My frustration with Apple is the mid-range, where you want a nice "pro-sumer" box without a monitor.
It's not just you.:) The one desktop model I really wish Apple would come out with is a "headless iMac" (or Mac mini Pro, if one prefers): the processor and graphics power of the higher-end iMacs, just without making me buy an integrated display. I'm impressed by the Mac Pro, it's just overkill for what I need in a desktop these days. I find myself doing most of my real work on my MacBook, but I wouldn't mind having a desktop Mac that wouldn't trip over itself trying to do graphics -- yet I'd rather have a setup I can share between desktop and 'docked' laptop when I want.
You and the OP are both right, but effectively talking about different things -- The "I, Robot" movie was based on a pre-existing script that had nothing to do with Ellison's script at all, which as you noted never got used. The pre-existing script was "Hardwired," by Jeff Vintar, which had been kicking around unproduced for bit. The studio that greenlighted it also happened to have the license for "I, Robot" (quite possibly from being the studio that Ellison refused to work with, although I'm not positive how it got from point A to point B) and looked at Vintar's story of robot rebellion, and decided, "Hey, why not."
I suspect this wasn't really fair to Vintar's work, let alone Asimov's work, but that's the way Hollywood tends to think. (Which is, I suppose, an implement lament in the MSN article.)
While there are indeed real "Mac zealots" out there, there seems to be a far, far greater number of PC users who squeal like stuck pigs and go on flaming, spittle-flecked anti-Apple rants whenever anyone suggests that they prefer Macs to PCs -- even when the preference is stated no more challengingly than, "Why, yes, I do own a Mac."
I've been a Mac owner for about six years and a Mac user off and on for twenty. (I've also owned several PCs, running, at various points, Windows 2000, Windows 95, DR-DOS, FreeBSD and a half-dozen distributions of Linux going all the way back to SLS before the kernel had hit 1.0.) While I've definitely met a few pricks among Apple users, the stupid ignorant fanboy who believes that OS X and Mac hardware is perfect in every meaningful way only seems to exist in those flaming, spittle-flecked anti-Apple rants. What seems to offend some PC users is simply the fact that by owning a Mac at all we are making a statement that we think OS X is better than Windows and Linux. Dear Lord, we've expressed a preference -- what arrogant fools we must be.
With over a million attorneys in the US, there are plenty of ones that specifically deserve scorn...
While this is probably true, it's also the Achilles' heel of the "frivolous lawsuits are killing us" argument. If you made a list of all the attorneys you think you make a good case for having pickled and shipped to Antarctica, that'd still be a very, very small fraction of the attorneys out there, right? Now apply that to lawsuits.
The thing is, there are hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of lawsuits filed annually asking for monetary damages. Many of them probably are frivolous--and many of those are probably being thrown out. The issue here is that when the court system works, it isn't news. If your sample set for "the way lawsuits work" is comprised chiefly of "lawsuits that attract media attention" (and for most of us, that's the only sample set we really have access to), your data is severely skewed.
I'm not saying that the "loser pays opposing court costs" approach is necessarily bad, although I've seen some good arguments made that it tends to have a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well. Valid cases are still occasionally lost in court, particularly if the defendant has considerably greater access to expensive legal resources--which leads to a serious catch: you're probably most likely to lose a lawsuit if you're suing someone who can spend orders of magnitude more money on their legal fees than you can. If you know that you will, upon losing, be required to pay those fees, you very well may not sue even if you think your case has merit.
I am, though, suggesting that the dangers of frivolous lawsuits tend to be highly overstated these days. And frankly, I'd rather suffer with a small percentage of those than take any corrective action which has the side effect of limiting anyone's access to the courts.
STOP EVANGELIZING PHP! YOU ARE HARMING THE INTERNET!
How do you really feel, Don? Don't hold back for our sake.
Seriously, while I agree in spirit, what PHP has going for it isn't "irresponsible PHP fan-boys" as much as it is a good ol' network effect. Every host has it and deploying a PHP application is often just a matter of uploading the file and going. (In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum, "There's no step three!") Contrast that with Ruby on Rails; you have to find a host that will host a Rails app, and as I'm learning, some of the ones that say they do have a lot of caveats on their basic plans (I'm looking at you, TextDrive, with shared hosting process size limits that make running Rails... problematic, shall we say). Assuming you manage to get things set up with Capistrano you're golden. Unless you gotta move providers for some reason. If you do, you're not just dumping your database file and zippin' up the application directory like you would with -- yes -- PHP. While I haven't used Django or Python-based apps, many of the concerns are, from what I've seen, similar.
Yes, yes, I know: none of these things make PHP any better as a language, all of them could be addressed through proper education, and so on. All true. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you're hostin' your own web site on Drupal rather than Django (or whatever) for reasons other than being convinced by droves of sloppy, uneducated programmers. And those reasons are the ones that need to be addressed. Until deploying Rails, Django, Seaside, or whatever else is as easy as deploying PHP, then PHP wins. The most repeatable (if oft depressing) lesson of modern technology is, arguably, convenience trumps all other considerations.
No, iTunes took off because the iPod has something around 70% of the digital music player market and you need iTunes to put music on your iPod. (And I've met more than a few Windows users who still prefer iTunes even without an iPod, because they like the way it manages their library -- and they may just like having access to the iTunes Store. On the Mac, of course, iTunes comes pre-installed.) When the software you're already using to manage your digital music library also happens to have a fully integrated media store that lets you search, browse and download in a manner that's fairly hard to improve on, for people who don't mind paying $10 for "DRM encumbered" media, it's going to be easier to use.
In the consumer tech world, convenience frequently trumps quality; if it didn't, we'd all be listening to CDs and clamoring for SACD and DVD-A releases. Likewise, convenience at a reasonable price can trump less convenient free. You may think it's silly to claim that it's "less convenient" to have to load a different program, do a P2P search, download that file, and do whatever's necessary to bring it into the format iTunes (or whatever equivalent one uses) to play it, but many people would disagree with you. (And if it's a video file, that last step may not be as simple just dragging it to your media player library, particularly if your end goal is to get the video on a portable device.)
N.B.: I've seen uTorrent (and used a very similar Mac client, BitRocket); I'm sorry, the browsing/searching interface on it isn't as good as iTunes. Given that the original discussion was about music, though, in my experience you're frequently better off searching Gnutella-style networks anyway if you're looking for individual songs.
Just because someone claims Christ doesn't mean Christ claims them.
If we allow that -- and I think the case can certainly be made that we should -- we have to allow it for Islam as well. That is, we have to take Muslims who say "those who commit crimes in the name of our religion are not Muslims at all" at face value. If Christians get to disown Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolph et. al., Muslims get to disown Osama bin Laden.
(N.B.: I'm aware that you didn't claim otherwise; I'm making this as a more general point. I've seen more than a few people who will claim, in effect, that only Christians who are good Christians should be called that, but Muslims who say "hey, I'm not with the terrorists" aren't to be believed.)
By definition, you can't do bad things and be a Christian. The moment a bad thing happens, one is no longer a Christian.
While I admit I haven't studied historical Christianity in great detail, I seem to recall a lot of emphasis on a concept called "forgiveness of sins." Your interpretation suggests a new definition of "forgive" I was previously unaware of.
Well, for starters, you've missed that major companies are buying "land" in Second Life and conducting meetings and interviews there. Politicians have conducted town hall meetings there. And Reuters has opened their first cyberspace news bureau in SL. As easy as it may be to mock these bits of information, I think they represent something very important: many companies and services have attempted to be "the metaverse" a la Snow Crash in the past, but what's going on in Second Life is, as klunky and hesitant as it may be, the metaverse actually happening.
For a year I worked for SL's erstwhile competitor, There, which was the one most people were betting on to "win" when both got going. (There made the cover of Business 2.0 and got out of the starting gate with companies like Nike already selling virtual products in-world.) And in a lot of ways There's client technology still kicks SL's ass; the experience is much smoother, even on less high-powered hardware. There's in-world "look" was designed by actual artists, including a former Disney imagineer or two, so when you wander around your eyes don't bleed. There has a sophisticated VR auction system designed by one of eBay's original employees. There accepts models created with GMax rather than a klunky proprietary design system, and ThereScript is based on Lua and is considerably better than Linden's scripting language.
But what Linden figured out that There didn't is that user-created content is king. SL really didn't give a damn if your eyes bled -- they opened the floodgates. Old "Therians" may boggle at my mention of ThereScript, because AFAIK There still hasn't opened it up to users even though they were talking about it when I was there in 2003. (There also had outstanding bugs in the "consumer service" that were going unfixed for months, if not years, IIRC, which were less a matter of technology than politics.)
Personally, I think SL's "under the hood" design is its Achilles' heel, and open-sourcing the client isn't going to help it -- they have a stream-everything model (possibly because their original team apparently came from Real Networks?) and the object system really isn't as sophisticated as what you'd find on an average MUCK server. Someone out there is almost certainly working on what amounts to "Third Life": a design and engineering sensibility as good as There's was (or at least aspired to be), with the understanding of the marketplace and user desires that Linden has. When this happens, that service will be the metaverse equivalent of World of Warcraft to SL's Everquest.
But between all the jokes about flying penises and the ritual mocking of the furries, I think SL is going to prove to be historically important in shaping an "avatar space." Yeah, the idea that a decade from now, it'll be common for businesses to have a virtual storefront in avatar space sounds pretty crazy, and I certainly wouldn't bet on it happening. But you know, in 1994, I'm not sure many of us would have predicted that by 2004, businesses that didn't have a URL would seem to be behind the times.
Astounding? Flabbergasting? Just ignorant? I'm honestly at a loss to describe your little anti-Gruber rant here. Hell, even most of the people who don't agree with his take on MacHeist -- who seem to be largely missing the point of what his gripe is, but never mind that -- have positive things to say about his self-published column otherwise.
Over the years he's pointed many of us at great apps, written one utility more than a few people on many platforms find to be a godsend for online writing, and had some very well-constructed, insightful things to say about not just the Apple market but the software and technology industry at large. Whether or not you agree with him, he explains exactly why he believes what he does. On any given subject. I don't always agree with him, but I always see why he came to his conclusion because he lays his cards on the table.
And this reminds you of John Dvorak how, pray tell?
The complaint Gruber made about MacHeist was primarily the flat-rate compensation: the better MH does, the better the MH "organizers" do in relation to the developers. And, the better they do, the lower effective per-copy revenue the developers take home, which carries a cost (hard to quantify, but nonetheless non-zero) in support. These really aren't disputed facts -- it's just a subjective call as to whether those negatives outweigh the "positives" of (anecdotally) increased market visibility. Obviously smart people disagree with Gruber and Gus Mueller. (Wil Shipley is undoubtedly a smart guy himself, although one might snark that he's demonstrating that in part by getting a few bucks from the 1.x version of Delicious Library he probably wouldn't have otherwise given that 2.0 is right around the corner.) I really wouldn't have any quibble with you disagreeing with Gruber, either, and I'd still say, "Hey, that justbill might be a smart guy."
But for you to post a massive "John Gruber is destroying the Mac community, he makes me ashamed, it's awful every time he opens his mouth, waaaah!" whine, y'know, that makes me wonder what chip you have on your shoulder, or just what crack it is you're smoking. It's so far out of sync with reality that it's... it's... flabbergastounding. (And to end it with "No whining": whoa, Irony Giant, man.)
You're welcome to make the case that Windows Server is pretty "turnkey" as far as such things go, but I'm not sure why you feel a need to keep slamming Apple every chance you get. No, OS X Server doesn't do everything The Microsoft Way. It doesn't have ActiveDirectory, but it has portable home directories. It doesn't have Exchange Server, but it has iCal server, LDAP and Postfix (not to mention sendmail). It doesn't have Microsoft SQL Server, but it has MySQL. It doesn't have IIS, but it has Apache. It has Xgrid, not Microsoft's... do they even have anything that compares with that? Hmm.
There's very little that a "small to medium" business needs that couldn't be done with OS X -- or to be fair, any other Unix-based server platform (OS X just has better administration tools than most). No, it won't make people who have a "if it ain't a Microsoft proprietary protocol, it's crap" mindset happy, because it's using a bunch of (gasp) open standards instead. And if you're that sort of person, that's fine by me. But don't argue that because OS X Server may not do what you want that it's objectively less capable. (None of the programs I have open on my MacBook currently have Windows port and some don't even have particularly good Windows equivalents--does that mean that Windows can't be used by any serious web developer?)
While I understand your objection to it -- which is essentially the most common objection to Javascript -- let me rephrase it, albeit in a deliberately provocative manner: "any tool to make the web-browsing experience more advanced than an IBM mainframe terminal can be exploited, and therefore should not be used."
There obviously are dangers to client-side scripting, and our current solutions could arguably handle them better. But are we really going to tell people to disable everything that could possibly execute in their browser because any such thing represents a security hole? Why, we could all be even more secure if we all used Lynx (graphics libraries have had exploitable bugs in them, after all), or better yet went back to Gopher. But somehow I'm betting that would be a tough sell.
For all of the buzzwordiness of Ajax and the inevitable abuse that goes with it, it really does provide usability benefits in terms of responsiveness and immediate user feedback. And while it may be easy to say, "Well, I object to Javascript itself, not the concept," I'm not convinced that any useful scripting language for client-side interaction isn't going to have the same potential for abuse. (And as a language, Javascript is not that horrible. It's got more than its fair share of warts, but it's a functional language, with closures and higher-order functions and a lot of general goodnesss people don't usually appreciate.)
On Slashdot in particular (but around diehard computer nerds in general), I've run into what I've dubbed the "engineer's mindset" that regards all advances past HTML 2 as unnecessary frills. But from not only a design but a usability standpoint, "Web 2.0" is not just about bling -- it's about making web applications work better. As Martha Stewart would say when she's not in prison: that's a good thing. And I don't think we really do web users nearly as much of a service as we imagine we are when we tell them, "No Google Maps for you."
I believe DHH cried "missing the point," which isn't that inaccurate.
There are a lot of valid complaints about Ruby's speed (although Rails can do pretty intelligent caching); I'm not aware of anyone really attempting to push Rails' scalability to the level that Java can do. I'd disagree with the description of DHH's rants as "FUD," though, by and large. His response to Joel's critique of Rails was that, basically, "I don't think it will scale!" is in a certain sense always FUD -- unless you know of a system out there guaranteed to have no bottlenecks that will show up if its usage increases by an order of magnitude.
Why did DHH pick on Java (I use the past tense because I haven't seen much of this recently)? Because Java people were the first out of the woodwork dismissing Rails. The funny thing is, when you look at some of the biggest, busiest sites on the net -- MySpace, Yahoo, Google, for that matter Slashdot -- while you're not seeing Rails, you're not seeing Java, either. Rails has the excuse of being "immature"; Java doesn't get cut the same level of slack. I'd suggest that the reason has less to do with functionality and "scalability" as it does with simple maintainability. And that's a lot of what attracts people to Rails in the first place. It's not FUD to say that Java is a beast to work with on many levels. It's an opinion and it may not be one you share, but it's not one that's particularly unique to 37Signals developers.
There's a quote that appeared on Daring Fireball today from a golf instruction book: "As for your grip pressure, keep it light. Arnold Palmer likes to grip the club tightly, but you are not Arnold Palmer." In a lot of ways, that's what most of of the Rails "message" boils down to. Rails may not be appropriate for Google, but you are not building Google. (The corollary is that if you are building Google with Rails, even metaphorically, you'll find ways to address those issues.)
Re:"Macs aren't more expensive..[shipped] with an
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Despite what Cory Doctorow eloquently ranted about some time ago, Apple has only used the TPM module in the initial developer-only "transition kit" computers. Some Intel Macs do indeed have TPM chips on their motherboards (as do most other Intel machines, of course), but the firmware doesn't talk to the chip and OS X has no driver for it. Furthermore, not all of the Intel Macs even have the module.
http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/
Singh also makes a point in that article which I'd noticed when I'd actually, y'know, read the TPM specs, which I don't think many people have -- the idea that the chips can somehow, in and of themselves, prevent you from running "unapproved" applications, let alone lock you into proprietary data specs, is pretty bogus. While the chips have the potential of being used for evil, that's certainly not intrinsic to their design, and in fact TPM chips could be used to implement public key security and signing for users in a more secure fashion than can be done in software alone.
At any rate, the idea that OS X is being locked to Mac hardware via TPM chips appears to simply not be the case. It's locked to Mac hardware primarily by Mac hardware just not being quite as interchangeable with PC hardware as the "Intel Macs are just PCs in new cases" crowd thinks.
On any given day, look at Slashdot's front page, and I guarantee most of the news stories will have first been reported by professional journalists. Most of the blogs most of us read are likewise not full of original reporting. They may be original commentary, but that's a different animal. What we see a lot of currently is free commentary on, or just links to, original reporting produced by pretty conventional methods, and this is an impending problem. Simply put, somebody has to pay for journalists to do their work, and one thing P2P networks have not done very well at so far is income generation -- commercial blogs tend to go back to commercial models.
We're all familiar with stories like bloggers deconstructing whether Vietnam-era typewriters had proportional spacing and superscripts, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. There are examples of news organizations that exist entirely online, like C|Net, and there are blogs that are striving to be journalistic enterprises, like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo launching "TPM Muckraker" -- but these aren't entire new paradigms, they're the old paradigms with new publishing software. Replacing QuarkXpress and InDesign with Movable Type and Drupal doesn't replace the concept of editorial standards.
The age where an editorial board of a mass (one-way) publication like the NYT controls the definition of "what's news" is drawing to a close.
I'm even less convinced of that. It's easy for those of us who are used to using RSS readers and web-based news portals to assemble our own ever-changing headline and commentary sections to assume that's the way everyone will read news in the future. But the way most people read news now on the internet is mediated through the BBC, CNN or Fox. I don't think that's because most people just haven't seen RSS feeds, despite what most of us who piddle around with Web 2.0 would like to believe. Most of my technically-savvy friends (here in Silicon Valley!) have... and don't see the point. Their response is very often a variant of, "I have more information than I can manage as it is now."
But filtering and weighting systems can do that, you might say. Maybe, but the problem is that you either have to take the time to learn to adjust them -- and time is the resource people feel they have the least of in this arena, remember -- or trust to the defaults of whatever system you're using, which I would argue is substantially worse than having human editorial control. "All the news within the first standard deviation" is not, to me, a very stirring rallying cry against the alleged tyranny of Times editorial staff.
I think we may soon see an age where the role of a news editor changes, and that link-blogs are prototypes of this new direction. And it's great that the Giant Tubes of Unmediated Data are accessible now in a way that they never have been before, that publishing is easier for everyone, that the sources are there for everyone to be their own managing editors when they want or need to. But in the long run, I doubt the majority of people actually want to be their own managing editors most of the time.
I don't think Apple is ignorant of the interest in running OS X on non-Apple hardware; in fact, I'd say it's a safe bet that somebody in Apple has projections of what the effects on their market share, on their own hardware sales, etc., etc. would be.
But as I've commented in earlier discussions on this topic, I also suspect Apple has projections on just what would happen if they turned Microsoft into a full-blown, no-pretense-of-partnership enemy. Because if Apple ever released OS X for non-Apple Intel hardware, Microsoft would perceive it -- correctly -- as the most serious assault on the Windows platform that they've ever faced. No offense is intended to Linux and *BSD variants by that; it's a simple recognition that OS X has much more "end user" friendliness and a much wider range of commercial applications (including some pretty big name ones) than any other Unix relative ever has, and Apple has one of the highest brand recognitions in the world.
Given how Microsoft has reacted to much less dangerous competition in the past, what do you think their response would be?
Yes, I know you were suggesting Apple could just release an OS X that had only license restrictions and "just happened" to be able to run on non-Apple hardware, nudge nudge wink wink. But if Apple sold enough copies of OS X to non-Mac owners to actually affect their bottom line, that would be enough to attract the attention of the industry press -- and of Microsoft. And at that point, if Apple didn't take very loud definitive actions to put a stop to it, it'd be effectively throwing down the gauntlet just as much as slapping "Now compatible with your Dell, HP and your crappy white box PC!" stickers on every OS X Leopard box.
It's nice to dream, but an OS X that just breezily installs on non-Apple hardware won't happen unless Apple decides they're willing to engage in a fight to the death with Microsoft.
The problem with the "gun control laws only apply to law-abiding citizens" argument isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it's just as correct if you take the phrase "gun control" out of the above statement. Anti-theft laws are also "only for good people who follow the laws," because criminals who violate the law get "free or cheap" TVs, cars, computers, and so on. This is hardly a "setup" caused by anti-theft laws, and it doesn't become any more so if we talk about laws relating to gun ownership and purchase, either.
The question is really whether the law reduces the incidence of crime it tries to address. Gun control is one of those hot button issues in which people are inclined to take all-or-nothing positions -- any restriction is too harsh for the NRA, and no restriction is too harsh for Handgun Control, Inc. -- but it seems to me that laws (or proposed laws) need to be examined on a case-by-case basis.
Whether one believes it's "fair" or not, legally posting copyrighted material does not fall under the "fair use" act--even a snippet is of dubious legality in this instance (it's not being "quoted" for a review or illustrative purposes), and posting works in their entirety certainly doesn't qualify.
Google is essentially counting on the same thing YouTube has been all along--a legal safe harbor provision. YouTube's business model (such as it is) doesn't rely on copyright infringement,* so as long as Google is diligent about removing infringing material they're likely safe. And what I've heard about this buyout suggests that their new copyright-holding partners like Universal plan to help them search.
*Napster lost making the same argument, but YouTube certainly has much more user-created and sanctioned content than the original Napster did.
You've mentioned this several times, but I'm going to challenge it, I think.:) It strikes me as a pretty dubious comparison if you go past the surface.
The Amiga name was passed around like a football and is being slapped on technologies that don't even pretend to have any connection with the original operating system and hardware by companies that also don't have any connection with the original work. The Macintosh now is certainly a very different computer than it was twenty years ago, but -- even though I've made the half-joke myself -- OS X really isn't just NextStep with a facelift. There's been a transition in software, to be sure, but it's only been the move to the Intel processor line in the last year that completely killed backward compatibility with the pre-OS 9 world. (The Carbon API started before OS X, and Carbon apps can run on both OS 9 and OS X, regardless of processor.)
The comparison simply isn't as straightforward as you keep trying to make it out to be. Yes, older programs do run in emulation even on my PowerPC-based Mac laptop -- but if you run your old DOS programs on Windows 2000 or XP, they're also running in emulation: the DOS box on NT-based systems is not that far off conceptually from the Classic environment on OS X. And in any case, Apple owns the Macintosh name and has been applying it consistently to their computer line since 1984, without a single red-letter "absolutely nothing before this will work" break -- the continuity has been fairly smooth, even if at this point in time they are indeed selling machines that can't run programs written twenty years ago (without third-party emulation). Contrast that with the current Amiga, Inc., which had no visible interest in the Amiga desktop computer and inexplicably thought "Amiga" would be a compelling brand name for a Java-based virtual machine licensed to handheld makers.
If Apple had gone out of business in the mid-90s and some tiny technology company had bought the name and was now trying to market a line of, say, second-rate Windows office applications as "Macintosh Office," then you'd have a more apt comparison.
You've hit the big thing I think the supporters of these moves keep either missing or simply dismissing. Most of the arguments for it eventually strip down to "while you're at war you have to trust the government with expanded powers to fight the enemy." But those checks and balances in our system exist largely so you don't have to just "trust the government." When you couple that with a "war" that has no victory condition--after all, you can't definitively defeat a tactic--you're talking about a very troubling expansion of power indeed. It astounds me how many theoretically conservative folks will shed fire and brimstone about the evils of big government when it comes to welfare programs, but wholeheartedly support laws that have clear potential to degrade constitutional rights. While I'm not a conservative, I don't think one has to be a bleeding heart liberal to think that preserving habeus corpus is a touch more important to our fundamental freedoms than repealing the estate tax.
I don't have any reason to doubt that those who are saying that the wiretap powers are just being used to track "known terrorists" are largely correct. But, they could be used to track people giving "material support" to known terrrorists, using the language of the recent enemy combatant bill--and those people could in turn be declared enemy combatants, and held indefinitely without trial. And just what is "material support"? Giving money to an organization that's deemed to have terrorist ties? Being a reporter in Iraq who seems to talk too much to the insurgents? Being a reporter here in America who publishes leaked information about a controversial wiretapping program?
...as they claim to be non-partisan but outline a fairly clearly partisan anti-conservative agenda...
You know, that's something I wonder about. I've seen a few political groups with pretty solidly liberal viewpoints talk about "non-partisan analysis" in such ways, and I suspect they're trying to say, more or less, "liberal but not automatically lining up behind the Democrats," in the way that some conservative thinktanks would prefer to be known as conservative rather than "carrying water for the Republicans." I'm not sure that's really a correct use of "partisan" in practice, though. One could say the Cato Institute is partisan for being pretty consistently libertarian.
Having said that, the Center for American Progress--the group the original post linked to--seems to do a pretty good job of supplying citations that check out when you follow them up, and they were mostly just pointing out, "Well, look, what Rice said here and what she said there don't line up."
... there sure isn't anything that [Ruby] has that Smalltalk doesn't.
Other than the whole "practical applications" thing, you mean, right?
I'm being facetious, of course, but when it comes to community support, breadth of libraries, and--I suspect very importantly--ease of use, it's hard to argue that Smalltalk has any of those things compared to Ruby. It's stayed in the academic/research world without ever really moving to the commercial or hobbyist side of the fence. There are many "research project" environments that have eloquent defenders who make great cases for their design and productivity benefits--Plan 9, anyone?--but the barrier for widespread adoption is too high, and the people in the community by and large don't consider "lowering barriers to widespread adoption" a problem worth spending time on. (Squeak may theoretically be an exception, but in practice, it hasn't quite been setting the world on fire.)
As a friend of mine who worked with Alan Kay briefly in a past job said, "Smalltalk is the language of the future--and always will be."
This is an example of what might be dubbed "political hypercorrectness." Yes, we have a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy. They're both still examples of democracy.
The SGI-to-PC and Apple-to-PC comparison isn't very solid, though. While people endlessly nitpick over PC and Mac prices, when comparing brand name to brand name, they're generally comparable in a way that SGI's workstations simply never were: a midline Octane workstation would be three or four times as expensive as a high-end PC. SGI's off-the-shelf software selection was extremely limited, tailored just for their niche markets (yes, you could compile open source software, but that's not generally what one bought an SGI workstation to do); OS X's selection is limited compared to Windows, but a couple orders of magnitude greater than Irix's. Apple hardware is (relatively) unique, but there's a wide variety of third-party manufacturers making peripherals, most of which use industry-standard connections -- none of which SGI did.
It's certainly possible that Apple computer hardware will die off in the long run -- but as cynics have noted, the death of the company has been predicted for well over a decade now. What killed SGI workstations, ultimately, was that they were in a specialized niche rather than a consumer market, and commodity hardware caught up with them. Apple may have positioned themselves as a "boutique" computer maker, but they're still very firmly in the consumer space.
As a previous commenter suggested, the "RMS wants to forcibly prevent you from using proprietary software" is, from everything I've seen, a caricature of his position. He's arguably easy to caricature in this way, and that's unfortunate, but I don't believe you've done much research on what he's actually said. And with all due respect, even if Mr. Stallman has categorically stated that he would personally love to wave a magic wand and make all proprietary software vanish into a puff of smoke, that doesn't have much bearing on what the original poster you were responding to said. He argued why he feels proprietary software reduces your freedom. You may or may not agree, but he never argued your software should be taken away from you, and that is the argument you kept responding to. You were arguing against something he did not say in the first place.
Lest you think it's unfair of me to suggest that you're leaping to conclusions based on a fairly limited data set, I'll gently point out that you've already demonstrated doing that with me. I've said you seem to have constructed a straw man argument against the original poster, from which you've abstracted that not only does the OP agree in toto with RMS, but that I do as well. You'll find nothing in what I've said that's evidence I'm in significant agreement with the OP. Out of seven applications running on my machine right now, only one is open source; three are commercial third-party applications and the others are closed-source utilities that came with OS X.
For what's worth, I think closed source applications do "restrict your freedom" in the sense that you lack the freedom to (legally?) modify them. Having source available has helped me in a handful of cases over the years (such as an input manager for OS X I recently recompiled to work with my Intel MacBook -- Rosetta emulation didn't work in this case), so this isn't merely a theoretical advantage. Given a choice between a good proprietary package and a mediocre open source one, though, source code alone is not a sufficient factor to sway me, and the bugbear of "closed data formats your data will be lost forever!!!" isn't really very scary these days. (How many truly closed data formats are still in use outside vertical markets?) I'd rather be using TextMate than Emacs or Vim (and I've used both of those for years). Nothing in the open source world that I've found compares to Macromedia Fireworks, or OmniOutliner, or OmniGraffle Pro, and I'm going to keep using those, thanks. If someone really does choose to make a stand on having only open source software on their machine, though, good for them. If they want to advocate to me for why that's the One True Way, that's their right.
My point, I suppose, is simply this: fascism is a very, very strong word to being throwing around so facilely. I've heard more than one free software advocate claim that proprietary software is fascist, and I don't think that baldly stupid statement is best countered by claiming its inverse.
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It's not just you. :) The one desktop model I really wish Apple would come out with is a "headless iMac" (or Mac mini Pro, if one prefers): the processor and graphics power of the higher-end iMacs, just without making me buy an integrated display. I'm impressed by the Mac Pro, it's just overkill for what I need in a desktop these days. I find myself doing most of my real work on my MacBook, but I wouldn't mind having a desktop Mac that wouldn't trip over itself trying to do graphics -- yet I'd rather have a setup I can share between desktop and 'docked' laptop when I want.
You and the OP are both right, but effectively talking about different things -- The "I, Robot" movie was based on a pre-existing script that had nothing to do with Ellison's script at all, which as you noted never got used. The pre-existing script was "Hardwired," by Jeff Vintar, which had been kicking around unproduced for bit. The studio that greenlighted it also happened to have the license for "I, Robot" (quite possibly from being the studio that Ellison refused to work with, although I'm not positive how it got from point A to point B) and looked at Vintar's story of robot rebellion, and decided, "Hey, why not."
I suspect this wasn't really fair to Vintar's work, let alone Asimov's work, but that's the way Hollywood tends to think. (Which is, I suppose, an implement lament in the MSN article.)
While there are indeed real "Mac zealots" out there, there seems to be a far, far greater number of PC users who squeal like stuck pigs and go on flaming, spittle-flecked anti-Apple rants whenever anyone suggests that they prefer Macs to PCs -- even when the preference is stated no more challengingly than, "Why, yes, I do own a Mac."
I've been a Mac owner for about six years and a Mac user off and on for twenty. (I've also owned several PCs, running, at various points, Windows 2000, Windows 95, DR-DOS, FreeBSD and a half-dozen distributions of Linux going all the way back to SLS before the kernel had hit 1.0.) While I've definitely met a few pricks among Apple users, the stupid ignorant fanboy who believes that OS X and Mac hardware is perfect in every meaningful way only seems to exist in those flaming, spittle-flecked anti-Apple rants. What seems to offend some PC users is simply the fact that by owning a Mac at all we are making a statement that we think OS X is better than Windows and Linux. Dear Lord, we've expressed a preference -- what arrogant fools we must be.
While this is probably true, it's also the Achilles' heel of the "frivolous lawsuits are killing us" argument. If you made a list of all the attorneys you think you make a good case for having pickled and shipped to Antarctica, that'd still be a very, very small fraction of the attorneys out there, right? Now apply that to lawsuits.
The thing is, there are hundreds of thousands--if not millions--of lawsuits filed annually asking for monetary damages. Many of them probably are frivolous--and many of those are probably being thrown out. The issue here is that when the court system works, it isn't news. If your sample set for "the way lawsuits work" is comprised chiefly of "lawsuits that attract media attention" (and for most of us, that's the only sample set we really have access to), your data is severely skewed.
I'm not saying that the "loser pays opposing court costs" approach is necessarily bad, although I've seen some good arguments made that it tends to have a chilling effect on valid lawsuits as well. Valid cases are still occasionally lost in court, particularly if the defendant has considerably greater access to expensive legal resources--which leads to a serious catch: you're probably most likely to lose a lawsuit if you're suing someone who can spend orders of magnitude more money on their legal fees than you can. If you know that you will, upon losing, be required to pay those fees, you very well may not sue even if you think your case has merit.
I am, though, suggesting that the dangers of frivolous lawsuits tend to be highly overstated these days. And frankly, I'd rather suffer with a small percentage of those than take any corrective action which has the side effect of limiting anyone's access to the courts.
How do you really feel, Don? Don't hold back for our sake.
Seriously, while I agree in spirit, what PHP has going for it isn't "irresponsible PHP fan-boys" as much as it is a good ol' network effect. Every host has it and deploying a PHP application is often just a matter of uploading the file and going. (In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum, "There's no step three!") Contrast that with Ruby on Rails; you have to find a host that will host a Rails app, and as I'm learning, some of the ones that say they do have a lot of caveats on their basic plans (I'm looking at you, TextDrive, with shared hosting process size limits that make running Rails... problematic, shall we say). Assuming you manage to get things set up with Capistrano you're golden. Unless you gotta move providers for some reason. If you do, you're not just dumping your database file and zippin' up the application directory like you would with -- yes -- PHP. While I haven't used Django or Python-based apps, many of the concerns are, from what I've seen, similar.
Yes, yes, I know: none of these things make PHP any better as a language, all of them could be addressed through proper education, and so on. All true. But I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that you're hostin' your own web site on Drupal rather than Django (or whatever) for reasons other than being convinced by droves of sloppy, uneducated programmers. And those reasons are the ones that need to be addressed. Until deploying Rails, Django, Seaside, or whatever else is as easy as deploying PHP, then PHP wins. The most repeatable (if oft depressing) lesson of modern technology is, arguably, convenience trumps all other considerations.
No, iTunes took off because the iPod has something around 70% of the digital music player market and you need iTunes to put music on your iPod. (And I've met more than a few Windows users who still prefer iTunes even without an iPod, because they like the way it manages their library -- and they may just like having access to the iTunes Store. On the Mac, of course, iTunes comes pre-installed.) When the software you're already using to manage your digital music library also happens to have a fully integrated media store that lets you search, browse and download in a manner that's fairly hard to improve on, for people who don't mind paying $10 for "DRM encumbered" media, it's going to be easier to use.
In the consumer tech world, convenience frequently trumps quality; if it didn't, we'd all be listening to CDs and clamoring for SACD and DVD-A releases. Likewise, convenience at a reasonable price can trump less convenient free. You may think it's silly to claim that it's "less convenient" to have to load a different program, do a P2P search, download that file, and do whatever's necessary to bring it into the format iTunes (or whatever equivalent one uses) to play it, but many people would disagree with you. (And if it's a video file, that last step may not be as simple just dragging it to your media player library, particularly if your end goal is to get the video on a portable device.)
N.B.: I've seen uTorrent (and used a very similar Mac client, BitRocket); I'm sorry, the browsing/searching interface on it isn't as good as iTunes. Given that the original discussion was about music, though, in my experience you're frequently better off searching Gnutella-style networks anyway if you're looking for individual songs.
If we allow that -- and I think the case can certainly be made that we should -- we have to allow it for Islam as well. That is, we have to take Muslims who say "those who commit crimes in the name of our religion are not Muslims at all" at face value. If Christians get to disown Tim McVeigh, Eric Rudolph et. al., Muslims get to disown Osama bin Laden.
(N.B.: I'm aware that you didn't claim otherwise; I'm making this as a more general point. I've seen more than a few people who will claim, in effect, that only Christians who are good Christians should be called that, but Muslims who say "hey, I'm not with the terrorists" aren't to be believed.)
While I admit I haven't studied historical Christianity in great detail, I seem to recall a lot of emphasis on a concept called "forgiveness of sins." Your interpretation suggests a new definition of "forgive" I was previously unaware of.
Well, for starters, you've missed that major companies are buying "land" in Second Life and conducting meetings and interviews there. Politicians have conducted town hall meetings there. And Reuters has opened their first cyberspace news bureau in SL. As easy as it may be to mock these bits of information, I think they represent something very important: many companies and services have attempted to be "the metaverse" a la Snow Crash in the past, but what's going on in Second Life is, as klunky and hesitant as it may be, the metaverse actually happening.
For a year I worked for SL's erstwhile competitor, There, which was the one most people were betting on to "win" when both got going. (There made the cover of Business 2.0 and got out of the starting gate with companies like Nike already selling virtual products in-world.) And in a lot of ways There's client technology still kicks SL's ass; the experience is much smoother, even on less high-powered hardware. There's in-world "look" was designed by actual artists, including a former Disney imagineer or two, so when you wander around your eyes don't bleed. There has a sophisticated VR auction system designed by one of eBay's original employees. There accepts models created with GMax rather than a klunky proprietary design system, and ThereScript is based on Lua and is considerably better than Linden's scripting language.
But what Linden figured out that There didn't is that user-created content is king. SL really didn't give a damn if your eyes bled -- they opened the floodgates. Old "Therians" may boggle at my mention of ThereScript, because AFAIK There still hasn't opened it up to users even though they were talking about it when I was there in 2003. (There also had outstanding bugs in the "consumer service" that were going unfixed for months, if not years, IIRC, which were less a matter of technology than politics.)
Personally, I think SL's "under the hood" design is its Achilles' heel, and open-sourcing the client isn't going to help it -- they have a stream-everything model (possibly because their original team apparently came from Real Networks?) and the object system really isn't as sophisticated as what you'd find on an average MUCK server. Someone out there is almost certainly working on what amounts to "Third Life": a design and engineering sensibility as good as There's was (or at least aspired to be), with the understanding of the marketplace and user desires that Linden has. When this happens, that service will be the metaverse equivalent of World of Warcraft to SL's Everquest.
But between all the jokes about flying penises and the ritual mocking of the furries, I think SL is going to prove to be historically important in shaping an "avatar space." Yeah, the idea that a decade from now, it'll be common for businesses to have a virtual storefront in avatar space sounds pretty crazy, and I certainly wouldn't bet on it happening. But you know, in 1994, I'm not sure many of us would have predicted that by 2004, businesses that didn't have a URL would seem to be behind the times.
Astounding? Flabbergasting? Just ignorant? I'm honestly at a loss to describe your little anti-Gruber rant here. Hell, even most of the people who don't agree with his take on MacHeist -- who seem to be largely missing the point of what his gripe is, but never mind that -- have positive things to say about his self-published column otherwise.
Over the years he's pointed many of us at great apps, written one utility more than a few people on many platforms find to be a godsend for online writing, and had some very well-constructed, insightful things to say about not just the Apple market but the software and technology industry at large. Whether or not you agree with him, he explains exactly why he believes what he does. On any given subject. I don't always agree with him, but I always see why he came to his conclusion because he lays his cards on the table.
And this reminds you of John Dvorak how, pray tell?
The complaint Gruber made about MacHeist was primarily the flat-rate compensation: the better MH does, the better the MH "organizers" do in relation to the developers. And, the better they do, the lower effective per-copy revenue the developers take home, which carries a cost (hard to quantify, but nonetheless non-zero) in support. These really aren't disputed facts -- it's just a subjective call as to whether those negatives outweigh the "positives" of (anecdotally) increased market visibility. Obviously smart people disagree with Gruber and Gus Mueller. (Wil Shipley is undoubtedly a smart guy himself, although one might snark that he's demonstrating that in part by getting a few bucks from the 1.x version of Delicious Library he probably wouldn't have otherwise given that 2.0 is right around the corner.) I really wouldn't have any quibble with you disagreeing with Gruber, either, and I'd still say, "Hey, that justbill might be a smart guy."
But for you to post a massive "John Gruber is destroying the Mac community, he makes me ashamed, it's awful every time he opens his mouth, waaaah!" whine, y'know, that makes me wonder what chip you have on your shoulder, or just what crack it is you're smoking. It's so far out of sync with reality that it's... it's... flabbergastounding. (And to end it with "No whining": whoa, Irony Giant, man.)
You're welcome to make the case that Windows Server is pretty "turnkey" as far as such things go, but I'm not sure why you feel a need to keep slamming Apple every chance you get. No, OS X Server doesn't do everything The Microsoft Way. It doesn't have ActiveDirectory, but it has portable home directories. It doesn't have Exchange Server, but it has iCal server, LDAP and Postfix (not to mention sendmail). It doesn't have Microsoft SQL Server, but it has MySQL. It doesn't have IIS, but it has Apache. It has Xgrid, not Microsoft's... do they even have anything that compares with that? Hmm.
There's very little that a "small to medium" business needs that couldn't be done with OS X -- or to be fair, any other Unix-based server platform (OS X just has better administration tools than most). No, it won't make people who have a "if it ain't a Microsoft proprietary protocol, it's crap" mindset happy, because it's using a bunch of (gasp) open standards instead. And if you're that sort of person, that's fine by me. But don't argue that because OS X Server may not do what you want that it's objectively less capable. (None of the programs I have open on my MacBook currently have Windows port and some don't even have particularly good Windows equivalents--does that mean that Windows can't be used by any serious web developer?)
While I understand your objection to it -- which is essentially the most common objection to Javascript -- let me rephrase it, albeit in a deliberately provocative manner: "any tool to make the web-browsing experience more advanced than an IBM mainframe terminal can be exploited, and therefore should not be used."
There obviously are dangers to client-side scripting, and our current solutions could arguably handle them better. But are we really going to tell people to disable everything that could possibly execute in their browser because any such thing represents a security hole? Why, we could all be even more secure if we all used Lynx (graphics libraries have had exploitable bugs in them, after all), or better yet went back to Gopher. But somehow I'm betting that would be a tough sell.
For all of the buzzwordiness of Ajax and the inevitable abuse that goes with it, it really does provide usability benefits in terms of responsiveness and immediate user feedback. And while it may be easy to say, "Well, I object to Javascript itself, not the concept," I'm not convinced that any useful scripting language for client-side interaction isn't going to have the same potential for abuse. (And as a language, Javascript is not that horrible. It's got more than its fair share of warts, but it's a functional language, with closures and higher-order functions and a lot of general goodnesss people don't usually appreciate.)
On Slashdot in particular (but around diehard computer nerds in general), I've run into what I've dubbed the "engineer's mindset" that regards all advances past HTML 2 as unnecessary frills. But from not only a design but a usability standpoint, "Web 2.0" is not just about bling -- it's about making web applications work better. As Martha Stewart would say when she's not in prison: that's a good thing. And I don't think we really do web users nearly as much of a service as we imagine we are when we tell them, "No Google Maps for you."
I believe DHH cried "missing the point," which isn't that inaccurate.
There are a lot of valid complaints about Ruby's speed (although Rails can do pretty intelligent caching); I'm not aware of anyone really attempting to push Rails' scalability to the level that Java can do. I'd disagree with the description of DHH's rants as "FUD," though, by and large. His response to Joel's critique of Rails was that, basically, "I don't think it will scale!" is in a certain sense always FUD -- unless you know of a system out there guaranteed to have no bottlenecks that will show up if its usage increases by an order of magnitude.
Why did DHH pick on Java (I use the past tense because I haven't seen much of this recently)? Because Java people were the first out of the woodwork dismissing Rails. The funny thing is, when you look at some of the biggest, busiest sites on the net -- MySpace, Yahoo, Google, for that matter Slashdot -- while you're not seeing Rails, you're not seeing Java, either. Rails has the excuse of being "immature"; Java doesn't get cut the same level of slack. I'd suggest that the reason has less to do with functionality and "scalability" as it does with simple maintainability. And that's a lot of what attracts people to Rails in the first place. It's not FUD to say that Java is a beast to work with on many levels. It's an opinion and it may not be one you share, but it's not one that's particularly unique to 37Signals developers.
There's a quote that appeared on Daring Fireball today from a golf instruction book: "As for your grip pressure, keep it light. Arnold Palmer likes to grip the club tightly, but you are not Arnold Palmer." In a lot of ways, that's what most of of the Rails "message" boils down to. Rails may not be appropriate for Google, but you are not building Google. (The corollary is that if you are building Google with Rails, even metaphorically, you'll find ways to address those issues.)
Despite what Cory Doctorow eloquently ranted about some time ago, Apple has only used the TPM module in the initial developer-only "transition kit" computers. Some Intel Macs do indeed have TPM chips on their motherboards (as do most other Intel machines, of course), but the firmware doesn't talk to the chip and OS X has no driver for it. Furthermore, not all of the Intel Macs even have the module. http://www.osxbook.com/book/bonus/chapter10/tpm/ Singh also makes a point in that article which I'd noticed when I'd actually, y'know, read the TPM specs, which I don't think many people have -- the idea that the chips can somehow, in and of themselves, prevent you from running "unapproved" applications, let alone lock you into proprietary data specs, is pretty bogus. While the chips have the potential of being used for evil, that's certainly not intrinsic to their design, and in fact TPM chips could be used to implement public key security and signing for users in a more secure fashion than can be done in software alone. At any rate, the idea that OS X is being locked to Mac hardware via TPM chips appears to simply not be the case. It's locked to Mac hardware primarily by Mac hardware just not being quite as interchangeable with PC hardware as the "Intel Macs are just PCs in new cases" crowd thinks.
I'm not so sure of that.
On any given day, look at Slashdot's front page, and I guarantee most of the news stories will have first been reported by professional journalists. Most of the blogs most of us read are likewise not full of original reporting. They may be original commentary, but that's a different animal. What we see a lot of currently is free commentary on, or just links to, original reporting produced by pretty conventional methods, and this is an impending problem. Simply put, somebody has to pay for journalists to do their work, and one thing P2P networks have not done very well at so far is income generation -- commercial blogs tend to go back to commercial models.
We're all familiar with stories like bloggers deconstructing whether Vietnam-era typewriters had proportional spacing and superscripts, but those are the exceptions, not the rule. There are examples of news organizations that exist entirely online, like C|Net, and there are blogs that are striving to be journalistic enterprises, like Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo launching "TPM Muckraker" -- but these aren't entire new paradigms, they're the old paradigms with new publishing software. Replacing QuarkXpress and InDesign with Movable Type and Drupal doesn't replace the concept of editorial standards.
I'm even less convinced of that. It's easy for those of us who are used to using RSS readers and web-based news portals to assemble our own ever-changing headline and commentary sections to assume that's the way everyone will read news in the future. But the way most people read news now on the internet is mediated through the BBC, CNN or Fox. I don't think that's because most people just haven't seen RSS feeds, despite what most of us who piddle around with Web 2.0 would like to believe. Most of my technically-savvy friends (here in Silicon Valley!) have... and don't see the point. Their response is very often a variant of, "I have more information than I can manage as it is now."
But filtering and weighting systems can do that, you might say. Maybe, but the problem is that you either have to take the time to learn to adjust them -- and time is the resource people feel they have the least of in this arena, remember -- or trust to the defaults of whatever system you're using, which I would argue is substantially worse than having human editorial control. "All the news within the first standard deviation" is not, to me, a very stirring rallying cry against the alleged tyranny of Times editorial staff.
I think we may soon see an age where the role of a news editor changes, and that link-blogs are prototypes of this new direction. And it's great that the Giant Tubes of Unmediated Data are accessible now in a way that they never have been before, that publishing is easier for everyone, that the sources are there for everyone to be their own managing editors when they want or need to. But in the long run, I doubt the majority of people actually want to be their own managing editors most of the time.
I don't think Apple is ignorant of the interest in running OS X on non-Apple hardware; in fact, I'd say it's a safe bet that somebody in Apple has projections of what the effects on their market share, on their own hardware sales, etc., etc. would be.
But as I've commented in earlier discussions on this topic, I also suspect Apple has projections on just what would happen if they turned Microsoft into a full-blown, no-pretense-of-partnership enemy. Because if Apple ever released OS X for non-Apple Intel hardware, Microsoft would perceive it -- correctly -- as the most serious assault on the Windows platform that they've ever faced. No offense is intended to Linux and *BSD variants by that; it's a simple recognition that OS X has much more "end user" friendliness and a much wider range of commercial applications (including some pretty big name ones) than any other Unix relative ever has, and Apple has one of the highest brand recognitions in the world.
Given how Microsoft has reacted to much less dangerous competition in the past, what do you think their response would be?
Yes, I know you were suggesting Apple could just release an OS X that had only license restrictions and "just happened" to be able to run on non-Apple hardware, nudge nudge wink wink. But if Apple sold enough copies of OS X to non-Mac owners to actually affect their bottom line, that would be enough to attract the attention of the industry press -- and of Microsoft. And at that point, if Apple didn't take very loud definitive actions to put a stop to it, it'd be effectively throwing down the gauntlet just as much as slapping "Now compatible with your Dell, HP and your crappy white box PC!" stickers on every OS X Leopard box.
It's nice to dream, but an OS X that just breezily installs on non-Apple hardware won't happen unless Apple decides they're willing to engage in a fight to the death with Microsoft.
The problem with the "gun control laws only apply to law-abiding citizens" argument isn't that it's incorrect, it's that it's just as correct if you take the phrase "gun control" out of the above statement. Anti-theft laws are also "only for good people who follow the laws," because criminals who violate the law get "free or cheap" TVs, cars, computers, and so on. This is hardly a "setup" caused by anti-theft laws, and it doesn't become any more so if we talk about laws relating to gun ownership and purchase, either.
The question is really whether the law reduces the incidence of crime it tries to address. Gun control is one of those hot button issues in which people are inclined to take all-or-nothing positions -- any restriction is too harsh for the NRA, and no restriction is too harsh for Handgun Control, Inc. -- but it seems to me that laws (or proposed laws) need to be examined on a case-by-case basis.
Whether one believes it's "fair" or not, legally posting copyrighted material does not fall under the "fair use" act--even a snippet is of dubious legality in this instance (it's not being "quoted" for a review or illustrative purposes), and posting works in their entirety certainly doesn't qualify.
Google is essentially counting on the same thing YouTube has been all along--a legal safe harbor provision. YouTube's business model (such as it is) doesn't rely on copyright infringement,* so as long as Google is diligent about removing infringing material they're likely safe. And what I've heard about this buyout suggests that their new copyright-holding partners like Universal plan to help them search.
*Napster lost making the same argument, but YouTube certainly has much more user-created and sanctioned content than the original Napster did.
You've mentioned this several times, but I'm going to challenge it, I think. :) It strikes me as a pretty dubious comparison if you go past the surface.
The Amiga name was passed around like a football and is being slapped on technologies that don't even pretend to have any connection with the original operating system and hardware by companies that also don't have any connection with the original work. The Macintosh now is certainly a very different computer than it was twenty years ago, but -- even though I've made the half-joke myself -- OS X really isn't just NextStep with a facelift. There's been a transition in software, to be sure, but it's only been the move to the Intel processor line in the last year that completely killed backward compatibility with the pre-OS 9 world. (The Carbon API started before OS X, and Carbon apps can run on both OS 9 and OS X, regardless of processor.)
The comparison simply isn't as straightforward as you keep trying to make it out to be. Yes, older programs do run in emulation even on my PowerPC-based Mac laptop -- but if you run your old DOS programs on Windows 2000 or XP, they're also running in emulation: the DOS box on NT-based systems is not that far off conceptually from the Classic environment on OS X. And in any case, Apple owns the Macintosh name and has been applying it consistently to their computer line since 1984, without a single red-letter "absolutely nothing before this will work" break -- the continuity has been fairly smooth, even if at this point in time they are indeed selling machines that can't run programs written twenty years ago (without third-party emulation). Contrast that with the current Amiga, Inc., which had no visible interest in the Amiga desktop computer and inexplicably thought "Amiga" would be a compelling brand name for a Java-based virtual machine licensed to handheld makers.
If Apple had gone out of business in the mid-90s and some tiny technology company had bought the name and was now trying to market a line of, say, second-rate Windows office applications as "Macintosh Office," then you'd have a more apt comparison.
You've hit the big thing I think the supporters of these moves keep either missing or simply dismissing. Most of the arguments for it eventually strip down to "while you're at war you have to trust the government with expanded powers to fight the enemy." But those checks and balances in our system exist largely so you don't have to just "trust the government." When you couple that with a "war" that has no victory condition--after all, you can't definitively defeat a tactic--you're talking about a very troubling expansion of power indeed. It astounds me how many theoretically conservative folks will shed fire and brimstone about the evils of big government when it comes to welfare programs, but wholeheartedly support laws that have clear potential to degrade constitutional rights. While I'm not a conservative, I don't think one has to be a bleeding heart liberal to think that preserving habeus corpus is a touch more important to our fundamental freedoms than repealing the estate tax.
I don't have any reason to doubt that those who are saying that the wiretap powers are just being used to track "known terrorists" are largely correct. But, they could be used to track people giving "material support" to known terrrorists, using the language of the recent enemy combatant bill--and those people could in turn be declared enemy combatants, and held indefinitely without trial. And just what is "material support"? Giving money to an organization that's deemed to have terrorist ties? Being a reporter in Iraq who seems to talk too much to the insurgents? Being a reporter here in America who publishes leaked information about a controversial wiretapping program?
You know, that's something I wonder about. I've seen a few political groups with pretty solidly liberal viewpoints talk about "non-partisan analysis" in such ways, and I suspect they're trying to say, more or less, "liberal but not automatically lining up behind the Democrats," in the way that some conservative thinktanks would prefer to be known as conservative rather than "carrying water for the Republicans." I'm not sure that's really a correct use of "partisan" in practice, though. One could say the Cato Institute is partisan for being pretty consistently libertarian.
Having said that, the Center for American Progress--the group the original post linked to--seems to do a pretty good job of supplying citations that check out when you follow them up, and they were mostly just pointing out, "Well, look, what Rice said here and what she said there don't line up."
Other than the whole "practical applications" thing, you mean, right?
I'm being facetious, of course, but when it comes to community support, breadth of libraries, and--I suspect very importantly--ease of use, it's hard to argue that Smalltalk has any of those things compared to Ruby. It's stayed in the academic/research world without ever really moving to the commercial or hobbyist side of the fence. There are many "research project" environments that have eloquent defenders who make great cases for their design and productivity benefits--Plan 9, anyone?--but the barrier for widespread adoption is too high, and the people in the community by and large don't consider "lowering barriers to widespread adoption" a problem worth spending time on. (Squeak may theoretically be an exception, but in practice, it hasn't quite been setting the world on fire.)
As a friend of mine who worked with Alan Kay briefly in a past job said, "Smalltalk is the language of the future--and always will be."
This is an example of what might be dubbed "political hypercorrectness." Yes, we have a representative democracy rather than a direct democracy. They're both still examples of democracy.
The SGI-to-PC and Apple-to-PC comparison isn't very solid, though. While people endlessly nitpick over PC and Mac prices, when comparing brand name to brand name, they're generally comparable in a way that SGI's workstations simply never were: a midline Octane workstation would be three or four times as expensive as a high-end PC. SGI's off-the-shelf software selection was extremely limited, tailored just for their niche markets (yes, you could compile open source software, but that's not generally what one bought an SGI workstation to do); OS X's selection is limited compared to Windows, but a couple orders of magnitude greater than Irix's. Apple hardware is (relatively) unique, but there's a wide variety of third-party manufacturers making peripherals, most of which use industry-standard connections -- none of which SGI did.
It's certainly possible that Apple computer hardware will die off in the long run -- but as cynics have noted, the death of the company has been predicted for well over a decade now. What killed SGI workstations, ultimately, was that they were in a specialized niche rather than a consumer market, and commodity hardware caught up with them. Apple may have positioned themselves as a "boutique" computer maker, but they're still very firmly in the consumer space.
As a previous commenter suggested, the "RMS wants to forcibly prevent you from using proprietary software" is, from everything I've seen, a caricature of his position. He's arguably easy to caricature in this way, and that's unfortunate, but I don't believe you've done much research on what he's actually said. And with all due respect, even if Mr. Stallman has categorically stated that he would personally love to wave a magic wand and make all proprietary software vanish into a puff of smoke, that doesn't have much bearing on what the original poster you were responding to said. He argued why he feels proprietary software reduces your freedom. You may or may not agree, but he never argued your software should be taken away from you, and that is the argument you kept responding to. You were arguing against something he did not say in the first place.
Lest you think it's unfair of me to suggest that you're leaping to conclusions based on a fairly limited data set, I'll gently point out that you've already demonstrated doing that with me. I've said you seem to have constructed a straw man argument against the original poster, from which you've abstracted that not only does the OP agree in toto with RMS, but that I do as well. You'll find nothing in what I've said that's evidence I'm in significant agreement with the OP. Out of seven applications running on my machine right now, only one is open source; three are commercial third-party applications and the others are closed-source utilities that came with OS X.
For what's worth, I think closed source applications do "restrict your freedom" in the sense that you lack the freedom to (legally?) modify them. Having source available has helped me in a handful of cases over the years (such as an input manager for OS X I recently recompiled to work with my Intel MacBook -- Rosetta emulation didn't work in this case), so this isn't merely a theoretical advantage. Given a choice between a good proprietary package and a mediocre open source one, though, source code alone is not a sufficient factor to sway me, and the bugbear of "closed data formats your data will be lost forever!!!" isn't really very scary these days. (How many truly closed data formats are still in use outside vertical markets?) I'd rather be using TextMate than Emacs or Vim (and I've used both of those for years). Nothing in the open source world that I've found compares to Macromedia Fireworks, or OmniOutliner, or OmniGraffle Pro, and I'm going to keep using those, thanks. If someone really does choose to make a stand on having only open source software on their machine, though, good for them. If they want to advocate to me for why that's the One True Way, that's their right.
My point, I suppose, is simply this: fascism is a very, very strong word to being throwing around so facilely. I've heard more than one free software advocate claim that proprietary software is fascist, and I don't think that baldly stupid statement is best countered by claiming its inverse.