You are right that banks and local news and so forth got by for years with less user tracking than they have now. I just think getting them to give it up is about as useful as tilting at windmills. I'm operating under the assumption that we can't trust these businesses to stop collecting data no matter what the law says, and it's our responsibility (we in the technology community) to devise ways to live a connected life while maintaining privacy in a way that prevents them from snooping whether they wish to snoop or not.
Search wouldn't be prohibitively expensive for ordinary users, just uncomfortably expensive for poor users.
I would love to see distributed social networking become prevalent, but I think the technical barriers for that to be practical for mainstream users to host are just too high. We the geeks can save ourselves from Facebook and Twitter with buddycloud, Diaspora, Status.net, and so forth, but we can't save everyone else. And a distributed, hosted solution is only partial salvation - if the great majority of the population runs their personal instance of Facebook-Killer on Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift or CloudBees or Amazon EC2 or whatever, then even if our data isn't mined for advertising it's still at the fingertips of the hosting companies. Even if my personal Facebook-killer instance runs out of my house, if my brother runs his on Heroku then everything I share with him is available to them.
I think mainstream Social Network features like sharing music preferences, cat videos, and political propoganda are overrated. But discussion boards and keeping in contact with people really is valuable. I'd consider these Slashdot discussions a variant of social network, and although there's a lot of noise around the signal you really can learn a thing or two here.
For me, the local grocery stores with shopper's cards charge 30% more for people without the cards. The card gets you the price you would expect to pay normally, and without it you're paying $5.00 (instead of $3.45) for a gallon of milk or $2.25 (instead of $1.50) for a loaf of bread, and so forth. It's only not worth the hassle if you can afford the difference. Walmart doesn't use a membership program, but dealing with them has separate ethical problems. Aldi doesn't use a membership program, but I don't believe they accept credit cards.
Internet search, social networks, news, Yahoo Local, Google Maps, banks, and discounts on groceries and other retail purchases, etc... are a little more valuable to consumers than candy and narcotics.
It's a little hypocritical, don't you think, for you to call ad-funded business offerings something like candy and narcotics offered by pedophiles when you're making that point on a news site and discussusion board funded by advertising. Enjoy your candy.
Collecting information about people for the purposes of statistical analysis and especially advertising purposes is one of the core business models of the internet. Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are outright built on top of it. Most media sites are built on it. Outside of direct internet companies, your grocery store, your pharmacy, your bank - they all collect information about you too for various purposes.
If you take that away, someone has to invent a radical new business model for the internet or else we all need to start paying monthly fees for all of our sites and see the prices of our groceries, banking, etc... increase to offset revenue lost from targeted advertising. A lot of people can't pay those fees - so instead of making the internet more private for all, you've made it more private for some and inaccessible for others. That might still be better than what we have now, I'm not sure. I'm not thrilled with the mountains of information Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, Sprint, Visa, Costco, my bank, etc... have about me.
It's beyond Google, Facebook, and Twitter, though. If you use a membership card at a retailer like Costco, a pharmacy, or a grocery store then they know a lot about you. If you use a credit card then the credit card knows a lot about you. Your bank knows a lot about you. Your wireless carrier knows a lot about you, unless you keep the phone at home and don't actually carry it with you - but that defeats the purpose of having a mobile phone. Your internet service provider knows a lot about you. etc... etc... And thanks to things like the Evercookie (which we can assume most of the major advertising networks already had in place before the actual Evercookie was publicized), dozens of web companies know a lot about you. If you use hosted email, that company knows a lot about you.
In all of those cases a skilled hacker, an unethical employee, or a corrupt goverment agent can get an unsettling amount of information about you. Avoiding it is difficult but plausible for educated, upper middle class or wealthier people - don't use a membership service for your pharmacy and grocery store. Don't have credit cards. Pay cash for your shopping. Use multiple banks, and do most of your transactions using prepaid credit cards and money orders. Switch phone numbers and wireless carriers frequently, or forego a mobile phone entirely. Set up all of your internet devices to use TOR or a VPN service. Host your own email, and only communicate using encrypted messages with other people that likewise host their own email and communicate only via encrypted messages. Avoid all social networks. All of that is a lot of work, and not practical for most of the population - it's so uncommon I wouldn't be surprised if you end up on a government watch list simply for conspicuously protecting your own privacy.
That said, legislating the problem away is simply unworkable. I don't know what the practical broad solution for privacy is, but simply passing a law demanding that Google, Facebook, Comcast, T-Mobile, Costco, Mastercard, etc... abandon large aspects of their business model is a nice fantasy but it won't fly.
That's a fair point, but I doubt the parent poster would then argue that prosecuting Bush is wrong and prosecuting or otherwise pursuing bin Laden is equally wrong.
By your logic, bin Laden was only "indirectly" responsible for the September 11th attacks, and claiming bin Laden was "directly" responsible "is just wrong".
The Tesla Model S with the big battery pack is EPA rated for a 265 mile range at 55 miles per hour, and 200 miles at 70 miles per hour. I drive more than 150 miles in a single day twice per year: once on the way to our vacation at the beach, and once on the way back. I could easily rent a vehicle or swap vehicles with a friend for that week, and use a Model S all year round as my only vehicle without problems.
In that case, the impractical part is the $80,000 price tag. For $80,000, my car better have a nymphomaniac in the back seat as standard equipment.
This is anecdotal, but it seems that the EPA fuel economy ratings for diesels tend to be pessimistic, while the EPA fuel economy ratings for gasoline engines tend to be optimistic. Plus, the diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs so that makes maintenance a little cheaper.
So you can probably adjust your repayment from "drive it into the ground" to somewhere above 150,000 miles, more or less. That's still not enough to justify the diesel.
Volkswagen Passat TDI in the US is rated 31 miles per gallon city, 43 miles per gallon highway. An American market Honda Accord (which is bigger than the Accord elsewhere, just about the exact same size as the American market Passat) with a 4-cylinder gasoline engine has similar performance and fuel economy 27 city and 36 highway. The Passat is less than 20% better in the city and highway, not your 60-70% figure.
Now I will grant that US fuel economy tests by the EPA tend to give diesel vehicles unrealistically low figures and gasoline vehicles unrealistically high ones. But I would put the error either way on the order of maybe 5-10%, so that still doesn't give the Passat diesel a 60% advantage.
If you compare the smaller US market Volksagen Jetta diesel with a gasoline engine Honda Civic, the fuel economy gap is even smaller. And as has been stated elsewhere, diesel fuel costs more in most of the US.
In many states in the US, diesel fuel costs 20-30% more than gasoline. So even though getting a diesel engine vehicle allows you to stop for fuel less often, and you use a lower volume of fuel on an annual basis, in terms of money the savings isn't that big.
Thanks for explaining that. I often hear people on both sides make incorrect claims, either that automatic transmissions have always been just as efficient as manual transmissions (wrong) or that manual transmissions have always been more efficient than automatic transmissions (also wrong). A good modern automatic does as well as a manual, or relatively close. But in some modern cars and in just about everything put out before the mid 2000s a manual delivered better fuel economy.
If you read the text of the actual Fogbeam blog post, the writer only brings up Microsoft to immediately disqualify them.
I think the historical pattern is pretty clear - companies support openness and interoperability when they have a very small share of the market, because it lets them potentially claim a bigger share. Once they own a big share of the market, it's in their interest to break interoperability and close down options, because it lets them lock competitors out of the market. Google has passed into the second category when it comes to social networking, maps, and RSS.
Google has not reached the point where closed is better than open with Android, and given the open source nature of Android it's possible they can't ever reach it. If Android 6 is proprietary, many companies may decide to fork Android 5 and work from that. That's a good thing, but I'm not sure if any of it came from altruistic planning on Google's behalf, or just the reality in 2006 that if they didn't adopt a very open platform, Android would have never gained marketshare.
Still, I think overall Google's lockdown is beneficial, it wakes up people clinging to the delusion that Google would put "Don't Be Evil" ahead of its business model.
Mobile computing is likely to just keep getting more popular and more prevalent in the future. Microsoft executives and shareholders would have liked if Zune and Kin were profitable, but otherwise it was just a side project. Windows Phone and Windows 8/RT on tablets are important to the future of the company. I bet they dump a lot more than 5 billion dollars into it before they give up.
As someone who believes in privacy, open source software, and freedom I dislike Microsoft. But I don't think that is why they have problems connecting with consumers. I think Microsoft has problems connecting with consumers because they have a pathological inability to make things simple, easy to understand, and easy to use. It's death by a thousand cuts. Mac OS X 10.whatever has one version, and each release of IOS has one version. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 had at least three versions each with different versions and prices. Windows 8 has two versions - oh wait, you have to buy Professional plus an add-on pack to watch DVDs, so that's effectively three versions. But then Windows RT is similar to Windows 8 in interface but doesn't run legacy software. It's all needlessly confusing.
The OEM versions of Windows come loaded with bloatware, and manufacturers routinely sold computers that barely run the version of Windows they had installed, or slow to a crawl once you open a third browser tab, or worked fine until you installed Service Pack 1 and then slowed to a crawl. Microsoft came out with its Signature PC series as a solution, and the result is PCs that operate much better right out of the box - but it's a harm, not a help. "You can buy our software from Dell, HP, Asus, Toshiba, and Lenovo. But if you want it to work, you have to pay extra to buy the exact same product directly from us." I can buy a $900 Windows 7 Home Premium Junk from HP, or a $950 Windows 7 Home Premium Non-Junk HP from Microsoft? Why do they even allow the Premium Junk bundle out into the market?
Too many updates require a reboot. Windows Explorer still hangs sometimes for twenty seconds or longer when you access a directory, even on a local drive. Processes that hang have to hang a while before you can do a force immediate kill, even with task manager. (Command line taskkill does the trick, but the average person doesn't know how to use it.) Windows Update occasionally breaks with bizarre errors, and you have to call tech support or spend hours hunting the web for solutions. For a small business, trying to navigate the restrictions and requirements for server licensing and terminal server licensing and office licensing is like a private tour of your own personal hell.
Even as a developer you're left at their tender mercy. "Hey, remember that Silverlight we sold you on? Our Flash killer? Remember all the time you spent learning how it works and taking classes on it and buying books about it? Well, we're killing it!" "Oh, and you know how C# was the hot new thing? We changed our minds, it's time for a C++ renaissance!" I don't know what the Windows Azure (PaaS and now IaaS ) website looks like right now, but when I first looked at it the jargon and instructions were something that would require a lawyer/developer hybrid to navigate. How about a program you downloaded that ran and automatically checked your system requirements to see if you could run the Azure developer tools, and then automatically downloaded and installed every piece of the Azure developer tools you didn't already have, and then walked you through setting up a test account? But no, the website for Azure made the websites for Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine look like masterworks of elegant simplicity.
Microsoft has all the technological tools it needs to dominate the consumer market as much today as it did in 2001. It's just incapable of using them properly.
It's not Big Brother, but when Big Brother arrives he'll have every useful intimate detail about every citizen right at his fingertips. Furthermore, cryptography is not a solution by itself.
I access Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and my work email through encrypted connections, and most of the transactions between those services is encrypted. So a third party snooper can't read my mail. But a corrupt employee at one of those companies, someone that hacks the web servers at one of those companies, or a corrupt government official with a warrant can get to my mail. For real privacy I need to host my own email on a secure I alone can physically access, and only send email using encrypted messages to other people that do the same. To do that I need to set up my own email server and get everyone I want to communicate with to do the same. The former is merely tedious, the latter is effectively impossible.
By using a cell phone and keeping it on so my family members can contact me in case of an emergency, I give my wireless carrier (and anyone unethical at the wireless carrier, or anyone that hacks into the carrier, or any corrupt government official) a long, detailed history of my travel patterns. I could avoid that by not having a wireless phone or leaving it at home most of the time, but since I have family members with potentially life-threatening medical problems I am unwilling to risk being unreachable during a crisis.
Thanks to tricks like Evercookie ( http://samy.pl/evercookie/ ), which are used by many sites, my web traffic is almost certainly tracked in a very detailed way. I can get around it, but it's a lot of work. And so few people manage it.
The cell phone can't be helped. Otherwise? I'm starting to think the best solution for tech-savvy people is just to unplug as much as possible. Google can't read the mail I send on paper over the postal service, Comcast and Amazon can't track the shopping I do with cash at a flea market.
I was raised Catholic, studied for the Catholic priesthood for a year, and had one of my former mentors imprisoned for pedophilia - though I was not among his victims.
I think that's just grounds for both understanding the Catholic Church, and also for attacking it. This institution claims authority from God, the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient, and they claim God is more good than we can possibly understand and God created the Catholic Church to be God's specific instrument in the world. For a neutral observer, evil is evil whether it's carried out by an atheist or a religious fanatic. But as someone raised Catholic, to see my institution that I loved and trusted to carry out acts as despicable as any secular institution... God's institution in the world for the spread of forgiveness has done unforgivable things.
Other Christian Churches, not the Catholic Church, give the Bible ultimate authority. The Catholic Church gives the Bible equal weight with Tradition (capital 'T' intentional), and for Tradition you have to trust... Catholic Church teachings.
Besides, the Bible contradicts itself. Two of the Gospels have incompatible genealogies for Jesus. There are two separate creation stories in Genesis. In one Gospel Judas hanged himself, in another he jumped to his death. In one Gospel Mary Magdalene discovered Jesus' was not present in the tomb on her own, in others she had other women with her. And for example, the most commonly cited Bible passage for condemning homosexuality is in Leviticus, right alongside passages discussing the execution of adulterers and disobedient children and the buying and selling of slaves. Paul also condemned homosexuality, but he was specifically condemning homosexual prostitutes in pagan temples - so some scholars have argued he was in fact railing against the pagan religions and religions with prostitution, not homosexuality.
If you just needed the Bible, the Pope would be superfluous. Try telling that to Catholics.
So "if you tell anyone I'm hurting you, I will kill someone in your family" is worse than "God wants me to do this to you, and if you tell anyone you will all go to hell and suffer for all eternity"? Sorry, I disagree. As bad as the first one is, the second is worse.
You are seriously making the claim that someone elected or hired to run a school is claiming more moral authority than someone claiming they are teaching rules handed down directly from God according to the will of God?
If you're a Catholic and you don't agree with Catholic teaching, to whom are you supposed to appeal? You can't pick up a phone or write a letter to an Archangel or one of the saints for guidance if you think the Pope is incorrect. With a school principal or other administrator, you can compare what he or she teaches for ethics to other administrators in other schools, including schools in other countries. You can also find, quite easily, respected secular authorities that disagree with each other. But most don't consider themselves the final authority on the topic of ethics or education and none teach students that failing to follow their direction could lead to eternal damnation.
The Catholic Church has not given up its battle over abortion rights in the US despite the fact that it is lost. I honestly don't believe they've dropped the ball on divorce and fornication because they can't win. I honestly believe they dropped the ball because they consider homosexuality more seriously wrong.
Two infertile people that happen to be of opposite sexes are permitted to enter a legal contract, marriage, in the US and receive certain legal benefits - shared medical coverage from employers, automatic visitation privileges if one is hospitalized, shared Social Security benefits, etc... Those same privileges are not afforded if the two people are of the same sex.
Now if you want to be pedantic, you can say that it's not rights taken away from gays, it's just privileges afforded to heterosexual couples that are not extended to homosexual couples. But whether the unfair treatment is rights taken away or privileges extended, either way it's unfair.
Now, I would be quite satisfied with a level playing field - the legal institution of marriage is abolished, and marriage is strictly a religious ceremony. Or make marriage a civil contract between any two people that want to share tax and insurance benefits, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, or just two siblings (not in an incestuous relationship) that live together. Or make marriage a civil contract that only extends benefits to two people partnering to raise children under the age of 18, and when the children reach age 18 the benefits end. In any of those cases, it's fair. But right now the law gives heterosexuals advantages over homosexuals that have nothing to do with parenting and everything to do with religious beliefs.
In order to argue against raising children in a homosexual household, you need to provide evidence that children raised that way suffer in some respect compared to children raised in a heterosexual household. No such evidence exists - except in the cases when the children are abused solely because their parents are gay, and then the problem is not the parents but the bigoted community.
Right. And I support freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But I am responding to sycodon's comment "No one is forced to be a Catholic. No one is forced to follow their teachings." People aren't forced to be Catholic, but if Catholics help pass laws that, for example, ban gay marriage, then the general population is forced to follow Catholic teachings.
I disagree with the Catholic Church on those key issues - gay rights, contraception, abortion, sexuality in general - and on a number of theological ones but fortunately my theological disputes have no impact on secular law. I think Catholics, at least in the US, have unfairly singled out gays as a target. The Church forbids divorce (except in rare cases where an anulment applies) and fornication, but Catholics in the US do not try to outlaw either thing - just gay marriage and gay adoption rights. That's unequal application of Catholic teachings regarding sexuality.
But more generally, I'm responding to the people who seem annoyed that non-Catholics have strong opinions on the Catholic Church. We have strong opinions because, as you said, religious beliefs are inherently intermingled with political beliefs, so what the Catholic Church teaches impacts our political landscape very heavily.
Aside from "Higher level Catholics" - I wonder which version of Dungeons and Dragons that's from.;) a lot of Catholics are Republican because of their pro-life position.
It must vary by region. In my section of Pennsylvania, the predominant political issue for Catholics is abortion, so my colossal Catholic extended family is almost entirely Republican.
Slashdot Mirror
You are right that banks and local news and so forth got by for years with less user tracking than they have now. I just think getting them to give it up is about as useful as tilting at windmills. I'm operating under the assumption that we can't trust these businesses to stop collecting data no matter what the law says, and it's our responsibility (we in the technology community) to devise ways to live a connected life while maintaining privacy in a way that prevents them from snooping whether they wish to snoop or not.
Search wouldn't be prohibitively expensive for ordinary users, just uncomfortably expensive for poor users.
I would love to see distributed social networking become prevalent, but I think the technical barriers for that to be practical for mainstream users to host are just too high. We the geeks can save ourselves from Facebook and Twitter with buddycloud, Diaspora, Status.net, and so forth, but we can't save everyone else. And a distributed, hosted solution is only partial salvation - if the great majority of the population runs their personal instance of Facebook-Killer on Heroku or Red Hat OpenShift or CloudBees or Amazon EC2 or whatever, then even if our data isn't mined for advertising it's still at the fingertips of the hosting companies. Even if my personal Facebook-killer instance runs out of my house, if my brother runs his on Heroku then everything I share with him is available to them.
I think mainstream Social Network features like sharing music preferences, cat videos, and political propoganda are overrated. But discussion boards and keeping in contact with people really is valuable. I'd consider these Slashdot discussions a variant of social network, and although there's a lot of noise around the signal you really can learn a thing or two here.
For me, the local grocery stores with shopper's cards charge 30% more for people without the cards. The card gets you the price you would expect to pay normally, and without it you're paying $5.00 (instead of $3.45) for a gallon of milk or $2.25 (instead of $1.50) for a loaf of bread, and so forth. It's only not worth the hassle if you can afford the difference. Walmart doesn't use a membership program, but dealing with them has separate ethical problems. Aldi doesn't use a membership program, but I don't believe they accept credit cards.
Internet search, social networks, news, Yahoo Local, Google Maps, banks, and discounts on groceries and other retail purchases, etc... are a little more valuable to consumers than candy and narcotics.
It's a little hypocritical, don't you think, for you to call ad-funded business offerings something like candy and narcotics offered by pedophiles when you're making that point on a news site and discussusion board funded by advertising. Enjoy your candy.
Collecting information about people for the purposes of statistical analysis and especially advertising purposes is one of the core business models of the internet. Facebook, Google, and Yahoo are outright built on top of it. Most media sites are built on it. Outside of direct internet companies, your grocery store, your pharmacy, your bank - they all collect information about you too for various purposes.
If you take that away, someone has to invent a radical new business model for the internet or else we all need to start paying monthly fees for all of our sites and see the prices of our groceries, banking, etc... increase to offset revenue lost from targeted advertising. A lot of people can't pay those fees - so instead of making the internet more private for all, you've made it more private for some and inaccessible for others. That might still be better than what we have now, I'm not sure. I'm not thrilled with the mountains of information Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Comcast, Sprint, Visa, Costco, my bank, etc... have about me.
It's beyond Google, Facebook, and Twitter, though. If you use a membership card at a retailer like Costco, a pharmacy, or a grocery store then they know a lot about you. If you use a credit card then the credit card knows a lot about you. Your bank knows a lot about you. Your wireless carrier knows a lot about you, unless you keep the phone at home and don't actually carry it with you - but that defeats the purpose of having a mobile phone. Your internet service provider knows a lot about you. etc... etc... And thanks to things like the Evercookie (which we can assume most of the major advertising networks already had in place before the actual Evercookie was publicized), dozens of web companies know a lot about you. If you use hosted email, that company knows a lot about you.
In all of those cases a skilled hacker, an unethical employee, or a corrupt goverment agent can get an unsettling amount of information about you. Avoiding it is difficult but plausible for educated, upper middle class or wealthier people - don't use a membership service for your pharmacy and grocery store. Don't have credit cards. Pay cash for your shopping. Use multiple banks, and do most of your transactions using prepaid credit cards and money orders. Switch phone numbers and wireless carriers frequently, or forego a mobile phone entirely. Set up all of your internet devices to use TOR or a VPN service. Host your own email, and only communicate using encrypted messages with other people that likewise host their own email and communicate only via encrypted messages. Avoid all social networks. All of that is a lot of work, and not practical for most of the population - it's so uncommon I wouldn't be surprised if you end up on a government watch list simply for conspicuously protecting your own privacy.
That said, legislating the problem away is simply unworkable. I don't know what the practical broad solution for privacy is, but simply passing a law demanding that Google, Facebook, Comcast, T-Mobile, Costco, Mastercard, etc... abandon large aspects of their business model is a nice fantasy but it won't fly.
That's a fair point, but I doubt the parent poster would then argue that prosecuting Bush is wrong and prosecuting or otherwise pursuing bin Laden is equally wrong.
By your logic, bin Laden was only "indirectly" responsible for the September 11th attacks, and claiming bin Laden was "directly" responsible "is just wrong".
The Tesla Model S with the big battery pack is EPA rated for a 265 mile range at 55 miles per hour, and 200 miles at 70 miles per hour. I drive more than 150 miles in a single day twice per year: once on the way to our vacation at the beach, and once on the way back. I could easily rent a vehicle or swap vehicles with a friend for that week, and use a Model S all year round as my only vehicle without problems.
In that case, the impractical part is the $80,000 price tag. For $80,000, my car better have a nymphomaniac in the back seat as standard equipment.
This is anecdotal, but it seems that the EPA fuel economy ratings for diesels tend to be pessimistic, while the EPA fuel economy ratings for gasoline engines tend to be optimistic. Plus, the diesel engine doesn't have spark plugs so that makes maintenance a little cheaper.
So you can probably adjust your repayment from "drive it into the ground" to somewhere above 150,000 miles, more or less. That's still not enough to justify the diesel.
Volkswagen Passat TDI in the US is rated 31 miles per gallon city, 43 miles per gallon highway. An American market Honda Accord (which is bigger than the Accord elsewhere, just about the exact same size as the American market Passat) with a 4-cylinder gasoline engine has similar performance and fuel economy 27 city and 36 highway. The Passat is less than 20% better in the city and highway, not your 60-70% figure.
Now I will grant that US fuel economy tests by the EPA tend to give diesel vehicles unrealistically low figures and gasoline vehicles unrealistically high ones. But I would put the error either way on the order of maybe 5-10%, so that still doesn't give the Passat diesel a 60% advantage.
If you compare the smaller US market Volksagen Jetta diesel with a gasoline engine Honda Civic, the fuel economy gap is even smaller. And as has been stated elsewhere, diesel fuel costs more in most of the US.
In many states in the US, diesel fuel costs 20-30% more than gasoline. So even though getting a diesel engine vehicle allows you to stop for fuel less often, and you use a lower volume of fuel on an annual basis, in terms of money the savings isn't that big.
Thanks for explaining that. I often hear people on both sides make incorrect claims, either that automatic transmissions have always been just as efficient as manual transmissions (wrong) or that manual transmissions have always been more efficient than automatic transmissions (also wrong). A good modern automatic does as well as a manual, or relatively close. But in some modern cars and in just about everything put out before the mid 2000s a manual delivered better fuel economy.
If you read the text of the actual Fogbeam blog post, the writer only brings up Microsoft to immediately disqualify them.
I think the historical pattern is pretty clear - companies support openness and interoperability when they have a very small share of the market, because it lets them potentially claim a bigger share. Once they own a big share of the market, it's in their interest to break interoperability and close down options, because it lets them lock competitors out of the market. Google has passed into the second category when it comes to social networking, maps, and RSS.
Google has not reached the point where closed is better than open with Android, and given the open source nature of Android it's possible they can't ever reach it. If Android 6 is proprietary, many companies may decide to fork Android 5 and work from that. That's a good thing, but I'm not sure if any of it came from altruistic planning on Google's behalf, or just the reality in 2006 that if they didn't adopt a very open platform, Android would have never gained marketshare.
Still, I think overall Google's lockdown is beneficial, it wakes up people clinging to the delusion that Google would put "Don't Be Evil" ahead of its business model.
Mobile computing is likely to just keep getting more popular and more prevalent in the future. Microsoft executives and shareholders would have liked if Zune and Kin were profitable, but otherwise it was just a side project. Windows Phone and Windows 8/RT on tablets are important to the future of the company. I bet they dump a lot more than 5 billion dollars into it before they give up.
As someone who believes in privacy, open source software, and freedom I dislike Microsoft. But I don't think that is why they have problems connecting with consumers. I think Microsoft has problems connecting with consumers because they have a pathological inability to make things simple, easy to understand, and easy to use. It's death by a thousand cuts. Mac OS X 10.whatever has one version, and each release of IOS has one version. Windows XP, Vista, and 7 had at least three versions each with different versions and prices. Windows 8 has two versions - oh wait, you have to buy Professional plus an add-on pack to watch DVDs, so that's effectively three versions. But then Windows RT is similar to Windows 8 in interface but doesn't run legacy software. It's all needlessly confusing.
The OEM versions of Windows come loaded with bloatware, and manufacturers routinely sold computers that barely run the version of Windows they had installed, or slow to a crawl once you open a third browser tab, or worked fine until you installed Service Pack 1 and then slowed to a crawl. Microsoft came out with its Signature PC series as a solution, and the result is PCs that operate much better right out of the box - but it's a harm, not a help. "You can buy our software from Dell, HP, Asus, Toshiba, and Lenovo. But if you want it to work, you have to pay extra to buy the exact same product directly from us." I can buy a $900 Windows 7 Home Premium Junk from HP, or a $950 Windows 7 Home Premium Non-Junk HP from Microsoft? Why do they even allow the Premium Junk bundle out into the market?
Too many updates require a reboot. Windows Explorer still hangs sometimes for twenty seconds or longer when you access a directory, even on a local drive. Processes that hang have to hang a while before you can do a force immediate kill, even with task manager. (Command line taskkill does the trick, but the average person doesn't know how to use it.) Windows Update occasionally breaks with bizarre errors, and you have to call tech support or spend hours hunting the web for solutions. For a small business, trying to navigate the restrictions and requirements for server licensing and terminal server licensing and office licensing is like a private tour of your own personal hell.
Even as a developer you're left at their tender mercy. "Hey, remember that Silverlight we sold you on? Our Flash killer? Remember all the time you spent learning how it works and taking classes on it and buying books about it? Well, we're killing it!" "Oh, and you know how C# was the hot new thing? We changed our minds, it's time for a C++ renaissance!" I don't know what the Windows Azure (PaaS and now IaaS ) website looks like right now, but when I first looked at it the jargon and instructions were something that would require a lawyer/developer hybrid to navigate. How about a program you downloaded that ran and automatically checked your system requirements to see if you could run the Azure developer tools, and then automatically downloaded and installed every piece of the Azure developer tools you didn't already have, and then walked you through setting up a test account? But no, the website for Azure made the websites for Amazon EC2 and Google App Engine look like masterworks of elegant simplicity.
Microsoft has all the technological tools it needs to dominate the consumer market as much today as it did in 2001. It's just incapable of using them properly.
If we pay for the service up front, they'll stop showing advertisements. But they'll still track us. It's just less visible tracking.
It's not Big Brother, but when Big Brother arrives he'll have every useful intimate detail about every citizen right at his fingertips. Furthermore, cryptography is not a solution by itself.
I access Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, and my work email through encrypted connections, and most of the transactions between those services is encrypted. So a third party snooper can't read my mail. But a corrupt employee at one of those companies, someone that hacks the web servers at one of those companies, or a corrupt government official with a warrant can get to my mail. For real privacy I need to host my own email on a secure I alone can physically access, and only send email using encrypted messages to other people that do the same. To do that I need to set up my own email server and get everyone I want to communicate with to do the same. The former is merely tedious, the latter is effectively impossible.
By using a cell phone and keeping it on so my family members can contact me in case of an emergency, I give my wireless carrier (and anyone unethical at the wireless carrier, or anyone that hacks into the carrier, or any corrupt government official) a long, detailed history of my travel patterns. I could avoid that by not having a wireless phone or leaving it at home most of the time, but since I have family members with potentially life-threatening medical problems I am unwilling to risk being unreachable during a crisis.
Thanks to tricks like Evercookie ( http://samy.pl/evercookie/ ), which are used by many sites, my web traffic is almost certainly tracked in a very detailed way. I can get around it, but it's a lot of work. And so few people manage it.
The cell phone can't be helped. Otherwise? I'm starting to think the best solution for tech-savvy people is just to unplug as much as possible. Google can't read the mail I send on paper over the postal service, Comcast and Amazon can't track the shopping I do with cash at a flea market.
I was raised Catholic, studied for the Catholic priesthood for a year, and had one of my former mentors imprisoned for pedophilia - though I was not among his victims.
I think that's just grounds for both understanding the Catholic Church, and also for attacking it. This institution claims authority from God, the Creator, the Omnipotent, the Omniscient, and they claim God is more good than we can possibly understand and God created the Catholic Church to be God's specific instrument in the world. For a neutral observer, evil is evil whether it's carried out by an atheist or a religious fanatic. But as someone raised Catholic, to see my institution that I loved and trusted to carry out acts as despicable as any secular institution... God's institution in the world for the spread of forgiveness has done unforgivable things.
Other Christian Churches, not the Catholic Church, give the Bible ultimate authority. The Catholic Church gives the Bible equal weight with Tradition (capital 'T' intentional), and for Tradition you have to trust... Catholic Church teachings.
Besides, the Bible contradicts itself. Two of the Gospels have incompatible genealogies for Jesus. There are two separate creation stories in Genesis. In one Gospel Judas hanged himself, in another he jumped to his death. In one Gospel Mary Magdalene discovered Jesus' was not present in the tomb on her own, in others she had other women with her. And for example, the most commonly cited Bible passage for condemning homosexuality is in Leviticus, right alongside passages discussing the execution of adulterers and disobedient children and the buying and selling of slaves. Paul also condemned homosexuality, but he was specifically condemning homosexual prostitutes in pagan temples - so some scholars have argued he was in fact railing against the pagan religions and religions with prostitution, not homosexuality.
If you just needed the Bible, the Pope would be superfluous. Try telling that to Catholics.
So "if you tell anyone I'm hurting you, I will kill someone in your family" is worse than "God wants me to do this to you, and if you tell anyone you will all go to hell and suffer for all eternity"? Sorry, I disagree. As bad as the first one is, the second is worse.
You are seriously making the claim that someone elected or hired to run a school is claiming more moral authority than someone claiming they are teaching rules handed down directly from God according to the will of God?
If you're a Catholic and you don't agree with Catholic teaching, to whom are you supposed to appeal? You can't pick up a phone or write a letter to an Archangel or one of the saints for guidance if you think the Pope is incorrect. With a school principal or other administrator, you can compare what he or she teaches for ethics to other administrators in other schools, including schools in other countries. You can also find, quite easily, respected secular authorities that disagree with each other. But most don't consider themselves the final authority on the topic of ethics or education and none teach students that failing to follow their direction could lead to eternal damnation.
The Catholic Church has not given up its battle over abortion rights in the US despite the fact that it is lost. I honestly don't believe they've dropped the ball on divorce and fornication because they can't win. I honestly believe they dropped the ball because they consider homosexuality more seriously wrong.
Two infertile people that happen to be of opposite sexes are permitted to enter a legal contract, marriage, in the US and receive certain legal benefits - shared medical coverage from employers, automatic visitation privileges if one is hospitalized, shared Social Security benefits, etc... Those same privileges are not afforded if the two people are of the same sex.
Now if you want to be pedantic, you can say that it's not rights taken away from gays, it's just privileges afforded to heterosexual couples that are not extended to homosexual couples. But whether the unfair treatment is rights taken away or privileges extended, either way it's unfair.
Now, I would be quite satisfied with a level playing field - the legal institution of marriage is abolished, and marriage is strictly a religious ceremony. Or make marriage a civil contract between any two people that want to share tax and insurance benefits, whether they be heterosexual, homosexual, or just two siblings (not in an incestuous relationship) that live together. Or make marriage a civil contract that only extends benefits to two people partnering to raise children under the age of 18, and when the children reach age 18 the benefits end. In any of those cases, it's fair. But right now the law gives heterosexuals advantages over homosexuals that have nothing to do with parenting and everything to do with religious beliefs.
In order to argue against raising children in a homosexual household, you need to provide evidence that children raised that way suffer in some respect compared to children raised in a heterosexual household. No such evidence exists - except in the cases when the children are abused solely because their parents are gay, and then the problem is not the parents but the bigoted community.
Right. And I support freedom of speech and freedom of religion. But I am responding to sycodon's comment "No one is forced to be a Catholic. No one is forced to follow their teachings." People aren't forced to be Catholic, but if Catholics help pass laws that, for example, ban gay marriage, then the general population is forced to follow Catholic teachings.
I disagree with the Catholic Church on those key issues - gay rights, contraception, abortion, sexuality in general - and on a number of theological ones but fortunately my theological disputes have no impact on secular law. I think Catholics, at least in the US, have unfairly singled out gays as a target. The Church forbids divorce (except in rare cases where an anulment applies) and fornication, but Catholics in the US do not try to outlaw either thing - just gay marriage and gay adoption rights. That's unequal application of Catholic teachings regarding sexuality.
But more generally, I'm responding to the people who seem annoyed that non-Catholics have strong opinions on the Catholic Church. We have strong opinions because, as you said, religious beliefs are inherently intermingled with political beliefs, so what the Catholic Church teaches impacts our political landscape very heavily.
Aside from "Higher level Catholics" - I wonder which version of Dungeons and Dragons that's from. ;) a lot of Catholics are Republican because of their pro-life position.
It must vary by region. In my section of Pennsylvania, the predominant political issue for Catholics is abortion, so my colossal Catholic extended family is almost entirely Republican.