Exactly. Nothing to see here, move along. This is the sort of thing we kinda want the government doing. You don't want to do disaster planning on the fly, it really is better if this sort of thing has been thought through and precautions taken ahead of time. National defense is actually one of the powers delegated to the FedGov. And maintaining reliable communications across a nation as large as this one is, especially when including territories, under any imaginable scenario isn't a trivial problem.
A quick look at my posting history will tell ya I am no Obama fan, but this story just doesn't fire me up to an epic rant or do much of anything.
> I personally think we have MORE religion than we need in this country. repubs think just the opposite.
Translation: I personally think we have too many people who believe DIFFERENTLY than I do in this country. Repubs think the same.
Your beliefs are just as 'faith based' as the most diehard Pentecostal, Muslim or Scientologist but you, like them, have convinced yourself that yours in the Truth and therefore the others are False and it is therefore OK to suppress them.
It is fun being an Agnostic because I get to laugh at all of you equally.:)
And Tibet is the only example Wikipedia could come up with. Read the article and you can see why it is an outlier, it is pretty much unworkable. Other societies solved the inheritence problem in more stable ways, which probably helped them dominate.
In most social structures you either have parity between the sexes and 1m-1f marriage or a shortage of males which leads to 1m-1+f. If you get a shortage of females for long your society is extinct and thus left little mark on history.
> i got no problem with gay people whatso ever, but I think google should stick to gooogle things, and not political things.
It is a pretty strong confirmation of Derbyshire's Law:
"Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality."
See Andrew Sullivan for a personification of the law in action. Apparently, there is no such thing as a X-gay, all you ever get is gay-X, i.e. they are gay before anything else. Once they come out of the closet, being homosexual almost instantly overrides any other considerations. Or more bluntly, the old handbooks probably had it right, mental disorder.
Not exactly. Marriage is one male and N females though, and N == 1 is a fairly common number. What can be said though, and I will be modded into oblivion again are these:
1. Until a hundred years ago my definition above of the word 'marriage' as the union of a male and one or more females in a family unit for purposes of reproduction and inheritence was the only one anyone had ever associated with the word and the similar words found in every human tongue. Until fifty yers ago no mainstream thinker was using the word any other way, although the more 'out there' progressives and homosexual activists were.
2. Since #1 isn't really debatable from a historical perspective, the almost universal meme of 'bible humping fundies and Republicans' trying to 'impose their morality' on others is a myth that needs busting. It is in fact the militant homosexual political activists trying to utilize NewSpeak tricks to redefine language.
You may now mod me into oblivion again. And I will return to excellent karma again and say it yet again in the next thread.
Not really. Because only one scenario mattered. If you counted ballots under the laws of Florida that were in effect on election day, Bush won. Nobody has ever produced a different result within those rules. I know it is an article of faith that the Supreme Court stole the election and Bush II was an usurper among some folk, but I can't help it if that is a total myth. Some myths need to be busted.
1. If the polling places are open longer than most people work there isn't an excuse to skip. Here in Louisiana they open at 6am and stay open until 8pm. If you want to vote you can unless you are out of town. Absentee ballots are a solution for that if you don't allow too many of them and don't let people do it all the time. Remember that absentee ballots create problems in ballot secrecy, ballot security etc. A few to help people who actually need them is probably an acceptable tradeoff though.
2. If you don't do it all on one day securing ballots is pretty much impossible, as is independent poll watchers.
3. Most poll workers are paid. Granted it isn't much but most are paid. Too many polling places also makes it harder to get observers into all of them.
Explain how ANY voting method that doesn't require voting in person where poll watchers can see and also voting inside a booth or other device to obscure the actual voting selection from observation can possibly be compatible with my #4 above.
That means no Internet voting method can work. So forget about technological fixes to ensure voting isn't tampered with in transit, that it is counted correctly, etc. Can't possibly be immune to problems at the keyboard end that do not involve tech. Won't stop the nursing home staff from 'voting' the residents.
No, that is just stupid. And so is mail in btw. Anything other than voting in person with a photo ID on election day with a paper ballot where the count is validated right after the polls close while poll watchers from all interested parties are there to witness is asking for fraud.
No, don't jump in with a reply until you STOP and think for a minute. Then you will realize I'm right. The problems with voting boil down to these:
1. Ensure that registered voters have unrestricted access to their polling place.
2. That inelligible people do not vote.
3. Ensure people only vote in the races they are elligible to vote in.
4. Ensure that the vote is secret and immune to outside influence.
5. Ensure that every vote is counted and only counted once.
Violate my formula in any way and one of those rules is impossible to ensure and thus the election by definition is unfair to some extent. Allowing a small percentage of absentee voting, contested ballots, etc. are perhaps acceptable compromises but must be understood as a compromise to prevent certain parties from trying to extrapolate those exceptions into bad general rules like universal mail in ballots, online voting, etc.
Yes, many enthusiast motherboards do that. But all also, by default, allow updating of the BIOS from within Windows. Now go look at mass produced machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. How many of them allow updating from within the BIOS? My Thinkpad at least allows the BIOS to be write protected before turning control over to the bootloader but doesn't have a built in flashing utility.
And getting the BIOS image to put onto that USB stick all too often requires Windows to unpack it out of a self executing binary.
> I've seen quite a few 'boot from cdrom' style bios upgrades, too. and on the cdrom? syslinux!;)
You know what I call that? Flash from user space. Bad idea. If you can flash from Linux malware can flash from Windows.
Flashing should happen one of two ways.
1. From the BIOS itself. And it should check a signature on the proposed image first. It should allow the owner to override the warning if the sig doesn't match to permit things like LinuxBIOS.
2. From an IPMI controller or similar totally isolated processor running a small, carefully controlled software load. And only after checking a signature, probably with no override possible. Physical presence at the console for an override isn't unreasonable and is as close to 100% safe as the real world permits.
> Gees, ten years isn't that long, have you folks forgotten already?
No, a new crop of idiots with iProducts have shown up. As long as the chains come in both black AND white and are considered the latest style they will not only submit to them, they will wear them with pride. They will make sure their clothing is designed to emphasize the brand name on the chains.
Now consider the XBox fanbois are just as bad. DRM to them is wonderful. It stops cheating, so STFU you haters.
Slowly, surely, relentlessly, those who control the culture have inserted those memes into the young through the media. Remember the close nexus between Apple through Pixar and into Disney that allowed His Steveness to push the RDF straight out into the mass media? And now follow the influences from Microsoft through MSNBC to NBC and out into the vast GE/Comcast media empire, the large game publishing houses into all of the other media. And for that matter, every media company, by definition, pushes the agenda of big media and DRM is their number one issue. They are nothing if not patient.
Not exactly. It is epic. In that it is trying to live up to the "Grand" in its name. But it has to be admitted that it is in one important way inferior to GRUB 1. The big advantage of GRUB over LILO was that you didn't have to worry about an unbootable machine if you changed anything and forgot to 'rerun lilo'. GRUB2 brings those bad days back with it's mammoth configuration file spread into shards in/etc/ to make it possible for scripts to manipilate it in a sane way.
It gets better. Ubuntu is assuming this lockdown will be happening with OEMs they have a contractual relationship with.
Think about it. I put out Unknown Hacker Linux with a boot loader signed by me. I publish it on my website somewhere. Evil Bit Computers downloads it and installs my public key into the firmware of machines that they then sell to the public in a totally locked state. A buyer of one of those machines decides they want to wipe the preload and install Windows 8. They go Evil Bit and demand they keys per the GPL3 and get an Evil Laugh(TM). Then they come to me and demand the signing key and I tell them, I feel your pain but I'm sorry I can't do that because it would compromise every machine installed with packages signed by that key. And they couldn't do a darned thing to me legally because I have no relationship to Evil Bit Computers. If push came to shove Evil Bit could be required to issue new firmware allowing rekeying or they could be barred from distribution of GPL3 software. But I'd never see the inside of the courthouse.
And now you know why I have never considered Ubuntu. Never could say why, but they have always given off a 'wrong' vibe. Best explanation would be the short story _Young Zaphod Plays It Safe._ Just an undefined unease with em.
> Secure Boot is very much required security feature. It will lock out malware that hides rootkits in boot sector. That's a very good thing.
Somebody with more crypto knowhow, please put me some knowledge on here. Because I'm not seeing it that way. Secure boot will work wonders to ensure Hollywierd and Microsoft that their hardware isn't doing something nasty like letting the guy who put money on the counter and thinks they own it (how funny!) run something of their choosing. What I don't see is how it really protects the user from malware.
The security only runs one way. Once somebody can subvert the boot process in any way (and show me ONE device that hasn't been rooted) all malware need do is what it has always been doing. Take over the boot. Then IT checks the sig on Windows and tells it that "I'm the bootloader, you can trust me." and there isn't a 100% sure way to verify backwards. We all know most vendors will still be flashing the BIOS/UEFI from Windows because anything else will be too much hassle for the end users. They will pretty much have to do it to get key revocation lists. Oh yea they talk now about secure pathways through secured supervisor modes but we know that if it is running Windows nothing on that CPU is really and truly secure. And wait until the motherboard makers start encheapening the system. Remember when a physical write protect jumper was standard to protect flash BIOS? And a ROM portion with an emergency rescue reflash util? When was the last time you saw any of those protective measures on sonsumer equipment?
> It's also optional, so you can always install Linux.
Yea. Which tells you where the money isn't at. Most the price of a smartphone is 'IP', overhead, R&D, marketing and most of all, sweet sweet profit. Why do ya think everybody + dog wants in?
I'm as anti fiat money as the next libertarian but I think you are falling into a common mental trap. You are mistaking meta problems with current faith based currencies with a problem with the idea of money in general. Those problems cause huge problems on a large scale but do not perturb the notion that someone with a lot of money has proven themselves to be of value to their fellows.
What is money? I like the 'certificate of satisfaction' definition. If I am holding a one hundred dollar bill it is because I performed a service to someone else or gave them goods that they valued more than the dollars[1]. I accepted the money knowing I can then take that money (proof of service) and trade it to someone else in exchange for them performing to my satisfaction in either services or by giving me some of their goods. It would in theory work just the same if the three of us worked a barter but the econony functions much more smoothly with a common universally honored medium of exchange; i.e. money.
[1] Or I got a welfare check or stole it, neither are a big enough problem (yet) to disqualify that statement of general principle.
In a Darwinian sense the only thing that matters is how many offspring you leave behind. How long you live doesn't count for jack, neither does how many asses you can or cannot kick in a deathmatch. So ask yourself the big question. Billionaires like Gates and Jobs didn't leave a thousand children sired on thousand mothers (each one a smoking hot babe, fittest specimens they could find) behind, all with a free ride through the university of their choice and into a career of their choosing, leaving them all in good positions to spread the royal seed even more; but they COULD if they wanted to. Could you?
The fact that people who could 'decree a stately pleasure dome' and properly staff it, haven't been doing that since Heff became old news does imply some bad things long term in the Idiocracy direction but that is another story.
> Which is my point; being able to hire a million people to do your dirty work for you does not make you stronger..
And I say that a million people will willingly DO your dirty work in exchange for the obligations incurred by virtue of the goods and services you produce makes you stronger and a more fit specimen. And I further point out the clearly evident fact that females of our species routinely make the same judgement in picking a less physically fit but financially capable mate. Hell, even a few males have no problem marrying into wealth.... including one fairly recent POTUS contender.
> The Nexus 7 looks fantastic. It is a revelation at the $199 price point.
No, at $199 it is another tethered media consumption device. No external ports. Add an SD slot (not Micro) and I'd probably have a pre-order in already. Add a USB host port and/or HDMI out and it would be a game changer.
Instead we got a Fire with better hardware specs tethered to an inferior content selection so it is a wash. Subsidized hardware is almost always a loser for the customer shortsighted enough to buy into it.
And back to the main topic, anything new from Apple suffers from the exact same problem. Tethered to the iTunes store. Just waiting for the door to close on the Mac.
> Not to feed the trolls, but where does this idea that monetary wealth = strength come from?
Probably because monetary wealth == power == strength.
> I'd put Billy Gates' fortune against mine that in a one-on-one deathmatch, I'd eat that scrawny fuck for lunch.
That is silly. Billy's wealth counts as much as your gym time or you weapons collection when comparing survival fitness. So pit your pitiful physical strength and possible sidearm against his legion of doom in a deathmatch and see how well you fare. You probably wouldn't even get past the zero level minions at the front gate.
Now a little less silly and more snarky. His monetary wealth represents the labor and assets of a billion or so people willingly traded for his. That is real, and it has value. The better question is who is more of an asset to the species and our civilization. You or Gates in a reality show faceoff to justify your existence to the studio audence and the loser gets deleted from the genepool. Who would the audience keep? Hell, who would be considered the more attractive mate? Should I continue to attack your very existence or have I made the point yet? Being able to physically beat somebody up hasn't mattered all that much since Sam Colt... or more bluntly, since junior high.
Well! You would think TPB would assume most users would be blocking JS and design around that assumption. I don't hang out there a lot, but had never seen an ad the few times I wandered over for look. My browser did such a good job of cleaning it up it left no obvious signs.
But look at those ads, those are so skeevy you would have a really hard time stopping them because the advertisers are about as outlaw as the site they are advertising on.
> that you can't block ad networks from working with pirate sites
Of course not. But if they get serious about cutting off the air supply they probably can. If they stop trying to sue little old ladies for downloading (and losing that PR war) and use the newly developed ability to track illicit money on the Internet to dry up the ability to make enough money to pay for hosting you could remove most of the sites that make it easy to find stuff on the trackers. And you could probably even go after the trackers and force everything to magnets. There are weak points in the networks they haven't yet expended the effort to go after in earnest because they were betting on just scaring off the users with high publicity low cost lawsuits.
If they decide that tactic is costing them more in goodwill than it is driving sales they will eventually adapt. They aren't quite dinosaurs, just a bit slow witted. Then we shall see just how well the pirates can really adapt.
Linux with an alternate desktop is still probably 100x the size of those in installed base and available apps. Problem is nobody big is pushing the alternate desktops and nobody at all is pushing Amiga OS (which doesn't currently run on any available hardware btw) and BeOS doesn't exist at all. Haiku pretty much only runs in virtual machines at the moment because finding physical hardware with working drivers is beyond the ability of all but the hardest of the hard core.
So a potential refugee from "tablet madness" is going to get a hundred fanboy recomends for obscure choices where support consists of the one hardcore fan and a forum. If Apple announced a clear plan to keep the Mac a Mac (i.e. no DRM lockdown, no forced app store, no touch madness, etc) they could probably even convert me at this point. And I HATE Apple with the heat of a thousand suns. But the choices are disappearing fast and Mac OS is POSIX when all is said and done. But Apple has already telegraphed their intent to do just the opposite so that isn't an option. If Microsoft gets their way with Windows 8 the cheap PC hardware us penguin folk have relied upon is going to get scarce. Dark times are coming.
Slashdot Mirror
> Meh.
Exactly. Nothing to see here, move along. This is the sort of thing we kinda want the government doing. You don't want to do disaster planning on the fly, it really is better if this sort of thing has been thought through and precautions taken ahead of time. National defense is actually one of the powers delegated to the FedGov. And maintaining reliable communications across a nation as large as this one is, especially when including territories, under any imaginable scenario isn't a trivial problem.
A quick look at my posting history will tell ya I am no Obama fan, but this story just doesn't fire me up to an epic rant or do much of anything.
> I personally think we have MORE religion than we need in this country. repubs think just the opposite.
Translation: I personally think we have too many people who believe DIFFERENTLY than I do in this country. Repubs think the same.
Your beliefs are just as 'faith based' as the most diehard Pentecostal, Muslim or Scientologist but you, like them, have convinced yourself that yours in the Truth and therefore the others are False and it is therefore OK to suppress them.
It is fun being an Agnostic because I get to laugh at all of you equally. :)
> There are societies that practice polyandry,
And Tibet is the only example Wikipedia could come up with. Read the article and you can see why it is an outlier, it is pretty much unworkable. Other societies solved the inheritence problem in more stable ways, which probably helped them dominate.
In most social structures you either have parity between the sexes and 1m-1f marriage or a shortage of males which leads to 1m-1+f. If you get a shortage of females for long your society is extinct and thus left little mark on history.
> i got no problem with gay people whatso ever, but I think google should stick to gooogle things, and not political things.
It is a pretty strong confirmation of Derbyshire's Law:
"Any organization that admits frank and open homosexuals into its higher
levels will sooner or later abandon its original purpose and give
itself over to propagating and celebrating the homosexualist ethos, and
to excluding heterosexuals and denigrating heterosexuality."
See Andrew Sullivan for a personification of the law in action. Apparently, there is no such thing as a X-gay, all you ever get is gay-X, i.e. they are gay before anything else. Once they come out of the closet, being homosexual almost instantly overrides any other considerations. Or more bluntly, the old handbooks probably had it right, mental disorder.
> Marriage is for a man and a woman.
Not exactly. Marriage is one male and N females though, and N == 1 is a fairly common number. What can be said though, and I will be modded into oblivion again are these:
1. Until a hundred years ago my definition above of the word 'marriage' as the union of a male and one or more females in a family unit for purposes of reproduction and inheritence was the only one anyone had ever associated with the word and the similar words found in every human tongue. Until fifty yers ago no mainstream thinker was using the word any other way, although the more 'out there' progressives and homosexual activists were.
2. Since #1 isn't really debatable from a historical perspective, the almost universal meme of 'bible humping fundies and Republicans' trying to 'impose their morality' on others is a myth that needs busting. It is in fact the militant homosexual political activists trying to utilize NewSpeak tricks to redefine language.
You may now mod me into oblivion again. And I will return to excellent karma again and say it yet again in the next thread.
Not really. Because only one scenario mattered. If you counted ballots under the laws of Florida that were in effect on election day, Bush won. Nobody has ever produced a different result within those rules. I know it is an article of faith that the Supreme Court stole the election and Bush II was an usurper among some folk, but I can't help it if that is a total myth. Some myths need to be busted.
A few additional things to think about.
1. If the polling places are open longer than most people work there isn't an excuse to skip. Here in Louisiana they open at 6am and stay open until 8pm. If you want to vote you can unless you are out of town. Absentee ballots are a solution for that if you don't allow too many of them and don't let people do it all the time. Remember that absentee ballots create problems in ballot secrecy, ballot security etc. A few to help people who actually need them is probably an acceptable tradeoff though.
2. If you don't do it all on one day securing ballots is pretty much impossible, as is independent poll watchers.
3. Most poll workers are paid. Granted it isn't much but most are paid. Too many polling places also makes it harder to get observers into all of them.
Explain how ANY voting method that doesn't require voting in person where poll watchers can see and also voting inside a booth or other device to obscure the actual voting selection from observation can possibly be compatible with my #4 above.
That means no Internet voting method can work. So forget about technological fixes to ensure voting isn't tampered with in transit, that it is counted correctly, etc. Can't possibly be immune to problems at the keyboard end that do not involve tech. Won't stop the nursing home staff from 'voting' the residents.
Whoosh!
Guess the Internet does need a sarcasm tag.
> How about the statements of the leaders of the country, both the puppet president and the Clerical Council?
Nope, you are gonna get flamed for saying that. It is unacceptable to take the stated positions of madmen seriously.
> 2) is online
No, that is just stupid. And so is mail in btw. Anything other than voting in person with a photo ID on election day with a paper ballot where the count is validated right after the polls close while poll watchers from all interested parties are there to witness is asking for fraud.
No, don't jump in with a reply until you STOP and think for a minute. Then you will realize I'm right. The problems with voting boil down to these:
1. Ensure that registered voters have unrestricted access to their polling place.
2. That inelligible people do not vote.
3. Ensure people only vote in the races they are elligible to vote in.
4. Ensure that the vote is secret and immune to outside influence.
5. Ensure that every vote is counted and only counted once.
Violate my formula in any way and one of those rules is impossible to ensure and thus the election by definition is unfair to some extent. Allowing a small percentage of absentee voting, contested ballots, etc. are perhaps acceptable compromises but must be understood as a compromise to prevent certain parties from trying to extrapolate those exceptions into bad general rules like universal mail in ballots, online voting, etc.
Yes, many enthusiast motherboards do that. But all also, by default, allow updating of the BIOS from within Windows. Now go look at mass produced machines from Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc. How many of them allow updating from within the BIOS? My Thinkpad at least allows the BIOS to be write protected before turning control over to the bootloader but doesn't have a built in flashing utility.
And getting the BIOS image to put onto that USB stick all too often requires Windows to unpack it out of a self executing binary.
> I've seen quite a few 'boot from cdrom' style bios upgrades, too. and on the cdrom? syslinux! ;)
You know what I call that? Flash from user space. Bad idea. If you can flash from Linux malware can flash from Windows.
Flashing should happen one of two ways.
1. From the BIOS itself. And it should check a signature on the proposed image first. It should allow the owner to override the warning if the sig doesn't match to permit things like LinuxBIOS.
2. From an IPMI controller or similar totally isolated processor running a small, carefully controlled software load. And only after checking a signature, probably with no override possible. Physical presence at the console for an override isn't unreasonable and is as close to 100% safe as the real world permits.
> Gees, ten years isn't that long, have you folks forgotten already?
No, a new crop of idiots with iProducts have shown up. As long as the chains come in both black AND white and are considered the latest style they will not only submit to them, they will wear them with pride. They will make sure their clothing is designed to emphasize the brand name on the chains.
Now consider the XBox fanbois are just as bad. DRM to them is wonderful. It stops cheating, so STFU you haters.
Slowly, surely, relentlessly, those who control the culture have inserted those memes into the young through the media. Remember the close nexus between Apple through Pixar and into Disney that allowed His Steveness to push the RDF straight out into the mass media? And now follow the influences from Microsoft through MSNBC to NBC and out into the vast GE/Comcast media empire, the large game publishing houses into all of the other media. And for that matter, every media company, by definition, pushes the agenda of big media and DRM is their number one issue. They are nothing if not patient.
> Grub2 is an epic piece of shit anyway.
Not exactly. It is epic. In that it is trying to live up to the "Grand" in its name. But it has to be admitted that it is in one important way inferior to GRUB 1. The big advantage of GRUB over LILO was that you didn't have to worry about an unbootable machine if you changed anything and forgot to 'rerun lilo'. GRUB2 brings those bad days back with it's mammoth configuration file spread into shards in /etc/ to make it possible for scripts to manipilate it in a sane way.
It gets better. Ubuntu is assuming this lockdown will be happening with OEMs they have a contractual relationship with.
Think about it. I put out Unknown Hacker Linux with a boot loader signed by me. I publish it on my website somewhere. Evil Bit Computers downloads it and installs my public key into the firmware of machines that they then sell to the public in a totally locked state. A buyer of one of those machines decides they want to wipe the preload and install Windows 8. They go Evil Bit and demand they keys per the GPL3 and get an Evil Laugh(TM). Then they come to me and demand the signing key and I tell them, I feel your pain but I'm sorry I can't do that because it would compromise every machine installed with packages signed by that key. And they couldn't do a darned thing to me legally because I have no relationship to Evil Bit Computers. If push came to shove Evil Bit could be required to issue new firmware allowing rekeying or they could be barred from distribution of GPL3 software. But I'd never see the inside of the courthouse.
And now you know why I have never considered Ubuntu. Never could say why, but they have always given off a 'wrong' vibe. Best explanation would be the short story _Young Zaphod Plays It Safe._ Just an undefined unease with em.
> Secure Boot is very much required security feature. It will lock out malware that hides rootkits in boot sector. That's a very good thing.
Somebody with more crypto knowhow, please put me some knowledge on here. Because I'm not seeing it that way. Secure boot will work wonders to ensure Hollywierd and Microsoft that their hardware isn't doing something nasty like letting the guy who put money on the counter and thinks they own it (how funny!) run something of their choosing. What I don't see is how it really protects the user from malware.
The security only runs one way. Once somebody can subvert the boot process in any way (and show me ONE device that hasn't been rooted) all malware need do is what it has always been doing. Take over the boot. Then IT checks the sig on Windows and tells it that "I'm the bootloader, you can trust me." and there isn't a 100% sure way to verify backwards. We all know most vendors will still be flashing the BIOS/UEFI from Windows because anything else will be too much hassle for the end users. They will pretty much have to do it to get key revocation lists. Oh yea they talk now about secure pathways through secured supervisor modes but we know that if it is running Windows nothing on that CPU is really and truly secure. And wait until the motherboard makers start encheapening the system. Remember when a physical write protect jumper was standard to protect flash BIOS? And a ROM portion with an emergency rescue reflash util? When was the last time you saw any of those protective measures on sonsumer equipment?
> It's also optional, so you can always install Linux.
On x86, for now.
Yea. Which tells you where the money isn't at. Most the price of a smartphone is 'IP', overhead, R&D, marketing and most of all, sweet sweet profit. Why do ya think everybody + dog wants in?
> and not even something of real value
I'm as anti fiat money as the next libertarian but I think you are falling into a common mental trap. You are mistaking meta problems with current faith based currencies with a problem with the idea of money in general. Those problems cause huge problems on a large scale but do not perturb the notion that someone with a lot of money has proven themselves to be of value to their fellows.
What is money? I like the 'certificate of satisfaction' definition. If I am holding a one hundred dollar bill it is because I performed a service to someone else or gave them goods that they valued more than the dollars[1]. I accepted the money knowing I can then take that money (proof of service) and trade it to someone else in exchange for them performing to my satisfaction in either services or by giving me some of their goods. It would in theory work just the same if the three of us worked a barter but the econony functions much more smoothly with a common universally honored medium of exchange; i.e. money.
[1] Or I got a welfare check or stole it, neither are a big enough problem (yet) to disqualify that statement of general principle.
In a Darwinian sense the only thing that matters is how many offspring you leave behind. How long you live doesn't count for jack, neither does how many asses you can or cannot kick in a deathmatch. So ask yourself the big question. Billionaires like Gates and Jobs didn't leave a thousand children sired on thousand mothers (each one a smoking hot babe, fittest specimens they could find) behind, all with a free ride through the university of their choice and into a career of their choosing, leaving them all in good positions to spread the royal seed even more; but they COULD if they wanted to. Could you?
The fact that people who could 'decree a stately pleasure dome' and properly staff it, haven't been doing that since Heff became old news does imply some bad things long term in the Idiocracy direction but that is another story.
> Which is my point; being able to hire a million people to do your dirty work for you does not make you stronger..
And I say that a million people will willingly DO your dirty work in exchange for the obligations incurred by virtue of the goods and services you produce makes you stronger and a more fit specimen. And I further point out the clearly evident fact that females of our species routinely make the same judgement in picking a less physically fit but financially capable mate. Hell, even a few males have no problem marrying into wealth.... including one fairly recent POTUS contender.
> The Nexus 7 looks fantastic. It is a revelation at the $199 price point.
No, at $199 it is another tethered media consumption device. No external ports. Add an SD slot (not Micro) and I'd probably have a pre-order in already. Add a USB host port and/or HDMI out and it would be a game changer.
Instead we got a Fire with better hardware specs tethered to an inferior content selection so it is a wash. Subsidized hardware is almost always a loser for the customer shortsighted enough to buy into it.
And back to the main topic, anything new from Apple suffers from the exact same problem. Tethered to the iTunes store. Just waiting for the door to close on the Mac.
> Not to feed the trolls, but where does this idea that monetary wealth = strength come from?
Probably because monetary wealth == power == strength.
> I'd put Billy Gates' fortune against mine that in a one-on-one deathmatch, I'd eat that scrawny fuck for lunch.
That is silly. Billy's wealth counts as much as your gym time or you weapons collection when comparing survival fitness. So pit your pitiful physical strength and possible sidearm against his legion of doom in a deathmatch and see how well you fare. You probably wouldn't even get past the zero level minions at the front gate.
Now a little less silly and more snarky. His monetary wealth represents the labor and assets of a billion or so people willingly traded for his. That is real, and it has value. The better question is who is more of an asset to the species and our civilization. You or Gates in a reality show faceoff to justify your existence to the studio audence and the loser gets deleted from the genepool. Who would the audience keep? Hell, who would be considered the more attractive mate? Should I continue to attack your very existence or have I made the point yet? Being able to physically beat somebody up hasn't mattered all that much since Sam Colt... or more bluntly, since junior high.
Well! You would think TPB would assume most users would be blocking JS and design around that assumption. I don't hang out there a lot, but had never seen an ad the few times I wandered over for look. My browser did such a good job of cleaning it up it left no obvious signs.
But look at those ads, those are so skeevy you would have a really hard time stopping them because the advertisers are about as outlaw as the site they are advertising on.
> that you can't block ad networks from working with pirate sites
Of course not. But if they get serious about cutting off the air supply they probably can. If they stop trying to sue little old ladies for downloading (and losing that PR war) and use the newly developed ability to track illicit money on the Internet to dry up the ability to make enough money to pay for hosting you could remove most of the sites that make it easy to find stuff on the trackers. And you could probably even go after the trackers and force everything to magnets. There are weak points in the networks they haven't yet expended the effort to go after in earnest because they were betting on just scaring off the users with high publicity low cost lawsuits.
If they decide that tactic is costing them more in goodwill than it is driving sales they will eventually adapt. They aren't quite dinosaurs, just a bit slow witted. Then we shall see just how well the pirates can really adapt.
> We just need to make sure cars have a safety interlock so you can't drive with your smart glasses on.
Why? The cars will be driving themselves by then so we will need something to do while travelling.
> Option #4: Amiga OS, BeOS, etc.
Linux with an alternate desktop is still probably 100x the size of those in installed base and available apps. Problem is nobody big is pushing the alternate desktops and nobody at all is pushing Amiga OS (which doesn't currently run on any available hardware btw) and BeOS doesn't exist at all. Haiku pretty much only runs in virtual machines at the moment because finding physical hardware with working drivers is beyond the ability of all but the hardest of the hard core.
So a potential refugee from "tablet madness" is going to get a hundred fanboy recomends for obscure choices where support consists of the one hardcore fan and a forum. If Apple announced a clear plan to keep the Mac a Mac (i.e. no DRM lockdown, no forced app store, no touch madness, etc) they could probably even convert me at this point. And I HATE Apple with the heat of a thousand suns. But the choices are disappearing fast and Mac OS is POSIX when all is said and done. But Apple has already telegraphed their intent to do just the opposite so that isn't an option. If Microsoft gets their way with Windows 8 the cheap PC hardware us penguin folk have relied upon is going to get scarce. Dark times are coming.