A lot of kids in the UK learnt to program on a ZX81/Spectrum. The ZX81 cost about £70 at the time, and with the 16K Ram Pack (another £40) you could do some decent things.
The ZX81 had a few games, but mostly, the lack of them meant people wrote things for themselves. And the simplicity of the machines (black and white, block graphics) meant that you could learn the fundamentals of coding.
2) Create a proxy app so that my requests go to my server with the same address on each, but the content that is sent (and not recorded) contains the address that I want to retrieve from. My ISP simply then sees and records each request as going to myserver.com.
3) Server retrieves data, and passes it back to me as though coming from my server, but containing message information which my proxy can then translate back to my browser.
What's the point in only retrieving where requests go? It lacks any context. I could visit a chat room in another country and talk about anything at all, and it's going to add nothing.
That's a distortion of what libertarians believe. Libertarians still believe in government, but as a force to simply allow people to live freely without being abused by another person and without undue interference of government.
I observe what is happening in the US, but the story is similar in the UK. Government isn't taking away your rights, it's about the people being more than happy to allow it to happen.
You have a pretty decent constitution, but it's only a piece of paper. I observe the US government doing things that they can do that mean they don't break the constitution, but work around it. Very few people there seem to care about what is going on in terms of privacy and freedom as long as it means they can sleep safely in bed (forgetting that they could be next to be accidentally detained without trial).
The amazing thing to me is how many people were still prepared to vote for a government (like in the UK) after they said "we can't show you the full intelligence, you are just going to have to trust us" and failed to produce the goods.
Such information should be trustworthy, and when government breaks that trust for political means (and after it's shown that it's a post grad study and that they said things that they knew would be misunderstood (like the "45 minutes" quote), they undermine the security of the nation. If there was an imminent attack and Blair tried to say "we have information, but you'll have to trust us", people won't. They'll want to see the goods.
I only co-operate with the police where I have to now. I'm getting tempted to download and digest a copy of the Police and Criminal Evidence Act.
A friend of mine was pulled over for something that in no way justified a breath test. Of course, my friend was clean, but my impression was that the police are doing something akin to random testing now (against UK law), but looking for the tiniest excuse for doing so.
On the other hand, a police officer who drove a government minister to a political meeting and was caught got let off.
Government is mostly bad because it's like a 5 year unenforcable contract which regardless of whether you want it, if enough people to get the government elected, you are stuck with it.
The politicians can break the promises with no recourse for 5 years.
A libertarian or small government is best because the services that would normally be provided by government are much more controlled by free markets, which then means that you, the member of the public can make real demands on those services, or take your money elsewhere. The fact that you only get a vote once every 5 years matters much less. Don't like a hospital? Use another one. School teaching your child things to please special interest groups? Go elsewhere.
The current government is extending reach more and more into people's pockets and personal lives. It will reach the point that people just break their ties and find a way out of the system, go abroad or live a black market outlaw life.
I can think of a couple of UK companies that come up good on price comparison. One company that deals by email only, meaning that what might have taken 10 minutes to discuss a return issue can take a few days.
My rule of thumb now is to deal with small suppliers that have served me well. Suppliers who when I email a technical pre-sales question, give me a comprehensive answer, not a hyperlink to a FAQ page on the manufacturer's website. Suppliers for whom a 5 minute waiting time for a call almost never happens (on average, I'm "next in queue" and talking to someone within 2 minutes).
I know that the small guy I deal with costs a little more, and that I'm paying for that service. But that's what I want, because to me, time is money, and spending half an hour on the phone talking to poorly trained staff about a fault (followed by numerous escalations) means I'm not getting on with my work.
Does anyone seriously suggest that Branson won't be able to find people willing to spend $200,000 on a trip into orbit?
38,000 people have already paid the 10% deposit. That's 3/4 billion of funding already in the bank. I'm not sure how long it's going to take just to get through that queue, but it sounds like a long time to me.
It's all to do with usability for the average guy/gal. There's the aspect you've talked about, and also the aesthetic aspect.
I don't know about the netherlands, but here in the UK, mobile phones are often sold on aesthetics, not features, something which often is a big point to women rather than men. Next time you see a VW Beetle, check out who the driver is. I've not yet seen a woman with an iRiver or a Creative player, but plenty with iPods.
I was thinking this last week as being the ultimate twist in the show.
Everyone is waiting for the confrontation when the "fools" get shown how they got duped, only for the producers to show some highlights which show various clues that it was all a load of bollocks.
The fact that there are 2 actors out of this bunch, and there are 3 actor "plants" is very suspicious to me.
I suppose my main point is that of all content restriction that has been tried, region coding is probably the biggest out there, and failed. People don't like being told what they can do (many/most accept reasonable copyright protection that doesn't get in their way).
When I first bought a DVD player, multi-region wasn't a big thing, but now, I don't know anyone with an R2 only machine (and that includes plenty of non-geeks like a plumber).
For all the complaints about DVD and it's restrictions (like the DVD-Jon case), it serves the public reasonably well. Very few people care about being able to have open access to their DVD. They put it in, it plays a movie. They can play it on their PC, on a standalone player. They can sell it on Ebay and lend it to their friends.
But the public will not swallow certain restrictions. If there really is to be calling home and machine-based restrictions, it won't take off. A few people might buy it just because they've got so much money that they can live without lending it to friends, trading it on Ebay, and are happy to have a DVD version for the car. Most people won't be.
When DVD came out, you could see an improvement with your existing equipment.
With HD you need a new TV to watch HDTV. I'm sure that over time we'll all end up with it, but I'm not going to spend £3000 to replace my TV to watch movies at a slightly higher resolution. I'd rather spend £3000 on cinema tickets than that.
The content industry is going to see a serious backlash if they try this.
They tried region coding, and people over here in the UK just got players chipped and hacked. Everyone I know has a multiregion player so that they can watch unavailable US movies or cheaper far east versions.
Start telling people that they can't lend a movie to a mate, and they'll either boycott, or work out a way around.
I wouldn't risk a whole lot of money on a company that I knew nothing about. If I was spending £500+ on a camera, I'd want someone that a friend had recommended and had some reasonable feedback.
I've spent small money on unknown retailers online, where spending £20-30 is an acceptable risk (even then, I've made sure that there's a few reasonable links around).
What seems a worry to me is that you no longer have a party backing small government, which reflects a real worry about how people feel about government. That instead of being the pioneers and creators, they'd rather just have a pork barrel rolled out for them.
The biggest problem is the First Past The Post (FPTP) system that is also employed here in the UK. It means that there is stagnation in political parties. You cannot get any political involvement by greens/libertarians/whoever because the system is weighted towards people voting for the best option to get the other party out of power instead of choosing who they want in power.
It also seems to discourage people from voting, as they figure that if they don't like Labour/Conservative, they may as well not bother voting, and sadly I think they are right.
Shipping is a very small cost, especially for small, lightweight goods like mp3 players.
At the moment China is a lot cheaper because their cost base is so very much lower. As people become wealthier there, so things will go up in price - housing, food etc. And they will become less competitive (unless they are wise and spend money on educating even more Chinese to compete with the world).
The problem for many parts of the world (like the EU and USA) is that they are doing exactly the wrong thing. Government (by will of the people) are creating more and more tax breaks/programs to ensure that their people maintain an improving wage structure, instead of letting costs slide and getting closer to being competitive with China. The longer that you do so (and run up larger and larger debts), the worst the eventual slide is going to be.
I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.
Slashdot Mirror
The ZX81 had a few games, but mostly, the lack of them meant people wrote things for themselves. And the simplicity of the machines (black and white, block graphics) meant that you could learn the fundamentals of coding.
What it means is that if you wanted to create an ISP that zapped logs 2 minutes after the request, you can't now. That's the difference.
Quite sad, really. That in order to protect my privacy, I'd have to trade with some unpleasant nations.
1) Create a server somewhere outside the EU.
2) Create a proxy app so that my requests go to my server with the same address on each, but the content that is sent (and not recorded) contains the address that I want to retrieve from. My ISP simply then sees and records each request as going to myserver.com.
3) Server retrieves data, and passes it back to me as though coming from my server, but containing message information which my proxy can then translate back to my browser.
What's the point in only retrieving where requests go? It lacks any context. I could visit a chat room in another country and talk about anything at all, and it's going to add nothing.
And no, I don't have anything to hide, it's more the principle of not giving them the opportunity of even looking.
Would Switzerland be worth consideration?
That's a distortion of what libertarians believe. Libertarians still believe in government, but as a force to simply allow people to live freely without being abused by another person and without undue interference of government.
Are you therefore saying "if you've done nothing illegal, then you've nothing to hide?"
I observe what is happening in the US, but the story is similar in the UK. Government isn't taking away your rights, it's about the people being more than happy to allow it to happen.
You have a pretty decent constitution, but it's only a piece of paper. I observe the US government doing things that they can do that mean they don't break the constitution, but work around it. Very few people there seem to care about what is going on in terms of privacy and freedom as long as it means they can sleep safely in bed (forgetting that they could be next to be accidentally detained without trial).
Such information should be trustworthy, and when government breaks that trust for political means (and after it's shown that it's a post grad study and that they said things that they knew would be misunderstood (like the "45 minutes" quote), they undermine the security of the nation. If there was an imminent attack and Blair tried to say "we have information, but you'll have to trust us", people won't. They'll want to see the goods.
A friend of mine was pulled over for something that in no way justified a breath test. Of course, my friend was clean, but my impression was that the police are doing something akin to random testing now (against UK law), but looking for the tiniest excuse for doing so.
On the other hand, a police officer who drove a government minister to a political meeting and was caught got let off.
The politicians can break the promises with no recourse for 5 years.
A libertarian or small government is best because the services that would normally be provided by government are much more controlled by free markets, which then means that you, the member of the public can make real demands on those services, or take your money elsewhere. The fact that you only get a vote once every 5 years matters much less. Don't like a hospital? Use another one. School teaching your child things to please special interest groups? Go elsewhere.
The current government is extending reach more and more into people's pockets and personal lives. It will reach the point that people just break their ties and find a way out of the system, go abroad or live a black market outlaw life.
My rule of thumb now is to deal with small suppliers that have served me well. Suppliers who when I email a technical pre-sales question, give me a comprehensive answer, not a hyperlink to a FAQ page on the manufacturer's website. Suppliers for whom a 5 minute waiting time for a call almost never happens (on average, I'm "next in queue" and talking to someone within 2 minutes).
I know that the small guy I deal with costs a little more, and that I'm paying for that service. But that's what I want, because to me, time is money, and spending half an hour on the phone talking to poorly trained staff about a fault (followed by numerous escalations) means I'm not getting on with my work.
Philippe Starck - the emperor's tailor.
38,000 people have already paid the 10% deposit. That's 3/4 billion of funding already in the bank. I'm not sure how long it's going to take just to get through that queue, but it sounds like a long time to me.
I don't know about the netherlands, but here in the UK, mobile phones are often sold on aesthetics, not features, something which often is a big point to women rather than men. Next time you see a VW Beetle, check out who the driver is. I've not yet seen a woman with an iRiver or a Creative player, but plenty with iPods.
Everyone is waiting for the confrontation when the "fools" get shown how they got duped, only for the producers to show some highlights which show various clues that it was all a load of bollocks.
The fact that there are 2 actors out of this bunch, and there are 3 actor "plants" is very suspicious to me.
When I first bought a DVD player, multi-region wasn't a big thing, but now, I don't know anyone with an R2 only machine (and that includes plenty of non-geeks like a plumber).
For all the complaints about DVD and it's restrictions (like the DVD-Jon case), it serves the public reasonably well. Very few people care about being able to have open access to their DVD. They put it in, it plays a movie. They can play it on their PC, on a standalone player. They can sell it on Ebay and lend it to their friends.
But the public will not swallow certain restrictions. If there really is to be calling home and machine-based restrictions, it won't take off. A few people might buy it just because they've got so much money that they can live without lending it to friends, trading it on Ebay, and are happy to have a DVD version for the car. Most people won't be.
With HD you need a new TV to watch HDTV. I'm sure that over time we'll all end up with it, but I'm not going to spend £3000 to replace my TV to watch movies at a slightly higher resolution. I'd rather spend £3000 on cinema tickets than that.
They tried region coding, and people over here in the UK just got players chipped and hacked. Everyone I know has a multiregion player so that they can watch unavailable US movies or cheaper far east versions.
Start telling people that they can't lend a movie to a mate, and they'll either boycott, or work out a way around.
No chance.
I've spent small money on unknown retailers online, where spending £20-30 is an acceptable risk (even then, I've made sure that there's a few reasonable links around).
What seems a worry to me is that you no longer have a party backing small government, which reflects a real worry about how people feel about government. That instead of being the pioneers and creators, they'd rather just have a pork barrel rolled out for them.
The biggest problem is the First Past The Post (FPTP) system that is also employed here in the UK. It means that there is stagnation in political parties. You cannot get any political involvement by greens/libertarians/whoever because the system is weighted towards people voting for the best option to get the other party out of power instead of choosing who they want in power.
It also seems to discourage people from voting, as they figure that if they don't like Labour/Conservative, they may as well not bother voting, and sadly I think they are right.
At the moment China is a lot cheaper because their cost base is so very much lower. As people become wealthier there, so things will go up in price - housing, food etc. And they will become less competitive (unless they are wise and spend money on educating even more Chinese to compete with the world).
The problem for many parts of the world (like the EU and USA) is that they are doing exactly the wrong thing. Government (by will of the people) are creating more and more tax breaks/programs to ensure that their people maintain an improving wage structure, instead of letting costs slide and getting closer to being competitive with China. The longer that you do so (and run up larger and larger debts), the worst the eventual slide is going to be.
Margaret Thatcher.