The iPhone 4 antenna issue was real, and the design was stupid, but too much was made of it. From what I could tell, it affected different phones in different ways. Mine would lose a little signal if I licked my finger and put it on the join, and others apparently were much more affected. The first announcement was based on one of three iPhones. There were other phones that could have their signal degraded depending on how the user was holding them, and in fact the way I normally held mine caused no problems.
The US Constitution doesn't claim that; that's the Declaration of Independence, which is a piece of rhetoric critical in the founding of the US that has no legal significance.
So, because one industry pulled a scam on science, all science must be a scam? And that random blogs should be trusted over almost all scientists in the field all over the world?
I'm going to suggest that neutral to irritating is the norm for operating systems. I didn't find one I actually liked until I got a Macintosh, and then again when I started using Unix.
Apple took PARC design elements and made a much better UI out of them. They paid PARC in Apple stock, which PARC them sold. Microsoft made an agreement with Apple to use their GUI design elements, and made a much worse interface (which they proceeded to improve slowly). When Apple tried suing Microsoft for their GUIs, it turned out Microsoft had a right to almost everything they were using.
It's an exaggeration, of course, but Microsoft hasn't done much successful innovation over the past 10-15 years..
By 1996, Microsoft had introduced its serious OS (NT) and its mediocre copy of the Macintosh UI. It was actually doing good work with Internet Explorer, which was a quality product back then, and improving Office. Sometime around then, they produced WinCE. They started moving into the tablet and PDA and phone business. Overall, they seemed to be doing pretty well.
Their tablets were expensive and awkward, extremely useful to a few people and pointless to most. They never caught on. Their PDAs and phones did reasonably well, and in 2007 Microsoft was strong in the smartphone market. They developed Internet Explorer into the very successful IE 6. And, then, they started failing.
Microsoft then just wandered off and got lost. They'd produced the best browser around, and just sat on it without trying to continually improve it. They never did get a clue as to how tablets could be successful, and like Blackberry had no idea how to stay in the smartphone business. Their attempts to produce a much more advanced OS than XP floundered, and they wound up cutting back their efforts into something that came out as Vista, which had a great many initial problems. They did well in the non-portable game console market, and in some more enterprisey software, but really didn't do much for the typical Windows user. They never did produce something that gave the users much more than XP did (although later OSes were much improved under the hood). After 7, they dropped their highly successful GUI in order to promote their tablet offerings.
The Surface was innovative, but not all that successful. Part of it was marketing. Not too long after it came out, I walked into a Microsoft store (nice and uncrowded so I could easily poke at everything), and found that my wife, a very intelligent software developer, didn't understand the difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro. The Surface Pro was extremely useful for some people, but not a general success. The Surface was a financial disaster. The much-hyped keyboards were not included in the purchase price, and really weren't that much different from the ones available for Android and the iPad by then. The marketing was thoroughly inept.
Overall, Microsoft has been steadily making itself less relevant. It sacrificed a lot of popularity on the desktop in order to push its doomed mobile offerings, at a time when fewer and fewer people were needing a Windows machine. I see no reason to think it'll ever be successful in the mobile market. It will continue to dominate the desktop/laptop market for the foreseeable future, while that becomes less relevant, much like IBM kept the mainframe market. Microsoft's going to be around and reasonably successful for a long time, but I don't see that it's likely to dominate like it did earlier.
First, there was the "ready for Vista" program that lied, so many people wound up buying computers that were allegedly ready for Vista but couldn't run the interface.
Second, there was the driver issue, Vista required new drivers, and they were more of a pain to develop. It took a while for peripheral vendors to catch up.
Third, Vista introduced some badly needed security features that made it a real pain to run lots of older software that ignored Microsoft's security guidelines. This was going to happen sometime or other, and it happened with Vista. Eventually, software vendors rewrote their software to run with UAC.
Fourth, there were a lot of bugs that should have been considered show-stoppers when Vista was released or escaped or something.
After a couple of years, people were generally running Vista on machines that could handle it, the drivers were in place, third-party software was becoming usable with UAC, and Microsoft had fixed a lot of things. It became almost as good as 7 near the end.
If the intelligence agency has physical possession of something, they're almost certainly going to be able to open and read it. They've put a lot of work into that over the years.
If the agency doesn't have physical possession, I'd suspect that using this technique requires too much equipment and time to be practical.
The obvious use is to read things that can't be safely opened, like ancient scrolls and the like.
If I understand the law correctly (IANAL), Yelp isn't liable for what reviews people submit as long as they don't exert any sort of editorial control, aside from things like community standards. If I understand Yelp's actions correctly, Yelp does exert such control, at least when paid for it. I don't see why Yelp shouldn't be held liable for libel that they publish, if they publish at their own discretion.
"Enemy" isn't defined in the Constitution, so it can include countries we haven't declared war on, but currently neither Russia nor China qualifies. I'd say ISIS qualified, but I don't see that Snowden has given ISIS aid or comfort.
In the US, there are two parties that differ significantly from each other, and both frequently win elections. (The Republicans seem intent on self-destruction, but if they succeed there will be another party for what most of the rest of the developed world considers far right.) Presidents are limited to a maximum of ten years in office, which normally translates to two terms, and they all hand over power on schedule. There is no expectation of a ruling family. The US has a court system that has frequently shown its independence.
The US, while far from perfect, is also far from being Russia, China, or North Korea.
Most seriously, near the end of the Reagan administration, in which buying a new infantry rifle was made illegal. I'm not actually pro-gun, but I do get sensitive about Constitutional rights, and I'd like to see that law found unconstitutional.
The Bush administration was not interested in gathering facts and then deciding what to do about Iraq. It was interested in going to war with Iraq and finding facts that supported the decision. The intelligence services did not cause the war.
What was a stained dress supposed to convict Clinton of? The trial made it very clear that he was a real jerk, but that isn't illegal. The dress proved that he had sex with an intern, who was very clear that it was consensual. The trial going on was a sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones, and (a) she never presented evidence that what Clinton did was illegal, and (b) whether Clinton had consensual sex with Lewinski was irrelevant to a sexual harassment trial.
He is allowed to defend himself against violations of the Espionage Act. He might not be allowed to bring things into the trial that have no legal relevance.
Snowden would be convicted in a perfectly fair trial. There's no doubt about his commission of crimes. There's really no point in having a trial.
I want the guy pardoned, which is the proper way to deal with someone who broke the law for very good reasons.
Suppose I had a right to use force against you for a non-lethal threat, and I wound up doing something I shouldn't and killed you. I'd get convicted of murder. The police have a duty to not kill people when they don't have to.
You provided some cites from reputable sources, but not ones that are listed as saying anything against the ACLU.
If the ACLU was left-wing, why did it defend the right of neo-Nazis to have a parade in an area where they'd offend as many people as deeply as possible (Skokie, Illinoise)?
You apparently don't understand what Apple has been offering, and prefer to blame it on "wannabe hipsters". There's really not enough wannabe hipsters around to provide Apple with all that revenue, guy. The reasons Apple has been so successful tend not to appeal to the techie crowd, and so they tend to discount them.
Apple has been providing ease of use, excellent customer service, style, and reliability for a long time, and charging accordingly. You probably don't care about style, don't care much about ease of use, and don't use Apple stuff enough to see their customer service and general reliability (these are statistical in nature and have been documented, so I'm not interested in anecdotes to the contrary).
If somebody thinks I'm being sexist or racist, they can sue me. Really, they can. We have laws they can sue me under. We have government agencies they can contact to help them out. The fact that nobody is suing Apple indicates to me that Apple is not a sexist or racist employer.
Ever been in a situation where you were sure you were being discriminated against for illegal reasons? I have. It's difficult to prove these things, even on the lesser "preponderance of the evidence" basis of civil law. It's expensive and stressful and time-consuming to file suit, the outcome is uncertain unless the discrimination is stupidly overt and in written form, and the likely rewards are often not worth it.
If someone goes through the government agencies, it's still an uphill battle, and you're probably not going to hear of the outcome. Lawsuits are public; out-of-court settlements aren't, and frequently come with agreements not to say anything about them.
By watching for lawsuits, you won't find the employers that are somewhat sexist and racist, only those who are really flagrant in their illegal discrimination.
I mean, do you do this with your group of friends?
How about colleagues?
I once worked with a young, blonde, cute, small woman. I realized once, during a larger conversation, that I was automatically discounting her views on the technical issues because of that (and she was also competent). I compensated by deliberately paying a little more attention to what she was saying when she said something. In other words, I discriminated in her favor when she spoke.
Obviously, I'm not perfect, and and am not at a point where I automatically treat people like equals. Given that, I think it worked better to pay attention to her specially to even things out. I continue to do the same with other small and cute women, and I believe it has worked to everyone's advantage.
Unless and until we arrive at a society where everyone is judged on their character and abilities, treating people unequally based on other characteristics can be beneficial. In a case where a group of people is likely to be similar in characteristics that don't really matter (like white males), it can be useful to deliberately try to include people who look different. It gives the others a better chance than they would have, it accustoms people to more diverse groups, and it increases the chances of finding good people, if done right.
"We don't have the tech" is true, but a completely useless observation when it comes to predicting the future. "We probably won't last long enough", even if true, doesn't justify saying "we will never". "Business certainly isn't going to do it" is arguable, but there are other ways to do things than wait for private industry to get around to them.
If I say "we might last long enough to get the necessary tech going with a lot of government assistance", I'm being completely consistent with what you just said, and that contradicts your earlier "not going to happen".
Who said anything about disregarding future benefits? My point is to use near returns as a proxy for those distant benefits. If you're not generating near future benefits, you're probably not generate far future benefits either.
And here is where I completely disagree with you. Near-term benefits are absolutely not a proxy for far-future benefits. By your reasoning, nobody would do basic research, and that would, sometime down the line, cripple applied research. Things we found out about the Universe decades and centuries ago enable us to figure how to direct applied research, and suggest ways to accomplish things. Quantum mechanics looked absolutely useless when we researched it initially, and lots of the stuff we use nowadays wouldn't have been developed yet without a good understanding of QM.
There's a way of looking at things I decided on long ago: when a person does something you think dumb or wrong, assume that there's reasons and try to figure out what they are. (They will often turn out not to be good reasons.) You'll figure out a lot of interesting things that way.
Instead, you see Apple customers doing things you wouldn't do, and rather than ask yourself why they do these things.you just attribute it to some vague Apple cult, whose members rationalize things you don't like. You'll understand more if you at least try to figure out why Apple is successful rather than attributing it to magic, just like scientists figure out more by trying to find out how things happen rather than just attributing things to God.
First, you're falling for the "employer contribution" scam. I defined taxes as payroll money that is legally required to be sent to governments. If I hire someone, I have to consider my contribution as part of the payroll. Were it not for the employer contribution, I could pay my employee more.
Second, you're overgeneralizing. There are some circumstances under which someone effectively pays negative income tax, and receives money, but many don't, and I don't know that it offsets the payroll taxes.
Third, poor people pay taxes other than payroll taxes, such as sales taxes and (typically indirectly) real estate taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPhone 4 antenna issue was real, and the design was stupid, but too much was made of it. From what I could tell, it affected different phones in different ways. Mine would lose a little signal if I licked my finger and put it on the join, and others apparently were much more affected. The first announcement was based on one of three iPhones. There were other phones that could have their signal degraded depending on how the user was holding them, and in fact the way I normally held mine caused no problems.
The US Constitution doesn't claim that; that's the Declaration of Independence, which is a piece of rhetoric critical in the founding of the US that has no legal significance.
So, because one industry pulled a scam on science, all science must be a scam? And that random blogs should be trusted over almost all scientists in the field all over the world?
I'm going to suggest that neutral to irritating is the norm for operating systems. I didn't find one I actually liked until I got a Macintosh, and then again when I started using Unix.
Apple took PARC design elements and made a much better UI out of them. They paid PARC in Apple stock, which PARC them sold. Microsoft made an agreement with Apple to use their GUI design elements, and made a much worse interface (which they proceeded to improve slowly). When Apple tried suing Microsoft for their GUIs, it turned out Microsoft had a right to almost everything they were using.
It's an exaggeration, of course, but Microsoft hasn't done much successful innovation over the past 10-15 years..
By 1996, Microsoft had introduced its serious OS (NT) and its mediocre copy of the Macintosh UI. It was actually doing good work with Internet Explorer, which was a quality product back then, and improving Office. Sometime around then, they produced WinCE. They started moving into the tablet and PDA and phone business. Overall, they seemed to be doing pretty well.
Their tablets were expensive and awkward, extremely useful to a few people and pointless to most. They never caught on. Their PDAs and phones did reasonably well, and in 2007 Microsoft was strong in the smartphone market. They developed Internet Explorer into the very successful IE 6. And, then, they started failing.
Microsoft then just wandered off and got lost. They'd produced the best browser around, and just sat on it without trying to continually improve it. They never did get a clue as to how tablets could be successful, and like Blackberry had no idea how to stay in the smartphone business. Their attempts to produce a much more advanced OS than XP floundered, and they wound up cutting back their efforts into something that came out as Vista, which had a great many initial problems. They did well in the non-portable game console market, and in some more enterprisey software, but really didn't do much for the typical Windows user. They never did produce something that gave the users much more than XP did (although later OSes were much improved under the hood). After 7, they dropped their highly successful GUI in order to promote their tablet offerings.
The Surface was innovative, but not all that successful. Part of it was marketing. Not too long after it came out, I walked into a Microsoft store (nice and uncrowded so I could easily poke at everything), and found that my wife, a very intelligent software developer, didn't understand the difference between the Surface and the Surface Pro. The Surface Pro was extremely useful for some people, but not a general success. The Surface was a financial disaster. The much-hyped keyboards were not included in the purchase price, and really weren't that much different from the ones available for Android and the iPad by then. The marketing was thoroughly inept.
Overall, Microsoft has been steadily making itself less relevant. It sacrificed a lot of popularity on the desktop in order to push its doomed mobile offerings, at a time when fewer and fewer people were needing a Windows machine. I see no reason to think it'll ever be successful in the mobile market. It will continue to dominate the desktop/laptop market for the foreseeable future, while that becomes less relevant, much like IBM kept the mainframe market. Microsoft's going to be around and reasonably successful for a long time, but I don't see that it's likely to dominate like it did earlier.
Vista had several big problems.
First, there was the "ready for Vista" program that lied, so many people wound up buying computers that were allegedly ready for Vista but couldn't run the interface.
Second, there was the driver issue, Vista required new drivers, and they were more of a pain to develop. It took a while for peripheral vendors to catch up.
Third, Vista introduced some badly needed security features that made it a real pain to run lots of older software that ignored Microsoft's security guidelines. This was going to happen sometime or other, and it happened with Vista. Eventually, software vendors rewrote their software to run with UAC.
Fourth, there were a lot of bugs that should have been considered show-stoppers when Vista was released or escaped or something.
After a couple of years, people were generally running Vista on machines that could handle it, the drivers were in place, third-party software was becoming usable with UAC, and Microsoft had fixed a lot of things. It became almost as good as 7 near the end.
If the intelligence agency has physical possession of something, they're almost certainly going to be able to open and read it. They've put a lot of work into that over the years.
If the agency doesn't have physical possession, I'd suspect that using this technique requires too much equipment and time to be practical.
The obvious use is to read things that can't be safely opened, like ancient scrolls and the like.
If I understand the law correctly (IANAL), Yelp isn't liable for what reviews people submit as long as they don't exert any sort of editorial control, aside from things like community standards. If I understand Yelp's actions correctly, Yelp does exert such control, at least when paid for it. I don't see why Yelp shouldn't be held liable for libel that they publish, if they publish at their own discretion.
"Enemy" isn't defined in the Constitution, so it can include countries we haven't declared war on, but currently neither Russia nor China qualifies. I'd say ISIS qualified, but I don't see that Snowden has given ISIS aid or comfort.
In the US, there are two parties that differ significantly from each other, and both frequently win elections. (The Republicans seem intent on self-destruction, but if they succeed there will be another party for what most of the rest of the developed world considers far right.) Presidents are limited to a maximum of ten years in office, which normally translates to two terms, and they all hand over power on schedule. There is no expectation of a ruling family. The US has a court system that has frequently shown its independence.
The US, while far from perfect, is also far from being Russia, China, or North Korea.
Most seriously, near the end of the Reagan administration, in which buying a new infantry rifle was made illegal. I'm not actually pro-gun, but I do get sensitive about Constitutional rights, and I'd like to see that law found unconstitutional.
You're getting the causes mixed up a little.
The Bush administration was not interested in gathering facts and then deciding what to do about Iraq. It was interested in going to war with Iraq and finding facts that supported the decision. The intelligence services did not cause the war.
What was a stained dress supposed to convict Clinton of? The trial made it very clear that he was a real jerk, but that isn't illegal. The dress proved that he had sex with an intern, who was very clear that it was consensual. The trial going on was a sexual harassment suit brought by Paula Jones, and (a) she never presented evidence that what Clinton did was illegal, and (b) whether Clinton had consensual sex with Lewinski was irrelevant to a sexual harassment trial.
He is allowed to defend himself against violations of the Espionage Act. He might not be allowed to bring things into the trial that have no legal relevance.
Snowden would be convicted in a perfectly fair trial. There's no doubt about his commission of crimes. There's really no point in having a trial.
I want the guy pardoned, which is the proper way to deal with someone who broke the law for very good reasons.
Suppose I had a right to use force against you for a non-lethal threat, and I wound up doing something I shouldn't and killed you. I'd get convicted of murder. The police have a duty to not kill people when they don't have to.
You provided some cites from reputable sources, but not ones that are listed as saying anything against the ACLU.
If the ACLU was left-wing, why did it defend the right of neo-Nazis to have a parade in an area where they'd offend as many people as deeply as possible (Skokie, Illinoise)?
Snowden is guilty of felony offenses. That's clear. He'd be convicted in a fair trial. Why he did what he did doesn't matter to these particular laws.
The way to get him legally cleared is not to subvert the law in a courtroom but to issue a pardon.
You apparently don't understand what Apple has been offering, and prefer to blame it on "wannabe hipsters". There's really not enough wannabe hipsters around to provide Apple with all that revenue, guy. The reasons Apple has been so successful tend not to appeal to the techie crowd, and so they tend to discount them.
Apple has been providing ease of use, excellent customer service, style, and reliability for a long time, and charging accordingly. You probably don't care about style, don't care much about ease of use, and don't use Apple stuff enough to see their customer service and general reliability (these are statistical in nature and have been documented, so I'm not interested in anecdotes to the contrary).
Ever been in a situation where you were sure you were being discriminated against for illegal reasons? I have. It's difficult to prove these things, even on the lesser "preponderance of the evidence" basis of civil law. It's expensive and stressful and time-consuming to file suit, the outcome is uncertain unless the discrimination is stupidly overt and in written form, and the likely rewards are often not worth it.
If someone goes through the government agencies, it's still an uphill battle, and you're probably not going to hear of the outcome. Lawsuits are public; out-of-court settlements aren't, and frequently come with agreements not to say anything about them.
By watching for lawsuits, you won't find the employers that are somewhat sexist and racist, only those who are really flagrant in their illegal discrimination.
How about colleagues?
I once worked with a young, blonde, cute, small woman. I realized once, during a larger conversation, that I was automatically discounting her views on the technical issues because of that (and she was also competent). I compensated by deliberately paying a little more attention to what she was saying when she said something. In other words, I discriminated in her favor when she spoke.
Obviously, I'm not perfect, and and am not at a point where I automatically treat people like equals. Given that, I think it worked better to pay attention to her specially to even things out. I continue to do the same with other small and cute women, and I believe it has worked to everyone's advantage.
Unless and until we arrive at a society where everyone is judged on their character and abilities, treating people unequally based on other characteristics can be beneficial. In a case where a group of people is likely to be similar in characteristics that don't really matter (like white males), it can be useful to deliberately try to include people who look different. It gives the others a better chance than they would have, it accustoms people to more diverse groups, and it increases the chances of finding good people, if done right.
"We don't have the tech" is true, but a completely useless observation when it comes to predicting the future. "We probably won't last long enough", even if true, doesn't justify saying "we will never". "Business certainly isn't going to do it" is arguable, but there are other ways to do things than wait for private industry to get around to them.
If I say "we might last long enough to get the necessary tech going with a lot of government assistance", I'm being completely consistent with what you just said, and that contradicts your earlier "not going to happen".
And here is where I completely disagree with you. Near-term benefits are absolutely not a proxy for far-future benefits. By your reasoning, nobody would do basic research, and that would, sometime down the line, cripple applied research. Things we found out about the Universe decades and centuries ago enable us to figure how to direct applied research, and suggest ways to accomplish things. Quantum mechanics looked absolutely useless when we researched it initially, and lots of the stuff we use nowadays wouldn't have been developed yet without a good understanding of QM.
There's a way of looking at things I decided on long ago: when a person does something you think dumb or wrong, assume that there's reasons and try to figure out what they are. (They will often turn out not to be good reasons.) You'll figure out a lot of interesting things that way.
Instead, you see Apple customers doing things you wouldn't do, and rather than ask yourself why they do these things.you just attribute it to some vague Apple cult, whose members rationalize things you don't like. You'll understand more if you at least try to figure out why Apple is successful rather than attributing it to magic, just like scientists figure out more by trying to find out how things happen rather than just attributing things to God.
First, you're falling for the "employer contribution" scam. I defined taxes as payroll money that is legally required to be sent to governments. If I hire someone, I have to consider my contribution as part of the payroll. Were it not for the employer contribution, I could pay my employee more.
Second, you're overgeneralizing. There are some circumstances under which someone effectively pays negative income tax, and receives money, but many don't, and I don't know that it offsets the payroll taxes.
Third, poor people pay taxes other than payroll taxes, such as sales taxes and (typically indirectly) real estate taxes.