To the average person, medicine may as well be voodoo, so it's perfectly natural to mistake correlation of the two events for causation. What we need in that case is an open and frank discussion by the experts, access to the facts behind the "data" and most of all, a reposible press who don't hit the panic button over every single issue.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
That's definitely the case, and it was even more pronounced here, because the vaccines were given at exactly the stage of a child's development when the symptoms of autism would manifest. Couple that with the fact that diagnosis of autism has increased (almost certainly this has more to do with better diagnosis than any causal link to vaccination) and it's easy to see how some people jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The debate was probably worth having, Wakefield was undoubtedly wrong in the manner he collected his data and presented it, but my view is the media should take the lion's share of the blame, here. There were huge scare stories running at the time, pretty much presenting the link between MMR and autism as proven. This is the same press which is now demonising Wakefield in order to hide their own hypocrisy. It's the same with every health story, everything gets blown up out of all proportion, every new virus is going to be a global pandemic, nothing is newsworthy anymore unless it's apocalyptic. There's no balanced view presented, there's no useful information, and when it transpires they were wrong or overreacted they brush it under the carpet or find a scapegoat and move on.
It's completely irresponsible journalism and, worse-case, leads to injury or death (people not immunising their kids, people buying prescription drugs online to combat the next pandemic, etc) yet they're never held to account. Politicians are too busy trying to curry the favour of big media to want to be seen criticising it.
Microsoft even jacked the price up on Vista when they released it here to try to bleed some of the losses out of the few remaining customers.
If this is true then it's very telling - even in a society where piracy is the de facto norm and DRM is no use whatsoever, it's the legitimate customers who still get screwed, instead of trying to encourage people to do the right thing by offering benefit to those customers. If companies want DRM to protect their products that's their choice, but if it impedes my enjoyment of said product in any way, or increases the amount of hassle I have to go through to use that product, or significantly increases the cost, or means I can't use the product in the event of the company going under, then I'll keep my money.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason:
- There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone.
So true. I remember getting the demo for Quake (I got it from a Magazine cover CD as my dial-up would have taken a month to download it) and they gave away something like 25% of the entire game, I just kept playing and expecting it to end after every level and it just kept going, I was first in the queue to buy the full product when it came out. That was great customer service and a great example of the way try-before-you-buy should always be done. I even remember naively thinking that everyone would want to follow this model in the future
I guess the problem is, if you know your game stinks, you don't really want to let people try it, and if you're a big publisher with two dozen stinkers and two or three top quality games on the horizon, you don't want to demo just the good stuff because it'll make it obvious the rest are stinkers. The net result for me personally is probably that I buy less games than I otherwise would, because I have to rely on the very rare demos or on doing lots of personal research to know if a game is worth my time and money, but I guess there must still be enough impulse buyers out there to make releasing crud worthwhile.
It's a brave person who buys a game that requires some online authentication second-hand and relies on the good nature of whoever sold the game not to have kept a copy installed (with a no-cd crack) and what should now be their authentication key. It's the reason most PC games are non-returnable these days, once you have the key they have zero resale value.
... along with a widely publicised promise to unlock all content should Steam be discontinued / Valve go under.
When companies go under, there is a priority order to who gets what, and guess what... customers are at the end of a very long list. That being the case, do you really believe that they'll be allowed to continue developing for long enough to do right by the customers when that is going to directly translate into further losses for the creditors? That's just not the way these things work, it's not even like the management there would be in charge if they were in liquidation, even if their promise is genuine. Maybe if the solution is already written and they literally just have to flick a switch to deploy it it'll happen, otherwise it's just a marketing tool to assure us everything will be okay (disclaimer: I really like Valve's games and have a few on Steam, I don't object to the service but I'm under no illusion of what will likely happen if they fail - people who still want to play games they bought will have to go find a cracked version somewhere).
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales
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Game Industry Vets On DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Exactly, the telling quote was that the inclusion of DRM didn't put customers off. We can extrapolate that to the non-inclusion of DRM not really losing customers to piracy (i.e. they would have similar sales figures and always lose similar customer numbers to piracy regardless of DRM). That being the case, the inclusion of any DRM seems incredibly pointless. Why neuter the customer's experience while simultaneously increasing your costs to produce (by developing around and testing the DRM), support (by having increased numbers of customers unable to play their legitimate copy contacting you to complain) and sell (when those self-same customers return their non-working copy) the game?
Re:right, so it doesn't matter in terms of sales
on
Game Industry Vets On DRM
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Um, they got their "stuff" back if he returned the game, or are you really accusing him of stealing some bytes? Letting them keep the money for a product that he couldn't even use would just endorse their practice of using DRM. Personally I just wouldn't have played the game, but I can understand his view if he wanted to legitimately play the game and the company was basically telling him he couldn't, and worse, treating him like a criminal after he paid for their product! In this case if the company lost out it was due to its own blinkered greed and stupidity.
I'm not sure where you are, I'd guess the US, but you're lucky you can even get past the phone jockey, let alone their direct line manager - there's absolutely no chance of being able to do that with a large corporation here (UK). They're specifically ordered to not escalate calls, and should you be incredibly lucky enough to get through to a line manager, that's pretty much the end of the line.
About ten years ago, I did some telephone tech support for DSG and we were ordered not to even put customers through to, or give them a number for, customer services, no matter how abusive they got on the phone. This is customer services, the department that's meant to deal with upset customers! And believe me, there were some very upset customers, due to a combination of shoddy hardware, spurious sales claims, "sure the standard warranty covers software as well as hardware" (it didn't), some incredibly bad technical advisors (some of the rubbish I had to deal with that my own colleagues had caused almost made me weep, and that's even before the Christmas rush when they hired in a ton of temps on six week contracts who had even less technical ability and zero vested interest in actually fixing the issue as opposed to racking up big call numbers), oh, and a fair share of idiot users, it has to be said.
My favourite part was when DSG bought Freeserve (or the other way around, or they merged, I forget the specifics), and I'd regularly see people being bounced between the two tech departments - customer can't get online, calls his ISP, they run through their script, say it's a hardware issue, bounce him to his hardware supplier, they go through a script (there was no written script but there were certain tests that "proved" the modem was working), say their hardware is fine, bounce him back to his ISP... it's the same bloody company for god's sake! A little training could have reduced call times by 50% easily from what I saw.
Try dealing with some poor guy who's been sold a massively overpriced PC, been on the phone three or four times and each time pretty much been told to put in the recovery disks and completely wipe the PC (that's when he could get through, we had a queue cut-off of, IIRC, 20 minutes, so at busy periods you'd wait in a queue for 20 minutes then get disconnected and have to redial, do this two or three times before you finally get through and you have customers who've already been on the phone an hour before they even speak to you). The guy's been lied to by sales, he's probably been lied to by previous operators (when I joined there was little real tracking to see who they spoke to before) and even if you know the exact fix for his issue because you've done your homework and actually spent some time properly diagnosing previous customers' issues (and got into trouble over that for taking too long on calls, even though you have one of the best first time fix rates in the call centre) you still have to spend 30 minutes defusing this human time bomb, and yet you can't even direct the guy to the proper department to air his totally legitimate complaints!
Rinse and repeat that 15 times a day, five days a week and... yeah, well, you can probably see why I got out ASAP... I would have loved to be in a position to give out the directors' numbers to the unhappy customers!
Of course, in the 5-60 minutes that you're fiddling about with stuff, they could be doing some actual work. Getting stuff done now isn't always the same as being efficient. Unless they have absolutely zero work that can be done while they're waiting, the average person would probably be better off leaving it to the professionals to figure out the problem.
They pretty much have to if they want to maintain the pretence that this increases security, otherwise the logical conclusion is that terrorists will just use kids to carry their bombs.
The ad servers are often ridiculously slow as well, if the browser is waiting for the adserver to return anything before it finishes displaying the page it can add a massive overhead to the load time. Almost always when a page is taking a long time to load, if I fire up tamper I see the culprit is someone like adserv or doubleclick. I mostly don't care if I see ads, so long as they're not full of movement I tend to mentally filter them out, but for god's sake at least don't kill the entire page while they're loading.
I even try to be fastidious in text messages, though I tend to get nothing but abuse for my troubles! The one exception I do make is sending messages using the XBOX Live interface. "Typing" messages with an analogue control pad is incredibly painful (although I do have a USB keyboard to hand, should I ever need it, thankfully).
When proofreading, just replace "it's" with "it is" and any incorrect usage becomes obvious.
For example, "The cat licked it's paw" becomes "The cat licked it is paw".
"it's" always means "it is".
True, but still counter-intuitive when you consider "Look at the cat's paw" doesn't mean "Look at the cat is paw". It means remembering a rule (the possessive) and then remembering the exception to the rule. English is full of such quirks, which is what makes it such fun.
The evolution (or devolution, some might say) of language is an interesting subject. I believe using contractions, such as "cuz", and popular slang terms that are in common usage are a perfectly valid evolution of the English language. Ideally you wouldn't want them to appear in an English paper, but I think it's a little unfair to judge them invalid on that basis, so long as they convey the meaning and are used in the correct context.
Shakespeare, often lauded as the epitome of the written word on these very courses, was a great innovator of language. His writings were littered with what, at the time, were invalid words, street slang used by the common people and often words he invented on the spot. Ironically, if he was sitting one of these courses, he'd probably fail by the same criteria. I wonder how much of this is simple snobbery and elitism. I'll admit that I don't particularly like a lot of the terms, I love the English language, but I acknowledge that understanding is the most important factor in most situations. Obviously taking an English degree doesn't quite fit this situation, but English wouldn't be the language it is if it couldn't accommodate these new usages and evolve accordingly.
Punctuation, on the other hand, is much more important. While slang can, in the right context, help to convey a greater depth of meaning or feeling, or do so more efficiently, poor use of punctuation generally has the opposite effect, rendering meaning imprecise or vague. I'm sure we've almost all encountered ambiguity as to the meaning of a message, particularly in a forum such as this, due entirely to a misplaced comma or apostrophe.
Of course, if those self-same "hippies" hadn't been busy doing Big Oil's job for them by demonising nuclear power at the time, the environmental situation, not to mention the face of world politics, might be very different today (I would have liked 20 years of building more efficient breeder reactors and better means of dealing with the waste, for instance, than the status quo of pumping the waste directly into the sky). I guess it's easy to say, in hindsight, that the world might be a cleaner, better place today if we'd done more nuclear back then, but the truth is the facts were there all along, people just chose to ignore them or distort them to their own ends (on both sides of the debate, I might add).
Like most things, while there's no pressing need to solve the problem (small number of reactors, countries willing to take the waste at low cost) and the cost of solving it is non-zero, we tend to find workarounds. With more investment in nuclear and more reactors appearing, more investment will be made into solving the problem (be it improved means to clean and store waste, more efficient reactors that can burn more of the waste, a giant space cannon or whatever else we can dream up).
Of course there are some geeks like us, who want more. We get the jailbreak. It's no big deal and it looks like it's ok with Apple too. I mean they are not really fighting much against it.
So, we have the choice.
They constantly fix the jailbreaks in updates (according to TFS), they claim that it's a violation of the DMCA (going against established legal precedent in this claim according to EFF) and a gateway to further piracy. In what way does it appear that Apple are okay with jailbreaking?
If they were really supportive of jailbreaking and just wanted a minor hurlde in place to prevent casual piracy, fair enough, I would expect some model to allow jailbreaking that didn't get fixed and for Apple to tip the wink to the geeks, much as they appeared to do with the whole iTunes DRM which could be circumvented by burning a CD and re-importing. That, however, does not appear to be the case.
Of course, the only difference is that today's kids who are learning to tinker and investigate these closed systems also get to do so in the knowledge that even the government are taking an interest in what they're up to...
Actually, I know a couple of people who say the Prosche driving experience didn't live up to their expectations - the director at one of my old companies was a car nut and said they were atrocious to drive, very uncomfortable ride, minimal extras to help with the long journeys and overal frustrating for the 99% of the time when you didn't get to burn up the tarmac. He still owned one though, but because it looked nice, not because it was particularly nice to own/drive.
It's a device that is fundamentally about the consumption of media. It's an iPod; a music player with access to the iTunes music store. It's a portable video player with access to the iTunes movies and tv shows store. It's an ebook reader with access to the iTunes bookstore. It's a gaming device with access to the iTunes App store.
A music player that's x times larger than their existing highly successful music player so you can't slip it into a pocket and go for a run? A portable video player that doesn't handle full HD in 2010? An ebook reader with no e-ink so harsh on the eyes and a 10 hour (theoretical maximum) life compared to about two weeks for competitor devices? A gaming device that is large and cumbersome (okay I haven't handled one but I can't imagine what genre of gaming it fits into - not the portable market, it's too big, it's going to be wearying to use for prolonged periods, etc - but then I think even the new DS:XL is a bad move, the current DS is about the maximum size/weight I want to hold to play games for more than five minutes)?
You're right that a lot of people haven't figure out what this is and what the market will be for it, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're all wrong and Apple are right. With all of their previous big announcements, the idea was obvious even if it wasn't always innovative (ah, a music player that looks stylish, ah, a smaller version of same, now one with a funky touch-screen to improve usability, a laptop that is ultra-portable, a phone that incorporates the best bits of the iPod, etc). With all of those devices you could look at it and instantly recognise what the device's unique selling points are and the need that it's trying to meet, and at that point it's just a question of whether the market is sufficiently large to recoup the development costs and move into profit. I just don't recognise these things in this device, it doesn't have that instant mental click, "ah, that's what they're doing".
With the iPad, it seems almost everything it does is already being done better elsewhere, it's possible they are marketing this to the exact person who wants a music device that they only use while stationery with a built in video player that only plays 720p max, an ebook reader that you'll only use in short bursts in between charging and never want to take on a long flight or use at the beach (or in direct sunlight at all) and to be able to play iPod type games on a bigger screen for very short periods of time and maybe wants to create the odd spreadsheet, but surely to god that's not a very big demographic?
I would have thought one of the key benefits of the iPad is that you have more screen real estate for precisely this kind of thing (having two or more apps open on screen at once), otherwise what does it offer that you can't already do with an iPod touch, apart from reduced portability (sure you can watch movies on a bigger screen, but holding that thing at a nice viewing angle for the duration of a movie is going to be a pain, and unless you shell out big bucks you're not going to have much memory to store them, something like the Archos might be better if that's your goal, or a netbook/laptop that you can position more comfortably and comes with much larger storage options).
Slashdot Mirror
To the average person, medicine may as well be voodoo, so it's perfectly natural to mistake correlation of the two events for causation. What we need in that case is an open and frank discussion by the experts, access to the facts behind the "data" and most of all, a reposible press who don't hit the panic button over every single issue.
True enough. The problem is that when hundreds of millions get some treatment, quite a few of those WILL (for entirely unrelated reasons) fall ill shortly after the treatment, thus the existence of these people prove nothing at all.
That's definitely the case, and it was even more pronounced here, because the vaccines were given at exactly the stage of a child's development when the symptoms of autism would manifest. Couple that with the fact that diagnosis of autism has increased (almost certainly this has more to do with better diagnosis than any causal link to vaccination) and it's easy to see how some people jumped to the wrong conclusions.
The debate was probably worth having, Wakefield was undoubtedly wrong in the manner he collected his data and presented it, but my view is the media should take the lion's share of the blame, here. There were huge scare stories running at the time, pretty much presenting the link between MMR and autism as proven. This is the same press which is now demonising Wakefield in order to hide their own hypocrisy. It's the same with every health story, everything gets blown up out of all proportion, every new virus is going to be a global pandemic, nothing is newsworthy anymore unless it's apocalyptic. There's no balanced view presented, there's no useful information, and when it transpires they were wrong or overreacted they brush it under the carpet or find a scapegoat and move on.
It's completely irresponsible journalism and, worse-case, leads to injury or death (people not immunising their kids, people buying prescription drugs online to combat the next pandemic, etc) yet they're never held to account. Politicians are too busy trying to curry the favour of big media to want to be seen criticising it.
Microsoft even jacked the price up on Vista when they released it here to try to bleed some of the losses out of the few remaining customers.
If this is true then it's very telling - even in a society where piracy is the de facto norm and DRM is no use whatsoever, it's the legitimate customers who still get screwed, instead of trying to encourage people to do the right thing by offering benefit to those customers. If companies want DRM to protect their products that's their choice, but if it impedes my enjoyment of said product in any way, or increases the amount of hassle I have to go through to use that product, or significantly increases the cost, or means I can't use the product in the event of the company going under, then I'll keep my money.
That said I still pirate games, and in the end it boils down to 1 reason: - There is no more try-before-you-buy for most games anymore - the age of Game Demos is gone.
So true. I remember getting the demo for Quake (I got it from a Magazine cover CD as my dial-up would have taken a month to download it) and they gave away something like 25% of the entire game, I just kept playing and expecting it to end after every level and it just kept going, I was first in the queue to buy the full product when it came out. That was great customer service and a great example of the way try-before-you-buy should always be done. I even remember naively thinking that everyone would want to follow this model in the future
I guess the problem is, if you know your game stinks, you don't really want to let people try it, and if you're a big publisher with two dozen stinkers and two or three top quality games on the horizon, you don't want to demo just the good stuff because it'll make it obvious the rest are stinkers. The net result for me personally is probably that I buy less games than I otherwise would, because I have to rely on the very rare demos or on doing lots of personal research to know if a game is worth my time and money, but I guess there must still be enough impulse buyers out there to make releasing crud worthwhile.
It's a brave person who buys a game that requires some online authentication second-hand and relies on the good nature of whoever sold the game not to have kept a copy installed (with a no-cd crack) and what should now be their authentication key. It's the reason most PC games are non-returnable these days, once you have the key they have zero resale value.
... along with a widely publicised promise to unlock all content should Steam be discontinued / Valve go under.
When companies go under, there is a priority order to who gets what, and guess what... customers are at the end of a very long list. That being the case, do you really believe that they'll be allowed to continue developing for long enough to do right by the customers when that is going to directly translate into further losses for the creditors? That's just not the way these things work, it's not even like the management there would be in charge if they were in liquidation, even if their promise is genuine. Maybe if the solution is already written and they literally just have to flick a switch to deploy it it'll happen, otherwise it's just a marketing tool to assure us everything will be okay (disclaimer: I really like Valve's games and have a few on Steam, I don't object to the service but I'm under no illusion of what will likely happen if they fail - people who still want to play games they bought will have to go find a cracked version somewhere).
Exactly, the telling quote was that the inclusion of DRM didn't put customers off. We can extrapolate that to the non-inclusion of DRM not really losing customers to piracy (i.e. they would have similar sales figures and always lose similar customer numbers to piracy regardless of DRM). That being the case, the inclusion of any DRM seems incredibly pointless. Why neuter the customer's experience while simultaneously increasing your costs to produce (by developing around and testing the DRM), support (by having increased numbers of customers unable to play their legitimate copy contacting you to complain) and sell (when those self-same customers return their non-working copy) the game?
Um, they got their "stuff" back if he returned the game, or are you really accusing him of stealing some bytes? Letting them keep the money for a product that he couldn't even use would just endorse their practice of using DRM. Personally I just wouldn't have played the game, but I can understand his view if he wanted to legitimately play the game and the company was basically telling him he couldn't, and worse, treating him like a criminal after he paid for their product! In this case if the company lost out it was due to its own blinkered greed and stupidity.
I'm not sure where you are, I'd guess the US, but you're lucky you can even get past the phone jockey, let alone their direct line manager - there's absolutely no chance of being able to do that with a large corporation here (UK). They're specifically ordered to not escalate calls, and should you be incredibly lucky enough to get through to a line manager, that's pretty much the end of the line.
About ten years ago, I did some telephone tech support for DSG and we were ordered not to even put customers through to, or give them a number for, customer services, no matter how abusive they got on the phone. This is customer services, the department that's meant to deal with upset customers! And believe me, there were some very upset customers, due to a combination of shoddy hardware, spurious sales claims, "sure the standard warranty covers software as well as hardware" (it didn't), some incredibly bad technical advisors (some of the rubbish I had to deal with that my own colleagues had caused almost made me weep, and that's even before the Christmas rush when they hired in a ton of temps on six week contracts who had even less technical ability and zero vested interest in actually fixing the issue as opposed to racking up big call numbers), oh, and a fair share of idiot users, it has to be said.
My favourite part was when DSG bought Freeserve (or the other way around, or they merged, I forget the specifics), and I'd regularly see people being bounced between the two tech departments - customer can't get online, calls his ISP, they run through their script, say it's a hardware issue, bounce him to his hardware supplier, they go through a script (there was no written script but there were certain tests that "proved" the modem was working), say their hardware is fine, bounce him back to his ISP... it's the same bloody company for god's sake! A little training could have reduced call times by 50% easily from what I saw.
Try dealing with some poor guy who's been sold a massively overpriced PC, been on the phone three or four times and each time pretty much been told to put in the recovery disks and completely wipe the PC (that's when he could get through, we had a queue cut-off of, IIRC, 20 minutes, so at busy periods you'd wait in a queue for 20 minutes then get disconnected and have to redial, do this two or three times before you finally get through and you have customers who've already been on the phone an hour before they even speak to you). The guy's been lied to by sales, he's probably been lied to by previous operators (when I joined there was little real tracking to see who they spoke to before) and even if you know the exact fix for his issue because you've done your homework and actually spent some time properly diagnosing previous customers' issues (and got into trouble over that for taking too long on calls, even though you have one of the best first time fix rates in the call centre) you still have to spend 30 minutes defusing this human time bomb, and yet you can't even direct the guy to the proper department to air his totally legitimate complaints!
Rinse and repeat that 15 times a day, five days a week and... yeah, well, you can probably see why I got out ASAP... I would have loved to be in a position to give out the directors' numbers to the unhappy customers!
Of course, in the 5-60 minutes that you're fiddling about with stuff, they could be doing some actual work. Getting stuff done now isn't always the same as being efficient. Unless they have absolutely zero work that can be done while they're waiting, the average person would probably be better off leaving it to the professionals to figure out the problem.
Actually they happen quite frequently. Million to one chances succeed nine times out of ten.
They pretty much have to if they want to maintain the pretence that this increases security, otherwise the logical conclusion is that terrorists will just use kids to carry their bombs.
The ad servers are often ridiculously slow as well, if the browser is waiting for the adserver to return anything before it finishes displaying the page it can add a massive overhead to the load time. Almost always when a page is taking a long time to load, if I fire up tamper I see the culprit is someone like adserv or doubleclick. I mostly don't care if I see ads, so long as they're not full of movement I tend to mentally filter them out, but for god's sake at least don't kill the entire page while they're loading.
I even try to be fastidious in text messages, though I tend to get nothing but abuse for my troubles! The one exception I do make is sending messages using the XBOX Live interface. "Typing" messages with an analogue control pad is incredibly painful (although I do have a USB keyboard to hand, should I ever need it, thankfully).
When proofreading, just replace "it's" with "it is" and any incorrect usage becomes obvious. For example, "The cat licked it's paw" becomes "The cat licked it is paw".
"it's" always means "it is".
True, but still counter-intuitive when you consider "Look at the cat's paw" doesn't mean "Look at the cat is paw". It means remembering a rule (the possessive) and then remembering the exception to the rule. English is full of such quirks, which is what makes it such fun.
The evolution (or devolution, some might say) of language is an interesting subject. I believe using contractions, such as "cuz", and popular slang terms that are in common usage are a perfectly valid evolution of the English language. Ideally you wouldn't want them to appear in an English paper, but I think it's a little unfair to judge them invalid on that basis, so long as they convey the meaning and are used in the correct context.
Shakespeare, often lauded as the epitome of the written word on these very courses, was a great innovator of language. His writings were littered with what, at the time, were invalid words, street slang used by the common people and often words he invented on the spot. Ironically, if he was sitting one of these courses, he'd probably fail by the same criteria. I wonder how much of this is simple snobbery and elitism. I'll admit that I don't particularly like a lot of the terms, I love the English language, but I acknowledge that understanding is the most important factor in most situations. Obviously taking an English degree doesn't quite fit this situation, but English wouldn't be the language it is if it couldn't accommodate these new usages and evolve accordingly.
Punctuation, on the other hand, is much more important. While slang can, in the right context, help to convey a greater depth of meaning or feeling, or do so more efficiently, poor use of punctuation generally has the opposite effect, rendering meaning imprecise or vague. I'm sure we've almost all encountered ambiguity as to the meaning of a message, particularly in a forum such as this, due entirely to a misplaced comma or apostrophe.
Of course, if those self-same "hippies" hadn't been busy doing Big Oil's job for them by demonising nuclear power at the time, the environmental situation, not to mention the face of world politics, might be very different today (I would have liked 20 years of building more efficient breeder reactors and better means of dealing with the waste, for instance, than the status quo of pumping the waste directly into the sky). I guess it's easy to say, in hindsight, that the world might be a cleaner, better place today if we'd done more nuclear back then, but the truth is the facts were there all along, people just chose to ignore them or distort them to their own ends (on both sides of the debate, I might add).
Like most things, while there's no pressing need to solve the problem (small number of reactors, countries willing to take the waste at low cost) and the cost of solving it is non-zero, we tend to find workarounds. With more investment in nuclear and more reactors appearing, more investment will be made into solving the problem (be it improved means to clean and store waste, more efficient reactors that can burn more of the waste, a giant space cannon or whatever else we can dream up).
China wouldn't dare nuke Japan. We already know the consequences...
Ok, if that upsets you just call them green-ER.
I prefer the term: less un-green.
Of course there are some geeks like us, who want more. We get the jailbreak. It's no big deal and it looks like it's ok with Apple too. I mean they are not really fighting much against it. So, we have the choice.
They constantly fix the jailbreaks in updates (according to TFS), they claim that it's a violation of the DMCA (going against established legal precedent in this claim according to EFF) and a gateway to further piracy. In what way does it appear that Apple are okay with jailbreaking?
If they were really supportive of jailbreaking and just wanted a minor hurlde in place to prevent casual piracy, fair enough, I would expect some model to allow jailbreaking that didn't get fixed and for Apple to tip the wink to the geeks, much as they appeared to do with the whole iTunes DRM which could be circumvented by burning a CD and re-importing. That, however, does not appear to be the case.
Of course, the only difference is that today's kids who are learning to tinker and investigate these closed systems also get to do so in the knowledge that even the government are taking an interest in what they're up to...
Actually, I know a couple of people who say the Prosche driving experience didn't live up to their expectations - the director at one of my old companies was a car nut and said they were atrocious to drive, very uncomfortable ride, minimal extras to help with the long journeys and overal frustrating for the 99% of the time when you didn't get to burn up the tarmac. He still owned one though, but because it looked nice, not because it was particularly nice to own/drive.
It's a device that is fundamentally about the consumption of media. It's an iPod; a music player with access to the iTunes music store. It's a portable video player with access to the iTunes movies and tv shows store. It's an ebook reader with access to the iTunes bookstore. It's a gaming device with access to the iTunes App store.
A music player that's x times larger than their existing highly successful music player so you can't slip it into a pocket and go for a run? A portable video player that doesn't handle full HD in 2010? An ebook reader with no e-ink so harsh on the eyes and a 10 hour (theoretical maximum) life compared to about two weeks for competitor devices? A gaming device that is large and cumbersome (okay I haven't handled one but I can't imagine what genre of gaming it fits into - not the portable market, it's too big, it's going to be wearying to use for prolonged periods, etc - but then I think even the new DS:XL is a bad move, the current DS is about the maximum size/weight I want to hold to play games for more than five minutes)?
You're right that a lot of people haven't figure out what this is and what the market will be for it, but that doesn't necessarily mean we're all wrong and Apple are right. With all of their previous big announcements, the idea was obvious even if it wasn't always innovative (ah, a music player that looks stylish, ah, a smaller version of same, now one with a funky touch-screen to improve usability, a laptop that is ultra-portable, a phone that incorporates the best bits of the iPod, etc). With all of those devices you could look at it and instantly recognise what the device's unique selling points are and the need that it's trying to meet, and at that point it's just a question of whether the market is sufficiently large to recoup the development costs and move into profit. I just don't recognise these things in this device, it doesn't have that instant mental click, "ah, that's what they're doing".
With the iPad, it seems almost everything it does is already being done better elsewhere, it's possible they are marketing this to the exact person who wants a music device that they only use while stationery with a built in video player that only plays 720p max, an ebook reader that you'll only use in short bursts in between charging and never want to take on a long flight or use at the beach (or in direct sunlight at all) and to be able to play iPod type games on a bigger screen for very short periods of time and maybe wants to create the odd spreadsheet, but surely to god that's not a very big demographic?
I would have thought one of the key benefits of the iPad is that you have more screen real estate for precisely this kind of thing (having two or more apps open on screen at once), otherwise what does it offer that you can't already do with an iPod touch, apart from reduced portability (sure you can watch movies on a bigger screen, but holding that thing at a nice viewing angle for the duration of a movie is going to be a pain, and unless you shell out big bucks you're not going to have much memory to store them, something like the Archos might be better if that's your goal, or a netbook/laptop that you can position more comfortably and comes with much larger storage options).