ctually, one in every hundred of us are currently incarcerated. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, since the companies running the prisons are turning a nice profit. The Soviet Union's "communist" experiment was a massive failure, and I suspect the history books will record the United States' quest to become the ultimate capitalist society as equally flawed. For better or worse, the explosive industrialization that made the US such an economic and social powerhouse throughout the 20th Century is in the past.
I once had a conversation about the USSR with several people who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 1980s. One remarked, "I honestly believed we lived in the most magnificent nation on Earth, and I couldn't imagine why anyone could possibly hate the people I loved so much."
OK, so you use an electric engine to drive a compressor which then drives the wheels. Or - even worse - you'll use a gasoline engine to compress the air. It's true that you'll get "zero pollution" while driving, but this vehicle is going to use significantly more energy than a vehicle that uses an electric or gasoline engine to drive the wheels directly. And that means *more* pollution, not less. There is a reason that we don't use compressed air to anything larger than toy cars and rockets - it has an incredibly low energy density compared to a tankful of hydrocarbon-based fuel.
This is yet another "clean energy" idea that preys on the naieve.
Which Kennedy assassination would you like us to blame you for?;) The global music industry is worth somewhere in the region of 30 billion dollars per year. That's a stunning amount of money for a discretionary product - after all, no one needs to purchase the latest hit songs. In the old days, one could make an argument that purchasing a $5.88 LP or cassette was "decent value." After all, there was no other way to obtain a high quality copy of a favorite song. In exchange for my money, I received physical media that I could resell, along with decent cover artwork and hopefully some interesting liner notes. These days, the major labels expect me to pay a buck for three minutes of highly compressed audio at a marginally acceptable bit rate. Your product sounds worse than it did fifteen years ago, and you've managed to get rid of artwork, liner notes and creative packaging.
The barriers to entry in your market have dropped through the floor - all that's needed is a killer "YouTube for music" app that lets independent artists reach an audience effectively and you're done for. Web-savvy artists love the idea of earning 50% or more for each track sold, rather than the meager royalties that large labels pay. They no longer need your exhorbitantly priced studio time (which you extracted from their royalties), expensive music videos (which you extracted from their royalties), or marketing effort(extracted from their royalties), nor are they comfortable with the idea of giving the lion's share of their earnings away. The days of the major labels are numbered. Now quit trying to blame us for your industry's ills and start working to come up with The Next Big Thing.
The Apollo astronauts reported that moondust smells like smells like 'spent gunpowder.' They couldn't help tracking the fine powder back into their lunar modules (especially after tripping and falling while bouncing around the lunar surface). To add to the mystery, the smell disappears after it being exposed to air.
Hitler is merely a footnote in the birth of the bug. An early "Beetle" design appeared as the NSU Typ 32, which appeared in 1932. It was designed by Ferdinand Porsche years before Hitler rose to power and bears a striking resemblance to the beetle. See my writeup here for a picture: http://www.retrothing.com/2007/06/the_vw_beetles_.html
The VW bug was promoted as the almost impossibly inexpensive KdF-Wagen (Kraft durch Freude - strength through happiness), which was announced by the Nazi's in 1938. Porsche thought that the very optimistic 1000 Reichmark price was unattainable, but it undoubtedly played a huge role in his clever and simple design. Unfortunately, the events if WWII put the Bug on hold in favour of military equipment. The production line was restarted by the British following the war and eventually handed over to the West German government.
The really important question that Sony shareholders should be asking is how this dimwitted marketing approach escaped into the wild. Even a team of newly minted MBAs wouldn't come up with something this limited without unrealistic constraints. I've been in boardrooms will a group of sharp 20-somethings, and they'd poke enough holes in this scheme to sink it within the first 90 seconds (partly because they are members of the download generation).
Therefore, I present the hypothesis that this marketing strategy was actually dreamed up a year or two ago. It seems that the constraints placed on the marketers were:
1. Must involve the sale of physical product from a physical location (to allow retail markup)
2. Must target Boomers and older Gen X'ers by offering an extremely focused selection (although it's an inexplicable mix)
3. Must be priced >= physical media to avoid cannibalizing sales from CDs (which are purchased predominantly by the older adults this new strategy is targeting)
4. Must promote Sony through extensive branding on the card and a private-label download site. The target demographic should perceive this as something that no other label offers.
5. DRM-free, to generate excitement (although that buzz has been killed by other labels introducing their entire catalog as DRM-free media) and eliminate compatibility issues for a less than tech-savvy target market.
I suspect that this approach has been planned at Sony for a year or more, since there are a lot of collateral pieces required (site branding, backend software, etc). It might have looked like a moderately acceptable compromise back then, when the other majors hadn't jumped onto the DRM-free bandwagon. Now, it's inexcusable. I suspect that the corporate hierarchy at Sony doesn't encourage "turn on a dime" rethinks, because this initiative is something I'd kill instantly if I was the project's VP. It no longer fits the market.
oddly enough, my new year's resolution is 1200 x 1920. I can't stand a wide but short monitor - completely inefficient use of space. The only thing it's good for is watching movies.
One wonders how effective this will be in a world filled with iPods. I see a stunning percentage of people wearing earbuds or bluetooth headsets in downtown public spaces. This is partly to counteract the noise of the city, and partly because I think it makes people feel safer and more connected to be able to walk through a crowd of strangers listening to their own personal soundtrack.
I get the feeling that the general response to this kind of invasive advertising will be, "Man, that's creepy and makes my skin crawl." The only advertisers who might want that kind of reaction are horror movie producers or skin cream manufacturers.:)
*When a piece of electronics is really bricked, that means that the ROM is in such an unrecoverable state, that it can't even be flashed with a new working ROM, and needs to be either thrown away, or sent to a factory for repair.*
I first heard the term 'bricked' in relation to hard drives, back when Apple was still producing the Newton. It makes sense - a drive with severe platter damage that won't spin up resembles a brick because of its shape and weight.
The modern term 'bricking' is usually used in relation to a firmware of OS patch that renders a device unusable. Your use of the term is misleading and overly narrow, since you can't 'flash' a ROM(what people refer to as flash memory is usually a variation of EEPROM). A device can also become 'bricked' because of corrupt user data stored on a drive or battery-backed RAM.
Aww, c'mon. Do we have to post stories to slashdot with an affiliate program codes in the links? This stuff should be removed by editors before posting, because it encourages people to submit links for profit. As far as obesity goes, it's caused by sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day, seven days a week while subsisting on Twinkies and Coca Cola.
Why is it that shows like Power Rangers are acceptable for slightly older kids, then? They clearly demonstrate an approach to the world seems destined to create a legion of Stormtroopers for Darth Vader's next galactic conquest, where head-to-toe uniforms obscure all trace of personality and violence succeeds above all else. A (very) weak argument could be made that violent kids' shows are aimed at a more mature audience, but many six and seven year olds have pre-school brothers and sisters who are exposed to this stuff "accidentally."
Umm... US police forces haven't been focused on personal downloading, either. The RIAA has been targeting downloaders through civil suits. The Canadian Recording Industry Assoc (whose members are international corporations - the Canadian labels have all withdrawn membership) could pursue the same course of action once they manage to push through a few draconian amendments to Canadian law.
TFA should be entitled, "Today's younger generations are discovering that some stuff can be fixed... if it's the right stuff and I don't have a six figure income." My father was more than happy to pull out a screwdriver and tinker with the record player, and would sometimes spend days tinkering with gadgets to get them to function correctly. Of course, most of the stuff that he used was electromechanical, with components large enough to replace by hand.
Dad often took the time to point out how things worked, because he honestly believed his understanding of "how things work" would be of immense value to me. Unfortunately, it wasn't. I was a child of the 8-bit microprocessor revolution; my childhood environment was filled with mysterious digital circuitry, and no manner of traditional tinkering could repair a blown Commodore 6581 SID chip. Things have gotten worse with time: The introduction of surface-mount components and multi-function chipsets means that there are genuinely few "user serviceable" parts inside consumer goods.
Millions of PDAs, handheld computers, digital cameras, phones and mp3 players flooded the marketplace in the 1990s. It didn't make sense to try to fix them if they broke, because something 10x better was always just around the corner. Fast forward a decade, and the rate of development has slowed. My 3-year-old iPod is like an old friend, and it's technically "good enough" for everyday use. If the battery or screen needs replacing, it's worth it (from an economic and time standpoint).
Unfortunately, lots of modern tech gear isn't designed to be fixed. It's designed to be cheap to produce. That translates to mp3 players with shoddy connectors that pop of the circuit board, or DVD playback mechanisms with poor quality plastic drive gears. Thist stuff can be fixed, but it's usually more trouble than its worth. As far as electronic repairs go, the easiest solution is often a board swap, because replacing SMD parts requires considerable skill and patience in addition to excellent troubleshooting skills. All is not lost, though -- things will change quickly if the economy continues to nosedive, for the simple reason that asian-made electronics will cost more to purchase and real incomes in the US will drop. Paradoxically, poverty breeds creativity and determination for geeks.
The telling thing is that the various northeastern states are pushing the Bush administration for tighter emission regulations. Usually, it's the other way around - local politicians seek to fend off draconian federal policies that might cripple local industry. The amazing thing is that they're suing the EPA itself, and my professional experience is that many scientists associated with the EPA are incredibly concerned about the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment. They're forced to keep quiet and follow the mandate passed down by a perplexingly out-of-touch executive team in the White House.
...it pays to wait. The technology industry is built around a culture of false urgency, and reviewers like Pogue - along with gadget-a-second blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo - just fuel the fire. It takes days or weeks to discover a new gadgets true strengths and weaknesses, and all that gets glossed over in the quest to be the first to write something meaningful.
It's been going on for decades, though - I can vividly remember kids in the early 1980s bringing super-slim Sony Walkmans to school. They were several hundreds of dollars a pop. My dad simply put his foot down and uttered words of infinite wisdom: "Just wait a year." So I did. In the end, I purchased an Aiwa clone for a fraction of the cost... and my dad's eyes sparkled. His voice still echoes in the back of my head every time I wander lustfully through Best Buy, deftly avoiding the enormous plasma TVs and zillion dollar smartphones: 99% of the stuff we lust after is unnecessary. Don't let Pogue, Mossberg, Lam or The Great Steve try to tell you otherwise.;)
The idea is that the TSA would still be able to run a check on the late pax because they've already screened the bulk of the flight several days in advance. The current system requires airlines to release passenger info 15 minutes before a flight and they're probably having a hard time processing weeding through the false positives in that time - that process probably requires manual intervention. They're dealing with some fairly rudimentary fields when matching: first/last name, passport number, etc. A single John Smith on the watch list is going to cause thousands of partial matches every day.
Honestly, the entire system seems overly simplistic - it appears that a fake passport and credit card with a neutral name is enough to avoid setting off the alarms.
TFA seems to be a slashdot reading comprehension test. Sadly, you fail. The TSA is not requiring you to book a flight more than 72 hours prior to departure, nor does anyone with half a brain think that would be a clever idea. They are simply proposing that airlines must provide certain information about confirmed passengers 72 hours prior to the flight. They expect that 90 to 93% of travel reservations will be finalized by that point. The other 7-10% are last minute flights or reschedules that will have to be reviewed separately. The whole idea is to give themselves enough time to review the passenger manifest and flag persons of interest well in advance of takeoff to avoid awkward mid-air diversions.
We do have universal health care in my country, along with OnStar. And even if we didn't, someone has to foot the bill for private health care. That someone will always be you, either indirectly through your employer or from your own pocket.
Should it also be your choice whether you choose to buckle in your children? How about someone else's child? That's where things start to get ethically difficult. The notion behind legislating public safety is that it is for the greater good. To that end, we have democratically elected officials who draft laws intended to protect the public as a whole.
This has nothing to do with universal health care, because you're the one footing the bill in both private and public systems. Seatbelt laws were passed to save lives. I'm too young to remember the pre-belt days, but I'm sure there were millions of supposedly intelligent people who didn't like the inconvenience of buckling up and chose to "use their arms" to hold themselves out of harm's way in an accident. Dumb.
*Anyone remember how the seat belt laws did the same thing? "They are for your safety".. " cant build a car without one".. "you gotta wear one or you violate the law"..."well, we can only charge you if we stop you for something else nad notice it".. Now they have roadblocks*
Huh?? People rocket around at a mile a minute in fragile little tin roller skates. When two roller skates run into each other, the contents tend to get badly shaken up. Without seat belts, you're far more likely to be ejected or impact the steering column with your face. I acknowledge your right to freedom, but at the same time I have no wish to fund your care while you spend 30 years fading to black in a vegetative state because your brain got scrambled in a relatively minor accident.
br>That said, OnStar shouldn't be in a position to disable a stolen vehicle while its rolling because they cannot assess the potential for injury to others. There's no reason they can't simply disable a stolen vehicle while its stationary and pass on its location to the police.
I quite clearly remember Jobs standing on stage at Moscone declaring proudly that the iPhone ran OS X. Everyone oohhed and ahhhed as they began to realize what this meant: the iPhone was a full-fledged miniature PC powered by their fave OS. Think of the killer apps that could be written for this thing, etcetera. Now that reality is setting in, one has to wonder what Steve's thinking. What use is a PC you can't write apps for?
Slashdot Mirror
Are we truly free? Or is that just an illusion?
ctually, one in every hundred of us are currently incarcerated. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, since the companies running the prisons are turning a nice profit. The Soviet Union's "communist" experiment was a massive failure, and I suspect the history books will record the United States' quest to become the ultimate capitalist society as equally flawed. For better or worse, the explosive industrialization that made the US such an economic and social powerhouse throughout the 20th Century is in the past.
I once had a conversation about the USSR with several people who had grown up behind the Iron Curtain in the 1970s and 1980s. One remarked, "I honestly believed we lived in the most magnificent nation on Earth, and I couldn't imagine why anyone could possibly hate the people I loved so much."
Errm... so use your "green" electricity to charge a battery, not run an incredibly inefficient electric air compressor.
OK, so you use an electric engine to drive a compressor which then drives the wheels. Or - even worse - you'll use a gasoline engine to compress the air. It's true that you'll get "zero pollution" while driving, but this vehicle is going to use significantly more energy than a vehicle that uses an electric or gasoline engine to drive the wheels directly. And that means *more* pollution, not less. There is a reason that we don't use compressed air to anything larger than toy cars and rockets - it has an incredibly low energy density compared to a tankful of hydrocarbon-based fuel.
This is yet another "clean energy" idea that preys on the naieve.
Which Kennedy assassination would you like us to blame you for? ;) The global music industry is worth somewhere in the region of 30 billion dollars per year. That's a stunning amount of money for a discretionary product - after all, no one needs to purchase the latest hit songs. In the old days, one could make an argument that purchasing a $5.88 LP or cassette was "decent value." After all, there was no other way to obtain a high quality copy of a favorite song. In exchange for my money, I received physical media that I could resell, along with decent cover artwork and hopefully some interesting liner notes. These days, the major labels expect me to pay a buck for three minutes of highly compressed audio at a marginally acceptable bit rate. Your product sounds worse than it did fifteen years ago, and you've managed to get rid of artwork, liner notes and creative packaging.
The barriers to entry in your market have dropped through the floor - all that's needed is a killer "YouTube for music" app that lets independent artists reach an audience effectively and you're done for. Web-savvy artists love the idea of earning 50% or more for each track sold, rather than the meager royalties that large labels pay. They no longer need your exhorbitantly priced studio time (which you extracted from their royalties), expensive music videos (which you extracted from their royalties), or marketing effort(extracted from their royalties), nor are they comfortable with the idea of giving the lion's share of their earnings away. The days of the major labels are numbered. Now quit trying to blame us for your industry's ills and start working to come up with The Next Big Thing.
The Apollo astronauts reported that moondust smells like smells like 'spent gunpowder.' They couldn't help tracking the fine powder back into their lunar modules (especially after tripping and falling while bouncing around the lunar surface). To add to the mystery, the smell disappears after it being exposed to air.
Hitler is merely a footnote in the birth of the bug. An early "Beetle" design appeared as the NSU Typ 32, which appeared in 1932. It was designed by Ferdinand Porsche years before Hitler rose to power and bears a striking resemblance to the beetle. See my writeup here for a picture: http://www.retrothing.com/2007/06/the_vw_beetles_.html The VW bug was promoted as the almost impossibly inexpensive KdF-Wagen (Kraft durch Freude - strength through happiness), which was announced by the Nazi's in 1938. Porsche thought that the very optimistic 1000 Reichmark price was unattainable, but it undoubtedly played a huge role in his clever and simple design. Unfortunately, the events if WWII put the Bug on hold in favour of military equipment. The production line was restarted by the British following the war and eventually handed over to the West German government.
The really important question that Sony shareholders should be asking is how this dimwitted marketing approach escaped into the wild. Even a team of newly minted MBAs wouldn't come up with something this limited without unrealistic constraints. I've been in boardrooms will a group of sharp 20-somethings, and they'd poke enough holes in this scheme to sink it within the first 90 seconds (partly because they are members of the download generation).
Therefore, I present the hypothesis that this marketing strategy was actually dreamed up a year or two ago. It seems that the constraints placed on the marketers were:1. Must involve the sale of physical product from a physical location (to allow retail markup)
2. Must target Boomers and older Gen X'ers by offering an extremely focused selection (although it's an inexplicable mix)
3. Must be priced >= physical media to avoid cannibalizing sales from CDs (which are purchased predominantly by the older adults this new strategy is targeting)
4. Must promote Sony through extensive branding on the card and a private-label download site. The target demographic should perceive this as something that no other label offers.
5. DRM-free, to generate excitement (although that buzz has been killed by other labels introducing their entire catalog as DRM-free media) and eliminate compatibility issues for a less than tech-savvy target market.
I suspect that this approach has been planned at Sony for a year or more, since there are a lot of collateral pieces required (site branding, backend software, etc). It might have looked like a moderately acceptable compromise back then, when the other majors hadn't jumped onto the DRM-free bandwagon. Now, it's inexcusable. I suspect that the corporate hierarchy at Sony doesn't encourage "turn on a dime" rethinks, because this initiative is something I'd kill instantly if I was the project's VP. It no longer fits the market.
oddly enough, my new year's resolution is 1200 x 1920. I can't stand a wide but short monitor - completely inefficient use of space. The only thing it's good for is watching movies.
One wonders how effective this will be in a world filled with iPods. I see a stunning percentage of people wearing earbuds or bluetooth headsets in downtown public spaces. This is partly to counteract the noise of the city, and partly because I think it makes people feel safer and more connected to be able to walk through a crowd of strangers listening to their own personal soundtrack.
I get the feeling that the general response to this kind of invasive advertising will be, "Man, that's creepy and makes my skin crawl." The only advertisers who might want that kind of reaction are horror movie producers or skin cream manufacturers. :)
*When a piece of electronics is really bricked, that means that the ROM is in such an unrecoverable state, that it can't even be flashed with a new working ROM, and needs to be either thrown away, or sent to a factory for repair.*
I first heard the term 'bricked' in relation to hard drives, back when Apple was still producing the Newton. It makes sense - a drive with severe platter damage that won't spin up resembles a brick because of its shape and weight.The modern term 'bricking' is usually used in relation to a firmware of OS patch that renders a device unusable. Your use of the term is misleading and overly narrow, since you can't 'flash' a ROM(what people refer to as flash memory is usually a variation of EEPROM). A device can also become 'bricked' because of corrupt user data stored on a drive or battery-backed RAM.
Aww, c'mon. Do we have to post stories to slashdot with an affiliate program codes in the links? This stuff should be removed by editors before posting, because it encourages people to submit links for profit. As far as obesity goes, it's caused by sitting in front of a computer 12 hours a day, seven days a week while subsisting on Twinkies and Coca Cola.
Why is it that shows like Power Rangers are acceptable for slightly older kids, then? They clearly demonstrate an approach to the world seems destined to create a legion of Stormtroopers for Darth Vader's next galactic conquest, where head-to-toe uniforms obscure all trace of personality and violence succeeds above all else. A (very) weak argument could be made that violent kids' shows are aimed at a more mature audience, but many six and seven year olds have pre-school brothers and sisters who are exposed to this stuff "accidentally."
Umm... US police forces haven't been focused on personal downloading, either. The RIAA has been targeting downloaders through civil suits. The Canadian Recording Industry Assoc (whose members are international corporations - the Canadian labels have all withdrawn membership) could pursue the same course of action once they manage to push through a few draconian amendments to Canadian law.
TFA should be entitled, "Today's younger generations are discovering that some stuff can be fixed... if it's the right stuff and I don't have a six figure income." My father was more than happy to pull out a screwdriver and tinker with the record player, and would sometimes spend days tinkering with gadgets to get them to function correctly. Of course, most of the stuff that he used was electromechanical, with components large enough to replace by hand.
Dad often took the time to point out how things worked, because he honestly believed his understanding of "how things work" would be of immense value to me. Unfortunately, it wasn't. I was a child of the 8-bit microprocessor revolution; my childhood environment was filled with mysterious digital circuitry, and no manner of traditional tinkering could repair a blown Commodore 6581 SID chip. Things have gotten worse with time: The introduction of surface-mount components and multi-function chipsets means that there are genuinely few "user serviceable" parts inside consumer goods.
Millions of PDAs, handheld computers, digital cameras, phones and mp3 players flooded the marketplace in the 1990s. It didn't make sense to try to fix them if they broke, because something 10x better was always just around the corner. Fast forward a decade, and the rate of development has slowed. My 3-year-old iPod is like an old friend, and it's technically "good enough" for everyday use. If the battery or screen needs replacing, it's worth it (from an economic and time standpoint).
Unfortunately, lots of modern tech gear isn't designed to be fixed. It's designed to be cheap to produce. That translates to mp3 players with shoddy connectors that pop of the circuit board, or DVD playback mechanisms with poor quality plastic drive gears. Thist stuff can be fixed, but it's usually more trouble than its worth. As far as electronic repairs go, the easiest solution is often a board swap, because replacing SMD parts requires considerable skill and patience in addition to excellent troubleshooting skills. All is not lost, though -- things will change quickly if the economy continues to nosedive, for the simple reason that asian-made electronics will cost more to purchase and real incomes in the US will drop. Paradoxically, poverty breeds creativity and determination for geeks.
The telling thing is that the various northeastern states are pushing the Bush administration for tighter emission regulations. Usually, it's the other way around - local politicians seek to fend off draconian federal policies that might cripple local industry. The amazing thing is that they're suing the EPA itself, and my professional experience is that many scientists associated with the EPA are incredibly concerned about the impact of greenhouse gases on the environment. They're forced to keep quiet and follow the mandate passed down by a perplexingly out-of-touch executive team in the White House.
...it pays to wait. The technology industry is built around a culture of false urgency, and reviewers like Pogue - along with gadget-a-second blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo - just fuel the fire. It takes days or weeks to discover a new gadgets true strengths and weaknesses, and all that gets glossed over in the quest to be the first to write something meaningful.
It's been going on for decades, though - I can vividly remember kids in the early 1980s bringing super-slim Sony Walkmans to school. They were several hundreds of dollars a pop. My dad simply put his foot down and uttered words of infinite wisdom: "Just wait a year." So I did. In the end, I purchased an Aiwa clone for a fraction of the cost... and my dad's eyes sparkled. His voice still echoes in the back of my head every time I wander lustfully through Best Buy, deftly avoiding the enormous plasma TVs and zillion dollar smartphones: 99% of the stuff we lust after is unnecessary. Don't let Pogue, Mossberg, Lam or The Great Steve try to tell you otherwise. ;)
The idea is that the TSA would still be able to run a check on the late pax because they've already screened the bulk of the flight several days in advance. The current system requires airlines to release passenger info 15 minutes before a flight and they're probably having a hard time processing weeding through the false positives in that time - that process probably requires manual intervention. They're dealing with some fairly rudimentary fields when matching: first/last name, passport number, etc. A single John Smith on the watch list is going to cause thousands of partial matches every day.
Honestly, the entire system seems overly simplistic - it appears that a fake passport and credit card with a neutral name is enough to avoid setting off the alarms.
TFA seems to be a slashdot reading comprehension test. Sadly, you fail. The TSA is not requiring you to book a flight more than 72 hours prior to departure, nor does anyone with half a brain think that would be a clever idea. They are simply proposing that airlines must provide certain information about confirmed passengers 72 hours prior to the flight. They expect that 90 to 93% of travel reservations will be finalized by that point. The other 7-10% are last minute flights or reschedules that will have to be reviewed separately. The whole idea is to give themselves enough time to review the passenger manifest and flag persons of interest well in advance of takeoff to avoid awkward mid-air diversions.
We do have universal health care in my country, along with OnStar. And even if we didn't, someone has to foot the bill for private health care. That someone will always be you, either indirectly through your employer or from your own pocket.
So we should just let 5-year-olds wander into traffic? ;) Excellent.
Should it also be your choice whether you choose to buckle in your children? How about someone else's child? That's where things start to get ethically difficult. The notion behind legislating public safety is that it is for the greater good. To that end, we have democratically elected officials who draft laws intended to protect the public as a whole.
This has nothing to do with universal health care, because you're the one footing the bill in both private and public systems. Seatbelt laws were passed to save lives. I'm too young to remember the pre-belt days, but I'm sure there were millions of supposedly intelligent people who didn't like the inconvenience of buckling up and chose to "use their arms" to hold themselves out of harm's way in an accident. Dumb.
Huh?? People rocket around at a mile a minute in fragile little tin roller skates. When two roller skates run into each other, the contents tend to get badly shaken up. Without seat belts, you're far more likely to be ejected or impact the steering column with your face. I acknowledge your right to freedom, but at the same time I have no wish to fund your care while you spend 30 years fading to black in a vegetative state because your brain got scrambled in a relatively minor accident.
br>That said, OnStar shouldn't be in a position to disable a stolen vehicle while its rolling because they cannot assess the potential for injury to others. There's no reason they can't simply disable a stolen vehicle while its stationary and pass on its location to the police.
Would Britney Spears do?
I quite clearly remember Jobs standing on stage at Moscone declaring proudly that the iPhone ran OS X. Everyone oohhed and ahhhed as they began to realize what this meant: the iPhone was a full-fledged miniature PC powered by their fave OS. Think of the killer apps that could be written for this thing, etcetera. Now that reality is setting in, one has to wonder what Steve's thinking. What use is a PC you can't write apps for?