I'm in the same boat as you -- a longtime Apple user (some people might, with some justification, say "fanboi") who's getting fed up with the company -- but I have to say that in the particular case, I don't see the problem. They offer warrantees against equipment failure that's not the user's fault, and one of the reasons for my brand loyalty is the excellent warranty service I've always received from them on the rare occasions that I've needed it. The warrantees are not intended to protect machines against user stupidity. Until now, they (and every other company that offers similar service) have had to rely on users being honest except in really blatant cases*. But we know there are a lot of users out there who aren't honest, and the truth of the matter is, they make things more expensive for everyone, including those of us who buy warranteed products and do our best to take reasonable care of them.
In short, yes, once you buy the machine you have the right to do whatever you want with it -- and Apple has the right to tell you that if you do certain things, they will no longer fix it for free.
Now, if you want to talk about the absurdity involved in the approval for iPhone apps, I'm right there with you.
* E.g., a friend of mine who does tech support for IBM receives an unbelievable number of requests for laptop replacements after said laptops have been thrown in swimming pools. Apparently with the particular support contract he works on, this is a frequent enough complaint that it has its own category in their database.
Imersion in liquids - This would leave dried residue unless it's immersed in de-ionized water or other pure substance that wouldn't leave any residue.
Except that with the amount of crap that accumulates inside any case with a reasonable amount of use, it's impossible to tell. Seriously. I've opened up both laptops and desktops that have had entire cups of coffee spilled in them, and after they dry out you can't tell exactly where the liquid was because the inside of the entire machine is so gunked up. I can't imagine cell phones are any better.
Arrogant? Egocentric? Maybe so. But since we are as far as we know the only species on Earth that's ever built any kind of robot, it doesn't seem unreasonable to put a certain amount of research effort into creating a robot which is in some way humanoid. (In this particular case, of course, this means "think like us" rather than "look and move like us.") If nothing else, it may give us a better understanding of ourselves. I assume you're not going to argue that's a bad thing.
Also, there are plenty of people working on robots that aren't upright and bipedal. As it happens, right now most of that research is going into new and better ways to kill things that are upright and bipedal, but give it time, give it time.
There will be no intelligence explosion. A snail cannot design a smarter snail. Humanity has not yet designed a smarter human.
Statements which are, in order, (1) unknown, (2) probably true, and (3) true. But (1) in no ways follows from (2) and (3).
In 1900, you could have written the following --
"There will be no powered heavier-than-air flight. A snail cannot design a flying machine. Humanity has not yet designed a way to fly a powered winged machine."
-- and your primary claim would have been proven false shortly thereafter.
And finally... snails? WTF do snails have to do with this? Snails don't design much of anything, as far as we know. When you can log onto Snaildot, let us know, maybe then there will be a point to bringing them into the discussion.
Hmmm, good point. I think, though, that you have to distinguish between the phenomenon as it applied to a very small subculture (geeks, basically) and to society as a whole. The critical point, it seems to me, was with the rise of the online services in the late 80s and early 90s -- ca. 1990 was when the idea of communicating via computer with a large number of people outside your local area became something the general public could understand. DARPAnet, BBSs, and even Usenet were just too far under the radar to have a widespread cultural effect.
"A plus to society" is the kind of thing that can only be judged in retrospect. When online social networking's been around for several generations, maybe we'll be able to decide. What is undeniable right now is that it's important to a hell of a lot of people, and people who reflexively say "no it's not" are ignoring the reality that's staring them in the face.
You're comparing, um, apples to oranges. Try entering "why does Google suck" into Google. The very first link is to http://www.whydoesgooglesuck.com/. Comparable behavior on Google's part to Microsoft would be if instead, you get suggestions on why Yahoo sucks.
Yes, I remember that article, and I think it's an interesting area of research. But "projected holographic universe" != "simulated universe". There's no support in Hogan's work that I can see for the quasi-creationist viewpoint that we're all living inside someone's video game.
Human brains are really, really good at visual pattern recognition. Having this kind of model to play with is very useful in understanding the anatomy of the creature we're studying. Looking at individual images of the fossils, or even the fossils themselves, is just not the same thing; there are patterns in the totality of the reconstructed image that we might miss looking at things one at a time.
Also, I don't remember playing any video games that looked that good in the 80s.
now science points towards us living in a simulated universe
Huh?
AFAICT, the "simulated universe" is a fun idea to play with, but there's no evidence for it (if you have real citations to the contrary, as opposed to uninformed pop-sci speculation, I'll be glad to see it.) Now, it is true that we are increasingly able to simulate certain aspects of the universe with impressive accuracy... which probably has to do with the fact that that's what we're trying to do when we create simulations. Being products of the universe in which we live, it's not too surprising that our simulations tend toward the nature of that universe.
True enough -- and as an anonymous coward pointed out, many (perhaps most) in-house networks aren't going to be secured all that well either. Allegedly HIPAA-compliant systems might satisfy the lawyers, but I have to say I'm deeply skeptical that the standard of privacy they actually provide is all it's cracked up to be... or any better than what Google can do.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
If we didn't already know quite a bit about the basic workings of our own bodies, we wouldn't have been able to make the discovery discussed in TFA.
Be careful not to confuse "we don't know everything," which is clearly true, with "we don't know anything," which is a favorite propaganda technique of anti-science fanatics (and usually followed up with "... except for what my personal fairy tale tells us, which of course Explains Everything.")
Um... how exactly is someone who does a webcomic a "fraud"? WYSIWIG: little stick figures doing goofy things. You liked his earlier comics, you don't like his later ones, fine. But he's not lying to anyone about what he's doing.
At this point, there are a lot of innocent Iraqis and Afghans who depend on the US military for protection from the fanatics in their midst. Now, you can argue that we should never have created this situation in the first place, and I'll agree with you (at least in the case of Iraq; Afghanistan's a little more complicated) but the fact is, that's the situation we have to deal with. The kind of abrupt pullout you suggest would lead inevitably to a bloodbath of epic proportions followed, most likely, by the creation of two new fanatical theocracies with active hatred for the US and the means (especially in Iraq's case) to fund massive terrorist attacks. There's bitter irony in this, of course, since before the wars, Iraq posed no threat to us and Afghanistan, while it was in the grip of a theocracy as grotesque as any the world has ever known, was only a threat insofar as it harbored foreign terrorists. But that's the way it is, and "how many transport planes do we need" won't make it go away.
We should have just left Iraq alone, and we probably could have bullied and/or bargained the Taliban into giving us bin Laden. That's what we should have done. But now we are prisoners of our history, and I don't envy Obama his job of planning how to get the sentence reduced.
GPP never said that everyone who gets a domain name stolen is sleazy. He did say that these particular guys who got their domain name stolen are sleazy, and as far as it's possible to tell from the TFA, he's right.
Yeah, I was thinking that too. There really aren't any good guys in this case.
I know it would open up a huge can of worms, but I've often thought that domain name ownership ought to be like land owenership under the Homestead Act. That is, if you're the first person to apply for a domain, you get it for free, but you have to "improve" it, i.e., do something with it other than just sitting on it and hoping someone will pay you a bunch of money, in a certain amount of time or you don't get to keep it. Impractical, I know, but the whole idea of domain name squatting is just irritating as hell.
He doesn't seem to be in any hurry to wind down Bush's wars, either. Granted, it's a lot easier to get into a war than get out of it, so I'm willing to give him a pass on this one. But --
I also haven't heard of him condoning practices that violate international treaties.
Then you haven't been paying attention. He is extending Bush's monstrous policies on "enemy combatants" and vigorously fighting any effort to open up the records. Glenn Greenwald has been covering this extensively on Salon for the last several months; look through the archives and you'll be pretty shocked.
Look, I voted for Obama, and I haven't yet -- quite -- ripped the "Vets for Obama" sticker off my car in disgust. I still have no doubt that he'll make a much better President than McCain would have. But while I expected him to back off somewhat on most of his campaign propaganda once he got in office, as all politicians do, I have to say I'm really kind of surprised at how thoroughly he's turned his back on what appeared to be some core values.
Ripley expected to be back for her daughter's birthday (per the director's cut) and the Marines all pretty much acted the way their current counterparts would when shipping out for a short mission. ("We get back without you, I'll tell your folks.") It's pretty clear that there's FTL involved, even if for whatever reason people have to sleep through it. The idea of a relativistic interstellar culture such as you describe is an interesting one, and I think there's fertile ground for storytelling there, but the Alien universe isn't it.
Re:Fiction == Making shit up.
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Making up what is necessary to tell the story is very different from making everything up. The first is, pretty much, what all fiction writers do; the second is pure laziness.
Tolkien's an interesting example. How do you come up with a believable fantasy world? Well, for one thing, you create a history for it. The history you create has echoes of real history and/or well-known mythology, so it feels right to the reader. You populate your world with people who are products of that history, who live in a self-consistent world and react to their surroundings in believable ways. If you're really dedicated, maybe you even come up with meaningful, believable languages for them to speak. All of which, of course, Tolkien did -- and most fantasy authors don't, which is why poorly thought out sword-and-sorcery epics come and go all the time, while Tolkien's work endures.
In the case of fiction set in the more-or-less real world, it's both easier and harder. Easier, because most of the worldbuilding is already done for you; harder, because if you make a mistake, there are going to be a hell of a lot of people who know exactly where you went wrong. If you give a damn about your own work, you'll try to do the latter as little as possible, and put just as much effort into your background research as you do into characterization and plot. There are plenty of authors who just don't care, of course, and plenty of readers who don't either; that's their choice, but those of us who do care reserve the right to point and laugh.
Re:Oh noes!
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Willing suspension of disbelief is easier when you aren't being asked to disbelieve everything you know all at once. In other words, no, people shouldn't rely on fiction for factual information. (Which doesn't stop people from doing it, as the constant "citations" of Gattaca and Jurassic Park in any/. discussion touching on genetics shows nicely.) But for a lot of readers, if the author comes up with a believable background, it makes the story itself a lot more enjoyable.
Re:Poor Dan Brown
on
Tetraktys
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Maybe the reason he writes his books lacking technical authenticity is at least in part because that's what people want to read?
That's what some people want to read. Hell, maybe even most people. But as long as there are enough people who want to read books with a technical gimmick where the technical part isn't complete gibberish, this one sounds like a good bet. Not every author has to write for every reader, you know? And the fact that Brown's books are popular doesn't make him immune from criticism.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple gets forgiven for everything, but if Microsoft even hinted of this they'd get flamed.
GMAFB. Have you ever dealt with Microsoft tech support? They are masters at dodging their responsibilities. Apple is a latecomer to this party.
I'm in the same boat as you -- a longtime Apple user (some people might, with some justification, say "fanboi") who's getting fed up with the company -- but I have to say that in the particular case, I don't see the problem. They offer warrantees against equipment failure that's not the user's fault, and one of the reasons for my brand loyalty is the excellent warranty service I've always received from them on the rare occasions that I've needed it. The warrantees are not intended to protect machines against user stupidity. Until now, they (and every other company that offers similar service) have had to rely on users being honest except in really blatant cases*. But we know there are a lot of users out there who aren't honest, and the truth of the matter is, they make things more expensive for everyone, including those of us who buy warranteed products and do our best to take reasonable care of them.
In short, yes, once you buy the machine you have the right to do whatever you want with it -- and Apple has the right to tell you that if you do certain things, they will no longer fix it for free.
Now, if you want to talk about the absurdity involved in the approval for iPhone apps, I'm right there with you.
* E.g., a friend of mine who does tech support for IBM receives an unbelievable number of requests for laptop replacements after said laptops have been thrown in swimming pools. Apparently with the particular support contract he works on, this is a frequent enough complaint that it has its own category in their database.
Imersion in liquids - This would leave dried residue unless it's immersed in de-ionized water or other pure substance that wouldn't leave any residue.
Except that with the amount of crap that accumulates inside any case with a reasonable amount of use, it's impossible to tell. Seriously. I've opened up both laptops and desktops that have had entire cups of coffee spilled in them, and after they dry out you can't tell exactly where the liquid was because the inside of the entire machine is so gunked up. I can't imagine cell phones are any better.
First off, it's been said that people only use 10% of their actual brain power.
Arrogant? Egocentric? Maybe so. But since we are as far as we know the only species on Earth that's ever built any kind of robot, it doesn't seem unreasonable to put a certain amount of research effort into creating a robot which is in some way humanoid. (In this particular case, of course, this means "think like us" rather than "look and move like us.") If nothing else, it may give us a better understanding of ourselves. I assume you're not going to argue that's a bad thing.
Also, there are plenty of people working on robots that aren't upright and bipedal. As it happens, right now most of that research is going into new and better ways to kill things that are upright and bipedal, but give it time, give it time.
There will be no intelligence explosion. A snail cannot design a smarter snail. Humanity has not yet designed a smarter human.
Statements which are, in order, (1) unknown, (2) probably true, and (3) true. But (1) in no ways follows from (2) and (3).
In 1900, you could have written the following --
"There will be no powered heavier-than-air flight. A snail cannot design a flying machine. Humanity has not yet designed a way to fly a powered winged machine."
-- and your primary claim would have been proven false shortly thereafter.
And finally ... snails? WTF do snails have to do with this? Snails don't design much of anything, as far as we know. When you can log onto Snaildot, let us know, maybe then there will be a point to bringing them into the discussion.
Hmmm, good point. I think, though, that you have to distinguish between the phenomenon as it applied to a very small subculture (geeks, basically) and to society as a whole. The critical point, it seems to me, was with the rise of the online services in the late 80s and early 90s -- ca. 1990 was when the idea of communicating via computer with a large number of people outside your local area became something the general public could understand. DARPAnet, BBSs, and even Usenet were just too far under the radar to have a widespread cultural effect.
"A plus to society" is the kind of thing that can only be judged in retrospect. When online social networking's been around for several generations, maybe we'll be able to decide. What is undeniable right now is that it's important to a hell of a lot of people, and people who reflexively say "no it's not" are ignoring the reality that's staring them in the face.
They are a business that owns a search engine, so #$@#$ what if they bias search results, what else would you expect from any business.
Google doesn't.
If Google, a business whose entire existence depends on its search engine, can give honest query results, what's Microsoft's excuse?
You're comparing, um, apples to oranges. Try entering "why does Google suck" into Google. The very first link is to http://www.whydoesgooglesuck.com/. Comparable behavior on Google's part to Microsoft would be if instead, you get suggestions on why Yahoo sucks.
Yes, I remember that article, and I think it's an interesting area of research. But "projected holographic universe" != "simulated universe". There's no support in Hogan's work that I can see for the quasi-creationist viewpoint that we're all living inside someone's video game.
Human brains are really, really good at visual pattern recognition. Having this kind of model to play with is very useful in understanding the anatomy of the creature we're studying. Looking at individual images of the fossils, or even the fossils themselves, is just not the same thing; there are patterns in the totality of the reconstructed image that we might miss looking at things one at a time.
Also, I don't remember playing any video games that looked that good in the 80s.
now science points towards us living in a simulated universe
Huh?
AFAICT, the "simulated universe" is a fun idea to play with, but there's no evidence for it (if you have real citations to the contrary, as opposed to uninformed pop-sci speculation, I'll be glad to see it.) Now, it is true that we are increasingly able to simulate certain aspects of the universe with impressive accuracy ... which probably has to do with the fact that that's what we're trying to do when we create simulations. Being products of the universe in which we live, it's not too surprising that our simulations tend toward the nature of that universe.
True enough -- and as an anonymous coward pointed out, many (perhaps most) in-house networks aren't going to be secured all that well either. Allegedly HIPAA-compliant systems might satisfy the lawyers, but I have to say I'm deeply skeptical that the standard of privacy they actually provide is all it's cracked up to be ... or any better than what Google can do.
Yes, everyone should be worried about a nonexistent law.
There is a law called HIPAA that might possibly have some bearing on this too, and as it happens, that one's real.
Yet, somehow, we don't know the basic workings of our own bodies.
If we didn't already know quite a bit about the basic workings of our own bodies, we wouldn't have been able to make the discovery discussed in TFA.
Be careful not to confuse "we don't know everything," which is clearly true, with "we don't know anything," which is a favorite propaganda technique of anti-science fanatics (and usually followed up with "... except for what my personal fairy tale tells us, which of course Explains Everything.")
I realised the guy is a fraud.
Um ... how exactly is someone who does a webcomic a "fraud"? WYSIWIG: little stick figures doing goofy things. You liked his earlier comics, you don't like his later ones, fine. But he's not lying to anyone about what he's doing.
At this point, there are a lot of innocent Iraqis and Afghans who depend on the US military for protection from the fanatics in their midst. Now, you can argue that we should never have created this situation in the first place, and I'll agree with you (at least in the case of Iraq; Afghanistan's a little more complicated) but the fact is, that's the situation we have to deal with. The kind of abrupt pullout you suggest would lead inevitably to a bloodbath of epic proportions followed, most likely, by the creation of two new fanatical theocracies with active hatred for the US and the means (especially in Iraq's case) to fund massive terrorist attacks. There's bitter irony in this, of course, since before the wars, Iraq posed no threat to us and Afghanistan, while it was in the grip of a theocracy as grotesque as any the world has ever known, was only a threat insofar as it harbored foreign terrorists. But that's the way it is, and "how many transport planes do we need" won't make it go away.
We should have just left Iraq alone, and we probably could have bullied and/or bargained the Taliban into giving us bin Laden. That's what we should have done. But now we are prisoners of our history, and I don't envy Obama his job of planning how to get the sentence reduced.
GPP never said that everyone who gets a domain name stolen is sleazy. He did say that these particular guys who got their domain name stolen are sleazy, and as far as it's possible to tell from the TFA, he's right.
Yeah, I was thinking that too. There really aren't any good guys in this case.
I know it would open up a huge can of worms, but I've often thought that domain name ownership ought to be like land owenership under the Homestead Act. That is, if you're the first person to apply for a domain, you get it for free, but you have to "improve" it, i.e., do something with it other than just sitting on it and hoping someone will pay you a bunch of money, in a certain amount of time or you don't get to keep it. Impractical, I know, but the whole idea of domain name squatting is just irritating as hell.
He hasn't started any wars so far.
He doesn't seem to be in any hurry to wind down Bush's wars, either. Granted, it's a lot easier to get into a war than get out of it, so I'm willing to give him a pass on this one. But --
I also haven't heard of him condoning practices that violate international treaties.
Then you haven't been paying attention. He is extending Bush's monstrous policies on "enemy combatants" and vigorously fighting any effort to open up the records. Glenn Greenwald has been covering this extensively on Salon for the last several months; look through the archives and you'll be pretty shocked.
Look, I voted for Obama, and I haven't yet -- quite -- ripped the "Vets for Obama" sticker off my car in disgust. I still have no doubt that he'll make a much better President than McCain would have. But while I expected him to back off somewhat on most of his campaign propaganda once he got in office, as all politicians do, I have to say I'm really kind of surprised at how thoroughly he's turned his back on what appeared to be some core values.
Not even the events in Aliens require FTL travel
Ripley expected to be back for her daughter's birthday (per the director's cut) and the Marines all pretty much acted the way their current counterparts would when shipping out for a short mission. ("We get back without you, I'll tell your folks.") It's pretty clear that there's FTL involved, even if for whatever reason people have to sleep through it. The idea of a relativistic interstellar culture such as you describe is an interesting one, and I think there's fertile ground for storytelling there, but the Alien universe isn't it.
Making up what is necessary to tell the story is very different from making everything up. The first is, pretty much, what all fiction writers do; the second is pure laziness.
Tolkien's an interesting example. How do you come up with a believable fantasy world? Well, for one thing, you create a history for it. The history you create has echoes of real history and/or well-known mythology, so it feels right to the reader. You populate your world with people who are products of that history, who live in a self-consistent world and react to their surroundings in believable ways. If you're really dedicated, maybe you even come up with meaningful, believable languages for them to speak. All of which, of course, Tolkien did -- and most fantasy authors don't, which is why poorly thought out sword-and-sorcery epics come and go all the time, while Tolkien's work endures.
In the case of fiction set in the more-or-less real world, it's both easier and harder. Easier, because most of the worldbuilding is already done for you; harder, because if you make a mistake, there are going to be a hell of a lot of people who know exactly where you went wrong. If you give a damn about your own work, you'll try to do the latter as little as possible, and put just as much effort into your background research as you do into characterization and plot. There are plenty of authors who just don't care, of course, and plenty of readers who don't either; that's their choice, but those of us who do care reserve the right to point and laugh.
Willing suspension of disbelief is easier when you aren't being asked to disbelieve everything you know all at once. In other words, no, people shouldn't rely on fiction for factual information. (Which doesn't stop people from doing it, as the constant "citations" of Gattaca and Jurassic Park in any /. discussion touching on genetics shows nicely.) But for a lot of readers, if the author comes up with a believable background, it makes the story itself a lot more enjoyable.
Maybe the reason he writes his books lacking technical authenticity is at least in part because that's what people want to read?
That's what some people want to read. Hell, maybe even most people. But as long as there are enough people who want to read books with a technical gimmick where the technical part isn't complete gibberish, this one sounds like a good bet. Not every author has to write for every reader, you know? And the fact that Brown's books are popular doesn't make him immune from criticism.