Hint, take some introductory level text on markets and read it.
Markets usually work well for situations with full information. Insurance does not work with full information. Not at all.
Without full information, you are getting a situation where the insurance will take only customers that are not likely to need anything from them. And they will exclude anything that might be related to some precondition.
So market-fan-boys, explain how do you get sick people (and not everyone is sick because he made himself sick, sickness can hit anyone) coverage? How to get coverage for existing preconditions?
Preconditions are even worse, because of this aspect it kills competition in the market. So you got sick and need some medication. Good for you that you've got coverage. Bad for you, because now you can stop looking for a better deal, because any new policy will exclude your precondition.
Furthermore the information balance is moving from not-much information (some decades ago the insurer had mostly statistics) to almost complete information (we are reaching a stage where DNA level tests are feasible to determinate the risks for all kinds of illnesses).
*boom* That basically means that health coverage as an private insurance item will be dead in the next decades. The insurer will only take on healthy customers, and the costs for the customer will get nearer and nearer to cost of treatment * probability + profit for the insurer.
Technically speaking, the health care bill in the US is really far far away from "government" health care. It's basically a bill that forces people to get coverage and subsidizes that. It does not create a national health service nor any other typical properties of a modern health system.
Well, I've been driving for years now often over 100mph (you know that's what German cars and expressways are built for), and funnily, never ever anything happened me at these high speeds. (guess the natural adrenalin kick that for me usually starts at 100mph keeps you alert. One does not fool with these speeds). On the other hand, the last 2.5 hours passing the Austrian border, switching on cruise control at 80mph (well, actually it's usually 87mph, that being the range where you can even overtake a police cruiser without being stopped), have been the most dangerous stretches of expressway. Guess it's boring, you don't have to think because you are dictated the allowed speed (in Austria most of the A8/A1 have dynamic speed displays), so my brain goes into sleep mode. All by itself. Interestingly, that never happened say the last couple of 100 miles before crossing over into Austria, were weather and traffic permitting I traditionally have kicked the car into it's electronic cut off.
Yeah, guess we are atypical, 2 Wiis and over 50 games I estimate (2 medium sized boxes full of it).
The Nintendo Wii is a game console that clearly not meant to have the most brilliant graphics.
It's got an interesting user input system, and sorry guys, mostly 1st party games that have often great game play (seldom only good, the only uninteresting games that come to mind are 3rd party games that are cheaply produced).
The Wii as such is completely different to the PS3/Xbox360:
* worse graphic support
* worse CPU
* better and especially totally different controllers.
So just porting naivly a PS3 game (btw, the PS3 has similar problems with less benefits to customer with it's Cell CPU that needs very special programming, architecture wise) to the Wii will give you the worst of all:
* bad graphics (the Wii never claimed to be able to compat)
* badly mismatched controller usage, resulting usually in bad game play.
That results in practice in perhaps a dozen games that gets played and replayed (Resident Evil 4, a number of shooters from the Resident Evil line, House of Dead, Animal Crossing, and some Mario games), and many more games (usually unloved ports from "classical" consoles).
Hint, we've got still a PS2 and a similar sized games collection, but the PS2 never got the level of usage that the Wii.
Graphics are not all in games, gameplay is way more relevant. (If graphics were so important all the 8 bit systems would have flopped with their less than 320x200 resolution and visible pixels. Obviously they have not flopped back then.)
One feature that impressed me is that if you have accidentally added misspellings to the dictionary (which I have done more than once) you can delete words individually rather than just resetting the user dictionary (which is certainly what you used to have to do with the iPhone, but I must admit my info could be out of date here.
Well, as all Apple fanboys like to point out, the iPhone being an Apple product, does have the superior intuitive user interface.
So either the iPhone does not have the feature (failed on feature) or the UI is bad (failed on user interface)
Surprisingly, the iPhone UI is really bad, IMHO. It looks nice, but is not exactly overly functional, nor practical for many things.
The great part about Android is, that internally it has no concept of an app as such.
It's all a collection of Intents, Activities, and so on.
And technically "multiple applications" from the same author can live in one underlying Linux process if so desired.
So yes, you cannot exit apps, usually at least, because the Android UI is designed not to have apps. (you can choose whatever you like better, an altenative wording would "all apps are always running/available")
Logically, all apps are active at all times. Usually only a small part of these do register for background events, hence all apps can be terminated at any time by the OS.
Combine that with a strict memory usage limit of 16MB per app, and you end up with being capable of keeping a number of apps "live" even on a lowly G1.
And when we are at, it seems incapable to control call forwarding as any 10 bucks GSM phone does. (I did not find any menu items to control "unconditional", "unreachable", "busy" and so on call forwardings. Should it be capable of this, same text, different point: the UI is not that intuitive, I guess)
But yes, if I would have the choice for me personally, I'd probably select any somewhat current Symbian phone over the iPhone. And that says much, because I've been using Symbian smartphones for years (starting with the first Geo based Communicator, which admittingly is pre-Symbian.), so I know the problems they have.
Use value half order:
iPhone Symbian Android Maemo
"Good looks" half order:
Symbian Android iPhone Maemo
UI half order:
Symbian iPhone Android (no ordering for Maemo, haven't used it long enough personally to sort it)
Well, in most markets there is no option (beyond perhaps some shaddy 3rd party shops that include a jailbreak into the deal from the start) to get an unlocked iPhone.
Or they hit you with an unlock fee in the area of £200, on top of the (not exactly cheap) contract that you have still to pay for.
Compare that to the £300 or so that I paid for my G1 in Germany, without contract. A phone that I could practically immediatly (I had to return to the office to get the online unlock code) use in whatever way I want.
OTOH, with the iPhone you get for free a peon relationship with Mr. Jobs, who will allow you to do whatever he feels okay with on the phone that you just bought. That starts from the point to helping the bottomline of the networks (data roaming, locked phones by default, atypical SIM formats [which is an issue if you just want to grab a prepaid SIM somewhere, wouldn't you say?]) on my cost, to using a secret definition of what it is acceptable to use the phone for in the first place. (and if we believe, most often that includes the standards of the American bible belt. Well, porn is only acceptable if it comes from a reputable company, right? Wonder how that mashes with the "family-friendly" image of the iPhone?)
Simple, for power users at least these that travel abroad (and most do at least for a couple of weeks per year), the first thing is how easy it's to change SIMs.
In most (at least European) countries you can get something at least vaguely acceptable (especially for data access) as a prepaid SIM. Data roaming on the other hand is practically never acceptable for usage on smartphone.
For this let's compare the iPhone with the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1.
First difference, the T-Mobile G1 is available as HTC Dream without lock. OTOH, most people in both cases will probably have gotten the simlocked version.
1.) unlocking experience on the iPhone: 2 days wasted trying to get a jail break going. 3rd day included a visit to a seedy 3rd party phone shop that advertised jailbreaking iPhones. Always in danger of undoing it all via iTunes that persistently tries to offer an upgrade for the phone.
2.) checked that the G1 is really simlocked, bought a 20 unlock code online, used it with my SIM of choice the same afternoon in the office.
Actually, both events happened some months ago, but I cannot remember the details of item 2 (as if the G1 was really locked), while item 1 makes me shudder. (Actually it's as bad that the iPhone got a non-smartphone assigned to cover wheneever the iPhone decides to go dead). OTOH, the G1 unlock did happen when the phone was very recent on the market, while the iPhone 3G jailbreak happened when the 3GS has been longer on the market than the G1 mentioned. And I'm still unclear how jailbreakable the 3GS are.
Next important item on a frequent travelers (that's what I admit is not exactly critical to the majority, but it's an important item about who controls the device that I own) is sharing Internet access. Obviously, a smartphone cannot manage to fill completely an UMTS uplink, so there is no drawback in sharing it's connectivity.
1.) the iPhone started to work as a tether after some months, basically after a couple of upgrades and the jailbreak. It offers USB Windows-only (perhaps Mac too?) tethering and standard PAN Bluetooth networking.
2.) the G1 offers TCP forwarding tethering via USB and after rooting, it offers a standard NAT-ing Linux kernel based router via Bluetooth or WLAN. The USB based tethering I was capable to use easily enough on day 1 to establish a full VPN (albeit TCP based) connection from my laptop. In practice the standard PAN Bluetooth networking is nicest for me personally, but everyone has probably his own favorite.
So I do not think that the iPhone rules the "total experience dept", as it's a total fail on two important items (one of general interest, even if they do not know, but they will when they go on their next holiday), so it's not even in the running for a phone here. (Ah, I learned yesterday why my wife got the iPhone 3G last year, "it was the cheapest colorful toy for our daughter that we could get back then easily and quickly", and "yeah that Motorola Droid looks cool")
Then he would have to go to court, and the retailer would have to pay court costs, and both attorney fees. (Loser pays all is the common system in most of Europe.)
Well, guys, there have been binary prefixes now for some time. Admittingly, spoken they sound a little bit funny, but writing 1KiB or 2 GiB does not look that bad.
That was not Chrysler bashing (if at all it was US-cars bashing, and not even that in a mean way, it's just that for a typical US-car the chances that somebody will drive it for long times over 90mph is rather limited).
The basic problem is that cars done for markets that have a speed limit will claim to have a higher top speed, but are mostly not designed to survive these speeds for a long time.
E.g. my Audi A6 was also repaired in a non-German Audi shop in a way that made it really dangerous in a German Autobahn environment. OTOH, German cars in this class are usually designed for this, e.g. the built in hands free speaker in said car works really well even at extreme speeds, I once had a chat with my wife where I've been doing over 125mph for over half an hour and she did not guess at my speed.
Btw, while high speed driving can be dangerous, low speed limit cruising is personally way more dangerous. I never had a case of getting sleepy while high speed driving (admittingly, if you get tired at such speeds, you stop without discussion and nap), while the scenario "German border, brakes, cruise control, some minutes, snor" is classical for me personally.
Well, I'll question the more reliable part. Despite having owned way more harddiscs in the last decade that I've owned even tape media (tape was a backup solution only for some years), I had more unreadable tapes than unreadable hdds.
Well, cars that are sold in Europe (around Germany) get that testing from time to time.
(And yes, sometimes cars can fail badly, because nobody thought about this.)
I had this happen once with a Chrysler New Yorker, which has a transmission that is not designed for >100mph speeds. (which is stupid, I talked with a mechanic specialized in transmissions, they are just using a to small cooling system. Saves them for some pennies, even a post sale upgrade is less than 100, but Chrysler prefers to repair the transmissions all the time.)
And once a certain German car failed, because of a repair (sad what happens when a new car collides with a train, the car being new, the insurance paying quite a bit for the repair) , that was done in a country with a speed limit. Retrospectively, I guess if I limited myself to the common 90mph around, but then, why should I have a car that blocks at 156mph and limit myself to crawling at 90mph?
That's not the point. The people targeted can be as guilty as the Devil himself.
1.) you've got the problem with oversight. So what do you do if the relevant authorities designate you an EC (btw, not that this is any relevant term, it's an invention, because it's to inconvenient to treat criminals like Osama Bin Laden as criminals)
2.) what do you do if some foreign government decides to kill you? (Hint: The Russian government has assassinated British citizens in the UK in the past)
Basically, you are argueing that anything goes, if it's good for the "country". Who are you that you would deny that argumentation to anyone else? The anyone else just might have a different "country", and might consider all Americans criminals worthy of capital punishment.
3.) Last but not least, there are collateral damages if you decide to kill Mr. X by bombing him. Perhaps not in every and each case, but in a good number of cases. Guess they should have considered whom they socialize with. So why don't put the neighbors of murderers (or their whole family) on death row too?
Well, hint. For the majority of the world population, the US is also just foreign soil. You just defended 9/11, right? I mean, I'm almost sure that at least one person killed during the attacks had been a serious criminal by some foreign country's definition of serious criminal, and the rest where just collateral damage. As some supporters here already argued, they should have kept better company. (Sounds slightly different, when applied in reverse, doesn't it?)
Hint, take some introductory level text on markets and read it.
Markets usually work well for situations with full information. Insurance does not work with full information. Not at all.
Without full information, you are getting a situation where the insurance will take only customers that are not likely to need anything from them.
And they will exclude anything that might be related to some precondition.
So market-fan-boys, explain how do you get sick people (and not everyone is sick because he made himself sick, sickness can hit anyone) coverage? How to get coverage for existing preconditions?
Preconditions are even worse, because of this aspect it kills competition in the market. So you got sick and need some medication. Good for you that you've got coverage. Bad for you, because now you can stop looking for a better deal, because any new policy will exclude your precondition.
Furthermore the information balance is moving from not-much information (some decades ago the insurer had mostly statistics) to almost complete information (we are reaching a stage where DNA level tests are feasible to determinate the risks for all kinds of illnesses).
*boom* That basically means that health coverage as an private insurance item will be dead in the next decades. The insurer will only take on healthy customers, and the costs for the customer will get nearer and nearer to cost of treatment * probability + profit for the insurer.
Technically speaking, the health care bill in the US is really far far away from "government" health care. It's basically a bill that forces people to get coverage and subsidizes that. It does not create a national health service nor any other typical properties of a modern health system.
Well, I've been driving for years now often over 100mph (you know that's what German cars and expressways are built for), and funnily, never ever anything happened me at these high speeds.
(guess the natural adrenalin kick that for me usually starts at 100mph keeps you alert. One does not fool with these speeds). On the other hand, the last 2.5 hours passing the Austrian border, switching on cruise control at 80mph (well, actually it's usually 87mph, that being the range where you can even overtake a police cruiser without being stopped), have been the most dangerous stretches of expressway. Guess it's boring, you don't have to think because you are dictated the allowed speed (in Austria most of the A8/A1 have dynamic speed displays), so my brain goes into sleep mode. All by itself. Interestingly, that never happened say the last couple of 100 miles before crossing over into Austria, were weather and traffic permitting I traditionally have kicked the car into it's electronic cut off.
Life is unfairly way harder for poorer people. Let's abolish life.
Yeah, guess we are atypical, 2 Wiis and over 50 games I estimate (2 medium sized boxes full of it).
The Nintendo Wii is a game console that clearly not meant to have the most brilliant graphics.
It's got an interesting user input system, and sorry guys, mostly 1st party games that have often great game play (seldom only good, the only
uninteresting games that come to mind are 3rd party games that are cheaply produced).
The Wii as such is completely different to the PS3/Xbox360:
* worse graphic support
* worse CPU
* better and especially totally different controllers.
So just porting naivly a PS3 game (btw, the PS3 has similar problems with less benefits to customer with it's Cell CPU that needs very special programming, architecture wise) to the
Wii will give you the worst of all:
* bad graphics (the Wii never claimed to be able to compat)
* badly mismatched controller usage, resulting usually in bad game play.
That results in practice in perhaps a dozen games that gets played and replayed (Resident Evil 4, a number of shooters from the Resident Evil line, House of Dead, Animal Crossing, and some Mario games), and many more games (usually unloved ports from "classical" consoles).
Hint, we've got still a PS2 and a similar sized games collection, but the PS2 never got the level of usage that the Wii.
Graphics are not all in games, gameplay is way more relevant. (If graphics were so important all the 8 bit systems would have flopped with their less than 320x200 resolution and visible pixels. Obviously they have not flopped back then.)
Well, this is clearly a very atypical approach for a carrier.
And to cite the url you've provided:
Thanks for visiting the O2 Online Shop
Unfortunately, we are unable to sell to countries outside the UK.
One feature that impressed me is that if you have accidentally added misspellings to the dictionary (which I have done more than once) you can delete words individually rather than just resetting the user dictionary (which is certainly what you used to have to do with the iPhone, but I must admit my info could be out of date here.
Well, as all Apple fanboys like to point out, the iPhone being an Apple product, does have the superior intuitive user interface.
So either the iPhone does not have the feature (failed on feature) or the UI is bad (failed on user interface)
Surprisingly, the iPhone UI is really bad, IMHO. It looks nice, but is not exactly overly functional, nor practical for many things.
Especially if one adds an external charger that can charge batteries outside the device.
This has the great benefit of changing
"Your phone is shutting down" (shitty phone)
to
"Your phone is shutting down" (okay, let's put in the second pack, reboot, 2 minutes later you are as good as before)
The great part about Android is, that internally it has no concept of an app as such.
It's all a collection of Intents, Activities, and so on.
And technically "multiple applications" from the same author can live in one underlying Linux process if so desired.
So yes, you cannot exit apps, usually at least, because the Android UI is designed not to have apps. (you can choose whatever you like better, an altenative wording would "all apps are always running/available")
Logically, all apps are active at all times. Usually only a small part of these do register for background events, hence all apps can be terminated at any time by the OS.
Combine that with a strict memory usage limit of 16MB per app, and you end up with being capable of keeping a number of apps "live" even on a lowly G1.
And when we are at, it seems incapable to control call forwarding as any 10 bucks GSM phone does. (I did not find any menu items to control "unconditional", "unreachable", "busy" and so on call forwardings. Should it be capable of this, same text, different point: the UI is not that intuitive, I guess)
But yes, if I would have the choice for me personally, I'd probably select any somewhat current Symbian phone over the iPhone. And that says much, because I've been using Symbian smartphones for years (starting with the first Geo based Communicator, which admittingly is pre-Symbian.), so I know the problems they have.
Use value half order:
iPhone Symbian Android Maemo
"Good looks" half order:
Symbian Android iPhone Maemo
UI half order:
Symbian iPhone Android (no ordering for Maemo, haven't used it long enough personally to sort it)
Well, in most markets there is no option (beyond perhaps some shaddy 3rd party shops that include a jailbreak into the deal from the start) to get an unlocked iPhone.
Or they hit you with an unlock fee in the area of £200, on top of the (not exactly cheap) contract that you have still to pay for.
Compare that to the £300 or so that I paid for my G1 in Germany, without contract. A phone that I could practically immediatly (I had to return to the office to get the online unlock code) use in whatever way I want.
OTOH, with the iPhone you get for free a peon relationship with Mr. Jobs, who will allow you to do whatever he feels okay with on the phone that you just bought. That starts from the point to helping the bottomline of the networks (data roaming, locked phones by default, atypical SIM formats [which is an issue if you just want to grab a prepaid SIM somewhere, wouldn't you say?]) on my cost, to using a secret definition of what it is acceptable to use the phone for in the first place. (and if we believe, most often that includes the standards of the American bible belt. Well, porn is only acceptable if it comes from a reputable company, right? Wonder how that mashes with the "family-friendly" image of the iPhone?)
Simple, for power users at least these that travel abroad (and most do at least for a couple of weeks per year), the first thing is how easy it's to change SIMs.
In most (at least European) countries you can get something at least vaguely acceptable (especially for data access) as a prepaid SIM. Data roaming on the other hand is practically never acceptable for usage on smartphone.
For this let's compare the iPhone with the HTC Dream/T-Mobile G1.
First difference, the T-Mobile G1 is available as HTC Dream without lock. OTOH, most people in both cases will probably have gotten the simlocked version.
1.) unlocking experience on the iPhone: 2 days wasted trying to get a jail break going. 3rd day included a visit to a seedy 3rd party phone shop that advertised jailbreaking iPhones. Always in danger of undoing it all via iTunes that persistently tries to offer an upgrade for the phone.
2.) checked that the G1 is really simlocked, bought a 20 unlock code online, used it with my SIM of choice the same afternoon in the office.
Actually, both events happened some months ago, but I cannot remember the details of item 2 (as if the G1 was really locked), while item 1 makes me shudder. (Actually it's as bad that the iPhone got a non-smartphone assigned to cover wheneever the iPhone decides to go dead). OTOH, the G1 unlock did happen when the phone was very recent on the market, while the iPhone 3G jailbreak happened when the 3GS has been longer on the market than the G1 mentioned. And I'm still unclear how jailbreakable the 3GS are.
Next important item on a frequent travelers (that's what I admit is not exactly critical to the majority, but it's an important item about who controls the device that I own) is sharing Internet access. Obviously, a smartphone cannot manage to fill completely an UMTS uplink, so there is no drawback in sharing it's connectivity.
1.) the iPhone started to work as a tether after some months, basically after a couple of upgrades and the jailbreak. It offers USB Windows-only (perhaps Mac too?) tethering and standard PAN Bluetooth networking.
2.) the G1 offers TCP forwarding tethering via USB and after rooting, it offers a standard NAT-ing Linux kernel based router via Bluetooth or WLAN. The USB based tethering I was capable to use easily enough on day 1 to establish a full VPN (albeit TCP based) connection from my laptop. In practice the standard PAN Bluetooth networking is nicest for me personally, but everyone has probably his own favorite.
So I do not think that the iPhone rules the "total experience dept", as it's a total fail on two important items (one of general interest, even if they do not know, but they will when they go on their next holiday), so it's not even in the running for a phone here. (Ah, I learned yesterday why my wife got the iPhone 3G last year, "it was the cheapest colorful toy for our daughter that we could get back then easily and quickly", and "yeah that Motorola Droid looks cool")
Does not matter, if you allow this, then the manufacturer could behind this.
Was the EULA posted on the box and known to the customer before the buying decision?
If so, does the EULA contain text that has been deemed illegal in non-freely negiotated contracts, or are deemed illegal in contracts with consumers?
Then he would have to go to court, and the retailer would have to pay court costs, and both attorney fees. (Loser pays all is the common system in most of Europe.)
Well, guys, there have been binary prefixes now for some time. Admittingly, spoken they sound a little bit funny, but writing 1KiB or 2 GiB does not look that bad.
Well Portugal and Greece are in troubles because they spend more than they take in.
Plus especially Greece lied a decade about their numbers.
That was not Chrysler bashing (if at all it was US-cars bashing, and not even that in a mean way, it's just that for a typical US-car the chances that somebody will drive it for long times over 90mph is rather limited).
The basic problem is that cars done for markets that have a speed limit will claim to have a higher top speed, but are mostly not designed to survive these speeds for a long time.
E.g. my Audi A6 was also repaired in a non-German Audi shop in a way that made it really dangerous in a German Autobahn environment. OTOH, German cars in this class are usually designed for this, e.g. the built in hands free speaker in said car works really well even at extreme speeds, I once had a chat with my wife where I've been doing over 125mph for over half an hour and she did not guess at my speed.
Btw, while high speed driving can be dangerous, low speed limit cruising is personally way more dangerous. I never had a case of getting sleepy while high speed driving (admittingly, if you get tired at such speeds, you stop without discussion and nap), while the scenario "German border, brakes, cruise control, some minutes, snor" is classical for me personally.
Well, I'll question the more reliable part. Despite having owned way more harddiscs in the last decade that I've owned even tape media (tape was a backup solution only for some years), I had more unreadable tapes than unreadable hdds.
Well, cars that are sold in Europe (around Germany) get that testing from time to time.
(And yes, sometimes cars can fail badly, because nobody thought about this.)
I had this happen once with a Chrysler New Yorker, which has a transmission that is not designed for >100mph speeds.
(which is stupid, I talked with a mechanic specialized in transmissions, they are just using a to small cooling system. Saves them for some pennies, even a post sale upgrade is less than 100, but Chrysler prefers to repair the transmissions all the time.)
And once a certain German car failed, because of a repair (sad what happens when a new car collides with a train, the car being new, the insurance paying quite a bit for the repair) , that was done in a country with a speed limit. Retrospectively, I guess if I limited myself to the common 90mph around, but then, why should I have a car that blocks at 156mph and limit myself to crawling at 90mph?
Well, use some systems that are not bug compatible with the major monoculture, ...
Guess it supersedes the constitution too? (And hint, the USA are not at war; no declaration of war has been voted out, prove me wrong on that one)
Let me repeat this yet again.
war => implies a declaration of war by congress, with a number explicit legal side effects => Somehow I've missed that.
The problem is with that this would imply superseding the constitution, wonder if you consider that a good idea too?
That's not the point. The people targeted can be as guilty as the Devil himself.
1.) you've got the problem with oversight. So what do you do if the relevant authorities designate you an EC (btw, not that this is any relevant term, it's an invention, because it's to inconvenient to treat criminals like Osama Bin Laden as criminals)
2.) what do you do if some foreign government decides to kill you? (Hint: The Russian government has assassinated British citizens in the UK in the past)
Basically, you are argueing that anything goes, if it's good for the "country". Who are you that you would deny that argumentation to anyone else? The anyone else just might have a different "country", and might consider all Americans criminals worthy of capital punishment.
3.) Last but not least, there are collateral damages if you decide to kill Mr. X by bombing him. Perhaps not in every and each case, but in a good number of cases. Guess they should have considered whom they socialize with. So why don't put the neighbors of murderers (or their whole family) on death row too?
Well, hint. For the majority of the world population, the US is also just foreign soil. You just defended 9/11, right? I mean, I'm almost sure that at least one person killed during the attacks had been a serious criminal by some foreign country's definition of serious criminal, and the rest where just collateral damage. As some supporters here already argued, they should have kept better company. (Sounds slightly different, when applied in reverse, doesn't it?)