I am so sick of the anti-entitlement movement here on slashdot. Life isn't fair. Deal with it.
So wealth belongs to whoever can take it? Considering the stats on gun ownership for conservatives and liberals, I don't think you'd like the results of that policy.
Social security is supposed to be the bare minimum income to subsist post retirement.
No, that would make far too much sense. As a high-income earner, my social security benefits will (allegedly) be significantly larger than those of a teacher, which is insane. I can almost understand if the complications of means-testing aren't worth it, but there is absolutely no reason why the rich should receive bigger government checks than the poor. If we want to have some form of Social Security (and we do, at least until goal 2 of my sig is achieved), then it should just be a payment of $X/month upon reaching age Y.
At least you didn't have it in the U.S. Stock Market. There you would be down about $15K
Assuming he invested everything at the peak of the market, which is unlikely. Look into dollar cost averaging; it's amazingly effective at reducing variance from market swings.
(including losses against other currencies)
Why is that relevant? The large majority of what we buy is in dollars.
Those that did will tell you about how people went from being set for life to having nothing in the course of a few days.
Shit happens, but there are plenty of things you can do to reduce (not eliminate) the chance that you'll suffer from it. Thousands of people have died in auto accidents despite wearing seatbelts; does that mean there's no point in doing so?
They're called U.S. Treasury Bills, and they are considered among the safest investments on the planet. Yes, even safer than 401ks, mortgage banked securities, private pensions etc, all of which can be considered as much "worthless IOUs" as the SS Trust Fund, which is exclusively U.S. Treasury Bills
When I buy a Treasury Bill, it's an asset to me and a liability to the government. When a government agency buys a Treasury Bill, it's simultaneously an asset and a liability to the government, with a net value of 0.
I suspect he'll lose more votes from his base than he'll gain from uncertains or democrats.
The Free Republic crowd loves her; possibly because they think she's more of a fundie than she really is, but still. They aren't as troglodytic in terms of keeping women barefoot and pregnant as many believe.
Google has an open cafeteria, and tons of free junk food in the hallways, which people who have a life do not need.
Gratuitous insult aside, employees with families still need to eat, and their spouses are probably not delivering meals to their offices. Free food is a far more egalitarian benefit than subsidized daycare.
But it's a reasonable observation to make or question to ask, given that the set of people who don't mind this kind of lifestyle is probably unevenly distributed agewise.
The set of IT workers in general is unevenly distributed agewise (and gender-wise). That doesn't make every tech company guilty of discrimination.
Or we could do something even more radical and cut spending, say the billions of dollars that we hand out to corporations in the form of agricultural subsidies. Except Obama is all for those.
Decrease the income inequality that's skyrocketed during the Clinton and (especially) Bush eras.
I've yet to see any explanation of why income inequality is bad that isn't just thinly veiled envy. Would it be an improvement if we destroyed (not redistributed) most the wealth of the top 1%?
C, C++ or Java, you normally have to write a lot more lines of code. This not only makes the code more readable in many cases
Ick, no. That may increase the average readability of each line of code, but because there's so much boilerplate that's unrelated to the actual problem being solved, net readability goes down. Even Java is starting to figure this out; the foreach loop in Java 1.5 is both more convenient and more readable than the silly Iterator incantations.
I'm not opposed to technology, but I am opposed to the relentless effort by most companies to save money
Huh? The entire point of technology is increasing efficiency, producing more output with less labor. Do you refuse to use email because it costs jobs at the post office?
I'm guessing you've never used Cocoa. Try it, and be amazed.
I have. It blows Swing and Win32 away, but these days I prefer Python, mainly due lack of header files, built-in collections, everything-is-an-object (no primitive types or half-objects like SEL) and expansive standard library (where the heck is NSRegularExpression or NSTCPSocket?). wxPython isn't as good as Cocoa for the UI, but it's decent and cross platform.
But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X?
Yes, which is irrelevant.
Don't they specifically state that it's only to be run on Apple hardware?
Yes, also irrelevant. Corporations can't create law by making "statements".
Why is it OK to break Apple's license?
Basically, because EULAs are BS.
Would you be saying "good for them" if the news article was about someone breaking the GPL?
The GPL grants rights that users would not normally have under copyright law. If I "break the GPL", I'm really violating copyright. The GPL only grants rights, it doesn't remove any. In contrast most EULAs claim to remove rights that I would normally have.
It's about buying products that haven't had to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, when you have a choice.
Right, and why does that matter? The costs of transportation are already included in the price, as are the often substantial benefits from economies of scale. Shipping containers are *big*.
On the other hand, you can argue that transportation involves negative externalities that aren't reflected in the price. I doubt that effect is very significant, again because of economies of scale. Even if you imposed large carbon taxes, it would only cause a slight price increase when amortized over millions of bananas or t-shirts.
No. The GPL and other open source licenses don't try to impose any restrictions on users that don't already exist in copyright law.
In the case of the GPL, the restrictions center largely around redistribution.
Redistribution is already forbidden (excepting fair use) under copyright law. The GPL grants rights to do so provided you fulfill certain conditions. You don't incur any additional restrictions by "agreeing" to the GPL.
I find it amazing that most people on Slashdot still do not understand the Apple business model.
I understand it just fine, and fail to see why it or any other business model should be backed up with government guns.
As a Mac user I hope the clone company goes down in flames
As a Mac user and also a US citizen, I've had quite enough of property rights being trampled by overbroad copyright laws. I'd much rather have Apple slightly inconvenienced than continue the march towards a system where we never actually own anything and just pay for things that we can only use in the manner dictated by the seller.
Yes, just like stealing from advertisers by going to the bathroom during commercials, or stealing from credit card issuers by paying off your bill every month. Failure to act in the manner that a company's business model would prefer you to is not legally or ethically wrong.
Expecting everyone to voluntarily abandon modern conveniences and toys to live in harmony with Gaia is more utopian than anything Ray Kurzweil has ever come up with.
Why? Oil is just one source of energy, there's also nukes, wind, and that big ball in the sky.
Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable.
Huh, so right now in 2008 we're at the optimum level of output? That's an amazing coincidence, or should we be going backwards? No need for curing cancer or Alzheimer's, or fusion power or zero-emission electric cars? You can enjoy your neo-luddism; fortunately there are plenty of others trying to improve things.
Get on with the news, zealots: the final SDK has been released July 11, so the NDA has been lifted for more than a week now.
You'd think so, but no. If you check Apple's Cocoa mailing lists you'll see multiple nastygrams from the moderators stating that the iPhone SDK is still under NDA. It's an exceptionally stupid situation where anybody in the world can download the SDK, but nobody can talk about it, and presumably publicly posting code that uses it would be in violation.
You are unfortunately only licensed to use it according to the EULA you must agree to BEFORE you use.
You don't need permission from the copyright holder to run software that you've purchased, any more than you need permission from the copyright holder to read a book that you've bought. (At least, that's what common sense would suggest. Sadly as the recent Blizzard case showed we have technologically illiterate judges).
Think of it as a lease or a rental.
Why? I walked into a store and paid for a product. There was no contact between the copyright holder and me. That's a sale.
Who should get to decide how you should sell your software, application, music, and writing?
Me. But after I sell a copy, I don't get to dictate how it's used. Copyright law prohibits the buyer from copying and redistributing it, but that's the exception and not the rule.
Since the Licence agreement can be read withough installing or operning the software, there is a clear path for the user to take to refuse its terms.
By continuing to post on Slashdot you agree to pay me $100 per post. There's a clear path for you to avoid those terms, but you have no reason to, because my assertion does not constitute a legal claim. I would argue that Apple's stated limitations on use are equally irrelevant. Holding copyright on a work doesn't mean you get to dictate all aspects of its use.
I don't know, at that point it can be considered a case of cognitive dissonance rearing its head. "I spent a month's salary on this computer, and I'm not an idiot, so I must have made a good purchase decision!"
The door swings both ways: "I can't afford that Mac, oh well, I bet they suck anyway".
Slashdot Mirror
I am so sick of the anti-entitlement movement here on slashdot. Life isn't fair. Deal with it.
So wealth belongs to whoever can take it? Considering the stats on gun ownership for conservatives and liberals, I don't think you'd like the results of that policy.
Social security is supposed to be the bare minimum income to subsist post retirement.
No, that would make far too much sense. As a high-income earner, my social security benefits will (allegedly) be significantly larger than those of a teacher, which is insane. I can almost understand if the complications of means-testing aren't worth it, but there is absolutely no reason why the rich should receive bigger government checks than the poor. If we want to have some form of Social Security (and we do, at least until goal 2 of my sig is achieved), then it should just be a payment of $X/month upon reaching age Y.
At least you didn't have it in the U.S. Stock Market. There you would be down about $15K
Assuming he invested everything at the peak of the market, which is unlikely. Look into dollar cost averaging; it's amazingly effective at reducing variance from market swings.
(including losses against other currencies)
Why is that relevant? The large majority of what we buy is in dollars.
Those that did will tell you about how people went from being set for life to having nothing in the course of a few days.
Shit happens, but there are plenty of things you can do to reduce (not eliminate) the chance that you'll suffer from it. Thousands of people have died in auto accidents despite wearing seatbelts; does that mean there's no point in doing so?
They're called U.S. Treasury Bills, and they are considered among the safest investments on the planet. Yes, even safer than 401ks, mortgage banked securities, private pensions etc, all of which can be considered as much "worthless IOUs" as the SS Trust Fund, which is exclusively U.S. Treasury Bills
When I buy a Treasury Bill, it's an asset to me and a liability to the government. When a government agency buys a Treasury Bill, it's simultaneously an asset and a liability to the government, with a net value of 0.
I suspect he'll lose more votes from his base than he'll gain from uncertains or democrats.
The Free Republic crowd loves her; possibly because they think she's more of a fundie than she really is, but still. They aren't as troglodytic in terms of keeping women barefoot and pregnant as many believe.
Google has an open cafeteria, and tons of free junk food in the hallways, which people who have a life do not need.
Gratuitous insult aside, employees with families still need to eat, and their spouses are probably not delivering meals to their offices. Free food is a far more egalitarian benefit than subsidized daycare.
But it's a reasonable observation to make or question to ask, given that the set of people who don't mind this kind of lifestyle is probably unevenly distributed agewise.
The set of IT workers in general is unevenly distributed agewise (and gender-wise). That doesn't make every tech company guilty of discrimination.
Can I write gui's for mac os x with some language other than objective-c yet?
Yes, easily.
Slow the hemorrhaging of money out of the country
Or we could do something even more radical and cut spending, say the billions of dollars that we hand out to corporations in the form of agricultural subsidies. Except Obama is all for those.
Decrease the income inequality that's skyrocketed during the Clinton and (especially) Bush eras.
I've yet to see any explanation of why income inequality is bad that isn't just thinly veiled envy. Would it be an improvement if we destroyed (not redistributed) most the wealth of the top 1%?
I mean, you could have gone TWO FREAKING WEEKS without a political statement, right?
Sure, and the Chinese government could have gone two weeks without massive lies and censorship. But people don't change that easily.
And don't forget the non-financial costs of living farther from work... having to spend more time in the car, instead of doing whatever you like.
This is huge. One of the few clear results of happiness research is that long commutes are very bad.
C, C++ or Java, you normally have to write a lot more lines of code. This not only makes the code more readable in many cases
Ick, no. That may increase the average readability of each line of code, but because there's so much boilerplate that's unrelated to the actual problem being solved, net readability goes down. Even Java is starting to figure this out; the foreach loop in Java 1.5 is both more convenient and more readable than the silly Iterator incantations.
Obfuscation is bad, but succinctness is good.
I'm not opposed to technology, but I am opposed to the relentless effort by most companies to save money
Huh? The entire point of technology is increasing efficiency, producing more output with less labor. Do you refuse to use email because it costs jobs at the post office?
I'm all for increased automation and efficiency
Obviously not.
I'm guessing you've never used Cocoa. Try it, and be amazed.
I have. It blows Swing and Win32 away, but these days I prefer Python, mainly due lack of header files, built-in collections, everything-is-an-object (no primitive types or half-objects like SEL) and expansive standard library (where the heck is NSRegularExpression or NSTCPSocket?). wxPython isn't as good as Cocoa for the UI, but it's decent and cross platform.
But didn't Apple spend a whole ton of money to write and maintain Mac OS X?
Yes, which is irrelevant.
Don't they specifically state that it's only to be run on Apple hardware?
Yes, also irrelevant. Corporations can't create law by making "statements".
Why is it OK to break Apple's license?
Basically, because EULAs are BS.
Would you be saying "good for them" if the news article was about someone breaking the GPL?
The GPL grants rights that users would not normally have under copyright law. If I "break the GPL", I'm really violating copyright. The GPL only grants rights, it doesn't remove any. In contrast most EULAs claim to remove rights that I would normally have.
It's about buying products that haven't had to be shipped hundreds or thousands of miles, when you have a choice.
Right, and why does that matter? The costs of transportation are already included in the price, as are the often substantial benefits from economies of scale. Shipping containers are *big*.
On the other hand, you can argue that transportation involves negative externalities that aren't reflected in the price. I doubt that effect is very significant, again because of economies of scale. Even if you imposed large carbon taxes, it would only cause a slight price increase when amortized over millions of bananas or t-shirts.
It is an end-user license agreement.
No. The GPL and other open source licenses don't try to impose any restrictions on users that don't already exist in copyright law.
In the case of the GPL, the restrictions center largely around redistribution.
Redistribution is already forbidden (excepting fair use) under copyright law. The GPL grants rights to do so provided you fulfill certain conditions. You don't incur any additional restrictions by "agreeing" to the GPL.
I find it amazing that most people on Slashdot still do not understand the Apple business model.
I understand it just fine, and fail to see why it or any other business model should be backed up with government guns.
As a Mac user I hope the clone company goes down in flames
As a Mac user and also a US citizen, I've had quite enough of property rights being trampled by overbroad copyright laws. I'd much rather have Apple slightly inconvenienced than continue the march towards a system where we never actually own anything and just pay for things that we can only use in the manner dictated by the seller.
Yes, stealing.
Yes, just like stealing from advertisers by going to the bathroom during commercials, or stealing from credit card issuers by paying off your bill every month. Failure to act in the manner that a company's business model would prefer you to is not legally or ethically wrong.
Expecting everyone to voluntarily abandon modern conveniences and toys to live in harmony with Gaia is more utopian than anything Ray Kurzweil has ever come up with.
Peak Oil represents a global 'Limit to Growth'
Why? Oil is just one source of energy, there's also nukes, wind, and that big ball in the sky.
Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable. Further economic growth is neither possible nor desirable.
Huh, so right now in 2008 we're at the optimum level of output? That's an amazing coincidence, or should we be going backwards? No need for curing cancer or Alzheimer's, or fusion power or zero-emission electric cars? You can enjoy your neo-luddism; fortunately there are plenty of others trying to improve things.
Get on with the news, zealots: the final SDK has been released July 11, so the NDA has been lifted for more than a week now.
You'd think so, but no. If you check Apple's Cocoa mailing lists you'll see multiple nastygrams from the moderators stating that the iPhone SDK is still under NDA. It's an exceptionally stupid situation where anybody in the world can download the SDK, but nobody can talk about it, and presumably publicly posting code that uses it would be in violation.
You are unfortunately only licensed to use it according to the EULA you must agree to BEFORE you use.
You don't need permission from the copyright holder to run software that you've purchased, any more than you need permission from the copyright holder to read a book that you've bought. (At least, that's what common sense would suggest. Sadly as the recent Blizzard case showed we have technologically illiterate judges).
Think of it as a lease or a rental.
Why? I walked into a store and paid for a product. There was no contact between the copyright holder and me. That's a sale.
Who should get to decide how you should sell your software, application, music, and writing?
Me. But after I sell a copy, I don't get to dictate how it's used. Copyright law prohibits the buyer from copying and redistributing it, but that's the exception and not the rule.
Since the Licence agreement can be read withough installing or operning the software, there is a clear path for the user to take to refuse its terms.
By continuing to post on Slashdot you agree to pay me $100 per post. There's a clear path for you to avoid those terms, but you have no reason to, because my assertion does not constitute a legal claim. I would argue that Apple's stated limitations on use are equally irrelevant. Holding copyright on a work doesn't mean you get to dictate all aspects of its use.
I don't know, at that point it can be considered a case of cognitive dissonance rearing its head. "I spent a month's salary on this computer, and I'm not an idiot, so I must have made a good purchase decision!"
The door swings both ways: "I can't afford that Mac, oh well, I bet they suck anyway".
Jobs was being truthful.
Yes, the specific statement is true. The impression it creates is false, and Apple knows that perfectly well.
Is this Apple's problem that AT&T will charge you more for their services?
Yes, because it was Apple's decision to make AT&T the only (supported) option for iPhones.