Yup - that's why I basically ascribe zero loyalty to corporate brands (whether they be governments, companies, whatever). Decisions are made by people, and I might trust a person who makes good decisions to continue to make them, but I won't trust a company to do the same.
When people say "how could the company that brought us... end up doing...?" they are failing to understand this principle. The reason the same company behaved in completely different ways was that completely different people made the decisions (usually).
Likewise, we can applaud the Republicans of the 1800s who fought to end slavery without having to agree with the modern-day ones who have a completely different agenda. The two are not the same. Heck, I can vote for one Republican and vote against another in the same ballot.
Decisions get made by people. Companies might have legal recognition as persons, but just because our government is dumb doesn't mean that you and I need to be - a promise made by a corporation should be considered as dependable as your ability to sue them when they break it. A promise made by a person should be weighed against that individual's character and history.
That is one possible reason. The other is budget politics. The more money you spend, the more money you can spend on more discretionary things. If your entire budget is $500k/yr and you're spending 95% of that on salaries then chances are that you can't afford to take your team out for a fact-finding trip to Hawaii. On the other hand, if on top of your staff you are forking out $100M annually to suppliers then spending $100k to do some due diligence in Hawaii is a lot easier.
But it is a mistake, a fallacy, to think that taking $800 per month from your neighbors so you can spend it is somehow good for the economy, or your neighbors.
With the way taxes are structured in the US, what you're basically doing is taking $800/month from some buy who makes $50M per month, with no benefit to them whatsoever. The alternative is to move from a society where the top few percent own 80% of everything to a society where the top few percent own 99.99% of everything.
The average American simply isn't capable of providing an "economic benefit" using the kinds of definitions you are employing. So, you can either hand them money, or let them starve. The nature of specialization in our society means that the genetic/environmental lottery only really gifts a small portion of society with being able to contribute much. We don't have jobs for ditch diggers any longer. We haven't figured out how to create new Albert Einsteins without creating a million Bud Finkelsteins as well. Obviously I exaggerate a bit, but this is the direction society is moving in, which is why unemployment and income disparity keep growing.
Thanks for the info. I'm all for regulating such processes, and getting rid of conditions that just allow pollution to be exported to regimes that allow it. However, in the end you still need carbon in steel, and coal seems as good a source for that carbon as anything (there will be impurities in any source). That said I'm sure there are ways to reduce the carbon impact of steel production, and getting rid of loopholes in the laws is probably the best start (like doing the most carbon-intense steps in countries that simply do not regulate them).
That is another real big gap in Kyoto that people miss. Sure, there is the whole impact on the indigenous population in developing countries angle (which was the original intent of exempting them), and then there is the known gap with China being considered developing. However, there is also the issue that if you make anybody exempt big industries will just stick the most carbon-intense parts of their processes in these areas. When a company sets up some pollution-spewing process in Zimbabwe they probably employ a minimal number of the locals, and they certainly aren't doing it to be charitable to the locals. They'll give the local government whatever kickbacks they have to in order to operate under their regulatory umbrella.
If you want to help 3rd world countries then by all means build schools, or sustainable jobs, or whatever. However, the solution isn't to just let everybody dump garbage into their environment.
And if it is not burnt, it is usually much worse pollutant, so you could say that it becomes pollution as soon as it surfaces.
This is neglecting things like petrochemicals - a use of oil as a raw material for manufacturing much more valuable goods, and which on its own does not produce much CO2 or pollution (though the fuel sources used in manufacture may).
Sure, some percentage of toy rubber ducks get dropped into the ocean, but for the most part that isn't the intended use, unlike something like gasoline which is basically designed to be burned with the resulting byproducts dumped into the atmosphere.
Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None.
Cyanogenmod doesn't really have any resources to spend on anything. It is a collection of volunteer contributions. People donate to it, but for the most part all donating does is encourage the devs to buy a new phone and stop supporting the one they currently have (that isn't to say that you shouldn't donate anyway). They aren't some shop that keeps a library of phones and systematically backports fixes to all of them. The way things get backported is that some volunteer who owns the phone tweaks things and gets it running.
I can take a phone that is owned by 3 people, and as long as I do the work to port it, chances are I'll get listed as the maintainer and that phone will show up on the supported devices list. On the other hand, if a phone sells in the millions but none of the owners can be bothered to get CM working on it, then it won't be supported. That's just how most non-commercial FOSS projects work - they don't go where the money is, they go where the volunteers are.
ORLY? Blackberry, iPhone, Creative Zen dont support Ogg; the Sansa clip only added it with a later firmware. None of them support the free MonkeysAudio, or Opus, or Speex.
Incidentally, they all support DRM'd WMA. So much for your argument that "DRM is the problem, not multiple standards".
If you have music in one format and need to convert it to another and there is no DRM involved, it is relatively easy to do (though only lossless if the formats are lossless).
They might all support WMA's DRM, but that is only because none of the music publishers sell music players, well, besides Apple, and you'll note that the format they prefer only plays on their own players. If Apple decided to stop supporting WMA then you'd have the eBook mess all over again. That's a decision they will make based on what they feel their own best interests are, not what the consumer's are.
Sure, you can have DRM that is more standardized, but in the case of eBooks that isn't the status quo, and it likely won't ever be until Amazon stops selling eBooks.
In any case, the only real point of DRM seems to be to keep no-names out of the device business. If you want your Amazon eBooks to work you have to buy their reader, and if you want your Apple music to work you have to buy the iWhatever. It does nothing to prevent piracy, readily demonstrated by the fact that anything that anybody would care to pirate is already pirated DRM-free online.
So, while you're right that a variety of standards is a big part of the problem, the fact is that it is DRM that helps publishers and device manufacturers to keep a variety of standards in place.
1. The CDMA Galaxy Nexus not getting proper updates is a black mark on the brand. I don't care whose fault it is - people bought a "Nexus" but didn't get the proper experience.
2. As a result of this Google stopped making CDMA Nexus phones. This shows that they do in fact care about the brand (though apparently not enough to spot things like this before they happen). This still improves the brand.
3. Not mentioned yet, but Google isn't supporting the Nexus 4 in AOSP (officially). That, too, is a black mark on the brand. Yes, I know CyanogenMod supports it. What I don't get is if the issue was with redistribution of blobs, why didn't they just put official support in AOSP and stick a script in it to extract the blobs from a phone, as they did with some of their past devices like the ADP? (This is setting aside the fact that getting redistribution rights is something they should have taken care of BEFORE they picked a vendor - don't they know anything about commercial software licensing?)
I think Google cares about their Nexus brand. It just seems like they're almost incompetent when anything beyond the software comes up. They don't negotiate licenses to redistribute code up-front. They don't ensure the ability to push updates is there up-front. They can't seem to run a store-front and yet they don't sell through vendors like Amazon who can. Even the software isn't quite there - my Nexus 10 hangs on boot maybe 10% of the time and wakes to a non-responsive black screen about 10% of the time as well (which can be fixed by hitting the power button twice to re-wake it - the hangups while running seem to be better with the most recent update).
Yeah, I think this is a pretty simple case of liability. Plus, the casino is probably going to want to publicize that they made good on the money up-front anyway. $33M is nothing to these huge operations, and they'll lose far more than that if all the high rollers go someplace else next time.
Being a casino is about as close to being a private mint as you can get. These companies will do anything to maintain the status quo.
Agreed. When the US burns oil they don't blame whoever sold it to us, and that seems appropriate. It makes sense to regulate pollution-production at the point where it becomes pollution.
And does metallurgical use of coal actually produce much in the way of Greenhouse gases? Companies aren't going to have super-high-quality coal shipped all the way around the world just to feed some fire that could just be as easily fed with cheaper local fuel. That is a low-impurity source of carbon that is going to end up getting incorporated into the steel itself - it is a raw material, not a fuel. The only way that carbon will end up in the atmosphere is if somebody burns the resulting girders. I'm sure some of it gets lost during manufacture, but companies already have incentive to minimize that as much as possible if they're paying so much to acquire it.
The same is true of oil used to make plastics and other petrochemicals. If you burn oil as fuel it produces greenhouse gases, but there are lots of uses for oil which do not release much CO2 into the atmosphere, and for these uses companies already have lots of incentive to minimize waste (it is expensive to dispose of under a proper regulatory regime, and it represents mass that could have gone into a useful product that would make money instead of costing money).
So, don't yell at the people producing resources. Yell at the people who are taking valuable materials and just burning them in unclean ways.
Things like Google Glass only put individuals on more equal footing. Right now there are security cameras on everything from traffic lights to police vehicles. They're getting to the point where they all log license plates, timestamps, and GPS locations forming a fairly comprehensive database of where every car is at any time. If a car becomes interesting to them they can mine the database and replay everywhere the car has been since they started gathering all that data. Expand this to facial recognition and that's basically the end of privacy.
Moore's law means that at some point it gets really cheap to process all that video - there end up being more spare cycles to use to track people than there are people to track, and available disk space to log all that movement grows faster than the population whose movements need to be logged.
At some point there will be logs of every single action any person alive makes from cradle to grave. One day there might be a log of every thought they think. Silicon just keeps getting cheaper, making the world smaller and smaller until there simply are no more secrets.
I suspect that culture is going to have to change. Right now it is obvious if somebody is wearing Google Glass, but imagine the day when cameras get smaller, get complete coverage (360deg in all DOF), and have the capacity to record continuously? Match that with FOSS facial recognition, bandwidth capable of sharing video without limit, and open shared databases on all of this stuff.
Pretty soon the complete history of everything that everybody does is available online. Sure, individuals by mutual consent could keep their interaction private, but nobody could have any assurance that nobody will later disclose video of anything.
That would be a world of complete honesty. Right now we all pretend to be better than we are, and we all pretend to accept that everybody else is the person they pretend to be. Imagine the world where every job candidate has damaging video online. Imagine the world where every potential spouse has video of them making out with somebody else in their youth, engaging in what are now socially unacceptable behaviors, etc. Now everybody is on an even playing field. The company that won't hire the guy with photos of drunken behavior on Facebook today suddenly finds they can't hire anybody at all. Blackmail loses all value, because there aren't any secrets left to threaten to divulge. When an oil tycoon has a quiet meeting with a congressman in some out-of-the-way place they get tagged with facial recognition from some video feed recorded by some random teenager.
The transition would be messy, but culture would have to shift. People can't simply refuse to associate with anybody - they'll have to accept that everybody does stuff that they wouldn't choose to brag about in public, and just deal with it. Society will have to learn to get by without taboos. People who do stuff that offends people but causes no real harm will no longer be punished, and those who cause real harm to others will no longer be able to get away with it. Mug somebody and you end up having people match your face up against your 6th grade football game video footage, and trace your every move both before and after the crime. Fugitives are detected the moment they step into the view of anybody.
Most laws like these have a stated purpose which has little to do with the true purpose. Arresting foreigners with GPS units and accusing them of espionage does a few things:
1. It drums up nationalistic support, which is good for staying in power. 2. It can be used to direct spending to local providers of high-tech equipment, maps, etc.
If the US military wanted the GPS coordinates of some building they'd just pull out their handy dandy 1m satellite maps. Those maps are calibrated to a very high level of precision. The US has had decades to get good at this sort of thing. After all, back in the 1970s there was no GPS and it wasn't like the Soviets would let the US send teams of surveyors to plot the coordinates of their missile silos (US ICBMs have errors measured in single-digit meters so that they can hit extremely hardened targets, and there would be no point in developing that technology if they couldn't achieve similar accuracy in the target coordinates). In a shooting war the challenge for the mappers is getting coordinates on all the moving stuff like tanks, parked jets, mobiles SAMs, etc so that you can go from taking photos to dropping bombs in hours. Buildings that don't move are a piece of cake.
While most of your other points demonstrate how much the US depends on China, this particular point really demonstrates how much China depends on the US. China holding US debt gives them no power over the US whatsoever, but it does create the risk of losing that investment should something really bad happen to the US.
Nations being in debt isn't the same as individuals being in debt. If I owe a bank $50k then as long as I make my payments on time they really have no power over me (they can't just "call my loan" in almost any normal loan, despite what some seem to think). If I fail to make payments they're worse-off than I am to start - after all, I still have whatever I got with the $50k they loaned me and they're out my loan payments. The power the bank has is to convince the local government to step in and seize assets for them. Most first world governments will do this, since they recognize the value of having banks, and banks can't exist if bad things don't happen to those who fail to pay their debts. Even so, the bank would rather you just made the payments - they're going to take a loss if they have to foreclose (usually). However, for a secured loan they can usually get back the bulk of the principal.
Nations aren't the same as people. If a nation stops making debt payments there is nobody for other nations to appeal to. They could stop loaning money (which they can do even if the country makes its payments), and they could invade (which they can also do even if the country makes its payments). For the most part loaning money to another nation results in big losses if the other nation defaults. When you're talking about a nation the size of the US you really have no discourse if there is a default. If you try to economically punish the US you just make it that much less likely that you'll get paid, and there aren't really any military options unless the whole world wants to unite and put their national populations through a big meat grinder just to prove a point.
In any case, a total US default (that is, a total loss on all bonds - not just a delayed payment) is pretty unlikely. I doubt Congress is dumb enough to delay a payment, but if it happened US debt interest rates would skyrocket, and suddenly there would be a big revenue shortfall. The domestic consequences of that would be dramatic, but once everybody is sick of politicians sacrificing the national economy on the altar of ideology tax rates would get cranked up on the wealthy and the debt would get paid down quickly until all the economic indicators approached some kind of normality (though with US interest rates now being closer to countries like France than where they are now). I doubt debt-holders would really lose much of anything. The only way I could see those loaning the US losing out is if some kind of ultra-nationalist faction rose to power and decided to increase revenue so as to not be dependent on deficit spending, and decide to default on the debt (not because they couldn't afford to pay it, but because ideologically they refuse to do so). A government that is dependent on deficit spending has good reason to keep a good credit rating. A government that sees no need for deficit spending does not care what its credit rating is.
In any case, there isn't likely to be a war between the US and China. At this point everybody has their bread and circuses on both sides of those borders. People got tired of attending funerals over political ideology half a world away back in the 60s.
I get your point, but what I'd say is getting a reliable router is difficult, though less difficult than improving the reliability of your electricity provider. If somebody did have lousy electrical service you couldn't really fault them for investing in a lot of battery or crank-powered gear - unless you want to go off-grid you can only do so much beyond mitigating the problem.
Maybe lousy power is the cause of many wireless router glitches. However, fixing that isn't really cheap. Good quality UPS and line conditioning equipment is expensive. Sure, a cheap one will suffice if you're ONLY plugging a router into it, but who buys a $100 UPS just for a router? For the typical slashdotter a $100 UPS isn't really going to cut it for their likely PC setup.
I think people are concerned that those other options might not be well-maintained for long with the direction things are moving. I agree that for now the options still exist.
Oh, as far as Xorg configs go, Xorg themselves have gotten a lot better about this. I haven't had to write modelines in the last decade, and these days you can usually get away with not having an xorg.conf at all. Usually I end up with a highly abbreviated one just to set a few non-default settings but nothing really essential for desktop use. Not sure how much Ubuntu had to do with that, but you don't really need to use Ubuntu to get a fairly plug-and-play X11. Kernel modesetting has also gotten way better on some cards - unless you play games the FOSS drivers work well out-of-the-box. On nvidia the proprietary ones are pretty trivial to get working as well. I've always found ATI to be more painful, but their FOSS drivers are pretty good so I haven't messed with them.
On something like a laptop I suspect that Ubuntu would still offer some advantages. Those tend to have non-working chipsets far more often than desktops. I don't run Linux (other than ChromeOS) on any laptops, so I can't really vouch for how well other distros perform.
Not really an expert in such things but when I was messing around with deciding whether to go VOIP at home I set up an account with an outgoing provider. My callerID would be whatever Asterisk said it was, and I could set a default with them. By law I couldn't spoof it, but since it is common to use such providers with PBXes and to have separate outgoing and incoming providers there was no way for them to validate what I gave them.
Calls to 800 numbers or 911 include ANI info which is not so readily spoofed, but if I called a 911 call center using that outgoing VOIP provider I doubt they'd get valid ANI info. I don't think I had to give them much info to set up an account, so there would be little for them to pass on.
We're long past the days where there was one phone company in the US. Now there are a bunch of large ones, and thousands of competitive ones, and millions of PBXes. Plus ordinary people are increasingly using VOIP, though usually through more consumer-oriented services that won't allow spoofing of caller ID. If you use a more commercial-oriented VOIP provider (which, by the way, is WAY cheaper than consumer services), then you generally don't get any support setting things up, but as long as you act like you know what you're going they basically just relay packets. It is similar to the world of ISPs - your consumer-oriented cable broadband account likely filters outgoing 25, packets from outside the subnet, etc, but if you sign up for a business account or for a VPN connection half a world away you can basically dump arbitrary packets onto the network.
X10 is actually coming down in price, though the improved protocols are still expensive.
You don't really need a lot of automation to make X10 useful. One of the best use cases to start with is you have a switch and you want it to be able to toggle an arbitrary lamp, not the one outlet it happened to be wired to. X10 makes that easy to do. Things like three-way switches are trivial to implement as well as opposed to requiring snaking wires all over the place.
Sure, you can get fancy with it as well, but the nice thing about X10 is that you aren't dependent on a computer at all. You can have the computer add in some extra logic/timing/etc, but you can also have wall switches and such which "just work."
The biggest downsides to X10 are that the range isn't great, and it is a one-way protocol that is not 100% reliable. For a wall switch it is no big deal - if 1% of the time it doesn't work just push the button again. For a computer sending commands to 10 lights 5x per day it means that once a day some light isn't in the state it should be in.
Routers are generally not repairable - you need to replace it with a decent one.
The problem is that it is hard to know which ones are decent. As the other reply to your post suggests price isn't everything. Neither is brand reputation for the most part these days. Most reviews focus on features - I haven't really seen many that leave the router running for six months under load and tell you if the WiFi stopped working.
I've had several flaky wireless routers over the years, including a Linksys 54G running OpenWRT (though that was one of the less flaky ones overall). Right now I'm using a Buffalo running DDWRT and it has been fairly solid, but I still find myself having to reboot it every few months.
Ok, they exist. However, it is easy to just point at anybody who disagrees with the direction your project is moving in and call them an elitist.
Do I want my OS to be easy to use? Sure, but for me. Do I mind if it is also easy to use for somebody else, not at all, unless it makes it harder for me to use. That's the gripe so many have with Unity/etc - people feel it makes it hard for them to work the way they want to work.
Outside of that it's all just which daemon is being used by what for where.
I'm not sure this is really the direction Ubuntu is going - they're not just concerned about what daemon is used by what for where. They're moving towards having an app store model (think Ubuntu-specific APIs, GUI models, etc), their own display server, and they have essentially their own desktop environment and sysvinit system now. Right now you can still run xubuntu/kubuntu/etc and still get a more vanilla experience, but I'm not sure that will be sustainable as things progress.
They haven't gotten there yet, so there isn't necessarily a reason to abandon ship except to one of the sister distros (kubuntu/etc) if you really hate unity. However, I think that is the direction they're moving in.
Ubuntu doesn't really scratch my itch in any case, so I've never been a user beyond for the odd VM for some focused purpose. So, their success/failure doesn't impact me all that much.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
I posted something like this on a blog comment recently. In the past I've handed people Ubuntu CDs as a way to introduce them to linux. Now it is a way to introduce them to Ubuntu, and about as useful otherwise as handing them an Android phone or Tivo for introducing them to Linux (well, they're not quite that far along, but they're going in that direction). Whatever, if they want to do their own thing they can. I might still install it on Aunt Tilly's desktop, but I wouldn't give it to a young aspiring computer scientist.
Sure, Ubuntu might result in lots of people using Linux (though many of them already use Linux in that sense - on their phones/etc), but it will probably lose most of the people who already use Linux in the process.
The "elitists" are the ones who would eventually kill Linux.
I doubt any "elitists" actually exist - that is a bit of a straw man.
Most of what some call elitists are really just people who want Linux to work for them. What good is it having a million people contributing to a distro, if they're making it into a distro you don't actually want to use? There is room in the world for more than one Linux distro - if there wasn't we'd all be running Android, Tivo, or whatever powers your car entertainment system on the desktop.
Sounds like a currency fork. You could conceivably end up with two currencies. Which raises the question: what is to stop groups of people (say China) from creating parallel systems?
If the answer is nothing, BTC is wide open for undermining by fragmentation.
Well, the whole system operates by consensus. The only reason that dollars work is because you and I can both look at a piece of paper and agree that it is a dollar. If you start dying your dollar bills purple and refuse to accept any bill that isn't dyed, then you can fork the dollar - well, to the degree that you can get anybody else to go along with it.
All it takes to deliberately fork bitcoin is for somebody to publish a new root block and say that it is the true bitcoin root. Since they'll be starting out at low difficulty they could even mine a fortune in bitcoins - well, assuming anybody is willing to trade them a fortune for them. Most bitcoin clients would reject these coins because they don't have the right root, but anybody who prefers the new coins to the old ones could feel free to join the new currency. The system lacks any central authority.
In fact, with this fork there was nothing to stop people from ignoring the wishes of the bitcoin creator and choosing the fork they are encouraging everybody to abandon. Newer clients would do that by default anyway. The only reason that the creators of bitcoin hold sway is because most people who do the mining listen to them.
Yup, it is really just an arbitrary thing. If you can work 40 hours, why not 60? If you can work 60, why not 80? If you can work 80, why not 120?
It works both ways - if you can work 40, why not 20, 10, or 5?
Bottom line - an employer trades money for services, and an employee trades services for money. As long as that is working out, then there is no "right" arrangement any more than there is a right landscaping contract for everybody, or a right cable package for everybody. The only arrangement where somebody gets full exclusive access to 100% of somebody's potential labor is slavery.
Somebody once told me that their boss would hand out paychecks every two weeks, and as each one was handed out he would say "we're even." The more I see how things work the more appealing that arrangement seems. Have a social safety net for those who lose their jobs, but no employment arrangement should have any debts that last more than two weeks on the part of either party. The employer can contribute to an employee-owned tax-deferred retirement fund or whatever, but at any time the employer never owes anybody more than their last paycheck, and when the employer goes under that is the most anybody stands to lose.
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Yup - that's why I basically ascribe zero loyalty to corporate brands (whether they be governments, companies, whatever). Decisions are made by people, and I might trust a person who makes good decisions to continue to make them, but I won't trust a company to do the same.
When people say "how could the company that brought us ... end up doing ...?" they are failing to understand this principle. The reason the same company behaved in completely different ways was that completely different people made the decisions (usually).
Likewise, we can applaud the Republicans of the 1800s who fought to end slavery without having to agree with the modern-day ones who have a completely different agenda. The two are not the same. Heck, I can vote for one Republican and vote against another in the same ballot.
Decisions get made by people. Companies might have legal recognition as persons, but just because our government is dumb doesn't mean that you and I need to be - a promise made by a corporation should be considered as dependable as your ability to sue them when they break it. A promise made by a person should be weighed against that individual's character and history.
That is one possible reason. The other is budget politics. The more money you spend, the more money you can spend on more discretionary things. If your entire budget is $500k/yr and you're spending 95% of that on salaries then chances are that you can't afford to take your team out for a fact-finding trip to Hawaii. On the other hand, if on top of your staff you are forking out $100M annually to suppliers then spending $100k to do some due diligence in Hawaii is a lot easier.
And so on...
But it is a mistake, a fallacy, to think that taking $800 per month from your neighbors so you can spend it is somehow good for the economy, or your neighbors.
With the way taxes are structured in the US, what you're basically doing is taking $800/month from some buy who makes $50M per month, with no benefit to them whatsoever. The alternative is to move from a society where the top few percent own 80% of everything to a society where the top few percent own 99.99% of everything.
The average American simply isn't capable of providing an "economic benefit" using the kinds of definitions you are employing. So, you can either hand them money, or let them starve. The nature of specialization in our society means that the genetic/environmental lottery only really gifts a small portion of society with being able to contribute much. We don't have jobs for ditch diggers any longer. We haven't figured out how to create new Albert Einsteins without creating a million Bud Finkelsteins as well. Obviously I exaggerate a bit, but this is the direction society is moving in, which is why unemployment and income disparity keep growing.
Thanks for the info. I'm all for regulating such processes, and getting rid of conditions that just allow pollution to be exported to regimes that allow it. However, in the end you still need carbon in steel, and coal seems as good a source for that carbon as anything (there will be impurities in any source). That said I'm sure there are ways to reduce the carbon impact of steel production, and getting rid of loopholes in the laws is probably the best start (like doing the most carbon-intense steps in countries that simply do not regulate them).
That is another real big gap in Kyoto that people miss. Sure, there is the whole impact on the indigenous population in developing countries angle (which was the original intent of exempting them), and then there is the known gap with China being considered developing. However, there is also the issue that if you make anybody exempt big industries will just stick the most carbon-intense parts of their processes in these areas. When a company sets up some pollution-spewing process in Zimbabwe they probably employ a minimal number of the locals, and they certainly aren't doing it to be charitable to the locals. They'll give the local government whatever kickbacks they have to in order to operate under their regulatory umbrella.
If you want to help 3rd world countries then by all means build schools, or sustainable jobs, or whatever. However, the solution isn't to just let everybody dump garbage into their environment.
And if it is not burnt, it is usually much worse pollutant, so you could say that it becomes pollution as soon as it surfaces.
This is neglecting things like petrochemicals - a use of oil as a raw material for manufacturing much more valuable goods, and which on its own does not produce much CO2 or pollution (though the fuel sources used in manufacture may).
Sure, some percentage of toy rubber ducks get dropped into the ocean, but for the most part that isn't the intended use, unlike something like gasoline which is basically designed to be burned with the resulting byproducts dumped into the atmosphere.
Reports are coming in that Cyanogenmod will not be spending any resources on Galaxy S4. None.
Cyanogenmod doesn't really have any resources to spend on anything. It is a collection of volunteer contributions. People donate to it, but for the most part all donating does is encourage the devs to buy a new phone and stop supporting the one they currently have (that isn't to say that you shouldn't donate anyway). They aren't some shop that keeps a library of phones and systematically backports fixes to all of them. The way things get backported is that some volunteer who owns the phone tweaks things and gets it running.
I can take a phone that is owned by 3 people, and as long as I do the work to port it, chances are I'll get listed as the maintainer and that phone will show up on the supported devices list. On the other hand, if a phone sells in the millions but none of the owners can be bothered to get CM working on it, then it won't be supported. That's just how most non-commercial FOSS projects work - they don't go where the money is, they go where the volunteers are.
ORLY? Blackberry, iPhone, Creative Zen dont support Ogg; the Sansa clip only added it with a later firmware. None of them support the free MonkeysAudio, or Opus, or Speex.
Incidentally, they all support DRM'd WMA. So much for your argument that "DRM is the problem, not multiple standards".
If you have music in one format and need to convert it to another and there is no DRM involved, it is relatively easy to do (though only lossless if the formats are lossless).
They might all support WMA's DRM, but that is only because none of the music publishers sell music players, well, besides Apple, and you'll note that the format they prefer only plays on their own players. If Apple decided to stop supporting WMA then you'd have the eBook mess all over again. That's a decision they will make based on what they feel their own best interests are, not what the consumer's are.
Sure, you can have DRM that is more standardized, but in the case of eBooks that isn't the status quo, and it likely won't ever be until Amazon stops selling eBooks.
In any case, the only real point of DRM seems to be to keep no-names out of the device business. If you want your Amazon eBooks to work you have to buy their reader, and if you want your Apple music to work you have to buy the iWhatever. It does nothing to prevent piracy, readily demonstrated by the fact that anything that anybody would care to pirate is already pirated DRM-free online.
So, while you're right that a variety of standards is a big part of the problem, the fact is that it is DRM that helps publishers and device manufacturers to keep a variety of standards in place.
The way I look at it is this:
1. The CDMA Galaxy Nexus not getting proper updates is a black mark on the brand. I don't care whose fault it is - people bought a "Nexus" but didn't get the proper experience.
2. As a result of this Google stopped making CDMA Nexus phones. This shows that they do in fact care about the brand (though apparently not enough to spot things like this before they happen). This still improves the brand.
3. Not mentioned yet, but Google isn't supporting the Nexus 4 in AOSP (officially). That, too, is a black mark on the brand. Yes, I know CyanogenMod supports it. What I don't get is if the issue was with redistribution of blobs, why didn't they just put official support in AOSP and stick a script in it to extract the blobs from a phone, as they did with some of their past devices like the ADP? (This is setting aside the fact that getting redistribution rights is something they should have taken care of BEFORE they picked a vendor - don't they know anything about commercial software licensing?)
I think Google cares about their Nexus brand. It just seems like they're almost incompetent when anything beyond the software comes up. They don't negotiate licenses to redistribute code up-front. They don't ensure the ability to push updates is there up-front. They can't seem to run a store-front and yet they don't sell through vendors like Amazon who can. Even the software isn't quite there - my Nexus 10 hangs on boot maybe 10% of the time and wakes to a non-responsive black screen about 10% of the time as well (which can be fixed by hitting the power button twice to re-wake it - the hangups while running seem to be better with the most recent update).
Yeah, I think this is a pretty simple case of liability. Plus, the casino is probably going to want to publicize that they made good on the money up-front anyway. $33M is nothing to these huge operations, and they'll lose far more than that if all the high rollers go someplace else next time.
Being a casino is about as close to being a private mint as you can get. These companies will do anything to maintain the status quo.
Agreed. When the US burns oil they don't blame whoever sold it to us, and that seems appropriate. It makes sense to regulate pollution-production at the point where it becomes pollution.
And does metallurgical use of coal actually produce much in the way of Greenhouse gases? Companies aren't going to have super-high-quality coal shipped all the way around the world just to feed some fire that could just be as easily fed with cheaper local fuel. That is a low-impurity source of carbon that is going to end up getting incorporated into the steel itself - it is a raw material, not a fuel. The only way that carbon will end up in the atmosphere is if somebody burns the resulting girders. I'm sure some of it gets lost during manufacture, but companies already have incentive to minimize that as much as possible if they're paying so much to acquire it.
The same is true of oil used to make plastics and other petrochemicals. If you burn oil as fuel it produces greenhouse gases, but there are lots of uses for oil which do not release much CO2 into the atmosphere, and for these uses companies already have lots of incentive to minimize waste (it is expensive to dispose of under a proper regulatory regime, and it represents mass that could have gone into a useful product that would make money instead of costing money).
So, don't yell at the people producing resources. Yell at the people who are taking valuable materials and just burning them in unclean ways.
Things like Google Glass only put individuals on more equal footing. Right now there are security cameras on everything from traffic lights to police vehicles. They're getting to the point where they all log license plates, timestamps, and GPS locations forming a fairly comprehensive database of where every car is at any time. If a car becomes interesting to them they can mine the database and replay everywhere the car has been since they started gathering all that data. Expand this to facial recognition and that's basically the end of privacy.
Moore's law means that at some point it gets really cheap to process all that video - there end up being more spare cycles to use to track people than there are people to track, and available disk space to log all that movement grows faster than the population whose movements need to be logged.
At some point there will be logs of every single action any person alive makes from cradle to grave. One day there might be a log of every thought they think. Silicon just keeps getting cheaper, making the world smaller and smaller until there simply are no more secrets.
I suspect that culture is going to have to change. Right now it is obvious if somebody is wearing Google Glass, but imagine the day when cameras get smaller, get complete coverage (360deg in all DOF), and have the capacity to record continuously? Match that with FOSS facial recognition, bandwidth capable of sharing video without limit, and open shared databases on all of this stuff.
Pretty soon the complete history of everything that everybody does is available online. Sure, individuals by mutual consent could keep their interaction private, but nobody could have any assurance that nobody will later disclose video of anything.
That would be a world of complete honesty. Right now we all pretend to be better than we are, and we all pretend to accept that everybody else is the person they pretend to be. Imagine the world where every job candidate has damaging video online. Imagine the world where every potential spouse has video of them making out with somebody else in their youth, engaging in what are now socially unacceptable behaviors, etc. Now everybody is on an even playing field. The company that won't hire the guy with photos of drunken behavior on Facebook today suddenly finds they can't hire anybody at all. Blackmail loses all value, because there aren't any secrets left to threaten to divulge. When an oil tycoon has a quiet meeting with a congressman in some out-of-the-way place they get tagged with facial recognition from some video feed recorded by some random teenager.
The transition would be messy, but culture would have to shift. People can't simply refuse to associate with anybody - they'll have to accept that everybody does stuff that they wouldn't choose to brag about in public, and just deal with it. Society will have to learn to get by without taboos. People who do stuff that offends people but causes no real harm will no longer be punished, and those who cause real harm to others will no longer be able to get away with it. Mug somebody and you end up having people match your face up against your 6th grade football game video footage, and trace your every move both before and after the crime. Fugitives are detected the moment they step into the view of anybody.
Most laws like these have a stated purpose which has little to do with the true purpose. Arresting foreigners with GPS units and accusing them of espionage does a few things:
1. It drums up nationalistic support, which is good for staying in power.
2. It can be used to direct spending to local providers of high-tech equipment, maps, etc.
If the US military wanted the GPS coordinates of some building they'd just pull out their handy dandy 1m satellite maps. Those maps are calibrated to a very high level of precision. The US has had decades to get good at this sort of thing. After all, back in the 1970s there was no GPS and it wasn't like the Soviets would let the US send teams of surveyors to plot the coordinates of their missile silos (US ICBMs have errors measured in single-digit meters so that they can hit extremely hardened targets, and there would be no point in developing that technology if they couldn't achieve similar accuracy in the target coordinates). In a shooting war the challenge for the mappers is getting coordinates on all the moving stuff like tanks, parked jets, mobiles SAMs, etc so that you can go from taking photos to dropping bombs in hours. Buildings that don't move are a piece of cake.
China also owns most of US foreign debt.
While most of your other points demonstrate how much the US depends on China, this particular point really demonstrates how much China depends on the US. China holding US debt gives them no power over the US whatsoever, but it does create the risk of losing that investment should something really bad happen to the US.
Nations being in debt isn't the same as individuals being in debt. If I owe a bank $50k then as long as I make my payments on time they really have no power over me (they can't just "call my loan" in almost any normal loan, despite what some seem to think). If I fail to make payments they're worse-off than I am to start - after all, I still have whatever I got with the $50k they loaned me and they're out my loan payments. The power the bank has is to convince the local government to step in and seize assets for them. Most first world governments will do this, since they recognize the value of having banks, and banks can't exist if bad things don't happen to those who fail to pay their debts. Even so, the bank would rather you just made the payments - they're going to take a loss if they have to foreclose (usually). However, for a secured loan they can usually get back the bulk of the principal.
Nations aren't the same as people. If a nation stops making debt payments there is nobody for other nations to appeal to. They could stop loaning money (which they can do even if the country makes its payments), and they could invade (which they can also do even if the country makes its payments). For the most part loaning money to another nation results in big losses if the other nation defaults. When you're talking about a nation the size of the US you really have no discourse if there is a default. If you try to economically punish the US you just make it that much less likely that you'll get paid, and there aren't really any military options unless the whole world wants to unite and put their national populations through a big meat grinder just to prove a point.
In any case, a total US default (that is, a total loss on all bonds - not just a delayed payment) is pretty unlikely. I doubt Congress is dumb enough to delay a payment, but if it happened US debt interest rates would skyrocket, and suddenly there would be a big revenue shortfall. The domestic consequences of that would be dramatic, but once everybody is sick of politicians sacrificing the national economy on the altar of ideology tax rates would get cranked up on the wealthy and the debt would get paid down quickly until all the economic indicators approached some kind of normality (though with US interest rates now being closer to countries like France than where they are now). I doubt debt-holders would really lose much of anything. The only way I could see those loaning the US losing out is if some kind of ultra-nationalist faction rose to power and decided to increase revenue so as to not be dependent on deficit spending, and decide to default on the debt (not because they couldn't afford to pay it, but because ideologically they refuse to do so). A government that is dependent on deficit spending has good reason to keep a good credit rating. A government that sees no need for deficit spending does not care what its credit rating is.
In any case, there isn't likely to be a war between the US and China. At this point everybody has their bread and circuses on both sides of those borders. People got tired of attending funerals over political ideology half a world away back in the 60s.
I get your point, but what I'd say is getting a reliable router is difficult, though less difficult than improving the reliability of your electricity provider. If somebody did have lousy electrical service you couldn't really fault them for investing in a lot of battery or crank-powered gear - unless you want to go off-grid you can only do so much beyond mitigating the problem.
Maybe lousy power is the cause of many wireless router glitches. However, fixing that isn't really cheap. Good quality UPS and line conditioning equipment is expensive. Sure, a cheap one will suffice if you're ONLY plugging a router into it, but who buys a $100 UPS just for a router? For the typical slashdotter a $100 UPS isn't really going to cut it for their likely PC setup.
I think people are concerned that those other options might not be well-maintained for long with the direction things are moving. I agree that for now the options still exist.
Oh, as far as Xorg configs go, Xorg themselves have gotten a lot better about this. I haven't had to write modelines in the last decade, and these days you can usually get away with not having an xorg.conf at all. Usually I end up with a highly abbreviated one just to set a few non-default settings but nothing really essential for desktop use. Not sure how much Ubuntu had to do with that, but you don't really need to use Ubuntu to get a fairly plug-and-play X11. Kernel modesetting has also gotten way better on some cards - unless you play games the FOSS drivers work well out-of-the-box. On nvidia the proprietary ones are pretty trivial to get working as well. I've always found ATI to be more painful, but their FOSS drivers are pretty good so I haven't messed with them.
On something like a laptop I suspect that Ubuntu would still offer some advantages. Those tend to have non-working chipsets far more often than desktops. I don't run Linux (other than ChromeOS) on any laptops, so I can't really vouch for how well other distros perform.
Not really an expert in such things but when I was messing around with deciding whether to go VOIP at home I set up an account with an outgoing provider. My callerID would be whatever Asterisk said it was, and I could set a default with them. By law I couldn't spoof it, but since it is common to use such providers with PBXes and to have separate outgoing and incoming providers there was no way for them to validate what I gave them.
Calls to 800 numbers or 911 include ANI info which is not so readily spoofed, but if I called a 911 call center using that outgoing VOIP provider I doubt they'd get valid ANI info. I don't think I had to give them much info to set up an account, so there would be little for them to pass on.
We're long past the days where there was one phone company in the US. Now there are a bunch of large ones, and thousands of competitive ones, and millions of PBXes. Plus ordinary people are increasingly using VOIP, though usually through more consumer-oriented services that won't allow spoofing of caller ID. If you use a more commercial-oriented VOIP provider (which, by the way, is WAY cheaper than consumer services), then you generally don't get any support setting things up, but as long as you act like you know what you're going they basically just relay packets. It is similar to the world of ISPs - your consumer-oriented cable broadband account likely filters outgoing 25, packets from outside the subnet, etc, but if you sign up for a business account or for a VPN connection half a world away you can basically dump arbitrary packets onto the network.
X10 is actually coming down in price, though the improved protocols are still expensive.
You don't really need a lot of automation to make X10 useful. One of the best use cases to start with is you have a switch and you want it to be able to toggle an arbitrary lamp, not the one outlet it happened to be wired to. X10 makes that easy to do. Things like three-way switches are trivial to implement as well as opposed to requiring snaking wires all over the place.
Sure, you can get fancy with it as well, but the nice thing about X10 is that you aren't dependent on a computer at all. You can have the computer add in some extra logic/timing/etc, but you can also have wall switches and such which "just work."
The biggest downsides to X10 are that the range isn't great, and it is a one-way protocol that is not 100% reliable. For a wall switch it is no big deal - if 1% of the time it doesn't work just push the button again. For a computer sending commands to 10 lights 5x per day it means that once a day some light isn't in the state it should be in.
Routers are generally not repairable - you need to replace it with a decent one.
The problem is that it is hard to know which ones are decent. As the other reply to your post suggests price isn't everything. Neither is brand reputation for the most part these days. Most reviews focus on features - I haven't really seen many that leave the router running for six months under load and tell you if the WiFi stopped working.
I've had several flaky wireless routers over the years, including a Linksys 54G running OpenWRT (though that was one of the less flaky ones overall). Right now I'm using a Buffalo running DDWRT and it has been fairly solid, but I still find myself having to reboot it every few months.
Ok, they exist. However, it is easy to just point at anybody who disagrees with the direction your project is moving in and call them an elitist.
Do I want my OS to be easy to use? Sure, but for me. Do I mind if it is also easy to use for somebody else, not at all, unless it makes it harder for me to use. That's the gripe so many have with Unity/etc - people feel it makes it hard for them to work the way they want to work.
Outside of that it's all just which daemon is being used by what for where.
I'm not sure this is really the direction Ubuntu is going - they're not just concerned about what daemon is used by what for where. They're moving towards having an app store model (think Ubuntu-specific APIs, GUI models, etc), their own display server, and they have essentially their own desktop environment and sysvinit system now. Right now you can still run xubuntu/kubuntu/etc and still get a more vanilla experience, but I'm not sure that will be sustainable as things progress.
They haven't gotten there yet, so there isn't necessarily a reason to abandon ship except to one of the sister distros (kubuntu/etc) if you really hate unity. However, I think that is the direction they're moving in.
Ubuntu doesn't really scratch my itch in any case, so I've never been a user beyond for the odd VM for some focused purpose. So, their success/failure doesn't impact me all that much.
[The solution, IMO, is to treat Ubuntu as being a OS/UI "based on Linux", not as a Linux distro. So it's not something you offer someone to "introduce them to Linux", it's a stand-alone free/free n00bs-friendly Windows replacement.]
I posted something like this on a blog comment recently. In the past I've handed people Ubuntu CDs as a way to introduce them to linux. Now it is a way to introduce them to Ubuntu, and about as useful otherwise as handing them an Android phone or Tivo for introducing them to Linux (well, they're not quite that far along, but they're going in that direction). Whatever, if they want to do their own thing they can. I might still install it on Aunt Tilly's desktop, but I wouldn't give it to a young aspiring computer scientist.
Sure, Ubuntu might result in lots of people using Linux (though many of them already use Linux in that sense - on their phones/etc), but it will probably lose most of the people who already use Linux in the process.
The "elitists" are the ones who would eventually kill Linux.
I doubt any "elitists" actually exist - that is a bit of a straw man.
Most of what some call elitists are really just people who want Linux to work for them. What good is it having a million people contributing to a distro, if they're making it into a distro you don't actually want to use? There is room in the world for more than one Linux distro - if there wasn't we'd all be running Android, Tivo, or whatever powers your car entertainment system on the desktop.
Sounds like a currency fork. You could conceivably end up with two currencies. Which raises the question: what is to stop groups of people (say China) from creating parallel systems?
If the answer is nothing, BTC is wide open for undermining by fragmentation.
Well, the whole system operates by consensus. The only reason that dollars work is because you and I can both look at a piece of paper and agree that it is a dollar. If you start dying your dollar bills purple and refuse to accept any bill that isn't dyed, then you can fork the dollar - well, to the degree that you can get anybody else to go along with it.
All it takes to deliberately fork bitcoin is for somebody to publish a new root block and say that it is the true bitcoin root. Since they'll be starting out at low difficulty they could even mine a fortune in bitcoins - well, assuming anybody is willing to trade them a fortune for them. Most bitcoin clients would reject these coins because they don't have the right root, but anybody who prefers the new coins to the old ones could feel free to join the new currency. The system lacks any central authority.
In fact, with this fork there was nothing to stop people from ignoring the wishes of the bitcoin creator and choosing the fork they are encouraging everybody to abandon. Newer clients would do that by default anyway. The only reason that the creators of bitcoin hold sway is because most people who do the mining listen to them.
Yup, it is really just an arbitrary thing. If you can work 40 hours, why not 60? If you can work 60, why not 80? If you can work 80, why not 120?
It works both ways - if you can work 40, why not 20, 10, or 5?
Bottom line - an employer trades money for services, and an employee trades services for money. As long as that is working out, then there is no "right" arrangement any more than there is a right landscaping contract for everybody, or a right cable package for everybody. The only arrangement where somebody gets full exclusive access to 100% of somebody's potential labor is slavery.
Somebody once told me that their boss would hand out paychecks every two weeks, and as each one was handed out he would say "we're even." The more I see how things work the more appealing that arrangement seems. Have a social safety net for those who lose their jobs, but no employment arrangement should have any debts that last more than two weeks on the part of either party. The employer can contribute to an employee-owned tax-deferred retirement fund or whatever, but at any time the employer never owes anybody more than their last paycheck, and when the employer goes under that is the most anybody stands to lose.