To solve that you need the approach that Lawrence Lessig promotes [fixcongressfirst.org] : create a movement inside both parties. And chose to be a turn voter that makes choice on a single issue : the stand of candidates toward lobbying.
This. This is exactly right.
The problem with it is that all of the powerful people who have an interest in things staying the way they are -- in both parties -- will oppose it. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying; on the contrary it means you have to try all the more.
I agree that neither party seems very interested in retracting copyright to any kind of sensible scope, but I feel like the Democrats are far more interested in making it even worse whereas the Republicans mostly just don't want to enrage the content industry by trying to fix it.
Of course, the Republicans have, shall we say, other problems. Like anything that comes out of the mouth of Glen Beck.
You could have elected McCain, Kucinich, or Paul in 2008 and this would still be happening.
No, definitely not. We could have elected any of those candidates and some completely different set of batshit crazy policies would be implemented. Imagine "drill baby drill" McCain's response to the BP oil spill. Or Kucinich trying to do anything whatsoever about the deficit. Or Ron Paul trying to abolish the federal reserve in the middle of the financial crisis.
That's why the copyright moguls are pushing ACTA and son-of-ACTA.
You've got it right for the wrong reason. They're pushing son-of-ACTA for the reason stated in this article -- lower prices.
But not for you. At the expense of you, as a matter of fact. They want to legislate, through another flagrantly undemocratic secret treaty, the enforcement of price discrimination. That way they can raise prices in the US and western Europe while reducing prices in poorer countries (and thus making labor here even less competitive with labor there), without anyone being able to arbitrage the difference because it will be prohibited.
So I hope you weren't expecting the corporate response to this study to be in your interests.
Speaking of which, this pretty much means that every PowerPC Mac ever made has to be thrown in the scrap heap, doesn't it? Because Adobe has stopped updating Flash for PowerPC, which means it will be vulnerable forever. So unless you want to give up Hulu, YouTube and half the internet, they're pretty much doorstops now. Or pretty Linux home servers.
I wonder if anybody wants to buy a G4 PowerBook? It's faster than a lot of the Atom netbooks they're still selling.
It is possible they have thought of this, but would like it even better if RedHat or Canonical or somebody coughs up a ransom payment like this.
The problem there is that they only get one payment, so it's a collective action problem. RedHat doesn't want to be the only one paying and then have Canonical, Novell and everybody else benefit from it or vice versa, so they just each refuse to include H.264 in the default install so that they can't be sued over it. And if they're not infringing the patents because they don't include it, MPEG-LA can't just pick one and force them to take a license for everybody.
Also, MPEG-LA isn't your typical patent licensor. Apple and Microsoft have a lot of sway and it isn't at all clear that they want Linux to support H.264 -- easier to compete when you make compatibility with your technology contingent on licensing patents that your competitors can't license, right?
We'll need to research a way to "scramble" this predictability that's more efficient than using fixed bitrates, which eats up un-needed bandwidth.
It seems like there might be some promise in improving the compression method itself using the same techniques, so that the things that currently take more bandwidth would take less and therefore become less distinguishable, but if the compression is already near-optimal then this won't work without an efficiency loss because the change would correspondingly make the things that currently take less bandwidth take more, and those things might be more common.
The only general solution is some kind of padding scheme, and the only way to completely defeat the attack is to use a compression method that compresses all inputs to output of the same size, i.e. fixed bitrate, because the degree of deviation from that is the degree to which the attack functions. The existence of efficiency-improving variation is what leaks information, because it tells the attacker a characteristic of the underlying data, namely the number of bits required to encode it. That isn't to say there is no compromise solution (like the OpenSSH method discussed below) where you sacrifice some degree of efficiency in order to make the attack sufficiently infeasible, but there is a direct inverse relationship between real-time encoding efficiency and information leakage.
If Red Hat's FAQ is correct the patent license applies to all derivative works... so there is a royaltee free license.
"All products distributed under a Red Hat brand are covered, as well as upstream predecessor versions of those products. In addition, derivative works of or combination products using covered products are protected from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products."
That's actually a pretty interesting strategy for the pro-patent people -- provide a royalty-free license for anyone distributing software under a copyleft license, but charge royalties to proprietary software makers and hardware companies. Then you get network effects from free software using it and you still get to levy a tax on Microsoft and Apple.
I'm pretty sure that identifying a specific word with 50% accuracy is better than random chance. There are more than two words in the English language.
To your point... these are better products now from Microsoft, and there is more of a consumer ecosystem today (XBOX + Windows Phone 7 WP7 App Store + Bing + Silverlight) than there was before. But Microsoft's problem is they didn't "get" the consumer ecosystem space until too late, and their offerings have all been a day late and a dollar short.
It seems like a big part of their problem is that their individual bits don't complement each other -- even where they obviously could. For example, XBOX should have shared 99% of its DNA with Windows -- the only thing different should have been a TV-optimized UI for XBOX, and even that should share the same API. You should be able to plug an XBOX controller into a Windows PC's USB port, put the XBOX game in the PC's DVD drive and play. But you can't.
Likewise, the whole DRM thing in general -- why are there so many mutually-incompatible flavors? Even embracing it at all was a huge mistake -- Apple can only barely get away with it because their customers are loyalists, and even they take a huge amount of flack for it. They need differentiators to separate themselves from Apple and being DRM-free would be a major one if they would give up the pro-DRM zealotry.
But the more basic trouble seems to be that their products don't really fit together. They're just copying whatever their competitors do. Hey, let's copy Google and make Bing. Copy Adobe and make Silverlight. Copy Apple and make phones with app stores. Copy Nintendo and Sony and make XBOX. Throwing everything at the wall with the hope that something sticks is a stupid plan -- most of the time it doesn't work because they're late to market with a product that isn't really better than what already exists.
They're just copying products without a strategy: iPhone fits with with Mac and iTunes because an iPhone is just an iPod with a radio in it, but Zune and WP7 have nothing to do with one another. Adobe makes Flash to sell Flash Creator and succeeds because Flash Player already runs on most platforms and is installed on most computers -- if Microsoft wanted to sell copies of Visual Studio they should have either made Silverlight output as HTML5 and javascript or BSD licensed the Silverlight client; the way they've done it makes everyone skittish about lock-in. I could go on. Where's the strategy?
Really? A bit more? Apple will double the prices as soon as Linux is the only alternative. Apple will be the only manufacturer, AMD will go out of business. etc. etc.
That's not how it works. Microsoft can't go out of business if most people are still paying them for Windows, which implies that people have switched to something else. Apple intentionally refuses to serve the budget market, which means that those people will have to switch to Linux. That's plenty of people for AMD to sell hardware to because the budget market has huge volumes (not to mention the server market, which is already Linux), and they're well positioned for those markets anyway. Plus, if a lot of people start using desktop Linux then it gets network effects which makes it more competitive and Apple can't really raise their prices that much.
They kept plugging on while their competitors make mistakes (eg Netscape vs. IE5). IE5 was definitely better.
You're forgetting what IE was. Microsoft has never made a dime from IE other than as a lock-in strategy to keep people tied to Windows, nor did they ever intend to. So if your point is that Microsoft can execute a successful lock-in strategy then the point is well taken, but if you're trying to argue that their products are good for the consumer... I don't think lock-in is very good for the consumer.
It looks like they're really making good progress. Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products.
I kind of feel like Vista really lowered the bar and now people are happy with anything that isn't strictly worse than the previous version. I mean sure, Windows 7 has features that Windows XP doesn't, but most home users use it because it came installed on their PC and most businesses are upgrading to it primarily because they skipped Vista and they don't want to be still running XP when Microsoft discontinues support for it, rather than because it's so awesome that they had to have it.
And look at WP7: About the best you can say about it is that it's an improvement over WP6. But it still seems like a day late and a dollar short compared to its competitors.
It's good, since I really wouldn't want to live in a world dominated by Apple and Google.
I'll take Apple and Google over Microsoft any day. And realistically that seems to be the way things are going -- Android is well-positioned to become the mobile commodity OS with the lion's share of sales volume, especially in the budget market, with iOS securing the position MacOS has always held relative to Windows, i.e. lower volume but higher margins.
I don't think you're getting it. You give all your data to Facebook, you say "only show this to my friends" but Facebook turns around and uses your data for evil, there is nothing you can do. You put all your data on your own server, you set it up to only allow your friends to access it, you're not trusting anybody other than your friends. Sure, your friends can copy it and repost it and whatever, but presumably you trust the friends you allow access to the sensitive stuff. Can you say the same thing about Facebook or Microsoft or Sony?
Your response is basically saying, "If you don't want it in the public-knowledge domain, don't tell your wife or your kids." That's not acceptable. You should be able to choose who you trust with the information without splattering it all over the world, and one of those trusted parties shouldn't have to be a corporation.
A right, by definition, does not require action on the part of another.
You have every right to remove what you've posted to your own servers - but once you post to someone else's server, you've relinquished control of that information, permanently.
This is exactly right, but let's not omit the corolary: If we want control over our information, we need to design systems where we're posting things to our own servers instead of someone else's.
Tablets are better at replacing paper or books than they are at replacing PCs.
This.
The funny thing is that people think they're going to continue to be high margin devices, but what will really make the market is when you can get one for almost nothing, so that people don't have to care about passing it around the room to a bunch of klutzes who will drop it on the floor, or giving it to someone and possibly not getting it back.
That's really a problem with the iPad right now: It costs enough that if you break it you're out a huge pile of cash so you have to treat it with kid gloves, and anything concealable and expensive is automatically a huge theft magnet.
Does Win7 make Bing the default now? I didn't know that.
I'm not sure what Windows 7 does, but when you install IE8 on Windows XP (as a 'critical update'), you get a wizard that says "use defaults for accelerators" where the defaults are Bing for search, Bing maps for maps, Bing translate for translation, etc. and the radio button for using the defaults is clicked for you, so anyone who just clicks next in the wizard until it goes away gets Bing. On top of that the process for changing it is pretty damn confusing -- you say "no, I don't want to use the defaults" and it opens like four browser windows, where the active one is the "Welcome to IE8" tab that doesn't let you change any of them, and the ones that open in other tabs behind that one actually have the options in them. Then you have to click one by one for each of the accelerators to "install" the version from Google or anyone else. Even if you do that, if you forget to check the box for using the newly installed one as the default, you still get Bing.
Windows 7 comes with IE8, so I'm assuming it does the same or similar.
So should they be third? That's the question.
That question doesn't make any sense. There is no "should" -- the rankings are highly subjective. And the complaint seems very much like complaining that Google is putting search results in their search results -- google.com searches everything. Some of the search results are put in categories like books, maps and products and then displayed in a format adapted for that category of search results. So the question of where the set of all product results "should" be in the main search results becomes even more subjective, because how do you compare a set of 5000 different models of camera on 100 different websites to a single Wikipedia entry?
I'm not saying they're necessarily guilty, but it *is* an area worth investigating.
That seems pretty weak to me. It seems like investigating them for the sole reason that they have a strong market position. Or trying to harass them because their competitors' lobbyists want you to. The more we talk about this the more it seems like the shakedown rationale is the most sensible one.
Sure, but you're missing a crucial piece of the equation. Unlike personal savings, rightly or wrongly, state managed pension plans depend on two things -
1) The contributions people made into the pool during their working lives
2) The contributions being made into the pool by people who are still working
If however, the number of individuals in #2 continue to shrink, well you're in trouble.
I don't think the problem is really who is paying into the fund when. The problem is simply that if you have a shrinking population then you have fewer workers for every retiree -- and that means that each retiree must consume a smaller amount of labor from the marketplace, unless you want to screw over the working man by transferring a larger portion of the fruits of his labor to retirees. There is no "retirement plan" or strategy that will change this, it's basic math.
Which is actually pretty scary, because it means that if we haven't restructured social security by the time the social security administration starts trying to redeem its bonds, we're going to get serious unrest from working people who have to pay huge taxes for services they're not receiving.
How does this even slightly relate to the original comment?
The GP criticized the idea of not buying devices with restrictive app stores by presenting consoles with restrictive app stores as something without an adequate open alternative. Assuming arguendo that that criticism is valid, it still doesn't negative the principle: If you OMFG HAVE TO buy a Wii so you can play whatever game you can't live without, you can decide that that is more important to you than avoiding restrictive app stores. But when it comes time to buy a phone or a music player or whatever, they're not gaming devices so the criticism doesn't apply and you should still avoid the ones with restrictive app stores.
Right. Being 'mostly' open means not installing Windows, leaving you with a Linux derivative.
Being "mostly" open means you can run anything you damn well please on it, including Windows (in a VM or otherwise) to play whatever games you like.
Slashdot Mirror
To solve that you need the approach that Lawrence Lessig promotes [fixcongressfirst.org] : create a movement inside both parties. And chose to be a turn voter that makes choice on a single issue : the stand of candidates toward lobbying.
This. This is exactly right.
The problem with it is that all of the powerful people who have an interest in things staying the way they are -- in both parties -- will oppose it. But that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying; on the contrary it means you have to try all the more.
I agree that neither party seems very interested in retracting copyright to any kind of sensible scope, but I feel like the Democrats are far more interested in making it even worse whereas the Republicans mostly just don't want to enrage the content industry by trying to fix it.
Of course, the Republicans have, shall we say, other problems. Like anything that comes out of the mouth of Glen Beck.
You could have elected McCain, Kucinich, or Paul in 2008 and this would still be happening.
No, definitely not. We could have elected any of those candidates and some completely different set of batshit crazy policies would be implemented. Imagine "drill baby drill" McCain's response to the BP oil spill. Or Kucinich trying to do anything whatsoever about the deficit. Or Ron Paul trying to abolish the federal reserve in the middle of the financial crisis.
Apple stopped supporting PowerPC Macs years ago, and has patched *more* security holes in the OS since then than have been reported in Flash.
Leopard was the last version of OS X to run on PowerPC. This is a security update for Leopard published last week.
It depends on who's saying what and who's looking to manipulate it. Dean Scream anyone?
That's the point. It has absolutely fuck all to do what what you've actually said or done and everything to do with who wants to end your campaign.
That's why the copyright moguls are pushing ACTA and son-of-ACTA.
You've got it right for the wrong reason. They're pushing son-of-ACTA for the reason stated in this article -- lower prices.
But not for you. At the expense of you, as a matter of fact. They want to legislate, through another flagrantly undemocratic secret treaty, the enforcement of price discrimination. That way they can raise prices in the US and western Europe while reducing prices in poorer countries (and thus making labor here even less competitive with labor there), without anyone being able to arbitrage the difference because it will be prohibited.
So I hope you weren't expecting the corporate response to this study to be in your interests.
Uh, then who cares?
In theory you're right. In practice, people will set up a VPN so that your mobile device thinks it's at home no matter where it really is.
Someone said no exploits for Mac and Linux, huh?
Speaking of which, this pretty much means that every PowerPC Mac ever made has to be thrown in the scrap heap, doesn't it? Because Adobe has stopped updating Flash for PowerPC, which means it will be vulnerable forever. So unless you want to give up Hulu, YouTube and half the internet, they're pretty much doorstops now. Or pretty Linux home servers.
I wonder if anybody wants to buy a G4 PowerBook? It's faster than a lot of the Atom netbooks they're still selling.
It is possible they have thought of this, but would like it even better if RedHat or Canonical or somebody coughs up a ransom payment like this.
The problem there is that they only get one payment, so it's a collective action problem. RedHat doesn't want to be the only one paying and then have Canonical, Novell and everybody else benefit from it or vice versa, so they just each refuse to include H.264 in the default install so that they can't be sued over it. And if they're not infringing the patents because they don't include it, MPEG-LA can't just pick one and force them to take a license for everybody.
Also, MPEG-LA isn't your typical patent licensor. Apple and Microsoft have a lot of sway and it isn't at all clear that they want Linux to support H.264 -- easier to compete when you make compatibility with your technology contingent on licensing patents that your competitors can't license, right?
We'll need to research a way to "scramble" this predictability that's more efficient than using fixed bitrates, which eats up un-needed bandwidth.
It seems like there might be some promise in improving the compression method itself using the same techniques, so that the things that currently take more bandwidth would take less and therefore become less distinguishable, but if the compression is already near-optimal then this won't work without an efficiency loss because the change would correspondingly make the things that currently take less bandwidth take more, and those things might be more common.
The only general solution is some kind of padding scheme, and the only way to completely defeat the attack is to use a compression method that compresses all inputs to output of the same size, i.e. fixed bitrate, because the degree of deviation from that is the degree to which the attack functions. The existence of efficiency-improving variation is what leaks information, because it tells the attacker a characteristic of the underlying data, namely the number of bits required to encode it. That isn't to say there is no compromise solution (like the OpenSSH method discussed below) where you sacrifice some degree of efficiency in order to make the attack sufficiently infeasible, but there is a direct inverse relationship between real-time encoding efficiency and information leakage.
If Red Hat's FAQ is correct the patent license applies to all derivative works ... so there is a royaltee free license.
"All products distributed under a Red Hat brand are covered, as well as upstream predecessor versions of those products. In addition, derivative works of or combination products using covered products are protected from any patent claim based in any respect on the covered products."
That's actually a pretty interesting strategy for the pro-patent people -- provide a royalty-free license for anyone distributing software under a copyleft license, but charge royalties to proprietary software makers and hardware companies. Then you get network effects from free software using it and you still get to levy a tax on Microsoft and Apple.
Use fixed-bitrate encoding for VoIP.
I'm pretty sure that identifying a specific word with 50% accuracy is better than random chance. There are more than two words in the English language.
To your point ... these are better products now from Microsoft, and there is more of a consumer ecosystem today (XBOX + Windows Phone 7 WP7 App Store + Bing + Silverlight) than there was before. But Microsoft's problem is they didn't "get" the consumer ecosystem space until too late, and their offerings have all been a day late and a dollar short.
It seems like a big part of their problem is that their individual bits don't complement each other -- even where they obviously could. For example, XBOX should have shared 99% of its DNA with Windows -- the only thing different should have been a TV-optimized UI for XBOX, and even that should share the same API. You should be able to plug an XBOX controller into a Windows PC's USB port, put the XBOX game in the PC's DVD drive and play. But you can't.
Likewise, the whole DRM thing in general -- why are there so many mutually-incompatible flavors? Even embracing it at all was a huge mistake -- Apple can only barely get away with it because their customers are loyalists, and even they take a huge amount of flack for it. They need differentiators to separate themselves from Apple and being DRM-free would be a major one if they would give up the pro-DRM zealotry.
But the more basic trouble seems to be that their products don't really fit together. They're just copying whatever their competitors do. Hey, let's copy Google and make Bing. Copy Adobe and make Silverlight. Copy Apple and make phones with app stores. Copy Nintendo and Sony and make XBOX. Throwing everything at the wall with the hope that something sticks is a stupid plan -- most of the time it doesn't work because they're late to market with a product that isn't really better than what already exists.
They're just copying products without a strategy: iPhone fits with with Mac and iTunes because an iPhone is just an iPod with a radio in it, but Zune and WP7 have nothing to do with one another. Adobe makes Flash to sell Flash Creator and succeeds because Flash Player already runs on most platforms and is installed on most computers -- if Microsoft wanted to sell copies of Visual Studio they should have either made Silverlight output as HTML5 and javascript or BSD licensed the Silverlight client; the way they've done it makes everyone skittish about lock-in. I could go on. Where's the strategy?
If your Server 2008/Exchange 2010 setup isnt stable youre doing it wrong
Trouble is there are a lot of MCSEs out there "doing it wrong."
Really? A bit more? Apple will double the prices as soon as Linux is the only alternative. Apple will be the only manufacturer, AMD will go out of business. etc. etc.
That's not how it works. Microsoft can't go out of business if most people are still paying them for Windows, which implies that people have switched to something else. Apple intentionally refuses to serve the budget market, which means that those people will have to switch to Linux. That's plenty of people for AMD to sell hardware to because the budget market has huge volumes (not to mention the server market, which is already Linux), and they're well positioned for those markets anyway. Plus, if a lot of people start using desktop Linux then it gets network effects which makes it more competitive and Apple can't really raise their prices that much.
They kept plugging on while their competitors make mistakes (eg Netscape vs. IE5). IE5 was definitely better.
You're forgetting what IE was. Microsoft has never made a dime from IE other than as a lock-in strategy to keep people tied to Windows, nor did they ever intend to. So if your point is that Microsoft can execute a successful lock-in strategy then the point is well taken, but if you're trying to argue that their products are good for the consumer... I don't think lock-in is very good for the consumer.
It looks like they're really making good progress. Windows 7, XBOX360, Windows Phone 7...All awesome products.
I kind of feel like Vista really lowered the bar and now people are happy with anything that isn't strictly worse than the previous version. I mean sure, Windows 7 has features that Windows XP doesn't, but most home users use it because it came installed on their PC and most businesses are upgrading to it primarily because they skipped Vista and they don't want to be still running XP when Microsoft discontinues support for it, rather than because it's so awesome that they had to have it.
And look at WP7: About the best you can say about it is that it's an improvement over WP6. But it still seems like a day late and a dollar short compared to its competitors.
It's good, since I really wouldn't want to live in a world dominated by Apple and Google.
I'll take Apple and Google over Microsoft any day. And realistically that seems to be the way things are going -- Android is well-positioned to become the mobile commodity OS with the lion's share of sales volume, especially in the budget market, with iOS securing the position MacOS has always held relative to Windows, i.e. lower volume but higher margins.
I don't think you're getting it. You give all your data to Facebook, you say "only show this to my friends" but Facebook turns around and uses your data for evil, there is nothing you can do. You put all your data on your own server, you set it up to only allow your friends to access it, you're not trusting anybody other than your friends. Sure, your friends can copy it and repost it and whatever, but presumably you trust the friends you allow access to the sensitive stuff. Can you say the same thing about Facebook or Microsoft or Sony?
Your response is basically saying, "If you don't want it in the public-knowledge domain, don't tell your wife or your kids." That's not acceptable. You should be able to choose who you trust with the information without splattering it all over the world, and one of those trusted parties shouldn't have to be a corporation.
A right, by definition, does not require action on the part of another.
You have every right to remove what you've posted to your own servers - but once you post to someone else's server, you've relinquished control of that information, permanently.
This is exactly right, but let's not omit the corolary: If we want control over our information, we need to design systems where we're posting things to our own servers instead of someone else's.
Tablets are better at replacing paper or books than they are at replacing PCs.
This.
The funny thing is that people think they're going to continue to be high margin devices, but what will really make the market is when you can get one for almost nothing, so that people don't have to care about passing it around the room to a bunch of klutzes who will drop it on the floor, or giving it to someone and possibly not getting it back.
That's really a problem with the iPad right now: It costs enough that if you break it you're out a huge pile of cash so you have to treat it with kid gloves, and anything concealable and expensive is automatically a huge theft magnet.
Does Win7 make Bing the default now? I didn't know that.
I'm not sure what Windows 7 does, but when you install IE8 on Windows XP (as a 'critical update'), you get a wizard that says "use defaults for accelerators" where the defaults are Bing for search, Bing maps for maps, Bing translate for translation, etc. and the radio button for using the defaults is clicked for you, so anyone who just clicks next in the wizard until it goes away gets Bing. On top of that the process for changing it is pretty damn confusing -- you say "no, I don't want to use the defaults" and it opens like four browser windows, where the active one is the "Welcome to IE8" tab that doesn't let you change any of them, and the ones that open in other tabs behind that one actually have the options in them. Then you have to click one by one for each of the accelerators to "install" the version from Google or anyone else. Even if you do that, if you forget to check the box for using the newly installed one as the default, you still get Bing.
Windows 7 comes with IE8, so I'm assuming it does the same or similar.
So should they be third? That's the question.
That question doesn't make any sense. There is no "should" -- the rankings are highly subjective. And the complaint seems very much like complaining that Google is putting search results in their search results -- google.com searches everything. Some of the search results are put in categories like books, maps and products and then displayed in a format adapted for that category of search results. So the question of where the set of all product results "should" be in the main search results becomes even more subjective, because how do you compare a set of 5000 different models of camera on 100 different websites to a single Wikipedia entry?
I'm not saying they're necessarily guilty, but it *is* an area worth investigating.
That seems pretty weak to me. It seems like investigating them for the sole reason that they have a strong market position. Or trying to harass them because their competitors' lobbyists want you to. The more we talk about this the more it seems like the shakedown rationale is the most sensible one.
Sure, but you're missing a crucial piece of the equation. Unlike personal savings, rightly or wrongly, state managed pension plans depend on two things -
1) The contributions people made into the pool during their working lives
2) The contributions being made into the pool by people who are still working
If however, the number of individuals in #2 continue to shrink, well you're in trouble.
I don't think the problem is really who is paying into the fund when. The problem is simply that if you have a shrinking population then you have fewer workers for every retiree -- and that means that each retiree must consume a smaller amount of labor from the marketplace, unless you want to screw over the working man by transferring a larger portion of the fruits of his labor to retirees. There is no "retirement plan" or strategy that will change this, it's basic math.
Which is actually pretty scary, because it means that if we haven't restructured social security by the time the social security administration starts trying to redeem its bonds, we're going to get serious unrest from working people who have to pay huge taxes for services they're not receiving.
I know this game.
Semaphore? In my day we sent messages by Pony Express.
Pony Express? I used to have to get a horse and a map and deliver the message myself.
Horses and maps? How spoilt ye modernists are these days -- we used to wander around aimlessly on foot until we found who we were looking for.
Wandering around on foot? I recall a time when we had to swim in the ocean because we didn't have lungs!
Swimming in the ocean? In my day we performed all communication by DNA replication.
DNA replication? What are you, a geneticist? There was once a time when we all communicated by smashing protons together.
Smashing protons together? Isn't that still 20 years away?
How does this even slightly relate to the original comment?
The GP criticized the idea of not buying devices with restrictive app stores by presenting consoles with restrictive app stores as something without an adequate open alternative. Assuming arguendo that that criticism is valid, it still doesn't negative the principle: If you OMFG HAVE TO buy a Wii so you can play whatever game you can't live without, you can decide that that is more important to you than avoiding restrictive app stores. But when it comes time to buy a phone or a music player or whatever, they're not gaming devices so the criticism doesn't apply and you should still avoid the ones with restrictive app stores.
Right. Being 'mostly' open means not installing Windows, leaving you with a Linux derivative.
Being "mostly" open means you can run anything you damn well please on it, including Windows (in a VM or otherwise) to play whatever games you like.