out of state sellers are not taxed but the local producers are taxed...*whine whine* so unfair...
OH MY GOD.
Guess what? We're all out-of-state sellers to 49 states, and in-state sellers to one.
The reason why this should not be changed is simple. Because if you only sell in-state and are tired of this "unfairness" then set up an online storefront for $100 bucks and start doing business with the 49 other states where you don't have to charge tax. If your customers are buying products you sell from your competitors over the internet, then OBVIOUSLY YOU COULD SELL OVER THE INTERNET TOO
"Oh, but that's so stupid, we'll waste so much gas sending goods across state lines just to evade income tax."
GOOD! When businesses start to do more and more of their sales across state lines to avoid their bullshit taxes, then this will force them to think of a better tax strategy!
This is just globalization on a smaller scale. Continentization, maybe?
And you don't explain how you propose to allow 49 other states to regulate each business that sells online... So does each business have to write 49 extra sales tax checks every month? And if they don't, then what happens? New York for example, would have to send tax evasion cops into California to arrest you? HOW MANY FREAKING TAX COPS WOULD YOU HAVE TO HIRE TO MAKE THIS WORK?
Why not just break the US into 50 little countries with no federal control.
Indeed, but the people in the states that have very little to contribute would never agree to it. They need the New Yorks and the Californias of the union to survive. They need my federal tax dollars as a Californian to pay them farm subsidies to not grow crops, or to grow crops that nobody needs and store them in huge silos somewhere as a "strategic corn reserve."
California, no offense to the rest of the states, would be stoked to be on our own. We'd be so much better off not supporting the rest of the country. But ask North Dakota and New Mexico how much they'd like the federal government free money spigot turned off.
You know, I agree with your thesis, but I think it's laughable that you're so biased against unions. You cited UPS. Hm, let's see. Both UPS and FDX can deliver a package for you in your choice of 1, 2, 3 days, or ground, both are highly reliable, and both cost about the same on average. Both of them make a tidy profit.
Yet UPS drivers, loaders, etc. are paid more and have better benefits. Why? Because FedEx are union-busters, so their management and shareholders keep more of their company "pie."
I know who I'd rather have handling my breakable electronics and stuff... A better-paid employee who has a contract and a vested interest in staying with a company where he's getting a good deal.
And DHL's quality (which is admittedly low in my limited experience) has nothing to do with Deutsche Post. In this country what's now DHL used to be a private enterprise called Airborne Express. It's always been the economy carrier. It charges accordingly, and you get about what you pay for.
Oh really. What does TiVo do that so deeply affects all these TiVo fanboys?
Every time we have a story on this TiVo topic, you guys come out of the workbook saying they're the lone exception to the standard (and correct)/. policy of "software patents are retarded."
WTF is TiVo putting in your Kool-Aid? I'd like specific examples of why TiVo is so inherently superior in ways that are non-obvious enough that I would agree a patent is warranted.
I don't know about you or your parents, but our Dish DVR wasn't hard to use in the slightest. It was far superior to the crap Comcast pushes.
And I'm sure plenty 60-year-olds, no offense intended towards my elders, couldn't figure out how to do more than pause and rewind on TiVo either.
(I've never had a TiVo because I refuse to pay $15/mo for the rest of my life for a few kilobytes of guide data. When I moved to a no-dish apartment, I built a PC-based DVR that kicks ass).
I'm not MS's biggest fan. But this isn't the worst strategy ever.
It's actually pretty logical that if you make running these retarded apps annoying, you can force the vendors to fix them.
But MS faces a big obstacle in that strategy--the fact that moving back to XP fixes the problem as well, from the user's perspective. And of course, the fact that doing so also makes today's computers 3x more responsive.
It's a shame... I would love a world where Vista caught on but UAC didn't have to pop up ever unless something truly administrator-ish were really going on. Then all my users could be Users.
You didn't really address anything I said though. I get that you hate the EULA. But the point is, Apple doesn't force you to do anything with that EULA. They can't and don't want to.
BUT...
Bricked iPhones are almost always caused by trying to use them on the assumption that like a computer, you should be able to install and modify software on them and still expect it to work properly, and to be able to easily fix problems caused in this process.
Apple doesn't stop people from doing this. If they really wanted to stop all iPhone hacking, homebrew, etc. in its tracks, they would probably do a better job of it than they have thus far.
What Apple does though, is draw the line in the sand and make you a deal: IF you follow the terms of this EULA, THEN we will give you support and service to keep your phone working right. This is not a foreign or evil concept. If you are issued a company laptop, and then hack the admin and bios passwords, and then install a lot of malware on it and overclock it too much and burn up the CPU, then your IT department won't be very happy about repairing it for you.
Now I understand that someone who bought an iPhone is free to do whatever he wants with it, up to and including hacking it. But how can you honestly expect Apple to continue supporting phones that have been modded in this way? Can you imagine how hard that would be? Suddenly Apple has to support an infinite array of third-party software.
What exactly would you like Apple to do for you (the hypothetical you that bought an iPhone) when you mod it and due to some software update that comes along, it is bricked? Give you a new one? Fix it for you?
And if it hasn't been hacked, they already will fix or replace it, and I think that's as fair as you could get. What else would you demand, for Steve to come to your door with a replacement wrapped in gold leaf wrapping paper?
Once again, all this is EXACTLY the same as any other cell phone manufacturer or carrier... Except that Apple is better than a normal cell mfg. If you buy a Motorola from AT&T or Verizon, etc., and it stops working under warranty, you could try to get Moto to fix it, but that would involve mailing it in, shipping charges, etc. What 99% of people do is take it into the carrier's store, and the carrier fixes it or swaps it out. Apple doesn't make you go through AT&T, but rather they let you go into their own stores to have your phone diagnosed, fixed, or swapped out.
But anyway, it's no worse than any other cell phone. If they find out you modded it, you're on your own because they can't spend all their time studying each hack that people might use and how they interact with the stock firmware apps. If you use it as intended, you enjoy a full warranty.
Dude, I don't even like the iPhone, and don't have one. But you're a dork because iPhones are like $300, not $800.
And think about this for a moment. I bought my cellphone from Verizon, and it is *exactly* as dangerous to hack the firmware and try to install non-authorized software on it. It's just as capable of running all sorts of neat third-party apps, but just like Apple, Verizon locks it down, under the pretense of protecting you from yourself, and guaranteeing their revenue stream from selling apps. And I've bricked phones before trying to do it.
The iPhone is not a computer. It is a phone. Phones are sold in this country as appliances with no user-serviceable parts. This is not done to spite you. This is just how it is. If you want a computer-phone so you can write and install your own apps, you should not buy an iPhone. You should buy a PocketPC-phobe, or something fancy from Nokia that runs Symbian or Linux. Both of these, not surprisingly, cost more than an iPhone.
If you want a fancy phone that is just a phone, then maybe you consider an iPhone.
Yes, I do understand that the iPhone is *really* a computer underneath it all. But so is every device you've bought in the past 10 years, from your microwave to your iPod to your TiVo to your Motorola RAZR. There's no law that says that every computer has to have supported APIs. There is a law that protects your right to try to hack it in ways that it wasn't intended, and I think that's great, but that doesn't require any manufacturer to support your efforts.
In conclusion, I think you're absolutely wrong--you think that somehow people give Apple a completely free pass where others are taken to task for similar antics. But in reality, people are holding Apple to a completely different standard than any other phone manufacturer.
the U.S. is trying to become more like them with more government-run companies.
Huh? I don't understand how this is the case. Apart from the security theater business (TSA) I haven't seen a trend toward government regulation, let alone state-owned enterprise, especially in the telecom sector. If anything, I would say we are trending the opposite direction, toward less regulation, because of things like the AT&T re-conglomeration.
I'm definitely disliking you less and less as I read more of your responses, I see your points and you're not being disingenuous, but I HAD to post my response to this part:
(with 50 megabit internet where I live, but only ~1 megabit in rural Missouri)
Ah-HAAAAAAA! Now I see why you haven't got nearly the amount of angst and cheated-ness we're feeling in the rest of the country towards the telcos. I think it's fair to estimate that at 50 megs, you're in the 99th percentile, or maybe even 99 1/2th percentile, among American consumer broadband connections. I know for a fact that the fastest speeds offered to consumers by the incumbent telcos is 6Mbps DSL and 30Mbps cable (Optimum Online, New York area, I think?), however most people live in areas where the fastest cable available is 6Mbps and the fastest DSL available is 3-4Mbps. ADSL2 is pretty rare, and I've never heard of an incumbent offering it. Speakeasy, and maybe Covad, do offer it in some areas. But it's also ridiculously expensive.
Do you agree that you are really, really lucky? If so, then I'll agree that you're really, really honest. I would also say, don't you think you might be a little biased based on this extraordinary luck? I feel like it's like walking into a rigged casino that almost never pays out and happening to be the one guy who hit a jackpot that year. It'd be pretty hard for him to join in the grumbling of the people who are losing.
I concede your point that they were not given a handout, per se. I do however take issue with it being cut and dried that they should be allowed to keep all their profits while you and I, and most other companies do not have a similar entitlement. This is unfair to all other industries that DID have to pay all their taxes in those years.
Whatever the source of the money, they NETTED a huge windfall. The government took an action that made their bank account balances $Billions higher than those balances would have been otherwise. Do I really care about the semantics of that? I admit that I don't.
And to say that oh look, they did all these things with that money...I say it's not enough. They would have done DSL anyway. It is a profitable service. Upgrades to DSL are already paid for by the money I piay for DSL. The same way upgrades to the cell phone network are paid for by the large sums of money I pay for cell phone service. And I really doubt you get very much for your $5 per month cell phone. I still pay $60 a month.
Also... Please explain to me, if they spent so much of that $200Bn on these fabulous upgrades, why our office, located in San Francisco, can't get get DSL OR cable. This is the 3rd most populous city in California and AT&T couldn't be bothered to put a DSLAM less than 17,000 feet from this location, right in the heart of the city? I think patches of "Dial-up or T-1" should not exist in a city of this size, if ATT was actually investing their giant windfalls (AND the money we pay them) in something besides fattening their own wallets.
They love to moan (especially ATT) about how they can't afford fiber, when the truth is they are too busy rubbing our billions of tax dollars all over their fat sweaty bodies.
"We already got paid, why should we invest in infrastructure?"
We need either a carrot or a stick for the telcos in this damn country. The carrot would have been making them ACTUALLY DO FTTH before giving them a big fat check. The stick would be forcing them to make good on it now or else face criminal charges of defrauding the US public, and/or fining them $200Bn.
Instead, we've chosen neither--to let them do whatever the hell they want, forever, with no consequences.
That's nice, be glad you're in Verizon territory. Unfortunately for those of use in AT&T territory, there will never be FTTH. They've said so. Why? Because they're the monopoly and they have no competition to fear, of course!
Here, it's your choice of Comcast (which is fast, but expensive, and apparently they're IN UR TCP STREAM, RESETTIN UR CONNECTIONS)... or crappy 1-2meg DSL which is cheap and slow.
The Apple-haters can't seem to fathom that Apple's market power in this particular industry is good for us all even if you hate Apple, iPods, iTunes, MP4AAC, and DRM. The reason being, while Apple may piss you off sometimes, they ARE the only ones selling major-label music today who aren't 100% the RIAA labels' bitch.
As more and more of this DRM-Free-Elsewhere-But-Still-Insisting-on-DRM-in-iTunes shit keeps going down it gets more and more clear what their #1 goal is: "Kill iTunes because they don't play ball with us."
Followed by "switch over to variable pricing" which will mean the 2 good songs on the album will be $4 apiece and the other 10 are 49c.
Followed by re-introduction of DRM on these sites in order to "curb rampant piracy." This is definitely a goal, since you can't seriously believe that these cocksuckers WANT to do away with DRM. Now in order to get DRM back they need to hope to god the Zune or something catches on, though, since an iPod-dominated market of course means you have to work with Apple or go DRM-free.
WTF? Are you trying to imply that the GFDL is worse than signing in blood and double-notarizing?
Yes, I am. Explicit permission signed in blood means WP can use it on their site. GFDL = giving your content away for free to the thousands of blood-sucking freeloading spammers that can legally leech all they want.
I'm not against free content. I'm just against assholes who SELL other people's work while contributing no value to the content or to society. To compare to software, what I support is a firm like RedHat that sells Free software and then provides support for it to justify their existence. What scammers like the above link do would be like selling Linux preloaded with extra adware and malware, providing only tiny small print (if anything) crediting the people who wrote the software, and made their living from that, contributing nothing of value, simply gaming for search engine rankings with zero original content.
Wikimedia projects are hosted in the United States but read worldwide. On whose laws do you think Wikimedia projects should base their policies for non-free content?
US laws would be a start. These laws allow fair use, for example, of images to illustrate the person in question. I love how you can have a WP article about a model, which is someone famous specifically because of his/her looks, and have no image on the page at all. This is someone of whom thousands of photographs have been taken, and hundreds of them have been uploaded to WP, and they've all been "Speedy-deleted" because WP is in denial that fair-use is an acceptable justification for displaying one low-resolution image of a public personality.
And don't give me crap like "Oh but they would get sued." Bullshit. There are millions of websites with pictures of celebrities, that sell ads and just haphazardly swipe the images uncredited from wherever they find them. I mean, do a Google Image Search for any hot female celebrity. It just leads to my main gripe about WP: Why do they have to make it "opt-in"? 99% of the "technically copyrighted" crap that gets deleted from WP every day is crap that the technical copyright holder doesn't care about, because they don't have any reason to care about it. For example, a photographer takes a picture in 2000, sells it to a magazine. The magazine publishes the photo and sells a bunch of ads. Both of them are happy. So if in 2004 somebody scans that picture in and puts it on their fan site, and that picture finds its way onto WP to illustrate the subject, who is being harmed? No one. Everybody got paid. No one's claiming the work as their original work. Maybe all this explains why nobody has ever sued Wikipedia for having a copyrighted photo posted.
Now the other 1% of this fair-use content belongs to people who are viciously protective of it, and they have lawyers who can serve a DMCA when needed. That should be fine. But what happens today is WP editors will delete things when the owner of the copyright is a company that's been out of business for 30 years. What is the benefit of doing this?
Fair use content should be allowed to stay until someone who holds the copyright has an objection to its use. (like "innocent until proven guilty," heard of it?) I can see not putting up a fight once a rights-holder complains and/or threatens--it's pointless when you could just remove it, send a form apology email, and find something whose author doesn't mind. But the way the WP editors play right into the hands of the IP-law-strengthening jackass contingent by waiving all fair use rights is stupid and self-destructive.
Okay, the blog thing seems like something that might make sense, but Wikipedia, WTF?
Publishing information to WP based on your own work would probably be original research according to WP. Which WP doesn't allow.
Secondly, WP doesn't allow copyrighted work like journals to be posted verbatim on the site--even IF the author grants explicit permission signed in blood and double-notarized to have the material published there too. For WP, it's basically 100% Free or no deal. So, the ONLY way this material could be posted on Wikipedia and stay up for more than 7 minutes with the WP Copyright Police would be if the author released it under GFDL. Which no one wants to do with anything, especially if it's their livelyhood. (I could see licensing a work of mine to Wikipedia, a donation to a nonprofit, but it would piss me off to see that work all over retarded AdSense farms that (legally) steal the content for profit.
And finally, since just posting full text of journal articles is not what WP does (or allows), this whole discussion is stupid. They don't accept full-text of newspaper columns, magazines, or your diary either. It's not a knowledge collective, it's a Freer-than-thou encyclopedia.
What WP does allow is citing these journal articles, and that's something that even our ludicrous current copyright laws has yet to forbid.
Though you can be sure that when citing copyrighted works does get forbidden WP will be the first to knuckle under and ban it, because they have shown in the past that they have no balls to stand up against unjust and overly-broad-interpreted IP laws, for example their complete denial that fair use rights exist.
I think you're a little off the mark with the "memory" comments. I don't think the amount of memory (RAM) has much of a bearing over downloadable content. 1GB or 2GB is absolutely enough to play even HD content. I know because I've played a Blu-Ray rip (in x264) on my dvr PC which has 2GB of RAM. When you say "2GB. In other words, not enough for more than one movie. If that," I think you are thinking of hard drive space and not memory. I clicked the Dell link in your post and looked at the cheapest pc on that page, the one that's $379. It comes with a 250GB hard drive standard, which is the smallest I've seen on a mainstream desktop lately. 320 or 500GB is just as common. Even 250GB is plenty of room to store lots of downloaded movies, be they in h.264, xviD, or even full-on drive-hogging MPEG-2. And I would expect that someone who bought movies for download would just grab a USB2.0 hard drive at Costco if they ran out of room for the movies. Cost: under $200. Install time: 2 minutes. Capacity gain: +750GB.
Also I think most PCs, even cheap ones, that you see from here on out are going to come with 3GB of RAM or more, since you need that in order to run Vista without losing your mind.
By the way, your first paragraph is absolutely right. Even if I did have an HDTV (I don't), and didn't have a ban on Sony-backed crap in my house (I do), I would wait a while on buying a Blu-Ray player at these prices. $200? Try $50.
oh BURRRRRRRN! You are so witty. Yeah, you got it, everyone who has an iPhone is shallow. That's why they like it. It has nothing to do with the device itself. It's not even a good phone or a good music-listening-device. Let me guess, if they could see through their shallowness they would actually see that it's actually the worst phone ever.
I don't even have an iPhone or have any plans to get one, but your douchebaggery was just too awesome to ignore.
I thought about that myself, but think about this: Since it's just one-way (it's not like Big Brother is going to cut in and start talking on your calls), the excessive delay that would be caused by routing your call itself across the country and back again isn't a problem. So perhaps when the FBI decides to, they can, on demand, cause your call audio to be -reflected- to the east coast facility and from there, out to the FBI.
That wouldn't require anything more than an additional data stream just like a three-way call, to transmit both sides of the conversation to our wonderful government overlords so they can look out for our best interests.
Has this EVER even freaking happened? I mean BESIDES in a Bruce Willis movie.
Yeah, somehow I'm not too worried. But since you asked, places where you can't run away are:
In line at Airport Security (if you start running and screaming there you're likely to get shot by the TSA.) Oh, noes! Your solution created another problem!
In an elevator if it gets stuck
in the vault of a bank (terrorists could lock you in and start shooting you, because they hate freedom!)
...especially US planes, can still be highjacked. I would suggest that they cannot.
I agree. Someone else pointed out that knowing about 9/11, no pilot would open the armored cockpit door, even at the expense of all the passengers' lives. This would be wise. So no, just as you say, planes can't be hijacked anymore. Pilots understand the stakes.
But if a plane was to be highjacked by terrorists, we already know what they plan to do with it.
Maybe so, but it won't be highjacked in the first place because of what we just agreed on, so while this may be the excuse they're using, it's NOT a reason. My argument is that it's purely irrational to guard so vigorously against something soooo unlikely.
I laughed out loud--I guess I haven't seen this particular smart-ass technique before.
Do you remember New Here? A slashdot user who only posts to correct someone who makes the mistake of telling someone, "You must be new here." The reply comes every time, "No, I'm New Here."
I wonder how hard it would be to write a bot that scanned conversations on Slashdot and posted smart-ass comebacks like the parent, or New Here's, whenever a comment matches a certain pattern.
someone who simply decides to take a gun on board a plane with you and shoot you.
OMFG. How can one be so paranoid about foul play on an airplane? You know, this same guy who wants to shoot you on the plane could just as easily shoot you:
On a bus
On a commuter train
In the line at 7/11
At the gas pump
In the line at Comcast waiting to drop off your cable box
At Starbucks while you wait for your latte
At work! The janitor might be a terrorist!
The toll-taker at the bridge
Now please explain to me why we need this bullcrap draconian security theatre to board a plane, but we don't need it at all those locations I listed above? I dare you.
Slashdot Mirror
Guess what? We're all out-of-state sellers to 49 states, and in-state sellers to one.
The reason why this should not be changed is simple. Because if you only sell in-state and are tired of this "unfairness" then set up an online storefront for $100 bucks and start doing business with the 49 other states where you don't have to charge tax. If your customers are buying products you sell from your competitors over the internet, then OBVIOUSLY YOU COULD SELL OVER THE INTERNET TOO
"Oh, but that's so stupid, we'll waste so much gas sending goods across state lines just to evade income tax."
GOOD! When businesses start to do more and more of their sales across state lines to avoid their bullshit taxes, then this will force them to think of a better tax strategy!
This is just globalization on a smaller scale. Continentization, maybe?
And you don't explain how you propose to allow 49 other states to regulate each business that sells online... So does each business have to write 49 extra sales tax checks every month? And if they don't, then what happens? New York for example, would have to send tax evasion cops into California to arrest you? HOW MANY FREAKING TAX COPS WOULD YOU HAVE TO HIRE TO MAKE THIS WORK?
California, no offense to the rest of the states, would be stoked to be on our own. We'd be so much better off not supporting the rest of the country. But ask North Dakota and New Mexico how much they'd like the federal government free money spigot turned off.
You know, I agree with your thesis, but I think it's laughable that you're so biased against unions. You cited UPS. Hm, let's see. Both UPS and FDX can deliver a package for you in your choice of 1, 2, 3 days, or ground, both are highly reliable, and both cost about the same on average. Both of them make a tidy profit.
Yet UPS drivers, loaders, etc. are paid more and have better benefits. Why? Because FedEx are union-busters, so their management and shareholders keep more of their company "pie."
I know who I'd rather have handling my breakable electronics and stuff... A better-paid employee who has a contract and a vested interest in staying with a company where he's getting a good deal.
And DHL's quality (which is admittedly low in my limited experience) has nothing to do with Deutsche Post. In this country what's now DHL used to be a private enterprise called Airborne Express. It's always been the economy carrier. It charges accordingly, and you get about what you pay for.
Oh really. What does TiVo do that so deeply affects all these TiVo fanboys?
/. policy of "software patents are retarded."
Every time we have a story on this TiVo topic, you guys come out of the workbook saying they're the lone exception to the standard (and correct)
WTF is TiVo putting in your Kool-Aid? I'd like specific examples of why TiVo is so inherently superior in ways that are non-obvious enough that I would agree a patent is warranted.
I don't know about you or your parents, but our Dish DVR wasn't hard to use in the slightest. It was far superior to the crap Comcast pushes.
And I'm sure plenty 60-year-olds, no offense intended towards my elders, couldn't figure out how to do more than pause and rewind on TiVo either.
(I've never had a TiVo because I refuse to pay $15/mo for the rest of my life for a few kilobytes of guide data. When I moved to a no-dish apartment, I built a PC-based DVR that kicks ass).
I'm not MS's biggest fan. But this isn't the worst strategy ever.
It's actually pretty logical that if you make running these retarded apps annoying, you can force the vendors to fix them.
But MS faces a big obstacle in that strategy--the fact that moving back to XP fixes the problem as well, from the user's perspective. And of course, the fact that doing so also makes today's computers 3x more responsive.
It's a shame... I would love a world where Vista caught on but UAC didn't have to pop up ever unless something truly administrator-ish were really going on. Then all my users could be Users.
You didn't really address anything I said though. I get that you hate the EULA. But the point is, Apple doesn't force you to do anything with that EULA. They can't and don't want to.
BUT...
Bricked iPhones are almost always caused by trying to use them on the assumption that like a computer, you should be able to install and modify software on them and still expect it to work properly, and to be able to easily fix problems caused in this process.
Apple doesn't stop people from doing this. If they really wanted to stop all iPhone hacking, homebrew, etc. in its tracks, they would probably do a better job of it than they have thus far.
What Apple does though, is draw the line in the sand and make you a deal: IF you follow the terms of this EULA, THEN we will give you support and service to keep your phone working right. This is not a foreign or evil concept. If you are issued a company laptop, and then hack the admin and bios passwords, and then install a lot of malware on it and overclock it too much and burn up the CPU, then your IT department won't be very happy about repairing it for you.
Now I understand that someone who bought an iPhone is free to do whatever he wants with it, up to and including hacking it. But how can you honestly expect Apple to continue supporting phones that have been modded in this way? Can you imagine how hard that would be? Suddenly Apple has to support an infinite array of third-party software.
What exactly would you like Apple to do for you (the hypothetical you that bought an iPhone) when you mod it and due to some software update that comes along, it is bricked? Give you a new one? Fix it for you?
And if it hasn't been hacked, they already will fix or replace it, and I think that's as fair as you could get. What else would you demand, for Steve to come to your door with a replacement wrapped in gold leaf wrapping paper?
Once again, all this is EXACTLY the same as any other cell phone manufacturer or carrier... Except that Apple is better than a normal cell mfg. If you buy a Motorola from AT&T or Verizon, etc., and it stops working under warranty, you could try to get Moto to fix it, but that would involve mailing it in, shipping charges, etc. What 99% of people do is take it into the carrier's store, and the carrier fixes it or swaps it out. Apple doesn't make you go through AT&T, but rather they let you go into their own stores to have your phone diagnosed, fixed, or swapped out.
But anyway, it's no worse than any other cell phone. If they find out you modded it, you're on your own because they can't spend all their time studying each hack that people might use and how they interact with the stock firmware apps. If you use it as intended, you enjoy a full warranty.
How is this so different when it comes to Apple?
Dude, I don't even like the iPhone, and don't have one. But you're a dork because iPhones are like $300, not $800.
And think about this for a moment. I bought my cellphone from Verizon, and it is *exactly* as dangerous to hack the firmware and try to install non-authorized software on it. It's just as capable of running all sorts of neat third-party apps, but just like Apple, Verizon locks it down, under the pretense of protecting you from yourself, and guaranteeing their revenue stream from selling apps. And I've bricked phones before trying to do it.
The iPhone is not a computer. It is a phone. Phones are sold in this country as appliances with no user-serviceable parts. This is not done to spite you. This is just how it is. If you want a computer-phone so you can write and install your own apps, you should not buy an iPhone. You should buy a PocketPC-phobe, or something fancy from Nokia that runs Symbian or Linux. Both of these, not surprisingly, cost more than an iPhone.
If you want a fancy phone that is just a phone, then maybe you consider an iPhone.
Yes, I do understand that the iPhone is *really* a computer underneath it all. But so is every device you've bought in the past 10 years, from your microwave to your iPod to your TiVo to your Motorola RAZR. There's no law that says that every computer has to have supported APIs. There is a law that protects your right to try to hack it in ways that it wasn't intended, and I think that's great, but that doesn't require any manufacturer to support your efforts.
In conclusion, I think you're absolutely wrong--you think that somehow people give Apple a completely free pass where others are taken to task for similar antics. But in reality, people are holding Apple to a completely different standard than any other phone manufacturer.
Do you agree that you are really, really lucky? If so, then I'll agree that you're really, really honest. I would also say, don't you think you might be a little biased based on this extraordinary luck? I feel like it's like walking into a rigged casino that almost never pays out and happening to be the one guy who hit a jackpot that year. It'd be pretty hard for him to join in the grumbling of the people who are losing.
I concede your point that they were not given a handout, per se. I do however take issue with it being cut and dried that they should be allowed to keep all their profits while you and I, and most other companies do not have a similar entitlement. This is unfair to all other industries that DID have to pay all their taxes in those years.
Whatever the source of the money, they NETTED a huge windfall. The government took an action that made their bank account balances $Billions higher than those balances would have been otherwise. Do I really care about the semantics of that? I admit that I don't.
And to say that oh look, they did all these things with that money...I say it's not enough. They would have done DSL anyway. It is a profitable service. Upgrades to DSL are already paid for by the money I piay for DSL. The same way upgrades to the cell phone network are paid for by the large sums of money I pay for cell phone service. And I really doubt you get very much for your $5 per month cell phone. I still pay $60 a month.
Also... Please explain to me, if they spent so much of that $200Bn on these fabulous upgrades, why our office, located in San Francisco, can't get get DSL OR cable. This is the 3rd most populous city in California and AT&T couldn't be bothered to put a DSLAM less than 17,000 feet from this location, right in the heart of the city? I think patches of "Dial-up or T-1" should not exist in a city of this size, if ATT was actually investing their giant windfalls (AND the money we pay them) in something besides fattening their own wallets.
Thank you for pointing that out.
They love to moan (especially ATT) about how they can't afford fiber, when the truth is they are too busy rubbing our billions of tax dollars all over their fat sweaty bodies.
"We already got paid, why should we invest in infrastructure?"
We need either a carrot or a stick for the telcos in this damn country. The carrot would have been making them ACTUALLY DO FTTH before giving them a big fat check. The stick would be forcing them to make good on it now or else face criminal charges of defrauding the US public, and/or fining them $200Bn.
Instead, we've chosen neither--to let them do whatever the hell they want, forever, with no consequences.
That's nice, be glad you're in Verizon territory. Unfortunately for those of use in AT&T territory, there will never be FTTH. They've said so. Why? Because they're the monopoly and they have no competition to fear, of course!
Here, it's your choice of Comcast (which is fast, but expensive, and apparently they're IN UR TCP STREAM, RESETTIN UR CONNECTIONS)... or crappy 1-2meg DSL which is cheap and slow.
Well, i'm glad somebody gets it besides just me.
The Apple-haters can't seem to fathom that Apple's market power in this particular industry is good for us all even if you hate Apple, iPods, iTunes, MP4AAC, and DRM. The reason being, while Apple may piss you off sometimes, they ARE the only ones selling major-label music today who aren't 100% the RIAA labels' bitch.
As more and more of this DRM-Free-Elsewhere-But-Still-Insisting-on-DRM-in-iTunes shit keeps going down it gets more and more clear what their #1 goal is: "Kill iTunes because they don't play ball with us."
Followed by "switch over to variable pricing" which will mean the 2 good songs on the album will be $4 apiece and the other 10 are 49c.
Followed by re-introduction of DRM on these sites in order to "curb rampant piracy." This is definitely a goal, since you can't seriously believe that these cocksuckers WANT to do away with DRM. Now in order to get DRM back they need to hope to god the Zune or something catches on, though, since an iPod-dominated market of course means you have to work with Apple or go DRM-free.
I'm not against free content. I'm just against assholes who SELL other people's work while contributing no value to the content or to society. To compare to software, what I support is a firm like RedHat that sells Free software and then provides support for it to justify their existence. What scammers like the above link do would be like selling Linux preloaded with extra adware and malware, providing only tiny small print (if anything) crediting the people who wrote the software, and made their living from that, contributing nothing of value, simply gaming for search engine rankings with zero original content.
And don't give me crap like "Oh but they would get sued." Bullshit. There are millions of websites with pictures of celebrities, that sell ads and just haphazardly swipe the images uncredited from wherever they find them. I mean, do a Google Image Search for any hot female celebrity. It just leads to my main gripe about WP: Why do they have to make it "opt-in"? 99% of the "technically copyrighted" crap that gets deleted from WP every day is crap that the technical copyright holder doesn't care about, because they don't have any reason to care about it. For example, a photographer takes a picture in 2000, sells it to a magazine. The magazine publishes the photo and sells a bunch of ads. Both of them are happy. So if in 2004 somebody scans that picture in and puts it on their fan site, and that picture finds its way onto WP to illustrate the subject, who is being harmed? No one. Everybody got paid. No one's claiming the work as their original work. Maybe all this explains why nobody has ever sued Wikipedia for having a copyrighted photo posted.
Now the other 1% of this fair-use content belongs to people who are viciously protective of it, and they have lawyers who can serve a DMCA when needed. That should be fine. But what happens today is WP editors will delete things when the owner of the copyright is a company that's been out of business for 30 years. What is the benefit of doing this?
Fair use content should be allowed to stay until someone who holds the copyright has an objection to its use. (like "innocent until proven guilty," heard of it?) I can see not putting up a fight once a rights-holder complains and/or threatens--it's pointless when you could just remove it, send a form apology email, and find something whose author doesn't mind. But the way the WP editors play right into the hands of the IP-law-strengthening jackass contingent by waiving all fair use rights is stupid and self-destructive.
Okay, the blog thing seems like something that might make sense, but Wikipedia, WTF?
Publishing information to WP based on your own work would probably be original research according to WP. Which WP doesn't allow.
Secondly, WP doesn't allow copyrighted work like journals to be posted verbatim on the site--even IF the author grants explicit permission signed in blood and double-notarized to have the material published there too. For WP, it's basically 100% Free or no deal. So, the ONLY way this material could be posted on Wikipedia and stay up for more than 7 minutes with the WP Copyright Police would be if the author released it under GFDL. Which no one wants to do with anything, especially if it's their livelyhood. (I could see licensing a work of mine to Wikipedia, a donation to a nonprofit, but it would piss me off to see that work all over retarded AdSense farms that (legally) steal the content for profit.
And finally, since just posting full text of journal articles is not what WP does (or allows), this whole discussion is stupid. They don't accept full-text of newspaper columns, magazines, or your diary either. It's not a knowledge collective, it's a Freer-than-thou encyclopedia.
What WP does allow is citing these journal articles, and that's something that even our ludicrous current copyright laws has yet to forbid.
Though you can be sure that when citing copyrighted works does get forbidden WP will be the first to knuckle under and ban it, because they have shown in the past that they have no balls to stand up against unjust and overly-broad-interpreted IP laws, for example their complete denial that fair use rights exist.
Happens to us all on occasion. I actually called a computer a "hard drive" once. I had my geek card suspended for 6 months!
I think you're a little off the mark with the "memory" comments. I don't think the amount of memory (RAM) has much of a bearing over downloadable content. 1GB or 2GB is absolutely enough to play even HD content. I know because I've played a Blu-Ray rip (in x264) on my dvr PC which has 2GB of RAM. When you say "2GB. In other words, not enough for more than one movie. If that," I think you are thinking of hard drive space and not memory. I clicked the Dell link in your post and looked at the cheapest pc on that page, the one that's $379. It comes with a 250GB hard drive standard, which is the smallest I've seen on a mainstream desktop lately. 320 or 500GB is just as common. Even 250GB is plenty of room to store lots of downloaded movies, be they in h.264, xviD, or even full-on drive-hogging MPEG-2. And I would expect that someone who bought movies for download would just grab a USB2.0 hard drive at Costco if they ran out of room for the movies. Cost: under $200. Install time: 2 minutes. Capacity gain: +750GB.
Also I think most PCs, even cheap ones, that you see from here on out are going to come with 3GB of RAM or more, since you need that in order to run Vista without losing your mind.
By the way, your first paragraph is absolutely right. Even if I did have an HDTV (I don't), and didn't have a ban on Sony-backed crap in my house (I do), I would wait a while on buying a Blu-Ray player at these prices. $200? Try $50.
oh BURRRRRRRN! You are so witty. Yeah, you got it, everyone who has an iPhone is shallow. That's why they like it. It has nothing to do with the device itself. It's not even a good phone or a good music-listening-device. Let me guess, if they could see through their shallowness they would actually see that it's actually the worst phone ever.
I don't even have an iPhone or have any plans to get one, but your douchebaggery was just too awesome to ignore.
I thought about that myself, but think about this: Since it's just one-way (it's not like Big Brother is going to cut in and start talking on your calls), the excessive delay that would be caused by routing your call itself across the country and back again isn't a problem. So perhaps when the FBI decides to, they can, on demand, cause your call audio to be -reflected- to the east coast facility and from there, out to the FBI.
That wouldn't require anything more than an additional data stream just like a three-way call, to transmit both sides of the conversation to our wonderful government overlords so they can look out for our best interests.
Yeah, somehow I'm not too worried. But since you asked, places where you can't run away are:
I laughed out loud--I guess I haven't seen this particular smart-ass technique before.
Do you remember New Here? A slashdot user who only posts to correct someone who makes the mistake of telling someone, "You must be new here." The reply comes every time, "No, I'm New Here."
I wonder how hard it would be to write a bot that scanned conversations on Slashdot and posted smart-ass comebacks like the parent, or New Here's, whenever a comment matches a certain pattern.
OMFG. How can one be so paranoid about foul play on an airplane? You know, this same guy who wants to shoot you on the plane could just as easily shoot you:
Now please explain to me why we need this bullcrap draconian security theatre to board a plane, but we don't need it at all those locations I listed above? I dare you.