It would hurt us worse than it hurts them, at least short-term.
In any event, there's an easier solution. (First a disclaimer: I am not well versed myself and am basing this on--eep!--another Slashdot user's post in a previous article and some reading from this link.) Rare earth elements aren't all that rare, and in fact the US has some pretty sizable deposits. We basically shut down our mines because we couldn't compete with the Chinese prices due in large part to their lack of safety measures.
They won't ship us any more rare earth elements? We start mining them ourselves. The price will jump for a year or two as we get the mines back to operational--hell, we could probably tap into some serious stimulus funds to do it and it would be a use supported strongly by most people--and get the companies re-staffed. They'll backpeddle pretty fast at that point, hoping not only to re-capture its US market but harm the US economy and burn these mining companies again by getting us to re-close the mines, sinking the costs and costing the jobs. We may or may not do it; we certainly shouldn't, but we shouldn't have in the first place so it's hard to predict.
In any event, smart companies who rely on rare earth elements for their products will consider very strongly whether the price break they can get is commensurate with the risk to disruption of their supply by a hostile Chinese government, a factor almost entirely outside of their control.
They are everyone and no one! They were once your fans but now your worst enemies! They are the embodiment of the hearts you're trying to win and the mass disappointed in your reality!
Isn't this trite junk the sort of thing you say in high school English papers when you want to sound deep without actually having anything important to say? I used to always tell people if they wanted high marks on things, all they needed to do was contradict themselves and acknowledge the contradiction. It's cheap points for sounding smart without saying anything.
By and large these people are not going to be KISS fans; they're not old enough. They're a bunch of immature twats with nothing better to do, who haven't quite managed to escape that phase of puberty where you rebel against all forms of authority. They're not deep. They're not principled. They're just asses on a power trip. It's all they have ever been and all they will ever be. They're an Internet-age gang, except without actually having the balls to let their affiliations be known and take the risks that come with it.
You had a "friend," a term I use loosely here. He lost god-knows-how-much-work when his laptop hard drive died and your first reaction is "I told you so?"
And you defend this behavior and claim he deserved your ridicule, yet think it's not unsympathetic.
If I were you, I would investigate the possibility that you may be a psychopath. At the very least you're a horrible ass and a poor excuse for a friend. I would much rather have this "stupid" friend than you in my life.
He is a biased source, yes. He's also the only source capable of 100% knowing the truth of why he decided to do something. It's up to the readers to decide if they prefer first-hand information from a biased source or second-hand information, guesses and suppositions from other, potentially also biased sources, or better yet, a mix of both.
Your simply dismissing somebody because he has a potential bias and, from the sounds of your post, runs a website you don't like isn't exactly the smartest thing in the world. Especially when you bring up things like him being a multi-billion-dollar-worth-guy (that is both debatable and entirely imaginary right now) and how the site is making cash "hand-over-fist" despite only being profitable for about the last year, which is questionable in general and totally unrelated to whether or not he is telling the truth about his original motivations.
I have no trouble believing that Zuckerberg is an ass. I have no trouble believing that his primary motivation now is money. But there is also good evidence that that was not always the case, such as the fact that Facebook used to be a fairly closed community available only to college students with a.edu email address.
My mother worked for a doctor's office for decades. This doctor's office was, on and off, owned by McNeal hospital. Suffice it for this story to say "owned by an added layer of bureaucracy."
The doctor's realized that when somebody works for you for that long, it is nice to give them occasional raises -- not only as a retention policy but a thank-you. In her latter years there, they wanted to give her another raise but couldn't. The corporate structure of McNeal said that for her position, she was at the pay ceiling. Ultimately what happened is they invented a new title for her and gave her the raise that way.
Corporations do not always act in what would seem to be a sensible manner. It's entirely possible that this position was invented to give this man more money or (perhaps more likely in this situation) more authority without completely upsetting some corporate structure or policy. If that's the case, there is no reason to fill it because it does not have a specific role within the company nor a specific place in the reporting chain that means it needs to be filled; it was a title given to a guy because you wanted him to have it. Suggesting it is some sort of power grab by Ballmer is rather silly. He is the CEO. Excepting the actual board of directors who technically have considerable power but seldom actually wield it, there is no more power for him to grab, much less a need to be the "regent" to a position like he couldn't simply re-organize things to report to him directly if he actually needed to.
I know a lot of people in their teens or twenties who are extremely interested in, shall we say, the visual arts. They love making music videos and video editing, logo design, website design, etc. One of them is finishing up a degree in marketing degree, the other is finishing up high school now and is already accepted into a design school, another is younger than them (friends of brothers etc) yet highly interested in web development. Never has the word "GIMP" entered any of their vocabularies. Never.
OpenOffice they are familiar with its existence, which it still didn't stop them from, for example, going out and buying the Mac version of Office when they bought their cool new Macs a year or so ago despite recommendations from me that they could at least wait and get by with OO for a bit while their wallets recovered from the purchase. And I don't mean clicked the "Sure, sell me Office too!" box, I mean literally drove to the store and bought it. (I was visiting one of them at the time.)
Yes, it's anecdotal but it's also real. They don't care about ideologies; they want to use the tools they will use as professionals, and that is determined by business and not their own inclinations. So long as kids (and schools) continue to look to business to see what they should be acquainted with, businesses will have a ready-trained new workforce and little incentive to move away from what they all know.
The problem is that they're all true, but seldom to the degrees that alarmists claim and never on their timelines, since they're notoriously difficult to predict.
Our oil consumption rather inarguably outpaces our planet's production, meaning at some point we will be at the limits of what we can do. But nobody knows when because nobody knows where all the oil is or how much is there. Will it be a global catastrophy? Nah. Supply and demand will drive prices for oil-based products up, dropping demand and making things work out. It may be a radical change to our way of life, however.
Same with overpopulation. There are only so many resources, especially in a given area (as opposed to Earth-wide) and when we reach a certain point, nature tends to correct itself with massive numbers of deaths. It will happen. Nobody knows when. Nobody knows what the "magic number" for a given area, nor can they easily quantify the resources available to the area, and they especially can not account for radical technological changes like the invention of dwarf wheat that would destroy any estimates no matter how accurate they may have been the day before.
What these people want is admirable: They want us to cut down consumption, invest more in things like recycling materials instead of harvesting them. But by putting estimates out that they have no good means of making, by essentially claiming to know the unknowable, it makes them hard to take seriously. As you've said, we've seen these estimates time and time again and they have thus far been wrong. Rather than having the desired effect of people going "shucks, we had better start working on solutions now!" it just makes people ignore the valid points they have. Their crying wolf like that actually hurts their cause.
While I wouldn't put it past them (this whole episode is a pretty good indication of how stupid Fox can be), that's a strategy sure to backfire.
Sure, you might even succeed in killing a particular show--but if you're trying to lock somebody up because you "kn[ow] he was too good to allow the competition to have him," you're going to alienate him and guarantee that as soon as the contract is up that you and not your competitors will be the only ones who does not have a chance to work with him. At least not seriously. (I would personally pretend to negotiate with them and use them to try to get other networks to up their prices. If they treat people like shit, they deserve it in return.)
Anybody on Slashdot knows that the Internet is little more than a bunch of smaller networks connected into an, ahem, world wide web. "The Internet" doesn't know what an individual network much less person is going to do, and yet it is incredibly resilient. Even when worms are criss-crossing the global at light speed, infecting millions and millions of machines, the vast majority of websites are still perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of users. This is, quite obviously, not achieved by pre-screening what people or programs may use the Internet.
The real problem is that, as they did with wired Internet access, the phone companies want to have it both ways. They want to tell you that you can buy an unlimited data plan but start to get uppity if anybody actually uses it. They want you to care about every bit you send if you're an "abusive user" who needs to cut back their usage and yet convince you to up-buy onto an "unlimited" plan if you're one of the people who will never in their damn lives get close to needing it.
If their networks can be brought down so easily by rogue applications, then in addition to the usage problem they're scrambling about they have a major security problem that they need to fix with much greater urgency. iPhones spiked your data usage? Poor things. That's one of the reasons people buy a damn iPhone, because of all the things it can do for that over and above being a phone -- and whether they like it or not, in this day and age that mostly means something on the Internet.
Now, I don't mind overselling in principle and I'm not saying every single thing has to be allowed.
while(1) { something_obnoxious(); }
has no place on any platform. I simply do not trust the phone companies to be in charge of determining it. Apple's running of the App Store should be enough to strike fear into anybody who believes a company should be allowed to decide everything for itself. Like child predators or terrorism in politics, "protecting the network" will be their rallying cry as they throw anything that hurts their bottom line off. I'm not willing to go there.
hey held back 15 thousand pages to protect people's names while they tried to sort through them. Google it.
I believe it. But "trying not to leak names" and "not leaking names" are not the same, and there is a real risk of death to the people trying to help save the lives not only of US troops but their own countrymen. For what? Daily incident reports that largely tell us nothing we don't know? That drone attacks are less successful than the spokesman says? That an Afghan policeman was shot by the Afghan army when he was smoking hash in the shower, got spooked and started firing at them? Does anybody in the world not know that the government of Afghanistan is weak yet? Is this "insight" really worth even the potential of getting people killed?
They asked the pentagon to tell them which name to remove, the pentagon told them to go to hell.
You make this sound like a bad thing. The Pentagon was supposed to help Assange with his goal of disseminating classified information to unauthorized sources? You think anybody involved wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole, which would be illegal for them to do in the first place? Especially anybody with the clearance to actually read the damn things without committing another crime? It was a false request, designed to paint them as uncaring when he did what he was going to do all along.
They did remove names, and they got no one killed.
You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.
As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php
The people who said they were gonna get people killed are the people who actively do indeed actually kill real people, have been for years, plan on doing it for years still
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
War sucks. Maybe this war should never have been started; maybe it should end tomorrow. But these are not, not nearly, the same thing.
In one of your approximately eight billion posts in this thread saying basically the exact same things over and over again you asked for reasons that Assange is an egotistical, self-centered prick. How about from human rights groups?
Mr. Assange asked what the groups were doing to analyze the documents already published, and asked whether Amnesty in particular would provide staff to help redact the names of Afghan civilians, according to people familiar with the letter.
An Amnesty official replied to say that while the group has limited resources, it wouldn't rule out the idea of helping, according to people familiar with the reply. The official suggested that Mr. Assange and the human-rights groups hold a conference call to discuss the matter.
Mr. Assange then replied: "I'm very busy and have no time to deal with people who prefer to do nothing but cover their asses. If Amnesty does nothing I shall issue a press release highlighting its refusal," according to people familiar with the exchange.
Later, WikiLeaks posted on its Twitter account: "Pentagon wants to bankrupt us by refusing to assist review. Media won't take responsibility. Amnesty won't. What to do?"
if people and government has to take the pick between funding science or covering things like civil protection(police), medical/fire services(hospitals, doctors, ems response). It's pretty easy to tell where the cuts are going to happen first.
That's true, but it's a bullshit argument.
For starters, science cuts are going to be an extremely small impact on the defecit, akin to claiming that if you can't afford your mortgage then it's time to not buy that cup of Starbucks coffee on Friday. It helps in the sense that every dollar helps, but it is so small an impact that it's almost not worth doing.
If those are peoples' choices, then of course science is going to be cut first -- as it should be. But they're not. How much are the various wars costing you? How much are your politicians and government employees being paid? How much waste is there in your healthcare system? How much are you spending on your defense budget, security theater at the airports, CCTV installations, foreign aide, bank bailouts, commissioning reports nobody is ever going to ready or any other number of things that you can cut to more success and less detriment than science and education?
If you're being presented with a choice between cutting science spending or emergency services to solve the budget problems, it's because people simply aren't looking hard enough.
A person who doesn't want a family is immature or irresponsible? I mean really? You know what I find to be irresponsible? Some notion that a person needs to get married and have children because some lunatic on the Internet says there is a societal benefit to it. I'm sure those kids will grow up in a fantastic loving home what with their parents wishing they were in any situation other than that one. It seems like a fantastic environment to raise kids.
Not owning a home is a result of lacking willpower against compulsion? How about the possibility that they find owning some big house on some big lot to be a wasteful use of resources (and I'm not talking about their money). How about them feeling that they don't need 3000 square feet of space to knock around in on their own, since they have yet to get married and have children to please you?
Maybe they mooch off of people with cars; unlike you, I'm not stupid enough to pant entire categories of people with the same brush. But there's also the possibility that they simply take public transportation or walk places. Tasks which benefit them monetarily and in terms of their own health, benefit society by not contributing unnecessary pollution to the air or crowding to the streets and even benefit businesses by not making parking some huge requirement and by freeing up more money for them to spend on loft apartments and $300 shirts. But I'm sure to you they're just being unfair to all the used car salesman and mechanics and gas station owners out there by not paying their fair share into those peoples' wallets. Those irresponsible kids.
In short? I can tell you're not young by your user ID, but I see you still haven't managed to grow up either. Your idea of a perfect way to live your life is not everybody's idea, nor does it mean it is the right idea just because you happen to be the one who possesses it. So do us all a favor and shut the fuck up. Go about your business your way and everybody else will go about their business their way. Nobody needs your smug sense of superiority, least of all you.
Did you actually look at this map? Most of them are retarded, and not for the reasons the creators think.
One of their entries is the Bell, California crew who gave themselves $800,000 salaries. Is that bad? Absolutely -- they're facing criminal charges. Does it help the economy? Of course not. It also has nothing to do with the stimulus; they simply voted themselves huge salaries and nobody paid attention enough to call them on it.
Then there's stuff like a highway beautification project in Oregon or a grant to Northwestern Illinois University to develop machine-generated humor. Silly? Yeah. But these are actually stimulus expenditures. People will be hired or retained to perform tasks like these, and that's ignoring the possibilities with some of the projects that actual technical advances might be made. Personally I'd prefer it be spent elsewhere, but it's not exactly failing to do the job it was assigned for. Other ones are complaining about it being "wasteful spending" to give overtime pay to government employees or how lots of money only created a few jobs, or complaining that building a truck driver training school is bad because big trucking companies make lots of money. It's still going to create the fucking jobs to build, maintain and staff the facility is it not? And then those big truck companies will use the facility to, you know, train new employees it's hiring right? What is the problem?
There's one about studying the effects of video games on the mental health of seniors. Apparently attempting to improve the mental health of seniors is a bad idea, or perhaps they're just trying to drum up indignation from ignorant people because the medium happens to be video games. I thought video games were destroying our children and needed to be banned? Surely if they have such a ridiculous effect on our minds it's worth studying if they can have a positive effect as well? Or is logical consistency not overly important to people on the right and we should just get out of their way when they're ranting?
There's even one that says Arkansas is not overspending (whatever that means) this year, has lost jobs and its unemployment rate has gone up. I have no idea how this is "bankrupting America" or bad stimulus spending. Isn't this the exact opposite? Isn't this NOT "wasteful stimulus spending" and showing that you're losing jobs with that approach? Maybe that "lots of money for a few jobs" thing in New York was actually an improvement in a bad economy? Are they simultaneously complaining about stimulus spending and the fact that Arkansas isn't getting much?
Nobody has ever accused the government of frugality or efficiency, nor would anybody claim that they always do the best possible things -- but most of these complaints are about actual, successful stimulus spending. If these mostly inane complaints is the best you can come up with, I'd call it a success. And if you're bitching about foreign aid like you appear to be, well, fine, but that is an entirely separate issue from the stimulus. This site doesn't even attempt to support your argument. Surely you can do better.
I just fail to understand the contempt so many of the comments here show.
Is it easy? Should they be able to do it themselves? Yeah, probably. I don't personally see anything about it that would even make me wonder if I could take it somewhere for the service, but then again that's why I don't use it. These people obviously do, and they're willing to pay for it.
On HGTV I saw a little mini-commercial about a job you could do yourself: A tubular skylight. In their opinion, it's a weekend homeowner task. They went through the steps, and nothing in itself sounded all that tricky. I'm not a super handy fellow, but I wasn't terribly intimidated by their descriptions. The problem is one of the steps is cutting a hole in your roof and removing the shingles around it, dropping in the device and putting the shingles back. Now, the hole isn't that intimidating because it's something you're either going to do right or mess up and you ought to know either way. The shingles scare the hell out of me. It's a job I could do and fuck up in some subtle way and never know it until all the sudden I have a huge discolored patch in my ceiling and mold growing all over the place and I've caused thousands of dollars of damage. I'd never attempt this task, because I'm afraid of how badly I could be wrong and how bad it could be if I was. I'd be willing to pay somebody to do it just for the peace of mind. (There's risks with contractors too, of course, but that's a different issue.)
These people are obviously intimidated by technology. They're afraid they're going to mess something up, and to them that peace of mind that it's going to be done right and any potential issue will be handled is worth $30. It's somewhat frustrating for me; it's the reason my parents call me to hook up a computer even though the damn cords are color-coded. But it's not worthy of derision or contempt. Take their money, giggle to yourself about how little work you had to do to earn it and be happy that everybody is happy.
I think it's the number of people on Slashdot who are programmers, system administrators and engineers that makes us so desire to bake perfection into everything or reject it as valueless.
First, understand this: Neither the legislatures nor the courts of any country are going to pseudo-legalize any crime that can be done with a computer and where the evidence is primarily on that computer so long as the person is smart enough to use encryption. It's not going to happen, and most people outside of sites like this are okay with that concept. If they can't wiggle around any particular law that may be stopping them, they will simply change it -- and it will happen with overwhelming support. The court system is about justice, and they're simply not going to let a loophole that big go.
Second, this case and similar ones is no more the person incriminating himself than it is self-incrimination to open the door when the police come knocking with a search warrant. You're not telling them anything about the (alleged) crime; you're complying with a court order that allows them access to private property to search for what they expect is there. The difference, of course, is that if you don't open the door they can simply and easily kick it in. If you don't open the safe they can easily cut it open or crack it. If you do not give them the encryption password, well, assuming there are no backdoors and no major security flaws they have no recourse. If you think the police and the court system will--or even should--just throw up their hands and go "shucks, guess we lose" then you're living in some reality that can probably only be accessed by the ingestion of certain mushrooms. Computers aren't going anywhere and neither is encryption, neither of which changes the fact that these are real crimes with real victims that deserve real punishment. If this is the case of some 19 year old with a picture of his sixteen year old girlfriend's boobs, that is the problem to be solved -- not self-incrimination. It's not about evidence, it is about access.
So long as these things are controlled by a judge and required by search warrant and demonstration of probable cause I have no problem with it, nor is it somehow a shift of the burden of proof from prosecution to accused. It is not a setup; you're not being asked to turn over the body and caught in some catch-22 that you either do it and incriminate yourself or can't because you're innocent but can't prove you're not actually guilty and pretending to be innocent. You're being ordered by a judge to let them look at your computer because cause exists to believe there is evidence there, and if such evidence is not found the case will probably be dropped. If you DID commit the crime, am I supposed to feel some sort of sympathy for you because you used technology to try to cover it up?
Of course the system isn't perfect. No system is. There are probably legitimate times at which an accused person might not remember the password in question, especially if the alleged crime took place relatively long ago. Once in a great while somebody really might end up in jail for being forgetful -- though I suspect it would still be far less than the amount of time an innocent person is convicted on average. It's a sad reality of an imperfect world, one that can be mitigated by a maximum incarceration term (even if that maximum is the maximum potential penalty you could receive if you were found guilty of the crime you're accused of) and allowing judges to exercise proper discretion given the facts of the case. Yes, if you just so happened to write a journal article about how much you want to shoot your neighbor and then he turns up dead by that exact same means you're probably going to have problems -- but what is your point? Innocent men have gone to prison before. It's sad, but like the legal system itself, scrapping it because of its imperfections would do far more harm than good. (As an aside that is a fairly bad example since we're talking about
Nobody said otherwise, including the court. He's (presumed) innocent of whatever child sex offenses he's charged with. That said he's also guilty of breaking the law compelling people to give up their passwords. A stupid law, to be sure, and possibly unconstitutional if it were a US court -- but a law just the same in the UK.
The point stands: Sixteen weeks is a long time to go to jail if you're just trying to make a point about a stupid law, but it's a cake-walk sentence if you're actually did the crime compared to what you'd almost assuredly get if you turned over the evidence. It's certainly possible he's still innocent and the courts should definitely treat him as such, but nobody outside the legal system has any such obligations.
Look, I loooove CLIs. It's why I love Linux so much and it's why I prefer Mac to Windows, even when I don't spend as much time in a shell there as I do on Linux.
But this is not a GUI problem. There's nothing that says that a GUI can't update multiple machines identically and from one location. In fact we know they can, with Active Directory on Windows servers being probably the best example. They simply need to be written to do so. There are certainly valid discussions to be had as to whether or not a good GUI with people intimately familiar with it could ever be as fast to perform tasks as a good CLI with people intimately familiar with it, how much time each solution takes to develop and even the possibility that a CLI doesn't need to pre-plan such support when a GUI probably does, but most are not inherent limitations -- they are design choices.
Of course, being a CLI lover I prefer the CLI. I love the idea of scripting something up, or how you can chain tools designed to do exactly one thing and do it well together to have a ridiculous amount of power at your fingertips. At the same time, if I were asked which to do for a product that was being released (sold or otherwise) I would choose a GUI. Or better yet, have the best of both worlds: A CLI that the GUI sits on top of, Windows 3.1 style. You can even have a little "Import configuration file" button that would make this guy's example sync perfectly, which it sounds like he suggests at the end. His other complaints seem to be about how the GUI is actually designed, which is once again not a GUI problem but rather a problem with a particular GUI.
Beyond that, if you really have to pick one or the other it's little more than a "know your audience" and solve for success, whether you define that as profit or adoption or otherwise.
Until you can somehow show that piracy results in lost sales, which has never successfully been done, perhaps you should shut your cakehole
It has been done: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar%25/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf. The jist of it: The top artists actually gain sales from piracy, the bottom artists lose sales (~5000 downloads:1 lost sale), the net effect is essentially zero. Still, to the artists losing money I don't think they care much about the net effect.
I agree with your premise, and calling it theft is still wrong and probably an attempt to hijack the debate--but hyperbole on either side is not appropriate. It does result in lost sales. Some. Sometimes.
Look, I don't support actions such as the US Copyright Group takes and I snicker a little inside at what Anonymous is doing to them (sans the bomb threat anyway) and I think our politicians are corporate sponsored enough that they should just go NASCAR style and wear a jacket with patches from all their contributors, but a corporation still can't vote in any elections.
I've said this before (and got modded Troll amusingly): Most people hate Congress. The approval level is what, low 20% now? And yet even in the Democrats' "sweeping victory" in 2008, about 90% of the seats that were up for election were retained by incumbents. Why? Because everybody hates Congress, but most people think their particular congressman is doing a pretty good job. It's a similar force at work here.
Do I think copyright law is out of hand? Absolutely. Do I think the actions of groups like the US Copyright Group are nothing but an extortion racket, filing lawsuits they have no intention of pursuing in hopes of getting some quick monetary settlements from people who can't afford to fight? Yes. Should courts begin bitchslapping lawyers who use tactics like this? Yes. Is this issue important enough to change whoever I plan on voting for for any given office? No. And the vast majority of people feel the same way. If they care at all, it's seldom enough to vote somebody out of office. Especially when 25% of people are polarized as Democrats and 32% of people are polarized as Republicans (if I recall the numbers from a recent CNN article correctly) and won't likely vote "against their guy" even if they did feel that strongly about it because it would mean letting the evil opposition win--a problem in its own right, but I digress.
Corporations may own our politicians, but it's because we let them. It's because we as a nation are so disinterested in politics that the guy who spends the most money on lawn signs and radio advertisements usually wins, and cashing those corporate checks and pursuing those corporate interests gets you most of the way to where you need to be. The reason corporations pour money into elections is because it works, and it works because we don't care enough to stop politicians from taking it. I can't get worked up about it anymore. Our silence is our approval, and we deserve what comes of it.
(As an aside, I highly doubt one would have trouble finding 5% of people who think 150 year copyright terms are unreasonable. I suspect most would take the approach: "They invented it, it's theirs" and not even care if a limit was imposed at all. From the people I've talked to, copyright is essentially a non-issue outside of geek circles.)
Jailbreakers are just as bad. They assume free is better in all cases, no matter if that means completely obliterating the actual intended purpose of the item in question or making the continued use of it such a tiresome exercise in maintenance that it might as well be a brick.
Perhaps, but here's the difference. Jailbreakers don't assume anything for anybody but themselves. They jailbreak their devices and offer that ability to everybody else, but they don't force them to do it. If jailbreaking isn't worth it or makes it too tiresome an exercise in maintenance that it might as well be a brick, then people who believe that will simply not jailbreak their device.
Steve Jobs' assumptions affect every customer. His definition of better had better fit your definition of better or you either don't get his product or live with what you feel is sub-par. That's cool, but then he gets on TV and in front of audiences talking about how awesome his way is and how everybody who has been doing it differently is dumb. When people start having problems with his phones, he tells them they're holding it wrong, because obviously what he's doing is better and that means it can never be worse. The reason jailbreaking turns into a maintenance nightmare is because he will permit no manner of doing anything of which he does not approve, and spins it as being for your benefit. Is there truly some reason he can't allow installation of third-party codecs for AppleTV? It wouldn't change his design. It wouldn't change his interface. It wouldn't make his device poof into smoke. It wouldn't impose liability on him, since he's not the one installing them. But Steve says no, so you live without or you try to hack it and live with whatever nightmare that causes.
Now, I'm not saying Apple's approach is completely wrong. Practically speaking, you can't please everybody and at some point you have to lock down a list and say "THIS is our feature set." But the two egos are not the same. "Like what I say to like or go away" is not the same as "This is better, here it is if you want to have better too."
The OP has a point; the sample is not random and thus the survey not scientific, so it is prudent to wonder to what extent that influences the data. However, you're taking it too far.
The fact that somebody uses a cross-platform toolkit does not mean they are "undecided." If I can write my code once and sell it for two devices, that's a strong benefit. It doesn't matter whether I think Device A or Device B is the better choice if I were required to choose. The entire point of the library is that I do not have to. Unless there is some particular reason that increasing the reach of my program with almost no new effort is a bad thing (bad toolkit, etc) then it tells little about their intent or their decisiveness, only that they realize more potential customers is a better thing than less.
Second, it does not "conform to their worldview" nor does the survey say "folks are undecided." In fact the results are pretty strong. Three to one say iOS is better right now; almost twice as many say Android is the way to go moving forward than says iOS. In what world is a two-to-one margin not considered strong? Give a politician a two-to-one advantage in the polls and he giggles his way to election.
It's not a scientific poll so take the results as you choose. But do not sit around putting words in peoples mouths or claiming their intentions, especially when you're wrong.
Perhaps a lot of people are merely working off pre-programmed social norms, like saying "how are you doing?"
I've heard this one a few times before. Am I the only one who actually wants to know how somebody is doing when I ask that? Maybe it's just part of my greater realization that words have meanings ("I could care less" really grates on my nerves for that reason!) and I only say it when I actually want to know the answer. I want to know how my friends are doing because I care and because if anything is not well, I want to at least offer to help them in whatever way I can. For social greetings, "hi," "hey," "good morning," etc do the trick.
As far as your actual point goes: I have empathy for these people; I certainly wouldn't wish death on this man or that kind of pain on his family. I wouldn't say I feel empathy in this case though. I don't know the man who died or his family and once I close this browser window I will probably never think of them or what happened again. That's not worthy of saying anything in my mind. It's just lip-service.
For what it's worth, I also almost never say "I'm sorry" unless I actually, literally feel bad about something. Otherwise it's just "I apologize." Weird or consistent, I don't know. That's just me.
When you have a talent that is in demand, that alone takes care of compensation. People have to pay to keep you.
That's true. People at the top of our social structures don't need protections like unions. Once you get to the top, you're in rare enough company that you're good to go. Kind of like how CEOs can run companies into the ground, be given a golden parachute and then put on the board of some other company for six figures. CEO of a major company is a rare job title. If you have it, you're in demand for the next opening.
The problem is, the vast majority of workers are not in that rarified air -- nor can they be. Even if every single person went out and got equivalent educations and skill sets (in different areas of course) as a CCIE has, they're just going to flatten the worker base and make EVERYBODY replaceable instead of just most everybody. In fact we have already begun to see something like that happen. A bachelor's degree is all but required for a decent job in the US, so while NOT having one is a bad thing, having one means essentially nothing -- you're simply now at par with everybody else. Now it's the people who possess a Masters that set themselves above, until that too becomes so common as to be meaningless.
I think there are a LOT of good reasons to think that a union is not the answer, but "I'm already rich enough that I don't need one" is hardly logically compelling. People who don't need unions don't think much of unions? Color me shocked!
This is the case with actors. They are in demand. [. ..] We are talking about rich people working in the environment they choose.
I get the impression that you have no idea how many actors there are in the word. Tom Cruise is in demand (well, maybe a bad example). Brad Pitt is in demand. Orc #3 is not in demand, and there are a hundred people who would kill to be cast as it. It requires no particular skill set; fashions no particular lasting memories in the eyes of the viewers. They're never going to remember that Orc #3 was played by Random Jobber #1 instead of Random Jobber #2.
The VAST majority of actors are not even close to rich. In fact the vast majority of all actors can't even make a living acting; they have to hold down jobs as a waitress or a substitute teacher or something else just to survive between--and often during--acting gigs. Again, maybe a union is not the answer but claiming they're in such demand that they don't need to worry about it is naive at best.
I agree with your point in #3, but I see it more as a failing of our specific examples of unions rather than the concept of unions. Is there something about a union that says it necessarily must become protective of worthless members, or is that simply the history we have with them? The idea of a union has a lot of benefits for its members, but only so far as its members understand that the integrity of the union membership means something. I don't think that's an impossibility.
And then the technie can walk over to his boss and tell him about it. What's the problem? Why all the defensiveness in the replies to this article? The military wants military people in charge of military posts? Whodda thunk it?
That doesn't mean there aren't hardcore geeks (soldiers or otherwise) doing the day to day work. They just report to a military officer, in touch with and accountable to the military chain of command and thus the civilian command of the military, rather than some guy with an MBA or even a CS degree.
For that matter, it doesn't mean mean the military commander isn't a hardcore geek himself or that he isn't brilliant. Almost all* officers have Bachelors degrees at the least and very often higher, especially at the general officer level where these commanders are likely to be. In the democratic primary in the 2004 election I supported (retired) General Wesley Clark -- valedictorian at West Point, Rhodes Scholar with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, master's degree in military science (and at one time perhaps the greatest title in the entire world: SACEUR--Supreme Allied Commander Europe). The guy currently atop the US Cyber Command (and the Director of the National Security Agency) has a BS degree from the US Military Academy, an MSBA from Boston University, dual Masters of Science degrees in systems technology and physics from the Naval Postgraduate School and a MS in National Security from the National Defense University.
The reality is that the top guys are typically ridiculously smart and highly qualified, and assumptions to the contrary are little more than geek bravado that, at the risk of the inevitable Flamebait mods, I suspect comes because these types of people were the popular jocks and bullies of our childhood and we feel the need to cling to the notion that at least we're smarter than them. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren't, but the guys at the top of these chains of command can give anybody a run for their money, make no mistake.
Also:
A techie would also more likely understand what anomalies could be a sign of a breach and what was more likely a software error.
I don't want the techies making this distinction. If they see an anomaly, bring it to the commander who may have more information at his disposal to make the decision. It's his ass (and possibly countless lives) if you're wrong; offer your evaluation like any good commander will ask for, but let him make the decision.
* If you join the military as an officer, you have a college degree either from an ROTC program or directly from one of the military academies. There are also other paths to a commission, but I believe they all either start or end with a college degree. I water down my statement just based on that uncertainty.
Slashdot Mirror
It would hurt us worse than it hurts them, at least short-term.
In any event, there's an easier solution. (First a disclaimer: I am not well versed myself and am basing this on--eep!--another Slashdot user's post in a previous article and some reading from this link.) Rare earth elements aren't all that rare, and in fact the US has some pretty sizable deposits. We basically shut down our mines because we couldn't compete with the Chinese prices due in large part to their lack of safety measures.
They won't ship us any more rare earth elements? We start mining them ourselves. The price will jump for a year or two as we get the mines back to operational--hell, we could probably tap into some serious stimulus funds to do it and it would be a use supported strongly by most people--and get the companies re-staffed. They'll backpeddle pretty fast at that point, hoping not only to re-capture its US market but harm the US economy and burn these mining companies again by getting us to re-close the mines, sinking the costs and costing the jobs. We may or may not do it; we certainly shouldn't, but we shouldn't have in the first place so it's hard to predict.
In any event, smart companies who rely on rare earth elements for their products will consider very strongly whether the price break they can get is commensurate with the risk to disruption of their supply by a hostile Chinese government, a factor almost entirely outside of their control.
They are everyone and no one! They were once your fans but now your worst enemies! They are the embodiment of the hearts you're trying to win and the mass disappointed in your reality!
Isn't this trite junk the sort of thing you say in high school English papers when you want to sound deep without actually having anything important to say? I used to always tell people if they wanted high marks on things, all they needed to do was contradict themselves and acknowledge the contradiction. It's cheap points for sounding smart without saying anything.
By and large these people are not going to be KISS fans; they're not old enough. They're a bunch of immature twats with nothing better to do, who haven't quite managed to escape that phase of puberty where you rebel against all forms of authority. They're not deep. They're not principled. They're just asses on a power trip. It's all they have ever been and all they will ever be. They're an Internet-age gang, except without actually having the balls to let their affiliations be known and take the risks that come with it.
So let me get this straight.
You had a "friend," a term I use loosely here. He lost god-knows-how-much-work when his laptop hard drive died and your first reaction is "I told you so?"
And you defend this behavior and claim he deserved your ridicule, yet think it's not unsympathetic.
If I were you, I would investigate the possibility that you may be a psychopath. At the very least you're a horrible ass and a poor excuse for a friend. I would much rather have this "stupid" friend than you in my life.
He is a biased source, yes. He's also the only source capable of 100% knowing the truth of why he decided to do something. It's up to the readers to decide if they prefer first-hand information from a biased source or second-hand information, guesses and suppositions from other, potentially also biased sources, or better yet, a mix of both.
Your simply dismissing somebody because he has a potential bias and, from the sounds of your post, runs a website you don't like isn't exactly the smartest thing in the world. Especially when you bring up things like him being a multi-billion-dollar-worth-guy (that is both debatable and entirely imaginary right now) and how the site is making cash "hand-over-fist" despite only being profitable for about the last year, which is questionable in general and totally unrelated to whether or not he is telling the truth about his original motivations.
I have no trouble believing that Zuckerberg is an ass. I have no trouble believing that his primary motivation now is money. But there is also good evidence that that was not always the case, such as the fact that Facebook used to be a fairly closed community available only to college students with a .edu email address.
My mother worked for a doctor's office for decades. This doctor's office was, on and off, owned by McNeal hospital. Suffice it for this story to say "owned by an added layer of bureaucracy."
The doctor's realized that when somebody works for you for that long, it is nice to give them occasional raises -- not only as a retention policy but a thank-you. In her latter years there, they wanted to give her another raise but couldn't. The corporate structure of McNeal said that for her position, she was at the pay ceiling. Ultimately what happened is they invented a new title for her and gave her the raise that way.
Corporations do not always act in what would seem to be a sensible manner. It's entirely possible that this position was invented to give this man more money or (perhaps more likely in this situation) more authority without completely upsetting some corporate structure or policy. If that's the case, there is no reason to fill it because it does not have a specific role within the company nor a specific place in the reporting chain that means it needs to be filled; it was a title given to a guy because you wanted him to have it. Suggesting it is some sort of power grab by Ballmer is rather silly. He is the CEO. Excepting the actual board of directors who technically have considerable power but seldom actually wield it, there is no more power for him to grab, much less a need to be the "regent" to a position like he couldn't simply re-organize things to report to him directly if he actually needed to.
And you would still be in the minority.
I know a lot of people in their teens or twenties who are extremely interested in, shall we say, the visual arts. They love making music videos and video editing, logo design, website design, etc. One of them is finishing up a degree in marketing degree, the other is finishing up high school now and is already accepted into a design school, another is younger than them (friends of brothers etc) yet highly interested in web development. Never has the word "GIMP" entered any of their vocabularies. Never.
OpenOffice they are familiar with its existence, which it still didn't stop them from, for example, going out and buying the Mac version of Office when they bought their cool new Macs a year or so ago despite recommendations from me that they could at least wait and get by with OO for a bit while their wallets recovered from the purchase. And I don't mean clicked the "Sure, sell me Office too!" box, I mean literally drove to the store and bought it. (I was visiting one of them at the time.)
Yes, it's anecdotal but it's also real. They don't care about ideologies; they want to use the tools they will use as professionals, and that is determined by business and not their own inclinations. So long as kids (and schools) continue to look to business to see what they should be acquainted with, businesses will have a ready-trained new workforce and little incentive to move away from what they all know.
The problem is that they're all true, but seldom to the degrees that alarmists claim and never on their timelines, since they're notoriously difficult to predict.
Our oil consumption rather inarguably outpaces our planet's production, meaning at some point we will be at the limits of what we can do. But nobody knows when because nobody knows where all the oil is or how much is there. Will it be a global catastrophy? Nah. Supply and demand will drive prices for oil-based products up, dropping demand and making things work out. It may be a radical change to our way of life, however.
Same with overpopulation. There are only so many resources, especially in a given area (as opposed to Earth-wide) and when we reach a certain point, nature tends to correct itself with massive numbers of deaths. It will happen. Nobody knows when. Nobody knows what the "magic number" for a given area, nor can they easily quantify the resources available to the area, and they especially can not account for radical technological changes like the invention of dwarf wheat that would destroy any estimates no matter how accurate they may have been the day before.
What these people want is admirable: They want us to cut down consumption, invest more in things like recycling materials instead of harvesting them. But by putting estimates out that they have no good means of making, by essentially claiming to know the unknowable, it makes them hard to take seriously. As you've said, we've seen these estimates time and time again and they have thus far been wrong. Rather than having the desired effect of people going "shucks, we had better start working on solutions now!" it just makes people ignore the valid points they have. Their crying wolf like that actually hurts their cause.
While I wouldn't put it past them (this whole episode is a pretty good indication of how stupid Fox can be), that's a strategy sure to backfire.
Sure, you might even succeed in killing a particular show--but if you're trying to lock somebody up because you "kn[ow] he was too good to allow the competition to have him," you're going to alienate him and guarantee that as soon as the contract is up that you and not your competitors will be the only ones who does not have a chance to work with him. At least not seriously. (I would personally pretend to negotiate with them and use them to try to get other networks to up their prices. If they treat people like shit, they deserve it in return.)
No, they do not have a point.
Anybody on Slashdot knows that the Internet is little more than a bunch of smaller networks connected into an, ahem, world wide web. "The Internet" doesn't know what an individual network much less person is going to do, and yet it is incredibly resilient. Even when worms are criss-crossing the global at light speed, infecting millions and millions of machines, the vast majority of websites are still perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of users. This is, quite obviously, not achieved by pre-screening what people or programs may use the Internet.
The real problem is that, as they did with wired Internet access, the phone companies want to have it both ways. They want to tell you that you can buy an unlimited data plan but start to get uppity if anybody actually uses it. They want you to care about every bit you send if you're an "abusive user" who needs to cut back their usage and yet convince you to up-buy onto an "unlimited" plan if you're one of the people who will never in their damn lives get close to needing it.
If their networks can be brought down so easily by rogue applications, then in addition to the usage problem they're scrambling about they have a major security problem that they need to fix with much greater urgency. iPhones spiked your data usage? Poor things. That's one of the reasons people buy a damn iPhone, because of all the things it can do for that over and above being a phone -- and whether they like it or not, in this day and age that mostly means something on the Internet.
Now, I don't mind overselling in principle and I'm not saying every single thing has to be allowed.
has no place on any platform. I simply do not trust the phone companies to be in charge of determining it. Apple's running of the App Store should be enough to strike fear into anybody who believes a company should be allowed to decide everything for itself. Like child predators or terrorism in politics, "protecting the network" will be their rallying cry as they throw anything that hurts their bottom line off. I'm not willing to go there.
I believe it. But "trying not to leak names" and "not leaking names" are not the same, and there is a real risk of death to the people trying to help save the lives not only of US troops but their own countrymen. For what? Daily incident reports that largely tell us nothing we don't know? That drone attacks are less successful than the spokesman says? That an Afghan policeman was shot by the Afghan army when he was smoking hash in the shower, got spooked and started firing at them? Does anybody in the world not know that the government of Afghanistan is weak yet? Is this "insight" really worth even the potential of getting people killed?
You make this sound like a bad thing. The Pentagon was supposed to help Assange with his goal of disseminating classified information to unauthorized sources? You think anybody involved wants to touch that with a 10 foot pole, which would be illegal for them to do in the first place? Especially anybody with the clearance to actually read the damn things without committing another crime? It was a false request, designed to paint them as uncaring when he did what he was going to do all along.
You might be right; two minutes of Google searching did not turn up any information about people who actually got killed.
As far as names? Simon Hermes, Mohammed Moubin, Gul Said. "On and on it goes, name after name of "collaborators" with the U.S. military, name after name of people whose lives are now in direct danger." -- http://www.cjr.org/campaign_desk/the_assange_leaks.php
Assigning some sort of moral equivalence to assassinating an informant and bombing the wrong building or shooting the wrong target makes you look like a moron. I hope you know that.
War sucks. Maybe this war should never have been started; maybe it should end tomorrow. But these are not, not nearly, the same thing.
In one of your approximately eight billion posts in this thread saying basically the exact same things over and over again you asked for reasons that Assange is an egotistical, self-centered prick. How about from human rights groups?
These are reall
That's true, but it's a bullshit argument.
For starters, science cuts are going to be an extremely small impact on the defecit, akin to claiming that if you can't afford your mortgage then it's time to not buy that cup of Starbucks coffee on Friday. It helps in the sense that every dollar helps, but it is so small an impact that it's almost not worth doing.
If those are peoples' choices, then of course science is going to be cut first -- as it should be. But they're not. How much are the various wars costing you? How much are your politicians and government employees being paid? How much waste is there in your healthcare system? How much are you spending on your defense budget, security theater at the airports, CCTV installations, foreign aide, bank bailouts, commissioning reports nobody is ever going to ready or any other number of things that you can cut to more success and less detriment than science and education?
If you're being presented with a choice between cutting science spending or emergency services to solve the budget problems, it's because people simply aren't looking hard enough.
Sorry, but you're a self-absorbed whackjob.
A person who doesn't want a family is immature or irresponsible? I mean really? You know what I find to be irresponsible? Some notion that a person needs to get married and have children because some lunatic on the Internet says there is a societal benefit to it. I'm sure those kids will grow up in a fantastic loving home what with their parents wishing they were in any situation other than that one. It seems like a fantastic environment to raise kids.
Not owning a home is a result of lacking willpower against compulsion? How about the possibility that they find owning some big house on some big lot to be a wasteful use of resources (and I'm not talking about their money). How about them feeling that they don't need 3000 square feet of space to knock around in on their own, since they have yet to get married and have children to please you?
Maybe they mooch off of people with cars; unlike you, I'm not stupid enough to pant entire categories of people with the same brush. But there's also the possibility that they simply take public transportation or walk places. Tasks which benefit them monetarily and in terms of their own health, benefit society by not contributing unnecessary pollution to the air or crowding to the streets and even benefit businesses by not making parking some huge requirement and by freeing up more money for them to spend on loft apartments and $300 shirts. But I'm sure to you they're just being unfair to all the used car salesman and mechanics and gas station owners out there by not paying their fair share into those peoples' wallets. Those irresponsible kids.
In short? I can tell you're not young by your user ID, but I see you still haven't managed to grow up either. Your idea of a perfect way to live your life is not everybody's idea, nor does it mean it is the right idea just because you happen to be the one who possesses it. So do us all a favor and shut the fuck up. Go about your business your way and everybody else will go about their business their way. Nobody needs your smug sense of superiority, least of all you.
Did you actually look at this map? Most of them are retarded, and not for the reasons the creators think.
One of their entries is the Bell, California crew who gave themselves $800,000 salaries. Is that bad? Absolutely -- they're facing criminal charges. Does it help the economy? Of course not. It also has nothing to do with the stimulus; they simply voted themselves huge salaries and nobody paid attention enough to call them on it.
Then there's stuff like a highway beautification project in Oregon or a grant to Northwestern Illinois University to develop machine-generated humor. Silly? Yeah. But these are actually stimulus expenditures. People will be hired or retained to perform tasks like these, and that's ignoring the possibilities with some of the projects that actual technical advances might be made. Personally I'd prefer it be spent elsewhere, but it's not exactly failing to do the job it was assigned for. Other ones are complaining about it being "wasteful spending" to give overtime pay to government employees or how lots of money only created a few jobs, or complaining that building a truck driver training school is bad because big trucking companies make lots of money. It's still going to create the fucking jobs to build, maintain and staff the facility is it not? And then those big truck companies will use the facility to, you know, train new employees it's hiring right? What is the problem?
There's one about studying the effects of video games on the mental health of seniors. Apparently attempting to improve the mental health of seniors is a bad idea, or perhaps they're just trying to drum up indignation from ignorant people because the medium happens to be video games. I thought video games were destroying our children and needed to be banned? Surely if they have such a ridiculous effect on our minds it's worth studying if they can have a positive effect as well? Or is logical consistency not overly important to people on the right and we should just get out of their way when they're ranting?
There's even one that says Arkansas is not overspending (whatever that means) this year, has lost jobs and its unemployment rate has gone up. I have no idea how this is "bankrupting America" or bad stimulus spending. Isn't this the exact opposite? Isn't this NOT "wasteful stimulus spending" and showing that you're losing jobs with that approach? Maybe that "lots of money for a few jobs" thing in New York was actually an improvement in a bad economy? Are they simultaneously complaining about stimulus spending and the fact that Arkansas isn't getting much?
Nobody has ever accused the government of frugality or efficiency, nor would anybody claim that they always do the best possible things -- but most of these complaints are about actual, successful stimulus spending. If these mostly inane complaints is the best you can come up with, I'd call it a success. And if you're bitching about foreign aid like you appear to be, well, fine, but that is an entirely separate issue from the stimulus. This site doesn't even attempt to support your argument. Surely you can do better.
I just fail to understand the contempt so many of the comments here show.
Is it easy? Should they be able to do it themselves? Yeah, probably. I don't personally see anything about it that would even make me wonder if I could take it somewhere for the service, but then again that's why I don't use it. These people obviously do, and they're willing to pay for it.
On HGTV I saw a little mini-commercial about a job you could do yourself: A tubular skylight. In their opinion, it's a weekend homeowner task. They went through the steps, and nothing in itself sounded all that tricky. I'm not a super handy fellow, but I wasn't terribly intimidated by their descriptions. The problem is one of the steps is cutting a hole in your roof and removing the shingles around it, dropping in the device and putting the shingles back. Now, the hole isn't that intimidating because it's something you're either going to do right or mess up and you ought to know either way. The shingles scare the hell out of me. It's a job I could do and fuck up in some subtle way and never know it until all the sudden I have a huge discolored patch in my ceiling and mold growing all over the place and I've caused thousands of dollars of damage. I'd never attempt this task, because I'm afraid of how badly I could be wrong and how bad it could be if I was. I'd be willing to pay somebody to do it just for the peace of mind. (There's risks with contractors too, of course, but that's a different issue.)
These people are obviously intimidated by technology. They're afraid they're going to mess something up, and to them that peace of mind that it's going to be done right and any potential issue will be handled is worth $30. It's somewhat frustrating for me; it's the reason my parents call me to hook up a computer even though the damn cords are color-coded. But it's not worthy of derision or contempt. Take their money, giggle to yourself about how little work you had to do to earn it and be happy that everybody is happy.
I think it's the number of people on Slashdot who are programmers, system administrators and engineers that makes us so desire to bake perfection into everything or reject it as valueless.
First, understand this: Neither the legislatures nor the courts of any country are going to pseudo-legalize any crime that can be done with a computer and where the evidence is primarily on that computer so long as the person is smart enough to use encryption. It's not going to happen, and most people outside of sites like this are okay with that concept. If they can't wiggle around any particular law that may be stopping them, they will simply change it -- and it will happen with overwhelming support. The court system is about justice, and they're simply not going to let a loophole that big go.
Second, this case and similar ones is no more the person incriminating himself than it is self-incrimination to open the door when the police come knocking with a search warrant. You're not telling them anything about the (alleged) crime; you're complying with a court order that allows them access to private property to search for what they expect is there. The difference, of course, is that if you don't open the door they can simply and easily kick it in. If you don't open the safe they can easily cut it open or crack it. If you do not give them the encryption password, well, assuming there are no backdoors and no major security flaws they have no recourse. If you think the police and the court system will--or even should--just throw up their hands and go "shucks, guess we lose" then you're living in some reality that can probably only be accessed by the ingestion of certain mushrooms. Computers aren't going anywhere and neither is encryption, neither of which changes the fact that these are real crimes with real victims that deserve real punishment. If this is the case of some 19 year old with a picture of his sixteen year old girlfriend's boobs, that is the problem to be solved -- not self-incrimination. It's not about evidence, it is about access.
So long as these things are controlled by a judge and required by search warrant and demonstration of probable cause I have no problem with it, nor is it somehow a shift of the burden of proof from prosecution to accused. It is not a setup; you're not being asked to turn over the body and caught in some catch-22 that you either do it and incriminate yourself or can't because you're innocent but can't prove you're not actually guilty and pretending to be innocent. You're being ordered by a judge to let them look at your computer because cause exists to believe there is evidence there, and if such evidence is not found the case will probably be dropped. If you DID commit the crime, am I supposed to feel some sort of sympathy for you because you used technology to try to cover it up?
Of course the system isn't perfect. No system is. There are probably legitimate times at which an accused person might not remember the password in question, especially if the alleged crime took place relatively long ago. Once in a great while somebody really might end up in jail for being forgetful -- though I suspect it would still be far less than the amount of time an innocent person is convicted on average. It's a sad reality of an imperfect world, one that can be mitigated by a maximum incarceration term (even if that maximum is the maximum potential penalty you could receive if you were found guilty of the crime you're accused of) and allowing judges to exercise proper discretion given the facts of the case. Yes, if you just so happened to write a journal article about how much you want to shoot your neighbor and then he turns up dead by that exact same means you're probably going to have problems -- but what is your point? Innocent men have gone to prison before. It's sad, but like the legal system itself, scrapping it because of its imperfections would do far more harm than good. (As an aside that is a fairly bad example since we're talking about
Nobody said otherwise, including the court. He's (presumed) innocent of whatever child sex offenses he's charged with. That said he's also guilty of breaking the law compelling people to give up their passwords. A stupid law, to be sure, and possibly unconstitutional if it were a US court -- but a law just the same in the UK.
The point stands: Sixteen weeks is a long time to go to jail if you're just trying to make a point about a stupid law, but it's a cake-walk sentence if you're actually did the crime compared to what you'd almost assuredly get if you turned over the evidence. It's certainly possible he's still innocent and the courts should definitely treat him as such, but nobody outside the legal system has any such obligations.
Look, I loooove CLIs. It's why I love Linux so much and it's why I prefer Mac to Windows, even when I don't spend as much time in a shell there as I do on Linux.
But this is not a GUI problem. There's nothing that says that a GUI can't update multiple machines identically and from one location. In fact we know they can, with Active Directory on Windows servers being probably the best example. They simply need to be written to do so. There are certainly valid discussions to be had as to whether or not a good GUI with people intimately familiar with it could ever be as fast to perform tasks as a good CLI with people intimately familiar with it, how much time each solution takes to develop and even the possibility that a CLI doesn't need to pre-plan such support when a GUI probably does, but most are not inherent limitations -- they are design choices.
Of course, being a CLI lover I prefer the CLI. I love the idea of scripting something up, or how you can chain tools designed to do exactly one thing and do it well together to have a ridiculous amount of power at your fingertips. At the same time, if I were asked which to do for a product that was being released (sold or otherwise) I would choose a GUI. Or better yet, have the best of both worlds: A CLI that the GUI sits on top of, Windows 3.1 style. You can even have a little "Import configuration file" button that would make this guy's example sync perfectly, which it sounds like he suggests at the end. His other complaints seem to be about how the GUI is actually designed, which is once again not a GUI problem but rather a problem with a particular GUI.
Beyond that, if you really have to pick one or the other it's little more than a "know your audience" and solve for success, whether you define that as profit or adoption or otherwise.
It has been done: http://www.unc.edu/~cigar%25/papers/FileSharing_March2004.pdf. The jist of it: The top artists actually gain sales from piracy, the bottom artists lose sales (~5000 downloads:1 lost sale), the net effect is essentially zero. Still, to the artists losing money I don't think they care much about the net effect.
I agree with your premise, and calling it theft is still wrong and probably an attempt to hijack the debate--but hyperbole on either side is not appropriate. It does result in lost sales. Some. Sometimes.
Then the people get what they deserve.
Look, I don't support actions such as the US Copyright Group takes and I snicker a little inside at what Anonymous is doing to them (sans the bomb threat anyway) and I think our politicians are corporate sponsored enough that they should just go NASCAR style and wear a jacket with patches from all their contributors, but a corporation still can't vote in any elections.
I've said this before (and got modded Troll amusingly): Most people hate Congress. The approval level is what, low 20% now? And yet even in the Democrats' "sweeping victory" in 2008, about 90% of the seats that were up for election were retained by incumbents. Why? Because everybody hates Congress, but most people think their particular congressman is doing a pretty good job. It's a similar force at work here.
Do I think copyright law is out of hand? Absolutely. Do I think the actions of groups like the US Copyright Group are nothing but an extortion racket, filing lawsuits they have no intention of pursuing in hopes of getting some quick monetary settlements from people who can't afford to fight? Yes. Should courts begin bitchslapping lawyers who use tactics like this? Yes. Is this issue important enough to change whoever I plan on voting for for any given office? No. And the vast majority of people feel the same way. If they care at all, it's seldom enough to vote somebody out of office. Especially when 25% of people are polarized as Democrats and 32% of people are polarized as Republicans (if I recall the numbers from a recent CNN article correctly) and won't likely vote "against their guy" even if they did feel that strongly about it because it would mean letting the evil opposition win--a problem in its own right, but I digress.
Corporations may own our politicians, but it's because we let them. It's because we as a nation are so disinterested in politics that the guy who spends the most money on lawn signs and radio advertisements usually wins, and cashing those corporate checks and pursuing those corporate interests gets you most of the way to where you need to be. The reason corporations pour money into elections is because it works, and it works because we don't care enough to stop politicians from taking it. I can't get worked up about it anymore. Our silence is our approval, and we deserve what comes of it.
(As an aside, I highly doubt one would have trouble finding 5% of people who think 150 year copyright terms are unreasonable. I suspect most would take the approach: "They invented it, it's theirs" and not even care if a limit was imposed at all. From the people I've talked to, copyright is essentially a non-issue outside of geek circles.)
Perhaps, but here's the difference. Jailbreakers don't assume anything for anybody but themselves. They jailbreak their devices and offer that ability to everybody else, but they don't force them to do it. If jailbreaking isn't worth it or makes it too tiresome an exercise in maintenance that it might as well be a brick, then people who believe that will simply not jailbreak their device.
Steve Jobs' assumptions affect every customer. His definition of better had better fit your definition of better or you either don't get his product or live with what you feel is sub-par. That's cool, but then he gets on TV and in front of audiences talking about how awesome his way is and how everybody who has been doing it differently is dumb. When people start having problems with his phones, he tells them they're holding it wrong, because obviously what he's doing is better and that means it can never be worse. The reason jailbreaking turns into a maintenance nightmare is because he will permit no manner of doing anything of which he does not approve, and spins it as being for your benefit. Is there truly some reason he can't allow installation of third-party codecs for AppleTV? It wouldn't change his design. It wouldn't change his interface. It wouldn't make his device poof into smoke. It wouldn't impose liability on him, since he's not the one installing them. But Steve says no, so you live without or you try to hack it and live with whatever nightmare that causes.
Now, I'm not saying Apple's approach is completely wrong. Practically speaking, you can't please everybody and at some point you have to lock down a list and say "THIS is our feature set." But the two egos are not the same. "Like what I say to like or go away" is not the same as "This is better, here it is if you want to have better too."
The OP has a point; the sample is not random and thus the survey not scientific, so it is prudent to wonder to what extent that influences the data. However, you're taking it too far.
The fact that somebody uses a cross-platform toolkit does not mean they are "undecided." If I can write my code once and sell it for two devices, that's a strong benefit. It doesn't matter whether I think Device A or Device B is the better choice if I were required to choose. The entire point of the library is that I do not have to. Unless there is some particular reason that increasing the reach of my program with almost no new effort is a bad thing (bad toolkit, etc) then it tells little about their intent or their decisiveness, only that they realize more potential customers is a better thing than less.
Second, it does not "conform to their worldview" nor does the survey say "folks are undecided." In fact the results are pretty strong. Three to one say iOS is better right now; almost twice as many say Android is the way to go moving forward than says iOS. In what world is a two-to-one margin not considered strong? Give a politician a two-to-one advantage in the polls and he giggles his way to election.
It's not a scientific poll so take the results as you choose. But do not sit around putting words in peoples mouths or claiming their intentions, especially when you're wrong.
I've heard this one a few times before. Am I the only one who actually wants to know how somebody is doing when I ask that? Maybe it's just part of my greater realization that words have meanings ("I could care less" really grates on my nerves for that reason!) and I only say it when I actually want to know the answer. I want to know how my friends are doing because I care and because if anything is not well, I want to at least offer to help them in whatever way I can. For social greetings, "hi," "hey," "good morning," etc do the trick.
As far as your actual point goes: I have empathy for these people; I certainly wouldn't wish death on this man or that kind of pain on his family. I wouldn't say I feel empathy in this case though. I don't know the man who died or his family and once I close this browser window I will probably never think of them or what happened again. That's not worthy of saying anything in my mind. It's just lip-service.
For what it's worth, I also almost never say "I'm sorry" unless I actually, literally feel bad about something. Otherwise it's just "I apologize." Weird or consistent, I don't know. That's just me.
That's true. People at the top of our social structures don't need protections like unions. Once you get to the top, you're in rare enough company that you're good to go. Kind of like how CEOs can run companies into the ground, be given a golden parachute and then put on the board of some other company for six figures. CEO of a major company is a rare job title. If you have it, you're in demand for the next opening.
The problem is, the vast majority of workers are not in that rarified air -- nor can they be. Even if every single person went out and got equivalent educations and skill sets (in different areas of course) as a CCIE has, they're just going to flatten the worker base and make EVERYBODY replaceable instead of just most everybody. In fact we have already begun to see something like that happen. A bachelor's degree is all but required for a decent job in the US, so while NOT having one is a bad thing, having one means essentially nothing -- you're simply now at par with everybody else. Now it's the people who possess a Masters that set themselves above, until that too becomes so common as to be meaningless.
I think there are a LOT of good reasons to think that a union is not the answer, but "I'm already rich enough that I don't need one" is hardly logically compelling. People who don't need unions don't think much of unions? Color me shocked!
I get the impression that you have no idea how many actors there are in the word. Tom Cruise is in demand (well, maybe a bad example). Brad Pitt is in demand. Orc #3 is not in demand, and there are a hundred people who would kill to be cast as it. It requires no particular skill set; fashions no particular lasting memories in the eyes of the viewers. They're never going to remember that Orc #3 was played by Random Jobber #1 instead of Random Jobber #2.
The VAST majority of actors are not even close to rich. In fact the vast majority of all actors can't even make a living acting; they have to hold down jobs as a waitress or a substitute teacher or something else just to survive between--and often during--acting gigs. Again, maybe a union is not the answer but claiming they're in such demand that they don't need to worry about it is naive at best.
I agree with your point in #3, but I see it more as a failing of our specific examples of unions rather than the concept of unions. Is there something about a union that says it necessarily must become protective of worthless members, or is that simply the history we have with them? The idea of a union has a lot of benefits for its members, but only so far as its members understand that the integrity of the union membership means something. I don't think that's an impossibility.
And then the technie can walk over to his boss and tell him about it. What's the problem? Why all the defensiveness in the replies to this article? The military wants military people in charge of military posts? Whodda thunk it?
That doesn't mean there aren't hardcore geeks (soldiers or otherwise) doing the day to day work. They just report to a military officer, in touch with and accountable to the military chain of command and thus the civilian command of the military, rather than some guy with an MBA or even a CS degree.
For that matter, it doesn't mean mean the military commander isn't a hardcore geek himself or that he isn't brilliant. Almost all* officers have Bachelors degrees at the least and very often higher, especially at the general officer level where these commanders are likely to be. In the democratic primary in the 2004 election I supported (retired) General Wesley Clark -- valedictorian at West Point, Rhodes Scholar with a degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford University, master's degree in military science (and at one time perhaps the greatest title in the entire world: SACEUR--Supreme Allied Commander Europe). The guy currently atop the US Cyber Command (and the Director of the National Security Agency) has a BS degree from the US Military Academy, an MSBA from Boston University, dual Masters of Science degrees in systems technology and physics from the Naval Postgraduate School and a MS in National Security from the National Defense University.
The reality is that the top guys are typically ridiculously smart and highly qualified, and assumptions to the contrary are little more than geek bravado that, at the risk of the inevitable Flamebait mods, I suspect comes because these types of people were the popular jocks and bullies of our childhood and we feel the need to cling to the notion that at least we're smarter than them. Well, maybe we are and maybe we aren't, but the guys at the top of these chains of command can give anybody a run for their money, make no mistake.
Also:
I don't want the techies making this distinction. If they see an anomaly, bring it to the commander who may have more information at his disposal to make the decision. It's his ass (and possibly countless lives) if you're wrong; offer your evaluation like any good commander will ask for, but let him make the decision.
* If you join the military as an officer, you have a college degree either from an ROTC program or directly from one of the military academies. There are also other paths to a commission, but I believe they all either start or end with a college degree. I water down my statement just based on that uncertainty.
I got it, though I didn't find it funny as much as clever.