The strongest socialist part of the Nazis were the SA (the brown shirts). The Nazis purged them very quickly after gaining power for a variety of reasons. They were useful to help Hitler gain power but afterwords they were a trouble causing rabble clamoring that the revolution should continue. The industrialists which funded the Nazis did not like the socialist leanings of the SA and wanted them gone; Himmler wanted his SS offshoot to have more power; the German army didn't want to be absorbed by the SA, etc. So then there was the night of the long knives, and after that there really were no significant socialists left in the Nazis.
The whole idea of Nazis and fascists really being left wing seems to come from the right wing who refuse to admit that evil things can come from any part of the political spectrum. It's also useful to lump all your enemies into one basket to make it easier to demonize them, reduce subtlety and paint with broad brush strokes.
As far as communist countries, the attrocities they commities were not based upon any ideology but instead about gaining and keeping power, paranoia, and so forth.
For socialists, there's nothing wrong there. We have modern countries with democractic socialist histories and governments that are quite sane, prosperous, and with plenty of civil rights. More so than the US in many ways.
This was done by the SS for the most part, not all Nazi party members and certainly not by the Wehrmacht as a whole. They did keep a lot of things secret even within Hitler's inner circle. And I wouldn't call the SS "seemingly normal people". Even the brown shirts in the early days were mostly thugs in the first place. There was a long period of time between the early days of the Nazi party, their rise to power, and the holocaust. Early warning signs are important.
But the court said Apple could respond with a statement about how this is an unreasonable burden to comply. Apple still has time left to do this. So it depends upon what "unreasonable burden" would be accepted here. Is it unreasonable to require one man year of work to do this, essentially doing the DOJ's work on their behalf? Will Apple be compensated for all expenses? Will complying with the court order harm their revenue by decreasing the value of their products or having customers leave in disgust that Apple caved in so easily?
The "reasonable" part is key here, is it reasonable for a unrelated third party to be compelled to assist in an investigation?
Apple has not failed to comply yet. The court order granted them time to respond with reasons why the order would be an unreasonable burden. Even with contempt of court you can appeal. A lower court judge does not have the final say in the matter.
The court order has given Apple a time in which to respond with reasons why it is an undue burden to comply. If they do so then they will have complied with the court order even if they dont crack the phone. Accusing Apple of non compliance is very premature, even though it seems to be today's fashion amongst politicians. There is always an appeal, since a court order from a lower level judge is not the final word on the matter.
It is whining. When they have a case they can't solve, they should deal with it. Today there's a case where they want to crack a phone to find out who murdered someone, despite not knowing if there is even any such evidence on the phone. So they whine that they *need* to crack the phone (I do not think that word means what they think it means).
What did they do ten years ago when no one carried around phones? I'm pretty sure they would have used traditional investigative methods and if nothing came up it'd be put on the unsolved cases list. But today now that they have a phone they whine about it. If no phone had been found at the scened they'd have had to deal with that lack of evidence some way or another.
So what happens if the compel a way to crack that phone? It opens the doors to compel Apple to assist in every single case of a locked phone showing in a criminal investigation (whether or not there is suspicion of evidence being on the phone). Each time Apple would have to create a one-off break in kit for that phone. And then after it is cracked open the FBI has a look and then tells the victim's family "sorry, all we found were pictures of kittens".
Law enforcement is ALWAYS pushing to expand the scope of its powers. One of the vital jobs of governments is to restrict law enforcement by saying "NO!" Use of rolled up newspaper on the nose is optional.
The FBI has not even bothered to provide a compelling reason to crack this particular phone. The FBI already has the meta data, they know who called who and when and from where. They don't know if there's any extra data on the phone, they're just suspicious. The killers are already known and they are dead. The killers used burner phones so they were probably smart enough to not put incriminating data on a work phone. So the FBI is just fishing, crossing their fingers that there might be a text message that contains a roadmap to find all other terrorist plots in the country. As a third party why should Apple be compelled to do the FBI's investigation for them?
After all there is no limit to how far the FBI will go to protect their terrorism task force budget. Er, I mean citizens, protect the citizens.
Also one is always allowed an appeal. Apple is not required to comply without question and is almost certainly going to provide a response to the judge within the time allowed by the judge. Apple is not thumbing it's nose at the courts and it has not violated any laws on this account or ignored any warrants. Yet so many politicians are up in arms that Apple is not responding immediately, some saying that Apple has to comply because "it's the law". More politicians who just don't seem to understand what the law really is, which should logically make them ineligible for the office they are seeking.
Yup, you can treat a UTF-8 string just like any other string almost all the time. Even with printf, and many other things that were never originally designed for things beyond ASCII. Embedded ASCII characters won't appear accidentally in the middle of a UTF-8 character, so you'll always find the right "%" for printf, or the right "/" for file names, and so forth. There are no embedded 0's, so you can use C strings without worry.
As for Microsoft, they have a tendency to quickly jump onto something new and create an API or standard for it before they actually understand the subject. Thus the idiocy of NTFS using 2 bytes for each character in a file name; wasted space for most languages and insufficient for the most commonly spoken language in the world! Then there's Microsoft Foundation Classes which were set in stone before they seemed to understand object oriented concepts. They even screwed up Hungarian notation by not understanding what their chief architect was saying.
Multi byte characters just work. 0 is not a valid character in UTF-8, and most other non-Unicode encodings. So all your strlen, strcpy, and so forth still work. Even strstr works for finding substrings in UTF-8! You don't even have to worry about special embedded ASCII characters that could screw up parsing (little Johnny Tables doesn't need to be American). If you need to know characters instead of bytes then use mblen, mbrlen, and family. If you're only passing around data as-is or doing textual parsing then that's all you need to know. At the very last moment when you need to render the string graphically, or are doing more complex language parsing, only then do you need to convert to a full 32-bit value (anything using 16-bit wide chars is brain dead).
So for the vast majority of programmers it's all very simple with basic 8-bit characters. But it scares so many people away because they don't know it's simple. So they mess things up thinking that they need to do things the hard way, like adding to wchar_t string templates to a language standard and screwing it up for everyone else.
Anyone sane uses UTF-8 instead of wide characters (and no, Microsoft is not sane). UTF-8 accepts ASCII and ISO-8859-1 (latin1) as-is with no special encoding. Multibyte encodings are trivial to use, you only need to know the longer codes when looking up a font glyph at the point of rendering it. Multibyte existed long before unicode (even though Joel implies that Unicode invented it). And yet so many ignorant people still thought you needed wide characters to do international characters, which had the side effect of getting dreadful wide character support into official programming language standards when it's not necessary. At least it provides job security for some people.
The real problem is that by being a "universal" character encoding that some languages have to lose out. Thus Chinese characters take more bytes by being in a universal character set than a Chinese-only character set. So there was a lot of resistance from Asian countries to the Unicode invaders. Especially as Unicode committee decided that certain characters just weren't important anymore. It was a political mess, won by the ASCII and ISO using countries that weren't going to lose anything and they had more votes on the committee. With unicode the politics is more important than the technology.
I also disagree with Joel about the "smart people" at Unicode consortium, or his view that everything was a complete disaster until Unicode made it all work smoothly and sanely.
No the ISP fight is how to get users and retain them. Providing better service means more revenue. Blocking ads is one way of providing better service.
These are not a "handful" of images. There are many web sites where the ads constitute the majority of the data. Streaming video is probably the biggest exception where the data is larger than the advertising. If I did not block ads then mail service would present more bytes of advertising then bytes of email (and I PAY for the service, it's not a free).
Not when those old people are family complaining about how slow the internet has gotten. I install ad blockers for them. Speeds up the internet and I spend less time dealing scrubbing out the malware.
If you don't want the ads, use an ad blocker. This is not illegal, unethical, or immoral. When 50% of received content is advertising then this means 50% of that monthly ISP bill is going to fund the advertisement delivery infrastructure, that is what is immoral in my view.
If companies don't want their ads blocked then they need to stop partnering with scum and find reputable advertisers who don't abuse the customers. Ad blocking wouldn't exist if we didn't need to use it in self defense.
They are delivering exactly the content that the users want, and delivering all of that content without prioritizing it. It's neutral. The only change is that they're blocking some bad actors who are intruding into the customer's bandwidth and providing unwanted content and malware. If this violates network neutrality then it would mean that any spam filtering also violates network neutrality, or any anti-virus scanner.
Net neutrality is about point to point neutrality, not about the third parties injecting unwanted content along the way that cuts into their bandwidth allowance.
If advertisers feel that they must get out to all the viewers then the advertisiers should PAY for that privilege, the same as they do for print media ads. Relying on the user to pay for their distribution may be good business but it's not a business practice we should defend.
I have never seen an ad while I have adblock on. For me it is blocking ads, and blocking ALL ads. It is not deceptive because it does exactly what it says it does. So few advertisers have opted into adblock's whitelist that it really doesn't matter.
I was not puzzled by that. Lucas had been pushing the idea that he had 9 movies planned out, including three prequels. So seeing the number V just reinforced that notion. But retroactively adding the "Episode IV" was what surprised some people.
The original Empire Strikes Back script did not have Vader as Luke's father. Some may say that this was to keep it secret*, but Lucas had asked Leigh Brackett to write the original script. After she died Lucas put in revisions that he wanted. So if Lucas had this plot point in mind the whole time, which would be vital to the whole 9 film continuity, he certainly would have mentioned it to the original script writer. So again, some will hand wave and claim that Lucas wanted to keep it a secret from the script writer too and then change it later, but thats just a whole lot of flimsy hand waving. It's a much simpler explanation to think that Lucas was making it up as he went along and his 9 movie story arc was nothing more than a rough idea and a lot of hype.
(* it's implausible that only 4 people knew this secret before the film's release as claimed in Wikipedia, because there were a lot of crew on the set and they couldn't have all been wearing ear plugs)
If you also look at Star Wars (the original) you can see how it's very much a standalone movie. There are no unresolved issues, there's no references to possible prequels, it just works. None of the other 5 movies do that, they're all clearly a part of a larger story arc. Except for the original. I think it was only after the unexpectedly huge success of Star Wars that Lucas started planning on making a lot more of them.
Although, saying "Episode IV" from the beginning would not have been a bad idea. This was an homage to sci-fi movie serials after all and it would not have been out of place. Except that historically we knew that the extra title was added later.
But it wasn't until 1981 that they added the "Episode 4" bit. So when Episode 4 was added it sort of reinforced the myth that Lucas had it all planned out. Some people saw it an addition, but other people were probably thinking it was odd that they didn't remember it from the first time they saw it but then brushed it off since it fit into Lucas' claim that he had 9 films all planned out (which was exaggeration since he as making up critical plot points on the fly during Empire Strikes Back filming.
It happened a lot. I remember I couldn't go see Willy Wonka because a neighbor's kid was upset and scared by some of the scenes (though 4 years younger than me, so it shouldn't have counted).
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The strongest socialist part of the Nazis were the SA (the brown shirts). The Nazis purged them very quickly after gaining power for a variety of reasons. They were useful to help Hitler gain power but afterwords they were a trouble causing rabble clamoring that the revolution should continue. The industrialists which funded the Nazis did not like the socialist leanings of the SA and wanted them gone; Himmler wanted his SS offshoot to have more power; the German army didn't want to be absorbed by the SA, etc. So then there was the night of the long knives, and after that there really were no significant socialists left in the Nazis.
The whole idea of Nazis and fascists really being left wing seems to come from the right wing who refuse to admit that evil things can come from any part of the political spectrum. It's also useful to lump all your enemies into one basket to make it easier to demonize them, reduce subtlety and paint with broad brush strokes.
As far as communist countries, the attrocities they commities were not based upon any ideology but instead about gaining and keeping power, paranoia, and so forth.
For socialists, there's nothing wrong there. We have modern countries with democractic socialist histories and governments that are quite sane, prosperous, and with plenty of civil rights. More so than the US in many ways.
This was done by the SS for the most part, not all Nazi party members and certainly not by the Wehrmacht as a whole. They did keep a lot of things secret even within Hitler's inner circle. And I wouldn't call the SS "seemingly normal people". Even the brown shirts in the early days were mostly thugs in the first place. There was a long period of time between the early days of the Nazi party, their rise to power, and the holocaust. Early warning signs are important.
But the court said Apple could respond with a statement about how this is an unreasonable burden to comply. Apple still has time left to do this. So it depends upon what "unreasonable burden" would be accepted here. Is it unreasonable to require one man year of work to do this, essentially doing the DOJ's work on their behalf? Will Apple be compensated for all expenses? Will complying with the court order harm their revenue by decreasing the value of their products or having customers leave in disgust that Apple caved in so easily?
The "reasonable" part is key here, is it reasonable for a unrelated third party to be compelled to assist in an investigation?
Apple has not failed to comply yet. The court order granted them time to respond with reasons why the order would be an unreasonable burden. Even with contempt of court you can appeal. A lower court judge does not have the final say in the matter.
The government certainly isn't striving towards any ideal that I can see.
Nonsense, it's easy to write Perl. The hard part is trying to read it.
The court order has given Apple a time in which to respond with reasons why it is an undue burden to comply. If they do so then they will have complied with the court order even if they dont crack the phone. Accusing Apple of non compliance is very premature, even though it seems to be today's fashion amongst politicians. There is always an appeal, since a court order from a lower level judge is not the final word on the matter.
It is whining. When they have a case they can't solve, they should deal with it. Today there's a case where they want to crack a phone to find out who murdered someone, despite not knowing if there is even any such evidence on the phone. So they whine that they *need* to crack the phone (I do not think that word means what they think it means).
What did they do ten years ago when no one carried around phones? I'm pretty sure they would have used traditional investigative methods and if nothing came up it'd be put on the unsolved cases list. But today now that they have a phone they whine about it. If no phone had been found at the scened they'd have had to deal with that lack of evidence some way or another.
So what happens if the compel a way to crack that phone? It opens the doors to compel Apple to assist in every single case of a locked phone showing in a criminal investigation (whether or not there is suspicion of evidence being on the phone). Each time Apple would have to create a one-off break in kit for that phone. And then after it is cracked open the FBI has a look and then tells the victim's family "sorry, all we found were pictures of kittens".
Law enforcement is ALWAYS pushing to expand the scope of its powers. One of the vital jobs of governments is to restrict law enforcement by saying "NO!" Use of rolled up newspaper on the nose is optional.
The FBI has not even bothered to provide a compelling reason to crack this particular phone. The FBI already has the meta data, they know who called who and when and from where. They don't know if there's any extra data on the phone, they're just suspicious. The killers are already known and they are dead. The killers used burner phones so they were probably smart enough to not put incriminating data on a work phone. So the FBI is just fishing, crossing their fingers that there might be a text message that contains a roadmap to find all other terrorist plots in the country. As a third party why should Apple be compelled to do the FBI's investigation for them?
After all there is no limit to how far the FBI will go to protect their terrorism task force budget. Er, I mean citizens, protect the citizens.
Also one is always allowed an appeal. Apple is not required to comply without question and is almost certainly going to provide a response to the judge within the time allowed by the judge. Apple is not thumbing it's nose at the courts and it has not violated any laws on this account or ignored any warrants. Yet so many politicians are up in arms that Apple is not responding immediately, some saying that Apple has to comply because "it's the law". More politicians who just don't seem to understand what the law really is, which should logically make them ineligible for the office they are seeking.
There exists set of criminals which is not contained within the set of senators. By induction, the reverse is not true.
Yup, you can treat a UTF-8 string just like any other string almost all the time. Even with printf, and many other things that were never originally designed for things beyond ASCII. Embedded ASCII characters won't appear accidentally in the middle of a UTF-8 character, so you'll always find the right "%" for printf, or the right "/" for file names, and so forth. There are no embedded 0's, so you can use C strings without worry.
As for Microsoft, they have a tendency to quickly jump onto something new and create an API or standard for it before they actually understand the subject. Thus the idiocy of NTFS using 2 bytes for each character in a file name; wasted space for most languages and insufficient for the most commonly spoken language in the world! Then there's Microsoft Foundation Classes which were set in stone before they seemed to understand object oriented concepts. They even screwed up Hungarian notation by not understanding what their chief architect was saying.
Multi byte characters just work. 0 is not a valid character in UTF-8, and most other non-Unicode encodings. So all your strlen, strcpy, and so forth still work. Even strstr works for finding substrings in UTF-8! You don't even have to worry about special embedded ASCII characters that could screw up parsing (little Johnny Tables doesn't need to be American). If you need to know characters instead of bytes then use mblen, mbrlen, and family. If you're only passing around data as-is or doing textual parsing then that's all you need to know. At the very last moment when you need to render the string graphically, or are doing more complex language parsing, only then do you need to convert to a full 32-bit value (anything using 16-bit wide chars is brain dead).
So for the vast majority of programmers it's all very simple with basic 8-bit characters. But it scares so many people away because they don't know it's simple. So they mess things up thinking that they need to do things the hard way, like adding to wchar_t string templates to a language standard and screwing it up for everyone else.
Anyone sane uses UTF-8 instead of wide characters (and no, Microsoft is not sane). UTF-8 accepts ASCII and ISO-8859-1 (latin1) as-is with no special encoding. Multibyte encodings are trivial to use, you only need to know the longer codes when looking up a font glyph at the point of rendering it. Multibyte existed long before unicode (even though Joel implies that Unicode invented it). And yet so many ignorant people still thought you needed wide characters to do international characters, which had the side effect of getting dreadful wide character support into official programming language standards when it's not necessary. At least it provides job security for some people.
The real problem is that by being a "universal" character encoding that some languages have to lose out. Thus Chinese characters take more bytes by being in a universal character set than a Chinese-only character set. So there was a lot of resistance from Asian countries to the Unicode invaders. Especially as Unicode committee decided that certain characters just weren't important anymore. It was a political mess, won by the ASCII and ISO using countries that weren't going to lose anything and they had more votes on the committee. With unicode the politics is more important than the technology.
I also disagree with Joel about the "smart people" at Unicode consortium, or his view that everything was a complete disaster until Unicode made it all work smoothly and sanely.
No the ISP fight is how to get users and retain them. Providing better service means more revenue. Blocking ads is one way of providing better service.
These are not a "handful" of images. There are many web sites where the ads constitute the majority of the data. Streaming video is probably the biggest exception where the data is larger than the advertising. If I did not block ads then mail service would present more bytes of advertising then bytes of email (and I PAY for the service, it's not a free).
I think you're overreaching here. The advertising industry is probably incapable of respecting users.
Not when those old people are family complaining about how slow the internet has gotten. I install ad blockers for them. Speeds up the internet and I spend less time dealing scrubbing out the malware.
If you don't want the ads, use an ad blocker. This is not illegal, unethical, or immoral. When 50% of received content is advertising then this means 50% of that monthly ISP bill is going to fund the advertisement delivery infrastructure, that is what is immoral in my view.
If companies don't want their ads blocked then they need to stop partnering with scum and find reputable advertisers who don't abuse the customers. Ad blocking wouldn't exist if we didn't need to use it in self defense.
They are delivering exactly the content that the users want, and delivering all of that content without prioritizing it. It's neutral. The only change is that they're blocking some bad actors who are intruding into the customer's bandwidth and providing unwanted content and malware. If this violates network neutrality then it would mean that any spam filtering also violates network neutrality, or any anti-virus scanner.
Net neutrality is about point to point neutrality, not about the third parties injecting unwanted content along the way that cuts into their bandwidth allowance.
If advertisers feel that they must get out to all the viewers then the advertisiers should PAY for that privilege, the same as they do for print media ads. Relying on the user to pay for their distribution may be good business but it's not a business practice we should defend.
I have never seen an ad while I have adblock on. For me it is blocking ads, and blocking ALL ads. It is not deceptive because it does exactly what it says it does. So few advertisers have opted into adblock's whitelist that it really doesn't matter.
What law says they can't block ads? Is there some Right Of Advertisers law in Europe? Is there a right for advertisers to steal your bandwidth also?
When I get Alzheimers, I'll be able to enjoy a new Star Wars every day!
I was not puzzled by that. Lucas had been pushing the idea that he had 9 movies planned out, including three prequels. So seeing the number V just reinforced that notion. But retroactively adding the "Episode IV" was what surprised some people.
The original Empire Strikes Back script did not have Vader as Luke's father. Some may say that this was to keep it secret*, but Lucas had asked Leigh Brackett to write the original script. After she died Lucas put in revisions that he wanted. So if Lucas had this plot point in mind the whole time, which would be vital to the whole 9 film continuity, he certainly would have mentioned it to the original script writer. So again, some will hand wave and claim that Lucas wanted to keep it a secret from the script writer too and then change it later, but thats just a whole lot of flimsy hand waving. It's a much simpler explanation to think that Lucas was making it up as he went along and his 9 movie story arc was nothing more than a rough idea and a lot of hype.
(* it's implausible that only 4 people knew this secret before the film's release as claimed in Wikipedia, because there were a lot of crew on the set and they couldn't have all been wearing ear plugs)
If you also look at Star Wars (the original) you can see how it's very much a standalone movie. There are no unresolved issues, there's no references to possible prequels, it just works. None of the other 5 movies do that, they're all clearly a part of a larger story arc. Except for the original. I think it was only after the unexpectedly huge success of Star Wars that Lucas started planning on making a lot more of them.
Although, saying "Episode IV" from the beginning would not have been a bad idea. This was an homage to sci-fi movie serials after all and it would not have been out of place. Except that historically we knew that the extra title was added later.
But it wasn't until 1981 that they added the "Episode 4" bit. So when Episode 4 was added it sort of reinforced the myth that Lucas had it all planned out. Some people saw it an addition, but other people were probably thinking it was odd that they didn't remember it from the first time they saw it but then brushed it off since it fit into Lucas' claim that he had 9 films all planned out (which was exaggeration since he as making up critical plot points on the fly during Empire Strikes Back filming.
It happened a lot. I remember I couldn't go see Willy Wonka because a neighbor's kid was upset and scared by some of the scenes (though 4 years younger than me, so it shouldn't have counted).