Comment Re:So.... (Score 2, Informative) 127
Answer: Empty bottles are sturdier, but full bottles have more mass. Both can exert enough force to crack a human skull.
Answer: Empty bottles are sturdier, but full bottles have more mass. Both can exert enough force to crack a human skull.
We are talking IE6 here, it is a decade old by now. Do you still use 10 year old PC's? Do you use 10 year old cars?
Firstly, many, many people use 10 year old cars. Not as many use 10 year old computers, I grant you, but cars can last for 30-40 years or more.
Secondly, IE6 is only a tad over 8 years old. It came out in the latter half of 2001.
Really, how can you standup and claim your earned your keep when you still haven't managed to retire IE6. Do you still have a punch card reader for that essential piece of accounting software? Still use floppies because you might need one? Have word perfect installed for an old word file?
I've worked for very large companies before. And yes, punch card readers are still used in some industries. And yes, floppies are still used. And yes, Word Perfect is still used.
Big corporations don't work the way you think they do. Most of them make money by, oddly enough, not paying for things. If that 10 year old computer running 10 year old software does the job, then they will let it sit there and keep doing its job until it *needs* to be upgraded.
You don't upgrade simply because there is an available upgrade. Upgrades cost money, and every dime you spend has to produce results in some fashion. Spending money in order to "not make any more money" is generally money that you should not have spent.
That said, upgrades do make sense, but only as part of larger strategies. You don't upgrade simply because you can. That way lies never-ending maintenance costs.
Admins are to afraid of having to say to their boss "why yes sir, the system is running perfectly but I still need resources to make sure it keeps doing that in the future"
True, but that's mainly because this is a lie and we both know it.
Once you have the system working, it will work that way until the hardware fails. You don't need to continually upgrade it to make it continue to work.
You only need to continually upgrade a system that is continually doing new things. A developer's box needs upgrades. The corporate user's box who does research using the web needs upgrades. The servers? Generally they don't need anything more than security fixes. They get upgraded when they get replaced or when the upgrade can be worked into a larger project. Upgrading solely for the sake of upgrading makes no sense.
It’s like having a supercomputer to control a toaster. It makes no sense at all.
Plain old toast is so retro. I prefer my toast printed with nice designs and patterns:
Kind of sad, since it shows that some people are too stupid to realize that proof is just ABV/2.
That was sort of the point of my original conversation.
Proof = ABV * 2, but only in the United States. In the United Kingdom, Proof = 7/4 * ABV. Meaning that pure ethanol is 175 degrees proof in the UK, but 200 proof in the US. A vodka that US people would call 80 proof would only be 70 proof in the UK.
Proof is basically an historical measurement only, and here in the US we don't even have the correct ratio to make it historically accurate. 7:4 is the correct ratio for the gunpowder explanation, not 2:1. So proof, as you use it, is totally meaningless.
Actually, he used a percentage measurement. Which is valid on both "sides of the pond", as well as anywhere else in the universe that has "math".
Most people measure alcohol in percentage ABV. Only old-timers use "proof".
And "degrees proof" is only really used in the UK, despite it making no sense. "Degrees" of what, exactly? In America, it's just "proof", if it's used at all. Usually it ain't, as places that require labeling of ABV require a percentage measurement. Nowhere requires a "proof" to be put on there, but it is generally allowed.
Even then they'd be fine as long as they don't also plant beans all over the island.
Law enforcement needs to be held to a higher standard
Higher standard than what though? There's nothing illegal, immoral, or in any way wrong about somebody pointing a FLIR camera at your house. What "standard" do you propose to apply to prevent a policeman from doing something that is in no way wrong for any private citizen to do?
What you are suggesting strikes me as absurd. You're basically saying that it would be in some way a violation for a cop to point an FLIR camera at a house, but not a violation for a citizen to do the exact same action while the cop looks over his shoulder.
Now, I do grant you that there is a difference between pointing a camera at a single building because of "information received" vs. flying over neighborhoods in helicopters with a FLIR camera searching for heat sources indiscriminately. The former is fine by me, the latter is not, mainly because the latter is not about enforcing the law, it's about using anti-drug-laws to produce income sources for the police department themselves.
That's the craziest interpretation of "in plain view" I think I've heard. Wiretapping equipment is cheap so it should it be available to the local police without a warrant because, in your estimation, we can "see" the electronic signals with equipment cheaply?
To take the argument to its absurdity, crowbars are cheap so the police should be able to bust into your house without a warrant?
Your arguments are absurd, the original argument wasn't.
A private citizen can legally stand on the street and point a thermal imaging device at your house. Furthermore, such devices are relatively easy to get and cheap.
Wiretapping is not legal for a private citizen to do.
Breaking into your house with a crowbar is not legal for a private citizen to do.
The short of it is that if it's legal and relatively easy for any average joe to do, then why should the cops have to jump through hoops to do the same thing?
Thermal imaging is a bit trickier. Frankly, I have no problem with the cops doing it, as any Joe could do the same. However, I have a problem with the law that makes them want to do it in the first place (marijuana should be legal, IMO).
GROWER PROTIP: Ordinary glass blocks infrared. Line the external walls with sheets of glass and voila, FLIR cameras see nothing. You still need to vent the heat out somewhere though, so I recommend running cold water pipes out into the ground somewhere. This is only if you're serious, of course.
Or if BBC went to the future to bring back to our time a superior codec that uses a lower bit rate but produces superior image.
No, the same codec, with a different algorithm, can make the same difference. Encoding schemes today are all about the perceptual filtering.
That is, when you're encoding something, you have to pick the bits you want to keep and the bits that you can toss away (but which the viewer won't notice). However, this is not a defined thing, you can use any algorithm you choose. Thus, "quality" is not an objective and measurable thing, it's a subjective assessment based on the viewer.
So if you have an algorithm that is good at deciding what people probably won't notice, then you can get a better quality for the same bitrate. If it's extremely good, you can sometimes get a better quality at a lower bitrate. And so forth. But the codec, the method of encoding and decoding, remains the same.
Facebook has, up until now, had an expectation of privacy. Generally, posts on Facebook stay visible only to your friends.
Facebook did recently change this default setting, however it's only a matter of time before somebody sues hell out of FB for not maintaining their expectations of privacy.
I'm not saying it's right or wrong, just saying what's gonna happen.
Okay, so a three dimensional pizza would be a calzone, but what would a four-dimensional pizza look like?
More importantly, on a four-dimensional pizza, can you fill the crust with cheese?
Yeah, I never will understand these youngsters...
New York came up with a workaround. Since Amazon lets people be "affiliates", they passed a law that says if you have an affiliate in the state, then that constitutes a physical presence, which means Amazon must collect sales taxes on all sales to New Yorkers.
Amazon responded by saying "fine, we won't have any affiliates in New York then" and cut them all off.
New York said "hey, no fair, you didn't cave like everybody else did, time for angry legal action!!".
That's the basic gist of it.
You're thinking about it wrong.
There is no demand for "rentals" or "purchases". There is demand for "content" at the lowest available price point. There are acceptable tradeoffs to consumers to achieve those price points.
If you think about it, a "rental" is a time-limited "purchase", basically. That's all it is. In exchange for this restriction, the company charges less. But, *WHY* would the company charge less? Answer: Because they're getting the product back and can rent it again. This is the underlying profit of the whole video rental industry. The fact that they can buy one video for P dollars and then rent it N times at R amount, where N*R > X.
But in the digital world, they don't need to get the thing back. It is possible to sell the content indefinitely, to all who are willing to purchase it. The only reason to raise the price is to increase profit, obviously. As the price rises, the market shrinks. Obviously there is an optimization function here, to maximize profit.
Have you done the market research which shows that the demand for $3 rentals does indeed not exceed the demand for $9 purchases by a factor of three?
It's not a function of the market demand for rentals. It's a function of the market demand for the content at the given price point. If the demand is indeed greater at $3, then it would make more sense to reduce the $9 sales down to the $3 point, in order to get that much more sales. Offering essentially the same content at two different prices, even with an artificial time-limitation on one of them, is less optimal than finding the correct price point in which to maximize profit.
What's more, that price point fluctuates over time, as demand decreases. So it'd make more sense to sell the content at a high price to start, then gradually lower it, maximizing profits over the whole of the audience.
They are also spending money on DRM schemes for the non-rental sales, so how is the cost any different?
The trend is clearly going away from DRM locked content for purchases, since consumers have figured out that you don't own content with DRM in it. Witness iTunes lack of DRM on music now.
Separation of the market into rental and purchase *doesn't make any sense* in the digital realm.
Huh?
Was that a question? The statement was straightforward enough.
It doesn't make any sense to charge less for a product when it costs more to create that product than to create a product which people will pay more for.
How does it work any better in the physical world, where I can simply rip the Netflix DVD I just rented? If anything, rental works better in the digital realm (in a world with strong DRM) than it does in the physical.
There is no such thing as "strong DRM", because DRM itself is a fundamental impossibility. No DRM can ever achieve the goal that DRM was created for. All DRM that exists has been broken. Most of it relatively quickly.
And you can rip the DVD, but you can also break the DRM. Neither of these is a relevant factor.
Rental works in the physical world because there's a fixed quantity of the item, and the items must be returned. Late fees can be charged, unreturned copies can be charged off entirely.
In the digital world, how do you charge a late fee? How do you charge if somebody wants to break the DRM shell open and buy the content? There's no more market other than the rental itself, which has a fixed bandwidth cost associated with it. The material itself is not limited by quantity, so there's no inherent difference between a rental and a purchase, other than one you've imposed (which can usually be easily broken and thus screw you out of a purchase, because without the DRM shell, rental == purchase).
"Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler." -- Albert Einstein
