That's a national sales tax which replaces ALL forms of federal taxation in favor of a tax on consumption. It's made non-regressive via a pre-bate.
So if I were rich, I would simply live outside the country in whatever first world nation had a lower consumption tax than the US, while claiming all of my income in the US so I don't have to pay taxes.
So the money stays at home, is doled out tax free to the shareholders, who spend it abroad.
Never mind that consumption, as a percentage of income, shrinks drastically as your income grows. Your idea is wholly defective.
The core problem with Android is a core problem with ARM, namely that all of the nice plug-and-play stuff that lets a single kernel, and thus an Ubuntu live CD, boot on many systems doesn't exist in ARM. So each handset has to have the kernel adapted to it. And since this adaptation has to be done for every kernel Google releases, the handset vendors get lazy particularly as the kernel moves on and leaves their older, out of tree drivers behind.
This has little to nothing to do with regular Linux distros because compatibility across them is actually quite good and as of Jellybean there is nothing other than the kernel in Android that is used by other open source projects.
That they fail to push security fixes, let alone new Android versions, is because they just don't give a fuck.
It is not written into the UEFI spec. In fact, the UEFI specification makes no such statements with respect to it being possible to disable secure boot, only how it is supposed to work. That was done deliberately.
The only reason you can even turn off secure boot on hardware now is because Microsoft caught shit for the first pass of their guidelines that left it up to OEMs whether or not users would be able to turn off secure boot. Had they left like that you can guarantee that Samsung et. al. would have locked every laptop and desktop they shipped with Windows 8 and you would never actually own your PC again.
I bet Samsung is more pissed that Microsoft changed it so they had to allow for unlocks than they are at their own developers.
Because Apple, HP and IBM don't have their own OS on some of their products...
Apple doesn't distribute their OS to any other OEMs, and neither HP nor IBM's OSes matter in the context that Microsoft has heavily pushed secure boot in.
My point was, quite simply, that Microsoft is the hard-charger behind the move towards secure boot. And they, more than anyone else in that list, hate Linux.
Microsoft is the only PC OS vendor in that list and carries a lot of sway. So much, in fact, that secure boot was designed and implemented completely by them. They did it under the guise of the TCG, whose flag they've been waving for years. Secure boot is just a culmination of the vendor-biased security they've wanted.
Your phone is locked when you get it at a reduced price in exchange for exclusivly using it with the carrier that sold it to you.
No, you get it at a reduced price in exchange for agreeing to a multi-year contract. The carrier lock on the handset is completely arbitrary.
Unlocking a phone yourself was breaking the promise you personnaly made to the carrier.
No it isn't. Breaking the contract is and they have recourse: the ETF they make you agree to.
If you are not fine with having your phone locked, you can either buy it unlocked but for a bigger price, or ask the carrier to unlock it, usually free after a (long) time or for a fee.
Assuming you can get it unlocked, as the US carriers actively keep unlocked handsets equivalent to the ones they sell out of the country (or worse, you're on Verizon/Sprint and can't), and often carriers will refuse to ever unlock handsets.
I can't avoid the Modern interface. There are a rather large number of options in the OS that are only accessible via that UI and, conversely, many that cannot. The OS is schizophrenic and unable to function in one or the other exclusively.
Did Windows 8 suddenly make you so lazy that you can't download and install something that gives you the options you desire?
The Start Menu was removed for the sole purpose of shoving a tablet-centric UI down users throats for the sake of their presence in the Tablet market. The entire Modern environment is centered around that (and to establish Microsoft's walled garden.)
The problem comes not with signing, but with who controls the chain of trust. That is what you need to be concerned about.
If I hold the keys to the chain of trust, then it's my computer and secure. Anything else is unacceptable and an abuse of security policies for the sake of control.
Given the number of BIOS updates for the DQ77MK, and the remaining incompatibilities with various PCIe cards, I have to object. I've had far more luck with ASUS and MSI for motherboards. Even Gigabyte tends to put out good quality boards.
But I really can't see this being a successful venture.
Why not? Game developers can't be hurt by being given a way to stay independent of any one company. Currently they can play the console vendors off each other, even if the platforms are vendor controlled. On the PC, they've never had anyone but Microsoft.
Why would people bother with this when they can just play practically all of (if not actually all of) the same games on the windows PC that they already have?
Because I want a choice other than "Microsoft or no games at all." I'm not alone, apparently.
Well, the entire "Modern" enviroment and associated tablet-oriented Start screen notwithstanding, they're the same. But Microsoft is banking on Modern and the WinRT API to establish their walled garden, which they feel they need to compete with Apple.
He's referring to a point made recently to some kernel-internal DMA interfaces that are marked as GPL only and Nvidia wanted them to be something else so they could use them with their proprietary module.
Alan Cox resisted, and as a result a small performance boost can't be had by proprietary graphics drivers.
I do like Apple's walled garden because of the polish, quantity, and diversity of the app offerings, but I want to be able to knock a hole in that wall every now and then when I want to do something they don't want me to do (wifi tethering, custom lock screens, custom notification badges, etc).
Then perhaps the right answer is, instead of giving money to a company that is hostile to you, that you should look around for a vendor who provides what you want. Android's done a good job at crippling that market however.
They get to lock down the OS so the vast majority of non tech-savvy customers don't wind up breaking their precious iDevices installing malware, but the holes still exist for the more adventurous users.
No. iOS 6 proves that this argument is and always has been shit. Apple doesn't give a flying fuck about jailbreakers and will fight them until they've got nothing and thus far Apple is winning.
However, if they ever succeed in truly battening down the hatches and making jailbreaking impossible, I'll be forced to jump ship.
And then you end up in the situation jailbreakers are with iOS 6. There is still no jailbreak for the platform. And when one is released, Apple will patch it.
Playing silly cat and mouse games with vendors that do this is effort and time wasted. If you see value in using devices you purchase as you see fit, then buy from vendors that don't deliberately interfere with you and make those devices and the software for them better.
In the case of Google, MeeGo/Sailfish and WebOS I think there's an interest in having the product open-source.
And in the case of MeeGo/Sailfish, they actively use GPL projects. Google actively avoids and replaces them, other than the kernel. Handset vendors, however, have a perverse fetish for releasing as little as they can get away with.
When has prudence had anything to do with the indelible need of geeks to create Nifty Cool Things?
That's unrelated to his point, which would be that if you moved Android or whatnot to a BSD kernel, you would be even more locked out of these devices than you already are.
There's no reason we couldn't switch over to BSD...
There's no reason you couldn't, but there are plenty of reasons not to. Particularly with respect to device manufacturers with a fetish for not releasing sources.
look at MacOS X. It didn't need the GPL to flourish.
Instead it had a marketing machine behind it and a thin veneer of *NIX on top. In areas actually important to Apple, they're aggressively hostile to anyone interested in a *NIX userspace.
Due in no small part to the fact that there is no such thing as a standard GNU/Linux distribution.
No, due to the fact that they eschew GNU entirely, which is actually pretty common across Linux distributions with the sole exception of Android.
If you had experience developing for Embedded Linux systems you would realize how unfounded your "complaint" is. We have been using Busybox and non-glibc libc for over a decade.
I'm aware that Embedded Linux don't use glibc, they tend to use uClibc or (worse) something proprietary.
But Android is still deliberately separated from GNU/Linux platforms because Google wanted to control it all and cater to handset vendors that don't like having to comply with the GPL.
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So if I were rich, I would simply live outside the country in whatever first world nation had a lower consumption tax than the US, while claiming all of my income in the US so I don't have to pay taxes.
So the money stays at home, is doled out tax free to the shareholders, who spend it abroad.
Never mind that consumption, as a percentage of income, shrinks drastically as your income grows. Your idea is wholly defective.
Nonsense.
The core problem with Android is a core problem with ARM, namely that all of the nice plug-and-play stuff that lets a single kernel, and thus an Ubuntu live CD, boot on many systems doesn't exist in ARM. So each handset has to have the kernel adapted to it. And since this adaptation has to be done for every kernel Google releases, the handset vendors get lazy particularly as the kernel moves on and leaves their older, out of tree drivers behind.
This has little to nothing to do with regular Linux distros because compatibility across them is actually quite good and as of Jellybean there is nothing other than the kernel in Android that is used by other open source projects.
That they fail to push security fixes, let alone new Android versions, is because they just don't give a fuck.
All of them. Apple isn't using it yet but I'm sure its inevitable.
Last I checked, this bootloader prompts before booting anything, i.e. it would be blatantly obvious if you used it.
It is not written into the UEFI spec. In fact, the UEFI specification makes no such statements with respect to it being possible to disable secure boot, only how it is supposed to work. That was done deliberately.
The only reason you can even turn off secure boot on hardware now is because Microsoft caught shit for the first pass of their guidelines that left it up to OEMs whether or not users would be able to turn off secure boot. Had they left like that you can guarantee that Samsung et. al. would have locked every laptop and desktop they shipped with Windows 8 and you would never actually own your PC again.
I bet Samsung is more pissed that Microsoft changed it so they had to allow for unlocks than they are at their own developers.
Apple doesn't distribute their OS to any other OEMs, and neither HP nor IBM's OSes matter in the context that Microsoft has heavily pushed secure boot in.
My point was, quite simply, that Microsoft is the hard-charger behind the move towards secure boot. And they, more than anyone else in that list, hate Linux.
Microsoft is the only PC OS vendor in that list and carries a lot of sway. So much, in fact, that secure boot was designed and implemented completely by them. They did it under the guise of the TCG, whose flag they've been waving for years. Secure boot is just a culmination of the vendor-biased security they've wanted.
Yes, the DMCA doesn't have a time limit on its protections.
No, you get it at a reduced price in exchange for agreeing to a multi-year contract. The carrier lock on the handset is completely arbitrary.
No it isn't. Breaking the contract is and they have recourse: the ETF they make you agree to.
Assuming you can get it unlocked, as the US carriers actively keep unlocked handsets equivalent to the ones they sell out of the country (or worse, you're on Verizon/Sprint and can't), and often carriers will refuse to ever unlock handsets.
Given how people use their devices these days, I'd argue that actual voice calls are a secondary, possibly tertiary function these days.
The correct response is that it should not crash while fulfilling any of its core functions, nor should applications be able to crash it.
I can't avoid the Modern interface. There are a rather large number of options in the OS that are only accessible via that UI and, conversely, many that cannot. The OS is schizophrenic and unable to function in one or the other exclusively.
The Start Menu was removed for the sole purpose of shoving a tablet-centric UI down users throats for the sake of their presence in the Tablet market. The entire Modern environment is centered around that (and to establish Microsoft's walled garden.)
The problem comes not with signing, but with who controls the chain of trust. That is what you need to be concerned about.
If I hold the keys to the chain of trust, then it's my computer and secure. Anything else is unacceptable and an abuse of security policies for the sake of control.
Given the number of BIOS updates for the DQ77MK, and the remaining incompatibilities with various PCIe cards, I have to object. I've had far more luck with ASUS and MSI for motherboards. Even Gigabyte tends to put out good quality boards.
Why not? Game developers can't be hurt by being given a way to stay independent of any one company. Currently they can play the console vendors off each other, even if the platforms are vendor controlled. On the PC, they've never had anyone but Microsoft.
Because I want a choice other than "Microsoft or no games at all." I'm not alone, apparently.
He's thinking of the distros few people use, like Trisquel and whatnot.
Because as you get away from Ubuntu and its derivatives the number of users drops off, with it falling even further as you get away from Fedora.
That said, Steam has been packaged up since the closed beta for other Distros.
Well, the entire "Modern" enviroment and associated tablet-oriented Start screen notwithstanding, they're the same. But Microsoft is banking on Modern and the WinRT API to establish their walled garden, which they feel they need to compete with Apple.
He's referring to a point made recently to some kernel-internal DMA interfaces that are marked as GPL only and Nvidia wanted them to be something else so they could use them with their proprietary module.
Alan Cox resisted, and as a result a small performance boost can't be had by proprietary graphics drivers.
http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTA0ODE
But its not. You're patronizing a hostile vendor.
Then perhaps the right answer is, instead of giving money to a company that is hostile to you, that you should look around for a vendor who provides what you want. Android's done a good job at crippling that market however.
No. iOS 6 proves that this argument is and always has been shit. Apple doesn't give a flying fuck about jailbreakers and will fight them until they've got nothing and thus far Apple is winning.
You'll eventually jump ship.
And then you end up in the situation jailbreakers are with iOS 6. There is still no jailbreak for the platform. And when one is released, Apple will patch it.
Playing silly cat and mouse games with vendors that do this is effort and time wasted. If you see value in using devices you purchase as you see fit, then buy from vendors that don't deliberately interfere with you and make those devices and the software for them better.
It's exceedingly hard in the US, where few if any handset vendors sell into the retail channel. I suspect this is under threat from the carriers.
And in the case of MeeGo/Sailfish, they actively use GPL projects. Google actively avoids and replaces them, other than the kernel. Handset vendors, however, have a perverse fetish for releasing as little as they can get away with.
That's unrelated to his point, which would be that if you moved Android or whatnot to a BSD kernel, you would be even more locked out of these devices than you already are.
There's no reason you couldn't, but there are plenty of reasons not to. Particularly with respect to device manufacturers with a fetish for not releasing sources.
Instead it had a marketing machine behind it and a thin veneer of *NIX on top. In areas actually important to Apple, they're aggressively hostile to anyone interested in a *NIX userspace.
No, due to the fact that they eschew GNU entirely, which is actually pretty common across Linux distributions with the sole exception of Android.
I'm aware that Embedded Linux don't use glibc, they tend to use uClibc or (worse) something proprietary.
But Android is still deliberately separated from GNU/Linux platforms because Google wanted to control it all and cater to handset vendors that don't like having to comply with the GPL.