They have considerable real assets, a 20% profit margin, the strongest brand in their industry, and an employee roster that holds some of the best minds in the business, how exactly are they extremely inflated?
Lots needs to be done to reform patent law, but it seems like an obvious first step would be, if devices "based" on your patent have been out for years and you still don't manufacture anything similar, the patent is null and void.
Patents were designed to protect actual products, not simply stick flags in the ground and say "mine."
The ten percent figure is from the Kinsey institutes landmark study 50 years ago. Not from "marketing" as you say. Recent studies put the figure a bit lower, but ten percent is in pop culture, so it was in my joke.
"I knew that vendors hired attractive women to staff their booths, hoping to attract the mostly-male attendees of technical conferences, but I had no idea that the subterfuge extended to the other half of the species. Live and learn!"
Or maybe they're just extending to the other *tenth* of the species, if you catch my drift.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say.
Couldn't someone make a utility that just converts DRMed files to mp3 on the fly as they're being transferred to an iPod (using a custom music store to iPod applet)? Sure users could use it to get around DRM, but that's not hard with ANY format for people who are willing to go around the steps in the manual.
Frankly I'm surprised gtkpod can't do this with ogg yet.
My guess is Wine or Crossover Office would work a lot better. Though this kind of stripped-down setup might be useful for the Wine community to work out exactly what the minimum needs are to get certain apps working.
Why do people keep thinking Apple is a software company. Just because you want OS X on your PC doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to port it. A lot of what makes Apple Apple is the fact that they operate on a small range of rigorously controlled hardware.
There will *never* be a general PC release for OS X, their profit margin is just too good on their own hardware, why would they want to spawn a bunch of cheap competitors?
They said that about pills too. But psychiatric medication is definitely given out at rates far in excess of medical psychiatric problems.
As someone with severe, diagnosed, bipolar disorder, it pisses me off. I feel like I'm lumped in with a bunch of people who would rather take pills than make changes to their lives.
Sooner or later, if this thing works, or hell even if it doesn't and the company that makes it just sends enough doctors on island vacations, it'll be used to help people deal with their shitty jobs, lack of exercize, addiction to consumerism, and all the other preventable causes of depression.
Someone else posted a link to Adbusters. Adbusters' anti-psychiatric medication standpoint is a little alarming, since they aim to get at the popular memespace of young people. They risk making it "not cool" to seek treatment for real illness. They are right, however, in suggesting that if you're having problems in your life, the cause is most likely something real that you can change, and you should look there first.
Question: what's with the common opinion that Episode 6 was bad?
The Ewoks, while maybe a little obnoxious, for the most part worked very well. They were introduced carefully, given a lot of time to relate to the main characters, and worked into the plot in an important way (unlike, say, any of the alien planets / situations in the new trilogy) I'm a big fan of the long, slow, dark opening with Jabba (gutsy way to start a sci-fi action movie) it has hands down the best space battle, and the Vader / Luke / Emperor confrontation on the bridge of the Death Star is downright Shakespearian (purposefully so, the similarities between Luke in that movie and a certain black-clad Danish prince are hardly accidental) None of the Star Wars movies are great cinema, but I don't see how Jedi fails to measure up to the first two.
As much as DRM irks me, I don't think we can expect to live without it. With technologies like Bittorrent out there, content providers can't claim to have an exclusive on high-speed downloads, and the studios are never going to sign on if they're going to be willingly providing source material for unlimited transfer and reproduction.
Now frankly I'm a bit of an anarchist. I don't like the big studios or the big record companies, and I think the quality of our entertainment would be improved a great deal if they were to all go out of business as a result of massive piracy. However, I'll admit that that opinion isn't terribly valid.
What we need to be arguing for is reasonable DRM from big content providers, and no built-in DRM on hardware, which endangers the freedom of content created outside of the system. In the case of Netflix, I can't imagine we have much to argue for; It's never been kosher to make a "backup" of a rented movie. But if they start *selling* movies online, then the right to make a DVD playable on standard players from the file should be fought for.
Your suggestion isn't really that far-fetched. Personally I can't see going with a PocketPC, they can do a whole lot, but they're kind of clunky to use. I'd go for an ultraportable laptop over one of those (better Linux support as well...)
However, you can have my Palm V when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. They need to just do an update on that model. Same screen (at least keep it legible-anywhere green & black) a bit more storage and power, and wireless.
The military hasn't protected Americans at home since the 1940s. Our nation has interests abroad, and there's a very good case to be made for protecting them, but the Viet Kong never had plans to march into Washington.
The contemporary situation is tougher to analyze, but remember, Bin Laden was a US operative until we enraged him by building a base in Saudi Arabia.
As for medicine, yes, the Amish use English medicine, but I imagine if they were really forced to choose between their society and medicine, a majority would risk living without modern medicine.
It seems analogous to most democracies, wherein a few political parties (made up of coilitions of different sub-ideologies) have 99% of the power, and fringe groups appeal to more narrow interests and occasionally throw some new ideas into the main debate.
Linux is doing *fine*, astoundingly well in fact. The notion that everyone has to unite under the same banner is silly. It's open source, so if Ubuntu comes up with something new and cool, then all the other distros are free to rip it off. It's a race where one teams advantage isn't another's set-back. And since consumer sales are such a small part of the linux pie, market-share bickering doesn't really come into play.
If I wanted a central authority standardizing every part of my computer, I'd use a Mac. I hope Linux never loses that Wild West feel.
And P.S. Ubuntu rocks hard. If you haven't given it a shot, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.
It won't take a war on our soil. All it will take is another 9/11, which shouldn't take too long since very little of any real worth has been done to prevent or deter terrorism.
Lies are often the bread and butter of advertising, but it's the name of the game is really dissatification. The point of an ad is to make you unhappy with what you currently own.
Let's say you've got a slightly old car. You're not thrilled with it, but it's running. The ad-man's job is to make the new cars out there looks *so* sexy and like *so* much fun that you start to hate your old rinky piece of crap and buy a new car before you really need it (and really, you *never* need a new car, you can find a used car with 15,000 miles on it for 70% of the cost of new, check rental-car auctions)
If people only bought when they needed new things, or even when the advertised specs on a new product demonstrated that they'd be getting a lot of extra utility, then the consumer economy would grind to a halt.
I'm very worried about the economy. When the next BIG recession / depression (there isn't a difference, 'recession' is a word that FDR made up to save his ass when he didn't end the depression as fast as he'd promised - but these days depression is like 'holocost' it's formerly generic but now too tied in with a specific historical event) hits, and people have to tighten their belts and start saving and living responsibly, there's going to be a secondary hit to the economy as all the money that moves around as a result of our somewhat silly consumer culture slows down.
Not only that, but efficiency in industry is really such that if people lived like our grandparents and greatgrandparents, there wouldn't be nearly enough jobs to go around. *SO* many people (myself included) work in service industry jobs that simpler times and lifestyles just won't support.
Douglas Adams had an idea of what to do with us when the going gets rough I believe... any planets out there need a telephone cleaner?
Sure, and we could also all be suspended in tanks experiencing a simulation; however, I don't want that taught in science classes either. And if you can't figure out why, you need a basic course in rhetorical logic.
I'm a liberal, a really big pinko, borderline-anarcho liberal. Why exactly should I be thrilled that the only organizations with the clout, resources, and stakeable reputation to conduct investigative journalism are going to vanish? Why should I be giddy that in 10 years all news will be conducted through semi-anonymous I-said-you-said stumping? Blogs only break new stories when something leaks from one of the big boys, or falls flat in front of them. Investigative Journalism (at least before that term just meant a segment of local news with audio levels set a bit higher) takes a lot of man-hours and organization. Perhaps blogs can evolve into something capable of a Woodward and Bernstein type investigation, but I'm not seeing anything like that yet.
I'm not saying that private newsmedia is adequately doing its job today. The behavior of the media since the "merger mania" of the early 80s has been an utter disgrace, and we now have a system in which ratings are valued far above exposing the truth (or even above that old evil of 'having an editorial position') However the problem needs to be properly fixed, not just given up on and replaced with something that doesn't require the public to do all that hard work of expecting better.
I'm a godless commie so shouldn't I just be listening to NPR and eating my granola? Sure, you get more news (as in, they inform you of more events that are happening in the world) from an hour of NPR than a full day of CNN, but I'm not dumb enough to view having the only valid source of news being the one that comes from the government at all acceptable.
I don't read blogs. I'm already assaulted with enough people claiming their talking ABOUT the news is news itself. I want facts. I'm a grown man, and I can think about those facts all by myself.
There's certainly a place for platter based hard drives, there isn't a cheaper efficient volume storage option out there.
But I'd love it if my laptop could have a couple dozen gigs of something silent and low power and then I could just save media and backups to a personal file server or external drive.
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They have considerable real assets, a 20% profit margin, the strongest brand in their industry, and an employee roster that holds some of the best minds in the business, how exactly are they extremely inflated?
Screw the math, sounds like an experiment left to the reader.
Lots needs to be done to reform patent law, but it seems like an obvious first step would be, if devices "based" on your patent have been out for years and you still don't manufacture anything similar, the patent is null and void.
Patents were designed to protect actual products, not simply stick flags in the ground and say "mine."
The ten percent figure is from the Kinsey institutes landmark study 50 years ago. Not from "marketing" as you say. Recent studies put the figure a bit lower, but ten percent is in pop culture, so it was in my joke.
from the article:
"I knew that vendors hired attractive women to staff their booths, hoping to attract the mostly-male attendees of technical conferences, but I had no idea that the subterfuge extended to the other half of the species. Live and learn!"
Or maybe they're just extending to the other *tenth* of the species, if you catch my drift.
Not that there's anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld would say.
Couldn't someone make a utility that just converts DRMed files to mp3 on the fly as they're being transferred to an iPod (using a custom music store to iPod applet)? Sure users could use it to get around DRM, but that's not hard with ANY format for people who are willing to go around the steps in the manual.
Frankly I'm surprised gtkpod can't do this with ogg yet.
My guess is Wine or Crossover Office would work a lot better. Though this kind of stripped-down setup might be useful for the Wine community to work out exactly what the minimum needs are to get certain apps working.
Why do people keep thinking Apple is a software company. Just because you want OS X on your PC doesn't mean it's a good idea for them to port it. A lot of what makes Apple Apple is the fact that they operate on a small range of rigorously controlled hardware.
There will *never* be a general PC release for OS X, their profit margin is just too good on their own hardware, why would they want to spawn a bunch of cheap competitors?
Linux is a leatherman, FreeBSD is a power drill. FreeBSD does what it does extremely well, but it doesn't do as much as easily.
They said that about pills too. But psychiatric medication is definitely given out at rates far in excess of medical psychiatric problems.
As someone with severe, diagnosed, bipolar disorder, it pisses me off. I feel like I'm lumped in with a bunch of people who would rather take pills than make changes to their lives.
Sooner or later, if this thing works, or hell even if it doesn't and the company that makes it just sends enough doctors on island vacations, it'll be used to help people deal with their shitty jobs, lack of exercize, addiction to consumerism, and all the other preventable causes of depression.
Someone else posted a link to Adbusters. Adbusters' anti-psychiatric medication standpoint is a little alarming, since they aim to get at the popular memespace of young people. They risk making it "not cool" to seek treatment for real illness. They are right, however, in suggesting that if you're having problems in your life, the cause is most likely something real that you can change, and you should look there first.
Question: what's with the common opinion that Episode 6 was bad?
The Ewoks, while maybe a little obnoxious, for the most part worked very well. They were introduced carefully, given a lot of time to relate to the main characters, and worked into the plot in an important way (unlike, say, any of the alien planets / situations in the new trilogy) I'm a big fan of the long, slow, dark opening with Jabba (gutsy way to start a sci-fi action movie) it has hands down the best space battle, and the Vader / Luke / Emperor confrontation on the bridge of the Death Star is downright Shakespearian (purposefully so, the similarities between Luke in that movie and a certain black-clad Danish prince are hardly accidental) None of the Star Wars movies are great cinema, but I don't see how Jedi fails to measure up to the first two.
As much as DRM irks me, I don't think we can expect to live without it. With technologies like Bittorrent out there, content providers can't claim to have an exclusive on high-speed downloads, and the studios are never going to sign on if they're going to be willingly providing source material for unlimited transfer and reproduction.
Now frankly I'm a bit of an anarchist. I don't like the big studios or the big record companies, and I think the quality of our entertainment would be improved a great deal if they were to all go out of business as a result of massive piracy. However, I'll admit that that opinion isn't terribly valid.
What we need to be arguing for is reasonable DRM from big content providers, and no built-in DRM on hardware, which endangers the freedom of content created outside of the system. In the case of Netflix, I can't imagine we have much to argue for; It's never been kosher to make a "backup" of a rented movie. But if they start *selling* movies online, then the right to make a DVD playable on standard players from the file should be fought for.
Also if you get good enough to touch-type, you can change the settings and then change them back when you're done.
http://store.shopfujitsu.com/fpc/Ecommerce/buildse riesbean.do?series=P7D
Your suggestion isn't really that far-fetched. Personally I can't see going with a PocketPC, they can do a whole lot, but they're kind of clunky to use. I'd go for an ultraportable laptop over one of those (better Linux support as well...)
However, you can have my Palm V when you pry it from my cold dead fingers. They need to just do an update on that model. Same screen (at least keep it legible-anywhere green & black) a bit more storage and power, and wireless.
The military hasn't protected Americans at home since the 1940s. Our nation has interests abroad, and there's a very good case to be made for protecting them, but the Viet Kong never had plans to march into Washington.
The contemporary situation is tougher to analyze, but remember, Bin Laden was a US operative until we enraged him by building a base in Saudi Arabia.
As for medicine, yes, the Amish use English medicine, but I imagine if they were really forced to choose between their society and medicine, a majority would risk living without modern medicine.
It seems analogous to most democracies, wherein a few political parties (made up of coilitions of different sub-ideologies) have 99% of the power, and fringe groups appeal to more narrow interests and occasionally throw some new ideas into the main debate.
Linux is doing *fine*, astoundingly well in fact. The notion that everyone has to unite under the same banner is silly. It's open source, so if Ubuntu comes up with something new and cool, then all the other distros are free to rip it off. It's a race where one teams advantage isn't another's set-back. And since consumer sales are such a small part of the linux pie, market-share bickering doesn't really come into play.
If I wanted a central authority standardizing every part of my computer, I'd use a Mac. I hope Linux never loses that Wild West feel.
And P.S. Ubuntu rocks hard. If you haven't given it a shot, you really owe it to yourself to check it out.
So instead of asking a hunk of plastic and metal for answers to math problems, I would have been asking a room full of educated unmarried women?
This is progress!?!?!
Maybe true, maybe not. I'd still worry more about the support to terrorism the tank of gas to get me to the black market is providing.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7802712/
*cough*
It won't take a war on our soil. All it will take is another 9/11, which shouldn't take too long since very little of any real worth has been done to prevent or deter terrorism.
So what you guys are telling me is buy a console...
Lies are often the bread and butter of advertising, but it's the name of the game is really dissatification. The point of an ad is to make you unhappy with what you currently own.
Let's say you've got a slightly old car. You're not thrilled with it, but it's running. The ad-man's job is to make the new cars out there looks *so* sexy and like *so* much fun that you start to hate your old rinky piece of crap and buy a new car before you really need it (and really, you *never* need a new car, you can find a used car with 15,000 miles on it for 70% of the cost of new, check rental-car auctions)
If people only bought when they needed new things, or even when the advertised specs on a new product demonstrated that they'd be getting a lot of extra utility, then the consumer economy would grind to a halt.
I'm very worried about the economy. When the next BIG recession / depression (there isn't a difference, 'recession' is a word that FDR made up to save his ass when he didn't end the depression as fast as he'd promised - but these days depression is like 'holocost' it's formerly generic but now too tied in with a specific historical event) hits, and people have to tighten their belts and start saving and living responsibly, there's going to be a secondary hit to the economy as all the money that moves around as a result of our somewhat silly consumer culture slows down.
Not only that, but efficiency in industry is really such that if people lived like our grandparents and greatgrandparents, there wouldn't be nearly enough jobs to go around. *SO* many people (myself included) work in service industry jobs that simpler times and lifestyles just won't support.
Douglas Adams had an idea of what to do with us when the going gets rough I believe... any planets out there need a telephone cleaner?
Sure, and we could also all be suspended in tanks experiencing a simulation; however, I don't want that taught in science classes either. And if you can't figure out why, you need a basic course in rhetorical logic.
OK, I'll bite.
I'm a liberal, a really big pinko, borderline-anarcho liberal. Why exactly should I be thrilled that the only organizations with the clout, resources, and stakeable reputation to conduct investigative journalism are going to vanish? Why should I be giddy that in 10 years all news will be conducted through semi-anonymous I-said-you-said stumping? Blogs only break new stories when something leaks from one of the big boys, or falls flat in front of them. Investigative Journalism (at least before that term just meant a segment of local news with audio levels set a bit higher) takes a lot of man-hours and organization. Perhaps blogs can evolve into something capable of a Woodward and Bernstein type investigation, but I'm not seeing anything like that yet.
I'm not saying that private newsmedia is adequately doing its job today. The behavior of the media since the "merger mania" of the early 80s has been an utter disgrace, and we now have a system in which ratings are valued far above exposing the truth (or even above that old evil of 'having an editorial position') However the problem needs to be properly fixed, not just given up on and replaced with something that doesn't require the public to do all that hard work of expecting better.
I'm a godless commie so shouldn't I just be listening to NPR and eating my granola? Sure, you get more news (as in, they inform you of more events that are happening in the world) from an hour of NPR than a full day of CNN, but I'm not dumb enough to view having the only valid source of news being the one that comes from the government at all acceptable.
I don't read blogs. I'm already assaulted with enough people claiming their talking ABOUT the news is news itself. I want facts. I'm a grown man, and I can think about those facts all by myself.
You know what? Many of the establishments that provide movies on a rentable basis also have a wide array of current video games.
There's certainly a place for platter based hard drives, there isn't a cheaper efficient volume storage option out there.
But I'd love it if my laptop could have a couple dozen gigs of something silent and low power and then I could just save media and backups to a personal file server or external drive.