In addition it boots faster than any windows machine I have ever owned.
I have an old Sony picturebook with Win98 on it for the same reason -- it's about as close to instant-on as a Palm OS device, which is great for a laptop. Coming back from standby on some laptops takes longer than booting from a cold start on my win98, and hibernate isn't even close.
And objectively, I object to statements such as: The hardware is better. (they've been saying their processors were superior and that set them apart, now they say that the processor is the same, which is somehow "innovative." What happened to the superior processor? Also search for known issues with Mac hardware)
Sounds like you get plenty emotional, too.
Yes, the hardware is better. Hardware is more than ICs and drive mechanics (even there, you can certainly say that an ASUS Mobo is better than a generic Dell Mobo, even though they are the "same" hardware -- quality in manufacturing and component selection counts). Open up any Mac tower system made in the last decade and it's a work of industrial design beauty -- a trained monkey could swap out processors, hard drives, memory in seconds, all without cutting your hand or unplugging seven cables. IBM thinkpads are the only other laptops that were the equal of Apple laptops in terms of industrial design, and Lenovo doesn't seem to be spending the same resources on design.
I don't think anyone has ever said using Intel processors was "innovative". It really is possible for the G3/G4/G5 to be a better processor design than the PII/PIII/PIV, while also being inferior in the to the modern Intel/AMD designs. The world is not static, what was great in 1998 is not necessarily great in 2008. AMD processors and chipsets were better than Intel's for many years. Now they aren't. That doesn't mean everyone who built a Athlon64 system in 2003 was wrong.
I just interviewed with a small growing company. Every single desktop they had were Apple. It didn't matter what it was doing, they were all Apple. Considering they could have had *just as good* for cheaper that did the same thing (and more depending on what you needed it to do) I think it was a very dumb and wasteful thing to do; especially for a small company.
Well, gee -- they're the growing company filled with technical people. Maybe they actually know what they're doing and you're the one who is missing something.
I don't understand how evolution can be either proven OR disproven, as it deals with things that happened in the past and that therefore aren't now observable or falsifiable.
Evolution, like all scientific theories, makes statements that can be used as predictors for future discoveries, even though the process in question happened in the past.
If evolution says that some specific sequence of events is impossible, then finding any evidence that those events occurred would instantly disprove the theory. There are numerous things that could be discovered at any moment that would call into question the most fundamental aspects of evolution, yet in nearly two centuries no evidence of the sort has been found.
Conversely, evolution says that many things pretty much must have happened a certain way to get from point A to point B, and that is prediction. It has in fact happened that scientists have had fossil A and fossil C, but no luck in finding the presumed to exist fossil B. By using the principles of evolution they've determined where the most likely place to find fossil B was -- and found it!
It should also be noted that evolution predicted (in fact REQUIRED) the existence of DNA (or something similar) a century before it was actually found -- indeed, when evolution was first discussed the very lack of something like DNA was one of the biggest criticisms against it. The notion that ALL life on Earth including plants and animals shared some fundamental building block that was completely unknown, eons old yet randomly changeable for no discernible reason, was considered absurd by many. Watson and Crick did more to confirm the accuracy of evolution than almost any other group in the 20th century.
it is admittedly disproportionate representation, since the true believers are still checking the Bible to figure out which of the Internets to sign up for.
Re:Try Smultron
on
TextMate
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· Score: 3, Interesting
There is an open source text editor for OS X called Smulton. I've been using it for awhile. It's a bit lean on features, but it is free.
I use Smultron exclusively -- every few months I check out Textmate again since everyone loves it so much, but it seems like a perfect example of a program that is made by programmers for programmers. For someone just looking for a text editor to do standard HTML/PHP/JS coding with syntax coloring, templates/snippets and good hidden file support Smultron works wonderfully out of the box. It would be nice to have code folding, but not if it means having 30,000 features for C++ programmers getting in my way.
I preemptively surrender to all the Textmate fans who will respond -- I know there's something about it everyone else loves, it just seems as awkward and geeky as emacs (though better looking) to me!
Playing on the unfounded belief of the general public that crimes go unsolved because the police don't work on them - as opposed to the reality that crimes go unsolved because there is not sufficient evidence, or that they are not as cut-and-dried (from the point of view of the law) as people commonly believe.
Yeah, you pretty much lost me there. I don't know anyone who has ever interacted with the police who hasn't been sorely disappointed by their complete lack of interest in pursuing most crime. You can bring a property crime to their doorstep, bring them evidence, tell them exactly who the perpetrator is and they will fill out a form and never even bother to interview the person who committed the crime because they don't have the resources and it isn't a high enough priority.
I've known several people who have been assaulted where numerous witnesses saw it, the person who did it was known to the victim (and too stupid to even deny it if a cop asked), videotape was available and the police never did anything more than fill out the form in their station -- forget going to all the effort of actually getting the security tape and driving all the way to the criminal's house, whose name and address were provided at the time of complaint!
No doubt you remember the slashdot story from last year where the guy in NYC had his $600 smartphone stolen and went to the police and they did nothing but basically try to intimidate him and his friends into shutting up about it until he got too much press coverage. Of course the phone company knew exactly where the phone was down to a few meters, could easily tell any investigator, and the victim provided photographs and text messages sent from it in which the people with the phone identified themselves.
We're not talking about Sherlock Holmes whodunnits here, where you need to call in an FBI profiler and a forensics team to swab for DNA samples. Every time I've known of a property crime, the cops have basically told the victim "there's no chance anyone will investigate this since your insurance will pay for it".
The second problem is (as the County Attorney attempts to explain) that the police cannot completely ignore crimes.
Of course they can. The police are not required to investigate 100% of crimes reported, much less those committed. We'd have to deputize every person in the county and they'd still be backlogged if that were the case. If the County Attorney has never heard of police or prosecutorial discretion, he must be a very busy man trying to fully prosecute every single misdemeanor that comes across his desk. Discretion is one way that every human being in the legal system is supposed to step in and keep the system from generating ridiculous results, so long as it isn't abused in a discriminatory way.
Since the NYPD police have zero jurisdiction in California or any other place but their own city, they have no more or less rights than any other citizen. They are just regular people. So they can goto public meetings like any other US citizen can. They have no power of how to tell how the NYPD runs its police force, and to make some blanket statement to all police from any state would run afowl from Equal Protection.
No, police officers outside their jurisdictions but still acting in their official capacities are NOT "just regular people". They are still acting as agents of the government, they just don't have arrest powers in another state (actually they might depending on the situation, there is a great deal of vagueness since usually it's easier and more polite to have the local cops handle the arrest).
Residents of California have rights. Agents of the NYPD, who were there on official NYPD business, being paid by the NYPD, in activities directed by the NYPD, created and maintained records for the NYPD based on the mere conjecture that criminal charges might be filed (someday for some reason) by the NYPD, in complete violation of the California Constitution. They can't pretend they were just acting as random citizens while drawing a government paycheck for the very activities in question.
Anyone acting as a government agent is required to observe the legal rights of citizens. That's why cops can't just call their friend Bob and have him conduct an illegal search rather than going to the trouble of getting a warrant. Just because Bob can't arrest anyone or hand out tickets doesn't mean he isn't acting as a government agent in the search.
You're right, of course that California can't tell cops what to do outside California. But the minute those NYPD officers came into California on government business, you better bet they have to respect the rights of citizens the same as any other government agent in California.
They seem to understand quite clearly that crimes are not all equal, that the police force is not infinite in size, and that they, as the taxpayers and voters, should be the ones to determine which crimes are top priority.
The implication of your original statement was that somehow the majority of voters were simply a bunch of criminals trying to justify their own transgressions. Obviously the majority of non-criminals people who live there think that property and violent crimes are not being addressed promptly enough and that issue will be improved by reallocating resources from (some) drug enforcement activities.
Your suggestion that they should just change the law is interesting -- whenever localities have, in fact, changed the local law, the federal government then steps in and tells them that they aren't *allowed* to, which is precisely why the citizens in this area chose this approach -- it has the effect of the locality effectively boycotting enforcement of laws they see as wasteful or unjust, while circumventing the supremacy issues that have plagued previous, more straightforward attempts.
That's interesting, you should let the Supreme Court know ASAP. Even back in the 50s they recognized that gathering information could itself have a chilling effect on free speech, hence their overturning the requirement that the NAACP hand membership lists to the government. There is actually a SC-recognized right to anonymity, to a certain degree, when it comes to political protest.
Of course, in the state of California, this isn't even a question, the right to privacy is explicit in the constitution and information gathering on political groups by law enforcement without reason to believe they are engaged in illegal activity is, in fact, prohibited. Somehow I doubt the NYPD officers were required to get a degree in California criminal justice before they bought their plane tickets.
Fishing expeditions against people you dislike is not only a lousy use of police resources, they are in fact quite contrary to both policy and law in many parts of the country (including NYC, which is part of why this case is so interesting -- the NYPD seems to be blatantly violating one of the most famous court-imposed intelligence-gathering restrictions in the entire United States -- imposed due entirely to the NYPD's vast PRIOR abuse of such operations to violate the civil rights of activists!).
it looked like a textbook example of good police work. They didn't tap any phones or break the law, they read open sourses like webpages and they put boots on the ground at meetings open to the public to collect human intelligence. Yes they kept files on threats and non threats...
Somehow I find it unlikely that the NYPD is up to date on current law in every jurisdiction where these activities took place. The likelihood of them having violated the legal rights of citizens increased with every new jurisdiction they entered for this conduct.
It should be noted, for example, that California's Constitution has an explicit right to Privacy, and the state AG has directed local law enforcement that "it is a mistake of constitutional dimension to gather information for a criminal intelligence file where there is no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity". In other words, what these officers did is blatantly unconstitutional in California, and only questionably unconstitutional in other jurisdictions.
It's okay, I support the right of you to be a fool willing to throw out the rights of anyone other than yourself, as long as they disagree with your politics. Continue to tell yourself that 90% of the world's population and 75% of the American population is wrong about current policy and that you, in your infinite wisdom, are the only one who understand how true peace and order may be brought to the world.
Bottom line people, the right to protest DOES not include the right to anarchy, terror and violence
Thank you! If only you'd tell law enforcement agencies that, perhaps more peaceful protests could take place and we could all forget that the phrase "agent provocateur" ever existed!
When undercover cops attent public meetings there's nothing remotly nefarious about that.
Um, yes there is, if he's using it to gather intelligence on political activists for later persecution based on nothing more than political activities which are explicitly protected by the first amendment of the Constitution. You should acquaint yourself with the 20th century abuses of such "innocent" behavior (particularly 1960-1975) before making such silly comments.
Of course, this is only made worse by the fact that the officers were working well outside their jurisdictions when no actual crimes had been committed or were planned. It's one thing to follow a criminal enterprise where it leads, another to speculate that someone half a country away may someday think about doing something criminal and therefore should be infiltrated by an agency that has no right to be operating in that area in the first place.
If you want to get all indignant about something how about you start making citizen's arrests the next time crazy wackos in the middle of a peaceful crowd start throwing stones.
That's pretty funny, considering it's been shown by countless official documents that pretty much everyone instigating riots and throwing stones during the period I mentioned above was a police officer or FBI agent whose job was to start violence as a way to discredit the protesters.
Welcome to capitalism. Every corporation does that. That's why you don't see a "The Sharper Image" in the middle of Compton. You sell your product in markets that are going to buy it.
Capitalism also requires open competition and equal information between buyer and seller so that an informed choice can be made. The article is about broadband providers trying to avoid having to provide information to customers. Much like the cellular companies several years ago, where it took a law to force actual coverage maps to be made available, rather than marketing-speak of coverage that may have no bearing on reality.
If they only want to service rich areas, that's fine, just say so. Step aside while another company comes in and takes the lower-margin, higher-volume poorer areas of the market. THAT is capitalism. You can't have it both ways.
That's what the Post blog (the other place that misrepresented the story too much initially to risk backing down) says, but not what Apple actually said at the time. If you read the statement by Apple, they refute that Maynor has provided them with any evidence of a flaw in their network drivers, which he stated he had but they didn't bother to fix it. They never claimed there were no flaws at all, that would be a ridiculous statement for ANY company to make about anything, they just said that they had no idea what flaw Maynor was talking about.
That's why this is such a ridiculous drama -- all Maynor or anyone else has to do to show Apple is a bunch of liars is provide the documentation trail they sent to Apple that they supposedly ignored. A year later, they still haven't provided even that, much less any evidence of the flaw itself.
This is not "news" by any stretch of the imagination. Ou is only now "at liberty" to discuss the matter? I remember quite clearly while the whole wireless driver brouhaha was happening that he and the researchers were claiming Apple was running a "smear campaign" against them -- a campaign that everyone else in the security community and press was somehow unaware of, given how massive Ou claims it to have been.
Apple never claimed there were no flaws in their drivers, I don't know how many more times this can possibly be stated to Ou, if it is necessary to use shorter words with fewer syllables or what. Apple's only statement on the whole matter was that Maynor never provided any specific information to Apple as to what this specific security hole was supposed to be. He jumped up and down and waved his arms and told Apple they needed to fix it real soon, but neither he nor Ou nor anyone else has provided any kind of documentation indicating he gave any actual, useful information to Apple about this security vulnerability. He just made vague pronouncements about wireless security and then expected Apple to read his mind, as far as all the available evidence can prove.
Yes, Apple released patches for network drivers after this whole announcement was made -- they released patches for network drivers before then, too!
Ou continues to be either grossly deceived, completely inept at actually investigating and reporting, or so caught up in his ego that he can't recognize he's been played like a piano.
This is not a case of Apple hiding their heads in the sand, running a smear campaign, or fanbois refusing to accept that something could be less than perfect.
Provide some actual evidence and people will listen to your fearmongering, but it's been a year already since this "huge vulnerability" was disclosed and the most we've seen is a computer crash!
Right, hardware costs more. So why spend a ton of money on a bunch of new Macs (FTFA: $1.4 million switch) to do the same thing as the replaced Windows PCs?
The replacement is happening over 3 years. I assume the college has plans in place to replace the computers every number of years regardless of who they are buying them from, so all they are doing is changing vendors on their normal upgrade cycle.
OS X will not teach you how to use UNIX, because its "UNIXness" is an incidental feature. OS X might be a UNIX, but the typical user doesn't use it like one.
I think you're missing a subtle distinction here -- OS X will not FORCE you to HAVE to learn about Unix in order to get anything accomplished, but it is great for teaching people about Unix (similar to Ubuntu when it works). Being able to use you computer for whatever you want whenever you want -- whether it's learning about Unix or just checking your email, is one of the main features of the system.
I've heard this a few times....but I'm a bit confused as to what OSes these people refer to? Windows? XP never screams at me.
You're just used to it.
Windows is constantly telling you when things succeed -- like it wants to be congratulated on doing what it's supposed to do. "New hardware detected! You've attached a camera! I found a driver! Do you want me to open the pictures or copy them or sing a song? The camera is now connected and working!" There are balloon tips popping up in the taskbar and notification area periodically, letting you know that whatever you're doing is not important, because Windows just found a new wireless network! Hey, Windows just updated your time thanks to daylight Savings! Thought you should know! hey, you have unused icons on your desktop!! Do you want me to help you clean them up? Icons are hard! Stop what you're doing and pay attention to me!
The assumption in the Windows OS interface is that things are going to fail -- that at any moment the computer could simply explode and kill everyone in the room, and if things go well it should get a pizza party like the winner of the Special Olympics.
On the Mac, it is assumed things will succeed. If you plug in a new piece of hardware, it just shows up ready to use.
Then why does everyone say Macs are better for video/graphics? Every graphics designer I know uses a Mac.
They've continued to be ahead in typography and color support for many, many years. I'm not sure if Vista finally supports independent color calibration of more than one monitor. PDF support is built into the OS in a very functional way, so sending stuff out for proofs or to the press is as easy as printing to your desktop printer, without any configuration or hassle or worry that something will look different on the other end.
Applescript. What Office macros/VBA scripts are to corporate Windows installations and perl scripts are to the ISP industry, Applescript is to the publishing industry.
True drag and drop. It sounds crazy, but when you use a Mac and can actually drag and drop things from place to place, that accounts for much of the "intuitiveness". Drag a photo into a document. Drag it from the document into a photo editor. Drag it to the terminal to complete a command line. Stuff "just works" the way it was promised decades ago.
So they're going to be buying a bunch of Macs to replace their PCs, in order to save money (the PCs presumably still work). Kind of like fucking for viginity.
Presumably this is being done over three years precisely so that they replace the PCs at the same time they normally would have replaced them with new PCs. If they just wanted to throw everything out and start fresh, they would have ordered a truck full of Mac Minis and replaced every class system over the summer and every staff system over winter break.
Over three years, in which time period the current macs would be outdated and require hardware upgrades in order to use the mac OS that will be in circulation by then?
Unlike Windows, Mac OS X gets FASTER with every version.
Maybe I'm just not up to speed on my current pricing, but I can't see this cutting costs.
Hardware still costs more than OS licenses, especially in bulk where software gets obscenely cheap. A university is paying $15-50 per desk for the OS, so cutting back on total amount of hardware needed (even if it is more expensive per unit) can pay for an awful lot of software. Indeed, this is probably a net win for Microsoft (at least in the short term), as the school will pay for Windows licenses on EVERY system instead of only half of a larger number of systems -- it's only a loss for Dell or whatever hardware vendor lost the site. The school already undoubtedly has a site license with MS, so it's not like they're having to go out and buy all new software that came "free" with their Dell systems previously.
"Easy cases make bad law." It's too easy, as in your examples, to allow emotional desire for one outcome to overwhelm all other considerations.
What you are in effect arguing is that unequal application of laws is fully justified and should be ignored. While selective prosecution is, in fact, one of the places where human judgment is supposed to protect against unforeseen consequences of the law, if a law is only used against a certain class of people, then you no longer have a nation of laws, only laws used as a tool for abuse of the disfavored.
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I have an old Sony picturebook with Win98 on it for the same reason -- it's about as close to instant-on as a Palm OS device, which is great for a laptop. Coming back from standby on some laptops takes longer than booting from a cold start on my win98, and hibernate isn't even close.
Sounds like you get plenty emotional, too.
Yes, the hardware is better. Hardware is more than ICs and drive mechanics (even there, you can certainly say that an ASUS Mobo is better than a generic Dell Mobo, even though they are the "same" hardware -- quality in manufacturing and component selection counts). Open up any Mac tower system made in the last decade and it's a work of industrial design beauty -- a trained monkey could swap out processors, hard drives, memory in seconds, all without cutting your hand or unplugging seven cables. IBM thinkpads are the only other laptops that were the equal of Apple laptops in terms of industrial design, and Lenovo doesn't seem to be spending the same resources on design.
I don't think anyone has ever said using Intel processors was "innovative". It really is possible for the G3/G4/G5 to be a better processor design than the PII/PIII/PIV, while also being inferior in the to the modern Intel/AMD designs. The world is not static, what was great in 1998 is not necessarily great in 2008. AMD processors and chipsets were better than Intel's for many years. Now they aren't. That doesn't mean everyone who built a Athlon64 system in 2003 was wrong.
Well, gee -- they're the growing company filled with technical people. Maybe they actually know what they're doing and you're the one who is missing something.
Evolution, like all scientific theories, makes statements that can be used as predictors for future discoveries, even though the process in question happened in the past.
If evolution says that some specific sequence of events is impossible, then finding any evidence that those events occurred would instantly disprove the theory. There are numerous things that could be discovered at any moment that would call into question the most fundamental aspects of evolution, yet in nearly two centuries no evidence of the sort has been found.
Conversely, evolution says that many things pretty much must have happened a certain way to get from point A to point B, and that is prediction. It has in fact happened that scientists have had fossil A and fossil C, but no luck in finding the presumed to exist fossil B. By using the principles of evolution they've determined where the most likely place to find fossil B was -- and found it!
It should also be noted that evolution predicted (in fact REQUIRED) the existence of DNA (or something similar) a century before it was actually found -- indeed, when evolution was first discussed the very lack of something like DNA was one of the biggest criticisms against it. The notion that ALL life on Earth including plants and animals shared some fundamental building block that was completely unknown, eons old yet randomly changeable for no discernible reason, was considered absurd by many. Watson and Crick did more to confirm the accuracy of evolution than almost any other group in the 20th century.
But then again, how much source code do we really need for our media access controllers?
it is admittedly disproportionate representation, since the true believers are still checking the Bible to figure out which of the Internets to sign up for.
I use Smultron exclusively -- every few months I check out Textmate again since everyone loves it so much, but it seems like a perfect example of a program that is made by programmers for programmers. For someone just looking for a text editor to do standard HTML/PHP/JS coding with syntax coloring, templates/snippets and good hidden file support Smultron works wonderfully out of the box. It would be nice to have code folding, but not if it means having 30,000 features for C++ programmers getting in my way.
I preemptively surrender to all the Textmate fans who will respond -- I know there's something about it everyone else loves, it just seems as awkward and geeky as emacs (though better looking) to me!
Yeah, you pretty much lost me there. I don't know anyone who has ever interacted with the police who hasn't been sorely disappointed by their complete lack of interest in pursuing most crime. You can bring a property crime to their doorstep, bring them evidence, tell them exactly who the perpetrator is and they will fill out a form and never even bother to interview the person who committed the crime because they don't have the resources and it isn't a high enough priority.
I've known several people who have been assaulted where numerous witnesses saw it, the person who did it was known to the victim (and too stupid to even deny it if a cop asked), videotape was available and the police never did anything more than fill out the form in their station -- forget going to all the effort of actually getting the security tape and driving all the way to the criminal's house, whose name and address were provided at the time of complaint!
No doubt you remember the slashdot story from last year where the guy in NYC had his $600 smartphone stolen and went to the police and they did nothing but basically try to intimidate him and his friends into shutting up about it until he got too much press coverage. Of course the phone company knew exactly where the phone was down to a few meters, could easily tell any investigator, and the victim provided photographs and text messages sent from it in which the people with the phone identified themselves.
We're not talking about Sherlock Holmes whodunnits here, where you need to call in an FBI profiler and a forensics team to swab for DNA samples. Every time I've known of a property crime, the cops have basically told the victim "there's no chance anyone will investigate this since your insurance will pay for it".
Of course they can. The police are not required to investigate 100% of crimes reported, much less those committed. We'd have to deputize every person in the county and they'd still be backlogged if that were the case. If the County Attorney has never heard of police or prosecutorial discretion, he must be a very busy man trying to fully prosecute every single misdemeanor that comes across his desk. Discretion is one way that every human being in the legal system is supposed to step in and keep the system from generating ridiculous results, so long as it isn't abused in a discriminatory way.
No, police officers outside their jurisdictions but still acting in their official capacities are NOT "just regular people". They are still acting as agents of the government, they just don't have arrest powers in another state (actually they might depending on the situation, there is a great deal of vagueness since usually it's easier and more polite to have the local cops handle the arrest).
Residents of California have rights. Agents of the NYPD, who were there on official NYPD business, being paid by the NYPD, in activities directed by the NYPD, created and maintained records for the NYPD based on the mere conjecture that criminal charges might be filed (someday for some reason) by the NYPD, in complete violation of the California Constitution. They can't pretend they were just acting as random citizens while drawing a government paycheck for the very activities in question.
Anyone acting as a government agent is required to observe the legal rights of citizens. That's why cops can't just call their friend Bob and have him conduct an illegal search rather than going to the trouble of getting a warrant. Just because Bob can't arrest anyone or hand out tickets doesn't mean he isn't acting as a government agent in the search.
You're right, of course that California can't tell cops what to do outside California. But the minute those NYPD officers came into California on government business, you better bet they have to respect the rights of citizens the same as any other government agent in California.
They seem to understand quite clearly that crimes are not all equal, that the police force is not infinite in size, and that they, as the taxpayers and voters, should be the ones to determine which crimes are top priority.
The implication of your original statement was that somehow the majority of voters were simply a bunch of criminals trying to justify their own transgressions. Obviously the majority of non-criminals people who live there think that property and violent crimes are not being addressed promptly enough and that issue will be improved by reallocating resources from (some) drug enforcement activities.
Your suggestion that they should just change the law is interesting -- whenever localities have, in fact, changed the local law, the federal government then steps in and tells them that they aren't *allowed* to, which is precisely why the citizens in this area chose this approach -- it has the effect of the locality effectively boycotting enforcement of laws they see as wasteful or unjust, while circumventing the supremacy issues that have plagued previous, more straightforward attempts.
That's interesting, you should let the Supreme Court know ASAP. Even back in the 50s they recognized that gathering information could itself have a chilling effect on free speech, hence their overturning the requirement that the NAACP hand membership lists to the government. There is actually a SC-recognized right to anonymity, to a certain degree, when it comes to political protest.
Of course, in the state of California, this isn't even a question, the right to privacy is explicit in the constitution and information gathering on political groups by law enforcement without reason to believe they are engaged in illegal activity is, in fact, prohibited. Somehow I doubt the NYPD officers were required to get a degree in California criminal justice before they bought their plane tickets.
Fishing expeditions against people you dislike is not only a lousy use of police resources, they are in fact quite contrary to both policy and law in many parts of the country (including NYC, which is part of why this case is so interesting -- the NYPD seems to be blatantly violating one of the most famous court-imposed intelligence-gathering restrictions in the entire United States -- imposed due entirely to the NYPD's vast PRIOR abuse of such operations to violate the civil rights of activists!).
Somehow I find it unlikely that the NYPD is up to date on current law in every jurisdiction where these activities took place. The likelihood of them having violated the legal rights of citizens increased with every new jurisdiction they entered for this conduct.
It should be noted, for example, that California's Constitution has an explicit right to Privacy, and the state AG has directed local law enforcement that "it is a mistake of constitutional dimension to gather information for a criminal intelligence file where there is no reasonable suspicion of criminal activity". In other words, what these officers did is blatantly unconstitutional in California, and only questionably unconstitutional in other jurisdictions.
It's okay, I support the right of you to be a fool willing to throw out the rights of anyone other than yourself, as long as they disagree with your politics. Continue to tell yourself that 90% of the world's population and 75% of the American population is wrong about current policy and that you, in your infinite wisdom, are the only one who understand how true peace and order may be brought to the world.
Thank you! If only you'd tell law enforcement agencies that, perhaps more peaceful protests could take place and we could all forget that the phrase "agent provocateur" ever existed!
Um, yes there is, if he's using it to gather intelligence on political activists for later persecution based on nothing more than political activities which are explicitly protected by the first amendment of the Constitution. You should acquaint yourself with the 20th century abuses of such "innocent" behavior (particularly 1960-1975) before making such silly comments.
Of course, this is only made worse by the fact that the officers were working well outside their jurisdictions when no actual crimes had been committed or were planned. It's one thing to follow a criminal enterprise where it leads, another to speculate that someone half a country away may someday think about doing something criminal and therefore should be infiltrated by an agency that has no right to be operating in that area in the first place.
That's pretty funny, considering it's been shown by countless official documents that pretty much everyone instigating riots and throwing stones during the period I mentioned above was a police officer or FBI agent whose job was to start violence as a way to discredit the protesters.
And if the majority of the non-criminal population agrees with them, that makes it a fact.
Capitalism also requires open competition and equal information between buyer and seller so that an informed choice can be made. The article is about broadband providers trying to avoid having to provide information to customers. Much like the cellular companies several years ago, where it took a law to force actual coverage maps to be made available, rather than marketing-speak of coverage that may have no bearing on reality.
If they only want to service rich areas, that's fine, just say so. Step aside while another company comes in and takes the lower-margin, higher-volume poorer areas of the market. THAT is capitalism. You can't have it both ways.
That's what the Post blog (the other place that misrepresented the story too much initially to risk backing down) says, but not what Apple actually said at the time. If you read the statement by Apple, they refute that Maynor has provided them with any evidence of a flaw in their network drivers, which he stated he had but they didn't bother to fix it. They never claimed there were no flaws at all, that would be a ridiculous statement for ANY company to make about anything, they just said that they had no idea what flaw Maynor was talking about.
That's why this is such a ridiculous drama -- all Maynor or anyone else has to do to show Apple is a bunch of liars is provide the documentation trail they sent to Apple that they supposedly ignored. A year later, they still haven't provided even that, much less any evidence of the flaw itself.
This is not "news" by any stretch of the imagination. Ou is only now "at liberty" to discuss the matter? I remember quite clearly while the whole wireless driver brouhaha was happening that he and the researchers were claiming Apple was running a "smear campaign" against them -- a campaign that everyone else in the security community and press was somehow unaware of, given how massive Ou claims it to have been.
Apple never claimed there were no flaws in their drivers, I don't know how many more times this can possibly be stated to Ou, if it is necessary to use shorter words with fewer syllables or what. Apple's only statement on the whole matter was that Maynor never provided any specific information to Apple as to what this specific security hole was supposed to be. He jumped up and down and waved his arms and told Apple they needed to fix it real soon, but neither he nor Ou nor anyone else has provided any kind of documentation indicating he gave any actual, useful information to Apple about this security vulnerability. He just made vague pronouncements about wireless security and then expected Apple to read his mind, as far as all the available evidence can prove.
Yes, Apple released patches for network drivers after this whole announcement was made -- they released patches for network drivers before then, too!
Ou continues to be either grossly deceived, completely inept at actually investigating and reporting, or so caught up in his ego that he can't recognize he's been played like a piano.
This is not a case of Apple hiding their heads in the sand, running a smear campaign, or fanbois refusing to accept that something could be less than perfect.
Provide some actual evidence and people will listen to your fearmongering, but it's been a year already since this "huge vulnerability" was disclosed and the most we've seen is a computer crash!
The replacement is happening over 3 years. I assume the college has plans in place to replace the computers every number of years regardless of who they are buying them from, so all they are doing is changing vendors on their normal upgrade cycle.
I think you're missing a subtle distinction here -- OS X will not FORCE you to HAVE to learn about Unix in order to get anything accomplished, but it is great for teaching people about Unix (similar to Ubuntu when it works). Being able to use you computer for whatever you want whenever you want -- whether it's learning about Unix or just checking your email, is one of the main features of the system.
You're just used to it.
Windows is constantly telling you when things succeed -- like it wants to be congratulated on doing what it's supposed to do. "New hardware detected! You've attached a camera! I found a driver! Do you want me to open the pictures or copy them or sing a song? The camera is now connected and working!" There are balloon tips popping up in the taskbar and notification area periodically, letting you know that whatever you're doing is not important, because Windows just found a new wireless network! Hey, Windows just updated your time thanks to daylight Savings! Thought you should know! hey, you have unused icons on your desktop!! Do you want me to help you clean them up? Icons are hard! Stop what you're doing and pay attention to me!
The assumption in the Windows OS interface is that things are going to fail -- that at any moment the computer could simply explode and kill everyone in the room, and if things go well it should get a pizza party like the winner of the Special Olympics.
On the Mac, it is assumed things will succeed. If you plug in a new piece of hardware, it just shows up ready to use.
They've continued to be ahead in typography and color support for many, many years. I'm not sure if Vista finally supports independent color calibration of more than one monitor. PDF support is built into the OS in a very functional way, so sending stuff out for proofs or to the press is as easy as printing to your desktop printer, without any configuration or hassle or worry that something will look different on the other end.
Applescript. What Office macros/VBA scripts are to corporate Windows installations and perl scripts are to the ISP industry, Applescript is to the publishing industry.
True drag and drop. It sounds crazy, but when you use a Mac and can actually drag and drop things from place to place, that accounts for much of the "intuitiveness". Drag a photo into a document. Drag it from the document into a photo editor. Drag it to the terminal to complete a command line. Stuff "just works" the way it was promised decades ago.
Presumably this is being done over three years precisely so that they replace the PCs at the same time they normally would have replaced them with new PCs. If they just wanted to throw everything out and start fresh, they would have ordered a truck full of Mac Minis and replaced every class system over the summer and every staff system over winter break.
Unlike Windows, Mac OS X gets FASTER with every version.
Hardware still costs more than OS licenses, especially in bulk where software gets obscenely cheap. A university is paying $15-50 per desk for the OS, so cutting back on total amount of hardware needed (even if it is more expensive per unit) can pay for an awful lot of software. Indeed, this is probably a net win for Microsoft (at least in the short term), as the school will pay for Windows licenses on EVERY system instead of only half of a larger number of systems -- it's only a loss for Dell or whatever hardware vendor lost the site. The school already undoubtedly has a site license with MS, so it's not like they're having to go out and buy all new software that came "free" with their Dell systems previously.
"Easy cases make bad law." It's too easy, as in your examples, to allow emotional desire for one outcome to overwhelm all other considerations.
What you are in effect arguing is that unequal application of laws is fully justified and should be ignored. While selective prosecution is, in fact, one of the places where human judgment is supposed to protect against unforeseen consequences of the law, if a law is only used against a certain class of people, then you no longer have a nation of laws, only laws used as a tool for abuse of the disfavored.