Safari only needs to have a reasonably high share within a certain target group for this to be a valid strategy. If the whole lot of Apple device users - Macs and i* combined - is essentially shielded from any ads but those served through iAd (or whatever the call it), that would indeed pose a significant issue for certain markets. It is not the death of the Interwebz, but I would not be so quick to dismiss this as a loony nutcase conspiracy theory.
[...] It seems the Australians are considering a European-style policy ie. the content of internet use isn't stored but its participants are. They know a variety of low level data regarding log in times, durations, sign-in names and the such, but nothing more. [...]
The first problem lies in the fact that all those records are not taken when a crime is committed but preemptively, because someone, somewhere, will break the law. We are all declared suspects, not of a specific crime, but of doing something that may later be of interest to law enforcement or parties in a civil suit.
The second problem lies in the provable fact that whenever the government (or any other state institution) grants itself a privilege it will never give it back or agree to have it limited but seek to have it extended way beyond what it was intended to be when introduced. We have gone from being able to intercept specific calls to preemptively storing any connection's details and already there are vocal calls for storing and filtering message contents, and demands to release data that was intended as a way to fight terrorism and organised crime for prosecuting copyright violations and suppressing unfavourable speech. Giving the state one iota has them push you back a full mile. I simply do not trust the government not to sell us all out to the highest bidder.
Thirdly, the problem lies not in the individual surveillance measures and databases but in the sum of all those little records that the state has on us, both directly and by proxy (corporations, medical information, basically anything they can somehow subpoena or otherwise siphon into their own records). The state can generate a full profile on any of us, yet it fights tooth and nail to keep information about itself out of our reach. Do you know precisely how much money your state is giving to, say, the defense and military sector? Orders, subsidies, grants, tax cuts, everything combined? I don't. Do you know exactly who is involved in drafting your laws throughout the different ministries, committees, subcommittees and so on, how many representatives of certain 'interest groups' directly write the laws that will regulate their employers' or clients' industries? I don't.
In a nutshell: I do not trust the state not to abuse the power it gains from all the data it has on all of us. And so far it has not given me any reason to change my mind. The prerequisite to my consent to such measures is the full transparency of any official matter down to the most basic parts and a truly effective means to fight any abuse of the power we bestow upon our state institutions all the way up to putting traitors up against the wall.
I was about to reply when I realised that your post as it stands can be read in two ways. One I share, namely that the government is a much more immediate threat than any of the scapegoats presented to us, the other - supposedly not the one you intended - brings up a very interesting point. Your sentence could be rephrased as: Pedophiles and terrorists are less afraid of the government than you are. Why should they? They do not mind breaking the law, they do not mind faking their identities or going underground altogether, so they can avoid governmental surveillance. The generally more law-abiding rest of the populace does not have that luxury - we go to work, we pay our taxes, we maintain our social life, we register our place of residency when we move, we buy our plane and train tickets via debit or credit card, we use our own car and our legally registered plates to drive around and so on. Which is why any such surveillance measures have a much more profound impact on us than they have on their supposed targets.
Of course I could make that very same kind of mistake. Just like anyone else. If I run someone over in my car because of a mistake I made I face prosecution and possibly imprisonment, no matter whether the judge or anyone else would have made the same mistake under the circumstances. The gunner accepted his position and the responsibility and, ultimately, liability that goes with it, likewise his pilot, their commanding officer, the CO's CO, the intel folks who supplied the info based on which the CO cleared the gunner to shoot and so on. They made mistakes, now they should be tried for them. If nothing happens and those folks get off without any kind of punishment this sends a very dangerous signal to all other soldiers.
Face palms do not cut it for this. Why should I try the demo in a browser that is useless to me? It is HTML5, so it is supposed to look and act exactly the same in any HTML5 capable browser. If it does not, then the implementation is lacking and needs to be improved. To see whether an implementation is working correctly you need to test it against the demo (and hope that the demo itself is standards compliant).
Oh, I believe the Firefox developers can handle that job for the most part all by themselves.
What are you trying to say? Did you even read what I wrote? I want to test Firefox's HTML5 implementation against Apple's demos. How hard is that to comprehend?
If everyone did this, it would avoid all the yammering and a boat load of our time.
Oh, I am so sorry for wasting your valuable time. God forbid you have to tolerate someone else's opinion.
You seem to have the same point of view as many people here - you attack this tragedy not simply on its own merits, but as part of your rage against a war you feel is unjust.
Yes, I do think this war is unjust - which war is not? - but my motivation behind seeing this not as an isolated incident but as a systemic problem is the sheer number of reports of similar happenings, not just from this war but from military operations in general. The "system" will never be perfect, of course. But each such incident is a call to try and improve upon military doctrine and practice, to identify the reason for such screw-ups and investigate ways to mitigate or at least reduce them, and most importantly: to reconsider whether sending an army into a sovereign country and occupying it by force when your set goal is to make the population trust you and adopt your values and lifestyle is a smart idea. Those soldiers are there in our name, so we are responsible for their behaviour.
I want to know how well HTML5 implementation is going in Firefox.
How do I file bug reports over HTML5 issues when I cannot test those HTML5 demos in the browser? If you limit HTML5 demos to browsers which display them well, you gain nothing for overall HTML5 adoption.
I do not expect them to avoid all errors. On the contrary, I expect them to make errors. They work under extreme pressure in a highly dynamic environment with many unknowns and dramatic consequences for every action or inaction they take. But this comment sums up my point of view quite nicely. This tragedy needs to have consequences, not just for the personnel immediately involved but for the whole Iraq occupation.
Regarding the Red Crescent: How many civilians know the Geneva Conventions? Few, because they do not usually need to. Armed forces personnel on the other hand should have undergone instructions in that regard. And how many civilians have undergone extensive training at how to properly behave on a battlefield? Mighty few, because they usually should not be on one. You defend the pilots' lack of knowledge, but blame the civilians for not knowing military protocol. Kind of unfair to me.
That's not the message Apple wants to send. If you're trying to promote HTML5 and terminate Flash, what you describe would be a stupid message. All people would say then is, "Clearly I'm not ready for HTML5. Just let me continue with Flash."
Face, meet palm. People would say "Why does my fancy $browsername not work with this demo? I want it!", putting pressure on the other vendors to push forward with their HTML5 implementation, thus creating incentive for websites to actually use HTML5, thus eliminating the need for Flash, thus enlarging the potential user base for Apple products.
Poor baby! If you care, you can download Safari. If you use Linux, try the demos on the developer page in Google Chrome for Linux. They work in Chrome for the most part.
Hey face, remember palm? I do not give a damn about Safari, Chrome, IE or any browser besides Firefox. I want to know how well HTML5 implementation is going in Firefox.
The gunner didn't know he was firing on civilians. He thought he was firing on insurgents.
Oh, right. Unarmed people carrying off a wounded person. How incredibly insurgent. The impertinence!
Besides, re-read my post: I did not place the blame solely or even specifically on the gunner. Someone screwed up the intel and told someone else to go ahead and shoot, and that someone was only too happy and eager to oblige. Many people fucked this up together. That does not make it a purely random, unavoidable accident.
If they can find a bug in your implementation just from input and output, and you cannot find the bug from input, output and the implementation itself, you deserve to have your super-secret information out in the open.
You are perfectly right. Which makes you perfectly wrong, though. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention says it as clear as can be:
A civilian is any person who does not belong to one of the categories of persons referred to in [...] In case of doubt whether a person is a civilian, that person shall be considered to be a civilian.
The soldiers have to confirm that their target is an enemy combattant before shooting them. And they failed to do so.
This was not an accident. The copter's gun did not accidentally go off and blast the living shit out of those civilians. Someone deliberately aimed at them and pulled the trigger. This was human failure up and down the chain of command, not an accident.
If the demos suck in all other browsers Apple could point to that and say "Hey, told you so. Safari shows all of them correctly, by the way.". Since there is no way I can test them with Firefox I do not know whether they really "look like crap" there.
This is not a pro-HTML5 stance, it is a pro-Apple stance.
[...] I don't like everything that Apple does, but in this case what are they supposed to do? [...]
Add a link to the demo below the Safari message that says "I understand that my browser may not fully support this demo, but I want to try anyway". Y'know, plain and simple cross-browser usability 1x1. It is not that hard.
In this case you should indeed and literally think of the children, specifically those Christian Taliban's kids. Allowing their parents to lock them into Christian Fundy training camps robs them of any chance to receive proper education. Society as a whole would suffer from a massive influx of brain-washed idiots.
[...] synthetic life forms created by human beings are by all accounts intelligent design.
I'd rather disagree. Intelligent Design basically means "too complex to have evolved on its own". Synthetic life form means "some person made it in a lab". That is not the same by a long margin. I concur with the AC: ID is a dogma.
That is what makes UI design so hard to get right. You have to shoot a bird that the one who wants it dead cannot describe any more closely than "it has wings, it is not an eagle and it may or may not carry an elephant". Which is precisely why one should not be so quick to dismiss an input method as archaic or "shit" when it is obviously helpful to many people. elrous0's attitude is exactly why Microsoft found itself on the receiving end of a shitstorm when they introduced the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 without retaining the old interface as an option: One size often does not fit all, no matter how well designed it is or how well it works in theory.
If a new user can't start it up and figure pretty much everything out in about 5 minutes, it's a design fail.
The same goes for games. Having the option (!) of using shortcuts does not exclude the need for an accessible UI, and vice versa. We are not talking emacs level complexity here. Pressing ALT+D to jump into the location bar is hardly arcane magic. Using a traditional computer (as in "has a screen, a mouse and a keyboard") gives you two input devices readily at hand; it would be retarded to eliminate one of them simply because, uhm, well, using it takes about one minute of your precious time to glance over the shortcut list.
Since the advent of touch devices on the mass market and the future uptake that is to be expected I agree that many applications' UIs will have to evolve to accommodate different interaction paradigms. That does not mean, though, that what has served many of "us" very well since the invention of graphical UIs is suddenly bad. Keyboard shortcuts have their place. So does the command line. Different users follow different strategies and have different requirements.
Slashdot Mirror
It will be just as useful after the storm as it is now, I give you that.
Safari only needs to have a reasonably high share within a certain target group for this to be a valid strategy. If the whole lot of Apple device users - Macs and i* combined - is essentially shielded from any ads but those served through iAd (or whatever the call it), that would indeed pose a significant issue for certain markets. It is not the death of the Interwebz, but I would not be so quick to dismiss this as a loony nutcase conspiracy theory.
[...] It seems the Australians are considering a European-style policy ie. the content of internet use isn't stored but its participants are. They know a variety of low level data regarding log in times, durations, sign-in names and the such, but nothing more. [...]
The first problem lies in the fact that all those records are not taken when a crime is committed but preemptively, because someone, somewhere, will break the law. We are all declared suspects, not of a specific crime, but of doing something that may later be of interest to law enforcement or parties in a civil suit.
The second problem lies in the provable fact that whenever the government (or any other state institution) grants itself a privilege it will never give it back or agree to have it limited but seek to have it extended way beyond what it was intended to be when introduced. We have gone from being able to intercept specific calls to preemptively storing any connection's details and already there are vocal calls for storing and filtering message contents, and demands to release data that was intended as a way to fight terrorism and organised crime for prosecuting copyright violations and suppressing unfavourable speech. Giving the state one iota has them push you back a full mile. I simply do not trust the government not to sell us all out to the highest bidder.
Thirdly, the problem lies not in the individual surveillance measures and databases but in the sum of all those little records that the state has on us, both directly and by proxy (corporations, medical information, basically anything they can somehow subpoena or otherwise siphon into their own records). The state can generate a full profile on any of us, yet it fights tooth and nail to keep information about itself out of our reach. Do you know precisely how much money your state is giving to, say, the defense and military sector? Orders, subsidies, grants, tax cuts, everything combined? I don't. Do you know exactly who is involved in drafting your laws throughout the different ministries, committees, subcommittees and so on, how many representatives of certain 'interest groups' directly write the laws that will regulate their employers' or clients' industries? I don't.
In a nutshell: I do not trust the state not to abuse the power it gains from all the data it has on all of us. And so far it has not given me any reason to change my mind. The prerequisite to my consent to such measures is the full transparency of any official matter down to the most basic parts and a truly effective means to fight any abuse of the power we bestow upon our state institutions all the way up to putting traitors up against the wall.
I was about to reply when I realised that your post as it stands can be read in two ways. One I share, namely that the government is a much more immediate threat than any of the scapegoats presented to us, the other - supposedly not the one you intended - brings up a very interesting point. Your sentence could be rephrased as: Pedophiles and terrorists are less afraid of the government than you are. Why should they? They do not mind breaking the law, they do not mind faking their identities or going underground altogether, so they can avoid governmental surveillance. The generally more law-abiding rest of the populace does not have that luxury - we go to work, we pay our taxes, we maintain our social life, we register our place of residency when we move, we buy our plane and train tickets via debit or credit card, we use our own car and our legally registered plates to drive around and so on. Which is why any such surveillance measures have a much more profound impact on us than they have on their supposed targets.
Of course I could make that very same kind of mistake. Just like anyone else. If I run someone over in my car because of a mistake I made I face prosecution and possibly imprisonment, no matter whether the judge or anyone else would have made the same mistake under the circumstances. The gunner accepted his position and the responsibility and, ultimately, liability that goes with it, likewise his pilot, their commanding officer, the CO's CO, the intel folks who supplied the info based on which the CO cleared the gunner to shoot and so on. They made mistakes, now they should be tried for them. If nothing happens and those folks get off without any kind of punishment this sends a very dangerous signal to all other soldiers.
Face palms do not cut it for this. Why should I try the demo in a browser that is useless to me? It is HTML5, so it is supposed to look and act exactly the same in any HTML5 capable browser. If it does not, then the implementation is lacking and needs to be improved. To see whether an implementation is working correctly you need to test it against the demo (and hope that the demo itself is standards compliant).
Oh, I believe the Firefox developers can handle that job for the most part all by themselves.
What are you trying to say? Did you even read what I wrote? I want to test Firefox's HTML5 implementation against Apple's demos. How hard is that to comprehend?
If everyone did this, it would avoid all the yammering and a boat load of our time.
Oh, I am so sorry for wasting your valuable time. God forbid you have to tolerate someone else's opinion.
You seem to have the same point of view as many people here - you attack this tragedy not simply on its own merits, but as part of your rage against a war you feel is unjust.
Yes, I do think this war is unjust - which war is not? - but my motivation behind seeing this not as an isolated incident but as a systemic problem is the sheer number of reports of similar happenings, not just from this war but from military operations in general. The "system" will never be perfect, of course. But each such incident is a call to try and improve upon military doctrine and practice, to identify the reason for such screw-ups and investigate ways to mitigate or at least reduce them, and most importantly: to reconsider whether sending an army into a sovereign country and occupying it by force when your set goal is to make the population trust you and adopt your values and lifestyle is a smart idea. Those soldiers are there in our name, so we are responsible for their behaviour.
I do not usually quote myself, but here it goes:
I want to know how well HTML5 implementation is going in Firefox.
How do I file bug reports over HTML5 issues when I cannot test those HTML5 demos in the browser? If you limit HTML5 demos to browsers which display them well, you gain nothing for overall HTML5 adoption.
I do not expect them to avoid all errors. On the contrary, I expect them to make errors. They work under extreme pressure in a highly dynamic environment with many unknowns and dramatic consequences for every action or inaction they take. But this comment sums up my point of view quite nicely. This tragedy needs to have consequences, not just for the personnel immediately involved but for the whole Iraq occupation.
Regarding the Red Crescent: How many civilians know the Geneva Conventions? Few, because they do not usually need to. Armed forces personnel on the other hand should have undergone instructions in that regard. And how many civilians have undergone extensive training at how to properly behave on a battlefield? Mighty few, because they usually should not be on one. You defend the pilots' lack of knowledge, but blame the civilians for not knowing military protocol. Kind of unfair to me.
That's not the message Apple wants to send. If you're trying to promote HTML5 and terminate Flash, what you describe would be a stupid message. All people would say then is, "Clearly I'm not ready for HTML5. Just let me continue with Flash."
Face, meet palm. People would say "Why does my fancy $browsername not work with this demo? I want it!", putting pressure on the other vendors to push forward with their HTML5 implementation, thus creating incentive for websites to actually use HTML5, thus eliminating the need for Flash, thus enlarging the potential user base for Apple products.
Poor baby! If you care, you can download Safari. If you use Linux, try the demos on the developer page in Google Chrome for Linux. They work in Chrome for the most part.
Hey face, remember palm? I do not give a damn about Safari, Chrome, IE or any browser besides Firefox. I want to know how well HTML5 implementation is going in Firefox.
The gunner didn't know he was firing on civilians. He thought he was firing on insurgents.
Oh, right. Unarmed people carrying off a wounded person. How incredibly insurgent. The impertinence!
Besides, re-read my post: I did not place the blame solely or even specifically on the gunner. Someone screwed up the intel and told someone else to go ahead and shoot, and that someone was only too happy and eager to oblige. Many people fucked this up together. That does not make it a purely random, unavoidable accident.
If they can find a bug in your implementation just from input and output, and you cannot find the bug from input, output and the implementation itself, you deserve to have your super-secret information out in the open.
You are perfectly right. Which makes you perfectly wrong, though. Article 50 of the Geneva Convention says it as clear as can be:
The soldiers have to confirm that their target is an enemy combattant before shooting them. And they failed to do so.
Oh my, where are those mod points when you need them? Please mod parent up.
This was not an accident. The copter's gun did not accidentally go off and blast the living shit out of those civilians. Someone deliberately aimed at them and pulled the trigger. This was human failure up and down the chain of command, not an accident.
If the demos suck in all other browsers Apple could point to that and say "Hey, told you so. Safari shows all of them correctly, by the way.". Since there is no way I can test them with Firefox I do not know whether they really "look like crap" there.
This is not a pro-HTML5 stance, it is a pro-Apple stance.
No. Google may be evil, but it is not intentionally annoying.
[...] I don't like everything that Apple does, but in this case what are they supposed to do? [...]
Add a link to the demo below the Safari message that says "I understand that my browser may not fully support this demo, but I want to try anyway". Y'know, plain and simple cross-browser usability 1x1. It is not that hard.
[...] what's wrong with asking users to download Safari if that's the only way currently to see the demos in their full glory?
Apple does not ask, it makes it a prerequisite. A simple recommendation and a "I don't care, show me the goods" link would have done perfectly.
Same annoying Safari nag message here. Lame, just lame.
In this case you should indeed and literally think of the children, specifically those Christian Taliban's kids. Allowing their parents to lock them into Christian Fundy training camps robs them of any chance to receive proper education. Society as a whole would suffer from a massive influx of brain-washed idiots.
[...] synthetic life forms created by human beings are by all accounts intelligent design.
I'd rather disagree. Intelligent Design basically means "too complex to have evolved on its own". Synthetic life form means "some person made it in a lab". That is not the same by a long margin. I concur with the AC: ID is a dogma.
What new class? If you mean the iPad, no, sorry to put a dark spot onto your world view, but His Jobsiness did not invent the keyboardless touch PC.
That is what makes UI design so hard to get right. You have to shoot a bird that the one who wants it dead cannot describe any more closely than "it has wings, it is not an eagle and it may or may not carry an elephant". Which is precisely why one should not be so quick to dismiss an input method as archaic or "shit" when it is obviously helpful to many people. elrous0's attitude is exactly why Microsoft found itself on the receiving end of a shitstorm when they introduced the Ribbon interface in Office 2007 without retaining the old interface as an option: One size often does not fit all, no matter how well designed it is or how well it works in theory.
If a new user can't start it up and figure pretty much everything out in about 5 minutes, it's a design fail.
The same goes for games. Having the option (!) of using shortcuts does not exclude the need for an accessible UI, and vice versa. We are not talking emacs level complexity here. Pressing ALT+D to jump into the location bar is hardly arcane magic. Using a traditional computer (as in "has a screen, a mouse and a keyboard") gives you two input devices readily at hand; it would be retarded to eliminate one of them simply because, uhm, well, using it takes about one minute of your precious time to glance over the shortcut list.
Since the advent of touch devices on the mass market and the future uptake that is to be expected I agree that many applications' UIs will have to evolve to accommodate different interaction paradigms. That does not mean, though, that what has served many of "us" very well since the invention of graphical UIs is suddenly bad. Keyboard shortcuts have their place. So does the command line. Different users follow different strategies and have different requirements.