This.
We shouldn't be granting exceptions we should be scrapping the program entirely. 9/11 would not have succeeded had the airline industry not been so cheap as to not pay for the kind of reinforced doors that had been in place in planes flown in other parts of the world. Additionally, had we not banned knives on planes, it's unlikely that the plot would have succeeded either as the terrorists would have been outnumbered.
It's simpler than that. 9/11 succeeded more due to the mindset at the time than anything that wasn't allowed on planes. Ten years ago, the standard operating procedure for a hijacking was to give in and deal with it on the ground. The 9/11 attackers went after the flaw in this plan, which assumed the hijackers weren't suicidal. Today, even if we didn't have reinforced doors and still banned knives on planes, any would be hijackers with box cutters wouldn't make it two steps up the aisle before half the passengers would take them down.
I've been thinking for a while that Canonical should distribute their own line of hardware, perhaps 3 models of laptop at various levels of power and price, similar to the Apple model, but cheaper, and open. This would get around some of the problems people run into with unusual, unsupported wireless and video cards. If done right, it could probably pull off marketing it as a bit of an upscale laptop.
You mean like System76? I guess it's not run by Canonical, but they are Ubuntu partners.
Speaking of how loathe people are to change defaults, how many people actually use the search bar instead of straight up visiting Google?
I ask this as someone that has seen his wife bring up Google in the Firefox browser window to do a search when the Google search bar is right! frickin! there!
tell me why censoring the Internet is the FIRST step taken by authoritarian governments when protests arise?
To try and prevent images and videos unsympathetic to the authoritarian government from spreading around the world (unsuccesfully in this case)
Secondly, even if you are distrbuting binary encoders/decoders you don't pay anything until you hit about 50,000 units shipped.
This is the problem with x264. If x264 becomes the de facto standard, two guys in a garage will never be able to develop their own browser that competes with all the current market leaders, because the second it starts to gain widespread acceptance it becomes subject to royalty fees that two guys in a garage will never be able to afford. The x264 standard may be open, but you can't do anything useful with that standard without paying up.
If I want to purchase services from a provider available to me that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, why the heck shouldn't I be able to?
The problem is that, whether or not you want to purchase services from a provider available to you that prioritizes YouTube and Netflix over Torrent traffic, your only choices are the local cable monopoly and the local phone monopoly (if you're lucky enough to have both providing high speed service to your house), so you're stuck with whatever policies they have. Now, if you or I could start up our own independent ISP with different prioritization policies to compete with the local monopolies, you might be on to something here.
Why not just give everyone the default code of 0000 or 12345?
12345? That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.
But from this article I will just take this: I don't care which one is fastest to the few dozen milliseconds, they are probably all in the same "class" now. Everybody wins.
Isn't competition so much nicer than having a monopoly one one browser that hasn't been updated in years?
Only through hard work and perseverance can one truly suffer.