Publicly owned transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure are all examples of socialism.
Insurance companies (at least, well-run insurance companies) are fundamentally socialist in nature as well. It's the ones which forget that and start becoming too capitalist that are problematic.
I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, I know exactly how that goes. Actually, I suppose that self-insurance works great for people who are actually rich (and 500K does not qualify as rich.) Bill Gates, for example, or maybe Rupert Murdoch.
Me... well, my employer offers decent health insurance. I took him up on his offer.
Oh and don't give me that nonsense about "expensive" health costs.
You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father also had a pacemaker, but he also suffered total renal failure and was on peritoneal dialysis. Very expensive process, and he was on it 'til the day he died. Fortunately, that's one of the very, very few conditions for which Medicare will pick up the costs no matter what your age (he died fairly young.) He was also on a drug that, at the time (this was almost two decades ago) cost about $15,000 year, in addition to the twenty grand a year his insurance company premiums went up to, because they wanted him to go away. We ran though my savings, my retirement funds, all of his money and had to sell his home. He then lost his insurance (Aetna, may they rot in Hell) and we had to bear all the costs after that. You can be proud of your half million, but if you find yourself in need of any significant level of care, you will burn through it fast. So don't get cocky.
You simply cannot compare the relatively insignificant costs of specific medical procedures with the long-term costs of having a serious (or, in his case, multiple) medical condition(s). Now, I will agree, medical costs are definitely inflated because of the middleman insurance companies (in effect, they've completely divorced the cost of medical care from our actual ability to pay.) Imagine if your automobile insurance was responsible for vehicle maintenance... a tune-up would probably cost ten grand.
If/When developers opt to use this DRM server, will they be branded as Evil as in Apple?
Yes. In no uncertain terms. I have no problem whatsoever paying for good software, but I do have a problem paying for software whose execute permissions can be remotely revoked. And, if I do find that I've bought an app from the Market that did not disclose its use of said DRM, it will be uninstalled moments later. So far as DRM is concerned, odds are that it will be performed competently (from a technical perspective) by Google. That doesn't make it right, or desirable from the user's perspective. Personally, I think it's ridiculous to even be considering this crap for apps whose average price is maybe five bucks. For that kind of money it's simply not worth the effort to copy the stuff illegally: that's a more powerful incentive to stay legit than any amount of Digital Restrictions Management.
I find it amusing watching the Google Fanboy's falling over themselves to defende the 'choice' to use DRM.
Huh? That doesn't actually make any sense. This is Slashdot, and I don't think you'll find too many people hereabouts defending DRM no matter who the vendor. The GP is correct in pointing out that this is not being shoved down users throats. Matter of fact, I doubt very much if Brin and Page give a damn about it either way... it's not going to affect their bottom line in the least. That's in direct contrast to Apple, for whom DRM plays a major role in their business model (one of many reasons why I own no Apple products.)
Developers are complaining about "piracy" (and I use the term loosely, I seriously doubt there are many true pirates in the Android world) and the powers-that-be at the big G are trying to accommodate them. Still, having said that, you'd have to have some hellaceously well-written and useful software for me to buy into this bullshit, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. This is going to be an interesting test to see just how well such DRM will be accepted, especially on an otherwise relatively open platform.
Then why does the fucked up US legal system allow them to still be a patent troll...everyone knows what they are. Everyone knows what they are doing. Surely, someone in your pathetic government and jurisprudence system has a backbone?
Dave
We try to respect the legal rights of everyone, even complete assholes. Can your pathetic legal system make the same claim?
Um, what? Buying a house is buying a house. When I buy a house, I own it outright.
You missed on this one. The essence of ownership is control, and if you truly own it, that control cannot be taken away unless your possession is stolen from you. At least where I live, if you fail to pay your property taxes each year, your home will be sold out from under you by the county. It's called a "tax sale." Consequently, I don't really consider myself to "own" my home. If I truly owned it, nobody could take it away from me. Most people believe they own their homes, but try not paying your taxes one year. Then it will become apparent to whom it really belongs.
Sony, et al. also sell an illusion. You said it yourself: the license that you bought. Most people think that when they lay out several hundred dollars for a sophisticated piece of electronics that it is theirs to do with as they wish. That is, I might add, a reasonable assumption, after all, they paid for it. But they don't have that ability, even though they are the nominal owners of said console, because the manufacturer is retaining control over the use of the product after it has been supposedly sold.
I would feel very differently if console makers simply leased or rented their equipment. Then the issue of who actually owns the device is crystal clear. But that's not what they do... they sell it to you and then try to tell you what you can and can't do with it. To me, it's not a matter of whether I can run homebrew or not: it's the principle of the thing.
The reality is that, with the exception of Nintendo, the console manufacturers lose money with each system sold. They sell it below cost with the expectation of recouping their lost profits in future game sales. Someone who buys a console to use as, say, a Linux box is denying them that revenue. So, they're doing everything they can to limit the ability of the nominal owners of that equipment to do anything but buy and play games. And you know what? If they could have a law passed that prevented their customers from using their consoles as paperweights... they would. Because a console used as a paperweight doesn't make them any money.
On the question of whether Sony could be described as "contributing" to copyright infringement, the Court stated:
[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses....
It's interesting that the two courts took diametrically opposed positions on this subject. Of course, Congress pretty well neutered that decision with a succession of purchased laws culminating in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but that was one case where the Supremes ultimately got it right.
And then, after all the hate and discontent they raised over the advent of the VCR, the movie industry went on to rake in billions selling VHS movies on writeable media played back on the previously-vilified Video Cassette Recorder. Money they would never have seen had the hardware companies not been free to develop and market something new. That was not a surprising attitude, though: the content cartels have always been about maintaining the status quo, and can't quite seem to wrap their heads around the fact that change can make money. But that would require them to actually think, and maybe do a little innovating of their own. But history has demonstrated conclusively that they don't know how to do that.
Anyone remember Jack Valenti's impassioned monologue about how the VCR would "destroy the industry"? Yeah. He was spot on with that one, wasn't he. This is also the guy who said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Right on, Jack. Point is, these are people who don't have anything on their minds but control, control and more control. It's not even about the money, it's about control. They've controlled matters so well, in fact, that I won't purchase a game console. I don't like who I'd have to thank for it, and I don't like their business models, and I don't like the fact that the machine isn't really mine. You want to lease the box to me, that would be different. But they don't: they want me to pay cold hard cash for the illusion of ownership (ha, kind of like buying a house, when you think about it.)
Fact is, the content industries are mostly led by short-sighted fools. At some point, their stockholders are going to have to rise up and slay them, because they're throwing money away by not going with the flow, by not learning from history and their own mistakes, by being greedy to the point of sociopathy.
The humble gas tank is far better than the batteries, fuel cells, ultra capacitors, and other things (like flywheels?) that we have now.
That's correct, and it will continue to be. Gasoline has its points. It's incredibly energy dense compared to anything else: a gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of about one hundred sticks of dynamite. That one gallon will move a couple of tons of metal and plastic some twenty or thirty miles at a conversion efficiency of only fifteen percent or so (if you're lucky.) Show me a practical battery that can equal that.
Personally, I think a liquid-fueled vehicle with an electric drive would be an ideal combination for the near term.. we could leverage the vast infrastructure we presently have for handling conventional fuels. We don't have a similarly-capable power generating and distribution system, and it would cost a lot of money (money the U.S. doesn't really have anymore) to build out a grid that could handle a significant number of electric vehicles. That might be in the future, but we'll need an interim technology first, one that gets more bang for the buck out of petroleum. Such a vehicle would probably have to be fuel-cell powered, but those aren't ready for prime time either.
The Year of the Pure Electric is still a long way off.
So far as shareholders are concerned, investing in the destruction of one's competition is always justifiable.
I doubt even Oracle would think that is a good idea.
If Oracle managed to drive a lot of potential customers off using open source by stifling those projects, I suspect the majority of the customers would be driven further into Microsofts arms rather than Oracles. After all those customers are more likely to already be MS customers than Oracle customers.
Sure, and I'm not claiming that this would be in Oracle's best interests. I am saying that killing off competition (especially potential competition) has always been a part of the business world.
No argument. But like I said, what we're talking about here is pretty much exactly what Microsoft has done (and IBM before it, just ask a man named Amdahl) and I'm sure Oracle has done a few nasty things in that line along the way as well. Once you get big enough, squelching or otherwise eliminating competition is ruthless at best, but pretty common in the corporate sector. And Ellison is nothing if not ruthless. I'm not saying this is even on Oracle's radar, but that corporate is hardly above something like it.
what algorithm were they using? And how were they load balancing? You'd almost have to be doing a bucket sort initially? And there was no detail whatsoever as to the data being sorted. Were they just a crapton of 64 bit words, sentences, database records, what was the data being sorted? I can sort a petabyte in O(1) time if it consists of two records each 1/2pb in size. None of what they've said means anything without getting into the context.
Oh, sorry... this is abuse. Argument is down the hall.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases.
That isn't what we're discussing, and I doubt very much if Ellison & Co, should they go down this road, would care one whit for monetizing any projects they acquire or with which they otherwise interfere. The idea is for Oracle to disrupt the development of any open source offerings that would compete with its own core products, much as Microsoft has done for decades (for both open and closed source software, for that matter.) So far as shareholders are concerned, investing in the destruction of one's competition is always justifiable.
Sadly, I'm not too sure we know an awful lot more about the oceans now, except that we're killing them.
We know a lot more about the oceans than our ancestors did, incredibly so. The real problem is that, during that same period, human beings haven't changed all that much. We're just as avaricious as we were then, only now we have the power to do more damage.
There, fixed that for you. Bricked is permanent. Non-permanent "bricking" isn't bricking at all. If you can revive it, it was never bricked in the first place.
Who cares. I don't want a device that is effectively capable of committing automatic suicide if I don't use it in some approved manner. Screw that. I bought a G1 early, rooted it two days later, and have been running various third-party ROMS ever since (Cyanogenmod is still my current favorite.) Yes, there's a risk of "bricking" the device (not flashing the correct radio and SPL in the proper order, etc.) but that's a matter of my screwing up and having to JTAG myself back. I have it on good authority that I'll be getting a Nexus One on my birthday, so Motorola can just go screw themselves. Seriously, these things are not cell phones anymore, they're bloody damn pocket- sized computers and I'll run the operating system of my choice, thank you very much.
Cell phone providers want to lock out third-party operating systems simply because they feel it will eliminate any revenue stream they get from proprietary apps and sales of ringtones and other useless cruft. Or course, they spin that by saying the need to prevent alternate platforms is because they want to "maintain the user experience" (read: keep users locked into the preprogrammed lameness) or to "help manage our network effectively to maintain proper service levels" or some such. Large helpings of BS at pretty much every level. Frankly, offering a true general-purpose computing system is not what they really want to do (because then they won't be able to nickle-and-dime us to death at every turn), what's unfortunate for them is that more and more people are demanding more power and more freedom. I will give T-Mobile credit for even selling a rootable device like the G1, and then working out a deal with Google for the N1, which can be rooted and is supplied carrier-unlocked anyway.
Sorry, Motorola, you were the big cheese in the cellular world once, but it appears that you still don't get it, and are a bit too friendly with the big boys like AT&T and Verizon.
Everything. Locking accounts to make up money that they lost. Having money stolen from you because someone decided to keep what you've sent and also file that they didn't receive it (or other types of situations like this). Massive fees. No contact information. Stealing donation money.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that the US gov. is the only "association" dumb enough to send a nuclear bomb to destroy a city.
Do you have any idea how stupid you just sounded?
Publicly owned transportation, water and firefighting infrastructure are all examples of socialism.
Insurance companies (at least, well-run insurance companies) are fundamentally socialist in nature as well. It's the ones which forget that and start becoming too capitalist that are problematic.
I got some sick people around me, and that whole self-insurance thing... yeah, doesn't actually work when the shit hits the fan.
Yeah, I know exactly how that goes. Actually, I suppose that self-insurance works great for people who are actually rich (and 500K does not qualify as rich.) Bill Gates, for example, or maybe Rupert Murdoch.
... well, my employer offers decent health insurance. I took him up on his offer.
Me
I've got almost half a million in the bank
Good for you.
Oh and don't give me that nonsense about "expensive" health costs.
You've been lucky, and you aren't thinking about the possibilities, you're really not. My father also had a pacemaker, but he also suffered total renal failure and was on peritoneal dialysis. Very expensive process, and he was on it 'til the day he died. Fortunately, that's one of the very, very few conditions for which Medicare will pick up the costs no matter what your age (he died fairly young.) He was also on a drug that, at the time (this was almost two decades ago) cost about $15,000 year, in addition to the twenty grand a year his insurance company premiums went up to, because they wanted him to go away. We ran though my savings, my retirement funds, all of his money and had to sell his home. He then lost his insurance (Aetna, may they rot in Hell) and we had to bear all the costs after that. You can be proud of your half million, but if you find yourself in need of any significant level of care, you will burn through it fast. So don't get cocky.
... a tune-up would probably cost ten grand.
You simply cannot compare the relatively insignificant costs of specific medical procedures with the long-term costs of having a serious (or, in his case, multiple) medical condition(s). Now, I will agree, medical costs are definitely inflated because of the middleman insurance companies (in effect, they've completely divorced the cost of medical care from our actual ability to pay.) Imagine if your automobile insurance was responsible for vehicle maintenance
If/When developers opt to use this DRM server, will they be branded as Evil as in Apple?
Yes. In no uncertain terms. I have no problem whatsoever paying for good software, but I do have a problem paying for software whose execute permissions can be remotely revoked. And, if I do find that I've bought an app from the Market that did not disclose its use of said DRM, it will be uninstalled moments later. So far as DRM is concerned, odds are that it will be performed competently (from a technical perspective) by Google. That doesn't make it right, or desirable from the user's perspective. Personally, I think it's ridiculous to even be considering this crap for apps whose average price is maybe five bucks. For that kind of money it's simply not worth the effort to copy the stuff illegally: that's a more powerful incentive to stay legit than any amount of Digital Restrictions Management.
I find it amusing watching the Google Fanboy's falling over themselves to defende the 'choice' to use DRM.
Huh? That doesn't actually make any sense. This is Slashdot, and I don't think you'll find too many people hereabouts defending DRM no matter who the vendor. The GP is correct in pointing out that this is not being shoved down users throats. Matter of fact, I doubt very much if Brin and Page give a damn about it either way ... it's not going to affect their bottom line in the least. That's in direct contrast to Apple, for whom DRM plays a major role in their business model (one of many reasons why I own no Apple products.)
Developers are complaining about "piracy" (and I use the term loosely, I seriously doubt there are many true pirates in the Android world) and the powers-that-be at the big G are trying to accommodate them. Still, having said that, you'd have to have some hellaceously well-written and useful software for me to buy into this bullshit, and I suspect I'm not alone in that. This is going to be an interesting test to see just how well such DRM will be accepted, especially on an otherwise relatively open platform.
As in you can get the source, change it, compile it, get it to work with your own hardware, and redistribute it.
Or even improve it.
Then why does the fucked up US legal system allow them to still be a patent troll...everyone knows what they are. Everyone knows what they are doing. Surely, someone in your pathetic government and jurisprudence system has a backbone?
Dave
We try to respect the legal rights of everyone, even complete assholes. Can your pathetic legal system make the same claim?
Um, what? Buying a house is buying a house. When I buy a house, I own it outright.
You missed on this one. The essence of ownership is control, and if you truly own it, that control cannot be taken away unless your possession is stolen from you. At least where I live, if you fail to pay your property taxes each year, your home will be sold out from under you by the county. It's called a "tax sale." Consequently, I don't really consider myself to "own" my home. If I truly owned it, nobody could take it away from me. Most people believe they own their homes, but try not paying your taxes one year. Then it will become apparent to whom it really belongs.
... they sell it to you and then try to tell you what you can and can't do with it. To me, it's not a matter of whether I can run homebrew or not: it's the principle of the thing.
... they would. Because a console used as a paperweight doesn't make them any money.
Sony, et al. also sell an illusion. You said it yourself: the license that you bought. Most people think that when they lay out several hundred dollars for a sophisticated piece of electronics that it is theirs to do with as they wish. That is, I might add, a reasonable assumption, after all, they paid for it. But they don't have that ability, even though they are the nominal owners of said console, because the manufacturer is retaining control over the use of the product after it has been supposedly sold.
I would feel very differently if console makers simply leased or rented their equipment. Then the issue of who actually owns the device is crystal clear. But that's not what they do
The reality is that, with the exception of Nintendo, the console manufacturers lose money with each system sold. They sell it below cost with the expectation of recouping their lost profits in future game sales. Someone who buys a console to use as, say, a Linux box is denying them that revenue. So, they're doing everything they can to limit the ability of the nominal owners of that equipment to do anything but buy and play games. And you know what? If they could have a law passed that prevented their customers from using their consoles as paperweights
Good to hear that AT&T is actually doing the "right thing" and hopefully learning from the research instead of attempting to suppress it.
Time was when "research" and "AT&T" were damn near synonymous. But yeah, it's good that they're keeping the sharks in check.
UK High Court
The mere fact that the device can be used for a non-infringing purpose is not a defence.
US Supreme Court in Sony vs. Universal:
On the question of whether Sony could be described as "contributing" to copyright infringement, the Court stated:
[There must be] a balance between a copyright holder's legitimate demand for effective - not merely symbolic - protection of the statutory monopoly, and the rights of others freely to engage in substantially unrelated areas of commerce. Accordingly, the sale of copying equipment, like the sale of other articles of commerce, does not constitute contributory infringement if the product is widely used for legitimate, unobjectionable purposes. Indeed, it need merely be capable of substantial noninfringing uses....
It's interesting that the two courts took diametrically opposed positions on this subject. Of course, Congress pretty well neutered that decision with a succession of purchased laws culminating in the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, but that was one case where the Supremes ultimately got it right.
And then, after all the hate and discontent they raised over the advent of the VCR, the movie industry went on to rake in billions selling VHS movies on writeable media played back on the previously-vilified Video Cassette Recorder. Money they would never have seen had the hardware companies not been free to develop and market something new. That was not a surprising attitude, though: the content cartels have always been about maintaining the status quo, and can't quite seem to wrap their heads around the fact that change can make money. But that would require them to actually think, and maybe do a little innovating of their own. But history has demonstrated conclusively that they don't know how to do that.
Anyone remember Jack Valenti's impassioned monologue about how the VCR would "destroy the industry"? Yeah. He was spot on with that one, wasn't he. This is also the guy who said, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." Right on, Jack. Point is, these are people who don't have anything on their minds but control, control and more control. It's not even about the money, it's about control. They've controlled matters so well, in fact, that I won't purchase a game console. I don't like who I'd have to thank for it, and I don't like their business models, and I don't like the fact that the machine isn't really mine. You want to lease the box to me, that would be different. But they don't: they want me to pay cold hard cash for the illusion of ownership (ha, kind of like buying a house, when you think about it.)
Fact is, the content industries are mostly led by short-sighted fools. At some point, their stockholders are going to have to rise up and slay them, because they're throwing money away by not going with the flow, by not learning from history and their own mistakes, by being greedy to the point of sociopathy.
The humble gas tank is far better than the batteries, fuel cells, ultra capacitors, and other things (like flywheels?) that we have now.
That's correct, and it will continue to be. Gasoline has its points. It's incredibly energy dense compared to anything else: a gallon of gasoline is the equivalent of about one hundred sticks of dynamite. That one gallon will move a couple of tons of metal and plastic some twenty or thirty miles at a conversion efficiency of only fifteen percent or so (if you're lucky.) Show me a practical battery that can equal that.
.. we could leverage the vast infrastructure we presently have for handling conventional fuels. We don't have a similarly-capable power generating and distribution system, and it would cost a lot of money (money the U.S. doesn't really have anymore) to build out a grid that could handle a significant number of electric vehicles. That might be in the future, but we'll need an interim technology first, one that gets more bang for the buck out of petroleum. Such a vehicle would probably have to be fuel-cell powered, but those aren't ready for prime time either.
Personally, I think a liquid-fueled vehicle with an electric drive would be an ideal combination for the near term
The Year of the Pure Electric is still a long way off.
No he doesn't, see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFyY2mK8pxk - and as an added bonus you get a very nice piece of thinking man's crumpet as well.
"Ah say, ah say, it's a JOKE, son!" -- Foghorn Leghorn
I doubt even Oracle would think that is a good idea.
If Oracle managed to drive a lot of potential customers off using open source by stifling those projects, I suspect the majority of the customers would be driven further into Microsofts arms rather than Oracles. After all those customers are more likely to already be MS customers than Oracle customers.
Sure, and I'm not claiming that this would be in Oracle's best interests. I am saying that killing off competition (especially potential competition) has always been a part of the business world.
No argument. But like I said, what we're talking about here is pretty much exactly what Microsoft has done (and IBM before it, just ask a man named Amdahl) and I'm sure Oracle has done a few nasty things in that line along the way as well. Once you get big enough, squelching or otherwise eliminating competition is ruthless at best, but pretty common in the corporate sector. And Ellison is nothing if not ruthless. I'm not saying this is even on Oracle's radar, but that corporate is hardly above something like it.
How many parallel predicting octopuses were required to predict their victory?
You mean "predictopi".
what algorithm were they using? And how were they load balancing? You'd almost have to be doing a bucket sort initially? And there was no detail whatsoever as to the data being sorted. Were they just a crapton of 64 bit words, sentences, database records, what was the data being sorted? I can sort a petabyte in O(1) time if it consists of two records each 1/2pb in size. None of what they've said means anything without getting into the context.
Oh, sorry ... this is abuse. Argument is down the hall.
No. NO. Rambus is an IP troll, at best they specify how chips talk to each other on a motherboard. Smarter people then design chips.
Yeah. Rambus has a lot in common with SCO ... parasitic beasts at best.
ATI is going to want to get sued in about six months for $500 million.
Maybe they'll make the mistake of suing IBM.
Because of that, it would be very difficult for Oracle to monetize their purchases.
That isn't what we're discussing, and I doubt very much if Ellison & Co, should they go down this road, would care one whit for monetizing any projects they acquire or with which they otherwise interfere. The idea is for Oracle to disrupt the development of any open source offerings that would compete with its own core products, much as Microsoft has done for decades (for both open and closed source software, for that matter.) So far as shareholders are concerned, investing in the destruction of one's competition is always justifiable.
Sadly, I'm not too sure we know an awful lot more about the oceans now, except that we're killing them.
We know a lot more about the oceans than our ancestors did, incredibly so. The real problem is that, during that same period, human beings haven't changed all that much. We're just as avaricious as we were then, only now we have the power to do more damage.
Why would you need two phones?
Stereo, of course.
There, fixed that for you. Bricked is permanent. Non-permanent "bricking" isn't bricking at all. If you can revive it, it was never bricked in the first place.
Who cares. I don't want a device that is effectively capable of committing automatic suicide if I don't use it in some approved manner. Screw that. I bought a G1 early, rooted it two days later, and have been running various third-party ROMS ever since (Cyanogenmod is still my current favorite.) Yes, there's a risk of "bricking" the device (not flashing the correct radio and SPL in the proper order, etc.) but that's a matter of my screwing up and having to JTAG myself back. I have it on good authority that I'll be getting a Nexus One on my birthday, so Motorola can just go screw themselves. Seriously, these things are not cell phones anymore, they're bloody damn pocket- sized computers and I'll run the operating system of my choice, thank you very much.
Cell phone providers want to lock out third-party operating systems simply because they feel it will eliminate any revenue stream they get from proprietary apps and sales of ringtones and other useless cruft. Or course, they spin that by saying the need to prevent alternate platforms is because they want to "maintain the user experience" (read: keep users locked into the preprogrammed lameness) or to "help manage our network effectively to maintain proper service levels" or some such. Large helpings of BS at pretty much every level. Frankly, offering a true general-purpose computing system is not what they really want to do (because then they won't be able to nickle-and-dime us to death at every turn), what's unfortunate for them is that more and more people are demanding more power and more freedom. I will give T-Mobile credit for even selling a rootable device like the G1, and then working out a deal with Google for the N1, which can be rooted and is supplied carrier-unlocked anyway.
Sorry, Motorola, you were the big cheese in the cellular world once, but it appears that you still don't get it, and are a bit too friendly with the big boys like AT&T and Verizon.
but it is just an another "china and communism is bad"-story when pretty much the same is done in the US.
Regardless, two wrongs still don't make a right.
So an electric car with the engine rated the same as a car with an ICE engine will accelerate much faster than the ICE car. So much for that.
You can also run an electric motor beyond its rating for brief intervals (such as when you accelerate onto an expressway.)
Everything. Locking accounts to make up money that they lost. Having money stolen from you because someone decided to keep what you've sent and also file that they didn't receive it (or other types of situations like this). Massive fees. No contact information. Stealing donation money.
That's a good start.