The key word is likely sustained. You might be getting 2-3MB/s the majority of the time and may not be noticing the minute or two that the transfer speed drops significantly because you're either not watching it closely or not downloading anything at the time. But when streaming, if transfer speeds drop at all and you exhaust what little buffer there is, you've either got to adjust to the available bandwidth or stop and refill the buffer.
My personal experience watching Netflix on Comcast and Charter bears this out...it's quite common for the vast majority of a movie or show to be very high quality but have short periods where the quality level dips or the streaming stops for a bit. So while I too frequently get big-Bs/s on downloads, the sustained transfer rate is lower because they can't keep that level of performance over the 2-hour period that I watch the movie.
I don't think this is about Netflix specifically since I see the same dips in quality when watching espn3.com as I do with Netflix on both providers. And considering that both providers have paid espn to allow me to use espn3.com, I find it unlikely that they'd do any type of throttling to discourage using it as it would be much easier (and cheaper) to just not pay for it.
...but why anyone would give a fuck about an event to award people in an industry that they're not even part of is beyond me.
It's for the same reason that people who know better buy lottery tickets. It's not because they think they can win, it's because they enjoy fantasizing about what would happen if they did.
Similarly, the appeal watching the Oscars and paying attention to the Hollywood lifestyle is in the fantasizing about being part of it. The vast majority of the people in the world are not pretty enough, creative enough or otherwise talented enough to make it in that world. But nearly all the jobs are relatable enough to imagine yourself doing them, which makes it easy to imagine yourself living with all the perks of that life. You can imagine what it would be like to live in their expensive houses, drive their expensive cars and date their gorgeous girlfriends/boyfriends. And those fantasies, however improbable, are pleasant to have. So people tune in to live vicariously through those who are able to live that way.
Saying that corporations are inherently evil isn't an indictment of capitalism. You seem to be conflating the two.
What it does mean is the realization that unfettered capitalism will result in serious problems and that Government needs to provide the necessary regulations to ensure that corporations act in a less psychopathic manner.
It's great that HP, Sony and Dell have been able to provide us with such cheap computers, but it's important that government ensure that those companies haven't done that by using cancer-causing materials or polluting the environment in pursuit of the goal of out-competing their competitors. And it's important that when those companies decide to lay off 10% of their workforce to bump the stock higher for the quarter, government is the one that forces them to pay unemployment costs associated with their layoffs.
And it's not just the externalities that should concern government, though that's the most important piece of the puzzle. Government can also provide incentives to act in a certain way. Those increased life spans owe a lot to the patent protections that result in companies feeling that they can spend resources developing treatments and medications without the fear that a competitor will instantly copy whatever they've done once it's complete. And there's also a ton of public funding that gets directed towards research the government deems worthwhile that might otherwise be ignored because there's not enough potential profit in the near term for corporations to be interested.
I'm not trying to argue that our government, as implemented, is an effective balance against the psychopathic behaviors of corporations...I think enough people have bemoaned the excesses of corporate behavior and the willingness of our recent government to represent those psychopathic behaviors over the interests of the majority of the people in this country. I'm just trying to point out that it's essential to embrace the fact that corporations are inherently psychopathic. The notion that regulation is bad and needs to be scaled back is ludicrous and, if we continue to repeal regulations, will further exacerbate the situation where corporations naively pursue profit without any concern for the well-being of society. It's true that not all regulations are good regulations, but we need to realize that significant regulation of corporate behavior is the only thing that will make capitalism work.
Just like our government itself was designed to work with checks and balances, capitalism needs similar checks and balances to run smoothly. Most critics of corporations aren't arguing for eliminating capitalism entirely, they're only advocating more government regulation to keep companies in line.
The difference between this and that is that that is limited to things the actor knowingly did. They knew that people would view their performance, albeit not in the context of a commercial. And, presumably, they made their performance after signing a contract that set ownership of the creation and could have dictated other terms.
If you digitally bring back the star, you could theoretically make them do something they wouldn't have been comfortable with. Whether it be something like a young Ronald Regan endorsing a Democratic candidate or a love scene that would have been scandalous during the time period of the actor, the lack of consent to make them act is troubling. If the technology works, someone could even release sex tapes of Hollywood couples of yesteryear (Lucy & Desi, Pickford & Fairbanks, Gable & Lombard, DiMaggio or Kennedy & Monroe, etc.) I'd bet any amount of money that almost none of them would have been okay with something like that being released.
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws.
It's actually much more complicated than that...sales taxes are assessed at the county and city level as well as the state level. And what is and isn't taxable can vary depending on location as well.
Brick-and-mortar companies have the advantage of only needing to consider the tax codes in their own locations, not every possible location their customers may live. Customers can travel from other cities, counties and even states to make purchases without those businesses having to consider any other tax codes. Expecting internet retailers to have these considerations seems, to me, unreasonable.
It also seems unreasonable that states are expecting people to keep track of the use taxes they owe personally without providing some systematic way to do so. I'd prefer to see a system where states work with credit card companies to provide some system for tracking out of state purchases where tax was not paid. Internet retailers could then submit credit card transactions with a binary flag indicating that the item was shipped out of state and no taxes were charged. The credit card companies could then supply the states and the taxpayers with a listing of all charges that could be subject to use taxes to make filing easier and avoidance harder.
This strategy seems more realistic to me since states have a greater chance of strong-arming credit card companies into helping them than they do internet retailers. For one thing, there's fewer credit card companies, so there's fewer parties involved. Also, credit card companies do business in every single state and are subject to consumer protection laws of each state. States can threaten legislation that the credit card companies dislike if the credit card companies don't go along with the plan.
And from a consumer's point of view, it makes compliance easier. I'm hesitant to pay any use taxes because I fear that my calculations will be off and reporting a non-zero number will cause someone to investigate how I came up with that number. But if there were a statutory amount or I was presented with a listing of all the transactions I needed to consider when coming up with a figure, I'm wouldn't have any objections to paying my fair share.
In all of those cases you mentioned, you're dealing speculating that they may do something in the future. I said in my original post that the minute they lock down OS X from doing things that are possible in other OS environments I'll be the first to start switching to those environments, but what they announced today doesn't do that. When Apple starts charging $99 for XCode, then I'll start bitching. When OS X starts requiring digital signatures, then I'll start bitching. But to start bitching now before Apple has done any of these things indicates a predisposition towards criticizing Apple.
All the anti-Apple responses to my post can basically be boiled down to, "The writing is on the wall and the announcements today are the first step towards what we're afraid of." But the point of my post is that OS X Lion appears no more locked down today that OS X Snow Leopard. All of what was announced today was an optional layer on top of the normal OS X that can do things that people may find useful. If Apple's vision for the future of their platform is, in fact, the walled garden that so many people here fear, there's plenty of time if and when they actually do start locking things down to abandon the platform for other options. But today's announcements aren't examples of them starting to do that.
I use OS X because it gives me everything I need. I have the power of a true Unix environment without the time commitment that other Unix OSs require to configure they way I like them. And with various applications installed (Quicksilver, Witch and a few others), OS X gives me unparalleled ability to work without ever having to touch a mouse or trackpad. As soon as this situation changes or other platforms evolve to offer me more, I'll switch...it's that simple. I'm not a technophobe who has problems adapting to new platforms.
The thing that actually does upset me about today's announcements is how much Apple seems to be committed to making the mouse and multi-touch gestures an essential part of using their OS. If people were making complaints like this, I'd be generally supportive of their raising those issues. But as long as what's being offered is pure FUD, I'll point out that there's nothing substantive there and that everything being presented is speculative.
why is their statement on the future of OS X to be believed?
Why is the paranoia of non-mac users posting in a web forum to be believed? Why should we worry when Apple is adding functionality, even if that functionality is locked down. The moment they start locking down existing functionality, I'll be the first to protest and I'll immediately start to consider abandoning OS X for Ubuntu. But none of what they announced today impacts my ability to do all the non-locked-down things that I do on my Mac.
I can still fire up a terminal window and have the full power of a CLI. I can probably even do that from their new Launch Pad app launcher too. I can still install the development tools so that I can build and install standard Unix software and use XCode to build Mac software. I can still install Eclipse when I want a different development environment (basically when I'm not developing Cocoa-based apps.) I can even fire up Emacs or Vim from within the the CLI, though I prefer working in either Eclipse or Qt Creator (when working with Qt.) And I can still install apps in any of the ways that I've always done...whether that be by MacPorts, Fink or the traditional application installation methods (dragging the.app to Applications or installing the.pkg.)
So why should I believe any of the "they're turning the Mac into the iPad" hysteria? They've just added an iPad-like layer on top of the traditional Mac environment without removing any of the access to that environment. I'm still in control of when/whether I wish to access stuff through the new layer or whether I'd like to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing them.
But if you've encrypted the hard drive of your main computer, and you have to enter a password every time you start it... a jury isn't necessarily going to believe that you've suddenly conveniently 'forgotten it'.
There are other ways to remember passwords other than committing them to memory. I seem to remember hearing about intelligence agencies teaching spies passwords based on muscle memory so that they couldn't be divulged under torture.
I'm a pianist and I've experimented with using passwords based on songs that I know by heart and it works great. My left hand is a bit sloppy, so I just use it on the shift key as if it was the sustain pedal. I had one password that was over 100 characters long and I had no problems entering it in. And even if someone knew the song, it's doubtful they could determine the password since it depends entirely on how I play the piece and which part of the piano key I use for each note. I suppose someone could figure it out by watching me play the piece, but I'm not even sure that would work and I could always play it slightly differently if I knew I was being watched.
If someone is a talented musician, I could see them plausibly telling a jury that they're unsure of the password because they enter it by playing a particularly difficult part of a song. Bonus difficulty points for telling them that the software is time sensitive and expects keys to be keyed in at the same rate as when the password was set.
The simplest thing is to dull the reflective surfaces of the offending parts of the building. This problem isn't unique, it's happened before elsewhere.
NoScript won't stop you following them unless the redirect systems are abusing JavaScript for this. Are they? Oh dear god no.
JavaScript is the only way to add POST data to the request, so it is typically used in situations like SSO where the redirect is actually submitting a form.
We've also run into problems with our JavaScript framework (GWT) since it uses URL fragments to represent state and those are not sent to the server. So when the URL fragment needs to survive the redirect, we have to use JavaScript.
It could also be useful in situations where you want to conditionally redirect based on some criteria not available in the initial HTTP request. For example, let's say you wanted to redirect clients with a screen width less than 800px wide to a page that explained why that was the minimum screen width for your site.
HTTP redirects are preferable when the functionality allows them, but JavaScript is far more flexible for the situations where HTTP redirects won't work.
Swearing may not be, but being able to contextually adjust your behavior is. I'd bet that everyone in your honors program was able to differentiate between situations where it's inappropriate to swear and situations where it's permissible or even expected to do so. That kind of awareness and ability to read situations is definitely something that more intelligent people do better.
There probably is a correlation between inappropriate swearing and low education/IQ.
They know their relevance is ending when the 20 somethings that used to watch them while eating cheetos are now turning 30 and are bored with their childish humor.
Got a source for that? My Googling turned up this:
Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Daily Show” were up +10% among Adults 18-49, +22% among Adults 18-34, up +20% among Men 18-34 and up +15% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 2.2 million Total Viewers (P2+)
Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Colbert Report” were up +9% among Adults 18-49, +18% among Adults 18-34, up +13% among Men 18-34 and up +12% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 1.5 million Total Viewers (P2+)
Unless that's factually incorrect, it would appear that they're relevance is increasing rather than decreasing and these rallies may be an attempt to publicly show their relevance to a country that's gotten the impression that the tea party groups are much more relevant than they actually are.
I believe you missed the point of the world-class athlete comparison. The point was that with enough practice and effort, we can do anything as well with our off hand as we can with our dominant hand. I chose the world-class athlete because it showed that it's possible to not only do something as well as could be done with the dominant hand, it's possible to do it better. Sure, he had to put a huge time commitment into getting as good as he did. But I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of that time commitment would have been the same had he chosen to use his dominant hand. I've taught myself to do many things with my off hand and, while it's extremely awkward at the start, it takes a lot less time than most people think.
There's a tendency to take the initial incredibly-clumsy attempts as an indication that you'll never get proficient, and that's simply not true. When I started to play ping pong left handed, I couldn't control the ball at all. But we played for 2 hours straight and started noticing a slight improvement. I lost almost every single point, but I could tell I was getting better. Two weeks later it was arguable which was my better playing hand.
My intention was not to be disingenuous. I was only trying to point out that many people, including the story's poster, underestimate their ability to adapt. He used the word impossible which clearly indicated to me that he hadn't ever had experiences like mine where he put in the time to teach himself to do things better with his off hand. But once you realize how proficient you can become with your off hand, you try doing more things with that hand. And every new thing you try becomes easier than the previous one.
The GP is basically being an insensitive clod in suggesting that lefties can easily do things right-handed.
I never said it was easy, only possible. The submitter said it was impossible, not difficult.
I was merely pointing out that there was a possibility that he hadn't considered. I'm right handed but I've been able to teach myself to do things with my left hand through conscious effort. I spent 3 months learning to throw lefty and now I can throw an 80mph fastball...not quite as fast as I can throw with my right, but close. I learned to play ping pong with my left hand initially to offer a handicap against players not at my level, but I'm now equally good with either hand. I've also learned to bowl and write with my left. And the goal for me in all of that was to get better at playing songs on piano with melodic bass clef parts that require more dexterity for the fingering. And it's worked pretty well...the more I force my brain to learn how to use my left hand for things that come more natural with my right, the better I get at doing most things with my left.
The story had such a defeatist tone like there was absolutely no way he could play the game. I was just pointing out the error in that thinking since I have experience working through similar things.
As I understand it, his coach identified high-bouncing balls to the opponent's backhand as the most difficult to handle and tailored his player/nephew's game to hit balls with an absurd amount of top spin towards the majority of players backhand side. Over the course of a match, reaching up to hit that shot will also cause the player to expend a lot of energy. His game has evolved to rely less on that, but it was still an incredibly effective strategy that he used to win titles immediately upon turning pro (he won the first 4 French Open tournaments he entered.)
...making it impossible for the game to be played for anyone who isn't right-handed.
That seems like a bizarre definition of the word impossible. It may be impossible for someone who doesn't have a right hand, but it is possible to build dexterity in your off hand. Just hold the thing like a right handed person. It might take some time to get used to, but it's still possible.
For instance, the current holder of the last 3 tennis grand slams is naturally right-handed but plays as a lefty. He built the muscle memory necessary be good at it and now it's not a problem for him. I see no reason why tennis would be easier to master with your off hand than a video game would be.
The group probably pays them a few thousand dollars a year. My company uses Rackspace and pays them over a hundred thousand dollars every year. And we're small...there's lots of customers that pay them a lot more than we do.
So what if this group's antagonistic efforts resulted in a service disruption for the customers that pay more? Well, I can tell you that significant service disruption to our site will cost Rackspace money based on the contract we have with them. That money alone is probably more than the church will pay them in a year. I see no reason why their larger customers won't have similar contractual provisions with larger financial consequences.
So why is it stupid that Rackspace is shutting down a site that earns them a negligible profit when that site makes the entire organization a target for extremists? It seems irresponsible to me for them to do otherwise.
The part of me that thinks that it sucks that extremists groups can suppress criticism in this way wishes Rackspace had been more principled. But the part of me that knows the shitstorm I'd have to go through at work if our site was unavailable due to a DDoS of Rackspace or a car bomb at our data center or any of the other violent measures that could be taken against Rackspace is glad that they've taken the more pragmatic approach. There are plenty of smaller hosting providers that a group of that size can choose.
Hey...Budweiser is awesome! It's just a shame some enterprising individual in the late 1800s started selling (clydesdale) horse piss disguised as beer and stole the name to lend some credibility to his swill.
That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world.
One of the ironies of this is that it's probably going to be what saves the American auto industry. The historic dislike of many of the neighboring Asian countries means that a number of the brands that are popular in America have very little of the Chinese market. And American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars. IIRC, Buicks are quite popular there since that's what the emperor drove back before even rich people could think of owning an automobile there.
The American auto industry has lost the US market to the Japanese/Koreans at the low end and the Germans at the high end, but with the Chinese market expanding the way it is, that may not matter much.
I thought about doing that for my FreeNAS box, but booting off the thumb drive was slow and I was worried that it would run into reliability problems if used as a primary drive. I ended up spending about $20 more than you did and getting a cheap controller card and an industrial flash module.
The system boots considerably faster than it did off the thumb drive and since it only uses the card's IDE slot, I've now got 2 SATA/eSATA connections to add more storage, should the need arise.
Why is it not okay just to coast along when you're on a good thing already?
I think it's drilled into students in business school (if not earlier) that perpetual growth is the only reasonable goal.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to tag along with a graduate business school trip to Japan (a parent was the faculty chaperon for the trip.) On the trip, we met a diverse selection of Japanese CEOs and executives. One of the most interesting to me was the head of a Sake brewer who was running the business that had been in his family since the early 1600s. It wasn't really his responses that were enlightening to me, but the questions the students asked. After asking basic questions about sales and profits (which were apparently relatively flat, as beer is becoming more popular among Japanese youth than Sake), he had to endure a string of questions asking about his plans for increasing market share, overseas expansion and even creating new product lines that would be more popular with today's youth.
His answer was almost identical to every single question...it basically boiled down to, "I just want to run my family's company the way my ancestors have. I want to make the best Sake I can possibly make and I want to provide for my family and leave the business to my sons. My profits provide a comfortable life for my family and myself and our Sake has won many awards. So I have no plans to..." (where... is whatever he was asked about)
It not only went on for nearly the entire hour he answered questions, but the discussions at dinner later indicated that none of the students could understand his point of view. Everyone kept saying how naive he was and everything they would do if they were in his position. It was disheartening to think that these students were the future business leaders of America.
Some of the reasons it won come from the reviewers being used to internal combustion engines. For example, they listed the satisfying sound of the Porsche as one of the reasons they liked it better than the Tesla.
This is yet another case of a technology being developed that's fundamentally different from what came before it and having to deal with the fact that humans have adjusted to the old technology. Digital photography had to cope with this because people had learned to feel that graininess was natural and pixelization felt less pleasant. And we still see lens flares in movies even when there's no camera involved because it feels natural to the viewer. Movies in general are also a good example...they're still at 24 fps because, despite being better by almost any conceivable measurement, it stops feeling like a movie at a higher, smoother frame rate.
The Porsche is likely still the superior automobile...and it should be considering Porsche's designs are the result of 80 years of experience and refinement. But the review should have stuck to objective measurements rather than commenting on things that inherently tilt the playing field towards the incumbent technology.
MySpace may not, but the Friendster point is valid.
Friendster had scalability problems that resulted in extremely slow performance. It made the site almost unusable. But the last straw was when they deleted all the fakester accounts. They basically took one of the best features of the site and a chunk of creativity on the part of their users and threw it away.
The point being, Facebook will remain on top as long as they don't screw up too badly. But never underestimate the effect of a massive blunder on their part. The privacy problems they've had seem like the first step in that direction...not enough on its own, but if they follow it up with another event/decision that angers users, that may start the exodus. And as Friendster found out, once people leave, they're gone forever.
The AOL analogy shouldn't have mentioned email. Email existed before AOL started offering the service and AOL's email offering could always communicate with non-AOL users.
The better corollary is AIM. AOL's chat was the same walled garden that FB is. And, like FB, you signed up because everyone in your social group was signed up for the service. There were other competitors (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ), but AIM was the most popular. Eventually someone decided that an open source approach based on open standards would make sense, and today we have Jabber, though it's never really displaced AIM. But the competitive pressure forced AOL to open AIM to non-AOL subscribers.
That is what will happen to Facebook. They have closed competitors that aren't too popular and people will create an open competitor that will get just enough traction so that it forces Facebook to play nice and allow things like exporting your data out of their app and interacting/communicating with Facebook users without needing an account. But, in the end, most users will stay with Facebook and all the controversy will fade away.
BTW...what self-respecting Slashdotter has never heard of Prodigy? Compuserve? GEnie?
Slashdot Mirror
The key word is likely sustained. You might be getting 2-3MB/s the majority of the time and may not be noticing the minute or two that the transfer speed drops significantly because you're either not watching it closely or not downloading anything at the time. But when streaming, if transfer speeds drop at all and you exhaust what little buffer there is, you've either got to adjust to the available bandwidth or stop and refill the buffer.
My personal experience watching Netflix on Comcast and Charter bears this out...it's quite common for the vast majority of a movie or show to be very high quality but have short periods where the quality level dips or the streaming stops for a bit. So while I too frequently get big-Bs/s on downloads, the sustained transfer rate is lower because they can't keep that level of performance over the 2-hour period that I watch the movie.
I don't think this is about Netflix specifically since I see the same dips in quality when watching espn3.com as I do with Netflix on both providers. And considering that both providers have paid espn to allow me to use espn3.com, I find it unlikely that they'd do any type of throttling to discourage using it as it would be much easier (and cheaper) to just not pay for it.
...but why anyone would give a fuck about an event to award people in an industry that they're not even part of is beyond me.
It's for the same reason that people who know better buy lottery tickets. It's not because they think they can win, it's because they enjoy fantasizing about what would happen if they did.
Similarly, the appeal watching the Oscars and paying attention to the Hollywood lifestyle is in the fantasizing about being part of it. The vast majority of the people in the world are not pretty enough, creative enough or otherwise talented enough to make it in that world. But nearly all the jobs are relatable enough to imagine yourself doing them, which makes it easy to imagine yourself living with all the perks of that life. You can imagine what it would be like to live in their expensive houses, drive their expensive cars and date their gorgeous girlfriends/boyfriends. And those fantasies, however improbable, are pleasant to have. So people tune in to live vicariously through those who are able to live that way.
Saying that corporations are inherently evil isn't an indictment of capitalism. You seem to be conflating the two.
What it does mean is the realization that unfettered capitalism will result in serious problems and that Government needs to provide the necessary regulations to ensure that corporations act in a less psychopathic manner.
It's great that HP, Sony and Dell have been able to provide us with such cheap computers, but it's important that government ensure that those companies haven't done that by using cancer-causing materials or polluting the environment in pursuit of the goal of out-competing their competitors. And it's important that when those companies decide to lay off 10% of their workforce to bump the stock higher for the quarter, government is the one that forces them to pay unemployment costs associated with their layoffs.
And it's not just the externalities that should concern government, though that's the most important piece of the puzzle. Government can also provide incentives to act in a certain way. Those increased life spans owe a lot to the patent protections that result in companies feeling that they can spend resources developing treatments and medications without the fear that a competitor will instantly copy whatever they've done once it's complete. And there's also a ton of public funding that gets directed towards research the government deems worthwhile that might otherwise be ignored because there's not enough potential profit in the near term for corporations to be interested.
I'm not trying to argue that our government, as implemented, is an effective balance against the psychopathic behaviors of corporations...I think enough people have bemoaned the excesses of corporate behavior and the willingness of our recent government to represent those psychopathic behaviors over the interests of the majority of the people in this country. I'm just trying to point out that it's essential to embrace the fact that corporations are inherently psychopathic. The notion that regulation is bad and needs to be scaled back is ludicrous and, if we continue to repeal regulations, will further exacerbate the situation where corporations naively pursue profit without any concern for the well-being of society. It's true that not all regulations are good regulations, but we need to realize that significant regulation of corporate behavior is the only thing that will make capitalism work.
Just like our government itself was designed to work with checks and balances, capitalism needs similar checks and balances to run smoothly. Most critics of corporations aren't arguing for eliminating capitalism entirely, they're only advocating more government regulation to keep companies in line.
The difference between this and that is that that is limited to things the actor knowingly did. They knew that people would view their performance, albeit not in the context of a commercial. And, presumably, they made their performance after signing a contract that set ownership of the creation and could have dictated other terms.
If you digitally bring back the star, you could theoretically make them do something they wouldn't have been comfortable with. Whether it be something like a young Ronald Regan endorsing a Democratic candidate or a love scene that would have been scandalous during the time period of the actor, the lack of consent to make them act is troubling. If the technology works, someone could even release sex tapes of Hollywood couples of yesteryear (Lucy & Desi, Pickford & Fairbanks, Gable & Lombard, DiMaggio or Kennedy & Monroe, etc.) I'd bet any amount of money that almost none of them would have been okay with something like that being released.
Just to be a prick, if you are a firm retail stores in 50 states, you must keep up with 50 state laws.
It's actually much more complicated than that...sales taxes are assessed at the county and city level as well as the state level. And what is and isn't taxable can vary depending on location as well.
Brick-and-mortar companies have the advantage of only needing to consider the tax codes in their own locations, not every possible location their customers may live. Customers can travel from other cities, counties and even states to make purchases without those businesses having to consider any other tax codes. Expecting internet retailers to have these considerations seems, to me, unreasonable.
It also seems unreasonable that states are expecting people to keep track of the use taxes they owe personally without providing some systematic way to do so. I'd prefer to see a system where states work with credit card companies to provide some system for tracking out of state purchases where tax was not paid. Internet retailers could then submit credit card transactions with a binary flag indicating that the item was shipped out of state and no taxes were charged. The credit card companies could then supply the states and the taxpayers with a listing of all charges that could be subject to use taxes to make filing easier and avoidance harder.
This strategy seems more realistic to me since states have a greater chance of strong-arming credit card companies into helping them than they do internet retailers. For one thing, there's fewer credit card companies, so there's fewer parties involved. Also, credit card companies do business in every single state and are subject to consumer protection laws of each state. States can threaten legislation that the credit card companies dislike if the credit card companies don't go along with the plan.
And from a consumer's point of view, it makes compliance easier. I'm hesitant to pay any use taxes because I fear that my calculations will be off and reporting a non-zero number will cause someone to investigate how I came up with that number. But if there were a statutory amount or I was presented with a listing of all the transactions I needed to consider when coming up with a figure, I'm wouldn't have any objections to paying my fair share.
In all of those cases you mentioned, you're dealing speculating that they may do something in the future. I said in my original post that the minute they lock down OS X from doing things that are possible in other OS environments I'll be the first to start switching to those environments, but what they announced today doesn't do that. When Apple starts charging $99 for XCode, then I'll start bitching. When OS X starts requiring digital signatures, then I'll start bitching. But to start bitching now before Apple has done any of these things indicates a predisposition towards criticizing Apple.
All the anti-Apple responses to my post can basically be boiled down to, "The writing is on the wall and the announcements today are the first step towards what we're afraid of." But the point of my post is that OS X Lion appears no more locked down today that OS X Snow Leopard. All of what was announced today was an optional layer on top of the normal OS X that can do things that people may find useful. If Apple's vision for the future of their platform is, in fact, the walled garden that so many people here fear, there's plenty of time if and when they actually do start locking things down to abandon the platform for other options. But today's announcements aren't examples of them starting to do that.
I use OS X because it gives me everything I need. I have the power of a true Unix environment without the time commitment that other Unix OSs require to configure they way I like them. And with various applications installed (Quicksilver, Witch and a few others), OS X gives me unparalleled ability to work without ever having to touch a mouse or trackpad. As soon as this situation changes or other platforms evolve to offer me more, I'll switch...it's that simple. I'm not a technophobe who has problems adapting to new platforms.
The thing that actually does upset me about today's announcements is how much Apple seems to be committed to making the mouse and multi-touch gestures an essential part of using their OS. If people were making complaints like this, I'd be generally supportive of their raising those issues. But as long as what's being offered is pure FUD, I'll point out that there's nothing substantive there and that everything being presented is speculative.
why is their statement on the future of OS X to be believed?
Why is the paranoia of non-mac users posting in a web forum to be believed? Why should we worry when Apple is adding functionality, even if that functionality is locked down. The moment they start locking down existing functionality, I'll be the first to protest and I'll immediately start to consider abandoning OS X for Ubuntu. But none of what they announced today impacts my ability to do all the non-locked-down things that I do on my Mac.
I can still fire up a terminal window and have the full power of a CLI. I can probably even do that from their new Launch Pad app launcher too. I can still install the development tools so that I can build and install standard Unix software and use XCode to build Mac software. I can still install Eclipse when I want a different development environment (basically when I'm not developing Cocoa-based apps.) I can even fire up Emacs or Vim from within the the CLI, though I prefer working in either Eclipse or Qt Creator (when working with Qt.) And I can still install apps in any of the ways that I've always done...whether that be by MacPorts, Fink or the traditional application installation methods (dragging the .app to Applications or installing the .pkg.)
So why should I believe any of the "they're turning the Mac into the iPad" hysteria? They've just added an iPad-like layer on top of the traditional Mac environment without removing any of the access to that environment. I'm still in control of when/whether I wish to access stuff through the new layer or whether I'd like to do things the way I'm accustomed to doing them.
But if you've encrypted the hard drive of your main computer, and you have to enter a password every time you start it... a jury isn't necessarily going to believe that you've suddenly conveniently 'forgotten it'.
There are other ways to remember passwords other than committing them to memory. I seem to remember hearing about intelligence agencies teaching spies passwords based on muscle memory so that they couldn't be divulged under torture.
I'm a pianist and I've experimented with using passwords based on songs that I know by heart and it works great. My left hand is a bit sloppy, so I just use it on the shift key as if it was the sustain pedal. I had one password that was over 100 characters long and I had no problems entering it in. And even if someone knew the song, it's doubtful they could determine the password since it depends entirely on how I play the piece and which part of the piano key I use for each note. I suppose someone could figure it out by watching me play the piece, but I'm not even sure that would work and I could always play it slightly differently if I knew I was being watched.
If someone is a talented musician, I could see them plausibly telling a jury that they're unsure of the password because they enter it by playing a particularly difficult part of a song. Bonus difficulty points for telling them that the software is time sensitive and expects keys to be keyed in at the same rate as when the password was set.
once firefox and/or chrome have enterprise tools to make it work with activedirectory
This has been an option for a couple of years now and it hasn't made much difference.
The simplest thing is to dull the reflective surfaces of the offending parts of the building. This problem isn't unique, it's happened before elsewhere.
NoScript won't stop you following them unless the redirect systems are abusing JavaScript for this. Are they? Oh dear god no.
JavaScript is the only way to add POST data to the request, so it is typically used in situations like SSO where the redirect is actually submitting a form.
We've also run into problems with our JavaScript framework (GWT) since it uses URL fragments to represent state and those are not sent to the server. So when the URL fragment needs to survive the redirect, we have to use JavaScript.
It could also be useful in situations where you want to conditionally redirect based on some criteria not available in the initial HTTP request. For example, let's say you wanted to redirect clients with a screen width less than 800px wide to a page that explained why that was the minimum screen width for your site.
HTTP redirects are preferable when the functionality allows them, but JavaScript is far more flexible for the situations where HTTP redirects won't work.
Swearing may not be, but being able to contextually adjust your behavior is. I'd bet that everyone in your honors program was able to differentiate between situations where it's inappropriate to swear and situations where it's permissible or even expected to do so. That kind of awareness and ability to read situations is definitely something that more intelligent people do better.
There probably is a correlation between inappropriate swearing and low education/IQ.
They know their relevance is ending when the 20 somethings that used to watch them while eating cheetos are now turning 30 and are bored with their childish humor.
Got a source for that? My Googling turned up this:
Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Daily Show” were up +10% among Adults 18-49, +22% among Adults 18-34, up +20% among Men 18-34 and up +15% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 2.2 million Total Viewers (P2+)
Vs. last summer, ratings for “The Colbert Report” were up +9% among Adults 18-49, +18% among Adults 18-34, up +13% among Men 18-34 and up +12% among Men 18-24. Viewership grew +9% to 1.5 million Total Viewers (P2+)
Unless that's factually incorrect, it would appear that they're relevance is increasing rather than decreasing and these rallies may be an attempt to publicly show their relevance to a country that's gotten the impression that the tea party groups are much more relevant than they actually are.
I believe you missed the point of the world-class athlete comparison. The point was that with enough practice and effort, we can do anything as well with our off hand as we can with our dominant hand. I chose the world-class athlete because it showed that it's possible to not only do something as well as could be done with the dominant hand, it's possible to do it better. Sure, he had to put a huge time commitment into getting as good as he did. But I can tell you from experience that the vast majority of that time commitment would have been the same had he chosen to use his dominant hand. I've taught myself to do many things with my off hand and, while it's extremely awkward at the start, it takes a lot less time than most people think.
There's a tendency to take the initial incredibly-clumsy attempts as an indication that you'll never get proficient, and that's simply not true. When I started to play ping pong left handed, I couldn't control the ball at all. But we played for 2 hours straight and started noticing a slight improvement. I lost almost every single point, but I could tell I was getting better. Two weeks later it was arguable which was my better playing hand.
My intention was not to be disingenuous. I was only trying to point out that many people, including the story's poster, underestimate their ability to adapt. He used the word impossible which clearly indicated to me that he hadn't ever had experiences like mine where he put in the time to teach himself to do things better with his off hand. But once you realize how proficient you can become with your off hand, you try doing more things with that hand. And every new thing you try becomes easier than the previous one.
The GP is basically being an insensitive clod in suggesting that lefties can easily do things right-handed.
I never said it was easy, only possible. The submitter said it was impossible, not difficult.
I was merely pointing out that there was a possibility that he hadn't considered. I'm right handed but I've been able to teach myself to do things with my left hand through conscious effort. I spent 3 months learning to throw lefty and now I can throw an 80mph fastball...not quite as fast as I can throw with my right, but close. I learned to play ping pong with my left hand initially to offer a handicap against players not at my level, but I'm now equally good with either hand. I've also learned to bowl and write with my left. And the goal for me in all of that was to get better at playing songs on piano with melodic bass clef parts that require more dexterity for the fingering. And it's worked pretty well...the more I force my brain to learn how to use my left hand for things that come more natural with my right, the better I get at doing most things with my left.
The story had such a defeatist tone like there was absolutely no way he could play the game. I was just pointing out the error in that thinking since I have experience working through similar things.
As I understand it, his coach identified high-bouncing balls to the opponent's backhand as the most difficult to handle and tailored his player/nephew's game to hit balls with an absurd amount of top spin towards the majority of players backhand side. Over the course of a match, reaching up to hit that shot will also cause the player to expend a lot of energy. His game has evolved to rely less on that, but it was still an incredibly effective strategy that he used to win titles immediately upon turning pro (he won the first 4 French Open tournaments he entered.)
...making it impossible for the game to be played for anyone who isn't right-handed.
That seems like a bizarre definition of the word impossible. It may be impossible for someone who doesn't have a right hand, but it is possible to build dexterity in your off hand. Just hold the thing like a right handed person. It might take some time to get used to, but it's still possible.
For instance, the current holder of the last 3 tennis grand slams is naturally right-handed but plays as a lefty. He built the muscle memory necessary be good at it and now it's not a problem for him. I see no reason why tennis would be easier to master with your off hand than a video game would be.
Stupid? Really?
The group probably pays them a few thousand dollars a year. My company uses Rackspace and pays them over a hundred thousand dollars every year. And we're small...there's lots of customers that pay them a lot more than we do.
So what if this group's antagonistic efforts resulted in a service disruption for the customers that pay more? Well, I can tell you that significant service disruption to our site will cost Rackspace money based on the contract we have with them. That money alone is probably more than the church will pay them in a year. I see no reason why their larger customers won't have similar contractual provisions with larger financial consequences.
So why is it stupid that Rackspace is shutting down a site that earns them a negligible profit when that site makes the entire organization a target for extremists? It seems irresponsible to me for them to do otherwise.
The part of me that thinks that it sucks that extremists groups can suppress criticism in this way wishes Rackspace had been more principled. But the part of me that knows the shitstorm I'd have to go through at work if our site was unavailable due to a DDoS of Rackspace or a car bomb at our data center or any of the other violent measures that could be taken against Rackspace is glad that they've taken the more pragmatic approach. There are plenty of smaller hosting providers that a group of that size can choose.
Hey...Budweiser is awesome! It's just a shame some enterprising individual in the late 1800s started selling (clydesdale) horse piss disguised as beer and stole the name to lend some credibility to his swill.
If you want great beer, go Czech...German and British are merely well above average. There's a reason why the Czechs are the #1 per capita beer consumption country in the world.
That includes a new interest in automobiles, as status symbols and otherwise, resulting in China becoming the largest car market in the world.
One of the ironies of this is that it's probably going to be what saves the American auto industry. The historic dislike of many of the neighboring Asian countries means that a number of the brands that are popular in America have very little of the Chinese market. And American cars are seen very popular and often seen as the luxury alternative to cheap Chinese cars. IIRC, Buicks are quite popular there since that's what the emperor drove back before even rich people could think of owning an automobile there.
The American auto industry has lost the US market to the Japanese/Koreans at the low end and the Germans at the high end, but with the Chinese market expanding the way it is, that may not matter much.
I thought about doing that for my FreeNAS box, but booting off the thumb drive was slow and I was worried that it would run into reliability problems if used as a primary drive. I ended up spending about $20 more than you did and getting a cheap controller card and an industrial flash module.
The system boots considerably faster than it did off the thumb drive and since it only uses the card's IDE slot, I've now got 2 SATA/eSATA connections to add more storage, should the need arise.
Why is it not okay just to coast along when you're on a good thing already?
I think it's drilled into students in business school (if not earlier) that perpetual growth is the only reasonable goal.
A few years ago, I had an opportunity to tag along with a graduate business school trip to Japan (a parent was the faculty chaperon for the trip.) On the trip, we met a diverse selection of Japanese CEOs and executives. One of the most interesting to me was the head of a Sake brewer who was running the business that had been in his family since the early 1600s. It wasn't really his responses that were enlightening to me, but the questions the students asked. After asking basic questions about sales and profits (which were apparently relatively flat, as beer is becoming more popular among Japanese youth than Sake), he had to endure a string of questions asking about his plans for increasing market share, overseas expansion and even creating new product lines that would be more popular with today's youth.
His answer was almost identical to every single question...it basically boiled down to, "I just want to run my family's company the way my ancestors have. I want to make the best Sake I can possibly make and I want to provide for my family and leave the business to my sons. My profits provide a comfortable life for my family and myself and our Sake has won many awards. So I have no plans to ..." (where ... is whatever he was asked about)
It not only went on for nearly the entire hour he answered questions, but the discussions at dinner later indicated that none of the students could understand his point of view. Everyone kept saying how naive he was and everything they would do if they were in his position. It was disheartening to think that these students were the future business leaders of America.
Some of the reasons it won come from the reviewers being used to internal combustion engines. For example, they listed the satisfying sound of the Porsche as one of the reasons they liked it better than the Tesla.
This is yet another case of a technology being developed that's fundamentally different from what came before it and having to deal with the fact that humans have adjusted to the old technology. Digital photography had to cope with this because people had learned to feel that graininess was natural and pixelization felt less pleasant. And we still see lens flares in movies even when there's no camera involved because it feels natural to the viewer. Movies in general are also a good example...they're still at 24 fps because, despite being better by almost any conceivable measurement, it stops feeling like a movie at a higher, smoother frame rate.
The Porsche is likely still the superior automobile...and it should be considering Porsche's designs are the result of 80 years of experience and refinement. But the review should have stuck to objective measurements rather than commenting on things that inherently tilt the playing field towards the incumbent technology.
MySpace may not, but the Friendster point is valid.
Friendster had scalability problems that resulted in extremely slow performance. It made the site almost unusable. But the last straw was when they deleted all the fakester accounts. They basically took one of the best features of the site and a chunk of creativity on the part of their users and threw it away.
The point being, Facebook will remain on top as long as they don't screw up too badly. But never underestimate the effect of a massive blunder on their part. The privacy problems they've had seem like the first step in that direction...not enough on its own, but if they follow it up with another event/decision that angers users, that may start the exodus. And as Friendster found out, once people leave, they're gone forever.
The AOL analogy shouldn't have mentioned email. Email existed before AOL started offering the service and AOL's email offering could always communicate with non-AOL users.
The better corollary is AIM. AOL's chat was the same walled garden that FB is. And, like FB, you signed up because everyone in your social group was signed up for the service. There were other competitors (Yahoo, MSN, ICQ), but AIM was the most popular. Eventually someone decided that an open source approach based on open standards would make sense, and today we have Jabber, though it's never really displaced AIM. But the competitive pressure forced AOL to open AIM to non-AOL subscribers.
That is what will happen to Facebook. They have closed competitors that aren't too popular and people will create an open competitor that will get just enough traction so that it forces Facebook to play nice and allow things like exporting your data out of their app and interacting/communicating with Facebook users without needing an account. But, in the end, most users will stay with Facebook and all the controversy will fade away.
BTW...what self-respecting Slashdotter has never heard of Prodigy? Compuserve? GEnie?