"Turing eventually killed himself by eating a poisoned apple after most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits."
Much, much sadder. He was prosecuted for homosexuality, sentenced to a course of estrogen, became depressed, and killed himself. This was how a grateful nation treated a man who had played a large, perhaps the leading role, in decoding Enigma signals - the decisive element in the Battle of the Atlantic. Tragic and wicked.
The reason is, they are trying to change the business model. The phone manufacturer has never before got a percentage of the revenue generated by the device for the service provider. Neither for that matter has the CD or DVD player maker ever gotten a percentage of the revenue from the CDs or DVDs that were rented.
However, people always dream of taking just a small slice of the revenue others are getting with the aid of their box or service. In the dot.com bubble days, it was common to hear telcos thinking that they would take a percent of transaction revenues that they cleared on their new fancy communications services. They got very upset if you said this was like the US Mail service trying to charge for parcels by value or for envelopes by what value of check they had in them.
Apple has always done similar things: the basic strategy is to find something the public wants, and then force them to buy something else they do not necessarily want, to get it, and use the linked sale to get increased margin. So, if I want OSX, I have to buy new hardware from Apple, whether I want to or not. If I want to buy from the iTunes store, get a Pod to play them on. If I have a Pod and I want to buy tunes, well, one online store to buy them from. Now we have the phone. Want the phone? Great, sign up with one provider whether you want to or not.
What is happening all the time is that Apple tries to, and often succeeds, in getting a piece of revenues from one of the players in the value chain which has previously been considered independent. So it was always the model in music that all music played on all players. However, if you can stop that, you can get some of the music revenues. Similarly, all phones except the iPhone are available for any network. However, if you can stop that, and if people want it enough, you can get a piece of the telco's business, unlike any other phone manufacturer.
Is it smart, and is it sustainable? The jury is out. Wall Street, or a proportion of it, clearly thinks so. The Apple faithful don't care one way or the other, but they are buying both phones and stock. A fairly large minority however are ready to buy unlocked. This is a bad sign for the model's longevity.
The real business strategy question has always been about returns. It is a strategy which involves limiting buyers, and therefore you lose potential share. Do you make it up on increased margins? The risk is that at some point you carry on with the strategy when your contribution to the party no longer will bear a premium, and this can happen for all kinds of reasons. When that happens, share will fall precipitously and stay down, as it did in the nineties, when Apple had its near death moment. OS9 was not so great that enough people were ready to pay the premiums for the hardware.
What will happen in the present case? It is doubtful that the strategy is sustainable in the mobile market. One maker probably cannot get and retain enough of a competitive lead in hardware and design that it can command the premium which the strategy implies. That after all is what is happening, isn't it? There is a premium that the iPhone commands over competitive offerings. Apple has chosen to take this by exacting a percent of revenues. It could also have taken it as a higher price. It is doubtful this premium will persist. It is also doubtful that it is technically feasible to enforce the premium by locks that will work.
There is also a fundamental question about the general strategy, and that is whether it is the best exploitation of the market premium. If you have a superb competitive position in Product A, that people will pay a premium for, is it a sensible use of that position to force people to buy Product B with it, which by hypothesis is less appealing, or you wouldn't have to lock the two together? It seems like the only circumstance this occurs is when you have a poorer competitive position in Product B. So in effect, you are wasting the margins of A by cross subsizing
What you might have said in addition is that the only reason people have the impression that translucent windows help, is that Apple has for 10 or more years now (along with MS) refused to support multiple desktops, which is the correct solution to the usability problem they are struggling with. You don't need 40 inch screens, you don't need translucent windows, you just need the ability to move windows to whatever desktop you want, and have them stay there.
He is mainly correct. There will be retail versions of Leopard that will run on x86. Contrary to what the previous poster says, this will be unlike Tiger, where you can buy a retail version, but it is PPC only.
Where he is wrong, or at least doubtful, or anyway there is no evidence for what he says, is that the retail version will run on anything but an Apple branded machine.
The interesting question is, how are they going to stop it from loading and booting - after the first couple of weeks.
If they are. That is the interesting conjecture. If it is not really possible, this could indeed be the time they finally stop trying. No evidence, but it is an interesting possibility.
This is clearly a right wing neo conservative study, probably financed by large computer and keyboard manufacturers or front organizations. The science is settled. Denialists like this are very dangerous to the future of our joints, and our children's joints. How are guys like this going to face the next generation? What will they say when our children ask us, what did you do when our elbows were at risk?
Are they going to sit there grinning sheepishly with their bandaged elbows and say, well, I waited till all the facts were in? No, they are going to hang their heads and have to admit that when all the facts were in, and the science was settled, the debate was over, they were Denialists, they cast doubt on whether the catastrophe was really heading for us. And now look what has happened. A whole generation has grown up without fingers or elbows that work! 95% of the population is no longer able to use a knife and fork!
These people are Dangerous. They probably deny evolution. They probably think cigarette smoking doesn't cause cancer. They are evil. Slashdot is part of the problem by giving them airspace. We need to move to action, now. Ban the manufacture of keyboards of any sort, and make it mandatory to use voice input devices. Like, do it next month, before its too late!
This is not quite true, in my experience. The difference between taking the drugs and not taking them, is the difference between being in a confused anxious state with no ability to do anything except beg for help over and over again, and sitting quietly reading the paper or a simple book and being able to offer comments about it. Now, this is only palliative - it slows the progress, it does not arrest it. But the benefits, particularly to the carers, are enormous.
If you have someone with Alzheimers, get them the drugs, and get them early.
This is a great move, because it will reveal the absurdity of the present locked player situation. Its a classic stage in industry evolution. Stage one is, some company (Apple) comes out with a format for purchased tunes which will only play on its own player.
This creates two incentives. The first is to increase the sale of tunes, since the other players depend on the tunes not the player as their main business. So they want more tunes sold. But as long as there is an Apple monopoly of sold tunes, this isn't going to happen, and there is nothing they can do about it.
The second incentive is to compete with Apple as a retailer.
So, because of the success so far of the Apple strategy, all they can really do is emulate it: come up with another store, another player, a different format, and tunes locked to it. Since they have to overcome an incumbent, they will be reduced to making his attractive by initially lowering the price of the tunes and using a different locked format, to make people use their player. This will be a replay of competing format wars that we have seen with hardware formats in the past.
We will then move to the stage, which we have seen previously in media with different consumer formats, where consumers still refuse to buy the stuff because they hate incompatible formats. After a while of this an unlocked standard will emerge. I don't mean a standard that is not copy protected, but one does not lock purchased tunes to players from one particular vendor, or make them be purchased by one specialised bit of software or currency. It will work just like CDs and DVDs do now: buy your content wherever you want from one of a variety of independent outlets, using whatever payment means you want, and play it on the player of your choice, from one of several manufacturers.
The Apple strategy has worked well for a while, but it has within it, like all DRM based attempts to tie up your use of what you buy, the seeds of its own destruction. It is not a sustainable business model longer term. The present model for music and CDs was. The only thing that is destroying it is overpricing from the content publishers.
Apple is far better placed to deal with the implosion of the business model. Its trivial to take locking off the iPod and iTunes store. And if the money falls out of the tunes market, it hardly affects them. For the content owners, their whole model is falling to bits in well defined stages that we have previously seen in other format wars. It is what is coming towards us.
Yes, quite right, exactly my own experience. This is what drove me to Debian. And this is what makes Mandriva basically unusable by the unsophisticated. The distro itself, any particular version, may run great. Never let a naive user try to upgrade it, though.
If all you want is one pc, and limited functionality, its quite easy. You basically emulate a simple cash register. You get a keyboard wedge type of bar code reader, you do a quick gui to allow lookups and pricing, which you model on a shopping basket. Use a keypad for data entry. Use bar codes for the control functions. Export your data as a text file, and then process it offline. Use opensource barcode software for your own code and label generation. PythonCard would be a choice, or one of the other simple Python gui generators.
However, there's a whole bunch of stuff you are not getting. You will not be able to interface with a merchant acquiror for credit card info. You'll likely end up booking in goods on a different copy of the database and keeping the two in synch while possible requires care. You won't have networking. If what you are doing it for is a small business with (for instance) one station, a few hundred stock codes, a few tens of thousands of transactions a year, it is possible. You can even do the reporting and accounting stuff in Excel or Filemaker or OO, but they are limited in terms of the size of files they will do efficiently. You will not get any real level of fraud prevention. You probably will not want to implement log ins and personal staff tracking.
When you start wanting multiple stations, large numbers of transactions, touch screen, staff tracking, handovers with cash register balancing, direct interface to credit cards...lots of discounts, complex tax accounting, that's the time to buy in. The time to write your own is when you perhaps positively do not want or need this sort of stuff, but for whatever reason want to keep it minimalist.
I basically agree that if you are wanting to get a real POS, buy it in. But there are some occasions when people want a screen based system that is much simpler than what's available commercially. If you want an electronic cash register which is easier to use and with screen based functions, don't be afraid to write it or get it written.
Remember that complexity of the coding rises as the square or cube of the functionality.
Yes, I have tried turning off Java and increasing memory. Makes no difference. The problem is this 'adapt row height' thing that it does on opening a workbook. I have some array formulas, and it simply takes forever to get through it. Its not acceptable. The row heights are all defaults in any case, so it must have some other than its literal meaning. There seems to be no information on it, no way to turn it off or find out what it is really doing.
Some of us have been approached recently by a shadowy organization trying to raise money to deal with this problem. Apparently they want to raise enough money that Daniel will absolutely have to accept it. Then they propose to assign him some enormous mind boggling task involving writing something humongous in assembler to a deadline of a year or two. It is their hope that he will then be a) too busy b) too tired to keep up this flood of stuff. The response seems to have been encouraging. A number of those approached are willing to pay substantial amounts of money for anything that will put a stop to this.
One of those approached remarked that he would rather have someone put a bucket over his head and beat it with a broom handle, than have to read another of Daniel's articles. He would rather contract Montezumas revenge in addition, if the article were about what Apple really intends, has done, will do, or why it is better and has greater market share than anyone realizes.
But that was just one person, of course. He may not be representative.
Its about mothers' reactions to male adolescent sexuality which they are seeing in the raw and closeup in their sons, maybe for the first time.
I would explain, if he just is looking for porn, this is, however little you may like it, quite normal and ordinary and all boys do it. Only worry if the porn becomes obsessively s/m or fetishistic. For many women, the raw impersonal lust of adolescent boys is quite worrying - as it would be for us, were we women.
If however he is communicating with other people about it, do worry. This is the danger: communications whose implications he doesn't fully understand, and with people who are not what they seem.
In either case, the only solution is communication with him. There are no technical solutions to this.
But the real question is: what is she worried her son may be doing?
We find this argument again and again from Apple advocates. It goes: choice is painful and people do not want it and cannot exercise it intelligently. Apple's product line, is better because it does not give this choice.
The argument has usually been applied to hardware. It is better to have less hardware choice - graphics card, keyboards, processors. In the present case it is being applied to features.
It ignores the way markets and products actually work. Nokia or whoever produces all these different models because they sell in competition with the offerings from all the other suppliers. If they stop selling, they stop making them. The same goes for Dell, Acer etc. If, from the product range on offer from all the different phone suppliers, you can't find what you want, it is not that they are idiots or manipulative, nor is it that your needs are not real and legitimate. It is just that you are in a very small minority.
It is a quite legitimate business strategy to focus on one particular set of needs in the market, as Apple does. Its called niche marketing. It is the reason why Porter is able to plot profitability versus market share, and show that it is U shaped. Profitability typically rises as share falls below a certain point - because you are in a profitable niche. If you like, you no longer have to try out all these different models in order to find out which will hit the mass buyer's hot spot, because that does not interest you. All that interests you is a small subset.
However, the basic mistake of the argument, both on the iPhone and on the Mac product range, is to assume that everyone in a mass market can practice a niche strategy. They cannot. Niches exist in large markets. It is only because of the large market that they exist. There may be a niche in computers and phones which consists among other things of people whose heads hurt when they have to choose among too many = more than three alternatives. But it is not the market as a whole. Most people actually like the choice, the competition otherwise would not produce it.
And no they are not stupid, and yes, they do pretty much know what they are buying. Whether its computers, refridgerators, washing machines, stereos...or even cars. As Detroit has been finding out over the last 10 or 20 years.
I have always been interested in the choice argument because it has echoes of political arguments. You find, for instance, in the UK, people arguing that choice in health care providers is bad. What I want is one good hospital, not a choice between 3 or 4. In the UK, this argument usually appears in the Guardian (coincidentally, an Apple computing environment...) where the assumption is that this hospital will naturally be State run. Choice in education is also deeply upsetting to people. What they really want is one good school, not a choice between half a dozen.
One suspects that the argument that lurks underneath is about politics. You really do not want all these confusing political parties. What you want is one nice, good one. It wouldn't be New Labour by any chance?
The analogy is correct in this respect: the argument in both cases ignores that the way, the only way, to get one or two or more good ones, cars, phones, computers, political parties, is by the mechanism of consumer choice. Back in the sixties, the argument might have been made, why does the UK need all these car imports? All we need is one or two good ones made by Rover (or British Leyland as it was then). Ah yes. And how exactly were you going to get Rover to produce even one halfway decent one?
You are going to be able to run Leopard on the hardware of your choice within a couple weeks of release whatever Apple thinks. It is also quite possible that Leopard will come out with official license to run it on the hardware of your choice. Either way, its going to be real interesting.
I took a small organisation to Linux and OpenOffice. The secretary/admin had only ever used MS Office previously. It was acceptable. There was a clear reason: money was very tight indeed. This certainly helped, it wasn't just ideology, there was a legitimate motivation rooted in the organisation's values of limiting overhead spend. There was a certain amount of confusion about small details of different operation of spreadsheets. The issue is, they are very similar but not quite identical. Most of the things she was used to worked about the same however - particularly filtering. However, pivot tables/data pilot turned out to be very hard to get used to. Mailing list label generation in Writer was another difficult point. I am terrible at this stuff myself and found it quite hard to teach. Well, hard to learn first.
Linux by contrast, the OS, turned out to be easy for everyone. It was indeed very stable. It turned out to supply lots of other free specialist software that we needed, and the people who needed it, not having run any proprietary equivalents in the past, just learned the new stuff and quite liked it. We created a couple of accounts for different people who work on different days, and they liked having the freedom to arrange their stuff how they liked.
Multiple desktops are one of the surprising things in Linux for new users. You must always teach them carefully and show people how to use them, and once they get used to them, they are something that is used all the time. What they really like is being able to leave one bit of work exactly as it was, move over to another workspace, do something else, and come back to exactly what you left as you left it. If you do move people to Linux, don't neglect to teach this. They will really come to appreciate it.
The big deal with calc turned out to be not the differences, which were a small irritation, but spreadsheets themselves. To get what we needed done, we ended up having to use array formulae. If you do this you will find that the average intelligent and computer literate person, even one who has worked quite a bit with spreadsheets, simply stops here. So we ended up with a spreadsheet that had a sort of mental 'off limits' tag on one of its worksheets. This works, I don't understand what it does, I don't want to know, if it goes wrong I will call up x and have him fix it. But this was a function of spreadsheets and arrays, not the way OO handles them.
There was a sort of side effect for our own admin. She left us, but before she went I watched a couple of other part timers being taught how to use the system, and the general account was, its a bit different, this is how it works, when you get used to it, its fine. But there was a definite increase in confidence that had come from mastering some new stuff, which at first had seemed rather forbidding, but had turned out to be adaptable to need.
If you do this, you have to understand you are asking people to do something unknown and a bit frightening, and absurd as it seems, something they really do not know whether they can do. I got the feedback a couple of times that 'I was so nervous about this, but I've actually learned it better than I thought I would'. You have to very much take the line that it just takes a bit of time, let them make mistakes, be instantly available when they need help, never get impatient. Pick the right time to explain just the right amount of what lies behind things. If you get them through the first few steps, the increased confidence will take them the rest of the way.
One of the most reassuring things you can say to people as they start is: you cannot do any damage to the system. Explain that they are signed on as a user, there's a backup of all the data, and nothing they do is going to damage anything. This is enormously reassuring.
All in all I would say, go for it. If you focus on the needs of the users and helping them, there's no reason it won't succeed.
Similar story, very good advice. Debian on the PIII 12 inch X series runs fast, the battery life is reasonable, the build quality is superb, and they are totally portable. Problems with the modem. But wireless works perfectly out of the box.
The remarks about bran are only partially correct. All bran is not the same. Wheat bran, contrary to the implication, is bad for you and has no dietary benefits. It irritates the intestines and blocks the absorption of nutrients. It is a myth that whole wheat bread has more vitamins and minerals and is therefore better for you than white bread. Yes, it has more vitamins and minerals. No it is not therefore better for you, because they are not accessible. What matters is not what is in it, what matters is what you can get out of it. The problem is phytates, which prevent absorption of minerals.
The right way to eat wheat bread is the way that was traditional until the rise of the steam baked industrial rapid rise loaf. That is,first, a slow fermenting rise, usually overnight. This makes the bread both lower GI index, and also more digestible. Second, flour which is not whole wheat but is relatively high extraction. This the so called grey flour of traditional French bread. Until modern times, when people talked about 'white' bread, what they meant was bread without the bran, a greyish color, but containing the germ.
The extraction rate varies from 75% or less for conventional white flour to 85% for brown but not wholewheat flour. In countries where bread is the staple, the extraction rate is usually in the low eighties and this is probably the sensible level. The rate in the US during WWII was raised to 80% - similarly in the UK, or perhaps a little higher. It would be a dramatic step forward for modern diets if it could be placed at that level today.
The same points apply to rice bran, which also should be avoided. It is striking that traditional cultures with long histories of healthy eating invariably mill rice and refine wheat, but never try remove oat bran. Both wheat and rice bran are better used by feeding to poultry, when the conversion into high quality protein is a much better use for it than irritating the human bowel to no nutritional effect.
Oat bran is in a completely different category. It does not irritate the bowel, and its nutrients are available. I believe the same to be true of spelt.
Its worth remarking that probably one of the main causes of obesity is the obsession with the low fat diet. Without any real evidence, we have embarked on a gigantic nutritional experiment in the Anglo Saxon countries over the last 30-40 years. We have gone from diets which were reasonably balanced in terms of saturated fats and complex carbohydrates, to ones which attempted to eliminate all saturated fats. However, the natural and normal craving for some fats has led to the substitution of polyunsaturated fats for saturated. There is no evidence that this is healthy, and much that it is far worse. In addition, since the available high carb foods are highly refined, we have then substitued for potatoes, rice and pasta, much sugar, including fructose. The result is a diet far worse than what we started with, and one which our evolutionary history has never prepared us for.
It is not an accident that this has happened at a time that the health food movement has metamorphosed into the supplements industry.
So what should we eat? Liberal amounts of meat, fish eggs butter and full-fat, non-homogenized milk. Absolutely no refined vegetable oils. Moderate amounts of mono-unsaturated vegetable oils (olive and peanut). No corn oil, safflower oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine. Liberal amounts of vegetables of all sorts. Liberal amounts of sourdough bread made with coarse white flour. Similarly pasta. White, not brown, rice. Parboiled is OK. Fruits in season. And fruit juice, if at all, in great moderation.
Exercise well, and stay off the scales! Because the other great cause of obesity in Western society is the practice of dieting, which, as many studies have shown, simply leads to long term weight gain.
You are missing the point. The point is not so much why they should do all these things. Maybe it is reasonable, maybe not.
The question is, why it should be necessary to compel all UK citizens who want to watch any sort of television, any of the other 80 or so channels available in the UK, to subscribe to the BBC on pain of criminal sanctions. This is what is wrong.
Various arguments are usually offered when one makes this point. Sometimes people say they like the BBC and its output. Fine, is that a reason for compelling other people to subscribe to it? I like the NYT, but I do not believe that this is a reason why everyone should have to buy it.
Sometimes people say that its a small amount of money, £120 or so a year. Yes, so what? Its not about whether its large or small, its whether I should be allowed to watch non-BBC TV, without subscribing to the BBC. £20 a year to the NYT would not be much. But I should not have to pay it as a condition of buying the Daily Mirror.
We thus arrive in the ridiculous situation where people say that they want iPlayer to work on whatever platform they choose - Mac, Linux, Amiga, BSD, whatever. They think this because they have no choice about subscribing, and so they think they are entitled to equal access to all services offered on the platforms of their choice And they are right, given the compulsion.
The BBC needs EITHER to allow the inhabitants of the UK to choose their TV programming supplier. OR, they need to make all of their services without exception available to everyone who is paying, regardless of which platform they use, or where they live. The consequences of compulsion are that you lose the freedom to act like a normal company. The BBC's current problem is that it wants to do both. It wants to be able to act like an ordinary company, raise prices at will, go into new businesses, compete with the private sector. But it also wants to have every UK citizen compelled to subscribe to it, whether they want to watch it or not, and it wants to enforce this compulsion by sending people to jail if they refuse.
This is not going to last. Sooner or later they will find, as John DeButts of ATT found, that holding the line leads to the collapse of the dam. After that, it will seem in retrospect that they should have opened the sluice gates a little. But then, it will be too late.
And, by the way, it is not the Linux or Mac user's problem. It is the BBC's problem. Figure it out, find a solution. If you can't, give them a refund and let them choose a different TV supplier. Don't bother us with your problems. We are the ones who are paying.
No, its not mistaken, they are negotiating with Vodafone in the UK, the Guardian is a UK paper, and the situation in the UK is as described. Yes, it is different in the US, but that is not what was being described or commented on.
The Guardian reported that in the UK, Vodafone had baulked at a couple of the demands. These were that a percentage of the revenues generated by the user should come back to Apple, and that there should be restrictions on what content could be accessed.
"Apple is understood to be demanding that its European mobile phone partners hand over a significant proportion of revenues generated by the iPhone and restrict the content that users can access."
So, the really interesting point about the device now becomes apparent. The business model has been so far, that you took service from whoever you wanted, using whatever phone you wanted, and you accessed whatever content you wanted. We are now seeing an attempt to get to a totally different model. To use a phone, you are obliged to sign up to a music download store, whether you are interested in music, or music from that store, or not. Then you are obliged to sign up to one and only one network. Finally, you can't access the content you want unless the phone supplier approves of it. And for all of this, you pay not only for the usage of the network, but you also end up paying a fee to the phone maker for the privilege of undergoing all these restrictions.
Now, people will write back and say, you don't have to buy it. No. And that is not the point at all. The point is not primarily about Apple or the iPhone. The point we should be paying attention to is, what happens and how will it feel, if this becomes the standard business model in the mobile internet and service arena?
I suggest not at all. As little, in fact, as if we were to be controlled in our use of our PCs by Microsoft. Buy only the hardware brands that Redmond tells you are permitted. Access only the sites that Redmond approves of. Load only the software that Redmond permits. Or Cupertino.
We must devoutly hope that this model turns into a huge business flop, not because we like or hate Apple, but because the model in itself is inimical to intellectual freedom. The present one, use what you like to do what you like, is infinitely preferable from the point of view of freedom of information and expression. Just as the present CD/DVD model is infinitely preferable to the iTunes model: buy what you want, by whatever browser or at whatever walkin store you want, pay by whatever credit card you want, take it home and play it on the player of your choice, made by whoever you choose to buy players from. This too will turn out to be about intellectual freedom, when it comes to buying ebooks and enews.
It is related to Apple and its values and strategy, in the sense that this has always been what Apple was about. But the important thing is not to be critical of Apple in itself. It is the model that is wrong. Of course, the company is very wrong too. But long as it stays below 5% of everything, who cares? Its when its model starts to dominate that we should become disturbed and enraged, or when it tries to extend its controlled and restrictive model to areas of intellectual life that are presently free.
The argument seems to be (yes it is very weird): there are lots of young men in Islamic societies that have no prospect of finding women. The cause of this is polygamy: some of the men in these societies have lots of women, the rest therefore have fewer...
[...we assume that the numbers of men and women are equal to start with, which is highly unlikely given that the societies originating suicide bombers are in servere violent conflict, which must consume quite a few men, and in addition, we also assume that the polygamy absorbs more than the 'surplus' number of women, again there's no proof...]
Then it goes on to argue, if you have no prospect of a woman in this life, and some prospect, however remote, in the next, then it is rational to choose the one in the next. But, you have to get there. One sure route is to become a suicide bomber, so you do.
[...again, note that you have to be convinced of having no prospect of a woman. This is pretty hard to believe, you might easily become convinced, assuming the rest of this idiotic argument is true, that you have a reduced prospect, but why you should believe you have none is obscure....]
The great difficulty with this is that those same societies produce women suicide bombers. In fact, in the recent case in the Red Mosque in Pakistan, the Times reports that young women of the age of 11 or so are proclaiming to their astonished families that they are seeking martyrdom for the sake of the religion in which those same parents had sent them to be educated. If the argument were valid, there would be no women suicide bombers, because according to the argument, all women are guaranteed a man. In addition, there have actually been married suicide bombers in the UK. And finally we know from Israel that some women encourage their children to become suicide bombers. So it is the motivation of mothers that also requires explanation.
You cannot simply explain the suicide bomber phenomenon by invoking the sexual situation and motives of men. It does not cover the known facts.
So what is the most plausible explanation? The most plausible explanation of polygamy is that it flourishes where there is a long term imbalance between the genders, with more women than men. The Islamic societies of medieval times and early modern times guaranteed that by living in a perpetual state of war, one aspect of which was that large numbers of women were imported. The practice of African slavery also led to the importation of large numbers of women (along with eunuchs). You had at the same time a large attrition rate among men, and a large growth of the female population. Polygamy was a social necessity as well as a motivation for the imports.
The most plausible explanation of suicide bombing is that it is a culturally licensed practice. The UK is probably the only society in which the opinion of the Muslim minority is regularly sounded. Surveys repeatedly show that a substantial minority of Muslims in the UK are ready to admit to sympathizing with acts of terror and suicide bombing.
Whether they are out of touch with the real tenets of their faith others may debate. But the facts seem inescapable. The scale of the thing also seems inescapable. If they are out of touch, they are out of touch to the extent that, lets say, the Presbyterians are out of touch with Christianity. They are not a minority on the scale of Christian Science. We are talking about something of the size of a major denomination, not just a small number of eccentrics.
The curious can get some clues by reading the Islamic scriptures. You look in vain for the equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, or St Paul's poetic hymn to Charity, or Christ's remarks on the woman taken in adultery. But you do find a great deal about the Islamic equivalent of smiting the Amalakite hip and thigh. To deny any connexion seems perverse.
Slashdot Mirror
"Turing eventually killed himself by eating a poisoned apple after most of the scientific community shunned his work due to some personal habits."
Much, much sadder. He was prosecuted for homosexuality, sentenced to a course of estrogen, became depressed, and killed himself. This was how a grateful nation treated a man who had played a large, perhaps the leading role, in decoding Enigma signals - the decisive element in the Battle of the Atlantic. Tragic and wicked.
The reason is, they are trying to change the business model. The phone manufacturer has never before got a percentage of the revenue generated by the device for the service provider. Neither for that matter has the CD or DVD player maker ever gotten a percentage of the revenue from the CDs or DVDs that were rented.
However, people always dream of taking just a small slice of the revenue others are getting with the aid of their box or service. In the dot.com bubble days, it was common to hear telcos thinking that they would take a percent of transaction revenues that they cleared on their new fancy communications services. They got very upset if you said this was like the US Mail service trying to charge for parcels by value or for envelopes by what value of check they had in them.
Apple has always done similar things: the basic strategy is to find something the public wants, and then force them to buy something else they do not necessarily want, to get it, and use the linked sale to get increased margin. So, if I want OSX, I have to buy new hardware from Apple, whether I want to or not. If I want to buy from the iTunes store, get a Pod to play them on. If I have a Pod and I want to buy tunes, well, one online store to buy them from. Now we have the phone. Want the phone? Great, sign up with one provider whether you want to or not.
What is happening all the time is that Apple tries to, and often succeeds, in getting a piece of revenues from one of the players in the value chain which has previously been considered independent. So it was always the model in music that all music played on all players. However, if you can stop that, you can get some of the music revenues. Similarly, all phones except the iPhone are available for any network. However, if you can stop that, and if people want it enough, you can get a piece of the telco's business, unlike any other phone manufacturer.
Is it smart, and is it sustainable? The jury is out. Wall Street, or a proportion of it, clearly thinks so. The Apple faithful don't care one way or the other, but they are buying both phones and stock. A fairly large minority however are ready to buy unlocked. This is a bad sign for the model's longevity.
The real business strategy question has always been about returns. It is a strategy which involves limiting buyers, and therefore you lose potential share. Do you make it up on increased margins? The risk is that at some point you carry on with the strategy when your contribution to the party no longer will bear a premium, and this can happen for all kinds of reasons. When that happens, share will fall precipitously and stay down, as it did in the nineties, when Apple had its near death moment. OS9 was not so great that enough people were ready to pay the premiums for the hardware.
What will happen in the present case? It is doubtful that the strategy is sustainable in the mobile market. One maker probably cannot get and retain enough of a competitive lead in hardware and design that it can command the premium which the strategy implies. That after all is what is happening, isn't it? There is a premium that the iPhone commands over competitive offerings. Apple has chosen to take this by exacting a percent of revenues. It could also have taken it as a higher price. It is doubtful this premium will persist. It is also doubtful that it is technically feasible to enforce the premium by locks that will work.
There is also a fundamental question about the general strategy, and that is whether it is the best exploitation of the market premium. If you have a superb competitive position in Product A, that people will pay a premium for, is it a sensible use of that position to force people to buy Product B with it, which by hypothesis is less appealing, or you wouldn't have to lock the two together? It seems like the only circumstance this occurs is when you have a poorer competitive position in Product B. So in effect, you are wasting the margins of A by cross subsizing
You're quite right.
What you might have said in addition is that the only reason people have the impression that translucent windows help, is that Apple has for 10 or more years now (along with MS) refused to support multiple desktops, which is the correct solution to the usability problem they are struggling with. You don't need 40 inch screens, you don't need translucent windows, you just need the ability to move windows to whatever desktop you want, and have them stay there.
He is mainly correct. There will be retail versions of Leopard that will run on x86. Contrary to what the previous poster says, this will be unlike Tiger, where you can buy a retail version, but it is PPC only.
Where he is wrong, or at least doubtful, or anyway there is no evidence for what he says, is that the retail version will run on anything but an Apple branded machine.
The interesting question is, how are they going to stop it from loading and booting - after the first couple of weeks.
If they are. That is the interesting conjecture. If it is not really possible, this could indeed be the time they finally stop trying. No evidence, but it is an interesting possibility.
This is clearly a right wing neo conservative study, probably financed by large computer and keyboard manufacturers or front organizations. The science is settled. Denialists like this are very dangerous to the future of our joints, and our children's joints. How are guys like this going to face the next generation? What will they say when our children ask us, what did you do when our elbows were at risk?
Are they going to sit there grinning sheepishly with their bandaged elbows and say, well, I waited till all the facts were in? No, they are going to hang their heads and have to admit that when all the facts were in, and the science was settled, the debate was over, they were Denialists, they cast doubt on whether the catastrophe was really heading for us. And now look what has happened. A whole generation has grown up without fingers or elbows that work! 95% of the population is no longer able to use a knife and fork!
These people are Dangerous. They probably deny evolution. They probably think cigarette smoking doesn't cause cancer. They are evil. Slashdot is part of the problem by giving them airspace. We need to move to action, now. Ban the manufacture of keyboards of any sort, and make it mandatory to use voice input devices. Like, do it next month, before its too late!
This is not quite true, in my experience. The difference between taking the drugs and not taking them, is the difference between being in a confused anxious state with no ability to do anything except beg for help over and over again, and sitting quietly reading the paper or a simple book and being able to offer comments about it. Now, this is only palliative - it slows the progress, it does not arrest it. But the benefits, particularly to the carers, are enormous.
If you have someone with Alzheimers, get them the drugs, and get them early.
This is a great move, because it will reveal the absurdity of the present locked player situation. Its a classic stage in industry evolution. Stage one is, some company (Apple) comes out with a format for purchased tunes which will only play on its own player.
This creates two incentives. The first is to increase the sale of tunes, since the other players depend on the tunes not the player as their main business. So they want more tunes sold. But as long as there is an Apple monopoly of sold tunes, this isn't going to happen, and there is nothing they can do about it.
The second incentive is to compete with Apple as a retailer.
So, because of the success so far of the Apple strategy, all they can really do is emulate it: come up with another store, another player, a different format, and tunes locked to it. Since they have to overcome an incumbent, they will be reduced to making his attractive by initially lowering the price of the tunes and using a different locked format, to make people use their player. This will be a replay of competing format wars that we have seen with hardware formats in the past.
We will then move to the stage, which we have seen previously in media with different consumer formats, where consumers still refuse to buy the stuff because they hate incompatible formats. After a while of this an unlocked standard will emerge. I don't mean a standard that is not copy protected, but one does not lock purchased tunes to players from one particular vendor, or make them be purchased by one specialised bit of software or currency. It will work just like CDs and DVDs do now: buy your content wherever you want from one of a variety of independent outlets, using whatever payment means you want, and play it on the player of your choice, from one of several manufacturers.
The Apple strategy has worked well for a while, but it has within it, like all DRM based attempts to tie up your use of what you buy, the seeds of its own destruction. It is not a sustainable business model longer term. The present model for music and CDs was. The only thing that is destroying it is overpricing from the content publishers.
Apple is far better placed to deal with the implosion of the business model. Its trivial to take locking off the iPod and iTunes store. And if the money falls out of the tunes market, it hardly affects them. For the content owners, their whole model is falling to bits in well defined stages that we have previously seen in other format wars. It is what is coming towards us.
Yes, quite right, exactly my own experience. This is what drove me to Debian. And this is what makes Mandriva basically unusable by the unsophisticated. The distro itself, any particular version, may run great. Never let a naive user try to upgrade it, though.
No, this is not true. I have done it. You get the unlock code with no problems.
If all you want is one pc, and limited functionality, its quite easy. You basically emulate a simple cash register. You get a keyboard wedge type of bar code reader, you do a quick gui to allow lookups and pricing, which you model on a shopping basket. Use a keypad for data entry. Use bar codes for the control functions. Export your data as a text file, and then process it offline. Use opensource barcode software for your own code and label generation. PythonCard would be a choice, or one of the other simple Python gui generators.
However, there's a whole bunch of stuff you are not getting. You will not be able to interface with a merchant acquiror for credit card info. You'll likely end up booking in goods on a different copy of the database and keeping the two in synch while possible requires care. You won't have networking. If what you are doing it for is a small business with (for instance) one station, a few hundred stock codes, a few tens of thousands of transactions a year, it is possible. You can even do the reporting and accounting stuff in Excel or Filemaker or OO, but they are limited in terms of the size of files they will do efficiently. You will not get any real level of fraud prevention. You probably will not want to implement log ins and personal staff tracking.
When you start wanting multiple stations, large numbers of transactions, touch screen, staff tracking, handovers with cash register balancing, direct interface to credit cards...lots of discounts, complex tax accounting, that's the time to buy in. The time to write your own is when you perhaps positively do not want or need this sort of stuff, but for whatever reason want to keep it minimalist.
I basically agree that if you are wanting to get a real POS, buy it in. But there are some occasions when people want a screen based system that is much simpler than what's available commercially. If you want an electronic cash register which is easier to use and with screen based functions, don't be afraid to write it or get it written.
Remember that complexity of the coding rises as the square or cube of the functionality.
Yes, I have tried turning off Java and increasing memory. Makes no difference. The problem is this 'adapt row height' thing that it does on opening a workbook. I have some array formulas, and it simply takes forever to get through it. Its not acceptable. The row heights are all defaults in any case, so it must have some other than its literal meaning. There seems to be no information on it, no way to turn it off or find out what it is really doing.
This needs fixing asap, or its not competitive.
No, you're not the only one.
Some of us have been approached recently by a shadowy organization trying to raise money to deal with this problem. Apparently they want to raise enough money that Daniel will absolutely have to accept it. Then they propose to assign him some enormous mind boggling task involving writing something humongous in assembler to a deadline of a year or two. It is their hope that he will then be a) too busy b) too tired to keep up this flood of stuff. The response seems to have been encouraging. A number of those approached are willing to pay substantial amounts of money for anything that will put a stop to this.
One of those approached remarked that he would rather have someone put a bucket over his head and beat it with a broom handle, than have to read another of Daniel's articles. He would rather contract Montezumas revenge in addition, if the article were about what Apple really intends, has done, will do, or why it is better and has greater market share than anyone realizes.
But that was just one person, of course. He may not be representative.
The elephant in the room of course is:
You are not doing all you can to defeat Vista as long as you will not sell it in direct competition with Vista. That means, on OEM hardware.
Now, that may or may not be the right thing for Apple to do. But until they do that, they are not even trying to compete with Vista.
Why is this so hard to see?
Its not a technical issue at all.
Its about mothers' reactions to male adolescent sexuality which they are seeing in the raw and closeup in their sons, maybe for the first time.
I would explain, if he just is looking for porn, this is, however little you may like it, quite normal and ordinary and all boys do it. Only worry if the porn becomes obsessively s/m or fetishistic. For many women, the raw impersonal lust of adolescent boys is quite worrying - as it would be for us, were we women.
If however he is communicating with other people about it, do worry. This is the danger: communications whose implications he doesn't fully understand, and with people who are not what they seem.
In either case, the only solution is communication with him. There are no technical solutions to this.
But the real question is: what is she worried her son may be doing?
We find this argument again and again from Apple advocates. It goes: choice is painful and people do not want it and cannot exercise it intelligently. Apple's product line, is better because it does not give this choice.
The argument has usually been applied to hardware. It is better to have less hardware choice - graphics card, keyboards, processors. In the present case it is being applied to features.
It ignores the way markets and products actually work. Nokia or whoever produces all these different models because they sell in competition with the offerings from all the other suppliers. If they stop selling, they stop making them. The same goes for Dell, Acer etc. If, from the product range on offer from all the different phone suppliers, you can't find what you want, it is not that they are idiots or manipulative, nor is it that your needs are not real and legitimate. It is just that you are in a very small minority.
It is a quite legitimate business strategy to focus on one particular set of needs in the market, as Apple does. Its called niche marketing. It is the reason why Porter is able to plot profitability versus market share, and show that it is U shaped. Profitability typically rises as share falls below a certain point - because you are in a profitable niche. If you like, you no longer have to try out all these different models in order to find out which will hit the mass buyer's hot spot, because that does not interest you. All that interests you is a small subset.
However, the basic mistake of the argument, both on the iPhone and on the Mac product range, is to assume that everyone in a mass market can practice a niche strategy. They cannot. Niches exist in large markets. It is only because of the large market that they exist. There may be a niche in computers and phones which consists among other things of people whose heads hurt when they have to choose among too many = more than three alternatives. But it is not the market as a whole. Most people actually like the choice, the competition otherwise would not produce it.
And no they are not stupid, and yes, they do pretty much know what they are buying. Whether its computers, refridgerators, washing machines, stereos...or even cars. As Detroit has been finding out over the last 10 or 20 years.
I have always been interested in the choice argument because it has echoes of political arguments. You find, for instance, in the UK, people arguing that choice in health care providers is bad. What I want is one good hospital, not a choice between 3 or 4. In the UK, this argument usually appears in the Guardian (coincidentally, an Apple computing environment...) where the assumption is that this hospital will naturally be State run. Choice in education is also deeply upsetting to people. What they really want is one good school, not a choice between half a dozen.
One suspects that the argument that lurks underneath is about politics. You really do not want all these confusing political parties. What you want is one nice, good one. It wouldn't be New Labour by any chance?
The analogy is correct in this respect: the argument in both cases ignores that the way, the only way, to get one or two or more good ones, cars, phones, computers, political parties, is by the mechanism of consumer choice. Back in the sixties, the argument might have been made, why does the UK need all these car imports? All we need is one or two good ones made by Rover (or British Leyland as it was then). Ah yes. And how exactly were you going to get Rover to produce even one halfway decent one?
Just wait for Leopard.
You are going to be able to run Leopard on the hardware of your choice within a couple weeks of release whatever Apple thinks. It is also quite possible that Leopard will come out with official license to run it on the hardware of your choice. Either way, its going to be real interesting.
So hang in there! Its only a couple more months.
I took a small organisation to Linux and OpenOffice. The secretary/admin had only ever used MS Office previously. It was acceptable. There was a clear reason: money was very tight indeed. This certainly helped, it wasn't just ideology, there was a legitimate motivation rooted in the organisation's values of limiting overhead spend. There was a certain amount of confusion about small details of different operation of spreadsheets. The issue is, they are very similar but not quite identical. Most of the things she was used to worked about the same however - particularly filtering. However, pivot tables/data pilot turned out to be very hard to get used to. Mailing list label generation in Writer was another difficult point. I am terrible at this stuff myself and found it quite hard to teach. Well, hard to learn first.
Linux by contrast, the OS, turned out to be easy for everyone. It was indeed very stable. It turned out to supply lots of other free specialist software that we needed, and the people who needed it, not having run any proprietary equivalents in the past, just learned the new stuff and quite liked it. We created a couple of accounts for different people who work on different days, and they liked having the freedom to arrange their stuff how they liked.
Multiple desktops are one of the surprising things in Linux for new users. You must always teach them carefully and show people how to use them, and once they get used to them, they are something that is used all the time. What they really like is being able to leave one bit of work exactly as it was, move over to another workspace, do something else, and come back to exactly what you left as you left it. If you do move people to Linux, don't neglect to teach this. They will really come to appreciate it.
The big deal with calc turned out to be not the differences, which were a small irritation, but spreadsheets themselves. To get what we needed done, we ended up having to use array formulae. If you do this you will find that the average intelligent and computer literate person, even one who has worked quite a bit with spreadsheets, simply stops here. So we ended up with a spreadsheet that had a sort of mental 'off limits' tag on one of its worksheets. This works, I don't understand what it does, I don't want to know, if it goes wrong I will call up x and have him fix it. But this was a function of spreadsheets and arrays, not the way OO handles them.
There was a sort of side effect for our own admin. She left us, but before she went I watched a couple of other part timers being taught how to use the system, and the general account was, its a bit different, this is how it works, when you get used to it, its fine. But there was a definite increase in confidence that had come from mastering some new stuff, which at first had seemed rather forbidding, but had turned out to be adaptable to need.
If you do this, you have to understand you are asking people to do something unknown and a bit frightening, and absurd as it seems, something they really do not know whether they can do. I got the feedback a couple of times that 'I was so nervous about this, but I've actually learned it better than I thought I would'. You have to very much take the line that it just takes a bit of time, let them make mistakes, be instantly available when they need help, never get impatient. Pick the right time to explain just the right amount of what lies behind things. If you get them through the first few steps, the increased confidence will take them the rest of the way.
One of the most reassuring things you can say to people as they start is: you cannot do any damage to the system. Explain that they are signed on as a user, there's a backup of all the data, and nothing they do is going to damage anything. This is enormously reassuring.
All in all I would say, go for it. If you focus on the needs of the users and helping them, there's no reason it won't succeed.
Similar story, very good advice. Debian on the PIII 12 inch X series runs fast, the battery life is reasonable, the build quality is superb, and they are totally portable. Problems with the modem. But wireless works perfectly out of the box.
Oh, thank you for this. it brought tears to my eyes!
Yes, read Nourishing Traditions.
The remarks about bran are only partially correct. All bran is not the same. Wheat bran, contrary to the implication, is bad for you and has no dietary benefits. It irritates the intestines and blocks the absorption of nutrients. It is a myth that whole wheat bread has more vitamins and minerals and is therefore better for you than white bread. Yes, it has more vitamins and minerals. No it is not therefore better for you, because they are not accessible. What matters is not what is in it, what matters is what you can get out of it. The problem is phytates, which prevent absorption of minerals.
The right way to eat wheat bread is the way that was traditional until the rise of the steam baked industrial rapid rise loaf. That is,first, a slow fermenting rise, usually overnight. This makes the bread both lower GI index, and also more digestible. Second, flour which is not whole wheat but is relatively high extraction. This the so called grey flour of traditional French bread. Until modern times, when people talked about 'white' bread, what they meant was bread without the bran, a greyish color, but containing the germ.
The extraction rate varies from 75% or less for conventional white flour to 85% for brown but not wholewheat flour. In countries where bread is the staple, the extraction rate is usually in the low eighties and this is probably the sensible level. The rate in the US during WWII was raised to 80% - similarly in the UK, or perhaps a little higher. It would be a dramatic step forward for modern diets if it could be placed at that level today.
The same points apply to rice bran, which also should be avoided. It is striking that traditional cultures with long histories of healthy eating invariably mill rice and refine wheat, but never try remove oat bran. Both wheat and rice bran are better used by feeding to poultry, when the conversion into high quality protein is a much better use for it than irritating the human bowel to no nutritional effect.
Oat bran is in a completely different category. It does not irritate the bowel, and its nutrients are available. I believe the same to be true of spelt.
Its worth remarking that probably one of the main causes of obesity is the obsession with the low fat diet. Without any real evidence, we have embarked on a gigantic nutritional experiment in the Anglo Saxon countries over the last 30-40 years. We have gone from diets which were reasonably balanced in terms of saturated fats and complex carbohydrates, to ones which attempted to eliminate all saturated fats. However, the natural and normal craving for some fats has led to the substitution of polyunsaturated fats for saturated. There is no evidence that this is healthy, and much that it is far worse. In addition, since the available high carb foods are highly refined, we have then substitued for potatoes, rice and pasta, much sugar, including fructose. The result is a diet far worse than what we started with, and one which our evolutionary history has never prepared us for.
It is not an accident that this has happened at a time that the health food movement has metamorphosed into the supplements industry.
So what should we eat? Liberal amounts of meat, fish eggs butter and full-fat, non-homogenized milk. Absolutely no refined vegetable oils. Moderate amounts of mono-unsaturated vegetable oils (olive and peanut). No corn oil, safflower oil, hydrogenated vegetable oil, margarine. Liberal amounts of vegetables of all sorts. Liberal amounts of sourdough bread made with coarse white flour. Similarly pasta. White, not brown, rice. Parboiled is OK. Fruits in season. And fruit juice, if at all, in great moderation.
Exercise well, and stay off the scales! Because the other great cause of obesity in Western society is the practice of dieting, which, as many studies have shown, simply leads to long term weight gain.
You are missing the point. The point is not so much why they should do all these things. Maybe it is reasonable, maybe not.
The question is, why it should be necessary to compel all UK citizens who want to watch any sort of television, any of the other 80 or so channels available in the UK, to subscribe to the BBC on pain of criminal sanctions. This is what is wrong.
Various arguments are usually offered when one makes this point. Sometimes people say they like the BBC and its output. Fine, is that a reason for compelling other people to subscribe to it? I like the NYT, but I do not believe that this is a reason why everyone should have to buy it.
Sometimes people say that its a small amount of money, £120 or so a year. Yes, so what? Its not about whether its large or small, its whether I should be allowed to watch non-BBC TV, without subscribing to the BBC. £20 a year to the NYT would not be much. But I should not have to pay it as a condition of buying the Daily Mirror.
We thus arrive in the ridiculous situation where people say that they want iPlayer to work on whatever platform they choose - Mac, Linux, Amiga, BSD, whatever. They think this because they have no choice about subscribing, and so they think they are entitled to equal access to all services offered on the platforms of their choice And they are right, given the compulsion.
The BBC needs EITHER to allow the inhabitants of the UK to choose their TV programming supplier. OR, they need to make all of their services without exception available to everyone who is paying, regardless of which platform they use, or where they live. The consequences of compulsion are that you lose the freedom to act like a normal company. The BBC's current problem is that it wants to do both. It wants to be able to act like an ordinary company, raise prices at will, go into new businesses, compete with the private sector. But it also wants to have every UK citizen compelled to subscribe to it, whether they want to watch it or not, and it wants to enforce this compulsion by sending people to jail if they refuse.
This is not going to last. Sooner or later they will find, as John DeButts of ATT found, that holding the line leads to the collapse of the dam. After that, it will seem in retrospect that they should have opened the sluice gates a little. But then, it will be too late.
And, by the way, it is not the Linux or Mac user's problem. It is the BBC's problem. Figure it out, find a solution. If you can't, give them a refund and let them choose a different TV supplier. Don't bother us with your problems. We are the ones who are paying.
No, its not mistaken, they are negotiating with Vodafone in the UK, the Guardian is a UK paper, and the situation in the UK is as described. Yes, it is different in the US, but that is not what was being described or commented on.
The Guardian reported that in the UK, Vodafone had baulked at a couple of the demands. These were that a percentage of the revenues generated by the user should come back to Apple, and that there should be restrictions on what content could be accessed.
"Apple is understood to be demanding that its European mobile phone partners hand over a significant proportion of revenues generated by the iPhone and restrict the content that users can access."
So, the really interesting point about the device now becomes apparent. The business model has been so far, that you took service from whoever you wanted, using whatever phone you wanted, and you accessed whatever content you wanted. We are now seeing an attempt to get to a totally different model. To use a phone, you are obliged to sign up to a music download store, whether you are interested in music, or music from that store, or not. Then you are obliged to sign up to one and only one network. Finally, you can't access the content you want unless the phone supplier approves of it. And for all of this, you pay not only for the usage of the network, but you also end up paying a fee to the phone maker for the privilege of undergoing all these restrictions.
Now, people will write back and say, you don't have to buy it. No. And that is not the point at all. The point is not primarily about Apple or the iPhone. The point we should be paying attention to is, what happens and how will it feel, if this becomes the standard business model in the mobile internet and service arena?
I suggest not at all. As little, in fact, as if we were to be controlled in our use of our PCs by Microsoft. Buy only the hardware brands that Redmond tells you are permitted. Access only the sites that Redmond approves of. Load only the software that Redmond permits. Or Cupertino.
We must devoutly hope that this model turns into a huge business flop, not because we like or hate Apple, but because the model in itself is inimical to intellectual freedom. The present one, use what you like to do what you like, is infinitely preferable from the point of view of freedom of information and expression. Just as the present CD/DVD model is infinitely preferable to the iTunes model: buy what you want, by whatever browser or at whatever walkin store you want, pay by whatever credit card you want, take it home and play it on the player of your choice, made by whoever you choose to buy players from. This too will turn out to be about intellectual freedom, when it comes to buying ebooks and enews.
It is related to Apple and its values and strategy, in the sense that this has always been what Apple was about. But the important thing is not to be critical of Apple in itself. It is the model that is wrong. Of course, the company is very wrong too. But long as it stays below 5% of everything, who cares? Its when its model starts to dominate that we should become disturbed and enraged, or when it tries to extend its controlled and restrictive model to areas of intellectual life that are presently free.
Then we need to educate, and to resist.
The argument seems to be (yes it is very weird): there are lots of young men in Islamic societies that have no prospect of finding women. The cause of this is polygamy: some of the men in these societies have lots of women, the rest therefore have fewer...
[...we assume that the numbers of men and women are equal to start with, which is highly unlikely given that the societies originating suicide bombers are in servere violent conflict, which must consume quite a few men, and in addition, we also assume that the polygamy absorbs more than the 'surplus' number of women, again there's no proof...]
Then it goes on to argue, if you have no prospect of a woman in this life, and some prospect, however remote, in the next, then it is rational to choose the one in the next. But, you have to get there. One sure route is to become a suicide bomber, so you do.
[...again, note that you have to be convinced of having no prospect of a woman. This is pretty hard to believe, you might easily become convinced, assuming the rest of this idiotic argument is true, that you have a reduced prospect, but why you should believe you have none is obscure....]
The great difficulty with this is that those same societies produce women suicide bombers. In fact, in the recent case in the Red Mosque in Pakistan, the Times reports that young women of the age of 11 or so are proclaiming to their astonished families that they are seeking martyrdom for the sake of the religion in which those same parents had sent them to be educated. If the argument were valid, there would be no women suicide bombers, because according to the argument, all women are guaranteed a man. In addition, there have actually been married suicide bombers in the UK. And finally we know from Israel that some women encourage their children to become suicide bombers. So it is the motivation of mothers that also requires explanation.
You cannot simply explain the suicide bomber phenomenon by invoking the sexual situation and motives of men. It does not cover the known facts.
So what is the most plausible explanation? The most plausible explanation of polygamy is that it flourishes where there is a long term imbalance between the genders, with more women than men. The Islamic societies of medieval times and early modern times guaranteed that by living in a perpetual state of war, one aspect of which was that large numbers of women were imported. The practice of African slavery also led to the importation of large numbers of women (along with eunuchs). You had at the same time a large attrition rate among men, and a large growth of the female population. Polygamy was a social necessity as well as a motivation for the imports.
The most plausible explanation of suicide bombing is that it is a culturally licensed practice. The UK is probably the only society in which the opinion of the Muslim minority is regularly sounded. Surveys repeatedly show that a substantial minority of Muslims in the UK are ready to admit to sympathizing with acts of terror and suicide bombing.
Whether they are out of touch with the real tenets of their faith others may debate. But the facts seem inescapable. The scale of the thing also seems inescapable. If they are out of touch, they are out of touch to the extent that, lets say, the Presbyterians are out of touch with Christianity. They are not a minority on the scale of Christian Science. We are talking about something of the size of a major denomination, not just a small number of eccentrics.
The curious can get some clues by reading the Islamic scriptures. You look in vain for the equivalent of the Sermon on the Mount, or St Paul's poetic hymn to Charity, or Christ's remarks on the woman taken in adultery. But you do find a great deal about the Islamic equivalent of smiting the Amalakite hip and thigh. To deny any connexion seems perverse.