Except that the folks doing the cracks aren't leeching off others. They're just providing a service in exchange for reputation. And I often wonder if upping the ante with the DRM isn't just making it worse in that respect. Rather than a relatively modest reward for a working crack, the reputation involved gets even more significant.
Except when it backfires and the individual doesn't know that it's been bugged and assumes that the development house is incompetent. Given the number of development houses out there that are incompetent and have major bugs or make games unfairly hard as a way of increasing the play time, it's not an unreasonable reaction.
Back a decade ago, when Napster was still Napster and was "killing" the music industry. I remember some artists like the Barenaked Ladies would release tracks specifically to be leaked onto the net. The idea was to pollute the pool of songs.
I doubt that lasted long as it tends not to take very long for the right ones to pop to the top of the popularity lists and stay there above the broken ones.
Or just roll your eyes at whomever is behind the counter and start to leave. Chances are that they'll do something to move things along, or you'll know not to shop there again.
Competition between the telecom providers? I've heard rumors of that combination of words applying, but I've never actually seen it. Ah, well, I guess I'll just keep on paying a couple dollars less for my DSL than Qwest pays for 40mbps service in other areas and pretend like I'm zooming down the tubes. And pretend that my over priced cellphone provider is actually providing my money's worth.
But, OTOH, free market capitalism and a deregulated telecom industry, is really going to do something for the subscriber...
I wouldn't bet on that. I've never owned an iPhone and if anything my opinion of AT&T is far lower than the people I know who have iPhones. Even before I moved up to a Backflip then Nexus One, the reception was terrible.
Really? You must not spend much time traveling around actually in the city, because the service is pretty much shit. But, OTOH, if you're up north closer to shoreline or down south the service ought to be much better given the location of the antennae.
That's similar to how I ended up on AT&T. Sprint's terrible service prompted me to switch and AT&T ended up being cheaper for reasons related to a family plant.
But the reception is far worse than it was on Sprint and I'm regularly in parts of the city where I can't get 3G.
Well, the example isn't the greatest because there are other restaurants out there that are presumably better. AT&T is worse than the competition, but not bad enough to make much of a difference in terms of switching.
3G coverage for them in Seattle is complete crap. Largely because they've got their antennae set up north of the city and south of the city with everybody in the middle with little to no consideration for topography. Before Sprint pissed me off with their customer service, I had much, much less trouble with reception.
I think it's telling that AT&T has had to stoop to the level of using the femtocells even in urban areas to deal with the problems. They shouldn't be needing to push those devices in any major city.
I suspect that's probably coincidental. There's also been a trend towards deregulation covering most of that period of time. Service even for voice seems to be getting significantly worse.
I just found out that Qwest charges only $6 a month more for their 40mbps fiber service than they do for my 5mbps DSL, only catch is that they don't provide any speeds faster than what I've got here, and they talked the city out of setting up municipal fiber on the premise that they don't want to have to put up with government regulation. Perhaps if they stopped sucking and started actually caring about the customer the urge to regulate might subside.
Cell service seems a bit like that, it's amazing how little they differ in terms of cost or what they provide.
To be fair, AT&T service here is sufficiently bad, that were we the only people with iPhones the problem would never have been discovered.
There's something about Seattle which leads us to get crappy service from telecoms. AT&T, Qwest and Comcast all in the same market. And I'm not sure that the others are any better. Receptionwise, Sprint was actually pretty good in my experience, but that was just for voice, no idea how they are for data.
Not really. I'm guessing that they're dealing with a large number of relatively low explosive devices. If it were a small number of highly explosive devices, they'd disarm. But if you've got that many devices, it's a lot safer to just burn the place down knowing that you'll have to shield the surrounding buildings.
It's also nice in that you've got a much more predictable timing on the explosives. Anything which doesn't go off as a result of the fire isn't likely to go off ever.
That's a bullshit argument to make. I'm going to be taking the train halfway across the country later this week. It's going to talk me nearly 2 full days to get there and a similar amount of time to get back.
Were I to have to do that under normal circumstances I would likely be unable to go because I'd have to give up too much work. But, On a plane, if I wanted to go to a funeral clear across the country, I could do that and be back within the typical 3 days they give you to do that. By train or car, not a chance.
Making bullshit arguments like the government isn't infringing upon your right to free speech because they allow you to stand on the corner and yell rather than use the internet to post it is disingenuous at best. As yes you've spoken about it, but they've greatly restricted the reach. A large part of why they included a freedom of the press.
It is discrimination and it doesn't work. The Israelis would be doing just that if it worked, and they don't do that. They do profile, however they don't profile based upon anything that flimsy. They look for the individual that's likely to be a terrorist. Islam in particular is sufficiently diverse that you're never going to catch all the Islamic extremists like that. And that ignores the folks that are more likely to be up to no good, such as ELF and the other domestic terrorist organizations out there.
That's a bullshit argument to make. We should drop them because they're doing no good in terms of preventing an attack. All they're doing is giving the terrorists and easier target. As in those long lines at the checkpoints. Nobody has been searched at that point and there's a huge number of people there, particularly right before a plane leaves.
Additionally, the reason that 9/11 worked was that the passengers weren't expecting to be hijacked into a kamikaze attack and the airlines were too cheap to pay for reinforced doors. Had the doors been reinforced or the passengers fought back, the attacks would have failed. There would've been life lost, but only a fraction of how many were lost as a result.
Even factoring in the deaths in 9/11 it's still far more likely that you'll die in a regular plane crash than a terrorist plane crash, to suggest otherwise is bullshit apologistics.
But lastly, the difference between reasonable and unreasonable tends to be related to likelihood of it happening. It's generally considered unreasonable to worry about what happens if one were to say be eaten by a shark while swimming in a pool and reasonable to worry about being killed if one steps out into traffic without looking. Given a situation which is barely more likely to happen than never ever happen, it requires a significant reason to worry about it.
But in this case, this runs afoul of the explicit ban on unreasonable search and seizure. You'd have much more of a point if the current constitution didn't explicitly ban the searches.
They specifically have to have a warrant granted upon probable cause to search a person or their possessions. It's been expanded a bit over the years to grant law enforcement the ability to do searches without a warrant when there's probable cause for it.
But there isn't anywhere that I've seen where one can strip search or fondle everybody that wants to go on a plane as being reasonable.
Wrong, it's about reminding the population that terrorists are out there so that politicians running on a strong military platform don't lose their elections.
The money to the companies is mostly just a sweetener.
It's not a matter of this being America. I doubt very much that people in civilized nations would permit such abuse of power. It's one thing to be naked in public because you like being naked, and quite another to be groped because they're threatening you with massive fines and possible arrest for refusing to complete the screenings.
More than that, whatever happened to common human decency? Why should those that have been sexually molested have to choose between being exposed to that sort of behavior again or not being able to fly? Some jobs do require flight as a portion of the work, seems bad to restrict people from applying for those jobs on such a shoddy basis.
Not really, the TSA stuff has been done to death. At this point, I doubt another dozen stories would result in any meaningful change for folks around here.
I'm not dependent upon them for anything. I specifically went with a Nook over a Kindle because I wasn't interested in being held hostage like that. As it is, I can move my files to several other ebook readers.
If you read that last link, Kindle owners aren't terribly satisfied and they only make up about a half of the market. Which means that only about a quarter of the current market is made up with satisfied Kindle owners. I do genuinely wonder if that would be the case if B&N and Sony actually bothered to advertise. This is just like the MP3 player days all over again where every MP3 player became an iPod in the eyes of many.
But, really, 90% isn't a particularly meaningful number at the point you're referencing. It's easy to put up numbers like that in a new market, it's not a shocker that they've already dropped to a bit over half.
I know that, but what I'm wondering about is at what point does Amazon admit that their format lost and add support for epub to their product. And hopefully drop.mobi as a failed file format.
The app is Adobe Editions, and it's a completely different app. Chances are good that it's already installed on the computer of most people with an ebook reader. I think the Kindle right now is the only one that doesn't support the format.
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Except that the folks doing the cracks aren't leeching off others. They're just providing a service in exchange for reputation. And I often wonder if upping the ante with the DRM isn't just making it worse in that respect. Rather than a relatively modest reward for a working crack, the reputation involved gets even more significant.
Except when it backfires and the individual doesn't know that it's been bugged and assumes that the development house is incompetent. Given the number of development houses out there that are incompetent and have major bugs or make games unfairly hard as a way of increasing the play time, it's not an unreasonable reaction.
Back a decade ago, when Napster was still Napster and was "killing" the music industry. I remember some artists like the Barenaked Ladies would release tracks specifically to be leaked onto the net. The idea was to pollute the pool of songs.
I doubt that lasted long as it tends not to take very long for the right ones to pop to the top of the popularity lists and stay there above the broken ones.
Or more likely conclude that the software is of poor quality and view the company as incompetent.
What's worse is that the copy protection has a nasty way of making its way into legit copies.
Or just roll your eyes at whomever is behind the counter and start to leave. Chances are that they'll do something to move things along, or you'll know not to shop there again.
Competition between the telecom providers? I've heard rumors of that combination of words applying, but I've never actually seen it. Ah, well, I guess I'll just keep on paying a couple dollars less for my DSL than Qwest pays for 40mbps service in other areas and pretend like I'm zooming down the tubes. And pretend that my over priced cellphone provider is actually providing my money's worth.
But, OTOH, free market capitalism and a deregulated telecom industry, is really going to do something for the subscriber...
Customers that demand good service are too expensive and need to be driven out, didn't you get the memo on that?
I wouldn't bet on that. I've never owned an iPhone and if anything my opinion of AT&T is far lower than the people I know who have iPhones. Even before I moved up to a Backflip then Nexus One, the reception was terrible.
Really? You must not spend much time traveling around actually in the city, because the service is pretty much shit. But, OTOH, if you're up north closer to shoreline or down south the service ought to be much better given the location of the antennae.
That's similar to how I ended up on AT&T. Sprint's terrible service prompted me to switch and AT&T ended up being cheaper for reasons related to a family plant.
But the reception is far worse than it was on Sprint and I'm regularly in parts of the city where I can't get 3G.
Well, the example isn't the greatest because there are other restaurants out there that are presumably better. AT&T is worse than the competition, but not bad enough to make much of a difference in terms of switching.
3G coverage for them in Seattle is complete crap. Largely because they've got their antennae set up north of the city and south of the city with everybody in the middle with little to no consideration for topography. Before Sprint pissed me off with their customer service, I had much, much less trouble with reception.
I think it's telling that AT&T has had to stoop to the level of using the femtocells even in urban areas to deal with the problems. They shouldn't be needing to push those devices in any major city.
I suspect that's probably coincidental. There's also been a trend towards deregulation covering most of that period of time. Service even for voice seems to be getting significantly worse.
I just found out that Qwest charges only $6 a month more for their 40mbps fiber service than they do for my 5mbps DSL, only catch is that they don't provide any speeds faster than what I've got here, and they talked the city out of setting up municipal fiber on the premise that they don't want to have to put up with government regulation. Perhaps if they stopped sucking and started actually caring about the customer the urge to regulate might subside.
Cell service seems a bit like that, it's amazing how little they differ in terms of cost or what they provide.
To be fair, AT&T service here is sufficiently bad, that were we the only people with iPhones the problem would never have been discovered.
There's something about Seattle which leads us to get crappy service from telecoms. AT&T, Qwest and Comcast all in the same market. And I'm not sure that the others are any better. Receptionwise, Sprint was actually pretty good in my experience, but that was just for voice, no idea how they are for data.
But does it blend?
Not really. I'm guessing that they're dealing with a large number of relatively low explosive devices. If it were a small number of highly explosive devices, they'd disarm. But if you've got that many devices, it's a lot safer to just burn the place down knowing that you'll have to shield the surrounding buildings.
It's also nice in that you've got a much more predictable timing on the explosives. Anything which doesn't go off as a result of the fire isn't likely to go off ever.
That's a bullshit argument to make. I'm going to be taking the train halfway across the country later this week. It's going to talk me nearly 2 full days to get there and a similar amount of time to get back.
Were I to have to do that under normal circumstances I would likely be unable to go because I'd have to give up too much work. But, On a plane, if I wanted to go to a funeral clear across the country, I could do that and be back within the typical 3 days they give you to do that. By train or car, not a chance.
Making bullshit arguments like the government isn't infringing upon your right to free speech because they allow you to stand on the corner and yell rather than use the internet to post it is disingenuous at best. As yes you've spoken about it, but they've greatly restricted the reach. A large part of why they included a freedom of the press.
It is discrimination and it doesn't work. The Israelis would be doing just that if it worked, and they don't do that. They do profile, however they don't profile based upon anything that flimsy. They look for the individual that's likely to be a terrorist. Islam in particular is sufficiently diverse that you're never going to catch all the Islamic extremists like that. And that ignores the folks that are more likely to be up to no good, such as ELF and the other domestic terrorist organizations out there.
That's a bullshit argument to make. We should drop them because they're doing no good in terms of preventing an attack. All they're doing is giving the terrorists and easier target. As in those long lines at the checkpoints. Nobody has been searched at that point and there's a huge number of people there, particularly right before a plane leaves.
Additionally, the reason that 9/11 worked was that the passengers weren't expecting to be hijacked into a kamikaze attack and the airlines were too cheap to pay for reinforced doors. Had the doors been reinforced or the passengers fought back, the attacks would have failed. There would've been life lost, but only a fraction of how many were lost as a result.
Even factoring in the deaths in 9/11 it's still far more likely that you'll die in a regular plane crash than a terrorist plane crash, to suggest otherwise is bullshit apologistics.
But lastly, the difference between reasonable and unreasonable tends to be related to likelihood of it happening. It's generally considered unreasonable to worry about what happens if one were to say be eaten by a shark while swimming in a pool and reasonable to worry about being killed if one steps out into traffic without looking. Given a situation which is barely more likely to happen than never ever happen, it requires a significant reason to worry about it.
But in this case, this runs afoul of the explicit ban on unreasonable search and seizure. You'd have much more of a point if the current constitution didn't explicitly ban the searches.
They specifically have to have a warrant granted upon probable cause to search a person or their possessions. It's been expanded a bit over the years to grant law enforcement the ability to do searches without a warrant when there's probable cause for it.
But there isn't anywhere that I've seen where one can strip search or fondle everybody that wants to go on a plane as being reasonable.
Wrong, it's about reminding the population that terrorists are out there so that politicians running on a strong military platform don't lose their elections.
The money to the companies is mostly just a sweetener.
It's not a matter of this being America. I doubt very much that people in civilized nations would permit such abuse of power. It's one thing to be naked in public because you like being naked, and quite another to be groped because they're threatening you with massive fines and possible arrest for refusing to complete the screenings.
More than that, whatever happened to common human decency? Why should those that have been sexually molested have to choose between being exposed to that sort of behavior again or not being able to fly? Some jobs do require flight as a portion of the work, seems bad to restrict people from applying for those jobs on such a shoddy basis.
Not really, the TSA stuff has been done to death. At this point, I doubt another dozen stories would result in any meaningful change for folks around here.
I'm not dependent upon them for anything. I specifically went with a Nook over a Kindle because I wasn't interested in being held hostage like that. As it is, I can move my files to several other ebook readers.
If you read that last link, Kindle owners aren't terribly satisfied and they only make up about a half of the market. Which means that only about a quarter of the current market is made up with satisfied Kindle owners. I do genuinely wonder if that would be the case if B&N and Sony actually bothered to advertise. This is just like the MP3 player days all over again where every MP3 player became an iPod in the eyes of many.
But, really, 90% isn't a particularly meaningful number at the point you're referencing. It's easy to put up numbers like that in a new market, it's not a shocker that they've already dropped to a bit over half.
I know that, but what I'm wondering about is at what point does Amazon admit that their format lost and add support for epub to their product. And hopefully drop .mobi as a failed file format.
The app is Adobe Editions, and it's a completely different app. Chances are good that it's already installed on the computer of most people with an ebook reader. I think the Kindle right now is the only one that doesn't support the format.