I disagree, human nature hasn't changed in all that time. And any warning about immanent tyranny is worth considering even if circumstances have changed. Democracy seems to be becoming a race to the middle, an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Take a look at what's happening in America, for example a peaceful protester beaten to the ground while Hillary Clinton talks on about repressive regimes abusing peaceful protesters. Obama carries on with Gitmo trials despite promising to end them. Here in the UK as well, we vote for a different party that said different things, yet when they get in power they carry on with the previous government's policies while the outgoing party picks up the rhetoric that the opposition used to use against them. Democracy is leading to tyranny, Plato might end up being right but for the wrong reasons.
That the pressure to buy Microsoft was overwhelming is evidenced by the fact that so many businesses made that choice because they perceived that they had no choice. No-one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. I have friends that still use Internet Explorer because they are concerned that other browsers will not work properly with Windows because Microsoft will make it so.
Of course, the next attack will be "Now that apple has a monopoly, we can claim that they are using that monopoly to try to gain a monopoly in another market", such as music or tablet apps. That would be interesting, but not something that I would support. The two things that makes the iPhone/iPad work well are tight hardware/software integration and brutal inspection of App Store source. If, just speculating wildly, Apple were ordered to split up into hardware and software companies, then out would go the baby with the bath water.
Also, right now, there are alternatives. Android tablets are a viable choice, it is not the case that "if I want a tablet I can effectively only choose iPad", so a 90% or even a 99.9% market share does not make a monopoly until that is the case.
The market for iPad type devices is too young to determine whether that makes a monopoly or not though. A monopoly is only a problem when you need to have one and you don't have an effective choice because there is only one practical option.
Like I said: [i]Having one monopoly isn't in any way illegal. Abusing it to gain another is.[/i] And [i]it's only been out for a year[/i], is Apple's position re: the iPad so harmful to society that the FTC need to step in? If you answer yes, then give me your dealer's 'phone number 'cos it's clearly good stuff.
When they use a monopoly position in one market as leverage to gain a monopoly in another. Having one monopoly isn't in any way illegal. Abusing it to gain another is. And Apple don't even have one monopoly or overwhelmingly dominant position yet. Don't like the iPhone? Plenty of other phones out there. Same with iPad, iPod, Mac, etc.
Apple have locked down their devices, and for (IMO) good reasons.
Two things:
1) They have locked down their user's devices, not their devices.
Semantics. It was Apple's device before I bought it, and I knew what I was buying into. I've stated my opinion, you've stated yours, there's no point saying more. I've seen this thread played out too many times already and it never gets anywhere. I'm not blindly committed to the Holy Book of Jobs. Maybe I'll change my mind. Maybe I'll "see the light". But it isn't going to happen here and now.
It's not arbitrary. Apple have locked down their devices, and for (IMO) good reasons. The GPL forbids distribution of locked down derivatives, so it isn't Apple's doing, it's the GPL's. Same for Microsoft.
Why buy devices locked to proprietary standards and licensing? I'd bet a six pack of micro brew the most open market will win the most customers. Android anyone?
Because they work really well, and are extremely reliable and secure. Unlike Android. Last summer I was genuinely of the opinion that my next phone would be an Android. But then I accidentally smashed my iPhone 3 and had to get a replacement right away and got an iPhone 4 (yes, locked in by dependecy on certain apps) so that's put it back a bit. With the recent story about infected apps on the Android Market, I am having second thoughts about switching at all.
Every animal, every organism, on the planet exploits other organisms. Does that make all life evil? Why are we so different, that the way we treat other life as a resource makes us evil? Perhaps the most effective evolutionary adaptation that life has ever stumbled across is to be domesticatable, tasty, and/or useful to humans. It's a guaranteed win.
This actually raises an interesting point that I've been thinking about recently. People imagine that an AI will also be a mathematical genius compared to us, because computers can calculate numbers quickly. Not necessarily so. One of the reasons we are slow with numbers is we keep vast amounts of related information along with the number. If I ask you to think of a number and tell me what it is, you might say "seven", but in your mind you might also be imagining the colours of the rainbow, the sides of a fifty pence coin, the age of your niece, the days of the week, etc. And if I say "double it, add one, is that a prime number?", then you have three numbers in your memory before you start to check for factors. A computer could be programmed to double a number, add one to it, and determine if it is prime, but unless specifically programmed to, it would not even have a record of the first number. An artificial intelligence that is built to think even in a vaguely similar manner to us would also have all these contexts to process, and might even have a previous instruction "whenever you think about the number fifteen..." that it also has to take into account. All of this baggage will slow down an AI massively, and so it might not be such a mathematical genius after all. Sure, you could include the functionality of a pocket calculator and have that as an independent subsystem that the main AI can access, but that would make it no different to us, it has to use a simple mathematical processing unit to do complex sums without getting bogged down in extraneous details.
Most telecomms have a web interface for sending sms to their customers. Using that interface through a dozen proxies is probably as anonymous as it gets.
Stamps, on the other hand, will always leave a money trail if you buy them.
And how, exactly, are you going to get the generated code to write on your letter if you send the SMS through an anonymous service? And I don't think it's practical to track a stamp back to the supermarket that I bought some stamps at.
They could use a subset of the alphabet containing characters that are hard to confuse with each other, e.g. if they use C then they should not use G, same for B and D, O and Q. So even if you only have, say, a 16 letter alphabet, a 5 character code has a million possibilities. Make it a 10 character code and you could even include redundancy to cope with a single character being illegible.
Deletion votes are not a pure numbers game, if I troll a forum and get a dozen people to chip in on a subject then that does not mean I get my way. The strength of the arguments presented and the reasons why certain policies should apply are far more important than the number of KEEP or DELETE posts.
If Wikipedia had to be consistent, then nothing would ever get done. There are millions of articles, so you'd need to make a million edits all at once if every editorial policy (e.g. establishing notability) had to be applied to all articles consistently. So, when someone with an interest in gaming reviews makes a call on whether Old Man Murray has sufficient notability, there is no expectation that he should therefore have to go looking for animé articles to delete.
I think half the ones Gandalf used in the film are not opening spells - one of them, "naur an edraith amen", is a fire spell that he casts in The Hobbit.
The 17" screen is 1200 pixels, the 15" is 900, what are you talking about? The 17" supports a 1050 pixel mode, but I'm guessing that that's something to do with the video card as that's quite a common PC screen resolution. I don't know why the video card standards don't match the TV resolutions but it's not Apple's doing.
OK, to a certain extent I agree with you, but if your kid guesses or shoulder-surfs your password, is that the same as giving them "unsupervised access to your credit card"? That's what happened in this case - but, as the article says, they did get refunds from Apple.
Children can't be held to a contract. If a child is playing a game, and they make a purchase within that game, can they be held to it? This is an issue for adults as well, generally purchases are subject to a return period, does that apply to online transactions? If not, why not? Shouldn't I be able to return that $99 cartload of Smurfberries that my 11 year old clicked on?
Similarly, Anonymous can't "issue a statement" that represents the entire group.
Yes they can. Anyone can. What matters is, whose ideas take root within the Anon community and are converted into action. It may be that some Anons saw the original declaration and thought "cool, they're a bunch of jerks that I hate, I'll DDOS them", and then when they saw the "we stand for freedom of speech, even if we dislike that speech" denouncement, I expect that most of them would realise that, yes, this isn't the sort of thing that Anon should be doing.
When I last built something that needed to cope with time changes, I built a static driver table that held all the changes up to 2099, and I included an Excel spreadsheet that would calculate the contents of the table based on the current rules, and a note on how to amend the spreadsheet formulae to cope with various potential changes to legislation in the future. The client just stared at me like I was speaking in Martian or describing how to survive an invasion by demons and pixies.
I think the most sensible way to do this change is simply not to put the clocks back in October, and then carry on as usual with +1 next spring and -1 in autumn. The client already had a system in place that would only allow for a maximum of 25 hours in any one day, so this would avoid breaking that limit.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree, human nature hasn't changed in all that time. And any warning about immanent tyranny is worth considering even if circumstances have changed. Democracy seems to be becoming a race to the middle, an appeal to the lowest common denominator. Take a look at what's happening in America, for example a peaceful protester beaten to the ground while Hillary Clinton talks on about repressive regimes abusing peaceful protesters. Obama carries on with Gitmo trials despite promising to end them. Here in the UK as well, we vote for a different party that said different things, yet when they get in power they carry on with the previous government's policies while the outgoing party picks up the rhetoric that the opposition used to use against them. Democracy is leading to tyranny, Plato might end up being right but for the wrong reasons.
Plato said that democracy leads to tyranny.
That the pressure to buy Microsoft was overwhelming is evidenced by the fact that so many businesses made that choice because they perceived that they had no choice. No-one ever got fired for choosing Microsoft. I have friends that still use Internet Explorer because they are concerned that other browsers will not work properly with Windows because Microsoft will make it so.
Of course, the next attack will be "Now that apple has a monopoly, we can claim that they are using that monopoly to try to gain a monopoly in another market", such as music or tablet apps. That would be interesting, but not something that I would support. The two things that makes the iPhone/iPad work well are tight hardware/software integration and brutal inspection of App Store source. If, just speculating wildly, Apple were ordered to split up into hardware and software companies, then out would go the baby with the bath water.
Also, right now, there are alternatives. Android tablets are a viable choice, it is not the case that "if I want a tablet I can effectively only choose iPad", so a 90% or even a 99.9% market share does not make a monopoly until that is the case.
Oh, come on. We've been here before. Stallman loves to talk shit.
You don't change the world by being meek, mild, and reasonable.
The market for iPad type devices is too young to determine whether that makes a monopoly or not though. A monopoly is only a problem when you need to have one and you don't have an effective choice because there is only one practical option.
Like I said: [i]Having one monopoly isn't in any way illegal. Abusing it to gain another is.[/i] And [i]it's only been out for a year[/i], is Apple's position re: the iPad so harmful to society that the FTC need to step in? If you answer yes, then give me your dealer's 'phone number 'cos it's clearly good stuff.
When they use a monopoly position in one market as leverage to gain a monopoly in another. Having one monopoly isn't in any way illegal. Abusing it to gain another is. And Apple don't even have one monopoly or overwhelmingly dominant position yet. Don't like the iPhone? Plenty of other phones out there. Same with iPad, iPod, Mac, etc.
Well, there'll be an iPad 4 next year, so might as well wait for that. Or, maybe even the iPad 5.
Two things:
1) They have locked down their user's devices, not their devices.
Semantics. It was Apple's device before I bought it, and I knew what I was buying into. I've stated my opinion, you've stated yours, there's no point saying more. I've seen this thread played out too many times already and it never gets anywhere. I'm not blindly committed to the Holy Book of Jobs. Maybe I'll change my mind. Maybe I'll "see the light". But it isn't going to happen here and now.
It's not arbitrary. Apple have locked down their devices, and for (IMO) good reasons. The GPL forbids distribution of locked down derivatives, so it isn't Apple's doing, it's the GPL's. Same for Microsoft.
Why buy devices locked to proprietary standards and licensing? I'd bet a six pack of micro brew the most open market will win the most customers. Android anyone?
Because they work really well, and are extremely reliable and secure. Unlike Android. Last summer I was genuinely of the opinion that my next phone would be an Android. But then I accidentally smashed my iPhone 3 and had to get a replacement right away and got an iPhone 4 (yes, locked in by dependecy on certain apps) so that's put it back a bit. With the recent story about infected apps on the Android Market, I am having second thoughts about switching at all.
Every animal, every organism, on the planet exploits other organisms. Does that make all life evil? Why are we so different, that the way we treat other life as a resource makes us evil? Perhaps the most effective evolutionary adaptation that life has ever stumbled across is to be domesticatable, tasty, and/or useful to humans. It's a guaranteed win.
This actually raises an interesting point that I've been thinking about recently. People imagine that an AI will also be a mathematical genius compared to us, because computers can calculate numbers quickly. Not necessarily so. One of the reasons we are slow with numbers is we keep vast amounts of related information along with the number. If I ask you to think of a number and tell me what it is, you might say "seven", but in your mind you might also be imagining the colours of the rainbow, the sides of a fifty pence coin, the age of your niece, the days of the week, etc. And if I say "double it, add one, is that a prime number?", then you have three numbers in your memory before you start to check for factors. A computer could be programmed to double a number, add one to it, and determine if it is prime, but unless specifically programmed to, it would not even have a record of the first number. An artificial intelligence that is built to think even in a vaguely similar manner to us would also have all these contexts to process, and might even have a previous instruction "whenever you think about the number fifteen..." that it also has to take into account. All of this baggage will slow down an AI massively, and so it might not be such a mathematical genius after all. Sure, you could include the functionality of a pocket calculator and have that as an independent subsystem that the main AI can access, but that would make it no different to us, it has to use a simple mathematical processing unit to do complex sums without getting bogged down in extraneous details.
Most telecomms have a web interface for sending sms to their customers. Using that interface through a dozen proxies is probably as anonymous as it gets.
Stamps, on the other hand, will always leave a money trail if you buy them.
And how, exactly, are you going to get the generated code to write on your letter if you send the SMS through an anonymous service? And I don't think it's practical to track a stamp back to the supermarket that I bought some stamps at.
They could use a subset of the alphabet containing characters that are hard to confuse with each other, e.g. if they use C then they should not use G, same for B and D, O and Q. So even if you only have, say, a 16 letter alphabet, a 5 character code has a million possibilities. Make it a 10 character code and you could even include redundancy to cope with a single character being illegible.
Deletion votes are not a pure numbers game, if I troll a forum and get a dozen people to chip in on a subject then that does not mean I get my way. The strength of the arguments presented and the reasons why certain policies should apply are far more important than the number of KEEP or DELETE posts.
If Wikipedia had to be consistent, then nothing would ever get done. There are millions of articles, so you'd need to make a million edits all at once if every editorial policy (e.g. establishing notability) had to be applied to all articles consistently. So, when someone with an interest in gaming reviews makes a call on whether Old Man Murray has sufficient notability, there is no expectation that he should therefore have to go looking for animé articles to delete.
Why are USians so obsessed with prison rape?
I think half the ones Gandalf used in the film are not opening spells - one of them, "naur an edraith amen", is a fire spell that he casts in The Hobbit.
The 17" screen is 1200 pixels, the 15" is 900, what are you talking about? The 17" supports a 1050 pixel mode, but I'm guessing that that's something to do with the video card as that's quite a common PC screen resolution. I don't know why the video card standards don't match the TV resolutions but it's not Apple's doing.
OK, to a certain extent I agree with you, but if your kid guesses or shoulder-surfs your password, is that the same as giving them "unsupervised access to your credit card"? That's what happened in this case - but, as the article says, they did get refunds from Apple.
Children can't be held to a contract. If a child is playing a game, and they make a purchase within that game, can they be held to it? This is an issue for adults as well, generally purchases are subject to a return period, does that apply to online transactions? If not, why not? Shouldn't I be able to return that $99 cartload of Smurfberries that my 11 year old clicked on?
Similarly, Anonymous can't "issue a statement" that represents the entire group.
Yes they can. Anyone can. What matters is, whose ideas take root within the Anon community and are converted into action. It may be that some Anons saw the original declaration and thought "cool, they're a bunch of jerks that I hate, I'll DDOS them", and then when they saw the "we stand for freedom of speech, even if we dislike that speech" denouncement, I expect that most of them would realise that, yes, this isn't the sort of thing that Anon should be doing.
When I last built something that needed to cope with time changes, I built a static driver table that held all the changes up to 2099, and I included an Excel spreadsheet that would calculate the contents of the table based on the current rules, and a note on how to amend the spreadsheet formulae to cope with various potential changes to legislation in the future. The client just stared at me like I was speaking in Martian or describing how to survive an invasion by demons and pixies.
I think the most sensible way to do this change is simply not to put the clocks back in October, and then carry on as usual with +1 next spring and -1 in autumn. The client already had a system in place that would only allow for a maximum of 25 hours in any one day, so this would avoid breaking that limit.