Need to look at the death rate by day of week for the general population. If people in general are more likely to die on these days, then a higher mortality rate in surgery on these days is not as surprising as you may think.
My google-fu is lacking at the moment, but I seem to recall reading a study a few years ago which showed that among the general population there's a higher mortality rate on Fridays and Saturdays, too. Unfortunately, right now all I'm finding is a 1983 study done in Australia which showed that the perinatal and infant mortality rates follow this pattern.
You could also buy a storage locker at the far end and leave the monitors there (assuming you don't have an apartment or office you could leave them at)... if you travel often enough, it'll be more economical that way. You aren't factoring in the cost of extra oversize baggage.
But I expect he was, badly, trying to make a comparison to the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea or some such. What really tips his hand that he's not actually a Canadian is that the question that shows up on job applications in this country is "have you ever been convicted of an offense for which a pardon has not been granted." It's ridiculously easy to get a pardon in this country, an issue which has been the subject of national-level debate in parliament. If he's too stupid to fill out a form and wait 6-8 weeks for his pardon to come through, then he deserves to be flipping burgers, which is a job where they don't even ask that question.
Simply having been accused and acquitted of a crime is *not* grounds for refusing to hire somebody and doesn't even show up on a normal background check. There's absolutely no reason to mention it during the hiring process.
Besides which, most employers won't actually deny you a job if you answer "yes" to that question. They just want to know about it going into it. We had to let somebody go a few months ago because he'd lied and put "no" after having been convicted of fraud, and the irony is that if he had simply said "yes", it wouldn't have affected his eligibility for the job. I guess it's not fraud if you're honest about it.;)
Another time, a loaded pistol passed through in an inappropriate container. A screening supervisor felt confident that he could remove the pistol and unload it. I didn't feel uncomfortable about it -- I'm okay around guns. He obviously knew what he was doing as well. But people freaked out just the same. The image was saved.
you may have just posted the only known instance of the TSA doing their job...
If I'm gaming on my laptop, I don't do it on battery. If I'm mobile, while 3W will make a difference in the long-run, it won't make anywhere near as big a difference as turning down the screen brightness will.
Ultimately it comes down to price for the average consumer... and while the Intel offering is more expensive on paper, at the retail point of sale, I expect that the AMD offering will end up being the same as the Intel offering in the low-end laptop market: you can already get i3-based laptops for $400 without having to buy a netbook, and I doubt that the manufacturers are going to leap at the chance to sell AMD for cheaper when consumers have already demonstrated that they'll pay that price point for a low end system.
In the price range the A4's comes in, Intel doesnt have any competitive chips. Not a single one at all.
In the mobile sphere, where something like the A4 is most likely to actually be used (since they're touting the power consumption), you can easily find $400 laptops with Intel i3 in them. Unless the AMD offering produces laptops in the sub-$300 range without sacrificing things like having a real keyboard or a screen larger than a netbook, then that price point is irrelevant: the manufacturers will happily eat the increased profit, and you the consumer will end up paying the same at the till.
As regards your signature, BTW, you realize that in 1997, MSIE *was* a better browser than all of the competition? IE didn't win out because of the bundling, though that helped, it won out because it was the better product until Phoenix (later Firefox) came along, and that was 5 years after the quote you claim. All of the bloat and proprietary bullshit that people accuse IE of doing these days (and which isn't actually true for MSIE 9 or MSIE 10)? Yeah... Mozilla was doing that in the mid and late 90's.
An i3 is a perfectly good CPU for casual gaming. Hell, I've been known to game on my laptop's Sandy Bridge Celeron U3600 1.2GHz dual core... it's not a hardcore gaming system, but it is quite usable when I'm not at home to use my desktop. There are quite a few games that will run quite acceptably on it, including most of my Steam library. (Civ5 is a hog, but that game is always CPU-heavy, and running it under Wine on a Celeron is painful).
The AMD system, apparently, won't be as good or even usable, in that role. And since they say that the i3 matches the A4 in power consumption when idle (which is 90% of the use of this system), why on earth would I buy the A4 for a laptop? If I want to maximize battery life, I'll buy another Celeron or Pentium, and if I want a good compromise I'll buy an i3 and still be better off than the A4.
And don't start kvetching about the price point either... this was a $430 laptop when I bought it, and it had the Intel in it. For a 13.3" laptop that weighs 3.2lbs, I challenge you to find an AMD-based offering in the same class without going to a netbook.
Except that it's not... it's a post-paid plan from a company that will subsidize the cost of a new phone if I decide I need to buy one. Nationwide network, no roaming fees, no long distance charges, and they don't charge extra to allow tethering.
They deal with phone subsidies as a running tab, which can have a balance between -$150 and $150, and to which 10% of the monthly fee is applied. If I cancel the service, I pay off whatever's left on the tab and walk away: that is the only ETP I incur. If I choose to buy a new phone, I can choose whether to use the tab to subsidize it or not, up to a maximum of $300 towards the phone if my previous balance is $150. And if I choose not to use the tab at all, I can opt out of it as long as I don't owe them money on it, and get 10% off my monthly bill.
My $60/mo gets me functionally unlimited domestic calling (5pm unlimited evenings/weekends, unlimited incoming, and 250 daytime minutes) and 6GB of 4G data, along with the usual suspects: call display/voicemail/3-way calling/call waiting, unilimited SMS/MMS and unlimited international SMS.
There's something very wrong with your cell phone company then. My monthly fee is advertised as $60, and I pay $60 to the cell phone company. Harmonized sales taxes get applied to the bill, as with anything (that's not the Cell phone company false advertising, that's legislation that requires the advertised price not include tax), and every month I pay $67.80 for my service, with no term contract. That price has never gone up, and even though the plan I currently have is no longer offered, they have not made any move to try to force me on to one of their new plans.
Please tell me that you leave an "acceptable" tip for "acceptable" service, and you're not that guy who goes out with his co-workers and stiffs the waiter, leaving everyone else to subsidize you just out of embarrassment. (That's also usually the guy who tries to get the whole table on a single check, so he can chip in just the price of his entree, rounded down. Not the beverage, not his portion of anything he shared, like the cheesy-potato-finger-burrito-fries appetizer. Not the tax. And certainly not the tip. "That service was not excellent".)
It's actually quite common, in some parts of the world, to add a 20% gratuity to the bill automatically when there is a large group of people eating together, because it makes the discussion easier when you're dividing up the bill. In some parts of the world, it's expected that the gratuity will be added to the bill for smaller groups or individuals as well.
Quite honestly, I prefer to go to a restaurant that does this than one that doesn't, because I know people who work in the service industry and who don't make a living wage because of cheap tippers. Similarly, I would prefer to go to a restaurant that pools the tips as well, and I always make a point of asking the server whether the owner takes a cut from the gratuity, as the answer to that question will determine how big a tip I leave: if half of the money is going to the owner, I'll leave a smaller tip and find some other way to give the gratuity directly to the server. I'd rather that the minimum wage for servers be raised to match the minimum wage for the rest of us, but since that's unlikely to happen....
If thousands of customers did this, I think AT&T would just remove the fee entirely.
I don't. The most you could possibly get if you went that route would be your $0.61, and the court filing costs which, depending on where you are, could be as little as $10. If thousands of customers did it, ATT would shrug and say "ok, at least our millions of other customers didn't... the one-time cost will be paid for by the increase within a month or two".
No, but a cell phone bill in arrears/collections won't hurt your credit rating. (depending on jurisdiction, blah blah)
So if they charge automatically to your credit card, tell your credit card that you had terminated service because they breached the contract, and that the charge is fraudulent. When I did that with my credit card, the charges were reversed, and the cell phone company in question never bothered to even try the collections route, because the credit card company had sent them a registered letter informing them of the reason the charge was reversed.
Since driving does involve a huge set of skills that cannot be fully learned without practice, raising the driving age will only have the effect of pushing the high accident rate group to still be the first age group allowed to drive
You've missed the point of what I was getting at though. It's not that people who are new to driving have a higher rate of accidents, it's that you take people who are new to driving, and give them something else new to do which lowers their inhibitions and impairs their judgement. Not only are they still learning how to drive safely, they're also learning how to drink safely.
It's not that I want to raise the driving age, it's that I want people to learn to drink safely before they're allowed behind the wheel of a car.
Not only won't that cost you $15/mile, you'll spend less on alcohol, too. Don't excuse being an idiot just because there's a lack of public transportation.
Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.
As for raising the driving age to 22? I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.
Global reach... Cellular carriers pay a ton of money to pass SMS between carriers when they don't have a peering agreement, which is why a lot of cellular providers all over the world either don't offer international SMS, or charge a lot for it.
That's changing though... the carrier I'm with has peering agreements with enough carriers around the world that they give me unlimited international MMS/SMS messaging included in the base plan (even the $25/mo entry level plan).
3 years ago, BBM on my Android device would have been huge. Today? I don't see the point. None of my friends still have Blackberry, and I can already communicate with people around the world using Google Talk or SMS. Google Talk also lets me make free international long distance phone calls, while still only has the same limitations that BBM does: it's effectively insecure and only works with other people who subscribe to it.
Yes... but TFA (and TFS) says that they're threatening to tell the neighbours. Marquess of Queensberry rules. Literally.... (look up Oscar Wilde, if you don't get the reference)
I'm not ashamed of my sexuality. I don't pirate porn, largely because the majority of it is fake and really poor quality (I'm not in the target audience), but let them tell my neighbours. They'll get hit with a defamation lawsuit pretty quickly.
And my neighbours have been able to wrap their heads around the fact that I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipping lesbian hippie who goes to festivals where witchcraft is practiced from time to time, I think they won't have any problem understanding that I may look at porn occasionally too.
so everything is only created solely for profit. sounds false.
Profit may not necessarily be financial, but every single thing that has ever been produced by humans for the entire history of our species has been done for profit of some sort.
Without getting into philosophical arguments about the ethics of it, content-creators have a vested interest in wanting to preserve distribution rights for the product they are making. We can argue until we run out of breath about whether DRM is the right way for them to do it, about its technical limitations, etc., but the fact is that nobody has provided them with an alternative to DRM that they like, and we simply can't force them to adopt what we want them to do. To do so would be to run counter to the free speech argument that most people hold up as the reason they're opposed to DRM in the first place: they have a right to speak or not speak in whichever way they want.
Given that there's no way they're giving up on DRM in the current climate, we're left with another question: should that content be on the web or not? That's a question that you, the consumer, need to decide. Personally, I like Netflix, I subscribe to it, and I'm happy to pay for it, despite its being encumbered with DRM. I find i get good value from their service. To me, yes, they do belong on the web, and as long as there's consumers like me who believe that they should be allowed to pay their money for such a service, that service belongs on the web regardless of your individual ideology.
Now given the choice between an ecosystem where everybody has their proprietary apps and one where everybody uses the same app, I would happily take the second one. While the first method works fine for my Android phone, that's because Android has enough market penetration to actually be worth targetting. It's still a platform where not everybody has made the switch, but it's big enough that people are noticing it. The same cannot be said for my Linux-based laptop.
And that leaves me with a choice, as far as the laptop is concerned: I can give up on watching content like this on the laptop (not really an option), I can install Windows (which would require paying extra: the laptop came with Linux preinstalled and no license for Windows), or I can decide that allowing DRM into the web standard isn't that bad an idea, because it means a standard API for accessing the content and I don't have to worry about whether the provider will get around to building a specific client for my laptop.
I'd *like* it to be DRM-free, and some content is DRM-free (sites like youtube or blip.tv for example), I also recognize that there's content which isn't free that I want to be able to use. If you don't want it to have DRM, then I'll refer you back to my first paragraph, where you'll find the answer to how to get them to stop using it: give them something else that they like more.
The loss itself may not be, but if you beat somebody up for their phone it's still a violent crime.
I think the more interesting statistic is that 579 cell phone/tablet thefts accounts for 41% of violent crime. Even if we assume that all 579 thefts were violent in nature, that's still only 1412 violent crimes. In a city the size of San Francisco over that time period, wouldn't the "think of the children" lobby have us believe that the rate is much higher?
Likely WOW is losing to those games that offer a better free to play or non subscriber fee gaming experience.
That's where I went. I didn't feel like paying a monthly tithe for the privilege of being called a fag. (btw, if you're going to use a slur, use the right one: it's dyke).
I like the freemium model that some games employ, especially when they don't significantly unbalance the game. It means I can decide how much the game is actually worth to me, and many of the costs incurred are one-time costs.
If Apple had allowed PC manufacturers to ship OS X at Windows 8 launch, then it could be very well standard desktop OS by now. But Apple chose not to 1-up Microsoft in order to avoid diluting their brand, so OS X remains confined to the high-price niche.
They've been down the grey box path before, and there's a reason they don't do it. The whole reason that 10 years ago Apple had a reputation for reliability and Windows had a reputation for being crashtastic was that Apple had control of the hardware environment and didn't have to worry about relying on 3rd parties to develop drivers.
Windows 7 is better than XP was, to say nothing of the whole 9X line, but Apple is still better in that respect. If they allow 3rd party vendors into the ecosystem again, then they lose control over the hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
Need to look at the death rate by day of week for the general population. If people in general are more likely to die on these days, then a higher mortality rate in surgery on these days is not as surprising as you may think.
My google-fu is lacking at the moment, but I seem to recall reading a study a few years ago which showed that among the general population there's a higher mortality rate on Fridays and Saturdays, too. Unfortunately, right now all I'm finding is a 1983 study done in Australia which showed that the perinatal and infant mortality rates follow this pattern.
You could also buy a storage locker at the far end and leave the monitors there (assuming you don't have an apartment or office you could leave them at)... if you travel often enough, it'll be more economical that way. You aren't factoring in the cost of extra oversize baggage.
Dominion of Canada... constitutional monarchy.
But I expect he was, badly, trying to make a comparison to the Democratic Peoples' Republic of Korea or some such. What really tips his hand that he's not actually a Canadian is that the question that shows up on job applications in this country is "have you ever been convicted of an offense for which a pardon has not been granted." It's ridiculously easy to get a pardon in this country, an issue which has been the subject of national-level debate in parliament. If he's too stupid to fill out a form and wait 6-8 weeks for his pardon to come through, then he deserves to be flipping burgers, which is a job where they don't even ask that question.
Simply having been accused and acquitted of a crime is *not* grounds for refusing to hire somebody and doesn't even show up on a normal background check. There's absolutely no reason to mention it during the hiring process.
Besides which, most employers won't actually deny you a job if you answer "yes" to that question. They just want to know about it going into it. We had to let somebody go a few months ago because he'd lied and put "no" after having been convicted of fraud, and the irony is that if he had simply said "yes", it wouldn't have affected his eligibility for the job. I guess it's not fraud if you're honest about it. ;)
Another time, a loaded pistol passed through in an inappropriate container. A screening supervisor felt confident that he could remove the pistol and unload it. I didn't feel uncomfortable about it -- I'm okay around guns. He obviously knew what he was doing as well. But people freaked out just the same. The image was saved.
you may have just posted the only known instance of the TSA doing their job...
Perhaps because they realize that advertising they can withstand an F3 tornado a week after an F5 hit is a bit silly....
If I'm gaming on my laptop, I don't do it on battery. If I'm mobile, while 3W will make a difference in the long-run, it won't make anywhere near as big a difference as turning down the screen brightness will.
Ultimately it comes down to price for the average consumer... and while the Intel offering is more expensive on paper, at the retail point of sale, I expect that the AMD offering will end up being the same as the Intel offering in the low-end laptop market: you can already get i3-based laptops for $400 without having to buy a netbook, and I doubt that the manufacturers are going to leap at the chance to sell AMD for cheaper when consumers have already demonstrated that they'll pay that price point for a low end system.
In the price range the A4's comes in, Intel doesnt have any competitive chips. Not a single one at all.
In the mobile sphere, where something like the A4 is most likely to actually be used (since they're touting the power consumption), you can easily find $400 laptops with Intel i3 in them. Unless the AMD offering produces laptops in the sub-$300 range without sacrificing things like having a real keyboard or a screen larger than a netbook, then that price point is irrelevant: the manufacturers will happily eat the increased profit, and you the consumer will end up paying the same at the till.
As regards your signature, BTW, you realize that in 1997, MSIE *was* a better browser than all of the competition? IE didn't win out because of the bundling, though that helped, it won out because it was the better product until Phoenix (later Firefox) came along, and that was 5 years after the quote you claim. All of the bloat and proprietary bullshit that people accuse IE of doing these days (and which isn't actually true for MSIE 9 or MSIE 10)? Yeah... Mozilla was doing that in the mid and late 90's.
An i3 is a perfectly good CPU for casual gaming. Hell, I've been known to game on my laptop's Sandy Bridge Celeron U3600 1.2GHz dual core... it's not a hardcore gaming system, but it is quite usable when I'm not at home to use my desktop. There are quite a few games that will run quite acceptably on it, including most of my Steam library. (Civ5 is a hog, but that game is always CPU-heavy, and running it under Wine on a Celeron is painful).
The AMD system, apparently, won't be as good or even usable, in that role. And since they say that the i3 matches the A4 in power consumption when idle (which is 90% of the use of this system), why on earth would I buy the A4 for a laptop? If I want to maximize battery life, I'll buy another Celeron or Pentium, and if I want a good compromise I'll buy an i3 and still be better off than the A4.
And don't start kvetching about the price point either... this was a $430 laptop when I bought it, and it had the Intel in it. For a 13.3" laptop that weighs 3.2lbs, I challenge you to find an AMD-based offering in the same class without going to a netbook.
Except that it's not... it's a post-paid plan from a company that will subsidize the cost of a new phone if I decide I need to buy one. Nationwide network, no roaming fees, no long distance charges, and they don't charge extra to allow tethering.
They deal with phone subsidies as a running tab, which can have a balance between -$150 and $150, and to which 10% of the monthly fee is applied. If I cancel the service, I pay off whatever's left on the tab and walk away: that is the only ETP I incur. If I choose to buy a new phone, I can choose whether to use the tab to subsidize it or not, up to a maximum of $300 towards the phone if my previous balance is $150. And if I choose not to use the tab at all, I can opt out of it as long as I don't owe them money on it, and get 10% off my monthly bill.
My $60/mo gets me functionally unlimited domestic calling (5pm unlimited evenings/weekends, unlimited incoming, and 250 daytime minutes) and 6GB of 4G data, along with the usual suspects: call display/voicemail/3-way calling/call waiting, unilimited SMS/MMS and unlimited international SMS.
There's something very wrong with your cell phone company then. My monthly fee is advertised as $60, and I pay $60 to the cell phone company. Harmonized sales taxes get applied to the bill, as with anything (that's not the Cell phone company false advertising, that's legislation that requires the advertised price not include tax), and every month I pay $67.80 for my service, with no term contract. That price has never gone up, and even though the plan I currently have is no longer offered, they have not made any move to try to force me on to one of their new plans.
You need to change companies, I think.
Please tell me that you leave an "acceptable" tip for "acceptable" service, and you're not that guy who goes out with his co-workers and stiffs the waiter, leaving everyone else to subsidize you just out of embarrassment. (That's also usually the guy who tries to get the whole table on a single check, so he can chip in just the price of his entree, rounded down. Not the beverage, not his portion of anything he shared, like the cheesy-potato-finger-burrito-fries appetizer. Not the tax. And certainly not the tip. "That service was not excellent".)
It's actually quite common, in some parts of the world, to add a 20% gratuity to the bill automatically when there is a large group of people eating together, because it makes the discussion easier when you're dividing up the bill. In some parts of the world, it's expected that the gratuity will be added to the bill for smaller groups or individuals as well.
Quite honestly, I prefer to go to a restaurant that does this than one that doesn't, because I know people who work in the service industry and who don't make a living wage because of cheap tippers. Similarly, I would prefer to go to a restaurant that pools the tips as well, and I always make a point of asking the server whether the owner takes a cut from the gratuity, as the answer to that question will determine how big a tip I leave: if half of the money is going to the owner, I'll leave a smaller tip and find some other way to give the gratuity directly to the server. I'd rather that the minimum wage for servers be raised to match the minimum wage for the rest of us, but since that's unlikely to happen....
So sign up for an MVNO that piggy-backs on their network and offers better plans....
If thousands of customers did this, I think AT&T would just remove the fee entirely.
I don't. The most you could possibly get if you went that route would be your $0.61, and the court filing costs which, depending on where you are, could be as little as $10. If thousands of customers did it, ATT would shrug and say "ok, at least our millions of other customers didn't... the one-time cost will be paid for by the increase within a month or two".
No, but a cell phone bill in arrears/collections won't hurt your credit rating. (depending on jurisdiction, blah blah)
So if they charge automatically to your credit card, tell your credit card that you had terminated service because they breached the contract, and that the charge is fraudulent. When I did that with my credit card, the charges were reversed, and the cell phone company in question never bothered to even try the collections route, because the credit card company had sent them a registered letter informing them of the reason the charge was reversed.
Since driving does involve a huge set of skills that cannot be fully learned without practice, raising the driving age will only have the effect of pushing the high accident rate group to still be the first age group allowed to drive
You've missed the point of what I was getting at though. It's not that people who are new to driving have a higher rate of accidents, it's that you take people who are new to driving, and give them something else new to do which lowers their inhibitions and impairs their judgement. Not only are they still learning how to drive safely, they're also learning how to drink safely.
It's not that I want to raise the driving age, it's that I want people to learn to drink safely before they're allowed behind the wheel of a car.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Designated_driver
Not only won't that cost you $15/mile, you'll spend less on alcohol, too. Don't excuse being an idiot just because there's a lack of public transportation.
Taking away driving privileges over 60? No. Requiring regular re-testing/re-certification? Absolutely... provided that you require it for *everybody*. If we *all* needed to go re-test for driving every 5 years (for example), there'd be a huge reduction in the number of accidents over-all, and people would be more likely to keep abreast of changes to the laws and safety standards.
As for raising the driving age to 22? I've been saying for years that we should raise the driving age to 21, and lower the drinking age to 14. That way you have a chance to learn to drink in a supervised setting with adults who (theoretically) know how to drink safely, and you have a chance to get all the stupid "hey guys, check this out!" stories out of your system before you're ever allowed near the wheel of a car.
Global reach... Cellular carriers pay a ton of money to pass SMS between carriers when they don't have a peering agreement, which is why a lot of cellular providers all over the world either don't offer international SMS, or charge a lot for it.
That's changing though... the carrier I'm with has peering agreements with enough carriers around the world that they give me unlimited international MMS/SMS messaging included in the base plan (even the $25/mo entry level plan).
3 years ago, BBM on my Android device would have been huge. Today? I don't see the point. None of my friends still have Blackberry, and I can already communicate with people around the world using Google Talk or SMS. Google Talk also lets me make free international long distance phone calls, while still only has the same limitations that BBM does: it's effectively insecure and only works with other people who subscribe to it.
Yes... but TFA (and TFS) says that they're threatening to tell the neighbours. Marquess of Queensberry rules. Literally.... (look up Oscar Wilde, if you don't get the reference)
I'm not ashamed of my sexuality. I don't pirate porn, largely because the majority of it is fake and really poor quality (I'm not in the target audience), but let them tell my neighbours. They'll get hit with a defamation lawsuit pretty quickly.
And my neighbours have been able to wrap their heads around the fact that I'm a tree-hugging dirt-worshipping lesbian hippie who goes to festivals where witchcraft is practiced from time to time, I think they won't have any problem understanding that I may look at porn occasionally too.
so everything is only created solely for profit. sounds false.
Profit may not necessarily be financial, but every single thing that has ever been produced by humans for the entire history of our species has been done for profit of some sort.
Without getting into philosophical arguments about the ethics of it, content-creators have a vested interest in wanting to preserve distribution rights for the product they are making. We can argue until we run out of breath about whether DRM is the right way for them to do it, about its technical limitations, etc., but the fact is that nobody has provided them with an alternative to DRM that they like, and we simply can't force them to adopt what we want them to do. To do so would be to run counter to the free speech argument that most people hold up as the reason they're opposed to DRM in the first place: they have a right to speak or not speak in whichever way they want.
Given that there's no way they're giving up on DRM in the current climate, we're left with another question: should that content be on the web or not? That's a question that you, the consumer, need to decide. Personally, I like Netflix, I subscribe to it, and I'm happy to pay for it, despite its being encumbered with DRM. I find i get good value from their service. To me, yes, they do belong on the web, and as long as there's consumers like me who believe that they should be allowed to pay their money for such a service, that service belongs on the web regardless of your individual ideology.
Now given the choice between an ecosystem where everybody has their proprietary apps and one where everybody uses the same app, I would happily take the second one. While the first method works fine for my Android phone, that's because Android has enough market penetration to actually be worth targetting. It's still a platform where not everybody has made the switch, but it's big enough that people are noticing it. The same cannot be said for my Linux-based laptop.
And that leaves me with a choice, as far as the laptop is concerned: I can give up on watching content like this on the laptop (not really an option), I can install Windows (which would require paying extra: the laptop came with Linux preinstalled and no license for Windows), or I can decide that allowing DRM into the web standard isn't that bad an idea, because it means a standard API for accessing the content and I don't have to worry about whether the provider will get around to building a specific client for my laptop.
I'd *like* it to be DRM-free, and some content is DRM-free (sites like youtube or blip.tv for example), I also recognize that there's content which isn't free that I want to be able to use. If you don't want it to have DRM, then I'll refer you back to my first paragraph, where you'll find the answer to how to get them to stop using it: give them something else that they like more.
The loss itself may not be, but if you beat somebody up for their phone it's still a violent crime.
I think the more interesting statistic is that 579 cell phone/tablet thefts accounts for 41% of violent crime. Even if we assume that all 579 thefts were violent in nature, that's still only 1412 violent crimes. In a city the size of San Francisco over that time period, wouldn't the "think of the children" lobby have us believe that the rate is much higher?
Likely WOW is losing to those games that offer a better free to play or non subscriber fee gaming experience.
That's where I went. I didn't feel like paying a monthly tithe for the privilege of being called a fag. (btw, if you're going to use a slur, use the right one: it's dyke).
I like the freemium model that some games employ, especially when they don't significantly unbalance the game. It means I can decide how much the game is actually worth to me, and many of the costs incurred are one-time costs.
If Apple had allowed PC manufacturers to ship OS X at Windows 8 launch, then it could be very well standard desktop OS by now. But Apple chose not to 1-up Microsoft in order to avoid diluting their brand, so OS X remains confined to the high-price niche.
They've been down the grey box path before, and there's a reason they don't do it. The whole reason that 10 years ago Apple had a reputation for reliability and Windows had a reputation for being crashtastic was that Apple had control of the hardware environment and didn't have to worry about relying on 3rd parties to develop drivers.
Windows 7 is better than XP was, to say nothing of the whole 9X line, but Apple is still better in that respect. If they allow 3rd party vendors into the ecosystem again, then they lose control over the hardware.