>If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
Congratulations. You win the 'most mind-bogglingly retarded statement of the millennium' award.
In reality, I'm aware that nobody is actually stupid enough to hold such an indefensibly ludicrous position, so you're clearly trolling. Good job though, it's the first troll so successful that I'm not going to read HN again. A community that could give this trash even a single upvote is not a community I want to go anywhere near.
>I usually multiple bytes * 10 to account for overhead
I don't disagree with your point, but this bit is faulty. If you want to account for some overhead you should multiply by a number lower than 8, not higher.
No, he's right here--just looking at it from a different perspective. He's saying "it takes roughly 3.5Gbit/s of bandwidth to support 350MB/s of real data transfer."
So does almost everyone, when asked. The depressing thing is, when it comes to actual results, the x.99 pricing still works (well, I read this on the BBC a couple of months ago - don't have the link but the study they were quoting sounded pretty convincing).
> The £.99 pricing also makes people in shops operate the till every time to make change, preventing theft.
In most US states, the listed price isn't the amount that the customer actually pays. In most retail establishments, sales tax isn't included. In most online sales, there's some shipping and handling fee.
As a result, even a "round number" price ends up being something like $12.31.
Sure, it sounds nice to have a price and know that's exactly what you're paying but I prefer the US way. I want to be reminded how much of a cut the government is taking. I don't want taxes to be hidden in the price of my purchase. I want to know that an increase in price is due to some business factor or if the government is taking a larger cut.
Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be over here not having to do mental math every time we go to buy something with a $/£/€5 bill. And we'll still know how much tax the government is charging if we really care - it's printed on the receipt.
Wondering - how do you feel about gas prices? Do you support advertising airline tickets net of 30-50% surcharges so you can know exactly how much of your ticket goes to fuel, airport charges, taxes, and "fees"? And for the other side of the coin - what about not being reminded exactly how much value you got out of the government every time you drive down a road?
> Meanwhile, the rest of the world will be over here not having to do mental math every time we go to buy something with a $/£/€5 bill. And we'll still know how much tax the government is charging if we really care - it's printed on the receipt.
Doing a little mental math is an awfully small price to pay for a little more transparency. Having it on a receipt, although good, doesn't quite cut it because most people will never look at one. I believe it to be important for every person be in tune with the cost of government.
> Wondering - how do you feel about gas prices?
Good that you mention that because I don't like the hidden taxes in gas prices and that's precisely the point I'm making. They can up the tax rates on gas here and no one would know the difference because it's built into the price.
All I'm suggesting is that we have very clear transparency in taxes and make sure everyone knows the cost; don't hide them.
> Do you support advertising airline tickets net of 30-50% surcharges so you can know exactly how much of your ticket goes to fuel, airport charges, taxes, and "fees"?
I'm not talking about surcharges; fuel, airport charges, and fees are nice to know but have nothing to do with taxes so have nothing to do with my point. However, they are nice to have itemized.
As for the taxes: yeah, I would like them clearly separated from the advertised price. It's annoying but are you seeing the pattern yet? Taxes that are hidden away in the price tend to be ridiculous and easily increased without the average person noticing. I'm fine with taxes but this isn't what I would call transparency and that's a bad thing.
[Side note: this wouldn't be so messy if we didn't have absurd taxes. "Sept. 11 Security Fee"? Why isn't that a service charged to the airport/airlines? Oh, because then it would have to be reasonable and the airlines would simply price their tickets with this cost in consideration and the TSA wouldn't be spending millions on privacy-invading machines that don't improve security. But they're the government and can just charge the passengers directly and when they need more money, instead of having to justify it to a for-profit company as actually improving security, they can do whatever they want and increase the tax.]
> And for the other side of the coin - what about not being reminded exactly how much value you got out of the government every time you drive down a road?
I suppose this question is because you think I object to taxes; I don't. I'm fine with them but with as much transparency as possible.
>> And for the other side of the coin - what about not being reminded exactly how much value you got out of the government every time you drive down a road?
> I suppose this question is because you think I object to taxes; I don't. I'm fine with them but with as much transparency as possible.
I'm not sure I follow. You want transparency for government revenue and for every person to be in tune with the cost of government. Do you think it is important for people to be in tune with the expenses of said government? You could easily make the claim that explicit transparency in terms of how much money is spent on $government_service would be beneficial (true cost of "free" roads, money spent on each military base, etc). Sure, you could look it up in the budget, but most people will never look at one.
In Australia, we have a single tax for goods and services, the "GST". It is 10%, (or put otherwise, 1/11 of the price of an item). Only a few categories are excluded, such as fresh food and beverages, healthcare, and education services.
There are a few things with different/additional taxes, but generally tax is pretty transparent here, so prices are usually inclusive of tax.
>You can also set up IPv6 for yourself or your home network via a tunnel (which is a pretty fun exercise), and get access to the IPv6-enabled Internet. All recent operating systems have very good support for it -- even Windows 7 will hear RA and autoconfigure itself.
In fact, even Windows XP will automagically set up a 6to4 tunnel with no configuration needed if you have a public IPv4 address. Just enable IPv6 support for your connection and it does it all for you.
>Finally, that's the first comment I get, instead of someone extolling the virtues of swap and babbling warmed-over 1990s rules of thumb about "twice the RAM is the recommended size of your swap file" as if I'm going to wait for even 200MB of swap to fill up before flipping out and killing the offending process, let alone 8GB.
Those people have doubtless misunderstood the point of swap. You should have a swapfile/partition because it allows allocated but currently unused memory (from an application which keeps data hanging around which is not needed for most of it's working life, or an application which simply leaks) to be dumped to long term storage, thus freeing memory for its real use: page cache. Sweet, sweet page cache.
I'm always happy to see a few tens, even a couple of hundred MB of swap in use, because it means that some application had some unused data hanging around for so long that to leave it there would mean my machine having to read from disk more frequently, which would be Bad.
Don't know about emacs, but vim has an (optional) gui.
>In Sublime you can select text with your mouse
And in vim - even in the console version in fact. It's useful being able to select text, scroll with the mouse wheel, etc in a terminal window, particularly if you're editing a file on a remote machine.
>and on the right there is a graphical overview of the entire document.
Depending on what 'graphical overview' means, it's almost a certainty that vim can do something similar. The only thing I can think of where that would not be the case is if you mean something like a thumbnail view of the whole document (can't see much use for that offhand, but maybe) [edit: I had a second look to see what you meant by that, and yeah it looks like that's one thing vim can't do].
Not sure if you're aware but it also has features like tabs, arbitrarily split screen, colouring (console version is limited to 256 colours unfortunately, not sure about gui [edit: gVim supports proper 24bit colours]) and numerous other features that you might only expect in a dedicated graphical application.
Having an (optional) gui is something "new". The parent post I was responding to asserted that there was nothing new in the editor space since emacs and vi.
I just opened vi on my machine and I was unable to select text. Maybe there's a way to get it to work... but in Sublime and other graphical editors it just works.
Thumbnail may have been a better word... Sublime has just that. I've found it useful when working on long files. But regardless, there are other features that a GUI enables, like code folding...
>For one thing, eFreedom.com actually answers your question. This is different from ExpertsExchange (which promises you might get an answer if you fork over $, yeah right)
Not sure if I'm taking you too literally, but Experts Exchange does answer your question without having to pay (scroll down).
That's even worse. Users habituate themselves to the two-step process in exactly the same way, only now they're annoyed because you're forcing them to do extra unnecessary work.
>Firefox doesn't hide that much of the details. You can still see the gory details of URLs and HTTP requests surfaced quite clearly, and the experience of using the web is that much richer if you know what they are and how to manipulate them. Firefox doesn't actively prevent you from doing so if you want to, which it would if it was trying to present a sealed abstraction.
Contrast with IEs 'friendly' error messages by default. Instead of an easily diagnosed 'page not found', or 'address not found', or 'server error' you get 'something went wrong' and then a list of always incorrect guesses as to what the problem might be and a confusing list of irrelevant things you can try to 'fix' the problem. I bet somebody got a bonus for that feature.
Congratulations. You win the 'most mind-bogglingly retarded statement of the millennium' award.
In reality, I'm aware that nobody is actually stupid enough to hold such an indefensibly ludicrous position, so you're clearly trolling. Good job though, it's the first troll so successful that I'm not going to read HN again. A community that could give this trash even a single upvote is not a community I want to go anywhere near.