Tailgating at night is particularly bothersome. I drove a subcompact car, and an SUV or truck on my tail with its headlights in my eyes is blinding. That's a really dangerous situation on the country roads, where I need to have enough vision to be able to watch for deer, fallen branches, etc.
My usual approach is to just slow down to the point where I'm not overdriving my vision, but since this tends to anger the clueless fuckers behind me, they will often respond by getting even closer or turning on their brights, which just forces me to slow down even more. I don't know why they don't pass; apparently it takes an appreciable amount of intelligence to figure out that the guy who is currently driving at 30 but was going 55 when you first got on his tail is probably not going to speed up and it's easier to just get ahead of him if you really absolutely have to be driving 65 at night during deer season.
When I got my TiVO, it was $200 for the box and $300 for a lifetime subscription, for a total of $500.
I didn't have a computer that was capable of running MythTV (and still don't), and when I priced the parts needed to build one, I was looking at over $1000 plus an appreciable amount of labor to build a machine that was as capable as a TiVO box.
It's been some years, so I really don't know if the math works out the same anymore, but at least in my case I really don't think it's a wonder at all that I chose the TiVO.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "games can be art, but art cannot be games." On the surface it's a logical contradiction, so I assume you're using either 'art' or 'games' two different ways in that sentence.
My guess at how to interpret it is "Something that is mostly meant to be a game can have artistic qualities, but something that is primarily intended to be art can't make a good game." I would disagree with that, though. I've seen art that also works well as a game, and while I agree that the gameplay can't stand on the same footing as something that's primarily meant to be a game, I don't really see this as a problem. Games that are games first and art second aren't really great art, either - though they are sometimes good art.
If you want to see great examples of art that's fun to play, you should really check out the interactive fiction scene. Some works that stand out particularly well in my opinion are Metamorphoses by Emily Short and So Far by Andrew Plotkin. Anchorhead by Michael Gentry is also worth a play - it could be called lower-brow in that its a work of Lovecraftian horror, but I found it to be far more frightening than any of the more modern survival horror games I've ever played - Silent Hill didn't quite manage to give me nightmares.
There's also some other neat stuff going on with visual games in the indie scene. I remember particularly appreciating Grow: Cube over at Eye Maze.
Keep in mind that the people who want our society to loosen up when it comes to the human body and the people who decry the loosening of our standards of modesty are not actually the same people.
It seems to me that budget is the key reason why game publishers are backing off on the prestige games. Specifically, a lot of people don't seem to know how to make a lower-budget game.
The article hints at this when they mention that prestige movies tend to be lower budget, and people who work on them are expected to work for lower pay. The huge expensive special effects and highest-paid actors are saved for movies with more mass-market appeal. Meanwhile, a lot of the more, shall we say, experimental games that I see coming out of major game studios still hold tight to their expensive high-detail graphics and whatnot. This makes the games much more expensive to produce, and they effectively price themselves out of their already restricted market.
I think a key lesson that the game industry could stand to learn is that they don't have to have incredibly complex graphics and endless content in order to make a game look good and get played a lot - Katamari Damacy illustrates this point extremely well. This is another thing that sets prestige movies, which do shun the special effects and whatnot, apart from most attempts at prestiget games that I've seen. Another is that people who pay attention to these games aren't necessarily all that interested in great visuals, anyway. Paying for all of that when your target market doesn't care about it is just throwing money down a well.
The higher execs at the company wanted Vista to be a revolution and had a clear and concise goal that they wanted this operating system to achieve. In order to do this, from what I've read, they needed to form many more separate divisions inside of the Windows division to concentrate on small parts of the operating system. This probably sounded like a good idea, but the problem was that none of their work was in sync with each other. Some had more work completed than others.
This seems like a key failure to me. Contrast with Apple. I get the impression that while they have separate teams with separate projects, no project is slated for a particular release of the OS until it is close enough to completion that they can begin to accurately predict when it will be finished. (Of course, this is easier for Apple since they release a new version of OS X every 12-18mo, whereas we've been sitting on Windows XP for half a decade.) The end result is, there's at least a little bit less rushing and a whole lot less touting this and that feature years ahead of time only to drop more and more of them as release approaches.
I'd also be inclined to think that Microsoft's love for integration is really dragging them down. Their OS is simply too massive to allow for so many tight couplings, and the increasing levels of bureaucracy only makes it harder to test the increasingly complex boundary conditions. (I get the impression that finding boundary cases in Windows so that they can be tested is a little bit like finding every point in the Mandelbrot set.) The integration doesn't even seem to be handled using simple, elegant protocols like in certain other platforms; I have no doubt that it was frustration with this situation that lead to the Zune team passing up WMP and developing their own player/media center.
It's funny, for all their pushing of object-oriented design with technologies like COM and.NET, Microsoft's software design culture seems to be an object-oriented cargo cult - they go through all the motions, sometimes with an almost pathological precision, but I often get the feeling that they've managed to memorize all of the details without ever managing to really grasp the basic point of it all.
For example, why does the shutdown menu team have to wait for their changes to make it all the way to the root repository before they can get it tested with everything else? Why can't they build only their code and drop the binary into whatever the latest global build is to test? Or, since I suppose they have people for that, why can't they hand just their module off to a testing team, who is also getting builds from any other pertinent software development teams, and they can throw all of these modules together on a running system to test? The only reasons I can think of are bureaucracy, or that everything is so tightly coupled that it really is impossible to build it all separately. If it's the latter, the easiest solution I can think of is to catch up with the 1980s: Dynamic linking and IPC exist for a reason.
The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Avron Barr & Edward Feigenbaum.
It comes in four volumes, each covering different topics. It's mostly introductory material, but it's served me as a great reference for algorithms. Probably out of print, but I got my copies used and it seems like it's easy enough to grab off of Amazon. Rather than chronological order, here's the order of usefulness:
I: Search, knowledge representation, computational linguistics. IV: Blackboard systems, expert systems, distributed problem solving, computer vision, knowledge-based systems III: Cognition models, deduction, computer vision, induction II: languages for AI research, writeups of various example applications, automatic programming
Amateurish might be a strong word, but it's certainly nothing exciting. It looks like somebody was just trying to incorporate various stylistic elements from OS X and Windows but not make it look *too* much like its competitors. Sort of like the Ford Focus and its oh-so-creative (Civic+Corolla)/2 styling.
That, and I saw at least one icon in there which might get them sued by Apple. The house is a particularly blatant rip-off.
No offense, but I think you're doing little more than spewing vitriol.
Er, another way to phrase that is, "we made a bunch of sh** up." I'm shaking my head right now. That's EXACTLY what says! "Ignorance of how forcings would actually developed."
Would you prefer he really did make a bunch of shit up? Because that's what he would have been doing if he didn't make a bunch of scenarios. In the absence of a crystal ball, all you can do is figure out what the range of possible future events is, and then plug that into a model in order to bracket what might happen. Those graphs were never meant to be final predictions. The way things like this are used are that, if anybody has any information that can help predict the likelihood of certain events (say, a massive volcanic eruption) over a range of time, you can start narrowing the probability cone.
I certainly don't understand the assertion that this set of scenarios was wrong because reality turned out to be closer to scenarios B and C rather than A, especially when history turned out to follow the "future events" models used to produce those scenarios. To me, the fact that what has happened pretty closely matches the results he predicted for the hypothetical that turned out to be true means he was pretty damn right about these predictions.
What he did is pretty standard practise in everything from monitoring potential asteroid strikes to forming business plans and family budgets. If you don't like it, I'd suggest you come up with an alternative. The only other two I know are making firm assumptions about the future and proceeding with an attitude that these arbitrary predictions are prophecy; or failing to think about consequences at all and stumbling blindly into the future without a care in the world. Which would you prefer?
Hell, I can give you "extreme" scenerios that would "bracket" plausible rates of change without knowing a damn thing! Moot. How closely would they bracket them?
Note that the article in question actually misquotes and misinterprets NUMBERS and SCIENCE Quote edited to improve accuracy.
versus the typical, "W-w-w-well, what if THE SKY STARTED FALLING!!! WE NEED TO TAKE ACTION JUST IN CASE!!!!" I like hyperbolie as much as the next person, but pointing out that there are people who are standing out there screaming the end is near is not useful for arguing that people who are making much more moderate predictions and suggesting much more reasonable risk management policies are wrong. I don't think the US economy is likely to collapse without warning anytime soon, but that doesn't keep me from maintaining a nest egg just in case I lose my job.
If Microsoft does this, it will be for some other reason. I have a really hard time believing MS execs could get a rationale like "We're pulling out of this massive massive massive but largely untapped market because our bleeding hearts tell us to" past the shareholders.
My money's on protecting their IP - not just piracy, as others have mentioned, but concerns about stuff like components of it being reverse engineered and incorporated into competing products.
A lot of municipalities have rules about trick-or-treating, and a common one is that it has to stop at sundown.
I have a feeling one of the industries that sent lobbyists for this is the candy industry, since it means they'll get an extra hour of trick-or-treating in the places that do have ordinances about it.
With lifespan of 5 years, it will start showing its age in 2 or 3 years as HDTV become the norm.
I think that's a rather optimistic prediction of how quickly HDTV is going to take over. Given current HDTV prices, HDTV has a *long* way to go before most anyone I know will be willing to buy one. I wouldn't be surprised if HDTV becomes the norm among people with media-and-technophilic tendencies within 3 years, but I'm also not so sure that that's the Wii's target market. Nintendo hasn't really been after people who obsess over graphics since the Super Nintendo.
I don't think I'm totally unusual for seeing the Wii's lack of support for 720p or 1080i as a bonus. To me, including that support would be something I know I wouldn't use but would have to pay for. All this bling in the 360 and PS3 is exactly why I'm not so excited about them but am drooling to see the Wii in action. (And I do think it would noticeably increase the cost especially given how low the Wii's price point is. They'd have to upgrade more than just one chip to add support.)
Won't reply to all of your points because you're right, but I have thoughts on a few:
1) Spelling is not a skill they possess. Spammers don't have to even try to be intelligent about the content of their e-mail, because the people they're looking to make money off of aren't the kind of people who have decent spelling skills.
3) The idea of 'doubling the flood' all the time, choking the internet and making email unusable, is plain dumb and equivivalent to sawing off the branch you're sitting on - if nobody can use email, nobody will be seeing your next spam. Two thoughts: Classic prisoner's dilemma, and selfishness. (ie, "Who cares if I broke the internet? I made this fat stack o' cash!")
4) Doing business that annoys 99% of everybody else and breaking the law in the process is both dumb and asking for trouble. You will be shut down, you will lose your money and you will not get much sympathy anywhere, including from the courts. Wonder whether spammers or pedophiles are getting the worst treatment in the slammer these days...;) If that were the case, then how come nobody has been able to curb spam, spammers routinely get away with extremely blatant practices like DDoS attacking antispam servers and using viruses to create zombie armies? How come spammers are continuing to make money almost unchecked?
5) Seeing interviews with spammers usually reveals that they're really stupid in every way of the word. Some may have a certain extent of technical knowledge, but as people they're bordering on the moron/retard level. ???
6) Smart people can strike it rich using regular sales methods with no need for spamming. Only those too dumb for that have the need for spamming. A good number of folks feel that regular sales methods - annoying advertisements, billboards everywhere, planting "I'm ugly" mind viruses in children's brains so they'll buy more beauty products and who cares if it's also creating an eating disorder epidemic, planned obsolesence and congenital wastefulness, squeezing every penny you can out of workers in 3rd world sweatshopss, etc. are at least as troublesome and unethical as spam.
It's worth pointing out that reverse engineering and disassembling/decompiling are not the same thing. The latter might be useful for helping with the former, but the law doesn't say that anybody is required to make sure reverse engineering will be easy. It just says that that you're allowed to do it for various reasons. Nor do I think anyone has an ethical responsibility to make reverse engineering easy. In fact, if you're looking to reverse engineer something it's probably in your best interests to not disassemble any Apple binaries, since you'll want to be staying on the safe side of copyright law. This is why the Wine folks down't want anybody who has seen the source code to Windows getting involved in their project. Similarly, both AMD and Intel would probably think twice before hiring somebody who has worked on the other company's chip designs.
This is true, but if you want binary compatibility throwing a WINE-like layer on top of GNUStep so that the system can handle universal binaries (or PPC ones if you're on LinuxPPC, I suppose) would be trivial compared to what WINE has had to do.
GNUStep is really your best starting place if you're wanting an open source OS X; they have a 10-year head start on you.
If you purchase a physical item, do you still think of it as the seller's property after you've paid for it and taken it home?
When I purchase a car, the car is my property. Honda is not trampling on my liberties by not giving me all the CAD files and whatnot that were used to make my car.
I hope you're just playing word games to get a rise out of me. I'd hate to think that you actually believe what you just said. But I'll jump on it anyway, 'cuz I have some time to kill this morning.
Yes, PC is often used to mean "IBM-Compatible Personal Computer", but that doesn't mean that a Mac is not a personal computer, too. It's also true that Apple is just about the last living company outside of the heavily commoditized Wintel segment, but that doesn't mean that a Macintosh is a fundamentally different product. There are other manufacturers who make similar hardware/software pairs - RISCStations and PegasOS computers come to mind. There used to be a lot more of them. Do Acorn and Genesi also have monopolies over their respective products?
Or is your problem that Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system? In that case, Sony has a monopoly on Playstations, Microsoft has a monopoly on XBoxes, and Nintendo has a monopoly on GameCubes; Nokia, Kyocera, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson all have monopolies on their particular lines of cell phones; and Tivo, Applanix, Sun, IBM, and Lego have monopolies on their DVR boxes, GPS systems, servers, workstations, and mainframes, and toy robot kits. While we're at it, we might as well initiate retroactive litigation against Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, Apple (for both the Apple II and the Lisa), HP, DEC, SGI, Honeywell, and whatever's left of Genesi and Symbolics.
Apple isn't locking everyone into their OS and applications. They're just locking some people out.
OS: They have released software that's specifically designed to allow you to run more than one OS on your computer. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a long history of making it damn hard to dual-boot.
Applications: You aren't required to run any of these encrypted apps. Heck, if you don't want them you aren't even required to pay for the operating system - you can download a pretty heavily stripped down version of the OS for free.
As long as there's a GSM version that speaks a language I understand (even just barely), I'd gladly order one of these babies from overseas. This is everything I've been dreaming of in a phone.
Slashdot Mirror
I use the anti-dazzle. Still I'm blinded. Much of the problem is that my side view mirrors don't have an anti-dazzle option.
Tailgating at night is particularly bothersome. I drove a subcompact car, and an SUV or truck on my tail with its headlights in my eyes is blinding. That's a really dangerous situation on the country roads, where I need to have enough vision to be able to watch for deer, fallen branches, etc.
My usual approach is to just slow down to the point where I'm not overdriving my vision, but since this tends to anger the clueless fuckers behind me, they will often respond by getting even closer or turning on their brights, which just forces me to slow down even more. I don't know why they don't pass; apparently it takes an appreciable amount of intelligence to figure out that the guy who is currently driving at 30 but was going 55 when you first got on his tail is probably not going to speed up and it's easier to just get ahead of him if you really absolutely have to be driving 65 at night during deer season.
When I got my TiVO, it was $200 for the box and $300 for a lifetime subscription, for a total of $500.
I didn't have a computer that was capable of running MythTV (and still don't), and when I priced the parts needed to build one, I was looking at over $1000 plus an appreciable amount of labor to build a machine that was as capable as a TiVO box.
It's been some years, so I really don't know if the math works out the same anymore, but at least in my case I really don't think it's a wonder at all that I chose the TiVO.
I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "games can be art, but art cannot be games." On the surface it's a logical contradiction, so I assume you're using either 'art' or 'games' two different ways in that sentence.
My guess at how to interpret it is "Something that is mostly meant to be a game can have artistic qualities, but something that is primarily intended to be art can't make a good game." I would disagree with that, though. I've seen art that also works well as a game, and while I agree that the gameplay can't stand on the same footing as something that's primarily meant to be a game, I don't really see this as a problem. Games that are games first and art second aren't really great art, either - though they are sometimes good art.
If you want to see great examples of art that's fun to play, you should really check out the interactive fiction scene. Some works that stand out particularly well in my opinion are Metamorphoses by Emily Short and So Far by Andrew Plotkin. Anchorhead by Michael Gentry is also worth a play - it could be called lower-brow in that its a work of Lovecraftian horror, but I found it to be far more frightening than any of the more modern survival horror games I've ever played - Silent Hill didn't quite manage to give me nightmares.
There's also some other neat stuff going on with visual games in the indie scene. I remember particularly appreciating Grow: Cube over at Eye Maze.
Keep in mind that the people who want our society to loosen up when it comes to the human body and the people who decry the loosening of our standards of modesty are not actually the same people.
It seems to me that budget is the key reason why game publishers are backing off on the prestige games. Specifically, a lot of people don't seem to know how to make a lower-budget game.
The article hints at this when they mention that prestige movies tend to be lower budget, and people who work on them are expected to work for lower pay. The huge expensive special effects and highest-paid actors are saved for movies with more mass-market appeal. Meanwhile, a lot of the more, shall we say, experimental games that I see coming out of major game studios still hold tight to their expensive high-detail graphics and whatnot. This makes the games much more expensive to produce, and they effectively price themselves out of their already restricted market.
I think a key lesson that the game industry could stand to learn is that they don't have to have incredibly complex graphics and endless content in order to make a game look good and get played a lot - Katamari Damacy illustrates this point extremely well. This is another thing that sets prestige movies, which do shun the special effects and whatnot, apart from most attempts at prestiget games that I've seen. Another is that people who pay attention to these games aren't necessarily all that interested in great visuals, anyway. Paying for all of that when your target market doesn't care about it is just throwing money down a well.
This seems like a key failure to me. Contrast with Apple. I get the impression that while they have separate teams with separate projects, no project is slated for a particular release of the OS until it is close enough to completion that they can begin to accurately predict when it will be finished. (Of course, this is easier for Apple since they release a new version of OS X every 12-18mo, whereas we've been sitting on Windows XP for half a decade.) The end result is, there's at least a little bit less rushing and a whole lot less touting this and that feature years ahead of time only to drop more and more of them as release approaches.
I'd also be inclined to think that Microsoft's love for integration is really dragging them down. Their OS is simply too massive to allow for so many tight couplings, and the increasing levels of bureaucracy only makes it harder to test the increasingly complex boundary conditions. (I get the impression that finding boundary cases in Windows so that they can be tested is a little bit like finding every point in the Mandelbrot set.) The integration doesn't even seem to be handled using simple, elegant protocols like in certain other platforms; I have no doubt that it was frustration with this situation that lead to the Zune team passing up WMP and developing their own player/media center.
It's funny, for all their pushing of object-oriented design with technologies like COM and
For example, why does the shutdown menu team have to wait for their changes to make it all the way to the root repository before they can get it tested with everything else? Why can't they build only their code and drop the binary into whatever the latest global build is to test? Or, since I suppose they have people for that, why can't they hand just their module off to a testing team, who is also getting builds from any other pertinent software development teams, and they can throw all of these modules together on a running system to test? The only reasons I can think of are bureaucracy, or that everything is so tightly coupled that it really is impossible to build it all separately. If it's the latter, the easiest solution I can think of is to catch up with the 1980s: Dynamic linking and IPC exist for a reason.
Get a virus scanner, silly. I believe this trojan is detected by all of them.
The Handbook of Artificial Intelligence, edited by Avron Barr & Edward Feigenbaum.
It comes in four volumes, each covering different topics. It's mostly introductory material, but it's served me as a great reference for algorithms. Probably out of print, but I got my copies used and it seems like it's easy enough to grab off of Amazon. Rather than chronological order, here's the order of usefulness:
I: Search, knowledge representation, computational linguistics.
IV: Blackboard systems, expert systems, distributed problem solving, computer vision, knowledge-based systems
III: Cognition models, deduction, computer vision, induction
II: languages for AI research, writeups of various example applications, automatic programming
Amateurish might be a strong word, but it's certainly nothing exciting. It looks like somebody was just trying to incorporate various stylistic elements from OS X and Windows but not make it look *too* much like its competitors. Sort of like the Ford Focus and its oh-so-creative (Civic+Corolla)/2 styling.
That, and I saw at least one icon in there which might get them sued by Apple. The house is a particularly blatant rip-off.
The full text of the grandparent post was quoted in my post. :|
Given the way programming on projects like this goes, my guess is that this isn't a bug; it's an egregious design flaw.
Choose one.
Why only one? I'd say 'both' is pretty likely.
No offense, but I think you're doing little more than spewing vitriol.
Er, another way to phrase that is, "we made a bunch of sh** up." I'm shaking my head right now. That's EXACTLY what says! "Ignorance of how forcings would actually developed."
Would you prefer he really did make a bunch of shit up? Because that's what he would have been doing if he didn't make a bunch of scenarios. In the absence of a crystal ball, all you can do is figure out what the range of possible future events is, and then plug that into a model in order to bracket what might happen. Those graphs were never meant to be final predictions. The way things like this are used are that, if anybody has any information that can help predict the likelihood of certain events (say, a massive volcanic eruption) over a range of time, you can start narrowing the probability cone.
I certainly don't understand the assertion that this set of scenarios was wrong because reality turned out to be closer to scenarios B and C rather than A, especially when history turned out to follow the "future events" models used to produce those scenarios. To me, the fact that what has happened pretty closely matches the results he predicted for the hypothetical that turned out to be true means he was pretty damn right about these predictions.
What he did is pretty standard practise in everything from monitoring potential asteroid strikes to forming business plans and family budgets. If you don't like it, I'd suggest you come up with an alternative. The only other two I know are making firm assumptions about the future and proceeding with an attitude that these arbitrary predictions are prophecy; or failing to think about consequences at all and stumbling blindly into the future without a care in the world. Which would you prefer?
Hell, I can give you "extreme" scenerios that would "bracket" plausible rates of change without knowing a damn thing!
Moot. How closely would they bracket them?
Note that the article in question actually misquotes and misinterprets NUMBERS and SCIENCE
Quote edited to improve accuracy.
versus the typical, "W-w-w-well, what if THE SKY STARTED FALLING!!! WE NEED TO TAKE ACTION JUST IN CASE!!!!"
I like hyperbolie as much as the next person, but pointing out that there are people who are standing out there screaming the end is near is not useful for arguing that people who are making much more moderate predictions and suggesting much more reasonable risk management policies are wrong. I don't think the US economy is likely to collapse without warning anytime soon, but that doesn't keep me from maintaining a nest egg just in case I lose my job.
If Microsoft does this, it will be for some other reason. I have a really hard time believing MS execs could get a rationale like "We're pulling out of this massive massive massive but largely untapped market because our bleeding hearts tell us to" past the shareholders.
My money's on protecting their IP - not just piracy, as others have mentioned, but concerns about stuff like components of it being reverse engineered and incorporated into competing products.
A lot of municipalities have rules about trick-or-treating, and a common one is that it has to stop at sundown.
I have a feeling one of the industries that sent lobbyists for this is the candy industry, since it means they'll get an extra hour of trick-or-treating in the places that do have ordinances about it.
With lifespan of 5 years, it will start showing its age in 2 or 3 years as HDTV become the norm.
I think that's a rather optimistic prediction of how quickly HDTV is going to take over. Given current HDTV prices, HDTV has a *long* way to go before most anyone I know will be willing to buy one. I wouldn't be surprised if HDTV becomes the norm among people with media-and-technophilic tendencies within 3 years, but I'm also not so sure that that's the Wii's target market. Nintendo hasn't really been after people who obsess over graphics since the Super Nintendo.
I don't think I'm totally unusual for seeing the Wii's lack of support for 720p or 1080i as a bonus. To me, including that support would be something I know I wouldn't use but would have to pay for. All this bling in the 360 and PS3 is exactly why I'm not so excited about them but am drooling to see the Wii in action. (And I do think it would noticeably increase the cost especially given how low the Wii's price point is. They'd have to upgrade more than just one chip to add support.)
Won't reply to all of your points because you're right, but I have thoughts on a few:
;)
1) Spelling is not a skill they possess.
Spammers don't have to even try to be intelligent about the content of their e-mail, because the people they're looking to make money off of aren't the kind of people who have decent spelling skills.
3) The idea of 'doubling the flood' all the time, choking the internet and making email unusable, is plain dumb and equivivalent to sawing off the branch you're sitting on - if nobody can use email, nobody will be seeing your next spam.
Two thoughts: Classic prisoner's dilemma, and selfishness. (ie, "Who cares if I broke the internet? I made this fat stack o' cash!")
4) Doing business that annoys 99% of everybody else and breaking the law in the process is both dumb and asking for trouble. You will be shut down, you will lose your money and you will not get much sympathy anywhere, including from the courts. Wonder whether spammers or pedophiles are getting the worst treatment in the slammer these days...
If that were the case, then how come nobody has been able to curb spam, spammers routinely get away with extremely blatant practices like DDoS attacking antispam servers and using viruses to create zombie armies? How come spammers are continuing to make money almost unchecked?
5) Seeing interviews with spammers usually reveals that they're really stupid in every way of the word. Some may have a certain extent of technical knowledge, but as people they're bordering on the moron/retard level.
???
6) Smart people can strike it rich using regular sales methods with no need for spamming. Only those too dumb for that have the need for spamming.
A good number of folks feel that regular sales methods - annoying advertisements, billboards everywhere, planting "I'm ugly" mind viruses in children's brains so they'll buy more beauty products and who cares if it's also creating an eating disorder epidemic, planned obsolesence and congenital wastefulness, squeezing every penny you can out of workers in 3rd world sweatshopss, etc. are at least as troublesome and unethical as spam.
I can do this with my computer, too.
It's worth pointing out that reverse engineering and disassembling/decompiling are not the same thing. The latter might be useful for helping with the former, but the law doesn't say that anybody is required to make sure reverse engineering will be easy. It just says that that you're allowed to do it for various reasons. Nor do I think anyone has an ethical responsibility to make reverse engineering easy. In fact, if you're looking to reverse engineer something it's probably in your best interests to not disassemble any Apple binaries, since you'll want to be staying on the safe side of copyright law. This is why the Wine folks down't want anybody who has seen the source code to Windows getting involved in their project. Similarly, both AMD and Intel would probably think twice before hiring somebody who has worked on the other company's chip designs.
This is true, but if you want binary compatibility throwing a WINE-like layer on top of GNUStep so that the system can handle universal binaries (or PPC ones if you're on LinuxPPC, I suppose) would be trivial compared to what WINE has had to do.
GNUStep is really your best starting place if you're wanting an open source OS X; they have a 10-year head start on you.
If you purchase a physical item, do you still think of it as the seller's property after you've paid for it and taken it home?
When I purchase a car, the car is my property. Honda is not trampling on my liberties by not giving me all the CAD files and whatnot that were used to make my car.
I hope you're just playing word games to get a rise out of me. I'd hate to think that you actually believe what you just said. But I'll jump on it anyway, 'cuz I have some time to kill this morning.
Yes, PC is often used to mean "IBM-Compatible Personal Computer", but that doesn't mean that a Mac is not a personal computer, too. It's also true that Apple is just about the last living company outside of the heavily commoditized Wintel segment, but that doesn't mean that a Macintosh is a fundamentally different product. There are other manufacturers who make similar hardware/software pairs - RISCStations and PegasOS computers come to mind. There used to be a lot more of them. Do Acorn and Genesi also have monopolies over their respective products?
Or is your problem that Apple makes both the hardware and the operating system? In that case, Sony has a monopoly on Playstations, Microsoft has a monopoly on XBoxes, and Nintendo has a monopoly on GameCubes; Nokia, Kyocera, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson all have monopolies on their particular lines of cell phones; and Tivo, Applanix, Sun, IBM, and Lego have monopolies on their DVR boxes, GPS systems, servers, workstations, and mainframes, and toy robot kits. While we're at it, we might as well initiate retroactive litigation against Commodore, Atari, Sinclair, Apple (for both the Apple II and the Lisa), HP, DEC, SGI, Honeywell, and whatever's left of Genesi and Symbolics.
Since when is 5% marketshare a monopoly?
Apple isn't locking everyone into their OS and applications. They're just locking some people out.
OS: They have released software that's specifically designed to allow you to run more than one OS on your computer. Microsoft, on the other hand, has a long history of making it damn hard to dual-boot.
Applications: You aren't required to run any of these encrypted apps. Heck, if you don't want them you aren't even required to pay for the operating system - you can download a pretty heavily stripped down version of the OS for free.
As long as there's a GSM version that speaks a language I understand (even just barely), I'd gladly order one of these babies from overseas. This is everything I've been dreaming of in a phone.