I also am not a huge iTunes fan (got spoiled with Amarok on KDE 3.x, I think), but those annoying ads for the music store can be turned off. Took me a while to figure out that the setting to turn that off was under Parental Controls (WTF?).
About one year ago the voting booths where I vote were moved farther into the building and away from the windows. Much harder to crash a truck into them, or into the ballot box (though more likely this was done to make it easier to handle more voters). Then again, we're still using paper ballots and permanent markers.
Still, your scenario reminds me of a story my grandfather once told me. He was living in Florida at the time and registered as a Democrat. The person at the poles told him that his name wasn't on the list of registered voters, hoping that being elderly his eyes might not be so good. He looked at the list and pointed to his name. Then he noticed that the poll worker tried the same nonsense with the guy behind him, so he pointed to that guy's name too.
The alternative is a panoptic society where everybody has equal access to the surveillance infrastructure. Well, either that or going off to live in a cave. I'm not a huge fan of any of these options.
Even the earliest Pong games might not really be considered software. I know that in the case of Computer Space (which predates the arcade version of Pong by a little bit, but perhaps doesn't predate an early oscilloscope based implementation, not sure on my history here) the game logic is implemented entirely in hardware. A Pong implementation certainly doesn't require the use of software as we know it.
Not to mention that people were still finding new things in FF6 to talk about on Usenet up through and even after the release of FF7. Not even all of it was FWAK-like.
I take it you never read the fine print on your ticket then. It's even worse than the message they use on television: "By use of this ticket, the ticket holder agrees that: (a) he or she shall not transmit or aid in transmitting any information about the game which it grants admission, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the game".
They'd be interested in your bills to steal your identity. You're right, of course. It's easier to steal this information from a mail box (generally outside, probably doesn't have a lock) than it is to steal this information from a hard drive, at least in any targeted sense. If someone needs a hard copy to prevent this information from being lost, it isn't hard to print the bills.
I see that your previous post has been modded flamebait and judging by your posting history, I am at this point probably just feeding a troll, but I will entertain one more reply as it is a good question. I would point to specialty coffee auctions such as Cup of Excellence, Q Auctions, and eCafe as rather high profile examples where the Internet has allowed better prices for the seller. Granted, these do not require Internet access in the countries of origin, however Internet access would have been greatly beneficial, particularly in that last example (eCafe) in communicating the results of these auctions to the growers. Had participating cooperatives in Ethiopia had the communications infrastructure to see just how well they had done in the first auction, they would have participated in the second. Better communication infrastructure may have also helped the logistical nightmare that plagued the second auction. In that case, the coffees were under the control of Sidama Union, whose member cooperatives took more than half of the auction total, yet they were refusing to release the coffee for export. Had the member cooperatives been able to learn that inaction on the part of the cooperative union was delaying a rather large final payment and had there been sufficient communications infrastructure to pressure the union, I believe this process would have been sped up considerably instead of requiring visits from three board members and eventually transferring control of these lots to Yirgacheffe Union (which did then release the coffee in a timely manner, though by that time the delay had been so great that an otherwise good program has been suspended until a way to prevent such an issue from recurring is found).
This is not necessarily just about selling over the Internet, and it should be clear by now that I see Internet access as part of the larger problem of communications infrastructure, however I believe there are numerous examples throughout the world where Internet access has provided significant economic benefits. If it were otherwise, why would the Internet have spread throughout the world?
As I said before, I do agree that this is not the largest problem. Transportation infrastructure in rural areas is a big issue that would certainly be more important. As for crops deteriorating and spoiling, part of this depends on just what crops are being grown. Most of my exposure in this area is in coffee which, after processing, holds quite well in cheap warehouse space. I also agree with you regarding phone calls, but I have been to cooperatives in Ethiopia that had no clue how much money they would be getting sometimes because the communication infrastructure just wasn't there.
Umm... They already are. Picking a few random African countries from the CIA World Fact Book, agriculture accounts for 60% of exports from Ethiopia, Niger is exporting onions and livestock, Cote d'Ivoire is one of the largest exporters of coffee, cocoa, and palm oil, and if you take a look at other African countries, you'll find many more examples where people are sensibly using their comparative advantage to grow products for export (and hard currency) and, if necessary, import other food stuffs. If these people are able to get better prices for what they export, they will be able to buy more of the food they would need to import.
While I agree that there are bigger problems that need to be tackled, Internet access would be very useful for farmers growing commodity foods for export as it provides access to market information and allows them to make an informed decision about when to sell and for how much. Cheap, reliable Internet access also opens up marketing opportunities and the potential for more direct relationships where higher prices might also be had.
Those early model iPods weren't put there by real employees giving up iPods. It's like a tip jar. You always start it out with a little in there to give people the idea.
Disclaimer: I own neither an iPod nor a Zune. I have an off brand music player.
I don't really follow Firefox development, so I can't answer point 1 and can only speculate on point 3, but as a happy user of SQLite I can say that the file is not particularly human readable. It would be a binary file and while you may be able to pick out bits of text, it isn't going to be as clear in a text editor as bookmarks.html. There are, however, free tools available for interacting with SQLite database files, so it isn't as though you'll be forced to use Firefox to see its bookmarks.
Between your comment about.app's not being recognized by bash and the fact that I can't CD into a EXT2 FS alias, I think I've finally been tipped into modding bash to include that capability on the Mac. Any other requests for bash while I'm at it?
Unless you're an Apple employee or an upsteam source for them and this will magically show up in a future update, shoot me an email when it's ready for beta testing. Source tarballs are fine.
It isn't hard, but it isn't elegant. If I want to open a particular program, I should be able to just type the name of the program rather than pass the program name as an argument to another program (open). In my Preview example, the better solution would be to just type open list_of_files and let open figure out for itself that Preview is the right program to use, but that only works if Preview is the application associated with with the files I want opened.
That was previously the case on the Macintosh where the executable typically had everything it needed in the resource fork of the file, but these days the executable file is buried in a folder with a.app filename extension and the folder also contains graphics and other resources that normally would have been in the resource fork or as separate files somewhere else. It's a nice solution, but the default shell Apple provides isn't as smart as the Finder when dealing with these, so running graphical applications from the command line isn't nearly as nice as it should be (you can't just add/Applications to $PATH and say, Preview list_of_files). Still, that's much nicer than the application being an executable file, a few dozen DLLs scattered throughout the system, and a couple hundred registry entries. (On a related note, why do I think I've heard about this already being done with Linux without the DRM?)
You're right that this will happen with Windows, but this is a potential problem with many other operating systems as well. Processes can break out of chroot jails in many implementations. Additional user annoyance is a separate probelem. The way to stop the user annoyance is to get application developers to stop writing code that assumes more privliges than it ought to need.
Such Health Savings Accounts already exist. I have one. You get it with low cost high deductable health insurance and when the insurance company takes the premium, money is also taken out that goes into the HSA. Some of these are just interest earning savings accounts, but others will allow you to actively invest money over a certain amount. Have an emergency and need medical attention? You pay your deductable with money in the HSA and the insurance picks up the rest. Once you get old enough, the HSA converts into an IRA and the money in it no longer needs to be spent on only qualified medical expenses. With the plan I have, the coverage is cheap, no co-pay hassles, no trouble getting a specialist, and there is no penalty for not using the money that goes into the HSA. The down side is that filling out the tax forms gets a little more complicated (one extra form for federal and it triggers having to use the long form, and an extra form for the state as the money going into the HSA is exempt from federal income tax, but the state I live in does tax it) and while it is true that if you never get sick the insurance premiums are basically a waste, it isn't the sort of thing most people should chance. A few years ago when I got sick, lost a lot of weight and blood, and spent a week in the hospital while they figured out what was wrong with me, I would have been ruined financially without that insurance. As it was, the HSA (it was actually an MSA at the time) had enough to cover my deductable, the insurance paid the rest, and I could afford the food to get back to a healthy weight (I lost about a quarter of my weight, so I'm still working muscles/strength).
Such a plan isn't ideal for everybody, but many people who probably should have such a plan just don't know that these exist. If you think such a plan would be good for you, mention it the next time you talk with your health insurance salesperson and see what's available in your area.
I don't know why parent is marked troll. Ghirardelli isn't bad, but several years ago it was better. These days Scharffen Berger is good, though we'll see how long that lasts now that Hershey owns them. Distribution is a little messed up, but the quality is still there. Vosges is also good, if a bit strange. There are also many American chocolatiers that do not have wide distribution (and probably never will) that make very good chocolates. Still, this is rather sad. Already there are things sold as chocolate in the United States that cannot even be sold as food in Europe.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh on Office. Word 5.1 on the Mac was actually pretty good (were they selling a bundle called Office back then? I can't remember).
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Unfortunately, projected touch screen doesn't mean the floating windows from Nadesico.
I also am not a huge iTunes fan (got spoiled with Amarok on KDE 3.x, I think), but those annoying ads for the music store can be turned off. Took me a while to figure out that the setting to turn that off was under Parental Controls (WTF?).
This is about Wisconsin. Wisconsin does have state tax.
About one year ago the voting booths where I vote were moved farther into the building and away from the windows. Much harder to crash a truck into them, or into the ballot box (though more likely this was done to make it easier to handle more voters). Then again, we're still using paper ballots and permanent markers.
Still, your scenario reminds me of a story my grandfather once told me. He was living in Florida at the time and registered as a Democrat. The person at the poles told him that his name wasn't on the list of registered voters, hoping that being elderly his eyes might not be so good. He looked at the list and pointed to his name. Then he noticed that the poll worker tried the same nonsense with the guy behind him, so he pointed to that guy's name too.
The alternative is a panoptic society where everybody has equal access to the surveillance infrastructure. Well, either that or going off to live in a cave. I'm not a huge fan of any of these options.
I know, but he mentioned Pong as a specific example of a game as software when, historically, it wasn't.
Even the earliest Pong games might not really be considered software. I know that in the case of Computer Space (which predates the arcade version of Pong by a little bit, but perhaps doesn't predate an early oscilloscope based implementation, not sure on my history here) the game logic is implemented entirely in hardware. A Pong implementation certainly doesn't require the use of software as we know it.
I think the problem is in the summary. After all,
"intellectual prophylactic for memetically transmitted diseases"
Does anybody else feel dumber just reading that?
Pluto is a planet. Dwarf and minor are adjectives and neither means "not".
Not to mention that people were still finding new things in FF6 to talk about on Usenet up through and even after the release of FF7. Not even all of it was FWAK-like.
I take it you never read the fine print on your ticket then. It's even worse than the message they use on television: "By use of this ticket, the ticket holder agrees that: (a) he or she shall not transmit or aid in transmitting any information about the game which it grants admission, including, but not limited to, any account, description, picture, video, audio, reproduction or other information concerning the game".
They'd be interested in your bills to steal your identity. You're right, of course. It's easier to steal this information from a mail box (generally outside, probably doesn't have a lock) than it is to steal this information from a hard drive, at least in any targeted sense. If someone needs a hard copy to prevent this information from being lost, it isn't hard to print the bills.
I see that your previous post has been modded flamebait and judging by your posting history, I am at this point probably just feeding a troll, but I will entertain one more reply as it is a good question. I would point to specialty coffee auctions such as Cup of Excellence, Q Auctions, and eCafe as rather high profile examples where the Internet has allowed better prices for the seller. Granted, these do not require Internet access in the countries of origin, however Internet access would have been greatly beneficial, particularly in that last example (eCafe) in communicating the results of these auctions to the growers. Had participating cooperatives in Ethiopia had the communications infrastructure to see just how well they had done in the first auction, they would have participated in the second. Better communication infrastructure may have also helped the logistical nightmare that plagued the second auction. In that case, the coffees were under the control of Sidama Union, whose member cooperatives took more than half of the auction total, yet they were refusing to release the coffee for export. Had the member cooperatives been able to learn that inaction on the part of the cooperative union was delaying a rather large final payment and had there been sufficient communications infrastructure to pressure the union, I believe this process would have been sped up considerably instead of requiring visits from three board members and eventually transferring control of these lots to Yirgacheffe Union (which did then release the coffee in a timely manner, though by that time the delay had been so great that an otherwise good program has been suspended until a way to prevent such an issue from recurring is found).
This is not necessarily just about selling over the Internet, and it should be clear by now that I see Internet access as part of the larger problem of communications infrastructure, however I believe there are numerous examples throughout the world where Internet access has provided significant economic benefits. If it were otherwise, why would the Internet have spread throughout the world?
As I said before, I do agree that this is not the largest problem. Transportation infrastructure in rural areas is a big issue that would certainly be more important. As for crops deteriorating and spoiling, part of this depends on just what crops are being grown. Most of my exposure in this area is in coffee which, after processing, holds quite well in cheap warehouse space. I also agree with you regarding phone calls, but I have been to cooperatives in Ethiopia that had no clue how much money they would be getting sometimes because the communication infrastructure just wasn't there.
Umm... They already are. Picking a few random African countries from the CIA World Fact Book, agriculture accounts for 60% of exports from Ethiopia, Niger is exporting onions and livestock, Cote d'Ivoire is one of the largest exporters of coffee, cocoa, and palm oil, and if you take a look at other African countries, you'll find many more examples where people are sensibly using their comparative advantage to grow products for export (and hard currency) and, if necessary, import other food stuffs. If these people are able to get better prices for what they export, they will be able to buy more of the food they would need to import.
While I agree that there are bigger problems that need to be tackled, Internet access would be very useful for farmers growing commodity foods for export as it provides access to market information and allows them to make an informed decision about when to sell and for how much. Cheap, reliable Internet access also opens up marketing opportunities and the potential for more direct relationships where higher prices might also be had.
Those early model iPods weren't put there by real employees giving up iPods. It's like a tip jar. You always start it out with a little in there to give people the idea.
Disclaimer: I own neither an iPod nor a Zune. I have an off brand music player.
I don't really follow Firefox development, so I can't answer point 1 and can only speculate on point 3, but as a happy user of SQLite I can say that the file is not particularly human readable. It would be a binary file and while you may be able to pick out bits of text, it isn't going to be as clear in a text editor as bookmarks.html. There are, however, free tools available for interacting with SQLite database files, so it isn't as though you'll be forced to use Firefox to see its bookmarks.
It isn't hard, but it isn't elegant. If I want to open a particular program, I should be able to just type the name of the program rather than pass the program name as an argument to another program (open). In my Preview example, the better solution would be to just type open list_of_files and let open figure out for itself that Preview is the right program to use, but that only works if Preview is the application associated with with the files I want opened.
That was previously the case on the Macintosh where the executable typically had everything it needed in the resource fork of the file, but these days the executable file is buried in a folder with a .app filename extension and the folder also contains graphics and other resources that normally would have been in the resource fork or as separate files somewhere else. It's a nice solution, but the default shell Apple provides isn't as smart as the Finder when dealing with these, so running graphical applications from the command line isn't nearly as nice as it should be (you can't just add /Applications to $PATH and say, Preview list_of_files). Still, that's much nicer than the application being an executable file, a few dozen DLLs scattered throughout the system, and a couple hundred registry entries. (On a related note, why do I think I've heard about this already being done with Linux without the DRM?)
You're right that this will happen with Windows, but this is a potential problem with many other operating systems as well. Processes can break out of chroot jails in many implementations. Additional user annoyance is a separate probelem. The way to stop the user annoyance is to get application developers to stop writing code that assumes more privliges than it ought to need.
Such Health Savings Accounts already exist. I have one. You get it with low cost high deductable health insurance and when the insurance company takes the premium, money is also taken out that goes into the HSA. Some of these are just interest earning savings accounts, but others will allow you to actively invest money over a certain amount. Have an emergency and need medical attention? You pay your deductable with money in the HSA and the insurance picks up the rest. Once you get old enough, the HSA converts into an IRA and the money in it no longer needs to be spent on only qualified medical expenses. With the plan I have, the coverage is cheap, no co-pay hassles, no trouble getting a specialist, and there is no penalty for not using the money that goes into the HSA. The down side is that filling out the tax forms gets a little more complicated (one extra form for federal and it triggers having to use the long form, and an extra form for the state as the money going into the HSA is exempt from federal income tax, but the state I live in does tax it) and while it is true that if you never get sick the insurance premiums are basically a waste, it isn't the sort of thing most people should chance. A few years ago when I got sick, lost a lot of weight and blood, and spent a week in the hospital while they figured out what was wrong with me, I would have been ruined financially without that insurance. As it was, the HSA (it was actually an MSA at the time) had enough to cover my deductable, the insurance paid the rest, and I could afford the food to get back to a healthy weight (I lost about a quarter of my weight, so I'm still working muscles/strength).
Such a plan isn't ideal for everybody, but many people who probably should have such a plan just don't know that these exist. If you think such a plan would be good for you, mention it the next time you talk with your health insurance salesperson and see what's available in your area.
I don't know why parent is marked troll. Ghirardelli isn't bad, but several years ago it was better. These days Scharffen Berger is good, though we'll see how long that lasts now that Hershey owns them. Distribution is a little messed up, but the quality is still there. Vosges is also good, if a bit strange. There are also many American chocolatiers that do not have wide distribution (and probably never will) that make very good chocolates. Still, this is rather sad. Already there are things sold as chocolate in the United States that cannot even be sold as food in Europe.
I wouldn't be quite so harsh on Office. Word 5.1 on the Mac was actually pretty good (were they selling a bundle called Office back then? I can't remember).