The difference being, of course, that the implied analogy was totally appropriate. History shows the parallels between the birth of the German police state and our own missteps in post-9/11 America. As for the demonization being rare, have you watched the GOP debates? You'd think that the only issue our country faces right now is illegal immigration, that's almost all they ever talk about. That and the cartels and terrorists in Iran/Pakistan. It's never anything we've done wrong as a nation (unless it's something Obama did), it's "everyone else" trying to "attack America" because they "hate freedom".
It's not a fucking game, either. It's the erosion of our free society for reasons of "security".
I suggest you get to bed, child. Us grown folks are having grown-up discussions over here and you're obviously both out of your depth and up way past your bedtime.
I said "we even have our own ethnic group to demonize in place of the Jews"; the Nazi's didn't immediately start throwing them in camps, either. At first it was just anti-immigrant propaganda, you know, kinda like how people are blaming all of America's ills on illegal immigrants lately?
As for your Muslim co-workers, they may not be worried about getting shipped off the Gitmo, but ask them if they have been mistreated by racists and bigots over the last 10 years. Ask them if people don't look at them suspiciously in the airport or any other mass transit. I have friends from all over the Middle-East and North Africa that came here to go to school and they deal with shit like that all the time out of ignorant assholes right here in the good ol' U.S. of A.
I think maybe you should go back to school and read up on your history. I think you'll find there are a lot more similarities between Nazi Germany and the path we're currently on in this country than you'd be comfortable to admit. We may not be burning books yet (although some bigots are happily burning Qurans) but we're not against banning them, and restricting the freedoms of the people of this country day by day.
I hope you're just a troll, I really do, because if not, you're one of the sad people that are unable to see past the propaganda and bullshit, and frankly, we have far too many of them in this country as it is...
We had our own camps, too. We didn't kill the Japanese like the Nazis killed the Jews, but they certainly were imprisoned, they certainly lost almost all of their material possessions, they certainly died in the camps due to lack of adequate medical care and suicide, and, in some cases, yeah, they were killed by sentries "trying to escape".
There's plenty of horrific things in our own history that are on par with the Nazi's. How many fucking Native Americans did we put in the ground over the 250 years our nation has existed? How many Chinese immigrants died building the railroads? And of course, the millions of African-American slaves...
I'm not saying that we should allow these things to cast a pall over our entire society, but it's important that we remember these atrocities lest we repeat them. Sugar-coating history, and especially our culpability in these foul acts, does a great disservice to those that fought and lived and died through those times.
While we may not have condensed our atrocities down to a 30 year period like Nazi Germany, we've definitely had more than our share spread out over the 250 years our nation has existed...
While we may not be anywhere near like Nazi Germany as it existed in 1943, how different are we compared to Germany of the 20's and early 30's? We're certainly tottering down the path to a full blown police state with this bullshit; that's undeniable to anyone that's really followed how things have gone in post 9/11 America. Hell, we even have our own ethnic group to demonize in place of the Jews, Middle-Easterners and Muslims. We may not be throwing them in camps and forced to work, but we have no problem shipping them off to Gitmo and holding them as long as we want without trial...
All this shit is supposed to keep us safer, but we just end up with our rights curtailed more and more. We may not be driving through police checkpoints every time we leave the house yet, but I doubt it's going to be long before people are getting thrown on the ground on the side of the road for not producing their "papers" fast enough.
I have literally never in my life bought one of those "similar products". I don't even look at them...it's pretty much banner blindness to me now.
A brick and mortar store, however, forces me to physically wander multiple aisles I would otherwise not go down, deliberately obfuscates high-demand items by forcing you to search through shit you don't need to find them, and in some cases, even makes it impossible to get a product without dealing with a fucking salesperson who's going to try and sell me a goddamned replacement plan or $200 Monster Cable to go with it whether I want it or not.
Speaking of Best Buy, I've actually had a salesperson ask me if I was going to buy one of those replacement plans, and when I said "Nope" told me he had to get my product out of the back and never returned. I saw him 15 minutes later as I was walking out trying to sell a plan on a $30 printer to some older woman. He was even holding it while he talked to make sure she didn't bail on him. I complained to the manager on duty about how it sure seemed like his employees didn't want to help people not buying service plans and he started trying to talk me into getting one. Never even got an apology (not that I really expected one...it's fucking Best Buy).
Yeah, to hell with that crap...I'll stick with Amazon.
Of course. Everything that made America great is dead or dying, from opportunity to our freedoms. The economy is in the crapper, we're 10 years away from outright Corporate Feudalism, and it's getting harder and harder to move around this country without some ex-con TSA agent asking for your papers while telling you to drop your pants for the body cavity search.
I can't blame a business for doing this, necessarily, but my time is valuable, and when I want something, I want to get in, buy it, and get out. As many stores are designed to make that as difficult as possible, online ordering is the way to go for me.
Ditto. There isn't much that I can't wait a day or two for, and because I'm a student, I get free shipping for a year anyway.
Plus, the only thing that I can really think of that I would just have to get right away from a place like Target is a hot new game or movie or something, and you can pre-order those and have them on street date, if not a day early sometimes.
The only shopping I bother doing in person anymore, besides groceries, is some clothes, just because it's hard to accurately tell how something is going to fit. Underwear and shit, though, I buy online as well. There's just no reason to deal with going into some big box store unless it's absolutely necessary.
Oh, believe me, the internal systems know exactly what they have in inventory, how much is there, and how much they're expecting in future orders.
Target especially, I know this from first hand experience, their internal systems track everything, they have an elaborate warehousing system that is updated constantly by warehouse personnel wielding LRT's (barcode scanners that tie into the inventory system) as they deal with overstock, as well as do replenishment pulls to keep the shelves stocked. You can also see what every store carries via their intranet for stock balancing purposes...they know what's coming on every trailer days before it gets there. It's all barcoded.
It would probably be trivial for them to hook that system into their forward-facing website, but they don't want that. They'd rather you get in the car and drive down to the store and impulse buy a ton of crap you weren't actively looking for. That's pretty much every big-box retailer.
Allowing people to get what they want and get out is the last thing they want, so outright telling you if they have something for sure via the web will likely not happen. Even if you can confirm it is there, good luck getting a hold on it so you can run over and pick it up.
They're no better than Walmart. Everything they sell is foreign made crap, too. The clothes are more stylish than what Walmart carries, but they fall apart just as fast. Couple this with their piss-poor way of treating employees (speaking as someone that worked there and saw the discrimination first hand) and their support of those hypocritical "family values" groups, I won't put a fucking dime into that corporation's pocket.
But why do this? It's not interesting to look at or anything...
It'd be like me building a lego replica of my first computer, a Hewlett Packard 386 beige monstrosity. Who the hell would look at it and say anything other than "why did you build a big beige box out of lego?"
Pretty much. I gave up on any Microsoft-based phone long ago. My last handset (HTC XV6800) was running WinMo 6.0 and it was such a piece of shit. I had to reboot the damn thing multiple times a day due to freezes and shit...
First it was bit torrent traffic, then video streaming traffic, then VOIP traffic...
They're just setting the stage for discriminating traffic so they can charge more to certain users to get back the money they lose from those customers not supporting their other services. The U.S. telecoms have been falling all over themselves trying to find a way to nullify Netflix to keep us from dropping their archaic tiered cable tv service.
Why would a Japanese company be any different? The Skype folks are going to end up getting squeezed for more money, just wait...and some goon will be saying to himself "that'll teach 'em to stop using up their anytime minutes!!" the whole time.
I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.
The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.
As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.
But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"
Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.
The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.
All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.
Those jobs are only coming back to the U.S.A. if you are prepared to pay $3000 for an iPad or an iPhone.
If the jobs were here than they would have to compete for labor, meaning higher wages, meaning more disposable income for people to buy those iPads.
The middle class is the key to a strong economy. When our middle-class was at it's strongest, 1945-1980, the buying power of a dollar was much higher than it is today. By allowing companies to offshore all the middle-class jobs, they're effectively crippling the very market of consumers they're trying to sell shit to. This is why these tech companies are looking to the growing middle-classes in Eastern countries to make up the difference, because even making shit in China is not cheap enough for them to turn the profits they expect here, and we let them bring the shit in for nothing...
We need to either put more protectionist measures in place, such as tariffs, like the EU and Canada does, or we need to be pushing for a global economy where these companies aren't able to take advantage of the weaker currency in production and then turn around and sell the product in the stronger economy and make a fortune. Think about it: these mega-corporations can shop around all over the world to find the cheapest place to produce a material good, but can consumers in the U.S. shop in that cheaper market to buy it? Nope, there's region-locks and all sorts of red tape preventing the consumers from take advantage of this. You can't even physically go to another country and buy a bunch of shit and bring it home without all sorts of hassles when you're coming back into the U.S.; there are strict limits.
The system is totally skewed, and until we reach economic parity with the countries producing these goods, it's only going to get worse. If a company can region-lock it's product, why can't we region-lock the labor required to produce it?
And those words are parroted by millions of Tea Party Republicans all over the country every day.
I know there are people on both the far left and the far right spewing their hatred, but in all honesty I hear a lot more of the idiocy Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck like to inflict upon the world regurgitated at me than any other demagogues. Maybe it's just that the people that listen to them are more likely to comment on news articles and such and thus the results are skewed, maybe not...
Hell, our legislators are doing the same shit now up here. When one of the Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate (which holds a single seat majority) did not fall into a party-line vote to force the recall elections to take place in the newly created (and obviously very favorably Republican) districts, against a century of precedent, they all but lynched him and he's pretty much persona non grata with the Tea Party Republicans, despite the fact that he's voted with them many, many times over the last couple years. The extremism has pervaded even our elected officials who now openly call half of their constituents whiners who want handouts. There's no middle ground anymore, they've all taken the Rush Limbaugh "I'm just a guy telling it like it is!" attitude whenever they say anything that is offensive to anyone. Look at the GOP Presidential debates, it's almost like these guys relish in the fact that large segments of the population find their views offensive and racist, they wear it like a badge of honor, and there are millions of people that think it's just fucking great, even if they wouldn't dare admit it in mixed company because they know it's a bigoted mindset.
They also have more in common with the occupy movement than anyone will admit.
To include Tea Party Republicans themselves. To be honest, I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard someone that self-characterizes as a Tea Party Republican say anything that wasn't totally negative or disparaging about either the Occupy Wall Street movement or the protesters themselves.
Hell, I remember back in early 2011 here in Madison, WI, when Governor Scott Walker went to war with the unions up here, people pretty much occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol for 2 months (over 100,000 at one point), you couldn't go more than 5 minutes without someone that called themselves a Tea Party member bitching and complaining about the people occupying the capitol, how "disgraceful it all is" and all that nonsense, how they have no right to protest. People from a movement that itself is named after one of the most famous protests in our nation's history, whining about protesters and the "legality of protesting", because, you know, sneaking aboard ships in Boston Harbor and throwing thousands of dollars worth of privately owned tea was totally legal back in those days or something....
There may be some overlap (and by all rights, there should be a lot more) but for the most part, they're two completely separate movements and until both sides are willing to respect each other (doubtful) they are going to continue to oppose each other even if they agree with each other on paper. The Tea Party, for the most part, has dismissed the OWS movement as being a bunch of whiny children just looking for handouts. Go read any article covering OWS, here's one from CNN's front page right now, and read the comments. I'll bet you a million bucks 99.999% of the people posting those negative comments, ask them what their political affiliation is, and they'll tell you Tea Party. Try it for yourself if you doubt it...
Doubt it. When Vista came out, there were tons of laptops people wanted to buy explicitly to wipe Vista and put XP on them, but the few I knew that tried had a ton of driver issues and all sorts of other problems. Granted, this was within the first month or so of Vista launch, so it could have taken a while for the XP drivers for the hardware to get out there, but it was pretty broken at first.
I would expect similar issues with Windows 8 hardware, especially the Kinect sensors. I wouldn't be surprised if they just required Windows 8 completely.
Apple are having no difficulty selling the idea to people. Not just on iOS, but on the Mac, where the option to download from where ever is still there, people are loving the Mac App Store. People like the reassurance that apps have been vetted, and they like the idea of a one stop shop.
Uh, good for those people, I guess? It's still a layer of security that everyone does not need, hence why people opt out of it by choosing Android. Hell, there are millions of people that opt out by jailbreaking their iDevices, which comes with it's own set of risks. Clearly, some people prefer having a choice one way or the other, if they're willing to go to such lengths to have one...
And no it's not just for those who don't know much about technology. I've been computing since 1977, and I spent a decade in mobile development. And I far prefer the single vetted store concept of iOS.
I never said it's just for people that don't know much about technology. I said people that don't know much about technology should opt for the walled garden. I know techy people that went with the iPhone because they didn't feel like fiddling with their phone and wanted one that "just works".
I can tell that you're sensitive about people criticizing the walled garden, but it's not like it's perfect. Like I said, it comes with a loss of personal control that some people are unwilling to accept, that's an undeniable fact, unless at some point recently Apple started letting people install and run whatever the hell they want on their phone. Personally, I prefer having the ability to run whatever apps I wish on my phone regardless of whether or not it's considered "safe".
I just wish I knew what so terrified some of these more "locked down" companies about giving people the choice one way or the other with their own device. That's the biggest thing that would irritate me, the fact that after paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of hardware it still has the nerve to tell me I can't do something arbitrary with it. I can take a hammer to it if I want, but I can't run an unapproved app, even if I assume all the risks of doing so? Come on.
I run several unofficial apps on my Android phone and have never had a problem. It's not like all blocked apps are blocked for being "malware", after all, and I'm willing to take the risk.
It's hard to take anything Symantec says seriously as regards security. They have every incentive to make things seem far worse than they really are. Does Symantec offer an antivirus for Android?
Ah right. It's the user's fault. The classic excuse for bad IT systems.
No matter how secure a system you create, users will find a way to fuck it all up. This is not a new concept.
The alternative approach, a "walled garden" has it's caveats as well. In the end it comes down to what's more important to you, being able to download and install whatever the fuck you want, or having someone playing referee before you even get the choice to protect you from yourself?
However you decide is your decision, but in my years of providing tech support, I've discovered that yeah, most people should probably be on the walled garden, but convincing them of that fact is akin to telling any full grown adult they need to be supervised like children. Most people are not so willing to hear shit like that, so we end up with a bunch of idiots downloading obvious malware that any experienced user could identify.
I wouldn't give a kid who just got his learner's permit the keys to a Bugatti Veyron. Similarly, I wouldn't advise someone that doesn't know how to make safe computing decisions to buy an android phone. But if you know what you're doing, there's just no comparison to what you can do with your handset compared to the iPhone or Windows Mobile. It would be quite hard for me to trade that in for a layer of security I do not need.
Today's "high data users" are tomorrow's normal users.
Exactly. Ten years ago you could surf the web on a 1 mbps connection and still zip around fairly well. Nowadays it's like being on fucking dial-up again.
With everyone pushing "the cloud", and more and more people adopting cloud services for streaming media, it's only a matter of time before what AT&T considers a "high-data user" is their average, and that matter of time is likely a lot shorter than what they think. This whole bandwidth crunch is a reflection of bad planning on their part as it is. It's not like they just became profitable yesterday and have been running in the red all these years. They could have invested more in their own infrastructure but instead they focused on absorbing every other mobile company they could find.
All in all, AT&T has nobody to blame for this but themselves. The "it's the high-data users fault!!" excuse isn't going to go far with consumers that see their bills go up. They're just going to bail at their earliest convenience. Now that AT&T doesn't have an iPhone monopoly they're in even less of a position to take this stance. All in all, major fail on their part, and it's gonna bite them in the ass.
Slashdot Mirror
Judges on the Wisconsin Supreme Court are elected to 10-year terms.
The difference being, of course, that the implied analogy was totally appropriate. History shows the parallels between the birth of the German police state and our own missteps in post-9/11 America. As for the demonization being rare, have you watched the GOP debates? You'd think that the only issue our country faces right now is illegal immigration, that's almost all they ever talk about. That and the cartels and terrorists in Iran/Pakistan. It's never anything we've done wrong as a nation (unless it's something Obama did), it's "everyone else" trying to "attack America" because they "hate freedom".
It's not a fucking game, either. It's the erosion of our free society for reasons of "security".
I suggest you get to bed, child. Us grown folks are having grown-up discussions over here and you're obviously both out of your depth and up way past your bedtime.
I said "we even have our own ethnic group to demonize in place of the Jews"; the Nazi's didn't immediately start throwing them in camps, either. At first it was just anti-immigrant propaganda, you know, kinda like how people are blaming all of America's ills on illegal immigrants lately?
As for your Muslim co-workers, they may not be worried about getting shipped off the Gitmo, but ask them if they have been mistreated by racists and bigots over the last 10 years. Ask them if people don't look at them suspiciously in the airport or any other mass transit. I have friends from all over the Middle-East and North Africa that came here to go to school and they deal with shit like that all the time out of ignorant assholes right here in the good ol' U.S. of A.
I think maybe you should go back to school and read up on your history. I think you'll find there are a lot more similarities between Nazi Germany and the path we're currently on in this country than you'd be comfortable to admit. We may not be burning books yet (although some bigots are happily burning Qurans) but we're not against banning them, and restricting the freedoms of the people of this country day by day.
I hope you're just a troll, I really do, because if not, you're one of the sad people that are unable to see past the propaganda and bullshit, and frankly, we have far too many of them in this country as it is...
We had our own camps, too. We didn't kill the Japanese like the Nazis killed the Jews, but they certainly were imprisoned, they certainly lost almost all of their material possessions, they certainly died in the camps due to lack of adequate medical care and suicide, and, in some cases, yeah, they were killed by sentries "trying to escape".
There's plenty of horrific things in our own history that are on par with the Nazi's. How many fucking Native Americans did we put in the ground over the 250 years our nation has existed? How many Chinese immigrants died building the railroads? And of course, the millions of African-American slaves...
I'm not saying that we should allow these things to cast a pall over our entire society, but it's important that we remember these atrocities lest we repeat them. Sugar-coating history, and especially our culpability in these foul acts, does a great disservice to those that fought and lived and died through those times.
While we may not have condensed our atrocities down to a 30 year period like Nazi Germany, we've definitely had more than our share spread out over the 250 years our nation has existed...
Nazi Germany didn't start out like the evil machine it's portrayed as in movies. A lot of the German people had no idea the atrocities that were being carried out in their own country.
While we may not be anywhere near like Nazi Germany as it existed in 1943, how different are we compared to Germany of the 20's and early 30's? We're certainly tottering down the path to a full blown police state with this bullshit; that's undeniable to anyone that's really followed how things have gone in post 9/11 America. Hell, we even have our own ethnic group to demonize in place of the Jews, Middle-Easterners and Muslims. We may not be throwing them in camps and forced to work, but we have no problem shipping them off to Gitmo and holding them as long as we want without trial...
All this shit is supposed to keep us safer, but we just end up with our rights curtailed more and more. We may not be driving through police checkpoints every time we leave the house yet, but I doubt it's going to be long before people are getting thrown on the ground on the side of the road for not producing their "papers" fast enough.
I have literally never in my life bought one of those "similar products". I don't even look at them...it's pretty much banner blindness to me now.
A brick and mortar store, however, forces me to physically wander multiple aisles I would otherwise not go down, deliberately obfuscates high-demand items by forcing you to search through shit you don't need to find them, and in some cases, even makes it impossible to get a product without dealing with a fucking salesperson who's going to try and sell me a goddamned replacement plan or $200 Monster Cable to go with it whether I want it or not.
Speaking of Best Buy, I've actually had a salesperson ask me if I was going to buy one of those replacement plans, and when I said "Nope" told me he had to get my product out of the back and never returned. I saw him 15 minutes later as I was walking out trying to sell a plan on a $30 printer to some older woman. He was even holding it while he talked to make sure she didn't bail on him. I complained to the manager on duty about how it sure seemed like his employees didn't want to help people not buying service plans and he started trying to talk me into getting one. Never even got an apology (not that I really expected one...it's fucking Best Buy).
Yeah, to hell with that crap...I'll stick with Amazon.
Of course. Everything that made America great is dead or dying, from opportunity to our freedoms. The economy is in the crapper, we're 10 years away from outright Corporate Feudalism, and it's getting harder and harder to move around this country without some ex-con TSA agent asking for your papers while telling you to drop your pants for the body cavity search.
It was good while it lasted, I guess...
There's a big difference between sending an easily ignored email and dealing with a store that is deliberately designed to make it harder to find stuff easily, as well as force you to walk through as many aisles as possible.
Grocery stores put the staples like milk and butter in the back of the store, and fresh produce in the front, for a reason. It's all painstakingly coordinated to ensure you walk out of there with as much stuff you didn't intend to buy when you went in as possible.
I can't blame a business for doing this, necessarily, but my time is valuable, and when I want something, I want to get in, buy it, and get out. As many stores are designed to make that as difficult as possible, online ordering is the way to go for me.
Ditto. There isn't much that I can't wait a day or two for, and because I'm a student, I get free shipping for a year anyway.
Plus, the only thing that I can really think of that I would just have to get right away from a place like Target is a hot new game or movie or something, and you can pre-order those and have them on street date, if not a day early sometimes.
The only shopping I bother doing in person anymore, besides groceries, is some clothes, just because it's hard to accurately tell how something is going to fit. Underwear and shit, though, I buy online as well. There's just no reason to deal with going into some big box store unless it's absolutely necessary.
Oh, believe me, the internal systems know exactly what they have in inventory, how much is there, and how much they're expecting in future orders.
Target especially, I know this from first hand experience, their internal systems track everything, they have an elaborate warehousing system that is updated constantly by warehouse personnel wielding LRT's (barcode scanners that tie into the inventory system) as they deal with overstock, as well as do replenishment pulls to keep the shelves stocked. You can also see what every store carries via their intranet for stock balancing purposes...they know what's coming on every trailer days before it gets there. It's all barcoded.
It would probably be trivial for them to hook that system into their forward-facing website, but they don't want that. They'd rather you get in the car and drive down to the store and impulse buy a ton of crap you weren't actively looking for. That's pretty much every big-box retailer.
Allowing people to get what they want and get out is the last thing they want, so outright telling you if they have something for sure via the web will likely not happen. Even if you can confirm it is there, good luck getting a hold on it so you can run over and pick it up.
That's true, although they probably already spent up all their lobbying money making sure gays aren't allowed to get married.
Plus you can't forget the anti-union videos they need to produce to intimidate new hires, they're not cheap. Refuse to sign and keep Target union free!!
They're no better than Walmart. Everything they sell is foreign made crap, too. The clothes are more stylish than what Walmart carries, but they fall apart just as fast. Couple this with their piss-poor way of treating employees (speaking as someone that worked there and saw the discrimination first hand) and their support of those hypocritical "family values" groups, I won't put a fucking dime into that corporation's pocket.
I want the last 30 seconds of my life back.
If couldn't have taken much longer than that to build the fucking thing in the first place. It's a black box for Christ's sake...
The fact that this was considered /. worthy by anyone has me torn, I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
But why do this? It's not interesting to look at or anything...
It'd be like me building a lego replica of my first computer, a Hewlett Packard 386 beige monstrosity. Who the hell would look at it and say anything other than "why did you build a big beige box out of lego?"
That's why you wait until 3rd party vendors swoop in to sell their own replacement toner for a less insane price...
Until they get hit with DMCA lawsuits and other legal bullshit, that is...
Either way, stay far the fuck away from any 3D printer made by HP, Epson, or any other major manufacturer...
The phones don't sell because they run WP7.
Pretty much. I gave up on any Microsoft-based phone long ago. My last handset (HTC XV6800) was running WinMo 6.0 and it was such a piece of shit. I had to reboot the damn thing multiple times a day due to freezes and shit...
Never again...
First it was bit torrent traffic, then video streaming traffic, then VOIP traffic...
They're just setting the stage for discriminating traffic so they can charge more to certain users to get back the money they lose from those customers not supporting their other services. The U.S. telecoms have been falling all over themselves trying to find a way to nullify Netflix to keep us from dropping their archaic tiered cable tv service.
Why would a Japanese company be any different? The Skype folks are going to end up getting squeezed for more money, just wait...and some goon will be saying to himself "that'll teach 'em to stop using up their anytime minutes!!" the whole time.
I like that people get paid to be creative and provide me with entertainment.
The problem is the 20 industry goons standing in between you and the content creator taking their cut.
As for the lawmakers, they're not really convinced of the shit they say as regards copyright and IP laws. For the most part they're just reading off of a script that comes with a 6 figure check stapled to it. It wasn't until massive opposition by their constituents and the threat of repercussion that they started backing away from it, and that was political self-preservation, not any belief that the people were right. How many legislators have even come out and said "The people don't want this, and they are justified"? No, it's all "We must reexamine this bill" or "We must craft it in a way that protects copyright blah blah", never "Yeah, you're right, on closer inspection the bill was a fucking joke." They're stuck between a rock and a hard place because on one hand you've got people like Chris Dodd saying "Don’t ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don’t pay any attention to me when my job is at stake" while their constituents are threatening to kick their ass out of office in the next election cycle if they jump on board with SOPA/PIPA.
Hell, Steve King (R-Iowa) was sitting in a SOPA hearing and tweets "We are debating the Stop Online Piracy Act and Shiela Jackson has so bored me that I'm killing time by surfing the Internet." What did he find boring? From her remarks:
But there are sufficient loopholes here that would allow innocent sites to be shut down, thereby a loss of jobs. Have we answered the question dealing with national security? And as well are we recognizing the value of the First Amendment?"
Those are the remarks he was so "bored" by. Given that, how the hell can we reasonably expect that these people have even thought about the shit they are doing? The few people actually doing real thinking in the comedy of errors we call congress get routinely ignored and dismissed. They've already decided how they're going to vote before the bill even gets entered. They've been paid to vote a certain way by the same fucking people writing these damn bills. They don't even want expert testimony, they didn't even want to allow anyone in the way of an expert to speak in opposition at the damn hearing. Google gave great testimony as to the problems with SOPA and were themselves dismissed, just as any opposing lawmaker was. I can't find the link to the exact quote, but one of them (I think it was Mike Leahy (D-Vermont) said something along the lines of "I don't see how this will break DNS and I don't believe any expert that says it will". This is what they're being paid for by the pro-SOPA groups, after all.
The only other thing I can think of, that maybe they have thought about it and are just too fucking stupid to see the problems with what they were proposing horrifies me even more.
All in all, I think convincing lawmakers is a fools errand. There are some people trying to pool money to lobby against the media cartels, but fighting bribery with bribery doesn't seem prudent to me. Better to just make their stupid laws as ineffectual as possible. Eventually they're going to get to the point where we really are living in an honest to god Orwellian Police State and the people are just going to overthrow the government entirely. I'm not entirely convinced that we could even prevent it at this point.
Those jobs are only coming back to the U.S.A. if you are prepared to pay $3000 for an iPad or an iPhone.
If the jobs were here than they would have to compete for labor, meaning higher wages, meaning more disposable income for people to buy those iPads.
The middle class is the key to a strong economy. When our middle-class was at it's strongest, 1945-1980, the buying power of a dollar was much higher than it is today. By allowing companies to offshore all the middle-class jobs, they're effectively crippling the very market of consumers they're trying to sell shit to. This is why these tech companies are looking to the growing middle-classes in Eastern countries to make up the difference, because even making shit in China is not cheap enough for them to turn the profits they expect here, and we let them bring the shit in for nothing...
We need to either put more protectionist measures in place, such as tariffs, like the EU and Canada does, or we need to be pushing for a global economy where these companies aren't able to take advantage of the weaker currency in production and then turn around and sell the product in the stronger economy and make a fortune. Think about it: these mega-corporations can shop around all over the world to find the cheapest place to produce a material good, but can consumers in the U.S. shop in that cheaper market to buy it? Nope, there's region-locks and all sorts of red tape preventing the consumers from take advantage of this. You can't even physically go to another country and buy a bunch of shit and bring it home without all sorts of hassles when you're coming back into the U.S.; there are strict limits.
The system is totally skewed, and until we reach economic parity with the countries producing these goods, it's only going to get worse. If a company can region-lock it's product, why can't we region-lock the labor required to produce it?
And those words are parroted by millions of Tea Party Republicans all over the country every day.
I know there are people on both the far left and the far right spewing their hatred, but in all honesty I hear a lot more of the idiocy Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck like to inflict upon the world regurgitated at me than any other demagogues. Maybe it's just that the people that listen to them are more likely to comment on news articles and such and thus the results are skewed, maybe not...
Hell, our legislators are doing the same shit now up here. When one of the Republicans in the Wisconsin State Senate (which holds a single seat majority) did not fall into a party-line vote to force the recall elections to take place in the newly created (and obviously very favorably Republican) districts, against a century of precedent, they all but lynched him and he's pretty much persona non grata with the Tea Party Republicans, despite the fact that he's voted with them many, many times over the last couple years. The extremism has pervaded even our elected officials who now openly call half of their constituents whiners who want handouts. There's no middle ground anymore, they've all taken the Rush Limbaugh "I'm just a guy telling it like it is!" attitude whenever they say anything that is offensive to anyone. Look at the GOP Presidential debates, it's almost like these guys relish in the fact that large segments of the population find their views offensive and racist, they wear it like a badge of honor, and there are millions of people that think it's just fucking great, even if they wouldn't dare admit it in mixed company because they know it's a bigoted mindset.
They also have more in common with the occupy movement than anyone will admit.
To include Tea Party Republicans themselves. To be honest, I can count on one hand the number of times I've heard someone that self-characterizes as a Tea Party Republican say anything that wasn't totally negative or disparaging about either the Occupy Wall Street movement or the protesters themselves.
Hell, I remember back in early 2011 here in Madison, WI, when Governor Scott Walker went to war with the unions up here, people pretty much occupied the Wisconsin State Capitol for 2 months (over 100,000 at one point), you couldn't go more than 5 minutes without someone that called themselves a Tea Party member bitching and complaining about the people occupying the capitol, how "disgraceful it all is" and all that nonsense, how they have no right to protest. People from a movement that itself is named after one of the most famous protests in our nation's history, whining about protesters and the "legality of protesting", because, you know, sneaking aboard ships in Boston Harbor and throwing thousands of dollars worth of privately owned tea was totally legal back in those days or something....
There may be some overlap (and by all rights, there should be a lot more) but for the most part, they're two completely separate movements and until both sides are willing to respect each other (doubtful) they are going to continue to oppose each other even if they agree with each other on paper. The Tea Party, for the most part, has dismissed the OWS movement as being a bunch of whiny children just looking for handouts. Go read any article covering OWS, here's one from CNN's front page right now, and read the comments. I'll bet you a million bucks 99.999% of the people posting those negative comments, ask them what their political affiliation is, and they'll tell you Tea Party. Try it for yourself if you doubt it...
Doubt it. When Vista came out, there were tons of laptops people wanted to buy explicitly to wipe Vista and put XP on them, but the few I knew that tried had a ton of driver issues and all sorts of other problems. Granted, this was within the first month or so of Vista launch, so it could have taken a while for the XP drivers for the hardware to get out there, but it was pretty broken at first.
I would expect similar issues with Windows 8 hardware, especially the Kinect sensors. I wouldn't be surprised if they just required Windows 8 completely.
Apple are having no difficulty selling the idea to people. Not just on iOS, but on the Mac, where the option to download from where ever is still there, people are loving the Mac App Store. People like the reassurance that apps have been vetted, and they like the idea of a one stop shop.
Uh, good for those people, I guess? It's still a layer of security that everyone does not need, hence why people opt out of it by choosing Android. Hell, there are millions of people that opt out by jailbreaking their iDevices, which comes with it's own set of risks. Clearly, some people prefer having a choice one way or the other, if they're willing to go to such lengths to have one...
And no it's not just for those who don't know much about technology. I've been computing since 1977, and I spent a decade in mobile development. And I far prefer the single vetted store concept of iOS.
I never said it's just for people that don't know much about technology. I said people that don't know much about technology should opt for the walled garden. I know techy people that went with the iPhone because they didn't feel like fiddling with their phone and wanted one that "just works".
I can tell that you're sensitive about people criticizing the walled garden, but it's not like it's perfect. Like I said, it comes with a loss of personal control that some people are unwilling to accept, that's an undeniable fact, unless at some point recently Apple started letting people install and run whatever the hell they want on their phone. Personally, I prefer having the ability to run whatever apps I wish on my phone regardless of whether or not it's considered "safe".
I just wish I knew what so terrified some of these more "locked down" companies about giving people the choice one way or the other with their own device. That's the biggest thing that would irritate me, the fact that after paying hundreds of dollars for a piece of hardware it still has the nerve to tell me I can't do something arbitrary with it. I can take a hammer to it if I want, but I can't run an unapproved app, even if I assume all the risks of doing so? Come on.
I run several unofficial apps on my Android phone and have never had a problem. It's not like all blocked apps are blocked for being "malware", after all, and I'm willing to take the risk.
It's hard to take anything Symantec says seriously as regards security. They have every incentive to make things seem far worse than they really are. Does Symantec offer an antivirus for Android?
Ah right. It's the user's fault. The classic excuse for bad IT systems.
No matter how secure a system you create, users will find a way to fuck it all up. This is not a new concept.
The alternative approach, a "walled garden" has it's caveats as well. In the end it comes down to what's more important to you, being able to download and install whatever the fuck you want, or having someone playing referee before you even get the choice to protect you from yourself?
However you decide is your decision, but in my years of providing tech support, I've discovered that yeah, most people should probably be on the walled garden, but convincing them of that fact is akin to telling any full grown adult they need to be supervised like children. Most people are not so willing to hear shit like that, so we end up with a bunch of idiots downloading obvious malware that any experienced user could identify.
I wouldn't give a kid who just got his learner's permit the keys to a Bugatti Veyron. Similarly, I wouldn't advise someone that doesn't know how to make safe computing decisions to buy an android phone. But if you know what you're doing, there's just no comparison to what you can do with your handset compared to the iPhone or Windows Mobile. It would be quite hard for me to trade that in for a layer of security I do not need.
Today's "high data users" are tomorrow's normal users.
Exactly. Ten years ago you could surf the web on a 1 mbps connection and still zip around fairly well. Nowadays it's like being on fucking dial-up again.
With everyone pushing "the cloud", and more and more people adopting cloud services for streaming media, it's only a matter of time before what AT&T considers a "high-data user" is their average, and that matter of time is likely a lot shorter than what they think. This whole bandwidth crunch is a reflection of bad planning on their part as it is. It's not like they just became profitable yesterday and have been running in the red all these years. They could have invested more in their own infrastructure but instead they focused on absorbing every other mobile company they could find.
All in all, AT&T has nobody to blame for this but themselves. The "it's the high-data users fault!!" excuse isn't going to go far with consumers that see their bills go up. They're just going to bail at their earliest convenience. Now that AT&T doesn't have an iPhone monopoly they're in even less of a position to take this stance. All in all, major fail on their part, and it's gonna bite them in the ass.