Government.

You can always choose to walk away from a computing platform.

Walking away from a government is very difficult, sometimes impossible. Try to leave the United States if you have substantial income and assets and you will see this.

Facebook is a pretty good way to keep in touch with friends and share my photographs with them. That's what I use it for. It's also pretty good for non-political special interest groups. As far as I know, there is no political component to Miami YouTube users or the Gringo Gardeners of Costa Rica (where I live part of the year), and so there is no censorship worth discussing. So if Facebook's politics are not congenial to me, I can simply use blogs and web sites that are. No need for government interference for me to do that.

Unfortunately the history of online communities have shown that there is some censorship that can be tolerated. Otherwise every other message would be some kind of noxious advertisement. Censorship of political views is best gotten around by reading web sites that include information from a variety of political views. The left checks the right and vice versa.

I think Goldman's memo is too pessimistic, and I'd like to explain.

The promise of profit enormously motivates people, far more so than any charity or government endeavor. So with the profit motive, people are motivated to work the long and tedious hours needed to find cures.

Obviously, if we cure the related disease, and it eventually goes away, we have no more revenues. But the whole business model of drug companies generates money to do the research to create the next generation of drugs. We grow to trust brands. So if FooCorp Unlimited makes a successful cure for hepatitis, we will consider FooCorp's cures for arthritis, AIDS, etc over others. In other words, FooCorp is building a brand, and until the end game where all diseases is eliminated, there will be profit to be had.

In the example given, the cure for hepatitis generated $12 billion in one year, and two years later was still generating $4 billion. That doesn't exactly sound like chump change. That sounds like a highly profitable product lifecycle, and since it cures the disease they can build a brand as they find more cures for other diseases.

This is really no different from a car company, say Ford. As our story begins, Ford makes cars. The public starts preferring SUVs, and so Ford starts making SUVs. Eventually it completely abandons car production in favor of SUVs, because that's where the fickle taste of the customer takes them. That's no different from drug products becoming useless because they have cured the diseases.

So in short if a drug maker creates a cure, it can still be highly profitable, and the business can continue to do well over time as it plows revenue into additional research to create new cures.

Also remember that diseases mutate eventually, requiring new or substantially modified cures. The story of disease, sadly, isn't going to end so easily. As long as the profit motive incentivizes cures, we will see them developed, and in the long run, everybody benefits from that.

My first BBSs were single line and used my own software written in Basic and then Turbo Pascal. I loved to be original and people enjoyed my software, even when it wasn't as reliable as it should have been. Back in the day, if your software crashed, your BBS would be down until you got home ...

I eventually bought someone's failed BBS project through The Recycler, yesteryear's equivalent of Craigslist. It had a six-line serial adapter and Microport Unix. I never liked Microport but it did work, after a fashion, and my six lines were quickly humming. Unfortunately, as we say in the Internet world, the revenue model was never what it should have been, although I remember being thrilled when my first subscriber check – $60 for an entire year! – came in, from one of my favorite users. I wanted to be a general purpose home for eccentrics, with both dating and discussion parts equally balanced. I have never had a more successful social life before or since. We would have roughly monthly meetings at various local venues, and a pretty substantial number of people would turn out. It was relatively easy making a geographically based community, because most people lived nearby thanks to free local calls and pricey "local long distance" ones.

There were a couple of bad apples, who trolled like crazy, but it was definitely a fun environment, and my six lines were always busy. I had the first three lines for the paying users, two for non-payers and one for administration. I set up a "holding tank" for new users and those who had been troublesome, which was a forerunner of today's ultra-complex moderation systems. It didn't work all that great since I have never been a big censorship supporter.

I still remember the one user who loved Werner Erhard's The Forum and kept posting about it, even though people were totally sick of the topic from minute one. I eventually set up the typo corrector (which changed "teh" to "the" and other similar conveniences) to change Forum to Murof. Made him mad as a hatter, but all in good fun.

Even though the system vanished due to a failing disk drive in the 1990s I still have fond memories of it. And I still have friends who are former users. Wish I'd kept a copy of the software. It did some pretty cool things. For instance, the dating questionnaire let you answer questions in your own words if one of the prepared answers didn't work for you.

What I really find sad about today's environment is that we are no longer open to much unique, different or eccentric. I tried creating a social network of my own, but I wasn't able to get anyone excited about it. It was unique, and different, and just not what people wanted. The world wanted the uniformity and impersonality of Facebook, not the informality and homey atmosphere I wanted to provide. The big city, not the small town.

Nowadays I'm a photographer instead of a programmer, with almost 2000 friends on Facebook. So you can teach an old dog new tricks. And honestly, I'm glad my photographs never crash.

Why would Comcast mess you over more than AT&T DSL/Landline?

Down here in South Florida, Comcast is 10x faster than AT&T at about the same price, and they have always billed me honestly. AT&T, by contrast, has added huge, incomprehensible fees to their bills, making $50 or so in announced charges turn into $80.

D

Try the Leaf, which is $26k after the credit - that's about the same as a VW Golf Diesel, and is much cheaper to run if you don't drive long distances.

Admittedly I'm not sure how non-rich people are going to come up with the $7.5k to pay in advance for the full price, even if they get a tax refund a year or so later. In that sense, the rich or at least upper middle class are the only people likely to afford it.

That being said it's a lot cheaper than the Tesla Roadster, and definitely worth considering if you want to drive an interesting car without spending a lot.

D

In the market for cars, there is no equivalent to software that yanks the wheel out of your hands and changes course on its own free will. It should be very easy to use computers; all you need to do is follow the instructions on the screen. As long as you follow those instructions, you should not get into trouble.

Malware completely breaks that trust and has no connection with someone going into a car with no driver training, or driving like a madman.

Having an "expert button" might be a reasonable idea. But remember, for every Slashdot user, or person who basically believes in the Slashdot philosophy, there are at least 100 ordinary users.

It's interesting that Apple does not appear to be actively trying to prevent people from jailbreaking their iPads or iPod Touches. Apple has some obligations concerning the iPhone and its interoperability with telephone networks that make jailbreaking genuinely probematic to them.

I seem to remember iPad was jailbroken using a fairly straightforward and well known exploit; if Apple had wanted to prevent it, they could have.

Just some food for thought there ...

D

The balanced perspective is between the worlds of freedom (being able to install any application I want) and Jobsian Tyranny (being able to install only what Steve approves).

Both philosophies serve their respective devices well, which is my point.

I am glad Windows has served you well.

D

Probably because the keyboard has a fixed location on the bottom of the phone.

The main reason for rotation on the iPhone was to make the onscreen keyboard less difficult to type with.

D

So I was saying, "Gee, this is sad, iPad gets almost 1,000 comments about its closed nature and the Palm Pre can only muster 28 about the outage?"

It was worse than that. Looks like most of them are about lousy iPhone coverage!

So I should chime in. To keep this on topic, I can say that my Palm Pre's Sprint coverage didn't work at all where I live, and if I wasn't using it as a development device, I would have taken it back.

My iPhone works fine in the Pittsburgh area. It drops calls almost identically to Verizon phones in the same area. Sometimes it's actually a little better, other times it's a little worse. Pittsburgh is very hilly - its topography is similar to the Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles - so truly excellent cellphone service is probably not feasible. But Verizon and AT&T are both about equally mediocre, with Sprint way behind. (I haven't tried T-Mobile in a while so I will ignore them.)

I think the real problem with iPhone is that AT&T didn't realize how geographically concentrated iPhone use was going to be, and did not plan accordingly. Last year, the AT&T network failed at South by Southwest in Austin due to the huge concentration of iPhones suddenly descending on the place. This year, no problem at all, because AT&T beefed up their network and things worked fine.

Now I wonder why on earth they couldn't do that for the Bay Area, since by now they know what they need.

So if you are in a random place in the USA, instead of NYC, the Bay Area or other hotbeds of iPhone use, your AT&T service is probably fine, as mine is.

D

Apple's App Store has sold billions of dollars worth of apps, and has millions of happy customers. By any reasonable criteria it has achieved greatness.

As for iPad, yes, I think it's the best thing out there for the purpose it serves. It's a portable device to browse the web, and it lets me use over 5,000 programs designed exclusively for it, almost all of which are interesting, fun to use and available at very fair prices. Not to mention almost 200,000 iPhone apps.

Have you tried one?

What device would you consider better for that purpose?

D

Of course Apple is anticipating this with iPhone OS, which doesn't allow unsigned software to run at all. You really should be completely impervious to attacks as long as you stick to the closed world of iPhone/iPad, which makes life a lot easier for everyone save virus writers.

That's the real dilemma created by advocates of software freedom. A closed system has genuine advantages and that's what scares many of them. The fact is that a non-free system is actually better for most users.

I'm not saying I like that fact, or that it's a good thing, but unfortunately it is still a fact.

D

Of course he is a little stuck if you do in fact lose the installation disks, as many of us absent-minded folks do.

I think you can just use the normal Unix passwd command to change the password in single user mode.

Or simply buy a copy of Snow Leopard, since they are available everywhere for $29.95, boot the system and change the password as you outlined.

It would be comparable in difficulty, or maybe even harder to do the same thing on Windows or Linux, so I'm not sure where this particular example gets us.

D

That last paragraph is exactly why Apple devices are locked down. You can't mess up your iPhone or iPad unless you deliberately set out to do so.

It's a good deal for a lot of people. Admittedly, almost none of then are Slashdotters. In my case I have both an iMac and an iPad and love both of them for what they do.

D

Should someone who is not an expert have to know and do all those things just to have a car?

Time has value. The more time you spend fixing things, the less time you have for being creative, or spending time with your girlfriend, or whatever.

You have the freedom to do those things, but sometimes the freedom from having to do them is more important.

D

It was a genuine virus that propagated via Bluetooth and MMS. The phone was a Nokia 6600, a device so confusing it took me forever to figure out how to run the web browser. I remember it was an odd sliver of an unmarked button that did it.

The virus spewed advertisements for some sexual web site and was a big embarrassment to my friend, who was a middle-aged female. It was all pretty funny until she got the bill.

D