See, this right here is what pisses me off. Offhanded comments about sweatshops in relation to Apple. So Apple is one of the very few companies going out of their way to do something about sweatshops. They voluntarily audit and review humans rights practices at the third world plants they do business with, have standards of behavior, require changes at those plants, and openly publish their audits. This puts them right at the top of the list for responsible electronics manufacture. Moreover, Steve Jobs tried the experiment of all US manufacturing with Next, but people decided automated manufactured computers in the US were too expensive and he had to sell out to Apple and go back to asian manufacturing.
So what pisses me off about your comment is that if people like you are spreading crap about one of the most responsible companies (presumably out of ignorance), what motivation do they have to continue with responsible practices? Seriously, if they get just as much shit as other companies doing business with the same factories, but who don't do audits or require changes or publish the audits, why should Apple do anything in that regard? The last time Apple published an audit, the press immediately jumped on it and reported on human rights abuses by Apple (not that Apple had discovered problems, ordered them fixed, and then told everyone) just that abuses were happening at "Apple" factories.
Thanks ever so much for being part of the problem and spreading crap that will pressure companies to do less due diligence and be less open and proactive about sweatshop conditions.
It's an awful lot easier to source an illegal gun when there are many legal guns. You just steal one.
First, theres a lot of guns int he world. Even in places where it is illegal to own them, criminals smuggle them in or buy them from police and military on the black market. Second, when there are fewer guns, people turn to other weapons, from fists to bombs and there is no objective evidence that murder or violent crime rates actually decrease as a result. You may not be able to grow guns from seeds,but you can grow weapons from them, from poisons to clubs, and you can make weapons and commit violence with almost anything. Look at the nonsense in Britain, they enacted very strict gun control laws and then changed their method of counting violent crime so no one would be able to tell if it helped at all. Objective parties doing studies seem to indicate both violent crime and murder went up and now the UK is looking at strict "knife control" laws. It's just useless legislation to appease the voters instead of useful legislation that actually makes a difference.
P.S. and before you kick in with a completely unsupported argument that guns are a special case and more likely to kill, look at the pipe bombings and molotov cocktail attacks so common in Brazil.
Sure you can. In fact, I think it might even be a viable business model. Clone the app store right down to using the same formats to make things easy. Roll your own payment and update system (preferably identical to Apple's but independent). Make a huge, public promise to never, ever, ever reject any app for any reason other than it being malware. Do actual due diligence on the apps, target both apps in the app store and apps that can't get into the app store. Make a deal with Adobe and Microsoft both of whom want Apple to have less power. Charge less than 30%, say 25%, what have developers got to lose by putting their apps in your store too? Build in features Apple is lacking, like demo/trail versions of software.
Don't download just any app, don't change the OS, don't share your books or music with anyone...
Umm, how does apple stop you from installing alternative OS's? I've never had a problem doing so on any Mac and there is an Android for iPhone project that works. As for books and music, you can easily share the music they sell, just be prepared to be sued if they start being mass distributed and you did not strip off the tag with your ID.
...NEVER develop unauthorized software or be ready to be remotely disabled!
Apple doesn't sell a large swath of applications through their store and that's annoying to us power users. But as for remote disabling, I thought only Google had used that feature so far.
But not like the one on Android, since you can still install apks from other sources, or use third party app stores.
So here's the problem. People like app stores because they like having a single UI for getting applications. People like app stores because they are vetted and that makes people feel safe. In truth, app stores controlled by a single body can revoke rights to a signature and kill malware pretty much everywhere it was installed and that does bring real security. People like app stores because they like censorship. They like that "inappropriate apps" are not available to their kids or grandparents and they certainly don't want to complain about the types of censorship happening (this applies to big media stores as well as app stores). So right now, Android devices are suffering from some of the same security problems as traditional computers, while iPhones (and soon Windows phones) are gaining a reputation for better security and for being more reliable and having better battery life (Apple doesn't look for malware so much as it limits apps written in toolkits that don't use the stability and battery saving features).
The good news is: there is a solution that can make everyone happy. The bad news is: there are very few companies in a position to do something about it.
What we really need is an app store that is vetted and which will provide and sell any and every application submitted to it without fail, even malware. There needs to be a "common carrier" type commitment so they aren't blamed for their actions. Next, within that store we need a vetting process that is decentralized, where multiple parties can rate the security, reliability, battery usage, privacy concerns, and usefulness of an app and where that gets translated into automatic patterns for users to access. Users need to see, right up front that some app they're thinking about downloading crashes regularly and will halve their battery life. And their mobile device needs to speak up when their battery becomes low and suggest shutting that app off. We need users to see malware or spyware in the store, but clearly labelled as such and with a string of very harsh warnings explaining exactly what it will do. These ratings need to be created by at last two major parties that invest manpower and skill into rating everything submitted. Preferably, there would be a community project contributing as well.
Frankly, because of the expense and manpower, I don't see this happening. Google doesn't like to involve that many people and put that level of polish and end users interaction into their services so they will bet on multiple application sources for their phones. Some Android phone makers will create their own, locked down stores. Apple and MS will keep with their locked down stores because they have no reason to have to invest that much time and money for something that they don't have to compete against.
Basically, I think unless something is done, Mr. Wales is right. Apple style app stores will become dominant and may even consolidate and will become a bottleneck in the mobiles space.
Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways...
Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.
The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264...
Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.
...their own personal wars against Adobe and Google
They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.
Google can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting Flash and using Flash support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.
How does open source help fight security in the short term?
Fight security? Did you mean improve security or fight vulnerabilities? In the short term it allows them to audit and improve the code, especially if they believe (as many do) that there are backdoors built into commercial, closed source OS's and applications.
Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
It sounds to me like both. Also, open source allows them to move development to their own country and build up a strategic reserve of programming talent versed in the software the government uses and able to make security improvements and fixes, rather than being reliant upon foreign programmers that may or may not be available and may or may not be agents of a foreign power.
You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?
It was a proposed part of the standard. Apple was one major company to step in though, but they had some pretty good reasons. Apple makes iPhones and they are trying to sell them partly on the fact that they use less battery. Part of that is using dedicated hardware for playing video. They have millions of existing devices out there they cannot retrofit to do the same with WebM. So it sounds like what Apple did was because it benefited Apple, but because in turn it benefits Apple's customers and making them happy makes Apple more money.
This is not an insolvable problem though. WebM support can be built into hardware. A few companies have proposals for chips and they say they will do it if the format takes off. Apple could convince them to start finishing those proposals and adding support right now. They just need a reason to push their vendors and eat a small cost for more expensive hardware going forward. So why isn't Google trying to make a compromise deal that they support h264 in Android and Chrome for a set number of years in exchange for Apple promising to add WebM support to Safari, OS X, and iPhones as soon as they can get hardware support added?
If Google is really serious, this should be their proposal. If, however, they're more interested in trying to gain smartphone market share at the expense of open standards and consumers, then they should continue on as they are, complaining about Apple, while secretly enjoying Flash's gain in market share which helps them accomplish that.
YouTube supports Flash and will almost certainly continue to do so to reach IE users.If they move away from it, it will only be after they implement Chrome plugin or a WebM plugin. Also, youtube is not going to abandon iPhones. Both markets are simply too big and would give too much market share to alternative sites. MS, in particular, still has more leverage and benefits more by breaking compatibility unless MS is getting really worried about Adobe; and lets face it, they're the real winners here.
The problem here is that multiple parties all have valid conflicts of interest, but lack of standardization hurts us all. Here's how:
Fragmentation promotes Flash which leaves us all stuck with a single vendor proprietary solution that will have poor security and performance.
Browser promoting WebM means everyone with an existing mobile device and many people with mobile devices being made for some number of years going forward will lack hardware support for that format, resulting in crappy battery life.
Companies that provide video now will have to translate large portions of their catalog, which means some video will simply go away (as that will be cheaper) and everyone will incur expense that no one wants.
So, can the big parties come together and create a compromise that will help everyone, or are they more interested in hurting one another than in helping consumers? Here's what I propose. All major browser/OS vendors commit to h264 support for a period of six years, then agree to remove said support; as part of the HTML5 transition. After six years, all browser vendors agree to support WebM. This gives content providers a plan going forward and gives companies that make cell phone chipsets time to integrate hardware support for WebM and for phone makers to incorporate those chips in their designs. People with six year old phones would still have shitty battery life at that point, but I suspect that will be well past the lifespan of a smartphone.
You do realize that he isn't a UK citizen? Sort of invalidates your theory.
He's a citizen of the commonwealth, which is still how a lot of the UK considers itself.
I realize that he is a Commonwealth citizen, but in no way do Canadians or Australians consider UK politicians as representing them, or vice-versa.
Your assertion is irrelevant. The relevant question is if UK citizens (who vote for the politicians) consider members of the commonwealth to be "like them" enough that they become worried about how they will be treated by those same politicians; and if those politicians understand the perspective of the citizens. Many UK citizens still consider members of the commonwealth to be in the same boat.
This is Assange's own lawyers trying to prevent extradition to Sweden, which has actually filed criminal charges against him.
I'm not even sure this is true. Last I heard they issued an international arrest warrant because they wanted to extradite him to question him, but had not actually filed any criminal charges.
Does anyone believe that the fact he is in UK custody doesn't effectively place him in US custody, more than Swedish custody would?
I do. You see politicians generally are a bit shy about handing over their own citizens to foreign powers for unknown. It tends to get their constituents thinking about what could happen to them, personally, and they vote the bum out pronto. Handing over a foreign national to another foreign power, on the other hand, makes some people upset but does not result in the same level of anger, fear, and motivation. It's not a political death sentence. In this case UK politicians can claim ignorance to some extent, claiming they could not foresee that he'd be handed over to the US. They can even blame the US and Sweden publicly and call for his return to the UK. This may well prevent them from being kicked out of office.
So, he and his lawyers use things that will strike a chord, like claiming he'll be sent to Guantanamo Bay (as the current administration is so keen to do) or that he'll be killed, whether by the death penalty or otherwise (when it isn't clear that there is any legal basis on which to prosecute him).
True enough, and the US handed every foreigner that legal tool when we started having "special" prisons outside the normal court system and with no regard for international human rights standards. Moreover, he was doubly enabled when powerful right wing politicians made public comments about having him killed.
Your link to violent crime statistics don't indicate whether those figures are for raw totals or for per capita totals. A quick run down of the list shows that it mostly tracks with population size, so I would assume that the figures are not adjusted for per capita.
True enough, I later in the thread linked to a map of violence by population and as several people have noted there is still no correlation.
Try a new argument when you have per capita figures.
Keep up, the discussion covered that more than an hour ago.
You do realise that the so called gun control even in those states is _nothing_ compared to countries with real gun control?
Certainly, but I already addressed that when I wrote that there was no correlation nationally either. Whether a country has strict or lax gun control does not seem to causatively effect the amount of violence and violent crime, with examples on both ends of the spectrum.
The pervasiveness of weapons in private hand is and will continue to be a major problem for public safety in the US.
Firearms are dangerous and will result in accidental deaths, like many other tools and recreational items. That said, there isn't really data to support them being any more of a threat to public health than say, backyard pools.
Just look at the stats of heavily regulated countries.
I certainly have. I've also looked at countries like Switzerland and Sweden with very high gun ownership. There is no correlation. No study has been able to show one that I've ever read. Unless you'd care to cite some comprehensive study I've missed.
Neither do they have more violence nor do the citizens feel threatened because they cannot arm themselves.
Umm, so you can't prove guns don't cause crime, even though there is no evidence to support such a hypothesis so we should pass laws to ban them?
My question is: Why is it so easy to get the angry, scared rhetoric to take root in people's minds and so hard to get it out again, no matter how sensible the evidence to the contrary might seem?
People in general do not form opinions logically. They don't form opinions based upon facts. The vast majority of people, intelligent or not, form opinions based upon emotion; upon what they want to be true or what they've heard and catches their fancy or what is socially acceptable and convenient. They then use logic and facts to support and defend that opinion in discussion. Facts that don't support the right opinion are more easily forgotten or rationalized. Show people a scientific study on a topic, and regardless of the conclusions of the paper, studies show everyone will be more convinced of the opinion they had before reading the paper.
The answer to all this is to be methodological when forming opinions. People need to grow up and learn to rely upon logic and the scientific method to not only justify opinions, but to form them in the first place. The fact that our schools don't teach such basic mental tools is the root of the problem in my opinion.
Agreed that there's little correlation between gun laws and violent crime, if you look at this spread. So why do people in states like Arizona keep clamoring for gun ownership as a way to reduce violent crime?
I wouldn't say they're exactly clamoring for it, but gun control is often suggested as a way to reduce crime and conversely the relaxation of gun laws is often suggested as a way to do the same. My theory is it comes up so often because it is an excellent political tool. People are afraid of being disarmed and helpless to crime and people are afraid of others with guns that could hurt them. So you get a lot of afraid people, spout off political nonsense that makes people more afraid and you have a lot of angry, scared people who will vote against whoever they fear and ignore all the more relevant topics of the day. It's easy politicking.
Of particular note: the top 4 are also the top 4 most populous. It's figures like #6 where Michigan is not the 6th highest population; a state which has stringent laws on hand guns (direct permission from local law enforcement).
It might be better to see numbers comparing violence with population.
You make a good point. Here's a map There still seems to be no correlation. I might mention Michigan is middle of the road for gun ownership, no registration for rifles, and approval for both pistols and concealed carry is mandatory for people that pass the criteria. Theoretically, open carry is legal as well.
"Armed citizens" are statistically a lot more likely to kill themselves or a family member than they are a bad guy.
Now, lets not get ahead of ourselves. We're talking about the viability of armed people in the crowd or among the staff. Are you implying that those people would be too busy murdering their families or are you just going off topic here? Clearly family members kill one another by all means much more often than anyone else, but that doesn't have a lot to do with firearm ownership. There are more successful suicides in places with high firearm ownership, but as I support the right to suicide I'm not really upset by that.
It's not even so much that I thing guns should be illegal. It's that I think the idiotic assertion (which only dates back to the 1980s) that the Second Amendment guarantees the "right" of every citizen to own a handgun ought to be illegal.
You think making assertions about the constitution ought to be illegal nd you don't see the irony of that in light of the first amendment?
Before 1980, even far-right conservatives like Judge Robert Bork agreed that the Second Amendment had nothing to do with any "right of everyone to own a handgun".
I'm well aware of the political opinions on the topic and how they've see-sawed over the centuries.
This is where the "constitutional" "right" to "bear" "arms" comes from. Not the Second Amendment.
I guess I'm not understanding your meaning. Those words are in the constitution, it's the interpretation that is in dispute, as to whether it is a personal right guaranteed or simply a right protected from intervention by the federal government but that can be banned by state and local governments. Also, most of the scholarly articles on the topic seem to indicate it was originally a much different interpretation, but in a way no one in modern US politics finds very palatable.
The difference is that the Swiss don't have the gun for "personal protection".
Actually, the differences are myriad if you're looking for factors that actually correlate with violent crime statistics. The Swiss have very low wealth disparity, socialized healthcare, good education, free addiction treatment programs, and significant social safety nets for the poor. All of these factors correlate strongly with lower rates of violent crime and murder. If people were serious about scientifically reducing violent crime in the US and tackling the problem we could work on any of those and have reason to expect improvement. Of course those are all a lot harder politically than getting people mad about gun laws because people are irrational and frankly not very interested in facts.
That's all well and good, but I gave up when you touted your two completely opposite scenarios. I could just as easily do that myself.
Great, lets do that.
Case A: Random lunatic breaks into a house, finds a gun and kills all 6 members of the household, as well as 3 neighbours and 1 police officer who attended the scene, before blowing his own head off.
Case B: Nutjob enters the home and is quickly subdued by the 6 people, who easily outnumber the crazy fool and keep him down long enough for police to arrive. Minor injuries were caused when the man attempted to cause harm with a bread knife but all involved made a full recovery.
Okay, so lets analyze those two cases using both methodologies:
"Violent crime": case A results in 10 homicides and one suicide racking up 10 violent crimes. Case B is one assault. Clearly laws that promote Case B seem to be indicated by this one sample.
"Gun crime": Case A results in 10 homicides and on suicide racking up 10 gun crimes. Case B zero gun crimes. Clearly laws that promote Case B seem to be indicated by this one sample.
I guess I'm not seeing your objection to evaluating this case in terms of "violent crime" or how that is in any way worse than evaluating it in terms of "gun crime". Are you sure you understood my post? Maybe you should re-read it.
So you see, these entirely hypothetical scenarios prove absolutely nothing useful.
Actually, although you do not seem to realize it, you just supported the point of my post with your example.
It is easy to argue that letting everyone have guns is better than letting just the criminals have guns...
Please stay on topic. This is not about what gun control laws are a good idea. It's about objectively evaluating the effects of gun control and other laws using valid, logic criteria instead of logically flawed problem statements designed to hide the fact that evidence does not support a particular conclusion.
Even if "gun crime" did rise after a ban, eventually it would fall as weapons are harder to obtain.
Clearly you did miss the point. I don't care if "gun crime" rises. You shouldn't care if "gun crime" rises. This is because only someone who hasn't thought about it or who has a phobia cares if they are murdered with a gun or with a bomb or with a baseball bat. The goal needs to be reducing violent crime and murder and "gun crime" is just a term used to obscure the data on that issue.
Please read my other post in this thread as to why "gun violence" statistics are misleading and not a good judge of the problem. If reducing gun availability reduces the number of violent crimes with guns, but increases violent crime and murder overall, then it causing more harm than good. We need to look at overall violent crime statistics.
So, here's a list of violent crime by state. Note the top 5 are: California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Illinois. So of the most violent states the highest has very middle of the road gun control laws (somewhat more strict than average), two have very lax gun control laws, and two have some of the most strict gun control laws in the country. Notice the strong correlation? Neither do I.
Frankly, if you're looking for causative factors for violent crime and murder, gun control laws are a red herring. There is little or no correlation demonstrated scientifically either regionally or nationally. Trying to fight violent crime with gun control laws is like trying to fight syphilis with prayer in public elementary schools. Everyone will have an opinion, get mad, and politicians will love it... but no matter what happens it's not going to help the problem significantly. Real solutions have worked other places though, reducing wealth disparity, social safety nets, decriminalizing narcotic use and personal possession, free addiction treatment programs, educational initiatives, socialized healthcare... all can be shown to have demonstrable effect in reducing violent crime. Of course they're also harder and expensive and not as easy of political targets.
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That means sweatshops for iPods...
See, this right here is what pisses me off. Offhanded comments about sweatshops in relation to Apple. So Apple is one of the very few companies going out of their way to do something about sweatshops. They voluntarily audit and review humans rights practices at the third world plants they do business with, have standards of behavior, require changes at those plants, and openly publish their audits. This puts them right at the top of the list for responsible electronics manufacture. Moreover, Steve Jobs tried the experiment of all US manufacturing with Next, but people decided automated manufactured computers in the US were too expensive and he had to sell out to Apple and go back to asian manufacturing.
So what pisses me off about your comment is that if people like you are spreading crap about one of the most responsible companies (presumably out of ignorance), what motivation do they have to continue with responsible practices? Seriously, if they get just as much shit as other companies doing business with the same factories, but who don't do audits or require changes or publish the audits, why should Apple do anything in that regard? The last time Apple published an audit, the press immediately jumped on it and reported on human rights abuses by Apple (not that Apple had discovered problems, ordered them fixed, and then told everyone) just that abuses were happening at "Apple" factories.
Thanks ever so much for being part of the problem and spreading crap that will pressure companies to do less due diligence and be less open and proactive about sweatshop conditions.
It's an awful lot easier to source an illegal gun when there are many legal guns. You just steal one.
First, theres a lot of guns int he world. Even in places where it is illegal to own them, criminals smuggle them in or buy them from police and military on the black market. Second, when there are fewer guns, people turn to other weapons, from fists to bombs and there is no objective evidence that murder or violent crime rates actually decrease as a result. You may not be able to grow guns from seeds,but you can grow weapons from them, from poisons to clubs, and you can make weapons and commit violence with almost anything. Look at the nonsense in Britain, they enacted very strict gun control laws and then changed their method of counting violent crime so no one would be able to tell if it helped at all. Objective parties doing studies seem to indicate both violent crime and murder went up and now the UK is looking at strict "knife control" laws. It's just useless legislation to appease the voters instead of useful legislation that actually makes a difference.
P.S. and before you kick in with a completely unsupported argument that guns are a special case and more likely to kill, look at the pipe bombings and molotov cocktail attacks so common in Brazil.
...you can't open a private "App Store" for OS X
Sure you can. In fact, I think it might even be a viable business model. Clone the app store right down to using the same formats to make things easy. Roll your own payment and update system (preferably identical to Apple's but independent). Make a huge, public promise to never, ever, ever reject any app for any reason other than it being malware. Do actual due diligence on the apps, target both apps in the app store and apps that can't get into the app store. Make a deal with Adobe and Microsoft both of whom want Apple to have less power. Charge less than 30%, say 25%, what have developers got to lose by putting their apps in your store too? Build in features Apple is lacking, like demo/trail versions of software.
What's stopping you?
Don't download just any app, don't change the OS, don't share your books or music with anyone...
Umm, how does apple stop you from installing alternative OS's? I've never had a problem doing so on any Mac and there is an Android for iPhone project that works. As for books and music, you can easily share the music they sell, just be prepared to be sued if they start being mass distributed and you did not strip off the tag with your ID.
...NEVER develop unauthorized software or be ready to be remotely disabled!
Apple doesn't sell a large swath of applications through their store and that's annoying to us power users. But as for remote disabling, I thought only Google had used that feature so far.
But not like the one on Android, since you can still install apks from other sources, or use third party app stores.
So here's the problem. People like app stores because they like having a single UI for getting applications. People like app stores because they are vetted and that makes people feel safe. In truth, app stores controlled by a single body can revoke rights to a signature and kill malware pretty much everywhere it was installed and that does bring real security. People like app stores because they like censorship. They like that "inappropriate apps" are not available to their kids or grandparents and they certainly don't want to complain about the types of censorship happening (this applies to big media stores as well as app stores). So right now, Android devices are suffering from some of the same security problems as traditional computers, while iPhones (and soon Windows phones) are gaining a reputation for better security and for being more reliable and having better battery life (Apple doesn't look for malware so much as it limits apps written in toolkits that don't use the stability and battery saving features).
The good news is: there is a solution that can make everyone happy. The bad news is: there are very few companies in a position to do something about it.
What we really need is an app store that is vetted and which will provide and sell any and every application submitted to it without fail, even malware. There needs to be a "common carrier" type commitment so they aren't blamed for their actions. Next, within that store we need a vetting process that is decentralized, where multiple parties can rate the security, reliability, battery usage, privacy concerns, and usefulness of an app and where that gets translated into automatic patterns for users to access. Users need to see, right up front that some app they're thinking about downloading crashes regularly and will halve their battery life. And their mobile device needs to speak up when their battery becomes low and suggest shutting that app off. We need users to see malware or spyware in the store, but clearly labelled as such and with a string of very harsh warnings explaining exactly what it will do. These ratings need to be created by at last two major parties that invest manpower and skill into rating everything submitted. Preferably, there would be a community project contributing as well.
Frankly, because of the expense and manpower, I don't see this happening. Google doesn't like to involve that many people and put that level of polish and end users interaction into their services so they will bet on multiple application sources for their phones. Some Android phone makers will create their own, locked down stores. Apple and MS will keep with their locked down stores because they have no reason to have to invest that much time and money for something that they don't have to compete against.
Basically, I think unless something is done, Mr. Wales is right. Apple style app stores will become dominant and may even consolidate and will become a bottleneck in the mobiles space.
anyone else here... miss the days when ios meant Cisco?
As someone who worked with them and had to use their products and put up with their business practices... dear Zeus no!
Temporary measures seldom are, and for anyone that wants h.264 that badly there's always Flash anyways...
Flash is likewise not supported by hardware decoders on many platforms and worse, since there is only one implementation of note, it is slow, crashy, and resource intensive.
The obvious solution would be to adopt WebM as the official standard, work on putting both software and hardware in place over the next couple years, and implement Flash/h.264...
Why Flash at all? Anyway, Google is not willing to do that since they say they're pulling support for h.264. If Google actually cared about the users, they'd commit to supporting h.264 until a specific date in order to benefit end users so those users aren't stuck with Flash.
...their own personal wars against Adobe and Google
They don't really care about either. They care about profits and they're fighting that battle the right way this time, by trying to make a better product. It just so happens that h264 is the only codec that works best for their customers NOW. And you expect them to agree to a standard that has worse battery life or is closed and under the control of a company that has been ignoring the need for security and stability and performance forever? Sorry, but you're completely blinded by partisanship on this one.
Google can easily broker a better solution, one that benefits customers, but they won't and this is because they are intentionally promoting Flash and using Flash support as a differentiating feature to try to gain market share in the mobile OS market... at the expense of open standards and users.
How does open source help fight security in the short term?
Fight security? Did you mean improve security or fight vulnerabilities? In the short term it allows them to audit and improve the code, especially if they believe (as many do) that there are backdoors built into commercial, closed source OS's and applications.
Sounds to me more like a cost savings move than a security move....
It sounds to me like both. Also, open source allows them to move development to their own country and build up a strategic reserve of programming talent versed in the software the government uses and able to make security improvements and fixes, rather than being reliant upon foreign programmers that may or may not be available and may or may not be agents of a foreign power.
You do know Theora was part of the official HTML5 standard until Apple raised a bitchfest of epic proportions to usurp it for their own gain, right?
It was a proposed part of the standard. Apple was one major company to step in though, but they had some pretty good reasons. Apple makes iPhones and they are trying to sell them partly on the fact that they use less battery. Part of that is using dedicated hardware for playing video. They have millions of existing devices out there they cannot retrofit to do the same with WebM. So it sounds like what Apple did was because it benefited Apple, but because in turn it benefits Apple's customers and making them happy makes Apple more money.
This is not an insolvable problem though. WebM support can be built into hardware. A few companies have proposals for chips and they say they will do it if the format takes off. Apple could convince them to start finishing those proposals and adding support right now. They just need a reason to push their vendors and eat a small cost for more expensive hardware going forward. So why isn't Google trying to make a compromise deal that they support h264 in Android and Chrome for a set number of years in exchange for Apple promising to add WebM support to Safari, OS X, and iPhones as soon as they can get hardware support added?
If Google is really serious, this should be their proposal. If, however, they're more interested in trying to gain smartphone market share at the expense of open standards and consumers, then they should continue on as they are, complaining about Apple, while secretly enjoying Flash's gain in market share which helps them accomplish that.
YouTube supports Flash and will almost certainly continue to do so to reach IE users.If they move away from it, it will only be after they implement Chrome plugin or a WebM plugin. Also, youtube is not going to abandon iPhones. Both markets are simply too big and would give too much market share to alternative sites. MS, in particular, still has more leverage and benefits more by breaking compatibility unless MS is getting really worried about Adobe; and lets face it, they're the real winners here.
The problem here is that multiple parties all have valid conflicts of interest, but lack of standardization hurts us all. Here's how:
So, can the big parties come together and create a compromise that will help everyone, or are they more interested in hurting one another than in helping consumers? Here's what I propose. All major browser/OS vendors commit to h264 support for a period of six years, then agree to remove said support; as part of the HTML5 transition. After six years, all browser vendors agree to support WebM. This gives content providers a plan going forward and gives companies that make cell phone chipsets time to integrate hardware support for WebM and for phone makers to incorporate those chips in their designs. People with six year old phones would still have shitty battery life at that point, but I suspect that will be well past the lifespan of a smartphone.
You do realize that he isn't a UK citizen? Sort of invalidates your theory.
He's a citizen of the commonwealth, which is still how a lot of the UK considers itself.
I realize that he is a Commonwealth citizen, but in no way do Canadians or Australians consider UK politicians as representing them, or vice-versa.
Your assertion is irrelevant. The relevant question is if UK citizens (who vote for the politicians) consider members of the commonwealth to be "like them" enough that they become worried about how they will be treated by those same politicians; and if those politicians understand the perspective of the citizens. Many UK citizens still consider members of the commonwealth to be in the same boat.
You do realize that he isn't a UK citizen? Sort of invalidates your theory.
He's a citizen of the commonwealth, which is still how a lot of the UK considers itself.
This is Assange's own lawyers trying to prevent extradition to Sweden, which has actually filed criminal charges against him.
I'm not even sure this is true. Last I heard they issued an international arrest warrant because they wanted to extradite him to question him, but had not actually filed any criminal charges.
Does anyone believe that the fact he is in UK custody doesn't effectively place him in US custody, more than Swedish custody would?
I do. You see politicians generally are a bit shy about handing over their own citizens to foreign powers for unknown. It tends to get their constituents thinking about what could happen to them, personally, and they vote the bum out pronto. Handing over a foreign national to another foreign power, on the other hand, makes some people upset but does not result in the same level of anger, fear, and motivation. It's not a political death sentence. In this case UK politicians can claim ignorance to some extent, claiming they could not foresee that he'd be handed over to the US. They can even blame the US and Sweden publicly and call for his return to the UK. This may well prevent them from being kicked out of office.
So, he and his lawyers use things that will strike a chord, like claiming he'll be sent to Guantanamo Bay (as the current administration is so keen to do) or that he'll be killed, whether by the death penalty or otherwise (when it isn't clear that there is any legal basis on which to prosecute him).
True enough, and the US handed every foreigner that legal tool when we started having "special" prisons outside the normal court system and with no regard for international human rights standards. Moreover, he was doubly enabled when powerful right wing politicians made public comments about having him killed.
Your link to violent crime statistics don't indicate whether those figures are for raw totals or for per capita totals. A quick run down of the list shows that it mostly tracks with population size, so I would assume that the figures are not adjusted for per capita.
True enough, I later in the thread linked to a map of violence by population and as several people have noted there is still no correlation.
Try a new argument when you have per capita figures.
Keep up, the discussion covered that more than an hour ago.
You do realise that the so called gun control even in those states is _nothing_ compared to countries with real gun control?
Certainly, but I already addressed that when I wrote that there was no correlation nationally either. Whether a country has strict or lax gun control does not seem to causatively effect the amount of violence and violent crime, with examples on both ends of the spectrum.
The pervasiveness of weapons in private hand is and will continue to be a major problem for public safety in the US.
Firearms are dangerous and will result in accidental deaths, like many other tools and recreational items. That said, there isn't really data to support them being any more of a threat to public health than say, backyard pools.
Just look at the stats of heavily regulated countries.
I certainly have. I've also looked at countries like Switzerland and Sweden with very high gun ownership. There is no correlation. No study has been able to show one that I've ever read. Unless you'd care to cite some comprehensive study I've missed.
Neither do they have more violence nor do the citizens feel threatened because they cannot arm themselves.
Umm, so you can't prove guns don't cause crime, even though there is no evidence to support such a hypothesis so we should pass laws to ban them?
My question is: Why is it so easy to get the angry, scared rhetoric to take root in people's minds and so hard to get it out again, no matter how sensible the evidence to the contrary might seem?
People in general do not form opinions logically. They don't form opinions based upon facts. The vast majority of people, intelligent or not, form opinions based upon emotion; upon what they want to be true or what they've heard and catches their fancy or what is socially acceptable and convenient. They then use logic and facts to support and defend that opinion in discussion. Facts that don't support the right opinion are more easily forgotten or rationalized. Show people a scientific study on a topic, and regardless of the conclusions of the paper, studies show everyone will be more convinced of the opinion they had before reading the paper.
The answer to all this is to be methodological when forming opinions. People need to grow up and learn to rely upon logic and the scientific method to not only justify opinions, but to form them in the first place. The fact that our schools don't teach such basic mental tools is the root of the problem in my opinion.
Agreed that there's little correlation between gun laws and violent crime, if you look at this spread. So why do people in states like Arizona keep clamoring for gun ownership as a way to reduce violent crime?
I wouldn't say they're exactly clamoring for it, but gun control is often suggested as a way to reduce crime and conversely the relaxation of gun laws is often suggested as a way to do the same. My theory is it comes up so often because it is an excellent political tool. People are afraid of being disarmed and helpless to crime and people are afraid of others with guns that could hurt them. So you get a lot of afraid people, spout off political nonsense that makes people more afraid and you have a lot of angry, scared people who will vote against whoever they fear and ignore all the more relevant topics of the day. It's easy politicking.
Of particular note: the top 4 are also the top 4 most populous. It's figures like #6 where Michigan is not the 6th highest population; a state which has stringent laws on hand guns (direct permission from local law enforcement).
It might be better to see numbers comparing violence with population.
You make a good point. Here's a map There still seems to be no correlation. I might mention Michigan is middle of the road for gun ownership, no registration for rifles, and approval for both pistols and concealed carry is mandatory for people that pass the criteria. Theoretically, open carry is legal as well.
"Armed citizens" are statistically a lot more likely to kill themselves or a family member than they are a bad guy.
Now, lets not get ahead of ourselves. We're talking about the viability of armed people in the crowd or among the staff. Are you implying that those people would be too busy murdering their families or are you just going off topic here? Clearly family members kill one another by all means much more often than anyone else, but that doesn't have a lot to do with firearm ownership. There are more successful suicides in places with high firearm ownership, but as I support the right to suicide I'm not really upset by that.
It's not even so much that I thing guns should be illegal. It's that I think the idiotic assertion (which only dates back to the 1980s) that the Second Amendment guarantees the "right" of every citizen to own a handgun ought to be illegal.
You think making assertions about the constitution ought to be illegal nd you don't see the irony of that in light of the first amendment?
Before 1980, even far-right conservatives like Judge Robert Bork agreed that the Second Amendment had nothing to do with any "right of everyone to own a handgun".
I'm well aware of the political opinions on the topic and how they've see-sawed over the centuries.
This is where the "constitutional" "right" to "bear" "arms" comes from. Not the Second Amendment.
I guess I'm not understanding your meaning. Those words are in the constitution, it's the interpretation that is in dispute, as to whether it is a personal right guaranteed or simply a right protected from intervention by the federal government but that can be banned by state and local governments. Also, most of the scholarly articles on the topic seem to indicate it was originally a much different interpretation, but in a way no one in modern US politics finds very palatable.
The difference is that the Swiss don't have the gun for "personal protection".
Actually, the differences are myriad if you're looking for factors that actually correlate with violent crime statistics. The Swiss have very low wealth disparity, socialized healthcare, good education, free addiction treatment programs, and significant social safety nets for the poor. All of these factors correlate strongly with lower rates of violent crime and murder. If people were serious about scientifically reducing violent crime in the US and tackling the problem we could work on any of those and have reason to expect improvement. Of course those are all a lot harder politically than getting people mad about gun laws because people are irrational and frankly not very interested in facts.
Running around in the trees and bush with a high powered rifle killing critters is not a sport.
Sort of a non sequitur there huh, since the person you're replying to didn't say anything about it being a sport.
That's all well and good, but I gave up when you touted your two completely opposite scenarios. I could just as easily do that myself.
Great, lets do that.
Case A: Random lunatic breaks into a house, finds a gun and kills all 6 members of the household, as well as 3 neighbours and 1 police officer who attended the scene, before blowing his own head off.
Case B: Nutjob enters the home and is quickly subdued by the 6 people, who easily outnumber the crazy fool and keep him down long enough for police to arrive. Minor injuries were caused when the man attempted to cause harm with a bread knife but all involved made a full recovery.
Okay, so lets analyze those two cases using both methodologies:
"Violent crime": case A results in 10 homicides and one suicide racking up 10 violent crimes. Case B is one assault. Clearly laws that promote Case B seem to be indicated by this one sample.
"Gun crime": Case A results in 10 homicides and on suicide racking up 10 gun crimes. Case B zero gun crimes. Clearly laws that promote Case B seem to be indicated by this one sample.
I guess I'm not seeing your objection to evaluating this case in terms of "violent crime" or how that is in any way worse than evaluating it in terms of "gun crime". Are you sure you understood my post? Maybe you should re-read it.
So you see, these entirely hypothetical scenarios prove absolutely nothing useful.
Actually, although you do not seem to realize it, you just supported the point of my post with your example.
It is easy to argue that letting everyone have guns is better than letting just the criminals have guns...
Please stay on topic. This is not about what gun control laws are a good idea. It's about objectively evaluating the effects of gun control and other laws using valid, logic criteria instead of logically flawed problem statements designed to hide the fact that evidence does not support a particular conclusion.
Even if "gun crime" did rise after a ban, eventually it would fall as weapons are harder to obtain.
Clearly you did miss the point. I don't care if "gun crime" rises. You shouldn't care if "gun crime" rises. This is because only someone who hasn't thought about it or who has a phobia cares if they are murdered with a gun or with a bomb or with a baseball bat. The goal needs to be reducing violent crime and murder and "gun crime" is just a term used to obscure the data on that issue.
So, here's a list of violent crime by state. Note the top 5 are: California, Florida, Texas, New York, and Illinois. So of the most violent states the highest has very middle of the road gun control laws (somewhat more strict than average), two have very lax gun control laws, and two have some of the most strict gun control laws in the country. Notice the strong correlation? Neither do I.
Frankly, if you're looking for causative factors for violent crime and murder, gun control laws are a red herring. There is little or no correlation demonstrated scientifically either regionally or nationally. Trying to fight violent crime with gun control laws is like trying to fight syphilis with prayer in public elementary schools. Everyone will have an opinion, get mad, and politicians will love it... but no matter what happens it's not going to help the problem significantly. Real solutions have worked other places though, reducing wealth disparity, social safety nets, decriminalizing narcotic use and personal possession, free addiction treatment programs, educational initiatives, socialized healthcare... all can be shown to have demonstrable effect in reducing violent crime. Of course they're also harder and expensive and not as easy of political targets.