You're missing the point. The war on drugs has failed to get people off drugs; almost everybody who wants drugs gets them already. With legalization, we could reduce the harm that drugs are causing to those families and to society.
But for the same price it's just not worth it to lose the ease of use, interoperability, and application support.
Interoperability? With what? iOS is tightly locked down and it primarily "interoperates" with iTunes and (eventually) iCloud.
Ease of use? That's rather dubious. iOS is a bit simpler because it's more limited. But ease of use ultimately needs to be measured in functionality per unit of UI complexity, not just UI complexity.
Application support? There are more tablet apps for iOS to be sure, but entire categories are missing because Apple doesn't allow them.
Sorry, I'm willing to pay extra for an Android tab. Having the Samsung 10.1 come out with the same size and price as the iPad is more than good enough for me, not despite Android but because of it.
I was responding to anon's "amazement" and pointing out that there are much bigger and older organizations that are hypocritical and still have tons of fanboys. In fact, Apple has become a religion.
The Catholic Church has a nearly 2,000 year history, has been the state religion in much of the world for most of the time it's been present in various regions, and ironically, the Catholic Church fully recognizes the imperfection of its own members and clerics.
Sure it does. Catholic attitudes towards fallibility can be summed up in two sentences:
"We're imperfect, but ours is the sole and absolute truth and if you don't join us, you will burn in hell."
"When Catholics make mistakes, it's because we are humble, fallible human beings following the right ideology, but when non-Catholics make mistakes it's because they are following evil ideologies."
I'd also add that the Pope is probably also zen-like in his humility
There is nothing "Zen-like" or humble about the Pope. He used to be an opinionated, arrogant, highly-paid academic, and now he's living in luxury in the Vatican, promoting his morally dubious ideology with totalitarian authority.
when he speaks for the Catholic Church, he's allegedly infallible.
Papal infallibility was formalized only in the 19th century (how is that for tradition?) and applies when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra.
The "conspiracy" is that Apple has "undocumented APIs" in the first place, the kind of thing that got Microsoft into trouble. Apple simply should not be permitted to reject legal apps from the app store. If that's the only way they say they can ensure security on their platform, they need to fix their security (it's a lame excuse and a lie anyway).
Apple is getting away with all the anti-competitive, evil, shitty behavior that got Microsoft into trouble with the law. That may have been OK when they were the underdog, but they are bigger than Microsoft now and they need to be held to a strict standard.
If I call you a cunt then that negatively affects my ability to do your job? Please never hire anyone, as it's often the best people (which I do not claim to be) who throw out the occasional harsh and sometimes well-placed insult and you'll be losing out significantly. If your'e the boss and they never have a bad word to say to your face, it's because they're saying it behind your back.
Your logic is flawed. I didn't say that people must fire someone who behaves disruptively, I said they had the right to make that choice.
Despite a severe disability from late teens it was several years of effort by friends with professional assistance to get the claim for assistance accepted
Your logic is flawed again. Just because your friend faced bureaucratic hurdles with one form of assistance doesn't mean he was deprived of his "right to eat". There are other forms of governmental food assistance in the US, plus private and charitable sources of food as well.
To a Westerner it may be perfectly reasonable that you can be fired for publicly calling your boss a cunt
Let's say I own the business and I hire you to do a job for me. If you start calling me names or are otherwise disruptive, of course I should be able to fire you: your behavior negatively affects your ability to do your job. In the US, you'll just get fired, in other democracies, you'll get slapped with a lawsuit for insulting someone on top of that.
But if we lack some semblance of rule of law, or if we lack much more fundamental rights such as the right to life or the right to eat (which is usually a consequence in Western nations of the rights to property and to social welfare), then speech doesn't matter so much.
Well, I don't know about what rinky-dink backwater nation you come from, but in the US, the government does, in fact, provide food to everybody who needs it. That's in addition to many charitable groups.
Google has had a number of failures, and they do seem to have a hard time pushing out obvious updates and improvements to many of their products. Think about what it says if a company with 26000 employees can't keep a services like Wave going and instead suffers the embarrassment of killing it off three months out of beta.
The reason you still see so much tech coming out of Google is because they have hired a large chunk of the best coders in the world. Google has so many good employees and so few core products that it can be argued that they are actually not working very efficiently.
Where did this weird idea that 'truth' is something that people create come from? It's just bizarre and nonsensical.
Words in natural languages have multiple meanings. You picked the wrong one. Go try figure out what meaning I was referring to, then we can talk again.
Merkel's spokesman says whatever it takes to get votes. By the time the shit hits the fan, Merkel is out of office and doesn't have to worry about it anymore. Remember, this is the same woman who said that it didn't matter that here defense minister lied and had copied almost his entire Ph.D. thesis from other sources.
Germany's CO2 emissions and energy consumption are currently no better than many other European countries on a per capita basis, despite its claims of being so environmentally conscious and successful at managing its energy usage.
Getting rid of nuclear power means one thing for Germany: a large increase in gas imports from Russia. Now, what could possibly go wrong with Russia being able to shut down the German economy at the touch of a button? Heck, Russia doesn't even need an army anymore to pressure Germany (not that Germany would fight back), they just need to hint at "slight technical problems with the pipeline".
I doubt there is a big demand at the moment for the type of voice recognition you're talking about,
Well, Woz disagrees with you, hence the whole f*cking discussion.
Who does have flawless voice recognition incorporated into a smartphone?
Nobody, because voice recognition doesn't work reliably yet. That's why Woz's suggestion is stupid. But Apple did the same kind of stupid thing with Newton.
Well, gosh, who might need multiple different platforms for their work, and might be forced to develop and test even on platforms they don't prefer? I leave it to you to try to figure that out.
It's not just people with too much money on their hands--like you--who buy Macs, some of us buy them for work even though we don't particularly like them.
(Acutally, I thought when OS X originally came out, it had promise, but the world is different now. The Mac is becoming ever more tightly controlled, while most of the innovation around Apple seems to be copying features that other platforms already offer.)
True, there are lots of science and engineering programs that only require a token writing and language credit. But there still are many universities (at least in the US) that do actually have meaningful liberal arts requirements for their science degrees. When you get a science degree at one of those, you do get a traditional "liberal arts" degree.
I think we also just have a "scholar inflation". Few people in the 19th century actually achieved a good understanding of "liberal arts", but these days, we expect universities to produce scholars predictably and by the thousands.
Microsoft may have some patents related to ".NET", but that's not used by most Mono applications. The language, the VM, and the core libraries are free and open, and most Mono apps use Gtk+ and other FOSS libraries and APIs. When you install Mono on Linux, you usually don't even get the.NET libraries by default.
Oh, dear, the analogy was lost on you. Let me explain.
Apple's last tablet, the Newton, had lousy handwriting recognition. They bought some third party software, it didn't work, and it dragged the whole product down. Their solution? A cheap, slow on-screen keyboard on their next attempt.
Speech recognition is similar to handwriting recognition. If Apple's past record is any predictor, they "solve speech recognition" by buying a third party speech recognizer (check), failing with it, and then having us speak in Morse code in the next product version.
I find it hard to believe that you ever had a MobileMe account.
Yeah, me too! I should have canceled right away and ask for a refund, but I kept hoping against hope that it would actually improve.
Heck, even Steve Jobs joked in his keynote about how bad MobileMe was. Looks like now they are copying Google and others they are finally getting it right.
1. Experts do not deserve any special role in declaring what is known. Knowledge is now democratically determined, as it should be.
In fact, experts do not and should not have any special role in declaring what is known. They can explain and advise, they can point at experiments and interpretations of those experiments.
But ultimately, truth is, in fact, democratically determined, both in the sciences and in democracies. That may fail sometimes, but the alternative is that truth is determined by popularity contests and official credentials, and that is far worse.
Historically, the "liberal arts" included state-of-the-art science and mathematics education.
Many science majors at good colleges and universities will, in fact, get a good grounding in non-scientific fields: they will have to learn foreign languages, read Shakespeare and other original writers, read original historical documents and interpret them, and take philosophy classes. That's a liberal arts education in the traditional sense.
What passes for "liberal arts" these days in colleges and universities is people taking a lot of courses requiring reading and writing, but their exposure to the sciences and mathematics is superficial. It's as if science majors would watch the Reduced Shakespeare Company for their literature requirement and read Asterix for European history.
And if you talk to these people, they don't even feel guilty about it; instead, they assume that anybody who actually bothers learning about math and science must be a soulless geek, and that they are the true scholars.
The only liberal arts majors in colleges and universities are the science and mathematics majors. Everybody else is missing an large chunk of their liberal arts education.
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Why would I want to go to a theater where I have to listen to the whinings of its drunk former patrons on screen?
Putting the rantings of a half drunk, angry patron on the movie screen speaks for itself.
You're missing the point. The war on drugs has failed to get people off drugs; almost everybody who wants drugs gets them already. With legalization, we could reduce the harm that drugs are causing to those families and to society.
Interoperability? With what? iOS is tightly locked down and it primarily "interoperates" with iTunes and (eventually) iCloud.
Ease of use? That's rather dubious. iOS is a bit simpler because it's more limited. But ease of use ultimately needs to be measured in functionality per unit of UI complexity, not just UI complexity.
Application support? There are more tablet apps for iOS to be sure, but entire categories are missing because Apple doesn't allow them.
Sorry, I'm willing to pay extra for an Android tab. Having the Samsung 10.1 come out with the same size and price as the iPad is more than good enough for me, not despite Android but because of it.
Neither the theater operators nor the patrons have any style. Best avoid the whole state.
I was responding to anon's "amazement" and pointing out that there are much bigger and older organizations that are hypocritical and still have tons of fanboys. In fact, Apple has become a religion.
Sure it does. Catholic attitudes towards fallibility can be summed up in two sentences:
"We're imperfect, but ours is the sole and absolute truth and if you don't join us, you will burn in hell."
"When Catholics make mistakes, it's because we are humble, fallible human beings following the right ideology, but when non-Catholics make mistakes it's because they are following evil ideologies."
There is nothing "Zen-like" or humble about the Pope. He used to be an opinionated, arrogant, highly-paid academic, and now he's living in luxury in the Vatican, promoting his morally dubious ideology with totalitarian authority.
Papal infallibility was formalized only in the 19th century (how is that for tradition?) and applies when the Pope is speaking ex cathedra.
The "conspiracy" is that Apple has "undocumented APIs" in the first place, the kind of thing that got Microsoft into trouble. Apple simply should not be permitted to reject legal apps from the app store. If that's the only way they say they can ensure security on their platform, they need to fix their security (it's a lame excuse and a lie anyway).
Apple is getting away with all the anti-competitive, evil, shitty behavior that got Microsoft into trouble with the law. That may have been OK when they were the underdog, but they are bigger than Microsoft now and they need to be held to a strict standard.
How is that different from religious hypocrisy? The Catholic church has 1 billion fanboys, and it has done a lot more evil than Apple.
Your logic is flawed. I didn't say that people must fire someone who behaves disruptively, I said they had the right to make that choice.
Your logic is flawed again. Just because your friend faced bureaucratic hurdles with one form of assistance doesn't mean he was deprived of his "right to eat". There are other forms of governmental food assistance in the US, plus private and charitable sources of food as well.
You're welcome. Now do you have a real point?
Let's say I own the business and I hire you to do a job for me. If you start calling me names or are otherwise disruptive, of course I should be able to fire you: your behavior negatively affects your ability to do your job. In the US, you'll just get fired, in other democracies, you'll get slapped with a lawsuit for insulting someone on top of that.
Well, I don't know about what rinky-dink backwater nation you come from, but in the US, the government does, in fact, provide food to everybody who needs it. That's in addition to many charitable groups.
Google has had a number of failures, and they do seem to have a hard time pushing out obvious updates and improvements to many of their products. Think about what it says if a company with 26000 employees can't keep a services like Wave going and instead suffers the embarrassment of killing it off three months out of beta.
The reason you still see so much tech coming out of Google is because they have hired a large chunk of the best coders in the world. Google has so many good employees and so few core products that it can be argued that they are actually not working very efficiently.
Words in natural languages have multiple meanings. You picked the wrong one. Go try figure out what meaning I was referring to, then we can talk again.
What does Windows 8 have to do with the evolution of the GUI? It looks like an irrelevant, cumbersome side-branch to me.
Merkel's spokesman says whatever it takes to get votes. By the time the shit hits the fan, Merkel is out of office and doesn't have to worry about it anymore. Remember, this is the same woman who said that it didn't matter that here defense minister lied and had copied almost his entire Ph.D. thesis from other sources.
Germany's CO2 emissions and energy consumption are currently no better than many other European countries on a per capita basis, despite its claims of being so environmentally conscious and successful at managing its energy usage.
Getting rid of nuclear power means one thing for Germany: a large increase in gas imports from Russia. Now, what could possibly go wrong with Russia being able to shut down the German economy at the touch of a button? Heck, Russia doesn't even need an army anymore to pressure Germany (not that Germany would fight back), they just need to hint at "slight technical problems with the pipeline".
Well, Woz disagrees with you, hence the whole f*cking discussion.
Nobody, because voice recognition doesn't work reliably yet. That's why Woz's suggestion is stupid. But Apple did the same kind of stupid thing with Newton.
Well, gosh, who might need multiple different platforms for their work, and might be forced to develop and test even on platforms they don't prefer? I leave it to you to try to figure that out.
It's not just people with too much money on their hands--like you--who buy Macs, some of us buy them for work even though we don't particularly like them.
(Acutally, I thought when OS X originally came out, it had promise, but the world is different now. The Mac is becoming ever more tightly controlled, while most of the innovation around Apple seems to be copying features that other platforms already offer.)
That statement is fully in line with Apple's usual "innovation by redefinition". The 1984 commercial was prophetic.
It's not an input method, it just recognizes a few commands.
True, there are lots of science and engineering programs that only require a token writing and language credit. But there still are many universities (at least in the US) that do actually have meaningful liberal arts requirements for their science degrees. When you get a science degree at one of those, you do get a traditional "liberal arts" degree.
I think we also just have a "scholar inflation". Few people in the 19th century actually achieved a good understanding of "liberal arts", but these days, we expect universities to produce scholars predictably and by the thousands.
Well, fortunately, Mono doesn't.
Microsoft may have some patents related to ".NET", but that's not used by most Mono applications. The language, the VM, and the core libraries are free and open, and most Mono apps use Gtk+ and other FOSS libraries and APIs. When you install Mono on Linux, you usually don't even get the .NET libraries by default.
Oh, dear, the analogy was lost on you. Let me explain.
Apple's last tablet, the Newton, had lousy handwriting recognition. They bought some third party software, it didn't work, and it dragged the whole product down. Their solution? A cheap, slow on-screen keyboard on their next attempt.
Speech recognition is similar to handwriting recognition. If Apple's past record is any predictor, they "solve speech recognition" by buying a third party speech recognizer (check), failing with it, and then having us speak in Morse code in the next product version.
Yeah, me too! I should have canceled right away and ask for a refund, but I kept hoping against hope that it would actually improve.
Heck, even Steve Jobs joked in his keynote about how bad MobileMe was. Looks like now they are copying Google and others they are finally getting it right.
Well, read what Larry Sanger wrote:
In fact, experts do not and should not have any special role in declaring what is known. They can explain and advise, they can point at experiments and interpretations of those experiments.
But ultimately, truth is, in fact, democratically determined, both in the sciences and in democracies. That may fail sometimes, but the alternative is that truth is determined by popularity contests and official credentials, and that is far worse.
What I'm getting at is the following.
Historically, the "liberal arts" included state-of-the-art science and mathematics education.
Many science majors at good colleges and universities will, in fact, get a good grounding in non-scientific fields: they will have to learn foreign languages, read Shakespeare and other original writers, read original historical documents and interpret them, and take philosophy classes. That's a liberal arts education in the traditional sense.
What passes for "liberal arts" these days in colleges and universities is people taking a lot of courses requiring reading and writing, but their exposure to the sciences and mathematics is superficial. It's as if science majors would watch the Reduced Shakespeare Company for their literature requirement and read Asterix for European history.
And if you talk to these people, they don't even feel guilty about it; instead, they assume that anybody who actually bothers learning about math and science must be a soulless geek, and that they are the true scholars.
The only liberal arts majors in colleges and universities are the science and mathematics majors. Everybody else is missing an large chunk of their liberal arts education.