99% of homeopathy is simply people using random herbs that are ineffective, or are far less effective than real medication, is more expensive, and is less convenient to take (I know, I didn''t think anyone would rip people off worse than Big Pharma, but...)
It is also far more likely that people will use dangerous herbs whose effects could make someone's condition worse. Besides the scientific and economic evidence against it, there is psychological evidence - it gives people false hope.
This is flawed reasoning at the core. Apple isn't just selling you a product, it's selling you a product, then telling you how to use it. It crushes creativity and inventiveness (something Mac users are supposed to have) and results in an artificially constrained market.
Here's a parallel - imagine if you bought a Sony DVD player, and it only allowed you to watch movies that Sony approved of, and blocked its rivals' movies from playing on it. While you can just buy other DVD players, it ignores the fact that to do something like this is fundamentally wrong, and we should stop it before other companies follow Apple's example.
We could go into all sorts of arguments about whether porn is good for teenagers or not. I don't want to do that, because it's a waste of our time.
Let me say instead - this is depriving ALL users because of a single demographic. People need the freedom to choose, and to do what they want. So what if sex games become popular? That's the way things work. A company can't enforce morality on its customers.
Also, here's another angle: a lot of people above have talked about Apple being conformist (either you fit their image or you have to leave). I think that it's borderline cult-like. Think about it, this is a group of people who suck vulnerable people in their group, remove their ability to choose alternatives and more or less force the rest of their products on them. When someone tries to do something inventive with the products that doesn't fit their narrow idea of what is acceptable, they throw them out. It also generates a group of fanatics (Mac fundamentalists?) who will support anything the cult leadership will do, no matter what.
The result? Like in a cult, the members are exploited endlessly for their time, money, and support, while the leadership slowly attempts to eradicate its rivals and brainwash its members even further.
Better than a "Windows" analogy - just because a computer has ports and they are open does not mean that by sending a few trojans its way and looking at some porn on another guy's computer means that you aren't totally exploiting user stupidity.
The summary is actually misleading. They act like the newspaper bruteforced it - in reality, someone else found it first and just gave them the link. The "3,727 requests from different IPs" weren't some kind of botnet, they were just 3,727 people all accessing the blueprints that some guy found. That doesn't say that the newspaper was doing anything nefarious - just that the plans were absurdly, childishly easy to find.
Gladly. The problem with most formats is that they can only be read by proprietary readers, and are thus locked in. The most "free" format is obviously plaintext, then html. Some people use rtf (windows-specific, and less support on other platforms), lit (proprietary) and the various Sony, Amazon, etc formats like AZW.
ePub is XHTML for the page layout and CSS for formatting. It also has various other files containing XML metadata, and is put in a zip archive. The metadata is used to identify copyright information, author, contributor, year of release, and other important information. This means that library management tools like Calibre are able to easily organize your books, so you can find all the books written in 1996, or all books written by Asimov, or all science fiction, or... the possibilities are endless. Basically, it's a way of packaging well-formatted ebook pages with chaptering and tables of contents, plus metadata.
If you're interested, take a look at the ePub spec, it outlines all the formatting options. By searching around you can find a few quickstart guides to formatting and packaging ePub.
http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/ops2.0/download/
Now we have Amazon making a deal. They have far fewer reasons on the surface, but I imagine we'll find out why at some point, and it probably has something to do with a much stronger, non-Linux-related, perhaps non-software patent that Microsoft holds and which they violate.
Or they wish to jointly own and patent every possible method, and jointly charge license fees to everyone for waking up in the morning (since they've patented that method).
Pirates seem to love the Lit format, I have no idea why. Out of all the ebooks I've seen, most are in either lit, pdf, or html. I personally convert 90% of the stuff I get to epub, but most people seem almost idiotically short-sighted - crying about how epub can be DRM'd (password-protected container, I guess), and ignoring the fact that lit is a proprietary format that very little works with properly. Anyone with a brain knows that ePub is the only proper format. My theory is that there's very few people suitable for it - you need almost a web designer to handle the markup properly, but most web designers are lazy hacks and idiots who still use HTML 4.01 transitional, and ePub calls for XHTML 1.1 Strict.
You can only educate people who want to be educated. The problem is that most people don't consider this a concern (i.e.: "It could never happen to me!") until it does, sort of like with identity theft. They will only educate themselves after the fact.
Basically, the baby won't know that the fire hurts until it tries to play with it.
Actually, he's Carlos Ray Norris and was born in 1940. The actor has the same name as most of his characters. Chuck Norris plays, well, Chuck Norris. Therefore they could even get the double whammy (or roundhouse kick?) of an infringement AND a libel lawsuit.
I've noticed a great deal of apathy with crypto. Most people agree that it's a good idea, and you'll see people that will keep a hidden, encrypted partition on their drive to keep sensitive files, and they will use SSL whenever possible... but most of them just won't bother with OpenPGP for mail, or stuff like libotr (Off The Record) for instant messaging clients. And, perhaps the worst, most won't bother with using encryption for downloading because of the slowdowns.
I think that crypto is just one of those things where the benefit (except for a select few) never came close to outweighing the gains. Nowadays, though, it's looking more and more attractive every day.
You know, mod me offtopic, but all of this discussion reminds me (in a hilarious aneurysm sort of way) of that scene in New Hope...
Governor Tarkin: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
I hate to be the person to Godwin this, but it is reminiscent of the regret of German intellectuals. They were intelligent, educated people who could have swayed the German public early in Hitler's rise but were too apathetic to do so, convinced that they would be left alone as long as they toed the line.
Which is ultimately the perfected method for slowly eroding liberties - to at first use it on "criminals" (catching more people who break existing laws), then creating new laws to support it, then revising it to suit the new laws... continue ad nauseum until you end up with a legal system in shambles that has been filled to over-capacity and can punish anyone just for living their daily life, if it so chooses. This is by far the most sneaky way of governments dealing with political dissidents - either find them committing a crime, frame them for a crime, or turn what they do into a crime to make it easier to lock them away. Then they have a pretext, an excuse to get rid of them without it being too obvious.
Yes. Buying something just to kill it is a very Microsoft kind of thing to do. Theoretically it makes good business sense, but considering all of the losing prospects MS has bought over the years, it's really just a giant money drain, since if it was popular at all, someone will come along and do the same thing. I'm guessing that (I don't know the specifics) if Android doesn't have something like this already, the developer will show up six months from now with an Android port.
... for finally being a man (figuratively) and actually open-sourcing something, rather than trying to squeeze blood from a stone (or money from a browser). Admittedly, this is only a peripheral part, but hopefully this will start a gradual transition.
Part of the point of representation rather than direct democracy is that, in a direct democracy, the majority rules every time with no regard for the minority. This kills diversity and multiculturalism, because then the minorities either leave or are incredibly downtrodden.
That's faulty logic. It's not the developer's fault if the OS changes completely, because it was external circumstances which are beyond their control. It is their fault when it's something they've done deliberately. We haven't seen this behaviour from Ubisoft, but we've seen something similar from EA - for instance, shutting down the multiplayer servers for a game after only a year (NHL '08 in favour of forcing people to buy NHL '09, I think.)
Slashdot Mirror
99% of homeopathy is simply people using random herbs that are ineffective, or are far less effective than real medication, is more expensive, and is less convenient to take (I know, I didn''t think anyone would rip people off worse than Big Pharma, but...)
It is also far more likely that people will use dangerous herbs whose effects could make someone's condition worse. Besides the scientific and economic evidence against it, there is psychological evidence - it gives people false hope.
This is flawed reasoning at the core. Apple isn't just selling you a product, it's selling you a product, then telling you how to use it. It crushes creativity and inventiveness (something Mac users are supposed to have) and results in an artificially constrained market.
Here's a parallel - imagine if you bought a Sony DVD player, and it only allowed you to watch movies that Sony approved of, and blocked its rivals' movies from playing on it. While you can just buy other DVD players, it ignores the fact that to do something like this is fundamentally wrong, and we should stop it before other companies follow Apple's example.
We could go into all sorts of arguments about whether porn is good for teenagers or not. I don't want to do that, because it's a waste of our time.
Let me say instead - this is depriving ALL users because of a single demographic. People need the freedom to choose, and to do what they want. So what if sex games become popular? That's the way things work. A company can't enforce morality on its customers.
Also, here's another angle: a lot of people above have talked about Apple being conformist (either you fit their image or you have to leave). I think that it's borderline cult-like. Think about it, this is a group of people who suck vulnerable people in their group, remove their ability to choose alternatives and more or less force the rest of their products on them. When someone tries to do something inventive with the products that doesn't fit their narrow idea of what is acceptable, they throw them out. It also generates a group of fanatics (Mac fundamentalists?) who will support anything the cult leadership will do, no matter what.
The result? Like in a cult, the members are exploited endlessly for their time, money, and support, while the leadership slowly attempts to eradicate its rivals and brainwash its members even further.
Better than a "Windows" analogy - just because a computer has ports and they are open does not mean that by sending a few trojans its way and looking at some porn on another guy's computer means that you aren't totally exploiting user stupidity.
They didn't - not every request was from the Herald, and I'm guessing only half a dozen were.
The summary is actually misleading. They act like the newspaper bruteforced it - in reality, someone else found it first and just gave them the link. The "3,727 requests from different IPs" weren't some kind of botnet, they were just 3,727 people all accessing the blueprints that some guy found. That doesn't say that the newspaper was doing anything nefarious - just that the plans were absurdly, childishly easy to find.
Gladly. The problem with most formats is that they can only be read by proprietary readers, and are thus locked in. The most "free" format is obviously plaintext, then html. Some people use rtf (windows-specific, and less support on other platforms), lit (proprietary) and the various Sony, Amazon, etc formats like AZW.
ePub is XHTML for the page layout and CSS for formatting. It also has various other files containing XML metadata, and is put in a zip archive. The metadata is used to identify copyright information, author, contributor, year of release, and other important information. This means that library management tools like Calibre are able to easily organize your books, so you can find all the books written in 1996, or all books written by Asimov, or all science fiction, or... the possibilities are endless. Basically, it's a way of packaging well-formatted ebook pages with chaptering and tables of contents, plus metadata.
If you're interested, take a look at the ePub spec, it outlines all the formatting options. By searching around you can find a few quickstart guides to formatting and packaging ePub.
http://www.idpf.org/2007/ops/ops2.0/download/
Now we have Amazon making a deal. They have far fewer reasons on the surface, but I imagine we'll find out why at some point, and it probably has something to do with a much stronger, non-Linux-related, perhaps non-software patent that Microsoft holds and which they violate.
Or they wish to jointly own and patent every possible method, and jointly charge license fees to everyone for waking up in the morning (since they've patented that method).
Pirates seem to love the Lit format, I have no idea why. Out of all the ebooks I've seen, most are in either lit, pdf, or html. I personally convert 90% of the stuff I get to epub, but most people seem almost idiotically short-sighted - crying about how epub can be DRM'd (password-protected container, I guess), and ignoring the fact that lit is a proprietary format that very little works with properly. Anyone with a brain knows that ePub is the only proper format. My theory is that there's very few people suitable for it - you need almost a web designer to handle the markup properly, but most web designers are lazy hacks and idiots who still use HTML 4.01 transitional, and ePub calls for XHTML 1.1 Strict.
No, I think it's just a Microsoft rep talking about things he knows nothing about.
You can only educate people who want to be educated. The problem is that most people don't consider this a concern (i.e.: "It could never happen to me!") until it does, sort of like with identity theft. They will only educate themselves after the fact.
Basically, the baby won't know that the fire hurts until it tries to play with it.
Actually, he's Carlos Ray Norris and was born in 1940. The actor has the same name as most of his characters. Chuck Norris plays, well, Chuck Norris. Therefore they could even get the double whammy (or roundhouse kick?) of an infringement AND a libel lawsuit.
I've noticed a great deal of apathy with crypto. Most people agree that it's a good idea, and you'll see people that will keep a hidden, encrypted partition on their drive to keep sensitive files, and they will use SSL whenever possible... but most of them just won't bother with OpenPGP for mail, or stuff like libotr (Off The Record) for instant messaging clients. And, perhaps the worst, most won't bother with using encryption for downloading because of the slowdowns.
I think that crypto is just one of those things where the benefit (except for a select few) never came close to outweighing the gains. Nowadays, though, it's looking more and more attractive every day.
IANAL, but the UN Declaration of Human Rights, as far as I know, is a moral document and isn't legally binding.
You know, mod me offtopic, but all of this discussion reminds me (in a hilarious aneurysm sort of way) of that scene in New Hope...
Governor Tarkin: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
I hate to be the person to Godwin this, but it is reminiscent of the regret of German intellectuals. They were intelligent, educated people who could have swayed the German public early in Hitler's rise but were too apathetic to do so, convinced that they would be left alone as long as they toed the line.
Which is ultimately the perfected method for slowly eroding liberties - to at first use it on "criminals" (catching more people who break existing laws), then creating new laws to support it, then revising it to suit the new laws... continue ad nauseum until you end up with a legal system in shambles that has been filled to over-capacity and can punish anyone just for living their daily life, if it so chooses. This is by far the most sneaky way of governments dealing with political dissidents - either find them committing a crime, frame them for a crime, or turn what they do into a crime to make it easier to lock them away. Then they have a pretext, an excuse to get rid of them without it being too obvious.
Somehow, I don't think this quote was one of them.
Just remember - Captain Obvious is never a villain. So, no matter how often he shows up, he always helps.
I love how I got modded down for this. Opera fanboys, I suppose.
I don't see your point. Open-source projects can compete, too, you know.
Yes. Buying something just to kill it is a very Microsoft kind of thing to do. Theoretically it makes good business sense, but considering all of the losing prospects MS has bought over the years, it's really just a giant money drain, since if it was popular at all, someone will come along and do the same thing. I'm guessing that (I don't know the specifics) if Android doesn't have something like this already, the developer will show up six months from now with an Android port.
... for finally being a man (figuratively) and actually open-sourcing something, rather than trying to squeeze blood from a stone (or money from a browser). Admittedly, this is only a peripheral part, but hopefully this will start a gradual transition.
Part of the point of representation rather than direct democracy is that, in a direct democracy, the majority rules every time with no regard for the minority. This kills diversity and multiculturalism, because then the minorities either leave or are incredibly downtrodden.
Come on, it's Switzerland. They haven't had any violence in their country for 700 years, it must frighten the poor dears in their government.
I believe "depending on where they lived" is the key to this.
That's faulty logic. It's not the developer's fault if the OS changes completely, because it was external circumstances which are beyond their control. It is their fault when it's something they've done deliberately. We haven't seen this behaviour from Ubisoft, but we've seen something similar from EA - for instance, shutting down the multiplayer servers for a game after only a year (NHL '08 in favour of forcing people to buy NHL '09, I think.)