And if I see one single comment pimping the Android in this story, I'll have all you Android fans know that you have become what you hate. Why can't someone use a product they like for any reason at all? Is that not allowed anymore, or do we all have to care about the same things you care about and use the same phone that you use?
Not really sure what your referring to. What is the "reason" why someone would want to use the iPhone over Android? About the only two things I can think of is the apps (which is a legitimate reason) or because they are an Apple fanboy. Apple releases -intentionally- crippled devices in order to make people buy the next generation of their phone. There are few Android devices that do that, heck, there are few devices that do that. Apple ignores all logic and gives people a crappy phone with very few features, claims that such little things like a lack of an SDK isn't a big deal then releases a -new- phone including it (and firmware updates for the old one if they feel generous). Why anyone would put up with these games that happen with -every- new iPhone is beyond me.
And it isn't subjective, guess what? A lot of Android phones are more powerful than the iPhone, can run many genres of apps banned from the Apple store (emulators are a big one), some even have better cameras, and -all- of them can make calls without having to hold the phone in a certain way.
Seriously, what Apple fanboys boil their argument down to is looks, what people who like Android reason with is facts. You can't deny that Apple has made a pretty crappy phone if it can't even make calls. If Apple wasn't... well, Apple, they would have done some real field testing and figured out these basic, fundamental flaws before making their customers their prototype testers.
Yeah, and DO NOT under any circumstances buy after Dell bought them. I was into PC gaming for a while and wanted a decent notebook so I decided to get an Alienware, of course I didn't realize that Dell had bought them... the computer was excellent, the fact that the motherboard got fried twice... wasn't. The fact that the power cord would break every 6 months... wasn't. The fact that near the end they sold me a replacement cable which melted in the laptop... was not. Really, I should have saved $200 and went with a cheaper system.
It doesn't mean that something is wrong at the core, it means that there isn't enough knowledge, what needs to be done is to eliminate all barriers to knowledge and remove restrictions to free commerce, by restoring sanity to copyright and eliminating many forms of patents, we can make sure that things work like they are supposed to.
First off, we don't have true capitalism in the USA. Secondly, everyone has been doing it since the dawn of time. Everyone tries to create a lower-cost product and sell it for a higher price, its been going on since the dawn of time.
What changes corporations is public knowledge, the more they know the higher the quality of product needs to be created in order for it to sell.
Really is there any PC maker that is 100% great and excellent? I'm sure that Dell's faults aren't any worse than HP, Toshiba's, Gateway's, or any other major maker of PCs.
About the only way you can make sure you get decent PC hardware is to build it yourself or have enough knowledge to sub in and out parts if need be.
Its -always- a bad idea to keep different cables with the same connector. Good luck getting the average person to know the difference between all of the cables with the same connectors.
But its not because developers who use the BSD license make a moral decision to allow this stuff.
Really, what do you want them to do? They chose to use the BSD license, its not some big secret loophole that Apple can do this with the BSD license, its allowed and thats exactly what the developers obviously wanted. So why is this some big moral discussion? So if I give you a dollar saying "go spend this how you want" I shouldn't be outraged on what you buy. Now, if I give you a dollar and say "spend this only on food" I have the right to be outraged if you don't spend it on food. But the BSD license is like handing someone a dollar with no conditions on what you spend it on, the GPL license is a dollar with strings attached. If you want to dictate what people can do with your software go with GPL, if you don't go with BSD. The developers made a conscious choice with the BSD license to choose it over the GPL.
Explain again why we should be outraged against Apple? If you want to be outraged, choose a different license. If not, then you allow it.
simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things.
Yeah, because we all know that money goes directly to the people you want to help... (yes, there are some good charities but the vast majority puts most of the money in administrative fees or gets hung up somewhere)
Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"
This attitude is the reason why most people don't donate to the homeless or charities, if I have excess stuff that is working, someone can probably use it that isn't me. If I have money, I can use it because most of us don't have much of it at the moment.
Plus, there are a lot of countries where the people are just poor, not starving, but just poor and really, old computer equipment could probably help them escape poverty. I know I got my start in computers by playing with old hardware then figuring out what made them work and changing it, chances are someone poor can do that too.
Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).
Just learn how to salvage. The majority of my desktops were built from old parts found for $.50 at a garage sale, an old HDD there, an optical drive here, etc. just wipe whatever OS is on there and replace it with a suitable replacement. Puppy Linux is always a good bet.
So? If you object to unsanitary conditions you just don't buy from meat packers which have unsanitary conditions. Had the laws not been made more people would become more aware of the conditions in meat packing plants and would be more careful from which meat packers they bought their food from and would buy from only trusted retailers thus putting more power into the hands of the consumer.
With people like Upton Sinclair, it stirs public interest in the industry and makes people watch where they get their goods/services from. You don't need laws to regulate it because laws will always be gamed because people think the government is "watching out" for them when in reality it never can efficiently.
The regulatory boards are slow and give low minimums and because of them we've become deaf again to conditions that it prevents innovation in sanitation and the like because it takes too long to get regulatory approval.
Imagine if rather than setting a low bar we would let places compete for better sanitation and private ratings boards.
Imagine this, a restaurant in town is dirty, unless the food is really, really amazing and people are willing to overlook that, people won't go to the restaurant and it dies. When you allow competition, you get cleaner restaurants of course because that is something people will look at.
Um, what? I don't like Apple, about the only Apple thing I own is an iPod touch first generation because at the time there was no handheld with a decent browser, wi-fi, etc. for the price point. The fact is that the BSD license was designed to allow what Apple is doing and that is one of the reasons RMS and the FSF use copyleft. When you license things under the BSD license, you allow Apple or any other company to take it and use it however they feel like. I fail to see how this is a "legal" discussion.
If you license something under the BSD license you make a conscious decision that you are OK with someone taking your work and using it in a mostly proprietary product and thats why you'd license it under the BSD license, if that isn't OK with you, just license it under the GPL. I fail to see what is so evil about Apple doing something with software that was designed to let Apple do what they are doing. I fail to feel outraged that someone who would license something under the BSD license rather than the GPL would feel violated when Apple/Microsoft/Google/Red Hat/IBM/etc would use the software under the terms of the license. If you feel so strongly that any use of your software should be OSS, use a copyleft license if not then you are saying its OK for Apple to continue what it is doing. I don't see how Apple is "playing dirty" or anything with this.
To make an analogy to a company Slashdot is less obsessive about, it's similar to when IBM asserted its patents against Open Source: it was allowed by law, but that didn't mean "biting the hand that feed them" with their patent portfolio wasn't morally objectionable.
Patent law has been warped to be dangerous to freedom, you are confusing two separate issues. It is completely different for IBM to use software patents which are incompatible with true economic freedom and basic sanity, and for Apple to use software licensed to them. If you want Apple to contribute back code and the like use a different license than BSD, seriously, if you license things under BSD you are saying you are OK with this stuff to happen. What part of that should I feel outraged about? That some developers licensed things under the BSD license thinking it was similar to the GPL or something? That some developers don't like copyleft? That some developers don't care if their work is used in a proprietary product? Why should I be outraged that some developers have different ideologies than me?
How is Apple an "abuser" of open technology? Their open technology was licensed under the BSD license which explicitly allows the type of stuff Apple is doing. If you don't like it then use the GPL or another license that has copyleft when you license your OSS.
You do realize that you don't have to use Apple products don't you? The main way to open up competition is to kill software patents and weaken copyrights.
When government fucks with free markets, the customer loses, always.
Yes, but you have to call into question if they are really doing it for the benefit of mankind if they won't do it for free. If they don't want to do it for free, get off their moral "high horse" and start being honest that you are doing things for a profit.
All of the Wikileaks stuff makes it sound like they are doing this purely out of the goodness of their hearts, if they really were doing something out of the goodness of their hearts they would do it no matter what the cost really was and find ways of distributing their content other than via "conventional" means.
The difference is that what TPB is doing is pretty much illegal in their jurisdiction, what WikiLeaks is doing is pretty much legal. And really, all they need to do is post if something odd is happening and then the media will take it up which influences the masses. No government can stop all of its citizens and if the message is out there, the citizens will revolt.
Neither do I, what I have a problem is when a site shuts down and just sits there and complains. I have no trouble with a little donation box, hell, I even donated a few bucks to Wikileaks back before they decided to shut down and complain. The problem is when they claim that they are doing things totally to help humanity then shutting down until they get "enough" money. If they -really- wanted to help humanity would they do that? Would we have wanted Gandhi to do some work then sit at home eating chips until he got "enough" donations to continue his work? No, of course not. But yet we think its typical for a website which claims to be important to the advancement of the free world to just randomly shut down do nothing and complain?
Do you -need- a website though? What about an archive of the site and all those things hosted throughout the world via torrents and the like? Etc. If the Wikileaks owners really felt so strongly about their duty they should be doing things to make things work rather than just shutting down and complaining.
If your goal is to/really/ spread around leaked documents for the benefit of mankind, you will find a way to do it regardless. Complaining that people aren't giving you enough money and taking down a site is simply babyish. Yes, you aren't going to become a millionaire* by doing it, but if you are/really/ doing it for the benefit of mankind, you will do it for free and find ways to make it work.
*Assuming you don't get a list of future lottery numbers or something
Wikileaks lost the majority of their credibility in January when they decided to stop actually being a decent site and instead beg for donations for a few months.
...Only because Apple (and their fanboys) seems to think their products are flawless.
If Apple was like the majority of tech manufacturers, they wouldn't have that problem because they wouldn't pretend that their devices didn't have issues. They would have multiple products to allow their consumers some choice in the matter, they would have research because they wouldn't try to make everything secretive, etc.
In short, its only Apple that puts design over functionality to the point that you get products like the Apple III and the iPhone 4.
....Because having the issue be plastered all around the internet isn't enough publicity? If you type in iPhone 4 in Google you find about 3 things mentioning the issue. People aren't just going to go out and buy a new tech product generally without googling it unless its a really, really low price which the iPhone 4 is not.
I'm sure that everyone who would generally go out and buy an iPhone now knows that it has problems.
Essentially has the same focus as the Kin only it runs on top of Android so you can actually -do- something with your phone other than use a terrible browser and you can actually download apps and the like.
Because Google killed selling the CDMA devices and the only reason why T-Mobile and AT&T customers are really happy with them is because neither AT&T or T-Mobile have a high-end Android handset in their ranks mostly because T-Mobile in general focuses on cheaper devices and plans and AT&T has their head in their ass and won't let any phone outshine the iPhone... Wait, even the BackFlip Android phone on AT&T will make calls... So perhaps not...
But really, the only reason that people are totally happy with their Nexus one on those two networks is that its the only phone thats high end on either of them.
Slashdot Mirror
And if I see one single comment pimping the Android in this story, I'll have all you Android fans know that you have become what you hate. Why can't someone use a product they like for any reason at all? Is that not allowed anymore, or do we all have to care about the same things you care about and use the same phone that you use?
Not really sure what your referring to. What is the "reason" why someone would want to use the iPhone over Android? About the only two things I can think of is the apps (which is a legitimate reason) or because they are an Apple fanboy. Apple releases -intentionally- crippled devices in order to make people buy the next generation of their phone. There are few Android devices that do that, heck, there are few devices that do that. Apple ignores all logic and gives people a crappy phone with very few features, claims that such little things like a lack of an SDK isn't a big deal then releases a -new- phone including it (and firmware updates for the old one if they feel generous). Why anyone would put up with these games that happen with -every- new iPhone is beyond me.
And it isn't subjective, guess what? A lot of Android phones are more powerful than the iPhone, can run many genres of apps banned from the Apple store (emulators are a big one), some even have better cameras, and -all- of them can make calls without having to hold the phone in a certain way.
Seriously, what Apple fanboys boil their argument down to is looks, what people who like Android reason with is facts. You can't deny that Apple has made a pretty crappy phone if it can't even make calls. If Apple wasn't... well, Apple, they would have done some real field testing and figured out these basic, fundamental flaws before making their customers their prototype testers.
Yeah, and DO NOT under any circumstances buy after Dell bought them. I was into PC gaming for a while and wanted a decent notebook so I decided to get an Alienware, of course I didn't realize that Dell had bought them... the computer was excellent, the fact that the motherboard got fried twice... wasn't. The fact that the power cord would break every 6 months... wasn't. The fact that near the end they sold me a replacement cable which melted in the laptop... was not. Really, I should have saved $200 and went with a cheaper system.
It doesn't mean that something is wrong at the core, it means that there isn't enough knowledge, what needs to be done is to eliminate all barriers to knowledge and remove restrictions to free commerce, by restoring sanity to copyright and eliminating many forms of patents, we can make sure that things work like they are supposed to.
First off, we don't have true capitalism in the USA. Secondly, everyone has been doing it since the dawn of time. Everyone tries to create a lower-cost product and sell it for a higher price, its been going on since the dawn of time.
What changes corporations is public knowledge, the more they know the higher the quality of product needs to be created in order for it to sell.
Really is there any PC maker that is 100% great and excellent? I'm sure that Dell's faults aren't any worse than HP, Toshiba's, Gateway's, or any other major maker of PCs.
About the only way you can make sure you get decent PC hardware is to build it yourself or have enough knowledge to sub in and out parts if need be.
Its -always- a bad idea to keep different cables with the same connector. Good luck getting the average person to know the difference between all of the cables with the same connectors.
But its not because developers who use the BSD license make a moral decision to allow this stuff.
Really, what do you want them to do? They chose to use the BSD license, its not some big secret loophole that Apple can do this with the BSD license, its allowed and thats exactly what the developers obviously wanted. So why is this some big moral discussion? So if I give you a dollar saying "go spend this how you want" I shouldn't be outraged on what you buy. Now, if I give you a dollar and say "spend this only on food" I have the right to be outraged if you don't spend it on food. But the BSD license is like handing someone a dollar with no conditions on what you spend it on, the GPL license is a dollar with strings attached. If you want to dictate what people can do with your software go with GPL, if you don't go with BSD. The developers made a conscious choice with the BSD license to choose it over the GPL.
Explain again why we should be outraged against Apple? If you want to be outraged, choose a different license. If not, then you allow it.
simply donate MONEY to an organization that is involved in these things.
Yeah, because we all know that money goes directly to the people you want to help... (yes, there are some good charities but the vast majority puts most of the money in administrative fees or gets hung up somewhere)
Look at me, the rich person, doing nothing about their hunger, but giving them my trash I'm too cheap to recycle!"
This attitude is the reason why most people don't donate to the homeless or charities, if I have excess stuff that is working, someone can probably use it that isn't me. If I have money, I can use it because most of us don't have much of it at the moment.
Plus, there are a lot of countries where the people are just poor, not starving, but just poor and really, old computer equipment could probably help them escape poverty. I know I got my start in computers by playing with old hardware then figuring out what made them work and changing it, chances are someone poor can do that too.
Anytime you have "free" equipment, if you don't have a plan in place to replace/repair it when it breaks, it's not worth having - because you will end up depending on the equipment, which will be a disaster when it fails (and you have no money to fix it).
Just learn how to salvage. The majority of my desktops were built from old parts found for $.50 at a garage sale, an old HDD there, an optical drive here, etc. just wipe whatever OS is on there and replace it with a suitable replacement. Puppy Linux is always a good bet.
So? If you object to unsanitary conditions you just don't buy from meat packers which have unsanitary conditions. Had the laws not been made more people would become more aware of the conditions in meat packing plants and would be more careful from which meat packers they bought their food from and would buy from only trusted retailers thus putting more power into the hands of the consumer.
With people like Upton Sinclair, it stirs public interest in the industry and makes people watch where they get their goods/services from. You don't need laws to regulate it because laws will always be gamed because people think the government is "watching out" for them when in reality it never can efficiently.
The regulatory boards are slow and give low minimums and because of them we've become deaf again to conditions that it prevents innovation in sanitation and the like because it takes too long to get regulatory approval.
Imagine if rather than setting a low bar we would let places compete for better sanitation and private ratings boards.
Imagine this, a restaurant in town is dirty, unless the food is really, really amazing and people are willing to overlook that, people won't go to the restaurant and it dies. When you allow competition, you get cleaner restaurants of course because that is something people will look at.
If you license something under the BSD license you make a conscious decision that you are OK with someone taking your work and using it in a mostly proprietary product and thats why you'd license it under the BSD license, if that isn't OK with you, just license it under the GPL. I fail to see what is so evil about Apple doing something with software that was designed to let Apple do what they are doing. I fail to feel outraged that someone who would license something under the BSD license rather than the GPL would feel violated when Apple/Microsoft/Google/Red Hat/IBM/etc would use the software under the terms of the license. If you feel so strongly that any use of your software should be OSS, use a copyleft license if not then you are saying its OK for Apple to continue what it is doing. I don't see how Apple is "playing dirty" or anything with this.
To make an analogy to a company Slashdot is less obsessive about, it's similar to when IBM asserted its patents against Open Source: it was allowed by law, but that didn't mean "biting the hand that feed them" with their patent portfolio wasn't morally objectionable.
Patent law has been warped to be dangerous to freedom, you are confusing two separate issues. It is completely different for IBM to use software patents which are incompatible with true economic freedom and basic sanity, and for Apple to use software licensed to them. If you want Apple to contribute back code and the like use a different license than BSD, seriously, if you license things under BSD you are saying you are OK with this stuff to happen. What part of that should I feel outraged about? That some developers licensed things under the BSD license thinking it was similar to the GPL or something? That some developers don't like copyleft? That some developers don't care if their work is used in a proprietary product? Why should I be outraged that some developers have different ideologies than me?
How is Apple an "abuser" of open technology? Their open technology was licensed under the BSD license which explicitly allows the type of stuff Apple is doing. If you don't like it then use the GPL or another license that has copyleft when you license your OSS.
You do realize that you don't have to use Apple products don't you? The main way to open up competition is to kill software patents and weaken copyrights.
When government fucks with free markets, the customer loses, always.
Yes, but you have to call into question if they are really doing it for the benefit of mankind if they won't do it for free. If they don't want to do it for free, get off their moral "high horse" and start being honest that you are doing things for a profit.
All of the Wikileaks stuff makes it sound like they are doing this purely out of the goodness of their hearts, if they really were doing something out of the goodness of their hearts they would do it no matter what the cost really was and find ways of distributing their content other than via "conventional" means.
The difference is that what TPB is doing is pretty much illegal in their jurisdiction, what WikiLeaks is doing is pretty much legal. And really, all they need to do is post if something odd is happening and then the media will take it up which influences the masses. No government can stop all of its citizens and if the message is out there, the citizens will revolt.
So its somehow more "taboo" to host documents criticizing a third-world government than to host pirated goods?
And really you aren't going to "starve" yourself, perhaps you need to take up a job then donate the money made to your site, etc.
So why is it that The Pirate Bay which comes on even more legal fire than WikiLeaks can stay afloat with minimal down time?
Yes, such things cost a bit of money, but this is the internet, distribute things via torrents and other ways, use other servers, etc.
Neither do I, what I have a problem is when a site shuts down and just sits there and complains. I have no trouble with a little donation box, hell, I even donated a few bucks to Wikileaks back before they decided to shut down and complain. The problem is when they claim that they are doing things totally to help humanity then shutting down until they get "enough" money. If they -really- wanted to help humanity would they do that? Would we have wanted Gandhi to do some work then sit at home eating chips until he got "enough" donations to continue his work? No, of course not. But yet we think its typical for a website which claims to be important to the advancement of the free world to just randomly shut down do nothing and complain?
Do you -need- a website though? What about an archive of the site and all those things hosted throughout the world via torrents and the like? Etc. If the Wikileaks owners really felt so strongly about their duty they should be doing things to make things work rather than just shutting down and complaining.
If your goal is to /really/ spread around leaked documents for the benefit of mankind, you will find a way to do it regardless. Complaining that people aren't giving you enough money and taking down a site is simply babyish. Yes, you aren't going to become a millionaire* by doing it, but if you are /really/ doing it for the benefit of mankind, you will do it for free and find ways to make it work.
*Assuming you don't get a list of future lottery numbers or something
Wikileaks lost the majority of their credibility in January when they decided to stop actually being a decent site and instead beg for donations for a few months.
...Only because Apple (and their fanboys) seems to think their products are flawless.
If Apple was like the majority of tech manufacturers, they wouldn't have that problem because they wouldn't pretend that their devices didn't have issues. They would have multiple products to allow their consumers some choice in the matter, they would have research because they wouldn't try to make everything secretive, etc.
In short, its only Apple that puts design over functionality to the point that you get products like the Apple III and the iPhone 4.
....Because having the issue be plastered all around the internet isn't enough publicity? If you type in iPhone 4 in Google you find about 3 things mentioning the issue. People aren't just going to go out and buy a new tech product generally without googling it unless its a really, really low price which the iPhone 4 is not.
I'm sure that everyone who would generally go out and buy an iPhone now knows that it has problems.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoblur
Essentially has the same focus as the Kin only it runs on top of Android so you can actually -do- something with your phone other than use a terrible browser and you can actually download apps and the like.
Because Google killed selling the CDMA devices and the only reason why T-Mobile and AT&T customers are really happy with them is because neither AT&T or T-Mobile have a high-end Android handset in their ranks mostly because T-Mobile in general focuses on cheaper devices and plans and AT&T has their head in their ass and won't let any phone outshine the iPhone... Wait, even the BackFlip Android phone on AT&T will make calls... So perhaps not...
But really, the only reason that people are totally happy with their Nexus one on those two networks is that its the only phone thats high end on either of them.
I wasn't saying that, I was saying that if you observe something for a long enough time, you will start seeing anything that you want to believe.
Really, you give enough observation to anything and you can show behavior promoting whatever.