You've completely missed my point, and you're also wrong. Money _is_ an abstract idea, with a concrete implementation. There is no currency that has inherent value. The value of the currency comes from our agreement (typically without reflection) to treat it as having value. This is as true of gold as it is of paper money. But even that is not my point. My point is that the context in which these misdeeds occur is one in which we assent to their occurrence without protest. All that is required for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
BTW, the way you withdraw consent is as follows: for ownership of property, you withdraw consent by stealing it. For value of currency, you withdraw consent by refusing to exchange goods for the currency. For spendability of the currency, you withdraw consent by passing and enforcing laws limiting the ways in which currency can be used: for instance, making quid pro quo illegal for politicians. It's not enough to simply pass a law, though. The law has to be accompanied by the will of enough people that it has force. This is what it means to withdraw consent.
Money is a social construct, which exists by consent. So it isn't accurate to say that money will buy anything. The correct statement is that we consent to allow anything to be bought with money. When the problem is restated this way, the logical consequence is inescapable: only as long as we stand by and allow money to buy anything can it in fact buy anything. If we are not happy with a world in which things work this way, all we need to is withdraw our consent in sufficient numbers to effect change. This is the basis for the rule of law.
Yup. The slashdot article and the winbeta article it references don't really unpack this, but this is about Intel's foundry business, not their x86 business. Presumably Intel will be making A5s in their foundry. It would be bizarre for Apple to switch away from the A4/A5 processor line after the investment they've made in it, particularly because there's simply no way the x86 architecture can ever go toe-to-toe with the ARM architecture on power efficiency.
You may find this less comforting when all your bank account information, which is owned by you, not by root, gets scooped off of your computer over the net. Likewise, it's trivial to add startup items; these run with your permissions, so they don't have total control over the machine, but they can still stick around and propogate.
This is true. The next step up from this is restricting what apps can access, which Apple does in iOS and to some degree Google does in Android. I don't see how they'd do this for every MacOS application, but there are plenty of MacOS applications they *could* do this for. It doesn't matter if your C compiler is vulnerable to a stack smash if there's no way for a network attacker to get to it.
Of course, the first thing that popped into my head when I read the line in the article where it says "Canonical doesn't make hardware" was "damn, I wish they would—we need an open source computing platform that's designed that way from the ground up instead if being designed to be locked down, and then hacked open."
No. Captive portal uses DNS- and HTTP-based browser capture to get you to log in. It requires you to install DD-WRT, which is a higher barrier to entry, and it requires you to manage your captive portal. What I'm suggesting with the WPA2 setup is that you just configure a few bits in your router and forget about it. Your SSID indicates that you're "open." The WPA2 enterprise server is managed at a central location, and you don't have to think about it anymore.
If someone abuses your network, the WPA2 enterprise server will have a record of the person accessing your network around the time of the abuse, which provides you with an audit trail in case of litigation. If you manage your own server, you can get this audit trail, but it's a lot of work for just one access point. I can't imagine that very many people would be willing to go to that much trouble.
Also, WPA2 Enterprise is fairly secure. I'm sure a dedicated person could crack it, but it would prevent casual sidejacking, which is a huge win.
The summary fails to point out that the EFF is _not_ talking about leaving access points unencrypted. They're actually talking about new standards, which I think is probably a doomed plan; what they should be talking about is a way to use WPA2 enterprise to provide a common authentication domain. This way you could get people to agree to reasonable terms of use (e.g., I will not pirate software on your network) and also have an audit trail in case someone did do something in violation of these ToS. You'd have a central web site where people register, and then set your access point up to authenticate against the WPA2 server run by that registrar.
Channel surfing is a waste of time that could be better spent on facebook. (Just kidding, sort of.) I have a wife to get me to watch chick flicks, and my dad is pretty good at finding documentaries for me to watch, as are the interwebs. I've seen a lot more really informative and cool stuff online than I ever saw on TV. Did you see this one, about making vacuum tubes by hand? Or this one about making books?
I get much less discreetly biased reporting online (bias is inevitable—it's when someone acts as if they are not biased that you ought to keep both hands on your wallet). Do you remember what it was like to watch the TV news and know with absolute certainty that the idiot reciting the news was reading outright lies with a straight face? I don't have to see that anymore, because I don't watch TV.
The last time I channel surfed to a good documentary was in a hotel near Narita on a layover on the way to Seoul. There was a fantastic program on CNN about a guy who lived for a month with an Ethiopian family, and what it was like for him to be fed by them, but still basically be starving. Never aired on U.S. TV, as far as I know. Another fantastic program where an Australian guy went to North Korea and tried to interview people about the famine that killed three million North Koreans. Again, as far as I know it never aired in the U.S.
So remind me again, why is channel surfing so great?
We aren't streaming-only, but we're streaming plus iTunes plus disc, and we've been doing less and less disc, to the point where I've fairly frequently sent discs back unwatched simply because I decided I wasn't that interested, and there was something better on iTunes or NetFlix. We might be an exceptional case though--we haven't had cable for about ten years, because it was too tempting to channel surf. With on-demand streaming and iTunes, you watch when you decide to watch, rather than being at the mercy of the schedule, which is a *huge* win. Plus, no commercials.
I don't know about *starting* in assembler, but a programmer who isn't somewhat proficient in assembler is going to have a very weird mental model of how programs work. OOP has the same problem--it's not that OOP is bad; it's that if you start out with an OOP language, you don't learn a lot of things that are important to understand. Once you know how the machine works, then you can start studying abstraction. Treating OOP as the only way, or even the best way, to solve any computing problem is going to tend to produce programmers who think everything is a nail. It doesn't mean that there are no nails, nor that students shouldn't learn to swing a hammer.
I'm puzzled. "Argument?" "Bogus?" To whom? If you want a computer that runs MacOS, you buy a Mac. If you don't, you can buy whatever you want, Mac or non-Mac. And you buy the Mac that does what you need, if you buy a Mac. I have a 13" MBP because I do not want the extra weight. I'd have to have a *really good reason* to spend the extra money for a 15" or 17"--not just to show off. My wife just got a 15", because she needs the extra screen real estate. Her backpack weighs a *ton*.
These aren't arguments--they're explanations for why the person making the explanation made the choice they made. You aren't that person, and you might not make the same choice given the same constraints for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean that the person's choice was "bogus," or that their explanation is wrong.
I will admit that I get a little ticked off when my non-geek friends buy Windows machines and then expect me to help them when they melt down, but if you're willing to be responsible for the downsides of your choice, buy what *you* want. Who cares what some guy on Slashdot thinks? If I were a Windows geek I'd probably feel the same way about my friends buying Macs and expecting me to help when they melt down.
Um, traditionally we consume *and* produce. That's how economies work. The tragedy of recent times is that a lot of what's produced is garbage whose only purpose is to justify a salary for a consumer, often while creating a burden on society that is much greater than the salary being paid. But we can't put people on the dole--oh no, that would make them lazy.
I think you're missing the point. It is precisely because of this phenomenon that the idea of using libraries as hackerspaces makes sense. We still need the function that the library provides, even if the medium through which that function is delivered has changed. Growing hackerspaces in public libraries is a way to save them.
As for what publishers want, are we (wo)men or are we mice? If what they want is contrary to the public interest, then this is just more nail in the coffin of traditional publishing, which has in fact been dying out faster than libraries, in case you hadn't noticed.
I have to drive through NH to visit my parents. I obey the speed limit to the exact number, using cruise control, because NH makes most of its revenue from speed traps, because they have no state income tax. The speed limit is frequently much lower than you would expect on a road in another state, because otherwise people wouldn't speed, and there would be no revenue. Live Free or Die, my ass. I'm just glad it's only about twenty minutes of driving.
Bwahahahahahah! As if. There are markets all over Beijing that have so many knock-off goods in them that I have to wonder how they expect to sell them all. Good-looking stuff, too. Trust me, Gucci has not made a dent in the supply with this one bust, and they know it. The point of publicizing the bust is disinformation of some kind. No trademark enforcement body would take this story seriously. Probably the point of the story was to embarrass the Chinese government in hopes of triggering a crackdown, but it'll never happen, because the Chinese people just don't take trademarks seriously. Very sensible of them, if you ask me.
And yes, there are people in China who want to buy real authentic luxury goods. But they would have bought them anyway—there are plenty of stores in Beijing selling real Gucci goods, just down the street from the fakes. If you want real, you go to those stores, not to the knock-off stores.
Sure, except that the "upstart" probably wasn't even aware of BP's patents. BP can be upset all they want about this, but it doesn't make suing them into a smoking cinder beneficial to society. The purpose of patents is to promote science and the useful arts. This is the opposite. It's too bad that's not one of the tests that any patent has to survive when challenged in court.
Untrue. The point of having a non-jailbroken phone is that it won't run software that hasn't been signed. This makes it difficult for viruses or even trojan horses to slip past. For someone who is not qualified to tell the difference between a trojan horse and a legitimate program, this is a very useful feature. For somebody who wants to be able to run their own software on the phone, the ability to jailbreak it is a huge win. Jailbreaking has to be difficult, or the trojan horse will just trick you into doing it ("Install this great new codec so that you can see the porn!"). Microsoft gets to have it both ways here, and it's a very smart move. It's true that they can always try to crack down on jailbreakers in the future, and it's also true that just because Microsoft is cooperating doesn't mean handset makers will also cooperate. But it's a good strategy.
If you want to be really pure, buy a Nexus S, or a SheevaPlug, and install your own kernel and runtime on it.
Slashdot Mirror
You've completely missed my point, and you're also wrong. Money _is_ an abstract idea, with a concrete implementation. There is no currency that has inherent value. The value of the currency comes from our agreement (typically without reflection) to treat it as having value. This is as true of gold as it is of paper money. But even that is not my point. My point is that the context in which these misdeeds occur is one in which we assent to their occurrence without protest. All that is required for evil to triumph is that good people do nothing.
BTW, the way you withdraw consent is as follows: for ownership of property, you withdraw consent by stealing it. For value of currency, you withdraw consent by refusing to exchange goods for the currency. For spendability of the currency, you withdraw consent by passing and enforcing laws limiting the ways in which currency can be used: for instance, making quid pro quo illegal for politicians. It's not enough to simply pass a law, though. The law has to be accompanied by the will of enough people that it has force. This is what it means to withdraw consent.
Money is a social construct, which exists by consent. So it isn't accurate to say that money will buy anything. The correct statement is that we consent to allow anything to be bought with money. When the problem is restated this way, the logical consequence is inescapable: only as long as we stand by and allow money to buy anything can it in fact buy anything. If we are not happy with a world in which things work this way, all we need to is withdraw our consent in sufficient numbers to effect change. This is the basis for the rule of law.
Your machine isn't a Mac?
Yup. The slashdot article and the winbeta article it references don't really unpack this, but this is about Intel's foundry business, not their x86 business. Presumably Intel will be making A5s in their foundry. It would be bizarre for Apple to switch away from the A4/A5 processor line after the investment they've made in it, particularly because there's simply no way the x86 architecture can ever go toe-to-toe with the ARM architecture on power efficiency.
You may find this less comforting when all your bank account information, which is owned by you, not by root, gets scooped off of your computer over the net. Likewise, it's trivial to add startup items; these run with your permissions, so they don't have total control over the machine, but they can still stick around and propogate.
This is true. The next step up from this is restricting what apps can access, which Apple does in iOS and to some degree Google does in Android. I don't see how they'd do this for every MacOS application, but there are plenty of MacOS applications they *could* do this for. It doesn't matter if your C compiler is vulnerable to a stack smash if there's no way for a network attacker to get to it.
Wow, thanks for clearing that up!
Of course, the first thing that popped into my head when I read the line in the article where it says "Canonical doesn't make hardware" was "damn, I wish they would—we need an open source computing platform that's designed that way from the ground up instead if being designed to be locked down, and then hacked open."
No. Captive portal uses DNS- and HTTP-based browser capture to get you to log in. It requires you to install DD-WRT, which is a higher barrier to entry, and it requires you to manage your captive portal. What I'm suggesting with the WPA2 setup is that you just configure a few bits in your router and forget about it. Your SSID indicates that you're "open." The WPA2 enterprise server is managed at a central location, and you don't have to think about it anymore.
If someone abuses your network, the WPA2 enterprise server will have a record of the person accessing your network around the time of the abuse, which provides you with an audit trail in case of litigation. If you manage your own server, you can get this audit trail, but it's a lot of work for just one access point. I can't imagine that very many people would be willing to go to that much trouble.
Also, WPA2 Enterprise is fairly secure. I'm sure a dedicated person could crack it, but it would prevent casual sidejacking, which is a huge win.
The summary fails to point out that the EFF is _not_ talking about leaving access points unencrypted. They're actually talking about new standards, which I think is probably a doomed plan; what they should be talking about is a way to use WPA2 enterprise to provide a common authentication domain. This way you could get people to agree to reasonable terms of use (e.g., I will not pirate software on your network) and also have an audit trail in case someone did do something in violation of these ToS. You'd have a central web site where people register, and then set your access point up to authenticate against the WPA2 server run by that registrar.
Channel surfing is a waste of time that could be better spent on facebook. (Just kidding, sort of.) I have a wife to get me to watch chick flicks, and my dad is pretty good at finding documentaries for me to watch, as are the interwebs. I've seen a lot more really informative and cool stuff online than I ever saw on TV. Did you see this one, about making vacuum tubes by hand? Or this one about making books?
I get much less discreetly biased reporting online (bias is inevitable—it's when someone acts as if they are not biased that you ought to keep both hands on your wallet). Do you remember what it was like to watch the TV news and know with absolute certainty that the idiot reciting the news was reading outright lies with a straight face? I don't have to see that anymore, because I don't watch TV.
The last time I channel surfed to a good documentary was in a hotel near Narita on a layover on the way to Seoul. There was a fantastic program on CNN about a guy who lived for a month with an Ethiopian family, and what it was like for him to be fed by them, but still basically be starving. Never aired on U.S. TV, as far as I know. Another fantastic program where an Australian guy went to North Korea and tried to interview people about the famine that killed three million North Koreans. Again, as far as I know it never aired in the U.S.
So remind me again, why is channel surfing so great?
We aren't streaming-only, but we're streaming plus iTunes plus disc, and we've been doing less and less disc, to the point where I've fairly frequently sent discs back unwatched simply because I decided I wasn't that interested, and there was something better on iTunes or NetFlix. We might be an exceptional case though--we haven't had cable for about ten years, because it was too tempting to channel surf. With on-demand streaming and iTunes, you watch when you decide to watch, rather than being at the mercy of the schedule, which is a *huge* win. Plus, no commercials.
If you factor out the phone subsidy, that's more than AT&T charges. The problem is that with AT&T there's no option to factor out the subsidy.
I don't know about *starting* in assembler, but a programmer who isn't somewhat proficient in assembler is going to have a very weird mental model of how programs work. OOP has the same problem--it's not that OOP is bad; it's that if you start out with an OOP language, you don't learn a lot of things that are important to understand. Once you know how the machine works, then you can start studying abstraction. Treating OOP as the only way, or even the best way, to solve any computing problem is going to tend to produce programmers who think everything is a nail. It doesn't mean that there are no nails, nor that students shouldn't learn to swing a hammer.
Laugh it up, fuzzball!
I'm puzzled. "Argument?" "Bogus?" To whom? If you want a computer that runs MacOS, you buy a Mac. If you don't, you can buy whatever you want, Mac or non-Mac. And you buy the Mac that does what you need, if you buy a Mac. I have a 13" MBP because I do not want the extra weight. I'd have to have a *really good reason* to spend the extra money for a 15" or 17"--not just to show off. My wife just got a 15", because she needs the extra screen real estate. Her backpack weighs a *ton*.
These aren't arguments--they're explanations for why the person making the explanation made the choice they made. You aren't that person, and you might not make the same choice given the same constraints for a variety of reasons, but that doesn't mean that the person's choice was "bogus," or that their explanation is wrong.
I will admit that I get a little ticked off when my non-geek friends buy Windows machines and then expect me to help them when they melt down, but if you're willing to be responsible for the downsides of your choice, buy what *you* want. Who cares what some guy on Slashdot thinks? If I were a Windows geek I'd probably feel the same way about my friends buying Macs and expecting me to help when they melt down.
Advertise asbestos suits.
Um, traditionally we consume *and* produce. That's how economies work. The tragedy of recent times is that a lot of what's produced is garbage whose only purpose is to justify a salary for a consumer, often while creating a burden on society that is much greater than the salary being paid. But we can't put people on the dole--oh no, that would make them lazy.
I think you're missing the point. It is precisely because of this phenomenon that the idea of using libraries as hackerspaces makes sense. We still need the function that the library provides, even if the medium through which that function is delivered has changed. Growing hackerspaces in public libraries is a way to save them.
As for what publishers want, are we (wo)men or are we mice? If what they want is contrary to the public interest, then this is just more nail in the coffin of traditional publishing, which has in fact been dying out faster than libraries, in case you hadn't noticed.
Wow, self-fulfilling prophesy much?
I have to drive through NH to visit my parents. I obey the speed limit to the exact number, using cruise control, because NH makes most of its revenue from speed traps, because they have no state income tax. The speed limit is frequently much lower than you would expect on a road in another state, because otherwise people wouldn't speed, and there would be no revenue. Live Free or Die, my ass. I'm just glad it's only about twenty minutes of driving.
Best. Comment. Evar.
Bwahahahahahah! As if. There are markets all over Beijing that have so many knock-off goods in them that I have to wonder how they expect to sell them all. Good-looking stuff, too. Trust me, Gucci has not made a dent in the supply with this one bust, and they know it. The point of publicizing the bust is disinformation of some kind. No trademark enforcement body would take this story seriously. Probably the point of the story was to embarrass the Chinese government in hopes of triggering a crackdown, but it'll never happen, because the Chinese people just don't take trademarks seriously. Very sensible of them, if you ask me.
And yes, there are people in China who want to buy real authentic luxury goods. But they would have bought them anyway—there are plenty of stores in Beijing selling real Gucci goods, just down the street from the fakes. If you want real, you go to those stores, not to the knock-off stores.
No, this is another moment where Slashdot story editors don't realize that the whole point of this article is to drive advertising hits by trolling.
Sure, except that the "upstart" probably wasn't even aware of BP's patents. BP can be upset all they want about this, but it doesn't make suing them into a smoking cinder beneficial to society. The purpose of patents is to promote science and the useful arts. This is the opposite. It's too bad that's not one of the tests that any patent has to survive when challenged in court.
Untrue. The point of having a non-jailbroken phone is that it won't run software that hasn't been signed. This makes it difficult for viruses or even trojan horses to slip past. For someone who is not qualified to tell the difference between a trojan horse and a legitimate program, this is a very useful feature. For somebody who wants to be able to run their own software on the phone, the ability to jailbreak it is a huge win. Jailbreaking has to be difficult, or the trojan horse will just trick you into doing it ("Install this great new codec so that you can see the porn!"). Microsoft gets to have it both ways here, and it's a very smart move. It's true that they can always try to crack down on jailbreakers in the future, and it's also true that just because Microsoft is cooperating doesn't mean handset makers will also cooperate. But it's a good strategy.
If you want to be really pure, buy a Nexus S, or a SheevaPlug, and install your own kernel and runtime on it.