On an unrelated note, I don't get why people have insurance for things they can afford to replace. House insurance, while betting against yourself, will save your life if you need it. So will health insurance.
Luggage insurance? Theft insurance? For idiots in my opinion...
More on topic: I think that reversing the executives' contractual bonuses at this point is theft, and distasteful lynch mob mentality. The US government should have let them go bankrupt, but saved the creditors and employees by immediately taking over the assets and dictating new terms while they could. Not now.
I am not an American, and I wasn't referring to any kind of superiority or fear of terrorism. This is about risk. Risk increases with uncertainty.
An infant has a probability distribution equal to infants of American parents, because it just came into being. Adult immigrants have motives and all kinds of selection pressures, even if their home country is better than America. (Of course, unscrupulous prospective immigrants might take advantage of their infant, but that's another issue.)
For example (and I am NOT saying this is reality), immigrants may be more likely to be losers because being unable to make a living in your own country is a strong motive to move abroad. On the other hand, skilled people may want to move to America to get better salaries.
Immigration policies must be based on an honest study of the motives of all types of prospective immigrants. This also doesn't mean that the current policy is perfect, but simply opening up all borders in the name of some ideal could be disastrous. Making naturalization hard is a legitimate idea for finding the most motivated people.
Notice that open borders wouldn't really be good for the countries you think I look down on either. Every person who could leave would do so, leaving the least capable parts of society in their home country. The third world would never recover. The best way to help those countries is to give the smart people a reason to build up their own country instead of escaping to industrialized nations that already have environmentally unsustainable populations.
In the mean time, I think your country (assuming you're American) has every right to pick and choose those it lets in.
I'm not American, but that's ridiculous. You can go out and get any kind of insurance right now, but live without it for decades and try to get it when you become afraid of getting sick and it'll suddenly be a lot harder. It's the same thing.
An infant born in America will grow up in an American cultural environment, and will have American probabilities for growing up to be a decent person. An adult immigrant from another country is a much larger risk, and many would show up just because they couldn't succeed in any other country either. You do not want to let those people in. It's ok to be selfish.
Borders may be a "disease" in the future, but today the western world would be overwhelmed by people trying to escape poverty and only succeeding in bringing their misery with them. When we've fixed the third world*, THEN we can consider lofty goals like opening borders. Anyone who thinks abolishing them in the present is a good idea is really naive.
*Or let it fix itself. Today's aid system is way too close to communism (and then people wonder why nothing is getting better).
Those aren't the only possible operations. Let's say you want to split a string into words (command line arguments maybe?). "apple pear orange lemon"
I'm not a C expert, but as far as I've understood, you would just create pointers to a, p, o, and l, and replace " " with null. If the memory is on the heap, you would remove them all using the pointer to a.
If the length was stored in the string, you would have to allocate new memory to fit the >1 byte integers.
Remove these obstacles and piracy would go back to meaning something that occurs at sea.
Well, not entirely. I agree with your point, but people have an insane obsession with eradicating all crime. Piracy rates could be as low as 0,1% and I'm completely sure some artists would still be advocating DRM so that not a single person on the planet could possibly enjoy their products without paying for the privilege.
Incidentally, this is also why we have insane pedophilia laws that don't actually stop pedophiles in any meaningful way, you only have free speech as long as nobody can possibly label you a "racist" and you can get ticketed for jaywalking on an empty street in some places.
Sick world, this, and it's not even because of the actual criminals!
The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
You're right, but I don't agree with your conclusion. Demand destruction is a valid goal. There is no way we'll get the average consumer to grow a spine and vote for saner laws anytime soon. If the businesses are unable to continue, the other side will lose much of its lobbying power.
In addition, and perhaps more importantly, buying their goods encourages their activities due to the same principle. If you think you're being both moral and practical by paying for and then hacking content that has DRM, think again. What you're doing is actually immoral, because it creates more demand for DRM. If you buy video cards that specifically don't support Linux and waste thousands of hacker-hours breaking them, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If you buy an iPhone and jailbreak it, you're encouraging the manufacture of completely closed platforms.
If you simply have to have some music that only comes with restrictions, for God's sake PIRATE IT. It's better than the alternative.
I find many websites prohibitively slow, but it has less to do with rendering performance than bad design. Few things are more annoying than staring at a blank page saying "439 of 440 files loaded".
(Well, ok, one thing. "This site requires flash"...)
Even if the vast majority of people are lazy and self centered, which is more convenient:
a) Downloading pirated material with inconsistent quality, inconsistent file names, under threat of being caught
b) Paying a reasonable fee for the same service with no quality issues
Even the most unscrupulous person would choose the latter. The industry is NOT providing the consumers with what they want.
Even the $1/MP3 model doesn't work properly. My friend just got close to 100 GB of music from his uncle. It would have cost him something like $30 000 legally (I don't know the exact number of files) and hundreds of hours hunting each album down, even though most of the music is just sitting there waiting to be randomly shuffled to and possibly favorited. That music does NOT have an economic value of $30 000 to one person.
One fair way would be to offer unlimited tracks in a Free format for a subscription fee that supports the artists proportionally to how much they're played.
What's better? Everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting 100 files or everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting unlimited music. Who would lose in such a deal? No one gets any less money.
I don't use the pirate bay, but I also refuse to buy legit copies of anything. They're all made by a bunch of assholes that want to restrict our rights, so why support them with my money?
Too old for an action film? They haven't been right for an action film since day one. Modern producers seem to have an emotional age of 5.
I realize all the films have some action, and that First Contact was very good. There is a difference, however, between "film with action" and "action film". I'd rather see Patrick Stewart talking to himself in a room for two hours than another Jean-Rambo Picard movie.
Or, how about a movie about how he solves a diplomatic crisis without a single shot fired? There could still be plenty of space suspense; just make it meaningful instead of mildly retarded.
I'll give you some specific examples, but first I'll say that I've never understood the argument that something that caters to "most people" is good enough. If the European system results in products ranging from super low end to super high end, how is a system that ignores high/super high end devices not worse?
The ridiculous roaming charges are an unfortunate byproduct of several different countries trying to work together. The EU has in fact cracked down on them lately. It has nothing to do with locked or unlocked hardware. Prices are going down in all markets. The difference is that features are increasing faster outside the US.
Now, the examples. In the EU, it's routine to for example see something cool you want to buy and send a picture message to your wife. The iPhone was launched without such a feature and people didn't even blink. In fact, people will defend the omission as "useless" if it's pointed out. It may not be mindblowing, but it's just one in a long list of conveniences.
In the EU, completely average people have been surfing on their phones for a long time. In the US, everyone is pretending the iPhone invented mobile browsing. Just yesterday there was a slashdot article about how the iPhone may get a front facing secondary camera, which is pretty much standard on European smartphones.
In the US, Verizon was sued in bloody 2005 because it wouldn't let customers copy photos to their computers without using an expensive network service.
In the US, Steve Jobs was required to explain that Apple's device is both a phone and an iPod before people realized that phones are able to function as music players (with Ogg Vorbis support no less, except for Apple).
I don't want to go on, but you probably get the point.
It's not just about switching operators. The widespread lockin lets the operators dictate what features the phones have, and it has damaged the US market significantly. In Europe, a lot of people go for the contract option, but the large unlocked market ensures that operators don't have power over the phone manufacturers. I'm constantly reading articles raving about features we've had for years that have nothing to do with building networks.
If you don't get a price break for buying a phone on your own it just means the carriers have so much power they can screw you over. That's not a sign of a healthy market.
As for people being happy with what comes installed, sure, but the effect of lockin on competition retards progress, and prevents anyone who does care from installing what they want. There is NO benefit to the consumer in such a system.
Yes, they would, but it would be very easy, and a lot of them would run Windows or MacOS (lock in to which is no more acceptable even if "more polished").
Masses of computer hardware that couldn't run Linux at all would be a disaster of gigantic proportions.
I could still live with the slightly higher price, since many other products, like graphics cards, use perfectly acceptable previous generation products for the low end.
What I don't understand is the push for ever bigger screens and storage. The 900-series could be even smaller, but is optimized for an acceptably large keyboard and display, and that's ok. A 10" hd-based laptop however, is not what I would consider a netbook anymore. The whole point is maximum portability. That means 7-9" screen and a flash drive.
Adding insult to injury, they don't even use the size to support a bigger resolution, and have removed the respected ASUS brand in favor of the childish Eee logo. No thanks.
>Imagine the fireworks should AT&T offer up a free ARM netbook with a service plan.
Be careful what you wish for. Do you really want people getting "free" computers that are as restrictive as the "free" cell phones they push at people? It would be the *death* of mainstream Linux.
And don't think people wouldn't put up with it. Us Europeans are already amazed you put up with the crippled cell phones just so you can buy them on credit.
Yes, I already have an idea for how this would work.
First, the computer "starts up" in some kind of new mode that only shows text. Once the new Windows user has entered single user mode and set a password for his account, he can then proceed to select the graphical environment and video driver supplier that he prefers.
This would probably be best accomplished by editing some sort of very simple text file, perhaps called wingui.conf or something. Some kind of easy to learn text editor would obviously have to be installed by default, but I've read that some standardization group has already decided on a very robust one that has to be available on all compliant operating systems, so that's ok.
Now, the new Windows user would be ready to enter the chosen GUI, if he wants to. (This whole process would probably not add more than a few minutes to the installation.) This should really not be much of a problem at all.
That's because those two groups don't actually believe in freedom; they just notice it when it affects themselves. The gun advocates love guns, and the porn producers love money.
Anyone who consistently speaks up for real freedom will be labeled all sorts of horrible things.
"Wake me up when they're competing with the likes of Motorola and Nokia - why don't we ever get stories about them?"
Every news story I've seen about the iPhone makes these same ridiculous assumptions. It's like the journalists are completely stuck in the Windows vs. MacOS mindset and completely ignoring the really big players in the cell phone market. Bad, bad reporting.
Even this one says that "the iPhone is still the top phone in terms of user interface, and features/price ratio". They've obviously not compared prices at all. Most phones have *vastly* better feature/price ratios. Most recently the Nokia 5800, which sells for about 300-400 euros unsubsidized and has better hardware (and is flying off the shelves).
The 5800 has excellent features, lets you install your own code, connects via USB mass storage, and has a slightly less polished user interface. Rather than a fair review, all you hear from the press is "it's no iPhone, doesn't even do multitouch". Go figure.
No, preemptive medical care should not be forced (your example is acute). Regardless of any discussions about rights, stupid paranoid people are humanity's insurance policy. If some of them ever turn out to be correct on a massive scale, at least someone will be left to breed.
In the meantime, if their children die more often, that's just good for the overall gene pool. We can't save everyone from themselves.
So why did you buy your phones from a corporation that does that? You can very easily buy Symbian phones that aren't crippled. Your lousy consumer research has nothing to do with the security features of the OS.
There are plenty of really useful applications for Symbian. For example, people have been walking around with Vorbis-capable music players in their pockets for several years while Slashdotters kept making bad jokes about how they just want to make calls.
The N810 already runs Linux with a Nokia UI. There's no reason to install Android.
In addition, Nokia has been shipping phones that let you install anything you want for years, and their phone OS will become open source as of next year. They even provide native Python interpreters.
The main reason Nokia is so unpopular in the US is that they refused to cripple their phones as much as the carriers wanted. Unfortunately even nerds in America are apparently too dependent on force fed advertising.
Also remote storage. Having a bunch of in-progress documents available on Google Apps is very convienient when switching between home, work, and other computers.
Sure, but that same functionality can be duplicated with a simple KIO Slave. Why is it better to start a browser and type http://example.com/editor rather than starting an editor and typing fish://example.com/user? The latter lets you host your files anywhere and they could even be encrypted.
If non-http URL:s are too confusing for the average id^h^huser, it could just be a button called "My remote storage" or something.
Customers with more than 20 users would never allow their employees to access company material from outside hardware anyway. If you're on a company laptop, you might as well use real programs instead of webapps.
And as a consumer, I would never trust my data to a webapp provider either. I admit most are less discriminating.
Slashdot Mirror
On an unrelated note, I don't get why people have insurance for things they can afford to replace. House insurance, while betting against yourself, will save your life if you need it. So will health insurance.
Luggage insurance? Theft insurance? For idiots in my opinion...
More on topic: I think that reversing the executives' contractual bonuses at this point is theft, and distasteful lynch mob mentality. The US government should have let them go bankrupt, but saved the creditors and employees by immediately taking over the assets and dictating new terms while they could. Not now.
I am not an American, and I wasn't referring to any kind of superiority or fear of terrorism. This is about risk. Risk increases with uncertainty.
An infant has a probability distribution equal to infants of American parents, because it just came into being. Adult immigrants have motives and all kinds of selection pressures, even if their home country is better than America. (Of course, unscrupulous prospective immigrants might take advantage of their infant, but that's another issue.)
For example (and I am NOT saying this is reality), immigrants may be more likely to be losers because being unable to make a living in your own country is a strong motive to move abroad. On the other hand, skilled people may want to move to America to get better salaries.
Immigration policies must be based on an honest study of the motives of all types of prospective immigrants. This also doesn't mean that the current policy is perfect, but simply opening up all borders in the name of some ideal could be disastrous. Making naturalization hard is a legitimate idea for finding the most motivated people.
Notice that open borders wouldn't really be good for the countries you think I look down on either. Every person who could leave would do so, leaving the least capable parts of society in their home country. The third world would never recover. The best way to help those countries is to give the smart people a reason to build up their own country instead of escaping to industrialized nations that already have environmentally unsustainable populations.
In the mean time, I think your country (assuming you're American) has every right to pick and choose those it lets in.
I'm not American, but that's ridiculous. You can go out and get any kind of insurance right now, but live without it for decades and try to get it when you become afraid of getting sick and it'll suddenly be a lot harder. It's the same thing.
An infant born in America will grow up in an American cultural environment, and will have American probabilities for growing up to be a decent person. An adult immigrant from another country is a much larger risk, and many would show up just because they couldn't succeed in any other country either. You do not want to let those people in. It's ok to be selfish.
Borders may be a "disease" in the future, but today the western world would be overwhelmed by people trying to escape poverty and only succeeding in bringing their misery with them. When we've fixed the third world*, THEN we can consider lofty goals like opening borders. Anyone who thinks abolishing them in the present is a good idea is really naive.
*Or let it fix itself. Today's aid system is way too close to communism (and then people wonder why nothing is getting better).
Those aren't the only possible operations. Let's say you want to split a string into words (command line arguments maybe?). "apple pear orange lemon"
I'm not a C expert, but as far as I've understood, you would just create pointers to a, p, o, and l, and replace " " with null. If the memory is on the heap, you would remove them all using the pointer to a.
If the length was stored in the string, you would have to allocate new memory to fit the >1 byte integers.
Remove these obstacles and piracy would go back to meaning something that occurs at sea.
Well, not entirely. I agree with your point, but people have an insane obsession with eradicating all crime. Piracy rates could be as low as 0,1% and I'm completely sure some artists would still be advocating DRM so that not a single person on the planet could possibly enjoy their products without paying for the privilege.
Incidentally, this is also why we have insane pedophilia laws that don't actually stop pedophiles in any meaningful way, you only have free speech as long as nobody can possibly label you a "racist" and you can get ticketed for jaywalking on an empty street in some places.
Sick world, this, and it's not even because of the actual criminals!
The marketplace works on supply/demand, and bootlegging music destroys the demand side of the marketplace, and it's to the interest of the marketplace (including its consumers) to see that the demand side of the equation is preserved so that the engine of the free market can still operate.
You're right, but I don't agree with your conclusion. Demand destruction is a valid goal. There is no way we'll get the average consumer to grow a spine and vote for saner laws anytime soon. If the businesses are unable to continue, the other side will lose much of its lobbying power.
In addition, and perhaps more importantly, buying their goods encourages their activities due to the same principle. If you think you're being both moral and practical by paying for and then hacking content that has DRM, think again. What you're doing is actually immoral, because it creates more demand for DRM. If you buy video cards that specifically don't support Linux and waste thousands of hacker-hours breaking them, you're shooting yourself in the foot. If you buy an iPhone and jailbreak it, you're encouraging the manufacture of completely closed platforms.
If you simply have to have some music that only comes with restrictions, for God's sake PIRATE IT. It's better than the alternative.
I'd love to see manufacturers targeting specifically blind and visually-impaired people as part of their strategy.
They're called "keypads". You may have heard of them. Most phones even have voice dial.
OMG blind people can't use all technologies! Society is putting someone down AGAIN!
I am hesitant to download free stuff to me mobile that hasn't been checked for malware.
How about free as in freedom?
I find many websites prohibitively slow, but it has less to do with rendering performance than bad design. Few things are more annoying than staring at a blank page saying "439 of 440 files loaded".
(Well, ok, one thing. "This site requires flash"...)
Even if the vast majority of people are lazy and self centered, which is more convenient:
a) Downloading pirated material with inconsistent quality, inconsistent file names, under threat of being caught
b) Paying a reasonable fee for the same service with no quality issues
Even the most unscrupulous person would choose the latter. The industry is NOT providing the consumers with what they want.
Even the $1/MP3 model doesn't work properly. My friend just got close to 100 GB of music from his uncle. It would have cost him something like $30 000 legally (I don't know the exact number of files) and hundreds of hours hunting each album down, even though most of the music is just sitting there waiting to be randomly shuffled to and possibly favorited. That music does NOT have an economic value of $30 000 to one person.
One fair way would be to offer unlimited tracks in a Free format for a subscription fee that supports the artists proportionally to how much they're played.
What's better? Everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting 100 files or everyone paying $100 to their favorite artists and getting unlimited music. Who would lose in such a deal? No one gets any less money.
I don't use the pirate bay, but I also refuse to buy legit copies of anything. They're all made by a bunch of assholes that want to restrict our rights, so why support them with my money?
Too old for an action film? They haven't been right for an action film since day one. Modern producers seem to have an emotional age of 5.
I realize all the films have some action, and that First Contact was very good. There is a difference, however, between "film with action" and "action film". I'd rather see Patrick Stewart talking to himself in a room for two hours than another Jean-Rambo Picard movie.
Or, how about a movie about how he solves a diplomatic crisis without a single shot fired? There could still be plenty of space suspense; just make it meaningful instead of mildly retarded.
I'll give you some specific examples, but first I'll say that I've never understood the argument that something that caters to "most people" is good enough. If the European system results in products ranging from super low end to super high end, how is a system that ignores high/super high end devices not worse?
The ridiculous roaming charges are an unfortunate byproduct of several different countries trying to work together. The EU has in fact cracked down on them lately. It has nothing to do with locked or unlocked hardware. Prices are going down in all markets. The difference is that features are increasing faster outside the US.
Now, the examples. In the EU, it's routine to for example see something cool you want to buy and send a picture message to your wife. The iPhone was launched without such a feature and people didn't even blink. In fact, people will defend the omission as "useless" if it's pointed out. It may not be mindblowing, but it's just one in a long list of conveniences.
In the EU, completely average people have been surfing on their phones for a long time. In the US, everyone is pretending the iPhone invented mobile browsing. Just yesterday there was a slashdot article about how the iPhone may get a front facing secondary camera, which is pretty much standard on European smartphones.
In the US, Verizon was sued in bloody 2005 because it wouldn't let customers copy photos to their computers without using an expensive network service.
In the US, Steve Jobs was required to explain that Apple's device is both a phone and an iPod before people realized that phones are able to function as music players (with Ogg Vorbis support no less, except for Apple).
I don't want to go on, but you probably get the point.
It's not just about switching operators. The widespread lockin lets the operators dictate what features the phones have, and it has damaged the US market significantly. In Europe, a lot of people go for the contract option, but the large unlocked market ensures that operators don't have power over the phone manufacturers. I'm constantly reading articles raving about features we've had for years that have nothing to do with building networks.
If you don't get a price break for buying a phone on your own it just means the carriers have so much power they can screw you over. That's not a sign of a healthy market.
As for people being happy with what comes installed, sure, but the effect of lockin on competition retards progress, and prevents anyone who does care from installing what they want. There is NO benefit to the consumer in such a system.
Yes, they would, but it would be very easy, and a lot of them would run Windows or MacOS (lock in to which is no more acceptable even if "more polished").
Masses of computer hardware that couldn't run Linux at all would be a disaster of gigantic proportions.
I could still live with the slightly higher price, since many other products, like graphics cards, use perfectly acceptable previous generation products for the low end.
What I don't understand is the push for ever bigger screens and storage. The 900-series could be even smaller, but is optimized for an acceptably large keyboard and display, and that's ok. A 10" hd-based laptop however, is not what I would consider a netbook anymore. The whole point is maximum portability. That means 7-9" screen and a flash drive.
Adding insult to injury, they don't even use the size to support a bigger resolution, and have removed the respected ASUS brand in favor of the childish Eee logo. No thanks.
>Imagine the fireworks should AT&T offer up a free ARM netbook with a service plan.
Be careful what you wish for. Do you really want people getting "free" computers that are as restrictive as the "free" cell phones they push at people? It would be the *death* of mainstream Linux.
And don't think people wouldn't put up with it. Us Europeans are already amazed you put up with the crippled cell phones just so you can buy them on credit.
Yes, I already have an idea for how this would work.
First, the computer "starts up" in some kind of new mode that only shows text. Once the new Windows user has entered single user mode and set a password for his account, he can then proceed to select the graphical environment and video driver supplier that he prefers.
This would probably be best accomplished by editing some sort of very simple text file, perhaps called wingui.conf or something. Some kind of easy to learn text editor would obviously have to be installed by default, but I've read that some standardization group has already decided on a very robust one that has to be available on all compliant operating systems, so that's ok.
Now, the new Windows user would be ready to enter the chosen GUI, if he wants to. (This whole process would probably not add more than a few minutes to the installation.) This should really not be much of a problem at all.
That's because those two groups don't actually believe in freedom; they just notice it when it affects themselves. The gun advocates love guns, and the porn producers love money.
Anyone who consistently speaks up for real freedom will be labeled all sorts of horrible things.
"Wake me up when they're competing with the likes of Motorola and Nokia - why don't we ever get stories about them?"
Every news story I've seen about the iPhone makes these same ridiculous assumptions. It's like the journalists are completely stuck in the Windows vs. MacOS mindset and completely ignoring the really big players in the cell phone market. Bad, bad reporting.
Even this one says that "the iPhone is still the top phone in terms of user interface, and features/price ratio". They've obviously not compared prices at all. Most phones have *vastly* better feature/price ratios. Most recently the Nokia 5800, which sells for about 300-400 euros unsubsidized and has better hardware (and is flying off the shelves).
The 5800 has excellent features, lets you install your own code, connects via USB mass storage, and has a slightly less polished user interface. Rather than a fair review, all you hear from the press is "it's no iPhone, doesn't even do multitouch". Go figure.
Yet again, an industry doesn't want us as customers.
And the solution is always the same.
Don't support DRM.
http://thepiratebay.org/search/book/0/99/600
No, preemptive medical care should not be forced (your example is acute). Regardless of any discussions about rights, stupid paranoid people are humanity's insurance policy. If some of them ever turn out to be correct on a massive scale, at least someone will be left to breed.
In the meantime, if their children die more often, that's just good for the overall gene pool. We can't save everyone from themselves.
So why did you buy your phones from a corporation that does that? You can very easily buy Symbian phones that aren't crippled. Your lousy consumer research has nothing to do with the security features of the OS.
There are plenty of really useful applications for Symbian. For example, people have been walking around with Vorbis-capable music players in their pockets for several years while Slashdotters kept making bad jokes about how they just want to make calls.
http://symbianoggplay.sourceforge.net/
The N810 already runs Linux with a Nokia UI. There's no reason to install Android.
In addition, Nokia has been shipping phones that let you install anything you want for years, and their phone OS will become open source as of next year. They even provide native Python interpreters.
The main reason Nokia is so unpopular in the US is that they refused to cripple their phones as much as the carriers wanted. Unfortunately even nerds in America are apparently too dependent on force fed advertising.
Also remote storage. Having a bunch of in-progress documents available on Google Apps is very convienient when switching between home, work, and other computers.
Sure, but that same functionality can be duplicated with a simple KIO Slave. Why is it better to start a browser and type http://example.com/editor rather than starting an editor and typing fish://example.com/user? The latter lets you host your files anywhere and they could even be encrypted.
If non-http URL:s are too confusing for the average id^h^huser, it could just be a button called "My remote storage" or something.
Customers with more than 20 users would never allow their employees to access company material from outside hardware anyway. If you're on a company laptop, you might as well use real programs instead of webapps.
And as a consumer, I would never trust my data to a webapp provider either. I admit most are less discriminating.