They are in the public domain naturally, it takes force of law and the establishment of an artificial monopoly to keep them out of it. Society has better things to do.
This is bad for Apple and the operators because it means people can buy a phone subsidised by AT&T, unlock it and use it on another operator. AT&T loses around $200 in subsidy each time this happens.
The original iPhone was unlocked in (I think) early 2008. They must have learned their lesson with the 3G because you couldn't get one of those without activating it in-store. But now it's the same as the original and you can activate it at home. I'm guessing that it was annoying customers because now the activation for the 3G is the same as the original (at home, with iTunes).
This was all following techniques using SIM-cloning devices, however. Those will always be around.
All of what you are saying would make ethical sense in the absence of the DMCA. That is, they sell what they want, we buy what we want. They encrypt the DVD so that it can be region-locked, we acquire hardware and software that either ignores the region coding or strips the CSS.
That was before the DMCA, however. Now, the situation has changed, because we have laws that make it illegal to break encryption *regardless* of whether or not fair use provisions apply.
That's the part that I don't understand: how this is ethical.
I hate to be cynical about it, but it's not just people asking to get out. Both the prosecution and the defense (but especially prosecution) select for jurors who are easily swayed, and pass on the ones who know a little bit about the court.
The one time I actually had to report to jury duty (as opposed to just getting the letter and calling in the morning), it seemed clear that since I was capable of making up my own mind I was not going to be put on the case that I was interviewed for.
It was a criminal case. Basically they asked if I was comfortable locking someone up and I said something like, sure, if there's evidence. That wasn't good enough. Maybe if it was a civil case I would have gotten on.
The story about your mom is really touching. I'll bet you're really proud of her and I know I would be.
Incidentally my family was on the other side of something like that. We never had to go to court or anything but we are Italian and we hear the whispers about mob ties all the damn time. Not being good looking or being a pure aryan specimen is a terrible reason to get locked the fuck up.
I hope I never have to go to court becuase a jury of *my* peers most likely doesn't exist;)
Also, why is it called taking a dump? You're really leaving it!
Seriously, now: Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Your hypothetical claim, that pedophiles are somehow the norm, if there is such a thing, is far more extraordinary than the alternative. It is *you* who should be providing proof for your claim.
The question of whether or not someone is mentally ill has to take into account the impact the illness has on their own life, as well as what's expected of them in the surrounding society. It is a serious issue and not one of those "why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?" things.
Children deserve a just system of law as much as the rest of us. Perhaps this guy doesn't make a good test case, because he had more than just cartoons. But let's say it was just cartoons, would you still be calling for a hanging? Again, whether the guy is a sick creep is not being debated. It's whether we as a society have the legal right to lock people up simply for being deviants, rather than for anything that they actually did.
How are they different? In an ideal sense, they're not. In a practical sense: they're different because people, including lawmakers, feel different about anything having to do with minors and sex, especially child pornography.
I won't go so far as to call it moral panic, but the fact that we're willing to err on the side of charging teens who took pictures of themselves shoudl tell you something...specifically that it's all fair game. Including cartoons.
I can add a few more: built-in CD burning, firewall, fast user switching, driver rollbacks, remote desktop, remote assistance.
Obviously all of that can be done with third-party software, but other than wanting to avoid product activation, I can't see why someone would go out of their way.
(Cleartype is great with the Vista fonts. I tend to go back and forth with it on XP for whatever reason.)
Dude, multimedia support? Next you'll be talking about long filenames. They need to stop trying to cater to Apple customers and west-coast bloggers and just make a nice gray squarish thingy for running DOS programs. That's the Microsoft we know and love.
If your metric for an upgraded OS is that it is even more XP-like, then obviously nothing is going to beat XP, and your dare is meaningless. Vista has plenty of new features that are worth looking at. I don't need to sell their product for them, but there are important improvements in IIS, DirectX, GUI, fonts, power management, searching, color management, input methods, and more.
Of course, those features may not mean anything to you. Windows is no longer my primary platform for work, and they mean very little to me. In this case sticking with XP is a bad choice. But don't confuse a difference in priorities with a lack of value.
It would seem that many people have found their perfect OS in Windows XP, but many of us were not so lucky.
I doubt that those who act astonished that Vista is heavier than XP are going to let a drive indexing service run in the background. Those cycles are worth saving, dammit!
There is a certain type of "power user" that is happy, or even proud, to be locked into a particular way of doing things. They will get dragged kicking into the next decade, and we will have to endure the whining about how no one writes PC programs in assembly anymore.
It's completely another thing to presume that you somehow entitled to foo and bar. No, you're NOT
Here's where I disagree. There isn't a big book of criteria that all polite societies should have to follow. If a society agrees to implement social welfare programs, then that's the end of the story.
I don't think it's illegitimate to say that a person is entitled to the fruit of their labor. In fact I'm sure I agree with your sentiment. But if you're going to espouse it like it's absolute truth rather than a personal philosophy, then you're going to need to back it up with some evidence.
None of our money or possessions would be worth much, were it not for the existence of a stable government to protect those things. Of course taxes suck, but read some Hobbes and see if you like the alternative. I don't.
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there.
I don't think any sane person would disagree. Your company was terrible to just throw software at people when they were already paying people to take care of such things who hopefully have more experience in it.
A real IT dept. or admin should know the difference between apps that are necessary for business, which get supported, and apps that aren't, which don't. The latter should really be blocked...people don't like to hear that, but hey, the company pays for the PC, and for the time it takes to clean up after a worm.
Also, consider the fact that if someone was rational they probably wouldn't be calling.
Granted, there are many problems that happen outside of the limits of someone's knowledge, but a lot of them are going to be the people who kicked their network cable out, and whose first way of dealing with this is to call someone, rather than to check first and call second.
I know people will take issue with the actual example..."what if they don't know there's a cable", etc. Substitute a power cable, or whatever you like. My point is that some people are wired to act before they think. These people call tech support more than the people that don't have this problem.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK that was an internal thing they did as a joke. Still great though.
. As careful as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Swift is careful enough for most people.
They are in the public domain naturally, it takes force of law and the establishment of an artificial monopoly to keep them out of it. Society has better things to do.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: the asshole.
understand how to improve haptic touch response
buttons?
(ducks)
This is bad for Apple and the operators because it means people can buy a phone subsidised by AT&T, unlock it and use it on another operator. AT&T loses around $200 in subsidy each time this happens.
The original iPhone was unlocked in (I think) early 2008. They must have learned their lesson with the 3G because you couldn't get one of those without activating it in-store. But now it's the same as the original and you can activate it at home. I'm guessing that it was annoying customers because now the activation for the 3G is the same as the original (at home, with iTunes).
This was all following techniques using SIM-cloning devices, however. Those will always be around.
All of what you are saying would make ethical sense in the absence of the DMCA. That is, they sell what they want, we buy what we want. They encrypt the DVD so that it can be region-locked, we acquire hardware and software that either ignores the region coding or strips the CSS.
That was before the DMCA, however. Now, the situation has changed, because we have laws that make it illegal to break encryption *regardless* of whether or not fair use provisions apply.
That's the part that I don't understand: how this is ethical.
Certificates don't do away with the fact that eventually you have to trust someone, and no one said that they did.
I hate to be cynical about it, but it's not just people asking to get out. Both the prosecution and the defense (but especially prosecution) select for jurors who are easily swayed, and pass on the ones who know a little bit about the court.
The one time I actually had to report to jury duty (as opposed to just getting the letter and calling in the morning), it seemed clear that since I was capable of making up my own mind I was not going to be put on the case that I was interviewed for.
It was a criminal case. Basically they asked if I was comfortable locking someone up and I said something like, sure, if there's evidence. That wasn't good enough. Maybe if it was a civil case I would have gotten on.
The story about your mom is really touching. I'll bet you're really proud of her and I know I would be.
Incidentally my family was on the other side of something like that. We never had to go to court or anything but we are Italian and we hear the whispers about mob ties all the damn time. Not being good looking or being a pure aryan specimen is a terrible reason to get locked the fuck up.
I hope I never have to go to court becuase a jury of *my* peers most likely doesn't exist ;)
Also, why is it called taking a dump? You're really leaving it!
Seriously, now: Carl Sagan said extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Your hypothetical claim, that pedophiles are somehow the norm, if there is such a thing, is far more extraordinary than the alternative. It is *you* who should be providing proof for your claim.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diagnostic_and_Statistical_Manual_of_Mental_Disorders
The question of whether or not someone is mentally ill has to take into account the impact the illness has on their own life, as well as what's expected of them in the surrounding society. It is a serious issue and not one of those "why do we drive on parkways and park on driveways?" things.
Depends on the judge.
I don't think "is" means what you think it means.
Children deserve a just system of law as much as the rest of us. Perhaps this guy doesn't make a good test case, because he had more than just cartoons. But let's say it was just cartoons, would you still be calling for a hanging? Again, whether the guy is a sick creep is not being debated. It's whether we as a society have the legal right to lock people up simply for being deviants, rather than for anything that they actually did.
How are they different? In an ideal sense, they're not. In a practical sense: they're different because people, including lawmakers, feel different about anything having to do with minors and sex, especially child pornography.
I won't go so far as to call it moral panic, but the fact that we're willing to err on the side of charging teens who took pictures of themselves shoudl tell you something...specifically that it's all fair game. Including cartoons.
I can add a few more: built-in CD burning, firewall, fast user switching, driver rollbacks, remote desktop, remote assistance.
Obviously all of that can be done with third-party software, but other than wanting to avoid product activation, I can't see why someone would go out of their way.
(Cleartype is great with the Vista fonts. I tend to go back and forth with it on XP for whatever reason.)
Wait until the end of March, when DST is in effect, and ask them what time it is. You'll be sure to have a major disagreement on that one :D
Dude, multimedia support? Next you'll be talking about long filenames. They need to stop trying to cater to Apple customers and west-coast bloggers and just make a nice gray squarish thingy for running DOS programs. That's the Microsoft we know and love.
Sorry, I meant to say, "sticking with XP is not a bad choice".
If your metric for an upgraded OS is that it is even more XP-like, then obviously nothing is going to beat XP, and your dare is meaningless. Vista has plenty of new features that are worth looking at. I don't need to sell their product for them, but there are important improvements in IIS, DirectX, GUI, fonts, power management, searching, color management, input methods, and more.
Of course, those features may not mean anything to you. Windows is no longer my primary platform for work, and they mean very little to me. In this case sticking with XP is a bad choice. But don't confuse a difference in priorities with a lack of value.
It would seem that many people have found their perfect OS in Windows XP, but many of us were not so lucky.
The two features you mentioned are great.
However, these are things that can be added to XP
I doubt that those who act astonished that Vista is heavier than XP are going to let a drive indexing service run in the background. Those cycles are worth saving, dammit!
There is a certain type of "power user" that is happy, or even proud, to be locked into a particular way of doing things. They will get dragged kicking into the next decade, and we will have to endure the whining about how no one writes PC programs in assembly anymore.
Too harsh? :)
You didn't see his title then: stay humble. We all have some stupidity lurking with on. It's harder to drum up that nerd rage when we look at our own.
It's completely another thing to presume that you somehow entitled to foo and bar. No, you're NOT
Here's where I disagree. There isn't a big book of criteria that all polite societies should have to follow. If a society agrees to implement social welfare programs, then that's the end of the story.
I don't think it's illegitimate to say that a person is entitled to the fruit of their labor. In fact I'm sure I agree with your sentiment. But if you're going to espouse it like it's absolute truth rather than a personal philosophy, then you're going to need to back it up with some evidence.
None of our money or possessions would be worth much, were it not for the existence of a stable government to protect those things. Of course taxes suck, but read some Hobbes and see if you like the alternative. I don't.
It was a troll, and a bad one at that. Don't feel bad, I almost bit until the bits about "whoring out" and talking about Fallout.
But in the bigger picture, if the IT department wants to lock down end users as far as what can be installed on their computers, and dictate what is and isn't allowed, then they are necessarily going to have to accept responsibility for the suitability and usability of what is there.
I don't think any sane person would disagree. Your company was terrible to just throw software at people when they were already paying people to take care of such things who hopefully have more experience in it.
A real IT dept. or admin should know the difference between apps that are necessary for business, which get supported, and apps that aren't, which don't. The latter should really be blocked...people don't like to hear that, but hey, the company pays for the PC, and for the time it takes to clean up after a worm.
Also, consider the fact that if someone was rational they probably wouldn't be calling.
Granted, there are many problems that happen outside of the limits of someone's knowledge, but a lot of them are going to be the people who kicked their network cable out, and whose first way of dealing with this is to call someone, rather than to check first and call second.
I know people will take issue with the actual example..."what if they don't know there's a cable", etc. Substitute a power cable, or whatever you like. My point is that some people are wired to act before they think. These people call tech support more than the people that don't have this problem.