This classic quote doesn't have much to do with rewriting history, I'm afraid.
I'm afraid it does. It is one of the basic points of the book, and what the entire Ministry of Truth is all about. Shortly after the above quote, this appears: 'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'
"So if the programming language doesn't matter that much, why is having to use Objective-C (or just using regular C) such a big deal?"
First, I am not so sure programming language does not matter. And even if you are right that your first language does not, that does not in any way imply that there is no difference between languages, period.
And even if it were so, it still makes a huge difference to the developers who have learned another language from the one Apple is decreeing!
And none of this is really the issue. The issue is that Apple wants it to be as hard as possible to create an app that runs on both Apple's platforms, and another. Because they are the big dog right now, making it hard to develop an app for several platforms means most developers will chose to write their programs only for theirs.
Which is why we are arguing against Apple's platform - if noone cares, everyone is worse off. So you can call us whatever you want, I for one will still argue that Apple's methods is hurting developers, and in the end consumers. If you believe I am wrong, or wrong that this matters, tell me why and we can discus it. Yelling "noone cares" is just silly...
Let's not forget what we are talking about here. Real censorship is a moral issue.
This debate isn't a whole lot different than Coke vs. Pepsi.
Yes it is. It is about censorship, which is a moral issue.
This consumer product, unlike Pepsi, comes with chains. There are certain things you cannot do with it, not because you would not want to or because of any sound technical reasons, but because it does not fit with Apple's plans.
And remember that Apple is selling a media platform. I have no reason to care what brand of cola you prefer, but I would hate to live in a democracy where Apple (and those they sell that service to) controls what news, satire and music people have access to.
Just because it is marketed as a service sold to the highest bidder, does not mean it is not oppression!
And the majority is always right, right? I do not give one whit how many people think corporate censorship is OK, it quite simply is not. I can prove this on an etch-a-sketch... Rupert Murdoch might be the only guy in the world who loves Apple for a "good" reason, which should tell you something.
It's censorship. Not governmental censorship, but censorship nonetheless. (And of course it is legal, but that is not the point).
If a newspaper refuses to run a story because of its volatile nature, or how it goes against the prejudices of its owners, that is censorship too. Just a different kind.
Apple is a carrier, pure and simple. Do we have laws that they should carry any app? No. Should we? I'll go with a cautious no, but your millage may vary. But anyone who thinks that a newspaper which refuses to run a story only (!) because it does not fit their paradigm, or might give them bad press, is still a relevant newspaper in any way is a moron. And anyone who thinks that Apple is an acceptable carrier (and they are a carrier) is a moron too. Just like anyone who thinks that a government that censors political speech is an acceptable government is... part of a repressive regime.
Apple is censoring stuff. Because they are in the business of delivering stuff, choosing not to deliver (when the choice is not made for sound reasons, but on prejudice - even if by proxy as in this case) is censorship. That anyone is accepting this at all just goes to show that the customer will not choose the better product. That this is opinion and art being censored just proves that this matters, damnit!
Shit like this is why the rest of the world hates you.
While this might actually be flamebait, it is also quite insightful.
The US MIC is the enforcement arm of the western capitalistic hegemony - so they suffer the brunt of the hate, and of course it is the young sod with the high caliber weapon who suffers the most. But we are all guilty here. We fear instability in our oil pipeline, so we send in troops and lie about why. And we kill.
If we actually wanted to help against a dictator, etc. etc., we'd have carpet-bombed the entire region with knowledge and food and extended hands and airstrips just over the border for taking refugees away to citizenship, no questions asked.
I'm with Bill Hicks on this one, you can keep replacing the place-names and corporations until we all wise up:
I'll pay the extra nickel on petrol, just knowing brown kids aren't being clubbed to death like baby seals in Honduras, so Pepsi can put a plant down there.
Until then, I'll be thankful for wikileaks - right now, it might be the only thing making Western civilisation a democracy in anything more than name.
Awesome, we need to have a completely anonymous leak site to even know how corrupt our government even is. What a statement!
Nailed it! This is the story!
Being able to spread and share news such as this is absolutely essential to any kind of informed democracy, or any civilised society for that matter. Resist the resistance!
Yup. When you are mouthing opinions based on orders from on high, you are twisting and manipulating that which makes something your opinion - that you actually believe it. Calling someone out on this might be a rhetorical trick, but someone who has previously sold his opinion should not expect it to be taken serious ever again, and certainly not when expounding on the same subject, while still taking the money!
PS: The parallel to actual whores/prostitutes would be that many believe, and many more somehow feel, that sex is also something which (should) express certain emotions, and not actually having them while implicitly expressing them is twisting that connection. Your milage may vary on how strong or necessary you believe that bond is and should be - personally, I couldn't get past the disconnect...
Exactly. Whoever disagrees has a right to fork the project and do whatever he wants. The only thing he is being denied (in this specific case quite politely by Shuttleworth) is to use the existing project's resources! This is not anti-democratic, the guy's opinion of what Shuttleworth, and those who chose to follow him, just ended up being heard, but not followed. Is your bar for democracy that every open source project should be voted on by the world assembly, or what exactly is the claim here?
Your seem to think (yeah, right) that anything you don't like is evil.
Try reading my post again, you may find there is exactly no support, nor any reason to suppose, that this is my claim or belief. And if you then try to adress my actual beliefs, without the personal attacks, we might have a conversation where we engage each other instead of just inventing positions for the other party and railing against them.
I am not holding my breath, though. But do surprise me:-)
"...but in calling Apple evil, you're espousing a communist standpoint."
No. The communist standpoint would be all corporations, and indeed any mode of production where the tools for production is owned and people then sell their labour-hours to the owners, is inherently and necessarily evil. (Socialism, btw, is thinking you can keep that system and mitigate its evils).
The things Apple are doing; suing, lying, pushing a model where people have no control over 'their own' devices and generally selling a platform to the so-called content owners instead of servicing the public - is evil. Their motivation does not matter, the things they do have bad consequences for everyone but their shareholders, they know it and this is about as close to 'evil' as you get without waxing theological.
Doing whatever makes money is not a get-out-of-having-a-conscience-card just because 'that's what the public wants'. How is that paper on the invisible hand (which allegedly guarantees this weird thesis) coming, Mr. Smith?
Exactly. Emily Howell is not writing any music, in the normal sense of the word. Cope is, using a very weird sort of sheet and pencil. Music composition is using math (mostly in the form of learned habits, but math nonetheless) and your own creativity.
What has changed is the complexity of those mathematics, and the (extremely) shortened feedback loop between pure mechanical/mathematical analysis and adding some input, changing or throwing out what didn't work, etc.
And! He has managed to to embody some of the "habits" of the greats, so he (or a randomizer) can riff off of that - kudos for that! As someone mentions below, it will be interesting whether (when?) we can teach such meta-skills to a computer. (Meta-Turing-test; a computer is sentient like us, when it can create a program, which can pass the Turing test).
But - and this is frightening too - the prosecutors wanted to convict google employee of criminal defamation. Of being complicit in defaming the boy. By working for a company, on whose websites kids they did not know posted a video they knew nothing about and never saw, which defamed a person they had never heard of!
PPS: If you start doing something else than taking notes, like emailing, you are not seriously discussing a computer's notetaking capabilities! You are admitting to your own lapsing attention and lack of notetaking capabilities.
IF you write-and-forget (never read your notes again, having saved them somewhere in obscurity), notetaking on a computer is worse. IF you try to write down everything that is said, instead of sorting and prioritizing as you would more obviously have to using pen and paper, notetaking on a computer is worse. IF you have no system of differentiating headlines, topics, quick asides, stuff to look up later, direct quotes, etc. etc., notetaking on a computer is worse.
But if you actually think about what media you are using, and adapt your notetaking to it, I have found that the increased throughput, self-and-techonology-enforced order and readability make my lecture and class notes made on a computer far superior than anything I might have had time for in hand. And yes, I have tried taking notes by hand recently. It sucks.
PS: Your milage may vary, some people are helped by doodling, illustrating, making their own charts and connecting bits with arrows. Such people should not, however, make any claims that computers are worse for notetaking, only that they are worse for them. My statements above should be read with similar qualifications.
Now don't pounce; but for me, Dune is just the original book cover. I hate reading, watching movies and playing video games, but on a good day my eyes can strain themselves through most of a picture. I don't care about the plot, characterisation or theme - just that one picture and the title.
Slashdot Mirror
This classic quote doesn't have much to do with rewriting history, I'm afraid.
I'm afraid it does. It is one of the basic points of the book, and what the entire Ministry of Truth is all about. Shortly after the above quote, this appears:
'In memory. Very well, then. We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?'
"What, you think you'd be better of on Adobe's proprietary platform?"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma
"So if the programming language doesn't matter that much, why is having to use Objective-C (or just using regular C) such a big deal?"
First, I am not so sure programming language does not matter. And even if you are right that your first language does not, that does not in any way imply that there is no difference between languages, period.
And even if it were so, it still makes a huge difference to the developers who have learned another language from the one Apple is decreeing!
And none of this is really the issue. The issue is that Apple wants it to be as hard as possible to create an app that runs on both Apple's platforms, and another. Because they are the big dog right now, making it hard to develop an app for several platforms means most developers will chose to write their programs only for theirs.
You may not like it but the fact is no one cares.
Which is why we are arguing against Apple's platform - if noone cares, everyone is worse off. So you can call us whatever you want, I for one will still argue that Apple's methods is hurting developers, and in the end consumers. If you believe I am wrong, or wrong that this matters, tell me why and we can discus it.
Yelling "noone cares" is just silly...
Let's not forget what we are talking about here. Real censorship is a moral issue.
This debate isn't a whole lot different than Coke vs. Pepsi.
Yes it is. It is about censorship, which is a moral issue.
This consumer product, unlike Pepsi, comes with chains. There are certain things you cannot do with it, not because you would not want to or because of any sound technical reasons, but because it does not fit with Apple's plans.
And remember that Apple is selling a media platform. I have no reason to care what brand of cola you prefer, but I would hate to live in a democracy where Apple (and those they sell that service to) controls what news, satire and music people have access to.
Just because it is marketed as a service sold to the highest bidder, does not mean it is not oppression!
"...the majority do not care about this stuff"
And the majority is always right, right? I do not give one whit how many people think corporate censorship is OK, it quite simply is not. I can prove this on an etch-a-sketch...
Rupert Murdoch might be the only guy in the world who loves Apple for a "good" reason, which should tell you something.
It's censorship. Not governmental censorship, but censorship nonetheless. (And of course it is legal, but that is not the point).
If a newspaper refuses to run a story because of its volatile nature, or how it goes against the prejudices of its owners, that is censorship too. Just a different kind.
Apple is a carrier, pure and simple. Do we have laws that they should carry any app? No. Should we? I'll go with a cautious no, but your millage may vary. But anyone who thinks that a newspaper which refuses to run a story only (!) because it does not fit their paradigm, or might give them bad press, is still a relevant newspaper in any way is a moron.
And anyone who thinks that Apple is an acceptable carrier (and they are a carrier) is a moron too. Just like anyone who thinks that a government that censors political speech is an acceptable government is... part of a repressive regime.
Apple is censoring stuff. Because they are in the business of delivering stuff, choosing not to deliver (when the choice is not made for sound reasons, but on prejudice - even if by proxy as in this case) is censorship. That anyone is accepting this at all just goes to show that the customer will not choose the better product. That this is opinion and art being censored just proves that this matters, damnit!
Also, my new HTC Desire is the hawtness!
Sure it's funny, but insightful is more apropos...
Shit like this is why the rest of the world hates you.
While this might actually be flamebait, it is also quite insightful.
The US MIC is the enforcement arm of the western capitalistic hegemony - so they suffer the brunt of the hate, and of course it is the young sod with the high caliber weapon who suffers the most. But we are all guilty here. We fear instability in our oil pipeline, so we send in troops and lie about why. And we kill.
If we actually wanted to help against a dictator, etc. etc., we'd have carpet-bombed the entire region with knowledge and food and extended hands and airstrips just over the border for taking refugees away to citizenship, no questions asked.
I'm with Bill Hicks on this one, you can keep replacing the place-names and corporations until we all wise up:
I'll pay the extra nickel on petrol, just knowing brown kids aren't being clubbed to death like baby seals in Honduras, so Pepsi can put a plant down there.
Until then, I'll be thankful for wikileaks - right now, it might be the only thing making Western civilisation a democracy in anything more than name.
Awesome, we need to have a completely anonymous leak site to even know how corrupt our government even is. What a statement!
Nailed it!
This is the story!
Being able to spread and share news such as this is absolutely essential to any kind of informed democracy, or any civilised society for that matter. Resist the resistance!
Yup. When you are mouthing opinions based on orders from on high, you are twisting and manipulating that which makes something your opinion - that you actually believe it. Calling someone out on this might be a rhetorical trick, but someone who has previously sold his opinion should not expect it to be taken serious ever again, and certainly not when expounding on the same subject, while still taking the money!
PS: The parallel to actual whores/prostitutes would be that many believe, and many more somehow feel, that sex is also something which (should) express certain emotions, and not actually having them while implicitly expressing them is twisting that connection. Your milage may vary on how strong or necessary you believe that bond is and should be - personally, I couldn't get past the disconnect...
Exactly. Whoever disagrees has a right to fork the project and do whatever he wants. The only thing he is being denied (in this specific case quite politely by Shuttleworth) is to use the existing project's resources!
This is not anti-democratic, the guy's opinion of what Shuttleworth, and those who chose to follow him, just ended up being heard, but not followed. Is your bar for democracy that every open source project should be voted on by the world assembly, or what exactly is the claim here?
Occam's Razor does not have to do with solutions, it has to do with chosing a hypothesis.
But yeah, I salute a simple solution. And hope that it also works... :-)
Your seem to think (yeah, right) that anything you don't like is evil.
Try reading my post again, you may find there is exactly no support, nor any reason to suppose, that this is my claim or belief.
And if you then try to adress my actual beliefs, without the personal attacks, we might have a conversation where we engage each other instead of just inventing positions for the other party and railing against them.
I am not holding my breath, though. But do surprise me :-)
"...but in calling Apple evil, you're espousing a communist standpoint."
No. The communist standpoint would be all corporations, and indeed any mode of production where the tools for production is owned and people then sell their labour-hours to the owners, is inherently and necessarily evil. (Socialism, btw, is thinking you can keep that system and mitigate its evils).
The things Apple are doing; suing, lying, pushing a model where people have no control over 'their own' devices and generally selling a platform to the so-called content owners instead of servicing the public - is evil. Their motivation does not matter, the things they do have bad consequences for everyone but their shareholders, they know it and this is about as close to 'evil' as you get without waxing theological.
Doing whatever makes money is not a get-out-of-having-a-conscience-card just because 'that's what the public wants'. How is that paper on the invisible hand (which allegedly guarantees this weird thesis) coming, Mr. Smith?
If we give everyone in their seats an iPad, and still replace Jobs, can we keep the jogger - maybe in a Gnu top?
Exactly. Emily Howell is not writing any music, in the normal sense of the word. Cope is, using a very weird sort of sheet and pencil. Music composition is using math (mostly in the form of learned habits, but math nonetheless) and your own creativity.
What has changed is the complexity of those mathematics, and the (extremely) shortened feedback loop between pure mechanical/mathematical analysis and adding some input, changing or throwing out what didn't work, etc.
And! He has managed to to embody some of the "habits" of the greats, so he (or a randomizer) can riff off of that - kudos for that! As someone mentions below, it will be interesting whether (when?) we can teach such meta-skills to a computer.
(Meta-Turing-test; a computer is sentient like us, when it can create a program, which can pass the Turing test).
I'd have a hard time knowing who to root for...
Modded 'insightful' with non-existing mod points!
True. It may be the Italian law, and not the judge in this case, that is utterly retarded (as pointed out by Dhalka226 above).
But - and this is frightening too - the prosecutors wanted to convict google employee of criminal defamation. Of being complicit in defaming the boy. By working for a company, on whose websites kids they did not know posted a video they knew nothing about and never saw, which defamed a person they had never heard of!
PPS: If you start doing something else than taking notes, like emailing, you are not seriously discussing a computer's notetaking capabilities! You are admitting to your own lapsing attention and lack of notetaking capabilities.
IF you write-and-forget (never read your notes again, having saved them somewhere in obscurity), notetaking on a computer is worse.
IF you try to write down everything that is said, instead of sorting and prioritizing as you would more obviously have to using pen and paper, notetaking on a computer is worse.
IF you have no system of differentiating headlines, topics, quick asides, stuff to look up later, direct quotes, etc. etc., notetaking on a computer is worse.
But if you actually think about what media you are using, and adapt your notetaking to it, I have found that the increased throughput, self-and-techonology-enforced order and readability make my lecture and class notes made on a computer far superior than anything I might have had time for in hand. And yes, I have tried taking notes by hand recently. It sucks.
PS: Your milage may vary, some people are helped by doodling, illustrating, making their own charts and connecting bits with arrows. Such people should not, however, make any claims that computers are worse for notetaking, only that they are worse for them. My statements above should be read with similar qualifications.
I am a longtime fan of Frank Herbert, and I approve of this parent! Very succinctly put, sir.
Now don't pounce; but for me, Dune is just the original book cover. I hate reading, watching movies and playing video games, but on a good day my eyes can strain themselves through most of a picture. I don't care about the plot, characterisation or theme - just that one picture and the title.
PS: What are those specks on tops of the worm?