Apple has all sorts of nice little customer service things that do depend on keeping some information about you. When my macbook was stolen a few years ago it was easier for me to just ask Apple for the original invoice for the insurance company rather than try and find it in my files. If you have an account with them they can e-mail you receipts (and also store them for you) rather than give you paper ones.
It's sad that you can't think of any reasons a business would want to know a few things about their customers except to sell it to the highest bidder.
You know, you'd be more believable with some basic fact checking. I should be working so I'm not going to address your last three points, but the first ones are easy enough:
Want music? Install whatever DRM free music you want. Apple once took a lot of flak for including encouragements to rip CDs as part of their marketing.
Upgrade hard drive? The notebook I'm typing this on is a mac and not only has an upgraded hard drive but has the CD drive replaced by an SSD. More recent macs don't have hard drives, but you can still buy one that does if that's important to you.
Ebook from Amazon? The Amazon ebook app on my iPad disagrees vehemently with your assertion.
Boobies? Type "breast fetish" into Safari's address bar, or the search box of the browser of your choice, on any Apple product that runs web browsers. You're welcome.
Apple isn't a marketing company. They hire marketing companies (you're correct, the ones they hire are the best in the business). Google is a marketing company (probably the largest and most powerful one).
Yeah, that's why "big data" is such a hot area, employing lots of people with PhDs and building giant data farms. It's easy, doesn't take any work at all.
Not to mention that collecting information on your customers might very well have negative effects. Some people don't LIKE being tracked. Apple has a competitive advantage against Google by protecting your privacy. They could probably keep and sell information about you, but that would have a negative effect on the rest of their business. Nothing is free.
Actually, there are a significant number of people who buy macs, mostly notebooks, and run Windows on them.
Most companies, particularly large ones, don't just do one thing. Apple is a computer company ("mobile devices" are computers). They make hardware people like, they make software people like, and they sell media that works well on that hardware, with that software. One of the major consistent parts of Apple's business model is that they regard both hardware and the software it runs as important.
Saying Apple is a software company (or a hardware company) is like saying Dow Corning is a breast implant company. Yes, they make those, but they make other things too.
People who hate Apple and can't come up with any better arguments have been saying that for decades. It hasn't come true and there's no real indication it ever will. If it did anyone who cared would just switch to something else.
Actually, it's a pretty fundamental economic truth, famously abbreviated TANSTAAFL by some famous science fiction writers. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In order to create things of value, somebody has to do some work and/or spend some resources. With the traditional commercial pay-up-front model you pay money and get things. With the web 2.0 model you pay with your information, which the seller then sells to others who have a use for it. With freeware, open source, etc. you pay with your time, contributing to the project, or you pay with your time making the product work for you. If you get lucky and your needs happen to align with those of the project then your payment is minimal (you're a leech and the project contributors are paying for you) but that's unlikely to be the situation all the time.
With the traditional model the price is clear and you are free to take it or leave it. With the open source model the price is not always clear but you are still free to take it or leave it, or quit halfway through the transaction (I can't get it to work, I give up). If you're nice you might even get some altruistic help. The web model, to me, is by far the worst. The price is not clear (generally the seller, including big names like Google, is very evasive or downright lies about it) and is completely out of your control: Google may decide to use your information in one way, or sell it to a specific entity, today, but in completely new ways and sell it to new people tomorrow, completely without your permission, knowledge or veto. Sometimes you don't even have the take it or leave it choice because the information is collected without your knowledge, with web tracking for example. In some cases it's even collected against your explicit expressed wishes, as with the Google-Safari thing.
You can install anything you want on a Mac. On an iOS device you can use whatever e-mail account you want (including Google) with the built in e-mail client, or install any of dozens of others you like, including the Google mail app.
Then you keep what's required and you write what it is in a big font and plain language when people sign up, and somewhere obvious (like the Privacy link) whenever they want to refresh their memories.
Most companies keep MUCH more than is required by law, and are very evasive about what it is they're keeping and what it is they're using it for.
I grew up in northern Alberta. The posted limit on two lane paved country highways is 100 km/h and the cops won't bother you unless you're going over 110 km/h. The posted limits on divided (semi) controlled access highways is 110 km/h (often 100 km/h at night) and the cops won't bother you so long as you keep it under 120. The highways are mostly straight with long rolling hills.
In rural Southern Ontario (which IS a tiny area by Canadian standards, regardless of population) the divided highways have posted limits of 100 km/h and the cops don't bother you unless you go over 120. The rural "highways" tend to be twisty little playgrounds that go right through towns and have houses, yards and driveways right up to their shoulders, where you really shouldn't be going more than 100 km/h, which is the cops-take-notice threshold (posted limit of 80). Northern Ontario highways are more similar to Alberta highways, with the posted two-lane limit usually at 90 and the enforcement threshold 110. I think a bit of the transcanada might be 80, but I always seem to end up driving that in February and going 100 seems quite reasonable.
That is, the actual speed limit is the same in both places. The posted limit in Ontario is systematically 10 km/h lower but the enforced limit is not. Quebec is like Ontario, most of the western provinces are like Alberta. The exception used to be BC (they've since changed a lot of the limits) where the speed limit was usually 10 km/h lower than Alberta but still enforced at +10.
A big difference between posted and enforced limits is dangerous because some people insist on driving the posted limit, causing a greater discrepancy in vehicle speeds in Ontario, but the effective speed limit isn't really different.
In any case, the roads in Ontario where the limit is 80 km/h (100 enforced) or 90 (110) are definitely not places the average person should be going 80 mph (130 km/h), particularly in the country at night. In southern Ontario that's because of people crossing the "highway" to get their mail from the box or borrow sugar from the neighbour, in northern it's because of moose, deer, snow, etc. Alberta is the same, evidenced by the current carnage on the Edmonton-Fort Mac highway. I lived on the other side of the province and knew lots of people who had hit animals hard, either because they weren't smart enough to slow down at night and were over driving their headlights and not watching for glowing eyes, or were in pickups and didn't care. I had one math teacher (a city transplant) who managed to total his car on a moose on the way to Edmonton, then total the rental on the way back. If the Toronto cottage country people, used to going 130 on the 400, could go faster than 50 km/h they'd be dying in droves too.
He AVERAGED 98. He says he approximately averaged 100 while moving, but if so that's more dangerous. Assuming he drove the safest way possible for the speed, slowing down for poor conditions, darkness, etc., he must have spent a good deal of time going considerably faster. Up to 150 m/h by his own admission.
Ontario didn't ever raise their limits after the oil crisis in the 70s. On the other hand, the cops would even blink unless you're doing more than 20 km/h over the limit.
On the other hand, if you manage to get out of the tiny area of southern Ontario where most of the time you can't even go that fast on the highway because of traffic, you'll realize that much of the time going faster is a dumb idea anyway because you simply don't have time to stop before that moose takes the top of your car (and the top of you) off.
True. The OP was talking about posting on a web page though. Even if you do sign over copyright the standard practice of most publishers may be to ignore personal web pages, so long as it's not too blatant, but it's not fun to be the one the publishing industry decides to make an example of (cough) Swartz (cough).
Most academics don't have the time or knowledge to maintain a web site. But they're happy to send you things when you e-mail and ask. I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people interested in a couple of papers. It's great to see people interested and the contacts have led to some good discussions, let me see my work being applied in completely new ways in very different fields, and even a few improvements that were or will be contributed back to the publicly available code.
Medical field journals usually don't have a problem with publishing preprints, although many engineering journals make you sign over the copyright. I've never pursued the matter to find out if they're serious about that, but the legalese is there.
In Canada you only have to go to a library and you have access to anything that any library in the country (and some outside it) have. It doesn't have to be a big library either. The library in my home town of 800 people is hooked into the interlibrary loan system and I used it when I was in high school (decades ago) to get papers and books for science fair projects. It takes a little more organization than clicking through papers Wikipedia style, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's the way everyone used to do it.
Your point about clinicians applying the latest stuff from the literature is important. Most clinicians are not trained to do research, or to evaluate it. Lots of papers are wrong (most, according to some very smart statisticians). Patients outside of proper clinical trials (they can be small, but they must be organized properly, scientifically and ethically) should be treated according to the consensus standard of care, not from the latest thing the clinician dug up in Homeopathy or The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Then fund science properly. At the moment the half assed public funding of science means that scientists are highly encouraged to patent their work so that their institutions can profit off it to continue operating. Governments encourage it too, because then they have an excuse to cut funding. Most scientists I've met aren't really interested in patenting and the hassles it involves. They'd all love to submit to open access journals too, but the high publication cost is often not covered by grants (although this is improving) and the decision is often whether to publish open access or pay a grad student enough to eat (and do research) for another month or two.
I'm not sure what journal you're submitting to, but most of the papers I've submitted have had reviewers comment disdainfully about peer reviewed conference abstract citations, never mind non-peer reviewed sources. A non-peer reviewed reference is useless and will generally be removed. That includes textbooks.
I once cited one of Fourier's original papers (which I had to find) because a reviewer scoffed at a textbook cite.
Because it's not generalizable. Nor is that silly "creating" meme. Particularly when you're talking about software and not hardware.
There is some truth to typing on a tablet being more difficult than on a notebook or desktop, but it doesn't matter what OS that tablet is running. Even then, lots of people who don't have to type much will find the tablet much more productive. For example, people who move around a lot like nurses, doctors, travel writers, mechanics.
As far as the OS is concerned, if there's something a lot of people do that you can do on a Win 8 tablet that can't be done on iOS or Android please let me know, I'll write an app that does it and make lots of money.
You're just regurgitating MS propaganda, which was doubtful when they first started writing it and is pretty ridiculous now. You might be able to use your Windows desktop software on your Win 8 tablet but that doesn't mean you're being productive. It certainly doesn't mean you're "crunching more numbers" or "crunching numbers more efficiently."
Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have very similar political systems. All three are also very similar to that of England.
The US has a political system that is also vaguely similar to that of England, in that it is democratic, has three branches, and a bicameral legislature.
NZ, AUS and CAN all have governments that grew out of systems in place for British rule. Some of those institutions might have been partially inspired by what the US had done, in the same way that what the US had done was inspired by revolutionary France. Or maybe the queen went directly to the source for those ideas. Certainly the governments aren't "heavily based upon what the USA had at that time." Also, none of NZ, AUS or CAN suddenly became independent. Canada, for example, could be considered independent in 1867 (which is the date we usually use), or sometime in the inter-war period in the 1900s, or in 1982 when our constitution was repatriated.
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Apple has all sorts of nice little customer service things that do depend on keeping some information about you. When my macbook was stolen a few years ago it was easier for me to just ask Apple for the original invoice for the insurance company rather than try and find it in my files. If you have an account with them they can e-mail you receipts (and also store them for you) rather than give you paper ones.
It's sad that you can't think of any reasons a business would want to know a few things about their customers except to sell it to the highest bidder.
You know, you'd be more believable with some basic fact checking. I should be working so I'm not going to address your last three points, but the first ones are easy enough:
Want music? Install whatever DRM free music you want. Apple once took a lot of flak for including encouragements to rip CDs as part of their marketing.
Upgrade hard drive? The notebook I'm typing this on is a mac and not only has an upgraded hard drive but has the CD drive replaced by an SSD. More recent macs don't have hard drives, but you can still buy one that does if that's important to you.
Ebook from Amazon? The Amazon ebook app on my iPad disagrees vehemently with your assertion.
Boobies? Type "breast fetish" into Safari's address bar, or the search box of the browser of your choice, on any Apple product that runs web browsers. You're welcome.
Apple isn't a marketing company. They hire marketing companies (you're correct, the ones they hire are the best in the business). Google is a marketing company (probably the largest and most powerful one).
Yeah, that's why "big data" is such a hot area, employing lots of people with PhDs and building giant data farms. It's easy, doesn't take any work at all.
Not to mention that collecting information on your customers might very well have negative effects. Some people don't LIKE being tracked. Apple has a competitive advantage against Google by protecting your privacy. They could probably keep and sell information about you, but that would have a negative effect on the rest of their business. Nothing is free.
Actually, there are a significant number of people who buy macs, mostly notebooks, and run Windows on them.
Most companies, particularly large ones, don't just do one thing. Apple is a computer company ("mobile devices" are computers). They make hardware people like, they make software people like, and they sell media that works well on that hardware, with that software. One of the major consistent parts of Apple's business model is that they regard both hardware and the software it runs as important.
Saying Apple is a software company (or a hardware company) is like saying Dow Corning is a breast implant company. Yes, they make those, but they make other things too.
People who hate Apple and can't come up with any better arguments have been saying that for decades. It hasn't come true and there's no real indication it ever will. If it did anyone who cared would just switch to something else.
Actually, it's a pretty fundamental economic truth, famously abbreviated TANSTAAFL by some famous science fiction writers. There ain't no such thing as a free lunch. In order to create things of value, somebody has to do some work and/or spend some resources. With the traditional commercial pay-up-front model you pay money and get things. With the web 2.0 model you pay with your information, which the seller then sells to others who have a use for it. With freeware, open source, etc. you pay with your time, contributing to the project, or you pay with your time making the product work for you. If you get lucky and your needs happen to align with those of the project then your payment is minimal (you're a leech and the project contributors are paying for you) but that's unlikely to be the situation all the time.
With the traditional model the price is clear and you are free to take it or leave it. With the open source model the price is not always clear but you are still free to take it or leave it, or quit halfway through the transaction (I can't get it to work, I give up). If you're nice you might even get some altruistic help. The web model, to me, is by far the worst. The price is not clear (generally the seller, including big names like Google, is very evasive or downright lies about it) and is completely out of your control: Google may decide to use your information in one way, or sell it to a specific entity, today, but in completely new ways and sell it to new people tomorrow, completely without your permission, knowledge or veto. Sometimes you don't even have the take it or leave it choice because the information is collected without your knowledge, with web tracking for example. In some cases it's even collected against your explicit expressed wishes, as with the Google-Safari thing.
The last three lines are a nice summary, actually I'll have to remember that.
(PS: all intents and purposes)
You can install anything you want on a Mac. On an iOS device you can use whatever e-mail account you want (including Google) with the built in e-mail client, or install any of dozens of others you like, including the Google mail app.
Then you keep what's required and you write what it is in a big font and plain language when people sign up, and somewhere obvious (like the Privacy link) whenever they want to refresh their memories.
Most companies keep MUCH more than is required by law, and are very evasive about what it is they're keeping and what it is they're using it for.
I grew up in northern Alberta. The posted limit on two lane paved country highways is 100 km/h and the cops won't bother you unless you're going over 110 km/h. The posted limits on divided (semi) controlled access highways is 110 km/h (often 100 km/h at night) and the cops won't bother you so long as you keep it under 120. The highways are mostly straight with long rolling hills.
In rural Southern Ontario (which IS a tiny area by Canadian standards, regardless of population) the divided highways have posted limits of 100 km/h and the cops don't bother you unless you go over 120. The rural "highways" tend to be twisty little playgrounds that go right through towns and have houses, yards and driveways right up to their shoulders, where you really shouldn't be going more than 100 km/h, which is the cops-take-notice threshold (posted limit of 80). Northern Ontario highways are more similar to Alberta highways, with the posted two-lane limit usually at 90 and the enforcement threshold 110. I think a bit of the transcanada might be 80, but I always seem to end up driving that in February and going 100 seems quite reasonable.
That is, the actual speed limit is the same in both places. The posted limit in Ontario is systematically 10 km/h lower but the enforced limit is not. Quebec is like Ontario, most of the western provinces are like Alberta. The exception used to be BC (they've since changed a lot of the limits) where the speed limit was usually 10 km/h lower than Alberta but still enforced at +10.
A big difference between posted and enforced limits is dangerous because some people insist on driving the posted limit, causing a greater discrepancy in vehicle speeds in Ontario, but the effective speed limit isn't really different.
In any case, the roads in Ontario where the limit is 80 km/h (100 enforced) or 90 (110) are definitely not places the average person should be going 80 mph (130 km/h), particularly in the country at night. In southern Ontario that's because of people crossing the "highway" to get their mail from the box or borrow sugar from the neighbour, in northern it's because of moose, deer, snow, etc. Alberta is the same, evidenced by the current carnage on the Edmonton-Fort Mac highway. I lived on the other side of the province and knew lots of people who had hit animals hard, either because they weren't smart enough to slow down at night and were over driving their headlights and not watching for glowing eyes, or were in pickups and didn't care. I had one math teacher (a city transplant) who managed to total his car on a moose on the way to Edmonton, then total the rental on the way back. If the Toronto cottage country people, used to going 130 on the 400, could go faster than 50 km/h they'd be dying in droves too.
He AVERAGED 98. He says he approximately averaged 100 while moving, but if so that's more dangerous. Assuming he drove the safest way possible for the speed, slowing down for poor conditions, darkness, etc., he must have spent a good deal of time going considerably faster. Up to 150 m/h by his own admission.
Ontario didn't ever raise their limits after the oil crisis in the 70s. On the other hand, the cops would even blink unless you're doing more than 20 km/h over the limit.
On the other hand, if you manage to get out of the tiny area of southern Ontario where most of the time you can't even go that fast on the highway because of traffic, you'll realize that much of the time going faster is a dumb idea anyway because you simply don't have time to stop before that moose takes the top of your car (and the top of you) off.
It's quite possible he broke it.
True. The OP was talking about posting on a web page though. Even if you do sign over copyright the standard practice of most publishers may be to ignore personal web pages, so long as it's not too blatant, but it's not fun to be the one the publishing industry decides to make an example of (cough) Swartz (cough).
Most academics don't have the time or knowledge to maintain a web site. But they're happy to send you things when you e-mail and ask. I've gotten a lot of e-mails from people interested in a couple of papers. It's great to see people interested and the contacts have led to some good discussions, let me see my work being applied in completely new ways in very different fields, and even a few improvements that were or will be contributed back to the publicly available code.
Medical field journals usually don't have a problem with publishing preprints, although many engineering journals make you sign over the copyright. I've never pursued the matter to find out if they're serious about that, but the legalese is there.
In Canada you only have to go to a library and you have access to anything that any library in the country (and some outside it) have. It doesn't have to be a big library either. The library in my home town of 800 people is hooked into the interlibrary loan system and I used it when I was in high school (decades ago) to get papers and books for science fair projects. It takes a little more organization than clicking through papers Wikipedia style, but that's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's the way everyone used to do it.
Your point about clinicians applying the latest stuff from the literature is important. Most clinicians are not trained to do research, or to evaluate it. Lots of papers are wrong (most, according to some very smart statisticians). Patients outside of proper clinical trials (they can be small, but they must be organized properly, scientifically and ethically) should be treated according to the consensus standard of care, not from the latest thing the clinician dug up in Homeopathy or The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine.
Then fund science properly. At the moment the half assed public funding of science means that scientists are highly encouraged to patent their work so that their institutions can profit off it to continue operating. Governments encourage it too, because then they have an excuse to cut funding. Most scientists I've met aren't really interested in patenting and the hassles it involves. They'd all love to submit to open access journals too, but the high publication cost is often not covered by grants (although this is improving) and the decision is often whether to publish open access or pay a grad student enough to eat (and do research) for another month or two.
I'm not sure what journal you're submitting to, but most of the papers I've submitted have had reviewers comment disdainfully about peer reviewed conference abstract citations, never mind non-peer reviewed sources. A non-peer reviewed reference is useless and will generally be removed. That includes textbooks.
I once cited one of Fourier's original papers (which I had to find) because a reviewer scoffed at a textbook cite.
Because it's not generalizable. Nor is that silly "creating" meme. Particularly when you're talking about software and not hardware.
There is some truth to typing on a tablet being more difficult than on a notebook or desktop, but it doesn't matter what OS that tablet is running. Even then, lots of people who don't have to type much will find the tablet much more productive. For example, people who move around a lot like nurses, doctors, travel writers, mechanics.
As far as the OS is concerned, if there's something a lot of people do that you can do on a Win 8 tablet that can't be done on iOS or Android please let me know, I'll write an app that does it and make lots of money.
You're just regurgitating MS propaganda, which was doubtful when they first started writing it and is pretty ridiculous now. You might be able to use your Windows desktop software on your Win 8 tablet but that doesn't mean you're being productive. It certainly doesn't mean you're "crunching more numbers" or "crunching numbers more efficiently."
"I can get a hell of a lot more number crunching done on a charge than on an android tablet."
I doubt that. What you mean is that you can get a hell of a lot more number crunching done in the particular application that you like.
I don't spill much gas when I fill my tank.
Now, for people who like to hold the nozzle a couple feet away from their car and aim it generally in the right direction, you've got a point.
If they actually make it so it can charge an EV in a reasonable amount of time then you won't have to be a nutjob to be afraid of it.
This rock on my desk can't predict it's behaviour at all. It sounds like it passes with flying colours.
On the other hand, I can predict it's behaviour quite accurately.
Canada, Australia and New Zealand all have very similar political systems. All three are also very similar to that of England.
The US has a political system that is also vaguely similar to that of England, in that it is democratic, has three branches, and a bicameral legislature.
NZ, AUS and CAN all have governments that grew out of systems in place for British rule. Some of those institutions might have been partially inspired by what the US had done, in the same way that what the US had done was inspired by revolutionary France. Or maybe the queen went directly to the source for those ideas. Certainly the governments aren't "heavily based upon what the USA had at that time." Also, none of NZ, AUS or CAN suddenly became independent. Canada, for example, could be considered independent in 1867 (which is the date we usually use), or sometime in the inter-war period in the 1900s, or in 1982 when our constitution was repatriated.