Alright, the guy above you is a moron. You're a bigger moron. First, when you talk about "entitlement spending", at least in any meaningful way, you're talking about Social Security and Medicare. That's where numbers like "50% of the federal budget" come from. Not stuff like welfare, which is some piddling amount that probably doesn't even hit a whole percentage point.The "welfare leach with ten kids" if she even exists, is such a negligible portion of the federal budget that you can completely eliminate welfare and it will hardly matter at all to the budget discussion. It will hurt a lot of people, but it won't even come close to balancing the budget.
So, Social Security and Medicare. Two programs that have been promised to us all. Especially Social Security, which we all pay a special tax for our entire working lives, on the theory that once we reach retirement it might provide us with some gas money. Is it really surprising that anytime anyone talks about messing with them, everyone over the age of 50 gets a little excited? Ya see, that's the interesting thing. When we talk about entitlement programs, everyone is always excited to cut programs that assist the poor. Get rid of that shit, fuckers don't do anything anyway. Problem is, that rarely has much of any effect on the budget becasue those programs don't cost all that much. As soon as we start talking abut the big ticket items everyone is all "Don't touch *my* Medicare."
Maybe they could license the systems walmart.com uses. It's pretty damned certain that Walmart has a physical presence in every state and they sell a wide variety of products online. You're right that I underestimated the complexity of selling such a variety of items, but it still doesn't make the problem that much more difficult. You could just use some extra tables in the main product database to figure out how an individual product is classified in an individual locale. Add an optional field for tax holidays. Have someone who's job it is to enter those as they get announced.
It's still not the overwhelming amount of work you seem to think it is, and I can think of more than a few retailers who most certainly must have figured out a way to handle it. Nearly all department stores and discounts stores have physical presences in many if not most states, and have online stores with a huge variety of items in them. I would not be surprised if there weren't one or more off the self products or services you get to handle this for you.
And yet other online retailers handle this. Apple and Barnes and Noble both come to mind. Due to their extensive retail outlet infrastructure both have to collect sales tax in nearly every state. When you order something from either company an intelligent system determines where you live and charges the relevant taxes. I'd guess once a quarter the same intelligent system adds up how much it owes every state and locality in taxes and disburses funds. This isn't that difficult a problem. I'm a pretty poor programmer (I do more sys admin, and don't get to practice much) and I could code up a look up table and database system to handle it. It wouldn't be very scalable, but luckily Amazon can hire a few people way more skilled than I am for a short term contract (or use their own internal assets for a few weeks work) to take care of it.
Sadly at this point it's all but impossible, outside of major metro areas, to find a decent local book store anymore. Huntsville is a mid-sized metro with a very high population of educated customer (lots of engineers and scientists per capita here), but we still don't have any that I am aware of. A few used book stores, a couple of "Christian" book stores; but for new general purpose books you have to go to B&N or BAM. I still try to go to the brick and mortar super stores, on the theory that they do at least employ people and while retail is retail, these aren't *awful* jobs.
B&N kind of cut their own throat to an extent there though. They finally convinced me to buy a Nook. Now the brick and mortar store is more like a showroom for me. I go in, wander about till I find the book I like, verify it's available as an e-book, and use their wifi to buy it. Barnes and Noble is still getting my money, but the local store is not. I worry a bit about that. I'd hate to have the store close, I still find the best way to find a book to be browsing in a physical store.
No, they really do this becasue of the spammers and gold farmers. I played for on and off for about 5 years. Even with severely gimped trial accounts the problems with spam and gold farming are rampant. Originally the trial accounts were not gimped this way (they were level limited, but could chat and stuff), they were forced to do this by player complaints. Ordinarily I'd be more that willing to entertain corporate greed as the motivation, but in this case I can verify that it's a legitimate attempt to prevent abuse.
Guns and sledgehammers don't reveal their owners as a strong potential consequence of use. Hitting something with a hammer isn't going to tell you whose hammer it is. Opening "resume.doc" on a USB stick is likely to net you not only a name, but an address, e-mail, and phone number.
Or put the the USB storage driver in/etc/modules/blacklist (I prefer this method, since I doesn't require any extra effort on kernel upgrades, but our IA guy wants teh drivers completely gone, so we do the first)
On Windows I don't know the procedure, but I definitely know you can do it. DOD disables USB storage (but not all USB devices) on every computer it owns. It's a pretty trivial procedure in Linux, and not any harder in Windows; and your keyboard and mouse still work just fine.
You know what? Fuck that. I'm not going to let the fact that there are bad people out there make me live my life in fear. For every robber/rapist/murderer out there, there are probably between a hundred and a thousand people who just need a few minutes of your time to help with a flat tire. I'll take my chances. The world has *not* changed. You've allowed the media and a tragic event to convince you that the world has changed. There have always been bad people. There have always been good people. There have always been the vast majority of people who are just going to get along. I choose how I live my life, not some asshole who thinks a gun makes him powerful.
Doesn't mean be stupid. If the news is reporting a "Flat tire robber", maybe you want to adjust your behavior for a while, but in general I'm going to help people who need help. I've lived my life that way for 37 years and I'm not changing it now. I've lived in downtown New Orleans. I spent a year in Iraq. The bad guys haven't made me bitter and fearful yet, I'm not going to let them do it now.
I believe it was that last one he was interested in. His theory, and not a bad one, is that kids will enjoy programming more if they can get an immediate and tangible result in a way that matters to them. "Learning programming" to a lot of kids is going to mean trying to replicate Microsoft Word or Portal. That's what they see and use day to day on their "computers". "iPhone programming", "Android programming", or "web programming" bring up a different level of expectation. People expect phone apps or web apps to be simple.
Phones, in a lot of ways, are the largest current inheritors of the old school Unix idea of a chain of small simple tools that work together. Most phone apps are simple programs that do one thing or a very small group of things, and don't try to be all things to all people. After a few weeks of poking around you could probably make a phone app that doesn't look to much worse than some of what is currently being sold on the app stores. There's value in that for a lot of people. Learning to program a computer seems hard, becasue most of what you're comparing your work to is a huge project written by a team of professionals. Learning to program a phone seems easier becasue most of what you're comparing your work to was done by a single person or a small group, who may or may not have been professionals.
The actual difficulty of the language, or it's popularity on a variety of platforms, is a factor to consider. On the other hand, there's a psychological edge to feeeling like you can make some as good or close to as good as what's for sale in the store.
I think it's a matter of recognizing a hole, a niche, that could be profitable to fill. Let's start with a premise. Men and women are different. Some of it is biological, some of it is cultural, and all of it varies from individual to individual; but in a broad, sweeping, sense men and women are different. Now let's instantiate that presence. Movies are made for three primary types of audiences (we'll ignore kid movies or specialty movies for now): men, women, or both. Don't get me wrong, plenty of girls like a kick and smash movie, at least occasionally. Plenty of guys can enjoy a check flick, at least occasionally. Mostly, though, those genres are made for one sex or the other, with the understanding that overlap will occur. Most more general comedy/drama type films are made to appeal to both audiences.
Video games are right now in a place where they're making mostly "Guy games" and "broad appeal" games. Most women enjoy the broad appeal games, and occasionally they'll enjoy a "guy game". My wife loves a good kick and smash movie every so often, and she also enjoys blowing away aliens every so often. Think of the money to be made if you could be the one to come up with the first "chick flicks" of the video games industry though. It doesn't mean women would stop liking general appeal or action focused games, any more than every woman loves chick flicks or hates action movies.
It would be a huge impact on the industry, potentially bringing in new female gamers and selling hugely to existing female gaming population. And as a guy who likes the occasional chick flick, I'd probably play it too.
Yeah, we still use SIM cards. Most people chose to sign contracts for severe discounts on new phones, but there's no legal or technological reason to do so. We just sent my dad my wife's old iPhone 3G, and he popped the SIM out of his (dying) flip-phone and stuck into the iPhone. Works fine. He was going to sign a contract for a new iPhone or Android, but he didn't want to buy a data plan until he had a better idea what his personal use case would be for the device. So now he has an older iPhone, but doesn't have to get a data plan.
The reason most people chose to sign contracts and get new phones every couple of years here isn't that we don't have SIMs or can't switch phones arbitrarily if we chose. It's that we get charged the same amount whether the phone company subsidizes our phone purchases or not. There's no "SIM only" rates. If I'm going to have to pay $x a month regardless of whether I'm using the subsidy, I may as well use it and get my money's worth. I'm paying for the subsidy either way, it's just whether I use it or not.
One is hopeful that existing subscribers will be able to keep their existing plans until their current contract runs out. That's how AT&T usually does it at any rate. I was actually (pleasantly) shocked recently when we went to replace my wife's iPhone and they told us that she was grandfathered into her unlimited 3G data plan and would keep it with her new phone. I imagine that whenever a "4G" iPhone comes out we'll be herded like good little cattle to buy a "limited" 4G plan along with the new phone, but apparently as long as we stick with 3G we get to keep our unlimitedness.
One a side note, those prices sound absolutely awful compared to the competition. I think the 4 gig capped AT&T plan is $30 a month, ig you're not grandfathered into the unlimited plan, that's twice what Sprint is offering for the same price. I want to say that the cheap 2 gig capped plan is only $15 or $20 a month with AT&T.
Still kind of an asshole move at this point I think.
"Gee Bob, you've been with the company a few years and, frankly, I've always thought you were a bit of a dim bulb. I've been meaning to fire you for years, but now that we've all worked our asses off to get this buyout to get through I think I should do it before you get your multimillion dollar bonus you've been working for."
I use both pretty regularly (Linux on my laptop, Windows on my desktop, probably about equal use). I like the Linux UI better, but the software is clearly inferior in an absolute sense. It's much more likely to freeze video, distort audio, etc. It could be hardware differences I suppose, but the two systems are pretty comparable. Don't get me wrong, It's great to have anything that lets me video chat with my parent (Windows) and wife (Mac). The software is decent and usable, but clearly not as a high a priority as other clients.
I realize that a lot of people consider the contract that make smartphones affordable are evil... but you know what? I'd pay for voice and data on my phone anyway. Arguably without the contract I'd have more freedom to move to different networks to squeeze a few more pennies out of my bill every month, but practically I don't think I'd move that often. Most of the major players charge similar amounts for equally mediocre service. If I was really on the ball I doubt I'd save more than a hundred bucks or so by always shopping the best carrier deal; and I save way more than that by buying a phone under contract rather than paying full price for it.
Except in many cases when IT says "No" they are also saying "It's illegal". I work in government contracting. When I say "No", you are to interrupt that as "It's a violation NISPOM and if I do that we'll all go to jail". There are many industries that deal with people's personal, financial, or medical informational that also have a legal requirement to be secure. I'm not saying that every industry is like this, or that every IT department is only fulfilling its legal obligations when it says "No", but in many cases IT saying "No" is exactly equivalent to legal saying "No".
The right way to do it (whether it's Legal or IT) is to say "No, but let's talk about what you really need and how we *can* fulfill that need." I'll agree that IT departments who fail in follow through and in making sure that business cases get due diligence are bad and need to be replaced. That's a long step from saying that IT should do whatever management says though.
He's not talking about governance of Open Source software groups, but rather applying Open Source concepts to government. It's a clever idea that largely ignores all sorts of political realities. The Wikipedia page he links will describe it better than I ever could.
On the subject of your comment, I find that I agree with you, but I'm not really sure how else it can go. Anytime a software package, whether an OS or application, becomes popular enough to have a significant percentage of its users be non-programmers it's going to lose its "everyone contributes to the whole" vibe. Debian is the way it is because the vast majority of Debian users either can't or don't want to compile everything on their systems from source. Unless you're going to require everyone user to be a geek and a contributor, you're going to eventually get an elite of coders who are willing and able to contribute directly; and various levels of users below that that have steadily less of an idea what's going on behind the scenes.
People often laugh at the the $800 hammer story, and I'm certainly not going to say that every military project is a bastion of fiscal responsibly and restraint. On the other hand civilians typically don't understand the often very good reasons that some of these things cost so much. A few months ago there was a story about the Army using Android as a development base for a lot of portable, soldier carried, software tools. These tools were being proof of concepted using commercial handsets on regular US cell carriers.
I made a comment that it was a great idea, as using a popular and capable commercial platform would give them access to a large of number developers, allow rapid development and patching, and generally streamline a lot of things. I also mentioned that I figured the final military version would use military radio systems with the radio code abstracted out as kernel drivers for Android. So the same software could run on a commercial handset for training and testing, or a military handset in theater. I almost immediately got a comment that this would be a waste of money, as virtually any country we're likely to go into had a developed cellular system.
It was a pretty classic example of a civilian not understanding how a military planner thinks. Redundancy and reliability are *highly* valued in military communications technology. Why? Becasue in combat, troops rely on these technologies to keep them alive. If it costs me twice as much to build in 25% more reliability, that's a reasonable compromise. If I can rely on a military grade radio network to relay information: one which is in my control, has redundant nodes, is difficult or impossible to jam or intercept, is portable when the battlefield moves, and is guarded by my soldiers, I'm going to spend the money to do that. Relying on a civilian cell network that may have been damaged by combat, might be jammed by the enemy, might simply be taken down by the enemy (how long were the Libyan Rebels without a cell network because Gaddafi just turned it off? Weeks? ) or any number of other things just isn't a smart option. There are ways to cut costs in military development. Using Android is a great step in the right direction, but lots of the costs in military hardware are in making it tough, reliable, and redundant. You don't want to save money by cutting that out.
Stuff like this is awesome. It's great that these guys are fighting for their freedom, and it's great that they're clever enough to come up with these kind of hacks to help them. Comparing something like this to a Predator drone just isn't even feasible.
I am often confused by this attitude. Let's assume for just a moment that all research into climate change is completely bunk. There is no man made influence on the climate at all. I don't happen to think this is the case, but purely for argument's sake let's pretend that there is no argument at all. You are completely right. We can burn all the fossil fuels we want forever and it will never change the temperature of the planet by a single degree.
What does that really change about environmental policy? We still know that these chemicals are poisonous, and that burning them as freely as we do causes health issues both for ourselves and other animals. We still know that there are limited supplies of them, and if we don't find alternatives we'll eventually run out. We still know that burning them creates unpleasant things like smog and acid rain, which, even ignoring their health affects, are not nice to have around.
Ignoring completely the idea of climate change and the affect that we may or may not be having on the long term health of the ecosystem, shouldn't we be doing exactly what climate change research says we should be for all kinds of reasons besides climate change itself? Now add in the possibility, the very real possibility, that climate change theories are correct. It's really just one more reason on top of lots of others, not a sole driver of policy. Unless you believe that Jesus will return before the last drop of oil is burned, there's every reason to curb our dependence on fossil fuels and come up with viable and sustainable alternatives.
(Note: I'm not a peak oil nut. I have no idea whether we're going to start running out of oil in 20 years, 50 years, or 100 years; and yes, I have every confidence that the clever buggers in the oil industry will continue to figure out new ways to extract it. However, unless you believe that the Earth is some sort of oil factory that we can crank up at our convenience, you must know that eventually there won't be anymore. Even if the entire interior of the planet is a giant vat full of the stuff, that's still a finite amount.)
Honestly I don't think it's all that arguable. B&N's Nook color, even without hacking it, is essentially a fairly decent Android tablet for $250. I haven't hacked mine yet, and I still have a decent selection of games, web, e-mail, and quite a few utility apps just from the B&N store. At some point I'll probably hack it to run stock Android, but so far I haven't had a good reason to do so. The main reason I wanted a tablet was e-books, which it obviously handles quite well. Beyond that I mostly use my computer for stuff if I'm local at home or work, and my iPhone for true portability.
If I wanted a phone that just "Makes calls" I'd get the free clam shell my provider tosses to me every two years when I sign a new contract (or for that matter just keep the first clam shell and not be under contract). WP7 phones compete primarily with iPhones and high end Android devices. For $200 and a two year contract it better do a Hell of a lot more than make calls. It needs to do what the iPhone and those high end Android phones do. It doesn't, so why should I spend my $200 on WP7 rather than iOS or Android?
In a regular retail store perhaps, but a cell company doesn't make money selling phones. Hell, with the subsidies for contracts, they lose money selling phones. They make money selling plans. They don't, abstractly, care what phone you buy. If you want to get an early 90's brick phone, and put a 2500 minute plan with 3G data on it, they'll go digging around for the last one in inventory. Much like movie theaters sell you ticket largely for the benefit of being able to sell you popcorn, or razor vendors will lose money on a razor to sell you blades; cell phone providers sell you phones so you will buy a plan. Whether you buy an iPhone, a Droid, or a WP7 phone, Verizon is selling you a voice and data plan. They will sell you whatever facilitates getting you out the door with those plans ans a shiny new phone that says "Verizon" somewhere on it.
(Pendants take note: I am aware you cannot get a an early 90's brick phone on a 3G network, this is known as hyperbole)
Well let's see. I'm Verizon. I have my immensely popular Droid line, that is almost becoming like "Q-Tip" in that lots of people actually use it as a generic term for "Android phone". I also have my hard-won iPhone that is also immensely popular, and I had to fight to get out from under the competition. I also have this WP7 phone which has a distinct lack of catchy name, and which no one has ever heard of. So three phones, at roughly the same price point, and with roughly the same likelihood of up-selling data plans and the like. Two of the three sell themselves, the third is widely considered inferior, and requires me to go out of my way to sell it. Gosh, I wonder which one I'm going to ignore?
Your system sounds perfectly reasonable, and I completely agree with not supporting non-WPA-Enterprise devices. I wasn't aware that the Kindle didn't. Seems like a big thing to leave out of a device that can expect to be on a lot of public, and especially campus, wifi networks.
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Alright, the guy above you is a moron. You're a bigger moron. First, when you talk about "entitlement spending", at least in any meaningful way, you're talking about Social Security and Medicare. That's where numbers like "50% of the federal budget" come from. Not stuff like welfare, which is some piddling amount that probably doesn't even hit a whole percentage point.The "welfare leach with ten kids" if she even exists, is such a negligible portion of the federal budget that you can completely eliminate welfare and it will hardly matter at all to the budget discussion. It will hurt a lot of people, but it won't even come close to balancing the budget.
So, Social Security and Medicare. Two programs that have been promised to us all. Especially Social Security, which we all pay a special tax for our entire working lives, on the theory that once we reach retirement it might provide us with some gas money. Is it really surprising that anytime anyone talks about messing with them, everyone over the age of 50 gets a little excited? Ya see, that's the interesting thing. When we talk about entitlement programs, everyone is always excited to cut programs that assist the poor. Get rid of that shit, fuckers don't do anything anyway. Problem is, that rarely has much of any effect on the budget becasue those programs don't cost all that much. As soon as we start talking abut the big ticket items everyone is all "Don't touch *my* Medicare."
Maybe they could license the systems walmart.com uses. It's pretty damned certain that Walmart has a physical presence in every state and they sell a wide variety of products online. You're right that I underestimated the complexity of selling such a variety of items, but it still doesn't make the problem that much more difficult. You could just use some extra tables in the main product database to figure out how an individual product is classified in an individual locale. Add an optional field for tax holidays. Have someone who's job it is to enter those as they get announced.
It's still not the overwhelming amount of work you seem to think it is, and I can think of more than a few retailers who most certainly must have figured out a way to handle it. Nearly all department stores and discounts stores have physical presences in many if not most states, and have online stores with a huge variety of items in them. I would not be surprised if there weren't one or more off the self products or services you get to handle this for you.
And yet other online retailers handle this. Apple and Barnes and Noble both come to mind. Due to their extensive retail outlet infrastructure both have to collect sales tax in nearly every state. When you order something from either company an intelligent system determines where you live and charges the relevant taxes. I'd guess once a quarter the same intelligent system adds up how much it owes every state and locality in taxes and disburses funds. This isn't that difficult a problem. I'm a pretty poor programmer (I do more sys admin, and don't get to practice much) and I could code up a look up table and database system to handle it. It wouldn't be very scalable, but luckily Amazon can hire a few people way more skilled than I am for a short term contract (or use their own internal assets for a few weeks work) to take care of it.
Sadly at this point it's all but impossible, outside of major metro areas, to find a decent local book store anymore. Huntsville is a mid-sized metro with a very high population of educated customer (lots of engineers and scientists per capita here), but we still don't have any that I am aware of. A few used book stores, a couple of "Christian" book stores; but for new general purpose books you have to go to B&N or BAM. I still try to go to the brick and mortar super stores, on the theory that they do at least employ people and while retail is retail, these aren't *awful* jobs.
B&N kind of cut their own throat to an extent there though. They finally convinced me to buy a Nook. Now the brick and mortar store is more like a showroom for me. I go in, wander about till I find the book I like, verify it's available as an e-book, and use their wifi to buy it. Barnes and Noble is still getting my money, but the local store is not. I worry a bit about that. I'd hate to have the store close, I still find the best way to find a book to be browsing in a physical store.
Also, isn't Oak Ridge National Lab supposed to be part of that list? Or is it a different section of DOE?
No, they really do this becasue of the spammers and gold farmers. I played for on and off for about 5 years. Even with severely gimped trial accounts the problems with spam and gold farming are rampant. Originally the trial accounts were not gimped this way (they were level limited, but could chat and stuff), they were forced to do this by player complaints. Ordinarily I'd be more that willing to entertain corporate greed as the motivation, but in this case I can verify that it's a legitimate attempt to prevent abuse.
Guns and sledgehammers don't reveal their owners as a strong potential consequence of use. Hitting something with a hammer isn't going to tell you whose hammer it is. Opening "resume.doc" on a USB stick is likely to net you not only a name, but an address, e-mail, and phone number.
rm -rf /lib/modules/$kernelnumber/kernel/drivers/usb/storage/*
Or put the the USB storage driver in /etc/modules/blacklist (I prefer this method, since I doesn't require any extra effort on kernel upgrades, but our IA guy wants teh drivers completely gone, so we do the first)
On Windows I don't know the procedure, but I definitely know you can do it. DOD disables USB storage (but not all USB devices) on every computer it owns. It's a pretty trivial procedure in Linux, and not any harder in Windows; and your keyboard and mouse still work just fine.
You know what? Fuck that. I'm not going to let the fact that there are bad people out there make me live my life in fear. For every robber/rapist/murderer out there, there are probably between a hundred and a thousand people who just need a few minutes of your time to help with a flat tire. I'll take my chances. The world has *not* changed. You've allowed the media and a tragic event to convince you that the world has changed. There have always been bad people. There have always been good people. There have always been the vast majority of people who are just going to get along. I choose how I live my life, not some asshole who thinks a gun makes him powerful.
Doesn't mean be stupid. If the news is reporting a "Flat tire robber", maybe you want to adjust your behavior for a while, but in general I'm going to help people who need help. I've lived my life that way for 37 years and I'm not changing it now. I've lived in downtown New Orleans. I spent a year in Iraq. The bad guys haven't made me bitter and fearful yet, I'm not going to let them do it now.
I believe it was that last one he was interested in. His theory, and not a bad one, is that kids will enjoy programming more if they can get an immediate and tangible result in a way that matters to them. "Learning programming" to a lot of kids is going to mean trying to replicate Microsoft Word or Portal. That's what they see and use day to day on their "computers". "iPhone programming", "Android programming", or "web programming" bring up a different level of expectation. People expect phone apps or web apps to be simple.
Phones, in a lot of ways, are the largest current inheritors of the old school Unix idea of a chain of small simple tools that work together. Most phone apps are simple programs that do one thing or a very small group of things, and don't try to be all things to all people. After a few weeks of poking around you could probably make a phone app that doesn't look to much worse than some of what is currently being sold on the app stores. There's value in that for a lot of people. Learning to program a computer seems hard, becasue most of what you're comparing your work to is a huge project written by a team of professionals. Learning to program a phone seems easier becasue most of what you're comparing your work to was done by a single person or a small group, who may or may not have been professionals.
The actual difficulty of the language, or it's popularity on a variety of platforms, is a factor to consider. On the other hand, there's a psychological edge to feeeling like you can make some as good or close to as good as what's for sale in the store.
I think it's a matter of recognizing a hole, a niche, that could be profitable to fill. Let's start with a premise. Men and women are different. Some of it is biological, some of it is cultural, and all of it varies from individual to individual; but in a broad, sweeping, sense men and women are different. Now let's instantiate that presence. Movies are made for three primary types of audiences (we'll ignore kid movies or specialty movies for now): men, women, or both. Don't get me wrong, plenty of girls like a kick and smash movie, at least occasionally. Plenty of guys can enjoy a check flick, at least occasionally. Mostly, though, those genres are made for one sex or the other, with the understanding that overlap will occur. Most more general comedy/drama type films are made to appeal to both audiences.
Video games are right now in a place where they're making mostly "Guy games" and "broad appeal" games. Most women enjoy the broad appeal games, and occasionally they'll enjoy a "guy game". My wife loves a good kick and smash movie every so often, and she also enjoys blowing away aliens every so often. Think of the money to be made if you could be the one to come up with the first "chick flicks" of the video games industry though. It doesn't mean women would stop liking general appeal or action focused games, any more than every woman loves chick flicks or hates action movies.
It would be a huge impact on the industry, potentially bringing in new female gamers and selling hugely to existing female gaming population. And as a guy who likes the occasional chick flick, I'd probably play it too.
Yeah, we still use SIM cards. Most people chose to sign contracts for severe discounts on new phones, but there's no legal or technological reason to do so. We just sent my dad my wife's old iPhone 3G, and he popped the SIM out of his (dying) flip-phone and stuck into the iPhone. Works fine. He was going to sign a contract for a new iPhone or Android, but he didn't want to buy a data plan until he had a better idea what his personal use case would be for the device. So now he has an older iPhone, but doesn't have to get a data plan.
The reason most people chose to sign contracts and get new phones every couple of years here isn't that we don't have SIMs or can't switch phones arbitrarily if we chose. It's that we get charged the same amount whether the phone company subsidizes our phone purchases or not. There's no "SIM only" rates. If I'm going to have to pay $x a month regardless of whether I'm using the subsidy, I may as well use it and get my money's worth. I'm paying for the subsidy either way, it's just whether I use it or not.
One is hopeful that existing subscribers will be able to keep their existing plans until their current contract runs out. That's how AT&T usually does it at any rate. I was actually (pleasantly) shocked recently when we went to replace my wife's iPhone and they told us that she was grandfathered into her unlimited 3G data plan and would keep it with her new phone. I imagine that whenever a "4G" iPhone comes out we'll be herded like good little cattle to buy a "limited" 4G plan along with the new phone, but apparently as long as we stick with 3G we get to keep our unlimitedness.
One a side note, those prices sound absolutely awful compared to the competition. I think the 4 gig capped AT&T plan is $30 a month, ig you're not grandfathered into the unlimited plan, that's twice what Sprint is offering for the same price. I want to say that the cheap 2 gig capped plan is only $15 or $20 a month with AT&T.
Still kind of an asshole move at this point I think.
"Gee Bob, you've been with the company a few years and, frankly, I've always thought you were a bit of a dim bulb. I've been meaning to fire you for years, but now that we've all worked our asses off to get this buyout to get through I think I should do it before you get your multimillion dollar bonus you've been working for."
I use both pretty regularly (Linux on my laptop, Windows on my desktop, probably about equal use). I like the Linux UI better, but the software is clearly inferior in an absolute sense. It's much more likely to freeze video, distort audio, etc. It could be hardware differences I suppose, but the two systems are pretty comparable. Don't get me wrong, It's great to have anything that lets me video chat with my parent (Windows) and wife (Mac). The software is decent and usable, but clearly not as a high a priority as other clients.
I realize that a lot of people consider the contract that make smartphones affordable are evil... but you know what? I'd pay for voice and data on my phone anyway. Arguably without the contract I'd have more freedom to move to different networks to squeeze a few more pennies out of my bill every month, but practically I don't think I'd move that often. Most of the major players charge similar amounts for equally mediocre service. If I was really on the ball I doubt I'd save more than a hundred bucks or so by always shopping the best carrier deal; and I save way more than that by buying a phone under contract rather than paying full price for it.
Except in many cases when IT says "No" they are also saying "It's illegal". I work in government contracting. When I say "No", you are to interrupt that as "It's a violation NISPOM and if I do that we'll all go to jail". There are many industries that deal with people's personal, financial, or medical informational that also have a legal requirement to be secure. I'm not saying that every industry is like this, or that every IT department is only fulfilling its legal obligations when it says "No", but in many cases IT saying "No" is exactly equivalent to legal saying "No".
The right way to do it (whether it's Legal or IT) is to say "No, but let's talk about what you really need and how we *can* fulfill that need." I'll agree that IT departments who fail in follow through and in making sure that business cases get due diligence are bad and need to be replaced. That's a long step from saying that IT should do whatever management says though.
He's not talking about governance of Open Source software groups, but rather applying Open Source concepts to government. It's a clever idea that largely ignores all sorts of political realities. The Wikipedia page he links will describe it better than I ever could.
On the subject of your comment, I find that I agree with you, but I'm not really sure how else it can go. Anytime a software package, whether an OS or application, becomes popular enough to have a significant percentage of its users be non-programmers it's going to lose its "everyone contributes to the whole" vibe. Debian is the way it is because the vast majority of Debian users either can't or don't want to compile everything on their systems from source. Unless you're going to require everyone user to be a geek and a contributor, you're going to eventually get an elite of coders who are willing and able to contribute directly; and various levels of users below that that have steadily less of an idea what's going on behind the scenes.
People often laugh at the the $800 hammer story, and I'm certainly not going to say that every military project is a bastion of fiscal responsibly and restraint. On the other hand civilians typically don't understand the often very good reasons that some of these things cost so much. A few months ago there was a story about the Army using Android as a development base for a lot of portable, soldier carried, software tools. These tools were being proof of concepted using commercial handsets on regular US cell carriers.
I made a comment that it was a great idea, as using a popular and capable commercial platform would give them access to a large of number developers, allow rapid development and patching, and generally streamline a lot of things. I also mentioned that I figured the final military version would use military radio systems with the radio code abstracted out as kernel drivers for Android. So the same software could run on a commercial handset for training and testing, or a military handset in theater. I almost immediately got a comment that this would be a waste of money, as virtually any country we're likely to go into had a developed cellular system.
It was a pretty classic example of a civilian not understanding how a military planner thinks. Redundancy and reliability are *highly* valued in military communications technology. Why? Becasue in combat, troops rely on these technologies to keep them alive. If it costs me twice as much to build in 25% more reliability, that's a reasonable compromise. If I can rely on a military grade radio network to relay information: one which is in my control, has redundant nodes, is difficult or impossible to jam or intercept, is portable when the battlefield moves, and is guarded by my soldiers, I'm going to spend the money to do that. Relying on a civilian cell network that may have been damaged by combat, might be jammed by the enemy, might simply be taken down by the enemy (how long were the Libyan Rebels without a cell network because Gaddafi just turned it off? Weeks? ) or any number of other things just isn't a smart option. There are ways to cut costs in military development. Using Android is a great step in the right direction, but lots of the costs in military hardware are in making it tough, reliable, and redundant. You don't want to save money by cutting that out.
Stuff like this is awesome. It's great that these guys are fighting for their freedom, and it's great that they're clever enough to come up with these kind of hacks to help them. Comparing something like this to a Predator drone just isn't even feasible.
I am often confused by this attitude. Let's assume for just a moment that all research into climate change is completely bunk. There is no man made influence on the climate at all. I don't happen to think this is the case, but purely for argument's sake let's pretend that there is no argument at all. You are completely right. We can burn all the fossil fuels we want forever and it will never change the temperature of the planet by a single degree.
What does that really change about environmental policy? We still know that these chemicals are poisonous, and that burning them as freely as we do causes health issues both for ourselves and other animals. We still know that there are limited supplies of them, and if we don't find alternatives we'll eventually run out. We still know that burning them creates unpleasant things like smog and acid rain, which, even ignoring their health affects, are not nice to have around.
Ignoring completely the idea of climate change and the affect that we may or may not be having on the long term health of the ecosystem, shouldn't we be doing exactly what climate change research says we should be for all kinds of reasons besides climate change itself? Now add in the possibility, the very real possibility, that climate change theories are correct. It's really just one more reason on top of lots of others, not a sole driver of policy. Unless you believe that Jesus will return before the last drop of oil is burned, there's every reason to curb our dependence on fossil fuels and come up with viable and sustainable alternatives.
(Note: I'm not a peak oil nut. I have no idea whether we're going to start running out of oil in 20 years, 50 years, or 100 years; and yes, I have every confidence that the clever buggers in the oil industry will continue to figure out new ways to extract it. However, unless you believe that the Earth is some sort of oil factory that we can crank up at our convenience, you must know that eventually there won't be anymore. Even if the entire interior of the planet is a giant vat full of the stuff, that's still a finite amount.)
Honestly I don't think it's all that arguable. B&N's Nook color, even without hacking it, is essentially a fairly decent Android tablet for $250. I haven't hacked mine yet, and I still have a decent selection of games, web, e-mail, and quite a few utility apps just from the B&N store. At some point I'll probably hack it to run stock Android, but so far I haven't had a good reason to do so. The main reason I wanted a tablet was e-books, which it obviously handles quite well. Beyond that I mostly use my computer for stuff if I'm local at home or work, and my iPhone for true portability.
If I wanted a phone that just "Makes calls" I'd get the free clam shell my provider tosses to me every two years when I sign a new contract (or for that matter just keep the first clam shell and not be under contract). WP7 phones compete primarily with iPhones and high end Android devices. For $200 and a two year contract it better do a Hell of a lot more than make calls. It needs to do what the iPhone and those high end Android phones do. It doesn't, so why should I spend my $200 on WP7 rather than iOS or Android?
In a regular retail store perhaps, but a cell company doesn't make money selling phones. Hell, with the subsidies for contracts, they lose money selling phones. They make money selling plans. They don't, abstractly, care what phone you buy. If you want to get an early 90's brick phone, and put a 2500 minute plan with 3G data on it, they'll go digging around for the last one in inventory. Much like movie theaters sell you ticket largely for the benefit of being able to sell you popcorn, or razor vendors will lose money on a razor to sell you blades; cell phone providers sell you phones so you will buy a plan. Whether you buy an iPhone, a Droid, or a WP7 phone, Verizon is selling you a voice and data plan. They will sell you whatever facilitates getting you out the door with those plans ans a shiny new phone that says "Verizon" somewhere on it.
(Pendants take note: I am aware you cannot get a an early 90's brick phone on a 3G network, this is known as hyperbole)
Well let's see. I'm Verizon. I have my immensely popular Droid line, that is almost becoming like "Q-Tip" in that lots of people actually use it as a generic term for "Android phone". I also have my hard-won iPhone that is also immensely popular, and I had to fight to get out from under the competition. I also have this WP7 phone which has a distinct lack of catchy name, and which no one has ever heard of. So three phones, at roughly the same price point, and with roughly the same likelihood of up-selling data plans and the like. Two of the three sell themselves, the third is widely considered inferior, and requires me to go out of my way to sell it. Gosh, I wonder which one I'm going to ignore?
Your system sounds perfectly reasonable, and I completely agree with not supporting non-WPA-Enterprise devices. I wasn't aware that the Kindle didn't. Seems like a big thing to leave out of a device that can expect to be on a lot of public, and especially campus, wifi networks.