The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
And they seem to be winning that fight. Putting aside your subjective argument about morality, wouldn't you consider them to be greater experts on the current state of copyright law as a result?
You realize that Mac OS X is based directly on NeXTSTEP, right? And NeXTSTEP ran well on 25 MHz 68040 computers!
Something would be really fucked if Mac OS X couldn't run well on the Atom processors, which in terms of processing power are actually on par with high-end x86 systems from late 2006.
So what? Software grows over time. Windows 7 is based on Windows NT 3.1, and it used to run just fine on 486s as well. Are you arguing that neither platform should be allowed to exceed the system requirements of their predecessors?
Superdeterminism is no different that saying that god made the universe this morning just before you wake up with all the memories included...it requires incredible fine-tuning of initial parameters.
Eh, it's no more hand-wavy than any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, especially the standard Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation. I mean, "consciousness causes collapse" or the notion that it's inevitable that some world resemble ours because all possible paths are taken? Meh.
And P was saying that it's impossible to predict everything, not that everything could be predetermined.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation.
Why?
I mean, I can see arguments for preferring a central fusebox or breaker panel, but I am completely flummoxed about why someone would prefer to have the option to go without shuttering. I mean, what advantage do you get other than the warm, fuzzy feeling of "You're not the boss of me!"
The media loves Obama and once loved Palin the same way -- they love the celebrity of the candidate, and not the actual substance of the person or their policies. Modern news organizations, especially cable news, are far more interested in a salable narrative than a dry recitation of facts. They like controversy over truth and flash over substance. After all, that's what the people tune in for, and it's what takes the least effort to produce.
The real bias in the media isn't liberal or conservative -- it's laziness.
Yet until mid-20's, I was lazy as hell. Once I turned that around, life has become very easy.
For the love of God, HOW? This still plagues me today, and I could use some advice (at least better than "Just do it," which is effectively saying, "Quit pretending it's a real problem.")
Why? Because women aren't jobs, they're people. And I wouldn't want to spend my time forging a relationship with another person who doesn't understand that she's not a commodity I'm supposed to win, but a person with whom I'm hoping to share some nice experiences.
I think that's a brutally unfair assessment of the GP's argument. One can compare apples and oranges in the same sentence without implying that they're the same thing. In fact, I'd say that a more fair assessment of the post would be that it's better to pick people and experiences over material commodities, and I'm honestly surprised that anyone would read it differently.
Italy had 1.29 murders per 100,000 people in 2000. We had 4.28 per 100,000 people. (link)
I guess those harsh prison sentences are going wonders for stopping murder here. Gosh, you'd think that with only 9% of the world population and 22% of the world's prison population that American society would be safe, right?
No, it really isn't. In the US at least, the prison system is officially called the Department of Corrections (DoC), and prisons are also commonly referred to as correctional facilities.
Sure, and since we changed the War Department to the Department of Defense, we've only used our military in self-defense, right? Names are just names, and they don't necessarily reflect the true intentions of the times much less modern intentions years after a name essentially became a meaningless label for an institution that's grown beyond it.
Plus, "corrections" could easily refer to either rehabilitation or deterrence. Rehabilitation was a dominant theory in the 60's & 70's, but deterrence was the dominant political theory from the 80's onward with the massive push towards increased sentences and mandatory sentencing guidelines.
At one point I might have thought rehabilitation was possible, but as we learn more about genes we discover the brains in some people are simply wired for aggression, or inability to feel emotions, or inability to sympathize. These persons can not be rehabilitated and should be removed from society, especially if they've already spent time in prison (apparently they learned nothing from their first offense).
But then on the other hand, you should consider things like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Experiment, and the hotly debated "Broken Windows" theory of crimefighting. Anyone who's ever been in/at a mob knows personally how much their behavior can be swayed by their surroundings, and it's no surprise that if you put someone in a building full of aggressive, hard criminals that they're going to learn some bad lessons.
Some people are bad apples, some people are in bad situations, and some people just made a bad decision. Most criminals are probably some mix of the three, and a system that could better sort through criminals to find out why they commit crime and that tried to save those that could be saved would be far more just and efficient than one that just simply takes people who failed once, drops them into a breeding ground for hard criminals, and then raises hard barriers against them rejoining society as a full member.
Nope. It is impossible, even at the most basic theoretical level, to predict everything. Basic physics theory shows that it is impossible to even just measure everything to an arbitrary degree of precision regardless of what instrumentation you may have. Go back and read your Heisenberg.
Actually, while complete measurement may be impossible, it does not mean that the actual underlying mechanics are not deterministic. In fact, superdeterminism is considered a viable explanation of Bell's inequality that avoids ruling out a completely deterministic universe by abandoning any notion of free will in performing an experiment.
So why can't a tomato come with an EULA? Seems a logical enough extension.
It could, in theory, but I think you need to read up on the difference between perfect competition and imperfect competition if you think that that could ever happen. Only one company makes Mac OS X; they can set the rules.
Hitting Google is apparently easier than doing research. I went through the articles on your "osx+virus+in+the+wild" link, and what I found on the first pages was...
4 pages on Leap-A: A Trojan that requires one to give an admin password after opening what's supposed to be an image file. It propagates itself via iChat file transfers, but it still requires an idiot to give a password upon opening a file that shouldn't require one.
1 forum post by someone worried about an unidentified Mac virus in the news around the same time as Leap-A.
1 page on Inqtana-B: A false positive from an AV package.
1 blog post by someone bragging about how there aren't any self-propagating Mac viruses in the wild.
1 nigh-incomprehensible wiki article on AV software for Macs.
2 articles on Inqtana-A: (See below.)
None of these (except possibly Inqtana-A) would be a threat to semi-competent users, and the only article that isn't from 2006 is the garbled wiki page.
Interestingly, what the site won't tell you is that most (if not all) of these viruses are phantom menaces; you have to Google each one yourself for that kind of detail. Many are proof-of-concept never seen in the wild, and most exploit holes already patched in the OS. All are trojans that require serious PEBKAC to run, even the only two known "worms" for the plantform -- Inqtana and Tored.
Inqtana, a virus one that got some notoriety and media attention is an example of all three -- a proof of concept (with an expiration date) that attacked an old hole in the Bluetooth stack and which required victims to consent to accept the download from an infected machine. Tored was an email worm that required you to execute an attachment on a very stupid looking spam email payload. Both are basically glorified trojans -- nothing on par with Conficker.
Now, trojans aren't complete non-issues, but savvy computer users currently have very little to fear from running a Mac w/o AV software since there are currently no self-instantiating viruses for the platform in the wild. Don't download pirated software (and risk something like iWorkS which hides itself in installers for certain programs), and don't trust installers where none should be present.
The Linux community, as a whole, needs to get it's story straight.
No it doesn't. The very notion that an entire community must speak with One Voice that tells the One Truth is frankly creepy and disturbing and smacks of the same kind of groupthink that marks political partisans and cultists.
(That said, while I think Linux hardware support in general is pretty good, no one in their right mind would claim that it's better than Windows, the platform most hardware is targeted to.)
If you don't make money on a product you offer it's your own fault. I can go to a grocery store and buy all the loss leader items in the sales flyer and leave. They lose money. It's still their fault.
Yes, it is, and their business model has to tolerate that fact because of the nature of their product. Software companies aren't so limited and can come up with licensing agreements that prevent that sort of thing. What people are complaining about is the steps that Apple takes to prevent that from happening. It they didn't take those steps, then people like you could say it's their fault if the company's revenues tanked from not preventing clones. After all, Apple's been burned twice on clones due to not structuring their licensing agreements properly. (See the Laser 128 and the System 7 & 8 clones.)
The difference is that IBM failed to lock in an exclusive license for MS-DOS, so Microsoft was willing to sell MS-DOS to a whole new market of clones. I doubt this would have been the case had IBM developed it own OS.
Apple's claims are not based on the idea that reverse engineering is illegal, IIRC. (After all, they lost that against Laser back in the Apple II days. Note how a loose license with MS played a role in that fight too.) Apple's claims are based on the fact that running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the software license, and Psystar is infringing this license and aiding and abetting others in infringing this license. Apple's argument there is pretty good.
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
And you have no right to demand freely-provided updates for non-Apple systems. What are you going to do if they break your install, sue them under the contract you refuse to accept as binding on you? The doctrine of first sale doesn't protect your rights to have a working copy of the OS on your hard drive.
They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it.
Good luck holding that argument up in court. Most contract law classes today cover cases like ProCD v. Zeidenberg, which not only upholds EULAs but upholds the kind that are binding upon opening the package and before getting to read the full terms.
As long as someone is paying Apple for the OS, then they're a customer.
Yeah, but they're a customer like someone who goes to a restaurant, orders a small cup of soup and a glass of water, and who then demands endless breadsticks. The restaurant seems pretty justified to me in cutting off the flow of bread, charging more, or kicking the customer out.
Or to use another metaphor, "the customer is always right" doesn't mean you have to tolerate shoplifters just because they buy some gum on the way out after pocketing a CD. If a "customer" tries to take something from you for less than it costs to make, you're quite justified in making sure they don't come back.
You've given the answer. 'Real' zombies can't starve to death, because they're already DEAD.
That they collapse due to starvation doesn't matter. "Real" zombies are impermanent as well in many/most zombie apocalypse films. Eventually, they decay and fall apart (or collapse into dust or something).
Do you think a single one of those scumbags give a gnat's fart about it?
Why would they? It's not like they can do their job for more than 6-8 years, so they don't have to take any pride in their office. And they don't have time to learn to be excellent legislators, so there's an entire industry of lobbyists and staff workers who handle the real load of lawmaking, resulting in a lot of bills just written by outside parties and passed through committees. And if a bill won't become a problem until a decade from now, then who cares?
How could anything good come out an entire legislature of amateurs, 1/3 (Assembly) or 1/2 (Senate) of which are lame ducks?
Someone who is a lawyer correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a terrible argument. I mean, if the secretary is an agent of the company who is authorized to receive communications on the company's behalf, then wouldn't service to a secretary be good enough?
Slashdot Mirror
The copyright lawyers are laughing at this guy's defense, but these are the same lawyers who think that file sharing is immoral and that record companies should have the right to sue people into poverty because of a few kilobytes of uploads.
And they seem to be winning that fight. Putting aside your subjective argument about morality, wouldn't you consider them to be greater experts on the current state of copyright law as a result?
I live in Newark, NJ. I got you all beat on crazies.
I actually had a guy attempt to attack me with a canteen. A frickin' canteen!
Could've been worse. Could've been so much worse. (My favorite "holy sh--!" moment in anime.)
You realize that Mac OS X is based directly on NeXTSTEP, right? And NeXTSTEP ran well on 25 MHz 68040 computers!
Something would be really fucked if Mac OS X couldn't run well on the Atom processors, which in terms of processing power are actually on par with high-end x86 systems from late 2006.
So what? Software grows over time. Windows 7 is based on Windows NT 3.1, and it used to run just fine on 486s as well. Are you arguing that neither platform should be allowed to exceed the system requirements of their predecessors?
Superdeterminism is no different that saying that god made the universe this morning just before you wake up with all the memories included...it requires incredible fine-tuning of initial parameters.
Eh, it's no more hand-wavy than any other interpretation of quantum mechanics, especially the standard Copenhagen interpretation and the Many-Worlds Interpretation. I mean, "consciousness causes collapse" or the notion that it's inevitable that some world resemble ours because all possible paths are taken? Meh.
And P was saying that it's impossible to predict everything, not that everything could be predetermined.
Fair point.
It's worse than that. I hate to spoil the ending for you but he comes to the conclusion that the British outlet is the greatest with a 10 out of 10 score. Why? Safety features. Features like shuttering and built in fuses. Both of which are optional on American outlets as well -- I'm sure -- as they are on outlets around the world. Maybe they're standard in the UK but they're optional in the US. I'd rather have the option than even more regulation.
Why?
I mean, I can see arguments for preferring a central fusebox or breaker panel, but I am completely flummoxed about why someone would prefer to have the option to go without shuttering. I mean, what advantage do you get other than the warm, fuzzy feeling of "You're not the boss of me!"
The media loves Obama and once loved Palin the same way -- they love the celebrity of the candidate, and not the actual substance of the person or their policies. Modern news organizations, especially cable news, are far more interested in a salable narrative than a dry recitation of facts. They like controversy over truth and flash over substance. After all, that's what the people tune in for, and it's what takes the least effort to produce.
The real bias in the media isn't liberal or conservative -- it's laziness.
Yet until mid-20's, I was lazy as hell. Once I turned that around, life has become very easy.
For the love of God, HOW? This still plagues me today, and I could use some advice (at least better than "Just do it," which is effectively saying, "Quit pretending it's a real problem.")
Why? Because women aren't jobs, they're people. And I wouldn't want to spend my time forging a relationship with another person who doesn't understand that she's not a commodity I'm supposed to win, but a person with whom I'm hoping to share some nice experiences.
I think that's a brutally unfair assessment of the GP's argument. One can compare apples and oranges in the same sentence without implying that they're the same thing. In fact, I'd say that a more fair assessment of the post would be that it's better to pick people and experiences over material commodities, and I'm honestly surprised that anyone would read it differently.
You attack him unfairly.
What do you do if he's already procreated? Punish his children?
Italy had 1.29 murders per 100,000 people in 2000. We had 4.28 per 100,000 people. (link)
I guess those harsh prison sentences are going wonders for stopping murder here. Gosh, you'd think that with only 9% of the world population and 22% of the world's prison population that American society would be safe, right?
No, it really isn't. In the US at least, the prison system is officially called the Department of Corrections (DoC), and prisons are also commonly referred to as correctional facilities.
Sure, and since we changed the War Department to the Department of Defense, we've only used our military in self-defense, right? Names are just names, and they don't necessarily reflect the true intentions of the times much less modern intentions years after a name essentially became a meaningless label for an institution that's grown beyond it.
Plus, "corrections" could easily refer to either rehabilitation or deterrence. Rehabilitation was a dominant theory in the 60's & 70's, but deterrence was the dominant political theory from the 80's onward with the massive push towards increased sentences and mandatory sentencing guidelines.
At one point I might have thought rehabilitation was possible, but as we learn more about genes we discover the brains in some people are simply wired for aggression, or inability to feel emotions, or inability to sympathize. These persons can not be rehabilitated and should be removed from society, especially if they've already spent time in prison (apparently they learned nothing from their first offense).
But then on the other hand, you should consider things like the Stanford Prison Experiment, the Milgram Experiment, and the hotly debated "Broken Windows" theory of crimefighting. Anyone who's ever been in/at a mob knows personally how much their behavior can be swayed by their surroundings, and it's no surprise that if you put someone in a building full of aggressive, hard criminals that they're going to learn some bad lessons.
Some people are bad apples, some people are in bad situations, and some people just made a bad decision. Most criminals are probably some mix of the three, and a system that could better sort through criminals to find out why they commit crime and that tried to save those that could be saved would be far more just and efficient than one that just simply takes people who failed once, drops them into a breeding ground for hard criminals, and then raises hard barriers against them rejoining society as a full member.
Nope. It is impossible, even at the most basic theoretical level, to predict everything. Basic physics theory shows that it is impossible to even just measure everything to an arbitrary degree of precision regardless of what instrumentation you may have. Go back and read your Heisenberg.
Actually, while complete measurement may be impossible, it does not mean that the actual underlying mechanics are not deterministic. In fact, superdeterminism is considered a viable explanation of Bell's inequality that avoids ruling out a completely deterministic universe by abandoning any notion of free will in performing an experiment.
You can read a longer explanation here.
So why can't a tomato come with an EULA? Seems a logical enough extension.
It could, in theory, but I think you need to read up on the difference between perfect competition and imperfect competition if you think that that could ever happen. Only one company makes Mac OS X; they can set the rules.
Hitting Google is apparently easier than doing research. I went through the articles on your "osx+virus+in+the+wild" link, and what I found on the first pages was...
None of these (except possibly Inqtana-A) would be a threat to semi-competent users, and the only article that isn't from 2006 is the garbled wiki page.
Now if you want some actual research on Mac OS X viruses, you can check a vendor's site:
http://www.sophos.com/security/analyses/viruses-and-spyware/search-results/?search=OSX&action=search&x=0&y=0
Interestingly, what the site won't tell you is that most (if not all) of these viruses are phantom menaces; you have to Google each one yourself for that kind of detail. Many are proof-of-concept never seen in the wild, and most exploit holes already patched in the OS. All are trojans that require serious PEBKAC to run, even the only two known "worms" for the plantform -- Inqtana and Tored.
Inqtana, a virus one that got some notoriety and media attention is an example of all three -- a proof of concept (with an expiration date) that attacked an old hole in the Bluetooth stack and which required victims to consent to accept the download from an infected machine. Tored was an email worm that required you to execute an attachment on a very stupid looking spam email payload. Both are basically glorified trojans -- nothing on par with Conficker.
Now, trojans aren't complete non-issues, but savvy computer users currently have very little to fear from running a Mac w/o AV software since there are currently no self-instantiating viruses for the platform in the wild. Don't download pirated software (and risk something like iWorkS which hides itself in installers for certain programs), and don't trust installers where none should be present.
The Linux community, as a whole, needs to get it's story straight.
No it doesn't. The very notion that an entire community must speak with One Voice that tells the One Truth is frankly creepy and disturbing and smacks of the same kind of groupthink that marks political partisans and cultists.
(That said, while I think Linux hardware support in general is pretty good, no one in their right mind would claim that it's better than Windows, the platform most hardware is targeted to.)
If you don't make money on a product you offer it's your own fault. I can go to a grocery store and buy all the loss leader items in the sales flyer and leave. They lose money. It's still their fault.
Yes, it is, and their business model has to tolerate that fact because of the nature of their product. Software companies aren't so limited and can come up with licensing agreements that prevent that sort of thing. What people are complaining about is the steps that Apple takes to prevent that from happening. It they didn't take those steps, then people like you could say it's their fault if the company's revenues tanked from not preventing clones. After all, Apple's been burned twice on clones due to not structuring their licensing agreements properly. (See the Laser 128 and the System 7 & 8 clones.)
The difference is that IBM failed to lock in an exclusive license for MS-DOS, so Microsoft was willing to sell MS-DOS to a whole new market of clones. I doubt this would have been the case had IBM developed it own OS.
Apple's claims are not based on the idea that reverse engineering is illegal, IIRC. (After all, they lost that against Laser back in the Apple II days. Note how a loose license with MS played a role in that fight too.) Apple's claims are based on the fact that running Mac OS X on non-Apple hardware is a violation of the software license, and Psystar is infringing this license and aiding and abetting others in infringing this license. Apple's argument there is pretty good.
Depends on what you call a customer. They have NO RIGHT to tell me what I can or can't install their OS on.
And you have no right to demand freely-provided updates for non-Apple systems. What are you going to do if they break your install, sue them under the contract you refuse to accept as binding on you? The doctrine of first sale doesn't protect your rights to have a working copy of the OS on your hard drive.
They try to with EULAs, but it wouldn't hold up in court if they tried to sue over it.
Good luck holding that argument up in court. Most contract law classes today cover cases like ProCD v. Zeidenberg, which not only upholds EULAs but upholds the kind that are binding upon opening the package and before getting to read the full terms.
As long as someone is paying Apple for the OS, then they're a customer.
Yeah, but they're a customer like someone who goes to a restaurant, orders a small cup of soup and a glass of water, and who then demands endless breadsticks. The restaurant seems pretty justified to me in cutting off the flow of bread, charging more, or kicking the customer out.
Or to use another metaphor, "the customer is always right" doesn't mean you have to tolerate shoplifters just because they buy some gum on the way out after pocketing a CD. If a "customer" tries to take something from you for less than it costs to make, you're quite justified in making sure they don't come back.
Ha ha! What a kidder. Next thing you'll be telling us is that someone made a sequel to the original Highlander movie!
You've given the answer. 'Real' zombies can't starve to death, because they're already DEAD.
That they collapse due to starvation doesn't matter. "Real" zombies are impermanent as well in many/most zombie apocalypse films. Eventually, they decay and fall apart (or collapse into dust or something).
Do you think a single one of those scumbags give a gnat's fart about it?
Why would they? It's not like they can do their job for more than 6-8 years, so they don't have to take any pride in their office. And they don't have time to learn to be excellent legislators, so there's an entire industry of lobbyists and staff workers who handle the real load of lawmaking, resulting in a lot of bills just written by outside parties and passed through committees. And if a bill won't become a problem until a decade from now, then who cares?
How could anything good come out an entire legislature of amateurs, 1/3 (Assembly) or 1/2 (Senate) of which are lame ducks?
Someone who is a lawyer correct me if I'm wrong, but this is a terrible argument. I mean, if the secretary is an agent of the company who is authorized to receive communications on the company's behalf, then wouldn't service to a secretary be good enough?
Sorry, I meant, "Does the entire jaw jut forward?" They had protruding mouths.
Soooo really what you're saying is Apple takes stuff other people have already released/made, makes ui tweaks, then makes it "cool"
The attitude that mere "ui tweaks" aren't innovative or important is the reason why the "Year of the Linux Desktop" will forever be a joke.