because over time regulations are worked to favor the existing players in the market.
Perhaps this points to a bankrupt political system which allows bribery to influence or even buy officials, rather than some fault in regulations per se? My point is that these issues should be approached in a pragmatic way, not with some dogma about 'regulations are evil', or even 'capitalism is evil'.
I agree that regulations can sometimes lead to ossification and restrict competition, but in the case of the US, and the cell phone market in particular, regulations are simply not in place to restrict predatory practices like overpricing of roaming calls. Perhaps they should be?
The issue is of government efficiency the US method in health is actually more efficient however it creates a situation of Haves and Have nots which is the problem.
What makes you think it is more efficient? The US spends more on public healthcare alone per capita than most nations with universal healthcare, or, as you call it in the United States 'socialized healthcare'. That's not even including private contributions to healthcare which probably equal public ones. The reason is that the system is hostage to pharmacutical companies, insurance companies, and private medical providers, and it's in the interest of all these parties to inflate prices.
So you pay more than other countries for less than complete coverage, and the system is getting more expensive every year. The US simply cannot afford to continue with the current system, as it is bankrupting the country with an ageing population. The only advantage to the US system is that if you are rich or work for a company which provides good healthcare coverage you will get slightly better treatment, and if you suffer from certain cancers you might get more aggressive treatment (which is very expensive). However if you are rich in other countries you can afford to pay for private care anyway.
On every other metric (including humanitarian ones) it is not as good as universal healthcare.
Really this obsession with government==bad and socialism==evil stunts all political debate in the states.
Ah, but this isn't capitalism - this is regulations, bught and paid for, allowing avoidance of capitalism. Capitalism allows competition - we have given competition away (ok, ok - sold out cheap) in exchange of supposed expensive infrastructure.
Truly free capitalism degenerates pretty quickly into monopolies and cartels (which are illegal for a reason). Once someone has a stranglehold on the market it does not allow competition as it is not in the interests of incumbents to give up power, and they have the means to easily crush any smaller companies (price fixing, bribery, coercion, subsidies below cost until the competitor goes under, etc etc).
The only way to ensure that doesn't happen is to introduce the regulations that you affect to despise.
You haven't been paying attention to the larger economic picture, have you?
If you wish to make a point about the larger economic picture, do so with facts and figures, not bizarre analogies. The point the parent made was correct - computer prices have dramatically dropped in the last 2 decades, with many many people in the world having a computer in their pocket phone as powerful as those discussed here.
PS Hari Seldon doesn't exist, and quoting implausible determinist pop-psychologists from utopian science fiction as your inspiration doesn't do much for your credibility.
heh heh, no spreadsheets were harmed in the making of this post (guess again).
I'm amazed how many people took this seriously. The point was that google is a terrible way to try to count anything save the occurrence of the word in online usage. It'd be a useful tool for a lexicologist studying the evolution of language, but trying to count crash reports with it is a farce, and likely only used as a method because it reinforced the prejudices of the poster - these statistics are meaningless for lots of reasons.
We have troops there to make sure the Western-friendly government lasts more than a weekend.
This didn't work the last n times it was tried (Iran, Pakistan, Colombia, Vietnam, Somalia etc etc, and that's just naming some US interventions off the top of my head, not all the other examples from history of failed puppet governments, the UK has a whole list too). What makes you think this time will work?
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force.
Unless you carry a bigger gun, outnumber me, or have the coercive force of the state to back you up (i.e. the majority of cases). In that case I'll meekly give in or die. The argument falls apart at this line.
Carrying guns lead to an arms race in which muggers are more numerous and better armed than before, not a fall in muggers.
And when the government, who HAS the guns, says 'jump', you do. Better hope that the government always has the citizens best interests at heart, and that there's a policeman nearby who actually wants to help you if you're being attacked.
The day I see gun-owners stand up for civil rights, stand up to authority successfully, or stand up for other people, is the day I'll agree with this sentiment. Civil rights have been protected and extended in the US without guns (see Martin Luther King, resistance to the draft, ACLU etc.), and have been allowed to erode dramatically over the last decade in spite of widespread gun ownership. Guns are not the only way to defend yourself, or even the best way to defend yourself, against an authoritarian government.
When the government says jump and you own a gun, what are you going to do - shoot your way out of the situation when they bring in armed police or even army? I don't think so. Guns are not a solution to bad government, civil unrest is (which may or may not involve guns, they're incidental).
Machines don't think. Machines don't get PTSD and decide to go on a killing rampage. Machines don't "go rogue".
All of these are useful signs that the stress you are putting humans under is unacceptable - if they're suffering from severe PTSD or going on killing rampages, we should be asking ourselves why, and what sort of war *we're* asking them to fight. Perhaps being unable to distinguish civilians from combatants and seeing every day how fucked up the country and situation is are stressful beyond belief. Perhaps that's an indication that the entire strategy and foundation for certain wars is flawed.
Machines would have no problem with the brutal subjugation of a people for some machiavellian 'higher purpose', and their controllers are distanced enough not to care. Introducing machines into warfare (which will happen, they're more efficient) will lead to the largest death tolls for humans we have ever seen - war inevitably becomes total war, civilians get involved, and with machines on the sharp end, there will be no mercy. The most efficient (and inhumane) solution to beating a rival group into submission is genocide after all, and if you don't have to witness it that makes it all the easier.
Simply the threat that we can deploy them keeps us out of wars.
Doesn't seem to have worked recently, and really this is an unprovable statement, which makes it pointless.
On a smaller level, societies where people own guns are usually more peaceful ones.
Really? Care to cite some statistics which actually back this up? Here's a starting point (note the high position of the US on that table):
I'd say the statistics on murder rates don't bear out your fantasy of a gun-owning yet peaceful land. At the top of the table, gun ownership is prevalent, and at the bottom, it is most often banned or extremely limited. Of course that's not the only factor in murder rates, but the correlation points to exactly the reverse of the conclusion you have come to.
Apparently, there are many crashes involving elephants and lions which have been mistakenly added to these results. Also, it appears at least 40,000 crashes involved bananas - this warrants further investigation.
I think what myself and Nursie are basically saying is that Apple's dominance has nothing to do with conversionn or smoothness, it has more to do with brand name recognition at this point, and not the actual merits of the product (or lack thereof). If it were about some kind of theoretical slickness then any company would be on equal footing and apple wouldn't dominate at all. As is, there are lots of other companies who do much better but people don't know about it and pay the apple premium, etc.
Meanwhile, in the real world:
Hey, this iTunes software is really slick - to add music I just insert a CD, it has a store built in, and I can just plug my device in and everything is transferred automatically. Those iPods have great software, look great, and have loads of games available too. Looks like I'll be getting an iPod.
All this is available elsewhere in bits and pieces you can cobble together, and yet people seem to like iTunes.
While there are serious disadvantages to the iPod/iTunes system if you want to customise it, use it with another player, or use it on Linux, you shouldn't deny that it does work well together and was designed so that people don't have to 'install cdex, have it autorun on cd entry, set path...'. Most people don't want to do that, they just want it to work.
The success of iTunes has nothing to do with brand name recognition, and everything to do with being a good system that gets out of the way and manages music and gets it onto their devices with the minimum of fuss. I believe Apple should commit to an open standard for interchange, but I can see why the current system works for them, and for the majority of consumers.
The parent you're responding to said nothing of the US being a happy harmonious land, he just noted that Japan was not 'harmonious' before the US nuked them, in fact it had been one of the world's warlike and civilised cultures for centuries prior to that.
To quote the originator of the thread 'there was no idyllic Eden like harmony'.
The argument has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the US occupation of Japan or any other nation.
Huh, I guess I got a goofy copy of it or something. I use firefox, inkscape, scribus, gimp, VLC, Opera, Itunes, putty, psftp, pscp, python and a whole slew of other open-source or designed-for-linux ported-to-windows apps on my XP machine and it hasn't complained once!
Opera began on windows BTW. I wasn't talking about Linux UI apps ported to Windows, I'm aware there are some, and yes some command line tools run fine via *third party* add-ons like cygwin. There are issues running things like ruby on windows, and you certainly wouldn't want to use it as a development environment using non-microsoft tools, unlike Linux or OS X. As I said, you may be happy with what you have, but it doesn't mean everyone would be or that Windows is somehow better.
In FACT!! Whats odd is that some of these apps seem to run better on my windows machine than they do on any of my linux or BSD machines!
Better in what way? More hand-waving.
There was one time where I even installed Flash instead of silverlight..don't tell microsoft, i would hate for them to come and give me whatever copy of windows you're using.
Funny that you mention that, as Silverlight is designed precisely to guide you into using Microsoft tools. When they break Flash deliberately and try to kill it (as they did with Java), I'm sure you'll find some rationalisation as to why Silverlight 'runs better' and wins.
If you dispense with the hand-waving, by what metric does it 'win'? One look at the control panels for Windows XP let me know all I need to about the lack of thought that has gone into the UI (and by extension the OS), and on that score it loses for me. I'm sure on other metrics it is adequate. I can't imagine how you would compare it to OS X and Linux (I'm thinking of Ubuntu) and consider it *winning*. It also lacks for example a lot of unix utilities that you can take for granted on other operating systems.
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations in federal court. Apple has not.
Courts are now the deciders for quality of tech?
No, courts are the deciders on illegal, predatory behaviour in the market, and that is what Microsoft were convicted of. If that sits fine with you, feel free to ignore it. It's you who has to deal wtih them.
Microsofts policy is "Here, do whatever you want with this so long as you buy it".
No, it's, here do whatever you want so long as you use exclusively our products, otherwise we will make life painful for you (from DR-DOS and Lotus on). They're very similar to Apple in some domains like music or entertainment, which makes a nonsense of your 'we are licensing this to you...' line on Apple. See Xbox, and PlaysForSure.
Apple certainly has faults, but setting them up as some fall-guy for all DRM or control is patently absurd - many other players in the market including Microsoft have been trying to control what their consumers do with their products.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
For the reasons you so airily dismiss in your post. Maybe they're meaningless to you, but certainly people do choose things other than Microsoft products after some thought.
Quite possibly they're hoping he does something 'smart' like this and thus gives himself away to the authorities. Anyone trying to claim the reward would I'm sure come under a lot of scrutiny, and likewise for the alleged criminal.
Thanks for that link. The NYTimes article was hyperbolic, but the Slashdot summary is hyperbolic and hopelessly confused -
most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but rather RNA.
??
As a layperson, I was under the impression that the standard model was DNA -> RNA -> mRNA -> Proteins, but the summary implies that this is somehow a new idea and we previously thought proteins came straight from DNA....
Actually, it is, as documented in your link if you take the time to read it. She did enquire about banning books, 3 times in succession, and a letter was sent to the librarian asking her to resign shortly afterward. She *tried* to have books banned.
What is not true is some allegation of a whole list of books being banned under her tenure (as documented at that link). I didn't make that claim and wouldn't support it - almost sounds like a crazy straw man set up so that the more serious issue (whether she actually enquired about banning books) can be ignored.
So I'm not quite sure what the "valuable lesson" is that I'm expected to learn.
Just that you can be caught out by your choices of technology and a naive trust in (or disregard for) the motives of producers. If you start using the service from Netflix, then in a few years are forced to switch to Windows to continue your subscription for example, or if you save all your documents in word format on your mac, then in five years are forced to switch to Windows to keep reading them properly, you might find a lesson in that.
That I as an individual have very little leverage over ginormous corporations? And that they want to screw me? I learned those ones a long time ago.
Well, given your disregard for the intentions of MS re. Silverlight, apparently not : )
As you say, you don't have a lot of leverage on your own, however if enough people refuse to be duped by plays like Silverlight or Apple's FairPlay lock-in, then vendors will have to offer open solutions which mean they can't force you to buy other unrelated products just to (for example) watch videos on Netflix. The web has opened up many options in that respect, and Silverlight is part of an effort to control that - to collect a vig on every transaction.
But this is a tired old argument, and you say you have heard it all before, so I won't pester you more with it. I do think it is important to remember that you can't avoid business strategies, just as you can't avoid politics....
Apart from when she tried to ban books in her local library, and have the librarian fired.
In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
Congratulations! You've supplied a link that doesn't support the claim that Palin requested books be banned or that she fired the librarian.
I talked about trying to ban books and fire the librarian, and that's exactly what she did. Sorry, but the attempt to change the premise is a tired rhetorical trick.
Palin herself does not deny that she asked about banning books, and a letter was sent asking the librarian to resign. To my mind, that, and some of her irrational beliefs, shows a certain narrowness of spirit, and disqualifies her completely from consideration for a post as a high as vice-president, you may think differently.
If you trust Microsoft not to screw you over, there is no reason to avoid Silverlight. There is no reason to hate Silverlight (the tech) at all, however some might take issue with the strategic purpose of it (which can be *very* important to you as a user).
Personally I think it's an embrace, extend and extinguish move much like IE was in its time - when it becomes prevalent enough, the windows version will get more features and the mac/linux version be left to wither. For the full experience you'll be expected to go all Microsoft, all the time (see Office suite, Active-X, IE, PFS, Zune etc). Balmer loves that kind of move, and he's in charge now.
If you haven't learned that this is their SOP, by all means go ahead and use it, as you will learn a valuable lesson.
Slashdot Mirror
because over time regulations are worked to favor the existing players in the market.
Perhaps this points to a bankrupt political system which allows bribery to influence or even buy officials, rather than some fault in regulations per se? My point is that these issues should be approached in a pragmatic way, not with some dogma about 'regulations are evil', or even 'capitalism is evil'.
I agree that regulations can sometimes lead to ossification and restrict competition, but in the case of the US, and the cell phone market in particular, regulations are simply not in place to restrict predatory practices like overpricing of roaming calls. Perhaps they should be?
The issue is of government efficiency the US method in health is actually more efficient however it creates a situation of Haves and Have nots which is the problem.
What makes you think it is more efficient? The US spends more on public healthcare alone per capita than most nations with universal healthcare, or, as you call it in the United States 'socialized healthcare'. That's not even including private contributions to healthcare which probably equal public ones. The reason is that the system is hostage to pharmacutical companies, insurance companies, and private medical providers, and it's in the interest of all these parties to inflate prices.
So you pay more than other countries for less than complete coverage, and the system is getting more expensive every year. The US simply cannot afford to continue with the current system, as it is bankrupting the country with an ageing population. The only advantage to the US system is that if you are rich or work for a company which provides good healthcare coverage you will get slightly better treatment, and if you suffer from certain cancers you might get more aggressive treatment (which is very expensive). However if you are rich in other countries you can afford to pay for private care anyway.
On every other metric (including humanitarian ones) it is not as good as universal healthcare.
Really this obsession with government==bad and socialism==evil stunts all political debate in the states.
Ah, but this isn't capitalism - this is regulations, bught and paid for, allowing avoidance of capitalism. Capitalism allows competition - we have given competition away (ok, ok - sold out cheap) in exchange of supposed expensive infrastructure.
Truly free capitalism degenerates pretty quickly into monopolies and cartels (which are illegal for a reason). Once someone has a stranglehold on the market it does not allow competition as it is not in the interests of incumbents to give up power, and they have the means to easily crush any smaller companies (price fixing, bribery, coercion, subsidies below cost until the competitor goes under, etc etc).
The only way to ensure that doesn't happen is to introduce the regulations that you affect to despise.
American's love the "little man vs. big man" story, which is about all Dickens coughed up.
If this is all you see in Dickens please give up reading and go back to TV.
PS Look up grocers' apostrophes
You haven't been paying attention to the larger economic picture, have you?
If you wish to make a point about the larger economic picture, do so with facts and figures, not bizarre analogies. The point the parent made was correct - computer prices have dramatically dropped in the last 2 decades, with many many people in the world having a computer in their pocket phone as powerful as those discussed here.
PS Hari Seldon doesn't exist, and quoting implausible determinist pop-psychologists from utopian science fiction as your inspiration doesn't do much for your credibility.
heh heh, no spreadsheets were harmed in the making of this post (guess again).
I'm amazed how many people took this seriously. The point was that google is a terrible way to try to count anything save the occurrence of the word in online usage. It'd be a useful tool for a lexicologist studying the evolution of language, but trying to count crash reports with it is a farce, and likely only used as a method because it reinforced the prejudices of the poster - these statistics are meaningless for lots of reasons.
Really? How's Iraq and Afghanistan working out?
Badly, for everyone involved.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Total_war
We have troops there to make sure the Western-friendly government lasts more than a weekend.
This didn't work the last n times it was tried (Iran, Pakistan, Colombia, Vietnam, Somalia etc etc, and that's just naming some US interventions off the top of my head, not all the other examples from history of failed puppet governments, the UK has a whole list too). What makes you think this time will work?
When I carry a gun, you cannot deal with me by force.
Unless you carry a bigger gun, outnumber me, or have the coercive force of the state to back you up (i.e. the majority of cases). In that case I'll meekly give in or die. The argument falls apart at this line.
Carrying guns lead to an arms race in which muggers are more numerous and better armed than before, not a fall in muggers.
And when the government, who HAS the guns, says 'jump', you do. Better hope that the government always has the citizens best interests at heart, and that there's a policeman nearby who actually wants to help you if you're being attacked.
The day I see gun-owners stand up for civil rights, stand up to authority successfully, or stand up for other people, is the day I'll agree with this sentiment. Civil rights have been protected and extended in the US without guns (see Martin Luther King, resistance to the draft, ACLU etc.), and have been allowed to erode dramatically over the last decade in spite of widespread gun ownership. Guns are not the only way to defend yourself, or even the best way to defend yourself, against an authoritarian government.
When the government says jump and you own a gun, what are you going to do - shoot your way out of the situation when they bring in armed police or even army? I don't think so. Guns are not a solution to bad government, civil unrest is (which may or may not involve guns, they're incidental).
Machines don't think. Machines don't get PTSD and decide to go on a killing rampage. Machines don't "go rogue".
All of these are useful signs that the stress you are putting humans under is unacceptable - if they're suffering from severe PTSD or going on killing rampages, we should be asking ourselves why, and what sort of war *we're* asking them to fight. Perhaps being unable to distinguish civilians from combatants and seeing every day how fucked up the country and situation is are stressful beyond belief. Perhaps that's an indication that the entire strategy and foundation for certain wars is flawed.
Machines would have no problem with the brutal subjugation of a people for some machiavellian 'higher purpose', and their controllers are distanced enough not to care. Introducing machines into warfare (which will happen, they're more efficient) will lead to the largest death tolls for humans we have ever seen - war inevitably becomes total war, civilians get involved, and with machines on the sharp end, there will be no mercy. The most efficient (and inhumane) solution to beating a rival group into submission is genocide after all, and if you don't have to witness it that makes it all the easier.
Simply the threat that we can deploy them keeps us out of wars.
Doesn't seem to have worked recently, and really this is an unprovable statement, which makes it pointless.
On a smaller level, societies where people own guns are usually more peaceful ones.
Really? Care to cite some statistics which actually back this up? Here's a starting point (note the high position of the US on that table):
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_mur_percap-crime-murders-per-capita
I'd say the statistics on murder rates don't bear out your fantasy of a gun-owning yet peaceful land. At the top of the table, gun ownership is prevalent, and at the bottom, it is most often banned or extremely limited. Of course that's not the only factor in murder rates, but the correlation points to exactly the reverse of the conclusion you have come to.
In Safari's defence, I'm sure half those million+ results are in regards to land rovers hitting elephants and other African fauna.
863,000 +safari +crashes
728,000 +safari +crashes -elephant
697,000 +safari +crashes -elephant -lions
655,000 +safari +crashes -elephant -lions -banana
Apparently, there are many crashes involving elephants and lions which have been mistakenly added to these results. Also, it appears at least 40,000 crashes involved bananas - this warrants further investigation.
On Slashdot :
I think what myself and Nursie are basically saying is that Apple's dominance has nothing to do with conversionn or smoothness, it has more to do with brand name recognition at this point, and not the actual merits of the product (or lack thereof). If it were about some kind of theoretical slickness then any company would be on equal footing and apple wouldn't dominate at all. As is, there are lots of other companies who do much better but people don't know about it and pay the apple premium, etc.
Meanwhile, in the real world :
Hey, this iTunes software is really slick - to add music I just insert a CD, it has a store built in, and I can just plug my device in and everything is transferred automatically. Those iPods have great software, look great, and have loads of games available too. Looks like I'll be getting an iPod.
All this is available elsewhere in bits and pieces you can cobble together, and yet people seem to like iTunes.
While there are serious disadvantages to the iPod/iTunes system if you want to customise it, use it with another player, or use it on Linux, you shouldn't deny that it does work well together and was designed so that people don't have to 'install cdex, have it autorun on cd entry, set path...'. Most people don't want to do that, they just want it to work.
The success of iTunes has nothing to do with brand name recognition, and everything to do with being a good system that gets out of the way and manages music and gets it onto their devices with the minimum of fuss. I believe Apple should commit to an open standard for interchange, but I can see why the current system works for them, and for the majority of consumers.
The parent you're responding to said nothing of the US being a happy harmonious land, he just noted that Japan was not 'harmonious' before the US nuked them, in fact it had been one of the world's warlike and civilised cultures for centuries prior to that.
To quote the originator of the thread 'there was no idyllic Eden like harmony'.
The argument has nothing to do with the rights and wrongs of the US occupation of Japan or any other nation.
Huh, I guess I got a goofy copy of it or something. I use firefox, inkscape, scribus, gimp, VLC, Opera, Itunes, putty, psftp, pscp, python and a whole slew of other open-source or designed-for-linux ported-to-windows apps on my XP machine and it hasn't complained once!
Opera began on windows BTW. I wasn't talking about Linux UI apps ported to Windows, I'm aware there are some, and yes some command line tools run fine via *third party* add-ons like cygwin. There are issues running things like ruby on windows, and you certainly wouldn't want to use it as a development environment using non-microsoft tools, unlike Linux or OS X. As I said, you may be happy with what you have, but it doesn't mean everyone would be or that Windows is somehow better.
In FACT!! Whats odd is that some of these apps seem to run better on my windows machine than they do on any of my linux or BSD machines!
Better in what way? More hand-waving.
There was one time where I even installed Flash instead of silverlight..don't tell microsoft, i would hate for them to come and give me whatever copy of windows you're using.
Funny that you mention that, as Silverlight is designed precisely to guide you into using Microsoft tools. When they break Flash deliberately and try to kill it (as they did with Java), I'm sure you'll find some rationalisation as to why Silverlight 'runs better' and wins.
Windows XP wins hands down every single time.
If you dispense with the hand-waving, by what metric does it 'win'? One look at the control panels for Windows XP let me know all I need to about the lack of thought that has gone into the UI (and by extension the OS), and on that score it loses for me. I'm sure on other metrics it is adequate. I can't imagine how you would compare it to OS X and Linux (I'm thinking of Ubuntu) and consider it *winning*. It also lacks for example a lot of unix utilities that you can take for granted on other operating systems.
Microsoft has been convicted of anti-trust violations in federal court. Apple has not.
Courts are now the deciders for quality of tech?
No, courts are the deciders on illegal, predatory behaviour in the market, and that is what Microsoft were convicted of. If that sits fine with you, feel free to ignore it. It's you who has to deal wtih them.
Microsofts policy is "Here, do whatever you want with this so long as you buy it".
No, it's, here do whatever you want so long as you use exclusively our products, otherwise we will make life painful for you (from DR-DOS and Lotus on). They're very similar to Apple in some domains like music or entertainment, which makes a nonsense of your 'we are licensing this to you...' line on Apple. See Xbox, and PlaysForSure.
Apple certainly has faults, but setting them up as some fall-guy for all DRM or control is patently absurd - many other players in the market including Microsoft have been trying to control what their consumers do with their products.
How, seriously, is Apple any better than anything else?
For the reasons you so airily dismiss in your post. Maybe they're meaningless to you, but certainly people do choose things other than Microsoft products after some thought.
in lieu does not mean after or because, it means instead of.
Quite possibly they're hoping he does something 'smart' like this and thus gives himself away to the authorities. Anyone trying to claim the reward would I'm sure come under a lot of scrutiny, and likewise for the alleged criminal.
Thanks for that link. The NYTimes article was hyperbolic, but the Slashdot summary is hyperbolic and hopelessly confused -
most of the molecules produced from DNA may not even be proteins, but rather RNA.
??
As a layperson, I was under the impression that the standard model was DNA -> RNA -> mRNA -> Proteins, but the summary implies that this is somehow a new idea and we previously thought proteins came straight from DNA....
Actually, it is, as documented in your link if you take the time to read it. She did enquire about banning books, 3 times in succession, and a letter was sent to the librarian asking her to resign shortly afterward. She *tried* to have books banned.
What is not true is some allegation of a whole list of books being banned under her tenure (as documented at that link). I didn't make that claim and wouldn't support it - almost sounds like a crazy straw man set up so that the more serious issue (whether she actually enquired about banning books) can be ignored.
So I'm not quite sure what the "valuable lesson" is that I'm expected to learn.
Just that you can be caught out by your choices of technology and a naive trust in (or disregard for) the motives of producers. If you start using the service from Netflix, then in a few years are forced to switch to Windows to continue your subscription for example, or if you save all your documents in word format on your mac, then in five years are forced to switch to Windows to keep reading them properly, you might find a lesson in that.
That I as an individual have very little leverage over ginormous corporations? And that they want to screw me? I learned those ones a long time ago.
Well, given your disregard for the intentions of MS re. Silverlight, apparently not : )
As you say, you don't have a lot of leverage on your own, however if enough people refuse to be duped by plays like Silverlight or Apple's FairPlay lock-in, then vendors will have to offer open solutions which mean they can't force you to buy other unrelated products just to (for example) watch videos on Netflix. The web has opened up many options in that respect, and Silverlight is part of an effort to control that - to collect a vig on every transaction.
But this is a tired old argument, and you say you have heard it all before, so I won't pester you more with it. I do think it is important to remember that you can't avoid business strategies, just as you can't avoid politics....
Apart from when she tried to ban books in her local library, and have the librarian fired.
In December 1996, Emmons told her hometown newspaper, the Frontiersman, that Palin three times asked her -- starting before she was sworn in -- about possibly removing objectionable books from the library if the need arose.
Congratulations! You've supplied a link that doesn't support the claim that Palin requested books be banned or that she fired the librarian.
I talked about trying to ban books and fire the librarian, and that's exactly what she did. Sorry, but the attempt to change the premise is a tired rhetorical trick.
Palin herself does not deny that she asked about banning books, and a letter was sent asking the librarian to resign. To my mind, that, and some of her irrational beliefs, shows a certain narrowness of spirit, and disqualifies her completely from consideration for a post as a high as vice-president, you may think differently.
If you trust Microsoft not to screw you over, there is no reason to avoid Silverlight. There is no reason to hate Silverlight (the tech) at all, however some might take issue with the strategic purpose of it (which can be *very* important to you as a user).
Personally I think it's an embrace, extend and extinguish move much like IE was in its time - when it becomes prevalent enough, the windows version will get more features and the mac/linux version be left to wither. For the full experience you'll be expected to go all Microsoft, all the time (see Office suite, Active-X, IE, PFS, Zune etc). Balmer loves that kind of move, and he's in charge now.
If you haven't learned that this is their SOP, by all means go ahead and use it, as you will learn a valuable lesson.
Neither Palin nor McCain has ever expressed a desire to force either you or your children to follow their religious choices.
Apart from when she tried to ban books in her local library, and have the librarian fired.