Yeah, I thought pretty much the same thing. There's a lot of money to be made by making HIPAA sound big, scary, and hard. But HIPAA security is hard only inasmuch as security in general is hard. The technical safeguards are dead easy for anyone who pays attention to computer security. (The auditing requirements, now those are a pain.)
The grandparent poster, while he apparently knows a good bit about Oracle, seems to view HIPAA from vendor sales perspective, not a covered entity perspective. I'd guess he's listened to his own company's sales staff with insufficient skepticism.
Remember, kids: if a salesman says their product is required by HIPAA or is HIPAA compliant, odds are that they're wrong.
HIPAA [specifies], more or less, that sensitive information must be encrypted within the database. That means the data at rest on disk must be encrypted.
That's not actually the case when it comes to HIPAA. Encryption is not a required element of the technical safeguards for data, it's only an addressable element. See section 164.312 part (a)(2)(iv) of the final Security Rule, which can be found in the Federal Register (volume 68 number 34 page 8378) or on my desk.
The regulation requires the covered entity to implement appropriate administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for protected health information. Encryption is just one element of those safeguards, and an optional one at that. Remember that HIPAA views security as including not only confidentiality, but also integrity and availablility of data. Encrypting data at rest would often be a marginal improvement to confidentiality at a potentially large risk to availablility (or even integrity). It may be a good idea in some security environments, of course, but encryption is not a blanket requirement of HIPAA.
(Even data in transit does not require encryption under HIPAA. It simply requires protection commensurate with the risk. Protected health information transmitted over a dialup line probably does not need encryption, whereas any transmission containing PHI over the internet certainly does need encryption.)
The attacks you suggest solving by database encryption can also be dealt with by policies regarding media disposal and backup media safeguards. A HIPAA covered entity is required to have a media disposal policy anyway, and offsite backup tapes are just another form of data in transit to be protected accordingly. Database encryption may be a valuable additional layer, but it's certainly not the only way to skin that cat.
(Incidentally, about half the Oracle DBAs at my EMR vendor are women.)
Sovereignity must not trump private property rights when it comes to intellectual property!
The only thing to do is get government completely out of Intellectual Property. Let's repeal all the laws regarding copyright, patent, and trademark. Then IP can be protected by market forces without government interference!
What's that you say? The very existence of exclusive intellectual property is due to government regulation? Oh, dear. Maybe this theory isn't all it's cracked up to be after all...
I walked into the local pharmacy the other week to fill a prescription. Behind the counter, next to the pharmacist, I saw a large florid-faced and bearded man wearing a polo shirt. I thought "That must be their IT guy. I bet he's wearing shorts." I stepped up to the counter and peered over. Yup. Shorts.
He noticed my glance and I could see him size me up. He too saw a large florid-faced and bearded man wearing a knit henley and shorts. Our eyes met and I knew that he knew were were of the same tribe, shamans to the silicon spirits. We smiled an went about our business.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers For he to-day that sheds his tie with me Shall be my brother; be he e'er so vile
"[...] where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal [...]"
Whoa! Hold on there, pardner. The theory of evolution through natural selection argues no such thing. It only addresses the ongoing changes in life, not their origin... there are other theories which handle that part. It certainly falls well short of addressing the origin of the matter in the universe.
"Intelligent Design is an alternative to the origins of life, not the continuing processes since that have shaped our world."
That would be sensible. If only it were true!
If that were what was actually being argued, there would be no conflict at all. ID would not be an alternative to the theory of evolution through natural selection, because origins are not within the scope of the theory of evolution. The current debate over ID in the biology classroom exists solely because ID is being presented as an alternative to the mechanism of natural selection.
If they're asking non-technical people to make technical judgements, then it's daft.
But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.
Or, you could save a couple hundred bucks by getting the Fujitsu version of the same idea. It's very similar to the X41, although it might be a smaller display. My office has two, and our experience with them seems superior to what's described in the review (Arstechnica.com) I read about the Thinkpad.
(Keep in mind that these are niche devices. It so happens that my office also sits in that niche, so we love 'em. YMMV.)
You can't please everyone all the time. Simply can't be done. So, just give up on that notion right now... someone is going to be disappointed no matter how well you do or how hard you try. It sucks, but it's inevitable in the same way gravity is.
With that out of the way, let me give you some practical suggestions. I'm not a programmer, but I used to be a production drafter for a manufacturing firm... same issues, different field.
You describe an organizational hierarchy. This structure causes you problems when "upper management" tries to interfere, but it also should protect you somewhat from such interference. Part of your boss's job is to shield you from unnecessary interference from above. This is a difficult responsibility of his, and maybe an impossible one... you need to both let him know that you expect him to accomplish it (or at least try harder) and offer him whatever help you can.
The best way to do this, IMHO, is to go to him and tell him about what you're seeing and hearing. Tell him that you're getting messages from certain specific members of upper management that conflict with the directions he has given you. Tell him that you'll be delighted to do whatever the company would like you to do, but you would very much appreciate the company making up its gorram mind about just what it wants from you. Ask him what he would like you to do about mixed messages from above.
This approach lets him know that there is a problem, that you want to be a team player, that you want to follow his lead, and that you are expecting more from him than he is currently delivering. Delivery of this message needs to polite and focused on finding solutions.
Your boss is a necessary ally. If nothing else, keep in mind that he writes your reviews.:-)
Screw TV. That's a neat feature, but not why it's going to be a big seller. Its big market is parents with digital cameras. Here's a case study based on my own life.
We bought a pocket-sized midrange digital camera last spring, with a single 1gb memory card. Like most midrange digital cameras, ours can capture 5 megapixel images and it can record continuous video at TV resolutions up to the limit of its memory. An empty 1gb card can hold abot 700 5-megapixel images or about 700 seconds of video in any combination. It's so powerful and so small that we have pretty much abandoned our other film and video cameras.
We have kids. Kids do cute stuff which we want to show grandma, so we take gobs of digital stills and video. Grandma lives over the river and through the woods and has neither broadband internet nor even a computer. But grandma does have a TV. So to show grandma videos or unprinted stills at her house, we must have a portable player that connects to the TV. The camera came with a cable that lets it output to a TV and it works well enough for playback of both still and video images. The playback interface is rudimentary, but it works so long as someone familiar with the camera is running the show.
But there's a problem with this. When we have the camera full of images to show grandma, we have little or no room on the memory card with which to take more photos or video of our kids or grandma's myriad other grandkids. This is a much bigger problem than those without kids might think.:-)
To solve this problem, we could buy more memory cards and swap them in and out of the camera. It would suck for usability: "Hang on while I swap cards... blast, that's not the right one either. Honey, which card has the video of baby's first cookie?"or "Yeah, I forgot to turn the camera off before I put in the card... but why is the card blank now?" It'd also rapidly become very expensive. Gigabyte SD cards cost about $75 each at Costco, last I looked.
For the price of four additional 1 gig cards, I could get a 30 gig iPod photo. For the price of six, I could get a 60 gig model and still take the kids to see Wallace and Gommit. With even the 30 gig model, we could cart all of our photo and video library to Grandma's house or wherever else we go. We could keep the camera empty and ready to shoot pics of the cousins even while playing videos for granny, instead of tying it to the TV and running down its battery as a rudimentary playback device. And I bet the video iPod's UI will be simple enough that grandma herself can browse the content, instead of one of us running the show while boring her with a typical slideshow monologue.
We needs a video iPod, precious. And we are far from alone in this need.
And that's why TV is just a marketing gimmick. Sure, they'll make money on video download sales. But that's not the killer app... that's just a demonstration that will make the general public take notice of the device's capability to play back anything. Apple is first to market with a general digital media playback device that has a grandma-compliant user interface, and they have incredible brand recognition at the outset. They are going to make an absolute killing off of the digital camera user base, which is just going to keep getting bigger.
Like I said, I'm out of the drafting profession. But I still have occasional need to draw some stuff for my own use. What would you suggest for a free/cheap/libre drafting application with broadly similar features to AutoCAD? (In particular, 2D/3D drafting with [hooks to] a full programming language and keystroke macros?)
Oh, I don't know about that last. It's been a few years since I got out of the drafting biz, but as of r14 and 2000 the intergrated AutoLISP programming language enabled me to do some really sweet parametric sheet-metal manufacturing design. I looked at replicating the capability in Solidworks, but what we had already in AutoCAD was going to remain faster for over 80% of designs and of equvalent output quality. (As far as actual manufacture went, anyway... visualization was way better in Solidworks.)
Of course, I could have done the same thing in any 2D package, so long as it supported a full programming environment. So I guess it wasn't that specific to AutoCAD.
Orson Scott Card may be a closet fascist, but Robert E. Howard was pretty open about believing in Aryan supremacy. Some asshats can write good fiction.
Case VII: You publish data on a disk whose format does not comply with the Compact Disk standard, and you use the CD logo. Are you allowed to do that? No.
That's my only beef. People can publish whatever they want on a CD-sized optical disk. I care not what DRM publishers choose to put on their disks. But I'll only buy disks that purport to comply with the various open CD and DVD standards, as indicated by the publisher's use of the stanard's logo.
If the CD logo is on the media, it should play on any device with the CD logo. Same goes for DVDs. That's what the logos are supposed to indicate.
If the logo is on a non-defective disk and my standards-compliant hardware, firmware, and software is unable to read and present the data, then the publisher's use of the logo is misleading and possibly fraudulent. I personally expect my money back, and as a citizen and consumer I expect the publisher to take corrective action, at a minimum including removal of the logo from all future non-compliant products.
As I said elsewhere, the docs probably do not have the option of direct response even if the forum allows it from a technical perspective.
Physicians (and staff) are generally constrained by HIPAA from disclosing any Protected Health Information without the written consent of the patient. (There are some specific exceptions, but they probably don't apply here.) Refuting these claims would require that the physician discuss specific details of the case in question, so he can't do it. Whether the claims are true or not, the physician being criticized is not allowed to tell his side of the story in public. Court may be the only response available to them.
It's bound to come up, so let me head this question off at the pass:
Q:Why don't the physicians post their side of the story and let the public decide who is more correct?
A: The docs cannot simply post their side of the story on a patient's blog in response to the complaints. HIPAA's privacy provisions generally prevent physicians and their staff from doing so.
In the court of public opinion, only patients have a voice. It's little wonder that some docs might choose to reply via the official court system, because they have no other recourse.
This is a pretty obvious troll; I should probably ignore it. But what the hell, I'm bored.
This particular left-leaning libertarian opposes the death penalty for two simple reasons.
One, I do not trust the existing criminal justice process to never execute a person who was mistakenly convicted. (Dozens of death row inmates have been set free based on new analysis of DNA evidence, so it's pretty clear that the current system generates false convictions.) I'm not willing to sacrifice even one innocent life while in pursuit of the guilty.
Two, it may be that there really is a God waiting to judge us all for our sins here on earth. How sad it would be, then, if in our haste for vengeance we deprive a murderer of the opportunity to repent for his mortal sin and be saved? If our time on Earth is all we have, life imprisonment is sufficient earthly punishment for murder. But if there is an afterlife, I trust that God's Judgement of Mercy or Wrath is more sound than mine. (Even in the worst case, I think a few years delay in the onset of Hellfire won't make a hill o' beans difference when set against all eternity.)
If that makes me holier-than-thou, well... that ain't a problem with me.:-)
Unlike other OS makers, Apple primarily sells hardware. It would be against their whole business plan to become a generic OS maker.
Yeah, I thought this would be obvious as well. The fact that they have achieved the limitation via DRM is only slightly alarming. (If that.) They have stated that they won't object to someone buying their hardware and running some other OS on it. If they stick to that, it completely undercuts the "DRM stole my hardware" argument.
The only other situation in which the DRM might stand in the way of the purchaser is if the OS fails to run on unsupported hardware... but that's not a licensed use anyway.
Of course, the hardware-level DRM might enable something more restrictive later or at a higher level, but if that happens the only surprise will be that Apple got there first.
Apple is in a very strong position here. They have an OS product that is widely acknowledged to be of superior quality. Currently, they sell it bundled with hardware for a profit. But if the PC hardware business should become unprofitable or if Apple, for whatever reason, decides to cease being a hardware company, they can release their source whenever they want to. Once their OS and applications fully support x86 and have a decent installed base, freeing the code would be a realistic strategy for them to deliver a mortal blow to Microsoft's OS monopoly.
(Personally, I think that's a big strategic incentive for The Switch.)
Traditionally, there has been a distinction drawn between "Terrorists" and "Brutal Dictators." Terrorists typically do not wield any State power, whereas brutal dictators gather it all to themselves.
Call Hussein a terrorist if you like. But if you want to do so honestly, you're going to have to call a bunch of other leaders terrorists, too. If a head of state could be lablelled a terrorist just for using his nation's powers against internal or external enemies, or by trying to intimidate others into making concessions by violent means, then the list of famous terrorists gets really long.
Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, of course, but also Winston Churchill. (Churchill authorized the "nighttime terror bombing" of Germany.) A little reading will reveal that pretty much every head of state in a difficult war also makes the list. I'd say that every US president from Andrew Jackson through the end of the "Indian wars" qualifies, as does every US president from 1942 through the end of the Cold War.
Me, I think that your usage of the word terrorist is overbroad and makes the word useless. Calling Hussein a brutal dictator is damning enough, no?
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I thought pretty much the same thing. There's a lot of money to be made by making HIPAA sound big, scary, and hard. But HIPAA security is hard only inasmuch as security in general is hard. The technical safeguards are dead easy for anyone who pays attention to computer security. (The auditing requirements, now those are a pain.)
The grandparent poster, while he apparently knows a good bit about Oracle, seems to view HIPAA from vendor sales perspective, not a covered entity perspective. I'd guess he's listened to his own company's sales staff with insufficient skepticism.
Remember, kids: if a salesman says their product is required by HIPAA or is HIPAA compliant, odds are that they're wrong.
HIPAA [specifies], more or less, that sensitive information must be encrypted within the database. That means the data at rest on disk must be encrypted.
That's not actually the case when it comes to HIPAA. Encryption is not a required element of the technical safeguards for data, it's only an addressable element. See section 164.312 part (a)(2)(iv) of the final Security Rule, which can be found in the Federal Register (volume 68 number 34 page 8378) or on my desk.
The regulation requires the covered entity to implement appropriate administrative, physical, and technical safeguards for protected health information. Encryption is just one element of those safeguards, and an optional one at that. Remember that HIPAA views security as including not only confidentiality, but also integrity and availablility of data. Encrypting data at rest would often be a marginal improvement to confidentiality at a potentially large risk to availablility (or even integrity). It may be a good idea in some security environments, of course, but encryption is not a blanket requirement of HIPAA.
(Even data in transit does not require encryption under HIPAA. It simply requires protection commensurate with the risk. Protected health information transmitted over a dialup line probably does not need encryption, whereas any transmission containing PHI over the internet certainly does need encryption.)
The attacks you suggest solving by database encryption can also be dealt with by policies regarding media disposal and backup media safeguards. A HIPAA covered entity is required to have a media disposal policy anyway, and offsite backup tapes are just another form of data in transit to be protected accordingly. Database encryption may be a valuable additional layer, but it's certainly not the only way to skin that cat.
(Incidentally, about half the Oracle DBAs at my EMR vendor are women.)
Sovereignity must not trump private property rights when it comes to intellectual property!
The only thing to do is get government completely out of Intellectual Property. Let's repeal all the laws regarding copyright, patent, and trademark. Then IP can be protected by market forces without government interference!
What's that you say? The very existence of exclusive intellectual property is due to government regulation? Oh, dear. Maybe this theory isn't all it's cracked up to be after all...
I walked into the local pharmacy the other week to fill a prescription. Behind the counter, next to the pharmacist, I saw a large florid-faced and bearded man wearing a polo shirt. I thought "That must be their IT guy. I bet he's wearing shorts." I stepped up to the counter and peered over. Yup. Shorts.
He noticed my glance and I could see him size me up. He too saw a large florid-faced and bearded man wearing a knit henley and shorts. Our eyes met and I knew that he knew were were of the same tribe, shamans to the silicon spirits. We smiled an went about our business.
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers
For he to-day that sheds his tie with me
Shall be my brother; be he e'er so vile
Please let me be among the first to congratulate these researchers for winning next year's IgNobel prize for Physics.
"[...] where did the matter come from' pops up, and evolution comes alogn and says that matter is eternal [...]"
Whoa! Hold on there, pardner. The theory of evolution through natural selection argues no such thing. It only addresses the ongoing changes in life, not their origin... there are other theories which handle that part. It certainly falls well short of addressing the origin of the matter in the universe.
"Intelligent Design is an alternative to the origins of life, not the continuing processes since that have shaped our world."
That would be sensible. If only it were true!
If that were what was actually being argued, there would be no conflict at all. ID would not be an alternative to the theory of evolution through natural selection, because origins are not within the scope of the theory of evolution. The current debate over ID in the biology classroom exists solely because ID is being presented as an alternative to the mechanism of natural selection.
If they're asking non-technical people to make technical judgements, then it's daft.
But if they're asking for political opinions, then this is probably a good idea. No matter how good the technical decision, the choice still needs to survive a political process on the way to implementation. Soliciting diverse opinions up front will be helpful in getting the product through that painful phase. It beats pressing blindly forward and hoping for the best, anyway.
Or, you could save a couple hundred bucks by getting the Fujitsu version of the same idea. It's very similar to the X41, although it might be a smaller display. My office has two, and our experience with them seems superior to what's described in the review (Arstechnica.com) I read about the Thinkpad.
(Keep in mind that these are niche devices. It so happens that my office also sits in that niche, so we love 'em. YMMV.)
And Springtime for Hitler is straight out.
You can't please everyone all the time. Simply can't be done. So, just give up on that notion right now... someone is going to be disappointed no matter how well you do or how hard you try. It sucks, but it's inevitable in the same way gravity is.
:-)
With that out of the way, let me give you some practical suggestions. I'm not a programmer, but I used to be a production drafter for a manufacturing firm... same issues, different field.
You describe an organizational hierarchy. This structure causes you problems when "upper management" tries to interfere, but it also should protect you somewhat from such interference. Part of your boss's job is to shield you from unnecessary interference from above. This is a difficult responsibility of his, and maybe an impossible one... you need to both let him know that you expect him to accomplish it (or at least try harder) and offer him whatever help you can.
The best way to do this, IMHO, is to go to him and tell him about what you're seeing and hearing. Tell him that you're getting messages from certain specific members of upper management that conflict with the directions he has given you. Tell him that you'll be delighted to do whatever the company would like you to do, but you would very much appreciate the company making up its gorram mind about just what it wants from you. Ask him what he would like you to do about mixed messages from above.
This approach lets him know that there is a problem, that you want to be a team player, that you want to follow his lead, and that you are expecting more from him than he is currently delivering. Delivery of this message needs to polite and focused on finding solutions.
Your boss is a necessary ally. If nothing else, keep in mind that he writes your reviews.
Screw TV. That's a neat feature, but not why it's going to be a big seller. Its big market is parents with digital cameras. Here's a case study based on my own life.
:-)
We bought a pocket-sized midrange digital camera last spring, with a single 1gb memory card. Like most midrange digital cameras, ours can capture 5 megapixel images and it can record continuous video at TV resolutions up to the limit of its memory. An empty 1gb card can hold abot 700 5-megapixel images or about 700 seconds of video in any combination. It's so powerful and so small that we have pretty much abandoned our other film and video cameras.
We have kids. Kids do cute stuff which we want to show grandma, so we take gobs of digital stills and video. Grandma lives over the river and through the woods and has neither broadband internet nor even a computer. But grandma does have a TV. So to show grandma videos or unprinted stills at her house, we must have a portable player that connects to the TV. The camera came with a cable that lets it output to a TV and it works well enough for playback of both still and video images. The playback interface is rudimentary, but it works so long as someone familiar with the camera is running the show.
But there's a problem with this. When we have the camera full of images to show grandma, we have little or no room on the memory card with which to take more photos or video of our kids or grandma's myriad other grandkids. This is a much bigger problem than those without kids might think.
To solve this problem, we could buy more memory cards and swap them in and out of the camera. It would suck for usability: "Hang on while I swap cards... blast, that's not the right one either. Honey, which card has the video of baby's first cookie?"or "Yeah, I forgot to turn the camera off before I put in the card... but why is the card blank now?" It'd also rapidly become very expensive. Gigabyte SD cards cost about $75 each at Costco, last I looked.
For the price of four additional 1 gig cards, I could get a 30 gig iPod photo. For the price of six, I could get a 60 gig model and still take the kids to see Wallace and Gommit. With even the 30 gig model, we could cart all of our photo and video library to Grandma's house or wherever else we go. We could keep the camera empty and ready to shoot pics of the cousins even while playing videos for granny, instead of tying it to the TV and running down its battery as a rudimentary playback device. And I bet the video iPod's UI will be simple enough that grandma herself can browse the content, instead of one of us running the show while boring her with a typical slideshow monologue.
We needs a video iPod, precious. And we are far from alone in this need.
And that's why TV is just a marketing gimmick. Sure, they'll make money on video download sales. But that's not the killer app... that's just a demonstration that will make the general public take notice of the device's capability to play back anything. Apple is first to market with a general digital media playback device that has a grandma-compliant user interface, and they have incredible brand recognition at the outset. They are going to make an absolute killing off of the digital camera user base, which is just going to keep getting bigger.
This will not be a flop.
Like I said, I'm out of the drafting profession. But I still have occasional need to draw some stuff for my own use. What would you suggest for a free/cheap/libre drafting application with broadly similar features to AutoCAD? (In particular, 2D/3D drafting with [hooks to] a full programming language and keystroke macros?)
Oh, I don't know about that last. It's been a few years since I got out of the drafting biz, but as of r14 and 2000 the intergrated AutoLISP programming language enabled me to do some really sweet parametric sheet-metal manufacturing design. I looked at replicating the capability in Solidworks, but what we had already in AutoCAD was going to remain faster for over 80% of designs and of equvalent output quality. (As far as actual manufacture went, anyway... visualization was way better in Solidworks.)
Of course, I could have done the same thing in any 2D package, so long as it supported a full programming environment. So I guess it wasn't that specific to AutoCAD.
Orson Scott Card may be a closet fascist, but Robert E. Howard was pretty open about believing in Aryan supremacy. Some asshats can write good fiction.
So why is BSD dying?
Case VII: You publish data on a disk whose format does not comply with the Compact Disk standard, and you use the CD logo. Are you allowed to do that? No.
That's my only beef. People can publish whatever they want on a CD-sized optical disk. I care not what DRM publishers choose to put on their disks. But I'll only buy disks that purport to comply with the various open CD and DVD standards, as indicated by the publisher's use of the stanard's logo.
If the CD logo is on the media, it should play on any device with the CD logo. Same goes for DVDs. That's what the logos are supposed to indicate.
If the logo is on a non-defective disk and my standards-compliant hardware, firmware, and software is unable to read and present the data, then the publisher's use of the logo is misleading and possibly fraudulent. I personally expect my money back, and as a citizen and consumer I expect the publisher to take corrective action, at a minimum including removal of the logo from all future non-compliant products.
As I said elsewhere, the docs probably do not have the option of direct response even if the forum allows it from a technical perspective.
Physicians (and staff) are generally constrained by HIPAA from disclosing any Protected Health Information without the written consent of the patient. (There are some specific exceptions, but they probably don't apply here.) Refuting these claims would require that the physician discuss specific details of the case in question, so he can't do it. Whether the claims are true or not, the physician being criticized is not allowed to tell his side of the story in public. Court may be the only response available to them.
It's bound to come up, so let me head this question off at the pass:
Q: Why don't the physicians post their side of the story and let the public decide who is more correct?
A: The docs cannot simply post their side of the story on a patient's blog in response to the complaints. HIPAA's privacy provisions generally prevent physicians and their staff from doing so.
In the court of public opinion, only patients have a voice. It's little wonder that some docs might choose to reply via the official court system, because they have no other recourse.
This is a pretty obvious troll; I should probably ignore it. But what the hell, I'm bored.
:-)
This particular left-leaning libertarian opposes the death penalty for two simple reasons.
One, I do not trust the existing criminal justice process to never execute a person who was mistakenly convicted. (Dozens of death row inmates have been set free based on new analysis of DNA evidence, so it's pretty clear that the current system generates false convictions.) I'm not willing to sacrifice even one innocent life while in pursuit of the guilty.
Two, it may be that there really is a God waiting to judge us all for our sins here on earth. How sad it would be, then, if in our haste for vengeance we deprive a murderer of the opportunity to repent for his mortal sin and be saved? If our time on Earth is all we have, life imprisonment is sufficient earthly punishment for murder. But if there is an afterlife, I trust that God's Judgement of Mercy or Wrath is more sound than mine. (Even in the worst case, I think a few years delay in the onset of Hellfire won't make a hill o' beans difference when set against all eternity.)
If that makes me holier-than-thou, well... that ain't a problem with me.
Unlike other OS makers, Apple primarily sells hardware. It would be against their whole business plan to become a generic OS maker.
Yeah, I thought this would be obvious as well. The fact that they have achieved the limitation via DRM is only slightly alarming. (If that.) They have stated that they won't object to someone buying their hardware and running some other OS on it. If they stick to that, it completely undercuts the "DRM stole my hardware" argument.
The only other situation in which the DRM might stand in the way of the purchaser is if the OS fails to run on unsupported hardware... but that's not a licensed use anyway.
Of course, the hardware-level DRM might enable something more restrictive later or at a higher level, but if that happens the only surprise will be that Apple got there first.
Apple is in a very strong position here. They have an OS product that is widely acknowledged to be of superior quality. Currently, they sell it bundled with hardware for a profit. But if the PC hardware business should become unprofitable or if Apple, for whatever reason, decides to cease being a hardware company, they can release their source whenever they want to. Once their OS and applications fully support x86 and have a decent installed base, freeing the code would be a realistic strategy for them to deliver a mortal blow to Microsoft's OS monopoly.
(Personally, I think that's a big strategic incentive for The Switch.)
Traditionally, there has been a distinction drawn between "Terrorists" and "Brutal Dictators." Terrorists typically do not wield any State power, whereas brutal dictators gather it all to themselves.
Call Hussein a terrorist if you like. But if you want to do so honestly, you're going to have to call a bunch of other leaders terrorists, too. If a head of state could be lablelled a terrorist just for using his nation's powers against internal or external enemies, or by trying to intimidate others into making concessions by violent means, then the list of famous terrorists gets really long.
Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, of course, but also Winston Churchill. (Churchill authorized the "nighttime terror bombing" of Germany.) A little reading will reveal that pretty much every head of state in a difficult war also makes the list. I'd say that every US president from Andrew Jackson through the end of the "Indian wars" qualifies, as does every US president from 1942 through the end of the Cold War.
Me, I think that your usage of the word terrorist is overbroad and makes the word useless. Calling Hussein a brutal dictator is damning enough, no?
Eeek!
Better yet, don't threaten. Just go straight to the cops. With bad behavior this (allegedly) pervasive, there's nothing to be gained from threats.
"So if "return true;" works but not "ret tru", then I'm forced to use "return true;" every time."
So what you're saying is, Grammar Nazis should throw more error messages?
"I WANT MY 6 PAID VIEWS BACK!!!"
It's not quite so serious as Logan's Run, but I guess it'll do.