Caps don't encourage piracy. Low speeds indirectly do, though. (Though it looks like that's not the case here; 100Mbps sounds sweet, at least compared to what I have.)
Los speeds encourage aynchronous downloading since realtime downloading while watching at the same time results in such low bitrate/quality. And bittorrent piracy is currently the only service that offers asynchronous downloading. It's either that, or buy physical media (which has its own problems thanks to DRM). To put it another way: the industry relying on streaming and not offering downloads, is encouraging piracy.
The trend for increasing speed is slowly wearing away at this piracy incentive, though, which will eventually leave "you have to use a proprietary stream player" as the last piracy incentive standing. For many people, though, that's still a decade or two away. There's no way I can stream on DSL and get a quality even remotely approaching the files I play from local hard disk. When I go over to a friend's house that uses Netflix, I'm pretty shocked at what they consider to be "good" quality. But that's today; in 2021 streaming will probably be pretty damn good, assuming they deal with the proprietary player problem. If they know what's good for them, they'll phase out DRM at the same time net speeds go up, so they'll end of with a viable business in the end, and in the mean time until everyone actually has 100 Mbps, they should offer downloads.
This is a clever argument (I like it!), but it's flawed.
It turns out that most of the time, you don't have a right to a jury or a fair trial. Go ahead and march into the nearest courthouse right now and demand a fair trial. You'll find that you can't get one, because you aren't currently being prosecuted for anything.
The fair trial right is conditional on the government initiating the action of prosecuting you. That is, they wouldn't normally have the right to force you to attend court for trial or punishment, but we will let them, provided they fulfill certain conditions, such as making a jury available to you. Fair trials are not natural right, because absent governemnt, there are no trials (fair or unfair) at all.
To put it another way, requiring the right to a fair trial, is a concession we make, in order to make it more palatable to grant the government the power to deny us our negative freedom to not be involuntarily summoned to court or punishment. Without recognizing that negative freedom, there is no reason to create the positive right. It all comes down to negative liberty.
The way that Berner's-Lee might be able to use this, would be if government violated our negative liberty by forcefully requiring us to have internet access. That might create a right to use the net. If, for example, they were to say "We have the power to imprison you if you don't file your taxes, and we refuse to accept tax returns that are not e-filed," then your rights would be violated, but we might decide to allow that (i.e. think of it as a not-abusive or unfair rights violation), if as a condition for that, they treated net access as a right.
The funny thing about having old unsafe nuke plants and abstaining from fuel reprocessing, and public opposition to nuclear power in general, is that I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect.
It's weird how when race cars crash, people don't oppose developing auto tech. When the space shuttle blows up, no one says we need to stop designing commercial airliners. But when 1960s design nuke plants fail, it means we need to abstain from building new nuke plants, thereby increasing the demand and lifetime of the old ones.
If you fail your math test, it means you need to stop doing your math homework, because math class only gets you in trouble.
If there is a sufficiently large population of powerful/well-armed idiots (and isn't that what a government is?), then maybe denying science is a survival trait. That would mean we're evolvi--*bang* *thud*
With widely available downloads, people do pirate A LOT of content.
Isn't that just all the more damning for MPAA? If fighting tech results in piracy, then maybe they should drop the anti-tech agenda and go back to a sales agenda. Anyone can guess what happens when you worry about pirates instead of worrying about customers: you get fewer customers.
That might be ok, if their new business model (have pirates be the revenue source, using the courts) were actually profitable, but it isn't. There is just no way that is result in them remaining the giants that they became back when they used to sell stuff. And the collateral damage from their anti-tech stance is making them lots of enemies.
The sooner they get back to the sales business model, the better for everyone (even themselves).
Yeah, using laziness or "my time is precious" as the reason to not bittorrent, is really weird. There are reasons not to bittorrent, but saving time or effort ain't among them. Nothing is as easy and point-and-click. All I can think of, is that this person's computer is hard-to-use, or he doesn't have an HTPC yet.
I don't think so. Part of the reason people elect to not "go buy the real one" is because "the real one" has built up a reputation for not being as good as the pirate releases. If the torrent is pan-and-scan and has burned-in French subtitles and corruption, people seeing it will think, "Damn, the DVD must have been really bad for the cleaned up and improved version to be as bad as this."
What they ought to be doing, is skip the bittorrent release altogether, but also skip the DVD (offer a for-pay download instead, and in a normal file format+codec and not requiring a specialized client (e.g. iTunes)). Or at least make sure the DVD release doesn't use CSS. Remove all the reasons that people pirate, and publicize like crazy that they've done this. (A lot of people are in the habit of pirating everything, because it's just assumed that all the non-pirate releases have DRM problems, so people working to fix the problem really do need to make a lot of noise, to get people to take the idea of non-piracy seriously again.) They should still go for getting money, but just make sure that a pirate release has no chance of being better than their own product.
Any release of a "crippled" product (whether a corrupt datastream, or Bluray DRM, or whatever) is just a way of telling people to go get the movie from pirates. That gets the publisher out of the loop and pretty much eliminates and chances of collecting revenue. The publisher should try to be the best go-to guy, or at least tied for best. Never ever tell potential customers to go somewhere else.
the White House wants Congress to enact legislation offering 'baseline consumer data privacy protections.'
Wait a minute.. isn't this the same guy who, when he was a Senator, voted for the bill to give AT&T retroactive immunity to their illegal wiretaps?
I guess it just goes to show, in 2008 Obama was just another politician, as corrupt and ineffective as anyone else, but now in 2011 he's become an idealist, finally offering the hope and change that just three years ago, nobody could credibly believe in.
if you're asked "Dude, do you know how to get some pot around here?" and you say "Look for that red-haired guy who hangs out down by the C building, he always has good stuff." you've done more than comment on what looks like a crack house.
Which just goes to show drug-dealers still don't have their shit together. He should have said something like, "Look for that red-haired guy who hangs out down by the C building. He always has good stuff. Tell him referral code #24C67."
Racism was merely an excuse for the real goal: money.
It always is. Well, that's an exaggeration, but it usually is. For all the supposedly irrational haters out there (and ok, there are some), most of the time when I talk to a racist, I find out that it's really just an excuse to treat anyone else like shit for financial gain. They would stab their own race in the back too, if they only had a socially-acceptable cover excuse for it. "A nigger took my job" is code for "That job paid more than the effort that goes into doing it, and I had a damn good racket going on before competitive pressures made someone think." If fellow white-trash takes their job instead, they are just as furious, but don't have as easy of a way to put it into words as "a nigger took my job."
Put another way, do you want the guy who's programming the software for your mother's heart monitor to be smoking that shit?* How about the guy who codes the braking software for your car?
Why not? It's lost in the noise. They don't test for the seriously impairing shit, like religion, insanity, or stupidity. Any chances that the programmer and all the people who checked his work, might have all been high while doing their jobs, is overwhelmed by both the possibility and consequences of other factors. You would have to be using a hundred heart monitors programmed by high programmers, to add up to all the routinely tolerated risks that nobody tests for.
If drug testing were seriously about safety and quality control, they would also be testing for the much more common and severe things first. They don't. Hence, the rationale for it is bullshit.
When NASA says they've stopped hiring people whose bank account audits have found transfers to Scientology, have stopped hiring people who watch Fox News for purposes other than comic entertainment, have stopped hiring people who who smoke a pack of tobacco cigarettes every day, then I'll believe they're serious when they include marijuana testing too, because they'll have shown they've already gone after all the low-hanging fruit.
Current drug testing, though, is like a cop seeing a bunch of cars drive by a school at 100 MPH by with flat tires, as the drivers throw beer cans out the window, and ignoring it all and pulling someone over because they have a suspicious bumper sticker. Don't tell me you're motivated by safety; your criteria for selection shows that you're lying so no one is buying it.
Pretty much the only real penalty for https is browser shittiness. If your identity isn't certified by a recognized CA, all the major browsers incorrectly treat your site, relative to http, as having a higher (rather than lower) risk of.. something.. so they try to scare the user with vague error messages that, even if the messages were appropriate, mislead the user rather than inform. So the penalty is that you have to pay someone to sign you.
As for the computations, it's 2011 so CPU is so close to "free" that it can hardly be measured. Your cellphone is a supercomputer, and anything that comes in a box too big for your pocket is a super-supercomputer, and anything that is sold as a "server" or comes in a rack form factor for data centers, is a super super-supercomputer. Encryption is free.
After they escape the game grid (which I'll admit was fairly realistically done), the programs get all excited about finding power. WTF? Hardware uses power; what programs want is memory. They should have been, all, "There must be forty-eight kilobytes here!! Gobble gobble, I'm gonna build another hash table!"
Or how about Ram, who I guess you're supposed to think "drank the koolaide" since he was going on about how insurance was a good investment. No insurance program would actually be able to really function, if it actually believed that. Maybe this wasn't a script error, though. Maybe Ram really believed that, and that is why he derezzed after fairly minor injuries. Or maybe he knew insurance-as-an-investment is a scam, and was trying to con Flynn into buying some insurance, so he died as a moral lesson on the importance of honesty.
Then there's Sark, getting all snippy with an underling, telling him to stop thinking because he does the thinking. That was stupid and made be guffaw at the idea that Sark was supposed to be some kind of bad-ass antagonist. Part of solving problems is break the up and get another process doing something, feeding you the answers through a pipe. Even if you don't have SMP (which was admitted pretty rare in 1982) multiprocess solutions still let you get work done while something is blocked on I/O, without all that bug-prone mucking around with threading.
Speaking of I/O.. the I/O towers! For all the praise Tron got for its graphics, you'd think they'd be able to get the color of I/O towers right.
I think the question is: does making sure everyone know the PS3 can be used to run whatever you want it to run, increase sales or decrease sales? Not everyone who uses the Streisand Effect is necessarily stupid.
It's been out for several years now; maybe it needs a little extra publicity.
"Tablet market" is just artificial slices of phone and laptop/notebook markets. Tablets compete with these devices, in the sense of "I already have a notebook so I don't need a tablet" or (to a lesser degree) "I already have a cool smartphone so I don't need a tablet."
Take a look around on a train or coffee shop, where people are using their gizmos to do whatever. These people are who Newscorp would love to sell "papers" to, but by having niche proprietary dependencies (ios) instead of just using the ubiquitously implemented web, The Daily is out in the cold, with most of their potential customers being told "fuck off, we don't want your money" because they don't run ios. Sure, some of them have iPads and you can make money in a niche, but it ain't easy. [delusion]There's a reason Fox pays The Daily Show under the table to make fun of them; they want the rest of the world to remember Fox exists.[/delusion]
Apple's mobile devices have what, twenty percent of the market and falling? I made up the number, but don't tell me it isn't small and falling.
If this is Murdoch's plan, he can remain a big fish, but it'll be a damn small pond he's in. "iPad newspaper" is a synonym for "obscure service that hardly anyone bothers to get access to." Newscorp: the new CompuServe.
Wow, Murdoch, so high tech! Please, nobody tell him the rest of us have had the same tech for over a century. No matter what (large enough) town you go to, there's the local media to read/watch/listento. You go buy a newspaper, and magically, somehow it's full of local news. How do they do that?!
Nope, didn't know. That kicks ass. If iTunes doesn't implement DRM, that means that people can now write their own iPod syncers as well as software to interact with the iTunes store. Anyone know if there are Linux versions of these things yet?
Trouble is...when exactly did taxes evolve to become a method for the government to influence citizen behavior??
Probably right around the same time that subsidies did. I don't want to pay extra income tax or higher interest rates to pay for wars in the Middle East in order to keep oil prices stable, but lots of voting drivers disagree, and think we should all pay to subsidize gasoline, instead of drivers having to pay for oil security in proportion to how much gasoline they use.
Right or wrong, 10th amendment or not, many decades ago Americans decided that cars and their fuel was an issue too important to be left to the free market and that the federal government should play a direct role in regulating how much of it people use and who pays for it. Don't like it? Start voting for people who say they'll repeal all that. But since we're talking about a platform that gets less than 1% of the vote, I think it's pretty fair for a president or people in congress to throw more taxes into the mix. Not that it's right, just that it's fair since obviously nobody minds it very much and everyone votes in favor of it, time after time without any of that pendulum effect that is sometimes seen in other political issues.
Taxes should be for nothing more than funding the common govt functionality, and most of it should reside a the state level, since the state is closer to its citizens and can more efficiently fill their needs in a more targeted way.
I've been hearing a lot of that kind of talk lately. I like it. But the terrible irony is that so often, the people who say it, then turn around 180 degrees and vote for Republicans. So we get even higher deficits and more wars, than the relatively spendthrift Democrats. Wake me up when someone who talks about small government actually votes for small government bills or signs/vetos based on small government. Even Reagan couldn't do it, and that man talked the talk better than anyone.
It was a dark and stormy night. I had just finished washing jeans #2 which I had bought 4-5 years earlier, and inspected them. Being better than shit tier quality, they were, as expected, still in good condition. Even the crotch was in good condition and showed no signs that it might dramatically fail at some inconvenient time. As is typical for dark and story nights, there was a conspicous lack of sunlight and very high humidity, so I knew the jeans would not dry on the line outside. I put them into the dryer, along with some other clothes, and I was careful to add a fabric softener sheet as well. Just as the dryer started rumbling, I heard the phone ring.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Kyrio, this is Reeno."
I was ecstatic. "Hey Reeno!! Good to hear from you finally! What have you been up to?" I had not heard from Reeno in a very long time. We had a falling out many years ago, over some dumb topic like jean quality tiers or something, but that was all water under the bridge, now.
"Well, I have been writing a novel."
"No shit, really?! What's it about?" I was intrigued.
"Oh, I don't think I can sum it up very briefly. Here, let me read it to you."
#include "war and peace.txt"
As Reeno's scratchy voice managed to croak out the final words, I noticed the sunlight shining through the window next to my phone charger (the batteries had long ago failed) and the eery silence that had so long dominated the house after the dryer had finished. What was there to say? I didn't have the heart to tell Reeno that his novel sounded an awful lot like another one written by Tolstoy. It was a very awkward situation -- awkward like realizing that you're not wearing any pants. I went to the dryer and took out good ol' reliable jeans #2.
"Well, Reeno, that's quite a story. I'm glad you called. But I need to go now. Later, dude!"
"Good bye, Kyrio," he said, and I pressed the "END" button on the phone.
Exhausted, I walked out my door into the bright and calm day. A pity; the line would certainly be able to dry my jeans now, but there was no need. That's when I noticed that the storm had blown down the drying line. I bent down to pick up the end so that I could re-tie it, when to my annoyance, there was a terrible ripping sound and the brisk air blew into my crotch.
"Oh no! Jeans #2! Noooo!!" I wailed. I know that some people buy shit tier quality jeans, so they never grow attached to their garments during their ephemeral lifetimes, but it's different for me. I had these jeans for half a decade! Crying and heartbroken, I ran back into the house and picked up the phone.
"Reeno! My jeans! I'm down from four pairs to only three," I brokenly told him through sobs.
"Oh my god! What happened?!"
"It's a long story," I began, and that's when I heard it. The bastard was laughing at me. Laughing!
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Caps don't encourage piracy. Low speeds indirectly do, though. (Though it looks like that's not the case here; 100Mbps sounds sweet, at least compared to what I have.)
Los speeds encourage aynchronous downloading since realtime downloading while watching at the same time results in such low bitrate/quality. And bittorrent piracy is currently the only service that offers asynchronous downloading. It's either that, or buy physical media (which has its own problems thanks to DRM). To put it another way: the industry relying on streaming and not offering downloads, is encouraging piracy.
The trend for increasing speed is slowly wearing away at this piracy incentive, though, which will eventually leave "you have to use a proprietary stream player" as the last piracy incentive standing. For many people, though, that's still a decade or two away. There's no way I can stream on DSL and get a quality even remotely approaching the files I play from local hard disk. When I go over to a friend's house that uses Netflix, I'm pretty shocked at what they consider to be "good" quality. But that's today; in 2021 streaming will probably be pretty damn good, assuming they deal with the proprietary player problem. If they know what's good for them, they'll phase out DRM at the same time net speeds go up, so they'll end of with a viable business in the end, and in the mean time until everyone actually has 100 Mbps, they should offer downloads.
This is a clever argument (I like it!), but it's flawed.
It turns out that most of the time, you don't have a right to a jury or a fair trial. Go ahead and march into the nearest courthouse right now and demand a fair trial. You'll find that you can't get one, because you aren't currently being prosecuted for anything.
The fair trial right is conditional on the government initiating the action of prosecuting you. That is, they wouldn't normally have the right to force you to attend court for trial or punishment, but we will let them, provided they fulfill certain conditions, such as making a jury available to you. Fair trials are not natural right, because absent governemnt, there are no trials (fair or unfair) at all.
To put it another way, requiring the right to a fair trial, is a concession we make, in order to make it more palatable to grant the government the power to deny us our negative freedom to not be involuntarily summoned to court or punishment. Without recognizing that negative freedom, there is no reason to create the positive right. It all comes down to negative liberty.
The way that Berner's-Lee might be able to use this, would be if government violated our negative liberty by forcefully requiring us to have internet access. That might create a right to use the net. If, for example, they were to say "We have the power to imprison you if you don't file your taxes, and we refuse to accept tax returns that are not e-filed," then your rights would be violated, but we might decide to allow that (i.e. think of it as a not-abusive or unfair rights violation), if as a condition for that, they treated net access as a right.
The funny thing about having old unsafe nuke plants and abstaining from fuel reprocessing, and public opposition to nuclear power in general, is that I'm not sure which is the cause and which is the effect.
It's weird how when race cars crash, people don't oppose developing auto tech. When the space shuttle blows up, no one says we need to stop designing commercial airliners. But when 1960s design nuke plants fail, it means we need to abstain from building new nuke plants, thereby increasing the demand and lifetime of the old ones.
If you fail your math test, it means you need to stop doing your math homework, because math class only gets you in trouble.
If there is a sufficiently large population of powerful/well-armed idiots (and isn't that what a government is?), then maybe denying science is a survival trait. That would mean we're evolvi--*bang* *thud*
Isn't that just all the more damning for MPAA? If fighting tech results in piracy, then maybe they should drop the anti-tech agenda and go back to a sales agenda. Anyone can guess what happens when you worry about pirates instead of worrying about customers: you get fewer customers.
That might be ok, if their new business model (have pirates be the revenue source, using the courts) were actually profitable, but it isn't. There is just no way that is result in them remaining the giants that they became back when they used to sell stuff. And the collateral damage from their anti-tech stance is making them lots of enemies.
The sooner they get back to the sales business model, the better for everyone (even themselves).
Yeah, using laziness or "my time is precious" as the reason to not bittorrent, is really weird. There are reasons not to bittorrent, but saving time or effort ain't among them. Nothing is as easy and point-and-click. All I can think of, is that this person's computer is hard-to-use, or he doesn't have an HTPC yet.
I don't think so. Part of the reason people elect to not "go buy the real one" is because "the real one" has built up a reputation for not being as good as the pirate releases. If the torrent is pan-and-scan and has burned-in French subtitles and corruption, people seeing it will think, "Damn, the DVD must have been really bad for the cleaned up and improved version to be as bad as this."
What they ought to be doing, is skip the bittorrent release altogether, but also skip the DVD (offer a for-pay download instead, and in a normal file format+codec and not requiring a specialized client (e.g. iTunes)). Or at least make sure the DVD release doesn't use CSS. Remove all the reasons that people pirate, and publicize like crazy that they've done this. (A lot of people are in the habit of pirating everything, because it's just assumed that all the non-pirate releases have DRM problems, so people working to fix the problem really do need to make a lot of noise, to get people to take the idea of non-piracy seriously again.) They should still go for getting money, but just make sure that a pirate release has no chance of being better than their own product.
Any release of a "crippled" product (whether a corrupt datastream, or Bluray DRM, or whatever) is just a way of telling people to go get the movie from pirates. That gets the publisher out of the loop and pretty much eliminates and chances of collecting revenue. The publisher should try to be the best go-to guy, or at least tied for best. Never ever tell potential customers to go somewhere else.
Wait a minute .. isn't this the same guy who, when he was a Senator, voted for the bill to give AT&T retroactive immunity to their illegal wiretaps?
I guess it just goes to show, in 2008 Obama was just another politician, as corrupt and ineffective as anyone else, but now in 2011 he's become an idealist, finally offering the hope and change that just three years ago, nobody could credibly believe in.
Which just goes to show drug-dealers still don't have their shit together. He should have said something like, "Look for that red-haired guy who hangs out down by the C building. He always has good stuff. Tell him referral code #24C67."
It always is. Well, that's an exaggeration, but it usually is. For all the supposedly irrational haters out there (and ok, there are some), most of the time when I talk to a racist, I find out that it's really just an excuse to treat anyone else like shit for financial gain. They would stab their own race in the back too, if they only had a socially-acceptable cover excuse for it. "A nigger took my job" is code for "That job paid more than the effort that goes into doing it, and I had a damn good racket going on before competitive pressures made someone think." If fellow white-trash takes their job instead, they are just as furious, but don't have as easy of a way to put it into words as "a nigger took my job."
Assholes. They're not stupid; they're evil.
Why not? It's lost in the noise. They don't test for the seriously impairing shit, like religion, insanity, or stupidity. Any chances that the programmer and all the people who checked his work, might have all been high while doing their jobs, is overwhelmed by both the possibility and consequences of other factors. You would have to be using a hundred heart monitors programmed by high programmers, to add up to all the routinely tolerated risks that nobody tests for.
If drug testing were seriously about safety and quality control, they would also be testing for the much more common and severe things first. They don't. Hence, the rationale for it is bullshit.
When NASA says they've stopped hiring people whose bank account audits have found transfers to Scientology, have stopped hiring people who watch Fox News for purposes other than comic entertainment, have stopped hiring people who who smoke a pack of tobacco cigarettes every day, then I'll believe they're serious when they include marijuana testing too, because they'll have shown they've already gone after all the low-hanging fruit.
Current drug testing, though, is like a cop seeing a bunch of cars drive by a school at 100 MPH by with flat tires, as the drivers throw beer cans out the window, and ignoring it all and pulling someone over because they have a suspicious bumper sticker. Don't tell me you're motivated by safety; your criteria for selection shows that you're lying so no one is buying it.
Pretty much the only real penalty for https is browser shittiness. If your identity isn't certified by a recognized CA, all the major browsers incorrectly treat your site, relative to http, as having a higher (rather than lower) risk of .. something .. so they try to scare the user with vague error messages that, even if the messages were appropriate, mislead the user rather than inform. So the penalty is that you have to pay someone to sign you.
As for the computations, it's 2011 so CPU is so close to "free" that it can hardly be measured. Your cellphone is a supercomputer, and anything that comes in a box too big for your pocket is a super-supercomputer, and anything that is sold as a "server" or comes in a rack form factor for data centers, is a super super-supercomputer. Encryption is free.
So you're saying it's exactly the same as every other OS?
After they escape the game grid (which I'll admit was fairly realistically done), the programs get all excited about finding power. WTF? Hardware uses power; what programs want is memory. They should have been, all, "There must be forty-eight kilobytes here!! Gobble gobble, I'm gonna build another hash table!"
Or how about Ram, who I guess you're supposed to think "drank the koolaide" since he was going on about how insurance was a good investment. No insurance program would actually be able to really function, if it actually believed that. Maybe this wasn't a script error, though. Maybe Ram really believed that, and that is why he derezzed after fairly minor injuries. Or maybe he knew insurance-as-an-investment is a scam, and was trying to con Flynn into buying some insurance, so he died as a moral lesson on the importance of honesty.
Then there's Sark, getting all snippy with an underling, telling him to stop thinking because he does the thinking. That was stupid and made be guffaw at the idea that Sark was supposed to be some kind of bad-ass antagonist. Part of solving problems is break the up and get another process doing something, feeding you the answers through a pipe. Even if you don't have SMP (which was admitted pretty rare in 1982) multiprocess solutions still let you get work done while something is blocked on I/O, without all that bug-prone mucking around with threading.
Speaking of I/O.. the I/O towers! For all the praise Tron got for its graphics, you'd think they'd be able to get the color of I/O towers right.
R2D2 could understand speech but not speak.
I think the question is: does making sure everyone know the PS3 can be used to run whatever you want it to run, increase sales or decrease sales? Not everyone who uses the Streisand Effect is necessarily stupid.
It's been out for several years now; maybe it needs a little extra publicity.
Oh, just date rapist, not a forcible rapist? Don't worry, half the chicks out there (the ones who vote Republican) won't see that as red flag.
Murder is bad. I mean, really bad and it has all sorts of negative consequences to our society, and government needs to something about it.
Therefore, suspected murderers shouldn't have due process.
Looks like airtight logic to me! Anyone see a problem with it?
"Tablet market" is just artificial slices of phone and laptop/notebook markets. Tablets compete with these devices, in the sense of "I already have a notebook so I don't need a tablet" or (to a lesser degree) "I already have a cool smartphone so I don't need a tablet."
Take a look around on a train or coffee shop, where people are using their gizmos to do whatever. These people are who Newscorp would love to sell "papers" to, but by having niche proprietary dependencies (ios) instead of just using the ubiquitously implemented web, The Daily is out in the cold, with most of their potential customers being told "fuck off, we don't want your money" because they don't run ios. Sure, some of them have iPads and you can make money in a niche, but it ain't easy. [delusion]There's a reason Fox pays The Daily Show under the table to make fun of them; they want the rest of the world to remember Fox exists.[/delusion]
Apple's mobile devices have what, twenty percent of the market and falling? I made up the number, but don't tell me it isn't small and falling.
If this is Murdoch's plan, he can remain a big fish, but it'll be a damn small pond he's in. "iPad newspaper" is a synonym for "obscure service that hardly anyone bothers to get access to." Newscorp: the new CompuServe.
Wow, Murdoch, so high tech! Please, nobody tell him the rest of us have had the same tech for over a century. No matter what (large enough) town you go to, there's the local media to read/watch/listento. You go buy a newspaper, and magically, somehow it's full of local news. How do they do that?!
Nope, didn't know. That kicks ass. If iTunes doesn't implement DRM, that means that people can now write their own iPod syncers as well as software to interact with the iTunes store. Anyone know if there are Linux versions of these things yet?
Probably right around the same time that subsidies did. I don't want to pay extra income tax or higher interest rates to pay for wars in the Middle East in order to keep oil prices stable, but lots of voting drivers disagree, and think we should all pay to subsidize gasoline, instead of drivers having to pay for oil security in proportion to how much gasoline they use.
Right or wrong, 10th amendment or not, many decades ago Americans decided that cars and their fuel was an issue too important to be left to the free market and that the federal government should play a direct role in regulating how much of it people use and who pays for it. Don't like it? Start voting for people who say they'll repeal all that. But since we're talking about a platform that gets less than 1% of the vote, I think it's pretty fair for a president or people in congress to throw more taxes into the mix. Not that it's right, just that it's fair since obviously nobody minds it very much and everyone votes in favor of it, time after time without any of that pendulum effect that is sometimes seen in other political issues.
I've been hearing a lot of that kind of talk lately. I like it. But the terrible irony is that so often, the people who say it, then turn around 180 degrees and vote for Republicans. So we get even higher deficits and more wars, than the relatively spendthrift Democrats. Wake me up when someone who talks about small government actually votes for small government bills or signs/vetos based on small government. Even Reagan couldn't do it, and that man talked the talk better than anyone.
How refreshing to hear someone talk about the "slowly boiled frog" as though it were a good thing, for a change.
It was a dark and stormy night. I had just finished washing jeans #2 which I had bought 4-5 years earlier, and inspected them. Being better than shit tier quality, they were, as expected, still in good condition. Even the crotch was in good condition and showed no signs that it might dramatically fail at some inconvenient time. As is typical for dark and story nights, there was a conspicous lack of sunlight and very high humidity, so I knew the jeans would not dry on the line outside. I put them into the dryer, along with some other clothes, and I was careful to add a fabric softener sheet as well. Just as the dryer started rumbling, I heard the phone ring.
"Hello?"
"Hi, Kyrio, this is Reeno."
I was ecstatic. "Hey Reeno!! Good to hear from you finally! What have you been up to?" I had not heard from Reeno in a very long time. We had a falling out many years ago, over some dumb topic like jean quality tiers or something, but that was all water under the bridge, now.
"Well, I have been writing a novel."
"No shit, really?! What's it about?" I was intrigued.
"Oh, I don't think I can sum it up very briefly. Here, let me read it to you."
#include "war and peace.txt"
As Reeno's scratchy voice managed to croak out the final words, I noticed the sunlight shining through the window next to my phone charger (the batteries had long ago failed) and the eery silence that had so long dominated the house after the dryer had finished. What was there to say? I didn't have the heart to tell Reeno that his novel sounded an awful lot like another one written by Tolstoy. It was a very awkward situation -- awkward like realizing that you're not wearing any pants. I went to the dryer and took out good ol' reliable jeans #2.
"Well, Reeno, that's quite a story. I'm glad you called. But I need to go now. Later, dude!"
"Good bye, Kyrio," he said, and I pressed the "END" button on the phone.
Exhausted, I walked out my door into the bright and calm day. A pity; the line would certainly be able to dry my jeans now, but there was no need. That's when I noticed that the storm had blown down the drying line. I bent down to pick up the end so that I could re-tie it, when to my annoyance, there was a terrible ripping sound and the brisk air blew into my crotch.
"Oh no! Jeans #2! Noooo!!" I wailed. I know that some people buy shit tier quality jeans, so they never grow attached to their garments during their ephemeral lifetimes, but it's different for me. I had these jeans for half a decade! Crying and heartbroken, I ran back into the house and picked up the phone.
"Reeno! My jeans! I'm down from four pairs to only three," I brokenly told him through sobs.
"Oh my god! What happened?!"
"It's a long story," I began, and that's when I heard it. The bastard was laughing at me. Laughing!