Pedagogy research has been done. The results tell how teaching should happen. If you know the research and apply the conclusions, students will succeed.
I'm inclined to believe this is true, that by now the research has been done and it's fairly well understood how to teach.
My question is, if this is the case, why does it seem like there's still such a wide variety of teaching? Why so many charter schools, differing "systems", etc? Shouldn't research-based teaching methods actually just eliminate the so-called achievement gap, with the remaining poor learners actually a product of poor parenting/poverty?
I feel like how to teach ought to be a fairly solved problem, and that the methods best backed by research should be fairly well taught in teacher education programs. But it seems like on the ground, there's constant churn of new trends/methods/philosophies. It's like if research identified how to cure a disease, but instead of standardizing on that therapy, people kept insisting that it didn't work and that some other newfangled method that contradicted existing research was better.
I would be inclined to think there is still continued growth in Visa/MC transactions as people use less and less cash, the growth in smartphone systems like ApplePay, etc.
And their costs probably do continue to increase in terms of fraud mitigation, regulatory compliance, etc.
My guess, though, is that its mostly a way of increasing net income. The real question is what is the tipping point before some other system begins to gain traction with banks and merchants.
You would think that they would have min-maxed the landing slot problem already and keep 2-3 regional jets, maybe even smaller turboprops around for just this purpose. I'm guessing the landing slot doesn't specify equipment, and it sounds a lot cheaper to me to fly a Saab turboprop with just a flight crew than a passenger jet running at marginal profitability load. The "slot only" plane has less fuel, doesn't need a flight attendant crew, and might even be able to get away with a junior pilot instead of a high-wage large jet pilot.
I can't say why, but I definitely get the vibe that Reddit has a lot of low income people among its user base.
My best theory is that it skews very young, and it demonstrates that the dominant age demographic is just showing how bad wages are. I'm not convinced, though, as in my experience the internet has always skewed young but so many postings I see on Reddit kind of scream "poor and more rural".
But it could be some other, weirder dynamic involving Reddit's appeal among less affluent people generally. I kind of wonder if more affluent people are more drawn to Facebook and Instagram because photo sharing is easier and those platforms allow for more wealth flaunting. Reddit is a less convenient platform for that kind of thing.
As far as I can tell, the people with a vested interest in opposing cigarettes are also vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes, despite their much lower risk profile.
Time and again I find myself reading "news" stories where e-cigarettes are lumped with tobacco use, and many anti-tobacco activists swear up and down that if you vape candy-flavored vape juice FOR SURE you will switch to Marlboro Reds at the first opportunity.
I just don't see how this could be the case -- I smoked for a decade and *liked it*. In the years since I quit I have tried a few cigarettes out of nostalgia and been absolutely repulsed by them. When I smoked I rolled my own, and occasionally a "light" cigarette smoker would want to try one out of curiosity or because they were out, and almost universally they hated them. If an actual cigarette smoker is turned off by a slightly harsher actual cigarette, then the idea anyone who has only or mostly vaped switching to tobacco seems absurd.
I think you're mostly right about the ideological/religious/control reasons historically, but I'd also guess it might not have been possible from a science perspective until maybe the last 20 years to make something truly revolutionary.
And by revolutionary, something euphoric along the lines of an opiate but nearly idiot proof for the common man -- something that would "work" but not result in overdoses, addiction and be resistant to chronic over use. I'd wager for a lot of the population who were mindful and informed with cheap and trustworthy sources, many *conventional* drugs aren't that dangerous. Unfortunately, though, you have to design for the 20% of the population for whom excessive consumption is the only consumption they know.
I'm not sure the "psychologically addictive" part can be really solved due to the fuzzy nature of psychological addiction and how even non-drug activities can more or less also be called psychologically addictive. But maybe if one of your successful engineering goals was a drug that wouldn't provide an effect if taken more than, say, 4 times a day, perhaps even psychological habituation wouldn't be that negative since you'd have a hard limit on how much reward could be provided.
I keep thinking there must be a way to engineer a close-to-optimal recreational drug and wonder why it hasn't happened.
As for design criteria:
* Diminishing returns on adding additional doses. Either because the drug itself can't bind to receptors beyond some optimal dose, or because its some kind of binary drug with its own antagonist which isn't potent enough until you take the 3rd or 4th tablet. IIRC, some sublingual buprenorphine formulations include nalaxone, which makes them useless for injection but the nalaxone has weak oral bio-availability, so when taken orally it doesn't take effect.
* Relatively short half-life, losing effectiveness after about 4 hours. This might help with ancillary problems where a user has poor motor reflexes or where long-term side effects contribute to some of the problems of "drug use". If you could get pretty high and then it went away relatively quickly, it'd be better than getting moderately high but having the effect last 8 hours, at least from a behavior/lifestyle/side-effects basis.
* No synergistic effects with common other drugs. Try to avoid the problem of taking $engineered_drug and alcohol or other drugs and making a worse or dangerous effect.
It seems like if we had a *better* drug that was legal we'd solve a lot of problems and perhaps keep a lot of people from bothering with more dangerous, expensive black market drugs.
Cannabis seems to pretty close to this, but not quite perfect.
So if black tar is highly viscous, basically tar-like, how the hell are they adding fentanyl to it? Is it happening at the "source" where they're cooking down opium to morphine base and then converting to heroin? It sounds extremely non-practical to try to add fentanyl to tar just from a materials properties basis.
I've read that a lot of counterfeit pills are out there with fentanyl, and honestly, it's kind of what I would expect would happen with fentanyl. Mostly because it represents what I assume someone more forward thinking in the drug business would do -- come up with a generally reliably non-toxic method of blending fentanyl with a bulking agent to sane doses and then sell pills.
It's kind of crazy, but I would expect whatever cartel/network who could sort out how to make pills at "reasonable" strength (similar to Oxy 30s or 60s) would end up with a decent business. I mean your customers aren't dying immediately and you have a product with broad appeal -- clean, non-scary pills for white collar types, and something with a lot of oomph for those who want to mainline, all in a simple and easy to carry form factor that slips into a bottle of over the counter medicine for no-fuss, no-muss storage and transportation.
A century ago, most of these drugs (i.e. cocaine, opium, etc.) were available to the general populace
Most of the available opiates were a lot weaker and diluted into oral tinctures that cuts their bio-availability. Most users weren't injecting them, and in fact smoking opium was the predominate form of "opiate abuse" into the 1920s.
Succesive bans and increased enforcement pushed illicit varieties into their more concentrated forms to aid in evading enforcement. This is more or less what happened once the DEA cracked down on overprescribing oral narcotics. People switched from pharmaceutical grade and lower dose pills to street heroin, and when supply couldn't match demand, synthetics like fentanyl got into the mix, partially abetted by the ease of obtaining them from corrupt Chinese labs.
I figure eventually a more or less reliable kitchen sink method is going to be developed for cutting and bulking fentanyl, some kind of solvent dilution combined with a binder which can be dried and handled at gram-size masses, capped into pills, etc.
This will create real problems because what has really held heroin back has been its complex supply chain, from poppy field to consumer. If you can cut this supply chain to a single lab that can synthesize fenatnyl it creates a ton of problems for enforcement. One, you can't just trace shit from "farm to table" so easily, and fentanyl is so potent that in its raw form it greatly reduces smuggling risks.
Why bother with blending with heroin at all? Why not just cut fentanyl to super-strength heroin potency and sell it as your super strength heroin?
It makes logical sense -- fucking fentanyl is hard to cut to a dose that won't kill an entire division of infantry at once, I can't imagine getting a partial dose useful for boosting weak heroin is easier.
If the "drug lords" could ever get just enough chemistry to *reliably* cut fentanyl to heroin strength, its going to make the opiate problem that much worse. AFAIK, fentanyl is made via total synthesis, while heroin is still derived from opium, which is somewhat worse from a supply chain perspective. Total synthesis can be done anywhere, and doesn't have tell-tale poppy farms.
It's kind of relevant because it demonstrates that Apple has a long relationship with AT&T, even if they no longer have an iPhone exclusive relationship.
It's also kind of relevant because of Apple's insistence on bring a privacy company and their image as beyond "above" carrier meddling in their platform.
Agreeing to run propaganda in the status field for a carrier suggests that Apple isn't beyond putting carrier interests above consumer interests in things like "what fucking network am I really on?" and things like the truth.
I always wondered if there had been any wifi-equipped devices that also had WPA breaking automation in them to gain access to networks when they otherwise couldn't.
But at this point what you have to stop now are cheap cellular modems.
In addition to the negative additions to the environment you point out (pollution, etc), there's also the increasing scarcity of existing scarce materials, like precious metals, lithium, etc. While I'm sure scarcity makes recycling economics improve, the long term problem is that we can't take 1 kilo of a material, use it in industrial processes, and recycle it to get 1 kilo of the same material. There's losses in the process from a chemistry perspective in addition to basic inefficiencies in collection, contamination, etc.
Besides all of that, I think the political dynamics of population expansion too much beyond where we're at now is a much bigger problem. I think incremental increases in resource scarcity result in exponential growth in resource hoarding, conflict over "unclaimed" resource pools, and general cultural conflict between population centers unwilling to compromise on certain rules of living.
I wonder how many of the anti-vaxxers are "cheaters" in other spheres of their life. I have this idea that anti-vaxxers believe (or know) the actual odds of their kid developing an immunizable illness are very low, but they think it will give them an advantage to not expose them to a vaccine -- it's the best of both words, no autism/vaccine risk and the disease risk is very low.
It's like just another sociopathic behavior trait common among the well-educated/wealthy. They probably cheat on their taxes, maybe on their spouses, and are generally willing to break the rules if they can get away with it and get something out of it.
There may be something to this -- Siri seems like it would be more useful if it could actually do things for me on my phone, which I think often means being able to process the data on my phone. This is probably a hard problem when you're relying on cloud processing but the relevant data is on the phone itself.
Can't you make an argument that by depriving repressive country consumers desirable products because of their governments policies that it will actually motivate their citizens to demand change?
A lot of the policies of both Russia and China seem to be driven around the idea that if the can buy off their citizens with access to high-quality and usually Western consumer goods, they won't complain about political repression.
Obviously this isn't the "job" of Apple or any other specific corporation, but ironically it seems to be the exact strategy used when economic sanctions are applied to a country. The goal with Iran seems to be to make life hard for their consumers who will then demand their government change. I can't say it's been a wholly successful policy, although there are arguments that the nuclear deal wouldn't have happened without it and its leaders are genuinely concerned with a populace increasingly believing that its pursuit of unpopular policies is directly connected to their suffering.
Is Siri's problem that it just doesn't work well -- doesn't understand requests or pulls wrong answers? Is it missing functionality that doesn't seem to require a lot more "AI", like voice-commands for accessing on-phone data?
For me I'd say it's both. I've never found it particularly good at interpreting requests, it doesn't seem able to integrate into my existing smartphone functionality well, and most of the time the answers boil down to returning search engine results.
I feel like this sentiment is most strongly communicated by people who have only slightly better shitty jobs and project hostility towards people who don't see a slightly less shitty job as worth the effort. It's like they don't like their situation very much and are angry or jealous of people who won't accept the same crummy deal they got.
The angry blue collar worker pissed at his lazy kid who won't knuckle under and take the same blue collar job and future he accepted.
Many truly "good" jobs -- high wages, good working conditions, ample future growth opportunity -- either require skills or abilities that aren't universal, or are really the byproduct of a ton of luck, either in being born in the right place or being part of the right circles.
I don't think I could have become a surgeon no matter how hard I worked at it, for example, and I've certainly met IT people that were no smarter and less hard working than I was -- if they were, most of the time they wouldn't be paying me to do their projects.
The thing is, I don't think we have a very good way to describe a company with a product for which there *is* a substitute (ie, you can get an Android if you don't like iPhone) but where at the same time there's a lot of barriers to switching because of the nature of the goods in question -- apps, user interface, and some cases purchased/cloud data that's not usable on the substitute good.
It's not accurate to call iPhones a monopoly, but at the same time an Android is a very imperfect substitute. If I don't like a particular car, I can switch to a similar model that will be nearly identical in most ways.
Sure, some of this is in the heads of the users who could in fact switch and over time might not see it as all that different, but this discounts a lot of very real differences.
Apple clearly are enforcing their rules and I'm sure their legal department said it was within their rights in the contract language.
That being said, this is one of those situations where there's little legal precedence -- who knows what kind of wild-ass challenges might undermine Apple's iron-clad right to do this.
I could see an argument against Apple based on quasi-monopoly power. Apple's products have no identical substitute goods, only similar substitute goods. In a normal market, someone selling tape, or diesel fuel or some other product would be less likely to severely cut off a customer for a contract term violation because they would worry that it would generate ill will and they would lose the customer. Apple can only get away with this behavior because they have a kind of monopoly power, and thus maybe they shouldn't be able to pull the kill switch without negotiating first or some more granular punishment that doesn't affect everything.
I think they definitely figure they are covered by the contract and by their exclusive control of an influential product.
My guess is that Google and Apple will resolve this without the courts. I'd guess neither side wants a legal precedent that says that immediate kill-switching all of a platforms apps and not just an offending one is too extreme. Apple wants control of what happens on their platform and I'm sure Google worries that "winning" a dispute with Apple could affect their ability to control the Android platform in similar ways.
I'd wager there will be some additional contract language between Apple and Google that further defines what "internal use only" actually means, probably tying it to some constructive internal business function, not making use of apps for collection of data/behavior about non-Google apps, data or platforms.
I'd wager that Apple is mostly in the driver seat here due the existing contract, but it's not hard to see a court providing injunctive relief based around the breadth of the certificate revocation's impact and the ambiguous nature of who is an internal employee. But it would have to be litigated and I doubt either party wants a legal precedent.
I don't know who the users of Google's monitoring application were or if they got any compensation, but I was their lawyer my first question would be "what does 'internal use only' mean?"
Does it mean only internal to the Google property? Probably not rational, it's a smartphone and use/testing implies it should be used anywhere the smartphone works.
Does it mean only to internal Google employees? I think this is probably closer to the meaning, but both Apple and Google employ thousands of contractors who are not officially Google employees, but most people would consider a contractor working for Google to be an internal use.
So what's it mean to be a contractor for Google? Do you have to actually work on their property, get a name badge, cubicle, etc? My guess is there are tons of contractors who seldom if ever set foot on Google's property. The most basic definition of a contractor would be someone who does something for Google and gets paid for it.
So if the people running Google's prohibited app somehow got consideration -- pay -- from Google, doesn't that make them contractors and thus their use of the app falls under the approved category of "internal use"?
I don't think it's a bad argument for Google and I think Apple has a tough job to specify what actually counts as "internal" use in the so-called gig economy where "employment" is totally ambiguous.
You'll have to explain this better, because I don't know if you're *backing* Apple's ability to arbitrarily enforce the contract or *critical* of Apple's ability to arbitrarily enforce the contract.
While the scale of Apple's enforcement would seem to make it extreme (ie, all internal apps stop), many contracts revolve around one party supplying a good they control to their contract partner. If you get fuel delivered every week and you stop paying the bill (ie, violate the contract terms) they will stop delivering your fuel.
I was friends with a guy who worked for a banking software vendor back in the early 1990s. He told me their software had a dead man's switch -- the license was only good for 90 days or something and had to be renewed. They would issue a new 90 day license key with every month's payment -- stop paying, and the software stopped without any intervention.
I mean, I'm of two minds about about whether Apple went too far. Did they *ask* Google to revoke the app first, or did they just "find out" and then flip a switch? Was immediate revocation a term in the contract? Does their cancellation appear to be associated with some other business competition or dispute? Some of these things could result in injunctive relief from a court if they could be shown to be true and worth litigating.
But they'd have to be litigated, and with that in mind, I don't know how you get to anarchy. Both sides have access to the civil court system and can file lawsuits around the enforcement of this contract. That's what it's for. But it's most likely not criminal behavior on either side.
There are some breech of contracts that could result in criminal charges (ie, fraud), but most contract disputes are just that -- contract disputes, not criminal activities that can be prosecuted by the state.
I'm sure Google has attorneys who could make a compelling case that using their internal development certs for external users is somehow covered, especially if the users in question get material compensation. Google could say this makes them contractors, and I doubt Apple's intent for enterprise certs is meant to block contractors from using internal enterprise apps.
But this boils down to Apple and Google settling this dispute on their own, not a "criminal" matter. They may decide to go to court over this, but my guess is neither wants to see some kind of precedent set that works against them. Apple doesn't want to find out that yanking a cert exposes them to damages and liability for business disruption, and Google doesn't want the court to affirm Apple's draconian contract enforcement as justifiable and their business losses resulting from it their own "contributory negligence".
Slashdot Mirror
Pedagogy research has been done. The results tell how teaching should happen. If you know the research and apply the conclusions, students will succeed.
I'm inclined to believe this is true, that by now the research has been done and it's fairly well understood how to teach.
My question is, if this is the case, why does it seem like there's still such a wide variety of teaching? Why so many charter schools, differing "systems", etc? Shouldn't research-based teaching methods actually just eliminate the so-called achievement gap, with the remaining poor learners actually a product of poor parenting/poverty?
I feel like how to teach ought to be a fairly solved problem, and that the methods best backed by research should be fairly well taught in teacher education programs. But it seems like on the ground, there's constant churn of new trends/methods/philosophies. It's like if research identified how to cure a disease, but instead of standardizing on that therapy, people kept insisting that it didn't work and that some other newfangled method that contradicted existing research was better.
I would be inclined to think there is still continued growth in Visa/MC transactions as people use less and less cash, the growth in smartphone systems like ApplePay, etc.
And their costs probably do continue to increase in terms of fraud mitigation, regulatory compliance, etc.
My guess, though, is that its mostly a way of increasing net income. The real question is what is the tipping point before some other system begins to gain traction with banks and merchants.
Realistically, isn't the larger problem here that gambling, porn and other fringe businesses are kind of sleazy from an honesty perspective?
You would think that they would have min-maxed the landing slot problem already and keep 2-3 regional jets, maybe even smaller turboprops around for just this purpose. I'm guessing the landing slot doesn't specify equipment, and it sounds a lot cheaper to me to fly a Saab turboprop with just a flight crew than a passenger jet running at marginal profitability load. The "slot only" plane has less fuel, doesn't need a flight attendant crew, and might even be able to get away with a junior pilot instead of a high-wage large jet pilot.
I can't say why, but I definitely get the vibe that Reddit has a lot of low income people among its user base.
My best theory is that it skews very young, and it demonstrates that the dominant age demographic is just showing how bad wages are. I'm not convinced, though, as in my experience the internet has always skewed young but so many postings I see on Reddit kind of scream "poor and more rural".
But it could be some other, weirder dynamic involving Reddit's appeal among less affluent people generally. I kind of wonder if more affluent people are more drawn to Facebook and Instagram because photo sharing is easier and those platforms allow for more wealth flaunting. Reddit is a less convenient platform for that kind of thing.
As far as I can tell, the people with a vested interest in opposing cigarettes are also vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes, despite their much lower risk profile.
Time and again I find myself reading "news" stories where e-cigarettes are lumped with tobacco use, and many anti-tobacco activists swear up and down that if you vape candy-flavored vape juice FOR SURE you will switch to Marlboro Reds at the first opportunity.
I just don't see how this could be the case -- I smoked for a decade and *liked it*. In the years since I quit I have tried a few cigarettes out of nostalgia and been absolutely repulsed by them. When I smoked I rolled my own, and occasionally a "light" cigarette smoker would want to try one out of curiosity or because they were out, and almost universally they hated them. If an actual cigarette smoker is turned off by a slightly harsher actual cigarette, then the idea anyone who has only or mostly vaped switching to tobacco seems absurd.
I think you're mostly right about the ideological/religious/control reasons historically, but I'd also guess it might not have been possible from a science perspective until maybe the last 20 years to make something truly revolutionary.
And by revolutionary, something euphoric along the lines of an opiate but nearly idiot proof for the common man -- something that would "work" but not result in overdoses, addiction and be resistant to chronic over use. I'd wager for a lot of the population who were mindful and informed with cheap and trustworthy sources, many *conventional* drugs aren't that dangerous. Unfortunately, though, you have to design for the 20% of the population for whom excessive consumption is the only consumption they know.
I'm not sure the "psychologically addictive" part can be really solved due to the fuzzy nature of psychological addiction and how even non-drug activities can more or less also be called psychologically addictive. But maybe if one of your successful engineering goals was a drug that wouldn't provide an effect if taken more than, say, 4 times a day, perhaps even psychological habituation wouldn't be that negative since you'd have a hard limit on how much reward could be provided.
I keep thinking there must be a way to engineer a close-to-optimal recreational drug and wonder why it hasn't happened.
As for design criteria:
* Diminishing returns on adding additional doses. Either because the drug itself can't bind to receptors beyond some optimal dose, or because its some kind of binary drug with its own antagonist which isn't potent enough until you take the 3rd or 4th tablet. IIRC, some sublingual buprenorphine formulations include nalaxone, which makes them useless for injection but the nalaxone has weak oral bio-availability, so when taken orally it doesn't take effect.
* Relatively short half-life, losing effectiveness after about 4 hours. This might help with ancillary problems where a user has poor motor reflexes or where long-term side effects contribute to some of the problems of "drug use". If you could get pretty high and then it went away relatively quickly, it'd be better than getting moderately high but having the effect last 8 hours, at least from a behavior/lifestyle/side-effects basis.
* No synergistic effects with common other drugs. Try to avoid the problem of taking $engineered_drug and alcohol or other drugs and making a worse or dangerous effect.
It seems like if we had a *better* drug that was legal we'd solve a lot of problems and perhaps keep a lot of people from bothering with more dangerous, expensive black market drugs.
Cannabis seems to pretty close to this, but not quite perfect.
So if black tar is highly viscous, basically tar-like, how the hell are they adding fentanyl to it? Is it happening at the "source" where they're cooking down opium to morphine base and then converting to heroin? It sounds extremely non-practical to try to add fentanyl to tar just from a materials properties basis.
I've read that a lot of counterfeit pills are out there with fentanyl, and honestly, it's kind of what I would expect would happen with fentanyl. Mostly because it represents what I assume someone more forward thinking in the drug business would do -- come up with a generally reliably non-toxic method of blending fentanyl with a bulking agent to sane doses and then sell pills.
It's kind of crazy, but I would expect whatever cartel/network who could sort out how to make pills at "reasonable" strength (similar to Oxy 30s or 60s) would end up with a decent business. I mean your customers aren't dying immediately and you have a product with broad appeal -- clean, non-scary pills for white collar types, and something with a lot of oomph for those who want to mainline, all in a simple and easy to carry form factor that slips into a bottle of over the counter medicine for no-fuss, no-muss storage and transportation.
A century ago, most of these drugs (i.e. cocaine, opium, etc.) were available to the general populace
Most of the available opiates were a lot weaker and diluted into oral tinctures that cuts their bio-availability. Most users weren't injecting them, and in fact smoking opium was the predominate form of "opiate abuse" into the 1920s.
Succesive bans and increased enforcement pushed illicit varieties into their more concentrated forms to aid in evading enforcement. This is more or less what happened once the DEA cracked down on overprescribing oral narcotics. People switched from pharmaceutical grade and lower dose pills to street heroin, and when supply couldn't match demand, synthetics like fentanyl got into the mix, partially abetted by the ease of obtaining them from corrupt Chinese labs.
I figure eventually a more or less reliable kitchen sink method is going to be developed for cutting and bulking fentanyl, some kind of solvent dilution combined with a binder which can be dried and handled at gram-size masses, capped into pills, etc.
This will create real problems because what has really held heroin back has been its complex supply chain, from poppy field to consumer. If you can cut this supply chain to a single lab that can synthesize fenatnyl it creates a ton of problems for enforcement. One, you can't just trace shit from "farm to table" so easily, and fentanyl is so potent that in its raw form it greatly reduces smuggling risks.
Why bother with blending with heroin at all? Why not just cut fentanyl to super-strength heroin potency and sell it as your super strength heroin?
It makes logical sense -- fucking fentanyl is hard to cut to a dose that won't kill an entire division of infantry at once, I can't imagine getting a partial dose useful for boosting weak heroin is easier.
If the "drug lords" could ever get just enough chemistry to *reliably* cut fentanyl to heroin strength, its going to make the opiate problem that much worse. AFAIK, fentanyl is made via total synthesis, while heroin is still derived from opium, which is somewhat worse from a supply chain perspective. Total synthesis can be done anywhere, and doesn't have tell-tale poppy farms.
It's kind of relevant because it demonstrates that Apple has a long relationship with AT&T, even if they no longer have an iPhone exclusive relationship.
It's also kind of relevant because of Apple's insistence on bring a privacy company and their image as beyond "above" carrier meddling in their platform.
Agreeing to run propaganda in the status field for a carrier suggests that Apple isn't beyond putting carrier interests above consumer interests in things like "what fucking network am I really on?" and things like the truth.
I always wondered if there had been any wifi-equipped devices that also had WPA breaking automation in them to gain access to networks when they otherwise couldn't.
But at this point what you have to stop now are cheap cellular modems.
In addition to the negative additions to the environment you point out (pollution, etc), there's also the increasing scarcity of existing scarce materials, like precious metals, lithium, etc. While I'm sure scarcity makes recycling economics improve, the long term problem is that we can't take 1 kilo of a material, use it in industrial processes, and recycle it to get 1 kilo of the same material. There's losses in the process from a chemistry perspective in addition to basic inefficiencies in collection, contamination, etc.
Besides all of that, I think the political dynamics of population expansion too much beyond where we're at now is a much bigger problem. I think incremental increases in resource scarcity result in exponential growth in resource hoarding, conflict over "unclaimed" resource pools, and general cultural conflict between population centers unwilling to compromise on certain rules of living.
I wonder how many of the anti-vaxxers are "cheaters" in other spheres of their life. I have this idea that anti-vaxxers believe (or know) the actual odds of their kid developing an immunizable illness are very low, but they think it will give them an advantage to not expose them to a vaccine -- it's the best of both words, no autism/vaccine risk and the disease risk is very low.
It's like just another sociopathic behavior trait common among the well-educated/wealthy. They probably cheat on their taxes, maybe on their spouses, and are generally willing to break the rules if they can get away with it and get something out of it.
There may be something to this -- Siri seems like it would be more useful if it could actually do things for me on my phone, which I think often means being able to process the data on my phone. This is probably a hard problem when you're relying on cloud processing but the relevant data is on the phone itself.
Can't you make an argument that by depriving repressive country consumers desirable products because of their governments policies that it will actually motivate their citizens to demand change?
A lot of the policies of both Russia and China seem to be driven around the idea that if the can buy off their citizens with access to high-quality and usually Western consumer goods, they won't complain about political repression.
Obviously this isn't the "job" of Apple or any other specific corporation, but ironically it seems to be the exact strategy used when economic sanctions are applied to a country. The goal with Iran seems to be to make life hard for their consumers who will then demand their government change. I can't say it's been a wholly successful policy, although there are arguments that the nuclear deal wouldn't have happened without it and its leaders are genuinely concerned with a populace increasingly believing that its pursuit of unpopular policies is directly connected to their suffering.
Is Siri's problem that it just doesn't work well -- doesn't understand requests or pulls wrong answers? Is it missing functionality that doesn't seem to require a lot more "AI", like voice-commands for accessing on-phone data?
For me I'd say it's both. I've never found it particularly good at interpreting requests, it doesn't seem able to integrate into my existing smartphone functionality well, and most of the time the answers boil down to returning search engine results.
I feel like this sentiment is most strongly communicated by people who have only slightly better shitty jobs and project hostility towards people who don't see a slightly less shitty job as worth the effort. It's like they don't like their situation very much and are angry or jealous of people who won't accept the same crummy deal they got.
The angry blue collar worker pissed at his lazy kid who won't knuckle under and take the same blue collar job and future he accepted.
Many truly "good" jobs -- high wages, good working conditions, ample future growth opportunity -- either require skills or abilities that aren't universal, or are really the byproduct of a ton of luck, either in being born in the right place or being part of the right circles.
I don't think I could have become a surgeon no matter how hard I worked at it, for example, and I've certainly met IT people that were no smarter and less hard working than I was -- if they were, most of the time they wouldn't be paying me to do their projects.
The thing is, I don't think we have a very good way to describe a company with a product for which there *is* a substitute (ie, you can get an Android if you don't like iPhone) but where at the same time there's a lot of barriers to switching because of the nature of the goods in question -- apps, user interface, and some cases purchased/cloud data that's not usable on the substitute good.
It's not accurate to call iPhones a monopoly, but at the same time an Android is a very imperfect substitute. If I don't like a particular car, I can switch to a similar model that will be nearly identical in most ways.
Sure, some of this is in the heads of the users who could in fact switch and over time might not see it as all that different, but this discounts a lot of very real differences.
Apple clearly are enforcing their rules and I'm sure their legal department said it was within their rights in the contract language.
That being said, this is one of those situations where there's little legal precedence -- who knows what kind of wild-ass challenges might undermine Apple's iron-clad right to do this.
I could see an argument against Apple based on quasi-monopoly power. Apple's products have no identical substitute goods, only similar substitute goods. In a normal market, someone selling tape, or diesel fuel or some other product would be less likely to severely cut off a customer for a contract term violation because they would worry that it would generate ill will and they would lose the customer. Apple can only get away with this behavior because they have a kind of monopoly power, and thus maybe they shouldn't be able to pull the kill switch without negotiating first or some more granular punishment that doesn't affect everything.
I think they definitely figure they are covered by the contract and by their exclusive control of an influential product.
My guess is that Google and Apple will resolve this without the courts. I'd guess neither side wants a legal precedent that says that immediate kill-switching all of a platforms apps and not just an offending one is too extreme. Apple wants control of what happens on their platform and I'm sure Google worries that "winning" a dispute with Apple could affect their ability to control the Android platform in similar ways.
I'd wager there will be some additional contract language between Apple and Google that further defines what "internal use only" actually means, probably tying it to some constructive internal business function, not making use of apps for collection of data/behavior about non-Google apps, data or platforms.
I'd wager that Apple is mostly in the driver seat here due the existing contract, but it's not hard to see a court providing injunctive relief based around the breadth of the certificate revocation's impact and the ambiguous nature of who is an internal employee. But it would have to be litigated and I doubt either party wants a legal precedent.
I don't know who the users of Google's monitoring application were or if they got any compensation, but I was their lawyer my first question would be "what does 'internal use only' mean?"
Does it mean only internal to the Google property? Probably not rational, it's a smartphone and use/testing implies it should be used anywhere the smartphone works.
Does it mean only to internal Google employees? I think this is probably closer to the meaning, but both Apple and Google employ thousands of contractors who are not officially Google employees, but most people would consider a contractor working for Google to be an internal use.
So what's it mean to be a contractor for Google? Do you have to actually work on their property, get a name badge, cubicle, etc? My guess is there are tons of contractors who seldom if ever set foot on Google's property. The most basic definition of a contractor would be someone who does something for Google and gets paid for it.
So if the people running Google's prohibited app somehow got consideration -- pay -- from Google, doesn't that make them contractors and thus their use of the app falls under the approved category of "internal use"?
I don't think it's a bad argument for Google and I think Apple has a tough job to specify what actually counts as "internal" use in the so-called gig economy where "employment" is totally ambiguous.
You'll have to explain this better, because I don't know if you're *backing* Apple's ability to arbitrarily enforce the contract or *critical* of Apple's ability to arbitrarily enforce the contract.
While the scale of Apple's enforcement would seem to make it extreme (ie, all internal apps stop), many contracts revolve around one party supplying a good they control to their contract partner. If you get fuel delivered every week and you stop paying the bill (ie, violate the contract terms) they will stop delivering your fuel.
I was friends with a guy who worked for a banking software vendor back in the early 1990s. He told me their software had a dead man's switch -- the license was only good for 90 days or something and had to be renewed. They would issue a new 90 day license key with every month's payment -- stop paying, and the software stopped without any intervention.
I mean, I'm of two minds about about whether Apple went too far. Did they *ask* Google to revoke the app first, or did they just "find out" and then flip a switch? Was immediate revocation a term in the contract? Does their cancellation appear to be associated with some other business competition or dispute? Some of these things could result in injunctive relief from a court if they could be shown to be true and worth litigating.
But they'd have to be litigated, and with that in mind, I don't know how you get to anarchy. Both sides have access to the civil court system and can file lawsuits around the enforcement of this contract. That's what it's for. But it's most likely not criminal behavior on either side.
There are some breech of contracts that could result in criminal charges (ie, fraud), but most contract disputes are just that -- contract disputes, not criminal activities that can be prosecuted by the state.
I'm sure Google has attorneys who could make a compelling case that using their internal development certs for external users is somehow covered, especially if the users in question get material compensation. Google could say this makes them contractors, and I doubt Apple's intent for enterprise certs is meant to block contractors from using internal enterprise apps.
But this boils down to Apple and Google settling this dispute on their own, not a "criminal" matter. They may decide to go to court over this, but my guess is neither wants to see some kind of precedent set that works against them. Apple doesn't want to find out that yanking a cert exposes them to damages and liability for business disruption, and Google doesn't want the court to affirm Apple's draconian contract enforcement as justifiable and their business losses resulting from it their own "contributory negligence".