Their spectrum is still very spiky, though not anywhere near as bad as CFLs. And who knows? Maybe people like spikes in certain places? GE sells those blue-tinted bulbs that some people seem to prefer.
Shouldn't the spectrum of LED bulbs be similar to CFLs? Afterall, they both work by shining UV on phosphors and having the phosphors reradiate it into the visible spectrum...
I've been using the same ones for 11 years, one takes longer to start these days, but none have died. Perhaps they're die when a house has a bad power source?
The quality of CFLs seems (or at least, seemed a few years ago) very variable.
A good number of years ago I made an off-hand remark to a tree-hugger friend of mine (who was perpetually going on about how great they are) that when I'd tried CFLs a few years previously, I found them extremely slow to start and had therefore switched back to incandescents. He informed me that this was no longer the case so long as I bought good quality bulbs.
So I went out and bought a pair of new bulbs - rather than the normal cheapy £2-a-pop CFLs, I opted for relatively expensive GE bulbs. As it turned out, these bulbs were actually *worse* for startup time than my very old cheapy ones, and 6 months after I bought them one of them died with a loud bang, taking out the main circuit breaker and leaving scorch marks around the light fitting. About a year later the second one went flickery and then did pretty much the same thing - bang, scorch marks and tripped the main breaker. The second bulb was in a different house to the first, so I can't attribute the failure to the supply.
These days I do use CFLs in most of my light fittings. I've gone back to using cheapy bulbs, which have greatly improved in recent years, but are still depressingly slow to start compared to incandescents. Thankfully I've had no more CFLs fail, but I've avoided GE and I don't think I have any over about 5 years old.
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin. This is a real, tangible, and strictly-defined value that can be quantified.
No. The computing time _had_ value; but then rather than selling that computing time to someone who could do something useful with it, the owner used it doing something useless. I can't buy a bitcoin and suddenly get a load of CPU time to use for a useful project (such as protein folding, etc).
Exactly the same goes for the electricity used to generate the bitcoins: it had value, but then it was used up by generating coins; you can't buy a coin and convert it back into electricity.
Something doesn't have "intrinsic value" just because it cost something valuable in order to produce it - "intrinsic value" means that the thing itself has physical value. For example, palladium and platinum have intrinsic value because you can make useful stuff like catalytic converters for cars, electronics, etc. out of them.
Seriously? And what happens when people look at the competition? They see nice enough systems that don't run the fucking programs people want and need.
No matter how many times people here want to say it, it just isn't true: You can't take a mainstream user from Windows to "Linux/Android/whatever" without a LOT of pain, hand holding, etc., unless that person is such a lightweight user that s/he lives in a browser.
And ye people are switching to OS X, which has exactly the same problems...
For some users, you are of course right, but for a very large fraction you're completely wrong. What does the average home user do? Email, web browsing, a bit of word processing, etc. - all of which they can do under a variety of competing OSes.
I mean... yes, it can be mis-used. The data should be used to flag up pupils who may be struggling, but will also flag those who may already know the material, but just because data could be incorrectly used doesn't make it inherently worrying.
Does it?
But who wants teachers/bosses/whoever prying into everything they do? Those who want to learn will learn, those who don't won't, irrespective of whether someone's spying on them.
The fact that the question submitter didn't provide reasons for keeping Windows does not mean that (s)he doesn't have any.
In fact, the question submitter explicitly identified the reason for keeping Windows for the guest access, "funny looks and confused users" when offering Linux instead.
Is Firefox on Linux somehow more confusing that Firefox on Windows?
Have a dedicated Linux boot just for them, and if they give you funny looks tell them too bad.
I don't get the "funny looks" comment at all. We don't have a Windows machine in the house - mostly we have Linux machines (running Gnome 3), although there are a couple of Macbooks. If someone wants to borrow a machine then they get either Linux (most common) or OS X (less common) and no one has expressed any "funny looks". Notably, no one seems to have any problems driving Gnome 3, even though they've almost certainly never used it before...
I don't particularly think that lakes are that unsightly, even if capped with a dam. I'd hardly classify it as environmental destruction. Yeah, you submerge a bunch of natural vegetation and replace one ecosystem with another. Big deal.
If completely replacing one ecosystem with another is no "big deal" and isn't "destructive" then we should just keep burning fossil fuels. After all, the greenhouse effect is only replacing one ecosystem with another, so clearly it isn't at all destructive.
Stuff that's more expensive but less useful? I can't believe they are scratching their head wondering why uptake sucked.
I think MS still can't understand why they aren't Apple... Apple regularly pull that kind of crap - produce a product that's very expensive but less useful than the competition, and the consumers just lap it up. From MS's pricing it seems that they think they have the same influence, and now they've fallen on their faces they probably can't understand why they don't.
You left out the part where Apple spent 4 years building a software infrastructure including apps for handheld devices (phones), and then rolled out the iPad.
Microsoft attempted to birth both (phone, tablet) into a hostile environment (solid competition), at the same time. They may as well have chucked a baby into the deep end of a swimming pool and expected it to survive. After draining the water from the pool first.
I'm not sure that trying to push a variety of platforms at once is necessarilly a bad thing. Tablets and phones are not the same market (although there is some overlap) - they largely won't cannibalise eachother's sales, so they are increasing the platform's user base, which makes it more attractive to developers, which makes it more attractive to consumers.
Where MS have gone wrong is that Windows RT doesn't have any kind of an edge over the already established platforms - its difficult to see what kind of edge they could ever have for home users, but they could certainly have made a big impact into the corporates by making a platform that would actually integrate with and work well on the corporate networks. They didn't do that, so as far as I can see there is no reason for anyone to buy Windows RT devices.
No, I wouldn't buy one either. But the inconsistency of the technical press is quite entertaining.
Apple strips most of the functionality out of OS X, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a cool, hip, trendy iPad that the critics adore.
Microsoft strips a small part of the functionality out of Windows, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a vile, loathed RT device that the critics lambast for being dumbed down and failing to run Excel macros.
While I'm no Apple fan, you've missed the point that Apple and Android both got there a long time before Microsoft. Microsoft is a late contender for the tablet/phone markets, and in order to succeed they needed an edge over the devices that were already available.
Apple has a cult following and so you'd be hard pressed to convert a lot of the Apple consumers away to any other platform. A good proportion of Apple users buy Apple hardware because its got an Apple logo on it - they don't care about the functionality so much as the "cool factor" of owning an Apple device. So in some respects, MS was always going to struggle to make significant inroads into the core iOS userbase, no matter what they came out with.
Android has cornered the "everything else" market - people who don't care about the supposed Apple "cool factor" are going to be drawn to Android largely because its a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple; but also there is the openness of the platform which is agreeable to a lot of the more techy consumers.
On the whole, there isn't actually a huge amount to choose between iOS, Android and Windows RT - they all do basically the same job; the vast majority of people don't know or care about vendor lockin and the only reason Apple can sell at such a high price is because they are Apple and have the affore mentioned cult status.
So Microsoft have pitched their Windows RT devices at a prices similar to iOS devices. People who buy Apple kit at the inflated prices that Apple charge will continue to do that because its Apple... The rest of the population will compare Apple, MS and Android and conclude that since they are all basically the same they may as well go for the cheaper one so MS has lost that part of the market too.
Who's going to buy MS's devices? Well, corporates would love tablets and phones that integrate well into their networks (and trust me, iOS and Android really don't - they feel, at best, extremely half arsed as soon as you put them on a corporate network). So The "edge" MS have is the corporates... However, they decided to leave all the "pro" stuff out of Windows RT - it actually won't integrate into the corporate networks any better than iOS and Android; so there they've gone and lost the corporates too.
Who's left? The only people I can see who are going to buy an MS device are people who haven't actually looked to see what else is available on the market. If MS had got there first, then I'm sure their current Windows RT offering would be doing very well indeed, but since they didn't they need to offer some kind of edge to sway people from the established platforms, and as far as I can see they just haven't done that.
(I should add that, unfortunately, there are people, even in a corporate environment, who buy shiny kit without researching if it will actually do what they want. For example, one of my customers has recently bought a load of Chromebooks without consulting with any IT staff... they were shocked when they discovered that all their users would need Google accounts and be expected to store everything in the cloud. The term "well duhh" sprang to mind.)
Require VOIP providers to provide proper safeguards or stop operating (and having access) to any of the wired networks? Seems like a fairly simple solution.
That's very similar to saying the solution to botnets is to require computer owners to provide proper safeguards. In short: completely unworkable. We're not just talking about big VoIP gateways, we're talking about anyone who has a VoIP device exposed to the internet. FWIW, I see a *lot* of SIP wardialling attempts on my Asterisk servers - in my case they all get given a "callee number invalid" response, but presumably there are enough misconfigured PBXes around to make it worth setting a botnet to work finding one that will allow anonymous callers to make PSTN calls.
They should pay the same postage that everyone else has to.
I don't care how much postage they pay - that's between them and whoever is handling the mail. I care about the fact that I, as a tax payer, am having to pay for the disposal of the junk they send through.
Also, if a person doesn't want to receive unsolicited mail, it should be trivial (and free) to return it to the sender. Let them throw it away.
To some extent it is - in the UK you can just write "return to sender" on it and pop it back in the post box. But very few people are going to go to the effort of doing that.
I don't think there's that big of a problem with adding hydroelectric storage. It can be done in valleys that have too low of a flow to support a hydroelectric power generation plant. I think there's enough hydro storage geology available in the U.S. that the entire base load could be from hydro storage only period.
Now weigh the environmental cost of destroying vast areas of countryside to make way for the hydro storage against the environmental costs of nuclear.
Hydro storage is an excellent technology for meeting peaks in demand since it can spin up to full capacity in an extremely short period of time, but at the scales you're talking about, the environmental destruction is emmense.
Yes, but in the US, at least, bulk mailing subsidizes ordinary first-class letters. It's annoying, but it's the postal equivalent of advertisements on the radio - the noise pays the bills for the signal. I have no idea if it works that way in the UK, though.
I have no interest in this subsidy. If someone wants to send me something through the post, they can damned well pay for it rather than expecting me to be subjected to the junk mail just so they can save a bit. Add to that the cost to every household of disposing of the junk, and the net result is it probably doesn't actually make anything cheaper anyway. Junk-mailers should be taxed heavilly.
I live in Europe (France) and I don't receive robocalls.
I live in Europe (UK) and I do receive robocalls, spam SMS and domestic spam email. All of these things are illegal here - most of the robocalls are from UK numbers (which suggests that at least the telco they are using is probably based in the UK) and from people with british accents (suggesting they are domestic); most of the spam SMS is from UK numbers, some of the spam email is from reputable british businesses.
Whilst I don't claim you could completely stop all of these things, the fact that the regulator persistently does *nothing at all* to punish the offenders probably has something to do with this...
If I actually have any business interest with you, send it to me in snail mail, because I no longer trust incoming calls
Meh, I get more junk snail mail than junk calls, and even though snail mail doesn't actually interrupt what I'm doing, its still pretty annoying because of the environmental cost and the cost of recycling, which is born by the council (and hence the council tax payer).
I do wish that Ofcom would actually do *something* about the illegal cold-callers and spam SMSers though. They just don't seem to be at all interested in punishing anyone, even where either the cold-callers themselves, or the telco they're using are located within the country.
Because noone has solved the problem of "how do you ensure that the user has transferred all of his copies to the recipient", among other things.
Same goes for CDs. If I were to sell you a CD (which I'm legally entitled to do) there is no way to ensure that I didn't copy it first. All you can say (in both the CD and MP3 cases) is that retaining a copy (not selling the original) would be copyright infringement.
Physical goods are much harder to copy for the average person.
Sticking a physical gizmo in your pocket and walking out of a store without paying for it is pretty easy, but selling physical gizmos is still legal because we don't usually assume everyone is guilty of committing a crime.
To be honest, if so many people are breaking a law that you have to assume everyone is always breaking it, its probably the law that's wrong, not the people...
I think the biggest problem though is that no one really knows exactly how the law applies here and that no one knows exactly what consumers are buying when they buy a digital copy of something.
Well the same is largely true when people buy physical CDs, DVDs, software, etc. largely because industry has done its best to muddy the waters - The media and software industries have long claimed that you don't buy these items - you buy a licence to use them instead. However, this falls somewhat short: 1. If you're buying a licence instead of the actual item, why won't they replace your item at a nominal cost if it gets damaged? (afterall, you are still licenced to use it). 2. When I go into a shop and pick up a CD, I go to the counter and say "I'd like to buy this CD", I'm not told that I can't buy it and get given a licence to sign instead; the cashier accepts my money and I walk out of the shop with a CD, having not signed any kind of licence. 3. When the latest movie comes out on DVD, the advertising says "Own this on DVD today!", not "Buy a limited licence to watch this movie in your own home today" However, would I like to guarantee that a court would rule that I *own* a physical CD, DVD, etc? No I would not - the industry has muddied the waters so much, I no longer truely know what a court would say on the subject.
whether or not it should be transferable when it was likely specified in the fine print somewhere that it wasn't transferable.
I'm fairly sure the licences say you're not allowed to transfer them. However, the question is, is this an enforcable term - you're not allowed to put just anything in a licence, some terms are not legal. Why should a licence be allowed a "nontransferrable" clause, but a book, loaf of bread, chocolate bar, etc. not?
since the file should really be irrelevant to the use rights granted by the license
Unfortunately, the media industry wants it both ways - they want to sell you a licence *and* the data itself as an inseparable bundle.
). Maybe a higher court will need to figure this out and bring this out of the realm of technical issues and copies of files and get it back to the licensing of imaginary property.
reading the CD and turning the bits into sound isn't considered copying under copyright law).
Debatable. IMHO running a piece of software shouldn't be governed by copyright law, but certainly some parts of the software industry believe that you need a licence to waive the copyright laws, since you are inherently copying the software into RAM. I don't think this has ever been tested in court (?)
If you assume that these parts of the software industry are correct (which I don't, but I doubt my views count), then surely copying a CD into your CD player's playback buffer is copying and requires a licence?
If you sell an MP3 by copying bits to someone else's media, you're making a copy even if you then delete the original.
If I want to move an MP3 from one hard disk to another on my computer then I'm doing exactly the same. Am I not allowed to do this?
Sure, I can say that I deleted the Mp3, but how can I prove it?
I might have copies of it elsewhere, on memory sticks.
Personally, I think a fair price for mp3's is under 10 cents these days. And I think when you actually go to the trouble of "buying" one, then you should be able to redownload it in the future.
The law isn't supposed to work on the presumption of guilt. If you sell a physical object, no one assumes you broke the law in order to acquire it - why doesn't the same apply to non-tangible goods, such as licences to listen to an MP3 (which, incidentally, is what is being sold; not the MP3 itself).
Clearly the judge is a firm believer in piracy, else he wouldn't have made that ruling. Seriously though, people are trying to sell "used" mp3's?
Well why not? The media industry is selling time-unlimited licences to play an MP3 - that licence clearly has value, otherwise no one would be willing to pay for it. When you don't want to use it any more, why shouldn't you be able to reclaim some of the value by selling the licence on to someone else? The doctrine of first sale prevents vendors from preventing people from reselling physical goods, why shouldn't the same apply to anything which has value (such as a licence)?
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
RMS tends to undermine any "free software" argument by virtue of being a religious fundamentalist... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of free software, but RMS seems to go to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion.
Example: he recommends using GPL instead of LGPL in situations where there is no reasonable competing library, in order to remove developers' freedom to use non-GPL licences for their software. Note - this isn't a consistent "everything should always be GPLed" view, he specifically says the choice of licence is down to whether or not you could use the GPL to remove other people's freedoms.
If customers find them valueless, why do they sign up for them? They are optional. So optional, I've never heard of them even after being a ten year customer of T-Mobile.
Often they don't sign up for them, they just magically find themselves signed up; and all attempts to "unsign up" and get a refund are met with the carrier disclaiming all responsibility and refusing to do anything.
Back when I was on Orange, I was signed up to 2 premium SMS services through no fault of my own on 2 separate phones (one of which had never been used). Orange wouldn't do anything about it other than continue to bill me, they informed me that I needed to contact the SMS service provider and insisted that I had somehow signed up for these services, even to the point of "well maybe someone else signed you up on a website without your knowledge". In one such instance the conversation went something like: "You need to contact the SMS service provider and have them stop the messages and send you a refund" "Ok, can you give me contact details for them?" "Yes, their number is 0123456789" "That number doesn't work - I just get a number unobtainable tone" "Well, you'll need to contact them about that" "How do I do that then?" "Their number is 0123456789" "I just told you, that number doesn't work - can you give me some other contact details?" "You'll need to ask them"
(This conversation went round and round for a good few times before I gave up).
At the end of the day, I _did_ manage to get both SMS providers to stop sending me messages; I even got a refund off one of them. I was left about a fiver out of pocket with the other. The financial cost was small, the time and hassle cost was high. And this is why they get away with it - if it had been a significant amount of money, I would've taken Orange to the small claims court; but it was about a fiver, so not worth it. Multiply that by thousands of customers and it just isn't in their interest to be customer focussed about these kinds of issues - they're making money by screwing the customers, but the amount they are screwing each customer by makes it not worth that customer actually investing the time to do something about it.
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Their spectrum is still very spiky, though not anywhere near as bad as CFLs. And who knows? Maybe people like spikes in certain places? GE sells those blue-tinted bulbs that some people seem to prefer.
Shouldn't the spectrum of LED bulbs be similar to CFLs? Afterall, they both work by shining UV on phosphors and having the phosphors reradiate it into the visible spectrum...
I've been using the same ones for 11 years, one takes longer to start these days, but none have died. Perhaps they're die when a house has a bad power source?
The quality of CFLs seems (or at least, seemed a few years ago) very variable.
A good number of years ago I made an off-hand remark to a tree-hugger friend of mine (who was perpetually going on about how great they are) that when I'd tried CFLs a few years previously, I found them extremely slow to start and had therefore switched back to incandescents. He informed me that this was no longer the case so long as I bought good quality bulbs.
So I went out and bought a pair of new bulbs - rather than the normal cheapy £2-a-pop CFLs, I opted for relatively expensive GE bulbs. As it turned out, these bulbs were actually *worse* for startup time than my very old cheapy ones, and 6 months after I bought them one of them died with a loud bang, taking out the main circuit breaker and leaving scorch marks around the light fitting. About a year later the second one went flickery and then did pretty much the same thing - bang, scorch marks and tripped the main breaker. The second bulb was in a different house to the first, so I can't attribute the failure to the supply.
These days I do use CFLs in most of my light fittings. I've gone back to using cheapy bulbs, which have greatly improved in recent years, but are still depressingly slow to start compared to incandescents. Thankfully I've had no more CFLs fail, but I've avoided GE and I don't think I have any over about 5 years old.
Bitcoin does have an intrinsic value: the computing time it takes to mine a bitcoin. This is a real, tangible, and strictly-defined value that can be quantified.
No. The computing time _had_ value; but then rather than selling that computing time to someone who could do something useful with it, the owner used it doing something useless. I can't buy a bitcoin and suddenly get a load of CPU time to use for a useful project (such as protein folding, etc).
Exactly the same goes for the electricity used to generate the bitcoins: it had value, but then it was used up by generating coins; you can't buy a coin and convert it back into electricity.
Something doesn't have "intrinsic value" just because it cost something valuable in order to produce it - "intrinsic value" means that the thing itself has physical value. For example, palladium and platinum have intrinsic value because you can make useful stuff like catalytic converters for cars, electronics, etc. out of them.
Seriously? And what happens when people look at the competition? They see nice enough systems that don't run the fucking programs people want and need.
No matter how many times people here want to say it, it just isn't true: You can't take a mainstream user from Windows to "Linux/Android/whatever" without a LOT of pain, hand holding, etc., unless that person is such a lightweight user that s/he lives in a browser.
And ye people are switching to OS X, which has exactly the same problems...
For some users, you are of course right, but for a very large fraction you're completely wrong. What does the average home user do? Email, web browsing, a bit of word processing, etc. - all of which they can do under a variety of competing OSes.
Why is it disconcerting?
I mean... yes, it can be mis-used. The data should be used to flag up pupils who may be struggling, but will also flag those who may already know the material, but just because data could be incorrectly used doesn't make it inherently worrying.
Does it?
But who wants teachers/bosses/whoever prying into everything they do? Those who want to learn will learn, those who don't won't, irrespective of whether someone's spying on them.
In fact, the question submitter explicitly identified the reason for keeping Windows for the guest access, "funny looks and confused users" when offering Linux instead.
Is Firefox on Linux somehow more confusing that Firefox on Windows?
Have a dedicated Linux boot just for them, and if they give you funny looks tell them too bad.
I don't get the "funny looks" comment at all. We don't have a Windows machine in the house - mostly we have Linux machines (running Gnome 3), although there are a couple of Macbooks. If someone wants to borrow a machine then they get either Linux (most common) or OS X (less common) and no one has expressed any "funny looks". Notably, no one seems to have any problems driving Gnome 3, even though they've almost certainly never used it before...
I don't particularly think that lakes are that unsightly, even if capped with a dam. I'd hardly classify it as environmental destruction. Yeah, you submerge a bunch of natural vegetation and replace one ecosystem with another. Big deal.
If completely replacing one ecosystem with another is no "big deal" and isn't "destructive" then we should just keep burning fossil fuels. After all, the greenhouse effect is only replacing one ecosystem with another, so clearly it isn't at all destructive.
Stuff that's more expensive but less useful? I can't believe they are scratching their head wondering why uptake sucked.
I think MS still can't understand why they aren't Apple... Apple regularly pull that kind of crap - produce a product that's very expensive but less useful than the competition, and the consumers just lap it up. From MS's pricing it seems that they think they have the same influence, and now they've fallen on their faces they probably can't understand why they don't.
You left out the part where Apple spent 4 years building a software infrastructure including apps for handheld devices (phones), and then rolled out the iPad.
Microsoft attempted to birth both (phone, tablet) into a hostile environment (solid competition), at the same time. They may as well have chucked a baby into the deep end of a swimming pool and expected it to survive. After draining the water from the pool first.
I'm not sure that trying to push a variety of platforms at once is necessarilly a bad thing. Tablets and phones are not the same market (although there is some overlap) - they largely won't cannibalise eachother's sales, so they are increasing the platform's user base, which makes it more attractive to developers, which makes it more attractive to consumers.
Where MS have gone wrong is that Windows RT doesn't have any kind of an edge over the already established platforms - its difficult to see what kind of edge they could ever have for home users, but they could certainly have made a big impact into the corporates by making a platform that would actually integrate with and work well on the corporate networks. They didn't do that, so as far as I can see there is no reason for anyone to buy Windows RT devices.
No, I wouldn't buy one either. But the inconsistency of the technical press is quite entertaining.
Apple strips most of the functionality out of OS X, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a cool, hip, trendy iPad that the critics adore.
Microsoft strips a small part of the functionality out of Windows, erects a walled garden around the system, dumps it onto an ARM-based tablet and, voila, a vile, loathed RT device that the critics lambast for being dumbed down and failing to run Excel macros.
While I'm no Apple fan, you've missed the point that Apple and Android both got there a long time before Microsoft. Microsoft is a late contender for the tablet/phone markets, and in order to succeed they needed an edge over the devices that were already available.
Apple has a cult following and so you'd be hard pressed to convert a lot of the Apple consumers away to any other platform. A good proportion of Apple users buy Apple hardware because its got an Apple logo on it - they don't care about the functionality so much as the "cool factor" of owning an Apple device. So in some respects, MS was always going to struggle to make significant inroads into the core iOS userbase, no matter what they came out with.
Android has cornered the "everything else" market - people who don't care about the supposed Apple "cool factor" are going to be drawn to Android largely because its a hell of a lot cheaper than Apple; but also there is the openness of the platform which is agreeable to a lot of the more techy consumers.
On the whole, there isn't actually a huge amount to choose between iOS, Android and Windows RT - they all do basically the same job; the vast majority of people don't know or care about vendor lockin and the only reason Apple can sell at such a high price is because they are Apple and have the affore mentioned cult status.
So Microsoft have pitched their Windows RT devices at a prices similar to iOS devices. People who buy Apple kit at the inflated prices that Apple charge will continue to do that because its Apple... The rest of the population will compare Apple, MS and Android and conclude that since they are all basically the same they may as well go for the cheaper one so MS has lost that part of the market too.
Who's going to buy MS's devices? Well, corporates would love tablets and phones that integrate well into their networks (and trust me, iOS and Android really don't - they feel, at best, extremely half arsed as soon as you put them on a corporate network). So The "edge" MS have is the corporates... However, they decided to leave all the "pro" stuff out of Windows RT - it actually won't integrate into the corporate networks any better than iOS and Android; so there they've gone and lost the corporates too.
Who's left? The only people I can see who are going to buy an MS device are people who haven't actually looked to see what else is available on the market. If MS had got there first, then I'm sure their current Windows RT offering would be doing very well indeed, but since they didn't they need to offer some kind of edge to sway people from the established platforms, and as far as I can see they just haven't done that.
(I should add that, unfortunately, there are people, even in a corporate environment, who buy shiny kit without researching if it will actually do what they want. For example, one of my customers has recently bought a load of Chromebooks without consulting with any IT staff... they were shocked when they discovered that all their users would need Google accounts and be expected to store everything in the cloud. The term "well duhh" sprang to mind.)
Require VOIP providers to provide proper safeguards or stop operating (and having access) to any of the wired networks?
Seems like a fairly simple solution.
That's very similar to saying the solution to botnets is to require computer owners to provide proper safeguards. In short: completely unworkable. We're not just talking about big VoIP gateways, we're talking about anyone who has a VoIP device exposed to the internet. FWIW, I see a *lot* of SIP wardialling attempts on my Asterisk servers - in my case they all get given a "callee number invalid" response, but presumably there are enough misconfigured PBXes around to make it worth setting a botnet to work finding one that will allow anonymous callers to make PSTN calls.
Junk-mailers should be taxed heavilly.
They should pay the same postage that everyone else has to.
I don't care how much postage they pay - that's between them and whoever is handling the mail. I care about the fact that I, as a tax payer, am having to pay for the disposal of the junk they send through.
Also, if a person doesn't want to receive unsolicited mail, it should be trivial (and free) to return it to the sender. Let them throw it away.
To some extent it is - in the UK you can just write "return to sender" on it and pop it back in the post box. But very few people are going to go to the effort of doing that.
I don't think there's that big of a problem with adding hydroelectric storage. It can be done in valleys that have too low of a flow to support a hydroelectric power generation plant. I think there's enough hydro storage geology available in the U.S. that the entire base load could be from hydro storage only period.
Now weigh the environmental cost of destroying vast areas of countryside to make way for the hydro storage against the environmental costs of nuclear.
Hydro storage is an excellent technology for meeting peaks in demand since it can spin up to full capacity in an extremely short period of time, but at the scales you're talking about, the environmental destruction is emmense.
Yes, but in the US, at least, bulk mailing subsidizes ordinary first-class letters. It's annoying, but it's the postal equivalent of advertisements on the radio - the noise pays the bills for the signal. I have no idea if it works that way in the UK, though.
I have no interest in this subsidy. If someone wants to send me something through the post, they can damned well pay for it rather than expecting me to be subjected to the junk mail just so they can save a bit. Add to that the cost to every household of disposing of the junk, and the net result is it probably doesn't actually make anything cheaper anyway. Junk-mailers should be taxed heavilly.
I live in Europe (France) and I don't receive robocalls.
I live in Europe (UK) and I do receive robocalls, spam SMS and domestic spam email. All of these things are illegal here - most of the robocalls are from UK numbers (which suggests that at least the telco they are using is probably based in the UK) and from people with british accents (suggesting they are domestic); most of the spam SMS is from UK numbers, some of the spam email is from reputable british businesses.
Whilst I don't claim you could completely stop all of these things, the fact that the regulator persistently does *nothing at all* to punish the offenders probably has something to do with this...
If I actually have any business interest with you, send it to me in snail mail, because I no longer trust incoming calls
Meh, I get more junk snail mail than junk calls, and even though snail mail doesn't actually interrupt what I'm doing, its still pretty annoying because of the environmental cost and the cost of recycling, which is born by the council (and hence the council tax payer).
I do wish that Ofcom would actually do *something* about the illegal cold-callers and spam SMSers though. They just don't seem to be at all interested in punishing anyone, even where either the cold-callers themselves, or the telco they're using are located within the country.
Because noone has solved the problem of "how do you ensure that the user has transferred all of his copies to the recipient", among other things.
Same goes for CDs. If I were to sell you a CD (which I'm legally entitled to do) there is no way to ensure that I didn't copy it first. All you can say (in both the CD and MP3 cases) is that retaining a copy (not selling the original) would be copyright infringement.
Physical goods are much harder to copy for the average person.
Sticking a physical gizmo in your pocket and walking out of a store without paying for it is pretty easy, but selling physical gizmos is still legal because we don't usually assume everyone is guilty of committing a crime.
To be honest, if so many people are breaking a law that you have to assume everyone is always breaking it, its probably the law that's wrong, not the people...
I think the biggest problem though is that no one really knows exactly how the law applies here and that no one knows exactly what consumers are buying when they buy a digital copy of something.
Well the same is largely true when people buy physical CDs, DVDs, software, etc. largely because industry has done its best to muddy the waters - The media and software industries have long claimed that you don't buy these items - you buy a licence to use them instead. However, this falls somewhat short:
1. If you're buying a licence instead of the actual item, why won't they replace your item at a nominal cost if it gets damaged? (afterall, you are still licenced to use it).
2. When I go into a shop and pick up a CD, I go to the counter and say "I'd like to buy this CD", I'm not told that I can't buy it and get given a licence to sign instead; the cashier accepts my money and I walk out of the shop with a CD, having not signed any kind of licence.
3. When the latest movie comes out on DVD, the advertising says "Own this on DVD today!", not "Buy a limited licence to watch this movie in your own home today"
However, would I like to guarantee that a court would rule that I *own* a physical CD, DVD, etc? No I would not - the industry has muddied the waters so much, I no longer truely know what a court would say on the subject.
whether or not it should be transferable when it was likely specified in the fine print somewhere that it wasn't transferable.
I'm fairly sure the licences say you're not allowed to transfer them. However, the question is, is this an enforcable term - you're not allowed to put just anything in a licence, some terms are not legal. Why should a licence be allowed a "nontransferrable" clause, but a book, loaf of bread, chocolate bar, etc. not?
since the file should really be irrelevant to the use rights granted by the license
Unfortunately, the media industry wants it both ways - they want to sell you a licence *and* the data itself as an inseparable bundle.
). Maybe a higher court will need to figure this out and bring this out of the realm of technical issues and copies of files and get it back to the licensing of imaginary property.
reading the CD and turning the bits into sound isn't considered copying under copyright law).
Debatable. IMHO running a piece of software shouldn't be governed by copyright law, but certainly some parts of the software industry believe that you need a licence to waive the copyright laws, since you are inherently copying the software into RAM. I don't think this has ever been tested in court (?)
If you assume that these parts of the software industry are correct (which I don't, but I doubt my views count), then surely copying a CD into your CD player's playback buffer is copying and requires a licence?
If you sell an MP3 by copying bits to someone else's media, you're making a copy even if you then delete the original.
If I want to move an MP3 from one hard disk to another on my computer then I'm doing exactly the same. Am I not allowed to do this?
Sure, I can say that I deleted the Mp3, but how can I prove it?
I might have copies of it elsewhere, on memory sticks.
Personally, I think a fair price for mp3's is under 10 cents these days.
And I think when you actually go to the trouble of "buying" one, then you should be able to redownload it in the future.
The law isn't supposed to work on the presumption of guilt. If you sell a physical object, no one assumes you broke the law in order to acquire it - why doesn't the same apply to non-tangible goods, such as licences to listen to an MP3 (which, incidentally, is what is being sold; not the MP3 itself).
Clearly the judge is a firm believer in piracy, else he wouldn't have made that ruling. Seriously though, people are trying to sell "used" mp3's?
Well why not? The media industry is selling time-unlimited licences to play an MP3 - that licence clearly has value, otherwise no one would be willing to pay for it. When you don't want to use it any more, why shouldn't you be able to reclaim some of the value by selling the licence on to someone else? The doctrine of first sale prevents vendors from preventing people from reselling physical goods, why shouldn't the same apply to anything which has value (such as a licence)?
Classifying RMS as "just a hacktivist" only highlights your ignorance. I suggest you read up on everything he's achieved (he started emacs, gdb and gcc to name a few) as a hacker before making such an unfounded claim.
The fact that RMS also cares about people and not just about sating his own technological cravings is a positive point imho, whether I agree with him or not (and I often don't)
RMS tends to undermine any "free software" argument by virtue of being a religious fundamentalist... Don't get me wrong, I'm a big supporter of free software, but RMS seems to go to great lengths to compromise on freedom in order to push his free software religion.
Example: he recommends using GPL instead of LGPL in situations where there is no reasonable competing library, in order to remove developers' freedom to use non-GPL licences for their software. Note - this isn't a consistent "everything should always be GPLed" view, he specifically says the choice of licence is down to whether or not you could use the GPL to remove other people's freedoms.
If customers find them valueless, why do they sign up for them? They are optional. So optional, I've never heard of them even after being a ten year customer of T-Mobile.
Often they don't sign up for them, they just magically find themselves signed up; and all attempts to "unsign up" and get a refund are met with the carrier disclaiming all responsibility and refusing to do anything.
Back when I was on Orange, I was signed up to 2 premium SMS services through no fault of my own on 2 separate phones (one of which had never been used). Orange wouldn't do anything about it other than continue to bill me, they informed me that I needed to contact the SMS service provider and insisted that I had somehow signed up for these services, even to the point of "well maybe someone else signed you up on a website without your knowledge". In one such instance the conversation went something like:
"You need to contact the SMS service provider and have them stop the messages and send you a refund"
"Ok, can you give me contact details for them?"
"Yes, their number is 0123456789"
"That number doesn't work - I just get a number unobtainable tone"
"Well, you'll need to contact them about that"
"How do I do that then?"
"Their number is 0123456789"
"I just told you, that number doesn't work - can you give me some other contact details?"
"You'll need to ask them"
(This conversation went round and round for a good few times before I gave up).
At the end of the day, I _did_ manage to get both SMS providers to stop sending me messages; I even got a refund off one of them. I was left about a fiver out of pocket with the other. The financial cost was small, the time and hassle cost was high. And this is why they get away with it - if it had been a significant amount of money, I would've taken Orange to the small claims court; but it was about a fiver, so not worth it. Multiply that by thousands of customers and it just isn't in their interest to be customer focussed about these kinds of issues - they're making money by screwing the customers, but the amount they are screwing each customer by makes it not worth that customer actually investing the time to do something about it.