Actually, true computer nerds have always thought the way to score a big job is:
1. Locate desired megacorp 2. Fire up hex editor and stub out HR screening department with NOPs. 3. Locate hiring manager 4. Replace all references to phone numbers in hiring manager with references to nerd's own phone 5. Sit back and wait for the call
This last economic collapse is probably due to too many nerds forgetting to reverse their hacks after they get hired.
You must be new to this internet thing: You're not supposed to respond to a revolutionary screed by bombarding it with analysis.
At the very best, you'll be ignored. Second to that, the person you've asked will just spam you with links to more "reading material" that is supposed to "open your eyes".
So if I buy an app via the phone, then plug it into the computer, is it automatically synced onto the computer? How about voice memos? Same thing? How about when I download a podcast via the phone? Same thing?
Wait... back up a step... can I actually buy apps via the phone?... This is easier how again??
They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources.
Apple embeds an email client into the device. It's not some extra you have to pay for. It's included. They would lose no money by allowing a company to sell a replacement email client via the store. They would in fact MAKE MONEY by allowing a company to sell a replacement email client via the store, in the form of transaction overhead.
Same with the web browser. Same with the iPod app. Same with the phone "app". And the SMS "app". And the "app store" app. Yet they will not allow these to be replaced.
On the other hand, Apple has turned a blind eye to third-party recreations of the clock app, the camera app, the voice recorder app (retroactively), the notes app, the calendar app, and the calculator app. Re-creations of those abound, because they do not constitute "core" highly-cross-integrated functionality.
Clearly their regard for user experience is more than just a "song and dance". Take your "simple truth" back to the pound, because that dog won't hunt.
The GSM Association, like any other industry regulatory body with members, can require its members to conduct their affairs a certain way even with regard to entities that are NOT part of the body, including competitors and POTENTIAL competitors who are trying to enter the industry. Those obligations can be declared enforceable by a local, state, or federal agency. In this specific case of Apple vs. Nokia, they have been. And Apple has filed suit in the appropriate venue.
Your examples regarding landlords and the GPL are inane red herrings.
Well, there you go. As you say, you have no idea what FRAND obligations Nokia faces. So I will describe them to you.
In 2008, Nokia demanded that, as part of it’s compensation for licensing Nokia’s portfolio of purported essential patents, Apple must grant Nokia a license to a particular number of Apple non-standards-essential patents. That demand is prima-facie discriminatory. Nokia is not allowed to troll through the entire portfolio of a company when assembling the terms of a license. That behavior is practically the opposite of what the GSM Association was assembled to do.
Then in 2009, Nokia actually worsened their terms, by demanding a royalty three times greater than any other they'd offered in the past.
Your ignorance invalidates the rest of your "argument", including your bizarre condition that only the GSM Association itself can file a patent lawsuit against its members.
What does "roughly twice" mean on the planet where you're from. The numbers tell an entirely different story [engadget.com] with Winmo outstripping Iphone by 2 to 1.
Hey dumbass: Your link points to an article written almost TWO YEARS AGO, and the statistic it gives is for SIX MONTHS, not a quarter.
Awesome! I can see it now! Sixteen icons on the home screen:
1. MAME r106, Really Hard To Control Edition 2. "Let's Bounce," With Russian ""Actress"" Yulia Nova 3. Telnet 4. Official Chase Bank App (actually released by phr0z3n crew, but who can tell?) 5. Captain Redb34rd's Totally Safe And Not Backdoored Personal Info Storage App 6. Flash Player (clocked down to 1fps for battery life) 7. I Am Rich 8. Baseband Burner 9. Firefox Mobile 10. Mozilla Mobile 11. Opera Mobile 12. Lynx Mobile 13. Internet Explorer Mobile 14. Internet Explorer Mobile Security Update Manager 15. WinAMP 16. Norton AV
Clearly, Apple sees short term commercial advantage in inconveniencing their customers, by not dropping each and every one of these apps into their next firmware update.
Android was not something built on hype like the iphone.
The iPhone was not built on hype, though it benefitted from it. It was built on damned strong innovation.
Google, HTC and the other OHA members planed for Android to have a slow release and ramp up which is exactly what has happened. Many tech products use this approach, creating a small market of early adopters, using this market to refine the product and come back with an R2. Also this has the added advantage of creating a support network as well as word of mouth campaigns as opposed to Apple's "blanket of hype" marketing.
There you go again with that "hype" word. Actually Apple is so respected for their ability to innovate that they benefit strongly from the word-of-mouth you speak of. The iPhone made the cover of Time magazine, as the "best invention of the year", total cost to Apple: Zero. The Steve was named by Fortune magazine as the CEO of the decade. Cost: Zero. Those represent the top of a mountain of free press coverage that Google simply cannot match. So of course their strategy is different; but not by choice.
The plan with Android is not to flood the market at once with "sales explosions" but to slowly seep in and take market share piecemeal.
Yes, that's "the plan". It's the only strategy that stands a chance in hell of working.
Slow and steady wins the race. Analysts are predicting 2012 for Android to routinely outsell the iphone.
Analyst. The Gartner research firm, last month, to be specific. They did not reveal any details about how they arrived at their numbers. They did not say that Android would eat marketshare away from Apple, either. They claimed that, three years from now, about 14% of smartphones would run the Android OS, and that about 13% of smartphones would be sold by Apple.
Don't hang your hat on what one analyst says. Another research firm, Canalys, has already pegged the Apple smartphone marketshare at 17 percent in Q3 2009.
Even if the iPhone marketshare were to SHRINK in three years down to the same level that Gartner promises the Android, Apple would still be making one hell of a lot more money off smartphones than Google would. And do you have any idea how long three and a half years is in this market? The iPhone had not even been released three years ago. What's Apple going to be rolling out three years from NOW? If you think the Android platform is going to destroy or even damage Apple's smartphone business, you still Have Some Splainin' To Do.
For those playing along at home Apple's sales ebb and flow with the level of marketing Apple produces, right now the level of iphone marketing is low so iphones are not selling much
7.4 million units sold in Q3 2009. That is roughly twice the number of units sold running Windows Mobile, and dangerously close to the number of BlackBerries sold in the same time frame. Explain your usage of the phrase "not selling much".
as of July 2010 it will have been released in every western nation for two years which is the standard plan length in our nations. This is going to affect iphone sales a lot.
Explain how.
the iphone didn't take that much away from competitors, certainly the likes of RIM and NOKIA aren't hurting, the iphone hasn't taken much from the smart phone market, most of the iphones market share comes from the consumer phone market.
... Which is where the smartphone market gets its growth from. And this is exactly why RIM and Nokia _are_ worried. The majority of the customers newly attracted to the smartphone market are being diverted to iPhones. Nokia's smartphone sales figures have been flat for the last three years. That is what we in the biz call "hurting".
Let's say Android is deployed on every smartphone in the world that isn't an iPhone. Some are large and fragile, some are gold-plated, some with touchscreens, some without, some with keyboards, et cetera et cetera. To do this, every manufacturer and carrier needs to write custom firmware, apps, and UI elements to work with their handsets, on top of Android,... so let's just say they did, and they work just fine, and here we are.
How does this in any way constitute a threat to the iPhone?
Here's another scenario: Let's take every computer in the world, from the toughest HP rig to the crappiest mini-ATX, and make them all run the same OS. Let's call this rival OS something suitably generic, like, "windows". By sheer numbers alone, it will totally crush Apple and their puny OS X! Except it hasn't.
What magic sauce does Android promise that will counteract the crushing weight of a zillion competing handsets and their chump code monkeys clamoring to distinguish themselves with blingy but utterly unusable interfaces?
Right. So, offshoring is not good or bad in itself - that depends on the concentration of wealth in the originating country.
The qualifier you prepended to your corrolary invalidates it.
On the other hand, as the GP said, offshoring is appealing as long as the offshore country offers cheaper labor. As long as they offer cheaper labor, the country derives an advantage from the investment, and that allows them to become less poor. That's a good thing.
Meanwhile the on-shore company only continues to employ that labor if they are able to SELL the product they've created. When the lower-class run out of money, the upper-class can no longer drive their offshore operation.
Unfortunately, the lower-class are already out of money. But the situation has not corrected itself because the lower-class have been given credit cards to prolong and cement their suffering. >:)
Do you see that awful end-game getting closer, or receding?
Think of how many easy low-tech jobs we could create, if we smashed every computer in the world and did ALL calculations by hand. Not to mention the fantastic manufacturing boom in paper, pencils, erasers, and desk chairs. The number of jobs we could create would be astounding, and even a person with an IQ of 70 could be quite useful, if we gave them all of the simplest arithmetic problems.
The number of middle-managers necessary for this would be incredible. More jobs! Jobs for everyone!
- - -
Clearly, keeping everyone "useful" is putting the cart before the horse. It is a mode of thinking which judges the quality of civilization by a single number on a piece of paper: The taxable employment rate. I submit to you that a better civilization would be one where less than HALF the populace is employed at any one time. Then, in the average two-adult household, one of the adults could stay home and raise the children.
I know, it sounds like an impossible dream, doesn't it.
You say being dependent upon China and others leaves the US in a weaker position... but a position for what?
What circumstances are more likely to result in two regions going to war? 1. Each region has its own deliberately isolated manufacturing and trade 2. Each region has its own imbalance of manufacturing and trade, absorbed by the other
Case 1 encourages each region to view the other as a threat. That view will encourage isolation of their own culture, language, and law just as they do for trade. Case 2 encourages each region to interconnect and communicate. In order to do business, they will need to understand one another's culture, language, and law.
Which case is the better deterrent of war? In the 80's, Russia and the US were so isolated from each other that they stockpiled vast quantities of nuclear arms, in order to fabricate what is essentially the same circumstance: If one dies, so does the other. Consider what would happen if we pulled the plug on ALL trade with China. Kaboom!!
Also, if you think a glut of low-wage factory jobs would have somehow averted the "dot-com bomb" or the "housing bust", you'd better explain how. From where I stand, both of those occurred because a gigantic swath of the country was preyed upon by a deregulated or poorly regulated entity - bank loan officers on one hand, and stock shills on the other - and was convinced that the path to riches was paved in debt and speculation. (That, and, housing construction - a MANUFACTURING JOB - boomed to the point where it over-produced.) How would a bunch of local jobs pounding rivets into a plastic truck, or reloading huge reels of surface-mount resistors, have averted either of those disasters?
I have faith in the mechanisms of the scientific method, since I employ them every day in my working and personal endeavors. I have faith in the advice of my parents and in the character of my spouse, and faith that the universe can be described mathematically, up to a very fine point, beyond which we encounter pure chaos. Faith is not "generally" only applied to spirituality, unless you wish to isolate the word for specific use as a weapon against the virulent forms of spirituality that prey on the weaknesses of everyone stuck in the working class. Using the word that way is like using a hammer to teach piano lessons. In short, if your aim is to eliminate virulent and asinine religious practice, You're Doing It Wrong.
The the inanity that Richard Dawkins et al wish to freight the word "faith" with - that it is belief despite a lack of evidence, or belief in spite of evidence - is a deliberate misunderstanding of the religious origins and use of the word. The faithful, those who would call themselves such with conviction, see their faith as a feeling of certainty that rests upon a foundation of what they consider to be very solid "evidence" indeed. To them, the intricate and lively world around them, in totality, constitutes evidence for their faith, as does their very presence in it, therefore no detail in the explanation of it could possibly reverse their conviction. Shout at them all you like that their "faith" is without evidence - they will fail to understand your meaning, and instead respond to your air of self-importance and superiority by calling you an asshole, or at the very least, a heretic.
Try it sometime and see if they don't.
Instead you need to recognize that you're going to have to approach the problem sideways: Do what you can to educate and empower these people, and leave your Us Versus Them faith/science logic sermons in the trash can. They will shed dangerous religion, by and large, just as you apparently have. Beyond that, you should have no quarrel with them anyway. Let them peacefully pray to any deity they like so long as they're smart enough to acknowledge that science is the best approach in matters of medicine, economics, and history.
Science and faith ARE intrinsically linked, for most people. Ask people the difference between belief and faith and you will probably just get a lot of head-scratching and shrugs. C'est la vie.
Re:Psystar winning would be terrible for Microsoft
on
Psystar Crushed In Court
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
To innovate is not to generate something entirely unique from a vacuum. Innovation is defined as "making changes in something established by introducing new methods, ideas, or products."
Microsoft is accused of "cloning" because the methods, ideas, and products that they introduce do not generally constitute an improvement.
So, young people pay for young people, old people pay for old people, and the rich pay for the rich? Where does the "spreading the risk" part of insurance come in?
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, true computer nerds have always thought the way to score a big job is:
1. Locate desired megacorp
2. Fire up hex editor and stub out HR screening department with NOPs.
3. Locate hiring manager
4. Replace all references to phone numbers in hiring manager with references to nerd's own phone
5. Sit back and wait for the call
This last economic collapse is probably due to too many nerds forgetting to reverse their hacks after they get hired.
You must be new to this internet thing: You're not supposed to respond to a revolutionary screed by bombarding it with analysis.
At the very best, you'll be ignored. Second to that, the person you've asked will just spam you with links to more "reading material" that is supposed to "open your eyes".
So if I buy an app via the phone, then plug it into the computer, is it automatically synced onto the computer? How about voice memos? Same thing? How about when I download a podcast via the phone? Same thing?
Wait ... back up a step ... can I actually buy apps via the phone? ... This is easier how again??
You might as well just ask the Slashdot editors to hard-link that in the top of the Apple section, what with how often you post it.
Gee, that sounds an awful lot like how jailbreaking voids your warranty, DOESN'T IT. What were you complaining about again?
They give a good song and dance about how closed the device is being about the "user experience," but the simple truth is that they don't want competition from other sources.
Apple embeds an email client into the device. It's not some extra you have to pay for. It's included.
They would lose no money by allowing a company to sell a replacement email client via the store.
They would in fact MAKE MONEY by allowing a company to sell a replacement email client via the store, in the form of transaction overhead.
Same with the web browser. Same with the iPod app. Same with the phone "app". And the SMS "app". And the "app store" app.
Yet they will not allow these to be replaced.
On the other hand, Apple has turned a blind eye to third-party recreations of the clock app, the camera app, the voice recorder app (retroactively), the notes app, the calendar app, and the calculator app. Re-creations of those abound, because they do not constitute "core" highly-cross-integrated functionality.
Clearly their regard for user experience is more than just a "song and dance". Take your "simple truth" back to the pound, because that dog won't hunt.
The GSM Association, like any other industry regulatory body with members, can require its members to conduct their affairs a certain way even with regard to entities that are NOT part of the body, including competitors and POTENTIAL competitors who are trying to enter the industry. Those obligations can be declared enforceable by a local, state, or federal agency. In this specific case of Apple vs. Nokia, they have been. And Apple has filed suit in the appropriate venue.
Your examples regarding landlords and the GPL are inane red herrings.
Well, there you go. As you say, you have no idea what FRAND obligations Nokia faces. So I will describe them to you.
In 2008, Nokia demanded that, as part of it’s compensation for licensing Nokia’s portfolio of purported essential patents, Apple must grant Nokia a license to a particular number of Apple non-standards-essential patents. That demand is prima-facie discriminatory. Nokia is not allowed to troll through the entire portfolio of a company when assembling the terms of a license. That behavior is practically the opposite of what the GSM Association was assembled to do.
Then in 2009, Nokia actually worsened their terms, by demanding a royalty three times greater than any other they'd offered in the past.
Your ignorance invalidates the rest of your "argument", including your bizarre condition that only the GSM Association itself can file a patent lawsuit against its members.
In Ultima 7, hacking his way through the Forge of Virtue.
Yeah. And I'm pointing out that your sample size of 1 is not very convincing.
oh YEAH? Well _I_ have a friend who's a die-hard PC user, who's getting an iPhone!
Take THAT!!!1!!!1
Yeah. Less neutral, like, sabotaging their finances. For example.
Actually I believe it was first popular as Spanish slang
What does "roughly twice" mean on the planet where you're from. The numbers tell an entirely different story [engadget.com] with Winmo outstripping Iphone by 2 to 1.
Hey dumbass: Your link points to an article written almost TWO YEARS AGO, and the statistic it gives is for SIX MONTHS, not a quarter.
Awesome! I can see it now! Sixteen icons on the home screen:
1. MAME r106, Really Hard To Control Edition
2. "Let's Bounce," With Russian ""Actress"" Yulia Nova
3. Telnet
4. Official Chase Bank App (actually released by phr0z3n crew, but who can tell?)
5. Captain Redb34rd's Totally Safe And Not Backdoored Personal Info Storage App
6. Flash Player (clocked down to 1fps for battery life)
7. I Am Rich
8. Baseband Burner
9. Firefox Mobile
10. Mozilla Mobile
11. Opera Mobile
12. Lynx Mobile
13. Internet Explorer Mobile
14. Internet Explorer Mobile Security Update Manager
15. WinAMP
16. Norton AV
Clearly, Apple sees short term commercial advantage in inconveniencing their customers, by not dropping each and every one of these apps into their next firmware update.
Android was not something built on hype like the iphone.
The iPhone was not built on hype, though it benefitted from it. It was built on damned strong innovation.
Google, HTC and the other OHA members planed for Android to have a slow release and ramp up which is exactly what has happened. Many tech products use this approach, creating a small market of early adopters, using this market to refine the product and come back with an R2. Also this has the added advantage of creating a support network as well as word of mouth campaigns as opposed to Apple's "blanket of hype" marketing.
There you go again with that "hype" word. Actually Apple is so respected for their ability to innovate that they benefit strongly from the word-of-mouth you speak of. The iPhone made the cover of Time magazine, as the "best invention of the year", total cost to Apple: Zero. The Steve was named by Fortune magazine as the CEO of the decade. Cost: Zero. Those represent the top of a mountain of free press coverage that Google simply cannot match. So of course their strategy is different; but not by choice.
The plan with Android is not to flood the market at once with "sales explosions" but to slowly seep in and take market share piecemeal.
Yes, that's "the plan". It's the only strategy that stands a chance in hell of working.
Slow and steady wins the race. Analysts are predicting 2012 for Android to routinely outsell the iphone.
Analyst. The Gartner research firm, last month, to be specific. They did not reveal any details about how they arrived at their numbers. They did not say that Android would eat marketshare away from Apple, either. They claimed that, three years from now, about 14% of smartphones would run the Android OS, and that about 13% of smartphones would be sold by Apple.
Don't hang your hat on what one analyst says. Another research firm, Canalys, has already pegged the Apple smartphone marketshare at 17 percent in Q3 2009.
Even if the iPhone marketshare were to SHRINK in three years down to the same level that Gartner promises the Android, Apple would still be making one hell of a lot more money off smartphones than Google would. And do you have any idea how long three and a half years is in this market? The iPhone had not even been released three years ago. What's Apple going to be rolling out three years from NOW? If you think the Android platform is going to destroy or even damage Apple's smartphone business, you still Have Some Splainin' To Do.
For those playing along at home Apple's sales ebb and flow with the level of marketing Apple produces, right now the level of iphone marketing is low so iphones are not selling much
7.4 million units sold in Q3 2009. That is roughly twice the number of units sold running Windows Mobile, and dangerously close to the number of BlackBerries sold in the same time frame. Explain your usage of the phrase "not selling much".
as of July 2010 it will have been released in every western nation for two years which is the standard plan length in our nations. This is going to affect iphone sales a lot.
Explain how.
the iphone didn't take that much away from competitors, certainly the likes of RIM and NOKIA aren't hurting, the iphone hasn't taken much from the smart phone market, most of the iphones market share comes from the consumer phone market.
... Which is where the smartphone market gets its growth from. And this is exactly why RIM and Nokia _are_ worried. The majority of the customers newly attracted to the smartphone market are being diverted to iPhones. Nokia's smartphone sales figures have been flat for the last three years. That is what we in the biz call "hurting".
Let's say Android is deployed on every smartphone in the world that isn't an iPhone. Some are large and fragile, some are gold-plated, some with touchscreens, some without, some with keyboards, et cetera et cetera. To do this, every manufacturer and carrier needs to write custom firmware, apps, and UI elements to work with their handsets, on top of Android, ... so let's just say they did, and they work just fine, and here we are.
How does this in any way constitute a threat to the iPhone?
Here's another scenario: Let's take every computer in the world, from the toughest HP rig to the crappiest mini-ATX, and make them all run the same OS. Let's call this rival OS something suitably generic, like, "windows". By sheer numbers alone, it will totally crush Apple and their puny OS X! Except it hasn't.
What magic sauce does Android promise that will counteract the crushing weight of a zillion competing handsets and their chump code monkeys clamoring to distinguish themselves with blingy but utterly unusable interfaces?
I'd really like to know.
Right. So, offshoring is not good or bad in itself - that depends on the concentration of wealth in the originating country.
The qualifier you prepended to your corrolary invalidates it.
On the other hand, as the GP said, offshoring is appealing as long as the offshore country offers cheaper labor. As long as they offer cheaper labor, the country derives an advantage from the investment, and that allows them to become less poor. That's a good thing.
Meanwhile the on-shore company only continues to employ that labor if they are able to SELL the product they've created. When the lower-class run out of money, the upper-class can no longer drive their offshore operation.
Unfortunately, the lower-class are already out of money. But the situation has not corrected itself because the lower-class have been given credit cards to prolong and cement their suffering. >:)
Do you see that awful end-game getting closer, or receding?
Think of how many easy low-tech jobs we could create, if we smashed every computer in the world and did ALL calculations by hand. Not to mention the fantastic manufacturing boom in paper, pencils, erasers, and desk chairs. The number of jobs we could create would be astounding, and even a person with an IQ of 70 could be quite useful, if we gave them all of the simplest arithmetic problems.
The number of middle-managers necessary for this would be incredible. More jobs! Jobs for everyone!
- - -
Clearly, keeping everyone "useful" is putting the cart before the horse. It is a mode of thinking which judges the quality of civilization by a single number on a piece of paper: The taxable employment rate. I submit to you that a better civilization would be one where less than HALF the populace is employed at any one time. Then, in the average two-adult household, one of the adults could stay home and raise the children .
I know, it sounds like an impossible dream, doesn't it.
Right. Because the people who punch rivets into girders are totally learning on-the-job how to be architects.
You say being dependent upon China and others leaves the US in a weaker position ... but a position for what?
What circumstances are more likely to result in two regions going to war?
1. Each region has its own deliberately isolated manufacturing and trade
2. Each region has its own imbalance of manufacturing and trade, absorbed by the other
Case 1 encourages each region to view the other as a threat. That view will encourage isolation of their own culture, language, and law just as they do for trade.
Case 2 encourages each region to interconnect and communicate. In order to do business, they will need to understand one another's culture, language, and law.
Which case is the better deterrent of war?
In the 80's, Russia and the US were so isolated from each other that they stockpiled vast quantities of nuclear arms, in order to fabricate what is essentially the same circumstance: If one dies, so does the other.
Consider what would happen if we pulled the plug on ALL trade with China.
Kaboom!!
Also, if you think a glut of low-wage factory jobs would have somehow averted the "dot-com bomb" or the "housing bust", you'd better explain how. From where I stand, both of those occurred because a gigantic swath of the country was preyed upon by a deregulated or poorly regulated entity - bank loan officers on one hand, and stock shills on the other - and was convinced that the path to riches was paved in debt and speculation. (That, and, housing construction - a MANUFACTURING JOB - boomed to the point where it over-produced.) How would a bunch of local jobs pounding rivets into a plastic truck, or reloading huge reels of surface-mount resistors, have averted either of those disasters?
I have faith in the mechanisms of the scientific method, since I employ them every day in my working and personal endeavors. I have faith in the advice of my parents and in the character of my spouse, and faith that the universe can be described mathematically, up to a very fine point, beyond which we encounter pure chaos. Faith is not "generally" only applied to spirituality, unless you wish to isolate the word for specific use as a weapon against the virulent forms of spirituality that prey on the weaknesses of everyone stuck in the working class. Using the word that way is like using a hammer to teach piano lessons. In short, if your aim is to eliminate virulent and asinine religious practice, You're Doing It Wrong.
The the inanity that Richard Dawkins et al wish to freight the word "faith" with - that it is belief despite a lack of evidence, or belief in spite of evidence - is a deliberate misunderstanding of the religious origins and use of the word. The faithful, those who would call themselves such with conviction, see their faith as a feeling of certainty that rests upon a foundation of what they consider to be very solid "evidence" indeed. To them, the intricate and lively world around them, in totality, constitutes evidence for their faith, as does their very presence in it, therefore no detail in the explanation of it could possibly reverse their conviction. Shout at them all you like that their "faith" is without evidence - they will fail to understand your meaning, and instead respond to your air of self-importance and superiority by calling you an asshole, or at the very least, a heretic.
Try it sometime and see if they don't.
Instead you need to recognize that you're going to have to approach the problem sideways: Do what you can to educate and empower these people, and leave your Us Versus Them faith/science logic sermons in the trash can. They will shed dangerous religion, by and large, just as you apparently have. Beyond that, you should have no quarrel with them anyway. Let them peacefully pray to any deity they like so long as they're smart enough to acknowledge that science is the best approach in matters of medicine, economics, and history.
Science and faith ARE intrinsically linked, for most people. Ask people the difference between belief and faith and you will probably just get a lot of head-scratching and shrugs. C'est la vie.
Ahh, 1987. Those were the days, eh? ;)
To innovate is not to generate something entirely unique from a vacuum.
Innovation is defined as "making changes in something established by introducing new methods, ideas, or products."
Microsoft is accused of "cloning" because the methods, ideas, and products that they introduce do not generally constitute an improvement.
So, young people pay for young people, old people pay for old people, and the rich pay for the rich? Where does the "spreading the risk" part of insurance come in?