One might argue that Steve Jobs is no more a threat to "free software" than Richard Stallman. Stallman believes that the GPL is superior to, say, the BSD or MIT licenses; a stance that is primarily idealogical. The GPL is not as free as the BSD license, but that's OK. Some people like it better that way. You have the choice. If you look at it from a certain, limited point of view, the GPL can be seen as the "iPhone" of the open source licenses in that it restricts what you can, and cannot do, with the software.
If you take everything coming from Apple as coming from Steve Jobs himself, then we could just as easily point to liberally-licensed projects like WebKit (LGPL), LLVM (NCSA License) and CLANG (BSD), libdispatch (Apache) or launchd (Apache) as arguments against your assertion that Jobs is against free software. Even the Apple Public Source License is certified by the FSF as a true Open Source license.
Licensing is the mechanism for regulation. A restaurant owner has to be licensed to operate, and if the quality of the food or sanitary measures falls below a certain level, that license can be revoked and the restaurant has to close. Licenses for cars allows for the regulation of those who have shown themselves competent enough to drive one. If you do something stupid, you get your license revoked and you can no longer drive. I have yet to hear of a credible story of the government revoking a driver's license for no reason. Care to link a source?
Licenses for guns make sense as well. Not having a firearms license and a registered firearm doesn't mean you're considered a felon, it simply means that you have not demonstrated a level of competence required to own a weapon.
But who am I to say anything? I think the "right to bear arms" is one of the most abused statutes in the Constitution. It was put there to address a practical problem - that of the King of England not allowing the citizens to bear arms, making a people's uprising against the military impossible. That was the days when there was a fairly level playing field between citizens and the military. Now, a popular uprising would not likely be done with guns, since type of firearm a citizen can get is significantly less powerful than the military's arsenal.
Hm. You have a very charming witticism, but I think you're wrong.
You can teach critical thinking, which is a major component in learning how to learn. True, some people are better at it than others, but it can be a skill you pick up. If not, everyone would be born understanding Plato and Wittgenstein.
Ha! If anything, PBS is more necessary now than it was before. With all of the big corporate entities buying and merging, your radio, newspaper and television media is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people. Or are you one of those people that think that corporations are more benevolent and altruistic than your government? At least in government there's always the threat that a politician will lose his or her job if they displease the people. With a corporate entity, they don't have to appease anyone as long as they make money.
Taxpayer-funded national broadcasters, like ABC (Australia), BBC or CBC can be critical of the government in a way that corporate broadcasters cannot be critical of their parent company.
Easy. Use h264, with a fallback to using a Flash player to play the same MP4 file. Firefox will be the only browser that will fall back to Flash, while all the others will present theirs in h264.
The Queen of Canada isn't British, she's Canadian. She can only be advised by Canadians on Canadian matters. She is a completely separate legal person from the British Queen, or the Australian Queen, or the Queen of any other commonwealth country. In fact, we would be in just as much right to call ourselves "Australian" as we would "British."
The Brits could oust their Monarchy tomorrow and we would still have a Queen. And maybe I'm just strange, but I think of a "national identity" as being a shared experience with other people that live in the same arbitrary geographical grouping as I do, not by who the current leader-du-jour is. You don't call yourself an "American" when the Republicans are in power, and then something else when the Democrats are.
The Queen of England and The Queen of Canada are, legally, two separate persons. They are embodied in one person, Elizabeth II, but are distinct entities.
The key word being 'acts'. There's no real power, so I don't know what your problem is here.
The Queen is the Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian military, and by extension the GG acts as CiC. At a whim, she could call in the military on the government and be perfectly within her rights to do so. In reality, she would need a very good reason, but the power still rests in her office and no other. I'd say that's "real" power.
Yeah, it is. As another poster said, most Canadians don't know what or who the GG is. What you feel/think != what the majority of Canadians think.
The majority of Canadians also don't know how an internal combustion engine works, or that the big blue E on their computer isn't "The Internet." Judging the importance of an office by how many people know what it's for is a very poor metric.
Ahhh, see, here's your problem. This has nothing whatsoever to do with Democracy: This is an appointed position. Glad I could clear that up for you.
Democracy doesn't necessarily mean "elected." Michaëlle Jean isn't nobility, she is a Haitian-born Canadian citizen appointed to the office because of her contribution to Canadian society. I don't understand how people think that just because someone is elected they're a better representative. Especially in Canada, where more often than not the person who is elected to an office only gains the plurality, and not the majority, of the votes.
Democracy is more about government of the people, for the people. Elections are a very expedient way of doing this for most cases, but I see no problem in having a few offices where they appoint someone "from the people" because of his or her contribution to society. Theoretically, anyone can be GG: You, me, your neighbour, an actor, a journalist... How is that not "democracy?"
Just because we're a fairly well-run country and the GG doesn't *have* to do anything doesn't mean she doesn't have real power. She is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. All military personnel swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, and by extension the office of the GG, not to the government of Canada. If we ever have a government that needs to be forcefully deposed, she would be the one commanding it, not the Prime Minister or the defence staff.
The GG is also the one that can dissolve parliament, declare a government or sign a bill into law. Granted, she usually does these on the advice of the Prime Minister or Parliament, but to say her role is solely ceremonial is to ignore the significant "checks and balances" the GG's office brings to the whole system.
Apple has pretty much said that it will anyway. The only reason they've given that they don't allow Flash on the iDevices is that it a) sucks battery life and b) Adobe has not yet released a mobile version that they felt performed acceptably on their systems. I'm sure if Adobe gets their ass in gear and releases a version of Flash that actually works on a mobile device, Apple will include it.
Could you clarify? Many of us have, what I would consider, "private" insurance - For example, I have health care coverage from Blue Cross that supplements the basic universal coverage and takes care of things like drugs, private hospital beds, etc.
Maybe there's another meaning of "private" insurance that I'm not aware of?
You get "passive services" (things that exist that you don't have to explicitly take advantage of) like police, fire departments, trash removal, equipment and food safety inspection, military protection, weather services, road maintenance, and a whole slew of other things. If you ever do need health care, employment insurance, immigration services, a pension fund, or any other service like that, they're there immediately, kinda like insurance.
All told, between paying the equivalent in insurance or private contractors to do these things, I would imagine that you do get more than $20k in services back per year.
Except run Microsoft Office reliably. Or Photoshop. Or plug your iPod in and have it "just work." I know you can do *equivalent* things, but most of the world doesn't know "word processing software," they know "Microsoft Word." Wishing it weren't so won't change a damn thing.
The classic case of "your grandmother uses Linux just fine, because I lock it down" isn't really where most of the population is. They're usually somewhere in between "likes pressing buttons and doesn't read dialog boxes" and "knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to fix it." For those people, Linux is absolutely abysmal.
I think what the OP is saying is that religions, for all of their wonky beliefs, actually do a lot of good in the world. It's an effective set of organizations that have made many positive contributions to society, historically and currently, and can be a strong motivator for social justice and poverty issues.
For every church group that opposes birth control in Africa on "moral" grounds, there is usually one that is there handing out condoms. We just hear a lot about the former, and less about the latter.
I agree with you in principle. Assuming an objective mind then yes, that's the way the scientific method is absolutely supposed to work.
In reality, though, if the scientific community were concerned about absolute objectivity, publication of negative results would be much more highly distributed and have a greater impact, on par with the impact of the publication of positive results. As it is now, however, there are only a few journals dedicated to publishing negative results, and a result that does not show a positive correlation with your hypothesis is usually a sign that your paper will not get published.
A human being that has dedicated months or years of their life to a certain topic has a highly vested interest in producing a favourable result. The community has developed accepted workarounds for this, though. If an observation does not match a hypothesis, it's almost expected that you'll change your stated hypothesis to fit the outcome so that you can present a successful result. That's not how it's *supposed* to work though, and while it usually doesn't affect things too much, it leaves much more up to the person to interpret than simply reporting a negative result and re-testing with a new hypothesis.
So, to respond directly, your "wrong order of procedure" is actually used all the time. It's just sometimes people claim absurd things, and then we notice it. But it's not necessarily because they got the scientific method wrong; it's just that they have a personal axe to grind.
Apple most certainly can do that. They make a killing from AT&T in long-term revenue from an iPhone account, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to eliminate the initial subsidy and make the revenue solely from the contract.
I'm not sure I follow your logic about Android, though. Are you saying that somehow they're able to create an app that will run on everything from a 3" screen to a 60" screen with no special considerations for how much information you can reasonably display on it? I'll believe it when I see it. Pixel doubling was a practical solution to a practical problem: how do you take advantage of software written specifically for a small screen on a device with a much larger screen? If Google has come up with a solution to this that doesn't use doubling, I'd like to see it.
So when your boss comes and asks you to create a website featuring videos, what do you tell him? At some point you have to choose, and choosing Theora isn't really an option, since it won't play on most browsers.
The video codec in most Flash-encoded videos is h.264. All the new <video> standardization does is ensure your browser plays the video without a plugin. So I'm not sure why you see a difference. It could be that the flash video is encoded at a lower bitrate than any "plain" h.264 videos you are trying to view.
The one advantage that Flash has is that Adobe pays the licensing fee for its users - just as Apple does for Safari, Microsoft for IE, etc. Firefox is the one browser without a major corporate sponsor to pony up the licensing fee.
Any video codec will be covered by a gazillion patents. Theora isn't patent unencumbered, it's just patent unenforced, and in that way it's a bigger legal minefield than h.264. It's highly likely that if it gains traction, it will be sued out of existence. I think the WebM codec is the only chance of a non-MPEG-LA codec surviving - not because it won't be infringing on any patents, but because Google actually has teeth to defend it.
Slashdot Mirror
One might argue that Steve Jobs is no more a threat to "free software" than Richard Stallman. Stallman believes that the GPL is superior to, say, the BSD or MIT licenses; a stance that is primarily idealogical. The GPL is not as free as the BSD license, but that's OK. Some people like it better that way. You have the choice. If you look at it from a certain, limited point of view, the GPL can be seen as the "iPhone" of the open source licenses in that it restricts what you can, and cannot do, with the software.
If you take everything coming from Apple as coming from Steve Jobs himself, then we could just as easily point to liberally-licensed projects like WebKit (LGPL), LLVM (NCSA License) and CLANG (BSD), libdispatch (Apache) or launchd (Apache) as arguments against your assertion that Jobs is against free software. Even the Apple Public Source License is certified by the FSF as a true Open Source license.
Huh? That's one twisted way to look at it.
Licensing is the mechanism for regulation. A restaurant owner has to be licensed to operate, and if the quality of the food or sanitary measures falls below a certain level, that license can be revoked and the restaurant has to close. Licenses for cars allows for the regulation of those who have shown themselves competent enough to drive one. If you do something stupid, you get your license revoked and you can no longer drive. I have yet to hear of a credible story of the government revoking a driver's license for no reason. Care to link a source?
Licenses for guns make sense as well. Not having a firearms license and a registered firearm doesn't mean you're considered a felon, it simply means that you have not demonstrated a level of competence required to own a weapon.
But who am I to say anything? I think the "right to bear arms" is one of the most abused statutes in the Constitution. It was put there to address a practical problem - that of the King of England not allowing the citizens to bear arms, making a people's uprising against the military impossible. That was the days when there was a fairly level playing field between citizens and the military. Now, a popular uprising would not likely be done with guns, since type of firearm a citizen can get is significantly less powerful than the military's arsenal.
Hm. You have a very charming witticism, but I think you're wrong.
You can teach critical thinking, which is a major component in learning how to learn. True, some people are better at it than others, but it can be a skill you pick up. If not, everyone would be born understanding Plato and Wittgenstein.
Ha! If anything, PBS is more necessary now than it was before. With all of the big corporate entities buying and merging, your radio, newspaper and television media is increasingly controlled by fewer and fewer people. Or are you one of those people that think that corporations are more benevolent and altruistic than your government? At least in government there's always the threat that a politician will lose his or her job if they displease the people. With a corporate entity, they don't have to appease anyone as long as they make money.
Taxpayer-funded national broadcasters, like ABC (Australia), BBC or CBC can be critical of the government in a way that corporate broadcasters cannot be critical of their parent company.
Easy. Use h264, with a fallback to using a Flash player to play the same MP4 file. Firefox will be the only browser that will fall back to Flash, while all the others will present theirs in h264.
A quick Google search turned up some ASCAP asshattery:
http://blogs.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendId=51550622&blogId=510343864 http://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/phillips.html http://www.synthzone.com/ubbs/Forum37/HTML/019179.html http://www.woodpecker.com/writing/essays/royalty-politics.html http://games.slashdot.org/story/09/12/16/0940232/ASCAP-Seeks-Licensing-Fees-For-emGuitar-Hero-Arcadeem?from=rss
You mean like the Mach kernel that both the iOS and OS X share? Or the BSD-based Darwin subsystem? Or some of the Cocoa frameworks?
No, my definition of "working" means "has been shown to not suck." Adobe hasn't shown this yet.
You're not listening.
The Queen of Canada isn't British, she's Canadian. She can only be advised by Canadians on Canadian matters. She is a completely separate legal person from the British Queen, or the Australian Queen, or the Queen of any other commonwealth country. In fact, we would be in just as much right to call ourselves "Australian" as we would "British."
The Brits could oust their Monarchy tomorrow and we would still have a Queen. And maybe I'm just strange, but I think of a "national identity" as being a shared experience with other people that live in the same arbitrary geographical grouping as I do, not by who the current leader-du-jour is. You don't call yourself an "American" when the Republicans are in power, and then something else when the Democrats are.
The Queen of England and The Queen of Canada are, legally, two separate persons. They are embodied in one person, Elizabeth II, but are distinct entities.
The Queen of Canada can only be advised by Canadians on Canadian matters. I'd suggest reading this page for a little more enlightenment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monarchy_of_Canada
The Queen is the Commander-in-Chief of the Canadian military, and by extension the GG acts as CiC. At a whim, she could call in the military on the government and be perfectly within her rights to do so. In reality, she would need a very good reason, but the power still rests in her office and no other. I'd say that's "real" power.
The majority of Canadians also don't know how an internal combustion engine works, or that the big blue E on their computer isn't "The Internet." Judging the importance of an office by how many people know what it's for is a very poor metric.
Democracy doesn't necessarily mean "elected." Michaëlle Jean isn't nobility, she is a Haitian-born Canadian citizen appointed to the office because of her contribution to Canadian society. I don't understand how people think that just because someone is elected they're a better representative. Especially in Canada, where more often than not the person who is elected to an office only gains the plurality, and not the majority, of the votes.
Democracy is more about government of the people, for the people. Elections are a very expedient way of doing this for most cases, but I see no problem in having a few offices where they appoint someone "from the people" because of his or her contribution to society. Theoretically, anyone can be GG: You, me, your neighbour, an actor, a journalist... How is that not "democracy?"
Just because we're a fairly well-run country and the GG doesn't *have* to do anything doesn't mean she doesn't have real power. She is the Commander-in-Chief of the military. All military personnel swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen, and by extension the office of the GG, not to the government of Canada. If we ever have a government that needs to be forcefully deposed, she would be the one commanding it, not the Prime Minister or the defence staff.
The GG is also the one that can dissolve parliament, declare a government or sign a bill into law. Granted, she usually does these on the advice of the Prime Minister or Parliament, but to say her role is solely ceremonial is to ignore the significant "checks and balances" the GG's office brings to the whole system.
Apple has pretty much said that it will anyway. The only reason they've given that they don't allow Flash on the iDevices is that it a) sucks battery life and b) Adobe has not yet released a mobile version that they felt performed acceptably on their systems. I'm sure if Adobe gets their ass in gear and releases a version of Flash that actually works on a mobile device, Apple will include it.
Could you clarify? Many of us have, what I would consider, "private" insurance - For example, I have health care coverage from Blue Cross that supplements the basic universal coverage and takes care of things like drugs, private hospital beds, etc.
Maybe there's another meaning of "private" insurance that I'm not aware of?
You get "passive services" (things that exist that you don't have to explicitly take advantage of) like police, fire departments, trash removal, equipment and food safety inspection, military protection, weather services, road maintenance, and a whole slew of other things. If you ever do need health care, employment insurance, immigration services, a pension fund, or any other service like that, they're there immediately, kinda like insurance.
All told, between paying the equivalent in insurance or private contractors to do these things, I would imagine that you do get more than $20k in services back per year.
Funny. That looks familiar.
You read Fake Steve! He totally called it that people would be saying this.
Except run Microsoft Office reliably. Or Photoshop. Or plug your iPod in and have it "just work." I know you can do *equivalent* things, but most of the world doesn't know "word processing software," they know "Microsoft Word." Wishing it weren't so won't change a damn thing.
The classic case of "your grandmother uses Linux just fine, because I lock it down" isn't really where most of the population is. They're usually somewhere in between "likes pressing buttons and doesn't read dialog boxes" and "knows just enough to be dangerous, but not enough to fix it." For those people, Linux is absolutely abysmal.
I think what the OP is saying is that religions, for all of their wonky beliefs, actually do a lot of good in the world. It's an effective set of organizations that have made many positive contributions to society, historically and currently, and can be a strong motivator for social justice and poverty issues.
For every church group that opposes birth control in Africa on "moral" grounds, there is usually one that is there handing out condoms. We just hear a lot about the former, and less about the latter.
I agree with you in principle. Assuming an objective mind then yes, that's the way the scientific method is absolutely supposed to work.
In reality, though, if the scientific community were concerned about absolute objectivity, publication of negative results would be much more highly distributed and have a greater impact, on par with the impact of the publication of positive results. As it is now, however, there are only a few journals dedicated to publishing negative results, and a result that does not show a positive correlation with your hypothesis is usually a sign that your paper will not get published.
A human being that has dedicated months or years of their life to a certain topic has a highly vested interest in producing a favourable result. The community has developed accepted workarounds for this, though. If an observation does not match a hypothesis, it's almost expected that you'll change your stated hypothesis to fit the outcome so that you can present a successful result. That's not how it's *supposed* to work though, and while it usually doesn't affect things too much, it leaves much more up to the person to interpret than simply reporting a negative result and re-testing with a new hypothesis.
So, to respond directly, your "wrong order of procedure" is actually used all the time. It's just sometimes people claim absurd things, and then we notice it. But it's not necessarily because they got the scientific method wrong; it's just that they have a personal axe to grind.
And how do they do that without doubling (or tripling, etc.) the pixels of the original sizes?
Apple most certainly can do that. They make a killing from AT&T in long-term revenue from an iPhone account, so it wouldn't be much of a stretch to eliminate the initial subsidy and make the revenue solely from the contract.
I'm not sure I follow your logic about Android, though. Are you saying that somehow they're able to create an app that will run on everything from a 3" screen to a 60" screen with no special considerations for how much information you can reasonably display on it? I'll believe it when I see it. Pixel doubling was a practical solution to a practical problem: how do you take advantage of software written specifically for a small screen on a device with a much larger screen? If Google has come up with a solution to this that doesn't use doubling, I'd like to see it.
So when your boss comes and asks you to create a website featuring videos, what do you tell him? At some point you have to choose, and choosing Theora isn't really an option, since it won't play on most browsers.
No, but Javascript and HTML renderers are getting more efficient.
The video codec in most Flash-encoded videos is h.264. All the new <video> standardization does is ensure your browser plays the video without a plugin. So I'm not sure why you see a difference. It could be that the flash video is encoded at a lower bitrate than any "plain" h.264 videos you are trying to view.
The one advantage that Flash has is that Adobe pays the licensing fee for its users - just as Apple does for Safari, Microsoft for IE, etc. Firefox is the one browser without a major corporate sponsor to pony up the licensing fee.
Any video codec will be covered by a gazillion patents. Theora isn't patent unencumbered, it's just patent unenforced, and in that way it's a bigger legal minefield than h.264. It's highly likely that if it gains traction, it will be sued out of existence. I think the WebM codec is the only chance of a non-MPEG-LA codec surviving - not because it won't be infringing on any patents, but because Google actually has teeth to defend it.