At what point does corporate America get the clue that people will actually start leaving over this kind of penurious legal system?
Maybe at the point that people actually start leaving over stuff like this, or even bother to do something less drastic, such as vote against it. We are not at that point, yet. In 2012 we will probably vote for the same people to stay in Congress, who created the silly statutory penalties. America is approximately 100% in favor of the judgement amount, and we will prove it in November when we re-elect those people.
People keep saying it's for sale on iTunes. That's exciting! There's just one little problem...
Putting aside the season 1 vs 2 issue, here is the link Google gave me for Season 1: GoT Season 1. If anyone has a better link, please share it. Let's bend over backward trying to find an alternative to piracy, looking at the publisher's efforts in the very best light, with the assumption that there's no dishonesty and that they are actually willing to sell what people want.
The above link takes me to a page that describes season 1, but is prefaced by an ad for some application software called iTunes (wait, is "iTunes" a store or an application?). Pretty much every link on the page turns out to take me to a page that tells me to get this application, except of course it hasn't actually been ported to anything except two OSes, neither of which is what I use.
How important that is, though, I'm not sure. So far, I have not found a link to a page I fill out some web form to arrange payment and they'll then let me download a file (which I assume would work in mplayer (ideally) or vlc or something). That doesn't mean the web page doesn't exist, merely that google and bing and wikipedia and hbo.com's own pages don't know about this link yet, so I don't know it either. Does anyone have it? Just because I can't find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe I'm an idiot.
I'll consider the publishing of this link to be HBO's Open For Business sign, even if they are trying to hide it. I know lots of businesses with truly shitty marketing, which are nevertheless intended as for-profit businesses. How an entertainment company could be one of them, I don't know, but that's beside the point. Maybe they just need our help. Anyone got the link?
Has anyone bought the GoT files from Apple without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?
Some people have mentioned Amazon, but all I have found over there (so far!) is a shitty Flash streaming service.
This particular defect in Amazon may be totally irrelevant, of course. Amazon does, in fact, sell music in a variety of ways that work excellently and require no bizarre player or client. They sell CDs, every one of which has been compatible with cdparanoia, and they also sell downloadable mp3s (which aren't what I prefer, but are good enough). I just can't find where the sell the video files, though. (And the Blu-Ray discs they sell have DRM, so it's illegal to read them, in addition to being a pain in the ass. So please, let's not talk about Blu-Ray discs until that tech becomes ready.)
Has anyone bought the GoT files from Amazon without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?
It all sounds so promising, as though HBO were really open for business. But either they keep failing to close the deal, or I'm too dumb to see where they do it, or somewhere in the middle where we're just not communicating. What's going on?
On thing's for sure, though: the premise where we look at HBO in the best light and assume they are honestly trying to sell the product, does require they are at least up to mid-1990s tech for their store. Somewhere there's gotta be a page where I can give payment info (whether it's credit card info or what.. maybe HBO is too smalltime so they only take paypal, and if so, that's acceptable for now, and maybe they can their little startup out of the garage over the next year) and they will let me download the file. The post I'm replying to comes close to implying this is possible, but stops short of actually saying it, fading into weird terminology ("open iTunes"). Surely someone is about to give me the huge enlightenment+smackdown by posting the mystery URL.
Because it's basically a dumb idea. If you're going to go to the trouble to bother making phones become instantly secure upon command, you might as well just make them secure by default, instead.
General Motors spends around $40 million per year on maintaining a Facebook profile and around a quarter of that goes into paid advertising.
My elite math skills tell me they are spending $30 million dollars per year on Facebook, where none of that $30M can be accounted for by paid ads.
Until I get a clear understanding of that, I have to think that some kind of legendary incompetence is happening at GM, so I don't know if I get much out of their conclusions.
Assuming it costs $50k/year for GM to pay someone to upload pictures of their cars, type status updates ("Looking forward to tomorrow's release of car X!" or "OMFG car X is sooo beautiful and fast, I don't even care what it costs!") I can't help but imagine they're paying 600 people to do that kind of work.
For example, if you had severely limited petroleum and no plant-based alternatives, you might recycle plastic at a loss in order to keep using plastic.
Except that if you recycle the plastic "at a loss," then I get super-sceptical about the petroleum being "severely limited." If petroleum is simultaneously cheap yet also severely limited, my scam detector goes off. I don't know where the error is, just that an error exists.
Your rant has no time dimension! All you have is an impression of stupidity, not of changes. Even when you do mention time, it's just that you sampled people "decades ago" and you imply you haven't done so, since then.
And then you conclude "it has likely gotten worse" but you don't even provide an opinion, much less evidence, for why you think it might have.
20 years ago, people didn't make such lame arguments, therefore, people are getting stu-- no wait, 20 years ago they that too! Read dejanews and you'll see it was just a bad back then.
Sorry, but it probably won't fix anything. They're light on the details but it really looks like it's just a DoS attack which has to be launched against specific swarms. If the attacker doesn't know about a particular swarm, the attack probably doesn't do anything.
It's open season on the MPAA and RIAA. Every time they prove themselves to be gullible, more and more people come out of the woodwork to sell them snake oil. I think over the next coming years we're going to hear of lots more unethical scumbags taking innocent entertainment companies to the cleaners, all telling them "You can keep on saying No to customers, refuse their money, and use our product to somehow make a profit anyway. Just sign here and hand over your check."
I've come to the conclusion that if someone isn't paying you to recycle, then the recycling is probably fake or scammy.
When you keep your aluminum cans and take 'em to the aluminum recyclers and they pay you, that's strong evidence that someone is really going to use the cans, and surely they're paying because it still costs them less to use those cans, than to mine and refine more bauxite. (Although there's always the terrifying prospect that there's some stupid subsidy or tax incentive at work behind the scenes, where your income tax is somehow being used to pay them to take the metal to the landfill.)
Real recycling is profitable. It's not something just for hippies, it's for the fat guy in the suit. If the fat guy in the suit isn't doing it, then the smart hippies (yes, such things exist) aren't doing it either, and it's just something stoner hippies are doing.
you can't just say "we are mad, you should be doing something".
Especially true since they shouldn't be doing things that people didn't demand as a precondition for getting their vote. "We are mad, we should be voting" is available to so many people, and not used. (High school students are an exception, though. I'll give 'em that.)
People say they're angry but they never ever act angry. I predict that Republicans and Democrats will win nearly all the November elections. If my prediction turns out to be wrong, then I'll really believe people are angry. In all the elections up to now, though, after-the-fact it was always obvious that the so-called angry people were really just acting dramatic, for entertainment purposes.
Does the net really need the intervention of the Nanny State?
Probably.
It's 2012 and we still don't have a free market in ISPs yet. Every business who is allowed by the government (remember: we're talking about a situation where various levels of government are already heavily involved) to run wires to my home (i.e. both of them), is also in the content bundling business. How many more decades until there's competition (more than two of them)? I'm not holding my breath on that one, because I also have only one powerline and water supply pipe. (Maybe there are some efficiency reasons that our government grants these monopolies. But however good/bad you think the tradeoff is, one thing's for sure: it exists. This is how things are, and all discussion about changing from this, is hypothetical.)
But until the government stops using deadly force to keep their numbers down, I think I'd like the government to also use deadly force to keep my IP payments from subsidizing their content business. If you're willing to kill to prevent a third ISP, I'm willing to kill to prevent that subsidy. Doesn't this seem reasonable? I hope you'll even join me; you and I should be voting together on this.
Only in Europe would this blatant intervention with people's business models be tolerated
You are mistaken. America, in fact, has a much greater desire for Nanny Statism than Europe, and Europe is downright hard line in its conservativism compared to our own population's desire for government micromanagement to expand into new areas at the expense of liberty. We are the freedom-hating interventionists, not them.
Consider that in America, people are voting to amend state constitutions to Nanny-Statize who can marry whom, a situation where there is a lot less public interest and motivation than something as large and interconnected as the Internet. We Americans even still vote to have our government overrule doctors' opinions on when marijuana should be prescribed, because we feel our politicians' faith is more authoritative and trustworthy than their silly experiments, observations, and reason.
America is far to the left of Europe. Those people are practically libertarian anarchists, compared to our worship of Stalin and Mao. Or if this isn't what people say on the street, it's at least what everyone says in the voting booth.
The good: the "mobile ecosystem" really does have almost completely negative connotations at this point. It's not that running things locally is bad (sometimes you very much want to do just that), but rather that "ecosystem" became a codeword for screwing people over by trapping them in proprietary dead ends. The NES was an "ecosystem" by the current usage, and that was the epitome of evil next to which, even Microsoft looked like a relatively benign force in the software industry (until the Xbox, that is). Death to the mobile ecosystem. I know lots of people are actually working on that from various directions, but coming out and saying that's what you want to get rid of, earns RIM some points.
The bad: Porsche, are you serious? High-end car market will always be irrelevant. Whoever gets their computers and OSes into the Civics and Accords, Corrolas and Camries: that is who is going to win, and that's the system that eventually will show up in all the high-end cars unless you want the high-end cars to be a joke. Computers are cheap and any time you pretend they're expensive luxury items, it's just a way of announcing to the world, "Look at me, I'm a liar! Don't trust meeeee!" This is especially true in a car, as opposed to a phone, where you don't have the same physical size/weight constraints.
TFA that I read simply says they do make better entrepreneurs, and gives examples of someone making more effort than I do. But it does not say why. (Why I suck, or why they don't, whatever: I'll take either answer.)
And why is it important to have astronauts in space? Symbolism, romance and sword-rattling are not acceptable answers.
Wrong. Those are good reasons to have astronauts in space. They're just shitty and unacceptable reasons to force other people to pay to have astronauts in space.
So, what keeps pedos from simply changing their downloadfolder to that of their browsercache-folder and be square with the law?
Inconvenience. By conflating your temporary trash files with your desired working set, yes, you can make it harder to analyze what you're doing, and cast ambiguity on evidence. But that works both ways: it makes it harder for you to keep shit together, and you're failing to use the power of computers to organize things for you. It's also not safe; this doesn't "square you with the law"; it simply provides an advantage.
Once could even argue that by creating such a situation, the law is functioning correctly: it's deterring kiddie porn by making the collecting and viewing of it a less pleasant experience. True, it's not as unpleasant as prison, but this measure is a much cheaper for us than prison (or even investigating a suspect), so the balance tips at least in the right direction, if not the degree that everyone would like.
Strategic advice noted. This is not an argument for a court, though. There is no crime in visiting "shitty sites" and according the law there's no reason reason people should avoid doing so, merely based on the site's shittiness. You have to try to see something illegal-to-see, for this particular court to treat you as a criminal, or at least that's what they're saying, in this instance.
The FBI can still arrest you..
..any time they feel like it, whether you commit a crime or not, or depending on the political content of your car's bumper sticker, or depending on the color of your skin. The injustice of bullshit arrests (even when they don't lead to convictions) is a totally separate issue. The point is that even if they arrest you, this court is saying it will try not to convict you, unless there is actual evidence that you were trying to commit a thoughtcrime.
If the FBI arrests you because of your bumper sticker or because a site you browsed contains kiddie porn, or because your skin is too dark, yes you are still fucked because you were suddenly kidnapped and because you're going to be spending money on legal defense. But at least if you get this judge, you might end up without a criminal record. The color of your skin or the fact that your browser loaded a kiddie porn image, won't be considered evidence that you were trying to get kiddie porn. His argument is that storing kiddie porn isn't enough; you have to want to do it or know you did it, in order for the act to be illegal.
Another thing people don't realize is your internet cache...
The court appears to be saying that's a good thing: not realizing you have a cache. If I'm reading this right, if you know how web browsers work, the act of viewing illegal content is more likely to be considered a crime by the court, than it would be for another person who doesn't know about caching.
There is no problem with prosecutors violating all the laws that they want to, even without exemptions, as long as no one prosecutes them. And generally, prosecutors tend to choose to not prosecute themselves. There's something about the sentence "I'm pressing charges against me" which causes people to not say it.
Remember that laws only exist when enforced. If a law isn't enforced, or is selectively enforced, then the details for when it applies and when it doesn't, are largely irrelevant.
As soon as I start popping my stack (why does this keep getting bigger?) I am going to completely refute what you're saying. I'm sure I will convince you. Just give me a little more time....
Once you start picking nits like that, you may as well open up the whole idea that all laptops will always relatively suck for development. Even the largest or best laptops are going to be downright awful in terms of both its screen and keyboard(!), compared to even a mediocre desktop.
Thing is, that desktop isn't portable, even if it's otherwise better in countless ways. (I'm surprised your going after its smaller screen, rather than the fact that every laptop in history has a shitty keyboard, but hey, whatever. We all have our own peeves.)
So the small or lower-res screen is all just part of the tradeoff. I don't particularly like the idea of 1366x768 but I don't know where you get the idea that it doesn't "cut it." That's especially true if you're mostly just testing your output in a web browser, since it doesn't seem like you can count on your users having stuff that large anyway.
One thing Ars is spot-on with, though, is that it sounds like this machine's drivers aren't in the mainline, and that's a liability. Having drivers exist is a good start, sure, but the year 1996 was a time for good starts. Dell, in 2012 you're deploying hardware without sending it to the kernel guys a few month in advance? Catch up.
I think his point is that it's silly to have a ceremonial role, where the "ceremony" undermines or mocks the non-ceremonial part.
Imagine US Congress passing some new pro-civil rights legislation, and at a purely ceremonial press event, the new law were announced by a guy wearing a Gestapo uniform or KKK robe.
The same applies to things outside of the CSS realm, like the apple-touch-icon link. Android uses it. Yep - want pretty bookmarks on Android? Specify the Apple (by name) icons.
Largely this is because the standards people are moving way, way too slow.
Didn't we already have link rel="icon"? Apple fucked around for no good reason that I can see. All they did was make people add more crap to their page heads, to make those pages say they same thing they were already saying, a new way.
Combined with Microsoft's shittiness (although perversely, they and their ico format are better than everything else, at dealing with multiple icon sizes as an alternative to scaling), my pages' heads specify icons three different ways (not counting the fact there's also a/favicon.ico). Bloat bloat bloat for no reason at all, other than there being three ways to say the same thing.
Indeed, my pages heads are just plain getting fucking huge with all the shit.
(It's not just browsers, either, but also the crawlers/scrapers/robots. Facebook, you bastards! OGP just couldn't just use all the same tags that everything elsealready knew how to read. link rel="img_src" and meta property="og:image" to specify the same image url, *sigh*. At least meta name="description" property="og:description" content="blah" seem to combine ok into one tag so I don't have too much duplication on that one. But WTF: meta property="og:title" when we've already had a title tag ever since html 1.0? Fuck you, Facebook.)
So let's say webkit specifies a blue background, moz specifies a yellow one, and o specifies red.
When the document author has specified ambiguous intent, it doesn't really matter what color it comes out. My complaint is that you often have to say the same thing three different ways; that's bad enough. You're talking about an even crazier situation where you want to say three different things, three different ways.;-) Of course Opera, the one browser that tries the hardest to do everything, is going to have its mind blown by that.
We must destroy the "got to have it now" mentality before it destroys the country.
You can't destroy stupid ideas; the best you can do is not be part of them. So many people have wanted to do what you want, and they all failed. It's a nice idea, but remember that even Nazis are still around, as well as various religions. Shit, man, somewhere a few days ago I heard a Bee Gees song; disco isn't totally dead. Disco!!
You can't win. You just have to protect your own brain, and accept the loss of others, because it's totally out of your control. This is the only way to remain sane.
No shit. I can promise you right now if anyone ever did that to my daughter they wouldn't be breathing for long after
Really, you would kill yourself if you ever detected that you had put your daughter into a situation where she would be subject to the inhuman TSA machine?
That's perversely admirable but I think you're being too hard-assed on yourself. In some moment of mental weakness (we all have them) you may decide that flying her somewhere is the most convenient thing to do, despite the fact that your choice predictably will cause your daughter to be exposed to TSA and therefore at risk of inhuman treatment by a completely unaccountable government bureaucracy. Should that happen, please give yourself a second chance, even if an objective analysis reveals that it was, in fact, due to your fully-informed risk-taking. You were really only doing the best you could in a shitty situation. It's not like a bus ride or a car ride was totally guaranteed to be safe from government goons either.
I think that DRM would be fine if it was implemented in an open/universal system.
That can't ever be done. The whole point of DRM is to deny people the capability of creating compatible readers.
DRM means lack-of-standard. It's a way of creating a monopoly for the implementation of I-can-read-X. Without the monopoly, the DRM cannot be "effective."
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe at the point that people actually start leaving over stuff like this, or even bother to do something less drastic, such as vote against it. We are not at that point, yet. In 2012 we will probably vote for the same people to stay in Congress, who created the silly statutory penalties. America is approximately 100% in favor of the judgement amount, and we will prove it in November when we re-elect those people.
People keep saying it's for sale on iTunes. That's exciting! There's just one little problem...
Putting aside the season 1 vs 2 issue, here is the link Google gave me for Season 1: GoT Season 1. If anyone has a better link, please share it. Let's bend over backward trying to find an alternative to piracy, looking at the publisher's efforts in the very best light, with the assumption that there's no dishonesty and that they are actually willing to sell what people want.
The above link takes me to a page that describes season 1, but is prefaced by an ad for some application software called iTunes (wait, is "iTunes" a store or an application?). Pretty much every link on the page turns out to take me to a page that tells me to get this application, except of course it hasn't actually been ported to anything except two OSes, neither of which is what I use.
How important that is, though, I'm not sure. So far, I have not found a link to a page I fill out some web form to arrange payment and they'll then let me download a file (which I assume would work in mplayer (ideally) or vlc or something). That doesn't mean the web page doesn't exist, merely that google and bing and wikipedia and hbo.com's own pages don't know about this link yet, so I don't know it either. Does anyone have it? Just because I can't find it, doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Maybe I'm an idiot.
I'll consider the publishing of this link to be HBO's Open For Business sign, even if they are trying to hide it. I know lots of businesses with truly shitty marketing, which are nevertheless intended as for-profit businesses. How an entertainment company could be one of them, I don't know, but that's beside the point. Maybe they just need our help. Anyone got the link?
Has anyone bought the GoT files from Apple without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?
Some people have mentioned Amazon, but all I have found over there (so far!) is a shitty Flash streaming service.
This particular defect in Amazon may be totally irrelevant, of course. Amazon does, in fact, sell music in a variety of ways that work excellently and require no bizarre player or client. They sell CDs, every one of which has been compatible with cdparanoia, and they also sell downloadable mp3s (which aren't what I prefer, but are good enough). I just can't find where the sell the video files, though. (And the Blu-Ray discs they sell have DRM, so it's illegal to read them, in addition to being a pain in the ass. So please, let's not talk about Blu-Ray discs until that tech becomes ready.)
Has anyone bought the GoT files from Amazon without having to use a special client? How did you do it? Got an URL?
It all sounds so promising, as though HBO were really open for business. But either they keep failing to close the deal, or I'm too dumb to see where they do it, or somewhere in the middle where we're just not communicating. What's going on?
On thing's for sure, though: the premise where we look at HBO in the best light and assume they are honestly trying to sell the product, does require they are at least up to mid-1990s tech for their store. Somewhere there's gotta be a page where I can give payment info (whether it's credit card info or what .. maybe HBO is too smalltime so they only take paypal, and if so, that's acceptable for now, and maybe they can their little startup out of the garage over the next year) and they will let me download the file. The post I'm replying to comes close to implying this is possible, but stops short of actually saying it, fading into weird terminology ("open iTunes"). Surely someone is about to give me the huge enlightenment+smackdown by posting the mystery URL.
Because it's basically a dumb idea. If you're going to go to the trouble to bother making phones become instantly secure upon command, you might as well just make them secure by default, instead.
My elite math skills tell me they are spending $30 million dollars per year on Facebook, where none of that $30M can be accounted for by paid ads.
Until I get a clear understanding of that, I have to think that some kind of legendary incompetence is happening at GM, so I don't know if I get much out of their conclusions.
Assuming it costs $50k/year for GM to pay someone to upload pictures of their cars, type status updates ("Looking forward to tomorrow's release of car X!" or "OMFG car X is sooo beautiful and fast, I don't even care what it costs!") I can't help but imagine they're paying 600 people to do that kind of work.
Except that if you recycle the plastic "at a loss," then I get super-sceptical about the petroleum being "severely limited." If petroleum is simultaneously cheap yet also severely limited, my scam detector goes off. I don't know where the error is, just that an error exists.
Your rant has no time dimension! All you have is an impression of stupidity, not of changes. Even when you do mention time, it's just that you sampled people "decades ago" and you imply you haven't done so, since then.
And then you conclude "it has likely gotten worse" but you don't even provide an opinion, much less evidence, for why you think it might have.
20 years ago, people didn't make such lame arguments, therefore, people are getting stu-- no wait, 20 years ago they that too! Read dejanews and you'll see it was just a bad back then.
Sorry, but it probably won't fix anything. They're light on the details but it really looks like it's just a DoS attack which has to be launched against specific swarms. If the attacker doesn't know about a particular swarm, the attack probably doesn't do anything.
It's open season on the MPAA and RIAA. Every time they prove themselves to be gullible, more and more people come out of the woodwork to sell them snake oil. I think over the next coming years we're going to hear of lots more unethical scumbags taking innocent entertainment companies to the cleaners, all telling them "You can keep on saying No to customers, refuse their money, and use our product to somehow make a profit anyway. Just sign here and hand over your check."
Heh, awesome recycling story.
I've come to the conclusion that if someone isn't paying you to recycle, then the recycling is probably fake or scammy.
When you keep your aluminum cans and take 'em to the aluminum recyclers and they pay you, that's strong evidence that someone is really going to use the cans, and surely they're paying because it still costs them less to use those cans, than to mine and refine more bauxite. (Although there's always the terrifying prospect that there's some stupid subsidy or tax incentive at work behind the scenes, where your income tax is somehow being used to pay them to take the metal to the landfill.)
Real recycling is profitable. It's not something just for hippies, it's for the fat guy in the suit. If the fat guy in the suit isn't doing it, then the smart hippies (yes, such things exist) aren't doing it either, and it's just something stoner hippies are doing.
Especially true since they shouldn't be doing things that people didn't demand as a precondition for getting their vote. "We are mad, we should be voting" is available to so many people, and not used. (High school students are an exception, though. I'll give 'em that.)
People say they're angry but they never ever act angry. I predict that Republicans and Democrats will win nearly all the November elections. If my prediction turns out to be wrong, then I'll really believe people are angry. In all the elections up to now, though, after-the-fact it was always obvious that the so-called angry people were really just acting dramatic, for entertainment purposes.
Probably.
It's 2012 and we still don't have a free market in ISPs yet. Every business who is allowed by the government (remember: we're talking about a situation where various levels of government are already heavily involved) to run wires to my home (i.e. both of them), is also in the content bundling business. How many more decades until there's competition (more than two of them)? I'm not holding my breath on that one, because I also have only one powerline and water supply pipe. (Maybe there are some efficiency reasons that our government grants these monopolies. But however good/bad you think the tradeoff is, one thing's for sure: it exists. This is how things are, and all discussion about changing from this, is hypothetical.)
But until the government stops using deadly force to keep their numbers down, I think I'd like the government to also use deadly force to keep my IP payments from subsidizing their content business. If you're willing to kill to prevent a third ISP, I'm willing to kill to prevent that subsidy. Doesn't this seem reasonable? I hope you'll even join me; you and I should be voting together on this.
You are mistaken. America, in fact, has a much greater desire for Nanny Statism than Europe, and Europe is downright hard line in its conservativism compared to our own population's desire for government micromanagement to expand into new areas at the expense of liberty. We are the freedom-hating interventionists, not them.
Consider that in America, people are voting to amend state constitutions to Nanny-Statize who can marry whom, a situation where there is a lot less public interest and motivation than something as large and interconnected as the Internet. We Americans even still vote to have our government overrule doctors' opinions on when marijuana should be prescribed, because we feel our politicians' faith is more authoritative and trustworthy than their silly experiments, observations, and reason.
America is far to the left of Europe. Those people are practically libertarian anarchists, compared to our worship of Stalin and Mao. Or if this isn't what people say on the street, it's at least what everyone says in the voting booth.
Too bad our public won't take the hint, and then start to vote for real politicians.
The good: the "mobile ecosystem" really does have almost completely negative connotations at this point. It's not that running things locally is bad (sometimes you very much want to do just that), but rather that "ecosystem" became a codeword for screwing people over by trapping them in proprietary dead ends. The NES was an "ecosystem" by the current usage, and that was the epitome of evil next to which, even Microsoft looked like a relatively benign force in the software industry (until the Xbox, that is). Death to the mobile ecosystem. I know lots of people are actually working on that from various directions, but coming out and saying that's what you want to get rid of, earns RIM some points.
The bad: Porsche, are you serious? High-end car market will always be irrelevant. Whoever gets their computers and OSes into the Civics and Accords, Corrolas and Camries: that is who is going to win, and that's the system that eventually will show up in all the high-end cars unless you want the high-end cars to be a joke. Computers are cheap and any time you pretend they're expensive luxury items, it's just a way of announcing to the world, "Look at me, I'm a liar! Don't trust meeeee!" This is especially true in a car, as opposed to a phone, where you don't have the same physical size/weight constraints.
TFA that I read simply says they do make better entrepreneurs, and gives examples of someone making more effort than I do. But it does not say why. (Why I suck, or why they don't, whatever: I'll take either answer.)
Yeah, they're "mostly past" clients now. When the plane took off, they thought they were mostly future.
Don't we all think that?
Wrong. Those are good reasons to have astronauts in space. They're just shitty and unacceptable reasons to force other people to pay to have astronauts in space.
Inconvenience. By conflating your temporary trash files with your desired working set, yes, you can make it harder to analyze what you're doing, and cast ambiguity on evidence. But that works both ways: it makes it harder for you to keep shit together, and you're failing to use the power of computers to organize things for you. It's also not safe; this doesn't "square you with the law"; it simply provides an advantage.
Once could even argue that by creating such a situation, the law is functioning correctly: it's deterring kiddie porn by making the collecting and viewing of it a less pleasant experience. True, it's not as unpleasant as prison, but this measure is a much cheaper for us than prison (or even investigating a suspect), so the balance tips at least in the right direction, if not the degree that everyone would like.
Strategic advice noted. This is not an argument for a court, though. There is no crime in visiting "shitty sites" and according the law there's no reason reason people should avoid doing so, merely based on the site's shittiness. You have to try to see something illegal-to-see, for this particular court to treat you as a criminal, or at least that's what they're saying, in this instance.
If the FBI arrests you because of your bumper sticker or because a site you browsed contains kiddie porn, or because your skin is too dark, yes you are still fucked because you were suddenly kidnapped and because you're going to be spending money on legal defense. But at least if you get this judge, you might end up without a criminal record. The color of your skin or the fact that your browser loaded a kiddie porn image, won't be considered evidence that you were trying to get kiddie porn. His argument is that storing kiddie porn isn't enough; you have to want to do it or know you did it, in order for the act to be illegal.
The court appears to be saying that's a good thing: not realizing you have a cache. If I'm reading this right, if you know how web browsers work, the act of viewing illegal content is more likely to be considered a crime by the court, than it would be for another person who doesn't know about caching.
There is no problem with prosecutors violating all the laws that they want to, even without exemptions, as long as no one prosecutes them. And generally, prosecutors tend to choose to not prosecute themselves. There's something about the sentence "I'm pressing charges against me" which causes people to not say it.
Remember that laws only exist when enforced. If a law isn't enforced, or is selectively enforced, then the details for when it applies and when it doesn't, are largely irrelevant.
As soon as I start popping my stack (why does this keep getting bigger?) I am going to completely refute what you're saying. I'm sure I will convince you. Just give me a little more time....
Once you start picking nits like that, you may as well open up the whole idea that all laptops will always relatively suck for development. Even the largest or best laptops are going to be downright awful in terms of both its screen and keyboard(!), compared to even a mediocre desktop.
Thing is, that desktop isn't portable, even if it's otherwise better in countless ways. (I'm surprised your going after its smaller screen, rather than the fact that every laptop in history has a shitty keyboard, but hey, whatever. We all have our own peeves.)
So the small or lower-res screen is all just part of the tradeoff. I don't particularly like the idea of 1366x768 but I don't know where you get the idea that it doesn't "cut it." That's especially true if you're mostly just testing your output in a web browser, since it doesn't seem like you can count on your users having stuff that large anyway.
One thing Ars is spot-on with, though, is that it sounds like this machine's drivers aren't in the mainline, and that's a liability. Having drivers exist is a good start, sure, but the year 1996 was a time for good starts. Dell, in 2012 you're deploying hardware without sending it to the kernel guys a few month in advance? Catch up.
I think his point is that it's silly to have a ceremonial role, where the "ceremony" undermines or mocks the non-ceremonial part.
Imagine US Congress passing some new pro-civil rights legislation, and at a purely ceremonial press event, the new law were announced by a guy wearing a Gestapo uniform or KKK robe.
Didn't we already have link rel="icon"? Apple fucked around for no good reason that I can see. All they did was make people add more crap to their page heads, to make those pages say they same thing they were already saying, a new way.
Combined with Microsoft's shittiness (although perversely, they and their ico format are better than everything else, at dealing with multiple icon sizes as an alternative to scaling), my pages' heads specify icons three different ways (not counting the fact there's also a /favicon.ico). Bloat bloat bloat for no reason at all, other than there being three ways to say the same thing.
Indeed, my pages heads are just plain getting fucking huge with all the shit.
(It's not just browsers, either, but also the crawlers/scrapers/robots. Facebook, you bastards! OGP just couldn't just use all the same tags that everything else already knew how to read. link rel="img_src" and meta property="og:image" to specify the same image url, *sigh*. At least meta name="description" property="og:description" content="blah" seem to combine ok into one tag so I don't have too much duplication on that one. But WTF: meta property="og:title" when we've already had a title tag ever since html 1.0? Fuck you, Facebook.)
When the document author has specified ambiguous intent, it doesn't really matter what color it comes out. My complaint is that you often have to say the same thing three different ways; that's bad enough. You're talking about an even crazier situation where you want to say three different things, three different ways. ;-) Of course Opera, the one browser that tries the hardest to do everything, is going to have its mind blown by that.
You can't destroy stupid ideas; the best you can do is not be part of them. So many people have wanted to do what you want, and they all failed. It's a nice idea, but remember that even Nazis are still around, as well as various religions. Shit, man, somewhere a few days ago I heard a Bee Gees song; disco isn't totally dead. Disco!!
You can't win. You just have to protect your own brain, and accept the loss of others, because it's totally out of your control. This is the only way to remain sane.
Really, you would kill yourself if you ever detected that you had put your daughter into a situation where she would be subject to the inhuman TSA machine?
That's perversely admirable but I think you're being too hard-assed on yourself. In some moment of mental weakness (we all have them) you may decide that flying her somewhere is the most convenient thing to do, despite the fact that your choice predictably will cause your daughter to be exposed to TSA and therefore at risk of inhuman treatment by a completely unaccountable government bureaucracy. Should that happen, please give yourself a second chance, even if an objective analysis reveals that it was, in fact, due to your fully-informed risk-taking. You were really only doing the best you could in a shitty situation. It's not like a bus ride or a car ride was totally guaranteed to be safe from government goons either.
That can't ever be done. The whole point of DRM is to deny people the capability of creating compatible readers.
DRM means lack-of-standard. It's a way of creating a monopoly for the implementation of I-can-read-X. Without the monopoly, the DRM cannot be "effective."