On the other hand, I can think of a couple of examples about what happens when you decide that a certain hundreds-of-years old document is inmutable, and use it to base all your laws. Like, say, Islam and the Qur'an.
No, such matters should be debated on their merits alone, not defended just because some people wrote them on a piece of paper a couple hundred years ago. I don't know what mr. Heston's reasons really were, though, but I sure hope that he had better arguments for supporting gun ownership rights than "Washington did it too".
You know things are fucked up when you have to depend on a monopoly to keep another monopoly within bounds.
Though personally I'd still take the extra competition, the RIAA is going under no matter what, and I'm willing to put up with a bit more trashing if it means we won't end up with another Microsoft.
Perhaps in this new world the role of gatekeeper doesn't have to be a hand-picked RIAA payola jockey, but there are only a handful of frequencies to fill, and the public still wants "generic bland" music readily available. How are those few gatekeepers/DJs selected? Who identifies the DJs for the mass markets?
How about, the free market? seriously. Auction off the different frequencies, and let different companies fight for the public's attention and the marketeers' money. TV has done just fine doing that, why not radio too?
While I don't think that books for non-engineering subjects are any better in that respect, I do agree with your general opinion. IMHO, all books would greatly benefit from an approach such as that in "Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science", where the first readers were asked to write notes on the book's margin, which were then preserved for the latter editions.
Yeah, some of the notes are just jokes, but so many of them propose alternative approaches for some problems, or explain in "layman's terms" some concept referenced in it, that it made the book a thousand times more useful for me than it had been otherwise.
Why? the problem here isn't copyright which, besides having a duration about 10x longer than the optimal, works just fine. The problem here is DRM and the way it's being used to deprive us of our rights, so what you have to attack is *that*, not copyright itself.
I, personally, propose mandating by law that all non-military use of cryptography has to disclose the algorithms for it, (presumably) making DRM useless while avoiding damaging saner uses of said technology, though being neither a lawyer nor a cryptoanalyst I'm not sure about how such a law would work. Still better than copyright taxes, though.
You've never had a game bitch about having to download the latest point-release of DirectX? or the installer requiring some.dll file included in a runtime installer from Microsoft themselves that just-doesn't-work? or being prompted to download some shitty library, only to find out after half an hour in Google that you need to edit some.dll file hidden in an obscure directory with a hex editor instead? 'cause I've had all those happen within the last two weeks, and I'm not even a big gamer.
And let us not speak of the troubles you have to go through just to get the fucking game you just bought from nagging you about needing the CD on the fucking drive everytime you try to play it... something that, if I might add, hasn't happened to me yet on Linux, even when the Windows versions of the games *are* of the nagging type.
He sees an iphone commercial. So what is he going to do if he gets sold on buying a new phone? Is he going to magically buy the product he doesn't know about (Nokia) or buy what he sees on TV?
If experience is any indicator, whatever's cheaper. Now, on the debt-ridden, popularity-driven US culture things are probably different, but elsewhere, the almighty buck truly deserves said adjective. Which also explains why Apple's other products generally aren't as popular outside the US as they're inside it.
Why compare to Microsoft at all? you only need to look at the original Macintosh to see how much people value "seamless integration" and "elegant design" over "having the fucking apps they need in the first place". Yeah, other computers of the time were also closed-down, overpriced crap but today most of us, Apple fans included, are using PCs that descend from the sole architecture that *wasn't*.
Not that I particularly care, though, if Apple was stupid enough not to learn the lesson the first time around, they don't deserve to survive the second one. Though they probably will in any case, thanks to their impressive marketing department.
Sure, be proud of your 10% contribution, as long as you rightfully attribute and compensate (in the same way you expect yourself to be) the authors of the other 90%. Otherwise, you'll either be an hypocrite, or agree with the rest of society that believes that thoughts and inventions should, after a reasonable time, pass on to become property of society at large instead of being perpetually controlled by one single individual.
If the former, the problem is obvious, but if the latter then we'd have to debate about how to balance the "MINEMINEMINE" instinct with society's interests to find the optimal lenght of such a period, something that neither your post nor, specially, the OP seem to recognize at all.
While China and Korea were cranking out cheap little generic MP3 players with tiny buttons and single line LCD displays, Apple came along with a player that was easy and actually *enjoyable* for people to manipulate.
Funny that you'd mention that, because personally all the iPods I've seen have been on TV celebrities, while *everyone* I've seen out in the street uses one of those cheap little generic MP3 players with tiny buttons and small LCD displays from China and Korea, or branded versions of such, myself included.
It seems that, outside the US, people in general aren't as ready to pay 10x the price just to avoid spending 15 minutes reading a short manual, so it's likely that the iPhone will follow it's predecessors' success (or lack thereof).
No, life doesn't exist just because the universe is configured for it to exist, but also because *life itself* is configured to perpetuate in time, the latter part being what's described by the OP's phrase. It ain't God, it ain't a special power or something, it's not a conscious, rational being deciding to ensure that life survives, it's just a (sightly poetic) description of a characteristic of life itself.
Seriously, it's not creationist propaganda, so stop treating it like one.
What is life finding a way for? To live, and adapt? So what you're telling me is that life in general finds a way to live, to survive, to adapt.
Yup.
Except that in this context life is finding a way to kill other life...
Nope, it's finding a way to continue to live, humans because the HIV virus is lethal to them, and the HIV virus because it needs to propagate for its species to continue, but I guess both wouldn't be so sad if HIV suddenly decided to mutate and infect only mice, or something. The mice probably wouldn't, though.
That guy who got a few hundred pounds of T-Rex tooth inserted into his body surely wasn't 'finding a way' to anywhere but being dead. But wait, I thought life always found a way. Shucks, guess not. But it sounded so poetic and beautiful!
Sure, but his species lived on, and most importantly, *life* (as in, the T-rex in particular), continued to live on. If we worried about each individual member of any species we'd only find that life only finds a way towards their death, since no single organism is inmortal, but that'd be kinda pessimistic and short-sighted, IMHO.
How about Python? Glade? LaTeX? ViM and Emacs? mpd? eMovix? what were the propietary predecessors of those? and that's just from the stuff I have in front of me right now.
Sure, if you hand-pick your examples, you can "prove" that F/OSS practically doesn't innovate. I could also "prove" that closed-source apps are just stagnant, bloated pieces of overpriced crap, too, but that statement wouldn't be entirely accurate either.
Fact is, on both the propietary and Free software worlds, there's lots of copying off each other, and lots of innovation, and sadly, on both worlds the users tend towards that which resembles their existing software the most, but innovation is always there for those who're willing to look. It's just that with Free Software, the chances of somebody eventually picking up that technology and pushing it further are a bit higher.
No, we're fighting DRM because it still exists. Yeah, most of their iTMS material can be bought without DRM, but what about the ones that aren't available as such? "tough luck, dude, go buy some Celine Dion like a happy, good consumer instead"?
And fuck, if DRM is so unimportant to the iTMS, why the fuck are they threatening legal action against Hymn then? if you were right, Apple would be offering DRM-stripping tools *themselves* as a way of gathering some good will out of an irrelevant technology, but they're doing the exact opposite. Why?
And for the record, no, I don't pirate music, I pay for it, but not from a DRM-supporting, law-abusing company like Apple.
Why does a parent having absolute authority imply no freedom? I highly doubt you've raised any children (at least, the kind that can keep out of jail).
And you have? because I highly doubt that too. But what do I know, right? I'm just someone who was raised with unrestricted and unsupervised internet access since I was 10, free to make any decision by myself, even up to quitting school at 15, and is now 21, having never tried alcohol, tobacco or any kind of illegal drugs, leads a happy, fulfilling life and goes to the best university in the entire country. Ohh yeah, and I've never been in jail
People, parenting means education, *not* control and permanent survelliance, and if you have to resort to those things, it means either you've already fucked up your children's education, or you've been brainwashed by your government's "won't someone think of the children?"-style propaganda.
Watching a child every second of his life may be impossible, but teaching them basic rules so that they may protect themselves is considerably easier.
Me, my parents let me befriend whoever I wanted (even a 22-years-old guy when I was 15), go to friends' houses for as long as I wanted to, and gave me completely unrestricted, unsupervised internet access since I was about 10, simply because they knew I'd never do stupid things such as drinking alcohol or having sex just because some idiot told me it was "the cool thing to do". In fact, my dad was specifically against installing any sort of web-filter on the family's PC because he thought it'd hinder my and my brothers' education, and frankly, I spent at least 10x more time on Linux websites than watching porn during my teenage years so I guess that was also the best decision.
Fuck, when did the term "parenting" stop being about "education" and started being "police watch"? when did everyone start being so goddamned dumb, both parents *and* children? truly, I fear for the humanity...
Re:I am not handsome enough to be a lawyer
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UK Report Slams EULAs
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You know, it's not an option for movies, either. And a $7 ticket for a two-hour movie costs more, hour for hour, than a $60 game you can finish in 20 hours. Would you be willing to claim that it's fair for you to "demo" a movie because the guy who runs the theater won't give you your money back if it's lousy?
Seriously, five years ago only the companies's local geeks had heard of Linux, nowadays only the young-and-stupid MSCEs *haven't*. And the amount of Linux users I've met during non computer-related activities has been surprising, too, and it has only tended to increase during the last couple of years.
Sure, it hasn't been as fast as Firefox, but I'd say it's not so much due to Linux's "free" status, as much as due to Microsoft's tight grip on it's OS monopoly. HTML is a standard, the Win32 API... not so much.
Not that I particularly care, though, Linux works for me perfectly without needing a 50%+ marketshare, but it *is* spreading, slowly perhaps but that should change once it gains a good foothold in the business market.
So what is the difference between the two? Apple's notebook looks and feels like it was designed around a task, a need, and Lenovo's laptop looks more like it was designed around the tech specs.
Or to put it another way, the Air is a gadget, the Thinkpad is a computer.
Or maybe we could try not to be so fanboyish about it, and say that Apple tries to put as many features as possible on an ultra-thin laptop, and Lenovo tries to make a full-featured laptop that's as thin as possible, and the relative importance of both criteria is what eventually determines which one appears better to whom.
Clearly, this means there will be at least a second service pack before Vista is actually ready!:P
Well, that *was* the case after all with Windows XP, and many would argue, with 2000 as well, so I think it's fair to assume it'll be the case now too.
Point given, I seem to have written "Pro" when I was thinking "Air". I'm actually considering buying a MBP as my next laptop since as you say it's a very high quality laptop that, for what you get, is priced quite reasonably. Too bad the same doesn't apply to most other Apple products, though.
I don't quite know why you're frothing at the mouth. Yes, there's some lock-in. That's advertised straight-up. You need iTunes; you need an AT&T contract. Don't like it? Then vote with your wallet and buy something else.
Well, yeah, but if we simply didn't buy the product and said nothing about it, Apple managers may look at us and say, "they aren't even talking about our product! They probably haven't heard of it yet, so clearly what we need is more marketing!", instead of making the changes they need to gain us as customers.
So here I am, and I'll say it clearly: I will *not* buy any electronic device with more restrictions than the device it's replacing, *ever*. That's why I don't have an iPhone, that's why I don't have an iPod, and that's why I don't have a MacBook Pro, not because I haven't heard of them, nor because "all my friends are using product $X", it's simply, because I will not pay more to do less with my hardware.
From the Borg perspective, I doubt that many consider it "unity through compulsive slavery"; they consider it as they were created and taught in a group that needs common beliefs and goals, forgoing personal good for the group's good, and assimilation, to survive. Borg that stay in the collective do so "voluntarily", according to their beliefs.
Compared to the Catholics, which members consider it as they were born and raised in a society that needs common beliefs and goals, forgoing personal good for church's and society's good, and recruiting, to survive. Catholics that stay with the church do so "voluntarily", according to their beliefs.
Funny, but the same applies to countries too, specially those heavy on nationalism like the USA.
So, basically, you bought an iPhone to be popular? wow. Just, wow.
As for the "20% of features 80% of the time" argument, I'll only give you the standard reply for it on arguments about Windows/Office replacements: it may be 20%, but *which* 20% varies from person to person, and when you ocassionally need one of the remaining 80% of features, you're fucked, so it's hardly a replacement for the more full-featured smartphones out there. And if you're like me and only need to make calls and receive calls, you're much better off with a $30 prepaid phone, rather than a locked-down, $400 shiny gadget.
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On the other hand, I can think of a couple of examples about what happens when you decide that a certain hundreds-of-years old document is inmutable, and use it to base all your laws. Like, say, Islam and the Qur'an.
No, such matters should be debated on their merits alone, not defended just because some people wrote them on a piece of paper a couple hundred years ago. I don't know what mr. Heston's reasons really were, though, but I sure hope that he had better arguments for supporting gun ownership rights than "Washington did it too".
You know things are fucked up when you have to depend on a monopoly to keep another monopoly within bounds.
Though personally I'd still take the extra competition, the RIAA is going under no matter what, and I'm willing to put up with a bit more trashing if it means we won't end up with another Microsoft.
How about, the free market? seriously. Auction off the different frequencies, and let different companies fight for the public's attention and the marketeers' money. TV has done just fine doing that, why not radio too?
While I don't think that books for non-engineering subjects are any better in that respect, I do agree with your general opinion. IMHO, all books would greatly benefit from an approach such as that in "Concrete Mathematics: A Foundation for Computer Science", where the first readers were asked to write notes on the book's margin, which were then preserved for the latter editions.
Yeah, some of the notes are just jokes, but so many of them propose alternative approaches for some problems, or explain in "layman's terms" some concept referenced in it, that it made the book a thousand times more useful for me than it had been otherwise.
Why? the problem here isn't copyright which, besides having a duration about 10x longer than the optimal, works just fine. The problem here is DRM and the way it's being used to deprive us of our rights, so what you have to attack is *that*, not copyright itself.
I, personally, propose mandating by law that all non-military use of cryptography has to disclose the algorithms for it, (presumably) making DRM useless while avoiding damaging saner uses of said technology, though being neither a lawyer nor a cryptoanalyst I'm not sure about how such a law would work. Still better than copyright taxes, though.
You've never had a game bitch about having to download the latest point-release of DirectX? or the installer requiring some .dll file included in a runtime installer from Microsoft themselves that just-doesn't-work? or being prompted to download some shitty library, only to find out after half an hour in Google that you need to edit some .dll file hidden in an obscure directory with a hex editor instead? 'cause I've had all those happen within the last two weeks, and I'm not even a big gamer.
And let us not speak of the troubles you have to go through just to get the fucking game you just bought from nagging you about needing the CD on the fucking drive everytime you try to play it... something that, if I might add, hasn't happened to me yet on Linux, even when the Windows versions of the games *are* of the nagging type.
If experience is any indicator, whatever's cheaper. Now, on the debt-ridden, popularity-driven US culture things are probably different, but elsewhere, the almighty buck truly deserves said adjective. Which also explains why Apple's other products generally aren't as popular outside the US as they're inside it.
Why compare to Microsoft at all? you only need to look at the original Macintosh to see how much people value "seamless integration" and "elegant design" over "having the fucking apps they need in the first place". Yeah, other computers of the time were also closed-down, overpriced crap but today most of us, Apple fans included, are using PCs that descend from the sole architecture that *wasn't*.
Not that I particularly care, though, if Apple was stupid enough not to learn the lesson the first time around, they don't deserve to survive the second one. Though they probably will in any case, thanks to their impressive marketing department.
Sure, be proud of your 10% contribution, as long as you rightfully attribute and compensate (in the same way you expect yourself to be) the authors of the other 90%. Otherwise, you'll either be an hypocrite, or agree with the rest of society that believes that thoughts and inventions should, after a reasonable time, pass on to become property of society at large instead of being perpetually controlled by one single individual.
If the former, the problem is obvious, but if the latter then we'd have to debate about how to balance the "MINEMINEMINE" instinct with society's interests to find the optimal lenght of such a period, something that neither your post nor, specially, the OP seem to recognize at all.
Funny that you'd mention that, because personally all the iPods I've seen have been on TV celebrities, while *everyone* I've seen out in the street uses one of those cheap little generic MP3 players with tiny buttons and small LCD displays from China and Korea, or branded versions of such, myself included.
It seems that, outside the US, people in general aren't as ready to pay 10x the price just to avoid spending 15 minutes reading a short manual, so it's likely that the iPhone will follow it's predecessors' success (or lack thereof).
No, life doesn't exist just because the universe is configured for it to exist, but also because *life itself* is configured to perpetuate in time, the latter part being what's described by the OP's phrase. It ain't God, it ain't a special power or something, it's not a conscious, rational being deciding to ensure that life survives, it's just a (sightly poetic) description of a characteristic of life itself.
Seriously, it's not creationist propaganda, so stop treating it like one.
Yup.
Except that in this context life is finding a way to kill other life...Nope, it's finding a way to continue to live, humans because the HIV virus is lethal to them, and the HIV virus because it needs to propagate for its species to continue, but I guess both wouldn't be so sad if HIV suddenly decided to mutate and infect only mice, or something. The mice probably wouldn't, though.
That guy who got a few hundred pounds of T-Rex tooth inserted into his body surely wasn't 'finding a way' to anywhere but being dead. But wait, I thought life always found a way. Shucks, guess not. But it sounded so poetic and beautiful!Sure, but his species lived on, and most importantly, *life* (as in, the T-rex in particular), continued to live on. If we worried about each individual member of any species we'd only find that life only finds a way towards their death, since no single organism is inmortal, but that'd be kinda pessimistic and short-sighted, IMHO.
How about Python? Glade? LaTeX? ViM and Emacs? mpd? eMovix? what were the propietary predecessors of those? and that's just from the stuff I have in front of me right now.
Sure, if you hand-pick your examples, you can "prove" that F/OSS practically doesn't innovate. I could also "prove" that closed-source apps are just stagnant, bloated pieces of overpriced crap, too, but that statement wouldn't be entirely accurate either.
Fact is, on both the propietary and Free software worlds, there's lots of copying off each other, and lots of innovation, and sadly, on both worlds the users tend towards that which resembles their existing software the most, but innovation is always there for those who're willing to look. It's just that with Free Software, the chances of somebody eventually picking up that technology and pushing it further are a bit higher.
No, we're fighting DRM because it still exists. Yeah, most of their iTMS material can be bought without DRM, but what about the ones that aren't available as such? "tough luck, dude, go buy some Celine Dion like a happy, good consumer instead"?
And fuck, if DRM is so unimportant to the iTMS, why the fuck are they threatening legal action against Hymn then? if you were right, Apple would be offering DRM-stripping tools *themselves* as a way of gathering some good will out of an irrelevant technology, but they're doing the exact opposite. Why?
And for the record, no, I don't pirate music, I pay for it, but not from a DRM-supporting, law-abusing company like Apple.
And you have? because I highly doubt that too. But what do I know, right? I'm just someone who was raised with unrestricted and unsupervised internet access since I was 10, free to make any decision by myself, even up to quitting school at 15, and is now 21, having never tried alcohol, tobacco or any kind of illegal drugs, leads a happy, fulfilling life and goes to the best university in the entire country. Ohh yeah, and I've never been in jail
People, parenting means education, *not* control and permanent survelliance, and if you have to resort to those things, it means either you've already fucked up your children's education, or you've been brainwashed by your government's "won't someone think of the children?"-style propaganda.
Watching a child every second of his life may be impossible, but teaching them basic rules so that they may protect themselves is considerably easier.
Me, my parents let me befriend whoever I wanted (even a 22-years-old guy when I was 15), go to friends' houses for as long as I wanted to, and gave me completely unrestricted, unsupervised internet access since I was about 10, simply because they knew I'd never do stupid things such as drinking alcohol or having sex just because some idiot told me it was "the cool thing to do". In fact, my dad was specifically against installing any sort of web-filter on the family's PC because he thought it'd hinder my and my brothers' education, and frankly, I spent at least 10x more time on Linux websites than watching porn during my teenage years so I guess that was also the best decision.
Fuck, when did the term "parenting" stop being about "education" and started being "police watch"? when did everyone start being so goddamned dumb, both parents *and* children? truly, I fear for the humanity...
Yup. BitTorrent FTW! ;)
Seriously, five years ago only the companies's local geeks had heard of Linux, nowadays only the young-and-stupid MSCEs *haven't*. And the amount of Linux users I've met during non computer-related activities has been surprising, too, and it has only tended to increase during the last couple of years.
Sure, it hasn't been as fast as Firefox, but I'd say it's not so much due to Linux's "free" status, as much as due to Microsoft's tight grip on it's OS monopoly. HTML is a standard, the Win32 API... not so much.
Not that I particularly care, though, Linux works for me perfectly without needing a 50%+ marketshare, but it *is* spreading, slowly perhaps but that should change once it gains a good foothold in the business market.
Or to put it another way, the Air is a gadget, the Thinkpad is a computer.
Or maybe we could try not to be so fanboyish about it, and say that Apple tries to put as many features as possible on an ultra-thin laptop, and Lenovo tries to make a full-featured laptop that's as thin as possible, and the relative importance of both criteria is what eventually determines which one appears better to whom.
Well, that *was* the case after all with Windows XP, and many would argue, with 2000 as well, so I think it's fair to assume it'll be the case now too.
Yes, there's no such thing as absolute evil.
Point given, I seem to have written "Pro" when I was thinking "Air". I'm actually considering buying a MBP as my next laptop since as you say it's a very high quality laptop that, for what you get, is priced quite reasonably. Too bad the same doesn't apply to most other Apple products, though.
Well, yeah, but if we simply didn't buy the product and said nothing about it, Apple managers may look at us and say, "they aren't even talking about our product! They probably haven't heard of it yet, so clearly what we need is more marketing!", instead of making the changes they need to gain us as customers.
So here I am, and I'll say it clearly: I will *not* buy any electronic device with more restrictions than the device it's replacing, *ever*. That's why I don't have an iPhone, that's why I don't have an iPod, and that's why I don't have a MacBook Pro, not because I haven't heard of them, nor because "all my friends are using product $X", it's simply, because I will not pay more to do less with my hardware.
Funny, but the same applies to countries too, specially those heavy on nationalism like the USA.
So, basically, you bought an iPhone to be popular? wow. Just, wow.
As for the "20% of features 80% of the time" argument, I'll only give you the standard reply for it on arguments about Windows/Office replacements: it may be 20%, but *which* 20% varies from person to person, and when you ocassionally need one of the remaining 80% of features, you're fucked, so it's hardly a replacement for the more full-featured smartphones out there. And if you're like me and only need to make calls and receive calls, you're much better off with a $30 prepaid phone, rather than a locked-down, $400 shiny gadget.