Because replacement parts will cost less because rather than have to have to make special procedures for every single different part for every different model, you can have a database with all possible parts for every possible model, when you need a certain part, just print it. No need for a massive inventory.
Furthermore, some parts might be made in "chunks" traditionally when only a smaller part is needed. For example, (while not a car part) consider a computer keyboard. You can find complete computer keyboards fairly often, and you might be able to find an entire key-set if you're lucky, but let's say that your "J" key popped off, or your spacebar popped off. It would be cheaper to print the part you needed than to buy an entire set of keys (or a new keyboard). With traditional manufacturing it makes sense to make things in bulk because you need specialized equipment for everything but if you have a general-purpose printer you can just print what you need.
It goes beyond hardware and software though. Even if everything that you have is secure and without backdoors it still has to go on the infrastructure that the state can hijack. Sure, at this time I think its safe to say that if you encrypt your traffic you can be fairly certain that the state cannot read your messages, but, eventually weaknesses may be found or quantum computing may allow for the breaking of current "strong" encryption.
For privacy to be sustainable, we need an open infrastructure with open hardware, open software and open firmware.
Language is not precise and computers like precision. The same words can mean entirely different things depending on context, where the speaker is from, how they say the words, etc. Furthermore, language evolves at a very rapid rate, new words are created on a daily basis. We're used to language and the vagueness that it implies but that translates very poorly to computer logic and it will never be perfect because it relies on variables that the computer will never know.
There's a huge difference between corporations and government.
Lets say we have Google actively reading my e-mails, what are they going to gain from them? They're going to gain insights into how to make their products better. They're going to learn how to make more relevant ads. They're maybe going to launch new products that fill a need I have. Google isn't going to kidnap me and throw me in a cage. Google isn't going to launch a hellfire missile at one of their customers. Everything that Google gains is going to (at least in theory anyways) help me because my relationship with Google is voluntary and not based on coercion. On the other hand, everything that the government does is based on coercion and violence, the information that they gain would be used to harm me (and others).
Do you really think the constitution is limiting these people? The constitution is long gone, demolished by the supreme court and by those who swore to protect it. All the constitution is used for is to give Americans an illusion that we're free, just like the constitution of North Korea claims to give human rights to its citizens.
The price of freedom is not that bombings and shootings will happen, that's just life. Safety can happen with freedom and a lack of safety can happen with a lack of freedom. Indeed I'd go as far as to say there's no real correlation between freedom and these happenings, after all, you look at perhaps the least-free places of all: prisons and you still see murder and rape.
The reason why we see so many dash-cam videos of Russia isn't because the Russians like recording their drives because they are so eventful, but rather insurance fraud is such a rampant problem that most insurance companies require them. So until the insurance companies start requiring HD dashcams, we might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak.
The fifth amendment (along with the rest of them) have all been substantially changed by various court rulings that they might as well not exist in the first place. We've seen in the last 100 or so years so much "compromise" when it comes to the constitution that it might as well be used as toilet paper. Its stopped being a rule and started being a "guideline" and now is simply ignored. It is too far gone to save.
Because Windows has set the standard for PC GUIs since Windows 95? Just look at the start menu and how its emulated on nearly every major DE in some way or another.
Microsoft is a company that is really left with no main strengths other than their legacy and branding except for the Xbox. The Xbox is Microsoft's only remaining trademark and product that people associate with cutting edge and (well, somewhat?) quality. People don't like subscription based software, heck most people don't like subscription based anything if they have a choice between paying a flat fee and using it in perpetuity or paying a subscription and renewing that monthly/yearly with an understanding that eventually the product will cease.
There are very few things that can really be done to make a PC operating system "better" aside from "under the hood" tweaks. Yeah, we can make them faster, we can make a better file system, we can create a more stable kernel, etc. but these are minor updates and for most people it doesn't justify paying $100 for minor things. Same with an office suite. If your old version is working fine, why upgrade? Really, aside from the Ribbon interface there's not a whole heck of a lot that has changed in Office since Office 2003 or even Office XP.
And most of Microsoft's hardware has quite frankly, sucked. Remember the RRoD that plagued the 360? Microsoft is still profitable and still can tread water, but they aren't and don't look like they can have a repeat of their "boom" years in the 1990s.
Security theater at its finest. The reason why there hasn't been 9/11 part II is not because of the TSA, instead its been because prior to 9/11 whenever an airplane was hijacked, the standard procedure was to keep a low profile, wait until your plane landed and the hijacker to make their demands and try not to piss off the hijacker, then the feds will storm the plane and light up the hijacker in a hail of bullets and so long as you kept a low profile you'd make it out alive. Today though, everyone associates hijacking with 9/11 and so people are going to be much more willing to fight when they think that their alternative isn't landing in Cuba but instead running into a skyscraper.
Instead, all the TSA has done is make ordinary passengers feel like criminals, damage the profitability of airlines and generally make it a pain to fly in US airspace.
Nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest and cheapest energy we can have right now. Sure, one day we might have unicorn-powered rainbows that provide all of our energy needs but today its basically either coal or nuclear for practical, cheap energy. The problem with nuclear energy is that everyone's too scared to build new plants and so the only nuclear power plants we're running are the older, less safe design. Fukishima was designed in the 1960s, nuclear technology has advanced a lot since then and its become a lot safer.
Right, because clearly less profit = more incentive to start a business! Clearly more paperwork = more incentive to sell online!
There's a reason why there's lots of small online stores: because you don't have to deal with the headaches of a "traditional" store, you don't have to get a business license, you don't have to fill out paperwork to get a tax ID, etc. I can sell online in minutes instead of weeks. I can spend most of my time making and creating my product rather than worrying about how to run my store. Take away that incentive and many of the small stores will close.
Its easy to implement for Amazon because Amazon is a large company with a team of lawyers and helped design it. In 2012 Amazon had revenue of about 60 billion or so, spending a couple hundred thousand (or more) on compliance with this proposal is a very small dent. However, the cost of compliance will be felt much more for smaller companies or individuals who sell online and may very well put them out of business. After all if you're selling something as a hobby, its not going to be much fun or profitable if you have to spend hundreds of dollars on either talking to a tax attorney or several man-hours trying to figure out the taxes on your own. Amazon can afford that, they've got the personnel and the spare cash, your "mom and pop" style internet store may not.
So in other words, Amazon has managed to lobby legislators into having a national internet sales tax which it can fairly easily implement (since it designed it and is a large company after all) in order to screw over both the average Joe AND make the playing field less competitive (the US tax code is far from simple...)
Once something has been learned, its really hard to un-learn it. I don't care if your alternative solution is "better" or not its automatically less usable because I have to change my muscle memory. Incremental changes can be good and in places where the "normal" UI hasn't been solidified change can be good! For example, with smartphones and consoles its quite possible to create a new UI that improves usability, because the technology to interface with the hardware is fairly new (capacitive touch-screens for phones, new controllers for consoles), but when it comes to the keyboard and mouse, just keep it the same, Firefox hasn't added anything beneficial UI-wise in the past 3 or 4 "design overhauls" and instead has added a good 15 minutes of tweaks I have to do to any fresh install.
Yep, I hate how I can't customize Chrome. I love the speed of Chrome, like its rendering engine but even the most basic settings you can't change. You can't change history or even put the tabs below the address bar! I suppose if you're the type of person who doesn't change anything Chrome might be for you, but since I spend most of my time on the computer using a browser, I like one that I can customize to my needs exactly.
The problem with Chrome is its complete lack of user customization. Compare that to Firefox (and Opera) where an about:config lets you change nearly anything.
Perhaps the thing that bothered me most about Chrome is there was no option to change history to:
Keep cookies
Keep downloads
But don't keep a log of the pages I've visited and don't change the colour of URLs that I've already clicked on (yeah, I know its minor but it bugs the crap out of me)
Instead, Google thinks you either need to be in super-secret-pr0n-surfing mode or keep a log of anything you visited (and show it in the address bar when you're searching).
Heck, I think even IE lets me have more control of my browsing history than Chrome does!
I think ET just showed that licensed games are nearly uniformly terrible. I mean, its an exception that a game based off of a movie, TV show or book turns out to be good. Film and video games are two separate mediums and rarely can you turn a good movie into a good game (and you certainly can't turn a good video game into a good movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._(film) ). Indeed with the exception of Goldeneye, Capcom's Disney games (Duck Tales, etc.), some of the Star Wars games and some of the LoTR games I don't think there's really been any great games based off of licensed properties in a different medium.
The Raspberry Pi can't emulate what the C64 and BBC Micro did though: let you make titles that rivaled commercial platforms.
Back during the heyday of the C64, video games could easily be developed by one person or a small team, coding was comparatively simple, with enough time and with a bit of effort you could code games that were similar to commercial games that appeared in arcades 2-3 years previously. Today's kids have grown up with multimillion dollar games lead by large teams of programmers, composers and artists. Rather than Pac-Man, today's kids have grown up with Skyrim. When you can't make games that are similar to what you consider to be "good games" the motivation to program (which is what gets most kids interested in programming, I mean, not many kids decide one day they want to learn arrays and merge-sorts) is diminished.
E.T. Wasn't that bad of a game, it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible financial decision on Atari's part, neither was Pac-Man. But Atari paid a stupidly-high licensing fee for E.T. then rushed the production and then produced far more inventory than was needed for demand, mix that with the fact that Pac-Man was produced with 2 million more cartridges than Atari had sold consoles leads to a poor outcome.
The 2600 had a bunch of trash released for it (along with a handful of great gems) its just that Atari's bad business practices turned what could have been a minor setback to an industry crash.
You should have the right to protest whatever regardless of your citizenship. Human rights are still human rights, this idea that we shouldn't care about and we shouldn't (peacefully!) try to do something about X has lead to some of the worst abuses in power in history. We are all humans and it is in all of our best interests that basic rights to self-expression, freedom of religion and the right of self-ownership are protected. Why should I care about sex-slavery in Africa? After all, I don't live in Africa, I'm white and I'm also male. Why should I care about what's happening in Syria? After all, I'm not Islamic and I'm not middle eastern and don't live in Syria. Heck, we can go even further, why should I care about the holocaust? I'm not Jewish, I don't live in Germany. Why should I care about the civil rights movement? I'm not black.
Rights need to be protected no matter who is violating them. The protection of human rights in Turkey is a cause that all liberty-minded individuals need to take note of and support no matter where their geographical location is, what race they are and whatever country you "legally belong to", because what happens to one human, affects us all.
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Because replacement parts will cost less because rather than have to have to make special procedures for every single different part for every different model, you can have a database with all possible parts for every possible model, when you need a certain part, just print it. No need for a massive inventory.
Furthermore, some parts might be made in "chunks" traditionally when only a smaller part is needed. For example, (while not a car part) consider a computer keyboard. You can find complete computer keyboards fairly often, and you might be able to find an entire key-set if you're lucky, but let's say that your "J" key popped off, or your spacebar popped off. It would be cheaper to print the part you needed than to buy an entire set of keys (or a new keyboard). With traditional manufacturing it makes sense to make things in bulk because you need specialized equipment for everything but if you have a general-purpose printer you can just print what you need.
But it is the government that is the problem, if you can take away the government's power, you've got nothing to fear from the corporations.
Strike the root, attack the government's power then you won't have to worry about corporations.
It goes beyond hardware and software though. Even if everything that you have is secure and without backdoors it still has to go on the infrastructure that the state can hijack. Sure, at this time I think its safe to say that if you encrypt your traffic you can be fairly certain that the state cannot read your messages, but, eventually weaknesses may be found or quantum computing may allow for the breaking of current "strong" encryption.
For privacy to be sustainable, we need an open infrastructure with open hardware, open software and open firmware.
Language is not precise and computers like precision. The same words can mean entirely different things depending on context, where the speaker is from, how they say the words, etc. Furthermore, language evolves at a very rapid rate, new words are created on a daily basis. We're used to language and the vagueness that it implies but that translates very poorly to computer logic and it will never be perfect because it relies on variables that the computer will never know.
There's a huge difference between corporations and government.
Lets say we have Google actively reading my e-mails, what are they going to gain from them? They're going to gain insights into how to make their products better. They're going to learn how to make more relevant ads. They're maybe going to launch new products that fill a need I have. Google isn't going to kidnap me and throw me in a cage. Google isn't going to launch a hellfire missile at one of their customers. Everything that Google gains is going to (at least in theory anyways) help me because my relationship with Google is voluntary and not based on coercion. On the other hand, everything that the government does is based on coercion and violence, the information that they gain would be used to harm me (and others).
Do you really think the constitution is limiting these people? The constitution is long gone, demolished by the supreme court and by those who swore to protect it. All the constitution is used for is to give Americans an illusion that we're free, just like the constitution of North Korea claims to give human rights to its citizens.
The price of freedom is not that bombings and shootings will happen, that's just life. Safety can happen with freedom and a lack of safety can happen with a lack of freedom. Indeed I'd go as far as to say there's no real correlation between freedom and these happenings, after all, you look at perhaps the least-free places of all: prisons and you still see murder and rape.
The reason why we see so many dash-cam videos of Russia isn't because the Russians like recording their drives because they are so eventful, but rather insurance fraud is such a rampant problem that most insurance companies require them. So until the insurance companies start requiring HD dashcams, we might not see them since the demand for them nearly anywhere else is naturally going to be weak.
The fifth amendment (along with the rest of them) have all been substantially changed by various court rulings that they might as well not exist in the first place. We've seen in the last 100 or so years so much "compromise" when it comes to the constitution that it might as well be used as toilet paper. Its stopped being a rule and started being a "guideline" and now is simply ignored. It is too far gone to save.
Because Windows has set the standard for PC GUIs since Windows 95? Just look at the start menu and how its emulated on nearly every major DE in some way or another.
Microsoft is a company that is really left with no main strengths other than their legacy and branding except for the Xbox. The Xbox is Microsoft's only remaining trademark and product that people associate with cutting edge and (well, somewhat?) quality. People don't like subscription based software, heck most people don't like subscription based anything if they have a choice between paying a flat fee and using it in perpetuity or paying a subscription and renewing that monthly/yearly with an understanding that eventually the product will cease.
There are very few things that can really be done to make a PC operating system "better" aside from "under the hood" tweaks. Yeah, we can make them faster, we can make a better file system, we can create a more stable kernel, etc. but these are minor updates and for most people it doesn't justify paying $100 for minor things. Same with an office suite. If your old version is working fine, why upgrade? Really, aside from the Ribbon interface there's not a whole heck of a lot that has changed in Office since Office 2003 or even Office XP.
And most of Microsoft's hardware has quite frankly, sucked. Remember the RRoD that plagued the 360? Microsoft is still profitable and still can tread water, but they aren't and don't look like they can have a repeat of their "boom" years in the 1990s.
Security theater at its finest. The reason why there hasn't been 9/11 part II is not because of the TSA, instead its been because prior to 9/11 whenever an airplane was hijacked, the standard procedure was to keep a low profile, wait until your plane landed and the hijacker to make their demands and try not to piss off the hijacker, then the feds will storm the plane and light up the hijacker in a hail of bullets and so long as you kept a low profile you'd make it out alive. Today though, everyone associates hijacking with 9/11 and so people are going to be much more willing to fight when they think that their alternative isn't landing in Cuba but instead running into a skyscraper.
Instead, all the TSA has done is make ordinary passengers feel like criminals, damage the profitability of airlines and generally make it a pain to fly in US airspace.
Nuclear energy is the safest, cleanest and cheapest energy we can have right now. Sure, one day we might have unicorn-powered rainbows that provide all of our energy needs but today its basically either coal or nuclear for practical, cheap energy. The problem with nuclear energy is that everyone's too scared to build new plants and so the only nuclear power plants we're running are the older, less safe design. Fukishima was designed in the 1960s, nuclear technology has advanced a lot since then and its become a lot safer.
Right, because clearly less profit = more incentive to start a business! Clearly more paperwork = more incentive to sell online!
There's a reason why there's lots of small online stores: because you don't have to deal with the headaches of a "traditional" store, you don't have to get a business license, you don't have to fill out paperwork to get a tax ID, etc. I can sell online in minutes instead of weeks. I can spend most of my time making and creating my product rather than worrying about how to run my store. Take away that incentive and many of the small stores will close.
Its easy to implement for Amazon because Amazon is a large company with a team of lawyers and helped design it. In 2012 Amazon had revenue of about 60 billion or so, spending a couple hundred thousand (or more) on compliance with this proposal is a very small dent. However, the cost of compliance will be felt much more for smaller companies or individuals who sell online and may very well put them out of business. After all if you're selling something as a hobby, its not going to be much fun or profitable if you have to spend hundreds of dollars on either talking to a tax attorney or several man-hours trying to figure out the taxes on your own. Amazon can afford that, they've got the personnel and the spare cash, your "mom and pop" style internet store may not.
So in other words, Amazon has managed to lobby legislators into having a national internet sales tax which it can fairly easily implement (since it designed it and is a large company after all) in order to screw over both the average Joe AND make the playing field less competitive (the US tax code is far from simple...)
Gee thanks Amazon!
Exactly.
Once something has been learned, its really hard to un-learn it. I don't care if your alternative solution is "better" or not its automatically less usable because I have to change my muscle memory. Incremental changes can be good and in places where the "normal" UI hasn't been solidified change can be good! For example, with smartphones and consoles its quite possible to create a new UI that improves usability, because the technology to interface with the hardware is fairly new (capacitive touch-screens for phones, new controllers for consoles), but when it comes to the keyboard and mouse, just keep it the same, Firefox hasn't added anything beneficial UI-wise in the past 3 or 4 "design overhauls" and instead has added a good 15 minutes of tweaks I have to do to any fresh install.
Yep, I hate how I can't customize Chrome. I love the speed of Chrome, like its rendering engine but even the most basic settings you can't change. You can't change history or even put the tabs below the address bar! I suppose if you're the type of person who doesn't change anything Chrome might be for you, but since I spend most of my time on the computer using a browser, I like one that I can customize to my needs exactly.
The problem with Chrome is its complete lack of user customization. Compare that to Firefox (and Opera) where an about:config lets you change nearly anything.
Perhaps the thing that bothered me most about Chrome is there was no option to change history to:
Keep cookies
Keep downloads
But don't keep a log of the pages I've visited and don't change the colour of URLs that I've already clicked on (yeah, I know its minor but it bugs the crap out of me)
Instead, Google thinks you either need to be in super-secret-pr0n-surfing mode or keep a log of anything you visited (and show it in the address bar when you're searching).
Heck, I think even IE lets me have more control of my browsing history than Chrome does!
I think ET just showed that licensed games are nearly uniformly terrible. I mean, its an exception that a game based off of a movie, TV show or book turns out to be good. Film and video games are two separate mediums and rarely can you turn a good movie into a good game (and you certainly can't turn a good video game into a good movie http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Mario_Bros._(film) ). Indeed with the exception of Goldeneye, Capcom's Disney games (Duck Tales, etc.), some of the Star Wars games and some of the LoTR games I don't think there's really been any great games based off of licensed properties in a different medium.
The Raspberry Pi can't emulate what the C64 and BBC Micro did though: let you make titles that rivaled commercial platforms.
Back during the heyday of the C64, video games could easily be developed by one person or a small team, coding was comparatively simple, with enough time and with a bit of effort you could code games that were similar to commercial games that appeared in arcades 2-3 years previously. Today's kids have grown up with multimillion dollar games lead by large teams of programmers, composers and artists. Rather than Pac-Man, today's kids have grown up with Skyrim. When you can't make games that are similar to what you consider to be "good games" the motivation to program (which is what gets most kids interested in programming, I mean, not many kids decide one day they want to learn arrays and merge-sorts) is diminished.
E.T. Wasn't that bad of a game, it was just a terrible, terrible, terrible financial decision on Atari's part, neither was Pac-Man. But Atari paid a stupidly-high licensing fee for E.T. then rushed the production and then produced far more inventory than was needed for demand, mix that with the fact that Pac-Man was produced with 2 million more cartridges than Atari had sold consoles leads to a poor outcome.
The 2600 had a bunch of trash released for it (along with a handful of great gems) its just that Atari's bad business practices turned what could have been a minor setback to an industry crash.
Before rushing to adopt online voting, we really need to ask ourselves, what exactly is wrong with just voting normally that voting online solves.
I sincerely believe he is wrong.
There, just added exactly the same amount to the conversation as you did.
You should have the right to protest whatever regardless of your citizenship. Human rights are still human rights, this idea that we shouldn't care about and we shouldn't (peacefully!) try to do something about X has lead to some of the worst abuses in power in history. We are all humans and it is in all of our best interests that basic rights to self-expression, freedom of religion and the right of self-ownership are protected. Why should I care about sex-slavery in Africa? After all, I don't live in Africa, I'm white and I'm also male. Why should I care about what's happening in Syria? After all, I'm not Islamic and I'm not middle eastern and don't live in Syria. Heck, we can go even further, why should I care about the holocaust? I'm not Jewish, I don't live in Germany. Why should I care about the civil rights movement? I'm not black.
Rights need to be protected no matter who is violating them. The protection of human rights in Turkey is a cause that all liberty-minded individuals need to take note of and support no matter where their geographical location is, what race they are and whatever country you "legally belong to", because what happens to one human, affects us all.