Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what he (she) wants to say?
Making a movie is often a more collorative effort than you might think. Of course, some of it depends on how much of a control-freak the director is, but very often the actors will have some say in the staging and everything, camera men will choose some of their own shots. Cinematographers play their role. Sometimes editors and special-effects people are given a lot of leeway. It kind of depends, but it's rare that directors exercise the level of exacting control that this question implies.
Well the question, apparently, was about requests not-currently offered by Dell. It's not saying that Dell is getting more requests for Linux than they're getting Windows purchases. It's nothing of that sort. Just, "out of things currently not altered by Dell, what would you like to see most?"
I'm not surprised that Linux would win this legitimately. Alternative operating systems, including Windows 200/XP now that Vista is out, would certainly be among my top requests. And anyway, even if it it is a "vocal minority", that's not meaningless. The silent majority is probably fine with Dell's current offerings. At least, they don't seem to care enough to say anything. Sometimes it's worth wooing the vocal minority too.
Well, there's Zelda. That kept me happy for a while. Plus, Wii Sports does have some single-player value. I really feel like there just aren't enough games to keep a picky gamer happy. they had a couple great launch titles, and nothing too great since.
In the end, I'm somewhat concerned that the controlls aren't actually refined enough for twitch-games. Playing Wii sports, sometimes I feel like it's not really measuring my movements as well as it pretends. I throw punches in boxing and my character barely moves. I swing my club in golf and the character raises his club and drops it, but doesn't swing. Games that use some sort of pointer are giving an approximation that force the user to calibrate his movements rather than the system giving an accurate read. Some games might require more accuracy than this. So far they've shown that the controls really can work well for certain sorts of games, but I'm not sure about games that require quickness and accuracy at the same time.
Still, I think there's room for developers to do some cool things, but we haven't really seen anything new since launch.
Yes, but if they're really a power user, if they try one DE and they don't like it, they'll probably know enough to investigate the situation. It won't take someone very long to figure out that they can get a different interface called "KDE".
Anyway, I think Gnome makes a great first impression. Whether or not it meets all of your needs is a different issue, but at least it's simple and consistent. KDE may be a little more like Windows, but it also has some things that are very unlike Windows that might confuse even a Windows "power-user". With Gnome, I'd have very little fear that a Windows user would become confused.
So if you want to paint it like Gnome is overly-simplistic and only good for people who don't know how to run a computer, I won't argue with it. I don't agree. I prefer Gnome to KDE (personally), and I'm a pretty savvy user who came up using Windows. However, it's fine to make that argument, because yes, KDE has more customization options while Gnome is simpler and more consistent. However, once you've argued that, you've also argued that it specifically should be the default for clueless users who don't understand how to run their own computers.
Yes, but that's why I raised the point that we're talking about FOSS. If you think Windows is terrible, you don't necessarily have the freedom to switch to something else, due to vendor lock-in. What vendor lock-in is there with Gnome? What are you doing in Gnome that you can't do in KDE, that you can't download the source code and make to run where you want it?
But also, If Windows really had absolutely no redeeming value, I don't think it would be as popular as it is. It's deeply flawed, yes, but it isn't without its good points.
The problem is, long after the licensing issues with Qt have gone, and while Gnome continues to be the least functional GUI available for any modern desktop OS (a badge the Gnome community appears to wear with pride), no one has switched.
That doesn't make sense. If Gnome is so terrible, why wouldn't anyone switch to something else? Have you considered that maybe some people don't dislike Gnome as much as you do?
Here's the thing: this is FOSS. Why all the in-fighting? If you don't like Gnome, why are you using it? There's KDE, Xfce, and others. They interoperate well enough. If everyone likes Gnome so much that they want to continue using it, but don't like the direction the developers are taking, why isn't there a branch? Seriously.
Linus should know as well as anyone that if he doesn't like Gnome, he has options. One of those options is that he and his like-minded developer friends can download the source code, make all the patches they damn well please, and use those patches. They can redistribute their own version of Gnome with those patches.
Of course, there are disadvantages to doing this, but there are disadvantages to having this public spats as well.
I am not sure that defaulting to Gnome is a good idea.
Yes, Gnome is easier to use for the completely naive users.
However, it makes Linux less appealing for Windows "power users".
It seems to me that that's the beauty of a "default": power users can still change it. If you can't figure out how to install KDE, and you can't figure out to download Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, then maybe you are better off using Gnome. But it's not like it's hard to find a KDE distro or even install KDE on a Gnome-default distro.
now if someone made a comparison between south korea and say, the bay area to the san fernando valley or the washington-new york city corridor, approximate equally sized, equally densely populated areas, then you have a metric useful to me
Well there is a comparison in the article between the US and other low-population-density countries:
One of the rationales often given for lower broadband penetration in the U.S. is that low population density makes broadband deployment, especially in rural areas, considerably more expensive in the U.S. than among more dense populations in countries such as Korea, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. That argument falters, however, when one considers that five of the 11 nations that lead the U.S. in per capita broadband penetration, including Iceland, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and Canada, have significantly lower population densities than the U.S.
They may have already been thrown from the cliff, but they don't seem to really understand that. They still seem to think they're sitting on the edge, deciding whether to jump.
Imagine you're a little baby bird learning to fly. You want to fly. You think life would be better if you could fly. So you step up to the edge of a cliff and look down. You understand that, if everything goes according to your theory, you should be fine. But then you think, "What if I'm not the sort of bird that could fly? What if I'm an ostrich or a penguin?" You realize that you have a choice: you can continue to walk around and your life will be fine, or you could take a chance, jump off the cliff, and hope you can fly.
So I think that's where they music execs are these days. They want to drop DRM. They theorize that dropping DRM might improve sales. They also recognize that unprotected and unregulated digital distribution could be the end of their entire industry. So if you're the Executive Vice President of BrandX Music, do you want to risk your career on this, or do you want to plod along doing business the way it's being done, and hope for the best?
In fairness, I don't think that "merit" is relative with respect to search-engine results. In a simplified example, if I search for "sony", I'm probably looking for one of three things:
The Sony website
A website that sells Sony products
A website that gives reviews of Sony products
Therefore, the top results should reflect that. Most likely, I'm not looking for porn. I remember the days where search engines would return porn for any and all searches. The fact that Google was able to avoid this is part of what brought about its rise to power.
Of course, not every example is so simple, but clearly there are results that are or are not correct for a given search.
Who got the $5000 worth of effort from each of them that they spent? That was the corresponding benefit to another party.
The SEO expert? I don't really know about deadweight loss, but it does seem that nothing was gained by the exercise that was described, except somebody got to leech money off of the companies paying for SEO.
I've wondered if, possibly, our relationship to music has changed. I'm not sure, but your post got me thinking, what if it isn't just the format that is dying?
It seems like music might be becoming more disposable in general. Maybe people used to "use" music differently, like people used to have their old favorites that they carried throughout their lives, and so it seemed to worthwhile to "buy" a nice copy. But maybe now that isn't the case. Maybe people today, with the excess of information and media at their disposal, just want to be exposed to something catchy a few times, and move on.
I don't know. You'd have to really study something like that. But it occurred to me that people used to really identify themselves as part of a community based on the music they liked, but now they can form communities over the internet more directly. Music is so available and accessible. You can't get away from it anymore. Real bands are licensing their stuff for commercials now, putting it on TV shows, and you can't go a day without hearing it.
Maybe all this excess is overload, or maybe it's just making us jaded. Either way, it seems possible to me that we've reached a point where our relationship to music and the role music is playing in our society is different-- and maybe that difference doesn't allow the RIAA to have the business model they want.
I know it's changed for me, but it might just be because I'm getting old.
Besides the fact that you could burn the song to CD or crack the DRM, there's an additional problem-- AFAIK, this isn't how the iTunes DRM works. The fairplay DRM isn't exactly different per-song, as in Apple doesn't authorize you to listen to each song individually when you connect. Therefore, they can't remotely "de-authorize" you once you're authorized, and they can't "de-authorize" individual songs.
What happens is that each song you buy is encrypted with a key that's unique to your iTunes account. So every song uses the same key as long as it's purchased with a given account. Then, there's a one-time authorization to a computer that allows that copy of iTunes to play all music for a given iTunes account. What's happened is that the decryption key for that iTunes account has been made available to your copy of iTunes.
So once you have the song and the decryption key for your iTunes account, Apple can't de-authorize anything remotely. And if they could de-authorize things, they would have to de-authorize the account and all music purchased with that account from playing on your computer.
So what you're suggesting could not happen without a complete over-haul to Apple's DRM.
I agree that there's a hole in Apple's desktop offerings. They have an ultra-small form-factor PC, an all-in-one, and a high-end workstation, but they just don't have a general/normal tower. It's possible that they don't offer it because their market is still relatively small, and they're figuring that most of the people who would normally buy a Mac would likely go for one of the offerings they have anyway.
Maybe it depends on what you're hoping to get in terms of performance. Of course, a stripped-down Linux desktop will perform better in certain tasks. Along with everything else, the Linux kernel, by being monolithic, is slightly faster all by itself. Also, IIRC, Intel minis use integrated graphic chipsets that share system RAM, which I suppose might cause a difference, too, depending on what you're doing and how you measure it.
However, like I said, we had an Powerbook Ti running OS9, we upgraded it to 10.2, and later to 10.4. It only had 256 MB of RAM, and it wasn't a *great* performer, but it was quite usable.
I think he meant to actually index the contents, not just to have a table of contents. As in-- search of files containing specific text on media that isn't currently in the computer. It's a good idea, I think, but you'd need a good way managing it. You wouldn't necessarily want it enabled by default, generating indexes for every disk inserted, never removing those indexes, and querying them all with every search. At least, I wouldn't think that it'd be too efficient for system resources, but I'm not going to pretend that I really know these things.
Neither has Apple in my opinion, just try running the latest OS X upgrade on hardware you bought two years on a Mac mini that has 256MB and a single core, seriously, try it -- It performs horribly.
I call BS. I've installed 10.4 on a Powerbook Ti (600 Mhz, 256 MB RAM), and it was definitely usable. As fast as 10.2, which is what I was upgrading from, and certainly was more usable than Windows XP on a 600 Mhz machine with such a small amount of RAM.
On the other hand, Apple has one distinction that makes them different from Microsoft: they're currently making good products. However much I might like or hate a business emotionally or philosophically, I feel like we should all give some credit to those who are putting out a product worth buying.
Microsoft hasn't released anything worthwhile since their 2000 line, excepting perhaps the XBox. Pretty much their entire product line is reliant on bullying OEMs and leveraging product lock-in. Otherwise, they've been virtually unimproved for the last several years.
And yes, I've tried Vista, I know all about it's "features", but it's still a very marginal improvement of the computing experience over Win2k.
We've been up and down this piracy issue a thousand times, and I think we should all be able to agree by now: They can't stop piracy. It's just not going to happen. For any DRM, all it takes is one person to be able to bypass it or crack it, through however elaborate means are necessary. That person can upload it to the internet, millions of people can copy it, and the DRM has failed.
If content owners want us to pay for content, they need to make it easier, not harder. They need to make the whole thing cheap enough and easy enough that it won't be worth the average person's time to figure out bittorrent and find a good tracker site. The thing is, Apple is almost to that point. They could bump quality up a little, they could drop the DRM, and maybe drop the price a few cents per song, a couple dollars per album. Any one of those things would decrease piracy. Integrate something like Pandora/Last.fm so that you can get good recommendations, and then make it so when you find a song you like, you click, download, get charged 80 cents for a 160 kbps DRM-free AAC, and it goes straight into iTunes where it can sync with your iPod. If someone offered that, I'm sure it'd be a big hit. Piracy would drop just because it wouldn't be worth all the headaches of piracy if you could get a good product at a fair price.
In other words, people pirate music because it's a) cheaper, and b) more convenient. Labels can't compete with "free", so if they want to have a chance at defeating piracy, they need to try to make sure they're delivering a better product through more convenient methods than what piracy offers.
The problems with piracy are that it's slightly hidden (hard to find what you want), it's a little dodgy (don't always know what you're getting), sometimes slow (depending on the method of download), hard to figure out (for people who aren't very literate, bittorrent isn't always as simple as point-and-click), and it's technically illegal (though the chances of getting caught are slim).
Solve these problems, drop DRM, and make pretty online stores with big libraries, and people will spend money there.
To be fair, NYC is sort of a separate entity from the rest of the *country*. I guess reasonable traffic laws can and should be enforced in 4 of the boroughs, but Manhattan... I just don't know if it's possible. If cars couldn't go while a pedestrian was in the crosswalk, cars would never be able to go. The city would grind to a halt. If you've walked around much in some of the busier places in Manhattan, you know that getting anywhere turns into a little bit of a game of chicken between pedestrian and car, and it almost has to because there are too many people and too many cars.
If anything, I think NYC should try to do something to discourage people from driving into Manhattan. I don't know what-- every time I think about what they could do, all the options seem like bad ideas. But if they could get fewer people to drive, more people to walk and take public transportation; if they could get all the commuters to take trains in instead of driving in, it seems like you could begin to address the traffic mess in Manhattan.
From a practicality standpoint, as a pedestrian, of course you should watch out for cars. However, from a responsibility standpoint, you're risking people's lives when you get behind the wheel. If you're not willing to accept that your responsible for being as safe as possible, you shouldn't be driving.
Motorists should be held more responsible for any accidents particularly because they are in a position to cause greater damage. If a pedestrian runs into a car, the car is fine. If a car runs into a pedestrian, the pedestrian might be killed. Drivers ought to know that what they're doing is inherently dangerous for everyone around them, and because of that, they should be careful. Period.
For all the talk about gun control and how the US has too many guns, more deaths each year are car-related than are gun-related. How about some car control?
Regardless, I think the best course would be to absolve motorists of 100% contributory negligence in accidents with pedestrians who are otherwise electronic-gadget engaged while crossing a street or intersection.
Um... no. The bottom line is that motorists should be looking out for pedestrians, even if those pedestrians are doing stupid things. That's the responsibility you take on when you gain the privilege of shooting a 5000 lbs hunk of metal around our cities. Why the hell is it so hard for people to accept that driving a car is an inherently dangerous activity, for both the people inside the car and the people outside of the car, and take necessary precautions?
It's one thing if someone literally steps in front of your car and you have no possibility of dodging them-- but that's covered under the law anyhow. If someone jumps in front of your car, gets hit, and dies, you won't be charged with anything. But my your suggestion, motorists would be allowed to mow people down in intersections if they have an iPod. That's stupid.
Well, in essence, security is not about being "100% secure". 100% never happens, and can't even happen theoretically. The 100% only way to prevent unauthorized access to a computer is to prevent any kind of access whatsoever. The only way to prevent anyone from ever accessing a particular piece of data is to never create that data anyway, or else destroy it immediately. Even then, you face a possible breakdown: what about the mechanism for preventing that data from being created, or for destroying it? If that mechanism breaks down, the data is out.
So, ok, what is security about, then? It's about making unauthorized activities difficult enough to discourage people from even trying. It's about making sure that breaking in takes longer than anyone would want to spend to break in. It's about increasing your odds of detecting someone doing something they shouldn't. In short, it's about making unauthorized activities difficult, unappealing, and visible, but it is *not* about making them impossible.
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Isn't a director's responsibility to convey exactly what he (she) wants to say?
Making a movie is often a more collorative effort than you might think. Of course, some of it depends on how much of a control-freak the director is, but very often the actors will have some say in the staging and everything, camera men will choose some of their own shots. Cinematographers play their role. Sometimes editors and special-effects people are given a lot of leeway. It kind of depends, but it's rare that directors exercise the level of exacting control that this question implies.
Well the question, apparently, was about requests not-currently offered by Dell. It's not saying that Dell is getting more requests for Linux than they're getting Windows purchases. It's nothing of that sort. Just, "out of things currently not altered by Dell, what would you like to see most?"
I'm not surprised that Linux would win this legitimately. Alternative operating systems, including Windows 200/XP now that Vista is out, would certainly be among my top requests. And anyway, even if it it is a "vocal minority", that's not meaningless. The silent majority is probably fine with Dell's current offerings. At least, they don't seem to care enough to say anything. Sometimes it's worth wooing the vocal minority too.
Well, there's Zelda. That kept me happy for a while. Plus, Wii Sports does have some single-player value. I really feel like there just aren't enough games to keep a picky gamer happy. they had a couple great launch titles, and nothing too great since.
In the end, I'm somewhat concerned that the controlls aren't actually refined enough for twitch-games. Playing Wii sports, sometimes I feel like it's not really measuring my movements as well as it pretends. I throw punches in boxing and my character barely moves. I swing my club in golf and the character raises his club and drops it, but doesn't swing. Games that use some sort of pointer are giving an approximation that force the user to calibrate his movements rather than the system giving an accurate read. Some games might require more accuracy than this. So far they've shown that the controls really can work well for certain sorts of games, but I'm not sure about games that require quickness and accuracy at the same time.
Still, I think there's room for developers to do some cool things, but we haven't really seen anything new since launch.
Yes, but if they're really a power user, if they try one DE and they don't like it, they'll probably know enough to investigate the situation. It won't take someone very long to figure out that they can get a different interface called "KDE".
Anyway, I think Gnome makes a great first impression. Whether or not it meets all of your needs is a different issue, but at least it's simple and consistent. KDE may be a little more like Windows, but it also has some things that are very unlike Windows that might confuse even a Windows "power-user". With Gnome, I'd have very little fear that a Windows user would become confused.
So if you want to paint it like Gnome is overly-simplistic and only good for people who don't know how to run a computer, I won't argue with it. I don't agree. I prefer Gnome to KDE (personally), and I'm a pretty savvy user who came up using Windows. However, it's fine to make that argument, because yes, KDE has more customization options while Gnome is simpler and more consistent. However, once you've argued that, you've also argued that it specifically should be the default for clueless users who don't understand how to run their own computers.
Yes, but that's why I raised the point that we're talking about FOSS. If you think Windows is terrible, you don't necessarily have the freedom to switch to something else, due to vendor lock-in. What vendor lock-in is there with Gnome? What are you doing in Gnome that you can't do in KDE, that you can't download the source code and make to run where you want it?
But also, If Windows really had absolutely no redeeming value, I don't think it would be as popular as it is. It's deeply flawed, yes, but it isn't without its good points.
Imagine one obfiscated MS Windows style registry per user that contains settings that are not portable to other users...
You mean... like the Windows registry?
The problem is, long after the licensing issues with Qt have gone, and while Gnome continues to be the least functional GUI available for any modern desktop OS (a badge the Gnome community appears to wear with pride), no one has switched.
That doesn't make sense. If Gnome is so terrible, why wouldn't anyone switch to something else? Have you considered that maybe some people don't dislike Gnome as much as you do?
Here's the thing: this is FOSS. Why all the in-fighting? If you don't like Gnome, why are you using it? There's KDE, Xfce, and others. They interoperate well enough. If everyone likes Gnome so much that they want to continue using it, but don't like the direction the developers are taking, why isn't there a branch? Seriously.
Linus should know as well as anyone that if he doesn't like Gnome, he has options. One of those options is that he and his like-minded developer friends can download the source code, make all the patches they damn well please, and use those patches. They can redistribute their own version of Gnome with those patches.
Of course, there are disadvantages to doing this, but there are disadvantages to having this public spats as well.
It seems to me that that's the beauty of a "default": power users can still change it. If you can't figure out how to install KDE, and you can't figure out to download Kubuntu instead of Ubuntu, then maybe you are better off using Gnome. But it's not like it's hard to find a KDE distro or even install KDE on a Gnome-default distro.
Well there is a comparison in the article between the US and other low-population-density countries:
They may have already been thrown from the cliff, but they don't seem to really understand that. They still seem to think they're sitting on the edge, deciding whether to jump.
Imagine you're a little baby bird learning to fly. You want to fly. You think life would be better if you could fly. So you step up to the edge of a cliff and look down. You understand that, if everything goes according to your theory, you should be fine. But then you think, "What if I'm not the sort of bird that could fly? What if I'm an ostrich or a penguin?" You realize that you have a choice: you can continue to walk around and your life will be fine, or you could take a chance, jump off the cliff, and hope you can fly.
So I think that's where they music execs are these days. They want to drop DRM. They theorize that dropping DRM might improve sales. They also recognize that unprotected and unregulated digital distribution could be the end of their entire industry. So if you're the Executive Vice President of BrandX Music, do you want to risk your career on this, or do you want to plod along doing business the way it's being done, and hope for the best?
In fairness, I don't think that "merit" is relative with respect to search-engine results. In a simplified example, if I search for "sony", I'm probably looking for one of three things:
Therefore, the top results should reflect that. Most likely, I'm not looking for porn. I remember the days where search engines would return porn for any and all searches. The fact that Google was able to avoid this is part of what brought about its rise to power.
Of course, not every example is so simple, but clearly there are results that are or are not correct for a given search.
Who got the $5000 worth of effort from each of them that they spent? That was the corresponding benefit to another party.
The SEO expert? I don't really know about deadweight loss, but it does seem that nothing was gained by the exercise that was described, except somebody got to leech money off of the companies paying for SEO.
I've wondered if, possibly, our relationship to music has changed. I'm not sure, but your post got me thinking, what if it isn't just the format that is dying?
It seems like music might be becoming more disposable in general. Maybe people used to "use" music differently, like people used to have their old favorites that they carried throughout their lives, and so it seemed to worthwhile to "buy" a nice copy. But maybe now that isn't the case. Maybe people today, with the excess of information and media at their disposal, just want to be exposed to something catchy a few times, and move on.
I don't know. You'd have to really study something like that. But it occurred to me that people used to really identify themselves as part of a community based on the music they liked, but now they can form communities over the internet more directly. Music is so available and accessible. You can't get away from it anymore. Real bands are licensing their stuff for commercials now, putting it on TV shows, and you can't go a day without hearing it.
Maybe all this excess is overload, or maybe it's just making us jaded. Either way, it seems possible to me that we've reached a point where our relationship to music and the role music is playing in our society is different-- and maybe that difference doesn't allow the RIAA to have the business model they want.
I know it's changed for me, but it might just be because I'm getting old.
Besides the fact that you could burn the song to CD or crack the DRM, there's an additional problem-- AFAIK, this isn't how the iTunes DRM works. The fairplay DRM isn't exactly different per-song, as in Apple doesn't authorize you to listen to each song individually when you connect. Therefore, they can't remotely "de-authorize" you once you're authorized, and they can't "de-authorize" individual songs.
What happens is that each song you buy is encrypted with a key that's unique to your iTunes account. So every song uses the same key as long as it's purchased with a given account. Then, there's a one-time authorization to a computer that allows that copy of iTunes to play all music for a given iTunes account. What's happened is that the decryption key for that iTunes account has been made available to your copy of iTunes.
So once you have the song and the decryption key for your iTunes account, Apple can't de-authorize anything remotely. And if they could de-authorize things, they would have to de-authorize the account and all music purchased with that account from playing on your computer.
So what you're suggesting could not happen without a complete over-haul to Apple's DRM.
I agree that there's a hole in Apple's desktop offerings. They have an ultra-small form-factor PC, an all-in-one, and a high-end workstation, but they just don't have a general/normal tower. It's possible that they don't offer it because their market is still relatively small, and they're figuring that most of the people who would normally buy a Mac would likely go for one of the offerings they have anyway.
Maybe it depends on what you're hoping to get in terms of performance. Of course, a stripped-down Linux desktop will perform better in certain tasks. Along with everything else, the Linux kernel, by being monolithic, is slightly faster all by itself. Also, IIRC, Intel minis use integrated graphic chipsets that share system RAM, which I suppose might cause a difference, too, depending on what you're doing and how you measure it.
However, like I said, we had an Powerbook Ti running OS9, we upgraded it to 10.2, and later to 10.4. It only had 256 MB of RAM, and it wasn't a *great* performer, but it was quite usable.
I think he meant to actually index the contents, not just to have a table of contents. As in-- search of files containing specific text on media that isn't currently in the computer. It's a good idea, I think, but you'd need a good way managing it. You wouldn't necessarily want it enabled by default, generating indexes for every disk inserted, never removing those indexes, and querying them all with every search. At least, I wouldn't think that it'd be too efficient for system resources, but I'm not going to pretend that I really know these things.
I call BS. I've installed 10.4 on a Powerbook Ti (600 Mhz, 256 MB RAM), and it was definitely usable. As fast as 10.2, which is what I was upgrading from, and certainly was more usable than Windows XP on a 600 Mhz machine with such a small amount of RAM.
On the other hand, Apple has one distinction that makes them different from Microsoft: they're currently making good products. However much I might like or hate a business emotionally or philosophically, I feel like we should all give some credit to those who are putting out a product worth buying.
Microsoft hasn't released anything worthwhile since their 2000 line, excepting perhaps the XBox. Pretty much their entire product line is reliant on bullying OEMs and leveraging product lock-in. Otherwise, they've been virtually unimproved for the last several years.
And yes, I've tried Vista, I know all about it's "features", but it's still a very marginal improvement of the computing experience over Win2k.
We've been up and down this piracy issue a thousand times, and I think we should all be able to agree by now: They can't stop piracy. It's just not going to happen. For any DRM, all it takes is one person to be able to bypass it or crack it, through however elaborate means are necessary. That person can upload it to the internet, millions of people can copy it, and the DRM has failed.
If content owners want us to pay for content, they need to make it easier, not harder. They need to make the whole thing cheap enough and easy enough that it won't be worth the average person's time to figure out bittorrent and find a good tracker site. The thing is, Apple is almost to that point. They could bump quality up a little, they could drop the DRM, and maybe drop the price a few cents per song, a couple dollars per album. Any one of those things would decrease piracy. Integrate something like Pandora/Last.fm so that you can get good recommendations, and then make it so when you find a song you like, you click, download, get charged 80 cents for a 160 kbps DRM-free AAC, and it goes straight into iTunes where it can sync with your iPod. If someone offered that, I'm sure it'd be a big hit. Piracy would drop just because it wouldn't be worth all the headaches of piracy if you could get a good product at a fair price.
In other words, people pirate music because it's a) cheaper, and b) more convenient. Labels can't compete with "free", so if they want to have a chance at defeating piracy, they need to try to make sure they're delivering a better product through more convenient methods than what piracy offers.
The problems with piracy are that it's slightly hidden (hard to find what you want), it's a little dodgy (don't always know what you're getting), sometimes slow (depending on the method of download), hard to figure out (for people who aren't very literate, bittorrent isn't always as simple as point-and-click), and it's technically illegal (though the chances of getting caught are slim).
Solve these problems, drop DRM, and make pretty online stores with big libraries, and people will spend money there.
To be fair, NYC is sort of a separate entity from the rest of the *country*. I guess reasonable traffic laws can and should be enforced in 4 of the boroughs, but Manhattan... I just don't know if it's possible. If cars couldn't go while a pedestrian was in the crosswalk, cars would never be able to go. The city would grind to a halt. If you've walked around much in some of the busier places in Manhattan, you know that getting anywhere turns into a little bit of a game of chicken between pedestrian and car, and it almost has to because there are too many people and too many cars.
If anything, I think NYC should try to do something to discourage people from driving into Manhattan. I don't know what-- every time I think about what they could do, all the options seem like bad ideas. But if they could get fewer people to drive, more people to walk and take public transportation; if they could get all the commuters to take trains in instead of driving in, it seems like you could begin to address the traffic mess in Manhattan.
From a practicality standpoint, as a pedestrian, of course you should watch out for cars. However, from a responsibility standpoint, you're risking people's lives when you get behind the wheel. If you're not willing to accept that your responsible for being as safe as possible, you shouldn't be driving.
Motorists should be held more responsible for any accidents particularly because they are in a position to cause greater damage. If a pedestrian runs into a car, the car is fine. If a car runs into a pedestrian, the pedestrian might be killed. Drivers ought to know that what they're doing is inherently dangerous for everyone around them, and because of that, they should be careful. Period.
For all the talk about gun control and how the US has too many guns, more deaths each year are car-related than are gun-related. How about some car control?
Regardless, I think the best course would be to absolve motorists of 100% contributory negligence in accidents with pedestrians who are otherwise electronic-gadget engaged while crossing a street or intersection.
Um... no. The bottom line is that motorists should be looking out for pedestrians, even if those pedestrians are doing stupid things. That's the responsibility you take on when you gain the privilege of shooting a 5000 lbs hunk of metal around our cities. Why the hell is it so hard for people to accept that driving a car is an inherently dangerous activity, for both the people inside the car and the people outside of the car, and take necessary precautions?
It's one thing if someone literally steps in front of your car and you have no possibility of dodging them-- but that's covered under the law anyhow. If someone jumps in front of your car, gets hit, and dies, you won't be charged with anything. But my your suggestion, motorists would be allowed to mow people down in intersections if they have an iPod. That's stupid.
Well, in essence, security is not about being "100% secure". 100% never happens, and can't even happen theoretically. The 100% only way to prevent unauthorized access to a computer is to prevent any kind of access whatsoever. The only way to prevent anyone from ever accessing a particular piece of data is to never create that data anyway, or else destroy it immediately. Even then, you face a possible breakdown: what about the mechanism for preventing that data from being created, or for destroying it? If that mechanism breaks down, the data is out.
So, ok, what is security about, then? It's about making unauthorized activities difficult enough to discourage people from even trying. It's about making sure that breaking in takes longer than anyone would want to spend to break in. It's about increasing your odds of detecting someone doing something they shouldn't. In short, it's about making unauthorized activities difficult, unappealing, and visible, but it is *not* about making them impossible.