Since smartphones can do much more than conventional mobile phones, security leaks become much more important. At least, one would expect security updates, if no new funcitonality, for a reasonable amount of time, for the expected lifetime of the device.
Apple could have chosen to keep the 3G on iOS3, but in that case would have been obliged to provide security fixes on both the 4.x and on the 3.x branch.
I know that some vendors, such as sony-ericsson, have been delivering their devices with already outdated versions (of android in this case) and did't provide updates, leaving security holes open already shortly after people purchased the device.
Clearly, there is a hole in the law w.r.t. warranty and consumer protection here. At the moment, a vendor that doesn't care for its public image, would be able to stop providing security updates early, effectively making a smartphone useless right from the start.
Hmm, there are some of us that have never stopped using twm (or ctwm, in my case). I fail to see why I would need a "desktop environment" instead of just a windows manager.
And as we know, all civilizations and empires rise and fall. What will happen when the current civilization goes down with existing nuclear power plants that require decades of cooling.
Even a regional conflict, causing interruptions in power and other supplies, will result in several nuclear power plants melting down, potentially affecting wide regions on earth.
You might be mistaken re. westerners. I feel that in Europe, in various countries (at least Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands) in the past few years the young generation has switched from viewing the US as an ally into viewing it as a threat to the world, potentially even an enemy.
Of course, the US can do what it wants, it is sovereign. But so are we. Don't expect us to take US bribes and threats any longer in the future in order to cooperate with US policies (waging wars, following insane narcotics/drug policies, intellectual property laws).
It is the old generation that is still in power, that (in part) is still following the US dictate. In a few years, this will be over.
And I'm not alone in hoping for an economic downfall into poverty of the US. It may hit us too, but at least the money-bribe-saction bully that the US often is will loose its power.
If this is serious, you're no better than the Iranian conservatives demanding death penalty for protestors and opposition politicians. I don't say he didn't do something illegal that may be punished, but demanding the death penalty is extreme.
Many countries make a distinction between natural persons (i.e. humans) and a legal person (entities, corporations). I have to assume that there must be some distiction between the two in the US too, though it is smaller than elsewhere. If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
I always order my games from amazon.co.uk, since germany, including amazon.de, often has censored versions.
And even though the shipping from amazon.de -> switzerland is free and from amazon.co.uk is not, the prices are so much lower for the game itself that the total price is lower too.
I assume that amazon.co.uk ships to germany as well.
Sometimes a server is gradually degrading due to some issue. During that time, things are being modified. If you learn that the problem started a few months ago, you can't just re-image an old state and loose everything that had changed since then.
Of course to make app servers as stateless as possible helps against this problem. One of the reasons that my company enforces that data are kept on physically separate DB servers, and (virtualized) app server instances should be as dedicated to a single app as possible.
Very sorry for you. And as a result you are only filling and emptying bags for a job? If so, please don't generalize. Maybe this is the case if you consume way too much, and the same could be said about using too much of many other things.
There are many responisble and moderate users however that have good jobs. I know several physicists (being one myself), not really the easiest job in the world, that like to use it recreationally (with moderation).
The medical is not only a scam by the way. Yes many use it as an excuse, which I don't have a problem with since prohibition is absurd and nonsensical anyway. But there are many documented cases of real medical benefits too. Just because some/many people use it as an excuse does not invalidate the truth behind it.
With legalization the price would plummet. Weed is very easy to grow and needs almost no processing. Do you see any cartels smuggling tomatoes? No, because it isn't worthwhile.
Even with a moderate tax it still would be too cheap to smuggle.
With an excessive tax, yes, but only on a small scale comparable to cigarette smuggling
Another government sponsored politically motivated research, if you ask me.
I've seen other studies (haven't go a reference at hand) that claim that THC makes you react less well (quite obvious) and does pose a risk, but the risk was measured to be less than alcohol given a normal dose:
reaction speed deteriorates about the same, but where alcohol users tend to over estimate themselves and drive to fast/dangerously, THC makes you to under estimate yourself and drive relatively slow and careful.
They have test persons either nothing, a standard amount of alcohol and a standard amount of THC and then tested their driving capability.
The study as described above just measures after an accident has happened, which is not a good measurement. There could be other correlations. Just stating that on average 10% of people have THC in their blood, but after an accident it is significantly more, doesn't proof much.
Maybe more accidents happen at night, and maybe at night more people are intoxicated in general (alcohol, THC, whatever)? Or maybe young people cause more accidents (less experienced), and young people also tned to use pot more? Or reckless people both tend to drive more risky and at the same time are more willing to try illegal substances?
Sound statistics and logical thinking are often lacking in politically motivated studies like these. I'd have to see the original study in full to know, but reading the description I have my doubts.
There are people who smoke 1 pack of cigarettes each day, there are those (e.g. my father) who smoke 1/2 cigarette a day.
There are people who drink alcohol all day, there are those who drink a glass of wine with dinner.
There are many pot smokers/eaters/vaporizers that use moderately, e.g. once a day and only in the weekend. And there are those that abuse it and have to suffer negative consequences.
Etc. etc. You can claim this for many activities/substances/food.
Not everyone drinks/smokes to unwind, some just do because it is fun at regular or irregular times, with or without moderation.
Personally I never have to unwind. I love my job and generally have a very pleasant life, which I make even a bit more pleasant at times by vaporizing (not smoking for health reasons) pot. I think the "silent majority" of pot consumers are like this. Of course the abusive users of whatever substance, such as alcoholics or obese people or complete "potheads" stand out more. If you would not know and see normal, social, responsible alcohol users at all, you'd probably also think that all alcohol users overuse and are at least psychologically addicted.
Indeed, and if everyone could grow it, it would be as cheap as tomatoes and noone would ever even want to steal or be interested where it is being grown. Most problems surrounding drugs stem merely from their illegal status, not from the substance itself.
The remaining problems can never be really resolved (personal health effects), but at least partially by regulating and public campaigns to use with care (just like with the legal drugs alcohol & tobacco).
Even if current models and statistics do not yet conclusively proove global warming, it is elementary knowledge that CO2 traps heat; we even have the example of Venus to "proove" this. We also know that mankind is causing CO2 level to rise very rapidly.
You just have to be able to add 1+1 to see we may have a problem here.
Now we do not observe yet hard evidence that global temperatures are rising significantly, but combined with the fact that the sun is going through a quiet fase that in the past caused a little ice age (which er aren't observing yet), I really wonder how stubborn you need to be to not see that we may have two effects here (rising CO2, cooling sun) that are, for the time being, cancelling each other out. If the inactive sun sooner or later returns to "full power", knowing that decreasing CO2 levels may take centuries, Doc Ruby's remark seems only logical.
One can only hope that the USA goes down economically so deep, that they can no longer bully the world to adopt their laws. At the moment the USA threatens with economic sactions and/or military action.
Once the USA is bankrupt, they cannot afford either anymore.
Most law enforcement people, at least the leadership, keep opposing legalization initiatives almost everywhere. Obviously, they fear for budget cuts when this senseless victim-less "crimes" would no longer be an easy target for them.
Yesterday, at a java conference (jazoon in zurich) one of the speakers gave a demo on how to create a domain specific language for an iphone app, implement a parser for this domain specific language (using xtext in eclipse) and a template to generate obj-c code using xpand. Then he generated java targeted for android resulting in both obj-c and java generated from the same domain specific language. I was quite impressed.
Current model driven design tools make it easy to implement your own domain specific language to express your business logic and generate to target different platforms.
As an ex-addict, I'm happy that now I can really "use" coffee when I need it. I.e. usually I don't drink coffee but when I really need to be extra (long) awake, one cup of coffee helps with this again. Formerly, coffee wouldn't keep me awake anymore but not having coffee would cause head-ache.
Still I would be interested to know the long-term effects.
For substances such as THC (cannabis) they keep trying to prove that there are negative long-term effects (until now with not much "success"). I'm sure if they started investigating long-term effects of "legal" substances such as caffeine, they would find some disturbing long-term effects here and there.
Don't think OSX is a particular advantage (on the contrary). I'm still perfectly happy with my 5 year old dell M70. It came with 4 years "next day on site" support which I have needed twice in the 4 years of coverage. Next day someone came at home and fixed my notebook (once a motherboard replacement, once a GPU replacement), and it is very solid and reliable. I have a MBP too (since 2009); for a machine that is almost 4 years newer I'm not too impressed (and I've really come to hate OSX in the meantime, running linux and windows on it now).
No, I would not pay extra for apple anymore. My iphone will be replaced by a google nexus soon (my 12yo daughter can have the iphone).
I can hardly imagine someone buying a mbp just for OSX, and even less putting together a hackintosh.
Being an old time unix/freebsd/linux user I expected, when I bought my mbp in september 2009 that I would be very pleased with OSX due to its unix underpinnings. But I have to say, I like windows even better than OSX in the GUI area (of course not behind the screens, but for daily work that isn't very relevant).
Yes it is nice to have a built-in unix-like command line (no need to install cygwin), but the GUI itself is horrible. In X-window I can use a window manager that I like (usually ctwm) and configure it such that I can do everything using keybindings and hardly ever have to use the mouse. In windows everyting can be done through shortcut keys as well, and efficiently. In the OSX gui you are really depending on the mouse, and many things cannot or only clumsily be done with keyboard shortcuts (e.g. to go to the app menu you have to press ctrl-f2 and then navigate through all entries using arrow keys, you do not have direct accellerators like in X or menu shortcuts like in windows).
So my mbp is dual booting between linux and windows (7 x64) right now, and I just have a small OSX partition just in case and for maintenance purposes.
It is just unacceptable that you need a proprietary plugin for essential functionality on the web, which otherwise is supposed to be open and adhere to published standards.
Just the existence of something like flash takes away pressure to come to truely standardized solutions for whatever functionality is deemed essential. However, do not forget that the web is not supposed to exactly determine how a page looks; the rendering is up to the client and its preferences. Content providers should say goodbye to the idea of total control on the detailed looks (otherwise you might even move to a web that consists only of PDF pages, what a horror that would be).
I am sure that, once flash is dead, there will be enough incentive to come to open standards for whatever functionality is lacking. Just like happened with the rest of w3c standards. The only real saboteur was microsoft which has refused to adhere to standards for strategic reasons. Now that they have lost their dominance, they can no longer afford to do this.
I think it is good to have someone who provides a clear and unambiguous opinion on these matters; and he has been proven right over and over again. In practice and for most people, a more moderate view is more appropriate; but without Stallman most of us wouldn't even realize what the real problem is.
Your reply w.r.t. neanderthals apparently assumes that neanderthals had lower intelligence.
This is not true, or at least not proven. Just google "neanderthal intelligence" and you'll see many references that believe that neanderthals had higher or at least equal intelligence than homo sapiens. Also they interbred with homo sapience (google for "neanderthal interbreeding with humans" for many references to that claim), so "people like you" you were responding to do not have to give anthropology a bad name.
Apart from that, it is not proven that each current human race must have the same average intelligence. On the contrary, there are indications that this is not the case.
Ideologically motivated people can give anthrolopogy a bad name. This goes in both directions.
Slashdot Mirror
Since smartphones can do much more than conventional mobile phones, security leaks become much more important.
At least, one would expect security updates, if no new funcitonality, for a reasonable amount of time, for the expected lifetime of the device.
Apple could have chosen to keep the 3G on iOS3, but in that case would have been obliged to provide security fixes on both the 4.x and on the 3.x branch.
I know that some vendors, such as sony-ericsson, have been delivering their devices with already outdated versions (of android in this case) and did't provide updates, leaving security holes open already shortly after people purchased the device.
Clearly, there is a hole in the law w.r.t. warranty and consumer protection here. At the moment, a vendor that doesn't care for its public image, would be able to stop providing security updates early, effectively making a smartphone useless right from the start.
And even many systems sold with windows (the windows tax) end up as linux boxes.
Hmm, there are some of us that have never stopped using twm (or ctwm, in my case).
I fail to see why I would need a "desktop environment" instead of just a windows manager.
And as we know, all civilizations and empires rise and fall. What will happen when the current civilization goes down with existing nuclear power plants that require decades of cooling.
Even a regional conflict, causing interruptions in power and other supplies, will result in several nuclear power plants melting down, potentially affecting wide regions on earth.
Après nous le déluge in its worst form.
You might be mistaken re. westerners. I feel that in Europe, in various countries (at least Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands) in the past few years the young generation has switched from viewing the US as an ally into viewing it as a threat to the world, potentially even an enemy.
Of course, the US can do what it wants, it is sovereign. But so are we. Don't expect us to take US bribes and threats any longer in the future in order to cooperate with US policies (waging wars, following insane narcotics/drug policies, intellectual property laws).
It is the old generation that is still in power, that (in part) is still following the US dictate. In a few years, this will be over.
And I'm not alone in hoping for an economic downfall into poverty of the US. It may hit us too, but at least the money-bribe-saction bully that the US often is will loose its power.
If this is serious, you're no better than the Iranian conservatives demanding death penalty for protestors and opposition politicians.
I don't say he didn't do something illegal that may be punished, but demanding the death penalty is extreme.
Many countries make a distinction between natural persons (i.e. humans) and a legal person (entities, corporations). I have to assume that there must be some distiction between the two in the US too, though it is smaller than elsewhere. If not, a corporation being a natural person would have a nationality, and if it is a US nationality, it would have the right to vote in elections, which is not the case.
I always order my games from amazon.co.uk, since germany, including amazon.de, often has censored versions.
And even though the shipping from amazon.de -> switzerland is free and from amazon.co.uk is not, the prices are so much lower for the game itself that the total price is lower too.
I assume that amazon.co.uk ships to germany as well.
Sometimes a server is gradually degrading due to some issue. During that time, things are being modified. If you learn that the problem started a few months ago, you can't just re-image an old state and loose everything that had changed since then.
Of course to make app servers as stateless as possible helps against this problem. One of the reasons that my company enforces that data are kept on physically separate DB servers, and (virtualized) app server instances should be as dedicated to a single app as possible.
With bare metal virtualizatoin, there is not that much to maintain, and there is pointy clicky software to do that. No real admin skills required.
Very sorry for you. And as a result you are only filling and emptying bags for a job? If so, please don't generalize.
Maybe this is the case if you consume way too much, and the same could be said about using too much of many other things.
There are many responisble and moderate users however that have good jobs. I know several physicists (being one myself), not really the easiest job in the world, that like to use it recreationally (with moderation).
The medical is not only a scam by the way. Yes many use it as an excuse, which I don't have a problem with since prohibition is absurd and nonsensical anyway. But there are many documented cases of real medical benefits too. Just because some/many people use it as an excuse does not invalidate the truth behind it.
With legalization the price would plummet. Weed is very easy to grow and needs almost no processing.
Do you see any cartels smuggling tomatoes? No, because it isn't worthwhile.
Even with a moderate tax it still would be too cheap to smuggle.
With an excessive tax, yes, but only on a small scale comparable to cigarette smuggling
Another government sponsored politically motivated research, if you ask me.
I've seen other studies (haven't go a reference at hand) that claim that THC makes you react less well (quite obvious) and does pose a risk, but the risk was measured to be less than alcohol given a normal dose:
reaction speed deteriorates about the same, but where alcohol users tend to over estimate themselves and drive to fast/dangerously, THC makes you to under estimate yourself and drive relatively slow and careful.
They have test persons either nothing, a standard amount of alcohol and a standard amount of THC and then tested their driving capability.
The study as described above just measures after an accident has happened, which is not a good measurement. There could be other correlations. Just stating that on average 10% of people have THC in their blood, but after an accident it is significantly more, doesn't proof much.
Maybe more accidents happen at night, and maybe at night more people are intoxicated in general (alcohol, THC, whatever)? Or maybe young people cause more accidents (less experienced), and young people also tned to use pot more? Or reckless people both tend to drive more risky and at the same time are more willing to try illegal substances?
Sound statistics and logical thinking are often lacking in politically motivated studies like these.
I'd have to see the original study in full to know, but reading the description I have my doubts.
There are people who smoke 1 pack of cigarettes each day, there are those (e.g. my father) who smoke 1/2 cigarette a day.
There are people who drink alcohol all day, there are those who drink a glass of wine with dinner.
There are many pot smokers/eaters/vaporizers that use moderately, e.g. once a day and only in the weekend. And there are those that abuse it and have to suffer negative consequences.
Etc. etc. You can claim this for many activities/substances/food.
Not everyone drinks/smokes to unwind, some just do because it is fun at regular or irregular times, with or without moderation.
Personally I never have to unwind. I love my job and generally have a very pleasant life, which I make even a bit more pleasant at times by vaporizing (not smoking for health reasons) pot. I think the "silent majority" of pot consumers are like this. Of course the abusive users of whatever substance, such as alcoholics or obese people or complete "potheads" stand out more. If you would not know and see normal, social, responsible alcohol users at all, you'd probably also think that all alcohol users overuse and are at least psychologically addicted.
Indeed, and if everyone could grow it, it would be as cheap as tomatoes and noone would ever even want to steal or be interested where it is being grown.
Most problems surrounding drugs stem merely from their illegal status, not from the substance itself.
The remaining problems can never be really resolved (personal health effects), but at least partially by regulating and public campaigns to use with care (just like with the legal drugs alcohol & tobacco).
Even if current models and statistics do not yet conclusively proove global warming, it is elementary knowledge that CO2 traps heat; we even have the example of Venus to "proove" this. We also know that mankind is causing CO2 level to rise very rapidly.
You just have to be able to add 1+1 to see we may have a problem here.
Now we do not observe yet hard evidence that global temperatures are rising significantly, but combined with the fact that the sun is going through a quiet fase that in the past caused a little ice age (which er aren't observing yet), I really wonder how stubborn you need to be to not see that we may have two effects here (rising CO2, cooling sun) that are, for the time being, cancelling each other out. If the inactive sun sooner or later returns to "full power", knowing that decreasing CO2 levels may take centuries, Doc Ruby's remark seems only logical.
One can only hope that the USA goes down economically so deep, that they can no longer bully the world to adopt their laws.
At the moment the USA threatens with economic sactions and/or military action.
Once the USA is bankrupt, they cannot afford either anymore.
If only this were so.
Most law enforcement people, at least the leadership, keep opposing legalization initiatives almost everywhere.
Obviously, they fear for budget cuts when this senseless victim-less "crimes" would no longer be an easy target for them.
Yesterday, at a java conference (jazoon in zurich) one of the speakers gave a demo on how to create a domain specific language for an iphone app, implement a parser for this domain specific language (using xtext in eclipse) and a template to generate obj-c code using xpand. Then he generated java targeted for android resulting in both obj-c and java generated from the same domain specific language. I was quite impressed.
Current model driven design tools make it easy to implement your own domain specific language to express your business logic and generate to target different platforms.
As an ex-addict, I'm happy that now I can really "use" coffee when I need it. I.e. usually I don't drink coffee but when I really need to be extra (long) awake, one cup of coffee helps with this again. Formerly, coffee wouldn't keep me awake anymore but not having coffee would cause head-ache.
Still I would be interested to know the long-term effects.
For substances such as THC (cannabis) they keep trying to prove that there are negative long-term effects (until now with not much "success"). I'm sure if they started investigating long-term effects of "legal" substances such as caffeine, they would find some disturbing long-term effects here and there.
Don't think OSX is a particular advantage (on the contrary). I'm still perfectly happy with my 5 year old dell M70. It came with 4 years "next day on site" support which I have needed twice in the 4 years of coverage. Next day someone came at home and fixed my notebook (once a motherboard replacement, once a GPU replacement), and it is very solid and reliable. I have a MBP too (since 2009); for a machine that is almost 4 years newer I'm not too impressed (and I've really come to hate OSX in the meantime, running linux and windows on it now).
No, I would not pay extra for apple anymore. My iphone will be replaced by a google nexus soon (my 12yo daughter can have the iphone).
I can hardly imagine someone buying a mbp just for OSX, and even less putting together a hackintosh.
Being an old time unix/freebsd/linux user I expected, when I bought my mbp in september 2009 that I would be very pleased with OSX due to its unix underpinnings. But I have to say, I like windows even better than OSX in the GUI area (of course not behind the screens, but for daily work that isn't very relevant).
Yes it is nice to have a built-in unix-like command line (no need to install cygwin), but the GUI itself is horrible.
In X-window I can use a window manager that I like (usually ctwm) and configure it such that I can do everything using keybindings and hardly ever have to use the mouse. In windows everyting can be done through shortcut keys as well, and efficiently. In the OSX gui you are really depending on the mouse, and many things cannot or only clumsily be done with keyboard shortcuts (e.g. to go to the app menu you have to press ctrl-f2 and then navigate through all entries using arrow keys, you do not have direct accellerators like in X or menu shortcuts like in windows).
So my mbp is dual booting between linux and windows (7 x64) right now, and I just have a small OSX partition just in case and for maintenance purposes.
It is just unacceptable that you need a proprietary plugin for essential functionality on the web, which otherwise is supposed to be open and adhere to published standards.
Just the existence of something like flash takes away pressure to come to truely standardized solutions for whatever functionality is deemed essential. However, do not forget that the web is not supposed to exactly determine how a page looks; the rendering is up to the client and its preferences. Content providers should say goodbye to the idea of total control on the detailed looks (otherwise you might even move to a web that consists only of PDF pages, what a horror that would be).
I am sure that, once flash is dead, there will be enough incentive to come to open standards for whatever functionality is lacking. Just like happened with the rest of w3c standards. The only real saboteur was microsoft which has refused to adhere to standards for strategic reasons. Now that they have lost their dominance, they can no longer afford to do this.
I think it is good to have someone who provides a clear and unambiguous opinion on these matters; and he has been proven right over and over again. In practice and for most people, a more moderate view is more appropriate; but without Stallman most of us wouldn't even realize what the real problem is.
Your reply w.r.t. neanderthals apparently assumes that neanderthals had lower intelligence.
This is not true, or at least not proven. Just google "neanderthal intelligence" and you'll see many references that believe that neanderthals had higher or at least equal intelligence than homo sapiens. Also they interbred with homo sapience (google for "neanderthal interbreeding with humans" for many references to that claim), so "people like you" you were responding to do not have to give anthropology a bad name.
Apart from that, it is not proven that each current human race must have the same average intelligence. On the contrary, there are indications that this is not the case.
Ideologically motivated people can give anthrolopogy a bad name. This goes in both directions.