What I was trying to say is basically that tablets that can be used for anything you want can be sold generally and adapted however the users, companies, or industries want them. You could have an application that runs a tablet for a single purpose, and it would be very useful, also having the ability to sync up with other devices and spread knowledge properly and accordingly.
However when you limit a device to a single use, and sell it for that one purpose there will always be an enormous markup, killing most of the potential costumers, I can't imagine a struggling hospital paying 2k for a tablet in every room, and then enormous software licensing costs and probably dealing with the cloud. But given an open tablet, with a single medical application to monitor statistics and input important changes into medical databases, the tablet might cost 600-999 dollars instead, more likely in the lower range if it is a stripped down version, and just purchasing the open app for a low price and putting it on all the tablets without monthly fees on it, running them on the hospitals wireless network, it becomes much less than half the original cost.
Sure, you buy an iPad, you hope that someone develops software for your specific need, and hope they upload it to appstore and hope that appstore accepts it so that you can put it on all of your iPads. Maybe a company who is going to develop specific software wants to do it in house only, to fit their specific needs. Also, what happens when you need to upgrade, or change the applications, good luck doing anything at all of value with an iPad.
sure, android and some others aren't bad, but are there tablets that currently run them? not that I have seen, as I would likely purchase one very soon. But the censorship of the iPad appstore makes it virtually useless. Not to mention their difficult management of features to keep your use in line with specific guidelines (ie only one 3g provider allowed, disabled cameras, no access to certain internals,...).
What I mean to say is, when you buy an iPad you barely have any right to play with it, use it to your will, unless your will coincides with their very narrow view of what can be done with their technology.
If you have a tablet built for a specific use, it is too expensive to maintain production/use. If you have one for specific applications that some company chooses, it is functionless in many scenarios. If you have a tablet that is general use, and can be programmed in any way the end user sees fit, with independent applications out the wazoo, and can run it literally however the hell you want, it is worth its weight in gold, despite costing much less. And it is easy to replace and upgrade, to move forward.
As I have said many times in the past: "The future is here, but we will never see it as long as companies like Apple forcefully keep it away from us" or something of that sort. I can never keep specific wordings right over time.
Yea, but even that is smooth enough, if you keep enough on you. Errors like that occur typically due to protective measures, and wells fargo ain't exactly the most wonderful company out there. With my bank of america account, there have been potential issues, but their system for straitening it out has allowed me to do everything I need to quickly, easily, and without hassle.
We are talking about applications though, and similarly, if you keep all of your software in a bank account far away, that has none of the restrictions our banks do, and have little to none in your own power, you are much more at risk. It would be more like keeping all your money in a bank account with the a loan shark in the next state. Sure it is still technically yours, but some tough policies can rob you out, just like cloud based computing.
Worse than that. Tablets have an enormous market in industries of every kind, as soon as they come out with a non-currated-computing based operating system. When an open, almost general computing tablet comes out, I envision it at the end of every hospital bed instead of the old clip-boards, keeping records/vitals up to date. I envision them in warehouses managing inventory, in schools with people taking notes, to run smart houses, to monitor systems of all kinds, from manufacturing to reading a cars status and fixing it. These things have more potential than any other form of computing device I have ever seen. But with an OS like the iPad? It will never be useful to more than the general user, psuedo-replacing a laptop, and using it for games and maybe some other stupid BS. But the beautiful revolution that these tablets could pose? It will never come under this so called currated-computing bullshit.
The future is here, and the only thing standing between us and it, is evil fucking companies like apple. I hope their corporate headquarters burn to the ground, with all the top brass in the building. Go down with the pirate ship plundering the good people of america, like the captains of IP terror that you are.
Yea but an electric bill is not gone till after you drop more superfluous services. I doubt anyone would cancel their electric before their internet. Again, with the shitty comparisons.
Hell, most on welfare can even afford electric bills. That is not exactly much of a risk. But internet? If it has to go it has to go.
Let me ask you, what happens when the police guns have handprint verification to fire, and link back up to centralized servers to check the handprint? You want to rob a bank, just knock out power to the police station for a couple of hours. What are they gonna do, throw the bullets?? The reality is we are currently pushing some of these systems into place.
You can say it about an electric bill, but it is a different situation, and due to the fact that most can pay their electric, its a terrible comparison. Really it is. Slashdotters love making shitty comparisons that are invalid to the original subject.
Banks are legally forced to make sure I am allowed my own money, and with only checking/debit account, I am not making the risks that many take with their money. I always have enough on me for a week or so, in case something happens.
Banking is highly regulated, extremely so to avoid panic and terrible things. Plus I don't keep all my value in one medium or one place. Just a smart, convenient way to live.
On the other hand, cloud computing, app licensing are about as regulated as product quality in china. There is barely anything stopping them from escalating the bullshit, and watching this escalation I avoid the bullshit. If you were a jew in germany in 1938, would you have stayed because you made a comparison to keeping your money in the bank? An escalation of hostilities is what it is, regardless of where. My bank shows no intention of raping me for my money, whereas these companies are basically screaming "HAIL DRM! HAIL DRM! HAIL DRM!"
what is it about you/. ers and making terrible comparisons??? Every situation is not the same just because you make a shitty comparison. Just because you say "well, if you drive a red car, its like eating sushi so your a communist" The logic behind the comparisons falls apart the second anyone actually would bother to engage their brain. Do everyone a favor and engage it before commenting again.
That is within the cloud, and those problems will always exist because redundancy is expensive and inefficient in next quarter stock price sense. And next quarter stock price is the only thing that matters to the average share holder that matters. That would be like giving a drug addict a pound of pot and telling him there are no consequences now, but there is a chance that someday something might go terribly wrong and you will be screwed. It just doesn't work. There is no incentive, no motivation for the company to be redundant in its power, storage, or anything.
But regardless of that, do you want someone standing between you and your applications, data, abilities? I wouldn't want someone standing between me and a gun,me and my money, me and my life, me and my anything mine really. Regardless of the technical efficiency it still fails as a good concept. It only helps shareholders of the clouding company, everyone else be damned.
And when we realize that we are paying a company that says we are to be damned, we should probably stop. Fat chance though. As in bioshock, he who has the adam owns the place.He who has the IP owns the place.
You own data? worthless. Corporation with resources owns data? priceless. = problem.
And at that time so much music was pirated it was insane. but what about the things still pirated. As companies begin to demonize the pirate, more and more, more and more people fall into that mindset. Not everything is as easy to transfer as music. Most people don't install 1 game on several mediums, or 1 e-book onto several things. There is no viable reason for DRM to be a problem for the average person with this stuff, so the same stick will not be made. If it only bothers 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 people, I doubt it will matter. But everyone listened to music, and pirating it was easy enough for anyone to do.
Change happens for reasons, and every situation is different. DRM was dead for something transfered to half a dozen devices for a typical user, but for something typically left on one medium for its life? What reasons are there here, and with people becoming more fond of micro-transactions and crap, from intense pay licensing fee's per use or whatever to become likely? It is not nearly as hard to avoid, and not nearly as simple to pirate, and with the companies making pirates look bad, and making an example of them? I don't see it happening.
A comparison is not a valid reason. A valid reason is a valid reason. No comparison is perfect, because no comparison A to A, or else it would be a restatement, not a comparison. You have made a very invalid comparison and assumed it a valid reason. That is called accidental complacency.
Things tend to follow a direction, moving towards an equilibrium, or at least to a point where forces are so unbalanced that a dampening effect is in order. Here we have a direction, more DRM on DRMable stuff. There is too little to stop it to have an effect. The tipping point of damping forces won't happen until some major event involving DRM and the economy happens, and people realize it is a problem. Even then, I doubt it will be realized. Healthcare costs practically caused the inability to pay the mortgages was the spark of the financial meltdown (although directly caused by morons putting all their golden eggs in one basket, and then strangling the goose).
Change does happen. It has happened before, and CAN happen again. But nothing happens without a reason (on any scale larger than a few atoms), and this is a case without sufficient reason.
I think perhaps a better lens would be "If all the info and apps are run in one place, then I can disable that place and run this giant bank without worry" or something else terrible of that sort.
If it ever happens, would you want all your proverbial guns in the safe that is standing between you and the badass that wants your wallet, identity, and liver/kidneys?? Or would you want to be holding them, reading to kick some ass? In a world where all the power lays in centralized systems, an authority of some kind can have your resources shut down in the blink of an eye, and you are done. It doesn't matter if you are good or bad or strange or up or down or charmed, you are screwed. Or if you have to drop a bill and internet comes up, do you want the hundreds of dollars in applications and gear to be worth absolutely nothing?
You are talking from the business point of view here, and for them there is profit to be had centralizing. It reduces costs and boosts profits if done right. But it always hurts the consumer. It robs them of physical ability and power. It would be like having to log into your house, which exists in china every night when you get home. having to mail your laundry to Ethiopia to be washed on boards instead of in the washer sitting two rooms over. I don't want everything I have the ability to use and get use from riding on my ability to keep a job and pay insane, ever rising bills.
Sure, there is money in a cure, but no drug company that can come up with a therapy will dare make a cure. And the economics behind it is simple. First of all, a corporation is driven by stockholders, whom the very vast majority of only care about profit (or at least all those that matter to the decision making). The more profit, the better. Every last cent you can squeeze out of each customer ends up in the bank account of a shareholder, and because they make the decisions, so it is. If a drug company creates a therapy or treatment, they can string people on for millions and do basically nothing at all. If they develop a cure, then an illness is just something which we can move forward from, and they either make much less, or get called out big time on unjustified costs to dying, desperate consumers. Therapies make you appear to care, but overcharging for cures makes you look sick. If you make a cure, you lose the potential to make a lot more money, and in economic terms, that is as good as losing money from your bank account. Sure it is terrible, sick and wrong, but that is how modern business works. It needs to be changed, because it is harming every business from our health, to our food, to our electronics and entertainment. Everything you buy, 99.99% of what you pay ends up in the financial sector, or the top brass of involved companies wallet. Imagine the 50's quality of life, and value of a dollar compared to wages. Now imagine 60 years of technological advancement making everything you bought cheaper to make and cheaper to own, while making more money yourself. We should be living like kings, not struggling like hell to get by.
Also, a few hundred/thousand bucks towards drugs like viagra will never add up the the tens of thousands to millions that those companies can make off of every single cancer patient. Hell, if they could give more people cancer they would be rolling in it, until the day the costs overwhelm yet another system and the financial sector gets another flat and the world gets another recession for it. This kind of half-assed logic and denial based on weak reasoning of something researched a while ago is pathetic. Sure, if you had actually thought about it, you might has something useful to say, but crappy statements like this just slowly divide a populace based on half assed ideas. Try fully engaging in thought before commenting, or at least more than you did here.
Fine grammar is just a formality. Language is a wonderful, ever changing tool. We can use it however we please. Sure, some mistakes are terrible, and accidental, but that does not mean that grammar need be as valuable as gold. We doth need remember that language cannot be controlled without losing that which it is used to create.
We can say things like "I don't grammar" and they convey meaning just as well as saying "I don't pay great attention to or check my grammar" It might sound a bit off, but it does what language is meant to do: convey meaning. The faster and better we can convey meaning, the better we are language-ing. So indeed the phrase "I'm don't grammar" may be terribly flawed, but it conveys meaning quicker and more efficiently than the other statement, so it can easily be said that it has fulfilled its purpose better than the grammatically correct phrase.
Every time I meet a grammar nazi in person I spend about half an hour giving them a speech on why they should go to hell.
Also: I might note that/. comments are terrible for correcting grammar, using crappy comparisons, and crappy attempts at being condescending. It is so much, it often covers up or ignores the important points of a debate. It is just as bad as watching intelligent debates degrade to anger or degrade to moronic babble. I would seriously like to see more focus on what is important, and less on this kind of crap, as a general rule. Maybe then someone could learn something besides how to be better at being a useless, progress impeding grammar nazi.
I suggest you cease and desist. Then we can all get on with our lives.
It is efficient for money-making to centralize everything, especially consumer services/money. But when you put all your eggs in one basket, only one basket needs to be broken to scramble all eggs.
Every day we put more in the cloud. Every day we have less power. What happens when everything is in the cloud? all you need is a truck and a utility pole and hell breaks lose. You can then do as you please while you wait for people to remember how to function without working electronic devices. Imagine the field day organized criminals will have when the police move to the cloud.
Actually, there is not a chance in the world economic forces will lead to the downfall of DRM. You see, monopolistic practices aren't just present in a business itself anymore, but in today's age they often drift across many corporations in the form of standards. As such, something like DRM may be evil, but corporations find it useful, and if all of them across an industry decide it is useful (which it undeniably appears to be (at least to all the morons that look only to profit in the next quarter, not the next year or decade)). If all of the corporations decide to only offer DRM laden goods, you either buy with DRM or don't by. And there is no legal reason this is not possible, and it is very economically likely, because us who only buy non-drm are in such a slim minority, and will likely end up buying DRM stuff eventually if they made it the only way. Economically killing DRM would require a world-wide boycott, and even then they would likely keep it, and just issue some BS press release and get people to go with it, one way or another. Most of these businesses would maintain enough income to last, or have enough in their credit lines.
No, economic destruction of DRM is not even imaginable. Not in an environment in which corporations can easily horizontally spread tools which are bad for consumers, that don't appear to harm the consumer enough for people to make a fuss. There are also far too many people to educate, and people will generally not listen and buy anyways.
And although Amazon isn't 'allowed' to remove your content, their contract specifies times when it is ok, and they have the ability to do so, whether or not they use it. I would say that makes it at the least unreliable. Especially if anything on it is internet-on DRM, if you happen to be away from internet, then fuck you. Just like cloud computing, you pay for access to something, not something. You pay over and over for something to which a one time fee would be sufficient if it were not based in the cloud. Cloud computing has been touted as a 'miracle' but in reality it is only a miracle for the stock holders of company using it, the workers will never see a pay increase.
Any type of monopoly, be it of standards or a corporation, or a style of product, ignores both law and economics. It follows one rule: profit in the next quarter. Find a way to get higher stock prices. That is all that matters. Even if it means plunging the world into recession, if the 50-100 major stockholders/financial guru's behind all the money get a couple mill.
You might make noise, but it is no more than meaningless background to these companies with enormous target markets, of which all of us are a tiny part of. As long as there are millions of ignorant people that will pay for software and get all confused when it doesn't work, and then pay for it again, then nothing you say will ever matter.
The only way DRM will die is if a powerful company kills it, and promotes publically their hate of DRM. Otherwise, it will live till long after we are gone, and get much worse. I have heard small talk of making a DRM in which everything is license charged by the hour. you get charged whenever you log into an application. And to be honest, with the ease of microtransactions, I doubt DRM types of things will do anything other than rape consumers of more money every year, until consumers run out, and some market suffers, causing another financial sector blow-out and another mini-recession.
This isn't the days before the optimization of business. Now everything is super-efficient. And super-efficient means more for stock holders, less for everyone else alive. Now companies have discovered that 1 popular culture is slightly more profitable than 50 amazing, mildly popular cultural sub-groups. Every company stands to make slightly more money by employing nasty tactics, such as DRM. If it succeeds here, other areas will learn to do the same. Like cloud smart housing. Imagine, it costing money constantly just to live in your own home. Sur
And what happens when books that you want to read do not have non-DRM versions? You have been censored of knowledge in a way. What happens when there is no DRM-free option? try finding a DRM free legal version of a video game, movie or book that was published with DRM. There was a time when it was easy to buy only made in america. Not so easy anymore. Saying "taking the moral highground in a situation is optimal, instead of protesting the fact that it is happening" is like if you had said "I have no slaves, therefore I am not infringing on anyones freedoms" while your neighbor is beating his slave, and laughing about it, and you are doing nothing. Just because it doesn't affect you directly doesn't mean that it won't eventually, or that it is not wrong. And your personal quiet protest via actions makes no difference to big mega-corp who can prey on unsuspecting people who have money and pay for things without understanding the technical implications of them.
Of course not, but that is not what I said. What I said would be if your car was entirely proprietary, and your car maker was the only company allowed to make these parts. Then you would either have to buy used parts and hope they work, or be screwed. If an item that has manufacturer "updates" that make a product worth less, then it should come with an automatic full refund to all who previously used that feature. Now if Sony bought the USAF a worthy Cray supercomputer replacement, whatever, but they did not. That is bullshit, and should be fixed, not just bitched about and have others say 'just deal with it'.
Also, I am getting really fucking tired of all the people on the internet that make shitty comparisons, and pretending that they shed light on a situation. If you are going to make a fucking comparison, do it right, especially if you are using it to criticize the accuracy of someone else's statement. That would be the pot calling the kettle black. And that was a good comparison. If I had said that would be like a shrimp calling a whale tiny, it would not be accurate. Seriously, this may be more intelligable than the general community, but as slashdot expands, I see more idiots falling into the same intellectual traps as morons, just using fancier tools to pretend that they aren't.
Sony sold hundreds, if not thousands, of computers to people whose sole intention was to cluster them, or use them as a PC, and for all those that purchased them, they can either get bug fixes and updates and lose their computer, or deal with something that keeps bugging out like some kind of piece of shit, and eventually parts of it will become defunct and die, with no possibility of quality replacement. If a company is going to sell something, they had sure as hell better make it better over time, or not touch it. If they instead make it worse? That would be like if people added a gene to their sequence that took away our ability to see, or hear, or taste, or breath, or in this case, it would make part of the brain die. A big part. See what I did there? how I used a quality comparison? Learn to do the same.
There is one hell of a big difference between capitalism. Capitalism is a free system of trade, where everyone has the right to make money, and spend it freely, and businesses are means of doing so. We do not have capitalism. We have bullshit. Let me explain. A bullshit system, is a system in which the vast majority of the cost of everything that you can spend money on goes to the financial sector, spread out among those with enough extra income to 'invest' or the few filthy rich that own the companies that do the investing. However, when you force at least 10,000,000,000% of the actually cost of something into a financial system, and sell it at that price to consumers, problems arise. See, every single step of production of something you buy generates massive wealth for commodity, stock traders, and top brass of involved corporations. unfortunately, when the workers are paid just enough to get by, and the cost of things constantly increases, this creates an inflation loop and minimum wage increases. On the side however, massive wealth is had to the select upper echlons of society. The cost to live comfortably would be something like 90% lower than it is now, if we didn't have all that bullshit. Plus, every corporation looks for every possible way that they can to pull money out of consumers, whether the consumer can afford it or not. The bullshit system cherishes evil, instead of goodness, and forces people into poverty, pretending to be capitalism. Someday, people will be paid fairly for the work they do, and the things that are so cheap and easy to make will be widely available.
You have a point. But that is fucked up. However you missed my point. My point was that I don't pay for things that I afford to not pay for. Like if my debit card has a clause about being allowed to charge me for nothing whenever they pleased, and it only worked as a debit card a locations that censorship loving bastards wholeheartedly approved of, I would not have it. If my lease on my apartment said that they are allowed to take things from my apartment and kick me out if I didn't comply with their morality standards, and could install cameras in in to make sure I did, then I would sure as hell not live hear. I have a pay-as you go phone, but only because I am not comfortable having non-necessary bills until I have a stable source of income aka after college. Health insurance is still under parents, but I do have cable/internet, and the contract on that does not say that If I look at porn on my connection it will be terminated. That is the kind of bullshit I am talking about.
If a women buys a dildo, but it comes with a contract saying that she can only stick it in her vagina, not in her mouth or but, it would be the unreasonable contracts from a couple of decades ago. If it not only said that, but that if she tried to do a prohibited behavior with it, it would grow legs and walk back to the manufacturer, and have you arrested for sodomy, then it would be these modern bullshit contracts. I do, most certainly, agree that this problem needs to be fixed. And we need to work towards fixing it soon.
However, as xkcd says (http://blacksunreview.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/xkcd11.png), acting like you are intelligent and pointed out a flaw in what someone said by misunderstanding or misconstruing their point, is fucking retarded. Yes, those corporations are raping us, and we are paying them to do it. But they are raping us with human or horse penis. Apple, Amazon, and now Sony, are not just raping us with barbed elephant penises, or blue whale penises. There is a DAMN BIG difference. The average mega-corp just makes us feel violated, sick, embarrassed, and sore. The evil tech-mega-corp that owns your fucking soul the second you give them even one cent, you walk away from the relationship having given up your money, the clothes off your back, the ability to ever use your lower extremities again, shame, anger, and an extremely painful, visible, and terrible injury. It is the difference between slapping you wife after she cheats on you, and tying her to a chair and beating her for the next year, then killing her and throwing her out the window of a 100 story tall hotel. When an iPad competitor comes out, I will likely buy it (assuming a free, non-censoring nature, and the ability to use it to my free will without monitoring, constant licensing, or monthly payments (besides optional 3g or whatever), but why would I pay a shitload of money for something about as useful as clog in your toilet.
I am not standing up for sony, I am just saying they are not the only ones guilty of being terrible.
If amazon advertises the ability to read books on the kindle, and you purchase a book to read, and it is removed, regardless of who removed it, it is a piece of property, a physical set of information contained on your device, and for them to take it from you under any circumstance is horrible, whether they refund you or not.
I am not talking about what apple advertised, and I don't mean they killed applications. I mean they get up and say 'here is a powerful device that can run applications'. It may be a powerful, beautiful device, but making it proprietary and pretty much constantly hooked to an apple IV with no chance to develop applications for yourself or for use only within a small or large corporation, and making everything pass through the damn appstore and censoring it? They are doing the job of the 'censorship' loving bastards that constantly speak up against knowledge in this country.
The tax code is complicated because features are added haphazardly and piled on. I agree it should be simpler, but that is aside from the point. There is actually a section of a law called the 'fair contract clause' in which it stops contracts from being insane. Like they can't just put at the bottom of a 200 page lease agreement "and you must turn over your identity, your children and your organs to our company after exactly 3 days", or a more mild "by the way, you don't own this device, we do, and have the right to do whatever we want whenever we want. Because we didn't sell it to you, we licensed it to you." Which is really the purpose of an EULA on anything really. It is a terrible thing. and should be fixed.
To sell a product with a promise of certain features, and then to act as if it is your own and disable everything you don't want the real owner to have. Disabling the otherOS feature was totally unnecessary. It was just some kind of cruel bullshit, limiting your freedoms on a device that belongs to you. That is the modern way.
Buy a kindle? Have YOUR PAID FOR books removed at amazons will.
Buy a PS3 for clustering? Have your PAID FOR CLUSTER disabled, unrepairable, and suddenly worth its weight in crap as soon as the machines start to die off.
Buy an apple product? well, might as well put your head in a plaster garbage bag and die, they own everything that touches the screen of that device, hell, likely they even own the device, just 'licence' it out to you in some peculiar way.
If sony's terms of service said something about taking away features at their own will, it is not a valid part of the contract. Here in america, we have laws that prevent mega-corporations from making insanely complicated contracts and inserting clauses about how they own your soul and can harvest your body parts whenever they please. This modern pattern of bullshit is why I avoid buying anything that follows that pattern. Unfortunately every day there are fewer options. And soon enough they will all be gone.
The article was about using DNA to build logic gates and processor pieces that were very small, on the order of just a few molecules, kind of like DNA making proteins. The next step is putting these elements together to build circuitry. DNA already puts together insane life forms that have millions of parts all working together. We are made using DNA. It is not our primary ingredient, but DNA builds us. That is the goal here, build circuits.
sure, one day v. 1 year of chip making is a bit of an overstatement. But if this is perjected, computer technology will certainly be on its way to becoming yet smaller, faster, and better. However, no matter how efficiently we make things, it will never be cheaper. Why? Because they will just mark it up even higher than whats already out there to make more money. And when asked "if they are so cheap to make, why don't you sell that are more reasonable prices" they will say "to cover 'costs'" which will be made up bullshit, or commodity trading over necessary supplies will drive up the price. All of that money will end up in the financial sector, everyone who does good work will recieve the same crap pay, and everyone who needs cheaper, better electronics had better wait in line to get ass raped by the company with the billion percent markup.
I see no reason why a consumer should ever be excited about advances in technology, the prices for the top of the line (even if it is the cheapest to produce) will always be unaffordably high, and will always increase. Meanwhile they extra money made pumps up the financial sector and causes more inflation, making our money worth even less. The electronics and entertainment industry has successfully evaded market forces, simply because ever company in the industry enjoys charging shitloads of money for every item they sell, and not just reasonable for profit.
The simple fact is that all of the wonderful, great discoveries of the past few years don't matter. They don't matter to consumers, to producers, to anyone, except for the financial sector. They trade in anything and everything, and can milk every single industry for insane amounts of money just by trading up the price of raw ingredients or companies that make parts for the final product. The works don't see better pay, the consumers don't see lower prices. Sure technology is advancing, and it makes minor improvements in our lives, but everything costs more and more every day while everyone makes less and less. Everyone except for the top brass of large companies, and anyone that does any kind of work in the financial sector.
Light actually does have a pressure. It is incredibly small, but in enormous quantities (like the sun or lasers) it can be quite powerful. I believe something like Intensity / c is radiation pressure formula. Not sure though. But it definitely has pressure, without radiation pressure our creation of Bose Einstein condensates would totally fail. Photons may not have rest mass, but they have some momentum because matter is just a form of energy. E.^2=M.^2.*c.^4 Its not much, but enough of it has measurable effects. A good part of the time the pressure is converted to heat (like on earth, or in our metal cutting lasers).
Uh, YES. Reality is a fantastic thing, i would suggest learning more about it, it is an enriching experience. Or you could just go on being a dumb-ass making the world a harder place to live in because people that know things have to sit around and explain things to you like a five year old, or just accept you people attempting to influence the world around you without understanding the possible consequences of your actions.
To be honest I would love to work in such conditions. Being able to relax in the nude while working?! My productivity would easily quadruple. Not to mention an office like that sounds more open on their dress code, so I might be able to get away with avoiding shoes (haven't worn any in 6 months, and Ill be damned if I do anytime soon).
Correlation doesn't imply causation. This is a perfect cause of that. Lets say I watch 3 or 4 different shows that occur during the course of a week, at 2 dollars a show thats 6-8 dollars a week, and 24-32 bucks a month, which is like adding another damn bill to the pile. But 12-16 bucks a month? entirely managable.
With these things there are two natural equilibriums. Charge to much and get the large number of people that are willing to pay for it, or charge half that and get 10x the target market, and make much more money.
Just think about it, 1 dollar per song, for someone who picks up maybe 10 songs a week can amount to over 40 bucks a month, but 50c a song is only 20 bucks a month, a much more manageable number. The average american does not have infinite disposable income to throw around 50 bucks a month on each of 10 different services just to get as much entertainment as if they have just the big cable package for 50 bucks a month. But a ton of services each at 5-10 bucks a month that add up to 50? just fine. We are not bitching because we always want things cheaper than they are no matter what, we are bitching because they are simply too expensive.
the iPad for example is a beautiful piece of machinery, and if I could program it to do whatever I want, it would be worth a good 700-800 bucks, it is a wonderful piece of the future, flying at us faster than we can take it. But with apples crap, it is basically just a brick for the millions of industry applications it could currently be filling. Everything would be unicorns if the prices were.5x, because then we could actually afford them, no rationalization about it. If I can't afford it, I can't afford it, it has nothing to do with any kind of heroic spirit of wanting a more reasonable price.
But to pay a price that it is a struggle for me and others to afford, at a huge markup from similar services, just so that I can watch 15 minutes of advertising and 45 minutes of programming? And I can only watch it once, so if I miss something, I have to buy it again? That is insanity.
I seriously wonder how much the xxAAs pay (if anything) to just run around the internet and post retarded bullshit like this. Or if people are really that quick to assume insane causations based on a few terrible observations, and demonizing everyone who is too poor to afford to spend 10x what everything is worth on meaningless bull they could either go without, or steal. Whats next, are you people going to start demonizing the hungry for not eating enough? Common already, have some sense.
Meanwhile anyone with a good idea that doesn't have some sort of million dollar backer or corporate account on hand, just the money in their pocket and a feeble bank account is totally out of the patent market now, not to mention after any increase.
What they should do is create an 3rd tier for companies that submit more than 1000 patents a year, and increase the rates by 10000x. There would be less patents on things like "the little rib between this part of the case and that part of the case of product from that other patent"
The filing fee is only like 150 bucks for a small entity, the real cost is in basically anything in the patent, any pager after x number of pages, and all the hundreds of fees to get it finished. Might cost an indepentent inventor navigating the system a good 10k to get a patent, more with a lawyer. Your average joe doesn't have that kind of money to play with, meanwhile big companies like GE that file something like 100k a year pay a lot less than they should have to.
Great, even worse news for the poor little guy. You think it is bad for small businesses, it is terrible for an independent inventor. Patents are becoming more expensive and harder to get every day, better for big companies that apply for ten thousand-a hundred thousand patents a year, meanwhile I have to construct elaborate contracts with a company before I can even show them what I have, at fear of losing everything. One hell of a messed up system.
Slashdot Mirror
Alright, but I seem to have missed my point.
What I was trying to say is basically that tablets that can be used for anything you want can be sold generally and adapted however the users, companies, or industries want them. You could have an application that runs a tablet for a single purpose, and it would be very useful, also having the ability to sync up with other devices and spread knowledge properly and accordingly.
However when you limit a device to a single use, and sell it for that one purpose there will always be an enormous markup, killing most of the potential costumers, I can't imagine a struggling hospital paying 2k for a tablet in every room, and then enormous software licensing costs and probably dealing with the cloud. But given an open tablet, with a single medical application to monitor statistics and input important changes into medical databases, the tablet might cost 600-999 dollars instead, more likely in the lower range if it is a stripped down version, and just purchasing the open app for a low price and putting it on all the tablets without monthly fees on it, running them on the hospitals wireless network, it becomes much less than half the original cost.
Sure, you buy an iPad, you hope that someone develops software for your specific need, and hope they upload it to appstore and hope that appstore accepts it so that you can put it on all of your iPads. Maybe a company who is going to develop specific software wants to do it in house only, to fit their specific needs. Also, what happens when you need to upgrade, or change the applications, good luck doing anything at all of value with an iPad.
sure, android and some others aren't bad, but are there tablets that currently run them? not that I have seen, as I would likely purchase one very soon. But the censorship of the iPad appstore makes it virtually useless. Not to mention their difficult management of features to keep your use in line with specific guidelines (ie only one 3g provider allowed, disabled cameras, no access to certain internals,...).
What I mean to say is, when you buy an iPad you barely have any right to play with it, use it to your will, unless your will coincides with their very narrow view of what can be done with their technology.
If you have a tablet built for a specific use, it is too expensive to maintain production/use. If you have one for specific applications that some company chooses, it is functionless in many scenarios. If you have a tablet that is general use, and can be programmed in any way the end user sees fit, with independent applications out the wazoo, and can run it literally however the hell you want, it is worth its weight in gold, despite costing much less. And it is easy to replace and upgrade, to move forward.
As I have said many times in the past: "The future is here, but we will never see it as long as companies like Apple forcefully keep it away from us" or something of that sort. I can never keep specific wordings right over time.
Yea, but even that is smooth enough, if you keep enough on you. Errors like that occur typically due to protective measures, and wells fargo ain't exactly the most wonderful company out there. With my bank of america account, there have been potential issues, but their system for straitening it out has allowed me to do everything I need to quickly, easily, and without hassle.
We are talking about applications though, and similarly, if you keep all of your software in a bank account far away, that has none of the restrictions our banks do, and have little to none in your own power, you are much more at risk. It would be more like keeping all your money in a bank account with the a loan shark in the next state. Sure it is still technically yours, but some tough policies can rob you out, just like cloud based computing.
Worse than that. Tablets have an enormous market in industries of every kind, as soon as they come out with a non-currated-computing based operating system. When an open, almost general computing tablet comes out, I envision it at the end of every hospital bed instead of the old clip-boards, keeping records/vitals up to date. I envision them in warehouses managing inventory, in schools with people taking notes, to run smart houses, to monitor systems of all kinds, from manufacturing to reading a cars status and fixing it. These things have more potential than any other form of computing device I have ever seen. But with an OS like the iPad? It will never be useful to more than the general user, psuedo-replacing a laptop, and using it for games and maybe some other stupid BS. But the beautiful revolution that these tablets could pose? It will never come under this so called currated-computing bullshit.
The future is here, and the only thing standing between us and it, is evil fucking companies like apple. I hope their corporate headquarters burn to the ground, with all the top brass in the building. Go down with the pirate ship plundering the good people of america, like the captains of IP terror that you are.
Yea but an electric bill is not gone till after you drop more superfluous services. I doubt anyone would cancel their electric before their internet. Again, with the shitty comparisons.
Hell, most on welfare can even afford electric bills. That is not exactly much of a risk. But internet? If it has to go it has to go.
Let me ask you, what happens when the police guns have handprint verification to fire, and link back up to centralized servers to check the handprint? You want to rob a bank, just knock out power to the police station for a couple of hours. What are they gonna do, throw the bullets?? The reality is we are currently pushing some of these systems into place.
You can say it about an electric bill, but it is a different situation, and due to the fact that most can pay their electric, its a terrible comparison. Really it is. Slashdotters love making shitty comparisons that are invalid to the original subject.
Banks are legally forced to make sure I am allowed my own money, and with only checking/debit account, I am not making the risks that many take with their money. I always have enough on me for a week or so, in case something happens.
Banking is highly regulated, extremely so to avoid panic and terrible things. Plus I don't keep all my value in one medium or one place. Just a smart, convenient way to live.
On the other hand, cloud computing, app licensing are about as regulated as product quality in china. There is barely anything stopping them from escalating the bullshit, and watching this escalation I avoid the bullshit. If you were a jew in germany in 1938, would you have stayed because you made a comparison to keeping your money in the bank? An escalation of hostilities is what it is, regardless of where. My bank shows no intention of raping me for my money, whereas these companies are basically screaming "HAIL DRM! HAIL DRM! HAIL DRM!"
what is it about you /. ers and making terrible comparisons??? Every situation is not the same just because you make a shitty comparison. Just because you say "well, if you drive a red car, its like eating sushi so your a communist" The logic behind the comparisons falls apart the second anyone actually would bother to engage their brain. Do everyone a favor and engage it before commenting again.
That is within the cloud, and those problems will always exist because redundancy is expensive and inefficient in next quarter stock price sense. And next quarter stock price is the only thing that matters to the average share holder that matters. That would be like giving a drug addict a pound of pot and telling him there are no consequences now, but there is a chance that someday something might go terribly wrong and you will be screwed. It just doesn't work. There is no incentive, no motivation for the company to be redundant in its power, storage, or anything.
But regardless of that, do you want someone standing between you and your applications, data, abilities? I wouldn't want someone standing between me and a gun,me and my money, me and my life, me and my anything mine really. Regardless of the technical efficiency it still fails as a good concept. It only helps shareholders of the clouding company, everyone else be damned.
And when we realize that we are paying a company that says we are to be damned, we should probably stop. Fat chance though. As in bioshock, he who has the adam owns the place.He who has the IP owns the place.
You own data? worthless. Corporation with resources owns data? priceless. = problem.
And at that time so much music was pirated it was insane. but what about the things still pirated. As companies begin to demonize the pirate, more and more, more and more people fall into that mindset. Not everything is as easy to transfer as music. Most people don't install 1 game on several mediums, or 1 e-book onto several things. There is no viable reason for DRM to be a problem for the average person with this stuff, so the same stick will not be made. If it only bothers 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 people, I doubt it will matter. But everyone listened to music, and pirating it was easy enough for anyone to do.
Change happens for reasons, and every situation is different. DRM was dead for something transfered to half a dozen devices for a typical user, but for something typically left on one medium for its life? What reasons are there here, and with people becoming more fond of micro-transactions and crap, from intense pay licensing fee's per use or whatever to become likely? It is not nearly as hard to avoid, and not nearly as simple to pirate, and with the companies making pirates look bad, and making an example of them? I don't see it happening.
A comparison is not a valid reason. A valid reason is a valid reason. No comparison is perfect, because no comparison A to A, or else it would be a restatement, not a comparison. You have made a very invalid comparison and assumed it a valid reason. That is called accidental complacency.
Things tend to follow a direction, moving towards an equilibrium, or at least to a point where forces are so unbalanced that a dampening effect is in order. Here we have a direction, more DRM on DRMable stuff. There is too little to stop it to have an effect. The tipping point of damping forces won't happen until some major event involving DRM and the economy happens, and people realize it is a problem. Even then, I doubt it will be realized. Healthcare costs practically caused the inability to pay the mortgages was the spark of the financial meltdown (although directly caused by morons putting all their golden eggs in one basket, and then strangling the goose).
Change does happen. It has happened before, and CAN happen again. But nothing happens without a reason (on any scale larger than a few atoms), and this is a case without sufficient reason.
I think perhaps a better lens would be "If all the info and apps are run in one place, then I can disable that place and run this giant bank without worry" or something else terrible of that sort.
If it ever happens, would you want all your proverbial guns in the safe that is standing between you and the badass that wants your wallet, identity, and liver/kidneys?? Or would you want to be holding them, reading to kick some ass? In a world where all the power lays in centralized systems, an authority of some kind can have your resources shut down in the blink of an eye, and you are done. It doesn't matter if you are good or bad or strange or up or down or charmed, you are screwed. Or if you have to drop a bill and internet comes up, do you want the hundreds of dollars in applications and gear to be worth absolutely nothing?
You are talking from the business point of view here, and for them there is profit to be had centralizing. It reduces costs and boosts profits if done right. But it always hurts the consumer. It robs them of physical ability and power. It would be like having to log into your house, which exists in china every night when you get home. having to mail your laundry to Ethiopia to be washed on boards instead of in the washer sitting two rooms over. I don't want everything I have the ability to use and get use from riding on my ability to keep a job and pay insane, ever rising bills.
Sure, there is money in a cure, but no drug company that can come up with a therapy will dare make a cure. And the economics behind it is simple. First of all, a corporation is driven by stockholders, whom the very vast majority of only care about profit (or at least all those that matter to the decision making). The more profit, the better. Every last cent you can squeeze out of each customer ends up in the bank account of a shareholder, and because they make the decisions, so it is. If a drug company creates a therapy or treatment, they can string people on for millions and do basically nothing at all. If they develop a cure, then an illness is just something which we can move forward from, and they either make much less, or get called out big time on unjustified costs to dying, desperate consumers. Therapies make you appear to care, but overcharging for cures makes you look sick. If you make a cure, you lose the potential to make a lot more money, and in economic terms, that is as good as losing money from your bank account. Sure it is terrible, sick and wrong, but that is how modern business works. It needs to be changed, because it is harming every business from our health, to our food, to our electronics and entertainment. Everything you buy, 99.99% of what you pay ends up in the financial sector, or the top brass of involved companies wallet. Imagine the 50's quality of life, and value of a dollar compared to wages. Now imagine 60 years of technological advancement making everything you bought cheaper to make and cheaper to own, while making more money yourself. We should be living like kings, not struggling like hell to get by.
Also, a few hundred/thousand bucks towards drugs like viagra will never add up the the tens of thousands to millions that those companies can make off of every single cancer patient. Hell, if they could give more people cancer they would be rolling in it, until the day the costs overwhelm yet another system and the financial sector gets another flat and the world gets another recession for it. This kind of half-assed logic and denial based on weak reasoning of something researched a while ago is pathetic. Sure, if you had actually thought about it, you might has something useful to say, but crappy statements like this just slowly divide a populace based on half assed ideas. Try fully engaging in thought before commenting, or at least more than you did here.
Fine grammar is just a formality. Language is a wonderful, ever changing tool. We can use it however we please. Sure, some mistakes are terrible, and accidental, but that does not mean that grammar need be as valuable as gold. We doth need remember that language cannot be controlled without losing that which it is used to create.
We can say things like "I don't grammar" and they convey meaning just as well as saying "I don't pay great attention to or check my grammar" It might sound a bit off, but it does what language is meant to do: convey meaning. The faster and better we can convey meaning, the better we are language-ing. So indeed the phrase "I'm don't grammar" may be terribly flawed, but it conveys meaning quicker and more efficiently than the other statement, so it can easily be said that it has fulfilled its purpose better than the grammatically correct phrase.
Every time I meet a grammar nazi in person I spend about half an hour giving them a speech on why they should go to hell.
Also: I might note that /. comments are terrible for correcting grammar, using crappy comparisons, and crappy attempts at being condescending. It is so much, it often covers up or ignores the important points of a debate. It is just as bad as watching intelligent debates degrade to anger or degrade to moronic babble. I would seriously like to see more focus on what is important, and less on this kind of crap, as a general rule. Maybe then someone could learn something besides how to be better at being a useless, progress impeding grammar nazi.
I suggest you cease and desist. Then we can all get on with our lives.
It is efficient for money-making to centralize everything, especially consumer services/money. But when you put all your eggs in one basket, only one basket needs to be broken to scramble all eggs.
Every day we put more in the cloud. Every day we have less power. What happens when everything is in the cloud? all you need is a truck and a utility pole and hell breaks lose. You can then do as you please while you wait for people to remember how to function without working electronic devices. Imagine the field day organized criminals will have when the police move to the cloud.
Actually, there is not a chance in the world economic forces will lead to the downfall of DRM. You see, monopolistic practices aren't just present in a business itself anymore, but in today's age they often drift across many corporations in the form of standards. As such, something like DRM may be evil, but corporations find it useful, and if all of them across an industry decide it is useful (which it undeniably appears to be (at least to all the morons that look only to profit in the next quarter, not the next year or decade)). If all of the corporations decide to only offer DRM laden goods, you either buy with DRM or don't by. And there is no legal reason this is not possible, and it is very economically likely, because us who only buy non-drm are in such a slim minority, and will likely end up buying DRM stuff eventually if they made it the only way. Economically killing DRM would require a world-wide boycott, and even then they would likely keep it, and just issue some BS press release and get people to go with it, one way or another. Most of these businesses would maintain enough income to last, or have enough in their credit lines.
No, economic destruction of DRM is not even imaginable. Not in an environment in which corporations can easily horizontally spread tools which are bad for consumers, that don't appear to harm the consumer enough for people to make a fuss. There are also far too many people to educate, and people will generally not listen and buy anyways.
And although Amazon isn't 'allowed' to remove your content, their contract specifies times when it is ok, and they have the ability to do so, whether or not they use it. I would say that makes it at the least unreliable. Especially if anything on it is internet-on DRM, if you happen to be away from internet, then fuck you. Just like cloud computing, you pay for access to something, not something. You pay over and over for something to which a one time fee would be sufficient if it were not based in the cloud. Cloud computing has been touted as a 'miracle' but in reality it is only a miracle for the stock holders of company using it, the workers will never see a pay increase.
Any type of monopoly, be it of standards or a corporation, or a style of product, ignores both law and economics. It follows one rule: profit in the next quarter. Find a way to get higher stock prices. That is all that matters. Even if it means plunging the world into recession, if the 50-100 major stockholders/financial guru's behind all the money get a couple mill.
You might make noise, but it is no more than meaningless background to these companies with enormous target markets, of which all of us are a tiny part of. As long as there are millions of ignorant people that will pay for software and get all confused when it doesn't work, and then pay for it again, then nothing you say will ever matter.
The only way DRM will die is if a powerful company kills it, and promotes publically their hate of DRM. Otherwise, it will live till long after we are gone, and get much worse. I have heard small talk of making a DRM in which everything is license charged by the hour. you get charged whenever you log into an application. And to be honest, with the ease of microtransactions, I doubt DRM types of things will do anything other than rape consumers of more money every year, until consumers run out, and some market suffers, causing another financial sector blow-out and another mini-recession.
This isn't the days before the optimization of business. Now everything is super-efficient. And super-efficient means more for stock holders, less for everyone else alive. Now companies have discovered that 1 popular culture is slightly more profitable than 50 amazing, mildly popular cultural sub-groups. Every company stands to make slightly more money by employing nasty tactics, such as DRM. If it succeeds here, other areas will learn to do the same. Like cloud smart housing. Imagine, it costing money constantly just to live in your own home. Sur
And what happens when books that you want to read do not have non-DRM versions? You have been censored of knowledge in a way. What happens when there is no DRM-free option? try finding a DRM free legal version of a video game, movie or book that was published with DRM. There was a time when it was easy to buy only made in america. Not so easy anymore. Saying "taking the moral highground in a situation is optimal, instead of protesting the fact that it is happening" is like if you had said "I have no slaves, therefore I am not infringing on anyones freedoms" while your neighbor is beating his slave, and laughing about it, and you are doing nothing. Just because it doesn't affect you directly doesn't mean that it won't eventually, or that it is not wrong. And your personal quiet protest via actions makes no difference to big mega-corp who can prey on unsuspecting people who have money and pay for things without understanding the technical implications of them.
Of course not, but that is not what I said. What I said would be if your car was entirely proprietary, and your car maker was the only company allowed to make these parts. Then you would either have to buy used parts and hope they work, or be screwed. If an item that has manufacturer "updates" that make a product worth less, then it should come with an automatic full refund to all who previously used that feature. Now if Sony bought the USAF a worthy Cray supercomputer replacement, whatever, but they did not. That is bullshit, and should be fixed, not just bitched about and have others say 'just deal with it'.
Also, I am getting really fucking tired of all the people on the internet that make shitty comparisons, and pretending that they shed light on a situation. If you are going to make a fucking comparison, do it right, especially if you are using it to criticize the accuracy of someone else's statement. That would be the pot calling the kettle black. And that was a good comparison. If I had said that would be like a shrimp calling a whale tiny, it would not be accurate. Seriously, this may be more intelligable than the general community, but as slashdot expands, I see more idiots falling into the same intellectual traps as morons, just using fancier tools to pretend that they aren't.
Sony sold hundreds, if not thousands, of computers to people whose sole intention was to cluster them, or use them as a PC, and for all those that purchased them, they can either get bug fixes and updates and lose their computer, or deal with something that keeps bugging out like some kind of piece of shit, and eventually parts of it will become defunct and die, with no possibility of quality replacement. If a company is going to sell something, they had sure as hell better make it better over time, or not touch it. If they instead make it worse? That would be like if people added a gene to their sequence that took away our ability to see, or hear, or taste, or breath, or in this case, it would make part of the brain die. A big part. See what I did there? how I used a quality comparison? Learn to do the same.
There is one hell of a big difference between capitalism. Capitalism is a free system of trade, where everyone has the right to make money, and spend it freely, and businesses are means of doing so. We do not have capitalism. We have bullshit. Let me explain. A bullshit system, is a system in which the vast majority of the cost of everything that you can spend money on goes to the financial sector, spread out among those with enough extra income to 'invest' or the few filthy rich that own the companies that do the investing. However, when you force at least 10,000,000,000% of the actually cost of something into a financial system, and sell it at that price to consumers, problems arise. See, every single step of production of something you buy generates massive wealth for commodity, stock traders, and top brass of involved corporations. unfortunately, when the workers are paid just enough to get by, and the cost of things constantly increases, this creates an inflation loop and minimum wage increases. On the side however, massive wealth is had to the select upper echlons of society. The cost to live comfortably would be something like 90% lower than it is now, if we didn't have all that bullshit. Plus, every corporation looks for every possible way that they can to pull money out of consumers, whether the consumer can afford it or not. The bullshit system cherishes evil, instead of goodness, and forces people into poverty, pretending to be capitalism. Someday, people will be paid fairly for the work they do, and the things that are so cheap and easy to make will be widely available.
You have a point. But that is fucked up. However you missed my point. My point was that I don't pay for things that I afford to not pay for. Like if my debit card has a clause about being allowed to charge me for nothing whenever they pleased, and it only worked as a debit card a locations that censorship loving bastards wholeheartedly approved of, I would not have it. If my lease on my apartment said that they are allowed to take things from my apartment and kick me out if I didn't comply with their morality standards, and could install cameras in in to make sure I did, then I would sure as hell not live hear. I have a pay-as you go phone, but only because I am not comfortable having non-necessary bills until I have a stable source of income aka after college. Health insurance is still under parents, but I do have cable/internet, and the contract on that does not say that If I look at porn on my connection it will be terminated. That is the kind of bullshit I am talking about.
If a women buys a dildo, but it comes with a contract saying that she can only stick it in her vagina, not in her mouth or but, it would be the unreasonable contracts from a couple of decades ago. If it not only said that, but that if she tried to do a prohibited behavior with it, it would grow legs and walk back to the manufacturer, and have you arrested for sodomy, then it would be these modern bullshit contracts. I do, most certainly, agree that this problem needs to be fixed. And we need to work towards fixing it soon.
However, as xkcd says (http://blacksunreview.files.wordpress.com/2008/08/xkcd11.png), acting like you are intelligent and pointed out a flaw in what someone said by misunderstanding or misconstruing their point, is fucking retarded. Yes, those corporations are raping us, and we are paying them to do it. But they are raping us with human or horse penis. Apple, Amazon, and now Sony, are not just raping us with barbed elephant penises, or blue whale penises. There is a DAMN BIG difference. The average mega-corp just makes us feel violated, sick, embarrassed, and sore. The evil tech-mega-corp that owns your fucking soul the second you give them even one cent, you walk away from the relationship having given up your money, the clothes off your back, the ability to ever use your lower extremities again, shame, anger, and an extremely painful, visible, and terrible injury. It is the difference between slapping you wife after she cheats on you, and tying her to a chair and beating her for the next year, then killing her and throwing her out the window of a 100 story tall hotel. When an iPad competitor comes out, I will likely buy it (assuming a free, non-censoring nature, and the ability to use it to my free will without monitoring, constant licensing, or monthly payments (besides optional 3g or whatever), but why would I pay a shitload of money for something about as useful as clog in your toilet.
I am not standing up for sony, I am just saying they are not the only ones guilty of being terrible.
If amazon advertises the ability to read books on the kindle, and you purchase a book to read, and it is removed, regardless of who removed it, it is a piece of property, a physical set of information contained on your device, and for them to take it from you under any circumstance is horrible, whether they refund you or not.
I am not talking about what apple advertised, and I don't mean they killed applications. I mean they get up and say 'here is a powerful device that can run applications'. It may be a powerful, beautiful device, but making it proprietary and pretty much constantly hooked to an apple IV with no chance to develop applications for yourself or for use only within a small or large corporation, and making everything pass through the damn appstore and censoring it? They are doing the job of the 'censorship' loving bastards that constantly speak up against knowledge in this country.
The tax code is complicated because features are added haphazardly and piled on. I agree it should be simpler, but that is aside from the point. There is actually a section of a law called the 'fair contract clause' in which it stops contracts from being insane. Like they can't just put at the bottom of a 200 page lease agreement "and you must turn over your identity, your children and your organs to our company after exactly 3 days", or a more mild "by the way, you don't own this device, we do, and have the right to do whatever we want whenever we want. Because we didn't sell it to you, we licensed it to you." Which is really the purpose of an EULA on anything really. It is a terrible thing. and should be fixed.
To sell a product with a promise of certain features, and then to act as if it is your own and disable everything you don't want the real owner to have. Disabling the otherOS feature was totally unnecessary. It was just some kind of cruel bullshit, limiting your freedoms on a device that belongs to you. That is the modern way.
Buy a kindle? Have YOUR PAID FOR books removed at amazons will.
Buy a PS3 for clustering? Have your PAID FOR CLUSTER disabled, unrepairable, and suddenly worth its weight in crap as soon as the machines start to die off.
Buy an apple product? well, might as well put your head in a plaster garbage bag and die, they own everything that touches the screen of that device, hell, likely they even own the device, just 'licence' it out to you in some peculiar way.
If sony's terms of service said something about taking away features at their own will, it is not a valid part of the contract. Here in america, we have laws that prevent mega-corporations from making insanely complicated contracts and inserting clauses about how they own your soul and can harvest your body parts whenever they please. This modern pattern of bullshit is why I avoid buying anything that follows that pattern. Unfortunately every day there are fewer options. And soon enough they will all be gone.
The article was about using DNA to build logic gates and processor pieces that were very small, on the order of just a few molecules, kind of like DNA making proteins. The next step is putting these elements together to build circuitry. DNA already puts together insane life forms that have millions of parts all working together. We are made using DNA. It is not our primary ingredient, but DNA builds us. That is the goal here, build circuits.
sure, one day v. 1 year of chip making is a bit of an overstatement. But if this is perjected, computer technology will certainly be on its way to becoming yet smaller, faster, and better. However, no matter how efficiently we make things, it will never be cheaper. Why? Because they will just mark it up even higher than whats already out there to make more money. And when asked "if they are so cheap to make, why don't you sell that are more reasonable prices" they will say "to cover 'costs'" which will be made up bullshit, or commodity trading over necessary supplies will drive up the price. All of that money will end up in the financial sector, everyone who does good work will recieve the same crap pay, and everyone who needs cheaper, better electronics had better wait in line to get ass raped by the company with the billion percent markup.
I see no reason why a consumer should ever be excited about advances in technology, the prices for the top of the line (even if it is the cheapest to produce) will always be unaffordably high, and will always increase. Meanwhile they extra money made pumps up the financial sector and causes more inflation, making our money worth even less. The electronics and entertainment industry has successfully evaded market forces, simply because ever company in the industry enjoys charging shitloads of money for every item they sell, and not just reasonable for profit.
The simple fact is that all of the wonderful, great discoveries of the past few years don't matter. They don't matter to consumers, to producers, to anyone, except for the financial sector. They trade in anything and everything, and can milk every single industry for insane amounts of money just by trading up the price of raw ingredients or companies that make parts for the final product. The works don't see better pay, the consumers don't see lower prices. Sure technology is advancing, and it makes minor improvements in our lives, but everything costs more and more every day while everyone makes less and less. Everyone except for the top brass of large companies, and anyone that does any kind of work in the financial sector.
Light actually does have a pressure. It is incredibly small, but in enormous quantities (like the sun or lasers) it can be quite powerful. I believe something like Intensity / c is radiation pressure formula. Not sure though. But it definitely has pressure, without radiation pressure our creation of Bose Einstein condensates would totally fail. Photons may not have rest mass, but they have some momentum because matter is just a form of energy. E.^2=M.^2.*c.^4 Its not much, but enough of it has measurable effects. A good part of the time the pressure is converted to heat (like on earth, or in our metal cutting lasers).
Uh, YES. Reality is a fantastic thing, i would suggest learning more about it, it is an enriching experience. Or you could just go on being a dumb-ass making the world a harder place to live in because people that know things have to sit around and explain things to you like a five year old, or just accept you people attempting to influence the world around you without understanding the possible consequences of your actions.
To be honest I would love to work in such conditions. Being able to relax in the nude while working?! My productivity would easily quadruple. Not to mention an office like that sounds more open on their dress code, so I might be able to get away with avoiding shoes (haven't worn any in 6 months, and Ill be damned if I do anytime soon).
Correlation doesn't imply causation. This is a perfect cause of that. Lets say I watch 3 or 4 different shows that occur during the course of a week, at 2 dollars a show thats 6-8 dollars a week, and 24-32 bucks a month, which is like adding another damn bill to the pile. But 12-16 bucks a month? entirely managable.
With these things there are two natural equilibriums. Charge to much and get the large number of people that are willing to pay for it, or charge half that and get 10x the target market, and make much more money.
Just think about it, 1 dollar per song, for someone who picks up maybe 10 songs a week can amount to over 40 bucks a month, but 50c a song is only 20 bucks a month, a much more manageable number. The average american does not have infinite disposable income to throw around 50 bucks a month on each of 10 different services just to get as much entertainment as if they have just the big cable package for 50 bucks a month. But a ton of services each at 5-10 bucks a month that add up to 50? just fine. We are not bitching because we always want things cheaper than they are no matter what, we are bitching because they are simply too expensive.
the iPad for example is a beautiful piece of machinery, and if I could program it to do whatever I want, it would be worth a good 700-800 bucks, it is a wonderful piece of the future, flying at us faster than we can take it. But with apples crap, it is basically just a brick for the millions of industry applications it could currently be filling. Everything would be unicorns if the prices were .5x, because then we could actually afford them, no rationalization about it. If I can't afford it, I can't afford it, it has nothing to do with any kind of heroic spirit of wanting a more reasonable price.
But to pay a price that it is a struggle for me and others to afford, at a huge markup from similar services, just so that I can watch 15 minutes of advertising and 45 minutes of programming? And I can only watch it once, so if I miss something, I have to buy it again? That is insanity.
I seriously wonder how much the xxAAs pay (if anything) to just run around the internet and post retarded bullshit like this. Or if people are really that quick to assume insane causations based on a few terrible observations, and demonizing everyone who is too poor to afford to spend 10x what everything is worth on meaningless bull they could either go without, or steal. Whats next, are you people going to start demonizing the hungry for not eating enough? Common already, have some sense.
Meanwhile anyone with a good idea that doesn't have some sort of million dollar backer or corporate account on hand, just the money in their pocket and a feeble bank account is totally out of the patent market now, not to mention after any increase.
What they should do is create an 3rd tier for companies that submit more than 1000 patents a year, and increase the rates by 10000x. There would be less patents on things like "the little rib between this part of the case and that part of the case of product from that other patent"
The filing fee is only like 150 bucks for a small entity, the real cost is in basically anything in the patent, any pager after x number of pages, and all the hundreds of fees to get it finished. Might cost an indepentent inventor navigating the system a good 10k to get a patent, more with a lawyer. Your average joe doesn't have that kind of money to play with, meanwhile big companies like GE that file something like 100k a year pay a lot less than they should have to.
Great, even worse news for the poor little guy. You think it is bad for small businesses, it is terrible for an independent inventor. Patents are becoming more expensive and harder to get every day, better for big companies that apply for ten thousand-a hundred thousand patents a year, meanwhile I have to construct elaborate contracts with a company before I can even show them what I have, at fear of losing everything. One hell of a messed up system.