However I do think it is the right thing to do for Google to recognize along with many of us that there are people who made the ultimate sacrifice that Google would have the freedom to do what they do (and we have the freedom to do what we will). [...] Remember, the seeds of the atom bomb and the guided missile began in WWII and pre WWII era Germany, not America. Who knows what would have happened if the Nazis were not reigned in.
See, you are making the same mistake again, trying to justify the suffering by pointing to its purpose.
But your very example shows that this is wrong. Soldiers most certainly didn't die in WW I to beat down an emergent Nazi state. Germany was no different in WW I from any other European power, entangled in a mesh of alliances and obligations. Nobody knows what would have happened if Germany had won WW I or if the victors had followed Woodrow Wilson's recommendations, but it's pretty clear there would have been no Nazis.
You don't honor veterans by inventing historical fictions for why they suffered. The fact is that many soldiers have died meaningless deaths, and those soldiers should still be honored. And we can honor them best by making sure that they are taken well care of in our society and that we are far more careful in the future about when and where we deploy our military.
Looks to me like people are remembering the wrong thing. On November 11, one should commemorate fallen soldiers. But one should also remember the political and social issues that caused millions to die in WWI and WWII in the first place, the international cooperation it took to win in those conflicts, and the dangers of right wing populism, nationalism, and militarism.
It seems to me those lessons are getting lost, in particular among the right wing nuts that complain about Google not having a special logo for Veterans Day.
while symbian could be improved i have no problems using it every day since a nokia 3650 -> nokia n70 -> e61 -> e61i. the current phone e61i is used every day to
Yes, Nokia makes good hardware and passable software. However, Nokia has a decade of experience building, customizing, shipping, and supporting Symbian phones; T-Mobile has none, but they do have a lot of experience with Windows Mobile.
T-Mobile isn't thinking about this as making the best phone, they are thinking about this as making a better phone for the Windows Mobile market segment, which is probably a big money maker for them already, and from that point of view, they made a reasonable choice.
While Symbian isn't great, it's not as bad as MS mobile [...] As regards price, if you don't spend on software then the software on your phone is going to suck
You and I may have that opinion, but the fact is that the US market is largely split between Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, and iPhone. US consumers seem to go for smart phones that suck, so it's low risk to ship another one with one of those OSes. And the only one T-Mobile can license is Windows Mobile.
Umm, openMoko, Symbian, Linux? You discount Symbian and Linux so quickly. While Symbian isn't great, it's not as bad as MS mobile
While we may share the opinion that these are better systems than Windows Mobile, where is the actual evidence? If T-Mobile were going to pick one of those, they'd have had to spend a lot of money on marketing, software development, and support in the US market.
Motorola, of course, is shipping a lot of Linux handsets, but notice that they haven't even started building a developer community around it; they are using Linux for dumb phones right now.
Android is hopefully changing all that and making Linux a much easier choice: both the buzz and the design of Android help with marketing and building a developer community.
what exactly? Has Google been demanding that the Firefox developers do something that doesn't make sense?
Sure, if Firefox can find another source of funding as good as Google, that's great. But to have no strings attached funding is useful even if there is only a single source.
The question I'd ask is whether Google is actually getting their money's worth; I don't find Firefox all that great. But, I suppose, Google also has to stick to what they can get, for the time being.
if the US government--president, NSA, CIA, FBI--are willing to give up their secrecy.
What is intolerable, however, is for government officials to have a lot of information on private citizens, but for private citizens to have little information on the government.
Yes, it largely is: it uses standard Gnome components (actually, the Gtk+ subset) and more-or-less standard windows, keybindings, themes, shortcuts, and menu structures.
Compare that with something like Blender. Or compare it with something like the consumer imaging programs from Adobe. Those use wildly non-standard user interface elements and layouts.
I look at the GNOME human interface guidelines, and I see whole bunches of ways the Gimp doesn't conform.
Quite right. And the best thing for the Gimp to do would be to fix those non-conforming aspects of the UI. The worst thing for the Gimp to do would be to try to clone Photoshop, since the Photoshop UI itself has lots of problems and it would not be Gnome HIG compliant.
Unfortunately, after they did such a great job designing the hardware, T-Mobile's chief executive and his ex-Apple designer punted on the software. They equipped this phone with Microsoft's Windows Mobile 6. As it turns out, that decision is just as much an impediment to the Shadow's greatness as AT&T exclusivity is to the iPhone.
(The 20 key hardware is the same used by Blackberry and Sony, by the way, and generally works pretty well... certainly a lot better than T9.)
But, what were they thinking going with MS Mobile?
For the US market, what choice did they have? Apple, PalmOS, and Blackberry can't be licensed, Symbian is likely expensive and nearly as messy as Windows Mobile. And they didn't have the time and resources to do their own Linux-based system. So, for a smartphone like that, Windows Mobile is the obvious choice for companies like HTC and T-Mobile right now. You can't fault them for that.
With Android, of course, they do... let's hope that T-Mobile is smart and makes that choice. HTC (the maker of the Shadow) is already on board with Android...
The device is called the "HTC Juno", related to the "HTC Vox". I doubt it was "designed by" a T-Mobile executive, although he probably had some input.
In any case, the problem with those phones is the Windows Mobile software; since HTC is part of the Open Handset Alliance, hopefully, all that great hardware will be liberated soon and run with easy-to-use Google services.
do people really think the one-off price (ignoring the contract) of the iPhone is high? it's about £270 for the UK
For an EDGE-only phone with no installable applications, a 480x320 screen, no voice dialing, no A2DP, limited chat, no OBEX, no modem functionality, and lots of other limitations?
You know wrong. Islam has a concept analogous to "kosher" called "halal". Strict observance of Islam is likely highly correlated with buying halal versions of food.
Even if you find out [blah blah blah]
I'm not saying that the data mining is effective, I'm merely pointing out that the analogy was wrong: Islam is different from communism in its relation to food.
If you don't understand why they are doing this, you can't argue effectively against it.
No, it does "not follow". That's why I said "it stands to reason".
Religion is just fine until religious people try to make unbelievers follow their religious laws
That is quite incorrect: many religions harm people even when they don't try to impose their religious beliefs on them.
you can't start by insulting 70% of the people you have to convince to follow you [...] You're preaching to the choir here, but if you talk like this to people who don't already agree with you it's no wonder nobody listens.
So, you think that by careful, polite dilly-dallying around theological issues, you are going to convince people? Get real.
Most people who follow religions do so out of social conformance and to be part of a community. That will only change if people understand that a sizeable fraction of the population considers their choice immoral and that their choice excludes them from many communities.
And one makes that clear differently in different contexts. In an on-line discussion forum, it's perfectly reasonable to state "I consider religion evil" and defend that statement. At a dinner party, one would express one's disapproval by rolling one's eyes, changing the subject, and crossing people who flaunt their religion off the list of future dinner guests.
Don't like what AT&T is doing? Don't buy their products,
I'd love to. Which provider can you name where I can be certain that this isn't happening?
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE company is allowing the government to examine traffic passing over its PRIVATE data network.
No, they are upset that this is done surreptitiously and that it is coerced by the government. If AT&T would do this voluntarily and announce it, everybody would just switch.
If you're the government, how hard do you think it would be to tamper with those signature databases to make them match the man in the middle?
It's basically impossible, given that there are many different ways in which people exchange and verify keys.
How is the government going to do a man in the middle attack against verifying a key by phone? How is it going to know not to tamper with my key when I travel across the country with my laptop that has all my keys on it, copied locally? How is it going to do man-in-the-middle attacks against electronic key generating fobs?
The government might get away with tampering with 99% of the keys out there, but screwing up on the remaining 1% would raise such a stink that everybody would have heard about it.
Even if you're right, Stalin's atheism didn't save him from irrationality
Stalin himself got everything he wanted, so I don't see how he was irrational. The people who were irrational were his followers, and their irrational belief was in totalitarianism.
because he believed in marxism-leninism in the same manner that Catholics believe in God
You correctly observe that totalitarianism and religion are very much alike. Since we recognize that totalitarianism is evil, it therefore stands to reason that religion is also evil.
People in general will find justifications for their preferred course of action, rational if they exist, irrational if that's all there is. Atheists are not excepted, as it's a human tendency.
It is a human tendency. But a society of billions capable of launching nuclear missiles needs to overcome its demons. And we do that one step at a time, identifying and working towards ending one social ill at a time: feudalism, monarchy, totalitarianism, religion, etc.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that religion should be banned. Religion is like abortion, drinking, smoking, and prostitution: in a free, democratic society, you can't realistically eliminate it by law, and you can't discriminate against people who engage in these acts as long as they don't hurt others. But we must not acquiesce to the immorality religion any more than to the immorality of smoking, abortion, or prostitution.
Atheism in specific doesn't, but lots of atheists (Stalin, for example) do.
Yes, and you're free to blame those atheists for their irrational behavior; you can't blame atheism itself for the irrationality of its members.
The problem isn't people believing in God or the wheel of history or somesuch with zero evidence.
That isn't "the" problem, but it is clearly one of many problems.
The problem is people making real-world decisions that affect millions on the basis of this zero evidence. Atheists are no more immune than religious people to making important decisions based on no evidence.
Quite to the contrary: atheists are considerably more "immune" to making important decisions based on no evidence because being an atheist does not intrinsically require you to make irrational decisions about anything, while being, say, a Catholic intrinsically requires you to make irrational decisions about some things.
If the goal is to have them switch, you have to address their needs
Well, that's not the goal. I really don't care about having thousands of whiny Photoshop users use the Gimp. I have no problem with those people paying Adobe if they can't be bothered to learn the Gimp.
GIMP will be surpassed by a more user-friendly program if the attitude is "we have all the users we want".
Programs are always surpassed by more user-friendly programs, and that's a good thing. I predict, though, that whatever user-friendly program it will be surpassed by will look nothing like Photoshop.
It's not belief in God that's a problem, it's believing you're right in the face of all evidence. Atheists are not immune to the latter.
The difference is that atheism itself does not claim absolute truth about anything. Communism and Marxism either work or they don't, and that's an empirical question, which has been settled for most people. Some people may irrationally persist in it, but that's because they are irrational, not because atheism tells them to be irrational. Even the existence of god in atheism is not a matter of faith, it's a matter of absence of evidence and Occam's razor.
But religion is different. Catholicism claims to be a universal truth, no matter how inconsistent and historically variable its beliefs are, and no matter how many rapes and genocides the church is responsible for. Religion intrinsically tells people to be irrational.
The sum of thousands of years of human suffering at the hands of religious leaders can't hold a candle to the hundreds of millions of deaths at the hands of 20th century dictators,
Religion was responsible for the very existence of many of those dictators, and often supported them.
The single largest cause of suffering? Greed. For money, power, sex etc. No question. Religion is merely the context in which some people have exercised that greed.
"Merely the context"? That is exactly the problem with religions: they create "contexts" and conditions in which people can get away with murder, oppression, and genocide.
In different words, we can't abolish greed--it is human nature. But we can try to create social institutions that limit it and channel it into beneficial directions; religions have proven that they are incapable of doing so.
Has it dawned on these people that a large number of Middle-Easterners might have the same sentiments regarding the religeous extremeism,
The situation is different for Chinese and Middle Eastern food: communists don't have any clearly identifiable food preferences, but religiously conservative Muslims do.
You obviously understand it even less. Data mining doesn't use relational queries, but it is looking for statistical anomalies and correlations. There is very little data to validate data mining for terrorists, which is why it is pointless.
Unfortunately, there is a good chance that the US government is doing what you suggest: hardcoding a bunch of bogus queries and hoping for the best.
Slashdot Mirror
However I do think it is the right thing to do for Google to recognize along with many of us that there are people who made the ultimate sacrifice that Google would have the freedom to do what they do (and we have the freedom to do what we will). [...] Remember, the seeds of the atom bomb and the guided missile began in WWII and pre WWII era Germany, not America. Who knows what would have happened if the Nazis were not reigned in.
See, you are making the same mistake again, trying to justify the suffering by pointing to its purpose.
But your very example shows that this is wrong. Soldiers most certainly didn't die in WW I to beat down an emergent Nazi state. Germany was no different in WW I from any other European power, entangled in a mesh of alliances and obligations. Nobody knows what would have happened if Germany had won WW I or if the victors had followed Woodrow Wilson's recommendations, but it's pretty clear there would have been no Nazis.
You don't honor veterans by inventing historical fictions for why they suffered. The fact is that many soldiers have died meaningless deaths, and those soldiers should still be honored. And we can honor them best by making sure that they are taken well care of in our society and that we are far more careful in the future about when and where we deploy our military.
Looks to me like people are remembering the wrong thing. On November 11, one should commemorate fallen soldiers. But one should also remember the political and social issues that caused millions to die in WWI and WWII in the first place, the international cooperation it took to win in those conflicts, and the dangers of right wing populism, nationalism, and militarism.
It seems to me those lessons are getting lost, in particular among the right wing nuts that complain about Google not having a special logo for Veterans Day.
while symbian could be improved i have no problems using it every day since a nokia 3650 -> nokia n70 -> e61 -> e61i. the current phone e61i is used every day to
Yes, Nokia makes good hardware and passable software. However, Nokia has a decade of experience building, customizing, shipping, and supporting Symbian phones; T-Mobile has none, but they do have a lot of experience with Windows Mobile.
T-Mobile isn't thinking about this as making the best phone, they are thinking about this as making a better phone for the Windows Mobile market segment, which is probably a big money maker for them already, and from that point of view, they made a reasonable choice.
While Symbian isn't great, it's not as bad as MS mobile [...] As regards price, if you don't spend on software then the software on your phone is going to suck
You and I may have that opinion, but the fact is that the US market is largely split between Windows Mobile, Palm, Blackberry, and iPhone. US consumers seem to go for smart phones that suck, so it's low risk to ship another one with one of those OSes. And the only one T-Mobile can license is Windows Mobile.
Umm, openMoko, Symbian, Linux? You discount Symbian and Linux so quickly. While Symbian isn't great, it's not as bad as MS mobile
While we may share the opinion that these are better systems than Windows Mobile, where is the actual evidence? If T-Mobile were going to pick one of those, they'd have had to spend a lot of money on marketing, software development, and support in the US market.
Motorola, of course, is shipping a lot of Linux handsets, but notice that they haven't even started building a developer community around it; they are using Linux for dumb phones right now.
Android is hopefully changing all that and making Linux a much easier choice: both the buzz and the design of Android help with marketing and building a developer community.
what exactly? Has Google been demanding that the Firefox developers do something that doesn't make sense?
Sure, if Firefox can find another source of funding as good as Google, that's great. But to have no strings attached funding is useful even if there is only a single source.
The question I'd ask is whether Google is actually getting their money's worth; I don't find Firefox all that great. But, I suppose, Google also has to stick to what they can get, for the time being.
if the US government--president, NSA, CIA, FBI--are willing to give up their secrecy.
What is intolerable, however, is for government officials to have a lot of information on private citizens, but for private citizens to have little information on the government.
Is it?
Yes, it largely is: it uses standard Gnome components (actually, the Gtk+ subset) and more-or-less standard windows, keybindings, themes, shortcuts, and menu structures.
Compare that with something like Blender. Or compare it with something like the consumer imaging programs from Adobe. Those use wildly non-standard user interface elements and layouts.
I look at the GNOME human interface guidelines, and I see whole bunches of ways the Gimp doesn't conform.
Quite right. And the best thing for the Gimp to do would be to fix those non-conforming aspects of the UI. The worst thing for the Gimp to do would be to try to clone Photoshop, since the Photoshop UI itself has lots of problems and it would not be Gnome HIG compliant.
According to the article, it is:
(The 20 key hardware is the same used by Blackberry and Sony, by the way, and generally works pretty well... certainly a lot better than T9.)
But, what were they thinking going with MS Mobile?
For the US market, what choice did they have? Apple, PalmOS, and Blackberry can't be licensed, Symbian is likely expensive and nearly as messy as Windows Mobile. And they didn't have the time and resources to do their own Linux-based system. So, for a smartphone like that, Windows Mobile is the obvious choice for companies like HTC and T-Mobile right now. You can't fault them for that.
With Android, of course, they do... let's hope that T-Mobile is smart and makes that choice. HTC (the maker of the Shadow) is already on board with Android...
The device is called the "HTC Juno", related to the "HTC Vox". I doubt it was "designed by" a T-Mobile executive, although he probably had some input.
In any case, the problem with those phones is the Windows Mobile software; since HTC is part of the Open Handset Alliance, hopefully, all that great hardware will be liberated soon and run with easy-to-use Google services.
do people really think the one-off price (ignoring the contract) of the iPhone is high? it's about £270 for the UK
For an EDGE-only phone with no installable applications, a 480x320 screen, no voice dialing, no A2DP, limited chat, no OBEX, no modem functionality, and lots of other limitations?
Yeah, I think that's overpriced.
about what I paid for my 5G when that came out.
There are no 5G phone yet.
Even if it is crash-safe for the occupants, any small fender bender will probably render the plane unsafe for flying.
AFAIK this preference is only by omission.
You know wrong. Islam has a concept analogous to "kosher" called "halal". Strict observance of Islam is likely highly correlated with buying halal versions of food.
Even if you find out [blah blah blah]
I'm not saying that the data mining is effective, I'm merely pointing out that the analogy was wrong: Islam is different from communism in its relation to food.
If you don't understand why they are doing this, you can't argue effectively against it.
Does not follow!
No, it does "not follow". That's why I said "it stands to reason".
Religion is just fine until religious people try to make unbelievers follow their religious laws
That is quite incorrect: many religions harm people even when they don't try to impose their religious beliefs on them.
you can't start by insulting 70% of the people you have to convince to follow you [...] You're preaching to the choir here, but if you talk like this to people who don't already agree with you it's no wonder nobody listens.
So, you think that by careful, polite dilly-dallying around theological issues, you are going to convince people? Get real.
Most people who follow religions do so out of social conformance and to be part of a community. That will only change if people understand that a sizeable fraction of the population considers their choice immoral and that their choice excludes them from many communities.
And one makes that clear differently in different contexts. In an on-line discussion forum, it's perfectly reasonable to state "I consider religion evil" and defend that statement. At a dinner party, one would express one's disapproval by rolling one's eyes, changing the subject, and crossing people who flaunt their religion off the list of future dinner guests.
I have an impression that the graph you link to only counts smartphones, and not communicators (or plain handhelds).
It counts everything comparable to Symbian and Android phones, which means smartphones and communicators. That's the market we're interested in here.
It would've been very different if it did.
Based on what? Plain handhelds are negligible these days, and Microsoft never dominated them anyway.
Don't like what AT&T is doing? Don't buy their products,
I'd love to. Which provider can you name where I can be certain that this isn't happening?
Everyone is up in arms because a PRIVATE company is allowing the government to examine traffic passing over its PRIVATE data network.
No, they are upset that this is done surreptitiously and that it is coerced by the government. If AT&T would do this voluntarily and announce it, everybody would just switch.
If you're the government, how hard do you think it would be to tamper with those signature databases to make them match the man in the middle?
It's basically impossible, given that there are many different ways in which people exchange and verify keys.
How is the government going to do a man in the middle attack against verifying a key by phone? How is it going to know not to tamper with my key when I travel across the country with my laptop that has all my keys on it, copied locally? How is it going to do man-in-the-middle attacks against electronic key generating fobs?
The government might get away with tampering with 99% of the keys out there, but screwing up on the remaining 1% would raise such a stink that everybody would have heard about it.
This just isn't happening, at least not yet.
Even if you're right, Stalin's atheism didn't save him from irrationality
Stalin himself got everything he wanted, so I don't see how he was irrational. The people who were irrational were his followers, and their irrational belief was in totalitarianism.
because he believed in marxism-leninism in the same manner that Catholics believe in God
You correctly observe that totalitarianism and religion are very much alike. Since we recognize that totalitarianism is evil, it therefore stands to reason that religion is also evil.
People in general will find justifications for their preferred course of action, rational if they exist, irrational if that's all there is. Atheists are not excepted, as it's a human tendency.
It is a human tendency. But a society of billions capable of launching nuclear missiles needs to overcome its demons. And we do that one step at a time, identifying and working towards ending one social ill at a time: feudalism, monarchy, totalitarianism, religion, etc.
To be clear: I'm not arguing that religion should be banned. Religion is like abortion, drinking, smoking, and prostitution: in a free, democratic society, you can't realistically eliminate it by law, and you can't discriminate against people who engage in these acts as long as they don't hurt others. But we must not acquiesce to the immorality religion any more than to the immorality of smoking, abortion, or prostitution.
Atheism in specific doesn't, but lots of atheists (Stalin, for example) do.
Yes, and you're free to blame those atheists for their irrational behavior; you can't blame atheism itself for the irrationality of its members.
The problem isn't people believing in God or the wheel of history or somesuch with zero evidence.
That isn't "the" problem, but it is clearly one of many problems.
The problem is people making real-world decisions that affect millions on the basis of this zero evidence. Atheists are no more immune than religious people to making important decisions based on no evidence.
Quite to the contrary: atheists are considerably more "immune" to making important decisions based on no evidence because being an atheist does not intrinsically require you to make irrational decisions about anything, while being, say, a Catholic intrinsically requires you to make irrational decisions about some things.
Sometimes-- not always, and not most of the time, but sometimes-- a complete redesign is called for.
Yes, but the Gimp is basically a standard Gnome program; there are a few design decisions one might want to revisit, but that's all.
If the goal is to have them switch, you have to address their needs
Well, that's not the goal. I really don't care about having thousands of whiny Photoshop users use the Gimp. I have no problem with those people paying Adobe if they can't be bothered to learn the Gimp.
GIMP will be surpassed by a more user-friendly program if the attitude is "we have all the users we want".
Programs are always surpassed by more user-friendly programs, and that's a good thing. I predict, though, that whatever user-friendly program it will be surpassed by will look nothing like Photoshop.
It's not belief in God that's a problem, it's believing you're right in the face of all evidence. Atheists are not immune to the latter.
The difference is that atheism itself does not claim absolute truth about anything. Communism and Marxism either work or they don't, and that's an empirical question, which has been settled for most people. Some people may irrationally persist in it, but that's because they are irrational, not because atheism tells them to be irrational. Even the existence of god in atheism is not a matter of faith, it's a matter of absence of evidence and Occam's razor.
But religion is different. Catholicism claims to be a universal truth, no matter how inconsistent and historically variable its beliefs are, and no matter how many rapes and genocides the church is responsible for. Religion intrinsically tells people to be irrational.
The sum of thousands of years of human suffering at the hands of religious leaders can't hold a candle to the hundreds of millions of deaths at the hands of 20th century dictators,
Religion was responsible for the very existence of many of those dictators, and often supported them.
The single largest cause of suffering? Greed. For money, power, sex etc. No question. Religion is merely the context in which some people have exercised that greed.
"Merely the context"? That is exactly the problem with religions: they create "contexts" and conditions in which people can get away with murder, oppression, and genocide.
In different words, we can't abolish greed--it is human nature. But we can try to create social institutions that limit it and channel it into beneficial directions; religions have proven that they are incapable of doing so.
Joseph Stalin, who purged religion from the state, is directly responsible for 5 to 7 million deaths, and another 30 to 60 million indirectly
If Russia hadn't been dominated for centuries by its orthodox church, neither Stalin nor the mass killings would have been possible.
Has it dawned on these people that a large number of Middle-Easterners might have the same sentiments regarding the religeous extremeism,
The situation is different for Chinese and Middle Eastern food: communists don't have any clearly identifiable food preferences, but religiously conservative Muslims do.
You don't understand how datamining works
You obviously understand it even less. Data mining doesn't use relational queries, but it is looking for statistical anomalies and correlations. There is very little data to validate data mining for terrorists, which is why it is pointless.
Unfortunately, there is a good chance that the US government is doing what you suggest: hardcoding a bunch of bogus queries and hoping for the best.