Says who? Most drug users are perfectly normal when not using.
So tell me what keeps you from getting behind the wheel?
If the penalty is severe and social stigma high then what remains of your judgement will suffice. I can't speak to other drugs, but I know that I have never thought it was a good idea to drive while under the influence of alcohol, despite how it may otherwise affect judgement. I may not be able to stand up or figure out anything complicated, but I can still remember that I shouldn't drive a car.
You're right, my bad. I was thinking of WMA, not WMV, and in any case it doesn't support either one. But my point still stands; if it plays WAV and MP3 then you can't really claim that it locks you in to their music store.
If you have to sign up for a special program, fork over your personal information, and potentially get denied entry just to install open source software on a platform, then it's not an open platform.
Apple can obviously do what they like, but acting like it's no big deal to give Apple all this information and wait for them to possibly approve you before you're allowed to install your own software on the device just doesn't make sense to me.
Ah yes, good old "If you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" rears its ugly head again. It was wrong the first time it was said and it's wrong now.
I'm as against drunk driving as anyone, and am even more against driving while high, but I am also highly against restrictions on these things while not driving. You should be free to get high on your own time as much as you want, just so long as you don't try to operate deadly machinery while doing it.
Banning an entire class of substances just because you don't want people driving while under their influence is ridiculous.
Find an Atheist who grew up in a country where Christianity does not pervade the culture. Like, say, China. And see if they still say whatever the local equivalent of "God damn it" is.
The fact that the iPhone NDA is still in effect is very obviously intentional on Apple's part. Look at how they're behaving on the mailing list. They're quickly shutting down any discussion about the SDK, and making thinly veiled threats to anyone who disputes it. This has continued well after the public release of the 3G and the 2.0 firmware and is going on right now.
when one person/group/company controls the entire ecosystem, they're able to weed out the junk that plagues the other ecosystems out there.
This must be why the iPhone App Store has no less than five flashlight apps, apps that crash on startup, apps that are useless for anything, and why most developers can't even update their software to take out the bugs that have been discovered.
At $7/month, a $400 phone is about 5 years worth. If you average less than that, you'll pay less money. If you break your phone more frequently, how are you getting the insurance so cheap?
As for waiting 2-3 weeks for a replacement, I guess I must not be familiar enough with these things. Why does it take weeks for a replacement to a broken phone when if you want a new one you can just walk into any cell phone store in the country and walk out with a new phone minutes later?
Well you know, I could say the exact same thing about you. Without evidence, we're both just blowing smoke. Except that it's a hell of a lot more reasonable to suppose that these indigenous, primitive people enjoyed lifespans similar to those of indigenous, primitive people everywhere else than to suppose that they somehow managed to double their life expectancies through "clean living".
In any case, "it just costs money" is a worthless argument. If it costs more money than is available, it won't happen. Industries live or die on thin margins, and you can't just say, let's spend a few trillion dollars installing expensive pollution control devices on every single polluter in the entire world. When I say "possible", I mean economically feasible as well as merely technologically possible.
Zero pollution is a fine goal and we should certainly work towards it, but getting to there from here is not a simple matter of waking up one day and deciding not to do it any more.
in fact, the Pomo peoples of northern California regularly lived to be over 100 years of age for these reasons
Got a reference for that? I can't find anything in a quick google search. I would be shocked if this were true for any reasonable definition of "regularly". People, even clean-living healthy people, just do not live to be that old on anything like a regular basis, especially not without access to modern medical care.
The simple truth is that we know that things we have started doing since the industrial revolution are carcinogenic and we know that we're doing more and more of them. Does that really sound like a good idea to you?
Overall? Yes, it does sound like a good idea. You can't really dispute that the industrial revolution has been an enormous net win in terms of both quality of life and life expectancy. If you want to go back three hundred years and live a short, nasty life as a medieval farm worker, go ahead, but I'm going to pass. Yes, it would be better if we could do all this stuff without the pollutants, but I see no evidence that this is possible yet on a large scale.
Cancer rates doubled in the industrial revolution.
This is an astonishingly pointless thing to say. Cancer is, for the most part, something you get to die of when you're old. Life expectancy went up, more people got old, thus more people got cancer.
For the most part, increased cancer rates have been a good thing. Cancer rates have, IIRC, tripled over the past hundred years or so. This is not because the environment is now loaded with carcinogens. Rather it is because people die less and less of things like heart attacks, strokes, accidents, etc., leaving more people to die of cancer instead.
The number you want is incidence of cancer at any particular age, and even then you must be extremely careful not to get your numbers skewed because of improved detection.
Energy consumption is roughly proportional to economic output (roughly, obviously there are many factors in play) so it should come as no surprise that the US, with a larger economy than China, consumes similar amounts of coal.
It still doesn't make sense to pay you the same rate that you pay them.
Consider the situation where you produce as much as you consume, but not at the same time. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you produce lots of power during the day, and then use lots of power during the night, such that the two are equal. Your net power use is therefore 0, but you're pushing lots of electricity to the grid during the day and pulling a lot at night.
Should your bill be zero?
I would argue that it should not. The power company is still maintaining the transmission lines, is still running the generation plants that you rely on at night, and the electricity you're giving them is not going to completely make up for that. The power company in this case is acting as a middleman, in the good sense, in that they ensure that stuff gets to where it needs to be. Middlemen can only make money, and thus provide their service, if the producers charge less money than the consumers pay.
Now, it may very well make sense in a broader political sense to make the rates be the same in order to encourage exactly this sort of independent generating capacity, but from the limited point of view of the economics of electrical generation and distribution, the rates should not be equal.
There's a lot to dislike about the iPhone. It has a lot of limitations, and many of them are distressingly artificial.
That said, even with all of the limitations and restrictions, for a lot of people it still easily provides $200 + $70/month of value. Not for you, not for me, but for a lot of people. You don't have to be an idiot for that equation to make sense, just have different priorities. That is all I have been saying.
I know lots of people with iPhones. I don't know anyone who has one and doesn't like it, or thinks it wasn't worth what they paid.
The thing has been available for over a year. Millions of people have bought it. Millions of people are not loudly complaining about how useless it is. I conclude that millions of people are reasonable satisfied with it. You might think that they should be unsatisfied, or you might know some people who are unsatisfied, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people who bought it and like it and they don't just like it because they're morons who don't know any better.
The iPhone 3G is selling like hotcakes. If people really hated it as much as you said, word of mouth would have gotten out and this would not have happened. It has had plenty of time to do so.
If you are not horribly disappointed, you are either clueless or a proxy.
Or maybe you just aren't going in with ridiculous expectations. Maybe you did your research beforehand, tried before you bought, and decided that the device, as it is, is a good purchase for the price.
Before you go all crazy on me, I want to note that I don't own an iPhone. I don't particularly like them. They seem decent, but they simply cost far too much money. But it's insane to act like the only reason they're flying off the shelves by the millions is because the purchasers are idiots who don't know what they're getting.
Yeah, fantastic. Once again, most people don't care.
It really should not be this difficult to understand that the iPhone does pretty well for most people. Despite the wet dreams of Slashdot users, it isn't flying off the shelves merely because of a massive advertising campaign and hype.
I'm kind of surprised you know enough to know that it sounds like him but haven't heard it. It's from his CD, Mitch All Together, on the track titled, oddly enough, Saved By The Buoyancy Of Citrus.
Slashdot Mirror
You never come in to land.
Says who? Most drug users are perfectly normal when not using.
So tell me what keeps you from getting behind the wheel?
If the penalty is severe and social stigma high then what remains of your judgement will suffice. I can't speak to other drugs, but I know that I have never thought it was a good idea to drive while under the influence of alcohol, despite how it may otherwise affect judgement. I may not be able to stand up or figure out anything complicated, but I can still remember that I shouldn't drive a car.
You're right, my bad. I was thinking of WMA, not WMV, and in any case it doesn't support either one. But my point still stands; if it plays WAV and MP3 then you can't really claim that it locks you in to their music store.
If you have to sign up for a special program, fork over your personal information, and potentially get denied entry just to install open source software on a platform, then it's not an open platform.
Apple can obviously do what they like, but acting like it's no big deal to give Apple all this information and wait for them to possibly approve you before you're allowed to install your own software on the device just doesn't make sense to me.
Ah yes, good old "If you've done nothing wrong then you have nothing to hide" rears its ugly head again. It was wrong the first time it was said and it's wrong now.
I'm as against drunk driving as anyone, and am even more against driving while high, but I am also highly against restrictions on these things while not driving. You should be free to get high on your own time as much as you want, just so long as you don't try to operate deadly machinery while doing it.
Banning an entire class of substances just because you don't want people driving while under their influence is ridiculous.
Could you tell me how to install open source software on my iPod Touch without paying Apple for the privilege or applying shady firmware hacks?
Linux certainly is not better than Windows in the "users want to use it" department, as Linux is still substantially more difficult to use.
For the things that Linux is better at, such as embedded systems, servers, number crunching, etc., Linux tends to do much better than Windows.
In any case, spamming Apple users isn't the way to go. These people deserve the same punishment that e-mail spammers deserve: summary execution.
did everything they could to lock it into their own music store.
I have a hard time understanding how being able to play WAV, WMV, and MP3 is compatible with this claim.
Find an Atheist who grew up in a country where Christianity does not pervade the culture. Like, say, China. And see if they still say whatever the local equivalent of "God damn it" is.
The fact that the iPhone NDA is still in effect is very obviously intentional on Apple's part. Look at how they're behaving on the mailing list. They're quickly shutting down any discussion about the SDK, and making thinly veiled threats to anyone who disputes it. This has continued well after the public release of the 3G and the 2.0 firmware and is going on right now.
when one person/group/company controls the entire ecosystem, they're able to weed out the junk that plagues the other ecosystems out there.
This must be why the iPhone App Store has no less than five flashlight apps, apps that crash on startup, apps that are useless for anything, and why most developers can't even update their software to take out the bugs that have been discovered.
Rotation != the only thing that can cause Earthrise.
At $7/month, a $400 phone is about 5 years worth. If you average less than that, you'll pay less money. If you break your phone more frequently, how are you getting the insurance so cheap?
As for waiting 2-3 weeks for a replacement, I guess I must not be familiar enough with these things. Why does it take weeks for a replacement to a broken phone when if you want a new one you can just walk into any cell phone store in the country and walk out with a new phone minutes later?
That's what you've been led to believe, yes.
That doesn't make it correct.
Well you know, I could say the exact same thing about you. Without evidence, we're both just blowing smoke. Except that it's a hell of a lot more reasonable to suppose that these indigenous, primitive people enjoyed lifespans similar to those of indigenous, primitive people everywhere else than to suppose that they somehow managed to double their life expectancies through "clean living".
In any case, "it just costs money" is a worthless argument. If it costs more money than is available, it won't happen. Industries live or die on thin margins, and you can't just say, let's spend a few trillion dollars installing expensive pollution control devices on every single polluter in the entire world. When I say "possible", I mean economically feasible as well as merely technologically possible.
Zero pollution is a fine goal and we should certainly work towards it, but getting to there from here is not a simple matter of waking up one day and deciding not to do it any more.
in fact, the Pomo peoples of northern California regularly lived to be over 100 years of age for these reasons
Got a reference for that? I can't find anything in a quick google search. I would be shocked if this were true for any reasonable definition of "regularly". People, even clean-living healthy people, just do not live to be that old on anything like a regular basis, especially not without access to modern medical care.
The simple truth is that we know that things we have started doing since the industrial revolution are carcinogenic and we know that we're doing more and more of them. Does that really sound like a good idea to you?
Overall? Yes, it does sound like a good idea. You can't really dispute that the industrial revolution has been an enormous net win in terms of both quality of life and life expectancy. If you want to go back three hundred years and live a short, nasty life as a medieval farm worker, go ahead, but I'm going to pass. Yes, it would be better if we could do all this stuff without the pollutants, but I see no evidence that this is possible yet on a large scale.
Yes I consider it a PROBLEM when you can't change the battery on your mobile phone given that this is a standard feature of most other phones.
Key word there: "I". Most people couldn't possibly care less.
Then let's go ahead and put you in prison so those nasty murderers can't get to you in a few years.
Cancer rates doubled in the industrial revolution.
This is an astonishingly pointless thing to say. Cancer is, for the most part, something you get to die of when you're old. Life expectancy went up, more people got old, thus more people got cancer.
For the most part, increased cancer rates have been a good thing. Cancer rates have, IIRC, tripled over the past hundred years or so. This is not because the environment is now loaded with carcinogens. Rather it is because people die less and less of things like heart attacks, strokes, accidents, etc., leaving more people to die of cancer instead.
The number you want is incidence of cancer at any particular age, and even then you must be extremely careful not to get your numbers skewed because of improved detection.
Energy consumption is roughly proportional to economic output (roughly, obviously there are many factors in play) so it should come as no surprise that the US, with a larger economy than China, consumes similar amounts of coal.
It still doesn't make sense to pay you the same rate that you pay them.
Consider the situation where you produce as much as you consume, but not at the same time. Imagine, for the sake of argument, that you produce lots of power during the day, and then use lots of power during the night, such that the two are equal. Your net power use is therefore 0, but you're pushing lots of electricity to the grid during the day and pulling a lot at night.
Should your bill be zero?
I would argue that it should not. The power company is still maintaining the transmission lines, is still running the generation plants that you rely on at night, and the electricity you're giving them is not going to completely make up for that. The power company in this case is acting as a middleman, in the good sense, in that they ensure that stuff gets to where it needs to be. Middlemen can only make money, and thus provide their service, if the producers charge less money than the consumers pay.
Now, it may very well make sense in a broader political sense to make the rates be the same in order to encourage exactly this sort of independent generating capacity, but from the limited point of view of the economics of electrical generation and distribution, the rates should not be equal.
There's a lot to dislike about the iPhone. It has a lot of limitations, and many of them are distressingly artificial.
That said, even with all of the limitations and restrictions, for a lot of people it still easily provides $200 + $70/month of value. Not for you, not for me, but for a lot of people. You don't have to be an idiot for that equation to make sense, just have different priorities. That is all I have been saying.
I know lots of people with iPhones. I don't know anyone who has one and doesn't like it, or thinks it wasn't worth what they paid.
You must hang out with a different crowd than I.
The thing has been available for over a year. Millions of people have bought it. Millions of people are not loudly complaining about how useless it is. I conclude that millions of people are reasonable satisfied with it. You might think that they should be unsatisfied, or you might know some people who are unsatisfied, but that doesn't change the fact that there are a lot of people who bought it and like it and they don't just like it because they're morons who don't know any better.
The iPhone 3G is selling like hotcakes. If people really hated it as much as you said, word of mouth would have gotten out and this would not have happened. It has had plenty of time to do so.
If you are not horribly disappointed, you are either clueless or a proxy.
Or maybe you just aren't going in with ridiculous expectations. Maybe you did your research beforehand, tried before you bought, and decided that the device, as it is, is a good purchase for the price.
Before you go all crazy on me, I want to note that I don't own an iPhone. I don't particularly like them. They seem decent, but they simply cost far too much money. But it's insane to act like the only reason they're flying off the shelves by the millions is because the purchasers are idiots who don't know what they're getting.
Yeah, fantastic. Once again, most people don't care.
It really should not be this difficult to understand that the iPhone does pretty well for most people. Despite the wet dreams of Slashdot users, it isn't flying off the shelves merely because of a massive advertising campaign and hype.
I'm kind of surprised you know enough to know that it sounds like him but haven't heard it. It's from his CD, Mitch All Together, on the track titled, oddly enough, Saved By The Buoyancy Of Citrus.
What he meant to say, I believe, was relying on unfamiliar and therefore frightening third party technology.