He's belling the cat. We've been talking about a transparent society for a while now but he's actually doing it, and not just with the low-hanging fruit either.
He's far gutsier than any soldier of ours - fighting the easy fight against "insurgents" - in that he's taking risks without the world's largest military and endless Hellfire missiles backing him up.
Yeah. They all assume that aggression by some people gives you the right to carpet bomb innocents who in no way pushed for a war.
By analogy, imagine defending yourself from a pick-pocket in a mall with an M16 and claiming the casualties of war were responsible for policing themselves. This is the scale of your overseas operations.
Planning raids on specific non-hostiles is clearly threatening. If I did it to you our courts would agree it was a threat. When we do it to others they see it as a threat. We can easily plan for features of foreign countries without having to plan the bombing of what is currently an innocent person.
As for ill-conceived, shove it up your ass. It was a flat-out lie by a war criminal.
That's what you say until you see I'm using your face for target practice but then you'll get all upset. Just wait until you see the mock-up of your house I've built for practice...
It's possible to practice to be able to handle the military might of any potential adversary without pulling out pictures of their capital cities and planning which daycare centers to bomb. If you insist on practicing on real targets, plan raids on yourself.
Yeah, I get that that's their story. What the banks do isn't their problem because they're only partners...
But they partnered with the bank. They allowed them to use their logo, and they have a compliance program to make sure the bank is doing a proper job.
Crazy legal fictions don't change the reality of the situation which is that you have a Visa card with a Visa logo on it, much of the profit goes back to them, and they run the show. You might not be able to call them for anything, even reporting criminal actions at your bank, but they're still in charge.
It has a Visa logo on it, it's Visa doing it. They only license their trademark to partners in good standing.
You want us to think they're astute enough to manage to push every little contract change, etc, to their partner banks, but NOT enough to be able to check for proper security practices?
You say that complete abolition is easier to explain than an arbitrary line in the sand, but I think that's contradicted by events in the last ten years.
Yes, easier to explain, and to morally justify. And easier to rally behind.
I was at a Iranian-vote rally a while back. The rally - shouting things like "remove Iranian dictator" and "help save the Iranian people" walked right past a bunch of Tamil having their own protest, saying almost the same things, and neither group batted an eye. Too caught up in their own experiences to see how they could team up with like-minded people around them and maybe get something done. And today the Iranian still have their dictator and the Tamils are still in racial-segregated refuge camps.
We've no big victories (yet) but the idea is being entertained and we've come within an inch of victory. As for abolishing the whole patent system, I haven't heard of any parliament in the developed world even starting a legislative proposal on that.
I see what you mean, but you're fighting the sense of entitlement by telling some people they can't have a patent while giving one to the guy standing right next to them.
You've got to understand that we don't give out patents to help spur invention, that's just a story for kids. We give patents because rent-seekers demanded it and we've always caved-in for the shrill demanding ones. This means you can't fight software patents by showing they slow development because all patents do.
If they believe they're got a right to keep you from doing something simply because they were the first to do any given thing then they'll never give up. They're looking to patent everything. Why not, they think? Even if you win now they'll keep lobbying, and far more broadly.
It's like rejecting the Canadian DMCA-equivalent. For years we've said no in a variety of forms and rejected their proposals. So now they're looking to stick it in ACTA and force us to take it.
Yes, fighting all patents is a bigger battle, but only by stopping them in their tracks will it ever really be over. Otherwise they'll keep shoving software/math/business-model patents at you in various guises, all the while feeling totally entitled to it.
Only by convincing everyone that it's sick for someone to horde something like that will a lasting victory be achieved. Otherwise you'll win, maybe, in one or two areas but face endless political battles, and then the USA will force everyone to accept a treaty and you'll end up losing anyways.
So yes, continue to fight your battles too, but be mindful of the overall one. We're not safe as long as the government runs around handing out monopolies to anyone.
Shows how much you know. I first programmed a computer in 1976 [...]
Slow down grandpa. I'm not saying you haven't used them before, I'm saying you don't seem to understand them.
No, you explicitly said "seen", not "understand". And it's amusing how you flip on the spot from trying to claim you have more
You fail reading comprehension, and basic logic.
I said "seemingly". Of course your posts aren't magically appearing on a website without a computer so obviously you've used one.
But you really don't seem to get that there can be thousands of apps which you haven't installed and they don't make your life any more difficult. It doesn't matter if some of those apps are for debugging.
expertise with computers to "grandpa" comments when you find out I have way more than you do.
You've got experiences, I'll give you that...
That's the UI cost for your particular desire to have something optional. However you're no one special. There are thousands of people wanting their own particular optional thing. Even allowing for duplicates that's hundreds of things to scroll past.
This is what I mean. You act like everything has to be thrown in one giant long menu. Ever hear of sub-menus?
Yes, there are thousands of options that are needed, and hundreds (like you're arguing this one is) that could be cut. Far too many for any one scrollable list, set of icons, etc, even if it was trimmed to the bare minimum.
Far before here you've had to manage all this choice by, for instance, building an app store with categories, ratings, searching, etc.
Take a look at the preferences in Azureus for an example of what happens when you implement al the options anybody asks for.
Wow, an open source project without any firm UI guidelines is messy. Good thing newspapers are dead, we'd have to stop the presses for that one.
A perfect case in point. Either the microwave oven is badly designed (a device designed to generate heat shouldn't fail under it's own heat), or it is faulty.
Or the landlord didn't cut big enough vent holes into the housing, or...
In the former case, the answer isn't for the manufacturer to add diagnostics, but for them to design it properly in the first place so it doesn't overheat.
Gee whiz, Batman. Really?
And while they're at it, why don't they make the iPhone never lose signal strength?
If it's faulty, you should be getting it repaired or replaced. It shouldn't be designed to run in a faulty state.
Until the unicorns replace an otherwise working unit, I'll just run it for less than twenty minutes at a time. Perhaps the manual, long gone, specifies a duty cycle. If the UI was clearer I wouldn't have had to guess.
Now, if it is faulty, and it has a display, then a message saying it is faulty would certainly be useful, in addition to the failsafe cut out. But that's a fatal error message, not the kind of monitoring whilst in use facility that you are suggesting.
I'd like a warning before a failsafe is tripped. And a message after saying Overheated - please wait or Melted - Replace unit.
Even during the time when Consumer Reports were criticising the antenna problems of the iPhone 4
And this is why Apple would never have good diagnostics, they'd provide proof of an Apple failing. This way there's nothing but rumors.
Being well designed, easy to understand, "It just works" and having excellent pre and post sales service are what matters to consumers and consumer reports. Not the availability of geeky diagnostics.
No though, that isn't it. If it was, they'd have and publish standards. They do not. Politically motivated decisions are the exact opposite of reasonable metrics.
I've said endlessly that Flash is shit, even on PCs. I hated it before it was even dreamed that phones could run it. I know it sucks. And Adobe killed my dog.
But that still doesn't mean I want it banned.
For one, not all apps are youtube video. There are a lot of tiny flash apps that'd work well on a phone.
And even then I don't want anything banned without technical standards. If its power drain is too high, what's okay? If it's too choppy when playing a youtube video does that mean a video player has to refuse to play a too-high bitrate movie if it'd be laggy or is it acceptable in one app but not another?
Yes, under any decent set of technical standards Flash would be blocked, but then so would much other software. If that's what they were going for - actually improving the quality for the apps, I'd be for it. It's their store. But instead they're banning a competitors app - from the phone at all - on vague hearsay about battery drain.
Shows how much you know. I first programmed a computer in 1976 [...]
Slow down grandpa. I'm not saying you haven't used them before, I'm saying you don't seem to understand them.
You keep talking about choice confusing people without understanding that you can hide the troubleshooting and all other advanced options easily - the users who don't tweak won't turn them on or download the app.
Choice that confuses people is badly handled choice. People don't want 80,000 options all at once - clearly. But many do want to customize their choice until there are far more than 80,000 possibilities. Witness kids and stickers/bedazzlers or people with phone backgrounds/ringtones/etc. If you had to choose a ringtone and such, at the store when buying your phone, it'd be overwhelming. If instead they give you a default and let you tweak I can ignore it and you can go to town. The only cost to me is scrolling past one of 'Change X' option - if and when I go to the menus to change something.
The app store already has far more choice than one person wants, all at once, but it makes an effort to break this choice down in ways that aren't stressful.
If you can skip games, or stock-market apps, or social apps, you can skip troubleshooting apps.
Making things optional is not an answer. If you make the battery monitoring optional, then you are saying that you are not solving the problem for all those people that don't take that option.
Wow, major reality distortion field.
It doesn't matter what you say, it matters if the problem is fixed. Hiding a battery meter and pretending all apps draw the same amount of power isn't fixing anything.
To fix it you'd need to have real standards, publish them, and incorporate them into the app-store testing and rating. As is, they've brushed the issue under the rug so that the non-technical don't know there's a problem. When their battery goes dead sooner they won't have been timing it so they'll just assume they used it more - result, one less-usable phone and one app unfairly unpunished by the marketplace because of market ignorance.
By not allowing Flash, you're solving the problem of Flash's battery eating behaviour (and other problems) for everyone.
Sigh. Solving one problem with in app, that as you point out doesn't work anyways, and leaving the problem in all other apps that simply haven't drawn Jobs' ire yet.
Had Apple set stability and power standards Flash couldn't meet they'd have also been setting a bar for other apps. It's like setting stricter regulations for oil drilling, for BP only.
Windows is like the iPhone here IMHO - neither provide the user with raw information they can use to diagnose anything.
This comes from a basic misunderstanding on your part as to the nature of a phone.
No, this is a bias on your part as to what a phone must be to everyone who has it.
Clearly there are people who recently wanted better signal strength diagnostics. It's great that you're content to sit back and wait for the manufacturer to issue a press release but that's not going to keep them honest if we all do that.
Diagnostics for users have no more place on a phone than on a microwave oven or a TV set.
Quite a lot you mean?
I've got a microwave that shuts down when it gets hot, I think. It doesn't display anything when it goes, it just shuts down. I couldn't (could but w/shouldn't) open it and put in a larger cooling fan but if I knew it was overheating I could run it at half-power. Sure, not something a user should have to know about to use it, but better that than tripping something and having it die for an hour when you're trying to cook dinner.
Until they do get it right, I want the ability to at least see why it's shutting off so
In a plebiscite? No. Just politically motivated leaders following the religious push of the lobbying groups. That's never been a measure of popular support.
At the time it was passed, drinking was considered to be contributing to the downfall of society.
By some.
The people "jailed for having a drink" were, by definition and standard of the time, not "law-abiding citizens".
But that's just the point. We ruled the restrictions were unconstitutional. That means the law was wrong, not the people.
It's okay, because they're not to me yet
How is this statement even relevant?
This thread 'started' with someone saying "The police aren't interested in me, this isn't news". Someone replied saying that was a bad reason, you replied saying that it was not bad.
I also have no objections to being tracked, myself. My opinion is that being tracked does not constitute any serious breach of privacy.
It is bad because it doesn't take into account that one day you may have a reason for privacy from the police. There may be an unjust law you feel the need to break but because you've given the police the overreaching powers, be unable to. The famous example is defending your neighbors from racial persecution.
In fact, there are some people who do this all the time already. They're called "private investigators".
You missed this: But does that justify me sticking a transmitter in your belongings, just because I could already do a similar thing?
Why waste a human officer following a car, when technology could do it as well?
Because that limits the type of investigations they can do. Police should be arresting actual criminals, not monitoring a vast network of intelligence for an infraction they can arrest you for. To the degree we need this it's a higher-level organization like the FBI or CSIS, and with strong directives to follow a particular person or case - not just given free reign.
The police are very capable of finding car thieves, almost all murderers, etc. There's no good reason to give them more power on a general basis. It supports the creation of victimless crimes from something that would have once needed a complaint to warrant investigation.
abolishing the whole system isn't my goal [...] Software is different
No, it isn't. You've still got an idea that you aren't allowed to use because someone came along earlier and stuck a flag in it, claiming it for themselves.
You think software advances more quickly, but you've never seen mechanical development unfettered by patents. You think it's more-often used for direct gain but you've obviously never seen a farmer machine their own trailer-hitch, or a company have its engineering department fix a defect in their trucks' loading ramps, etc.
All patents are a restriction of your ability to develop what you thought of or seen. Your fundamental ability to manipulate the world around you.
but for how I use my own time and resources, I'll focus them on abolishing *software* patents
Totally the wrong way to go about it.
Look at what 'IP law' proponents say, things like "why doesn't software deserve the same protection as mechanical inventions?" Sure, software is intangible, but it's also the embodiment of a process. For all the differences you can draw, they can draw a similarity.
The problem is that society has been brainwashed by the rent-seeking parasites into thinking that inventions deserve monopoly control. But once they buy that, why shouldn't they extend the system to everything? And really, if we allow someone to claim a process because they reported that they did it to the government before anyone else did, why the hell not extend it to sexual positions, or chess plays as well?
As long as you want to take candy from all the kids in red shirts you'll have a problem, they'll see it as arbitrary and fight - when you remove the candy entirely it can work. Your arbitrary limits are no fair - if patents exist and have all these problems already why shouldn't they also cover software where they're just a little worse? To them you might as well be saying you want to ban vehicular patents but leave the rest, for the arbitrary nature of the distinction you make.
Instead, when they ask "why can't we patent software" if you say "because patents are a violation of the right to invent" you won't be trying to defend your arbitrary line in the sand.
Explain how a world without any patents allows you the freedom to make anything you can, if you invented it or merely saw it somewhere else. How a world with patents means you and your neighbor can both invent something but because his paperwork goes through faster than yours you don't even have the right to use your invention outside the lab.
Too many business owners have heard "patents are good for business" and blindly pursue them seeing only the immediate benefits to them without considering the cost to society, part of which is them. Without patents they might lose some fees, but without patents everything they buy would cost half as much. Without patents engineers could study competitors products, society would leap forward.
You seemingly have never seen a computer before. The things on the screen don't always have to be there. You could include a Tetris game and it'd take no room away from a Solitaire game, and neither would distract at all from messaging.
An app in the app-store wouldn't make anyone's phone more complicated unless they chose to install it, presumably because they had a problem they wished to debug.
Windows was made by people like you: If there's a tricky problem pass it on to the user
Space-ghost forbid. Windows is like the iPhone here IMHO - neither provide the user with raw information they can use to diagnose anything. Sure, Windows has a ton more options to click but they wouldn't provide a battery meter with per-app metering either for the same marketing/political reasons.
What I would do - this complexity you fear - is make the information available so that the marketplace could create a UI based on actual customer demand.
I don't know why the idea of debugging info that you just wouldn't look at bothers you so much. Do the words 'More Info' obligate you to look? Do you have to try every app in the store?
Derivative works do have an impact on how people feel. Your lack of respect for that shows your insensitivity and lack of class.
Yeah, and not being able to share your imaginings where those relate to copyrighted characters has an impact on how people feel. The only thing stopping us from having a participatory culture are laws we passed to help increase the public domain - something we no-longer need.
You with your righteous expectations have no room for the existence of others, let alone actually giving a shit about how they feel.
Hardly uncommon traits, but some of us respect others enough that not only would we not do it, we support laws protecting them (and ourselves) from it, rather than give jerks like you carte blanche to do whatever you wish.
You're perfectly happy playing the respect card, as long as it's to respect your feelings. But when it's time to respect others - who don't want to live artificially cloistered in a world of your obsolete dictates, you couldn't give a shit.
You, and other protectionists like you, are leeches on the ass of anyone who actually does something. By demanding others bow to your demands only because you've been there first you're a fine example of the greatest drain on our society.
It's too bad you don't respect people enough to NOT pass laws limiting them.
you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets
Ummm, largely, via unlawful and certainly immoral market control, it was. Every time they pulled a signature dirty trick they put a competitor out of business, or cemented their monopoly.
If you fined MS not only for the damage they caused, and money collected, but did so on all earnings it generated since they stole it, they wouldn't be a twentieth the company they are today. It's only because they put key competitors out of business and forced everyone to buy their OS, like it or not, that Gates has this money to give away.
and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves.
No, that it's easy for Gates to give it away because it's more than he could reasonably spend.
But if the people had not had to buy Windows just to get PC hardware some of them could have saved money through not only free alternatives but also a market of MS competitors and they could have spent more money directly on schooling, healthcare, and other things that Gates is now donating to.
but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual
Not at all. Had any blue-collar worker or small-business owner based his success off the same type of racketeering you'd label them a mobster. Faking product safety scares against competitors (DR DOS), blockading competitors out of markets and limiting retailers ability to stock other products unless they pay protection money (OS bundling "deals").
It's like how early spam, while hated, wasn't dealt with properly in law like it's starting to be now. If you started a spamming business (in a first-world country) now that forged headers to innocent ISPs you'd be shut down quickly and maybe jailed. If you did this ten years ago and then stopped you'd be hailed as a great businessman today simply because the law isn't retroactive.
[...] unless you can show me that MS somehow forced them to buy MS products.
Yeah, this is the complaint.
Microsoft by abusing its majority market-share forced manufacturers to pay for a copy of MS's latest OS for every PC sold, even if the customer didn't get the OS. Of course this meant they charged the same amount for a computer without MS's products as with them.
Also, various dirty tricks MS used, such as refusing to treat receipts as proof of ownership forced many institutions to buy redundant copies when audited to avoid lawsuits, despite being in total compliance w.r.t. copyright law itself.
Irritated by Slashdot's anti-Apple bias and hostility? A recent example, they post anti-iPad tirades but don't mention negative reviews of flash on mobile devices: (laptopmag.com).
You're an idiot. Perhaps you'd listen to the people who dislike Apple's Flash ban before going on about conspiracies.
It doesn't matter if Flash sucks on mobile devices, it sucks on full-powered PCs. Most of us hate it regardless just for its fucked-up UIs and instability. But we don't want anyone telling us what software we can't use. I've had a few instances on the PC where I've had to view a Flash document, like needing to open a.doc file. If it was an anti-flash warning, or flash-blocker installed by default, we'd probably never want to go around it but an absolute block on ever running the software just isn't acceptable.
In iOS you're restricted to what everyone else can handle. Welcome to kindergarten, here's your paste.
Yeah, you want welfare. You want all the taxpayers to be forced to create an authoritarian society, overreaching copyright law, and a fascist enforcement arm, then use that to threaten people who want to copy your book so that they'll pay you even though they don't need you at this stage, thus monetizing it for you at great cost to society in productivity and freedom.
As for your stories, go fuck yourself. If you don't like what someone else is doing, don't read it.
Actually that's exactly the soft of thing I thought you had in mind. And to compound the inability to understand what ordinary phone users want, you're now suggesting stats about cell towers. WTF is any non-geek going to do with such a thing? Heck what's a geek going to do with it other than bore other geeks with the details.
And of course, you totally overlook the suggestion of having it in an optional utils app and not adding to the default UI at all.
Forgive me though for not really seeing a graph of average signal strength as geeky. I think most users would recognize how the green bars got smaller as they went into the building, smaller again in the elevator, and now bigger by the window.
But even if it is a geeky detail, users need to know it. So you simply put it somewhere out of sight and let the geeky friends diagnose the issues.
Yes, that's a horrible user experience.
No, you're just assuming it would be. Who's saying that's going to be one of the default menu entries? "Call Mom", "Open Facebook", "Dump tons of debugging data in hex"
Neither is about what the user actually wants to do with the system. They are debugging facilities, not utilities for users.
And when the phone isn't working as expected, what does a user want but a way to get it fixed? Most just hand the phone to their geek friend here but the geek friend has to look somewhere.
Politics? WTF? It's nothing to do with politics. It's to do with maximising sales.
Bullshit. If it wasn't politics they'd have power-drain standards and Flash wouldn't be banned, it just wouldn't qualify.
Most of how Apple maximises sales is by designing excellent products that people want to use. If they made terrible design decisions such as yours, they wouldn't be successful.
Ahh yes, I continually forget the iPhone target user is so festeringly stupid they can't scroll past something that says "Troubleshooting" without clicking on it if they don't have trouble. Pretty sad view you have of your peers.
That whole one UI element I'd want to put somewhere is obviously going to RUIN IT ENTIRELY!!
The reasons for Flash not being allowed all come down to not degrading the iOS user experience.
Bullshit. The iFart app degrades the average user experience. Apple merely doesn't ship it by default. That's all they'd have to do with Flash.
Of course if Flash was on the iPhone people would be talking about its CPU speed...
Clearly the reason everything is, or isn't, allowed on the iPhone is to make sure you never use it in a way that its weaknesses could show - even if you really need to.
I had a cordless phone like that. It boasted great call clarity, and always delivered, by dropping calls when you went into another room where another phone would have simply sounded worse.
So by your reasoning, if I suspect the device (which might well be a frikken bomb!) might be from the police, I should simply respect the device and leave it because I *MIGHT* be hindering an investigation?
Sigh. No, numbnuts. I'm saying you'll get fucked over if you remove it despite all that being true.
And yes, living in the USA you should expect the secret box on your car to be from the police. Hello, reality calling.
Secret surveillance is illegal. When police act without a warrant or without public accountability, the police no longer represent the interests of the people they are hired to protect.
Duh. And you'll never successfully use the law to stop them.
They have no right to tag me for the purposes of tracking my whereabouts. My freedom to travel is guaranteed by the constitution.
No, dead wrong.
Your freedom to travel is guaranteed by your willingness to travel, restrictions be damned, over those who say otherwise if necessary. The constitution is just a list of restrictions, such as on travel, speech, etc, that we have already agreed are unjust.
NB quantity of choice does make people happy. In fact the contrary is true.
Oh, if only I had a small unit of cash for every time someone has used that as a reason to quash things they didn't find useful. Ideally that unit of cash would be replaced with a larger unit when the people then proceeded to argue that nobody would ever want to do such a thing despite obvious counter-examples.
Existing apps don't have battery draining problems. You're suggesting creation of a new method that would only be needed because Flash apps drain batteries.
Wrong. I've heard people comment that full-screen mapping applications drain more power than static browser windows. And of course movies would require more, but certain encodings and bitrates require more CPU again.
User satisfaction is NOT improved by adding extra choices which are bad choices.
How is it some extra choice? It'd be rolled into an overall score. For more than a hundred apps you need a way to sort and filter anyways so it's not extra cruft, just more information behind the existing UI.
When I read review they often rate an item in many categories and then boil that down to a single number. For people who don't care about the details that number is all they need and by default the store would sort by it. For people for whom battery life is paramount, they'd probably like the ability to sort by that, etc.
What a utterly stupid idea. A user experience no no. And to describe it as "correct" as if it's the only answer? Laughable!
It is the only correct answer, but only an idiot would assume that extra features have to have horrible UI. Stick it, a list of apps and power-drain per minute of use in a stats page with info about the cell towers and such. It doesn't have to be in everyone's face, but there needs to be a way for people to check.
It could be a free system utils app.
People like Apple products because they don't indulge in that kind of ridiculous geekiness.
No, because they don't think they need to. They think Apple's making choices based on the app quality, power drain, etc, instead of largely political reasons.
And their continued survival despite the thousands of apps in the store seem to indicate they're okay with choice.
Real people don't want to be monitoring the battery usage of individual apps on their phone. They just want good battery life.
Yes, which Apple is not giving them here. They're banning Flash, as if that makes all the rest of the apps draw less power.
They don't want to have to download 10 competing apps and evaluate each one to discover which uses less battery power.
Nor should they need to. If power draw stats were available and rolled into the overall app score, people wouldn't have to check for themselves.
But now all Apple has done is shot one scapegoat.
Apple does them a service if they don't allow a platform which will always produce apps that consume more power.
But that's not what Apple's doing. Jobs is banning other dev environments to retain control of the process, not to provide higher quality tools. This time it's easy, Flash does suck, but that's why they started there.
Slashdot Mirror
If it goes by results, he nearly deserves it.
He's belling the cat. We've been talking about a transparent society for a while now but he's actually doing it, and not just with the low-hanging fruit either.
He's far gutsier than any soldier of ours - fighting the easy fight against "insurgents" - in that he's taking risks without the world's largest military and endless Hellfire missiles backing him up.
Yeah. They all assume that aggression by some people gives you the right to carpet bomb innocents who in no way pushed for a war.
By analogy, imagine defending yourself from a pick-pocket in a mall with an M16 and claiming the casualties of war were responsible for policing themselves. This is the scale of your overseas operations.
Planning raids on specific non-hostiles is clearly threatening. If I did it to you our courts would agree it was a threat. When we do it to others they see it as a threat. We can easily plan for features of foreign countries without having to plan the bombing of what is currently an innocent person.
As for ill-conceived, shove it up your ass. It was a flat-out lie by a war criminal.
That's what you say until you see I'm using your face for target practice but then you'll get all upset. Just wait until you see the mock-up of your house I've built for practice...
It's possible to practice to be able to handle the military might of any potential adversary without pulling out pictures of their capital cities and planning which daycare centers to bomb. If you insist on practicing on real targets, plan raids on yourself.
Yeah, I get that that's their story. What the banks do isn't their problem because they're only partners...
But they partnered with the bank. They allowed them to use their logo, and they have a compliance program to make sure the bank is doing a proper job.
Crazy legal fictions don't change the reality of the situation which is that you have a Visa card with a Visa logo on it, much of the profit goes back to them, and they run the show. You might not be able to call them for anything, even reporting criminal actions at your bank, but they're still in charge.
Yes, the entire internet is useless because you can't expose broken servers in total safety.
Pack it up.
It has a Visa logo on it, it's Visa doing it. They only license their trademark to partners in good standing.
You want us to think they're astute enough to manage to push every little contract change, etc, to their partner banks, but NOT enough to be able to check for proper security practices?
You say that complete abolition is easier to explain than an arbitrary line in the sand, but I think that's contradicted by events in the last ten years.
Yes, easier to explain, and to morally justify. And easier to rally behind.
I was at a Iranian-vote rally a while back. The rally - shouting things like "remove Iranian dictator" and "help save the Iranian people" walked right past a bunch of Tamil having their own protest, saying almost the same things, and neither group batted an eye. Too caught up in their own experiences to see how they could team up with like-minded people around them and maybe get something done. And today the Iranian still have their dictator and the Tamils are still in racial-segregated refuge camps.
We've no big victories (yet) but the idea is being entertained and we've come within an inch of victory. As for abolishing the whole patent system, I haven't heard of any parliament in the developed world even starting a legislative proposal on that.
I see what you mean, but you're fighting the sense of entitlement by telling some people they can't have a patent while giving one to the guy standing right next to them.
You've got to understand that we don't give out patents to help spur invention, that's just a story for kids. We give patents because rent-seekers demanded it and we've always caved-in for the shrill demanding ones. This means you can't fight software patents by showing they slow development because all patents do.
If they believe they're got a right to keep you from doing something simply because they were the first to do any given thing then they'll never give up. They're looking to patent everything. Why not, they think? Even if you win now they'll keep lobbying, and far more broadly.
It's like rejecting the Canadian DMCA-equivalent. For years we've said no in a variety of forms and rejected their proposals. So now they're looking to stick it in ACTA and force us to take it.
Yes, fighting all patents is a bigger battle, but only by stopping them in their tracks will it ever really be over. Otherwise they'll keep shoving software/math/business-model patents at you in various guises, all the while feeling totally entitled to it.
Only by convincing everyone that it's sick for someone to horde something like that will a lasting victory be achieved. Otherwise you'll win, maybe, in one or two areas but face endless political battles, and then the USA will force everyone to accept a treaty and you'll end up losing anyways.
So yes, continue to fight your battles too, but be mindful of the overall one. We're not safe as long as the government runs around handing out monopolies to anyone.
You seemingly have never seen a computer before.
Shows how much you know. I first programmed a computer in 1976 [...]
Slow down grandpa. I'm not saying you haven't used them before, I'm saying you don't seem to understand them.
No, you explicitly said "seen", not "understand". And it's amusing how you flip on the spot from trying to claim you have more
You fail reading comprehension, and basic logic.
I said "seemingly". Of course your posts aren't magically appearing on a website without a computer so obviously you've used one.
But you really don't seem to get that there can be thousands of apps which you haven't installed and they don't make your life any more difficult. It doesn't matter if some of those apps are for debugging.
expertise with computers to "grandpa" comments when you find out I have way more than you do.
You've got experiences, I'll give you that...
That's the UI cost for your particular desire to have something optional. However you're no one special. There are thousands of people wanting their own particular optional thing. Even allowing for duplicates that's hundreds of things to scroll past.
This is what I mean. You act like everything has to be thrown in one giant long menu. Ever hear of sub-menus?
Yes, there are thousands of options that are needed, and hundreds (like you're arguing this one is) that could be cut. Far too many for any one scrollable list, set of icons, etc, even if it was trimmed to the bare minimum.
Far before here you've had to manage all this choice by, for instance, building an app store with categories, ratings, searching, etc.
Take a look at the preferences in Azureus for an example of what happens when you implement al the options anybody asks for.
Wow, an open source project without any firm UI guidelines is messy. Good thing newspapers are dead, we'd have to stop the presses for that one.
A perfect case in point. Either the microwave oven is badly designed (a device designed to generate heat shouldn't fail under it's own heat), or it is faulty.
Or the landlord didn't cut big enough vent holes into the housing, or ...
In the former case, the answer isn't for the manufacturer to add diagnostics, but for them to design it properly in the first place so it doesn't overheat.
Gee whiz, Batman. Really?
And while they're at it, why don't they make the iPhone never lose signal strength?
If it's faulty, you should be getting it repaired or replaced. It shouldn't be designed to run in a faulty state.
Until the unicorns replace an otherwise working unit, I'll just run it for less than twenty minutes at a time. Perhaps the manual, long gone, specifies a duty cycle. If the UI was clearer I wouldn't have had to guess.
Now, if it is faulty, and it has a display, then a message saying it is faulty would certainly be useful, in addition to the failsafe cut out. But that's a fatal error message, not the kind of monitoring whilst in use facility that you are suggesting.
I'd like a warning before a failsafe is tripped. And a message after saying Overheated - please wait or Melted - Replace unit.
Even during the time when Consumer Reports were criticising the antenna problems of the iPhone 4
And this is why Apple would never have good diagnostics, they'd provide proof of an Apple failing. This way there's nothing but rumors.
Being well designed, easy to understand, "It just works" and having excellent pre and post sales service are what matters to consumers and consumer reports. Not the availability of geeky diagnostics.
Having a reputation fo
No though, that isn't it. If it was, they'd have and publish standards. They do not. Politically motivated decisions are the exact opposite of reasonable metrics.
Do you even read the posts you reply to?
I've said endlessly that Flash is shit, even on PCs. I hated it before it was even dreamed that phones could run it. I know it sucks. And Adobe killed my dog.
But that still doesn't mean I want it banned.
For one, not all apps are youtube video. There are a lot of tiny flash apps that'd work well on a phone.
And even then I don't want anything banned without technical standards. If its power drain is too high, what's okay? If it's too choppy when playing a youtube video does that mean a video player has to refuse to play a too-high bitrate movie if it'd be laggy or is it acceptable in one app but not another?
Yes, under any decent set of technical standards Flash would be blocked, but then so would much other software. If that's what they were going for - actually improving the quality for the apps, I'd be for it. It's their store. But instead they're banning a competitors app - from the phone at all - on vague hearsay about battery drain.
You seemingly have never seen a computer before.
Shows how much you know. I first programmed a computer in 1976 [...]
Slow down grandpa. I'm not saying you haven't used them before, I'm saying you don't seem to understand them.
You keep talking about choice confusing people without understanding that you can hide the troubleshooting and all other advanced options easily - the users who don't tweak won't turn them on or download the app.
Choice that confuses people is badly handled choice. People don't want 80,000 options all at once - clearly. But many do want to customize their choice until there are far more than 80,000 possibilities. Witness kids and stickers/bedazzlers or people with phone backgrounds/ringtones/etc. If you had to choose a ringtone and such, at the store when buying your phone, it'd be overwhelming. If instead they give you a default and let you tweak I can ignore it and you can go to town. The only cost to me is scrolling past one of 'Change X' option - if and when I go to the menus to change something.
The app store already has far more choice than one person wants, all at once, but it makes an effort to break this choice down in ways that aren't stressful.
If you can skip games, or stock-market apps, or social apps, you can skip troubleshooting apps.
Making things optional is not an answer. If you make the battery monitoring optional, then you are saying that you are not solving the problem for all those people that don't take that option.
Wow, major reality distortion field.
It doesn't matter what you say, it matters if the problem is fixed. Hiding a battery meter and pretending all apps draw the same amount of power isn't fixing anything.
To fix it you'd need to have real standards, publish them, and incorporate them into the app-store testing and rating. As is, they've brushed the issue under the rug so that the non-technical don't know there's a problem. When their battery goes dead sooner they won't have been timing it so they'll just assume they used it more - result, one less-usable phone and one app unfairly unpunished by the marketplace because of market ignorance.
By not allowing Flash, you're solving the problem of Flash's battery eating behaviour (and other problems) for everyone.
Sigh. Solving one problem with in app, that as you point out doesn't work anyways, and leaving the problem in all other apps that simply haven't drawn Jobs' ire yet.
Had Apple set stability and power standards Flash couldn't meet they'd have also been setting a bar for other apps. It's like setting stricter regulations for oil drilling, for BP only.
Windows is like the iPhone here IMHO - neither provide the user with raw information they can use to diagnose anything.
This comes from a basic misunderstanding on your part as to the nature of a phone.
No, this is a bias on your part as to what a phone must be to everyone who has it.
Clearly there are people who recently wanted better signal strength diagnostics. It's great that you're content to sit back and wait for the manufacturer to issue a press release but that's not going to keep them honest if we all do that.
Diagnostics for users have no more place on a phone than on a microwave oven or a TV set.
Quite a lot you mean?
I've got a microwave that shuts down when it gets hot, I think. It doesn't display anything when it goes, it just shuts down. I couldn't (could but w/shouldn't) open it and put in a larger cooling fan but if I knew it was overheating I could run it at half-power. Sure, not something a user should have to know about to use it, but better that than tripping something and having it die for an hour when you're trying to cook dinner.
Until they do get it right, I want the ability to at least see why it's shutting off so
The Volstead Act passed with a 3-1 ratio.
In a plebiscite? No. Just politically motivated leaders following the religious push of the lobbying groups. That's never been a measure of popular support.
At the time it was passed, drinking was considered to be contributing to the downfall of society.
By some.
The people "jailed for having a drink" were, by definition and standard of the time, not "law-abiding citizens".
But that's just the point. We ruled the restrictions were unconstitutional. That means the law was wrong, not the people.
It's okay, because they're not to me yet
How is this statement even relevant?
This thread 'started' with someone saying "The police aren't interested in me, this isn't news". Someone replied saying that was a bad reason, you replied saying that it was not bad.
I also have no objections to being tracked, myself. My opinion is that being tracked does not constitute any serious breach of privacy.
It is bad because it doesn't take into account that one day you may have a reason for privacy from the police. There may be an unjust law you feel the need to break but because you've given the police the overreaching powers, be unable to. The famous example is defending your neighbors from racial persecution.
In fact, there are some people who do this all the time already. They're called "private investigators".
You missed this: But does that justify me sticking a transmitter in your belongings, just because I could already do a similar thing?
Why waste a human officer following a car, when technology could do it as well?
Because that limits the type of investigations they can do. Police should be arresting actual criminals, not monitoring a vast network of intelligence for an infraction they can arrest you for. To the degree we need this it's a higher-level organization like the FBI or CSIS, and with strong directives to follow a particular person or case - not just given free reign.
The police are very capable of finding car thieves, almost all murderers, etc. There's no good reason to give them more power on a general basis. It supports the creation of victimless crimes from something that would have once needed a complaint to warrant investigation.
abolishing the whole system isn't my goal [...] Software is different
No, it isn't. You've still got an idea that you aren't allowed to use because someone came along earlier and stuck a flag in it, claiming it for themselves.
You think software advances more quickly, but you've never seen mechanical development unfettered by patents. You think it's more-often used for direct gain but you've obviously never seen a farmer machine their own trailer-hitch, or a company have its engineering department fix a defect in their trucks' loading ramps, etc.
All patents are a restriction of your ability to develop what you thought of or seen. Your fundamental ability to manipulate the world around you.
but for how I use my own time and resources, I'll focus them on abolishing *software* patents
Totally the wrong way to go about it.
Look at what 'IP law' proponents say, things like "why doesn't software deserve the same protection as mechanical inventions?" Sure, software is intangible, but it's also the embodiment of a process. For all the differences you can draw, they can draw a similarity.
The problem is that society has been brainwashed by the rent-seeking parasites into thinking that inventions deserve monopoly control. But once they buy that, why shouldn't they extend the system to everything? And really, if we allow someone to claim a process because they reported that they did it to the government before anyone else did, why the hell not extend it to sexual positions, or chess plays as well?
As long as you want to take candy from all the kids in red shirts you'll have a problem, they'll see it as arbitrary and fight - when you remove the candy entirely it can work. Your arbitrary limits are no fair - if patents exist and have all these problems already why shouldn't they also cover software where they're just a little worse? To them you might as well be saying you want to ban vehicular patents but leave the rest, for the arbitrary nature of the distinction you make.
Instead, when they ask "why can't we patent software" if you say "because patents are a violation of the right to invent" you won't be trying to defend your arbitrary line in the sand.
Explain how a world without any patents allows you the freedom to make anything you can, if you invented it or merely saw it somewhere else. How a world with patents means you and your neighbor can both invent something but because his paperwork goes through faster than yours you don't even have the right to use your invention outside the lab.
Too many business owners have heard "patents are good for business" and blindly pursue them seeing only the immediate benefits to them without considering the cost to society, part of which is them. Without patents they might lose some fees, but without patents everything they buy would cost half as much. Without patents engineers could study competitors products, society would leap forward.
You seemingly have never seen a computer before. The things on the screen don't always have to be there. You could include a Tetris game and it'd take no room away from a Solitaire game, and neither would distract at all from messaging.
An app in the app-store wouldn't make anyone's phone more complicated unless they chose to install it, presumably because they had a problem they wished to debug.
Windows was made by people like you: If there's a tricky problem pass it on to the user
Space-ghost forbid. Windows is like the iPhone here IMHO - neither provide the user with raw information they can use to diagnose anything. Sure, Windows has a ton more options to click but they wouldn't provide a battery meter with per-app metering either for the same marketing/political reasons.
What I would do - this complexity you fear - is make the information available so that the marketplace could create a UI based on actual customer demand.
I don't know why the idea of debugging info that you just wouldn't look at bothers you so much. Do the words 'More Info' obligate you to look? Do you have to try every app in the store?
Derivative works do have an impact on how people feel. Your lack of respect for that shows your insensitivity and lack of class.
Yeah, and not being able to share your imaginings where those relate to copyrighted characters has an impact on how people feel. The only thing stopping us from having a participatory culture are laws we passed to help increase the public domain - something we no-longer need.
You with your righteous expectations have no room for the existence of others, let alone actually giving a shit about how they feel.
Hardly uncommon traits, but some of us respect others enough that not only would we not do it, we support laws protecting them (and ourselves) from it, rather than give jerks like you carte blanche to do whatever you wish.
You're perfectly happy playing the respect card, as long as it's to respect your feelings. But when it's time to respect others - who don't want to live artificially cloistered in a world of your obsolete dictates, you couldn't give a shit.
You, and other protectionists like you, are leeches on the ass of anyone who actually does something. By demanding others bow to your demands only because you've been there first you're a fine example of the greatest drain on our society.
It's too bad you don't respect people enough to NOT pass laws limiting them.
Jerk.
you act like we're all being forced to buy MS products and that every cent they've earned was all but stolen from our pockets
Ummm, largely, via unlawful and certainly immoral market control, it was. Every time they pulled a signature dirty trick they put a competitor out of business, or cemented their monopoly.
If you fined MS not only for the damage they caused, and money collected, but did so on all earnings it generated since they stole it, they wouldn't be a twentieth the company they are today. It's only because they put key competitors out of business and forced everyone to buy their OS, like it or not, that Gates has this money to give away.
and that, if it weren't stolen from our pockets, we'd be giving all that money to charity ourselves.
No, that it's easy for Gates to give it away because it's more than he could reasonably spend.
But if the people had not had to buy Windows just to get PC hardware some of them could have saved money through not only free alternatives but also a market of MS competitors and they could have spent more money directly on schooling, healthcare, and other things that Gates is now donating to.
but it's foolish and simply wrong to suggest that Gates is just a successful crook rather than an accomplished individual
Not at all. Had any blue-collar worker or small-business owner based his success off the same type of racketeering you'd label them a mobster. Faking product safety scares against competitors (DR DOS), blockading competitors out of markets and limiting retailers ability to stock other products unless they pay protection money (OS bundling "deals").
It's like how early spam, while hated, wasn't dealt with properly in law like it's starting to be now. If you started a spamming business (in a first-world country) now that forged headers to innocent ISPs you'd be shut down quickly and maybe jailed. If you did this ten years ago and then stopped you'd be hailed as a great businessman today simply because the law isn't retroactive.
He's simply acting like anyone with found money.
[...] unless you can show me that MS somehow forced them to buy MS products.
Yeah, this is the complaint.
Microsoft by abusing its majority market-share forced manufacturers to pay for a copy of MS's latest OS for every PC sold, even if the customer didn't get the OS. Of course this meant they charged the same amount for a computer without MS's products as with them.
Also, various dirty tricks MS used, such as refusing to treat receipts as proof of ownership forced many institutions to buy redundant copies when audited to avoid lawsuits, despite being in total compliance w.r.t. copyright law itself.
Irritated by Slashdot's anti-Apple bias and hostility? A recent example, they post anti-iPad tirades but don't mention negative reviews of flash on mobile devices: (laptopmag.com).
You're an idiot. Perhaps you'd listen to the people who dislike Apple's Flash ban before going on about conspiracies.
It doesn't matter if Flash sucks on mobile devices, it sucks on full-powered PCs. Most of us hate it regardless just for its fucked-up UIs and instability. But we don't want anyone telling us what software we can't use. I've had a few instances on the PC where I've had to view a Flash document, like needing to open a .doc file. If it was an anti-flash warning, or flash-blocker installed by default, we'd probably never want to go around it but an absolute block on ever running the software just isn't acceptable.
In iOS you're restricted to what everyone else can handle. Welcome to kindergarten, here's your paste.
Yeah, you want welfare. You want all the taxpayers to be forced to create an authoritarian society, overreaching copyright law, and a fascist enforcement arm, then use that to threaten people who want to copy your book so that they'll pay you even though they don't need you at this stage, thus monetizing it for you at great cost to society in productivity and freedom.
As for your stories, go fuck yourself. If you don't like what someone else is doing, don't read it.
No, that's cool. We just don't want it used in any way where the users don't get the code when they want it.
Wow, that's funny. Because Ballmer hates Apple and I'm saying things that don't praise Apple so I must be him.
Did you get the pipe with the detective costume?
Actually that's exactly the soft of thing I thought you had in mind. And to compound the inability to understand what ordinary phone users want, you're now suggesting stats about cell towers. WTF is any non-geek going to do with such a thing? Heck what's a geek going to do with it other than bore other geeks with the details.
And of course, you totally overlook the suggestion of having it in an optional utils app and not adding to the default UI at all.
Forgive me though for not really seeing a graph of average signal strength as geeky. I think most users would recognize how the green bars got smaller as they went into the building, smaller again in the elevator, and now bigger by the window.
But even if it is a geeky detail, users need to know it. So you simply put it somewhere out of sight and let the geeky friends diagnose the issues.
Yes, that's a horrible user experience.
No, you're just assuming it would be. Who's saying that's going to be one of the default menu entries? "Call Mom", "Open Facebook", "Dump tons of debugging data in hex"
Neither is about what the user actually wants to do with the system. They are debugging facilities, not utilities for users.
And when the phone isn't working as expected, what does a user want but a way to get it fixed? Most just hand the phone to their geek friend here but the geek friend has to look somewhere.
Politics? WTF? It's nothing to do with politics. It's to do with maximising sales.
Bullshit. If it wasn't politics they'd have power-drain standards and Flash wouldn't be banned, it just wouldn't qualify.
Most of how Apple maximises sales is by designing excellent products that people want to use. If they made terrible design decisions such as yours, they wouldn't be successful.
Ahh yes, I continually forget the iPhone target user is so festeringly stupid they can't scroll past something that says "Troubleshooting" without clicking on it if they don't have trouble. Pretty sad view you have of your peers.
That whole one UI element I'd want to put somewhere is obviously going to RUIN IT ENTIRELY!!
The reasons for Flash not being allowed all come down to not degrading the iOS user experience.
Bullshit. The iFart app degrades the average user experience. Apple merely doesn't ship it by default. That's all they'd have to do with Flash.
Of course if Flash was on the iPhone people would be talking about its CPU speed...
Clearly the reason everything is, or isn't, allowed on the iPhone is to make sure you never use it in a way that its weaknesses could show - even if you really need to.
I had a cordless phone like that. It boasted great call clarity, and always delivered, by dropping calls when you went into another room where another phone would have simply sounded worse.
So by your reasoning, if I suspect the device (which might well be a frikken bomb!) might be from the police, I should simply respect the device and leave it because I *MIGHT* be hindering an investigation?
Sigh. No, numbnuts. I'm saying you'll get fucked over if you remove it despite all that being true.
And yes, living in the USA you should expect the secret box on your car to be from the police. Hello, reality calling.
Secret surveillance is illegal. When police act without a warrant or without public accountability, the police no longer represent the interests of the people they are hired to protect.
Duh. And you'll never successfully use the law to stop them.
They have no right to tag me for the purposes of tracking my whereabouts. My freedom to travel is guaranteed by the constitution.
No, dead wrong.
Your freedom to travel is guaranteed by your willingness to travel, restrictions be damned, over those who say otherwise if necessary. The constitution is just a list of restrictions, such as on travel, speech, etc, that we have already agreed are unjust.
NB quantity of choice does make people happy. In fact the contrary is true.
Oh, if only I had a small unit of cash for every time someone has used that as a reason to quash things they didn't find useful. Ideally that unit of cash would be replaced with a larger unit when the people then proceeded to argue that nobody would ever want to do such a thing despite obvious counter-examples.
Existing apps don't have battery draining problems. You're suggesting creation of a new method that would only be needed because Flash apps drain batteries.
Wrong. I've heard people comment that full-screen mapping applications drain more power than static browser windows. And of course movies would require more, but certain encodings and bitrates require more CPU again.
User satisfaction is NOT improved by adding extra choices which are bad choices.
How is it some extra choice? It'd be rolled into an overall score. For more than a hundred apps you need a way to sort and filter anyways so it's not extra cruft, just more information behind the existing UI.
When I read review they often rate an item in many categories and then boil that down to a single number. For people who don't care about the details that number is all they need and by default the store would sort by it. For people for whom battery life is paramount, they'd probably like the ability to sort by that, etc.
What a utterly stupid idea. A user experience no no. And to describe it as "correct" as if it's the only answer? Laughable!
It is the only correct answer, but only an idiot would assume that extra features have to have horrible UI. Stick it, a list of apps and power-drain per minute of use in a stats page with info about the cell towers and such. It doesn't have to be in everyone's face, but there needs to be a way for people to check.
It could be a free system utils app.
People like Apple products because they don't indulge in that kind of ridiculous geekiness.
No, because they don't think they need to. They think Apple's making choices based on the app quality, power drain, etc, instead of largely political reasons.
And their continued survival despite the thousands of apps in the store seem to indicate they're okay with choice.
Real people don't want to be monitoring the battery usage of individual apps on their phone. They just want good battery life.
Yes, which Apple is not giving them here. They're banning Flash, as if that makes all the rest of the apps draw less power.
They don't want to have to download 10 competing apps and evaluate each one to discover which uses less battery power.
Nor should they need to. If power draw stats were available and rolled into the overall app score, people wouldn't have to check for themselves.
But now all Apple has done is shot one scapegoat.
Apple does them a service if they don't allow a platform which will always produce apps that consume more power.
But that's not what Apple's doing. Jobs is banning other dev environments to retain control of the process, not to provide higher quality tools. This time it's easy, Flash does suck, but that's why they started there.