This thing makes my Nokia E61 look pretty sad. And I just got it.
That being said, Apple really missed an opportunity here - they should have ONLY sold it unlocked, or at least as an MVNO, and done an end-around the telcos. Cingular? Nope, won't put a dime in their pocket, no matter how good the phone is. The Cingular thing is such a hurdle that it remains to be seen if Apple will really ship 10mm of these, like their target. They definitely would have if they were the MVNO supporting this.
It also remains to be seen just how capable the device is, what CPU it is running (probably ARM, but who knows?), an how "hackable" it is. Will it require signed apps like Nokia's S60v3? Let's hope not.
Nonetheless, Nokia, Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm - they're all staining their drawers right now, and whipping their engineers. All of their offerings look pretty sad now.
If the Xbox was so hot, then why was it being offered with a $100 rebate during the Xmas buying season?
Seems odd to me that a next-gen console, out for a few months, would be offering such incentives during the height of consumer insanity. Perhaps the plan was to get to 10mm shipped by any means necessary in order to achieve a "PR-mark", which would insure the next 10mm being sold. Or something like that.
Who sells at a BIGGER loss during supposedly peak demand in order to gain marketplace dominance? Sounds like a monopoly to me.
A cheapo Amiga would be a great addition. It might be interesting to show a computer that still has unique abilities - folks love the multiple resolution "screens" that you can slide up and down.
OK, perhaps the new generation of Web entrepreneurs had better learn something from their "elders". We're about to see a lot of concepts that didn't work in the 90's be resurrected and funded. This has been tried and failed, badly:
Simply put, MS could have made their life a LOT easier if they had put in support for a new product class - the Media Accelerator.
Imagine a card that had a couple of SATA interfaces, a video pass through input, and an audio pass through input. The card would have its own OS/firmware, and it'd be easy to control from an external software API.
Unprotected input would flow into it, but only it could generate video/audio for protected media. It'd automatically substitute its own video/audio for protected stuff.
This way, if you didn't care about "protected media", your computer and OS wouldn't be encumbered. If you did, you'd pop a couple of hundred for the Media Accelerator, and go from there.
Of course, this would have benefited the rest of the non-MS industry, too. Guess it is a bad idea.
* Intel will become, pretty much overnight, what all of these routers have to interoperate with, * Everyone else tweaks their chipsets to work with Intel, * Intel's interpretation of the draft standard becomes the standard.
Yeah, I'm quite sure that the IEEE will do something to rock that boat.
The Memorex VIS takes the lame cake. It was really a Microsoft product, but they couldn't put their name on it for fear of pissing off the OEMs.
It was a 286 PC crammed into a console. It ran "Modular Windows" - a version of Win3.x - which meant that almost any then-current software could be ported to it. This was Microsoft's first atttempt at entering the videogame/console market.
RadioShack sold them, Memorex gave it branding. MS provided the OS, and invited big publishers to release. They sure did - direct ports. None of the software was adapted for television, meaning that text was unreadable, and colors just looked wrong or shimmered off the screen. Single pixel dithering and single pixel lines abounded, but made most TVs "tear". The processor was terribly slow, as was the optical drive. The sound capabilities were horrid (think 1992 soundcard, then cheapened). The entire experience was totally inferior to older 8-bit consoles and the still-then-popular Commodore 64 - yet it cost an astounding $400.
In short, the entire thing was totally unusable. It had NO redeeming features at all.
They tried selling it for a while, but no one bit. I recall that total sales figures may have been hundreds, perhaps a few thousand. It was a huge, huge failure, perhaps the biggest one that MS experienced up until that time.
No one remembers, especially the lamo "journalist" that wrote that lame article.
Pretty much, EWeek found that the OSS stacks run best on Windows. Now, is this because EWeek ran everything without tuning? Possibly. But then again, so do most folks, so the results are pretty valid.
IANAL, but if Creative, in any way, induced you to upgrade the firmware (i.e., it fixed an existing bug), then they have just handed the class action vultures a nice gift. Can't sell a product based on features, and then take them away.
If you want to see Creative punished (you won't benefit, class action suits never actually benefit the consumer), take a screen grab of anything on their site that still shows this capability, and then email it to the proper vultures.
If you use Linux or other OSS in a commercial environment, you sometimes need to buy software. I'm not talking about stuff like Oracle, but components like imaging SDKs (one example).
The reality is: it costs more, and the costs for implementation are horrid. I can understand the extra cost to some degree, but at least give me some kind of parity with the cheaper Windows version, OK?
Case in point - my company was looking to incorporate an OCR engine into an internal system a couple of years ago. Abbyy made a nice one, at least for some stuffs. So we called Abbyy and got a time-locked eval.
This thing was pretty much a rough port from their Windows stuff, and it was a Red Hat only install. Not only that, but in porting it they had done something that made trying to wrap it with SWIG or somesuch out of the question. So, my developers tell me, if we want to use it, we do so with C++, and write any scripting bindings by hand. Integrating in any other way is out of the question. Well, that makes trying the SDK a bit too expensive - too many hours screwing around, especially when our codebase is decidely not written in C++.
I called Abbyy - yup, we only support C++ - aren't all Linux programmers using C++? When it became apparent that they had not heard of Perl or Python and that they decided to also ignore C - that was pretty much it for us. Shame, they can do some cool stuffs, even if their Linux stuff is two generations behind the Win version.
Quote: Congratulations. Sounds to me like you wanted to use all the FoSS tools to create a non-Open product (let alone Free.) We don't need ya! Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, kthx.
Wow, what a crap attitude. My company has an internally developed image/document processing system developed on Linux and other OSS stuffs. We won't make it GPL, and we may even (gasp) sell it one day.
Moreover, we even BOUGHT software components to incorporate into our system from OSS friendly developers that make commercial stuffs. Oh my god! We've paid money to OSS friendly consultants, too!
Oh, and along the way, some of that revenue allowed us to donate equipment to a notable OSS project - equipment that hadn't been supported. We gave it all away, and bought something else supported - we just thought it was a Good Citizen thing to do.
So, critize all you want, but companies like mine are _essential_ to OSS. We help keep the OSS economy going in just abuot every respect. So grow up and get out of the basement, zealot.
The feedback system is broken due to people either not leaving it all, or using it in a quid pro quo fashion.
Here's one idea:
* Make feedback mandatory. Either make auctions more expensive to both parties if you don't leave it, or actually reduce feedback scores if none if left after a certain period. I mean, isn't a seller or buyer who takes the time more valuable than one who doesn't?
* Do not post feedback from either party until both parties leave it.
That's it. If you do this, new seller are going to be very anxious to establish good scores, and they'll actually have to be good sellers to do it. Old seller will want to prevent their existing scores from eroding (which will happen quickly if they don't reform their behavior).
Of course, eBay would likely see less money in the short term. But, if they don't do something, they'll enter conventional wisdom as something to avoid, and they'll be done.
I had a weirdo project where I needed to print 50,000 pages _quickly_. Hit eBay, and found a used Optra S 1855, plus duplexer, extra paper trays, network adapter _and_ toner for something like $300 plus shipping. Postscript, PCL, 1200dpi - it pretty much does it all. No issues printing from Linux. It even took memory that I had sitting in my junk drawer, helped speed things up a bit.
I printed the 50k pages using the crappiest, cheapest Staples brand paper around. It jammed just twice. Oh, and predates Lexmark's evil chipped carts. It thrives on cheapo refills (each of which has gotten like 20k pages). And duplexing is excellent, highly recommend it.
Most people believe that equity is equity. It isn't.
Let's say that I do a startup. I immediately create two classes of equity - Class A for me, Class B for you and everyone else that I hire. To make things simple in this example, let's say that in terms of ownership, Class A = Class B, but they have different rights. Class A gets to vote on things, Class B doesn't.
OK, so I have 50% of the company in Class A stock, let's say 100 shares. You have options for 50% of the company in Class B stock, also 100 shares. These shares seem to be equal, but they're not.
So, together, we build the better mouse trap. Then we run out of money. The VC's step in... and since we're distressed, they seek to do a cramdown. Which means that they're going to shrink the existing slices of the pie,and perhaps convert things. Time to vote on whether to accept the cramdown. But only I have voting rights. So I agree to do it on whatever terms we can get.
So... first they buy the majority of the company with their investment 89.99%. The company issues 10,000 shares of a new class, Class C, which is what the investors get - 8999 shares worth. Class C becomes the only redeemable equity. The investment terms specify that Class A owners can convert on a 10:1 ratio - so now I have 10% of the company, or 1000 shares. I've been diluted. Class B owners can convert on a 1:10 ratio, or 10 shares. You are diluted, the way the "active ingredients" in homeopathic remedies are diluted. So now you have.1% of the company. You still have the same number of SHARES as spelled out in your agreement, but they're now effectively valueless.
The VCs find someone who wants to buy the company for $100 million. They get $89.99 mil for doing a bit of social networking, and tiding us over through the rough times - in other words, the rich get richer. I get $10 million. Woo hoo. You get $10k. Thanks for playing!
This is how it works. Founders often end up with far less than 10% of the company, if anything at all. Employees typically get screwed. The exceptions are the companies that are so hot, and/or have enough revenue coming in, that they can play one VC off of another. It is not often that founders have the ethical grounding to make sure that employees don't get screwed, at least any more than the founders themselves. But, on the other hand, I've seen employees cut separate deals with new investors to cut the founders out. No one plays nice in this game.
This is what you need to know going forward: get the same CLASS of equity that the founders have. Insist on instant vesting upon change of control. Insist on at least partial vesting if you are fired without cause (although employers will always be able to show cause, there is at least the threat of a lawsuit).
The flipside: if you have the stomach to do another startup... since you helped launch a company that made people money, you can get a better deal the next time around.
I second this! Even a really good tutorial that's "...for idiots" style would be helpful. Seems that distributed filesystems are becoming less used now that things like SANs exist.
At the same time, don't assume that I have no experience with this - I lived three blocks north of the WTC that day. I've had relatives die in the towers. I was evacuated. I'll probably suffer from some exotic respiratory illness in the future, thanks to the EPA's lies. I think that I can safely say that I've had my life touched by terrorism. I only mention it because you infer that somehow being a victim makes your arguement more relevant. It doesn't.
That being said: We live in a country where roughly 20,000 citizens are murdered, mostly by their fellow citizens, yearly. I'm sure that I can come up with many other salient figures, but let's stay with good old murder. So, 20k died in 2001, and every year since then. 100k dead because of the murderers.
Imagine if Bush had declared a War on Murder. We're going to do the following:
* Spend a trillion dollars, to rebuild lots and lots of stuff in major cities. * Monitor the phones of all Americans. Without warrants. * Have forced, unpaid overtime for all law-enforcement officials. Oh, and they cannot retire, either. * Have private security forces, on the government payroll, also doing stuff. Except that they're unaccountable to anyone, so they do a lot of bad stuff. * Put "known murderer associates" in prison, no trial, no representation. * Torture said "known murderer associates" for information regarding the murderers.
This is a pretty direct analogy.
But, remember - we're going to end murder, right? We're going to Win the War on Murder! Mission Accomplished!
Yeah. Americans would never, ever allow this. It'd never happen. *You* probably wouldn't want it to happen.
Of course, the average American is much more likely to be murdered "normally" than as a result of terrorism. Hell, they're much more likely to be killed by their husband, wife, parent, friend, lover, neighbor - really, anyone BESIDES a "terrorist". So, what rights should we give up to stop these killers?
Please don't tell me about substantive threats. There are many threats to the safety and security of American citizens, but terrorism doesn't merit the supposed cure that this administration wants to foist on the people.
That was the first line of the first college lecture I ever had. Although the absolute veracity of the statement is likely untrue, the blunt assertion was given to make one point: Give up your rights, have more "security".
The point is this: leaks, crime, terrorism, etc. are a REQUIRED side effect of freedom. Americans will never get that, and will be happy to toss liberty away in order to prevent nebulous bad things from happening.
The United States is truly starting to resemble the old Soviet Union in so many ways. The Soviets had official state media; we have totally co-opted media outlets. The Soviets had strong controls on copy machines; we have DRM'd/watermarked copy machines (and output devices). The Soviets had one party rule; we have outright one party rule right now, which stemmed from effective one-party rule of the past (seems that the Democratic-Republican party has split, and one side came out on top). The Soviets had no expectation of privacy... and soon, neither will we.
The big difference is that the Soviets used an iron fist, as opposed to the USA's velvet glove, to smother freedom. The net result is the same.
Slashdot Mirror
This thing makes my Nokia E61 look pretty sad. And I just got it.
That being said, Apple really missed an opportunity here - they should have ONLY sold it unlocked, or at least as an MVNO, and done an end-around the telcos. Cingular? Nope, won't put a dime in their pocket, no matter how good the phone is. The Cingular thing is such a hurdle that it remains to be seen if Apple will really ship 10mm of these, like their target. They definitely would have if they were the MVNO supporting this.
It also remains to be seen just how capable the device is, what CPU it is running (probably ARM, but who knows?), an how "hackable" it is. Will it require signed apps like Nokia's S60v3? Let's hope not.
Nonetheless, Nokia, Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm - they're all staining their drawers right now, and whipping their engineers. All of their offerings look pretty sad now.
jh
If the Xbox was so hot, then why was it being offered with a $100 rebate during the Xmas buying season?
Seems odd to me that a next-gen console, out for a few months, would be offering such incentives during the height of consumer insanity. Perhaps the plan was to get to 10mm shipped by any means necessary in order to achieve a "PR-mark", which would insure the next 10mm being sold. Or something like that.
Who sells at a BIGGER loss during supposedly peak demand in order to gain marketplace dominance? Sounds like a monopoly to me.
A cheapo Amiga would be a great addition. It might be interesting to show a computer that still has unique abilities - folks love the multiple resolution "screens" that you can slide up and down.
OK, perhaps the new generation of Web entrepreneurs had better learn something from their "elders". We're about to see a lot of concepts that didn't work in the 90's be resurrected and funded. This has been tried and failed, badly:
An orphaned ref to Magellan, the human powered search engine
Didn't work before when there were a lot less sites out there, not likely to work this time, either.
jh
Simply put, MS could have made their life a LOT easier if they had put in support for a new product class - the Media Accelerator.
Imagine a card that had a couple of SATA interfaces, a video pass through input, and an audio pass through input. The card would have its own OS/firmware, and it'd be easy to control from an external software API.
Unprotected input would flow into it, but only it could generate video/audio for protected media. It'd automatically substitute its own video/audio for protected stuff.
This way, if you didn't care about "protected media", your computer and OS wouldn't be encumbered. If you did, you'd pop a couple of hundred for the Media Accelerator, and go from there.
Of course, this would have benefited the rest of the non-MS industry, too. Guess it is a bad idea.
jh
Pretty obvious how this plays out:
* Intel will become, pretty much overnight, what all of these routers have to interoperate with,
* Everyone else tweaks their chipsets to work with Intel,
* Intel's interpretation of the draft standard becomes the standard.
Yeah, I'm quite sure that the IEEE will do something to rock that boat.
See here. The article specifically mentions the GF2 as a competitor. It was a very good chip for the time and the price.
You mean, this?
"All I got for Xmas was a Brown Zune"
Whoa. You're going to need a closed-source kernel driver to use your CPU now? They can eat me. The graphics driver situation is bad enough.
This one is untouchable until they open up the graphics drivers - or goodbye AMD/ATI.
jh
The Memorex VIS takes the lame cake. It was really a Microsoft product, but they couldn't put their name on it for fear of pissing off the OEMs.
It was a 286 PC crammed into a console. It ran "Modular Windows" - a version of Win3.x - which meant that almost any then-current software could be ported to it. This was Microsoft's first atttempt at entering the videogame/console market.
RadioShack sold them, Memorex gave it branding. MS provided the OS, and invited big publishers to release. They sure did - direct ports. None of the software was adapted for television, meaning that text was unreadable, and colors just looked wrong or shimmered off the screen. Single pixel dithering and single pixel lines abounded, but made most TVs "tear". The processor was terribly slow, as was the optical drive. The sound capabilities were horrid (think 1992 soundcard, then cheapened). The entire experience was totally inferior to older 8-bit consoles and the still-then-popular Commodore 64 - yet it cost an astounding $400.
In short, the entire thing was totally unusable. It had NO redeeming features at all.
They tried selling it for a while, but no one bit. I recall that total sales figures may have been hundreds, perhaps a few thousand. It was a huge, huge failure, perhaps the biggest one that MS experienced up until that time.
No one remembers, especially the lamo "journalist" that wrote that lame article.
See the pretty charts and the article.
Pretty much, EWeek found that the OSS stacks run best on Windows. Now, is this because EWeek ran everything without tuning? Possibly. But then again, so do most folks, so the results are pretty valid.
I bet that someone at MS was reading that, too.
jh
Yay, I'm surfing and I'm not using up all of my memory. Joy.
IANAL, but if Creative, in any way, induced you to upgrade the firmware (i.e., it fixed an existing bug), then they have just handed the class action vultures a nice gift. Can't sell a product based on features, and then take them away.
If you want to see Creative punished (you won't benefit, class action suits never actually benefit the consumer), take a screen grab of anything on their site that still shows this capability, and then email it to the proper vultures.
jh
If you use Linux or other OSS in a commercial environment, you sometimes need to buy software. I'm not talking about stuff like Oracle, but components like imaging SDKs (one example).
The reality is: it costs more, and the costs for implementation are horrid. I can understand the extra cost to some degree, but at least give me some kind of parity with the cheaper Windows version, OK?
Case in point - my company was looking to incorporate an OCR engine into an internal system a couple of years ago. Abbyy made a nice one, at least for some stuffs. So we called Abbyy and got a time-locked eval.
This thing was pretty much a rough port from their Windows stuff, and it was a Red Hat only install. Not only that, but in porting it they had done something that made trying to wrap it with SWIG or somesuch out of the question. So, my developers tell me, if we want to use it, we do so with C++, and write any scripting bindings by hand. Integrating in any other way is out of the question. Well, that makes trying the SDK a bit too expensive - too many hours screwing around, especially when our codebase is decidely not written in C++.
I called Abbyy - yup, we only support C++ - aren't all Linux programmers using C++? When it became apparent that they had not heard of Perl or Python and that they decided to also ignore C - that was pretty much it for us. Shame, they can do some cool stuffs, even if their Linux stuff is two generations behind the Win version.
Quote: Congratulations. Sounds to me like you wanted to use all the FoSS tools to create a non-Open product (let alone Free.) We don't need ya! Don't let the door hit your ass on the way out, kthx.
Wow, what a crap attitude. My company has an internally developed image/document processing system developed on Linux and other OSS stuffs. We won't make it GPL, and we may even (gasp) sell it one day.
Moreover, we even BOUGHT software components to incorporate into our system from OSS friendly developers that make commercial stuffs. Oh my god! We've paid money to OSS friendly consultants, too!
Oh, and along the way, some of that revenue allowed us to donate equipment to a notable OSS project - equipment that hadn't been supported. We gave it all away, and bought something else supported - we just thought it was a Good Citizen thing to do.
So, critize all you want, but companies like mine are _essential_ to OSS. We help keep the OSS economy going in just abuot every respect. So grow up and get out of the basement, zealot.
jh
Totally off-topic: I used your software back in the Amiga days, and it was simply amazing - I bet the Win version is totally off the hook now.
:( Good to see you're still around.
:)
I'd use it now, but my arty computer graphics passed with that system
Please resume your conversation about Vista
The feedback system is broken due to people either not leaving it all, or using it in a quid pro quo fashion.
Here's one idea:
* Make feedback mandatory. Either make auctions more expensive to both parties if you don't leave it, or actually reduce feedback scores if none if left after a certain period. I mean, isn't a seller or buyer who takes the time more valuable than one who doesn't?
* Do not post feedback from either party until both parties leave it.
That's it. If you do this, new seller are going to be very anxious to establish good scores, and they'll actually have to be good sellers to do it. Old seller will want to prevent their existing scores from eroding (which will happen quickly if they don't reform their behavior).
Of course, eBay would likely see less money in the short term. But, if they don't do something, they'll enter conventional wisdom as something to avoid, and they'll be done.
jh
I had a weirdo project where I needed to print 50,000 pages _quickly_. Hit eBay, and found a used Optra S 1855, plus duplexer, extra paper trays, network adapter _and_ toner for something like $300 plus shipping. Postscript, PCL, 1200dpi - it pretty much does it all. No issues printing from Linux. It even took memory that I had sitting in my junk drawer, helped speed things up a bit.
I printed the 50k pages using the crappiest, cheapest Staples brand paper around. It jammed just twice. Oh, and predates Lexmark's evil chipped carts. It thrives on cheapo refills (each of which has gotten like 20k pages). And duplexing is excellent, highly recommend it.
jh
Make a bold claim, do a bold presentation.
Most people believe that equity is equity. It isn't.
.1% of the company. You still have the same number of SHARES as spelled out in your agreement, but they're now effectively valueless.
Let's say that I do a startup. I immediately create two classes of equity - Class A for me, Class B for you and everyone else that I hire. To make things simple in this example, let's say that in terms of ownership, Class A = Class B, but they have different rights. Class A gets to vote on things, Class B doesn't.
OK, so I have 50% of the company in Class A stock, let's say 100 shares. You have options for 50% of the company in Class B stock, also 100 shares. These shares seem to be equal, but they're not.
So, together, we build the better mouse trap. Then we run out of money. The VC's step in... and since we're distressed, they seek to do a cramdown. Which means that they're going to shrink the existing slices of the pie,and perhaps convert things. Time to vote on whether to accept the cramdown. But only I have voting rights. So I agree to do it on whatever terms we can get.
So... first they buy the majority of the company with their investment 89.99%. The company issues 10,000 shares of a new class, Class C, which is what the investors get - 8999 shares worth. Class C becomes the only redeemable equity. The investment terms specify that Class A owners can convert on a 10:1 ratio - so now I have 10% of the company, or 1000 shares. I've been diluted. Class B owners can convert on a 1:10 ratio, or 10 shares. You are diluted, the way the "active ingredients" in homeopathic remedies are diluted. So now you have
The VCs find someone who wants to buy the company for $100 million. They get $89.99 mil for doing a bit of social networking, and tiding us over through the rough times - in other words, the rich get richer. I get $10 million. Woo hoo. You get $10k. Thanks for playing!
This is how it works. Founders often end up with far less than 10% of the company, if anything at all. Employees typically get screwed. The exceptions are the companies that are so hot, and/or have enough revenue coming in, that they can play one VC off of another. It is not often that founders have the ethical grounding to make sure that employees don't get screwed, at least any more than the founders themselves. But, on the other hand, I've seen employees cut separate deals with new investors to cut the founders out. No one plays nice in this game.
This is what you need to know going forward: get the same CLASS of equity that the founders have. Insist on instant vesting upon change of control. Insist on at least partial vesting if you are fired without cause (although employers will always be able to show cause, there is at least the threat of a lawsuit).
The flipside: if you have the stomach to do another startup... since you helped launch a company that made people money, you can get a better deal the next time around.
I second this! Even a really good tutorial that's "...for idiots" style would be helpful. Seems that distributed filesystems are becoming less used now that things like SANs exist.
jh
I'm sorry for the loss of your cousin.
At the same time, don't assume that I have no experience with this - I lived three blocks north of the WTC that day. I've had relatives die in the towers. I was evacuated. I'll probably suffer from some exotic respiratory illness in the future, thanks to the EPA's lies. I think that I can safely say that I've had my life touched by terrorism. I only mention it because you infer that somehow being a victim makes your arguement more relevant. It doesn't.
That being said: We live in a country where roughly 20,000 citizens are murdered, mostly by their fellow citizens, yearly. I'm sure that I can come up with many other salient figures, but let's stay with good old murder. So, 20k died in 2001, and every year since then. 100k dead because of the murderers.
Imagine if Bush had declared a War on Murder. We're going to do the following:
* Spend a trillion dollars, to rebuild lots and lots of stuff in major cities.
* Monitor the phones of all Americans. Without warrants.
* Have forced, unpaid overtime for all law-enforcement officials. Oh, and they cannot retire, either.
* Have private security forces, on the government payroll, also doing stuff. Except that they're unaccountable to anyone, so they do a lot of bad stuff.
* Put "known murderer associates" in prison, no trial, no representation.
* Torture said "known murderer associates" for information regarding the murderers.
This is a pretty direct analogy.
But, remember - we're going to end murder, right? We're going to Win the War on Murder! Mission Accomplished!
Yeah. Americans would never, ever allow this. It'd never happen. *You* probably wouldn't want it to happen.
Of course, the average American is much more likely to be murdered "normally" than as a result of terrorism. Hell, they're much more likely to be killed by their husband, wife, parent, friend, lover, neighbor - really, anyone BESIDES a "terrorist". So, what rights should we give up to stop these killers?
Please don't tell me about substantive threats. There are many threats to the safety and security of American citizens, but terrorism doesn't merit the supposed cure that this administration wants to foist on the people.
jh
That was the first line of the first college lecture I ever had. Although the absolute veracity of the statement is likely untrue, the blunt assertion was given to make one point: Give up your rights, have more "security".
The point is this: leaks, crime, terrorism, etc. are a REQUIRED side effect of freedom. Americans will never get that, and will be happy to toss liberty away in order to prevent nebulous bad things from happening.
The United States is truly starting to resemble the old Soviet Union in so many ways. The Soviets had official state media; we have totally co-opted media outlets. The Soviets had strong controls on copy machines; we have DRM'd/watermarked copy machines (and output devices). The Soviets had one party rule; we have outright one party rule right now, which stemmed from effective one-party rule of the past (seems that the Democratic-Republican party has split, and one side came out on top). The Soviets had no expectation of privacy... and soon, neither will we.
The big difference is that the Soviets used an iron fist, as opposed to the USA's velvet glove, to smother freedom. The net result is the same.
Thanks for the vote of confidence; certainly, the intention was not to flame, but to point out a major strategic error in their pricing.
:)
Mod should get (-1, Sony Fellator)