So what do you do when the retailer is in, say, Canada, but the fulfiller (shipping the book) and the customer (receiving the book) are in the US? You can't get them for customs: they didn't import anything. Nor can you get them for selling things across state lines: they didn't. It was an international sale and an interstate shipping. The tax model for brick and mortar simply doesn't work online: it's too easy to avoid.
Nor does it seem to me that there's any reason to tax interstate sales in this way. Technically, if I buy something in MD (where I work) and take it back to VA (where I live), I should pay a use tax (in addition to the sales tax I would pay when I buy it). Yet the state makes no effort to track such purchases, and depends on the taxpayers to self report. Why is this any different from the online world? Why should there be any attempt to do anything differently than we do for physical goods purchased offline? After all, if you believe that taxation benefits the taxed, then tax cheats are only harming themselves, right?
Tell the airlines and the passengers that they fly at their own risk, and that the government doesn't recommend that they fly due to the hazard.
If people want to fly expensive airplanes through this, and risk their loss without insurance (which I believe would actually prevent this) or government help in paying for the loss, fine. If passengers want to risk their lives this way, fine.
If you think the Congress is powerless to regulate (or even eviscerate) the intelligence community, you should research the Church Commission. You can argue whether Congress is doing a good or a bad job regulating the intelligence agencies, but that they have the power to do so effectively has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.
Your point 1 requires evidence. What unreasonable searches and seizures do you refer to?
Your point 2 is clearly false. There are committees in both the House and Senate whose job is to oversee the intelligence agencies. Note that this... person... did not report to those committees, even anonymously or under the whistleblower protections, but leaked to the media instead.
Your point 3 is covered by Article I Section 8. If you want to make a case that all budgets must be entirely disclosed at some given level of detail, I'd love to hear it.
Also, this is all entirely a red herring. Are you disputing the government's authority to operate clandestine intelligence agencies? If so, I'd love to hear the argument for that, too.
Look, I'm not a fan of large, intrusive governments. I'm especially not a fan of permanent intelligence agencies with sweeping powers (though this applies less to the NSA than to the CIA and other organizations with "direct action" capabilities). But the solution for that is not turning a blind eye while people spill our secrets in wartime. If you don't trust the government to keep secrets, fine, push for laws or amendments that remove that power from them. I'd likely even support you.
As far as this being treason, if indeed the guy disclosed intelligence programs, then he has committed it because he gave aid to the enemy (the overt act of making public information about our operations that enables the enemy to avoid detection). If he admits it, or if his acts are attested to by two witnesses, then he can be convicted for it. (In this case, I'm betting it's the lack of direct witnesses that would prevent a treason charge from sticking.)
The information given is also consistent with leaks to the New York Times that destroyed (hopefully temporarily) our ability to move captured enemies safely, and destroyed (probably permanently) our best tools for intercepting enemy financing, and destroyed one of our best tools for monitoring enemy communications. IIRC, there were some other similar leaks.
Yeah, the government sometimes uses classification to hide embarrassments, and that should be rooted out. But it also uses classification to undertake its constitutionally mandated duties. For the former, leaks are not the answer: whistleblower statutes and notification of congressmen on the intelligence oversight committees are the answer. For the latter, leaks are treason in time of war, though we seem to have discarded the notion of treason lately at least in terms of prosecuting people for it.
It's interesting to listen to the opinions of people against the tea parties. Having been to several (and in fact my wife/kids are going to one on the 15th in DC), those opinions do not in the slightest match up with what I've seen. Yes, there are the Ron Paul people, and yes, there are the socially conservative people with their grotesque anti-abortion signs, and both groups are typically largely ignored. (I've also seen anti-tea party street theater groups trying to disrupt things, and being similarly ignored.) For the most part, though, the people showing up seem to be ordinary middle class folks who just want to be largely left alone. No, we're not as a general rule saying that government needs to go away (it's not an anarchist movement in any sense). We're not even necessarily saying that no new social programs should be added. Instead, the general sentiment is to get the government's house in order, eliminate what doesn't work, stop adding things without considering costs or side effects, stop interfering in everyone's daily lives, and take the Constitution at its word. (If you don't like what it prevents you from doing, amend it rather than ignoring it.)
Hardly the stereotypical image I see here, but then slashdot is hardly a reasonable reflection of reality in any sense.
The shareholder meeting. Simply note that you reported bug # XXXX some months ago, and it has not been acted on. You wouldn't mention it except that it's a security vulnerability that, if disclosed, would tank the share price for the company. So in that light, when will this vulnerability be addressed?
Let everyone else take it from there.
Plus, his response is so wrong as to be not worth rebutting. It has the intellectual depth of a 5 year old's crayon drawings, and about as much relationship to reality. Maybe not quite as much relationship to reality.
Not exactly true. The Flash apps would be compiled down to run on the iPhone platform, with the Flash VM statically linked in. So they wouldn't use native libraries or calls for most things, and would have an additional layer of cruft between the app and the OS. If a tool makes source code compiled to the iPhone using native libs, rather than an app bundle, I suspect the tool won't be disapproved for use on the platform.
Frankly, I think that's a feature. I also think you're wrong: there will always be a need for general purpose computers. It's just a smaller niche than the general purpose computer currently fills.
Oy. I stopped reading Roughly Drafted a while ago. His takes on the history of computing are interesting and informative, but he is the only person whom I actually think of as an Apple fanboy. I hate the term, personally, because it's intellectually dishonest. But I think Daniel Eran Dilger really would defend Apple if they decided to kill of the app store entirely and stop allowing any third-party apps on the iPhone. (Not to mention his continual insults directed at people who aren't progressives.) So no, I didn't go read. But I do suspect that the gist as you reported it is correct: Adobe is terrified and spewing propaganda in desperation. That said, they are terrified for good reason: if Apple succeeds in killing Flash, much of Adobe's revenue stream is gone.
Sorry, but it's pretty clear that he knows a lot more about it than you do. The reason I say this is that your comment is that "[t]hat sounds like it will waste a lot of battery and processor when an app runs in the background without any halting of unnecessary threads." Um, no, if the program doesn't use the APIs to allow it to run selected threads in the background, the app is simply terminated as all apps are now.
I don't weep over this restriction, because I don't think that by and large apps cross-compiled from Flash are going to be that useful. I am assuming in this that Apple only cares that a package is produced from native source (like Unity3D generates) rather than being cross-compiled (as the Flash->iPhone tool does). I doubt Unity3D will be blocked, for that reason. And I suspect that Apple really does have good, solid technical reasons for doing this. Apple may be gleefully sticking it to Adobe, and may even be taking great joy in that, but I don't think that's the root cause of why they're doing this. Ideas about political and business actors that assume a level of evil or stupidity, rather than merely acting in their own best interests, tend to be misperceptions.
We use Documentum. It's excellent but expensive. And no matter what tool you use, proper organization and process are key, to ensure that things do get added, and in a findable place. (Search is useful, but not good enough for all needs.)
Something similar happened to me years ago. A person with my wife's name and who had lived on the same street some years prior had taken out a loan and defaulted on it (among many, many other defaults and legal issues). The lender had sent it to collections. The collections agency called us (presumably looking up name and street), and we told them they had the wrong people. They read off the information we had, and the only thing that matched was the first and last name and the street name. We told them the middle name was wrong (it was X, my wife's is Y) and that the address was wrong (it was 1234, ours was 4321) and so forth. A week later, we had a collections letter at our address with the "corrected" information. We called up the collections company president, and noted the legal trouble he was about to be in if he didn't correct this forthwith (thankfully, we were smart enough not to correct the SSN!), and things got corrected. We no longer give out any PII, and no longer do business over the phone unless we initiate the call. Sad that we had to learn the hard way, but at least it wasn't harder.
Why is it that when the government creates a poor legal system or poor incentives, the solution to fixing that is always put forth as more of what caused it in the first place? Courts are very good at figuring out who defrauded whom and what to do about it. Simply remove government backing for the banks and lenders, and let them compete in the market, and pretty soon the courts and the market will have sorted it out. It's the government's constant thumb on the scale that causes most of these problems; the solution is not to push the thumb down harder.
Well, you have to remember that you and I are not the target audience, and that these are not general-purpose computers. The iPhone and iPod touch are special-purpose devices that are remarkably flexible for what they are. The iPad is an application-running appliance for short-duration interactions and media consumption. The tradeoffs Apple has made have been to make the devices work for those purposes and for the majority of non-technical users. For technical users, or people who want to do other things, well, go find another platform. A lot of the complaining just floors me, being on the order of: My car won't provide a luxury ride while also being a tugboat - waah! I mean, come on, it's just not a general purpose computer, and wishing won't make it so.
Any particular reason that you want to call a significant fraction of the American public cocksuckers? Oh, never mind, I just answered my own question.
Markets are wonderful. Apple won't have to restrict this to pay ads, because the market will refuse to accept for-pay applications with ads. It has in fact already done exactly that. When people started putting ads in for-pay apps (because of Apple's earlier limited ways for developers to earn money from existing users for future app versions), they faced a user revolt, and some never recovered even after they removed the ads.
I have yet to see an expression of press outrage at the acts of the enemy on the same level as their outrage at Abu Ghraib. Even 9/11 faded faster than that; I suppose because there were fewer scalps to be taken among the Republicans. (Disclaimer: I'm not a Republican, but they do get bad treatment by most of the media.) Even the beheading of an American journalist (Daniel Pearl) in Pakistan was the subject of less outrage than when American tanks fired on a hotel with journalists in it (because cameras look like anti-tank launchers, and the tanks were under fire at the time) or this incident shown by Wikileaks (in which Reuters employees - probably stringers - were embedded with the enemy).
Slashdot Mirror
So what do you do when the retailer is in, say, Canada, but the fulfiller (shipping the book) and the customer (receiving the book) are in the US? You can't get them for customs: they didn't import anything. Nor can you get them for selling things across state lines: they didn't. It was an international sale and an interstate shipping. The tax model for brick and mortar simply doesn't work online: it's too easy to avoid. Nor does it seem to me that there's any reason to tax interstate sales in this way. Technically, if I buy something in MD (where I work) and take it back to VA (where I live), I should pay a use tax (in addition to the sales tax I would pay when I buy it). Yet the state makes no effort to track such purchases, and depends on the taxpayers to self report. Why is this any different from the online world? Why should there be any attempt to do anything differently than we do for physical goods purchased offline? After all, if you believe that taxation benefits the taxed, then tax cheats are only harming themselves, right?
Tell the airlines and the passengers that they fly at their own risk, and that the government doesn't recommend that they fly due to the hazard. If people want to fly expensive airplanes through this, and risk their loss without insurance (which I believe would actually prevent this) or government help in paying for the loss, fine. If passengers want to risk their lives this way, fine.
Well, if I were at Oracle, I'd be convinced.
If you think the Congress is powerless to regulate (or even eviscerate) the intelligence community, you should research the Church Commission. You can argue whether Congress is doing a good or a bad job regulating the intelligence agencies, but that they have the power to do so effectively has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt.
Your point 1 requires evidence. What unreasonable searches and seizures do you refer to? Your point 2 is clearly false. There are committees in both the House and Senate whose job is to oversee the intelligence agencies. Note that this ... person ... did not report to those committees, even anonymously or under the whistleblower protections, but leaked to the media instead.
Your point 3 is covered by Article I Section 8. If you want to make a case that all budgets must be entirely disclosed at some given level of detail, I'd love to hear it.
Also, this is all entirely a red herring. Are you disputing the government's authority to operate clandestine intelligence agencies? If so, I'd love to hear the argument for that, too.
Look, I'm not a fan of large, intrusive governments. I'm especially not a fan of permanent intelligence agencies with sweeping powers (though this applies less to the NSA than to the CIA and other organizations with "direct action" capabilities). But the solution for that is not turning a blind eye while people spill our secrets in wartime. If you don't trust the government to keep secrets, fine, push for laws or amendments that remove that power from them. I'd likely even support you.
As far as this being treason, if indeed the guy disclosed intelligence programs, then he has committed it because he gave aid to the enemy (the overt act of making public information about our operations that enables the enemy to avoid detection). If he admits it, or if his acts are attested to by two witnesses, then he can be convicted for it. (In this case, I'm betting it's the lack of direct witnesses that would prevent a treason charge from sticking.)
The information given is also consistent with leaks to the New York Times that destroyed (hopefully temporarily) our ability to move captured enemies safely, and destroyed (probably permanently) our best tools for intercepting enemy financing, and destroyed one of our best tools for monitoring enemy communications. IIRC, there were some other similar leaks. Yeah, the government sometimes uses classification to hide embarrassments, and that should be rooted out. But it also uses classification to undertake its constitutionally mandated duties. For the former, leaks are not the answer: whistleblower statutes and notification of congressmen on the intelligence oversight committees are the answer. For the latter, leaks are treason in time of war, though we seem to have discarded the notion of treason lately at least in terms of prosecuting people for it.
Yup. Not to mention the security theater that is air travel.
At what point did libertarianism mean anarchy? Libertarians are minarchists, not anarchists.
It's interesting to listen to the opinions of people against the tea parties. Having been to several (and in fact my wife/kids are going to one on the 15th in DC), those opinions do not in the slightest match up with what I've seen. Yes, there are the Ron Paul people, and yes, there are the socially conservative people with their grotesque anti-abortion signs, and both groups are typically largely ignored. (I've also seen anti-tea party street theater groups trying to disrupt things, and being similarly ignored.) For the most part, though, the people showing up seem to be ordinary middle class folks who just want to be largely left alone. No, we're not as a general rule saying that government needs to go away (it's not an anarchist movement in any sense). We're not even necessarily saying that no new social programs should be added. Instead, the general sentiment is to get the government's house in order, eliminate what doesn't work, stop adding things without considering costs or side effects, stop interfering in everyone's daily lives, and take the Constitution at its word. (If you don't like what it prevents you from doing, amend it rather than ignoring it.)
Hardly the stereotypical image I see here, but then slashdot is hardly a reasonable reflection of reality in any sense.
The shareholder meeting. Simply note that you reported bug # XXXX some months ago, and it has not been acted on. You wouldn't mention it except that it's a security vulnerability that, if disclosed, would tank the share price for the company. So in that light, when will this vulnerability be addressed? Let everyone else take it from there.
Plus, his response is so wrong as to be not worth rebutting. It has the intellectual depth of a 5 year old's crayon drawings, and about as much relationship to reality. Maybe not quite as much relationship to reality.
Not exactly true. The Flash apps would be compiled down to run on the iPhone platform, with the Flash VM statically linked in. So they wouldn't use native libraries or calls for most things, and would have an additional layer of cruft between the app and the OS. If a tool makes source code compiled to the iPhone using native libs, rather than an app bundle, I suspect the tool won't be disapproved for use on the platform.
Frankly, I think that's a feature. I also think you're wrong: there will always be a need for general purpose computers. It's just a smaller niche than the general purpose computer currently fills.
Oy. I stopped reading Roughly Drafted a while ago. His takes on the history of computing are interesting and informative, but he is the only person whom I actually think of as an Apple fanboy. I hate the term, personally, because it's intellectually dishonest. But I think Daniel Eran Dilger really would defend Apple if they decided to kill of the app store entirely and stop allowing any third-party apps on the iPhone. (Not to mention his continual insults directed at people who aren't progressives.) So no, I didn't go read. But I do suspect that the gist as you reported it is correct: Adobe is terrified and spewing propaganda in desperation. That said, they are terrified for good reason: if Apple succeeds in killing Flash, much of Adobe's revenue stream is gone.
Sorry, but it's pretty clear that he knows a lot more about it than you do. The reason I say this is that your comment is that "[t]hat sounds like it will waste a lot of battery and processor when an app runs in the background without any halting of unnecessary threads." Um, no, if the program doesn't use the APIs to allow it to run selected threads in the background, the app is simply terminated as all apps are now.
I don't weep over this restriction, because I don't think that by and large apps cross-compiled from Flash are going to be that useful. I am assuming in this that Apple only cares that a package is produced from native source (like Unity3D generates) rather than being cross-compiled (as the Flash->iPhone tool does). I doubt Unity3D will be blocked, for that reason. And I suspect that Apple really does have good, solid technical reasons for doing this. Apple may be gleefully sticking it to Adobe, and may even be taking great joy in that, but I don't think that's the root cause of why they're doing this. Ideas about political and business actors that assume a level of evil or stupidity, rather than merely acting in their own best interests, tend to be misperceptions.
We use Documentum. It's excellent but expensive. And no matter what tool you use, proper organization and process are key, to ensure that things do get added, and in a findable place. (Search is useful, but not good enough for all needs.)
Something similar happened to me years ago. A person with my wife's name and who had lived on the same street some years prior had taken out a loan and defaulted on it (among many, many other defaults and legal issues). The lender had sent it to collections. The collections agency called us (presumably looking up name and street), and we told them they had the wrong people. They read off the information we had, and the only thing that matched was the first and last name and the street name. We told them the middle name was wrong (it was X, my wife's is Y) and that the address was wrong (it was 1234, ours was 4321) and so forth. A week later, we had a collections letter at our address with the "corrected" information. We called up the collections company president, and noted the legal trouble he was about to be in if he didn't correct this forthwith (thankfully, we were smart enough not to correct the SSN!), and things got corrected. We no longer give out any PII, and no longer do business over the phone unless we initiate the call. Sad that we had to learn the hard way, but at least it wasn't harder.
Why is it that when the government creates a poor legal system or poor incentives, the solution to fixing that is always put forth as more of what caused it in the first place? Courts are very good at figuring out who defrauded whom and what to do about it. Simply remove government backing for the banks and lenders, and let them compete in the market, and pretty soon the courts and the market will have sorted it out. It's the government's constant thumb on the scale that causes most of these problems; the solution is not to push the thumb down harder.
So are you saying it's ok to rob banks, because that's where the money is kept?
Yes, yes, don't know
Ah, the concern troll finally appears.
Well, you have to remember that you and I are not the target audience, and that these are not general-purpose computers. The iPhone and iPod touch are special-purpose devices that are remarkably flexible for what they are. The iPad is an application-running appliance for short-duration interactions and media consumption. The tradeoffs Apple has made have been to make the devices work for those purposes and for the majority of non-technical users. For technical users, or people who want to do other things, well, go find another platform. A lot of the complaining just floors me, being on the order of: My car won't provide a luxury ride while also being a tugboat - waah! I mean, come on, it's just not a general purpose computer, and wishing won't make it so.
Any particular reason that you want to call a significant fraction of the American public cocksuckers? Oh, never mind, I just answered my own question.
Markets are wonderful. Apple won't have to restrict this to pay ads, because the market will refuse to accept for-pay applications with ads. It has in fact already done exactly that. When people started putting ads in for-pay apps (because of Apple's earlier limited ways for developers to earn money from existing users for future app versions), they faced a user revolt, and some never recovered even after they removed the ads.
I have yet to see an expression of press outrage at the acts of the enemy on the same level as their outrage at Abu Ghraib. Even 9/11 faded faster than that; I suppose because there were fewer scalps to be taken among the Republicans. (Disclaimer: I'm not a Republican, but they do get bad treatment by most of the media.) Even the beheading of an American journalist (Daniel Pearl) in Pakistan was the subject of less outrage than when American tanks fired on a hotel with journalists in it (because cameras look like anti-tank launchers, and the tanks were under fire at the time) or this incident shown by Wikileaks (in which Reuters employees - probably stringers - were embedded with the enemy).