Actually, there's an idea. With the right kind of program I'd make it non-functional... in about three months. Ought to be plenty of time for the pirate to have all sorts of data entered into that program's file format.
"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."
Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.
"The terrorists are motivated primarily by religion and hatred."
You totally forgot to mention the United State's motivation, which is to secure long-term oil leases in the midle east for US and US-affiliated oil companies, to provide an economic boost by funneling billions of federal dollars into the private sector through military contractors (not so coincidentally also providing a nice profit for Bush's friends), and so Bush can prove that the US (and himself, by extension) still has what it takes.
Besides, Steve said during his keynote that Apple only wanted 1% of the high-end "smart" phone market the first year. According to the survey numbers it sounds like he's home free.
"I'd submit that the vast majority of people keep their mobiles for no more than 2 years"
Industry average is 18 months. New phones, new features, switching carriers, early cancellations, phones that are dropped, damaged, or stolen, all contribute to earlier replacement.
Sorry, but you're wrong. If the device does what you need it to do out of the box, then it's not worthless. Further, as one blog pointed out, roughly 90% of all of the software sold for PDAs are utilities: e.g., file managers, photo viewers, interface enhancers, and so on. Things that, if Apple does it's job correctly, you don't need to "add" anyway.
Finally, unless you're a skilled PDA system developer, "you" can't write software for them either. And I sincerely doubt that, as time goes by, you'll not be able to add software and new functionality to it.
"Gels work by subtracting wavelengths from the spectrum of light."
Yes.
"There isn't anything between the peaks for the warming gel pack to subtract."
No.
Gels subtract wavelengths that are not theirs. Thus a blue gel will tend to reduce everything ELSE that's not blue. As such, a warming gel will tend to reduce complementary colors, leaving the result "warmer".
I have lot's of those drives. And the cables. And the cases. And additonal batteries. All for an already large 17" notebook. And finding the right one, plugging it in, mounting, unmounting, making sure THOSE drives are backed up, all is a major PITA.
You can't take it down to 5/10/25/50 cents w/o going to a paid-up-front account model like Zune uses, as credit card transaction fees eat up too much of the net otherwise.
I can also see how you'd like 10 cents, and "if so", how you'd buy the entire album, but from their side it doesn't make a lot of sense. If you'd buy a song for a buck occasionally one way, and an entire album for 10 cents a song (another buck), it doesn't seem like they're going to be making any additional money off of you, while giving you more content in exchange and eating up more bandwidth as a consequence.
Keeping my own iTMS purchases in mind, I'm not sure that if, say, they dropped the price to a quarter I'd buy enough additional music to compensate for the lost revenue. Heck, I already have a hard enough time finding stuff I like.
"They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that."
Books have a lot of advantages. They're also bulky, heavy, utilize a "fixed" display mechanism, and require an external light source.
Backlit ebooks can be read in the dark or in low-light situations. Screens can increase font sizes for people with bad eyesight. Storage systems can let you carry hundreds, if not thousands of books all at the same time. If you had a fairly inexpensive sturdy lightweight reader with good battery life, and a bright, contrasty, high-resolution backlit "writeable" screen that could also double as media player and internet device... and couple that with DRM-free standardized content, then, in my opinion, you'd be well on your way.
Especially for things like school books, tech manuals, reference books, trashy paperback novels, magazines, and so forth where the "feel" of a book is much less important than its contents.
Speaking of reference books and tech manuals, I have a ton of them (almost literally) sitting on shelves around here. And what do I do when I need to look something up? I Google it. The ability to quickly find information hidden somewhere in a mass of physical books is nearly non-existent.
In short, real books have many, many, many limitations, and as such neither you nor I WANT an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a real book, any more than you want a car that that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a horse-drawn carriage.
Why do half the links on the bottom go to pages with no format? Why do About us and Safety Tips use different layouts, widths, line widths, etc. Why the 1980's-style colored text on a patterened background on the home page? Why is the page style/font/color scheme different from the logo scheme, which is different from the sign-up block, which is different from the sign-up button.
You have three choices: 1) hire a designer; 2) get a template; 3) find a designer.
You've already indicated you don't want to do number 1. Fine. There are thousands of page templates available for $50 or so. Go through those and find somethng that works for you. Standing out is all well and good, as long as you're not standing out by looking amateur, home-built, and unprofessional. That's not so good.
Third, find an art school nearby and see if you can work out a trade with someone. A design for some of your time, or a design for their portfolio, or just a design that's cheap ($100?).
You're trying to get people to sign-up and give you their name, email, and personal information (. You can NOT afford to look untrustworthy. Good luck.
"Sell music in an open format at a guaranteed quality level with access to their entire back catalogue at a reasonable price (i.e. not $1 a track)?"
I was with you right up until the end, as I think a buck is reasonable, especially as more bands go independent or sign with indie-labels and the majority of the money starts going back back to the people who make it.
Your last point was telling, however. Let Apple tell us tomorrow that all music will be DRM-free and someone will complain that $1 isn't "reasonable". Let them drop the price to.50 or.25, and plenty of others will crawl out of the cracks and complain (loudly) that those prices aren't "reasonable" to them either.
And as such, all of those people who used DRM as an excuse before will now switch to price or format or bit-rate as a rationalization for continuing to pirate their music. Just watch.
"As Ruby matures, so will things like performance and secondary OS support."
And when will that happen, exactly? I've been hearing about R/RoR for years now, and it's still distinctly in the low-performance category. Yet every time I go visit the site for updates all I see is talk about how they're adding feature X and Y in the next point release.
These guys need to stop dinking with the language, freeze it, and work on fixing bugs and increasing performance so people out here in the real world can actually use it.
Unfortunately, like most OSS projects it seems that it's cooler to add the feature-of-the-day, rather than do the actual work needed to make it a stable and solid development platform...
If it was "JFL" (just fucking Linux) you could get away with that. Unfortunately, you can't call it JFL because it's not JFL. Hundreds of distros each different in some significant way or another.
Heck, you forgot to mention that you can't figure out what works with what without mention which point version you have...
"You need to haul as much mass down through a space elevator as you lift up."
I think you're off on that one, otherwise there be no reason for building one.
And take the water example. Take your space elevator cable and run a super-strong garden hose up the side of it. Install some pumps and valves along the way so that water doesn't fall back down (think giraffe). Once the hose is full of water it's weight and mass is constant. Doesn't matter that water is flowing through it.
Read the product description. Note that while the name of the product is "Linksys WIP320 Linksys Wireless-G Skype iPhone", everywhere else it refers to the phone as, "the Linksys Wireless-G Phone for Skype", or simply, "the Wireless-G Phone".
Not the "the Wireless-G iPhone". Looks to me like they tacked an "i" onto the product name just in time for the lawsuit.
Be interesting to see if anyone has any physical brochures or product sheets on the "iPhone" that predate the lawsuit... and whether or not they had an "i" in them.
""Cristian conservatives for a moral USA", "Communist anarchists against everything" or whoever"
That, of course, leads to a different problem, namely a rather insidious form of "groupthink". Isolating yourself from opposing viewpoints and ideas is pretty dangerous. Or do you think "Cristian conservatives for a moral USA" are always going to be unbiased and fair, and are never going to tag material in opposition to their viewpoint as inappropriate?
Whether or not you trust the taggers is immaterial. And "giving away control willingly" is still giving away your control, except I'd probably substitute "blindly" for "willingly".
Slashdot Mirror
"If he knows the keys are pirated or stolen, then the installer should just report back "invalid key" instead of trying to cause the user harm."
Yeah, there's a security measure. Why is it that I think all that will happen is that the jerk will just go back online and look for another key...
"The keys should be none [sic] fuctional..."
Actually, there's an idea. With the right kind of program I'd make it non-functional... in about three months. Ought to be plenty of time for the pirate to have all sorts of data entered into that program's file format.
"... focusing on providing a solution that more people would likely want."
Unfortunately, it sounds as if it IS a solution that people want. They're just too cheap to pay for it.
"The sole mistake Americans make is by automatically assuming that "The enemy of my enemy is my friend". All other mistakes including sending the military and the CIA are a mere consequence of this one."
Actually, the major mstake we make, as a country, is assuming we have the right to interfere in the internal affairs of other nations. This is usually done to protect our "interests", which in turn is code for protecting the interests of our various companies and corporations. Read "Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq" and you'll see the same patterns repeated again and again and again.
"Besides, if the author sells activation keys, he knows who bought which one, and thus whom to sue when one of those keys gets posted on warez sites."
Yeah, good luck trying to sue "John Smith" in Russia over a $29.95 shareware program.
"The terrorists are motivated primarily by religion and hatred."
You totally forgot to mention the United State's motivation, which is to secure long-term oil leases in the midle east for US and US-affiliated oil companies, to provide an economic boost by funneling billions of federal dollars into the private sector through military contractors (not so coincidentally also providing a nice profit for Bush's friends), and so Bush can prove that the US (and himself, by extension) still has what it takes.
"Shock and Awe," indeed.
Besides, Steve said during his keynote that Apple only wanted 1% of the high-end "smart" phone market the first year. According to the survey numbers it sounds like he's home free.
"I'd submit that the vast majority of people keep their mobiles for no more than 2 years"
Industry average is 18 months. New phones, new features, switching carriers, early cancellations, phones that are dropped, damaged, or stolen, all contribute to earlier replacement.
Sorry, but you're wrong. If the device does what you need it to do out of the box, then it's not worthless. Further, as one blog pointed out, roughly 90% of all of the software sold for PDAs are utilities: e.g., file managers, photo viewers, interface enhancers, and so on. Things that, if Apple does it's job correctly, you don't need to "add" anyway.
Finally, unless you're a skilled PDA system developer, "you" can't write software for them either. And I sincerely doubt that, as time goes by, you'll not be able to add software and new functionality to it.
Fine with me. Just means that they're more likely to have 'em in stock when I go in to get mine. ;)
"... spectacular mountainscape in a movie several years ago, suddenly realizing that it was computer-generated..."
True Lies?
"Gels work by subtracting wavelengths from the spectrum of light."
Yes.
"There isn't anything between the peaks for the warming gel pack to subtract."
No.
Gels subtract wavelengths that are not theirs. Thus a blue gel will tend to reduce everything ELSE that's not blue. As such, a warming gel will tend to reduce complementary colors, leaving the result "warmer".
I have lot's of those drives. And the cables. And the cases. And additonal batteries. All for an already large 17" notebook. And finding the right one, plugging it in, mounting, unmounting, making sure THOSE drives are backed up, all is a major PITA.
That's why I want to do without.
So? Go to any halfway decent camera store and get a "warming" gel pack. Gel your bulbs to taste. Problem solved.
"Honestly I only need about 40-60GB of drive space on my work laptop ..."
I wish. As a developer and photographer who travels a lot, I'm waiting on tenderhooks for those 300GB notebook drives to ship this summer...
You can't take it down to 5/10/25/50 cents w/o going to a paid-up-front account model like Zune uses, as credit card transaction fees eat up too much of the net otherwise.
I can also see how you'd like 10 cents, and "if so", how you'd buy the entire album, but from their side it doesn't make a lot of sense. If you'd buy a song for a buck occasionally one way, and an entire album for 10 cents a song (another buck), it doesn't seem like they're going to be making any additional money off of you, while giving you more content in exchange and eating up more bandwidth as a consequence.
Keeping my own iTMS purchases in mind, I'm not sure that if, say, they dropped the price to a quarter I'd buy enough additional music to compensate for the lost revenue. Heck, I already have a hard enough time finding stuff I like.
"They will continue to fail until we somehow figure out a way to make an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves exactly like a real book. Good luck with that."
Books have a lot of advantages. They're also bulky, heavy, utilize a "fixed" display mechanism, and require an external light source.
Backlit ebooks can be read in the dark or in low-light situations. Screens can increase font sizes for people with bad eyesight. Storage systems can let you carry hundreds, if not thousands of books all at the same time. If you had a fairly inexpensive sturdy lightweight reader with good battery life, and a bright, contrasty, high-resolution backlit "writeable" screen that could also double as media player and internet device... and couple that with DRM-free standardized content, then, in my opinion, you'd be well on your way.
Especially for things like school books, tech manuals, reference books, trashy paperback novels, magazines, and so forth where the "feel" of a book is much less important than its contents.
Speaking of reference books and tech manuals, I have a ton of them (almost literally) sitting on shelves around here. And what do I do when I need to look something up? I Google it. The ability to quickly find information hidden somewhere in a mass of physical books is nearly non-existent.
In short, real books have many, many, many limitations, and as such neither you nor I WANT an e-book that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a real book, any more than you want a car that that looks, feels, and behaves EXACTLY like a horse-drawn carriage.
Why do half the links on the bottom go to pages with no format? Why do About us and Safety Tips use different layouts, widths, line widths, etc. Why the 1980's-style colored text on a patterened background on the home page? Why is the page style/font/color scheme different from the logo scheme, which is different from the sign-up block, which is different from the sign-up button.
You have three choices: 1) hire a designer; 2) get a template; 3) find a designer.
You've already indicated you don't want to do number 1. Fine. There are thousands of page templates available for $50 or so. Go through those and find somethng that works for you. Standing out is all well and good, as long as you're not standing out by looking amateur, home-built, and unprofessional. That's not so good.
Third, find an art school nearby and see if you can work out a trade with someone. A design for some of your time, or a design for their portfolio, or just a design that's cheap ($100?).
You're trying to get people to sign-up and give you their name, email, and personal information (. You can NOT afford to look untrustworthy. Good luck.
"Sell music in an open format at a guaranteed quality level with access to their entire back catalogue at a reasonable price (i.e. not $1 a track)?"
.50 or .25, and plenty of others will crawl out of the cracks and complain (loudly) that those prices aren't "reasonable" to them either.
I was with you right up until the end, as I think a buck is reasonable, especially as more bands go independent or sign with indie-labels and the majority of the money starts going back back to the people who make it.
Your last point was telling, however. Let Apple tell us tomorrow that all music will be DRM-free and someone will complain that $1 isn't "reasonable". Let them drop the price to
And as such, all of those people who used DRM as an excuse before will now switch to price or format or bit-rate as a rationalization for continuing to pirate their music. Just watch.
"...and amazing.com was developed (and is being developed) using Ruby on Rails"
Gack! Somebody needs to hire a graphic designer quick. That site is NOT a promising endorsement for RoR...
"As Ruby matures, so will things like performance and secondary OS support."
And when will that happen, exactly? I've been hearing about R/RoR for years now, and it's still distinctly in the low-performance category. Yet every time I go visit the site for updates all I see is talk about how they're adding feature X and Y in the next point release.
These guys need to stop dinking with the language, freeze it, and work on fixing bugs and increasing performance so people out here in the real world can actually use it.
Unfortunately, like most OSS projects it seems that it's cooler to add the feature-of-the-day, rather than do the actual work needed to make it a stable and solid development platform...
If it was "JFL" (just fucking Linux) you could get away with that. Unfortunately, you can't call it JFL because it's not JFL. Hundreds of distros each different in some significant way or another.
Heck, you forgot to mention that you can't figure out what works with what without mention which point version you have...
"You need to haul as much mass down through a space elevator as you lift up."
I think you're off on that one, otherwise there be no reason for building one.
And take the water example. Take your space elevator cable and run a super-strong garden hose up the side of it. Install some pumps and valves along the way so that water doesn't fall back down (think giraffe). Once the hose is full of water it's weight and mass is constant. Doesn't matter that water is flowing through it.
Read the product description. Note that while the name of the product is "Linksys WIP320 Linksys Wireless-G Skype iPhone", everywhere else it refers to the phone as, "the Linksys Wireless-G Phone for Skype", or simply, "the Wireless-G Phone".
Not the "the Wireless-G iPhone". Looks to me like they tacked an "i" onto the product name just in time for the lawsuit.
Be interesting to see if anyone has any physical brochures or product sheets on the "iPhone" that predate the lawsuit... and whether or not they had an "i" in them.
""Cristian conservatives for a moral USA", "Communist anarchists against everything" or whoever"
That, of course, leads to a different problem, namely a rather insidious form of "groupthink". Isolating yourself from opposing viewpoints and ideas is pretty dangerous. Or do you think "Cristian conservatives for a moral USA" are always going to be unbiased and fair, and are never going to tag material in opposition to their viewpoint as inappropriate?
Whether or not you trust the taggers is immaterial. And "giving away control willingly" is still giving away your control, except I'd probably substitute "blindly" for "willingly".