This works because the Dutch still generally care about private property rights, and have a sense of the need to reward people for hard work. The "entitlement mentality" has not fully set in because most of Dutch society is still working from the older mindset, but slowly we are seeing this falling away across the Western world. Give it another 100 years, and it's doubtful that this will be true.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers. In every other area of the economy, you don't get access to the goods and services until you pay for them or come to an understanding that allows you to get them for free. Why should this be any different?
One of the things we need to face up to here is that in another century or two, manufacturing technology will be advanced enough to allow people to fabricate complex physical goods from raw materials. What will happen when any good on the store can be replicated at the cost of materials? I suspect that a pirate culture would end up meeting with utter disaster here.
So really, we need to face up to the fact that we need a culture that says "you don't deserve it just because you can't pay for it or don't want to pay for it." That sort of thing would pay dividends in other areas, since such a culture would also tend to promote an attitude that you have no right to tell others what to do on most things.
And a Linux/Ubuntu fanboy, much like yourself, convinced her she didn't need to because "Ubuntu was great, college students loved it, it was compatible with everything I needed". Your analogy fails because under said analogy, she went to the mechanic who told her everything was fine and not to worry about it.
Ahh, the number of times I've been downmodded on Slashdot for criticizing Linux... you'd think I was a fanboy for Microsoft with the number of times that I've said that even Windows XP is faster out of the box. Where your analogy falls down is that what she did was the equivalent of calling the car dealership up and asking them if something weren't quite right with her car when the dealership had no incentive to say "well, you really intended to get this, but you settled for this based on your order."
3)If it has taken her several months to get to this point and she needs the laptop to take the on-line course and can't afford to buy another one or to buy Windows to put on this one, it makes sense that she cancel her classes until she can in fact attend them.
You can get Windows XP for about $100 on Tiger Direct, and most people know at least someone who can run the Windows installer and get it up and running. For that matter, what happened to the computer she used to buy it. Was it someone else's?
I would say you are an arrogant asshole for assuming that everyone is a technical expert who knows about Linux and assuming she is incompetent because she trusted customer support at the place she bought the computer from. I can only hope that you are fired from your job for being an asshole, so no one ever has to deal with your sorry ass.
It takes a special breed of hypocrite to take the moral high ground while blatantly wishing evil on others. Have you ever actually looked at Dell's offerings and realized that the only laptops that they have for home users that cost $1,100 are ones that only get distributed with Windows? Either she got really badly ripped off on a Dell Netbook or something is very fishy here.
This chick obviously had no business being in college for several good reasons:
1) She couldn't even see fit to double or triple check a $1,100 order for a laptop to make sure it was what she wanted. For most of us, that's blatant financial irresponsibility.
2) She didn't have the wherewithal to get someone to put Windows on for her when she realized she just couldn't handle Ubuntu. Again, a sign of irresponsibility. Arguing that her ignorance, not laziness, was a factor here is like arguing that someone with car problems doesn't deserve criticism for not seeking out a mechanic.
3) She canceled 2 semesters of college over this.
I'd say Dell probably saved the tax payers money, since she'd probably end up as some 6 year Art History major whose "education" is funded by tax payers. Hopefully no business will hire her for any important job either, since she is precisely the opposite of what most businesses mean when they say they want a "self-starter."
How about Obama surprise everyone by doing something radical like announcing that he is going to make the FCC's only responsibility the licensing of spectrum and enforcement of (future?) federal cable and telecom franchising laws?
The iPhone is a different platform from the original iPod. The nano worked there because there were no third part applications that depended on screen size assumptions and things like that. I would be surprise if a lot of the software written for the iPhone would work as well on the nano because it's going to be a smaller device, and that means that the user interface will be harder to deal with. Safari is just barely usable comfortably, for example. I can't imagine using it if it were even smaller.
People tend to underestimate how much our incredibly wasteful governments cost both in terms of tax money that is taken out of the economy and in terms of compliance with regulations that are probably not needed. If the laws were made more efficient, and taxes were made dramatically lower, like a 10% maximum federal income tax, it would be easier to make more expensive devices that have all sorts of things ranging from extremely eco-friendly designs to being shielded from EMPs because most of the middle and upper classes would have the money to buy them.
What people don't tend to realize is that making eco-friendly products that are resilient against EMPs, solar flares, etc. costs a lot of money. When you combine that cost with the cost of having tax-heavy, low-value governments, people are going to save their money. The best thing that could be done for environmentalism and getting people to spend money on more durable products would be to let them keep more of their money and then nudge manufacturers in this direction since everyone wants eco-friendly, durable, crisis-resilient products.
Ever heard of this thing called a "pilot license?" Yeah... "most people" neither have them nor an opportunity to get one, and they'll be required to operate one of these things.
They made a lightning fast, small, good looking, stable, awe-inspiring operating system that didn't actually run anything useful.
They actually did have some good apps like Gobe Productive and E-Picture. They weren't up to the same level as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, but they were a start. In addition, some major producers of high-end audio software were porting their products over before the platform died due to funding issues.
Furthermore, as an open source project, it wouldn't have mattered. Many people who wanted desktop Linux would have turned to BeOS and brought it up to speed. Most of us would have ended up switch to open source BeOS by now instead of considering or actually switching to MacOS X.
He will not support net neutrality, but rather will support federalizing and then heavily deregulating franchising laws so that cable, telephone and wireless companies don't have to really pay any taxes or face any regulatory burdens when they decide to set up shop in a new market. In addition, hopefully he will support the first half of Lessig's suggestion that the FCC be abolished, but will stop short of creating the "iEPA" (innovation Environmental Protection Agency) replacement. These laws and agencies only serve to enrich the well-connected at the expense of competition.
It'll probably be too little, too late. Palm could have been the superpower in this area by building a new OS based on BeOS when they bought Be's assets. In fact, if they had forked BeOS by creating a proprietary new mobile OS for their products and ditching the original BeOS as a BSD-licensed product, they could have put both Microsoft and Apple on the defensive in the operating system market.
They'll be 100% on the up and up WRT implementing standards compliance, and will release every last detail as open source, no-strings-attached goodness for the world to use. Such an act would be a giant cudgel that they could use against arguments that they're embracing proprietary tactics. They should do for routers what Android is trying to do for phones.
But as it is, we can't get local news media to perform their "watchdog" role in most cases. I can't even begin to count the number of times when I've seen a case that looked suspicious as hell based on the reporting of it, but the local media just parroted the police/prosecutor's story and moved on. Alternatively, when they do get involved, it's often in cases like the Jena 6 where you end up finding out that the media was spreading disinformation and building up a narrative to make more profit.
Most news media have become a combination of an AP outlet and a source of editorials and classifieds. They're like a primitive RSS feed with some mashed up content thrown in there for local flair.
If you get hosting through your ISP, you should be at least offered to have a DVD of your data mailed to you for a fee, or have a week or two to download everything. Otherwise, they owe you nothing since you never invested any money into the relationship.
There are plenty of other worthy causes; those are just the ones on my list this year. Think about it this way: the God-botherers contribute a full 10% of their income, pre-tax, to try to drag civilization back into the Middle Ages. What's the best you can do?
Those same God botherers have been shown in study after study to be far quicker to give a large percentage of their income to charities that directly reach out to the poor and down-trodden than their secular counterparts. Even some atheists have admitted that Christianity is doing wonders in Africa at changing the hearts of millions and bringing them to a point where they can build peaceful, stable societies.
Why don't you think these companies OPERATE in Ireland? You know the answer, because Ireland doesn't have the population, infrastructure, educational system, etc. these companies need to operate. And that infrastructure if paid for largely by tax dollars. Make no mistake, these companies are defrauding the American government and American people by dodging taxes.
Ireland is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth! If you believe this crap, then by all means, check my eBay listings. I have some fabulous landmarks that I picked up on the cheap in the down-turned economy that will fetch you a handsome profit if you take them off my hands...
The main reason that a lot of countries are upset over Ireland is because of the fact that they are one of the most capitalistic countries in the West, and have grown very rich and successful by being a tax haven and business mecca for Europe. Consequently, they have, for their size, a very large and robust economy and have to fight off immigrants with a stick. If I were to expatriate, Ireland would be at the top of my list of countries because of all of the job opportunities that exist there compared to most of Europe.
'Software piracy negatively impacts local economic growth,' explained Microsoft VP Fengming Liu in a celebratory New Year's Eve press release. But then again, so does transferring $16B of assets and $9B in annual profit to an Irish tax haven, doesn't it?"
Yes, it does. So, the natural solution to this is to give corporations incentives to keep their money local instead of sending it to tax havens. America used to be a tax haven for foreign investors. If we want to pull out of the recession quickly, we should restructure our taxes and spending accordingly, to encourage people to squirrel their assets away on our soil, rather than Ireland, Switzerland, the Caribbean or Indonesia.
This is just basic, good sense, especially if you are one of those people who believes that the rich can buy influence. If you believe that, then what makes you think that they won't be able to get their assets overseas while the middle class and lower end of the upper class get taxed into oblivion?
They wouldn't have had to spend over $1B on repairs and extend the warranty an extra 3 years for the XBox 360. Chances are, the 360 would be cutting a small profit by now. The moral of the story if the successor to the XBox 360 is to trounce Sony, is that they need to not cut corners if they want to exploit Sony's weakness. They'd better learn that because the PS3 is a very, very powerful system and when it hits $300 will be in the range that a lot of gamers will be willing to pay.
TypePad antispam is a great alternative to Akismet.
The first three were definitely strong books
on
Zoe's Tale
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I think the part that I found most interesting was how he ended The Last Colony with the aliens defeating the Colonial Union without having to go to war. It would be interesting to see him write a new story that takes place several decades later when the aliens have completely liberated the Earth from the Colonial Union, and maybe even have Earth conquer the colonials out of revenge for exploitation that it suffered at their hands.
They have a whole host of options for playing it back, and the iTunes ecosystem is very well suited for the average person. Half the TV that my wife and I watch, while not saying much since we don't watch much TV, is on our Apple TV. I've ripped a big chunk of our DVD collection to MPEG4 and put it into our iTunes library. If we want to take movies with us when we travel, we just sync up our iPhones and that's it.
There's also the fact that you can burn the music you download to CD. So what if you can't do that with movie downloads. They're overpriced enough as it is, and so you might as well buy the DVD media at the same price. That's also a problem that affects every online movie distributor.
The RIAA has taken to suing a lot of people who turned out to be innocent, on very flimsy evidence. If there is one thing that Americans generally dislike, it's programs, no matter how well-intentioned, that end up often getting the wrong people.
He's an excellent businessman, but let's look at what brought Apple back, in order:
1) The iMac, which was just a heavily consumer-oriented Mac desktop. This wasn't really a big innovation for Apple, but was the sort of smart business move they needed.
2) The iPod--which wasn't Jobs' idea.
3) MacOS X
4) The fairly high quality of the MacBook and MacBook Pro Line
5) The transition to Intel
6) The iPhone
I love my Apple TV, but it's not a very successful product, over all. Time capsule is probably about the same. The Cube was a failure, and quite frankly the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it (otherwise it is so hellaciously overpriced that it's like a time warp back to the mid 1990s for Apple).
I don't really see a whole lot in that list that is unique to Jobs. What Apple needs is competent management that are aggressive and willing to take risks. That is what has made Jobs a success, more than anything else. People tend to forget that some of his ideas have't gone anywhere, but many of them have because they were calculated risks that only a non-risk averse CEO would make.
Slashdot Mirror
This works because the Dutch still generally care about private property rights, and have a sense of the need to reward people for hard work. The "entitlement mentality" has not fully set in because most of Dutch society is still working from the older mindset, but slowly we are seeing this falling away across the Western world. Give it another 100 years, and it's doubtful that this will be true.
The fundamental problem with this issue is that the business model is forced to work based on the good will of the buyers. In every other area of the economy, you don't get access to the goods and services until you pay for them or come to an understanding that allows you to get them for free. Why should this be any different?
One of the things we need to face up to here is that in another century or two, manufacturing technology will be advanced enough to allow people to fabricate complex physical goods from raw materials. What will happen when any good on the store can be replicated at the cost of materials? I suspect that a pirate culture would end up meeting with utter disaster here.
So really, we need to face up to the fact that we need a culture that says "you don't deserve it just because you can't pay for it or don't want to pay for it." That sort of thing would pay dividends in other areas, since such a culture would also tend to promote an attitude that you have no right to tell others what to do on most things.
Ahh, the number of times I've been downmodded on Slashdot for criticizing Linux... you'd think I was a fanboy for Microsoft with the number of times that I've said that even Windows XP is faster out of the box. Where your analogy falls down is that what she did was the equivalent of calling the car dealership up and asking them if something weren't quite right with her car when the dealership had no incentive to say "well, you really intended to get this, but you settled for this based on your order."
You can get Windows XP for about $100 on Tiger Direct, and most people know at least someone who can run the Windows installer and get it up and running. For that matter, what happened to the computer she used to buy it. Was it someone else's?
It takes a special breed of hypocrite to take the moral high ground while blatantly wishing evil on others. Have you ever actually looked at Dell's offerings and realized that the only laptops that they have for home users that cost $1,100 are ones that only get distributed with Windows? Either she got really badly ripped off on a Dell Netbook or something is very fishy here.
This chick obviously had no business being in college for several good reasons:
1) She couldn't even see fit to double or triple check a $1,100 order for a laptop to make sure it was what she wanted. For most of us, that's blatant financial irresponsibility.
2) She didn't have the wherewithal to get someone to put Windows on for her when she realized she just couldn't handle Ubuntu. Again, a sign of irresponsibility. Arguing that her ignorance, not laziness, was a factor here is like arguing that someone with car problems doesn't deserve criticism for not seeking out a mechanic.
3) She canceled 2 semesters of college over this.
I'd say Dell probably saved the tax payers money, since she'd probably end up as some 6 year Art History major whose "education" is funded by tax payers. Hopefully no business will hire her for any important job either, since she is precisely the opposite of what most businesses mean when they say they want a "self-starter."
When the federal budget is released in a well-documented, well-designed XML file format.
How about Obama surprise everyone by doing something radical like announcing that he is going to make the FCC's only responsibility the licensing of spectrum and enforcement of (future?) federal cable and telecom franchising laws?
The iPhone is a different platform from the original iPod. The nano worked there because there were no third part applications that depended on screen size assumptions and things like that. I would be surprise if a lot of the software written for the iPhone would work as well on the nano because it's going to be a smaller device, and that means that the user interface will be harder to deal with. Safari is just barely usable comfortably, for example. I can't imagine using it if it were even smaller.
People tend to underestimate how much our incredibly wasteful governments cost both in terms of tax money that is taken out of the economy and in terms of compliance with regulations that are probably not needed. If the laws were made more efficient, and taxes were made dramatically lower, like a 10% maximum federal income tax, it would be easier to make more expensive devices that have all sorts of things ranging from extremely eco-friendly designs to being shielded from EMPs because most of the middle and upper classes would have the money to buy them.
What people don't tend to realize is that making eco-friendly products that are resilient against EMPs, solar flares, etc. costs a lot of money. When you combine that cost with the cost of having tax-heavy, low-value governments, people are going to save their money. The best thing that could be done for environmentalism and getting people to spend money on more durable products would be to let them keep more of their money and then nudge manufacturers in this direction since everyone wants eco-friendly, durable, crisis-resilient products.
Ever heard of this thing called a "pilot license?" Yeah... "most people" neither have them nor an opportunity to get one, and they'll be required to operate one of these things.
They actually did have some good apps like Gobe Productive and E-Picture. They weren't up to the same level as Microsoft Office and Adobe Photoshop, but they were a start. In addition, some major producers of high-end audio software were porting their products over before the platform died due to funding issues.
Furthermore, as an open source project, it wouldn't have mattered. Many people who wanted desktop Linux would have turned to BeOS and brought it up to speed. Most of us would have ended up switch to open source BeOS by now instead of considering or actually switching to MacOS X.
He will not support net neutrality, but rather will support federalizing and then heavily deregulating franchising laws so that cable, telephone and wireless companies don't have to really pay any taxes or face any regulatory burdens when they decide to set up shop in a new market. In addition, hopefully he will support the first half of Lessig's suggestion that the FCC be abolished, but will stop short of creating the "iEPA" (innovation Environmental Protection Agency) replacement. These laws and agencies only serve to enrich the well-connected at the expense of competition.
It'll probably be too little, too late. Palm could have been the superpower in this area by building a new OS based on BeOS when they bought Be's assets. In fact, if they had forked BeOS by creating a proprietary new mobile OS for their products and ditching the original BeOS as a BSD-licensed product, they could have put both Microsoft and Apple on the defensive in the operating system market.
They'll be 100% on the up and up WRT implementing standards compliance, and will release every last detail as open source, no-strings-attached goodness for the world to use. Such an act would be a giant cudgel that they could use against arguments that they're embracing proprietary tactics. They should do for routers what Android is trying to do for phones.
No, but Mine-layer is...
But as it is, we can't get local news media to perform their "watchdog" role in most cases. I can't even begin to count the number of times when I've seen a case that looked suspicious as hell based on the reporting of it, but the local media just parroted the police/prosecutor's story and moved on. Alternatively, when they do get involved, it's often in cases like the Jena 6 where you end up finding out that the media was spreading disinformation and building up a narrative to make more profit.
Most news media have become a combination of an AP outlet and a source of editorials and classifieds. They're like a primitive RSS feed with some mashed up content thrown in there for local flair.
If you get hosting through your ISP, you should be at least offered to have a DVD of your data mailed to you for a fee, or have a week or two to download everything. Otherwise, they owe you nothing since you never invested any money into the relationship.
Those same God botherers have been shown in study after study to be far quicker to give a large percentage of their income to charities that directly reach out to the poor and down-trodden than their secular counterparts. Even some atheists have admitted that Christianity is doing wonders in Africa at changing the hearts of millions and bringing them to a point where they can build peaceful, stable societies.
You accept the fact that the world has always been dominated by idiots and malcontents and yet, somehow, it has managed to survive.
Ireland is one of the wealthiest nations on Earth! If you believe this crap, then by all means, check my eBay listings. I have some fabulous landmarks that I picked up on the cheap in the down-turned economy that will fetch you a handsome profit if you take them off my hands...
The main reason that a lot of countries are upset over Ireland is because of the fact that they are one of the most capitalistic countries in the West, and have grown very rich and successful by being a tax haven and business mecca for Europe. Consequently, they have, for their size, a very large and robust economy and have to fight off immigrants with a stick. If I were to expatriate, Ireland would be at the top of my list of countries because of all of the job opportunities that exist there compared to most of Europe.
Yes, it does. So, the natural solution to this is to give corporations incentives to keep their money local instead of sending it to tax havens. America used to be a tax haven for foreign investors. If we want to pull out of the recession quickly, we should restructure our taxes and spending accordingly, to encourage people to squirrel their assets away on our soil, rather than Ireland, Switzerland, the Caribbean or Indonesia.
This is just basic, good sense, especially if you are one of those people who believes that the rich can buy influence. If you believe that, then what makes you think that they won't be able to get their assets overseas while the middle class and lower end of the upper class get taxed into oblivion?
They wouldn't have had to spend over $1B on repairs and extend the warranty an extra 3 years for the XBox 360. Chances are, the 360 would be cutting a small profit by now. The moral of the story if the successor to the XBox 360 is to trounce Sony, is that they need to not cut corners if they want to exploit Sony's weakness. They'd better learn that because the PS3 is a very, very powerful system and when it hits $300 will be in the range that a lot of gamers will be willing to pay.
TypePad antispam is a great alternative to Akismet.
I think the part that I found most interesting was how he ended The Last Colony with the aliens defeating the Colonial Union without having to go to war. It would be interesting to see him write a new story that takes place several decades later when the aliens have completely liberated the Earth from the Colonial Union, and maybe even have Earth conquer the colonials out of revenge for exploitation that it suffered at their hands.
They have a whole host of options for playing it back, and the iTunes ecosystem is very well suited for the average person. Half the TV that my wife and I watch, while not saying much since we don't watch much TV, is on our Apple TV. I've ripped a big chunk of our DVD collection to MPEG4 and put it into our iTunes library. If we want to take movies with us when we travel, we just sync up our iPhones and that's it.
There's also the fact that you can burn the music you download to CD. So what if you can't do that with movie downloads. They're overpriced enough as it is, and so you might as well buy the DVD media at the same price. That's also a problem that affects every online movie distributor.
The RIAA has taken to suing a lot of people who turned out to be innocent, on very flimsy evidence. If there is one thing that Americans generally dislike, it's programs, no matter how well-intentioned, that end up often getting the wrong people.
He's an excellent businessman, but let's look at what brought Apple back, in order:
1) The iMac, which was just a heavily consumer-oriented Mac desktop. This wasn't really a big innovation for Apple, but was the sort of smart business move they needed.
2) The iPod--which wasn't Jobs' idea.
3) MacOS X
4) The fairly high quality of the MacBook and MacBook Pro Line
5) The transition to Intel
6) The iPhone
I love my Apple TV, but it's not a very successful product, over all. Time capsule is probably about the same. The Cube was a failure, and quite frankly the MacBook Air ONLY has its form factor going for it (otherwise it is so hellaciously overpriced that it's like a time warp back to the mid 1990s for Apple).
I don't really see a whole lot in that list that is unique to Jobs. What Apple needs is competent management that are aggressive and willing to take risks. That is what has made Jobs a success, more than anything else. People tend to forget that some of his ideas have't gone anywhere, but many of them have because they were calculated risks that only a non-risk averse CEO would make.