Except for the fact that pretty much anything in China is considered to be a "capital" crime. In most civilized countries they have either A) Abolished the death penalty or B) Have restricted it to the most serious of crimes (murder) and the trials are well publicized and generally have multiple trials and many people trying to prove that the accused party is innocent.
China though has 55 "offenses" that are a capital "crime" including theft, smuggling of drugs, counterfeiting currency, rape and murder. Now, murder is something that is hard to prove, on the other hand counterfeiting currency? That is pretty easy to "prove" in a secretive totalitarian state like China, smuggling drugs? Also easy to "prove". Stealing weapons? Just plant a few bullets and you have yourself a solid "case" against them...
Officers have been shown to plant evidence even in western courts where corruption is comparatively low and there is much more transparency than in China which won't even say how many prisoners have been executed! Kidnapping or wholesale murder is a lot harder than planting evidence of a capital "crime" and than using the Chinese "justice" system to carry out the punishments using the falsified evidence.
The problem is mobile games have one of 3 problems.
A) They don't work. Whether it is because your program requires version X of iOS and device Y can only go up to version Z, or because you created it for an Android device with a keyboard and it runs badly on touchscreen only phones (or vice versa) or the game simply doesn't work (as in, it crashes upon boot up)
B) They don't stand out from the crowd. I'm sorry but the vast majority of mobile apps look pretty much the same (cartoon-ish, flash-game look) and are pretty much the same genres (tower defense, Angry Birds clones, Wario Ware "Microgames" style games, etc.) Nor are there really any major channels of advertising to make me actually/want/ your game. I mean, Skyrim had hype, Final Fantasy XIII had hype, even obscure titles of a familiar series has a bit of hype. With Android/iOS gaming there really isn't that, I mean, they do have "editors choice" titles and such, but without a knowledge of an editor, why would I choose them? That's the nice thing about console gaming, there are already a bunch of review sites out there by different editors who I know I have similar tastes in games with. What one person loves, I might hate.
C) They have no quality guarantee. For every application on my phone, there were 3 or 4 that I downloaded, opened then realized that they were of poor quality and deleted them. Games with annoying advertising, broken controls or generally buggy gameplay have no place on my phone. Sorry, but unless your game wows me within the first 5 minutes and I can say that it is actually/fun/ I'm going to delete it and try another. In general, I know that most Nintendo published games are going to be pretty good, I know that a game in the Zelda series is most likely going to be a fun adventure title, similarly, an RPG published by Square-Enix will also be a decent game, and a Resident Evil game is going to have me shooting zombies (or whatever those things were in RE5)
Of course they can survive when the alternative is buying a $1-10 game that you don't even know will be there in the future. What are the chances that the games I download via the Xbox live service will be available to me when I upgrade to the Xbox 3 (or whatever it will be called)? What are the chances that it will be seamless and free (as in, I can continue to play both consoles with the games on them without having to "transfer" them between the two consoles because if the first Xbox is any indication there will be various glitches that will make not all 360 games work on the Xbox 3). What are the chances that they will still be even/in/ the shop? Various games have been removed from current-gen consoles due to licensing conflicts, etc. While most of the time it allows you to re-download the games if they got deleted somehow, such a policy makes it hard for late adopters to get gems that are downloadable.
My $60 (or realistically $20-30) Xbox disks will continue to play no problem for quite a while, just like my ~30 year old NES.
There are so many stupidities with the current downloadable game market to make me unlikely to spend some serious cash on them. Of course it isn't enough to stop me spending a buck or two here and there for a few downloadable only gems, but I'm not going to be spending the cash I do on disks.
The mill was never an official US coin and if you look at the half cent, while it was officially discontinued, you saw its use in private tokens up until the great depression. In fact, the demand for 1/2 cent and 1/10 cent coins were so great in the great depression that the US government considered making official coins of those denominations, the plan ultimately fell through though. Until rampant inflation hit when tyrant-in-chief FDR took us off of the true gold standard and seized the nation's wealth for his own gain, half a cent was still a sizable amount of wealth.
So in other words you screw the people using cash (which over here are mostly either poor people or people concerned about privacy or distrust the banking sector)?
Yes, occasionally you'll press the lock button and... nothing. Or you press it and the screen goes off so you put it in your pocket and take it out later only to find that it never really locked in the first place... Its like it locks then decides to unlock itself in like 3 seconds. Overall its a great phone and I love it, but if it ran stock Android (especially Ice Cream Sandwich!) it would be so much nicer, plus, more customization. I suppose eventually there will be a nice Cyanogen mod ROM for it I'll put on there. At least AT&T lets you remove some of the bloatware which is a positive. Android has the software and the hardware but OEMs and cell companies decide to screw it all up... Plus, it makes basic instructions a pain, what is called one thing in Sense is called something different in stock Android, still something different in TouchWiz, still different in MotoBlur and even then things change between versions of those...
But even then, it was HP's fault they released the Veer and not the Pre 3 which was vastly superior in every way. It was almost as if HP was trying their hardest to kill WebOS. They sink a lot of money into buying Palm, then they randomly decide not to release phones that were already produced (Pre 3 in the US) and then they get rid of the rest of their already produced tablets at cost. And without a real reason. Now HP comes back and says great things about WebOS after it already killed it off in more ways than one.
Actually, if Google decided to close source Android (which they won't) I doubt that many manufacturers would stick with the OSS version. After all, they've proved their incompetence in coding their own individual "experiences" which make the phones slower and do nothing for usability. Give me stock Android over Sense/Touch-Wiz/MotoBlur/Etc. any day. Yes, some of the things are novel and yes, Sense is an attractive UI but whenever something breaks or malfunctions on my phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) its generally due to TouchWiz and its bugs rather than bugs native to Android, particularly the lock screen which manages to lag or fail every now and then.
Right, because the Google flagship phones (Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus) have been some of the most closed phones... Oh wait, they are some of the most open devices out there, far more open than the Droid you bought on Verizon or the Atrix you bought on AT&T...
If HP really wanted an open source mobile OS why didn't they quickly release the source to WebOS? Heck, why didn't they actually make decent phones to go with WebOS? Like the Veer? Tiny, dimensions that make it nearly unusable, no software keyboard, no microSD card slot, proprietary charger, not even a headphone jack! Along with a tiny 910mAh battery. The OS was never really the problem with the Pre, Pixi and Veer, the problem was Palm (and later HP) could never make hardware that actually worked well and couldn't convince third parties to make WebOS devices. HP neither could get WebOS to the masses like Android (and Windows Phone 7) or make a single great smartphone like Apple.
I think it will be interesting to see what hardware/software combos come out of this. Hopefully Google can make well supported Android phones without all the crap that current ones have, and make them be upgrade friendly for official updates instead of having to guess which handsets will be popular enough to get an upgrade.
So, in other words we should ban things because you don't like them?
Your logic is no different than the logic used to ban all sorts of things.
Living in a civil society requires some level of protection of the innocent.
Protection from what? Protection against someone looking lustfully at a picture? A picture that, in most cases, you took and posted on the internet?
If you want to talk about slippery slopes look at what you are saying, that a PICTURE is the same thing as actual harm. Laws against such things border on the absurd, for example the man who was convicted of photoshopping "pornographic" pictures that looked underage. Where was the crime there?
There is a pretty huge difference between the rape of a child to suggestive pictures (most likely) posted by a minor.
Possession of a picture should not constitute a crime.
Brick and Mortar tech stores have the possibility of being great. I for one much prefer shopping in physical stores for any sort of medium to major purchase. For example, some laptops have very comfortable keyboards, others... not so much. Similarly some displays look very good while others... not so much even though they have the same "specs" if you look online.
The problem is the service which could be their number 1 selling point is terrible. They sell you things you don't need and leave out the things you do need.
Of course most of the military FPS games are clones of each other, which is why I don't ever see the need to buy the newest Call of Duty every single year. But there are the rare gems of FPS games like Team Fortress 2, there really aren't any Indie games that compare to TF2, or even Call of Duty for that matter.
The thing isn't about originality but good games the games aren't as Katamari Damacy is to Bubbles but as Bubbles is to Bubbles when you can play Bubbles online for free or play it as an "Indie game" for $3-4. There are some Indie games that are alright, like Castle Crashers (though not sure if you can even call that an Indie game) but the vast majority are unplayable crap.
There are plenty of good games that aren't original, Skyrim wasn't original, but it was a good game. Final Fantasy wasn't original but it was a pretty fun game. Super Smash Bros. wasn't really that original but it was a pretty fun game. Indie versions of those games would be like a Skyrim clone that doesn't have depth, a near straight port of Final Fantasy and Super Smash Bros. with none of the charm and none of the balanced game mechanics.
The point is, very, very, very, few Indie games are worth playing, let alone buying.
That's a bad analogy. The Wii is backwards compatible 1 generation, it can play GameCube games and that's it. If I have some old SNES cartridges lying around, I can't exactly plug them into my Wii, I can't even send them in to Nintendo to have them imaged into Wii ROMs nor can I go to walmart and get a device that lets me transfer my NES/SNES/N64/Turbo-Grafix-16/Genesis/Neo Geo cartridges and play them on the Wii. Instead, I have to buy them again. That isn't backwards compatibility, that is simply Nintendo milking older games and older franchises for all they are worth. By your logic the PS3 and 360 are just as backwards compatible, after all, you can download Genesis and N64 games on there.
Honestly there really aren't that many decent Indie games out there. For "Indie" games you'd best just stick to Flash game and Minecraft because that's really all the Xbox Indie games are, either clones of a different game or flash games with 3D graphics that cost money.
Yep, the only console that I know of that removes features in firmware updates. It doesn't matter that the hardware was standard, Sony believes its their hardware to do with as they wish, regardless of what you want.
Android isn't perfect, but its the best there is. Your choices in the smartphone world are:
1) iOS, you know the one with draconian app approval process only 1 form factor, and planned obsolescence.
2) Android, not that great of a UI, but lots of apps, a multitude of form factors, but semi-official community updates give you a long life. Consider the G1 (HTC Dream) the first Android phone, it can run (unofficially) the latest release (Ice Cream Sandwich) although it is a bit slow. But the phone is usable with Gingerbread, the main release.
3) Windows Phone 7, too new to really say much about it, I think that 2012 will be the year of make it or break it when it comes to Windows Phone 7, its certainly interesting and might be promising.
4) All other smaller OSes (WebOS, Meego, Maemo, Symbian, etc.) have some good ideas but ultimately crippled by either lackluster support, lackluster hardware, lack of apps or lack of actually getting your phone out to customers (I'm looking at you Nokia).
Still, explain to me why I should have to pay for you to have phone/central grid electricity in Saskatchewan when I choose not to live there? You have the freedom to live where you want to and some of those areas it makes little sense to have central power grids or landline phones. Its one of the trade offs with living out in the middle of nowhere.
As for electricity, government sponsorships is the entire reason why we have this sudden push for immature "green" energy. In the US before dear dictator FDR's push to "electrify" the nation there were multitudes of small start up companies pushing wind along with hydroelectric power for rural areas. You know, those things that we are now spending billions of dollars or more a year trying to get them to work better in a mad rush before coal/oil run electric plants are impractical. Had we not had the stealing of wealth to move towards a central, fossil fuel grid, the free market would have made wind energy cheap, affordable and efficient and we might have not had this huge problem we have today.
As for phones, cellular and other wireless technology may have taken over, or we might have had a thriving competitive landline market. Who knows.
Government solutions are rarely the best, are rarely the cheapest and rarely work.
Really though, I'm still a bit confused with how Kansas City managed to get Google's fiber optic cables when really it was Topeka that should have been chosen...
Either way, a good development that should help the KC area get more technology companies and make it a bit more livable.
The difference between Anonymous and most other groups is that Anonymous isn't really a group. Rather, it is more of a banner that individuals rally around for a common cause. There is no real agenda that Anonymous has because Anonymous really has no leader or real members. Anonymous is simply a rallying cry.
Really, who knows what they intend to accomplish with this. But undoubtedly there are some "members" of Anonymous who agree with it and undoubtedly there are some that disagree.
That is a really, really stupid idea. When it comes to real rights such as freedom of expression or freedom of religion there is nothing that I am not forced to promote that, only not to trample the rights of others. In no way am I forced to agree with them, to pay money to help them put up billboards or go with them on protest marches. With a "right" to internet I'm forced to pay for the lifestyle of someone else. If someone wants to choose to live far away from others in a remote location, why should I be forced to help lay fiber or cable for them to have the "right" to internet?
A better solution would be net neutrality is required if you use public land or public owned cables to run your ISP. Because it allows for the most amount of net neutrality (nearly all ISPs use public owned cables to do business with customers) but allows the greatest amount of freedom (if the ISP doesn't want to implement net neutrality don't use public land or cables).
I don't know much about the stamp market, but I know a decent amount about the coin collecting market and normal issue coins are next to worthless and will continue to be worthless. Just look at the mintage numbers, they are all insanely high. About the only modern (1970-present) US coins that have been solid investments in the past 20-30 years have been precious metal coins (gold eagles, silver eagles, etc.) and the occasional error coin. A few years ago there was a great stir as Presidential dollars were found with no edge lettering... Except that now it is believed that a good amount of these were smuggled out of the mint by an employee... (see http://numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=23748 ). State quarters, presidential dollars, national park quarters, shield pennies, etc. will never be worth more than face value unless you have one with a major error. The mintages are too high and they lack precious metals, unless the dollar collapses they will only be worth face value. Both stamp and coin collectors have a rich history which is where most of the developments come out of when it comes to western coins/stamps. While in the 1910-1920s it was quite possible to stumble upon a real "key date" in pocket change (back then the 1916 D Mercury Dime wasn't really considered to be much of a rarity) and if you held on to it for a few years it could be worth quite a bit. However, look at the people with a 1950 D Jefferson nickel, in the 50s and 60s it was expensive! Mint state examples ran about $25 (~100 today), however, today you can walk into most coin shops and buy the same coin for $10 or $15 in today's money.
Yes, like that, its completely ruined the market for stamp collecting because so many stamps are purely produced for collectors. The US post office has been doing it for several years, the US mint has just started doing it in the last few years by producing presidential dollars and Native American dollars no one wants but "collectors" snatch them up hoping they will be worth lots of money later (they won't be) and making worthless commemorative coins for collectors which they buy in hopes they will sell for more later on (chances are they won't). I mean, today you can't even hardly give away modern (non silver) proof sets. While older coins are rising in value and the value of junk silver/gold has gone up dramatically, there are few modern coins made at any western mint that has retained its issue price value except for a rare few which now have a higher scrap silver/gold value than issue price. This is true for the US mint, the Royal Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Perth Mint and many private and European mints. About the only positive gain in modern commemorative is from China which is dangerous for a western collector to collect due to the huge amount of fakes and lack of information.
Just stop with the madness of commemorative stamps/coins.
Don't worry, the post office killed off the stamp collecting hobby years ago. And the US mint is threatening to do the same to (commemorative) coin collecting.
The post office kept making stamps for the silliest things and so the hobby died due to over-saturation. Perhaps we need to realize that not -everything- needs to be commemorated in coin or stamp format and keep it for the big things that happen.
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Except for the fact that pretty much anything in China is considered to be a "capital" crime. In most civilized countries they have either A) Abolished the death penalty or B) Have restricted it to the most serious of crimes (murder) and the trials are well publicized and generally have multiple trials and many people trying to prove that the accused party is innocent.
China though has 55 "offenses" that are a capital "crime" including theft, smuggling of drugs, counterfeiting currency, rape and murder. Now, murder is something that is hard to prove, on the other hand counterfeiting currency? That is pretty easy to "prove" in a secretive totalitarian state like China, smuggling drugs? Also easy to "prove". Stealing weapons? Just plant a few bullets and you have yourself a solid "case" against them...
Officers have been shown to plant evidence even in western courts where corruption is comparatively low and there is much more transparency than in China which won't even say how many prisoners have been executed! Kidnapping or wholesale murder is a lot harder than planting evidence of a capital "crime" and than using the Chinese "justice" system to carry out the punishments using the falsified evidence.
The problem is mobile games have one of 3 problems.
/want/ your game. I mean, Skyrim had hype, Final Fantasy XIII had hype, even obscure titles of a familiar series has a bit of hype. With Android/iOS gaming there really isn't that, I mean, they do have "editors choice" titles and such, but without a knowledge of an editor, why would I choose them? That's the nice thing about console gaming, there are already a bunch of review sites out there by different editors who I know I have similar tastes in games with. What one person loves, I might hate.
/fun/ I'm going to delete it and try another. In general, I know that most Nintendo published games are going to be pretty good, I know that a game in the Zelda series is most likely going to be a fun adventure title, similarly, an RPG published by Square-Enix will also be a decent game, and a Resident Evil game is going to have me shooting zombies (or whatever those things were in RE5)
A) They don't work. Whether it is because your program requires version X of iOS and device Y can only go up to version Z, or because you created it for an Android device with a keyboard and it runs badly on touchscreen only phones (or vice versa) or the game simply doesn't work (as in, it crashes upon boot up)
B) They don't stand out from the crowd. I'm sorry but the vast majority of mobile apps look pretty much the same (cartoon-ish, flash-game look) and are pretty much the same genres (tower defense, Angry Birds clones, Wario Ware "Microgames" style games, etc.) Nor are there really any major channels of advertising to make me actually
C) They have no quality guarantee. For every application on my phone, there were 3 or 4 that I downloaded, opened then realized that they were of poor quality and deleted them. Games with annoying advertising, broken controls or generally buggy gameplay have no place on my phone. Sorry, but unless your game wows me within the first 5 minutes and I can say that it is actually
Of course they can survive when the alternative is buying a $1-10 game that you don't even know will be there in the future. What are the chances that the games I download via the Xbox live service will be available to me when I upgrade to the Xbox 3 (or whatever it will be called)? What are the chances that it will be seamless and free (as in, I can continue to play both consoles with the games on them without having to "transfer" them between the two consoles because if the first Xbox is any indication there will be various glitches that will make not all 360 games work on the Xbox 3). What are the chances that they will still be even /in/ the shop? Various games have been removed from current-gen consoles due to licensing conflicts, etc. While most of the time it allows you to re-download the games if they got deleted somehow, such a policy makes it hard for late adopters to get gems that are downloadable.
My $60 (or realistically $20-30) Xbox disks will continue to play no problem for quite a while, just like my ~30 year old NES.
There are so many stupidities with the current downloadable game market to make me unlikely to spend some serious cash on them. Of course it isn't enough to stop me spending a buck or two here and there for a few downloadable only gems, but I'm not going to be spending the cash I do on disks.
The mill was never an official US coin and if you look at the half cent, while it was officially discontinued, you saw its use in private tokens up until the great depression. In fact, the demand for 1/2 cent and 1/10 cent coins were so great in the great depression that the US government considered making official coins of those denominations, the plan ultimately fell through though. Until rampant inflation hit when tyrant-in-chief FDR took us off of the true gold standard and seized the nation's wealth for his own gain, half a cent was still a sizable amount of wealth.
So in other words you screw the people using cash (which over here are mostly either poor people or people concerned about privacy or distrust the banking sector)?
Yes, occasionally you'll press the lock button and... nothing. Or you press it and the screen goes off so you put it in your pocket and take it out later only to find that it never really locked in the first place... Its like it locks then decides to unlock itself in like 3 seconds. Overall its a great phone and I love it, but if it ran stock Android (especially Ice Cream Sandwich!) it would be so much nicer, plus, more customization. I suppose eventually there will be a nice Cyanogen mod ROM for it I'll put on there. At least AT&T lets you remove some of the bloatware which is a positive. Android has the software and the hardware but OEMs and cell companies decide to screw it all up... Plus, it makes basic instructions a pain, what is called one thing in Sense is called something different in stock Android, still something different in TouchWiz, still different in MotoBlur and even then things change between versions of those...
But even then, it was HP's fault they released the Veer and not the Pre 3 which was vastly superior in every way. It was almost as if HP was trying their hardest to kill WebOS. They sink a lot of money into buying Palm, then they randomly decide not to release phones that were already produced (Pre 3 in the US) and then they get rid of the rest of their already produced tablets at cost. And without a real reason. Now HP comes back and says great things about WebOS after it already killed it off in more ways than one.
Actually, if Google decided to close source Android (which they won't) I doubt that many manufacturers would stick with the OSS version. After all, they've proved their incompetence in coding their own individual "experiences" which make the phones slower and do nothing for usability. Give me stock Android over Sense/Touch-Wiz/MotoBlur/Etc. any day. Yes, some of the things are novel and yes, Sense is an attractive UI but whenever something breaks or malfunctions on my phone (Samsung Captivate Glide) its generally due to TouchWiz and its bugs rather than bugs native to Android, particularly the lock screen which manages to lag or fail every now and then.
Right, because the Google flagship phones (Nexus One, Nexus S, Galaxy Nexus) have been some of the most closed phones... Oh wait, they are some of the most open devices out there, far more open than the Droid you bought on Verizon or the Atrix you bought on AT&T...
If HP really wanted an open source mobile OS why didn't they quickly release the source to WebOS? Heck, why didn't they actually make decent phones to go with WebOS? Like the Veer? Tiny, dimensions that make it nearly unusable, no software keyboard, no microSD card slot, proprietary charger, not even a headphone jack! Along with a tiny 910mAh battery. The OS was never really the problem with the Pre, Pixi and Veer, the problem was Palm (and later HP) could never make hardware that actually worked well and couldn't convince third parties to make WebOS devices. HP neither could get WebOS to the masses like Android (and Windows Phone 7) or make a single great smartphone like Apple.
I think it will be interesting to see what hardware/software combos come out of this. Hopefully Google can make well supported Android phones without all the crap that current ones have, and make them be upgrade friendly for official updates instead of having to guess which handsets will be popular enough to get an upgrade.
Your logic is no different than the logic used to ban all sorts of things.
Living in a civil society requires some level of protection of the innocent.
Protection from what? Protection against someone looking lustfully at a picture? A picture that, in most cases, you took and posted on the internet?
If you want to talk about slippery slopes look at what you are saying, that a PICTURE is the same thing as actual harm. Laws against such things border on the absurd, for example the man who was convicted of photoshopping "pornographic" pictures that looked underage. Where was the crime there?
There is a pretty huge difference between the rape of a child to suggestive pictures (most likely) posted by a minor.
Possession of a picture should not constitute a crime.
Brick and Mortar tech stores have the possibility of being great. I for one much prefer shopping in physical stores for any sort of medium to major purchase. For example, some laptops have very comfortable keyboards, others... not so much. Similarly some displays look very good while others... not so much even though they have the same "specs" if you look online.
The problem is the service which could be their number 1 selling point is terrible. They sell you things you don't need and leave out the things you do need.
Of course most of the military FPS games are clones of each other, which is why I don't ever see the need to buy the newest Call of Duty every single year. But there are the rare gems of FPS games like Team Fortress 2, there really aren't any Indie games that compare to TF2, or even Call of Duty for that matter.
The thing isn't about originality but good games the games aren't as Katamari Damacy is to Bubbles but as Bubbles is to Bubbles when you can play Bubbles online for free or play it as an "Indie game" for $3-4. There are some Indie games that are alright, like Castle Crashers (though not sure if you can even call that an Indie game) but the vast majority are unplayable crap.
There are plenty of good games that aren't original, Skyrim wasn't original, but it was a good game. Final Fantasy wasn't original but it was a pretty fun game. Super Smash Bros. wasn't really that original but it was a pretty fun game. Indie versions of those games would be like a Skyrim clone that doesn't have depth, a near straight port of Final Fantasy and Super Smash Bros. with none of the charm and none of the balanced game mechanics.
The point is, very, very, very, few Indie games are worth playing, let alone buying.
That's a bad analogy. The Wii is backwards compatible 1 generation, it can play GameCube games and that's it. If I have some old SNES cartridges lying around, I can't exactly plug them into my Wii, I can't even send them in to Nintendo to have them imaged into Wii ROMs nor can I go to walmart and get a device that lets me transfer my NES/SNES/N64/Turbo-Grafix-16/Genesis/Neo Geo cartridges and play them on the Wii. Instead, I have to buy them again. That isn't backwards compatibility, that is simply Nintendo milking older games and older franchises for all they are worth. By your logic the PS3 and 360 are just as backwards compatible, after all, you can download Genesis and N64 games on there.
Honestly there really aren't that many decent Indie games out there. For "Indie" games you'd best just stick to Flash game and Minecraft because that's really all the Xbox Indie games are, either clones of a different game or flash games with 3D graphics that cost money.
Yep, the only console that I know of that removes features in firmware updates. It doesn't matter that the hardware was standard, Sony believes its their hardware to do with as they wish, regardless of what you want.
Android isn't perfect, but its the best there is. Your choices in the smartphone world are:
1) iOS, you know the one with draconian app approval process only 1 form factor, and planned obsolescence.
2) Android, not that great of a UI, but lots of apps, a multitude of form factors, but semi-official community updates give you a long life. Consider the G1 (HTC Dream) the first Android phone, it can run (unofficially) the latest release (Ice Cream Sandwich) although it is a bit slow. But the phone is usable with Gingerbread, the main release.
3) Windows Phone 7, too new to really say much about it, I think that 2012 will be the year of make it or break it when it comes to Windows Phone 7, its certainly interesting and might be promising.
4) All other smaller OSes (WebOS, Meego, Maemo, Symbian, etc.) have some good ideas but ultimately crippled by either lackluster support, lackluster hardware, lack of apps or lack of actually getting your phone out to customers (I'm looking at you Nokia).
The Android update model:
1) Flash the latest CyanogenMod
2) Update it when the update comes out
Not too hard (at least on the newer phones, some older ones need exploits)
Still, explain to me why I should have to pay for you to have phone/central grid electricity in Saskatchewan when I choose not to live there? You have the freedom to live where you want to and some of those areas it makes little sense to have central power grids or landline phones. Its one of the trade offs with living out in the middle of nowhere.
As for electricity, government sponsorships is the entire reason why we have this sudden push for immature "green" energy. In the US before dear dictator FDR's push to "electrify" the nation there were multitudes of small start up companies pushing wind along with hydroelectric power for rural areas. You know, those things that we are now spending billions of dollars or more a year trying to get them to work better in a mad rush before coal/oil run electric plants are impractical. Had we not had the stealing of wealth to move towards a central, fossil fuel grid, the free market would have made wind energy cheap, affordable and efficient and we might have not had this huge problem we have today.
As for phones, cellular and other wireless technology may have taken over, or we might have had a thriving competitive landline market. Who knows.
Government solutions are rarely the best, are rarely the cheapest and rarely work.
Really though, I'm still a bit confused with how Kansas City managed to get Google's fiber optic cables when really it was Topeka that should have been chosen...
Either way, a good development that should help the KC area get more technology companies and make it a bit more livable.
The difference between Anonymous and most other groups is that Anonymous isn't really a group. Rather, it is more of a banner that individuals rally around for a common cause. There is no real agenda that Anonymous has because Anonymous really has no leader or real members. Anonymous is simply a rallying cry.
Really, who knows what they intend to accomplish with this. But undoubtedly there are some "members" of Anonymous who agree with it and undoubtedly there are some that disagree.
That is a really, really stupid idea. When it comes to real rights such as freedom of expression or freedom of religion there is nothing that I am not forced to promote that, only not to trample the rights of others. In no way am I forced to agree with them, to pay money to help them put up billboards or go with them on protest marches. With a "right" to internet I'm forced to pay for the lifestyle of someone else. If someone wants to choose to live far away from others in a remote location, why should I be forced to help lay fiber or cable for them to have the "right" to internet?
A better solution would be net neutrality is required if you use public land or public owned cables to run your ISP. Because it allows for the most amount of net neutrality (nearly all ISPs use public owned cables to do business with customers) but allows the greatest amount of freedom (if the ISP doesn't want to implement net neutrality don't use public land or cables).
I don't know much about the stamp market, but I know a decent amount about the coin collecting market and normal issue coins are next to worthless and will continue to be worthless. Just look at the mintage numbers, they are all insanely high. About the only modern (1970-present) US coins that have been solid investments in the past 20-30 years have been precious metal coins (gold eagles, silver eagles, etc.) and the occasional error coin. A few years ago there was a great stir as Presidential dollars were found with no edge lettering... Except that now it is believed that a good amount of these were smuggled out of the mint by an employee... (see http://numismaster.com/ta/numis/Article.jsp?ad=article&ArticleId=23748 ). State quarters, presidential dollars, national park quarters, shield pennies, etc. will never be worth more than face value unless you have one with a major error. The mintages are too high and they lack precious metals, unless the dollar collapses they will only be worth face value. Both stamp and coin collectors have a rich history which is where most of the developments come out of when it comes to western coins/stamps. While in the 1910-1920s it was quite possible to stumble upon a real "key date" in pocket change (back then the 1916 D Mercury Dime wasn't really considered to be much of a rarity) and if you held on to it for a few years it could be worth quite a bit. However, look at the people with a 1950 D Jefferson nickel, in the 50s and 60s it was expensive! Mint state examples ran about $25 (~100 today), however, today you can walk into most coin shops and buy the same coin for $10 or $15 in today's money.
Yes, like that, its completely ruined the market for stamp collecting because so many stamps are purely produced for collectors. The US post office has been doing it for several years, the US mint has just started doing it in the last few years by producing presidential dollars and Native American dollars no one wants but "collectors" snatch them up hoping they will be worth lots of money later (they won't be) and making worthless commemorative coins for collectors which they buy in hopes they will sell for more later on (chances are they won't). I mean, today you can't even hardly give away modern (non silver) proof sets. While older coins are rising in value and the value of junk silver/gold has gone up dramatically, there are few modern coins made at any western mint that has retained its issue price value except for a rare few which now have a higher scrap silver/gold value than issue price. This is true for the US mint, the Royal Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint, the Perth Mint and many private and European mints. About the only positive gain in modern commemorative is from China which is dangerous for a western collector to collect due to the huge amount of fakes and lack of information.
Just stop with the madness of commemorative stamps/coins.
Don't worry, the post office killed off the stamp collecting hobby years ago. And the US mint is threatening to do the same to (commemorative) coin collecting.
The post office kept making stamps for the silliest things and so the hobby died due to over-saturation. Perhaps we need to realize that not -everything- needs to be commemorated in coin or stamp format and keep it for the big things that happen.