Would it be too much trouble to give customers an RSA SecurID, so it would be impossible for them to give their password to some third party person, without being ultimately stupid, and handing them a physical device. Real two factor authentication would be great.
You're assuming the banks want actual security or have any particular external motivation.
Actual security is expensive and inconvenient. If the banks can push responsibility off onto their customers or some other party, what motivation do they have to implement actual security?
And, given that the banking lobby is one of the most powerful in the United States -- and we've just seen that they successfully pushed responsibility for one of the most spectacular catastrophic economic failures onto the State -- why would they have any trouble pushing responsibility off onto others?
Leopard messed up audio programs of all kinds until Apple finally got around to addressing the issues with the.3 update. The recent.8 update screwed up some people's wireless connectivity. It hasn't been that long since some early adopters lost entire volumes of data when they upgraded.
Snow Leopard is supposed to be fixes, tweaks, and improvements, so maybe this one is a better bet, but still, I can't see myself pre-ordering.
Of course, the government option will have to be as good as any private insurance, right?... It will have to cheaper than private insurance. The whole point is universal coverage. That means the poor should be able to afford it as well. The only way the poor will be able to afford it is if it's cheap. So now you have a competitor to the private sector that is just as good or better than the private sector, at half the cost. It is financed by the American taxpayer so it can profit is not a concern. For that matter, it doesn't have to break even. It can lose billions of dollars every single year and it does not matter.
Now tell me. How long do you think it will take before every private health insurance company is out of business?
A couple of points:
1) The most important one first: even if we do end up with a true single payer system, comparisons with NHS still aren't apt. There are important distinctions between even a true nationalized health insurance system and a nationalized health care industry which make the concerns described in the quote from your linked article unlikely.
2) It's likely that the discounted coverage for the poor won't be the price that's available to everyone. The private sector won't have to compete across the income scale on an uneven playing field, it will simply be an uncompetitive option in a market segment it already has demonstrated it doesn't know how to provide service to.
3) However vast the public budget is, it's a limited pie and even the largest state institutions have finite pieces. Competition for investment is different, but it exists. Nor do all state entities run at a loss. The U.S. postal service (despite laws that state it should strive to be revenue neutral) runs at a profit that's reached into 10 figures over the last decade.
Still, it's true that some programs seem to be given accounting-defying resources. If this is a basic concern, it'd seem that it might be as easily addressed by crafting policy with appropriate limits on the program's resources as a simple taboo on state operation in a given sector.
4) While it's possible that some private insurers will fold if they're confronted with sizeable state competition, I also have a measure of faith that the private sector sometimes really does unleash creative energy on a problem when faced with a real challenge. It's possible insurers might step it up a notch and learn to provide more cost effective service rather than continuing a general trajectory of borderline collusive gamesmanship and rent-seeking. And if it's true they can't outdo the proverbial government bureaucrats when it comes time to, it doesn't much help the case that we should have our insurance needs met privately.
If an insurance company screws over enough of its customers, word gets out and it loses its customers and goes out of business. It has to keep a vast majority of its customers happy or they'll become the competition's customers.
That's how markets operate in ideal circumstances. That doesn't mean all markets behave that way. Insurance is one of these markets for a wide variety of reasons. It's never as simple for a customer to go to the competition in the insurance world -- even if you're in the rare position of owning an individual policy or controlling the policy selection of a group, by the nature of the business, once you need the service, it make business sense for insurers to be reluctant to provide it to you. You can't simply sign up for another insurer to take care of the chronic illness you've discovered if you're unhappy with the service of the current one.
And reputation is a limited check at best. The huge degree of information asymmetry between businesses and consumers might be enough alone to introduce problems with any ad hoc reputation system -- and this isn't just theoretical, as an example, the aforementioned MEGA Life & Health company apparently still has enough customers to shrug off a recent $20 million dollar fine.
First off: credit to you for presenting an actual policy argument in a time when so many conservatives appear to have completely lost their minds.
That said, a couple of problems with the argument.
The first: in general, if the central core of an argument relies on an examination of how rationing works in a system with a fully nationalized industry, then it's not likely to be an apt comparison.
The system under discussion when we talk about the "public option" isn't anywhere near a single-payer system -- let alone actual socialized medicine like the NHS. There are real distinctions between these, they don't all collapse into insignificant differences behind an event horizon of government involvement as some people seem to suggest. If you think about it, unless all medical professionals are employed by the government (NHS) or there are explicit laws against personal funding of medical care, the scenario you quoted from the article is simply impossible. And I haven't seen any evidence that anything like either of those provisions is in the proposed legislation.
The second one... like rationing, there's no getting around the fact that someone will decide who gets treatments and, who doesn't. The state is far from a completely trustworthy entity, and I'd agree in an instant that wherever it has *any* responsibility -- let alone over life and death -- there needs to be real watchfulness and accountability. The thing is, the mechanisms for this are already at least to some degree built into our state system. There's nothing comparable in private insurance. A lot of the "market forces" that work to make private enterprise efficient and responsive in other industries aren't present here: insurance isn't driven by studied consumer choice, you can't easily make another choice and move to another insurer once you've developed a need for the insurance, and there's a *huge* information and power asymmetry between most insurers and their clients. Even the courts don't work well as mechanisms of accountability. MEGA Life & Health has been in and out of court for bad faith denial of claims and has settled or been ruled against in class action lawsuits... and they're still out there, operating and selling.
Handing anybody power over life and death is worthy of close examination, but the fact is, someone will have to do it. It's far from clear that the government is any less trustworthy than the private sector, and it's at least theoretically more accountable.
Is there evidence that the journalists referenced in the article in any way distorted facts during the election?
If not, and they were simply pro-Obama, is their evidence or even a good argument that their support was based in zombie-like fervor rather than studied consideration?
Similarly, is there evidence that their decision to enter public service after the election wasn't
Finally, what evidence exists that these journalists represent a critical mass of journalists as a whole?
A pithy summary for a document that no one for a moment disputed was false based on its contents.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
The mainstream broadcast media has their problems, and certainly biases, but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.
It's time for telcos to stop being telcos and start being wireless data providers. Selling bits instead of services is fundamental to net neutrality. I know that breaks their business models, but too bad.
If we're going to just regard it as "too bad" if something doesn't fit their business model, then that's more or less an admission that this service shouldn't be a part of the private sector anymore. Businesses should be able to pursue their private interests, investors should be able to get returns.
Not that I think you're necessarily wrong -- if it's not already, it may soon be time for a different way of handling wireless communication infrastructure.
Why on earth geeks continue to view Apple as a Good Company boggles my mind.
Partly because you're at best partly right about your assertions. On a closed-open spectrum, Apple's hardly crammed up entirely against the left hand side, as a number of open sourced projects they've contributed to or created demonstrate. And given the focus they put on consumer experience, it's tenuous to argue that they're "anti-consumer," however common and accepted it may be here because they don't offer a handful of features developers tend to heavily favor. And to top it off, they make pretty good technology. Cocoa Touch is a pretty compelling mobile development platforms in terms of smoothness of actual development.
All that said: I agree, this is a pretty evil move, and the way they handle the App Store approval in general doesn't inspire much trust or enthusiasm for learning even a very slick mobile platform. It's certainly something I'm going to consider next time I think about an iPhone project. And I was already thinking about canceling my AT&T prepaid plan, but I think this is going to push me over the edge. Not that any mobile carrier wouldn't have done the same, but this is one way of sending a message.
This may be just yet another reason to migrate to Silverlight, especially for intranet applications.
Other than the large security problem of handing Microsoft any degree of weight in the market for internet clients.
Particularly given Microsoft's history, which suggests they barely have the slightest idea of how to create anything secure, chances are that Silverlight's record has a lot to do with its small market share.
But mostly, they're simple not trustworthy. We saw what they did with IE6. Even if you ignore the rest of their history, trusting them is foolish.
The artist can publish on his own. The label can not sing on their own. The asymmetry is thus in the artist's favor.
Or would be, if there were fewer artists than labels, rather than a surfeit of people interested in making music for a living that's greater than the number of effective labels by a few orders of magnitude.
The artist is not compelled to sell to a particular label any more than you are compelled to work for a particular employer.
This is a pretty good analogy, but I'd say it highlights the problems rather than the freedoms. Problematic clauses are nearly default boilerplate for most employment agreements and you're only as uncompelled to work for any given employer as you are able to go without employment.
Going back to that, as abolishing copyrights will ensure, will not only be sad, but also unfair. Makers of things tangible do enjoy the right to own their creations (or pre-sell them, as most workers do). Why should the creators of "imaginary" property be cursed with their works being unsellable, as anyone able to copy them gets the same rights as the author?
While I realize it's the top level topic at hand, I don't believe I made any statements supporting the abolition of copyright, and I certainly wouldn't mean to, given that I'm of the opinion that copyright *should* be preserved, if scaled back somewhat from where it is now to somewhere closer to the original bargain.
I *do* take issue with the conception of ideas as actual property, though. There's enough obvious differences that it's a tenuous parallel, and there's enough negative consequences -- as the article for this thread points out -- that it's dangerous as well. The idea of copyrights and patents as a policy bargain is much safer and probably more fair.
This cracks me up. You're probably too young to remember the "nattering nabobs of negativism", but this is a perfect example.
I believe I was alive when Agnew said it, but yes, too young, though I'm enough of an amateur student of politics and recent history that I'm familiar with the phrase and its origin and the career of the attached politician.
You mention two objections to this technology:
1) We can't do this
Did I say we couldn't do it? I don't believe I did. I mentioned two concerns that are worth balancing against a need for energy. *You've* transformed that into a dichotomy in which the idea that there might be tension between two valid needs or principles tends to fall by the wayside, but I can assure you, I don't mean it that way at all.
You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
How clever are *you* feeling now that you realize your basic take on my statement is wrong?
the fact that copyright allows labels to benefit from sales more than artists is THE FAULT OF THE ARTIST for signing away forever and ever rights in exchange for an advance from the label.
While it's always good to remind people that they're the ones who sign on problematic contracts, ignoring the power asymmetries between parties is a formula for misunderstanding a situation.
Especially since today a record label is largely obsolete.
A few months ago I heard the frontman of a platinum-selling 90s band who's turned independent said "In case you're wondering if it's possible to succeed without music industry and marketing people, the answer is no." This is a guy with a huge legacy fanbase who's been working hard regularly releasing stuff for the last decade, some free on the internet, allows live recording and tape trading, and yes, he blogs and uses myspace and twitter and what have you. And yes, the music is decent.
I recognize there's cases where people have been able to leverage the internet to achieve a certain popularity or even level of meme-hood, and that music blogs and review sites have created whole markets where they have as much control as labels in some genres, and we're certainly at a point where independent artists can do a lot more bootstrapping than they used to, but bootstrapping all the way to a career and sustaining it is still difficult on your own.
Maybe we'll get to the points where labels are irrelevant, but we're not there yet, and at least part of the job a label does will *never* be obsolete.
Don't bother. PETA and Greenpeace both called and said it'll kill too many endagered fish species.
While PETA and Greenpeace may have different definitions of "too many" than you do, balancing concern about impacts on fish stocks with concerns about energy is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that fish are part of our food supply (and food chain).
There's also issues like whether or not a given fresh water supply might have better uses.
Google had a total revenue of $ 5,508,990 (5.5 billion) in Q1 2009. If Microsoft had to reimburse them for half of that each quarter, it would hurt.
How much would it hurt if they were capturing some significant portion of that revenue as the new alternative to Google?
As in, reason enough to trigger a big wave of Apple and Linux migrations.
This *might* be true for the crowd that's abandoned MS Office in favor of Google apps, but it's far from clear that the majority of people love their search engine enough to abandon an investment in their existing operating environment.
Finally, it would be a good reason for the DOJ to start a new round of anti-trust legislation. Last time, Microsoft got off easy because the DOJ under Bush was no longer interested in harsh penalties. But they cannot be sure of getting that kind of rescue again.
It's also far from certain they'd get any kind penalty harsh enough to deter them. Microsoft took a lesson from that last round and learned to lobby. They likely have more friends in Washington across the political spectrum than they did last time, and they're certainly more sophisticated than they used to be. The kind of penalties that would have to be hanging over their head to act as an absolute deterent would be something between being barred from a market that's important to them to being actually broken up. Anything else will simply become part of the financial calculus: if they stand to gain anywhere near as much ground as Google might lose in a dirty-play scenario, even if they have to pay substantial fines on top of that over the short term, it might well be worthwhile to them.
Microsoft was almost stopped. The Clinton Justice Department had MS on the ropes. But when Bush came into office his Justice Department let them off without even a slap on the wrist.
Which is to say, they were not stopped. It's possible that a different executive and judicial environment might result in actual punishment, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion, and Microsoft has learned to lobby in the last 10 years.
Did I need Windows? For anything? No
You don't need windows. I don't need it for anything other than testing sites under IE. That freedom plus and awareness of alternatives make us fortunate, but also a small percentage of the computer-using population.
MS would never do such a thing. It would utterly ruin their reputation as a company (especially among businesses), and expose them to massive legal liabilities, and they would gain nothing of any use from it.
Legal liabilities? The threat from those would have to be pretty big. Again, they were willing to drop 45 billion. How sure are you that the legal liabilities you're thinking of would cost them more than that? Particularly, say, if they were able to steal the top search spot from Google because of this kind of tactic? I'd think the only threat that'd be big enough to really be a deterrent here would be the breakup of the company, and I don't see any reason to believe the government would actually do that.
And reputation? There's a lot of evidence that Microsoft sometimes simply values winning and control over reputation. You force people to need you, you don't need to care how they feel about it seems to have been their operative philosophy.
I'm not saying it's a move you should expect to see tomorrow. But if for any reason Microsoft either gets scared or smells blood in the water, nobody should think it's impossible and certainly not that it's beyond the company's makeup to want to try such a thing.
But computers have millions of times the RAM that they did in the 1980s. There's no longer any need for tight code, and compact data structures. Sadly, the value of knowing assembler is waning.
I say this as someone who's pretty far from an assembly prorammer -- I've only studied and worked with it in school. But near as I can tell, this isn't its only nor its most important value. The value of learning assembly is in no small measure about having some idea of what's going on under the hood when you're writing in a higher level language (eg what does the machine actually do when you make a function call?).
Most of this technology wasn't developed by Toyota, it was developed by research labs in the US and by college grad students, sadly, companies take advantage of these less fortunate and steel what others have created and claim it as their own.
If that's demonstrably true, then for the cost of a good lawyer or two (expensive, but probably less than actual R&D), it should be straightforward to get around any patent restrictions by showing the research as evidence of prior art.
Please, tepples, do a little bit of research. Learn a little bit about the design of nuclear power plants
I suspect the GP is referring to the potential for nuclear power technology to be diverted into weapons building, not to the probability we will be blown up by malfunctioning plants themselves, and while this risk can be mitigated if you're careful about regulation, it can't really be dismissed as nonsense.
I'm a fan of the e70, and it's a nice phone, but other than bluetooth tethering and mobility across GSM providers, there's not much in terms of objective advantages to it vs the iPhone.
who hasn't had a business need for multiple levels of aggregates (eg averages of sums across multiple groupings, say "average across all customers' total balances") As it is, you end up splitting the logic between the database and the application
This is one class of problem Prolog or Datalog or some other variant would be great at, and I often wish not so much that I had a non-relational database as I had a better way of querying relational data.
Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of. I know it's all sorts of fun and games to bash MS on slashdot
Funny, I don't even buy their software frequently. And I've *still* been a victim of a bunch of their practices over almost two decades, from having to work around ridiculous problems with DOS to having to having to work around ridiculous problems in their web browser. Given their level of success and the unprecedented resources they have to bring to bear on a given problem -- particularly in the case of IE6 where they basically gave the idea of advancing the web as a platform (and every web developer who built on it) a giant silent middle finger for five years *after* they conspired to "cut off the air supply" of a viable competitor -- pushing these issues onto the backs of everyday devs is a pretty crappy thing to do. Maybe it's only kindof miserable, rather than "rape." But given the number of man hours lost to these flaws, "theft" is nearly an apt metaphor.
So, perhaps rape is over the top. Perhaps it's merely theft or abuse, perhaps both are metaphors or even hyperbole. In any case, I'm glad it's worked out for YOU as a customer, and hey, feel free to keep buying from them if that's your choice. But it's been pretty far from a picnic for a lot of people building on top of their platform (to say nothing of competitors coming up against their market manipulation).
I'd say chances are that it isn't so much that you *haven't* been negatively impacted by Microsoft software and their business practices, it's that you haven't really considered how their development and business practices have impacted the industry and by extension your options and costs as a customer.
There was a report referenced on slashdot a while ago where over 90% of the money for a work is collected in the first 5 years.
For all kinds of creative and technical work across the board? That's surprising enough that I have to remain skeptical, though I'd naturally be interested in seeing a cite for the study.
And 90% of all new business ventures fail. Should the government give them bailouts for the first 5 years to see if they can work?
The differences between control over an invention or creative work and a "bailout" are many and large enough that this is a pretty tenuous connection.
And stop that crap about how it takes so long to get published. You don't have copyright until it's published
This is actually false. You have copyright for something (in the US, at any rate) as soon as you've created it (and fixed the work in some medium of expression, IIRC). You don't even have to register it with the copyright office (unless you're going to seek statutory damages).
you have NDA's which are PERMANENT until rescinded
NDAs are pretty much orthogonal to copyright concerns, a work that's protected by one doesn't usually need to be protected by the other, and any concerns about one would therefore be unaddressed by a change in the other.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be too much trouble to give customers an RSA SecurID, so it would be impossible for them to give their password to some third party person, without being ultimately stupid, and handing them a physical device. Real two factor authentication would be great.
You're assuming the banks want actual security or have any particular external motivation.
Actual security is expensive and inconvenient. If the banks can push responsibility off onto their customers or some other party, what motivation do they have to implement actual security?
And, given that the banking lobby is one of the most powerful in the United States -- and we've just seen that they successfully pushed responsibility for one of the most spectacular catastrophic economic failures onto the State -- why would they have any trouble pushing responsibility off onto others?
Leopard messed up audio programs of all kinds until Apple finally got around to addressing the issues with the .3 update. The recent .8 update screwed up some people's wireless connectivity. It hasn't been that long since some early adopters lost entire volumes of data when they upgraded.
Snow Leopard is supposed to be fixes, tweaks, and improvements, so maybe this one is a better bet, but still, I can't see myself pre-ordering.
Of course, the government option will have to be as good as any private insurance, right? ... It will have to cheaper than private insurance. The whole point is universal coverage. That means the poor should be able to afford it as well. The only way the poor will be able to afford it is if it's cheap. So now you have a competitor to the private sector that is just as good or better than the private sector, at half the cost. It is financed by the American taxpayer so it can profit is not a concern. For that matter, it doesn't have to break even. It can lose billions of dollars every single year and it does not matter.
Now tell me. How long do you think it will take before every private health insurance company is out of business?
A couple of points:
1) The most important one first: even if we do end up with a true single payer system, comparisons with NHS still aren't apt. There are important distinctions between even a true nationalized health insurance system and a nationalized health care industry which make the concerns described in the quote from your linked article unlikely.
2) It's likely that the discounted coverage for the poor won't be the price that's available to everyone. The private sector won't have to compete across the income scale on an uneven playing field, it will simply be an uncompetitive option in a market segment it already has demonstrated it doesn't know how to provide service to.
3) However vast the public budget is, it's a limited pie and even the largest state institutions have finite pieces. Competition for investment is different, but it exists. Nor do all state entities run at a loss. The U.S. postal service (despite laws that state it should strive to be revenue neutral) runs at a profit that's reached into 10 figures over the last decade.
Still, it's true that some programs seem to be given accounting-defying resources. If this is a basic concern, it'd seem that it might be as easily addressed by crafting policy with appropriate limits on the program's resources as a simple taboo on state operation in a given sector.
4) While it's possible that some private insurers will fold if they're confronted with sizeable state competition, I also have a measure of faith that the private sector sometimes really does unleash creative energy on a problem when faced with a real challenge. It's possible insurers might step it up a notch and learn to provide more cost effective service rather than continuing a general trajectory of borderline collusive gamesmanship and rent-seeking. And if it's true they can't outdo the proverbial government bureaucrats when it comes time to, it doesn't much help the case that we should have our insurance needs met privately.
If an insurance company screws over enough of its customers, word gets out and it loses its customers and goes out of business. It has to keep a vast majority of its customers happy or they'll become the competition's customers.
That's how markets operate in ideal circumstances. That doesn't mean all markets behave that way. Insurance is one of these markets for a wide variety of reasons. It's never as simple for a customer to go to the competition in the insurance world -- even if you're in the rare position of owning an individual policy or controlling the policy selection of a group, by the nature of the business, once you need the service, it make business sense for insurers to be reluctant to provide it to you. You can't simply sign up for another insurer to take care of the chronic illness you've discovered if you're unhappy with the service of the current one.
And reputation is a limited check at best. The huge degree of information asymmetry between businesses and consumers might be enough alone to introduce problems with any ad hoc reputation system -- and this isn't just theoretical, as an example, the aforementioned MEGA Life & Health company apparently still has enough customers to shrug off a recent $20 million dollar fine.
With
First off: credit to you for presenting an actual policy argument in a time when so many conservatives appear to have completely lost their minds.
That said, a couple of problems with the argument.
The first: in general, if the central core of an argument relies on an examination of how rationing works in a system with a fully nationalized industry, then it's not likely to be an apt comparison.
The system under discussion when we talk about the "public option" isn't anywhere near a single-payer system -- let alone actual socialized medicine like the NHS. There are real distinctions between these, they don't all collapse into insignificant differences behind an event horizon of government involvement as some people seem to suggest. If you think about it, unless all medical professionals are employed by the government (NHS) or there are explicit laws against personal funding of medical care, the scenario you quoted from the article is simply impossible. And I haven't seen any evidence that anything like either of those provisions is in the proposed legislation.
The second one... like rationing, there's no getting around the fact that someone will decide who gets treatments and, who doesn't. The state is far from a completely trustworthy entity, and I'd agree in an instant that wherever it has *any* responsibility -- let alone over life and death -- there needs to be real watchfulness and accountability. The thing is, the mechanisms for this are already at least to some degree built into our state system. There's nothing comparable in private insurance. A lot of the "market forces" that work to make private enterprise efficient and responsive in other industries aren't present here: insurance isn't driven by studied consumer choice, you can't easily make another choice and move to another insurer once you've developed a need for the insurance, and there's a *huge* information and power asymmetry between most insurers and their clients. Even the courts don't work well as mechanisms of accountability. MEGA Life & Health has been in and out of court for bad faith denial of claims and has settled or been ruled against in class action lawsuits... and they're still out there, operating and selling.
Handing anybody power over life and death is worthy of close examination, but the fact is, someone will have to do it. It's far from clear that the government is any less trustworthy than the private sector, and it's at least theoretically more accountable.
Fox News does not compete with CNN or the other "real" news sources.
The last time I turned on CNN they were devoting hours to coverage of Michael Jackson.
The second to last time I turned on CNN they spent at least 15 minutes on Brittney Spears.
The last time I was watching some other cable news station, they were reading twitter feeds and talking about them.
I'm not sure what broadcast cable does anymore, but I'm pretty sure it's not particularly "real" news.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/03/world/americas/03iht-journalists.1.19890938.html
Perhaps you could explain the point here.
Is there evidence that the journalists referenced in the article in any way distorted facts during the election?
If not, and they were simply pro-Obama, is their evidence or even a good argument that their support was based in zombie-like fervor rather than studied consideration?
Similarly, is there evidence that their decision to enter public service after the election wasn't
Finally, what evidence exists that these journalists represent a critical mass of journalists as a whole?
Dan Rather: "Fake but accurate."
A pithy summary for a document that no one for a moment disputed was false based on its contents.
You're just another shill who has a bent, nothing more and nothing less. Take off the rose colored glasses, and stop pretending that only one part of the media manipulates.
The mainstream broadcast media has their problems, and certainly biases, but nobody else in broadcast media working on an out-and-out agenda at the scale that Fox works.
It's time for telcos to stop being telcos and start being wireless data providers. Selling bits instead of services is fundamental to net neutrality. I know that breaks their business models, but too bad.
If we're going to just regard it as "too bad" if something doesn't fit their business model, then that's more or less an admission that this service shouldn't be a part of the private sector anymore. Businesses should be able to pursue their private interests, investors should be able to get returns.
Not that I think you're necessarily wrong -- if it's not already, it may soon be time for a different way of handling wireless communication infrastructure.
Why on earth geeks continue to view Apple as a Good Company boggles my mind.
Partly because you're at best partly right about your assertions. On a closed-open spectrum, Apple's hardly crammed up entirely against the left hand side, as a number of open sourced projects they've contributed to or created demonstrate. And given the focus they put on consumer experience, it's tenuous to argue that they're "anti-consumer," however common and accepted it may be here because they don't offer a handful of features developers tend to heavily favor. And to top it off, they make pretty good technology. Cocoa Touch is a pretty compelling mobile development platforms in terms of smoothness of actual development.
All that said: I agree, this is a pretty evil move, and the way they handle the App Store approval in general doesn't inspire much trust or enthusiasm for learning even a very slick mobile platform. It's certainly something I'm going to consider next time I think about an iPhone project. And I was already thinking about canceling my AT&T prepaid plan, but I think this is going to push me over the edge. Not that any mobile carrier wouldn't have done the same, but this is one way of sending a message.
This may be just yet another reason to migrate to Silverlight, especially for intranet applications.
Other than the large security problem of handing Microsoft any degree of weight in the market for internet clients.
Particularly given Microsoft's history, which suggests they barely have the slightest idea of how to create anything secure, chances are that Silverlight's record has a lot to do with its small market share.
But mostly, they're simple not trustworthy. We saw what they did with IE6. Even if you ignore the rest of their history, trusting them is foolish.
The artist can publish on his own. The label can not sing on their own. The asymmetry is thus in the artist's favor.
Or would be, if there were fewer artists than labels, rather than a surfeit of people interested in making music for a living that's greater than the number of effective labels by a few orders of magnitude.
The artist is not compelled to sell to a particular label any more than you are compelled to work for a particular employer.
This is a pretty good analogy, but I'd say it highlights the problems rather than the freedoms. Problematic clauses are nearly default boilerplate for most employment agreements and you're only as uncompelled to work for any given employer as you are able to go without employment.
Going back to that, as abolishing copyrights will ensure, will not only be sad, but also unfair. Makers of things tangible do enjoy the right to own their creations (or pre-sell them, as most workers do). Why should the creators of "imaginary" property be cursed with their works being unsellable, as anyone able to copy them gets the same rights as the author?
While I realize it's the top level topic at hand, I don't believe I made any statements supporting the abolition of copyright, and I certainly wouldn't mean to, given that I'm of the opinion that copyright *should* be preserved, if scaled back somewhat from where it is now to somewhere closer to the original bargain.
I *do* take issue with the conception of ideas as actual property, though. There's enough obvious differences that it's a tenuous parallel, and there's enough negative consequences -- as the article for this thread points out -- that it's dangerous as well. The idea of copyrights and patents as a policy bargain is much safer and probably more fair.
This is odd, because Boingo has an OS X client for accessing their service. If Verizon is using them as the provider, why would it be locked out?
This cracks me up. You're probably too young to remember the "nattering nabobs of negativism", but this is a perfect example.
I believe I was alive when Agnew said it, but yes, too young, though I'm enough of an amateur student of politics and recent history that I'm familiar with the phrase and its origin and the career of the attached politician.
You mention two objections to this technology:
1) We can't do this
Did I say we couldn't do it? I don't believe I did. I mentioned two concerns that are worth balancing against a need for energy. *You've* transformed that into a dichotomy in which the idea that there might be tension between two valid needs or principles tends to fall by the wayside, but I can assure you, I don't mean it that way at all.
You may even consider yourself particularly clever because cynicism and negativism pass for intelligence in these degenerate days.
How clever are *you* feeling now that you realize your basic take on my statement is wrong?
the fact that copyright allows labels to benefit from sales more than artists is THE FAULT OF THE ARTIST for signing away forever and ever rights in exchange for an advance from the label.
While it's always good to remind people that they're the ones who sign on problematic contracts, ignoring the power asymmetries between parties is a formula for misunderstanding a situation.
Especially since today a record label is largely obsolete.
A few months ago I heard the frontman of a platinum-selling 90s band who's turned independent said "In case you're wondering if it's possible to succeed without music industry and marketing people, the answer is no." This is a guy with a huge legacy fanbase who's been working hard regularly releasing stuff for the last decade, some free on the internet, allows live recording and tape trading, and yes, he blogs and uses myspace and twitter and what have you. And yes, the music is decent.
I recognize there's cases where people have been able to leverage the internet to achieve a certain popularity or even level of meme-hood, and that music blogs and review sites have created whole markets where they have as much control as labels in some genres, and we're certainly at a point where independent artists can do a lot more bootstrapping than they used to, but bootstrapping all the way to a career and sustaining it is still difficult on your own.
Maybe we'll get to the points where labels are irrelevant, but we're not there yet, and at least part of the job a label does will *never* be obsolete.
Don't bother. PETA and Greenpeace both called and said it'll kill too many endagered fish species.
While PETA and Greenpeace may have different definitions of "too many" than you do, balancing concern about impacts on fish stocks with concerns about energy is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, given that fish are part of our food supply (and food chain).
There's also issues like whether or not a given fresh water supply might have better uses.
Google had a total revenue of $ 5,508,990 (5.5 billion) in Q1 2009. If Microsoft had to reimburse them for half of that each quarter, it would hurt.
How much would it hurt if they were capturing some significant portion of that revenue as the new alternative to Google?
As in, reason enough to trigger a big wave of Apple and Linux migrations.
This *might* be true for the crowd that's abandoned MS Office in favor of Google apps, but it's far from clear that the majority of people love their search engine enough to abandon an investment in their existing operating environment.
Finally, it would be a good reason for the DOJ to start a new round of anti-trust legislation. Last time, Microsoft got off easy because the DOJ under Bush was no longer interested in harsh penalties. But they cannot be sure of getting that kind of rescue again.
It's also far from certain they'd get any kind penalty harsh enough to deter them. Microsoft took a lesson from that last round and learned to lobby. They likely have more friends in Washington across the political spectrum than they did last time, and they're certainly more sophisticated than they used to be. The kind of penalties that would have to be hanging over their head to act as an absolute deterent would be something between being barred from a market that's important to them to being actually broken up. Anything else will simply become part of the financial calculus: if they stand to gain anywhere near as much ground as Google might lose in a dirty-play scenario, even if they have to pay substantial fines on top of that over the short term, it might well be worthwhile to them.
Microsoft was almost stopped. The Clinton Justice Department had MS on the ropes. But when Bush came into office his Justice Department let them off without even a slap on the wrist.
Which is to say, they were not stopped. It's possible that a different executive and judicial environment might result in actual punishment, but it's hardly a foregone conclusion, and Microsoft has learned to lobby in the last 10 years.
Did I need Windows? For anything? No
You don't need windows. I don't need it for anything other than testing sites under IE. That freedom plus and awareness of alternatives make us fortunate, but also a small percentage of the computer-using population.
MS would never do such a thing. It would utterly ruin their reputation as a company (especially among businesses), and expose them to massive legal liabilities, and they would gain nothing of any use from it.
Gain nothing? They'd cripple their biggest competitor in a market that they offered almost 45 billion dollars just to compete in.
Legal liabilities? The threat from those would have to be pretty big. Again, they were willing to drop 45 billion. How sure are you that the legal liabilities you're thinking of would cost them more than that? Particularly, say, if they were able to steal the top search spot from Google because of this kind of tactic? I'd think the only threat that'd be big enough to really be a deterrent here would be the breakup of the company, and I don't see any reason to believe the government would actually do that.
And reputation? There's a lot of evidence that Microsoft sometimes simply values winning and control over reputation. You force people to need you, you don't need to care how they feel about it seems to have been their operative philosophy.
I'm not saying it's a move you should expect to see tomorrow. But if for any reason Microsoft either gets scared or smells blood in the water, nobody should think it's impossible and certainly not that it's beyond the company's makeup to want to try such a thing.
But computers have millions of times the RAM that they did in the 1980s. There's no longer any need for tight code, and compact data structures. Sadly, the value of knowing assembler is waning.
I say this as someone who's pretty far from an assembly prorammer -- I've only studied and worked with it in school. But near as I can tell, this isn't its only nor its most important value. The value of learning assembly is in no small measure about having some idea of what's going on under the hood when you're writing in a higher level language (eg what does the machine actually do when you make a function call?).
Most of this technology wasn't developed by Toyota, it was developed by research labs in the US and by college grad students, sadly, companies take advantage of these less fortunate and steel what others have created and claim it as their own.
If that's demonstrably true, then for the cost of a good lawyer or two (expensive, but probably less than actual R&D), it should be straightforward to get around any patent restrictions by showing the research as evidence of prior art.
Please, tepples, do a little bit of research. Learn a little bit about the design of nuclear power plants
I suspect the GP is referring to the potential for nuclear power technology to be diverted into weapons building, not to the probability we will be blown up by malfunctioning plants themselves, and while this risk can be mitigated if you're careful about regulation, it can't really be dismissed as nonsense.
I'm a fan of the e70, and it's a nice phone, but other than bluetooth tethering and mobility across GSM providers, there's not much in terms of objective advantages to it vs the iPhone.
who hasn't had a business need for multiple levels of aggregates (eg averages of sums across multiple groupings, say "average across all customers' total balances") As it is, you end up splitting the logic between the database and the application
This is one class of problem Prolog or Datalog or some other variant would be great at, and I often wish not so much that I had a non-relational database as I had a better way of querying relational data.
Funny, we've been a customer of Microsoft's for 20 years and have yet to experience this "raping" you speak of. I know it's all sorts of fun and games to bash MS on slashdot
Funny, I don't even buy their software frequently. And I've *still* been a victim of a bunch of their practices over almost two decades, from having to work around ridiculous problems with DOS to having to having to work around ridiculous problems in their web browser. Given their level of success and the unprecedented resources they have to bring to bear on a given problem -- particularly in the case of IE6 where they basically gave the idea of advancing the web as a platform (and every web developer who built on it) a giant silent middle finger for five years *after* they conspired to "cut off the air supply" of a viable competitor -- pushing these issues onto the backs of everyday devs is a pretty crappy thing to do. Maybe it's only kindof miserable, rather than "rape." But given the number of man hours lost to these flaws, "theft" is nearly an apt metaphor.
So, perhaps rape is over the top. Perhaps it's merely theft or abuse, perhaps both are metaphors or even hyperbole. In any case, I'm glad it's worked out for YOU as a customer, and hey, feel free to keep buying from them if that's your choice. But it's been pretty far from a picnic for a lot of people building on top of their platform (to say nothing of competitors coming up against their market manipulation).
I'd say chances are that it isn't so much that you *haven't* been negatively impacted by Microsoft software and their business practices, it's that you haven't really considered how their development and business practices have impacted the industry and by extension your options and costs as a customer.
There was a report referenced on slashdot a while ago where over 90% of the money for a work is collected in the first 5 years.
For all kinds of creative and technical work across the board? That's surprising enough that I have to remain skeptical, though I'd naturally be interested in seeing a cite for the study.
And 90% of all new business ventures fail. Should the government give them bailouts for the first 5 years to see if they can work?
The differences between control over an invention or creative work and a "bailout" are many and large enough that this is a pretty tenuous connection.
And stop that crap about how it takes so long to get published. You don't have copyright until it's published
This is actually false. You have copyright for something (in the US, at any rate) as soon as you've created it (and fixed the work in some medium of expression, IIRC). You don't even have to register it with the copyright office (unless you're going to seek statutory damages).
you have NDA's which are PERMANENT until rescinded
NDAs are pretty much orthogonal to copyright concerns, a work that's protected by one doesn't usually need to be protected by the other, and any concerns about one would therefore be unaddressed by a change in the other.