Re:A basic article about a 2-year-old OS is news?
on
Mac Systems Management
·
· Score: 1
Yes, very occasionally, in proportion to when anything's happened. As opposed to articles everytime someone decides to write about something minor, as seems to be the case with Apple.
"Everyone" != "Open standards" (Though unfortunately the article really didn't make this clear.)
For example on some blog services, I could make commenting available to certain people based on their OpenID, so they could post without signing up for an account, and it wouldn't mean any random person could post.
Like many posters, you're conflating meanings of "open". You can still have your cliquey closed friends groups, whilst running on open standards. When people chat to their close circle of friends on their mobile phones, I don't think they care that this is done using different companies and separate networks all talking to each other.
People don't give a damn about the technology, but they do care about the hassle of signing up to multiple companies, or the risk of your cliquey friends group all being dependent on a single company's goodwill.
In some sense you are right - the sites are popular because they are not open - but it's not that people like it being not open, they just have no choice. The site being not open means you are forced to sign up to the company to keep up with your circle of friends, but it would be much better if people could remain part of their group without having to sign up to a particular company.
It's not open in the sense of public, it's open in the sense of standards.
You do use email, don't you, without fearing that everyone is reading it? But clearly it would be silly if, in order to email someone, they had to sign up to the same email service that you used.
There are already ways of doing this - for example, OpenID, which allows signing onto services, and people can let you see information without you having to sign up for an account on that system. But further improvement and adoption of open standards would be a good thing.
Unfortunately though the article is confusing in that later on ("Make Your Own Facebook"), it only discusses the ways of using data which has to be publicly available. But open doesn't mean it has to be public.
How about allowing users to submit an alternate abstract to a story in the firehose.
This is a good idea - there are often good ways and bad ways to submit a story, I've often seen perfectly good stories in the firehose with rubbish summaries. Also there might be additional or more notable relevant links for the story.
This can already be done by commenting on the story - though for some reason I don't know why, only some stories in the firehose allow comments?
Could somebody explain exactly how a screening tool that can be turned on or off by the owner is censorship?... These laws aren't about mandating that people _use_ the V-chip.
True, but it is mandating (I think) that every adult has to pay for it, presumably in everything from computers to phones, which is still an issue. What's wrong with overseeing the development to make it available as an option to those who want it?
There's also the question of how they intend to implement a rating system for the Internet.
The musicians of the 60's and 70's were emulating. The crap you hear today is copying direct sounds from people....
What music are you listening to when you talk about music today?
It sounds like you need to listen to more music - there's plenty I like today which emulates, not copies, and introduces elements from a variety of genres. Some bands write on the road, others write at home - just like happened in the past. If your argument is that writing at home will destroy music, it's not sufficient to show one example of a band writing on the road, you have to show that all music in the past was written on the road (or at least show that music written at home was sufficiently poorer).
I suspect you're doing the fallacy of comparing the greatest bands of the past, to the typical chart rubbish today - ignoring that chart rubbish existed in the 60s today.
And this has nothing to do with the Internet, anyway. The Internet didn't create those rubbish pop bands. This is completely off-topic.
People who "try" to commit suicide and fail that badly (can't gas themselves, don't cut their wrist in the right place, whatever) are generally doing it to try to get attention and try to get help with some issue they can't just outright tell people about, not to actually kill themselves.
Sadly, I've known people who cut themselves up for attention-whore purposes
Really getting off-topic - but self-harm is nothing to do with attempting suicide, nor is it usually about attention-seeking (consider the lengths many go to hide it, and the stigma associated with it - it's usually just assumed that if you don't hide it, you must be attention-seeking). I.e., it's a fallacy to assume that the only two possible motives are "suicide" or "seeking attention".
Indeed, all these people who sit at home and play the piano - they're destroying music!
They need to get out in the streets, march and protest, and actually meet some real people. You're not going to do that stuck inside on your piano.
(To be fair, I don't think he's actually campaigning to ban the Internet, but suggesting it as a hypothetical experiment: "I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span." - he's still a prize turnip of course. Clearly we don't need to do this experiment, because the experiment's already been done: we can simply look at that brief period of time when we didn't have the Internet, you know, almost the entire period of human civilization...)
the music of the past was created through collaboration, through jam sessions, through actual instruments.
Which was still done "sitting at home" and not "out in the streets" marching and protesting (I mean, I presume that Elton John's piano sits in his home, and not in the street?)
the vast majority of the music on the internet is people copying bands they like and never getting better at what they do.
You've just described the vast majority of music of the 20th Century, and probably everything before that too.
getting out and performing in front of people, getting out and meeting others who also play music drives creativity. sitting at home writing songs that emulate what someone else did keeps the status quo.
I suspect that performers who get out and perform still first wrote their songs at home. And I suspect that those who use the Internet still get out and perform and meet people.
The thing I love most is the way that Elton John uses the Internet to push these views (and apparentely charges $40 for access to his forum). Hey, Elton, how about you stop staying at home blogging, and get out in the street and write some music!
The lessen learned is that playing online games can lead to off line wars.
On a similar note, just as people blame computer games for violent behaviour, I think we should blame games like Civilization for causing our world leaders to develop a thirst for war.
See those juicy oil resource squares? Why, we'd better invade. My words are backed with nuculear weapons!
Quite - it appears they don't offer a Motorola phone either. Where's the front page story about that?
There's two stories on the front page atm, the other one being the revolutionary news of a 0.0.1 version update. (I don't recall ever seeing news for phone updates before, even major revisions...)
(And I don't think you can either filter the stories out, like you can say with the usual Apple stories, because they don't appear to be in the Apple category.)
When we had the stories of criminalising people for fictional virtual pr0n in online environments, one of the responses to show how ludicrous this is was to suggest we start criminalising WoW players for virtual murder...
It's sad that everytime someone says "But you can't stop X, otherwise we might as well crack down on Y too, which would be silly", it's not long before Y becomes the Internet taboo which people also want to crack down upon...
I loved the anti-piracy ad the last time I went to the cinema, dissuading us from watching downloaded versions people had filmed (I'm not sure why they tell us that, given that we've decided to pay for the cinema, but anyway) - it went on about how you get problems in the downloaded copy, like people getting up and blocking the view.
Besides, you know it's your DVD player that ultimately enforces whether or not you can skip through commercials and the FBI notice. If you're that upset about it, why don't you use electronics that don't tell you what you can or can't do? (There are plenty of software DVD players that will not enforce this meaningless restriction.)
Clickwrap and shrinkwrap are often upheld in court
Examples please of cases upheld in court (where the terms were not already covered by law)?
I think that users should start having their own "user" contracts - just stick it up on the webpage, and tell the company it's up to them to check it, and the terms can change at any time.
If it's a contract, it should be also fine for me to negotiate a different contract. So I tell my computer what terms I'd actually like - if their program accepts that, tough luck to them.
The point being - if these were really upheld as being contracts, and the law was applied to users just as much as companies, users could easily take advantage of this.
but at no time have EULAs or ToS contracts been deemed NOT legally binding. Until such a time as they are tested in court, they most certainly ARE legally binding.
Really? This seems a rather odd thing to say. I think that it's a bit meaningless to say that, for example, you are legally bound to pay me $1000, unless a court rules otherwise.
If I ask for say $50, and the machine spits out $200, what should you do? I think first it is obvious that $150 is not _your_ money, it is the banks money. Actually, it is not quite clear, because the bank might have deducted $200 from your account.
Indeed - I'd say that the $200 is your money, but the bank's records are wrong, and in time I expect them to fix it.
If it is not your money, then the only safe thing to leave the money. Consider, if you were standing nearby and the ATM randomly spewed out money, and you took it, do you think the police would accept "But I was only keeping it safe so I could return it to the bank"? Even though keeping it safe might be the moral thing to do, in practice, you're better off not touching it at all, and instead alerting the bank as soon as you can. But in the case where this was extra money given to you, and you leave it, I can bet that they'll then deduct the money from your account, and it'll be tough luck that the money you left is now nicked by someone else!
Going back for more I think would be considered fraud.
Can you defraud a machine? Can it be fraud when you are being entirely truthful, and it's the bank (their equipment) that is in error?
The first time is an accident and you should not go to jail. However, if you continue asking for $100 then you are knowingly comitting a crime and should go to jail. I expect that the people to be prosecuted are those who engaged in the latter.
It's an important distinction, but it's still not illegal to withdraw your own money. Where things perhaps become different is when the amount you've withdrawn exceeds what you have in your account, as then you've intentionally cheated the system to take money which isn't yours.
Well there's no "official" billion or "one true system". Yes, I'm amazed that many people don't even know how big a number is, when it is commonly used. And in particular, they know that there are two meanings of "billion", but insist on believing that 10^12 is still the "English" billion.
Well, note that you can still role-play them in real life, so you still get more of a physical aspect than you would in SL, with it still being consensual. So I don't think SL makes it more of an ethical alternative, it's just another way of doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, very occasionally, in proportion to when anything's happened. As opposed to articles everytime someone decides to write about something minor, as seems to be the case with Apple.
Why do people flock to these gated, closed, proprietary online communities?
Says the one still using Slashdot...
Yes, it's a pain, but people, just like you, use them because there isn't a choice.
"Everyone" != "Open standards" (Though unfortunately the article really didn't make this clear.)
For example on some blog services, I could make commenting available to certain people based on their OpenID, so they could post without signing up for an account, and it wouldn't mean any random person could post.
Once again - the article was about open standards, not making data publicly available. Or don't you ever mention anything personal in email?
Like many posters, you're conflating meanings of "open". You can still have your cliquey closed friends groups, whilst running on open standards. When people chat to their close circle of friends on their mobile phones, I don't think they care that this is done using different companies and separate networks all talking to each other.
People don't give a damn about the technology, but they do care about the hassle of signing up to multiple companies, or the risk of your cliquey friends group all being dependent on a single company's goodwill.
In some sense you are right - the sites are popular because they are not open - but it's not that people like it being not open, they just have no choice. The site being not open means you are forced to sign up to the company to keep up with your circle of friends, but it would be much better if people could remain part of their group without having to sign up to a particular company.
It's not open in the sense of public, it's open in the sense of standards.
You do use email, don't you, without fearing that everyone is reading it? But clearly it would be silly if, in order to email someone, they had to sign up to the same email service that you used.
There are already ways of doing this - for example, OpenID, which allows signing onto services, and people can let you see information without you having to sign up for an account on that system. But further improvement and adoption of open standards would be a good thing.
Unfortunately though the article is confusing in that later on ("Make Your Own Facebook"), it only discusses the ways of using data which has to be publicly available. But open doesn't mean it has to be public.
How about allowing users to submit an alternate abstract to a story in the firehose.
This is a good idea - there are often good ways and bad ways to submit a story, I've often seen perfectly good stories in the firehose with rubbish summaries. Also there might be additional or more notable relevant links for the story.
This can already be done by commenting on the story - though for some reason I don't know why, only some stories in the firehose allow comments?
Could somebody explain exactly how a screening tool that can be turned on or off by the owner is censorship? ... These laws aren't about mandating that people _use_ the V-chip.
True, but it is mandating (I think) that every adult has to pay for it, presumably in everything from computers to phones, which is still an issue. What's wrong with overseeing the development to make it available as an option to those who want it?
There's also the question of how they intend to implement a rating system for the Internet.
The musicians of the 60's and 70's were emulating. The crap you hear today is copying direct sounds from people. ...
What music are you listening to when you talk about music today?
It sounds like you need to listen to more music - there's plenty I like today which emulates, not copies, and introduces elements from a variety of genres. Some bands write on the road, others write at home - just like happened in the past. If your argument is that writing at home will destroy music, it's not sufficient to show one example of a band writing on the road, you have to show that all music in the past was written on the road (or at least show that music written at home was sufficiently poorer).
I suspect you're doing the fallacy of comparing the greatest bands of the past, to the typical chart rubbish today - ignoring that chart rubbish existed in the 60s today.
And this has nothing to do with the Internet, anyway. The Internet didn't create those rubbish pop bands. This is completely off-topic.
People who "try" to commit suicide and fail that badly (can't gas themselves, don't cut their wrist in the right place, whatever) are generally doing it to try to get attention and try to get help with some issue they can't just outright tell people about, not to actually kill themselves.
Sadly, I've known people who cut themselves up for attention-whore purposes
Really getting off-topic - but self-harm is nothing to do with attempting suicide, nor is it usually about attention-seeking (consider the lengths many go to hide it, and the stigma associated with it - it's usually just assumed that if you don't hide it, you must be attention-seeking). I.e., it's a fallacy to assume that the only two possible motives are "suicide" or "seeking attention".
Indeed, all these people who sit at home and play the piano - they're destroying music!
They need to get out in the streets, march and protest, and actually meet some real people. You're not going to do that stuck inside on your piano.
(To be fair, I don't think he's actually campaigning to ban the Internet, but suggesting it as a hypothetical experiment: "I do think it would be an incredible experiment to shut down the whole internet for five years and see what sort of art is produced over that span." - he's still a prize turnip of course. Clearly we don't need to do this experiment, because the experiment's already been done: we can simply look at that brief period of time when we didn't have the Internet, you know, almost the entire period of human civilization...)
the music of the past was created through collaboration, through jam sessions, through actual instruments.
Which was still done "sitting at home" and not "out in the streets" marching and protesting (I mean, I presume that Elton John's piano sits in his home, and not in the street?)
the vast majority of the music on the internet is people copying bands they like and never getting better at what they do.
You've just described the vast majority of music of the 20th Century, and probably everything before that too.
getting out and performing in front of people, getting out and meeting others who also play music drives creativity. sitting at home writing songs that emulate what someone else did keeps the status quo.
I suspect that performers who get out and perform still first wrote their songs at home. And I suspect that those who use the Internet still get out and perform and meet people.
The thing I love most is the way that Elton John uses the Internet to push these views (and apparentely charges $40 for access to his forum). Hey, Elton, how about you stop staying at home blogging, and get out in the street and write some music!
Heh, looks like I upset a Bush-fanboy with no sense of humour.
The lessen learned is that playing online games can lead to off line wars.
On a similar note, just as people blame computer games for violent behaviour, I think we should blame games like Civilization for causing our world leaders to develop a thirst for war.
See those juicy oil resource squares? Why, we'd better invade. My words are backed with nuculear weapons!
On the other hand, I'm wondering if Bush will decide to invade WoW as part of the "War on Terror".
Is there any oil there?
Quite - it appears they don't offer a Motorola phone either. Where's the front page story about that?
There's two stories on the front page atm, the other one being the revolutionary news of a 0.0.1 version update. (I don't recall ever seeing news for phone updates before, even major revisions...)
(And I don't think you can either filter the stories out, like you can say with the usual Apple stories, because they don't appear to be in the Apple category.)
When we had the stories of criminalising people for fictional virtual pr0n in online environments, one of the responses to show how ludicrous this is was to suggest we start criminalising WoW players for virtual murder...
It's sad that everytime someone says "But you can't stop X, otherwise we might as well crack down on Y too, which would be silly", it's not long before Y becomes the Internet taboo which people also want to crack down upon...
Please tell me this story is just a parody?
I loved the anti-piracy ad the last time I went to the cinema, dissuading us from watching downloaded versions people had filmed (I'm not sure why they tell us that, given that we've decided to pay for the cinema, but anyway) - it went on about how you get problems in the downloaded copy, like people getting up and blocking the view.
Oh yeah, just like you get in a real cinema.
Besides, you know it's your DVD player that ultimately enforces whether or not you can skip through commercials and the FBI notice. If you're that upset about it, why don't you use electronics that don't tell you what you can or can't do? (There are plenty of software DVD players that will not enforce this meaningless restriction.)
Which would also presumably be illegal anyway.
Clickwrap and shrinkwrap are often upheld in court
Examples please of cases upheld in court (where the terms were not already covered by law)?
I think that users should start having their own "user" contracts - just stick it up on the webpage, and tell the company it's up to them to check it, and the terms can change at any time.
If it's a contract, it should be also fine for me to negotiate a different contract. So I tell my computer what terms I'd actually like - if their program accepts that, tough luck to them.
The point being - if these were really upheld as being contracts, and the law was applied to users just as much as companies, users could easily take advantage of this.
but at no time have EULAs or ToS contracts been deemed NOT legally binding. Until such a time as they are tested in court, they most certainly ARE legally binding.
Really? This seems a rather odd thing to say. I think that it's a bit meaningless to say that, for example, you are legally bound to pay me $1000, unless a court rules otherwise.
If I ask for say $50, and the machine spits out $200, what should you do? I think first it is obvious that $150 is not _your_ money, it is the banks money. Actually, it is not quite clear, because the bank might have deducted $200 from your account.
Indeed - I'd say that the $200 is your money, but the bank's records are wrong, and in time I expect them to fix it.
If it is not your money, then the only safe thing to leave the money. Consider, if you were standing nearby and the ATM randomly spewed out money, and you took it, do you think the police would accept "But I was only keeping it safe so I could return it to the bank"? Even though keeping it safe might be the moral thing to do, in practice, you're better off not touching it at all, and instead alerting the bank as soon as you can. But in the case where this was extra money given to you, and you leave it, I can bet that they'll then deduct the money from your account, and it'll be tough luck that the money you left is now nicked by someone else!
Going back for more I think would be considered fraud.
Can you defraud a machine? Can it be fraud when you are being entirely truthful, and it's the bank (their equipment) that is in error?
The first time is an accident and you should not go to jail. However, if you continue asking for $100 then you are knowingly comitting a crime and should go to jail. I expect that the people to be prosecuted are those who engaged in the latter.
It's an important distinction, but it's still not illegal to withdraw your own money. Where things perhaps become different is when the amount you've withdrawn exceeds what you have in your account, as then you've intentionally cheated the system to take money which isn't yours.
Well there's no "official" billion or "one true system". Yes, I'm amazed that many people don't even know how big a number is, when it is commonly used. And in particular, they know that there are two meanings of "billion", but insist on believing that 10^12 is still the "English" billion.
Well, note that you can still role-play them in real life, so you still get more of a physical aspect than you would in SL, with it still being consensual. So I don't think SL makes it more of an ethical alternative, it's just another way of doing it.