Not random at all... the app violates the donation prohibition in their store. Apps that solicit donations must be free, and this app promises a donation of $1 for each $1.99 purchase.
Now, that prohibition might be a different reason to hate Apple, but they aren't necessarily going after Wikileaks.
You'll always have food stores, clothing retailers, and appliance shops. Workmen will always need building supplies. Amazon is the new Sears catalog - the difference being that a web site is a lot cheaper to run than sending out a huge catalog to every address in the US, then staffing a huge call center to take the orders. And their business is not as easily eroded by boutiques like LL Bean - Sears got crushed by leaner specialty catalogs, Amazon can add a specialty section for very little additional cost.
But Amazon will not kill your local retailers - people still like fresh vegetables and want to try on clothes. Appliances need to be repaired and are heavy to ship. People need drug stores and their requisite Hallmark section. And of course, people like their restaurants and ice cream.
Exactly, I just willingly paid $50 more at a brick-and-mortar plumbing supply place for a specific toilet that was cheaper online. For one thing, I could go over and pick it up immediately, and for another, I didn't have to deal with having a delicate thing shipped to me.
He just made a joke - not only can you turn off the iPhone, but you can disable GPS and WiFi while it is on. I don't have one, but my Mom turns off GPS and WiFi for battery life.
Think about it... how could you get on an airplane if you couldn't turn it off?
That's partly true... I mean, we aren't really seeing limits where analog loses points. Like, they need to filter that noise out, which will require more than just reprogramming the DSP. What kind of safety limits does it have built-in? Does it change behavior when it heats up or cools down? Do you have to use trim pots every time you go to use it?
And I'm not really sure why Google would even want to compete with it.
It's a locked-down internet device. Not only can you get content without searching the wider web, but Apple even gets all of the ad revenue. Google wants you to think "Web!" when you want a book, movie, or song. Not the iBook store or iTunes... Google has zero chance to get a cut that way. Even the weather can be fetched without a single Adword visit.:)
This is true. However, I bought it with the full knowledge of what I was getting into. I don't have a smartphone, but I do have an iPod Touch. I had no need for jailbreaking, so I don't really care that the device is locked down.
Would I rather that Apple didn't lock the device down? Sure. But until a competent competitor comes around, they are the best in town and worth the trade-off. If someone made a polished Android media player, maybe I would buy that instead. There's an Archos device that you can hack (jailbreak?) to get to the Android store, but the touch screen is resistive so it can't compete. I also found the video playback confusing - apparently you have to pay extra for some codecs? Anyway, it seemed inferior.
This meshes with research I've seen where they've found a correlation between finger length and female homosexuality. A separate study found a correlation between womb testosterone levels and finger length... hmmmm...:)
And now there's this study showing a correlation between finger length and prostate cancer risk... so, yeah, womb conditions are certainly important.
I don't think we understand the causes enough to say that. For instance, if male homosexuality is caused by a gene that gives heterosexual females a reproductive advantage, then it will never go away unless we outlaw daughters. Maybe that's what they are up to in China?
to achieve its goals (instilling fear in the target population).
That is not the "goal" of terrorism - that is the method. The goals of specific terrorists are varied, but most of the current crop simply want us out of the Middle East.
I'm not willing to allow my civil rights, guaranteed by the Constitution, become null-and-void so an already insignificant risk can be further minimalized.
What civil rights? The TSA is working within a framework laid down by the Supreme Court in the 60s (search) and possibly the 70s (expectation of privacy). If you are arguing that your civil rights are being infringed, then they died 50 years ago - not because a scanner can see you naked at the airport.
What you are advocating is a search for perfect security.
No. If I were after that, I'd advocate the 45-minute per passenger invasive-as-all-hell Israeli style security. I've been through that, and it sucks way more than any scanner.
I'm after a reasonable balance. The difference is that I think that this "security theater" has a valuable deterrent effect which is hard to quantify. Maybe they should have a no-security flight per day for all you civil liberties types - then we could get some hard numbers.
Why should I need to know whether Dolphin (I'll leave out Plasma, since it's functionality is so KDE-specific) is a KDE app?
It's not so much that you need to know that it is with KDE, but what it does at all! Why didn't they go with the Navigator/Explorer/Safari theme? And let's not get into "Calligra"... MS uses "Word", Apple uses "Pages" - I mean, what the hell? Why are all of their apps named like club drugs?
Copying files is as natural to this generation as listening to the radio was in the past.
I don't even think it is that generational in nature. I remind older people that making a copy of a tape, CD, or LP and then giving that to a friend is illegal, too. Sometimes they know but don't care, and sometimes they are simply floored. I've never met someone who hasn't copied music or received copied music illegally in some fashion.
Hell, I made a photo DVD with background music from my iTunes library and gave it to my grandfather. That's illegal.:)
When a law is this absurd, it really needs reform.
I happen to agree, but others would not. It rather depends on your ideology. Agree or not, the entire premise of the US government is based on the existence of the natural right to "Life", "Liberty", and the "Pursuit of Happiness". Lots of wiggle room in that last one:)
But we're off track. My point is that copyright is not actually a "right" in the same sense as liberty. Comparing the pretend ownership of a piece of software to the real deprivation of rights that blacks experienced in the US would be insulting if it weren't so naive.
I've had two phones that were awesome in this regard. First was the Motorola V360. I could be in a conference call while walking down 1st Ave in NYC, and no one would hear the street noise - and the volume was loud enough to hear the call. The other is a Sony Ericsson TM560, which is not as loud or noise-proof as the V360, but makes up for it by having a pretty good speaker phone. People often don't know I'm on speaker.
3. Distorts supply and demand and free market economy
I had to kind of chuckle at that... it doesn't distort the "free market" when the government grants you a monopoly over data that is in the free and clear for 95 years?
You are confusing or conflating natural rights with copy "rights". Copyrights are completely artificial and have no basis in morality. They are a government-constructed entity - like a corporation or paper money. The only similarity to civil "rights" is that the same word is used for both.
Bottom line, end of the day...if someone is determined enough to die in order to bring down an aircraft, then no amount of scanners or pat-downs are going to stop them.
How can you say this? This is simply not true. If you believe this, then the rest of your argument follows very logically.
Our "security theater" has pushed would-be terrorists to try novel and untested methods in order to get around security. Whether Richard Reid failed because he was an idiot or because the device was a dud, it is clear that he would have been successful if it were a simple pipe bomb.
We're standing idly by while our rights are being stripped away
What rights? The definition of "search" isn't even being met, according to a 60s-era Supreme Court decision. If you think you are losing 4th Amendment rights, then you might be right - but you lost this particular battle 50 years ago.
Funny thing, statistics. If Richard Reid and the Christmas bomber had succeeded, your odds would halve been about 1 in 8 million. Still good, but it's amazing how quickly the odds can go to shit.
I have gained nothing
You can either let the odds get greater or you can play cat-and-mouse. What are acceptable odds to you? Isn't that an arbitrary number? Why is your number better than 1:25 million?
Well I certainly don't recommend the back-scatter scanners. Italy dumped them because they don't work.
Now this is an argument I can get behind... If the scanners are no more effective than the metal detectors, then they should go.
In fact anything completely taped to your skin that is mostly thin
Are there any bomb designs so thin? If they can stop an assembled bomb from entering, I'd argue that they add a lot of value.
The TSA is now officially security theater.
This "theater" has value. The pool of people willing to kill themselves for their cause is pretty large, but finite. Now remove the people who pass the pre-screening. Now remove the people who have been unable to find a good bombmaker who can make a metal-free bomb. Already we are down to - apparently - 2 idiots. Now you are whittling down this very shallow pool of people even more by requiring that they smuggle in bomb PARTS and actually assemble a bomb.
I assert that there is value in making a job harder, even if it is still technically possible. You have to find a suicidal ideologue who has not run afoul of authorities and who can somehow be connected with a competent bomb-maker. This person must also now have the intelligence to actually become a bomb-maker as well.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but you've seriously cut down the pool of potential bombers.
I think that if you don't think we need some regulation of the markets after the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, we simply are never going to agree. At my heart I'm a libertarian, but libertarian principles only apply to people - not corporations. Corporations get their charter from the government and are inherently tied to government, and I have no problem regulating them.
Not in the US - that's a British rule. You can recover some legal fees, but it requires a counter-suit and so on. Mr. Nissan seems to indicate that he's spent almost half a million on defense, IIRC.
Again, why not? Your particular sense of fairness? Don't you agree that is kind of arbitrary? Why not make the DNS rules mesh with old established meatspace rules?
For one, that someone has very likely already added value to that domain name
The counter-argument is that Coca-Cola has added immense value to the word "Coke" over the last 100+ years, so allowing someone to call "first" over their hard-earned trademark is not fair.
Trademark is just a form of IP, and I'm not a huge fan of IP in general - but I think that trademarks help consumers on balance.
Slashdot Mirror
Not random at all... the app violates the donation prohibition in their store. Apps that solicit donations must be free, and this app promises a donation of $1 for each $1.99 purchase.
Now, that prohibition might be a different reason to hate Apple, but they aren't necessarily going after Wikileaks.
But thanks to people like you
You'll always have food stores, clothing retailers, and appliance shops. Workmen will always need building supplies. Amazon is the new Sears catalog - the difference being that a web site is a lot cheaper to run than sending out a huge catalog to every address in the US, then staffing a huge call center to take the orders. And their business is not as easily eroded by boutiques like LL Bean - Sears got crushed by leaner specialty catalogs, Amazon can add a specialty section for very little additional cost.
But Amazon will not kill your local retailers - people still like fresh vegetables and want to try on clothes. Appliances need to be repaired and are heavy to ship. People need drug stores and their requisite Hallmark section. And of course, people like their restaurants and ice cream.
The last time I bought a camera, they were within a few pennies of the lowest cost (before tax, natch).
you've got to at least make the same ballpark.
Exactly, I just willingly paid $50 more at a brick-and-mortar plumbing supply place for a specific toilet that was cheaper online. For one thing, I could go over and pick it up immediately, and for another, I didn't have to deal with having a delicate thing shipped to me.
He just made a joke - not only can you turn off the iPhone, but you can disable GPS and WiFi while it is on. I don't have one, but my Mom turns off GPS and WiFi for battery life.
Think about it... how could you get on an airplane if you couldn't turn it off?
That's partly true... I mean, we aren't really seeing limits where analog loses points. Like, they need to filter that noise out, which will require more than just reprogramming the DSP. What kind of safety limits does it have built-in? Does it change behavior when it heats up or cools down? Do you have to use trim pots every time you go to use it?
And I'm not really sure why Google would even want to compete with it.
It's a locked-down internet device. Not only can you get content without searching the wider web, but Apple even gets all of the ad revenue. Google wants you to think "Web!" when you want a book, movie, or song. Not the iBook store or iTunes... Google has zero chance to get a cut that way. Even the weather can be fetched without a single Adword visit. :)
I am buying it by trading my money in exchange.
This is true. However, I bought it with the full knowledge of what I was getting into. I don't have a smartphone, but I do have an iPod Touch. I had no need for jailbreaking, so I don't really care that the device is locked down.
Would I rather that Apple didn't lock the device down? Sure. But until a competent competitor comes around, they are the best in town and worth the trade-off. If someone made a polished Android media player, maybe I would buy that instead. There's an Archos device that you can hack (jailbreak?) to get to the Android store, but the touch screen is resistive so it can't compete. I also found the video playback confusing - apparently you have to pay extra for some codecs? Anyway, it seemed inferior.
And given that you can't turn off
Can't turn it off? Have you ever actually used one of these things?
tracking devices
Crackberries and WinMo had GPS before iPhones, and they also had the ability to run corporate code without hacks.
If your employer wants to track you, they can do it with any current-generation smart phone.
This meshes with research I've seen where they've found a correlation between finger length and female homosexuality. A separate study found a correlation between womb testosterone levels and finger length... hmmmm... :)
And now there's this study showing a correlation between finger length and prostate cancer risk... so, yeah, womb conditions are certainly important.
Isn't the homosexuality trend self-fixing anyway?
I don't think we understand the causes enough to say that. For instance, if male homosexuality is caused by a gene that gives heterosexual females a reproductive advantage, then it will never go away unless we outlaw daughters. Maybe that's what they are up to in China?
They did succeed
I think you know what I meant.
to achieve its goals (instilling fear in the target population).
That is not the "goal" of terrorism - that is the method. The goals of specific terrorists are varied, but most of the current crop simply want us out of the Middle East.
I'm not willing to allow my civil rights, guaranteed by the Constitution, become null-and-void so an already insignificant risk can be further minimalized.
What civil rights? The TSA is working within a framework laid down by the Supreme Court in the 60s (search) and possibly the 70s (expectation of privacy). If you are arguing that your civil rights are being infringed, then they died 50 years ago - not because a scanner can see you naked at the airport.
What you are advocating is a search for perfect security.
No. If I were after that, I'd advocate the 45-minute per passenger invasive-as-all-hell Israeli style security. I've been through that, and it sucks way more than any scanner.
I'm after a reasonable balance. The difference is that I think that this "security theater" has a valuable deterrent effect which is hard to quantify. Maybe they should have a no-security flight per day for all you civil liberties types - then we could get some hard numbers.
Why should I need to know whether Dolphin (I'll leave out Plasma, since it's functionality is so KDE-specific) is a KDE app?
It's not so much that you need to know that it is with KDE, but what it does at all! Why didn't they go with the Navigator/Explorer/Safari theme? And let's not get into "Calligra"... MS uses "Word", Apple uses "Pages" - I mean, what the hell? Why are all of their apps named like club drugs?
Indeed - there is no natural right to property at all.
On the other hand, it is possible to defend one's physical property without a government - not really so with an idea.
Copying files is as natural to this generation as listening to the radio was in the past.
I don't even think it is that generational in nature. I remind older people that making a copy of a tape, CD, or LP and then giving that to a friend is illegal, too. Sometimes they know but don't care, and sometimes they are simply floored. I've never met someone who hasn't copied music or received copied music illegally in some fashion.
Hell, I made a photo DVD with background music from my iTunes library and gave it to my grandfather. That's illegal. :)
When a law is this absurd, it really needs reform.
All rights are social constructs.
I happen to agree, but others would not. It rather depends on your ideology. Agree or not, the entire premise of the US government is based on the existence of the natural right to "Life", "Liberty", and the "Pursuit of Happiness". Lots of wiggle room in that last one :)
But we're off track. My point is that copyright is not actually a "right" in the same sense as liberty. Comparing the pretend ownership of a piece of software to the real deprivation of rights that blacks experienced in the US would be insulting if it weren't so naive.
did the basic things right first
I've had two phones that were awesome in this regard. First was the Motorola V360. I could be in a conference call while walking down 1st Ave in NYC, and no one would hear the street noise - and the volume was loud enough to hear the call. The other is a Sony Ericsson TM560, which is not as loud or noise-proof as the V360, but makes up for it by having a pretty good speaker phone. People often don't know I'm on speaker.
3. Distorts supply and demand and free market economy
I had to kind of chuckle at that... it doesn't distort the "free market" when the government grants you a monopoly over data that is in the free and clear for 95 years?
deprive people of their rights
You are confusing or conflating natural rights with copy "rights". Copyrights are completely artificial and have no basis in morality. They are a government-constructed entity - like a corporation or paper money. The only similarity to civil "rights" is that the same word is used for both.
Bottom line, end of the day...if someone is determined enough to die in order to bring down an aircraft, then no amount of scanners or pat-downs are going to stop them.
How can you say this? This is simply not true. If you believe this, then the rest of your argument follows very logically.
Our "security theater" has pushed would-be terrorists to try novel and untested methods in order to get around security. Whether Richard Reid failed because he was an idiot or because the device was a dud, it is clear that he would have been successful if it were a simple pipe bomb.
We're standing idly by while our rights are being stripped away
What rights? The definition of "search" isn't even being met, according to a 60s-era Supreme Court decision. If you think you are losing 4th Amendment rights, then you might be right - but you lost this particular battle 50 years ago.
I have an approximate 1 in 25,000,000 chance
Funny thing, statistics. If Richard Reid and the Christmas bomber had succeeded, your odds would halve been about 1 in 8 million. Still good, but it's amazing how quickly the odds can go to shit.
I have gained nothing
You can either let the odds get greater or you can play cat-and-mouse. What are acceptable odds to you? Isn't that an arbitrary number? Why is your number better than 1:25 million?
Well I certainly don't recommend the back-scatter scanners. Italy dumped them because they don't work.
Now this is an argument I can get behind... If the scanners are no more effective than the metal detectors, then they should go.
In fact anything completely taped to your skin that is mostly thin
Are there any bomb designs so thin? If they can stop an assembled bomb from entering, I'd argue that they add a lot of value.
The TSA is now officially security theater.
This "theater" has value. The pool of people willing to kill themselves for their cause is pretty large, but finite. Now remove the people who pass the pre-screening. Now remove the people who have been unable to find a good bombmaker who can make a metal-free bomb. Already we are down to - apparently - 2 idiots. Now you are whittling down this very shallow pool of people even more by requiring that they smuggle in bomb PARTS and actually assemble a bomb.
I assert that there is value in making a job harder, even if it is still technically possible. You have to find a suicidal ideologue who has not run afoul of authorities and who can somehow be connected with a competent bomb-maker. This person must also now have the intelligence to actually become a bomb-maker as well.
I'm not saying it won't happen, but you've seriously cut down the pool of potential bombers.
So what should we have done about that?
I think that if you don't think we need some regulation of the markets after the dot-com bubble and the housing bubble, we simply are never going to agree. At my heart I'm a libertarian, but libertarian principles only apply to people - not corporations. Corporations get their charter from the government and are inherently tied to government, and I have no problem regulating them.
because loser pays the winner's legal fees too
Not in the US - that's a British rule. You can recover some legal fees, but it requires a counter-suit and so on. Mr. Nissan seems to indicate that he's spent almost half a million on defense, IIRC.
you cannot simply force someone to give it over.
Again, why not? Your particular sense of fairness? Don't you agree that is kind of arbitrary? Why not make the DNS rules mesh with old established meatspace rules?
For one, that someone has very likely already added value to that domain name
The counter-argument is that Coca-Cola has added immense value to the word "Coke" over the last 100+ years, so allowing someone to call "first" over their hard-earned trademark is not fair.
Trademark is just a form of IP, and I'm not a huge fan of IP in general - but I think that trademarks help consumers on balance.