"Why do we convince our selves that these types of drastic measures are worth the capital we expend to make them happen."

My cynical guess? Wealthy people with liberal guilt. As for the companies, more eyeballs == more money.

I agree with you. It's hard to force this. If the underlying infrastructure is lacking (clean water, food, medicine, clothing, safety) then the internet isn't going to take hold.

If the core infra is already in place, they're likely already working on bringing the net in.

I have traveled pretty widely and the most remote place I ever went to was an un-mapped village in sub-Saharan Africa a 16 hour drive from the nearest large city. I was there last about 4 years ago, at the time I felt the most away from civilization I had ever been, then my cellphone rang, I had 5 bars.

In January a man I met in that village sent me a friend request on Facebook they have 3g now.

>clean water, food, medicine, clothing, safety

aren't really profit centers. but bringing internet service to as many people as possible... is worth its weight in gold to major telecoms.

I'm not sure it's marketing but being in the bubble like was previously mentioned.

Apple has nearly 100% market share with fellow engineers at work.

Sometimes I forget PCs exist until I'm forced to use one (internet cafe, friends home, etc)

Yeah there is a fascinating income bias at play there. Think about it this way, if you are an engineer and you make over 75k a year gross you are in the top 15% of wage earners in the united states, if you make over 100k you are in the top 10% of wage earners.

So if you are in one of those brackets chances are your company is spending a good chunk of change on you and doesn't mind springing for a nice laptop to keep you happy. But from the other angle there are some 350 million people working in this country who aren't in that space. and considering that something like 76 to 80% of Americans own a PC/Mac that leaves a good chunk of people who lead a significantly different existence than most engineers.

Would developers write better software if they had to write on slower, older machines with less memory and storage?

I think the machine that they design on isn't nearly as important as the machine that they have in their head as designing for.

When testing the early OS and apps for the iphone apple purposely cobbled together a machine that was crippled (performance wise) to be representative of how the end product would run from a user experience perspective.

http://www.tuaw.com/2014/03/26/heres-what-apples-first-hacke...

No. They would write the kind of software we used to write back in the days when all computers are like that and we traded away everything else for machine efficiency because we had no choice: clumsy, feature impoverished, riddled with arbitrary limits that trip you up at the worst possible moment, fundamentally insecure, hard to use and generally crap.

I think that's the point. If you only expect to make 500K* from album sales, it makes sense to sell a single copy for 500K to a wealthy fan and let the content leak out to other fans.

Same pay, less work and more happy fans.

* - I don't really know what the numbers are. 500K is just an example.

Or crowdsource it and not release it until you hit 500K.

Right, this is mostly a threshold-pledge model, with the caveat that one wealthy individual could buy it up and destroy it.

What's interesting is that this model works in a world without copyright - you can always sell the first copy.

Corporate policy :(

I really wanted to try this out but I'm stuck on 10.8

I didn't know this was a thing but I think I'll make April STFUApril for me and give it a try.

I definitely complain too often. I even complain about others who complain.

Facebook is slowly becoming more like Myspace when it lost the lead.

Except they have the money the buy any latest hyped app.

My guess is that they were being asked by bloggers, journalists, etc who were coming in for SXSW and thought it would be easier to put out an online statement to direct people to.

I don't think this is a high priority for APD.

I don't see the big deal really. I've lived in Austin since 2005 and I've never used a cab service here. They seem pretty useless in this city IMO.

I should also mention that I'm not a fan of Uber. I've been with friends and coworkers using it in San Francisco and always I see 3-4 available yellow cabs go by while we wait for our driver.

I'm in San Fran 1 week a month and when I'm by myself, I just take yellow cabs. They seem to work OK for me.

I wonder how much this is the impact of uber/lyft/sidecar etc though. Like many things posted on hn, this is highly anecdotal, but when I first moved to SF almost four years ago it was difficult to find an available cab. I often waited 20 minutes or more on nights when I went out.

Now I have a similar experience to you as open cabs seem more available, but I wonder how much of this is the ridesharing services siphoning off demand.

Sometimes an M-Kill is better than destroying the entire thing because you can target support troops when they bring in a wrecker.

I do this too. I dislike when functions in languages don't explicitly return something even if that something is nothing.

Perhaps it's a form of copy protection but IMO, without it being digital, DRM isn't possible.

I did purchase this book because the last version has so many good reviews and I too would have preferred a digital copy but to me, calling it DRM is technically incorrect and smells like bait. I'm mostly disappointed that I fell for it.

This discussion hinges on some pretty fundamental questions of what is "a book," whether you can protect digital rights by not having a digital form, and whether the term DRM is understood to mean any kind of IP protection. I think there are reasonable answers to all of those that would have people falling on both sides of the question.

If physical only was done to prevent piracy, it is at the least a "RM" move.