Probably not. I'm pretty sure the Mormon church doesn't give a rat's ass about trademark enforcement, and I can't see one company benefiting more than another, so I'd go with this.
Re:That's an impressive feat
on
100 Million iPods
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· Score: 3, Insightful
You also have to take into account that TV's weren't widely available until nearly ten years after they were first introduced (and were essentially banned for five years), the US population is 60% larger than it was even at the end of the time period you quote, the US is much more affluent than it was back then, and of course a very significant number of those iPods were sold outside the US. Still impressive, but very difficult to compare. If TV had been able to jump to the mass market the way products today can, no doubt it would've achieved widespread adoption much faster.
That might be part of the problem, but I'm sure there are more people out there that simply don't upgrade. Every time I visit my sister and/or parents house I make sure to do it, because they never download or install updates. If it wasn't for me I doubt they'd have gotten SP2.
Because ping times are measured in milliseconds. Why don't you tell someone that you are 1,800,000,000 nanometers tall or weigh 90,000,000,000 micrograms?
China is not fully industrialized. Far from it. The fact is that in the first world, by practically any measurable metric (life expectancy, access to healthcare, literacy/education, wealth, etc.) people today are vastly better off because of industrialization. One need only look at the developing world vs. the industrialized world and see the differences.
This isn't some random government jerk asking to look inside your house. This was a subpoena from federal court on information related to a violent crime. You can't pick and choose which evidence you want to provide to a grand jury for obvious reasons. This is not a freedom of the press or freedom of speech issue. They didn't take his property. They didn't publish it against his will. They didn't prevent him from publishing it. This is a very simple case that is remarkable only for the duration that he kept his head up his ass. If you withhold evidence from a trial you will go to jail.
Do you know that members of hunter gatherer societies had more free time than the average person today?
Do you know that free time is a shit poor metric of quality of life? You're an idiot. Poor by today's standards would be a massive, massive improvement over even all but the most elite in our society a hundred years ago. When was the last time you shit in a hole in the ground (or ceramic pot and threw it out the window)? Contracted a life-threatening disease from eating food/drinking water or walking through a market? Actually feared for your ability to produce enough food for you and your family to survive? Had a family member die of a strange disease for which the doctors couldn't even diagnose a malady? Had a family member die in an industrial accident? These things happen much less often than they did in the past (and are quantitative, unlike happiness). If you think you spend too much time at work and are too materialistic then get a goddamn different job and don't buy as many things. Otherwise, stop whining about it. Shit wasn't better in the past, whether you would like it to be or not.
You're right. You *are* so much smarter and important than the rest of us. Sorry for even bothering.
Back to the actual subject (sorry for dirtying myself responding to your non sequiturs), if your main concern is to buy stuff, then why the hell wouldn't you want to pay the cheapest price? Certainly if you're after something unique or you want a community atmosphere you can go elsewhere, but we're talking about massively produced homogeneous products here! If small record stores go out of business, it's because they don't offer anything that people can't get at Wal-Mart or off the internet. That's the real problem.
Care to explain your point a little or are you just gonna continue to shake your head at all us stupid people who can't possibly grasp the truth?
I'm American, so I don't really have a horse in the race, and I disagree (mostly). You are probably correct that Turkey is not ready for full freedom of speech, religion, etc. It doesn't seem to be an issue that most Turks support strongly. I may be wrong on that, but that's certainly how it seems to me. However, the European Union must not under any circumstances budge in any of these instances.
The fact is that the EU already exists. It doesn't have to make the same decisions that the US had to make in order to ensure the survival of the government. They have dealt with insane countries at their border before (i.e. USSR, Yugoslavia, North Africa) and they can do so again. There is absolutely no need to make such a large compromise here, the EU is much better off without Turkey than Turkey without the EU. If it wants admittance, it must play by the rules completely. If that doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen. But this is an issue so important that the EU absolutely can't bend. If it takes fifty or a hundred years for Turkey to accept, then so be it. What's the point of even having freedoms spelled out in a constitution (or treaties, whatever it is that makes up EU law) if you're just going to write them off for a relatively small political and economic gain?
I'm foremost a pragmatist, but do you really want to undermine the very things the EU is supposed to protect? What really is the worth of having Turkey in the EU if it means giving up some of your own rights (nominally, sure but still)? What if EU laws concerning free expression of religion in Turkey actually causes radical Islam to *increase* its influence? It's not a given that membership in the EU will affect positive change in Turkey.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it's legal. There are two tactics that they could use that would be illegal. One, they lower the price and drive the competition out of the market, followed by them raising the price (i.e. predatory pricing). The other is if they use an existing monopoly in some way to gain a monopoly in music players. Neither Zune nor the Zune subscription service is a monopoly (they're not even significant players in the market). The only way I could think for them to do that is to lock out other music players from being used on Windows, which would be supremely stupid. Either way, for it to be illegal they will have to drive competition out. The Zune would have to actually *be* a monopoly, or at least have significantly large market share, in order to claim anti-competition.
Just look at the Xbox. It's was/is massively subsidized in order to create a larger market share. It's not considered illegal, however, because they don't have a monopoly on console sales. They still have plenty of competitors. They just sell it as a loss leader.
If they actually figure out some way to do this profitably, more power to them. I seriously doubt very many people are that interested in the subscription service to buy a Zune, even if they do get a decent deal. I mean, locking yourself into a phone contract is one thing. At least that is something you need. Locking myself into an music subscription contract does not interest me a damn bit.
I haven't played it, but I'm really excited about it. The consensus seems to be that it's ok but with a killer learning curve. Most reviewers claimed that the controls were unforgiving and too much like real golf.
This is more of a freedom of the press issue. They're not censoring what he says, or preventing him from saying what he wants. What they're trying to do is prevent him from putting his speech on the internet. That's a distinctive difference. I don't think they're targeting him specifically. Other candidates are also banned from publishing speeches other than on gov't TV. In many places freedom of the press is restricted for elections. Whether you agree with that is another issue entirely, but it's not a speech issue.
That may be a poor example. They probably should've stopped allowing unlimited returns, as that would no doubt be heavily exploited by people looking to rip CD's. What they maybe should've done instead is create some sort of membership (like grocery store cards) that allowed them to track which customers were legitimately buying CD's and which were just screwing them. Obviously it's hard to make a case for Tower doing the right thing, as they are now out of business, but I think they may have been screwed either way.
On another note, nobody seems to be talking about the fact that Tower *massively* over-expanded in the 90's. Record sales were great, and they opened up a ton of new stores that it couldn't support. When the market sank earlier this decade, they obviously couldn't support the massive number of shops they opened. Other large chains, while certainly not having great success, have not experienced the massive collapse of Tower.
I played Wii sports at a friend's house, and I enjoyed it. It didn't really make me want to get a Wii, though. Once they bring over something like Top Spin or Virtua Tennis I'll buy the thing in a heartbeat. That's a dream come true.
I wasn't defending Vista. I was just saying your estimates were ridiculously off. My PC, which again cost only $300 over a year ago, runs Vista well (yes, even Aero). The only thing that is worse on my PC than on a Mini is the processor. Everything else is significantly better than the low level Mini. You can easily get a PC that runs Vista well for much less than your wildly overestimated $1200.
You don't have to lie and exaggerate to make your point. If you think Vista sucks, then say Vista sucks. I'm not gonna argue with that, it's not really that cool. Don't just make shit up, though. There are enough legitimate marks against it, you don't have to resort to that.
To answer your (obviously patronizing) question, the home premium edition of Vista has everything but full backup/restore, fax/scan, remote desktop, and drive encryption. It costs $160 to upgrade. I don't know why anyone would buy Vista Ultimate as it doesn't really make much sense, especially for a home user.
PS, don't say sheeple. It's a ridiculous term and makes you look like a condescending asshole. God forbid if someone has a different opinion than you.
You're crazy. You must be trolling because nobody could throw out that line of shit with a straight face. I run Vista on my machine, and it runs fine. It is a year old, and not counting the monitor cost me about $300. I have a Sempron 2600+, semi-cheap mobo, 1GB memory, 256MB video card, and 120GB HDD. Everything Vista does works fine. It's certainly not a top of the line system, but it performs *very* well and compares well to a Mini. You could build a similar system to the Mini for much less than the $600-800 price tag Apple puts on that thing (hint, no 2GB RAM or $300+ video card). That form factor costs you an arm and a leg.
Also, a high end copy of Vista doesn't cost $300 if you're upgrading from XP. And if you're not upgrading from XP then why the hell would you build a system from scratch? You might as well make use of Dell to get a discount.
If you like Apple, then that's fine, but you are lying. Stop making shit up in an attempt to make yourself feel better.
Well, I sympathize with you and hope you get lucky and end up staying here. I think a great system would be to offer automatic work visas and a fast-track to citizenship for anyone who graduates from an accredited US university. A huge amount of top students from around the world (particularly Asia) get their degrees here, and it would be a tremendous advantage for us to be able to attract more talented people into immigrating. I really don't see a down side. Most of our immigrants (it seems, at least) are unskilled and uneducated. It'd be great to get more skilled workers.
I no longer feel that a college education means something. My military background and ability to learn from the Internet makes for a strong ME.
I think maybe a college education has always been a little overrated. Granted, it's the most common way for people to get educated in difficult subjects, but an intelligent, inquisitive person can always succeed no matter the path they take to get knowledge. For most people, you can at least get an undergrad degree in some area with a good amount of effort. It's just a piece of paper that says you're slightly smarter than average and are willing to put in a certain amount of effort to finish what you start. A college degree isn't a guarantee for anything anymore, if it ever was.
You're joking, but you hit on a salient point. Whether chimps should have more rights than something stupid like a cow is an important question, just like whether a cow should have more rights than a cockroach. I think it's pretty ridiculous to expect the same rights to be given a chimp as you give to a human, though. Rights come with responsibilities as well. You certainly wouldn't expect a chimp to be able to understand the law and understand the consequences of things such as the aforementioned flinging poo at people. If a chimp can sue me for abusing it, then I damn sure better be able to sue the chimp for abusing me. Could you imagine someone at the zoo suing a monkey for throwing shit at them? To anyone paying attention, that's pretty god damn ridiculous.
Besides, what the hell is the point in chimps even having rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion? Obviously they don't need them, so it's pretty ridiculous to claim that they should have them. If they don't even have the ability to exercise natural rights, they probably don't have them.
NYC to Chicago is only medium distance by US standards. It's about 800 miles (1300 km) which is roughly the same distance as Aomori to Yamaguchi (the whole island of Honshu) and over 50% longer than Paris-Marseille (nearly as long as Paris-Rome would be, although without the mountains). If you want to run through Pittsburgh and Cleveland (only two cities near the route) add another 100 miles (160 km). Add another hundred miles if you want to run through Philadelphia. A high speed train running that far is simply not realistic with the low population densities that exist in the US. DC to Boston is the only realistic path for a high speed train. Even going further down the coast doesn't make much sense.
LA to San Francisco is 400 miles, which is a little longer than the distance from Berlin to Munich. That's a route that bypasses any medium to large sized California city, which pretty much means the passengers on the train would be riding only from LA to San Fran. Any other route going through a different route in the central valley would be a significant distance longer, going through San Jose would add maybe 50-75 miles to the route. It's hard to imagine a train running that distance being profitable with no cities on the way to load/unload passengers. And once you start adding stops, the train gets slower to the point where it's much, much faster to just take a plane.
The US lacks the population density to run a rail service for a profit anywhere but the northeast. Any large-scale rail service like what is done in Europe would have to be done at a massive loss by the government. Some things would have to change dramatically for that to happen.
The reason American's "love traffic" is because it is fast and convenient. Train service, unless done exceptionally well, is not either.
Trying to sell you something you actually want, as opposed to mass-marketed stuff you aren't interested in. Hardly worthy of a peace prize, but certainly not evil.
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Probably not. I'm pretty sure the Mormon church doesn't give a rat's ass about trademark enforcement, and I can't see one company benefiting more than another, so I'd go with this.
You also have to take into account that TV's weren't widely available until nearly ten years after they were first introduced (and were essentially banned for five years), the US population is 60% larger than it was even at the end of the time period you quote, the US is much more affluent than it was back then, and of course a very significant number of those iPods were sold outside the US. Still impressive, but very difficult to compare. If TV had been able to jump to the mass market the way products today can, no doubt it would've achieved widespread adoption much faster.
That might be part of the problem, but I'm sure there are more people out there that simply don't upgrade. Every time I visit my sister and/or parents house I make sure to do it, because they never download or install updates. If it wasn't for me I doubt they'd have gotten SP2.
Because ping times are measured in milliseconds. Why don't you tell someone that you are 1,800,000,000 nanometers tall or weigh 90,000,000,000 micrograms?
China is not fully industrialized. Far from it. The fact is that in the first world, by practically any measurable metric (life expectancy, access to healthcare, literacy/education, wealth, etc.) people today are vastly better off because of industrialization. One need only look at the developing world vs. the industrialized world and see the differences.
This isn't some random government jerk asking to look inside your house. This was a subpoena from federal court on information related to a violent crime. You can't pick and choose which evidence you want to provide to a grand jury for obvious reasons. This is not a freedom of the press or freedom of speech issue. They didn't take his property. They didn't publish it against his will. They didn't prevent him from publishing it. This is a very simple case that is remarkable only for the duration that he kept his head up his ass. If you withhold evidence from a trial you will go to jail.
Do you know that free time is a shit poor metric of quality of life? You're an idiot. Poor by today's standards would be a massive, massive improvement over even all but the most elite in our society a hundred years ago. When was the last time you shit in a hole in the ground (or ceramic pot and threw it out the window)? Contracted a life-threatening disease from eating food/drinking water or walking through a market? Actually feared for your ability to produce enough food for you and your family to survive? Had a family member die of a strange disease for which the doctors couldn't even diagnose a malady? Had a family member die in an industrial accident? These things happen much less often than they did in the past (and are quantitative, unlike happiness). If you think you spend too much time at work and are too materialistic then get a goddamn different job and don't buy as many things. Otherwise, stop whining about it. Shit wasn't better in the past, whether you would like it to be or not.
You're right. You *are* so much smarter and important than the rest of us. Sorry for even bothering.
Back to the actual subject (sorry for dirtying myself responding to your non sequiturs), if your main concern is to buy stuff, then why the hell wouldn't you want to pay the cheapest price? Certainly if you're after something unique or you want a community atmosphere you can go elsewhere, but we're talking about massively produced homogeneous products here! If small record stores go out of business, it's because they don't offer anything that people can't get at Wal-Mart or off the internet. That's the real problem.
Care to explain your point a little or are you just gonna continue to shake your head at all us stupid people who can't possibly grasp the truth?
I'm American, so I don't really have a horse in the race, and I disagree (mostly). You are probably correct that Turkey is not ready for full freedom of speech, religion, etc. It doesn't seem to be an issue that most Turks support strongly. I may be wrong on that, but that's certainly how it seems to me. However, the European Union must not under any circumstances budge in any of these instances.
The fact is that the EU already exists. It doesn't have to make the same decisions that the US had to make in order to ensure the survival of the government. They have dealt with insane countries at their border before (i.e. USSR, Yugoslavia, North Africa) and they can do so again. There is absolutely no need to make such a large compromise here, the EU is much better off without Turkey than Turkey without the EU. If it wants admittance, it must play by the rules completely. If that doesn't happen, then it doesn't happen. But this is an issue so important that the EU absolutely can't bend. If it takes fifty or a hundred years for Turkey to accept, then so be it. What's the point of even having freedoms spelled out in a constitution (or treaties, whatever it is that makes up EU law) if you're just going to write them off for a relatively small political and economic gain?
I'm foremost a pragmatist, but do you really want to undermine the very things the EU is supposed to protect? What really is the worth of having Turkey in the EU if it means giving up some of your own rights (nominally, sure but still)? What if EU laws concerning free expression of religion in Turkey actually causes radical Islam to *increase* its influence? It's not a given that membership in the EU will affect positive change in Turkey.
Not to mention it's right next to El Paso, Texas which according to Wikipedia is the 21st largest city in the US.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure it's legal. There are two tactics that they could use that would be illegal. One, they lower the price and drive the competition out of the market, followed by them raising the price (i.e. predatory pricing). The other is if they use an existing monopoly in some way to gain a monopoly in music players. Neither Zune nor the Zune subscription service is a monopoly (they're not even significant players in the market). The only way I could think for them to do that is to lock out other music players from being used on Windows, which would be supremely stupid. Either way, for it to be illegal they will have to drive competition out. The Zune would have to actually *be* a monopoly, or at least have significantly large market share, in order to claim anti-competition.
Just look at the Xbox. It's was/is massively subsidized in order to create a larger market share. It's not considered illegal, however, because they don't have a monopoly on console sales. They still have plenty of competitors. They just sell it as a loss leader.
If they actually figure out some way to do this profitably, more power to them. I seriously doubt very many people are that interested in the subscription service to buy a Zune, even if they do get a decent deal. I mean, locking yourself into a phone contract is one thing. At least that is something you need. Locking myself into an music subscription contract does not interest me a damn bit.
I haven't played it, but I'm really excited about it. The consensus seems to be that it's ok but with a killer learning curve. Most reviewers claimed that the controls were unforgiving and too much like real golf.
This is more of a freedom of the press issue. They're not censoring what he says, or preventing him from saying what he wants. What they're trying to do is prevent him from putting his speech on the internet. That's a distinctive difference. I don't think they're targeting him specifically. Other candidates are also banned from publishing speeches other than on gov't TV. In many places freedom of the press is restricted for elections. Whether you agree with that is another issue entirely, but it's not a speech issue.
That may be a poor example. They probably should've stopped allowing unlimited returns, as that would no doubt be heavily exploited by people looking to rip CD's. What they maybe should've done instead is create some sort of membership (like grocery store cards) that allowed them to track which customers were legitimately buying CD's and which were just screwing them. Obviously it's hard to make a case for Tower doing the right thing, as they are now out of business, but I think they may have been screwed either way.
On another note, nobody seems to be talking about the fact that Tower *massively* over-expanded in the 90's. Record sales were great, and they opened up a ton of new stores that it couldn't support. When the market sank earlier this decade, they obviously couldn't support the massive number of shops they opened. Other large chains, while certainly not having great success, have not experienced the massive collapse of Tower.
Care to expand on that a little now that your acid trip has worn off?
I played Wii sports at a friend's house, and I enjoyed it. It didn't really make me want to get a Wii, though. Once they bring over something like Top Spin or Virtua Tennis I'll buy the thing in a heartbeat. That's a dream come true.
I wasn't defending Vista. I was just saying your estimates were ridiculously off. My PC, which again cost only $300 over a year ago, runs Vista well (yes, even Aero). The only thing that is worse on my PC than on a Mini is the processor. Everything else is significantly better than the low level Mini. You can easily get a PC that runs Vista well for much less than your wildly overestimated $1200.
You don't have to lie and exaggerate to make your point. If you think Vista sucks, then say Vista sucks. I'm not gonna argue with that, it's not really that cool. Don't just make shit up, though. There are enough legitimate marks against it, you don't have to resort to that.
To answer your (obviously patronizing) question, the home premium edition of Vista has everything but full backup/restore, fax/scan, remote desktop, and drive encryption. It costs $160 to upgrade. I don't know why anyone would buy Vista Ultimate as it doesn't really make much sense, especially for a home user.
PS, don't say sheeple. It's a ridiculous term and makes you look like a condescending asshole. God forbid if someone has a different opinion than you.
You're crazy. You must be trolling because nobody could throw out that line of shit with a straight face. I run Vista on my machine, and it runs fine. It is a year old, and not counting the monitor cost me about $300. I have a Sempron 2600+, semi-cheap mobo, 1GB memory, 256MB video card, and 120GB HDD. Everything Vista does works fine. It's certainly not a top of the line system, but it performs *very* well and compares well to a Mini. You could build a similar system to the Mini for much less than the $600-800 price tag Apple puts on that thing (hint, no 2GB RAM or $300+ video card). That form factor costs you an arm and a leg.
Also, a high end copy of Vista doesn't cost $300 if you're upgrading from XP. And if you're not upgrading from XP then why the hell would you build a system from scratch? You might as well make use of Dell to get a discount.
If you like Apple, then that's fine, but you are lying. Stop making shit up in an attempt to make yourself feel better.
Well, I sympathize with you and hope you get lucky and end up staying here. I think a great system would be to offer automatic work visas and a fast-track to citizenship for anyone who graduates from an accredited US university. A huge amount of top students from around the world (particularly Asia) get their degrees here, and it would be a tremendous advantage for us to be able to attract more talented people into immigrating. I really don't see a down side. Most of our immigrants (it seems, at least) are unskilled and uneducated. It'd be great to get more skilled workers.
I think maybe a college education has always been a little overrated. Granted, it's the most common way for people to get educated in difficult subjects, but an intelligent, inquisitive person can always succeed no matter the path they take to get knowledge. For most people, you can at least get an undergrad degree in some area with a good amount of effort. It's just a piece of paper that says you're slightly smarter than average and are willing to put in a certain amount of effort to finish what you start. A college degree isn't a guarantee for anything anymore, if it ever was.
You're joking, but you hit on a salient point. Whether chimps should have more rights than something stupid like a cow is an important question, just like whether a cow should have more rights than a cockroach. I think it's pretty ridiculous to expect the same rights to be given a chimp as you give to a human, though. Rights come with responsibilities as well. You certainly wouldn't expect a chimp to be able to understand the law and understand the consequences of things such as the aforementioned flinging poo at people. If a chimp can sue me for abusing it, then I damn sure better be able to sue the chimp for abusing me. Could you imagine someone at the zoo suing a monkey for throwing shit at them? To anyone paying attention, that's pretty god damn ridiculous.
Besides, what the hell is the point in chimps even having rights like freedom of speech and freedom of religion? Obviously they don't need them, so it's pretty ridiculous to claim that they should have them. If they don't even have the ability to exercise natural rights, they probably don't have them.
NYC to Chicago is only medium distance by US standards. It's about 800 miles (1300 km) which is roughly the same distance as Aomori to Yamaguchi (the whole island of Honshu) and over 50% longer than Paris-Marseille (nearly as long as Paris-Rome would be, although without the mountains). If you want to run through Pittsburgh and Cleveland (only two cities near the route) add another 100 miles (160 km). Add another hundred miles if you want to run through Philadelphia. A high speed train running that far is simply not realistic with the low population densities that exist in the US. DC to Boston is the only realistic path for a high speed train. Even going further down the coast doesn't make much sense.
LA to San Francisco is 400 miles, which is a little longer than the distance from Berlin to Munich. That's a route that bypasses any medium to large sized California city, which pretty much means the passengers on the train would be riding only from LA to San Fran. Any other route going through a different route in the central valley would be a significant distance longer, going through San Jose would add maybe 50-75 miles to the route. It's hard to imagine a train running that distance being profitable with no cities on the way to load/unload passengers. And once you start adding stops, the train gets slower to the point where it's much, much faster to just take a plane.
The US lacks the population density to run a rail service for a profit anywhere but the northeast. Any large-scale rail service like what is done in Europe would have to be done at a massive loss by the government. Some things would have to change dramatically for that to happen.
The reason American's "love traffic" is because it is fast and convenient. Train service, unless done exceptionally well, is not either.
Trying to sell you something you actually want, as opposed to mass-marketed stuff you aren't interested in. Hardly worthy of a peace prize, but certainly not evil.