However, in this case, "second home" means this is the second home to be vandalized. The article describes the first home, owned by a different family in a different location.
From the article: "Last week, a teenager was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage after her family's £230,000 home near Sunderland was wrecked during a 'Skins' party.
Rachael Bell, 17, had also advertised the event on MySpace. Skins is a Channel 4 series in which teenagers behave appallingly"
This "party" was an advertisement on MySpace to show up at a vacant house that someone owns, break in, and completely and utterly trash the place. 200 kids showed up and from the look of the pictures got pretty creative in their destruction, and managed to trash the house to the tune of 30 thousand British pounds.
Look for "what could possibly go wrong" in the summary above.
Good point, I should have added that a proper home- or un- schooling environment would almost certainly require the occasional hiring of a surrogate/substitute instructor or tutor. Your kid's going to go off on tangents that you aren't going to be able to learn fast enough to help with, and even with a "home-school" curriculum, there are a lot of subjects best learned from a subject matter expert as a hands-on experience.
Better be. One lucky party will be crashed by Steve Ballmer, and you know what happens when HE sees a chair. The host or hostess would be well-advised to choose lightweight chairs. This will reduce the chance of back strain on His Steveness, and also reduce the risk of injury to your guests.
You know, it just occurred to me. Since so many LAN parties turn into Pirate Fests (dude!! you've got the latest (insert_game_or_movie_name_here), I suspect Microsoft is.. well... late to the party on this one.
I'm sure there is, at this very moment, a solid handful of LAN parties where cracked Windows 7 installs are happening.
And I'm sure the host of THOSE parties is receiving a full copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. OK, "full" except the install disc, and artwork, and a shiny hologram logo, and DRM...
Still, kudos to Microsoft for being inventive in their marketing.
Personally, I think it's a bad example because I think the collective IQ of America would go up considerably if "Lilo and Stitch" WERE to be vaulted away, say, forever. I'll vote for Disney to have a perpetual copyright on it as long as they promise never to sell it again. But I digress...
I guess that would depend on copyright versus trademark. The work itself is not being pursued for profit, therefore the movie could potentially become public domain. However, no doubt the artwork remains a trademark of Disney Co.
Well, I guess there's a vaguely happy medium to be had there. The character art remains trademarked, but the movie (other than the characters) becomes public domain. So I could write a movie called "Lehi and Scratch" using many of the behaviors and plot elements, should I be stupid enough to do so, but I can't use a.. umm.. well, what the hell IS "Stitch"? Anyway, I can't use whatever it is as my "Scratch" character.
Of course, should such a thing come to pass, Disney would probably simply get rid of their silly "vault" nonsense and exercise their copyright actively until it runs out. And there'd be a hell of a lot of lawmakers who'd owe them significant refunds of bribe money, so you know it's never gonna happen anyway.
The trouble is "guidance". I agree that a committed, competent, organized parent could probably pull this off, and end up with a very well-rounded and well-educated child. After all, the parent-teacher ratio is fantastic, and there are no discipline problems with "you're not my Mom, I don't have to do what you tell me to".
But, to succeed (at either college admissions or finding a desirable non-college job), a student has to have a balance of useful skills. If the parent lacks those skills, lacks the tools, or lacks the commitment to teach and promote those skills within their child, this could turn out really badly for the child.
There are lots of parents who are smart and organized enough to do this. There are a bunch who are ambitious enough to do it. There are some that are even committed enough to see it through. There are a few that have the time to do it. Unfortunately, there are just a small number with all four traits. We pay for Waldorf school for our daughter because I feel the method of education is worth the cost. I don't think we could take on this kind of task ourselves, though, which is why we chose what we feel is the best method then "hired experts" to do the heavy lifting.
I'm not saying home/non-schooling should be disallowed, but it's in society's best interests to educate as many kids as we can to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. So if a parent wants to do this, I'd say they should have to demonstrate the skills and commitment, then they can receive support, assistance, and above all constructive progress monitoring and feedback.
After all, if a parent succeeds, they've saved the school district a significant amount of money. It's well worth taking the parents who are willing and able to do this and supporting them as a volunteer force to take care of their own kids.
But if they fail, they cost society an even more significant sum. So the overarching priority is - is the parent accomplishing the task they have taken on? If they start faltering, intervene with assistance and constructive advice. If they start having real trouble, then the child should go to school.
But, I guess if there is a state-established guideline and monitoring, it becomes "home schooling" again, doesn't it?
Leprosy has this effect, and lepers need to perform what is called a VSE (Visual Survey of Extremities, fancy term for "look for cuts and bruises on yourself") frequently to prevent small cuts from getting infected, etc. So you have a good point there - if an animal doesn't know they are hurting themselves, they'll hurt themselves a lot worse and a lot more often. Without any tactile feedback, the animals are also going to be a lot harder to control.
The lifespan of these animals is going to be really short, and the meat is probably going to be of relatively poor quality.
Either that or the animals have to live their short miserable lives somehow cooped up in an expensive sterile environment, which would probably be worse than living a longer life outdoors followed by a short walk down a corridor to the quick and painless "brain basher".
Right, that was the "artificial scarcity" I mentioned. Disney is the epitome of that.
Hence the need for an "orphaned work" provision. If you lock the work up for a couple of years and don't demonstrate any effort to profit from it, then you lose your right to prevent others from profiting from it.
1. If purchasing it is not a value proposition to you, then ignore the work. "I wasn't going to buy the movie" means the movie is worth less than they charge. Fair enough. But they own the rights to the work, and they set the price. If you disagree with the price, call them and tell them that lowering it means you'll buy it. If everyone who pirated called the movie companies and said, "you know, I'd buy Matrix 12 if it was $2 less", someone in marketing might figure out that they've set their sweet spot a couple of bucks high.
2. Someone put work into that product, and if you don't intend to give them money for it, you don't get to take it.
3. Why would you want to risk a massive RIAA/MPAA settlement for a movie that sucked?
4. It's not their fault you think it doesn't, and if it's not a good movie by your standards, see #3.
5. Don't pay. Don't accept the terms. Don't buy the work within their terms, and don't take it outside their terms. Ignore the work. Problem solved.
6. Because piracy simply justifies DRM and stupid effing laws. The controls, though useless, get more and more complex and harder for paying customers to deal with.
If you demonstrate to the studios that their work has no value (or not enough value to justify their prices), they'll have to think about how to make their work have value or lower their prices. The only way to show that the work is valueless (or of lower value than their prices justify) that is to stop buying *and stop downloading* the work. Also state loudly your reasons for ignoring it, preferably to the studios who, after all, just want to sell movies.
If no one is accepting the present value of their work, then the studios can start realizing that they need to add more value or charge less. They might decide that, say, actually writing a good script is cheaper and makes a better product than millions of dollars in special effects. But right now, they are making what they think people value, because that means people are going to want it.
By downloading it, you are acknowledging that the work has value to you (which may be less than what they want to charge, but it obviously has value), but that you choose not to pay that value. You are assigning a value to it, because otherwise you wouldn't be going to the effort to download it and risking a multimillion-dollar settlement (at a very low chance of happening) to get it.
A side effect of piracy is that the RIAA/MPAA can then turn to our venerable Congresscritters and have new silly laws passed that eat away at legitimate user's rights and pay for stupid ads like "piracy = supporting terrorism". But the primary effect is to communicate that their works have value that people are willfully choosing not to pay.
I'm not saying the studios are right. By my standards, they charge too much for their work. But it's THEIR work to sell on their terms.
Generally I rent movies. If I don't like a movie, I don't buy it. I also don't download it illegally, because I don't like it. If I like a movie a whole lot and think I'll watch it again and again, I'll buy it, because the potential risk of having my life utterly ruined ain't worth saving $20 on a movie. Plus I don't want to feed the MPAA trolls.
If everyone who pirated a movie stopped, and instead approached the studio and said "gee, that movie really blew steaming monkey chunks, but it had some mild entertainment value, could you sell it to me as a download for $(name what you'd pay here) and save yourself the packaging and distribution costs?", the studios might just react by coming out with a reasonable download option. Then again, they might not, but at least they couldn't justify draconian new DRM schemes to "prevent piracy" - they'd see that their dropping sales really WERE a matter of their content sucking or being too expensive, and not because a bunch of freeloaders would rather take the content than pay for it.
You forgot having all of your neighbors chipped so if one of them happens to stop by and wants to watch a few minutes of the game, the system can shut itself down to protect you from infringement.
That'll be one standard RIAA settlement for content sharing, please. $200,000 for each neighbor within 1/4 mile (potential person you shared your content with) multiplied by the number of shows that have aired on all 1500 channels you get since you put the system in (potential content you shared).
>>>The same thing will happen, just with a large publisher with a huge sum of cash. The copyright never falls into the public domain, the artists get screwed and orphan works (as in works that are never released but still have copyright on them) still happen.
Why, pray tell, would a publisher pay good money to extend a copyright if they have no intention of releasing the works in some form of per-profit publication? The only reason I could see is to maintain an artificial rarity, which is a valid gripe, but maybe a copyright could be automatically terminated early if the product is not available for sale (orphan works are automatically considered "abandoned property" and become public domain after a year or two of non-publication, for example?).
I pretty much agree with the rest of your points, but the proposal is at least a significant improvement over our current system, which has utterly no provision to release orphaned works and no requirement for anyone to take action to protect a copyright that lasts longer than most people will live. As it stands, pretty much any work released during the course of my lifetime is something I will never be able to freely use to create a derivative or adaptive work.
We have Jimi Hendrix's family suing "Huey Lewis and the News" for stealing a 4-note riff from Purple Haze for "I want a new drug", when even the Huey Lewis song realistically should be public domain by now. And in Australia, where laws are similar, they have "Men at Work" being sued for "Do you come from a land down under" because the tune is somewhat reminiscent of the children's song "Kukaburra".
I'm all for protecting an artist's work for a reasonable time so they can make a profit, but "reasonable time" went away a long time ago, and the artist needs to come back to the table and demonstrate that they (or their agents) are still interested in making a profit on the work.
Right, but this won't be the same size as a "real" SSD which means if every file operation caches through this, the memory locations are going to wear out faster. On a full-sized SSD, you have enough memory locations to spread the load out.
Basically this is taking a disk cache and making it flash-based so (presumably) you can do true lazy-writes to disk because the data is safely tucked away on a flash. Flash is more expensive than spinny drives, so it makes sense I suppose, but it's a cheap fix - if performance is that important to you spend the dough and get SSD, and if it's not put in RAM and don't cache writes.
I agree, but why would Intel want to use flash memory for this? RAM is faster, has the capability of a LOT more read/write cycles, and could be backed up by a small battery in the case of short power outages (or maybe a battery big enough to run the hard drive long enough to flush the write buffer, as others have said).
This is essentially a cache, which means it's going to get a lot of reads and writes. Under those circumstances, the flash memory's going to wear out relatively quickly and unless it's easily replaceable it means everyone's going to need to buy new motherboards every year. How could forcing people to replace motherboards annually possibly benefit Intel? Oh, wait...
I read an article about Google starting to use the location data from Google Maps to analyze traffic patterns to determine where traffic was backed up, etc.
How am I being simplistic? I'm stating my opinion on my preference to equipment, and I've already stated that (if it means anything to you) I respect your right to a different opinion and different decision.
I have lots of things that work on standard USB connectors. For *my* use, in *my* opinion, I'd rather be able to transfer music and data (and electricity) to my various devices using a single, common, standard connector. And since most of my gear is not Apple, that connector cannot (by definition) be the Apple iPod/iPhone connector since they have patented it and control its use.
The original thread was a list of things the Apple iPhone is not capable of, and all I said was "it doesn't support a standard USB connection". To me, that's important. To you, it's obviously not. Isn't America great? Neither of us gets to tell the other one what to buy! I love this country!
As I said, "and yes, I know... 'because we can.'" I'm not trying to detract from the technical achievement. Merely pointing out that it is, in fact, probably a relatively pointless achievement.
I understand doing things "because you can, I carve my own kayak paddles when perfectly good ones are available for less than I spend on the cedar 2x4. But I prefer to do it myself and spend the time.
Are you talking about the word "violence" in a dictionary? The word isn't harmful.
If you're talking about actual physical violence, then we're not talking about speech any more. We're talking about physical violence, and if someone offers you violence you have a right to defend yourself.
I'm not clear on who you mean by "they" in "they find this little word". Are you saying that someone who is offended by something you said gets violent?
I don't see how reacting against someone who acts with violence toward you could be considered "racist", and you've totally lost me on "insensitive". In my book it's "self defense".
*IF* the 3G connection survived, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But the author himself merely replied "YES BUT DON'T DO IT" when asked if the 3G connection was still there.
Even with the loss of 3G, though, I suppose you have a good point. If you don't care about the thing talking, but you want to have a better index of books, or use it as a large GPS unit, or whatever, I suppose the tradeoff might be worth it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, the expression is common in America.
However, in this case, "second home" means this is the second home to be vandalized. The article describes the first home, owned by a different family in a different location.
From the article: "Last week, a teenager was arrested on suspicion of criminal damage after her family's £230,000 home near Sunderland was wrecked during a 'Skins' party.
Rachael Bell, 17, had also advertised the event on MySpace. Skins is a Channel 4 series in which teenagers behave appallingly"
This "party" was an advertisement on MySpace to show up at a vacant house that someone owns, break in, and completely and utterly trash the place. 200 kids showed up and from the look of the pictures got pretty creative in their destruction, and managed to trash the house to the tune of 30 thousand British pounds.
Look for "what could possibly go wrong" in the summary above.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-448842/MySpace-invaders-trash-second-home-tune-30-000.html
What's scary is that the article mentions that this is the SECOND home to be trashed in this manner.
Good point, I should have added that a proper home- or un- schooling environment would almost certainly require the occasional hiring of a surrogate/substitute instructor or tutor. Your kid's going to go off on tangents that you aren't going to be able to learn fast enough to help with, and even with a "home-school" curriculum, there are a lot of subjects best learned from a subject matter expert as a hands-on experience.
Better be. One lucky party will be crashed by Steve Ballmer, and you know what happens when HE sees a chair. The host or hostess would be well-advised to choose lightweight chairs. This will reduce the chance of back strain on His Steveness, and also reduce the risk of injury to your guests.
Think "inflatable".
You know, it just occurred to me. Since so many LAN parties turn into Pirate Fests (dude!! you've got the latest (insert_game_or_movie_name_here), I suspect Microsoft is.. well... late to the party on this one.
I'm sure there is, at this very moment, a solid handful of LAN parties where cracked Windows 7 installs are happening.
And I'm sure the host of THOSE parties is receiving a full copy of Windows 7 Ultimate. OK, "full" except the install disc, and artwork, and a shiny hologram logo, and DRM...
Still, kudos to Microsoft for being inventive in their marketing.
Hmm. Interesting wrinkle.
Personally, I think it's a bad example because I think the collective IQ of America would go up considerably if "Lilo and Stitch" WERE to be vaulted away, say, forever. I'll vote for Disney to have a perpetual copyright on it as long as they promise never to sell it again. But I digress...
I guess that would depend on copyright versus trademark. The work itself is not being pursued for profit, therefore the movie could potentially become public domain. However, no doubt the artwork remains a trademark of Disney Co.
Well, I guess there's a vaguely happy medium to be had there. The character art remains trademarked, but the movie (other than the characters) becomes public domain. So I could write a movie called "Lehi and Scratch" using many of the behaviors and plot elements, should I be stupid enough to do so, but I can't use a .. umm .. well, what the hell IS "Stitch"? Anyway, I can't use whatever it is as my "Scratch" character.
Of course, should such a thing come to pass, Disney would probably simply get rid of their silly "vault" nonsense and exercise their copyright actively until it runs out. And there'd be a hell of a lot of lawmakers who'd owe them significant refunds of bribe money, so you know it's never gonna happen anyway.
But a man can dream...
The trouble is "guidance". I agree that a committed, competent, organized parent could probably pull this off, and end up with a very well-rounded and well-educated child. After all, the parent-teacher ratio is fantastic, and there are no discipline problems with "you're not my Mom, I don't have to do what you tell me to".
But, to succeed (at either college admissions or finding a desirable non-college job), a student has to have a balance of useful skills. If the parent lacks those skills, lacks the tools, or lacks the commitment to teach and promote those skills within their child, this could turn out really badly for the child.
There are lots of parents who are smart and organized enough to do this. There are a bunch who are ambitious enough to do it. There are some that are even committed enough to see it through. There are a few that have the time to do it. Unfortunately, there are just a small number with all four traits. We pay for Waldorf school for our daughter because I feel the method of education is worth the cost. I don't think we could take on this kind of task ourselves, though, which is why we chose what we feel is the best method then "hired experts" to do the heavy lifting.
I'm not saying home/non-schooling should be disallowed, but it's in society's best interests to educate as many kids as we can to the highest level we can reasonably achieve. So if a parent wants to do this, I'd say they should have to demonstrate the skills and commitment, then they can receive support, assistance, and above all constructive progress monitoring and feedback.
After all, if a parent succeeds, they've saved the school district a significant amount of money. It's well worth taking the parents who are willing and able to do this and supporting them as a volunteer force to take care of their own kids.
But if they fail, they cost society an even more significant sum. So the overarching priority is - is the parent accomplishing the task they have taken on? If they start faltering, intervene with assistance and constructive advice. If they start having real trouble, then the child should go to school.
But, I guess if there is a state-established guideline and monitoring, it becomes "home schooling" again, doesn't it?
Leprosy has this effect, and lepers need to perform what is called a VSE (Visual Survey of Extremities, fancy term for "look for cuts and bruises on yourself") frequently to prevent small cuts from getting infected, etc. So you have a good point there - if an animal doesn't know they are hurting themselves, they'll hurt themselves a lot worse and a lot more often. Without any tactile feedback, the animals are also going to be a lot harder to control.
The lifespan of these animals is going to be really short, and the meat is probably going to be of relatively poor quality.
Either that or the animals have to live their short miserable lives somehow cooped up in an expensive sterile environment, which would probably be worse than living a longer life outdoors followed by a short walk down a corridor to the quick and painless "brain basher".
OK, that's far more interesting. :)
Right, that was the "artificial scarcity" I mentioned. Disney is the epitome of that.
Hence the need for an "orphaned work" provision. If you lock the work up for a couple of years and don't demonstrate any effort to profit from it, then you lose your right to prevent others from profiting from it.
Then don't download it.
1. If purchasing it is not a value proposition to you, then ignore the work. "I wasn't going to buy the movie" means the movie is worth less than they charge. Fair enough. But they own the rights to the work, and they set the price. If you disagree with the price, call them and tell them that lowering it means you'll buy it. If everyone who pirated called the movie companies and said, "you know, I'd buy Matrix 12 if it was $2 less", someone in marketing might figure out that they've set their sweet spot a couple of bucks high.
2. Someone put work into that product, and if you don't intend to give them money for it, you don't get to take it.
3. Why would you want to risk a massive RIAA/MPAA settlement for a movie that sucked?
4. It's not their fault you think it doesn't, and if it's not a good movie by your standards, see #3.
5. Don't pay. Don't accept the terms. Don't buy the work within their terms, and don't take it outside their terms. Ignore the work. Problem solved.
6. Because piracy simply justifies DRM and stupid effing laws. The controls, though useless, get more and more complex and harder for paying customers to deal with.
If you demonstrate to the studios that their work has no value (or not enough value to justify their prices), they'll have to think about how to make their work have value or lower their prices. The only way to show that the work is valueless (or of lower value than their prices justify) that is to stop buying *and stop downloading* the work. Also state loudly your reasons for ignoring it, preferably to the studios who, after all, just want to sell movies.
If no one is accepting the present value of their work, then the studios can start realizing that they need to add more value or charge less. They might decide that, say, actually writing a good script is cheaper and makes a better product than millions of dollars in special effects. But right now, they are making what they think people value, because that means people are going to want it.
By downloading it, you are acknowledging that the work has value to you (which may be less than what they want to charge, but it obviously has value), but that you choose not to pay that value. You are assigning a value to it, because otherwise you wouldn't be going to the effort to download it and risking a multimillion-dollar settlement (at a very low chance of happening) to get it.
A side effect of piracy is that the RIAA/MPAA can then turn to our venerable Congresscritters and have new silly laws passed that eat away at legitimate user's rights and pay for stupid ads like "piracy = supporting terrorism". But the primary effect is to communicate that their works have value that people are willfully choosing not to pay.
I'm not saying the studios are right. By my standards, they charge too much for their work. But it's THEIR work to sell on their terms.
Generally I rent movies. If I don't like a movie, I don't buy it. I also don't download it illegally, because I don't like it. If I like a movie a whole lot and think I'll watch it again and again, I'll buy it, because the potential risk of having my life utterly ruined ain't worth saving $20 on a movie. Plus I don't want to feed the MPAA trolls.
If everyone who pirated a movie stopped, and instead approached the studio and said "gee, that movie really blew steaming monkey chunks, but it had some mild entertainment value, could you sell it to me as a download for $(name what you'd pay here) and save yourself the packaging and distribution costs?", the studios might just react by coming out with a reasonable download option. Then again, they might not, but at least they couldn't justify draconian new DRM schemes to "prevent piracy" - they'd see that their dropping sales really WERE a matter of their content sucking or being too expensive, and not because a bunch of freeloaders would rather take the content than pay for it.
You forgot having all of your neighbors chipped so if one of them happens to stop by and wants to watch a few minutes of the game, the system can shut itself down to protect you from infringement.
That'll be one standard RIAA settlement for content sharing, please. $200,000 for each neighbor within 1/4 mile (potential person you shared your content with) multiplied by the number of shows that have aired on all 1500 channels you get since you put the system in (potential content you shared).
>>>The same thing will happen, just with a large publisher with a huge sum of cash. The copyright never falls into the public domain, the artists get screwed and orphan works (as in works that are never released but still have copyright on them) still happen.
Why, pray tell, would a publisher pay good money to extend a copyright if they have no intention of releasing the works in some form of per-profit publication? The only reason I could see is to maintain an artificial rarity, which is a valid gripe, but maybe a copyright could be automatically terminated early if the product is not available for sale (orphan works are automatically considered "abandoned property" and become public domain after a year or two of non-publication, for example?).
I pretty much agree with the rest of your points, but the proposal is at least a significant improvement over our current system, which has utterly no provision to release orphaned works and no requirement for anyone to take action to protect a copyright that lasts longer than most people will live. As it stands, pretty much any work released during the course of my lifetime is something I will never be able to freely use to create a derivative or adaptive work.
We have Jimi Hendrix's family suing "Huey Lewis and the News" for stealing a 4-note riff from Purple Haze for "I want a new drug", when even the Huey Lewis song realistically should be public domain by now. And in Australia, where laws are similar, they have "Men at Work" being sued for "Do you come from a land down under" because the tune is somewhat reminiscent of the children's song "Kukaburra".
I'm all for protecting an artist's work for a reasonable time so they can make a profit, but "reasonable time" went away a long time ago, and the artist needs to come back to the table and demonstrate that they (or their agents) are still interested in making a profit on the work.
Right, but this won't be the same size as a "real" SSD which means if every file operation caches through this, the memory locations are going to wear out faster. On a full-sized SSD, you have enough memory locations to spread the load out.
Basically this is taking a disk cache and making it flash-based so (presumably) you can do true lazy-writes to disk because the data is safely tucked away on a flash. Flash is more expensive than spinny drives, so it makes sense I suppose, but it's a cheap fix - if performance is that important to you spend the dough and get SSD, and if it's not put in RAM and don't cache writes.
I agree, but why would Intel want to use flash memory for this? RAM is faster, has the capability of a LOT more read/write cycles, and could be backed up by a small battery in the case of short power outages (or maybe a battery big enough to run the hard drive long enough to flush the write buffer, as others have said).
This is essentially a cache, which means it's going to get a lot of reads and writes. Under those circumstances, the flash memory's going to wear out relatively quickly and unless it's easily replaceable it means everyone's going to need to buy new motherboards every year. How could forcing people to replace motherboards annually possibly benefit Intel? Oh, wait...
I read an article about Google starting to use the location data from Google Maps to analyze traffic patterns to determine where traffic was backed up, etc.
Randomly-found article using, what else?, google: http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/google-uses-your-mobile-to-end-traffic-jams-629554
Anyway, just another example where we know the data is being collected, but somehow it feels less comfortable when the data gets used.
Won't stop me from using it if I get to a city where there might be enough cars to actually use the data.
Well, it's got Ubuntu and a USB port. Of COURSE it'll blend... :)
How am I being simplistic? I'm stating my opinion on my preference to equipment, and I've already stated that (if it means anything to you) I respect your right to a different opinion and different decision.
I have lots of things that work on standard USB connectors. For *my* use, in *my* opinion, I'd rather be able to transfer music and data (and electricity) to my various devices using a single, common, standard connector. And since most of my gear is not Apple, that connector cannot (by definition) be the Apple iPod/iPhone connector since they have patented it and control its use.
The original thread was a list of things the Apple iPhone is not capable of, and all I said was "it doesn't support a standard USB connection". To me, that's important. To you, it's obviously not. Isn't America great? Neither of us gets to tell the other one what to buy! I love this country!
As I said, "and yes, I know... 'because we can.'" I'm not trying to detract from the technical achievement. Merely pointing out that it is, in fact, probably a relatively pointless achievement.
I understand doing things "because you can, I carve my own kayak paddles when perfectly good ones are available for less than I spend on the cedar 2x4. But I prefer to do it myself and spend the time.
Simple: "More than I'm willing to pay." :)
Good question. Let me give it a tr...
Sorry, I'm apparently missing your point.
Are you talking about the word "violence" in a dictionary? The word isn't harmful.
If you're talking about actual physical violence, then we're not talking about speech any more. We're talking about physical violence, and if someone offers you violence you have a right to defend yourself.
I'm not clear on who you mean by "they" in "they find this little word". Are you saying that someone who is offended by something you said gets violent?
I don't see how reacting against someone who acts with violence toward you could be considered "racist", and you've totally lost me on "insensitive". In my book it's "self defense".
My post was not critical of the Kindle, per se. I haven't a use for one myself, but I recognize that others do.
My criticism was directed at the utility of hacking a Kindle and replacing the operating system.
*IF* the 3G connection survived, I'd be inclined to agree with you. But the author himself merely replied "YES BUT DON'T DO IT" when asked if the 3G connection was still there.
Even with the loss of 3G, though, I suppose you have a good point. If you don't care about the thing talking, but you want to have a better index of books, or use it as a large GPS unit, or whatever, I suppose the tradeoff might be worth it.
Then the correct answer is "NO", at least to the public. :)