If Obama's energy strategy doesn't involve tax handouts to the oil companies and shortsighted environmental rules then I don't support it.
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
The retards (or if you want to be polite, the misled) are the ones who keep supporting this Democrat-Republican duopoly that's gotten us nowhere, eroded liberty, and steadily run the nation into the ground for the last several decades. They don't even pretend to be our servants anymore.
Granted, it's a masterpiece of social engineering because it exploits a few simple principles without trying to be overly elaborate. It's classic divide-and-conquer: get the voters bickering over relatively trivial issues, each "side" thinking the other "side" is a bunch of morons who don't understand the facts, meanwhile all of the important decisions are made by the corporatocracy which can afford media campaigns, lobbyists, and real representation. It exploits the baser facets of human nature that date back to our hunter-gatherer days: members of my group good, outsiders bad, us against them. Isn't it funny how the status quo never really changes, it just becomes more so, just moves farther down the path it's already on? This is why.
Here's the failure of basing an educational system on memorization and authority instead of principle and discovery: most people would recognize why a duopoly with a stranglehold on an entire market is undesirable, why it guarantees that customers get screwed. Those same people need to have it pointed out to them that a duopoly with a strangehold on the entire political process is worse, that with money and power the stakes are higher than with money alone, that the voters get screwed quite badly.
Yes, we'll call it the OAT (Obese American Tax) the new IRS forms will have a sheet for BMI calculations to determine your share of the costs of public services.
I think you finally found a great way to account for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles. BMI wouldn't be such a great metric but percentage of body fat would work. Hopefully it will be a formula where the lowest 20% receive a tax rebate while the remaining 80% pay a progressively higher tax.
Hey, we place "sin taxes" on alcohol and tobacco all the time. The ones for tobacco are particularly egregious compared to the actual cost of the product. What's wrong with a "sin tax" on obesity? Part of it can go towards road maintainence and part can go towards health care.
It's merely a question of willingness. I agree there's only so much you can possibly do for someone who won't lift a finger to help himself.
That is the position I was talking about. Joe Sixpack does not care, and will not care. The position of Joe Sixpack is that anything that requires reading or 5 minutes of his time is to hard for him.
As I have now two responses that seem to assume I think Joe Sixpack is some sort of invalid I will admit I should have been clearer.
There seems to be this unstated consensus that unless you excuse, legitimize, and enable any and all forms of intellectual laziness and willful helplessness, then you must be some kind of cold-hearted bastard who wants the poor to starve, old ladies to eat dog food, and baby seals to get clubbed to death.
There's also this widespread and completely false notion that you're doing anyone any favor by teaching them to be at the mercy of others for basic things they are actually capable of doing themselves. Like when someone chooses to be helpless, you're their best friend and a real great guy if you coddle them and make that decision as consequence-free for them as possible, and some kind of evil enemy if you see that they are better served by overcoming their helplessness and would be much happier with their experience if they did.
The amusing notion is that if, in the absence of medically diagnosed mental retardation, illiteracy, or organic brain damage, you tend to assume "if I could do it with a few minutes of effort, he should be able to handle it too since we're fundamentally equal" then you're some kind of elitist who thinks he's better than everyone else. They really don't grasp the self-contradiction this represents.
Combine all of these things and what you get is an emotional need to demonstrate a phony compassion that only makes its recipients less capable, more lazy, and more needlessly dependent. All in the name of caring and winning the approval of others. Oh, except those horrible "elitists", they have a different value system so it's okay to regard them as pieces of shit and make unfounded judgments about what kind of terrible human beings they are. Because you're so caring and nice and accommodating.
That some numbnuts would misinterpret where you were coming from so he could climb on his high horse and make accusations against your character was predictable. Many people have an emptiness they can only fill temporarily by looking down their nose at someone who disagrees with them. That's why I spoke up and added a bit of framework to your statement. To me, what you meant was obvious. It would be obvious to anyone who doesn't have such pathology.
It would be obvious also to anyone who actually wants what is best for average users and would rather teach them how to fish instead of giving them a fish every day so they can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves how kind and generous they are.
Joe Sixpack is not in a position to be knowledgeable about anything, no need to worry about it.
Assuming he's literate, he's in a position that is as good as yours or mine.
It's merely a question of willingness. I agree there's only so much you can possibly do for someone who won't lift a finger to help himself. That's a character weakness and I wouldn't be doing anyone any favors if I validated it. For that I make no apology.
It reminds me of that joke: "a 'computer expert' is someone who can read the manual". Most end-user manuals I've seen appear to be targeting about a fifth-grade reading level and assume little or no technical prowess. They often have illustrated, step-by-step directions that don't require you to understand *why* the procedure works. If you expect the average adult to be able to handle that, people will call you a heartless elitist. So be it.
Though I do find it amusing that those who scream "elitist" et al never seem to comprehend one basic fact: a real elitist would not expect a literate adult to handle such things. A real elitist would assume they're too stupid and could never be expected to inform themselves about relatively easy things.
This is exactly how I felt about a lot of recent "vigilantism", either online or in real life. It's too soul crushing for me to believe that there aren't great leaders out there who do understand human behavior.
A lot of people are greedy to acquire understanding without fully understanding the serious burden it represents. That's the real problem. If not for that, most of it would be considered common damned sense.
The idea that you need to treat the cause and not the symptoms seems lost on most people and that makes me sad.
It's an inability to appreciate cause-and-effect combined with a conditioned unwillingness to identify causes. Mass media and public schooling are the methods of reinforcement. Though there are conspiracies, it's not a conspiracy so much as it's a self-perpetuating downward spiral that, once established, tends to become more so. Those who believe they run the show are only effects of this cause. The competitive pressures become all about becoming more ruthless, manipulative, powerful, Machiavellian. The active participants merely follow this as their leader. Information and the control thereof becomes everything.
It's quite difficult to have such virtue that you can really model a different understanding that would never need to resort to their methods. In order to do that, you really have to believe in something better. We are in an era of pessimism during which empires are starting to collapse, entire systems are beginning to fail, and the nature of the replacement is undecided.
That's strange, since the arbitrators have to be agreed to by both parties and very often are appointed by the court system (or approved by them). They, the arbitrators, get paid the same regardless of which side wins. Of course, the point of arbitration is to finds a solution that is palatable for both sides.
The point was about who is paying the bill. The things you mention don't address this point. I don't know how to make that less ambiguous.
Research the tendency yourself. Arbitration generally and overwhelmingly favors the party that's actually paying the arbitrators. I'm not talking about just a little bit, either. That's generally how business works -- the one paying the bill has the most say. It's just that in this particular business that tendency is undesirable.
This can actually be a big benefit for the small guy. Many claims never get filed, because there isn't enough money involved to get an attorney interested. However, through arbitration, the small guy gets heard without having to go through the expense of long drawn out and expensive court proceedings.
Did you ever wonder why it is AT&T that wants the ability to force arbitration and not a dissatisfied customer? To the point they went through the expense of paying attorneys to pursue the case through multiple appeals all the way to the Supreme Court? Does that tell you something?
Did you suppose it was because AT&T is a charitable organization that wants the expenses of claims from as many little guys as possible? Or maybe in the back of your mind someplace did you consider that there might be another reason they want it so badly?
I'm not trying to insult you but what you're saying is just naive.
In a class action lawsuit, if I'm the lucky first guy to file, I might get a couple G's to serve as lead plaintiff, the lawyers make tens of millions of dollars, and everyone else gets a coupon for $10 off their next phone.
How much did I really lose here?
The question you pose is valid only if you believe the entire affair is all about your personal financial gain and how to maximize it.
I think that was the whole point over fighting such a silly case all the way up to the Supreme Court--to virtually guarantee that you can never be subject to a class action case again. Let's not kid ourselves, who here thinks that any company will ever again sell any service again without a clause in it forcing arbitration and disallowing class action lawsuits?
Note that arbitrators are notorious for overwhelmingly favoring the party which hires them. In this case, that'd be the company. This is part of a much larger and utterly foolish trend: the systematic dismantling of each available "working through the system" method of either getting justice or effecting change.
Social unrest is like any other kind of energy. It can be neither created nor destroyed; it only changes form. It does not go away merely because you start removing the legitimate means of acting on it. Quite predictably, this is only going to lead to the exact kind of vendettas and feuds that the justice system was specifically put in place to avoid. We're already beginning to see this with groups like Anonymous.
In fact I can sum up Anonymous quite easily. Right or wrong, I believe the reasoning goes like this: "I don't have the millions of dollars and years of my life that it takes to bring a lawsuit against a multinational corporation and actually prevail, but what I do have is some skill with computers and a lot of outrage with no approved outlet." Anonymous should be completely redundant. Instead, they are a blatantly obvious sign that the justice system is failing.
When the authoritarian types witness this, do they feel an immediate need to reform the system? No, they don't. They haven't the wisdom. Instead, they feel a need to "crack down" on computer crimes, as though they were random events happening in a vacuum, as if that does anything to address why they are happening. Where are the leaders who actually understand how to deal with human beings? Are they extinct? Are they the ones who never desired power in the first place?
Alright alright, I apologize for my knee-jerk, anti-butthole reaction. Sometimes you focus so much on finding buttholes, that you don't notice the one in the mirror.
The willingness to admit that definitely qualifies you as "not a butthole". There is no uncertainty about that. I wish that kind of honesty were more common.
It reminds me of that saying, "an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it".
To answer your previous post... the use of the English language and its grammar comes quite naturally to me. The correct use of words like "they're" and "their" and "there" is effortless and automatic. It requires no conscious thought; the correct word just seems to fit. I would have to deliberately go out of my way to use them incorrectly. Someone looking over my shoulder as I write would see that I touch-type -- since I am looking at the screen the entire time, I correct any typos and such on-the-fly. It's not so much that I am trying to look for them; it's more like they stand out as something that immediately doesn't look right to me. They get my attention on their own.
Now, do I do that perfectly without ever making a mistake? No, I'm a human being. For just that reason I'd give it a beginning-to-end proofreading prior to submitting it to an audience of many thousands. I would do that to account for the fact that I'm not perfect. I'd bother to account for that because I believe that something worth doing is worth doing well, not to mention that being involved, giving a damn, and doing a good job provides a certain satisfaction that can be difficult to find elsewhere.
I'm not claiming special status here, only that people have strengths and weaknesses and this is one of my strengths. The point I am making is that if I seriously struggled with things like this, and had no intention of doing whatever it took to change that, then I would have no business taking a job as an editor. I would consider myself incompetent and unqualified. That's alright because everyone can't be skilled at every task, but the skills I do and don't have definitely determine the tasks I consider myself competent to handle.
If I were the editor, I would consider myself personally responsible for a discussion where the first few dozen posts are off-topic references to my poor editing that thousands of users must now sift through to get to the topic at hand. What I wouldn't do is expect someone to pay me for work that is unprofessional and mediocre. I think the vast number of comments about it are because it's such a regular event. It's not the occasional error that slips through the cracks, which would be understandable.
It's really not too bad an issue, so you get banned one site, it's not important, move on with your live, letting other people define you is as unhealthy as succumbing to total narcissism. But still, it's wrong.
Letting yourself get defined by narcissists (and sociopaths) is The American Way. It's a staple of public schooling, higher education, and the corporate ladder.
What are you, some kind of un-American pinko commie?
I think you misunderstand his post. Someone who researched a device and decided it didn't fit their needs is completely different than the blind hatred exhibited by status seeking pseudo intellectual tech geeks that seem to come out of the woodwork when the name Apple is mentioned. I think that is his complaint and it does have merit.
I was aware of this but perhaps I did not give it the consideration it deserves. I do understand why you would place emphasis on it. Now that you've caused me to think it over, I believe it deserves more emphasis than I originally gave to it.
I suppose I would reconcile the two positions thusly: a lot of the "haters" depend on feeling like they are listened to and engaged and taken seriously. They're like trolls this way. Perhaps my post de-emphasized the difference between the "haters" and those with reasonable objection because I unconsciously didn't consider the "haters" worth a moment's thought, so I automatically focused on what remained.
A more deliberate, conscious rejection of them, a willingness to ignore them if you like, in order to move on to better and more worthy posts, might be just the solution. I don't really see a point in trying to reason with them. People who take a religious stance on a factual matter generally do that because they don't like reason to begin with. You can't reason with someone who doesn't value reason, it just doesn't work. You can show them up before an audience, such as this one, but that tends to just make them more vocal and belligerent. Above all, it tends to make them feel validated that you take them seriously enough to offer opposition.
I guess that takes us back to my previous question of why anyone feels a need to straighten them out. Let them be religious. It seems so important to them.
The banking system seems set up to facilitate fraud sometimes. Every time we hear about a wire transfer, the police have to point out how they're untraceable and any money sent over them is just gone. This sounds insane to me, why aren't there computerized logs of every single transaction? Finding out where money went should be as simple as "ok, it was transferred to , from there it was transferred to , and then to . At the last bank it was withdrawn as cash. With that information, you should be able to go to the bank and get the security camera footage, signature, account holder information, etc... It's not perfect, but it sure beats " electronic transfer are impossible to trace".
It depends. The paper trail is precisely how they will get you, if you piss off the wrong people. It's surprisingly difficult for a corporation to do that, even if it's just a shell corporation.
Granted, it would lead to the same outcry you get when Paypal freezes an account, but it seems better than funding organized crime all over the world.
If we were really interested in no longer funding organized crime, we'd end the idiotic War on (some) Drugs and admit that after decades of trying, it has never accomplished its stated goals and never will. Creating a black market to ensure organized criminals always have a steady revenue stream seems to be the only thing it's managed to do. Wouldn't that also restore some respect for the institution of law, if people could see that laws get repealed as soon as it's obvious that they don't work and aren't going to work? This one is long past that time.
It would be the single most harmful thing we could possibly do to organized criminals everywhere. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it would do more to undermine them than the next ten best ideas put together. As Al Capone found out, there's nothing quite like contraband that many people really want for ensuring an under-the-table revenue stream.
Oh, I have no problem with discussions about this and related topics. I'm just fed up with the slobbering hordes of "anti-fanboys" who show up every time Apple is mentioned (there is a similar but smaller reaction for Google, Microsoft and most other high-profile tech companies, Apple seems to be the main target for the "cool to hate" crowd and has been so for a while now).
These commenters rarely contribute to the discussion, don't bother reading up on the issues at hand and instead tend to just resort to fear-mongering, misinterpretations and of course outright name-calling.
This is an issue that should be discussed but the vast majority of comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "APPLE SI TEH EVül!!1 STAEV JOBS IS SUING IS SATTEILT IN ORBIT TO TARKC UR POSISHION!!! ANY1 STIL USING CRAPPLE IPHONIE IS AN IDIOTS OR A FAGET 4 STAVE JOBS CAWK!!11one" (really, when venturing outside of "geek circles" and onto the internet at large that isn't very far from a very large number of comments I've seen although most have worse punctuation and don't use all-caps, the caps-lock is pretty much implied from the tone of the posts though)
It's possible that I am about to bring up a distinction that means something only to me. Having said that...
Let's assume for argument's sake that you have characterized the anti-fanbois with complete accuracy. Here's my question: why do you consider it something you need to straighten out? Does not Apple have a marketing department, PR people, official spokespersons, the ability to launch marketing campaigns, etc.?
Just about the only time I don't feel that way is when Linux is the subject. You could call that a bias, I suppose, but it's quite unique for a bias because I have an objective reason. There is no single corporation that owns Linux. There's no marketing department anyplace that represents all of Linux. Maybe Red Hat has marketers that represent Red Had Linux but they don't own Linux itself any more than I do. Most of what they'd be marketing is along the lines of paid support. In the absence of one central representative entity, it is mostly the relatively decentralized community of uses and enthusiasts who perform most of the advocation and support.
I am humbled by the comparison between how much I have benefitted from using Linux and GPL software, when that is compared to how much I have personally helped out. But I do help out. I try to answer forums, though most of the time I am helping people I know personally to understand and master this OS. I can actually get personally involved, pitch in, contribute some effort. I can be an actual part of the Linux community, however small. Therefore I do have some kind of stake in it, in a way that I don't have a personal stake in the success of Microsoft or Apple.
Why does someone who presumably is not an employee of Apple feel so strongly about others who badmouth Apple or its products? That's what is difficult for me to understand.
Hush now, don't ruin a good anti-Apple flamefest. You're not giving the haters a chance to proclaim that they've never used, never owned, never wished to own or even seen an Apple product in real life but they're still horribly outraged and this great assault on their human rights by the evil empire led by the great satan, Steve Jobs.
Yes, I'm exaggerating but I can't help but be slightly baffled by the hordes of people who seem to think that Apple is somehow more powerful in the world of computing than Microsoft or that they are "more evil" than MS has ever been. Not to mention the fact that about half of them swear they've never used a mac or iDevice in their lives yet they are experts on the subject...
These are mundane issues concerning device design and business decisions. It is not some vast unknowable thing that can only be experienced. It can be researched and anyone willing to do that can acquaint themselves with the facts. If you think someone is misinformed tell him where he is factually incorrect.
I admit I may be misunderstanding you, but what you're doing there seems like dismissal. It's similar to the tactics of the worst "anti-Apple" types and therefore it won't reveal the error of their ways. Right now, you say they probably don't own Apple devices. You say that like the following never occurred to you: maybe they don't own an Apple device because they did some research before spending the money and learned ahead of time that such devices wouldn't suit their needs. I'd consider that person more pro-active and likely more wise than someone who blindly invests in something and ends up dissatisfied when the information was out there the whole time.
So if someone does own an Apple device and has complaints about it, what then? Are they now hypocrites for buying something they later decided they didn't like? Does worrying so much about their character do anything to address the legitimacy of any complaint they have about the design of the device? I don't believe so.
No, of course not. It's entirely possible for someone to cry wolf 500 times, and then later suffer a legitimate injustice.
It's entirely possible for them to think about that prior to crying wolf 500 times.
It's entirely possible for them to be held up as an example to others, a warning against those who might feel inclined to similarly cry wolf.
Particularly when their crying wolf is not a matter that's just between themselves and the judge, but involves the legal intimidation of innocents. All of these strong-arm tactics are over a relatively trivial matter like unauthorized copying, not gang violence or warfare or impending catastrophe.
So now they are following the latest trend and trying to go after domains and equipment. They're following in the footsteps of what the government is doing in the name of safety and anti-terrorism, methods they no doubt admire. That's the latest escalation, then? Copyright cases need a "loser pays" system, where the loser of a case has to pay all of the opposition's legal expenses (perhaps times 1.5). Remove the profit from being a copyright troll and embolden the recipients of these threats to insist that the cases go to court. That's the best long-term solution to this kind of company. It also addresses the apparent rarity of such reasonable judges as this one.
"Yet, no matter how good your blog post is, it would have been better journalism to include in the summary link(s) to other source(s) with different perspective(s)."
You mean, like the Wired and Atlantic articles that I linked to at the end of my posting...?
You understand the distinction between your link and the Slashdot staffs' links, yes?
The moment they rely upon third parties such as yourself to do their journalism for them, is the moment they admit they have abandoned journalistic integrity. Therefore, whether you provided such links and whether the links you provided are immaculate or not is completely irrelevant to my commentary about Slashdot's journalistic quality.
Put another way, you may have shown them up. That still doesn't improve their standards, now does it?
I've enjoyed the discourse we have shared, but at some point I have to wonder if you just want to argue for the sake of contention.
Is that really the best you can do in the face of someone who is aware of what is happening to a once-free country?
It is better to show up empty-handed than to bring this kind of cowardly dismissal to the table.
Tell you what: put my words to the test. Find an elderly person at least 70 years old. Ask them how police used to be. Then come back to me, if you have the fortitude.
Well, keep in mind that there is a difference between being asked and being told to do something. If a cop asks you:
"Can I see your cellphone?"
Then, you're under no obligation to answer in the affirmative. However, if he says:
"Hand over your cellphone."
That's a demand and you're legally required (with some exceptions) to comply. Although cops are well-trained and they know how to phrase a question such that it sounds like a demand:
"I'm going to take a look at your cellphone. Would you hand it to me?"
The point is that when talking to the police, stay calm and listen to exactly what they're saying. If you're not clear if something is a question or a demand, then ask for clarification.
I can talk to elderly people who remember a time when cops were not state-sponsored thugs who rigorously searched for every possible way to nail you with something. Seriously... what kind of psychotic assholes thought it would be a great idea to train cops to request optional cooperation in a manner that sounds like a mandatory demand? What kind of world do people like this hope to live in?
Even if I were the undisputed dictator for life, an autocrat with absolute power, a sovereign whose orders are always obeyed without question and without hestiation, a ruler without rival, the man in charge of everything... I still would not want to live in a dictatorial police state. I still don't want to be surrounded by that kind of misery and disharmony. I especially wouldn't want to be even partially responsible for it. No affirmation of my ego would be enough to make it worthwhile.
In some ways I can easily understand the minds and spirits of power-hungry people. In some ways I can easily grasp why the USA is becoming a police state. I see the forces at work driving both. They're the same type of perversion and corruption that has befallen every great nation. It's what possessed every bloodthirsty mass-murdering tyrant throughout history, and by that I refer to those who had motives other than self-defense. The history books usually refer to them as "conquerors" with a certain awe. As the saying goes, if you kill a man you're a murderer; kill many and you're a conqueror.
But in other ways, I really don't understand it at all. I mostly want to be left alone to live my life as I see fit. Taking responsibility for my life, not allowing my decisions to harm others, and respecting the freedom of others to live as they see fit are the only obligations I truly recognize. Yet for those who view life as one gigantic struggle for control of others, it's just a matter of who's holding the reins. Each would like to be that person or a member of that group. Often, this is even portrayed as normal and is rarely questioned. As common as it is, as predictable as its machinations are, this mentality is completely alien to me. I know it only through outside observation. Am I in a small minority here? Am I really?
If so, cops who find petty deception and intimidation useful, not so they can solve some heinous crime and bring a dangerous criminal to justice, but so they can brag to their buddies about how many additional charges they added to some poor schmuck who was a threat to no one... well that's just the beginning. They think they're running the show because they can push civilians around? They're dogs on a leash to the truly powerful, obedient and loyal so long as their "appetites" are satisfied.
What a shame. We could have a much more beautiful world than this.
Whereas you merely explain why you believe this is nothing to panic about, the Forbes author positively thinks it's wonderful and hopes to see other vendors do the same. It's quite a leap from "this isn't a threat" to "this is quite an asset" when we still don't know exactly what this file is for. Unlike you, that Forbes author is making positive claims about the desirability of this feature and has about as much evidence as I do, i.e. zero. Meanwhile she is severely downplaying the privacy issues surrounding any kind of data collection of this type, reducing the entire subject to a one-liner about her "hope that creepy apps can't tap into it." That of course completely sidesteps the question of what, if anything, Apple does with the data.
She also talked about how the cell networks (i.e. Verizon, AT&T) already have location information from the towers. She completely ignores the fact that Apple doesn't have location information from the cell network, unless of course they are able to access location data stored on the phone as part of their location-based services. She does not even mention that and I doubt she appreciates the difference. One of those would have a legitimate need-to-know while the other would not.
I attribute that to fanboyism. When fanboys act like paid marketers when in fact they are not receiving compensation from the company in question, I refer to that as useful idiocy. For some reason, Apple in particular has a lot of fanboys and apologists who tend to downplay and dismiss instead of recognizing such questions and trying to answer them.
"... one of my buddies might get ad revenue if I link his no-name blog on the main page..."
Given that there aren't any ads on my blog for me to get revenue from, and I don't have any "buddies" who are moderators on slashdot (that I know of), I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
One reason my post was clearly marked as opinion and definitely not represented as fact.. is that I run ad blockers to where it would look exactly the same to me whether or not you actually ran ads on your blog. I appreciate you clarifying that my opinion doesn't apply to you personally -- that's something I should have explicitly stated and I regret that you had to point this out.
The original post asking whether Slashdot is becoming the "FOX news of tech discussion" was evidently not written by someone who only just now thinks so. That, in turn, raises a bigger question about how stories are done that is not remotely limited to this particular story. In fact this particular story and anything you could say about it would be within the margin of error if one were to do a survey of all Slashdot stories. I don't know if you have been an active participant in Slashdot lately (UID alone doesn't tell me much), but this is a subject that comes up from time to time. That's why I also mentioned the book reviews, which this story is clearly not, because I am referring to a general trend and not to any specific story.
For example, I for one found your blog entry to be rational, decently well-written, and generally a pleasure to read. Yet, no matter how good your blog post is, it would have been better journalism to include in the summary link(s) to other source(s) with different perspective(s). We really have very few facts about this iPhone issue, apart from those we are all just speculating, and speculation is much more interesting and useful when it is diverse. In summary, it would have taken a trivial amount of effort on the part of Slashdot staff to make this a much higher quality story.
Reading back over my previous post, I can see how it probably did look like unfair personal criticism of you and for that I apologize. I appreciate the calm and reasonable manner with which you made me aware of this. Really, I wish more people handled disagreement this way.
My point was that if you view the file being backed up to your PC as a "vulnerability", then encrypting it should ease you worries.
While we haven't heard from Apple what the reason for the file is, it seems pretty reasonable to me that it's a database of known cell tower and WiFi locations, to be used to rapidly "triangulate" your location, when possible, if you have an application that wants to use iOS' Location Services. This idea would seem to be supported by the existence of a similar location cache on Android.
It sounds then like we can agree that backups are not the issue here.
While I think your hypothesis is quite reasonable, it is unfortunate that we are all just speculating. I believe my point stands that if companies don't want people raising questions of trust, they should implement such things openly in a well-documented fashion. All it would take is something you can easily find with a Web search and this whole issue would have been put to rest before it ever got started.
How is it that marketers and PR people are so good at manipulating behavior and perception, yet so terrible at foreseeing preventable controversies like this one? The cost to produce one simple document or a couple of entries in a FAQ is absolutely negligible compared to all the other costs involved in designing a phone and implementing a location service.
I saw the blog and I wondered what conclusion the blogger would have had if it was microsoft instead of apple. Personally, I was on the creepy side of the scale and was stunned when she thought it was cool. I am so glad I am not cool.
It's not known for sure that Vladimir Lenin came up with the phrase, but it is attributed to him. The phrase is "useful idiots".
The very fact that someone would feel differently about Microsoft doing it than they would about Apple doing it qualifies them as a moron. To allow the legitimacy of a business practice to be defined by your personal feelings about the corporation is pure emotion that has no place in a discussion about the facts of the matter. I especially expect anyone who wants to be a reporter, blogger, pundit, or commentator to understand this.
/. seems to have turned into a sort-of FOX news of tech discussion - without even a pretense of objectivity
There was a time when Slashdot had a pretense of objectivity?
Here's my opinion:
If by "objectivity" you mean "one of my buddies might get ad revenue if I link his no-name blog on the main page... so what if higher quality sources for the story are available?" then yes. It's just an unstated pretense. Also, if objectivity were a highly regarded goal, there'd be at least one book review on Slashdot that straight up says "this book is sub-par; here are a few books published by competitors that are much higher quality". Instead, virtually all of them are quite favorable, even though knowing what not to purchase is at least as useful as knowing that something else is recommended.
No, it's called "apple is innocent focus on android I'm an apple fanboy", to some degree (and not always). The "oh but android!" argument is seriously getting old.
If it's anything like the "oh but [the Democrats | the Republicans] aren't the only ones, because [the Republicans | the Democrats] did this nasty thing too!" then it's not going away anytime soon.
I mod those posts "Redundant" every chance I get, but it doesn't work when I'm the only one.
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If Obama's energy strategy doesn't involve tax handouts to the oil companies and shortsighted environmental rules then I don't support it.
Of course, I'm retarded so I was probably going to vote for a Republican anyway...
The retards (or if you want to be polite, the misled) are the ones who keep supporting this Democrat-Republican duopoly that's gotten us nowhere, eroded liberty, and steadily run the nation into the ground for the last several decades. They don't even pretend to be our servants anymore.
Granted, it's a masterpiece of social engineering because it exploits a few simple principles without trying to be overly elaborate. It's classic divide-and-conquer: get the voters bickering over relatively trivial issues, each "side" thinking the other "side" is a bunch of morons who don't understand the facts, meanwhile all of the important decisions are made by the corporatocracy which can afford media campaigns, lobbyists, and real representation. It exploits the baser facets of human nature that date back to our hunter-gatherer days: members of my group good, outsiders bad, us against them. Isn't it funny how the status quo never really changes, it just becomes more so, just moves farther down the path it's already on? This is why.
Here's the failure of basing an educational system on memorization and authority instead of principle and discovery: most people would recognize why a duopoly with a stranglehold on an entire market is undesirable, why it guarantees that customers get screwed. Those same people need to have it pointed out to them that a duopoly with a strangehold on the entire political process is worse, that with money and power the stakes are higher than with money alone, that the voters get screwed quite badly.
Yes, we'll call it the OAT (Obese American Tax) the new IRS forms will have a sheet for BMI calculations to determine your share of the costs of public services.
I think you finally found a great way to account for fuel-efficient and electric vehicles. BMI wouldn't be such a great metric but percentage of body fat would work. Hopefully it will be a formula where the lowest 20% receive a tax rebate while the remaining 80% pay a progressively higher tax.
Hey, we place "sin taxes" on alcohol and tobacco all the time. The ones for tobacco are particularly egregious compared to the actual cost of the product. What's wrong with a "sin tax" on obesity? Part of it can go towards road maintainence and part can go towards health care.
It's merely a question of willingness. I agree there's only so much you can possibly do for someone who won't lift a finger to help himself.
That is the position I was talking about. Joe Sixpack does not care, and will not care. The position of Joe Sixpack is that anything that requires reading or 5 minutes of his time is to hard for him.
As I have now two responses that seem to assume I think Joe Sixpack is some sort of invalid I will admit I should have been clearer.
There seems to be this unstated consensus that unless you excuse, legitimize, and enable any and all forms of intellectual laziness and willful helplessness, then you must be some kind of cold-hearted bastard who wants the poor to starve, old ladies to eat dog food, and baby seals to get clubbed to death.
There's also this widespread and completely false notion that you're doing anyone any favor by teaching them to be at the mercy of others for basic things they are actually capable of doing themselves. Like when someone chooses to be helpless, you're their best friend and a real great guy if you coddle them and make that decision as consequence-free for them as possible, and some kind of evil enemy if you see that they are better served by overcoming their helplessness and would be much happier with their experience if they did.
The amusing notion is that if, in the absence of medically diagnosed mental retardation, illiteracy, or organic brain damage, you tend to assume "if I could do it with a few minutes of effort, he should be able to handle it too since we're fundamentally equal" then you're some kind of elitist who thinks he's better than everyone else. They really don't grasp the self-contradiction this represents.
Combine all of these things and what you get is an emotional need to demonstrate a phony compassion that only makes its recipients less capable, more lazy, and more needlessly dependent. All in the name of caring and winning the approval of others. Oh, except those horrible "elitists", they have a different value system so it's okay to regard them as pieces of shit and make unfounded judgments about what kind of terrible human beings they are. Because you're so caring and nice and accommodating.
That some numbnuts would misinterpret where you were coming from so he could climb on his high horse and make accusations against your character was predictable. Many people have an emptiness they can only fill temporarily by looking down their nose at someone who disagrees with them. That's why I spoke up and added a bit of framework to your statement. To me, what you meant was obvious. It would be obvious to anyone who doesn't have such pathology.
It would be obvious also to anyone who actually wants what is best for average users and would rather teach them how to fish instead of giving them a fish every day so they can pat themselves on the back and tell themselves how kind and generous they are.
Assuming he's literate, he's in a position that is as good as yours or mine.
It's merely a question of willingness. I agree there's only so much you can possibly do for someone who won't lift a finger to help himself. That's a character weakness and I wouldn't be doing anyone any favors if I validated it. For that I make no apology.
It reminds me of that joke: "a 'computer expert' is someone who can read the manual". Most end-user manuals I've seen appear to be targeting about a fifth-grade reading level and assume little or no technical prowess. They often have illustrated, step-by-step directions that don't require you to understand *why* the procedure works. If you expect the average adult to be able to handle that, people will call you a heartless elitist. So be it.
Though I do find it amusing that those who scream "elitist" et al never seem to comprehend one basic fact: a real elitist would not expect a literate adult to handle such things. A real elitist would assume they're too stupid and could never be expected to inform themselves about relatively easy things.
A lot of people are greedy to acquire understanding without fully understanding the serious burden it represents. That's the real problem. If not for that, most of it would be considered common damned sense.
It's an inability to appreciate cause-and-effect combined with a conditioned unwillingness to identify causes. Mass media and public schooling are the methods of reinforcement. Though there are conspiracies, it's not a conspiracy so much as it's a self-perpetuating downward spiral that, once established, tends to become more so. Those who believe they run the show are only effects of this cause. The competitive pressures become all about becoming more ruthless, manipulative, powerful, Machiavellian. The active participants merely follow this as their leader. Information and the control thereof becomes everything.
It's quite difficult to have such virtue that you can really model a different understanding that would never need to resort to their methods. In order to do that, you really have to believe in something better. We are in an era of pessimism during which empires are starting to collapse, entire systems are beginning to fail, and the nature of the replacement is undecided.
The point was about who is paying the bill. The things you mention don't address this point. I don't know how to make that less ambiguous.
Research the tendency yourself. Arbitration generally and overwhelmingly favors the party that's actually paying the arbitrators. I'm not talking about just a little bit, either. That's generally how business works -- the one paying the bill has the most say. It's just that in this particular business that tendency is undesirable.
Did you ever wonder why it is AT&T that wants the ability to force arbitration and not a dissatisfied customer? To the point they went through the expense of paying attorneys to pursue the case through multiple appeals all the way to the Supreme Court? Does that tell you something?
Did you suppose it was because AT&T is a charitable organization that wants the expenses of claims from as many little guys as possible? Or maybe in the back of your mind someplace did you consider that there might be another reason they want it so badly?
I'm not trying to insult you but what you're saying is just naive.
OK, so in arbitration, I get my sales tax back.
In a class action lawsuit, if I'm the lucky first guy to file, I might get a couple G's to serve as lead plaintiff, the lawyers make tens of millions of dollars, and everyone else gets a coupon for $10 off their next phone.
How much did I really lose here?
The question you pose is valid only if you believe the entire affair is all about your personal financial gain and how to maximize it.
Absolutely nothing, pretty much guaranteed.
...If you're a corporation.
I think that was the whole point over fighting such a silly case all the way up to the Supreme Court--to virtually guarantee that you can never be subject to a class action case again. Let's not kid ourselves, who here thinks that any company will ever again sell any service again without a clause in it forcing arbitration and disallowing class action lawsuits?
Note that arbitrators are notorious for overwhelmingly favoring the party which hires them. In this case, that'd be the company. This is part of a much larger and utterly foolish trend: the systematic dismantling of each available "working through the system" method of either getting justice or effecting change.
Social unrest is like any other kind of energy. It can be neither created nor destroyed; it only changes form. It does not go away merely because you start removing the legitimate means of acting on it. Quite predictably, this is only going to lead to the exact kind of vendettas and feuds that the justice system was specifically put in place to avoid. We're already beginning to see this with groups like Anonymous.
In fact I can sum up Anonymous quite easily. Right or wrong, I believe the reasoning goes like this: "I don't have the millions of dollars and years of my life that it takes to bring a lawsuit against a multinational corporation and actually prevail, but what I do have is some skill with computers and a lot of outrage with no approved outlet." Anonymous should be completely redundant. Instead, they are a blatantly obvious sign that the justice system is failing.
When the authoritarian types witness this, do they feel an immediate need to reform the system? No, they don't. They haven't the wisdom. Instead, they feel a need to "crack down" on computer crimes, as though they were random events happening in a vacuum, as if that does anything to address why they are happening. Where are the leaders who actually understand how to deal with human beings? Are they extinct? Are they the ones who never desired power in the first place?
Alright alright, I apologize for my knee-jerk, anti-butthole reaction. Sometimes you focus so much on finding buttholes, that you don't notice the one in the mirror.
The willingness to admit that definitely qualifies you as "not a butthole". There is no uncertainty about that. I wish that kind of honesty were more common.
It reminds me of that saying, "an error doesn't become a mistake until you refuse to correct it".
To answer your previous post... the use of the English language and its grammar comes quite naturally to me. The correct use of words like "they're" and "their" and "there" is effortless and automatic. It requires no conscious thought; the correct word just seems to fit. I would have to deliberately go out of my way to use them incorrectly. Someone looking over my shoulder as I write would see that I touch-type -- since I am looking at the screen the entire time, I correct any typos and such on-the-fly. It's not so much that I am trying to look for them; it's more like they stand out as something that immediately doesn't look right to me. They get my attention on their own.
Now, do I do that perfectly without ever making a mistake? No, I'm a human being. For just that reason I'd give it a beginning-to-end proofreading prior to submitting it to an audience of many thousands. I would do that to account for the fact that I'm not perfect. I'd bother to account for that because I believe that something worth doing is worth doing well, not to mention that being involved, giving a damn, and doing a good job provides a certain satisfaction that can be difficult to find elsewhere.
I'm not claiming special status here, only that people have strengths and weaknesses and this is one of my strengths. The point I am making is that if I seriously struggled with things like this, and had no intention of doing whatever it took to change that, then I would have no business taking a job as an editor. I would consider myself incompetent and unqualified. That's alright because everyone can't be skilled at every task, but the skills I do and don't have definitely determine the tasks I consider myself competent to handle.
If I were the editor, I would consider myself personally responsible for a discussion where the first few dozen posts are off-topic references to my poor editing that thousands of users must now sift through to get to the topic at hand. What I wouldn't do is expect someone to pay me for work that is unprofessional and mediocre. I think the vast number of comments about it are because it's such a regular event. It's not the occasional error that slips through the cracks, which would be understandable.
Letting yourself get defined by narcissists (and sociopaths) is The American Way. It's a staple of public schooling, higher education, and the corporate ladder.
What are you, some kind of un-American pinko commie?
I think you misunderstand his post. Someone who researched a device and decided it didn't fit their needs is completely different than the blind hatred exhibited by status seeking pseudo intellectual tech geeks that seem to come out of the woodwork when the name Apple is mentioned. I think that is his complaint and it does have merit.
I was aware of this but perhaps I did not give it the consideration it deserves. I do understand why you would place emphasis on it. Now that you've caused me to think it over, I believe it deserves more emphasis than I originally gave to it.
I suppose I would reconcile the two positions thusly: a lot of the "haters" depend on feeling like they are listened to and engaged and taken seriously. They're like trolls this way. Perhaps my post de-emphasized the difference between the "haters" and those with reasonable objection because I unconsciously didn't consider the "haters" worth a moment's thought, so I automatically focused on what remained.
A more deliberate, conscious rejection of them, a willingness to ignore them if you like, in order to move on to better and more worthy posts, might be just the solution. I don't really see a point in trying to reason with them. People who take a religious stance on a factual matter generally do that because they don't like reason to begin with. You can't reason with someone who doesn't value reason, it just doesn't work. You can show them up before an audience, such as this one, but that tends to just make them more vocal and belligerent. Above all, it tends to make them feel validated that you take them seriously enough to offer opposition.
I guess that takes us back to my previous question of why anyone feels a need to straighten them out. Let them be religious. It seems so important to them.
It depends. The paper trail is precisely how they will get you, if you piss off the wrong people. It's surprisingly difficult for a corporation to do that, even if it's just a shell corporation.
If we were really interested in no longer funding organized crime, we'd end the idiotic War on (some) Drugs and admit that after decades of trying, it has never accomplished its stated goals and never will. Creating a black market to ensure organized criminals always have a steady revenue stream seems to be the only thing it's managed to do. Wouldn't that also restore some respect for the institution of law, if people could see that laws get repealed as soon as it's obvious that they don't work and aren't going to work? This one is long past that time.
It would be the single most harmful thing we could possibly do to organized criminals everywhere. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it would do more to undermine them than the next ten best ideas put together. As Al Capone found out, there's nothing quite like contraband that many people really want for ensuring an under-the-table revenue stream.
Oh, I have no problem with discussions about this and related topics. I'm just fed up with the slobbering hordes of "anti-fanboys" who show up every time Apple is mentioned (there is a similar but smaller reaction for Google, Microsoft and most other high-profile tech companies, Apple seems to be the main target for the "cool to hate" crowd and has been so for a while now).
These commenters rarely contribute to the discussion, don't bother reading up on the issues at hand and instead tend to just resort to fear-mongering, misinterpretations and of course outright name-calling.
This is an issue that should be discussed but the vast majority of comments I've seen so far have been along the lines of "APPLE SI TEH EVül!!1 STAEV JOBS IS SUING IS SATTEILT IN ORBIT TO TARKC UR POSISHION!!! ANY1 STIL USING CRAPPLE IPHONIE IS AN IDIOTS OR A FAGET 4 STAVE JOBS CAWK!!11one" (really, when venturing outside of "geek circles" and onto the internet at large that isn't very far from a very large number of comments I've seen although most have worse punctuation and don't use all-caps, the caps-lock is pretty much implied from the tone of the posts though)
It's possible that I am about to bring up a distinction that means something only to me. Having said that ...
Let's assume for argument's sake that you have characterized the anti-fanbois with complete accuracy. Here's my question: why do you consider it something you need to straighten out? Does not Apple have a marketing department, PR people, official spokespersons, the ability to launch marketing campaigns, etc.?
Just about the only time I don't feel that way is when Linux is the subject. You could call that a bias, I suppose, but it's quite unique for a bias because I have an objective reason. There is no single corporation that owns Linux. There's no marketing department anyplace that represents all of Linux. Maybe Red Hat has marketers that represent Red Had Linux but they don't own Linux itself any more than I do. Most of what they'd be marketing is along the lines of paid support. In the absence of one central representative entity, it is mostly the relatively decentralized community of uses and enthusiasts who perform most of the advocation and support.
I am humbled by the comparison between how much I have benefitted from using Linux and GPL software, when that is compared to how much I have personally helped out. But I do help out. I try to answer forums, though most of the time I am helping people I know personally to understand and master this OS. I can actually get personally involved, pitch in, contribute some effort. I can be an actual part of the Linux community, however small. Therefore I do have some kind of stake in it, in a way that I don't have a personal stake in the success of Microsoft or Apple.
Why does someone who presumably is not an employee of Apple feel so strongly about others who badmouth Apple or its products? That's what is difficult for me to understand.
Hush now, don't ruin a good anti-Apple flamefest. You're not giving the haters a chance to proclaim that they've never used, never owned, never wished to own or even seen an Apple product in real life but they're still horribly outraged and this great assault on their human rights by the evil empire led by the great satan, Steve Jobs.
Yes, I'm exaggerating but I can't help but be slightly baffled by the hordes of people who seem to think that Apple is somehow more powerful in the world of computing than Microsoft or that they are "more evil" than MS has ever been. Not to mention the fact that about half of them swear they've never used a mac or iDevice in their lives yet they are experts on the subject...
These are mundane issues concerning device design and business decisions. It is not some vast unknowable thing that can only be experienced. It can be researched and anyone willing to do that can acquaint themselves with the facts. If you think someone is misinformed tell him where he is factually incorrect.
I admit I may be misunderstanding you, but what you're doing there seems like dismissal. It's similar to the tactics of the worst "anti-Apple" types and therefore it won't reveal the error of their ways. Right now, you say they probably don't own Apple devices. You say that like the following never occurred to you: maybe they don't own an Apple device because they did some research before spending the money and learned ahead of time that such devices wouldn't suit their needs. I'd consider that person more pro-active and likely more wise than someone who blindly invests in something and ends up dissatisfied when the information was out there the whole time.
So if someone does own an Apple device and has complaints about it, what then? Are they now hypocrites for buying something they later decided they didn't like? Does worrying so much about their character do anything to address the legitimacy of any complaint they have about the design of the device? I don't believe so.
No, of course not. It's entirely possible for someone to cry wolf 500 times, and then later suffer a legitimate injustice.
It's entirely possible for them to think about that prior to crying wolf 500 times.
It's entirely possible for them to be held up as an example to others, a warning against those who might feel inclined to similarly cry wolf.
Particularly when their crying wolf is not a matter that's just between themselves and the judge, but involves the legal intimidation of innocents. All of these strong-arm tactics are over a relatively trivial matter like unauthorized copying, not gang violence or warfare or impending catastrophe.
So now they are following the latest trend and trying to go after domains and equipment. They're following in the footsteps of what the government is doing in the name of safety and anti-terrorism, methods they no doubt admire. That's the latest escalation, then? Copyright cases need a "loser pays" system, where the loser of a case has to pay all of the opposition's legal expenses (perhaps times 1.5). Remove the profit from being a copyright troll and embolden the recipients of these threats to insist that the cases go to court. That's the best long-term solution to this kind of company. It also addresses the apparent rarity of such reasonable judges as this one.
Vladimir Lenin predates the KGB.
"Yet, no matter how good your blog post is, it would have been better journalism to include in the summary link(s) to other source(s) with different perspective(s)."
You mean, like the Wired and Atlantic articles that I linked to at the end of my posting...?
You understand the distinction between your link and the Slashdot staffs' links, yes?
The moment they rely upon third parties such as yourself to do their journalism for them, is the moment they admit they have abandoned journalistic integrity. Therefore, whether you provided such links and whether the links you provided are immaculate or not is completely irrelevant to my commentary about Slashdot's journalistic quality.
Put another way, you may have shown them up. That still doesn't improve their standards, now does it?
I've enjoyed the discourse we have shared, but at some point I have to wonder if you just want to argue for the sake of contention.
histrionic much?
Is that really the best you can do in the face of someone who is aware of what is happening to a once-free country?
It is better to show up empty-handed than to bring this kind of cowardly dismissal to the table.
Tell you what: put my words to the test. Find an elderly person at least 70 years old. Ask them how police used to be. Then come back to me, if you have the fortitude.
Well, keep in mind that there is a difference between being asked and being told to do something. If a cop asks you:
"Can I see your cellphone?"
Then, you're under no obligation to answer in the affirmative. However, if he says:
"Hand over your cellphone."
That's a demand and you're legally required (with some exceptions) to comply. Although cops are well-trained and they know how to phrase a question such that it sounds like a demand:
"I'm going to take a look at your cellphone. Would you hand it to me?"
The point is that when talking to the police, stay calm and listen to exactly what they're saying. If you're not clear if something is a question or a demand, then ask for clarification.
I can talk to elderly people who remember a time when cops were not state-sponsored thugs who rigorously searched for every possible way to nail you with something. Seriously... what kind of psychotic assholes thought it would be a great idea to train cops to request optional cooperation in a manner that sounds like a mandatory demand? What kind of world do people like this hope to live in?
Even if I were the undisputed dictator for life, an autocrat with absolute power, a sovereign whose orders are always obeyed without question and without hestiation, a ruler without rival, the man in charge of everything ... I still would not want to live in a dictatorial police state. I still don't want to be surrounded by that kind of misery and disharmony. I especially wouldn't want to be even partially responsible for it. No affirmation of my ego would be enough to make it worthwhile.
In some ways I can easily understand the minds and spirits of power-hungry people. In some ways I can easily grasp why the USA is becoming a police state. I see the forces at work driving both. They're the same type of perversion and corruption that has befallen every great nation. It's what possessed every bloodthirsty mass-murdering tyrant throughout history, and by that I refer to those who had motives other than self-defense. The history books usually refer to them as "conquerors" with a certain awe. As the saying goes, if you kill a man you're a murderer; kill many and you're a conqueror.
But in other ways, I really don't understand it at all. I mostly want to be left alone to live my life as I see fit. Taking responsibility for my life, not allowing my decisions to harm others, and respecting the freedom of others to live as they see fit are the only obligations I truly recognize. Yet for those who view life as one gigantic struggle for control of others, it's just a matter of who's holding the reins. Each would like to be that person or a member of that group. Often, this is even portrayed as normal and is rarely questioned. As common as it is, as predictable as its machinations are, this mentality is completely alien to me. I know it only through outside observation. Am I in a small minority here? Am I really?
If so, cops who find petty deception and intimidation useful, not so they can solve some heinous crime and bring a dangerous criminal to justice, but so they can brag to their buddies about how many additional charges they added to some poor schmuck who was a threat to no one ... well that's just the beginning. They think they're running the show because they can push civilians around? They're dogs on a leash to the truly powerful, obedient and loyal so long as their "appetites" are satisfied.
What a shame. We could have a much more beautiful world than this.
For the record, if it were Microsoft, my response would be identical: tempest; teapot.
From what I've seen of your rationality, I wouldn't doubt that for a moment. For others, that's more of an open question.
The poster to whom I was responding was talking about a Forbes author.
Whereas you merely explain why you believe this is nothing to panic about, the Forbes author positively thinks it's wonderful and hopes to see other vendors do the same. It's quite a leap from "this isn't a threat" to "this is quite an asset" when we still don't know exactly what this file is for. Unlike you, that Forbes author is making positive claims about the desirability of this feature and has about as much evidence as I do, i.e. zero. Meanwhile she is severely downplaying the privacy issues surrounding any kind of data collection of this type, reducing the entire subject to a one-liner about her "hope that creepy apps can't tap into it." That of course completely sidesteps the question of what, if anything, Apple does with the data.
She also talked about how the cell networks (i.e. Verizon, AT&T) already have location information from the towers. She completely ignores the fact that Apple doesn't have location information from the cell network, unless of course they are able to access location data stored on the phone as part of their location-based services. She does not even mention that and I doubt she appreciates the difference. One of those would have a legitimate need-to-know while the other would not.
I attribute that to fanboyism. When fanboys act like paid marketers when in fact they are not receiving compensation from the company in question, I refer to that as useful idiocy. For some reason, Apple in particular has a lot of fanboys and apologists who tend to downplay and dismiss instead of recognizing such questions and trying to answer them.
"... one of my buddies might get ad revenue if I link his no-name blog on the main page..."
Given that there aren't any ads on my blog for me to get revenue from, and I don't have any "buddies" who are moderators on slashdot (that I know of), I'm not sure what this has to do with anything.
One reason my post was clearly marked as opinion and definitely not represented as fact .. is that I run ad blockers to where it would look exactly the same to me whether or not you actually ran ads on your blog. I appreciate you clarifying that my opinion doesn't apply to you personally -- that's something I should have explicitly stated and I regret that you had to point this out.
The original post asking whether Slashdot is becoming the "FOX news of tech discussion" was evidently not written by someone who only just now thinks so. That, in turn, raises a bigger question about how stories are done that is not remotely limited to this particular story. In fact this particular story and anything you could say about it would be within the margin of error if one were to do a survey of all Slashdot stories. I don't know if you have been an active participant in Slashdot lately (UID alone doesn't tell me much), but this is a subject that comes up from time to time. That's why I also mentioned the book reviews, which this story is clearly not, because I am referring to a general trend and not to any specific story.
For example, I for one found your blog entry to be rational, decently well-written, and generally a pleasure to read. Yet, no matter how good your blog post is, it would have been better journalism to include in the summary link(s) to other source(s) with different perspective(s). We really have very few facts about this iPhone issue, apart from those we are all just speculating, and speculation is much more interesting and useful when it is diverse. In summary, it would have taken a trivial amount of effort on the part of Slashdot staff to make this a much higher quality story.
Reading back over my previous post, I can see how it probably did look like unfair personal criticism of you and for that I apologize. I appreciate the calm and reasonable manner with which you made me aware of this. Really, I wish more people handled disagreement this way.
My point was that if you view the file being backed up to your PC as a "vulnerability", then encrypting it should ease you worries.
While we haven't heard from Apple what the reason for the file is, it seems pretty reasonable to me that it's a database of known cell tower and WiFi locations, to be used to rapidly "triangulate" your location, when possible, if you have an application that wants to use iOS' Location Services. This idea would seem to be supported by the existence of a similar location cache on Android.
It sounds then like we can agree that backups are not the issue here.
While I think your hypothesis is quite reasonable, it is unfortunate that we are all just speculating. I believe my point stands that if companies don't want people raising questions of trust, they should implement such things openly in a well-documented fashion. All it would take is something you can easily find with a Web search and this whole issue would have been put to rest before it ever got started.
How is it that marketers and PR people are so good at manipulating behavior and perception, yet so terrible at foreseeing preventable controversies like this one? The cost to produce one simple document or a couple of entries in a FAQ is absolutely negligible compared to all the other costs involved in designing a phone and implementing a location service.
I saw the blog and I wondered what conclusion the blogger would have had if it was microsoft instead of apple. Personally, I was on the creepy side of the scale and was stunned when she thought it was cool. I am so glad I am not cool.
It's not known for sure that Vladimir Lenin came up with the phrase, but it is attributed to him. The phrase is "useful idiots".
The very fact that someone would feel differently about Microsoft doing it than they would about Apple doing it qualifies them as a moron. To allow the legitimacy of a business practice to be defined by your personal feelings about the corporation is pure emotion that has no place in a discussion about the facts of the matter. I especially expect anyone who wants to be a reporter, blogger, pundit, or commentator to understand this.
/. seems to have turned into a sort-of FOX news of tech discussion - without even a pretense of objectivity
There was a time when Slashdot had a pretense of objectivity?
Here's my opinion:
If by "objectivity" you mean "one of my buddies might get ad revenue if I link his no-name blog on the main page ... so what if higher quality sources for the story are available?" then yes. It's just an unstated pretense. Also, if objectivity were a highly regarded goal, there'd be at least one book review on Slashdot that straight up says "this book is sub-par; here are a few books published by competitors that are much higher quality". Instead, virtually all of them are quite favorable, even though knowing what not to purchase is at least as useful as knowing that something else is recommended.
If it's anything like the "oh but [the Democrats | the Republicans] aren't the only ones, because [the Republicans | the Democrats] did this nasty thing too!" then it's not going away anytime soon.
I mod those posts "Redundant" every chance I get, but it doesn't work when I'm the only one.