The question should have been: How Far Should Sony Hate Go ?
Why is the GPL preventing Sony from using BusyBox as is ? The source code is already available, so if they feel the burning need to make changes, they can simply post patches on the web. Am I misinterpreting the GPL here ?
Why would rewriting BusyBox be considered cheaper/easier than complying with the GPL ?
I'm quite familiar with the Kaleidescape system. It's effectively a DVD jukebox that uses disc images instead of physical media. In 2011, it's a very outdated piece of technology, but it remains one of the few idiot-proof systems out there. Pay gobs of money, plug it into your TV, fiddle the remote and you're off to the races.
From the very beginning, the system has required users to rip their own DVDs. You don't download shows to it, you have to pop in the disc and let the system create its own image. No disc, no love. Sure, you could toss in a burned disc, but by that point the encryption has already been broken. The only way you can willfully circumvent copyright laws with this thing is by renting/borrowing a movie, ripping it and returning the disc.
That said, if someone has the whimsical income to afford a $7000+ Kaleidescape system, they can probably afford to buy their movies legally. Once again, the movie industry doesn't have a goddamned clue.
HTML isn't trendy enough with the non-techies. No, seriously, people are too dumb to bookmark a page, but they'll happily install a browser-based app that basically accomplishes the same as a handful of bookmarks.
As a guy who writes apps for hire, a lot of the stuff I do is essentially packaged HTML, occasionally with small native features added, but nothing groundbreaking. Once in a while, I'll take a bunch of complex pages and recreate them with native UI widgets, as mobile browsers tend to be a bit laggy with DOM manipulation or Javascript-heavy pages. I guess it's kind of like what business app development was 10-15 years ago: skinning MS Access. One guy wanted a database that catalogs sales data, the next guy wants to store supplier data. You change a few labels around and POOF! You sell the same bullshit all over again for zillions of dollars.
The great majority of non-gaming apps can be recreated with HTML. Things like jqTouch and Sencha basically accomplish the same thing. They just don't earn you brownie points with the hipster crowd.
So why can't we have governments that foster that kind of constant development ?
I hate to put on my socialist costume, but when something benefits the great majority of society, I firmly believe the profit motive should be taken out of the equation. If it's not through direct government control and oversight, then perhaps a government-supported not-for-profit org and think-tank. They could headhunt those same creative engineers to keep technology moving forward, and let traditional businesses focus on smaller niches within their grasp.
Building something with public funds, and then giving it away to a private entity that could not have built it in the first place, well I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. What makes AT&T so special ? I could create all sorts of cool shit if the government gave me a chip fab and manufacturing plant. Where's my giant tax-funded present ? Oh, that's right - I don't have lobbyists flashing G's on my behalf...
If, by "trained professionals" you mean suit-warmers with an MBA, you're probably right.
FACT: Most people have fixed budgets for entertainment.
Implementing countermeasures to restrict used game sales is never going to change that fact. If I have $35 and you want $70 for a game, I can't buy your game. No amount of corporate posturing is going to change that. What it *will* do is drive more people to alternatives, whether that means a modded console with copied games, or different platform/hobby altogether.
How can these corporate dunces not understand that the used game market is what fuels new game sales ?
On the few occasions where I've sold a game, in my case it's because I didn't like it, and wanted to free up those funds to buy something else. My most recent example was last year's Splinter Cell game (which I dubbed "Gears of Splinter Cell"). I spent $60 on it, didn't like it, sold it to someone else for $45 or so. Then I turned around and spent another $70 on Black Ops. So far, the game industry has made $130.
If I were unable to sell the game, due to arbitrary restrictions enforced by the platform, the other guy would not have gotten his hands on my unloved Splinter Cell, and I would have had $45 less to spend on my next game. Restricting that private sale then directly results in one less retail sale.
Now, I only rarely sell games. I'm more of a collector, and I like to revisit old games every few years. I can afford it, so I'm not the typical used-game-market kind of guy. A lot of my friends are, though, and they rarely have more than 4-5 games in their possession at any given time. They beat one, sell/trade it, get a new one. That's the key factor: they keep buying new ones with the money from used sales!
The people who are buying used games ? They're not even on the radar. $70 for a video game is fucking expensive, considering most modern titles are hastily-polished turds. About half gamer guys I know in the 25-35 age range are broke asses, working retail jobs and having less than $200 left after rent and necessities. The used market is the only way they can afford any games, so they may not contribute directly to the game industry's bottom line, but it keeps them addicted. How often have I heard these guys go "Man when I get a 2nd job I am so buying a PS3"... but kill off the used game market and these folks will find other hobbies, and you lose them as a customer for life!
The DDoS is supposedly a response to the speedy implementation of ACTA, so now that the Polish officials have threatened to sign it anyway, the Pirat guy wants the DDoS to stop ?
Let me translate that into slash-speak:
"I was thinking of stealing your car next Saturday, but since you've been hitting me in the face with a Louisville slugger, I'm gonna steal your car this Thursday"
The only people I know who think that way are thugs and gangsters. I think the attacks need to double in strength and breadth, and for the Polish people to take their protests to the streets. Swarm those government offices and scare the bejeezus out of those smug bastards.
They would control the government if they posed a credible threat. Sadly, most first world nations don't even remember how to do that, because the last civil wars were centuries ago.
It seems you still don't quite "get" Anonymous (pardon the pun).
It's not one giant coordinated group of people, but an umbrella name for any individual or group choosing to use the label, along with the massive numbers of lurkers who join in as willing DDoS participants. Many of them follow a loosely aligned hacktivist ethos, others are unrelated troublemakers coopting the name because it's trendy or convenient.
I would dare suggest that the random vandalism may be the result of small fringe groups hiding behind the Anonymous name, or even false-flag operations by governments to hurt the activists' reputation.
1. I am not with AT&T 2. I am on the highest tier of service for my mobile carrier, it ain't cheap. 3. This is all covered by the contract and AUP agreed upon when I signed up for the service. If anyone is losing money, they're doing so voluntarily. PROTIP: They're not losing money.
If you think 3GB per day is a lot, you should see my cable usage. My ISP has several plans, the standard one includes a 300gb monthly cap. The top one is unlimited. I've been averaging 800gb, so I pay a bit more for the unlimited plan. Actually, that's a lie. I pay for two unlimited plans because I have two modems and I'm doing static load balancing between them. Under my previous ISP, just one slower line with a 60gb cap cost more than my current setup with 2 lines and unlimited data. Everybody's happy, and everybody's making good money.
So before you go chastising random people on the internet, you may want to think outside your very small box. Just because your area is dominated by a greedy monopoly does not mean everyone else is stuck in the same situation.
How about a primitive type that serves the purpose of Null, without actually being a pointer to 0x0.
Other languages have the concept of an empty object, which is simply an object that discards all input and ignores method calls, without throwing an error. It might return an empty result for whichever type is expected by the context. That could be a boolean FALSE, zero, empty array, etc. You can still ask the object if it is empty, but at least your app won't shit the bed if you accidentally or lazily invoke something on that object.
If the get() call returns a true Null, the subsequent getBytes() will throw a Null pointer error. Either you try-catch that block, or you crash.
If instead the language uses empty objects, calling getBytes() on an empty object would simply return an empty byte array. myData = byte[0]. Still perfectly valid code and you could simply check that the size of myData is greater than 0, as a crude yet effective error check.
Oh, I could type but I wasn't handwriting. I could manage block letters by age 3, which I remember quite well because I labeled my copy of the Michael Jackson VHS. It probably took me 10 minutes though, and lacked vowels: "MKL JKSN". I bet my mother still has that tape somewhere.
I could read the BASIC book, not with a scholarly command of the English language, but enough to understand most concepts. For any parts I didn't understand, I could simply type out the code samples and figure things out by intuition. Keep in mind, this was BASIC, a procedural language. Each line of code has a direct and immediate result, a pattern any sane child can understand. I didn't figure out OOP until my early teens...
Handwriting (cursive) didn't happen until much, much later. Heck, I still can't write anything legible in cursive. It was never a priority for me as I was typing 40 wpm by the time I hit grade 2 - much to the dismay of the computer tutor, as I spent most of my time pounding out elaborate sketches for that poor turtle. How many kids do you know who asked for a LOGO cartridge for their 6th birthday ? And an Assembler cartridge for their 8th ?:)
And yet, for all my computer wizardry, I was most envious of the neighbour's electronic skills. I could create my own crude versions of arcade games, but he was building freakin' robots with remotes and lights and buzzers! Robots >> sprites.
Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy a few pints at the pub, despite the premium price, but that's in part because my government imposes such usurious levies and taxes on alcohol that even "cheap swill" at the liquor store costs nearly as much as a full-service bar, for a bottled product that's been oxidizing on the shelf for a month. And, well, I haven't quite mastered the art of homebrewing yet...
I really do believe the only reason telcos are so dominant is because people don't bother spending any time to evaluate their options. I'm with a big-three telco, only because I got onto a group plan for $50, less than half the regular price given my usage. The reason I got a smartphone in the first place was to support my business, prior to that I was still using a simple flip-phone. The day a competitor comes along with a better deal, I'm switching. Meanwhile, I know a bunch of unemployed twits with $150+/mo bills due to constant overages, a few of those "one ringtone everyday" scams, and assloads of texting - you know, because the dumb have so much to say. It is these cretins who are plumping up the telcos so they can better abuse us all.
Ten years ago, the only people with smartphones were the ones who had a justifiable need for them. Accordingly, we had business plans that were a good fit for our needs. Now, every minimum-wage stoner has a new phone every 12 months because it's shinier than the last, and the telcos are laughing all the way to the bank.
And that would be why the owner of that phone company is the richest man in the world.
Just because it's a developing country does not mean it is devoid of profiteering tyrants - it just means said tyrants haven't yet mastered the art of deception (see: U.S., France, U.K.).
The key difference between your gym and AT&T, is choice.
If you know you're going to hit the gym 5 days a week, you choose the plan that offers the best value, the yearly plan. Every gym user has an affordable option based on their needs.
With AT&T, if you know you're a heavy user, the only thing you can do is brace for impact. Even the most "generous" plan is very tight - 5gb may seem huge to someone who reads the occasional email or googles trivia at the bar, but for a guy like me who often works over 3G on a laptop, I blow through 2-3 gb per day. Where is the 100gb for $70 plan ?
Or, if we really want to point out the illogical price discrimination: why does unlimited data only cost $10 on a "standard phone" ? Are the bits any different from bits sent to a smartphone ? Are the zeroes and ones made from cheaper electrons ? Why should the device have any impact on a platform-agnostic network and its costs ?
Telcos' business models are so full of holes, they need armies of full-time lawyers and spin doctors to keep the ship from sinking.
Actually, yes, being bootstrapped should result in a long-term debt to the tax payer, because AT&T could not have existed without that bootstrapping.
If an investor pumps a lot of cash into your startup, which in turn allows you to succeed, should that investor not reap some rewards from their investment ? Like a majority stake in the company ? Why would a government not be allowed the same rights ?
You don't have any "God-given rights". There is no God.
Now since that's out of the way, let's help you down from that shiny pedestal and talk about how ridiculous, unreasonable, and borderline fraudulent it is for an ISP to bill $68,376 for residential usage.
Why is it unreasonable ? Because for $68k you could get an all-you-can-eat 100mb fibre loop, erect a damn cell tower on top of your house that will cover a 40 mile radius and still have some change left over for a hot dog and a few hundred cases of beer.
The only reason AT&T can make up any price and get away with it, is because THERE IS NO COMPETITION. Back in the 80's, the DOJ forced AT&T to split into smaller companies over antitrust concerns. Now 30 years later, they've reabsorbed half of those pieces and continue to gobble up every telco they can find. Soon it will be time for another antitrust battle.
The funny thing about free speech is that racism goes both ways.
Shall we have a police-assiated shaming parade every time a black person speaks negatively of whites ? Cracker this, ghostface that ?
I'm no fan of overt racism, but I'm also not buying into race denial. I think, fundamentally, most people today are still innately racist. People have cultural differences, and those differences cause social friction. When you consistently notice those behaviours in a certain identifiable group of people, you start to generalize. It goes both ways!
For example, I grew up in a neighbourhood with many lebanese immigrants who held very progressive views, and got along with them quite famously. So I assumed all Lebanese people were cool, until the day I met one very hardcore traditionalist who pulled a gun on me because I made a gay reference, and apparently in some parts of Lebanon, being gay is a capital crime. Had I grown up around that kind of people instead of the open-minded ones, there's a pretty good chance I would hate the Lebanese today. The only thing race has to do with anything is that it's an easily recognizable sign. If statistically your brain remembers most Lebanese people as homophobic sociopaths, you're going to spot them at a distance and maybe change sidewalks... or vice versa!
It's not about the color of your face, it's what's inside your head that counts, and I think there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone's actual behaviours and ideas. I'm French-Canadian, and I even have negative stereotypes about my own kind. On the surface, we're a bunch of alcoholic uneducated breeders (Jersey Shore!)... why ? Because that negative description covers the significant majority of random Quebecers I grew up with. That doesn't mean we're all white trash. I'm certainly not, but I can recognize that to an outsider, that may be the first thing they notice.
Understanding and working around racism is a far more rational approach than denying it even exists.
That's okay, I had a (drunken) Future Shop manager type pick a bar fight with me because he remembered me as "that guy who caused all my car stereo reps to quit". What did I do ? I educated them.
I bought my first car stereo from Future Shop, and it was very mediocre, mostly because their sales guys know little, and their installers even less. Still, I met a really nice sales guy who shared my passion for music, and we stayed in touch. Being an obsessive geek with golden ears, well I set out to learn all about sound reproduction over the next year or so, and ended up replacing much of my car stereo with lesser-known brands. I even bought a cheap high-current amp and replaced a few components inside to make it awesome for a third of the price of the name-brand offerings. So then one day, I'm at Future Shop buying a game or something, and my buddy the sales guy asks about the stereo he had sold me. 5 minutes later, he's gazing at my custom setup with the DIY touchscreen head-unit (Linux powered!), and playing a few choice pieces of music to show off the result. Over the next 3 months, I helped him assemble a similar kit for himself, teaching him some basic acoustic theory along the way.
At some point, he mentioned the only reason he stayed at Future Shop was because he got everything at cost, which is a huge savings, especially for audio components. Hey I did the same thing with computers so I can relate. That's great, except FS didn't carry any of the new gear I was using, it all came from pro audio dealers and specialists like Parts Express, and it was often cheaper than the stuff he could get through his staff purchasing options. So he quit and got a better job somewhere else, and the other audio freaks followed suit over the next few months, once they realized the shit job no longer yielded any fringe benefits. Good for them!
Where things got messy is when the initial guy started a side-business selling and installing stereos. He plundered his old customer base from FS, but ultimately the manager felt this was all my fault. He lost a bunch of loyal staff, and his sales took a nose dive, I can understand why he was upset. Years later, he walks into my friend's bar, recognizes me and decides it's a good idea to push a 330lb guy around on his home turf. I didn't hurt him much, but the police report was enough to get him suspended and soon fired. The best part of it all is he's now managing an A&W in the nearby mall, so once in a while my buddy and I will stop by for a burger and a laugh.
Looking back, the only good purchase I ever made at Future Shop was my first DVD burner. It was a Pioneer DVR-A03 and cost about $1000. I took the extended warranty with it, so for the next five years I always had a top-of-the-line DVD burner. It would wear out, or in one case die from a bad flash, and FS would replace it with the latest and greatest. I went from 2x to 8x on that one purchase, and when my last Pioneer died, new ones were down to $100 or less. It was definitely worth the $70 warranty:)
Slashdot Mirror
The question should have been: How Far Should Sony Hate Go ?
Why is the GPL preventing Sony from using BusyBox as is ? The source code is already available, so if they feel the burning need to make changes, they can simply post patches on the web. Am I misinterpreting the GPL here ?
Why would rewriting BusyBox be considered cheaper/easier than complying with the GPL ?
Congratulations. You've just summarized the entire stock market in a single sentence.
AKA Ponzi scheme.
I'm quite familiar with the Kaleidescape system. It's effectively a DVD jukebox that uses disc images instead of physical media. In 2011, it's a very outdated piece of technology, but it remains one of the few idiot-proof systems out there. Pay gobs of money, plug it into your TV, fiddle the remote and you're off to the races.
From the very beginning, the system has required users to rip their own DVDs. You don't download shows to it, you have to pop in the disc and let the system create its own image. No disc, no love. Sure, you could toss in a burned disc, but by that point the encryption has already been broken. The only way you can willfully circumvent copyright laws with this thing is by renting/borrowing a movie, ripping it and returning the disc.
That said, if someone has the whimsical income to afford a $7000+ Kaleidescape system, they can probably afford to buy their movies legally. Once again, the movie industry doesn't have a goddamned clue.
Ok then, call it Wi-Far! :)
HTML isn't trendy enough with the non-techies. No, seriously, people are too dumb to bookmark a page, but they'll happily install a browser-based app that basically accomplishes the same as a handful of bookmarks.
As a guy who writes apps for hire, a lot of the stuff I do is essentially packaged HTML, occasionally with small native features added, but nothing groundbreaking. Once in a while, I'll take a bunch of complex pages and recreate them with native UI widgets, as mobile browsers tend to be a bit laggy with DOM manipulation or Javascript-heavy pages. I guess it's kind of like what business app development was 10-15 years ago: skinning MS Access. One guy wanted a database that catalogs sales data, the next guy wants to store supplier data. You change a few labels around and POOF! You sell the same bullshit all over again for zillions of dollars.
The great majority of non-gaming apps can be recreated with HTML. Things like jqTouch and Sencha basically accomplish the same thing. They just don't earn you brownie points with the hipster crowd.
So why can't we have governments that foster that kind of constant development ?
I hate to put on my socialist costume, but when something benefits the great majority of society, I firmly believe the profit motive should be taken out of the equation. If it's not through direct government control and oversight, then perhaps a government-supported not-for-profit org and think-tank. They could headhunt those same creative engineers to keep technology moving forward, and let traditional businesses focus on smaller niches within their grasp.
Building something with public funds, and then giving it away to a private entity that could not have built it in the first place, well I'm sorry but that makes no sense to me. What makes AT&T so special ? I could create all sorts of cool shit if the government gave me a chip fab and manufacturing plant. Where's my giant tax-funded present ? Oh, that's right - I don't have lobbyists flashing G's on my behalf...
If, by "trained professionals" you mean suit-warmers with an MBA, you're probably right.
FACT: Most people have fixed budgets for entertainment.
Implementing countermeasures to restrict used game sales is never going to change that fact. If I have $35 and you want $70 for a game, I can't buy your game. No amount of corporate posturing is going to change that. What it *will* do is drive more people to alternatives, whether that means a modded console with copied games, or different platform/hobby altogether.
How can these corporate dunces not understand that the used game market is what fuels new game sales ?
On the few occasions where I've sold a game, in my case it's because I didn't like it, and wanted to free up those funds to buy something else. My most recent example was last year's Splinter Cell game (which I dubbed "Gears of Splinter Cell"). I spent $60 on it, didn't like it, sold it to someone else for $45 or so. Then I turned around and spent another $70 on Black Ops. So far, the game industry has made $130.
If I were unable to sell the game, due to arbitrary restrictions enforced by the platform, the other guy would not have gotten his hands on my unloved Splinter Cell, and I would have had $45 less to spend on my next game. Restricting that private sale then directly results in one less retail sale.
Now, I only rarely sell games. I'm more of a collector, and I like to revisit old games every few years. I can afford it, so I'm not the typical used-game-market kind of guy. A lot of my friends are, though, and they rarely have more than 4-5 games in their possession at any given time. They beat one, sell/trade it, get a new one. That's the key factor: they keep buying new ones with the money from used sales!
The people who are buying used games ? They're not even on the radar. $70 for a video game is fucking expensive, considering most modern titles are hastily-polished turds. About half gamer guys I know in the 25-35 age range are broke asses, working retail jobs and having less than $200 left after rent and necessities. The used market is the only way they can afford any games, so they may not contribute directly to the game industry's bottom line, but it keeps them addicted. How often have I heard these guys go "Man when I get a 2nd job I am so buying a PS3"... but kill off the used game market and these folks will find other hobbies, and you lose them as a customer for life!
Let me get this straight:
The DDoS is supposedly a response to the speedy implementation of ACTA, so now that the Polish officials have threatened to sign it anyway, the Pirat guy wants the DDoS to stop ?
Let me translate that into slash-speak:
"I was thinking of stealing your car next Saturday, but since you've been hitting me in the face with a Louisville slugger, I'm gonna steal your car this Thursday"
The only people I know who think that way are thugs and gangsters. I think the attacks need to double in strength and breadth, and for the Polish people to take their protests to the streets. Swarm those government offices and scare the bejeezus out of those smug bastards.
They would control the government if they posed a credible threat. Sadly, most first world nations don't even remember how to do that, because the last civil wars were centuries ago.
I'm not sure I agree, because the usual reaction to non-canon ops is to discredit Anonymous and label them not as activists but terrorists.
I'd say any Anon op that doesn't have a clear anti-oppressive goal to be a potential false-flag op.
It seems you still don't quite "get" Anonymous (pardon the pun).
It's not one giant coordinated group of people, but an umbrella name for any individual or group choosing to use the label, along with the massive numbers of lurkers who join in as willing DDoS participants. Many of them follow a loosely aligned hacktivist ethos, others are unrelated troublemakers coopting the name because it's trendy or convenient.
I would dare suggest that the random vandalism may be the result of small fringe groups hiding behind the Anonymous name, or even false-flag operations by governments to hurt the activists' reputation.
1. I am not with AT&T
2. I am on the highest tier of service for my mobile carrier, it ain't cheap.
3. This is all covered by the contract and AUP agreed upon when I signed up for the service. If anyone is losing money, they're doing so voluntarily. PROTIP: They're not losing money.
If you think 3GB per day is a lot, you should see my cable usage. My ISP has several plans, the standard one includes a 300gb monthly cap. The top one is unlimited. I've been averaging 800gb, so I pay a bit more for the unlimited plan. Actually, that's a lie. I pay for two unlimited plans because I have two modems and I'm doing static load balancing between them. Under my previous ISP, just one slower line with a 60gb cap cost more than my current setup with 2 lines and unlimited data. Everybody's happy, and everybody's making good money.
So before you go chastising random people on the internet, you may want to think outside your very small box. Just because your area is dominated by a greedy monopoly does not mean everyone else is stuck in the same situation.
How about a primitive type that serves the purpose of Null, without actually being a pointer to 0x0.
Other languages have the concept of an empty object, which is simply an object that discards all input and ignores method calls, without throwing an error. It might return an empty result for whichever type is expected by the context. That could be a boolean FALSE, zero, empty array, etc. You can still ask the object if it is empty, but at least your app won't shit the bed if you accidentally or lazily invoke something on that object.
Example:
byte[] myData = HTTP.get("http://slashdot.org/blah").getBytes();
If the get() call returns a true Null, the subsequent getBytes() will throw a Null pointer error. Either you try-catch that block, or you crash.
If instead the language uses empty objects, calling getBytes() on an empty object would simply return an empty byte array. myData = byte[0]. Still perfectly valid code and you could simply check that the size of myData is greater than 0, as a crude yet effective error check.
Hehehe... ok, ok :)
Still, it's more of a condiment than a main course. At least for those of us who are:
1. Past the age of 21
2. Gave up on the rock band
3. Have to be up in the morning for work.
Oh, I could type but I wasn't handwriting. I could manage block letters by age 3, which I remember quite well because I labeled my copy of the Michael Jackson VHS. It probably took me 10 minutes though, and lacked vowels: "MKL JKSN". I bet my mother still has that tape somewhere.
I could read the BASIC book, not with a scholarly command of the English language, but enough to understand most concepts. For any parts I didn't understand, I could simply type out the code samples and figure things out by intuition. Keep in mind, this was BASIC, a procedural language. Each line of code has a direct and immediate result, a pattern any sane child can understand. I didn't figure out OOP until my early teens...
Handwriting (cursive) didn't happen until much, much later. Heck, I still can't write anything legible in cursive. It was never a priority for me as I was typing 40 wpm by the time I hit grade 2 - much to the dismay of the computer tutor, as I spent most of my time pounding out elaborate sketches for that poor turtle. How many kids do you know who asked for a LOGO cartridge for their 6th birthday ? And an Assembler cartridge for their 8th ? :)
And yet, for all my computer wizardry, I was most envious of the neighbour's electronic skills. I could create my own crude versions of arcade games, but he was building freakin' robots with remotes and lights and buzzers! Robots >> sprites.
Correction: at two years old, *YOU* didn't have the motor skills to operate a computer.
I am not you. Some might say I was a gifted child, others would say I'm just an encyclopedic asshole. I say it's all about perspective.
This.
Don't get me wrong, I quite enjoy a few pints at the pub, despite the premium price, but that's in part because my government imposes such usurious levies and taxes on alcohol that even "cheap swill" at the liquor store costs nearly as much as a full-service bar, for a bottled product that's been oxidizing on the shelf for a month. And, well, I haven't quite mastered the art of homebrewing yet...
I really do believe the only reason telcos are so dominant is because people don't bother spending any time to evaluate their options. I'm with a big-three telco, only because I got onto a group plan for $50, less than half the regular price given my usage. The reason I got a smartphone in the first place was to support my business, prior to that I was still using a simple flip-phone. The day a competitor comes along with a better deal, I'm switching. Meanwhile, I know a bunch of unemployed twits with $150+/mo bills due to constant overages, a few of those "one ringtone everyday" scams, and assloads of texting - you know, because the dumb have so much to say. It is these cretins who are plumping up the telcos so they can better abuse us all.
Ten years ago, the only people with smartphones were the ones who had a justifiable need for them. Accordingly, we had business plans that were a good fit for our needs. Now, every minimum-wage stoner has a new phone every 12 months because it's shinier than the last, and the telcos are laughing all the way to the bank.
And that would be why the owner of that phone company is the richest man in the world.
Just because it's a developing country does not mean it is devoid of profiteering tyrants - it just means said tyrants haven't yet mastered the art of deception (see: U.S., France, U.K.).
The key difference between your gym and AT&T, is choice.
If you know you're going to hit the gym 5 days a week, you choose the plan that offers the best value, the yearly plan. Every gym user has an affordable option based on their needs.
With AT&T, if you know you're a heavy user, the only thing you can do is brace for impact. Even the most "generous" plan is very tight - 5gb may seem huge to someone who reads the occasional email or googles trivia at the bar, but for a guy like me who often works over 3G on a laptop, I blow through 2-3 gb per day. Where is the 100gb for $70 plan ?
Or, if we really want to point out the illogical price discrimination: why does unlimited data only cost $10 on a "standard phone" ? Are the bits any different from bits sent to a smartphone ? Are the zeroes and ones made from cheaper electrons ? Why should the device have any impact on a platform-agnostic network and its costs ?
Telcos' business models are so full of holes, they need armies of full-time lawyers and spin doctors to keep the ship from sinking.
Actually, yes, being bootstrapped should result in a long-term debt to the tax payer, because AT&T could not have existed without that bootstrapping.
If an investor pumps a lot of cash into your startup, which in turn allows you to succeed, should that investor not reap some rewards from their investment ? Like a majority stake in the company ? Why would a government not be allowed the same rights ?
You don't have any "God-given rights". There is no God.
Now since that's out of the way, let's help you down from that shiny pedestal and talk about how ridiculous, unreasonable, and borderline fraudulent it is for an ISP to bill $68,376 for residential usage.
Why is it unreasonable ? Because for $68k you could get an all-you-can-eat 100mb fibre loop, erect a damn cell tower on top of your house that will cover a 40 mile radius and still have some change left over for a hot dog and a few hundred cases of beer.
The only reason AT&T can make up any price and get away with it, is because THERE IS NO COMPETITION. Back in the 80's, the DOJ forced AT&T to split into smaller companies over antitrust concerns. Now 30 years later, they've reabsorbed half of those pieces and continue to gobble up every telco they can find. Soon it will be time for another antitrust battle.
Jack Daniel's isn't food, brah.
The funny thing about free speech is that racism goes both ways.
Shall we have a police-assiated shaming parade every time a black person speaks negatively of whites ? Cracker this, ghostface that ?
I'm no fan of overt racism, but I'm also not buying into race denial. I think, fundamentally, most people today are still innately racist. People have cultural differences, and those differences cause social friction. When you consistently notice those behaviours in a certain identifiable group of people, you start to generalize. It goes both ways!
For example, I grew up in a neighbourhood with many lebanese immigrants who held very progressive views, and got along with them quite famously. So I assumed all Lebanese people were cool, until the day I met one very hardcore traditionalist who pulled a gun on me because I made a gay reference, and apparently in some parts of Lebanon, being gay is a capital crime. Had I grown up around that kind of people instead of the open-minded ones, there's a pretty good chance I would hate the Lebanese today. The only thing race has to do with anything is that it's an easily recognizable sign. If statistically your brain remembers most Lebanese people as homophobic sociopaths, you're going to spot them at a distance and maybe change sidewalks... or vice versa!
It's not about the color of your face, it's what's inside your head that counts, and I think there is nothing wrong with disagreeing with someone's actual behaviours and ideas. I'm French-Canadian, and I even have negative stereotypes about my own kind. On the surface, we're a bunch of alcoholic uneducated breeders (Jersey Shore!)... why ? Because that negative description covers the significant majority of random Quebecers I grew up with. That doesn't mean we're all white trash. I'm certainly not, but I can recognize that to an outsider, that may be the first thing they notice.
Understanding and working around racism is a far more rational approach than denying it even exists.
That's okay, I had a (drunken) Future Shop manager type pick a bar fight with me because he remembered me as "that guy who caused all my car stereo reps to quit". What did I do ? I educated them.
I bought my first car stereo from Future Shop, and it was very mediocre, mostly because their sales guys know little, and their installers even less. Still, I met a really nice sales guy who shared my passion for music, and we stayed in touch. Being an obsessive geek with golden ears, well I set out to learn all about sound reproduction over the next year or so, and ended up replacing much of my car stereo with lesser-known brands. I even bought a cheap high-current amp and replaced a few components inside to make it awesome for a third of the price of the name-brand offerings. So then one day, I'm at Future Shop buying a game or something, and my buddy the sales guy asks about the stereo he had sold me. 5 minutes later, he's gazing at my custom setup with the DIY touchscreen head-unit (Linux powered!), and playing a few choice pieces of music to show off the result. Over the next 3 months, I helped him assemble a similar kit for himself, teaching him some basic acoustic theory along the way.
At some point, he mentioned the only reason he stayed at Future Shop was because he got everything at cost, which is a huge savings, especially for audio components. Hey I did the same thing with computers so I can relate. That's great, except FS didn't carry any of the new gear I was using, it all came from pro audio dealers and specialists like Parts Express, and it was often cheaper than the stuff he could get through his staff purchasing options. So he quit and got a better job somewhere else, and the other audio freaks followed suit over the next few months, once they realized the shit job no longer yielded any fringe benefits. Good for them!
Where things got messy is when the initial guy started a side-business selling and installing stereos. He plundered his old customer base from FS, but ultimately the manager felt this was all my fault. He lost a bunch of loyal staff, and his sales took a nose dive, I can understand why he was upset. Years later, he walks into my friend's bar, recognizes me and decides it's a good idea to push a 330lb guy around on his home turf. I didn't hurt him much, but the police report was enough to get him suspended and soon fired. The best part of it all is he's now managing an A&W in the nearby mall, so once in a while my buddy and I will stop by for a burger and a laugh.
Looking back, the only good purchase I ever made at Future Shop was my first DVD burner. It was a Pioneer DVR-A03 and cost about $1000. I took the extended warranty with it, so for the next five years I always had a top-of-the-line DVD burner. It would wear out, or in one case die from a bad flash, and FS would replace it with the latest and greatest. I went from 2x to 8x on that one purchase, and when my last Pioneer died, new ones were down to $100 or less. It was definitely worth the $70 warranty :)