Agreed - I don't know about this phone, but plenty of phone companies sell far more than Apple. The only reason people queue up for the Iphone is because they've had to wait so long for basic functionality such as 3G.
We're basing success of a product based on whether there were queues outside your local store? How about hard sales figures? And guess what - I never saw queues outside my local Apple store either.
And surely this article is an obvious troll, with nonsense comments like "The iPhone appears to still be the gold standard" and "It isn't as intuitive as the iPhone, and it may take average users a while to figure out basic and advanced shortcuts".
The Iphone has never been a "gold standard" - phones have been providing the functionality years before (and Apple is still playing catch-up on bog standard features you can get on cheap phones, such as Java, cut-and-paste, video, MMS).
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land.
I doubt that every citizen supports this law - I suspect that the one facing prison isn't, for starters!
No one is questioning the process by which they arrive at laws, so this is a straw man argument. Totalitarianism doesn't imply a lack of public support - indeed, often, the majority of the public will gladly vote in a totalitarian government and vote away their rights - consider support for "anti-terrorist" laws in western countries, and there's the obvious example I could give from the 20th Century, that I won't mention because of Godwin...
What people are saying is, it's wrong to lock people up against their will for 20 years for "blasphemy". The fact that lots of people in the country support it is no more relevant than there being lots of people in a country who might support slavery or rape. In fact, it just makes it all the more worrying that so many people think that someone should be locked up for blasphemy.
Yes that's right. Let's believe that Wikipedia is flawed, based on a rant written by some random guy on his LiveJournal!
The fact that he insults with "their toady suck-ups" shows what his real agenda is. His points make no sense - are you seriously suggesting that allowing sockpuppets on Wikipedia is a good thing? It sounds like a classic case of someone whining because he didn't get his way. If you want somewhere to write your own stuff - get a blog. And then tell me how the accuracy and bias of random blogs compares to Wikipedia?
If you want to criticise Wikipedia, then let's start by not shooting yourself in the foot by making the same errors that you claim Wikipedia has: let's see evidence. For example, let's see analysis of articles on a range of topics, with comparisons on accuracy to other sources (other encyclopedias, the media, books/webpages etc).
And then realize that this horribly written stuff is going to be fed to schoolkids as an example of "researched" material.
They're going to feed this LiveJournal post to schoolkids? I hope not.
pointed out above, two random anonymous guys from Wikipedia disproved the research. If you trust that, you are the wikipedia target market.
No, I evaluate my trust based on the sources it links to. It's Wikipedia critics who seem to trust any old hearsay that someone randomly post on a blog/forum, or anything written in the mainstream media, whilst strangely distrusting everything they read in Wikipedia.
And the target market of "people who trust what they read" is, rightly or wrongly, just about everyone. The idea that there exists this major group of people who only believe things when presented with 100% evidence is a myth - and any such people who do fall into that group would have to be sceptical of just about everything they read, including other encyclopedias.
If Wikipedia makes people sceptical of what they read, then that's good. You should be sceptical of everything you read. Wikipedia has succeeded in this, where no other source has.
Indeed - this whole article is based on a lie. Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth - rather, they have a different threshold for inclusion. This is to stop people putting in stuff claiming it's true, when they have no source for their claims.
Whilst it is a problem that Wikipedia is only as good as its sources, the key point is attribution. So when it says "blah blah is blah[1]", that should be read as implicit shorthand for "source [1] claims that blah blah is blah".
It's also not true that Wikipedia accepts any source - the issue of reliable sources is an important requirement, and if a source's reliability is doubted, it should not be used.
Furthermore, this is an issue with all encyclopedias, and indeed, anyone who ever cites a source. Why does the article single out Wikipedia?
For it to claim that Wikipedia is redefining truth is a straw man (and I note the irony that an article that critices Wikipedia over "truth" is itself spreading a misconception...)
I'm not quite sure of the details of the Jaron Lanier case (the link was a rather tldr rant...), but Wikipedia bends over backwards to be "nice" to people who have articles written about them (biographies of living people), and getting material removed that is disputed by that person shouldn't be any trouble at all, even if he doesn't have a counter source.
Put it this way - correcting misinformation about you in Wikipedia will be far easier than correcting it in any other encylopedia, or just about any news article.
IOW, they're engineered to a non-existent standards. Once again, something that would be a serious bad point for any other product is twisted around to be a good point for Apple...
I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.
Things weren't really any worse than the different file formats around today - IIRC, Atari used the same PC format, and although Amiga and Mac had their own custom formats, they also supported reading and writing using PC formatted disks.
In a way, things are worse today - e.g., I believe that non-Windows platforms can't write to NTFS drives, due to it being a closed format?
The new part is the national surveillance database.
Indeed, and just to explain to others why this is quite significant: a "passport" will soon be morphed into the National ID Card and Database system. Although they ultimately want it to be compulsory for all, this is proving controversial, so they're trying to sneak it in the back door by increasing the number of occasions that you'll need an ID card / passport.
Giving up the right to have a passport is a big sacrifice for people in the UK, as many travel abroad (I'm not sure of the latest timeline, but very soon it won't be possible to get a passport without paying the full cost of an ID card, and being placed on the database), but with these plans, you'll need one just to get a mobile phones.
You'll be required to pay £93 (at least) for a card, to entitle you to buy a £30 phone.
In Opera 9.02 on Windows, I can see tags, but not add my own.
In IE6, I can't see or add tags.
In Chrome, I can sort of see tags, but they're a bit jumbled up, and I can't add my own.
(I know, I should get round to submitting a bug, though I'm curious if it's not been noticed - it's not my single machine, this occurs on both my machines, and my work PC.)
On that note, the tagging system doesn't seem to work at all in Opera, IE or Chrome anymore - only Firefox. The tags can't be seen or added to. (I know this is Slashdot, but we don't all use Firefox...)
It's a ridiculous claim anyway for the article to suggest that PCs still have modems - surely most desktop PCs don't have modems as standard now? Modems have almost always been available via add-on cards rather than the motherboards (I've never actually seen a desktop motherboard that had on-board dial up), so not including them is easy.
Laptops might be different, but as you say, I'd still rather have modem as backup on a laptop, since not everywhere has wifi (or sometimes it's still very expensive or a hassle to get to), than have to buy and lug around an extra piece of hardware, like I'd have to with a Mac.
What was wrong with an external USB floppy drive - I'm sure those were available at the time, or very shortly after?
But if you're crediting the Imac for not having floppies, it doesn't make sense to then say that criticisms can be addressed by... buying a floppy!
What was wrong with having an internal floppy drive available from the start?
Floppies were obsolete, and they deserved to die.
That's an odd definition of "obsolete" that requires you to still need it as an extra external piece of hardware...
The problem is that people (like the author of the article) try to have it both ways: they claim that Apple was special because when they dropped the floppy, people no longer needed it, but when people point out problems, they respond with "well people could buy floppy drives for it" - in which case, it's not true that people no longer required floppies, making the Imac no different to the NEXT machine that they also mention, or the Amiga CDTV.
I agree - and whilst it my be a matter of opinion when floppies were no longer needed, I don't understand why the Imac gets so much credit for not having a feature that most people were still using anyway.
It's also a common Apple myth that they were first - consider, Commodore dropped the floppy from the Amiga CDTV, years beforehand! If you mention that, people will say that that was obviously too early - but how is that any different to the Imac? Apple get credit for being "first", but Commodore don't because they were earlier?
What country do you in where students have to drop out of college in order to pay a speeding fine?
Indeed, what an excellent (car) analogy: If you speed in a car, something that risks putting lives at danger, you might have to pay $150 (e.g., http://www.speedingticketkiller.com/ - and that's a site that is saying how high it is). But if you make a single mp3 available that might, oh I don't know, cause a few lost sales, resulting in a few dollars less profit (remember how the RIAA tell us most of the cost of a CD is costs, and only a tiny amount is profit, right?), they're after $750.
Glad to see they have their priorities straight.
Note also that the RIAA openly brag about going after college students.
There are games available for loads of mobile platforms, including phones. It's only because this story includes the word "Iphone" that it gets front page news, as if it were something new.
Cast aside the argument that it will make the Internet sluggish, because that argument will be nullified if technology and such improve enormously. Also cast aside the argument that it will be expensive to do, because what if we make it incredibly efficient?
Also cast aside the false positives occurring, because what if they get it so refined that a false positive is a one in a million occurance.
What sort of argument is that? "If we ignore the reasons why it would be bad, why would it be bad?"
I want someone to make a good argument.
It's not a good argument to ignore all the perfectly good arguments already made.
Another point is that not all "illegal material" is material that should be illegal. Of course yes, we should oppose those laws too - and I see nothing suggesting that people outraged at this aren't against such laws too.
Plans like this go hand in hand with the laws themselves. People will be more likely to be affected with this system (as opposed to something which is technically illegal but unenforceable).
Also consider that politicians will be more willing to criminalise things, if they know that doing so will mean it can be censored (and this isn't just hypothetical - I've seen this argument used by politicians in the UK, supporting the recent law criminalising adult material).
The main problem will be when they start blocking content that they just don't like, rather than stuff which is 100% illegal.
Oh that's not a problem anyway - they write the laws, so if they don't like it, they can make it illegal too.
(When passing the recent law in the UK that introduces criminalisation of possession of so-called "extreme" adult material, one of the politicans made the argument that they want to make it illegal, because then it will be easier for them to get ISPs and other companies to block the material...)
Had you followed your own link you would have seen that they are concerned with "Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK".
Agreed, although note that it's not just "in the UK", despite what they claim - they recently reported the guy for prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for writing a fictional story, even though the material is hosted in another country.
On the (slightly) positive side, although my ISP (Virgin Media) apparently uses it, I've never seen any evidence of its presence. Also, I've never heard of anyone having problems or false positives (which obviously doesn't mean this doesn't occur).
if you are a BT broadband customer and you follow a link to a website that is suspected of hosting images of child sexual abuse - what is often sloppily called "child porn" - then you will get a "page not found" error.
(Compared with places like Saudi Arabia, which inform you why the page isn't available, and even allow you submit a form if you think it's been incorrectly blocked.)
Note that although theoretically this only covers "illegal content" like child pr0n, from January the Government will start criminalising possession of some adult material, vastly increasing the range of sites which could fall under such blocking.
Also it was the IWF (who run Cleanfeed) who recently reported someone for prosecution for writing a fictional story (although as it happens, the story in question still seems to be available and doesn't seem to be blocked - instead they're going after the author, who may face up to five years in prison).
And we clearly have the best schools in the world, right?/sarcasm
Okay, point me to a country that has no state schools, but results in a better educated population?
Instead of paying taxes to pay for low quality public schools, people could keep they tax money and instead pay for a school where teachers will actually teach failing students.
Well that's rather simplistic. And it's unclear to me how the money saved from tax is enough for a better school. What would happen is:
* Children of rich parents would either have no change (their parents keep the extra money) or go to a slightly better school.
* At some point, there'd be children who are no worse off, as the money saved in tax equals the money it costs to send them to an equivalent school.
* Children of poorer parents than that will receive a worse education, or perhaps no education at all.
Not to mention that some parents may be more likely to use the saved money for other means, preferring to send their child to as cheap a school as possible.
I wouldn't call discrimination on the basis of something that has an actual impact unfair.
If people are judged on reasons other than individual merit, it's discrimination. It may be statistical discrimination as opposed to prejudice, but it's still discrimination.
So sure, judging you on your individual health is one thing, but companies may also judge based on average results from a group you belong to. Is it better to live in a society where if you fit some group (e.g., genetic profile, sexuality), you end up with massive health insurance costs - even if you never end up needing treatment?
And even if it is your individual health that's worse, if seems unfair that someone who had no choice in getting that condition ends up being uninsurable.
But it would shift the burden of choice and responsibility away from me personally and onto society as a whole. I'd prefer freedom and responsibility to regulation and socialized costs.
Does it really? In the US, it seems it's led to the sue-happy culture where they have to find someone else to blame, because they don't want to pay for the huge health costs they will have. We don't have that in the UK - perhaps it's easier to accept responsibility, when there isn't a whopping great big price tag associated with a minor one-off mistake.
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed - I don't know about this phone, but plenty of phone companies sell far more than Apple. The only reason people queue up for the Iphone is because they've had to wait so long for basic functionality such as 3G.
We're basing success of a product based on whether there were queues outside your local store? How about hard sales figures? And guess what - I never saw queues outside my local Apple store either.
And surely this article is an obvious troll, with nonsense comments like "The iPhone appears to still be the gold standard" and "It isn't as intuitive as the iPhone, and it may take average users a while to figure out basic and advanced shortcuts".
The Iphone has never been a "gold standard" - phones have been providing the functionality years before (and Apple is still playing catch-up on bog standard features you can get on cheap phones, such as Java, cut-and-paste, video, MMS).
Out of interest, do schools require this information from all textbook publishers? Full list of sources, full list of authors who contributed?
I agree it's unclear why they chose to strip the sources - though I don't recall any school textbook I ever saw having references.
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land.
I doubt that every citizen supports this law - I suspect that the one facing prison isn't, for starters!
No one is questioning the process by which they arrive at laws, so this is a straw man argument. Totalitarianism doesn't imply a lack of public support - indeed, often, the majority of the public will gladly vote in a totalitarian government and vote away their rights - consider support for "anti-terrorist" laws in western countries, and there's the obvious example I could give from the 20th Century, that I won't mention because of Godwin...
What people are saying is, it's wrong to lock people up against their will for 20 years for "blasphemy". The fact that lots of people in the country support it is no more relevant than there being lots of people in a country who might support slavery or rape. In fact, it just makes it all the more worrying that so many people think that someone should be locked up for blasphemy.
Note that you could say exactly the same thing with the word "Wikipedia" replaced with any encyclopedia.
the content of the website can change
No it can't, not if you cite properly and link to the static version.
Yes that's right. Let's believe that Wikipedia is flawed, based on a rant written by some random guy on his LiveJournal!
The fact that he insults with "their toady suck-ups" shows what his real agenda is. His points make no sense - are you seriously suggesting that allowing sockpuppets on Wikipedia is a good thing? It sounds like a classic case of someone whining because he didn't get his way. If you want somewhere to write your own stuff - get a blog. And then tell me how the accuracy and bias of random blogs compares to Wikipedia?
If you want to criticise Wikipedia, then let's start by not shooting yourself in the foot by making the same errors that you claim Wikipedia has: let's see evidence. For example, let's see analysis of articles on a range of topics, with comparisons on accuracy to other sources (other encyclopedias, the media, books/webpages etc).
And then realize that this horribly written stuff is going to be fed to schoolkids as an example of "researched" material.
They're going to feed this LiveJournal post to schoolkids? I hope not.
pointed out above, two random anonymous guys from Wikipedia disproved the research. If you trust that, you are the wikipedia target market.
No, I evaluate my trust based on the sources it links to. It's Wikipedia critics who seem to trust any old hearsay that someone randomly post on a blog/forum, or anything written in the mainstream media, whilst strangely distrusting everything they read in Wikipedia.
And the target market of "people who trust what they read" is, rightly or wrongly, just about everyone. The idea that there exists this major group of people who only believe things when presented with 100% evidence is a myth - and any such people who do fall into that group would have to be sceptical of just about everything they read, including other encyclopedias.
If Wikipedia makes people sceptical of what they read, then that's good. You should be sceptical of everything you read. Wikipedia has succeeded in this, where no other source has.
Indeed - this whole article is based on a lie. Wikipedia hasn't redefined truth - rather, they have a different threshold for inclusion. This is to stop people putting in stuff claiming it's true, when they have no source for their claims.
Whilst it is a problem that Wikipedia is only as good as its sources, the key point is attribution. So when it says "blah blah is blah[1]", that should be read as implicit shorthand for "source [1] claims that blah blah is blah".
It's also not true that Wikipedia accepts any source - the issue of reliable sources is an important requirement, and if a source's reliability is doubted, it should not be used.
Furthermore, this is an issue with all encyclopedias, and indeed, anyone who ever cites a source. Why does the article single out Wikipedia?
For it to claim that Wikipedia is redefining truth is a straw man (and I note the irony that an article that critices Wikipedia over "truth" is itself spreading a misconception...)
I'm not quite sure of the details of the Jaron Lanier case (the link was a rather tldr rant...), but Wikipedia bends over backwards to be "nice" to people who have articles written about them (biographies of living people), and getting material removed that is disputed by that person shouldn't be any trouble at all, even if he doesn't have a counter source.
Put it this way - correcting misinformation about you in Wikipedia will be far easier than correcting it in any other encylopedia, or just about any news article.
IOW, they're engineered to a non-existent standards. Once again, something that would be a serious bad point for any other product is twisted around to be a good point for Apple...
I'm assuming that around that time (when 3.5 inch floppies hadn't completely replaced 5.25) there were many proprietary formats in fairly common use. Amiga or Atari, perhaps.
Things weren't really any worse than the different file formats around today - IIRC, Atari used the same PC format, and although Amiga and Mac had their own custom formats, they also supported reading and writing using PC formatted disks.
In a way, things are worse today - e.g., I believe that non-Windows platforms can't write to NTFS drives, due to it being a closed format?
Others have pointed out about PAYG, etc, but:
The new part is the national surveillance database.
Indeed, and just to explain to others why this is quite significant: a "passport" will soon be morphed into the National ID Card and Database system. Although they ultimately want it to be compulsory for all, this is proving controversial, so they're trying to sneak it in the back door by increasing the number of occasions that you'll need an ID card / passport.
Giving up the right to have a passport is a big sacrifice for people in the UK, as many travel abroad (I'm not sure of the latest timeline, but very soon it won't be possible to get a passport without paying the full cost of an ID card, and being placed on the database), but with these plans, you'll need one just to get a mobile phones.
You'll be required to pay £93 (at least) for a card, to entitle you to buy a £30 phone.
Let's also not forget that this ties in with Government plans to monitor every Briton's phone calls, e-mails, and internet usage. They want you're details, so they can keep track of everyone you call or text.
See http://www.no2id.net/ for more info on ID cards and the database.
In Opera 9.02 on Windows, I can see tags, but not add my own.
In IE6, I can't see or add tags.
In Chrome, I can sort of see tags, but they're a bit jumbled up, and I can't add my own.
(I know, I should get round to submitting a bug, though I'm curious if it's not been noticed - it's not my single machine, this occurs on both my machines, and my work PC.)
On that note, the tagging system doesn't seem to work at all in Opera, IE or Chrome anymore - only Firefox. The tags can't be seen or added to. (I know this is Slashdot, but we don't all use Firefox...)
Yeah, because Apple were the only system around other than DOS...
It's a ridiculous claim anyway for the article to suggest that PCs still have modems - surely most desktop PCs don't have modems as standard now? Modems have almost always been available via add-on cards rather than the motherboards (I've never actually seen a desktop motherboard that had on-board dial up), so not including them is easy.
Laptops might be different, but as you say, I'd still rather have modem as backup on a laptop, since not everywhere has wifi (or sometimes it's still very expensive or a hassle to get to), than have to buy and lug around an extra piece of hardware, like I'd have to with a Mac.
What was wrong with an external USB floppy drive - I'm sure those were available at the time, or very shortly after?
But if you're crediting the Imac for not having floppies, it doesn't make sense to then say that criticisms can be addressed by ... buying a floppy!
What was wrong with having an internal floppy drive available from the start?
Floppies were obsolete, and they deserved to die.
That's an odd definition of "obsolete" that requires you to still need it as an extra external piece of hardware...
The problem is that people (like the author of the article) try to have it both ways: they claim that Apple was special because when they dropped the floppy, people no longer needed it, but when people point out problems, they respond with "well people could buy floppy drives for it" - in which case, it's not true that people no longer required floppies, making the Imac no different to the NEXT machine that they also mention, or the Amiga CDTV.
I agree - and whilst it my be a matter of opinion when floppies were no longer needed, I don't understand why the Imac gets so much credit for not having a feature that most people were still using anyway.
It's also a common Apple myth that they were first - consider, Commodore dropped the floppy from the Amiga CDTV, years beforehand! If you mention that, people will say that that was obviously too early - but how is that any different to the Imac? Apple get credit for being "first", but Commodore don't because they were earlier?
What country do you in where students have to drop out of college in order to pay a speeding fine?
Indeed, what an excellent (car) analogy: If you speed in a car, something that risks putting lives at danger, you might have to pay $150 (e.g., http://www.speedingticketkiller.com/ - and that's a site that is saying how high it is). But if you make a single mp3 available that might, oh I don't know, cause a few lost sales, resulting in a few dollars less profit (remember how the RIAA tell us most of the cost of a CD is costs, and only a tiny amount is profit, right?), they're after $750.
Glad to see they have their priorities straight.
Note also that the RIAA openly brag about going after college students.
There are games available for loads of mobile platforms, including phones. It's only because this story includes the word "Iphone" that it gets front page news, as if it were something new.
Cast aside the argument that it will make the Internet sluggish, because that argument will be nullified if technology and such improve enormously. Also cast aside the argument that it will be expensive to do, because what if we make it incredibly efficient?
Also cast aside the false positives occurring, because what if they get it so refined that a false positive is a one in a million occurance.
What sort of argument is that? "If we ignore the reasons why it would be bad, why would it be bad?"
I want someone to make a good argument.
It's not a good argument to ignore all the perfectly good arguments already made.
Another point is that not all "illegal material" is material that should be illegal. Of course yes, we should oppose those laws too - and I see nothing suggesting that people outraged at this aren't against such laws too.
Plans like this go hand in hand with the laws themselves. People will be more likely to be affected with this system (as opposed to something which is technically illegal but unenforceable).
Also consider that politicians will be more willing to criminalise things, if they know that doing so will mean it can be censored (and this isn't just hypothetical - I've seen this argument used by politicians in the UK, supporting the recent law criminalising adult material).
The main problem will be when they start blocking content that they just don't like, rather than stuff which is 100% illegal.
Oh that's not a problem anyway - they write the laws, so if they don't like it, they can make it illegal too.
(When passing the recent law in the UK that introduces criminalisation of possession of so-called "extreme" adult material, one of the politicans made the argument that they want to make it illegal, because then it will be easier for them to get ISPs and other companies to block the material...)
Though I was under the impression that Cleanfeed's list comes from the IWF? (E.g., see http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3797563.stm )
Had you followed your own link you would have seen that they are concerned with "Child sexual abuse content hosted worldwide and criminally obscene and incitement to racial hatred content hosted in the UK".
Agreed, although note that it's not just "in the UK", despite what they claim - they recently reported the guy for prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act for writing a fictional story, even though the material is hosted in another country.
Because there's never been any reduction of people's freedoms in the US lately...
On the (slightly) positive side, although my ISP (Virgin Media) apparently uses it, I've never seen any evidence of its presence. Also, I've never heard of anyone having problems or false positives (which obviously doesn't mean this doesn't occur).
Note that you wouldn't actually know if you had reached a page that was blocked under the system. From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/3797563.stm :
if you are a BT broadband customer and you follow a link to a website that is suspected of hosting images of child sexual abuse - what is often sloppily called "child porn" - then you will get a "page not found" error.
(Compared with places like Saudi Arabia, which inform you why the page isn't available, and even allow you submit a form if you think it's been incorrectly blocked.)
Note that although theoretically this only covers "illegal content" like child pr0n, from January the Government will start criminalising possession of some adult material, vastly increasing the range of sites which could fall under such blocking.
Also it was the IWF (who run Cleanfeed) who recently reported someone for prosecution for writing a fictional story (although as it happens, the story in question still seems to be available and doesn't seem to be blocked - instead they're going after the author, who may face up to five years in prison).
Re:We Can Only Hope the Same Happens to Obama
And we clearly have the best schools in the world, right? /sarcasm
Okay, point me to a country that has no state schools, but results in a better educated population?
Instead of paying taxes to pay for low quality public schools, people could keep they tax money and instead pay for a school where teachers will actually teach failing students.
Well that's rather simplistic. And it's unclear to me how the money saved from tax is enough for a better school. What would happen is:
* Children of rich parents would either have no change (their parents keep the extra money) or go to a slightly better school.
* At some point, there'd be children who are no worse off, as the money saved in tax equals the money it costs to send them to an equivalent school.
* Children of poorer parents than that will receive a worse education, or perhaps no education at all.
Not to mention that some parents may be more likely to use the saved money for other means, preferring to send their child to as cheap a school as possible.
I wouldn't call discrimination on the basis of something that has an actual impact unfair.
If people are judged on reasons other than individual merit, it's discrimination. It may be statistical discrimination as opposed to prejudice, but it's still discrimination.
So sure, judging you on your individual health is one thing, but companies may also judge based on average results from a group you belong to. Is it better to live in a society where if you fit some group (e.g., genetic profile, sexuality), you end up with massive health insurance costs - even if you never end up needing treatment?
And even if it is your individual health that's worse, if seems unfair that someone who had no choice in getting that condition ends up being uninsurable.
But it would shift the burden of choice and responsibility away from me personally and onto society as a whole. I'd prefer freedom and responsibility to regulation and socialized costs.
Does it really? In the US, it seems it's led to the sue-happy culture where they have to find someone else to blame, because they don't want to pay for the huge health costs they will have. We don't have that in the UK - perhaps it's easier to accept responsibility, when there isn't a whopping great big price tag associated with a minor one-off mistake.