so far no one's made a sound argument for community internet
Let's assume it's an essential service (I think it pretty much is, these days, and it's certainly got a huge social benefit). Internet service has only ever thrived when the last mile has been provided as a "Utility", whether through traditional regulated utilities like the phone companies (all the way back to dialup), or through cable. All the private "last mile" Internet service I know of that's succeeded has been based on making everyone in an area pay for the road: apartment complexes or similar developments where the cost of establishing the infrastructure has been shared by everyone whether they used it or not.
This is the utility model. Whether the utility is paid for by taxes or fees is a whole different question from whether it's built by the municipality using bonds or by a franchisee on speculation, is a different argument than the one I'm making. I'm just asking... why is this service which has traditionally depended on a utility model and which seems to need one different from other similar services?
I think the lesson of the 20th century is "life is complex, 'ism's don't work". But for god's sake, at least get your 'ism's straight: If you think that a government-regulated monopoly on the use of a slice of the RF spectrum is laissez-faire capitalism, you are obviously using a different meaning of the term "laissez-faire capitalism" than I've ever heard of.
HDTV? the thing that's been holding up HDTV more than anything else has been the MPAA's panic attack over digital television and their insistence on building copy protection into every TV. I don't recall anything about guaranteeing Hollywood's profits in any of my Socialist Conspiracy playbooks. I'll ask my controller about that next orientation meeting of my cell.
In the meantime, since cellular companies are supposed to be the ones Munis are unfairly competing with, let's look at cellular. Let's have a look at why cellular service has gotten cheaper.
20 years ago a top of the line home computer had a Motorola 68000 in it and cost $5000. 10 years ago it had a first generation Pentium and cost $1500. Today your optical mouse has more CPU power than that 20 year old home computer, and any internet-capable cellphone has a faster processor than that first generation Pentium.
20 years ago you couldn't build a modern cellular phone at all. 10 years ago it would have been prohibitively expensive. All the infrastructure associated with it's gotten cheaper too: it's gotten about twice as fast (or about half the price, same thing) every 18 months. And that goes for the wiring, too. The biggest cost of the wiring now is actual digging... the fiber is so efficient and has so much bandwidth that some places they're laying ten times the amount they ever expect to need, and they've actually set their expectations high enough that they're close to correct. The cost of cell hardware has gone way down to the point that they're putting microcells in buildings to fill in the gaps.
And despite that, the cellular service in the US sucks. If I get service from verizon, I get a choice of 9 phones Verizon sells in my area. If I switch to T-Mobile, I get a choice of 9 phones T-mobile sells in my area. If I switch to Sprint, I get a choice of 9 phones Sprint cells. None of those phones are even vaguely like the one I want, and once I actually found one I liked I had to give it up because they changed the protocol on me.
If someone calls me on my phone, I pay for the airtime, whether I solicited the call or not... so there's all kinds of laws about who can and can not call me on my cellphone, and I STILL get (and get to pay for) telemarketing calls on my phone. What's laissez-faire about that?
In Europe, cellphone service is more heavily regulated. Everyone uses the same protocol... there's none of this TDMA vs CDMA vs Triband vs PCS vs whatever... but you can use any phone you want, you just take the SIM card out of one phone and plug it into another. And the caller pays for the airtime, whichever way it goes. Funny how those socialists have managed to come up with a good capitalist solution and the capitalists are messing about with microregulations.
I had a T-Mobile smartphone. I wanted to try it with the T-Mobile service. I went to the T-Mobile store and asked for some pay-as-you-go service. They wanted a $200 deposit. What for? For the phone! What phone? I already have the phone, I just want to buy the service. Oh, that's OK, I don't need the phone, but there's still a $200 deposit. What for? It's in case you leave the service early. Leave the service? It's pay-as-you-go! Well, yes, but there's still a monthly minimum and a 2 year commitment. Why? because it includes a phone. I don't want a phone. You don't need to take it, but it's still included...
They sell WiFi service, too. But only at T-mobile Hotspots. Which are pretty much only at Starbucks. I don't have a Starbucks nearby, but when I was in one last I wanted to use one. It was $6.00 for 60 minutes, which is a bit steep... and you couldn't sign up there, yo
WiFi - 11Mbps to 54Mbps, regional, uses wired internet infrastructure, static (slow handoff), "lillypad" coverage, compatible with home wireless lans.
EVDO - 300kbps-2Mbps, national, uses cellular infrastructure, mobile (fast handoff), wide coverage, requires new hardware.
These are not competing services: I've done the "cellphone internet" thing, and accumulated a fine collection of proprietary widgets that would have let me use my internet service nationwide... then when the next big thing comes along, they turn into technotrash. I can get a WiFi card for just about any gadget I like and it'll work with any WiFi access point whether it's my home WAN or the coffee shop down the street.
I don't care if Verizon or T-Mobile give out free blow jobs with their gadgets: I don't travel much, I'm not in the market for Yet Another Omnisky or a drawer full of cellphone-computer cables. All my cellphone does now is voice.
But someone who does travel, who's already using a fancy cellphone, EVDO will be great. For them. Not for me.
I'm not convinced that municipal WiFi is a good use of funds, but EVDO isn't in the same market at all.
It's not coke versus pepsi, it's coffee versus beer.
Disadvantage #3... a patchwork of different services in different areas, requiring people to purchase multiple Wifi accounts for home, work, school, public parks, etcetera...
This is the big problem with Wifi. Since it's a mobile service, you need to follow a utility model where one company gets a franchise and a price regulated by the city (by contract or law), or you end up with a fragmented network, multiple network coverage (and conflicts) in popular locations, no coverage in others.
One possibility would be for the municipality to own the network, but it would be paid for and operated by one company who would have a monopoly on the use of the network for the first N years.
Personally, I'm not certain that "municipal WiFi" is necessary or useful or an appropriate use of public funds. So I can't give you the argument you want.
I do want to know one thing, however.
Consider that the last bastion of true lassaiz-faire capitalism is organized crime, and the mixed economy has become the norm in the civilised world.
Consider the number of services that are provided through the city or town you live in, either directly or through contracts with utility companies. Do you really think you'd be better off if you had to separately and personally contract with competing providers of power, sewage, and water?
Given that background, can you explain why you think Wireless Internet service is somehow different than any of the other municipal services? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe wired internet is, and wireless isn't, or vice versa. Maybe there should be WiFi access to local services, and you could buy general access to the worldwide Internet? Since you're so sure that the free market is the best model, I'm sure you've already thought about this stuff.
The bottom line to all this licence discussion is that 99% of the time people don't give a hoot about software licences. They just apply common sense and fairness.
That's a really interesting way of putting it.
That's where the difference between the BSDL and the GPL is, that last one percent.
The GPL was born out of one of those 1% cases, so that 1% is really why it exists at all.
The BSDL, born in an environment where the 99% case is practically a religion, says that 1% isn't worth worrying about.
IE makes your boot and login take longer, because the HTML control that's 95% of IE is used by Windows Explorer. That does make it seem to start faster, but if your system was properly designed it wouldn't.
Heh. I had a box recently where I had to update a configuration file, and when I did a PS to get the PID to send a HUP, I noticed it was sitting at simething like 10,000 minutes of CPU time. Which woried me at first, until I noticed that the process had been running since Aug03. OK, that's more reasonable.
I haven't managed to have a box stay up as long as some of the ones at the top of the Netcraft runtime ratings. Even with UPSes, you get occasional long power outages. But really, "I'll finally have a reason to reboot the OS after 3 years" is a better taunt.:)
Backwards compatibility and preventing anyone else from being backwards compatible by repeatedly changing what they had to be backwards-compatible with won. Being backwards-compatible with MS-DOS 3.3 wasn't a problem. The problem was that while they were doing that, MS-DOS 5 came out with a bunch of undocumented interfaces that nobody else but Microsoft and a few applications vendors had access to. And then Windows 3 beta came out with checks that brought up obscure error messages when you tried running under any of the DOS 3.3 and DOS 5.x emulations, further reducing public confidence in the emulators.
It wasn't just backwards compatibility that won. It was backwards compatibility and dirty tricks.
People don't remember that there was a reason Microsoft won. They actually had a better product.
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
What Eric is saying is that, in a perfect world, in a perfectly free market, in the very long run, closed source models would win lose to open source ones.
Where open source works, this is already happening.
Where open source doesn't work, the only viable open source products are closed-source products that have failed in the market.
And the first really big example of an open source license keeping an open source tree out of private hands wasn't even using the GPL. And the hook that made that possible (which was also the an attempt at creating the freedom to know what's running on your computer) was opposed so aggressively by the FSF that it was eventually taken out just to shut the beggars up.
I could see $8.00 swarmbots being practical, but only for limited purposes... until they're cheap enough that there's no point in stealing them the really interesting applications are pretty impractical.
Not when I park on a slope, because the car lets me know right away I need the handbrake on. When you park on a slope you put the handbrake on, you turn the wheels into the curb, and you leave the car in gear. At least I do, don't you?
In Houston? I might need the handbrake once in six months. At most. I don't have earthquake insurance either. Stupid me.
I mean surely it would be sooo easy to have the car detect when you would like the handbrake on
I dont know about that, but obviously it's easy enough to build an iPod that doesn't need a hold switch because it doesn't have a ridiculously sensitive user interface. Apple managed it, and so I bought one.
ActiveX is IE's binary plugin mechanism, allowing plugins to run such as Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, Real, WMP, Java (IE loads JVMs as ActiveX components). Your proposal would cripple IE by disallowing the running of such plugins.
Then it sounds like IE needs to be redesigned to support a direct plugin mechanism that doesn't contain a path that allows for the remote installation of controls.
At all.
Not from "trusted sites".
Not from a "trusted zone".
Nothing.
No installation except by explicit user request. Period. Nothing less is acceptable.
This has largely been fixed [...]
If it had been fixed, they wouldn't need "Low Rights IE". So "This has been largely fixed" means "this hasn't been fixed, but they've stuck some more fingers in holes in the dyke".
They don't need to run IE in "low rights" mode, they need to change the design of the HTML control and IE so they display pages in "no rights" mode all the time, unless the application they're embedded in explicitly extends the capabilities. That is, the HTML control by itself should have no mechanism for running ActiveX or VBscript or any "local access" features in JScript. All these would need to be added by the app (such as Windows Update), and there would be NO TIME that the IE shell would add these capabilities, no matter what "zone" it's in.
Give us a strong sandbox in the browser, and you won't need to run the browser in a weak one.
do you also have difficulty remembering to stick your key in to start the engine when you try to drive
If you had to switch the engine off and pull the key out every time you came to a stop, even at a traffic light, or else you might accidentally brush a control and the car would start driving again... I think you'd find yourself forgetting now and then.
I suppose I should be thankful I couldn't accidentally run over and kill people with my old iPod, right?
Think of the hold switch as a mode selector and it can become second-nature.
All kinds of stupid extra steps can be learned: pushing a button on your LED watch to see the time, toggling in the IPL sequence for your mainframe computer, I don't do that kind of thing any more, why should I put up with it from an MP3 player when Apple makes a perfectly good MP3 player that doesn't have the same design flaw?
How you got the idea that I hadn't "tried it out" I have no idea, perhaps you're just looking for a reason to dismiss my perfectly reasonable objection to the ridiculously sensitive controls on the iPod (and on many other poorly designed music players). Not only did I "try it out", I tried it and found it wanting, even after I bought Apple's wired remote so I could leave the "hold" button on all the time.
It's not even the iPod. I replaced my iPod Mini with... an iPod Shuffle. Which has much better controls, showing that Apple isn't wedded to the iPod's funky clickwheel.
Slashdot Mirror
Because you were unable to turn on your laptop, open a web browser, and be re-directed to their sign-up page?
Not when I did it, at least not on a PDA. They wanted me to install some kind of wireless manager first.
so far no one's made a sound argument for community internet
Let's assume it's an essential service (I think it pretty much is, these days, and it's certainly got a huge social benefit). Internet service has only ever thrived when the last mile has been provided as a "Utility", whether through traditional regulated utilities like the phone companies (all the way back to dialup), or through cable. All the private "last mile" Internet service I know of that's succeeded has been based on making everyone in an area pay for the road: apartment complexes or similar developments where the cost of establishing the infrastructure has been shared by everyone whether they used it or not.
This is the utility model. Whether the utility is paid for by taxes or fees is a whole different question from whether it's built by the municipality using bonds or by a franchisee on speculation, is a different argument than the one I'm making. I'm just asking... why is this service which has traditionally depended on a utility model and which seems to need one different from other similar services?
I think the lesson of the 20th century is "life is complex, 'ism's don't work". But for god's sake, at least get your 'ism's straight: If you think that a government-regulated monopoly on the use of a slice of the RF spectrum is laissez-faire capitalism, you are obviously using a different meaning of the term "laissez-faire capitalism" than I've ever heard of.
HDTV? the thing that's been holding up HDTV more than anything else has been the MPAA's panic attack over digital television and their insistence on building copy protection into every TV. I don't recall anything about guaranteeing Hollywood's profits in any of my Socialist Conspiracy playbooks. I'll ask my controller about that next orientation meeting of my cell.
In the meantime, since cellular companies are supposed to be the ones Munis are unfairly competing with, let's look at cellular. Let's have a look at why cellular service has gotten cheaper.
20 years ago a top of the line home computer had a Motorola 68000 in it and cost $5000. 10 years ago it had a first generation Pentium and cost $1500. Today your optical mouse has more CPU power than that 20 year old home computer, and any internet-capable cellphone has a faster processor than that first generation Pentium.
20 years ago you couldn't build a modern cellular phone at all. 10 years ago it would have been prohibitively expensive. All the infrastructure associated with it's gotten cheaper too: it's gotten about twice as fast (or about half the price, same thing) every 18 months. And that goes for the wiring, too. The biggest cost of the wiring now is actual digging... the fiber is so efficient and has so much bandwidth that some places they're laying ten times the amount they ever expect to need, and they've actually set their expectations high enough that they're close to correct. The cost of cell hardware has gone way down to the point that they're putting microcells in buildings to fill in the gaps.
And despite that, the cellular service in the US sucks. If I get service from verizon, I get a choice of 9 phones Verizon sells in my area. If I switch to T-Mobile, I get a choice of 9 phones T-mobile sells in my area. If I switch to Sprint, I get a choice of 9 phones Sprint cells. None of those phones are even vaguely like the one I want, and once I actually found one I liked I had to give it up because they changed the protocol on me.
If someone calls me on my phone, I pay for the airtime, whether I solicited the call or not... so there's all kinds of laws about who can and can not call me on my cellphone, and I STILL get (and get to pay for) telemarketing calls on my phone. What's laissez-faire about that?
In Europe, cellphone service is more heavily regulated. Everyone uses the same protocol... there's none of this TDMA vs CDMA vs Triband vs PCS vs whatever... but you can use any phone you want, you just take the SIM card out of one phone and plug it into another. And the caller pays for the airtime, whichever way it goes. Funny how those socialists have managed to come up with a good capitalist solution and the capitalists are messing about with microregulations.
I had a T-Mobile smartphone. I wanted to try it with the T-Mobile service. I went to the T-Mobile store and asked for some pay-as-you-go service. They wanted a $200 deposit. What for? For the phone! What phone? I already have the phone, I just want to buy the service. Oh, that's OK, I don't need the phone, but there's still a $200 deposit. What for? It's in case you leave the service early. Leave the service? It's pay-as-you-go! Well, yes, but there's still a monthly minimum and a 2 year commitment. Why? because it includes a phone. I don't want a phone. You don't need to take it, but it's still included...
They sell WiFi service, too. But only at T-mobile Hotspots. Which are pretty much only at Starbucks. I don't have a Starbucks nearby, but when I was in one last I wanted to use one. It was $6.00 for 60 minutes, which is a bit steep... and you couldn't sign up there, yo
WiFi - 11Mbps to 54Mbps, regional, uses wired internet infrastructure, static (slow handoff), "lillypad" coverage, compatible with home wireless lans.
EVDO - 300kbps-2Mbps, national, uses cellular infrastructure, mobile (fast handoff), wide coverage, requires new hardware.
These are not competing services: I've done the "cellphone internet" thing, and accumulated a fine collection of proprietary widgets that would have let me use my internet service nationwide... then when the next big thing comes along, they turn into technotrash. I can get a WiFi card for just about any gadget I like and it'll work with any WiFi access point whether it's my home WAN or the coffee shop down the street.
I don't care if Verizon or T-Mobile give out free blow jobs with their gadgets: I don't travel much, I'm not in the market for Yet Another Omnisky or a drawer full of cellphone-computer cables. All my cellphone does now is voice.
But someone who does travel, who's already using a fancy cellphone, EVDO will be great. For them. Not for me.
I'm not convinced that municipal WiFi is a good use of funds, but EVDO isn't in the same market at all.
It's not coke versus pepsi, it's coffee versus beer.
Disadvantage #3... a patchwork of different services in different areas, requiring people to purchase multiple Wifi accounts for home, work, school, public parks, etcetera...
This is the big problem with Wifi. Since it's a mobile service, you need to follow a utility model where one company gets a franchise and a price regulated by the city (by contract or law), or you end up with a fragmented network, multiple network coverage (and conflicts) in popular locations, no coverage in others.
One possibility would be for the municipality to own the network, but it would be paid for and operated by one company who would have a monopoly on the use of the network for the first N years.
What's wrong with you? Tar and feathers not good enough any more?
Personally, I'm not certain that "municipal WiFi" is necessary or useful or an appropriate use of public funds. So I can't give you the argument you want.
I do want to know one thing, however.
Consider that the last bastion of true lassaiz-faire capitalism is organized crime, and the mixed economy has become the norm in the civilised world.
Consider the number of services that are provided through the city or town you live in, either directly or through contracts with utility companies. Do you really think you'd be better off if you had to separately and personally contract with competing providers of power, sewage, and water?
Given that background, can you explain why you think Wireless Internet service is somehow different than any of the other municipal services? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. Maybe wired internet is, and wireless isn't, or vice versa. Maybe there should be WiFi access to local services, and you could buy general access to the worldwide Internet? Since you're so sure that the free market is the best model, I'm sure you've already thought about this stuff.
The bottom line to all this licence discussion is that 99% of the time people don't give a hoot about software licences. They just apply common sense and fairness.
That's a really interesting way of putting it.
That's where the difference between the BSDL and the GPL is, that last one percent.
The GPL was born out of one of those 1% cases, so that 1% is really why it exists at all.
The BSDL, born in an environment where the 99% case is practically a religion, says that 1% isn't worth worrying about.
How many cases can you think of enterprises releasing their software under a BSD license?
If you mean "the BSD license, specifically, under that name?" Probably none, unless they're the University of California at Berkeley.
If you mean "a license that grants comparable rights to the BSDL", then how about Netscape and Apple?
IE just plain starts faster.
IE makes your boot and login take longer, because the HTML control that's 95% of IE is used by Windows Explorer. That does make it seem to start faster, but if your system was properly designed it wouldn't.
Heh. I had a box recently where I had to update a configuration file, and when I did a PS to get the PID to send a HUP, I noticed it was sitting at simething like 10,000 minutes of CPU time. Which woried me at first, until I noticed that the process had been running since Aug03. OK, that's more reasonable.
:)
I haven't managed to have a box stay up as long as some of the ones at the top of the Netcraft runtime ratings. Even with UPSes, you get occasional long power outages. But really, "I'll finally have a reason to reboot the OS after 3 years" is a better taunt.
Why firefox keeps locking up on me, and why I can't start it up without getting 2 or 3 msgbox errors?
Friend, if you can tell us what those errors are mayhap we can figger them out for you, hear?
Backwards compatibility won.
Yeh, I get that. It's incomplete, though.
Backwards compatibility and preventing anyone else from being backwards compatible by repeatedly changing what they had to be backwards-compatible with won. Being backwards-compatible with MS-DOS 3.3 wasn't a problem. The problem was that while they were doing that, MS-DOS 5 came out with a bunch of undocumented interfaces that nobody else but Microsoft and a few applications vendors had access to. And then Windows 3 beta came out with checks that brought up obscure error messages when you tried running under any of the DOS 3.3 and DOS 5.x emulations, further reducing public confidence in the emulators.
It wasn't just backwards compatibility that won. It was backwards compatibility and dirty tricks.
People don't remember that there was a reason Microsoft won. They actually had a better product.
Where "better" is (as you note) defined as "more compatible with Microsoft's existing product". Where the competition was compatible, Microsoft changed their software to make it incompatible (this is not simply speculation, it's well documented by MS employees and in MS memos). Microsoft really DID have that kind of power to cripple a competing product back in 1987 (or the early '90s: Windows wasn't really usable until Windows 3.11 and the 386 came together).
But the key thing that you're missing is that the fact that "better" means "more compatible with DOS" means that Microsoft was starting the race at the finish line.
What Eric is saying is that, in a perfect world, in a perfectly free market, in the very long run, closed source models would win lose to open source ones.
Where open source works, this is already happening.
Where open source doesn't work, the only viable open source products are closed-source products that have failed in the market.
And the first really big example of an open source license keeping an open source tree out of private hands wasn't even using the GPL. And the hook that made that possible (which was also the an attempt at creating the freedom to know what's running on your computer) was opposed so aggressively by the FSF that it was eventually taken out just to shut the beggars up.
The GPL takes away your freedom to be selfish
If I release my software under the BSDL, how am I being selfish?
I could see $8.00 swarmbots being practical, but only for limited purposes... until they're cheap enough that there's no point in stealing them the really interesting applications are pretty impractical.
That's all well and good, but is that what he was explicitly convicted for? Or was he convicted for the 80 videogames he was pirating?
Do you ever forget to put the handbrake on?
Not when I park on a slope, because the car lets me know right away I need the handbrake on. When you park on a slope you put the handbrake on, you turn the wheels into the curb, and you leave the car in gear. At least I do, don't you?
In Houston? I might need the handbrake once in six months. At most. I don't have earthquake insurance either. Stupid me.
I mean surely it would be sooo easy to have the car detect when you would like the handbrake on
I dont know about that, but obviously it's easy enough to build an iPod that doesn't need a hold switch because it doesn't have a ridiculously sensitive user interface. Apple managed it, and so I bought one.
ActiveX is IE's binary plugin mechanism, allowing plugins to run such as Flash, Acrobat, QuickTime, Real, WMP, Java (IE loads JVMs as ActiveX components). Your proposal would cripple IE by disallowing the running of such plugins.
Then it sounds like IE needs to be redesigned to support a direct plugin mechanism that doesn't contain a path that allows for the remote installation of controls.
At all.
Not from "trusted sites".
Not from a "trusted zone".
Nothing.
No installation except by explicit user request. Period. Nothing less is acceptable.
This has largely been fixed [...]
If it had been fixed, they wouldn't need "Low Rights IE". So "This has been largely fixed" means "this hasn't been fixed, but they've stuck some more fingers in holes in the dyke".
They don't need to run IE in "low rights" mode, they need to change the design of the HTML control and IE so they display pages in "no rights" mode all the time, unless the application they're embedded in explicitly extends the capabilities. That is, the HTML control by itself should have no mechanism for running ActiveX or VBscript or any "local access" features in JScript. All these would need to be added by the app (such as Windows Update), and there would be NO TIME that the IE shell would add these capabilities, no matter what "zone" it's in.
Give us a strong sandbox in the browser, and you won't need to run the browser in a weak one.
do you also have difficulty remembering to stick your key in to start the engine when you try to drive
If you had to switch the engine off and pull the key out every time you came to a stop, even at a traffic light, or else you might accidentally brush a control and the car would start driving again... I think you'd find yourself forgetting now and then.
I suppose I should be thankful I couldn't accidentally run over and kill people with my old iPod, right?
Your last CD player didn't fit in your pocket.
Cargo pants.
Think of the hold switch as a mode selector and it can become second-nature.
All kinds of stupid extra steps can be learned: pushing a button on your LED watch to see the time, toggling in the IPL sequence for your mainframe computer, I don't do that kind of thing any more, why should I put up with it from an MP3 player when Apple makes a perfectly good MP3 player that doesn't have the same design flaw?
and instead of saying "thanks, I'll try that out"
How you got the idea that I hadn't "tried it out" I have no idea, perhaps you're just looking for a reason to dismiss my perfectly reasonable objection to the ridiculously sensitive controls on the iPod (and on many other poorly designed music players). Not only did I "try it out", I tried it and found it wanting, even after I bought Apple's wired remote so I could leave the "hold" button on all the time.
It's not even the iPod. I replaced my iPod Mini with... an iPod Shuffle. Which has much better controls, showing that Apple isn't wedded to the iPod's funky clickwheel.
What, exactly, are "moral sufferings"?
This.