These little-known movies... remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent.
Everything Jim Henson ever created remained fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. I had my son watch sesame street for as long as I could, and I bought the Muppet show seasons for my niece as they come out. The old movies are still hilarious. The man was a genius!
I don't know about you, but ancient history classes for me included discussions of the paleolithic. You know, things that happened more than 6000 years ago?
Intelligent design is creationism in a cloak of pseudoscience bullshit. Intelligent design attempts to pass itself off as a scientific theory when you can't prove it, therefore it's not a theory, it's a random hypothesis with no supporting evidence. And yet because proponents of ID keep trying to do this annoying tap dance around scientific principles when it's not science.
I refuse to allow ID in any school in any way because it's a lie. Creationism as a philosophy isn't a lie, it shows itself exactly for what it is, it's a philosophy of how people think the universe was created, but there's no science behind it. Fine, so it belongs in a philosophy class that discusses multiple philosophies and ideas and critical thinking and that's it. ID is an attempt to get creationism outside of philosophy and into any other class, and that's because when you allow people to think about and question an idea, critical thinking will expose the truths and flaws. By getting it into another class, it suddenly becomes something that gets more legitimacy. The average person in a history/science/math class simply accepts what they are taught as so. People who are vested in teaching creationism don't want you to think about this or have a real critical thinking discussion, they are just hoping for more sheep.
Just from a quick google search on itunes music market share:
According to Wikipedia, as of 2006 Stevie said iTunes had 88% of the market for downloadable music According to Cnet, that percentage was 70% in 2009.
Okay so Apple appears to have market dominance in downloadable music. Confirm monopoly stamp.
Now, from the article:
"But people briefed on the inquiries also said investigators had asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple used its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give the online retailer Amazon.com exclusive access to music about to be released."
So... Amazon got first and only dibs to specific songs, thus restricting competition, and Apple is using monopoly power to tell music distributors not to do that?
*brain explodes*
I'm sure I'm going to sniff some RIAA lobbiest involvement in this once I reassemble my head.
#1 In a car, you are required to be licensed in order to use it (at least in the US and europe).
To use a car, you have to know how to drive it.
To use a router, you have to know how to set it up properly.
If you don't know how to use it, don't buy it.
#2 In your CD theft situation, it is not the normal behavior of the thief to then return the car to it's owner. Your argument makes sense but in the real world it doesn't happen that way and therefore is not a condition you have to deal with because the owner of the car is a victim of theft too. With a router, you gain unauthorized access and commits crime, but you do not actually steal the router. The owner of the router did not intend to help the criminal, but the owner's inaction did assist the criminal. The purpose of a fine would be to deter crime like this by making people responsible for their property, and learn to set up their routers properly. It's cheaper in the long run to find ways of making people concerned about security than having to drag cases like this through court and waste court time.
#3 Car manufacturers put locks on ALL cars and they are easy to use and understand. Comparitively, routers have locks, but you have to turn them on to enable them. It's like having a car with locks that you can't lock until you open the door with tools, get in, and enable by hand. People need to educate themselves on these locks or they shouldn't have wireless routers.
Along the lines of #3, this is also a great argument to start pressuring manufacturers to come up with a simple and sane tool for router configuration that requires/ you to set a password and security before you are able to use it at all! Plug it in, turn it on, try to access the internet, and you are given a page that says "set security bub". By default, routers are open and anyone can use them and the manufacturers don't care.
What drives me up a wall is that, no matter how good the Watchmen is as a comic, and how much attention to detail it has, the whole scheme was blown wide open when Nite Owl looked at a book on the desk and guessed the password for a computer that belonged to the alleged smartest man in the world. Give me a break! If you say "well this was 1985" I call BS, because even then good password practices existed then, just not as well known since not everything was password protected or connected to a net. If you say "well maybe he wasn't that smart" and I call BS because he created an intricate plot and executed it successfully so he did have high intellect. If you say he was arrogant, and he was, then why plan so well every other portion of the plan and then leave open this tiny hole? Someone else could have done the same thing and stolen company documents and been far more destructive to the plan.
My point is that Hollywood isn't the only one who uses this old standby. I love The Watchmen but even that has to have flaws.
There's no competition for consumers here, it's the same books before and after this, and they come from the same **publishers** who are selling the books. The publishers here are oligopolies who are setting prices. Amazon was strong arming the publishers and sold ebooks at a loss because they were the only ebook game in town. Now Apple comes in and offers its services, and suddenly it's the publishers who have leverage. Remember Amazon was selling books at a loss, because they had negotiating leverage. Apple didn't have as much and contractually must sell books at a specific price. Apple doesn't set the prices, the publishers do.
To increase competition for consumers you have to make publishers smaller and more numerous.
This wasn't even some crazy coup by Steve Jobs, it's in fact actually the standard publisher price. I heard the business model on Fresh Air this week and it's quite interesting.
Amazon has been taking a loss on almost every new ebook in their store. They did this to gain marketshare (they have about 80% of the ebook market) and hoped to make up the difference on kindles. The publishers feared that Amazon would demand lower prices from them over time since they have a huge marketshare and because Amazon wants to drive sales of kindles. Amazon is also trying to cut the publishers out by providing publishing services for books. The old publishers hate Amazon right now.
Along comes Apple and the iPad, and Steve basically made an agreement with publishers that they like. Steve doesn't compete on price, he competes with flash and glamour, and does to very well. The publishers in fact like the fact that there's more competition now, and that Apple has agreed to, for one year, a price structure favorable to what they want. Now Amazon will lose marketshare and be in a less favorable negotiating position and publishers can increase their prices again.
Yes Apple did agree to this, but besides the.99 thing, Steve could care less about the true price of the book. The price increases came from the publishers directly.
It's the 4/29/10 podcast of Fresh Air on NPR, check it out.
Just to point out an important correction, since this is about copyright, I can prove no Democrat ever stole music, and for that matter that no Republican stole music either.
You don't STEAL music, you infringe on the copyright. Otherwise, your comment was spot on (and I am a Democrat saying that).
No that's not true. Yes you can initiate a lawsuit and sue anyone for anything, but there is no legal basis for your feelings being hurt by this post, and with a middling lawyer you will be laughed out of court by all but the craziest of judges.
Firing, I can understand, but suing? No one was publicly humiliated or libeled. No one was physically harmed or killed. No one else suddenly lost their job. No one was discriminated against or denied rights or equal protection under the law. No one cheated or stole anything. No one was placed in potential harms way.
IANAL so I won't comment on if someone could be legally sued for this right now in the US. But I will say that I don't think anyone should be sued for this nor do I think the law should allow it. The guy goofed by leaving a phone in a bar, this isn't like falling asleep while monitoring a nuclear power plant. Being fired is enough punishment.
I don't believe any sane person believes that maximizing shareholder profits at the expense of consumer freedom and choice is a moral thing. And no, Wall Street is not sane.
Apple has a financial responsibility to it's shareholders, not a moral one. If the law allowed companies to put babies on spikes and make an obscene amount of profit from doing so, any company would do it. The amount of profit companies make these days is obscene. Naked people doing acts based on natural bodily functions to give each other pleasure is not obscene.
Ebert is seriously not going to see a serious uptick in movie review gigs if he says movies are not art. Nor is he going to see a serious downtick if he doesn't say this. He's just a critic, and as such he is full of opinions. He just think everyone wants to hear his opinion on everything. Critics are paid to write columns that are interesting and flowery to a certain kind of person. Most movie critics are over the top, and it's just their nature. They don't actually provide any real information because if they did, they'd be giving away too much about the movie.
Logically, his argument is not sound, because in an epistomological sense, everything is art. Art is life, life is art sort of thing. Art is like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. He is perfectly entitled to his opinion, but his opinion is not valid.
Thanks! Sorry I was trying to make the post American centric so I should have clarified that, I truly didn't understand Canada's specific laws or laws anywhere else and didn't mean to imply that I did.
Also, ENDA doesn't really apply to "gays at the prom" does it? I was trying to be more broad in my interpretation of "equal protection under the law". ENDA is for employers and employees and school kids aren't employees. For example, no one would think of trying to ban an African-American couple or mixed couple from a dance at a public school these days, that's currently considered legal discrimination in schools.
In the US, Schools are tasked with the impossible job of trying to please parents, who are also voters, and who are also incredibly rude and stupid about what they think is right for their kids. And what happens is that if you DON'T take action, then you get sued anyway!
Drugs? Zero tolerance because some parents and all politicians have zero tolerance, even for aspirin! Someone wrote the rule that way because some crazy person pushed it.
Gays at the prom? Because there is no equal protection under the law for gays, and too many people in american society still view gay relationships as evil. Allowing gays in the right conservative school district will get you just as sued.
Computer survellience? Well for this one there simply is no excuse. Someone obviously didn't do their homework and thought it was a good idea and forgot to check where the legal line crossed. This example is not like the others because the first two are more about social values in those areas and this is clearly a breach in well established law.
And don't forget these people are voted into office, and they are of the people and by the people. They are politicians as well, and if someone wants them to do something or risk being voted out, well this is how it works when the law isn't more clearly spelled out.
Then again, sometimes parents have an attack of sanity, like the Dover, PA case where the old school board tried to implement intelligent design, and they were voted out en masse the next election and the curriculum was scrapped.
The Russians aren't communists any more. They are capitalists, as shown in the fact that they are taking advantage of the shortage in space vehicles and the rise in demand for their ships. So now they are just like the US... greedy, corrupt corporatist pigs.
Once you master the basics, Asteroids is simply a game of endurance: Can you keep from falling asleep? And if you can, will the arcade cabinet you're playing on stay glitch-free and powered up for three days straight?
So it's incredibly easy to master the basics, and all you need to then do is keep from falling asleep and hope your lucky enough that the machine doesn't crash.
So you are saying this isn't a very impressive feat huh? It's definitely not a very interesting one.
Once the internet is completely metered and locked down, with corporate traffic given huge priority over private traffic, I wonder if all the "free market solves everything" libertarian types will still be so anti-regulation....
The libertarian philosophy is illogical at it's heart. Taking government out of everything in our lives is not government, it's Anarchy. Once the government gets involved in anything, it's no longer libertarian. It could be conservative, but it's not libertarian. And if you think the government should only be providing national defense and nothing else, then what about police and courts? Again, no rule of law, just Anarchy within the borders.
My father is the president of his home town council. Every libertarian he's every had to deal with wants the government to stay off their land and out of their life... until their neighbor does something to piss them off, then they march in demanding action from the government. It's just not logical.
Considering the philosophy is not logical, and many of them are, IMHO, downright crazy, I seriously anything short of a holocaust will change their minds. Even some conservative Republicans continue to say the economic downturn was because we weren't conservative enough in our regulation laws, and they and libertarians will cling to statements like that until the end of days.
...your definition of monopoly. In order to be a monopoly you have to have dominant market share. Period, end of story. Using the word monopoly in any other context is abuse of the word monopoly.
Microsoft is and continues to be a monopoly. They have 90% of the desktop OS PC market, and in the 90s they used that dominating control to armtwist PC manufacturers into not allowing AOL or netscape, both direct competitors, to be preinstalled on those PCs. They bullied the biggest of firms, IBM, into higher fees just because IBM would not play ball in exactly the way they wanted. IBM at the time was a bigger company than Microsoft. If you can bully IBM, of all companies, you have way too much power.
Apple does not dominate the cell phone or smart phone market Apple does not dominate the desktop PC market Apple does not dominate the desktop OS market Apple does dominate the portable MP3 music player market
So your comments do have merit if you were talking the portable MP3 player market, but you never clarified that, and I seriously doubt you are only talking about MP3 players.
You also have to keep in context what Microsoft and apple does as a monopoly. Microsoft used it's market dominance to damage competitors and stifle competition so they could drive up prices on their software. Apple has strong armed, who? The RIAA? The MPAA? The telecom companies? Talk about monopolies! Apple doesn't have anyone downstream to strong arm, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone upstream manufacturing devices for Apple that is getting strong armed. Apple is in fact bringing more things in house, so that they own the pieces to design.
Do I think that it would be nice to have more freedom on our devices? Yes. Do I think apple censoring apps on the app store is wrong? Yes. Do I have ethical and moral concerns with how they treat developers and selectively control the market for their own apps? Yes. Do I think they are a monopoly? HELL NO. I could switch to windows in a heartbeat. I could switch to Symbian, Palm, Android, Windows or Blackberry in a second if it wasn't for contracts which, while supported by Apple, are not directly Apple's and need to be addressed ultimately with the phone company, not Apple. The iPod touch is a dominating music player, but it's also going up against PSP and nintendo for gaming, which it doesn't have a dominant market in, and I could switch to either of those for portable gaming. I could simply chose not to use the iPad.
As a consumer and as a developer, I have a choice, so far. That is, not to work with Apple and work on the other platforms where I could be a success as well. I think the best companies find a way to work with all of them, but the secret is, you have a choice here. And choice = no monopoly.
I never trust an outfit that has return policies like new Egg. Unless you prove that the item is defective, and note you have to find some way of proving that it's defective over the internet, especially after you have already returned it, they charge you a 15% restocking fee. It's not illegal, but it's still bullshit. I need to trust the products are quality and that if they aren't the merchant is willing to stand behind them.
I bought an SD chip from they a while ago. It didn't work. So I returned it saying it was defective and got a new one, which worked. Well they charged me the 15% restocking fee even though I said it was defective. I later bought an external hard drive case, that to this day is a little flakey, but it was one of the higher end cases that supposedly got good reviews. The risk of the 15% restock fee was not worth it.
That's not good customer service. I'm surprised to this day how much good press it gets from some slashdotters, but they don't get my business any more. I don't trust their customer service or their quality. I know this is anecdotal but I'm just throwing my $.02 in.
All I see in the story is innuendo; no hint of any actual evidence.
It's also somewhat hard to believe that the Korean conglomerates are conspiring with the Japanese ones.
I agree with you about your first assertion, but trying to support your assertion with stereotypes is silly.
Human beings the world over speak the language of money. Supposed "cultural enemies" time and time again over history have colluded to make more money. Don't dismiss this as unlikely simply because Koreans and Japanese don't get along all the time.
Stereotypically, everyone hates the Americans for being stupid and hateful and Sterotypically Americans are xenophobes, and yet everyone seems to be doing business with us when it's profitable.
Slashdot Mirror
...Insult the good name of Muppets.
These little-known movies... remain fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent.
Everything Jim Henson ever created remained fresh, funny, and surprisingly irreverent. I had my son watch sesame street for as long as I could, and I bought the Muppet show seasons for my niece as they come out. The old movies are still hilarious. The man was a genius!
I don't know about you, but ancient history classes for me included discussions of the paleolithic. You know, things that happened more than 6000 years ago?
Intelligent design is creationism in a cloak of pseudoscience bullshit. Intelligent design attempts to pass itself off as a scientific theory when you can't prove it, therefore it's not a theory, it's a random hypothesis with no supporting evidence. And yet because proponents of ID keep trying to do this annoying tap dance around scientific principles when it's not science.
I refuse to allow ID in any school in any way because it's a lie. Creationism as a philosophy isn't a lie, it shows itself exactly for what it is, it's a philosophy of how people think the universe was created, but there's no science behind it. Fine, so it belongs in a philosophy class that discusses multiple philosophies and ideas and critical thinking and that's it. ID is an attempt to get creationism outside of philosophy and into any other class, and that's because when you allow people to think about and question an idea, critical thinking will expose the truths and flaws. By getting it into another class, it suddenly becomes something that gets more legitimacy. The average person in a history/science/math class simply accepts what they are taught as so. People who are vested in teaching creationism don't want you to think about this or have a real critical thinking discussion, they are just hoping for more sheep.
Just from a quick google search on itunes music market share:
According to Wikipedia, as of 2006 Stevie said iTunes had 88% of the market for downloadable music
According to Cnet, that percentage was 70% in 2009.
Okay so Apple appears to have market dominance in downloadable music. Confirm monopoly stamp.
Now, from the article:
"But people briefed on the inquiries also said investigators had asked in particular about recent allegations that Apple used its dominant market position to persuade music labels to refuse to give the online retailer Amazon.com exclusive access to music about to be released."
So... Amazon got first and only dibs to specific songs, thus restricting competition, and Apple is using monopoly power to tell music distributors not to do that?
*brain explodes*
I'm sure I'm going to sniff some RIAA lobbiest involvement in this once I reassemble my head.
Microsoft=evil
Software patents=evil
Commence obligatory head explosions as we all realize that it's us, the average joe, that's losing in this battle.
#1
In a car, you are required to be licensed in order to use it (at least in the US and europe).
To use a car, you have to know how to drive it.
To use a router, you have to know how to set it up properly.
If you don't know how to use it, don't buy it.
#2
In your CD theft situation, it is not the normal behavior of the thief to then return the car to it's owner. Your argument makes sense but in the real world it doesn't happen that way and therefore is not a condition you have to deal with because the owner of the car is a victim of theft too. With a router, you gain unauthorized access and commits crime, but you do not actually steal the router. The owner of the router did not intend to help the criminal, but the owner's inaction did assist the criminal. The purpose of a fine would be to deter crime like this by making people responsible for their property, and learn to set up their routers properly. It's cheaper in the long run to find ways of making people concerned about security than having to drag cases like this through court and waste court time.
#3
Car manufacturers put locks on ALL cars and they are easy to use and understand. Comparitively, routers have locks, but you have to turn them on to enable them. It's like having a car with locks that you can't lock until you open the door with tools, get in, and enable by hand. People need to educate themselves on these locks or they shouldn't have wireless routers.
Along the lines of #3, this is also a great argument to start pressuring manufacturers to come up with a simple and sane tool for router configuration that requires/ you to set a password and security before you are able to use it at all! Plug it in, turn it on, try to access the internet, and you are given a page that says "set security bub". By default, routers are open and anyone can use them and the manufacturers don't care.
What drives me up a wall is that, no matter how good the Watchmen is as a comic, and how much attention to detail it has, the whole scheme was blown wide open when Nite Owl looked at a book on the desk and guessed the password for a computer that belonged to the alleged smartest man in the world. Give me a break! If you say "well this was 1985" I call BS, because even then good password practices existed then, just not as well known since not everything was password protected or connected to a net. If you say "well maybe he wasn't that smart" and I call BS because he created an intricate plot and executed it successfully so he did have high intellect. If you say he was arrogant, and he was, then why plan so well every other portion of the plan and then leave open this tiny hole? Someone else could have done the same thing and stolen company documents and been far more destructive to the plan.
My point is that Hollywood isn't the only one who uses this old standby. I love The Watchmen but even that has to have flaws.
Obviously you aren't paying attention
There's no competition for consumers here, it's the same books before and after this, and they come from the same **publishers** who are selling the books. The publishers here are oligopolies who are setting prices. Amazon was strong arming the publishers and sold ebooks at a loss because they were the only ebook game in town. Now Apple comes in and offers its services, and suddenly it's the publishers who have leverage. Remember Amazon was selling books at a loss, because they had negotiating leverage. Apple didn't have as much and contractually must sell books at a specific price. Apple doesn't set the prices, the publishers do.
To increase competition for consumers you have to make publishers smaller and more numerous.
This wasn't even some crazy coup by Steve Jobs, it's in fact actually the standard publisher price. I heard the business model on Fresh Air this week and it's quite interesting.
Amazon has been taking a loss on almost every new ebook in their store. They did this to gain marketshare (they have about 80% of the ebook market) and hoped to make up the difference on kindles. The publishers feared that Amazon would demand lower prices from them over time since they have a huge marketshare and because Amazon wants to drive sales of kindles. Amazon is also trying to cut the publishers out by providing publishing services for books. The old publishers hate Amazon right now.
Along comes Apple and the iPad, and Steve basically made an agreement with publishers that they like. Steve doesn't compete on price, he competes with flash and glamour, and does to very well. The publishers in fact like the fact that there's more competition now, and that Apple has agreed to, for one year, a price structure favorable to what they want. Now Amazon will lose marketshare and be in a less favorable negotiating position and publishers can increase their prices again.
Yes Apple did agree to this, but besides the .99 thing, Steve could care less about the true price of the book. The price increases came from the publishers directly.
It's the 4/29/10 podcast of Fresh Air on NPR, check it out.
Just to point out an important correction, since this is about copyright, I can prove no Democrat ever stole music, and for that matter that no Republican stole music either.
You don't STEAL music, you infringe on the copyright. Otherwise, your comment was spot on (and I am a Democrat saying that).
No that's not true. Yes you can initiate a lawsuit and sue anyone for anything, but there is no legal basis for your feelings being hurt by this post, and with a middling lawyer you will be laughed out of court by all but the craziest of judges.
Firing, I can understand, but suing? No one was publicly humiliated or libeled. No one was physically harmed or killed. No one else suddenly lost their job. No one was discriminated against or denied rights or equal protection under the law. No one cheated or stole anything. No one was placed in potential harms way.
IANAL so I won't comment on if someone could be legally sued for this right now in the US. But I will say that I don't think anyone should be sued for this nor do I think the law should allow it. The guy goofed by leaving a phone in a bar, this isn't like falling asleep while monitoring a nuclear power plant. Being fired is enough punishment.
I don't believe any sane person believes that maximizing shareholder profits at the expense of consumer freedom and choice is a moral thing. And no, Wall Street is not sane.
Apple has a financial responsibility to it's shareholders, not a moral one. If the law allowed companies to put babies on spikes and make an obscene amount of profit from doing so, any company would do it. The amount of profit companies make these days is obscene. Naked people doing acts based on natural bodily functions to give each other pleasure is not obscene.
Blogs and websites like to claim that they are as legitimate as broadcast and, dare I say it, print journalism
I hope when you mean legitimate broadcast journalism, you mean NPR and BBC, right?
Ebert is seriously not going to see a serious uptick in movie review gigs if he says movies are not art. Nor is he going to see a serious downtick if he doesn't say this. He's just a critic, and as such he is full of opinions. He just think everyone wants to hear his opinion on everything. Critics are paid to write columns that are interesting and flowery to a certain kind of person. Most movie critics are over the top, and it's just their nature. They don't actually provide any real information because if they did, they'd be giving away too much about the movie.
Logically, his argument is not sound, because in an epistomological sense, everything is art. Art is life, life is art sort of thing. Art is like beauty, it's in the eye of the beholder. He is perfectly entitled to his opinion, but his opinion is not valid.
Thanks! Sorry I was trying to make the post American centric so I should have clarified that, I truly didn't understand Canada's specific laws or laws anywhere else and didn't mean to imply that I did.
Also, ENDA doesn't really apply to "gays at the prom" does it? I was trying to be more broad in my interpretation of "equal protection under the law". ENDA is for employers and employees and school kids aren't employees. For example, no one would think of trying to ban an African-American couple or mixed couple from a dance at a public school these days, that's currently considered legal discrimination in schools.
In the US, Schools are tasked with the impossible job of trying to please parents, who are also voters, and who are also incredibly rude and stupid about what they think is right for their kids. And what happens is that if you DON'T take action, then you get sued anyway!
Drugs? Zero tolerance because some parents and all politicians have zero tolerance, even for aspirin! Someone wrote the rule that way because some crazy person pushed it.
Gays at the prom? Because there is no equal protection under the law for gays, and too many people in american society still view gay relationships as evil. Allowing gays in the right conservative school district will get you just as sued.
Computer survellience? Well for this one there simply is no excuse. Someone obviously didn't do their homework and thought it was a good idea and forgot to check where the legal line crossed. This example is not like the others because the first two are more about social values in those areas and this is clearly a breach in well established law.
And don't forget these people are voted into office, and they are of the people and by the people. They are politicians as well, and if someone wants them to do something or risk being voted out, well this is how it works when the law isn't more clearly spelled out.
Then again, sometimes parents have an attack of sanity, like the Dover, PA case where the old school board tried to implement intelligent design, and they were voted out en masse the next election and the curriculum was scrapped.
The Russians aren't communists any more. They are capitalists, as shown in the fact that they are taking advantage of the shortage in space vehicles and the rise in demand for their ships. So now they are just like the US... greedy, corrupt corporatist pigs.
Once you master the basics, Asteroids is simply a game of endurance: Can you keep from falling asleep? And if you can, will the arcade cabinet you're playing on stay glitch-free and powered up for three days straight?
So it's incredibly easy to master the basics, and all you need to then do is keep from falling asleep and hope your lucky enough that the machine doesn't crash.
So you are saying this isn't a very impressive feat huh? It's definitely not a very interesting one.
THERE... ARE... FOUR... DAYS!
Once the internet is completely metered and locked down, with corporate traffic given huge priority over private traffic, I wonder if all the "free market solves everything" libertarian types will still be so anti-regulation....
The libertarian philosophy is illogical at it's heart. Taking government out of everything in our lives is not government, it's Anarchy. Once the government gets involved in anything, it's no longer libertarian. It could be conservative, but it's not libertarian. And if you think the government should only be providing national defense and nothing else, then what about police and courts? Again, no rule of law, just Anarchy within the borders.
My father is the president of his home town council. Every libertarian he's every had to deal with wants the government to stay off their land and out of their life... until their neighbor does something to piss them off, then they march in demanding action from the government. It's just not logical.
Considering the philosophy is not logical, and many of them are, IMHO, downright crazy, I seriously anything short of a holocaust will change their minds. Even some conservative Republicans continue to say the economic downturn was because we weren't conservative enough in our regulation laws, and they and libertarians will cling to statements like that until the end of days.
...your definition of monopoly. In order to be a monopoly you have to have dominant market share. Period, end of story. Using the word monopoly in any other context is abuse of the word monopoly.
Microsoft is and continues to be a monopoly. They have 90% of the desktop OS PC market, and in the 90s they used that dominating control to armtwist PC manufacturers into not allowing AOL or netscape, both direct competitors, to be preinstalled on those PCs. They bullied the biggest of firms, IBM, into higher fees just because IBM would not play ball in exactly the way they wanted. IBM at the time was a bigger company than Microsoft. If you can bully IBM, of all companies, you have way too much power.
Apple does not dominate the cell phone or smart phone market
Apple does not dominate the desktop PC market
Apple does not dominate the desktop OS market
Apple does dominate the portable MP3 music player market
So your comments do have merit if you were talking the portable MP3 player market, but you never clarified that, and I seriously doubt you are only talking about MP3 players.
You also have to keep in context what Microsoft and apple does as a monopoly. Microsoft used it's market dominance to damage competitors and stifle competition so they could drive up prices on their software. Apple has strong armed, who? The RIAA? The MPAA? The telecom companies? Talk about monopolies! Apple doesn't have anyone downstream to strong arm, and you'd be hard pressed to find someone upstream manufacturing devices for Apple that is getting strong armed. Apple is in fact bringing more things in house, so that they own the pieces to design.
Do I think that it would be nice to have more freedom on our devices? Yes. Do I think apple censoring apps on the app store is wrong? Yes. Do I have ethical and moral concerns with how they treat developers and selectively control the market for their own apps? Yes. Do I think they are a monopoly? HELL NO. I could switch to windows in a heartbeat. I could switch to Symbian, Palm, Android, Windows or Blackberry in a second if it wasn't for contracts which, while supported by Apple, are not directly Apple's and need to be addressed ultimately with the phone company, not Apple. The iPod touch is a dominating music player, but it's also going up against PSP and nintendo for gaming, which it doesn't have a dominant market in, and I could switch to either of those for portable gaming. I could simply chose not to use the iPad.
As a consumer and as a developer, I have a choice, so far. That is, not to work with Apple and work on the other platforms where I could be a success as well. I think the best companies find a way to work with all of them, but the secret is, you have a choice here. And choice = no monopoly.
Direct from the article:
"This is still marked as a rumour, so we'll let you know when (and if!) it's confirmed."
And I can find no reference to a 2 or 3 in IMDB. Someone's trying to drum up ad hits, methinks.
I never trust an outfit that has return policies like new Egg. Unless you prove that the item is defective, and note you have to find some way of proving that it's defective over the internet, especially after you have already returned it, they charge you a 15% restocking fee. It's not illegal, but it's still bullshit. I need to trust the products are quality and that if they aren't the merchant is willing to stand behind them.
I bought an SD chip from they a while ago. It didn't work. So I returned it saying it was defective and got a new one, which worked. Well they charged me the 15% restocking fee even though I said it was defective. I later bought an external hard drive case, that to this day is a little flakey, but it was one of the higher end cases that supposedly got good reviews. The risk of the 15% restock fee was not worth it.
That's not good customer service. I'm surprised to this day how much good press it gets from some slashdotters, but they don't get my business any more. I don't trust their customer service or their quality. I know this is anecdotal but I'm just throwing my $.02 in.
All I see in the story is innuendo; no hint of any actual evidence.
It's also somewhat hard to believe that the Korean conglomerates are conspiring with the Japanese ones.
I agree with you about your first assertion, but trying to support your assertion with stereotypes is silly.
Human beings the world over speak the language of money. Supposed "cultural enemies" time and time again over history have colluded to make more money. Don't dismiss this as unlikely simply because Koreans and Japanese don't get along all the time.
Stereotypically, everyone hates the Americans for being stupid and hateful and Sterotypically Americans are xenophobes, and yet everyone seems to be doing business with us when it's profitable.