You can't outright discount gasoline, though. Gasoline engine innovations are quite important right now, where relatively few reliable sources for on-the-go alternative energy exist.
Given that the distribution systems for gasoline are already well in place, an efficient petrol-burner may end up being a far better ecological and conservational option than even a more efficient alternative-energy car. If a car can't fit into the budget and lifestyle of a large enough group of people-- as well as be successfully marketed and sold as such-- it won't have the adoption to support its production, and have as little real impact as if it was never made.
OS X is made to work on Macs, and therefore people are in no position to complain if they install it on something that isn't a Mac and Apple subsequently break that installation.
I still say there's some leeway for gripes if Apple specifically targets non-badged installations with an unnecessary and artificial "poison update". I'd agree that it is Apple's right to do that, for the reasons you said, but one can still be technically right, but an asshole for practical purposes nonetheless.
Apple does have an advantage there, though, in that there's not as much expectation of backward compatibility in the Mac world. From the software side, there's bland-standard software that requires the latest two revs of the OS to run, and from the hardware side, there's the fact that newer versions of the OSs won't run on older hardware (or vice versa).
With that, and their control over both the OS and the hardware, Apple can reasonably put new blocks in new models, say "new, shiny, not compatible", and still not have as much fallout. The new stuff "just works", and we never expected the old stuff to "just keep working" in the first place.
I imagine they'd get you on whatever general "obscuring your license plate" law is on the books. Finagle with the semantics all you want-- a blunt and broad law will still apply.
If it was anything else but a rejection of Congress' Interstate Commerce jurisdiction, I'd have to agree. In this case, though, it gets in the way of the Feds' most useful playing card, the "mumble-mumble-mumble-INTERSTATE COMMERCE!" defense. This, of course, is not acceptable.
Well, if they never actually verified the passwords, I could imagine a lot of lying and scamming going on-- just not by the people giving out the swag.
I'd say that part of the problem is that there isn't a clear definition considered-- both in the sense of 'what' and 'why'-- of morality. Morality deals with "good" and "bad", but those terms cannot exist in a vacuum. 'Good' is good... toward what end? 'Bad' is bad... against what goal? Without goals for morality, nothing can be proven-- not so much from a lack of objective ability, as much as from the simple fact that no actual assertion has been made.
I think a box of some sort would have to be involved, even if just as one option out of many. For most people, a software-only method means being stuck at a computer, be it sitting in the office watching movies, or clearing a space for the laptop. Few people have the hardware, experience, or inclination to make a generic PC into a media machine, and being restricted to a computer makes the service much less popularly useful.
With the current specs for an affordable computer, though, now is really the time to do it. They've got Virtual PC... it shouldn't be difficult, relatively speaking, to create an emulated "compatibility mode" in the same sort of way that Apple did (earlier) with Classic under OS X.
I doubt they'd do that to something like DirectX or multimedia drivers. Those are core system components, and the people who make their OS relevant-- application builders-- wouldn't stand for paid prerequisites to use their basic products. However, one could take a look at Apple's strategy with iLife, iWork, and QuickTime Pro and see that while content viewing apps are usually too basic or needed to be an upgrade, simple content production apps are enough of a seperately added value that they could be split off into paid additions. Things like Windows Media Encoder, Movie Maker, tools for CD/DVD authoring, a pared-down Office... all of those could reasonably make a case as a paid add-on.
I've got a mostly-bricky TiVo that might fit the bill.
(Rant on: Luckily, I bought the thing second-hand for a fiver at a yard sale, otherwise I'd be more annoyed than I am. Really, the thing that bugs me most are the TiVo "hacking" boards that somehow equate talking about ways to get a device with a tuner, a hard drive, and the clear ability buried within to record A onto B actually doing it, without shelling out monthly "keep the magic working" fees to TiVo as somehow being "theft of service". As it stands, I do use the "Pause live TV" features, and I'm just holding out for next yard sale season to cobble together a Myth-or-similar box and scrap the thing.)
Despite the wealth of information around us, I get the impression people, as a whole, are becoming more ignorant, not less, and the spelling skills of the average person seem to show it.
I think the big problem-- perhaps more generally speaking to "information" as opposed to "education"-- is that there's so much readily available "junk" information. Even avoiding elitist "high culture/low culture" separation and speaking practically, there's a heaping feed of information readily available to us every day, jumping, flashing, and disguised as IMPORTANT! to our evolutionarily-lagged brain parts, a large part of which has no long-term or formative value at all.
There could also be something to be said for the effects of an advanced society that can provide the necessities of life to even its least motivated members, allowing practiced ignorance to prosper as well or better than practiced intelligence. Although it doesn't lead directly to an ignorance-loving culture, such provision certainly allows cultures that celebrate the shiftless and ignorant over the studious and intelligent to grow. It's like the middle/high school problem-- with no real challenges, the metrics a person is judged by can become warped to weight toward useless or harmful traits.
(Okay, reality check: I'm not sure if this last perception is just a trend gathered from a rose-tinted view of a yesteryear that was just as dumb as today... I'm talking out my ass, sans actual statistics, so take with salt as necessary.)
Only a fool is more interested in a person's spelling than in their communication. If you understand, you understand. All of us knew more words than we could spell at some point of our lives.
The practical reason being that-- especially in extreme cases-- misspelling and misuse of words can interrupt the flow of reading, as the reader "hangs" for a moment, having to evaluate the misspelling and re-integrate the proper meaning into the thought. Also, it can call undue attention to the minor point of the misuse, voluntarily or involuntarily overshadowing the actual content. Perhaps it's a petty reaction, but for a person who is sensitive to such problems, it can interfere nonetheless.
Personally, and more ideologically, I see it like this (Actually, this is more my rant against txt-speakers who can't manage to spell words like "you", but it applies here...): We're on the Internet. The potential is heaped high for a person to display the finest points of their character. It is a place beyond all the useless standards of race, physical appearance, visible wealth or poverty... you can even smell as bad as I do right now and be regarded with equal standing. The only thing keeping a person's ideas from being evaluated on the equitable grounds is their expression of those ideas. (Granted, people writing in a second language have a setback, but I'll overlook that.) In a forum like this, people even have the time to compose and check their writing before they submit. A criticism or ribbing for a reasonable and common grammar problem should be taken in stride, and learned from. On the Internet, there's nothing between you and not being an idiot... except a little diligence, perhaps. The tolerance train has to stop somewhere, and the expression of someone's ideas, when that person has such a favorable platform, is a perfectly understandable place.
It's always interesting to see people criticize other's for hurdles that they've already surpassed in life. If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
That's what criticism is. It's the "tough love" kind of help (or at least as "tough" as getting harangued on the Internet can be).
Well, it's a great story, but I doubt that a sliver of people who take content are as scrupulous or as dutiful. What's more, remove the social and legal stigma from unauthorized copying, and there becomes no pressure at all to be that scrupulous or dutiful. A sanctioned legal market of free leaves no reason to pay anyone, and all of a sudden content producers become literal beggars.
I think it's more that it's far more difficult to prove that downloading is illegal, and uploading is just a more cut and dry case of infringement. Unless the person on the other end of the connection said "CLICK HERE TO GET THESE COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED PIRATED COPIES OF *****", there could still be the dubious legal defense of "Well, I thought they were with the record company."
At least that's the way I assume/understand it to be.
Frankly, all our freedom of communication is simply more important than your ability to make money selling copyright-monopolised copies of your book.
And yet the law and much of the surrounding history would disagree. Copyright was put in place because having the right to sell copyright-monopolized copies of one's book was considered superior to the right of anyone with a press to make copies.
In theory, it may seem that only the first copy of a work should be protected, but in practice, that is a completely unreasonable conclusion in a time when innovation is still difficult, but replication is physically simple. You might say "Okay, so content creation is an unsupportable model, then. Let 'em pack it up and go home.", but society and lawmakers have realized that each creation and dissemination is valuable, and the most equitable model is for the creators of content-- those who created most of the real value-- to have a system to be compensated accordingly. Just as the woodworker has the restriction of physicality to control distribution, now the wordsmith is on an equal footing.
Slashdot Mirror
It's two different units and systems.
Wait. Huh? Thought pattern flew off elsewhere... meant to say "It's two different things being measured".
Wikipedias (in this case) is a measure of collective time. The LoC is a measure of information quantity. It's two different units and systems.
You can't outright discount gasoline, though. Gasoline engine innovations are quite important right now, where relatively few reliable sources for on-the-go alternative energy exist.
Given that the distribution systems for gasoline are already well in place, an efficient petrol-burner may end up being a far better ecological and conservational option than even a more efficient alternative-energy car. If a car can't fit into the budget and lifestyle of a large enough group of people-- as well as be successfully marketed and sold as such-- it won't have the adoption to support its production, and have as little real impact as if it was never made.
OS X is made to work on Macs, and therefore people are in no position to complain if they install it on something that isn't a Mac and Apple subsequently break that installation.
I still say there's some leeway for gripes if Apple specifically targets non-badged installations with an unnecessary and artificial "poison update". I'd agree that it is Apple's right to do that, for the reasons you said, but one can still be technically right, but an asshole for practical purposes nonetheless.
Apple does have an advantage there, though, in that there's not as much expectation of backward compatibility in the Mac world. From the software side, there's bland-standard software that requires the latest two revs of the OS to run, and from the hardware side, there's the fact that newer versions of the OSs won't run on older hardware (or vice versa).
With that, and their control over both the OS and the hardware, Apple can reasonably put new blocks in new models, say "new, shiny, not compatible", and still not have as much fallout. The new stuff "just works", and we never expected the old stuff to "just keep working" in the first place.
I imagine they'd get you on whatever general "obscuring your license plate" law is on the books. Finagle with the semantics all you want-- a blunt and broad law will still apply.
Whatever you do...
Don't... say...
"Allow".
(( Deafening gunfire, general mayhem ))
Regardless, you can't have a war without costs, time spent and casualties.
Fine, then... let's just not have a war if you're going to be so pessimistic about it.
If it was anything else but a rejection of Congress' Interstate Commerce jurisdiction, I'd have to agree. In this case, though, it gets in the way of the Feds' most useful playing card, the "mumble-mumble-mumble-INTERSTATE COMMERCE!" defense. This, of course, is not acceptable.
Well, if they never actually verified the passwords, I could imagine a lot of lying and scamming going on-- just not by the people giving out the swag.
I'd say that part of the problem is that there isn't a clear definition considered-- both in the sense of 'what' and 'why'-- of morality. Morality deals with "good" and "bad", but those terms cannot exist in a vacuum. 'Good' is good... toward what end? 'Bad' is bad... against what goal? Without goals for morality, nothing can be proven-- not so much from a lack of objective ability, as much as from the simple fact that no actual assertion has been made.
I think a box of some sort would have to be involved, even if just as one option out of many. For most people, a software-only method means being stuck at a computer, be it sitting in the office watching movies, or clearing a space for the laptop. Few people have the hardware, experience, or inclination to make a generic PC into a media machine, and being restricted to a computer makes the service much less popularly useful.
So it's like the Segway hoopla, then?
With the current specs for an affordable computer, though, now is really the time to do it. They've got Virtual PC... it shouldn't be difficult, relatively speaking, to create an emulated "compatibility mode" in the same sort of way that Apple did (earlier) with Classic under OS X.
I doubt they'd do that to something like DirectX or multimedia drivers. Those are core system components, and the people who make their OS relevant-- application builders-- wouldn't stand for paid prerequisites to use their basic products. However, one could take a look at Apple's strategy with iLife, iWork, and QuickTime Pro and see that while content viewing apps are usually too basic or needed to be an upgrade, simple content production apps are enough of a seperately added value that they could be split off into paid additions. Things like Windows Media Encoder, Movie Maker, tools for CD/DVD authoring, a pared-down Office... all of those could reasonably make a case as a paid add-on.
Aww, c'mon. "Anonymous Coward"? That's downright quotable.
I've got a mostly-bricky TiVo that might fit the bill.
(Rant on: Luckily, I bought the thing second-hand for a fiver at a yard sale, otherwise I'd be more annoyed than I am. Really, the thing that bugs me most are the TiVo "hacking" boards that somehow equate talking about ways to get a device with a tuner, a hard drive, and the clear ability buried within to record A onto B actually doing it, without shelling out monthly "keep the magic working" fees to TiVo as somehow being "theft of service". As it stands, I do use the "Pause live TV" features, and I'm just holding out for next yard sale season to cobble together a Myth-or-similar box and scrap the thing.)
Despite the wealth of information around us, I get the impression people, as a whole, are becoming more ignorant, not less, and the spelling skills of the average person seem to show it.
I think the big problem-- perhaps more generally speaking to "information" as opposed to "education"-- is that there's so much readily available "junk" information. Even avoiding elitist "high culture/low culture" separation and speaking practically, there's a heaping feed of information readily available to us every day, jumping, flashing, and disguised as IMPORTANT! to our evolutionarily-lagged brain parts, a large part of which has no long-term or formative value at all.
There could also be something to be said for the effects of an advanced society that can provide the necessities of life to even its least motivated members, allowing practiced ignorance to prosper as well or better than practiced intelligence. Although it doesn't lead directly to an ignorance-loving culture, such provision certainly allows cultures that celebrate the shiftless and ignorant over the studious and intelligent to grow. It's like the middle/high school problem-- with no real challenges, the metrics a person is judged by can become warped to weight toward useless or harmful traits.
(Okay, reality check: I'm not sure if this last perception is just a trend gathered from a rose-tinted view of a yesteryear that was just as dumb as today... I'm talking out my ass, sans actual statistics, so take with salt as necessary.)
Violin!
Huh?
Only a fool is more interested in a person's spelling than in their communication. If you understand, you understand. All of us knew more words than we could spell at some point of our lives.
The practical reason being that-- especially in extreme cases-- misspelling and misuse of words can interrupt the flow of reading, as the reader "hangs" for a moment, having to evaluate the misspelling and re-integrate the proper meaning into the thought. Also, it can call undue attention to the minor point of the misuse, voluntarily or involuntarily overshadowing the actual content. Perhaps it's a petty reaction, but for a person who is sensitive to such problems, it can interfere nonetheless.
Personally, and more ideologically, I see it like this (Actually, this is more my rant against txt-speakers who can't manage to spell words like "you", but it applies here...): We're on the Internet. The potential is heaped high for a person to display the finest points of their character. It is a place beyond all the useless standards of race, physical appearance, visible wealth or poverty... you can even smell as bad as I do right now and be regarded with equal standing. The only thing keeping a person's ideas from being evaluated on the equitable grounds is their expression of those ideas. (Granted, people writing in a second language have a setback, but I'll overlook that.) In a forum like this, people even have the time to compose and check their writing before they submit. A criticism or ribbing for a reasonable and common grammar problem should be taken in stride, and learned from. On the Internet, there's nothing between you and not being an idiot... except a little diligence, perhaps. The tolerance train has to stop somewhere, and the expression of someone's ideas, when that person has such a favorable platform, is a perfectly understandable place.
It's always interesting to see people criticize other's for hurdles that they've already surpassed in life. If you're already past the hurdle, why not help the person over?
That's what criticism is. It's the "tough love" kind of help (or at least as "tough" as getting harangued on the Internet can be).
I'm going to reach the point where I'm financially better off sitting at home claiming benefits than trying to drive to work.
Telecommuting's catching on.
Here's an idea: Transmit and store the military GO codes using different procedures than the rest of the archive-worthy correspondence.
Well, it's a great story, but I doubt that a sliver of people who take content are as scrupulous or as dutiful. What's more, remove the social and legal stigma from unauthorized copying, and there becomes no pressure at all to be that scrupulous or dutiful. A sanctioned legal market of free leaves no reason to pay anyone, and all of a sudden content producers become literal beggars.
Second, downloading isn't illegal, uploading is.
I think it's more that it's far more difficult to prove that downloading is illegal, and uploading is just a more cut and dry case of infringement. Unless the person on the other end of the connection said "CLICK HERE TO GET THESE COMPLETELY UNAUTHORIZED PIRATED COPIES OF *****", there could still be the dubious legal defense of "Well, I thought they were with the record company."
At least that's the way I assume/understand it to be.
Frankly, all our freedom of communication is simply more important than your ability to make money selling copyright-monopolised copies of your book.
And yet the law and much of the surrounding history would disagree. Copyright was put in place because having the right to sell copyright-monopolized copies of one's book was considered superior to the right of anyone with a press to make copies.
In theory, it may seem that only the first copy of a work should be protected, but in practice, that is a completely unreasonable conclusion in a time when innovation is still difficult, but replication is physically simple. You might say "Okay, so content creation is an unsupportable model, then. Let 'em pack it up and go home.", but society and lawmakers have realized that each creation and dissemination is valuable, and the most equitable model is for the creators of content-- those who created most of the real value-- to have a system to be compensated accordingly. Just as the woodworker has the restriction of physicality to control distribution, now the wordsmith is on an equal footing.