The people who should pay taxes are the top 40% who make 75% of the income.
60% of the people should be able to soak 40% of the people? Really?
60% should get a FREE RIDE? really?
YES. Absolutely, yes.
The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. There are those who say "tough luck, if you can't afford healthcare AND food, then I guess we'll be burying you in a pauper's grave" but you really want to live in a society like that?
Some people are less fortunate than others, and the wealth gap between the rich and poor is continuing to widen. There is no reason why universal healthcare can't work, and work well, and cost everyone in the US *less* than it costs them now - even the rich people. The US spends twice the GDP per capita on healthcare than the next closest country, and that's not even including out of pocket insurance costs of its citizens. It's just crazy.
There is a point where economies of scale and the removal of profit as a motivator actually works. While it may be abhorrent to some rich, middle class, comfortably living white dude that he might be "subsidising" his poor neighbour through universal healthcare because he makes considerably more money, he should get over it and realise that overall, he's paying less for his own care than under a private system, and as a bonus gets to help out his poor neighbour who now gets the same coverage as the rich guy, but would otherwise be uninsured under a private system.
The US is the only developed nation that does their healthcare this way, and it is clearly broken. Take all the best bits of all the other developed nations' universal systems and you could be the envy of the world.
You would have to get over yourselves and realise that there is at least *some* small amount of "help thy neighbour, and those less fortunate than yourself" involved. But hey, you guys always claim to be a Christian country right? You should be right on that.
(disclaimer: values expressed not solely the domain of Christian or even religion in general, just used as an example).
A baseless, totally irrelevant, ad hominem attack that paints all of your political opponents as stupid and/or illogical. Lemme guess, Tea Partier/Republican.
(And no, I did not vote for Obama, nor am I the GP).
Apple's keyboards currently have something close - tapping on the caps lock key doesn't activate it, so it won't toggle on if you hit it accidentally while typing. You have to hold it down for a fraction longer to turn it on. Conversely, it disables immediately at a normal keypress.
I have never accidentally turned on caps lock on this keyboard, and I'm a woeful, self-taught high speed modified hunt and peck sloppy typist. I do hit ; a lot when I mean to hit ' since the keys are in a slightly different place than on the original keyboard I "honed" my woeful skills on.
Press Function + backspace/delete to get the opposite effect. You can toggle this in System Prefs, or set up a specific rule just for that key if you want it the other way.
The MBP keyboard layout is identical to the Apple Bluetooth k/b, that I have in front of me right now, except the keys are labelled a little differently - the delete/backspace key has a left-pointing arrow, the tab key has a tab-stop icon, and the caps lock has a thick upward pointing arrow with a break in the segment - all of these keys on the MBP have been labelled with words.
They did it with the option key too, which is a fork-ike icon on many Mac keyboards, but is actually labelled "option" on the MBP.
My point was solely about addressing the Mac point, not talking about the Windows side of thing. Your single data point was pretty much your argument for saying "well, in my experience, 100% of Mac games don't work out of the box, and my 50 Windows games that all work prove the reverse."
The main issues I see with games not working on Windows are down to things like aggressive DRM or anti copy measures, like failing to run if you have two CD drives, or dropping you out of the game if you lose internet connection briefly, even in a solo campaign.
Of course Apple has a monopoly on Apple products - they are the only people who make Apple products, but it is a meaningless assertion.
Nike have a monopoly on making Nike products too.
I live in the EU, and the monopoly laws do not say what you think they say, if that is your argument. Since you posted AC, it seems you think your argument is too weak to back up, thus proving the point.
And Apple have a monopoly on apps on the iPhone in what world?
You can still deliver apps via HTML5 - the original method promoted by Apple, and still in use and supported by them before the App Store came along.
Also nothing stopping them providing paywalled online content to iPhone customers - you can even have it preload data for times when you'll be out of network range.
There's no way for them to claim that iPhone users are restricted solely by the App Store, unless the only other way to get their content is via flash or something.
Also, which day of the week is it right now? It seems to go back and forth on slashdot whether Apple has a monopoly on smartphones, depending on whether it paints them in a positive or negative light (ie, they're "a tiny, insignificant portion" of the smartphone market when it suits, or "a monopoly" when it suits, depending on the story - I see both, quite often). Either way, they don;t actually have a monopoly on web-delivered content (which this magazine clearly must be - either the app was designed to update from a remote server, or you needed to buy a new app every time there's a new issue) on the iPhone.
It's only different if copyright infringement (of GPL code; let's move this into an area slashdot might care about) is somehow different on the web too, because "there's no longer a physical good to deprive from the owner". That argument is bullshit, just as yours is, amounting to a special case because epublishing is limited to a smaller number of stores.
By your logic, if the news outlets, distribution channels and magazines were owned by one or two large corporations, then the same rules would apply in the real world.... oh wait...
And do you actually have a Mac, or did you try to install it on Windows. If you had "50" Windows games, I would assume you were flush with assorted PC hardware over a few generations.
The only Mac game I have come across that doesn't work very well is EvE Online, more because it's a hideous, hideous hack job, shoved into an emulation container that causes weird graphical errors after you quit it. It also crashes after a couple of hours unless you restart it - I think it has a memory leak. Given that it's not a native game and is instead an emulation wrapper around the Windows client I'm amazed it worked as well as it did. I still wouldn't call it "not working out of the box" though.
Apple pays for its servers, and its bandwidth to AT&T's network, and its backup systems and staff to look after those servers. It also handles the front-of-house store, and listing of your products for sale in a consumer-rich marketplace.
They also handle the microtransactions involved in small purchases such as this, lowering your costs overall, since they can get bulk rates and economies of scale.
You can also use iTunes solely with giftcards - just buy them from a store (even with cash if you want to eliminate the paper trail entirely) and then set up an iTunes account without using a credit card. You can do this, just not directly from an iPhone/iPad - you have to set it up via iTunes. From then onwards you can charge up the account using iTunes giftcards from iTunes or via the app store on the phone.
Language *input* though, I think the droid has it (at least some droids - I haven't seen it on all handsets), with the ability to trace words that you're typing on the keyboard, and have the phone interpret what letters you touched in what order to form likely words.
It was an excellent way to write text messages, and I wish iOS had it.
That you can't see my original statement as facetious without me pointing it out does not make it less so.
You also appear to be attempting to interpret analogies literally to further your own argument.
Let's redo the analogy except let's say that you're emulating PS3 games instead.
I threw in the magazine comment to thread it back to the original story - an app with magazine-style content on the iPhone. I have never actually seen anything like that on XBL, but hey, we're making analogies here, not discussing historical accuracy. We're discussing a hypothetical situation. Before this app on iPhone, there was no Android magazine on iOS, and had someone brought up the possibility it would have been dismissed as unlikely, but here we are.
There's plenty of editorial content on Steam, so it's no real stretch to consider that one day it might end up on console analogues like XBL or the PSN, but that's just getting us side tracked.
Microsoft cares very much what is on it's platform, just as Sony cares about the Playstation. The brand is very important, far more than whatever small amount of profit would come from this sort of thing. Short term profits like that only serve to weaken your carefully constructed brand that you spent time and money to build up. There is a reason that the Halo franchise is Xbox exclusive (apart from the first title, for various contractual reasons), and that Mario makes you think "Nintendo" - brand building is big business. Brand dilution is more important than short term, small profit.
You also apparently missed my facetiousness, signified with the exclamation mark, meant to convey a little hyperbole in my point, to ape the usual "zomg Apple censorship" stuff that goes on around here.
The original point, way back in the day here, was about "wielding the banhammer about information for a competing platform" and how that was "telling, very telling" when it is really just common sense - why provide publicity for a competing product on your own store?
I am going to assume here that there are no ads or magazines or demo reels for PSN games on Xbox Live, so how is this different?
You were the one who went to the whole "it's a hardware and software difference", in fact, I will quote you:
No that is absolutely not the reason at all they have different hardware and different software so it's technically impossible. If you can make it work then nothing will stop you.
So, if I can make PSN games work on an Xbox 360, and say I go for something well inside the realms of emulation, an old Playstation 1 game, that the 360 would have no problems playing back even with emulation overhead, and then submitted it for sale on Xbox Live, what exactly do you think would happen? There's no reason a 360 couldn't emulate a PS1 - it has more than enough grunt.
We'll assume that in this situation, Sony has oked it and won;t be trying to stop you from selling Playstation 1 games via XBL. What do you think Microsoft's reaction would be?
That is pretty much what this situation is: an app with Andoid news, written/converted to run on iOS, submitted for sale via Apple's store.
Now who's reaching for the strawman? It's interesting that you seem so convinced of what my argument is, and claim to know what I am arguing, yet still seem to miss my point going off on some ad hominem. I just don;t think you like the fact that you have been called on calling someone stupid for not reading the post when you didn't notice yourself that it was written by the person you were replying to. Putdown fail.
My original point was that iPhones are a lot like consoles, in that while both are computers, both feature a tightly controlled software distribution system and operating system/hardware combination.
They are both controlled environments that simplify development for from direction (an Xbox is and Xbox is and Xbox) and simplify purchase decisions from the consumer perspective (a game sold to run on an Xbox will do so, assuming you have the necessary controllers or memory, but we can roll that in with 'as long as you have certain newer features in an iPhone, eg compass or more powerful CPU).
The same is true of the iPhone, so there are clear comparisons between the two platforms. Neither are general purpose computing environments.
The original argument was trying to force the illogical connection between a desktop OS (Windows 7 in this case) and the iPhone app store, when it really has far more in common with the Xbox ecosystem (staying with MS products here) than it does with Windows. In either case, what is at issue here is whether Apple can decide what it carries in its own store, and of course the answer is "whatever it likes" since it is their store, running on their hardware (their servers, I mean, not the phones themselves - the client is irrelevant), maintained by them.
Even easier, I just keep Facebook sandboxed in a totally separate browser that never visits any other website. This browser is also equipped with adblocking, script blocking and so on.
They can't track you if you don't go anywhere. I also never click on links in facebook posts or on the facebook page - I copy and paste them into a text file and strip off any added facebook nonsense to get to the actual URL.
And I would say that you are "equally incapable of reading" and take a look at the usernames on the posts - the "he" in the post you are talking about is me.
If you can't even keep track of who it is you're talking to, then what good are your arguments? You're just not paying attention.
And the iPhone has different hardware and software to other smartphones, and only one store.
You could always distribute this Android magazine app via the HTML5 route, as suggested and supported by Apple, and they not only wouldn't care, they wouldn't do anything to stop it.
However, they can choose not to sell an app in their store if they choose, since it is their store.
This is certain to run afoul of anti-trust/unfair business practice laws, should someone choose to push the issue. As long as they set themselves up to be the sole supplier of applications for their platform, they hold a monopoly, and exerting it in such a way is wrong.
Emphasis mine.
Did you even read it? So, who said there was a law being broken? The grandparent post.
And Walmart refuses to sell certain DVDs, purely due to their content. It's the same exact delivery mechanism, just because it's "DP in Deeping" instead of Toy Story.
The fact that the App Store is the sole app store for the iOS devices has no bearing - you know that going in. It's Apple's store and they can stock whatever they choose.
Slashdot Mirror
The people who should pay taxes are the top 40% who make 75% of the income.
60% of the people should be able to soak 40% of the people? Really?
60% should get a FREE RIDE? really?
YES. Absolutely, yes.
The measure of a society is how it treats its most vulnerable members. There are those who say "tough luck, if you can't afford healthcare AND food, then I guess we'll be burying you in a pauper's grave" but you really want to live in a society like that?
Some people are less fortunate than others, and the wealth gap between the rich and poor is continuing to widen. There is no reason why universal healthcare can't work, and work well, and cost everyone in the US *less* than it costs them now - even the rich people. The US spends twice the GDP per capita on healthcare than the next closest country, and that's not even including out of pocket insurance costs of its citizens. It's just crazy.
There is a point where economies of scale and the removal of profit as a motivator actually works. While it may be abhorrent to some rich, middle class, comfortably living white dude that he might be "subsidising" his poor neighbour through universal healthcare because he makes considerably more money, he should get over it and realise that overall, he's paying less for his own care than under a private system, and as a bonus gets to help out his poor neighbour who now gets the same coverage as the rich guy, but would otherwise be uninsured under a private system.
The US is the only developed nation that does their healthcare this way, and it is clearly broken. Take all the best bits of all the other developed nations' universal systems and you could be the envy of the world.
You would have to get over yourselves and realise that there is at least *some* small amount of "help thy neighbour, and those less fortunate than yourself" involved. But hey, you guys always claim to be a Christian country right? You should be right on that.
(disclaimer: values expressed not solely the domain of Christian or even religion in general, just used as an example).
A baseless, totally irrelevant, ad hominem attack that paints all of your political opponents as stupid and/or illogical. Lemme guess, Tea Partier/Republican.
(And no, I did not vote for Obama, nor am I the GP).
Apple's keyboards currently have something close - tapping on the caps lock key doesn't activate it, so it won't toggle on if you hit it accidentally while typing. You have to hold it down for a fraction longer to turn it on. Conversely, it disables immediately at a normal keypress.
I have never accidentally turned on caps lock on this keyboard, and I'm a woeful, self-taught high speed modified hunt and peck sloppy typist. I do hit ; a lot when I mean to hit ' since the keys are in a slightly different place than on the original keyboard I "honed" my woeful skills on.
Perhaps it is an ad hominem, but I don't think it is a fallacy.
People rarely stand behind arguments that they know to be false, at least if they know it is easy to call them on such a fact.
Press Function + backspace/delete to get the opposite effect. You can toggle this in System Prefs, or set up a specific rule just for that key if you want it the other way.
The MBP keyboard layout is identical to the Apple Bluetooth k/b, that I have in front of me right now, except the keys are labelled a little differently - the delete/backspace key has a left-pointing arrow, the tab key has a tab-stop icon, and the caps lock has a thick upward pointing arrow with a break in the segment - all of these keys on the MBP have been labelled with words.
They did it with the option key too, which is a fork-ike icon on many Mac keyboards, but is actually labelled "option" on the MBP.
It's Gizmodo, you pretty much have to start with those assumptions going in. Then you'll never be disappointed.
My point was solely about addressing the Mac point, not talking about the Windows side of thing. Your single data point was pretty much your argument for saying "well, in my experience, 100% of Mac games don't work out of the box, and my 50 Windows games that all work prove the reverse."
The main issues I see with games not working on Windows are down to things like aggressive DRM or anti copy measures, like failing to run if you have two CD drives, or dropping you out of the game if you lose internet connection briefly, even in a solo campaign.
Of course Apple has a monopoly on Apple products - they are the only people who make Apple products, but it is a meaningless assertion.
Nike have a monopoly on making Nike products too.
I live in the EU, and the monopoly laws do not say what you think they say, if that is your argument. Since you posted AC, it seems you think your argument is too weak to back up, thus proving the point.
And Apple have a monopoly on apps on the iPhone in what world?
You can still deliver apps via HTML5 - the original method promoted by Apple, and still in use and supported by them before the App Store came along.
Also nothing stopping them providing paywalled online content to iPhone customers - you can even have it preload data for times when you'll be out of network range.
There's no way for them to claim that iPhone users are restricted solely by the App Store, unless the only other way to get their content is via flash or something.
Also, which day of the week is it right now? It seems to go back and forth on slashdot whether Apple has a monopoly on smartphones, depending on whether it paints them in a positive or negative light (ie, they're "a tiny, insignificant portion" of the smartphone market when it suits, or "a monopoly" when it suits, depending on the story - I see both, quite often). Either way, they don;t actually have a monopoly on web-delivered content (which this magazine clearly must be - either the app was designed to update from a remote server, or you needed to buy a new app every time there's a new issue) on the iPhone.
Yes it is.
It's only different if copyright infringement (of GPL code; let's move this into an area slashdot might care about) is somehow different on the web too, because "there's no longer a physical good to deprive from the owner". That argument is bullshit, just as yours is, amounting to a special case because epublishing is limited to a smaller number of stores.
By your logic, if the news outlets, distribution channels and magazines were owned by one or two large corporations, then the same rules would apply in the real world.... oh wait...
Godwinned after 11 comments. Not quite the record. Try harder next time.
Which game was it?
And do you actually have a Mac, or did you try to install it on Windows. If you had "50" Windows games, I would assume you were flush with assorted PC hardware over a few generations.
The only Mac game I have come across that doesn't work very well is EvE Online, more because it's a hideous, hideous hack job, shoved into an emulation container that causes weird graphical errors after you quit it. It also crashes after a couple of hours unless you restart it - I think it has a memory leak. Given that it's not a native game and is instead an emulation wrapper around the Windows client I'm amazed it worked as well as it did. I still wouldn't call it "not working out of the box" though.
Apple pays for its servers, and its bandwidth to AT&T's network, and its backup systems and staff to look after those servers. It also handles the front-of-house store, and listing of your products for sale in a consumer-rich marketplace.
They also handle the microtransactions involved in small purchases such as this, lowering your costs overall, since they can get bulk rates and economies of scale.
You can also use iTunes solely with giftcards - just buy them from a store (even with cash if you want to eliminate the paper trail entirely) and then set up an iTunes account without using a credit card. You can do this, just not directly from an iPhone/iPad - you have to set it up via iTunes. From then onwards you can charge up the account using iTunes giftcards from iTunes or via the app store on the phone.
No credit card info ever has to go near Apple.
Language *input* though, I think the droid has it (at least some droids - I haven't seen it on all handsets), with the ability to trace words that you're typing on the keyboard, and have the phone interpret what letters you touched in what order to form likely words.
It was an excellent way to write text messages, and I wish iOS had it.
I suspect that even if this is in jest, this is the reason a large number of /. folk are single.
Your partners are not your users. At least not unless you role play.
That you can't see my original statement as facetious without me pointing it out does not make it less so.
You also appear to be attempting to interpret analogies literally to further your own argument.
Let's redo the analogy except let's say that you're emulating PS3 games instead.
I threw in the magazine comment to thread it back to the original story - an app with magazine-style content on the iPhone. I have never actually seen anything like that on XBL, but hey, we're making analogies here, not discussing historical accuracy. We're discussing a hypothetical situation. Before this app on iPhone, there was no Android magazine on iOS, and had someone brought up the possibility it would have been dismissed as unlikely, but here we are.
There's plenty of editorial content on Steam, so it's no real stretch to consider that one day it might end up on console analogues like XBL or the PSN, but that's just getting us side tracked.
Microsoft cares very much what is on it's platform, just as Sony cares about the Playstation. The brand is very important, far more than whatever small amount of profit would come from this sort of thing. Short term profits like that only serve to weaken your carefully constructed brand that you spent time and money to build up. There is a reason that the Halo franchise is Xbox exclusive (apart from the first title, for various contractual reasons), and that Mario makes you think "Nintendo" - brand building is big business. Brand dilution is more important than short term, small profit.
You also apparently missed my facetiousness, signified with the exclamation mark, meant to convey a little hyperbole in my point, to ape the usual "zomg Apple censorship" stuff that goes on around here.
The original point, way back in the day here, was about "wielding the banhammer about information for a competing platform" and how that was "telling, very telling" when it is really just common sense - why provide publicity for a competing product on your own store?
I am going to assume here that there are no ads or magazines or demo reels for PSN games on Xbox Live, so how is this different?
You were the one who went to the whole "it's a hardware and software difference", in fact, I will quote you:
No that is absolutely not the reason at all they have different hardware and different software so it's technically impossible. If you can make it work then nothing will stop you.
So, if I can make PSN games work on an Xbox 360, and say I go for something well inside the realms of emulation, an old Playstation 1 game, that the 360 would have no problems playing back even with emulation overhead, and then submitted it for sale on Xbox Live, what exactly do you think would happen? There's no reason a 360 couldn't emulate a PS1 - it has more than enough grunt.
We'll assume that in this situation, Sony has oked it and won;t be trying to stop you from selling Playstation 1 games via XBL. What do you think Microsoft's reaction would be?
That is pretty much what this situation is: an app with Andoid news, written/converted to run on iOS, submitted for sale via Apple's store.
Now who's reaching for the strawman? It's interesting that you seem so convinced of what my argument is, and claim to know what I am arguing, yet still seem to miss my point going off on some ad hominem. I just don;t think you like the fact that you have been called on calling someone stupid for not reading the post when you didn't notice yourself that it was written by the person you were replying to. Putdown fail.
My original point was that iPhones are a lot like consoles, in that while both are computers, both feature a tightly controlled software distribution system and operating system/hardware combination.
They are both controlled environments that simplify development for from direction (an Xbox is and Xbox is and Xbox) and simplify purchase decisions from the consumer perspective (a game sold to run on an Xbox will do so, assuming you have the necessary controllers or memory, but we can roll that in with 'as long as you have certain newer features in an iPhone, eg compass or more powerful CPU).
The same is true of the iPhone, so there are clear comparisons between the two platforms. Neither are general purpose computing environments.
The original argument was trying to force the illogical connection between a desktop OS (Windows 7 in this case) and the iPhone app store, when it really has far more in common with the Xbox ecosystem (staying with MS products here) than it does with Windows. In either case, what is at issue here is whether Apple can decide what it carries in its own store, and of course the answer is "whatever it likes" since it is their store, running on their hardware (their servers, I mean, not the phones themselves - the client is irrelevant), maintained by them.
I have an adblocker that keeps that crap off the page in my primary browser - I don't see those facebook "like" boxes.
Since the "clean" browser also has no idea about my facebook information, any tracking they are doing is totally unconnected to me.
Even easier, I just keep Facebook sandboxed in a totally separate browser that never visits any other website. This browser is also equipped with adblocking, script blocking and so on.
They can't track you if you don't go anywhere. I also never click on links in facebook posts or on the facebook page - I copy and paste them into a text file and strip off any added facebook nonsense to get to the actual URL.
And I would say that you are "equally incapable of reading" and take a look at the usernames on the posts - the "he" in the post you are talking about is me.
If you can't even keep track of who it is you're talking to, then what good are your arguments? You're just not paying attention.
And the iPhone has different hardware and software to other smartphones, and only one store.
You could always distribute this Android magazine app via the HTML5 route, as suggested and supported by Apple, and they not only wouldn't care, they wouldn't do anything to stop it.
However, they can choose not to sell an app in their store if they choose, since it is their store.
Direct quote from the parent post I replied to:
This is certain to run afoul of anti-trust/unfair business practice laws, should someone choose to push the issue. As long as they set themselves up to be the sole supplier of applications for their platform, they hold a monopoly, and exerting it in such a way is wrong.
Emphasis mine.
Did you even read it? So, who said there was a law being broken? The grandparent post.
And Walmart refuses to sell certain DVDs, purely due to their content. It's the same exact delivery mechanism, just because it's "DP in Deeping" instead of Toy Story.
The fact that the App Store is the sole app store for the iOS devices has no bearing - you know that going in. It's Apple's store and they can stock whatever they choose.