You should try reading the conversation before you get all indignant like I insulted your mom.
The assertion made was that "open platforms" attract more developers because developers want to work on platforms they can tinker with. Axiomatic to this is the notion that, where an "open platform" exists, it will attract developers away because those devs will eschew closed platforms where they cannot tinker.
Linux has been around for 20 years. The notion of "open source" and "free software" for even longer. Do you really mean to suggest that all the developers in the FOSS world are so tied up with Expose (^H^H sorry, Compiz), "The Web," and NoSQL db's that there has literally been no manpower available to produce games, desktop software, mobile apps, and a host of other things which Linux lacks? And if so, and if the "openness" argument put forth by the GGP is correct, how come all of those things exist on closed platforms in far greater numbers than they do on open platforms?
It is currently at 2% desktops (again, it is dominant in the server and embedded spaces).
And yet a 10% market share and growing is dismissed as an also-ran platform when it comes to Mac OS X. Double standard much?
for being there to catch the next wave.
This is just empty sloganeering. Open source produces cheap knockoffs of existing functionality, there is very little evidence that anything in the open source world, vis-a-vis applications, that is not a response to some existing piece of software on another platform. Where's the cutting-edge applications that are being developed by this enormous horde of developers which Linux's openness has attracted to it? Give me 3 examples of software that is only available on Linux, and which is not simply a knockoff of an existing Windows or Mac OS application, or which wasn't a clone/port of an existing piece of UNIX software? Mimicry, yes; catching the next wave by being a first-mover in a space where no other platform is going? Not so much.
Looking at the history of Android, it's almost comically obvious how un-original the ideas were. The pre-iPhone prototypes look more or less like Blackberries - the dominant (at the time) smartphone platform. Fast forward a year, and suddenly every Android phone is a touchscreen candy-bar form factor, which looks remarkably... like an iPhone, the "next wave" in smartphones.
I could be off-my-ass wrong, and I'll readily admit I'm speculating on their future prospects. But at this point, I see very little that suggests they're going to make a real go at Facebook - or even Myspace, before Myspace finally implodes. I don't think they've fizzled quite yet, there's still small amounts of activity over at github, but there certainly doesn't look like there's much of a trend towards more interest/contribution/users, and if you're challenging an established competitor, and you're not growing, you're pretty much dying.
Bottom line is that Diaspora's appeal is mostly geek-centric. 500 million users says that a lot of people don't really care that much about Facebook's privacy policies, or at least can learn to coexist uncomfortably with them and edit out anything they're really unwilling to share. I'm not sure I ever saw the real draw to producing a Facebook-like social platform for people who don't want to share their information, or require absolutely fine-grained control over every byte of data they share.
Given that they're open source advocates, I expect that they will have the typical FOSS tin ear for and pronounced distaste for marketing and advertising, which they would need to actually attract more users to their service.
Honestly, Diaspora is on track to become permanent "fun-time" beta abandon-ware, just like a large percentage of other Open Source projects (see: Sourceforge.net). Kudos to them for trying, but it seems to have been a poorly conceived notion that was poorly executed, judging from the initial quality of the code they released. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Diaspora to light the social networking world on fire.
(But seriously - am I really the only one who finds it unbearably ironic that Diaspora, the self-styled Facebook-slayer, has... a Facebook fan page?)
Android will soon-ish relegate iOS, WP7, etc. to irrelevance.
Wrong. Android is only being shipped in the smartphone space in any large quantities, and the ONLY reason it's being shipped there is because it was a free-as-in-beer knockoff that provided "iphone-ish" functionality to the manufacturers who were caught completely flat-footed by iOS. And if you think that Motorla, Samsung, HTC, etc. chose Android because of it's "openness," please explain the existence of the Droid's eFuse technology, and the lack of root access on just about every Android device NOT sold by Google.
Comparing platform vs. platform, and not limiting it to the smartphone space, iOS is still the dominant platform, and shows very little sign of being unseated by Android, if the lackluster sales of... oh, just about every other Android device that's not sold by a cellular provider... are any indication.
Linux "runs the web" for much the same reason: It was a free-as-in-beer copy of the UNIX platforms (AIX, Irix, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.) that most of those web servers were running on to begin with, and it runs Apache. And yet, the year of the Linux desktop is always (current year + 1), the Linux desktop is more or less a cheap knockoff of Windows and Mac OS X, and the desktop space for Linux is most notable for it's remarkable LACK of decent applications, and remarkable proliferation of half-baked sourceforge-quality beta software. If Linux is attracting all the developers and winning... why is just about every other system leaps & bounds ahead of Linux in terms of actual quality of available software?
Maybe not as far-fetched as you'd suspect - I'd say "redownload/stream your music/videos/etc as many times as you like" is fairly likely if they ever bring the rumored "cloud" service to iTunes - I suspect a feature they'd love to offer for that would be the ability to download (either mac/itunes->ipod, or direct to ipod over 3g/wifi) your songs (or a selection of them) from your "cloud storage" for offline viewing/listening.
The point is that if devs, and future devs (geeks in their mom's basement) don't like your platform and never got to tinker with it, you will soon enough have no one coding for your platform.
If "control" were the thing devs desired above everything else, then Linux would have won the dev wars long ago. It hasn't. Discuss.
Most developers who are trying to make a living at development actually DON'T want to dick around with compiling their own kernel. They want a stable set of APIs and a stable target platform that they can write their code against. It doesn't hurt that the people buying the hardware & software that Mac OS runs on also have (in general) demonstrated a willingness to pay real money for that hardware & software, too.
long with the fact that OS X is nearly as buggy as windows now
Yes, Win7 has made huge strides, it's a solid OS, and a vast improvement over XP, and the abortion that was Vista.
plus the Applestore techs were not competent to repair the last Mac I owned
This is certainly a "your mileage may vary" experience, I think, but I've always had good experiences with the repair techs. I brought a failing mini into an Apple Store a few years back, and was duly impressed (and, admittedly, it was kind of hot) when the lovely brunette behind the counter booted it from an external device, dropped into a bash shell, and started running diagnostics from the unix command line. I've always been pleased with the capability of the techs, and found their repair service to be quite good, if pricey for out-of-warranty systems. If you had that bad an experience, I'd suggest that you should have involved the manager on the first "replace the replacement part" trip, not after 3 replacements as you experienced.
Ever hear the phrase "putting all your eggs in one basket"? Understand at all what it means?
Ever hear of focusing on low-hanging fruit?
Developing interstellar travel and spending trillions and trillions of dollars on building colonies in places which are not hospitable to human life, or on speculative interstellar missions to "find a planet" is about the most expensive and fanciful way of accomplishing your risk mitigation goals that it's possible to conceive of.
though the median projection of experts in the field is closer to 40 years
And 40 years ago, the experts in the field said we'd have flying cars, jetpacks, and be living on the moon. There are very real practical limits on what is possible without inordinately wasteful expense. I'd rather see trillions of dollars be spent here on earth, making life better for people here, today, right now, rather than seeing that money get spent on shipping a few hundred people to some remote spot where they'll probably die due to equipment failure or malfunction long before they have a chance to establish a self-sufficient colony.
Yeah, I hate that Facebook opens up all my personal secrets to the world.
Oh wait, it doesn't do that, because I don't post my personal secrets to a social networking site, and if I did, I wouldn't expect them to remain secret.
The reason people emigrate is to have a "better life," and it would be monstrously immoral to knowingly send people out into a situation where they and every single one of their descendants is going to have a demonstrably WORSE life than they would have had. We don't suggest to the peasant farmer in India that he might enjoy living in the middle of a battlezone in Darfur, and we don't suggest to the homeless guy in Miami that maybe he'd be better off moving to Boston in the middle of February.
Unless you really believe that a technological undertaking like an interstellar generational ship could truly be crewed by a bunch of illiterate farmers, goat herders, and tribal hunter-gatherers, then the fact is this: nobody who is *qualified* to go would be going with any expectation of a "better life". In fact, the people on that ship would be, out of necessity, the very best-and-brightest we have to offer - as close to perfect as we can get physically, and extremely smart and capable in one more more areas of science, medicine, technology, etc. They would be signing up for a stressful, dangerous life of privation for themselves, and all of their descendants, for thousands of years.
Perhaps you're a sci-fi junkie, and don't have any qualms with promising the life of your firstborn (and the life of every other descendant) in return for satisfying some selfish desire that you have to live out your Star Trek fantasy. But you cannot simply ignore the huge moral and ethical gray area there - over the course of its mission, you'd be looking at millions of lives, sentenced to live & die in a small metal box somewhere in space, because somebody back here on earth thought it would be totally neat to try and colonize another star. Any suggestion that that is an easy or clear-cut moral decision is foolish.
So you see no ethical problem with the idea of selling someone's entire family into indentured servitude, for as long as their family & descendants should live, so long as the first person signing the contract agrees that it'd be cool and fun to be an indentured servant? So why can't we sell families into servitude today? Sure, the first couple people you sell into slavery will object, but once they breed, those kids won't know anything but servitude, you'll have created a sub-class of servants for life! Right?
I'd remind you that people being dissatisfied with the "natural order of things" have brought us just about every bloodbath, massacre, revolution, civil war, and assassination in recorded history. Taking lots of people, cramming them into crowded living spaces, subjecting them to high stress, and leaving them with no sense of self-determination is pretty much a recipe for disaster - mass murder, suicide, mutiny, self-destruction.
And remember, we're talking about trips that could take *thousands* of years. How many slave revolutions, civil wars, mutinies, and assassinations have happened in that time here on earth? And why should we expect life on a generational ship to be vastly different?
If you live in the states and bought a phone 2+ years ago, you are probably eligible for a very cheap upgrade from your carrier, provided you're willing to re-up your contract.
Given the high-profile nature of this, even if you're not due for a re-up because you bought a refurb 3G 6 months ago, I'd suggest picking up your phone and calling customer service for your cell provider, and asking them what they can do to help you out. If you're willing to renew your contract, I'd bet they'd be willing to cut you a deal on a new phone (maybe a free 3GS, or a cheap iPhone 4), or a discount on some other Android-ish device if that's your fancy.
Yes, it would be nice if they supported all of these devices forever. No, they don't do so today. So you can gripe on Slashdot, or you can call your cell provider and see if they're willing to cut you a deal on an upgrade. They usually are if you say "I'll go to $some_other_carrier over this, but I'd be willing to renew my contract today for 2 years if you can make something happen."
Now imagine if Earth was, at best, a few thousand square meters of living space, and you had to share that space with hundreds of other people. And no matter what *you* want to do with your life, the simple fact remains that your survival, and the survival of all of the people you know and live with, is entirely dependent on whether or not you can become a competent mechanic, despite the fact that you'd rather be a writer, or a musician. Oh, and you also have to marry and reproduce with someone who you're matched to not because you like them, but because the group demands the most genetic variation and diversity to prevent against genetic disorders cropping up in the population - have to make sure that all of the genes mix and match thoroughly. And there's certainly no room for homosexuals on this trip, what a selfish behavior - consuming energy & food produced by the group and leaving no children behind to guarantee future staffing of the ship!
Start thinking about the practical realities of a "generational ship" type of mission, and it's not too hard to see where people could begin to feel resentment or even hatred towards people who made a choice that resulted in them having zero choice, and absolutely no control over their destiny, where a huge portion of their life is predetermined for them by the needs of the group they live in. Better hope people feeling that loss of control don't get depressed and turn to suicide, or you're looking at a real crisis where your ship might not have enough people to even operate and maintain properly. And god forbid your only nuclear tech kills himself before he can teach the next generation how to maintain & fix the engines...
We've already spent too long with all humanity living under the threat of annihilation
Honest questions. Given your suggestion that we may be destined for inevitable self-destruction:
1) What makes you think expanding to half a dozen other locations wouldn't simply result in 6 times the self-destructive behavior? ("Mars humans are better than Luna humans, kill them all in the name of the Mars God!")
2) What makes our species worth the effort of preserving it, if you feel that self-destruction is inevitable? What changes the equation of inevitable self-destruction so drastically by simply uprooting a few people and slapping them down on a new piece of rock? All you've done at that point is postpone the inevitable by introducing a backup.
I don't see that expanding into space makes much of a difference to the long-term survival of the species either way - either we can get along with one another, and will learn to do so here on earth regardless of whether we're going to ever colonize the stars, or we can't get along, and will simply delay the inevitable by making the species go through self-immolation on N planets/colonies/space stations, and taking along N*(number of other species we share the planet with) with us when we do it - in short, a way to maximize our destructive effect when the balloon finally goes up.
If the people had elected Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich, the wars most likely would have ended very quickly.
Define "very quickly"?
The president has the power to unilaterally pull out of any military engagement he chooses to, but it takes a great deal of time to withdraw (safely, and without leaving a shitload of material & equipment behind) 10's of thousands of troops from halfway around the world.
Not to mention the simple fact that "unilaterally" ending the wars would result in the situation simply getting worse where there is a sudden power vacuum that was occupied by those tens of thousands of troops with guns and tanks and bombers.
It has nothing to do with "shadow governments," it has everything to do with the practical realities of being forced to eat a soggy shit sandwich, and trying to minimize the mess it's going to make. Pres. Bush committed us to the wars, and we can second-guess his rationales and intelligence all we want, but it doesn't change the fact that we have those thousands of boots on the ground overseas, and bringing them all home is a lot more complicated than just sending each soldier a flight voucher via expedia.
Anybody who thought Pres. Obama was going to close Guantanamo in his first 100 days, or end the wars the moment he got into office *was* a credulous moron. But then, anybody who believed *ANY* candidate - including Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich - could have, and would have, done that is a credulous moron, as well.
Itunes' (and other softwares') "organising media crap" amounts to the software creating and managing a bunch of directories on disk for you. I'd respectfully submit that anybody who's managing their music collection by manually creating and shuffling folders around, and manually updating filenames should turn in their self-congratulatory geek card.
I'm pretty sure being someone "with brains" amounts to more than "right click -> new folder..." or "cd ~/music; mkdir 'The Beatles'", and doing that a thousand times doesn't make you any more of a geek than doing it once. In fact, insisting on doing something manually which is adequately, consistently, and automatically performed by software would tend to make you a luddite.
WRT to your follow-up to your own post: perhaps some perspective would be helpful when you find yourself getting "angry" over the opinions other people share about a piece of media playback software? The submit button will still be there after you've proofed your comments, and spewing bile doesn't generally make people more likely to want to spend time reading your opinions.
I have a friend who was a state cop (now working in the IT field). He told me that one of their favorite tactics when bored on patrol was to pull up to a red light or a busy intersection, and hit their lights and sirens.
When I asked why they'd do that, he said, "To see if anybody spooks and runs."
Unfortunately, all of the bad and low-value data was in a Windows folder named "My Misleading Documents," making it pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
This presumes that we're not already watching those suspected safehouses and banking accounts, and won't also make not of a sudden flurry of activity hours after it was announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. If they suspect that we will get access to it sooner or later, then they have to make their changes quickly. If you suddenly see 30 men with RPGs and AK-47's rushing out of a suspected safehouse carrying dozens of crates labeled "Caution: High Explosive!", well... perhaps those guys are worth watching regardless of whether or not we have confirmation that their names & location are on that encrypted volume.
And also, let's be honest: he was a mid-50's man who simply may not have known all that much about computers, and how to choose a good password or use encryption properly. I know a whole lot of 50-somethings (working in software) who I wouldn't trust to properly encrypt stuff and choose a good password without significant outside assistance - i.e., someone else to do it all for you, and then just tell you the password when they're done.
Slashdot Mirror
You should try reading the conversation before you get all indignant like I insulted your mom.
The assertion made was that "open platforms" attract more developers because developers want to work on platforms they can tinker with. Axiomatic to this is the notion that, where an "open platform" exists, it will attract developers away because those devs will eschew closed platforms where they cannot tinker.
Linux has been around for 20 years. The notion of "open source" and "free software" for even longer. Do you really mean to suggest that all the developers in the FOSS world are so tied up with Expose (^H^H sorry, Compiz), "The Web," and NoSQL db's that there has literally been no manpower available to produce games, desktop software, mobile apps, and a host of other things which Linux lacks? And if so, and if the "openness" argument put forth by the GGP is correct, how come all of those things exist on closed platforms in far greater numbers than they do on open platforms?
And yet a 10% market share and growing is dismissed as an also-ran platform when it comes to Mac OS X. Double standard much?
This is just empty sloganeering. Open source produces cheap knockoffs of existing functionality, there is very little evidence that anything in the open source world, vis-a-vis applications, that is not a response to some existing piece of software on another platform. Where's the cutting-edge applications that are being developed by this enormous horde of developers which Linux's openness has attracted to it? Give me 3 examples of software that is only available on Linux, and which is not simply a knockoff of an existing Windows or Mac OS application, or which wasn't a clone/port of an existing piece of UNIX software? Mimicry, yes; catching the next wave by being a first-mover in a space where no other platform is going? Not so much.
Looking at the history of Android, it's almost comically obvious how un-original the ideas were. The pre-iPhone prototypes look more or less like Blackberries - the dominant (at the time) smartphone platform. Fast forward a year, and suddenly every Android phone is a touchscreen candy-bar form factor, which looks remarkably... like an iPhone, the "next wave" in smartphones.
I could be off-my-ass wrong, and I'll readily admit I'm speculating on their future prospects. But at this point, I see very little that suggests they're going to make a real go at Facebook - or even Myspace, before Myspace finally implodes. I don't think they've fizzled quite yet, there's still small amounts of activity over at github, but there certainly doesn't look like there's much of a trend towards more interest/contribution/users, and if you're challenging an established competitor, and you're not growing, you're pretty much dying.
Bottom line is that Diaspora's appeal is mostly geek-centric. 500 million users says that a lot of people don't really care that much about Facebook's privacy policies, or at least can learn to coexist uncomfortably with them and edit out anything they're really unwilling to share. I'm not sure I ever saw the real draw to producing a Facebook-like social platform for people who don't want to share their information, or require absolutely fine-grained control over every byte of data they share.
Smile, I was joking.
Given that they're open source advocates, I expect that they will have the typical FOSS tin ear for and pronounced distaste for marketing and advertising, which they would need to actually attract more users to their service.
Honestly, Diaspora is on track to become permanent "fun-time" beta abandon-ware, just like a large percentage of other Open Source projects (see: Sourceforge.net). Kudos to them for trying, but it seems to have been a poorly conceived notion that was poorly executed, judging from the initial quality of the code they released. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for Diaspora to light the social networking world on fire.
(But seriously - am I really the only one who finds it unbearably ironic that Diaspora, the self-styled Facebook-slayer, has... a Facebook fan page?)
Wrong. Android is only being shipped in the smartphone space in any large quantities, and the ONLY reason it's being shipped there is because it was a free-as-in-beer knockoff that provided "iphone-ish" functionality to the manufacturers who were caught completely flat-footed by iOS. And if you think that Motorla, Samsung, HTC, etc. chose Android because of it's "openness," please explain the existence of the Droid's eFuse technology, and the lack of root access on just about every Android device NOT sold by Google.
Comparing platform vs. platform, and not limiting it to the smartphone space, iOS is still the dominant platform, and shows very little sign of being unseated by Android, if the lackluster sales of... oh, just about every other Android device that's not sold by a cellular provider... are any indication.
Linux "runs the web" for much the same reason: It was a free-as-in-beer copy of the UNIX platforms (AIX, Irix, HP-UX, Solaris, etc.) that most of those web servers were running on to begin with, and it runs Apache. And yet, the year of the Linux desktop is always (current year + 1), the Linux desktop is more or less a cheap knockoff of Windows and Mac OS X, and the desktop space for Linux is most notable for it's remarkable LACK of decent applications, and remarkable proliferation of half-baked sourceforge-quality beta software. If Linux is attracting all the developers and winning... why is just about every other system leaps & bounds ahead of Linux in terms of actual quality of available software?
Maybe not as far-fetched as you'd suspect - I'd say "redownload/stream your music/videos/etc as many times as you like" is fairly likely if they ever bring the rumored "cloud" service to iTunes - I suspect a feature they'd love to offer for that would be the ability to download (either mac/itunes->ipod, or direct to ipod over 3g/wifi) your songs (or a selection of them) from your "cloud storage" for offline viewing/listening.
If "control" were the thing devs desired above everything else, then Linux would have won the dev wars long ago. It hasn't. Discuss.
Most developers who are trying to make a living at development actually DON'T want to dick around with compiling their own kernel. They want a stable set of APIs and a stable target platform that they can write their code against. It doesn't hurt that the people buying the hardware & software that Mac OS runs on also have (in general) demonstrated a willingness to pay real money for that hardware & software, too.
Yes, Win7 has made huge strides, it's a solid OS, and a vast improvement over XP, and the abortion that was Vista.
This is certainly a "your mileage may vary" experience, I think, but I've always had good experiences with the repair techs. I brought a failing mini into an Apple Store a few years back, and was duly impressed (and, admittedly, it was kind of hot) when the lovely brunette behind the counter booted it from an external device, dropped into a bash shell, and started running diagnostics from the unix command line. I've always been pleased with the capability of the techs, and found their repair service to be quite good, if pricey for out-of-warranty systems. If you had that bad an experience, I'd suggest that you should have involved the manager on the first "replace the replacement part" trip, not after 3 replacements as you experienced.
What do you mean, treated like shit? He hosed it off with soap and water every 3 months, whether it needed it or not!
Ever hear of focusing on low-hanging fruit?
Developing interstellar travel and spending trillions and trillions of dollars on building colonies in places which are not hospitable to human life, or on speculative interstellar missions to "find a planet" is about the most expensive and fanciful way of accomplishing your risk mitigation goals that it's possible to conceive of.
And 40 years ago, the experts in the field said we'd have flying cars, jetpacks, and be living on the moon. There are very real practical limits on what is possible without inordinately wasteful expense. I'd rather see trillions of dollars be spent here on earth, making life better for people here, today, right now, rather than seeing that money get spent on shipping a few hundred people to some remote spot where they'll probably die due to equipment failure or malfunction long before they have a chance to establish a self-sufficient colony.
Yeah, I hate that Facebook opens up all my personal secrets to the world.
Oh wait, it doesn't do that, because I don't post my personal secrets to a social networking site, and if I did, I wouldn't expect them to remain secret.
With EIGHTEEN public diaspora pods available, each with TENS of seeds, I think it's safe to say that everybody who's anybody is on Diaspora by now.
The reason people emigrate is to have a "better life," and it would be monstrously immoral to knowingly send people out into a situation where they and every single one of their descendants is going to have a demonstrably WORSE life than they would have had. We don't suggest to the peasant farmer in India that he might enjoy living in the middle of a battlezone in Darfur, and we don't suggest to the homeless guy in Miami that maybe he'd be better off moving to Boston in the middle of February.
Unless you really believe that a technological undertaking like an interstellar generational ship could truly be crewed by a bunch of illiterate farmers, goat herders, and tribal hunter-gatherers, then the fact is this: nobody who is *qualified* to go would be going with any expectation of a "better life". In fact, the people on that ship would be, out of necessity, the very best-and-brightest we have to offer - as close to perfect as we can get physically, and extremely smart and capable in one more more areas of science, medicine, technology, etc. They would be signing up for a stressful, dangerous life of privation for themselves, and all of their descendants, for thousands of years.
Perhaps you're a sci-fi junkie, and don't have any qualms with promising the life of your firstborn (and the life of every other descendant) in return for satisfying some selfish desire that you have to live out your Star Trek fantasy. But you cannot simply ignore the huge moral and ethical gray area there - over the course of its mission, you'd be looking at millions of lives, sentenced to live & die in a small metal box somewhere in space, because somebody back here on earth thought it would be totally neat to try and colonize another star. Any suggestion that that is an easy or clear-cut moral decision is foolish.
So you see no ethical problem with the idea of selling someone's entire family into indentured servitude, for as long as their family & descendants should live, so long as the first person signing the contract agrees that it'd be cool and fun to be an indentured servant? So why can't we sell families into servitude today? Sure, the first couple people you sell into slavery will object, but once they breed, those kids won't know anything but servitude, you'll have created a sub-class of servants for life! Right?
I'd remind you that people being dissatisfied with the "natural order of things" have brought us just about every bloodbath, massacre, revolution, civil war, and assassination in recorded history. Taking lots of people, cramming them into crowded living spaces, subjecting them to high stress, and leaving them with no sense of self-determination is pretty much a recipe for disaster - mass murder, suicide, mutiny, self-destruction.
And remember, we're talking about trips that could take *thousands* of years. How many slave revolutions, civil wars, mutinies, and assassinations have happened in that time here on earth? And why should we expect life on a generational ship to be vastly different?
If you live in the states and bought a phone 2+ years ago, you are probably eligible for a very cheap upgrade from your carrier, provided you're willing to re-up your contract.
Given the high-profile nature of this, even if you're not due for a re-up because you bought a refurb 3G 6 months ago, I'd suggest picking up your phone and calling customer service for your cell provider, and asking them what they can do to help you out. If you're willing to renew your contract, I'd bet they'd be willing to cut you a deal on a new phone (maybe a free 3GS, or a cheap iPhone 4), or a discount on some other Android-ish device if that's your fancy.
Yes, it would be nice if they supported all of these devices forever. No, they don't do so today. So you can gripe on Slashdot, or you can call your cell provider and see if they're willing to cut you a deal on an upgrade. They usually are if you say "I'll go to $some_other_carrier over this, but I'd be willing to renew my contract today for 2 years if you can make something happen."
Now imagine if Earth was, at best, a few thousand square meters of living space, and you had to share that space with hundreds of other people. And no matter what *you* want to do with your life, the simple fact remains that your survival, and the survival of all of the people you know and live with, is entirely dependent on whether or not you can become a competent mechanic, despite the fact that you'd rather be a writer, or a musician. Oh, and you also have to marry and reproduce with someone who you're matched to not because you like them, but because the group demands the most genetic variation and diversity to prevent against genetic disorders cropping up in the population - have to make sure that all of the genes mix and match thoroughly. And there's certainly no room for homosexuals on this trip, what a selfish behavior - consuming energy & food produced by the group and leaving no children behind to guarantee future staffing of the ship!
Start thinking about the practical realities of a "generational ship" type of mission, and it's not too hard to see where people could begin to feel resentment or even hatred towards people who made a choice that resulted in them having zero choice, and absolutely no control over their destiny, where a huge portion of their life is predetermined for them by the needs of the group they live in. Better hope people feeling that loss of control don't get depressed and turn to suicide, or you're looking at a real crisis where your ship might not have enough people to even operate and maintain properly. And god forbid your only nuclear tech kills himself before he can teach the next generation how to maintain & fix the engines...
Honest questions. Given your suggestion that we may be destined for inevitable self-destruction:
1) What makes you think expanding to half a dozen other locations wouldn't simply result in 6 times the self-destructive behavior? ("Mars humans are better than Luna humans, kill them all in the name of the Mars God!")
2) What makes our species worth the effort of preserving it, if you feel that self-destruction is inevitable? What changes the equation of inevitable self-destruction so drastically by simply uprooting a few people and slapping them down on a new piece of rock? All you've done at that point is postpone the inevitable by introducing a backup.
I don't see that expanding into space makes much of a difference to the long-term survival of the species either way - either we can get along with one another, and will learn to do so here on earth regardless of whether we're going to ever colonize the stars, or we can't get along, and will simply delay the inevitable by making the species go through self-immolation on N planets/colonies/space stations, and taking along N*(number of other species we share the planet with) with us when we do it - in short, a way to maximize our destructive effect when the balloon finally goes up.
Define "very quickly"?
The president has the power to unilaterally pull out of any military engagement he chooses to, but it takes a great deal of time to withdraw (safely, and without leaving a shitload of material & equipment behind) 10's of thousands of troops from halfway around the world.
Not to mention the simple fact that "unilaterally" ending the wars would result in the situation simply getting worse where there is a sudden power vacuum that was occupied by those tens of thousands of troops with guns and tanks and bombers.
It has nothing to do with "shadow governments," it has everything to do with the practical realities of being forced to eat a soggy shit sandwich, and trying to minimize the mess it's going to make. Pres. Bush committed us to the wars, and we can second-guess his rationales and intelligence all we want, but it doesn't change the fact that we have those thousands of boots on the ground overseas, and bringing them all home is a lot more complicated than just sending each soldier a flight voucher via expedia.
Anybody who thought Pres. Obama was going to close Guantanamo in his first 100 days, or end the wars the moment he got into office *was* a credulous moron. But then, anybody who believed *ANY* candidate - including Ron Paul or Dennis Kucinich - could have, and would have, done that is a credulous moron, as well.
Itunes' (and other softwares') "organising media crap" amounts to the software creating and managing a bunch of directories on disk for you. I'd respectfully submit that anybody who's managing their music collection by manually creating and shuffling folders around, and manually updating filenames should turn in their self-congratulatory geek card.
I'm pretty sure being someone "with brains" amounts to more than "right click -> new folder..." or "cd ~/music; mkdir 'The Beatles'", and doing that a thousand times doesn't make you any more of a geek than doing it once. In fact, insisting on doing something manually which is adequately, consistently, and automatically performed by software would tend to make you a luddite.
WRT to your follow-up to your own post: perhaps some perspective would be helpful when you find yourself getting "angry" over the opinions other people share about a piece of media playback software? The submit button will still be there after you've proofed your comments, and spewing bile doesn't generally make people more likely to want to spend time reading your opinions.
Do you know how much the mats cost for that enchant?!
But he may not be the ONLY guy you need to kill!
I have a friend who was a state cop (now working in the IT field). He told me that one of their favorite tactics when bored on patrol was to pull up to a red light or a busy intersection, and hit their lights and sirens.
When I asked why they'd do that, he said, "To see if anybody spooks and runs."
Unfortunately, all of the bad and low-value data was in a Windows folder named "My Misleading Documents," making it pretty easy to separate the wheat from the chaff.
This presumes that we're not already watching those suspected safehouses and banking accounts, and won't also make not of a sudden flurry of activity hours after it was announced that Osama Bin Laden was dead. If they suspect that we will get access to it sooner or later, then they have to make their changes quickly. If you suddenly see 30 men with RPGs and AK-47's rushing out of a suspected safehouse carrying dozens of crates labeled "Caution: High Explosive!", well... perhaps those guys are worth watching regardless of whether or not we have confirmation that their names & location are on that encrypted volume.
And also, let's be honest: he was a mid-50's man who simply may not have known all that much about computers, and how to choose a good password or use encryption properly. I know a whole lot of 50-somethings (working in software) who I wouldn't trust to properly encrypt stuff and choose a good password without significant outside assistance - i.e., someone else to do it all for you, and then just tell you the password when they're done.