Granted - this organisational 'feature' works pretty well for improving security on Apple's mobile devices.
Malicious apps can, in extreme cases, be remotely disabled by the store
So long as Apple remain trustworthy, sure. Hardly ideal from a Free Software perspective (in that you can't opt-out of these shut-downs, unless I'm mistaken).
purchases, at least in Apple's store, are tied to you, not your computer
The two issues here are DRM and redownload policy.
I've not had an issue with this for years, but then again I've not been using a lot of proprietary software. I have used Steam, which might be viewed as an 'app store' in this light, and the redownload-wherever feature is indeed good one.
the app seller never gets your credit card or any other private info
Unfortunate that the way we pay for things is still so fundamentally broken. Why are we still required to provide sellers with our credit-card details and do the whole payment on trust? It really shouldn't take a trusted app-store, or something weird like PayPal, to securely pay a seller over the web... Haven't credit-card companies had long enough to sort something out?
It's just PR for little political people that want to pander to the Gay and Lesbian community.
It's symbolic, sure, but that doesn't warrant your cynicism.
The question is whether it's a worthwhile symbolism. Personally I'm all for government apologies and pardons. If anything I'd like them to go further, and not just apologise and pardon only Turing himself.
It would also be good if they'd cut out this kind of shit (one could blame the ISP, but the whole bullshit censorship initiative was the UK government's idea).
You're right that on average terrorism dooesn't kill that many each year, but you're ignoring the issue of the worst-case.
One can't really see a way for traffic accidents to ever 'have a really bad year'. The variance on annual traffic accident deaths is presumably quite low.
The worst case for terrorism? The nuclear destruction of most of the populated areas of the world.
I don't agree with pervasive spying, but that's because there are plenty of good reasons to oppose it.
...which of itself has no value, as bus routes are publicly advertised. The trick is the widespread CCTV surveillance - if they want to know which bus you're taking, they can find out.
You are implying that the state would be getting poor value by persuing an appropriate punishment. To me, deterring bomb-threats seems like a perfectly good use of state funds.
Of course, it's only the copyright holder that can complain
I don't follow - is this not as it should be?
Or are you saying it's a limitation that there are no 'copyright police' to discover copyright infringements on behalf of copyright holders (contrasting with the way police do look out for burglars on behalf of the people)?
What? No. You've just invented the idea that the UK only recognises copyrights for works produced within the UK.
I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine the UK court would recognise a copyright infringement regardless of that the author was in California. Surely, if you infringe the Californian's copyright whilst in the UK, you've broken UK copyright law and can be tried in the UK.
Hope you don't mind, I.F., but here's that comment again in human-readable form:
The problem with DRM is that it's inherently the opposite of everything good about computing. The Internet in particular is nothing if not a near-infinite collection of bits and bytes that can be copied and shared at will; in other words, the information superhighway we've been talking about for years. DRM proposes to solve one problem by introducing more problems. The problem is, since information on the Internet is infinitely copyable, none of it should have any inherent value.
Finite demand divided by infinite supply equals zero. Trying to solve this by artificially limiting the supply, which is what copy-protection naturally does, limits what the end user can do with the product in a few ways that have been expanded upon by a lot of people who know more about the matter than I.
Mainly, the dilemma is that you cannot keep people from copying something illegally without keeping people from copying it legally. Copyability being one of the distinct advantages data has over every other medium since the beginning of written records, this is an issue. By causing customers that disadvantage, you make it measurably better for a potential buyer to simply download a cracked version of your 'good', to pirate it. That way, the customer bypasses copy protection and can do as he pleases with whatever he just downloaded, which he couldn't do with the protected version. This obviously isn't a good idea.
You might notice that some software has disadvantages to using pirated versions. One main disadvantage is that you aren't able to get automatically-updated versions of the software after the fact, and another is that you aren't entitled to using certain services, such as the case with pirated video games. The reason for this, and the answer to the piracy conundrum, is that both are services rather than goods. Updates to software provide something that was once impossible to a consumer, the steady improvement and future-proofing of their purchase for the foreseeable future.
An antivirus software can adapt to growing security risks, a video game can update to take advantage of new computing technology (and the users' wishes, which is even more important), and countless other products can see huge improvements in their value by adding regular updates as a service, rather than a good. Access to online services like EA's online servers, for example, does the same thing in a different manner, giving the consumer a service rather than a worthless, infinitely-copyable good.
You might notice that Netflix is built on this model. In exchange for a strikingly low monthly fee, the customer gets access (a service) to every movie and television show Netflix can get the rights to, in a way that takes up no storage space (an advantage over piracy) and now even provides access to proprietary shows that don't exist on the more traditional TV networks.
Netflix doesn't need DRM because they don't sell movies. They provide access to a movie-watching service, and even in the case that a cracker gave access to a way to download movies from Netflix's servers directly, it wouldn't change anything about what Netflix does. It doesn't invalidate what they sell. To put it simply (in our internet-speak, tl;dr), the Internet is enough to tear down the existence of information as a good, and will give rise to the industry of information as a service. And of course, the industries affected will resist at every turn along the way.
My own comment:
Netflix doesn't need DRM
Yes they do, or at least they think they do. That's why they use it. Silverlight is the go-to plugin for DRM'ed video in the browser. This is unfortunate, because Silverlight is terrible. It runs fine on Windows, but with enormous CPU load on Mac. There is no Linux support, and there never will be (except through Wine, if you have a powerful computer).
If Netflix weren't interested in DRM (and if their overlords gave them the choice), they might be using HTML5, but that's not the case.
Just try editing a Wikipedia article introduce a deliberate mistake and see what happens:)
Worth mentioning that, in seriousness, you should never do this. It's Wikipedia vandalism, and waste's everyone's time.
Instead you could just find a Wikipedia edit which corrected an error, and backtrack to see for how long that error was present on Wikipedia. No vandalism necessary.
Slashdot Mirror
Developers are more identifiable.
Granted - this organisational 'feature' works pretty well for improving security on Apple's mobile devices.
Malicious apps can, in extreme cases, be remotely disabled by the store
So long as Apple remain trustworthy, sure. Hardly ideal from a Free Software perspective (in that you can't opt-out of these shut-downs, unless I'm mistaken).
purchases, at least in Apple's store, are tied to you, not your computer
The two issues here are DRM and redownload policy.
I've not had an issue with this for years, but then again I've not been using a lot of proprietary software. I have used Steam, which might be viewed as an 'app store' in this light, and the redownload-wherever feature is indeed good one.
the app seller never gets your credit card or any other private info
Unfortunate that the way we pay for things is still so fundamentally broken. Why are we still required to provide sellers with our credit-card details and do the whole payment on trust? It really shouldn't take a trusted app-store, or something weird like PayPal, to securely pay a seller over the web... Haven't credit-card companies had long enough to sort something out?
Ah yes. Windows technologies aren't meant to last more than 5 years.
It's just PR for little political people that want to pander to the Gay and Lesbian community.
It's symbolic, sure, but that doesn't warrant your cynicism.
The question is whether it's a worthwhile symbolism. Personally I'm all for government apologies and pardons. If anything I'd like them to go further, and not just apologise and pardon only Turing himself.
It would also be good if they'd cut out this kind of shit (one could blame the ISP, but the whole bullshit censorship initiative was the UK government's idea).
You're right that on average terrorism dooesn't kill that many each year, but you're ignoring the issue of the worst-case.
One can't really see a way for traffic accidents to ever 'have a really bad year'. The variance on annual traffic accident deaths is presumably quite low.
The worst case for terrorism? The nuclear destruction of most of the populated areas of the world.
I don't agree with pervasive spying, but that's because there are plenty of good reasons to oppose it.
I agree. Can't see much reason for the rest of the world to continue trusting this stuff.
The credibility is gone.
I guess you're right, but what does driving being dangerous have to do with anything?
Don't know how these two are related...
Numpty? You insensitive clod!
Tories bad, therefore Labour good, right?
while engaging in the statistically most dangerous everyday activity in the Western world
What?
...which of itself has no value, as bus routes are publicly advertised. The trick is the widespread CCTV surveillance - if they want to know which bus you're taking, they can find out.
Are you not paying attention at all? ICC produced slower, i.e. deliberately sabotaged code-paths for non-Intel chips.
The design choices made by AMD/VIA/etc don't enter into the equation.
This sounds vaguely like a 'capitalist economics is an inescapable force of nature' argument, but conveyed needlessly cryptically.
What exactly are you trying to say?
My thoughts almost exactly.
Silverlight has at least succeeded in stopping people downloading the video files directly, the way people did with BBC's iPlayer.
they should be executed.
No, but that's an entirely different conversation. Other than this, I agree entirely.
You are implying that the state would be getting poor value by persuing an appropriate punishment. To me, deterring bomb-threats seems like a perfectly good use of state funds.
Am I missing something?
Not to continue to feed the troll, but that doesn't sit with:
but female students would be a distraction
"yankee" which is a slur against denizens of the northeastern US.
Of course, it's only the copyright holder that can complain
I don't follow - is this not as it should be?
Or are you saying it's a limitation that there are no 'copyright police' to discover copyright infringements on behalf of copyright holders (contrasting with the way police do look out for burglars on behalf of the people)?
I guess it does sound simmilar to "yankee" which is a slur against denizens of the northeastern US.
It always struck me as odd that that word made its way into the NATO phonetic alphabet.
What? No. You've just invented the idea that the UK only recognises copyrights for works produced within the UK.
I'm not a lawyer, but I imagine the UK court would recognise a copyright infringement regardless of that the author was in California. Surely, if you infringe the Californian's copyright whilst in the UK, you've broken UK copyright law and can be tried in the UK.
Hope you don't mind, I.F., but here's that comment again in human-readable form:
The problem with DRM is that it's inherently the opposite of everything good about computing. The Internet in particular is nothing if not a near-infinite collection of bits and bytes that can be copied and shared at will; in other words, the information superhighway we've been talking about for years. DRM proposes to solve one problem by introducing more problems. The problem is, since information on the Internet is infinitely copyable, none of it should have any inherent value.
Finite demand divided by infinite supply equals zero. Trying to solve this by artificially limiting the supply, which is what copy-protection naturally does, limits what the end user can do with the product in a few ways that have been expanded upon by a lot of people who know more about the matter than I.
Mainly, the dilemma is that you cannot keep people from copying something illegally without keeping people from copying it legally. Copyability being one of the distinct advantages data has over every other medium since the beginning of written records, this is an issue. By causing customers that disadvantage, you make it measurably better for a potential buyer to simply download a cracked version of your 'good', to pirate it. That way, the customer bypasses copy protection and can do as he pleases with whatever he just downloaded, which he couldn't do with the protected version. This obviously isn't a good idea.
You might notice that some software has disadvantages to using pirated versions. One main disadvantage is that you aren't able to get automatically-updated versions of the software after the fact, and another is that you aren't entitled to using certain services, such as the case with pirated video games. The reason for this, and the answer to the piracy conundrum, is that both are services rather than goods. Updates to software provide something that was once impossible to a consumer, the steady improvement and future-proofing of their purchase for the foreseeable future.
An antivirus software can adapt to growing security risks, a video game can update to take advantage of new computing technology (and the users' wishes, which is even more important), and countless other products can see huge improvements in their value by adding regular updates as a service, rather than a good. Access to online services like EA's online servers, for example, does the same thing in a different manner, giving the consumer a service rather than a worthless, infinitely-copyable good.
You might notice that Netflix is built on this model. In exchange for a strikingly low monthly fee, the customer gets access (a service) to every movie and television show Netflix can get the rights to, in a way that takes up no storage space (an advantage over piracy) and now even provides access to proprietary shows that don't exist on the more traditional TV networks.
Netflix doesn't need DRM because they don't sell movies. They provide access to a movie-watching service, and even in the case that a cracker gave access to a way to download movies from Netflix's servers directly, it wouldn't change anything about what Netflix does. It doesn't invalidate what they sell. To put it simply (in our internet-speak, tl;dr), the Internet is enough to tear down the existence of information as a good, and will give rise to the industry of information as a service. And of course, the industries affected will resist at every turn along the way.
My own comment:
Netflix doesn't need DRM
Yes they do, or at least they think they do. That's why they use it. Silverlight is the go-to plugin for DRM'ed video in the browser. This is unfortunate, because Silverlight is terrible. It runs fine on Windows, but with enormous CPU load on Mac. There is no Linux support, and there never will be (except through Wine, if you have a powerful computer).
If Netflix weren't interested in DRM (and if their overlords gave them the choice), they might be using HTML5, but that's not the case.
Sure, there is sometimes a DRM-free option, but for a given title available only on Steam?
Vehicles are registered to individuals, though. Even if the vehicles database and the tax database aren't unified now, they probably will be some day.
Further, here is some discussion on just this topic.
(I could've sworn there was an official mention of this on Wikipedia itself, but I can't find one.)
Just try editing a Wikipedia article introduce a deliberate mistake and see what happens :)
Worth mentioning that, in seriousness, you should never do this. It's Wikipedia vandalism, and waste's everyone's time.
Instead you could just find a Wikipedia edit which corrected an error, and backtrack to see for how long that error was present on Wikipedia. No vandalism necessary.