So, Android is the best choice because you (meaning a team of concerned citizens) can essentially take all the privacy leaking parts out and create a private and secure system.
The versions used in the United States haven't had that done (mostly though some phones like Amazon's might be an exception). So what could happen and what the current state is are different. But moreover they can't really. Android as used in the USA includes the Google Play layer which is not open source and can't be modified. Certainly base Android is easy to separate from Google as the Chinese market demonstrates but the ecosystem cannot be severed.
They get clean once they stop racing. The big drugs used are Lasix (which controls bleeding in the lungs), phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory), and cortiscosteroids (for pain and inflammation). Also for many horses steroids and pain killers. Those aren't needed for breeding just racing.
Abandoned by Apple and Microsoft - lol what? Apple never used Java, they have always used their own languages.
Not at all true. When OSX came out Apple had a series of 4 core programming modes: Classic (ran against an OSX9 emulator), C++/Carbon (ran directly against OSX), Objective-C/Cocoa and Java/SDK. Overtime the Java SDK got pulled further and further from the core. But there is no question that Apple was a huge Java proponent, many people often thinking it was the future of OSX development around 2001.
Windows 8, and in fact Microsoft's whole "One UI" strategy is management driven.... Zune, was actually a decent device but management killed the program
That's not in any possible sense a bug. It is a strategic choice you disagree with. As for not releasing products when programmers say you should. I think Perl 6 provides a pretty good example of what happens when complex projects aren't disciplined with the "best version ships in 10 months".
I don't think the problem is so much the firmware on Android. The Samsung firmware on the Galaxy is excellent from a privacy and security standpoint. The issue is the higher up layers in the stack.
I'm not sure what you mean specifically so I can't comment on that. They seem to have a pretty good range of consumer grade privacy features that are adjustable. That's not to say that every-time there is a conflict between privacy and some other goal they optimize for privacy but they do seem to lean towards privacy and allow the privacy conscious to lean more towards privacy.
I disagree. Apple does a pretty good job on privacy and is concerned about it. They've already limited applications interactions and they are fairly secure by default. Their infrastructure allows additional privacy to be easily added on.
As for Microsoft I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me.
That's not lack of funding that's just atrocious allocation. Why even have centers with that sort of light coverage? Send it to a statewide or nationwide center and have them deal with it.
I doubt that. I've sold call centers. I can't see anyway that I wouldn't run huge surpluses running a call center with that kind of inflow. Say 150k person county throwing off $1.8m a year. Infrastructure doesn't cost much at all. 10 operators with benefits $400k, $500k. Full features PBX, trunks, pooling, screens, control software $250k. No I don't buy it doesn't cover the costs.
Now of course if states are redirecting the budget to something else then sure. But there is funding.
Between commercial malware and government agencies, how do you keep your phone's data relatively private?
There are 4 main smartphone brands:
Apple is in the hardware business. Their goal is to sell you hardware with a basket of software that enhances the experiences and showcases the hardware. Blackberry is in the enterprise software business. Their goal is to sell you hardware that ties you to a management system from which they make their margin. Microsoft is in the productivity software business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases the features of their productivity suites including their server / cloud based collaboration tools. Google is in the advertising business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases their web services. Those web services are designed to collect information about you to sell to advertisers.
Of those 4 companies which do you think you are going to have the toughest time with privacy? If you care about privacy and don't have a strong reason to pick Android, don't use Android, it is quite obviously going to have to be the worst of the 4. You are going to have to cut against the grain to be secure and be on a platform designed advertisers. The other 3 while they may have problems are all much much better on privacy. Blackberry's balance feature allows you to create a container which divides your data a secure side and an insecure side. They offer things like secure browsing by default. You want security choose an operating system designed to enhance not reduce security. Apple and Microsoft are sort of midpoints. Apple is very good about now allowing applications to upload data you don't know about sharing between apps is off by default. Microsoft emulated the Apple sandboxing, certification and limited interaction approach we'll see if overtime they maintain it. If you want to use these devices and have secure data something like Good's containers (which do work on Android) provide a pretty excellent way to keep specific data associated with specific applications secure.
I like Windows 8. First version of Windows since 2000 that I've genuinely been enthusiastic about. Of course I use it on the right hardware not Windows 7 hardware. Anyway I wouldn't worry about Mint going to a Gnome 3 style interface. Mint came out of the backlash against that interface they may well be one of the last distributions to switch.
As for Linux on the desktop, yeah it is very usable. I think the lack of commercial desktop distributions has hurt quite a bit. Ubuntu plays the role that Debian used to play but we need Mandrake's and Calderas (pre SCO). I liked the "mostly free but enhanced" distributions and am often annoyed at how driver problems or codex problems end up crippling my experience.
They can call you. There are different types of 911 messages. For example: dead deer blocking lane 17.2 mile market southbound highway XYZ doesn't require a callback.
Printing works fine if you use a printer with a standard print language like PCL, Postscript, LPDS... Really that's sort of a BS issue. Don't buy Linux incompatible hardware to run Linux.
The barrier to entry or to re-entry with anything more than using the default setup from the distribution is very, very high, much moreso than even the days when one had to do a lot more by hand.
As someone who was using Linux since 1995. No it isn't moreso. Things are much much better then times when standard Linux documentation talked about recompiling the kernel to load up particular features or getting X to run at all was a challenge. Yes configuration is annoying but nowhere near what it was then.
I'm primarily an OSX user. I still have to open shell pretty regularly to fix things. In the dozen years I've been on OSX I doubt there has been a week I haven't had to be in shell for some reason. That's UNIX not just Linux.
It isn't immediate cash flow, these are rich people. But total cash flow is higher for breeding than racing. A winner is worth more not racing. Risk is higher both for injury and the horse might start to suck lowering their eventual value.
Also the horses become much more pleasant to be around when they are breeding. It is more fun for the owners.
my point is that other US professional sports manage to treat their fans much better..
Maybe I don't know. Take horse racing for example. One of the things most destructive to the sport is early retirements. Horses retire early because there is much more money in breeding potential winners than being a winner. So once a horse wins enough to get a following it is likely to be breeding not racing. Incredibly destructive, has had huge impact on lowering the quality of the racing horses. It has undermined the fan base. Yet because the top.5% of fans (the breeders) like breeding and that maximized revenue... I'd say that's worse than the NFL.
Another example is boxing and women's ice skating. In both of those the judging in uniformally corrupt. The results of the "games" are modified for the purposes or raising revenues since fans like to see "their team" (by analogy) win and pay more for winning teams. Whatever problems the NFL has, it doesn't cheat.
most companies have to balance their product, consumer happiness, and price
I suspect the NFL is doing that. You seem like you are at exactly the balance point. You feel like you are paying a bit too much and feel pressured to pay more. But you don't completely walk away.
I was thinking of them when I wrote that. It was a good choice for the community. That way the local team has real meaningful ties to the community and the "home team" can act in the public interest.
But why does every pro football player have to play ticket-selling (i.e. commercial) matches under the umbrella of the NFL
They don't. The AFL is professional. The XFL was professional. There is no government guarantee. Now what is the case
If the govt. or whoever
The whoever here is the customer base. The customer base wants to see top tier players and wants to see them in competition with one another. So there are are substantial network effects. These mean that with very few exceptions good players make more money working for the NFL than they would with any competing league.
The player should have a choice of various organizations with different pay structures/benefits to choose from.
They do.
Similarly, ticket buyers should have a choice of various leagues that have very, very good players.
That only happens if multiple leagues are able to attract the best players. And that requires that network effects not be present.
It is unclear if that generates more or less revenue for the NFL. Clearly lots of football games do exist. The only thing Madden has is rights to use trademarks. It may very well be the case that having the unique rights to those trademarks are substantially more valuable than splitting them.
streaming games online
Why would they want to do that? They make a lot revenue from charging the broadcast networks the rights to their games. That's not punishing fans that's charging.
-a way to watch all games (not only the ones you happen to get on tv in your area) without needing a ~$200 satellite subscription
They want you to buy an expensive subscription. Again they are charging you for their services.
these give consumers more choice and flexibility and are things that fans *really want* and will be happy to pay for.
Probably not as much as they are paying now. The level at which a person feels a product is too expensive but still worth buying is usually pretty close to the maximum they are willing to pay. They are doing their job if they have you paying more than you want to be paying. That's maximizing revenue.
maybe "punishment" is the wrong word, "abuse" or "mistreatment" may fit better
Its none of the above. They are just charging you for their services. Same as most entertainers in a capitalist society.
There is no government guaranteed monopoly. There is the arena football league. There are college leagues. There used to be the XFL (a fun league). The NFL just feels like a monopoly because the fans are very very picky.
All the things you listed as punishment are getting you to pay more money to them. They aren't punishing you they are however charging you for a service you like a lot. I suspect having local games often not be on TV is a way to encourage people to have season tickets. It doesn't matter on an individual level if collectively that behavior raises ticket prices.
Yes. And the best thing for them have done would have been to buy the team and make it a municipal asset in full or in part. Huge corporate subsidies with no guarantees of public return are bad policy across the board.
Yes. That's progress. Aperture filled a niche that was important:
a) It provided a platform in case Adobe discontinued photoshop for Mac b) It provided a way to work with raw images c) It provided a version of iPhoto advanced
Well: a) Is never happening b) is now handled well by Lightroom c) Is going to be included in 10.10
Slashdot Mirror
The versions used in the United States haven't had that done (mostly though some phones like Amazon's might be an exception). So what could happen and what the current state is are different. But moreover they can't really. Android as used in the USA includes the Google Play layer which is not open source and can't be modified. Certainly base Android is easy to separate from Google as the Chinese market demonstrates but the ecosystem cannot be severed.
And I didn't get your last sentence at all.
They get clean once they stop racing. The big drugs used are Lasix (which controls bleeding in the lungs), phenylbutazone (an anti-inflammatory), and cortiscosteroids (for pain and inflammation). Also for many horses steroids and pain killers. Those aren't needed for breeding just racing.
Not at all true. When OSX came out Apple had a series of 4 core programming modes: Classic (ran against an OSX9 emulator), C++/Carbon (ran directly against OSX), Objective-C/Cocoa and Java/SDK. Overtime the Java SDK got pulled further and further from the core. But there is no question that Apple was a huge Java proponent, many people often thinking it was the future of OSX development around 2001.
That's not in any possible sense a bug. It is a strategic choice you disagree with. As for not releasing products when programmers say you should. I think Perl 6 provides a pretty good example of what happens when complex projects aren't disciplined with the "best version ships in 10 months".
I don't think the problem is so much the firmware on Android. The Samsung firmware on the Galaxy is excellent from a privacy and security standpoint. The issue is the higher up layers in the stack.
I'm not sure what you mean specifically so I can't comment on that. They seem to have a pretty good range of consumer grade privacy features that are adjustable. That's not to say that every-time there is a conflict between privacy and some other goal they optimize for privacy but they do seem to lean towards privacy and allow the privacy conscious to lean more towards privacy.
I disagree. Apple does a pretty good job on privacy and is concerned about it. They've already limited applications interactions and they are fairly secure by default. Their infrastructure allows additional privacy to be easily added on.
As for Microsoft I'm not sure where you are disagreeing with me.
That's not lack of funding that's just atrocious allocation. Why even have centers with that sort of light coverage? Send it to a statewide or nationwide center and have them deal with it.
I doubt that. I've sold call centers. I can't see anyway that I wouldn't run huge surpluses running a call center with that kind of inflow. Say 150k person county throwing off $1.8m a year. Infrastructure doesn't cost much at all. 10 operators with benefits $400k, $500k. Full features PBX, trunks, pooling, screens, control software $250k. No I don't buy it doesn't cover the costs.
Now of course if states are redirecting the budget to something else then sure. But there is funding.
There are 4 main smartphone brands:
Apple is in the hardware business. Their goal is to sell you hardware with a basket of software that enhances the experiences and showcases the hardware.
Blackberry is in the enterprise software business. Their goal is to sell you hardware that ties you to a management system from which they make their margin.
Microsoft is in the productivity software business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases the features of their productivity suites including their server / cloud based collaboration tools.
Google is in the advertising business. Their goal is to sell you an endpoint that showcases their web services. Those web services are designed to collect information about you to sell to advertisers.
Of those 4 companies which do you think you are going to have the toughest time with privacy? If you care about privacy and don't have a strong reason to pick Android, don't use Android, it is quite obviously going to have to be the worst of the 4. You are going to have to cut against the grain to be secure and be on a platform designed advertisers. The other 3 while they may have problems are all much much better on privacy. Blackberry's balance feature allows you to create a container which divides your data a secure side and an insecure side. They offer things like secure browsing by default. You want security choose an operating system designed to enhance not reduce security. Apple and Microsoft are sort of midpoints. Apple is very good about now allowing applications to upload data you don't know about sharing between apps is off by default. Microsoft emulated the Apple sandboxing, certification and limited interaction approach we'll see if overtime they maintain it. If you want to use these devices and have secure data something like Good's containers (which do work on Android) provide a pretty excellent way to keep specific data associated with specific applications secure.
I like Windows 8. First version of Windows since 2000 that I've genuinely been enthusiastic about. Of course I use it on the right hardware not Windows 7 hardware. Anyway I wouldn't worry about Mint going to a Gnome 3 style interface. Mint came out of the backlash against that interface they may well be one of the last distributions to switch.
As for Linux on the desktop, yeah it is very usable. I think the lack of commercial desktop distributions has hurt quite a bit. Ubuntu plays the role that Debian used to play but we need Mandrake's and Calderas (pre SCO). I liked the "mostly free but enhanced" distributions and am often annoyed at how driver problems or codex problems end up crippling my experience.
They can call you. There are different types of 911 messages. For example: dead deer blocking lane 17.2 mile market southbound highway XYZ doesn't require a callback.
Look at your phone bill there is a 911 charge on it. There is funding.
Printing works fine if you use a printer with a standard print language like PCL, Postscript, LPDS... Really that's sort of a BS issue. Don't buy Linux incompatible hardware to run Linux.
As someone who was using Linux since 1995. No it isn't moreso. Things are much much better then times when standard Linux documentation talked about recompiling the kernel to load up particular features or getting X to run at all was a challenge. Yes configuration is annoying but nowhere near what it was then.
I'm primarily an OSX user. I still have to open shell pretty regularly to fix things. In the dozen years I've been on OSX I doubt there has been a week I haven't had to be in shell for some reason. That's UNIX not just Linux.
It isn't immediate cash flow, these are rich people. But total cash flow is higher for breeding than racing. A winner is worth more not racing.
Risk is higher both for injury and the horse might start to suck lowering their eventual value.
Also the horses become much more pleasant to be around when they are breeding. It is more fun for the owners.
Maybe I don't know. Take horse racing for example. One of the things most destructive to the sport is early retirements. Horses retire early because there is much more money in breeding potential winners than being a winner. So once a horse wins enough to get a following it is likely to be breeding not racing. Incredibly destructive, has had huge impact on lowering the quality of the racing horses. It has undermined the fan base. Yet because the top .5% of fans (the breeders) like breeding and that maximized revenue... I'd say that's worse than the NFL.
Another example is boxing and women's ice skating. In both of those the judging in uniformally corrupt. The results of the "games" are modified for the purposes or raising revenues since fans like to see "their team" (by analogy) win and pay more for winning teams. Whatever problems the NFL has, it doesn't cheat.
I suspect the NFL is doing that. You seem like you are at exactly the balance point. You feel like you are paying a bit too much and feel pressured to pay more. But you don't completely walk away.
I was thinking of them when I wrote that. It was a good choice for the community. That way the local team has real meaningful ties to the community and the "home team" can act in the public interest.
They don't. The AFL is professional. The XFL was professional. There is no government guarantee. Now what is the case
The whoever here is the customer base. The customer base wants to see top tier players and wants to see them in competition with one another. So there are are substantial network effects. These mean that with very few exceptions good players make more money working for the NFL than they would with any competing league.
They do.
That only happens if multiple leagues are able to attract the best players. And that requires that network effects not be present.
It is unclear if that generates more or less revenue for the NFL. Clearly lots of football games do exist. The only thing Madden has is rights to use trademarks. It may very well be the case that having the unique rights to those trademarks are substantially more valuable than splitting them.
Why would they want to do that? They make a lot revenue from charging the broadcast networks the rights to their games. That's not punishing fans that's charging.
They want you to buy an expensive subscription. Again they are charging you for their services.
Probably not as much as they are paying now. The level at which a person feels a product is too expensive but still worth buying is usually pretty close to the maximum they are willing to pay. They are doing their job if they have you paying more than you want to be paying. That's maximizing revenue.
Its none of the above. They are just charging you for their services. Same as most entertainers in a capitalist society.
There is no government guaranteed monopoly. There is the arena football league. There are college leagues. There used to be the XFL (a fun league). The NFL just feels like a monopoly because the fans are very very picky.
All the things you listed as punishment are getting you to pay more money to them. They aren't punishing you they are however charging you for a service you like a lot. I suspect having local games often not be on TV is a way to encourage people to have season tickets. It doesn't matter on an individual level if collectively that behavior raises ticket prices.
Yes. And the best thing for them have done would have been to buy the team and make it a municipal asset in full or in part. Huge corporate subsidies with no guarantees of public return are bad policy across the board.
Yes. That's progress. Aperture filled a niche that was important:
a) It provided a platform in case Adobe discontinued photoshop for Mac
b) It provided a way to work with raw images
c) It provided a version of iPhoto advanced
Well:
a) Is never happening
b) is now handled well by Lightroom
c) Is going to be included in 10.10
So the platform is moving on.