I assure you that whatever house you live in, wherever on earth it may be, does not have clear title back to the primordial soup. At some point a human being almost certainly forced another human being off of that piece of land under threat of serious bodily harm without compensation. By your argument, nobody has a right to live anywhere...
Companies are smarter than that. If they want to fire you than anytime you take 16-minutes for a 15-minute break it gets recorded, and anytime you're a penny short it gets recorded, and anytime you fail to meet some boss's arbitrary deadline it gets recorded. Anytime you do something really nice no note is made, unless you're smart enough to keep your own records.
After 6-12 months a huge one-sided record of failures is documented, since you're not perfect. You are then terminated without cause, but they've got ammo to defend them in court. The records will contain no mention of the fact that you tried to form a union, and the HR guy processing your termination would have no knowledge of this - they'd just be handed a record of your "poor work history" and asked to take care of it.
Senior leaders in the company can of course not be expected to know about the performance of individual employees and that is why we have local managers (who are all eager to be promoted to senior management). The local manager will of course not receive such promotion until well after the legal dust settles from the termination.
Or, maybe they just keep the name in their heads for the next time 10% of the workforce needs to be reduced. For all the reasons above the targeted employee will be on the bottom end of the ratings bell-curve anyway, and easy to eliminate in a large elimination stratified by race/gender/orientation so as to pass any legal scrutiny. Nothing will be said, but everybody will get the message.
In most US states companies can basically fire anybody they want to for whatever reason they want to, and it is near-impossible to improve that they've done otherwise. States that do otherwise just don't find mega-corps moving into them, at least not for anything bigger than retail outlets (which granted, this is about).
Regarding the Linux Paradox - I've always maintained that open source benefits people even if they NEVER intend to install a compiler or whatever.
First, you benefit anytime somebody else installs a compiler, and there always seem to be people willing to do it.
Second, if you build an important product around open source software and the project really does dry up, you can hire yourself people to maintain it for you until you're able to transition to somebody else. It is analogous to code escrow with any other vendor, except that it will be easier to find people who are already familiar with the code. Going it alone may not be a good long-term strategy, but at least you don't end up completely high-and-dry for a year or two while you redesign your product. Open-source is also better than code escrow since you don't need to spend three years in the courts fighting to get the code released to you (by which time you probably no longer need it anyway).
Agreed - the first example of this that I can think of that began to drive me nuts is the windows start menu (95/XP - not sure how it is in later versions). Ever try to click and mouse-over through 5 layers of menus (since every app by default installs 8 icons in a vendor-based heirarchy)? Ever try to do that with a trackpad on a laptop on a screen whose resolution is low enough to require moving both right and left? After 10 seconds of navigation if you drive 5 pixels in the wrong direction the whole thing collapses. I wish I could turn on an option that only opened a sub-menu if I clicked on it.
Yup - people look strangely at me when I have a meeting with somebody in my office at work, the phone rings, I glance at it, and then I don't answer it and proceed with the meeting. I find this bizarre - this person has taken the time to set up a meeting with me, and I made time on my calendar to meet because whatever we're talking about was important enough to discuss (and my calendar tends to book up quite a bit). Why would I then set aside that carefully prioritized calendar just because some random person wants something from me? When I have a free moment I'll find out what it was about, prioritize it accordingly, and deal with it. If they're having a heart attack they should be dialing 911, since there isn't much I can do for them personally.
Answering the phone when it rings amounts to prioritizing your work (or recreation) purely on the basis of the urgent, and not on the basis of the important. Learning the difference changed my life.
MLRS??? Uh, just a bit overkill - this is a couple of drug runners with armored trucks, not a Warsaw Pact invasion...
Javelins or similar manportable weapons are probably the most economical solution, assuming a 50 cal doesn't just take it out. If the drug runners build a thousand of these then maybe we'll need to lean on the Mexicans to control their side of the border or just annex a few hundred miles and turn it into a no-man's land - a much more economical prospect than turning the entire Mexican border into the Korean DMZ.
Of course the real solutions are as everybody points out ending the stupid war on drugs, or leaning hard on the Mexicans to get their act together...
It is, but keep in mind that there are many bleeding edges.
You could be running bleeding edge postfix, or you could be running bleeding edge sendmail - the distro doesn't care which.
You could be running bleeding edge KDE or Gnome - again we don't care.
You could be running the default openrc, or perhaps one day you could be running systemd (right now we care - some would like to change that).
There is a default experience if you follow the guidebook and don't mess with certain flags/packages/etc. It can be stable or bleeding-edge. However, to do the really exotic stuff you need to go looking.
The typical experimental user tends to stick with fairly stable stuff for 95% of the system, and go crazy with the other 5%. That lets them do something exotic without having to play whack-a-mole with all the bugs.
Does btrfs actually stripe like this, or does it simply keep a copy on two volumes for RAID1, and spread data around for RAID0?
You can tell btrfs to even keep two copies on the same volume if you want, I think.
They call it RAID, but I don't think it is really the same thing. The RAID5-like features and reshaping don't exist yet (the last time I checked). Then again, maybe it supports both modes of operations - if there is one thing about btrs is that it has a million optional features.
I think the bigger issue with btrfs vs mdadm and ext4 will just be maturity. Btrfs repair tools just haven't evolved to the same place the other tools are at, but there is no fundamental reason why they won't eventually make it there.
As you say btrfs has the advantage that it knows something about how the space is used, so if space was just free it could just nuke it and not worry about trying to salvage garbage data. It could also use free space to leverage recovery. And, the concept of COW means that strips are less likely to be in a transitory state of having meaningful data partially overwritten by other meaningful data, since the filesystem would first try to write the stripe over unused space leaving a fully intact backup if it is interrupted and the array is already degraded/etc.
The last time I tried test-converting an existing ext4 into a btrfs on RAID it paniced, but it has been almost a year now...
So, I'm a Gentoo Dev and I'd qualify that statement a little. Gentoo tends to make a lot of stuff available very early, but it doesn't tend to go all-in with experimental stuff for the base user experience. The default Gentoo stable experience is legacy Grub, for example. And Gentoo hasn't bought into Unity/Systemd/etc. Although, there is talk of adding systemd to the list, and Chrome OS is a Gentoo-based distro that uses unity - so clearly it can be done.
Gentoo tends to be about giving users a default experience that is reasonably stable, but making it a lot easier for users to branch out and try different things, while still keeping much of the update automation in place.
Gentoo tends to be less about the polished desktop experience, so I suspect we'll always lag something like Ubuntu in that regard - at least when it comes to ripping apart everything and trying something new.
I believe in btrfs that a snapshot is itself a mountable structure, so in theory all you have to do is do a snapshot called "previous_foo" and then install your changes, and if it doesn't work boot with (real_)root= on your kernel line.
Not a whole lot needs to actually come together unless you want it all automated. Then again, I run gentoo so my grub.conf is hand-configured anyway.:)
How long do they let you keep them out when you're renting them? From what I've seen, the more a club charges the more permissive it tends to be about hanging onto planes for a week or whatever. Makes sense - the up-front charges cover the time the plane isn't running, and the per-hour fee covers the time that it is running.
The more expensive ones tend to encourage members to treat the planes like they own them, since to a great extent they actually do. Usually these sorts of things tend to be informal so less frequent users may subsidize more frequent users, and this isn't necessarily a horrible thing.
Yup, imaging studies are only useful because of just how ignorant we are about how the brain works. Their resolution isn't very high. When you think about, individual neurons are what carry messages around, and an fMRI voxel probably contains tens of thousands of them easily, and it isn't like the resolution is really one voxel either.
An imaging study is analogous to measuring the EMF output of 10 undersea cables and trying it relate it to individual phone calls. Sure, the calls go through the cables, but each cable contains thousands of individual wires. And yes, let's assume fiber optics haven't been invented yet...
I dunno - just a big a problem is delayed treatment.
If somebody goes to the ER the first thing the doctors do is stop ALL their medication. Now, it isn't so much that they stop it, but if the time to take pills comes along they don't administer the pills. I'm not convinced that this is always a good thing, even though there is a risk that a pill could make things worse.
The current hospital system has a bias towards inaction (ie the patient just sits in a bed all day), since if you tell the patient that they can do something and something goes wrong you can get sued, but if the patient dies from deep-vein thrombosis or whatever then that is just a normal rare consequence of hospitalization.
That said, I am a fan of checklists/etc, as long as they come along with enough manpower that they don't turn into bottlenecks.
Yup, but it made me feel nostalgic just the same. I see that Weather Wars has a C64 port (conceptually - not an exact clone).
I think that the 4051 was a neat platform for this. There was nothing quite like seeing a vector lightning bolt traced on the screen. From my very hazy memories it was a lot more dramatic than what you see on the typical raster non-storage-display terminal that we use today.
Yup, and guess whose answer gets sent to the PR department? The engineers don't represent the "official" thinking of the organization. They never do...
I never suggested that the government should collect taxes on book sales or pay taxes to authors (that is pure RMS crazy). I didn't suggest that slavery in the US was voluntary either - I specifically stated that it wasn't.
As far as indentured servitude goes - it is a condition that is easily exploited and in practice almost always was. Your choice of indentured servitude vs starvation is a false dichotomy. The banning of indentured servitude denied those who needed to hire labor this mechanism, which means they have to just pay people outright, which means the number of non-indentured jobs goes up and people can get money to pay their debts normally. Plus bankruptcy allows people to discharge debts that they'll never be able to pay, thus giving them incentive to work and make money that they can keep (and pay taxes on).
You also don't need to be a Pirate to play a game your parents paid for, and just because you bought a game for your kid doesn't mean that you will play it.
I'm also a sim enthusiast who has looked into getting a PPL but hasn't committed yet. The situation in the average US suburb is a little less dire as airspace is less restricted generally in the US than the UK (from my limited understanding). When I fly in a sim I usually do look for some level of realism in instruments, ATC, etc as well - though most sims are very limited even with add-ons unless you're talking about something like VATSIM.
The cost is the biggest issue I see. If you're a casual flyer who doesn't go anywhere then your best bet is probably the $100/hr 152-like aircraft. That is expensive, but you don't have to deal with all the maintenance hassles, and it is cheaper than owning an aircraft unless you fly it a LOT. If you do want to use a plane to travel somewhere then you'll need to have some kind of partial ownership as nobody lets you park a rental somewhere for a week without paying for the idle time. The costs of that are considerable.
Also, those cheaper planes not only are only marginally faster than a car, but they carry far less payload. My wife and I can hop in a car and probably fit about half a ton of payload (ourselves and our luggage) if we want to. Small planes don't carry nearly that much, so you'll probably end up FedEx-ing your luggage. That isn't cheap either.
The kind of aircraft that I'd call the "family sedan" of the sky would be something like a small turboprop like a King Air, and those cost millions of dollars (they're not jets by any stretch but they have the kind of performance that most people who don't fly probably envision a plane as having). A twin-engine piston would be what I'd consider the equivalent of a budget family car, and those cost $300k or so. My point isn't whether one model or another is the "ideal" family plane so much that the cost associated with what the average person considers as a "typical" aircraft is VERY high. By "typical" I mean that they could do whatever they could do with a car, take off, fly halfway across the US on a tank of gas, fly at 200mph and clear mountains, carry 4 people and the quantity of luggage you could check on an airline, and so on. Very few people could afford to own the kind of aircraft that does this.
How do you even measure the risk associated with things that never actually happen?
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
If you asked somebody in 1985 what the chances of the shuttle being destroyed with all hands they would have said 1 in 100,000 launches or whatever - right now the trend is closer to 1:75.
Now, we don't have enough data in either case to really put an accurate figure on the risk, but clearly the risks are much higher than were estimated.
The problem with modeling risk is that you don't account for anything not in your model, and chances are that things not in your model are the sorts of things most likely to cause a problem in the first place since otherwise you'd be mitigating the risk. It is also hard for people doing risk estimates to put failure modes like "management making stupid decisions" on the list with any kind of probability greater than "it never happens."
Obviously the US Civil War, which was about giving states the freedom to deny freedom to some people living inside their borders. There were a bunch of other issues as well, but that was the hot-button item.
The US Civil War actually has quite a few parallels with the debate on this thread, but I'd argue that if anything it is a good reason for why people SHOULDN'T have the freedom to give up freedom. In the case of slavery as it was practiced in the US this wasn't even a voluntary choice, but the history of indentured servitude isn't much better.
Uh, you'll have to keep paying that $99/yr long after updates are no longer available for your phone, and you don't get free maintenance of any kind with that - just updates.
Slashdot Mirror
I assure you that whatever house you live in, wherever on earth it may be, does not have clear title back to the primordial soup. At some point a human being almost certainly forced another human being off of that piece of land under threat of serious bodily harm without compensation. By your argument, nobody has a right to live anywhere...
Companies are smarter than that. If they want to fire you than anytime you take 16-minutes for a 15-minute break it gets recorded, and anytime you're a penny short it gets recorded, and anytime you fail to meet some boss's arbitrary deadline it gets recorded. Anytime you do something really nice no note is made, unless you're smart enough to keep your own records.
After 6-12 months a huge one-sided record of failures is documented, since you're not perfect. You are then terminated without cause, but they've got ammo to defend them in court. The records will contain no mention of the fact that you tried to form a union, and the HR guy processing your termination would have no knowledge of this - they'd just be handed a record of your "poor work history" and asked to take care of it.
Senior leaders in the company can of course not be expected to know about the performance of individual employees and that is why we have local managers (who are all eager to be promoted to senior management). The local manager will of course not receive such promotion until well after the legal dust settles from the termination.
Or, maybe they just keep the name in their heads for the next time 10% of the workforce needs to be reduced. For all the reasons above the targeted employee will be on the bottom end of the ratings bell-curve anyway, and easy to eliminate in a large elimination stratified by race/gender/orientation so as to pass any legal scrutiny. Nothing will be said, but everybody will get the message.
In most US states companies can basically fire anybody they want to for whatever reason they want to, and it is near-impossible to improve that they've done otherwise. States that do otherwise just don't find mega-corps moving into them, at least not for anything bigger than retail outlets (which granted, this is about).
Regarding the Linux Paradox - I've always maintained that open source benefits people even if they NEVER intend to install a compiler or whatever.
First, you benefit anytime somebody else installs a compiler, and there always seem to be people willing to do it.
Second, if you build an important product around open source software and the project really does dry up, you can hire yourself people to maintain it for you until you're able to transition to somebody else. It is analogous to code escrow with any other vendor, except that it will be easier to find people who are already familiar with the code. Going it alone may not be a good long-term strategy, but at least you don't end up completely high-and-dry for a year or two while you redesign your product. Open-source is also better than code escrow since you don't need to spend three years in the courts fighting to get the code released to you (by which time you probably no longer need it anyway).
Agreed - the first example of this that I can think of that began to drive me nuts is the windows start menu (95/XP - not sure how it is in later versions). Ever try to click and mouse-over through 5 layers of menus (since every app by default installs 8 icons in a vendor-based heirarchy)? Ever try to do that with a trackpad on a laptop on a screen whose resolution is low enough to require moving both right and left? After 10 seconds of navigation if you drive 5 pixels in the wrong direction the whole thing collapses. I wish I could turn on an option that only opened a sub-menu if I clicked on it.
Yup - people look strangely at me when I have a meeting with somebody in my office at work, the phone rings, I glance at it, and then I don't answer it and proceed with the meeting. I find this bizarre - this person has taken the time to set up a meeting with me, and I made time on my calendar to meet because whatever we're talking about was important enough to discuss (and my calendar tends to book up quite a bit). Why would I then set aside that carefully prioritized calendar just because some random person wants something from me? When I have a free moment I'll find out what it was about, prioritize it accordingly, and deal with it. If they're having a heart attack they should be dialing 911, since there isn't much I can do for them personally.
Answering the phone when it rings amounts to prioritizing your work (or recreation) purely on the basis of the urgent, and not on the basis of the important. Learning the difference changed my life.
MLRS??? Uh, just a bit overkill - this is a couple of drug runners with armored trucks, not a Warsaw Pact invasion...
Javelins or similar manportable weapons are probably the most economical solution, assuming a 50 cal doesn't just take it out. If the drug runners build a thousand of these then maybe we'll need to lean on the Mexicans to control their side of the border or just annex a few hundred miles and turn it into a no-man's land - a much more economical prospect than turning the entire Mexican border into the Korean DMZ.
Of course the real solutions are as everybody points out ending the stupid war on drugs, or leaning hard on the Mexicans to get their act together...
How about getting your FAQs straight?
Hmm, thought I had read that it did. Seems that you're only half-wrong, or were you just trolling? :)
It is, but keep in mind that there are many bleeding edges.
You could be running bleeding edge postfix, or you could be running bleeding edge sendmail - the distro doesn't care which.
You could be running bleeding edge KDE or Gnome - again we don't care.
You could be running the default openrc, or perhaps one day you could be running systemd (right now we care - some would like to change that).
There is a default experience if you follow the guidebook and don't mess with certain flags/packages/etc. It can be stable or bleeding-edge. However, to do the really exotic stuff you need to go looking.
The typical experimental user tends to stick with fairly stable stuff for 95% of the system, and go crazy with the other 5%. That lets them do something exotic without having to play whack-a-mole with all the bugs.
Does btrfs actually stripe like this, or does it simply keep a copy on two volumes for RAID1, and spread data around for RAID0?
You can tell btrfs to even keep two copies on the same volume if you want, I think.
They call it RAID, but I don't think it is really the same thing. The RAID5-like features and reshaping don't exist yet (the last time I checked). Then again, maybe it supports both modes of operations - if there is one thing about btrs is that it has a million optional features.
I think the bigger issue with btrfs vs mdadm and ext4 will just be maturity. Btrfs repair tools just haven't evolved to the same place the other tools are at, but there is no fundamental reason why they won't eventually make it there.
As you say btrfs has the advantage that it knows something about how the space is used, so if space was just free it could just nuke it and not worry about trying to salvage garbage data. It could also use free space to leverage recovery. And, the concept of COW means that strips are less likely to be in a transitory state of having meaningful data partially overwritten by other meaningful data, since the filesystem would first try to write the stripe over unused space leaving a fully intact backup if it is interrupted and the array is already degraded/etc.
The last time I tried test-converting an existing ext4 into a btrfs on RAID it paniced, but it has been almost a year now...
So, I'm a Gentoo Dev and I'd qualify that statement a little. Gentoo tends to make a lot of stuff available very early, but it doesn't tend to go all-in with experimental stuff for the base user experience. The default Gentoo stable experience is legacy Grub, for example. And Gentoo hasn't bought into Unity/Systemd/etc. Although, there is talk of adding systemd to the list, and Chrome OS is a Gentoo-based distro that uses unity - so clearly it can be done.
Gentoo tends to be about giving users a default experience that is reasonably stable, but making it a lot easier for users to branch out and try different things, while still keeping much of the update automation in place.
Gentoo tends to be less about the polished desktop experience, so I suspect we'll always lag something like Ubuntu in that regard - at least when it comes to ripping apart everything and trying something new.
I believe in btrfs that a snapshot is itself a mountable structure, so in theory all you have to do is do a snapshot called "previous_foo" and then install your changes, and if it doesn't work boot with (real_)root= on your kernel line.
Not a whole lot needs to actually come together unless you want it all automated. Then again, I run gentoo so my grub.conf is hand-configured anyway. :)
How long do they let you keep them out when you're renting them? From what I've seen, the more a club charges the more permissive it tends to be about hanging onto planes for a week or whatever. Makes sense - the up-front charges cover the time the plane isn't running, and the per-hour fee covers the time that it is running.
The more expensive ones tend to encourage members to treat the planes like they own them, since to a great extent they actually do. Usually these sorts of things tend to be informal so less frequent users may subsidize more frequent users, and this isn't necessarily a horrible thing.
Yup, imaging studies are only useful because of just how ignorant we are about how the brain works. Their resolution isn't very high. When you think about, individual neurons are what carry messages around, and an fMRI voxel probably contains tens of thousands of them easily, and it isn't like the resolution is really one voxel either.
An imaging study is analogous to measuring the EMF output of 10 undersea cables and trying it relate it to individual phone calls. Sure, the calls go through the cables, but each cable contains thousands of individual wires. And yes, let's assume fiber optics haven't been invented yet...
I dunno - just a big a problem is delayed treatment.
If somebody goes to the ER the first thing the doctors do is stop ALL their medication. Now, it isn't so much that they stop it, but if the time to take pills comes along they don't administer the pills. I'm not convinced that this is always a good thing, even though there is a risk that a pill could make things worse.
The current hospital system has a bias towards inaction (ie the patient just sits in a bed all day), since if you tell the patient that they can do something and something goes wrong you can get sued, but if the patient dies from deep-vein thrombosis or whatever then that is just a normal rare consequence of hospitalization.
That said, I am a fan of checklists/etc, as long as they come along with enough manpower that they don't turn into bottlenecks.
Yup, but it made me feel nostalgic just the same. I see that Weather Wars has a C64 port (conceptually - not an exact clone).
I think that the 4051 was a neat platform for this. There was nothing quite like seeing a vector lightning bolt traced on the screen. From my very hazy memories it was a lot more dramatic than what you see on the typical raster non-storage-display terminal that we use today.
Yup, and guess whose answer gets sent to the PR department? The engineers don't represent the "official" thinking of the organization. They never do...
I never suggested that the government should collect taxes on book sales or pay taxes to authors (that is pure RMS crazy). I didn't suggest that slavery in the US was voluntary either - I specifically stated that it wasn't.
As far as indentured servitude goes - it is a condition that is easily exploited and in practice almost always was. Your choice of indentured servitude vs starvation is a false dichotomy. The banning of indentured servitude denied those who needed to hire labor this mechanism, which means they have to just pay people outright, which means the number of non-indentured jobs goes up and people can get money to pay their debts normally. Plus bankruptcy allows people to discharge debts that they'll never be able to pay, thus giving them incentive to work and make money that they can keep (and pay taxes on).
You also don't need to be a Pirate to play a game your parents paid for, and just because you bought a game for your kid doesn't mean that you will play it.
Am I the only one who remembers playing weather wars or artillery on this? That is way older than gorillas.bas...
I'm also a sim enthusiast who has looked into getting a PPL but hasn't committed yet. The situation in the average US suburb is a little less dire as airspace is less restricted generally in the US than the UK (from my limited understanding). When I fly in a sim I usually do look for some level of realism in instruments, ATC, etc as well - though most sims are very limited even with add-ons unless you're talking about something like VATSIM.
The cost is the biggest issue I see. If you're a casual flyer who doesn't go anywhere then your best bet is probably the $100/hr 152-like aircraft. That is expensive, but you don't have to deal with all the maintenance hassles, and it is cheaper than owning an aircraft unless you fly it a LOT. If you do want to use a plane to travel somewhere then you'll need to have some kind of partial ownership as nobody lets you park a rental somewhere for a week without paying for the idle time. The costs of that are considerable.
Also, those cheaper planes not only are only marginally faster than a car, but they carry far less payload. My wife and I can hop in a car and probably fit about half a ton of payload (ourselves and our luggage) if we want to. Small planes don't carry nearly that much, so you'll probably end up FedEx-ing your luggage. That isn't cheap either.
The kind of aircraft that I'd call the "family sedan" of the sky would be something like a small turboprop like a King Air, and those cost millions of dollars (they're not jets by any stretch but they have the kind of performance that most people who don't fly probably envision a plane as having). A twin-engine piston would be what I'd consider the equivalent of a budget family car, and those cost $300k or so. My point isn't whether one model or another is the "ideal" family plane so much that the cost associated with what the average person considers as a "typical" aircraft is VERY high. By "typical" I mean that they could do whatever they could do with a car, take off, fly halfway across the US on a tank of gas, fly at 200mph and clear mountains, carry 4 people and the quantity of luggage you could check on an airline, and so on. Very few people could afford to own the kind of aircraft that does this.
How do you even measure the risk associated with things that never actually happen?
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
If you asked somebody in 1985 what the chances of the shuttle being destroyed with all hands they would have said 1 in 100,000 launches or whatever - right now the trend is closer to 1:75.
Now, we don't have enough data in either case to really put an accurate figure on the risk, but clearly the risks are much higher than were estimated.
The problem with modeling risk is that you don't account for anything not in your model, and chances are that things not in your model are the sorts of things most likely to cause a problem in the first place since otherwise you'd be mitigating the risk. It is also hard for people doing risk estimates to put failure modes like "management making stupid decisions" on the list with any kind of probability greater than "it never happens."
Obviously the US Civil War, which was about giving states the freedom to deny freedom to some people living inside their borders. There were a bunch of other issues as well, but that was the hot-button item.
The US Civil War actually has quite a few parallels with the debate on this thread, but I'd argue that if anything it is a good reason for why people SHOULDN'T have the freedom to give up freedom. In the case of slavery as it was practiced in the US this wasn't even a voluntary choice, but the history of indentured servitude isn't much better.
Uh, you'll have to keep paying that $99/yr long after updates are no longer available for your phone, and you don't get free maintenance of any kind with that - just updates.