If a company does something I don't like, cuts my service in a way I don't think is reasonable, I'm fully capable of switching providers.
Who would you switch to? Telcos love the idea. Cable companies love the idea. Wireless companies with broadband-capable service (like Cingular's UTMS or Verizon & Sprint's EV-DO networks) ARE the telco companies. Satellite isn't viable, and alternative DSL companies like SpeakEasy already do this to some extent with their VoIP services. This is about power, and everyone wants to play kingmaker and kingbreaker.
If there is too great of an incentive for bad behavior, no alternatives will present themselves. This is especially true when access to customers is limited due to the need to build pipes to them or the limited availability of wireless frequencies (which exists to allow them to be used at all).
You can refuse to shop at Wal-mart, but you have to radically change your life to only buy products whose businesses aren't affected by Wal-mart. It doesn't matter if you switch to some minor player in the market who has to charge more to compete; all the other consumers will be dealing with the big boys, and they'll have their power over the companies you want to do business with. Voting with your wallet doesn't matter when lower costs guide everyone else to vote against you due to lack of alternatives or lack of information.
This very much seems like a Republican/Democrat stand-off. Are you pro-business or pro-consumer?
Sixteen Republican Senators makes this a bipartisan issue at this point, especially since the bills has just been introduced. We don't know if the others actually oppose the bill or haven't yet made up their mind on it. At any rate, if this were an actual partisan issue, you wouldn't see more than 2 Senators crossing party lines.
The Republican Party is very efficient at getting their people to march in lock-step on issues that are truly partisan.
And are you really that thick that you don't see that the two are fundamentally the same?
What would you think of a law that lifted the usury limits on credit card rates? Is that pro-business and pro-consumer? Were lemon laws pro-business and pro-consumer? (If so, why did auto dealers fight them so hard?)
It isn't that simple. If you assume that good behavior is good for business, then why would you need laws to stop behavior that the market should prevent from happening? Frequently, you have to step in in favor of the consumer, especially when the business has power over them (like a utility or lender) or when the business has more information than them (like a used car dealer or insurance agent).
Zimbabwe's an utter horrorshow, though. The sooner Mugabe is out of power, the better. Honestly, he's so bad that I honestly start to wonder if Somalia's anarchy isn't better than his incompetent pseudo-democratic dictatorship. At least there'd be no "Operation Drive-Out Trash" without him.
Let's be blunt here. This is the government telling companies they can't try and be competitive, they can't make deals to offer premium services. This curtails competitive behavior.
I'll be equally blunt. Competitive with who?
Telecoms want to do this. Cable companies want to do this. Cell phone companies are mostly owned by the same telecom companies who all love the idea. That's pretty much the entire forseeable broadband market outside of municipal WiFi projects. Every middleman gatekeeper to the internet loves this idea because it lets them charge both producer and consumer. This also gives them extremely powerful leverage to pick what kind of services should thrive and which should die. Let me give you a hint on the latter -- 3rd party VoIP is the big thing that they all hate. Even cable companies are getting in on the anti-competitive action.
This is a raw power grab by an infrastructure monopoly, the purest form of anti-competitive deformation of the market for voice services. This all about turning a competitive market into one ruled by back-room collusion with companies that are willing to do business with the thugs setting up checkpoints on the information superhighway. Maybe you want to use iTunes to download some music but maybe someone like Bell Canada decides to buy a music service and would prefer for you to use their service instead. Therefore, they simply don't prioritize iTunes traffic like they do their own music site. Oh, it's not deprioritizing, it's just not giving highway access for competitors, forcing them to stick to surface streets instead.
Allowing this allows eyes on the internet to be monopolized, which they currently can't be. If you allow companies to treat their customers as a resource to sell to preferred partners, then the customers are the ones who lose out.
Telecommunication is the one of the only industries to profit significantly due to the ability of wireless providers to establish locally protected towers that don't need lots of unprotected infrastructure (i.e. wires) to communicate between them. Power is also generated locally for the towers due to the lack of ability to create an infrastructure for power transmission.
The money exchange system that you're talking of is hawala, the same system that has been under severe scrutiny for its use by terrorists due to its complete lack of accountability and traceability. It also typically charges a 4-5% transaction fee for transfers. That's good bit more than my bank charges, by the way. As for the markets, well as long as Mogadishu has access to goods, I guess the rest of the country doesn't matter much, huh?
You choose to focus on the success stories where obviously a free market does work well. Congratulations! I haven't argued that government intervention always produces the best result, which is the typical black-and-white straw man argument that free market fundies and other minarchists love to believe that those of us who are not "one of the body" fervently believe.
By only focusing on the successes, you miss out on the lack of a water infrastructure and of sewage treatment. You miss out on the thuggery and rule of violence both on checkpoints on the roads (where only those who can afford bodyguards can pass unmolested by khat-chewing thugs) and on the high seas (where piracy and kidnapping is rampant). You miss out on the toxic waste being dumped off-shore. You miss out on the looting and destruction of their industry to be sold off as scrap metal. You miss out on the fact that only 15% of Somalia's kids go to school as compared to over 75% back when they were under the cruel hand of a dictator.
You miss out on the fact that the vast majority of Somalis cannot afford the $3 for a clinic visit under the country's completely private healthcare system. This is one of many reasons that the life expetancy there is only 48 years, ranking it 203 out 225 nations. This isn't aided by the lack of a sustainable agricultural system that is wholly dependent on each year's rainfall.
A few successes in a pure lawless state are praiseworthy, but they do not mean that failures have not occured or that the people are better off without laws.
I'm pointing out that free markets can't solve the problem. You're pointing out that free markets didn't create the problem. You're right, but you haven't disproved what I said with that. You've just played the old card of "your side was wrong too."
Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance. We don't live in blank slate world where the free market could've somehow avoided the problem of physical exclusivity in the first place, so you're going to have to explain how it can fix the world we do have.
Don't forget to account for the difference in costs between the established monopoly and free market competitors in gaining new customers (assuming of course that the monopoly pursues its rational self-interest and denies the competitors access to its infrastructure).
Remember. On a free market you can only be screwed over if you agree to be screwed over. Under government regulation you will be screwed over everytime 51% of the voters wants you to be.
So, if there's only one cable/phone/internet company, one water company, one gas company, and one water company, I guess that I won't be screwed on costs when all those nice guy competitors build their own parallel infrastructures to reach me.
Face it, free markets only work in certain situations. These situations are the majority of cases, but not all.
Thanks for your post. I was not aware of the finer details of why antibiotics were used. It almost certainly has to contribute to antibiotic resistant bacteria, though, for the same reasons that humans taking antibiotics cause it. In addition, you have to worry about run-off from the animal wastes (antibiotics aren't usually completely consumed in the body).
I guess this is yet another reason to prefer grass-fed beef.
The rules for dairy cattle and beef cattle are very different. Most people aren't aware of the ban on antibiotics for dairy cattle or that it goes so far that companies that sell milk can't advertise the lack of antibiotics as a feature since everyone else has to do it too.
Beef cattle are very different. Farmers use antibiotics in them because it causes them to grow larger. This is widely considered to be a potential problem for helping to spread immunity to bacteria that can infect humans, but there aren't any good studies proving it one way or another that I'm aware of. If any studies did show up, expect a hard industry push for studies to "disprove" it and hard lobbying to stop any bills to restrict the practice.
For those who are willing to pay, organic beef does not have this problem. Most beef, though, does possess this problem.
Another problem for profitability is the fact that once a new antibiotic is discovered, doctors will horde the thing and make sure to only use it when everything else fails to prolong the time until resistance becomes common.
This is honestly why government funding is needed. There's very little free market incentive to spend gobs of money on a product that people will use as little as possible.
I'm sorry that no one got what you were asking for, and I wish that I could help, but I'm in a similar boat with no paddle. Personally, I don't use aliases very much, but I've grown to hate ksh88 and miss my bash and tcsh so very much. (I want my command substitution and '!!' back!)
On the other hand, I have leared to stop worrying and love the vi mode.
There are two scenarios that I can think of off the top of my head could prevent him from doing so:
1) He doesn't have permission to modify his own user account. Unlikely, but possible -- especially if/home is deliberately kept free of space or he's not given an actual home directory to prevent user customization and all he has is the shared shell resource scripts in/etc.
2) He's got to use several shared administrative accounts (like root or various accounts for specific services), or the account he has to use is shared with production processes that might be impacted by adding aliases willy-nilly without knowledge of the whole of all command runs by the system. That's bad security, but it's probably not his design.
I have to deal with both of these problems at my job. I don't have an actual home directory on most of our test servers due to a lazy IT department and immense bureaucratic red tape in getting it fixed, so I'm stuck using the main production user on the test box, and I can't customize it. In actual production, no one is allowed to use this particular ID for accountability purposes, but on a different system we all have to use a different shared production ID which hasn't been obsoleted to do anything. Both of these scenarios are irritatingly bad and beyond my ability to do much about.
At any rate, it's safe to assume from his description that he doesn't have permission to do what you suggested. Reread the article text. He's a "helpdesk jockey" without "the weight to convince management to deploy alias scripts to all of the servers [he supports]." The requirements presented explictly state that your solution is not allowed.
Sorry, try again. The real world of business sometimes sucks in ways that common sense suggests it wouldn't.
The guy's not too stupid to figure out how to copy his aliases everywhere. He doesn't have permission to do so. That why both he and I both said so (including in the text you quoted).
I am all too familiar with his conundrum, especially when it comes to being forced to work with inferior tools. I work in an environment where I am responsible for keeping production systems running, and I don't have admin install privileges. Even our admins don't have the political power to change things without serious peer-review and management approval. This is the way and enterprise-level IT organization has to work. Making changes in production without verification and authorization can result in revenue loss or loss of data that you may one day be required by court to cough up.
I've never read Bone, so to me the real news is that there's another Sam & Max sequel in the works after LucasArts put an axe in the back of the last one. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dancing around in circles giggling and making a fool of myself.
It's a good thing most of my coworkers have gone home.
He has no power to install his favored command aliases on all of the machine he has to administrate. He wants to have an SSH client (that he can run on Windows to connect to the Linux machines) that will interpret what he types and substitute aliases so that he doesn't have to set up his favored commands every time he logs into a system.
I don't know if you can set an SSH session into a line-based instead of keystroke-based communication mode. By default, it sends messages to the remote server after every keystroke and not after enter is hit at the end of a line -- otherwise using curses-based applications would really, really hurt as would using tab-completion, vi mode, and other advanced shell features. If this can't be done, then a client couldn't interpret your commands before you send them.
I don't forsee anyone providing this functionality because the demand is so low. This is the kind of thing that the remote end is expected to handle for you.
I'm not sure this really matters immediately. After all, if California can force automakers to improve their emissions nationwide, China can certainly force companies to make interoperable networks between their two systems. It will raise costs of doing business with China, but China's forte is not in internet-connectivity and IT like India but in manufacturing. This will slightly raise logistics costs between countries and will mean an increased cost of having an international net presence.
The long-term effects, of course, is more central government control of the internet by China. This is the real issue. China doesn't really like its citizens having easy access to Western sites, and control over the.com and.net TLDs mean that it's very likely that Chinese ISPs will simply respect conflicting and blocked URLs for those sites from the Chinese TLD. Furthermore, there's always been a fear by some governments that the US will use its control of the domain root as a stick in diplomacy. This eleminates that.
Repeat after me: Volcanoes, Potatoes, Heroes, Typoes Ignorance of this rule is why Dan Quayle thought potato ended with an E.
Geez, if you wanted to nitpick my spelling and grammar, you should've gone after my first post in this thread which is just shamefully riddled with mistakes.
Is anyone else here reminded of the bad old days at Apple before Jobs returned to the helm when they had some blue bazillion Performa models, and you couldn't really figure out which one did what you wanted? Yeah, I remember those days when inventory overstocks almost put the company out of business.
I think this is going to turn out to be MS shooting themselves in the foot. This sort of "pay another 20% for this next feature" nonsense may fly in the business world, but it's going to cause massive confusion in the mass market and is going to leave a lot of end users feeling burned and cheated (especially when you combine the high system requirements and new DRM lock-outs of everything).
Wait, so your major objection is not that they might be invading our privacy but that they aren't paying money to the rightful property owners of all that data? Yeesh. I don't think I've seen such a frightenly clear picture of the belief that property rights are the most important rights.
Okay, look at it this way, then. The government wants to acquire data to bolster support for a law to prevent Americans from spending their money on whatever goods the free market wishes to provide them. Would you still be happy if they paid for said data for the purposes of regulating free markets?
Yet you post anonymously while enjoying your Constitutionally granted privileges of free political speech. So what do you have to hide? What retribution do you fear?
Then again, I don't expect consistent reasoning from someone who believes that men who seek out power should be safe from criticism by those they hold power over. You either have no appreciation of history or human nature, or you are trolling.
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Bandwidth is consumed in the same way that land is. You don't "use it up" and make it disappear; you occupy it.
If a company does something I don't like, cuts my service in a way I don't think is reasonable, I'm fully capable of switching providers.
Who would you switch to? Telcos love the idea. Cable companies love the idea. Wireless companies with broadband-capable service (like Cingular's UTMS or Verizon & Sprint's EV-DO networks) ARE the telco companies. Satellite isn't viable, and alternative DSL companies like SpeakEasy already do this to some extent with their VoIP services. This is about power, and everyone wants to play kingmaker and kingbreaker.
If there is too great of an incentive for bad behavior, no alternatives will present themselves. This is especially true when access to customers is limited due to the need to build pipes to them or the limited availability of wireless frequencies (which exists to allow them to be used at all).
You can refuse to shop at Wal-mart, but you have to radically change your life to only buy products whose businesses aren't affected by Wal-mart. It doesn't matter if you switch to some minor player in the market who has to charge more to compete; all the other consumers will be dealing with the big boys, and they'll have their power over the companies you want to do business with. Voting with your wallet doesn't matter when lower costs guide everyone else to vote against you due to lack of alternatives or lack of information.
This very much seems like a Republican/Democrat stand-off. Are you pro-business or pro-consumer?
Sixteen Republican Senators makes this a bipartisan issue at this point, especially since the bills has just been introduced. We don't know if the others actually oppose the bill or haven't yet made up their mind on it. At any rate, if this were an actual partisan issue, you wouldn't see more than 2 Senators crossing party lines.
The Republican Party is very efficient at getting their people to march in lock-step on issues that are truly partisan.
And are you really that thick that you don't see that the two are fundamentally the same?
What would you think of a law that lifted the usury limits on credit card rates? Is that pro-business and pro-consumer? Were lemon laws pro-business and pro-consumer? (If so, why did auto dealers fight them so hard?)
It isn't that simple. If you assume that good behavior is good for business, then why would you need laws to stop behavior that the market should prevent from happening? Frequently, you have to step in in favor of the consumer, especially when the business has power over them (like a utility or lender) or when the business has more information than them (like a used car dealer or insurance agent).
Few of those countries have fully functional democracies, and most of those democracies are very young still. South Africa's really the only shining star in the midst of them all, and it has a public healthcare system though it is one shadowed by its much better private healthcare system for the wealthy. I know nothing about Lesotho; apparently they've reestablished a king and have moved towards constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament.
Zimbabwe's an utter horrorshow, though. The sooner Mugabe is out of power, the better. Honestly, he's so bad that I honestly start to wonder if Somalia's anarchy isn't better than his incompetent pseudo-democratic dictatorship. At least there'd be no "Operation Drive-Out Trash" without him.
Let's be blunt here. This is the government telling companies they can't try and be competitive, they can't make deals to offer premium services. This curtails competitive behavior.
I'll be equally blunt. Competitive with who?
Telecoms want to do this. Cable companies want to do this. Cell phone companies are mostly owned by the same telecom companies who all love the idea. That's pretty much the entire forseeable broadband market outside of municipal WiFi projects. Every middleman gatekeeper to the internet loves this idea because it lets them charge both producer and consumer. This also gives them extremely powerful leverage to pick what kind of services should thrive and which should die. Let me give you a hint on the latter -- 3rd party VoIP is the big thing that they all hate. Even cable companies are getting in on the anti-competitive action.
This is a raw power grab by an infrastructure monopoly, the purest form of anti-competitive deformation of the market for voice services. This all about turning a competitive market into one ruled by back-room collusion with companies that are willing to do business with the thugs setting up checkpoints on the information superhighway. Maybe you want to use iTunes to download some music but maybe someone like Bell Canada decides to buy a music service and would prefer for you to use their service instead. Therefore, they simply don't prioritize iTunes traffic like they do their own music site. Oh, it's not deprioritizing, it's just not giving highway access for competitors, forcing them to stick to surface streets instead.
Allowing this allows eyes on the internet to be monopolized, which they currently can't be. If you allow companies to treat their customers as a resource to sell to preferred partners, then the customers are the ones who lose out.
Telecommunication is the one of the only industries to profit significantly due to the ability of wireless providers to establish locally protected towers that don't need lots of unprotected infrastructure (i.e. wires) to communicate between them. Power is also generated locally for the towers due to the lack of ability to create an infrastructure for power transmission.
The money exchange system that you're talking of is hawala, the same system that has been under severe scrutiny for its use by terrorists due to its complete lack of accountability and traceability. It also typically charges a 4-5% transaction fee for transfers. That's good bit more than my bank charges, by the way. As for the markets, well as long as Mogadishu has access to goods, I guess the rest of the country doesn't matter much, huh?
You choose to focus on the success stories where obviously a free market does work well. Congratulations! I haven't argued that government intervention always produces the best result, which is the typical black-and-white straw man argument that free market fundies and other minarchists love to believe that those of us who are not "one of the body" fervently believe.
By only focusing on the successes, you miss out on the lack of a water infrastructure and of sewage treatment. You miss out on the thuggery and rule of violence both on checkpoints on the roads (where only those who can afford bodyguards can pass unmolested by khat-chewing thugs) and on the high seas (where piracy and kidnapping is rampant). You miss out on the toxic waste being dumped off-shore. You miss out on the looting and destruction of their industry to be sold off as scrap metal. You miss out on the fact that only 15% of Somalia's kids go to school as compared to over 75% back when they were under the cruel hand of a dictator.
You miss out on the fact that the vast majority of Somalis cannot afford the $3 for a clinic visit under the country's completely private healthcare system. This is one of many reasons that the life expetancy there is only 48 years, ranking it 203 out 225 nations. This isn't aided by the lack of a sustainable agricultural system that is wholly dependent on each year's rainfall.
A few successes in a pure lawless state are praiseworthy, but they do not mean that failures have not occured or that the people are better off without laws.
I'm pointing out that free markets can't solve the problem. You're pointing out that free markets didn't create the problem. You're right, but you haven't disproved what I said with that. You've just played the old card of "your side was wrong too."
Now, for the audience, please explain how a free market can solve this problem now that it's been created if given a chance. We don't live in blank slate world where the free market could've somehow avoided the problem of physical exclusivity in the first place, so you're going to have to explain how it can fix the world we do have.
Don't forget to account for the difference in costs between the established monopoly and free market competitors in gaining new customers (assuming of course that the monopoly pursues its rational self-interest and denies the competitors access to its infrastructure).
Remember. On a free market you can only be screwed over if you agree to be screwed over. Under government regulation you will be screwed over everytime 51% of the voters wants you to be.
So, if there's only one cable/phone/internet company, one water company, one gas company, and one water company, I guess that I won't be screwed on costs when all those nice guy competitors build their own parallel infrastructures to reach me.
Face it, free markets only work in certain situations. These situations are the majority of cases, but not all.
Because you know when the gov't gets involved... It can't get screwed up...
That's completely wrong. Everybody knows that it's when governments aren't involved that things can't get screwed up.
Thanks for your post. I was not aware of the finer details of why antibiotics were used. It almost certainly has to contribute to antibiotic resistant bacteria, though, for the same reasons that humans taking antibiotics cause it. In addition, you have to worry about run-off from the animal wastes (antibiotics aren't usually completely consumed in the body).
I guess this is yet another reason to prefer grass-fed beef.
The rules for dairy cattle and beef cattle are very different. Most people aren't aware of the ban on antibiotics for dairy cattle or that it goes so far that companies that sell milk can't advertise the lack of antibiotics as a feature since everyone else has to do it too.
Beef cattle are very different. Farmers use antibiotics in them because it causes them to grow larger. This is widely considered to be a potential problem for helping to spread immunity to bacteria that can infect humans, but there aren't any good studies proving it one way or another that I'm aware of. If any studies did show up, expect a hard industry push for studies to "disprove" it and hard lobbying to stop any bills to restrict the practice.
For those who are willing to pay, organic beef does not have this problem. Most beef, though, does possess this problem.
Another problem for profitability is the fact that once a new antibiotic is discovered, doctors will horde the thing and make sure to only use it when everything else fails to prolong the time until resistance becomes common.
This is honestly why government funding is needed. There's very little free market incentive to spend gobs of money on a product that people will use as little as possible.
Nice nick, by the way -- very relevant.
I'm sorry that no one got what you were asking for, and I wish that I could help, but I'm in a similar boat with no paddle. Personally, I don't use aliases very much, but I've grown to hate ksh88 and miss my bash and tcsh so very much. (I want my command substitution and '!!' back!)
On the other hand, I have leared to stop worrying and love the vi mode.
There are two scenarios that I can think of off the top of my head could prevent him from doing so:
/home is deliberately kept free of space or he's not given an actual home directory to prevent user customization and all he has is the shared shell resource scripts in /etc.
1) He doesn't have permission to modify his own user account. Unlikely, but possible -- especially if
2) He's got to use several shared administrative accounts (like root or various accounts for specific services), or the account he has to use is shared with production processes that might be impacted by adding aliases willy-nilly without knowledge of the whole of all command runs by the system. That's bad security, but it's probably not his design.
I have to deal with both of these problems at my job. I don't have an actual home directory on most of our test servers due to a lazy IT department and immense bureaucratic red tape in getting it fixed, so I'm stuck using the main production user on the test box, and I can't customize it. In actual production, no one is allowed to use this particular ID for accountability purposes, but on a different system we all have to use a different shared production ID which hasn't been obsoleted to do anything. Both of these scenarios are irritatingly bad and beyond my ability to do much about.
At any rate, it's safe to assume from his description that he doesn't have permission to do what you suggested. Reread the article text. He's a "helpdesk jockey" without "the weight to convince management to deploy alias scripts to all of the servers [he supports]." The requirements presented explictly state that your solution is not allowed.
Sorry, try again. The real world of business sometimes sucks in ways that common sense suggests it wouldn't.
The guy's not too stupid to figure out how to copy his aliases everywhere. He doesn't have permission to do so. That why both he and I both said so (including in the text you quoted).
I am all too familiar with his conundrum, especially when it comes to being forced to work with inferior tools. I work in an environment where I am responsible for keeping production systems running, and I don't have admin install privileges. Even our admins don't have the political power to change things without serious peer-review and management approval. This is the way and enterprise-level IT organization has to work. Making changes in production without verification and authorization can result in revenue loss or loss of data that you may one day be required by court to cough up.
7) Imagine doing this 8-9 times every single day.
8) Sob yourself to sleep after tearing out all hair.
I've never read Bone, so to me the real news is that there's another Sam & Max sequel in the works after LucasArts put an axe in the back of the last one. Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go dancing around in circles giggling and making a fool of myself.
It's a good thing most of my coworkers have gone home.
Okay, I get it now. Here's what the guy wants:
He has no power to install his favored command aliases on all of the machine he has to administrate. He wants to have an SSH client (that he can run on Windows to connect to the Linux machines) that will interpret what he types and substitute aliases so that he doesn't have to set up his favored commands every time he logs into a system.
I don't know if you can set an SSH session into a line-based instead of keystroke-based communication mode. By default, it sends messages to the remote server after every keystroke and not after enter is hit at the end of a line -- otherwise using curses-based applications would really, really hurt as would using tab-completion, vi mode, and other advanced shell features. If this can't be done, then a client couldn't interpret your commands before you send them.
I don't forsee anyone providing this functionality because the demand is so low. This is the kind of thing that the remote end is expected to handle for you.
I'm not sure this really matters immediately. After all, if California can force automakers to improve their emissions nationwide, China can certainly force companies to make interoperable networks between their two systems. It will raise costs of doing business with China, but China's forte is not in internet-connectivity and IT like India but in manufacturing. This will slightly raise logistics costs between countries and will mean an increased cost of having an international net presence.
.com and .net TLDs mean that it's very likely that Chinese ISPs will simply respect conflicting and blocked URLs for those sites from the Chinese TLD. Furthermore, there's always been a fear by some governments that the US will use its control of the domain root as a stick in diplomacy. This eleminates that.
The long-term effects, of course, is more central government control of the internet by China. This is the real issue. China doesn't really like its citizens having easy access to Western sites, and control over the
Try learning English pluralization rules.
Repeat after me: Volcanoes, Potatoes, Heroes, Typoes
Ignorance of this rule is why Dan Quayle thought potato ended with an E.
Geez, if you wanted to nitpick my spelling and grammar, you should've gone after my first post in this thread which is just shamefully riddled with mistakes.
Is anyone else here reminded of the bad old days at Apple before Jobs returned to the helm when they had some blue bazillion Performa models, and you couldn't really figure out which one did what you wanted? Yeah, I remember those days when inventory overstocks almost put the company out of business.
I think this is going to turn out to be MS shooting themselves in the foot. This sort of "pay another 20% for this next feature" nonsense may fly in the business world, but it's going to cause massive confusion in the mass market and is going to leave a lot of end users feeling burned and cheated (especially when you combine the high system requirements and new DRM lock-outs of everything).
Wait, so your major objection is not that they might be invading our privacy but that they aren't paying money to the rightful property owners of all that data? Yeesh. I don't think I've seen such a frightenly clear picture of the belief that property rights are the most important rights.
Okay, look at it this way, then. The government wants to acquire data to bolster support for a law to prevent Americans from spending their money on whatever goods the free market wishes to provide them. Would you still be happy if they paid for said data for the purposes of regulating free markets?
Yet you post anonymously while enjoying your Constitutionally granted privileges of free political speech. So what do you have to hide? What retribution do you fear?
Then again, I don't expect consistent reasoning from someone who believes that men who seek out power should be safe from criticism by those they hold power over. You either have no appreciation of history or human nature, or you are trolling.