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Living in Thailand, most TV shows aren't available here until WAY after the Western airdate, if ever.

I live in a pretty small town. Western movies don't play here, and if I travel an hour or so to a town where they do, they do they are dubbed in Thai with no English subtitles. DVDs are readily available, but they are usually pirated cam copies burned to disc, and again dubbed in Thai.

Games? Not available in stores in my town. Bangkok, sure -- but again they are almost always pirated copies burned to disk. Console games are the same way and any shops selling the game will also chip the console to play pirated disks. I could, and admittedly probably SHOULD use steam for PC games.

Other software? Basically same story as games. If you go to a computer store here, advertising usually says that they are sold with Linux OS or bare drives. But, the shop will automatically put on a pirated Windows plus loads of software (office, Photoshop if you ask for it, etc.) upon purchasing the hardware. They are usually fairly inept at it, frequently have viruses or fail to actually activate the OS, etc. so I tell them to leave the drives bare and do all that stuff myself. But for 99% of people who buy a PC here, they will automatically get a pirated OS and software along with it.

Basically, my default mode of getting ANY media is piracy. Price (free versus not) is a part of that. Incomes are low here, but cost of living is comparatively even lower. Still, if media was fully available here but equal to the price in, say, the US the vast majority of people here don't have enough disposable income to afford much if any of it. A bigger issue for me personally is convenience. Piracy (torrents, etc.) as a distribution system is infinitely more convenient, easy, and "customer"-friendly than any more legitimate service. I get what I want very quickly, usually in multiple options for filesize vs quality on up to as-good-as-broadcast/blu-ray 1080p, with most everything available from a single source (isoHunt, kickass, PirateBay, take your pick). In terms of user experience, legitimate distribution can't even begin to compete with that -- and that is BEFORE considering price.

Instead, they exacerbate the difference by treating paying customers with open contempt. Pay for TV service? Enjoy 10 minutes of ads for every 12 minutes of show. Buy a DVD? Sit through un-skippable ads, dire piracy warnings, etc. before the show actually starts. Move or simply take the disk on vacation to another country and you will likely be screwed by region locking. Buy software? Get some DRM that slows things down or restricts fully NORMAL use of the software, nags you to register, etc. On the other hand, if you pirate stuff all of that goes away. No ads. Watch/use the media wherever you want, whenever you want, on whatever device you want. Software DRM circumvented easily, usually hours after the first release if not *before*.

I honestly see it as a problem that I am not supporting the creators of the media that I enjoy. But, Pandora's box has been opened on this one. Generation X and Y learned to scoff at the idea of paying for music due to Napster. iTunes has been extremely lucky to turn that around even slightly, making lots of mistakes along the way (DRM and device-locking, etc.). Gen Y and beyond are going to have the same attitude towards piracy with regards to ALL MEDIA that we learned to have towards music. I don't think there is any getting around that.

For content creators, I think that funding via Label / Publisher / Network is going to die out. And soon. The good news is that something akin to an evolution of patronage of arts and creators can work even better than it did in the past. The Motzarts and Beethovens of the future don't need 1 rich duke or king to commision a work, they need 10,000 average Joes on kickstarter or the like. I see things trending more and more in that direction, and all the time. I think it is an exciting time -- unless you're an exec in one of the old dinosaur publishers/networks.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

I agree with most of your points. I would like to make a small defense of the inability to change things in OS X. With mutability can come a lot of overhead and chaos. There is something to be said for an iron hand on the tiller of user interfaces - but only if you trust the group making decisions.

I am not a UX expert. Up until Lion I trusted the UX people at Apple to have a better idea about how humans can optimally interact with a computer. For the most part, I think they were right. Up until Lion - now I think I'm starting to be sold a crock. The decisions they have made don't seem to be based on making efficient interactions happen - but instead about some grand unified melding of Macs and iOS devices. It's bullshit.

The mandatory click to focus thing is really a taste thing. For me, personally it drives me batty. I don't want focus until I've clicked.

Bouncy in your face icons - agreed, annoying - but not as bad modal windows you have to dismiss.


>> ^srd:

>> ^dag:
Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.


Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.
Things that really put me off:
- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.
- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.
- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.
- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).
I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.
For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.
Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

>> ^dag:

Up until Lion I would completely disagree with you and say the UX of OS X is simply the best. Yes, I'm talking against Windows 7, Gnome, KDE et al. Now however, I'm starting to cast a wandering eye back towards Linux.
Windows 7 however, is a frigging awful experience any way you slice it. It's stupid little things like the alt-tab selecting whatever window is in the background when really you just want to cycle through the icons. Also, I can't believe they still haven't killed the dysfunctional bloatware ridden system tray. The retarded nanny-ware labyrinth that has to be navigated to connect to a wireless network makes my eyes bleed.
The way I'm feeling now is that all operating systems suck hard, but OS X sucks a little less, at least until Lion - which, again, is starting to suck much harder for all the reasons outlined in this video - and more.



Gnome, KDE, Windows et al have been scampering after the OSX UX for some years now, and I agreee have been doing it rather badly. And this is a trend I'm very skeptical of. However, if you like the workflow that OSX/Quarz imposes, I'm sure you can be happy with it. Where I take exception is having no choice except for what some people in a meeting in Cupertino decide is how I should do my work.

Things that really put me off:

- Menu bar at the top of the screen instead of attached to the individual application... Sure, thats traditional on apple computers and that made sense back in the days when the Mac didn't have real multitasking. But nowadays it's just terribly confusing and imposes longer mouse travel distances.

- Mandatory click-to-focus, which can be seen as a neccessary corrolary of the previous point. I've been using the focus-follows-mouse model (without raise-on-focus) for 15 years now and the difference is jarring. Imagine having to click away an overlay on each and every page you go to in your browser.

- Bouncy in-your-face animations and notification boxes that are reminiscent of Paperclip. Shut up already and get out of my face, I'm trying to work, not playing a game of whack-an-icon.

- Apple marketing OSX as 64 bit but delivering it in 32 bit mode and not telling you until you a) find out by accident and then b) spend 10 minutes gooling around until you find the command to switch it to 64bit default mode (no GUI level preference here for whatever reason).

I'd be a lot happier if I had a choice. Either by having real preferences that goes beyond what color scheme do I want and in what way do I want to stroke my touchpad to do what. Or open up the possibility for alternative window managers.

For all the "think different" attitude that Apple likes to spread, the OSX ecosystem seems to be hard at work to remove individual preferences. Apple turned into the opposite of what the 1984 commercial implied.

Dag, if you're looking at linux again, both KDE and Gnome (especially Gnome 3) are IMO horrible too. If you don't like them, give XFCE a go. I've been using it since '03 IIRC, when I grew tired of Blackbox. And you'd be in good company too

Harris hasn't done his homework. He's reading contemporary context into something that he's thousands of years removed from to make an argument.

Look at slavery. In first-century, when the New Testament was written, there was not a great difference between between slaves and the average free person. Slaves were not distinguishable from others by race, speech, or clothing. Slaves earned a wage equal to that of free laborers and could earn enough capital to buy themselves out. Most importantly, very few slaves were slaves for life. Most could reasonably hope to be manumitted within ten or fifteen years.

By contrast, New World slavery was much more systematically brutal. It was "chattel" slavery, in which the whole person was the property of the master. In the older bond-service form of slavery, only slaves' productivity (their time and skills) were owned by the master, and only temporarily. New World slavery, however, was race-based, default mode was for life, and the whole trade was resourced through kidnapping.

Now, I'm not trying to argue that women should have to wear burkas. I think it's despicable. However, he asks the question "is it good for human flourishing for women to wear burkas? Does it make more compassionate men, does it make more confident women, does it improve relationships between the sexes?" I think science would show that it doesn't do those things, but since when is that human flourishing? It can't be shown empirically and it certainly isn't self-evident to all people. Wouldn't the Muslim world say that human flourishing has nothing to with relationships between the sexes, but instead submitting to Allah? That would mean that the things like forcing women to wear the burka and sharia law DO improve human flourishing. It's all in how you define flourishing and progress, something I think Harris just completely didn't do.

Different cultures, political parties, and ideologies all have different ideas of what progress and flourishing are. If society is going in the wrong direction, then the most progressive person is actually the first one to do an about-face, which is why all groups believe themselves to be the most progressive or on the right side of history. The question that should have been tackled is What is human flourishing?

There's no reason why many Aikido techniques shouldn't work in a sport setting. Sure there may be some things they do that are illegal - but lots of it is sport-legal strikes and holds designed to protect against the very same attacks used in sport fighting.

For example, the first part of this video shows a counter to a guy punching (the air a ways from) your face. Surely if you were able to block a punch like that and then do a whole bunch of crap before the guy reacted, you could just block that punch and punch him back (and do very well in a sport fight situation).

I mean, couldn't you do some Aikido training by having a guy really trying to punch your face? Wouldn't that do a better job of getting you ready? Or at least do that some of the time to get a feel for a real fighting situation. I mean, sure you wouldn't be poking his eyes out or something - but at least you could practice that first part where you counter his punch by touching his shoulder and then holding your other arm up there. You know, see if that actually works: feel what it feels like to do in real life.

I can't imagine training this way. I mean, imagine training basketball only in drills. Imagine training wrestling only with collusive opponents. I realize those things aren't exactly the same, but they're a lot the same. And sure there is going to be distortions when sport competition becomes prevalent, but I think that can be managed.

Other arts aren't perfect. Surely boxing isn't a lot like a "to-the-death" fight with 100 opponents with bottles (or whatever fantasy situation we're imagining)... but the key is that someone who practices boxing (or anything) is going to be used to feeling pain, used to having a real punch coming at them, and is actually going to be used to using their "weapon" on an unwilling opponent. They're going to have something they can pull out - whether that's a single-leg takedown, a straight left, or whatever - that they've really hurt unwilling people with before. I think that's huge.

In the end, the sad defense of these arts is usually "they were used for 100s of years and blah, blah, blah". The problem is is that for those periods, it's not like there was anyone collecting statistics, nor was it like these were the default modes of combat in those times.

There is no time in human history when war in general was conducted without weapons. It's not like we ever had two unarmed groups running at each other and we could see whose training worked out better. If unarmed defense was ever practical against armed defense, any study of it was always anecdotal and almost certainly biased. It couldn't not be - you can't repeat the experiment with the same people 10 times if the experiment involved serious injury (and learning between trials, and random choosing of specific strategy).

Edit: my point is is that the same "it's been studied hard for ages" could be said about Chinese medicine. Sure it's been around for 100s of years, but it wasn't really studied scientifically or rigorously - and as such you get some good things that clearly work, some things that kind of work (but probably rely heavily on placebo effect), but also a lot of nonsense, horrible theory, very little progress over time, and some things that are completely backwards.

PS: Gah, I just watched some of the video again. In one part, buddy throws a right and pretty much gives up his whole back to the other guy. I mean, you might as well train a counter for the situation where you duck down to avoid a punch and the other guy follows your head down and ends up in a handstand. How anyone can take this seriously is beyond me and I regret having wasted so much text on it.

But which points of Gabriel's speech do you disagree with here? "It is stupid" is the Beavis and/or Butthead response. Although Brigitte Gabriel is a battle-scarred veteran of the right-wing radio wingnut circuit, I don't think that she is entirely wrong here.

Radical Islam does indeed seem to be a cancer both in Islamic nations and in growing Islamic communities in Europe. I disagree with the overwrought apocalyptic language used by both Bush neocons like Gabriel and the jihadists. And I understand fully that preventative war is a synonym for sole source, high dollar defense contracting.

But I do believe that Europe will have to come to terms with the radicalization of its Islamic communities. Particularly since George Bush has adopted Christian Crusading as the default mode for his foreign policy. I prefer Hirsi Ali to Brigitte Gabriel, but this little diatribe was alright.