What the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about people who have witnessed seizures in their children, and that's a hard thing to be inaccurate about. A kid has a seizure or he doesn't. My sister did, and I remember that. Don't try to make this into a "You don't understand, I know more about the brain that you, blah blah." I'm talking about parents reporting that their kids had seizures. And I'm not talking about having a study that uses people's memories for data. I'm talking about people's experiences with a terrible phenomenon being a reason to do studies to find answers.
I can't understand why people here have such a strong reaction this way. They won't even admit that further study is needed to understand why kids have seizures, if these seizures could possibly related to autism, or anything like that. Again, I never said that vaccinations should be stopped or that they should even be reduced (for now). I do think there should be a lot of study into the effects of vaccinations to see if there are more effective/less risky ways to deploy them.
It's funny how around here, if someone writes in their blog that MS or Apple or Sony may have possibly violated someone's privacy or that they may have shipped a product with a defect, even if the/. comments are skeptical, there's at least a healthy amount of understanding that the complaint should be looked into. But if you even mention vaccinations here, the instant knee-jerk reaction is completely that anyone who thinks that there's any problems with vaccinations is an idiot and they should shut the hell up. We're talking about parents watching their children go into seizures, and parents witnessing their children's personalities slip away forever. This is a big deal. Just because it isn't your problem doesn't mean it's not a tremendous problem to a lot of other people.
Actually I am familiar with Asperger's (not Ausperger's) syndrome, that's what my kid sister has. What I'm saying is not based on what some Dr. said, or some TV feature story, but based on real people posting about the things they have seen with their own eyes in their own children. Of course, since they are so close to the situation, and because they have, on average, little scientific knowledge in the applicable areas, I don't think these parents are a good place to find a scientific explanation of the problem. But I do believe that people who are more emotionally separated from the experience, and who have scientific knowledge in these areas, need to pay attention to the fact that there are currently people experiencing these things.
Keep in mind, I did not say in my previous post that I believe that mercury is the cause or even that it is involved in the problem. I recognize that I can't even begin to create a theory about what the real problem is, but I think that someone should consider the fact that there are kids having seizures sometime relatively close to when they receive vaccinations, and start from there. The fact that a study proved that Thimerosal does not cause autism does not prove that there is absolutely no link between vaccinations and autism.
Obviously it's unscientific to believe whatever scientific-sounding theories these parents are coming up with on their own, but isn't it also unscientific to not recognize that there are parents reporting problems?
As I said, they need to have a good scientific explanation for what they're seeing. I don't think that they can claim any scientific knowledge based on the fact that a bunch of them think they've seen something. I do think that attention should be paid to the fact that these people are seeing something, even if they don't know what it is, or even if they are making their own wild and unscientific guesses about what they see. Someone needs to ask why are they seeing anything at all.
It may be true that people's memories aren't entirely accurate, especially when something so emotional is involved. But if people can be taken at their word that there was any seizure at all, even as far as a week or two after having a vaccination, and if a large enough group experiences the same thing, isn't that something that someone should look into at least a little? We seem to be awfully quick to dismiss these people.
But the fact is that very few of them have the expertise or the knowledge to make valid judgments about this issue, and yet they continue to spread unsupported claims about vaccination as though they were facts.
You say they don't have the expertise or the knowledge, but I think what they don't have is a solid, scientific explanation for the things they see happening before their eyes. As I read on a different Slashdot post earlier today, the plural of anecdote is not data, but you may be surprised to know how many parents witness seizures in their children the same day they have a vaccination, and then over time the autism sets in. Jenny McCarthy was on Oprah a few months back discussing this same thing, and from what my mother tells me, the discussion boards on Oprah's site got a lot of posts from people detailing the same scenario I mentioned above. That's exactly what happened to my little sister.
Now I'm not saying that vaccinations should be stopped. I give them to my own kids. But I do believe that people are really seeing things happen, and just because those people are mostly soccer moms, they don't always get taken seriously. They end up making a lot of noise because that's the only way anyone will listen to them. Most of us here on Slashdot don't hear a lot of first-hand accounts of these things, because we read Slashdot instead of Oprah.com. The thing about Slashdot, is we tend to be very opinionated, and whenever a touchy subject comes up, be it politics, religion or whatever, you see a lot of people stating their opinions as absolute fact, even when they have no experience in the subjects at hand. To have any real discussion and make any kind of progress, we have to be able to at least listen to someone else's point of view, and acknowledge that they have a reason to feel how they feel, without prejudging them as crazy or paranoid. If Slashdotters expect the world to listen to them, then they have to be willing to listen, too.
I would also like to say that even though I do believe that there is some type of link between vaccinations and autism, I don't think it's a case of "chemical XYZ causes autism"... rather, I think it's a very complex interaction of environment, genetics, and maybe an immune system reaction to something that may be very loosely related to the vaccines. I don't think we're going to figure it out with any single study, and I don't think we can prove or disprove any individual theories without years of study. I think vaccinations are important, and we should be giving them to our children. I don't know that I agree with all of the vaccinations kids get these days (have you seen what the schedule looks like now?), and I don't think it's such a great idea to dump a whole bunch of vaccinations into a single shot or give several shots in one day, especially if the child is in any way sick. But I do think that vaccinations are important and absolutely necessary.
No, the cheapest HD-DVD players are 1080i, but HD-DVD in general can be 1080p, and many of the players are. I believe that Blu-Ray mandates 1080p in all players, but I'm not sure on that. On the other side of things, I believe that HD-DVD mandates that all players have an ethernet connection, while Blu-Ray does not (even though many Blu-Ray players do have it.)
I find it strange that everyone's saying that Apple is actively disabling support for WMAs, like it supports them natively.
Not only that, but iTunes will let you copy non-DRM'd.wma files to an iPod (I believe it converts them along the way). I don't think this discussion is even supposed to have anything to do with whether or not the iPod supports Windows Media formats. It's supposed to be about whether music from the iTunes Music Store can play on other devices. So the whole DRM'd.wma issue is more of a problem with the.wma stores.
Furthermore, according to the GPP:
Back on the topic of actively disabling WMA, how about requiring manufacturers doing more to point out supported formats? Maybe a spiky red bubble on the front of the box saying what's supported? That way, it would look like some marvelous extra, like 'batteries included' or 'one free song download'.
That's a funny complaint about Apple, considering the fact that any song that's ever been purchased from Apple's store is compatible with every iPod ever sold. Unlike the Microsoft side of things, where MS initially supported several different stores selling.wma music, then started their own MSN online music store, then created the Zune with an entirely separate store (and entirely different software?!?). And since the music from the Zune store won't work on the other.wma devices, and the "PlaysForSure" music from the other.wma stores won't play on the Zune, I'd say Microsoft is the one that has been "actively disabling WMA". Why in the hell would someone refer to their music format as "PlaysForSure", license it to hardware manufacturers, then create their own player that ForSureWon'tPlay the PlaysForSure files?
gtkpod didn't work well with the latest generation of iPods when they first came out, but that only lasted about a week or two, I believe. At this point, you can use gtkpod, Amarok, banshee, Rhythmbox (all on Linux), Floola (for Win/Mac/Linux), and quite a few others on each platform. I don't have a Mac, so I don't know what software there is for Macs, but I'm sure they've all caught up, too.
Also, as mentioned by a previous poster, the GPP wasn't really even talking about not using iTunes anyway, he was talking about not using the iTunes Music Store.
Except in reality you are twice as likely to shoot a friend or family member than defend your home with your home defense gun. This comes from a highly dishonest "study" by Kellermann. The only "use" counted in the study was to kill someone, so (for example) holding an attacker at gun point until the police show up was not counted as a "use" of a gun.
So what you're saying is, for all the situations where someone was killed in a home with a gun, it's twice as likely that the person killed was a family member than a robber/attacker. That really doesn't make your argument any better. Maybe you should have specified what the other major flaws are too.
Dams have been responsible for wiping out some species of salmon... Sure, they try to make ways for the fish to get past the dams on their way up and down the river, but there's still a huge impact. Not to mention the actual construction of the dam, and the fact that you're now backing up water which used to flow freely.
And dams may help prevent floods, but if a dam fails, it can cause a flood, too. And that can be a huge disaster.
That said, I'm all for hydro, I grew up in a town that depends quite a bit on hydropower. But it's not such a clean cut decision that it's *better* than nuclear. Let's keep it all in perspective, and use nuclear where it's appropriate, and hydro where it's appropriate.
I know that information like this is considered anecdotal, but I'm not expecting you to take it to heart, just to understand that I have my own reasons. I'm sure that you feel you're doing yourself a favor by assuming I'm an indoctrinated idiot because I expressed a belief (is the B-word getting to be taboo these days?), but there really are other, potentially valid opinions out there besides your own.
My little sister had a seizure the day she received the MMR as a young child. Later on, she was discovered to be autistic. My wife's little sister had a seizure after receiving either the MMR or the DPT, I don't remember which. She was later on discovered to be severely mentally handicapped, and eventually died at the age of 6. I'm not saying that the shot was "The Cause" of these problems. In my sister-in-law's case, I'm sure there was a lot of other things going wrong in her brain and/or body, and it is very possible that the shot and the seizure weren't the direct cause, or even that they didn't have anything to do with her handicap in any way. As for my sister, there are plenty of cases of seizures after the MMR that seem to lead to autism. The studies that I am aware of have tested one factor or another in the immunizations (such as thimerosal), and found no direct link to that individual factor. I still believe that there is some kind of more complicated link between autism and vaccinations. I also believe that any autism that may be related to vaccinations probably also has other very significant factors, such as environment or genes, and that the vaccinations are not the sole cause of the autism.
Again, I believe that immunizations are important and necessary. I just don't think we should be throwing so many of them at our tiny undeveloped children all at once. Autism is a serious thing, and if you haven't lived with someone who is autistic, then maybe you don't understand, but if there is a possibility that the risk can be reduced by spacing vaccinations, separating the compound vaccinations out, and eliminating/reducing unnecessary vaccinations, then I'm going to take those steps to try to reduce the risk to my children.
The number of recommended vaccinations has increased dramatically over the last 30 years (have you seen the list?). Do you have any actual evidence to support the belief that this is 100% safe, or is it more like a creationism thing?
Well a farmer cares about the health of his cattle right? A government has the same interest in the health of its citizens.
Thanks for the comparison... I think we're all flattered to be considered livestock.
And no, I don't think governments in general always are interested in the health of their citizens. I believe the GGPP was talking about the Canadian government specifically, and I don't know much about that government. I do know that ours in the US seems all too eager to sell us all down the river for short-term commercial interests. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies developing immunizations more than I have to. I still believe in immunizing my kids, but I don't believe we should be doing it at the rate they're telling us to. And I don't believe that combining 3 or more immunizations into a single shot is always such a great idea.
I do think that immunizations are important, though.
And considering that most medical research is funded by grants issued by government agencies, yeah I think they're pretty well qualified to provide such advice. ...Because the government would never come down on the side of a corporation rather than its own people... *cough*Haliburton*cough*
What happens with iPhone/iPod Touch resolutions versus iPod Classic/Nano? What happens if the form factor changes to accommodate different resolutions? What about my AppleTV that's hooked up to my high-def tv? What about audio options?
All iPods have the samespecs for the video they play... Presumably the iPod version of the video from the DVD would conform to the same standards as videos from the iTunes store. Your questions about various iPods and the AppleTV apply just as much to the iTunes video store as they would to these hypothetical DVDs, so I wouldn't think that your questions really pose a problem for this concept. Of course, the AppleTV is supposed to be HD-capable, so that could represent a good question here, but Apple doesn't give you a way to get HD content for it, other than some sample podcasts, at least that's all I've heard about it.
Personally, I think it's dumb that they would sell this for a 20% price increase to "let" you have a "legal" way to get videos to your iPod. I use HandBrake all the time (which the author of TFA incorrectly identifies as violating the DMCA... it doesn't violate it because it doesn't have any way on its own to handle CSS decryption... you need an external program/driver/library for that), and in a decent world, it would be perfectly easy for anyone to use it to put their movies on their portable players. But these companies step in and act like they're freaking awesome, because they've given us a legal way to do this.
If someone wants to pay $4 to make it easier to copy their DVDs, and they think the hassle is worth the price, then good for them. But I would hate to see people paying that extortion money because the content providers are pretending that it's the only way to get it legally.
Also... is he aware that Wal-Mart has its own online music store? Even my mother-in-law knows about that one, and she's about as non-techy as they get.
For a product that hasn't been out that long, I would think that as long as it matches the binaries they send out from this point on would suffice. I mean, maybe someone could go after them for what was previously released, but why bother?
It may also be three different 'E' words, though, but I forgot what those are, if that is the case... Initially, I think it was part of the marketing to explain what the EEE stood for, but maybe that's fallen by the wayside now.
True, but none of those things compels a tinkerer more than a PC. What could some neighbor kid do to a DVD player or a TV (other than rescan the channels on the TV)...?
I doubt it. I tried Vista on my P4 2.6 GHz laptop, which originally had 512MB of RAM, but it ran like a pig, so I bumped it up to 2 GB RAM. Still ran like a pig. And since my 32MB NVidia chip doesn't support the Aero Glass interface, I was left with what was essentially a Vista Home Basic experience. To be honest, I kind of liked some of the updates to Vista, like the search in the Start Menu, and the breadcrumb address bar in Explorer. But it ran terribly.
A large part of the utility of this gOS PC is that it's giving you shortcuts to webapps like GMail and web-based IM. There are web-based tax programs and budgeting sites, Google docs, and Flash games. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are the latest killer apps for PCs these days. A lot of people aren't buying PCs for the software you can run off the store shelf, they're buying them more and more for the online apps. Why buy a box at the store when you get things done just by visiting a web site?
I'm not saying there isn't value in local applications, or in keeping your data stored locally. But for people who are really concerned about that, a good distro (gOS is based on Ubuntu) will provide repos where you can find good software to run locally. There are still shortcomings, like tax software. But as more and more people embrace a low-cost linux PC for the reasons specified by the GPP, software companies will see more value in producing apps for linux.
Actually... I think it should be: the smarter the user thinks they are, the less secure the phone is. Reminds me of my PC Tech Support days long ago... "My neighbor came over, and he knows a lot about computers, so he started fixing my computer, now it won't start..."
Slashdot Mirror
What the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about people who have witnessed seizures in their children, and that's a hard thing to be inaccurate about. A kid has a seizure or he doesn't. My sister did, and I remember that. Don't try to make this into a "You don't understand, I know more about the brain that you, blah blah." I'm talking about parents reporting that their kids had seizures. And I'm not talking about having a study that uses people's memories for data. I'm talking about people's experiences with a terrible phenomenon being a reason to do studies to find answers.
/. comments are skeptical, there's at least a healthy amount of understanding that the complaint should be looked into. But if you even mention vaccinations here, the instant knee-jerk reaction is completely that anyone who thinks that there's any problems with vaccinations is an idiot and they should shut the hell up. We're talking about parents watching their children go into seizures, and parents witnessing their children's personalities slip away forever. This is a big deal. Just because it isn't your problem doesn't mean it's not a tremendous problem to a lot of other people.
I can't understand why people here have such a strong reaction this way. They won't even admit that further study is needed to understand why kids have seizures, if these seizures could possibly related to autism, or anything like that. Again, I never said that vaccinations should be stopped or that they should even be reduced (for now). I do think there should be a lot of study into the effects of vaccinations to see if there are more effective/less risky ways to deploy them.
It's funny how around here, if someone writes in their blog that MS or Apple or Sony may have possibly violated someone's privacy or that they may have shipped a product with a defect, even if the
Actually I am familiar with Asperger's (not Ausperger's) syndrome, that's what my kid sister has. What I'm saying is not based on what some Dr. said, or some TV feature story, but based on real people posting about the things they have seen with their own eyes in their own children. Of course, since they are so close to the situation, and because they have, on average, little scientific knowledge in the applicable areas, I don't think these parents are a good place to find a scientific explanation of the problem. But I do believe that people who are more emotionally separated from the experience, and who have scientific knowledge in these areas, need to pay attention to the fact that there are currently people experiencing these things.
Keep in mind, I did not say in my previous post that I believe that mercury is the cause or even that it is involved in the problem. I recognize that I can't even begin to create a theory about what the real problem is, but I think that someone should consider the fact that there are kids having seizures sometime relatively close to when they receive vaccinations, and start from there. The fact that a study proved that Thimerosal does not cause autism does not prove that there is absolutely no link between vaccinations and autism.
Obviously it's unscientific to believe whatever scientific-sounding theories these parents are coming up with on their own, but isn't it also unscientific to not recognize that there are parents reporting problems?
As I said, they need to have a good scientific explanation for what they're seeing. I don't think that they can claim any scientific knowledge based on the fact that a bunch of them think they've seen something. I do think that attention should be paid to the fact that these people are seeing something, even if they don't know what it is, or even if they are making their own wild and unscientific guesses about what they see. Someone needs to ask why are they seeing anything at all.
It may be true that people's memories aren't entirely accurate, especially when something so emotional is involved. But if people can be taken at their word that there was any seizure at all, even as far as a week or two after having a vaccination, and if a large enough group experiences the same thing, isn't that something that someone should look into at least a little? We seem to be awfully quick to dismiss these people.
You say they don't have the expertise or the knowledge, but I think what they don't have is a solid, scientific explanation for the things they see happening before their eyes. As I read on a different Slashdot post earlier today, the plural of anecdote is not data, but you may be surprised to know how many parents witness seizures in their children the same day they have a vaccination, and then over time the autism sets in. Jenny McCarthy was on Oprah a few months back discussing this same thing, and from what my mother tells me, the discussion boards on Oprah's site got a lot of posts from people detailing the same scenario I mentioned above. That's exactly what happened to my little sister.
Now I'm not saying that vaccinations should be stopped. I give them to my own kids. But I do believe that people are really seeing things happen, and just because those people are mostly soccer moms, they don't always get taken seriously. They end up making a lot of noise because that's the only way anyone will listen to them. Most of us here on Slashdot don't hear a lot of first-hand accounts of these things, because we read Slashdot instead of Oprah.com. The thing about Slashdot, is we tend to be very opinionated, and whenever a touchy subject comes up, be it politics, religion or whatever, you see a lot of people stating their opinions as absolute fact, even when they have no experience in the subjects at hand. To have any real discussion and make any kind of progress, we have to be able to at least listen to someone else's point of view, and acknowledge that they have a reason to feel how they feel, without prejudging them as crazy or paranoid. If Slashdotters expect the world to listen to them, then they have to be willing to listen, too.
I would also like to say that even though I do believe that there is some type of link between vaccinations and autism, I don't think it's a case of "chemical XYZ causes autism"... rather, I think it's a very complex interaction of environment, genetics, and maybe an immune system reaction to something that may be very loosely related to the vaccines. I don't think we're going to figure it out with any single study, and I don't think we can prove or disprove any individual theories without years of study. I think vaccinations are important, and we should be giving them to our children. I don't know that I agree with all of the vaccinations kids get these days (have you seen what the schedule looks like now?), and I don't think it's such a great idea to dump a whole bunch of vaccinations into a single shot or give several shots in one day, especially if the child is in any way sick. But I do think that vaccinations are important and absolutely necessary.
Did he get the facts from Wikipedia? Maybe they're not true!
No, the cheapest HD-DVD players are 1080i, but HD-DVD in general can be 1080p, and many of the players are. I believe that Blu-Ray mandates 1080p in all players, but I'm not sure on that. On the other side of things, I believe that HD-DVD mandates that all players have an ethernet connection, while Blu-Ray does not (even though many Blu-Ray players do have it.)
Just wait until Google comes up with "Google Baby Formula [beta]"... I believe we'll see a Microsoft Delicious Baby Formula yet.
Not only that, but iTunes will let you copy non-DRM'd
Furthermore, according to the GPP: Back on the topic of actively disabling WMA, how about requiring manufacturers doing more to point out supported formats? Maybe a spiky red bubble on the front of the box saying what's supported? That way, it would look like some marvelous extra, like 'batteries included' or 'one free song download'.
That's a funny complaint about Apple, considering the fact that any song that's ever been purchased from Apple's store is compatible with every iPod ever sold. Unlike the Microsoft side of things, where MS initially supported several different stores selling
gtkpod didn't work well with the latest generation of iPods when they first came out, but that only lasted about a week or two, I believe. At this point, you can use gtkpod, Amarok, banshee, Rhythmbox (all on Linux), Floola (for Win/Mac/Linux), and quite a few others on each platform. I don't have a Mac, so I don't know what software there is for Macs, but I'm sure they've all caught up, too.
Also, as mentioned by a previous poster, the GPP wasn't really even talking about not using iTunes anyway, he was talking about not using the iTunes Music Store.
So what you're saying is, for all the situations where someone was killed in a home with a gun, it's twice as likely that the person killed was a family member than a robber/attacker. That really doesn't make your argument any better. Maybe you should have specified what the other major flaws are too.
Dams have been responsible for wiping out some species of salmon... Sure, they try to make ways for the fish to get past the dams on their way up and down the river, but there's still a huge impact. Not to mention the actual construction of the dam, and the fact that you're now backing up water which used to flow freely.
And dams may help prevent floods, but if a dam fails, it can cause a flood, too. And that can be a huge disaster.
That said, I'm all for hydro, I grew up in a town that depends quite a bit on hydropower. But it's not such a clean cut decision that it's *better* than nuclear. Let's keep it all in perspective, and use nuclear where it's appropriate, and hydro where it's appropriate.
Actually, it's not an option of one or the other... you have to do both the online survey and the spyware to get any "free" software.
Steven, is that you?
I know that information like this is considered anecdotal, but I'm not expecting you to take it to heart, just to understand that I have my own reasons. I'm sure that you feel you're doing yourself a favor by assuming I'm an indoctrinated idiot because I expressed a belief (is the B-word getting to be taboo these days?), but there really are other, potentially valid opinions out there besides your own.
My little sister had a seizure the day she received the MMR as a young child. Later on, she was discovered to be autistic. My wife's little sister had a seizure after receiving either the MMR or the DPT, I don't remember which. She was later on discovered to be severely mentally handicapped, and eventually died at the age of 6. I'm not saying that the shot was "The Cause" of these problems. In my sister-in-law's case, I'm sure there was a lot of other things going wrong in her brain and/or body, and it is very possible that the shot and the seizure weren't the direct cause, or even that they didn't have anything to do with her handicap in any way. As for my sister, there are plenty of cases of seizures after the MMR that seem to lead to autism. The studies that I am aware of have tested one factor or another in the immunizations (such as thimerosal), and found no direct link to that individual factor. I still believe that there is some kind of more complicated link between autism and vaccinations. I also believe that any autism that may be related to vaccinations probably also has other very significant factors, such as environment or genes, and that the vaccinations are not the sole cause of the autism.
Again, I believe that immunizations are important and necessary. I just don't think we should be throwing so many of them at our tiny undeveloped children all at once. Autism is a serious thing, and if you haven't lived with someone who is autistic, then maybe you don't understand, but if there is a possibility that the risk can be reduced by spacing vaccinations, separating the compound vaccinations out, and eliminating/reducing unnecessary vaccinations, then I'm going to take those steps to try to reduce the risk to my children.
The number of recommended vaccinations has increased dramatically over the last 30 years (have you seen the list?). Do you have any actual evidence to support the belief that this is 100% safe, or is it more like a creationism thing?
Thanks for the comparison... I think we're all flattered to be considered livestock.
And no, I don't think governments in general always are interested in the health of their citizens. I believe the GGPP was talking about the Canadian government specifically, and I don't know much about that government. I do know that ours in the US seems all too eager to sell us all down the river for short-term commercial interests. I don't trust pharmaceutical companies developing immunizations more than I have to. I still believe in immunizing my kids, but I don't believe we should be doing it at the rate they're telling us to. And I don't believe that combining 3 or more immunizations into a single shot is always such a great idea.
I do think that immunizations are important, though.
And considering that most medical research is funded by grants issued by government agencies, yeah I think they're pretty well qualified to provide such advice.
All iPods have the same specs for the video they play... Presumably the iPod version of the video from the DVD would conform to the same standards as videos from the iTunes store. Your questions about various iPods and the AppleTV apply just as much to the iTunes video store as they would to these hypothetical DVDs, so I wouldn't think that your questions really pose a problem for this concept. Of course, the AppleTV is supposed to be HD-capable, so that could represent a good question here, but Apple doesn't give you a way to get HD content for it, other than some sample podcasts, at least that's all I've heard about it.
Personally, I think it's dumb that they would sell this for a 20% price increase to "let" you have a "legal" way to get videos to your iPod. I use HandBrake all the time (which the author of TFA incorrectly identifies as violating the DMCA... it doesn't violate it because it doesn't have any way on its own to handle CSS decryption... you need an external program/driver/library for that), and in a decent world, it would be perfectly easy for anyone to use it to put their movies on their portable players. But these companies step in and act like they're freaking awesome, because they've given us a legal way to do this.
If someone wants to pay $4 to make it easier to copy their DVDs, and they think the hassle is worth the price, then good for them. But I would hate to see people paying that extortion money because the content providers are pretending that it's the only way to get it legally.
Also... is he aware that Wal-Mart has its own online music store? Even my mother-in-law knows about that one, and she's about as non-techy as they get.
Have you ever met a marketing director?
For a product that hasn't been out that long, I would think that as long as it matches the binaries they send out from this point on would suffice. I mean, maybe someone could go after them for what was previously released, but why bother?
I believe it's from "Easy to Learn, Easy to Work, Easy to Play".
It may also be three different 'E' words, though, but I forgot what those are, if that is the case... Initially, I think it was part of the marketing to explain what the EEE stood for, but maybe that's fallen by the wayside now.
True, but none of those things compels a tinkerer more than a PC. What could some neighbor kid do to a DVD player or a TV (other than rescan the channels on the TV)...?
I doubt it. I tried Vista on my P4 2.6 GHz laptop, which originally had 512MB of RAM, but it ran like a pig, so I bumped it up to 2 GB RAM. Still ran like a pig. And since my 32MB NVidia chip doesn't support the Aero Glass interface, I was left with what was essentially a Vista Home Basic experience. To be honest, I kind of liked some of the updates to Vista, like the search in the Start Menu, and the breadcrumb address bar in Explorer. But it ran terribly.
A large part of the utility of this gOS PC is that it's giving you shortcuts to webapps like GMail and web-based IM. There are web-based tax programs and budgeting sites, Google docs, and Flash games. YouTube, MySpace and Facebook are the latest killer apps for PCs these days. A lot of people aren't buying PCs for the software you can run off the store shelf, they're buying them more and more for the online apps. Why buy a box at the store when you get things done just by visiting a web site?
I'm not saying there isn't value in local applications, or in keeping your data stored locally. But for people who are really concerned about that, a good distro (gOS is based on Ubuntu) will provide repos where you can find good software to run locally. There are still shortcomings, like tax software. But as more and more people embrace a low-cost linux PC for the reasons specified by the GPP, software companies will see more value in producing apps for linux.
Don't worry, it says it's in-flammable
BOOM!
Who would have thought that inflammable means flammable!?!?
Actually... I think it should be: the smarter the user thinks they are, the less secure the phone is. Reminds me of my PC Tech Support days long ago... "My neighbor came over, and he knows a lot about computers, so he started fixing my computer, now it won't start..."