I wiggle the mouse and randomly highlight text while I'm reading -- it used to confuse and baffle co-workers. Mostly it's just keeping my hand busy.
If they can infer anything meaningful from what is essentially doodling with the mouse, good luck with that. What I'm highlighting or hovering over has little to do with how they might be able to advertise to me. Heck, I think it would be funny to see the results.
And, I somewhat agree with the observations in TFA that there might be some privacy issues here. I already block google analytics on most of my machines.
Oh, you make some very good points -- indeed, I can't disagree about the arrogance of "you're holding it wrong". That one just seems bizarre bordering on the stupid.
I guess where I view it as more of a "device" than a "computer", I haven't felt quite so restricted in my choices. The sheer number of free apps for the iPad is vast -- and, since it keeps growing, I find one or two free apps each week that I'm interested in. And, I guess there's just an entire range of things I never wanted to do on my iPad, so I've never felt I was constrained.
For me, I could just sync it with some of the MP3s I already have in iTunes, download a bunch of free ebooks, copy over a couple of movies, and grab a couple of productivity apps and be going with an hour of buying it. With each week as I learn it more and get more apps for it, it does even more than the previous week.
Yes, it was definitely a pricey purchase. But, I've never regretted it.
As with all things, you mileage and needs may vary. For me, the device fills a niche that I've never been able to adequately fill in. And, since I don't own a smartphone, the wifi is a nice compromise for the device.
I'm curious. What are those things that you couldn't do before?
Can't speak to the GP's experience, but for me the following:
The form factor, hold it more like a book
Completely untethered and I can walk around with it
I've actually had my iPad open next to my laptop because the reference document I needed could be displayed no the iPad and the other stuff on the laptop
Reading my email from a comfy chair in the backyard
There are games which take advantage of the iPad's motion detection, so the controls are more natural (think of a flight game, the iPad becomes the yoke)
It's a photo frame when I'm traveling
Basically it's lightweight, uber-portable, can carry a bunch of media with me (so for a vacation it's ideal), and it's generally much less like a traditional computer. Between my photos, music (straight out of my MP3s in iTunes), movies, ebooks, web browsing, and games -- it's somewhere between a web-browsing console, a Kindle, an iPad, movie player, and a Game Boy.
I actually find I do things I've done thousands of times before, but in a slightly different way (or at least place, like a hammock). If I'm not writing something, but more passively reading, playing, web surfing... being away from the desk and keyboard is nice. It just feels different. Heck, I've looked up recipes and put it into the same book holder I use for my cookbooks when cooking.
Not everybody needs or wants one. But, it really is a nice thing to have.
I think you need to learn to read entire sentences. It seems that you got up to "I hate Apple..." and then clicked the reply button immediately.
No, I actually read his entire post. I even included the bit where he says the entire submission is juvenile when I quoted him -- which if you'd read my post, you'd have realized that instead of accusing me of not reading entire sentences.
However, the statement "Ya, I hate Apple and its products as much as the next anti-fanboi" still belies an unsubstantiated hatred of Apple. He's not defending Apple hatred. He's just taking it for granted, and stating it upfront.
I mean, I could say "I think Gadget Guy is a moron, but saying so would be juvenile"... and, seriously, I don't mean to imply you're a moron, but you can't start a sentence saying you hate Apple just as much as everyone else does and then wave that away by saying the article is juvenile. He have still said he hates Apple without any substantiation. That is what I was asking him about.
Ya, I hate Apple and its products as much as the next anti-fanboi, but this submission just comes across as.. juvenile?
So, is it just an irrational hatred because you think Linux is better and everybody else is wrong, or are you actually basing it on something?
Because, around here, it seems popular to hate Apple just as it used to be popular to hate Microsoft a few years ago.
Having been around computers and technology since the 80's, and having been a raving Linux fanboi at one point, I'm no longer sure I get why people divide up into camps. I have Windows, Linux, FreeBSD all running at home. I've got iPods and now an iPad -- it was iTunes that made me choose iPods since I've had a really good experience with it in the decade I've been using it. I haven't use a Mac in over a decade, but I can't think of reason to hate them. They're a bit spendy, but there's nothing inherently wrong with them.
It just sounds like you're defending a hatred of Apple because it's trendy.
Sure, WE might walk far enough to reach the walls and be unhappy about it, but to the average consumer (who doesn't walk far and never reaches the walls), it feels like beautiful freedom. It's like the restrictions don't exists.
You know, I'm going to define your "we" as people who feel the same way as you do thereby giving you a smug sense of self and superiority. Just as elitist as people are accusing the iPad owners of.
I don't mean that to be rude, but you seem to think that "we" is all geeks. It isn't. (Sorry, I don't meant to attack you, but you're a good example of "oh, it's OK for the average consumer, but not us" which I think is just as bad.)
Seriously, I've got an honors degree in comp-sci, I've been coding for around 20 years. I've got Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines (I've had physical boxes over the last 15 years too), and I know my way around technology. My favorite editor is still vi. I've read just as much sci-fi as the next geek.
Do you know why I bought an iPad? There's lots of reasons -- not the least of which is in my estimation, the iPad represents the first new change in computer interfaces in my lifetime. If there is something which is even similar, I'm unaware of it. Even as a geek, I don't want to tinker with everything all of the time. Thus far, I've not paid for a single app on the iPad -- there's literally hundreds of free applications for it, and loads of free content in the form of eBooks. It's an exceedingly comfortable form factor that unchains me from a desk. For reviewing large technical PDFs, I'd rather use iBooks on my iPad than my laptop -- not the least of which is I can have an unlimited number of bookmarks in a document. So, last week when I was reviewing a PDF document of approximately 1000 pages, it was far easier to flip through the sections I needed.
The next time I go on vacation, I've got music, movies, games, and books to keep me entertained for days. I can sit in my backyard in a lawn chair and read my email, surf the web, or just read a book. The fact that I can plug it into my existing iTunes which I already had for my iPad was a bonus. It's not like maintaining a whole computer -- it's a device, which I bought knowing full well wouldn't be used like a general-purpose computer.
Yes, you could buy a netbook for less. But, I don't want a netbook. I don't want to have a keyboard and a mouse. I want something I can use laying down for casual usage. You wouldn't use it for extensive work -- though, with something to prop it up and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use it much more extensively for document editing.
Even knowing there are "walls around the garden", I don't exactly feel restricted by this device. If anything, I feel somewhat liberated by it. I find the more rigidly defined behavior of it to be a great simplifier -- it really is an easy device to get used to, and I use it entirely differently that I would use a desktop or a laptop. They're complementary in my experience.
It is entirely possible for an actual geek to like the device. And, it certainly has nothing to do with someone else's perception about me or the device -- it rarely leaves the house. The walled garden is hardly like being shackled, it's more like a place where you can work in peace without getting pestered.
There are always exceptions to the rule.... Why are so many getting their panties in a bunch?
Because it's not a rule. It's a really broad generalization, based on some subset of iPad owners.
At best the sample is sketchy...
From March through May of 2010 MyType surveyed over 20,000 of its users on Facebook
So, it's a heavily self-selected set of Facebook users (who might themselves be selfish elitists moreso than everyone else), which may or may actually be representative of anything. To top it off, the typical iPad critic:
If at this point you’re imagining the classic young male geek, your stereotyped imagination is right. iPad Critics do tend to be young men. To add even more color: they tend to have no children and little interest in family.
So, people who like the product are elitist bastards, and the people who don't like it are knee-jerk elitist geeks who live in their mothers basement and are responding viscerally as opposed to rationally. (And, yes, I'm intentionally injecting some slant to that.) But, I do mean the elitist geek -- the kind of person who believes that since they know something about technology, everybody else is misinformed and stupid. That's about as elitist as you get, and just as anti-social as the conclusions arrived at by the 'study'.
I think people are responding to this so strongly because it takes a sample of 20,000 people, drawn from the Facebook pool who already voluntarily self-selected themselves to participate. In my estimation, that makes the statistics pretty worthless since it's not drawing on a representative sample. Heck, as I said, do Facebook users themselves have a tendency to be elitist, narcissistic selfish bastards? It almost seems like drawing entirely from Facebook gives you a sample bias towards people who like Facebook.
I just don't see any validity to the sample, methods, or conclusion of this article. Any time anybody tries to make such a broad set of statements, people are going to get their hackles up, because it sounds like the worst sort of stereotyping.
What if that's what I actually believe? That the rights of individuals to communicate as they please is more important than the rights of a made up entity?
You do realize that the banking industry is probably still the most heavily regulated industry in America... right?
And you realize that despite those regulations, AIG just paid out a big settlement to get rid of allegations of
anti-competitive market division, accounting violations, and stock price manipulation by AIG between October 1999 and April 2005.
You know -- On one hand they're selling something to consumers and saying "oh, this is a great idea". On the other hand they were selling something to brokerage houses as something to bet against this exact thing -- asset backed commodities were useless crap, but they managed to sell it to consumers as an investment vehicle. This to cover up the fact that they'd been giving mortgages with no sound financial reasoning for most of a decade, and were holding a lot of worthless debt and mostly wanted to offload that onto someone else.
This is an industry which recently ran into troubles because their computerized stock sellers got a little twitchy and triggered a panic. Nothing to do with anything, but the computer program which was designed to milk as much money from the system as possible went a little glitchy.
I never said the financial and banking industry was unregulated. I said they're as close to unregulated as they've been able to manage, and they're usually lobbying to have existing regulations removed.
I think in this, and in many other segments, we need far more regulation than we have now. I don't have faith in them to adhere to the existing rules, let alone trying to exploit things that nobody has made a rule about.
Then, after their big bailout, they're back to record profits and executive bonuses in a startlingly small amount of time. Mostly because they clammed up and did things like saying "well, since our profits have been down we're increasing service fees".
A truly 'free market' would only make more things worse in the long run, not better. If they could rape and pillage the economy even more, they would in a heartbeat.
Then I propose that we refer to it as a "hands-off market", since the term "free market" falsely implies a maximization of freedom.
There's already the term "laissez-faire", which loosely translates as "leave it be" or "let it happen". It means exactly what you propose, as does "free market" in this context.
The market isn't about maximizing your freedom. It's about maximizing the freedom of the market to conduct business how it sees fit.
Meaning, the 'market' is free to do whatever it likes without restriction. Eventually the consumers will decide what is best, and everything will naturally work out in a way that is best for business, and gives consumers what they want.
According to the free market people, the companies in the market aren't required to promote your freedoms and should be left 'free' to impose any rules they see fit.
So, forcing them to not throttle their networks to keep out packets infringes on their freedom to conduct business. You only get the freedom to buy, or not buy a product. All other 'value' decisions fall out of the results of the market, with an implicit (explicit?) assumption that the market will find the 'right' solution.
In this case, net neutrality says they'd like to apply regulations to industry, so that your rights are made more important that the rights of Comcast to say what you do with your internet connection.
Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.
In practice, nobody has ever had a free market. There's always some degree of regulation.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.
It's about as brutally Darwinistic as you can get, and its proponents like to think that any form of regulation and rules placed on industry is an impediment to their proper role of making as much money as they can. Effects on society be damned since in the long term, society will vote with their dollars and get the optimal outcome.
In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.
Allright mister science man, if we all evolved from monkeys, then why come there still monkeys?
We didn't evolve from monkeys.
We evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys. Descendants of that ancestor evolved into several different primates. Think of Lucy as showing this. She had a lot of ape-like features, but a bigger brain capacity and a more upright gait.
Saying we evolved from monkeys is just muddying the waters by people who like to misrepresent what other people say.
More importantly it only applies to carbon based life I would assume. How about silicon based life - as an example?
You know, someone asks this in almost every thread where the search for extra terrestrial life comes up.
The reality of it is, we don't know anything about what a hypothetical silicon-based life-form would look like, or what kind of environment it would need.
Since we know nothing about this life-form, how do you propose we look for this? The simple answer is, we can't because we don't know what to look for.
When you don't have any actual testable hypotheses, it's simply not possible to conduct science. What you're describing is essentially science fiction since you start with the position that there must be silicon-based life and we should be looking for it.
Methinks you've watched too much Star Trek.
Looking for life that is similar to ours, we can at least say "well there is life on Earth which could live under those circumstances, so maybe there's something there". The whole point is to narrow the search, not needless widen it to conditions that, at present, represent nothing more than mere conjecture.
In short, searching for silicon-based life is currently futile and a waste of resources.
I'll bet you can put pictures on the internet though, and be sure that they will last a lot longer than 40 years, *if* someone in the world finds them valuable.
So, all pictures of boobies will last forever, and all other information will be lost to antiquity?
We are so doomed -- in 40 years nobody will know anything about now besides Brittney Spear's upskirt photos and myspace girls showing their boobs.
In the laboratory we can actively cool stuff. We have gotten temperatures down to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero. We are pretty dang certain that these conditions have never existed in the history of the universe, unless some alien science lab beat us to it. At these temperatures you can achieve an entirely new state of matter called a Bose-Einstein condensate.
Generally I agree with everything you said.
But, I'm more inclined to believe that somewhere, due to some natural process we can't even think of, that if we've done it in a lab, the universe has done it as part of something else. Of course, that's not really based in anything more solid than many years of being amazed that the kind of stuff that comes along that everybody said was impossible.
Same goes for the Bose-Einstein condensate -- I'm fairly confident that the universe has done this before. It might be fleeting and exceedingly rare. But, I also find it highly unlikely we've been able to push the laws of physics beyond what the biggest experiment ever (the universe) has managed to do.
I mean, with all of the vastness and diversity that exists in the universe, it seems somewhat arrogant that we've been able to generate something which has never happened anywhere else. We likely will never know about it, but I still believe deep in space, wacky stuff that we can't even conceive of happens all the time (in a relative use of the word).
Somewhere, there is a whale and a potted petunia falling to the ground.:-P
But clever marketing people know damn well that placating your children who are demanding to see the latest "Finding Nemo" sequel is far more important to you than getting annoyed at not being able to skip past advertising trailers...
Skipping the whole "kids" thing for exactly that reason. Not interested.
I'm far more annoyed about the advertising. Trust me.
And if I find myself running low on gas... Or if I get hungry... Or if I wind up spending the night... My GPS has a POI feature that lets me find local points of interest. Very, very handy.
Humorously enough, it took my 70 year old mother to show me that mine had the same feature. I think I'd seen it when I first got it, and then never looked at it again.
My parents came up to visit last year (about 1000 miles away) and told me that at one point they had to say "find the nearest gas station", which it promptly did.
Now that I know it's there, I actually use this feature quite a bit. Last vacation I took, I just told it to take me to the hotel I was staying in -- 4.5 hrs drive away. Took me right to the door of the hotel. Absolutely brilliant!
As I said in another post, my parents absolutely love their GPS since it saves them so much frustration.
That is still better then the new Blu-ray disks that download an ad from the net when you put the disk in. I didn't give the company the right to use my internet connection to download an ad that they force me to watch when I purchased a disk from the store. If my connection was metered I would send them a bill for what I think the download cost on my end.
That's news to me since I'm skipping Blu Ray altogether since it's just going to be an intermediate thing until they re-write the HD specs again. We're now on at least the 3rd iteration since I've been keeping track.
So, can you disconnect it from the network? Or is it mandatory that it be connected for some evil DRM purposes? If you need to have your DVD player connected to the internet, all the more reason to not buy a Blu Ray.
What, exactly, is the network connection used for?
I agree with you, I would not accept a DVD player downloading anything off the internet. It's none of their business how often I watch a movie, and forced advertising deserves a boot to the head.
Wait a minute - if Apple has the patent on in-OS advertizing, does this mean that Microsoft will be unable to follow suit because Steve Jobs has ensured no one else but him gets to do it?
Sadly, it would likely mean that Apple would gladly license people to use their patent so they get paid no matter who is watching an ad.
My DVD player disables certain functions while it is playing advertisements.
Of course, the annoying thing about that is that advertising and previews wasn't why the DVD player has mandatory "no-skip" sections -- it was for the copyright notice.
Then a bunch of marketing weenies at Disney and others decided to make all of the previews and crap as mandatory as well.
I hope there's a special place in hell reserved for people who put mandatory ads into DVDs and other things. I'm pretty sure that if I bought a machine that locked me out until I watched an ad, I'd be taking it back to the store for a refund.
If I bought the machine, unless you gave me a discount on it or are paying me to watch ads, I'm not part of your advertising revenue.
Slashdot Mirror
I wiggle the mouse and randomly highlight text while I'm reading -- it used to confuse and baffle co-workers. Mostly it's just keeping my hand busy.
If they can infer anything meaningful from what is essentially doodling with the mouse, good luck with that. What I'm highlighting or hovering over has little to do with how they might be able to advertise to me. Heck, I think it would be funny to see the results.
And, I somewhat agree with the observations in TFA that there might be some privacy issues here. I already block google analytics on most of my machines.
Oh, you make some very good points -- indeed, I can't disagree about the arrogance of "you're holding it wrong". That one just seems bizarre bordering on the stupid.
I guess where I view it as more of a "device" than a "computer", I haven't felt quite so restricted in my choices. The sheer number of free apps for the iPad is vast -- and, since it keeps growing, I find one or two free apps each week that I'm interested in. And, I guess there's just an entire range of things I never wanted to do on my iPad, so I've never felt I was constrained.
For me, I could just sync it with some of the MP3s I already have in iTunes, download a bunch of free ebooks, copy over a couple of movies, and grab a couple of productivity apps and be going with an hour of buying it. With each week as I learn it more and get more apps for it, it does even more than the previous week.
Yes, it was definitely a pricey purchase. But, I've never regretted it.
As with all things, you mileage and needs may vary. For me, the device fills a niche that I've never been able to adequately fill in. And, since I don't own a smartphone, the wifi is a nice compromise for the device.
Cheers
Can't speak to the GP's experience, but for me the following:
Basically it's lightweight, uber-portable, can carry a bunch of media with me (so for a vacation it's ideal), and it's generally much less like a traditional computer. Between my photos, music (straight out of my MP3s in iTunes), movies, ebooks, web browsing, and games -- it's somewhere between a web-browsing console, a Kindle, an iPad, movie player, and a Game Boy.
I actually find I do things I've done thousands of times before, but in a slightly different way (or at least place, like a hammock). If I'm not writing something, but more passively reading, playing, web surfing ... being away from the desk and keyboard is nice. It just feels different. Heck, I've looked up recipes and put it into the same book holder I use for my cookbooks when cooking.
Not everybody needs or wants one. But, it really is a nice thing to have.
A survey of 20,000 Facebook users isn't a "study". It's an opinion poll from a skewed subset of the population.
No, I actually read his entire post. I even included the bit where he says the entire submission is juvenile when I quoted him -- which if you'd read my post, you'd have realized that instead of accusing me of not reading entire sentences.
However, the statement "Ya, I hate Apple and its products as much as the next anti-fanboi" still belies an unsubstantiated hatred of Apple. He's not defending Apple hatred. He's just taking it for granted, and stating it upfront.
I mean, I could say "I think Gadget Guy is a moron, but saying so would be juvenile" ... and, seriously, I don't mean to imply you're a moron, but you can't start a sentence saying you hate Apple just as much as everyone else does and then wave that away by saying the article is juvenile. He have still said he hates Apple without any substantiation. That is what I was asking him about.
Ya, I hate Apple and its products as much as the next anti-fanboi, but this submission just comes across as.. juvenile?
So, is it just an irrational hatred because you think Linux is better and everybody else is wrong, or are you actually basing it on something?
Because, around here, it seems popular to hate Apple just as it used to be popular to hate Microsoft a few years ago.
Having been around computers and technology since the 80's, and having been a raving Linux fanboi at one point, I'm no longer sure I get why people divide up into camps. I have Windows, Linux, FreeBSD all running at home. I've got iPods and now an iPad -- it was iTunes that made me choose iPods since I've had a really good experience with it in the decade I've been using it. I haven't use a Mac in over a decade, but I can't think of reason to hate them. They're a bit spendy, but there's nothing inherently wrong with them.
It just sounds like you're defending a hatred of Apple because it's trendy.
You know, I'm going to define your "we" as people who feel the same way as you do thereby giving you a smug sense of self and superiority. Just as elitist as people are accusing the iPad owners of.
I don't mean that to be rude, but you seem to think that "we" is all geeks. It isn't. (Sorry, I don't meant to attack you, but you're a good example of "oh, it's OK for the average consumer, but not us" which I think is just as bad.)
Seriously, I've got an honors degree in comp-sci, I've been coding for around 20 years. I've got Linux and FreeBSD virtual machines (I've had physical boxes over the last 15 years too), and I know my way around technology. My favorite editor is still vi. I've read just as much sci-fi as the next geek.
Do you know why I bought an iPad? There's lots of reasons -- not the least of which is in my estimation, the iPad represents the first new change in computer interfaces in my lifetime. If there is something which is even similar, I'm unaware of it. Even as a geek, I don't want to tinker with everything all of the time. Thus far, I've not paid for a single app on the iPad -- there's literally hundreds of free applications for it, and loads of free content in the form of eBooks. It's an exceedingly comfortable form factor that unchains me from a desk. For reviewing large technical PDFs, I'd rather use iBooks on my iPad than my laptop -- not the least of which is I can have an unlimited number of bookmarks in a document. So, last week when I was reviewing a PDF document of approximately 1000 pages, it was far easier to flip through the sections I needed.
The next time I go on vacation, I've got music, movies, games, and books to keep me entertained for days. I can sit in my backyard in a lawn chair and read my email, surf the web, or just read a book. The fact that I can plug it into my existing iTunes which I already had for my iPad was a bonus. It's not like maintaining a whole computer -- it's a device, which I bought knowing full well wouldn't be used like a general-purpose computer.
Yes, you could buy a netbook for less. But, I don't want a netbook. I don't want to have a keyboard and a mouse. I want something I can use laying down for casual usage. You wouldn't use it for extensive work -- though, with something to prop it up and a bluetooth keyboard, you could use it much more extensively for document editing.
Even knowing there are "walls around the garden", I don't exactly feel restricted by this device. If anything, I feel somewhat liberated by it. I find the more rigidly defined behavior of it to be a great simplifier -- it really is an easy device to get used to, and I use it entirely differently that I would use a desktop or a laptop. They're complementary in my experience.
It is entirely possible for an actual geek to like the device. And, it certainly has nothing to do with someone else's perception about me or the device -- it rarely leaves the house. The walled garden is hardly like being shackled, it's more like a place where you can work in peace without getting pestered.
Because it's not a rule. It's a really broad generalization, based on some subset of iPad owners.
At best the sample is sketchy ...
So, it's a heavily self-selected set of Facebook users (who might themselves be selfish elitists moreso than everyone else), which may or may actually be representative of anything. To top it off, the typical iPad critic:
So, people who like the product are elitist bastards, and the people who don't like it are knee-jerk elitist geeks who live in their mothers basement and are responding viscerally as opposed to rationally. (And, yes, I'm intentionally injecting some slant to that.) But, I do mean the elitist geek -- the kind of person who believes that since they know something about technology, everybody else is misinformed and stupid. That's about as elitist as you get, and just as anti-social as the conclusions arrived at by the 'study'.
I think people are responding to this so strongly because it takes a sample of 20,000 people, drawn from the Facebook pool who already voluntarily self-selected themselves to participate. In my estimation, that makes the statistics pretty worthless since it's not drawing on a representative sample. Heck, as I said, do Facebook users themselves have a tendency to be elitist, narcissistic selfish bastards? It almost seems like drawing entirely from Facebook gives you a sample bias towards people who like Facebook.
I just don't see any validity to the sample, methods, or conclusion of this article. Any time anybody tries to make such a broad set of statements, people are going to get their hackles up, because it sounds like the worst sort of stereotyping.
Posting on Slashdot? Somehow, I doubt that. :-P
Then, I would be forced to agree with you.
And you realize that despite those regulations, AIG just paid out a big settlement to get rid of allegations of
You know -- On one hand they're selling something to consumers and saying "oh, this is a great idea". On the other hand they were selling something to brokerage houses as something to bet against this exact thing -- asset backed commodities were useless crap, but they managed to sell it to consumers as an investment vehicle. This to cover up the fact that they'd been giving mortgages with no sound financial reasoning for most of a decade, and were holding a lot of worthless debt and mostly wanted to offload that onto someone else.
This is an industry which recently ran into troubles because their computerized stock sellers got a little twitchy and triggered a panic. Nothing to do with anything, but the computer program which was designed to milk as much money from the system as possible went a little glitchy.
I never said the financial and banking industry was unregulated. I said they're as close to unregulated as they've been able to manage, and they're usually lobbying to have existing regulations removed.
I think in this, and in many other segments, we need far more regulation than we have now. I don't have faith in them to adhere to the existing rules, let alone trying to exploit things that nobody has made a rule about.
Then, after their big bailout, they're back to record profits and executive bonuses in a startlingly small amount of time. Mostly because they clammed up and did things like saying "well, since our profits have been down we're increasing service fees".
A truly 'free market' would only make more things worse in the long run, not better. If they could rape and pillage the economy even more, they would in a heartbeat.
There's already the term "laissez-faire", which loosely translates as "leave it be" or "let it happen". It means exactly what you propose, as does "free market" in this context.
The market isn't about maximizing your freedom. It's about maximizing the freedom of the market to conduct business how it sees fit.
Meaning, the 'market' is free to do whatever it likes without restriction. Eventually the consumers will decide what is best, and everything will naturally work out in a way that is best for business, and gives consumers what they want.
According to the free market people, the companies in the market aren't required to promote your freedoms and should be left 'free' to impose any rules they see fit.
So, forcing them to not throttle their networks to keep out packets infringes on their freedom to conduct business. You only get the freedom to buy, or not buy a product. All other 'value' decisions fall out of the results of the market, with an implicit (explicit?) assumption that the market will find the 'right' solution.
In this case, net neutrality says they'd like to apply regulations to industry, so that your rights are made more important that the rights of Comcast to say what you do with your internet connection.
Literally, one with as few rules as possible. A market scenario in which whatever happens in the market must be good, because the "invisible guiding hand" ensures that the market always makes the best decision.
In practice, nobody has ever had a free market. There's always some degree of regulation.
And, when the greedy bastards manipulate the system to get as much money for themselves and screw everybody else over, you get to see all sorts of reasons why the free market isn't such a good system. The entire banking fiasco of the last few years is what happens when the financial industry has as close to a free market as they can get.
According to strict, laissez fair capitalism, the BP spill happened because that was the optimal market outcome, and in the long term if it is good business to prevent such things, and if not, it will keep happening. I would argue letting oil companies self regulate gives them no incentive to actually fix things if it might impact their bottom line.
It's about as brutally Darwinistic as you can get, and its proponents like to think that any form of regulation and rules placed on industry is an impediment to their proper role of making as much money as they can. Effects on society be damned since in the long term, society will vote with their dollars and get the optimal outcome.
In short, it's something people hold up as in ideal, which never actually produces the results and good things that people like to ascribe to it.
If he's not, I will.
We didn't evolve from monkeys.
We evolved from a common ancestor with monkeys. Descendants of that ancestor evolved into several different primates. Think of Lucy as showing this. She had a lot of ape-like features, but a bigger brain capacity and a more upright gait.
Saying we evolved from monkeys is just muddying the waters by people who like to misrepresent what other people say.
You know, someone asks this in almost every thread where the search for extra terrestrial life comes up.
The reality of it is, we don't know anything about what a hypothetical silicon-based life-form would look like, or what kind of environment it would need.
Since we know nothing about this life-form, how do you propose we look for this? The simple answer is, we can't because we don't know what to look for.
When you don't have any actual testable hypotheses, it's simply not possible to conduct science. What you're describing is essentially science fiction since you start with the position that there must be silicon-based life and we should be looking for it.
Methinks you've watched too much Star Trek.
Looking for life that is similar to ours, we can at least say "well there is life on Earth which could live under those circumstances, so maybe there's something there". The whole point is to narrow the search, not needless widen it to conditions that, at present, represent nothing more than mere conjecture.
In short, searching for silicon-based life is currently futile and a waste of resources.
So, all pictures of boobies will last forever, and all other information will be lost to antiquity?
We are so doomed -- in 40 years nobody will know anything about now besides Brittney Spear's upskirt photos and myspace girls showing their boobs.
Mama don't take my Kodachrome
Mama don't take my Kodachrome away.
*sigh* At least I still have my Nikon camera. Though, sadly, my Nikon film camera is now a dinosaur.
"Mama don't take my DSLR away" doesn't have the same ring to it.
Generally I agree with everything you said.
But, I'm more inclined to believe that somewhere, due to some natural process we can't even think of, that if we've done it in a lab, the universe has done it as part of something else. Of course, that's not really based in anything more solid than many years of being amazed that the kind of stuff that comes along that everybody said was impossible.
Same goes for the Bose-Einstein condensate -- I'm fairly confident that the universe has done this before. It might be fleeting and exceedingly rare. But, I also find it highly unlikely we've been able to push the laws of physics beyond what the biggest experiment ever (the universe) has managed to do.
I mean, with all of the vastness and diversity that exists in the universe, it seems somewhat arrogant that we've been able to generate something which has never happened anywhere else. We likely will never know about it, but I still believe deep in space, wacky stuff that we can't even conceive of happens all the time (in a relative use of the word).
Somewhere, there is a whale and a potted petunia falling to the ground. :-P
Skipping the whole "kids" thing for exactly that reason. Not interested.
I'm far more annoyed about the advertising. Trust me.
True, or not, it has always been explained as being for the FBI warning. See here.
Once it was in the spec, marketing idiots were then free to do even more annoying things with it.
Humorously enough, it took my 70 year old mother to show me that mine had the same feature. I think I'd seen it when I first got it, and then never looked at it again.
My parents came up to visit last year (about 1000 miles away) and told me that at one point they had to say "find the nearest gas station", which it promptly did.
Now that I know it's there, I actually use this feature quite a bit. Last vacation I took, I just told it to take me to the hotel I was staying in -- 4.5 hrs drive away. Took me right to the door of the hotel. Absolutely brilliant!
As I said in another post, my parents absolutely love their GPS since it saves them so much frustration.
That's news to me since I'm skipping Blu Ray altogether since it's just going to be an intermediate thing until they re-write the HD specs again. We're now on at least the 3rd iteration since I've been keeping track.
So, can you disconnect it from the network? Or is it mandatory that it be connected for some evil DRM purposes? If you need to have your DVD player connected to the internet, all the more reason to not buy a Blu Ray.
What, exactly, is the network connection used for?
I agree with you, I would not accept a DVD player downloading anything off the internet. It's none of their business how often I watch a movie, and forced advertising deserves a boot to the head.
Sadly, it would likely mean that Apple would gladly license people to use their patent so they get paid no matter who is watching an ad.
Companies like revenue streams.
Of course, the annoying thing about that is that advertising and previews wasn't why the DVD player has mandatory "no-skip" sections -- it was for the copyright notice.
Then a bunch of marketing weenies at Disney and others decided to make all of the previews and crap as mandatory as well.
I hope there's a special place in hell reserved for people who put mandatory ads into DVDs and other things. I'm pretty sure that if I bought a machine that locked me out until I watched an ad, I'd be taking it back to the store for a refund.
If I bought the machine, unless you gave me a discount on it or are paying me to watch ads, I'm not part of your advertising revenue.