Actually, yes, that's exactly how it should be. The point of the internet (not the web only) is the free exchange of information regardless of which device is in use. It's fine for devices to be locked down and proprietary. But it's not fine for the standards of communication between devices to be locked down and proprietary. If IE breaks the standards, web developers should design their pages to the standards and IE users should suffer: web pages should not be browser-specific. (It's fine if they have special code to handle special cases for certain browsers, but they shouldn't break the page for other browsers in order to attain browser lock-in. MS is famous for this, and Sharepoint still doesn't work right on anything but IE.)
It's actually a variation of the argument between statists and libertarians: libertarians don't care what you do with your own self and property, but do care about the commons. Statists care about what everyone else does with their selves and their property, as well as about the commons. The design of the internet is, in this sense, libertarian: the devices can be anything at all, so long as the protocols and formats are all agreed. Flash is nothing new in this regard; Adobe simply follows the horrid path blazed by REAL.
Hardly. In order for a company to stay in business, they have to make enough profit to invest back into their business to create new products. I mean, look at all the stuff Apple has done that is new and innovative, particularly in the last five years. It takes a lot of money to do that, particularly since for every successful concept that you sink billions into developing, there are dozens of other concepts that you also sink money into but that fail. For a business, unless you are providing a commodity, a small profit margin may as well be a loss.
I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for consumers, though consumers don't seem to mind. I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for developers, though developers still seem to be developing for the platform. But I don't see the meagre profits from the app store, or from video rentals, or similar low-margin operations (possibly, in fact probably, including their music sales) as being reasonable; they strike me as ignorant of how businesses think. Yes, it's all about money with Apple (and every other successful corporation), but for Apple, the money is in the device sales.
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
And honestly, this has been borne out by many platforms. Quick, name successful tablets with high volume sales. As far as I can tell, that's just Apple. Quick, name successful smart phone vendors with high volume sales. Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market, there are basically Apple and RIM (which both tightly control their platforms) and Google (which doesn't). But note that Apple and RIM are hardware vendors, and Google is a software vendor: they have different priorities. We will see which philosophy is preferred by users, but my long-term bet is that Apple and RIM will survive, and any other smart phone vendors will be basically niche market vendors at best.
So I can't really blame Apple for a lot of the decisions they've made, even the ones I disagree with. They are just trying to represent the interests of their shareholders by making a profit, which is their job after all.
Why is it Apple's job to modify their platform to accommodate Flash?
Platform vendors are under no obligation to build a platform that works just like all other platforms so that a particular software vendor doesn't have to rework something that makes money for them (the software vendor). If Adobe can't build Flash to fit within the constraints of the device, then too bad.
You as a consumer can decide to not buy the platform if it doesn't run the applications you want, of course. And if enough people agree with you, I am willing to bet that the platform vendor would either accommodate the application, or be rendered irrelevant in the market.
You need to observe better. Both major parties are fascist on economic matters: nominal private control with extensive government regulation coupled with indirect government policy control of business they deem "critical." Neither party shares the strange racial quirks of the NAZIs, but then again, neither did Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy was on a much lower key than the Germans in that regard.
Both government programs, which are money pits for essentially anything they do. (It's in their nature: there are political benefits to being inefficient.) Plus, the shuttle is not really reusable in the way that, say, an airliner or a ship is. The shuttle needs to be overhauled after every flight, essentially rebuilt. That's where the money pit aspect comes in. I suspect that in a few years, we'll see affordable (at least an order of magnitude less cost per flight) private spacecraft, if the regulatory market doesn't tighten down and kill the market, and that these will be reusables. It simply is not cost effective to throw away the vehicle after one use, and we're past the point where LEO requires a Bugatti equivalent: technology advances.
Bush certainly held the (absolute dollar, not inflation adjusted) record for overspending. Until Obama's first year, where he outspent Bush's 8 years in just his first. The rest of your comment is even less useful, so I'll just leave it at that.
See, that's the thing. It's just real easy to call people names on the Internet, to make up allegations of a theocracy (only about 40% of Republicans are socially conservative, and most of those don't even want anything approaching rule by clerics, or even rule restricted to only Christians) or the even more over-the-top "America's Taliban." It's just childish. All politicians are alike, certainly, though all policies are not. Yet I find about the same amount objectionable in Democratic and Republican policy proposals, and for that matter much objectionable in policies they both agree on. But that doesn't mean I think the Democrats are communists or the Republicans are theocrats. You have to have lived a very culturally sheltered and ideologically isolated life to believe that kind of crap.
But I guess if you want to feel better about yourself, demonizing those who disagree with you is the easier path.
That's true at the Federal level (where the Republicans are in the minority), but not in all states, and certainly not in Florida.
In 2002-2006, with the exception of right around the 9/11 attacks, the Democrats did the same thing, and for the same reason.
What happens on the floor is not debate. It is a series of speeches for the consumption of voters. The actual debates happen in committee rooms as the bills are marked up (not written; that happens sans debate) and in the halls as favors and votes are traded. This seems to be true of every legislative body in the US above the town hall level.
Hyperbole much? That's like saying that the Democrats would happily send bankers to the gulag for short selling investments, while they short sold investments as well, if they could only get the full-on fascism they are striving so hard for. It's just hyperbole, and it's stupid. Oh, it's Slashdot; business as usual: carry on.
Um, how is it that we expect defendants to know the entirety of the law (ignorantia legis nemenem excusat), but not jurors?
But that said, I think it's right to seal the earlier records during the trial; the jurors have to decide based on what is presented: they are not investigators.
The thing that people seem to forget is that these trial procedures are what they are for a very good reason. People have been trying to break the trial system in their favor for hundreds of years, and the procedures we use have been evolved to prevent those problems.
I really don't mind ads on web pages, per se. The ad supported model is reasonable. Yet, I find that there are numerous web pages I won't read because of their ads, and eventually I installed ClickToFlash to get rid of the worst of it. Here's what ticks me off:
Ads that pop up in the middle of text whenever my mouse moves across the text (not even hovering, just moving across). This interferes with my reading the text, which is why I'm there.
Short web articles broken into two or three pages to increase the number of ad impressions. This is inconvenient and annoying.
Ads that play music automatically. Sound is particularly annoying at work, because it disturbs my coworkers. It can also be annoying at home, because it's unexpected.
Ads that involve motion. It's very distracting, because the human eye is drawn to motion. For the advertiser, of course, that's the point. But I didn't come for the ads, but for the content, and sites that using moving ads don't get much of my return views.
Movies with sound are the devil's spawn, combining both of the previous points.
If websites cannot find a way to stay in business without the annoying kinds of ads, then they need to find a new business model. This is not my problem, it is theirs. Or yours, as the case may be.
There was a news story just last week, IIRC, about exactly that. Someone who used to work at Google using his gmail account for official business for the administration, I think. Too lazy to look up the details, though, so no "informative" mods for me.
It's so easy. All we have to do is give up our remaining freedom (because it would require a police state to protect us from this form of terrorism), and problem solved.
I think we've been making a bit of a mistake in Afghanistan, in that we haven't done a good job of laying out why we're there (that is, keeping it from being a place where our enemies plan and train against us), and haven't closed down the enemy's sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. But I don't think it's reasonable to treat this as something we can just wall off. That was true before WWII. It's not true now.
Extraordinarily good comment, needing only one clarification. The last two decades were like that, with the collapse of the internet bubble leaving government trying to prop up the economy to unsustainable levels of growth by creating the housing bubble. My guess is that the next decade will either be like that (with a health care bubble instead) or we'll see a crash as spending passes the level where we can be trusted to pay back our accumulating public debt. The government is not into letting us down easy, either because they think that the can can be forever kicked down the road, or because they're idiots, or because they are mendacious. I suspect it's a combination of the first two, with only a tiny bit of the latter thrown in.
Firing a government employee is extraordinarily hard. Part of this is deliberate, in that prior to the civil service system, Presidents had too much power over hiring and firing, and the result was an increasingly partisan government in the theoretically non-political parts of the government (like passport issuance and the post office). The more nefarious part is that government workers are nearly universally unionized, and the unions have pushed for increasingly difficult procedures, and drawn out reviews, and other impediments to make it nearly impossible to fire an incompetent person. As a result, if you are a government manager, you can be put through hell for potentially years to fire a goof off, or you can let him goof off and hire a replacement for a newly "necessary" position (bonus! bigger budget = more bureaucratic power), or you can transfer him to some useless work (where you know he'll goof off, but not do active harm by it) if you can't get the budget request approved.
Well, yes. When you have a tool that is easily abused, you redesign it to be less easily abused. The Internet is far, far past its optimal expiration life and design use cases, kept alive by the cost of replacing it with something better. The evidence for the Internet being past its optimal life is the prevalence of spam, malware and botnets. While no system can be completely secure, it's possible (via non-deniability if you're feeling big brotherish, or webs of trust if you're feeling libertarian, and packet signing regardless of which way you're feeling) to make the internet far more secure than it is.
No one who has studied warfare doubts the French soldiers. The French leaders, on the other hand, tend to be panic-stricken, egotistical and unwilling to believe the reality in front of them. Which is why France has the reputation for surrender that it does: it's not the soldiers, but the leaders, who fall apart.
But your survivors would own an airline.
Yes, there are risks to people on the ground when airplanes fly over. Civil courts will remove or minimize that risk very quickly if governments stop protecting airlines from civil liability for air crashes.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, yes, that's exactly how it should be. The point of the internet (not the web only) is the free exchange of information regardless of which device is in use. It's fine for devices to be locked down and proprietary. But it's not fine for the standards of communication between devices to be locked down and proprietary. If IE breaks the standards, web developers should design their pages to the standards and IE users should suffer: web pages should not be browser-specific. (It's fine if they have special code to handle special cases for certain browsers, but they shouldn't break the page for other browsers in order to attain browser lock-in. MS is famous for this, and Sharepoint still doesn't work right on anything but IE.)
It's actually a variation of the argument between statists and libertarians: libertarians don't care what you do with your own self and property, but do care about the commons. Statists care about what everyone else does with their selves and their property, as well as about the commons. The design of the internet is, in this sense, libertarian: the devices can be anything at all, so long as the protocols and formats are all agreed. Flash is nothing new in this regard; Adobe simply follows the horrid path blazed by REAL.
Hardly. In order for a company to stay in business, they have to make enough profit to invest back into their business to create new products. I mean, look at all the stuff Apple has done that is new and innovative, particularly in the last five years. It takes a lot of money to do that, particularly since for every successful concept that you sink billions into developing, there are dozens of other concepts that you also sink money into but that fail. For a business, unless you are providing a commodity, a small profit margin may as well be a loss.
I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for consumers, though consumers don't seem to mind. I can buy a lot of arguments about what Apple is doing being bad for developers, though developers still seem to be developing for the platform. But I don't see the meagre profits from the app store, or from video rentals, or similar low-margin operations (possibly, in fact probably, including their music sales) as being reasonable; they strike me as ignorant of how businesses think. Yes, it's all about money with Apple (and every other successful corporation), but for Apple, the money is in the device sales.
Let me expand that a bit. Apple sells digital music because an easy source of high-quality music that requires little thought to access leads to more sales of music which leads to more sales of music players, which Apple manufactures and gets a high margin on. If Apple could sell enough more music players to pay for the costs of hosting the songs just by giving away the songs, they would probably do it. The problem is that if the songs are all free, then Apple's costs go up (both hosting/bandwidth costs and the costs of royalties to the music companies) astronomically, so it's probably not possible to make more profit on music players from giving away music than from selling it at a nominal cost. If Apple could make more money giving away videos than selling them, they probably would for the same reason. And so on.
So why does Apple so tightly control the app store? Why is it that they want to ensure that apps are not crashing, or even worse crashing the device? Why is it that they want to ensure that applications are not poor performers, or that they don't drain the battery of the device? Why were they so long in allowing multi-tasking, and even then only allowing it in very restricted contexts? Quite simply, if apps for the platform were to do these things, then the ordinary, unsophisticated user would blame the platform rather than the software vendor for the crashes and performance problems they experience. This already happens on PCs: Microsoft gets blamed for badly written third party device drivers, poor third party software and the like. And if users start seeing the platform as poorly performing and underpowered and crash-prone, Apple would sell fewer of those devices and would make less money.
And honestly, this has been borne out by many platforms. Quick, name successful tablets with high volume sales. As far as I can tell, that's just Apple. Quick, name successful smart phone vendors with high volume sales. Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market, there are basically Apple and RIM (which both tightly control their platforms) and Google (which doesn't). But note that Apple and RIM are hardware vendors, and Google is a software vendor: they have different priorities. We will see which philosophy is preferred by users, but my long-term bet is that Apple and RIM will survive, and any other smart phone vendors will be basically niche market vendors at best.
So I can't really blame Apple for a lot of the decisions they've made, even the ones I disagree with. They are just trying to represent the interests of their shareholders by making a profit, which is their job after all.
Why is it Apple's job to modify their platform to accommodate Flash?
Platform vendors are under no obligation to build a platform that works just like all other platforms so that a particular software vendor doesn't have to rework something that makes money for them (the software vendor). If Adobe can't build Flash to fit within the constraints of the device, then too bad.
You as a consumer can decide to not buy the platform if it doesn't run the applications you want, of course. And if enough people agree with you, I am willing to bet that the platform vendor would either accommodate the application, or be rendered irrelevant in the market.
You need to observe better. Both major parties are fascist on economic matters: nominal private control with extensive government regulation coupled with indirect government policy control of business they deem "critical." Neither party shares the strange racial quirks of the NAZIs, but then again, neither did Franco's Spain, and Mussolini's Italy was on a much lower key than the Germans in that regard.
Both government programs, which are money pits for essentially anything they do. (It's in their nature: there are political benefits to being inefficient.) Plus, the shuttle is not really reusable in the way that, say, an airliner or a ship is. The shuttle needs to be overhauled after every flight, essentially rebuilt. That's where the money pit aspect comes in. I suspect that in a few years, we'll see affordable (at least an order of magnitude less cost per flight) private spacecraft, if the regulatory market doesn't tighten down and kill the market, and that these will be reusables. It simply is not cost effective to throw away the vehicle after one use, and we're past the point where LEO requires a Bugatti equivalent: technology advances.
Bush certainly held the (absolute dollar, not inflation adjusted) record for overspending. Until Obama's first year, where he outspent Bush's 8 years in just his first. The rest of your comment is even less useful, so I'll just leave it at that.
See, that's the thing. It's just real easy to call people names on the Internet, to make up allegations of a theocracy (only about 40% of Republicans are socially conservative, and most of those don't even want anything approaching rule by clerics, or even rule restricted to only Christians) or the even more over-the-top "America's Taliban." It's just childish. All politicians are alike, certainly, though all policies are not. Yet I find about the same amount objectionable in Democratic and Republican policy proposals, and for that matter much objectionable in policies they both agree on. But that doesn't mean I think the Democrats are communists or the Republicans are theocrats. You have to have lived a very culturally sheltered and ideologically isolated life to believe that kind of crap. But I guess if you want to feel better about yourself, demonizing those who disagree with you is the easier path.
That's true at the Federal level (where the Republicans are in the minority), but not in all states, and certainly not in Florida. In 2002-2006, with the exception of right around the 9/11 attacks, the Democrats did the same thing, and for the same reason.
What happens on the floor is not debate. It is a series of speeches for the consumption of voters. The actual debates happen in committee rooms as the bills are marked up (not written; that happens sans debate) and in the halls as favors and votes are traded. This seems to be true of every legislative body in the US above the town hall level.
Hyperbole much? That's like saying that the Democrats would happily send bankers to the gulag for short selling investments, while they short sold investments as well, if they could only get the full-on fascism they are striving so hard for. It's just hyperbole, and it's stupid. Oh, it's Slashdot; business as usual: carry on.
Um, how is it that we expect defendants to know the entirety of the law (ignorantia legis nemenem excusat), but not jurors? But that said, I think it's right to seal the earlier records during the trial; the jurors have to decide based on what is presented: they are not investigators. The thing that people seem to forget is that these trial procedures are what they are for a very good reason. People have been trying to break the trial system in their favor for hundreds of years, and the procedures we use have been evolved to prevent those problems.
I really don't mind ads on web pages, per se. The ad supported model is reasonable. Yet, I find that there are numerous web pages I won't read because of their ads, and eventually I installed ClickToFlash to get rid of the worst of it. Here's what ticks me off:
If websites cannot find a way to stay in business without the annoying kinds of ads, then they need to find a new business model. This is not my problem, it is theirs. Or yours, as the case may be.
First, we take OWA; then we take SharePoint.
There was a news story just last week, IIRC, about exactly that. Someone who used to work at Google using his gmail account for official business for the administration, I think. Too lazy to look up the details, though, so no "informative" mods for me.
Flash is a standard.
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
It's so easy. All we have to do is give up our remaining freedom (because it would require a police state to protect us from this form of terrorism), and problem solved. I think we've been making a bit of a mistake in Afghanistan, in that we haven't done a good job of laying out why we're there (that is, keeping it from being a place where our enemies plan and train against us), and haven't closed down the enemy's sanctuaries in neighboring Pakistan. But I don't think it's reasonable to treat this as something we can just wall off. That was true before WWII. It's not true now.
Are you making a phone call or miming being stuck in a box?
Extraordinarily good comment, needing only one clarification. The last two decades were like that, with the collapse of the internet bubble leaving government trying to prop up the economy to unsustainable levels of growth by creating the housing bubble. My guess is that the next decade will either be like that (with a health care bubble instead) or we'll see a crash as spending passes the level where we can be trusted to pay back our accumulating public debt. The government is not into letting us down easy, either because they think that the can can be forever kicked down the road, or because they're idiots, or because they are mendacious. I suspect it's a combination of the first two, with only a tiny bit of the latter thrown in.
Firing a government employee is extraordinarily hard. Part of this is deliberate, in that prior to the civil service system, Presidents had too much power over hiring and firing, and the result was an increasingly partisan government in the theoretically non-political parts of the government (like passport issuance and the post office). The more nefarious part is that government workers are nearly universally unionized, and the unions have pushed for increasingly difficult procedures, and drawn out reviews, and other impediments to make it nearly impossible to fire an incompetent person. As a result, if you are a government manager, you can be put through hell for potentially years to fire a goof off, or you can let him goof off and hire a replacement for a newly "necessary" position (bonus! bigger budget = more bureaucratic power), or you can transfer him to some useless work (where you know he'll goof off, but not do active harm by it) if you can't get the budget request approved.
I'm sure they'll do just fine managing the health care system.
Well, yes. When you have a tool that is easily abused, you redesign it to be less easily abused. The Internet is far, far past its optimal expiration life and design use cases, kept alive by the cost of replacing it with something better. The evidence for the Internet being past its optimal life is the prevalence of spam, malware and botnets. While no system can be completely secure, it's possible (via non-deniability if you're feeling big brotherish, or webs of trust if you're feeling libertarian, and packet signing regardless of which way you're feeling) to make the internet far more secure than it is.
Not to rain on your partisan parade, but much of IT staff for the WH now were also here in the prior administration.
Did we surrender Drupal to Canada? I seem to have not had any interest in RTFA, but that still sounds like a bit of a stretch.
No one who has studied warfare doubts the French soldiers. The French leaders, on the other hand, tend to be panic-stricken, egotistical and unwilling to believe the reality in front of them. Which is why France has the reputation for surrender that it does: it's not the soldiers, but the leaders, who fall apart.
But your survivors would own an airline. Yes, there are risks to people on the ground when airplanes fly over. Civil courts will remove or minimize that risk very quickly if governments stop protecting airlines from civil liability for air crashes.