Steve Jobs was the vey definition of a magnificent bastard. The guy made some poor choices in his life, as have we all (a life without regrets is a very sheltered one indeed.) He obviously had issues, with his naming a computer after his daughter Lisa while at the same time denying her and all. It's worth mentioning though that he and Lisa were eventually reconciled :
"Steve Jobs did eventually claim paternity for his out-of-wedlock daughter and opened his home to her during her teenage years. He sent her to Harvard where she realized a flair for writing and earned her chops at the Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Advocate."
They weren't producing films when they were a part of Lucasfilm. Jobs saw the potential of the technology there (Lucasfilm obviously didn't), attracted the talent (and kept them, a coup in any tech company) and supported the company through some dark years with personal capital. Then he oversaw their focus shift from hardware to software to the widely successful media company they are today.
The guy freely acknowledges he can't run a company nor does he want to, that's why Apple is a story of 2 Steves instead of 1.
"I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it." - Woz
"Steve and I are very different. Mainly, I want to be an engineer and make neat things for my own fun, forever. I told Steve and Mike Markkula that I wouldn't expand Apple into a real company because I had to quit HP (I'd designed all the Apple stuff moonlighting for a year!). I loved HP. But I finally realized that I could do it and not have to run it. From the start, Steve wanted to run a company and learn the ways to. " - Woz
He was a flawed human being trying to make sense of this mess as best he could trying to leave things better than he found them, as are we all. He will be missed.
No, a comedy show isn't my only source of information regarding international news. Maybe you missed the part where I said I'm not an American. The Daily Show is pretty good at what they do though, which is expose and complain about the sort of right wing idiocy the AC brought up so I think it's a valid reference here.
You can certainly email your representative in the federal parlement to voice your concern however they won't be able to do anything directly since they cannot interfere with court decisions (due to the independence of the judiciary.) You could contact your ISP and voice your concern in the hopes that they fight the decision and go the the Court of Cassation or the European Court.
NURPA (Net Users' Rights Protection Association, active in Belgium and Europe to fight against ACTA for example) says it's stupid, useless, and in conflict with the European Court of Justice's decision about what, when and how filtering may be legitimate. (answer : never when it is about Intellectual Property)
Never heard of them and the fact that their website is only in 1 of the 3 official languages of the country makes me suspect these are just a couple of guys in a garage somewhere.
It only comes down to a question of how determined your ISP/government is to block you.
In this case they aren't at all determined. It's just the 2 biggest ISP's (Belgacom & Telenet) who have been ordered to block TPB, not the smaller ones (yet?) and they are just blocking the DNS lookup for TPB on their own servers. It's typically belgian if you ask me : create some bs laws and rules and implicitly encourage people to get around them by making circumvention trivial.
I really gotta wonder what their executives are thinking...
How many customers has Sprint lost because they cannot offer them the iPhone, how many sales to new customers do they continue to lose each day ? Apple sold 20.34 million iPhones in Q3 2011, let's say US sales amount to half that, those are all people who in all probability don't even consider going to Sprint because they chose their (i)phone first and carier second.
Small niggle : those are shipments you're quoting, not sales. But it'll definitely be interesting to see real sales figures after christmas. I am starting to see some non-Apple tablets around my neck of the woods, not many but they're out there.
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it.
Not only are they selling to the masses (if you don't think selling tens to hundreds of millions of devices is mass market you're seriously deluded), but they are turning them into loyal customers. The iPhone has by far the highest customer retention rate around ("UBS: iPhone’s 89% retention rate crushes competition; next closest is HTC at 39%") and they continue to lead in PC customer satisfaction figures ("Apple scored 87 points, ahead of HP with a result of 78, Dell with 77, Acer also with 77 and Compaq with 75. [...] Apple holds the highest score on record for the eighth consecutive year.") They're obviously doing something right.
They are definitely getting smaller margins, but they aren't getting the volume they need to make it worthwhile (lower prices to not necessarily equate to higher volume.) Report from back in April :
"Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry estimates that Motorola Mobility has manufactured between 500,000 and 800,000 Xooms, but has sold only 5 to 15 percent of them. Best case scenario then, according to Chowdry, is that Motorola has sold 120,000 Xooms; worse case scenario, it’s sold just 25,000."
And the Xoom is generally regarded as the best of the lot.
How long will these companies keep trying to get into a market where they aren't making any money ? Slashing prices reeks of desperation especially since components haven't gotten noticeably cheaper and they aren't making the volume to benefit from economies of scale. Like I said the best bet for real competition is probably the new Kindles. Amazon can sell these with an extremely low margin (or even a subsidized price) because unlike all the other tablet hopefuls they can make their money on media sales.
And Amazon's recent product intro and the success of the Touchpad firesale has FINALLY shaken up the market and prices are starting to drop rapidly.
Prices are dropping rapidly for companies who are throwing in the towel and dumping their stock. It's not a sign of a healthy market. The only interesting thing that has happened in the tablet market so far is Amazon going after tablets (and by tablets I mean the iPad) from the low-end through the ebook reader market.
The loser here is Google. They created Android to prevent Apple putting a layer between the user and Google's services and now here's Amazon using their Android fork to do exactly that. Oopsy.
So how is Luke stating that he's a late comer in gospel writing unscientific? How does that conflict with any fact? It only conflicts with the Q doc THEORY. Don't base your facts on theories.
I wasn't talking about that specific quotation but the bible as a whole. What I am saying is that your starting point is to assume the bible is 100% correct. As you stated earlier you wouldn't make the same assumption about the Iliad, nor Plato or even ancient historians like Herodotus. These all have embellishments, misunderstandings and literary additions to them. The bible is not a scientific document, don't base your facts on literature.
But I know the type. You're probably one of those people who can't accept a single verse in Bible as fact because it's in the Bible.
I accept what's in there when borne out by the facts and supported by the evidence. Very little is, but of course the bible isn't meant as an historical record even though contemporary christians insist on using it as such. It's a propaganda piece meant to convert and reinforce the beliefs of the believers (I don't mean this in a derogatory way, just that it's written to convince and exult not prove.) As are the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the Book of Mormon or any other ancient or contemporary work of religious literature.
And don't preach to me about scientific in that derogatory manner unless you're qualified and it's necessary. I have a PhD in organic chemistry from UCSD:)
It seemed necessary. All your arguments so far have been to point to the bible which is to say they have been an appeal to authority, an authority which is suspect on the topic at hand (the historical accuracy of same.)
Also you appear to be misinformed about how modern (not the 15, 16th century stuff, but 17th and onward) translations of the Bible were made. For NT, they are direct translation from the Greek manuscripts. For OT, they're direct translation from the Hebrew manuscirpts although they do consult the Septuagint. Those manuscripts in the original languages are readily available. So when you're studying the Bible you can discern whether a particular translation of a word or a sentence is sound or not. I do that all the time.
Modern translations are undoubtedly closer to the source materials than were the copies of the middle ages. We don't have the source materials though, what we have is a reconstruction based on several later fragmentary versions that tell us what the originals probably were like and that also tell us about the religious attitudes of the persons who made "corrections" to the text at various points in history.
I'll try to respond in full later, but your citation is Ehrman? Really? His book is simply textual criticism! I'm sure you know what that means practically. It just means scholars say "there are different tones in which text is written in this book. So there must be more than one author!" Even within one post on/., I change my tone sometimes. This is far from the Bible being "proven" to be altered.
Read the book first. Analysis of all the different versions of the bible throughout history have shown that there are errors, parts have been worded in translations to put forward a certain theological viewpoint, there have been translation errors, etc. It's not just about "tone."
Yes, I've heard about the Q doc. Just the fact that Luke admits to being a late comer in the gospel writing business alone puts that whole theory in doubt. There is nothing concrete that you've put forth here. Nice try tho
There's the problem right there, you base your argument on the assumption the biblical account is 100% reliable which is an unproven assumption. So you put your unproven assumption up against scientific analysis and say that the analysis can't possibly be correct because it doesn't fit your assumption. I'm sorry but that isn't scientific. If you want to take it on faith alone that's fine, but don't try to dress it up as fact.
Also, Samsung is only targeting Apple at this time and there is no reason to believe that Samsung won't stop with Apple.
What reason is there they will, altruism ? Best-case scenario you have the sword of Damocles hanging over all of their competitors, no way that isn't going to lead to back-room dealing at best and all out patent wars at worst.
Sure Apple took an unprofitable niche market and turned it into the hottest property in tech today by just adding round corners. Do you guys even listen to yourselves ?
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite. Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
This is a dirty war, there are no good guys. Want to end it ? Ban the munition (patents.)
How does science deal with the inevitable flaws in humans? We are not perfect creatures, and science has come to the wrong conclusions many many times in the past, and have been dogmatic about it.
How many PhD's were given based on a Thesis supporting the concept of Piltdown Man? How many of those were revoked upon realization that it was nothing more than a hoax?
People did these things were basing their finale of their eduction, their crowning achievement on FAITH that what came before was true. Those PhD's went on to teach others about the very same Piltdown man, wrote whole works on it, and had others base PhD's upon it. It wasn't fully stricken from the records for nearly 50 years in education.
But it was revealed as a hoax eventually because the scientific method keeps looking for evidence and eventually something will turn up that can put into question old certainties. Science is not about finding Absolute Truth, it's about making the best hypothesis that fits the fact as we understand them at the moment. It's an iterative process that'll get us ever closer to full understanding of something.
I've made this point before, but nobody has ever convinced me that Science cannot be snowed by people wanting to believe in something. Global Warming (used to be cooling) is another fine example of Science Faith. Remember the guy saying he saw Polar Bears drowning for lack of Icepacks? Wrote a paper or two, people wrote PhD Thesis on it, turns out another "hoax" of science based on FAITH and a strong desire for their faith to be actualized.
Belief comes first, then people try to prove those beliefs with science. The good thing about science is that your results can be checked by people who don't hold your beliefs. The history of science is full of high profile rivalries of people supporting opposing theories. Big Bang vs Steady State, Out of Africa vs Out of Asia, Lamarckism vs natural selection, etc. What matters is that these rivalries drive the discovery of new data and the data will eventually prove one over the other, sooner or later a wrong theory will simply be unable to explain the available data and it will be falsified.
People who claim Science is without bias are liars. The only thing Science can do is self correct when the lies are exposed. And that is the most common rebuttal I get to these points. In the meantime all those people who were wrong about frauds and hoaxes continue to teach people how great science is.
Don't get me wrong, the scientific method is great at teaching about this world as it exists, but it is ultimately flawed by people, who are flawed.
People who claim this don't know what they are talking about. Cognitive biases are widely known. What you seem to want is a system where people can't be wrong. I'm sorry but to err is human. People can and will make mistakes through chance, pride or for whatever reason. Science can't help this but it will correct itself given time which is why it's the best system we have.
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Steve Jobs was the vey definition of a magnificent bastard. The guy made some poor choices in his life, as have we all (a life without regrets is a very sheltered one indeed.) He obviously had issues, with his naming a computer after his daughter Lisa while at the same time denying her and all. It's worth mentioning though that he and Lisa were eventually reconciled :
"Steve Jobs did eventually claim paternity for his out-of-wedlock daughter and opened his home to her during her teenage years. He sent her to Harvard where she realized a flair for writing and earned her chops at the Harvard Crimson and The Harvard Advocate."
They weren't producing films when they were a part of Lucasfilm. Jobs saw the potential of the technology there (Lucasfilm obviously didn't), attracted the talent (and kept them, a coup in any tech company) and supported the company through some dark years with personal capital. Then he oversaw their focus shift from hardware to software to the widely successful media company they are today.
You need the grain of sand for the pearl to form around.
The guy freely acknowledges he can't run a company nor does he want to, that's why Apple is a story of 2 Steves instead of 1.
"I designed the computers just to do it and show the world that it could be done and help them happen. Later Steve Jobs suggested starting a company to make money from it. I'd been giving out schematics for free at the Homebrew Computer Club. That's what I believed in. It was hard for me to even start the company when it looked like there might be real money in it." - Woz
"Steve and I are very different. Mainly, I want to be an engineer and make neat things for my own fun, forever. I told Steve and Mike Markkula that I wouldn't expand Apple into a real company because I had to quit HP (I'd designed all the Apple stuff moonlighting for a year!). I loved HP. But I finally realized that I could do it and not have to run it. From the start, Steve wanted to run a company and learn the ways to. " - Woz
He was a flawed human being trying to make sense of this mess as best he could trying to leave things better than he found them, as are we all. He will be missed.
No, a comedy show isn't my only source of information regarding international news. Maybe you missed the part where I said I'm not an American. The Daily Show is pretty good at what they do though, which is expose and complain about the sort of right wing idiocy the AC brought up so I think it's a valid reference here.
You can certainly email your representative in the federal parlement to voice your concern however they won't be able to do anything directly since they cannot interfere with court decisions (due to the independence of the judiciary.) You could contact your ISP and voice your concern in the hopes that they fight the decision and go the the Court of Cassation or the European Court.
NURPA (Net Users' Rights Protection Association, active in Belgium and Europe to fight against ACTA for example) says it's stupid, useless, and in conflict with the European Court of Justice's decision about what, when and how filtering may be legitimate. (answer : never when it is about Intellectual Property)
Never heard of them and the fact that their website is only in 1 of the 3 official languages of the country makes me suspect these are just a couple of guys in a garage somewhere.
It only comes down to a question of how determined your ISP/government is to block you.
In this case they aren't at all determined. It's just the 2 biggest ISP's (Belgacom & Telenet) who have been ordered to block TPB, not the smaller ones (yet?) and they are just blocking the DNS lookup for TPB on their own servers. It's typically belgian if you ask me : create some bs laws and rules and implicitly encourage people to get around them by making circumvention trivial.
When did this happen? I didn't hear about it until now. Link please, if any?
Here you go. I'm not even an American and I've heard of several instances, through the Daily Show mostly.
I really gotta wonder what their executives are thinking...
How many customers has Sprint lost because they cannot offer them the iPhone, how many sales to new customers do they continue to lose each day ? Apple sold 20.34 million iPhones in Q3 2011, let's say US sales amount to half that, those are all people who in all probability don't even consider going to Sprint because they chose their (i)phone first and carier second.
I save 90% on my cell phone bill compared to a smartphone.
You can see why operators want to dump customers like you for internet junky iPhone users then :-) ?
Small niggle : those are shipments you're quoting, not sales. But it'll definitely be interesting to see real sales figures after christmas. I am starting to see some non-Apple tablets around my neck of the woods, not many but they're out there.
You are not being honest with yourself. Apple has well and truly moved out of the fanbois base and now sells to the masses. Non-tech people totally love it.
Not only are they selling to the masses (if you don't think selling tens to hundreds of millions of devices is mass market you're seriously deluded), but they are turning them into loyal customers. The iPhone has by far the highest customer retention rate around ("UBS: iPhone’s 89% retention rate crushes competition; next closest is HTC at 39%") and they continue to lead in PC customer satisfaction figures ("Apple scored 87 points, ahead of HP with a result of 78, Dell with 77, Acer also with 77 and Compaq with 75. [...] Apple holds the highest score on record for the eighth consecutive year.") They're obviously doing something right.
If you want toys for Suri Cruise or Grandma Gump, pay your iTaxes.
I love how an obvious troll like this is modded "insightful". Stay classy Slashdot.
"Nature" is quickly running out of companies that haven't soured on the whole tablet thing. It's looking more like an extinction level event.
They are definitely getting smaller margins, but they aren't getting the volume they need to make it worthwhile (lower prices to not necessarily equate to higher volume.) Report from back in April :
"Global Equities analyst Trip Chowdry estimates that Motorola Mobility has manufactured between 500,000 and 800,000 Xooms, but has sold only 5 to 15 percent of them. Best case scenario then, according to Chowdry, is that Motorola has sold 120,000 Xooms; worse case scenario, it’s sold just 25,000."
And the Xoom is generally regarded as the best of the lot.
How long will these companies keep trying to get into a market where they aren't making any money ? Slashing prices reeks of desperation especially since components haven't gotten noticeably cheaper and they aren't making the volume to benefit from economies of scale. Like I said the best bet for real competition is probably the new Kindles. Amazon can sell these with an extremely low margin (or even a subsidized price) because unlike all the other tablet hopefuls they can make their money on media sales.
And Amazon's recent product intro and the success of the Touchpad firesale has FINALLY shaken up the market and prices are starting to drop rapidly.
Prices are dropping rapidly for companies who are throwing in the towel and dumping their stock. It's not a sign of a healthy market. The only interesting thing that has happened in the tablet market so far is Amazon going after tablets (and by tablets I mean the iPad) from the low-end through the ebook reader market.
It's not always lose-win or lose-lose.
The loser here is Google. They created Android to prevent Apple putting a layer between the user and Google's services and now here's Amazon using their Android fork to do exactly that. Oopsy.
So how is Luke stating that he's a late comer in gospel writing unscientific? How does that conflict with any fact? It only conflicts with the Q doc THEORY. Don't base your facts on theories.
I wasn't talking about that specific quotation but the bible as a whole. What I am saying is that your starting point is to assume the bible is 100% correct. As you stated earlier you wouldn't make the same assumption about the Iliad, nor Plato or even ancient historians like Herodotus. These all have embellishments, misunderstandings and literary additions to them. The bible is not a scientific document, don't base your facts on literature.
But I know the type. You're probably one of those people who can't accept a single verse in Bible as fact because it's in the Bible.
I accept what's in there when borne out by the facts and supported by the evidence. Very little is, but of course the bible isn't meant as an historical record even though contemporary christians insist on using it as such. It's a propaganda piece meant to convert and reinforce the beliefs of the believers (I don't mean this in a derogatory way, just that it's written to convince and exult not prove.) As are the works of L. Ron Hubbard, the Book of Mormon or any other ancient or contemporary work of religious literature.
And don't preach to me about scientific in that derogatory manner unless you're qualified and it's necessary. I have a PhD in organic chemistry from UCSD :)
It seemed necessary. All your arguments so far have been to point to the bible which is to say they have been an appeal to authority, an authority which is suspect on the topic at hand (the historical accuracy of same.)
Also you appear to be misinformed about how modern (not the 15, 16th century stuff, but 17th and onward) translations of the Bible were made. For NT, they are direct translation from the Greek manuscripts. For OT, they're direct translation from the Hebrew manuscirpts although they do consult the Septuagint. Those manuscripts in the original languages are readily available. So when you're studying the Bible you can discern whether a particular translation of a word or a sentence is sound or not. I do that all the time.
Modern translations are undoubtedly closer to the source materials than were the copies of the middle ages. We don't have the source materials though, what we have is a reconstruction based on several later fragmentary versions that tell us what the originals probably were like and that also tell us about the religious attitudes of the persons who made "corrections" to the text at various points in history.
I'll try to respond in full later, but your citation is Ehrman? Really? His book is simply textual criticism! I'm sure you know what that means practically. It just means scholars say "there are different tones in which text is written in this book. So there must be more than one author!" Even within one post on /., I change my tone sometimes. This is far from the Bible being "proven" to be altered.
Read the book first. Analysis of all the different versions of the bible throughout history have shown that there are errors, parts have been worded in translations to put forward a certain theological viewpoint, there have been translation errors, etc. It's not just about "tone."
Yes, I've heard about the Q doc. Just the fact that Luke admits to being a late comer in the gospel writing business alone puts that whole theory in doubt. There is nothing concrete that you've put forth here. Nice try tho
There's the problem right there, you base your argument on the assumption the biblical account is 100% reliable which is an unproven assumption. So you put your unproven assumption up against scientific analysis and say that the analysis can't possibly be correct because it doesn't fit your assumption. I'm sorry but that isn't scientific. If you want to take it on faith alone that's fine, but don't try to dress it up as fact.
Also, Samsung is only targeting Apple at this time and there is no reason to believe that Samsung won't stop with Apple.
What reason is there they will, altruism ? Best-case scenario you have the sword of Damocles hanging over all of their competitors, no way that isn't going to lead to back-room dealing at best and all out patent wars at worst.
Sure Apple took an unprofitable niche market and turned it into the hottest property in tech today by just adding round corners. Do you guys even listen to yourselves ?
My point is: Apple is a hypocrite.
Yes, I know there is no way around RAND patents and that there IS a way around rounded corners, but it's equally absurd.
This is a dirty war, there are no good guys. Want to end it ? Ban the munition (patents.)
How does science deal with the inevitable flaws in humans? We are not perfect creatures, and science has come to the wrong conclusions many many times in the past, and have been dogmatic about it.
How many PhD's were given based on a Thesis supporting the concept of Piltdown Man? How many of those were revoked upon realization that it was nothing more than a hoax?
People did these things were basing their finale of their eduction, their crowning achievement on FAITH that what came before was true. Those PhD's went on to teach others about the very same Piltdown man, wrote whole works on it, and had others base PhD's upon it. It wasn't fully stricken from the records for nearly 50 years in education.
But it was revealed as a hoax eventually because the scientific method keeps looking for evidence and eventually something will turn up that can put into question old certainties. Science is not about finding Absolute Truth, it's about making the best hypothesis that fits the fact as we understand them at the moment. It's an iterative process that'll get us ever closer to full understanding of something.
I've made this point before, but nobody has ever convinced me that Science cannot be snowed by people wanting to believe in something. Global Warming (used to be cooling) is another fine example of Science Faith. Remember the guy saying he saw Polar Bears drowning for lack of Icepacks? Wrote a paper or two, people wrote PhD Thesis on it, turns out another "hoax" of science based on FAITH and a strong desire for their faith to be actualized.
Belief comes first, then people try to prove those beliefs with science. The good thing about science is that your results can be checked by people who don't hold your beliefs. The history of science is full of high profile rivalries of people supporting opposing theories. Big Bang vs Steady State, Out of Africa vs Out of Asia, Lamarckism vs natural selection, etc. What matters is that these rivalries drive the discovery of new data and the data will eventually prove one over the other, sooner or later a wrong theory will simply be unable to explain the available data and it will be falsified.
People who claim Science is without bias are liars. The only thing Science can do is self correct when the lies are exposed. And that is the most common rebuttal I get to these points. In the meantime all those people who were wrong about frauds and hoaxes continue to teach people how great science is.
Don't get me wrong, the scientific method is great at teaching about this world as it exists, but it is ultimately flawed by people, who are flawed.
People who claim this don't know what they are talking about. Cognitive biases are widely known. What you seem to want is a system where people can't be wrong. I'm sorry but to err is human. People can and will make mistakes through chance, pride or for whatever reason. Science can't help this but it will correct itself given time which is why it's the best system we have.