Absolutely. For instance, showning that it isn't a part of a natural cycle, that it correlates with greenhouse gas emissions and doesn't correlate with natural occurances.
The reason I ask is because I think you underestimate the difficulty of what you're asking for. The "natural cycles" that you speak of may only be apparent as averages over thousands or tens of thousands of years, with entirely natural local "spikes" along the way. One or two or ten really hot summers, for example, really may not prove anything.
What I mean by "spare planet" is that because we live here, we can't just increase or decrease our various emissions to see what it does over the requisite long span. It is not an emotional appeal along the "this is our only planet" vein.
But the implication of your question is the problem. You imply that it is safer to assume that it is true so we should act on the assumption.
No, I imply no such thing. What I am asking is how you would act if reliable objective data is unknowable. Human progress has brought us to a point where we might be able to shape (for better or worse) our own environment without the ability to fully understand its consequences. The question is how we should act in such cases, not an implication that we should act quickly and blindly.
Your global warming Jews analogy is not a good one. We know Jews are anatomically similar to other humans, and that they emit no unique poison. We cannot even posit how Jews can cause global warming more than other humans. On the other hand, we do know that greenhouse gases have a property of trapping heat. I'd say greenhouse gases are substantially more suspect than Jews, but the important thing is to understand that it's all relative.
What I am saying is that sometimes we have to choose (and not acting is also a choice) without full information. In such cases we choose to attack the most plausible problems, not sit around doing nothing on principle until evidence can be provided. Maybe this isn't what you meant, but it's what you sounded like to me.
In the specific case of the Kyoto Accord, I think the most basic problem is the political one that very few believe that Bush pulled out because of legitimate scientific concerns. Do you?
as oil reserves dwindle (gradually, over time), the cost of oil-based energy will go up. At various points, other energy sources will become more ecnomical than oil, and development of those sources will begin to accelerate.
At the same time, because the oil consuming machinery cannot turn on a dime, the high prices of oil will allow us to drill literally everywhere for it. The environmentalist fear is that by the time the market forces an alternative energy source into the mainstream, we'd have drilled holes in every backyard and national park.
We'd be saving our children (or grandchildren, or whatever) the cost of conversion, by taking that cost on ourselves. But it seems likely that our descendants will have more wealth available to pay those costs than we do.
Is that why these are the same politicians who are borrowing money to cut taxes for the same descendants to pay? The question to me is not whether they will or will not be richer, but whether we can already afford to start doing something right now.
On a philosophical scale, if you can't leave the earth a little better than you inherited it, why do you exist? Just to consume?
Its great, Apple does bad business practices and people look away, a company like Microsoft does something simular and people start whining about how their evil and mean.
Let's say Apple makes a word processor called AppleWorks. Let's say it has a proprietary file format that changes frequently to prevent anybody from ever cloning it well. Who cares? Even if all Mac owners use AppleWorks (and they most emphatically do not), that's 5% or so if you're optimistic.
Let's say Microsoft makes a word processor called Word...
Do you understand now? You can choose not to use or be influenced by Apple. This is also why the laws of acceptable business practices are literally different depending on whether you are a monopoly.
Reminds me of a certain big software company somewhere in the North West of the USA.
Reminds me of every for-profit company. Do you imagine there are lasting alliances (much less true friendship) in business? If MusicMatch did not profit from its cooperation with Apple while it lasted, their stockholders should be upset at its management.
I like and own Apple products, and I think they distinguish themselves in the marketplace by putting out polished products at a premium. However, I don't expect them to be "nice", or to care for me more than my money. Where do you folks get your expectations anyway?
Maybe because millions and millions of dollars were spent to fix the bugs before the deadline, and hundreds or thousands of engineers were on duty or on call during the actual transition?
I'm not familiar with his work, so I can't say if it was overblown. Even if it was, there was no way to know the precise extent of the problem until the relevant systems were audited. Worse, mass media frequently seize the worst case scenarios that scientists consider possible without explaining how probable they think it would be.
So I suggest you cut them some slack. They did not have the benefit of your 20/20 hindsight.
I guess he can't find another "crisis" so he's decided we have too much stuff.
Obesity is one of the most serious public health crises in the United States. Where have you been?
I guess it's because you get to code in html instead of C. Great, so now you can hire a TOTAL idiot html jockey to design your life-and-death medical interface instead of a (slightly-) better-trained C programmer?
The choice of language or API does not remove the necessity of a user interface expert in either case. There is simply a higher chance that a UI expert can wield HTML effectively than he or she can wield C. So instead of two people (a UI expert and a C expert), you may need just one, possibly with less miscommunication and better results.
Speaking broadly, it is important to make technology directly accessible to domain experts, and away from computer experts acting as their proxies.
Here's a shiny image of PortsManager, in all its Aqua goodness.
It's not just the buttons. Looking at your screen shot, I mean this in the most constructive way possible:
What's "devel", "comms", "parallel", or "textproc" who doesn't already know what they mean?
What's the difference between "sci" and "science", or "sysutil" and "sysutils", or "amusements" and "games"?
Why are "irc" and "mail" not under "net" or "comms"?
What is "lang", and why is "python" not under "lang" or "devel"?
Looking at the list, why are lame and bladeenc, which are end user applications, presented together with libvorbis and other libraries? Why are servers put in the same list as applications?
Yes, I know the answers and I understand the limitations of the database, but this is exactly what people mean when they say Unix is cryptic. I'd like to see the left pane become a list of Applications, Libraries, and Servers, each grouped perhaps by categories like "audio", "games", "office", and so on. Provide a clickable link to the home page of each application, and perhaps the date of last update, or an indicator of its maturity.
The best "online music service" is still to buy CDs online, wait for them to arrive, and then rip'n'encode on your home computer, into whatever format happens to work best with ytour playback equipment.
Obviously, an article has to establish criteria for the products or services that it is comparing. Your "best" method fails miserably in the "instant gratification" criterion, and the "cost for just one track" criterion. I'm happy it works for you, but that doesn't mean it's the "best" for anybody else.
For a lot of independant films (or just about any film that doesn't come from one of the major mega-corporate studios) the screeners are just about the only way that they get seen by the Academy members.
Ideally, any Academy member who has not seen every nominee should abstain from voting. Thus, the presence or absence screener DVDs would affect the number of members voting, but not the actual decision except in rare cases. In this ideal world, the problem you point out doesn't really exist.
The problem is, without screener DVDs, members are actually voting without seeing the less popular films at all. But who cares what this sort of people think about a film, with or without screeners? These people are why the Oscar picks basically resemble commercial successes.
And how exactly does this translate into students being able to pay for things. I doubt that the average income of students in the US is much if any higher than that of UK students.
Purchasing power is very difficult to compare. For example, if US students mainly pay for college with loans, while UK students mainly have parents help pay, then $50 to a US student could be much tougher than even $100 to a UK student. This is why I will not try to compare directly, and per capita GDP is probably as bad as any measure. I'm also not just talking about the UK, so please don't keep complaining about just the UK.
If you try to sell a $100 book in the Philippines, where most people make under $4,000 a year, the population will simply resort to uncontrollable and massive copyright infringement. It's a Good Thing that publishers recognize this, and would rather give people the choice of purchasing legally at some lower profit. Many software vendors, in contrast, insist on their usual US profit margins and complain about piracy.
The other side of the issue is that I simply don't see the publishers lower their US prices as a response to massive smuggling. What's going to happen is strong enforcement of Customs regulations (30 heavy textbooks in your luggage are pretty obvious), and perhaps the end of benevolent pricing for the Third World.
What will lower prices is no mystery. Stop buying the expensive books. The difference between buying used books, outright infringement, and smuggling is that smuggling is so much easier to stop in this case. It will likely also give already poor students an even harder time staying within the law.
In England, being a third world country, this is clearly the reason for half price textbooks.
The average per capita GDP of the United Kingdom is $25,300. The average per capital GDP of the United States is $37,600. I'm not saying it makes sense to sell a book at half the price in England, but it does make sense to sell it at a proportionate discount.
Now, the point is not that US students are not getting screwed. The point is that they are screwed less today than their third world counterparts would be if the publishers could not effectively implement different pricing. More likely, if the smuggling continues, all students will suffer the same high prices. The publishers really don't make that much money from discounted third world textbooks, so losing those sales matters less compared to having to halving US prices.
Don't know about students in third world countries (doubt books are necessities though)
You are severely mistaken. Text books required for a college education is basically the only way a student from a poor family can compete. It's not necessary unless you want to leave poverty.
students from third world countries studying here do not seem to have a problem with high prices.
Students from the third world studying in the US either come from rich families*, or are exceptional students receiving government or private assistance. They cannot be compared at all to the regular student in a third world university. Just because Bill Gates can shop in the most expensive stores in Paris or Milan or Tokyo doesn't mean the average American can.
* The per capita GDP of the Philippines is $4,200, which is less than half the (out-of-state) tuition of a public university in the US. Remember also that GDP figures are inflated, because third world countries typically lack a big middle class, so the figure is skewed by the extremely rich.
Frankly AMERICAN students can't afford American textbooks. My financial aid factored in like $50/quarter for books. Sheesh. That MIGHT buy ONE book...
This is true, but there are several level of "cannot afford". A $120 book is about 18 hours of pre-tax minimum wages in California, which is maybe a week's worth of part time work. In the Philippines, for example, a city nurse makes an average of $169 a month, while a rural area nurse makes $75 to $95 a month. Doctors earn some $300 to $800 a month.
So while I sympathize with your problems, you shouldn't think for a moment you're all in the same boat. Smuggling text books in a massive scale will likely hurt these people first when publishers simply stop selling them at greatly reduced prices.
American publishers sell their books cheap in third world with the pretext that the students can't afford expensive text books.
This isn't a pretext. It is fact. Third World students literally (it's not a matter of not buying that iPod, but a matter of not eating) cannot afford American text book prices. In many areas, American books are necessities, not luxuries.
The only way to prevent such dumping is to send back these books back to US and that would teach a nice lesson to big publishers here
I'm afraid the lesson they'll learn is to not give Third World students a price break, and to lobby US Customs into tighter inspections for these contraband. What do you imagine they'll do? Lower prices in the US?
Then you are choosing to accept collateral damage.
If your enemy has a choice at all whether or not your attack would kill civilians or not, then you're weapons are not "truly surgical", are they?
In the context of the United States, it will continue to face ruthless leaders who will endanger their own civilians, hoping that massive civilian casualties will result in domestic backlash in the US. Because the US military is so dominant, this is essentially the only way they can hope to lose the battles but win the war. Therefore, it really does matter if your weapons are precise or not.
Understand now why I'm objecting to "truly surgical"?
why is the push pin marker on the wrong side of the street 80% of the time?
If this is true, just remember that the marker is always on the wrong side, and you'll get the right answer 80% of the time. I suspect your real problem is that they're wrong about 50% of the time.
If the enemy stores munitions in civilian areas that is their problem.
Does your country plan to defend any of its cities if attacked, or just surrender the cities and fight only in the wilderness? If you choose to fight in the cities, then you will store munitions in close proximity to civilians.
Steve Jobs referred to it as the greatest Windows app ever. This is somewhat of an overstatement, considering iTunes for Windows, while it certainly does run under Windows, is by no means a "Windows app".
Try to understand the perspective that the ultimate version of Windows is MacOS X, and the best Windows app ever looks just like a Mac app, and then it'll make perfect sense. It's all the other Windows apps that are "wrong". This isn't a guy who's trying to promote Windows, you know.
I expected better of Apple who provide a lot of documentation explaining to PC programmers that when porting their applications to MacOS they should follow the Mac UI guidelines in order to provide an application that will be consistent with the rest that are available.
Guidelines are not religion. They exist to serve a purpose. The purpose of following Mac UI guidelines when porting to the Mac is both because Apple would like you to, and because Mac users tend to be picky about this. The purpose of not following Windows UI *cough* guidelines is to give Windows users a taste of how nice their lives might be if they were using MacOS instead. Even more obviously than the iPod, iTunes (and the music store) for Windows is a trojan horse to get you to buy a Mac.
Why the hell do you imagine Apple would want to just give Windows one of the reasons you might actually pay for Apple hardware? iTunes for Windows will be just a little more awkward, as long as Apple is trying to sell hardware. Just because it has rabid fans doesn't mean Apple isn't a for-profit company.
Point is, your expectations and disappointments come from the mistaken assumption that Apple is trying to build a Windows app.
does anyone else wish that the government was forced to enforce its own laws, instead of picking and choosing when and where to do so?
As usual, I think the proper route is somewhere in the middle. Because laws cannot be written perfectly, given a prosecutor zero choice results in injustice to that one-in-a-million exception case. This is also why judges generally dislike mandatory sentencing requirements, because it favors pre-judgement (by the legislature) over case-by-case judgement. On the other hand, as you say, a book full of unenforced laws is not a hallmark of a free society. The opposite extreme, which we also don't want to see, is that everybody can be prosecuted for something and whether or not you're going to jail today entirely depends on whether the prosecutor wants you in jail or not.
I would suggest a Constitutional Amendment that would automatically retire all laws under which there has been no successful prosecution for a period of time.
It was founded by those who could not worship God because of persecution. There i s n o d e b a t e about this. This is history.
It may be a nation founded by people who came to North America to escape religious persecution, but it was not founded for that reason. The union of the original 13 states was not caused by religious intervention from the British Crown. Later, enshrined in the US Constitution:
...to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity...
No, the US isn't perfect. But we don't arrest people for their religion, we allow people to vote, we honor personal achievement, science, etc etc etc. When we went to the moon in 1969, there were ticker tape parades, spontaneous celebration...
In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat in a bus. Two years after the Montgomery buses were finally desegregated, the Pioneer 4 flew by the moon.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King marched in Washington DC and gave his famous speech. In the subsequent years, President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and the Apollo 1 was lost in a launch pad accident. Six years after the march, Apollo 11 lands on the moon. In that same year, the Supreme Court rules that women meeting the physical requirements can work in many jobs that had been for men only.
It wasn't until 1989, twenty years after Americans first landed on the moon, that an African-American was elected as state governor for the first time.
Your criticisms against China are valid, but do read a bit of your own history and get off that high horse.
Until iTunes (et al) really has a wealth of independent artists and labels on offer, I will peruse but not buy.
First of all, understand that you have absolute final say on what you do with your money.
Having said that, consider that a for-profit company like Apple needs to be rewarded for what it does right (sell songs with acceptable DRM), so it can continue doing better (sell more varieties of songs). What you are asking for is for Apple to continue investing, before you will reward their initial investment. This may spur Apple into action to fulfill your demand, or it may cause Apple to lose money and withdraw.
Like I said, I'm not telling you how to spend money, but it may be beneficial to you in the long run to support Apple (and other companies doing things you like) even before they achieve perfection in your eyes. That is, to me the point is not whether Apple can do better or should do better, but whether a 128-bit AAC version of a particular music track is worth the $1 Apple is asking for, today.
The only thing left in which we humans can claim superiority is "smarts". So naturally people are going to have a strong emotional reaction when challenged in this last domain.
You're right, but it's silly because arbitrary mental puzzles like Chess are horrible indicators of intelligence. They are intentionally hard for humans, because they require talent we haven't necessarily evolved. Open a book of puzzles, and you'll find that just about every problem can be solved by a modern computer in milliseconds, even with brute force algorithms. Yet it takes us minutes and minutes of pencil work to solve.
Chess is hard partially because we (the general human, not chess grandmasters) have difficulty remembering every step we consider. We really shouldn't feel far more threatened than finding out calculators can add more quickly than we can.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason I ask is because I think you underestimate the difficulty of what you're asking for. The "natural cycles" that you speak of may only be apparent as averages over thousands or tens of thousands of years, with entirely natural local "spikes" along the way. One or two or ten really hot summers, for example, really may not prove anything.
What I mean by "spare planet" is that because we live here, we can't just increase or decrease our various emissions to see what it does over the requisite long span. It is not an emotional appeal along the "this is our only planet" vein.
But the implication of your question is the problem. You imply that it is safer to assume that it is true so we should act on the assumption.
No, I imply no such thing. What I am asking is how you would act if reliable objective data is unknowable. Human progress has brought us to a point where we might be able to shape (for better or worse) our own environment without the ability to fully understand its consequences. The question is how we should act in such cases, not an implication that we should act quickly and blindly.
Your global warming Jews analogy is not a good one. We know Jews are anatomically similar to other humans, and that they emit no unique poison. We cannot even posit how Jews can cause global warming more than other humans. On the other hand, we do know that greenhouse gases have a property of trapping heat. I'd say greenhouse gases are substantially more suspect than Jews, but the important thing is to understand that it's all relative.
What I am saying is that sometimes we have to choose (and not acting is also a choice) without full information. In such cases we choose to attack the most plausible problems, not sit around doing nothing on principle until evidence can be provided. Maybe this isn't what you meant, but it's what you sounded like to me.
In the specific case of the Kyoto Accord, I think the most basic problem is the political one that very few believe that Bush pulled out because of legitimate scientific concerns. Do you?
I would agree, but is there actually any evidence of sabotage, or did you just presume it? The linked article did not allege any such thing.
I'm sincerely curious. Can this be proven to your satisfaction without a spare planet to experiment on?
At the same time, because the oil consuming machinery cannot turn on a dime, the high prices of oil will allow us to drill literally everywhere for it. The environmentalist fear is that by the time the market forces an alternative energy source into the mainstream, we'd have drilled holes in every backyard and national park.
We'd be saving our children (or grandchildren, or whatever) the cost of conversion, by taking that cost on ourselves. But it seems likely that our descendants will have more wealth available to pay those costs than we do.
Is that why these are the same politicians who are borrowing money to cut taxes for the same descendants to pay? The question to me is not whether they will or will not be richer, but whether we can already afford to start doing something right now.
On a philosophical scale, if you can't leave the earth a little better than you inherited it, why do you exist? Just to consume?
Let's say Apple makes a word processor called AppleWorks. Let's say it has a proprietary file format that changes frequently to prevent anybody from ever cloning it well. Who cares? Even if all Mac owners use AppleWorks (and they most emphatically do not), that's 5% or so if you're optimistic.
Let's say Microsoft makes a word processor called Word...
Do you understand now? You can choose not to use or be influenced by Apple. This is also why the laws of acceptable business practices are literally different depending on whether you are a monopoly.
Reminds me of every for-profit company. Do you imagine there are lasting alliances (much less true friendship) in business? If MusicMatch did not profit from its cooperation with Apple while it lasted, their stockholders should be upset at its management.
I like and own Apple products, and I think they distinguish themselves in the marketplace by putting out polished products at a premium. However, I don't expect them to be "nice", or to care for me more than my money. Where do you folks get your expectations anyway?
Maybe because millions and millions of dollars were spent to fix the bugs before the deadline, and hundreds or thousands of engineers were on duty or on call during the actual transition?
I'm not familiar with his work, so I can't say if it was overblown. Even if it was, there was no way to know the precise extent of the problem until the relevant systems were audited. Worse, mass media frequently seize the worst case scenarios that scientists consider possible without explaining how probable they think it would be.
So I suggest you cut them some slack. They did not have the benefit of your 20/20 hindsight.
I guess he can't find another "crisis" so he's decided we have too much stuff.
Obesity is one of the most serious public health crises in the United States. Where have you been?
The choice of language or API does not remove the necessity of a user interface expert in either case. There is simply a higher chance that a UI expert can wield HTML effectively than he or she can wield C. So instead of two people (a UI expert and a C expert), you may need just one, possibly with less miscommunication and better results.
Speaking broadly, it is important to make technology directly accessible to domain experts, and away from computer experts acting as their proxies.
It's not just the buttons. Looking at your screen shot, I mean this in the most constructive way possible:
Yes, I know the answers and I understand the limitations of the database, but this is exactly what people mean when they say Unix is cryptic. I'd like to see the left pane become a list of Applications, Libraries, and Servers, each grouped perhaps by categories like "audio", "games", "office", and so on. Provide a clickable link to the home page of each application, and perhaps the date of last update, or an indicator of its maturity.
Obviously, an article has to establish criteria for the products or services that it is comparing. Your "best" method fails miserably in the "instant gratification" criterion, and the "cost for just one track" criterion. I'm happy it works for you, but that doesn't mean it's the "best" for anybody else.
Ideally, any Academy member who has not seen every nominee should abstain from voting. Thus, the presence or absence screener DVDs would affect the number of members voting, but not the actual decision except in rare cases. In this ideal world, the problem you point out doesn't really exist.
The problem is, without screener DVDs, members are actually voting without seeing the less popular films at all. But who cares what this sort of people think about a film, with or without screeners? These people are why the Oscar picks basically resemble commercial successes.
Purchasing power is very difficult to compare. For example, if US students mainly pay for college with loans, while UK students mainly have parents help pay, then $50 to a US student could be much tougher than even $100 to a UK student. This is why I will not try to compare directly, and per capita GDP is probably as bad as any measure. I'm also not just talking about the UK, so please don't keep complaining about just the UK.
If you try to sell a $100 book in the Philippines, where most people make under $4,000 a year, the population will simply resort to uncontrollable and massive copyright infringement. It's a Good Thing that publishers recognize this, and would rather give people the choice of purchasing legally at some lower profit. Many software vendors, in contrast, insist on their usual US profit margins and complain about piracy.
The other side of the issue is that I simply don't see the publishers lower their US prices as a response to massive smuggling. What's going to happen is strong enforcement of Customs regulations (30 heavy textbooks in your luggage are pretty obvious), and perhaps the end of benevolent pricing for the Third World.
What will lower prices is no mystery. Stop buying the expensive books. The difference between buying used books, outright infringement, and smuggling is that smuggling is so much easier to stop in this case. It will likely also give already poor students an even harder time staying within the law.
The average per capita GDP of the United Kingdom is $25,300. The average per capital GDP of the United States is $37,600. I'm not saying it makes sense to sell a book at half the price in England, but it does make sense to sell it at a proportionate discount.
Now, the point is not that US students are not getting screwed. The point is that they are screwed less today than their third world counterparts would be if the publishers could not effectively implement different pricing. More likely, if the smuggling continues, all students will suffer the same high prices. The publishers really don't make that much money from discounted third world textbooks, so losing those sales matters less compared to having to halving US prices.
Don't know about students in third world countries (doubt books are necessities though)
You are severely mistaken. Text books required for a college education is basically the only way a student from a poor family can compete. It's not necessary unless you want to leave poverty.
students from third world countries studying here do not seem to have a problem with high prices.
Students from the third world studying in the US either come from rich families*, or are exceptional students receiving government or private assistance. They cannot be compared at all to the regular student in a third world university. Just because Bill Gates can shop in the most expensive stores in Paris or Milan or Tokyo doesn't mean the average American can.
* The per capita GDP of the Philippines is $4,200, which is less than half the (out-of-state) tuition of a public university in the US. Remember also that GDP figures are inflated, because third world countries typically lack a big middle class, so the figure is skewed by the extremely rich.
This is true, but there are several level of "cannot afford". A $120 book is about 18 hours of pre-tax minimum wages in California, which is maybe a week's worth of part time work. In the Philippines, for example, a city nurse makes an average of $169 a month, while a rural area nurse makes $75 to $95 a month. Doctors earn some $300 to $800 a month.
So while I sympathize with your problems, you shouldn't think for a moment you're all in the same boat. Smuggling text books in a massive scale will likely hurt these people first when publishers simply stop selling them at greatly reduced prices.
This isn't a pretext. It is fact. Third World students literally (it's not a matter of not buying that iPod, but a matter of not eating) cannot afford American text book prices. In many areas, American books are necessities, not luxuries.
The only way to prevent such dumping is to send back these books back to US and that would teach a nice lesson to big publishers here
I'm afraid the lesson they'll learn is to not give Third World students a price break, and to lobby US Customs into tighter inspections for these contraband. What do you imagine they'll do? Lower prices in the US?
If your enemy has a choice at all whether or not your attack would kill civilians or not, then you're weapons are not "truly surgical", are they?
In the context of the United States, it will continue to face ruthless leaders who will endanger their own civilians, hoping that massive civilian casualties will result in domestic backlash in the US. Because the US military is so dominant, this is essentially the only way they can hope to lose the battles but win the war. Therefore, it really does matter if your weapons are precise or not.
Understand now why I'm objecting to "truly surgical"?
If this is true, just remember that the marker is always on the wrong side, and you'll get the right answer 80% of the time. I suspect your real problem is that they're wrong about 50% of the time.
Does your country plan to defend any of its cities if attacked, or just surrender the cities and fight only in the wilderness? If you choose to fight in the cities, then you will store munitions in close proximity to civilians.
But would the detonating munitions know to avoid civilians as well?
Try to understand the perspective that the ultimate version of Windows is MacOS X, and the best Windows app ever looks just like a Mac app, and then it'll make perfect sense. It's all the other Windows apps that are "wrong". This isn't a guy who's trying to promote Windows, you know.
I expected better of Apple who provide a lot of documentation explaining to PC programmers that when porting their applications to MacOS they should follow the Mac UI guidelines in order to provide an application that will be consistent with the rest that are available.
Guidelines are not religion. They exist to serve a purpose. The purpose of following Mac UI guidelines when porting to the Mac is both because Apple would like you to, and because Mac users tend to be picky about this. The purpose of not following Windows UI *cough* guidelines is to give Windows users a taste of how nice their lives might be if they were using MacOS instead. Even more obviously than the iPod, iTunes (and the music store) for Windows is a trojan horse to get you to buy a Mac.
Why the hell do you imagine Apple would want to just give Windows one of the reasons you might actually pay for Apple hardware? iTunes for Windows will be just a little more awkward, as long as Apple is trying to sell hardware. Just because it has rabid fans doesn't mean Apple isn't a for-profit company.
Point is, your expectations and disappointments come from the mistaken assumption that Apple is trying to build a Windows app.
As usual, I think the proper route is somewhere in the middle. Because laws cannot be written perfectly, given a prosecutor zero choice results in injustice to that one-in-a-million exception case. This is also why judges generally dislike mandatory sentencing requirements, because it favors pre-judgement (by the legislature) over case-by-case judgement. On the other hand, as you say, a book full of unenforced laws is not a hallmark of a free society. The opposite extreme, which we also don't want to see, is that everybody can be prosecuted for something and whether or not you're going to jail today entirely depends on whether the prosecutor wants you in jail or not.
I would suggest a Constitutional Amendment that would automatically retire all laws under which there has been no successful prosecution for a period of time.
It may be a nation founded by people who came to North America to escape religious persecution, but it was not founded for that reason. The union of the original 13 states was not caused by religious intervention from the British Crown. Later, enshrined in the US Constitution:
Nothing about religion.In 1955, Rosa Parks was arrested for sitting in the wrong seat in a bus. Two years after the Montgomery buses were finally desegregated, the Pioneer 4 flew by the moon.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King marched in Washington DC and gave his famous speech. In the subsequent years, President Johnson signs the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act, and the Apollo 1 was lost in a launch pad accident. Six years after the march, Apollo 11 lands on the moon. In that same year, the Supreme Court rules that women meeting the physical requirements can work in many jobs that had been for men only.
It wasn't until 1989, twenty years after Americans first landed on the moon, that an African-American was elected as state governor for the first time.
Your criticisms against China are valid, but do read a bit of your own history and get off that high horse.
First of all, understand that you have absolute final say on what you do with your money.
Having said that, consider that a for-profit company like Apple needs to be rewarded for what it does right (sell songs with acceptable DRM), so it can continue doing better (sell more varieties of songs). What you are asking for is for Apple to continue investing, before you will reward their initial investment. This may spur Apple into action to fulfill your demand, or it may cause Apple to lose money and withdraw.
Like I said, I'm not telling you how to spend money, but it may be beneficial to you in the long run to support Apple (and other companies doing things you like) even before they achieve perfection in your eyes. That is, to me the point is not whether Apple can do better or should do better, but whether a 128-bit AAC version of a particular music track is worth the $1 Apple is asking for, today.
You're right, but it's silly because arbitrary mental puzzles like Chess are horrible indicators of intelligence. They are intentionally hard for humans, because they require talent we haven't necessarily evolved. Open a book of puzzles, and you'll find that just about every problem can be solved by a modern computer in milliseconds, even with brute force algorithms. Yet it takes us minutes and minutes of pencil work to solve.
Chess is hard partially because we (the general human, not chess grandmasters) have difficulty remembering every step we consider. We really shouldn't feel far more threatened than finding out calculators can add more quickly than we can.