You paid for the part of it that resides in the US. You didn't pay for the part of it outside of the US. And many, many, agencies, contributed to the technology used. The World Wide Web, for instance, was a European creation.
Either way, this is irrelevent. The point is that, today, the Internet is a global network. It needs to be "governed" globally, not by one major player. I'm finding the nationalistic cries of outrage posted here difficult to stomach. Something tells me that if it were proposed that control of the World Wide Web be handed over to the EU, on the grounds it's a European invention, you'd be pretty pissed.
(Before responding, take note that I said "useful", not "Featureful", the fact a device has a bunch of features is of no consequence unless they're genuinely something people would want to use, and aren't redundant.)
Well, my responses to this would be:
1. I've not heard any major complaints about DS game graphics quality.
2. It's not an iPod. It doesn't have serious mass storage capacity. The MP3/etc playing capabilities are thus more of a gimmick than a feature. I've never, ever, seen the advantage in this kind of device.
3. That's what the discussion is about.
4. Again, this appears to be more of a gimmick than a useful feature. In any case, when we're talking about "useful features", it's worth noting that this feature is built into most modern mobile phones, which the PSP isn't good enough to completely replace.
5. I would question the practicality of this at this point in time.
6. See (2).
How is the DS more useful? It:
1. Has a massive library of games already available thanks to reverse compatability with its portable predecessors.
2. Has the potential to play game types simply not envisagable for the Sony. People are seriously talking about Civilization ports, for example. The touch screen makes this possible.
3. Is far cheaper (half the price), and most of its unique features aren't already built into your mobile phone.
From a practical standpoint, in terms of not overlapping with devices you already have and implementing things that do not require significant financial outlays or a lot of maintenance, or both, the DS implements the correct feature set and does it well.
Given the choice, if I could be bothered, I'd get the DS. I seriously cannot justify, or see any good reason, for getting a PSP. It just doesn't do anything useful the DS doesn't already, and the DS, very clearly, is the one with potential for advancement over the next few years.
There are things I'd like on the DS that the PSP has. I'd like it to have MMC, for example (the PSP has memory sticks, the point is "external storage"), but I think as a general rule the DS is doing very well.
My belief is that the PSP will not take off until it either drops in price significantly, or is combined with something like a mobile phone.
1. PSPs are expensive, therefore bought primarily by people with money to burn. The same people are willing to spend money on buying multiple copies of movies. It's fair to say the PSP has probably close to saturated that particular market.
2. PSPs have very little game content available, therefore buyers are going to be inclined to look at movies, for nothing else but to salvage the device and ensure it isn't completely useless.
3. As others have said, Sony has been disengenuous in how it counts sales, including free copies of Spiderman in its figures.
I seriously keep looking at the PSP and can't figure out why third parties keep repeating the hype. It's an expensive games system whose sole selling point seems to be the Sony-PS connection. The DS is arguably a more useful machine, and it costs half the price.
The man who doesn't own SUVs but daily drives any one of seven owned by his wife?
Possibly true, I dunno. By itself, not much to go on.
The same John Kerry who ((allegedly)) cheated his way into multiple purple hearts in his quest for an early discharge?
Nice try with the word "allegedly", presumably meant in the sense of "If I'm wrong with this scandalous allegation, don't blame me, I was just repeating stuff I knew was from bogus sources but wanted the smear widely circulated."
The same John Kerry who was putting down those who did their duty and served our country?
That would be Kerry smearing himself, presumably, as he went to Vietnam to do his duty and serve his country. He came back and alleged a number of his superiors made wrong (wrong as in evil) decisions, and that some of his fellow soldiers obeyed those orders when they shouldn't have done. This was repainted by the right as some kind of smear against everyone there, including a number of people who quoted a comment by him over and over again in an effort to suggest Kerry was a self-confessed war criminal when the quote made no such allegation/confession.
You've been drinking too much of the Republican kook-aid. The fact is the guy put himself in danger to fight for his country, he conducted missions against the enemy, he was shot at, he saved - directly - people under his command. He found he found the war unconsciable, and came back and said so at a time when it was political death to do so. The man's a hero. He's a hero for going off to fight. He's a hero for standing up for what he believed when doing so carried great political costs. It's an absolute outrage the right were able to get away with this smear campaign, and that people still repeat misrepresentations and outright lies from those smears as "fact'.
He did say "increased" competition, and Motorola may have had its downs in the European market lately (though they certainly used to be a major player) but it has started to creep back. Phones like the RAZR are also knocking on Nokia's "premium" doors, which isn't something any competitor has generally pulled off for a long time, despite a massive decrease in quality from Nokia.
I used to like Nokia's phones. The original 21xx (2110, 2150, 2190) series was one of the best GSM phones ever made. It'd be nice to see the threat of serious competition force them to increase quality control and reign in some of the more insane design directions they've been going in lately.
You were using the likelihood that people like me did not exist to support making the devices I use illegal (suggesting that the betamax decision is ripe for overturning). What I'm doing is standing up to be counted. Just because I can record in digital form doesn't make my use no longer fair and I can demonstrate my exercise thereto has not diminished the market for the commercial work.
No, I wasn't. I was using the fact that a market has been created for selling TV shows to people who hadn't watched them at the time for arguing that the Betamax ruling is no longer valid, that as a matter of law it's highly unlikely the Supreme Court would rule the same way again. Far from arguing it should be made illegal, I argued Congress needs to intervene and make it legal.
Thanks. I'm probably guilty of (unintentionally) spreading FUD. I've never asked Cingular to unlock a phone BUT I'm a former AT&T customer, was aware of various people including CS reps on their support forums who'd made it clear it wasn't policy to unlock them, and I've also read a number of people claim they bought phones with contracts, asked for the phones to be unlocked, and been refused, with nobody responding.
Ok, so it's unlikely to be T-Mobile or Cingular because both companies do unlock phones. I'm wondering who it could be. Right now, the only potential culprit I can think of is Tracfone. Tracfone has a GSM-only service called net10, and also resells GSM, TDMA, AMPS (presumably, not any more), and CDMA services under the generic Tracfone label (what you end up with depends on where you buy the phone and when.) That said, I was under the impression Tracfone has special firmware in the phones they use that'd be useless if combined with a different SIM. That'd make the DMCA complaint even less valid, because you wouldn't even be accessing Tracfone specific software if you did unlock a phone, you'd be flashing it with generic Nokia/Motorola/etc firmware and unlocking that.
All in all, pretty baffling.
As far as your last comment goes, Cingular's doing some major innovating (with their AT&T division I assume) on GoPhone, and they do seem to have better plans (in all) than their largest competitor (Verizon); my guess right now is any shortsightedness on Cingular's part is based largely on Verizon being their competitor. Cingular knows they have a better network than Verizon does, and Verizon is very much the "We're trying to build a monopoly here!" operator.
You are incorrect on a number of points, firstly, you are correct on the subsidy lock, phones are not cheap, even the free phones providers give away fro free, will cost about $300+ if you buy them from the aftermarket arena, and usually, the ETF does not cover the full cost of the phone, nor does it cover the cost of the man hours put into creating your account, and the customer service man hours a user inevitably goes through.
I'm not really sure I understand what you're trying to say here. My comment about the subsidy lock really had nothing to do with the economics of doing so. I did, however, point out that there's no saving to an end consumer who supplies his or her own phone despite the fact that they're reducing the expenses of the cellphone company.
Now, phones are often provider exlusives of an existing model, some manufacturers will make a phone for specific providers (think verizon and sprint compared to Cingatt/tmobile), often they will make 2 versions, CDMA and GSM, and on the GSM side, they will often make both the 850 and 900 versions. However, cingular is rolling out on the 850 range, they will still work in most major areas due to either roaming agreements (that dont cost the customer anything), or legacy systems, rural areas are another story. And the reason they use 850, as it has better penatrating power for better reception inside buildings, as well as few towers needed since it has better range, but is only used in the US, and only requires a single part change by the manufacturer. Most will make 3 different versions or more of there phones, usually the more popular ones will come in 850/1800/1900 and 900/1800/1900, and some will even come in CDMA versions. Many new phones are however being released as quad band.
Erm, yes. I also said the above. I said that the triband phones available from resellers of imported, unlocked, GSM phones are generally 1900/1800/900 whereas the triband phones usually sold by operators (that you'd want, in the US) are 1900/1800/850. That's completely correct.
It is very easy to buy aftermarket phones, expansys, mobile bee, there are hundreds of sites, soem will even seel you an unlocked phone at a discount price if you sign up for service for a provider through them (be carefull, some of these sites have a very high ETF if you cancell your service though).
As I said above, there are limitations here. For the most part, you cannot buy the US versions of GSM phones from all but a handful of suppliers. The vast majority of unlocked GSM cellphones available are the European versions. This makes no difference if you're buying a quad-band phone, but right now most are tri-band, and imported Triband phones rarely support 850MHz. And you really want a phone that supports 850MHz if you're going to use it in the US.
More importantly, you have no incentive for doing so. You pay $500 for a $200 phone, but you still end up with a two year contract (in the MAJORITY of cases), and you still end up paying $50 for 500 anytime minutes + unlimited M2M and N&W. You don't get $300 off. You've just saved Cingular $300, or would have done had Cingular not required you buy a phone from them anyway.
Ultimately, I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You said various points I said were incorrect, but I don't think you've answered them. Do you believe that most operators make it easy to start a new account without buying a subsidized phone? 'cos Cingular, T-Mobile, and, less usefully, Sprint PCS, Verizon, Alltel, and Nextel certainly don't make it easy. Do you believe you get a lower rate for doing so? Because I've yet to see a single offer from any of the above operators that implies supplying your own phone. Have you done searches for triband phones on shopping.yahoo.com and found the vast majority of unlocked triband GSM phones were 1900/1800/850 (or 1900/900/850)? Which of my statements is "incorrect"?
Well, yeah, but T-Mobile is Voicestream. The problem isn't with Voicestream SIMs and phones, but with those from the various other GSM operators Voicestream bought. That's why I used Omnipoint in my example.
They're different companies though all owned by the same German telecoms conglomerate.
T-Mobile UK is a company that started out as Mercury one2one, shortly afterwards becoming just one2one.
T-Mobile US started out as various different GSM operators throughout the US. Gradually, all the US GSM operators with the exception of BellSouth DCS merged with Voicestream.
Later on, Voicestream and one2one were bought by T-Mobile.
I would make a guess that there are probably a fair few Omnipoint customers who cannot upgrade to a new, T-Mobile locked, phone without getting their SIM replaced at the same time, despite Omnipoint being part of what's now T-Mobile USA. You can imagine how annoying it'd be if every single T-Mobile customer worldwide was put in the same position.
I've gone directly to Motorola and asked them their policy on this. The response (including spelling or grammar mistake):
Dear Mr. (<i>my name</i>),
Thank you for your recent correspondence with Motorola.
Regarding your question, we do not sale unlock units from our web page or from our customer care department.
However, you are able to purchase this units from after markets web pages
Thank you for allowing us to be of your service, if you need further assistance please do not hesitate to contact us again or visit our web page (www.motorola.com -If you cannot hiperlink, please copy/paste the link into your browser ). You are also able to contact our Customer Care Department at 1-800-331-6456 for further assistance.
Best Regards,
Auto-Response - 06/07/2004 01:55 PM
So, nah, you can't always go directly to the manufacturer. Nokia USA's website tends to be inconsistant on the subject, usually they'll not sell phones without subsidy locks unless you really, genuinely, cannot buy the phone at all from any US mobile operator. I was able to buy a 9290 from them that was unlocked, but most of the phones aren't in the same position.
Either way, it's worth mentioning that the current situation that exists is that the vast majority of US mobile operators do the following:
1. All new activations require the purchase of a cellphone, unless you really want to go around the houses to do it and even them some operators simply will not let you, period. I think it's possible to get a prepay SIM from T-Mobile, but that's about it. I tried getting a GoPhone PAYG SIM card from Cingular recently and you just couldn't do it.
2. Almost all cellphones are subsidy locked.
3. Several cellphones are exclusive to specific carriers. You can't get a RAZR BLK for T-Mobile or unlocked for instance (though if you're feeling brave you can import them or buy from a seller of imported phones. However, note that if a cellphone is available in a Tri-Band version, the imported versions are always 1900/1800/900, even though the US version is 1900/1800/850, which means the imports will not get coverage in key Cingular markets. This doesn't affect the RAZR, which is Quad-band, but does most other "world" phones)
4. You can't get cheaper service by offering to subsidize your own cellphone (see (1) above), the carriers just will not do it. Rates do not drop after a year. Everything possible is done to lock you into contracts that typically last two years (though T-Mobile "only" limits its to a year.)
So, whatever happens, if the phone you want isn't available for your carrier and/or you want an unlocked phone, you can expect to pay full price for it and pay to subsidize a phone you don't want, need, or, if you put a lot of effort into it, never bought in the first place. Unfortunately, consumer protection and pro-competition laws are generally considered anti-business in the US, and it's in the carrier's best interests individually to play this game while all of their rivals are, so I don't see this situation improving any time soon.
I know, it's terrible. They'll be storing stuff magnetically next, imagine losing all your data because some idiot decided to design a storage device based upon magnetism and you waved an ordinary fridge magnet at it.
Yeah, but it's not likely to be a IS95 operator. For the most part, the phones sold by IS95 operators in the US can only be used on US networks because few accept SIM cards, and most of the operators outside of the US that use "IS95" use a slightly better variant that does use them, as I understand it.
Most US operators know that they'd be no better or worse off if there was a culture of unlocking that still limited US phones to US customers. What they'd lose by someone switching to Verizon from Sprint after two years without forcing Verizon to pay out a phone subsidy, they'd gain in having an ex-Verizon customer do the same thing. Where it becomes problematic is where people are able to sign up for contracts (or just prepaid service, which is also subsidized, only to a lesser degree), and then skip out of the country, reselling the phone in a market where economic conditions are substantially different. If the subsidies are leaving the country, and are essentially unrecoverable, then you lose.
It's not impossible of course. This could be as simple as a company being bloody-minded. But right now I think it's substantially more likely that it's Cingular, or maybe - at a stretch - T-Mobile. Cingular doesn't usually unlock phones (and contrary to some reports, while they shipped some world phones unlocked, most of their phones including their world phones certainly are locked, I've read a number of "sob-stories" from people who bought Cingular RAZRs and planned to use them outside the country using prepaid GSM SIMs and found they couldn't), T-Mobile has a policy that it will after someone's been a customer in good standing for three months.
I've bought phones from Sprint PCS, BellSouth/Cingular, AT&T, and T-Mobile, all on contacts, and I've NEVER seen anything that suggests that I do not own the phone. Not for any of those operators. Every single phone operator will tell you that they're SELLING YOU a phone. However, they'll generally refuse to sell you one at a discount if you don't also sign up to a contract plan.
If Cingular (most likely culprit in this case, as T-Mobile will unlock phones for free as long as a customer has been in good standing for three months) doesn't feel subsidized phone buyers should be allowed to do what they want with their own hardware (note, Cingular's network does not constitute subsidized phone buyer's "own hardware", before anyone criticises me for suggesting that Cingular allow people to modify their phones to do crappy things all over Cingular's frequencies, that's not what I'm suggesting at all) then perhaps they shouldn't sell the phones, perhaps they should rent them out, and have their customers sign lease agreements.
Batteries (at least, non-rechargable ones) convert chemical reactions into electricity. While there may be "energy" in a generic sense that went into creating the environment where these chemicals existed and could react, they're not electric so electricity is being produced, not merely moved, in this process.
As far as the second definition goes, it doesn't contradict the notion that electricity is producable. Electricity is one form of energy. Converting something into something else, like heat into electricity, water pressure into electricity, or even flour into cake, is legitimately called producing it. The fact you've lose something doesn't mean you haven't created something else.
Filesharing isn't necessarily illegal, for example you might actually have the consent of the copyright holder. A band might choose to distribute their music using a peer-to-peer technology.
So prefacing labels of instances of illegal filesharing with the word "illegal" seems perfectly reasonable. Kind of like you would the word "took" if you were describing stealing, eg "He illegally took the money" as opposed to "He took the money".
Now, piracy I can't explain. That one's by definition illegal (yes, "copyright infringement isn't piracy" people, LOOK IT UP, yes it is.) But as trading, filesharing, release, etc are by themselves neutral on the subject of something being illegal, it certainly ought to be mentioned, and would - in many ways - be wrong to omit it given the overuse of the words to describe illegal activity might give the impression they really are, by definition, illegal.
Civilization I was a game that you could play through in a few hours.
I'm not so sure about this. If I was knocked out of the game early, then, yeah. That used to really annoy me, given it took twenty minutes to generate the map on my stock Amiga 500+.
But I've actually experienced the joy of playing a game for 30 hours without a break. Not something I'd do now, but 12 years ago, it didn't seem so awful.
With the dust being blown off the Civilization for the third time, I'm wondering if similar plans are afoot to work on Alpha Centauri, and if so, how the original will be improved upon.
Some of us see AC as the best in the whole (greater) Civilization series. Awesome game.
They probably had the same problem as the rest of us - there was one Python advocate in the office who just wouldn't shut up about how good it was, and how it was better than all the other languages, and how it's soooooo much better than Java, and look I had to write this program to extract a column of data from a CSV file which would have taken months in C but I was able to just import the "cut" module and write the entire thing in three lines of Python and it's just really great and you can't do that kind of thing in C and C sucks and SHUT UP! SHUT THE F--- UP!! OK, OK, WE'LL USE PYTHON! JUST STOP TALKING ABOUT IT ON AND ON AND ON LIKE IT'S GOD'S GIFT TO PROGRAMMING! Jeez.
No, I wouldn't either, I was just trying to give a sense of the history. The fact is that the Series 3s and 5s that Psion produced do follow a clear line back to the original Psion Organiser, with the clam-shell design being essentially based upon Psions attempts to make a "notebook" version. Psion was one of three major innovators in the area.
I don't know if GEOS ran on the Portfolio, but I'm 90% convinced it didn't come with it. I assume GEM would have worked on the Portfolio too, as that had pretty low hardware requirements too.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but the RIAA hasn't been demanding much compared to the costs of the CDs whose sales supposedly didn't happen because of piracy. The "fine" has generally been a few thousand dollars, but the suits have been levied against people who generally had hundreds of MP3s available for download. Assuming this amounts to 25 CDs worth, each costing $15, and each has been downloaded ten times (these are highly conservative figures), you're looking at a "fair" fine by the copyright holders of around $3,750.
Of course, according to Slashdot lore, you can't buy a CD for under $20. More seriously, I suspect most of those targetted by the lawsuits have way more than 25 CDs worth of MP3s, and have, on average, uploaded each MP3 to far more than ten people.
I don't think this is extortion by any definition of the word. And remember, the copyright holders have the right to demand far, far, more than simply the cost of lost sales. If they wanted to be serious arseholes, they could be serious arseholes.
The Psion Organiser predates even that, going back to 1984. This has a single line LCD display and a keyboard where the letters appeared in order. The Psion machines the GP refers to are direct decendents. Actually, modern smart and semi-smart phones run an OS with some technologies that come from that - OPL, the scripting language of Symbian, stands for "Organiser Programming Language" and was present in the very first Psions.
So, nah, the Atari Portfolio wasn't the first by a long shot. Psion was one of the original entrants in the portable computer market, with Sharp and Casio producing minature battery operated machines (I, personally, had a Casio device in 1987, I can't recall the name, I *think* it was PB80 - update, Holy Googled History Lessons Batman, here it is - it had a touch sensitive keyboard, single line 10 character LCD display, and was programmable in BASIC though it had about 500 bytes of RAM free for BASIC programming.)
While the Portfolio had a similar form factor to some of the later Psion machines, it's worth pointing out that they more decend from some mini-(non-PC)-notebooks Psion made than from external-to-Psion influences. The adding of a GUI is exclusively Psion's work, no GUI was on the Portfolio which ran DOS.
THE PROBLEM WITH BLOGGING IS THE SELF DELUSION THAT YOU BELIEVE YOU MATTER OR THAT PEOPLE GIVE A FUCK WHAT YOU SAY.
Nope. The problem with "blogging" is the delusion by some outsiders that most bloggers care all that much about interesting their readers.
Like many Slashdotters, I have a "blog" myself. I write it for an audience of one. If someone expresses an interest in something I've written, as they do from time to time, it's interesting and, to a limited extent, I'll engage in the odd argument, but for the most part, the blog exists for me to let off steam. As a location I can rant about politics, computers, cellphone companies, Slashdotters, open source and free software, and other stuff, without actually boring the pants off the people around me or offending them. Sometimes I'll ask a question in the hope it'll be answered, but for the most part, I honestly don't care. The only real interactive nature of it is that after a while, if and when people do look occasionally enough to think it worthwhile looking regularly, you end up with a little community of people who are interested in each other's stuff. Kind of like a group of people who hang out at a pub. That's really the only reason it ends up going online.
And I don't think most bloggers care either. Do you think the 14 year old who explains in great depth how Snuggles shat all over her mother's best rug today and how yesterday Mike (urgh!) broke up with her AGAIN really considers this more than a version of her diary with the potential for the odd bit of feedback?
As far as calling a blog a website and other stuff. Why? Amazon's "just a website" too, as is "Cingular.com" and "Yahoo". A blog is a relatively specific form of website, it's an online journal (and not a "home page" as at least one person argued. This (NSFW! NSFH either, come to think of it...) is a home page, and this is a blog.) It may be a stupid sounding name, but it's nonetheless describes a particular type of website rather than "all websites". Would I prefer a term like "journal"? Probably, that'd probably be more reasonable, and some people - and for the most part I myself do - use that term instead. But you're not suggesting "journal", you're suggesting "website", which I'll start calling blogs the day I drive to building in my vehicle every period of day, driving back to other building in my vehicle while stopping by another building to get products on the way back every some other period of day.
My advice: lose the snobbery. And if you feel posting your unsolicited feelings and news on the web should be beneath anyone, you might want to reconsider your policy of involving yourself in Slashdot discussions. You're missing the point, in a way far sillier than any teenager who writes about their cat is.
Re:Originality
on
Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 2, Informative
Though, I THOUGHT someone DID get fired as a result of that ultimatum, I can't find anything to back that up
Best to avoid Absolute Astronomy as, IIRC, it's essentially a mirror of Wikipedia, so you're getting out of date information. That said, the answer you're looking for is in the last sentence you quote.
The Wikipedia story confirms that one Paul Steed, a fairly forthright artist in the group, was indeed fired over the Doom 3 Ultimatum, at least according to John Carmack.
Slashdot Mirror
Either way, this is irrelevent. The point is that, today, the Internet is a global network. It needs to be "governed" globally, not by one major player. I'm finding the nationalistic cries of outrage posted here difficult to stomach. Something tells me that if it were proposed that control of the World Wide Web be handed over to the EU, on the grounds it's a European invention, you'd be pretty pissed.
Well, my responses to this would be:
1. I've not heard any major complaints about DS game graphics quality.
2. It's not an iPod. It doesn't have serious mass storage capacity. The MP3/etc playing capabilities are thus more of a gimmick than a feature. I've never, ever, seen the advantage in this kind of device.
3. That's what the discussion is about.
4. Again, this appears to be more of a gimmick than a useful feature. In any case, when we're talking about "useful features", it's worth noting that this feature is built into most modern mobile phones, which the PSP isn't good enough to completely replace.
5. I would question the practicality of this at this point in time.
6. See (2).
How is the DS more useful? It:
1. Has a massive library of games already available thanks to reverse compatability with its portable predecessors.
2. Has the potential to play game types simply not envisagable for the Sony. People are seriously talking about Civilization ports, for example. The touch screen makes this possible.
3. Is far cheaper (half the price), and most of its unique features aren't already built into your mobile phone.
From a practical standpoint, in terms of not overlapping with devices you already have and implementing things that do not require significant financial outlays or a lot of maintenance, or both, the DS implements the correct feature set and does it well.
Given the choice, if I could be bothered, I'd get the DS. I seriously cannot justify, or see any good reason, for getting a PSP. It just doesn't do anything useful the DS doesn't already, and the DS, very clearly, is the one with potential for advancement over the next few years.
There are things I'd like on the DS that the PSP has. I'd like it to have MMC, for example (the PSP has memory sticks, the point is "external storage"), but I think as a general rule the DS is doing very well.
My belief is that the PSP will not take off until it either drops in price significantly, or is combined with something like a mobile phone.
2. PSPs have very little game content available, therefore buyers are going to be inclined to look at movies, for nothing else but to salvage the device and ensure it isn't completely useless.
3. As others have said, Sony has been disengenuous in how it counts sales, including free copies of Spiderman in its figures.
I seriously keep looking at the PSP and can't figure out why third parties keep repeating the hype. It's an expensive games system whose sole selling point seems to be the Sony-PS connection. The DS is arguably a more useful machine, and it costs half the price.
You've been drinking too much of the Republican kook-aid. The fact is the guy put himself in danger to fight for his country, he conducted missions against the enemy, he was shot at, he saved - directly - people under his command. He found he found the war unconsciable, and came back and said so at a time when it was political death to do so. The man's a hero. He's a hero for going off to fight. He's a hero for standing up for what he believed when doing so carried great political costs. It's an absolute outrage the right were able to get away with this smear campaign, and that people still repeat misrepresentations and outright lies from those smears as "fact'.
I used to like Nokia's phones. The original 21xx (2110, 2150, 2190) series was one of the best GSM phones ever made. It'd be nice to see the threat of serious competition force them to increase quality control and reign in some of the more insane design directions they've been going in lately.
So, again, lay off the crack.
Ok, so it's unlikely to be T-Mobile or Cingular because both companies do unlock phones. I'm wondering who it could be. Right now, the only potential culprit I can think of is Tracfone. Tracfone has a GSM-only service called net10, and also resells GSM, TDMA, AMPS (presumably, not any more), and CDMA services under the generic Tracfone label (what you end up with depends on where you buy the phone and when.) That said, I was under the impression Tracfone has special firmware in the phones they use that'd be useless if combined with a different SIM. That'd make the DMCA complaint even less valid, because you wouldn't even be accessing Tracfone specific software if you did unlock a phone, you'd be flashing it with generic Nokia/Motorola/etc firmware and unlocking that.
All in all, pretty baffling.
As far as your last comment goes, Cingular's doing some major innovating (with their AT&T division I assume) on GoPhone, and they do seem to have better plans (in all) than their largest competitor (Verizon); my guess right now is any shortsightedness on Cingular's part is based largely on Verizon being their competitor. Cingular knows they have a better network than Verizon does, and Verizon is very much the "We're trying to build a monopoly here!" operator.
More importantly, you have no incentive for doing so. You pay $500 for a $200 phone, but you still end up with a two year contract (in the MAJORITY of cases), and you still end up paying $50 for 500 anytime minutes + unlimited M2M and N&W. You don't get $300 off. You've just saved Cingular $300, or would have done had Cingular not required you buy a phone from them anyway.
Ultimately, I'm not sure what you're trying to say. You said various points I said were incorrect, but I don't think you've answered them. Do you believe that most operators make it easy to start a new account without buying a subsidized phone? 'cos Cingular, T-Mobile, and, less usefully, Sprint PCS, Verizon, Alltel, and Nextel certainly don't make it easy. Do you believe you get a lower rate for doing so? Because I've yet to see a single offer from any of the above operators that implies supplying your own phone. Have you done searches for triband phones on shopping.yahoo.com and found the vast majority of unlocked triband GSM phones were 1900/1800/850 (or 1900/900/850)? Which of my statements is "incorrect"?
Well, yeah, but T-Mobile is Voicestream. The problem isn't with Voicestream SIMs and phones, but with those from the various other GSM operators Voicestream bought. That's why I used Omnipoint in my example.
T-Mobile UK is a company that started out as Mercury one2one, shortly afterwards becoming just one2one.
T-Mobile US started out as various different GSM operators throughout the US. Gradually, all the US GSM operators with the exception of BellSouth DCS merged with Voicestream.
Later on, Voicestream and one2one were bought by T-Mobile.
I would make a guess that there are probably a fair few Omnipoint customers who cannot upgrade to a new, T-Mobile locked, phone without getting their SIM replaced at the same time, despite Omnipoint being part of what's now T-Mobile USA. You can imagine how annoying it'd be if every single T-Mobile customer worldwide was put in the same position.
Either way, it's worth mentioning that the current situation that exists is that the vast majority of US mobile operators do the following:
1. All new activations require the purchase of a cellphone, unless you really want to go around the houses to do it and even them some operators simply will not let you, period. I think it's possible to get a prepay SIM from T-Mobile, but that's about it. I tried getting a GoPhone PAYG SIM card from Cingular recently and you just couldn't do it.
2. Almost all cellphones are subsidy locked.
3. Several cellphones are exclusive to specific carriers. You can't get a RAZR BLK for T-Mobile or unlocked for instance (though if you're feeling brave you can import them or buy from a seller of imported phones. However, note that if a cellphone is available in a Tri-Band version, the imported versions are always 1900/1800/900, even though the US version is 1900/1800/850, which means the imports will not get coverage in key Cingular markets. This doesn't affect the RAZR, which is Quad-band, but does most other "world" phones)
4. You can't get cheaper service by offering to subsidize your own cellphone (see (1) above), the carriers just will not do it. Rates do not drop after a year. Everything possible is done to lock you into contracts that typically last two years (though T-Mobile "only" limits its to a year.)
So, whatever happens, if the phone you want isn't available for your carrier and/or you want an unlocked phone, you can expect to pay full price for it and pay to subsidize a phone you don't want, need, or, if you put a lot of effort into it, never bought in the first place. Unfortunately, consumer protection and pro-competition laws are generally considered anti-business in the US, and it's in the carrier's best interests individually to play this game while all of their rivals are, so I don't see this situation improving any time soon.
I know, it's terrible. They'll be storing stuff magnetically next, imagine losing all your data because some idiot decided to design a storage device based upon magnetism and you waved an ordinary fridge magnet at it.
Most US operators know that they'd be no better or worse off if there was a culture of unlocking that still limited US phones to US customers. What they'd lose by someone switching to Verizon from Sprint after two years without forcing Verizon to pay out a phone subsidy, they'd gain in having an ex-Verizon customer do the same thing. Where it becomes problematic is where people are able to sign up for contracts (or just prepaid service, which is also subsidized, only to a lesser degree), and then skip out of the country, reselling the phone in a market where economic conditions are substantially different. If the subsidies are leaving the country, and are essentially unrecoverable, then you lose.
It's not impossible of course. This could be as simple as a company being bloody-minded. But right now I think it's substantially more likely that it's Cingular, or maybe - at a stretch - T-Mobile. Cingular doesn't usually unlock phones (and contrary to some reports, while they shipped some world phones unlocked, most of their phones including their world phones certainly are locked, I've read a number of "sob-stories" from people who bought Cingular RAZRs and planned to use them outside the country using prepaid GSM SIMs and found they couldn't), T-Mobile has a policy that it will after someone's been a customer in good standing for three months.
If Cingular (most likely culprit in this case, as T-Mobile will unlock phones for free as long as a customer has been in good standing for three months) doesn't feel subsidized phone buyers should be allowed to do what they want with their own hardware (note, Cingular's network does not constitute subsidized phone buyer's "own hardware", before anyone criticises me for suggesting that Cingular allow people to modify their phones to do crappy things all over Cingular's frequencies, that's not what I'm suggesting at all) then perhaps they shouldn't sell the phones, perhaps they should rent them out, and have their customers sign lease agreements.
As far as the second definition goes, it doesn't contradict the notion that electricity is producable. Electricity is one form of energy. Converting something into something else, like heat into electricity, water pressure into electricity, or even flour into cake, is legitimately called producing it. The fact you've lose something doesn't mean you haven't created something else.
Did the spokesman say "NO" because it's not the job of a representation of the recording industry to go around suing people who redistribute movies?
So prefacing labels of instances of illegal filesharing with the word "illegal" seems perfectly reasonable. Kind of like you would the word "took" if you were describing stealing, eg "He illegally took the money" as opposed to "He took the money".
Now, piracy I can't explain. That one's by definition illegal (yes, "copyright infringement isn't piracy" people, LOOK IT UP, yes it is.) But as trading, filesharing, release, etc are by themselves neutral on the subject of something being illegal, it certainly ought to be mentioned, and would - in many ways - be wrong to omit it given the overuse of the words to describe illegal activity might give the impression they really are, by definition, illegal.
But I've actually experienced the joy of playing a game for 30 hours without a break. Not something I'd do now, but 12 years ago, it didn't seem so awful.
Some of us see AC as the best in the whole (greater) Civilization series. Awesome game.
They probably had the same problem as the rest of us - there was one Python advocate in the office who just wouldn't shut up about how good it was, and how it was better than all the other languages, and how it's soooooo much better than Java, and look I had to write this program to extract a column of data from a CSV file which would have taken months in C but I was able to just import the "cut" module and write the entire thing in three lines of Python and it's just really great and you can't do that kind of thing in C and C sucks and SHUT UP! SHUT THE F--- UP!! OK, OK, WE'LL USE PYTHON! JUST STOP TALKING ABOUT IT ON AND ON AND ON LIKE IT'S GOD'S GIFT TO PROGRAMMING! Jeez.
I don't know if GEOS ran on the Portfolio, but I'm 90% convinced it didn't come with it. I assume GEM would have worked on the Portfolio too, as that had pretty low hardware requirements too.
Of course, according to Slashdot lore, you can't buy a CD for under $20. More seriously, I suspect most of those targetted by the lawsuits have way more than 25 CDs worth of MP3s, and have, on average, uploaded each MP3 to far more than ten people.
I don't think this is extortion by any definition of the word. And remember, the copyright holders have the right to demand far, far, more than simply the cost of lost sales. If they wanted to be serious arseholes, they could be serious arseholes.
So, nah, the Atari Portfolio wasn't the first by a long shot. Psion was one of the original entrants in the portable computer market, with Sharp and Casio producing minature battery operated machines (I, personally, had a Casio device in 1987, I can't recall the name, I *think* it was PB80 - update, Holy Googled History Lessons Batman, here it is - it had a touch sensitive keyboard, single line 10 character LCD display, and was programmable in BASIC though it had about 500 bytes of RAM free for BASIC programming.)
While the Portfolio had a similar form factor to some of the later Psion machines, it's worth pointing out that they more decend from some mini-(non-PC)-notebooks Psion made than from external-to-Psion influences. The adding of a GUI is exclusively Psion's work, no GUI was on the Portfolio which ran DOS.
Like many Slashdotters, I have a "blog" myself. I write it for an audience of one. If someone expresses an interest in something I've written, as they do from time to time, it's interesting and, to a limited extent, I'll engage in the odd argument, but for the most part, the blog exists for me to let off steam. As a location I can rant about politics, computers, cellphone companies, Slashdotters, open source and free software, and other stuff, without actually boring the pants off the people around me or offending them. Sometimes I'll ask a question in the hope it'll be answered, but for the most part, I honestly don't care. The only real interactive nature of it is that after a while, if and when people do look occasionally enough to think it worthwhile looking regularly, you end up with a little community of people who are interested in each other's stuff. Kind of like a group of people who hang out at a pub. That's really the only reason it ends up going online.
And I don't think most bloggers care either. Do you think the 14 year old who explains in great depth how Snuggles shat all over her mother's best rug today and how yesterday Mike (urgh!) broke up with her AGAIN really considers this more than a version of her diary with the potential for the odd bit of feedback?
As far as calling a blog a website and other stuff. Why? Amazon's "just a website" too, as is "Cingular.com" and "Yahoo". A blog is a relatively specific form of website, it's an online journal (and not a "home page" as at least one person argued. This (NSFW! NSFH either, come to think of it...) is a home page, and this is a blog.) It may be a stupid sounding name, but it's nonetheless describes a particular type of website rather than "all websites". Would I prefer a term like "journal"? Probably, that'd probably be more reasonable, and some people - and for the most part I myself do - use that term instead. But you're not suggesting "journal", you're suggesting "website", which I'll start calling blogs the day I drive to building in my vehicle every period of day, driving back to other building in my vehicle while stopping by another building to get products on the way back every some other period of day.
My advice: lose the snobbery. And if you feel posting your unsolicited feelings and news on the web should be beneath anyone, you might want to reconsider your policy of involving yourself in Slashdot discussions. You're missing the point, in a way far sillier than any teenager who writes about their cat is.
The Wikipedia story confirms that one Paul Steed, a fairly forthright artist in the group, was indeed fired over the Doom 3 Ultimatum, at least according to John Carmack.