There was a comparison in a news article a few weeks back......lets see if I can remember them (god knows I can't find the link). It was comparing Obama's policies with Venezuela.
There was government control of banks, nationalizing car manufacturers, "fairness doctrine" style manipulation of the media (or at least attempts to pass such laws), raising taxes on "the evil rich", and I can't remember what else - but Obama's policies in general perfectly mirrored those of Chavez.
But that hardly qualifies as a leftist policy, and it's more of a different take of the role of government and tax distribution in a capitalist system. You might need to brush up on what leftism and socialism actually entails.
Not trying to insult you, but I think you've fallen prey to the revisionist history that's occurred where as long as the government doesn't run EVERYTHING they claim it's "capitalism" - that's just false. As for health care? Yes, there are things we can do to improve it - however, Obama's plan doesn't do anything to improve it and it is well known that it will raise costs to unsustainable levels.
I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.
Which is why I stick with news where bias isn't (well, with a few exceptions) an issue - business, technology, and financial news. The rest of it, I pretty much ignore anymore because there's so much blatant lying go on from just about every news source. I used to care about the news until I realized how much of it was lying for ratings.
While it's a bit much, I understand the reasoning for it. For one, it probably allows them to have a lower price on the non-3G versions, thus helping to subsidize those. For another, it helps Apple make more of a profit off people who want the "always online" functionality. Come on, you can't tell me that you were expecting this device to cost WAY more than it does. $499 - $829 means that Apple isn't putting anywhere near as much of a markup as they normally do for an Apple product, and I applaud them for that.
My only real complaint with the device is that it doesn't allow for input with a stylus, so you can't just write on it to take notes.
2) Nothing said about mouse support. Seriously, if I'm going to be using it for any type of document creation (and they seem to think people will, as they're providing iWorks in the app store), I don't want to have to use the screen for copy and paste. Lack of mouse support would be a killer for me.
I would assume that since it has bluetooth, you would be able to connect a bluetooth mouse to it.
Yes, but it's also an ebook reader and at 10 hours of battery life, it beats most netbooks too. So while it's more expensive than a Kindle and a netbook, it's LESS expensive than a Kindle AND a Netbook. It's all a matter of what you want out of your devices on if it's "expensive" or not.
There's also the question of how you get non-online movies to it, doesn't appear to have USB or SD card the like so you have to transfer everything wirelessly from your desktop and then save them on the small internal memory.
One of the accessories for the iPad is a SD card reader - I would assume that this would allow you to access music, movies, ebooks, and documents stored on the SD card.
It can run some programs an iPod / iPhone can't (like iWorks for $10) and the keyboard is much more usable for typing something big (like say editing a document or writing a long email). It's also easier to read websites on. As long as you're not going to flash-based video sites, I see this being much more useful than a netbook for the "only does email and web-browsing" users - also that starting price of $499 is pretty damn nice.
I've tried explaining this to many people and so many of them don't get it. Once I buy an item, it becomes mine - that's how property rights work. The company still has the copyrights / distribution rights to the game, so I cannot legally give away or sell copies of the game, but I own the copy that they sold me and can do whatever I want with it for my own use.
No other industry is allowed to get away with trying to claim ownership of a product once it has been sold and it's completely ridiculous.
If everyone plays only pirated games, there will be no more games to pirate. Did that occur to you?
Sorry, but I have to disagree. Companies know that DRM doesn't stop pirates. Companies also know that many paying customers boycott / turn to piracy as a result of DRM. I think that once companies see a noticeable dent in their sales to where they may no longer be profitable, they will stop paying the huge licensing fees for DRM / costs of activation servers (thus improving their profitability) and as a result they will also regain customers who refused to purchase games crippled by DRM. Yes, some of the companies will go out of business from this (as they should for pissing on their paying customers), but the industry will survive. New companies will then appear to fill the void left by the ones that went bankrupt and they would have seen what lead to the demise of the DRM-using companies and would not use those methods.
Your TV analogy is flawed because a TV is a means of viewing other media (tv shows and movies). Your ability to watch tv shows and movies was not in any way hampered by it. DRM / online activations is more akin to after X years, the manufacturer of your dvd player turns off their servers and your dvd player ceases to function - then in this hypothetical model, blu-ray does not play dvd's, so you must not only buy a blu-ray player, but you must repurchase all of your movies.
Where have you seen that? I've seen an excerpt from Steam's FAQ that says they MIGHT give you an offline version / patch, but no promises. Then of course they also included the typical "we can change these terms to renege on our promises at any time and you can't do jack shit about it" clause.
In general, I like the concept of Steam. However, since they still control your ability to get to your game in the future, that's a deal breaker for me. If they would allow you to download your game with a cd-key tied to your Steam account (so that it would prevent people from giving away their non-DRM'd offline copies) to use as a backup, then I'd be perfectly fine with using Steam. I refuse to pay money to a company that maintains control over my property, since it means that they can take away my right to use what I paid for at any time and without warning.
I think you have it backwards - most piracy is caused by DRM / online requirements for single player games. I know I never pirated a game before DRM started making it so that I had to rely on the whims of a company to buy a game I paid for. I also know many others who are just like me and used to always buy games until DRM came about to take away our rights.
As for MMO's, the reason those are successful with online activation and such is because due to the nature of the game, you HAVE to be online. If you have to be online just to play the game because it's multi-player only, then no, people aren't going to care if you have to authenticate online because without internet, you can't play the game anyways, even if it didn't have DRM.
It will never be impossible to pirate games and the industry is only losing more money by trying. The majority of people are perfectly willing to pay for games, especially a good one. However, many of them don't buy (whether it's a boycott or pirating) due to DRM. I'm guessing it's in the hundreds of thousands for companies to license DRM for a game, and since DRM has been proven completely ineffective at stopping the pirates who just don't want to pay AND it has driven away paying customers, DRM does nothing but lose money for the companies.
They figure fewer people are buying their console games because they just pirate the PC version.
I doubt it since if you're going to go through with the excessive cost of buying consoles (if you get a Wii, 360, and PS3 plus all of the controllers for each, you're looking at $2,000-$2,500 for hardware alone, not to mention that console games rarely go down in price as PC games do after several months), it wouldn't make sense to pirate PC games and not use the console.
The game industry has a serious reckoning coming - some PC game companies are actively trying to kill off their PC games business (2K and Ubisoft) buy using DRM to drive away their paying customers and the console industry has too high of prices - hardware prices are high because it does cost a lot to make the system, but game prices are fixed and virtually never go down - which will cause the people not willing to throw several thousand dollars every few years on gaming to stop buying as well.
Well if we give them cable tv and movie nights, why not let them play a game that would actually help them develop their ability to interact with other actual human beings? At least that way they're learning something as opposed to just sitting on their butt alone being entertained.
There are a number of things in his tracts (aside from the weird stuff) that he presents as Biblical that aren't in the Bible (no matter how liberal/conservative your reading of it.
The above two don't really compare to talking on the cellphone so much. For example, there is no visual feedback or queues to inform each other of their attention status. As such, the driver feels compelled to maintain a constant I/O of communication because the other person will never know if the driver is comprehending at all times. So it is assumed they are 100%. Naturally, the driver reciprocates by ensuring what has been said doesn't go in one ear and out the other.
If a person can't figure out that when you need to concentrate, you say "hang on" and you shut up and concentrate, then they shouldn't be driving PERIOD.
Many of you will hate me for saying this, but I firmly believe it should be illegal for the driver to place and/or answer a cell phone while driving. Period!
I'm fine with that as long as you outlaw passengers (or at least interacting in any way with the passengers) and the radio / music as well. Both of those are just as distracting, if not more so, than a phone.
Then again, maybe it's because I drive a manual so I'm used to being much more focused on my driving, so on the rare occasions I talk on the phone, the phone is definitely NOT my priority.
If you cannot talk and drive at the same time, then there are much bigger issues here. Despite the BS claims, as long as you're not an idiot putting the phone in front of driving, it's LESS distracting to talk on the phone than it is to talk to passengers. But hey, it's not like I've ever driven a car with passengers in it or talked on the phone, so how could I possibly be able to compare the two.
Also, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I'm assuming by "commercially-licensed" driver, you mean you drive trucks? I've seen way too many of those guys nearly kill people by not paying attention to what they were doing, so when I hear the claims that they are "more rigorously trained", I take it with a HELL of a big grain of salt from my personal experience with them.
I've looked at many (not all, obviously, I doubt anyone has seen them all) and they all have one HUGE flaw - they're rigged by forcing the person to not stop talking and forcing them to keep the phone in their hand. In real world driving, you can stop talking if you need to think more, or if you need both hands you can drop the phone. Every study I've seen has prevented this, which obviously would lead to higher accident rates when talking on a phone.
I think you means "Not paying attention while driving causes car accidents all the time". Just because X% of people who don't pay attention are on cell phones does not mean that the problem is the phone. The problem is people who don't pay attention to the road and who think the phone is more important than driving.
If you knew anything about the psychology of choice, you'd know that confronted with more options, humans tend to make worse choices, not better ones.
Inferior humans, sure. However, the ones who actually bother to think things through and learn what's going on so that they can make an informed choice make better choices. If that wasn't the case, why do so many people search online to find the best tv / computer / car to buy?
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There was a comparison in a news article a few weeks back......lets see if I can remember them (god knows I can't find the link). It was comparing Obama's policies with Venezuela.
There was government control of banks, nationalizing car manufacturers, "fairness doctrine" style manipulation of the media (or at least attempts to pass such laws), raising taxes on "the evil rich", and I can't remember what else - but Obama's policies in general perfectly mirrored those of Chavez.
But that hardly qualifies as a leftist policy, and it's more of a different take of the role of government and tax distribution in a capitalist system. You might need to brush up on what leftism and socialism actually entails.
Not trying to insult you, but I think you've fallen prey to the revisionist history that's occurred where as long as the government doesn't run EVERYTHING they claim it's "capitalism" - that's just false. As for health care? Yes, there are things we can do to improve it - however, Obama's plan doesn't do anything to improve it and it is well known that it will raise costs to unsustainable levels.
I got a couple of countries I can advise you to visit if you really want to take a look at what the "hard left" is really like.
I know the countries you speak of, and if you look at policies passed / proposed in the past year, you'll find that Obama has emulated them wonderfully. Just because Obama knows he can't change the entire government overnight doesn't mean he doesn't WANT to.
Which is why I stick with news where bias isn't (well, with a few exceptions) an issue - business, technology, and financial news. The rest of it, I pretty much ignore anymore because there's so much blatant lying go on from just about every news source. I used to care about the news until I realized how much of it was lying for ratings.
$130 extra for 3G. Geez.
While it's a bit much, I understand the reasoning for it. For one, it probably allows them to have a lower price on the non-3G versions, thus helping to subsidize those. For another, it helps Apple make more of a profit off people who want the "always online" functionality. Come on, you can't tell me that you were expecting this device to cost WAY more than it does. $499 - $829 means that Apple isn't putting anywhere near as much of a markup as they normally do for an Apple product, and I applaud them for that.
My only real complaint with the device is that it doesn't allow for input with a stylus, so you can't just write on it to take notes.
2) Nothing said about mouse support. Seriously, if I'm going to be using it for any type of document creation (and they seem to think people will, as they're providing iWorks in the app store), I don't want to have to use the screen for copy and paste. Lack of mouse support would be a killer for me.
I would assume that since it has bluetooth, you would be able to connect a bluetooth mouse to it.
It starts $19 more than a Kindle DX and does a hell of a lot more than a Kindle DX.
Yes, but it's also an ebook reader and at 10 hours of battery life, it beats most netbooks too. So while it's more expensive than a Kindle and a netbook, it's LESS expensive than a Kindle AND a Netbook. It's all a matter of what you want out of your devices on if it's "expensive" or not.
There's also the question of how you get non-online movies to it, doesn't appear to have USB or SD card the like so you have to transfer everything wirelessly from your desktop and then save them on the small internal memory.
One of the accessories for the iPad is a SD card reader - I would assume that this would allow you to access music, movies, ebooks, and documents stored on the SD card.
It can run some programs an iPod / iPhone can't (like iWorks for $10) and the keyboard is much more usable for typing something big (like say editing a document or writing a long email). It's also easier to read websites on. As long as you're not going to flash-based video sites, I see this being much more useful than a netbook for the "only does email and web-browsing" users - also that starting price of $499 is pretty damn nice.
even with that, it's still got very limited disk space (why no rotational drive option?), and the limited iphone style OS (why not full mac OS).
I'd rather have something that can hold at least a 250GB hdd and full MacOS/Windows.
Actually, with those, and give it at least a 14" screen, and they would switch me away from Toshiba.
Apple already makes such a device! It's called a "Macbook Pro".
I've tried explaining this to many people and so many of them don't get it. Once I buy an item, it becomes mine - that's how property rights work. The company still has the copyrights / distribution rights to the game, so I cannot legally give away or sell copies of the game, but I own the copy that they sold me and can do whatever I want with it for my own use.
No other industry is allowed to get away with trying to claim ownership of a product once it has been sold and it's completely ridiculous.
If everyone plays only pirated games, there will be no more games to pirate. Did that occur to you?
Sorry, but I have to disagree. Companies know that DRM doesn't stop pirates. Companies also know that many paying customers boycott / turn to piracy as a result of DRM. I think that once companies see a noticeable dent in their sales to where they may no longer be profitable, they will stop paying the huge licensing fees for DRM / costs of activation servers (thus improving their profitability) and as a result they will also regain customers who refused to purchase games crippled by DRM. Yes, some of the companies will go out of business from this (as they should for pissing on their paying customers), but the industry will survive. New companies will then appear to fill the void left by the ones that went bankrupt and they would have seen what lead to the demise of the DRM-using companies and would not use those methods.
Your TV analogy is flawed because a TV is a means of viewing other media (tv shows and movies). Your ability to watch tv shows and movies was not in any way hampered by it. DRM / online activations is more akin to after X years, the manufacturer of your dvd player turns off their servers and your dvd player ceases to function - then in this hypothetical model, blu-ray does not play dvd's, so you must not only buy a blu-ray player, but you must repurchase all of your movies.
Where have you seen that? I've seen an excerpt from Steam's FAQ that says they MIGHT give you an offline version / patch, but no promises. Then of course they also included the typical "we can change these terms to renege on our promises at any time and you can't do jack shit about it" clause.
In general, I like the concept of Steam. However, since they still control your ability to get to your game in the future, that's a deal breaker for me. If they would allow you to download your game with a cd-key tied to your Steam account (so that it would prevent people from giving away their non-DRM'd offline copies) to use as a backup, then I'd be perfectly fine with using Steam. I refuse to pay money to a company that maintains control over my property, since it means that they can take away my right to use what I paid for at any time and without warning.
I think you have it backwards - most piracy is caused by DRM / online requirements for single player games. I know I never pirated a game before DRM started making it so that I had to rely on the whims of a company to buy a game I paid for. I also know many others who are just like me and used to always buy games until DRM came about to take away our rights.
As for MMO's, the reason those are successful with online activation and such is because due to the nature of the game, you HAVE to be online. If you have to be online just to play the game because it's multi-player only, then no, people aren't going to care if you have to authenticate online because without internet, you can't play the game anyways, even if it didn't have DRM.
It will never be impossible to pirate games and the industry is only losing more money by trying. The majority of people are perfectly willing to pay for games, especially a good one. However, many of them don't buy (whether it's a boycott or pirating) due to DRM. I'm guessing it's in the hundreds of thousands for companies to license DRM for a game, and since DRM has been proven completely ineffective at stopping the pirates who just don't want to pay AND it has driven away paying customers, DRM does nothing but lose money for the companies.
They figure fewer people are buying their console games because they just pirate the PC version.
I doubt it since if you're going to go through with the excessive cost of buying consoles (if you get a Wii, 360, and PS3 plus all of the controllers for each, you're looking at $2,000-$2,500 for hardware alone, not to mention that console games rarely go down in price as PC games do after several months), it wouldn't make sense to pirate PC games and not use the console.
The game industry has a serious reckoning coming - some PC game companies are actively trying to kill off their PC games business (2K and Ubisoft) buy using DRM to drive away their paying customers and the console industry has too high of prices - hardware prices are high because it does cost a lot to make the system, but game prices are fixed and virtually never go down - which will cause the people not willing to throw several thousand dollars every few years on gaming to stop buying as well.
Well if we give them cable tv and movie nights, why not let them play a game that would actually help them develop their ability to interact with other actual human beings? At least that way they're learning something as opposed to just sitting on their butt alone being entertained.
There are a number of things in his tracts (aside from the weird stuff) that he presents as Biblical that aren't in the Bible (no matter how liberal/conservative your reading of it.
So he's Catholic?
The above two don't really compare to talking on the cellphone so much. For example, there is no visual feedback or queues to inform each other of their attention status. As such, the driver feels compelled to maintain a constant I/O of communication because the other person will never know if the driver is comprehending at all times. So it is assumed they are 100%. Naturally, the driver reciprocates by ensuring what has been said doesn't go in one ear and out the other.
If a person can't figure out that when you need to concentrate, you say "hang on" and you shut up and concentrate, then they shouldn't be driving PERIOD.
Many of you will hate me for saying this, but I firmly believe it should be illegal for the driver to place and/or answer a cell phone while driving. Period!
I'm fine with that as long as you outlaw passengers (or at least interacting in any way with the passengers) and the radio / music as well. Both of those are just as distracting, if not more so, than a phone.
Then again, maybe it's because I drive a manual so I'm used to being much more focused on my driving, so on the rare occasions I talk on the phone, the phone is definitely NOT my priority.
If you cannot talk and drive at the same time, then there are much bigger issues here. Despite the BS claims, as long as you're not an idiot putting the phone in front of driving, it's LESS distracting to talk on the phone than it is to talk to passengers. But hey, it's not like I've ever driven a car with passengers in it or talked on the phone, so how could I possibly be able to compare the two.
Also, and I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I'm assuming by "commercially-licensed" driver, you mean you drive trucks? I've seen way too many of those guys nearly kill people by not paying attention to what they were doing, so when I hear the claims that they are "more rigorously trained", I take it with a HELL of a big grain of salt from my personal experience with them.
I've looked at many (not all, obviously, I doubt anyone has seen them all) and they all have one HUGE flaw - they're rigged by forcing the person to not stop talking and forcing them to keep the phone in their hand. In real world driving, you can stop talking if you need to think more, or if you need both hands you can drop the phone. Every study I've seen has prevented this, which obviously would lead to higher accident rates when talking on a phone.
Cell phones cause car accidents all the time.
I think you means "Not paying attention while driving causes car accidents all the time". Just because X% of people who don't pay attention are on cell phones does not mean that the problem is the phone. The problem is people who don't pay attention to the road and who think the phone is more important than driving.
If you knew anything about the psychology of choice, you'd know that confronted with more options, humans tend to make worse choices, not better ones.
Inferior humans, sure. However, the ones who actually bother to think things through and learn what's going on so that they can make an informed choice make better choices. If that wasn't the case, why do so many people search online to find the best tv / computer / car to buy?