Two ways to allow third parties to develop apps and run them on iPhones without going through the app store, one way via standards and under Apple's control, one way via a proprietary system not under Apple's control and which on the Mac for many years was a steaming pile of constantly-crashing junk. Maybe their goal is to keep crashing junk off the iPhone. Maybe their goal is to limit iPhone apps to ones that support multi-touch and do not depend on mouse-overs.
I think this contains two good points and both probably have a lot to do with Apple's stance on Flash for the iPhone. The first point is that Apple has been badly burned by Flash. Adobe has a history of either not supporting new platforms with Flash players, or supporting them with horrible, buggy, barely functional players for years until they get around to putting in real effort. How long did 64 bit Windows take? How long is 64 bit Linux *still* taking? How long were the 32 bit Linux and the MacOS clients crap? Arguably the 32 bit Linux player is till crap, though has admittedly gotten better. The 64 bit Linux player went into alpha in 2008 and is still in alpha. It works OK, but getting it is a pain, and any support issues are essentially answered by, "Well, yeah, it's alpha".
The second point is of course, touch screens. I, and a lot of other people I'm sure, tend to think of Flash as a way of playing videos on the web. I know it *can* do a lot more, but I'd say 90% of the time when I use my Flash player it's to watch some kind of online video. the other 10% is when some moron uses it make the navigation system on a website that I have to use for some reason. Obviously when you think about videos, you tend to think that multi-touch screens will work fine. A tap is like a click and most of what you're doing is clicking stop, pause, play, rewind, etc. With a lot of other flash though, it's more complicated. Mouse hovers, right clicks, and keyboard entries are all used a lot in flash navigation pages and applications. None of that translates to multi-touch well. The experience is quite likely to suck even if Adobe makes a good player product.
Given Apple's insistence on as pleasant an experience as possible for iPhone users, I can see either or both of these playing a big part in their decision to disallow Flash.
And I keep pointing out that it does so purely for the sake of complexity to allow room for lawyers and their "interpretation". There is no other reason whatsoever for "complex system of timelines and gates". The whole point of establishing such a system is its complexity, to allow the entities that are supposedly being "reformed" a room to maneuver and to enable them to take advantage of these provisions to maximize their immunity from this "reform".
A sane form of the reform would be "all provisions of this bill take effect 90 days from the date of enactment". I dare you to explain the rationale for "complex time-lines" in any way involving reason and sanity.
Because no one would vote for it. Because people are inherently irrational creatures in groups, and each of the 535 people that had a say in the creation of that bill had their own agenda, and they tried in many cases to represent the points of view of others who also had *their* own agendas. Whether any on individual congress-person represents only their own interests, what they perceive to be the interests of their constituents, the interests of their "corporate masters", or any combination there of; there were literally thousands of points of view fighting for consideration in the bill. All of them got some of what they wanted, and none of them got all of what they wanted. So it's complex. Would you prefer that The President simply plunk down a hopefully benevolent bill and get a rubber stamp? That's fine if you happen to agree with the President (this time). Is it a "reasonable and sane" explanation? Probably not. Sorry.
Oh for Pete's sake, an actual bill that governs the entire medical establishment of a whole country for the last 30 years is not an example of a "viable alternative" only because you say so! Right.
It's not a viable alternative because something like it would never have passed. A large enough minority of the Congress did not want a simple single payer system to make it impossible to pass one. Not because a mysterious cabal of lawyers refused to let them, but because enough law makers simply don't trust the government to run a Health Care system. I personally disagree, but there ya go.
Also the "internal policies" are not law. They are not inherently enforceable as such and can be challenged by anyone. The only pertaining law of the land in effect is the act itself.
You're nuts if you don't think the internal policies and regulations of a service providing government agency don't have every bit the same affect on day to day life as Congressional or Parliamentary law. Half the rules and regulations you have to follow for the FCC, FTC, IRS, etc are simply internal regulation given the force of laws by a phrase like "The IRS will regulate blah blah blah" in a law somewhere. As long as those rules don't contradict an existing law, they have the force of law.
You cannot argue that a product has a monopoly in a scope as small as the product itself. It's absurd, stop doing it. Yes, Apple has a monopoly on producing iPhones. Dell has a monopoly on producing Optiplex 760s. Big deal. Apple no more has a monopoly on anything that could resonantly be called a "market" (Phones, smartphones, even consumer smartphones), than Dell does on anything that could be called a market (computers, personal computers, or even x86 personal computers). They have a dominant position in they position in the consumer smartphone market. You might, *might*, be able to argue a monopoly *if* you can get a judge to consider a market scope that small, *and* Apple has a bigger share of that market than I suspect they do. Otherwise forget it.
If we're talking about the smartphone market, Apple still doesn't have a "monopoly". Likewise, Microsoft didn't and doesn't have a monopoly in the personal computer market.
This is where the problem is. What defines a monopoly on a market? Apple have a reasonably small share of the smartphone market. I don't know the exact numbers, but it's certainly far smaller than 50% market share. At the time Microsoft was being sued by the DoJ they had more that a 90% market share in the PC market. The scope the DoJ was considering was the PC market and they determined that a 90% share was a monopoly. It would be much harder to argue that Apple has a monopoly in same scope at less then 50%.
The argument could be made of course, and perhaps even successfully, that the scope should be narrowed to "consumer smartphone" where Apple is far more dominant. I'm not saying that Apple should or should be considered a monopoly in this or any other space. Simply saying that the likelihood of them being ruled a monopoly depends entirely on where the judge draws the line. It is very unlikely that the line will be drawn as "iPhone devices", that's not a market it's a device in a market. If Microsoft had merely dominated x86 computer operating systems, and there had been a healthy ecosystem of Macs, Amigas, Sparc PCs, etc, it is less likely that Microsoft would ever had been declared a monopoly.
It may be that laws are needlessly complex (it's certainly true in some cases), but your example trivializes a complex problem set. While some laws are needlessly complex, taking a random example of a law with a huge number of legitimate legal permutations, simplifying it to an absurd level that would be completely unjust if implemented, and presenting that as an example does little for your point.
You point out the Health Care bill in other places, but again fail to make any detailed analysis of how it could actually be simplified. You compare it to a much simpler Canadian version, ignoring the fact that the laws cover completely different things. The Canadian law establishes a bureaucracy to completely run the national health care system. A bureaucracy which no doubt has thousands of pages of internal policies and procedures to help it run itself. The US version is a completely different animal. It is making laws and regulation that govern outside entities (insurance companies, state boards of health and welfare, individual people, etc), establishes a smaller and less powerful internal bureaucracy, and creates a fairly complex system of timelines and gates.
Could it have been simpler? No doubt. I'm certain there is lots of legalese and unnecessary language. You don't even attempt to find examples. You simply make an invalid comparison to another, very different, system. Your point has some validity. Laws are in many cases overly complex. Your examples and evidence are poor or nonexistent, and you don't present any viable alternatives. Governing via short "Ten Commandments" like statements would be far worse than the current system.
The precision is necessary. It's just like a computer program. If you are imprecise in your meaning in a computer program you get difficult to track bugs. "A = C + B" is not the same as "A == C + B" for a reason, despite the fact that they appear identical to a layman.
Killing a person is in fact NOT always forbidden by law. There are any number of circumstances in which it is considered justified, and a number more where it is considered illegal, but circumstances mitigate the crime. If we're in a fight, and I punch you in the head, and you die by some odd fluke of medical history or something, am I equally as culpable as if I just walked up and shot you in the back of the head? What if you started the fight? What about if I loose control of my car and run you over? It was an accident (tragic, yes, but an accident) is my culpability the same?
Laws are written with a level a needless complexity in many cases, but a great deal of the complexity is needed. To continue my computer programming analogy, think what you wrote above and consider libraries. The references in the paragraphs work like function calls. They could let the law get even longer by referencing the entire text each time, "henceforth, notwithstanding (the entire content of paragraph 12.3), with the exception of points (entire content of 1.3) and (entire content of 1.23), in reference to (entire content of 2.33)..." How long would that get? Instead they just use a reference call. Just like when I want use the code contained in my makeSecret() function I call "makeSecret();" instead of coping and pasting the entire function each time.
I'd rather have complicated laws that recognize and deal with fine degrees of culpability and responsibility, than simple laws that punish a serial killer, kid who got in a fist fight, person who lost control of their car, and guy who shot someone in self defense all the same way with the same crime.
I'm personally pretty damned tempted by the HTC EVO that Sprint announced at CES. I've really liked my iPhone, but I gotta say that there is enough tech stuffed into that announcement that my "iPhone does everything I need" argument is starting to fail under the sheer volume of shiny. On the other hand, I really don't want to switch carriers. I know lots of people aren't pleased with AT&Ts network, but here in Northern Alabama it's pretty solid.
But do you understand that the Internet and personal computing were made by people who reject that approach? The people who made Apple a success in the first place are people who probably formatted the hard drive on their new Macs within at most a day or so. The first place we looked was extensions or control panel or settings. If people like that wanted somebody to hand us a sealed black box and be grateful that it just "works" (as long as "works" means "things that Apple thinks you should be doing").
Yes and no. I have an iPhone. I like my iPhone. I haven't even jailbroken my iPhone. Why? Because I'm really not all that interested in hacking my phone. My computers are every kind of weird hack jobs, with dual boots and virtual machines and such, but not so much my phone. It does what I need it too, and I don't really "work" on it. I don't need it to have an IDE and three different web browsers. I don't need root access to it. It's a phone. Sometimes I read a web site on it if I'm bored or need some bit of info *right now*. It allows me to quick scan my e-mail in a pinch. In an emergency I can even manage my servers from it.
If that makes me a bad geek, I'm sorry. I am interested in how things work and playing with new hardware/software, but in this case I'm *more* interested in a device that does what it's supposed to.
By the way, I own nexus one, and with the right firmware (latest cyanogenmod with UV kernel), it's a great phone.
That, to a large extent, is the problem. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for you to say, don't get me wrong, but 9/10 of the population would look at you and say, "Firmware? Is that some kind of new exercise plan? What do kernels have to do with it? Is their a corn diet too?"
I exaggerate only very slightly. iPhone continues to dominate the consumer smartphone space because people buy an iPhone and use it. Every so often iTunes pops up and tells you there's an OS update. It downloads and installs in a few minutes automatically like every other sync. Yeah, the major releases are sometimes a bit messy, but mostly it all just does what people expect it to, automatically.
If you get an app from the App Store it just work on your phone. No need to worry about which version of the OS is on it, whether your carrier has installed their own UI mods, or whether your phone supports the features. Even if your phone has some obvious missing feature, like a location based app on a first gen iPhone, the app works with the existing feature set and simply provides what information it can.
I'm not saying that the iPhone paradigm is better or worse. Certainly there is something to be said for flexibility and portability. When it comes to computers and electronics though, most people seem to prefer predictable and intuitive to flexible and portable. Ideally people want both, but we both know how easy that is to accomplish.
Remember that things like the ability to read DVDs under linux were originally illegal features. It is very unfortunate but today, we techies, have to take a political stand to do our job even in its most obvious tasks.
It technically still is if you use DeCSS or any of it's progeny. No one tries to enforce the patent, because the cat is so badly out of the bag that it's become pointless, but the software is still technically illegal. I think some of the commercial Linux vendors (Red Hat, Novell, etc) have paid for licenses to legally decrypt DVDs at this point and put them in the "non-free" repositories of their distros. This allows them to a) stay legal with regards to DeCSS and the like, b) keep their "base" distributions Free, and c) allow their users to watch DVDs through an officially supported channel if they want to deal with the "non-free" software.
it wasn't so very long ago that reverse engineering patented stuff in a clean room environment was considered kosher. Hence the reason you're able to use a Dell, HP, or home grown PC instead of an "IBM PC IX, now with *two color* text display." (OK, so more likely you'd be using a Mac or Amiga, but it's really hard to be sure)
some minuscule documentation that nobody will read.
Maybe it was in there;-)
Re:Location without GPS
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iPad Review
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iPhones use a combination of "real" (satellite based)GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wifi hotspot location mapping through Skyhook. Unless you're in the complete middle of nowhere, *and* screened from sat transmission it can pretty much figure out where you are most of the time. Even my first gen iPhone can get remarkably accurate location fixes despite not having a GPS chip. Since it has neither GPS, nor cell tower triangulation I'd imagine the iPad is a lot less accuate outside of heavily populated areas. First gen iPhones get pretty sketchy when they get out far enough that they can only get one or two cell towers (or none at all, but such places are becoming pretty rare in the US).
Not to say you're wrong exactly, because yes, Apple's market cap is much closer to Microsoft's now than it was ten years ago; but looking at stock prices like that is not really a valid comparison. If, for whatever reason, Microsoft stock had split three times in that decade, and Apple had done a join or two, the relative market caps would be nearly identical despite the huge variation in share prices.
I missed the "simulated" Sorry. That is definitely a gray line. As a purely practical matter, I wonder how many people have been arrested and/or convicted for possession of exclusively "simulated child porn". That's not the point, I know, but it's none-the-less an interesting question. Ironically you could pretty easily turn any answer to that question into an argument for either side of the larger question.
I never said that and arrest causes no actual harm. I merely said that arrest is not an indication of guilt. The fact that our society, or at least certain facets of our society, suck, and will persecute you anyway is immaterial to the point I was making. You said "innocent till proven guilty" I pointed that proven guilt is established at trial, not by the police before arrest. Does it suck? Yes. I can't think of a better way though. Alternative include: leaving potentially dangerous criminals on the loose to escape or possibly re-offend until they have their day in court, allowing the police to make determinations of what constitutes proof and guilt, or simply giving up on the concepts of law and justice.
The fact is that there was reasonable evidence that this man had committed a fairly serious crime. The police would have been remiss to simply ignore it because the circumstances seemed odd. The only thing they can do is act on the evidence, while simultaneously acting to determine what circumstances caused them to receive the evidence in such an unorthodox manner. That appears to be what they did, thankfully. I'm not saying it's right or fair. They did the best they could under the circumstances and it worked out this time.
Personally, I think arrest was overkill. They could have simply asked his wife to take the kids on a short holiday while they investigated the situation, since it seems obvious that something was up. As I said, I'm glad I wasn't the guy having to make the call. The whole situation sucked.
Now you're blaming the victim. *Should* they have run a more secure system? Probably, but that's neither here nor there. Running an insecure home system is not a crime. breaking into someone house to take advantage of that lack of security is. This is all completely incidental to whether they should have arrested him or not.
"Not sure about in the UK, but innocent until PROVEN guilty used to mean something across the pond."
As I've already said elsewhere, that axiom relates to conviction, not arrest (on either side of the pond). Always had, always will. Half the time evidence required for conviction isn't found until after arrest. You can be arrested on any strong suspicion backed by reasonable evidence (like a hard drive which is clearly yours and clearly full of kiddy porn). It's not the job of the police to convict you, it's their job to collect evidence and arrest you once a sufficient amount exists. Does it suck? Yes. You got a better idea? No arrests till after conviction should work very well I'm sure.
One of the big problems with the current system is the assumption by many people that arrest is the same as conviction. This leads to: 1) People like you assuming that people can't be arrested until they've been proven guilty and 2) People who have been arrested for crimes that they were later found innocent of or even found to have had no involvement in at all becoming social pariahs. That's a completely separate issue though, and not related to this story.
"But the urgency works against "innocent until proven guilty", and spills over in a policy sense into thinking that prevention is even better than rapid response. (Think "pre-crime".) I think that's the psychological basis for the push against simulated kiddy pr0n. "No real children are harmed, but who knows what real children WILL be harmed which Sicky Sickington decides to act on his perverted fantasies.""
Two points here.
One: Real kids really are harmed in the making of this stuff. Granted, the kid was harmed yesterday, last week, last year, or whatever, and most likely the person with the clip did not do the harming; but at some point some real kid was harmed to make it. That's the justification for making it illegal to possess, Snuff films and Blood Diamonds are illegal to possess or traffic in for the same reason. The possessor may not have directly hurt anyone, but they provided the market which pushed someone else to hurt someone. It's thin (often the originator would have hurt people whether the market exists or not), makes a certain amount of sense (can you be sure they would have? Does it matter?)
Two: The police (and I'm pretty sure it's same in the UK) don't have to "prove" guilt to make an arrest. They just need reasonable or preponderant evidence to get a warrant. The prosecutor has to prove guilt to get you convicted, but arrested and convicted are not the same thing. Often the arrest is needed to collect the remaining evidence required for conviction. Yes you are innocent until proven guilty, but there's a reason we arrest "suspects", not "criminals".
All in all, I'm just glad I wasn't the cops having to work this case. On the one hand they can't ignore a hard drive full of kiddy porn, on the other the whole thing screams "frame job".
It is a difficult situation for the police. On the one hand, it has "frame job" written all over it, on the other hand, what if it isn't? Arresting him was probably overkill, but limiting contact with children until the whole thing is cleared up makes some sense. The police clearly made more than a usual effort investigate at least, but still. I dunno what you'd call the "right" answer is here. (Except, obviously, don't have a sociopath break into your house and frame you for a difficult to defend against crime)
I'm not at all sure where you go any of that from my post. Quite the contrary of being partisan I (a liberal) praised an article in an apparently conservative magazine, and point out weaknesses in the teacher union and public school models. I simply state that I can't come up with a more effective system. I, in fact, say that this scenario particularly highlights the weakness of these systems. I also find it amusing that you heap disdain upon public schools and then compare American children to those of China and Eastern Europe, both of whom are educated by public school systems.
I think the point (perhaps poorly made up to this point, and almost certainly not what was meant by the original poster) is that while he was Bolivian, the people he educated were primarily Mexican-American. Therefore, while he might not have been Mexican himself, he can still be an icon to the Mexican (or Mexican-American) community. Hence the comparisons to St. Patrick and St. George, both of whom are particularly revered by people who are not of the same racial, cultural or ethnic background as they themselves were.
I can't speak for the magazine in general, but this article seemed fairly balanced. It did leave some blame on the doorstep of the teacher's union, but pretty clearly laid the lion's share on the school's administration. It also (having been written in the beginning of the decade) expressed concern about the (then anticipated) No Child Left Behind act. That was a conservative darling at the time of the writing. Most of the facts are undeniable anyway. He build a huge and successful program, he was driven out by perceived lack of support from the administration and union, and the program fell apart after he left.
As someone who generally supports both unions and government services, even I have to admit that neither encourage excellence. They are both very good things in many ways, and both serve useful functions in bringing the most good to the most people, but neither is designed to accommodate the exceptional well. Like so many things in our society, public schools and teacher's unions fall into the "terrible idea, but better than the alternative" category. This case simply demonstrates the lacks of both structures particularly well, because of the particularly exception nature of the people involved.
Essentially if you really want secure end to end communication with someone that is more or less fool proof and not subject to outside interference you have to manually exchange keys. It's always been this way. Any time you do less you are trusting *someone* other than yourself and person at the remote end. The simple point is that we *have* to trust someone to exist in society. We trust that the government will not suddenly decide to print "Braquats" and declare Dollars (or Pounds, or Euros, or whatever) useless. We trust that the bank won't wander off with all our money. We trust that our ISP isn't just putting up servers that pretend to be the Internet and are slowly stealing everything we type into our browsers. We trust that the grocery store hasn't poisoned all the produce. Virtually every social action we take involves some modicum of trust that the "other guy" is acting in reasonably good faith.
Thus far the certificate authorities have been trustworthy. Could they be compromised? Of course. Could the clerk at the grocery store be bribed to poison all the produce? Of course. Do we have any reason to think the CAs *have* been compromised? Not that I'm aware of. It's pretty straightforward. Are you doing something that needs to be *completely* secret? Exchange keys with the remote end manually. Are you doing something that needs to be as secret as one can reasonably expect while still dealing public entities? Use the CAs. They have an extremely good track record and seem to be about as trustworthy as anyone can reasonably expect.
I used to be a systems administrator for a University Mathematics department. This was back before Africa and Russia took over the top spots for Spam production, and China was king. Spam had not yet reached a critical juncture on our e-mail servers, but was becoming a steadily more annoying problem. We had a short meeting to discuss what to do about the matter, and I brought up the various filtering solutions that were becoming more and more necessary. Some suggested that we block e-mail from China. Needless to say the 4 Chinese faculty members were less than impressed with this idea.
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Two ways to allow third parties to develop apps and run them on iPhones without going through the app store, one way via standards and under Apple's control, one way via a proprietary system not under Apple's control and which on the Mac for many years was a steaming pile of constantly-crashing junk. Maybe their goal is to keep crashing junk off the iPhone. Maybe their goal is to limit iPhone apps to ones that support multi-touch and do not depend on mouse-overs.
I think this contains two good points and both probably have a lot to do with Apple's stance on Flash for the iPhone. The first point is that Apple has been badly burned by Flash. Adobe has a history of either not supporting new platforms with Flash players, or supporting them with horrible, buggy, barely functional players for years until they get around to putting in real effort. How long did 64 bit Windows take? How long is 64 bit Linux *still* taking? How long were the 32 bit Linux and the MacOS clients crap? Arguably the 32 bit Linux player is till crap, though has admittedly gotten better. The 64 bit Linux player went into alpha in 2008 and is still in alpha. It works OK, but getting it is a pain, and any support issues are essentially answered by, "Well, yeah, it's alpha".
The second point is of course, touch screens. I, and a lot of other people I'm sure, tend to think of Flash as a way of playing videos on the web. I know it *can* do a lot more, but I'd say 90% of the time when I use my Flash player it's to watch some kind of online video. the other 10% is when some moron uses it make the navigation system on a website that I have to use for some reason. Obviously when you think about videos, you tend to think that multi-touch screens will work fine. A tap is like a click and most of what you're doing is clicking stop, pause, play, rewind, etc. With a lot of other flash though, it's more complicated. Mouse hovers, right clicks, and keyboard entries are all used a lot in flash navigation pages and applications. None of that translates to multi-touch well. The experience is quite likely to suck even if Adobe makes a good player product.
Given Apple's insistence on as pleasant an experience as possible for iPhone users, I can see either or both of these playing a big part in their decision to disallow Flash.
And I keep pointing out that it does so purely for the sake of complexity to allow room for lawyers and their "interpretation". There is no other reason whatsoever for "complex system of timelines and gates". The whole point of establishing such a system is its complexity, to allow the entities that are supposedly being "reformed" a room to maneuver and to enable them to take advantage of these provisions to maximize their immunity from this "reform".
A sane form of the reform would be "all provisions of this bill take effect 90 days from the date of enactment". I dare you to explain the rationale for "complex time-lines" in any way involving reason and sanity.
Because no one would vote for it. Because people are inherently irrational creatures in groups, and each of the 535 people that had a say in the creation of that bill had their own agenda, and they tried in many cases to represent the points of view of others who also had *their* own agendas. Whether any on individual congress-person represents only their own interests, what they perceive to be the interests of their constituents, the interests of their "corporate masters", or any combination there of; there were literally thousands of points of view fighting for consideration in the bill. All of them got some of what they wanted, and none of them got all of what they wanted. So it's complex. Would you prefer that The President simply plunk down a hopefully benevolent bill and get a rubber stamp? That's fine if you happen to agree with the President (this time). Is it a "reasonable and sane" explanation? Probably not. Sorry.
Oh for Pete's sake, an actual bill that governs the entire medical establishment of a whole country for the last 30 years is not an example of a "viable alternative" only because you say so! Right.
It's not a viable alternative because something like it would never have passed. A large enough minority of the Congress did not want a simple single payer system to make it impossible to pass one. Not because a mysterious cabal of lawyers refused to let them, but because enough law makers simply don't trust the government to run a Health Care system. I personally disagree, but there ya go.
Also the "internal policies" are not law. They are not inherently enforceable as such and can be challenged by anyone. The only pertaining law of the land in effect is the act itself.
You're nuts if you don't think the internal policies and regulations of a service providing government agency don't have every bit the same affect on day to day life as Congressional or Parliamentary law. Half the rules and regulations you have to follow for the FCC, FTC, IRS, etc are simply internal regulation given the force of laws by a phrase like "The IRS will regulate blah blah blah" in a law somewhere. As long as those rules don't contradict an existing law, they have the force of law.
You cannot argue that a product has a monopoly in a scope as small as the product itself. It's absurd, stop doing it. Yes, Apple has a monopoly on producing iPhones. Dell has a monopoly on producing Optiplex 760s. Big deal. Apple no more has a monopoly on anything that could resonantly be called a "market" (Phones, smartphones, even consumer smartphones), than Dell does on anything that could be called a market (computers, personal computers, or even x86 personal computers). They have a dominant position in they position in the consumer smartphone market. You might, *might*, be able to argue a monopoly *if* you can get a judge to consider a market scope that small, *and* Apple has a bigger share of that market than I suspect they do. Otherwise forget it.
If we're talking about the smartphone market, Apple still doesn't have a "monopoly". Likewise, Microsoft didn't and doesn't have a monopoly in the personal computer market.
This is where the problem is. What defines a monopoly on a market? Apple have a reasonably small share of the smartphone market. I don't know the exact numbers, but it's certainly far smaller than 50% market share. At the time Microsoft was being sued by the DoJ they had more that a 90% market share in the PC market. The scope the DoJ was considering was the PC market and they determined that a 90% share was a monopoly. It would be much harder to argue that Apple has a monopoly in same scope at less then 50%.
The argument could be made of course, and perhaps even successfully, that the scope should be narrowed to "consumer smartphone" where Apple is far more dominant. I'm not saying that Apple should or should be considered a monopoly in this or any other space. Simply saying that the likelihood of them being ruled a monopoly depends entirely on where the judge draws the line. It is very unlikely that the line will be drawn as "iPhone devices", that's not a market it's a device in a market. If Microsoft had merely dominated x86 computer operating systems, and there had been a healthy ecosystem of Macs, Amigas, Sparc PCs, etc, it is less likely that Microsoft would ever had been declared a monopoly.
It may be that laws are needlessly complex (it's certainly true in some cases), but your example trivializes a complex problem set. While some laws are needlessly complex, taking a random example of a law with a huge number of legitimate legal permutations, simplifying it to an absurd level that would be completely unjust if implemented, and presenting that as an example does little for your point.
You point out the Health Care bill in other places, but again fail to make any detailed analysis of how it could actually be simplified. You compare it to a much simpler Canadian version, ignoring the fact that the laws cover completely different things. The Canadian law establishes a bureaucracy to completely run the national health care system. A bureaucracy which no doubt has thousands of pages of internal policies and procedures to help it run itself. The US version is a completely different animal. It is making laws and regulation that govern outside entities (insurance companies, state boards of health and welfare, individual people, etc), establishes a smaller and less powerful internal bureaucracy, and creates a fairly complex system of timelines and gates.
Could it have been simpler? No doubt. I'm certain there is lots of legalese and unnecessary language. You don't even attempt to find examples. You simply make an invalid comparison to another, very different, system. Your point has some validity. Laws are in many cases overly complex. Your examples and evidence are poor or nonexistent, and you don't present any viable alternatives. Governing via short "Ten Commandments" like statements would be far worse than the current system.
The precision is necessary. It's just like a computer program. If you are imprecise in your meaning in a computer program you get difficult to track bugs. "A = C + B" is not the same as "A == C + B" for a reason, despite the fact that they appear identical to a layman.
Killing a person is in fact NOT always forbidden by law. There are any number of circumstances in which it is considered justified, and a number more where it is considered illegal, but circumstances mitigate the crime. If we're in a fight, and I punch you in the head, and you die by some odd fluke of medical history or something, am I equally as culpable as if I just walked up and shot you in the back of the head? What if you started the fight? What about if I loose control of my car and run you over? It was an accident (tragic, yes, but an accident) is my culpability the same?
Laws are written with a level a needless complexity in many cases, but a great deal of the complexity is needed. To continue my computer programming analogy, think what you wrote above and consider libraries. The references in the paragraphs work like function calls. They could let the law get even longer by referencing the entire text each time, "henceforth, notwithstanding (the entire content of paragraph 12.3), with the exception of points (entire content of 1.3) and (entire content of 1.23), in reference to (entire content of 2.33)..."
How long would that get? Instead they just use a reference call. Just like when I want use the code contained in my makeSecret() function I call "makeSecret();" instead of coping and pasting the entire function each time.
I'd rather have complicated laws that recognize and deal with fine degrees of culpability and responsibility, than simple laws that punish a serial killer, kid who got in a fist fight, person who lost control of their car, and guy who shot someone in self defense all the same way with the same crime.
I'm personally pretty damned tempted by the HTC EVO that Sprint announced at CES. I've really liked my iPhone, but I gotta say that there is enough tech stuffed into that announcement that my "iPhone does everything I need" argument is starting to fail under the sheer volume of shiny. On the other hand, I really don't want to switch carriers. I know lots of people aren't pleased with AT&Ts network, but here in Northern Alabama it's pretty solid.
But do you understand that the Internet and personal computing were made by people who reject that approach? The people who made Apple a success in the first place are people who probably formatted the hard drive on their new Macs within at most a day or so. The first place we looked was extensions or control panel or settings. If people like that wanted somebody to hand us a sealed black box and be grateful that it just "works" (as long as "works" means "things that Apple thinks you should be doing").
Yes and no. I have an iPhone. I like my iPhone. I haven't even jailbroken my iPhone. Why? Because I'm really not all that interested in hacking my phone. My computers are every kind of weird hack jobs, with dual boots and virtual machines and such, but not so much my phone. It does what I need it too, and I don't really "work" on it. I don't need it to have an IDE and three different web browsers. I don't need root access to it. It's a phone. Sometimes I read a web site on it if I'm bored or need some bit of info *right now*. It allows me to quick scan my e-mail in a pinch. In an emergency I can even manage my servers from it.
If that makes me a bad geek, I'm sorry. I am interested in how things work and playing with new hardware/software, but in this case I'm *more* interested in a device that does what it's supposed to.
By the way, I own nexus one, and with the right firmware (latest cyanogenmod with UV kernel), it's a great phone.
That, to a large extent, is the problem. It's a perfectly reasonable thing for you to say, don't get me wrong, but 9/10 of the population would look at you and say, "Firmware? Is that some kind of new exercise plan? What do kernels have to do with it? Is their a corn diet too?"
I exaggerate only very slightly. iPhone continues to dominate the consumer smartphone space because people buy an iPhone and use it. Every so often iTunes pops up and tells you there's an OS update. It downloads and installs in a few minutes automatically like every other sync. Yeah, the major releases are sometimes a bit messy, but mostly it all just does what people expect it to, automatically.
If you get an app from the App Store it just work on your phone. No need to worry about which version of the OS is on it, whether your carrier has installed their own UI mods, or whether your phone supports the features. Even if your phone has some obvious missing feature, like a location based app on a first gen iPhone, the app works with the existing feature set and simply provides what information it can.
I'm not saying that the iPhone paradigm is better or worse. Certainly there is something to be said for flexibility and portability. When it comes to computers and electronics though, most people seem to prefer predictable and intuitive to flexible and portable. Ideally people want both, but we both know how easy that is to accomplish.
Remember that things like the ability to read DVDs under linux were originally illegal features. It is very unfortunate but today, we techies, have to take a political stand to do our job even in its most obvious tasks.
It technically still is if you use DeCSS or any of it's progeny. No one tries to enforce the patent, because the cat is so badly out of the bag that it's become pointless, but the software is still technically illegal. I think some of the commercial Linux vendors (Red Hat, Novell, etc) have paid for licenses to legally decrypt DVDs at this point and put them in the "non-free" repositories of their distros. This allows them to a) stay legal with regards to DeCSS and the like, b) keep their "base" distributions Free, and c) allow their users to watch DVDs through an officially supported channel if they want to deal with the "non-free" software.
it wasn't so very long ago that reverse engineering patented stuff in a clean room environment was considered kosher. Hence the reason you're able to use a Dell, HP, or home grown PC instead of an "IBM PC IX, now with *two color* text display." (OK, so more likely you'd be using a Mac or Amiga, but it's really hard to be sure)
I think your sarcasm detector might be faulty. Also those of at least 4 other people who modded you to +5. Might wanna get that looked at.
some minuscule documentation that nobody will read.
Maybe it was in there ;-)
iPhones use a combination of "real" (satellite based)GPS, cell tower triangulation, and Wifi hotspot location mapping through Skyhook. Unless you're in the complete middle of nowhere, *and* screened from sat transmission it can pretty much figure out where you are most of the time. Even my first gen iPhone can get remarkably accurate location fixes despite not having a GPS chip. Since it has neither GPS, nor cell tower triangulation I'd imagine the iPad is a lot less accuate outside of heavily populated areas. First gen iPhones get pretty sketchy when they get out far enough that they can only get one or two cell towers (or none at all, but such places are becoming pretty rare in the US).
Not to say you're wrong exactly, because yes, Apple's market cap is much closer to Microsoft's now than it was ten years ago; but looking at stock prices like that is not really a valid comparison. If, for whatever reason, Microsoft stock had split three times in that decade, and Apple had done a join or two, the relative market caps would be nearly identical despite the huge variation in share prices.
I missed the "simulated" Sorry. That is definitely a gray line. As a purely practical matter, I wonder how many people have been arrested and/or convicted for possession of exclusively "simulated child porn". That's not the point, I know, but it's none-the-less an interesting question. Ironically you could pretty easily turn any answer to that question into an argument for either side of the larger question.
I never said that and arrest causes no actual harm. I merely said that arrest is not an indication of guilt. The fact that our society, or at least certain facets of our society, suck, and will persecute you anyway is immaterial to the point I was making. You said "innocent till proven guilty" I pointed that proven guilt is established at trial, not by the police before arrest. Does it suck? Yes. I can't think of a better way though. Alternative include: leaving potentially dangerous criminals on the loose to escape or possibly re-offend until they have their day in court, allowing the police to make determinations of what constitutes proof and guilt, or simply giving up on the concepts of law and justice.
The fact is that there was reasonable evidence that this man had committed a fairly serious crime. The police would have been remiss to simply ignore it because the circumstances seemed odd. The only thing they can do is act on the evidence, while simultaneously acting to determine what circumstances caused them to receive the evidence in such an unorthodox manner. That appears to be what they did, thankfully. I'm not saying it's right or fair. They did the best they could under the circumstances and it worked out this time.
Personally, I think arrest was overkill. They could have simply asked his wife to take the kids on a short holiday while they investigated the situation, since it seems obvious that something was up. As I said, I'm glad I wasn't the guy having to make the call. The whole situation sucked.
Now you're blaming the victim. *Should* they have run a more secure system? Probably, but that's neither here nor there. Running an insecure home system is not a crime. breaking into someone house to take advantage of that lack of security is. This is all completely incidental to whether they should have arrested him or not.
"Not sure about in the UK, but innocent until PROVEN guilty used to mean something across the pond."
As I've already said elsewhere, that axiom relates to conviction, not arrest (on either side of the pond). Always had, always will. Half the time evidence required for conviction isn't found until after arrest. You can be arrested on any strong suspicion backed by reasonable evidence (like a hard drive which is clearly yours and clearly full of kiddy porn). It's not the job of the police to convict you, it's their job to collect evidence and arrest you once a sufficient amount exists. Does it suck? Yes. You got a better idea? No arrests till after conviction should work very well I'm sure.
One of the big problems with the current system is the assumption by many people that arrest is the same as conviction. This leads to: 1) People like you assuming that people can't be arrested until they've been proven guilty and 2) People who have been arrested for crimes that they were later found innocent of or even found to have had no involvement in at all becoming social pariahs. That's a completely separate issue though, and not related to this story.
"But the urgency works against "innocent until proven guilty", and spills over in a policy sense into thinking that prevention is even better than rapid response. (Think "pre-crime".) I think that's the psychological basis for the push against simulated kiddy pr0n. "No real children are harmed, but who knows what real children WILL be harmed which Sicky Sickington decides to act on his perverted fantasies.""
Two points here.
One: Real kids really are harmed in the making of this stuff. Granted, the kid was harmed yesterday, last week, last year, or whatever, and most likely the person with the clip did not do the harming; but at some point some real kid was harmed to make it. That's the justification for making it illegal to possess, Snuff films and Blood Diamonds are illegal to possess or traffic in for the same reason. The possessor may not have directly hurt anyone, but they provided the market which pushed someone else to hurt someone. It's thin (often the originator would have hurt people whether the market exists or not), makes a certain amount of sense (can you be sure they would have? Does it matter?)
Two: The police (and I'm pretty sure it's same in the UK) don't have to "prove" guilt to make an arrest. They just need reasonable or preponderant evidence to get a warrant. The prosecutor has to prove guilt to get you convicted, but arrested and convicted are not the same thing. Often the arrest is needed to collect the remaining evidence required for conviction. Yes you are innocent until proven guilty, but there's a reason we arrest "suspects", not "criminals".
All in all, I'm just glad I wasn't the cops having to work this case. On the one hand they can't ignore a hard drive full of kiddy porn, on the other the whole thing screams "frame job".
It is a difficult situation for the police. On the one hand, it has "frame job" written all over it, on the other hand, what if it isn't? Arresting him was probably overkill, but limiting contact with children until the whole thing is cleared up makes some sense. The police clearly made more than a usual effort investigate at least, but still. I dunno what you'd call the "right" answer is here. (Except, obviously, don't have a sociopath break into your house and frame you for a difficult to defend against crime)
I'm not at all sure where you go any of that from my post. Quite the contrary of being partisan I (a liberal) praised an article in an apparently conservative magazine, and point out weaknesses in the teacher union and public school models. I simply state that I can't come up with a more effective system. I, in fact, say that this scenario particularly highlights the weakness of these systems. I also find it amusing that you heap disdain upon public schools and then compare American children to those of China and Eastern Europe, both of whom are educated by public school systems.
I think the point (perhaps poorly made up to this point, and almost certainly not what was meant by the original poster) is that while he was Bolivian, the people he educated were primarily Mexican-American. Therefore, while he might not have been Mexican himself, he can still be an icon to the Mexican (or Mexican-American) community. Hence the comparisons to St. Patrick and St. George, both of whom are particularly revered by people who are not of the same racial, cultural or ethnic background as they themselves were.
I can't speak for the magazine in general, but this article seemed fairly balanced. It did leave some blame on the doorstep of the teacher's union, but pretty clearly laid the lion's share on the school's administration. It also (having been written in the beginning of the decade) expressed concern about the (then anticipated) No Child Left Behind act. That was a conservative darling at the time of the writing. Most of the facts are undeniable anyway. He build a huge and successful program, he was driven out by perceived lack of support from the administration and union, and the program fell apart after he left.
As someone who generally supports both unions and government services, even I have to admit that neither encourage excellence. They are both very good things in many ways, and both serve useful functions in bringing the most good to the most people, but neither is designed to accommodate the exceptional well. Like so many things in our society, public schools and teacher's unions fall into the "terrible idea, but better than the alternative" category. This case simply demonstrates the lacks of both structures particularly well, because of the particularly exception nature of the people involved.
Essentially if you really want secure end to end communication with someone that is more or less fool proof and not subject to outside interference you have to manually exchange keys. It's always been this way. Any time you do less you are trusting *someone* other than yourself and person at the remote end. The simple point is that we *have* to trust someone to exist in society. We trust that the government will not suddenly decide to print "Braquats" and declare Dollars (or Pounds, or Euros, or whatever) useless. We trust that the bank won't wander off with all our money. We trust that our ISP isn't just putting up servers that pretend to be the Internet and are slowly stealing everything we type into our browsers. We trust that the grocery store hasn't poisoned all the produce. Virtually every social action we take involves some modicum of trust that the "other guy" is acting in reasonably good faith.
Thus far the certificate authorities have been trustworthy. Could they be compromised? Of course. Could the clerk at the grocery store be bribed to poison all the produce? Of course. Do we have any reason to think the CAs *have* been compromised? Not that I'm aware of. It's pretty straightforward. Are you doing something that needs to be *completely* secret? Exchange keys with the remote end manually. Are you doing something that needs to be as secret as one can reasonably expect while still dealing public entities? Use the CAs. They have an extremely good track record and seem to be about as trustworthy as anyone can reasonably expect.
I used to be a systems administrator for a University Mathematics department. This was back before Africa and Russia took over the top spots for Spam production, and China was king. Spam had not yet reached a critical juncture on our e-mail servers, but was becoming a steadily more annoying problem. We had a short meeting to discuss what to do about the matter, and I brought up the various filtering solutions that were becoming more and more necessary. Some suggested that we block e-mail from China. Needless to say the 4 Chinese faculty members were less than impressed with this idea.