Any idea how long that price and shipping deal are going to be good for?
I don't normally go out and buy coffee-table type books for myself, but they make really good entries on a gift list. If that offer from Ars is going to be good for a while, I'll definitely keep it in mind, the next time I get someone bugging me through an intermediary that they want to know what I'd like as a gift.
Spamgourmet is your solution for sign-up email addresses.
You go to their site once, and give them your real email address, and create a handle. Then, you can go to web sites and create addresses of the form [someword].[handle]@spamgourmet.com where [someword] is any character string you want, generally something that has to do with the site you're signing up for. The address will work for a set number of messages, and then disable itself, eating anything that's sent. (By 'eating' it means deleted without any confirmation or response.)
You can control the number of emails that the address will work for (if you want to override the default that you can set), by making an address of the form [someword].[integer].[handle]@spamgourmet.com, where the integer can be anything from 1 to 20, I think.
They also have some advanced features you can use, like specifying particular senders that are OK globally (so messages from them don't count against the number-before-kill on an address), either by address or domain name, or "exclusive senders" who are only OK when they send to a particular address. The latter feature is really good for mailing lists.
And the best part is that they have an absolute slew of domain names. If a site won't let you register with a "spamgourmet.com" address, you can just use one of their many other domains with the same address. They own some pretty innocuous-seeming ones, like "xoxy.net", so if you're smart about constructing the address, it's very hard for anyone to tell that you're using a one-shot addy.
I've been using them for a few years now, and the volume of spam they've saved me from is just staggering. Every once in a while I log in and look at the number of "eaten" messages... on some addresses, there are literally tens of thousands of spam messages that have been blocked.
There one of a select number of free services that I would pay money for, but (at least last time I checked) they seem to have sufficient funding so that they're not even soliciting donations. Truly a remarkable service.
Adblock Plus "subscribes" to various blocklists, which at least last time I checked, does not include Filterset.G (due to licensing problems -- the maintainer of Filterset.G doesn't allow redistribution).
ABP's blocklists are similar to Filterset.G and I think in time, the 'real' Filterset.G will fade from significance. Using ABP's auto-updated blocklists, I basically don't see any ads at all, except every once in a while on a foreign page (I subscribe, obviously, to the English-language block lists, which don't target foreign servers as heavily).
So anyway, the short version is, there's no reason to care about Filterset.G if you have Adblock Plus (which is what you should have if you want adblocking).
More significant, IMO, than the lack of Quicksilver, is the lack of Adium.
Seriously -- iChat AV? Who do they think they're kidding? iChat is only useful if all of your contacts are using either AIM or Jabber, and that means it's a nonstarter if you have many contacts outside the U.S., where AIM is a distant second or third (usually to MSN Messenger). Sure, if I could, I'd get them to all ditch MSN and move to a protocol that's not owned by the Great Satan, but that's just not an option in most cases.
The only thing iChat offers over Adium is video and audio chat, and to most people, I think those are mostly eye-candy features rather than something they'll use every day, particularly since they really tax your hardware, software, and internet connection. I can only think of a few people that I would be able to conduct video chat with, if I wanted to. And this is out of the literally hundreds of people across the four major (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google) IM networks that I communicate with.
The 'killer feature' of instant messaging isn't video or audio. If people want those, they'll use a purpose-built application that does the job better than an IM client will -- c.f. the success of Skype. The key feature is telepresence and quick, effortless communication. It's being able to glance at a Buddy List and see whether someone on the other side of the planet is there at their desk, or if they're away, and sending them a quick message.
The value provided by an IM application (really, any communications application), is directly related to how many people it lets you interact with. In this, Adium kicks the bejeezus out of iChat.
I think you're sort of proving the GP's point, in a way.
Most Windows users don't understand how to edit the Registry, or how to fix any Windows problems that aren't trivially solvable with GUI tools.
Because of this, they just reinstall Windows constantly. If the Registry gets fscked, they "fix" it by waiting for the computer to become unusable, and then they hose the whole thing and reinstall. Or, if they're like a lot of consumers, they don't have any media to reinstall from, so they just buy a new PC.
You need to be able to use a command-line and edit files, to be an effective Windows admin... but most people aren't. They're horrible admins, and they'll be horrible regardless of what OS they use. It's because, ultimately, they don't care how the computer works, and their eyes glaze over if you try to tell them.
Reformatting is going to be the solution of choice for the dominant consumer PC platform, regardless of who it's from. If Apple had 90 pct of the desktop market, people would do the same thing. Why? Because it's the only solution you can communicate to an "average user" before their eyes glaze and they shut off.
Apologies in advance to any Utahans that I offend here... but my understanding, based on a lot of anecdotal evidence, is that Utah is (or at least, the people in power perceive it to be) seriously hurting for business, and are trying very hard to appear pro-business and inviting. They've looked on and seen the Silicon Valley boom in CA, and then the Pacific Northwest boom in Washington, and now all the growth in Texas led by Dell... and realistic or not, they'd really like to be the next Place To Be. (Well, wouldn't we all.)
I don't think that would lead to tremendously lax enforcement, but I do think it might cause them to be a little more open to business plans that might attract skepticism in more traditional tech enclaves.
When Darl announced a few months (maybe more like a year) ago that SCO was going to get involved in some sort of cellular/direct-marketing/pyramid-scheme, they had the mayor (I think it was the mayor) of whatever city in Utah they're located in, giving all sorts of rah-rah quotes in the press release. When you can get local government to promote a completely vaporous, not to mention insane, product, which is coming from a company that's done literally NOTHING productive lately, and is the laughingstock of its entire field... you know they're desperate for business.
I'm with you on the man pages. I've never really been clear on what the overriding philosophy is behind them, but they're not terribly useful.
IMO, it would be better to view them as a "quick reference guide" rather than in-depth, conceptual technical documentation. Every page ought to begin, below the syntax breakdown, with some examples of common tasks that a user might want to perform with that command, and how to do it. More theoretical or conceptual explanations should go further down, or into a separate file (maybe referenced under 'Further reading' or something).
Aside from the fact that the examples are buried way too far down in the article, I've always thought that the manpage for rsync was pretty good -- it has a lot of examples, as well as a description of all the flags. That could easily be a model for other commands.
But I've really started relying on manpages less and less as of late, and just using Google more and more; if I have a problem where I once might have switched terminals and looked at the manpage, now I just Google the command and some keywords relating to what I'm trying to do, and find somebody's HOWTO or a forum posting about it. Not ideal, but it's more useful than much of the inbuilt documentation.
Amen to that. Alas, Americans think mass transit is evil.
Here's the thing with mass transit. I've lived in a variety of areas, from honestly rural (and I don't mean exurban, I mean rural), to highrise ferret cages, and most of the opposition to mass transit is in the suburbs or low-density urban areas.
The objection is pretty simple: if you bring mass transit into an area, it decreases the cost of living, because it no longer means you need to own a car. That means more people, particularly low-income people who might consume more services than they pay in (local) taxes, and thus it's a Bad Thing. There's also a lot of latent racism tied up in it, too, particularly if you have predominantly white suburbs lying outside urban areas with substantial non-white populations. But in my experience the racial influence is somewhat overstated; I'd say the single biggest factor that really scares suburbanites is that public transport will bring out young, low-income families who will overtax the public school systems (which as anyone who's lived in one of these places can attest to, are the centers of political and social power). Any proposal that might somehow negatively impact schools is a No-Go.
I've seen suburban and exurban 'bedroom communities' fight absolutely tooth and nail to keep out bus services, in particular. (Rail services seem to engender less opposition -- perhaps because you generally still need a car in order to get to the train station, so therefore it's less offensive.) Until you've seen one of these disputes in person, it's tough to appreciate the tenacity with which people will fight what seems at first glance to be a common-sense, win-win proposal. I've seen people pitch absolutely brilliant transportation schemes at local town council meetings, without realizing the minefield they were walking into, and that they were doomed from the beginning by factors essentially outside their control.
How are you supposed to pay the rent if you get laid off your job?
How would this be any different if you were living in employee-owned apartments versus your own, rented from a leasing agency apartment?
If you get laid off and have no income, you're screwed once you burn through your savings: that's true whether you're renting from your boss, from somebody else, or from a bank (via a mortgage).
Bottom line: if you lose your job, unless you like the idea of living in a refrigerator box, you'd better get a new one quick, and if you can't get a new one where you are, it's time to toss your crap into a U-Haul and move to someplace with better prospects or lower costs.
Some of the other respondents have gotten pretty close, I think, but I just wanted to add my thoughts on the train business.
The reason the trains running on time thing is so important, is because it's a hard problem. Like, really terrifically hard. If you can have a national railroad, in a country of significant size, run predictably on time, that's a clear demonstration that you Have Your Shit Together. It means you can manage the logistics of having enough trains and personnel to take up the slack if something happens to one train, plus you have the overseeing bureaucracy to coordinate it all from the top down. And when a country Has Its Shit Together, it is probably also a force to be reckoned with, economically and militarily. It's a sign, in other words, that as a nation, you have made it to the big leagues.
Or at least it was, in the early 20th century. Now, I'm not sure if people would see it as being quite as impressive now as it once was, because it's not as clear that it's quite so hard a problem. Prior to computers, it probably seemed pretty amazing to pick up a timetable (presumably printed a few weeks in advance), and know, with absolute certainty, that a train would actually show up at the platform at the time that was written on the sheet. It implied a vast amount of coordination in order to do that, which any educated person could appreciate. Today, I think it's still impressive, but there are other things that a modern visitor is going to look for in a nation and use as a comparison bar, in deciding whether they're in someplace Civilized or not. (Such as, can I use my Amex here / get Internet service / distance from a major airport / etc.)
For various historical reasons, railroads in the United States never were the source of the same nationalistic pride that they were (and to a limited extent still are) in Europe. If a train ran on time, it was less a reflection of the nation and/or its underlying work ethic, than of the company running it. I suspect at the height of the railroad wars that there was intense competition to keep trains running on time, particularly high-profile ones, simply as a matter of corporate pride and as an advertising advantage. But it wasn't really a reflection of the nation or the government in power at the time, except in an indirect sense.
As a sidenote, the last time I was in Germany, I noted that at least in the bigger train stations, they still had clocks on the platforms that are synchronized together down to the second, which even to a modern geek strikes me as pretty cool. I don't know how they work, but they must all be like stepper motors, slaved together. All the hands, including the second hand, "tick" at the same time. Struck me as a little OCD, but in a good way. (And there do seem to be different standards within the rail systems in Europe on tardiness. I used to be able to haul ass and predictably make 2-minute connections on DB, but when I tried that coming in from Belgium, I missed the connection by 10 seconds and was left, in a crowd of 30 or 40 other people, watching the German train pull out without waiting. They don't mess around.)
I actually believe that the majority of the population in the UK is more or less centre right. A lot of people are embarrassed by this (as it is sooo unfashionable), so they would never even admit it to themselves, let alone others, so they have tacitly allowed centre right government for almost 30 years. I know way too many people who claim to be left leaning but when they say what they actually believe in it sounds like a Conservative party manifesto. If the population wasn't mostly centre right then somebody would have stepped into the vacuum. The LibDems try to fill that void, but they only have fairly minor success - they don't really have much in the way of actual policy, their success mostly rests on people's total disgust of the main parties behaviour as opposed to any strong political beliefs.
FWIW, as an American who has spent a substantial amount of time in GB, this seems to have the ring of truth to it. Now, it's possible that people I talked to (and I didn't normally make a point of talking politics, particularly of late), knowing that I was an American, held a more conservative line when with me than they really believed, but on multiple occasions, I'd talk with people in a pub and hear a lot of things that sounded basically moderate/conservative (in the U.S., I'd say they'd fall into that vague category of 'socially liberal but economically slightly conservative' -- e.g., annoyed at government intrusiveness and waste, annoyed at high taxes, annoyed at redistributive programs, bitching about the NHS), but then see the same people later on holding much more Liberal positions in public. So there definitely seems to be some, as you put it, taboos about being conservative or holding conservative opinions, that keep people from voicing them in public.
I don't think this is by any means a British phenomenon; there are definitely parts of the U.S. where being an "out" Republican is social suicide, but where Republicans have been successfully elected, meaning that more than a few people are talking one thing at cocktail parties and pulling a very different lever in the voting booth.
I've never done any research in this vein, but it strikes me as probably being true historically as well; it's often socially advantageous to be seen as avant garde, "progressive," or "forward thinking" in public, but in the privacy of their own minds and consequently in the voting booth, people tend to be much more cautious and thus conservative. Perhaps it's because, knowing why they act the way they do, they have to wonder who's really a true believer, and who else is just putting on the beret in order to get laid.
I greatly admire The Something Must be Done philosophy. It suggests a degree of discipline that pushes society as a whole to improve itself, act on its problems and not try to excuse itself as a victim of circumstances. It shows people value personal responsibility and back their feelings with real actions. And while in some aspects this may be an idealization, it shows a set of values which are lost on the general Brazilian culture.
Very interesting.
As an American, I see that particular facet of our culture more as a sign of our irrationality than anything else, although I guess that a total absence of any desire to change culture or civilization for the better would be if anything more depressing.
As usual, there is a happy medium in there somewhere, which I think in the U.S. we generally overshoot. As someone said here on Slashdot, the problem with the "Something Must Be Done" philosophy, is that it lends itself too easily to "this is something, therefore, it must be done." People will do things, simply for the sake of doing them, even if they're not productive (or counter-productive). They are so preoccupied with doing that they don't think about the long term effects, or even the efficacy, of what's being done. It's all about looking busy and covering your ass.
Obviously it's not good if hundreds of people get food poisoning at a restaurant, and everyone who's in a position to do something about it just shrugs and says "hey, that's life." But just as obviously, it ought to be clear that it's counterproductive to have a reaction that's disconnected either logically or in scope, with the original event. And too often, that's what we do here. We seem to go after things that have the appearance or 'gut feeling' of being helpful, but without really thinking about them too hard.
Somewhere between catatonia (not giving a shit) and mania (caring too much, to the point where there's not time to think about what should really be done), there's got to be a better way.
If I were Venezuelan, the whole Chavez thing would really have me pretty frightened. Admittedly, Chavez isn't Hitler -- frankly, I don't think he's that talented, and Venezuela isn't anything like the industrial power that Germany was in the '30s, for starters -- but it's pretty hard not to start drawing comparisons when he starts getting "enabling" laws passed by a rubberstamp legislature, just like, well, you know who. The rhetoric is a bit different, but they're both going after the same support base (and largely succeeding) by demonizing outsiders. Actually, Chavez has something of an easier time than the NSDAP did, because while the Nazis were in the unenviable position of having to distinguish themselves both from more capitalist countries like the U.K. and U.S., they also had to differentiate themselves from Soviet-style socialism and communism. Chavez doesn't; by positioning himself on the left wing, he can simply blame everyone right of him, without having to find any middle ground.
I hope anyone with any brains at all has seen the writing on the wall and headed for the border, because I think it's going to get a lot worse there before it gets better.
Racism, in large part, is what allowed the citizenry's anger about 9/11 to be directed against a completely different group of people than were probably responsible for the attack: a whole lot of people just see "Arabs" as interchangeable; this allowed the Afghanistan/Iraq bait-and-switch to go over, where Afghanistan/France or Afghanistan/North-Korea probably would not have.
U.S. politics is more than the maneuverings of the capitalist aristocracy; at any given time, there are people who are set to benefit from conflict, but rarely are they actually in a position to manufacture one. It is the people (as well as random, chance events) who shift power from one faction to another, and more or less allow things to go forward.
It's obvious why some people wanted the Iraq war, and you're right on target when you look at the trillions of dollars that's been and is currently being transferred from the public coffers to the private sector, and also the budget money (and thus, power) that's been sloshed to and from various governmental agencies. But it's important to remember that were it not for the public desire to have a war in the first place, the war could not have happened -- if the military-industrial-political complex could manufacture a war whenever it wished (taking on premise that war is profitable for them), they would just have one perpetually. That they didn't have one until after 9/11 is clear evidence that it was the shift in public opinion, that allowed them to go forward.
The motives driving the M-I-P complex are fairly obvious and thus uninteresting (personal profit of one sort or another, and uninteresting because there have always been and will always be people in a position to profit from wars), but the ones driving the shift in public opinion which handed power to those who could profit from a war are fairly complex. It involves a lot of factors that are part of the American public's psyche but that we as a general rule prefer not to acknowledge or admit, for example, rampant racism, xenophobia, and general bloodthirstiness, as well as the simple fact that America is built on an extremely violent culture, and it was unacceptable not to have had 9/11 happen and not unleash our vast military machine and watch it destroy somebody, somewhere.
The Iraq war was a sort of geopolitical dog-kicking or wall-punching; failing to get the wasp that actually stung us, as a country we vented our frustrations and anger on the next convenient target: Iraq, which had gotten to us in the past and was a source of continual annoyance. Although momentarily satisfying (as evidenced by the high opinion of the war during its opening stages), once completed, we realized the sheer pointlessness of it.
Looking at the defense contractors or 'Beltway insiders' who engineered the war is only interesting as a sort of academic footnote to the war, because there will always be people around ready to turn the country in that direction, if the country allows it. The way our government works is that far from being a unified force, it's a mess of factions, each trying to drag the country in one direction or another. It is the people, directly and indirectly, who empower or chastise various factions, and allow the nation to slide one way or the other. However, most Americans would rather not confront the real reasons for war, because doing so would involve too much self-discovery of a rather unpleasant nature, so instead, it is more convenient to blame the particular faction that was given power at the time.
Seems like it depends on the question. Someone with a PhD in a field is likely to have a very particular opinion; if you ask them about something in their field, they're likely to give you an answer that represents their point of view, relative to whatever the big debates are within that field.
For example, if you start asking a physicist who's into string theory about gravity, even basic stuff, they may give you answers that seem at first glance to be a little off, because it might be that they're building a case for their pet theory, further down the line of inquiry. I have seen people do this all the time. They won't lie, or be factually incorrect, but they'll have so much invested in a field and in a certain point of view, that it's very difficult for them to give a fair overview of the topic.
People take "their" disciplines very personally, and while sometimes that focus and commitment can be an asset (it usually is), in writing a general overview article for something like Wikipedia, it can sometimes be useful to get the words of experts, filtered through people who don't have any real interest in one side of the argument or another.
I'm not disagreeing with you (I don't really know anything about Wales, so I'm in no position to), however, while Wikipedia as an organization might be doomed, there's nothing that says that the content can't be scraped from it and used to seed some new project down the road.
Has anyone ever managed to get a full database dump of WP? Not just of the articles as they are right now -- although that would be better than nothing -- but the whole thing, including all the edit histories and talk pages and stuff? It's all GFDL, so there's nothing stopping someone from taking it and restarting the project elsewhere, if WP collapsed under its own weight.
The problem that I see, based on several other OSS/"community" projects that I've watched implode, is that generally when things start to go really badly for the people in control, eventually someone will decide to try and pull a scorched earth and will start destroying or deleting content. Sometimes this has been truly disastrous; they'll delete the only copy of the source, or the forum's database, or something like that, and attempt to hold it hostage, and sometimes in the scuffle things really do get deleted forever.
So if WP as an organization looks like it's going downhill, I wonder if there's some way that other, external, interested parties could get in there and make sure that the content -- all of it -- is protected and doesn't get destroyed during the inevitable Terminal Pissing Contest.
I'm aware of that -- I should have been more clear. I was stating something more obvious: the day doesn't actually get magically "longer" as a result of Daylight Savings Time. There's still the same number of minutes of daylight on a particular day in the year, regardless of whether you bump the clocks backwards or forwards an hour. It's all just a mind game to get people up earlier, and thus let them make use of more daylight, so that the day seems longer. But the day is the same length whether you're awake or not, obviously.
I wasn't implying that the days don't get shorter in the winter -- they do (and that's kind of why we have a winter to begin with). However, what I'm not clear on, is whether the daylight actually shifts earlier and later in the day, in addition to becoming longer and shorter (i.e., does the "median daylight time" or 'middle of the day' actually move, or does it grow shorter and longer at both ends equally?). If it the 'middle of the day' doesn't move significantly, then it seems like we could dispense with the clock-setting and just move the TZs earlier.
It's not a war for oil, exactly. It is a war that is partly about control of oil producing regions by certain powerful interests in the US. It is mostly about money for the contractors in our newly privatized military. Revenge is just a story used to whip the masses into a frenzy.
It's an academic argument, I suppose, but I think you're underestimating the role of the good old Mob in politics; the "defense sector" (or 'military-industrial complex' or whatever you want to call it) is always ready and looking for a war, and will take one any way it can get one. It's the hoi polloi who swing things one way or the other. If it were trivial to manipulate the masses, then they'd be doing it all the time and we'd be constantly at war. That we haven't been, suggests that getting the sheeple to do one's bidding is not trivial, or at least not as trivial as it might seem at first glance.
The hawks and the defense sector have been waiting for a war ever since the end of the first Big Iraq Spat; they weren't able to figure out a way of engineering it, until after 9/11, when the Mob was suddenly keen on the idea of anything that involved bombing Arabs. Had it not been for the great undercurrent of anger and desire to see stuff get blown up on CNN, the war would never have happened (just like it never happened in any of the preceding years).
Except that it seems to be closed-source and proprietary, yeah. But if you can live with that, it's a very different question, because then you lose much of the motivation (besides upfront cost) for using OpenOffice/StarOffice instead of MS in the first place.
I've never really understood why they didn't just make DST permanent. In other words, get rid of the whole spring-forward/fall-back business, and just move the time zones in the U.S. up an hour, if that would give us more daylight in the evenings, when apparently we want it.
It's all just a psychological game, anyway; the actual amount of daylight obviously never changes, it's just that people really hate having to get up before their clock says they should, and thus it's necessary to fudge the clocks so that people get up earlier, and don't waste daylight and end up having it dark in their (clock-proscribed) "evening."
If we want it to show something different on the lock when the big warm ball starts to rise in the morning, which is apparently what we want, I don't get why we don't just push all the U.S. time zones forward an hour and leave them there, and get rid of this fall/spring switching.
Honestly -- lay off the Kool Aid. Take a look at the amount spent on the Iraq war sometime. It's a vast sum; easily enough to have just bought Saddam's cooperation (and let's face it, he was desperate for friends anyway) and all the oil under Iraq.
If you're going to come up with conspiracy theories, at least make them plausible. The "OMG it's blood for oil BLOOD FOR OIL" thing just doesn't fly. If oil had been the goal, it could have just been purchased. It's not like the U.S. has a ethical problem with funding repressive dictators when it suits us.
I'm not really justifying the war per se, but you're going to have to look a little harder if you want to find its root causes. As usual, it's not something that can be rendered down to a three-word slogan. I think in large part, it had to do with the American populace wanting their government to kick the living shit out of some brown-skinned somebody's (and the government only too happy to oblige -- war being a far easier condition to manage than peace), and when the whole thing in Afghanistan didn't look like it was going to go anywhere satisfying in a hurry, Iraq was a convenient target for our collective spleen-venting: it was big, flat, filled with people we either didn't like or didn't care about, and we had good maps from the last time we'd taken a stroll through. Kind of a no-brainer.
And if you told them to surrender their mouse pads and screen cleaner, doubtless they'd hide those and drag them back out when you weren't looking, too.
Do SIM locked T-Mobile US phones work with a T-Mobile UK SIM card (and vice-versa)?
I don't think so; but one of the other benefits of T-Mobile is that they will unlock your phone on request, and I think they will do so even if you're not off contract, just as long as you've paid your bill and are in good standing for six months or so. I'm not sure because I was month-to-month by the time I had them unlock mine, but it was no big deal. They sent me an email with the instructions on how to do it, which involved pressing some buttons and entering a code (which I think is somehow derived from the phone's EIN, so I'm surprised that nobody has reverse-engineered it yet); after that, the phone is totally unlocked and will work with anyone's SIM.
Other than having the same name and having the same parent company, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of cooperation between T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile UK or Europe. For instance, if I take my T-Mobile cell to Europe and don't get a new SIM, I get charged some exorbitant "global roaming" rate (which incidentally you have to call up TM and activate -- so why wouldn't you just get the phone unlocked?), that's far in excess of what I'd get charged if I just bought a T-Mobile Europe SIM.
While there might be some sort of "forking" as a result of this, and I also consider myself a fan of the free-culture movement, I'm not sure that I think it's even close to acceptable to basically write off our entire culture prior to today. Because that's pretty much what it would come down to: the "public domain" as we know it would disappear, probably bought up at great cost by people who wanted to horde it and dole it out as 'broadcasts.' Just think: if you could round up all the extant copies of something, no matter how old, you'd own that work -- forever. Disney and Time Warner would be paying people to steal books out of libraries and burn them, just to keep the monopoly on old folk tales.
You'd basically be starting everything off from a blank slate, or what little of our culture are in widely-distributed repositories that can't be destroyed by people with vast amounts of treasure to spend on it, and I don't think that's exactly a bright idea. Culture builds on what comes before it; if you have to "reboot" the whole thing under Creative Commons licenses, that's a whole lot of development to just throw away.
Plus, what makes you think that they won't just eliminate the whole free culture movement via politics and technology? All you'd need to do was legislate a system into being that prevented "display devices" (TVs, computer monitors, etc.) from playing anything that wasn't encrypted -- to prevent piracy and porn here in the U.S.; "hate speech" in Europe, naturally -- and suddenly you'd just not be able to view anything that didn't come from a major studio. Or they'd get Comcast and the telcos on board, and refuse to push any video content over the networks that wasn't authorized (and they'd just block end-to-end encrypted traffic, in favor of schemes that involve a centralized peer to snoop -- easier for the feds to wiretap that way anyway): suddenly 'free culture' is a lot of underground newspapers and tape swapping, not too impressive in the days when "legit" movies will be available at the push of a button.
Power breeds more power; if we allow the media companies to stomp out public domain, that will only give them more, and from there, it will put them in a position to consolidate and continue to move forward. To me, that whole future looks pretty grim.
Slashdot Mirror
Did they really test these for 5 million hours or are they just pulling the number out of their ass?
Well, given that 5 million hours is equal to 570.39 years, I'm going to guess that no, they didn't actually test them for that long.
Any idea how long that price and shipping deal are going to be good for?
I don't normally go out and buy coffee-table type books for myself, but they make really good entries on a gift list. If that offer from Ars is going to be good for a while, I'll definitely keep it in mind, the next time I get someone bugging me through an intermediary that they want to know what I'd like as a gift.
Spamgourmet is your solution for sign-up email addresses.
... on some addresses, there are literally tens of thousands of spam messages that have been blocked.
You go to their site once, and give them your real email address, and create a handle. Then, you can go to web sites and create addresses of the form [someword].[handle]@spamgourmet.com where [someword] is any character string you want, generally something that has to do with the site you're signing up for. The address will work for a set number of messages, and then disable itself, eating anything that's sent. (By 'eating' it means deleted without any confirmation or response.)
You can control the number of emails that the address will work for (if you want to override the default that you can set), by making an address of the form [someword].[integer].[handle]@spamgourmet.com, where the integer can be anything from 1 to 20, I think.
They also have some advanced features you can use, like specifying particular senders that are OK globally (so messages from them don't count against the number-before-kill on an address), either by address or domain name, or "exclusive senders" who are only OK when they send to a particular address. The latter feature is really good for mailing lists.
And the best part is that they have an absolute slew of domain names. If a site won't let you register with a "spamgourmet.com" address, you can just use one of their many other domains with the same address. They own some pretty innocuous-seeming ones, like "xoxy.net", so if you're smart about constructing the address, it's very hard for anyone to tell that you're using a one-shot addy.
I've been using them for a few years now, and the volume of spam they've saved me from is just staggering. Every once in a while I log in and look at the number of "eaten" messages
There one of a select number of free services that I would pay money for, but (at least last time I checked) they seem to have sufficient funding so that they're not even soliciting donations. Truly a remarkable service.
Adblock Plus "subscribes" to various blocklists, which at least last time I checked, does not include Filterset.G (due to licensing problems -- the maintainer of Filterset.G doesn't allow redistribution).
ABP's blocklists are similar to Filterset.G and I think in time, the 'real' Filterset.G will fade from significance. Using ABP's auto-updated blocklists, I basically don't see any ads at all, except every once in a while on a foreign page (I subscribe, obviously, to the English-language block lists, which don't target foreign servers as heavily).
So anyway, the short version is, there's no reason to care about Filterset.G if you have Adblock Plus (which is what you should have if you want adblocking).
More significant, IMO, than the lack of Quicksilver, is the lack of Adium.
Seriously -- iChat AV? Who do they think they're kidding? iChat is only useful if all of your contacts are using either AIM or Jabber, and that means it's a nonstarter if you have many contacts outside the U.S., where AIM is a distant second or third (usually to MSN Messenger). Sure, if I could, I'd get them to all ditch MSN and move to a protocol that's not owned by the Great Satan, but that's just not an option in most cases.
The only thing iChat offers over Adium is video and audio chat, and to most people, I think those are mostly eye-candy features rather than something they'll use every day, particularly since they really tax your hardware, software, and internet connection. I can only think of a few people that I would be able to conduct video chat with, if I wanted to. And this is out of the literally hundreds of people across the four major (AIM, MSN, Yahoo, Google) IM networks that I communicate with.
The 'killer feature' of instant messaging isn't video or audio. If people want those, they'll use a purpose-built application that does the job better than an IM client will -- c.f. the success of Skype. The key feature is telepresence and quick, effortless communication. It's being able to glance at a Buddy List and see whether someone on the other side of the planet is there at their desk, or if they're away, and sending them a quick message.
The value provided by an IM application (really, any communications application), is directly related to how many people it lets you interact with. In this, Adium kicks the bejeezus out of iChat.
I think you're sort of proving the GP's point, in a way.
... but most people aren't. They're horrible admins, and they'll be horrible regardless of what OS they use. It's because, ultimately, they don't care how the computer works, and their eyes glaze over if you try to tell them.
Most Windows users don't understand how to edit the Registry, or how to fix any Windows problems that aren't trivially solvable with GUI tools.
Because of this, they just reinstall Windows constantly. If the Registry gets fscked, they "fix" it by waiting for the computer to become unusable, and then they hose the whole thing and reinstall. Or, if they're like a lot of consumers, they don't have any media to reinstall from, so they just buy a new PC.
You need to be able to use a command-line and edit files, to be an effective Windows admin
Reformatting is going to be the solution of choice for the dominant consumer PC platform, regardless of who it's from. If Apple had 90 pct of the desktop market, people would do the same thing. Why? Because it's the only solution you can communicate to an "average user" before their eyes glaze and they shut off.
Apologies in advance to any Utahans that I offend here ... but my understanding, based on a lot of anecdotal evidence, is that Utah is (or at least, the people in power perceive it to be) seriously hurting for business, and are trying very hard to appear pro-business and inviting. They've looked on and seen the Silicon Valley boom in CA, and then the Pacific Northwest boom in Washington, and now all the growth in Texas led by Dell ... and realistic or not, they'd really like to be the next Place To Be. (Well, wouldn't we all.)
... you know they're desperate for business.
I don't think that would lead to tremendously lax enforcement, but I do think it might cause them to be a little more open to business plans that might attract skepticism in more traditional tech enclaves.
When Darl announced a few months (maybe more like a year) ago that SCO was going to get involved in some sort of cellular/direct-marketing/pyramid-scheme, they had the mayor (I think it was the mayor) of whatever city in Utah they're located in, giving all sorts of rah-rah quotes in the press release. When you can get local government to promote a completely vaporous, not to mention insane, product, which is coming from a company that's done literally NOTHING productive lately, and is the laughingstock of its entire field
I'm with you on the man pages. I've never really been clear on what the overriding philosophy is behind them, but they're not terribly useful.
IMO, it would be better to view them as a "quick reference guide" rather than in-depth, conceptual technical documentation. Every page ought to begin, below the syntax breakdown, with some examples of common tasks that a user might want to perform with that command, and how to do it. More theoretical or conceptual explanations should go further down, or into a separate file (maybe referenced under 'Further reading' or something).
Aside from the fact that the examples are buried way too far down in the article, I've always thought that the manpage for rsync was pretty good -- it has a lot of examples, as well as a description of all the flags. That could easily be a model for other commands.
But I've really started relying on manpages less and less as of late, and just using Google more and more; if I have a problem where I once might have switched terminals and looked at the manpage, now I just Google the command and some keywords relating to what I'm trying to do, and find somebody's HOWTO or a forum posting about it. Not ideal, but it's more useful than much of the inbuilt documentation.
Amen to that. Alas, Americans think mass transit is evil.
Here's the thing with mass transit. I've lived in a variety of areas, from honestly rural (and I don't mean exurban, I mean rural), to highrise ferret cages, and most of the opposition to mass transit is in the suburbs or low-density urban areas.
The objection is pretty simple: if you bring mass transit into an area, it decreases the cost of living, because it no longer means you need to own a car. That means more people, particularly low-income people who might consume more services than they pay in (local) taxes, and thus it's a Bad Thing. There's also a lot of latent racism tied up in it, too, particularly if you have predominantly white suburbs lying outside urban areas with substantial non-white populations. But in my experience the racial influence is somewhat overstated; I'd say the single biggest factor that really scares suburbanites is that public transport will bring out young, low-income families who will overtax the public school systems (which as anyone who's lived in one of these places can attest to, are the centers of political and social power). Any proposal that might somehow negatively impact schools is a No-Go.
I've seen suburban and exurban 'bedroom communities' fight absolutely tooth and nail to keep out bus services, in particular. (Rail services seem to engender less opposition -- perhaps because you generally still need a car in order to get to the train station, so therefore it's less offensive.) Until you've seen one of these disputes in person, it's tough to appreciate the tenacity with which people will fight what seems at first glance to be a common-sense, win-win proposal. I've seen people pitch absolutely brilliant transportation schemes at local town council meetings, without realizing the minefield they were walking into, and that they were doomed from the beginning by factors essentially outside their control.
How are you supposed to pay the rent if you get laid off your job?
How would this be any different if you were living in employee-owned apartments versus your own, rented from a leasing agency apartment?
If you get laid off and have no income, you're screwed once you burn through your savings: that's true whether you're renting from your boss, from somebody else, or from a bank (via a mortgage).
Bottom line: if you lose your job, unless you like the idea of living in a refrigerator box, you'd better get a new one quick, and if you can't get a new one where you are, it's time to toss your crap into a U-Haul and move to someplace with better prospects or lower costs.
Some of the other respondents have gotten pretty close, I think, but I just wanted to add my thoughts on the train business.
The reason the trains running on time thing is so important, is because it's a hard problem. Like, really terrifically hard. If you can have a national railroad, in a country of significant size, run predictably on time, that's a clear demonstration that you Have Your Shit Together. It means you can manage the logistics of having enough trains and personnel to take up the slack if something happens to one train, plus you have the overseeing bureaucracy to coordinate it all from the top down. And when a country Has Its Shit Together, it is probably also a force to be reckoned with, economically and militarily. It's a sign, in other words, that as a nation, you have made it to the big leagues.
Or at least it was, in the early 20th century. Now, I'm not sure if people would see it as being quite as impressive now as it once was, because it's not as clear that it's quite so hard a problem. Prior to computers, it probably seemed pretty amazing to pick up a timetable (presumably printed a few weeks in advance), and know, with absolute certainty, that a train would actually show up at the platform at the time that was written on the sheet. It implied a vast amount of coordination in order to do that, which any educated person could appreciate. Today, I think it's still impressive, but there are other things that a modern visitor is going to look for in a nation and use as a comparison bar, in deciding whether they're in someplace Civilized or not. (Such as, can I use my Amex here / get Internet service / distance from a major airport / etc.)
For various historical reasons, railroads in the United States never were the source of the same nationalistic pride that they were (and to a limited extent still are) in Europe. If a train ran on time, it was less a reflection of the nation and/or its underlying work ethic, than of the company running it. I suspect at the height of the railroad wars that there was intense competition to keep trains running on time, particularly high-profile ones, simply as a matter of corporate pride and as an advertising advantage. But it wasn't really a reflection of the nation or the government in power at the time, except in an indirect sense.
As a sidenote, the last time I was in Germany, I noted that at least in the bigger train stations, they still had clocks on the platforms that are synchronized together down to the second, which even to a modern geek strikes me as pretty cool. I don't know how they work, but they must all be like stepper motors, slaved together. All the hands, including the second hand, "tick" at the same time. Struck me as a little OCD, but in a good way. (And there do seem to be different standards within the rail systems in Europe on tardiness. I used to be able to haul ass and predictably make 2-minute connections on DB, but when I tried that coming in from Belgium, I missed the connection by 10 seconds and was left, in a crowd of 30 or 40 other people, watching the German train pull out without waiting. They don't mess around.)
I actually believe that the majority of the population in the UK is more or less centre right. A lot of people are embarrassed by this (as it is sooo unfashionable), so they would never even admit it to themselves, let alone others, so they have tacitly allowed centre right government for almost 30 years. I know way too many people who claim to be left leaning but when they say what they actually believe in it sounds like a Conservative party manifesto. If the population wasn't mostly centre right then somebody would have stepped into the vacuum. The LibDems try to fill that void, but they only have fairly minor success - they don't really have much in the way of actual policy, their success mostly rests on people's total disgust of the main parties behaviour as opposed to any strong political beliefs.
FWIW, as an American who has spent a substantial amount of time in GB, this seems to have the ring of truth to it. Now, it's possible that people I talked to (and I didn't normally make a point of talking politics, particularly of late), knowing that I was an American, held a more conservative line when with me than they really believed, but on multiple occasions, I'd talk with people in a pub and hear a lot of things that sounded basically moderate/conservative (in the U.S., I'd say they'd fall into that vague category of 'socially liberal but economically slightly conservative' -- e.g., annoyed at government intrusiveness and waste, annoyed at high taxes, annoyed at redistributive programs, bitching about the NHS), but then see the same people later on holding much more Liberal positions in public. So there definitely seems to be some, as you put it, taboos about being conservative or holding conservative opinions, that keep people from voicing them in public.
I don't think this is by any means a British phenomenon; there are definitely parts of the U.S. where being an "out" Republican is social suicide, but where Republicans have been successfully elected, meaning that more than a few people are talking one thing at cocktail parties and pulling a very different lever in the voting booth.
I've never done any research in this vein, but it strikes me as probably being true historically as well; it's often socially advantageous to be seen as avant garde, "progressive," or "forward thinking" in public, but in the privacy of their own minds and consequently in the voting booth, people tend to be much more cautious and thus conservative. Perhaps it's because, knowing why they act the way they do, they have to wonder who's really a true believer, and who else is just putting on the beret in order to get laid.
As an American, I see that particular facet of our culture more as a sign of our irrationality than anything else, although I guess that a total absence of any desire to change culture or civilization for the better would be if anything more depressing.
As usual, there is a happy medium in there somewhere, which I think in the U.S. we generally overshoot. As someone said here on Slashdot, the problem with the "Something Must Be Done" philosophy, is that it lends itself too easily to "this is something, therefore, it must be done." People will do things, simply for the sake of doing them, even if they're not productive (or counter-productive). They are so preoccupied with doing that they don't think about the long term effects, or even the efficacy, of what's being done. It's all about looking busy and covering your ass.
Obviously it's not good if hundreds of people get food poisoning at a restaurant, and everyone who's in a position to do something about it just shrugs and says "hey, that's life." But just as obviously, it ought to be clear that it's counterproductive to have a reaction that's disconnected either logically or in scope, with the original event. And too often, that's what we do here. We seem to go after things that have the appearance or 'gut feeling' of being helpful, but without really thinking about them too hard.
Somewhere between catatonia (not giving a shit) and mania (caring too much, to the point where there's not time to think about what should really be done), there's got to be a better way.
If I were Venezuelan, the whole Chavez thing would really have me pretty frightened. Admittedly, Chavez isn't Hitler -- frankly, I don't think he's that talented, and Venezuela isn't anything like the industrial power that Germany was in the '30s, for starters -- but it's pretty hard not to start drawing comparisons when he starts getting "enabling" laws passed by a rubberstamp legislature, just like, well, you know who. The rhetoric is a bit different, but they're both going after the same support base (and largely succeeding) by demonizing outsiders. Actually, Chavez has something of an easier time than the NSDAP did, because while the Nazis were in the unenviable position of having to distinguish themselves both from more capitalist countries like the U.K. and U.S., they also had to differentiate themselves from Soviet-style socialism and communism. Chavez doesn't; by positioning himself on the left wing, he can simply blame everyone right of him, without having to find any middle ground.
I hope anyone with any brains at all has seen the writing on the wall and headed for the border, because I think it's going to get a lot worse there before it gets better.
It's not simply about racism.
Racism, in large part, is what allowed the citizenry's anger about 9/11 to be directed against a completely different group of people than were probably responsible for the attack: a whole lot of people just see "Arabs" as interchangeable; this allowed the Afghanistan/Iraq bait-and-switch to go over, where Afghanistan/France or Afghanistan/North-Korea probably would not have.
U.S. politics is more than the maneuverings of the capitalist aristocracy; at any given time, there are people who are set to benefit from conflict, but rarely are they actually in a position to manufacture one. It is the people (as well as random, chance events) who shift power from one faction to another, and more or less allow things to go forward.
It's obvious why some people wanted the Iraq war, and you're right on target when you look at the trillions of dollars that's been and is currently being transferred from the public coffers to the private sector, and also the budget money (and thus, power) that's been sloshed to and from various governmental agencies. But it's important to remember that were it not for the public desire to have a war in the first place, the war could not have happened -- if the military-industrial-political complex could manufacture a war whenever it wished (taking on premise that war is profitable for them), they would just have one perpetually. That they didn't have one until after 9/11 is clear evidence that it was the shift in public opinion, that allowed them to go forward.
The motives driving the M-I-P complex are fairly obvious and thus uninteresting (personal profit of one sort or another, and uninteresting because there have always been and will always be people in a position to profit from wars), but the ones driving the shift in public opinion which handed power to those who could profit from a war are fairly complex. It involves a lot of factors that are part of the American public's psyche but that we as a general rule prefer not to acknowledge or admit, for example, rampant racism, xenophobia, and general bloodthirstiness, as well as the simple fact that America is built on an extremely violent culture, and it was unacceptable not to have had 9/11 happen and not unleash our vast military machine and watch it destroy somebody, somewhere.
The Iraq war was a sort of geopolitical dog-kicking or wall-punching; failing to get the wasp that actually stung us, as a country we vented our frustrations and anger on the next convenient target: Iraq, which had gotten to us in the past and was a source of continual annoyance. Although momentarily satisfying (as evidenced by the high opinion of the war during its opening stages), once completed, we realized the sheer pointlessness of it.
Looking at the defense contractors or 'Beltway insiders' who engineered the war is only interesting as a sort of academic footnote to the war, because there will always be people around ready to turn the country in that direction, if the country allows it. The way our government works is that far from being a unified force, it's a mess of factions, each trying to drag the country in one direction or another. It is the people, directly and indirectly, who empower or chastise various factions, and allow the nation to slide one way or the other. However, most Americans would rather not confront the real reasons for war, because doing so would involve too much self-discovery of a rather unpleasant nature, so instead, it is more convenient to blame the particular faction that was given power at the time.
Seems like it depends on the question. Someone with a PhD in a field is likely to have a very particular opinion; if you ask them about something in their field, they're likely to give you an answer that represents their point of view, relative to whatever the big debates are within that field.
For example, if you start asking a physicist who's into string theory about gravity, even basic stuff, they may give you answers that seem at first glance to be a little off, because it might be that they're building a case for their pet theory, further down the line of inquiry. I have seen people do this all the time. They won't lie, or be factually incorrect, but they'll have so much invested in a field and in a certain point of view, that it's very difficult for them to give a fair overview of the topic.
People take "their" disciplines very personally, and while sometimes that focus and commitment can be an asset (it usually is), in writing a general overview article for something like Wikipedia, it can sometimes be useful to get the words of experts, filtered through people who don't have any real interest in one side of the argument or another.
I'm not disagreeing with you (I don't really know anything about Wales, so I'm in no position to), however, while Wikipedia as an organization might be doomed, there's nothing that says that the content can't be scraped from it and used to seed some new project down the road.
Has anyone ever managed to get a full database dump of WP? Not just of the articles as they are right now -- although that would be better than nothing -- but the whole thing, including all the edit histories and talk pages and stuff? It's all GFDL, so there's nothing stopping someone from taking it and restarting the project elsewhere, if WP collapsed under its own weight.
The problem that I see, based on several other OSS/"community" projects that I've watched implode, is that generally when things start to go really badly for the people in control, eventually someone will decide to try and pull a scorched earth and will start destroying or deleting content. Sometimes this has been truly disastrous; they'll delete the only copy of the source, or the forum's database, or something like that, and attempt to hold it hostage, and sometimes in the scuffle things really do get deleted forever.
So if WP as an organization looks like it's going downhill, I wonder if there's some way that other, external, interested parties could get in there and make sure that the content -- all of it -- is protected and doesn't get destroyed during the inevitable Terminal Pissing Contest.
I'm aware of that -- I should have been more clear. I was stating something more obvious: the day doesn't actually get magically "longer" as a result of Daylight Savings Time. There's still the same number of minutes of daylight on a particular day in the year, regardless of whether you bump the clocks backwards or forwards an hour. It's all just a mind game to get people up earlier, and thus let them make use of more daylight, so that the day seems longer. But the day is the same length whether you're awake or not, obviously.
I wasn't implying that the days don't get shorter in the winter -- they do (and that's kind of why we have a winter to begin with). However, what I'm not clear on, is whether the daylight actually shifts earlier and later in the day, in addition to becoming longer and shorter (i.e., does the "median daylight time" or 'middle of the day' actually move, or does it grow shorter and longer at both ends equally?). If it the 'middle of the day' doesn't move significantly, then it seems like we could dispense with the clock-setting and just move the TZs earlier.
It's an academic argument, I suppose, but I think you're underestimating the role of the good old Mob in politics; the "defense sector" (or 'military-industrial complex' or whatever you want to call it) is always ready and looking for a war, and will take one any way it can get one. It's the hoi polloi who swing things one way or the other. If it were trivial to manipulate the masses, then they'd be doing it all the time and we'd be constantly at war. That we haven't been, suggests that getting the sheeple to do one's bidding is not trivial, or at least not as trivial as it might seem at first glance.
The hawks and the defense sector have been waiting for a war ever since the end of the first Big Iraq Spat; they weren't able to figure out a way of engineering it, until after 9/11, when the Mob was suddenly keen on the idea of anything that involved bombing Arabs. Had it not been for the great undercurrent of anger and desire to see stuff get blown up on CNN, the war would never have happened (just like it never happened in any of the preceding years).
Except that it seems to be closed-source and proprietary, yeah. But if you can live with that, it's a very different question, because then you lose much of the motivation (besides upfront cost) for using OpenOffice/StarOffice instead of MS in the first place.
I've never really understood why they didn't just make DST permanent. In other words, get rid of the whole spring-forward/fall-back business, and just move the time zones in the U.S. up an hour, if that would give us more daylight in the evenings, when apparently we want it.
It's all just a psychological game, anyway; the actual amount of daylight obviously never changes, it's just that people really hate having to get up before their clock says they should, and thus it's necessary to fudge the clocks so that people get up earlier, and don't waste daylight and end up having it dark in their (clock-proscribed) "evening."
If we want it to show something different on the lock when the big warm ball starts to rise in the morning, which is apparently what we want, I don't get why we don't just push all the U.S. time zones forward an hour and leave them there, and get rid of this fall/spring switching.
but in reality to get their oil.
Honestly -- lay off the Kool Aid. Take a look at the amount spent on the Iraq war sometime. It's a vast sum; easily enough to have just bought Saddam's cooperation (and let's face it, he was desperate for friends anyway) and all the oil under Iraq.
If you're going to come up with conspiracy theories, at least make them plausible. The "OMG it's blood for oil BLOOD FOR OIL" thing just doesn't fly. If oil had been the goal, it could have just been purchased. It's not like the U.S. has a ethical problem with funding repressive dictators when it suits us.
I'm not really justifying the war per se, but you're going to have to look a little harder if you want to find its root causes. As usual, it's not something that can be rendered down to a three-word slogan. I think in large part, it had to do with the American populace wanting their government to kick the living shit out of some brown-skinned somebody's (and the government only too happy to oblige -- war being a far easier condition to manage than peace), and when the whole thing in Afghanistan didn't look like it was going to go anywhere satisfying in a hurry, Iraq was a convenient target for our collective spleen-venting: it was big, flat, filled with people we either didn't like or didn't care about, and we had good maps from the last time we'd taken a stroll through. Kind of a no-brainer.
And if you told them to surrender their mouse pads and screen cleaner, doubtless they'd hide those and drag them back out when you weren't looking, too.
Do SIM locked T-Mobile US phones work with a T-Mobile UK SIM card (and vice-versa)?
I don't think so; but one of the other benefits of T-Mobile is that they will unlock your phone on request, and I think they will do so even if you're not off contract, just as long as you've paid your bill and are in good standing for six months or so. I'm not sure because I was month-to-month by the time I had them unlock mine, but it was no big deal. They sent me an email with the instructions on how to do it, which involved pressing some buttons and entering a code (which I think is somehow derived from the phone's EIN, so I'm surprised that nobody has reverse-engineered it yet); after that, the phone is totally unlocked and will work with anyone's SIM.
Other than having the same name and having the same parent company, there doesn't seem to be much in the way of cooperation between T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile UK or Europe. For instance, if I take my T-Mobile cell to Europe and don't get a new SIM, I get charged some exorbitant "global roaming" rate (which incidentally you have to call up TM and activate -- so why wouldn't you just get the phone unlocked?), that's far in excess of what I'd get charged if I just bought a T-Mobile Europe SIM.
While there might be some sort of "forking" as a result of this, and I also consider myself a fan of the free-culture movement, I'm not sure that I think it's even close to acceptable to basically write off our entire culture prior to today. Because that's pretty much what it would come down to: the "public domain" as we know it would disappear, probably bought up at great cost by people who wanted to horde it and dole it out as 'broadcasts.' Just think: if you could round up all the extant copies of something, no matter how old, you'd own that work -- forever. Disney and Time Warner would be paying people to steal books out of libraries and burn them, just to keep the monopoly on old folk tales.
You'd basically be starting everything off from a blank slate, or what little of our culture are in widely-distributed repositories that can't be destroyed by people with vast amounts of treasure to spend on it, and I don't think that's exactly a bright idea. Culture builds on what comes before it; if you have to "reboot" the whole thing under Creative Commons licenses, that's a whole lot of development to just throw away.
Plus, what makes you think that they won't just eliminate the whole free culture movement via politics and technology? All you'd need to do was legislate a system into being that prevented "display devices" (TVs, computer monitors, etc.) from playing anything that wasn't encrypted -- to prevent piracy and porn here in the U.S.; "hate speech" in Europe, naturally -- and suddenly you'd just not be able to view anything that didn't come from a major studio. Or they'd get Comcast and the telcos on board, and refuse to push any video content over the networks that wasn't authorized (and they'd just block end-to-end encrypted traffic, in favor of schemes that involve a centralized peer to snoop -- easier for the feds to wiretap that way anyway): suddenly 'free culture' is a lot of underground newspapers and tape swapping, not too impressive in the days when "legit" movies will be available at the push of a button.
Power breeds more power; if we allow the media companies to stomp out public domain, that will only give them more, and from there, it will put them in a position to consolidate and continue to move forward. To me, that whole future looks pretty grim.