I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave, and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
What's changed is that the pervasiveness of social media and the anonymity of the internet makes it so that waging an astroturfing PR campaign can be both harder to detect and much more effective. Basically, you should take everything and everyone online with a grain of salt (including me!).
You're a douche. In an economy where many people have been unemployed for so long that they're just dropping out of the workforce altogether, you're fretting over "FUD" because your company did a normal thing and switched products? Get over it. Do you realize how insane you have to be to take platform wars so seriously that you actually quit your job and avoid any other jobs that have anything to do with Microsoft products? For god's sake, get some perspective.
SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) visited Foxconn and said that the biggest gripe from employees was money, and they also grumbled that overtime was sometimes forced upon them. Other concerns included exposure to dust at a construction site. Employees are allowed bathroom breaks each day, though managers did encourage them to work through their breaks. You make it sound like some torture dungeon, and it's just not. It's a typical grueling Chinese factory, but it's one of the least bad.
Yes - helping other people is "an impossible slippery slope" indeed!
Trying to police the entire world is impossible. In fact, it's what gets us into trouble in the first place. More pressure should be placed on the Chinese government, since it is ultimately their responsibility to improve the lives of their citizens. I believe Apple and other companies do as much as can reasonably be done as foreign private entities, but since electronics factories like Foxconn are the biggest in the world, there really isn't any other place to go that can match supply.
We've become so used to the idea that ALL consumer electronics are made in sweatshops that we're down to comparing whose sweatshop is the *least* nightmarish? That's more than a little sad, no?
Foxconn is so "nightmarish" that thousands lined up to work there. That's not to say that conditions can't always be improved, but it's hardly some drastic human rights violation. A lot of its violations are managerial abuses and overtime exploitation, making it not unlike Walmart.
Interesting how the original headline reads "Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough" while Slashdot's reads "Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse". From best to terrible in the flash of a Slashdot submission.
I don't get why Apple is always the one intimately associated with Foxconn when, as the largest electronics manufacturer in the world, Foxconn builds products for Dell, HP, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Microsoft, and so on. That Apple is the most proactive about labor policies isn't a surprise given the company's left-wing political leanings. You can always say someone should be doing more, but one can't help but wonder at what point it becomes the responsibility of the native government to make its citizen's lives better rather than the companies in another country sending the build orders. If Apple and other companies did what Li Qiang suggests, they'd essentially be babysitting the entire world's industrial labor, and that's just an impossible slippery slope. However, the storyline of a glossy, profitable American company using "slave labor" is just too juicy a narrative for the mainstream media to pass up.
The iPhone 4S was such a huge hit that it passed Android's marketshare at the end of 2011 (it wouldn't surprise me if people didn't know, since Slashdot refused to report it). But, see, we're not supposed to focus on the facts. We're supposed to rant about these "money sucking leeches" like the submitter wanted.
Yep! Check your account options in the upper right. People used to take advantage of this feature to block the infamous "personalities" JonKatz and michael.
In the last four years, Slashdot has become a troll-heavy advocacy site. If you praise Apple even a little bit in the comments, you get modbombed and accused of shilling. It's like Engadget's muddy runoff seeps through here like a rainy ditch, hating everything mainstream and popular. It's really sad, because this site used to be a lot more fun.
That's a dumb argument. People put artwork in a store window specifically for customers to see and be drawn into the store. And the storeowners probably paid for the artwork, either with money or with the time and effort in making it themselves.
It sounds like you're living in a fantasy land where artists should grudgingly shoulder the many greedy mouths of mass consumption, just because. It's unfortunate that the spirit of OSS, which was intend to encourage a culture of giving back, has also helped create a culture of "gimme that, it's mine!"
Just like SOPA was an overreaction, yours is as well, in the opposite direction.
So I can steal GPL code then? Technology lets me do it, after all.
Not to cut in on the INFORMATION-WANTS-TO-BE-FREE rant, but culture can't survive in the long term if its creators don't get rewarded for their work. Just because something can be done technologically doesn't mean it justifies itself. Some people, who are often new to OSS, get confused over the fact they can download Linux software for free and end up thinking everything should be free. As the saying goes, it's free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. If someone wants to sell their software, they have that right too. Would you like it if your boss withheld your paycheck and told you your code "wanted to be free" and that you were a casualty of technology changing the world?
You have to be rational and fight against overreactions like SOPA while acknowledging sane solutions for compensating content creators so that we can continue to enjoy cool shit in our society.
I didn't like the legislation either, but isn't this headline and summary kind of biased? I don't know...I just feel uncomfortable having the submission frame it specifically to make me react a certain way. I mean, it flat-out states how "most/. readers" will respond. I'd rather just read what Cary Sherman has to say and come to my own conclusions, which will likely align with others here, but at least I arrived there on my own.
Most people just go to the store or ask a techie friend. They don't do Google research.
If you don't think traditional search is a dead-end, then maybe you'd like to explain why Google is turning its search engine upside-down and integrating Google+ everywhere in spite of the uproar. It's because Facebook has outright replaced the web for many people--email, news, videos, casual games, it's all coming through Facebook. Google knows that social is the future and that if they don't do something, they'll just be another Infoseek getting replaced by some hot, new thing.
Of course that's not going to ring true for a site full of Linux-loving techies who avoid social networks and think searching for esoteric computer parts is what everybody does. But in the mainstream, people are using Facebook all day long for almost all communication now.
You're the second person to post something like this, where your example is asking for some kind of esoteric technical knowledge. Do you really not see that you don't represent the mainstream? How do you not see that the shrinking demand for search is why Google is so forcefully integrating Google+ everywhere? Facebook is replacing the web for many people.
My tip is to never let yourself remain attached to a particular subset of languages for 20 years. Absorb all crazy things, because it makes you better in all languages.
Not to cut in on the OMG-PROPRIETARY-PLATFORMS rant, but benefiting the company is kind of the point of running a business. And the console business is doing extremely well, much better than the PC gaming market, so mainstream customers are clearly okay with it. The fact that people on Slashdot still rant about PS3 Linux as if any significant share of the PS3 user base even bothered with it is illustration enough how out-of-touch many of the posters are.
I wonder if anyone replying to this article will make the connection to smartphones and realize that this is why Android's hardware fragmentation is a bad thing. In fact, Apple is practically like every other console manufacturer in providing a restricted set of hardware with a centrally approved software set.
P.S. Your argument for the Galaxy S / Android 4.0 is the same situation you're in, if you can look over your own clear bias. You are NOT getting all the features from the new OS.
You're completely nuts. The Galaxy S is a top-selling phone that's only months old and yet not getting Android 4.0, while the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS.
This is the major difference between Android. It actually adds a ton of stuff, new features, and isn't afraid to change for the better.
Unfortunately, it's limited to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) devices
So are all the people who trashed Apple for making Siri exclusive to the iPhone 4S going to trash Google for making Chrome exclusive to ICS devices? Recall that ICS is currently only on 1% of Android devices.
This is what you get when you run apple. Literally - you let them dictate the software that you can run, this is the result. Don't like it? Don't use apple.
Not to cut into the OMG-MY-FREEDOM rant, but Siri is in beta and can barely keep up with current network demands of iPhone 4S users. If it saw general release across multiple devices, it would be a clusterfuck on the level of MobileMe.
Besides, the premise is a bit silly, as the alternatives to Apple cut off support for your phone mere months after it's released, like the Galaxy S that won't get Android 4.0, because the business model is based on making you buy new hardware after half a year. I'll take Apple's software dictation over most of the Android carriers, all things considered. I'm just a guy using a phone, not a freedom fighter.
Bravo, Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that the geek crowd finds interesting. Is it useful? Nope. Is it cool and borderline bizarre? Yep!
Slashdot used to post a lot more of this stuff before it became an advocacy site. I'm so sick of patent, copyright, and Pirate Bay articles I could cry blood.
By the way, noticed that the "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters." tagline is gone?
Slashdot Mirror
I'm totally going to use this from now on.
I think the lesson to take away is to strive for a rational, "healthily skeptical" position when presented with climate data. It's just such an unpredictable thing--literally, a complicated system the size of the entire world with a scale spanning molecules, continents, and beyond. The media doesn't help, either--it's drive for alarmism tends to overly simplify or exaggerate situations, and perhaps even the scientists involved get caught up in it.
For example, do you remember how polar bears drowning in the Arctic sea due to global warming were cited as a reason to classify them as an endangered species, and how they were used as a symbol of climate change in Al Gore's movie? The lead scientist was actually placed on administrative leave, and several questions were raised about how the bears actually died and how the corpses were observed from 1,500 up in a helicopter rather than examined to actually determine their cause of death. Whether or not they were really drowning, there just wasn't enough data to come to the conclusion that was presented to the public with the level of certainty that was conveyed.
Unfortunately, if you're someone who agrees with doing the logical thing--reducing the negative environmental impact of humans as much as possible, within reasonable economic boundaries--the exaggerations and alarmism sweep you away into being on a "side", and you're shoved right in the middle of the mosh pit of tribal politics. If you question a conclusion or suggest a way of doing things, and you maintain a nuanced or balanced position, you get shit on by everybody, and nothing gets accomplished.
George Carlin did an insightful (and profanity-laden) bit on alarmism in modern society.
What's changed is that the pervasiveness of social media and the anonymity of the internet makes it so that waging an astroturfing PR campaign can be both harder to detect and much more effective. Basically, you should take everything and everyone online with a grain of salt (including me!).
As we all know, most CEOs are honest people who never twist truth or distort reality to achieve their goals.
Meanwhile, Google is officially becoming an enforcer of Motorola's patents and will demand a billion dollars a year in royalty fees, contrary to everything about patents that they complained about six months ago and everything their defenders have claimed about their values. But, yeah, it's good that this old Gawker story about mean Steve Jobs was posted instead.
You're a douche. In an economy where many people have been unemployed for so long that they're just dropping out of the workforce altogether, you're fretting over "FUD" because your company did a normal thing and switched products? Get over it. Do you realize how insane you have to be to take platform wars so seriously that you actually quit your job and avoid any other jobs that have anything to do with Microsoft products? For god's sake, get some perspective.
SACOM (Students & Scholars Against Corporate Misbehaviour) visited Foxconn and said that the biggest gripe from employees was money, and they also grumbled that overtime was sometimes forced upon them. Other concerns included exposure to dust at a construction site. Employees are allowed bathroom breaks each day, though managers did encourage them to work through their breaks. You make it sound like some torture dungeon, and it's just not. It's a typical grueling Chinese factory, but it's one of the least bad.
Trying to police the entire world is impossible. In fact, it's what gets us into trouble in the first place. More pressure should be placed on the Chinese government, since it is ultimately their responsibility to improve the lives of their citizens. I believe Apple and other companies do as much as can reasonably be done as foreign private entities, but since electronics factories like Foxconn are the biggest in the world, there really isn't any other place to go that can match supply.
Foxconn is so "nightmarish" that thousands lined up to work there. That's not to say that conditions can't always be improved, but it's hardly some drastic human rights violation. A lot of its violations are managerial abuses and overtime exploitation, making it not unlike Walmart.
Interesting how the original headline reads "Apple Best at Auditing Factories, Still Not Doing Enough" while Slashdot's reads "Apple May Be Terrible, But All Others Are Worse". From best to terrible in the flash of a Slashdot submission.
I don't get why Apple is always the one intimately associated with Foxconn when, as the largest electronics manufacturer in the world, Foxconn builds products for Dell, HP, Sony, Motorola, Nintendo, Microsoft, and so on. That Apple is the most proactive about labor policies isn't a surprise given the company's left-wing political leanings. You can always say someone should be doing more, but one can't help but wonder at what point it becomes the responsibility of the native government to make its citizen's lives better rather than the companies in another country sending the build orders. If Apple and other companies did what Li Qiang suggests, they'd essentially be babysitting the entire world's industrial labor, and that's just an impossible slippery slope. However, the storyline of a glossy, profitable American company using "slave labor" is just too juicy a narrative for the mainstream media to pass up.
The iPhone 4S was such a huge hit that it passed Android's marketshare at the end of 2011 (it wouldn't surprise me if people didn't know, since Slashdot refused to report it). But, see, we're not supposed to focus on the facts. We're supposed to rant about these "money sucking leeches" like the submitter wanted.
Yep! Check your account options in the upper right. People used to take advantage of this feature to block the infamous "personalities" JonKatz and michael.
In the last four years, Slashdot has become a troll-heavy advocacy site. If you praise Apple even a little bit in the comments, you get modbombed and accused of shilling. It's like Engadget's muddy runoff seeps through here like a rainy ditch, hating everything mainstream and popular. It's really sad, because this site used to be a lot more fun.
That's a dumb argument. People put artwork in a store window specifically for customers to see and be drawn into the store. And the storeowners probably paid for the artwork, either with money or with the time and effort in making it themselves.
It sounds like you're living in a fantasy land where artists should grudgingly shoulder the many greedy mouths of mass consumption, just because. It's unfortunate that the spirit of OSS, which was intend to encourage a culture of giving back, has also helped create a culture of "gimme that, it's mine!"
Just like SOPA was an overreaction, yours is as well, in the opposite direction.
So I can steal GPL code then? Technology lets me do it, after all.
Not to cut in on the INFORMATION-WANTS-TO-BE-FREE rant, but culture can't survive in the long term if its creators don't get rewarded for their work. Just because something can be done technologically doesn't mean it justifies itself. Some people, who are often new to OSS, get confused over the fact they can download Linux software for free and end up thinking everything should be free. As the saying goes, it's free-as-in-speech, not free-as-in-beer. If someone wants to sell their software, they have that right too. Would you like it if your boss withheld your paycheck and told you your code "wanted to be free" and that you were a casualty of technology changing the world?
You have to be rational and fight against overreactions like SOPA while acknowledging sane solutions for compensating content creators so that we can continue to enjoy cool shit in our society.
I didn't like the legislation either, but isn't this headline and summary kind of biased? I don't know...I just feel uncomfortable having the submission frame it specifically to make me react a certain way. I mean, it flat-out states how "most /. readers" will respond. I'd rather just read what Cary Sherman has to say and come to my own conclusions, which will likely align with others here, but at least I arrived there on my own.
Maybe it's just me. Carry on.
Most people just go to the store or ask a techie friend. They don't do Google research.
If you don't think traditional search is a dead-end, then maybe you'd like to explain why Google is turning its search engine upside-down and integrating Google+ everywhere in spite of the uproar. It's because Facebook has outright replaced the web for many people--email, news, videos, casual games, it's all coming through Facebook. Google knows that social is the future and that if they don't do something, they'll just be another Infoseek getting replaced by some hot, new thing.
Of course that's not going to ring true for a site full of Linux-loving techies who avoid social networks and think searching for esoteric computer parts is what everybody does. But in the mainstream, people are using Facebook all day long for almost all communication now.
You're the second person to post something like this, where your example is asking for some kind of esoteric technical knowledge. Do you really not see that you don't represent the mainstream? How do you not see that the shrinking demand for search is why Google is so forcefully integrating Google+ everywhere? Facebook is replacing the web for many people.
My tip is to never let yourself remain attached to a particular subset of languages for 20 years. Absorb all crazy things, because it makes you better in all languages.
Try LISP sometime.
Not to cut in on the OMG-PROPRIETARY-PLATFORMS rant, but benefiting the company is kind of the point of running a business. And the console business is doing extremely well, much better than the PC gaming market, so mainstream customers are clearly okay with it. The fact that people on Slashdot still rant about PS3 Linux as if any significant share of the PS3 user base even bothered with it is illustration enough how out-of-touch many of the posters are.
I wonder if anyone replying to this article will make the connection to smartphones and realize that this is why Android's hardware fragmentation is a bad thing. In fact, Apple is practically like every other console manufacturer in providing a restricted set of hardware with a centrally approved software set.
You're completely nuts. The Galaxy S is a top-selling phone that's only months old and yet not getting Android 4.0, while the 2 1/2 year old iPhone 3GS can run the latest version of iOS.
And people accuse me of being a shill?
So are all the people who trashed Apple for making Siri exclusive to the iPhone 4S going to trash Google for making Chrome exclusive to ICS devices? Recall that ICS is currently only on 1% of Android devices.
Not to cut into the OMG-MY-FREEDOM rant, but Siri is in beta and can barely keep up with current network demands of iPhone 4S users. If it saw general release across multiple devices, it would be a clusterfuck on the level of MobileMe.
Besides, the premise is a bit silly, as the alternatives to Apple cut off support for your phone mere months after it's released, like the Galaxy S that won't get Android 4.0, because the business model is based on making you buy new hardware after half a year. I'll take Apple's software dictation over most of the Android carriers, all things considered. I'm just a guy using a phone, not a freedom fighter.
Bravo, Slashdot. This is the kind of stuff that the geek crowd finds interesting. Is it useful? Nope. Is it cool and borderline bizarre? Yep!
Slashdot used to post a lot more of this stuff before it became an advocacy site. I'm so sick of patent, copyright, and Pirate Bay articles I could cry blood.
By the way, noticed that the "News For Nerds. Stuff That Matters." tagline is gone?
Courtesy of the Onion:
Blockbuster Offers Glimpse Of Movie Renting Past