Did you miss the part where I noted that, if the researchers violated the terms of the informed consent agreement, that would be "all kinds of unethical"?
I even put it before the other stuff, just to make it especially obvious that it was the primary consideration. If the researchers didn't have informed consent for their use of the samples, they can hang out to dry for all I care. "Career ending" is just fine by me.
The point that I was addressing, in the second bit, was that it was not clear that the informed consent had been violated, just clear that the research subjects didn't like the results of the research. If you have informed consent, nothing(except the arguably ignoble and unethical habit of lying to preserve your access/funding supply) requires you to deliver only what people want to hear.
An addendum: Specifically, anybody who thinks that religion promotes equal application of rules should look at the Catholic Church's sex abuse coverup(please note, the kiddie fiddling itself, while tragic, is not unique to the church, the incredible institutional stonewalling, at all levels, is, however, a useful demonstration of how "rule of law" goes down under religious authority structures). For a more exotic take, google "dancing boys of afghanistan". Ooh boy, religious repression brings out some weird kink, and religious authority structures give certain old men in funny hats the power to act them out...
If you want economic justice, consider medieval Catholic "Indulgences"(why yes, you can buy your way into heaven) or the later Protestant invention of the "Gospel of Wealth"(why yes, God wants you to be rich. Oh, you aren't rich, I wonder what that says about what God thinks of you, sucker?)
I'm torn here. On the one hand, I would not want research on tissue samples being done outside of the scope of the informed consent permissions document under which the samples were collected. If that did, indeed, occur, the researchers lied to their test subjects. That is all kinds of unethical.
On the other hand, every time I here a "waaah, cry cry, science is being mean to my bullshit creation myths, mommy make it stop!" my blood starts to boil and I get serious about implementing a method of punching people in the face over the internet.
Yeah, of course we'll be able to do genetic research into your nasty-and-probably-heritable-disease without comparing your DNA to that of other populations, probably in ways that cast doubt on your bullshit story of having been plopped down by the gods, ready made, in the Grand Canyon... No problem at all. Also, we'll definitely not have to mention that inbreeding might have occurred, after we see those stacks of homozygous alleles. Oh, of course inbreeding would never occur in your precious (and very genetically isolated) little culture, and it hurts your feelings when we mention that the genetic evidence says that it did. Cry, cry.
Listen, fuckers, science isn't some magically wish fulfillment machine "Why yes Dr. Scientist, please use your science magic to cure my diabetes...", it's just the best method we have for learning about the world. If you don't want to know, GTFO. If you want science to solve your little problems, be prepared to learn about how the world actually is.
If the researchers went beyond the scope of their subject's informed consent, fuck them.
However, if our picturesque little tribe signed up for the research, but is just getting all touchy because they don't like the results, then fuck them. Maybe next time they can ask the mythical entities that plunked them down in the Canyon to solve their medical problems for them, if the idea of having crossed the Bering Strait is just too culturally insensitive for them...
Oh no! Power hungry politicians might use appeals to "progress" in order to dominate and control us! Quick, lets establish a class of politicians(yes, a religious leader is nothing but a politician in a funny hat) who already have absolute power, and thus don't need to promise anything, aside from an afterlife, which is a very cheap promise indeed, in order to dominate and control us. Problem solved!
In the same, contradictory, vein, you mention "In the US, the President can wage his own private war; in Iran, only the Ayatollah can." as though that were some sort of advantage. Yes, the US executive has too much ability to do whatever the fuck he wants, with the only real penalty being losing office after 4 years. The alternative proposed, though, is even worse. (Incidentally, the idea that the Pope would be a moderating influence is largely only true because of the Enlightenment. Wasn't so long ago that Popes had their own standing armies, and called crusades[in a manner rather similar to today's more militant "fatwa" declarations]. Nor were all of these crusades external. The reason that the "cathar" variant of Christianity is mentioned only historically is because of the thoroughness of the Albigensian crusades[best line of that particular conflict: "Kill them all, God will know his own"].)
Yes, it must, undeniably, be admitted that the Enlightenment didn't live up to the highest hopes of its backers. That much is undeniable. However, it was an improvement over what came before, and subsequent reactions against it have, unequivocally, been steps backwards.
Fascism and Communism in Europe, and Fundamentalism in the Middle East, have preserved most of the vices, and destroyed most of the virtues, of Enlightenment. If you think that religious authoritarianism manages to create "rules that apply to rich and poor alike", where secular rule of law has not, you are dreaming.
If Sony wishes to house a device under their control on my premises, I hope they won't mind being invoiced for my (very reasonable, I assure you) colocation fees...
As far as those companies are concerned, the law is catching up just fine. If anything, the DMCA gave them most of what they wanted even before they needed it. Now ACTA promises to finish the job.
Remember kids: If you think that the government doesn't represent your interests, its just because you don't matter enough.
Re:Buying ARM for a leg?
on
Apple To Buy ARM?
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· Score: 3, Informative
Saudi Arabia is, unfortunately, a particularly messy instance because of our petroleum based relationship with them.
The Saudi monarchy is perceived(largely correctly) by their local nest of fundamentalist nutjobs as being a bunch of apostate American puppets. They aren't exactly a western liberal's dream; but the Islamic hardliners have correctly perceived that they are basically more interested in enjoying their oil wealth, being chummy with the Americans(which can be quite rewarding, just look at the arms deals that we do), and generally enjoying all the more-or-less Haram hobbies that being a multimillionaire international playboy allows.
In order to save their own skins(they have the guns, and the tanks, and the attach aircraft, and whatnot; but having to deal with a domestic insurgency and constant assassination attempts would still really crimp your style), and possibly out of some degree of actual religious conviction(if only of the "do as I say, not as I do" variety), the Saudi State does a great deal of pandering to the religious hardliners on just about every issue that doesn't threaten their power and personal security. Hence substantial monetary support for Wahhabi propagantion projects of various flavors all over the place.
It's an ugly little story for all involved, really. The US, and the west generally, hold their noses and cut deals with the Saudi Monarchy, who really ought to be an international pariah state, because they need the oil. The Saudi Monarchy holds its nose and cuts deals with the very worst of their domestic extremists, who really ought to be suppressed; because they are correctly perceived as western sell-outs, and they need all the legitimacy they can buy. The extremists then turn around and (quite successfully) employ the monetary support with which their acquiescence at home is purchased toward the goal of converting Islamic populations abroad from being garden-variety Abrahamic superstitions into frankly barbaric nutjobs.
Probably not. In quantities large enough to be worth the risk of Hard Federal Time(tm) coins are heavy and bulky. Plus, fabricating metal objects on any substantial scale is generally more of a pain in the ass, and is rather more visible, than printing paper.
My(admittedly layman's) understanding, is that hundreds, to the degree they are counterfeited at all, are mostly the domain of Real Serious Actors(North Korea always seems to be on the list of suspects). Most domestic and/or fairly small-time operators are banging out twenties or smaller; because those are much easier to disseminate without attracting suspicion(counterfeit currency is worse than useless if you can't find a good way to spend it, or sell it to someobody who can, since merely producing or knowingly possessing is illegal; but it is only valuable if spent). Even if they are 100% authentic, most places will give you a seriously suspicious look if you show up with a brick of hundreds. No bored retail drone is even going to bother with a second glance if you pay your tab in a busy, dimly-lit bar with a reasonably plausible twenty or two.
What that argument never explains, though, is why basically none of the US has decent home internet access.
Obviously, somebody in the sticks depending on satellite, or using a wildly-uneconomic-but-universal-access-fee-subsidized copper POTS line is going to have lousy internet access. Barring a government(probably federal) initiative on a grand scale, or the invention of a magic WISP that doesn't have lousy ping, that isn't going to change.
However, by population much of the US lives in areas of suburban density or greater. Why do they pay more for worse access than do citizens of other equivalently dense places?
The punchline, for those who don't care to plowthrough it(you should, it's worth a read) is pretty much as follows: they ranked all the countries they could get data for on two axes. 1. State Restrictions. 2. Social Hostility.
In broad strokes, communist or post-communist countries tend to have very substantial state-imposed restrictions; but rank low on social hostility. Basically, the state doesn't want competing loci of power; but the population is largely apathetic.
Your western liberal democracies, along with places like Japan, Taiwan, and Australia(which aren't really western; but otherwise does "Western liberal democracy" pretty well) tend to rank fairly low on both axes.
The middle east and north Africa rank quite high on both axes, unsurprisingly.
There are a few interesting outliers/tidbits: India, despite its democratic reputation(which is likely what keeps it to only a "moderate" State Repression index) has really high social hostility rates, just below Iraq(which takes some doing). Among countries with "Low" State Repression, Ghana has the greatest level of social hostility. Saudi Arabia is, overall, the most repressive, with high state and social scores; but has slightly lower social hostility scores than some others, probably by virtue of being fairly homogeneous.
The genocides of the 20th century would have been largely impossible without the Enlightenment; but not for the reason you seem to be insinuating.
Both fascism and communism, the leading players in the 20th century genocide field, are modern, post-Enlightenment anti-Enlightenment movements. Ironically, both could not have existed without the Enlightenment: Fascism is a reactionary movement against post-enlightenment social liberalism(things like tolerance, democracy, multiculturalism, etc. What we now call "liberalism".). Communism is a revolutionary movement against post-enlightenment economic liberalism(free market activity, market theories of price, rationalization of labor, etc. What we now call "libertarianism"). Incidentally, fascists were also no great fans of economic liberalism; but their criticisms tended to be more reactionary than revolutionary, and were usually secondary to their concern for the annihilation of social liberalism.
He is really being a dick there. There's a "porn store" for the iPhone as well, called "Mobile Safari". If anything, the prices are lower.
However, if he is going to be an asshole he should have gone just a little further... Something to the effect of "And the inferior multitouch support won't bother you nearly as much if you are always using your phone one-handed..."
Is that while the woman in question is almost definitely out to lunch, and could probably use some psych help, the notion that somebody would implant a microchip in you has gone from "automatically crazy" to "must be dismissed as crazy based on the specific facts of the case".
Is that Islam has not undergone a process analogous to the Enlightenment.
Pre-Enlightenment, much of Europe was basically a mass of warring theocracies, split between the Catholic ones and the Protestant ones. Separation of church and state were basically nonexistent, blasphemy laws were on the books(and had real teeth, with limited exceptions[thanks a whole fucking lot Ireland] the ones that remain are just relics at this point). You easily could be, and people were, killed for having the wrong doctrinal positions. Censorship was rampant. Things pretty much sucked.
Thanks to the dedicated(and at times heroic, not a few faced jail, or worse) efforts of various Enlightenment figures, along with a number of political occurrences(the French Revolution had its minuses; but it did have the salubrious effect of annihilating a schlerotic and corrupt divine-right absolutism and replacing it with a secular nation-state. The Glorious Revolution in England was less dramatic; but went rather better. Then, of course, you had the American Revolution, which was absolutely dripping with Enlightenment sentiment[much to the displeasure of today's crop of "America is a Christian Nation founded on the Bible!!! Dominionist nutjobs]).
The Enlightenment was not an easy process. Much blood, sweat, and ink were spilled; but the results helped make the modern west the more-or-less pleasant place it is today. It was basically the death-knell of absolutist theocracy in the west, and the impetus behind the broad introduction of fun concepts like "human rights" and "freedom of religion"(also coffeehouses and atheism, what's not to love?).
The relatively benign forms of Christianity that we think of today are basically creations of the Enlightenment(even among the zealous, things like persecution and warfare between Catholics, protestants, and various sects thereof are basically off the table). It wasn't always that way. Even today, there are reactionary hardliners who would really prefer to roll things back(Rushdooney and the "Reconstructionists", for instance, "Dominionists" more generally, are the main thrust of that in the US, where the hardcore are predominantly fundamentalist protestants. On the European stage, we still have the Catholic church pretending that its "canon law", rather than being simply a set of rules for a private club, somehow takes precedence over Civil Law. Without substantial moderating influences, Abrahamic monotheisms are mean, ugly, primitive, and brutal.
Unfortunately, Islam has not, historically, experienced an analogous process. This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of more-or-less modern people who are nominally "muslim" in the same way that much of the west is still nominally "christian"; but it does mean that none of the major strains of Islam have been subjected to the radical reduction in power that all the various flavors of Christianity have. For instance, a Christian advocate of theocratic government qualifies as a right-wing nutjob(they exist in surprisingly large numbers, unfortunately; but they still qualify as a fringe position). In large areas of the world, Islamic theocracy(either as a matter of law, or in the form of a state so heavily subservient to religious enthusiasts and Sharia courts that it might as well be) is simply the local form of government.
This is not to say that there is anything intrinsically superior about Christianity. It fought progress tooth-and-nail, every step of the way, during the Enlightenment. To this day, it harbors downright nasty reactionary elements. And, despite protestations to the contrary, most of the noblest aspects of our society exist in spite of rather than because of it. (Fun stuff like "Civil law" and "freedom of conscience" are either classical, or modern derivations from the classical philosophical tradition). However, because Islam has not been subjected to the moderating(some would say "neutering") influence of an Enlightenment, it retains many of the ugly elements that Christianity no longer has the political power or cultural clout to employ.
What I don't know is whether the suckitude of the integrated systems is down to genuine, good-faith incompetence(assuming that automotive engineers can hack it as sat-nav UI designers, or contracting it out to the wrong guys, or just suffering from the rather longer product lifecycle imposed by being part of a car) or whether it is just a "We don't even have to care because what are you going to do, stick a suction cup mount to your windshield and have a cigarette lighter adapter flopping around, exactly like the guy driving the beater civic who earns a factor of ten less than you?"
I could imagine either (or both) being the case. Bad things happen when people underestimate the difficultly of things outside their area of expertise. However, it is also the case that, whenever multiple items are bundled, all the members of the bundle that aren't selling points have a nasty habit of atrophying to the point where they are pretty much good enough to fill the checkbox, and no better.
The worst thing about the integrated sat-navs is that they are often worse in every way(except the awkward cigarette-lighter-for-power and suction cup mount aspect) than even substantially cheaper discrete units.
Standalone GPS units live in a brutal darwinian hell-world, where only the strong or the super-cheap survive. Integrated units live sheltered lives; bundled with much more expensive objects. The difference shows.
I suspect that, for the ARM designs, the real killer would be the glue logic/connectivity required.
Even if the ARM cores were more efficient, in terms of work done per unit power consumption, you'd still get less work per core, which means more cores, which means more network gear(whether it be network gear in the classic "1U, 48ports, ethernet" sense or whether it would be some custom thing(dozens of cores per card, with glue logic, some sort of cardcage/blade design, whatever) the interconnect silicon and cabling costs money, consumes energy, takes time to set up/administer and constitutes another point of failure.
If the ARM cluster equivalent in power to your basic boring 1-2 socket x86 requires 24 or 48 switch ports, any power and initial cost savings are going to be eaten fast.
It does; but one of their mechanical engineers came to a rather brilliant realization:
A WinCE PDA is almost exactly the same size as a data tape. With modest modifications(consisting largely of forcing the work experience kid to run lots and lots of docking cables) an industry standard tape silo can be turned into a gigantic WinCE/ARM blade farm. If a node stops responding, the robot retrieval arm pops it out, presses the reset button, and pops it back in again. Since the OS is in ROM, boot is short and downtime is minimal.
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Did you miss the part where I noted that, if the researchers violated the terms of the informed consent agreement, that would be "all kinds of unethical"?
I even put it before the other stuff, just to make it especially obvious that it was the primary consideration. If the researchers didn't have informed consent for their use of the samples, they can hang out to dry for all I care. "Career ending" is just fine by me.
The point that I was addressing, in the second bit, was that it was not clear that the informed consent had been violated, just clear that the research subjects didn't like the results of the research. If you have informed consent, nothing(except the arguably ignoble and unethical habit of lying to preserve your access/funding supply) requires you to deliver only what people want to hear.
An addendum: Specifically, anybody who thinks that religion promotes equal application of rules should look at the Catholic Church's sex abuse coverup(please note, the kiddie fiddling itself, while tragic, is not unique to the church, the incredible institutional stonewalling, at all levels, is, however, a useful demonstration of how "rule of law" goes down under religious authority structures). For a more exotic take, google "dancing boys of afghanistan". Ooh boy, religious repression brings out some weird kink, and religious authority structures give certain old men in funny hats the power to act them out...
If you want economic justice, consider medieval Catholic "Indulgences"(why yes, you can buy your way into heaven) or the later Protestant invention of the "Gospel of Wealth"(why yes, God wants you to be rich. Oh, you aren't rich, I wonder what that says about what God thinks of you, sucker?)
I'm torn here. On the one hand, I would not want research on tissue samples being done outside of the scope of the informed consent permissions document under which the samples were collected. If that did, indeed, occur, the researchers lied to their test subjects. That is all kinds of unethical.
On the other hand, every time I here a "waaah, cry cry, science is being mean to my bullshit creation myths, mommy make it stop!" my blood starts to boil and I get serious about implementing a method of punching people in the face over the internet.
Yeah, of course we'll be able to do genetic research into your nasty-and-probably-heritable-disease without comparing your DNA to that of other populations, probably in ways that cast doubt on your bullshit story of having been plopped down by the gods, ready made, in the Grand Canyon... No problem at all. Also, we'll definitely not have to mention that inbreeding might have occurred, after we see those stacks of homozygous alleles. Oh, of course inbreeding would never occur in your precious (and very genetically isolated) little culture, and it hurts your feelings when we mention that the genetic evidence says that it did. Cry, cry.
Listen, fuckers, science isn't some magically wish fulfillment machine "Why yes Dr. Scientist, please use your science magic to cure my diabetes...", it's just the best method we have for learning about the world. If you don't want to know, GTFO. If you want science to solve your little problems, be prepared to learn about how the world actually is.
If the researchers went beyond the scope of their subject's informed consent, fuck them.
However, if our picturesque little tribe signed up for the research, but is just getting all touchy because they don't like the results, then fuck them. Maybe next time they can ask the mythical entities that plunked them down in the Canyon to solve their medical problems for them, if the idea of having crossed the Bering Strait is just too culturally insensitive for them...
Oh no! Power hungry politicians might use appeals to "progress" in order to dominate and control us! Quick, lets establish a class of politicians(yes, a religious leader is nothing but a politician in a funny hat) who already have absolute power, and thus don't need to promise anything, aside from an afterlife, which is a very cheap promise indeed, in order to dominate and control us. Problem solved!
In the same, contradictory, vein, you mention "In the US, the President can wage his own private war; in Iran, only the Ayatollah can." as though that were some sort of advantage. Yes, the US executive has too much ability to do whatever the fuck he wants, with the only real penalty being losing office after 4 years. The alternative proposed, though, is even worse. (Incidentally, the idea that the Pope would be a moderating influence is largely only true because of the Enlightenment. Wasn't so long ago that Popes had their own standing armies, and called crusades[in a manner rather similar to today's more militant "fatwa" declarations]. Nor were all of these crusades external. The reason that the "cathar" variant of Christianity is mentioned only historically is because of the thoroughness of the Albigensian crusades[best line of that particular conflict: "Kill them all, God will know his own"].)
Yes, it must, undeniably, be admitted that the Enlightenment didn't live up to the highest hopes of its backers. That much is undeniable. However, it was an improvement over what came before, and subsequent reactions against it have, unequivocally, been steps backwards.
Fascism and Communism in Europe, and Fundamentalism in the Middle East, have preserved most of the vices, and destroyed most of the virtues, of Enlightenment. If you think that religious authoritarianism manages to create "rules that apply to rich and poor alike", where secular rule of law has not, you are dreaming.
If Sony wishes to house a device under their control on my premises, I hope they won't mind being invoiced for my (very reasonable, I assure you) colocation fees...
Don't worry, the court has you covered on technical matters...
As far as those companies are concerned, the law is catching up just fine. If anything, the DMCA gave them most of what they wanted even before they needed it. Now ACTA promises to finish the job.
Remember kids: If you think that the government doesn't represent your interests, its just because you don't matter enough.
Umm... ARM would beg to differ.
It may be less similar to ARM Cortex reference designs than some of its competitors; but it is definitely ARM based.
Saudi Arabia is, unfortunately, a particularly messy instance because of our petroleum based relationship with them.
The Saudi monarchy is perceived(largely correctly) by their local nest of fundamentalist nutjobs as being a bunch of apostate American puppets. They aren't exactly a western liberal's dream; but the Islamic hardliners have correctly perceived that they are basically more interested in enjoying their oil wealth, being chummy with the Americans(which can be quite rewarding, just look at the arms deals that we do), and generally enjoying all the more-or-less Haram hobbies that being a multimillionaire international playboy allows.
In order to save their own skins(they have the guns, and the tanks, and the attach aircraft, and whatnot; but having to deal with a domestic insurgency and constant assassination attempts would still really crimp your style), and possibly out of some degree of actual religious conviction(if only of the "do as I say, not as I do" variety), the Saudi State does a great deal of pandering to the religious hardliners on just about every issue that doesn't threaten their power and personal security. Hence substantial monetary support for Wahhabi propagantion projects of various flavors all over the place.
It's an ugly little story for all involved, really. The US, and the west generally, hold their noses and cut deals with the Saudi Monarchy, who really ought to be an international pariah state, because they need the oil. The Saudi Monarchy holds its nose and cuts deals with the very worst of their domestic extremists, who really ought to be suppressed; because they are correctly perceived as western sell-outs, and they need all the legitimacy they can buy. The extremists then turn around and (quite successfully) employ the monetary support with which their acquiescence at home is purchased toward the goal of converting Islamic populations abroad from being garden-variety Abrahamic superstitions into frankly barbaric nutjobs.
Probably not. In quantities large enough to be worth the risk of Hard Federal Time(tm) coins are heavy and bulky. Plus, fabricating metal objects on any substantial scale is generally more of a pain in the ass, and is rather more visible, than printing paper.
My(admittedly layman's) understanding, is that hundreds, to the degree they are counterfeited at all, are mostly the domain of Real Serious Actors(North Korea always seems to be on the list of suspects). Most domestic and/or fairly small-time operators are banging out twenties or smaller; because those are much easier to disseminate without attracting suspicion(counterfeit currency is worse than useless if you can't find a good way to spend it, or sell it to someobody who can, since merely producing or knowingly possessing is illegal; but it is only valuable if spent). Even if they are 100% authentic, most places will give you a seriously suspicious look if you show up with a brick of hundreds. No bored retail drone is even going to bother with a second glance if you pay your tab in a busy, dimly-lit bar with a reasonably plausible twenty or two.
What that argument never explains, though, is why basically none of the US has decent home internet access.
Obviously, somebody in the sticks depending on satellite, or using a wildly-uneconomic-but-universal-access-fee-subsidized copper POTS line is going to have lousy internet access. Barring a government(probably federal) initiative on a grand scale, or the invention of a magic WISP that doesn't have lousy ping, that isn't going to change.
However, by population much of the US lives in areas of suburban density or greater. Why do they pay more for worse access than do citizens of other equivalently dense places?
Just to put some numbers behind my bloviation: Pew has a relevant set of surveys(PDF, 8MB).
The punchline, for those who don't care to plowthrough it(you should, it's worth a read) is pretty much as follows: they ranked all the countries they could get data for on two axes. 1. State Restrictions. 2. Social Hostility.
In broad strokes, communist or post-communist countries tend to have very substantial state-imposed restrictions; but rank low on social hostility. Basically, the state doesn't want competing loci of power; but the population is largely apathetic.
Your western liberal democracies, along with places like Japan, Taiwan, and Australia(which aren't really western; but otherwise does "Western liberal democracy" pretty well) tend to rank fairly low on both axes.
The middle east and north Africa rank quite high on both axes, unsurprisingly.
There are a few interesting outliers/tidbits: India, despite its democratic reputation(which is likely what keeps it to only a "moderate" State Repression index) has really high social hostility rates, just below Iraq(which takes some doing). Among countries with "Low" State Repression, Ghana has the greatest level of social hostility. Saudi Arabia is, overall, the most repressive, with high state and social scores; but has slightly lower social hostility scores than some others, probably by virtue of being fairly homogeneous.
The genocides of the 20th century would have been largely impossible without the Enlightenment; but not for the reason you seem to be insinuating.
Both fascism and communism, the leading players in the 20th century genocide field, are modern, post-Enlightenment anti-Enlightenment movements. Ironically, both could not have existed without the Enlightenment: Fascism is a reactionary movement against post-enlightenment social liberalism(things like tolerance, democracy, multiculturalism, etc. What we now call "liberalism".). Communism is a revolutionary movement against post-enlightenment economic liberalism(free market activity, market theories of price, rationalization of labor, etc. What we now call "libertarianism"). Incidentally, fascists were also no great fans of economic liberalism; but their criticisms tended to be more reactionary than revolutionary, and were usually secondary to their concern for the annihilation of social liberalism.
Because you allocate respect to beliefs based on how sensible they are, not on how strongly people hold them?
"The porn guys are pikers: They pay to screw their employees. My customers pay me to screw them."
Yours in manifest serenity, S. Jobs
That's the kicker, though, I don't care whether they "respect" my beliefs or not. They are perfectly welcome to return my open scorn in kind.
However, I do care if, and they are not welcome, if they decide to respond to hurt feelings with violence.
He is really being a dick there. There's a "porn store" for the iPhone as well, called "Mobile Safari". If anything, the prices are lower.
However, if he is going to be an asshole he should have gone just a little further... Something to the effect of "And the inferior multitouch support won't bother you nearly as much if you are always using your phone one-handed..."
"Self control" lives in the brain, and the brain is made of meat and chemicals and electrical impulses.
The knowledge of neuroscience needed to bend people's most private inner lives to our will isn't quite there yet; but it should not be counted out...
Right...
Is that while the woman in question is almost definitely out to lunch, and could probably use some psych help, the notion that somebody would implant a microchip in you has gone from "automatically crazy" to "must be dismissed as crazy based on the specific facts of the case".
Welcome to the future.
Is that Islam has not undergone a process analogous to the Enlightenment.
Pre-Enlightenment, much of Europe was basically a mass of warring theocracies, split between the Catholic ones and the Protestant ones. Separation of church and state were basically nonexistent, blasphemy laws were on the books(and had real teeth, with limited exceptions[thanks a whole fucking lot Ireland] the ones that remain are just relics at this point). You easily could be, and people were, killed for having the wrong doctrinal positions. Censorship was rampant. Things pretty much sucked.
Thanks to the dedicated(and at times heroic, not a few faced jail, or worse) efforts of various Enlightenment figures, along with a number of political occurrences(the French Revolution had its minuses; but it did have the salubrious effect of annihilating a schlerotic and corrupt divine-right absolutism and replacing it with a secular nation-state. The Glorious Revolution in England was less dramatic; but went rather better. Then, of course, you had the American Revolution, which was absolutely dripping with Enlightenment sentiment[much to the displeasure of today's crop of "America is a Christian Nation founded on the Bible!!! Dominionist nutjobs]).
The Enlightenment was not an easy process. Much blood, sweat, and ink were spilled; but the results helped make the modern west the more-or-less pleasant place it is today. It was basically the death-knell of absolutist theocracy in the west, and the impetus behind the broad introduction of fun concepts like "human rights" and "freedom of religion"(also coffeehouses and atheism, what's not to love?).
The relatively benign forms of Christianity that we think of today are basically creations of the Enlightenment(even among the zealous, things like persecution and warfare between Catholics, protestants, and various sects thereof are basically off the table). It wasn't always that way. Even today, there are reactionary hardliners who would really prefer to roll things back(Rushdooney and the "Reconstructionists", for instance, "Dominionists" more generally, are the main thrust of that in the US, where the hardcore are predominantly fundamentalist protestants. On the European stage, we still have the Catholic church pretending that its "canon law", rather than being simply a set of rules for a private club, somehow takes precedence over Civil Law. Without substantial moderating influences, Abrahamic monotheisms are mean, ugly, primitive, and brutal.
Unfortunately, Islam has not, historically, experienced an analogous process. This doesn't mean that there aren't plenty of more-or-less modern people who are nominally "muslim" in the same way that much of the west is still nominally "christian"; but it does mean that none of the major strains of Islam have been subjected to the radical reduction in power that all the various flavors of Christianity have. For instance, a Christian advocate of theocratic government qualifies as a right-wing nutjob(they exist in surprisingly large numbers, unfortunately; but they still qualify as a fringe position). In large areas of the world, Islamic theocracy(either as a matter of law, or in the form of a state so heavily subservient to religious enthusiasts and Sharia courts that it might as well be) is simply the local form of government.
This is not to say that there is anything intrinsically superior about Christianity. It fought progress tooth-and-nail, every step of the way, during the Enlightenment. To this day, it harbors downright nasty reactionary elements. And, despite protestations to the contrary, most of the noblest aspects of our society exist in spite of rather than because of it. (Fun stuff like "Civil law" and "freedom of conscience" are either classical, or modern derivations from the classical philosophical tradition). However, because Islam has not been subjected to the moderating(some would say "neutering") influence of an Enlightenment, it retains many of the ugly elements that Christianity no longer has the political power or cultural clout to employ.
What I don't know is whether the suckitude of the integrated systems is down to genuine, good-faith incompetence(assuming that automotive engineers can hack it as sat-nav UI designers, or contracting it out to the wrong guys, or just suffering from the rather longer product lifecycle imposed by being part of a car) or whether it is just a "We don't even have to care because what are you going to do, stick a suction cup mount to your windshield and have a cigarette lighter adapter flopping around, exactly like the guy driving the beater civic who earns a factor of ten less than you?"
I could imagine either (or both) being the case. Bad things happen when people underestimate the difficultly of things outside their area of expertise. However, it is also the case that, whenever multiple items are bundled, all the members of the bundle that aren't selling points have a nasty habit of atrophying to the point where they are pretty much good enough to fill the checkbox, and no better.
The worst thing about the integrated sat-navs is that they are often worse in every way(except the awkward cigarette-lighter-for-power and suction cup mount aspect) than even substantially cheaper discrete units.
Standalone GPS units live in a brutal darwinian hell-world, where only the strong or the super-cheap survive. Integrated units live sheltered lives; bundled with much more expensive objects. The difference shows.
I suspect that, for the ARM designs, the real killer would be the glue logic/connectivity required.
Even if the ARM cores were more efficient, in terms of work done per unit power consumption, you'd still get less work per core, which means more cores, which means more network gear(whether it be network gear in the classic "1U, 48ports, ethernet" sense or whether it would be some custom thing(dozens of cores per card, with glue logic, some sort of cardcage/blade design, whatever) the interconnect silicon and cabling costs money, consumes energy, takes time to set up/administer and constitutes another point of failure.
If the ARM cluster equivalent in power to your basic boring 1-2 socket x86 requires 24 or 48 switch ports, any power and initial cost savings are going to be eaten fast.
It does; but one of their mechanical engineers came to a rather brilliant realization:
A WinCE PDA is almost exactly the same size as a data tape. With modest modifications(consisting largely of forcing the work experience kid to run lots and lots of docking cables) an industry standard tape silo can be turned into a gigantic WinCE/ARM blade farm. If a node stops responding, the robot retrieval arm pops it out, presses the reset button, and pops it back in again. Since the OS is in ROM, boot is short and downtime is minimal.