You're the one who's making a claim; it is you who should be providing evidence.
Actually, look up the thread: it was Stormwatch who made a claim without providing evidence. I just illustrated the absurdity of his statement by making the opposite statement.
So, thanks for illustrating through your response how ridiculous and unfounded Stormwatch's original statement was. Take your complaints to him and ask him for evidence.
"Victim mentality"? "Blaming"? Get a grip of yourself and get real. We're talking about people who physically and mentally abuse other human beings without cause. Are you seriously trying to defend them?
Bullying has no social value; it is not related to normal leadership qualities, it has no benefits to society, and it violates the rights of other human beings. Hence, educators and the police need to intervene, first to stop the harm bullies cause to others, and then to try to change the bully.
Victims of bullying don't violate anybody's rights, and the attributes that make them victims (physical weakness, aloofness, intellectual pursuits, etc.) don't require or even justify intervention. Furthermore, being able to defend yourself against bullies is not, actually, an essential life skill.
It's crystal clear that interventions for bullying need to be directed towards the perpetrators. There is little justification for attempting to change the behavior of the victims.
The bully's nature is a force of nature. It is a preprogrammed primal primate instinct.
So is mass murder; that doesn't mean society should tolerate it.
The tribe has a hierarchy and you had better learn your place and how to socially interact.
We are humans, not apes, and our social structure is different, as is our capacity to overcome our instincts.
They are still victims of their own primal nature they have yet to learn the importance of fitting in society.
A bully is not a victim, he's a perpetrator. And if someone commits violence against anybody else at any age, some kind of intervention needs to be made, including possibly locking them up. That's true for a five year old just like it is true for a 35 year old.
I mean the US and UK have some rather lax laws regarding the holding of data and what can be done with it.
When it comes to government (which applies here), US data protection laws are generally stronger than European ones. But they mainly protect US citizens.
Your analogy is bullshit. A windy cliff is a force of nature, it doesn't have any responsibility or conscience. A bully is a human being and if he intentionally hurts someone else, the bully is responsible, nobody else.
<sarcasm>Who would have guessed? Those poor bullies are really the victims of the kids they beat up, because the kids being beaten up are practically asking the bullies to commit violence against them. I mean, obviously, if anybody doesn't want to conform to social norms or has interests other than those that the popular kids have, they are abnormal and hence need to be cured!</sarcasm>
I don't see why this got the "me too" tag. People have been working on Chrome OS and Android-based tables for as long as those operating systems have been out. The first Android tablets probably will ship before iPad.
Is it good or bad? The truth is, in America, it's neither good nor bad...
Of course it's bad: cell phone service in the US is expensive, has poor coverage, is monopolistic, and is less technologically advanced than it is in Europe.
I think Europeans regulate far too much. But if the market fails to work well in the US after operating for more than a decade, while other nations are doing really well with simple, specific regulation, maybe it's time for the US to adopt such regulation as well.
UNIX is celebrating 40th year, it is older if you think its roots (MULTICS). It is running on most trendy mobile devices ever, N900 and iPhone
To claim that the iPhone or the Mac run UNIX is a bald-faced marketing lie; OS X is based on Mach, a completely different design from UNIX. It happens to have some UNIX compatibility, but so does NT.
N900 runs Linux, which also has almost nothing to do with the UNIX of 40 years ago (or even the UNIX of 20 years ago). As someone who was hacking UNIX kernels in the 80's, trust me, I know.
NeXT is older too, if you put the smalltalk language to its true beginning.
NeXT was a cheap rip-off of parts of Smalltalk language and philosophy, and that's where it has stagnated to this day as OS X.
Have fun with your.exe files.
I mostly develop on Linux, and I prefer modern languages and environments, as opposed to NeXT's/Apple's 25 year old Smalltalk rip-off.
Have fun chasing pointer bugs in your Objective-C code. Well, until Apple closes their platform completely, that is.
I'd rather have someone see a vague picture of my junk than grab it and my ass, while breathing in my face.
I don't know, I'm occasionally rather fond of someone grabbing my junk and my ass; it really depends on who it is. Maybe this would be more fun if we could pick our screeners and the level of screening ourselves?
I appreciate your admiration for Archos, but it can't come at the expense of what Apple has done with touch tablets during the last few years.
What exactly do you think Apple "has done"? What actual technical contributions has Apple made, relative to the state of the art (prior work on multitouch, Palm, Danger, WinMo, etc.)?
A stylus is a way to emulate handwriting on paper
No, a stylus is a way of making precise pointing gestures on a small screen device.
There is no vendor lock-in from Apple except for the native apps, but again, they are optional, and again, that is the case with all platforms.
Oh, so I can watch the videos I buy in the iTunes store on an Archos player? I can read the books I buy for the iPad on a Kindle? On any reading that's not made by Apple? No? Well, then there is vendor lock-in. That's what vendor lock-in means.
The fact that iPad also supports some open standards doesn't change that.
Those are native app platforms from other manufacturers, they run only on those platforms.
That's total bullshit. Flash and J2ME run on many devices and there are multiple implementations. Android is open source. None of those are tied to anybody's hardware or any particular vendor.
Apple could have done iTunes Store in QuickTime but they used MPEG-4,...
The fact that Apple uses many open standards doesn't change the fact that they lock you into their hardware, software, and store.
You are ranting and raving but you're standing on sand. There is just no content in what you're saying.
You're either an idiot or a liar, I can't quite tell which.
Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both.
Who said anything about that? 3G is a lost cause in the US.
But the US could fix a future generation of cell phone service (maybe 4G, otherwise 5G) by making rational frequency allocations and demanding standard. That kind of planning needs to be 5-10 years ahead of deployment.
That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval. And the reason for that mess is because the FCC and Congress have failed to set standards for mobile telecommunications.
That's one of the many reasons the US mobile market is so terribly backwards and overpriced: there is no competition, and monopolies are enforced through technology.
As a consumer, if there was no regulation, then I would want to be able to know what testing was done on the software of a safety critical component.
There's no evidence that there was any unexpected malfunction in a safety critical component here.
The fact that accelerators get stuck is a normal part of operating a car. You need to be able to deal with this; nobody can build a car that avoids that problem. Fly-by-wire with brake override may help, but so does a stickshift.
If you want the safest kind of car, get tried-and-true technology, not the latest and greatest.
No, you simply can't read. Those articles talk about how software might cause unintended acceleration, but the recalls that are in the news are both related to mechanical problems, in one case with mats, in another case with a sticky pedal.
So I thought it must have been a sticky pedal.
It probably was a sticky pedal, so what?. A sticky pedal is not a software problem, and it occurs with mechanical linkages too (more frequently probably). Of course, software problems are possible in principle and have occurred in the past, it's just that they haven't been shown to have been involved in these cases. In particular, there is no evidence that they were involved in the crashes we discussed.
However, whether software or hardware, mechanical or fly-by-wire, all cars can accelerate suddenly. You as a driver need to be prepared and know what to do, just like you need to be able to deal with tire blowouts, flying debris, and other unexpected events.
Furthermore, you need to be aware that most cases of "unexpected" acceleration are simply due to human error: people step on the wrong pedal. It's happened to me, too. The safest car in that regard (and others) is a stick shift with no cruise control.
From the Washington Post: Toyota did not install brake override systems despite complaints
You are reading that wrong. Toyotas are doing what cars traditionally do: brakes and accelerator operate independently; the accelerator does not override the brake as you incorrectly claim.
"Brake overrides" are a new feature in which the brake does override the accelerator in software. It's probably a reasonable feature, but it was a reasonable decision for Toyota just to operate their cars the way cars have always worked.
From the news sources... Also one of the very first comments on this topic: Also, they couldn't put it into neutral because it had a push-button shifter as well
Where does that say that there was a software problem? Furthermore, that guy was jumping to conclusions just like you.
I'm sorry, but you are really making a lot of things up here. Go get the facts before scaring people with unsubstantiated claims of CPU and software problems.
By that definition nothing is free because you pay for it some way.
Not at all. For Apple, the software is tied to their hardware; that means that you pay for the software as part of your hardware. For Android, Linux, etc. the software is not tied to the hardware of the people developing it.
Android just isn't there yet. It's reasonably easy to develop for and I like it being Java based but the UI overall is crappy and there is to much difference from platform to platform.
I don't know what you mean by "crappy". I have both, and the major difference I see is that the iPhone OS has severe limitations, limitations that really get in the way of using the thing.
Android devices are just crappy compared to iPhone OS devices. The screens aren't as good, the touch sensors aren't as good, the devices just aren't as well engineered.
Those statements are based on a bunch of poorly done tests you read over the Internet.
But let's assume they were true, so what? You can get Android devices for less than $200, and the most expensive ones are much cheaper than an iPhone and offer complicated features like sliding keyboards. Of course, it's easy to make good hardware if you charge a premium and don't add anything complicated.
I'm all for competition but Google needs to step it up a notch.
You don't worry your pretty little head about Google, they are doing just fine. Apple will continue to get its 1-5% of the premium market segment, but that's all.
I hope they can stay friendly and cooperating through the competition as I think we all get the best results that way.
Apple has done a good job at pointing out the importance of design and usability. But I think Jobs is getting completely out of control and Apple either needs to change radically or they need to be kicked off the stage.
I have some Apple hardware, but over the last few years, I have gotten so pissed off with Apple that I'm thinking of not replacing it.
What could this guy have done in this situation? He can't un-press the gas, he can't press the brake because the CPU gives the gas precedence if you press both,
Where do you get that idea from? On these cars, the CPU does what the mechanical linkage does: you step on both, both get engaged.
But some of these cars had such ridiculously powerful motors that the brakes failed after a minute. There are just physical limits to what brakes can accomplish.
the emergency brake would cause him to go out of control
That is true: pulling the emergency brake is a bad idea.
and he can't shift gears because that is under software control too!!
I have seen no evidence in any of the cases that I read that people couldn't shift gears. Where are you getting this stuff from?
Slashdot Mirror
You're the one who's making a claim; it is you who should be providing evidence.
Actually, look up the thread: it was Stormwatch who made a claim without providing evidence. I just illustrated the absurdity of his statement by making the opposite statement.
So, thanks for illustrating through your response how ridiculous and unfounded Stormwatch's original statement was. Take your complaints to him and ask him for evidence.
"Victim mentality"? "Blaming"? Get a grip of yourself and get real. We're talking about people who physically and mentally abuse other human beings without cause. Are you seriously trying to defend them?
Bullying has no social value; it is not related to normal leadership qualities, it has no benefits to society, and it violates the rights of other human beings. Hence, educators and the police need to intervene, first to stop the harm bullies cause to others, and then to try to change the bully.
Victims of bullying don't violate anybody's rights, and the attributes that make them victims (physical weakness, aloofness, intellectual pursuits, etc.) don't require or even justify intervention. Furthermore, being able to defend yourself against bullies is not, actually, an essential life skill.
It's crystal clear that interventions for bullying need to be directed towards the perpetrators. There is little justification for attempting to change the behavior of the victims.
The bully's nature is a force of nature. It is a preprogrammed primal primate instinct.
So is mass murder; that doesn't mean society should tolerate it.
The tribe has a hierarchy and you had better learn your place and how to socially interact.
We are humans, not apes, and our social structure is different, as is our capacity to overcome our instincts.
They are still victims of their own primal nature they have yet to learn the importance of fitting in society.
A bully is not a victim, he's a perpetrator. And if someone commits violence against anybody else at any age, some kind of intervention needs to be made, including possibly locking them up. That's true for a five year old just like it is true for a 35 year old.
I mean the US and UK have some rather lax laws regarding the holding of data and what can be done with it.
When it comes to government (which applies here), US data protection laws are generally stronger than European ones. But they mainly protect US citizens.
Your analogy is bullshit. A windy cliff is a force of nature, it doesn't have any responsibility or conscience. A bully is a human being and if he intentionally hurts someone else, the bully is responsible, nobody else.
<sarcasm>Who would have guessed? Those poor bullies are really the victims of the kids they beat up, because the kids being beaten up are practically asking the bullies to commit violence against them. I mean, obviously, if anybody doesn't want to conform to social norms or has interests other than those that the popular kids have, they are abnormal and hence need to be cured!</sarcasm>
Yeah, be afraid. Carnies. Circus Folk. Nomads, you know. Smell like cabbage. Small hands.
I don't see why this got the "me too" tag. People have been working on Chrome OS and Android-based tables for as long as those operating systems have been out. The first Android tablets probably will ship before iPad.
Is it good or bad? The truth is, in America, it's neither good nor bad...
Of course it's bad: cell phone service in the US is expensive, has poor coverage, is monopolistic, and is less technologically advanced than it is in Europe.
I think Europeans regulate far too much. But if the market fails to work well in the US after operating for more than a decade, while other nations are doing really well with simple, specific regulation, maybe it's time for the US to adopt such regulation as well.
UNIX is celebrating 40th year, it is older if you think its roots (MULTICS). It is running on most trendy mobile devices ever, N900 and iPhone
To claim that the iPhone or the Mac run UNIX is a bald-faced marketing lie; OS X is based on Mach, a completely different design from UNIX. It happens to have some UNIX compatibility, but so does NT.
N900 runs Linux, which also has almost nothing to do with the UNIX of 40 years ago (or even the UNIX of 20 years ago). As someone who was hacking UNIX kernels in the 80's, trust me, I know.
NeXT is older too, if you put the smalltalk language to its true beginning.
NeXT was a cheap rip-off of parts of Smalltalk language and philosophy, and that's where it has stagnated to this day as OS X.
Have fun with your .exe files.
I mostly develop on Linux, and I prefer modern languages and environments, as opposed to NeXT's/Apple's 25 year old Smalltalk rip-off.
Have fun chasing pointer bugs in your Objective-C code. Well, until Apple closes their platform completely, that is.
I'd rather have someone see a vague picture of my junk than grab it and my ass, while breathing in my face.
I don't know, I'm occasionally rather fond of someone grabbing my junk and my ass; it really depends on who it is. Maybe this would be more fun if we could pick our screeners and the level of screening ourselves?
I largely agree with you, a fear of nakedness can never be an excuse for less security.
Really? How far are you going to take that? Do we have to run around naked in the street? Can any policeman ask us to undress?
Especially in the case of the Brits and Americans I'd have some worries about the last issue.
OK, so you're Dutch. Am I to believe that you prefer Dutch people to look at travelers naked? Why exactly is that?
I can tell you, given the reputation that the Dutch have in American and the UK, I seriously doubt most Americans and Brits would agree with you.
I appreciate your admiration for Archos, but it can't come at the expense of what Apple has done with touch tablets during the last few years.
What exactly do you think Apple "has done"? What actual technical contributions has Apple made, relative to the state of the art (prior work on multitouch, Palm, Danger, WinMo, etc.)?
A stylus is a way to emulate handwriting on paper
No, a stylus is a way of making precise pointing gestures on a small screen device.
There is no vendor lock-in from Apple except for the native apps, but again, they are optional, and again, that is the case with all platforms.
Oh, so I can watch the videos I buy in the iTunes store on an Archos player? I can read the books I buy for the iPad on a Kindle? On any reading that's not made by Apple? No? Well, then there is vendor lock-in. That's what vendor lock-in means.
The fact that iPad also supports some open standards doesn't change that.
Those are native app platforms from other manufacturers, they run only on those platforms.
That's total bullshit. Flash and J2ME run on many devices and there are multiple implementations. Android is open source. None of those are tied to anybody's hardware or any particular vendor.
Apple could have done iTunes Store in QuickTime but they used MPEG-4, ...
The fact that Apple uses many open standards doesn't change the fact that they lock you into their hardware, software, and store.
You are ranting and raving but you're standing on sand. There is just no content in what you're saying.
You're either an idiot or a liar, I can't quite tell which.
Well, there's one problem with REQUIRING both 850 and 1700/2100 -- it costs more to make a phone capable of doing both.
Who said anything about that? 3G is a lost cause in the US.
But the US could fix a future generation of cell phone service (maybe 4G, otherwise 5G) by making rational frequency allocations and demanding standard. That kind of planning needs to be 5-10 years ahead of deployment.
No, sorry, there aren't many phones that support both AT&T and T-Mobile. Not even Nokia's previous top-end world business phone, the E90, does.
Sprint won't allow its customers to use Verizon-branded phones, and Verizon won't sell phones that aren't built to be "Uniquely Verizon"
Yes, and Congress and the FCC could require all phones to use the same standard and frequencies.
Need more proof of corporate policy dictating handset frequency availability?
I don't need any proof at all. I'm saying Congress should grow some balls and put an end to this madness by law.
That's not Nokia's fault. In order to cover the US market, they would have to offer different versions for AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, and Sprint. Each of those versions would require separate FCC approval. And the reason for that mess is because the FCC and Congress have failed to set standards for mobile telecommunications.
That's one of the many reasons the US mobile market is so terribly backwards and overpriced: there is no competition, and monopolies are enforced through technology.
As I was saying, all cars are at risk of having the gas pedal stick; dirt may gum up the pedal assembly, or the cable may snag on something.
Have you had your car checked out by a mechanic? Have they replaced the part and has it come back?
I read the "electric moon buggie" as an "electric boondoggle". It might as well be :-)
As a consumer, if there was no regulation, then I would want to be able to know what testing was done on the software of a safety critical component.
There's no evidence that there was any unexpected malfunction in a safety critical component here.
The fact that accelerators get stuck is a normal part of operating a car. You need to be able to deal with this; nobody can build a car that avoids that problem. Fly-by-wire with brake override may help, but so does a stickshift.
If you want the safest kind of car, get tried-and-true technology, not the latest and greatest.
You haven't been looking, then:
No, you simply can't read. Those articles talk about how software might cause unintended acceleration, but the recalls that are in the news are both related to mechanical problems, in one case with mats, in another case with a sticky pedal.
So I thought it must have been a sticky pedal.
It probably was a sticky pedal, so what?. A sticky pedal is not a software problem, and it occurs with mechanical linkages too (more frequently probably). Of course, software problems are possible in principle and have occurred in the past, it's just that they haven't been shown to have been involved in these cases. In particular, there is no evidence that they were involved in the crashes we discussed.
However, whether software or hardware, mechanical or fly-by-wire, all cars can accelerate suddenly. You as a driver need to be prepared and know what to do, just like you need to be able to deal with tire blowouts, flying debris, and other unexpected events.
Furthermore, you need to be aware that most cases of "unexpected" acceleration are simply due to human error: people step on the wrong pedal. It's happened to me, too. The safest car in that regard (and others) is a stick shift with no cruise control.
From the Washington Post: Toyota did not install brake override systems despite complaints
You are reading that wrong. Toyotas are doing what cars traditionally do: brakes and accelerator operate independently; the accelerator does not override the brake as you incorrectly claim.
"Brake overrides" are a new feature in which the brake does override the accelerator in software. It's probably a reasonable feature, but it was a reasonable decision for Toyota just to operate their cars the way cars have always worked.
From the news sources... Also one of the very first comments on this topic: Also, they couldn't put it into neutral because it had a push-button shifter as well
Where does that say that there was a software problem? Furthermore, that guy was jumping to conclusions just like you.
I'm sorry, but you are really making a lot of things up here. Go get the facts before scaring people with unsubstantiated claims of CPU and software problems.
By that definition nothing is free because you pay for it some way.
Not at all. For Apple, the software is tied to their hardware; that means that you pay for the software as part of your hardware. For Android, Linux, etc. the software is not tied to the hardware of the people developing it.
Android just isn't there yet. It's reasonably easy to develop for and I like it being Java based but the UI overall is crappy and there is to much difference from platform to platform.
I don't know what you mean by "crappy". I have both, and the major difference I see is that the iPhone OS has severe limitations, limitations that really get in the way of using the thing.
Android devices are just crappy compared to iPhone OS devices. The screens aren't as good, the touch sensors aren't as good, the devices just aren't as well engineered.
Those statements are based on a bunch of poorly done tests you read over the Internet.
But let's assume they were true, so what? You can get Android devices for less than $200, and the most expensive ones are much cheaper than an iPhone and offer complicated features like sliding keyboards. Of course, it's easy to make good hardware if you charge a premium and don't add anything complicated.
I'm all for competition but Google needs to step it up a notch.
You don't worry your pretty little head about Google, they are doing just fine. Apple will continue to get its 1-5% of the premium market segment, but that's all.
I hope they can stay friendly and cooperating through the competition as I think we all get the best results that way.
Apple has done a good job at pointing out the importance of design and usability. But I think Jobs is getting completely out of control and Apple either needs to change radically or they need to be kicked off the stage.
I have some Apple hardware, but over the last few years, I have gotten so pissed off with Apple that I'm thinking of not replacing it.
What could this guy have done in this situation? He can't un-press the gas, he can't press the brake because the CPU gives the gas precedence if you press both,
Where do you get that idea from? On these cars, the CPU does what the mechanical linkage does: you step on both, both get engaged.
But some of these cars had such ridiculously powerful motors that the brakes failed after a minute. There are just physical limits to what brakes can accomplish.
the emergency brake would cause him to go out of control
That is true: pulling the emergency brake is a bad idea.
and he can't shift gears because that is under software control too!!
I have seen no evidence in any of the cases that I read that people couldn't shift gears. Where are you getting this stuff from?