I'm only a couple of decades older than you. I agree with you, but I also realize that I take it as a given that, during the course of my lifespan, there's always been television (not color to start with, but there was TV), that indoor plumbing and lights have always been around, flight is not only possible but commonplace and pretty much always has been, and the moon landing happened before I was born.
A part of me regrets missing the introduction of all of those exciting technologies and innovations, because to me they are all background things that just are. They aren't wondrous, they just are.
No matter where you live in history, there are always improvements that you'll appreciate, but there's always amazing stuff that was there before that you will only see as part of the world as it's always been, and will be even more amazing stuff that will come after you that would probably blow your mind if you ever had the chance to see it (or would be so far beyond your comprehension you couldn't appreciate it).
You don't truly appreciate the amazing parts of an advance unless you've watched those parts happen.
To me, computers (and video games, etc), color/stereo televisions, microwaves, mobile phones, digital wristwatches, and many of the things you no doubt take for granted are marvels. When I was a kid, they largely did not exist. Which is not to say they all of them were completely unavailable, but when I was growing up no one I knew owned any of them and they were brand new.
I both envy my grandparents (now all dead) and my yet-to-be-born grandchildren the wonders of their lifetimes that I will never see they way they do. The wonders of my grandparents are my commonplace items. The wonders of my grandchildren are probably beyond my imagination.
But that's just human nature. We want to see it all. And eventually we learn we'll never succeed. It's both heartening and saddening at the same time.
But it's not "free". I'm paying them, just not in money.
Yahoo! and Google both offer me services in return for my divulging information which is to be used for specific purposes, which are laid out in the user agreement.
If they want to change that agreement, the changes should be opt-in, and if I choose not to opt in it's acceptable to me that they disable or delete my account. It is NOT acceptable to me that inaction on my part will result in divulging information that was previously covered under a privacy policy, unless they actively inform me that the policy is changing, and present me with a choice to either accept the new terms, opt out of them (if they wish to offer that as an option), or delete my account.
I have a Yahoo! account. It's very old. I don't use it for email any more because the account is up to several thousand spams a day, but I do still use the account for other services. I'm not going to see any service change emails they send me. Until and unless they put a box in front of me telling me how they want to further profits from my use of my account, they do not have the right to change the terms of our agreement.
For companies like Google and Yahoo!, who derive almost all of their money from advertising revenue, "increasing revenue" and "advertising opportunities" are exactly the same thing.
Don't forget, with Google and Yahoo!, the people who visit their web pages and use their nifty tools are not their customers. The people who buy advertising space from them are their customers. Yahoo! makes no (or almost no) money from you. They make nearly all their money from advertisers.
The people who visit their web pages and use all the cool stuff are the product being sold. Your eyeballs are worth some serious coin, amigo.
There's a vested interest in both learning as much about you as possible (so they can target ads and get more money per ad impression), getting you to recruit your friends (more product to sell), and keeping you on the site as long as possible (to increase the number of ad impressions). In fact, those are really the only things they ever really want to do.
So assuming a business wants to increase its revenue is a knee-jerk reaction, but only in the context that it's always true with almost no exceptions. Businesses are in business to make money. There's literally no other motivation to the majority of for-profit businesses. They do things that are good for you pretty much only when it benefits them in some way.
Yahoo! wants to do this for one of a few very simple reasons:
1. They are going to collect this information and sell it to advertisers. 2. They are offering you prettier cooler stuff so you'll stay on their site longer and see more ads. 3. They want you to tell your friends how cool all this stuff is so they'll sign up too.
You can't today, and I doubt you ever will be able to.
But... From the summary: " Additionally, they suggest making facts 'proprietary' and allowing news organizations to copyright them."
Let me summarize the summary: "they suggest allowing news organizations to copyright facts"
This conversation is based the GP's premise of "If this does pass", therefore my assumption for the purposes of the conversation was "If a law is passed to allow news organizations to copyright facts."
If this passes (which I doubt it will, but let's just theorize), the media who receive the bailout will simply apply the other half of the law - they'll copyright the facts of the law.
If anyone else attempts to report on the facts of the law, the major media will have plenty of cash coming in to hire lots of sharks with legal beams (lawyers) to monitor other news media sites and swamp them with DMCA takedown notices.
First they'll go for all competing media and drain them dry, then they'll go after blogs, then they'll come after anyone who comments on...
Yeah, and who's going to report it as the bad thing it is?
The major news media? No, they'll just take their bailout and spin the news to all goodness and light and fluffy bunnies and fuzzy puppies.
Other outlets? No, they'll get sued to oblivion because the news media will have copyrighted the facts, so anyone else who tries to report on it will get a DMCA Smackdown.
No matter how professional your humans are to start out, unless you have your entire group as either singles not attracted to each other, or very stable and committed couples (and even that's a risk), there's gonna be some serious tension by the end of several years in a confined space. Maybe even some killing.
The best way to reduce the risk is to eliminate sexual tension, and that means picking a single gender. And orgasmotron wouldn't hurt either.
Of course, this also brings some politically charged but valid questions about homosexuality into the debate as well. Regardless of gender, if any member of the crew is potentially sexually attractive to more than one of the other members of the crew, your mission is at a much-elevated risk of trouble.
Could just as easily have been all women (and I think a separate Mars500 mission comprised solely of women would be a good idea to see how well they fare as compared to an all-male crew).
The distance to Mars, relative to me driving down to the corner store to pick up a 6er of Sam Adams, is mindbogglingly vast. And I live in a rural enough area that it's not a short drive.
Bad humor aside, the distance to Mars (about 55 million km, if you use the closest approach) is still vast compared to a trip to, say, the Moon (the furthest out Humans have been so far, at about 385,000 km).
It's almost 150 times as far to Mars as it is to the Moon. That's sufficiently "vast" that we really need to make sure humans can manage the trip in a confined space without killing each other.
You obviously don't live in New England. Up here, we measure distances in time, not linear measurements. If you ask me how far away something is, I'll give you an answer in minutes or hours.
"How far is it to Boston?" "2 hours"
The distance to Mars is vast enough that I'd probably answer "You can't get there from here."
"Vast" is a matter of perspective. Compared to any distance we've sent humans, Mars is pretty vast.
The distance is sufficiently vast that we need to make sure the driver can handle the folks in the back seat asking "Are we there yet? Now much further is it?" every five minutes. That's why this test is important.
If the people in this box start killing each other, we at least haven't wasted a bunch of billions of dollars to get their corpses to Mars. We can learn what kind of living space we need to work out to maximize their chances of making it there alive and reasonably sane.
My now-practiced answer is, "I'm terribly sorry to have offended you. You see, my mother always taught me to hold the door for a lady, and I apologize for mistaking you for one."
Then it won't matter when the space whelk eats the earth, which, since I saw it on the Weekly World News cover as a child, has to be due any day now.
Until then, though, we can still ask our doctors to be courteous. After all, we all know they are using pictures of varicose veins as treasure maps (also as seen on the Weekly World News cover).
What is this "E and R" of which you type? Or do you mean "ER" (Emergency Room)?
Yes, I agree that doctors can be dickheads. At which point they should receive some form of consequence that does not involve withholding medical information that they have asked for. Start a "Wall Of Shame" at your hospital, or a "I didn't like it when you..." policy that requires that the doctors sit down with the staff they offended at a later date, hear the staff out, and hopefully apologize.
If your doctors are asshats, forcing them to write a word that has no meaning to them onto a form isn't going to magically engage a friendliness faerie and make them into Doctor Care Bear. It's going to make them into the same discourteous asshat they already are, with just another excuse to believe that the people they work with are childish idiots.
Don't force false courtesy on a form and make the patient the one who suffers when the doctors ignore it. It won't do a bit of good, it just adds what the doctors will consider needless bureaucratic nonsense to the form.
"Please" put on a form when it is a requirement of filling out the form is meaningless, and everyone in that office has to know that. It won't actually change the doctor's level of courtesy in the real world.
Given the source of this story, I doubt it's true or complete, but assuming it is...
I like this rule, except that the failure to write "please" should not prevent the actual test from being performed when the doctor orders it to be done.
Maybe fine the doctor $10 every time they fail to say "please" on a form, put the doctor's names up on a wall of shame, or make them buy the next round of flowers for the office.
But anyone in the medical field should know that you do not withhold medical information that is possibly vital to a patient's health because the doc forgot to say "pweddy pweaze wiff sugar on top" on the form. Ever.
I'm not saying courtesy is unimportant, or that doctors have the right to be rude, only that the patient shouldn't suffer because their doctor is a dickhead to the support staff.
Apple could still solve this by differentiating between "approved" and "non-approved" applications, but still offering both for sale.
I think about this in terms of Synaptic as found in most Debian-based Linux distros (my experience with Synaptic is mostly through Linux Mint). I have a magnificently huge library of applications that I may choose from, and there are controls and checkboxes that allow me to set my level of "safe/stable" versus "cutting edge/unstable". By manipulating those sliders and tickyboxes, I can easily say "I want LTS levels of stable" or "I want nightly builds that might not even compile well and could cause my OS to self-destruct".
If I find something that isn't even available in those libraries, I can even download the.DEB file and install it myself, or download and compile the source if I really want to get my geek on.
In other words, I can choose a range of options starting with "walled garden in a comfy straitjacket" and going all the way to "Wild West featuring frequent drunken gunfights", all with a relatively simple set of controls on a single screen.
Apple has a vested interest in keeping true malware out. I get that. I applaud them for their efforts in this direction. Honestly.
But the whole concept of denying benign and formerly profitable apps because they changed a set of unwritten and ambiguous rules seems, well, unfortunate. For Apple.
At the end of the day, their platform, their decision, and it's one of the reasons the only bit of iFruitery I own is an iPod Touch, and that only because I won it in a writing contest a couple of years ago.
It's a nice device, but I've let the credit card associated with my account expire so I can't even install free applications or application updates any more, and I'm getting nervous about giving them a new card number with their recent behavior. One day, I'll make up a $5 limit temporary card and give it to them, I suppose.
But I look at it sometimes - the elegance of its construction and design, the almost magic UI design decisions that went into taking advantage of that teensy little screen. I marvel at how well executed a device it really is. I think of the smart and resourceful people who really poured a lot into this almost magical little gizmo.
Then I think about how much of its potential is wasted because of Apple's various decisions. It's a real shame.
Actually, I should have used "expect" instead of "ask"
"It's unreasonable to expect Apple to do anything they don't want to"
I just read this morning that Apple has also pulled "iFart" from the App Store for the iPad because the application "is of little functional value". So they are pulling applications because they emulate desktops (have too much function), they are pulling applications that have similar functions to what exists on the iP{hone,ad,od}, and they are pulling applications because they serve no useful (in Apple's opinion) function.
I'd be the last one on this planet to defend the utility of a fart noises application. But it's a good example of them ruining a relationship with someone who has sold a shitload of copies of an obviously popular application in the App Store.
With some platforms, the problem is getting your application noticed. Apparently, with Apple, it's all about NOT getting your application noticed.
How could they possibly ever be declared a monopoly in the mobile device application sales market? The iPhone, for all its popularity, is still in the hands of the minority of users.
Frankly, forcing Apple to open up would be bad for the marketplace at large. Apple restricts their own sales by engaging in silly restrictive behavior like this, and encourages people to explore the other available alternatives (Symbian, Blackberry, Android, etc).
Apple opening their marketplace would simply make the iPhone a more attractive device, and probably push them closer to a monopoly position.
If Apple exposes the fallacy of the walled garden by making more people aware of the importance of freedom in their selections of equipment, then they are doing a public service in my book.
I do feel sorry for the iFruited masses for the pain they are about to experience in this learning experience, but my pappy always taught me by letting me learn my lessons the hard way if I didn't listen up when he tried to tell me what I was about to do was stupid.
You buy a locked phone from a carrier that's known for turning shit off, you get a locked phone with shit turned off. You buy a phone from a company who uses a walled garden as a selling point, you end up in a walled garden.
Answer: There are lots of companies that make smart phones that don't have walled gardens. There are plenty of them available as unlocked phones.
Want freedom? Choose a company that believes in it. My wife's Nokia Symbian phone is all that an iPhone should be, and more, and we bought it unlocked so anyone tells us we can't use a feature we can rip their SIM out of it, ship it back to them in itty bitty little pieces, and tell them to go fuck themselves.
Want freedom? Choose freedom.
Just don't do business with a company that has a long history of the reverse of what you want and come boo-hooing when they do what they always do.
It's sad, really. Apple started as the "computer for the masses", and ended up being what they are today. Makes me want to cry, sometimes.
They make some really nice stuff, but it's not worth what it costs. And I'm not talking about money.
But that's my opinion. Fortunately, Apple does not have a monopoly on smartphones. In fact, I'm coming close to believing they don't have a "smart" phone at all. Just the iPhone.
If your app doesn't match up to the level of quality that Apple require[sic], then it's a message
And given that the very things that make your app meet Apple's quality control one day can be disqualification criteria the next day means the answer is simple:
1. Don't write any innovative, interesting, and unique applications, or 2. Write your applications for another platform where the arbitrary rules are less ambiguous or do not exist.
Apple certainly has the right to kick out "any old piece of crap" should they choose, but after the application has enjoyed sales, and as a result of an arbitrary rules change? Well, yes, they still have the right.
The trouble is, people write applications because they want to make a profit, and arbitrary vague rules will lead the best developers to stop putting massive effort into supporting a platform that may not support them. You'll still have plenty of developers who will take the risk, but the ones who put massive amounts of effort into their applications only to have them yanked because the background was just the wrong shade of puce or Steve's chair hit the "REJECT" button instead of the wall that particular moment will eventually learn to go elsewhere.
Other app stores are fledgling and not as well-organized, you say? Agreed. But who do you need to push to other platforms to make the other platforms succeed?
But only one can be replaced with a new unique identifier. The library can make up numbers for cards, they can't make up a fingerprint. A fingerprint is yours for the rest of your life.
I understand that the library is only storing a hash, but unless the library is using a truly unique fingerprint hashing technique, a breach of the computer they are storing those hashes on could mean that validation data about you that cannot be changed could be used for other purposes. Think of "fingerprint hash" as the equivalent to "SSN". It's not something you can change easily, and for that reason it's something that can be used to identify you with a decent level of confidence. That hash could be injected into any computer that uses the same (or a similar) hashing algorithm, and even if the library discovers the breach there's little they can do about it.
That's where biometrics get interesting. They uniquely (or at least "practically uniquely") identify you, but if someone breaches the system holding it, it's hard to prove it invalid.
If the library makes up their own numbers, they aren't holding any valuable data. If they store something that can be uniquely derived from your fingerprint, they should at least be held to PCI compliance, but preferably a lot higher - you can change a credit card number.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been widely studied that isolating groups to male-only does not alleviate sexual tension.
It doesn't alleviate it, but it also means they have no females to rape when the tensions get high - so they go visit Rosie.
So you send all guys (or all gals), some good porn, and lots of tissues. Problem solved.
I'm only a couple of decades older than you. I agree with you, but I also realize that I take it as a given that, during the course of my lifespan, there's always been television (not color to start with, but there was TV), that indoor plumbing and lights have always been around, flight is not only possible but commonplace and pretty much always has been, and the moon landing happened before I was born.
A part of me regrets missing the introduction of all of those exciting technologies and innovations, because to me they are all background things that just are. They aren't wondrous, they just are.
No matter where you live in history, there are always improvements that you'll appreciate, but there's always amazing stuff that was there before that you will only see as part of the world as it's always been, and will be even more amazing stuff that will come after you that would probably blow your mind if you ever had the chance to see it (or would be so far beyond your comprehension you couldn't appreciate it).
You don't truly appreciate the amazing parts of an advance unless you've watched those parts happen.
To me, computers (and video games, etc), color/stereo televisions, microwaves, mobile phones, digital wristwatches, and many of the things you no doubt take for granted are marvels. When I was a kid, they largely did not exist. Which is not to say they all of them were completely unavailable, but when I was growing up no one I knew owned any of them and they were brand new.
I both envy my grandparents (now all dead) and my yet-to-be-born grandchildren the wonders of their lifetimes that I will never see they way they do. The wonders of my grandparents are my commonplace items. The wonders of my grandchildren are probably beyond my imagination.
But that's just human nature. We want to see it all. And eventually we learn we'll never succeed. It's both heartening and saddening at the same time.
But it's not "free". I'm paying them, just not in money.
Yahoo! and Google both offer me services in return for my divulging information which is to be used for specific purposes, which are laid out in the user agreement.
If they want to change that agreement, the changes should be opt-in, and if I choose not to opt in it's acceptable to me that they disable or delete my account. It is NOT acceptable to me that inaction on my part will result in divulging information that was previously covered under a privacy policy, unless they actively inform me that the policy is changing, and present me with a choice to either accept the new terms, opt out of them (if they wish to offer that as an option), or delete my account.
I have a Yahoo! account. It's very old. I don't use it for email any more because the account is up to several thousand spams a day, but I do still use the account for other services. I'm not going to see any service change emails they send me. Until and unless they put a box in front of me telling me how they want to further profits from my use of my account, they do not have the right to change the terms of our agreement.
For companies like Google and Yahoo!, who derive almost all of their money from advertising revenue, "increasing revenue" and "advertising opportunities" are exactly the same thing.
Don't forget, with Google and Yahoo!, the people who visit their web pages and use their nifty tools are not their customers. The people who buy advertising space from them are their customers. Yahoo! makes no (or almost no) money from you. They make nearly all their money from advertisers.
The people who visit their web pages and use all the cool stuff are the product being sold. Your eyeballs are worth some serious coin, amigo.
There's a vested interest in both learning as much about you as possible (so they can target ads and get more money per ad impression), getting you to recruit your friends (more product to sell), and keeping you on the site as long as possible (to increase the number of ad impressions). In fact, those are really the only things they ever really want to do.
So assuming a business wants to increase its revenue is a knee-jerk reaction, but only in the context that it's always true with almost no exceptions. Businesses are in business to make money. There's literally no other motivation to the majority of for-profit businesses. They do things that are good for you pretty much only when it benefits them in some way.
Yahoo! wants to do this for one of a few very simple reasons:
1. They are going to collect this information and sell it to advertisers.
2. They are offering you prettier cooler stuff so you'll stay on their site longer and see more ads.
3. They want you to tell your friends how cool all this stuff is so they'll sign up too.
Personally, I think it's 4. All of the above.
You can't today, and I doubt you ever will be able to.
But... From the summary: " Additionally, they suggest making facts 'proprietary' and allowing news organizations to copyright them."
Let me summarize the summary: "they suggest allowing news organizations to copyright facts"
This conversation is based the GP's premise of "If this does pass", therefore my assumption for the purposes of the conversation was "If a law is passed to allow news organizations to copyright facts."
Context. It's important.
File that under "other outlets" in my post.
If this passes (which I doubt it will, but let's just theorize), the media who receive the bailout will simply apply the other half of the law - they'll copyright the facts of the law.
If anyone else attempts to report on the facts of the law, the major media will have plenty of cash coming in to hire lots of sharks with legal beams (lawyers) to monitor other news media sites and swamp them with DMCA takedown notices.
First they'll go for all competing media and drain them dry, then they'll go after blogs, then they'll come after anyone who comments on...
oh, wait, hold on, someone's at the door. BRB
[LOST CARRIER]
Yeah, and who's going to report it as the bad thing it is?
The major news media? No, they'll just take their bailout and spin the news to all goodness and light and fluffy bunnies and fuzzy puppies.
Other outlets? No, they'll get sued to oblivion because the news media will have copyrighted the facts, so anyone else who tries to report on it will get a DMCA Smackdown.
I don't think that could be replicated.
Well, it could, but I doubt the lawyers would sign off on the concept.
Yes. Mix genders and things just get ugly.
No matter how professional your humans are to start out, unless you have your entire group as either singles not attracted to each other, or very stable and committed couples (and even that's a risk), there's gonna be some serious tension by the end of several years in a confined space. Maybe even some killing.
The best way to reduce the risk is to eliminate sexual tension, and that means picking a single gender. And orgasmotron wouldn't hurt either.
Of course, this also brings some politically charged but valid questions about homosexuality into the debate as well. Regardless of gender, if any member of the crew is potentially sexually attractive to more than one of the other members of the crew, your mission is at a much-elevated risk of trouble.
Could just as easily have been all women (and I think a separate Mars500 mission comprised solely of women would be a good idea to see how well they fare as compared to an all-male crew).
The distance to Mars, relative to me driving down to the corner store to pick up a 6er of Sam Adams, is mindbogglingly vast. And I live in a rural enough area that it's not a short drive.
Bad humor aside, the distance to Mars (about 55 million km, if you use the closest approach) is still vast compared to a trip to, say, the Moon (the furthest out Humans have been so far, at about 385,000 km).
It's almost 150 times as far to Mars as it is to the Moon. That's sufficiently "vast" that we really need to make sure humans can manage the trip in a confined space without killing each other.
You obviously don't live in New England. Up here, we measure distances in time, not linear measurements. If you ask me how far away something is, I'll give you an answer in minutes or hours.
"How far is it to Boston?"
"2 hours"
The distance to Mars is vast enough that I'd probably answer "You can't get there from here."
"Vast" is a matter of perspective. Compared to any distance we've sent humans, Mars is pretty vast.
The distance is sufficiently vast that we need to make sure the driver can handle the folks in the back seat asking "Are we there yet? Now much further is it?" every five minutes. That's why this test is important.
If the people in this box start killing each other, we at least haven't wasted a bunch of billions of dollars to get their corpses to Mars. We can learn what kind of living space we need to work out to maximize their chances of making it there alive and reasonably sane.
I've run into that several times.
My now-practiced answer is, "I'm terribly sorry to have offended you. You see, my mother always taught me to hold the door for a lady, and I apologize for mistaking you for one."
Then it won't matter when the space whelk eats the earth, which, since I saw it on the Weekly World News cover as a child, has to be due any day now.
Until then, though, we can still ask our doctors to be courteous. After all, we all know they are using pictures of varicose veins as treasure maps (also as seen on the Weekly World News cover).
What is this "E and R" of which you type? Or do you mean "ER" (Emergency Room)?
Yes, I agree that doctors can be dickheads. At which point they should receive some form of consequence that does not involve withholding medical information that they have asked for. Start a "Wall Of Shame" at your hospital, or a "I didn't like it when you..." policy that requires that the doctors sit down with the staff they offended at a later date, hear the staff out, and hopefully apologize.
If your doctors are asshats, forcing them to write a word that has no meaning to them onto a form isn't going to magically engage a friendliness faerie and make them into Doctor Care Bear. It's going to make them into the same discourteous asshat they already are, with just another excuse to believe that the people they work with are childish idiots.
Don't force false courtesy on a form and make the patient the one who suffers when the doctors ignore it. It won't do a bit of good, it just adds what the doctors will consider needless bureaucratic nonsense to the form.
"Please" put on a form when it is a requirement of filling out the form is meaningless, and everyone in that office has to know that. It won't actually change the doctor's level of courtesy in the real world.
Given the source of this story, I doubt it's true or complete, but assuming it is...
I like this rule, except that the failure to write "please" should not prevent the actual test from being performed when the doctor orders it to be done.
Maybe fine the doctor $10 every time they fail to say "please" on a form, put the doctor's names up on a wall of shame, or make them buy the next round of flowers for the office.
But anyone in the medical field should know that you do not withhold medical information that is possibly vital to a patient's health because the doc forgot to say "pweddy pweaze wiff sugar on top" on the form. Ever.
I'm not saying courtesy is unimportant, or that doctors have the right to be rude, only that the patient shouldn't suffer because their doctor is a dickhead to the support staff.
Apple could still solve this by differentiating between "approved" and "non-approved" applications, but still offering both for sale.
I think about this in terms of Synaptic as found in most Debian-based Linux distros (my experience with Synaptic is mostly through Linux Mint). I have a magnificently huge library of applications that I may choose from, and there are controls and checkboxes that allow me to set my level of "safe/stable" versus "cutting edge/unstable". By manipulating those sliders and tickyboxes, I can easily say "I want LTS levels of stable" or "I want nightly builds that might not even compile well and could cause my OS to self-destruct".
If I find something that isn't even available in those libraries, I can even download the .DEB file and install it myself, or download and compile the source if I really want to get my geek on.
In other words, I can choose a range of options starting with "walled garden in a comfy straitjacket" and going all the way to "Wild West featuring frequent drunken gunfights", all with a relatively simple set of controls on a single screen.
Apple has a vested interest in keeping true malware out. I get that. I applaud them for their efforts in this direction. Honestly.
But the whole concept of denying benign and formerly profitable apps because they changed a set of unwritten and ambiguous rules seems, well, unfortunate. For Apple.
At the end of the day, their platform, their decision, and it's one of the reasons the only bit of iFruitery I own is an iPod Touch, and that only because I won it in a writing contest a couple of years ago.
It's a nice device, but I've let the credit card associated with my account expire so I can't even install free applications or application updates any more, and I'm getting nervous about giving them a new card number with their recent behavior. One day, I'll make up a $5 limit temporary card and give it to them, I suppose.
But I look at it sometimes - the elegance of its construction and design, the almost magic UI design decisions that went into taking advantage of that teensy little screen. I marvel at how well executed a device it really is. I think of the smart and resourceful people who really poured a lot into this almost magical little gizmo.
Then I think about how much of its potential is wasted because of Apple's various decisions. It's a real shame.
But they are Apple's decisions to make.
Actually, I should have used "expect" instead of "ask"
"It's unreasonable to expect Apple to do anything they don't want to"
I just read this morning that Apple has also pulled "iFart" from the App Store for the iPad because the application "is of little functional value". So they are pulling applications because they emulate desktops (have too much function), they are pulling applications that have similar functions to what exists on the iP{hone,ad,od}, and they are pulling applications because they serve no useful (in Apple's opinion) function.
I'd be the last one on this planet to defend the utility of a fart noises application. But it's a good example of them ruining a relationship with someone who has sold a shitload of copies of an obviously popular application in the App Store.
With some platforms, the problem is getting your application noticed. Apparently, with Apple, it's all about NOT getting your application noticed.
How could they possibly ever be declared a monopoly in the mobile device application sales market? The iPhone, for all its popularity, is still in the hands of the minority of users.
Frankly, forcing Apple to open up would be bad for the marketplace at large. Apple restricts their own sales by engaging in silly restrictive behavior like this, and encourages people to explore the other available alternatives (Symbian, Blackberry, Android, etc).
Apple opening their marketplace would simply make the iPhone a more attractive device, and probably push them closer to a monopoly position.
Good.
No, seriously, great.
If Apple exposes the fallacy of the walled garden by making more people aware of the importance of freedom in their selections of equipment, then they are doing a public service in my book.
I do feel sorry for the iFruited masses for the pain they are about to experience in this learning experience, but my pappy always taught me by letting me learn my lessons the hard way if I didn't listen up when he tried to tell me what I was about to do was stupid.
You buy a locked phone from a carrier that's known for turning shit off, you get a locked phone with shit turned off. You buy a phone from a company who uses a walled garden as a selling point, you end up in a walled garden.
Answer: There are lots of companies that make smart phones that don't have walled gardens. There are plenty of them available as unlocked phones.
Want freedom? Choose a company that believes in it. My wife's Nokia Symbian phone is all that an iPhone should be, and more, and we bought it unlocked so anyone tells us we can't use a feature we can rip their SIM out of it, ship it back to them in itty bitty little pieces, and tell them to go fuck themselves.
Want freedom? Choose freedom.
Just don't do business with a company that has a long history of the reverse of what you want and come boo-hooing when they do what they always do.
It's sad, really. Apple started as the "computer for the masses", and ended up being what they are today. Makes me want to cry, sometimes.
They make some really nice stuff, but it's not worth what it costs. And I'm not talking about money.
But that's my opinion. Fortunately, Apple does not have a monopoly on smartphones. In fact, I'm coming close to believing they don't have a "smart" phone at all. Just the iPhone.
I'd say it's all based on a "Magic 8-ball", but wasn't that app rejected? (grin)
It's unreasonable to ask Apple to do anything they don't want to. It's their damned platform and they can be as pricky as they want.
It's also unreasonable for Apple to expect their developer base to remain loyal after being ass-reamed by Steve with sandy vaseline.
This sort of thing will work itself out. Likely not to Apple's long-term benefit, IMHO.
If your app doesn't match up to the level of quality that Apple require[sic], then it's a message
And given that the very things that make your app meet Apple's quality control one day can be disqualification criteria the next day means the answer is simple:
1. Don't write any innovative, interesting, and unique applications, or
2. Write your applications for another platform where the arbitrary rules are less ambiguous or do not exist.
Apple certainly has the right to kick out "any old piece of crap" should they choose, but after the application has enjoyed sales, and as a result of an arbitrary rules change? Well, yes, they still have the right.
The trouble is, people write applications because they want to make a profit, and arbitrary vague rules will lead the best developers to stop putting massive effort into supporting a platform that may not support them. You'll still have plenty of developers who will take the risk, but the ones who put massive amounts of effort into their applications only to have them yanked because the background was just the wrong shade of puce or Steve's chair hit the "REJECT" button instead of the wall that particular moment will eventually learn to go elsewhere.
Other app stores are fledgling and not as well-organized, you say? Agreed. But who do you need to push to other platforms to make the other platforms succeed?
DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!
I learned from the BOFH that the fastest backups are written to /dev/null.
But only one can be replaced with a new unique identifier. The library can make up numbers for cards, they can't make up a fingerprint. A fingerprint is yours for the rest of your life.
I understand that the library is only storing a hash, but unless the library is using a truly unique fingerprint hashing technique, a breach of the computer they are storing those hashes on could mean that validation data about you that cannot be changed could be used for other purposes. Think of "fingerprint hash" as the equivalent to "SSN". It's not something you can change easily, and for that reason it's something that can be used to identify you with a decent level of confidence. That hash could be injected into any computer that uses the same (or a similar) hashing algorithm, and even if the library discovers the breach there's little they can do about it.
That's where biometrics get interesting. They uniquely (or at least "practically uniquely") identify you, but if someone breaches the system holding it, it's hard to prove it invalid.
If the library makes up their own numbers, they aren't holding any valuable data. If they store something that can be uniquely derived from your fingerprint, they should at least be held to PCI compliance, but preferably a lot higher - you can change a credit card number.