Who's heaping undeserved platitudes here? Miss USA says "I'm a history geek," and a bunch of angry computer nerds felt it necessary to chime in and go, "Harumph harumph, it's absolutely impossible for her to be a geek. First of all, she's pretty. Second of all, she's a woman. Pretty women aren't geeks, pretty woman - especially those in a pageant - are stupid." Your whining about some broader social injustice is unwarranted in this case, and simply makes you look petty.
In attempting to maintain some sort of negative correlation between beauty and intellect (i.e., pretty people can't be smart, and smart people can't be pretty), you are only betraying your own prejudices and anger towards a system that you irrationally perceive as being "misandric," despite the fact that men enjoy clear and quanitifiable benefits in almost every aspect of the workplace and society over their female peers.
If these girls were truly 'geek smart' they'd've gotten their scholarships from academics and/or applied science and engineering societies.
Right, because we all know how easy it is - at least here in the states - to get a full 4 year scholarship to any school you care to attend based solely on the merits of your brain alone, right? Nobody every takes student loans, or applies for every ridiculous scholarship they might remotely be eligible for in order to pay tuition. I'm also sure that the dozens of girls I met, personally, during my college ROTC days were all lying about being in college, too. By all means, don't let any of the facts get in the way of your fantasies.
So this isn't prejudice, but simple experience based on good old statistical evidence. (The only sexists here are those who always blame everything on gender issues.)
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Pretty people do not get some "automatic free pass for life". There's a very small number of people with the requisite drive, talents, and ambition to be actresses/actors/models/etc - professionally pretty people. The vast majority of "pretty girls" are faced with a choice between improving their minds so they can get a job which will let them support themselves, or stripping at a club out by the airport. Your argument suggests that only ugly people would ever be motivated to be smart, and pretty people would only motivated to remain pretty so they can keep coasting on their looks.
A look around any modern workplace would disabuse you of this notion. I work with some absolute stunners - two of whom majored in actuarial math and biomedical engineering, respectively. This notion that "ugly = smart" and "pretty = dumb" is retarded - there are plenty of very good looking, very smart people; there are plenty of very bad looking, very dumb people. The two are entirely unrelated characteristics, and attempting to force some correlation between the two simply betrays the biases of the person making that assertion.
That deterministic thinking is what leads people to fail once, and then never try again. "I'm not born smart, so why even bother," or "I'm naturally fat, so I shouldn't even bother exercising."
MOST people - by which I mean, the overwhelming majority - are not born with a hideously misshapen head, missing limbs, or a vestigial tail which would make them hideous and repulsive to behold no matter how hard they try.
MOST people - by which I mean, the overwhelming majority - are not born with a severe mental handicap which prevents their efforts to learn.
There will always be genetic outliers - people who seem *born* to be a model, or be a guitar player, or be a physicist, or be a poet - people who have randomly inherited some assortment of genes and nurture which gifts them with an amazing capacity and propensity to excel in some area. The rest of the people - most people - need to learn that grinding it out, as unexciting as that can be, is the way to build intelligence, just as it's the way to build a more attractive body.
Expertise in an area is built far more on the foundation of dedication and practice than it is built on the foundation of "random assortment of genes makes you an expert."
Intelligence *is* built. Capacity for knowledge, abstract thought, and critical thinking *are* built. Just like muscles, just like a trim body, just like knowing how to fix your hair, apply makeup, trim your nails, dress yourself, and a host of other things *are built*. Intelligence and beauty require work, and the only thing stopping most people from building their intelligence and/or their attractiveness is an unwillingness to dedicate the time and effort to build those capabilities.
isn't a geek just because she's a girl or is it because she is attractive?
I'm sure there's a little bit of misogyny mixed into these responses, but I think it's mostly because most of the people assuming this imagines that every participant in a beauty pageant is dumb-as-rocks. (See: Miss South Carolina's response about maps & education several years back.)
Comically, many of the same people who make that assumption will also turn around and express their titanic levels of outrage over being stereotyped when people generalize them based on a comparison with a single data point about the neckbearded computer geek they once knew.
Having been to a 15-20 pageants as a member of the color guard presenting & retiring the national colors when I was in college, I had the opportunity to meet quite a few pageant participants (and yes, it was pretty great being a 19 year old in uniform surrounded by a bunch of 18-25 year old pageant contestants). Some of them were pretty dumb, and talking to them was tremendously un-fun. Others were quite sharp, and a lot of fun to talk to - quite a few were college students trying to win some scholarship money for school.
An entirely substantiated conclusion from this data is that "Android phones vary pretty widely in quality and reliability, and there's no way of knowing whether a model is good or bad until after you've bought it." Corporate purchasers are not widely known for their risk-taking behaviors.
Why do you think Google has been slowly ratcheting up the controls and requirements for Android device makers? Because they realized that allowing a crapflood of cheap & shitty devices would tarnish the Android brand, and give it a reputation for unpredictable, uneven experiences - which will cause people to migrate away from Android as they get tired of never knowing what to expect. My parents still refuse to even consider purchasing a vehicle made by Ford, due to a bad experience with a Ford (and the dealership they bought it from) they owned in the mid-80's. Rational? No. But humans so rarely are.
It doesn't matter if Samsung makes really great Android phones, if every other device maker is out there giving Android a bad name by making shit devices. You know that saying, "You only get one chance to make a first impression?" Yeah. That.
There are some android phones that are going to be designed to meet a price point rather than maximum quality.
By which you mean "ALL PHONES are designed to meet a price point rather than maximum quality," right?
The *maximum* price point is a carrier-subsidized $199/299 or $649/749 unlocked in the US. No phone that costs significantly more than the iPhone is going to sell in any numbers, especially now that AT&T and Verizon both sell the iPhone.
Reliability certainly enters into the purchasing decisions, though. A phone is something you carry around with you all day, every day, and at least for me, I need the thing to work, not randomly crap out on me when I'm in a conference call with clients. If I'm a corporate purchaser evaluating iPhone and some Android model, and find that I'm looking at a possible Android issue rate that's nearly 2x the issue rate of an iPhone, and the phones cost the same... guess which phone I'll add to my "corporate-approved device list?"
And who's creating those games, music players, social media, and other things using computers? Are they just materializing out of thin air?
Are Mark Zuckerberg and all the other 20-somethings building Facebook, writing games, and building music sites secretly 60-year old veterans of FORTRAN and COBOL programming?
Your argument suggests that everybody in the world should be a trained mechanic in order to be able to use cars to drive themselves to work, or that everybody should be an HVAC technician if they want to have a cool house during the summer months. The simple fact is that computers are becoming appliances, where you don't need to have a 4 year university degree just to operate one. The appliance-ization of technology doesn't kill off the need for experts, they just require less expertise and training on the user end for the users to accomplish the things they want to do with them.
- 3d games, music players, facebook, social media != fun. - Writing a script for mIRC to scrape text for keywords and have your bot auto respond to people == fun.
Yes, you're absolutely right - If you define "providing an entire infrastructure and toolchain with which to access/update the content" for a very low price to be "going out of their way to make it difficult."
You can also access a host of functionality for your iDevice via the build-in Safari browser, and Apple has zero control over what you access that way.
Microsoft only ran afoul of antitrust laws because it tried to punish PC vendors for bundling anything but IE - that's where your "market abuse" comes in. They used their dominance in the area of operating systems to unfairly inhibit competition in the browser space.
Building a better product at a better price point or with a better feature set is not "forcing others to compete at a disadvantage." There are dozens of tv manufacturers out there. What, exactly, has Apple done to "abuse the market" or "unfairly limit competition" in the TV market? What monopoly or near-monopoly status do they have in another area that is allowing them to abuse the tv market?
Specifics please, not hand-waving armchair lawyering.
The major difference is that credit cards and the computerization of banking didn't "replace" any currencies, they simply eased the circulation of standard fiat currencies around from bank to bank and account to account. They digitized the existing system, in other words.
There are *very* few use cases where Bitcoin offers substantial benefits above and beyond using something like a credit card, and most of those use cases are directly antagonistic to the governments and regulatory bodies who would need to embrace bitcoin to make it a truly viable standard beyond the niche market it currently occupies. Of the list of strengths Mr. Taaki cited, the only ones truly unique to Bitcoin (that could NOT be implemented in our current system) are the decentralization and privacy offered - both of which do nothing to entice a centralized regulatory body charged with overseeing, taxing, and monitoring the system to accomplish those goals, and in fact actively work against their accomplishment of those goals.
I'd also say that you could make a pretty solid argument that the majority of people who are buying into the Bitcoin hype at this point are the paranoid & the criminal (for whom a decentralized, anonymous transaction mechanism is appealing), or the excessively-nerdy folks with very fast computer rigs (who dream of making millions on something which bears all the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme).
There is no app store monopoly. Apple does not require you to not develop for other mobile platforms, nor do they refuse to let people use their app store if they already have an Android version of their app.
In fact, the very argument you make argues against the notion of "monopoly" in this space. How could an app developer be rendered obsolete by a competing app store, if Apple has a "monopoly" on app stores? The answer: There is no monopoly, and you are using the term improperly.
Pro tip: Monopoly does not mean, "I disagree with the policies under which a company offers their services, and prefer the policies of a competing service." It has a very specific legal meaning, and if you're going to use the word, you should probably know what it means.
History is littered with the detritus of "inevitable ideas whose time has come" that weren't inevitable, and whose time hadn't come.
Is this type of system inevitable? No, I don't think so. In fact I think it has a lot of things actively working against it, not the least of which is the simple fact that it'll be hard for the government to trace, tax, and control this new currency, and the government is the only one with the guns and laws to enforce adoption of a fiat currency, so you've just alienated the very organization whose support you desperately need to be able to break out of the small niche you're occupying.
Do I really, really think this is not going to happen in my lifetime? There will always be naive simpletons willing to buy into the delusion that this sort of thing will catch on "any day now." I don't think that means that this is going to happen in my lifetime.
A steady drumbeat of articles flogging this pyramid scam is not "expressing a general interest," it's beating a dead horse.
1 bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places, giving 100,000,000 units of value (source - Bitcoin)
If 1 bitcoin were running the world economy, then the smallest unit of currency in our new world economy would be worth approximately 740 dollars. Good luck buying a cup of coffee or a pack of gum. And if you think gas prices are high today, good luck earning your.00000001 bitcoin/liter.
I can't wait to see him invoke the "warning shot" defense.
"Your Honor, I fired shots to keep police away when they were trying to serve me with a felony warrant. But yo, check it out, they was just WARNING shots, I wasn't aiming at the police, just wanted to let them know that I didn't want them to come any closer."
When somebody's pointing a weapon in your direction and pulling the trigger, they're shooting at you. The fact that he has bad aim and was probably firing blind / wildly doesn't mean a thing, legally speaking. He still discharged his weapon at police, he still resisted arrest, and he still held someone - presumably against her will, unless she's going to now agree that she was his accomplice, rather than his hostage.
And who to blame for the existence and proliferation of cheap Chinese tablets? Right. Google.
By commoditizing the mobile OS with a "free" offering, they've ensured a race to bare minimum quality among the many handset / tablet manufacturers. You can't save much money by cutting your OS dev costs once you use Android, so you save money and shave margins by cutting testing & integration resources, while hoping that the raw horsepower you're cramming into the device will make up for its lack of detail finish.
Ad revenues über alles, after all - who cares if the consumers are faced with a minefield that's 80% full of half-functional devices? Google will serve ads to cheap, shitty hardware just as readily as they'll serve ads to expensive, thoughtfully designed hardware. And if people don't like the stuff Samsung, HTC, Nokia, et al. are putting out, Google can simply say, "How about a nice Chrome device instead? Or why not use our wonderful Google services on an Apple device? We'll serve you ads any which way you to access them!"
From what I can tell, there's a real fear of the breaking of the Apple monopoly right now.
There would have to be an "Apple monopoly" for it to be broken, or for there to be any fear that it "might" be broken at some point in the near future.
Since there isn't, is it safe to dismiss the rest of your post as insane rambling?
My bet is that Apple will make more money selling several-hundred-to-several-thousand-dollar devices to its customers, making a hefty profit margin on every sale, and then selling them all kinds of great apps, music, books, movies, and other stuff to put on those devices, and continue doing that for years and years and years, rather than selling out their entire customer base for a $5 million payoff in 2012 that will end in their bankruptcy in 2013.
But don't let logic get in the way of your "WHOA SPOOKY!" paranoid delusions.
Actually, criminal cases are beyond a "reasonable doubt" not "beyond a shadow of a [reasonable] doubt," which is generally considered to be an unattainable standard of evidence, as there's always some bizarre, but possible, alternate way things went down - this confusion is why Slashdotters frequently get outraged at stories about judgements where they can "totally conceive of an alternate conspiracy theory where the guy being declared guilty is actually innocent." Beyond the shadow of a doubt, and beyond a reasonable doubt, are two very different legal standards. The latter is what we use in our criminal cases, but it's no surprise that literal-minded science & math types often want to think in terms of the binary certitude of "beyond the shadow of a doubt," instead of the much more analog "beyond a reasonable doubt."
But that's beside the point anyway.
If you apply your critical reading skills, you'll see that the GP wasn't talking about the standard of evidence required to convict, he was saying that even if they knew absolutely, 100% correctly, that you have a pirated file on your hard drive (i.e., it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that you have pirated this file), that does nothing to prove that you have *ever* shared it with anybody - it doesn't even meet the much lower standard of "preponderance of the evidence" which would be required for a civil judgement against you for file sharing. "The existence of a file" =/= "the file was shared by the user whose hard drive we found it on." The best they could do would say "You owe us $0.99 for that pirated track," and for those returns, they're not going to expend a lot of time and effort tracking down individual users and building a case against them that will get them the subpoena to pull Apple's records.
So the effort of setting up and administering your own photo sharing site - similary to Picasa, or Flickr, or any of the dozens of other photo sharing sites - isn't duplicated effort?
RIAA: "In order for us to agree to let you set this service up, we need your assurance that you will hand over to us any and all evidence you can gather through an aggressive indexing of all music files. This includes personal information as well as an exhaustive list of every file that person has infringed on."
Apple: "Well, that would make our service useless because nobody would use it, and drive us to the brink of bankruptcy as our users abandon our products in droves when they find out that we've sold them out by being a stooge of the RIAA. I see no potential downside. Agreed."
Apple has made some missteps in recent years, but a botch of this scope would require them to have hired Ballmer's lovechild by Bernie Madoff, the one whose birth Nokia's management team midwifed. There is NO conceivable reality where Apple would agree to those terms.
So me reciting a bunch of memorized facts "increases knowledge"? Me performing bad Youtube covers of Lady Gaga songs "increases culture"? Me inviting everybody into my bedroom to watch me have sex with my girlfriend "increases common bonds"?
Notice that none of what you've said makes any sense? You might want to investigate this entire concept of "rational coherence" a bit further.
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Who's heaping undeserved platitudes here? Miss USA says "I'm a history geek," and a bunch of angry computer nerds felt it necessary to chime in and go, "Harumph harumph, it's absolutely impossible for her to be a geek. First of all, she's pretty. Second of all, she's a woman. Pretty women aren't geeks, pretty woman - especially those in a pageant - are stupid." Your whining about some broader social injustice is unwarranted in this case, and simply makes you look petty.
In attempting to maintain some sort of negative correlation between beauty and intellect (i.e., pretty people can't be smart, and smart people can't be pretty), you are only betraying your own prejudices and anger towards a system that you irrationally perceive as being "misandric," despite the fact that men enjoy clear and quanitifiable benefits in almost every aspect of the workplace and society over their female peers.
Right, because we all know how easy it is - at least here in the states - to get a full 4 year scholarship to any school you care to attend based solely on the merits of your brain alone, right? Nobody every takes student loans, or applies for every ridiculous scholarship they might remotely be eligible for in order to pay tuition. I'm also sure that the dozens of girls I met, personally, during my college ROTC days were all lying about being in college, too. By all means, don't let any of the facts get in the way of your fantasies.
I'm sorry, but this is bullshit. Pretty people do not get some "automatic free pass for life". There's a very small number of people with the requisite drive, talents, and ambition to be actresses/actors/models/etc - professionally pretty people. The vast majority of "pretty girls" are faced with a choice between improving their minds so they can get a job which will let them support themselves, or stripping at a club out by the airport. Your argument suggests that only ugly people would ever be motivated to be smart, and pretty people would only motivated to remain pretty so they can keep coasting on their looks.
A look around any modern workplace would disabuse you of this notion. I work with some absolute stunners - two of whom majored in actuarial math and biomedical engineering, respectively. This notion that "ugly = smart" and "pretty = dumb" is retarded - there are plenty of very good looking, very smart people; there are plenty of very bad looking, very dumb people. The two are entirely unrelated characteristics, and attempting to force some correlation between the two simply betrays the biases of the person making that assertion.
That deterministic thinking is what leads people to fail once, and then never try again. "I'm not born smart, so why even bother," or "I'm naturally fat, so I shouldn't even bother exercising."
MOST people - by which I mean, the overwhelming majority - are not born with a hideously misshapen head, missing limbs, or a vestigial tail which would make them hideous and repulsive to behold no matter how hard they try.
MOST people - by which I mean, the overwhelming majority - are not born with a severe mental handicap which prevents their efforts to learn.
There will always be genetic outliers - people who seem *born* to be a model, or be a guitar player, or be a physicist, or be a poet - people who have randomly inherited some assortment of genes and nurture which gifts them with an amazing capacity and propensity to excel in some area. The rest of the people - most people - need to learn that grinding it out, as unexciting as that can be, is the way to build intelligence, just as it's the way to build a more attractive body.
Expertise in an area is built far more on the foundation of dedication and practice than it is built on the foundation of "random assortment of genes makes you an expert."
Intelligence *is* built. Capacity for knowledge, abstract thought, and critical thinking *are* built. Just like muscles, just like a trim body, just like knowing how to fix your hair, apply makeup, trim your nails, dress yourself, and a host of other things *are built*. Intelligence and beauty require work, and the only thing stopping most people from building their intelligence and/or their attractiveness is an unwillingness to dedicate the time and effort to build those capabilities.
I'm sure there's a little bit of misogyny mixed into these responses, but I think it's mostly because most of the people assuming this imagines that every participant in a beauty pageant is dumb-as-rocks. (See: Miss South Carolina's response about maps & education several years back.)
Comically, many of the same people who make that assumption will also turn around and express their titanic levels of outrage over being stereotyped when people generalize them based on a comparison with a single data point about the neckbearded computer geek they once knew.
Having been to a 15-20 pageants as a member of the color guard presenting & retiring the national colors when I was in college, I had the opportunity to meet quite a few pageant participants (and yes, it was pretty great being a 19 year old in uniform surrounded by a bunch of 18-25 year old pageant contestants). Some of them were pretty dumb, and talking to them was tremendously un-fun. Others were quite sharp, and a lot of fun to talk to - quite a few were college students trying to win some scholarship money for school.
An entirely substantiated conclusion from this data is that "Android phones vary pretty widely in quality and reliability, and there's no way of knowing whether a model is good or bad until after you've bought it." Corporate purchasers are not widely known for their risk-taking behaviors.
Why do you think Google has been slowly ratcheting up the controls and requirements for Android device makers? Because they realized that allowing a crapflood of cheap & shitty devices would tarnish the Android brand, and give it a reputation for unpredictable, uneven experiences - which will cause people to migrate away from Android as they get tired of never knowing what to expect. My parents still refuse to even consider purchasing a vehicle made by Ford, due to a bad experience with a Ford (and the dealership they bought it from) they owned in the mid-80's. Rational? No. But humans so rarely are.
It doesn't matter if Samsung makes really great Android phones, if every other device maker is out there giving Android a bad name by making shit devices. You know that saying, "You only get one chance to make a first impression?" Yeah. That.
Well sure, them too. But mostly the Illuminati.
By which you mean "ALL PHONES are designed to meet a price point rather than maximum quality," right?
The *maximum* price point is a carrier-subsidized $199/299 or $649/749 unlocked in the US. No phone that costs significantly more than the iPhone is going to sell in any numbers, especially now that AT&T and Verizon both sell the iPhone.
Reliability certainly enters into the purchasing decisions, though. A phone is something you carry around with you all day, every day, and at least for me, I need the thing to work, not randomly crap out on me when I'm in a conference call with clients. If I'm a corporate purchaser evaluating iPhone and some Android model, and find that I'm looking at a possible Android issue rate that's nearly 2x the issue rate of an iPhone, and the phones cost the same... guess which phone I'll add to my "corporate-approved device list?"
And who's creating those games, music players, social media, and other things using computers? Are they just materializing out of thin air?
Are Mark Zuckerberg and all the other 20-somethings building Facebook, writing games, and building music sites secretly 60-year old veterans of FORTRAN and COBOL programming?
Your argument suggests that everybody in the world should be a trained mechanic in order to be able to use cars to drive themselves to work, or that everybody should be an HVAC technician if they want to have a cool house during the summer months. The simple fact is that computers are becoming appliances, where you don't need to have a 4 year university degree just to operate one. The appliance-ization of technology doesn't kill off the need for experts, they just require less expertise and training on the user end for the users to accomplish the things they want to do with them.
So...
- 3d games, music players, facebook, social media != fun.
- Writing a script for mIRC to scrape text for keywords and have your bot auto respond to people == fun.
You have a strange definition of fun, friend.
Yes, you're absolutely right - If you define "providing an entire infrastructure and toolchain with which to access/update the content" for a very low price to be "going out of their way to make it difficult."
You can also access a host of functionality for your iDevice via the build-in Safari browser, and Apple has zero control over what you access that way.
Microsoft only ran afoul of antitrust laws because it tried to punish PC vendors for bundling anything but IE - that's where your "market abuse" comes in. They used their dominance in the area of operating systems to unfairly inhibit competition in the browser space.
Building a better product at a better price point or with a better feature set is not "forcing others to compete at a disadvantage." There are dozens of tv manufacturers out there. What, exactly, has Apple done to "abuse the market" or "unfairly limit competition" in the TV market? What monopoly or near-monopoly status do they have in another area that is allowing them to abuse the tv market?
Specifics please, not hand-waving armchair lawyering.
The major difference is that credit cards and the computerization of banking didn't "replace" any currencies, they simply eased the circulation of standard fiat currencies around from bank to bank and account to account. They digitized the existing system, in other words.
There are *very* few use cases where Bitcoin offers substantial benefits above and beyond using something like a credit card, and most of those use cases are directly antagonistic to the governments and regulatory bodies who would need to embrace bitcoin to make it a truly viable standard beyond the niche market it currently occupies. Of the list of strengths Mr. Taaki cited, the only ones truly unique to Bitcoin (that could NOT be implemented in our current system) are the decentralization and privacy offered - both of which do nothing to entice a centralized regulatory body charged with overseeing, taxing, and monitoring the system to accomplish those goals, and in fact actively work against their accomplishment of those goals.
I'd also say that you could make a pretty solid argument that the majority of people who are buying into the Bitcoin hype at this point are the paranoid & the criminal (for whom a decentralized, anonymous transaction mechanism is appealing), or the excessively-nerdy folks with very fast computer rigs (who dream of making millions on something which bears all the hallmarks of a pyramid scheme).
There is no app store monopoly. Apple does not require you to not develop for other mobile platforms, nor do they refuse to let people use their app store if they already have an Android version of their app.
In fact, the very argument you make argues against the notion of "monopoly" in this space. How could an app developer be rendered obsolete by a competing app store, if Apple has a "monopoly" on app stores? The answer: There is no monopoly, and you are using the term improperly.
Pro tip: Monopoly does not mean, "I disagree with the policies under which a company offers their services, and prefer the policies of a competing service." It has a very specific legal meaning, and if you're going to use the word, you should probably know what it means.
History is littered with the detritus of "inevitable ideas whose time has come" that weren't inevitable, and whose time hadn't come.
Is this type of system inevitable? No, I don't think so. In fact I think it has a lot of things actively working against it, not the least of which is the simple fact that it'll be hard for the government to trace, tax, and control this new currency, and the government is the only one with the guns and laws to enforce adoption of a fiat currency, so you've just alienated the very organization whose support you desperately need to be able to break out of the small niche you're occupying.
Do I really, really think this is not going to happen in my lifetime? There will always be naive simpletons willing to buy into the delusion that this sort of thing will catch on "any day now." I don't think that means that this is going to happen in my lifetime.
A steady drumbeat of articles flogging this pyramid scam is not "expressing a general interest," it's beating a dead horse.
He's talking out his ass is how you explain it.
World economy - roughly 74 trillion GDP. 74,000,000,000.00 dollars - (source - Wikipedia)
1 bitcoin is divisible to 8 decimal places, giving 100,000,000 units of value (source - Bitcoin)
If 1 bitcoin were running the world economy, then the smallest unit of currency in our new world economy would be worth approximately 740 dollars. Good luck buying a cup of coffee or a pack of gum. And if you think gas prices are high today, good luck earning your .00000001 bitcoin/liter.
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I can't wait to see him invoke the "warning shot" defense.
"Your Honor, I fired shots to keep police away when they were trying to serve me with a felony warrant. But yo, check it out, they was just WARNING shots, I wasn't aiming at the police, just wanted to let them know that I didn't want them to come any closer."
When somebody's pointing a weapon in your direction and pulling the trigger, they're shooting at you. The fact that he has bad aim and was probably firing blind / wildly doesn't mean a thing, legally speaking. He still discharged his weapon at police, he still resisted arrest, and he still held someone - presumably against her will, unless she's going to now agree that she was his accomplice, rather than his hostage.
And who to blame for the existence and proliferation of cheap Chinese tablets? Right. Google.
By commoditizing the mobile OS with a "free" offering, they've ensured a race to bare minimum quality among the many handset / tablet manufacturers. You can't save much money by cutting your OS dev costs once you use Android, so you save money and shave margins by cutting testing & integration resources, while hoping that the raw horsepower you're cramming into the device will make up for its lack of detail finish.
Ad revenues über alles, after all - who cares if the consumers are faced with a minefield that's 80% full of half-functional devices? Google will serve ads to cheap, shitty hardware just as readily as they'll serve ads to expensive, thoughtfully designed hardware. And if people don't like the stuff Samsung, HTC, Nokia, et al. are putting out, Google can simply say, "How about a nice Chrome device instead? Or why not use our wonderful Google services on an Apple device? We'll serve you ads any which way you to access them!"
There would have to be an "Apple monopoly" for it to be broken, or for there to be any fear that it "might" be broken at some point in the near future.
Since there isn't, is it safe to dismiss the rest of your post as insane rambling?
My bet is that Apple will make more money selling several-hundred-to-several-thousand-dollar devices to its customers, making a hefty profit margin on every sale, and then selling them all kinds of great apps, music, books, movies, and other stuff to put on those devices, and continue doing that for years and years and years, rather than selling out their entire customer base for a $5 million payoff in 2012 that will end in their bankruptcy in 2013.
But don't let logic get in the way of your "WHOA SPOOKY!" paranoid delusions.
Actually, criminal cases are beyond a "reasonable doubt" not "beyond a shadow of a [reasonable] doubt," which is generally considered to be an unattainable standard of evidence, as there's always some bizarre, but possible, alternate way things went down - this confusion is why Slashdotters frequently get outraged at stories about judgements where they can "totally conceive of an alternate conspiracy theory where the guy being declared guilty is actually innocent." Beyond the shadow of a doubt, and beyond a reasonable doubt, are two very different legal standards. The latter is what we use in our criminal cases, but it's no surprise that literal-minded science & math types often want to think in terms of the binary certitude of "beyond the shadow of a doubt," instead of the much more analog "beyond a reasonable doubt."
But that's beside the point anyway.
If you apply your critical reading skills, you'll see that the GP wasn't talking about the standard of evidence required to convict, he was saying that even if they knew absolutely, 100% correctly, that you have a pirated file on your hard drive (i.e., it is beyond the shadow of a doubt that you have pirated this file), that does nothing to prove that you have *ever* shared it with anybody - it doesn't even meet the much lower standard of "preponderance of the evidence" which would be required for a civil judgement against you for file sharing. "The existence of a file" =/= "the file was shared by the user whose hard drive we found it on." The best they could do would say "You owe us $0.99 for that pirated track," and for those returns, they're not going to expend a lot of time and effort tracking down individual users and building a case against them that will get them the subpoena to pull Apple's records.
So the effort of setting up and administering your own photo sharing site - similary to Picasa, or Flickr, or any of the dozens of other photo sharing sites - isn't duplicated effort?
RIAA: "In order for us to agree to let you set this service up, we need your assurance that you will hand over to us any and all evidence you can gather through an aggressive indexing of all music files. This includes personal information as well as an exhaustive list of every file that person has infringed on."
Apple: "Well, that would make our service useless because nobody would use it, and drive us to the brink of bankruptcy as our users abandon our products in droves when they find out that we've sold them out by being a stooge of the RIAA. I see no potential downside. Agreed."
Apple has made some missteps in recent years, but a botch of this scope would require them to have hired Ballmer's lovechild by Bernie Madoff, the one whose birth Nokia's management team midwifed. There is NO conceivable reality where Apple would agree to those terms.
People also could be selling because the item is fundamentally flawed and destined for failure. Hope you're confident that's not the case here.
So me reciting a bunch of memorized facts "increases knowledge"? Me performing bad Youtube covers of Lady Gaga songs "increases culture"? Me inviting everybody into my bedroom to watch me have sex with my girlfriend "increases common bonds"?
Notice that none of what you've said makes any sense? You might want to investigate this entire concept of "rational coherence" a bit further.