I'd sooner trust what my dog tells me, since they understand themselves about as well but at least the dogs don't lie. I've dealt with plenty of 3 year olds, and even remember being 3 years old myself. Most of the time, they're just saying what they think they're supposed to say. Sometimes, they're mimicking what someone else said outright.
But in any case, one of the really amazing things that psychology has discovered is that you can't get an accurate picture of what people are thinking by just asking them. Sometimes they don't tell the truth, but very often what happens is that people don't know how their own thought process is working, but their own thought processes make things up in order to cover that up.
Old fashioned methods, no matter how old, should be the requirement to participate at all as a citizen otherwise you alienate thousands, if not millions, of people. It would probably be considered unconstitutional.
Funny thing... the people who are alienated from normal channels of society are also often the sort that can't afford to hire a lawyer to get things rules unconstitutional. There are lots of ways already where it's difficult to participate in our democracy without a telephone or mailing address, so lots of people are already being excluded.
It seems like you're just looking for reasons to criticize Obama, which I think is a bit off-topic.
Yeah, so you have some anecdotal experiences with what you think 3 year olds understand. Nice. And I've also known plenty of people who make lots of claims about what their dogs think.
his "study" is claiming that 3 year olds cannot connect the dots between very closely related cause and effect.
No, it's not. It's claiming that 3 year olds are basically incapable of planning ahead and thinking about what they will want in the future as circumstances change. So the idea is that you can tell them that it's cold outside and that they're going to go outside, so they should dress warmly, and that won't really make sense to the 3 year old. It may put on a jacket anyway, but the child is only really doing it because you've told them to, and not because they understand. As soon as they experience the cold, however, the child will immediately understand that the jacket will make them warmer, and they'll want the jacket.
Doesn't make sense to you how someone could fail to predict the future in that way? Well maybe you're not 3 years old.
I wasn't aware of that, but I think it agrees with my point: we don't take such actions lightly. Even when we take away someone's license, we do it because they have shown an inability to operate a car safely, and not because we don't like what they're using the roads for. The government doesn't say, "We think you're driving someplace in order to something that may be actionable in a court of law, so your driver's license is now suspended."
Also, even when we take away someone's license, we don't try to prohibit them from making use of roads. We still allow them to travel on those roads, so long as someone else is driving. Or they can still ride a bike or something.
So once you look at the Internet as communications infrastructure, suspending someone's account because of copyright infringement appears strange and worrisome. It's like suspending your electricity because you may be running an appliance that may infringe on someone's patent. Or suspending telephone service because you may be making slanderous claims over the phone.
Kids learn, but it's also true (at least AFAIK according to our current scientific understanding) there are also things that are just part of development. There are things that kids cannot do at 1 year old that kids are able to do at 3 years old without special instruction. Likewise between 3 and 10, 10 and 17. There's evidence that kids don't really "learn" how to walk through practicing, but rather they just get to the point where they're physically and neurologically able to, and then they do. Same thing with controlling their own urinations and bowel movements.
If you think you can speed those processes along by teaching, training, or implementing punishment/reward systems, you may be underestimating how much a role basic biological development plays. But it may not be a simple distinction. It seems that, below a certain age, children are unable to "hold it" (with regards to going to the bathroom). Under that age, there's no point in trying to do anything but let them go in their diapers. But once they start being able to "hold it", there is some degree to which they must be taught to use the bathroom. I believe the exact degree is still under debate, though, with some people arguing that children learn more by example anyway, and when they're able, they won't want to wear diapers, and will choose to use the bathroom if for no other reason than mimicry.
It's not up to AT&T to decide if people have done something or not, that's up to a court of law.
Well yes, but it seems to me that there's another issue, too. What motivation should AT&T have to cut off access without a court order? As an ISP, there shouldn't be a business case for refusing customer money without being required to do so. I suspect that the reason other ISPs have given in is either they're frightened by the RIAA or they're in cahoots with the RIAA. Either way, that's not appropriate.
Internet access is *not* a right.
No, it's not, but it's getting to the point where loss of Internet access is a serious thing. Newspapers are getting shut down, and soon you may need Internet access to get your news. The government is putting more online (e.g. recovery.gov) and soon you may need Internet access to participate fully as a citizen. The Internet is infrastructure, and denying access is potentially as serious as denying access to roads, water, and electricity. Now it's true, we do take away people's driver's licenses, and it's possible to get your water and electrical services cut. But we usually don't take those actions lightly.
People are going to say I'm overblowing the situation. It's true that failing to have Internet access in today's world is still nowhere near as serious as not having heat in the winter. That's true. On the other hand, as a society we're becoming increasingly dependent on the Internet. I wish people would stop talking about the Internet like it's an entertainment service.
they just don't have the reasoning capability at that age to comprehend complex conditional statements like "When I tell you it is cold outside get a jacket"
Yeah, and that is interesting. It suggests, essentially, that there's no point in telling your child "It's cold outside" because they won't really have the ability to connect that with "you should get your jacket." If you want your kids to wear a jacket, you either have to just tell them to put one on, or else let them go outside and see how cold it is.
Maybe. Maybe telling them that stuff over time actually helps them develop those connections?
No, they're not. They "merely" apply science to specific well-known problems.
Well they are in a way. A long time ago, scientists used to be something like philosophers in that they were simply trying to figure things out and discover the order behind things. I'm sure some scientists are still doing that, but I suspect that many scientists today have jobs where they take their grounding for granted and are just trying to figure out how to accomplish some goal.
Like they're trying to find a cure for cancer, trying to figure out how to make faster computers, or trying to understand how genetics can be used to cure diseases. Even if they're not engaged in what you would normally called "applied science", it's still sort of an exercise in engineering. Theoretical physicists are trying to generate ever smaller particles and then doing the math to figure out how those particles fit into a particular model. Even generating a TOE is approached as sort of a trial-and-error engineering effort.
That's a nice summary, but can you describe the cognitive mechanisms by which they "learn by doing" and how that relates to brain development? I bet you can't without doing a study-- at least not in a way that provides anything but conjecture.
I would think that Apple would be perfectly capable of selling GSM phones on their own. They don't have a problem selling computers without bundling them with internet service.
That's a totally different deal. I don't know of any ISPs that try to force you to buy computers through them.
If you mean unlimited bandwidth, well no, no carrier offers that. But if you think there's no carrier that will let you use whatever phone you want, well,,,, no
I'm saying there's no carrier whose attitude toward the whole thing is like ISPs, where they don't expect you to buy a phone through them, won't use tactics to punish you for not buying a phone through them, and will just offer services a la carte and give you unfettered access to use those services the way you want.
I chose a GSM company specifically because I presumed I'd be allowed to use any unlocked GSM phone I wished. They may have been more restrictive in the past, but that does not appear to be the case now.
Well whatever, but T-Mobile flat out refused to sell me data services about 2 years ago. At the time, people told me that T-Mobile wouldn't do that, but I called multiple times and had multiple operators that I was not allowed to purchase the data services because it wasn't one of their phones.
Even if that's just an issue of bad customer service training, it's still an issue. The issue would be that Apple has no control over the customer experience, and no leverage with the carrier to make sure features are supported. You might be fine buying a Blackberry and finding that some of the features won't work, but then you probably aren't Apple's target audience.
The problem I see is that Apple wanted to bundle it with a company, because Apple thought they'd get more sales if the cost of the phone was spread over the length of a contract--instead of people needing to cough up ~$700 for the phone all at once.
That may have contributed, but I doubt that was the only issue. Another was probably the desire to be carried at a mobile carrier's stores, as well as being officially supported by someone. If the only place the iPhone was being carried was Apple stores and mobile carriers were explicitly telling you not to buy iPhones, business probably wouldn't be very good.
It really wouldn't be too bright, either, to try to market a device that's completely dependent on a wireless network without getting some kind of agreement from the people running that network. For as much as you can say, "It's GSM, so any GSM device will work," it's not really how the industry operates. The first time a customer has a problem with the service, they'll try to talk to AT&T or T-Mobile, and they'll be told, "Sorry, we don't support that phone." Their networks may as well be proprietary. I even had an experience where T-Mobile refused to sell me data services because I was using an unlocked version of a phone that they supported.
The fact of the matter is that none of the major wireless operators are offering a dumb pipe with unrestricted service. Until they do, anyone hoping to sell a wireless device pretty much has to play by the carrier's rules.
Well the reason I wrote the text you quoted was just to point out that there are additional issues involved without actually getting too deeply into those issues. A VPN connection from TPB may protect you from certain sorts of snooping, but there's then the question of "who watches the watchmen?" Even if TPB says they aren't logging my traffic or snooping on it, I'm not sure how you'd verify that.
But my point was, whether your trust TPB in particular, it's irrelevant to the issue of whether VPN tunnels have uses other than copyright protection. I've used a VPN connections at public WiFi points for the express purpose of protecting myself from snooping, since even when you find an open access point at an airport or something, there's no way to be sure that it's not set up by someone hoping to collect unencrypted passwords. However, in those cases, I used a VPN server that I set up myself, so I would trust it for that purpose much more than I trust TPB.
The only thing that I question is whether a shift in format must necessarily mean a change in the reporting. If I run a newspaper and one of the big costs is actually printing the newspaper, is there not a business model in keeping my reporting staff, dropping the actual "print" part of the equation, putting the stories online, and still making a profit?
I think that's the way the problem needs to be addressed. Paper as a distribution medium may be going obsolete, but there's nothing inherent about the paper medium that makes for better reporting.
It's a good point, but wouldn't it be a worse situation if the government were essentially funding newspapers that were in turn endorsing political candidates? The line between giving a tax break to something vs. funding it is pretty thin, if existent at all.
So the real question, as I see it, is whether the government has any business at all trying to keep newspapers in business.
Well it wouldn't be surprising if a government built around bribes that are called "donations" would favor a media run the same way. Or rather, the people "donating" to Congress may well like the idea of being able to "donate" to newspapers as a tax write-off.
On the other hand, I don't know of any reason why they can't "donate" to newspapers now, and it's not as though newspapers have always been separate from private interests in the past. So I'm not sure I really see the harm here.
Often the selection of what is important (by the reporter or his editor) allows for bias to creep in, however unintentionally.
Right, and I think it's important to say that it's not necessarily an unfair bias. If I were a reporter, I might exclude information because I don't believe it's important, and I may have a lot of valid reasons for why I don't think it's important. However, it's still a judgment that is made based on my way of thinking about things. There is no absolute and correct way of determining importance, and people who are smart and honest may have different judgements about what is important. However reasonable that determination is, it's not "objective".
This shows that even Pirates are willing to fork over money and pay for the products if the service is good enough and the price is low enough.
This is a very good point, and how clever of you to point this out.
It's reasonable to conclude (even though it's not certain) that each of these pirates would be equally willing to pay $5/month to a legal service that provided access to the same things that are available on TPB. If you consider the fact that it's legal and therefore less dangerous, they may even be willing to pay more.
Now add on the safety of sending your money to a reputable company rather than some random site called "The Pirate Bay", as well as whatever feel-goodery people get from believing that their money makes it to the actual people who create the content. Plus you could make it approved content rather than random trackers, meaning you end the risk of viruses as well as the annoyance of downloading gigabytes of content only to find that it was labelled incorrectly. Now lets say the company also provides seeds for each download, so you'd know that all the content would definitely be available. Plus, I imagine that it's not uncommon for people to try to limit their uploads as much as possible to lower the chances of getting caught, so the fact that it's legal could mean generally faster download speeds.
Now think about additional values that could be added in, such as improved search and recommendation engines.
So now add all that stuff together, and it gets pretty easy to argue that you should be able to charge significantly more than $5/month on such a service. Think about how much people spend on cable TV and Netflix combined, and you figure you should be able to charge more for a service that's more convenient (at least where Internet speeds are fast enough). Add on some peripheral services and cross-promotional opportunities, and you have something that looks like a real business plan.
Too bad the content owners are all pretty much tied to distribution channels already.
I'm still predicting and hoping that the iPhone will become more open as time goes on. I doubt they really wanted to be tied to a single carrier in the first place, but they had to make some deal with someone to get their foot in the door of a pretty closed-off industry. I suspect that some of the closed-off nature of the iPhone's development is a combination of deals that they have with AT&T and a tendency toward wanting to control a new product until it's more clear where things are going.
Personally, I'd love to see the iPhone eventually be a product that you buy outright, have reliable high-speed coast-to-coast wireless access, and your own choice of VoIP services. I bet that sort of thing would be appealing to Apple, too, if anyone were actually offering high-speed wireless dumb-pipe service.
Right. When you buy SATA hard drives for your server's SAS RAID, they tend to be more expensive than the Western Digital SATA drive you buy off the shelf from Best Buy. Whether this is some kind of a marketing rip-off is a question you could ask, but it's certainly not something that's limited to Apple.
I wouldn't even argue this issue, but instead reject the premise out of hand, since it is not "a paid service that really has no other function". There are other functions for VPN other than copyright infringement
First, assuming you trust TPB (which is your choice) there are security benefits to encrypting traffic through their VPN. It means that if you're on an untrusted Internet connection, you can encrypt your otherwise unencrypted traffic through this tunnel. So if I hop onto a WiFi network without being sure whether the person running that network is trying to capture my traffic for some reason, the VPN blocks that.
Of course, on the other side of the issue, you have to trust TPB to not be spying on you, and what happens when that traffic leave TBP is a different issue.
Further, there are lots of reasons to want to anonymize Internet traffic. Only a subset of those reasons are illegal, and only a subset of those are illegal copyright infringement. But still, there are legal reasons to what to be anonymous. For example, political or industrial whistleblowers who want to avoid retaliation. Or, on the slightly less noble (though still legal) side of things, there's not wanting your ISP to have a record of your porn-viewing habits.
Regardless, I don't think TPB would claim to have no part of circumventing copyright law anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought their argument was just that they weren't the ones violating copyright, but were only providing an open forum (so to speak) that was sometimes used for copyright violations. There are actually trackers for legal torrents on TPB too. You could definitely argue that offering a place for users to exchange torrents and a service to anonymize traffic are as morally/legally neutral as the Internet itself, and that what users choose to do with those services is a different matter.
The fact that you think "...that the older generation didn't grow up with computers." qulifies as a 'fact' shows at the very least your ignorance and, at worst, your ageism.
Actually, in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, there's actually a range that's right now between 25 and 35 that it sort of optimal for supporting Windows systems. That's the group that spent their formative years trying to troubleshoot DOS games to get them to run. People younger than that grew up in an age where things sort of already worked after running an install program, and seem to have better troubleshooting skills when looking at the particular logic applied by Microsoft.
And I find that interesting as a trend for a particular set of skills (not the set of skills a CS degree is generally trying to teach). No, trends don't apply in every case.
It's true that the older you are, the less likely you are to feel comfortable on a computer. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's been my experience, the experience of pretty much everyone I've talked to, and seems to be commonly accepted. That doesn't mean that, in every case, a younger person will be more comfortable on a computer, but if given a random 80 year old and a random teenager, there's a pretty good chance that the teenager knows more and understands better about "what's going on" with a modern computer.
Your 37, and therefore on the high end of the "I grew up with computers" spectrum. That's not a bad thing. It means that you may well have an advantage over those older than you as well as having more experience than those who are younger.
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
The option to retract messages as implemented in Outlook isn't a bad idea, really, but I still hate it for the false impression it creates. I've seen it happen enough that some user becomes familiar with the feature and then comes under the impression that it actually allows them to rescind email messages at will, regardless of the circumstances. I've even had a couple users get angry with me-- as though I had the email server configured incorrectly-- because, after having sent the message over the Internet to some random person, the "Recall this message" feature didn't actually prevent the recipient from reading it.
Slashdot Mirror
Also: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29895614/
I'd sooner trust what my dog tells me, since they understand themselves about as well but at least the dogs don't lie. I've dealt with plenty of 3 year olds, and even remember being 3 years old myself. Most of the time, they're just saying what they think they're supposed to say. Sometimes, they're mimicking what someone else said outright.
But in any case, one of the really amazing things that psychology has discovered is that you can't get an accurate picture of what people are thinking by just asking them. Sometimes they don't tell the truth, but very often what happens is that people don't know how their own thought process is working, but their own thought processes make things up in order to cover that up.
Old fashioned methods, no matter how old, should be the requirement to participate at all as a citizen otherwise you alienate thousands, if not millions, of people. It would probably be considered unconstitutional.
Funny thing... the people who are alienated from normal channels of society are also often the sort that can't afford to hire a lawyer to get things rules unconstitutional. There are lots of ways already where it's difficult to participate in our democracy without a telephone or mailing address, so lots of people are already being excluded.
It seems like you're just looking for reasons to criticize Obama, which I think is a bit off-topic.
Yeah, so you have some anecdotal experiences with what you think 3 year olds understand. Nice. And I've also known plenty of people who make lots of claims about what their dogs think.
his "study" is claiming that 3 year olds cannot connect the dots between very closely related cause and effect.
No, it's not. It's claiming that 3 year olds are basically incapable of planning ahead and thinking about what they will want in the future as circumstances change. So the idea is that you can tell them that it's cold outside and that they're going to go outside, so they should dress warmly, and that won't really make sense to the 3 year old. It may put on a jacket anyway, but the child is only really doing it because you've told them to, and not because they understand. As soon as they experience the cold, however, the child will immediately understand that the jacket will make them warmer, and they'll want the jacket.
Doesn't make sense to you how someone could fail to predict the future in that way? Well maybe you're not 3 years old.
I wasn't aware of that, but I think it agrees with my point: we don't take such actions lightly. Even when we take away someone's license, we do it because they have shown an inability to operate a car safely, and not because we don't like what they're using the roads for. The government doesn't say, "We think you're driving someplace in order to something that may be actionable in a court of law, so your driver's license is now suspended."
Also, even when we take away someone's license, we don't try to prohibit them from making use of roads. We still allow them to travel on those roads, so long as someone else is driving. Or they can still ride a bike or something.
So once you look at the Internet as communications infrastructure, suspending someone's account because of copyright infringement appears strange and worrisome. It's like suspending your electricity because you may be running an appliance that may infringe on someone's patent. Or suspending telephone service because you may be making slanderous claims over the phone.
Kids learn, but it's also true (at least AFAIK according to our current scientific understanding) there are also things that are just part of development. There are things that kids cannot do at 1 year old that kids are able to do at 3 years old without special instruction. Likewise between 3 and 10, 10 and 17. There's evidence that kids don't really "learn" how to walk through practicing, but rather they just get to the point where they're physically and neurologically able to, and then they do. Same thing with controlling their own urinations and bowel movements.
If you think you can speed those processes along by teaching, training, or implementing punishment/reward systems, you may be underestimating how much a role basic biological development plays. But it may not be a simple distinction. It seems that, below a certain age, children are unable to "hold it" (with regards to going to the bathroom). Under that age, there's no point in trying to do anything but let them go in their diapers. But once they start being able to "hold it", there is some degree to which they must be taught to use the bathroom. I believe the exact degree is still under debate, though, with some people arguing that children learn more by example anyway, and when they're able, they won't want to wear diapers, and will choose to use the bathroom if for no other reason than mimicry.
It's not up to AT&T to decide if people have done something or not, that's up to a court of law.
Well yes, but it seems to me that there's another issue, too. What motivation should AT&T have to cut off access without a court order? As an ISP, there shouldn't be a business case for refusing customer money without being required to do so. I suspect that the reason other ISPs have given in is either they're frightened by the RIAA or they're in cahoots with the RIAA. Either way, that's not appropriate.
Internet access is *not* a right.
No, it's not, but it's getting to the point where loss of Internet access is a serious thing. Newspapers are getting shut down, and soon you may need Internet access to get your news. The government is putting more online (e.g. recovery.gov) and soon you may need Internet access to participate fully as a citizen. The Internet is infrastructure, and denying access is potentially as serious as denying access to roads, water, and electricity. Now it's true, we do take away people's driver's licenses, and it's possible to get your water and electrical services cut. But we usually don't take those actions lightly.
People are going to say I'm overblowing the situation. It's true that failing to have Internet access in today's world is still nowhere near as serious as not having heat in the winter. That's true. On the other hand, as a society we're becoming increasingly dependent on the Internet. I wish people would stop talking about the Internet like it's an entertainment service.
they just don't have the reasoning capability at that age to comprehend complex conditional statements like "When I tell you it is cold outside get a jacket"
Yeah, and that is interesting. It suggests, essentially, that there's no point in telling your child "It's cold outside" because they won't really have the ability to connect that with "you should get your jacket." If you want your kids to wear a jacket, you either have to just tell them to put one on, or else let them go outside and see how cold it is.
Maybe. Maybe telling them that stuff over time actually helps them develop those connections?
No, they're not. They "merely" apply science to specific well-known problems.
Well they are in a way. A long time ago, scientists used to be something like philosophers in that they were simply trying to figure things out and discover the order behind things. I'm sure some scientists are still doing that, but I suspect that many scientists today have jobs where they take their grounding for granted and are just trying to figure out how to accomplish some goal.
Like they're trying to find a cure for cancer, trying to figure out how to make faster computers, or trying to understand how genetics can be used to cure diseases. Even if they're not engaged in what you would normally called "applied science", it's still sort of an exercise in engineering. Theoretical physicists are trying to generate ever smaller particles and then doing the math to figure out how those particles fit into a particular model. Even generating a TOE is approached as sort of a trial-and-error engineering effort.
So children learn by DOING, I get it.
That's a nice summary, but can you describe the cognitive mechanisms by which they "learn by doing" and how that relates to brain development? I bet you can't without doing a study-- at least not in a way that provides anything but conjecture.
I would think that Apple would be perfectly capable of selling GSM phones on their own. They don't have a problem selling computers without bundling them with internet service.
That's a totally different deal. I don't know of any ISPs that try to force you to buy computers through them.
If you mean unlimited bandwidth, well no, no carrier offers that. But if you think there's no carrier that will let you use whatever phone you want, well,,,, no
I'm saying there's no carrier whose attitude toward the whole thing is like ISPs, where they don't expect you to buy a phone through them, won't use tactics to punish you for not buying a phone through them, and will just offer services a la carte and give you unfettered access to use those services the way you want.
I chose a GSM company specifically because I presumed I'd be allowed to use any unlocked GSM phone I wished. They may have been more restrictive in the past, but that does not appear to be the case now.
Well whatever, but T-Mobile flat out refused to sell me data services about 2 years ago. At the time, people told me that T-Mobile wouldn't do that, but I called multiple times and had multiple operators that I was not allowed to purchase the data services because it wasn't one of their phones.
Even if that's just an issue of bad customer service training, it's still an issue. The issue would be that Apple has no control over the customer experience, and no leverage with the carrier to make sure features are supported. You might be fine buying a Blackberry and finding that some of the features won't work, but then you probably aren't Apple's target audience.
The problem I see is that Apple wanted to bundle it with a company, because Apple thought they'd get more sales if the cost of the phone was spread over the length of a contract--instead of people needing to cough up ~$700 for the phone all at once.
That may have contributed, but I doubt that was the only issue. Another was probably the desire to be carried at a mobile carrier's stores, as well as being officially supported by someone. If the only place the iPhone was being carried was Apple stores and mobile carriers were explicitly telling you not to buy iPhones, business probably wouldn't be very good.
It really wouldn't be too bright, either, to try to market a device that's completely dependent on a wireless network without getting some kind of agreement from the people running that network. For as much as you can say, "It's GSM, so any GSM device will work," it's not really how the industry operates. The first time a customer has a problem with the service, they'll try to talk to AT&T or T-Mobile, and they'll be told, "Sorry, we don't support that phone." Their networks may as well be proprietary. I even had an experience where T-Mobile refused to sell me data services because I was using an unlocked version of a phone that they supported.
The fact of the matter is that none of the major wireless operators are offering a dumb pipe with unrestricted service. Until they do, anyone hoping to sell a wireless device pretty much has to play by the carrier's rules.
Well the reason I wrote the text you quoted was just to point out that there are additional issues involved without actually getting too deeply into those issues. A VPN connection from TPB may protect you from certain sorts of snooping, but there's then the question of "who watches the watchmen?" Even if TPB says they aren't logging my traffic or snooping on it, I'm not sure how you'd verify that.
But my point was, whether your trust TPB in particular, it's irrelevant to the issue of whether VPN tunnels have uses other than copyright protection. I've used a VPN connections at public WiFi points for the express purpose of protecting myself from snooping, since even when you find an open access point at an airport or something, there's no way to be sure that it's not set up by someone hoping to collect unencrypted passwords. However, in those cases, I used a VPN server that I set up myself, so I would trust it for that purpose much more than I trust TPB.
The only thing that I question is whether a shift in format must necessarily mean a change in the reporting. If I run a newspaper and one of the big costs is actually printing the newspaper, is there not a business model in keeping my reporting staff, dropping the actual "print" part of the equation, putting the stories online, and still making a profit?
I think that's the way the problem needs to be addressed. Paper as a distribution medium may be going obsolete, but there's nothing inherent about the paper medium that makes for better reporting.
It's a good point, but wouldn't it be a worse situation if the government were essentially funding newspapers that were in turn endorsing political candidates? The line between giving a tax break to something vs. funding it is pretty thin, if existent at all.
So the real question, as I see it, is whether the government has any business at all trying to keep newspapers in business.
Well it wouldn't be surprising if a government built around bribes that are called "donations" would favor a media run the same way. Or rather, the people "donating" to Congress may well like the idea of being able to "donate" to newspapers as a tax write-off.
On the other hand, I don't know of any reason why they can't "donate" to newspapers now, and it's not as though newspapers have always been separate from private interests in the past. So I'm not sure I really see the harm here.
Often the selection of what is important (by the reporter or his editor) allows for bias to creep in, however unintentionally.
Right, and I think it's important to say that it's not necessarily an unfair bias. If I were a reporter, I might exclude information because I don't believe it's important, and I may have a lot of valid reasons for why I don't think it's important. However, it's still a judgment that is made based on my way of thinking about things. There is no absolute and correct way of determining importance, and people who are smart and honest may have different judgements about what is important. However reasonable that determination is, it's not "objective".
Even if true, I don't see how they could enforce that.
This shows that even Pirates are willing to fork over money and pay for the products if the service is good enough and the price is low enough.
This is a very good point, and how clever of you to point this out.
It's reasonable to conclude (even though it's not certain) that each of these pirates would be equally willing to pay $5/month to a legal service that provided access to the same things that are available on TPB. If you consider the fact that it's legal and therefore less dangerous, they may even be willing to pay more.
Now add on the safety of sending your money to a reputable company rather than some random site called "The Pirate Bay", as well as whatever feel-goodery people get from believing that their money makes it to the actual people who create the content. Plus you could make it approved content rather than random trackers, meaning you end the risk of viruses as well as the annoyance of downloading gigabytes of content only to find that it was labelled incorrectly. Now lets say the company also provides seeds for each download, so you'd know that all the content would definitely be available. Plus, I imagine that it's not uncommon for people to try to limit their uploads as much as possible to lower the chances of getting caught, so the fact that it's legal could mean generally faster download speeds.
Now think about additional values that could be added in, such as improved search and recommendation engines.
So now add all that stuff together, and it gets pretty easy to argue that you should be able to charge significantly more than $5/month on such a service. Think about how much people spend on cable TV and Netflix combined, and you figure you should be able to charge more for a service that's more convenient (at least where Internet speeds are fast enough). Add on some peripheral services and cross-promotional opportunities, and you have something that looks like a real business plan.
Too bad the content owners are all pretty much tied to distribution channels already.
I'm still predicting and hoping that the iPhone will become more open as time goes on. I doubt they really wanted to be tied to a single carrier in the first place, but they had to make some deal with someone to get their foot in the door of a pretty closed-off industry. I suspect that some of the closed-off nature of the iPhone's development is a combination of deals that they have with AT&T and a tendency toward wanting to control a new product until it's more clear where things are going.
Personally, I'd love to see the iPhone eventually be a product that you buy outright, have reliable high-speed coast-to-coast wireless access, and your own choice of VoIP services. I bet that sort of thing would be appealing to Apple, too, if anyone were actually offering high-speed wireless dumb-pipe service.
Right. When you buy SATA hard drives for your server's SAS RAID, they tend to be more expensive than the Western Digital SATA drive you buy off the shelf from Best Buy. Whether this is some kind of a marketing rip-off is a question you could ask, but it's certainly not something that's limited to Apple.
I wouldn't even argue this issue, but instead reject the premise out of hand, since it is not "a paid service that really has no other function". There are other functions for VPN other than copyright infringement
First, assuming you trust TPB (which is your choice) there are security benefits to encrypting traffic through their VPN. It means that if you're on an untrusted Internet connection, you can encrypt your otherwise unencrypted traffic through this tunnel. So if I hop onto a WiFi network without being sure whether the person running that network is trying to capture my traffic for some reason, the VPN blocks that.
Of course, on the other side of the issue, you have to trust TPB to not be spying on you, and what happens when that traffic leave TBP is a different issue.
Further, there are lots of reasons to want to anonymize Internet traffic. Only a subset of those reasons are illegal, and only a subset of those are illegal copyright infringement. But still, there are legal reasons to what to be anonymous. For example, political or industrial whistleblowers who want to avoid retaliation. Or, on the slightly less noble (though still legal) side of things, there's not wanting your ISP to have a record of your porn-viewing habits.
Regardless, I don't think TPB would claim to have no part of circumventing copyright law anyway. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought their argument was just that they weren't the ones violating copyright, but were only providing an open forum (so to speak) that was sometimes used for copyright violations. There are actually trackers for legal torrents on TPB too. You could definitely argue that offering a place for users to exchange torrents and a service to anonymize traffic are as morally/legally neutral as the Internet itself, and that what users choose to do with those services is a different matter.
The fact that you think "...that the older generation didn't grow up with computers." qulifies as a 'fact' shows at the very least your ignorance and, at worst, your ageism.
Actually, in my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, there's actually a range that's right now between 25 and 35 that it sort of optimal for supporting Windows systems. That's the group that spent their formative years trying to troubleshoot DOS games to get them to run. People younger than that grew up in an age where things sort of already worked after running an install program, and seem to have better troubleshooting skills when looking at the particular logic applied by Microsoft.
And I find that interesting as a trend for a particular set of skills (not the set of skills a CS degree is generally trying to teach). No, trends don't apply in every case.
It's true that the older you are, the less likely you are to feel comfortable on a computer. I'm not saying it's a fact, but it's been my experience, the experience of pretty much everyone I've talked to, and seems to be commonly accepted. That doesn't mean that, in every case, a younger person will be more comfortable on a computer, but if given a random 80 year old and a random teenager, there's a pretty good chance that the teenager knows more and understands better about "what's going on" with a modern computer.
Your 37, and therefore on the high end of the "I grew up with computers" spectrum. That's not a bad thing. It means that you may well have an advantage over those older than you as well as having more experience than those who are younger.
Alas, it had reached its destination, and there was nothing to do but push the "retract message" button in Outlook, which is about as useful as the mail that usually precedes it.
The option to retract messages as implemented in Outlook isn't a bad idea, really, but I still hate it for the false impression it creates. I've seen it happen enough that some user becomes familiar with the feature and then comes under the impression that it actually allows them to rescind email messages at will, regardless of the circumstances. I've even had a couple users get angry with me-- as though I had the email server configured incorrectly-- because, after having sent the message over the Internet to some random person, the "Recall this message" feature didn't actually prevent the recipient from reading it.