I'm not a big fan of Apple, but you seem to be wrong about some facts:
"People don't have loyalty except in the many places that AT&T just doesn't work. While many smaller phone companies have built towers there and you get full bars with them. And the fact that I believe the contract is *$100* per month!?!? And that doesn't include texting which is nearly essential to have today."
I have 200 texts, unlimited data, and more minutes then I can use for $60 a month...
"Except if they rip CDs using Windows Media Player and then they have WMAs. Myself I have music in MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV/FLAC/MIDI formats. Yes, most people will have MP3s, but if they are using Windows Media Player they will have mostly WMAs which I don't blame Apple to not support, but they have them nonetheless."
Itunes automatically converts WMV's when imported into the Itunes library. Most people won't notice the difference
They are not as clear cut, but I'd say it still comes out ahead. Copyrights only exist for public benefit, and studies have shown that copyright periods that maximize incentives to produce are drastically lower than copyright periods mandated by law.
Make copyright periods too long, and eventually you have companies like Nintendo re-releasing old games in lieu of actually producing new content.
Some might say a glass of water costs pennies.
But that's not the real price of a glass of water however. Water in High-End French Restaurants are around the $8-$10 mark
Upgrade 1.1 irreversibly bricked phones. Every single update at the very least, disabled 3rd party apps and cleared all user entered non-standard data.
Inductive is a philosophical term, the inference of new facts based on previously known ones. In Physics, this means using experimental data in order to make general assumptions about the universe.
In mathematics, we use the term tongue-in-cheek, to refer to a particular and useful consequence of the least-element axiom. It resembles inductive reasoning, but it is indeed quite more rigorous.
We went over this a lot last year, but let's return. What the previous poster said was bunk. AT&T paid Apple $432 per iphone ($18 per month for a 2 year contract). This was the overwhelming reason that Apple decided to go with carrier exclusivity, and to suggest otherwise shows overwhelming naivete.
To use Visual Voicemail as a justification is a joke. It's trivial to set up a fully functioning(and most likely superior) visual voice mail system with any carrier that allows call forwarding and data, without any cooperation from the carrier. If you can't think of how.
Millions of US citizens engage in file-sharing and copyright infringement. It is impossible to arrest all of them for it. And to prey on the weakest individuals in our society, so as to make an example out of them, is both in-egalitarian and morally repugnant.
Yes, that is a very good point. I was trying to be terse, but here is more on the subject:
There are 3 main costs to extending copyright beyond the optimal period.
1) As I talked about before, authors live off their previous work, decreasing incentive to work. This decreases the amount of content that society can produce.
2) Quite simply, people are deprived of their ability to consume content that they would have consumed if it were free. This is usually justified by "if the price was 0, then nothing would be produced", but beyond the optimal period, that is no longer true.
3) Copyright laws drastically increase transaction costs and make production of derivative works more complicated. Look at the difficulty of rescuing orphan movies, or the prosecution against fan-works.
I'd like to point something out, the rationale for property at all, is the exact same one as for intellectual property.
Contrary to popular belief, property rights are a very modern invention, and large chunks of the world still do things relatively communally.
Developed nations implemented wide scale property rights only in the late 19th century, so as to avoid "tragedy of the commons" situations by giving owners of property an inventive to maintain it.
In other words, property rights were designed to overcome a market failure(Tradgedy of the Commons), much in the same way as copyright laws.
Both IP and property rights have severe costs(Think of absentee landlords owning multiple homes while others are homeless), but when property designed, they can serve the public good.
Conventional property rights are pretty well designed, IP laws not so much...
Yes, producers will do this. But it's pretty clear that production of intellectual property, while non-zero, is going to be below the social optimum. This isn't that big a deal with music, which is mainly a positional good anyway, but is more important with things like microprocessor research.
Mind you, there is a lot of economic evidence that our current copyright system decreases production(Long copyright periods produce income streams that can be lived off).
But the solution, is to change copyright periods so that we can can as close to the optimum level of production as possible(Some estimates are around 14 years, there is a lot of literature on the subject).
Remember, writers and content producers are a very small percentage of the population, and should not have very high priority in social utility function.
The only purpose of IP law is to increase production of information and research.
And as it stands now, it's an empirical near-certainty that copyright periods are far too long to serve the public interest.
there is an effect you are neglecting: as copyright periods increase, this effects incentives in two directions:
1) the obvious, expected profits increase, increasing incentive to work.
2) Writers can expect to profit longer off of their previous work, allowing them to "live off there previous work"
Because of the decreasing marginal utility from money, effect 2 overpowers effect 1 pretty quickly. There have been some nice papers on this( google "optimal copyright period"), and the current estimate is that a period of around 14 years maximizes incentives to produce. Anything above that actually decreases the amount of works produced. (This is only for copyright, the formula for patents depends on the sector)
Quite frankly, there is no reason to believe that whatever government your revolution creates, would not quickly fall under the same problems as the current.
Unfortunately, infiltration by interest groups is a straight-forward by-product of democracy itself, not the moral failings of individual congressman. What do I mean by that? Perfectly rational politicians trying to get re-elected, even in the absence of personal greed(And assuming elections are free), will produce sub-optimal policies and fall victim to special interest groups. It's a standard result of public choice theory.
Sure, leaders can "Do what's right, not whats popular", but that is inherently undemocratic. It's an inescapable dilemma.
That's why every developed nation in the world has farm subsidies, and every nation sans Sweden has draconian copyright law as well.
The solution? Find a set of benevolent philosopher kings to run things. Failing that, keep in mind that the current system is quite good, and that revolutions are rarely worth it(French and American ones are outliers, most of the time it doesn't go so well...)
As warm and fuzzy as that makes us feel, it's not really true. Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce, so long as it does not interfere with explicitly spelled out constitutional rights.
During the time of the founding fathers, this wasn't very important. But now that nearly every transaction(Economic or otherwise) has interstate(and usually international) intermediaries, the federal government has essentially unlimited authority to regulate it.
The only rights you have are then, those explicitly given in the constitution.
"The truth is, "terrorists" - meaning radically extremist muslims - are overwhelmingly ignorant and stupid"
Please look up Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nigeria, and others. Not all Muslims are terrorists, and if you take out the Iraq outlier, I doubt that even most Muslims are terrorists.
"9/11 apparently used up all of the top talent, because we haven't gotten hit by anything since then and it certainly isn't thanks to the crack commandos of the TSA. If terrorists had any real brains, we'd have been hit a hundred times by now."
Have you considered that maybe, they don't want to hit us right now? Al-Qaeda has strategic goals, and terror attacks are one way of fulfilling those goals.
9/11 made the US invade Iraq and Afghanistan(Something Al-Qaeda hoped and planned for, according to documents found in Afghanistan). The Madrid attacks pushed Spain out of Iraq, setting a ground-breaking precedent. The 7/7 bombings led to a backlash that radicalized moderate Muslims.
Security in European countries is quite a bit better than in the US, and yet Al-Qaeda managed to launch several attacks in the area since 9/11.
Combine this with our weak security(And the known fact that Al-Qaeda managed to set up active cells in the US post 9/11), and it becomes clear that there have been no terror attacks in the US, mainly because they havn't been trying.
A simplified version of what this program does is assume that the terrorists have perfect knowledge of the random algorithm. Then terrorists have two choices, what type of attack they will commit(women, two women and a child, etc.), and where they will commit it(lane 3, lane 4, etc.). The program then assumes that the terrorists act in a way that maximizes their chance of success(taking into account risk and potential damage).
Now the computer has a function that tells the risk and potential damage of a terror attack for every security regime. They now use some sort of algorithm to minimize expected damage as a function of security regime, keeping the cost of the regime as a restraint.
Some terrorism will get through, but this system, if properly designed(and this is the hard part), works better than any other system with the same amount of resources.
You obviously know a lot more about this then me. So please clear any misunderstanding on my part.
I thought that countries like Nepal and Bhutan served as buffer states between India and China. Wouldn't India intervene in Nepal to preserve the balence of power if they shifted too much toward China?
China could prevent such a thing, but then India could retaliate by supporting active Tibet seperatists. Soon, things become a mess.
Both China and India enjoy the status quo, and I doubt either will allow things to deviate from it.
What if I rewrite the statement as "It's pretty clear that World War II would not have ended anywhere near as quickly as it did if it were not for the US's indiscriminate bombing of German cities. Because of that, and despite the massive civilian casualties, the bombing was justified." Do you still disagree? If so, I think you're in the minority.
There are many uncontroversial bad things that are for the societal good. Taxation is theft, imprisonment is kidnapping, and war is large scale murder. But we accept that these acts, immoral in a local sense, can sometimes be for the greater good.
Yes, defining "the greater good" is very subjective, and our enemies think they are doing the same.
But that's the point. If we are to condemn Al-Qaeda on the world stage, the statement "They've attacked civilians!" rings hollow from the government that has killed more innocents then Al-Qaeda could dream of.
Attacking them on their goals, as opposed to their means, would be much more fruitful.
Pro-apartheid parties won consistently every year in free and democratic(if white only) elections. If anti-apartheid parties won, but were denied the right to take power, then your Zimbabwe analogy would make sense. Instead, anti-apartheid parties never won more then 30% of the vote in any South African election.
In fact, a referendum was held in 1992 to determine whether the public supported the ruling party's negotiations to dismantle apartheid. Despite the reigning international sanctions, riots, and 30 years of terrorism, the "No" vote got 31% of the vote.
It's pretty clear that Apartheid wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for the ANC's terrorist tactics. Because of that, the ANC's terrorism was justified.
You never considered that maybe, the other parties historic ties to the monarchy discredited them in the eyes of their people? This would explain why they even won seats in Kathmandu, where they had no ability to "intimidate" voters due to the heavy army presence.
The Maoists are not going to take over and set up a Maoist regime, India and China wouldn't allow it.
But the GP's point, is that their frequent terrorism was justified, in that it freed the country from dictatorial monarchy.
I just want to provide some context for those who listen to Anonymous cowards.
South Africa was never a first world country, if you included the huge black majority that was held in well... apartheid. The economy is actually doing very well, and has consistently grown at a rate of 5-7% per year. It is now quite a bit richer than it was in 1991. There are rolling blackouts, but that is mainly a result of the high energy prices that have hit the rest of the world.
What scares me most about this poster, is that she fails to see the biggest problem with Apartheid. That 85% of the population was systematically oppressed and denied the right to vote.
Then please, give me a definition of terrorism that does not make the US military a terrorist organization(And remember not to use intent! Governments do not have feelings, and the slain do not care about the motivations of their killers).
Once you do this, then explain how the US would not be a state sponsor of terror, based on our confirmed historical support of right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, and our more recent involvement funding warlords in Somalia, and violent separatist groups in Iran.
For extra-credit, justify the US's refusal to prosecute perpetrators the My Lai massacre, or our WW2 era concepts of total war, or even better, the African National Congress's tendency to or Irgun.
After you finish with the mental acrobatics necessary to do such a thing, then apply these new and broad standards to Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Mahdi army.
The point? Things are not black and white, and we do not possess any moral high-ground upon which to condemn others. Terrorism is just a tactic, one used for good and bad. And at the same time, a tactic that kills far less people then organized war.
Slashdot Mirror
"People don't have loyalty except in the many places that AT&T just doesn't work. While many smaller phone companies have built towers there and you get full bars with them. And the fact that I believe the contract is *$100* per month!?!? And that doesn't include texting which is nearly essential to have today."
I have 200 texts, unlimited data, and more minutes then I can use for $60 a month...
"Except if they rip CDs using Windows Media Player and then they have WMAs. Myself I have music in MP3/OGG/WMA/WAV/FLAC/MIDI formats. Yes, most people will have MP3s, but if they are using Windows Media Player they will have mostly WMAs which I don't blame Apple to not support, but they have them nonetheless."
Itunes automatically converts WMV's when imported into the Itunes library. Most people won't notice the difference
Make copyright periods too long, and eventually you have companies like Nintendo re-releasing old games in lieu of actually producing new content.
Some might say a glass of water costs pennies. But that's not the real price of a glass of water however. Water in High-End French Restaurants are around the $8-$10 mark
Upgrade 1.1 irreversibly bricked phones. Every single update at the very least, disabled 3rd party apps and cleared all user entered non-standard data.
A french-English dictionary costs $19 on the app store. Meanwhile, I can get it for free on an unlocked iphone with webdict.
It seems that Apple's approval process has discouraged a lot of free software development.
Inductive is a philosophical term, the inference of new facts based on previously known ones. In Physics, this means using experimental data in order to make general assumptions about the universe.
In mathematics, we use the term tongue-in-cheek, to refer to a particular and useful consequence of the least-element axiom. It resembles inductive reasoning, but it is indeed quite more rigorous.
To use Visual Voicemail as a justification is a joke. It's trivial to set up a fully functioning(and most likely superior) visual voice mail system with any carrier that allows call forwarding and data, without any cooperation from the carrier. If you can't think of how.
Millions of US citizens engage in file-sharing and copyright infringement. It is impossible to arrest all of them for it. And to prey on the weakest individuals in our society, so as to make an example out of them, is both in-egalitarian and morally repugnant.
Yes, that is a very good point. I was trying to be terse, but here is more on the subject: There are 3 main costs to extending copyright beyond the optimal period. 1) As I talked about before, authors live off their previous work, decreasing incentive to work. This decreases the amount of content that society can produce. 2) Quite simply, people are deprived of their ability to consume content that they would have consumed if it were free. This is usually justified by "if the price was 0, then nothing would be produced", but beyond the optimal period, that is no longer true. 3) Copyright laws drastically increase transaction costs and make production of derivative works more complicated. Look at the difficulty of rescuing orphan movies, or the prosecution against fan-works.
Contrary to popular belief, property rights are a very modern invention, and large chunks of the world still do things relatively communally.
Developed nations implemented wide scale property rights only in the late 19th century, so as to avoid "tragedy of the commons" situations by giving owners of property an inventive to maintain it.
In other words, property rights were designed to overcome a market failure(Tradgedy of the Commons), much in the same way as copyright laws.
Both IP and property rights have severe costs(Think of absentee landlords owning multiple homes while others are homeless), but when property designed, they can serve the public good.
Conventional property rights are pretty well designed, IP laws not so much...
Mind you, there is a lot of economic evidence that our current copyright system decreases production(Long copyright periods produce income streams that can be lived off).
But the solution, is to change copyright periods so that we can can as close to the optimum level of production as possible(Some estimates are around 14 years, there is a lot of literature on the subject).
The only purpose of IP law is to increase production of information and research.
And as it stands now, it's an empirical near-certainty that copyright periods are far too long to serve the public interest.
there is an effect you are neglecting: as copyright periods increase, this effects incentives in two directions: 1) the obvious, expected profits increase, increasing incentive to work. 2) Writers can expect to profit longer off of their previous work, allowing them to "live off there previous work" Because of the decreasing marginal utility from money, effect 2 overpowers effect 1 pretty quickly. There have been some nice papers on this( google "optimal copyright period"), and the current estimate is that a period of around 14 years maximizes incentives to produce. Anything above that actually decreases the amount of works produced. (This is only for copyright, the formula for patents depends on the sector)
Unfortunately, infiltration by interest groups is a straight-forward by-product of democracy itself, not the moral failings of individual congressman. What do I mean by that? Perfectly rational politicians trying to get re-elected, even in the absence of personal greed(And assuming elections are free), will produce sub-optimal policies and fall victim to special interest groups. It's a standard result of public choice theory.
Sure, leaders can "Do what's right, not whats popular", but that is inherently undemocratic. It's an inescapable dilemma.
That's why every developed nation in the world has farm subsidies, and every nation sans Sweden has draconian copyright law as well.
The solution? Find a set of benevolent philosopher kings to run things. Failing that, keep in mind that the current system is quite good, and that revolutions are rarely worth it(French and American ones are outliers, most of the time it doesn't go so well...)
During the time of the founding fathers, this wasn't very important. But now that nearly every transaction(Economic or otherwise) has interstate(and usually international) intermediaries, the federal government has essentially unlimited authority to regulate it.
The only rights you have are then, those explicitly given in the constitution.
The law is nonenforceable, and could only be applied selectively. This could, by a bit of stretching, raise 14th amendment concerns.
Please look up Sri Lanka, Thailand, Nigeria, and others. Not all Muslims are terrorists, and if you take out the Iraq outlier, I doubt that even most Muslims are terrorists.
"9/11 apparently used up all of the top talent, because we haven't gotten hit by anything since then and it certainly isn't thanks to the crack commandos of the TSA. If terrorists had any real brains, we'd have been hit a hundred times by now."
Have you considered that maybe, they don't want to hit us right now? Al-Qaeda has strategic goals, and terror attacks are one way of fulfilling those goals.
9/11 made the US invade Iraq and Afghanistan(Something Al-Qaeda hoped and planned for, according to documents found in Afghanistan). The Madrid attacks pushed Spain out of Iraq, setting a ground-breaking precedent. The 7/7 bombings led to a backlash that radicalized moderate Muslims.
Security in European countries is quite a bit better than in the US, and yet Al-Qaeda managed to launch several attacks in the area since 9/11.
Combine this with our weak security(And the known fact that Al-Qaeda managed to set up active cells in the US post 9/11), and it becomes clear that there have been no terror attacks in the US, mainly because they havn't been trying.
A simplified version of what this program does is assume that the terrorists have perfect knowledge of the random algorithm. Then terrorists have two choices, what type of attack they will commit(women, two women and a child, etc.), and where they will commit it(lane 3, lane 4, etc.). The program then assumes that the terrorists act in a way that maximizes their chance of success(taking into account risk and potential damage).
Now the computer has a function that tells the risk and potential damage of a terror attack for every security regime. They now use some sort of algorithm to minimize expected damage as a function of security regime, keeping the cost of the regime as a restraint.
Some terrorism will get through, but this system, if properly designed(and this is the hard part), works better than any other system with the same amount of resources.
I thought that countries like Nepal and Bhutan served as buffer states between India and China. Wouldn't India intervene in Nepal to preserve the balence of power if they shifted too much toward China?
China could prevent such a thing, but then India could retaliate by supporting active Tibet seperatists. Soon, things become a mess.
Both China and India enjoy the status quo, and I doubt either will allow things to deviate from it.
There are many uncontroversial bad things that are for the societal good. Taxation is theft, imprisonment is kidnapping, and war is large scale murder. But we accept that these acts, immoral in a local sense, can sometimes be for the greater good.
Yes, defining "the greater good" is very subjective, and our enemies think they are doing the same.
But that's the point. If we are to condemn Al-Qaeda on the world stage, the statement "They've attacked civilians!" rings hollow from the government that has killed more innocents then Al-Qaeda could dream of.
Attacking them on their goals, as opposed to their means, would be much more fruitful.
In fact, a referendum was held in 1992 to determine whether the public supported the ruling party's negotiations to dismantle apartheid. Despite the reigning international sanctions, riots, and 30 years of terrorism, the "No" vote got 31% of the vote.
It's pretty clear that Apartheid wouldn't have ended as quickly as it did if it were not for the ANC's terrorist tactics. Because of that, the ANC's terrorism was justified.
The Maoists are not going to take over and set up a Maoist regime, India and China wouldn't allow it.
But the GP's point, is that their frequent terrorism was justified, in that it freed the country from dictatorial monarchy.
South Africa was never a first world country, if you included the huge black majority that was held in well... apartheid. The economy is actually doing very well, and has consistently grown at a rate of 5-7% per year. It is now quite a bit richer than it was in 1991. There are rolling blackouts, but that is mainly a result of the high energy prices that have hit the rest of the world.
What scares me most about this poster, is that she fails to see the biggest problem with Apartheid. That 85% of the population was systematically oppressed and denied the right to vote.
Once you do this, then explain how the US would not be a state sponsor of terror, based on our confirmed historical support of right-wing paramilitaries in Nicaragua, and our more recent involvement funding warlords in Somalia, and violent separatist groups in Iran.
For extra-credit, justify the US's refusal to prosecute perpetrators the My Lai massacre, or our WW2 era concepts of total war, or even better, the African National Congress's tendency to or Irgun.
After you finish with the mental acrobatics necessary to do such a thing, then apply these new and broad standards to Hezbollah, Hamas, or the Mahdi army.
The point? Things are not black and white, and we do not possess any moral high-ground upon which to condemn others. Terrorism is just a tactic, one used for good and bad. And at the same time, a tactic that kills far less people then organized war.