I'd just like to point out that the iPhone wouldn't be able to connect to a network without a SIM. It's required for any service other than calling emergency services, as defined by the GSM standard. It's far more likely that the phone doesn't recognise SIM cards that aren't issued by AT&T, which is a standard way to handle things.
(There are phones that don't use a SIM, but they use a CDMA network and can't connect to GSM.)
And hands-free is almost as dangerous as actually holding the phone. Your attention's on the conversation, not the road.
(A conversation with a passenger is not as bad because you can rely on body language and mouth movements to ge tthe gist of the conversation. You don't need to concentrate quite as much.)
In any case, I fail to see how The Pirate Bay hosting my images suddenly makes them uncensorable. Sure, Pirate Bay's generally been less willing to cave to legal pressure than other internet groups, but it's still someone else in control of your stuff who theoretically can do what they like with it.
"I don't even buy the conceit that government run health-care will be necessarily worse."
Well, it'll be worse to someone, because governments, despite popular opinion, don't have unlimited resources. So inevitably there will need to have tradeoffs. (A popular one is to make healthcare not completely free, but at a very reasonable price within the range of anyone below the poverty line. This gives the healthcare a 'value', which stops it being exploited by people who see it as basically free and therefore unlimited.)
This is also true of private healthcare, but they have an additional tradeoff in that they have to return value for their shareholders.
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare. Right now, though, I'm willing to argue that a non-optimal distribution of MRI devices, in an age where travelling hundreds of miles is commonplace (though certainly not convenient), is less of a concern than restricting the devices only to a certain portion of the market. (That is, those who'll pay.) I fail to see the difference between the two in principle: not everyone gets low-cost access (in economic terms) to the MRI device. It's just that the cost of travel is easier, these days, to pay.
Without the EPA, *and* without the restrictions preventing me from retaliating forcefully against the people producing toxins that enter into my lungs, it would be a whole lot cleaner, and you can guess why.
But if the people producing toxins have decided that it's better to spend money on effective mercenary security than effective pollution control, you're still SOL. Especially seeing as the security forces don't have to worry about the restrictions on appropriate force.
Let's rewind, and put aside the question of whether the free market promotes theft and murder. The idea behind capitalism is that several self-interested parties are going to do a better job of finding an appropriate balance in the market (that is, a rate for goods and services that ensures that transactions continue and one side doesn't end up with an advantage) than one party with no particular interest. This is desirable because when the market inevitably shifts, one of the parties is going to change their valuation of the market, so the market stay nice and nimble and those who come up with innovations that change the balance of the market will be rewarded.
The problem comes if someone works out a way to permanently unbalance a market, so they have a much greater say about how it works than others. This is undesirable, because it means that those innovations are only rewarded if they conform to the interests of the controlling party. Most forms of corporate crime - monopolistic practices, antitrust and suchlike - are ways in which a party attempt to seize control of the market in such a way that they cannot be displaced. In any result, what you get is a broken market, no better than a communist or feudalist market where one person determines the price of everything.
In a capitalist economy, the job of the government is to identify and regulate this behaviour, using its very effective methods of regulating personal criminal behaviour. In some cases, governments will go one step further and attempt to stimulate competition in a market, or ensure that a minimum level of competition takes place for the public good - while this rarely happens in the United States (the USPS is one example), it's known overseas, and for the most part the government-owned business is mandated to turn a profit under its own funding.
The whole point the market exists is because it's better than the government (and interested private citizens) doing everything. If the market stops doing that, why keep it around at all?
I've always wondered about the term "free market", anyway. I thought that a free market was one where any entity could enter into the market and start buying and selling, not one with no government regulation. As it stands, market leaders have a very good reason to stop entities entering into the market and increasing competition, so the two can't be one and the same.
I'm still trying to work out this part of Jamie's e-mails (sent from Jamie to Microsoft):
"I'm also referencing 'office.dll' and 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFrame work.dll', which come with Visual Studio.NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite respectively."
You're assuming that ISPs have a recognizable business ethic. They don't. You're further assuming that they are interested in providing the best possible service scenario for the fees they charge. They aren't. Worse yet, your fundamental assumption that criminalizing encryption and giving ISPs total control of the type of traffic crossing their networks would do anything but trigger yet another round of price increases and lowered service levels. These simply aren't people that can be trusted with that kind of power, and ultimately that is what the Net Neutrality controversy is all about.
Look up the term "common carrier", realize that ISPs (even those that are also phone companies) are generally not common carriers, and maybe you'll grasp what your proposal actually means to the consumer. In any event, your thoughts are local in scope: the Internet has been a global phenomenon for some time and all outlawing encryption in one nation will do is help competing nations, one way or another. Bad idea.
It's funny, on the one hand you advocate having a global view, and on the other you espouse a view of corporations that chiefly applies to America. Most other countries have cowed their corporations into not being as overtly out to get the consumer.
Think about the effect this would have on book publishers too. They would be forced to look for new talent more vigorously then they have because eventually the copy write for older works will be unmanageable. This would give more opportunity for younger artists trying to make a living. This would be a good thing all around.
You can make the same argument for non-perpetual copyright on the part of the artists - Happy Birthday won't be a family's meal ticket for generations, so they've got to come up with something new. Unlike the publishers (the British publishers for Harry Potter weren't children's publishers, and it's very unlikely they'll get anything like it again), the authors can often be relied on to repeat their success.
This is, in fact, the entire point of copyright expiring - it's a recognition that there is a point where ideas seep into the public consciousness, and the relative harm of 'taking away' someone's work is balanced by the good it does society to acknowledge our shared history; and vice versa, the relative harm of restricting distribution of a work is balanced by the encouragement it gives its creator to have a crack at selling it.
Seeing as the trend these days has been towards self-publishing via the internet, publishers are unlikely to drive generation of new talent. In some industries they haven't done for years (new talent in the computer game industry has always been driven by independents, and arguably the music industry hasn't taken finding new talent seriously since the 80s.)
Be liberal in what you accept, unless you're an antsy Slashdot poster and want to punish the Internet for having the gall to make it up as they went along. It's like they didn't think that the Internet was going to become the defining feature of the 00's!
(Understandable, because it took, what, 20 to 25 years for the Internet to become mainstream?)
But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects
And I believe you've just broken your NDA. Unless they don't have that pesky 'you're not allowed to say you work for Google until all of the info we have that you know, including your interview, is on public record' in your NDA, in which case hurrah!
If you had "free will" you would be able to choose to make a different decision, which you clearly can't.
Oh thank god, I was wondering how I was going to get off my Murder One rap. Now I can just claim that because my actions were pre-determined, I could not be considered in control of my actions and thus can use the insanity defense! Thank you, anonymous internet stranger!
For me, the creepiest part of Scientology is the 'fair game' policy - that if you're a critic of Scientology, a 'suppressive person', the group gives its members carte blanche to attack you. It sounds like a great basis for a thriller movie (The Wicker Man had a similar premise, so there's precedent there).
Nah, first off someone's going to make a book that has a tiny Quicktime window on the right page, and when you touch it, it goes 'whuuuuuuuum whum whum' and sends you to D'ni.
"I can definitely understand it, but it'd be fantastic to have a forum where game devs for major companies can speak their minds without screaming hordes of fanbois/haters clogging the place."
I suspect that a forum full of everyone's favourite developers would attract the screaming hordes of fanbois/haters.
And they couldn't speak their mind because as soon they do, Joystiq would cross-post it and add a snarky comment.
"Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same, movies are sequels or generic snoozefests, and software is the same repackaged sports game from EA or expansion pack for the B-level game you already bought last year?"
As I recall, music was generic pap long before BitTorrent - Britney Spears started her career in 1998, about half a year before Napster came out. Movies have probably been hit harder by the rise of television brought about by the success of 24 than by piracy - movie piracy's only been viable for a few years, and it's nowhere near the scale of music piracy. As for games, piracy has been a constant issue with gaming since the 80's, and that didn't stop creative games from being made. Gaming's problems have much more to do with the increasing inability for one creative person to make a commercially viable game, which stagnates the entire industry.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the networks that require the phone locking; the phone manufacturers would certainly not like to have to implement locking.
That said, Europe and Australia require it to be possible to remove the locks.
A humanoid is anything you can cast Polymorph on. It's a standard I'm happy to live by.
I'd just like to point out that the iPhone wouldn't be able to connect to a network without a SIM. It's required for any service other than calling emergency services, as defined by the GSM standard. It's far more likely that the phone doesn't recognise SIM cards that aren't issued by AT&T, which is a standard way to handle things.
(There are phones that don't use a SIM, but they use a CDMA network and can't connect to GSM.)
And hands-free is almost as dangerous as actually holding the phone. Your attention's on the conversation, not the road.
(A conversation with a passenger is not as bad because you can rely on body language and mouth movements to ge tthe gist of the conversation. You don't need to concentrate quite as much.)
"I am sick of hearing this. Technically inferior? Why, because it doesn't have worthless features like wi-fi or an FM tuner?"
I would like my iPod to play OGGs. For all this talk in TFA about 'open standards', the iPod and iPhone don't support the most open standard of all.
(Of course, this is only important to me because I've ripped all my music to Ogg and don't want to have to convert lossy to lossy or re-rip.)
Isn't copyright infringement illegal?
In any case, I fail to see how The Pirate Bay hosting my images suddenly makes them uncensorable. Sure, Pirate Bay's generally been less willing to cave to legal pressure than other internet groups, but it's still someone else in control of your stuff who theoretically can do what they like with it.
"I don't even buy the conceit that government run health-care will be necessarily worse."
Well, it'll be worse to someone, because governments, despite popular opinion, don't have unlimited resources. So inevitably there will need to have tradeoffs. (A popular one is to make healthcare not completely free, but at a very reasonable price within the range of anyone below the poverty line. This gives the healthcare a 'value', which stops it being exploited by people who see it as basically free and therefore unlimited.)
This is also true of private healthcare, but they have an additional tradeoff in that they have to return value for their shareholders.
Hey, we can keep picking countries, and inevitably all of them will have tradeoffs in order to facilitate universal healthcare. Right now, though, I'm willing to argue that a non-optimal distribution of MRI devices, in an age where travelling hundreds of miles is commonplace (though certainly not convenient), is less of a concern than restricting the devices only to a certain portion of the market. (That is, those who'll pay.) I fail to see the difference between the two in principle: not everyone gets low-cost access (in economic terms) to the MRI device. It's just that the cost of travel is easier, these days, to pay.
Yeah, that lack of SDK really hurt that iPod thingie. I mean, who really uses that anyway?
Without the EPA, *and* without the restrictions preventing me from retaliating forcefully against the people producing toxins that enter into my lungs, it would be a whole lot cleaner, and you can guess why.
But if the people producing toxins have decided that it's better to spend money on effective mercenary security than effective pollution control, you're still SOL. Especially seeing as the security forces don't have to worry about the restrictions on appropriate force.
Let's rewind, and put aside the question of whether the free market promotes theft and murder. The idea behind capitalism is that several self-interested parties are going to do a better job of finding an appropriate balance in the market (that is, a rate for goods and services that ensures that transactions continue and one side doesn't end up with an advantage) than one party with no particular interest. This is desirable because when the market inevitably shifts, one of the parties is going to change their valuation of the market, so the market stay nice and nimble and those who come up with innovations that change the balance of the market will be rewarded.
The problem comes if someone works out a way to permanently unbalance a market, so they have a much greater say about how it works than others. This is undesirable, because it means that those innovations are only rewarded if they conform to the interests of the controlling party. Most forms of corporate crime - monopolistic practices, antitrust and suchlike - are ways in which a party attempt to seize control of the market in such a way that they cannot be displaced. In any result, what you get is a broken market, no better than a communist or feudalist market where one person determines the price of everything.
In a capitalist economy, the job of the government is to identify and regulate this behaviour, using its very effective methods of regulating personal criminal behaviour. In some cases, governments will go one step further and attempt to stimulate competition in a market, or ensure that a minimum level of competition takes place for the public good - while this rarely happens in the United States (the USPS is one example), it's known overseas, and for the most part the government-owned business is mandated to turn a profit under its own funding.
The whole point the market exists is because it's better than the government (and interested private citizens) doing everything. If the market stops doing that, why keep it around at all?
I've always wondered about the term "free market", anyway. I thought that a free market was one where any entity could enter into the market and start buying and selling, not one with no government regulation. As it stands, market leaders have a very good reason to stop entities entering into the market and increasing competition, so the two can't be one and the same.
I'm still trying to work out this part of Jamie's e-mails (sent from Jamie to Microsoft):
e work.dll', which .NET 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite
"I'm also referencing 'office.dll' and
'Microsoft.VisualStudio.QualityTools.UnitTestFram
come with Visual Studio
respectively."
Surely they're in breach?
No, based on precedent the Slashdot editors should post how its feature set is not as good as the competition and how it's doomed to fail.
I can see it now:
Constituents, constituents, constituents, constituents, (deep breath) constituents, constituents, constituents, constituents!
You're assuming that ISPs have a recognizable business ethic. They don't. You're further assuming that they are interested in providing the best possible service scenario for the fees they charge. They aren't. Worse yet, your fundamental assumption that criminalizing encryption and giving ISPs total control of the type of traffic crossing their networks would do anything but trigger yet another round of price increases and lowered service levels. These simply aren't people that can be trusted with that kind of power, and ultimately that is what the Net Neutrality controversy is all about.
Look up the term "common carrier", realize that ISPs (even those that are also phone companies) are generally not common carriers, and maybe you'll grasp what your proposal actually means to the consumer. In any event, your thoughts are local in scope: the Internet has been a global phenomenon for some time and all outlawing encryption in one nation will do is help competing nations, one way or another. Bad idea.
It's funny, on the one hand you advocate having a global view, and on the other you espouse a view of corporations that chiefly applies to America. Most other countries have cowed their corporations into not being as overtly out to get the consumer.
I find it appropriate that they'd have to build a new wing to house the intelligent design exhibit, instead of letting it evolve naturally.
Think about the effect this would have on book publishers too. They would be forced to look for new talent more vigorously then they have because eventually the copy write for older works will be unmanageable. This would give more opportunity for younger artists trying to make a living. This would be a good thing all around.
You can make the same argument for non-perpetual copyright on the part of the artists - Happy Birthday won't be a family's meal ticket for generations, so they've got to come up with something new. Unlike the publishers (the British publishers for Harry Potter weren't children's publishers, and it's very unlikely they'll get anything like it again), the authors can often be relied on to repeat their success.
This is, in fact, the entire point of copyright expiring - it's a recognition that there is a point where ideas seep into the public consciousness, and the relative harm of 'taking away' someone's work is balanced by the good it does society to acknowledge our shared history; and vice versa, the relative harm of restricting distribution of a work is balanced by the encouragement it gives its creator to have a crack at selling it.
Seeing as the trend these days has been towards self-publishing via the internet, publishers are unlikely to drive generation of new talent. In some industries they haven't done for years (new talent in the computer game industry has always been driven by independents, and arguably the music industry hasn't taken finding new talent seriously since the 80s.)
Be liberal in what you accept, unless you're an antsy Slashdot poster and want to punish the Internet for having the gall to make it up as they went along. It's like they didn't think that the Internet was going to become the defining feature of the 00's!
(Understandable, because it took, what, 20 to 25 years for the Internet to become mainstream?)
But my favorite part of Google universal search, and I must admit that I work at Google on unrelated projects
And I believe you've just broken your NDA. Unless they don't have that pesky 'you're not allowed to say you work for Google until all of the info we have that you know, including your interview, is on public record' in your NDA, in which case hurrah!
If you had "free will" you would be able to choose to make a different decision, which you clearly can't.
Oh thank god, I was wondering how I was going to get off my Murder One rap. Now I can just claim that because my actions were pre-determined, I could not be considered in control of my actions and thus can use the insanity defense! Thank you, anonymous internet stranger!
I have a present for you if you want it...
For me, the creepiest part of Scientology is the 'fair game' policy - that if you're a critic of Scientology, a 'suppressive person', the group gives its members carte blanche to attack you. It sounds like a great basis for a thriller movie (The Wicker Man had a similar premise, so there's precedent there).
Nah, first off someone's going to make a book that has a tiny Quicktime window on the right page, and when you touch it, it goes 'whuuuuuuuum whum whum' and sends you to D'ni.
Eh, I thought it fell a bit flat, myself. I mean, the whole 'toad hall' thing's been done before.
Or: Dvorak is a crackpot until /. agrees with him.
"I can definitely understand it, but it'd be fantastic to have a forum where game devs for major companies can speak their minds without screaming hordes of fanbois/haters clogging the place."
I suspect that a forum full of everyone's favourite developers would attract the screaming hordes of fanbois/haters.
And they couldn't speak their mind because as soon they do, Joystiq would cross-post it and add a snarky comment.
"Haven't you guys made the connection as to why popular music today sounds the same, movies are sequels or generic snoozefests, and software is the same repackaged sports game from EA or expansion pack for the B-level game you already bought last year?"
As I recall, music was generic pap long before BitTorrent - Britney Spears started her career in 1998, about half a year before Napster came out. Movies have probably been hit harder by the rise of television brought about by the success of 24 than by piracy - movie piracy's only been viable for a few years, and it's nowhere near the scale of music piracy. As for games, piracy has been a constant issue with gaming since the 80's, and that didn't stop creative games from being made. Gaming's problems have much more to do with the increasing inability for one creative person to make a commercially viable game, which stagnates the entire industry.