The distinction is easy to discern. One deals with a matter of public welfare. The other does not.
To be more precise, when any legal entity engages in activities or behaviors that are damaging or potentially damaging to members of the public, and such actions or the judgment demonstrated by them continue to pose a threat to the welfare of others, then there exists a right to inform and be informed. Those that may be harmed by the acts of another have a right to know of the danger. The revelation of salacious details regarding an individual's affairs purely on the basis of their celebrity clearly does not withstand this criterion, and therefore the right to privacy supersedes any privilege of the public interest to be informed of such matters.
However, note that the application of this particular standard is not based on an individual's celebrity--for example, Mel Gibson caught driving drunk may be reportable, because his actions pose a threat to other drivers. Reporting Chris Brown as having assaulted Rihanna may be acceptable. But posting pictures of the victim's abuse is not, because the release of that information is not pertinent to preventing others from coming to harm.
To be fair, Sidekick users didn't have a viable means to back up their personal data that was being pulled from Microsoft/Danger servers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to find some hack or unofficial method to copy all their data from their devices. The only blame they could be assigned is that they bought the service being sold. Your criticism would be valid for, say, iPhone users, since the user has a backup stored on their computer. But no such functionality exists for the Sidekick, as far as I am aware.
And as to who is really being burned here.... Obviously not Microsoft/Danger. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about this, since their acquisition of Danger in 2008 was really about cannibalizing their talent for Windows Mobile 7, as the Pink project has shown. Danger is just a shell of its former self--the damage was done long before this latest failure, which I think was an inevitable consequence of the acquisition. The ones who got burned are T-Mobile (for trusting Microsoft to manage Danger, and Danger to maintain a proper backup solution), and of course, the consumers.
The real issue, of course, is that data is always at risk of being lost no matter how, where, or in what amount it is stored. The passage of time guarantees it. But people want to believe in the existence of certainties, in the notion that if something has a 99.9999% reliability, then we can effectively ignore the minuscule probability of failure. But failures happen all the time and there is no such guarantee. We need to rid ourselves of this delusion that data can somehow be made "safe," that risk can be ignored when made small. Cloud computing is just the flavor of the day.
I knew someone who worked at Danger years ago when the company was still fairly new. It was, at the time, an amazing technology. There was nothing like it. They had so much going for them, and there was a lot of good talent working there. One thing that impressed me was how they solved the problem of mobile web browsing. At the time, mobile web browsing seriously sucked ass. It was not only slow, but many sites simply would not load. Danger solved that by re-parsing the sites on their servers so that pages would look good and function properly on your mobile device. It was the best solution until mobile OSes and hardware became powerful and complex enough to support full browsing; and even then, the UI needed to be tightly integrated before browsing became efficient instead of tedious. It's sad to see such a pioneering company wither on the vine.
The article quotes him as saying online banking is "very safe." Well, if it's so safe, why doesn't he use it? Either he is glaringly, abysmally stupid, or he is a fucking hypocrite who is too much of a pussy to call out the banking and computing (read: Microsoft) industries for perpetuating an inherently insecure system. And then you've got companies like PayPal that try to silence people who dare proclaim that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
But forgive me for being but a lowly member of the hoi polloi, for I should simply continue to believe everything that the government and multinational corporations tell me. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not exactly an appropriate framework by which one goes about fixing problems, much less enforce the law. Oh wait...police officers routinely and frivolously violate the very same laws the rest of us are held to. So I guess this is just business as usual.
Why is it I never have the mod points when I need them???
You COMPLETELY WIN this one. In the face of this one truth, nothing else matters and there is no other rational argument.
The fact of the matter is that Palm is doing this because its developers are too lazy or their management too dishonest to properly implement their own syncing solution. What other conceivable reason is there? RIM has had their own sync for years in their products. And it works perfectly well. They never needed iTMS. All they had to do to provide added value for iTunes users is to be able to read/write the XML. Most tellingly, Apple hasn't so much as lifted a finger in protest.
By all indications Palm picked this fight by deliberately choosing not to develop their own sync software like RIM did. They saw the cash cow Apple made in the iPhone+iPod+iTMS, and the management basically decided that they were going to ride atop it because (1) their status as a dying brand meant they had nothing to lose (2) as the underdog, they would get consumer sympathy even if their actions were found in violation of USB standards (3) it would be a lot cheaper than doing things right (4) should the tie-in be broken by Apple, they could pin the blame on them in the name of "consumer choice". So far, it seems like they calculated it just right.
Folks, it's not that freaking hard to figure out. I think that the legacy of Microsoft's anti-trust practices in the computing industry has had such a profound effect on the culture of computing that people are now hyper-vigilant about anything that might be vaguely construed as anti-competitive. In an ideal world, Apple wouldn't have to disable Palm's unsupported tie-in, because Palm would have made their product sufficiently innovative that it would stand on its own merits. After all, that's what Apple did with the iMac and iPod. It wasn't all that long ago that they too, were in dire straits. They didn't turn the ship around by engaging in dirty tricks. They did it by making good products. The Blackberry is also a good product. RIM was the first to do mobile email the right way (don't even get me started on Windows Mobile). When you do things right, you don't have to cheat to win. That's the real takeaway of the Microsoft story, not "get paranoid about anti-trust." Palm has forgotten the legacy of their past successes, all the more tragic in context of their enormity.
Rio de Janeiro is one of the most violent cities in the world. You think one sensationalist news story compares to what goes on in the favelas of Rio? What's worse is that the proximity of poor areas to rich ones means you're not safe anywhere. People regularly get mugged and kidnapped, tourists especially.
Rio's murder rate: 37.7 per 100,000 (2006) Chicago's murder rate: 15.7 per 100,000 (2005)
Asparagus? That's downright pleasant compared to the smell of cow shit as you drive past Coalinga, home to the Harris Ranch feedlot. I'm all for a bullet train that would more than halve the time I spend smelling that stench.
But I don't have much hope for this to happen. They've been talking it up for so many years, and still we can't build something that the Japanese had done over 40 years ago. The environmental impact of taking all those cars off the road would be worth it.
This is sort of correct. Microsoft is certainly worried about online presence but it is much in the way that a hypochondriac might be worried about the threat of a specific disease. MS management is paranoid that every external innovation related to computing technology in some way is a potential threat or a missed opportunity. They don't focus on one area (e.g. search) at the expense of another, which explains why they continue to insist on developing Zune in the face of the iPod's success, Windows Mobile in the face of the iPhone, and Bing in the face of Google. And they are willing to eat losses--embrace them even--if they believe that doing so permits them to bring attention to their own offerings in some way, even if it is ridiculed (remember the shit brown Zune?). Another great example of this is Bing cashback, where MS actually pays consumers (albeit indirectly) a variable percentage as a reward for making purchases through Bing. That is how much they believe that everyone is out to get them, that they must have a hand in every computing niche.
Microsoft is compelled to do something just because someone else is doing it. If they can't buy it, they try to copy it. If they can't copy it, they try to discredit it. And this compulsion is, I believe, driven by fear--fear that if they don't stay on top of everything and everyone, that minor papercut could harbor a flesh-eating bacterium. Hypochondria. They talk tough and have lots of money to back their actions, but behind the scenes they're worried about everything. It's like the Howard Hughes of computer technology.
It's not about "right" or "wrong." What I describe is merely my model, a conceptual framework for understanding the motives of this one company. Apple's model is different, almost the polar opposite--they are not about needing to be everywhere and for everyone. Rather, their model is rather egocentric in that the product is designed according to internal beliefs about what it should be, essentially dictating to the consumer what they ought to want. The product drives the demand, rather than the other way around. This approach is often miscast as saying Apple consumers care about style over substance. The truth is, Apple products are successful only to the extent that there are people for whom it is successful. They've made some bombs, even fairly recently (iPod HiFi, anyone? G4 Cube? Hockey puck mouse? Need I go on?) If it truly sucks, people won't hesitate to ditch it, even when made by the almighty Apple.
Of course, these are not absolute models of corporate philosophy that apply universally.
Whereas MS acts out of insecurity, Apple acts out of arrogance. Asking which approach is "correct" is sort of like asking whether a watermelon is green or red, when all I really care about is if it's tasty....
While this is mostly true, it's also beside the point. Microsoft doesn't care about whether their hired retail staff will know anything about Windows. They already have huge market share. People buy Windows because they are either (1) too ignorant and scared to use anything else (be it Mac or Linux), or (2) they are gamers and have no need for people to sell them a Windows box, they'd buy it anyway. The entire point of these MS stores is to say F**K YOU APPLE. It is ALL about leveraging Microsoft's vast financial resources to hurt Apple as much as possible. They don't care if they lose huge amounts of money doing it. That is why Zune exists, why their advertising is all about underpricing Macs, why they propose opening stores right next to Apple Retail Stores, and now why they are actively trying to poach Apple Retail Store management. It is warfare, pure and simple, because Microsoft senior management knows they have lost the innovation battle. They've lost it for the better part of this past decade.
Many companies--not just Microsoft--don't simply use their wealth to generate more wealth. They also use it to actively deny their competition from succeeding. Profit is not the only motive in a free market. Sometimes--perhaps quite often--success is measured in terms of how completely and efficiently you are able to punish others for even daring to go up against you. You don't have to win outright, just make your enemies suffer more than you. And that kind of attitude is perfectly exemplified by what we already know about Ballmer's chair-throwing, monkey dancing personality.
This is so many levels of incorrect I don't even know where to begin.
Let's start with the Clean Water Act. There are numerous failures in compliance, and the EPA acknowledges they are vastly underfunded to provide proper enforcement. Depending on the state, there have been noncompliance rates of as high as 80%, e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The violators claim that many of these are bureaucratic in nature and don't actually represent a threat to the water supply, but to say that legal measures have adequately protected the US water supply is woefully ignorant of the facts.
Second, "residual chlorine" does not "leach" out of the water. Chlorine does not just magically disappear out of aqueous solution; the atoms are still there--indeed they must be in order for chlorination to be effective!--unless you have found some way to evolve a gas that will bubble out of the water. Leaching refers to the release of a substance out of a solution over time. Once you put chlorine into water, it forms hypochlorite (the same ion found in household bleach), which is the disinfecting agent.
Third, the study already amply documents the growth of the aforementioned bacteria inside the shower head. There is a small amount of standing water that remains in the head; exposure to air then permits the bacteria to grow--even in the presence of any small concentration of chlorine in the water. It doesn't take much for a colony to overpower a little bit of chlorine.
Fourth, there are many species of bacteria that are well adapted to surviving in what we would consider highly toxic environments. It should not come as a surprise that there should exist bacteria that are simultaneously (a) able to flourish in a (poorly-maintained) shower head attached to a municipal water supply, and (b) pathogenic in nature.
Finally, all it takes is to get an all-metal shower head where you can easily detach the nozzle assembly. They sell them at the hardware store--I should know, I bought one recently (my old shower broke). Once a month, you unscrew the nozzle portion, and clean it out. If your water is really crazy hard like mine (seriously wtf, it's got more calcium than milk), you pretty much need to do this anyway because the nozzles get clogged if you don't. But don't buy cheapo plastic shower heads because (1) they break easily, and (2) they seem to clog faster because the nozzles tend to be finer.
By the time we can set up a self-sufficient ecosystem hospitable to human life on Mars, you can bet that we would also have the resources to do a 2-way trip. A lot of unmanned flights would be necessary to set up a colony. One two-way trip is going to cost far less than colonization in the short run, but in the long run, of course colonization wins.
The bottom line, however, is that human exploration of other planets in our system is going to be severely limited until we are better able to capture and utilize the energy coming to OUR planet. We have a much more complex and important task at hand, which is to find ways of harnessing Earth-bound energy in a way that is sustainable and economically efficient. If we can do this, we won't need to ask people to go on one-way trips. Cheap, abundant energy is what enables technological and social progress.
"Like the toupee on a fading fame The final whistle in a losing game Thick lipstick on a five year old girl It makes you think it's a plastic world
A plastic world and we're all plastic too Just a couple of different faces in a dead man's queue The world is turning Disney and there's nothing you can do You're trying to walk like giants but you're wearing Pluto's shoes
And the answers fall easier from the barrel of a gun Than it does from the lips of the beautiful and the dumb The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun With Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun "
Actually, based on the narration, I believe that the computation involved requires three basic processing steps: (1) detection systems to measure physical properties of the system at any given point in time, such as position, velocity, acceleration, and force; (2) real-time algorithms based on rapid numerical solution of equations to predict future states of the system, with continual updating by comparing predicted state with actual state inferred from step 1; and (3) determination of the appropriate movement in the robotic arm for the necessary outcome.
I think that this is a very difficult thing to program in general because the examples shown are very specific tasks which serve to demonstrate the speed of this type of processing, but we do not see how well arbitrary tasks can be similarly implemented or how accurately.
Make no mistake: this is very impressive performance, because it is basically a huge step forward in machine vision and real-time robotic control. On some level, the mathematics has always been there, but only in as much as the basic mathematics of binary arithmetic has been used to develop programming languages. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes that extends beyond a mere physical description of the system in question, because for such an approach to be possible in the general sense, the robot doesn't know things like the precise distribution of the mass in the object being manipulated, or all the frictional forces involved. It's not operating under a sort of Laplacian notion wherein if one knew the precise state of all parameters of the system, one can simply solve the required physical equations and predict the future state at any arbitrary point in time, because (a) chaos guarantees the instability of such nonlinear systems, and (b) it wouldn't be possible to measure all such parameters with sufficient precision.
What is really going on is perhaps best explained in human terms: the programming is doing a lot of what humans do--we observe the state with our visual and tactile senses, and our brains receive these continual updates and decide what to do next. This processing is already extremely fast in a biological context, but with these machines, it is made at least an order of magnitude faster. The next step is to simulate a sort of adaptive intelligence to allow the handling of a wider class of scenarios than the ones shown in the video.
It's a great way to test the performance of these supercomputers, to ensure that their calculations are correct. The calculation of pi to additional decimal places beyond what was previously known is never done with just a single method--otherwise, it is impossible to verify the additional digits. It is always done with two different algorithms to ensure that the result is valid. There are many rapidly converging algorithms (e.g., variations on AM-GM methods can be quadratically convergent or better; BBP-type digit extraction methods; and of course, classic Ramanujan series-type methods). However, computing pi to so many decimal places has much less to do with the chosen algorithm than it has to do with the memory- and computing time-efficient implementations of such algorithms in massively parallel architectures. Thus these calculations serve as very good tests for the robustness of supercomputers. The result is also verifiable to previously known digits, and even beyond the previous record, it is possible to perform statistical analyses to determine whether there are any significant deviations in the distribution of digit frequencies.
So, in summary, it is hardly a useless computation. Not that you're going to get an explanation like this from your usual news sources, which generally do not write for technical audiences.
Also note that distributed computing resources such as Folding@home, or even the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search don't bother with calculating pi, as the purpose of these projects is to make new discovers in their respective fields of interest.
The prison system can't even stop prisoners from ordering hits from inside. What does that tell you about their ability to control the interactions among each other?
The truly sickening thing is that the cost to correctly implement the concept of incarceration greatly exceeds what the public is willing to pay, and perhaps even exceeds the cost to sort them out. But people are fearful, and they want criminals to disappear so they can be safe, so we have a terrible system that costs taxpayers huge amounts of money yet doesn't work. Where does a lot of this money go? Private contractors, of course. Prisons are extremely profitable for companies that manage the food, clothing, and medications for inmates. Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame), in one of his "30 Days" episodes, spends--you guessed it--30 days in a state prison. It's quite eye-opening. Watch it on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/56914/30-days-jail#s-p2-so-i0
You don't need to buy a ticket to drive along public roads and photograph what you can see with the naked eye...although of course, if you violate traffic laws you might "purchase" a ticket against your will....
Look, I'm a photographer and I know what is and is not allowed in terms of image capture, copyright, and publication rights in the US. If you are standing on public property, you have the right to photograph just about anything you can see with your unaided vision (i.e., no long telephoto lenses or binoculars to peer into houses). The key is whether the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy from where they are located and the context in which they are situated at that location. Buying a ticket from an event organizer who has leased the land for that event turns that land into private property for that event's duration, and therefore ALL activities fall under the purview of the organizers. You become their guest, which is why they can eject you from the event should you violate the terms of the contract you agreed to by purchasing the ticket in the first place.
So to compare Google's Street View against Burning Man photo policy is comparing apples and oranges. One is about photos taken from public land, whereas the other is about photos taken at a private event. The organizer's policy is designed to prevent commercial use, which is absolutely their right to do. They could even have the right to prevent you from taking pictures at all while on their property, just like a shopping mall can say "No Photography Permitted."
I'm not concerned about the legal issues surrounding photography @ Burning Man. I'm far more concerned about the issues surrounding photography of public landmarks from public property that is now being prevented by law enforcement under the guise of "anti-terror measures." That's right, photographers (basically anyone with a professional-looking camera) are being told they will be arrested and their equipment confiscated if they take photos of, say, the Sears Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge. WTF is that? And much of the time, if you do a bit of digging, the real reason why this is happening is because the advent of high-quality digital imaging has now made it possible for amateurs to create artistically compelling images that compete with the "official" landmark images that are for sale. Why buy a poster or print if you can shoot your own? It's just another piece of security theater and illegal restriction under the guise of "protecting us from terror." That is something to be worried about.
The problem is not simply that the working class must borrow from the rich. It is not that in a capitalist society, the working class, by definition, requires others to lend them money to make purchases on goods and services that they cannot buy outright. The problem is that there is no counteracting force--that is to say, the rich have all the power to rewrite the rules of the game as they see fit, and thus there is no real accountability for their misdeeds.
I find it curious that you believe that my statement was anti-capitalist. To the contrary, if you apply my statement to the current economic crisis which was in no small part due to the willful underwriting of bad risks, you will clearly see that the problem is that the financial institutions have become so large and influential that the government bailed them out to prevent a complete collapse of the economy. Had the system been truly capitalist, these lenders would have had to write down their losses, rather than being rewarded by taxpayers for making bets they knew were unwise.
Capitalism when times are good and socialism when times are bad is neither capitalism nor socialism. It's simply robbery.
The credit rating problem is only one facet of the larger issue, which is that our economic system is based upon a belief that it is possible to create a sufficiently accurate quantitative model of risk such that one can "almost always" trust it. When viewed in this larger context, it becomes obvious that the trend towards more data collection, more intrusion into consumer behaviors, is the logical consequence of this flawed belief. It is this idea that the more you know about something, the more predictive you can be--but the fundamental truth remains that there is no way to eliminate risk entirely.
The working class are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of this system based upon flawed assumptions, as are the rich. But I am more inclined to blame the rich because they are the ones who have historically been in control, both financially and politically.
The lending of money, in of itself, is not a bad thing. But when mixed with an easily cowed, manipulated, and self-entitled public that is told from infancy that "you can do anything if you just try hard enough" and "you are special and deserve everything," it becomes a problem. But in whose interest is it to make a credit-based, consumer economy the foundation of the American financial system in the first place? Who do you blame--the ones who are too stupid to behave responsibly, or the ones who encourage them to be stupid in the first place, because it makes them easy to control and profit off them?
The problem with credit rating is not that it exists, or that it lacks sufficient predictive value for creditworthiness. It's that over the last few decades, credit rating has increasingly become a proxy for overall responsibility and our legal system has upheld its widespread misuse. Credit score is now a prerequisite for nearly everything that has to do with money. Your insurance premiums are a function of your credit score. Your ability to secure a job is dependent on your credit score. Whether a landlord will rent to you depends on your credit score. Just about anyone these days asks you for permission to peek at your score--even your mobile phone provider.
Credit rating was never meant to be used in this way. And yet, everyone does it because it works, and nobody is willing to stand up to it. The future of credit rating is that it will begin to use increasingly sophisticated methods to quantify how much risk you present to a lender, and on the flip side of the coin, it will be used to determine whether you can do ANYTHING. What jobs you are allowed to hold, which people you will be allowed to socialize with, what goods and services you are allowed to buy, which schools you will be allowed to attend, how many children you will be allowed to have, and where and when you will be able to travel.
Creditworthiness is the new class system. What else did anybody expect in a capitalist, consumer-driven society? This is merely the logical conclusion of a set of conditions on a system. Your entire worth as an individual will be quantified and reduced to a single number, and you will be completely under the control of powerful financial entities that sees society as a source of passive income.
The dirty little secret is that credit rating is a system imposed by the rich elite onto the working class. The rich do not have credit, because they have no need for it. Everything they could want, they simply buy. And they buy it with money that the working class earns as a result of real work, but gets funneled to them through--guess what--credit.
But how does a provider know whether or not you are able to pay for a procedure? If you are dying in the ER, or if you call 911 and the ambulance comes, are they going to run your credit report before treating you for cardiac arrest? So you say you will borrow the funds to pay for a lifesaving procedure? Well, there's another problem. How much do you borrow? Does the provider know in advance how much it will cost to treat you? They barely know what's wrong with you, and sometimes they NEVER figure it out. So how can you know how much debt you will incur, much less know if you can repay it?
The conservative way--everyone is responsible for themselves--sounds real nice, but it isn't a workable solution, no more than a welfare state. It also ignores a fundamental reason why insurance exists, which is to transfer risks that no single individual is able to absorb. Health care is not and should not strictly be a business enterprise. Even health insurers and providers understand this concept to varying extents. Mankind, throughout history, has continually sought to put a monetary value on everything and anything, as a means to establish a basis for a fair exchange. But is it fundamentally possible to put a value on a person's life? Trading in human life is called murder, or suicide. All you are proposing is to give it a third name, "health care."
Margaret Thatcher on TV Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing It seems strange that she should be offended The same orders are given by her
I've said this before now You said I was childish and you'll say it now "Remember what I told you If they hated me they will hate you"
England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving I don't want him to be aware that there's Any such thing as grieving
Young mother down at Smithfield 5 am, looking for food for her kids In her arms she holds three cold babies And the first word that they learned was "please"
These are dangerous days To say what you feel is to dig your own grave "Remember what I told you If you were of the world they would love you"
--Sinead O'Connor, "Black Boys on Mopeds"
This is not just England. It is most of the so-called "civilized" world.
Have you read "Animal Farm?" If you have, you would know that the power of the people to unite against the power of corporations has long been extinct.
You know what's going to happen? A small but vocal minority will heavily protest and boycott Amazon and the Kindle, while the vast majority of mindless consumers will continue to purchase their goods. Amazon could not possibly care less about this. As a large corporate entity they make money hand over fist. Eventually, if the Kindle becomes sufficiently popular and achieves critical mass, people will simply accept the ability to remotely revoke your ownership rights as part of the normal terms of usage of the device.
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The exact same thing happens in Animal Farm. The government, which in actuality is ruled by a privileged elite, leverages the power of propaganda to exploit the worker class under the guise of improving the collective good. Dissent is not tolerated and mercilessly suppressed until the people simply accept the injustice as the reality of life. What the American public has largely failed to grasp is that Orwell's allegory of the dangers of communism is not a specific condemnation of this particular political ideology, but rather, of the dangers of an imbalanced power structure and a malleable, uneducated society. The modern-day corporation has supplanted the role of the communist elite. They are the true puppet masters in today's Western capitalist systems. We have quite vividly observed this phenomenon in the US government's reaction to the past year's economic debacle.
What many people do not realize is that the game is already lost. Americans do not live in a democratic society founded upon the principles of liberty and justice, but an illusion of one, much in the same way that the proletariat class lived under Communism. The average American consumer is as much brainwashed as your typical North Korean.
That's illogical. If someone bought a Pre, they either did or did not intend to use it with iTunes. If they did not, they have not lost anything as a result of Apple closing the loophole. If they did, then they are foolish for thinking that they could rely on that functionality remaining intact for the lifetime of both products.
All I'm asking is: where's the accusation of "it's a dick move on Palm's part" for (1) not bothering to develop their own music services and syncing application, (2) not bothering to cooperate with and secure permission to link to a competitor's product and services, (3) boasting about how their product will work with iTunes, and (4) having sat on their collective asses for the larger part of this past DECADE by releasing shitty products nobody wanted to use? You didn't see them rolling over when other companies wanted to appropriate their IP (e.g., Graffiti). So why would you now defend them for appropriating Apple's iTunes just because it's *popular*?
Get a grip people. Apple-bashing is tremendously popular these days. But give credit where credit is due. It's fun to root for the underdog, but what you're all missing out on here is that NONE of the corporations--Apple included--are the victims. All of these companies employ slimy MBAs who earn their six- and seven-figure incomes by spending all day thinking up ways to squeeze more money out of YOU. If you believe for even one second that Palm didn't see this coming, then the real victim is you.
Seriously think about this for a minute. You've got a device manufacturer that creates a direct competitor to Apple's products, openly advertising that they are piggybacking onto Apple's software functionality without negotiating some kind of licensing agreement and without Apple's consent. Then Apple closes the loophole that enables this unsupported functionality. But nobody wants to blame poor underdog Palm for having done this in the first place. Your average consumer, who either is too ignorant or too self-centered to think two steps ahead, buys into the advertised functionality and then blames Apple when they decide to break it?
That's not how the game is played, folks. If Palm wants to compete, then let them create their own service and interface rather than leveraging another company's successful work. You say that's unfair because Apple has created a heavily lopsided playing field, and now it's impossible to compete with the massive popularity of iTunes. But you have to ask yourself, where were these same competitors five years ago? What where they doing? They were twiddling their thumbs and milking the consumer for all they were worth while making incremental improvements in their devices. Then Apple came along and blew the whole mobile device market away with the iPhone and NOW they want to complain about the playing field not being level? Fuck that bullshit.
Make no mistake, I don't particularly approve that Apple did what they did, but if you bought a Palm Pre and couldn't see this coming you are not only blind but you're an idiot. Palm, RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony--all the handset makers, not to mention the telecoms who still continue to nickel-and-dime consumers with exorbitant rates on SMS (for no other reason except that they can), are not, and never were, your friends just because now they're the underdogs. Same thing with the MP3 player market. These companies want you to think that slapping on features like they were afterthoughts is "technological progress." They never had the vision to rethink the whole device and the whole user experience from the bottom up. And now people have the balls to complain that Apple is a monopoly because they gave you real competition? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
It's even worse that that--taxpayer money was given to Wells Fargo as part of the bailout, so in essence they are paying lawyers on both sides with public money and wasting public money by litigating against itself. I don't think there's any more to the story, except perhaps that the sudden discovery that every employee in their legal department has simultaneously and collectively found a way to shove their cranium into their rectum should have been equally as newsworthy, if not publishable in a scientific journal.
Remember, Clarence Thomas was the one who was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings, and got away with it. So why should it surprise anyone that he would find it perfectly acceptable for a government employee to strip search a 13 year-old girl? His dissent was the closest he could get to saying "Hot damn, I wish I'd been there to do it myself!" The man is a misogynist and a perv and the only reason why he was confirmed was because of his race.
Seriously, Justice Thomas, Scalia, and Alito are the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Roberts is the understudy. The problem is that they have such a narrow, literal understanding of constitutional law that they utterly fail to appreciate how laws only have meaning when they are understood in the larger context of the needs of a diverse and ever-changing society. The Founding Fathers understood the Constitution to be a living document. No one so capable of drafting such words could possibly be so stupid or arrogant as to believe that the laws they created are forever perfectly formed. They knew they could not anticipate how American society would change over the centuries. The conservatives' insistence on the immutability of the Constitution is merely an excuse set forth in order to justify their attempts to holding onto power, even if it means denying entire classes of citizens their human rights.
But when such a society treats the most despised better than they treat the most valued, what does that say about how they understand value? There are millions of disenfranchised working poor who cannot get medical treatment that prisoners in jail get simply by being incarcerated. If you can advance the constitutional rights of criminals, why is it that such arguments are not made for those who are financially imprisoned?
Slashdot Mirror
The distinction is easy to discern. One deals with a matter of public welfare. The other does not.
To be more precise, when any legal entity engages in activities or behaviors that are damaging or potentially damaging to members of the public, and such actions or the judgment demonstrated by them continue to pose a threat to the welfare of others, then there exists a right to inform and be informed. Those that may be harmed by the acts of another have a right to know of the danger. The revelation of salacious details regarding an individual's affairs purely on the basis of their celebrity clearly does not withstand this criterion, and therefore the right to privacy supersedes any privilege of the public interest to be informed of such matters.
However, note that the application of this particular standard is not based on an individual's celebrity--for example, Mel Gibson caught driving drunk may be reportable, because his actions pose a threat to other drivers. Reporting Chris Brown as having assaulted Rihanna may be acceptable. But posting pictures of the victim's abuse is not, because the release of that information is not pertinent to preventing others from coming to harm.
To be fair, Sidekick users didn't have a viable means to back up their personal data that was being pulled from Microsoft/Danger servers. I don't think it's reasonable to expect the users to find some hack or unofficial method to copy all their data from their devices. The only blame they could be assigned is that they bought the service being sold. Your criticism would be valid for, say, iPhone users, since the user has a backup stored on their computer. But no such functionality exists for the Sidekick, as far as I am aware.
And as to who is really being burned here.... Obviously not Microsoft/Danger. Microsoft doesn't give two shits about this, since their acquisition of Danger in 2008 was really about cannibalizing their talent for Windows Mobile 7, as the Pink project has shown. Danger is just a shell of its former self--the damage was done long before this latest failure, which I think was an inevitable consequence of the acquisition. The ones who got burned are T-Mobile (for trusting Microsoft to manage Danger, and Danger to maintain a proper backup solution), and of course, the consumers.
The real issue, of course, is that data is always at risk of being lost no matter how, where, or in what amount it is stored. The passage of time guarantees it. But people want to believe in the existence of certainties, in the notion that if something has a 99.9999% reliability, then we can effectively ignore the minuscule probability of failure. But failures happen all the time and there is no such guarantee. We need to rid ourselves of this delusion that data can somehow be made "safe," that risk can be ignored when made small. Cloud computing is just the flavor of the day.
I knew someone who worked at Danger years ago when the company was still fairly new. It was, at the time, an amazing technology. There was nothing like it. They had so much going for them, and there was a lot of good talent working there. One thing that impressed me was how they solved the problem of mobile web browsing. At the time, mobile web browsing seriously sucked ass. It was not only slow, but many sites simply would not load. Danger solved that by re-parsing the sites on their servers so that pages would look good and function properly on your mobile device. It was the best solution until mobile OSes and hardware became powerful and complex enough to support full browsing; and even then, the UI needed to be tightly integrated before browsing became efficient instead of tedious. It's sad to see such a pioneering company wither on the vine.
The article quotes him as saying online banking is "very safe." Well, if it's so safe, why doesn't he use it? Either he is glaringly, abysmally stupid, or he is a fucking hypocrite who is too much of a pussy to call out the banking and computing (read: Microsoft) industries for perpetuating an inherently insecure system. And then you've got companies like PayPal that try to silence people who dare proclaim that the Emperor Has No Clothes.
But forgive me for being but a lowly member of the hoi polloi, for I should simply continue to believe everything that the government and multinational corporations tell me. "Do as I say, not as I do" is not exactly an appropriate framework by which one goes about fixing problems, much less enforce the law. Oh wait...police officers routinely and frivolously violate the very same laws the rest of us are held to. So I guess this is just business as usual.
Why is it I never have the mod points when I need them???
You COMPLETELY WIN this one. In the face of this one truth, nothing else matters and there is no other rational argument.
The fact of the matter is that Palm is doing this because its developers are too lazy or their management too dishonest to properly implement their own syncing solution. What other conceivable reason is there? RIM has had their own sync for years in their products. And it works perfectly well. They never needed iTMS. All they had to do to provide added value for iTunes users is to be able to read/write the XML. Most tellingly, Apple hasn't so much as lifted a finger in protest.
By all indications Palm picked this fight by deliberately choosing not to develop their own sync software like RIM did. They saw the cash cow Apple made in the iPhone+iPod+iTMS, and the management basically decided that they were going to ride atop it because (1) their status as a dying brand meant they had nothing to lose (2) as the underdog, they would get consumer sympathy even if their actions were found in violation of USB standards (3) it would be a lot cheaper than doing things right (4) should the tie-in be broken by Apple, they could pin the blame on them in the name of "consumer choice". So far, it seems like they calculated it just right.
Folks, it's not that freaking hard to figure out. I think that the legacy of Microsoft's anti-trust practices in the computing industry has had such a profound effect on the culture of computing that people are now hyper-vigilant about anything that might be vaguely construed as anti-competitive. In an ideal world, Apple wouldn't have to disable Palm's unsupported tie-in, because Palm would have made their product sufficiently innovative that it would stand on its own merits. After all, that's what Apple did with the iMac and iPod. It wasn't all that long ago that they too, were in dire straits. They didn't turn the ship around by engaging in dirty tricks. They did it by making good products. The Blackberry is also a good product. RIM was the first to do mobile email the right way (don't even get me started on Windows Mobile). When you do things right, you don't have to cheat to win. That's the real takeaway of the Microsoft story, not "get paranoid about anti-trust." Palm has forgotten the legacy of their past successes, all the more tragic in context of their enormity.
Who the hell modded you up?
Rio de Janeiro is one of the most violent cities in the world. You think one sensationalist news story compares to what goes on in the favelas of Rio? What's worse is that the proximity of poor areas to rich ones means you're not safe anywhere. People regularly get mugged and kidnapped, tourists especially.
Rio's murder rate: 37.7 per 100,000 (2006)
Chicago's murder rate: 15.7 per 100,000 (2005)
Asparagus? That's downright pleasant compared to the smell of cow shit as you drive past Coalinga, home to the Harris Ranch feedlot. I'm all for a bullet train that would more than halve the time I spend smelling that stench.
But I don't have much hope for this to happen. They've been talking it up for so many years, and still we can't build something that the Japanese had done over 40 years ago. The environmental impact of taking all those cars off the road would be worth it.
This is sort of correct. Microsoft is certainly worried about online presence but it is much in the way that a hypochondriac might be worried about the threat of a specific disease. MS management is paranoid that every external innovation related to computing technology in some way is a potential threat or a missed opportunity. They don't focus on one area (e.g. search) at the expense of another, which explains why they continue to insist on developing Zune in the face of the iPod's success, Windows Mobile in the face of the iPhone, and Bing in the face of Google. And they are willing to eat losses--embrace them even--if they believe that doing so permits them to bring attention to their own offerings in some way, even if it is ridiculed (remember the shit brown Zune?). Another great example of this is Bing cashback, where MS actually pays consumers (albeit indirectly) a variable percentage as a reward for making purchases through Bing. That is how much they believe that everyone is out to get them, that they must have a hand in every computing niche.
Microsoft is compelled to do something just because someone else is doing it. If they can't buy it, they try to copy it. If they can't copy it, they try to discredit it. And this compulsion is, I believe, driven by fear--fear that if they don't stay on top of everything and everyone, that minor papercut could harbor a flesh-eating bacterium. Hypochondria. They talk tough and have lots of money to back their actions, but behind the scenes they're worried about everything. It's like the Howard Hughes of computer technology.
It's not about "right" or "wrong." What I describe is merely my model, a conceptual framework for understanding the motives of this one company. Apple's model is different, almost the polar opposite--they are not about needing to be everywhere and for everyone. Rather, their model is rather egocentric in that the product is designed according to internal beliefs about what it should be, essentially dictating to the consumer what they ought to want. The product drives the demand, rather than the other way around. This approach is often miscast as saying Apple consumers care about style over substance. The truth is, Apple products are successful only to the extent that there are people for whom it is successful. They've made some bombs, even fairly recently (iPod HiFi, anyone? G4 Cube? Hockey puck mouse? Need I go on?) If it truly sucks, people won't hesitate to ditch it, even when made by the almighty Apple.
Of course, these are not absolute models of corporate philosophy that apply universally.
Whereas MS acts out of insecurity, Apple acts out of arrogance. Asking which approach is "correct" is sort of like asking whether a watermelon is green or red, when all I really care about is if it's tasty....
While this is mostly true, it's also beside the point. Microsoft doesn't care about whether their hired retail staff will know anything about Windows. They already have huge market share. People buy Windows because they are either (1) too ignorant and scared to use anything else (be it Mac or Linux), or (2) they are gamers and have no need for people to sell them a Windows box, they'd buy it anyway. The entire point of these MS stores is to say F**K YOU APPLE. It is ALL about leveraging Microsoft's vast financial resources to hurt Apple as much as possible. They don't care if they lose huge amounts of money doing it. That is why Zune exists, why their advertising is all about underpricing Macs, why they propose opening stores right next to Apple Retail Stores, and now why they are actively trying to poach Apple Retail Store management. It is warfare, pure and simple, because Microsoft senior management knows they have lost the innovation battle. They've lost it for the better part of this past decade.
Many companies--not just Microsoft--don't simply use their wealth to generate more wealth. They also use it to actively deny their competition from succeeding. Profit is not the only motive in a free market. Sometimes--perhaps quite often--success is measured in terms of how completely and efficiently you are able to punish others for even daring to go up against you. You don't have to win outright, just make your enemies suffer more than you. And that kind of attitude is perfectly exemplified by what we already know about Ballmer's chair-throwing, monkey dancing personality.
This is so many levels of incorrect I don't even know where to begin.
Let's start with the Clean Water Act. There are numerous failures in compliance, and the EPA acknowledges they are vastly underfunded to provide proper enforcement. Depending on the state, there have been noncompliance rates of as high as 80%, e.g., Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas. The violators claim that many of these are bureaucratic in nature and don't actually represent a threat to the water supply, but to say that legal measures have adequately protected the US water supply is woefully ignorant of the facts.
Second, "residual chlorine" does not "leach" out of the water. Chlorine does not just magically disappear out of aqueous solution; the atoms are still there--indeed they must be in order for chlorination to be effective!--unless you have found some way to evolve a gas that will bubble out of the water. Leaching refers to the release of a substance out of a solution over time. Once you put chlorine into water, it forms hypochlorite (the same ion found in household bleach), which is the disinfecting agent.
Third, the study already amply documents the growth of the aforementioned bacteria inside the shower head. There is a small amount of standing water that remains in the head; exposure to air then permits the bacteria to grow--even in the presence of any small concentration of chlorine in the water. It doesn't take much for a colony to overpower a little bit of chlorine.
Fourth, there are many species of bacteria that are well adapted to surviving in what we would consider highly toxic environments. It should not come as a surprise that there should exist bacteria that are simultaneously (a) able to flourish in a (poorly-maintained) shower head attached to a municipal water supply, and (b) pathogenic in nature.
Finally, all it takes is to get an all-metal shower head where you can easily detach the nozzle assembly. They sell them at the hardware store--I should know, I bought one recently (my old shower broke). Once a month, you unscrew the nozzle portion, and clean it out. If your water is really crazy hard like mine (seriously wtf, it's got more calcium than milk), you pretty much need to do this anyway because the nozzles get clogged if you don't. But don't buy cheapo plastic shower heads because (1) they break easily, and (2) they seem to clog faster because the nozzles tend to be finer.
By the time we can set up a self-sufficient ecosystem hospitable to human life on Mars, you can bet that we would also have the resources to do a 2-way trip. A lot of unmanned flights would be necessary to set up a colony. One two-way trip is going to cost far less than colonization in the short run, but in the long run, of course colonization wins.
The bottom line, however, is that human exploration of other planets in our system is going to be severely limited until we are better able to capture and utilize the energy coming to OUR planet. We have a much more complex and important task at hand, which is to find ways of harnessing Earth-bound energy in a way that is sustainable and economically efficient. If we can do this, we won't need to ask people to go on one-way trips. Cheap, abundant energy is what enables technological and social progress.
"Like the toupee on a fading fame
The final whistle in a losing game
Thick lipstick on a five year old girl
It makes you think it's a plastic world
A plastic world and we're all plastic too
Just a couple of different faces in a dead man's queue
The world is turning Disney and there's nothing you can do
You're trying to walk like giants
but you're wearing Pluto's shoes
And the answers fall easier from the barrel of a gun
Than it does from the lips of the beautiful and the dumb
The world won't end in darkness, it'll end in family fun
With Coca Cola clouds behind a Big Mac sun "
Surely this must be a sign of the Apocalypse...?
Actually, based on the narration, I believe that the computation involved requires three basic processing steps: (1) detection systems to measure physical properties of the system at any given point in time, such as position, velocity, acceleration, and force; (2) real-time algorithms based on rapid numerical solution of equations to predict future states of the system, with continual updating by comparing predicted state with actual state inferred from step 1; and (3) determination of the appropriate movement in the robotic arm for the necessary outcome.
I think that this is a very difficult thing to program in general because the examples shown are very specific tasks which serve to demonstrate the speed of this type of processing, but we do not see how well arbitrary tasks can be similarly implemented or how accurately.
Make no mistake: this is very impressive performance, because it is basically a huge step forward in machine vision and real-time robotic control. On some level, the mathematics has always been there, but only in as much as the basic mathematics of binary arithmetic has been used to develop programming languages. There's a lot more going on behind the scenes that extends beyond a mere physical description of the system in question, because for such an approach to be possible in the general sense, the robot doesn't know things like the precise distribution of the mass in the object being manipulated, or all the frictional forces involved. It's not operating under a sort of Laplacian notion wherein if one knew the precise state of all parameters of the system, one can simply solve the required physical equations and predict the future state at any arbitrary point in time, because (a) chaos guarantees the instability of such nonlinear systems, and (b) it wouldn't be possible to measure all such parameters with sufficient precision.
What is really going on is perhaps best explained in human terms: the programming is doing a lot of what humans do--we observe the state with our visual and tactile senses, and our brains receive these continual updates and decide what to do next. This processing is already extremely fast in a biological context, but with these machines, it is made at least an order of magnitude faster. The next step is to simulate a sort of adaptive intelligence to allow the handling of a wider class of scenarios than the ones shown in the video.
It's a great way to test the performance of these supercomputers, to ensure that their calculations are correct. The calculation of pi to additional decimal places beyond what was previously known is never done with just a single method--otherwise, it is impossible to verify the additional digits. It is always done with two different algorithms to ensure that the result is valid. There are many rapidly converging algorithms (e.g., variations on AM-GM methods can be quadratically convergent or better; BBP-type digit extraction methods; and of course, classic Ramanujan series-type methods). However, computing pi to so many decimal places has much less to do with the chosen algorithm than it has to do with the memory- and computing time-efficient implementations of such algorithms in massively parallel architectures. Thus these calculations serve as very good tests for the robustness of supercomputers. The result is also verifiable to previously known digits, and even beyond the previous record, it is possible to perform statistical analyses to determine whether there are any significant deviations in the distribution of digit frequencies.
So, in summary, it is hardly a useless computation. Not that you're going to get an explanation like this from your usual news sources, which generally do not write for technical audiences.
Also note that distributed computing resources such as Folding@home, or even the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search don't bother with calculating pi, as the purpose of these projects is to make new discovers in their respective fields of interest.
The prison system can't even stop prisoners from ordering hits from inside. What does that tell you about their ability to control the interactions among each other?
The truly sickening thing is that the cost to correctly implement the concept of incarceration greatly exceeds what the public is willing to pay, and perhaps even exceeds the cost to sort them out. But people are fearful, and they want criminals to disappear so they can be safe, so we have a terrible system that costs taxpayers huge amounts of money yet doesn't work. Where does a lot of this money go? Private contractors, of course. Prisons are extremely profitable for companies that manage the food, clothing, and medications for inmates. Morgan Spurlock (of Super Size Me fame), in one of his "30 Days" episodes, spends--you guessed it--30 days in a state prison. It's quite eye-opening. Watch it on Hulu: http://www.hulu.com/watch/56914/30-days-jail#s-p2-so-i0
You don't need to buy a ticket to drive along public roads and photograph what you can see with the naked eye...although of course, if you violate traffic laws you might "purchase" a ticket against your will....
Look, I'm a photographer and I know what is and is not allowed in terms of image capture, copyright, and publication rights in the US. If you are standing on public property, you have the right to photograph just about anything you can see with your unaided vision (i.e., no long telephoto lenses or binoculars to peer into houses). The key is whether the subject has a reasonable expectation of privacy from where they are located and the context in which they are situated at that location. Buying a ticket from an event organizer who has leased the land for that event turns that land into private property for that event's duration, and therefore ALL activities fall under the purview of the organizers. You become their guest, which is why they can eject you from the event should you violate the terms of the contract you agreed to by purchasing the ticket in the first place.
So to compare Google's Street View against Burning Man photo policy is comparing apples and oranges. One is about photos taken from public land, whereas the other is about photos taken at a private event. The organizer's policy is designed to prevent commercial use, which is absolutely their right to do. They could even have the right to prevent you from taking pictures at all while on their property, just like a shopping mall can say "No Photography Permitted."
I'm not concerned about the legal issues surrounding photography @ Burning Man. I'm far more concerned about the issues surrounding photography of public landmarks from public property that is now being prevented by law enforcement under the guise of "anti-terror measures." That's right, photographers (basically anyone with a professional-looking camera) are being told they will be arrested and their equipment confiscated if they take photos of, say, the Sears Tower, or the Brooklyn Bridge. WTF is that? And much of the time, if you do a bit of digging, the real reason why this is happening is because the advent of high-quality digital imaging has now made it possible for amateurs to create artistically compelling images that compete with the "official" landmark images that are for sale. Why buy a poster or print if you can shoot your own? It's just another piece of security theater and illegal restriction under the guise of "protecting us from terror." That is something to be worried about.
You misunderstand the point I have made.
The problem is not simply that the working class must borrow from the rich. It is not that in a capitalist society, the working class, by definition, requires others to lend them money to make purchases on goods and services that they cannot buy outright. The problem is that there is no counteracting force--that is to say, the rich have all the power to rewrite the rules of the game as they see fit, and thus there is no real accountability for their misdeeds.
I find it curious that you believe that my statement was anti-capitalist. To the contrary, if you apply my statement to the current economic crisis which was in no small part due to the willful underwriting of bad risks, you will clearly see that the problem is that the financial institutions have become so large and influential that the government bailed them out to prevent a complete collapse of the economy. Had the system been truly capitalist, these lenders would have had to write down their losses, rather than being rewarded by taxpayers for making bets they knew were unwise.
Capitalism when times are good and socialism when times are bad is neither capitalism nor socialism. It's simply robbery.
The credit rating problem is only one facet of the larger issue, which is that our economic system is based upon a belief that it is possible to create a sufficiently accurate quantitative model of risk such that one can "almost always" trust it. When viewed in this larger context, it becomes obvious that the trend towards more data collection, more intrusion into consumer behaviors, is the logical consequence of this flawed belief. It is this idea that the more you know about something, the more predictive you can be--but the fundamental truth remains that there is no way to eliminate risk entirely.
The working class are simultaneously victims and perpetrators of this system based upon flawed assumptions, as are the rich. But I am more inclined to blame the rich because they are the ones who have historically been in control, both financially and politically.
The lending of money, in of itself, is not a bad thing. But when mixed with an easily cowed, manipulated, and self-entitled public that is told from infancy that "you can do anything if you just try hard enough" and "you are special and deserve everything," it becomes a problem. But in whose interest is it to make a credit-based, consumer economy the foundation of the American financial system in the first place? Who do you blame--the ones who are too stupid to behave responsibly, or the ones who encourage them to be stupid in the first place, because it makes them easy to control and profit off them?
The problem with credit rating is not that it exists, or that it lacks sufficient predictive value for creditworthiness. It's that over the last few decades, credit rating has increasingly become a proxy for overall responsibility and our legal system has upheld its widespread misuse. Credit score is now a prerequisite for nearly everything that has to do with money. Your insurance premiums are a function of your credit score. Your ability to secure a job is dependent on your credit score. Whether a landlord will rent to you depends on your credit score. Just about anyone these days asks you for permission to peek at your score--even your mobile phone provider.
Credit rating was never meant to be used in this way. And yet, everyone does it because it works, and nobody is willing to stand up to it. The future of credit rating is that it will begin to use increasingly sophisticated methods to quantify how much risk you present to a lender, and on the flip side of the coin, it will be used to determine whether you can do ANYTHING. What jobs you are allowed to hold, which people you will be allowed to socialize with, what goods and services you are allowed to buy, which schools you will be allowed to attend, how many children you will be allowed to have, and where and when you will be able to travel.
Creditworthiness is the new class system. What else did anybody expect in a capitalist, consumer-driven society? This is merely the logical conclusion of a set of conditions on a system. Your entire worth as an individual will be quantified and reduced to a single number, and you will be completely under the control of powerful financial entities that sees society as a source of passive income.
The dirty little secret is that credit rating is a system imposed by the rich elite onto the working class. The rich do not have credit, because they have no need for it. Everything they could want, they simply buy. And they buy it with money that the working class earns as a result of real work, but gets funneled to them through--guess what--credit.
But how does a provider know whether or not you are able to pay for a procedure? If you are dying in the ER, or if you call 911 and the ambulance comes, are they going to run your credit report before treating you for cardiac arrest? So you say you will borrow the funds to pay for a lifesaving procedure? Well, there's another problem. How much do you borrow? Does the provider know in advance how much it will cost to treat you? They barely know what's wrong with you, and sometimes they NEVER figure it out. So how can you know how much debt you will incur, much less know if you can repay it?
The conservative way--everyone is responsible for themselves--sounds real nice, but it isn't a workable solution, no more than a welfare state. It also ignores a fundamental reason why insurance exists, which is to transfer risks that no single individual is able to absorb. Health care is not and should not strictly be a business enterprise. Even health insurers and providers understand this concept to varying extents. Mankind, throughout history, has continually sought to put a monetary value on everything and anything, as a means to establish a basis for a fair exchange. But is it fundamentally possible to put a value on a person's life? Trading in human life is called murder, or suicide. All you are proposing is to give it a third name, "health care."
Margaret Thatcher on TV
Shocked by the deaths that took place in Beijing
It seems strange that she should be offended
The same orders are given by her
I've said this before now
You said I was childish and you'll say it now
"Remember what I told you
If they hated me they will hate you"
England's not the mythical land of Madame George and roses
It's the home of police who kill black boys on mopeds
And I love my boy and that's why I'm leaving
I don't want him to be aware that there's
Any such thing as grieving
Young mother down at Smithfield
5 am, looking for food for her kids
In her arms she holds three cold babies
And the first word that they learned was "please"
These are dangerous days
To say what you feel is to dig your own grave
"Remember what I told you
If you were of the world they would love you"
--Sinead O'Connor, "Black Boys on Mopeds"
This is not just England. It is most of the so-called "civilized" world.
Have you read "Animal Farm?" If you have, you would know that the power of the people to unite against the power of corporations has long been extinct.
You know what's going to happen? A small but vocal minority will heavily protest and boycott Amazon and the Kindle, while the vast majority of mindless consumers will continue to purchase their goods. Amazon could not possibly care less about this. As a large corporate entity they make money hand over fist. Eventually, if the Kindle becomes sufficiently popular and achieves critical mass, people will simply accept the ability to remotely revoke your ownership rights as part of the normal terms of usage of the device.
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The exact same thing happens in Animal Farm. The government, which in actuality is ruled by a privileged elite, leverages the power of propaganda to exploit the worker class under the guise of improving the collective good. Dissent is not tolerated and mercilessly suppressed until the people simply accept the injustice as the reality of life. What the American public has largely failed to grasp is that Orwell's allegory of the dangers of communism is not a specific condemnation of this particular political ideology, but rather, of the dangers of an imbalanced power structure and a malleable, uneducated society. The modern-day corporation has supplanted the role of the communist elite. They are the true puppet masters in today's Western capitalist systems. We have quite vividly observed this phenomenon in the US government's reaction to the past year's economic debacle.
What many people do not realize is that the game is already lost. Americans do not live in a democratic society founded upon the principles of liberty and justice, but an illusion of one, much in the same way that the proletariat class lived under Communism. The average American consumer is as much brainwashed as your typical North Korean.
That's illogical. If someone bought a Pre, they either did or did not intend to use it with iTunes. If they did not, they have not lost anything as a result of Apple closing the loophole. If they did, then they are foolish for thinking that they could rely on that functionality remaining intact for the lifetime of both products.
All I'm asking is: where's the accusation of "it's a dick move on Palm's part" for (1) not bothering to develop their own music services and syncing application, (2) not bothering to cooperate with and secure permission to link to a competitor's product and services, (3) boasting about how their product will work with iTunes, and (4) having sat on their collective asses for the larger part of this past DECADE by releasing shitty products nobody wanted to use? You didn't see them rolling over when other companies wanted to appropriate their IP (e.g., Graffiti). So why would you now defend them for appropriating Apple's iTunes just because it's *popular*?
Get a grip people. Apple-bashing is tremendously popular these days. But give credit where credit is due. It's fun to root for the underdog, but what you're all missing out on here is that NONE of the corporations--Apple included--are the victims. All of these companies employ slimy MBAs who earn their six- and seven-figure incomes by spending all day thinking up ways to squeeze more money out of YOU. If you believe for even one second that Palm didn't see this coming, then the real victim is you.
Seriously think about this for a minute. You've got a device manufacturer that creates a direct competitor to Apple's products, openly advertising that they are piggybacking onto Apple's software functionality without negotiating some kind of licensing agreement and without Apple's consent. Then Apple closes the loophole that enables this unsupported functionality. But nobody wants to blame poor underdog Palm for having done this in the first place. Your average consumer, who either is too ignorant or too self-centered to think two steps ahead, buys into the advertised functionality and then blames Apple when they decide to break it?
That's not how the game is played, folks. If Palm wants to compete, then let them create their own service and interface rather than leveraging another company's successful work. You say that's unfair because Apple has created a heavily lopsided playing field, and now it's impossible to compete with the massive popularity of iTunes. But you have to ask yourself, where were these same competitors five years ago? What where they doing? They were twiddling their thumbs and milking the consumer for all they were worth while making incremental improvements in their devices. Then Apple came along and blew the whole mobile device market away with the iPhone and NOW they want to complain about the playing field not being level? Fuck that bullshit.
Make no mistake, I don't particularly approve that Apple did what they did, but if you bought a Palm Pre and couldn't see this coming you are not only blind but you're an idiot. Palm, RIM, Nokia, Samsung, Sony--all the handset makers, not to mention the telecoms who still continue to nickel-and-dime consumers with exorbitant rates on SMS (for no other reason except that they can), are not, and never were, your friends just because now they're the underdogs. Same thing with the MP3 player market. These companies want you to think that slapping on features like they were afterthoughts is "technological progress." They never had the vision to rethink the whole device and the whole user experience from the bottom up. And now people have the balls to complain that Apple is a monopoly because they gave you real competition? Talk about biting the hand that feeds you.
It's even worse that that--taxpayer money was given to Wells Fargo as part of the bailout, so in essence they are paying lawyers on both sides with public money and wasting public money by litigating against itself. I don't think there's any more to the story, except perhaps that the sudden discovery that every employee in their legal department has simultaneously and collectively found a way to shove their cranium into their rectum should have been equally as newsworthy, if not publishable in a scientific journal.
Remember, Clarence Thomas was the one who was accused by Anita Hill of sexual harassment during his confirmation hearings, and got away with it. So why should it surprise anyone that he would find it perfectly acceptable for a government employee to strip search a 13 year-old girl? His dissent was the closest he could get to saying "Hot damn, I wish I'd been there to do it myself!" The man is a misogynist and a perv and the only reason why he was confirmed was because of his race.
Seriously, Justice Thomas, Scalia, and Alito are the three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Roberts is the understudy. The problem is that they have such a narrow, literal understanding of constitutional law that they utterly fail to appreciate how laws only have meaning when they are understood in the larger context of the needs of a diverse and ever-changing society. The Founding Fathers understood the Constitution to be a living document. No one so capable of drafting such words could possibly be so stupid or arrogant as to believe that the laws they created are forever perfectly formed. They knew they could not anticipate how American society would change over the centuries. The conservatives' insistence on the immutability of the Constitution is merely an excuse set forth in order to justify their attempts to holding onto power, even if it means denying entire classes of citizens their human rights.
But when such a society treats the most despised better than they treat the most valued, what does that say about how they understand value? There are millions of disenfranchised working poor who cannot get medical treatment that prisoners in jail get simply by being incarcerated. If you can advance the constitutional rights of criminals, why is it that such arguments are not made for those who are financially imprisoned?