There isn't much of interest that can be said in a mere 250 (or 140) characters.
Never used LiveJournal, but I was on another similar website that allowed long-form entries - I miss that. It seems like there must be a market for a bloggier version of Facebook.
Sprint, in my mind, has always been the kindest to their customers - I had them for years. Whereas Verizon nickel and dimed customers to death, Spring was always pretty good about having reasonable service packages. Unfortunately, their reception sucked so badly I ultimately had to drop them.
it needs to be stopped by the people voting w/their feet to some new startup carrier that is smart enough to buck the trends.
Great in theory, but there are huge barriers to entry into this business - you'd have to put about about a billion cell towers. I doubt you'll see any new startup carriers. The only real solution to this is better gov't regulation.
Their "genius" service within iTunes ALREADY indexes your whole freaking music library and sends the results to Apple. If the music industry wanted to use this data to try to sue "pirates", they could have done so a long time ago.
Amazon, Google, et al, didn't go to the trouble of getting licenses from the labels. Apple did. Presumably, the large share of iCloud subscription revenue the labels negotiated (they're getting something like 60% of the subscription fees!) was sufficient to buy them off.
If you were following Apple gossip in the weeks before the iCloud announcement, the press was full of reports about how Apple's negotiations with the labels were going. Some large percentage of the subscription cost is, in fact, going to the labels (vs. the RIAA). So, yeah, I doubt I'd worry too much about this. RIAA members are going to make a ton of money off this scheme.
And if you're still paranoid, go ahead and put on your tinfoil hat, and then just change a few bits from each song (or cut a second of the silence at the end of each track). Voila, new MD5 hash.
Because in the US, we have a choice between people who will ignore the constitution to build their utopian socialist welfare state
"Utopian socialist welfare state"? You're kidding, right? The real choice we have in this country is between the guys who are going to give (well, HAVE given) all the fruits of economic growth to the very rich, and the guys who are going to give ALMOST all of them to the rich (while pretending to care about the poor). Between the guys who used to throw people in GTMO forever, without trial; and the guys who are CURRENTLY throwing people in GTMO forever, without trial. Between the guys who bombed Iraq without a declaration of war, and the guys who are bombing Yemen and Libya without a declaration of war.
We should be so lucky as to have a an actual left-oriented option.
... is an essential attribute of any currency - unless, of course, you don't actually want your economy to grow. Conversely, consumers knowing exactly how much money is "in the system" is not in any sense an important attribute for currency to have.
And more being annoyed by the constant Slashdot flogging of bitcoins. If we saw a couple articles every month about Linden dollars, people would be foaming at the mouth over those too.
... is that these days it's too hard to tell it from the ACTUAL stuff Tea Party types are saying. Parent is only a little more over the top than what you'll hear from the likes of Michele ("the EPA destroys jobs!!!1!1") Bachman.
Knowing where your iPhone is is only half the battle (probably less than half). The rest of the problem is getting the police to actually do something about it. From what I've read, most police departments are not that interested in pursuing something like this even if you can show them where the thief is. And trying to get your phone back yourself, from some guy who stole it from you? Not recommended.
Dude, you need to read up on the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. Essentially, the US gov't has given the nuclear industry a giant subsidy in the form of free insurance. In effect, the government has "pre-bailed-out" the industry, by indemnifying them from all costs above about $12B per incident. Of course, all of that liability is now in the hands of the taxpayers. If the industry hadn't externalized the cost of that insurance coverage, there's absolutely no doubt that nuclear power would be unaffordable - the plants would never have even been built.
Every time I drive to my parents' house in Wisconsin, I drive through a windmill farm. Which is also, you know, a farm farm. This is not that complicated.
No, wind by itself will never be our sole source of power. But it can be an important part of it.
Not only are the capital costs huge, in many cases they've way overrun their budget. In some cases, yes, this is because of legal challenges. In others it's because of pure poor planning. But in any case, the risk of cost overruns is very high, and as a result, investors for nuclear plants are very scarce.
Then there's the insurance dilemma. Way back at the dawn of the nuclear age, it became apparent that you could build a practical nuclear generating station, but the plants couldn't get off the drawing board. Why? Insurance - all the underwriters looked at the industry, calculated that the potential liabilities involved in an accident were so huge as to be uninsurable, and refused to write policies. But the government was eager to get nuclear power off the ground, so it gave the industry a gigantic subsidy in the form of indemnity. The nuclear industry had to obtain insurance coverage in the amount of around $12B per incident, and the feds essentially provide no-fault coverage for any amount above that, at no cost to the plants. If it weren't for that, no nuclear plants would ever have been built. In a sense, the nuclear industry has been "pre-bailed-out" by the gov't.
Finally, there are externalities. Costs like decommissioning, fuel acquisition, and disposal are frequently not figured into the cost basis for nuclear plants. And yet someone's going to pay for that stuff. Usually it's the taxpayers.
So, yeah, nuclear power. It's a lot more expensive than you might think.
... the US has the Koch brothers. So things are not as different as they might seem - either way, a bunch of rich guys who control industry do whatever they want, and everyone else sucks it up.
Ok, like I said, I understand if you do international travel. Still not understanding the other two - why would you pay more for an unlocked used phone, when an unlocked phone still can only connect to AT&T? Not to mention that unlocking it yourself really isn't that hard. And what prepaid plan/carriers? Isn't it AT&T with a standard plan or nothing? So, to answer your final question, it's not so much that I *wouldn't* want it, it's just that I don't actually WANT it enough to do anything about it, given that it's not much of an advantage.
In fact, I'd be surprised if illegal activities weren't the biggest use for Bitcoins. Silk Road is a service (you need to be on TOR) specifically designed to exchange Bitcoins for various illegal drugs, delivered right to your door.
Essentially everyone with a negative net worth would be tremendously victimized by a deflation. Even some people with positive net worth would have problems, per the example someone gave above: you get paid $x/week, regardless of the deflation. Good for you, right? But your employer keeps having to cut prices for the product you make because of deflation. Eventually he can't afford you any more, and lays you off.
I've never understood how people got hoodwinked into thinking that moderate inflation is bad. The only people it's bad for are the very wealthy.
I guarantee you that if there were tons of people out there with their mortgages denominated in Bitcoins, there would be a giant outcry about the deflation. But as it stands now, practically no one uses bitcoins for anything. That's why no one minds.
Holders of debt denominated in Bitcoins would really be sucking it up in a deflationary environment, as the effective balance due would keep going up with time. But, you say, no one is making loans denominated in Bitcoins. That makes the situation even worse for the currency. Loans actually create money out of nothing - if there are no loans, then it's hard to see how there could ever be a supply of the currency sufficient to support an economy of any size.
I'm not sure I understand what the advantage to unlocking a US-based iPhone is. The only GSM providers are AT&T and T-mobile, right? And isn't T-mobile on a different frequency band or something. So you unlock your phone, and your choices are... AT&T. I guess I could see it if you were doing a lot of international travel, but for those of us primarily staying in the US, I don't see the appeal. Or do I have the technical details wrong?
... just never upgrade your computer, ever? If you can't afford to take the time to upgrade it without going bankrupt, what happens when your computer dies? I guess you go out of business. And dude, seriously, "hundreds" of productivity applications? I'm calling BS there. If you're really using hundreds of applications every week, you'd have no time to do anything but start up and shut down applications. I have maybe 6 I use every day: the Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, Adobe Reader, and Firefox. Then there are another handful I use a couple times a month: Cygwin (well, various Linux tools inside of Cygwin), GIMP, various utilities (WinZip, disk defraggers, etc). Then there are another few I use rarely (OpenOffice - which is surprisingly good at cleaning up corrupted MS Office files, a few others). Sure, some people will need a few more than that, but freaking nobody uses hundreds of applications continually.
Because it's fairly clear that you don't understand what it is. Among other things, it syncs mail, contacts, calendars (Outlook/Exchange or Apple apps), music (if it's in iTunes), and photographs (probably only from iPhoto) with "the Cloud", and from there to your mobile devices. How is it even conceptually possible for a browser to do all that? Open API? Seems doubtful. Only work with proprietary Apple software? Mostly, but again, understand what the thing is before asking these questions. Clearly, if you use a Linux box at home, a Window box at work, and your phone is an Android, iCloud is not for you. If you use mostly Apple products, but you need to pull an odd Windows machine into the mix, iCloud is most definitely for you. The entire point is to sell more Apple products by producing an ecosystem where once you have iCloud set up, you never again have to think about where some piece of media is resident, because it's everywhere. That's going to be pretty attractive to a lot of people, although obviously not all of them. Independence from specific desktop software is not at all the point.
Clearly (at least to me) they are. The question is whether screwing over your customers because The Man asked you to is the right thing to do. Clearly, it's not.
Reason #437 to dislike the Apple App Store. Publishing data on police checkpoints is neither illegal nor immoral. This is publicly available information (police departments frequently publish it themselves). This is yet another arbitrary restriction on Apple's part.
Slashdot Mirror
Never used LiveJournal, but I was on another similar website that allowed long-form entries - I miss that. It seems like there must be a market for a bloggier version of Facebook.
Sprint, in my mind, has always been the kindest to their customers - I had them for years. Whereas Verizon nickel and dimed customers to death, Spring was always pretty good about having reasonable service packages. Unfortunately, their reception sucked so badly I ultimately had to drop them.
Great in theory, but there are huge barriers to entry into this business - you'd have to put about about a billion cell towers. I doubt you'll see any new startup carriers. The only real solution to this is better gov't regulation.
Their "genius" service within iTunes ALREADY indexes your whole freaking music library and sends the results to Apple. If the music industry wanted to use this data to try to sue "pirates", they could have done so a long time ago.
Amazon, Google, et al, didn't go to the trouble of getting licenses from the labels. Apple did. Presumably, the large share of iCloud subscription revenue the labels negotiated (they're getting something like 60% of the subscription fees!) was sufficient to buy them off.
If you were following Apple gossip in the weeks before the iCloud announcement, the press was full of reports about how Apple's negotiations with the labels were going. Some large percentage of the subscription cost is, in fact, going to the labels (vs. the RIAA). So, yeah, I doubt I'd worry too much about this. RIAA members are going to make a ton of money off this scheme.
And if you're still paranoid, go ahead and put on your tinfoil hat, and then just change a few bits from each song (or cut a second of the silence at the end of each track). Voila, new MD5 hash.
"Utopian socialist welfare state"? You're kidding, right? The real choice we have in this country is between the guys who are going to give (well, HAVE given) all the fruits of economic growth to the very rich, and the guys who are going to give ALMOST all of them to the rich (while pretending to care about the poor). Between the guys who used to throw people in GTMO forever, without trial; and the guys who are CURRENTLY throwing people in GTMO forever, without trial. Between the guys who bombed Iraq without a declaration of war, and the guys who are bombing Yemen and Libya without a declaration of war.
We should be so lucky as to have a an actual left-oriented option.
... is an essential attribute of any currency - unless, of course, you don't actually want your economy to grow. Conversely, consumers knowing exactly how much money is "in the system" is not in any sense an important attribute for currency to have.
And more being annoyed by the constant Slashdot flogging of bitcoins. If we saw a couple articles every month about Linden dollars, people would be foaming at the mouth over those too.
... is that these days it's too hard to tell it from the ACTUAL stuff Tea Party types are saying. Parent is only a little more over the top than what you'll hear from the likes of Michele ("the EPA destroys jobs!!!1!1") Bachman.
Knowing where your iPhone is is only half the battle (probably less than half). The rest of the problem is getting the police to actually do something about it. From what I've read, most police departments are not that interested in pursuing something like this even if you can show them where the thief is. And trying to get your phone back yourself, from some guy who stole it from you? Not recommended.
Dude, you need to read up on the Nuclear Industries Indemnity Act. Essentially, the US gov't has given the nuclear industry a giant subsidy in the form of free insurance. In effect, the government has "pre-bailed-out" the industry, by indemnifying them from all costs above about $12B per incident. Of course, all of that liability is now in the hands of the taxpayers. If the industry hadn't externalized the cost of that insurance coverage, there's absolutely no doubt that nuclear power would be unaffordable - the plants would never have even been built.
Every time I drive to my parents' house in Wisconsin, I drive through a windmill farm. Which is also, you know, a farm farm. This is not that complicated.
No, wind by itself will never be our sole source of power. But it can be an important part of it.
Not only are the capital costs huge, in many cases they've way overrun their budget. In some cases, yes, this is because of legal challenges. In others it's because of pure poor planning. But in any case, the risk of cost overruns is very high, and as a result, investors for nuclear plants are very scarce.
Then there's the insurance dilemma. Way back at the dawn of the nuclear age, it became apparent that you could build a practical nuclear generating station, but the plants couldn't get off the drawing board. Why? Insurance - all the underwriters looked at the industry, calculated that the potential liabilities involved in an accident were so huge as to be uninsurable, and refused to write policies. But the government was eager to get nuclear power off the ground, so it gave the industry a gigantic subsidy in the form of indemnity. The nuclear industry had to obtain insurance coverage in the amount of around $12B per incident, and the feds essentially provide no-fault coverage for any amount above that, at no cost to the plants. If it weren't for that, no nuclear plants would ever have been built. In a sense, the nuclear industry has been "pre-bailed-out" by the gov't.
Finally, there are externalities. Costs like decommissioning, fuel acquisition, and disposal are frequently not figured into the cost basis for nuclear plants. And yet someone's going to pay for that stuff. Usually it's the taxpayers.
So, yeah, nuclear power. It's a lot more expensive than you might think.
... the US has the Koch brothers. So things are not as different as they might seem - either way, a bunch of rich guys who control industry do whatever they want, and everyone else sucks it up.
Ok, like I said, I understand if you do international travel. Still not understanding the other two - why would you pay more for an unlocked used phone, when an unlocked phone still can only connect to AT&T? Not to mention that unlocking it yourself really isn't that hard. And what prepaid plan/carriers? Isn't it AT&T with a standard plan or nothing? So, to answer your final question, it's not so much that I *wouldn't* want it, it's just that I don't actually WANT it enough to do anything about it, given that it's not much of an advantage.
In fact, I'd be surprised if illegal activities weren't the biggest use for Bitcoins. Silk Road is a service (you need to be on TOR) specifically designed to exchange Bitcoins for various illegal drugs, delivered right to your door.
Essentially everyone with a negative net worth would be tremendously victimized by a deflation. Even some people with positive net worth would have problems, per the example someone gave above: you get paid $x/week, regardless of the deflation. Good for you, right? But your employer keeps having to cut prices for the product you make because of deflation. Eventually he can't afford you any more, and lays you off.
I've never understood how people got hoodwinked into thinking that moderate inflation is bad. The only people it's bad for are the very wealthy.
I guarantee you that if there were tons of people out there with their mortgages denominated in Bitcoins, there would be a giant outcry about the deflation. But as it stands now, practically no one uses bitcoins for anything. That's why no one minds.
Holders of debt denominated in Bitcoins would really be sucking it up in a deflationary environment, as the effective balance due would keep going up with time. But, you say, no one is making loans denominated in Bitcoins. That makes the situation even worse for the currency. Loans actually create money out of nothing - if there are no loans, then it's hard to see how there could ever be a supply of the currency sufficient to support an economy of any size.
I'm not sure I understand what the advantage to unlocking a US-based iPhone is. The only GSM providers are AT&T and T-mobile, right? And isn't T-mobile on a different frequency band or something. So you unlock your phone, and your choices are... AT&T. I guess I could see it if you were doing a lot of international travel, but for those of us primarily staying in the US, I don't see the appeal. Or do I have the technical details wrong?
... just never upgrade your computer, ever? If you can't afford to take the time to upgrade it without going bankrupt, what happens when your computer dies? I guess you go out of business. And dude, seriously, "hundreds" of productivity applications? I'm calling BS there. If you're really using hundreds of applications every week, you'd have no time to do anything but start up and shut down applications. I have maybe 6 I use every day: the Word, Powerpoint, Excel, Outlook, Adobe Reader, and Firefox. Then there are another handful I use a couple times a month: Cygwin (well, various Linux tools inside of Cygwin), GIMP, various utilities (WinZip, disk defraggers, etc). Then there are another few I use rarely (OpenOffice - which is surprisingly good at cleaning up corrupted MS Office files, a few others). Sure, some people will need a few more than that, but freaking nobody uses hundreds of applications continually.
Because it's fairly clear that you don't understand what it is. Among other things, it syncs mail, contacts, calendars (Outlook/Exchange or Apple apps), music (if it's in iTunes), and photographs (probably only from iPhoto) with "the Cloud", and from there to your mobile devices. How is it even conceptually possible for a browser to do all that? Open API? Seems doubtful. Only work with proprietary Apple software? Mostly, but again, understand what the thing is before asking these questions. Clearly, if you use a Linux box at home, a Window box at work, and your phone is an Android, iCloud is not for you. If you use mostly Apple products, but you need to pull an odd Windows machine into the mix, iCloud is most definitely for you. The entire point is to sell more Apple products by producing an ecosystem where once you have iCloud set up, you never again have to think about where some piece of media is resident, because it's everywhere. That's going to be pretty attractive to a lot of people, although obviously not all of them. Independence from specific desktop software is not at all the point.
Clearly (at least to me) they are. The question is whether screwing over your customers because The Man asked you to is the right thing to do. Clearly, it's not.
Reason #437 to dislike the Apple App Store. Publishing data on police checkpoints is neither illegal nor immoral. This is publicly available information (police departments frequently publish it themselves). This is yet another arbitrary restriction on Apple's part.