You mean, you would have been able to come up with google's optimization (which one would that be exactly?)
(Heh, this is what I get for using some company's name as a verb.) No, I meant search the internet for the topic of optimization. Perhaps start here and read up on things like genetic algorithms or simulated annealing.
My DNA came from a billion year run on a gigantic parallel processing farm
Exactly! A solution was found, for encoding a dizzying combination of proteins which achieve a certain result. And it was done all without understanding the problem, or even there being someone to understand it. Nature is chock-full of this stuff (and not just in the bio-sciences) and we have learned from it and even (probably.. you can never be sure) invented a few of our own. They're ways to achieve a certain result, without fully understanding all the intricate details.
This is more in the area of decades of applied CS shown to work, not religious faith in technology. Well, perhaps in the 1940s it might have sounded like "faith" to most people. Now it's just (to use a word with religious connotations) orthodoxy.;-) I'm not at all surprised that someone like Brin might suggest using them.
..technology as a solution to anything we can't figure out by ourselves. This belief is the product of not really understanding then nature of technology: to be able to solve a problem, one needs to understand it first.
It's not technology; it's algorithms. Google optimization, and you'll find plenty of classics that really are based on the idea of getting a certain type of result in situations where the problem is too complex to fully understand. And they're all dependable techniques.
Life itself is based on it: where did your DNA come from?
You don't have to understand a problem to solve it; you just have to be able to measure your happiness with the result. But that's what makes it so unsuitable for taxes; we all have subjectively differing opinions about the performance of the tax code, and Brin seems to have rather arbitrarily defined a good result as 1) no losers combined with 2) smaller amount of code. That makes it an interesting exercise but not one that anyone should actually want; everyone's going to want to set the bar higher than that, in some way.
IMHO, a major tenet of the left wing ideology is how something makes them feel as opposed to whether or not something is practical, efficient, or cost effective.
No, that's a stupid-people problem, not something that distinguishes left from right. For every left-wing weirdness that fits what you're talking about, I can list a right-wing one. You cite "tax the rich" and I'll cite "teach creationism." Pretty much everyone is demanding their government make choices that are destructive pragmatism and efficiency, all for the sake of feeling good.
Drat, I somehow lost a paragraph between first and second. "We want your money" isn't the ideal that would be lost, rather it is the only remaining one that would be preserved. Almost all the exceptions that have modified that, had some kind of "moral" justification, even if they were only a cover stories. Those are what would be lost.
The sad thing about the tax code is that there isn't any underlying principle behind it, other than "we want your money." Generations of thousands of competing interests then went to work on modifying that, so that if you make your income in the "right" form or spend it on the "right" things, then you don't have to pay (or you have to pay extra, if you consider sales and sin taxes to be related to all this). But "we want your money" remained the closest thing the tax code had to an ideal.
If you replace its maze of exceptions with a simplified function that is mechanically derived, then you lose that last vestige of "purity," tainted though it be. At that point the tax code will not be just effectively arbitrary but even philosophically arbitrary too. There just won't be any defense or even flawed justification for taxes anymore.
Maybe that's not so bad, if you view it as a step toward the ultimate goal of destroying it (by further discrediting it first) so that it can be replaced by something more sensible. But if that's the goal, and if you've already premised that Congress would be willing to make such a sweeping change anyway (pretty idealistic) then why not work more directly?
No way; he's right this time. Sure, friends have things in common, but in my experience, diversity in preferences among friends seems more common than conformity. This is especially true for typical Facebook usage, where the threshold for "friend" is so low (i.e. someone you know or like, rather than someone you actually have so much in common with that you can stand to be around them 16 hours every day (e.g. your wife)).
That's the problem with social-based recommendations as opposed to similar-rating-based recommendations. The people you hang out with are usually into different things (which is what makes them interesting), and the people who are into the same things as you, you probably don't feeling like hanging out with (ever been to a LUG?).
Now that I've gotten the trolling out of the way..yes, I get why someone would want more space. I don't get why they care about the number of monitors rather than the total pixels or area, though. But maybe that's an economics thing, where a 2n-square-inch display costs more than twice as much as an n-square-inch display, so asking for more smaller monitors is more likely to happen.
When I read other comments here, one of the surprising things is that people say switching between windows is a pain in the ass. For some reason this conjures up an image of people having to wait for their computers to redraw window contents because they don't have blitters. Obviously that's not the real problem, but I do think if people find window switching to be a pain, then something about desktops is broken.
FWIW I use a Mac at work, and when I get home to Linux I often find myself wanting Expose. (In fact, that's pretty much the only uniquely cool thing about the Mac UI; everything else is pretty much the same, or different-but-no-better-or-worse.)
Basically, it boiled down to gold being really the only choice for a currency (from all of the elements) based on it's physical properties and scarcity.
This is why the Great Old Ones' seem so godlike to us.
They didn't have a sufficiently long history of stellar nucleosynthesis, and without elements as heavy as gold, they never had currency. Hydrogen wasn't up to the task. It would take billions of years and many generations of supernovas, but Cthulhu and his like had no time to lose and had to get on with their liv-- existence.
Without currency, sophisticated economic systems couldn't develop, which in turn kept leisure time down and inhibited technological development (though that was also retarded by the mineral scarcity). There was nothing to do, but turn to what we can only think of as "magic." Magic -- the other way of doing things -- the thing that people who live in a later universe where heavy elements exist on planets, cannot possibly comprehend.
What beings walk the sky in a universe where wealth is measured, not by the long-awaited output of gravitationally-compressed fusion reactors, but the output of mathematical processes like what BitCoin uses? Not gods, surely. With their immense but illusory "wealth" they never have occasion to draw upon real power, the power that sustains you through unimaginable scarcity. It's not just the billions of years of experience that makes one a badass motherfucker; it's the fact that you were the one of the few who survived those early eons of the universe's overwhelming poverty. When Cthulhu talks about the "Iron Age", he's referring to when the first atoms of iron were created.
The problem is fundamentally how do you have a a single coherent addressing scheme without a central authority to enforce it?
You don't; you sometimes sacrifice coherence. That's the least-bad compromise.
It's really not so bad. Imagine: You put out the request to the p2p system for the name boycott-example.org, and you get back several "competing" answers. Some of those answers are 3rd party testaments that as of [timestamp] that names resolves to
1.1.1.1, signed/asserted by a keyid associated with someone named viagradude to whom you can't even find a trust path through the WoT, nor whose assertions you have used and rated before, nor for whom you can find any ratings by anyone you know through recursively asking the same question
2.2.2.2, asserted by verisign whose keyid-to-identity is very well known to be accurate (you're sure that really is verisign, so you would happily use it as a fully-trusted introducer if you ever needed to call verisign tech support), but even though you're sure it's their key, you also know verisign is routinely subject to coercion by governments so their reputation is only moderately trusted
2.2.2.2, as asserted by a keyid published by the Turkish Intelligence Service
3.3.3.3, signed by a keyid for whom you also don't know who that really is but you have used that identity's assertions in the past and it always seemed to give good results
3.3.3.3, signed by a different keyid but for which you have a similar personal history
3.3.3.3, signed by a yet another keyid but for which you have a similar history
and your browser connects to 3.3.3.3. Someone else's browser which came preloaded with defaults different than what you're currently using, connects to 2.2.2.2. Don't panic. This is ok. It merely becomes necessary to make some decisions about who you trust and how/why, in order to train your computer to use the internet most accurately.
That's the key: stop thinking in terms of correct/incorrect and think in terms of degrees of confidence, also acknowledging that confidence in an assertion will be subjective. Subjective trust is ok, because real life works exactly the same way and we've all gotten this far. When you think about how current DNS trust works and map that onto real life, the silliness should leap out at you.
There will be some unfortunate consequences of this; I'm not saying this avoids all harm. But it's better than letting governments interfere with naming, and it lets/encourages us to build up and leverage the giant WoT to which mainstream non-hacker people are part of, which is something we ultimately need anyway, for many other things (e.g. making phone calls, filtering spam, reviewing consumer products, loading the most interesting consensual imagery into your wearable HUD, and hundreds of other applications that I can't begin to imagine).
BTW, I am not saying it is totally stupid to develop for iOS. Just don't think you're going to directly get enough revenue from it to feed and house yourself, unless
You like to gamble -- you think you're the one guy who will be lucky among the thousands who won't
You think of it like the console videogame market, charge enough for your app, and maybe directly negotiate some exceptional terms with Apple, hopefully as good as the (dubiously good) terms that Wii/XBox/Playstation developers get
Aside from that approach, you can do it as an amateur and have a fun time (but why not Android or Meego instead?). Or do it as an extra thing on the side which won't make directly make money in itself, to support another form of business and stay visible to iOS users.
Saying Apple is engaging in price fixing for ebooks is like saying movie theaters engage in price fixing for popcorn. Nobody is contesting that it's a bad deal for the users, but OTOH is downright trivial for users to avoid opting in. Don't like it? Don't buy it!
And if you look at it from the developers perspective, then I stand by my earlier words: you decided to be someone's bitch. Live with the consequences. Everyone knew, before Apple changed any terms, that people who got into bed with them on such ludicrously lopsided terms were destined to get fucked. Almost everyone said, "Don't be Apple's bitch," but some people went ahead anyway and did it. Some of them were fast and made some money before the hammer came down. Some people are very clever (way smarter than me) or are under Apple's radar and may be able to sustain it for quite a while. Good for them! (I can't say I admire these people but I sure as hell respect them and their brilliance.) But thinking of it as a serious market was always a transparent joke.
iOS crApp developers are the 20xx equivalent of the Windows "utility" developers of the early-mid 1990s. They used to be warned, "your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows," and we all had a blast laughing at them after they got all indignant whenever it finally happened. Now the joke is on you, Windows95 gu-- er I mean-- iOS guy. Except this time, you guys won't be able to go crying to mommy government to regulate the monopoly, because iOS will never approach monopoly-like marketshare.
BTW, from TFA:
BeamItDown was particularly bitter because it believes Apple knew that it was going to move the goalposts when it approved the iFlowReader app for inclusion in the App Store.
Bitter, ha! They should be embarrassed, because everyone including BeamItDown knew it was going to happen, before BeamItDown wrote their first line of code or even heard that Apple was introducing a product called iPad.
This story is particularly amusing, because nothing screams "crApp" like the idea of a "developer" who has written an eBook reader and is trying to product-tie that particular app with eBook content. That kind of idea is so revoltingly user-hostile that even if he wasn't stupid enough to be someone's bitch and then whine about it, I would still have no sympathy for him. Wait, now that I think it, that's the very same business model that Apple is using themselves: product tying the hardware and the app store. The recursive irony here is laid on so thick.
I just fucking hate these kind of people. The petty twits see an evil overlord, admire him, and so they so they pledge fealty to the overlord and set out to do their own evil working under their mighty shadow. Then they pretend to be all shocked and complain when the overlord acts like an overlord. Fuck those guys.
We bet everything on Apple and iOS and then Apple killed us
Paraphrased: "We bet everything on one single trendy niche product among many, which is linked to one single trendy content sales channel, both of which happen to be tightly controlled by another party whose interests conflict with ours, and somehow it didn't work out for us."
If it makes you feel any better, that particular manufacturer probably isn't going to have lasting, long-term dominance (but if they stay on the ball (and I think they will), they'll be a player you can't quite totally ignore), so it's pretty silly to say they've ruined the ebook business. You'll face other challenges later, so the general lesson you should take from this ephemeral phenomenon is: don't be anyone's bitch. And face it, you did decide to be someone's bitch.
Why would you use a proprietary format to store openly distributed files?
More to the point, why would I care as long as I can open said file?
Many possible reasons.
Premise rejection: Because you can't open the file. Proprietary software tends to be ported to far fewer platforms than Free software (is there a PPC NetBSD port of WinRar? I don't know) so the proprietary software may not be available to you. (Related to this: because running software inside of emulators is cumbersome and inconvenient, even when it technically can do the job. The idea of running a Windows archiver in Wine where it can't be scripted as part of the bigger get-files-from-Usenet picture is laughably luddite.)
Safety: who knows what else this proprietary software does or is even unintentionally capable of doing? Theo de Raadt aside, who has audited it, even superficially and informally? If you can't answer that question (as is often the case unless you do the auditing yourself) then consider what the upper limit may be.
Maintenance: What can you do about bugs? If the software has a problem then you're not ever going to get maintenance until the vendor decides they have reason to fix that bug. With Free software, bug fixes and feature additions can happen independent of any particular central authority. (Sometimes this is a very big deal. Honestly, I think this reason is the #1 factor in how I became a Linux user. I got burned so many times, both at home and professionally. Never Again. I will give up computers altogether and live in a shack in Montana, before I ever return to that level of frustration and utter helplessness. I don't know how anyone can stand it.)
Competition: Remember that the whole reason you're using this proprietary software, is that you somehow got stuck with a proprietary file format. Whenever that happens, it is usually the case that that particular proprietary application is the only application that can deal with the file. That means that if you ever want a particular feature or bugfix, not only do you not get maintenance (as mentioned above) but you may not even have the option to jump ship to a competing application. Free software, on the other hand, tends to default to writing non-proprietary formats, and because of that, there tend to be multiple implementations (whether they're forks of an ancestor or completely unrelated), so if you decide you don't like that application, there's probably another one which is interoperative with your data. This is why it's big news (I guess) that someone has created an application that can read rar3 files, whereas it wouldn't be news at all if someone created an application that can read tar or zip files.
This isn't to say that Free software is always something users must insist on, but it nevertheless does have practical non-religious advantages. (Well, non-religious unless you think platform diversity, security, maintenance availability and competition are all religious values.)
If you think you've found a case where those advantages are outweighed by other factors, or happen to be met by some particular proprietary application, fine, I won't preach at you and will leave RMS to do that job.;-) But nevertheless, using proprietary formats for interchange with other users really is a dumb idea. And considering the particular application we're talking about here, it's a doubly-dumb idea because the proprietary format we're talking about just doesn't have any significant advantages. Whoever is writing rar3 files is clueless.
what are you doing that would warrant the FBI's eye
First: who knows? Even if you're not cynical about government convicting or even prosecuting innocent people all the time, surely you admit they investigate innocent people all the time. They have to in order to do their job, rule out suspects, etc. This is why the we try to limit them taking extra more-invasive steps against people to only when they can show they have a good reason. If they only looked at people who are doing things that really warrant their attention, we would assume them to have godlike infallibility and wouldn't even bother with a justice system at all; just have them pass sentence on the bad guys.
But aside from that...
what are you doing that you do not want law enforcement to know?
If it is legal for law enforcement to do this without a warrant, that suggests that legally the activity of putting a bug on someone else's care isn't special; i.e. it is not something that is considered to be a violation of privacy for which we sometimes permit government to do it as part of their rightful monopoly on force. In other words, if government can do this without invoking its special government-y powers, then anyone should be legally allowed to do it.
So your question becomes:
What are you doing that anyone in the world might want to know?
Might the neighborhood burglar like realtime updated reports on when you're home and when you're not? Might your insurance carrier want to know if your daily patterns are outside the median? Might your stalker want to know where you are? Might your ex-wife's private investigator want to know who you're visiting? Might ClearChannel want to know which billboards you drive by most often? And so on. Draw on your paranoia and imagination and I think you'll see that Big Brother is just one of many brothers to be concerned about.
If Just Anyone is not allowed to bug your car, then that suggests it is a special power reserved for government, and you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not a violation of privacy (if it's not, then why can't I bug your car?) or that it doesn't require any sort of balances or limits of power for which the 4th amendment was intended to provide protection.
Sample says the "null hypothesis" is such because the old experiments that attempted to produce "building blocks" of amino acids failed to do so.
He fails to mention that when he seals a sterilized beaker and waits for Yog-Sothoth to create life within it, the life also didn't appear. So even if you believe that scientists must take a belief other than "I don't know" by default, creationism seems to have nothing to recommend it.
I think the concern is that if a device is used in a real operation instead of secret tests as Area 51, then someone might see it! Maybe no one ever thought of that. And then on top of that, is the brand new idea that if an aircraft has secret aspects to it, for whatever reason (shit happens) it may be shot down or crash or have to make an emergency landing, and then someone might get to see it up close! No one ever thought of that either.
With your argument, I could as well say the web site isn't responsible for the site's content, because after all, it's the web browser which renders that content.
The web browser isn't responsible for the content, but certainly is responsible for what ends up being done with the content and how it is rendered. Likewise, the browser is responsible for 1) the cookie getting stored 2) the stored cookie being sent back.
I don't know a web browser which sets cookies without the web site requesting it
The key word is "request." Both the storage and the retransmission are extremely optional behaviors. Cookies are just another advisory header.
People seems to have the weird idea that cookies are like executable code, or that them getting sent back is some kind of exploit of unintended browser functionality. That's just terribly wrong. The behavior is exactly what the browser author intends. If the behavior is a bad thing, then this is a conflict between users and browsers.
Here's your error: I bet that 90% of all people don't even know what cookies are (if they actually know that they exist). That's the point of opt-in: An opt-in solution makes sure that you have to explicitly(!) agree that it happens, which means you have to get informed about it if it happens (because if you are not informed, you cannot agree).
Ok, I'll concede you're right about that and I was overzealous in arguing that users are informed.
But the browser authors are certainly informed about how they decided to implement cookies, and the they have a much closer and responsible relationship with the user. That is what makes it so reprehensible that governments are treating it as though web sites need to get the user to opt in to storing and sending back cookies. If people think there's a problem with cookies, then the browser is what needs to get the user's permission. It's very reasonable for the web site to assume that if someone is using a browser that stores and sends back cookies, that the user is at peace with whatever their browser is doing.
I understand that a site could do something underhanded, like say, offer javascript which exploits the browser to do something that users (or browser authors) don't intend. If that's what were happening, I'd join in and say the website should be required to get users to opt in. But that's just not what's happening with cookies.
How was Taco's statement really "wrong?" He wasn't saying it wouldn't be successful (though maybe that's what he thought); he was saying it was lame. And compared to the other products on the market at the time, he was (arguably, subjectively) right, especially so from a geeky users' point of view.
He could have made a very analogous statement in 1995 with the exact same underlying essence about Windows 95, and nobody in later years would making fun of what he said, despite how widely deployed that product became.
And check it out: both of the shortcomings that Taco cited, were things Apple had to address later in order to stay relevant.
That the storage limitation got addressed was just a technological inevitability that Apple didn't really need to think about, so the iPod's storage limitations weren't really important. So in this respect, Taco's comment was short-sighted (assuming (!) you totally discount the idea that he was just talking about people buying the product as-is, as opposed to making a general comment about a coming legacy).
But please don't tell me that adding wireless connectivity isn't a totally essential aspect of later iThings (as well as the emerging competitors of original iPod), which the designers didn't have to really work on and think about. With networking and the software on top of it to use it, Apple had the big looming issue of "if we screw this up, we'll be crushed."
Even if you misinterpret Taco's comment as a prediction about commercial success (rather than as a user-oriented or technical comment), Taco was half right. At worst, he was "too early" about perceiving the public's need for networking.
Taco's brief evaluation of the iPod does have a humorous and ironic aspect, in light of the product's success. The humor isn't at Taco's expense, however, and it's a very black humor about the nature of the tech market.
It's also opt-in if the user decided to install a browser which opts to both store and send back cookies. It's also opt-in if such a browser is already installed and the user decides to run it.
The reason this proposal (and others like it in the news lately) is so bad, is that it's based on a fundamental confusion. Someone seems to think cookies have something to do with web sites when really they're a web browser thing. The users' problem is that they are running software which isn't necessarily working for them; their problem has very little to do with who they are talking to.
I think politicians are loath to look at it in terms of who is really responsible, because once you accept the idea that people really do opt (with fully informed consent) to run potentially hostile software, combined with the idea that government must use force to prevent it, then that's the end of DRM, walled gardens, etc. So they're going to be lobbied to pass laws which deliberately misrepresent/misinterpret who is really responsible for what. All kinds of senseless nonsense will necessarily flow from that. Weird ideas about cookies are a symptom.
This is one of the great mysteries of the phone market, a situation where it seems to my ignorant amateur eyes that they're doing the same thing as the MPAA companies: saying, "No, we don't want your money. Fuck off, customers. Go find someone else to do business with."
Wouldn't a 2011 phone whose battery lasts as long as a 2006 phone sell like hotcakes? Is "slim" really all that "cool?"
"If you fill the chip with highly specialized cores, then the fraction of the chip that is lit up at one time can be the most energy efficient for that particular task,
You can't win, because when a performance hacker reads this, he thinks, "Ooh, such waste! I need to parallelize all my stuff to increase utilization. Light 'em up!"
If you have the camera in question, then you can take photos for which you are the copyright holder. Then as the copyright holder, you can authorize yourself to bypass the technological measure that limits access (wait, this measure doesn't limit access) to your photo, which makes the activity not be "circumvention" (as DMCA defines that word).
Slashdot Mirror
(Heh, this is what I get for using some company's name as a verb.) No, I meant search the internet for the topic of optimization. Perhaps start here and read up on things like genetic algorithms or simulated annealing.
Exactly! A solution was found, for encoding a dizzying combination of proteins which achieve a certain result. And it was done all without understanding the problem, or even there being someone to understand it. Nature is chock-full of this stuff (and not just in the bio-sciences) and we have learned from it and even (probably .. you can never be sure) invented a few of our own. They're ways to achieve a certain result, without fully understanding all the intricate details.
This is more in the area of decades of applied CS shown to work, not religious faith in technology. Well, perhaps in the 1940s it might have sounded like "faith" to most people. Now it's just (to use a word with religious connotations) orthodoxy. ;-) I'm not at all surprised that someone like Brin might suggest using them.
It's not technology; it's algorithms. Google optimization, and you'll find plenty of classics that really are based on the idea of getting a certain type of result in situations where the problem is too complex to fully understand. And they're all dependable techniques.
Life itself is based on it: where did your DNA come from?
You don't have to understand a problem to solve it; you just have to be able to measure your happiness with the result. But that's what makes it so unsuitable for taxes; we all have subjectively differing opinions about the performance of the tax code, and Brin seems to have rather arbitrarily defined a good result as 1) no losers combined with 2) smaller amount of code. That makes it an interesting exercise but not one that anyone should actually want; everyone's going to want to set the bar higher than that, in some way.
No, that's a stupid-people problem, not something that distinguishes left from right. For every left-wing weirdness that fits what you're talking about, I can list a right-wing one. You cite "tax the rich" and I'll cite "teach creationism." Pretty much everyone is demanding their government make choices that are destructive pragmatism and efficiency, all for the sake of feeling good.
Drat, I somehow lost a paragraph between first and second. "We want your money" isn't the ideal that would be lost, rather it is the only remaining one that would be preserved. Almost all the exceptions that have modified that, had some kind of "moral" justification, even if they were only a cover stories. Those are what would be lost.
The sad thing about the tax code is that there isn't any underlying principle behind it, other than "we want your money." Generations of thousands of competing interests then went to work on modifying that, so that if you make your income in the "right" form or spend it on the "right" things, then you don't have to pay (or you have to pay extra, if you consider sales and sin taxes to be related to all this). But "we want your money" remained the closest thing the tax code had to an ideal.
If you replace its maze of exceptions with a simplified function that is mechanically derived, then you lose that last vestige of "purity," tainted though it be. At that point the tax code will not be just effectively arbitrary but even philosophically arbitrary too. There just won't be any defense or even flawed justification for taxes anymore.
Maybe that's not so bad, if you view it as a step toward the ultimate goal of destroying it (by further discrediting it first) so that it can be replaced by something more sensible. But if that's the goal, and if you've already premised that Congress would be willing to make such a sweeping change anyway (pretty idealistic) then why not work more directly?
No way; he's right this time. Sure, friends have things in common, but in my experience, diversity in preferences among friends seems more common than conformity. This is especially true for typical Facebook usage, where the threshold for "friend" is so low (i.e. someone you know or like, rather than someone you actually have so much in common with that you can stand to be around them 16 hours every day (e.g. your wife)).
That's the problem with social-based recommendations as opposed to similar-rating-based recommendations. The people you hang out with are usually into different things (which is what makes them interesting), and the people who are into the same things as you, you probably don't feeling like hanging out with (ever been to a LUG?).
..if you need two monitors, you're a pussy.
Now that I've gotten the trolling out of the way..yes, I get why someone would want more space. I don't get why they care about the number of monitors rather than the total pixels or area, though. But maybe that's an economics thing, where a 2n-square-inch display costs more than twice as much as an n-square-inch display, so asking for more smaller monitors is more likely to happen.
When I read other comments here, one of the surprising things is that people say switching between windows is a pain in the ass. For some reason this conjures up an image of people having to wait for their computers to redraw window contents because they don't have blitters. Obviously that's not the real problem, but I do think if people find window switching to be a pain, then something about desktops is broken.
FWIW I use a Mac at work, and when I get home to Linux I often find myself wanting Expose. (In fact, that's pretty much the only uniquely cool thing about the Mac UI; everything else is pretty much the same, or different-but-no-better-or-worse.)
This is why the Great Old Ones' seem so godlike to us.
They didn't have a sufficiently long history of stellar nucleosynthesis, and without elements as heavy as gold, they never had currency. Hydrogen wasn't up to the task. It would take billions of years and many generations of supernovas, but Cthulhu and his like had no time to lose and had to get on with their liv-- existence.
Without currency, sophisticated economic systems couldn't develop, which in turn kept leisure time down and inhibited technological development (though that was also retarded by the mineral scarcity). There was nothing to do, but turn to what we can only think of as "magic." Magic -- the other way of doing things -- the thing that people who live in a later universe where heavy elements exist on planets, cannot possibly comprehend.
What beings walk the sky in a universe where wealth is measured, not by the long-awaited output of gravitationally-compressed fusion reactors, but the output of mathematical processes like what BitCoin uses? Not gods, surely. With their immense but illusory "wealth" they never have occasion to draw upon real power, the power that sustains you through unimaginable scarcity. It's not just the billions of years of experience that makes one a badass motherfucker; it's the fact that you were the one of the few who survived those early eons of the universe's overwhelming poverty. When Cthulhu talks about the "Iron Age", he's referring to when the first atoms of iron were created.
You don't; you sometimes sacrifice coherence. That's the least-bad compromise.
It's really not so bad. Imagine: You put out the request to the p2p system for the name boycott-example.org, and you get back several "competing" answers. Some of those answers are 3rd party testaments that as of [timestamp] that names resolves to
and your browser connects to 3.3.3.3. Someone else's browser which came preloaded with defaults different than what you're currently using, connects to 2.2.2.2. Don't panic. This is ok. It merely becomes necessary to make some decisions about who you trust and how/why, in order to train your computer to use the internet most accurately.
That's the key: stop thinking in terms of correct/incorrect and think in terms of degrees of confidence, also acknowledging that confidence in an assertion will be subjective. Subjective trust is ok, because real life works exactly the same way and we've all gotten this far. When you think about how current DNS trust works and map that onto real life, the silliness should leap out at you.
There will be some unfortunate consequences of this; I'm not saying this avoids all harm. But it's better than letting governments interfere with naming, and it lets/encourages us to build up and leverage the giant WoT to which mainstream non-hacker people are part of, which is something we ultimately need anyway, for many other things (e.g. making phone calls, filtering spam, reviewing consumer products, loading the most interesting consensual imagery into your wearable HUD, and hundreds of other applications that I can't begin to imagine).
BTW, I am not saying it is totally stupid to develop for iOS. Just don't think you're going to directly get enough revenue from it to feed and house yourself, unless
Aside from that approach, you can do it as an amateur and have a fun time (but why not Android or Meego instead?). Or do it as an extra thing on the side which won't make directly make money in itself, to support another form of business and stay visible to iOS users.
Saying Apple is engaging in price fixing for ebooks is like saying movie theaters engage in price fixing for popcorn. Nobody is contesting that it's a bad deal for the users, but OTOH is downright trivial for users to avoid opting in. Don't like it? Don't buy it!
And if you look at it from the developers perspective, then I stand by my earlier words: you decided to be someone's bitch. Live with the consequences. Everyone knew, before Apple changed any terms, that people who got into bed with them on such ludicrously lopsided terms were destined to get fucked. Almost everyone said, "Don't be Apple's bitch," but some people went ahead anyway and did it. Some of them were fast and made some money before the hammer came down. Some people are very clever (way smarter than me) or are under Apple's radar and may be able to sustain it for quite a while. Good for them! (I can't say I admire these people but I sure as hell respect them and their brilliance.) But thinking of it as a serious market was always a transparent joke.
iOS crApp developers are the 20xx equivalent of the Windows "utility" developers of the early-mid 1990s. They used to be warned, "your product may be a DLL in the next version of Windows," and we all had a blast laughing at them after they got all indignant whenever it finally happened. Now the joke is on you, Windows95 gu-- er I mean-- iOS guy. Except this time, you guys won't be able to go crying to mommy government to regulate the monopoly, because iOS will never approach monopoly-like marketshare.
BTW, from TFA:
Bitter, ha! They should be embarrassed, because everyone including BeamItDown knew it was going to happen, before BeamItDown wrote their first line of code or even heard that Apple was introducing a product called iPad.
This story is particularly amusing, because nothing screams "crApp" like the idea of a "developer" who has written an eBook reader and is trying to product-tie that particular app with eBook content. That kind of idea is so revoltingly user-hostile that even if he wasn't stupid enough to be someone's bitch and then whine about it, I would still have no sympathy for him. Wait, now that I think it, that's the very same business model that Apple is using themselves: product tying the hardware and the app store. The recursive irony here is laid on so thick.
I just fucking hate these kind of people. The petty twits see an evil overlord, admire him, and so they so they pledge fealty to the overlord and set out to do their own evil working under their mighty shadow. Then they pretend to be all shocked and complain when the overlord acts like an overlord. Fuck those guys.
"I'm bombing the ammunition depot at Daquiri tomorrow morning. We're coming in from the North, under their radar."
"When will you be back?"
"I can't tell you. Classified."
Paraphrased: "We bet everything on one single trendy niche product among many, which is linked to one single trendy content sales channel, both of which happen to be tightly controlled by another party whose interests conflict with ours, and somehow it didn't work out for us."
If it makes you feel any better, that particular manufacturer probably isn't going to have lasting, long-term dominance (but if they stay on the ball (and I think they will), they'll be a player you can't quite totally ignore), so it's pretty silly to say they've ruined the ebook business. You'll face other challenges later, so the general lesson you should take from this ephemeral phenomenon is: don't be anyone's bitch. And face it, you did decide to be someone's bitch.
Many possible reasons.
This isn't to say that Free software is always something users must insist on, but it nevertheless does have practical non-religious advantages. (Well, non-religious unless you think platform diversity, security, maintenance availability and competition are all religious values.)
If you think you've found a case where those advantages are outweighed by other factors, or happen to be met by some particular proprietary application, fine, I won't preach at you and will leave RMS to do that job. ;-) But nevertheless, using proprietary formats for interchange with other users really is a dumb idea. And considering the particular application we're talking about here, it's a doubly-dumb idea because the proprietary format we're talking about just doesn't have any significant advantages. Whoever is writing rar3 files is clueless.
First: who knows? Even if you're not cynical about government convicting or even prosecuting innocent people all the time, surely you admit they investigate innocent people all the time. They have to in order to do their job, rule out suspects, etc. This is why the we try to limit them taking extra more-invasive steps against people to only when they can show they have a good reason. If they only looked at people who are doing things that really warrant their attention, we would assume them to have godlike infallibility and wouldn't even bother with a justice system at all; just have them pass sentence on the bad guys.
But aside from that...
If it is legal for law enforcement to do this without a warrant, that suggests that legally the activity of putting a bug on someone else's care isn't special; i.e. it is not something that is considered to be a violation of privacy for which we sometimes permit government to do it as part of their rightful monopoly on force. In other words, if government can do this without invoking its special government-y powers, then anyone should be legally allowed to do it.
So your question becomes:
Might the neighborhood burglar like realtime updated reports on when you're home and when you're not? Might your insurance carrier want to know if your daily patterns are outside the median? Might your stalker want to know where you are? Might your ex-wife's private investigator want to know who you're visiting? Might ClearChannel want to know which billboards you drive by most often? And so on. Draw on your paranoia and imagination and I think you'll see that Big Brother is just one of many brothers to be concerned about.
If Just Anyone is not allowed to bug your car, then that suggests it is a special power reserved for government, and you're going to have a hard time arguing it's not a violation of privacy (if it's not, then why can't I bug your car?) or that it doesn't require any sort of balances or limits of power for which the 4th amendment was intended to provide protection.
He fails to mention that when he seals a sterilized beaker and waits for Yog-Sothoth to create life within it, the life also didn't appear. So even if you believe that scientists must take a belief other than "I don't know" by default, creationism seems to have nothing to recommend it.
I think the concern is that if a device is used in a real operation instead of secret tests as Area 51, then someone might see it! Maybe no one ever thought of that. And then on top of that, is the brand new idea that if an aircraft has secret aspects to it, for whatever reason (shit happens) it may be shot down or crash or have to make an emergency landing, and then someone might get to see it up close! No one ever thought of that either.
They put some DHS code into mafiaafire right before they did this, to subvert subversive people.
The web browser isn't responsible for the content, but certainly is responsible for what ends up being done with the content and how it is rendered. Likewise, the browser is responsible for 1) the cookie getting stored 2) the stored cookie being sent back.
The key word is "request." Both the storage and the retransmission are extremely optional behaviors. Cookies are just another advisory header.
People seems to have the weird idea that cookies are like executable code, or that them getting sent back is some kind of exploit of unintended browser functionality. That's just terribly wrong. The behavior is exactly what the browser author intends. If the behavior is a bad thing, then this is a conflict between users and browsers.
Ok, I'll concede you're right about that and I was overzealous in arguing that users are informed.
But the browser authors are certainly informed about how they decided to implement cookies, and the they have a much closer and responsible relationship with the user. That is what makes it so reprehensible that governments are treating it as though web sites need to get the user to opt in to storing and sending back cookies. If people think there's a problem with cookies, then the browser is what needs to get the user's permission. It's very reasonable for the web site to assume that if someone is using a browser that stores and sends back cookies, that the user is at peace with whatever their browser is doing.
I understand that a site could do something underhanded, like say, offer javascript which exploits the browser to do something that users (or browser authors) don't intend. If that's what were happening, I'd join in and say the website should be required to get users to opt in. But that's just not what's happening with cookies.
How was Taco's statement really "wrong?" He wasn't saying it wouldn't be successful (though maybe that's what he thought); he was saying it was lame. And compared to the other products on the market at the time, he was (arguably, subjectively) right, especially so from a geeky users' point of view.
He could have made a very analogous statement in 1995 with the exact same underlying essence about Windows 95, and nobody in later years would making fun of what he said, despite how widely deployed that product became.
And check it out: both of the shortcomings that Taco cited, were things Apple had to address later in order to stay relevant.
Even if you misinterpret Taco's comment as a prediction about commercial success (rather than as a user-oriented or technical comment), Taco was half right. At worst, he was "too early" about perceiving the public's need for networking.
Taco's brief evaluation of the iPod does have a humorous and ironic aspect, in light of the product's success. The humor isn't at Taco's expense, however, and it's a very black humor about the nature of the tech market.
It's also opt-in if the user decided to install a browser which opts to both store and send back cookies. It's also opt-in if such a browser is already installed and the user decides to run it.
The reason this proposal (and others like it in the news lately) is so bad, is that it's based on a fundamental confusion. Someone seems to think cookies have something to do with web sites when really they're a web browser thing. The users' problem is that they are running software which isn't necessarily working for them; their problem has very little to do with who they are talking to.
I think politicians are loath to look at it in terms of who is really responsible, because once you accept the idea that people really do opt (with fully informed consent) to run potentially hostile software, combined with the idea that government must use force to prevent it, then that's the end of DRM, walled gardens, etc. So they're going to be lobbied to pass laws which deliberately misrepresent/misinterpret who is really responsible for what. All kinds of senseless nonsense will necessarily flow from that. Weird ideas about cookies are a symptom.
Run the browser on the Corei7 guy's computer, use his RAM, and see it on yours. ;-)
This is one of the great mysteries of the phone market, a situation where it seems to my ignorant amateur eyes that they're doing the same thing as the MPAA companies: saying, "No, we don't want your money. Fuck off, customers. Go find someone else to do business with."
Wouldn't a 2011 phone whose battery lasts as long as a 2006 phone sell like hotcakes? Is "slim" really all that "cool?"
You can't win, because when a performance hacker reads this, he thinks, "Ooh, such waste! I need to parallelize all my stuff to increase utilization. Light 'em up!"
If you have the camera in question, then you can take photos for which you are the copyright holder. Then as the copyright holder, you can authorize yourself to bypass the technological measure that limits access (wait, this measure doesn't limit access) to your photo, which makes the activity not be "circumvention" (as DMCA defines that word).
So basically: no and no.