I see your point, but I don't think your analogy quite holds; it's not software price discrimination in general I object to, it's specifically being charged a recurring fee for a feature that presents a non-recurring expense to the company. I know it's not the biggest issue in the world, it's just one I find bloody annoying. There's normally at least some correspondence between costs to the company (including research and development costs to recoup) and price to the consumer - price gouging laws exist specifically to enforce that correspondence.
If a piece of software has extra features, it cost time and effort to code those features - that time and effort needs to be offset some how, so your "£5 for some, £10 for others, rather than £8 for everybody" argument holds. In the case of Spotify, the artificial limitations prevent you from using either the official apps, or even third party clients developed using the open API, unless you're on the £10 plan; the dev costs of the apps were, I'm willing to bet, negligible, but if they really wanted to push the issue then I wouldn't object too much to being charged a one-off fee to purchase the app for my device. Similarly, allowing people to connect via the API would present no extra cost to Spotify, so there would be no reason for it to push the price from £5 to £8. Like I said, not a major issue, but the kind of irritation that just nags at me.
But I would certainly tell people who have that money available for other things but somehow value music so low that they think this is overpriced, that their expectations are skewed.
One of the key thing that skews the value is Spotify's own choice of pricing structure. The music is priced at £5/month (in the UK, at least), but the music plus the right to listen to it on a device running an OS other than Windows/OSX is £10/month. In absolute terms that extra £5 is not a huge amount, I know, but it makes me reluctant to buy the basic subscription (since it's lacking mobile play, a feature I would like) and reluctant to buy the premium subscription (since it's double the price, forever, for the use of a basic mobile app that presented a one-time cost to develop).
Like Spotify, Rdio has a pricing model where they charge more if the endpoint is a phone. This makes no sense to me whatsoever and reminds me of the bad old days when cable tv companies wanted you to buy a separate subscription for each television set.
I'm hugely glad to see someone else pointing this out; we know it doesn't cost them anything continuous, and we're rightly irritated when they try to keep charging us. At best, it's greedy; at worst, they're treating their customers (us) like morons who can't count.
Limits to its free service, not to Spotify in general. I've been a paying subscriber for a while and it's fine.
I tend to draw a distinction between free and ad-supported (and the summary does mention the latter) - it's less like they were giving content away, more that they were trading it for revenue generated by ad views, just like Hulu, commercial radio, many TV stations, and so forth. A subtle point, perhaps, but one I think is important.
As for their paid service, I'm considering a subscription (although being forced to do so by this kind of manoeuvre does grate just as a matter of principle - I'd rather not show them that screwing the free service is a good business model) but I really, really dislike the fact that they charge a recurring fee for features which present them with little or no recurring cost; Hulu are guilty of the same, incidentally. I don't mind paying a subscription for access to the content itself (and the upstream bandwidth I consume from their data centre), but having to pay double the price for the privilege of accessing it on my phone just seems unreasonable. If they're that worried about dev costs (something I find unlikely), charge a one time fee for the app, or just open the API and let the community handle it. Don't charge me £5/month for access to the content in general, and then another £5 for the privilege of accessing it from a particular class of device.
For those who haven't RTFA, that's actually a pretty good analogy. The reasoning they use seems to go something along the lines of: "Facebook credits are kind of like money. Also Facebook has a shitton of users. They'll probably be dealing direct with banks for an exchange mechanism soon enough. That makes them a bank with a shitton of customers, right?".
By some fairly tenuous leaps of logic I can see what they're getting at, but it's hardly what the headline claims.
All of what you say is entirely reasonable (with the possible exception of $ony), but it discounts the context; Hotz said, when taking donations: "...this case isn't about me. Clearly I am not being sued because of something I have that Sony wants, I am being sued in order to send a message that Sony is not to be messed with. But if I(and all codefendants likewise) actually win this, we have the power to send a much stronger message back. That consumers have rights, and we aren't afraid to stand up for them." and "My attempts at humor aside, I do take this whole matter very seriously. Again, it's not about me, I was on the verge of quitting this stuff last June, and I would hate to be the one who sets a reputation for hackers that all a company has to do is sue us and we back down. In fact, I want the opposite reputation set, that the more a company tries to abuse the legal system, the harder we rally back.".
He talked big, he took money, and then he shied away when he realised that Sony could quite possibly crush him. I think it's disgusting that they can do so, and I think it's quite understandable that he didn't want to take the risk, but the fact remains that he was fairly misleading in what he said. It wasn't "please help me survive until I can make Sony leave me alone" it was "fuck them, I'm fighting back, I'll make them pay, and I want you to help". I don't really blame him for backing down, but I do think those who donated have a reasonable right to feel aggrieved, and some level of apology and explanation from Hotz would probably be appropriate.
I don't doubt that what you say is accurate, but I'm amazed it's still socially acceptable for people to be unable to use the basic technology we interact with every day. A person who needs to drive a company vehicle as part of their job would be out pretty quickly if they kept crashing into trees - sure, the occasional genuine accident happens, and will be overlooked, but negligence/stupidity/repeated incompetence will (rightly) get you fired. There's absolutely no reason that the same shouldn't apply to people using company computers.
Thing is, if they're being bought primarily for the lack of features, it seems hardly worth bothering with an expensive graphing calculator in the first place. If you don't want people using equation solvers, storage capabilities, and so forth then they're pretty much a total waste of money (and if you need to do these things in real life, that money is better spent on a copy of Mathematica). I bought one in school, just like everyone else on the course, and I don't think I ever actually used any features you wouldn't find on a $10 scientific calculator.
If I need to plot a graph, or get the roots of a difficult equation, or whatever else, I'll do it on the computer. If I'm in an exam designed to test my ability to do those things, it'll probably be written in such a way that the calculator can't just do it for me. The overlap between things that can be tested in an exam, and things that a graphical calculator can do but a scientific calculator can't, is minuscule, and really doesn't seem worth making everyone buy the things just to test that tiny area.
He said he pulled the key from the ROM - by definition that can't be updated. Perhaps they could manage some kind of workaround in the firmware, but I don't know that they'd bother - apart from anything else, it's hardly their flagship device.
It's not about the ability to perform those actions over the network, it's about the hardware to do so. The print server is built in (with a USB port to hook in standard non-networked desktop printers), as is the audio streaming hardware and line out. Whether or not those are worth $99 to you I don't know, but they are features that the vast majority of other routers do not provide.
As more people go to university, university becomes a requirement for a career; as university becomes a requirement for a career, it starts to offer career-related skills. There's less space for rounded understanding, and learning for its own sake. I think that's a damn shame, actually, and many of my peers at university would agree, but it's the way things have gone. There is, of course, the question of why more people are going to university in the first place - perhaps the impression that education alone can make people smart, for instance. I do think we'd be much better off if universities were far more selective, and vocational schools were respected. But (and it's a major 'but') I'm not sure I'd want the universities to be selective in the manner that this exam is: it seems to test very little understanding and an awful lot of memorisation; as I said in another post, it's a filter to ensure the candidates have good memories and have had a very specific education - the onus is still on the student to show the motivation to understand what they're working on, and if this is a representative sample then I'm sure many then could've got through by eating textbooks the night before the exam rather than really learning from what they studied.
I don't like the way that university education is being devalued, but I think it's also very important to remember that in many cases things have changed with good reason. They aren't great now, so those changes may not have been entirely successful, but they probably weren't great then, either.
And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.
Knowledge for its own sake is always a laudable goal, but an entry exam that requires a reasonable swath of fact recitation plus a set of specific grammatical questions in a dead language seems set to accept those who have had a very specific education, not those who have especially high critical thinking skills, motivation, ambition, or any of many other qualities I would suggest single out a truly worthy candidate.
It looks like you'd get people with good memories, as well as the patience and attention to detail to do the number crunching in the mathematical sections, but those alone do not a good student make. Whether entry requirements today are too fuzzy, maybe even too fearful of telling students that they're wrong, is something reasonable to debate, but I'll never accept that the memorisation-centric curriculum of the past is a paragon to be emulated.
It'd be depressing if it weren't so funny. You can practically hear the author's monocle falling out in his apoplexy when he says "In its determination to boost the Google model and to encourage other internet search sites to follow it, the Government seems to believe the internet should be free and open to everyone.". It honestly sounds like he's about two steps away from adding "Don't they know that if it's open to everyone, the wrong sort of people will get access? Where would we be then?"
What you say is true, but I'd take a step back for a minute, say "screw the brand", and remind everyone that what he's doing is fucking cool. This is sci-fi territory, the stuff we read about and wish we could try one day. I'd say it's a much greater inspiration to see someone using his billions to do all the amazing things that he dreamed of doing as a kid (not to mention making some of them possible for people who aren't billionaires, too), rather than using his billions to make further billions, and so on ad infinitum.
The Taliban WAS the government of Afghanistan. You are an unqualified ignoramus.
And Al Qaeda were the group behind the attacks on US civilians, not the Taliban. Argue about the level of collusion between the two if you want, but don't just imply that they are one and the same and then call me an idiot.
Yes, because I'm sure if we'd left those terrorist camps in place, they wouldn't have produced any new ideas for how to kill people.
A reasonable point, but whether they would have succeeded in carrying out those plans is very much up for debate, especially considering the greater preparedness after the attacks on in New York. More importantly, perhaps, is that it is extremely unlikely that these hypothetical attacks could have killed 20,000+ people, as the Afghanistan war has.
It's much, much more complex than that. I believe it is fairly tenuous to have claimed that attacking a government for the actions of a separate group was a purely defensive action. I think that there were missed opportunities for non-violent pressure to be placed on the Taliban. I think that attacking a nation and killing tens of thousands of civilians was a poor response to a relatively simplistic and potentially isolated (but devastating) act of terrorism which could not be repeated once passengers knew not to co-operate with hijackers. I think that saying "9/11 justifies the Afghan war" fails to take into account the very nature of the group that carried out the attacks, and their connections to the Afghan government and people.
As I said in another post, I'm still undecided on the Libya situation, although I do tend towards supporting the defence the local population from a clear and well-defined threat, but my prior post was intended to make clear that they are very different situations and that placing one against the other is, at the very best, a vast oversimplification.
I don't know how you infer that I 'like' Obama's actions in Libya - I said that it's a different situation, and meant to imply that it is therefore disingenuous to compare it with the circumstances surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan. I absolutely could not care less about the headings 'republican' or 'democrat' - honestly I am undecided on Libya; I actually agree with your point on the lack of provocation, but it's balanced against the fact that the US government is choosing to support rebels who have been attacked by their own army - something which I consider to be positive, inasmuch as violence can ever be so.
I'm not a great fan of Obama, and I'm sincerely disappointed in his performance, but I'd agree with those who say he's much better than Bush.
Bush started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (absolutely unjustly, in my opinion), but having done so it would cause a greater mess to disappear and leave a power vacuum. Better not to have gone in in the first place, but now the troops are there, I agree with the decision to remain. Agree with it or not, Libya's a different situation: backing up something the local population started, rather than starting something at the behest of the US government.
As for Gauntanamo bay, I quite agree with you, he has absolutely failed in his promise to shut the place down; his administration's attempts to give the inmates fair trials have been hindered by congress (something I find absolutely astonishing), but nonetheless he made a promise he wasn't in a position to keep. Still, though - Bush actually started the place, and considered it a good idea, while Obama is having trouble in his attempts to shut it down; I'd call that a serious improvement, even if far from perfect (and, to be honest, well below even 'acceptable').
I'll admit to not being well enough informed on the current US economic situation to comment with confidence, but I do know enough to know that the major issues with the worldwide banking organisations early in Obama's presidency make direct comparisons to Bush's terms difficult.
As for the patriot act and general civil liberties: I basically agree with you, Obama hasn't lived up to what many of us hoped for, and that is a serious problem. Again, though, Bush was the instigator of many of these policies, and Obama's greatest crime has been not to repeal them - I know "ll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", but there is still a difference between actively pushing for bad policies (not to say Obama hasn't done some of that too) and failing to remove the ones that already exist. On some issues (gay rights, for example) Obama has at least tried to make a stand, although he hasn't done anywhere near enough.
On balance, though, that still puts him ahead of Bush on some issues and as bad, or almost as bad, on others. Not a shining report, certainly, but still better than Bush.
Not an unreasonable definition, but I don't really see its value. Logically, what does one gain by classifying "devices which receive and display moving pictures" into the subsets of computers and TVs? I guess I just fail to see why it matters to regulators, content producers, or anybody else whether the device on which I'm watching this week's episode of House can also run third party software or not.
I know that this all stems from advertisers treating "web TV" differently from "real TV", but that just links back to my previous point: any boundary drawn is entirely arbitrary, so why choose to create one?
If you’re watching programmes on a computer or laptop as they're being shown on TV, then you need a TV Licence. However, you don’t need to be covered by a licence if you’re only using ‘on-demand’ services to watch programmes after they have been shown on TV. So, you need a licence to watch any channel live online, but you wouldn’t need one to use BBC iPlayer to catch up on an episode of a programme you missed, for example.
I think you misunderstood my point. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding yours. I was saying her disinterest is understandable, and that her showing that disinterest was impolite, but not the fault of the tech. You can't make someone have a good time if they're not, and I don't see how that's a "low standard we should hold 16 year old's to these days".
If people look at the internet and attached devices as enabling a lot more interaction and getting of news, they really can take the place of traditional media sources. Maybe it's of a different type, but choice is a Good Thing.
I found it particularly odd that TFA states "They maintained a casual relationship to news brands, and rarely distinguished between news and general information." - what is news if not general information? Maybe saying that exposes me as a member of the very generation they're studying, but it's more or less the definition I would provide if asked to describe 'news': information about what's going on around me.
More generally, the sense of hand-wringing by both the authors and the student quoted seems excessive to me. A permanent connection to an information stream (world news, messages from friends, etc. etc.) seems like a wonderful thing to have access to, and I'm glad to live in a time when it's available - is it really surprising that artificially removing it from one person while everyone else remains connected is a somewhat jarring experience?
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, but I don't think your analogy quite holds; it's not software price discrimination in general I object to, it's specifically being charged a recurring fee for a feature that presents a non-recurring expense to the company. I know it's not the biggest issue in the world, it's just one I find bloody annoying. There's normally at least some correspondence between costs to the company (including research and development costs to recoup) and price to the consumer - price gouging laws exist specifically to enforce that correspondence.
If a piece of software has extra features, it cost time and effort to code those features - that time and effort needs to be offset some how, so your "£5 for some, £10 for others, rather than £8 for everybody" argument holds. In the case of Spotify, the artificial limitations prevent you from using either the official apps, or even third party clients developed using the open API, unless you're on the £10 plan; the dev costs of the apps were, I'm willing to bet, negligible, but if they really wanted to push the issue then I wouldn't object too much to being charged a one-off fee to purchase the app for my device. Similarly, allowing people to connect via the API would present no extra cost to Spotify, so there would be no reason for it to push the price from £5 to £8. Like I said, not a major issue, but the kind of irritation that just nags at me.
But I would certainly tell people who have that money available for other things but somehow value music so low that they think this is overpriced, that their expectations are skewed.
One of the key thing that skews the value is Spotify's own choice of pricing structure. The music is priced at £5/month (in the UK, at least), but the music plus the right to listen to it on a device running an OS other than Windows/OSX is £10/month. In absolute terms that extra £5 is not a huge amount, I know, but it makes me reluctant to buy the basic subscription (since it's lacking mobile play, a feature I would like) and reluctant to buy the premium subscription (since it's double the price, forever, for the use of a basic mobile app that presented a one-time cost to develop).
Like Spotify, Rdio has a pricing model where they charge more if the endpoint is a phone. This makes no sense to me whatsoever and reminds me of the bad old days when cable tv companies wanted you to buy a separate subscription for each television set.
I'm hugely glad to see someone else pointing this out; we know it doesn't cost them anything continuous, and we're rightly irritated when they try to keep charging us. At best, it's greedy; at worst, they're treating their customers (us) like morons who can't count.
Limits to its free service, not to Spotify in general. I've been a paying subscriber for a while and it's fine.
I tend to draw a distinction between free and ad-supported (and the summary does mention the latter) - it's less like they were giving content away, more that they were trading it for revenue generated by ad views, just like Hulu, commercial radio, many TV stations, and so forth. A subtle point, perhaps, but one I think is important.
As for their paid service, I'm considering a subscription (although being forced to do so by this kind of manoeuvre does grate just as a matter of principle - I'd rather not show them that screwing the free service is a good business model) but I really, really dislike the fact that they charge a recurring fee for features which present them with little or no recurring cost; Hulu are guilty of the same, incidentally. I don't mind paying a subscription for access to the content itself (and the upstream bandwidth I consume from their data centre), but having to pay double the price for the privilege of accessing it on my phone just seems unreasonable. If they're that worried about dev costs (something I find unlikely), charge a one time fee for the app, or just open the API and let the community handle it. Don't charge me £5/month for access to the content in general, and then another £5 for the privilege of accessing it from a particular class of device.
For those who haven't RTFA, that's actually a pretty good analogy. The reasoning they use seems to go something along the lines of: "Facebook credits are kind of like money. Also Facebook has a shitton of users. They'll probably be dealing direct with banks for an exchange mechanism soon enough. That makes them a bank with a shitton of customers, right?".
By some fairly tenuous leaps of logic I can see what they're getting at, but it's hardly what the headline claims.
All of what you say is entirely reasonable (with the possible exception of $ony), but it discounts the context; Hotz said, when taking donations: "...this case isn't about me. Clearly I am not being sued because of something I have that Sony wants, I am being sued in order to send a message that Sony is not to be messed with. But if I(and all codefendants likewise) actually win this, we have the power to send a much stronger message back. That consumers have rights, and we aren't afraid to stand up for them." and "My attempts at humor aside, I do take this whole matter very seriously. Again, it's not about me, I was on the verge of quitting this stuff last June, and I would hate to be the one who sets a reputation for hackers that all a company has to do is sue us and we back down. In fact, I want the opposite reputation set, that the more a company tries to abuse the legal system, the harder we rally back.".
He talked big, he took money, and then he shied away when he realised that Sony could quite possibly crush him. I think it's disgusting that they can do so, and I think it's quite understandable that he didn't want to take the risk, but the fact remains that he was fairly misleading in what he said. It wasn't "please help me survive until I can make Sony leave me alone" it was "fuck them, I'm fighting back, I'll make them pay, and I want you to help". I don't really blame him for backing down, but I do think those who donated have a reasonable right to feel aggrieved, and some level of apology and explanation from Hotz would probably be appropriate.
I don't doubt that what you say is accurate, but I'm amazed it's still socially acceptable for people to be unable to use the basic technology we interact with every day. A person who needs to drive a company vehicle as part of their job would be out pretty quickly if they kept crashing into trees - sure, the occasional genuine accident happens, and will be overlooked, but negligence/stupidity/repeated incompetence will (rightly) get you fired. There's absolutely no reason that the same shouldn't apply to people using company computers.
Thing is, if they're being bought primarily for the lack of features, it seems hardly worth bothering with an expensive graphing calculator in the first place. If you don't want people using equation solvers, storage capabilities, and so forth then they're pretty much a total waste of money (and if you need to do these things in real life, that money is better spent on a copy of Mathematica). I bought one in school, just like everyone else on the course, and I don't think I ever actually used any features you wouldn't find on a $10 scientific calculator.
If I need to plot a graph, or get the roots of a difficult equation, or whatever else, I'll do it on the computer. If I'm in an exam designed to test my ability to do those things, it'll probably be written in such a way that the calculator can't just do it for me. The overlap between things that can be tested in an exam, and things that a graphical calculator can do but a scientific calculator can't, is minuscule, and really doesn't seem worth making everyone buy the things just to test that tiny area.
He said he pulled the key from the ROM - by definition that can't be updated. Perhaps they could manage some kind of workaround in the firmware, but I don't know that they'd bother - apart from anything else, it's hardly their flagship device.
It's not about the ability to perform those actions over the network, it's about the hardware to do so. The print server is built in (with a USB port to hook in standard non-networked desktop printers), as is the audio streaming hardware and line out. Whether or not those are worth $99 to you I don't know, but they are features that the vast majority of other routers do not provide.
As more people go to university, university becomes a requirement for a career; as university becomes a requirement for a career, it starts to offer career-related skills. There's less space for rounded understanding, and learning for its own sake. I think that's a damn shame, actually, and many of my peers at university would agree, but it's the way things have gone. There is, of course, the question of why more people are going to university in the first place - perhaps the impression that education alone can make people smart, for instance. I do think we'd be much better off if universities were far more selective, and vocational schools were respected. But (and it's a major 'but') I'm not sure I'd want the universities to be selective in the manner that this exam is: it seems to test very little understanding and an awful lot of memorisation; as I said in another post, it's a filter to ensure the candidates have good memories and have had a very specific education - the onus is still on the student to show the motivation to understand what they're working on, and if this is a representative sample then I'm sure many then could've got through by eating textbooks the night before the exam rather than really learning from what they studied.
I don't like the way that university education is being devalued, but I think it's also very important to remember that in many cases things have changed with good reason. They aren't great now, so those changes may not have been entirely successful, but they probably weren't great then, either.
And for that matter, heaven forbid that college should be about getting an education instead of necessary vocational training. Clearly knowledge is worthless except as a bullet on a résumé.
Knowledge for its own sake is always a laudable goal, but an entry exam that requires a reasonable swath of fact recitation plus a set of specific grammatical questions in a dead language seems set to accept those who have had a very specific education, not those who have especially high critical thinking skills, motivation, ambition, or any of many other qualities I would suggest single out a truly worthy candidate.
It looks like you'd get people with good memories, as well as the patience and attention to detail to do the number crunching in the mathematical sections, but those alone do not a good student make. Whether entry requirements today are too fuzzy, maybe even too fearful of telling students that they're wrong, is something reasonable to debate, but I'll never accept that the memorisation-centric curriculum of the past is a paragon to be emulated.
It'd be depressing if it weren't so funny. You can practically hear the author's monocle falling out in his apoplexy when he says "In its determination to boost the Google model and to encourage other internet search sites to follow it, the Government seems to believe the internet should be free and open to everyone.". It honestly sounds like he's about two steps away from adding "Don't they know that if it's open to everyone, the wrong sort of people will get access? Where would we be then?"
What you say is true, but I'd take a step back for a minute, say "screw the brand", and remind everyone that what he's doing is fucking cool. This is sci-fi territory, the stuff we read about and wish we could try one day. I'd say it's a much greater inspiration to see someone using his billions to do all the amazing things that he dreamed of doing as a kid (not to mention making some of them possible for people who aren't billionaires, too), rather than using his billions to make further billions, and so on ad infinitum.
Correct.
And even those should be nowhere close to anti-matter in toxicity.
Tell that to anyone who's ever had a PET scan.
The Taliban WAS the government of Afghanistan. You are an unqualified ignoramus.
And Al Qaeda were the group behind the attacks on US civilians, not the Taliban. Argue about the level of collusion between the two if you want, but don't just imply that they are one and the same and then call me an idiot.
Yes, because I'm sure if we'd left those terrorist camps in place, they wouldn't have produced any new ideas for how to kill people.
A reasonable point, but whether they would have succeeded in carrying out those plans is very much up for debate, especially considering the greater preparedness after the attacks on in New York. More importantly, perhaps, is that it is extremely unlikely that these hypothetical attacks could have killed 20,000+ people, as the Afghanistan war has.
Couldn't you just throw the SIM card in the Droid and set it to always default to WiFi? Same result, but it saves carrying two phones.
It's much, much more complex than that. I believe it is fairly tenuous to have claimed that attacking a government for the actions of a separate group was a purely defensive action. I think that there were missed opportunities for non-violent pressure to be placed on the Taliban. I think that attacking a nation and killing tens of thousands of civilians was a poor response to a relatively simplistic and potentially isolated (but devastating) act of terrorism which could not be repeated once passengers knew not to co-operate with hijackers. I think that saying "9/11 justifies the Afghan war" fails to take into account the very nature of the group that carried out the attacks, and their connections to the Afghan government and people.
As I said in another post, I'm still undecided on the Libya situation, although I do tend towards supporting the defence the local population from a clear and well-defined threat, but my prior post was intended to make clear that they are very different situations and that placing one against the other is, at the very best, a vast oversimplification.
I don't know how you infer that I 'like' Obama's actions in Libya - I said that it's a different situation, and meant to imply that it is therefore disingenuous to compare it with the circumstances surrounding Iraq and Afghanistan. I absolutely could not care less about the headings 'republican' or 'democrat' - honestly I am undecided on Libya; I actually agree with your point on the lack of provocation, but it's balanced against the fact that the US government is choosing to support rebels who have been attacked by their own army - something which I consider to be positive, inasmuch as violence can ever be so.
I'm not a great fan of Obama, and I'm sincerely disappointed in his performance, but I'd agree with those who say he's much better than Bush.
Bush started the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (absolutely unjustly, in my opinion), but having done so it would cause a greater mess to disappear and leave a power vacuum. Better not to have gone in in the first place, but now the troops are there, I agree with the decision to remain. Agree with it or not, Libya's a different situation: backing up something the local population started, rather than starting something at the behest of the US government.
As for Gauntanamo bay, I quite agree with you, he has absolutely failed in his promise to shut the place down; his administration's attempts to give the inmates fair trials have been hindered by congress (something I find absolutely astonishing), but nonetheless he made a promise he wasn't in a position to keep. Still, though - Bush actually started the place, and considered it a good idea, while Obama is having trouble in his attempts to shut it down; I'd call that a serious improvement, even if far from perfect (and, to be honest, well below even 'acceptable').
I'll admit to not being well enough informed on the current US economic situation to comment with confidence, but I do know enough to know that the major issues with the worldwide banking organisations early in Obama's presidency make direct comparisons to Bush's terms difficult.
As for the patriot act and general civil liberties: I basically agree with you, Obama hasn't lived up to what many of us hoped for, and that is a serious problem. Again, though, Bush was the instigator of many of these policies, and Obama's greatest crime has been not to repeal them - I know "ll that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing", but there is still a difference between actively pushing for bad policies (not to say Obama hasn't done some of that too) and failing to remove the ones that already exist. On some issues (gay rights, for example) Obama has at least tried to make a stand, although he hasn't done anywhere near enough.
On balance, though, that still puts him ahead of Bush on some issues and as bad, or almost as bad, on others. Not a shining report, certainly, but still better than Bush.
Not an unreasonable definition, but I don't really see its value. Logically, what does one gain by classifying "devices which receive and display moving pictures" into the subsets of computers and TVs? I guess I just fail to see why it matters to regulators, content producers, or anybody else whether the device on which I'm watching this week's episode of House can also run third party software or not.
I know that this all stems from advertisers treating "web TV" differently from "real TV", but that just links back to my previous point: any boundary drawn is entirely arbitrary, so why choose to create one?
You are incorrect. From the official TV licensing website:
If you’re watching programmes on a computer or laptop as they're being shown on TV, then you need a TV Licence. However, you don’t need to be covered by a licence if you’re only using ‘on-demand’ services to watch programmes after they have been shown on TV. So, you need a licence to watch any channel live online, but you wouldn’t need one to use BBC iPlayer to catch up on an episode of a programme you missed, for example.
(emphasis mine)
I think you misunderstood my point. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding yours. I was saying her disinterest is understandable, and that her showing that disinterest was impolite, but not the fault of the tech. You can't make someone have a good time if they're not, and I don't see how that's a "low standard we should hold 16 year old's to these days".
If people look at the internet and attached devices as enabling a lot more interaction and getting of news, they really can take the place of traditional media sources. Maybe it's of a different type, but choice is a Good Thing.
I found it particularly odd that TFA states "They maintained a casual relationship to news brands, and rarely distinguished between news and general information." - what is news if not general information? Maybe saying that exposes me as a member of the very generation they're studying, but it's more or less the definition I would provide if asked to describe 'news': information about what's going on around me.
More generally, the sense of hand-wringing by both the authors and the student quoted seems excessive to me. A permanent connection to an information stream (world news, messages from friends, etc. etc.) seems like a wonderful thing to have access to, and I'm glad to live in a time when it's available - is it really surprising that artificially removing it from one person while everyone else remains connected is a somewhat jarring experience?