Sony just can't stop screwing itself over... the last news is that Sony will NOT be offering the service available to the Japanese to turn UMD discs into downloadable games. The reason? Low sales... piracy off course.
So... who is affected by this? The pirates? Non-Sony customers? No. They are not affected. ONLY paying customers who bought Sony products are affected by this, punished to either carry two consoles or re-buy their games at near full price.
Sony is already way behind in the west so to combat this, they provide less service to the few customers they managed to get. Either this shows an amazing disconnect with the real world by Sony exec's or they don't mind sending the message "If you buy our goods, you must be stupid enough to pay twice for the same game".
You might think Sony would have been warned to provide an amazing experience after the failure of the 3DS. It wasn't just the 3D element, it was that the device was a throwback compared to the DS XL and just didn't offer a smooth or indeed even better experience then a mobile phone, let alone a tablet. Look at the 3DS again, the screens are amazingly bad considered against the latest phones. They aren't worse then previous gameboys but those didn't have any other devices people ALREADY will have in their pocket anyway.
My prediction is that the Vita will fail even harder then the PSP. The line up games are again very slim pickings with some of the bigger games still not realizing that a MOBILE games is played OUTSIDE and that therefor the display needs to be extremely clear because a sudden ray of light while in a dark area can ruin the game. In normal PC/Console games such dark moments are called atmoshere, outside they are called "I can't see a fucking thing" and then your avatar dies.
Early GBA games required you to write down a very long hex key to "save" the game... game companies seem to barely have moved on from this... except android/ios game makers. Do you know WHY angry birds is such a success? Because you can easily start it, easily resume it. If the crappy controls cause a miss, you can easily restart with no punishment. The game would do EVEN better if you could skip levels. I never bought it because I never made it past a certain point so what is the point of buying even more levels?
Mobile games have to fun, easy to play, fast to start, playable on the go and in changing light and not punish the player for having to suddenly stop playing or even accidental input. And they should be cheap.
Sony hasn't gotten any of this right. The hardware looks okay but so did the original. And as said, this time there is a LOT more competition, competition that is often consider a MUST have (can you really exist anymore without a cellphone?). What about people without a smartphone you say? Right... they do exist but if you think the overlap between (refuses to buy a smartphone) and (wants to buy a fairly expensive handheld game console) is very large... well you must be working for Sony.
If you think 8.11 liters per 100 kilometers or a bit of 10km per liter on the highway is any good. When you do city driving, do you just squirt the fuel out the back for propulsion?
Apparently what you as the American public doesn't know is what efficiency is.
And quite often, when covering the US elections, the reporter finds a homeless person waving a flag for a Republican candidate who wants to use the homeless for fuel. There are an amazingly high number of dumb people among the poor and dumb people really believe it that THEY can make it rich someday... quite why when you are rich you need to worry about a few millions more or less in taxes is beyond me (and also beyond a rich guy like Buffet) but the poor believe it. There is an incredibly large group who believes that a certain politician making more then 100k a year is ready for the poor house if his taxes go up a bit.
Voters are dumb. There is a reason the people who introduced democracy never intended for everyone to be a voter. Not the Greeks and not the Americans. Votes were once restricted to people who could at least be presumed to have more then two braincells to rub together. In modern times... well that homeless guy can vote...
But you take the cake. So basically you are giving movie proof that people abuse sensibilities about searches to hide things and then call out the TSA for searching in those places?
Oh wait, I get it, you are one of those people that believe the police should play fair and not try to hard to catch criminals?
He doesn't post anything substantial because he can't. His own rant proofs copyright is not needed to ensure art survives. The post DesScorp below is also a snob, ignoring folk art, such as song and story telling which survived and thrived perfectly fine without patronage or copyright. The dutch "Smartlap" (tearjerker song) was a type of troubadour, those songs are still sung, they were not high art with patrons but simple performers making their living from live concerts.
Ah, but good living... of course, just because you sing a song, you and 5 generations of your kids (see yesterday story about perputual copyright) should be millionaires. Forget nurses doing stuff nobody else wants to do and saving human lives day in, day out for minimum wage. The true social injustice of our time is artists not being able to afford another Ferrari.
Technology has changed art and will continue to do so regardless of what some dinosaurs might desire. It isn't just recent stuff like the cassette tape but far older stuff like cheap musical instruments, printed sheet music, mechanical instruments. Even things like the movies going from silent to talkies. Once each movie theather had a pit for the band to play music to accompany the silent movie. Then, long before talkies were introduced, record players took over to save costs and put an artist out of work. Movies themselves killed Vaudeville.
Tech changed and the world adapted. Copyright was a result of tech changes so why shouldn't new tech changes not change copyright?
Trolls like brit74 are living under a bridge trying to pretend the world is unchanging and that laws which were once valid should remain valid indefinitely. He can't cope with a changing world, his kind would have kept slavery going just because that is the way things are.
Copyright is doomed in a world where digital media can be perfectly reproduced by anyone at trivial costs. It isn't even a case anymore about whether copyright is just or not. It ain't just either that 1% of the world lives with more money then they could ever possibly spent while millions starve.
The invention of the gun forever changed murder. Shooting someone is easy, far easier then choking them to death, feeling them struggle as you choke the life out of them. Shoot them and they just fall over and that is it. We haven't been able to outlaw the idea of the gun and even gun control has been impossible.
So what change do we have of putting digital copying back in the bag?
I have a proposal, every piece of recorded music must be taxed and the tax sent to live performers and instrument makers. And every printed music sheet needs a tax to compensate the monks who used to copy these works by hand. And the monks need to pay those who passed music on through teach and oral tradition. All the way back so the first caveman can live comfortable on his original art.
The content industry needs to adapt or it will go the way of other industries before that have been made obsolete or un-economical by the march of progress. If this means that commercial art dies... then so be it. Humanity will survive without and whatever comes in its place might even be greater. Or not but trying to stop the future is futile.
If you were to suggest at say a shipping company that at the end of the year you dump all the unshipped packages in the ocean and start with a clean slate... welll, some might do that but it is not policy! Just practice.
But to be serious, the idea that you got more work then people to do it and that this is done year after year is insane. You can't have any sensible planning this way. It means projects that are not high priority have no chance of being completed, so they are elevated and this just adds to the load.
There are only two solutions, either optimize your production methods OR increase the amount of staff working on it. Yeah yeah, training new staff costs time but if that is your excuse, just resign and kill yourself. Understaffing is only fixed by the company going bust, so if you don't fix it now, you will only have even less hours to train new people in the future.
You can of course start to reduce the number of projects but they SHOULD all be mandated by business needs and anyway, changing this when you are already overloaded will just consume even more resources and telling people THEIR needs are not important... well, do you want to continue working at said company?
Any other methods are just putting your head in the sand and hoping that with continued growth of the company, customer base, feature set and code complexity, things will magically get better.
You don't get what a provisional approval means. The FCC said, we don't know if what you want to do is possible but we are not going to say no right away, if you want, you can proof your claim.
Had the FCC not done this, they would have been a dinosaur, an unmovable object on the road to progress. Instead they allowed a test, a test to prove that what the FCC believed (that the proposal would not work) was wrong.
It is like a provisional driving license or are you going to claim that if you get a provisional driving license, the state is obliged to give you a full license regardless of whether you pass the test?
Provisional licenses are pretty common, often you need a license to do something for real but you first need to do it in a test to do but to test it you need a license. To get around this, you issue a provisional license. It allows test and allows people to challenge assumptions but if you fail the test, so be it. Unless you want to sue your examiner for failing you.
The warrant system works pretty well. It is not perfect but it was never meant to be. There are abuses and innocent people get affected but the justice system was designed like this. Only the naive think you can have a legal system that can at least be somewhat effective without ever inconveniencing anyone. You might get your entire house torn up because of a wrongly issued warrant and that bloody sucks and compensation may be way to low but it is the price for the legal system we got. Better hope that like most, you never notice how it is to be subject of a police investigation.
BUT why chance this? The warrant system WORKS. It is effective enough and has proven checks and balances. The only reason to change this is if you want to chance the way the legal system works. Now there are two reasons to do it. To make it better or to make it worse. Somehow I can't see how removing warrants and oversight and review from searches is going to make the legal system any better. More effective?
The legal system works because most of us have no real reason not to make it work. In holland a recent news story was that of a man in a car trying to abuct several kids and succeeding with one. The police investigate and during their investigation they encountered two men, one who refused to let the police into his house (had a hennep farm inside) and one who refused to show ID... this wasted police time if nothing else. Cops had to check out why these two men were refusing to cooperate rather then simply going on to the next house/person to search for the abductor.
It is safe to assume to police didn't just question these two men. The rest of the people investigated were innocent and had nothing to fear from the law, so could be easily eliminated.
If anything can be searched any time by anyone, encryption will become the norm, so even if the police get a warrant, they can't eliminate the innocent in a search and will have to spend a lot more time investigating. Make everyone a criminal and finding the serious criminal will become a lot harder.
I am not a privacy nutter, I think that the justice system having special powers is the correct way to go about them, but there must be check and balances and the process open to outside review to make sure abuses do not happen. This is not new, this is the current situation. I am VERY suspicious of anyone who claims this has to change. Extra ordinary powers require extra ordinary reasons. So far I have not heard any.
That campaign really had a lot of success. The only people who buy AMD are geeks who only do it when it gives a good price performance ratio. It does for me, going AMD simply means you can spend your budget on a fast SSD which will do a hell of a lot more for your performance then a faster more expensive intel CPU with a regular HD.
But people like me are the exception and AMD never really managed to remove "a computer has an intel inside" from the consumers mind. Just try your local electronic store.
Netbooks were a chance, AMD didn't put restrictions on its netbooks but they failed to push high end netbooks before Intel again stole their thunder with smart books. My netbook has got 8gb in it, it makes it a very smooth machine, just light and cheap enough to lug around and not worry about it getting dented or worse, stolen. Netbooks partially failed because they sold with slow HD's and tiny amounts of memory, hurting their performance no end.
AMD just never had the clout to sell its chips on even terms. And it is sad because Intel dropped the ball completely when they believed they had no competition. There is a reason that 64 bit linux is report as AMD64. Intel failed and AMD delivered but for AMD to have truly broken through they need a long string of victories and no losses like Bulldozer.
If AMD wants to succeed, they might consider something that Intel is also thinking of doing. Intel is having trouble gettings its chips into tablets and phones especially, so they have considered making their own... AMD could do a lot better getting their CPU's in PC's if they started selling them. Control the whole supply line and pass the savings on to the consumer and beat Intel and Intel Inside PC makers on price. Intel can't do that for fear of pissing of all its customers but AMD doesn't have many bridges to burn.
Yes, making PC's is a very low margin industry but that is partly because you are buying all the parts from third parties. AMD wouldn't be doing that. The profit on the CPU inside the PC would be part of the profit of their PC. The profit on the graphics card would be part of the profits on the PC.
Risky and unconventional but unless THEY build the PC, they are always going to have a hard time getting their CPU into the PC.
Isn't Sweden that is prosecuting Assange on behalve of its American masters? Or went after the pirate bay which wasn't breaking its own local laws on behalve of its Amercan masters?
At least Americans can vote out their leaders, Swedes can only vote for which puppet is stuck on the hand.
I can only guess that teachers in Arizona are not in the habit of ripping off nipple shields... so what is this really guarding against? Bad language? Most teachers have to look up the curse words of kids.
No, this isn't about teachers mis-behaving. This is about art, sexual education and the "wrong" kind of books. There are plenty of parents who want to sanitize all education so that little Timmy doesn't learn anything that might upset his parents and this is the way to do it. Don't bother banning books, art or subjects, simply say that undecent things are not allowed and then watch teachers censor themselves to not loose their jobs.
A few years ago two old forgers, father and son, were caught. They did masterful work but their real master stroke was in authenticating the items. How do you proof something is yours and is legit? Well, you shows that you, or rather, someone long death in your family, bought it legit at an auction.
How? They used an old and real auction catalog, pointed to an item description that was similar to the item they had forged and went with a story like my father bought this item here, what do you think it is worth if we wanted to sell it? It worked wonders. The documents were 100% legit and therefor in no doubt, they just weren't related.
If you want to sell these bonds, you have to come up with a convincing story of why you have trillions worth of bonds. You don't just dump them in a shopping bag and get payed. A scam is about the details and a period container complete with dust is a nice detail.
Mind you, you would have to be bloody greedy to believe such a scam but there are plenty of greedy people on the planet.
People often forget there client card at my super market (AH) and I happily lend them mine. Must give them some interesting stats.
The problem is that marketeers really think this matter. Lets examine this particular case for just how idiotic it is.
Target profiles its EXISTING customers to be able to bombard them with coupons for products these same customers already pass everyday... Can win these customers for live? YOU ALREADY GOT THEM! And now instead of them buying the products they already seen at full price, you are reducing the price for no good reason.
TV shows just how desperate marketeers are to prove they matter, the program you are watching interrupted by ads, for the program you were trying to watch followed by overlays of the next program, so please stay tuned... I would if you didn't ruin the program with all this begging. It is like going to a restaurant and having the chef come over after every bite to ask if you are enjoying yourself.
Marketing doesn't sell products, marketing sells marketing. I am not saying ads don't work but rather that the constant overloading of ads, does not work. Check this for yourself, if an adblock takes longer then it used to, do you continue watching? Once ads were singular, to short to flick away. But the "going to the toilet" during the advertising is now a way of life and has been for decades. And here poor advertisers are trying to sell their products to viewers who are studying their toilet door.
Myself? I barely bother with TV anymore. If for some masochistic reason I want to see what happens, I download it and get rid of ads altogether. I have ad block installed and ghostery. NOT because I mind being tracked so much but because I just can't stand the interuptions and delays that slow ads and scripts cause.
This Target campaign targets existing customers into buy stuff they have to buy anyway and ignores new customers altogether... BRILLIANT. I know how effective it is, some marketeers and statisticians got payed big bugs. Mission accomplished. Any actual new customers that make up for the costs and potential lawsuits? (Oh you just wait till they get it wrong or target a woman who had an abortion, or didn't want her family to know or had a miscarriage).
There are some real idiots on Slashdot who can't think outside the box that is their mothers basement.
Wood burning has some nasty side effects. First off, wood isn't all that efficient for burning, meaning you need a lot of it. Neither can you turn it on/off as you want, meaning you waste a lot of energy. Consider a gas grill to a coal one. The coals needs to first burn up, then glow and finally cool down. The gas grill is hot in an instant and the moment you stop using it, you can turn of the supply of fuel.
The second problem is that wood is not a renawable resource if you use it up to fast. Trees only grow so fast and it is VERY easy to use them up faster then they can regrow. Land is also expensive and often owned by someone. You can't just go around collecting wood from anywhere and the more people there are, the more this is true. Removing trees even if you intend to replace them also causes climate change. Don't believe this? The rain forest causes most of its own rain, trees evaporate a hell of a lot of water but also capture a lot of it again, it is a complex system that can easily turn forest to desert if upset. See the expanding Sahara as an example.
Then there is another issue, collecting wood is a labor intensive task, often falling down to the women. Gathering it means they can't go to school, can't do anything else. It also forces them to go outside their village, in Africa especially this opens them to attack. Not every area in the world is safe to go outside. One of the reasons for putting wells inside villages is pricesly this, to protect the women and stop them to having to spent every waking hour collecting basic resources.
The solar stove is a good idea. There is just one snag. Those making the decisions ain't the ones who would benefit from it. The mentioned problems of cooking outside sunlight hours are trivial to solve by adjusting how you eat. But the ones in charge don't want to do that, the old ways suit them just fine. They can afford to send their women out to collect wood, and if they get attacked, they are just killed to spare the family shame. Never underestimate the evilness of a village elder.
Change will come but it will come slowly, just as it did in our own history. It isn't so long ago we cooked on wood and coal and suffered from it. Research the clean air act of Britain. You would be suprised how recent it is.
Take it slow with this solar cooker, don't get the adults or old people involved at all, show the kids at school. Those girls will one day have to buy their own stove and if they have learned they can cook at least some percentage of their food without having to spend a fortune on fuel, some might just do it when they got the chance.
Similar things happened in our own history, the bicycle was a huge liberator. While the proper women thought they were indecent, lots of young women took them as it allowed them to take jobs far further from home and thus increase the earning capacity of their family. If you get payed by the hour, any hour not spend travelling means more money and the further your range, the more options you have.
These things go faster then you might think but slower then you might wish. The solution for the solar cooker is already known and used. Hot stones. Heat a stone, it retains the heat for long enough to continue cooking after the fire has gone out (sun has gone down). And people adjusted to this. Just takes time for the old to be replaced by the young.
The Dutch Guilder (Gulden) had its cent removed years ago and when the Euro was introduced it wasn't long before it was agreed the Euro cent would no longer be used either. The latter is a bit more of a hassle since other countries haven't joined but in Holland it works pretty well.
Prices are till in cents but the deal is that if you pay in cash, it is rounded off. On the whole it balances out although if you are REALLY cheap, you pay eletronically when the rounding is in the shops favor and cash when it is in your favor. Items that you tend to buy on their own are already at a 5 center round off. So a cola would cost 95 instead of 99 cents.
It just makes sense, inflation makes prices go up but currency stays the same. So why keep amounts around that just don't make sense anymore? When the euro cent was briefly used everyone here quickly saw how fucking annoying they were, you soon ended up with a huge pile of worthless coins. You have to go pretty far back in time to remember being able to buy anything for a cent. I can barely remember being able to buy a single piece of gum for a nickle. Yes, that meant if you saved up 5 cents you had a piece of gum... but those days are gone. Move on.
It will be intresting to read the reactions on this subject from Americans. Americans are after all paying for these expensive pennies with their taxes and if there is anything an American hates it is paying taxes. So, what excuses will those people come up with to keep cent/penny around? Nostalgia?
In a way this shows the failure of democracy. This kind of move should be left to wise men, not people who feel nostalgic for a by gone era when you got a shiny penny from your granddad to buy candy. Maybe if democracy wasn't secret, then those 55% could be made to pay for the costs of making the pennies directly out of their own pocket. Wonder how many would still be nostalgic then?
The paranormal and other frauds claim amazing things that just don't fit in our universe. The most obvious is the capacity for prediction of the future. If you can predict the future, why are you not rolling in money from winning every lottery? Or made it big on the stock market?
The defence against this simple method of proofing your supernatural powers is either that your power can't be monotized OR that you don't think it is ethical.
Randi breaks that defence wide open by given these fraudsters a clear way to monotize their power AND do it in a highly ethical way. So why don't they? Even if you ain;t intrested in the money, you could donate it to a good cause. So why don't people who claim to have powers not claim 1 million dollars that is theirs by rights if they can proof it?
They don't, because they can't. There are no super natural powers. but fools like you can't accept that, you want your beard in the sky and hate anyone who dispels the delusion.
Early radio phones, even early mobiles were a disaster to use. A car phone wasn't always just your mobile in your car, it was a major installation.
Early mobile phones came in a suitcase. So... where did you leave all the stuff in your normal case? Carry 2 suitcases? Not very high powered right?
But tech progressed and right now with bluetooth headsets and voice dialing we are getting damned close to the perceived convenience of Star Trek communicators.
I think tablets are a dead end. The future is retina displays and neural input. It is obvious really, holding a screen and a keyboard in whatever combinations just ain't convenient. Laptops ain't any better, we just got used to their inconvenience. If you see some people type on a phone, you can easily forget just how fucking akward it is to use... but we move on.
I think tablets are the very early ancestors of anywhere computing. Not anywhere as in anywhere I sit down but anywhere as in on the move. Not traditional computing work tasks such as writing a document or doing design, but informational and entertainment computing. Google maps has completely replaced my need for a map. I used to have several. Recently threw them out. Don't need them. Not that I use Maps all that often but that is the real convenience, when I need it, it is right there, up to date and ready to use.
Music, movies and games. We used to have to sit down to play them or bring very specialized travel sets with us. With a phone/tablet, you can play almost any game, wherever you want, when you want. Yes, they are akward and simplistic and underpowered. But that will chance. I still got an old phone that can play snakes, compared to that, modern mobile games are a million times better. NEITHER is yet anywhere as convenient and reliable as old LCD games or as rich and powerful as PC games but... getting there.
I remember the Walkman... it was all the rage for a while and then it died. It wasn't until years later that personal audio made a come back with the portable MP3 player. Why?
Walkman's just weren't convenient with their tapes, it takes a lot of work to mix a tape and then you have the same limitted tracks in the same order unless you bring bulky tapes (check tape size vs MP3 player). Only the hardcore persisted, some bought mini-disc but the majority didn't bother.
Now the MP3 player is back with a vengeance.
I see a LOT of people with iPads that barely use them, they just ain't that comfortable to use right now or all that useful but that will change. Those cheap nasty headphones of the walkman (orange foam pads) have evolved into in-ear buds and massive headphones depending on taste. Tablets will evolve too. How? If I knew that I would be to busy being filthy rich to post on slashdot.
Everytime there is a story about car black boxes and insurance, people complain about the invasion of privacy. At all other times they complain that they pay insurance for other people...
Why should MY ticket payed with a secure and cheap payment option pay for YOUR incredibly insecure and costly credit card? I worked on payment systems and the cost difference is extreme. Credit Cards charge a percentage, have chargebacks with high fees while EU payment systems have a flat rate of cents with no chargeback without a serious investigation.
Ryan Air just offers what people think they want, the cheapest possible ticket. Customers just don't realize how much they rely on all the "free" extra's others offer. It is budget and means it. It is like ordering a really healthy meal and then being really served one. UGH! A healthy salad has little to no dressing, you are eating rabbit food.
Everyone of the items you mention cost money, if you want them, you got to pay for them. And you also end up paying for the overhead of choosing (tracking all those options cost money) and for the increased cost of those options because fewer people use them.
But you knew all this, and still bought a Ryan air ticket. Because you thought you could save a few bucks. Then when you landed, you bought a 5 euro cup of coffee. Right?
I guess a lot of people really want their shiny. But it ain't all that hard to at least TRY to limit slave labor in your purchases. Lots of stuff is made outside of China. It is like the Raspberry PI claim that they couldn't find anywhere to produce it except China... right.
Where is the Arduino produced? In Italy. All of it? Probably not but at least it is not totally outsourced to China for the sake of lowest possible costs.
There are other phone, mp3 and even tablet makers that produce in Korea and Japan. Some parts may come from China but at least they try.
But a lot of people prefer just to look the other way, make excuses and claim "ich habe es nicht gewust". Well, the Indians probably are happier on their reserve.
These excuses have always been used. At least they got work, our own labor laws were pretty bad, they don't know any better, it is their culture.
Only this time we are not just screwing some minority, this time we are screwing ourselves. Right now, if you try to google "non-china made tablet" you only get articles telling you about Chinese made tablets... and how crappy they are... and how the first china made iPad killers are just around the corner.
Does that matter?
Japan was once the place that cheap crap came from and stabs at Sony aside, that is no longer the case. High quality tech is not just produced by Japan on its own initiave, it is researched and invented. Nobody seriously could still think of Japan as a backwards nation with the only selling point hard workers and cheap labor.
And this change hit the western economies pretty hard. Where are the western TV makers? Until MS entered the market, console makers were ALL Japanese for a LONG time. Granted, you could say that all these consoles are really IBM but how many people make their money of Nintendo/Sony in Japan vs the US? How many wage packages are taken home? Not the 100.000 dollar type, just the average salary with which people pay their rent, their taxes and send their kids to school?
If China pulls of what Japan and Korea and even Taiwan did before, go from just cheap labor to technically advanced countries with their own products... then the west is done for.
It is already happening. In Holland the story at the moment is the closing of a car factory. What does it produce? Daf (dutch)... no. Volvo? Volkswagen? Any european or American name?
No. Mitshubishi. Right now the Dutch government is begging the Japenese to keep some production in Holland. And talking about changing labour laws and wages to attract the business?
If you can't see the irony, then that explains a lot about peoples attitude towards the global economy.
And it is already to late, if you are old, you might remember the worry about Japanese buying up western assets. Right now, the Chinese government is already supporting the western economies with massive loans. If they pull the switch for whatever reason, the western economies will think the recent banking crisis was a tiny pimple on the charts.
The claim by Raspberry PI that they could not produce in the west is either a damning statement about the willingness of people to pay a few pennies extra OR shows just how much the west has collapsed in its production capacity.
If you can no longer buy tech or even have it produced anymore, then you are now a third world nation. The Brits really believed pre-WW2 that they could outsource farming. Why would you want to sully the british isles with farms when those grounds could be used for hunting and tea parties and let Americans and Australians do the hard work (and make the real money).
WW2 put a stop to that before it was to late but it is happening again. Farms are closing down because they can't compete with cheaper imports. It makes perfect short term economic sense. Just better hope that nothing happens to those supply lines. Fuel costs, a blockade or a natural disaster in another part of the world.
I just had an image of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates going down on Larry Page and Sergey Brin (which by the way, google had to guess at being the right answer for being the founder of google) in a nerd love fest...
I am not a great fan of crypto nerds because I know just how idiotic the idea of a darknet is in a dictatorship. A darknet lights up light a christmas tree at your ISP if they can be bothered and in places in the world, they can be bothered. So what if it is encrypted? That never stopped the goons.
So... what do we need a free internet for? To AVOID getting that far. It would be nice if humanity always veered towards doing what was right for the greater good, if all journalists always could be counted on to ask the hard questions. That politicians don't look away because they think it helps their cause in the long term.
A free internet is a new tool to share information outside the main stream, it is as revolutionary as the printing press and the post office (For women's lib, the post office suddenly allowed them to communicate with anyone without needing permission) before. But the printing press was used to reproduce child porn and the post office was used to distribute it. Not so long ago (70's) child porn (and I am not talking David Hamilton style stuff) was produced fairly openly and sold. But this was done through tech that allowed Martin Luther to take the bible out of the church and into the domain of the common people AND to spread his anti-semitism that would on day lead to the holocaust.
Tech isn't good or bad but banning tech because there are not so nice uses for it, that is silly and dangerous. Silly because you can't put the cat back in the bag. People have tried it. The printing press, mechanical harvesters, cars. They all been attacked and are now a part of our lives. The internet allows anyone to communicate with anyone else at a near neg-liable cost. But this also means spammers and scammers can reach an audience in the past even Hollywood could not dream off. 911 from Nigeria might have negative overtones but it also means that people from what is not one of the most developed nations in the world can deal as equals with those developed nations. Ever tried calling Africa on the phone? Sent a wire? A letter? Sure, a percentage uses that connection for scams but how much information is being shared for the good of both sides as well?
And you can't have one without the other. Either you allow everyone to communicate or you don't. The makers of Freenet faced this, the simple fact is that the only real use for Freenet in the west at the moment is to share files that you can't share anywhere else and for a LOOOOOOONG time, that only was child porn. If you ever use Tor you can see just what it contains, hate (nazi wannabe's), a tiny bit of drugs for those who think the police has nothing better to do and under aged porn.
You can say you want to get rid of that part of Freenet but you can't. Either you have free communication or your don't. Child porn is even nastier then terrorism, I can say I am willing to take the risk of being blown up but I can't accept that risk on behalf of someone elses child.
Child porn is real and it is big, torrents are pretty clean and usenet can be realtively easy administred but as said, Tor and Freenet are full of it and so are other P2P programs. You can combat it easily, just restrict all traffic to non-encrypted, known content that is filtered and block any unknown traffic. Hiding data in data? Can't be done if the data is known, just make the Internet the Internet Microsoft and Apple dream off, all content pre-approved.
Do you think that is impossible? HA! IT IS ALREADY HERE. The movies you watch, the TV you watch, the music you listen to, the articles you read. ALL have been screened to make sure it is "safe" for you to consume. Hell, we don't even need the state for it, we do it ourselves right here on Slashdot all the time.
That is how tempting it is. If you are for a free internet, browse slashdot at -11.
It is tempting to want to get rid of child porn and you can do it, you just have to sacrifice everyones freedom and make it just a bit easier for a wannabe dictator to one day get away with it. But how do you def
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Sony just can't stop screwing itself over... the last news is that Sony will NOT be offering the service available to the Japanese to turn UMD discs into downloadable games. The reason? Low sales... piracy off course.
So... who is affected by this? The pirates? Non-Sony customers? No. They are not affected. ONLY paying customers who bought Sony products are affected by this, punished to either carry two consoles or re-buy their games at near full price.
Sony is already way behind in the west so to combat this, they provide less service to the few customers they managed to get. Either this shows an amazing disconnect with the real world by Sony exec's or they don't mind sending the message "If you buy our goods, you must be stupid enough to pay twice for the same game".
You might think Sony would have been warned to provide an amazing experience after the failure of the 3DS. It wasn't just the 3D element, it was that the device was a throwback compared to the DS XL and just didn't offer a smooth or indeed even better experience then a mobile phone, let alone a tablet. Look at the 3DS again, the screens are amazingly bad considered against the latest phones. They aren't worse then previous gameboys but those didn't have any other devices people ALREADY will have in their pocket anyway.
My prediction is that the Vita will fail even harder then the PSP. The line up games are again very slim pickings with some of the bigger games still not realizing that a MOBILE games is played OUTSIDE and that therefor the display needs to be extremely clear because a sudden ray of light while in a dark area can ruin the game. In normal PC/Console games such dark moments are called atmoshere, outside they are called "I can't see a fucking thing" and then your avatar dies.
Early GBA games required you to write down a very long hex key to "save" the game... game companies seem to barely have moved on from this... except android/ios game makers. Do you know WHY angry birds is such a success? Because you can easily start it, easily resume it. If the crappy controls cause a miss, you can easily restart with no punishment. The game would do EVEN better if you could skip levels. I never bought it because I never made it past a certain point so what is the point of buying even more levels?
Mobile games have to fun, easy to play, fast to start, playable on the go and in changing light and not punish the player for having to suddenly stop playing or even accidental input. And they should be cheap.
Sony hasn't gotten any of this right. The hardware looks okay but so did the original. And as said, this time there is a LOT more competition, competition that is often consider a MUST have (can you really exist anymore without a cellphone?). What about people without a smartphone you say? Right... they do exist but if you think the overlap between (refuses to buy a smartphone) and (wants to buy a fairly expensive handheld game console) is very large... well you must be working for Sony.
You want men to treated as kids instead? Why exactly in your example is the man NOT responsible?
Double standards I guess in favor of your own gender.
If you think 8.11 liters per 100 kilometers or a bit of 10km per liter on the highway is any good. When you do city driving, do you just squirt the fuel out the back for propulsion?
Apparently what you as the American public doesn't know is what efficiency is.
And quite often, when covering the US elections, the reporter finds a homeless person waving a flag for a Republican candidate who wants to use the homeless for fuel. There are an amazingly high number of dumb people among the poor and dumb people really believe it that THEY can make it rich someday... quite why when you are rich you need to worry about a few millions more or less in taxes is beyond me (and also beyond a rich guy like Buffet) but the poor believe it. There is an incredibly large group who believes that a certain politician making more then 100k a year is ready for the poor house if his taxes go up a bit.
Voters are dumb. There is a reason the people who introduced democracy never intended for everyone to be a voter. Not the Greeks and not the Americans. Votes were once restricted to people who could at least be presumed to have more then two braincells to rub together. In modern times... well that homeless guy can vote...
But you take the cake. So basically you are giving movie proof that people abuse sensibilities about searches to hide things and then call out the TSA for searching in those places?
Oh wait, I get it, you are one of those people that believe the police should play fair and not try to hard to catch criminals?
He doesn't post anything substantial because he can't. His own rant proofs copyright is not needed to ensure art survives. The post DesScorp below is also a snob, ignoring folk art, such as song and story telling which survived and thrived perfectly fine without patronage or copyright. The dutch "Smartlap" (tearjerker song) was a type of troubadour, those songs are still sung, they were not high art with patrons but simple performers making their living from live concerts.
Ah, but good living... of course, just because you sing a song, you and 5 generations of your kids (see yesterday story about perputual copyright) should be millionaires. Forget nurses doing stuff nobody else wants to do and saving human lives day in, day out for minimum wage. The true social injustice of our time is artists not being able to afford another Ferrari.
Technology has changed art and will continue to do so regardless of what some dinosaurs might desire. It isn't just recent stuff like the cassette tape but far older stuff like cheap musical instruments, printed sheet music, mechanical instruments. Even things like the movies going from silent to talkies. Once each movie theather had a pit for the band to play music to accompany the silent movie. Then, long before talkies were introduced, record players took over to save costs and put an artist out of work. Movies themselves killed Vaudeville.
Tech changed and the world adapted. Copyright was a result of tech changes so why shouldn't new tech changes not change copyright?
Trolls like brit74 are living under a bridge trying to pretend the world is unchanging and that laws which were once valid should remain valid indefinitely. He can't cope with a changing world, his kind would have kept slavery going just because that is the way things are.
Copyright is doomed in a world where digital media can be perfectly reproduced by anyone at trivial costs. It isn't even a case anymore about whether copyright is just or not. It ain't just either that 1% of the world lives with more money then they could ever possibly spent while millions starve.
The invention of the gun forever changed murder. Shooting someone is easy, far easier then choking them to death, feeling them struggle as you choke the life out of them. Shoot them and they just fall over and that is it. We haven't been able to outlaw the idea of the gun and even gun control has been impossible.
So what change do we have of putting digital copying back in the bag?
I have a proposal, every piece of recorded music must be taxed and the tax sent to live performers and instrument makers. And every printed music sheet needs a tax to compensate the monks who used to copy these works by hand. And the monks need to pay those who passed music on through teach and oral tradition. All the way back so the first caveman can live comfortable on his original art.
The content industry needs to adapt or it will go the way of other industries before that have been made obsolete or un-economical by the march of progress. If this means that commercial art dies... then so be it. Humanity will survive without and whatever comes in its place might even be greater. Or not but trying to stop the future is futile.
If you were to suggest at say a shipping company that at the end of the year you dump all the unshipped packages in the ocean and start with a clean slate... welll, some might do that but it is not policy! Just practice.
But to be serious, the idea that you got more work then people to do it and that this is done year after year is insane. You can't have any sensible planning this way. It means projects that are not high priority have no chance of being completed, so they are elevated and this just adds to the load.
There are only two solutions, either optimize your production methods OR increase the amount of staff working on it. Yeah yeah, training new staff costs time but if that is your excuse, just resign and kill yourself. Understaffing is only fixed by the company going bust, so if you don't fix it now, you will only have even less hours to train new people in the future.
You can of course start to reduce the number of projects but they SHOULD all be mandated by business needs and anyway, changing this when you are already overloaded will just consume even more resources and telling people THEIR needs are not important... well, do you want to continue working at said company?
Any other methods are just putting your head in the sand and hoping that with continued growth of the company, customer base, feature set and code complexity, things will magically get better.
CCDP vs CCCP. So close. (CCCP was better known in the west as the USSR, you can see it on aircraft and cosmonauts)
You don't get what a provisional approval means. The FCC said, we don't know if what you want to do is possible but we are not going to say no right away, if you want, you can proof your claim.
Had the FCC not done this, they would have been a dinosaur, an unmovable object on the road to progress. Instead they allowed a test, a test to prove that what the FCC believed (that the proposal would not work) was wrong.
It is like a provisional driving license or are you going to claim that if you get a provisional driving license, the state is obliged to give you a full license regardless of whether you pass the test?
Provisional licenses are pretty common, often you need a license to do something for real but you first need to do it in a test to do but to test it you need a license. To get around this, you issue a provisional license. It allows test and allows people to challenge assumptions but if you fail the test, so be it. Unless you want to sue your examiner for failing you.
The warrant system works pretty well. It is not perfect but it was never meant to be. There are abuses and innocent people get affected but the justice system was designed like this. Only the naive think you can have a legal system that can at least be somewhat effective without ever inconveniencing anyone. You might get your entire house torn up because of a wrongly issued warrant and that bloody sucks and compensation may be way to low but it is the price for the legal system we got. Better hope that like most, you never notice how it is to be subject of a police investigation.
BUT why chance this? The warrant system WORKS. It is effective enough and has proven checks and balances. The only reason to change this is if you want to chance the way the legal system works. Now there are two reasons to do it. To make it better or to make it worse. Somehow I can't see how removing warrants and oversight and review from searches is going to make the legal system any better. More effective?
The legal system works because most of us have no real reason not to make it work. In holland a recent news story was that of a man in a car trying to abuct several kids and succeeding with one. The police investigate and during their investigation they encountered two men, one who refused to let the police into his house (had a hennep farm inside) and one who refused to show ID... this wasted police time if nothing else. Cops had to check out why these two men were refusing to cooperate rather then simply going on to the next house/person to search for the abductor.
It is safe to assume to police didn't just question these two men. The rest of the people investigated were innocent and had nothing to fear from the law, so could be easily eliminated.
If anything can be searched any time by anyone, encryption will become the norm, so even if the police get a warrant, they can't eliminate the innocent in a search and will have to spend a lot more time investigating. Make everyone a criminal and finding the serious criminal will become a lot harder.
I am not a privacy nutter, I think that the justice system having special powers is the correct way to go about them, but there must be check and balances and the process open to outside review to make sure abuses do not happen. This is not new, this is the current situation. I am VERY suspicious of anyone who claims this has to change. Extra ordinary powers require extra ordinary reasons. So far I have not heard any.
That campaign really had a lot of success. The only people who buy AMD are geeks who only do it when it gives a good price performance ratio. It does for me, going AMD simply means you can spend your budget on a fast SSD which will do a hell of a lot more for your performance then a faster more expensive intel CPU with a regular HD.
But people like me are the exception and AMD never really managed to remove "a computer has an intel inside" from the consumers mind. Just try your local electronic store.
Netbooks were a chance, AMD didn't put restrictions on its netbooks but they failed to push high end netbooks before Intel again stole their thunder with smart books. My netbook has got 8gb in it, it makes it a very smooth machine, just light and cheap enough to lug around and not worry about it getting dented or worse, stolen. Netbooks partially failed because they sold with slow HD's and tiny amounts of memory, hurting their performance no end.
AMD just never had the clout to sell its chips on even terms. And it is sad because Intel dropped the ball completely when they believed they had no competition. There is a reason that 64 bit linux is report as AMD64. Intel failed and AMD delivered but for AMD to have truly broken through they need a long string of victories and no losses like Bulldozer.
If AMD wants to succeed, they might consider something that Intel is also thinking of doing. Intel is having trouble gettings its chips into tablets and phones especially, so they have considered making their own... AMD could do a lot better getting their CPU's in PC's if they started selling them. Control the whole supply line and pass the savings on to the consumer and beat Intel and Intel Inside PC makers on price. Intel can't do that for fear of pissing of all its customers but AMD doesn't have many bridges to burn.
Yes, making PC's is a very low margin industry but that is partly because you are buying all the parts from third parties. AMD wouldn't be doing that. The profit on the CPU inside the PC would be part of the profit of their PC. The profit on the graphics card would be part of the profits on the PC.
Risky and unconventional but unless THEY build the PC, they are always going to have a hard time getting their CPU into the PC.
Isn't Sweden that is prosecuting Assange on behalve of its American masters? Or went after the pirate bay which wasn't breaking its own local laws on behalve of its Amercan masters?
At least Americans can vote out their leaders, Swedes can only vote for which puppet is stuck on the hand.
I can only guess that teachers in Arizona are not in the habit of ripping off nipple shields... so what is this really guarding against? Bad language? Most teachers have to look up the curse words of kids.
No, this isn't about teachers mis-behaving. This is about art, sexual education and the "wrong" kind of books. There are plenty of parents who want to sanitize all education so that little Timmy doesn't learn anything that might upset his parents and this is the way to do it. Don't bother banning books, art or subjects, simply say that undecent things are not allowed and then watch teachers censor themselves to not loose their jobs.
Real nice.
A few years ago two old forgers, father and son, were caught. They did masterful work but their real master stroke was in authenticating the items. How do you proof something is yours and is legit? Well, you shows that you, or rather, someone long death in your family, bought it legit at an auction.
How? They used an old and real auction catalog, pointed to an item description that was similar to the item they had forged and went with a story like my father bought this item here, what do you think it is worth if we wanted to sell it? It worked wonders. The documents were 100% legit and therefor in no doubt, they just weren't related.
If you want to sell these bonds, you have to come up with a convincing story of why you have trillions worth of bonds. You don't just dump them in a shopping bag and get payed. A scam is about the details and a period container complete with dust is a nice detail.
Mind you, you would have to be bloody greedy to believe such a scam but there are plenty of greedy people on the planet.
People often forget there client card at my super market (AH) and I happily lend them mine. Must give them some interesting stats.
The problem is that marketeers really think this matter. Lets examine this particular case for just how idiotic it is.
Target profiles its EXISTING customers to be able to bombard them with coupons for products these same customers already pass everyday... Can win these customers for live? YOU ALREADY GOT THEM! And now instead of them buying the products they already seen at full price, you are reducing the price for no good reason.
TV shows just how desperate marketeers are to prove they matter, the program you are watching interrupted by ads, for the program you were trying to watch followed by overlays of the next program, so please stay tuned... I would if you didn't ruin the program with all this begging. It is like going to a restaurant and having the chef come over after every bite to ask if you are enjoying yourself.
Marketing doesn't sell products, marketing sells marketing. I am not saying ads don't work but rather that the constant overloading of ads, does not work. Check this for yourself, if an adblock takes longer then it used to, do you continue watching? Once ads were singular, to short to flick away. But the "going to the toilet" during the advertising is now a way of life and has been for decades. And here poor advertisers are trying to sell their products to viewers who are studying their toilet door.
Myself? I barely bother with TV anymore. If for some masochistic reason I want to see what happens, I download it and get rid of ads altogether. I have ad block installed and ghostery. NOT because I mind being tracked so much but because I just can't stand the interuptions and delays that slow ads and scripts cause.
This Target campaign targets existing customers into buy stuff they have to buy anyway and ignores new customers altogether... BRILLIANT. I know how effective it is, some marketeers and statisticians got payed big bugs. Mission accomplished. Any actual new customers that make up for the costs and potential lawsuits? (Oh you just wait till they get it wrong or target a woman who had an abortion, or didn't want her family to know or had a miscarriage).
There are some real idiots on Slashdot who can't think outside the box that is their mothers basement.
Wood burning has some nasty side effects. First off, wood isn't all that efficient for burning, meaning you need a lot of it. Neither can you turn it on/off as you want, meaning you waste a lot of energy. Consider a gas grill to a coal one. The coals needs to first burn up, then glow and finally cool down. The gas grill is hot in an instant and the moment you stop using it, you can turn of the supply of fuel.
The second problem is that wood is not a renawable resource if you use it up to fast. Trees only grow so fast and it is VERY easy to use them up faster then they can regrow. Land is also expensive and often owned by someone. You can't just go around collecting wood from anywhere and the more people there are, the more this is true. Removing trees even if you intend to replace them also causes climate change. Don't believe this? The rain forest causes most of its own rain, trees evaporate a hell of a lot of water but also capture a lot of it again, it is a complex system that can easily turn forest to desert if upset. See the expanding Sahara as an example.
Then there is another issue, collecting wood is a labor intensive task, often falling down to the women. Gathering it means they can't go to school, can't do anything else. It also forces them to go outside their village, in Africa especially this opens them to attack. Not every area in the world is safe to go outside. One of the reasons for putting wells inside villages is pricesly this, to protect the women and stop them to having to spent every waking hour collecting basic resources.
The solar stove is a good idea. There is just one snag. Those making the decisions ain't the ones who would benefit from it. The mentioned problems of cooking outside sunlight hours are trivial to solve by adjusting how you eat. But the ones in charge don't want to do that, the old ways suit them just fine. They can afford to send their women out to collect wood, and if they get attacked, they are just killed to spare the family shame. Never underestimate the evilness of a village elder.
Change will come but it will come slowly, just as it did in our own history. It isn't so long ago we cooked on wood and coal and suffered from it. Research the clean air act of Britain. You would be suprised how recent it is.
Take it slow with this solar cooker, don't get the adults or old people involved at all, show the kids at school. Those girls will one day have to buy their own stove and if they have learned they can cook at least some percentage of their food without having to spend a fortune on fuel, some might just do it when they got the chance.
Similar things happened in our own history, the bicycle was a huge liberator. While the proper women thought they were indecent, lots of young women took them as it allowed them to take jobs far further from home and thus increase the earning capacity of their family. If you get payed by the hour, any hour not spend travelling means more money and the further your range, the more options you have.
These things go faster then you might think but slower then you might wish. The solution for the solar cooker is already known and used. Hot stones. Heat a stone, it retains the heat for long enough to continue cooking after the fire has gone out (sun has gone down). And people adjusted to this. Just takes time for the old to be replaced by the young.
That depends, does that low bar show up on the cars sensors? No? Then what passes under the bar, passes. The rest, stays put.
Have you never seen any car chase movies?
The Dutch Guilder (Gulden) had its cent removed years ago and when the Euro was introduced it wasn't long before it was agreed the Euro cent would no longer be used either. The latter is a bit more of a hassle since other countries haven't joined but in Holland it works pretty well.
Prices are till in cents but the deal is that if you pay in cash, it is rounded off. On the whole it balances out although if you are REALLY cheap, you pay eletronically when the rounding is in the shops favor and cash when it is in your favor. Items that you tend to buy on their own are already at a 5 center round off. So a cola would cost 95 instead of 99 cents.
It just makes sense, inflation makes prices go up but currency stays the same. So why keep amounts around that just don't make sense anymore? When the euro cent was briefly used everyone here quickly saw how fucking annoying they were, you soon ended up with a huge pile of worthless coins. You have to go pretty far back in time to remember being able to buy anything for a cent. I can barely remember being able to buy a single piece of gum for a nickle. Yes, that meant if you saved up 5 cents you had a piece of gum... but those days are gone. Move on.
It will be intresting to read the reactions on this subject from Americans. Americans are after all paying for these expensive pennies with their taxes and if there is anything an American hates it is paying taxes. So, what excuses will those people come up with to keep cent/penny around? Nostalgia?
In a way this shows the failure of democracy. This kind of move should be left to wise men, not people who feel nostalgic for a by gone era when you got a shiny penny from your granddad to buy candy. Maybe if democracy wasn't secret, then those 55% could be made to pay for the costs of making the pennies directly out of their own pocket. Wonder how many would still be nostalgic then?
The paranormal and other frauds claim amazing things that just don't fit in our universe. The most obvious is the capacity for prediction of the future. If you can predict the future, why are you not rolling in money from winning every lottery? Or made it big on the stock market?
The defence against this simple method of proofing your supernatural powers is either that your power can't be monotized OR that you don't think it is ethical.
Randi breaks that defence wide open by given these fraudsters a clear way to monotize their power AND do it in a highly ethical way. So why don't they? Even if you ain;t intrested in the money, you could donate it to a good cause. So why don't people who claim to have powers not claim 1 million dollars that is theirs by rights if they can proof it?
They don't, because they can't. There are no super natural powers. but fools like you can't accept that, you want your beard in the sky and hate anyone who dispels the delusion.
You first. Don't worry, the rest will be right behind you. laughing.
Early radio phones, even early mobiles were a disaster to use. A car phone wasn't always just your mobile in your car, it was a major installation.
Early mobile phones came in a suitcase. So... where did you leave all the stuff in your normal case? Carry 2 suitcases? Not very high powered right?
But tech progressed and right now with bluetooth headsets and voice dialing we are getting damned close to the perceived convenience of Star Trek communicators.
I think tablets are a dead end. The future is retina displays and neural input. It is obvious really, holding a screen and a keyboard in whatever combinations just ain't convenient. Laptops ain't any better, we just got used to their inconvenience. If you see some people type on a phone, you can easily forget just how fucking akward it is to use... but we move on.
I think tablets are the very early ancestors of anywhere computing. Not anywhere as in anywhere I sit down but anywhere as in on the move. Not traditional computing work tasks such as writing a document or doing design, but informational and entertainment computing. Google maps has completely replaced my need for a map. I used to have several. Recently threw them out. Don't need them. Not that I use Maps all that often but that is the real convenience, when I need it, it is right there, up to date and ready to use.
Music, movies and games. We used to have to sit down to play them or bring very specialized travel sets with us. With a phone/tablet, you can play almost any game, wherever you want, when you want. Yes, they are akward and simplistic and underpowered. But that will chance. I still got an old phone that can play snakes, compared to that, modern mobile games are a million times better. NEITHER is yet anywhere as convenient and reliable as old LCD games or as rich and powerful as PC games but... getting there.
I remember the Walkman... it was all the rage for a while and then it died. It wasn't until years later that personal audio made a come back with the portable MP3 player. Why?
Walkman's just weren't convenient with their tapes, it takes a lot of work to mix a tape and then you have the same limitted tracks in the same order unless you bring bulky tapes (check tape size vs MP3 player). Only the hardcore persisted, some bought mini-disc but the majority didn't bother.
Now the MP3 player is back with a vengeance.
I see a LOT of people with iPads that barely use them, they just ain't that comfortable to use right now or all that useful but that will change. Those cheap nasty headphones of the walkman (orange foam pads) have evolved into in-ear buds and massive headphones depending on taste. Tablets will evolve too. How? If I knew that I would be to busy being filthy rich to post on slashdot.
Everytime there is a story about car black boxes and insurance, people complain about the invasion of privacy. At all other times they complain that they pay insurance for other people...
Why should MY ticket payed with a secure and cheap payment option pay for YOUR incredibly insecure and costly credit card? I worked on payment systems and the cost difference is extreme. Credit Cards charge a percentage, have chargebacks with high fees while EU payment systems have a flat rate of cents with no chargeback without a serious investigation.
Ryan Air just offers what people think they want, the cheapest possible ticket. Customers just don't realize how much they rely on all the "free" extra's others offer. It is budget and means it. It is like ordering a really healthy meal and then being really served one. UGH! A healthy salad has little to no dressing, you are eating rabbit food.
Everyone of the items you mention cost money, if you want them, you got to pay for them. And you also end up paying for the overhead of choosing (tracking all those options cost money) and for the increased cost of those options because fewer people use them.
But you knew all this, and still bought a Ryan air ticket. Because you thought you could save a few bucks. Then when you landed, you bought a 5 euro cup of coffee. Right?
There are a lot of apologists on /.
I guess a lot of people really want their shiny. But it ain't all that hard to at least TRY to limit slave labor in your purchases. Lots of stuff is made outside of China. It is like the Raspberry PI claim that they couldn't find anywhere to produce it except China... right.
Where is the Arduino produced? In Italy. All of it? Probably not but at least it is not totally outsourced to China for the sake of lowest possible costs.
There are other phone, mp3 and even tablet makers that produce in Korea and Japan. Some parts may come from China but at least they try.
But a lot of people prefer just to look the other way, make excuses and claim "ich habe es nicht gewust". Well, the Indians probably are happier on their reserve.
These excuses have always been used. At least they got work, our own labor laws were pretty bad, they don't know any better, it is their culture.
Only this time we are not just screwing some minority, this time we are screwing ourselves. Right now, if you try to google "non-china made tablet" you only get articles telling you about Chinese made tablets... and how crappy they are... and how the first china made iPad killers are just around the corner.
Does that matter?
Japan was once the place that cheap crap came from and stabs at Sony aside, that is no longer the case. High quality tech is not just produced by Japan on its own initiave, it is researched and invented. Nobody seriously could still think of Japan as a backwards nation with the only selling point hard workers and cheap labor.
And this change hit the western economies pretty hard. Where are the western TV makers? Until MS entered the market, console makers were ALL Japanese for a LONG time. Granted, you could say that all these consoles are really IBM but how many people make their money of Nintendo/Sony in Japan vs the US? How many wage packages are taken home? Not the 100.000 dollar type, just the average salary with which people pay their rent, their taxes and send their kids to school?
If China pulls of what Japan and Korea and even Taiwan did before, go from just cheap labor to technically advanced countries with their own products... then the west is done for.
It is already happening. In Holland the story at the moment is the closing of a car factory. What does it produce? Daf (dutch)... no. Volvo? Volkswagen? Any european or American name?
No. Mitshubishi. Right now the Dutch government is begging the Japenese to keep some production in Holland. And talking about changing labour laws and wages to attract the business?
If you can't see the irony, then that explains a lot about peoples attitude towards the global economy.
And it is already to late, if you are old, you might remember the worry about Japanese buying up western assets. Right now, the Chinese government is already supporting the western economies with massive loans. If they pull the switch for whatever reason, the western economies will think the recent banking crisis was a tiny pimple on the charts.
The claim by Raspberry PI that they could not produce in the west is either a damning statement about the willingness of people to pay a few pennies extra OR shows just how much the west has collapsed in its production capacity.
If you can no longer buy tech or even have it produced anymore, then you are now a third world nation. The Brits really believed pre-WW2 that they could outsource farming. Why would you want to sully the british isles with farms when those grounds could be used for hunting and tea parties and let Americans and Australians do the hard work (and make the real money).
WW2 put a stop to that before it was to late but it is happening again. Farms are closing down because they can't compete with cheaper imports. It makes perfect short term economic sense. Just better hope that nothing happens to those supply lines. Fuel costs, a blockade or a natural disaster in another part of the world.
The worl
I just had an image of Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates going down on Larry Page and Sergey Brin (which by the way, google had to guess at being the right answer for being the founder of google) in a nerd love fest...
My eyes! What has been seen cannot be unseen.
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Oh who am I kidding. Fap fap fap fap fap
I am not a great fan of crypto nerds because I know just how idiotic the idea of a darknet is in a dictatorship. A darknet lights up light a christmas tree at your ISP if they can be bothered and in places in the world, they can be bothered. So what if it is encrypted? That never stopped the goons.
So... what do we need a free internet for? To AVOID getting that far. It would be nice if humanity always veered towards doing what was right for the greater good, if all journalists always could be counted on to ask the hard questions. That politicians don't look away because they think it helps their cause in the long term.
A free internet is a new tool to share information outside the main stream, it is as revolutionary as the printing press and the post office (For women's lib, the post office suddenly allowed them to communicate with anyone without needing permission) before. But the printing press was used to reproduce child porn and the post office was used to distribute it. Not so long ago (70's) child porn (and I am not talking David Hamilton style stuff) was produced fairly openly and sold. But this was done through tech that allowed Martin Luther to take the bible out of the church and into the domain of the common people AND to spread his anti-semitism that would on day lead to the holocaust.
Tech isn't good or bad but banning tech because there are not so nice uses for it, that is silly and dangerous. Silly because you can't put the cat back in the bag. People have tried it. The printing press, mechanical harvesters, cars. They all been attacked and are now a part of our lives. The internet allows anyone to communicate with anyone else at a near neg-liable cost. But this also means spammers and scammers can reach an audience in the past even Hollywood could not dream off. 911 from Nigeria might have negative overtones but it also means that people from what is not one of the most developed nations in the world can deal as equals with those developed nations. Ever tried calling Africa on the phone? Sent a wire? A letter? Sure, a percentage uses that connection for scams but how much information is being shared for the good of both sides as well?
And you can't have one without the other. Either you allow everyone to communicate or you don't. The makers of Freenet faced this, the simple fact is that the only real use for Freenet in the west at the moment is to share files that you can't share anywhere else and for a LOOOOOOONG time, that only was child porn. If you ever use Tor you can see just what it contains, hate (nazi wannabe's), a tiny bit of drugs for those who think the police has nothing better to do and under aged porn.
You can say you want to get rid of that part of Freenet but you can't. Either you have free communication or your don't. Child porn is even nastier then terrorism, I can say I am willing to take the risk of being blown up but I can't accept that risk on behalf of someone elses child.
Child porn is real and it is big, torrents are pretty clean and usenet can be realtively easy administred but as said, Tor and Freenet are full of it and so are other P2P programs. You can combat it easily, just restrict all traffic to non-encrypted, known content that is filtered and block any unknown traffic. Hiding data in data? Can't be done if the data is known, just make the Internet the Internet Microsoft and Apple dream off, all content pre-approved.
Do you think that is impossible? HA! IT IS ALREADY HERE. The movies you watch, the TV you watch, the music you listen to, the articles you read. ALL have been screened to make sure it is "safe" for you to consume. Hell, we don't even need the state for it, we do it ourselves right here on Slashdot all the time.
That is how tempting it is. If you are for a free internet, browse slashdot at -11.
It is tempting to want to get rid of child porn and you can do it, you just have to sacrifice everyones freedom and make it just a bit easier for a wannabe dictator to one day get away with it. But how do you def