Ignoring the stupidity of ideologues confusing the philosophical ideal of "laissez-faire" with the much more generic term "free market", all I have to say to you is WHOOSH!
How is Apple a monopoly, if we understand the term monopoly to mean something other than "a company you don't like/does things that displease you?"
Wait, like Microsoft?
It isn't the market share that makes a monopoly, it is what they do with it. Apple's negotiating power with the members of the RIAA cartel is very close to that, only we don't mind so much because Apple is actually the lesser evil.
But Apple does use its market share with music players to create lock-in in the markets of computers and mobile phones. How is that different than what Microsoft did/does?
The DMCA is the regulation that makes breaking DRM-based vendor lock-in illegal, regardless of other legal issues. Perhaps you don't understand what you linked to.
Those are legacy devices, pre-dating the iPod, from the time when iTunes was just a music management application (originally called SoundJam MP) and not the lynchpin of Apple's vertical monopoly entertainment strategy.
None of those devices are supported on iTunes for Windows.
One thing I see as very important is making sure not all of the phones are smartphones.
Every phone is a smartphone. At this point, the distinction is as meaningless as the distinction between smartphone and PDA five years ago, when people were making noise about the supposed "death" of the PDA. It is all marketing gibberish. And in another five years, you'll have to go out of your way to not get a data plan.
What matters now is what platform the phone runs, and whether it allows the installation of applications from anywhere, or only from a centralized store and blessed by the manufacturer, or only from a centralized store and blessed by the carrier, or not at all. Google is putting a stake in the ground for the first category, the open category, the one that resembles computers as we all know them. Apple and the carriers want to turn phones into consoles.
In 2002 alone, the last year with figures released by the Social Security Administration, nine million W-2's with incorrect Social Security numbers landed in the suspense file, accounting for $56 billion in earnings, or about 1.5 percent of total reported wages.
Social Security officials do not know what fraction of the suspense file corresponds to the earnings of illegal immigrants. But they suspect that the portion is significant.
''Our assumption is that about three-quarters of other-than-legal immigrants pay payroll taxes,'' said Stephen C. Goss, Social Security's chief actuary, using the agency's term for illegal immigration.
I have almost a terabyte of music and video, all of it legal. Tell me, submissive fanboy, where can I find an iPod that will sync all of that in ten seconds? And how do you make iTunes index it across multiple drives, some of which won't always be online? Because navigating a hierarchical directory tree and sending and deleting individual files and directories was a hell of a lot faster than what I now must put up with in iTunes.
And for that matter, how does one make iTunes usable with more than a hundred or so albums? It scrolls like an arthritic dog.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands
Aye, he is someone who understands technology well enough to admit what he doesn't know, as opposed to a fashionable dandy who takes credit for other people's work and expertise.
When you choose to sacrifice for the greater good and your neighbor doesn't, you're a chump, and the free riders like him consume the benefit your sacrifice brought.
When you're forced to sacrifice for the greater good, it doesn't bother you, since everyone else must as well, and the benefit is shared equally.
Charity is a deceitful ideology, preying on your empathy, designed to trick you in shouldering the burden of society while others get off scot-free.
Hardly. Do the people own the cables? The cell towers? The servers and routers? They even have control over their own hardware?
We're at the mercy of international conglomerates with government-granted monopolies and utility right-of-way, who censor our speech and interfere with our commerce, and what they can't do themselves they buy politicians to legislate for them.
But when any small municipality attempts to free themselves from the corporate stranglehold by erecting their own network infrastructure, they are sued into submission for "unfair competition".
That is the kind of communism we should strive for. It should be about the communal ownership of real things, things with measurable value, the very infrastructure on which we will base the future of the increasingly augmented human race, not a bunch of hippie-dippy nonsense about sharing and social media.
Why should I waste my time on Google, when you are the one projecting a ridiculous personal conception of science fiction authors? This is a Socratic troll-alogue, and I'm leading you toward wisdom, but you're going to work for it.
[T]he question always boils down to: "How can we better anticipate, cover, and overcome all conceivable or plausible threat envelopes?"
While this is a worthy and admirable emphasis for protectors to take, it is also profoundly and narrowly overspecialized. It reflects a counterfactual assumption that, given sufficient funding, these communities can not only anticipate all future shocks, but prepare adequately to deal with them on a strictly in-house basis, through the application of fiercely effective professional action.
You started preaching an aspect of his sermon, one he's been preaching well before 9/11. I was anticipating you'd find it; I guess you can only lead a horse to water.
The budget allocated to SIGMA is minuscule. The participants are involved because they consider it a patriotic duty. Obviously they're not tasked with developing detailed contingency plans, their job is to think of the things that a specialized analyst or a managerial bureaucrat will never think of. That is not chasing movie plot threats, that is quite the opposite, because movie plot threats are just the sort of stupid things that unimaginative, politically motivated people come up when told to "think outside the box". Or to frighten the public.
As a form of satire, security researcher Bruce Schnier holds an annual contest to come up with absurd movie plot threats that would actually justify DHS policies. I suspect that is what you're going off from. The only SIGMA authors that I can think of who wouldn't agree with, and be highly amused by, the exercise would be the paranoid right-wingers Niven and Pournelle. And it seems even they aren't fans of DHS.
The Bear thing you quote betrays another assumption made in ignorance. Where do you think potential computer vision researchers end up after they decide they'd rather make money than make tenure? Pixar and ILM are full of PhDs. I'm not sure Bear understands the many sub-fields of computer graphics, but he is certainly correct in knowing where some of the smartest people in the industry are working.
My credibility, that derives from knowing how to read, and having read the SIGMA website and several of the blogs of its members?
My assertion, that you don't know what you're talking about, reinforced when you betrayed that you didn't know SIGMA pre-dates DHS?
You have nothing and you know it. You're engaged in a trolling tactic, so now I'm doing this for fun.
As to your assertion, that a bureaucrat can anticipate threats better than science fiction authors (despite having advanced degrees, scientific or engineering experience, military or military consulting experience, and lives continually engaged in though experiments of scientific, military, political, and cultural extrapolation), let's hear what a career bureaucrat has to say:
"Never did anybody's thought process about how to protect America, did we ever think that the evildoers would fly not one but four commercial aircraft into precious U.S. targets. Never." - George Bush, 9/16/2001.
Funny, Tom Clancy thought of that. So did our military and intelligence services on numerous occasions. The bureaucrats overseeing the analysts who wrote those reports considered it implausible. They knew it was possible, but they lacked the imagination to believe that terrorists would actually do that.
Is it any wonder they're now listening to people with imagination?
If you would like to challenge their credibility, all of them have an internet presence and many of them keep blogs. I'm sure they would welcome your input, given your superior knowledge of the issues. Just make sure to post links via Slashdot so we may all learn from you as well.
If you knew WTF you were talking about, you'd be well aware that these people understand the stupidity of movie plot threats precisely because they spend a great deal of time trying to invent plausible scenarios themselves. Many of these guys and gals have been consulting for the government long before DHS existed.
I assume that you're trolling, but I just love the common complaint that WoW is cartoony. I can only assume it is made by the kind of person who masturbates to CG characters, considering it more mature than the hentai to which they previously masturbated, as that is the only way they could possibly be desensitized to the uncanny valley. Age of Conan was made for you, buddy.
WoW didn't copy other MMOs. WoW copied Dungeons and Dragons, the same as every other role playing game, ever. They followed a trend twenty years in the making and nailed it so thoroughly that everything that follows will be derivative of WoW instead of DnD.
What I hate about WoW is how no one stops to enjoy the scenery. Once you're in the Skinner box, all anyone cares about is pushing the button and getting the loot.
I hate that the story, what little there is, has become as arbitrary and convoluted as Lost.
I hate how player actions never actually effect the story. You only follow a script that forty, I mean, twenty-five other people have also followed in order to gain entry to the Skinner box.
I hate how the economy rewards wasting time on pointless diversions such as daily quests, and resource and loot farming before that.
I hate how the economy is based on inflation (daily quests) and sinks for inflation (tradeskill leveling, epic flying, trophy mounts), and not the production of actual value. The real economy is farming the Skinner box, now more than ever.
I hate how the constant whining by the PvP basement dwellers causes Blizzard to keep changing how character mechanics work for "balance".
I hate how Blizzard has removed nearly all forms of specialization, focusing on "the player not the class", thus commodifying players and putting an even greater focus on gear, macros, and meters.
Do you know what the next big MMO will have? None of the above. WoW has played it out. You don't trade crack for a harder drug, you either quit or you fry your brain, so you're done either way. There is nothing fun about a homogeneous treadmill, especially one with an extremely awkward and complex user interface that requires add-ons to render it effective.
The WoW-killer will have a simple user interface, with easy to learn but difficult to master player mechanics. The story and environment will change based on player actions, and player actions will not happen in an individual sandbox. Different "realms" will progress at different rates and in different directions, so there is incentive to progress the story and do so in the direction you want it to go. It will reward specialization, strategy, long term planning, and cooperation. It will punish ganking, out-of-band drama, and other behavior that attracts socially stunted basement dwellers, or, at least, give other players incentive to punish it. It will never have a quest to bring $npc $x $animal $organ.
Slashdot Mirror
Ignoring the stupidity of ideologues confusing the philosophical ideal of "laissez-faire" with the much more generic term "free market", all I have to say to you is WHOOSH!
How is Apple a monopoly, if we understand the term monopoly to mean something other than "a company you don't like/does things that displease you?"
Wait, like Microsoft?
It isn't the market share that makes a monopoly, it is what they do with it. Apple's negotiating power with the members of the RIAA cartel is very close to that, only we don't mind so much because Apple is actually the lesser evil.
But Apple does use its market share with music players to create lock-in in the markets of computers and mobile phones. How is that different than what Microsoft did/does?
The DMCA is the regulation that makes breaking DRM-based vendor lock-in illegal, regardless of other legal issues. Perhaps you don't understand what you linked to.
Those are legacy devices, pre-dating the iPod, from the time when iTunes was just a music management application (originally called SoundJam MP) and not the lynchpin of Apple's vertical monopoly entertainment strategy.
None of those devices are supported on iTunes for Windows.
One thing I see as very important is making sure not all of the phones are smartphones.
Every phone is a smartphone. At this point, the distinction is as meaningless as the distinction between smartphone and PDA five years ago, when people were making noise about the supposed "death" of the PDA. It is all marketing gibberish. And in another five years, you'll have to go out of your way to not get a data plan.
What matters now is what platform the phone runs, and whether it allows the installation of applications from anywhere, or only from a centralized store and blessed by the manufacturer, or only from a centralized store and blessed by the carrier, or not at all. Google is putting a stake in the ground for the first category, the open category, the one that resembles computers as we all know them. Apple and the carriers want to turn phones into consoles.
They have a God-given right to live, to work, and to do what is best for their families. Borders were invented by man.
Since you're so hung up on legality, perhaps the solution is the remove the borders.
Jesus, people, learn to use Google:
I have almost a terabyte of music and video, all of it legal. Tell me, submissive fanboy, where can I find an iPod that will sync all of that in ten seconds? And how do you make iTunes index it across multiple drives, some of which won't always be online? Because navigating a hierarchical directory tree and sending and deleting individual files and directories was a hell of a lot faster than what I now must put up with in iTunes.
And for that matter, how does one make iTunes usable with more than a hundred or so albums? It scrolls like an arthritic dog.
I'm pretty sure you're thinking of Wargames. Ferris Bueller never hacked into any goverment computers.
public school computer [is element of] "government computers"
(stupid slashdot, eating Unicode math characters)
Don't get me wrong, Jobs is a brilliant engender and programmer
He thinks Objective-C is the perfect language. All he engenders is mockery.
Sadly, I don't think there's a whole lot we can do about it.
We could have a massive, all-out civil war, with everybody against everybody! Then we could finally determine who is better than whom.
Probably a fair indication of what kind of leader you have on your hands
Aye, he is someone who understands technology well enough to admit what he doesn't know, as opposed to a fashionable dandy who takes credit for other people's work and expertise.
Hell, by that metric, the Nomad was the best mp3 player ever.
nomadii -s *.mp3
FTW!
When you choose to sacrifice for the greater good and your neighbor doesn't, you're a chump, and the free riders like him consume the benefit your sacrifice brought.
When you're forced to sacrifice for the greater good, it doesn't bother you, since everyone else must as well, and the benefit is shared equally.
Charity is a deceitful ideology, preying on your empathy, designed to trick you in shouldering the burden of society while others get off scot-free.
Hardly. Do the people own the cables? The cell towers? The servers and routers? They even have control over their own hardware?
We're at the mercy of international conglomerates with government-granted monopolies and utility right-of-way, who censor our speech and interfere with our commerce, and what they can't do themselves they buy politicians to legislate for them.
But when any small municipality attempts to free themselves from the corporate stranglehold by erecting their own network infrastructure, they are sued into submission for "unfair competition".
That is the kind of communism we should strive for. It should be about the communal ownership of real things, things with measurable value, the very infrastructure on which we will base the future of the increasingly augmented human race, not a bunch of hippie-dippy nonsense about sharing and social media.
Why should I waste my time on Google, when you are the one projecting a ridiculous personal conception of science fiction authors? This is a Socratic troll-alogue, and I'm leading you toward wisdom, but you're going to work for it.
First, read David Brin's editorial on the SIGMA website:
You started preaching an aspect of his sermon, one he's been preaching well before 9/11. I was anticipating you'd find it; I guess you can only lead a horse to water.
The budget allocated to SIGMA is minuscule. The participants are involved because they consider it a patriotic duty. Obviously they're not tasked with developing detailed contingency plans, their job is to think of the things that a specialized analyst or a managerial bureaucrat will never think of. That is not chasing movie plot threats, that is quite the opposite, because movie plot threats are just the sort of stupid things that unimaginative, politically motivated people come up when told to "think outside the box". Or to frighten the public.
As a form of satire, security researcher Bruce Schnier holds an annual contest to come up with absurd movie plot threats that would actually justify DHS policies. I suspect that is what you're going off from. The only SIGMA authors that I can think of who wouldn't agree with, and be highly amused by, the exercise would be the paranoid right-wingers Niven and Pournelle. And it seems even they aren't fans of DHS.
The Bear thing you quote betrays another assumption made in ignorance. Where do you think potential computer vision researchers end up after they decide they'd rather make money than make tenure? Pixar and ILM are full of PhDs. I'm not sure Bear understands the many sub-fields of computer graphics, but he is certainly correct in knowing where some of the smartest people in the industry are working.
My credibility, that derives from knowing how to read, and having read the SIGMA website and several of the blogs of its members?
My assertion, that you don't know what you're talking about, reinforced when you betrayed that you didn't know SIGMA pre-dates DHS?
You have nothing and you know it. You're engaged in a trolling tactic, so now I'm doing this for fun.
As to your assertion, that a bureaucrat can anticipate threats better than science fiction authors (despite having advanced degrees, scientific or engineering experience, military or military consulting experience, and lives continually engaged in though experiments of scientific, military, political, and cultural extrapolation), let's hear what a career bureaucrat has to say:
"Never did anybody's thought process about how to protect America, did we ever think that the evildoers would fly not one but four commercial aircraft into precious U.S. targets. Never." - George Bush, 9/16/2001.
Funny, Tom Clancy thought of that. So did our military and intelligence services on numerous occasions. The bureaucrats overseeing the analysts who wrote those reports considered it implausible. They knew it was possible, but they lacked the imagination to believe that terrorists would actually do that.
Is it any wonder they're now listening to people with imagination?
If you would like to challenge their credibility, all of them have an internet presence and many of them keep blogs. I'm sure they would welcome your input, given your superior knowledge of the issues. Just make sure to post links via Slashdot so we may all learn from you as well.
If you knew WTF you were talking about, you'd be well aware that these people understand the stupidity of movie plot threats precisely because they spend a great deal of time trying to invent plausible scenarios themselves. Many of these guys and gals have been consulting for the government long before DHS existed.
Just say NO to spec work!
"They were not marks of social class"
Well, that's not surprising. They aren't now, either.
Guess who I probably won't be going with this time?!
A corporation that manufactures and sells anything? Because most of them would have done the same. Especially the one Palm is competing with.
You've got procedurally generated content in my player made content!
No, you've got player made content in my procedurally generated content!
Woah, what we have here is a unique, complex world that exists as we found it, but we can change it, defeat its challenges, and create new ones!
I assume that you're trolling, but I just love the common complaint that WoW is cartoony. I can only assume it is made by the kind of person who masturbates to CG characters, considering it more mature than the hentai to which they previously masturbated, as that is the only way they could possibly be desensitized to the uncanny valley. Age of Conan was made for you, buddy.
WoW didn't copy other MMOs. WoW copied Dungeons and Dragons, the same as every other role playing game, ever. They followed a trend twenty years in the making and nailed it so thoroughly that everything that follows will be derivative of WoW instead of DnD.
What I hate about WoW is how no one stops to enjoy the scenery. Once you're in the Skinner box, all anyone cares about is pushing the button and getting the loot.
I hate that the story, what little there is, has become as arbitrary and convoluted as Lost.
I hate how player actions never actually effect the story. You only follow a script that forty, I mean, twenty-five other people have also followed in order to gain entry to the Skinner box.
I hate how the economy rewards wasting time on pointless diversions such as daily quests, and resource and loot farming before that.
I hate how the economy is based on inflation (daily quests) and sinks for inflation (tradeskill leveling, epic flying, trophy mounts), and not the production of actual value. The real economy is farming the Skinner box, now more than ever.
I hate how the constant whining by the PvP basement dwellers causes Blizzard to keep changing how character mechanics work for "balance".
I hate how Blizzard has removed nearly all forms of specialization, focusing on "the player not the class", thus commodifying players and putting an even greater focus on gear, macros, and meters.
Do you know what the next big MMO will have? None of the above. WoW has played it out. You don't trade crack for a harder drug, you either quit or you fry your brain, so you're done either way. There is nothing fun about a homogeneous treadmill, especially one with an extremely awkward and complex user interface that requires add-ons to render it effective.
The WoW-killer will have a simple user interface, with easy to learn but difficult to master player mechanics. The story and environment will change based on player actions, and player actions will not happen in an individual sandbox. Different "realms" will progress at different rates and in different directions, so there is incentive to progress the story and do so in the direction you want it to go. It will reward specialization, strategy, long term planning, and cooperation. It will punish ganking, out-of-band drama, and other behavior that attracts socially stunted basement dwellers, or, at least, give other players incentive to punish it. It will never have a quest to bring $npc $x $animal $organ.