Hasn't there always been an underground crime racket in things like check fraud, ID fraud, ID forging, financial fraud, theft etc. It isn't that this is an emerging market, more than it is where the old market has moved into. In the same way as Wallmart moved from the real to the virtual so are the criminals.
Sure its slightly different in that you don't get mugged and it can be better automated and scaled, but fake or duplicate passports have been around for years as has the ID theft problem. Hell in a world where Illinois can elect 4 out of 8 corrupt governors its hardly surprising that there is a problem with fraud and extortion.
This isn't news about a market that is new, its news about how existing crime organisations are going into new markets, just like the Mafia et al shifting from alcohol and protection into drugs. There has always been a problem with organised crime and there has always been an underground market for illegal information and products (after all these are just different illegal shipments).
This reads a bit like the.com stories of 1999 which said that there was a new magic economy that would replace the old one, then it turned out that mainly it was the boring old economy that worked in the new world. I'd imagine that the same is pretty true for the cybercrime world, same bosses, different henchmen who have more brains than muscles.
You do know who makes Dr Who don't you? Its the BBC which is pretty much quasi-government (its independent in terms of editorial control but its budget gets set by the government).
So your argument that a government controlled entity can't possibly show decent quality TV produced by another government controlled entity really doesn't make sense. The BBC is probably the finest global broadcaster in terms of overall content, originality and political coverage. HBO will have a shot from a quality perspective but politics?
Government control can indeed be a very bad thing (look at Italy or Venezuela) but one thing you can't do is complain about it in a thread talking about Dr Who.
Come on folks its time to have fun with the arts students again. We are all going to die because as we know a black hole sucks everything into it and these guys have only just discovered it which means it must be new so it can only be a matter of days/weeks/months a year at most before our solar system is devoured by this giant black hole.
Run for the hills, there is no escape.
Ahhh arts students, the sort of people who fall for the "di-hydrogen monoxide is potentially lethal but the government are letting it into our water supplies".
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.
Stallman is that you? Are you serious?
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?
The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that. Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.
I don't have the right to listen freely to their music, it just happens to work well.
I've never felt like condemning copyright violation as outright theft before but your mentality really does seem to be in that category of "F-U, F-everyone" and "I'm alright Jack" asshole that just deserves to be up before the judge. I don't have a right to my neighbours car... and you know what I won't be taking it for a joy ride no matter how well it would work for me.
Oh hang on, you are clearly actually an RIAA plant because no-one could be that big a sociopath.... could they?
One point to make though is that Paul McCartney is the sort of guy who can afford to go DRM free, if this album is ripped, lobbed on bit-torrent and limewire then Macca is unlikely to be out on the streets through lost revenue. Its great that he has done it but the _fear_ of being ripped off is going to be less for one of the biggest selling artists of all time than it would be for the average band.
Kudos indeed, but this isn't just a random artist choosing DRM this is the bloke from the Beatles who co-wrote the first hit for the Rolling Stones and the Frog Chorus.
The only problem with this is that according to the OECD ratings on where the best 21st Century Schools are its mainly around Finland and Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan none of which leave education in the hands of back-water local folks who can dictate "no evolution" or its ilk.
Education isn't a federal problem and giving people laptops won't solve it. Unless Obama is planning on shifting to Federal control of education then this really is just lipstick on a pig. Broadband adoption is at least some way federally regulated via the FCC but throwing money at the Cable Cabal won't mean better competition an thus better value it will just mean better profits.
"Is Never get involved in a land war in Asia" - Vencini - The Princess Bride
Seriously with 1.2 billion people and a US Government that doesn't fighting on even grounds (doctrine of overwhelming superiority) the Chinese are number 1 on a list of countries to not go around starting a War with (Russia as a close number 2).
The stupidest thing that Bush ever did (and lets face that is a long list) were the "threats" that he made to China over the spy plane thing. It showed the most amazing lack of knowledge on the global political sphere and a complete lack of perception as to how his threats would cause them to react. What a gimp.
By Women to subjugate men and stop us breaking through the glass ceiling and having successful careers. I for one think it is awful that Women can not only discriminate against men but can also actively poison us without society doing anything, this just goes to show the level of control that women have at all levels of society and their near total control of politics and the news.
Brought to you by the same people at FoxNews who claimed the rest of the Media was biased.
3. Have Yahoo team up with an already convicted monopoly (MS) to help stop Google becoming an monopoly
Making MS stronger doesn't exactly help the consumer or do anything to weaken MS' already existing monopoly on the desktop (as found by the previous DoJ investigation).
Today the Union of Wise Men complained about the Hubble advent calendar and released the following statement
"How on earth are we meant to follow a star if using Hubble we can now see billions of the buggers and makes it clear that rather than being Wise men we are in fact just gullible fools who are clinging to an outdated set of beliefs and primitive ideas on how the Universe operates. We insist that the Hubble advent calendar and telescope are shutdown immediately in order to prevent our beliefs in star following being ridiculed as a result of this vicious use of information. The Union of Wise Men is in favour of scientific endeavour as long as it doesn't imply that star following is a silly way of finding things."
The Union of Wise Men also denied that Star following tended to happen after they staggered out of a pub drunk and went "oooh look at the pretty star".
Brilliantly "I CANN but I shouldn't" manages to win the dumbest, stupidest, most pointless idea of the whole sodding year.
I mean just having a "standard" of I don't know VCF and using MIMEtypes from a web page would give you the ability to do this sort of connectivity address book stuff within the existing infrastructure. Now the idea is that everyone should register an equivalent.tel (errrr how do they do that when there are different companies at the.com,.net,.org,.co.uk,.fr etc addresses).
Quite astonishingly badly stupid and I applaud their genius by making sure it will be in everyone's mind as the "worst idea of 2008" is compiled. The only person who might be happy about this is the 2000-2007 undisputed winning partnership of Bush/Cheney for their "Threatening China", "What Torture?" "What WMD?" "Mission Accomplished", "What problems in Iraq?" and many other household favourites.
As my mother said "Just because 'you can' doesn't mean 'you should'". I propose a name change to ICANN to "Please god no we can't be trusted with this responsibility"
The aim of a really good degree (as opposed to a lecture driven box ticking one) is to be cruel, you want to feel that your head is going to explode and that your subject really is an absolute bitch.
Then you graduate and find out the real world is easier than the theory.
Cruelty is important in a good education to make you achieve in the real world. An easy flow through degree gets you the cert but gives you unrealistic expectation of how hard the real world can be.
Personally my degree was a mind bending bitch of mumbling lecturers and impossible (literally in some cases) questions that covered everything from quantum mechanics "basics" and abstract computing theory through to how to dope a transistor.
Seriously folks, can't the greatest power in the world today do some form of prioritisation? Free internet access, brilliant a free utility, a basic fundamental right of every american guaranteed by the constitution and our founding fathers.
Free Healthcare of course is a communist plot to subvert the country and destroy everything America stands for.
Free Healthcare should be a right, the internet should be a utility just like power and water... something that you pay for.
Server side the savings are pretty obvious, especially around maintenance contracts. On the desktop its much harder as you have all the transition and training costs. Looking at things like SugarCRM, rather than Salesforce.com, is a grey area as you have to pay for the implementation rather than just renting.
Oh hang on its Slashdot and we aren't going to worry about the actual business change, implementation or management side of it, we just want to see two list prices compared and be able to go "OSS is free".
The crunch will help OSS, especially as a CapEx reduction strategy. That is the sales pitch even if it increases the OpEx as right now Cash is king. If you can build a case that does OpEx and CapEx then you are completely sorted.
Remember all those adverts with an acorn that grows into an oak tree and some voice over about safe investments that flourish?
Yes folks it turns out the banks really were just investing money in acorns and have now created an "acorn bubble" which has driven all of the squirrels into poverty.
Like most people in IT I spend a certain part of the year helping out those less fortunate than myself. Namely all the friends, friends of the wife, some bloke I met in the pub and the school in getting their computers to work. Most recently I fixed a couple of laptops and an internet connection, one was on XP the other on Vista, the wife asked to have her (XP) PC "look like" her husbands as she like the look of the interface. When I said it was a different operating system she said "Isn't it Windows then?"
The point is of course that it is Windows and the difference between XP and Vista for most users does just come down to the pretty window manager... until stuff doesn't work. The XP box was back-online in under 10 minutes, the Vista box took me longer due to the wonderful UAC and a driver problem.
Most of the time however I feel like a Mac salesman, I turn up with my Mac (the trouble shooting box) run all the tests and have them thinking "ooooh that must be hard to use because its so powerful and techy" then let them play around with it for a few minutes. I'd say that around 50% of those people I've supported this year who are looking at replacements are now looking at a Mac.
Now a Slashdot poll on what is the correct payment for these unofficial support calls (often at a party or other social function) would be good. Right now I'm getting around two bottles of wine and a decent meal out of it.
Come on.... "Dark Energy" this should have everyone wearing some form of mask and a black uniform with just a simple white spark on it or something. We complain about not getting kids into science and then when we get something with one of the coolest sounding names around we make it into something dull and boring.
"Dark Energy has been around for 13 billion years but no-one has been able to harness it. Do you have what it takes to join the Legion of Dark Scientists?"
Part of the issue here is the meaning of the word capable. Balmer has already said that Vista isn't really a capable operating system (or at least wasn't when launched) so surely the argument therefore is that a machine that is incapable of running Vista is therefore getting exactly the same experience (or better) than someone who is actually running Vista.
Thus actually Vista Capable is a comparison between XP and Vista and thus you are better off having XP as that is just as capable as Vista.
Come on are we seriously thinking that Balmer can't talk his way around the word Capable?
MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today). It became more successful once opened but the original design was very much closed and of course the operating systems that made it successful are pretty much the poster child of the closed software movement. The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open either (otherwise why would there be Ogg?).
So Openness can be a good thing, but your examples are in fact more examples of how closed works commercially as long as it develops an established market.
One point to note here is that Smartphones of today are the "ultra-portables" of a couple of years ago, the laptops of about 5 years ago and the desktops of 8 years ago. The power of the devices is equivalent to what many modern OSes were developed upon, so the issue when looking at OSX(iPhone), Android or Symbian is purely on its better battery efficiency and better small scale UI.
Personally I'd add Symbian to the list as the old Psion 5mx and 7 were in effect the netbooks and ultra-portables of their time and Nokia have some tablet devices at the moment. Combined with the touch screen interfaces, especially the "drag" widescreen display that Android and the iPhone have, gives a robust, low power, operating platform with the added benefits of an easy to use set of installers.
So maybe the question isn't so much whether this is a good plan, but what marketing, software suites and public perception pieces are preventing these mobile OSes (mainly Symbian at this stage) being the default.
But one thing that isn't preventing them is the power of the devices, I'm continually stunned at the multi-processor power of my humble "mobile phone", for most people a netbook with the same processor as my phone (iPhone) but a bigger screen would be perfectly okay and easier to use for their core tasks (email, internet browsing, minor games).
Surely the way they interact with Games is to complain about Sex/Drugs/Violence in games as being the root of all evil and the cause of all society's ills. Stuff around copyright (and the insane idea of a sell-on tax) is how companies interact with politicians rather than anything to do with the games themselves.
The politicians screaming "think of the children" around games like GTA is, and will remain, the norm. Given that most politicians are well over game playing age this is hardly surprising and I can't quite see Obama saying that he is a big GTA or other "controversial" game fan.
So basically politicians don't interact with games, they interact with Games companies and with the media to decry the fall of civilisation.
And this from a bunch of people for whom being a convicted Felon isn't something that bars them from office.
I lived in the country for 2 years working in a multi-national organisation, and have a reasonable French music collection. One day we had a competition of "who is the worst at" and for the music category it came down to France v Germany in the final.
The french contender put forwards the amount of average 50 year old crooners and Johnny Halliday who all have their crowds of 17-20 year old models in the background all the time.
The german contender pulled out the winning plug however by pointing out that not only is "oompha" music played on German TV but that their music is so had that they.... BOUGHT DAVID HASSELHOFF CDs.
The issue with French music (and German) isn't that there aren't some reasonable things in there, its that most of it is just stunningly bad and makes bad UK or American music seem like the Beatles, Stones or Beach Boys. As a French colleague said "if your Uncle sang like that at a party you'd be embarrassed". The occasional stars aren't even allowed to shine that brightly in France amongst the turgid nonsense of French "Pop" and Drunk Uncle music.
I mean come on, it should be struck down on the basis that France doesn't even play Baseball so a "3 strikes" rule is just the American Imperialism that they are always railing against.
Now a "7 Course Meal and you are out" sounds a much more French rule to have.
On the copyright side of course its quite odd that France, which has a set of music that only the French want to listen to (Manau excepted) is worried about piracy, hell if more people listen to some of their artists they should be glad.
Slashdot Mirror
Hasn't there always been an underground crime racket in things like check fraud, ID fraud, ID forging, financial fraud, theft etc. It isn't that this is an emerging market, more than it is where the old market has moved into. In the same way as Wallmart moved from the real to the virtual so are the criminals.
Sure its slightly different in that you don't get mugged and it can be better automated and scaled, but fake or duplicate passports have been around for years as has the ID theft problem. Hell in a world where Illinois can elect 4 out of 8 corrupt governors its hardly surprising that there is a problem with fraud and extortion.
This isn't news about a market that is new, its news about how existing crime organisations are going into new markets, just like the Mafia et al shifting from alcohol and protection into drugs. There has always been a problem with organised crime and there has always been an underground market for illegal information and products (after all these are just different illegal shipments).
This reads a bit like the .com stories of 1999 which said that there was a new magic economy that would replace the old one, then it turned out that mainly it was the boring old economy that worked in the new world. I'd imagine that the same is pretty true for the cybercrime world, same bosses, different henchmen who have more brains than muscles.
You do know who makes Dr Who don't you? Its the BBC which is pretty much quasi-government (its independent in terms of editorial control but its budget gets set by the government).
So your argument that a government controlled entity can't possibly show decent quality TV produced by another government controlled entity really doesn't make sense. The BBC is probably the finest global broadcaster in terms of overall content, originality and political coverage. HBO will have a shot from a quality perspective but politics?
Government control can indeed be a very bad thing (look at Italy or Venezuela) but one thing you can't do is complain about it in a thread talking about Dr Who.
Come on folks its time to have fun with the arts students again. We are all going to die because as we know a black hole sucks everything into it and these guys have only just discovered it which means it must be new so it can only be a matter of days/weeks/months a year at most before our solar system is devoured by this giant black hole.
Run for the hills, there is no escape.
Ahhh arts students, the sort of people who fall for the "di-hydrogen monoxide is potentially lethal but the government are letting it into our water supplies".
You are supposed to make music because you like to do it, not as a full-time job.
Stallman is that you? Are you serious?
Artists don't have a right to make money from their art, it just happened to work well.
WTF? So Michaelangelo should have done the Sistine Chapel for free? Da Vinci shouldn't have taken that commission for the Mona Lisa? Mozart should never have taken that court job or done those popular operas?
The multi-millionaires rock stars didn't exist before the invention of disc records and probably won't exist after that.
Go and have a look at some of the musicians, opera singers, composers and the like (who didn't drink it all away) from previous centuries and realise what a piece of muppetry you are saying.
I don't have the right to listen freely to their music, it just happens to work well.
I've never felt like condemning copyright violation as outright theft before but your mentality really does seem to be in that category of "F-U, F-everyone" and "I'm alright Jack" asshole that just deserves to be up before the judge. I don't have a right to my neighbours car... and you know what I won't be taking it for a joy ride no matter how well it would work for me.
Oh hang on, you are clearly actually an RIAA plant because no-one could be that big a sociopath.... could they?
One point to make though is that Paul McCartney is the sort of guy who can afford to go DRM free, if this album is ripped, lobbed on bit-torrent and limewire then Macca is unlikely to be out on the streets through lost revenue. Its great that he has done it but the _fear_ of being ripped off is going to be less for one of the biggest selling artists of all time than it would be for the average band.
Kudos indeed, but this isn't just a random artist choosing DRM this is the bloke from the Beatles who co-wrote the first hit for the Rolling Stones and the Frog Chorus.
The only problem with this is that according to the OECD ratings on where the best 21st Century Schools are its mainly around Finland and Scandinavia, South Korea and Japan none of which leave education in the hands of back-water local folks who can dictate "no evolution" or its ilk.
Education isn't a federal problem and giving people laptops won't solve it. Unless Obama is planning on shifting to Federal control of education then this really is just lipstick on a pig. Broadband adoption is at least some way federally regulated via the FCC but throwing money at the Cable Cabal won't mean better competition an thus better value it will just mean better profits.
Fix the basics, then throw the money.
"Is Never get involved in a land war in Asia" - Vencini - The Princess Bride
Seriously with 1.2 billion people and a US Government that doesn't fighting on even grounds (doctrine of overwhelming superiority) the Chinese are number 1 on a list of countries to not go around starting a War with (Russia as a close number 2).
The stupidest thing that Bush ever did (and lets face that is a long list) were the "threats" that he made to China over the spy plane thing. It showed the most amazing lack of knowledge on the global political sphere and a complete lack of perception as to how his threats would cause them to react. What a gimp.
By Women to subjugate men and stop us breaking through the glass ceiling and having successful careers. I for one think it is awful that Women can not only discriminate against men but can also actively poison us without society doing anything, this just goes to show the level of control that women have at all levels of society and their near total control of politics and the news.
Brought to you by the same people at FoxNews who claimed the rest of the Media was biased.
All of your plug-ins communicate with a centrally controlled authority.
No not funny, but it is scary how the people in the world's 2nd largest nuclear power appear to be so far beyond the normal rule of law.
So the third option is
3. Have Yahoo team up with an already convicted monopoly (MS) to help stop Google becoming an monopoly
Making MS stronger doesn't exactly help the consumer or do anything to weaken MS' already existing monopoly on the desktop (as found by the previous DoJ investigation).
Rock, Hard place, Alaska in February
Today the Union of Wise Men complained about the Hubble advent calendar and released the following statement
"How on earth are we meant to follow a star if using Hubble we can now see billions of the buggers and makes it clear that rather than being Wise men we are in fact just gullible fools who are clinging to an outdated set of beliefs and primitive ideas on how the Universe operates. We insist that the Hubble advent calendar and telescope are shutdown immediately in order to prevent our beliefs in star following being ridiculed as a result of this vicious use of information. The Union of Wise Men is in favour of scientific endeavour as long as it doesn't imply that star following is a silly way of finding things."
The Union of Wise Men also denied that Star following tended to happen after they staggered out of a pub drunk and went "oooh look at the pretty star".
Brilliantly "I CANN but I shouldn't" manages to win the dumbest, stupidest, most pointless idea of the whole sodding year.
I mean just having a "standard" of I don't know VCF and using MIMEtypes from a web page would give you the ability to do this sort of connectivity address book stuff within the existing infrastructure. Now the idea is that everyone should register an equivalent .tel (errrr how do they do that when there are different companies at the .com, .net, .org, .co.uk, .fr etc addresses).
Quite astonishingly badly stupid and I applaud their genius by making sure it will be in everyone's mind as the "worst idea of 2008" is compiled. The only person who might be happy about this is the 2000-2007 undisputed winning partnership of Bush/Cheney for their "Threatening China", "What Torture?" "What WMD?" "Mission Accomplished", "What problems in Iraq?" and many other household favourites.
As my mother said "Just because 'you can' doesn't mean 'you should'". I propose a name change to ICANN to "Please god no we can't be trusted with this responsibility"
The aim of a really good degree (as opposed to a lecture driven box ticking one) is to be cruel, you want to feel that your head is going to explode and that your subject really is an absolute bitch.
Then you graduate and find out the real world is easier than the theory.
Cruelty is important in a good education to make you achieve in the real world. An easy flow through degree gets you the cert but gives you unrealistic expectation of how hard the real world can be.
Personally my degree was a mind bending bitch of mumbling lecturers and impossible (literally in some cases) questions that covered everything from quantum mechanics "basics" and abstract computing theory through to how to dope a transistor.
It was cruel, it was unusual... it was great.
Question: Where can I find a Reading Guide to AI Design & Neural Networks
Answer: Why do you want to AI design & Neural Networks?
Question: Because I want to learn.
Answer: Will learn AI design & neural networks make you happy
Question: Yes
There you go. Now the question is whether Slashdot beats the Turing test on this one.
Seriously folks, can't the greatest power in the world today do some form of prioritisation? Free internet access, brilliant a free utility, a basic fundamental right of every american guaranteed by the constitution and our founding fathers.
Free Healthcare of course is a communist plot to subvert the country and destroy everything America stands for.
Free Healthcare should be a right, the internet should be a utility just like power and water... something that you pay for.
Server side the savings are pretty obvious, especially around maintenance contracts. On the desktop its much harder as you have all the transition and training costs. Looking at things like SugarCRM, rather than Salesforce.com, is a grey area as you have to pay for the implementation rather than just renting.
Oh hang on its Slashdot and we aren't going to worry about the actual business change, implementation or management side of it, we just want to see two list prices compared and be able to go "OSS is free".
The crunch will help OSS, especially as a CapEx reduction strategy. That is the sales pitch even if it increases the OpEx as right now Cash is king. If you can build a case that does OpEx and CapEx then you are completely sorted.
Remember all those adverts with an acorn that grows into an oak tree and some voice over about safe investments that flourish?
Yes folks it turns out the banks really were just investing money in acorns and have now created an "acorn bubble" which has driven all of the squirrels into poverty.
Simple explanation really.
Like most people in IT I spend a certain part of the year helping out those less fortunate than myself. Namely all the friends, friends of the wife, some bloke I met in the pub and the school in getting their computers to work. Most recently I fixed a couple of laptops and an internet connection, one was on XP the other on Vista, the wife asked to have her (XP) PC "look like" her husbands as she like the look of the interface. When I said it was a different operating system she said "Isn't it Windows then?"
The point is of course that it is Windows and the difference between XP and Vista for most users does just come down to the pretty window manager... until stuff doesn't work. The XP box was back-online in under 10 minutes, the Vista box took me longer due to the wonderful UAC and a driver problem.
Most of the time however I feel like a Mac salesman, I turn up with my Mac (the trouble shooting box) run all the tests and have them thinking "ooooh that must be hard to use because its so powerful and techy" then let them play around with it for a few minutes. I'd say that around 50% of those people I've supported this year who are looking at replacements are now looking at a Mac.
Now a Slashdot poll on what is the correct payment for these unofficial support calls (often at a party or other social function) would be good. Right now I'm getting around two bottles of wine and a decent meal out of it.
Come on.... "Dark Energy" this should have everyone wearing some form of mask and a black uniform with just a simple white spark on it or something. We complain about not getting kids into science and then when we get something with one of the coolest sounding names around we make it into something dull and boring.
"Dark Energy has been around for 13 billion years but no-one has been able to harness it. Do you have what it takes to join the Legion of Dark Scientists?"
Part of the issue here is the meaning of the word capable. Balmer has already said that Vista isn't really a capable operating system (or at least wasn't when launched) so surely the argument therefore is that a machine that is incapable of running Vista is therefore getting exactly the same experience (or better) than someone who is actually running Vista.
Thus actually Vista Capable is a comparison between XP and Vista and thus you are better off having XP as that is just as capable as Vista.
Come on are we seriously thinking that Balmer can't talk his way around the word Capable?
MP3 for example is an open format, just look at the MP3 players industry now. PCs are essentially an open design, and it's been flourishing for decades
First off the PC wasn't an open design, it was closed but companies did a "whiteroom" re-engineering of the BIOS (something that the DMCA would outlaw today). It became more successful once opened but the original design was very much closed and of course the operating systems that made it successful are pretty much the poster child of the closed software movement. The other example you give which is MP3 isn't really open either (otherwise why would there be Ogg?).
So Openness can be a good thing, but your examples are in fact more examples of how closed works commercially as long as it develops an established market.
One point to note here is that Smartphones of today are the "ultra-portables" of a couple of years ago, the laptops of about 5 years ago and the desktops of 8 years ago. The power of the devices is equivalent to what many modern OSes were developed upon, so the issue when looking at OSX(iPhone), Android or Symbian is purely on its better battery efficiency and better small scale UI.
Personally I'd add Symbian to the list as the old Psion 5mx and 7 were in effect the netbooks and ultra-portables of their time and Nokia have some tablet devices at the moment. Combined with the touch screen interfaces, especially the "drag" widescreen display that Android and the iPhone have, gives a robust, low power, operating platform with the added benefits of an easy to use set of installers.
So maybe the question isn't so much whether this is a good plan, but what marketing, software suites and public perception pieces are preventing these mobile OSes (mainly Symbian at this stage) being the default.
But one thing that isn't preventing them is the power of the devices, I'm continually stunned at the multi-processor power of my humble "mobile phone", for most people a netbook with the same processor as my phone (iPhone) but a bigger screen would be perfectly okay and easier to use for their core tasks (email, internet browsing, minor games).
Surely the way they interact with Games is to complain about Sex/Drugs/Violence in games as being the root of all evil and the cause of all society's ills. Stuff around copyright (and the insane idea of a sell-on tax) is how companies interact with politicians rather than anything to do with the games themselves.
The politicians screaming "think of the children" around games like GTA is, and will remain, the norm. Given that most politicians are well over game playing age this is hardly surprising and I can't quite see Obama saying that he is a big GTA or other "controversial" game fan.
So basically politicians don't interact with games, they interact with Games companies and with the media to decry the fall of civilisation.
And this from a bunch of people for whom being a convicted Felon isn't something that bars them from office.
I lived in the country for 2 years working in a multi-national organisation, and have a reasonable French music collection. One day we had a competition of "who is the worst at" and for the music category it came down to France v Germany in the final.
The french contender put forwards the amount of average 50 year old crooners and Johnny Halliday who all have their crowds of 17-20 year old models in the background all the time.
The german contender pulled out the winning plug however by pointing out that not only is "oompha" music played on German TV but that their music is so had that they.... BOUGHT DAVID HASSELHOFF CDs.
The issue with French music (and German) isn't that there aren't some reasonable things in there, its that most of it is just stunningly bad and makes bad UK or American music seem like the Beatles, Stones or Beach Boys. As a French colleague said "if your Uncle sang like that at a party you'd be embarrassed". The occasional stars aren't even allowed to shine that brightly in France amongst the turgid nonsense of French "Pop" and Drunk Uncle music.
I mean come on, it should be struck down on the basis that France doesn't even play Baseball so a "3 strikes" rule is just the American Imperialism that they are always railing against.
Now a "7 Course Meal and you are out" sounds a much more French rule to have.
On the copyright side of course its quite odd that France, which has a set of music that only the French want to listen to (Manau excepted) is worried about piracy, hell if more people listen to some of their artists they should be glad.