IMO, the software should be saying what type of sandbox it wants upfront. From a finite manageable set of sandbox templates.
Agreed. It greatly lessens the work for auditors as they only have to figure out what you're doing with the services/access and then decide if that is actually appropriate. I'd also mention adding official services and protocols (such as an update service, a secure registration/purchasing service, a service for ad streaming to supported apps, etc.) results in fewer apps needing to roll their own services for these purposes and further simplifies security auditing.
Give me "trusted computing" where I control the keys and decide what software is "trusted" and I'd be fine w/ it.
The problem is, 99% of our society cannot properly decide whether software should be trusted or not, and even with more granular controls and proper feedback from the OS a lot of malware will slip through.
I don't think this is an unsolvable problem. I like the iPhone App store model to some extent. A company with professionals should be vetting software and should be telling users what software should and should not be able to run. But the iPhone App store fails in many ways as well.
First, there should not be one company deciding. We should harness the free market and build a system that takes inputs from whatever security feeds users subscribe to and weight those security feeds based upon the end user's preferences. Also, we should be able to override the choices for any given case. If we really want to run some software but our security feeds think it is malware, we should be able to do it. Heck, there are valid reasons, such as research, for wanting to run malware. It should just be a very advanced setting that makes it perfectly clear to the end user that they're handing complete control of their device to some other party, forever.
I'm convinced we could leverage the benefits of both an iPhone app store approach and a traditional package manager approach. I fear, however, that none of the companies in a position to actually make a good system and push it to end users is going to be motivated to do so. Apple will wait for others, and Microsoft sees the way they could leverage their monopoly using an iApp store of their own. Canonical has laid the groundwork, but only as far as copying Apple and incorporating it into their package manager. They're not much for making revolutionary new technologies, nor are they in much position to push it and, lastly, unless they're aiming at the ultra-secure market, their users are currently least in the need of beefing up security.
But in doing that, they impose American morals and standards on the rest of the world.
As someone already pointed out, it's not american morals although the US currently has a lot of influence on it. It's the morals of the market as a whole. If enough potential purchasers pushed to prevent censorship, Apple would stop doing it. Sadly, the majority of the market seems to favor removing risque material.
I'd say that you Americans should be worried about how Apple may limit your free speech - because in my opinion, they are well on their way.
This isn't really a free speech issue. It's one store that sells for one one OS installed by default on one of the many mobile devices sold. Further it's only on channel of speech in that store. You can still publish a Web page and reach iPhone users with no problem. Consider it this way, if I submit an article to Ekstrabladet about the evils of nudity and they decline to publish it because they don't think their readers want to read said article, is Ekstrabladet censoring me? It's a completely analogous situation.
The real question is: what will Apple block next? Unfavorable descriptions of Apple products? Articles that are critical of US politics?
They could block anything if their potential customers decide they want them blocked. Just as Ekstrabladet could decline to run articles about any topic. They already don't publish articles about how awesome my motorcycle is. What's next, not publishing articles about automobiles at all? About anything that happens in North America?
I'd say that you Americans should be worried about how Apple may limit your free speech - because in my opinion, they are well on their way.
We should all be vigilant and aware with regard to our rights including free speech. But until a company gains enough market share and starts to abuse that share, I'm not too worried. If you're concerned it is harming your country you can always look to get legislation passed that declares mobile operators to be something akin to common carriers and prohibit online stores from refusing to sell any product offered to them.
I have no idea how you can argue the PC (read personal computer.. not microsoft windows) industry is not an oligopoly. The whole information age is riddled with them. When Joe Blow goes to Best Buy to get a computer what are his choices? Windows, and OSX; without sufficient knowledge he has no others.
You do realize Windows is not a PC, but an OS, a component of a PC, right? "Desktop OS's" is a monopolized market, but they sell to computer makers (OEMs) and the end results trickle down. Yu might as well argue logitech is part of an oligopoly on PCs because they supply input devices to a good portion of them.
Now he wants a cellphone; hmm, blackberry, iphone, or android?
Blackberry is a brand from RIM, iPhone is a brand from Apple. Android is an OS that runs on various brands of phone. Then there's Symbian OS from Nokia which has a larger market share than any of the ones you mention. Basically you're mushing markets together in ways that don't make sense and your comparisons are weird mixes of OS's, brands, companies, and components. You really need to apply some more discipline to your analysis.
Yet stating that WebKit was 'put together' by Apple is akin to saying Ubuntu is built upon Red Hat's kernel
No it isn't. The Linux kernel is a collaborative project and the version used by Ubuntu is not a fork, nor is it significantly different from that used by Redhat. Webkit is significantly different than KHTML and the project that is building upon it was a fork started by Apple when they dumped a pile of resources into it. Your analogy is flawed.
This is ALREADY happening, as people who've bought iPods and iPhones and purchased content are forced to buy MORE Apple devices as they upgrade and evolve. Essentially it's the same thing we saw for years with MS, but on a much larger scale sine it's now beginning to consume every type of media you use (music, movies, etc.).
Umm, I don't see it. I have plenty of friends with smartphones and I've seen most migrate between devices, including away from an iPhone at least once. The music is portable. Not many people buy reusable video content. Many apps have versions for multiple platforms and often even provide them free to switchers. For portable apps, Apple and Google are pushing HTML5 and it's gained significant traction not only on smartphones but now for Web apps on those Microsoft computers you mention.
Apple's "profit motive" is to slowly pull the different pieces of your day to day experience into a DRM, protected, entitled world that requires you purchase one of their devices to access said information.
Umm, the only way to do that is for you to already have bought one, and Apple hasn't been problematic for interoperability in any way. They've been pretty good about standards and protocols. Having 14% of the market, that makes sense as breaking cross platform interoperability hurts them more than helps.
Sure, you can argue that "some stuff" can be moved to another platform, but if the level of technical knowledge required to do it is prohibitive no one will.
And your evidence that this is the case?
all empowered and enabled by Apple who makes money:
1) Selling hardware to do it
2) Taking 30% off the top
Except according to all the credible market analysis, 30% off the top covers the hosting costs, management, overhead for free apps, credit card processing, and a tiny profit that barely shows up on Apple's bottom line. They make money on hardware. Hell, they make more money selling premium apps for OS X than they do selling iPhone apps to date.
Not seeing this and not seeing the frightening power of a walled garden is "daft" to say the least.
No, it's daft to assume Apple is going to take an action that will make things harder for their customers and lose them hardware sales while chasing a mythical profit using a business model they've not only never used, but specifically told their shareholders they aren't using.
It's daft to say a company with a fairly small market share that has driven most of the recent innovation and growth in a market is "stifling" competition without supporting that assertion with anything.
That wasn't really my point. It doesn't really matter whether they're making megabucks from selling apps, or even why they're limiting what apps can be installed. The point about network effects is valid: They need to maintain a high volume of sales
Yes, but for "high volume" they do fine with 10% of the US PC market. Most major apps have Mac versions, sometimes slightly delayed. For the iPod they maintain plenty of sales volume without targeting the low end. None of this has anything to do with Apple needing to lock things down to make a profit using DRM.
...since nobody is going to pay 3X the price for a device...
This is just hyperbole. Apple devices don't cost 3x comparable products. They're usually 15% more expensive in non-responsive markets, at least according to the last professional analysis I saw. People absolutely are willing to pay more for premium products which is why Apple is so profitable.
But none of that really changes the result anyway, which is that they control what apps people can make for their devices.
Yes they do. How does that make it less true that they make money of of hardware, you know the original point you contested? How does it make it more likely Apple will not support HTML5 and open internet standards, but will instead try to lock down the internet?
Even if consumers want a curated experience, it still puts the curator up as a choke point for other players to kill disruptive innovation.
Yes, it's called choice. But until they gain dominance in the market, if they "choke" the internet people just move elsewhere. Moreover, where's the motivation for Apple to "choke" the internet? How does that make them more money?
Hollywood can say they don't want P2P apps or Slingbox clients. Telecoms can say they don't want VOIP apps. Governments can prohibit applications that don't have back doors built in.
Yes and how is that any different between Apple and other vendors? Telecos can still ban phones they don't want on their network. The only difference with Apple is, they don't want to lose the money from iPhones so when Apple pushes back on behalf of the consumer (which also sells more Apple devices) the telcos actually back down, just like the RIAA did.
The best argument you're impliedly making is that Apple is going to willingly relegate itself to the high end...
Historically they have, but that is both academic and irrelevant. If Apple were to dominate the market, then we might have a problem if they changed their business model. But Apple is nowhere near dominating the market nor is that likely in the foreseeable future. I mean they have 14% of the smartphone market and barely make a dent in the phone market. I don't see a lot of danger there.
If "everyone but geeks" wants the curated experience, what matters isn't market dominance of a single company, it's market dominance of that business model.
The danger of market dominance of a single company is abuse. The danger of market dominance of a business model is umm, well there really isn't one. Does your vendor lock you down too much? Get a different vendor. So long as there are options there has to be standards for interoperability and that means choices for end users, just like the internet now. It's called the free market and it works for the most part.
No one can write a disruptive app if Apple owns the entire market and rejects the app, but neither can anyone write one if two or three "competitors" with the same business model together own the market and each rejects the disruptive app.
Ahh, but they can. With multiple vendors that means there is interoperability and if one doesn't pick up a disruptive new app, a new player can enter the market suing it as a differentiator and start to take market share. That's how the free market works. I guess I don't even understand what alternative you're proposing.
Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware.
This is less true as time goes on.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
But now they're getting a cut of everything sold in their App Stores.
Yes, but it accounts for an insignificant portion of their profits and Steve Jobs has repeatedly told shareholders it is not a money maker for Apple and they're running the store as a way to sell hardware. Since it would be criminal for him to lie to shareholders, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume this is true.
Once there are Android phones available for $150 or less, Apple has to decide whether compete at that price point. The old Apple would say no.
Umm, we've been through this with the iPod market and the PC market. Apple builds offering on the high end, moves into the midrange and uses volume to keep the added services and differentiators they use to make sales a non-issue. They leave the low-end to other players.
The new Apple has to weigh the lower margins on hardware against all the revenue they would lose by having fewer iOS devices out in the world to sell apps for, plus the network effects when they sell more devices and therefore people write more and better apps for them and therefore they sell more devices and more apps.
They don't really make money selling apps, at least not enough to account for more than a few percent of Apple's revenue. Losing those sales and not completely dominating a market are familiar territory for Apple. It makes them more money to ignore the low end as demonstrated by how much money Apple has been making.
But the trouble for freedom with that model is that it's predicated on Apple getting a cut of all the software that anyone sells for an Apple device.
Your hypothesis IS interesting, but doesn't seem supported by the facts. Apple does wield a lot of control over apps on iPhones, but they do it as a differentiator to make customers happy and sell more hardware. Apple doesn't limit apps because app sales are so profitable. They do it because people who aren't geeks don't want to have to go multiple places to get apps, don't want to deal with malware apps, don't want to worry about security, don't want their kids having access to porn apps, etc. It's a way to make iPhones more attractive to buyers. Apple isn't pulling in piles of cash from their share of app sales. They have very thin margins there. If they were, would they offer free apps? No, they're raking in the cash by selling iPhones because people like them, partly because of the store lock in effects. It might not seem that public opinion is in favor of it if you just read Slashdot and listen to geeks, but we're a tiny segment of the market. I just don't see the money in app sales considering how small a share Apple is taking compared to hosting costs, overhead, payment processing, and tech support.
Of course, if you buy Android you'll be using the extremely standards-compliant WebKit engine Apple put together
Err, webkit is a fork of KHTML, which Apple forked in 2002 and rebadged "webkit." Thank the KDE guys who wrote KHTML under a license that allows such things.
Yes, Webkit is a fork of KHTML, but with a huge amount of code added. Do thank the KHTML team for much of the initial work. Do thank Google and Nokia and several other players for contributing significant amounts of code to the project. But don't ignore Apple's contribution of a huge amount of the code and for taking KHTML, modernizing it, organizing it into a first class HTML and javascript engine, and funding and supporting the effort to make it a collaborative mainstream project that can truly utilize the contributions of several major players. Also, don't overlook that it is indicative of much of Apple's strategy regarding openness and the Web.
The only market that Apple competes in that this wouldn't apply to is smart-phones.
Apple is part of an oligopoly controlling input devices, music players, Web editors, and laptops? Umm, maybe you need to go do a bit more research on what an oligopoly is.
Music sales, personal computers and music players would all count
So Apple is part of an oligopoly on the personal computer market? So fully 25% of the market belongs to small players and the remaining 75% is divided among five major companies with no one company dominating. So I guess my question for you is, how do you differentiate an oligopoly from a healthy, competitive market? I mean you can literally choose from hundreds of PC manufacturers when making a purchase. I really don't see it.
but I would call the market I'm referring to "general computing".
You need to take an economics course. "general computing" isn't a market. A market is defined by sellers and buyers and the subset of offerings where those sellers are competing for a transaction from the buyer. For example, a person buying a PC might look at a Dell, and HP, an Apple, and a Microtel. All the people offering competing options make up the market. Microsoft does not sell a PC, nor does AMD so they are not part of the market. IBM sells large contracts that include many PCs and support and services, so they too are not part of the market. You see how it works? "General computing" would be an industry (maybe), not a market.
The oligopoly is between Microsoft and Apple, and although it is close to a monopoly for Microsoft I would still consider it a oligopoly because the only choices most consumers consider are Apple and Microsoft, and most consumers do consider both.
That's not an oligopoly because Microsoft sells into the desktop OS market and Apple does not sell a stand alone desktop OS. Microsoft has a monopoly in that market. Apple bypasses the market entirely by insourcing and competes in the fairly robust desktop and laptop computer markets. The lack of choice you're complaining about is called a "monopoly".
The reason I haven't been answering this specific question is because it should be obvious to most people.
That's not a very good reason, especially because you seem to be misusing the terms and failing to understand the basic principals of markets. It's only obvious if people understand your misuse terms and share your imprecise perception of how markets are working.
Their reasons for supporting HTML5 are most certainly not to be more open (or whatever happy fairy tale one might conceive of), but to stifle their competition.
Stifle competition? Don't be daft. They support HTML5 because it aligns with their business goals. Having an open standard for the Web that is capable and not tied to any other company simply provides Apple with a better position to sell devices without worrying about other companies blocking them. If neither Adobe nor Microsoft controls the tools and formats and players needed to view the Web, then they can't be roadblocks to technological changes Apple implements as a way to differentiate their hardware offerings.
There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not use it to justify some belief that Apple isn't a threat to the free Internet.
Apple or any other large company could do things that threaten freedom on the internet. Blackwater could threaten to kill executives of any company that doesn't lock down all their offerings with DRM. But that's no reason to label Blackwater the number one threat to the free internet. You have to look at what companies are actually doing and why and how it fits into their business plans. Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware. They create software and services to make that hardware more attractive. So how does locking down the internet make Apple more money and sell more devices? Oh yeah, it doesn't. Until you have a compelling business plan that will make Apple more money and some reason to think Apple is moving towards that business plan, you're just spreading FUD, which is really what this article is.
Actually an oligopoly doesn't necessarily imply price fixing...
No, it doesn't but it does require control of the market.
...it just means there is a general lack of choices. And that is exactly what we have.
I already asked twice. For the third and final time, what market? Oligopolies refer to markets. If you can't specify a market, your comment makes no sense at all. You say, "we" have no choices. So are you referring to a market where consumers are doing the purchasing directly? Please be specific. What market, dominated by Apple and what other parties?
It's easy to be in favor of opening things up once you've managed your way into a stranglehold on the market.
Actually, no it isn't. You see keeping things closed makes it harder to acquire market share because it makes your offering less attractive to users. Keeping things closed is an advantage only after you've dominated a market, because it prevents you from having to work hard to compete in that space to maintain your dominance. So by your version of events, Apple did the exact opposite of what an abusive monopoly normally does or what would make sense if Apple was concentrating on the online music market instead of using it as a way to push their hardware business.
if you wanted to listen to it away from your computer or laptop you were stuck using an iPod or degrading the sound quality further by burning it to CD and ripping it.
Yeah, but that was the case with every offering at the time because if you wanted to sell digital music you had to abide by the rules of the RIAA, you know an actual illegal trust convicted multiple time of colluding to undermine the free market. Apple played by the RIAA's rules until they had enough influence to make changes. Now don't get me wrong. There was nothing altruistic about Apple's actions. They just weren't interested in the online music business except as a way to make money selling devices. That's the business model they thought would profit them most and it is only coincidence that their business plans aligned with the best interests of consumers in weakening and getting rid of DRM. They still did more good than most any other single company in making things better for consumers.
Don't you need to dominate the market to be considered a monopoly?
Its a oligopoly, like Coke and Pepsi.
Okay then, to be an oligopoly you still need to control a market, just in collusion with another company. What market are you alleging Apple is colluding to control? I mean there are a few candidates where they have a lot of influence, but I don't know any where collusion is really significant.
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.
Ahh but if it is about strategic decisions to try to change the shape of the Web, maybe they need better strategists... since all they're doing right now is keeping Flash alive.
It isn't a good idea to turn Linux into Windows. In fact, most mainstream OSs are switching to package managers.
Bundled applications that are portable and contain necessary libraries are not a concept that is mutually exclusive with package managers. What's wrong with having portable bundles users can migrate and use from remote disks and easily move, share, delete... and using a package manager to acquire and keep things up to date?
Forget about cloning Windows, let's clone OS X and Ubuntu's new package manager, but better incorporating a good package manager that pulls from multiple repositories but handles nicely bundled portable apps. Why would desktop users want anything else? Is disk that constrained on your desktop? I'd rather spend a bit of space and get packages that I can IM to friends, or delete in a single go, or run from a flash drive, or better yet run from a network drive from different machines with different architectures all just by clicking on a normal binary created in its default configuration by the most common dev tools for Linux. The fact that some developers seem very resistant to this sort of progress is exactly why I sometimes feel Linux is always lagging in areas that would require more revolutionary changes.
Which means the old one is still there for my to use for privilege escalation or whatever evil I want.
Umm, how do you use an older library from a different package? Do you have some exploit for the linker no one else knows about? In general it makes things significantly harder to exploit because old apps that have the same library as new apps automatically use the newer library in many cases, making even apps that haven't been updated harder to exploit.
They never changed it. If you read the bible it references 616 for the mark of the beast. I have no idea where the 666 ever came from.
Actually, both numbers are in the same passage in versions of the bible from the same period. It's 616 in the earliest versions in greek, but 666 in some latin versions. This actually makes sense as historians believe it was a numerological code used to identify the emperor and since his name had different characters in each language it adds up differently.
Or you could just use OpenStep, get dynamic libraries and portable apps.
No, not really. You still have dependency issues.
What do you mean? OpenStep includes the libraries in the packages and dynamically links to newer versions that become available. If you have a dependency problem using OpenStep, you're using a broken toolset to build.
Great, now we can have outdated exploitable libs and every other kind of BS that comes with this. Might as well just statically link everything. Package mangers exist for a reason, use them. Do not bring the errors of Windows to us.
Or you could just use OpenStep, get dynamic libraries and portable apps. This is a long solved problem.
I'll be the first to say it: Correlation does not imply causation.
Actually, that's not true. Correlation does imply causation. It doesn't prove causation. It doesn't imply a specific causation, i.e. texting causes drug use; or drug use causes texting; or low IQ causes texting and drug use. But noticing correlations and testing to discover the specific causation is the heart of most modern science.
Maybe your assumption is that some sort of gun control only applies to the individual on the street, and since he's already breaking the law by owning a gun, everyone should own a gun in order to be safe.
No, a criminal, by definition, is already breaking the law, so laws that try to restrict them are only effective when they make illegal action less possible. You have to actually support that a gun control law does that, rather than base your argument upon the assumption that it will.
i.e. a society with 1 gun is far less likely to result in gun violence than a society with 1 billion guns. So, yes, it is reasonable to assume that new law can modify someone's already illegal behaviour[sic].
FAIL. I already mentioned that logical misstatement of the problem. Please pay attention.
Not really, I was just making a rather flippant comment, but if I had to say, then, ya, I'd say I'd rather have laws than no laws.
This is called the "false dichotomy" fallacy.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've provided links, and you haven't. Show me the studies that say the more guns a society has, the less gun deaths they have.
Again, you insist on this failure of logic. Do I need to call this out for you? Okay first, there is no study that shows a significant causation or even correlation between gun control laws and rates of violent crime. This is because gun control laws seem to have little or no effect upon rates of violent crime. Violent crime with guns sometimes decreases, and violent crime with other weapons generally increases more than enough to compensate.
Now on to gun crime. For a problem statement to apply, it needs to describe in all cases the desired change. "Decrease violent crime and death" is an overly simplistic one, but at least usable given normal assumptions. "Decrease crime with guns" (aka gun crime) fails. For an extreme example, suppose you pass a law like making assault and murder with anything other than a gun legal. This results results in a 95% decrease in murders with firearms, and a 10000% increase in murders overall. Using the logical misstatement of the problem by studying "gun crime" shows the law to be a smashing success. That's why it fails as a definition. The term "gun crime" was actually invented by statisticians that couldn't demonstrate the effectiveness of gun control laws on reducing crime but had an agenda to push.
I also agree that safety is a complex issue. When I used it above, I was referring to personal safety (on a societal level) from gun violence.
So you're okay with being stabbed, burned, beaten with clubs, or hit with hammers? Stop with the "gun violence" crap already. Take a look at some lovely idyllic countries like Brazil, with low gun ownership and low gun crime. Drive by shootings are very rare. Drive by pipe bombings and molotov cocktail attacks, however, are commonplace as many a mutilated bystander will tell you. Overall violent crime is absurdly bad, like Detroit. Take a look at Sweden, with very high gun ownership rates and lax gun control laws, yet some of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.
Guns and other weapons exist in the world and passing laws about it is not going to significantly change that, even if it slightly alters the makeup of what weapons are most common. But more importantly than any of that, give up on this "gun crime" and "gun violence" crap. It's just a way of hiding from the facts about violent crime and effective ways to address it. The more idiots that failed logic and statistics who buy into it and parrot it, the easier it is for politicians to pass do nothing laws that are easy for them, rather than address the hard problem of making a difference by reducing wealth disparity, decriminalizing addictive substances, providing social safety nets and treatment programs for addiction and mental illness, and stopping organized crime related violence. Please stop being part of the problem.
First, that's not an ad hominem attack. Please people, if you're going to try to use classical rhetorical references, read a book first.
Ahh, yes, because nobody would ever think being called a "sociopath" would be an insult.
First not all insults are ad hominem attacks if they relate directly to the issue being discussed. An ad hominem attack is an attack on the person as a way of discrediting their view. The only people that fit into the category originally described are people with one of several severe mental illnesses.
Second, If you decide to experiment on prisoners and murder people who have never harmed you, you are fitting into the textbook definition of "sociopath". Most people feel empathy for fellow human beings, picture themselves in the place of others, recognize the emotions of pain and fear and have a built in aversion to them. If your only reason for not murdering people is religion, you have a mental illness and should seek help.
Murder is simply far too extreme a case. Try something milder...
You're trying to move the goalposts. The original comment was talking about religion being a motivation to not, "...kill people to harvest organs, not to experiment on prisoners of war, not to kill off the unproductive members of society or undesirable societies...".
Maybe you missed that, very important part of this discussion?
Again with the borderline cases.
It's not a borderline case, it's exactly the case we were discussing. Please stay on topic.
But hey, anything as long as it keeps the religion hate going, right?
When did I express any hate, love, or other strong emotion with regard to religion? You're simply being misleading by making this statement. What I said and implied was, religion is not needed or useful for the purpose of stopping us from murdering and torturing one another, since normal people without mental illnesses have an inbuild sense of empathy that takes care of that and mentally ill people use religion as an excuse to kill people.
Morality is inherently subjective, and the GGP's point on religion providing a 'baseline standard' of sorts for many people is spot-on, even if the examples he picked weren't the best.
I'd agree that religion trains people with baseline beliefs formed from irrationality. I'm not convinced those beliefs to more good than harm to society.
Stop making wild generalizations just because you love to hate on religion, you give the rest of us atheists a bad name.
Stop slandering me and don't presume I'm an atheist (I'm actually an agnostic) or that I care if people prejudge you based upon their interpretations of my statements. You may be an atheist but that doesn't make you a rational person or a person able to read and comprehend objectively.
I'll break it down for you: GP made a statement, that since people already have guns, making guns illegal doesn't fix the problem.
Except that isn't what the original poster stated; which was that those people are already breaking the law in carrying the guns, thus it is not reasonable to assume that making another law is going to modify their behavior.
My counter (stated sarcastically) was that making murder (an action) illegal _does_ do good. In other words, we have an example of where making an action or state of being illegal does some good.
Your analogy, however, fails spectacularly because of the above.
You may not like the analogy, but the logic is sound: laws do good for society.
The problem is you're trying to base your argument upon that being a truism. Laws also do harm to society. Most all laws, in fact, do both, but there is no reason to suppose the balance is in any particular direction and the original poster stated a reason why it is unlikely to do good in this case.
Making it illegal to own butcher knives almost certainly would reduce the number of deaths by butcher knife.
It might be, but reducing murders with butcher knives is a logical misstatement of the problem.
And it is also sound to say that it is easier to kill with a gun than with a knife. And it is sound to say that by making it more difficult to kill people, less people will be killed.
I reject the assumption that making any particular implement illegal to own makes it harder to kill people. In fact, when a particular implement is already being used illegally by criminals and legally by non-criminals it has to opposite effect. That is to say, one more law means nothing to a criminal, whereas the lack of a defensive tool in the hands of those who obey the laws makes killing easier for them.
We're talking about whether a gun makes you safer.
Actually, no we're not. We're talking about the effect of guns specifically on crime, which is a completely different matter. You're simply making the logical fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". Because people die with guns you assume the causation is that gun result in more overall death. There is NO evidence to support said hypothetical causation. Moreover, there is significant evidence to refute it in regard to crime, such as the increase in violent crime and murder overall in the UK, when the strict gun controls came into effect; or the worldwide lack of correlation between firearm legislation and rates of violent crime and murder. While I'm sure you are only concerned if you are shot to death, some people don't really prefer being beaten with clubs, stabbed, or blown up as a preference.
The data I've seen (and provided) supports the hypothesis that less gun ownership means more safety.
What do you mean by "safety"? To quote, "Do not be too proud of your safety for even a thief in prison is safe from robbery by another thief." Personally I support the right to suicide and effective tools with which to commit the act. Fewer botched suicides is fine with me. I also support providing free mental health services to the citizenry, and other healthcare while we're at it. Statistically, it will have a much, much, much more dramatic effect upon rates of death and rates of violent crime than any firearm legislation could. It's a sad society that judges "safety" by the rate at which it prevents people from dying at a time and in a manner of their choosing when life becomes unbearable to them.
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IMO, the software should be saying what type of sandbox it wants upfront. From a finite manageable set of sandbox templates.
Agreed. It greatly lessens the work for auditors as they only have to figure out what you're doing with the services/access and then decide if that is actually appropriate. I'd also mention adding official services and protocols (such as an update service, a secure registration/purchasing service, a service for ad streaming to supported apps, etc.) results in fewer apps needing to roll their own services for these purposes and further simplifies security auditing.
Give me "trusted computing" where I control the keys and decide what software is "trusted" and I'd be fine w/ it.
The problem is, 99% of our society cannot properly decide whether software should be trusted or not, and even with more granular controls and proper feedback from the OS a lot of malware will slip through.
I don't think this is an unsolvable problem. I like the iPhone App store model to some extent. A company with professionals should be vetting software and should be telling users what software should and should not be able to run. But the iPhone App store fails in many ways as well.
First, there should not be one company deciding. We should harness the free market and build a system that takes inputs from whatever security feeds users subscribe to and weight those security feeds based upon the end user's preferences. Also, we should be able to override the choices for any given case. If we really want to run some software but our security feeds think it is malware, we should be able to do it. Heck, there are valid reasons, such as research, for wanting to run malware. It should just be a very advanced setting that makes it perfectly clear to the end user that they're handing complete control of their device to some other party, forever.
I'm convinced we could leverage the benefits of both an iPhone app store approach and a traditional package manager approach. I fear, however, that none of the companies in a position to actually make a good system and push it to end users is going to be motivated to do so. Apple will wait for others, and Microsoft sees the way they could leverage their monopoly using an iApp store of their own. Canonical has laid the groundwork, but only as far as copying Apple and incorporating it into their package manager. They're not much for making revolutionary new technologies, nor are they in much position to push it and, lastly, unless they're aiming at the ultra-secure market, their users are currently least in the need of beefing up security.
But in doing that, they impose American morals and standards on the rest of the world.
As someone already pointed out, it's not american morals although the US currently has a lot of influence on it. It's the morals of the market as a whole. If enough potential purchasers pushed to prevent censorship, Apple would stop doing it. Sadly, the majority of the market seems to favor removing risque material.
I'd say that you Americans should be worried about how Apple may limit your free speech - because in my opinion, they are well on their way.
This isn't really a free speech issue. It's one store that sells for one one OS installed by default on one of the many mobile devices sold. Further it's only on channel of speech in that store. You can still publish a Web page and reach iPhone users with no problem. Consider it this way, if I submit an article to Ekstrabladet about the evils of nudity and they decline to publish it because they don't think their readers want to read said article, is Ekstrabladet censoring me? It's a completely analogous situation.
The real question is: what will Apple block next? Unfavorable descriptions of Apple products? Articles that are critical of US politics?
They could block anything if their potential customers decide they want them blocked. Just as Ekstrabladet could decline to run articles about any topic. They already don't publish articles about how awesome my motorcycle is. What's next, not publishing articles about automobiles at all? About anything that happens in North America?
I'd say that you Americans should be worried about how Apple may limit your free speech - because in my opinion, they are well on their way.
We should all be vigilant and aware with regard to our rights including free speech. But until a company gains enough market share and starts to abuse that share, I'm not too worried. If you're concerned it is harming your country you can always look to get legislation passed that declares mobile operators to be something akin to common carriers and prohibit online stores from refusing to sell any product offered to them.
I have no idea how you can argue the PC (read personal computer.. not microsoft windows) industry is not an oligopoly. The whole information age is riddled with them. When Joe Blow goes to Best Buy to get a computer what are his choices? Windows, and OSX; without sufficient knowledge he has no others.
You do realize Windows is not a PC, but an OS, a component of a PC, right? "Desktop OS's" is a monopolized market, but they sell to computer makers (OEMs) and the end results trickle down. Yu might as well argue logitech is part of an oligopoly on PCs because they supply input devices to a good portion of them.
Now he wants a cellphone; hmm, blackberry, iphone, or android?
Blackberry is a brand from RIM, iPhone is a brand from Apple. Android is an OS that runs on various brands of phone. Then there's Symbian OS from Nokia which has a larger market share than any of the ones you mention. Basically you're mushing markets together in ways that don't make sense and your comparisons are weird mixes of OS's, brands, companies, and components. You really need to apply some more discipline to your analysis.
Yet stating that WebKit was 'put together' by Apple is akin to saying Ubuntu is built upon Red Hat's kernel
No it isn't. The Linux kernel is a collaborative project and the version used by Ubuntu is not a fork, nor is it significantly different from that used by Redhat. Webkit is significantly different than KHTML and the project that is building upon it was a fork started by Apple when they dumped a pile of resources into it. Your analogy is flawed.
This is ALREADY happening, as people who've bought iPods and iPhones and purchased content are forced to buy MORE Apple devices as they upgrade and evolve. Essentially it's the same thing we saw for years with MS, but on a much larger scale sine it's now beginning to consume every type of media you use (music, movies, etc.).
Umm, I don't see it. I have plenty of friends with smartphones and I've seen most migrate between devices, including away from an iPhone at least once. The music is portable. Not many people buy reusable video content. Many apps have versions for multiple platforms and often even provide them free to switchers. For portable apps, Apple and Google are pushing HTML5 and it's gained significant traction not only on smartphones but now for Web apps on those Microsoft computers you mention.
Apple's "profit motive" is to slowly pull the different pieces of your day to day experience into a DRM, protected, entitled world that requires you purchase one of their devices to access said information.
Umm, the only way to do that is for you to already have bought one, and Apple hasn't been problematic for interoperability in any way. They've been pretty good about standards and protocols. Having 14% of the market, that makes sense as breaking cross platform interoperability hurts them more than helps.
Sure, you can argue that "some stuff" can be moved to another platform, but if the level of technical knowledge required to do it is prohibitive no one will.
And your evidence that this is the case?
all empowered and enabled by Apple who makes money: 1) Selling hardware to do it 2) Taking 30% off the top
Except according to all the credible market analysis, 30% off the top covers the hosting costs, management, overhead for free apps, credit card processing, and a tiny profit that barely shows up on Apple's bottom line. They make money on hardware. Hell, they make more money selling premium apps for OS X than they do selling iPhone apps to date.
Not seeing this and not seeing the frightening power of a walled garden is "daft" to say the least.
No, it's daft to assume Apple is going to take an action that will make things harder for their customers and lose them hardware sales while chasing a mythical profit using a business model they've not only never used, but specifically told their shareholders they aren't using.
It's daft to say a company with a fairly small market share that has driven most of the recent innovation and growth in a market is "stifling" competition without supporting that assertion with anything.
That wasn't really my point. It doesn't really matter whether they're making megabucks from selling apps, or even why they're limiting what apps can be installed. The point about network effects is valid: They need to maintain a high volume of sales
Yes, but for "high volume" they do fine with 10% of the US PC market. Most major apps have Mac versions, sometimes slightly delayed. For the iPod they maintain plenty of sales volume without targeting the low end. None of this has anything to do with Apple needing to lock things down to make a profit using DRM.
...since nobody is going to pay 3X the price for a device...
This is just hyperbole. Apple devices don't cost 3x comparable products. They're usually 15% more expensive in non-responsive markets, at least according to the last professional analysis I saw. People absolutely are willing to pay more for premium products which is why Apple is so profitable.
But none of that really changes the result anyway, which is that they control what apps people can make for their devices.
Yes they do. How does that make it less true that they make money of of hardware, you know the original point you contested? How does it make it more likely Apple will not support HTML5 and open internet standards, but will instead try to lock down the internet?
Even if consumers want a curated experience, it still puts the curator up as a choke point for other players to kill disruptive innovation.
Yes, it's called choice. But until they gain dominance in the market, if they "choke" the internet people just move elsewhere. Moreover, where's the motivation for Apple to "choke" the internet? How does that make them more money?
Hollywood can say they don't want P2P apps or Slingbox clients. Telecoms can say they don't want VOIP apps. Governments can prohibit applications that don't have back doors built in.
Yes and how is that any different between Apple and other vendors? Telecos can still ban phones they don't want on their network. The only difference with Apple is, they don't want to lose the money from iPhones so when Apple pushes back on behalf of the consumer (which also sells more Apple devices) the telcos actually back down, just like the RIAA did.
The best argument you're impliedly making is that Apple is going to willingly relegate itself to the high end...
Historically they have, but that is both academic and irrelevant. If Apple were to dominate the market, then we might have a problem if they changed their business model. But Apple is nowhere near dominating the market nor is that likely in the foreseeable future. I mean they have 14% of the smartphone market and barely make a dent in the phone market. I don't see a lot of danger there.
If "everyone but geeks" wants the curated experience, what matters isn't market dominance of a single company, it's market dominance of that business model.
The danger of market dominance of a single company is abuse. The danger of market dominance of a business model is umm, well there really isn't one. Does your vendor lock you down too much? Get a different vendor. So long as there are options there has to be standards for interoperability and that means choices for end users, just like the internet now. It's called the free market and it works for the most part.
No one can write a disruptive app if Apple owns the entire market and rejects the app, but neither can anyone write one if two or three "competitors" with the same business model together own the market and each rejects the disruptive app.
Ahh, but they can. With multiple vendors that means there is interoperability and if one doesn't pick up a disruptive new app, a new player can enter the market suing it as a differentiator and start to take market share. That's how the free market works. I guess I don't even understand what alternative you're proposing.
Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware.
This is less true as time goes on.
That's an interesting hypothesis.
But now they're getting a cut of everything sold in their App Stores.
Yes, but it accounts for an insignificant portion of their profits and Steve Jobs has repeatedly told shareholders it is not a money maker for Apple and they're running the store as a way to sell hardware. Since it would be criminal for him to lie to shareholders, I think it's pretty reasonable to assume this is true.
Once there are Android phones available for $150 or less, Apple has to decide whether compete at that price point. The old Apple would say no.
Umm, we've been through this with the iPod market and the PC market. Apple builds offering on the high end, moves into the midrange and uses volume to keep the added services and differentiators they use to make sales a non-issue. They leave the low-end to other players.
The new Apple has to weigh the lower margins on hardware against all the revenue they would lose by having fewer iOS devices out in the world to sell apps for, plus the network effects when they sell more devices and therefore people write more and better apps for them and therefore they sell more devices and more apps.
They don't really make money selling apps, at least not enough to account for more than a few percent of Apple's revenue. Losing those sales and not completely dominating a market are familiar territory for Apple. It makes them more money to ignore the low end as demonstrated by how much money Apple has been making.
But the trouble for freedom with that model is that it's predicated on Apple getting a cut of all the software that anyone sells for an Apple device.
Your hypothesis IS interesting, but doesn't seem supported by the facts. Apple does wield a lot of control over apps on iPhones, but they do it as a differentiator to make customers happy and sell more hardware. Apple doesn't limit apps because app sales are so profitable. They do it because people who aren't geeks don't want to have to go multiple places to get apps, don't want to deal with malware apps, don't want to worry about security, don't want their kids having access to porn apps, etc. It's a way to make iPhones more attractive to buyers. Apple isn't pulling in piles of cash from their share of app sales. They have very thin margins there. If they were, would they offer free apps? No, they're raking in the cash by selling iPhones because people like them, partly because of the store lock in effects. It might not seem that public opinion is in favor of it if you just read Slashdot and listen to geeks, but we're a tiny segment of the market. I just don't see the money in app sales considering how small a share Apple is taking compared to hosting costs, overhead, payment processing, and tech support.
Jeez, just think how long it took you guys to get RIGHT CLICK ! Hahahahahahahah
1986? So ten years after Apple shipped the first computer and years before Windows supported the feature?
Of course, if you buy Android you'll be using the extremely standards-compliant WebKit engine Apple put together
Err, webkit is a fork of KHTML, which Apple forked in 2002 and rebadged "webkit." Thank the KDE guys who wrote KHTML under a license that allows such things.
Yes, Webkit is a fork of KHTML, but with a huge amount of code added. Do thank the KHTML team for much of the initial work. Do thank Google and Nokia and several other players for contributing significant amounts of code to the project. But don't ignore Apple's contribution of a huge amount of the code and for taking KHTML, modernizing it, organizing it into a first class HTML and javascript engine, and funding and supporting the effort to make it a collaborative mainstream project that can truly utilize the contributions of several major players. Also, don't overlook that it is indicative of much of Apple's strategy regarding openness and the Web.
The only market that Apple competes in that this wouldn't apply to is smart-phones.
Apple is part of an oligopoly controlling input devices, music players, Web editors, and laptops? Umm, maybe you need to go do a bit more research on what an oligopoly is.
Music sales, personal computers and music players would all count
So Apple is part of an oligopoly on the personal computer market? So fully 25% of the market belongs to small players and the remaining 75% is divided among five major companies with no one company dominating. So I guess my question for you is, how do you differentiate an oligopoly from a healthy, competitive market? I mean you can literally choose from hundreds of PC manufacturers when making a purchase. I really don't see it.
but I would call the market I'm referring to "general computing".
You need to take an economics course. "general computing" isn't a market. A market is defined by sellers and buyers and the subset of offerings where those sellers are competing for a transaction from the buyer. For example, a person buying a PC might look at a Dell, and HP, an Apple, and a Microtel. All the people offering competing options make up the market. Microsoft does not sell a PC, nor does AMD so they are not part of the market. IBM sells large contracts that include many PCs and support and services, so they too are not part of the market. You see how it works? "General computing" would be an industry (maybe), not a market.
The oligopoly is between Microsoft and Apple, and although it is close to a monopoly for Microsoft I would still consider it a oligopoly because the only choices most consumers consider are Apple and Microsoft, and most consumers do consider both.
That's not an oligopoly because Microsoft sells into the desktop OS market and Apple does not sell a stand alone desktop OS. Microsoft has a monopoly in that market. Apple bypasses the market entirely by insourcing and competes in the fairly robust desktop and laptop computer markets. The lack of choice you're complaining about is called a "monopoly".
The reason I haven't been answering this specific question is because it should be obvious to most people.
That's not a very good reason, especially because you seem to be misusing the terms and failing to understand the basic principals of markets. It's only obvious if people understand your misuse terms and share your imprecise perception of how markets are working.
Their reasons for supporting HTML5 are most certainly not to be more open (or whatever happy fairy tale one might conceive of), but to stifle their competition.
Stifle competition? Don't be daft. They support HTML5 because it aligns with their business goals. Having an open standard for the Web that is capable and not tied to any other company simply provides Apple with a better position to sell devices without worrying about other companies blocking them. If neither Adobe nor Microsoft controls the tools and formats and players needed to view the Web, then they can't be roadblocks to technological changes Apple implements as a way to differentiate their hardware offerings.
There is nothing wrong with that, but let's not use it to justify some belief that Apple isn't a threat to the free Internet.
Apple or any other large company could do things that threaten freedom on the internet. Blackwater could threaten to kill executives of any company that doesn't lock down all their offerings with DRM. But that's no reason to label Blackwater the number one threat to the free internet. You have to look at what companies are actually doing and why and how it fits into their business plans. Apple right now and for the foreseeable future makes their money selling hardware. They create software and services to make that hardware more attractive. So how does locking down the internet make Apple more money and sell more devices? Oh yeah, it doesn't. Until you have a compelling business plan that will make Apple more money and some reason to think Apple is moving towards that business plan, you're just spreading FUD, which is really what this article is.
Actually an oligopoly doesn't necessarily imply price fixing...
No, it doesn't but it does require control of the market.
...it just means there is a general lack of choices. And that is exactly what we have.
I already asked twice. For the third and final time, what market? Oligopolies refer to markets. If you can't specify a market, your comment makes no sense at all. You say, "we" have no choices. So are you referring to a market where consumers are doing the purchasing directly? Please be specific. What market, dominated by Apple and what other parties?
It's easy to be in favor of opening things up once you've managed your way into a stranglehold on the market.
Actually, no it isn't. You see keeping things closed makes it harder to acquire market share because it makes your offering less attractive to users. Keeping things closed is an advantage only after you've dominated a market, because it prevents you from having to work hard to compete in that space to maintain your dominance. So by your version of events, Apple did the exact opposite of what an abusive monopoly normally does or what would make sense if Apple was concentrating on the online music market instead of using it as a way to push their hardware business.
if you wanted to listen to it away from your computer or laptop you were stuck using an iPod or degrading the sound quality further by burning it to CD and ripping it.
Yeah, but that was the case with every offering at the time because if you wanted to sell digital music you had to abide by the rules of the RIAA, you know an actual illegal trust convicted multiple time of colluding to undermine the free market. Apple played by the RIAA's rules until they had enough influence to make changes. Now don't get me wrong. There was nothing altruistic about Apple's actions. They just weren't interested in the online music business except as a way to make money selling devices. That's the business model they thought would profit them most and it is only coincidence that their business plans aligned with the best interests of consumers in weakening and getting rid of DRM. They still did more good than most any other single company in making things better for consumers.
Don't you need to dominate the market to be considered a monopoly?
Its a oligopoly, like Coke and Pepsi.
Okay then, to be an oligopoly you still need to control a market, just in collusion with another company. What market are you alleging Apple is colluding to control? I mean there are a few candidates where they have a lot of influence, but I don't know any where collusion is really significant.
What market(s)?
And Mozilla isn't just about making a browser, its about making the web better.
Ahh but if it is about strategic decisions to try to change the shape of the Web, maybe they need better strategists... since all they're doing right now is keeping Flash alive.
It isn't a good idea to turn Linux into Windows. In fact, most mainstream OSs are switching to package managers.
Bundled applications that are portable and contain necessary libraries are not a concept that is mutually exclusive with package managers. What's wrong with having portable bundles users can migrate and use from remote disks and easily move, share, delete... and using a package manager to acquire and keep things up to date?
Forget about cloning Windows, let's clone OS X and Ubuntu's new package manager, but better incorporating a good package manager that pulls from multiple repositories but handles nicely bundled portable apps. Why would desktop users want anything else? Is disk that constrained on your desktop? I'd rather spend a bit of space and get packages that I can IM to friends, or delete in a single go, or run from a flash drive, or better yet run from a network drive from different machines with different architectures all just by clicking on a normal binary created in its default configuration by the most common dev tools for Linux. The fact that some developers seem very resistant to this sort of progress is exactly why I sometimes feel Linux is always lagging in areas that would require more revolutionary changes.
Which means the old one is still there for my to use for privilege escalation or whatever evil I want.
Umm, how do you use an older library from a different package? Do you have some exploit for the linker no one else knows about? In general it makes things significantly harder to exploit because old apps that have the same library as new apps automatically use the newer library in many cases, making even apps that haven't been updated harder to exploit.
They never changed it. If you read the bible it references 616 for the mark of the beast. I have no idea where the 666 ever came from.
Actually, both numbers are in the same passage in versions of the bible from the same period. It's 616 in the earliest versions in greek, but 666 in some latin versions. This actually makes sense as historians believe it was a numerological code used to identify the emperor and since his name had different characters in each language it adds up differently.
Or you could just use OpenStep, get dynamic libraries and portable apps.
No, not really. You still have dependency issues.
What do you mean? OpenStep includes the libraries in the packages and dynamically links to newer versions that become available. If you have a dependency problem using OpenStep, you're using a broken toolset to build.
Great, now we can have outdated exploitable libs and every other kind of BS that comes with this. Might as well just statically link everything. Package mangers exist for a reason, use them. Do not bring the errors of Windows to us.
Or you could just use OpenStep, get dynamic libraries and portable apps. This is a long solved problem.
I'll be the first to say it: Correlation does not imply causation.
Actually, that's not true. Correlation does imply causation. It doesn't prove causation. It doesn't imply a specific causation, i.e. texting causes drug use; or drug use causes texting; or low IQ causes texting and drug use. But noticing correlations and testing to discover the specific causation is the heart of most modern science.
Maybe your assumption is that some sort of gun control only applies to the individual on the street, and since he's already breaking the law by owning a gun, everyone should own a gun in order to be safe.
No, a criminal, by definition, is already breaking the law, so laws that try to restrict them are only effective when they make illegal action less possible. You have to actually support that a gun control law does that, rather than base your argument upon the assumption that it will.
i.e. a society with 1 gun is far less likely to result in gun violence than a society with 1 billion guns. So, yes, it is reasonable to assume that new law can modify someone's already illegal behaviour[sic].
FAIL. I already mentioned that logical misstatement of the problem. Please pay attention.
Not really, I was just making a rather flippant comment, but if I had to say, then, ya, I'd say I'd rather have laws than no laws.
This is called the "false dichotomy" fallacy.
I'm not saying you're wrong, but I've provided links, and you haven't. Show me the studies that say the more guns a society has, the less gun deaths they have.
Again, you insist on this failure of logic. Do I need to call this out for you? Okay first, there is no study that shows a significant causation or even correlation between gun control laws and rates of violent crime. This is because gun control laws seem to have little or no effect upon rates of violent crime. Violent crime with guns sometimes decreases, and violent crime with other weapons generally increases more than enough to compensate.
Now on to gun crime. For a problem statement to apply, it needs to describe in all cases the desired change. "Decrease violent crime and death" is an overly simplistic one, but at least usable given normal assumptions. "Decrease crime with guns" (aka gun crime) fails. For an extreme example, suppose you pass a law like making assault and murder with anything other than a gun legal. This results results in a 95% decrease in murders with firearms, and a 10000% increase in murders overall. Using the logical misstatement of the problem by studying "gun crime" shows the law to be a smashing success. That's why it fails as a definition. The term "gun crime" was actually invented by statisticians that couldn't demonstrate the effectiveness of gun control laws on reducing crime but had an agenda to push.
I also agree that safety is a complex issue. When I used it above, I was referring to personal safety (on a societal level) from gun violence.
So you're okay with being stabbed, burned, beaten with clubs, or hit with hammers? Stop with the "gun violence" crap already. Take a look at some lovely idyllic countries like Brazil, with low gun ownership and low gun crime. Drive by shootings are very rare. Drive by pipe bombings and molotov cocktail attacks, however, are commonplace as many a mutilated bystander will tell you. Overall violent crime is absurdly bad, like Detroit. Take a look at Sweden, with very high gun ownership rates and lax gun control laws, yet some of the lowest violent crime rates in the world.
Guns and other weapons exist in the world and passing laws about it is not going to significantly change that, even if it slightly alters the makeup of what weapons are most common. But more importantly than any of that, give up on this "gun crime" and "gun violence" crap. It's just a way of hiding from the facts about violent crime and effective ways to address it. The more idiots that failed logic and statistics who buy into it and parrot it, the easier it is for politicians to pass do nothing laws that are easy for them, rather than address the hard problem of making a difference by reducing wealth disparity, decriminalizing addictive substances, providing social safety nets and treatment programs for addiction and mental illness, and stopping organized crime related violence. Please stop being part of the problem.
First, that's not an ad hominem attack. Please people, if you're going to try to use classical rhetorical references, read a book first.
Ahh, yes, because nobody would ever think being called a "sociopath" would be an insult.
First not all insults are ad hominem attacks if they relate directly to the issue being discussed. An ad hominem attack is an attack on the person as a way of discrediting their view. The only people that fit into the category originally described are people with one of several severe mental illnesses.
Second, If you decide to experiment on prisoners and murder people who have never harmed you, you are fitting into the textbook definition of "sociopath". Most people feel empathy for fellow human beings, picture themselves in the place of others, recognize the emotions of pain and fear and have a built in aversion to them. If your only reason for not murdering people is religion, you have a mental illness and should seek help.
Murder is simply far too extreme a case. Try something milder...
You're trying to move the goalposts. The original comment was talking about religion being a motivation to not, "...kill people to harvest organs, not to experiment on prisoners of war, not to kill off the unproductive members of society or undesirable societies...".
Maybe you missed that, very important part of this discussion?
Again with the borderline cases.
It's not a borderline case, it's exactly the case we were discussing. Please stay on topic.
But hey, anything as long as it keeps the religion hate going, right?
When did I express any hate, love, or other strong emotion with regard to religion? You're simply being misleading by making this statement. What I said and implied was, religion is not needed or useful for the purpose of stopping us from murdering and torturing one another, since normal people without mental illnesses have an inbuild sense of empathy that takes care of that and mentally ill people use religion as an excuse to kill people.
Morality is inherently subjective, and the GGP's point on religion providing a 'baseline standard' of sorts for many people is spot-on, even if the examples he picked weren't the best.
I'd agree that religion trains people with baseline beliefs formed from irrationality. I'm not convinced those beliefs to more good than harm to society.
Stop making wild generalizations just because you love to hate on religion, you give the rest of us atheists a bad name.
Stop slandering me and don't presume I'm an atheist (I'm actually an agnostic) or that I care if people prejudge you based upon their interpretations of my statements. You may be an atheist but that doesn't make you a rational person or a person able to read and comprehend objectively.
I'll break it down for you: GP made a statement, that since people already have guns, making guns illegal doesn't fix the problem.
Except that isn't what the original poster stated; which was that those people are already breaking the law in carrying the guns, thus it is not reasonable to assume that making another law is going to modify their behavior.
My counter (stated sarcastically) was that making murder (an action) illegal _does_ do good. In other words, we have an example of where making an action or state of being illegal does some good.
Your analogy, however, fails spectacularly because of the above.
You may not like the analogy, but the logic is sound: laws do good for society.
The problem is you're trying to base your argument upon that being a truism. Laws also do harm to society. Most all laws, in fact, do both, but there is no reason to suppose the balance is in any particular direction and the original poster stated a reason why it is unlikely to do good in this case.
Making it illegal to own butcher knives almost certainly would reduce the number of deaths by butcher knife.
It might be, but reducing murders with butcher knives is a logical misstatement of the problem.
And it is also sound to say that it is easier to kill with a gun than with a knife. And it is sound to say that by making it more difficult to kill people, less people will be killed.
I reject the assumption that making any particular implement illegal to own makes it harder to kill people. In fact, when a particular implement is already being used illegally by criminals and legally by non-criminals it has to opposite effect. That is to say, one more law means nothing to a criminal, whereas the lack of a defensive tool in the hands of those who obey the laws makes killing easier for them.
We're talking about whether a gun makes you safer.
Actually, no we're not. We're talking about the effect of guns specifically on crime, which is a completely different matter. You're simply making the logical fallacy of "post hoc ergo propter hoc". Because people die with guns you assume the causation is that gun result in more overall death. There is NO evidence to support said hypothetical causation. Moreover, there is significant evidence to refute it in regard to crime, such as the increase in violent crime and murder overall in the UK, when the strict gun controls came into effect; or the worldwide lack of correlation between firearm legislation and rates of violent crime and murder. While I'm sure you are only concerned if you are shot to death, some people don't really prefer being beaten with clubs, stabbed, or blown up as a preference.
The data I've seen (and provided) supports the hypothesis that less gun ownership means more safety.
What do you mean by "safety"? To quote, "Do not be too proud of your safety for even a thief in prison is safe from robbery by another thief." Personally I support the right to suicide and effective tools with which to commit the act. Fewer botched suicides is fine with me. I also support providing free mental health services to the citizenry, and other healthcare while we're at it. Statistically, it will have a much, much, much more dramatic effect upon rates of death and rates of violent crime than any firearm legislation could. It's a sad society that judges "safety" by the rate at which it prevents people from dying at a time and in a manner of their choosing when life becomes unbearable to them.