or we could subsidize the development of said drugs and really employ the public benefit by thereafter making them free......Oh wait, we already do the former!
It's not that they're perfect, it's that they're good enough. Lots of people use Apple products and have complaints about them, it's just that they have LESS complaints about Apple than anyone else. Case in point, Apple's conditioning of people to have a dock with 10000x icons on it (through the default installation, the use of it in the Apple store, and the way in which almost everyone actually does this), seems absolutely RIDICULOUS to me. This particular problem can be alleviated through other software (namely Quicksilver), but even if it couldn't I probably wouldn't go back to Windows over it.
Stop creating a false dichotomy and look around a bit.
Really? what if the customer doesn't care? What if the customer implicitly wants Apple to be a gatekeeper for them? I mean that certainly seems to be the case considering all the missing apps / features / etc combined with great sales numbers.
Except that what you call a necessity isn't what other people call a necessity. Just look at the number of 1st and 2nd gen iPhones that were sold. EVERY single one of those purchasers did NOT consider those features necessities.
Just like you state later on "I don't know about you, but I...." Not everyone is like you. You're priorities simply aren't the priorities of other people.
Apple's closed nature is simply a function of a significant group of people that don't mind "closed" systems. Those people prefer to pay lots of money, accepting (in the case of the iPhone) a "closed" or "limited" device and in return be able to call Apple or goto an Apple store and basically never hear "that is unsupported" (unless they ran out of warranty, or obvious situations like spilling water on your phone).
Love it or hate it you've got to admit that a lot of people really like the experience that Apple provides. It's not crack, and it's not inherently some sort of moral evil (like crack is (due to it's ridiculously addictive nature and proven record of ruining lives but I digress)).
Some call it catchup and others don't care. That is that most iPhone users are willing to accept some measure of freedom loss in order to gain a consistently high level of user experience. It gets so old to hear people whine about what Apple won't give them. It's obvious by now that what they give you is sufficient for a really significant number of people. We get it, it's not for you. I could sit here and complain about how GM doesn't make any cars I want, but if GM has happy customers and is doing well then I'm just being a troll.
More importantly stop and consider the large number of apple purchasers who are relatively ignorant about technology and rely on Apple to control things for them. These people need someone to limit them and Apple is VERY VERY concerned with not providing them enough rope to hang themselves with. The reason is that these people hold Apple liable for even the most minor of problems. Not only do they exercise this through future purchases but also through Apple support. Just go into an Apple store and look at the sorts of support issues that a large percentage of people are in there...essentially they're there for things that you and I (and all of slashdot) already know about. The last thing that Apple needs is for even more people to show up going "I tried to find XXX on google maps and all I found was some YYYY (strange content)" because they think the new google app is something that it's not.
Simply put do not underestimate the ignorance of a lot of Apple's customers, and the level of support (time, money) that Apple puts into supporting these people. THAT is the reason they can charge so much and why they're bastards about user experience. Yes it's slightly nefarious, but more importantly it's good business as it makes them profitable and it makes most of their customers really happy, happy enough to keep buying lots of stuff. Fortunately they manage to provide for all of those people and to a lesser extent for the rest of us, enough to satisfy a significant number of non-ignorant people.
Personally I'd prefer if they catered more towards people like myself, but oh well.
Interesting point. The collectivized aspect is that those who dont have claims subsidize those who do (as premiums dont correspond directly to payouts, as in you have the $20k medical bill accident that you mentioned and you're premiums dont skyrocket, in fact you probably don't cover that $20k with your premiums for years if ever), and the fact that your premium is affected by your use of claims is the privatized aspect.
Thanks for clarifying!
Only when their customers and potential customers are capable and actually DO represent their interests through money. It's an unlikely situation when someone knowingly votes against their self interest, but people frequently and knowingly do not wield their money in their own self interest. So if people don't spend they're money in their self interest than what the market does and tells us is not a reflection of those interests and you end up with things like the gross food that is mass produced. The power of "saving money" (when consuming) in our consumer culture outweighs so many of the self interests of consumers that the market has ceased to operate in the conceptual free market fashion.
Not to mention that when you're poor you're often not faced with choices and you're forced into supporting companies and their operations when you're rather not.
The market relies on this operation of money as a representation of self interest to gain it's morality because it inherently has none. And in areas like health and education a huge dose of morality is a fundamental requirement.
Specious argument because you disregard all the poor and working class people that both champion the public school system and actually send their kids there.
The discussion is political, and it's about jobs. The entire reason this program exists is to fund defense contractors and their employees. I'm not gonna bother to look it up but it's something like an aggregate of 100,000+ jobs.
How is it not all information when he says phone calls, texts emails originating in or going to afghanistan / pakistan.
There's a far cry difference between border searches (for physical goods) and spying on people.
Lack of prosecution only implies innocence in simple cases of unilateral DA's prosecuting. It's an entirely different game when politics come to bear full force.
YOu really think that the bush administration DoJ was going to prosecute bush admin officials?????? Especially when the president himself is the one behind this? PLEASE.
Go ahead pretending the bush administration wasn't corrupt as hell. Go ahead and pretend that they didnt go on an absolute rampage with abuse of power. Go ahead and pretend that they didn't have severe special interests in mind and do anything they could to help them out. Go ahead and pretend that the bush administration wasn't a group of people who made plans for a decade while they were out of power. Go ahead and pretend that they're just an innocent group who was looking out for you and me.
"well just cuz its unknowable means we have to assume innocence"...it's not a court here. Unfortunately they set it up so that we can't know and are only allowed to piece it together from the fragments that we have. Again I cite the operation of plausible deniability.
yes you're conception is plausible BUT UNLIKELY. to add some more occam's razor quality knowledge "if it smells like a fish, it's probably a fish"/useless:(
the pattern is the insight. I told you I wouldnt call it insight though.
Yes the republicans have 1000x the balls of the democrats because their base is 1000x stronger.
Occam's razor is arbitrary. It doesn't take into account corruption and has us presuppose that power hungry people actually in power are just innocent. If you really want some folk wisdom how about "absolute power corrupts absolutely"...try applying THAT to this situation.
Wow, you really have no concept at all of why they didn't prosecute. You live in a fantasy world where lack of prosecution implies innocence.
To deny that the right would totally go ape-shit over the left trying to prosecute the bush admin on this is insane. And yes the the DoJ COULD try to do it on their own but Obama would get blamed, and the same situation would ensue. Obama wants to move on so that the right can't keep lambasting him on these issues, so he just drops them because its politically better to drop them than to be a martyr.
Seriously man stop living in a right wing tower isolated from the potentialities of the bush administration being thoroughly corrupt.
Yeah you're right national security claims allow wholesale tapping! / please. Yoo doesn't want to tap suspects but EVERYONE....thats some national interest claim.
Hahah so everyone else collectively looks at Yoo's opinions and calls them insane but he had no malicious intent. It's just a big coincidence?
Occam's razor is bullshit and exactly the principle behind plausible deniability. without it then plausible deniability doesnt work.
The obvious pattern which YOU cant see is that this administration was corrupt beyond belief.
No one prosecuted because congress wanted to get reelected and feared that the right would lambast the shit out of them, like they already do. what is politically pheasible is often short of what is right.
Glad you have to resort to name calling and insults.
Forgot to mention that advocating wholesale spying on all traffic between the US and Afghanistan/Pakistan is clearly unconstitutional. But according to Yoo the president in order to fulfill his constitutional requirement to protect us is supposed to violate the constitution in spying on all traffic.
Just because a political body, congress, refuses to proescute doesn't mean nothing wrong happened. It's in their political interest to drop it because there is no public outrage. Many have suggested this is the specific reason why Obama decided not to release the torture pictures after all, because there hasn't been enough outrage over the torture to justify the political flack from the right that he would take over releasing the pics.
In any case politicians are motivated by political forces and their action or inaction has little to do with what is right (like prosecuting people for crimes).
The legal justification for the Bush administrationâ(TM)s warrantless wiretapping program was handled with unprecedented secrecy that sidestepped usual Justice Department procedure, the Washington Post reports. Only three Justice officialsâ"John Ashcroft, John Yoo, and staff attorney James Bakerâ"were made aware of the program and participated in drafting memos that established its legality.
Yoo drafted the controversial memos in November 2001, but his superiors didn't learn of them until late 2003. They put âoewarrantless searches that protect the national securityâ outside of the purview of FISA, a report by five government inspectors general says. The memos thus dodged a rigorous departmental review process. The Bush administrationâ(TM)s arrangements were âoeextraordinary and inappropriate,â the report says, and âoeunderminedâ the Justice Department's function.
And long before this report was generated people within the DoJ expressed concerns about the legality of the program (remember that originally Yoo, Ashcroft (maybe), and James Baker were the only DoJ staff to know of the program (out of around a dozen people in total ) which basically means they had concerns with the memo's that Yoo wrote (in fact this is usually what they had problems with) ). It's no small coincidence that Yoo is the guy that gave the Bush admin legal memos for both spying and torture, both of which have turned out to be not exactly legal.
But back to the report: Deficiencies in Yoo's memorandum identified by his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel and Office of the Deputy Attorney General later became critical to DOJ's decision to reassess the legality of the program in 2003.
Also interesting to note that after legal concerns had been expressed: It was then explained to the group that [Deputy Attorney General James] Comey "has problems" with some activities authorized under the program. Mueller's notes state that Cheney suggested that "the president may have to reauthorize without the blessing of DOJ."
Anyway you might also want to consider this quote, considering that Yoo is the guy that said that nothing short of organ failure or death was torture: But I would like to say that it is my understanding that the United States does not engage in torture, and that the reports of abuses that have occurred in Iraq or elsewhere appear to have been the result of individuals acting outside official policy.
Of course when you make a memo defining out of existence basically all forms of torture you can claim that no one was tortured.
You might want to learn the facts about how basically everything this guy authorized was later rescinded and called into question.
I'm glad that his legal theory was supported by his colleagues/NOT:(
And that ultimately is why the administrations story is unbelievable. They just happened to ask the one lawyer who has a crackpot theory about FISA not applying. It just happened to be a coincidence!
Unfortunately John Yoo was much more biased than you allege that I am:( According to him the constitutional role of the government ("protect" us) is to violate the constitution (spy on all traffic):(
Or maybe they should eliminate the profit that the market will charge and make the insurance that is mandatory actually be based on risk, not risk + profit.
Except that you're required by law to have it. Not quite the same as optional insurance on a ship.
The purpose now is to make sure that when someone hits you that you don't have to sue them to get your damages covered, because they'll have insurance which will pay for your damages.
So then why do they even need this "Pay-As-You-Drive" insurance if they already have it? I guess they're going to just get more fine grained with it.
Anyway the easiest way to cheat on your insurance is to collaborate with your family by doing something like making the person with the best driving record the official driver of the most expensive to insure vehicle and making the person with the worst record the drier of the cheaper to insure vehicle. But I digress.
10 yrs ago (my only speed related accident, which was only because I tried to take a corner under the speed limit but too fast for the corner) was my 1st year driving. The other accidents can't be considered speed related when 1) I was stopped 2) I was in a pack that had just taken off from a stop light going about 30mph in a 40mph (ie NO ONE considers them speed-related) 3) in cases 1 & 2 the INSURANCE company assigned me no blame.
But thanks for using your AC insight, to speculate wildly.
Oh so laws that you consider obsolete are laws which you don't have to follow because they're "not applicable"??? Funny that every other lawyer that read his briefs said WTF.
I wouldn't call this administrations, nor John Yoo's track record an "insight" but I would call it suggestive.
Sorry for the confusion. The parent to my post said that most accidents happen close to home, so that the really risk part of trips is the first 10 or so miles. Therefore supposing you took a 2000 mile trip across country 1990 miles of it would be relatively risk free. However if you racked up those same 2000 miles by taking 2000 10 mile trips the risk would be HUGELY increased. Therefore overall miles wouldn't seem to be such a good indicator of actual risk.
In short the 2000 miles in traffic lights and parking lots (short trips) would be significantly more dangerous IF it is indeed true that most accidents occur in the first 5-10 miles, near home.
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or we could subsidize the development of said drugs and really employ the public benefit by thereafter making them free......Oh wait, we already do the former!
It's not that they're perfect, it's that they're good enough. Lots of people use Apple products and have complaints about them, it's just that they have LESS complaints about Apple than anyone else. Case in point, Apple's conditioning of people to have a dock with 10000x icons on it (through the default installation, the use of it in the Apple store, and the way in which almost everyone actually does this), seems absolutely RIDICULOUS to me. This particular problem can be alleviated through other software (namely Quicksilver), but even if it couldn't I probably wouldn't go back to Windows over it.
Stop creating a false dichotomy and look around a bit.
Really? what if the customer doesn't care? What if the customer implicitly wants Apple to be a gatekeeper for them? I mean that certainly seems to be the case considering all the missing apps / features / etc combined with great sales numbers.
Except that what you call a necessity isn't what other people call a necessity. Just look at the number of 1st and 2nd gen iPhones that were sold. EVERY single one of those purchasers did NOT consider those features necessities.
Just like you state later on "I don't know about you, but I...." Not everyone is like you. You're priorities simply aren't the priorities of other people.
Apple's closed nature is simply a function of a significant group of people that don't mind "closed" systems. Those people prefer to pay lots of money, accepting (in the case of the iPhone) a "closed" or "limited" device and in return be able to call Apple or goto an Apple store and basically never hear "that is unsupported" (unless they ran out of warranty, or obvious situations like spilling water on your phone).
Love it or hate it you've got to admit that a lot of people really like the experience that Apple provides. It's not crack, and it's not inherently some sort of moral evil (like crack is (due to it's ridiculously addictive nature and proven record of ruining lives but I digress)).
Some call it catchup and others don't care. That is that most iPhone users are willing to accept some measure of freedom loss in order to gain a consistently high level of user experience. It gets so old to hear people whine about what Apple won't give them. It's obvious by now that what they give you is sufficient for a really significant number of people. We get it, it's not for you. I could sit here and complain about how GM doesn't make any cars I want, but if GM has happy customers and is doing well then I'm just being a troll.
More importantly stop and consider the large number of apple purchasers who are relatively ignorant about technology and rely on Apple to control things for them. These people need someone to limit them and Apple is VERY VERY concerned with not providing them enough rope to hang themselves with. The reason is that these people hold Apple liable for even the most minor of problems. Not only do they exercise this through future purchases but also through Apple support. Just go into an Apple store and look at the sorts of support issues that a large percentage of people are in there...essentially they're there for things that you and I (and all of slashdot) already know about. The last thing that Apple needs is for even more people to show up going "I tried to find XXX on google maps and all I found was some YYYY (strange content)" because they think the new google app is something that it's not.
Simply put do not underestimate the ignorance of a lot of Apple's customers, and the level of support (time, money) that Apple puts into supporting these people. THAT is the reason they can charge so much and why they're bastards about user experience. Yes it's slightly nefarious, but more importantly it's good business as it makes them profitable and it makes most of their customers really happy, happy enough to keep buying lots of stuff. Fortunately they manage to provide for all of those people and to a lesser extent for the rest of us, enough to satisfy a significant number of non-ignorant people.
Personally I'd prefer if they catered more towards people like myself, but oh well.
Interesting point. The collectivized aspect is that those who dont have claims subsidize those who do (as premiums dont correspond directly to payouts, as in you have the $20k medical bill accident that you mentioned and you're premiums dont skyrocket, in fact you probably don't cover that $20k with your premiums for years if ever), and the fact that your premium is affected by your use of claims is the privatized aspect. Thanks for clarifying!
Only when their customers and potential customers are capable and actually DO represent their interests through money. It's an unlikely situation when someone knowingly votes against their self interest, but people frequently and knowingly do not wield their money in their own self interest. So if people don't spend they're money in their self interest than what the market does and tells us is not a reflection of those interests and you end up with things like the gross food that is mass produced. The power of "saving money" (when consuming) in our consumer culture outweighs so many of the self interests of consumers that the market has ceased to operate in the conceptual free market fashion.
Not to mention that when you're poor you're often not faced with choices and you're forced into supporting companies and their operations when you're rather not.
The market relies on this operation of money as a representation of self interest to gain it's morality because it inherently has none. And in areas like health and education a huge dose of morality is a fundamental requirement.
Specious argument because you disregard all the poor and working class people that both champion the public school system and actually send their kids there.
is health care the role of any government in your opinion? or does the market get to decide that my health isn't valuable?
That's because politicians dont want to cut funding and have ensuing job losses :(
The discussion is political, and it's about jobs. The entire reason this program exists is to fund defense contractors and their employees. I'm not gonna bother to look it up but it's something like an aggregate of 100,000+ jobs.
Our existing aircraft would let us control the skies, and so will the F-35. The F-22 is a hold over from the cold war era.
How is it not all information when he says phone calls, texts emails originating in or going to afghanistan / pakistan.
/useless :(
There's a far cry difference between border searches (for physical goods) and spying on people.
Lack of prosecution only implies innocence in simple cases of unilateral DA's prosecuting. It's an entirely different game when politics come to bear full force.
YOu really think that the bush administration DoJ was going to prosecute bush admin officials?????? Especially when the president himself is the one behind this? PLEASE.
Go ahead pretending the bush administration wasn't corrupt as hell. Go ahead and pretend that they didnt go on an absolute rampage with abuse of power. Go ahead and pretend that they didn't have severe special interests in mind and do anything they could to help them out. Go ahead and pretend that the bush administration wasn't a group of people who made plans for a decade while they were out of power. Go ahead and pretend that they're just an innocent group who was looking out for you and me.
"well just cuz its unknowable means we have to assume innocence"...it's not a court here. Unfortunately they set it up so that we can't know and are only allowed to piece it together from the fragments that we have. Again I cite the operation of plausible deniability.
yes you're conception is plausible BUT UNLIKELY. to add some more occam's razor quality knowledge "if it smells like a fish, it's probably a fish"
the pattern is the insight. I told you I wouldnt call it insight though.
Yes the republicans have 1000x the balls of the democrats because their base is 1000x stronger.
Occam's razor is arbitrary. It doesn't take into account corruption and has us presuppose that power hungry people actually in power are just innocent. If you really want some folk wisdom how about "absolute power corrupts absolutely"...try applying THAT to this situation.
Wow, you really have no concept at all of why they didn't prosecute. You live in a fantasy world where lack of prosecution implies innocence.
To deny that the right would totally go ape-shit over the left trying to prosecute the bush admin on this is insane. And yes the the DoJ COULD try to do it on their own but Obama would get blamed, and the same situation would ensue. Obama wants to move on so that the right can't keep lambasting him on these issues, so he just drops them because its politically better to drop them than to be a martyr.
Seriously man stop living in a right wing tower isolated from the potentialities of the bush administration being thoroughly corrupt.
Yeah you're right national security claims allow wholesale tapping! / please. Yoo doesn't want to tap suspects but EVERYONE....thats some national interest claim.
Hahah so everyone else collectively looks at Yoo's opinions and calls them insane but he had no malicious intent. It's just a big coincidence? Occam's razor is bullshit and exactly the principle behind plausible deniability. without it then plausible deniability doesnt work. The obvious pattern which YOU cant see is that this administration was corrupt beyond belief.
No one prosecuted because congress wanted to get reelected and feared that the right would lambast the shit out of them, like they already do. what is politically pheasible is often short of what is right.
Glad you have to resort to name calling and insults.
Forgot to mention that advocating wholesale spying on all traffic between the US and Afghanistan/Pakistan is clearly unconstitutional. But according to Yoo the president in order to fulfill his constitutional requirement to protect us is supposed to violate the constitution in spying on all traffic.
Just because a political body, congress, refuses to proescute doesn't mean nothing wrong happened. It's in their political interest to drop it because there is no public outrage. Many have suggested this is the specific reason why Obama decided not to release the torture pictures after all, because there hasn't been enough outrage over the torture to justify the political flack from the right that he would take over releasing the pics.
In any case politicians are motivated by political forces and their action or inaction has little to do with what is right (like prosecuting people for crimes).
The legal justification for the Bush administrationâ(TM)s warrantless wiretapping program was handled with unprecedented secrecy that sidestepped usual Justice Department procedure, the Washington Post reports. Only three Justice officialsâ"John Ashcroft, John Yoo, and staff attorney James Bakerâ"were made aware of the program and participated in drafting memos that established its legality. Yoo drafted the controversial memos in November 2001, but his superiors didn't learn of them until late 2003. They put âoewarrantless searches that protect the national securityâ outside of the purview of FISA, a report by five government inspectors general says. The memos thus dodged a rigorous departmental review process. The Bush administrationâ(TM)s arrangements were âoeextraordinary and inappropriate,â the report says, and âoeunderminedâ the Justice Department's function.
:(
And long before this report was generated people within the DoJ expressed concerns about the legality of the program (remember that originally Yoo, Ashcroft (maybe), and James Baker were the only DoJ staff to know of the program (out of around a dozen people in total ) which basically means they had concerns with the memo's that Yoo wrote (in fact this is usually what they had problems with) ). It's no small coincidence that Yoo is the guy that gave the Bush admin legal memos for both spying and torture, both of which have turned out to be not exactly legal.
But back to the report:
Deficiencies in Yoo's memorandum identified by his successors in the Office of Legal Counsel and Office of the Deputy Attorney General later became critical to DOJ's decision to reassess the legality of the program in 2003.
Also interesting to note that after legal concerns had been expressed:
It was then explained to the group that [Deputy Attorney General James] Comey "has problems" with some activities authorized under the program. Mueller's notes state that Cheney suggested that "the president may have to reauthorize without the blessing of DOJ."
Anyway you might also want to consider this quote, considering that Yoo is the guy that said that nothing short of organ failure or death was torture:
But I would like to say that it is my understanding that the United States does not engage in torture, and that the reports of abuses that have occurred in Iraq or elsewhere appear to have been the result of individuals acting outside official policy.
Of course when you make a memo defining out of existence basically all forms of torture you can claim that no one was tortured.
You might want to learn the facts about how basically everything this guy authorized was later rescinded and called into question.
But hey I'm the biased one for pointing it out
I'm glad that his legal theory was supported by his colleagues /NOT :(
:( According to him the constitutional role of the government ("protect" us) is to violate the constitution (spy on all traffic) :(
And that ultimately is why the administrations story is unbelievable. They just happened to ask the one lawyer who has a crackpot theory about FISA not applying. It just happened to be a coincidence!
Unfortunately John Yoo was much more biased than you allege that I am
Or maybe they should eliminate the profit that the market will charge and make the insurance that is mandatory actually be based on risk, not risk + profit.
Except that you're required by law to have it. Not quite the same as optional insurance on a ship.
The purpose now is to make sure that when someone hits you that you don't have to sue them to get your damages covered, because they'll have insurance which will pay for your damages.
So then why do they even need this "Pay-As-You-Drive" insurance if they already have it? I guess they're going to just get more fine grained with it.
Anyway the easiest way to cheat on your insurance is to collaborate with your family by doing something like making the person with the best driving record the official driver of the most expensive to insure vehicle and making the person with the worst record the drier of the cheaper to insure vehicle. But I digress.
10 yrs ago (my only speed related accident, which was only because I tried to take a corner under the speed limit but too fast for the corner) was my 1st year driving. The other accidents can't be considered speed related when 1) I was stopped 2) I was in a pack that had just taken off from a stop light going about 30mph in a 40mph (ie NO ONE considers them speed-related) 3) in cases 1 & 2 the INSURANCE company assigned me no blame.
But thanks for using your AC insight, to speculate wildly.
Oh so laws that you consider obsolete are laws which you don't have to follow because they're "not applicable"??? Funny that every other lawyer that read his briefs said WTF.
I wouldn't call this administrations, nor John Yoo's track record an "insight" but I would call it suggestive.
Sorry for the confusion. The parent to my post said that most accidents happen close to home, so that the really risk part of trips is the first 10 or so miles. Therefore supposing you took a 2000 mile trip across country 1990 miles of it would be relatively risk free. However if you racked up those same 2000 miles by taking 2000 10 mile trips the risk would be HUGELY increased. Therefore overall miles wouldn't seem to be such a good indicator of actual risk.
In short the 2000 miles in traffic lights and parking lots (short trips) would be significantly more dangerous IF it is indeed true that most accidents occur in the first 5-10 miles, near home.