Actually, the driver's still work, but there is a greater risk of malicious code without the signing. They can still release the drivers. It falls on the consumer to take a risk to keep their 13+ year old (after 2014) OS. I still fail to see how this is Microsoft's problem.
It is on the burden of the hardware manufacturers to write drivers, not the OS developer. Especially for new hardware. How in any way does the blame fall on XP and Microsoft?
and may be hard to find. But the best book I always refer back to as what seriously started me on the path to being a programmer was Microsoft QuickBasic Primer Plus. QB may be old, but it is still available and the book is an amazing text as to the details of programming and why/how things work.
It should be ticked on by default. Most people out there really don't care about being tracked. Tracking is extremely valuable to the market in terms ad conversion and sales. This allows businesses to stay in business and employ people. There are few people out there who really care at all about the fact that they are being tracked, and those people generally know how to find the privacy settings in a browser. No one is going to actively seek out a setting to allow websites to track them because if they don't care if they are tracked, they also don't care if they aren't.
Since tablets are considered a fundamentally different device than a desktop/laptop, I feel this is where Linux could shine. Ubuntu always seemed to be in the best position to capitalize on it as well. I am anxious to see what they come up with because I would almost definitely ditch my iPad for an Ubuntu tablet. I should note that no machine in my regular use runs Ubuntu or any other form of Linux as it could not replace what I need my desktops and laptops to do.
Enterhost, been using them for over 8 years. Great service and a lot of bandwidth
Re:Only "troubled" if you're not Lockheed Martin
on
The F-35 Story
·
· Score: 1
Everything military is going civilian, when I got out of the USAF 4 years ago, they were in the process of outsourcing (or A-76'ing as it was called) all of the base support squadrons. Comm (which is where I was), Civil Engineering, and Mission Support were all going civilian to "save cost".
No, wanting it to some extent means you buy it or don't. This is a binary question. There are plenty of things in this world that I either can't afford or justify spending money on, and guess what, I don't have them. You don't get something for nothing just because you don't have or don't want to spend the money.
1) Then they don't get to have their cake and eat it too. If they don't want to spend money on it, they don't get to have it. 2) Then they don't get to have it. 3) Gray area at best 4) Most pirates fall into this category, I would be willing to put money on it.
And even if a person in the fourth category pirated something, I still do not believe that something was stolen. I believe that an act of copyright infringement (technically, all of them qualify) occurred and a chance to make a profit (potential profit) was lost. I only think that something is stolen if the original owner loses something that they already had (such as property or currently owned money), not just the chance to earn more money. I'm sure you can (and will) argue that copyright infringement is still harmful, but I didn't state anything about that.
Loss of potential sale is theft, plain and simple. If you pirate something, you no longer have to spend money to get said thing. If everyone does that, then people lose all chance of recouping the cost of creating what was pirated. If you can't recoup the cost, you can't create more. The cost of creating is owned money, you spend the money with the hopes of making it back, as well as enough to continue creating. Every loss of sale cuts into that. Copies reduce the value of the original as well, making it even harder to recoup the cost, if possible at all.
I see. So you're 100% correct and anyone who challenges you is 100% wrong. In my opinion, not even accounting for the possibility that you may be wrong is quite arrogant.
Yes, I will arrogantly say that I am correct. And you have yet to make a valid point in your argument to make me question otherwise. All you have is what you "think" and what your "opinion" is. Just because you don't agree with the law doesn't make it OK, and hell, even if the laws didn't exist, it would still be wrong and detrimental to the economy. There is no such thing as something for nothing.
What the pirates believe and what is reality are two very different things. They are criminals, they are breaking the law. It really is a black and white matter despite what those who want something for nothing think. They can bitch and moan about the MPAA/RIAA coming after them, but it is really simple how to avoid it in the first place and them saying that they think they should be able to download whatever they want is not going to hold up in court and they will lose.
I welcome you to counter my argument, your previous attempt did nothing sway my convictions.
Nonsense. There are movies I would like to watch but do not buy. I also do not download them. If I changed my mind about downloading them, they would not be losing a sale, proven by the fact that I am now simply not watching those movies rather than buying them.
Like to watch without buying is like saying there are cars I would like to drive but I wont buy them. You don't go break into one, take it for a joy ride, and give it back. This is a binary thing, either you want it or you don't. If you want it, you buy it. And just because the car is physical while movies are not does not mean they don't cost anything to produce. A lot of money went into producing that movie. The sale of the movie is what lets them recoup that.
I don't need to justify myself since I'm not illegally downloading anything. Nevertheless, despite my complete lack of any need to justify my actions in this regard, I am still of the opinion that downloading is not theft. Furthermore, even if I was downloading for personal use, I still wouldn't be a criminal. I could (in that hypothetical case) be sued but not arrested as non-commercial copyright violation does not violate any part of the criminal code in my country.
Opinion doesn't mean anything where law (civil or criminal) is concerned. You don't get to change how the system works just by saying that you don't think that that is how it should work.
Perhaps the clearest indicator that copyright violation is not theft is the existence of copyright laws. Since laws against theft precede copyright laws by thousands of years, if copyright violation was theft there would have been no need for copyright laws as offenders could have been prosecuted under the already existing laws against theft.
That makes no sense, copyright laws were created to help with non physical items. There were plenty of loopholes for people to weasel out of theft charges. There are a number of laws that were created after thousands of years of them not existing, but by your logic, they aren't needed because all contingencies were thought of thousands of years ago.
A work of art, be it music, video, or text, still takes time and effort to create and people have the right to demand compensation for their work from people wishing to benefit from it.
Although this thread has gone way off topic, I will throw in my two cents.
I once had a friend say it wasn't stealing because he wouldn't have bought it otherwise. This argument fails on so many levels. For you to have downloaded/copied it, you had to want it on some extent. If you didn't want it, you wouldn't download it. If you did, you would buy it. Since you did download it, you did want it, and therefore denied the owner the sale and revenue. Plus, if you can download what you marginally want and wouldn't buy otherwise, you are going to definitely download what you do want.
I have yet to meet someone who buys what they like and downloads what they don't, it is always an all or nothing.
Piracy is theft, plain and simple.
Any other argument is just lying to yourself to justify that you are not a criminal.
And I will admit that I used to pirate music, I stopped a long time ago and buy everything I want on CD or off of Amazon. The Amazon part is nice too because it kills the argument of not wanting to spend $20 on a CD since most CDs on Amazon/iTunes are $10 or less, and songs are usually $1, sometimes a little higher. Even videos are getting cheap when you can get episodes of TV shows at an average cost of $2.
We all used to complain that the MAFIAA wasn't changing to match technology, well they finally have and, really, all arguments pro piracy have dried up. The only thing I think they are failing with now are the stupid PSAs and commercials on every DVD I buy, but digital downloads are slowly taking care of that as well.
I am sure this will get modded down, but there you have it.
Yes, mainstream games and Linux don't mix at the moment, and probably never will sadly. As far video streaming and tax prep, Video streaming is working it's way there due to tablets, if any major distro (namely Ubuntu) releases a solid tablet that is more desktop than smartphone then I could see closed source plugins being developed for streaming. Tax prep is easier, they are already going full on web app, I say it give it 3-5 years and they won't be selling software anymore, so you can run it on anything. I think we are going to see a massive shift as far as the media industry is handling video in the next decade. It is a new (to them) tech that has been exploited by pirates and scared the crap out of them, the same as MP3. When companies like Netflix who could care less about DRM and just wants their software everywhere gets enough clout (like Amazon or Apple), we will see the removal of DRM from video like we did audio.
Except that a number of games and apps run on Mac as well as Windows, and there is no lack of FOSS out there to provide the same functionality in Linux as many Windows apps. Device support is getting to be pretty solid as well, I can't remember the last time I had trouble getting a device to work in Linux (granted I use Ubuntu).
There are no direct substitutes for OS, granted, but in the grand scheme of things, OS's are pretty new. Back to the car analogy, there were a small number of successful auto manufacturers back in the beginning. Some survived, many didn't, nowadays there is a (relatively) large number of brand options in the auto world.
We are already seeing a splintering of the traditional computer environment between desktops, smartphones, tablets, TVs, etc. I think with this we are going to see more of a splintering of OS's and apps as well, as well as more cross platform dev. Take the original story, MS is dropping plugins in the metro interface to use HTML5. While it sucks that H264 is licensed, it also works on practically every platform out there, and most media devices (TV's, Blurays, Game Consoles, Phones, etc.). I think this is a great thing, and kind of blow to MS in the OS environment. They have relinquished the reigns to there largest stranglehold on the market. With the PC moving to cloud storage and web based applications and a start towards a move to a media intense dev standard (I use the term standard loosely for the moment), the OS will become more disposable and really more preference of UI than anything else.
I grant this is all speculation, but it really seems to be where the industry is heading, and I for one hope that it continues. Certain things will never move, hardcore gaming will not be replaced by web apps, but then again, game consoles suffer the same problem that OS's do, there is no guarantee a game will be released on all platforms. Certain specialized apps will not make the transition either, but those will always be OS specific because of the cost of development and the fact that the cost of OS itself is not really an issue in most cases (think CAD software for instance).
Ok, think smaller then, the warranty on my TV ends and they stop supporting the model. They have no responsibility to replace my TV with one they support.
I figured as much, my point was that his argument was very flawed. I use Ubuntu and Windows, so I am not biased against one or the other. Just the idea that Linux is better because it is "older" than Windows XP was invalid.
And I am sure you are only using the apps and kernel that came out those 18 years ago, because there is no need to upgrade right. Linux is 18 years old and Windows is 26 years old. The XP version of Windows is 10 years old. Most Linux distros release new versions once a year or once every other year, some even more often, some less. I am sure you are going to argue that those new versions are not needed because version 1 is plenty useful and all you need.
but no matter what advances occur, a hammer will always be a hammer.
Yep, your right on that one. A hammer made of bone is just as useful as one made steel, why bother advancing. I guess an operating system will always be an operating system based on that logic. Just ignore the fact there are many different types of hammers out there for many different purposes, just like operating systems and applications.
Please make a relevant point.
Unless you are a die hard using the original version of linux with only apps released when it came out, I ask you to please make a relevant point.
We need to raise taxes period, and cut government spending. You can't keep cutting taxes and maintain our infrastructure, it just doesn't work. Police, Fire, Roads, Military, Public schools, etc are all funded by tax dollars, and a lot of them are seriously hurting financially these days (schools especially), but we also need to cut welfare programs (or at the very least regulate them better) and pet projects. I don't want to use a broad statement to say welfare or lobbying is bad, it most definitely has its positives for people and this country, but it is being abused and we have no real way to show this due to lack of regulation.
How businesses are handled needs to be changed as well. I'll admit I have more of a Randian approach to how I feel government should treat business. I feel meddling in company affairs should be limited, not eliminated per se. I support antitrust laws as long as they used correctly, but I feel that a large amount of business regulation is unnecessary. Keep any law that protects the worker, because are those are definitely needed. Eliminate most laws that prevent companies from being successful. A monopoly is prevention of choice (cable companies/internet/telcos that are locked into an area) but hurting a company because they are doing things right while their competitors aren't just to help their competitors needs to stop. Prime example of this would be the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit regarding Internet Explorer and Netscape. IE was good, Netscape sucked, plain and simple. I used both browsers and knew many people who did as well, and almost all of them preferred IE and it reflected in the market. But, since Netscape was failing, they attacked their competitor and tried to say it was because they offered it free, or that it was bundled with the OS.
That meddling goes both ways, our government should not be bailing out large companies. Bailing out large companies because they are "too big to fail" breaks the whole model removing the incentive to do things correctly as well as the punishment for not. It only helped out the big execs who used it as a chance to cut and run. It didn't help keep the doors open or save jobs, it just put more hurt on the people who will have to pay for it in the future. I think that was one of the biggest mistakes any administration could make.
Dishing out billions of tax dollars wasn't exactly a bad idea, though. Had that money been evenly split among taxpayers, it would have been a major jump start to the economy, because while some people would save their money, most would go out and spend it (either on bills or material items). That money would eventually trickle up to the top, through every level. This would require companies to hire more people to meet demand, in turn putting more money in people's pockets, starting the whole process over again and creating more tax dollars from more people working and spending. It gives big business a chance to right the problems they created, but requires them to do so if they want to survive. Everybody wins. Some will learn from their earlier mistakes, some won't, but that is human nature and there is nothing you can do about it.
I look at it like building a campfire. If you light the top of the pile, it will die out quickly and leave the tinder at the bottom unaffected. However, if you light it at the bottom, it will grow to engulf the whole pile. That being said, if they were to attempt this, it would have to be a very large payout per person to make it effective. The good thing is that a large portion would be recouped through sales tax and eventually income tax of the newly employed/promoted. I am not saying I support a move like this either, I am saying that it would have been more effective than bailing out big businesses.
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Yes, and larger, and heavier. You are paying for the form factor. Shall I compare you laptop to a much more powerful desktop that was cheaper?
drivers, not driver's
Actually, the driver's still work, but there is a greater risk of malicious code without the signing. They can still release the drivers. It falls on the consumer to take a risk to keep their 13+ year old (after 2014) OS. I still fail to see how this is Microsoft's problem.
How is this insightful?
It is on the burden of the hardware manufacturers to write drivers, not the OS developer. Especially for new hardware. How in any way does the blame fall on XP and Microsoft?
"We could possibly see drivers going 95 up to 100 miles per hour."
Hate to break it to Sandra, but that's the usual speed in many parts of the country.
FTFY
and may be hard to find. But the best book I always refer back to as what seriously started me on the path to being a programmer was Microsoft QuickBasic Primer Plus. QB may be old, but it is still available and the book is an amazing text as to the details of programming and why/how things work.
Except I am not repub. So you fail.
Yes, but the court system deals with frivolous cases on a daily basis which means that this one isn't special.
To be fair, it was the party that sued, not the state. So, in theory, tax payer money was not involved.
I just don't get the fearmongering.
It should be ticked on by default. Most people out there really don't care about being tracked. Tracking is extremely valuable to the market in terms ad conversion and sales. This allows businesses to stay in business and employ people. There are few people out there who really care at all about the fact that they are being tracked, and those people generally know how to find the privacy settings in a browser. No one is going to actively seek out a setting to allow websites to track them because if they don't care if they are tracked, they also don't care if they aren't.
I think that was definitely part of the reason for Unity, the other I am pretty sure was for Touch PCs which are starting to gain some popularity.
Since tablets are considered a fundamentally different device than a desktop/laptop, I feel this is where Linux could shine. Ubuntu always seemed to be in the best position to capitalize on it as well. I am anxious to see what they come up with because I would almost definitely ditch my iPad for an Ubuntu tablet. I should note that no machine in my regular use runs Ubuntu or any other form of Linux as it could not replace what I need my desktops and laptops to do.
Enterhost, been using them for over 8 years. Great service and a lot of bandwidth
Everything military is going civilian, when I got out of the USAF 4 years ago, they were in the process of outsourcing (or A-76'ing as it was called) all of the base support squadrons. Comm (which is where I was), Civil Engineering, and Mission Support were all going civilian to "save cost".
No, wanting it to some extent means you buy it or don't. This is a binary question. There are plenty of things in this world that I either can't afford or justify spending money on, and guess what, I don't have them. You don't get something for nothing just because you don't have or don't want to spend the money.
1) Then they don't get to have their cake and eat it too. If they don't want to spend money on it, they don't get to have it.
2) Then they don't get to have it.
3) Gray area at best
4) Most pirates fall into this category, I would be willing to put money on it.
And even if a person in the fourth category pirated something, I still do not believe that something was stolen. I believe that an act of copyright infringement (technically, all of them qualify) occurred and a chance to make a profit (potential profit) was lost. I only think that something is stolen if the original owner loses something that they already had (such as property or currently owned money), not just the chance to earn more money. I'm sure you can (and will) argue that copyright infringement is still harmful, but I didn't state anything about that.
Loss of potential sale is theft, plain and simple. If you pirate something, you no longer have to spend money to get said thing. If everyone does that, then people lose all chance of recouping the cost of creating what was pirated. If you can't recoup the cost, you can't create more.
The cost of creating is owned money, you spend the money with the hopes of making it back, as well as enough to continue creating. Every loss of sale cuts into that. Copies reduce the value of the original as well, making it even harder to recoup the cost, if possible at all.
I see. So you're 100% correct and anyone who challenges you is 100% wrong. In my opinion, not even accounting for the possibility that you may be wrong is quite arrogant.
Yes, I will arrogantly say that I am correct. And you have yet to make a valid point in your argument to make me question otherwise. All you have is what you "think" and what your "opinion" is. Just because you don't agree with the law doesn't make it OK, and hell, even if the laws didn't exist, it would still be wrong and detrimental to the economy. There is no such thing as something for nothing.
What the pirates believe and what is reality are two very different things. They are criminals, they are breaking the law. It really is a black and white matter despite what those who want something for nothing think. They can bitch and moan about the MPAA/RIAA coming after them, but it is really simple how to avoid it in the first place and them saying that they think they should be able to download whatever they want is not going to hold up in court and they will lose.
I welcome you to counter my argument, your previous attempt did nothing sway my convictions.
Nonsense. There are movies I would like to watch but do not buy. I also do not download them. If I changed my mind about downloading them, they would not be losing a sale, proven by the fact that I am now simply not watching those movies rather than buying them.
Like to watch without buying is like saying there are cars I would like to drive but I wont buy them. You don't go break into one, take it for a joy ride, and give it back. This is a binary thing, either you want it or you don't. If you want it, you buy it. And just because the car is physical while movies are not does not mean they don't cost anything to produce. A lot of money went into producing that movie. The sale of the movie is what lets them recoup that.
I don't need to justify myself since I'm not illegally downloading anything. Nevertheless, despite my complete lack of any need to justify my actions in this regard, I am still of the opinion that downloading is not theft. Furthermore, even if I was downloading for personal use, I still wouldn't be a criminal. I could (in that hypothetical case) be sued but not arrested as non-commercial copyright violation does not violate any part of the criminal code in my country.
Opinion doesn't mean anything where law (civil or criminal) is concerned. You don't get to change how the system works just by saying that you don't think that that is how it should work.
Perhaps the clearest indicator that copyright violation is not theft is the existence of copyright laws. Since laws against theft precede copyright laws by thousands of years, if copyright violation was theft there would have been no need for copyright laws as offenders could have been prosecuted under the already existing laws against theft.
That makes no sense, copyright laws were created to help with non physical items. There were plenty of loopholes for people to weasel out of theft charges. There are a number of laws that were created after thousands of years of them not existing, but by your logic, they aren't needed because all contingencies were thought of thousands of years ago.
A work of art, be it music, video, or text, still takes time and effort to create and people have the right to demand compensation for their work from people wishing to benefit from it.
Although this thread has gone way off topic, I will throw in my two cents.
I once had a friend say it wasn't stealing because he wouldn't have bought it otherwise. This argument fails on so many levels. For you to have downloaded/copied it, you had to want it on some extent. If you didn't want it, you wouldn't download it. If you did, you would buy it. Since you did download it, you did want it, and therefore denied the owner the sale and revenue. Plus, if you can download what you marginally want and wouldn't buy otherwise, you are going to definitely download what you do want.
I have yet to meet someone who buys what they like and downloads what they don't, it is always an all or nothing.
Piracy is theft, plain and simple.
Any other argument is just lying to yourself to justify that you are not a criminal.
And I will admit that I used to pirate music, I stopped a long time ago and buy everything I want on CD or off of Amazon. The Amazon part is nice too because it kills the argument of not wanting to spend $20 on a CD since most CDs on Amazon/iTunes are $10 or less, and songs are usually $1, sometimes a little higher. Even videos are getting cheap when you can get episodes of TV shows at an average cost of $2.
We all used to complain that the MAFIAA wasn't changing to match technology, well they finally have and, really, all arguments pro piracy have dried up. The only thing I think they are failing with now are the stupid PSAs and commercials on every DVD I buy, but digital downloads are slowly taking care of that as well.
I am sure this will get modded down, but there you have it.
Yes, mainstream games and Linux don't mix at the moment, and probably never will sadly. As far video streaming and tax prep, Video streaming is working it's way there due to tablets, if any major distro (namely Ubuntu) releases a solid tablet that is more desktop than smartphone then I could see closed source plugins being developed for streaming. Tax prep is easier, they are already going full on web app, I say it give it 3-5 years and they won't be selling software anymore, so you can run it on anything. I think we are going to see a massive shift as far as the media industry is handling video in the next decade. It is a new (to them) tech that has been exploited by pirates and scared the crap out of them, the same as MP3. When companies like Netflix who could care less about DRM and just wants their software everywhere gets enough clout (like Amazon or Apple), we will see the removal of DRM from video like we did audio.
Except that a number of games and apps run on Mac as well as Windows, and there is no lack of FOSS out there to provide the same functionality in Linux as many Windows apps. Device support is getting to be pretty solid as well, I can't remember the last time I had trouble getting a device to work in Linux (granted I use Ubuntu).
There are no direct substitutes for OS, granted, but in the grand scheme of things, OS's are pretty new. Back to the car analogy, there were a small number of successful auto manufacturers back in the beginning. Some survived, many didn't, nowadays there is a (relatively) large number of brand options in the auto world.
We are already seeing a splintering of the traditional computer environment between desktops, smartphones, tablets, TVs, etc. I think with this we are going to see more of a splintering of OS's and apps as well, as well as more cross platform dev. Take the original story, MS is dropping plugins in the metro interface to use HTML5. While it sucks that H264 is licensed, it also works on practically every platform out there, and most media devices (TV's, Blurays, Game Consoles, Phones, etc.). I think this is a great thing, and kind of blow to MS in the OS environment. They have relinquished the reigns to there largest stranglehold on the market. With the PC moving to cloud storage and web based applications and a start towards a move to a media intense dev standard (I use the term standard loosely for the moment), the OS will become more disposable and really more preference of UI than anything else.
I grant this is all speculation, but it really seems to be where the industry is heading, and I for one hope that it continues. Certain things will never move, hardcore gaming will not be replaced by web apps, but then again, game consoles suffer the same problem that OS's do, there is no guarantee a game will be released on all platforms. Certain specialized apps will not make the transition either, but those will always be OS specific because of the cost of development and the fact that the cost of OS itself is not really an issue in most cases (think CAD software for instance).
Ok, think smaller then, the warranty on my TV ends and they stop supporting the model. They have no responsibility to replace my TV with one they support.
When the warranty on my car ran out, Toyota didn't offer me a new car that they would support.
I figured as much, my point was that his argument was very flawed. I use Ubuntu and Windows, so I am not biased against one or the other. Just the idea that Linux is better because it is "older" than Windows XP was invalid.
"Windows XP is 10 years old OS."
Spoken like a Windows customer.
Linux is an 18 year old OS
And I am sure you are only using the apps and kernel that came out those 18 years ago, because there is no need to upgrade right. Linux is 18 years old and Windows is 26 years old. The XP version of Windows is 10 years old. Most Linux distros release new versions once a year or once every other year, some even more often, some less. I am sure you are going to argue that those new versions are not needed because version 1 is plenty useful and all you need.
but no matter what advances occur, a hammer will always be a hammer.
Yep, your right on that one. A hammer made of bone is just as useful as one made steel, why bother advancing. I guess an operating system will always be an operating system based on that logic. Just ignore the fact there are many different types of hammers out there for many different purposes, just like operating systems and applications.
Please make a relevant point.
Unless you are a die hard using the original version of linux with only apps released when it came out, I ask you to please make a relevant point.
We need to raise taxes period, and cut government spending. You can't keep cutting taxes and maintain our infrastructure, it just doesn't work. Police, Fire, Roads, Military, Public schools, etc are all funded by tax dollars, and a lot of them are seriously hurting financially these days (schools especially), but we also need to cut welfare programs (or at the very least regulate them better) and pet projects. I don't want to use a broad statement to say welfare or lobbying is bad, it most definitely has its positives for people and this country, but it is being abused and we have no real way to show this due to lack of regulation.
How businesses are handled needs to be changed as well. I'll admit I have more of a Randian approach to how I feel government should treat business. I feel meddling in company affairs should be limited, not eliminated per se. I support antitrust laws as long as they used correctly, but I feel that a large amount of business regulation is unnecessary. Keep any law that protects the worker, because are those are definitely needed. Eliminate most laws that prevent companies from being successful. A monopoly is prevention of choice (cable companies/internet/telcos that are locked into an area) but hurting a company because they are doing things right while their competitors aren't just to help their competitors needs to stop. Prime example of this would be the Microsoft antitrust lawsuit regarding Internet Explorer and Netscape. IE was good, Netscape sucked, plain and simple. I used both browsers and knew many people who did as well, and almost all of them preferred IE and it reflected in the market. But, since Netscape was failing, they attacked their competitor and tried to say it was because they offered it free, or that it was bundled with the OS.
That meddling goes both ways, our government should not be bailing out large companies. Bailing out large companies because they are "too big to fail" breaks the whole model removing the incentive to do things correctly as well as the punishment for not. It only helped out the big execs who used it as a chance to cut and run. It didn't help keep the doors open or save jobs, it just put more hurt on the people who will have to pay for it in the future. I think that was one of the biggest mistakes any administration could make.
Dishing out billions of tax dollars wasn't exactly a bad idea, though. Had that money been evenly split among taxpayers, it would have been a major jump start to the economy, because while some people would save their money, most would go out and spend it (either on bills or material items). That money would eventually trickle up to the top, through every level. This would require companies to hire more people to meet demand, in turn putting more money in people's pockets, starting the whole process over again and creating more tax dollars from more people working and spending. It gives big business a chance to right the problems they created, but requires them to do so if they want to survive. Everybody wins. Some will learn from their earlier mistakes, some won't, but that is human nature and there is nothing you can do about it.
I look at it like building a campfire. If you light the top of the pile, it will die out quickly and leave the tinder at the bottom unaffected. However, if you light it at the bottom, it will grow to engulf the whole pile. That being said, if they were to attempt this, it would have to be a very large payout per person to make it effective. The good thing is that a large portion would be recouped through sales tax and eventually income tax of the newly employed/promoted. I am not saying I support a move like this either, I am saying that it would have been more effective than bailing out big businesses.
That's my two cents anyway.