> As a result MS priced windows for netbooks at $8..
The lowest pricing I have ever heard from anyone halfway reliable is $15 but that isn't the whole story. If they ship Windows they also get to ship the bundleware which means they probably actually make a profit.
> So you ask what killed the Arm Netbook?
You forgot two other major players in killing the netbook. The OEMs and the retailers. So sit right down and I'll tell 'yall the rest of the story.
Netbooks were originally imagined as inexpensive, small and oriented towards a network centric view of the world. EVERYONE wanted that idea dead. The original eeePC was supposed to start at $200, remember? Lets imagine someone hitting that target now, not a black friday dump, $200 MSRP for a useful netbook in the original definition, i.e. no need to run Photoshop (how did this become the one everyone whines about?....anyway). What retailer wants to put that on the shelf beside units that can make them twice the money before considering the better odds of followon sales with a traditional laptop/modern netbook? Software, service contracts, crapware removal services, accessories, all are better sales opportunities with a notebook/modern netbook running Windows. The OEMs realized they were risking cannibalization of a huge chunk of their more profitable lines. Then Microsoft came unto the OEMs, who were already afraid and said, "So lemme help you guys out of this mess. Ship XP at little or no upcharge and customers will demand the upsized specs to run it well." So the 7 and 9 inch displays vanished along with the slow Celerons and by the time ASUS had their supply chain issues sorted out demand for anything that would have hit their original $200 target had gone away. The industry was saved.
Let me now pronounce unto you what will be. Because Apple announced the iPad there will be a flurry of tablets, all intended to compete with it so price will be high, HD video will be the one spec on all of em (1080p so as to beat Apple) and they will all fail, Apple included. When that happens the interest in ARM and Android (beyond the smartphone space) will end with it. ARM+Linux and/or Android on inexpensive ARM netbooks will never really be tried. Today's product won't ever be seen in qualtity outside Asia any more than the dozen ARM/Mips units announced in the past or the dozens to be announced in the future will be. Last year I believed some Chinese OEM with no ties to the existing Intel/Microsoft/Notebook ecosystem existed and one of them would eventually get the idea to make an end run around the Walmart/BestBuy roadblock and distribute through non-traditional channels. Now I have studied the matter more and realized that won't likely happen.
The problem is the $100 disposable netbook would represent a fundamental upheaval in the computing ecosystem. It could be done in a way to benefit the consumer but all the incentives are against it. There is zero upside for any of the established players though, nothing but pain and downsizing. It will happen eventually but they intend to put that day off as long as possible. What we will probably end up with is subsidized locked down crap eventually marginalizing traditional computing to the point computing as a mind lever is relegated to expensive specialty stuff while most stuff is glorified TV with carefully approved interraction. All government approved, child safe and perfectly non offensive. Do we really want to hasten that world or do we join Intel/Microsoft/Dell/BestBuy is pushing that nightmare off in the hope we can find a better solution?
Or we fight like hell right now for the better more open future that is possible but won't happen if evolution takes its dismal course. If we can get a standard bootloader on those ARM netbooks so we can offer the OEMs the choice of expensive internal OS development and ongoing security patching vs offloading most of that to the community we have a shot at enough of the next generation of cheap hardwa
> and the limited iphone style OS (why not full mac OS).
Because at this point Apple would like nothing better than to find a way to discontinue OS X. The huge revenue stream they unleashed with the App Store has distorted everything at Apple. OS X on the desktop doesn't give Apple a cut of every app sold; so all new products are going to be in the iPhone development model. Hence this new product, which COULD have run a more open operating system and supported a lot of traditional OS X applications (add ARM to the fat binaries and ship) is instead an iPod/iPhone with a bigger display.
Since they will sell a ton of these shiny iTurds expect them to take it as a green light for the next step and move the closed Nintendo/Cellphone OS model to the all in one desktops next. If that works the bottom end of the laptops will go next.
> However if we really believe "Congress shall make no law" means "Congress shall make no law" > then the restrictions on tobacco and alcohol advertising are right out.
Yes. "No law" means pretty much what it says. Since almost day one of the Republic a few restrictions have been permitted, slander, libel, shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters, etc. on the grounds no right is so 100% absolute that total anarchy has to be allowed.
> If we believe the 14th Amendment means "and state legislatures shall also make no law" then > the restrictions on slander and libel are right out in addition to any "fighting words". > Obscenity statutes go down everywhere as well.
See above regarding slander and libel. The 14th was passed with the best of intentions, and served a real purpose at the time, but the law of unintended consequences has hit this Amendment hard. It should be repealed for many reasons, the problems you note among them. Although many states have almost identical wording to the 1st in their own Constitution.
> For what purposes, really, should a corporation be given the rights of individuals? They aren't an individual. They are a tool created to maximize profits.
Silly child. Corporations are chartered for many purposes. Returning profit to shareholders is but one. An honorable one by the way so long as the means used are honorable.
Others are founded for political goals, such as the incorporated entities known as the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Others for specific tasks such as the National Rifle Association which promotes firearms, firearm safety and general awareness of 2nd Amendment issues. It also operates an explicitly political PAC with political change as it's goal. Other corporate entities do social work, others like the International Red Cross are dedicated to disaster relief and other related purposes. Many religious entities are incorporated with the non commercial goal of spreading a religious faith, operating hospitals, etc. and other works generally intended to bring glory to their deity. And so on. And all of them should have the right to speak on issues they care about.
> I also really like the Sierra Club, but I think the Club should be subject to restrictions on political advertisements just like every other group.
Dude. Imagine for a moment we adopted your view. So in northstarlarry's world the Sierra Club could no longer buy political ads. So instead they put up a website where their members could go. They would pick how much they would have liked to donate back in the real world and the site would give them a task that would cost them that amount of money. Things like take this PDF to Kinko's and print some copies and send it to this list of X people. Or download this video and place a a buy for X airings on cable system Y on channel Z. And so on. A corporate entity such as the Sierra Club is just a way for people to pool their efforts more efficiently... which you made less efficient but still able to do most of it's mission. Sooner or later people would tire of doing it so clumsy and wonder "Why can't we just enter our credit card and let the Club hire people to do all this grunt work?" And "Why don't I find this northstarlarry prick and kick him square in the nuts for inflicting this BS on us?"
> denying "corporate voting rights". I don't know how you can cogently argue that an entity must have one fundamental right, but not another
No need. Every shareholder/member/etc. already gets to vote. They can't vote collectively because we have a secret ballot. But they can pool their right to speak. There is exactly zero difference in theory between a thousand people buying one ad and giving the cash to a clearing house that buys a thousand ads at once. When Exxon buys an ad they are speaking for their shareholders in exactly the same way the Sierra Club is speaking for their members.
> No...quite the opposite. I said in the next paragraph after what you quoted...
Yea, the one where you say "..somehow (I've not worked the details out in my head yet)". So obviously true I ignored it and moved on to what would happen here in the real world. What you are pondering can't be done so pick, only candidates speak and only with the offical government budget or everybody says what the hell they want and we don't need government funded politicians. This notion that keeps coming up that you can have 'independent' expenditures and that that is somehow different is batshit insane if you bother to ponder it a few seconds, just leads to more of the sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge ritualized corruption that makes most folk disgusted with politics already.
Don't feel for a moment, Think. Can the candidate (or any of their staff, relations, etc) make so much as a blog post regarding what they think of an independent expenditure? Then a line of communication can exist between the campaign and the independent group. Can the candidate or any of their staff chat in a bar with someone who happens to know somebody who works for an outfit doing independent advertising? And could they just HAPPEN to mention what themes the campaign really wishes they had more resources to hammer on in the critical last few days of the campaign? Could the official campaign blog post scripts of ads they would like to see but can't afford to run? And could an 'independent' group grab those posts, film them and saturate the airwaves with them? Or just save a step, could the campaign license their adds such that anyone could run them unmodified (except a tag saying who paid for that airing) and let 'independent' groups download the files in HD res? And can lawyers have a field day terrorizing everyone on every side of this, deposing and discovering till they run every sane person out of politics? Yes they can!
> And things like debates and all...aren't they currently put on by...
If you are going to remove all external influences those semi non-partisan groups can't speak either.
> I'd also expect some mandates for the public airwaves to be given for free equally for the candidates to speak to the nation and to each other...
So now you want to seize valuable airtime and give it away, lemme guess who won't be compensated for the seizure. Clue, use PBS or NPR if ya have to but leave the rest alone. There ain't no 'public' airwaves anymore to speak of, since the digital switch they auction that crap off and most news is on cable and really shouldn't be subject to the FCC anyway.
> Just some ideas...my main point is to try to do something that keeps special interests from giving to politicians > in order to curry favor when elected...and to keep politicians from having to seek out funding, and end up beholden > to the large donation givers.
Nice notion, but we don't live in the land of unicorns and fluffy bunnies; instead we live in this crappy place. Best we deal with it as is. You want people less interested in buying a politician? Make them less valuable. Limited government. If rent seeking wasn't so profitable corporations would spend more time trying to earn an honest buck. If government pinheads didn't have almost unlimited power to cause harm lots of organizations would have less motive to pay protection.
Besides, your pernicious special interest is my NRA defending essential civil liberties. (Or your Greenpeace, EFF, ACLU, SEIU, whatever floats yer boat.) Just because an organization is expending money on politics doesn't make em evil.
> Oh come on. He's just a/.er. Why "evangelicals" and "Christians" and "Republicans" are at the end of every "ignorant" joke is beyond me.
It is the famous 'tolerance' and promotion of 'diversity' of the modern left. When they use those words they don't mean what we think they mean. Diversity if people of every color, racial background and gender identity fucking each other in every possible way, but all thinking in perfect lockstep. Tolerance is every form of fascism/socialism/etc getting along with every other atheist philosophical system.... so long as everyone agrees to hate America and all thestic religions.
> Why not have it this way...by constitutional amendment. The funding for the political candidates > (parties and all) are strictly from a fixed public funding scheme. That keeps them equal in > everything but planning how best to use the funds and what they have to say.
Are you insane or just really stupid? Sorry to flame but really. So only the candidates can speak during election season? And only with a very fixed budget.
So the press must cease all coverage of political races during election season, instead airing only paid advertising? Debates would be paid advertising from the candidates budgets. All politically themed Internet sites, bloggers, mailing lists, etc. not paid for by a candidate would be go silent during campaign season. No book, movie, documentary, etc. that can possibly be contrued as having a political theme that could impact on a race could be published or aired during campaign season. Is that really what you are arguing for? Because if you aren't your scheme becomes an Epic Fail and if you are you have zero clue what being an American is about.
> The flaw in your argument lies with the fact that a single very wealth person could 'buy' more speech for a candidate > that they favored, than a candidate that had broad grass roots support and more modest funding.
And your point is? That same very wealthy candidate could just run themselves instead and you wouldn't utter a peep of protest, yet if he funds a guy he agrees with instead you see it as a grave threat to our system of government. Why? California is likely to see both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina self funding campaigns this season for Governor and Senator. Why is this a good thing yet if instead they dumped the same money to a candidate of their chosing and instead stayed in the private sector creating wealth and jobs, it would be a criminal offense under current law that would see them sent to prison. Again I ask, Why?
Note also that when the grass roots really get fired up they can beat billionare playboys who think it is neat to buy an elected office, ask ex Governor Jon Corzine[sp].
> The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, for that matter, were explicitly never meant to be enumerations of our Rights.
You are preaching to the choir, I'm up to speed on the concept of negative liberty and natural law. But I'm saying a 'right to privacy' is a nice sounding idea, but a bitch to codify beyond what was already put in with the right to refuse to testify against oneself and the right to be secure in your person and home, etc. Which is why no right to privacy to enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
> The Constitution and the Bill or Rights are a snapshot in time, reflecting their interests, experiences, and priorities. > I have a feeling that if they were writing such in today's world, privacy would be right up there...
Ok, great. But the Constitution is DEAD. If you want it to have a new feature you don't just pretend it grew a new Amendment, you actually have to ratify one. Propose one, then we will have something concrete to debate and perhaps you can get it passed. But since the current Congress wipes their asses on special toilet paper printed with the Constitution, you might want to join my team in fixing THAT problem first lest you get your Amendment and then get to watch them wipe their asses with it as well.
> Don't forget that these same "conservatives", whose critics you have criticized, also are telling us that "Nowhere in the Constitution is there an enumerated right to privacy.
That is because it isn't there. But the Founders were wise enough to provide for such a problem arising. Propose an Amendment. If a right to privacy is really a no brainer you should have no problem proposing wording that will quickly secure the votes to ratify it. Hint, it is harder than you apparently believe to write such a thing without obviously bad side effects.
> And by explicitly circumscribing what governments may not do, they implicitly give the government the right to do everything else.
Not quite. After painstakingly spelling out a carefully enumerated list of what the federal government could do, they for good measure spelling out a list of things it could not do they went one final step farther and added the 9th and 10th Amendments saying that everything not explicitly permitted was forbidden. Three layers of clearly spelled out rules intended to protect against the crap we have now and the Progressives wiped their asses on the lot of it and replaced the rule of law with the rule of great (in their minds) men. The Founding Fathers, who were truly great men, knew enough to know that NO man could be entrusted with the sort of power every member of Congress now wields (illegally) and forbade it to themselves and to the current generation.
> I do not believe that my or your rights are in any way trampled merely by forcing structural separation between the groups banded together for > the purpose of political persuasion and the groups banded together for for the purpose of buying, selling and producing products.
I take it you couldn't be bothered to even read the summary of the decision before pontificating on what you 'believe.' Had you read the decision you would know they examined that argument and rejected it for good reason. Almost every media outlet is part of a corporation as you describe, "banded together for for the purpose of buying, selling and producing products" and if you are to limit the content of corporate speech you would have to muzzle most of the press. Look at GE and NBC for example, GE is deeply involved in the defense industry, 'green energy', the medical industry, etc. and at the same time operating a major media organ in cahoots with a corporation that stands convicted of abusing a monopoly! Or look at the News Corp empire, while less involved in non-publishing activity they are still a major corporation with tentacles in a lot of things while operating a media operation that expresses political positions.
> We limit individuals to a maximum $5000 donation. We limit corporations to a maximum $1000 donation.
> Contrast this with quotes I remember of saying that the 2008 presidential election in the states ran in excess of a billion dollars.
I'd like to object to the entire premise behind your inane argument. We need MORE money in politics, not less. Think about it. Yes President Obama set a record haul of a billion dollars in the '08 campaign but so freaking what. Just means my team is going to have to up its fundraising game next time if we want to compete. Nike spent 1.7 billion in marketing for shows and otherwise ordinary apparel except for a swoosh logo. The argument over who leads the free world is at least as important as the question of which shoes to wear.
Money == speech. Any restriction of one implies a restriction on the other. With unlimited contributions, paired with solid disclosure (an idea which the SCOTUS upheld today) laws, perhaps candidates would need to spend less time whoring at endless fundraisers and more time campaigning and/or reading the bills they are voting on.
> If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing.
Curiously enough, this case was about exactly that. A group of people put together a corporation called "Citizens United" and produced a film critical of Her Majesty, Hillary Clinton. It produced the film with the intent of airing it near the election so as to influence it, that is what caused them to run afoul of McCain/Feingold. Though far too late to save this group's efforts at Free Speech the SCOTUS has finally ruled that "Congress shall make no law...." means what it says. This is considered a radical decision in our dark times.
Exactly. I got a good laugh out of that claimed 122 hours of runtime. Not with the screen showing anything it won't. Yes OLED has some important advantages over LCD but not that great. Unless it is going to have a huge ass battery pack sticking out current battery tech won't light up the screen for a hundred hours. Can't avoid the reality that emitting light consumes power. Of course there are ways to cheat the spec. Only light a small percentage of the pixels at less than full brightness and you might get that battery life but that is basically a rigged demo.
The new tradeoff, use typefaces with less 'ink' to gain battery life and leave the screen black in a throwback to old school terminals. Nah. And last I heard OLED still has horrible problems with burn lifetime where colors age at different rates.
Meanwhile Pixel Qi will be able to do eBook mode with black type on a light page and still get good a battery life.
> No more than the ability of the Zimbabwe government to print Zimbabwe dollars, or the Chinese to print yuans, or the US to print US dollars does.
You are getting close to the truth of the matter. The more accurate term for what we call fiat money is faith based money. When the US prints money the only reason people accept it is because it carries the 'full faith and credit' of the US government. So until fairly recently that carried enough weight that it was THE world currency. The Chinese yuan, backed by communists with a fuzzy grasp of things economic didn't give people the same warm fuzzy feelings and as for Zimbabwe, well their money had little more value than the intrinsic value of the paper it was printed upon, because nobody put much faith or credit in that government.
With which background we can take up in game currency. The only question is what does the 'full faith and credit' of a game operator count for? If run with sufficient attention to accounting transparency and regulation it should be possible to have the same level of trust as with a bank. Linden Dollars have a well known exchange rate already, if not for game related reasons which argue against it, there is no reason an entity as large as Sony couldn't make it's in game currency fully trustworthy and exchangable on the world's currency exchanges; if not quite on the level of trust as the King Dollar of old at least as reliable as the yuan and if they couldn't beat Zimbabwe they should disband the corporation on grounds of incompetence. Publicly traded corporations aren't given the liberty to be as corrupt and incompetent as nation states can get away with.
> The New York Times can make an effective paywall because they hold the rights to columnists that share opinions that are nationally relevant.
Of course they might not be all that relevant when people stop seeing their columns. Seriously, most online folk these days start at an agregator, whether that is a set of favored blogs or drudge, realclearpolitics, etc. Even if the people who create those key influencer sites subscribe to the NYT it is doubtful they will link to content behind a paywall if the past is any guide. Thus those who are contracted to write only for the NYT will, as they have already experienced in the past, see their influence decline. Good riddence to the lot of em as far as I'm concerned. Personally they end of the NYT will be a great day, this decision is a good step toward that happy event.
> The Nazis sucked, but they weren't "barbarians". Germans had a thirst for knowledge;
If it had military value. And had they won we would have quickly fallen into a Hell on Earth scenario where there wouldn't have been much pure science going on.
> Al Qaeda's attack was nasty and worthy of retribution, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation at all.
Fraid it does. They are still learning and adapting as we mostly remain on defense. Eventually they are going to learn how to really hurt us. Give me 100 Jihidis and I could bring the US to a virtual standstill. Bet with some thought about the unthinkable you too could do it. Thankfully they don't understand us quite well enough yet. Don't count on that lasting forever. And then there is the problem of them getting their hands on a WMD. They only have to succeed once, we have to defend successfully every time, eventually those odds are in their favor. And there is an effectively limitless pool of new recruits for them to draw from. Do the math, there are a billion muslims so if only.1% are in the "Death to America!" camp that gives em a million potential recruits. That.1% estimate is almost certainly low. We need to change the game to one we can win. But we are currently unable to even discuss most of the ideas that might work.
> So what exactly are we being protected from? Mexico?
Yes. Some of civilization's defenders don't wear cammo, they are part of the thin blue line defending against threats inside the perimeter. Look how many people are getting gunned down daily across the border in the drug wars. The point being civilization isn't something that can be taken as a given, it requires constant vigilance and resources.
> So why do we need such a huge budget anymore?
Because we already took a 'peace dividend' at the end of the Cold War. Take a look at the current difficulties we are having keeping fairly small forces in Iraq and Afganistan. We are supposed to be the big dog in things military, we are supposed to be at war, yet we are having great difficulty keeping a couple hundred thousand troops in the field with proper supply lines. Could we open a third front if we really HAD to? I really doubt it. I'd bet good money the Mad Mullas in Iran doubt it too, which is why we should be upping the capabilities of the military instead of talking about redirecting resources away from defense.
> I wish we took 50% of the money given to the military and put it into space.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole. It doesn't. We get two benefits from that money. First is tech, probably more tech than NASA has delivered and NASA has done some good stuff. But look how much tech came out of two World Wars and the Cold War (WWIII in everything but body count) and compare it to NASA. But by far the bigger benefit is that Western Civilization didn't fall to the barbarian hordes. Hint: Barbarians don't send out space probes in a peaceful quest for pure knowledge. Can you see the Thousand Year Reich sending unmanned probes to the outer solar system? How about the Soviet Union in a world where they defeated the West and didn't need to 'waste' resources in a PR war? Remember, with some of the more productive farmland in the world their system couldn't feed their population, if the whole world fell to their level of productivity there wouldn't be much surplus wealth to blow on exploration. How 'bout the sixth century rejects wanting to re-establish the Caliphate? Think they would be interested in the Final Frontier? We are free to argue about these things and do basic science, safe under the protection of hard men walking the wall and beating back the unreasoning barbarian hordes who are always out there waiting for weakness.
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Good grief, could this/. article possibly be more biased? Who the hell does Slashdot think it is, the MSM? I thought the Internet was supposed to be an improvement.
Lets just agree with the idiots at Greenpeace.... on one condition, that if we agree the current plants are operating far beyond their original design life they agree with us that the solution is to replace them with modern safer reactors.
> The FCC could solve all of this with a few modest policy changes.
But why would they? The FCC is the heart of the problem. Adn I can promise you any attempt by those clowns to 'fix' anything will make it worse.
I remember way back... I was in the room when FCC Chairman Powell was prattling on about "Competition" in the Internet game. I was there as an employee of a government agency (wearing a shirt emblazoned with a logo) so I bit my tongue and didn't stand up and call him out. But I should have... it would have been worth getting fired.... almost.
I wanted to just jump up and ask "How in the hell does the word Competition get applied to two huge lumbering monopolies who can't pass gas without getting permission from nimrods like YOU and a dozen other local, state and federal regulators?"
> The issue with the App memory is that it sounds like a design decision made in a desperate attempt to accommodate some flaw in design or reduce costs.
Yup. Go look at the detailed specs. The CPU package has 512MB of flash, there is a 4GB MicroSD with the bulk of the OS almost filling it up. The trick would be getting the current contents properly transferred to a larger card. If it is just an normal filesystem that isn't hard (for anyone posting here at least) but if any of the SD DRM crap is being used it gets 'interesting.' On a flagship smartphone 4GB is kinda pathetic. It should have shipped with at least 8GB standard.
Bet it ain't. Think like a vendor. All they did was add one secret knock usb command that unlocks the drive. The crypto is purely in the Windows driver. They had to actually use AES somewhere or they really would get a fraud suit thrown at them. But once they did the lameness with the secret knock do you really think they wasted the extra money to put real AES crypto (and either take a performance hit or throw still more money at making it fast) in the stick vs just using a slightly modified regular part? It was pure fraud, with some attempt to have some cover if they got caught.
Slashdot Mirror
> As a result MS priced windows for netbooks at $8..
The lowest pricing I have ever heard from anyone halfway reliable is $15 but that isn't the whole story. If they ship Windows they also get to ship the bundleware which means they probably actually make a profit.
> So you ask what killed the Arm Netbook?
You forgot two other major players in killing the netbook. The OEMs and the retailers. So sit right down and I'll tell 'yall the rest of the story.
Netbooks were originally imagined as inexpensive, small and oriented towards a network centric view of the world. EVERYONE wanted that idea dead. The original eeePC was supposed to start at $200, remember? Lets imagine someone hitting that target now, not a black friday dump, $200 MSRP for a useful netbook in the original definition, i.e. no need to run Photoshop (how did this become the one everyone whines about? ....anyway). What retailer wants to put that on the shelf beside units that can make them twice the money before considering the better odds of followon sales with a traditional laptop/modern netbook? Software, service contracts, crapware removal services, accessories, all are better sales opportunities with a notebook/modern netbook running Windows. The OEMs realized they were risking cannibalization of a huge chunk of their more profitable lines. Then Microsoft came unto the OEMs, who were already afraid and said, "So lemme help you guys out of this mess. Ship XP at little or no upcharge and customers will demand the upsized specs to run it well." So the 7 and 9 inch displays vanished along with the slow Celerons and by the time ASUS had their supply chain issues sorted out demand for anything that would have hit their original $200 target had gone away. The industry was saved.
Let me now pronounce unto you what will be. Because Apple announced the iPad there will be a flurry of tablets, all intended to compete with it so price will be high, HD video will be the one spec on all of em (1080p so as to beat Apple) and they will all fail, Apple included. When that happens the interest in ARM and Android (beyond the smartphone space) will end with it. ARM+Linux and/or Android on inexpensive ARM netbooks will never really be tried. Today's product won't ever be seen in qualtity outside Asia any more than the dozen ARM/Mips units announced in the past or the dozens to be announced in the future will be. Last year I believed some Chinese OEM with no ties to the existing Intel/Microsoft/Notebook ecosystem existed and one of them would eventually get the idea to make an end run around the Walmart/BestBuy roadblock and distribute through non-traditional channels. Now I have studied the matter more and realized that won't likely happen.
The problem is the $100 disposable netbook would represent a fundamental upheaval in the computing ecosystem. It could be done in a way to benefit the consumer but all the incentives are against it. There is zero upside for any of the established players though, nothing but pain and downsizing. It will happen eventually but they intend to put that day off as long as possible. What we will probably end up with is subsidized locked down crap eventually marginalizing traditional computing to the point computing as a mind lever is relegated to expensive specialty stuff while most stuff is glorified TV with carefully approved interraction. All government approved, child safe and perfectly non offensive. Do we really want to hasten that world or do we join Intel/Microsoft/Dell/BestBuy is pushing that nightmare off in the hope we can find a better solution?
Or we fight like hell right now for the better more open future that is possible but won't happen if evolution takes its dismal course. If we can get a standard bootloader on those ARM netbooks so we can offer the OEMs the choice of expensive internal OS development and ongoing security patching vs offloading most of that to the community we have a shot at enough of the next generation of cheap hardwa
> and the limited iphone style OS (why not full mac OS).
Because at this point Apple would like nothing better than to find a way to discontinue OS X. The huge revenue stream they unleashed with the App Store has distorted everything at Apple. OS X on the desktop doesn't give Apple a cut of every app sold; so all new products are going to be in the iPhone development model. Hence this new product, which COULD have run a more open operating system and supported a lot of traditional OS X applications (add ARM to the fat binaries and ship) is instead an iPod/iPhone with a bigger display.
Since they will sell a ton of these shiny iTurds expect them to take it as a green light for the next step and move the closed Nintendo/Cellphone OS model to the all in one desktops next. If that works the bottom end of the laptops will go next.
> However if we really believe "Congress shall make no law" means "Congress shall make no law"
> then the restrictions on tobacco and alcohol advertising are right out.
Yes. "No law" means pretty much what it says. Since almost day one of the Republic a few restrictions have been permitted, slander, libel, shouting "Fire!" in crowded theaters, etc. on the grounds no right is so 100% absolute that total anarchy has to be allowed.
> If we believe the 14th Amendment means "and state legislatures shall also make no law" then
> the restrictions on slander and libel are right out in addition to any "fighting words".
> Obscenity statutes go down everywhere as well.
See above regarding slander and libel. The 14th was passed with the best of intentions, and served a real purpose at the time, but the law of unintended consequences has hit this Amendment hard. It should be repealed for many reasons, the problems you note among them. Although many states have almost identical wording to the 1st in their own Constitution.
> For what purposes, really, should a corporation be given the rights of individuals? They aren't an individual. They are a tool created to maximize profits.
Silly child. Corporations are chartered for many purposes. Returning profit to shareholders is but one. An honorable one by the way so long as the means used are honorable.
Others are founded for political goals, such as the incorporated entities known as the Democratic and Republican National Committees. Others for specific tasks such as the National Rifle Association which promotes firearms, firearm safety and general awareness of 2nd Amendment issues. It also operates an explicitly political PAC with political change as it's goal. Other corporate entities do social work, others like the International Red Cross are dedicated to disaster relief and other related purposes. Many religious entities are incorporated with the non commercial goal of spreading a religious faith, operating hospitals, etc. and other works generally intended to bring glory to their deity. And so on. And all of them should have the right to speak on issues they care about.
> I also really like the Sierra Club, but I think the Club should be subject to restrictions on political advertisements just like every other group.
Dude. Imagine for a moment we adopted your view. So in northstarlarry's world the Sierra Club could no longer buy political ads. So instead they put up a website where their members could go. They would pick how much they would have liked to donate back in the real world and the site would give them a task that would cost them that amount of money. Things like take this PDF to Kinko's and print some copies and send it to this list of X people. Or download this video and place a a buy for X airings on cable system Y on channel Z. And so on. A corporate entity such as the Sierra Club is just a way for people to pool their efforts more efficiently... which you made less efficient but still able to do most of it's mission. Sooner or later people would tire of doing it so clumsy and wonder "Why can't we just enter our credit card and let the Club hire people to do all this grunt work?" And "Why don't I find this northstarlarry prick and kick him square in the nuts for inflicting this BS on us?"
> denying "corporate voting rights". I don't know how you can cogently argue that an entity must have one fundamental right, but not another
No need. Every shareholder/member/etc. already gets to vote. They can't vote collectively because we have a secret ballot. But they can pool their right to speak. There is exactly zero difference in theory between a thousand people buying one ad and giving the cash to a clearing house that buys a thousand ads at once. When Exxon buys an ad they are speaking for their shareholders in exactly the same way the Sierra Club is speaking for their members.
> No...quite the opposite. I said in the next paragraph after what you quoted...
Yea, the one where you say "..somehow (I've not worked the details out in my head yet)". So obviously true I ignored it and moved on to what would happen here in the real world. What you are pondering can't be done so pick, only candidates speak and only with the offical government budget or everybody says what the hell they want and we don't need government funded politicians. This notion that keeps coming up that you can have 'independent' expenditures and that that is somehow different is batshit insane if you bother to ponder it a few seconds, just leads to more of the sort of wink-wink, nudge-nudge ritualized corruption that makes most folk disgusted with politics already.
Don't feel for a moment, Think. Can the candidate (or any of their staff, relations, etc) make so much as a blog post regarding what they think of an independent expenditure? Then a line of communication can exist between the campaign and the independent group. Can the candidate or any of their staff chat in a bar with someone who happens to know somebody who works for an outfit doing independent advertising? And could they just HAPPEN to mention what themes the campaign really wishes they had more resources to hammer on in the critical last few days of the campaign? Could the official campaign blog post scripts of ads they would like to see but can't afford to run? And could an 'independent' group grab those posts, film them and saturate the airwaves with them? Or just save a step, could the campaign license their adds such that anyone could run them unmodified (except a tag saying who paid for that airing) and let 'independent' groups download the files in HD res? And can lawyers have a field day terrorizing everyone on every side of this, deposing and discovering till they run every sane person out of politics? Yes they can!
> And things like debates and all...aren't they currently put on by...
If you are going to remove all external influences those semi non-partisan groups can't speak either.
> I'd also expect some mandates for the public airwaves to be given for free equally for the candidates to speak to the nation and to each other...
So now you want to seize valuable airtime and give it away, lemme guess who won't be compensated for the seizure. Clue, use PBS or NPR if ya have to but leave the rest alone. There ain't no 'public' airwaves anymore to speak of, since the digital switch they auction that crap off and most news is on cable and really shouldn't be subject to the FCC anyway.
> Just some ideas...my main point is to try to do something that keeps special interests from giving to politicians
> in order to curry favor when elected...and to keep politicians from having to seek out funding, and end up beholden
> to the large donation givers.
Nice notion, but we don't live in the land of unicorns and fluffy bunnies; instead we live in this crappy place. Best we deal with it as is. You want people less interested in buying a politician? Make them less valuable. Limited government. If rent seeking wasn't so profitable corporations would spend more time trying to earn an honest buck. If government pinheads didn't have almost unlimited power to cause harm lots of organizations would have less motive to pay protection.
Besides, your pernicious special interest is my NRA defending essential civil liberties. (Or your Greenpeace, EFF, ACLU, SEIU, whatever floats yer boat.) Just because an organization is expending money on politics doesn't make em evil.
> Oh come on. He's just a /.er. Why "evangelicals" and "Christians" and "Republicans" are at the end of every "ignorant" joke is beyond me.
It is the famous 'tolerance' and promotion of 'diversity' of the modern left. When they use those words they don't mean what we think they mean. Diversity if people of every color, racial background and gender identity fucking each other in every possible way, but all thinking in perfect lockstep. Tolerance is every form of fascism/socialism/etc getting along with every other atheist philosophical system.... so long as everyone agrees to hate America and all thestic religions.
> Why not have it this way...by constitutional amendment. The funding for the political candidates
> (parties and all) are strictly from a fixed public funding scheme. That keeps them equal in
> everything but planning how best to use the funds and what they have to say.
Are you insane or just really stupid? Sorry to flame but really. So only the candidates can speak during election season? And only with a very fixed budget.
So the press must cease all coverage of political races during election season, instead airing only paid advertising? Debates would be paid advertising from the candidates budgets. All politically themed Internet sites, bloggers, mailing lists, etc. not paid for by a candidate would be go silent during campaign season. No book, movie, documentary, etc. that can possibly be contrued as having a political theme that could impact on a race could be published or aired during campaign season. Is that really what you are arguing for? Because if you aren't your scheme becomes an Epic Fail and if you are you have zero clue what being an American is about.
> The flaw in your argument lies with the fact that a single very wealth person could 'buy' more speech for a candidate
> that they favored, than a candidate that had broad grass roots support and more modest funding.
And your point is? That same very wealthy candidate could just run themselves instead and you wouldn't utter a peep of protest, yet if he funds a guy he agrees with instead you see it as a grave threat to our system of government. Why? California is likely to see both Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina self funding campaigns this season for Governor and Senator. Why is this a good thing yet if instead they dumped the same money to a candidate of their chosing and instead stayed in the private sector creating wealth and jobs, it would be a criminal offense under current law that would see them sent to prison. Again I ask, Why?
Note also that when the grass roots really get fired up they can beat billionare playboys who think it is neat to buy an elected office, ask ex Governor Jon Corzine[sp].
> The Bill of Rights, and the Constitution, for that matter, were explicitly never meant to be enumerations of our Rights.
You are preaching to the choir, I'm up to speed on the concept of negative liberty and natural law. But I'm saying a 'right to privacy' is a nice sounding idea, but a bitch to codify beyond what was already put in with the right to refuse to testify against oneself and the right to be secure in your person and home, etc. Which is why no right to privacy to enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
> The Constitution and the Bill or Rights are a snapshot in time, reflecting their interests, experiences, and priorities.
> I have a feeling that if they were writing such in today's world, privacy would be right up there...
Ok, great. But the Constitution is DEAD. If you want it to have a new feature you don't just pretend it grew a new Amendment, you actually have to ratify one. Propose one, then we will have something concrete to debate and perhaps you can get it passed. But since the current Congress wipes their asses on special toilet paper printed with the Constitution, you might want to join my team in fixing THAT problem first lest you get your Amendment and then get to watch them wipe their asses with it as well.
> Don't forget that these same "conservatives", whose critics you have criticized, also are telling us that "Nowhere in the Constitution is there an enumerated right to privacy.
That is because it isn't there. But the Founders were wise enough to provide for such a problem arising. Propose an Amendment. If a right to privacy is really a no brainer you should have no problem proposing wording that will quickly secure the votes to ratify it. Hint, it is harder than you apparently believe to write such a thing without obviously bad side effects.
> And by explicitly circumscribing what governments may not do, they implicitly give the government the right to do everything else.
Not quite. After painstakingly spelling out a carefully enumerated list of what the federal government could do, they for good measure spelling out a list of things it could not do they went one final step farther and added the 9th and 10th Amendments saying that everything not explicitly permitted was forbidden. Three layers of clearly spelled out rules intended to protect against the crap we have now and the Progressives wiped their asses on the lot of it and replaced the rule of law with the rule of great (in their minds) men. The Founding Fathers, who were truly great men, knew enough to know that NO man could be entrusted with the sort of power every member of Congress now wields (illegally) and forbade it to themselves and to the current generation.
> I do not believe that my or your rights are in any way trampled merely by forcing structural separation between the groups banded together for
> the purpose of political persuasion and the groups banded together for for the purpose of buying, selling and producing products.
I take it you couldn't be bothered to even read the summary of the decision before pontificating on what you 'believe.' Had you read the decision you would know they examined that argument and rejected it for good reason. Almost every media outlet is part of a corporation as you describe, "banded together for for the purpose of buying, selling and producing products" and if you are to limit the content of corporate speech you would have to muzzle most of the press. Look at GE and NBC for example, GE is deeply involved in the defense industry, 'green energy', the medical industry, etc. and at the same time operating a major media organ in cahoots with a corporation that stands convicted of abusing a monopoly! Or look at the News Corp empire, while less involved in non-publishing activity they are still a major corporation with tentacles in a lot of things while operating a media operation that expresses political positions.
> We limit individuals to a maximum $5000 donation. We limit corporations to a maximum $1000 donation.
> Contrast this with quotes I remember of saying that the 2008 presidential election in the states ran in excess of a billion dollars.
I'd like to object to the entire premise behind your inane argument. We need MORE money in politics, not less. Think about it. Yes President Obama set a record haul of a billion dollars in the '08 campaign but so freaking what. Just means my team is going to have to up its fundraising game next time if we want to compete. Nike spent 1.7 billion in marketing for shows and otherwise ordinary apparel except for a swoosh logo. The argument over who leads the free world is at least as important as the question of which shoes to wear.
Money == speech. Any restriction of one implies a restriction on the other. With unlimited contributions, paired with solid disclosure (an idea which the SCOTUS upheld today) laws, perhaps candidates would need to spend less time whoring at endless fundraisers and more time campaigning and/or reading the bills they are voting on.
> If you voluntarily join a group with the intent of having your opinions heard through the voice of others in that group, that is one thing.
Curiously enough, this case was about exactly that. A group of people put together a corporation called "Citizens United" and produced a film critical of Her Majesty, Hillary Clinton. It produced the film with the intent of airing it near the election so as to influence it, that is what caused them to run afoul of McCain/Feingold. Though far too late to save this group's efforts at Free Speech the SCOTUS has finally ruled that "Congress shall make no law...." means what it says. This is considered a radical decision in our dark times.
> Pixel Qi
Exactly. I got a good laugh out of that claimed 122 hours of runtime. Not with the screen showing anything it won't. Yes OLED has some important advantages over LCD but not that great. Unless it is going to have a huge ass battery pack sticking out current battery tech won't light up the screen for a hundred hours. Can't avoid the reality that emitting light consumes power. Of course there are ways to cheat the spec. Only light a small percentage of the pixels at less than full brightness and you might get that battery life but that is basically a rigged demo.
The new tradeoff, use typefaces with less 'ink' to gain battery life and leave the screen black in a throwback to old school terminals. Nah. And last I heard OLED still has horrible problems with burn lifetime where colors age at different rates.
Meanwhile Pixel Qi will be able to do eBook mode with black type on a light page and still get good a battery life.
> No more than the ability of the Zimbabwe government to print Zimbabwe dollars, or the Chinese to print yuans, or the US to print US dollars does.
You are getting close to the truth of the matter. The more accurate term for what we call fiat money is faith based money. When the US prints money the only reason people accept it is because it carries the 'full faith and credit' of the US government. So until fairly recently that carried enough weight that it was THE world currency. The Chinese yuan, backed by communists with a fuzzy grasp of things economic didn't give people the same warm fuzzy feelings and as for Zimbabwe, well their money had little more value than the intrinsic value of the paper it was printed upon, because nobody put much faith or credit in that government.
With which background we can take up in game currency. The only question is what does the 'full faith and credit' of a game operator count for? If run with sufficient attention to accounting transparency and regulation it should be possible to have the same level of trust as with a bank. Linden Dollars have a well known exchange rate already, if not for game related reasons which argue against it, there is no reason an entity as large as Sony couldn't make it's in game currency fully trustworthy and exchangable on the world's currency exchanges; if not quite on the level of trust as the King Dollar of old at least as reliable as the yuan and if they couldn't beat Zimbabwe they should disband the corporation on grounds of incompetence. Publicly traded corporations aren't given the liberty to be as corrupt and incompetent as nation states can get away with.
> The New York Times can make an effective paywall because they hold the rights to columnists that share opinions that are nationally relevant.
Of course they might not be all that relevant when people stop seeing their columns. Seriously, most online folk these days start at an agregator, whether that is a set of favored blogs or drudge, realclearpolitics, etc. Even if the people who create those key influencer sites subscribe to the NYT it is doubtful they will link to content behind a paywall if the past is any guide. Thus those who are contracted to write only for the NYT will, as they have already experienced in the past, see their influence decline. Good riddence to the lot of em as far as I'm concerned. Personally they end of the NYT will be a great day, this decision is a good step toward that happy event.
> The Nazis sucked, but they weren't "barbarians". Germans had a thirst for knowledge;
If it had military value. And had they won we would have quickly fallen into a Hell on Earth scenario where there wouldn't have been much pure science going on.
> Al Qaeda's attack was nasty and worthy of retribution, but it didn't threaten the existence of our nation at all.
Fraid it does. They are still learning and adapting as we mostly remain on defense. Eventually they are going to learn how to really hurt us. Give me 100 Jihidis and I could bring the US to a virtual standstill. Bet with some thought about the unthinkable you too could do it. Thankfully they don't understand us quite well enough yet. Don't count on that lasting forever. And then there is the problem of them getting their hands on a WMD. They only have to succeed once, we have to defend successfully every time, eventually those odds are in their favor. And there is an effectively limitless pool of new recruits for them to draw from. Do the math, there are a billion muslims so if only .1% are in the "Death to America!" camp that gives em a million potential recruits. That .1% estimate is almost certainly low. We need to change the game to one we can win. But we are currently unable to even discuss most of the ideas that might work.
> So what exactly are we being protected from? Mexico?
Yes. Some of civilization's defenders don't wear cammo, they are part of the thin blue line defending against threats inside the perimeter. Look how many people are getting gunned down daily across the border in the drug wars. The point being civilization isn't something that can be taken as a given, it requires constant vigilance and resources.
> So why do we need such a huge budget anymore?
Because we already took a 'peace dividend' at the end of the Cold War. Take a look at the current difficulties we are having keeping fairly small forces in Iraq and Afganistan. We are supposed to be the big dog in things military, we are supposed to be at war, yet we are having great difficulty keeping a couple hundred thousand troops in the field with proper supply lines. Could we open a third front if we really HAD to? I really doubt it. I'd bet good money the Mad Mullas in Iran doubt it too, which is why we should be upping the capabilities of the military instead of talking about redirecting resources away from defense.
> I wish we took 50% of the money given to the military and put it into space.
You are making a very silly assumption. You assume the military budget just goes down a black hole. It doesn't. We get two benefits from that money. First is tech, probably more tech than NASA has delivered and NASA has done some good stuff. But look how much tech came out of two World Wars and the Cold War (WWIII in everything but body count) and compare it to NASA. But by far the bigger benefit is that Western Civilization didn't fall to the barbarian hordes. Hint: Barbarians don't send out space probes in a peaceful quest for pure knowledge. Can you see the Thousand Year Reich sending unmanned probes to the outer solar system? How about the Soviet Union in a world where they defeated the West and didn't need to 'waste' resources in a PR war? Remember, with some of the more productive farmland in the world their system couldn't feed their population, if the whole world fell to their level of productivity there wouldn't be much surplus wealth to blow on exploration. How 'bout the sixth century rejects wanting to re-establish the Caliphate? Think they would be interested in the Final Frontier? We are free to argue about these things and do basic science, safe under the protection of hard men walking the wall and beating back the unreasoning barbarian hordes who are always out there waiting for weakness.
> To the advocates of nuclear power, Chernobyl isn't a demonstration of the danger of nuclear power...
I'm interested in hearing a contrary opinion, but really. It was a demonstration of something we all know, that if you try really hard to screw something up you usually succeed.
Chernobyl was a poorly designed Russian reactor that would have never been issued a permit anywhere in the Western world but that wasn't why it failed. We still don't know all of the details of what they were researching but the assholes had intentionally turned off what safety features it did have. It is really hard to design something so idiot proof that it can withstand a determined effort by trained engineers to subvert the safety cutoffs.
Good grief, could this /. article possibly be more biased? Who the hell does Slashdot think it is, the MSM? I thought the Internet was supposed to be an improvement.
Lets just agree with the idiots at Greenpeace.... on one condition, that if we agree the current plants are operating far beyond their original design life they agree with us that the solution is to replace them with modern safer reactors.
> The FCC could solve all of this with a few modest policy changes.
But why would they? The FCC is the heart of the problem. Adn I can promise you any attempt by those clowns to 'fix' anything will make it worse.
I remember way back... I was in the room when FCC Chairman Powell was prattling on about "Competition" in the Internet game. I was there as an employee of a government agency (wearing a shirt emblazoned with a logo) so I bit my tongue and didn't stand up and call him out. But I should have... it would have been worth getting fired.... almost.
I wanted to just jump up and ask "How in the hell does the word Competition get applied to two huge lumbering monopolies who can't pass gas without getting permission from nimrods like YOU and a dozen other local, state and federal regulators?"
> The issue with the App memory is that it sounds like a design decision made in a desperate attempt to accommodate some flaw in design or reduce costs.
Yup. Go look at the detailed specs. The CPU package has 512MB of flash, there is a 4GB MicroSD with the bulk of the OS almost filling it up. The trick would be getting the current contents properly transferred to a larger card. If it is just an normal filesystem that isn't hard (for anyone posting here at least) but if any of the SD DRM crap is being used it gets 'interesting.' On a flagship smartphone 4GB is kinda pathetic. It should have shipped with at least 8GB standard.
> No, it's actually encrypted.
Bet it ain't. Think like a vendor. All they did was add one secret knock usb command that unlocks the drive. The crypto is purely in the Windows driver. They had to actually use AES somewhere or they really would get a fraud suit thrown at them. But once they did the lameness with the secret knock do you really think they wasted the extra money to put real AES crypto (and either take a performance hit or throw still more money at making it fast) in the stick vs just using a slightly modified regular part? It was pure fraud, with some attempt to have some cover if they got caught.