I'm sorry but this is a red herring. You can't sum up literacy into a simple percentage and call it a day. There are many ways to define literacy and every country has their own standards for doing so. You also have to consider that the US has a huge immigrant population, many of which can speak and read almost no English. These people would all be considered illiterate even by the loose standards the government came up with for their survey.
I've lived in three states spread across the US (CA, NC, and MN) and I've found virtually everyone to be literate if you exclude people who are either immigrants, criminals, mentally retarded, and the very poor. Of the people who are illiterate, it's their choice and not a failure on the part of the US to offer education. Note: by law, all children must attend school, however, there is no law that requires them to study. In New Zealand, you have virtually no immigration by comparison so you can weave a culture of literacy across generations very easily. It's not an apples to oranges comparison. There's no way a country like the US could EVER have a literacy rate at the top, short of countries like New Zealand suddenly not caring any more.
"FON managed to alienate many advanced users that wished to participate but were locked out of their routers."
They alienated those people for good reason: they advertise how safe their router is on their site. They can't promise any safety if they're allowing people to change how it works. The device was never intended as a tech toy for geeks to mess with.
It has been known for some time that people of limited literacy (can read enough to flip burgers, can't read enough to work in an office) form a majority in the US - you have a majority that's either uneducated or just plain stupid. You can divide up any country in this fashion: 20% are smart to brilliant, 60% are average (or somewhat stupid as I see it), and stupid to moronic. I've traveled to eight countries (including England) and this seems to hold true everywhere I go.
Actually he was probably a Russian Jew. They usually have non-russian sounding names even though they were born and raised there (as were their parents). However, like many Russian Jews, he emigrated to Israel.
I have an uncle who has a sizable fortune and decided after he retired that he might want to get into producing music. To his dismay, he found the industry laden with actual mob men. He ended up quitting the business and this is a guy who doesn't quit anything when it comes to business stuff unless he's damn good and ready. Granted, this was 15 years ago but I doubt those people all just packed up their bags and left such a lucrative industry.
So, it's no surprise to me that the RIAA uses the exact same tactics the mob uses because the industry is littered with those people.
The article is poorly worded but they aren't talking about charging the consumer $20. The $20 is what Apple wants to pay the record companies per device. It's not clear what they have in mind for the consumer. In any event, they aren't getting any bites because Nokia already pays $80 for the same priviledge.
Mind you, you can already get this feature from Rhapsody To Go for $14.99/mo for unlimited access to ~4.5 million songs. They've had this feature for quite a while now.
Well, from my decade of service in the USN Submarine Service I'd say that a significant (if not vast) majority of my fellow bubbleheads exhibited the traits of "prickly independence" and "rebel/renegade". From encounters and conversations with other parts of the Navy and other branches of the service over the years I'd say that (outside of the more elite branches, like the Submarine Service) the traits are present in what amounts to only a very slight minority. I was in the Air Force and I can assure you that there's no shortage of independence (rebel style or otherwise). However, there's a huge difference between talking to a military person as a military person in the presence of other military people and speaking to the civilian masses. This general has very little leeway in what he can say to the public if he wants to keep his stars in-tact. The only thing the press seems to love more than a politician saying something stupid is a senior military official saying it. The press views Dr. Strangelove as a freakin' documentary.
I agree. She seems willing to do anything it takes to win. She doesn't care about what she says so long as it gets her votes. She's changed her opinion things so many times that she's the definition of what the Repubs like to call a "waffler". In short, she's extremely manipulative. I think that's why if she gets the nomination she has no chance against McCain even though the Repubs aren't super-happy about him.
It doesn't throw off my body clock at all because when I wake up (around 8:00) it's already been sun-up for a while. It's only the early risers that suffer. Also, since I, personally, get more sun every day it improves my overall mood and productivity. So I think it's personal matter of whether it's a good thing or not. For me, it's unquestionably much better.
I'm complaining bitterly about the fact that America is a nice place, if you happen to live inside of it. Otherwise, we are as bad, if not worse, than any other empire that the world has seen. Apparently you haven't studied much history. Your ire about our inaction in places like Africa is warranted and places we sell weapons to are not always good choices but your hyperbole about our place in history comes from either ignorance or an inability to differentiate levels of evil. Either way, it weakens your otherwise well stated argument.
It's unfair since it's not safe for anyone BUT Apple to do it. It should be noted that Microsoft pulled the same crap with Office apps on Windows going all the way back to the OS/2 days. It gave them an unfair performance advantage. They could also have their apps division collude with the OS division to put in APIs that would improve performance even further or to provide features that other apps just cannot get.
Lets be honest here...you and I both know that if this were Microsoft we were talking about there would be this huge uproar (and rightly so). Lets try and keep the playing field equal and call a spade a spade.
No, they are talking about the customers AFTER THE FACT. It's clear none of this was a consideration before releasing the product or they wouldn't have had to write the emails in the first place. Get your chronology right.
And yes, helping their customers helps them keep their customers and get new ones but they've clearly failed to do that with Vista. So how is it that I'm wrong again? In recent years they demonstrate time and time again that they don't care about their customers. Vista isn't the only example but it's the most glaring because it's a flagship product for them. There's a damn good reason Apple is getting so popular lately and it has nothing to do with their spectacular prices.
I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
But there is a conflict. Religious people will always believe what their holy book says over what any scientist says regardless of the evidence provided by the scientist.
I also don't see what your point is about religious modes of thought existing in every culture around the world. So? A few thousand years ago most people around the world thought that when there was a lightning storm that one or more gods were angry at them.
Ultimately you have to make the choice of what takes precidence and if you pick science over religion than you're not very religious and you if you pick religion over science you're certainly not a scientist.
That said, I don't see why a religious person would feel obligated to not believe in evolution. There's nothing in the bible or any other holy book (to my knowledge) that says you can't nor is there any conclusive language that excludes the possibility.
Yes, what I said is SOOO untrue, that's why Ford is moving so many of its manufacturing plants down there. You need to do some research. Like most people on/., you have no idea what you're talking about.
As for pushing for a silver standard...guess what, there's people pushing for us to go back to a gold/silver standard. Our currency has lost so much value that Canada's dollar is even worth more. Also, every bribe a company pays a government official in Mexico is a drop in the bucket to their costs here in the US. It's also extremely easy to get out of paying taxes there. Sorry but you just don't know jack shit.
You're thinking of Europe. Places like Mexico (and most of the third world) have very low taxes, almost no environmental laws, and far weaker medical testing restrictions.
They come here precisely because they are smart. As bad as the US government is in terms of taxation and economic policy it is still easier for a smart individual to get ahead in the United States than it is in many other parts of the world. Thus, in light of the higher pay, lower taxes, better recognition for intellectual accomplishments (i.e. bonus, raises, and promotions) it is easy to see why many smart people, particularly in medical research for example, choose to work in the United States, if possible, rather than remain in their native country where they will take a bath in taxes and generally receive less financial reward for their work. Does this answer your question? There are many countries that are much better tax-wise than the US and far less imposing on laws and ethics when it comes to medical research. So I would say, the only real reason they come here is that there are companies here spending the shitload of money required to do the research in the first place. Medical research is extremely expensive even if you factor out the salaries of the researchers.
Music isn't about sound, it is about rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics and attitude. A beautiful work is still beautiful even with its high frequencies muddied up and a pop every few minutes. If audiophiles find momentary breaks in fidelity distracting whereas others do not, then it is the audiophiles who cannot love music. People train themselves to assess the technology, to listen for artifacts and distortion, when there is music playing all they can hear from it is that the impedance of the left woofer's coil is not matched with that of the amp. Having a nice sound system is something to be proud of, being able to hear the problems in cheaper ones is not.
So, sound quality doesn't matter? I suppose you rip all your MP3's at 32kbps then? After all, it's still beautiful, right? As for being proud of not hearing things...so you're saying that because YOU do not have a sensitive ear, then it's everyone else's problem, right? Don't get me wrong, most audiophiles are morons who think buying a wooden volume knob improves the sound of their music, but there are "real" audiophiles with a truely refined sense of hearing. A lot of musicians have a refined sense of hearing because you NEED to train your ear to hear very very subtle things. I'm a musician and I have a refined sense of hearing. I hear very subtle things that a lot of people miss. I'm not bragging but it's extremely valuable to me. I'm sorry that you think I'm somehow handicapped because of it but from my perspective, you're the defective one.
I've also seen guys doing wheelies on the highway, and standing on the seat. It seems to depend a lot on the kind of bike. The crotch-rocket folks tend to be the ones riding like idiots. I've never seen a guy on a Harley or a Goldwing doing anything stupid on the highway. I wonder if the accident / death rates confirm this... This is an offtopic response to an offtopic response but I don't care because my karma sucks anyway...
Harley riders don't do it because 1) they can't (the physics don't allow it), and 2) the Harley world has a completely different social dynamic than crotch rocket riders (like me) do. That said, motorcycle people help motorcycle people in need regardless of the type of bike (there are a couple of exceptions to this but its not a cruiser vs. crotch-rocket thing). Finally, the VAST majority of sport bike riders do not engage in wheelies, stoppies, etc.
The protective layer on blu-ray discs is very effective. When I rent them from Netflix, they aren't scratched at all unlike the DVDs and HD-DVDs I rent from them. In fact, I like it so much it's the only thing I like better about blu-ray than HD-DVD.
The GOAL was a $100 laptop. The fact he couldn't produce a viable product for that doesn't marginalize what he's trying to accomplish in any way.
"Utter tripe. Not to mention he didn't "make it happen" before others were starting their own production."
Prove it. I never heard ANYTHING from anyone about this. You're full of shit.
"The third world could only benefit if there were three players in the ultra-low cost laptop sector."
BS. This isn't a capatalism game with free market economics at play. This is about a guy who was attempting to produce a cheap laptop for CHARITY that had the potential to be distrubted to a large number of poor kids because of its price. In any event, what is most likely to happen at this point is that the OLPC will go the way of the dinosaur within the next two years and Intel will be the only provider of this category of laptops. So you're going to get your monopoly anyway.
Finally, you haven't provided any evidence of any of the things you said, so I won't either.
I still think you're an Intel employee.
So now I'm to believe that giant corporations like Intel lagged behind the likes of Negroponte and his all-volunteer staff because, they, of all people, couldn't produce the laptops at low enough price? Hmm, well, the Classmate is STILL more expensive and still lacking in some of the capabilities of the OLPC. Please, you live in a fantasy world if you think a corp with Intel's resources couldn't beat a nut like Negroponte to market by a large margin. Also, your argument about it was just a matter of time before someone produced something like the OLPC and therefore Negroponte meant nothing is pretty lame considering you could say this about any endeavor or activity. It's all just a matter of time, right? So is fucking anti-gravity. The truth is that someone has to be the one to make it happen once. It's much easier for the followers to ride the coattails of the first guy. Finally, you seem to derride him for the delays in releasing the product...as if that NEVER happens with every other fucking tech company product in the world. I don't know what your malfunction is, but you have an extreme bias against Negroponte/OLPC for some reason. Do you work for Intel? I have no steak in this fight. I don't even really give a shit about giving laptops to kids who will always remain the fucked over people of the world even if they learn how to browse porn and use OpenOffice. There's reasons for that but it goes way beyond the bounds of this discussion.
There is no $100 laptop. He made the laptop as cheap as he could with the features it HAD to have. What that has to do with this argument is beyond me.
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I'm sorry but this is a red herring. You can't sum up literacy into a simple percentage and call it a day. There are many ways to define literacy and every country has their own standards for doing so. You also have to consider that the US has a huge immigrant population, many of which can speak and read almost no English. These people would all be considered illiterate even by the loose standards the government came up with for their survey.
I've lived in three states spread across the US (CA, NC, and MN) and I've found virtually everyone to be literate if you exclude people who are either immigrants, criminals, mentally retarded, and the very poor. Of the people who are illiterate, it's their choice and not a failure on the part of the US to offer education. Note: by law, all children must attend school, however, there is no law that requires them to study. In New Zealand, you have virtually no immigration by comparison so you can weave a culture of literacy across generations very easily. It's not an apples to oranges comparison. There's no way a country like the US could EVER have a literacy rate at the top, short of countries like New Zealand suddenly not caring any more.
"FON managed to alienate many advanced users that wished to participate but were locked out of their routers." They alienated those people for good reason: they advertise how safe their router is on their site. They can't promise any safety if they're allowing people to change how it works. The device was never intended as a tech toy for geeks to mess with.
Couldn't the woman just encase her cat in lead and avoid the whole problem? :)
Actually he was probably a Russian Jew. They usually have non-russian sounding names even though they were born and raised there (as were their parents). However, like many Russian Jews, he emigrated to Israel.
I have an uncle who has a sizable fortune and decided after he retired that he might want to get into producing music. To his dismay, he found the industry laden with actual mob men. He ended up quitting the business and this is a guy who doesn't quit anything when it comes to business stuff unless he's damn good and ready. Granted, this was 15 years ago but I doubt those people all just packed up their bags and left such a lucrative industry. So, it's no surprise to me that the RIAA uses the exact same tactics the mob uses because the industry is littered with those people.
The article is poorly worded but they aren't talking about charging the consumer $20. The $20 is what Apple wants to pay the record companies per device. It's not clear what they have in mind for the consumer. In any event, they aren't getting any bites because Nokia already pays $80 for the same priviledge.
Mind you, you can already get this feature from Rhapsody To Go for $14.99/mo for unlimited access to ~4.5 million songs. They've had this feature for quite a while now.
I agree. She seems willing to do anything it takes to win. She doesn't care about what she says so long as it gets her votes. She's changed her opinion things so many times that she's the definition of what the Repubs like to call a "waffler". In short, she's extremely manipulative. I think that's why if she gets the nomination she has no chance against McCain even though the Repubs aren't super-happy about him.
It doesn't throw off my body clock at all because when I wake up (around 8:00) it's already been sun-up for a while. It's only the early risers that suffer. Also, since I, personally, get more sun every day it improves my overall mood and productivity. So I think it's personal matter of whether it's a good thing or not. For me, it's unquestionably much better.
It's unfair since it's not safe for anyone BUT Apple to do it. It should be noted that Microsoft pulled the same crap with Office apps on Windows going all the way back to the OS/2 days. It gave them an unfair performance advantage. They could also have their apps division collude with the OS division to put in APIs that would improve performance even further or to provide features that other apps just cannot get.
Lets be honest here...you and I both know that if this were Microsoft we were talking about there would be this huge uproar (and rightly so). Lets try and keep the playing field equal and call a spade a spade.
No, they are talking about the customers AFTER THE FACT. It's clear none of this was a consideration before releasing the product or they wouldn't have had to write the emails in the first place. Get your chronology right. And yes, helping their customers helps them keep their customers and get new ones but they've clearly failed to do that with Vista. So how is it that I'm wrong again? In recent years they demonstrate time and time again that they don't care about their customers. Vista isn't the only example but it's the most glaring because it's a flagship product for them. There's a damn good reason Apple is getting so popular lately and it has nothing to do with their spectacular prices.
I just read their internal emails and it appears that they changed the drivers required for Vista such that due to new DRM A/V requirements in Vista, most existing drivers were made inoperable and, in many cases, would never be fixed. They then colluded with Intel to say that machines based on the 915 chipset were sufficient to run the OS so that Intel would have good quarterly results.
To summarize, they just don't care about the customer. At no point do the emails indicate them making any decisions based on what's best for their customers. It makes it pretty obvious why Vista has been such a failure so far. They can't even get the service pack right.
I'm not big on the idea of predicting corporate downfalls but you really have to wonder whether a company that makes such incredibly bad decisions is long for this world.
But there is a conflict. Religious people will always believe what their holy book says over what any scientist says regardless of the evidence provided by the scientist. I also don't see what your point is about religious modes of thought existing in every culture around the world. So? A few thousand years ago most people around the world thought that when there was a lightning storm that one or more gods were angry at them. Ultimately you have to make the choice of what takes precidence and if you pick science over religion than you're not very religious and you if you pick religion over science you're certainly not a scientist. That said, I don't see why a religious person would feel obligated to not believe in evolution. There's nothing in the bible or any other holy book (to my knowledge) that says you can't nor is there any conclusive language that excludes the possibility.
Yes, what I said is SOOO untrue, that's why Ford is moving so many of its manufacturing plants down there. You need to do some research. Like most people on /., you have no idea what you're talking about.
As for pushing for a silver standard...guess what, there's people pushing for us to go back to a gold/silver standard. Our currency has lost so much value that Canada's dollar is even worth more. Also, every bribe a company pays a government official in Mexico is a drop in the bucket to their costs here in the US. It's also extremely easy to get out of paying taxes there. Sorry but you just don't know jack shit.
You're thinking of Europe. Places like Mexico (and most of the third world) have very low taxes, almost no environmental laws, and far weaker medical testing restrictions.
Music isn't about sound, it is about rhythm, melody, harmony, lyrics and attitude. A beautiful work is still beautiful even with its high frequencies muddied up and a pop every few minutes. If audiophiles find momentary breaks in fidelity distracting whereas others do not, then it is the audiophiles who cannot love music. People train themselves to assess the technology, to listen for artifacts and distortion, when there is music playing all they can hear from it is that the impedance of the left woofer's coil is not matched with that of the amp. Having a nice sound system is something to be proud of, being able to hear the problems in cheaper ones is not.
So, sound quality doesn't matter? I suppose you rip all your MP3's at 32kbps then? After all, it's still beautiful, right? As for being proud of not hearing things...so you're saying that because YOU do not have a sensitive ear, then it's everyone else's problem, right? Don't get me wrong, most audiophiles are morons who think buying a wooden volume knob improves the sound of their music, but there are "real" audiophiles with a truely refined sense of hearing. A lot of musicians have a refined sense of hearing because you NEED to train your ear to hear very very subtle things. I'm a musician and I have a refined sense of hearing. I hear very subtle things that a lot of people miss. I'm not bragging but it's extremely valuable to me. I'm sorry that you think I'm somehow handicapped because of it but from my perspective, you're the defective one.I hope you like using NetBeans :P
The protective layer on blu-ray discs is very effective. When I rent them from Netflix, they aren't scratched at all unlike the DVDs and HD-DVDs I rent from them. In fact, I like it so much it's the only thing I like better about blu-ray than HD-DVD.
The GOAL was a $100 laptop. The fact he couldn't produce a viable product for that doesn't marginalize what he's trying to accomplish in any way. "Utter tripe. Not to mention he didn't "make it happen" before others were starting their own production." Prove it. I never heard ANYTHING from anyone about this. You're full of shit. "The third world could only benefit if there were three players in the ultra-low cost laptop sector." BS. This isn't a capatalism game with free market economics at play. This is about a guy who was attempting to produce a cheap laptop for CHARITY that had the potential to be distrubted to a large number of poor kids because of its price. In any event, what is most likely to happen at this point is that the OLPC will go the way of the dinosaur within the next two years and Intel will be the only provider of this category of laptops. So you're going to get your monopoly anyway. Finally, you haven't provided any evidence of any of the things you said, so I won't either. I still think you're an Intel employee.
So now I'm to believe that giant corporations like Intel lagged behind the likes of Negroponte and his all-volunteer staff because, they, of all people, couldn't produce the laptops at low enough price? Hmm, well, the Classmate is STILL more expensive and still lacking in some of the capabilities of the OLPC. Please, you live in a fantasy world if you think a corp with Intel's resources couldn't beat a nut like Negroponte to market by a large margin. Also, your argument about it was just a matter of time before someone produced something like the OLPC and therefore Negroponte meant nothing is pretty lame considering you could say this about any endeavor or activity. It's all just a matter of time, right? So is fucking anti-gravity. The truth is that someone has to be the one to make it happen once. It's much easier for the followers to ride the coattails of the first guy. Finally, you seem to derride him for the delays in releasing the product...as if that NEVER happens with every other fucking tech company product in the world. I don't know what your malfunction is, but you have an extreme bias against Negroponte/OLPC for some reason. Do you work for Intel? I have no steak in this fight. I don't even really give a shit about giving laptops to kids who will always remain the fucked over people of the world even if they learn how to browse porn and use OpenOffice. There's reasons for that but it goes way beyond the bounds of this discussion.
There is no $100 laptop. He made the laptop as cheap as he could with the features it HAD to have. What that has to do with this argument is beyond me.