If you’re making an argument that Google derives its authority from the USG, it’s not hairsplitting to point out that the USG doesn’t have that authority to delegate in the first place.
Are you really comfortable with domain-registrars being in a position to decide, who gets to speak?
Nope, but I recognize that what I’m comfortable with is thankfully not the basis for law in this country. You’d do well to realize the same.
I'd like you to confirm or deny this stance...
You set up a false dichotomy, so I won’t be taking either of your canned responses, but I will answer the underlying questions. 1) If a domain registrar has a policy against inciting violence, I believe it should be applied consistently, though I recognize that they may not have a legal obligation to do so. If a registrar has no such policy, they should not be forced to adopt one.
2) I didn’t even know what Antifa was until you linked me (I had heard of them, but I find I’m happier when I stay out of the day-to-day political news, so I honestly thought it was some sort of Islamic group in the US), but from the sound of things, they’re way off-base too.
had you really been as adamant about free speech as you claim to be, you would've been outraged about Google playing the lawmaker, the prosecution, and the judge all at once and applying their own "laws" so capriciously.
No, because I believe that our rights become less meaningful to us when we confuse them with privileges. Using private services is a privilege, not a right. You’re not entitled to use their service according to your own terms, so if you don’t like their terms, don’t agree to them. Instead, vote with your wallet and go elsewhere, same as any other business. Likewise, recognize that if you sign up for an account with them, you’re bound by their policies. And if you think I like Google, think again. I migrated away from Google products years ago after finding their policies abhorrent.
That said, I only start to become concerned about this sort of stuff when regional or national monopolies mean that there are no alternatives, since that’s when the government may need to get involved in a regulatory fashion.
Yes, they are — they are private in the sense they are offering their services on the free market, free to refuse any customer and/or charge whatever they please. But, once they certify a signature, they can not revoke the certification simply because they don't like the customer.
No, they aren’t. Participating in the free market doesn’t mean you’re private. Unlike Google, they’re appointed by the government, receive their authority from the government, and have to play within special rules set by the government. That makes them public. They aren’t allowed to revoke their seals because doing so is beyond their authority as a public officer.
Then so — de facto — are the registrars. Their function is purely to register a domain-name.
Again, no. That they serve a (questionably) similar purpose has no bearing on if they’re public or private. That they aren’t government owned means they’re private, and as a private entity operating under the authority granted to them by another private entity, they get to set whatever rules they want, including cancelling an account at their sole discretion. You may not like it, but that doesn’t change that they are allowed to do so.
The subject of the thread still lists hosters (of services) in addition to registrars.
"Hosters" (which I think is your incorrect way of referring to hosts) aren't being held liable either, so whether we're talking about registrars or hosts makes no difference. You're still conflating businesses with their clients and your comparison still falls apart right from the get-go. Same as before.
Whatever it is ostensibly, the governance of the Internet is still very much controlled by the US government [...] Many of the root DNS-servers are US-owned...
None of which matters to what you were claiming.
You were trying to argue that Google is obligated to uphold a higher standard because it derives its authority from the USG. That argument only holds water if the USG has "authority over the Internet" like you said it did. When I pointed out that you were incorrect about it having that legal authority (i.e. de jure control), you switched to arguing that the USG has de facto control of the Internet, but having de facto control is not the same as having authority you can delegate. As such, no, Google is not under any obligation of the sort you're suggesting.
Put differently, your current argument boils down to "Because the USG owns some infrastructure, Google is obligated to allow anything the USG allows". It's a non-sequitur. It's like arguing that because the USG owns a lot of land, I'm obligated to allow protesters on my private property. That's not how it works. It's a nonsensical argument, but you're so lost in the weeds that you don't even realize how irrational it is.
Likewise, your argument that they are government-like holds no water, since government-like != government. Everything from Facebook to Sam's Club to my local library requires that I register before I use their service. That doesn't make them government-like, and even if it did, that still wouldn't matter.
You aren't offering any citations
I didn't realize I needed to cite the link that you provided. I figured you read your own link and would recognize that's where I pulled most of my information.
how is mere accusation of inciting violence sufficient [...]?
Irrelevant question. We're talking about a private company cancelling the service of a customer who broke rules that the customer agreed to. Simple as that. And to answer your later question, of course I have no problem with a private service provider terminating the service of a customer who broke the terms of service that the customer freely agreed to. Why do you? Do you think civil liberties are being trampled upon every time a message board bans a user who violates their rules?
Notary Publics are private too
No, notary publicsaren't private, actually. They're public officers appointed by the government. You're correct that they (in most cases) can choose whom they serve, but they are legally bound to act in their capacity as a public officer whenever they do serve.
Apple assumes everyone gets everything from Apple.
Has this ever been true? Sure, it's a funny line to toss out there, but Apple has obviously recognized that their products exist in a world beyond their control, which is why we see support for SMB, NTFS, and a host of other technologies and formats that didn't originate at Apple.
To be sure, their support falls far short of what we see on Windows or Linux, but in the various Macs I've worked on, I've replaced RAM, batteries, SSDs, HDDs, and even created my own Fusion Drive, none of which I did using Apple-branded components. Clearly they designed their products to work with products they didn't create. That something otherwise is being reported here today is an upsetting departure from the status quo for Macs.
A) You've confused registrants with registrars. It's the registrant, Sorenson Communications, that's being held liable here, not a registrar like Google, so your comparisons to Google's situation fall apart right from the get-go.
B) Companies that provide 911 service agree to certain legal obligations. Failure to uphold those obligations results in hefty fines because lives are literally at risk. Registrars like Google are under no such obligations to IANA.
C) Speaking of IANA, it, rather than the US government, is the organization with the authority you're talking about. The USG gave it away in 1998 to ICANN, which is a nonprofit organization in the private sector. As such, none of their authority has stemmed from the USG in nearly 20 years.
D) Barring its obligations to IANA—which again, do NOT derive from government authority—Google can set whatever terms they want. If an applicant doesn't like them, they can simply take their business elsewhere.
E) Google's terms—which The Daily Stormer agreed to—make it clear that they can cancel registrations at their discretion, such as if a site is being used for unlawful activities. The courts have repeatedly ruled that inciting violence—which is what The Daily Stormer is accused of—is an unlawful form of speech, akin to shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. It is neither protected speech nor a civil right. Guess what Google cited as the reason for cancelling the registration?
All of which is to say, I'm fine with people pointing out that Nazis have rights too, and I'll stand by you in defending them (regardless of my utter and complete distaste for what they say), but don't you dare suggest that private entities are obligated to assist them in spreading their message, particularly for speech that not even the US government itself is obligated to protect.
No, it doesn't. They've proven that the problem's complexity is beyond the bounds of our universe, not just that it's beyond our ability to compute. They're saying that to solve this problem, you'd need something more than our universe. Advancements in computing machines will certainly allow us to solve more complex problems, but we're still bounded by the limits of our universe. If problems go beyond those bounds, no advancements in computing will ever allow us to solve them.
Of course, as others have pointed out, this doesn't prove we're not in a simulation. Rather, it puts bounds on potential simulations by proving two related things: 1) We will never be capable of creating a simulation that perfectly simulates our own universe, so any child universes we may one day create will necessarily be lesser in some way than ours.
2) Any parent universe in which we may be a simulation would have faced that same constraint, so if we are in a simulation, our universe would necessarily be lesser in some way than our parent's.
iPhones have been randomizing MAC addresses for several years now, specifically to defeat drive-by tracking efforts of this sort (though the examples people were giving back when the feature was introduced were restaurant franchises and the like using their free hotspots to recognize people driving by or stopping in on a daily basis). Once you actually connect to a network, it'll give that network your actual MAC address, but up to that point it simply delivers fake addresses.
On the Android side of things, I'm sure there must be some utilities that allow this sort of thing, but I'm not aware of it being baked into the OS as it is with iOS.
Assembly wasn't available right from the start, nor on all systems. I used to work with a couple of NASA subcontractors who talked about when they would code by flipping 8 switches and then pressing a button to push that single byte of code into the computer.
I thought about putting code in quotation marks, a la "code", since it bears little semblance to modern coding, but then I realized that would be an utter and complete disservice to the absolutely herculean effort those people went through back then to build what were in many cases mission critical systems.
Uhh...we actually did have net neutrality for most of the time that we had the Internet. Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence, and those lines were regulated under the same Title II classification that Obama’s FCC simply extended to cable ISPs. It’s a matter of bringing Internet-over-cable in line with the regulations that have existed for Internet-over-anything-else for the duration of the Internet’s history.
In fact, they can't even turn it on in the first place. Neither last year's iPhone 7 nor the brand new iPhone 8 even have the FM chip in them that the commissioner seems to think they have, and I suspect the same will be true for the iPhone X as well.
Older iPhones still had the chip, since it was yet one more chip on a commodity component Apple used, but, as you pointed out, there was no FM antenna connected to the chip, so it couldn't actually receive a signal. And even if we ignored that problem, you'd still need to add hardware and software support for turning the chip on and off, tuning the antenna, and piping the signal through the speakers, none of which was ever baked into iOS.
Asking Apple to simply "flip the switch" on a missing chip is like asking chairman Pai to simply "flip the switch" to begin acting in an ethical manner: it's an impossible request.
On top of that, releasing it right before Apple's big event is a surefire way to kill any buzz you might have managed to eke out in the general population. The moment the iPhone X hit the news circuits, the Essential phone was guaranteed to get zero additional coverage from mainstream media unless it had already built up such a huge head of steam that it couldn't be ignored. That clearly didn't happen.
Steve Jobs taught us that [...] we should just take care of making sure we're in sync with the cloud.
Yeah...no. While Jobs was definitely at the forefront of pushing for a cloud-based future even before we were calling it "the cloud" (e.g. I recall him talking in a mid-'90s interview about wanting to bring server-based user directories to consumers, since he had personally been using them at NeXT for years and thought they could change the way we used computers), there's no doubt that Apple's cloud products were one disaster after another for the entire time he was at the helm.
First there was iTools in the late '90s. They eventually had to rebrand iTools as.Mac in the early 2000s to get away from the bad word of mouth it had. Likewise, they eventually had to rebrand.Mac as MobileMe in the mid-2000s to get away from.Mac's bad word of mouth. And then they eventually had to rebrand MobileMe as iCloud in 2011, which is what we still have today. At no point along that journey was it a reliable product or one that I could recommend to friends and family. In fact, my father's choice to jump on the MobileMe bandwagon continues to be a cause for tech support issues he brings to me, years after the service's discontinuation.
Even iCloud was widely maligned at its launch in 2011, and continues to be widely maligned today, despite the fact that it eventually did become a reliable product a year or two ago with the advent of their CloudKit APIs. But prior to that? Dumpster fire after dumpster fire. Even the most ardent of Apple apologists will agree that Apple's cloud services were simply bad under Jobs' tenure.
Steve Jobs taught us that fewer controls are better [...]
I think what he tried to teach us was that replacing numerous single-purpose controls (e.g. keyboard buttons) with a single infinite-purpose control (i.e. a touchscreen that could become anything you needed) was better. Sure, minimalism was his thing, but so was brushed aluminum in iTunes, Corinthian leather in iCal, green felt in Game Center, and a wheel on the iPod that was actually five buttons in one. Put differently, he was trying to teach us to use simpler controls, not fewer controls.
Also, most places I shop, actually REMOVE the 2-4% markup for cash and debit transactions and again obliterates your argument about consumer markup.
As is commonly said around here, an anecdote does not a trend make, and your personal anecdote is in no way indicative of the situation for most people in the US. In fact, I believe there are only 6 states in the US (Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming) where merchants are free to set different prices based on payment method without fear of facing fines or being sued for breach of contract.
Why is that?
Well, so far as I know, it's still illegal for businesses in all of the big states (e.g. California, New York, Texas, and Florida) as well as a number of other states (about a dozen in total) to add a surcharge for customers who use a credit card. As such, you're guaranteed that the list prices in those states will have the credit card fees baked in. The caveat to that is, as you suggested, that businesses in those states can offer discounts for cash payments, rather than add a surcharge for credit card users. Unfortunately, most businesses shy away from the practice for the simple reason that it's a legal minefield. Depending on the phrases their cashiers use, where their signage is placed, and even when the discount is applied in the payment process, we've seen a number of businesses have their "discounts" classified as unlawful surcharges, resulting in hefty fines.
Moreover, even in states without laws against surcharges, I believe it's generally still the case that contracts with credit card companies have clauses that disallow retailers from offering different prices, thus ensuring that credit card users always receive the same price as everyone else. Only 10 states have laws that render those clauses null and void, but 4 of those 10 also have no-surcharge laws, hence why I said that there are only 6 states where merchants don't need to worry about stepping into a regulatory minefield or running afoul of contract law.
At the end of the day, with the laws varying so much from state to state (I didn't even talk about the state-to-state differences with regards whether debit cards are eligible for surcharges or discounts), it's simply easier for most retailers—particularly regional or national chains—to have a single price that everyone pays.
Oh, and just to quickly provide my own anecdote as a counterpoint to yours, I live in one of the no-surcharge states and I only know of one place in town (a liquor store) that offers a discount for paying in cash. Everything else is full price for everyone.
I couldn’t keep reading your post after its deliberately false claims that Apple is shipping “puny CPUs” in their mobile devices, despite synethetic and real world benchmarks indicating that they’re about a year ahead in terms of multicore performance (Android devices managed to eke out a win over the iPhone 7’s multicore performance shortly before the iPhone 8 leap frogged them by a wide margin), and perhaps as much as two years ahead of the closest competition in terms of single core performance (Android devices only recently passed the 6s and have yet to pass the year-old 7, let alone the brand new 8).
You’re wrong about a lot of the rest of what you said as well, but you’re SO grossly wrong about CPU performance that I had to speak up about that point in particular.
My conclusion was that they were factually wrong. I proved that in my first post.
You’re arguing the orthogonal topic that a bug is causing these issues, and you’re welcome to do so, but the fact that the battery issues are already diminishing would seem to discredit your argument while supporting the sole claim I actually agreed with from the bogus research company’s statements: that the cause of the problem is simply maintenance processes running post-update, just like they do after every major update.
You seem to be confused. A) Drones aren't allowed above 500 feet in residential areas, so the helicopter pilot never should have had to have been looking for it in the first place.
B) In a crash between two moving vehicles, "A struck B" is generally interchangeable with "B struck A". Whether the helicopter hit the drone or the drone hit the helicopter is immaterial to the question of whether the helicopter was operating within regulations by flying at that altitude.
C) Whether the helicopter pilot should have noticed and evaded the drone is a completely separate topic that you're only bringing up now in an effort to move the goalposts after you learned that you were incorrect in your claim that he was operating outside of FAA regulations.
While I agree that bugs related to unreleased features can cause problems, that clearly wasn't what they were talking about here. Unless you stretch their words well past the breaking point, it's pretty clear from the context that they were talking about actual usage of new features and the hardware enabling them. They specifically blame "[t]he hardware [...] in the iPhone X" and "[n]ew functionality in iOS 11", rather than bugs related to supporting either. In fact, nowhere do they even hint at the notion of bugs or other concerns of that sort being a factor.
Sure there is. If you add a zero to my bank balance, it will facilitate many more financial transactions by me.
Well, given that I said I was talking about "facilitat[ing] the operation of the financial system" and that you are not the financial system, I think it's safe to say that you're talking about something wholly separate. In fact, if you engaged in more financial transactions, it would place additional burden on those who are facilitating the system's operation, and if you intentionally twist terms in a disingenuous way like that again, I'll be done with this discussion.
In terms of productivity, those two things are exactly the same.
If you live in an agrarian society, perhaps, I suppose.
But as soon as your society grows beyond the ability for every transaction to occur via cash on a face-to-face basis, you'll necessarily incur a loss of productivity as people wait for funds to arrive before they can resume productive activities. As such, the act of facilitating timely and trustworthy transactions beyond face-to-face interactions produces value by allowing our productive activities to continue unabated. In much the same way that a courier provides value by moving an object from point A to point B in a timely and trustworthy manner, miners or an ACH provide value to financial systems by moving money from account A to account B in a timely and trustworthy manner.
Not only did they incorrectly blame FaceID in the original article, they even acknowledged the actual cause right at the start, before leaping headfirst into a series of factually incorrect assertions. Right at the start:
Battery drain is a common iOS problem that usually pops up immediately after a major iOS upgrade release. This is partly due to Spotlight re-indexing and other behind the scenes shuffling.
I.e. We know exactly what's causing it, and it's a perfectly understandable problem that resolves itself after a few days, but let's author a report using data that we know is in no way representative of actual usage so we can stir up a storm over an "issue" that won't exist in about a week.
As for the iPhone X stuff that you mentioned they got wrong, here's the relevant quote for anyone interested:
New functionality in iOS 11 could also be responsible for draining the life out of your phone. Animoji and iPhone X’s FaceID hardware use face-scanning technology relying heavily on the camera which is a notorious battery sucker. The hardware enabling this advanced facial recognition (A11 Bionic GPU) in the iPhone X could be the reason there is such a dramatic difference in battery decay rate.
They managed to pack a lot of wrong into that one paragraph, namely that: A) The iPhone X doesn't launch until November, so we can safely rule the iPhone X out as a factor.
B) Animoji is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule Animoji out as a factor.
C) FaceID is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule FaceID out as a factor.
D) FaceID does not rely on the "notorious battery sucker" camera (it relies on an IR sensor like the Kinect's), so we can rule the camera out as a factor.
E) The A11 SoC is not available on any iOS 10 device. Given that Wandera claims to have measured "the same device" draining in different versions of the OS, we can conclude that they didn't measure any A11 devices, so we can safely rule the A11 out as a factor.
More or less, they said exactly what the actual cause was, then proceeded to lie through their teeth for no reason other than to make a salacious headline that would drive traffic their way.
No, because in your example there's no correlation between the people adding 0s to their bank account and the people facilitating financial transactions. You're talking about paying people for doing nothing to aid the operation of the system, whereas I was talking about paying the people who facilitate the operation of the financial system.
If you'd like an actual example of this sort of thing in the real world, look no further than banks, ACH, and other financial institutions who facilitate the transfer of money. We pay them in various ways for the services they render. The big difference with cryptocurrencies is that the people facilitating transfers (i.e. miners) are paid directly via mechanisms built into the cryptocurrency's architecture, rather than via fees and interest that they have to collect themselves. In any financial system, someone(s) will need to facilitate things, and their efforts are of value to the people making use of that currency, whether we're talking about USD or Bitcoin. Paying someone for work done is not the same as arbitrarily adding 0s to bank accounts.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of cryptocurrency mining is that it actually does produce value, in that the mining process itself is what's responsible for distributing, verifying, and otherwise maintaining the blockchain on which the currency is built. Which is to say, miners are the ones facilitating the use of the currency. It's actually part of what makes cryptocurrencies work so well, since the very act of maintaining the currency is both distributed and incentivized.
All of which is to say, mining isn't just a matter of spinning one's wheels without purpose. It produces value for the people making use of that currency.
...to persons or property on the surface. A drone that’s in the air is, by definition, not on the surface. The helicopter pilot appears to have been operating with the regulations.
I’ve told the story here before, but I knew a professor at a university who discovered a means for curing yeast infections in a single day, back when the industry standard was still a one-week treatment. A large pharmaceutical company approached him, bought him out, and then proceeded to do nothing with his work for the next several years. Their three-day treatment was about to launch and was already ahead of the competition, so they wanted to milk it for all they could before bringing the one-day treatment to market later.
I too doubt that anyone is holding back cures for major illnesses, but they absolutely do hold back better treatments when there are financial advantages to doing so.
In fact, this could be fixed on either end: either increase the requirements on the gathering side or increase the requirements on the selling side. If my state has strict laws in place to ensure the quality of tap water, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that bottled water should be required to be at least as safe, though obviously that isn't how it works yet.
The reporting I read earlier today suggested that the positions have been swapped at the table, so T-Mobile's owner (Deutsche Telekom) would be the majority shareholder in a 60-40 merger with Sprint (owned by SoftBank). Likewise, the current T-Mobile CEO who has been leading a successful comeback for the carrier would be the CEO of the merged company.
Slashdot Mirror
You are hairsplitting.
If you’re making an argument that Google derives its authority from the USG, it’s not hairsplitting to point out that the USG doesn’t have that authority to delegate in the first place.
Are you really comfortable with domain-registrars being in a position to decide, who gets to speak?
Nope, but I recognize that what I’m comfortable with is thankfully not the basis for law in this country. You’d do well to realize the same.
I'd like you to confirm or deny this stance...
You set up a false dichotomy, so I won’t be taking either of your canned responses, but I will answer the underlying questions.
1) If a domain registrar has a policy against inciting violence, I believe it should be applied consistently, though I recognize that they may not have a legal obligation to do so. If a registrar has no such policy, they should not be forced to adopt one.
2) I didn’t even know what Antifa was until you linked me (I had heard of them, but I find I’m happier when I stay out of the day-to-day political news, so I honestly thought it was some sort of Islamic group in the US), but from the sound of things, they’re way off-base too.
had you really been as adamant about free speech as you claim to be, you would've been outraged about Google playing the lawmaker, the prosecution, and the judge all at once and applying their own "laws" so capriciously.
No, because I believe that our rights become less meaningful to us when we confuse them with privileges. Using private services is a privilege, not a right. You’re not entitled to use their service according to your own terms, so if you don’t like their terms, don’t agree to them. Instead, vote with your wallet and go elsewhere, same as any other business. Likewise, recognize that if you sign up for an account with them, you’re bound by their policies. And if you think I like Google, think again. I migrated away from Google products years ago after finding their policies abhorrent.
That said, I only start to become concerned about this sort of stuff when regional or national monopolies mean that there are no alternatives, since that’s when the government may need to get involved in a regulatory fashion.
Yes, they are — they are private in the sense they are offering their services on the free market, free to refuse any customer and/or charge whatever they please. But, once they certify a signature, they can not revoke the certification simply because they don't like the customer.
No, they aren’t. Participating in the free market doesn’t mean you’re private. Unlike Google, they’re appointed by the government, receive their authority from the government, and have to play within special rules set by the government. That makes them public. They aren’t allowed to revoke their seals because doing so is beyond their authority as a public officer.
Then so — de facto — are the registrars. Their function is purely to register a domain-name.
Again, no. That they serve a (questionably) similar purpose has no bearing on if they’re public or private. That they aren’t government owned means they’re private, and as a private entity operating under the authority granted to them by another private entity, they get to set whatever rules they want, including cancelling an account at their sole discretion. You may not like it, but that doesn’t change that they are allowed to do so.
The subject of the thread still lists hosters (of services) in addition to registrars.
"Hosters" (which I think is your incorrect way of referring to hosts) aren't being held liable either, so whether we're talking about registrars or hosts makes no difference. You're still conflating businesses with their clients and your comparison still falls apart right from the get-go. Same as before.
Whatever it is ostensibly, the governance of the Internet is still very much controlled by the US government [...] Many of the root DNS-servers are US-owned...
None of which matters to what you were claiming.
You were trying to argue that Google is obligated to uphold a higher standard because it derives its authority from the USG. That argument only holds water if the USG has "authority over the Internet" like you said it did. When I pointed out that you were incorrect about it having that legal authority (i.e. de jure control), you switched to arguing that the USG has de facto control of the Internet, but having de facto control is not the same as having authority you can delegate. As such, no, Google is not under any obligation of the sort you're suggesting.
Put differently, your current argument boils down to "Because the USG owns some infrastructure, Google is obligated to allow anything the USG allows". It's a non-sequitur. It's like arguing that because the USG owns a lot of land, I'm obligated to allow protesters on my private property. That's not how it works. It's a nonsensical argument, but you're so lost in the weeds that you don't even realize how irrational it is.
Likewise, your argument that they are government-like holds no water, since government-like != government. Everything from Facebook to Sam's Club to my local library requires that I register before I use their service. That doesn't make them government-like, and even if it did, that still wouldn't matter.
You aren't offering any citations
I didn't realize I needed to cite the link that you provided. I figured you read your own link and would recognize that's where I pulled most of my information.
how is mere accusation of inciting violence sufficient [...]?
Irrelevant question. We're talking about a private company cancelling the service of a customer who broke rules that the customer agreed to. Simple as that. And to answer your later question, of course I have no problem with a private service provider terminating the service of a customer who broke the terms of service that the customer freely agreed to. Why do you? Do you think civil liberties are being trampled upon every time a message board bans a user who violates their rules?
Notary Publics are private too
No, notary publics aren't private, actually. They're public officers appointed by the government. You're correct that they (in most cases) can choose whom they serve, but they are legally bound to act in their capacity as a public officer whenever they do serve.
Apple assumes everyone gets everything from Apple.
Has this ever been true? Sure, it's a funny line to toss out there, but Apple has obviously recognized that their products exist in a world beyond their control, which is why we see support for SMB, NTFS, and a host of other technologies and formats that didn't originate at Apple.
To be sure, their support falls far short of what we see on Windows or Linux, but in the various Macs I've worked on, I've replaced RAM, batteries, SSDs, HDDs, and even created my own Fusion Drive, none of which I did using Apple-branded components. Clearly they designed their products to work with products they didn't create. That something otherwise is being reported here today is an upsetting departure from the status quo for Macs.
A) You've confused registrants with registrars. It's the registrant, Sorenson Communications, that's being held liable here, not a registrar like Google, so your comparisons to Google's situation fall apart right from the get-go.
B) Companies that provide 911 service agree to certain legal obligations. Failure to uphold those obligations results in hefty fines because lives are literally at risk. Registrars like Google are under no such obligations to IANA.
C) Speaking of IANA, it, rather than the US government, is the organization with the authority you're talking about. The USG gave it away in 1998 to ICANN, which is a nonprofit organization in the private sector. As such, none of their authority has stemmed from the USG in nearly 20 years.
D) Barring its obligations to IANA—which again, do NOT derive from government authority—Google can set whatever terms they want. If an applicant doesn't like them, they can simply take their business elsewhere.
E) Google's terms—which The Daily Stormer agreed to—make it clear that they can cancel registrations at their discretion, such as if a site is being used for unlawful activities. The courts have repeatedly ruled that inciting violence—which is what The Daily Stormer is accused of—is an unlawful form of speech, akin to shouting "FIRE!" in a crowded theater. It is neither protected speech nor a civil right. Guess what Google cited as the reason for cancelling the registration?
All of which is to say, I'm fine with people pointing out that Nazis have rights too, and I'll stand by you in defending them (regardless of my utter and complete distaste for what they say), but don't you dare suggest that private entities are obligated to assist them in spreading their message, particularly for speech that not even the US government itself is obligated to protect.
No, it doesn't. They've proven that the problem's complexity is beyond the bounds of our universe, not just that it's beyond our ability to compute. They're saying that to solve this problem, you'd need something more than our universe. Advancements in computing machines will certainly allow us to solve more complex problems, but we're still bounded by the limits of our universe. If problems go beyond those bounds, no advancements in computing will ever allow us to solve them.
Of course, as others have pointed out, this doesn't prove we're not in a simulation. Rather, it puts bounds on potential simulations by proving two related things:
1) We will never be capable of creating a simulation that perfectly simulates our own universe, so any child universes we may one day create will necessarily be lesser in some way than ours.
2) Any parent universe in which we may be a simulation would have faced that same constraint, so if we are in a simulation, our universe would necessarily be lesser in some way than our parent's.
iPhones have been randomizing MAC addresses for several years now, specifically to defeat drive-by tracking efforts of this sort (though the examples people were giving back when the feature was introduced were restaurant franchises and the like using their free hotspots to recognize people driving by or stopping in on a daily basis). Once you actually connect to a network, it'll give that network your actual MAC address, but up to that point it simply delivers fake addresses.
On the Android side of things, I'm sure there must be some utilities that allow this sort of thing, but I'm not aware of it being baked into the OS as it is with iOS.
Assembly wasn't available right from the start, nor on all systems. I used to work with a couple of NASA subcontractors who talked about when they would code by flipping 8 switches and then pressing a button to push that single byte of code into the computer.
I thought about putting code in quotation marks, a la "code", since it bears little semblance to modern coding, but then I realized that would be an utter and complete disservice to the absolutely herculean effort those people went through back then to build what were in many cases mission critical systems.
Uhh...we actually did have net neutrality for most of the time that we had the Internet. Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence, and those lines were regulated under the same Title II classification that Obama’s FCC simply extended to cable ISPs. It’s a matter of bringing Internet-over-cable in line with the regulations that have existed for Internet-over-anything-else for the duration of the Internet’s history.
It doesn’t look to me like he’s against electric cars. It looks like he’s against poor logic, regardless of which side it’s on.
In fact, they can't even turn it on in the first place. Neither last year's iPhone 7 nor the brand new iPhone 8 even have the FM chip in them that the commissioner seems to think they have, and I suspect the same will be true for the iPhone X as well.
Older iPhones still had the chip, since it was yet one more chip on a commodity component Apple used, but, as you pointed out, there was no FM antenna connected to the chip, so it couldn't actually receive a signal. And even if we ignored that problem, you'd still need to add hardware and software support for turning the chip on and off, tuning the antenna, and piping the signal through the speakers, none of which was ever baked into iOS.
Asking Apple to simply "flip the switch" on a missing chip is like asking chairman Pai to simply "flip the switch" to begin acting in an ethical manner: it's an impossible request.
On top of that, releasing it right before Apple's big event is a surefire way to kill any buzz you might have managed to eke out in the general population. The moment the iPhone X hit the news circuits, the Essential phone was guaranteed to get zero additional coverage from mainstream media unless it had already built up such a huge head of steam that it couldn't be ignored. That clearly didn't happen.
Steve Jobs taught us that [...] we should just take care of making sure we're in sync with the cloud.
Yeah...no. While Jobs was definitely at the forefront of pushing for a cloud-based future even before we were calling it "the cloud" (e.g. I recall him talking in a mid-'90s interview about wanting to bring server-based user directories to consumers, since he had personally been using them at NeXT for years and thought they could change the way we used computers), there's no doubt that Apple's cloud products were one disaster after another for the entire time he was at the helm.
First there was iTools in the late '90s. They eventually had to rebrand iTools as .Mac in the early 2000s to get away from the bad word of mouth it had. Likewise, they eventually had to rebrand .Mac as MobileMe in the mid-2000s to get away from .Mac's bad word of mouth. And then they eventually had to rebrand MobileMe as iCloud in 2011, which is what we still have today. At no point along that journey was it a reliable product or one that I could recommend to friends and family. In fact, my father's choice to jump on the MobileMe bandwagon continues to be a cause for tech support issues he brings to me, years after the service's discontinuation.
Even iCloud was widely maligned at its launch in 2011, and continues to be widely maligned today, despite the fact that it eventually did become a reliable product a year or two ago with the advent of their CloudKit APIs. But prior to that? Dumpster fire after dumpster fire. Even the most ardent of Apple apologists will agree that Apple's cloud services were simply bad under Jobs' tenure.
Steve Jobs taught us that fewer controls are better [...]
I think what he tried to teach us was that replacing numerous single-purpose controls (e.g. keyboard buttons) with a single infinite-purpose control (i.e. a touchscreen that could become anything you needed) was better. Sure, minimalism was his thing, but so was brushed aluminum in iTunes, Corinthian leather in iCal, green felt in Game Center, and a wheel on the iPod that was actually five buttons in one. Put differently, he was trying to teach us to use simpler controls, not fewer controls.
Also, most places I shop, actually REMOVE the 2-4% markup for cash and debit transactions and again obliterates your argument about consumer markup.
As is commonly said around here, an anecdote does not a trend make, and your personal anecdote is in no way indicative of the situation for most people in the US. In fact, I believe there are only 6 states in the US (Maryland, Nevada, Oklahoma, Washington, Wisconsin and Wyoming) where merchants are free to set different prices based on payment method without fear of facing fines or being sued for breach of contract.
Why is that?
Well, so far as I know, it's still illegal for businesses in all of the big states (e.g. California, New York, Texas, and Florida) as well as a number of other states (about a dozen in total) to add a surcharge for customers who use a credit card. As such, you're guaranteed that the list prices in those states will have the credit card fees baked in. The caveat to that is, as you suggested, that businesses in those states can offer discounts for cash payments, rather than add a surcharge for credit card users. Unfortunately, most businesses shy away from the practice for the simple reason that it's a legal minefield. Depending on the phrases their cashiers use, where their signage is placed, and even when the discount is applied in the payment process, we've seen a number of businesses have their "discounts" classified as unlawful surcharges, resulting in hefty fines.
Moreover, even in states without laws against surcharges, I believe it's generally still the case that contracts with credit card companies have clauses that disallow retailers from offering different prices, thus ensuring that credit card users always receive the same price as everyone else. Only 10 states have laws that render those clauses null and void, but 4 of those 10 also have no-surcharge laws, hence why I said that there are only 6 states where merchants don't need to worry about stepping into a regulatory minefield or running afoul of contract law.
At the end of the day, with the laws varying so much from state to state (I didn't even talk about the state-to-state differences with regards whether debit cards are eligible for surcharges or discounts), it's simply easier for most retailers—particularly regional or national chains—to have a single price that everyone pays.
Oh, and just to quickly provide my own anecdote as a counterpoint to yours, I live in one of the no-surcharge states and I only know of one place in town (a liquor store) that offers a discount for paying in cash. Everything else is full price for everyone.
I couldn’t keep reading your post after its deliberately false claims that Apple is shipping “puny CPUs” in their mobile devices, despite synethetic and real world benchmarks indicating that they’re about a year ahead in terms of multicore performance (Android devices managed to eke out a win over the iPhone 7’s multicore performance shortly before the iPhone 8 leap frogged them by a wide margin), and perhaps as much as two years ahead of the closest competition in terms of single core performance (Android devices only recently passed the 6s and have yet to pass the year-old 7, let alone the brand new 8).
You’re wrong about a lot of the rest of what you said as well, but you’re SO grossly wrong about CPU performance that I had to speak up about that point in particular.
My conclusion was that they were factually wrong. I proved that in my first post.
You’re arguing the orthogonal topic that a bug is causing these issues, and you’re welcome to do so, but the fact that the battery issues are already diminishing would seem to discredit your argument while supporting the sole claim I actually agreed with from the bogus research company’s statements: that the cause of the problem is simply maintenance processes running post-update, just like they do after every major update.
You seem to be confused.
A) Drones aren't allowed above 500 feet in residential areas, so the helicopter pilot never should have had to have been looking for it in the first place.
B) In a crash between two moving vehicles, "A struck B" is generally interchangeable with "B struck A". Whether the helicopter hit the drone or the drone hit the helicopter is immaterial to the question of whether the helicopter was operating within regulations by flying at that altitude.
C) Whether the helicopter pilot should have noticed and evaded the drone is a completely separate topic that you're only bringing up now in an effort to move the goalposts after you learned that you were incorrect in your claim that he was operating outside of FAA regulations.
While I agree that bugs related to unreleased features can cause problems, that clearly wasn't what they were talking about here. Unless you stretch their words well past the breaking point, it's pretty clear from the context that they were talking about actual usage of new features and the hardware enabling them. They specifically blame "[t]he hardware [...] in the iPhone X" and "[n]ew functionality in iOS 11", rather than bugs related to supporting either. In fact, nowhere do they even hint at the notion of bugs or other concerns of that sort being a factor.
Sure there is. If you add a zero to my bank balance, it will facilitate many more financial transactions by me.
Well, given that I said I was talking about "facilitat[ing] the operation of the financial system" and that you are not the financial system, I think it's safe to say that you're talking about something wholly separate. In fact, if you engaged in more financial transactions, it would place additional burden on those who are facilitating the system's operation, and if you intentionally twist terms in a disingenuous way like that again, I'll be done with this discussion.
In terms of productivity, those two things are exactly the same.
If you live in an agrarian society, perhaps, I suppose.
But as soon as your society grows beyond the ability for every transaction to occur via cash on a face-to-face basis, you'll necessarily incur a loss of productivity as people wait for funds to arrive before they can resume productive activities. As such, the act of facilitating timely and trustworthy transactions beyond face-to-face interactions produces value by allowing our productive activities to continue unabated. In much the same way that a courier provides value by moving an object from point A to point B in a timely and trustworthy manner, miners or an ACH provide value to financial systems by moving money from account A to account B in a timely and trustworthy manner.
Not only did they incorrectly blame FaceID in the original article, they even acknowledged the actual cause right at the start, before leaping headfirst into a series of factually incorrect assertions. Right at the start:
Battery drain is a common iOS problem that usually pops up immediately after a major iOS upgrade release. This is partly due to Spotlight re-indexing and other behind the scenes shuffling.
I.e. We know exactly what's causing it, and it's a perfectly understandable problem that resolves itself after a few days, but let's author a report using data that we know is in no way representative of actual usage so we can stir up a storm over an "issue" that won't exist in about a week.
As for the iPhone X stuff that you mentioned they got wrong, here's the relevant quote for anyone interested:
New functionality in iOS 11 could also be responsible for draining the life out of your phone. Animoji and iPhone X’s FaceID hardware use face-scanning technology relying heavily on the camera which is a notorious battery sucker. The hardware enabling this advanced facial recognition (A11 Bionic GPU) in the iPhone X could be the reason there is such a dramatic difference in battery decay rate.
They managed to pack a lot of wrong into that one paragraph, namely that:
A) The iPhone X doesn't launch until November, so we can safely rule the iPhone X out as a factor.
B) Animoji is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule Animoji out as a factor.
C) FaceID is an iPhone X feature, so we can safely rule FaceID out as a factor.
D) FaceID does not rely on the "notorious battery sucker" camera (it relies on an IR sensor like the Kinect's), so we can rule the camera out as a factor.
E) The A11 SoC is not available on any iOS 10 device. Given that Wandera claims to have measured "the same device" draining in different versions of the OS, we can conclude that they didn't measure any A11 devices, so we can safely rule the A11 out as a factor.
More or less, they said exactly what the actual cause was, then proceeded to lie through their teeth for no reason other than to make a salacious headline that would drive traffic their way.
No, because in your example there's no correlation between the people adding 0s to their bank account and the people facilitating financial transactions. You're talking about paying people for doing nothing to aid the operation of the system, whereas I was talking about paying the people who facilitate the operation of the financial system.
If you'd like an actual example of this sort of thing in the real world, look no further than banks, ACH, and other financial institutions who facilitate the transfer of money. We pay them in various ways for the services they render. The big difference with cryptocurrencies is that the people facilitating transfers (i.e. miners) are paid directly via mechanisms built into the cryptocurrency's architecture, rather than via fees and interest that they have to collect themselves. In any financial system, someone(s) will need to facilitate things, and their efforts are of value to the people making use of that currency, whether we're talking about USD or Bitcoin. Paying someone for work done is not the same as arbitrarily adding 0s to bank accounts.
My (admittedly limited) understanding of cryptocurrency mining is that it actually does produce value, in that the mining process itself is what's responsible for distributing, verifying, and otherwise maintaining the blockchain on which the currency is built. Which is to say, miners are the ones facilitating the use of the currency. It's actually part of what makes cryptocurrencies work so well, since the very act of maintaining the currency is both distributed and incentivized.
All of which is to say, mining isn't just a matter of spinning one's wheels without purpose. It produces value for the people making use of that currency.
...to persons or property on the surface. A drone that’s in the air is, by definition, not on the surface. The helicopter pilot appears to have been operating with the regulations.
I’ve told the story here before, but I knew a professor at a university who discovered a means for curing yeast infections in a single day, back when the industry standard was still a one-week treatment. A large pharmaceutical company approached him, bought him out, and then proceeded to do nothing with his work for the next several years. Their three-day treatment was about to launch and was already ahead of the competition, so they wanted to milk it for all they could before bringing the one-day treatment to market later.
I too doubt that anyone is holding back cures for major illnesses, but they absolutely do hold back better treatments when there are financial advantages to doing so.
In fact, this could be fixed on either end: either increase the requirements on the gathering side or increase the requirements on the selling side. If my state has strict laws in place to ensure the quality of tap water, I don't think it's unreasonable to believe that bottled water should be required to be at least as safe, though obviously that isn't how it works yet.
The reporting I read earlier today suggested that the positions have been swapped at the table, so T-Mobile's owner (Deutsche Telekom) would be the majority shareholder in a 60-40 merger with Sprint (owned by SoftBank). Likewise, the current T-Mobile CEO who has been leading a successful comeback for the carrier would be the CEO of the merged company.