The AGPL does concern itself with this particular type of use though.
Which is why I and many others have a problem with it. Usage restrictions are an abuse of copyright and violate freedom zero, and it's disappointing to see the FSF supporting them.
I was lazy and just took $1200 with a growth rate of 10%
Gotcha, you were using $100 a month for $1200 total, I was just taking the straight $100. Yeah, $1200 at 9.8% over 40 years becomes $50k.
However, my portfolio, despite taking it on the chin today, is up 48% this year. I'm not claiming that's typical, of course, but 10% average is not unreasonable.
10% nominal is about right, but then there's taxes and inflation. If only I had held on to the AAPL I bought at 15...
$100 a month spent as a 25 year-old steals (conservatively) $50,000 from the 65 year-old
That comes out to a 16.8% annual return, and if you're getting that from "conservative" investments I would like to subscribe to your newsletter:) Assuming a more reasonable 8% average return, which is still pretty good after taxes and inflation, $100 grows to $2172 after 40 years.
I agree that saving for the future is vitally important. But basic cell phone plans aren't much more than land lines, and if you're not sending dozens of texts a day it shouldn't be a significant expense.
There is absolutely no question that Uluru deserves protection. It's protected by a World Heritage Order, which puts it in the global crown jewels. What is it? It's a bloody big rock, just like the moon.
And if it had a few trillion barrels of oil we'd drill it, and rightfully so.
the implication that environmentalists are just crazy Ludites is crazy in itself
Most aren't. But unfortunately the few that are have a lot of influence. Look at the utterly irrational fear of nuclear power they've created, when by any environmental standard it's tremendously better than fossil fuels. For them, the real problem is not environmental damage but our decadent materialist lifestyles, and anything that allows us to continue on that path must be opposed.
"It has been pointed out to me that I have a problem making fiction that doesn't have super-powered adolescent girls in it. I don't care." -Joss Whedon {Serenity commentary}
The higher prices would drive people back to ground transportation, reducing their carbon footprint.
And resulting in a higher percentage of those people dying in auto accidents. Of course that would really reduce their carbon footprint...
Deregulation brought down prices for anybody flying between major hubs, but drove them through the roof for anything out of the way, and shot the quality of service to hell.
Do you pay for first class today? Everybody says they want better service even if it costs more, just like everybody says there's too much sex and violence on TV, but generally their actions indicate otherwise.
In an online poker game, it's pretty hard to prove when the dealing is fair.
Actually it's much easier than in a live game, because you can keep records of every single hand.
I do remember an article on slashdot from years back where the author statistically examined the deals from an online poker site and concluded that they were dealing from the bottom of the deck
I'd be interested in that article if you can find it. I have no idea what "bottom of the deck" means in an online game, but if the hands aren't distributed randomly, that would quickly show up in the hand histories.
You said that the room takes a percentage of the pot in each hand, so the obvious ways for them to make more money from the same game are to manipulate events to increase the number of hands played, and to increase the size of every pot.
True, although those parameters tend to have an inverse relationship. Hands where the pot gets big often take longer, because players will spend more time on their decisions when the stakes are larger. An exception might be if one player is dealt KK and another has AA in which case they'll likely both get all in quickly, but again if that happens more often than it statistically should, your hand histories will be able to prove it.
It's been mentioned again and again that the online poker sites have complete hand histories as if this is protection to the player against a crooked site.
The key is that players can keep histories as well.
It seems to me that if you want to socially engineer someone to keep gambling past the point where they would normally stop
Like many MMORPGs, poker is close to an ideal Skinner box because of the "random" rewards which vary in size (heavily influenced by skill, of course). You really don't need to artificially tweak anything to get that effect.
If I'm wrong about how they could cheat the players, please tell me in what way I'm wrong and then I'll have learned something new.
You're not "wrong" in that what you describe is theoretically possible, it's just that it's a bad idea for a casino to do any of it. They can make boatloads by running fair games; your schemes would let them increase their profits slightly at the risk of being exposed and losing everything. Sure, some sites like AP will be that stupid, but that doesn't indicate that all online casinos are cheating, any more than Enron indicates that all businesses are cooking the books.
Your counterparts in my area rendered my EyeTV DVR useless when I moved to a new place that couldn't get OTA reception, by encrypting local HD channels. I'll pay $10 for an unencrypted HD feed that I can use my existing hardware with, I won't pay $25 a month to rent a crippled DVR.
In fact, Apple would be negligent and unethical if they did not act in the best interests of their stockholders.
I'm a shareholder, and I'm disappointed that Apple appears to be pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term goodwill. I don't want them to go down the Sony path.
What people are unhappy about is that they want the features the new update provides (like the WiFi msuic store) along with custom apps. They refuse to choose between the two worlds.
Well, I have no problem choosing the latter, although if you buy an iPhone that ships with the new firmware you don't get that choice. (Which in a way is good for me, as it increases my iPhone's potential ebay value). My fundamental annoyance is that Apple's engineers have produced a fantastic handheld Unix-based touchscreen computer that also makes phone calls, but Apple's suits insist on crippling it so that it's just a phone and browser.
When did dickish corporate behavior become the new standard?
My question is, why are corporations in certain sectors almost invariably dickish while corporations in other sectors aren't? Lack of competition may be necessary, but it isn't sufficient. Intel and AMD are a duopoly but they're both constantly producing better and cheaper products. My tentative theory is that when companies are selling ongoing services rather than products, they see much more opportunity to try to control you and nickel and dime you at every turn. They count on people's tendency to use hyperbolic discounting and focus on short term benefits (e.g. "free" phones) rather than long term costs.
they aren't even close to making their target of 10 million phones in the first year.
Erm, their goal is to sell 10 million phones in 2008. It's technically true that they "aren't even close" to that, inasmuch as they have currently sold 0 phones in 2008.
You know, I've always wondered why many self-proclaimed libertarian types are so against regulating emissions.
Does Greg Mankiw count as a libertarian? He and many others have been advocating raising taxes on pollution to compensate for the externalities. This is opposed by many on the right who have a knee-jerk opposition to all taxes (even though it would allow more economically harmful taxes to be cut), and by many on the left who dislike market mechanisms.
The thing is locked down it's ridiculous. But people stillbuy them...
Well, I bought mine only after the jailbreak and unlock processes were confirmed working. So I have an unlocked phone with a development environment and lots of native apps. Now, Apple may foolishly try to break support for this stuff in a future update, but I've come up with a brilliant countermeasure of not installing said update.
But what is the joke? Why say anything? I really don't get it.
No joke. It just sounds like the culture in your group is to do the minimum required to satisfy the dress code. You're an outlier, so you get noticed, and as the GP said the same thing would probably happen if a male showed up dressed unusually well.
The same thing happened in reverse to me. During the interval when our new and more corporate management was dropping a bunch of hints that they wanted us to dress "more professionally", but before the dress code was officially added to the employee handbook, I got some comments for being one of the few people continuing to wear jeans. (I'll work late when needed, or I'll wear uncomfortable clothes. Pick one). But nobody was being insulting or hostile, they were just noticing something out of the ordinary.
(Tangent: if casual clothes are so terrible, why are they often ok on Friday? Nobody has an "Embezzlement Friday" or a "Swear at Customers Friday")
It's likely that those applications would be the first of any to receive an official endorsement from Apple, according to Jobs' comments, as those that require Internet access could threaten the 'high standard' of experience customers have come to expect with the iPhone.
That's rather amusing when compared to his earlier pitch of "Web 2.0 apps are all you need".
More realistically, what happens when thousands of developers start making awful applications for the iPhone and potential customers see how crappy apps crash and ruin the iPhone's functionality?
I don't understand why this argument is always trotted out for phones but not PCs. Bad PC software (either actual malware or just buggy code) can potentially do more damage since it'll likely have access to more personal data and CPU and network resources, but (almost) nobody considers prohibiting third party applications to be a reasonable solution.
trust me, I'd love that option; a Mac Mini without OS X, or any of its built-in applications, without the Apple keyboard, mouse, or display -- something I would actually buy quite a lot of!
The mini doesn't come with a keyboard or mouse or display, and it's easy to wipe OS X and install Linux or Windows. Even ignoring the bundled software it's a good value if you're looking for that form factor; a system76 Koala with comparable specs to the $600 mini would be over $900.
I draw the line when they begin interfering with the development of fundamental new technologies that will be used in countless devices collectively worth trillions of dollars to "protect" a measly few billion dollars of entertainment revenue.
***Applause***
If these rent-seekers had their way, we'd never have heard of Steve Jobs or Woz because the equipment they hacked on would have been restricted to "licensed" "professionals". Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have been shut down or thrown in prison for massive unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. I'd honestly prefer just handing them eleventy billion dollars in taxpayer money. That would at least make the corporate welfare honest and efficient, and the rest of us could get back to inventing the future.
Slashdot Mirror
The AGPL does concern itself with this particular type of use though.
Which is why I and many others have a problem with it. Usage restrictions are an abuse of copyright and violate freedom zero, and it's disappointing to see the FSF supporting them.
I was lazy and just took $1200 with a growth rate of 10%
Gotcha, you were using $100 a month for $1200 total, I was just taking the straight $100. Yeah, $1200 at 9.8% over 40 years becomes $50k.
However, my portfolio, despite taking it on the chin today, is up 48% this year. I'm not claiming that's typical, of course, but 10% average is not unreasonable.
10% nominal is about right, but then there's taxes and inflation. If only I had held on to the AAPL I bought at 15...
$100 a month spent as a 25 year-old steals (conservatively) $50,000 from the 65 year-old
:) Assuming a more reasonable 8% average return, which is still pretty good after taxes and inflation, $100 grows to $2172 after 40 years.
That comes out to a 16.8% annual return, and if you're getting that from "conservative" investments I would like to subscribe to your newsletter
I agree that saving for the future is vitally important. But basic cell phone plans aren't much more than land lines, and if you're not sending dozens of texts a day it shouldn't be a significant expense.
It's something Australia's aborigines have been pointing out for years, that their land has intrinsic value
Fantastic. So does economic growth and technological progress.
Most of the rest of Australia has taken the moon mining viewpoint and desecrated the land in the name of development.
And good for them. Would you rather live as an aborigine 500 years ago or in Sydney today?
There is absolutely no question that Uluru deserves protection. It's protected by a World Heritage Order, which puts it in the global crown jewels. What is it? It's a bloody big rock, just like the moon.
And if it had a few trillion barrels of oil we'd drill it, and rightfully so.
the implication that environmentalists are just crazy Ludites is crazy in itself
Most aren't. But unfortunately the few that are have a lot of influence. Look at the utterly irrational fear of nuclear power they've created, when by any environmental standard it's tremendously better than fossil fuels. For them, the real problem is not environmental damage but our decadent materialist lifestyles, and anything that allows us to continue on that path must be opposed.
Me either.
It's called Aleph One Memory ... but the spool it comes on is pretty large.
I was looking at the "c" brand, but nobody will give me a straight answer as to whether it's better than Aleph One.
So I guess that means the answer to life is somewhere between 0 and 1 ?
Yes.
The higher prices would drive people back to ground transportation, reducing their carbon footprint.
And resulting in a higher percentage of those people dying in auto accidents. Of course that would really reduce their carbon footprint...
Deregulation brought down prices for anybody flying between major hubs, but drove them through the roof for anything out of the way, and shot the quality of service to hell.
Do you pay for first class today? Everybody says they want better service even if it costs more, just like everybody says there's too much sex and violence on TV, but generally their actions indicate otherwise.
Interesting. So you now get those HD channels as clear QAM?
In an online poker game, it's pretty hard to prove when the dealing is fair.
Actually it's much easier than in a live game, because you can keep records of every single hand.
I do remember an article on slashdot from years back where the author statistically examined the deals from an online poker site and concluded that they were dealing from the bottom of the deck
I'd be interested in that article if you can find it. I have no idea what "bottom of the deck" means in an online game, but if the hands aren't distributed randomly, that would quickly show up in the hand histories.
You said that the room takes a percentage of the pot in each hand, so the obvious ways for them to make more money from the same game are to manipulate events to increase the number of hands played, and to increase the size of every pot.
True, although those parameters tend to have an inverse relationship. Hands where the pot gets big often take longer, because players will spend more time on their decisions when the stakes are larger. An exception might be if one player is dealt KK and another has AA in which case they'll likely both get all in quickly, but again if that happens more often than it statistically should, your hand histories will be able to prove it.
It's been mentioned again and again that the online poker sites have complete hand histories as if this is protection to the player against a crooked site.
The key is that players can keep histories as well.
It seems to me that if you want to socially engineer someone to keep gambling past the point where they would normally stop
Like many MMORPGs, poker is close to an ideal Skinner box because of the "random" rewards which vary in size (heavily influenced by skill, of course). You really don't need to artificially tweak anything to get that effect.
If I'm wrong about how they could cheat the players, please tell me in what way I'm wrong and then I'll have learned something new.
You're not "wrong" in that what you describe is theoretically possible, it's just that it's a bad idea for a casino to do any of it. They can make boatloads by running fair games; your schemes would let them increase their profits slightly at the risk of being exposed and losing everything. Sure, some sites like AP will be that stupid, but that doesn't indicate that all online casinos are cheating, any more than Enron indicates that all businesses are cooking the books.
Have we broken any Tivos? No.
Your counterparts in my area rendered my EyeTV DVR useless when I moved to a new place that couldn't get OTA reception, by encrypting local HD channels. I'll pay $10 for an unencrypted HD feed that I can use my existing hardware with, I won't pay $25 a month to rent a crippled DVR.
Think synaptic, only for the iPhone.
Done. Of course you need to hack your iPhone in order to use it, but it works great.
In fact, Apple would be negligent and unethical if they did not act in the best interests of their stockholders.
I'm a shareholder, and I'm disappointed that Apple appears to be pursuing short-term profits at the expense of long-term goodwill. I don't want them to go down the Sony path.
What people are unhappy about is that they want the features the new update provides (like the WiFi msuic store) along with custom apps. They refuse to choose between the two worlds.
Well, I have no problem choosing the latter, although if you buy an iPhone that ships with the new firmware you don't get that choice. (Which in a way is good for me, as it increases my iPhone's potential ebay value). My fundamental annoyance is that Apple's engineers have produced a fantastic handheld Unix-based touchscreen computer that also makes phone calls, but Apple's suits insist on crippling it so that it's just a phone and browser.
When did dickish corporate behavior become the new standard?
My question is, why are corporations in certain sectors almost invariably dickish while corporations in other sectors aren't? Lack of competition may be necessary, but it isn't sufficient. Intel and AMD are a duopoly but they're both constantly producing better and cheaper products. My tentative theory is that when companies are selling ongoing services rather than products, they see much more opportunity to try to control you and nickel and dime you at every turn. They count on people's tendency to use hyperbolic discounting and focus on short term benefits (e.g. "free" phones) rather than long term costs.
they aren't even close to making their target of 10 million phones in the first year.
Erm, their goal is to sell 10 million phones in 2008. It's technically true that they "aren't even close" to that, inasmuch as they have currently sold 0 phones in 2008.
You know, I've always wondered why many self-proclaimed libertarian types are so against regulating emissions.
Does Greg Mankiw count as a libertarian? He and many others have been advocating raising taxes on pollution to compensate for the externalities. This is opposed by many on the right who have a knee-jerk opposition to all taxes (even though it would allow more economically harmful taxes to be cut), and by many on the left who dislike market mechanisms.
The thing is locked down it's ridiculous. But people stillbuy them...
Well, I bought mine only after the jailbreak and unlock processes were confirmed working. So I have an unlocked phone with a development environment and lots of native apps. Now, Apple may foolishly try to break support for this stuff in a future update, but I've come up with a brilliant countermeasure of not installing said update.
But what is the joke? Why say anything? I really don't get it.
No joke. It just sounds like the culture in your group is to do the minimum required to satisfy the dress code. You're an outlier, so you get noticed, and as the GP said the same thing would probably happen if a male showed up dressed unusually well.
The same thing happened in reverse to me. During the interval when our new and more corporate management was dropping a bunch of hints that they wanted us to dress "more professionally", but before the dress code was officially added to the employee handbook, I got some comments for being one of the few people continuing to wear jeans. (I'll work late when needed, or I'll wear uncomfortable clothes. Pick one). But nobody was being insulting or hostile, they were just noticing something out of the ordinary.
(Tangent: if casual clothes are so terrible, why are they often ok on Friday? Nobody has an "Embezzlement Friday" or a "Swear at Customers Friday")
It's likely that those applications would be the first of any to receive an official endorsement from Apple, according to Jobs' comments, as those that require Internet access could threaten the 'high standard' of experience customers have come to expect with the iPhone.
That's rather amusing when compared to his earlier pitch of "Web 2.0 apps are all you need".
More realistically, what happens when thousands of developers start making awful applications for the iPhone and potential customers see how crappy apps crash and ruin the iPhone's functionality?
I don't understand why this argument is always trotted out for phones but not PCs. Bad PC software (either actual malware or just buggy code) can potentially do more damage since it'll likely have access to more personal data and CPU and network resources, but (almost) nobody considers prohibiting third party applications to be a reasonable solution.
trust me, I'd love that option; a Mac Mini without OS X, or any of its built-in applications, without the Apple keyboard, mouse, or display -- something I would actually buy quite a lot of!
The mini doesn't come with a keyboard or mouse or display, and it's easy to wipe OS X and install Linux or Windows. Even ignoring the bundled software it's a good value if you're looking for that form factor; a system76 Koala with comparable specs to the $600 mini would be over $900.
I draw the line when they begin interfering with the development of fundamental new technologies that will be used in countless devices collectively worth trillions of dollars to "protect" a measly few billion dollars of entertainment revenue.
***Applause***
If these rent-seekers had their way, we'd never have heard of Steve Jobs or Woz because the equipment they hacked on would have been restricted to "licensed" "professionals". Larry Page and Sergey Brin would have been shut down or thrown in prison for massive unauthorized use of copyrighted materials. I'd honestly prefer just handing them eleventy billion dollars in taxpayer money. That would at least make the corporate welfare honest and efficient, and the rest of us could get back to inventing the future.