That's fair, but to me, the cost of a new device isn't how much I pay for it - it's the time I invest in using it and maintaining it, as well as how much I rely on it. The biggest reason that I think open hardware and software is important is not just the cost, but the reliability - the fact that it will still be working tomorrow. That is worth a lot more than money to me!
namingthingsiseasy
joined 2 years ago
The tactic only becomes illegal when it confers the ability to exclude competitors from the market.
You're probably right in a legal sense, but I think that's a bit stupid. It's very difficult to draw a line that delineates between when a company has the ability to exclude competitors or not. It requires a lot of costly legal battles and a length appeal process to prove, and nobody will create that court case without significant financial means to be able to prove all of it. And if the court rules against you, all of that time, money and effort achieved nothing and just leaves you with a heavily damaged reputation.
From a practical perspective, it sounds like a very weak legal framework.
Exactly. All these devices can just be bricked the moment some corporation decides they're not worth supporting anymore. Never buy a device that is so heavily dependent on running on another company's services.
Yeah! At this point, Windows is even worse than Minix!
I didn't see this comment when I wrote a few other ones, but you can absolutely use proportional representation as a solution for single-winner elections. Just look at how most prime ministers are chosen in any country that uses proportionally-represented parliaments.
It brings up an interesting question of wasted votes. By definition, in plurality voting, at least 50% of all votes must be wasted. Anyone who votes for a losing candidate (and thereby doesn't receive an elected representative) wasted his/her vote. And anyone who voted above the threshold for the winner also cast a wasted vote (because the candidate wouldn't win anyway). It's easy to see why turnout would be low in such a system.
(You could of course argue that a candidate winning a race with 60% of the votes is much stronger in the office than a candidate that wins 51:49, so this is a bit of an oversimplification, but hopefully you get the idea of how wasted votes work solely within the context of decided who wins the race.)
Ranked Choice Voting is an improvement over plurality voting, but as I've written elsewhere (too lazy to look it up), I think any election with a single winner is still going to end up with weird/disappointing outcomes at least 90% of the time. I think this post is referring to the governor of New York, no? I would rather see a system where the state legislature is elected proportionally, and then the governor would be selected from a coalition agreement between the governing parties - similar to what you see in many national, state and provincial systems across Europe. This system isn't without its downsides, but at least it's harder for incumbent parties to force voters to support them even if those voters don't want to.
Of course, this is a much more fundamental reform, so it's harder to adopt. RCV is definitely an improvement. It's great to see some progress happening out there in the USA.
Really fascinating how this is happening in coordination all of a sudden. I'm practically certain that this is all coming from a small group of investors (maybe even just a couple) who are trying to influence companies as hard as they can into making everyone to start using it.
If I were forced to choose between two choices and I didn't like either, I would not consider myself living in a democracy. Democracy is pointless if you aren't able to vote for a candidate that you actually like.
The solution is reform. If your democracy is not proportional, then it is not a democracy.
He's clearly letting his guests know that they mean as much to him as his employees.
The dominoes are falling. Windows is nothing but a legacy burden at this point. Soon we will be rid of this worthless operating system.
I've used a US-QWERTY keyboard layout my entire life. I've seen other layouts that do things like reduce the size of the enter/backspace keys, move the pipe operator (|) and can't wrap my head around how I would code on those.
What are your experiences? Are there any layouts that you prefer for coding over US English? Are there any symbols that you have a hard time reaching ($ for example)?
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Not to mention tone-deaf. Maybe you shouldn't talk about life-saving technology when your technology anti-saved a life....
And that's ignoring the fact that they're using inferior technology. Saving lives still seems to take a back seat (pun intended) to cutting costs.