I would take that completely into consideration and act on that factual information instead of this made up fairy fantasy land created by the stupid courts! While it may feel good to 'get the bad guy' ala Law and Order or CSI it is important to realize that in real life if the evidence was collected improperly, in violation of the law or the defendant's rights AND the judge rules that the evidence is not admissible then the Jury is duty bound to disregard that evidence, no matter how damning it may be or how heinous the accusations against the defendant. If you disregard this duty and pass judgment based upon emotion then you are contributing to a slide into mob justice where there is no end to the accusations and innocent people are eventually swept into the maelstrom of something like the Reign of Terror or the Salem Witch Trials. It has happened before and people are still human so it could happen again if we are not careful to dispense justice and NOT simply retribution against 'the bad guy'.
Elgan argues that there should be no questions about members of the public being allowed to record such interactions. IANAL, but in California I am reasonably certain that the conversation may only be recorded if (a) both parties know the conversation is being recorded and (b) both parties consent to the conversation being recorded. If both conditions are not met then the recording is not admissable as evidence in state court (i.e. the conversation never took place as far as they are concerned). This is why many customer support lines inform callers to the effect: "your call may be monitored or recorded and you agree to these terms by continuing with the call otherwise please hangup now...". Even if the recording was consensual it could still have been altered after the fact so the evidence may be circumstantial at best.
Can Microsoft be sued for not supporting "Apple File Protocol" or some other Apple-specific protocol? No, but neither have they prevented third parties from writing them and offering them on their platform. Apple has a history of being unfriendly to third party developers, so by not supporting the format AND locking down their platform so that a third party cannot implement WMA support (hacking ala iPhone doesn't count) Apple opens itself up to legitimate criticism. Now, you may argue that Apple locks down their platform for good reasons, but that does not exempt them from running a foul of the bundling and monopoly laws in the localities where they choose to operate.
But Sony? What would be the total impact on Sony if their record label arm spun off or died out completely? More than you might think. The electronics side of the business is facing increasingly strong third party competition in what used to be franchise markets for Sony, especially televisions and portable music players. In fact, I would argue that the restrictions demanded by the music side of their business on the electronics side of their business (i.e. Sony only DRM) is accelerating their slide into the status of "just another manufacturer in an increasingly commoditized business". If I had to pick a Japanese company to invest in then I would much prefer Toyota to Sony.
I thought that Tobacco sales overseas were still fairly profitable, even if sales in the United States and Europe have been declining for years now on top of high taxes, lawsuits, and health campaigns. The American cigarette is known and liked the world over, particularly in Asia, among smokers and many of them are either unable to or are not sophisticated enough to sue foreign corporations for damages or maybe they simply don't care.
I'm not convinced there's any way to die gracefully when your business becomes outmoded
You diversify into other businesses. If that is not profitable or the most profitable among alternative courses of action then the assets, assuming that any remain after liabilities are paid, are returned to the shareholders / owners and the corporation ceases to exist as an entity. There is nothing wrong with returning the value to the shareholders and closing up shop, sometimes that is the best business decision that a company in trouble can make.
Draconian contracts that restrict them to either selling their work to the labels, or not selling their work at all? More like trading their work to the labels in exchange for "promotion" and then owing the labels money for the studio bills, payola, and other concrete expenses associated with "promoting" the artist. As for the term of the contract, does "the rest of your prime working life" sound reasonable to you? BTW: If you want to break the contract early then they charge you penalties with interest for all of the "promotion" fees that you will be denying them from that point on AND you still owe them for the loans. Recording contracts suck. Why do you suppose that big name artists eventually found their own labels? So that they in turn can become the exploiters after they have taken their hundred lashes and paid for their spurs.
All well and good but I would guess that the vast majority of developers out there, including.NET developers, do not work for broadcast media companies, hollywood studios, or even in the entertainment business. The majority of us work in engineering, scientific, or back office (i.e. crud database) type development where Silverlight will be of limited utility, at least in an immediate sense. Now, if I have a good non-gee whiz reason to consider Silverlight in a user interface project AND I have some extra time to work with their separate graphics widget IDE (we don't have any graphics designers on staff here...or at least not in our department) then I MIGHT (and that is a big if) use Silverlight, but I would say that right now the odds aren't too great. The ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax support in.NET 3.5 and the extension libraries for.NET 2.0 will probably take care of 99% of any gee whiz type element that I might want to add to my user interfaces so that only further moves Silverlight down on my list. I agree with you that Silverlight has its uses, but I think that it is fair to say that those uses, at least for know, are mostly limited to specialists or industries where the benefit is obvious. This is not because Silverlight is difficult to use, but rather most developers have a limited amount of time to work on something (i.e. creating graphics) that most of us are not very good at and there is generally limited or no money in the budget to hire either full time graphics designers or even contractors (even the marketing departments outsource graphics work for advertising copy these days after all). If you don't have graphics designers then the final product may not look great, but if you have no developers then you will have no final product. If the product is not being produced for public consumption then most companies would rather have "it just works" than "it just works" AND "it looks great", especially if they have to pay more for "it looks great".
That is true, but to be fair, it has more to do with a particular supreme court decision Thor Power Tool Company v Commissioner regarding the amount of write down allowed on inventories of goods. The decision which came out of that case is that a corporation must write down all of the same goods by the same amounts, regardless of how much they are likely to eventually sell for or at what price. For example, suppose that one had ten (10) widgets in inventory and at the end of the year you thought that you might only sell 3 of them in the next year. You cannot write down the value of the seven (7) widgets that you probably will not sell to a lower value then the three (3) remaining widgets which you believe that you are likely to sell. If you write down one then you must write down all of them and you may not sell them for more than the value which you depreciated them.
The net effect of this ruling was to make holding on to inventory that you plan to sell more expensive because you cannot take substantial write downs to offset the cost of storing the inventory for long periods of time. In particular this has resulted in many new books (i.e. those which are not best sellers or don't sell regularly), even those published just a couple of years ago, becoming worthless as inventory items much more quickly than if unequal write downs were allowed. Instead, the books which cannot be sold are pulped into recycled paper in lieu of being stored on the off chance that somebody someday might want to purchase a copy. Now, the Internet, Amazon.com, and other web based used book dealers have managed to alter the economics of this somewhat by running no physical storefronts and storing their inventory in cheaper geographic locations, but it is still worse under the no unequal write downs rule than it would be otherwise.
OR they want the BMW, but realizing that they simply cannot afford it, they settle for the Hyundai instead. The decision to purchase one product over another cannot be taken as proof positive that the consumer necessarily absolutely preferred one product over a similar one, but rather that given the circumstances the consumer chose or was forced to chose one over the other.
Fortunately, since it was public knowledge that NASA was conducting the study, it was more difficult for certain factions within NASA or low-level political appointees to pull a Philip Cooney style "editing" of the results and conclusions. The truth must be told, no matter how bad it is or how much it hurts the airlines. Failure to release the full report because the average American might "draw the wrong conclusions" or become scared or "lose confidence" in the airlines is NOT an acceptable excuse to edit, quash, or destroy the report. The people have a right to know what risks they are taking when they fly, particularly when their tax dollars paid for the formal analysis of those risks by qualified scientists and other experts.
What I was getting at was that those motorcycles just became a lot more dangerous with this heavier vehicle that everyone can afford on the road. If you have ever seen the traffic in India then you know that it is already quite dangerous, especially by American or European standards: wrong way drivers, red light runners, tailgaters, roundabouts without lane markers, motorcycle taxis using the cars stopped in traffic like cones in an obstacle course...you name it and they've got it. India is a study in contrasts really between efficient outsourcing on the one hand (although even in that industry there are inefficient operators) and highly inefficient urban planning (among other things) on the other hand. However, this car isn't going to make things much better or worse with regard to safety (it would be hard to make it much worse than it already is). In fact, adding to the congestion might actually reduce traffic deaths because everyone would be slowed down to a crawl (although the increased pollution would be an unwelcome side effect).
The design mandate of this car is flawed, and strikes me as a public affairs marketing ploy to justify a cheap vehicle that they plan on selling like hot cakes. That $500 (or more) dollars could have been much better spent on a solution that would have actually been solving a problem, not contributing to one Remember that Tata is a private business, they are out to produce what the market (read the people) wants to buy. If you really want change then you have to be willing to get the government out of the way and let the market handle the details. Especially in India, people have become accustomed to going around the government (bribes, ignoring the rules, black market, etc) because for years that was the only way that one could get *anything* actually done in India (it has gotten better now, but the willingness of people to circumvent government imposed restrictions without second thought remains strong) so attempts at government regulation and control are probably even *less* effective in India than anywhere else in the world.
Cars like this one, once everyone in the world has one, are going to be our undoing. Not if we let the market decide. They could start by cutting any petrol subsidies and either auctioning off the roads to private toll operators or charging tolls themselves to use the roads. If you compel people to pay the real market prices for things, by getting the government out, then you will very often achieve the results that you wanted without resorting to direct government interference (which not only does not produce the result that you want, but very often results in the opposite effect). Policy should be judged by what the actual real world results are, not by what sensibilities they appeal to based upon some notion people have about the way the world ought to work.
Realistically, the best approach may be PDF's and full text search. Anything else is just not going to capture the full extent of the medical history.
For the complexities of medical charts and notes you are probably right. However, certain well known and structured information, particularly billing, could definitely benefit from a more integrated database oriented approach to processing. The data set could probably be simplified drastically if, instead of looking to model the structure of ALL medical data, they decided what data was important enough that it would be used in query like questions such as dates of hospitalization, previous diagnosed conditions and prescribed medications and what data can be left in PDF charts that are simply attached to the root of the database records (i.e. non-query-able parts). The former gets modeled in the database while the later does not.
why wasn't that a factor in the vehicle's design?! Because that would add about $500 more to the price of the vehicle (minimum) and they were optimizing the vehicle for cost not for fuel economy, safety, or low emissions. It would still be an improvement however over the equally unsafe and much dirtier two-stroke 3 wheelers and motorcycle taxis with sidecars that are still driving around in India today.
ther's one big glaringly obvious idea that has been much talked about but never fully implemented system-wide - the idea of a virtual file system that would replace the file/folder metaphor with something resembling the filing system of email clients, with virtual folders, tags, etc.
That is really not the fault of the operating system, but rather it inevitably arises out of the fact that different software applications written by different developers use a variety of context sensitive views of data which is mapped into the file system provided by the operating system, but does not limit itself to a single view across all possible applications. In fact, you will find that there is no one view of generic data that will satisfy the needs of everyone and there is nothing wrong with that.
The technical details of file system in generic storage system have been well understood and generally well implemented for quite some time know. In fact, they teach them in the upper division Operating Systems course in most Computer Science schools here in the United States. There have been a few pioneering implementations willing to try radically different concepts, RiserFS for example, but most people are not willing to accept data loss at anytime, ever, no way now how for a bit more speed, so the basic approaches remain the same (i.e some variant of B-Tree is at the heart of most modern file systems and even databases, because when it comes right down to it there are only so many ways to organize data in a linear arrangement of memory whether that is tape, platter, array or something else and B-Tree or its variants has a lot to recommend it for offline storage).
Object in a computer - single emails, files, whatever - should act the same. Why can't I file my pictures of cousin Larry along with my emails from and to cousin Larry in the same place?
Because the software is abstracting the storage of that information from direct manipulation by you the user via the file system. If you want to blame somebody for that then blame the developers who wrote your application software, not the ones who wrote the operating system.
The entire desktop metaphor should also be ditched in favor of something else and serious improvements are required in the area of error recovery - for example, why won't the OS auto-save each document I'm working on every 1-5 minutes so I can recover from mistakenly overwriting a file or saving it when I intended to discard changes?
Again you misunderstand the distribution of responsibilities within the computer. The operating system exists primarily to provide abstraction and management of and access to hardware resources. The secondary duty of the operating system is to provide management of and services to application processes to ensure that the greatest number of processes doing the greatest amount of work can all run relatively simultaneously without stepping on each other's feet and efficiently. However, this does not include directly taking over functionality of or second guessing what the applications are trying to accomplish (provided that they have the appropriate permissions). If your application software doesn't save the document every five minutes then blame the application developers, not the ones who wrote the operating system. The operating system is sort of like the ideal government, it keeps the peace and intervenes when necessary, but most of the time it lets applications succeed or fail on their own provided that they don't interfere with the ability of other processes to do the same.
The persistence of the desktop metaphor is mostly due to Microsoft and to a lesser extent Apple rather than to any inherent flaw in the way that modern operating systems are constructed. If you do not like the desktop metaphor then don't use it. There is nothing stopping you from running Linux from the command line only if you so choose. If by "desktop" you mean graphical window management system (i.e. windows, bu
buy and leave You mean buy OR leave right? While retailers would no doubt like the idea of "cannot leave until you buy something" it probably wouldn't go over so well with the patrons to say nothing of enforcement.
Is it just me or does anybody else find this extreme thin fetishism to be a little bit out of control? I can see how thin, in the absence of other considerations, can be desirable from the standpoint of it takes up less space in my pocket or on my desk. However, we see device manufacturers producing products which overheat and die because they wanted that last 2mm of thinness instead of a long lasting and stable product or they put a really small battery in the device, substantially reducing uptime when running on battery, simply to save that few millimeters again. I wouldn't even mind so much except that it is becoming difficult for people like me, who value other qualities besides just "thinness", to find the electronics that we want at a reasonable price instead of planned obsolescence consumer grade junk that sacrifices the functional characteristics of the device for the physical looks and dimensions of the device (among the least important characteristics in my opinion).
$2 for a 14 day taste would wreck the economics That would probably be a better idea, but it would have to be charged by ICANN to the registrars or else the registrars would never do it because they would rather squat the domains themselves in the hopes that you will buy it from them for an inflated price. If the registrars have to pay ICANN then they will either have to eat the cost or give up squatting.
He is taking an awful risk if you ask me. The Chinese, as you say, have no respect for their own constitution or at best they respect it as long as it doesn't get in the way of what government officials and the politburo want to do. It wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese government decided to...ahem...settle out of court if you know what I mean. There are plenty of accidents every day in China and it would not be difficult for the Chinese government to arrange an "accident" both to rid themselves of an "inconvenient" citizen and provide a warning to other citizens who might be tempted to exercise their "rights" under the Chinese Constitution.
and Walmart isn't a leader in anything at present. Whether you love or hate Wal-Mart they are the world's largest single public corporation by revenue in the world according to Fortune so they are a leader in that sense.
Walmart is large, but it is horribly inefficient, led by executives which willingly painted themselves into a corner Wal-Mart is large, but they are mostly fairly efficient, or at least more efficient than their competitors, or else they would never have become large (and they are certainly not shrinking although they have hit a few bumps in the road lately) and they are still quite profitable.
As their competition continues to catch up in their only area of strength I think that it is true to say that Wal-Mart still has a fairly decent franchise on their management and supply chain organization competencies which cannot be simply copied without effort by their competitors. Their competitors will try of course (and that is a good thing for the consumers), but for now Wal-Mart does the direct from China to you thing substantially better than the competition on the retail level (Cosco beats them on wholesale vs SamsClub which is the Wal-Mart wholesale proxy).
DISCLAIMER: I do not work for Wal-Mart nor do I own their stock, I am merely presenting my own impressions based upon what I know of their business and the retail sales industry in general.
Perhaps, but the studios will be reluctant, just as the music labels were reluctant and finally dragged kicking and screaming by Apple into the download market, to deal with either Amazon or Wal-Mart (and Wal-Mart especially so) because they know that both retailers will push them hard on price in order to access their distribution channels and that would accelerate the erosion of their current pricing power which is already being squeezed by cutthroat competition between the likes of Amazon, Cosco, and Wal-Mart in the packaged for sale DVD market and Netflix in the DVD rental market. To the studios, DRM is like the mirage always just over the horizon, with promises of wealth without compromises and they will be reluctant to give up that hope, even though it is almost certainly in their long-term best interests to do so.
Nobody abandoned sovereignty to join the WTO, but all of the members did sign treaties (including your elected representatives in Congress here in the United States) promising to make certain concessions and changes in existing laws on tarrifs and trade beginning with the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade. Now, nobody is forcing anyone to hold up their end of the bargain, it is voluntary after all, but if we don't hold up our end of the bargain on concessions such as elimination of tarrifs and subsidies and opening of our markets then how can we expect other countries to do the same for us? So yes, you can take your ball and go home, but if everyone did that then all of us would be worse off because of highly restricted trade. It would be the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act all over again and really nobody wants that because it is not in the best interests of any of the member countries. We are all better off cooperating on trade, but sometimes a sanctioned retaliation (i.e. anti-dumping tarrifs in the case of Chinese furniture and copyright exemptions in the case of Antigua) are necessary to remind the politicians of the benefits of trade (the stick that comes with the carrot).
The pornography example is not a good one because it is not representative (Saudi Arabia really does ban it entirely so there is no unfair protection of local producers because there are none in that country anyway), but the Antiguans definitely have a point on the gambling issue here. If the United States was really serious about "protecting the public morals" from the "evils of gambling" then they would ban it completely at the federal level (which they cannot do anyway, but assume that they could). Instead, just about every state has a lottery monopoly or participates in one, there are native American casinos all over the place, and certain states which do have legalized gambling all have a vested special interest in locking out the competition (at least to the extent that they can). So who do you think is paying the anti-gambling lobbyists on capital hill to preach against the "evils of gambling"? Is it the Christian Right? Hardly (they are bit players on the issue...vocal perhaps, but no money and it really isn't a voting issue in the same way that abortion is for them), it is primarily financed by...you guessed it, the vested interests in the domestic bricks and mortar gaming industry (i.e. Native American Tribes, Nevada and Atlantic City gaming corporations, and States that want to preserve their lottery revenues). So the United States is talking out of both sides of its mouth on the gambling issue and Antigua and others are right to call them out on it.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that Tobacco sales overseas were still fairly profitable, even if sales in the United States and Europe have been declining for years now on top of high taxes, lawsuits, and health campaigns. The American cigarette is known and liked the world over, particularly in Asia, among smokers and many of them are either unable to or are not sophisticated enough to sue foreign corporations for damages or maybe they simply don't care.
I'm not convinced there's any way to die gracefully when your business becomes outmoded
You diversify into other businesses. If that is not profitable or the most profitable among alternative courses of action then the assets, assuming that any remain after liabilities are paid, are returned to the shareholders / owners and the corporation ceases to exist as an entity. There is nothing wrong with returning the value to the shareholders and closing up shop, sometimes that is the best business decision that a company in trouble can make.
All well and good but I would guess that the vast majority of developers out there, including .NET developers, do not work for broadcast media companies, hollywood studios, or even in the entertainment business. The majority of us work in engineering, scientific, or back office (i.e. crud database) type development where Silverlight will be of limited utility, at least in an immediate sense. Now, if I have a good non-gee whiz reason to consider Silverlight in a user interface project AND I have some extra time to work with their separate graphics widget IDE (we don't have any graphics designers on staff here...or at least not in our department) then I MIGHT (and that is a big if) use Silverlight, but I would say that right now the odds aren't too great. The ASP.NET 2.0 Ajax support in .NET 3.5 and the extension libraries for .NET 2.0 will probably take care of 99% of any gee whiz type element that I might want to add to my user interfaces so that only further moves Silverlight down on my list. I agree with you that Silverlight has its uses, but I think that it is fair to say that those uses, at least for know, are mostly limited to specialists or industries where the benefit is obvious. This is not because Silverlight is difficult to use, but rather most developers have a limited amount of time to work on something (i.e. creating graphics) that most of us are not very good at and there is generally limited or no money in the budget to hire either full time graphics designers or even contractors (even the marketing departments outsource graphics work for advertising copy these days after all). If you don't have graphics designers then the final product may not look great, but if you have no developers then you will have no final product. If the product is not being produced for public consumption then most companies would rather have "it just works" than "it just works" AND "it looks great", especially if they have to pay more for "it looks great".
Perhaps he should write a "jump to conclusions" mat...in Rails.
Too many books don't get second prints anyway.
That is true, but to be fair, it has more to do with a particular supreme court decision Thor Power Tool Company v Commissioner regarding the amount of write down allowed on inventories of goods. The decision which came out of that case is that a corporation must write down all of the same goods by the same amounts, regardless of how much they are likely to eventually sell for or at what price. For example, suppose that one had ten (10) widgets in inventory and at the end of the year you thought that you might only sell 3 of them in the next year. You cannot write down the value of the seven (7) widgets that you probably will not sell to a lower value then the three (3) remaining widgets which you believe that you are likely to sell. If you write down one then you must write down all of them and you may not sell them for more than the value which you depreciated them.
The net effect of this ruling was to make holding on to inventory that you plan to sell more expensive because you cannot take substantial write downs to offset the cost of storing the inventory for long periods of time. In particular this has resulted in many new books (i.e. those which are not best sellers or don't sell regularly), even those published just a couple of years ago, becoming worthless as inventory items much more quickly than if unequal write downs were allowed. Instead, the books which cannot be sold are pulped into recycled paper in lieu of being stored on the off chance that somebody someday might want to purchase a copy. Now, the Internet, Amazon.com, and other web based used book dealers have managed to alter the economics of this somewhat by running no physical storefronts and storing their inventory in cheaper geographic locations, but it is still worse under the no unequal write downs rule than it would be otherwise.
OR they want the BMW, but realizing that they simply cannot afford it, they settle for the Hyundai instead. The decision to purchase one product over another cannot be taken as proof positive that the consumer necessarily absolutely preferred one product over a similar one, but rather that given the circumstances the consumer chose or was forced to chose one over the other.
Fortunately, since it was public knowledge that NASA was conducting the study, it was more difficult for certain factions within NASA or low-level political appointees to pull a Philip Cooney style "editing" of the results and conclusions. The truth must be told, no matter how bad it is or how much it hurts the airlines. Failure to release the full report because the average American might "draw the wrong conclusions" or become scared or "lose confidence" in the airlines is NOT an acceptable excuse to edit, quash, or destroy the report. The people have a right to know what risks they are taking when they fly, particularly when their tax dollars paid for the formal analysis of those risks by qualified scientists and other experts.
Realistically, the best approach may be PDF's and full text search. Anything else is just not going to capture the full extent of the medical history.
For the complexities of medical charts and notes you are probably right. However, certain well known and structured information, particularly billing, could definitely benefit from a more integrated database oriented approach to processing. The data set could probably be simplified drastically if, instead of looking to model the structure of ALL medical data, they decided what data was important enough that it would be used in query like questions such as dates of hospitalization, previous diagnosed conditions and prescribed medications and what data can be left in PDF charts that are simply attached to the root of the database records (i.e. non-query-able parts). The former gets modeled in the database while the later does not.
ther's one big glaringly obvious idea that has been much talked about but never fully implemented system-wide - the idea of a virtual file system that would replace the file/folder metaphor with something resembling the filing system of email clients, with virtual folders, tags, etc.
That is really not the fault of the operating system, but rather it inevitably arises out of the fact that different software applications written by different developers use a variety of context sensitive views of data which is mapped into the file system provided by the operating system, but does not limit itself to a single view across all possible applications. In fact, you will find that there is no one view of generic data that will satisfy the needs of everyone and there is nothing wrong with that.
The technical details of file system in generic storage system have been well understood and generally well implemented for quite some time know. In fact, they teach them in the upper division Operating Systems course in most Computer Science schools here in the United States. There have been a few pioneering implementations willing to try radically different concepts, RiserFS for example, but most people are not willing to accept data loss at anytime, ever, no way now how for a bit more speed, so the basic approaches remain the same (i.e some variant of B-Tree is at the heart of most modern file systems and even databases, because when it comes right down to it there are only so many ways to organize data in a linear arrangement of memory whether that is tape, platter, array or something else and B-Tree or its variants has a lot to recommend it for offline storage).
Object in a computer - single emails, files, whatever - should act the same. Why can't I file my pictures of cousin Larry along with my emails from and to cousin Larry in the same place?
Because the software is abstracting the storage of that information from direct manipulation by you the user via the file system. If you want to blame somebody for that then blame the developers who wrote your application software, not the ones who wrote the operating system.
The entire desktop metaphor should also be ditched in favor of something else and serious improvements are required in the area of error recovery - for example, why won't the OS auto-save each document I'm working on every 1-5 minutes so I can recover from mistakenly overwriting a file or saving it when I intended to discard changes?
Again you misunderstand the distribution of responsibilities within the computer. The operating system exists primarily to provide abstraction and management of and access to hardware resources. The secondary duty of the operating system is to provide management of and services to application processes to ensure that the greatest number of processes doing the greatest amount of work can all run relatively simultaneously without stepping on each other's feet and efficiently. However, this does not include directly taking over functionality of or second guessing what the applications are trying to accomplish (provided that they have the appropriate permissions). If your application software doesn't save the document every five minutes then blame the application developers, not the ones who wrote the operating system. The operating system is sort of like the ideal government, it keeps the peace and intervenes when necessary, but most of the time it lets applications succeed or fail on their own provided that they don't interfere with the ability of other processes to do the same.
The persistence of the desktop metaphor is mostly due to Microsoft and to a lesser extent Apple rather than to any inherent flaw in the way that modern operating systems are constructed. If you do not like the desktop metaphor then don't use it. There is nothing stopping you from running Linux from the command line only if you so choose. If by "desktop" you mean graphical window management system (i.e. windows, bu
Is it just me or does anybody else find this extreme thin fetishism to be a little bit out of control? I can see how thin, in the absence of other considerations, can be desirable from the standpoint of it takes up less space in my pocket or on my desk. However, we see device manufacturers producing products which overheat and die because they wanted that last 2mm of thinness instead of a long lasting and stable product or they put a really small battery in the device, substantially reducing uptime when running on battery, simply to save that few millimeters again. I wouldn't even mind so much except that it is becoming difficult for people like me, who value other qualities besides just "thinness", to find the electronics that we want at a reasonable price instead of planned obsolescence consumer grade junk that sacrifices the functional characteristics of the device for the physical looks and dimensions of the device (among the least important characteristics in my opinion).
He is taking an awful risk if you ask me. The Chinese, as you say, have no respect for their own constitution or at best they respect it as long as it doesn't get in the way of what government officials and the politburo want to do. It wouldn't surprise me if the Chinese government decided to...ahem...settle out of court if you know what I mean. There are plenty of accidents every day in China and it would not be difficult for the Chinese government to arrange an "accident" both to rid themselves of an "inconvenient" citizen and provide a warning to other citizens who might be tempted to exercise their "rights" under the Chinese Constitution.
DISCLAIMER: I do not work for Wal-Mart nor do I own their stock, I am merely presenting my own impressions based upon what I know of their business and the retail sales industry in general.
Perhaps, but the studios will be reluctant, just as the music labels were reluctant and finally dragged kicking and screaming by Apple into the download market, to deal with either Amazon or Wal-Mart (and Wal-Mart especially so) because they know that both retailers will push them hard on price in order to access their distribution channels and that would accelerate the erosion of their current pricing power which is already being squeezed by cutthroat competition between the likes of Amazon, Cosco, and Wal-Mart in the packaged for sale DVD market and Netflix in the DVD rental market. To the studios, DRM is like the mirage always just over the horizon, with promises of wealth without compromises and they will be reluctant to give up that hope, even though it is almost certainly in their long-term best interests to do so.
Nobody abandoned sovereignty to join the WTO, but all of the members did sign treaties (including your elected representatives in Congress here in the United States) promising to make certain concessions and changes in existing laws on tarrifs and trade beginning with the General Agreement on Tarrifs and Trade. Now, nobody is forcing anyone to hold up their end of the bargain, it is voluntary after all, but if we don't hold up our end of the bargain on concessions such as elimination of tarrifs and subsidies and opening of our markets then how can we expect other countries to do the same for us? So yes, you can take your ball and go home, but if everyone did that then all of us would be worse off because of highly restricted trade. It would be the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act all over again and really nobody wants that because it is not in the best interests of any of the member countries. We are all better off cooperating on trade, but sometimes a sanctioned retaliation (i.e. anti-dumping tarrifs in the case of Chinese furniture and copyright exemptions in the case of Antigua) are necessary to remind the politicians of the benefits of trade (the stick that comes with the carrot).
The pornography example is not a good one because it is not representative (Saudi Arabia really does ban it entirely so there is no unfair protection of local producers because there are none in that country anyway), but the Antiguans definitely have a point on the gambling issue here. If the United States was really serious about "protecting the public morals" from the "evils of gambling" then they would ban it completely at the federal level (which they cannot do anyway, but assume that they could). Instead, just about every state has a lottery monopoly or participates in one, there are native American casinos all over the place, and certain states which do have legalized gambling all have a vested special interest in locking out the competition (at least to the extent that they can). So who do you think is paying the anti-gambling lobbyists on capital hill to preach against the "evils of gambling"? Is it the Christian Right? Hardly (they are bit players on the issue...vocal perhaps, but no money and it really isn't a voting issue in the same way that abortion is for them), it is primarily financed by...you guessed it, the vested interests in the domestic bricks and mortar gaming industry (i.e. Native American Tribes, Nevada and Atlantic City gaming corporations, and States that want to preserve their lottery revenues). So the United States is talking out of both sides of its mouth on the gambling issue and Antigua and others are right to call them out on it.