Mac OS X doesn't (yet) use secured apps. There's only limited signing of applications, and the kernel implicitly trusts the applications installed by authenticated, administrative users. The iPhone kernel does not trust applications, it sandboxes them.
The old desktop OS conventions doesn't work well when dealing with the constraints of a mobile device. Witness WinMo and Palm OS. No security, install a few apps and everything goes south quick.
The iPhone is based on Mac OS X, but has unique constraints. You either know this, and are a troll, or are too ignorant to be talking.
As for "no keyboard shortcuts," Apple invented the ctrl/command ZXCV conventions later aped by Microsoft, and similarly standardized P for Print, S for Save, and so on. Where you got the idea that Apple was against keyboard shortcuts must be dark and smell like your poo.
The "one button mouse" rant is similarly tired, as Job's NeXT was among the first computers to codify consistent use of the right button, years before Windows was even being pre-installed on PCs. And Macs have supported multiple mouse buttons long before the release of Mac OS X.
But yes, Apple does want the iPhone to work correctly, and that means ignoring the incessant, insufferable twits who think they know better than engineers because they have good hunches about how to deliver tech products based on no experience.
The iPhone's App Store works over 3G and has for some time. It has nothing to do with Apple not letting you. Apple had to negotiate this with the labels and AT&T (both of whom probably wanted more money, just as other providers ask for extra fees on mobile download songs).
MMS was developed by the 3GPP. If it were supportable on the first gen iPhone hardware, why do you think Apple would block it?
Much of what you think of as stupid is actually your own ignorance.
So Apple is "lying" and inventing a huge legal pretense in order to ask for $10?
Perhaps if Apple wanted to make money on its software, it would charge a lot for it. There's no reason Apple needs to charge less than $99 for the iPod touch 3.0 upgrade; if nothing else, it would make buying a new touch more attractive.
To suggest that the $10 fee is egregious is simply absurd. To go on and on about it just makes you a troll. This is not an issue.
Apple has never charged for Apple TV updates, including those that supported HD. That's because it uses subscription accounting.
Same with the iPhone. The iPod touch doesn't. A $10 optional fee charged ~ annually for a major update is not worthy of the outrage expressed here. Ridiculous.
1) as a kluge to present video due to the fact that browsers haven't managed to support any common web standards for embedding video in html
2) as a way to animate ads and very rarely, as a way to present actual data (as Google's Analytics does)
3) as a replacement to HTML by retarded web hosts who think that's a good idea. It's not.
If the iPhone can destroy Flash, it will be Apple's greatest contribution since WebKit and Mac OS X. And the iPhone.
Yaping about Flash as a legitimate and modern part of the web is ridiculous. It's a proprietary old turd that needs to get flushed as soon as possible.
Apple invented standardized copy and paste in the OS with the Macintosh. It invented mobile copy and paste conventions with Newton.
So ask yourself, is Apple just too stupid to please an arrogant but anonymous coward, or are you perhaps uninformed on what might be involved in developing secure copy and paste on a new platform with a unique security model?
Do you understand that other phones with copy/paste features do not sandbox their apps? That their kernels will pretty much run any code from any source? That rogue apps can do anything?
The more you learn, the less you'll view the world in simple black and white as a bunch of things to be outraged about.
First off, the EFF is wrong, as it has been many times before.
Second, the premise that Apple is as bad as Microsoft, and therefore worse than Microsoft, is also wrong and delusional.
Third, your side argument that the EFF has criticized Microsoft in the past, and therefore is correct now in criticizing Apple for "DRM" in headphones (which does not exist), regardless of the facts at hand and ignoring the lapse of logic that the EFF presents, along with the implication that Apple is being worse than Microsoft at preventing competition and innovation... is just breathtakingly devoid of basic reasoning ability.
You're not really joining a conversation as much as popping up to agree with an argument because it has something bad-sounding about DRM and Apple in it, and calling me names in an effort to sidestep having to actually consider the facts.
By the way, dismissing an argument by waving the "ad hominem" flag is about the most hypocritical thing one can do on Slashdot.
"No one is claiming that Microsoft are fine and Apple are bad - that's a straw man."
I see you have trouble following logic. It was the EFF that was screeching that Apple was being evil and nobody would stand for it if Microsoft did the same: "If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft "authentication chips" in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I'd think reviewers would be screaming about it."
Comparing Apple against Microsoft, Ford, Toyota is not just stupid, but apeshit retarded FIRST BECAUSE the EFF made Microsoft a poster child for its War on DRM, SECOND because Windows has a monopoly position and therefore has no need for DRM to lock it to PCs and THIRD because Microsoft pushes far more draconian DRM that creates terrible products that nobody wants to buy. Yet his comments suggest that Apple has done something Microsoft does not do.
Then you come along and start yapping about ad hominems and straw men. What's next, are you going to call me a sock puppet and say in Russia your argument isn't backwards?
When some ideological zealot with a penchant for getting things wrong files unsubstantiated accusations, it's not the responsibility of the rest of the world to prove them wrong, it's their duty to ignore them until they are substantiated.
The EFF, and specifically Fred von Lohmann, is not only taking a shaky position here, but expressing it ignorantly. The group is getting good at going on witch hunts without really knowing what they're talking about.
For starters, comparing Apple against Microsoft, Ford, Toyota is not just stupid, but apeshit retarded. Microsoft isn't a principally hardware maker, but its hardware IS all encrusted with DRM, from the Xbox to Zune. It also promotes WMA/WMV DRM on files and HD-DVD style end to end video output DRM on PCs, so von Lohmanns' comments are ridiculous.
Ford and Toyota all use proprietary parts in their vehicles that can not be swapped out for third party bits from any supplier a user might want to pick from.
But secondly, the guy doesn't even verify the information he's complaining about at full speed. Fred von Lohmann is a shoot first, gather details later kind of guy. He was the same EFF staffer who wrote, "Apple is among the worst offenders when it comes to messing around with stuff you've already paid for. But iTunes 7.2 is likely to be remembered for the especially wicked tricks it plays on iTunes customers."
That's the same whiney moralist language he's using here, but he was wrong about iTunes 7.2 removing the ability to rip tracks to CD. That didn't stop him from prattling on about it.
Von Lohmann thought iTunes could no longer burn and re-rip music after reading about it in a blog. He was wrong, because the blogger he believed was also mistaken. However, von Lohmann did not correct his posting accusing Apple of "removing the feature" from iTunes; he also cited [EFF's Peter] Eckersley's "previous revelations" [erroneous nonsense about metadata spying in iTunes] as proof Apple could not be trusted.
You are completely wrong on two counts on this "DRM in headphones" nonsense.
Apple has used a form of DRM in the recent generations of iPods to limit how commercial video content could be exported, in part to placate studios so they will allow Apple to resell their commercial content, and in part to monetize iPod video accessories, apparently.
In this case, however, there's no DRM involved in the iPod shuffle's headphones. It's a simple click mechanism that signals play controls to the device over a fourth conductor headphone jack. There are third parties bringing compatible integrated-control headphones to market, although its not yet clear if they are licensing the (probably patented) technology from Apple, or simply able to design a compatible implementation.
If there is an authentication chip, it is an example of at worst a proprietary design and at best a new innovative standard in controlling devices via the headphones, something Apple first rolled out with the iPhone. Why not have the device in your pocket, and simply navigate by touching the headphone wire? It is not, however, an example of DRM, because it has nothing to do with digital rights management. It's a security mechanism.
Why is it Apple's moral duty to enrich third parties? Nobody posts complaints to Slashdot when Sony or any other company releases an accessory that only works on its own models. This is such absurd bullshit. If you don't like the product, don't buy it.
But secondly, your kind needs to shut the fuck up with the simpleton, ignorant ranting against DRM.
DRM secures the rights of content producers to distribute their work as they want. It's not going away because you can organize a circle jerk complaint session amongst your fellow commercial content thieves and people who don't use commercial content and are therefore irrelevant to the subject of DRM.
It isn't obsolete or doomed because it can and will eventually be broken, any more than physical locks are obsolete or doomed because they can always be removed or bypassed by people who are intent on getting around them. DRM is a deterrent to protect a business model, just like every other security system. You might as well bitch about the shoplifting mechanisms in retail stores that are there to slow down the thieving sprees of people who end up making products cost more.
DRM in the iPhone App Store has been essential in creating a functional market that attracts both users and developers, and gives both what they want: cheap fresh content for users and volume sales for a sustainable developer revenue stream.
DRM on iTunes music similarly allows labels to limit the simplicity of users' ability to widely copy around digital songs, creating a real market where users can now buy commercial content at consistent quality and with better production than the thieves stealing content on torrents.
Music labels didn't "sue their customers," they fucking sued the thieves and digital counterfeiters who thought that they could fuck the music industry by stealing its content rather than just refusing to buy its overpriced, poor quality bullshit products.
Prior to music moving to digital files, the limiting factor of DRM was provided by a physical analog: the fact that CDs bonded music to a plastic platter, and removing it to cassette resulted in a significant loss of sound quality. Coping music from cassettes or LPs did the same, limiting how content could be resold or distributed outside of authorized channels. Copying songs off the radio similarly gave you a degraded experience.
DRM usually attempts to artificially degrade the signal the same way, although it does not in iTunes when users burn their own tracks to CD.
That physical analog to DRM has also worked for books, which are infeasible to casually copy in unauthorized ways because the text on paper is a lot of the value of buying a book. Digital books, like those for the Kindle, are so much easier to distribute that the format needs DRM to prevent widespread piracy.
Throwing around jargon doesn't make things cost less. A DLSAM can only serve broadband to users within 3 miles of good quality twisted pair. It is neither cheap nor basic. How many of these are you going to install to serve rural users scattered around with more space than that between their homes? It makes no sense.
Republicans are always big on small government and cutting spending until it comes time to address their own highly subsidized lifestyles. The Red States are all money pits living off the teat of Blue States. You're suggesting this must go even further so that Republicans can have faster access to their porn.
Microsoft's problem has never been that it didn't cater to developers, but rather that its software was poor quality, insecure, badly designed, ugly, bloated, and slow, and that the company leveraged the monopoly position it was handed by IBM to prevent competition, ensuring that it didn't need to improve its software.
In competitive markets where Microsoft's PC monopoly does it no real good, its software is similarly poor quality, insecure, badly designed, ugly, bloated, and slow, but there are much better alternatives available.
Money. And while you're lusting after your "not bad looking smart chick," she's monopolizing the ad market, fucking over advertisers and content producers both, and using that money to develop fun apps and tools. But she isn't generating revenue for smartphone developers. So good luck with writing Android apps as a hobby while you fantasize about Google Corporation as your ideal woman.
The rest of the world is writing mobile software for Apple's platform, not because it tickles their fantasies, but because it makes them money. That's how things get done.
second, as you acknowledge in principle, "the constitution stops the freedoms of it's citizens from being trampled on by it's governments" but NOT IF BUSH IGNORES IT. That's the point you struggle to grasp as you rant on about how terrorists don't have any protections.
The problem is, unless you only ever take a break from Fox News to watch "24," the definition of who "the terrorists" are is not conveniently scripted. Your reasoning is specious and absurdly childish.
If we trusted the government to just "do whatever it takes" to provide security and freedom, we wouldn't need a Constitution. The reason we have a Constitution and a revered rule of law is to prevent crooks like Bush and his administration from overstepping their authority in violating the freedom of citizens and violate international law to do things our society has long determined to be inappropriate. That includes picking up citizens and holding them for years in torture concentration camps without even charging them with a crime.
The rest of your post is so wildly uninformed and rant-a-holic I didn't bother reading further.
And why should the government subsidize "luxury" data service for people who choose to live far from urban centers?
USF is lifeline service to telephone access, a large subsidy to provide basic communications services for everyone. Expecting your fellow citizens to pay far more for the much more expensive task of setting up cheap, heavily subsidized data services for you is plain socialism. Especially when rural residents can buy sat service or use dialup Internet.
Nobody has an emergency need for access to YouTube.
You should, or the Constitution isn't worth the paper it was written on. If our freedoms can be thrown out whenever radicals stage a terrorist attack (in this case, crashing a plane that resulted in subsequent horrific damage and loss of life, but certainly not an "invasion" by a foreign power and unquestionably not a "rebellion"), then we really don't have any real freedom.
Don't Republicans make a pretense of upholding the Constitution as a big part of their platform? Or is it only lip service, like the whole bit about shrinking government and being fiscally responsible?
In the last 8 years of nearly unfettered Republican rule, the Constitution was trampled, the government expanded (and not by offering services to citizens, but largely in becoming a militarized taser police state focused on enforcing pot laws through paramilitary raids on citizens), and taxpayers amassed the highest deficit ever, following Clinton's efforts to balance the budget and get the US out of debt.
Republicans hate America as much as Islamic fundamentalists, and yet Obama isn't rounding up Rush Limbaugh and his party's members and holding them without due process as enemies of the state. And they are. Your argument for rebellion actually fits there. Republican leaders have incited terrorism (OReilly), hope for the President's stimulus to fail (Limbaugh) and repudiate rational thought and science in order to establish religion (further dumping on the Constitution).
Better be glad Obama isn't the power grabbing fascist Bush was, or you'd already be locked up in Cuba getting raped by US soldiers armed with video cameras, tasers, and memorandums giving them carte blanch to torture.
Thanks but "regulation" isn't the natural enemy of capitalism. It is in fact necessary for capitalism to function properly. It is the rule of law. Without regulation of things from standard measurements to money supply to accounting practices to reporting rules and so on, business couldn't function and we'd have anarchy.
That's exactly what happened in the unregulated markets for new securities, developed by big finance to skirt the rule of law in order to make vast short term wealth on the side. That house of cards collapsed, proving that "deregulation" is not "pro-business" as Republicans like to claim it is.
Excessive regulation can certainly be a problem, resulting in bureaucracy, but we're not near that problem and haven't been for decades.
Worrying about the perils of excessive regulation as the economy tanks from the outcome of lax regulation, a direct result of years of the Republican-driven assault on regulation, is as ridiculous as fretting about the US suddenly falling to communism as it climbs from the crater of corporate fascism.
The slippery slope toward liberal democracy isn't as slippery as Republicans fear it is. Progress is actually a lot of work. Slipping backward is the real threat.
Slashdot Mirror
Mac OS X doesn't (yet) use secured apps. There's only limited signing of applications, and the kernel implicitly trusts the applications installed by authenticated, administrative users. The iPhone kernel does not trust applications, it sandboxes them.
The old desktop OS conventions doesn't work well when dealing with the constraints of a mobile device. Witness WinMo and Palm OS. No security, install a few apps and everything goes south quick.
The iPhone is based on Mac OS X, but has unique constraints. You either know this, and are a troll, or are too ignorant to be talking.
As for "no keyboard shortcuts," Apple invented the ctrl/command ZXCV conventions later aped by Microsoft, and similarly standardized P for Print, S for Save, and so on. Where you got the idea that Apple was against keyboard shortcuts must be dark and smell like your poo.
The "one button mouse" rant is similarly tired, as Job's NeXT was among the first computers to codify consistent use of the right button, years before Windows was even being pre-installed on PCs. And Macs have supported multiple mouse buttons long before the release of Mac OS X.
But yes, Apple does want the iPhone to work correctly, and that means ignoring the incessant, insufferable twits who think they know better than engineers because they have good hunches about how to deliver tech products based on no experience.
The iPhone's App Store works over 3G and has for some time. It has nothing to do with Apple not letting you. Apple had to negotiate this with the labels and AT&T (both of whom probably wanted more money, just as other providers ask for extra fees on mobile download songs).
MMS was developed by the 3GPP. If it were supportable on the first gen iPhone hardware, why do you think Apple would block it?
Much of what you think of as stupid is actually your own ignorance.
No, Flash would be using 99% of your phone every hour you were trying to use Safari.
Flash needs to die to return the web to open standards, and we have plenty now. Flash is obsolete.
Good luck finding a signal.
Nokia doesn't sell any significant number of phones in the US, while Apple sells half of its stuff in the US, making it more sensitive to US law.
Also, Apple is the target of every ambulance chasing lawyer in the US. Europe doesn't have quite the same litigation happy mindset.
It's $10, get over it. It's not a conspiracy.
Palm said it would be doing the same thing for the Palm Pre troll
Apple offers free AirPort updates troll
So Apple is "lying" and inventing a huge legal pretense in order to ask for $10?
Perhaps if Apple wanted to make money on its software, it would charge a lot for it. There's no reason Apple needs to charge less than $99 for the iPod touch 3.0 upgrade; if nothing else, it would make buying a new touch more attractive.
To suggest that the $10 fee is egregious is simply absurd. To go on and on about it just makes you a troll. This is not an issue.
Apple has never charged for Apple TV updates, including those that supported HD. That's because it uses subscription accounting.
Same with the iPhone. The iPod touch doesn't. A $10 optional fee charged ~ annually for a major update is not worthy of the outrage expressed here. Ridiculous.
It activates largely dormant Bluetooth features for starters.
Microsoft doesn't sell hardware that it bundles with "free" software updates that activate existing hardare features.
Redhat doens't sell hardware, nor Ubuntu.
Apple also doesn't charge for its "service pack" releases on the iPhone or the Mac or the iPhone/iPod touch, only major new releases.
And you're turning inside out because of a major update for $10? What a retard.
The "modern web" uses Flash for three things:
1) as a kluge to present video due to the fact that browsers haven't managed to support any common web standards for embedding video in html
2) as a way to animate ads and very rarely, as a way to present actual data (as Google's Analytics does)
3) as a replacement to HTML by retarded web hosts who think that's a good idea. It's not.
If the iPhone can destroy Flash, it will be Apple's greatest contribution since WebKit and Mac OS X. And the iPhone.
Yaping about Flash as a legitimate and modern part of the web is ridiculous. It's a proprietary old turd that needs to get flushed as soon as possible.
Your G1 has also no application security model. Good luck with that.
Apple invented standardized copy and paste in the OS with the Macintosh. It invented mobile copy and paste conventions with Newton.
So ask yourself, is Apple just too stupid to please an arrogant but anonymous coward, or are you perhaps uninformed on what might be involved in developing secure copy and paste on a new platform with a unique security model?
Do you understand that other phones with copy/paste features do not sandbox their apps? That their kernels will pretty much run any code from any source? That rogue apps can do anything?
The more you learn, the less you'll view the world in simple black and white as a bunch of things to be outraged about.
OMG- your logic, it's apeshit retard.
First off, the EFF is wrong, as it has been many times before.
Second, the premise that Apple is as bad as Microsoft, and therefore worse than Microsoft, is also wrong and delusional.
Third, your side argument that the EFF has criticized Microsoft in the past, and therefore is correct now in criticizing Apple for "DRM" in headphones (which does not exist), regardless of the facts at hand and ignoring the lapse of logic that the EFF presents, along with the implication that Apple is being worse than Microsoft at preventing competition and innovation... is just breathtakingly devoid of basic reasoning ability.
You're not really joining a conversation as much as popping up to agree with an argument because it has something bad-sounding about DRM and Apple in it, and calling me names in an effort to sidestep having to actually consider the facts.
By the way, dismissing an argument by waving the "ad hominem" flag is about the most hypocritical thing one can do on Slashdot.
"No one is claiming that Microsoft are fine and Apple are bad - that's a straw man."
I see you have trouble following logic. It was the EFF that was screeching that Apple was being evil and nobody would stand for it if Microsoft did the same: "If it were Microsoft demanding that computer peripherals all include Microsoft "authentication chips" in order to work with Windows (or Toyota or Ford doing the same for replacement parts), I'd think reviewers would be screaming about it."
Comparing Apple against Microsoft, Ford, Toyota is not just stupid, but apeshit retarded FIRST BECAUSE the EFF made Microsoft a poster child for its War on DRM, SECOND because Windows has a monopoly position and therefore has no need for DRM to lock it to PCs and THIRD because Microsoft pushes far more draconian DRM that creates terrible products that nobody wants to buy. Yet his comments suggest that Apple has done something Microsoft does not do.
Then you come along and start yapping about ad hominems and straw men. What's next, are you going to call me a sock puppet and say in Russia your argument isn't backwards?
When some ideological zealot with a penchant for getting things wrong files unsubstantiated accusations, it's not the responsibility of the rest of the world to prove them wrong, it's their duty to ignore them until they are substantiated.
The EFF, and specifically Fred von Lohmann, is not only taking a shaky position here, but expressing it ignorantly. The group is getting good at going on witch hunts without really knowing what they're talking about.
For starters, comparing Apple against Microsoft, Ford, Toyota is not just stupid, but apeshit retarded. Microsoft isn't a principally hardware maker, but its hardware IS all encrusted with DRM, from the Xbox to Zune. It also promotes WMA/WMV DRM on files and HD-DVD style end to end video output DRM on PCs, so von Lohmanns' comments are ridiculous.
Ford and Toyota all use proprietary parts in their vehicles that can not be swapped out for third party bits from any supplier a user might want to pick from.
But secondly, the guy doesn't even verify the information he's complaining about at full speed. Fred von Lohmann is a shoot first, gather details later kind of guy. He was the same EFF staffer who wrote, "Apple is among the worst offenders when it comes to messing around with stuff you've already paid for. But iTunes 7.2 is likely to be remembered for the especially wicked tricks it plays on iTunes customers."
That's the same whiney moralist language he's using here, but he was wrong about iTunes 7.2 removing the ability to rip tracks to CD. That didn't stop him from prattling on about it.
Von Lohmann thought iTunes could no longer burn and re-rip music after reading about it in a blog. He was wrong, because the blogger he believed was also mistaken. However, von Lohmann did not correct his posting accusing Apple of "removing the feature" from iTunes; he also cited [EFF's Peter] Eckersley's "previous revelations" [erroneous nonsense about metadata spying in iTunes] as proof Apple could not be trusted.
Apple's 'Especially Wicked Tricks.'
You are completely wrong on two counts on this "DRM in headphones" nonsense.
Apple has used a form of DRM in the recent generations of iPods to limit how commercial video content could be exported, in part to placate studios so they will allow Apple to resell their commercial content, and in part to monetize iPod video accessories, apparently.
In this case, however, there's no DRM involved in the iPod shuffle's headphones. It's a simple click mechanism that signals play controls to the device over a fourth conductor headphone jack. There are third parties bringing compatible integrated-control headphones to market, although its not yet clear if they are licensing the (probably patented) technology from Apple, or simply able to design a compatible implementation.
If there is an authentication chip, it is an example of at worst a proprietary design and at best a new innovative standard in controlling devices via the headphones, something Apple first rolled out with the iPhone. Why not have the device in your pocket, and simply navigate by touching the headphone wire? It is not, however, an example of DRM, because it has nothing to do with digital rights management. It's a security mechanism.
Why is it Apple's moral duty to enrich third parties? Nobody posts complaints to Slashdot when Sony or any other company releases an accessory that only works on its own models. This is such absurd bullshit. If you don't like the product, don't buy it.
But secondly, your kind needs to shut the fuck up with the simpleton, ignorant ranting against DRM.
DRM secures the rights of content producers to distribute their work as they want. It's not going away because you can organize a circle jerk complaint session amongst your fellow commercial content thieves and people who don't use commercial content and are therefore irrelevant to the subject of DRM.
It isn't obsolete or doomed because it can and will eventually be broken, any more than physical locks are obsolete or doomed because they can always be removed or bypassed by people who are intent on getting around them. DRM is a deterrent to protect a business model, just like every other security system. You might as well bitch about the shoplifting mechanisms in retail stores that are there to slow down the thieving sprees of people who end up making products cost more.
DRM in the iPhone App Store has been essential in creating a functional market that attracts both users and developers, and gives both what they want: cheap fresh content for users and volume sales for a sustainable developer revenue stream.
DRM on iTunes music similarly allows labels to limit the simplicity of users' ability to widely copy around digital songs, creating a real market where users can now buy commercial content at consistent quality and with better production than the thieves stealing content on torrents.
Music labels didn't "sue their customers," they fucking sued the thieves and digital counterfeiters who thought that they could fuck the music industry by stealing its content rather than just refusing to buy its overpriced, poor quality bullshit products.
Prior to music moving to digital files, the limiting factor of DRM was provided by a physical analog: the fact that CDs bonded music to a plastic platter, and removing it to cassette resulted in a significant loss of sound quality. Coping music from cassettes or LPs did the same, limiting how content could be resold or distributed outside of authorized channels. Copying songs off the radio similarly gave you a degraded experience.
DRM usually attempts to artificially degrade the signal the same way, although it does not in iTunes when users burn their own tracks to CD.
That physical analog to DRM has also worked for books, which are infeasible to casually copy in unauthorized ways because the text on paper is a lot of the value of buying a book. Digital books, like those for the Kindle, are so much easier to distribute that the format needs DRM to prevent widespread piracy.
Throwing around jargon doesn't make things cost less. A DLSAM can only serve broadband to users within 3 miles of good quality twisted pair. It is neither cheap nor basic. How many of these are you going to install to serve rural users scattered around with more space than that between their homes? It makes no sense.
Republicans are always big on small government and cutting spending until it comes time to address their own highly subsidized lifestyles. The Red States are all money pits living off the teat of Blue States. You're suggesting this must go even further so that Republicans can have faster access to their porn.
Ridiculous.
Microsoft's problem has never been that it didn't cater to developers, but rather that its software was poor quality, insecure, badly designed, ugly, bloated, and slow, and that the company leveraged the monopoly position it was handed by IBM to prevent competition, ensuring that it didn't need to improve its software.
In competitive markets where Microsoft's PC monopoly does it no real good, its software is similarly poor quality, insecure, badly designed, ugly, bloated, and slow, but there are much better alternatives available.
Money. And while you're lusting after your "not bad looking smart chick," she's monopolizing the ad market, fucking over advertisers and content producers both, and using that money to develop fun apps and tools. But she isn't generating revenue for smartphone developers. So good luck with writing Android apps as a hobby while you fantasize about Google Corporation as your ideal woman.
The rest of the world is writing mobile software for Apple's platform, not because it tickles their fantasies, but because it makes them money. That's how things get done.
Google's Android Market Guarantees Problems for Users
hey dumdum, er, "sumdumass:"
first off, it's = it is.
second, as you acknowledge in principle, "the constitution stops the freedoms of it's citizens from being trampled on by it's governments" but NOT IF BUSH IGNORES IT. That's the point you struggle to grasp as you rant on about how terrorists don't have any protections.
The problem is, unless you only ever take a break from Fox News to watch "24," the definition of who "the terrorists" are is not conveniently scripted. Your reasoning is specious and absurdly childish.
If we trusted the government to just "do whatever it takes" to provide security and freedom, we wouldn't need a Constitution. The reason we have a Constitution and a revered rule of law is to prevent crooks like Bush and his administration from overstepping their authority in violating the freedom of citizens and violate international law to do things our society has long determined to be inappropriate. That includes picking up citizens and holding them for years in torture concentration camps without even charging them with a crime.
The rest of your post is so wildly uninformed and rant-a-holic I didn't bother reading further.
Please do society a favor and kill yourself.
And why should the government subsidize "luxury" data service for people who choose to live far from urban centers?
USF is lifeline service to telephone access, a large subsidy to provide basic communications services for everyone. Expecting your fellow citizens to pay far more for the much more expensive task of setting up cheap, heavily subsidized data services for you is plain socialism. Especially when rural residents can buy sat service or use dialup Internet.
Nobody has an emergency need for access to YouTube.
You should, or the Constitution isn't worth the paper it was written on. If our freedoms can be thrown out whenever radicals stage a terrorist attack (in this case, crashing a plane that resulted in subsequent horrific damage and loss of life, but certainly not an "invasion" by a foreign power and unquestionably not a "rebellion"), then we really don't have any real freedom.
Don't Republicans make a pretense of upholding the Constitution as a big part of their platform? Or is it only lip service, like the whole bit about shrinking government and being fiscally responsible?
In the last 8 years of nearly unfettered Republican rule, the Constitution was trampled, the government expanded (and not by offering services to citizens, but largely in becoming a militarized taser police state focused on enforcing pot laws through paramilitary raids on citizens), and taxpayers amassed the highest deficit ever, following Clinton's efforts to balance the budget and get the US out of debt.
Republicans hate America as much as Islamic fundamentalists, and yet Obama isn't rounding up Rush Limbaugh and his party's members and holding them without due process as enemies of the state. And they are. Your argument for rebellion actually fits there. Republican leaders have incited terrorism (OReilly), hope for the President's stimulus to fail (Limbaugh) and repudiate rational thought and science in order to establish religion (further dumping on the Constitution).
Better be glad Obama isn't the power grabbing fascist Bush was, or you'd already be locked up in Cuba getting raped by US soldiers armed with video cameras, tasers, and memorandums giving them carte blanch to torture.
Thanks but "regulation" isn't the natural enemy of capitalism. It is in fact necessary for capitalism to function properly. It is the rule of law. Without regulation of things from standard measurements to money supply to accounting practices to reporting rules and so on, business couldn't function and we'd have anarchy.
That's exactly what happened in the unregulated markets for new securities, developed by big finance to skirt the rule of law in order to make vast short term wealth on the side. That house of cards collapsed, proving that "deregulation" is not "pro-business" as Republicans like to claim it is.
Excessive regulation can certainly be a problem, resulting in bureaucracy, but we're not near that problem and haven't been for decades.
Worrying about the perils of excessive regulation as the economy tanks from the outcome of lax regulation, a direct result of years of the Republican-driven assault on regulation, is as ridiculous as fretting about the US suddenly falling to communism as it climbs from the crater of corporate fascism.
The slippery slope toward liberal democracy isn't as slippery as Republicans fear it is. Progress is actually a lot of work. Slipping backward is the real threat.