No, the demand for drugs will not go away. What we need to do is make sure the demand for drugs doesn't spill over into violence. Remember, there was a time in the history of the United States where every drug was legal, pharmacists sold morphine and you could buy cocaine drops to cure toothaches. Were people addicted? Of course they were, just like today, but what we didn't see that we see today is the violence associated with the drug trade.
End drug cartels by legalizing drugs. When you prohibit something with a large, inelastic demand you create violence. There's a reason why (except in prisons where they are banned) you don't see people stabbing other people for cigarettes because they are available just about anywhere. When alcohol was banned in the US, there was a rise in organized crime selling booze. When prohibition ended, gang violence declined massively. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it doesn't work with drugs.
Mozilla will keep on staying afloat so long as its competitors suck, which, at the time being, they do.
Their main competition right now is Chrome which offers users next to no customization. Opera is still... Opera. And IE, well, is getting better but isn't anywhere near as functional as Firefox/Chrome/Opera.
The problem with having a basic income as in your link is that you're confusing 2 issues: the problems in the western world and the problems in the underdeveloped African world.
How many people in the western world could honestly say they don't make more than $13 a month? My guess is no one with the exception of children who are too young to have a job. How many people in the western world truly don't have a chance to go to school and learn basic skills. Of course not everyone can get into and afford Harvard, Yale and MIT, but elementary school? Of course they can (and do) go there.
In the US, you can get a "guaranteed" income when you are poor by having kids. As a result, you have many low income families with several kids that they can't really afford, but the more kids they have the more money mom has to spend on booze.
Except for people still need to use critical thinking, really the only truly useful brain function. The problem is schools don't teach it, schools focus on teaching just the "facts" which are pretty much worthless since even today any fact you might want to know is just a Google query away.
Exactly. The problem with Nokia is ever since they've been making decent phones there's no easy way to get them. When most people go shopping for a phone, they don't go online to buy a phone and then get the SIM card, they go to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or the T-Mobile store and get the phone there on contract. If your phone isn't in there, its not going to sell in the US plain and simple. The last time I was in one of those stores, I found exactly 1 Nokia phone and it was a Lumia.
Because they are 2 separate markets. Has there really been anything that has started in China and made it big in Europe/North America? I really can't think of anything. Sure, there's been stuff that's been Korean and Japanese and sold quite well, but the Japanese and Korean markets are much different than the Chinese market.
I don't think it's its an accident that we drive Toyotas and not Cherys. Nor why we go on Facebook and not Renren.
3D isn't -all- bad, for example the new Spider-Man movie is pretty good in 3D, 3D won't make a crap movie better, but movies shot in 3D and intended to have a 3D release the 3D adds to the movie.
Because when translating it into a movie, it doesn't make that much financial sense to do what they did with the LoTR movies which is to shoot the entire trilogy but only release a part of it in the theaters and have the rest on an extended cut DVD. Plus, unlike the LoTR books, The Hobbit is fairly straightforward and there really aren't any unnecessary parts.
For your first part, you are destroying -real- property, not imaginary property. You are devaluing the property, you are not simply making a copy. That is the key difference between imaginary property and actual property, saying that copyright is equal to theft is like saying someone stole my car last night despite the fact your car is still there, has the exact same mileage, gas in the tank, and all items in it.
As for your second part, I'd really have no problem with that, so long as the kids voluntarily chose to get drunk. I'd love to see the drinking age get abolished and the legalization of all drugs. Will this mean I will drink to get drunk, smoke and do drugs? No, its a stupid idea legal or not.
Absolutely not. The idea that "society" (whatever that consists of) is able to decide what is right or wrong makes no sense. If "society" is able to determine right or wrong we should be spitting on Rosa Park's grave, after all, she broke the law which was written by "society" to mandate that public transportation be segregated by race.
We should be praising Stalin, after all, the vast majority of the things he did once in power were perfectly legal, same with every other tyrant with legal power.
Laws != moral. It is not just to as a human to punish another human for an immoral action because then we become tyrannical gods. Laws should have the sole purpose of punishing harm done to individuals and their property without their consent such as murder and theft. If we change justice to including morals we pervert the meaning of justice. Is it just to stone an adulteress? Of course not, but in many cultures being an adulteress is immoral.
Laws should just cover the bare minimum, don't murder, don't steal, etc. Morals fill in the rest and morals are quite different between each person, even people with the same culture and beliefs. You only need to look at the 14th chapter of Romans to see that.
Don't like nVidia's prices? Don't buy it. Last time I checked nVidia didn't hold a gun to your head and force you to put in a new nVidia graphics card.
The problem with the 3DS is the main marketing gimmick was IT'S 3-D!!! GAMES IN 3-D ITS GONNA BE AWESOME!!! Well, its awesome for about... 5 minutes or so, then you just get a headache. But really, the 3DS isn't a bad console but will most likely sell fairly poorly because 3D is the main gimmick.
Aside from battery life (which is better with recent firmware updates) there's nothing really bad about the 3DS. There's been a few good games that have come out, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, Tales of the Abyss, Ocarina of Time, and more. Nintendo still doesn't get online services and rather than doing the sane thing and releasing tons of Virtual Console games at once, they keep releasing one or two a week.
I play games because they are fun not because they "matter" or don't. There are a good chunk of fun games on the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy (2), Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, New Super Mario Bros, Skyward Sword, Pandora's Tower, Mario Kart, Etc. None of those games really suffer by not having HD, a sucky game like Castlevania Judgment won't be improved by having HD, New Super Mario Bros isn't worse off by not having HD.
There are great games on the Xbox and PS3, but don't discount the Wii.
Yeah, mine was a lucky one and had a CPU that would overclock fairly high, then again, I mostly played RPGs on it, so speed didn't matter as much.
I really want(ed) a Pandora, when it was envisioned back in 2007/8 the specs were unreal, a keyboard, 600 Mhz ARM CPU, Wi-Fi, 256 MB of RAM...
Fast forward a few years and my phone which cost me under $200 on contract comes with always on 3.5G internet, Wi-Fi, a keyboard, a dual-core 1 Ghz ARM CPU, a camera... etc.
Ever since I've had a smartphone, I really haven't bought many other gadgets. I've got a 3DS (birthday gift) and that gets used only about once a week, usually to play a retro game. Perhaps I'm turning into less of a geek but I just don't see me really -needing- another device save for another commercial game console when the 4DS (or if I switch over to Sony's camp which is unlikely). I'd like a cheap little device I could have fun with, or heck, I'd like a nice HDD based (I've had terrible luck with SD cards lately...) music player that's cheap and not an iPod (mostly to travel with), if it runs Linux that's a bonus.
Yes, you can buy them if you were incredibly lucky. Myself? I've been stuck on a waiting list for a couple of months now.
This is the problem with F/OSS hardware projects, you can either take the gamble and pre-order way in advance in hopes of avoiding the delay but take the risk that the project will never materialize at all or may completely change its goals, or you wait and it takes 3-4 months before you get your product, and by that time, something else will have come out.
The problem with the PI and nearly every other promising F/OSS device that wants to be cheap is that you can't buy it. All of their "official distributors" say they're out of stock and the next shipment will happen "very soon". I wouldn't mind more Raspberry Pi articles if you could actually buy it and use it, but you can't. By the time the next available shipment arrives and those that have pre-ordered it receive their Pi, there will be something better.
There are a lot of indie consoles out there, but most have one (or more) of these problems:
A) Impossible to find.
B) Questionable build quality
C) Lack of non-emulated games
Currently there are quite a few Linux-based consoles out there:
The GP2x and its successors the Wiz and CAANOO. The Dingoo. And most notably the Pandora (or Open Pandora as its often called)
Out of all of them I only own a GP2x (original model) and it wasn't a bad console, it was a pain to get (I think I had to order it direct from Korea) and had some weird build quality issues (the batteries were nearly impossible to remove, not a bad problem at first but a set of AA high capacity batteries lasted about 4 hours of gameplay meaning you had to change batteries often), the original model also had a weird joystick that sort of worked but sort of didn't. There was a decent amount of software available, but, lets be honest, it was more my portable SNES:)
Yeah, desktop environments have been annoying me of late. I don't like OS X (not enough customization), never been a fan of KDE, I liked GNOME but GNOME 3X has missed the mark, currently I'm using MATE which is a fork of GNOME 2X. I've never had many complaints about the UI of Windows except for one problem: you can't move windows around on the bottom bar. You can move things -somewhat- around in Windows 7 but I can't have, say, a word document, Firefox, another word document, another Firefox window, Outlook, another word document. But Metro just makes no sense on the desktop, on phones its great, but I'm not staring at a 3 inch screen when I'm on my laptop.
So explain to me the harm that a corporation has in a free market.
What is the primary motivation for a corporation? To make money for their shareholders.
In a free market, how do corporations get money? From providing services and products.
Are you going to pay for services/products that do not improve your quality of life? No.
Therefore, if a corporation wants to make money (which is the entire point of a corporation) it must produce products/services that improve people's quality of life, otherwise it goes bankrupt. If you don't want to support a corporation, you don't have to. You can live your entire life without buying a Sony product, without buying anything from Wal-Mart, etc. If you live in the US though, you can't not fund the various wars and drone strikes without going to jail.
Corporations therefore must produce products that the public likes at a low enough cost to remain profitable.
Any democracy will eventually slide towards totalitarianism, it is inherent in a democracy.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years.
Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Is probably the most true quote as it relates to democracy (although the author is unknown).
The people are the problem. Every constitution wants to remain changeable and re-interpretable to the point where it perverts its original meaning for the sake of being "modern". Due process isn't popular today and so the constitution gets sidestepped with a lie that we live in more "dangerous" times that the founding fathers lived in and that they couldn't have imagined a rise of "terrorism".
...And how do you think corporations make money (in a free market)? It is by providing a good service that people want to use. If they don't do that, they go out of business. I don't know about you but I don't pay for things that don't improve my standard of living.
Unless a corporation provides a good service, it makes no money. Therefore, it is in the corporation's best interest to create the best service possible so it can make the most money. It has the net result in a corporation creating a much better cloud at a much cheaper price than the government ever could dream of.
Slashdot Mirror
No, the demand for drugs will not go away. What we need to do is make sure the demand for drugs doesn't spill over into violence. Remember, there was a time in the history of the United States where every drug was legal, pharmacists sold morphine and you could buy cocaine drops to cure toothaches. Were people addicted? Of course they were, just like today, but what we didn't see that we see today is the violence associated with the drug trade.
End drug cartels by legalizing drugs. When you prohibit something with a large, inelastic demand you create violence. There's a reason why (except in prisons where they are banned) you don't see people stabbing other people for cigarettes because they are available just about anywhere. When alcohol was banned in the US, there was a rise in organized crime selling booze. When prohibition ended, gang violence declined massively. Prohibition didn't work with alcohol and it doesn't work with drugs.
Mozilla will keep on staying afloat so long as its competitors suck, which, at the time being, they do.
Their main competition right now is Chrome which offers users next to no customization. Opera is still... Opera. And IE, well, is getting better but isn't anywhere near as functional as Firefox/Chrome/Opera.
The problem with having a basic income as in your link is that you're confusing 2 issues: the problems in the western world and the problems in the underdeveloped African world.
How many people in the western world could honestly say they don't make more than $13 a month? My guess is no one with the exception of children who are too young to have a job. How many people in the western world truly don't have a chance to go to school and learn basic skills. Of course not everyone can get into and afford Harvard, Yale and MIT, but elementary school? Of course they can (and do) go there.
In the US, you can get a "guaranteed" income when you are poor by having kids. As a result, you have many low income families with several kids that they can't really afford, but the more kids they have the more money mom has to spend on booze.
Except for people still need to use critical thinking, really the only truly useful brain function. The problem is schools don't teach it, schools focus on teaching just the "facts" which are pretty much worthless since even today any fact you might want to know is just a Google query away.
Exactly. The problem with Nokia is ever since they've been making decent phones there's no easy way to get them. When most people go shopping for a phone, they don't go online to buy a phone and then get the SIM card, they go to AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, or the T-Mobile store and get the phone there on contract. If your phone isn't in there, its not going to sell in the US plain and simple. The last time I was in one of those stores, I found exactly 1 Nokia phone and it was a Lumia.
Because they are 2 separate markets. Has there really been anything that has started in China and made it big in Europe/North America? I really can't think of anything. Sure, there's been stuff that's been Korean and Japanese and sold quite well, but the Japanese and Korean markets are much different than the Chinese market.
I don't think it's its an accident that we drive Toyotas and not Cherys. Nor why we go on Facebook and not Renren.
3D isn't -all- bad, for example the new Spider-Man movie is pretty good in 3D, 3D won't make a crap movie better, but movies shot in 3D and intended to have a 3D release the 3D adds to the movie.
Because when translating it into a movie, it doesn't make that much financial sense to do what they did with the LoTR movies which is to shoot the entire trilogy but only release a part of it in the theaters and have the rest on an extended cut DVD. Plus, unlike the LoTR books, The Hobbit is fairly straightforward and there really aren't any unnecessary parts.
For your first part, you are destroying -real- property, not imaginary property. You are devaluing the property, you are not simply making a copy. That is the key difference between imaginary property and actual property, saying that copyright is equal to theft is like saying someone stole my car last night despite the fact your car is still there, has the exact same mileage, gas in the tank, and all items in it.
As for your second part, I'd really have no problem with that, so long as the kids voluntarily chose to get drunk. I'd love to see the drinking age get abolished and the legalization of all drugs. Will this mean I will drink to get drunk, smoke and do drugs? No, its a stupid idea legal or not.
Absolutely not. The idea that "society" (whatever that consists of) is able to decide what is right or wrong makes no sense. If "society" is able to determine right or wrong we should be spitting on Rosa Park's grave, after all, she broke the law which was written by "society" to mandate that public transportation be segregated by race.
We should be praising Stalin, after all, the vast majority of the things he did once in power were perfectly legal, same with every other tyrant with legal power.
Laws != moral. It is not just to as a human to punish another human for an immoral action because then we become tyrannical gods. Laws should have the sole purpose of punishing harm done to individuals and their property without their consent such as murder and theft. If we change justice to including morals we pervert the meaning of justice. Is it just to stone an adulteress? Of course not, but in many cultures being an adulteress is immoral.
Laws should just cover the bare minimum, don't murder, don't steal, etc. Morals fill in the rest and morals are quite different between each person, even people with the same culture and beliefs. You only need to look at the 14th chapter of Romans to see that.
Don't like nVidia's prices? Don't buy it. Last time I checked nVidia didn't hold a gun to your head and force you to put in a new nVidia graphics card.
The problem with the 3DS is the main marketing gimmick was IT'S 3-D!!! GAMES IN 3-D ITS GONNA BE AWESOME!!! Well, its awesome for about... 5 minutes or so, then you just get a headache. But really, the 3DS isn't a bad console but will most likely sell fairly poorly because 3D is the main gimmick.
Aside from battery life (which is better with recent firmware updates) there's nothing really bad about the 3DS. There's been a few good games that have come out, Super Mario 3D Land, Mario Kart 7, Tales of the Abyss, Ocarina of Time, and more. Nintendo still doesn't get online services and rather than doing the sane thing and releasing tons of Virtual Console games at once, they keep releasing one or two a week.
I play games because they are fun not because they "matter" or don't. There are a good chunk of fun games on the Wii, Super Mario Galaxy (2), Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Xenoblade, Fire Emblem, New Super Mario Bros, Skyward Sword, Pandora's Tower, Mario Kart, Etc. None of those games really suffer by not having HD, a sucky game like Castlevania Judgment won't be improved by having HD, New Super Mario Bros isn't worse off by not having HD.
There are great games on the Xbox and PS3, but don't discount the Wii.
Yeah, mine was a lucky one and had a CPU that would overclock fairly high, then again, I mostly played RPGs on it, so speed didn't matter as much.
I really want(ed) a Pandora, when it was envisioned back in 2007/8 the specs were unreal, a keyboard, 600 Mhz ARM CPU, Wi-Fi, 256 MB of RAM...
Fast forward a few years and my phone which cost me under $200 on contract comes with always on 3.5G internet, Wi-Fi, a keyboard, a dual-core 1 Ghz ARM CPU, a camera... etc.
Ever since I've had a smartphone, I really haven't bought many other gadgets. I've got a 3DS (birthday gift) and that gets used only about once a week, usually to play a retro game. Perhaps I'm turning into less of a geek but I just don't see me really -needing- another device save for another commercial game console when the 4DS (or if I switch over to Sony's camp which is unlikely). I'd like a cheap little device I could have fun with, or heck, I'd like a nice HDD based (I've had terrible luck with SD cards lately...) music player that's cheap and not an iPod (mostly to travel with), if it runs Linux that's a bonus.
Yes, you can buy them if you were incredibly lucky. Myself? I've been stuck on a waiting list for a couple of months now.
This is the problem with F/OSS hardware projects, you can either take the gamble and pre-order way in advance in hopes of avoiding the delay but take the risk that the project will never materialize at all or may completely change its goals, or you wait and it takes 3-4 months before you get your product, and by that time, something else will have come out.
The problem with the PI and nearly every other promising F/OSS device that wants to be cheap is that you can't buy it. All of their "official distributors" say they're out of stock and the next shipment will happen "very soon". I wouldn't mind more Raspberry Pi articles if you could actually buy it and use it, but you can't. By the time the next available shipment arrives and those that have pre-ordered it receive their Pi, there will be something better.
There are a lot of indie consoles out there, but most have one (or more) of these problems:
:)
A) Impossible to find.
B) Questionable build quality
C) Lack of non-emulated games
Currently there are quite a few Linux-based consoles out there:
The GP2x and its successors the Wiz and CAANOO. The Dingoo. And most notably the Pandora (or Open Pandora as its often called)
Out of all of them I only own a GP2x (original model) and it wasn't a bad console, it was a pain to get (I think I had to order it direct from Korea) and had some weird build quality issues (the batteries were nearly impossible to remove, not a bad problem at first but a set of AA high capacity batteries lasted about 4 hours of gameplay meaning you had to change batteries often), the original model also had a weird joystick that sort of worked but sort of didn't. There was a decent amount of software available, but, lets be honest, it was more my portable SNES
Yeah, desktop environments have been annoying me of late. I don't like OS X (not enough customization), never been a fan of KDE, I liked GNOME but GNOME 3X has missed the mark, currently I'm using MATE which is a fork of GNOME 2X. I've never had many complaints about the UI of Windows except for one problem: you can't move windows around on the bottom bar. You can move things -somewhat- around in Windows 7 but I can't have, say, a word document, Firefox, another word document, another Firefox window, Outlook, another word document. But Metro just makes no sense on the desktop, on phones its great, but I'm not staring at a 3 inch screen when I'm on my laptop.
Am I the only one who read this as "Nigeria" and thought, why is there a /. story about networks in Nigeria?
Windows Phone 8 != Windows 8. Windows 8 is referring the successor to Windows 7.
So explain to me the harm that a corporation has in a free market.
What is the primary motivation for a corporation? To make money for their shareholders.
In a free market, how do corporations get money? From providing services and products.
Are you going to pay for services/products that do not improve your quality of life? No.
Therefore, if a corporation wants to make money (which is the entire point of a corporation) it must produce products/services that improve people's quality of life, otherwise it goes bankrupt. If you don't want to support a corporation, you don't have to. You can live your entire life without buying a Sony product, without buying anything from Wal-Mart, etc. If you live in the US though, you can't not fund the various wars and drone strikes without going to jail.
Corporations therefore must produce products that the public likes at a low enough cost to remain profitable.
A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship. The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been 200 years. Great nations rise and fall. The people go from bondage to spiritual truth, to great courage, from courage to liberty, from liberty to abundance, from abundance to selfishness, from selfishness to complacency, from complacency to apathy, from apathy to dependence, from dependence back again to bondage.
Is probably the most true quote as it relates to democracy (although the author is unknown).
The people are the problem. Every constitution wants to remain changeable and re-interpretable to the point where it perverts its original meaning for the sake of being "modern". Due process isn't popular today and so the constitution gets sidestepped with a lie that we live in more "dangerous" times that the founding fathers lived in and that they couldn't have imagined a rise of "terrorism".
...And how do you think corporations make money (in a free market)? It is by providing a good service that people want to use. If they don't do that, they go out of business. I don't know about you but I don't pay for things that don't improve my standard of living.
Unless a corporation provides a good service, it makes no money. Therefore, it is in the corporation's best interest to create the best service possible so it can make the most money. It has the net result in a corporation creating a much better cloud at a much cheaper price than the government ever could dream of.