"Some suffering isn't a result of evil choices and seems to be simply a part of living. That's a tougher nut to crack, but one answer is that even with God, there is no such thing as a perfect world. Instead, there is merely the best of all possible worlds, and as long as God has given us that, he has given us the best that ever could be. Then, morally, for God it comes down to a choice of whether creating an imperfect -- but valuable -- world is better than creating nothing at all."
A best of all possible worlds that includes creatures such as the ichneumon wasp, whose entire life cycle depends on causing horrible, prolonged suffering to another animal. Observing these was a major reason for Darwin eventually rejecting the Christianity that he'd previously believed in, because he found it impossible to reconcile their existence with the concept of a god that was "good" or "loving" according to any reasonable definition of those terms.
"Time and Space didn't appear out of nowhere. It just happened to be really small once."
The GP is actually more correct than you, because space and time didn't exist until after the Big Bang, so the terms "where", "when, and indeed "really small" had no meaning. It is thus literally true that the time and space appeared out of nowhere, because there was no "where" in the singularity.
"the Axiom of Choice, Godel's incompleteness theorem, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle; all of which I've seen dragged into and horribly misused in philosophical and theological arguments"
This is generally because the people doing the dragging don't understand the things they're dragging, and neither do their audiences.
"Incorrect. Agnosticism is a philosophical position that God is unknown and/or inherently unknowable. In layman's terms, our subjective experiences are not capable of producing a knowledge of God."
It is you who is incorrect. The term "agnostic" was invented by T. H. Huxley, and (to use your own canard) in layman's terms, can be described as "Don't claim it if you can't explain it". Huxley did not restrict this to religious matters, but also scientific ones, because he was just as dismayed by those who accept laws and theories because they are based on some "authority", or for their conformance with a preconceived world view, as he was with religions that expect people to believe in them for precisely the same reasons.
"Agnosticism is a more complicated topic than simple "absence of faith," and should not be used as an alternative to "weak atheism.""
While I agree that agnosticism is not the same as weak atheism, it is not complicated, because it can in its entirety be summed up by two sentences, which are Huxley's "positive" and "negative" definitions:
Positive definition: "In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration". Negative definition: "In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable".
Note that this isn't what most modern people _think_ an agnostic is, or for that matter, what many people who describe themselves as agnostics believe, but it's the real definition of the term, irrespective of what some dictionaries say (because dictionaries are records of common usage, and not, as many seem to think, authoritative definitions of a term. I think therefore that Huxley would be rather amused by any who would use dictionaries to refute his own definition of a term he invented, because it's precisely the sort of blind appeal to authority that agnosticism rejects!).
"Classical agnosticism also makes an epistemologically unsound assertion: that one cannot know whether or not god exists."
There's no such things as "classical agnosticism", because the term was first used in the 19th century by T. H. Huxley (a notable proponent of Darwin's theories) to describe himself. He defined agnosticism in the following way:
"...it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism."
Note that Huxley included _everything_ in this, not merely spiritual matters. It was therefore as much a critique of what he termed "ists" (members of the scientific community who accept certain propositions because they satisfy their preconceived ideas about the nature of the universe, and are therefore matters of faith) as those who believe in gods.
The viewpoint you are describing was not therefore a part of agnosticism, so the following assertion is just plain wrong:
"In fact, it is not a contradiction to be both a theist and an agnostic, when one applies the classical definition of agnostic."
"This essay represents my opinions decently."
Unfortunately, that essay is based on a common straw man definition of agnosticism which only seems to exist among intellectually dishonest atheists who are trying to present their ideas as being the only logical ones. It's interesting how this parallels the tactics that ID proponents try to use as a refutation for evolution...
"it took Microsoft 2 years just to design the damn shutdown button"
Now be fair, it took them two years to design _and_ implement the shutdown _dialog_, which has several buttons on it. The pressure must have been pretty unbearable when Vista was about to ship after they'd only been given two years to decide how big those buttons should be, what order to put them in, how much space should be between them, how far to inset them from the edges of the dialog, and if that wasn't enough, also ensure that their event handling code called the correct OS routines to prevent potential disasters such as the Cancel button making the machine reformat its hard disk after sending Ballmer an insulting EMAIL. QA people and beta testers can't be relied on to spot this sort of error before the OS is being shipped out on millions of OEM machines, so the responsibility for getting it right was entirely on the shoulders of the poor shutdown dialog team, who probably used special teams of mouse-wielding robots for months to ensure that each of the buttons did exactly what it was supposed to with the legendary level of reliability that's become the hallmark of Microsoft software.
"I'd say the critics are instead those who have made the leap from "this looks like a fully-fledged computer, masquerading as a phone" to "it's so deliberately locked-down by Apple, it's not a computer, but only a phone that does X, Y, Z.""
Those critics obviously missed the fact that it was called "iPhone", and Apple have been saying it was "a phone that does X, Y, Z" from the beginning. Moaning at a company for not delivering what they promised is criticism; complaining about them delivering precisely what they promised is whinging.
If you'd actually understood what the document you'd linked to was saying, you'd have realised that it was about using custom hardware for brute-force attacks on a variety of stuff, including some things in MacOS X, but all of the Mac ones require having physical access to the machine in question (or its hard disk). Instead of showing that Macs are insecure (as you'd obviously hoped to do), you've thus ended up proving the exact opposite, i.e. that their passwords and FileVault (optional file encryption) cannot be broken using software alone in any reasonable time frame.
"Do you really think its going to stay that way? Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket?"
"Name a single piece of hardware for which one company dominates the market, and for which much cheaper alternatives are avaliable."
Hewlett Packard have 54% of the market for inkjet and multifunction printers. By definition, any singe company with 50% or more of a market is dominant within that market.
"Actually, it does."
I fail to see how me demonstrating that there is in reality little if any lock-in supports this claim:
"The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently."
" Since the vast majority of my music is not Apple DRM encumbered, why would I spend the $200 premium now I could a perfectly functional mp3 player for so much less?"
What you would spend on anything is irrelevant, because hundreds of thousands of Slashdot posts on consumer-related topics have conclusively demonstrated that Slashdotters are the Kuiper Belt of the consumer demographic solar system. Geeks have been regularly predicting the doom of the iPod since it was launched, and will continue to do so until the inevitable demise of personal media players as a viable market will result in Apple leaving leaving others to squabble over the the small number of people who are still interested in them. Geeks will claim that they were right all along when SanDisk dominate the 150,000 dedicated media players that ship worldwide in 2014, all of which were given away with Happy Meals, and contained a movie called "MacBuglar Learns His Lesson".
"In raw numbers, yes. As market share, that's simply bullshit. They had a much smaller share of a much larger market."
I presume you can provide a link to some reliable figures that justify calling my post "bullshit".
"That's whats about to happen to Apple."
It will happen to Apple when personal MP3 players cease to be an important item that people are willing to spend significant amounts of money on, as for example happened with PDAs.
" If the European prosecutors were taking the stance that DRM itself was illegal, because it was anti-consumer, that would be fine. They could simply require that it be removed from ALL products sold in the European Union. But they aren't. They're going after Apple, whose DRM is actually the least restrictive."
It's not "European prosecutors", but the Norwegian consumer protection ombudsman, and they're going after Apple because they don't license their DRM to other manufacturers, so the issue is lock-in, not how restrictive the DRM itself is. And before you do the standard US poster thing of stating that it's legal to copy Apple's DRM files to a CD, the fact of the matter is that not everything that's legal for people in the US is legal everywhere else (and vice-versa)..
"Meanwhile, if cost is what matters, why has Wal-Mart not become the digital music store?"
Perhaps the fact that they're a US-only outfit while iTunes operates in a whole bunch of different countries has a bearing on this. Believe it or not, people outside the US actually buy and listen to music.
"If that is the law there, then it is quite foolish."
Because any laws that still put consumer rights above those of corporations are quite foolish due to the fact that the US legal system doesn't, and as the US keeps telling everybody, its legal system is by far the best in the entire world.
"Then...came larger harddrives, cd burners and cd drives on computers...and compression techs (mp3, etc). Well, what was once 'secure' to do consumer's hardware limitations, wasn't any more."
That's not what worried them, because they simply used the strategy they came up with for cassettes, i.e. get governments to put a levy on blank media to "make up for the losses from casual piracy". The shit started to hit the fan when Napster was launched in 1999, because it turned the Internet into a wide scale media distribution network that non-Geeks could use.
It will probably stay that way for as long as separate MP3 players are still a viable market.
"Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket?"
Ah, the old Geek "people always buy the cheapest item" canard, which is amply supported by the fact that there aren't any premium brands anymore, because the cheapest possible items have destroyed all of them.
"Sony Walkmen had a massive share of the portable audio market after they were first released, but within two or three years the market had become completely commoditized."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Sony actually sold the vast bulk of their Walkman cassette players long after they'd become a commodity. What killed the Walkman wasn't competition from other manufacturers, but the fact that cheap CD-based personal stereos replaced those using cassettes, and Sony decided to use the Walkman name for their ill-fated mini-disk players.
"The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently."
I assume by "iTunes" you mean "the iTunes" store, which, leaving out the fact that purchases made from it work fine on any computer that can run iTunes, does require an iPod for DRM content. However, it's a rather well known fact that only 3% of the songs on an average iPod were bought from the iTunes store, which means that 97% of them come from some other source. How does this support your contention? Oh, that's right, it doesn't...
Damn -- I should have previewed to prevent sodding Slashdot from removing everything after a "less than" sign. The first sentence of the above should have said:
It's only naive Slashdotters who believe that having a parts list that totals less than 50% of the price a manufacturer sells something for means that they more than 50% profit on each item.
"There is no hardware with 50% or more profit margin, that is ludicrous."
It's only naive Slashdotters who believe that having a parts list that totals 50% profit on each item. This is based on the Geek theory of economics, which assumes that large corporations operate from their parents' basements, and therefore have zero operating costs, so everything they aren't spending on parts must obviously be profit.
"I don't know if it applies to all EU countries but when on vaction in the UK last year I needed to see a doctor. No appointment, waited half an hour, but the surprising part was the consultation and meds were "free". Apparently the two governerments have an arrangement to look after each others tourists. "
All EU citizens have a right to state healthcare when visiting any other EU country, but whether those from outside the EU have the same privilege usually depends on whether there is a specific agreement between the two nations. AFAIK, there's no requirement for any EU country to treat people from outside the EU itself, although they will usually do so if somebody has a non-trivial problem.
"I think it's great you can buy extra cover eg: over here dentistry is not a "universal right" (yet)."
Dentistry seems to be an exception everywhere!
"I'm an old fart who (as a child) did not have a good experience with the "pay or die" system this country had up until the mid 70's"
I'm 47 myself, but had the good fortune to grow up in the UK (although I left about 20 years ago) during the 1960s, when their state healthcare system was superb, and everything including dentistry was free (it still is technically, but dentists who take "national health" patients are rarer than Australian virgins).
"I suffered from childhood asthma that was consistently diagnosed as bronchitis untill I was about 13-14 (oddly enough this correct diagnosis coincided with the introduction of universal health care)."
I did too. Mine was correctly diagnosed under the old but effective Brit. national health system (as opposed to the current notably less effective one), and I received free treatment. Interestingly, the doctor told my mother (I was about 3 years old at the time) that it would very likely begin to abate when I reached puberty, and disappear when I became an adult, and this is exactly what happened.
"Under the old system his health care costs would easily have bankrupt me as a young dad in a "dead end" job."
This is obviously the reason why many Canadians are so defensive about their state healthcare system, and resist the idea of having any form of supplementary private medicine whatsoever. People who've had unpleasant experiences with something tend to polarise in the opposite direction, whereas those of us who've been spoilt by tandem systems for decades are pretty comfortable with the idea of everyone paying for state healthcare, while the ones who can afford it also support a private medical infrastructure that the state can pay to use if it needs to.
"They need to be in a liquid support medium to be able to manipulate their world effectively"
No they don't. I've seen quite large octopi that have been caught by fishermen in traps very effectively climb out of crates, move fairly quickly across the deck of a boat, make their way up its sides with their tentacles and suckers, and then drop into the sea. Unlike most aquatic creatures, they're a lot more capable of moving around in our element than we are in theirs, and can survive for a much longer out of water than land animals like humans do when entirely submerged.
"That works until they develop metallurgy.
Add cephalopods and a forge to a liquid environment and the result is tasty, but hardly civilised."
Hot water rises, just like hot air, hence the fact that divers can weld and hold burning flares in their hands without getting their hands boiled. An underwater forge for an advanced cephalopod would not therefore be any more dangerous than said forge is to a human working in air -- the main problem would be generating heat for it due to the fact that an intelligent but still technologically primitive cephalopod would never have seen fire (although fire is not of course the only way of generating significant amounts of heat).
"There's already doctor and specialist shortages here in Canada in the public health sector, the last thing we need is more health care practitioners leaving for the private sector"
Shortages in the state sector can be caused by many factors that have no bearing whatsoever on whether things would be better or worse with a parallel private system. It could for example be due to the fact that the Canadian education system isn't producing enough doctors, or that they don't like the deal they get from the state medical service, so they move to the nearby US where they can earn a lot more money for less hours. By contrast, some European countries with parallel state and private medical sectors produce far more doctors and nurses than they have jobs for, resulting is situations where (for example) Spanish nurses often work in the UK state sector, which has a shortage of qualified nursing staff, whereas their own country has a surplus.
"All that would do is reduce the level of care delivered in the public sector while people who could afford it would get better care in the private sector."
This hasn't been the case in Europe, where many doctors (especially specialists) work for the state sector while also doing private consultations to supplement their income. It makes a career in medicine more attractive, and helps to keep those who choose it in their own country instead of having them emigrate to somewhere that offers them a better deal.
"I really hope the Canadian government and individual provinces fight off companies that seek to profit off of peoples health. Privatizing health care will only hurt the public system in the long run."
If there are staff shortages, then it's already suffering from problems that some of the European countries with both types of healthcare don't have. As I said before, the fact that the state system is already less than ideal doesn't prove that things would be worse if people were given a choice of whether to use it or not.
"On a side note, that's exactly what happened to public schools here in Ontario after the government started funding Catholic schools, the quality of public education went down hill."
Correlation does not imply causality. The UK for example has a private education sector that existed _long_ before there was a state one, yet that didn't prevent the state sector from becoming pretty good. It's crap now, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence of private education -- it's due the fact that successive UK governments have paid state-sector teachers badly, and progressively eroded their ability to discipline pupils, so the few good people who opt for a career in teaching don't last very long. I have a friend in the UK who, after spending three years teaching, said "If I'd wanted to work with a load of obnoxious little shits who behave as they please, I'd have got a job maintaining sewers and earned a lot more money".
"Why the hell do private catholic schools get government funding?"
I don't know, and I don't agree with it either. Not because they're Catholic, but for the simple reason that private schools are companies that should be run like other companies, i.e. they either make money from their product, or go broke and shut down.
"That money would be better served going to help public schools"
The experience of most countries that have tried it seems to indicate that simply throwing lots more money at state systems that aren't working well doesn't improve them in any measurable way, irrespective of the fact that the people within them inevitably blame their poor performance on a lack of funding. From what I've seen after living in several countries, the major difference between private and state schools isn't funding, but the fact that they have the luxury of selecting their pupils, and can permanently eject unruly, disruptive ones who prevent teachers from doing their jobs effectively.
""The iPhone requires iTunes to work. Does iTunes support 64bit Vista or XP?""
"Uh, yes, yes it does. I've got my iPod hooked up to iTunes on 64-bit XP right now."
For a supposedly technical forum, the number of people on Slashdot who who obviously don't know the difference between "support" and "works with on my computer" is quite astonishing.
Quote: "iTunes is currently not supported in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or any 64-bit edition of Windows Vista. Features may or may not work correctly."
"Other publicly traded companies dont try to pull this. If I pay for a computer and have it shipped to me dell doesnt immediately go back and start trying to dream up ways to deny sending the computer to save money."
They would be quite happy to take your money and tell you to sod off if (a) fraud wasn't a crime that can land executives in jail, and (b) they believed that doing this was a sustainable business model (it obviously isn't).
"Its possible to make an honest buck as a corporation."
It is indeed possible to do so, but history tends to show that corporations manoeuvre through every legal and financial loophole they can find, and some are willing to step outside the law if they think they can get away with it.
"The problem isnt the corporation, the problem is the health insurance industry."
The problem _is_ the corporation, because corporations are legally obliged to maximise the value of investments, and the only way to do this is by charging the highest price that customers will pay for the worst deal they'll swallow. The current trend towards outsourcing and globalisation is evidence of this: companies are falling over themselves to shift every possible operation to countries where people will work the most hours under the worst possible conditions for the lowest wages in an effort to spend as little as possible while charging their Western customers the same price. Stock markets actively encourages this sort of behaviour by raising the share price of companies who cut costs by moving large segments of their infrastructure to the cheapest locations they can find, especially if doing so avoids pesky labour and environmental protection laws that raise the costs of building, equipping, and staffing such facilities.
"Their job is to collect premiums and then if a client needs his medical bills covered, they pay for it."
Their job is to earn a profit if they're a private company, and grow the value of shares if they're a corporation. That's what companies exist for -- providing products or services is simply a means to that end, not an end in itself.
"The issue is that they are trying to weasel out of the second part here and people are dieing over it."
Because keeping all your money is obviously more profitable than spending some of it on you. In the case of a corporation, they are actually legally _required_ to do this, because the company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximise the value of their investment, and with insurance companies of all types, this means doing everything they can to minimise the amount that they pay out to the insured, and they pay CEOs seven figure salaries to come up with new and creative ways of doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
"Some suffering isn't a result of evil choices and seems to be simply a part of living. That's a tougher nut to crack, but one answer is that even with God, there is no such thing as a perfect world. Instead, there is merely the best of all possible worlds, and as long as God has given us that, he has given us the best that ever could be. Then, morally, for God it comes down to a choice of whether creating an imperfect -- but valuable -- world is better than creating nothing at all."
A best of all possible worlds that includes creatures such as the ichneumon wasp, whose entire life cycle depends on causing horrible, prolonged suffering to another animal. Observing these was a major reason for Darwin eventually rejecting the Christianity that he'd previously believed in, because he found it impossible to reconcile their existence with the concept of a god that was "good" or "loving" according to any reasonable definition of those terms.
"Time and Space didn't appear out of nowhere. It just happened to be really small once."
The GP is actually more correct than you, because space and time didn't exist until after the Big Bang, so the terms "where", "when, and indeed "really small" had no meaning. It is thus literally true that the time and space appeared out of nowhere, because there was no "where" in the singularity.
"the Axiom of Choice, Godel's incompleteness theorem, and Heisenberg's Uncertainty principle; all of which I've seen dragged into and horribly misused in philosophical and theological arguments"
This is generally because the people doing the dragging don't understand the things they're dragging, and neither do their audiences.
"Incorrect. Agnosticism is a philosophical position that God is unknown and/or inherently unknowable. In layman's terms, our subjective experiences are not capable of producing a knowledge of God."
It is you who is incorrect. The term "agnostic" was invented by T. H. Huxley, and (to use your own canard) in layman's terms, can be described as "Don't claim it if you can't explain it". Huxley did not restrict this to religious matters, but also scientific ones, because he was just as dismayed by those who accept laws and theories because they are based on some "authority", or for their conformance with a preconceived world view, as he was with religions that expect people to believe in them for precisely the same reasons.
"Agnosticism is a more complicated topic than simple "absence of faith," and should not be used as an alternative to "weak atheism.""
While I agree that agnosticism is not the same as weak atheism, it is not complicated, because it can in its entirety be summed up by two sentences, which are Huxley's "positive" and "negative" definitions:
Positive definition: "In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration".
Negative definition: "In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable".
Note that this isn't what most modern people _think_ an agnostic is, or for that matter, what many people who describe themselves as agnostics believe, but it's the real definition of the term, irrespective of what some dictionaries say (because dictionaries are records of common usage, and not, as many seem to think, authoritative definitions of a term. I think therefore that Huxley would be rather amused by any who would use dictionaries to refute his own definition of a term he invented, because it's precisely the sort of blind appeal to authority that agnosticism rejects!).
"Classical agnosticism also makes an epistemologically unsound assertion: that one cannot know whether or not god exists."
There's no such things as "classical agnosticism", because the term was first used in the 19th century by T. H. Huxley (a notable proponent of Darwin's theories) to describe himself. He defined agnosticism in the following way:
"...it is wrong for a man to say he is certain of the objective truth of a proposition unless he can provide evidence which logically justifies that certainty. This is what agnosticism asserts and in my opinion, is all that is essential to agnosticism."
Note that Huxley included _everything_ in this, not merely spiritual matters. It was therefore as much a critique of what he termed "ists" (members of the scientific community who accept certain propositions because they satisfy their preconceived ideas about the nature of the universe, and are therefore matters of faith) as those who believe in gods.
The viewpoint you are describing was not therefore a part of agnosticism, so the following assertion is just plain wrong:
"In fact, it is not a contradiction to be both a theist and an agnostic, when one applies the classical definition of agnostic."
"This essay represents my opinions decently."
Unfortunately, that essay is based on a common straw man definition of agnosticism which only seems to exist among intellectually dishonest atheists who are trying to present their ideas as being the only logical ones. It's interesting how this parallels the tactics that ID proponents try to use as a refutation for evolution...
"I would be surpised if Ellison was loved by anyone"
I've heard rumours that he's very popular with himself.
"it took Microsoft 2 years just to design the damn shutdown button"
Now be fair, it took them two years to design _and_ implement the shutdown _dialog_, which has several buttons on it. The pressure must have been pretty unbearable when Vista was about to ship after they'd only been given two years to decide how big those buttons should be, what order to put them in, how much space should be between them, how far to inset them from the edges of the dialog, and if that wasn't enough, also ensure that their event handling code called the correct OS routines to prevent potential disasters such as the Cancel button making the machine reformat its hard disk after sending Ballmer an insulting EMAIL. QA people and beta testers can't be relied on to spot this sort of error before the OS is being shipped out on millions of OEM machines, so the responsibility for getting it right was entirely on the shoulders of the poor shutdown dialog team, who probably used special teams of mouse-wielding robots for months to ensure that each of the buttons did exactly what it was supposed to with the legendary level of reliability that's become the hallmark of Microsoft software.
"I'd say the critics are instead those who have made the leap from "this looks like a fully-fledged computer, masquerading as a phone" to "it's so deliberately locked-down by Apple, it's not a computer, but only a phone that does X, Y, Z.""
Those critics obviously missed the fact that it was called "iPhone", and Apple have been saying it was "a phone that does X, Y, Z" from the beginning. Moaning at a company for not delivering what they promised is criticism; complaining about them delivering precisely what they promised is whinging.
If you'd actually understood what the document you'd linked to was saying, you'd have realised that it was about using custom hardware for brute-force attacks on a variety of stuff, including some things in MacOS X, but all of the Mac ones require having physical access to the machine in question (or its hard disk). Instead of showing that Macs are insecure (as you'd obviously hoped to do), you've thus ended up proving the exact opposite, i.e. that their passwords and FileVault (optional file encryption) cannot be broken using software alone in any reasonable time frame.
"Err. No. That's not what I said at all."
It's precisely what you said. Quote:
"Do you really think its going to stay that way? Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket?"
"Name a single piece of hardware for which one company dominates the market, and for which much cheaper alternatives are avaliable."
Hewlett Packard have 54% of the market for inkjet and multifunction printers. By definition, any singe company with 50% or more of a market is dominant within that market.
"Actually, it does."
I fail to see how me demonstrating that there is in reality little if any lock-in supports this claim:
"The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently."
" Since the vast majority of my music is not Apple DRM encumbered, why would I spend the $200 premium now I could a perfectly functional mp3 player for so much less?"
What you would spend on anything is irrelevant, because hundreds of thousands of Slashdot posts on consumer-related topics have conclusively demonstrated that Slashdotters are the Kuiper Belt of the consumer demographic solar system. Geeks have been regularly predicting the doom of the iPod since it was launched, and will continue to do so until the inevitable demise of personal media players as a viable market will result in Apple leaving leaving others to squabble over the the small number of people who are still interested in them. Geeks will claim that they were right all along when SanDisk dominate the 150,000 dedicated media players that ship worldwide in 2014, all of which were given away with Happy Meals, and contained a movie called "MacBuglar Learns His Lesson".
"In raw numbers, yes. As market share, that's simply bullshit. They had a much smaller share of a much larger market."
I presume you can provide a link to some reliable figures that justify calling my post "bullshit".
"That's whats about to happen to Apple."
It will happen to Apple when personal MP3 players cease to be an important item that people are willing to spend significant amounts of money on, as for example happened with PDAs.
" If the European prosecutors were taking the stance that DRM itself was illegal, because it was anti-consumer, that would be fine. They could simply require that it be removed from ALL products sold in the European Union. But they aren't. They're going after Apple, whose DRM is actually the least restrictive."
It's not "European prosecutors", but the Norwegian consumer protection ombudsman, and they're going after Apple because they don't license their DRM to other manufacturers, so the issue is lock-in, not how restrictive the DRM itself is. And before you do the standard US poster thing of stating that it's legal to copy Apple's DRM files to a CD, the fact of the matter is that not everything that's legal for people in the US is legal everywhere else (and vice-versa)..
"Meanwhile, if cost is what matters, why has Wal-Mart not become the digital music store?"
Perhaps the fact that they're a US-only outfit while iTunes operates in a whole bunch of different countries has a bearing on this. Believe it or not, people outside the US actually buy and listen to music.
"If that is the law there, then it is quite foolish."
Because any laws that still put consumer rights above those of corporations are quite foolish due to the fact that the US legal system doesn't, and as the US keeps telling everybody, its legal system is by far the best in the entire world.
"Then...came larger harddrives, cd burners and cd drives on computers...and compression techs (mp3, etc). Well, what was once 'secure' to do consumer's hardware limitations, wasn't any more."
That's not what worried them, because they simply used the strategy they came up with for cassettes, i.e. get governments to put a levy on blank media to "make up for the losses from casual piracy". The shit started to hit the fan when Napster was launched in 1999, because it turned the Internet into a wide scale media distribution network that non-Geeks could use.
"Do you really think its going to stay that way?"
It will probably stay that way for as long as separate MP3 players are still a viable market.
"Now that massively cheaper, functional mp3-playing alternatives are available in every supermarket?"
Ah, the old Geek "people always buy the cheapest item" canard, which is amply supported by the fact that there aren't any premium brands anymore, because the cheapest possible items have destroyed all of them.
"Sony Walkmen had a massive share of the portable audio market after they were first released, but within two or three years the market had become completely commoditized."
Sorry to burst your bubble, but Sony actually sold the vast bulk of their Walkman cassette players long after they'd become a commodity. What killed the Walkman wasn't competition from other manufacturers, but the fact that cheap CD-based personal stereos replaced those using cassettes, and Sony decided to use the Walkman name for their ill-fated mini-disk players.
"The only reason that hasn't happened yet is the fact that iTunes required an iPod until very recently."
I assume by "iTunes" you mean "the iTunes" store, which, leaving out the fact that purchases made from it work fine on any computer that can run iTunes, does require an iPod for DRM content. However, it's a rather well known fact that only 3% of the songs on an average iPod were bought from the iTunes store, which means that 97% of them come from some other source. How does this support your contention? Oh, that's right, it doesn't...
Damn -- I should have previewed to prevent sodding Slashdot from removing everything after a "less than" sign. The first sentence of the above should have said:
It's only naive Slashdotters who believe that having a parts list that totals less than 50% of the price a manufacturer sells something for means that they more than 50% profit on each item.
"There is no hardware with 50% or more profit margin, that is ludicrous."
It's only naive Slashdotters who believe that having a parts list that totals 50% profit on each item. This is based on the Geek theory of economics, which assumes that large corporations operate from their parents' basements, and therefore have zero operating costs, so everything they aren't spending on parts must obviously be profit.
"I don't know if it applies to all EU countries but when on vaction in the UK last year I needed to see a doctor. No appointment, waited half an hour, but the surprising part was the consultation and meds were "free". Apparently the two governerments have an arrangement to look after each others tourists. "
All EU citizens have a right to state healthcare when visiting any other EU country, but whether those from outside the EU have the same privilege usually depends on whether there is a specific agreement between the two nations. AFAIK, there's no requirement for any EU country to treat people from outside the EU itself, although they will usually do so if somebody has a non-trivial problem.
"I think it's great you can buy extra cover eg: over here dentistry is not a "universal right" (yet)."
Dentistry seems to be an exception everywhere!
"I'm an old fart who (as a child) did not have a good experience with the "pay or die" system this country had up until the mid 70's"
I'm 47 myself, but had the good fortune to grow up in the UK (although I left about 20 years ago) during the 1960s, when their state healthcare system was superb, and everything including dentistry was free (it still is technically, but dentists who take "national health" patients are rarer than Australian virgins).
"I suffered from childhood asthma that was consistently diagnosed as bronchitis untill I was about 13-14 (oddly enough this correct diagnosis coincided with the introduction of universal health care)."
I did too. Mine was correctly diagnosed under the old but effective Brit. national health system (as opposed to the current notably less effective one), and I received free treatment. Interestingly, the doctor told my mother (I was about 3 years old at the time) that it would very likely begin to abate when I reached puberty, and disappear when I became an adult, and this is exactly what happened.
"Under the old system his health care costs would easily have bankrupt me as a young dad in a "dead end" job."
This is obviously the reason why many Canadians are so defensive about their state healthcare system, and resist the idea of having any form of supplementary private medicine whatsoever. People who've had unpleasant experiences with something tend to polarise in the opposite direction, whereas those of us who've been spoilt by tandem systems for decades are pretty comfortable with the idea of everyone paying for state healthcare, while the ones who can afford it also support a private medical infrastructure that the state can pay to use if it needs to.
"They need to be able to breath, or at least, not die in the presence of, oxygen (or our technologies started to differ at the invention of fire)"
Oxygen if far from being the only reactive gas that supports combustion.
"They need to be in a liquid support medium to be able to manipulate their world effectively"
No they don't. I've seen quite large octopi that have been caught by fishermen in traps very effectively climb out of crates, move fairly quickly across the deck of a boat, make their way up its sides with their tentacles and suckers, and then drop into the sea. Unlike most aquatic creatures, they're a lot more capable of moving around in our element than we are in theirs, and can survive for a much longer out of water than land animals like humans do when entirely submerged.
"That works until they develop metallurgy.
Add cephalopods and a forge to a liquid environment and the result is tasty, but hardly civilised."
Hot water rises, just like hot air, hence the fact that divers can weld and hold burning flares in their hands without getting their hands boiled. An underwater forge for an advanced cephalopod would not therefore be any more dangerous than said forge is to a human working in air -- the main problem would be generating heat for it due to the fact that an intelligent but still technologically primitive cephalopod would never have seen fire (although fire is not of course the only way of generating significant amounts of heat).
"There's already doctor and specialist shortages here in Canada in the public health sector, the last thing we need is more health care practitioners leaving for the private sector"
Shortages in the state sector can be caused by many factors that have no bearing whatsoever on whether things would be better or worse with a parallel private system. It could for example be due to the fact that the Canadian education system isn't producing enough doctors, or that they don't like the deal they get from the state medical service, so they move to the nearby US where they can earn a lot more money for less hours. By contrast, some European countries with parallel state and private medical sectors produce far more doctors and nurses than they have jobs for, resulting is situations where (for example) Spanish nurses often work in the UK state sector, which has a shortage of qualified nursing staff, whereas their own country has a surplus.
"All that would do is reduce the level of care delivered in the public sector while people who could afford it would get better care in the private sector."
This hasn't been the case in Europe, where many doctors (especially specialists) work for the state sector while also doing private consultations to supplement their income. It makes a career in medicine more attractive, and helps to keep those who choose it in their own country instead of having them emigrate to somewhere that offers them a better deal.
"I really hope the Canadian government and individual provinces fight off companies that seek to profit off of peoples health. Privatizing health care will only hurt the public system in the long run."
If there are staff shortages, then it's already suffering from problems that some of the European countries with both types of healthcare don't have. As I said before, the fact that the state system is already less than ideal doesn't prove that things would be worse if people were given a choice of whether to use it or not.
"On a side note, that's exactly what happened to public schools here in Ontario after the government started funding Catholic schools, the quality of public education went down hill."
Correlation does not imply causality. The UK for example has a private education sector that existed _long_ before there was a state one, yet that didn't prevent the state sector from becoming pretty good. It's crap now, but that has nothing whatsoever to do with the existence of private education -- it's due the fact that successive UK governments have paid state-sector teachers badly, and progressively eroded their ability to discipline pupils, so the few good people who opt for a career in teaching don't last very long. I have a friend in the UK who, after spending three years teaching, said "If I'd wanted to work with a load of obnoxious little shits who behave as they please, I'd have got a job maintaining sewers and earned a lot more money".
"Why the hell do private catholic schools get government funding?"
I don't know, and I don't agree with it either. Not because they're Catholic, but for the simple reason that private schools are companies that should be run like other companies, i.e. they either make money from their product, or go broke and shut down.
"That money would be better served going to help public schools"
The experience of most countries that have tried it seems to indicate that simply throwing lots more money at state systems that aren't working well doesn't improve them in any measurable way, irrespective of the fact that the people within them inevitably blame their poor performance on a lack of funding. From what I've seen after living in several countries, the major difference between private and state schools isn't funding, but the fact that they have the luxury of selecting their pupils, and can permanently eject unruly, disruptive ones who prevent teachers from doing their jobs effectively.
""The iPhone requires iTunes to work. Does iTunes support 64bit Vista or XP?""
1 301
"Uh, yes, yes it does. I've got my iPod hooked up to iTunes on 64-bit XP right now."
For a supposedly technical forum, the number of people on Slashdot who who obviously don't know the difference between "support" and "works with on my computer" is quite astonishing.
"What mistake?"
This one: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=30
Quote: "iTunes is currently not supported in Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or any 64-bit edition of Windows Vista. Features may or may not work correctly."
"Other publicly traded companies dont try to pull this. If I pay for a computer and have it shipped to me dell doesnt immediately go back and start trying to dream up ways to deny sending the computer to save money."
They would be quite happy to take your money and tell you to sod off if (a) fraud wasn't a crime that can land executives in jail, and (b) they believed that doing this was a sustainable business model (it obviously isn't).
"Its possible to make an honest buck as a corporation."
It is indeed possible to do so, but history tends to show that corporations manoeuvre through every legal and financial loophole they can find, and some are willing to step outside the law if they think they can get away with it.
"The problem isnt the corporation, the problem is the health insurance industry."
The problem _is_ the corporation, because corporations are legally obliged to maximise the value of investments, and the only way to do this is by charging the highest price that customers will pay for the worst deal they'll swallow. The current trend towards outsourcing and globalisation is evidence of this: companies are falling over themselves to shift every possible operation to countries where people will work the most hours under the worst possible conditions for the lowest wages in an effort to spend as little as possible while charging their Western customers the same price. Stock markets actively encourages this sort of behaviour by raising the share price of companies who cut costs by moving large segments of their infrastructure to the cheapest locations they can find, especially if doing so avoids pesky labour and environmental protection laws that raise the costs of building, equipping, and staffing such facilities.
"Their job is to collect premiums and then if a client needs his medical bills covered, they pay for it."
Their job is to earn a profit if they're a private company, and grow the value of shares if they're a corporation. That's what companies exist for -- providing products or services is simply a means to that end, not an end in itself.
"The issue is that they are trying to weasel out of the second part here and people are dieing over it."
Because keeping all your money is obviously more profitable than spending some of it on you. In the case of a corporation, they are actually legally _required_ to do this, because the company has a fiduciary duty to its shareholders to maximise the value of their investment, and with insurance companies of all types, this means doing everything they can to minimise the amount that they pay out to the insured, and they pay CEOs seven figure salaries to come up with new and creative ways of doing it.