Well, yes and no. When things first moved to HD, I was excited by this proposition myself. (Hey, for the one time cost of putting up a decent antenna on my roof, I can watch hi-def broadcasts, AND receive a bunch of new stations to boot, because the networks tend to put additional programming on sub-carrier channels like 9.2, 9.3, etc.? Cool deal!)
In reality, it didn't work out that well. For starters, without an antenna rotator (and those motorized contraptions break down every few years too!), it's not possible for me to tune in all of the local stations at one time. The digital broadcast towers are *mostly* in the same general direction from my house, but a few broadcast from a completely different direction. To make matters worse, we have a big water tower down the road from me, which I'm pretty sure causes the digital OTA broadcasts to bounce off of it in various directions - meaning you're often just tuning in a reflected signal instead of the primary one.
Additionally, I still wanted a fast Internet broadband connection, since that's what I really spend most of my free time using, vs. vegging out to TV shows. Well, I already had a big fight with our local cable company at my previous residence, and swore I'd never sign back up with them again after the billing errors they made and subsequent disconnection of my service due to THEIR mistake. (They refused to even hook me back up without paying a big reconnect fee, despite it being their fault!) So cable broadband was right off my list. That left me with DSL, which tops out at 6mbits. I used that for a while, but the pricing isn't really much better to buy that, stand-alone, than it is to take a basic Internet/TV bundle from the cable co. Then AT&T U-Verse came along with promises of 18mbit (now up to 24mbit) Internet speeds available, BUT they won't even sell you that service without the TV combo.
All things considered, I'd still LOVE to cancel my television subscription somehow, but AT&T U-Verse is still about my only relatively reasonably priced option for fast broadband, AND the bonus convenience of getting 200+ stations that actually come in properly all the time, with no antenna muss and fuss.
And as someone else pointed out here, if you go with the local cable company for JUST broadband, and you want a relatively high speed flavor of it - they make you pay full "retail pricing" for it, vs. all the special bundle offer discounts they'll give to mix and match TV with Internet and even Internet phone.
I happen to agree with practically of his points, and have been saying much the same thing about Flash since the beginning of this whole debate.
Honestly, I don't have much sympathy for Adobe here. No matter how loudly they whine - the fact remains that they rely too heavily on their products securing a place in the computing world simply because they're "good concepts", vs. making the effort necessary to ensure they're solid and reliable in actual use.
EG. Adobe Acrobat Reader is in such widespread use in the Windows world, it may as well be rolled into the operating system itself. BUT, if you actually stop and look around, you find plenty of better alternatives to work with your PDF documents. Kind of pathetic, really, when you consider PDF is Adobe's own invention, yet other people are handling the format better than they are! For example, people using the free PDF reader offered by Nuance get the ability to do document markup/annotation to their PDFs, and it launches a lot faster than Acrobat Reader too. And on the Mac side, the difference is even more striking. Apple's own "Preview" app in OS X is MANY times faster than Acrobat Reader for OS X, and even allows re-ordering pages in a PDF before printing or re-saving it. But all of that aside, look at Adobe's track record just handling installs/uninstalls/updates! Take a look at any Windows PC that's been around a while. If it has the latest (or even version 8.x) of Acrobat Reader on it, obtained through Adobe's automatic updates over time - go into C:\Program Files\Adobe and see what's in there. Betcha it's not just the folder for the current version of Acrobat Reader! I've seen multiple megabytes of leftovers in there on most systems from Acrobat 7 and even 5 or 6. They're TERRIBLE about doing housekeeping when updating their product!
And frankly, Acrobat Reader may arguably be Adobe's BEST piece of free software they let you download! Flash is multiple times worse! It crashes regularly, eats huge amounts of CPU time, and isn't consistently updated to work with the latest browser and OS technologies.
I'm not much of a Microsoft fan either, but let's face the facts. When have you heard the kind of negativity about Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology? It's basically the MS version of Flash, but it seems to run much better for people (even if that's just because it isn't as old, and doesn't have as much "legacy code" in it?) I've heard rumors they may release it for the iPhone at some point, too. That would further illustrate that this is a real failing on ADOBE'S part, not Apple's.
First off, people keep saying the finder should have "returned the phone to the bar/bartender". That's insanity! Most bars I've been to, I *hardly* trust the bartender or other staff not to just lie to me, promising they'll "try to get it back to the rightful owner" and then just turn around and sell it themselves! Especially in a part of the country where a large portion of the clientele are fairly "tech savvy"? How can you be remotely confident the people working there wouldn't have some personal interest in hanging onto a phone like that?
Second, I don't think it really matters what part of Apple the guy says he tried to contact. The point is, he made an initial effort. He didn't just sell the thing off immediately. That might be "feeble" to you, but it's probably going to hold up in court to prove he doesn't meet the required standards for his actions to be criminal.
Third, what about an Apple store?! Do you have any idea how "in the dark" their employees are kept on Apple's unreleased products and projects? Most of their "geniuses" I've dealt with knew less than I did about upcoming products, or even the details of exactly what's in a brand new product AFTER its released. I had to educate a couple of them on some of the new features Apple added to the Macbook Pro aluminum, when I was in there right after those were released and in stores to demo. Apple actually prefers hiring employees who DON'T have previous experience working in computer stores. They don't think the "hard-core techno geek" types give off the type of image they want for their retail stores of a "friendly place for ANYONE to shop for a computer".
Fourth, giving it to the police?! Another foolish idea. I know most police are way too busy to waste time with a lost cellphone. If I called my local police about something like that, I'm pretty sure they'd laugh and tell me just to keep it. A few, less honest cops I know would just take the thing themselves - figuring they eased your conscience and made you happy, and they got a free bonus at the same time.
About the only sensible thing you've said so far is that he could try to contact the engineer whose name was supposedly in the phone. Still, even that's a little questionable. I thought Apple killed the phone pretty quickly after they realized it was lost, so that would mean he couldn't get back in it to see any info at all. Would he necessarily remember how the guy spelled his whole name, after only looking at it once on the night he found it (and presumably after doing some drinking himself)?
Really, the whole thing looks to me like Apple might have just ignored the lost phone completely and decided to "cut their losses" by letting the world guess if what was found was real or a fake. But all the media attention and diagnosis forced their hand to do something, days later.
I'm not saying what he did, trying to SELL the phone, was completely ethical -- but this is far from being a clear-cut "criminal" case either. He didn't pick-pocket the phone from the engineer in the bar. He found it after it was LOST. And neither Apple corporate nor the engineer made a huge rush to get the phone back either.
I'm not even sure exactly what I would do, if I was the one who found this thing.... Knowing what I know about Apple and their paranoia about leaks of info, I'd be sort of afraid to drop by their HQ with it - for fear I'd get blamed for stealing it or something. I'd also realize the value it would have to the tech-geeks and Mac fans out there, and think I'd rather see them "win one" for a change, vs. helping Apple protect trade secrets they weren't able to sufficiently protect themselves this time around.
Heh.... Doing the right thing almost always *ensures* you'll make less money -- at least in the world of computing.
I do on-site service too, and honestly, that's one reason I charge higher hourly rates than some of my competition. I've seen, first-hand, the way they leave a PC after they're supposedly done "cleaning up a spyware infection". Typically, they run a couple of their favorite programs on it, letting them run through and remove whatever they find, and they declare it "clean" - charging their fee and leaving.
I actually take the time out to test a system after I clean a virus/spyware issue, and if I see any evidence that, say, pop-up windows are still occasionally coming up in Internet Explorer, or error boxes are displaying from files that got deleted but not removed from the registry entries referencing them? I go back in and fix all of that. If I can't get it to where I'm satisfied it's 100% back to normal, I sometimes back up all their documents, bookmarks/favorites, Outlook email store, autocomplete files, photos, music, and whatever else - wipe the drive, and rebuild the whole machine.
Honestly, that stuff takes many HOURS to do right, and I can't really bill a person for all of the time that takes - so I just "cap" things at that point with what I think is a fair price, and "eat" the rest of it.
If I was less honest, I'd do what the other guys do and just do a quick, easy automated "once over" of things, take my money and run. Chances are good they'll call back and pay a second or third time to go back and mess with the remaining junk that was left behind anyway. And if not, at least I wasn't stuck putting in hours of unpaid work to do the job right....
But I dunno.... there's still something satisfying about knowing you did a job the best you could -- even if it usually goes relatively unappreciated.
Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".
Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?
I switched our company over to Kaspersky from McAfee Corporate last year (and sure do feel good about that decision right now!). But honestly, I think almost ALL of these products eventually cause problems.
Kaspersky has frustrated me repeatedly because some of the workstations seem to get "out of sync" with the centralized management console, every so often. They'll show an icon saying their anti-virus signatures are out of date and complain about BLACK.LST being damaged or missing. (This is Kaspersky's cryptic and misleading error message that's really trying to tell you the client believes it's not properly licensed anymore, so it's refusing to take updates.) If you force an update manually from the console, you can usually "kick start" it back to life. But it's an annoyance I shouldn't have to deal with!
For free home anti-virus, I currently recommend Avast to most people... but again, I realize this is subject to change at any time. I used to love AVG, but then they went and pulled the stunt of generating tons of Internet traffic with their web-scanner they added, and the product started having major bugs doing upgrade installations from v8.x to v9 on some machines. (You had to jump through a bunch of hoops, manually editing registry entries or running a script they made to purge old ones, before you could get it to install properly.)
I just dealt with an issue last week where I was trying to recover a forgotten but stored password in Outlook Express on a Windows XP system. I downloaded a shareware "password recovery" tool that was supposed to expose the saved password - but as soon as it ran, the anti-virus software (AVG in this case) flagged it as a potential security risk and stopped it from running. Unfortunately, it apparently was able to partially run, faster than AVG could kill the process, resulting in corruption of the stored password. (Outlook Express couldn't retrieve email anymore with whatever was saved in there, after the tool tried to run and AVG nuked it.)
Yeah, you could.... and then you'd have a device that has to be plugged in half way through a long trip, because its battery ran out, vs. an iPad that can go 8 hours + with no problem.
You'd also, probably, have a system with a physical hard drive and a full-blown OS that can get screwed up by anything ranging from dropping the thing and causing a drive crash to getting it infected with spyware while web-surfing, to a kid accidentally deleting an important system file.
I agree that the stuff is way overpriced, but to be fair - some of those buyers may not have been "stupid", as much as they simply wanted an integrated, clean solution - and wanted the whole thing ready to go when they took delivery of the vehicle.
That's always been the problem, really. If you buy an aftermarket GPS unit, for example, you can get one for as little as $99 or so, or for maybe $200-400, get one that has a lifetime subscription to traffic updates, a bigger display, and can even display a photo collection, act as a display for a reverse backup camera and play MP3s. If you buy one that comes integrated with the car or truck? You're probably looking at $1500 or more, for something with far less functionality. BUT, there's no dangling wires going to an adapter tying up the cigarette lighter plug. There's no suction cup leaving marks on the windshield. There's no tempting theft target in clear view of everyone, every time you forget to take the thing down and hide it someplace or carry it with you.
Factory integration is a really big benefit. It's just a shame auto-makers take so much advantage of it as a ridiculous profit-maker.
I know I'm replying to a post you made about a week ago.... so not even sure you'll see or feel like replying at this point? But you bring up some great points and arguments -- and I'd be interested in talking about this a little more in-depth.
I'm not sure your "3 types of Libertarians" is really accurate.... I grant that your choice B. may in fact be correct. I haven't really spent a lot of time listening to what western ranchers are complaining about, I suppose, but plenty of people are looking for a govt. handout, using whatever angle they think works best for them. But I take some issue with the labeling of people as "Paul-ites". That seemed to me, more than anything, a knee-jerk response from those with opposing beliefs, upon seeing that Ron Paul was actually gaining some popularity and traction.
Most of the libertarian-minded people I've encountered who are very educated about things are *both* in favor of a tiny government and vast civil liberties, AND see that the Federal Reserve is one of the areas of govt. that needs to be examined closely (and quite possibly eliminated). At the very least, I'm not sure how anyone can defend the current "leadership" in the Fed, given their history of working for the very investment firms on Wall Street that caused much of our economic downturn, with their deceptive and shady practices.
Whether or not the gold standard is an anachronism is a good subject for debate, but I think the downsides of moving away from it are very clear today. (Bottom line: When you're forced to back your nation's currency with a hard good of equal value, you make it *impossible* to print money out of thin air whenever you find it convenient to have some more to spend.)
I've been contacted by several Internet security product vendors recently (after I attended a free network security conference in town). The "in" thing right now seems to be selling "security appliances" that can intelligently sniff traffic on port 80 or 443 and discern what's actually going through. Of course, right now, they seem to be trying to sell these as additions to your environment, rather than replacements for existing traditional firewalls... but it's only a matter of time before it all gets rolled together into one product.
Yep... but I imagine close to 90% of consumers never upgrade displays either. Everyone I see in a small business/office environment, or even the typical "casual user" at home just uses whichever LCD display was bundled with their new PC until they upgrade machines. They didn't view their mini-tower as offering them an "advantage" because they could pick from many different monitor choices, or because they could upgrade to a larger screen after they owned it a while.
Therefore, the iMac works for these folks just fine. (And frankly, the recent iMacs have included some beautiful displays - other than those manufacturing glitches they had with some of the 27" models. Assuming you have one that's working properly, I wouldn't think you'd be disappointed with it, display-wise.)
Corporations buying/merging with other corporations only destroys competition when they're able to make the environment poisonous for small business start-ups. That's the *real* problem today in the U.S.
History is full of examples of huge corporations toppling, when a new start-up came out of the woodwork with a fresh, new idea. (Remember when IBM was "Big Blue", the dominant player in all things computing? Apparently, a couple of college drop-outs appeared with "personal computer" ideas and wound up knocking them right over.)
Big businesses can't react to change quickly. That's always going to be their weak spot. But what they CAN do is buy politicians, to enact laws that tilt the tables in their favor, so it's near impossible for a new competitor to get a foot-hold.
Your argument is the exact same one I hear all the time in the USA, when it comes to the Libertarians. (In fact, the man most people probably consider the quintessential Libertarian figure today -- Ron Paul? He's run on the Republican party ticket since the mid 1970's!)
The problem with the entrenched 2-party system is, the 2 parties tend to align themselves with certain "goals" they want to achieve. Individuals signing up to run under one of their party names who have different ideas quickly get marginalized or "shut down" by the majority in the party.
Now, if you've really only got a single issue you're trying to advance, sure... your best best is to pick which of the 2 major parties would be more receptive to it, and try to weasel in there. Whether you agree with many other things they want to do or not, you pretend to care while you try to "wheel and deal" to get your idea out there. (And so far, I'd have to say, that's my problem with the current "Pirate Party". They really do only seem to focus on one issue - copyright. They may pay some lip service to holding other political beliefs, but I've never seen them make any effort to, say, become outspoken on environmental issues or discuss whether or not government intervention of certain type might boost an economic recovery.)
But I think it's dangerous to cling too tightly to that belief that a 3rd. party "only helps one of the other 2 major parties, so it's pointless". If he actually cared to do so, Ross Perot could certainly have become one of our U.S. presidents, despite his 3rd. party affiliation. And if enough people get disgusted with the way the Republicans and the Democrats of today both seem to have the SAME agenda on so many major issues (Obama is pretty much just following the same advisers Bush did about what to do with the war)? We're ripe for a 3rd. party to step in and take control.
Well, yeah.... because Apple historically does updates of only one product line at a time. Today is Macbook Pro update day... NOT Mac Mini or Mac Pro or iMac update day.
If you've kept up with the rumors sites at all (or even "tech" site that occasionally discussed it), it sounds like a new Mac Pro has been in development for a while now, and most likely is coming pretty soon. Among other things, it will supposedly feature Intel's new "Light Peak" cabling technology (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10370349-264.html).
I really don't think the Mac Mini is a big priority for Apple at this point. Its initial release was important, because it helped MANY people make the initial jump from Windows PCs to "testing the water" with a Mac running OS X. But currently, an iMac really makes a lot more sense for most people. The Mac Mini has become more of a "niche" system, being purchased primarily by people wanting it for various projects (such as a home theater machine to leave attached to a big-screen TV, or an in-car computer). The recent offering of an OS X Server version of the Mini was another interesting "niche use" for such a system.
And where are the headless desktop upgradable Macs? Non-existent... same as every day since Jobs took Apple back over and released OS X. People always bring that up and suggest Apple "needs to make one, now!" -- but apparently, Apple doesn't. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a cool system, or sell really well. I'm just saying, it's obviously not part of their marketing strategy and someone running numbers must have determined it winds up more profitable for Apple to deny people that choice. (Causes loss of some business, but also drives a lot of sales of bigger, more expensive Macs like Mac Pros, I imagine.)
I actually share your sentiment, overall. I don't watch anything on TV currently, except for the very rare occasion where I'm both bored and worn-out but not ready to sleep yet. (For example, if I'm sick and lying in bed.) On occasions like those, I tend to channel-surf for anything I can find of some interest that happens to be on. Last time, I wound up watching an episode on the Science channel of some show explaining how a few random things were made.
That said though, I'm not ready to "get rid of my set", or to preach that others should do so. If I didn't work two jobs and have a kid to worry about, I just might have a little more free time, and I might like to keep up with one or two TV shows. (Out of the lineup you listed, I think I might be entertained by the "V"series, at least? I know I've randomly seen good episodes of Nightline or 20/20 too, and I've randomly watched episodes of Scrubs over the years too. Not worth recording it or anything... but actually a pretty well-written show with an interesting twist on what you expect to see out of a "medical themed sitcom".)
1. It seems to me that no matter WHAT political system you put in place, you wind up with the "haves" and the "have nots" anyway. I think it's foolish to believe that ANY form of government can magically make this go away. Under many political systems, it's those IN the government who constitute the majority of the "haves".
2. I think the important component of Libertarian philosophy isn't the "Utopian ideal" portion, but the fact that in real, every-day practice, it tries to ensure that each individual is able to live his/her life with the minimum amount of negative impact on personal freedom. Most political systems mandate that a portion of your earnings (labor) be taken from you by force, for others in the government to spend however they see fit. This doesn't *guarantee* anything, but at least it empowers the individual -- rather than letting an elite group of individuals at the top of the power structure call the shots for them.
I'm doing something similar but in our family, we've got a 7 and an 8 year old and a 3 year old, so it's a different "ball game".
In our situation, I don't bother trying to put Linux on any of their machines. I've found that for the younger kids, the vast majority of their time spent playing anything Internet/web-based involves Shockwave Flash based sites (or sites using other proprietary 3D player plug-ins). Unfortunately, nothing runs this stuff quite as well as either a Windows XP (or later) OS, or a newer Mac running a recent version of OS X.
I found a free add-on for Firefox called Kidzui that was pretty nice. It basically turns the browser into a "kids' browser" that has a "home page" with good suggested sites for them to visit, and lets them click and explore around in a big collection of known "kid safe" web sites. Basically, it doesn't allow going anyplace except sites they pre-approved, but they make the whole experience feel like the kid is just getting around the net without restrictions. Additionally, it can email the parent weekly stats on the sites they spent the most time using, etc.
If you're using a Mac, OS X has pretty nice parental controls built into the OS for things like not allowing use of the machine after certain hours. I didn't find Windows had nearly as nice of capabilities for that, out of the box (though Windows 7 was closer than any previous version of Windows to offering it).
Honestly, I'm not that "sold" on putting forth the effort of setting up a lot of centralized administration and maintenance for the machines on a small home network (like for 3 kids). You may as well put free anti-virus/spyware software on each computer and let them auto update themselves independently. The products that support centralized management of the AV software tend to be expensive and/or buggy. (You get weirdness like one box that gets out of sync with the server console, so you have to mess with things to get them to both be on the "same page" about the workstation's status again.)
If anything, I think it'd be worthwhile to image the drives of all the machines, once they're freshly set up with the OS and applications and configuration defaults you like. Then, if one gets screwed up, you can just wipe its drive and re-image at will from your network server. Typically, on a kids' PC, they don't have that much important data to worry about losing anyway. If they're doing most things on the net, the sites they use are saving their high scores, user profiles, and such.
I hate these damn slogans too.... but for me, I think it's their authoritarian "tough guy" attitude with them that irks me the most. We already have FAR too many problems with police officers who think they're "above the law" and that the best way to handle any situation is to get up in people's faces and bark out commands. Why reinforce this police-state B.S. with radio and TV advertising?
I live in Missouri, but being in St. Louis, I'm real close to the Illinois border, so we hear plenty of IL based commercials on our radio stations. The IL state ones were some of the most offensive, along these lines. They really hammered home that whole "We WILL give you a ticket!" and "You WILL be arrested!" thing.....
We live in a land of "control freaks" who want to tell everyone else how to conduct their personal affairs. It's always in the name of a lofty goal like "safety!" too. But the fact is, people are unique. Studies have proven that there is a minority out there who really can effectively multitask talking on a cellphone in their hand and driving. Others realize it's an added distraction, but they're only using their phone the bare minimum essential for what they're doing. (EG. Most courier services I know communicate with their drivers via Nextel phones. It's simply not possible to do the job properly if you don't juggle your phone a little bit with your driving. You need to know if dispatch wants you to stop before you reach a destination to pick up an additional package.)
And as others have said, we seem to just be singling out cellphones because they're everybody's favorite item to bash on right now. (Let's face it... It's easy to observe someone driving while they've got a phone held up to their ear. So many people hate cellphones anyway, because they equate them with their workplace forcing them to use one to "keep them on a leash" and so on, they've got immediate negative reactions to what they're seeing.) But who's to say people's car stereos aren't just as bad a distraction, if not worse? Oh! But wait a minute! We don't WANT to address that possibility, because most of us really LIKE listening to the radio while we drive. Never-mind the fact a person might not be able to hear the siren of an oncoming fire truck or ambulance, right? Don't bother counting all the accidents that happen when a person takes their eyes off the road at the wrong moment to change the station or adjust the radio.....
As for driving while too tired? Yep, that's dangerous too... but again, different people have different tolerance levels. Some people I know can do really long drives straight-through, and have proven their competence at it by doing it time after time after time, without once having an accident. Others (like myself) would have to stop after about half that distance to get some rest and give my eyes a break. Banning cellphone usage in cars is about as sensible as passing laws requiring you prove you slept a minimum of 8 to 9 hours the previous night, any time you're stopped and checked for "tiredness"!
If anything, perhaps the issue is simply that some of the non NP-hard games have discernible patterns in them that human players pick up on? For example, I can remember one of my friends who loved console sports games, back when we were all in college. Often, though, he'd buy a new one for Sega or what-not, think it was *awesome* for a while, and then suddenly just quit playing it. His reason was inevitably one of having figured out some pattern that he could always score a goal with - making the game no longer a challenge. Same reason I quit playing Starcraft and several other "resource management" type games.... Once I (or in my case, my opponents) all started figuring out the "optimal" ways to use their characters, it became more a game of following exact patterns of "create this unit, then this and this one as quickly as possible, followed by using first unit to make 4 of these.... etc. etc.". If all players knew the optimal strategies, it boiled down to who clicked with the least "lag time" between clicks, or who made a mistake by mis-clicking. BORING!
I'm sure NP-hard games have an inherent "advantage" in that they're proven not to have such "possible to memorize" strategies to win consistently... but many other factors determine if they're "fun to play" or not, beyond that. (I know quite a few people who really dislike playing chess, even though it's both NP-hard AND considered one of the "all time great games ever invented". For some folks, it probably just seems too dull and dry. I'm sure that's why they sold so many copies of "Battlechess" years ago. It was still chess, but all the 3D animations and creative "kill moves" when you captured pieces added something the original lacked.)
"Don't buy their products" is hardly a useful response this long after the fact! Most people I know with a PS3 purchased it YEARS ago, and are just now dealing with this firmware issue.
And furthermore, I don't *care* if piracy "convinces a corporation that stricter anti-piracy measures are the answer". The fact is, eventually, that whole "cat and mouse" game ends somewhere. Either the company tries the "let's get tough on them!" thing, pumping huge amounts of money in it, only to find it keeps failing them and they change strategies, OR they come up with something that's genuinely effective at curbing the piracy and the would-be pirates move to greener pastures.
For an example of this, look at the satellite TV providers. After years and years of "back and forth", both Dish and DirecTV now have a system that's considered "unbreakable" by the TV pirates. (It would be interesting to see how many basic subscriptions they completely lost though, since with many of the old methods of hacking their receivers, keeping at least a basic subscription was needed so the access card's ID was shown as "active" in their system.)
In this particular situation, Sony has done something pretty indefensible, because they removed a legitimate feature from their product to block THEORETICAL piracy. (GeoHot hadn't even released anything allowing PS3 software piracy. He just showed how Linux could theoretically be useful to hack into the system.) And frankly, I'm still not sure why someone can't create a bootable Linux image on DVD that runs completely from the disc a a "live distro" for a PS3, even with this "boot other OS" menu option stripped out?
Sony completely jumped the gun on this, out of nothing but fear of a potential hack -and alienated a big part of their existing customer base in the process. Dumb move.
You can go to customize your network settings from XMB, and get to the part about DNS nameservers. Select custom, and enter the following IP as your Primary DNS: 67.202.81.137
Aaron at RVLution.net is hosting this customized DNS server that hands your PS3 back info tricking it into believing it's already running the latest firmware revision. It can then connect happily to PSN, @Home and whatever else without requiring this garbage firmware "downgrade" they released.
I never said that I was for the bailout. In fact, I think that's one of the WORST decisions our government has ever made!
The problem is, the banks and the government are in collusion. The Federal Reserve is going to look out for the interests of those they're closest to, and that would be the bankers and big brokers on Wall Street. They hold all the power, because they control all the wealth. As long as government places trust in the Fed, and treats their word as the "best financial advice" to implement moving forward, we'll continue to see them looking out for their "buddies" at everyone else's peril.
I'm not absolving lenders of their responsibility. But what I am saying is, for better or for worse, we DO rely on a central banking system in this nation. People collectively decided long ago that the barter system was awfully inconvenient, and there were some big advantages to setting up a network of banks that could loan sometimes large amounts of money to people. This requires a degree of a thing called TRUST, for it all to work smoothly.
I'm sure we all know someone who felt (or felt ourselves) that they were mistreated by lenders in the past, because they were so fixated on a FICA score, vs. really sitting down and evaluating credit-worthiness of the INDIVIDUAL. In the not so distant past, a simple handshake agreement held some actual weight. There was an understanding that one's promise and word was something of value, and not to be squandered. These days, all the lenders reduce you to some numbers, purchased from one of several big credit agencies who typically have inaccurate and/or outdated records in their files. People willing to "game" the system can do all sorts of things to artificially inflate those scores and get credit they don't deserve, while others get punished by those numbers, despite having the best intentions and motivation to make their payments on time.
Many things are broken with the current system of lending on BOTH sides of the equation... and I'm pretty sure you actually have a better handle on the relative risk involved in lending to your poor cousin than the typical bank does on lending to your poor cousin!
If the banks decided to "minimize their risks", they'd simply quit loaning money to anyone but the people with the absolute highest of credit scores and largest incomes. But that won't do us any good. So we demand they do some more risky lending, for the sake of the "people" -- but we get pissed off when they do so and it doesn't work out.
Bottom line, IMHO? NEVER legislate anything based on "morality". If we adhered to that simple policy, we wouldn't have the huge fight over whether or not gays can get married in various states, and we wouldn't have all the nonsense about prostitution (illegal to pay for something it's illegal to get for free, even from the SAME people). We wouldn't blow MASSIVE amounts of tax dollars on the "war on drugs" that's impossible to win either.
And as for laws preventing people from "parading around naked all day long"? I agree. It doesn't make much sense to enforce "indecent exposure" laws, as we have them currently. (In fact, some of the people charged with such a thing for simple public urination during past Mardi Gras celebrations in my city led to them getting put on the sex offender registry! Nice, huh?)
I'd rather say that private establishments are free to enforce their own rules and restrictions on who is welcome on their property. So if your local grocery store still wants to enforce a "no shirt, no shoes - no service!" rule, great. Failure to comply means law enforcement can have you arrested, but not just for "indecent exposure".... for trespassing.
Sorry, but I don't think my suggestion was "bullshit".... I hear what you're saying, but despite a home (or car) loan being collateral-based, that doesn't imply that the lender is just as happy to have your property back as getting paid.
Banks aren't in the auto sales business, nor are they in the business of selling homes. Whenever people default on these loans and cost the lenders money to collect, and again to hire people to resell the goods for them, they make it tougher on everyone else who needs a loan.
I'm with you that our nation is "going down the tubes" right now, and I'm in 100% agreement that greedy bankers and Wall Street traders are largely responsible, along with a federal govt. that's ever increasing in size, scope and desire to try to manipulate the market. But to suggest that the best course of action is to "take whatever you can get, before the ship sinks" is to admit defeat, and is the cowardly way out, IMHO.
If I was going to "get the heck out" before it "all falls down", where do you suggest I go? We're in a global economy, like it or not, and the bankruptcy and failure of the United States wouldn't be some isolated event you could just run away from. Our collapse would create a ripple effect that would probably collapse a few other economies along the way, and definitely shift the "balance of power" in the world in a new direction. (Since we owe so much to China, presently, I assume they'd be the ones to step in and claim our assets for defaulting on their loans. That would make China the new "ultimate world power", owning two large nations on opposite sides of the globe.)
But back to the original discussion point for a moment? I *do* hold the "Average Joe citizen" partly responsible for our mess, too. Far too many people were living beyond their means, trying to buy the biggest home or the priciest car or truck they could possibly get a loan for, instead of using common sense and taking a long-term outlook on things. (EG. Just because I can afford to make this payment today... am I reasonably confident I can still make it years down the road? Am I taking into account emergencies that might come up that I'll need money for?) Despite the complaints about the "deregulation of the finance industry", that alone wouldn't have caused the problem we have now if the consumers were using their heads, instead of listening to any lender who would tell them what they wanted to hear.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, yes and no. When things first moved to HD, I was excited by this proposition myself. (Hey, for the one time cost of putting up a decent antenna on my roof, I can watch hi-def broadcasts, AND receive a bunch of new stations to boot, because the networks tend to put additional programming on sub-carrier channels like 9.2, 9.3, etc.? Cool deal!)
In reality, it didn't work out that well. For starters, without an antenna rotator (and those motorized contraptions break down every few years too!), it's not possible for me to tune in all of the local stations at one time. The digital broadcast towers are *mostly* in the same general direction from my house, but a few broadcast from a completely different direction. To make matters worse, we have a big water tower down the road from me, which I'm pretty sure causes the digital OTA broadcasts to bounce off of it in various directions - meaning you're often just tuning in a reflected signal instead of the primary one.
Additionally, I still wanted a fast Internet broadband connection, since that's what I really spend most of my free time using, vs. vegging out to TV shows. Well, I already had a big fight with our local cable company at my previous residence, and swore I'd never sign back up with them again after the billing errors they made and subsequent disconnection of my service due to THEIR mistake. (They refused to even hook me back up without paying a big reconnect fee, despite it being their fault!) So cable broadband was right off my list. That left me with DSL, which tops out at 6mbits. I used that for a while, but the pricing isn't really much better to buy that, stand-alone, than it is to take a basic Internet/TV bundle from the cable co. Then AT&T U-Verse came along with promises of 18mbit (now up to 24mbit) Internet speeds available, BUT they won't even sell you that service without the TV combo.
All things considered, I'd still LOVE to cancel my television subscription somehow, but AT&T U-Verse is still about my only relatively reasonably priced option for fast broadband, AND the bonus convenience of getting 200+ stations that actually come in properly all the time, with no antenna muss and fuss.
And as someone else pointed out here, if you go with the local cable company for JUST broadband, and you want a relatively high speed flavor of it - they make you pay full "retail pricing" for it, vs. all the special bundle offer discounts they'll give to mix and match TV with Internet and even Internet phone.
I happen to agree with practically of his points, and have been saying much the same thing about Flash since the beginning of this whole debate.
Honestly, I don't have much sympathy for Adobe here. No matter how loudly they whine - the fact remains that they rely too heavily on their products securing a place in the computing world simply because they're "good concepts", vs. making the effort necessary to ensure they're solid and reliable in actual use.
EG. Adobe Acrobat Reader is in such widespread use in the Windows world, it may as well be rolled into the operating system itself. BUT, if you actually stop and look around, you find plenty of better alternatives to work with your PDF documents. Kind of pathetic, really, when you consider PDF is Adobe's own invention, yet other people are handling the format better than they are! For example, people using the free PDF reader offered by Nuance get the ability to do document markup/annotation to their PDFs, and it launches a lot faster than Acrobat Reader too. And on the Mac side, the difference is even more striking. Apple's own "Preview" app in OS X is MANY times faster than Acrobat Reader for OS X, and even allows re-ordering pages in a PDF before printing or re-saving it. But all of that aside, look at Adobe's track record just handling installs/uninstalls/updates! Take a look at any Windows PC that's been around a while. If it has the latest (or even version 8.x) of Acrobat Reader on it, obtained through Adobe's automatic updates over time - go into C:\Program Files\Adobe and see what's in there. Betcha it's not just the folder for the current version of Acrobat Reader! I've seen multiple megabytes of leftovers in there on most systems from Acrobat 7 and even 5 or 6. They're TERRIBLE about doing housekeeping when updating their product!
And frankly, Acrobat Reader may arguably be Adobe's BEST piece of free software they let you download! Flash is multiple times worse! It crashes regularly, eats huge amounts of CPU time, and isn't consistently updated to work with the latest browser and OS technologies.
I'm not much of a Microsoft fan either, but let's face the facts. When have you heard the kind of negativity about Microsoft's competing Silverlight technology? It's basically the MS version of Flash, but it seems to run much better for people (even if that's just because it isn't as old, and doesn't have as much "legacy code" in it?) I've heard rumors they may release it for the iPhone at some point, too. That would further illustrate that this is a real failing on ADOBE'S part, not Apple's.
First off, people keep saying the finder should have "returned the phone to the bar/bartender". That's insanity! Most bars I've been to, I *hardly* trust the bartender or other staff not to just lie to me, promising they'll "try to get it back to the rightful owner" and then just turn around and sell it themselves! Especially in a part of the country where a large portion of the clientele are fairly "tech savvy"? How can you be remotely confident the people working there wouldn't have some personal interest in hanging onto a phone like that?
Second, I don't think it really matters what part of Apple the guy says he tried to contact. The point is, he made an initial effort. He didn't just sell the thing off immediately. That might be "feeble" to you, but it's probably going to hold up in court to prove he doesn't meet the required standards for his actions to be criminal.
Third, what about an Apple store?! Do you have any idea how "in the dark" their employees are kept on Apple's unreleased products and projects? Most of their "geniuses" I've dealt with knew less than I did about upcoming products, or even the details of exactly what's in a brand new product AFTER its released. I had to educate a couple of them on some of the new features Apple added to the Macbook Pro aluminum, when I was in there right after those were released and in stores to demo. Apple actually prefers hiring employees who DON'T have previous experience working in computer stores. They don't think the "hard-core techno geek" types give off the type of image they want for their retail stores of a "friendly place for ANYONE to shop for a computer".
Fourth, giving it to the police?! Another foolish idea. I know most police are way too busy to waste time with a lost cellphone. If I called my local police about something like that, I'm pretty sure they'd laugh and tell me just to keep it. A few, less honest cops I know would just take the thing themselves - figuring they eased your conscience and made you happy, and they got a free bonus at the same time.
About the only sensible thing you've said so far is that he could try to contact the engineer whose name was supposedly in the phone. Still, even that's a little questionable. I thought Apple killed the phone pretty quickly after they realized it was lost, so that would mean he couldn't get back in it to see any info at all. Would he necessarily remember how the guy spelled his whole name, after only looking at it once on the night he found it (and presumably after doing some drinking himself)?
Really, the whole thing looks to me like Apple might have just ignored the lost phone completely and decided to "cut their losses" by letting the world guess if what was found was real or a fake. But all the media attention and diagnosis forced their hand to do something, days later.
I'm not saying what he did, trying to SELL the phone, was completely ethical -- but this is far from being a clear-cut "criminal" case either. He didn't pick-pocket the phone from the engineer in the bar. He found it after it was LOST. And neither Apple corporate nor the engineer made a huge rush to get the phone back either.
I'm not even sure exactly what I would do, if I was the one who found this thing.... Knowing what I know about Apple and their paranoia about leaks of info, I'd be sort of afraid to drop by their HQ with it - for fear I'd get blamed for stealing it or something. I'd also realize the value it would have to the tech-geeks and Mac fans out there, and think I'd rather see them "win one" for a change, vs. helping Apple protect trade secrets they weren't able to sufficiently protect themselves this time around.
Heh.... Doing the right thing almost always *ensures* you'll make less money -- at least in the world of computing.
I do on-site service too, and honestly, that's one reason I charge higher hourly rates than some of my competition. I've seen, first-hand, the way they leave a PC after they're supposedly done "cleaning up a spyware infection". Typically, they run a couple of their favorite programs on it, letting them run through and remove whatever they find, and they declare it "clean" - charging their fee and leaving.
I actually take the time out to test a system after I clean a virus/spyware issue, and if I see any evidence that, say, pop-up windows are still occasionally coming up in Internet Explorer, or error boxes are displaying from files that got deleted but not removed from the registry entries referencing them? I go back in and fix all of that. If I can't get it to where I'm satisfied it's 100% back to normal, I sometimes back up all their documents, bookmarks/favorites, Outlook email store, autocomplete files, photos, music, and whatever else - wipe the drive, and rebuild the whole machine.
Honestly, that stuff takes many HOURS to do right, and I can't really bill a person for all of the time that takes - so I just "cap" things at that point with what I think is a fair price, and "eat" the rest of it.
If I was less honest, I'd do what the other guys do and just do a quick, easy automated "once over" of things, take my money and run. Chances are good they'll call back and pay a second or third time to go back and mess with the remaining junk that was left behind anyway. And if not, at least I wasn't stuck putting in hours of unpaid work to do the job right....
But I dunno.... there's still something satisfying about knowing you did a job the best you could -- even if it usually goes relatively unappreciated.
Facebook's first round of venture capital funding ($US500,000) came from former Paypal CEO Peter Thiel. Author of anti-multicultural tome 'The Diversity Myth', he is also on the board of radical conservative group VanguardPAC.
The second round of funding into Facebook ($US12.7 million) came from venture capital firm Accel Partners. Its manager James Breyer was formerly chairman of the National Venture Capital Association, and served on the board with Gilman Louie, CEO of In-Q-Tel, a venture capital firm established by the Central Intelligence Agency in 1999. One of the company's key areas of expertise are in "data mining technologies".
Do you really *think* they're THAT concerned with your security, given the situation?
I switched our company over to Kaspersky from McAfee Corporate last year (and sure do feel good about that decision right now!). But honestly, I think almost ALL of these products eventually cause problems.
Kaspersky has frustrated me repeatedly because some of the workstations seem to get "out of sync" with the centralized management console, every so often. They'll show an icon saying their anti-virus signatures are out of date and complain about BLACK.LST being damaged or missing. (This is Kaspersky's cryptic and misleading error message that's really trying to tell you the client believes it's not properly licensed anymore, so it's refusing to take updates.) If you force an update manually from the console, you can usually "kick start" it back to life. But it's an annoyance I shouldn't have to deal with!
For free home anti-virus, I currently recommend Avast to most people... but again, I realize this is subject to change at any time. I used to love AVG, but then they went and pulled the stunt of generating tons of Internet traffic with their web-scanner they added, and the product started having major bugs doing upgrade installations from v8.x to v9 on some machines. (You had to jump through a bunch of hoops, manually editing registry entries or running a script they made to purge old ones, before you could get it to install properly.)
Pathetic, but not surprising, unfortunately.
I just dealt with an issue last week where I was trying to recover a forgotten but stored password in Outlook Express on a Windows XP system. I downloaded a shareware "password recovery" tool that was supposed to expose the saved password - but as soon as it ran, the anti-virus software (AVG in this case) flagged it as a potential security risk and stopped it from running. Unfortunately, it apparently was able to partially run, faster than AVG could kill the process, resulting in corruption of the stored password. (Outlook Express couldn't retrieve email anymore with whatever was saved in there, after the tool tried to run and AVG nuked it.)
Yeah, you could .... and then you'd have a device that has to be plugged in half way through a long trip, because its battery ran out, vs. an iPad that can go 8 hours + with no problem.
You'd also, probably, have a system with a physical hard drive and a full-blown OS that can get screwed up by anything ranging from dropping the thing and causing a drive crash to getting it infected with spyware while web-surfing, to a kid accidentally deleting an important system file.
I agree that the stuff is way overpriced, but to be fair - some of those buyers may not have been "stupid", as much as they simply wanted an integrated, clean solution - and wanted the whole thing ready to go when they took delivery of the vehicle.
That's always been the problem, really. If you buy an aftermarket GPS unit, for example, you can get one for as little as $99 or so, or for maybe $200-400, get one that has a lifetime subscription to traffic updates, a bigger display, and can even display a photo collection, act as a display for a reverse backup camera and play MP3s. If you buy one that comes integrated with the car or truck? You're probably looking at $1500 or more, for something with far less functionality. BUT, there's no dangling wires going to an adapter tying up the cigarette lighter plug. There's no suction cup leaving marks on the windshield. There's no tempting theft target in clear view of everyone, every time you forget to take the thing down and hide it someplace or carry it with you.
Factory integration is a really big benefit. It's just a shame auto-makers take so much advantage of it as a ridiculous profit-maker.
I know I'm replying to a post you made about a week ago.... so not even sure you'll see or feel like replying at this point? But you bring up some great points and arguments -- and I'd be interested in talking about this a little more in-depth.
I'm not sure your "3 types of Libertarians" is really accurate.... I grant that your choice B. may in fact be correct. I haven't really spent a lot of time listening to what western ranchers are complaining about, I suppose, but plenty of people are looking for a govt. handout, using whatever angle they think works best for them. But I take some issue with the labeling of people as "Paul-ites". That seemed to me, more than anything, a knee-jerk response from those with opposing beliefs, upon seeing that Ron Paul was actually gaining some popularity and traction.
Most of the libertarian-minded people I've encountered who are very educated about things are *both* in favor of a tiny government and vast civil liberties, AND see that the Federal Reserve is one of the areas of govt. that needs to be examined closely (and quite possibly eliminated). At the very least, I'm not sure how anyone can defend the current "leadership" in the Fed, given their history of working for the very investment firms on Wall Street that caused much of our economic downturn, with their deceptive and shady practices.
Whether or not the gold standard is an anachronism is a good subject for debate, but I think the downsides of moving away from it are very clear today. (Bottom line: When you're forced to back your nation's currency with a hard good of equal value, you make it *impossible* to print money out of thin air whenever you find it convenient to have some more to spend.)
I've been contacted by several Internet security product vendors recently (after I attended a free network security conference in town). The "in" thing right now seems to be selling "security appliances" that can intelligently sniff traffic on port 80 or 443 and discern what's actually going through. Of course, right now, they seem to be trying to sell these as additions to your environment, rather than replacements for existing traditional firewalls ... but it's only a matter of time before it all gets rolled together into one product.
Yep... but I imagine close to 90% of consumers never upgrade displays either. Everyone I see in a small business/office environment, or even the typical "casual user" at home just uses whichever LCD display was bundled with their new PC until they upgrade machines. They didn't view their mini-tower as offering them an "advantage" because they could pick from many different monitor choices, or because they could upgrade to a larger screen after they owned it a while.
Therefore, the iMac works for these folks just fine. (And frankly, the recent iMacs have included some beautiful displays - other than those manufacturing glitches they had with some of the 27" models. Assuming you have one that's working properly, I wouldn't think you'd be disappointed with it, display-wise.)
Corporations buying/merging with other corporations only destroys competition when they're able to make the environment poisonous for small business start-ups. That's the *real* problem today in the U.S.
History is full of examples of huge corporations toppling, when a new start-up came out of the woodwork with a fresh, new idea. (Remember when IBM was "Big Blue", the dominant player in all things computing? Apparently, a couple of college drop-outs appeared with "personal computer" ideas and wound up knocking them right over.)
Big businesses can't react to change quickly. That's always going to be their weak spot. But what they CAN do is buy politicians, to enact laws that tilt the tables in their favor, so it's near impossible for a new competitor to get a foot-hold.
Your argument is the exact same one I hear all the time in the USA, when it comes to the Libertarians. (In fact, the man most people probably consider the quintessential Libertarian figure today -- Ron Paul? He's run on the Republican party ticket since the mid 1970's!)
The problem with the entrenched 2-party system is, the 2 parties tend to align themselves with certain "goals" they want to achieve. Individuals signing up to run under one of their party names who have different ideas quickly get marginalized or "shut down" by the majority in the party.
Now, if you've really only got a single issue you're trying to advance, sure ... your best best is to pick which of the 2 major parties would be more receptive to it, and try to weasel in there. Whether you agree with many other things they want to do or not, you pretend to care while you try to "wheel and deal" to get your idea out there. (And so far, I'd have to say, that's my problem with the current "Pirate Party". They really do only seem to focus on one issue - copyright. They may pay some lip service to holding other political beliefs, but I've never seen them make any effort to, say, become outspoken on environmental issues or discuss whether or not government intervention of certain type might boost an economic recovery.)
But I think it's dangerous to cling too tightly to that belief that a 3rd. party "only helps one of the other 2 major parties, so it's pointless". If he actually cared to do so, Ross Perot could certainly have become one of our U.S. presidents, despite his 3rd. party affiliation. And if enough people get disgusted with the way the Republicans and the Democrats of today both seem to have the SAME agenda on so many major issues (Obama is pretty much just following the same advisers Bush did about what to do with the war)? We're ripe for a 3rd. party to step in and take control.
Well, yeah.... because Apple historically does updates of only one product line at a time. Today is Macbook Pro update day... NOT Mac Mini or Mac Pro or iMac update day.
If you've kept up with the rumors sites at all (or even "tech" site that occasionally discussed it), it sounds like a new Mac Pro has been in development for a while now, and most likely is coming pretty soon. Among other things, it will supposedly feature Intel's new "Light Peak" cabling technology (http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10370349-264.html).
I really don't think the Mac Mini is a big priority for Apple at this point. Its initial release was important, because it helped MANY people make the initial jump from Windows PCs to "testing the water" with a Mac running OS X. But currently, an iMac really makes a lot more sense for most people. The Mac Mini has become more of a "niche" system, being purchased primarily by people wanting it for various projects (such as a home theater machine to leave attached to a big-screen TV, or an in-car computer). The recent offering of an OS X Server version of the Mini was another interesting "niche use" for such a system.
And where are the headless desktop upgradable Macs? Non-existent ... same as every day since Jobs took Apple back over and released OS X. People always bring that up and suggest Apple "needs to make one, now!" -- but apparently, Apple doesn't. I'm not saying it wouldn't be a cool system, or sell really well. I'm just saying, it's obviously not part of their marketing strategy and someone running numbers must have determined it winds up more profitable for Apple to deny people that choice. (Causes loss of some business, but also drives a lot of sales of bigger, more expensive Macs like Mac Pros, I imagine.)
I actually share your sentiment, overall. I don't watch anything on TV currently, except for the very rare occasion where I'm both bored and worn-out but not ready to sleep yet. (For example, if I'm sick and lying in bed.) On occasions like those, I tend to channel-surf for anything I can find of some interest that happens to be on. Last time, I wound up watching an episode on the Science channel of some show explaining how a few random things were made.
That said though, I'm not ready to "get rid of my set", or to preach that others should do so. If I didn't work two jobs and have a kid to worry about, I just might have a little more free time, and I might like to keep up with one or two TV shows. (Out of the lineup you listed, I think I might be entertained by the "V"series, at least? I know I've randomly seen good episodes of Nightline or 20/20 too, and I've randomly watched episodes of Scrubs over the years too. Not worth recording it or anything ... but actually a pretty well-written show with an interesting twist on what you expect to see out of a "medical themed sitcom".)
A few thoughts in response to all of this:
1. It seems to me that no matter WHAT political system you put in place, you wind up with the "haves" and the "have nots" anyway. I think it's foolish to believe that ANY form of government can magically make this go away. Under many political systems, it's those IN the government who constitute the majority of the "haves".
2. I think the important component of Libertarian philosophy isn't the "Utopian ideal" portion, but the fact that in real, every-day practice, it tries to ensure that each individual is able to live his/her life with the minimum amount of negative impact on personal freedom. Most political systems mandate that a portion of your earnings (labor) be taken from you by force, for others in the government to spend however they see fit. This doesn't *guarantee* anything, but at least it empowers the individual -- rather than letting an elite group of individuals at the top of the power structure call the shots for them.
I'm doing something similar but in our family, we've got a 7 and an 8 year old and a 3 year old, so it's a different "ball game".
In our situation, I don't bother trying to put Linux on any of their machines. I've found that for the younger kids, the vast majority of their time spent playing anything Internet/web-based involves Shockwave Flash based sites (or sites using other proprietary 3D player plug-ins). Unfortunately, nothing runs this stuff quite as well as either a Windows XP (or later) OS, or a newer Mac running a recent version of OS X.
I found a free add-on for Firefox called Kidzui that was pretty nice. It basically turns the browser into a "kids' browser" that has a "home page" with good suggested sites for them to visit, and lets them click and explore around in a big collection of known "kid safe" web sites. Basically, it doesn't allow going anyplace except sites they pre-approved, but they make the whole experience feel like the kid is just getting around the net without restrictions. Additionally, it can email the parent weekly stats on the sites they spent the most time using, etc.
If you're using a Mac, OS X has pretty nice parental controls built into the OS for things like not allowing use of the machine after certain hours. I didn't find Windows had nearly as nice of capabilities for that, out of the box (though Windows 7 was closer than any previous version of Windows to offering it).
Honestly, I'm not that "sold" on putting forth the effort of setting up a lot of centralized administration and maintenance for the machines on a small home network (like for 3 kids). You may as well put free anti-virus/spyware software on each computer and let them auto update themselves independently. The products that support centralized management of the AV software tend to be expensive and/or buggy. (You get weirdness like one box that gets out of sync with the server console, so you have to mess with things to get them to both be on the "same page" about the workstation's status again.)
If anything, I think it'd be worthwhile to image the drives of all the machines, once they're freshly set up with the OS and applications and configuration defaults you like. Then, if one gets screwed up, you can just wipe its drive and re-image at will from your network server. Typically, on a kids' PC, they don't have that much important data to worry about losing anyway. If they're doing most things on the net, the sites they use are saving their high scores, user profiles, and such.
I hate these damn slogans too.... but for me, I think it's their authoritarian "tough guy" attitude with them that irks me the most. We already have FAR too many problems with police officers who think they're "above the law" and that the best way to handle any situation is to get up in people's faces and bark out commands. Why reinforce this police-state B.S. with radio and TV advertising?
I live in Missouri, but being in St. Louis, I'm real close to the Illinois border, so we hear plenty of IL based commercials on our radio stations. The IL state ones were some of the most offensive, along these lines. They really hammered home that whole "We WILL give you a ticket!" and "You WILL be arrested!" thing.....
We live in a land of "control freaks" who want to tell everyone else how to conduct their personal affairs. It's always in the name of a lofty goal like "safety!" too. But the fact is, people are unique. Studies have proven that there is a minority out there who really can effectively multitask talking on a cellphone in their hand and driving. Others realize it's an added distraction, but they're only using their phone the bare minimum essential for what they're doing. (EG. Most courier services I know communicate with their drivers via Nextel phones. It's simply not possible to do the job properly if you don't juggle your phone a little bit with your driving. You need to know if dispatch wants you to stop before you reach a destination to pick up an additional package.)
And as others have said, we seem to just be singling out cellphones because they're everybody's favorite item to bash on right now. (Let's face it... It's easy to observe someone driving while they've got a phone held up to their ear. So many people hate cellphones anyway, because they equate them with their workplace forcing them to use one to "keep them on a leash" and so on, they've got immediate negative reactions to what they're seeing.) But who's to say people's car stereos aren't just as bad a distraction, if not worse? Oh! But wait a minute! We don't WANT to address that possibility, because most of us really LIKE listening to the radio while we drive. Never-mind the fact a person might not be able to hear the siren of an oncoming fire truck or ambulance, right? Don't bother counting all the accidents that happen when a person takes their eyes off the road at the wrong moment to change the station or adjust the radio.....
As for driving while too tired? Yep, that's dangerous too ... but again, different people have different tolerance levels. Some people I know can do really long drives straight-through, and have proven their competence at it by doing it time after time after time, without once having an accident. Others (like myself) would have to stop after about half that distance to get some rest and give my eyes a break. Banning cellphone usage in cars is about as sensible as passing laws requiring you prove you slept a minimum of 8 to 9 hours the previous night, any time you're stopped and checked for "tiredness"!
If anything, perhaps the issue is simply that some of the non NP-hard games have discernible patterns in them that human players pick up on? For example, I can remember one of my friends who loved console sports games, back when we were all in college. Often, though, he'd buy a new one for Sega or what-not, think it was *awesome* for a while, and then suddenly just quit playing it. His reason was inevitably one of having figured out some pattern that he could always score a goal with - making the game no longer a challenge. Same reason I quit playing Starcraft and several other "resource management" type games.... Once I (or in my case, my opponents) all started figuring out the "optimal" ways to use their characters, it became more a game of following exact patterns of "create this unit, then this and this one as quickly as possible, followed by using first unit to make 4 of these.... etc. etc.". If all players knew the optimal strategies, it boiled down to who clicked with the least "lag time" between clicks, or who made a mistake by mis-clicking. BORING!
I'm sure NP-hard games have an inherent "advantage" in that they're proven not to have such "possible to memorize" strategies to win consistently ... but many other factors determine if they're "fun to play" or not, beyond that. (I know quite a few people who really dislike playing chess, even though it's both NP-hard AND considered one of the "all time great games ever invented". For some folks, it probably just seems too dull and dry. I'm sure that's why they sold so many copies of "Battlechess" years ago. It was still chess, but all the 3D animations and creative "kill moves" when you captured pieces added something the original lacked.)
"Don't buy their products" is hardly a useful response this long after the fact! Most people I know with a PS3 purchased it YEARS ago, and are just now dealing with this firmware issue.
And furthermore, I don't *care* if piracy "convinces a corporation that stricter anti-piracy measures are the answer". The fact is, eventually, that whole "cat and mouse" game ends somewhere. Either the company tries the "let's get tough on them!" thing, pumping huge amounts of money in it, only to find it keeps failing them and they change strategies, OR they come up with something that's genuinely effective at curbing the piracy and the would-be pirates move to greener pastures.
For an example of this, look at the satellite TV providers. After years and years of "back and forth", both Dish and DirecTV now have a system that's considered "unbreakable" by the TV pirates. (It would be interesting to see how many basic subscriptions they completely lost though, since with many of the old methods of hacking their receivers, keeping at least a basic subscription was needed so the access card's ID was shown as "active" in their system.)
In this particular situation, Sony has done something pretty indefensible, because they removed a legitimate feature from their product to block THEORETICAL piracy. (GeoHot hadn't even released anything allowing PS3 software piracy. He just showed how Linux could theoretically be useful to hack into the system.) And frankly, I'm still not sure why someone can't create a bootable Linux image on DVD that runs completely from the disc a a "live distro" for a PS3, even with this "boot other OS" menu option stripped out?
Sony completely jumped the gun on this, out of nothing but fear of a potential hack -and alienated a big part of their existing customer base in the process.
Dumb move.
You can go to customize your network settings from XMB, and get to the part about DNS nameservers. Select custom, and enter the following IP as your Primary DNS:
67.202.81.137
Aaron at RVLution.net is hosting this customized DNS server that hands your PS3 back info tricking it into believing it's already running the latest firmware revision. It can then connect happily to PSN, @Home and whatever else without requiring this garbage firmware "downgrade" they released.
I never said that I was for the bailout. In fact, I think that's one of the WORST decisions our government has ever made!
The problem is, the banks and the government are in collusion. The Federal Reserve is going to look out for the interests of those they're closest to, and that would be the bankers and big brokers on Wall Street. They hold all the power, because they control all the wealth. As long as government places trust in the Fed, and treats their word as the "best financial advice" to implement moving forward, we'll continue to see them looking out for their "buddies" at everyone else's peril.
I'm not absolving lenders of their responsibility. But what I am saying is, for better or for worse, we DO rely on a central banking system in this nation. People collectively decided long ago that the barter system was awfully inconvenient, and there were some big advantages to setting up a network of banks that could loan sometimes large amounts of money to people. This requires a degree of a thing called TRUST, for it all to work smoothly.
I'm sure we all know someone who felt (or felt ourselves) that they were mistreated by lenders in the past, because they were so fixated on a FICA score, vs. really sitting down and evaluating credit-worthiness of the INDIVIDUAL. In the not so distant past, a simple handshake agreement held some actual weight. There was an understanding that one's promise and word was something of value, and not to be squandered. These days, all the lenders reduce you to some numbers, purchased from one of several big credit agencies who typically have inaccurate and/or outdated records in their files. People willing to "game" the system can do all sorts of things to artificially inflate those scores and get credit they don't deserve, while others get punished by those numbers, despite having the best intentions and motivation to make their payments on time.
Many things are broken with the current system of lending on BOTH sides of the equation ... and I'm pretty sure you actually have a better handle on the relative risk involved in lending to your poor cousin than the typical bank does on lending to your poor cousin!
If the banks decided to "minimize their risks", they'd simply quit loaning money to anyone but the people with the absolute highest of credit scores and largest incomes. But that won't do us any good. So we demand they do some more risky lending, for the sake of the "people" -- but we get pissed off when they do so and it doesn't work out.
Bottom line, IMHO? NEVER legislate anything based on "morality". If we adhered to that simple policy, we wouldn't have the huge fight over whether or not gays can get married in various states, and we wouldn't have all the nonsense about prostitution (illegal to pay for something it's illegal to get for free, even from the SAME people). We wouldn't blow MASSIVE amounts of tax dollars on the "war on drugs" that's impossible to win either.
And as for laws preventing people from "parading around naked all day long"? I agree. It doesn't make much sense to enforce "indecent exposure" laws, as we have them currently. (In fact, some of the people charged with such a thing for simple public urination during past Mardi Gras celebrations in my city led to them getting put on the sex offender registry! Nice, huh?)
I'd rather say that private establishments are free to enforce their own rules and restrictions on who is welcome on their property. So if your local grocery store still wants to enforce a "no shirt, no shoes - no service!" rule, great. Failure to comply means law enforcement can have you arrested, but not just for "indecent exposure" .... for trespassing.
Sorry, but I don't think my suggestion was "bullshit" .... I hear what you're saying, but despite a home (or car) loan being collateral-based, that doesn't imply that the lender is just as happy to have your property back as getting paid.
Banks aren't in the auto sales business, nor are they in the business of selling homes. Whenever people default on these loans and cost the lenders money to collect, and again to hire people to resell the goods for them, they make it tougher on everyone else who needs a loan.
I'm with you that our nation is "going down the tubes" right now, and I'm in 100% agreement that greedy bankers and Wall Street traders are largely responsible, along with a federal govt. that's ever increasing in size, scope and desire to try to manipulate the market. But to suggest that the best course of action is to "take whatever you can get, before the ship sinks" is to admit defeat, and is the cowardly way out, IMHO.
If I was going to "get the heck out" before it "all falls down", where do you suggest I go? We're in a global economy, like it or not, and the bankruptcy and failure of the United States wouldn't be some isolated event you could just run away from. Our collapse would create a ripple effect that would probably collapse a few other economies along the way, and definitely shift the "balance of power" in the world in a new direction. (Since we owe so much to China, presently, I assume they'd be the ones to step in and claim our assets for defaulting on their loans. That would make China the new "ultimate world power", owning two large nations on opposite sides of the globe.)
But back to the original discussion point for a moment? I *do* hold the "Average Joe citizen" partly responsible for our mess, too. Far too many people were living beyond their means, trying to buy the biggest home or the priciest car or truck they could possibly get a loan for, instead of using common sense and taking a long-term outlook on things. (EG. Just because I can afford to make this payment today ... am I reasonably confident I can still make it years down the road? Am I taking into account emergencies that might come up that I'll need money for?) Despite the complaints about the "deregulation of the finance industry", that alone wouldn't have caused the problem we have now if the consumers were using their heads, instead of listening to any lender who would tell them what they wanted to hear.