldn't be surprised if Apple came out with a different iPhone model with a physical keyboard of some sort, though, especially if iPhone 1.0 does reasonably well. I also wouldn't be surprised if Apple managed to squirm out of the exclusivity arrangements with AT&T at some point, though that would require another provider to work with Apple on the new mail system; for all we know, AT&T might have been the only provider willing to work with Apple on that. If so, assuming the iPhone does well, don't be too surprised if other providers start saying, "Hey, we'll do that out-of-order mail system," at which point we'll not only see iPhones being available for other providers but probably also see other phones taking advantage of that feature.
I was talking about this with a coworker of mine, and we decided something:
The iPhone is not meant to compete against the Blackberry or Windows Mobile phones of the world. The iPhone is not for business customers. Instead, it's for home users that want similar basic functionality to a Blackberry or Windows Mobile device (something that handles e-mail, browses the web on an easy-to-read display, that sort of thing) but don't want it to feel like a "work" phone. Consequently, Exchange support is unnecessary, as is anything beyond basic calendaring and the like. If it can play a few mini-games, so much the better. It doesn't have support for a bunch of third-party plugins? Oh well - the home user won't need them anyways.
Now, what my coworker and I couldn't agree on was how many home users actually want that, and the reason for that is because this market segment has never been touched. Consequently, I'm curious to see how big the "I want a PDA but not for work" market really is.
Here's a thought:
Instead of taxing fuel, why not tax tires? We could tax them based on cost and provide a nominal tax break for used tires, such that:
New tires: X% of sale price
Used tires: (X/2)% of used sale price
This would have the following advantages:
1. Used tires would be a credible option for poorer people, so the tax would be less regressive.
2. All road-worthy motor vehicles require tires to operate. Most municipalities ban tracked vehicles on public roads since they tear up pavement. Since tire purchasing is directly proportional to the life of the tire, and since the life of a tire is directly proportional to the amount you use it (either in years or in mileage), this would serve as a "use tax" on roads, save for the rare person that buys a car and lets it sit for years at a time.
3. Larger tires are common on larger, less fuel-efficient vehicles, and cost more than smaller tires, so they would have a greater tax $-wise than smaller tires.
4. Older vehicles traditionally used smaller tires than newer vehicles, so someone putting tires on the '76 Ford LTD they drive out of desperation will pay less tax money than someone putting tires on their brand new Hummer H2, even though they get comparable gas mileage. This would further "progressivize" the tax.
Actually, in Europe, they base gas mileage on liters used per 100 km; in other words, instead of looking at "miles per gallon", they look at "gallons per mile" or the metric equivalent.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use computers running Microsoft Windows to track their resources and finances.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use oxygen as part of their metabolic processes.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use explosives to blow things up.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use water to hydrate themselves.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use coffee and other stimulants to stay awake in the morning.
Organized criminal gangs and even terrorist groups use exercise equipment to stay in shape.
If you don't want to be like organized criminal gangs or terrorist groups, you better stop selling counterfeit CDs, running Microsoft Windows, breathing, using explosives, drinking, caffeinating, or exercising RIGHT NOW!
Was it decisive? Yeah, actually, it was. Is the Nazi party in control of Germany? No. Are the Fascists in charge of Italy? No. Is the military in control of Japan? No. Looks like we're three for three.
Please read about the Second World War. About how Soviet attacked Finland, and the 10-to-1 kill ratio. That was the reason that the United States intervened, as someone else showed that the Red Army was not so good as it appeared. If you do not understand the scale of that accomplishment, pretend that Florida is a country you need to invade, and you fail at it.
Actually, the US was quite anti-Soviet during the Soviet-Finnish invasion, in part because of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, which divided Eastern Europe between Hitler and Stalin. The country which royally got screwed in all of this was Finland because they dared to fight our "allies" after Hitler double-crossed Stalin and supported Finnish resistance against the Soviet military. By the way, how did France and Britain do against the Soviets during that war? Oh, that's right - they did nothing. Outstanding. In fact, if memory serves, France ended up collapsing faster than they did against the Prussians in the Franco-Prussian War and the British led the greatest amphibious evacuation of an area in Dunkirk - being in the record books for the biggest retreat is not something to be proud of, y'know.
Now consider Germany who got subdued when Russia, USA, England and France ganged up on them. What about when France, Germany and England gangs up on somebody else?
Oh, you mean like in Bosnia and Kosovo, where the Europeans let a nice little genocide proceed before the US finally decided it was time to show up? Or how about Rwanda, where the French openly supported the bad guys? Of the three countries you just listed, England is the only one to actually win a war within recent memory, and that was against Argentina. Also, France did distressingly little in World War II, at least in any organized sense. They certainly didn't do any more than the Polish or any of the other Nazi-occupied countries did against their occupiers. Read up on the Polish resistance some time - they contributed more troops than every country in the war, save for the Soviets, Americans, and the British.
Look, don't get me wrong - I'm not a flag-waving pro-USA kind of guy here, but you guys need to get honest with yourselves here. Your population is declining, you have a bunch of Muslim immigrants that you don't know what to do with, and a welfare state that you guys love to hate but can't bring yourselves to kill off before it completely chokes your economies. Fix your own problems, then talk to us about ours. We'll be busy talking about our own problems here since, well, shoot, we're Americans - we don't care about your problems or the problems of anyone else in the world unless they become our problems, right?
From Wikipedia...
Mickey Mouse is neither a device, method, process, or composition of matter.
Mickey Mouse is almost certainly copyrighted. According to US copyright law, all works before 1923 are in the public domain - Mickey Mouse, however, was created in 1928, so Disney has almost certainly renewed a few times since then. Plus, I'm not sure, but since they change how Mickey Mouse looks every so often to reflect changes in technology (black & white to color to digital, etc.), the original copyright on Mickey Mouse might expire in the next few years, but that might only be for "Steamboat Willy" Mickey Mouse. Like I said, though, I'm not sure about that one.
It's entirely possible that Mickey Mouse could be a trademark for Disney, considering the amount of merchandise and advertising material he's on. Trademarks last until either the creator stops using them or until they become "generic" (think "Kleenex" for "facial tissue", "Xerox" for "copy", etc.). So, if you want Mickey Mouse to stop being a trademark, the easiest way to do it is to generify Mickey Mouse and start using his name as a general verb/noun for any talking mouse with a high-pitched voice.
I can't speak about the rest, but I can overcome #1 rather quickly with a couple of free options:
CutePDF - The basic version is free as in beer; I've used this quite successfully on Office 2000-2003 documents, as well as Visio diagrams. It creates a virtual printer that you print your document to.
PDFCreator - A quick Google search found this Sourceforge project that is GPL'd and was at least reasonably active last year. I've never tried it, but it appears the concept is similar to CutePDF.
Keep in mind that both of these products can print just about anything, including Office documents. Also, as for #3, it's my understanding that Office has a number of collaboration tools specifically to address situations like this, at least from Office 2003 and on. I haven't had the pleasure of working with them, so I'm not entirely sure how well they work. I have used Google Docs and it has a rather nifty collaboration package, however, that seems to mimic the functionality you're describing, with the ability to roll back to previous versions of a document and the like.
+ (Odds of accident)*(respective odds and costs of: Killing oneself + Killing one's friend + Killing someone else + Going to jail for doing any of the last two)
... is non-zero even when you're sober. So, in fact, the odds are more like the difference between the odds of an accident when you're sober and all its related consequences subtracted from the (presumably) greater odds of those things when you're drunk. Consequently, if you're feeling really pedantic, the real sum would look something like:
$100 vs. ((Avg. Cost of DUI)*(Odds of Getting Caught) + (Odds of accident-Odds of accident while sober under the same road conditions)*(respective odds and costs of: Killing oneself + Killing one's friend + Killing someone else + Going to jail for doing any of the last two - same odds while sober)
Because of this, there are at least two possible conclusions that can be drawn from your statement:
1. Don't drive whether you're drunk or not - the odds of killing yourself or someone else are non-zero in either case. In fact, leaving the house is probably a bad idea today.
2. Don't drive if you're drunk and the odds of getting into an accident are sufficiently high enough to deter you from driving or your friends from letting you drive.
For what it's worth, I think driving drunk is a bad idea no matter how the odds look - there's just too much that can go wrong. That said, there's a big difference between driving drunk from a club downtown where you have to drive through city traffic and driving drunk from a bar in the middle of nowhere; neither is good, but one clearly has less favorable odds than the other.
Yes, when parents don't feed their children because they need drug money, its a victimless crime, no one other than the parent is hurt!
Of course that's not a victimless crime. The crime here is child abuse and neglect, which is not victimless.
People dealing drugs to others, even when the others haven't been shown how dangerous the drugs are, is a victimless crime. The people who recieved the drugs certainly weren't hurt!
It's a little difficult to accurately gauge the efficacy and dangers of a drug when, as schedule 1 drugs, it's very, very difficult to research them. That said, making a drug illegal will not solve the issue you've raised here. As our experience with alcohol and tobacco has shown, if you want to publicize the dangers of a drug, the best way is to legalize it and use the taxes raised by it to educate the public about the dangers of it.
When people cant think properly because they've taken too many drugs, or can't afford what they a mentally or physically dependant on, and rob/kill others for drug money, its a victimless crime. The people robbed/killed certainly weren't hurt.
Hypothetically, if I were mentally dependent on World of Warcraft, stayed up for 48 hours straight playing it, found out I didn't have enough money to maintain the subscription because I lost my job, so concluded that I should rob a liquor store to satisfy my dependency, would that mean we should ban World of Warcraft? Of course not. Now, I understand the concept of chemical dependence, but there's a big leap between "Wow, I need this substance in my body" and "Wow, I think I should go kill someone for it." When people make that leap, prosecute them for that. Until then, they haven't done anything wrong.
At this point, I will point out that I'm not necessarily a fan of legalizing all drugs for OTC purposes. I do think opiates should be prescription-only (too difficult for a person to reliably self-dose), and drugs that are addictive that lead to severe bodily harm after constant use are definitely a concern (meth, LSD, PCP, etc.). Then again, tobacco would fall under that category, and alcohol can, too, if it's abused enough - that's the problem with drawing the line in the sand there. I do think that marijuana should probably be legal; I don't think it's a particularly healthy drug, but it isn't any worse than anything else we have legalized.
On the networking component side, I've had decent luck with SMC switches, though, of course, HP's switches are really nice, too (hence why they cost so much). On the router side, Cisco is great if you can afford it, but for a place with 50 people, it's probably overkill. I've had tolerable luck with Netgear ProSafe firewall/routers, but they can be really simplistic. Sonicwall makes some easy-to-use, versatile firewall/routers, but I'm not a big fan of their per-connection licensing scheme. Fortinet makes some competitively priced mid-range firewall/routers with decent anti-virus scanning abilities, which is nice, and they're incredibly flexible. I've even been able to configure them to connect to Windows servers using LDAP and control user access to the Internet through them, which is pretty nice, and their routers are SIP-aware, which is handy if you plan on doing any in-house VoIP work. However, that flexibility comes at a price - they are REALLY quirky. Be ready for a serious learning curve if you've never dealt with one before.
One key point with many locals is they don't necessarily build their own machines; a lot of them will go through a whitebox vendor like Equus or Columbus Micro, among others. Having dealt with both of them, I can offer the following advice:
1. Avoid Equus. Their servers are crap. I've spent the past six months doing little but rebuilding ones that lost their RAID controllers and hard drives due to poor ventilation. Also, their PCs are substandard as well, with poor fit & finish (their buttons would stick, onboard network card would flake out, etc.).
2. Columbus Micro is okay as long as you're not in a hurry. This makes them decent for cheap PCs, but servers are a different matter. They like to ship everything ground by default, which means that, unless you have some spare equipment lying around, you're looking at serious downtime on the server side.
Both just put together Intel boxes - Intel motherboards, Intel RAID cards (rebranded LSI, in other words), etc. etc. etc. You get what you pay for. I have had decent luck with Supermicros, but haven't seen a new one in a couple of years.
If you're in the US, a great place to get some decent deals on software is Techsoup. In my experience, even Microsoft licensing is ridiculously affordable; I was able to fully license a server running Windows 2003 Standard and Exchange 2003 with 30 User CALs for each for under well under $1000 total. Even Office Professional is currently running $20/license there. The catch is that you usually have to have a 501(c)(3), among other things, and it takes a little while to get through their paperwork, but it's definitely worth it. Also, CDW-G is your friend; that's a great way to get hardware on the cheap, as well as any software that you can't find or get on Techsoup.
This brings up an interesting point - make sure that whatever you get is something you and your client can work on. If you only know Microsoft, fine - get Microsoft. You'll spend a little more than you would if you had to go the open source route, but, with their non-profit rates, you're not going to go broke doing it. If the only thing the staff of the non-profit knows is Microsoft, keep in mind that many of them are probably volunteers - if you make it difficult (read: unfamiliar) for them to work, they may just stop working. Of course, if you can competently maintain a cheaper platform, whatever that might be, and it doesn't get in the way of the non-profit's ability to get work done and keep volunteers, go for it - non-profits love saving money any chance they get. In the end, most of the same rules apply as in the 'real' world - communicate with them, let them know what you're doing, why you're doing it, and make sure they're comfortable enough with your solution to accept it.
There are FOUR LIGHTS!
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
You're looking for ZFS. It's in OpenSolaris, BSD 7.x, and Mac OS X 10.5.
1. Let's see here... BSD proper only got as far as version 4.4, at which point it split off into various trunks. You might be referring to FreeBSD, however, which is looking to integrate ZFS into Version 7.
2. So far, ZFS on Mac OS X 10.5 is mentioned on rumor sites; granted, I understand that Apple must be slipping them into their developer builds for the rumor sites to be as hungry as they are, but that's no guarantee it's going to make an appearance in the final product.
My point here is that, in the process of listing systems that are ZFS-capable, you managed to throw out one OS that only exists on paper (FreeBSD 7) and an OS that won't be publicly available until October and which may or may not have ZFS support, depending on the whims of Steve Jobs.
Please keep in mind that I'm not knocking ZFS. From what information I've picked up, it looks great. However, it's a little hypocritical when people here knock Microsoft on their vaporware database-driven filesystem and then proceed to say that you can get a really good file system on operating systems that don't exist, especially when you could've stopped at "OpenSolaris" and saved a whole truckload of credibility right there.
Depending on the office, it's frequently much cheaper than that. For example, in Nevada, the rates go from $500 to run for US Senator to $0 for any office that does not receive compensation.
No third party gets >1% of the vote in most federal elections consistently since more than that can swing an election in either direction if the election is close enough. You'll occasionally have a third party get well above that in certain circumstances (not a close race, no competition from the other party, strong dissatisfaction with both candidates a la Bush/Clinton '92) but the momentum rarely lasts.
1. What's your threshold? Set it at "get 5% of the votes" and you knock out every single third party in the country, at least most years. Set it at "get 1% of the votes" and you get close enough to sneak the Libertarians and Greens in on some years, with the American Independent Party showing up once in a while... but who's writing this law? Right - the major two parties. Never mind. Besides, TV isn't the only advertising medium in the world - you're reading this on one media right now.
2. More regulations = more loopholes. Don't want your congress(wo)men having dinner with lobbyists? No problem - ban dinners with lobbyists. What happens? More appetizers. Take your financing restriction. Does it restrict groups of multiple people (think non-profit organizations, PACs, and the like)? No - not any more than the current laws do, provided, of course, that this organization isn't considered a corporation or a union. Ah, but of course - make it where the only legal campaign contributions are those from individuals. Okay, no problem; you didn't restrict how many candidates a person can donate to, so this is easy enough to circumvent. Just have a party send in a bunch of candidates for a position whose job is to grab dollars and advertise for the main candidate ("Vote for my opponent! I approve this message."). I'm sure there are far more clever ways to work around it than that. Even if there aren't, with the stakes as high as they are, people will just resort to illegal ways to distribute money. Think of it like DRM - if I want a [good|good={music, drugs, politicians, etc.}] and it's ridiculously complicated to get one legally, will I just not get it or will I find some illegal means to get it? Depends on how badly I want it. Of course, if enough people want a politician bad enough, all politicians will be corrupt, which, of course, just leads to my favorite quote from Atlas Shrugged:
Where am I going with that? Easy - if a group of politicians find a politician that gets in their way, or even a group of politicians, they can just start smearing them by showing they receive illegal campaign contributions...
Sort of like they do right now.
The real irony is that the 17th Amendment was passed to reduce corruption - since state legislatures were cheaper to buy than the federal legislature, it was rather easy to bribe enough people in the state to elect the Senator you wanted and have that Senator represent your interests. Also, I don't know about your state legislature, but mine (Nevada) can hardly figure out what city it should meet in on a regular basis, much less determine something like which senator we should ship to Washington. Think of a Supreme Court Justice opening and the political wrangling that goes into that to see what kind of delays and mishaps might occur.
For more information, check this out.
Oh, quite the contrary - it's twice as good!
Right - which is precisely why cars can now last over 100,000 miles with minimal maintenance (and still under warranty) whereas when they were "simpler" you were lucky if you could get more than a 12,000 mile warranty and 100,000 miles was the practical end of life for a car.
Look, I prefer to work on simpler cars, too - it's nice knowing what each and every part is on my '64 Chevy C-10 because there are only maybe 10 parts under the hood, not including all the parts in the engine block. I also know we use much, much, MUCH better materials in our cars now than we did 40 years ago - better metals, better lubricants, and, hey, check it out... antifreeze! That said, I don't miss carburetors, I can live without manual choke, I'm very happy that anti-knocking and anti-pinging systems are in place on newer engines, synchromesh is glorious, and there's something to be said for being able to sit immediately behind a car and not smell overwhelming amounts of unburnt hydrocarbons.
Last month, two Belgian publications reported that the Brussels police have begun an investigation into a citizen's allegations of rape -- in Second Life. ... you might've been able to infer that Brussels is, in fact, in Belgium.
I suspect the bigger question here is whether having a large gap between rich and poor is bad, provided everyone's needs are met? In a country like India where the poor are starving and have absolutely no prayer of not being poor, the gap between rich and poor is a big problem. In the USA, however, the basic needs are met, at least 98% of the time - most everyone has a roof over their heads, most everyone has food, most everyone has equal access to a basic education, etc. This is why the rich-poor gap and the issue of what "poor" means in different countries aren't orthogonal - they tie very closely together.
Note that this does not mean the US should stop looking at the remaining 2% and figure out what's wrong and what we can do about it.
Close. It wasn't allied with Russia - it was (and still is) a part of Russia, and has been since the late 16th century.