Yeah, good luck finding the memo that says "Engineer Bob, doesn't matter if the gas pedal is dangerously broken, I don't care. We need to ship tomorrow. Signed, TEH EVULZ CEO."
And since the design problem will likely fall at the level of engineering or below, again, good luck collecting your judgement, and have fun destroying a salaried employee's life in revenge for what - almost certainly - was an innocent mistake or oversight, while the C*O's and management laugh all the way to the bank.
Oh, and also have fun trying to unravel the internal reporting & responsibility structure in any corporation larger than a handful of people. Bet your lawyer will love the fees he'll get for finding a reason to file & prosecute a suit against 500 different people. Sounds like you could spend most of a career on that single bit of litigation.
One tasty bit is that unless it can be proven that a single individual broke a very specific law, individuals are NOT held responsible for things that were done in the name of corporation.
In what court do you NOT have to prove that a single individual broke a very specific law in order for that individual to be held accountable for violating that law? I have two responses to this "tasty bit": 1) It's a good thing that we can't hold someone liable without PROVING that the individual broke a law; 2) This is the case for everybody, not just corporations;
I think his point is that since government regulation creates corporations, it should also probably address any corporate bad behavior.
That's not what he said, and I'd like specific examples of what you mean by this statement. What bad behavior is allowed of corporations that would not be allowed to individuals?
unless it can be proven that a single individual broke a very specific law, individuals are NOT held responsible for things that were done in the name of corporation.
Are you suggesting that individuals are (or should be) responsible for things that you cannot prove they actually did? Life *would* be much easier without that whole "presumption of innocence" thing, wouldn't it?
This needs to be balanced.
The individual working alone can incorporate, and enjoy the same legal protections as any other corporation, while conducting his or her business. Costs a couple hundred dollars in Massachusetts to file the necessary paperwork - if you have assets or conduct business worth more than that, you should be incorporated.
Enron got a lot of press. You don't hear as much about the thousands of other lawsuits that are wending their way through the courts involving corporations, most of which don't involve deliberate, "malice aforethought" crimes - many of them involve negligence, or downright accidental events.
SO... when you slip and fall at Wal-Mart because there was no "wet floor" sign up, will you take the individual janitor and the cashier to court to cover your medical bills? Good luck collecting enough money to even cover your bills, much less cover for loss of work.
Now you've got WAY more legal paperwork involved (adding friction to an already inefficient system), and you've got a bunch of people who have NO MONEY trying to squeeze money out of one another. Yeah, that sounds like a great system, we should totally do that.
So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems? Ford & Firestone's tire issues?
Hint: Everybody from the top down (you know, the people who have money to afford a lawyer) will point the finger at the assembly line worker, and say "it's his fault."
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
This does not mitigate the risk of her fucking another woman, however. And for the majority of you that will think that's cool and not cheating: Allow me to dress into womens' clothing, put on a wig and makeup, tape my dick to my taint, and spend a few hours getting your wife off with my hands and mouth. What's the difference?
Um... wait, don't tell me. I think I saw this in Kindergarten Cop: "Boys have a penis. Girls have a va-CHINA." Yours just happens to be taped to your taint.
I did find the item I cited earlier to be interesting, however, that the lower end of the scale was primarily supported by government welfare. To me, this really seems to set up three sets of competing interests: -- The capitalists - the very rich who lend to businesses & employ others as their primary means of making income; -- The labor - the working & middle classes, who make an income off their physical or mental labor; -- The entitlement recipients - bottom quintile-or-so - whose primary source of income is government welfare;
If the goal is social mobility, we really need to focus on making it possible for people on the bottom rung to move up into the middle & upper rungs, and to do that we need to drastically reduce the number of people who are relying on government handouts to survive. Now, before anybody calls me heartless, I'm not suggesting that this be accomplished through welfare cuts - food, shelter, and basic healthcare are all absolute necessities... hard to learn much when you're worried about where you're going to be sleeping tonight, or where your next meal is coming from. But, moving beyond that - education & vocational programs are a huge component of encouraging mobility, and things like day care for single parents, easily available (and affordable) birth control, and sensible (fair) minimum wage laws will also help.
Now, with all of that said, I think that it's also important to keep in mind that, as Thomas Paine said, "what we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly." There need to be some responsibilities & requirements placed on the people receiving these benefits. For example, want government healthcare? Great, you show up for regular checkups, don't smoke, exercise regularly, and are subject to random drug tests - if someone else is footing the bill for your healthcare, it's awfully impolite to abuse that charity and deliberately make yourself sick. Collecting a welfare check? Great, 20 hours of your week will be spent doing some work (even if it's sweeping sidewalks & picking up trash) for the government. The other 20 hours of your 'work week' can be spent in vocational training, job searching, or doing other things aimed at moving you out of the entitlement class, and into the middle class.
I also have to question the statistic you cited earlier suggesting that "50% of children make less than their parents." I have to wonder if this is also an indicator of the wide latitude of career options available. For instance: maybe dad's a teacher, and I become a mechanical engineer - I make more than him; Or, maybe mom's a nurse, and I become a teacher - I make less than her. It seems that social mobility doesn't necessarily require every child to make more money in absolute terms than their parents - perhaps I would be miserable as a nurse, but thrive as a carpenter. This doesn't necessarily mean my life is "worse," it just means that I'm happy doing a different type of work than my parents did, and that my career is one which by definition earns less than theirs did. I'd be interested to see a more in-depth review of the numbers you cited, to see if they've accounted for these sorts of things, because the ability to pursue the career you want seems to me as if it should also count in any measure of social mobility.
I wouldn't ever suspect it of you anyway - I've seen your posts around here, and often disagreed with them, but I wouldn't lump you in as a troll. Though I must say that I'm delighted to have inspired such a passionate and memorable follower - he's been following me around posting the same nonsense for about a week in response to anything I post here.
People who make a quarter million a year should be supporting government policies that help their interests, which are the same as the average persons;s, not the interests of the ultra rich.
This, I can agree with, to the extent that it doesn't require the top 0.5% of the "ultra rich" to become beasts of burden supporting the lower 99.5% of the socioeconomic scale. As I said, I'm not disputing that there's a vast difference between the incomes of the ultra rich and a street sweeper - there absolutely is. My issue was specifically with the (percevied) suggestion that someone making 250k/year is barely scraping by as a member of the lower middle class. By any sane measure, a household pulling down 250k/yr is well off, and living quite comfortably. They're not sharing a private airport with Warren Buffet, but they're also not living in a 5th floor studio walk-up in Queens.
No, I wrote open standards AND open software. I was not conflating the two.
You sort of are conflating the two: You keep saying "open standards AND open software," but then cite the increased mindshare of open standards to support your arguments that both are achieving mainstream appeal. I agree that open standards have a clear and obvious appeal - access your data wherever and however you want. Everybody has data they want to access. Open source's appeal - "access the source code!" - is targeted directly at a small number (in comparison to the overall population) of specialists, who are - by definition - not the mainstream. Open standards and open source are not necessarily a package deal, and there's a much higher barrier to acceptance for open source - namely, that most people, even with the full source code, can't make heads or tails of it anyway.
I think you're being overly optimistic about open source reaching some sort of inevitable tipping point. Open standards need not be implemented with open source software - you can easily write a closed-source implementation. And frankly, open "standards" - the ability to say "I need to be able to play my songs & videos, open my books, and view & edit my documents on whatever device I buy," is the only part of "open" that most individuals care about (and even that... it's often not viewed as a terribly urgent need.)
Governments are using open source because it's free (as in beer - cost savings) and they can also make sure that nobody's slipping in a little NSA backdoor or Stuxnet variant with that Microsoft Office disc. This is not a benefit that most individuals care about, because even if they could read the code, they can't make sense of it or understand what it's doing without an immense amount of time spent learning how to program.
Assuming that everybody in the bottom ~53% of that chart (households making less than $47500/yr) makes the very lowest amount allowed for their bracket, the "bottom 50%" of earners makes about $1,353,870,000,000/yr - that's 1.35 trillion. The "top 400 earners" who you assert make more than the entire lower 50% would then need to have average salaries and income of 3.375 billion dollars per year.
If you look at the Forbes 400 - the list of the richest people in America - there are people who do not even have a NET WORTH of 3.375 billion dollars, much less a yearly income of 3+ billion dollars. According to this, the "average income" of the top 400 households in 2007 was roughly 345 million per year. That falls far short of 3.375 billion dollars.
I am not disputing that there's a vast differential between the earnings of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, and a disabled mechanic or an unemployed daycare worker. But pretending that people making 250k per year are somehow "the working poor" is just deluded. If you want to argue that the super-rich have a disproportionate amount of power, I'll agree with that. But let's keep our numbers grounded in reality.
It's also worth noting that in that bottom quintile, "Educational attainment, alongside the amount of work done by individuals are among the main determinants of income. The vast majority of Americans derive their income from occupational tasks and the utilization of their expertise. The notable exception is the lower class, where the most common source of income was not occupational status, but government welfare." (Cannot find link to primary source, but name & info is available from footnote 50.) -- this suggests that the people at the bottom are already primarily supported by tax revenues, which raises the question of exactly how high a standard of living everybody has a "right" to, and what sort of terms & conditions that standard of living comes with.
A household income of 100k/year or more in "much" of the US would generally fall into the upper middle class, or upper class, depending on how much greater than 100k your income is.
I know that we like to stretch definitions and imagine ourselves to be much worse off than we are here, but you can live a comfortable middle class lifestyle, even in NYC or LA, on 100k/year. Middle class doesn't mean "caviar only 3 nights a week." Take a look at the various definitions of classes given here.
By just about any definition that's not solely based in "soak the rich" populist rhetoric, a household with 100k yearly income is firmly in the middle class, and would generally be considered "upper middle class," or even higher on the social scale. I'm not disputing that there is a vast difference between the top income earners and the bottom earners. But to suggest that 250k, or even 100k, per year makes you more or less one of the working poor is just so divorced from any reality that it's ludicrous.
Again: if you consider "250k / year" to be "not real money," it's clear that you are tremendously out of touch with what the average person lives on, and earns, in a year.
Considering that a household income of "a measly quarter million a year" puts your household in the 2nd-highest percentile of households in America, I'd say calling that "barely upper middle class" is a bit of a stretch. If you earn more than 98.3% of the rest of the population, there is no way that you can claim that you're "barely" middle class.
Somebody's got an awfully skewed vision of how much it costs to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and an awfully skewed vision of how much people actually earn.
And meanwhile, a bunch of FOSS pedants will debate whether "open.org" is truly "open," with half concluding that it's fine, and the other half declaring holy war on open.org because it's not a 100% completely free and open. And then we could fully expect GPLv4 to require that all distribution services be ideologically pure in letter and spirit.
Either that, or it'll be started in a rush of enthusiasm, and then the maintainers will realize "Gee, this writing and updating stuff is boring and hard. Let's just go write code," and so open.org will turn into abandonware with no updates or improvements for years -- just like the bulk of Sourceforge.
So in other words, they should put up a web page saying "A bunch of software companies you've likely never heard of are awesome. And companies like Apple and Microsoft, who you have heard of, own their products, and use those products every day, are not awesome"? The take-away from that page may not be what you think it will be to the average person - in fact, they may conclude based on their familiarity with Apple and Microsoft products, that this "closed" stuff is where all the stuff worth having is.
I'd point out two other problems with this plan: -- If you want to build up your "brand," a good first lesson is that you need to stop chanting the name of your competitors, and giving them free press; -- Many people in these comments have pointed out similar attempts at directories and work-alikes (sourceforge, etc.) - stop trying to reinvent the wheel; the ability (and willingness) of open source supporters to keep forking rather than negotiate & compromise without "breaking up the family" only serves to dilute your available pool of talent. Unchecked egos will make this just another offering in the already vast sea of half-finished, stale, outdated "You should use FOSS software because..." blogs.
If you want to open a competing store, you can quite easily launch your own phone with your own integrated app store, and compete head-on with Apple. This is what Android, WP7, and WebOS are all doing. Your complaint is *really* that Apple has said, "This is our vision for our product, this is what it does, and this is how it works," and that that vision doesn't match how YOU think they should operate. And that's fine to disagree with their business model - but they're under no obligation to conform to your desires. If they don't offer a product people are willing to buy, then they will lose money, and go out of business.
This is not some sort of civil rights issue, and I'm afraid I simply don't see why anybody feels justified in using the blunt threat of legislative action to force a company to "allow competition" in a field in which NUMEROUS competitors already exist, and in a field in which we're repeatedly told that those competitors are better, faster, and more feature-rich. If the product is a non-starter, then why the hell do you get so wound up about it? Ignore it, and let it die off, just like millions of other bad products have in the past.
There is no "other store" to buy from in Apple-town, and you know that when you move in. If you want a town with a dozen different stores to shop from, then don't move into a town with only one store.
Apple prevents you from running Android apps in the same way that Linux prevents you from running Windows apps, and the same way Ford prevents you from installing a Toyota engine in your Fusion: they're simply not compatible.
You are aware that homeowner's associations regularly exert arbitrary rules about paint colors, exterior decorations, lawn maintenance, vehicle parking, and the like... right? And that if you violate those requirements, you can be subject to anything from fines up to being removed from your home, depending on the HOA?
Doesn't much matter who controls the homeowner's association, if you're not being forced to go live there in the first place. There are numerous legitimate competitors that you can use instead - just like you can buy a home in another town or subdivision if you don't like the terms the HOA imposes in the first town or subdivision.
So, if you decide to buy a home in a town that only has a Target, it's somehow Target's fault if the nearest Wal-Mart is 2 towns over?
You are not "forced" to buy an Apple phone, or an Android phone, or any phone at all, for that matter. If you choose to buy one, you are buying into that phone's ecosystem, and you know that going in. If you don't like Apples' policies, vote with your dollars and support Android, or WebOS, or WP7. There are plenty of legitimate alternatives to Apple's phones, and we read here on Slashdot every day about how iOS' market share is shrinking perceptibly every day.
Maybe that's the difference - most of my experience with Blizzard's games is with WoW, and that game is most assuredly released in a "good enough for government work" fashion, with further tuning and refinements made frequently via hotfix & small patches. And to be clear, I'm not criticizing that practice, I agree that "good enough" is generally more desirable because it helps eliminate feature creep and actually gets the product out the door. I just was asking because if you asked me to name a developer who I think follows your "get it good enough, then ship it" model, I would definitely say Blizzard springs to mind.
Am I misreading this, or are you suggesting Blizzard only releases when it's "just right"? Because I've seen a lot of patch notes and hotfixes that would suggest otherwise.:)
Perhaps it's improved in the past few years. I have a friend who owns an older one (2002-ish Sephia, I think) and the thing has been a hot mess of maintenance issues. If their quality has improved in recent model years, s/Kia/${this year's unreliable brand}/g
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, good luck finding the memo that says "Engineer Bob, doesn't matter if the gas pedal is dangerously broken, I don't care. We need to ship tomorrow. Signed, TEH EVULZ CEO."
And since the design problem will likely fall at the level of engineering or below, again, good luck collecting your judgement, and have fun destroying a salaried employee's life in revenge for what - almost certainly - was an innocent mistake or oversight, while the C*O's and management laugh all the way to the bank.
Oh, and also have fun trying to unravel the internal reporting & responsibility structure in any corporation larger than a handful of people. Bet your lawyer will love the fees he'll get for finding a reason to file & prosecute a suit against 500 different people. Sounds like you could spend most of a career on that single bit of litigation.
Let's look at what he actually wrote:
In what court do you NOT have to prove that a single individual broke a very specific law in order for that individual to be held accountable for violating that law? I have two responses to this "tasty bit":
1) It's a good thing that we can't hold someone liable without PROVING that the individual broke a law;
2) This is the case for everybody, not just corporations;
That's not what he said, and I'd like specific examples of what you mean by this statement. What bad behavior is allowed of corporations that would not be allowed to individuals?
Are you suggesting that individuals are (or should be) responsible for things that you cannot prove they actually did? Life *would* be much easier without that whole "presumption of innocence" thing, wouldn't it?
The individual working alone can incorporate, and enjoy the same legal protections as any other corporation, while conducting his or her business. Costs a couple hundred dollars in Massachusetts to file the necessary paperwork - if you have assets or conduct business worth more than that, you should be incorporated.
There, it's balanced.
Sounds like a worker's paradise, truly.
I don't understand why we haven't introduced more inefficiency and waste into the system before now! Abolish corporate personhood today!
Enron got a lot of press. You don't hear as much about the thousands of other lawsuits that are wending their way through the courts involving corporations, most of which don't involve deliberate, "malice aforethought" crimes - many of them involve negligence, or downright accidental events.
SO... when you slip and fall at Wal-Mart because there was no "wet floor" sign up, will you take the individual janitor and the cashier to court to cover your medical bills? Good luck collecting enough money to even cover your bills, much less cover for loss of work.
Now you've got WAY more legal paperwork involved (adding friction to an already inefficient system), and you've got a bunch of people who have NO MONEY trying to squeeze money out of one another. Yeah, that sounds like a great system, we should totally do that.
So who do we send to jail or fine for the Toyota gas pedal problems? Ford & Firestone's tire issues?
Hint: Everybody from the top down (you know, the people who have money to afford a lawyer) will point the finger at the assembly line worker, and say "it's his fault."
Good luck collecting your multi-million dollar award from that single assembly line worker, and enjoy destroying his life in revenge for the damage (most likely accidental) that "he alone" caused you.
Um... wait, don't tell me. I think I saw this in Kindergarten Cop: "Boys have a penis. Girls have a va-CHINA." Yours just happens to be taped to your taint.
Do I win?
I did find the item I cited earlier to be interesting, however, that the lower end of the scale was primarily supported by government welfare. To me, this really seems to set up three sets of competing interests:
-- The capitalists - the very rich who lend to businesses & employ others as their primary means of making income;
-- The labor - the working & middle classes, who make an income off their physical or mental labor;
-- The entitlement recipients - bottom quintile-or-so - whose primary source of income is government welfare;
If the goal is social mobility, we really need to focus on making it possible for people on the bottom rung to move up into the middle & upper rungs, and to do that we need to drastically reduce the number of people who are relying on government handouts to survive. Now, before anybody calls me heartless, I'm not suggesting that this be accomplished through welfare cuts - food, shelter, and basic healthcare are all absolute necessities... hard to learn much when you're worried about where you're going to be sleeping tonight, or where your next meal is coming from. But, moving beyond that - education & vocational programs are a huge component of encouraging mobility, and things like day care for single parents, easily available (and affordable) birth control, and sensible (fair) minimum wage laws will also help.
Now, with all of that said, I think that it's also important to keep in mind that, as Thomas Paine said, "what we obtain too cheaply, we esteem too lightly." There need to be some responsibilities & requirements placed on the people receiving these benefits. For example, want government healthcare? Great, you show up for regular checkups, don't smoke, exercise regularly, and are subject to random drug tests - if someone else is footing the bill for your healthcare, it's awfully impolite to abuse that charity and deliberately make yourself sick. Collecting a welfare check? Great, 20 hours of your week will be spent doing some work (even if it's sweeping sidewalks & picking up trash) for the government. The other 20 hours of your 'work week' can be spent in vocational training, job searching, or doing other things aimed at moving you out of the entitlement class, and into the middle class.
I also have to question the statistic you cited earlier suggesting that "50% of children make less than their parents." I have to wonder if this is also an indicator of the wide latitude of career options available. For instance: maybe dad's a teacher, and I become a mechanical engineer - I make more than him; Or, maybe mom's a nurse, and I become a teacher - I make less than her. It seems that social mobility doesn't necessarily require every child to make more money in absolute terms than their parents - perhaps I would be miserable as a nurse, but thrive as a carpenter. This doesn't necessarily mean my life is "worse," it just means that I'm happy doing a different type of work than my parents did, and that my career is one which by definition earns less than theirs did. I'd be interested to see a more in-depth review of the numbers you cited, to see if they've accounted for these sorts of things, because the ability to pursue the career you want seems to me as if it should also count in any measure of social mobility.
I wouldn't ever suspect it of you anyway - I've seen your posts around here, and often disagreed with them, but I wouldn't lump you in as a troll. Though I must say that I'm delighted to have inspired such a passionate and memorable follower - he's been following me around posting the same nonsense for about a week in response to anything I post here.
This, I can agree with, to the extent that it doesn't require the top 0.5% of the "ultra rich" to become beasts of burden supporting the lower 99.5% of the socioeconomic scale. As I said, I'm not disputing that there's a vast difference between the incomes of the ultra rich and a street sweeper - there absolutely is. My issue was specifically with the (percevied) suggestion that someone making 250k/year is barely scraping by as a member of the lower middle class. By any sane measure, a household pulling down 250k/yr is well off, and living quite comfortably. They're not sharing a private airport with Warren Buffet, but they're also not living in a 5th floor studio walk-up in Queens.
You sort of are conflating the two: You keep saying "open standards AND open software," but then cite the increased mindshare of open standards to support your arguments that both are achieving mainstream appeal. I agree that open standards have a clear and obvious appeal - access your data wherever and however you want. Everybody has data they want to access. Open source's appeal - "access the source code!" - is targeted directly at a small number (in comparison to the overall population) of specialists, who are - by definition - not the mainstream. Open standards and open source are not necessarily a package deal, and there's a much higher barrier to acceptance for open source - namely, that most people, even with the full source code, can't make heads or tails of it anyway.
I think you're being overly optimistic about open source reaching some sort of inevitable tipping point. Open standards need not be implemented with open source software - you can easily write a closed-source implementation. And frankly, open "standards" - the ability to say "I need to be able to play my songs & videos, open my books, and view & edit my documents on whatever device I buy," is the only part of "open" that most individuals care about (and even that... it's often not viewed as a terribly urgent need.)
Governments are using open source because it's free (as in beer - cost savings) and they can also make sure that nobody's slipping in a little NSA backdoor or Stuxnet variant with that Microsoft Office disc. This is not a benefit that most individuals care about, because even if they could read the code, they can't make sense of it or understand what it's doing without an immense amount of time spent learning how to program.
I'll refer you again to this chart.
Assuming that everybody in the bottom ~53% of that chart (households making less than $47500/yr) makes the very lowest amount allowed for their bracket, the "bottom 50%" of earners makes about $1,353,870,000,000/yr - that's 1.35 trillion. The "top 400 earners" who you assert make more than the entire lower 50% would then need to have average salaries and income of 3.375 billion dollars per year.
If you look at the Forbes 400 - the list of the richest people in America - there are people who do not even have a NET WORTH of 3.375 billion dollars, much less a yearly income of 3+ billion dollars. According to this, the "average income" of the top 400 households in 2007 was roughly 345 million per year. That falls far short of 3.375 billion dollars.
I am not disputing that there's a vast differential between the earnings of Bill Gates or Warren Buffet, and a disabled mechanic or an unemployed daycare worker. But pretending that people making 250k per year are somehow "the working poor" is just deluded. If you want to argue that the super-rich have a disproportionate amount of power, I'll agree with that. But let's keep our numbers grounded in reality.
It's also worth noting that in that bottom quintile, "Educational attainment, alongside the amount of work done by individuals are among the main determinants of income. The vast majority of Americans derive their income from occupational tasks and the utilization of their expertise. The notable exception is the lower class, where the most common source of income was not occupational status, but government welfare." (Cannot find link to primary source, but name & info is available from footnote 50.) -- this suggests that the people at the bottom are already primarily supported by tax revenues, which raises the question of exactly how high a standard of living everybody has a "right" to, and what sort of terms & conditions that standard of living comes with.
A household income of 100k/year or more in "much" of the US would generally fall into the upper middle class, or upper class, depending on how much greater than 100k your income is.
I know that we like to stretch definitions and imagine ourselves to be much worse off than we are here, but you can live a comfortable middle class lifestyle, even in NYC or LA, on 100k/year. Middle class doesn't mean "caviar only 3 nights a week." Take a look at the various definitions of classes given here.
By just about any definition that's not solely based in "soak the rich" populist rhetoric, a household with 100k yearly income is firmly in the middle class, and would generally be considered "upper middle class," or even higher on the social scale. I'm not disputing that there is a vast difference between the top income earners and the bottom earners. But to suggest that 250k, or even 100k, per year makes you more or less one of the working poor is just so divorced from any reality that it's ludicrous.
Again: if you consider "250k / year" to be "not real money," it's clear that you are tremendously out of touch with what the average person lives on, and earns, in a year.
Considering that a household income of "a measly quarter million a year" puts your household in the 2nd-highest percentile of households in America, I'd say calling that "barely upper middle class" is a bit of a stretch. If you earn more than 98.3% of the rest of the population, there is no way that you can claim that you're "barely" middle class.
Somebody's got an awfully skewed vision of how much it costs to maintain a middle-class lifestyle, and an awfully skewed vision of how much people actually earn.
And meanwhile, a bunch of FOSS pedants will debate whether "open.org" is truly "open," with half concluding that it's fine, and the other half declaring holy war on open.org because it's not a 100% completely free and open. And then we could fully expect GPLv4 to require that all distribution services be ideologically pure in letter and spirit.
Either that, or it'll be started in a rush of enthusiasm, and then the maintainers will realize "Gee, this writing and updating stuff is boring and hard. Let's just go write code," and so open.org will turn into abandonware with no updates or improvements for years -- just like the bulk of Sourceforge.
So in other words, they should put up a web page saying "A bunch of software companies you've likely never heard of are awesome. And companies like Apple and Microsoft, who you have heard of, own their products, and use those products every day, are not awesome"? The take-away from that page may not be what you think it will be to the average person - in fact, they may conclude based on their familiarity with Apple and Microsoft products, that this "closed" stuff is where all the stuff worth having is.
I'd point out two other problems with this plan:
-- If you want to build up your "brand," a good first lesson is that you need to stop chanting the name of your competitors, and giving them free press;
-- Many people in these comments have pointed out similar attempts at directories and work-alikes (sourceforge, etc.) - stop trying to reinvent the wheel; the ability (and willingness) of open source supporters to keep forking rather than negotiate & compromise without "breaking up the family" only serves to dilute your available pool of talent. Unchecked egos will make this just another offering in the already vast sea of half-finished, stale, outdated "You should use FOSS software because..." blogs.
So it'd be a well-curated experience? You might even call it a... *cough*... walled garden... of sorts?
If you want to open a competing store, you can quite easily launch your own phone with your own integrated app store, and compete head-on with Apple. This is what Android, WP7, and WebOS are all doing. Your complaint is *really* that Apple has said, "This is our vision for our product, this is what it does, and this is how it works," and that that vision doesn't match how YOU think they should operate. And that's fine to disagree with their business model - but they're under no obligation to conform to your desires. If they don't offer a product people are willing to buy, then they will lose money, and go out of business.
This is not some sort of civil rights issue, and I'm afraid I simply don't see why anybody feels justified in using the blunt threat of legislative action to force a company to "allow competition" in a field in which NUMEROUS competitors already exist, and in a field in which we're repeatedly told that those competitors are better, faster, and more feature-rich. If the product is a non-starter, then why the hell do you get so wound up about it? Ignore it, and let it die off, just like millions of other bad products have in the past.
There is no "other store" to buy from in Apple-town, and you know that when you move in. If you want a town with a dozen different stores to shop from, then don't move into a town with only one store.
Apple prevents you from running Android apps in the same way that Linux prevents you from running Windows apps, and the same way Ford prevents you from installing a Toyota engine in your Fusion: they're simply not compatible.
You are aware that homeowner's associations regularly exert arbitrary rules about paint colors, exterior decorations, lawn maintenance, vehicle parking, and the like... right? And that if you violate those requirements, you can be subject to anything from fines up to being removed from your home, depending on the HOA?
Doesn't much matter who controls the homeowner's association, if you're not being forced to go live there in the first place. There are numerous legitimate competitors that you can use instead - just like you can buy a home in another town or subdivision if you don't like the terms the HOA imposes in the first town or subdivision.
So, if you decide to buy a home in a town that only has a Target, it's somehow Target's fault if the nearest Wal-Mart is 2 towns over?
You are not "forced" to buy an Apple phone, or an Android phone, or any phone at all, for that matter. If you choose to buy one, you are buying into that phone's ecosystem, and you know that going in. If you don't like Apples' policies, vote with your dollars and support Android, or WebOS, or WP7. There are plenty of legitimate alternatives to Apple's phones, and we read here on Slashdot every day about how iOS' market share is shrinking perceptibly every day.
Maybe that's the difference - most of my experience with Blizzard's games is with WoW, and that game is most assuredly released in a "good enough for government work" fashion, with further tuning and refinements made frequently via hotfix & small patches. And to be clear, I'm not criticizing that practice, I agree that "good enough" is generally more desirable because it helps eliminate feature creep and actually gets the product out the door. I just was asking because if you asked me to name a developer who I think follows your "get it good enough, then ship it" model, I would definitely say Blizzard springs to mind.
Am I misreading this, or are you suggesting Blizzard only releases when it's "just right"? Because I've seen a lot of patch notes and hotfixes that would suggest otherwise. :)
Perhaps it's improved in the past few years. I have a friend who owns an older one (2002-ish Sephia, I think) and the thing has been a hot mess of maintenance issues. If their quality has improved in recent model years, s/Kia/${this year's unreliable brand}/g