What the hell kind of "basketball and other sports" were your cousins playing??? They can barely walk now?
Basketball, baseball, tennis, and track, for the most part. Two of the three suffered serious ankle injury multiple times. One of them has a blown out knee in addition. Both problems were the result of repetitive high impact compounding sport related injury.
Everyone I know who has played sports from elementary school through high school graduation walks around just fine now that we are middle-aged.
High school and college level competitive sports, or the occasional game? Last I looked sports related injury accounted for something like 40% of all injuries resulting in long term disability among people under the age of 55. I sure know plenty of people with shin splints and the like as a result of high impact sports like running and basketball.
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
You do know Hulu is jointly owned by Fox, NBC, and ABC right? It's their way of making sure Web content is bottlenecked the same way as cable TV. They're even moving to a pay model, offering only subscription service to iPhone users and starting to put portions of the content behind a paywall. ABC has started pulling out though, so maybe it will fail. A better way to test original content on the Web are the YouTube and Netflix original content.
In typical Slashdot fashion, anti-exercise trolls come out of the woodworks!
I did plenty of physical activities that damaged my body growing up and even I recognize the difference. Being opposed to getting kids to run marathons or compete in sports that are damaging is not anti-exercise. Marathons are pretty hard on the body, high impact on the joints. My cousins played basketball and several other sports and now they hobble around barely able to walk properly while not even middle aged yet. Calling opposition to marathons anti-exercise is like calling people who don't like poison ivy anti-plant people. A lot of us encourage healthy exercise while still not encouraging kids to exercise in ways that likely damage them permanently.
I finally bailed on my cable a little while ago. There were a lot of problems, including spotty internet service. The cable subscription included basic TV service, but only because that was cheaper than internet by itself. The rates kept going up and up for no reason. Then they call me and tell me they're no longer going to support my cable modem and I can't buy a new one, I have to rent one from them or they won't support it... but they'll still provide the service... oh and the rates are going up as well. Whatever, I'm too busy to mess with it. Then the cable goes dark because by still providing the service to an unsupported cable modem they meant, we'll shut it off because we don't have the MAC address in our list and charge you anyway... but not tell our customer service department that's what we're doing. After three service calls without the two departments figuring it out, I told them to just cancel the bloody service. Then, of course, they offer me discounted rates, when it is way, way, way too late. Luckily DSL rates had just dropped to be about the same price. AT&T has a monster bureaucracy too, but at least they have reliable service.
Just to jump in quickly, what macro-economic model do you subscribe to? Almost every one I've seen that has not basically failed us entirely, predicts that any system with levels of capitalism such as we've had for the last 20 years or so, will collapse upon itself due to wealth condensation. That's exactly what has happened numerous times in numerous places. That's what preceded and most economist believe created the Great Depression. That's what we had going into this depression.
I don't mean they're socialists either, just that most countries exist somewhere in the shades fo grey not at the ends of the spectrum.
All functioning economies are shades of grey, ours included, blending capitalism and socialism, but the more extreme an economy becomes in either direction, the less stable it becomes. Our taxation policies certainly took a sharp turn towards extreme capitalism in the 80's and numerous economists have been saying right along what was going to happen. Our banking crisis, for example, was in large part due to banks making loans that they knew would fail and finding ways to gamble that they would... something that would not be a problem if wealth was distributed more and there were an increasing instead of decreasing number of people with a realistic chance of accumulating wealth over their lifetimes.
"rewriting history" is just accusation against someone that doesn't believe your incorrect version of history.
"Rewriting history" means just that. The objection is they are changing what is taught as history to be something other than what the documents and supporting evidence that we have shows it to be, in favor of what non-experts who haven't done any research but do have a political agenda want it to be.
The federal government doesn't get to say what history is, neither do you.
Both the federal and state governments are forbidden from promoting any specific religion and with very good reason. If you bothered to read the writings of the founding fathers you'd see some excellent explanations as to why this is the case. Now you have a state government trying to convince the citizenry that is not the case, using tax dollars; which is likely illegal under the exact provision they're trying to convince people does not exist... all this while admitting they are not "experts" and haven't done any "research" on the topic.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion"...
Likewise your statement is open to interpretation. You probably meant "is" in a way that means "is not". Since it would be impossible to look at all the context surrounding your writing or research your ideas further we'll have to teach people to be skeptical of the meaning of your comment.
encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation -- a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer.
While there are numerous problems with the curriculum, isn't teaching students to be skeptical of government a good thing?
No. Teaching them to be skeptical of the government in general is a good thing. Teaching them to be skeptical about certain, well established, historical occurrences is not a good thing. They are not teaching kids to be skeptical of the government, but to question the history researched by many,many historians in favor of history as these politicians would like it to be.
Is[sic] the actual text, it says nowhere about "separation of church and state" it comes down to interpretation if school prayer is a violation of establishing a national religion.
No, which is why we have to read all the letters and essays written by the people who wrote that portion of the constitution. Clearly it was written by Locke who made his views on the matter very clear. You can go read them yourself. Jefferson coined the phrase "separation of church and state" but it was just a catchier phrasing of Locke's idea.
As for "interpretation of school prayer" that's a vague term. It's perfectly legal to pray in schools or other public institutions. It's not legal to promote any particular religion when acting as an agent of the government and public schools are government institutions. I don't see that this is open to much interpretation at all.
Teaching students to question government.
Because you're overgeneralizing. Teaching students to be skeptical of a well established principal of founding fathers is not teaching them to be skeptical of the government. It's teaching them to be skeptical of history as supported by the facts. It's analogous to teaching kids to be skeptical of the fact that George Washington was a man. Sure that's what the government wants you to think, but while we don't have any fancy facts or historical records, you have to be skeptical. Washington may have been a woman, probably was, just dressed as a man so she could get things done in a male chauvinist dominated society.
They might be integral but that still don't equate to use; children of a family might use resources but they certainly don't own or control them.
Sure they do. They control how much electricity or water to consume, paid for by the family as a whole.
First off the "atomic family" is named for the hierarchical structure of the family unit, top down control.
Actually, that's not true. The atomic family named for the model of a central pair of parents with children "surrounding" them. It was used to differentiate from the extended family.
Secondly, every organisation that exists is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. So no, the "atomic family" is nowhere near a model for communism of any stripe.
Not all organizations share resources in a greater portion of the economy, certainly not resources significant enough to qualify as what is economically termed a communist cell. Lots of organizations have less cooperative models and few share the majority of resources in the way a family does. Normally communes or larger cell sizes are the model for communism, but families are the same model on a very small scale.
Can you clarify for us, what economist called the family unit communist
Sure, Bernstein mentions that in several of his works. I know I've seen it elsewhere too.
and please exclude any marxist ideologues trying to make out that their worldview is somehow natural?
I don't even know what you mean by that. Marxists certainly can be economists and communism is a fairly natural and basic concept of economics. I don't know anyone can claim to be an economist without having read and understood Marxism, even if they disagree with a lot of the models it puts forth.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs.
What's interesting s Apple is one of the very few companies that not only has requirements for their suppliers with regard to working conditions, but has actually been performing and openly publishing their audits of those suppliers and requiring changes from them. The last time they published such an audit, the press picked it up and spun it as Apple being evil even though Apple found and stopped rights abuses at their factory. The fact that press has been so sensationalist and so willing to go after Apple that they misrepresent the fact to this extent (look at how many of these articles are calling out Apple specifically despite none of them actually saying this plant makes Apple products, just a plant run by Foxconn the company that makes Apple hardware) seems like they are completely failing to provide the information needed by the people.
This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already...
Actually, Apple has been one of the few companies actually holding their suppliers responsible for working conditions to some extent. The last series of articles bashing Apple for the treatment of workers at Foxconn were the result of Apple investigating working conditions, fining Foxconn, and requiring Foxconn to improve conditions (which was then spun in the press as "terrible conditions at Apple factories"). Other companies do business with Foxconn and haven't been as strict doing audits. They occasionally make the press when investigative reporters or human rights organizations find abuses, but I don't know any that actually publish regular audits of their policies.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured.
Do you have a citation for that? All the articles I've read just say a Foxconn factory, then talk about what Foxconn makes. None of them specify what Foxconn makes at that factory that I've seen.
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy.
I know about the origins of the term, but we're not talking history here."Communism" and "socialism" are both political movements based upon philosophies. But then "capitalism" originally referred to a more oligarchical system as well where economy was controlled by a subset of extreme wealth. It has sense changed meaning in both everyday use and in terms of economics.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other.
You're both missing the point and failing to see the distinction of economics and politics. The family unit may be governed in different ways, totalitarian, oligarchy, or democracy. Economically it is communism, because it is sharing resources together, but within a larger economy. By viewing it outside the context of the larger economy, you lose sight of what makes it communist in the economic sense. An atomic family may be governed like a totalitarian regime internally and exist within a larger democratic country. The fact that they share economic resources and bargain collectively with the rest of the economy, makes them an example of communism (the economic term).
Pure communism...
Again, you're talking about the political movement. Economically, all economies are a mix of capitalism, socialism, and communism. In economic terms, the degree to which these are prevalent. Economist talk about how many and what size of communist cells are in an economy. Ironically, the US has been becoming more communist of late, but just because extended family sizes are growing. Extreme communism is where cell sizes grow to very large, likely unsustainable sizes, but this is very rare. More common is extreme socialism, where the degree to which an entire economy is centrally owned/controlled grows to the point where it becomes easy for totalitarianism to take root in the government. Of course such a situation is often referred to as "communism" but only because that term is so overloaded.
Eh no, you jumped from the ownership of resources to the use of resources, these are two different things.
Ownership and control are integral. We're talking about economics.
In the "atomic family" one or two people own the resources and distribute them to the rest of the family.
In the atomic family, one person could make all the decisions, or both parents could decide together, or the whole family could vote on all important decisions. That's more akin to politics, however, Economically speaking, they're all communism, because it is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. The first would be communist totatilitarianism and the last communist democracy.
The main difference between co-ops and shares in a company is co-ops are comprised of several different interlocking companies
I don't know what you're talking about. I was referring to co-op stores, common in much of the US. None of the ones I've seen are comprised of several interlocking companies.
...similar to the Keiretsus in Japan, and I don't think anyone would call them communist.
No one would call the atomic family communist either, except for economists. The term "communism" has come to mean a number of different things, kind of like "republicanism". Few people would consider the Democratic party's primaries to be "republicanism" but in fact it does follow the model of a republic more closely than other parties in the US. When there came about such a things as the "communist party" the term became hopelessly mired in myriad and contradictory meanings that have nothing to do with "communism" the economic term.
How do you propose we identify whether the software is doing "something normal" or "something strange" ?
First of all require ACLs as part of applications, second profile normal use cases for common types of applications and make sure users can see those profiles to make sure they make sense, third require apps to be signed, and fourth, vet those ACLs either as the OS vendor, using third party security greylists, or a combination of both in a weighted manner. But that's just a quick outline, there have been a number of very good papers written on this topic, and demonstrations of working code, just not moved into the mainstream.
This means a user installs an app, they know where it is from, the OS knows what the developer claims it will do and the user knows the type of app (game, web app, etc. By default it is significantly sandboxed and if it says "web app" when the user doesn't want it talking to the web, that raises a red flag.
How are you going to account for situations where the definitions are wrong ?
99% of the time, there is no reason an app would need to break out of a fairly restrictive default sandbox, unless it is doing something the user doesn't want. Thus users can become accustomed to only being bothered once or twice, ever, unless they are encountering malware. When an app does need to exceed the sandbox, they can have it well vetted by whoever supplies the ACL so customers are not bothered, or the user can grant it permission after clicking through some scary looking explanations (with a proper UI) that they're handing over control of their computer to a third party and trusting that third party with everything from now on. On current systems users might ignore such a warning, but if this is the only time they ever see it, that's a lot less likely, which is why all the current useless UAC type garbage has to go.
Windows in terms of openness, maybe a little ahead because of Darwin is more open source than the NT kernel, although you can get bits and pieces of either OS under funny semi-open licenses.
I'd say OS X is more open in terms of development because it relies upon open standards such as OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL, etc. for development instead of closed, MS proprietary technologies like DirectX.
The hardware for Macs is not very open though compared to PCs, although after the switch to x86 it has improved.
How is Mac hardware any more or less open than any other PC OEM? It's a little different (EFI instead of BIOS) but no more or less open that I know of.
How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms. Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism applied with slightly larger communist cell sizes.
But I think what you're talking about is socialism. There is a connection between totalitarianism and socialism, in that the more socialism is prevalent in an economy, the more centralized resources are, the easier it is for someone to take control and establish a totalitarian regime. That doesn't mean you can't have extreme levels of socialism in a completely democratic system of government, it's just more difficult to maintain.
... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?
Actually, while the title says "iPhone Factory" none of the articles I found make that claim. They just say it is at a factory run by Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones. Most of the articles are less Apple focused and mention the other products they make too, since no one seems to know what this particular factory makes.
A big part of social engineering is that users don't have the patience for the sorts of full explanations required to implement that.
Why would they need patience if you provide them with immediate verification of who they're talking to, if they're affiliated with who they claim, and if what they are doing is a normal procedure or something strange?
Consider Microsoft's new UAC system, for example—that's close to what you described,
No, not really.
but users tend to either just hit "yes" as quickly as possible to get on with their work
UAC is a study in how operant conditioning can be used to undermine the purpose of a user interface. It's a classic example of the OK/Cancel pitfall documented in numerous UI design books. If you force users to click a button, the same button, in the same place, over and over and over again when there is no real need to do so, all you do is condition them to click a button and ignore the useless UI. Dialogue boxes should be for the very rare occasion when default security settings are being overridden, otherwise the false positive rate undermines the usefulness. Dialogue boxes should be fairly unique and the buttons should change based upon the action being taken. If your dialogue box says "yes" or anything other than an action verb, you've already failed. Further UAC is still a failure of control. Users don't want to authorize a program to either have complete control of their computer or not run. Those are shitastic options. They need to be told how much trust to put in an application and want the option to run a program but not let it screw up their computer. Where's the "this program is from an untrusted source and has not been screened: (run it in a sandbox and don't let it see my personal data)(don't run it)(view advanced options)" dialogue box?
Social engineering relies upon deceiving a user and getting the user to authorize someone they don't know to do something they don't want. By making sure the user is informed of who is contacting them and what exactly that person is doing, as well as making sure something very similar is never required, yes we can eliminate pretty much all cases of social engineering as it is generally understood.
Wait...is this a case where anti-copyright people are complaining about someone stealing their stuff?
Where did you see the word "stealing"? All I saw were complaints that a company was illegally copying and reproducing images in violation of copyright law. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the people posting comments here are "anti-copyright" either, although personally I'm in favor of a lot of copyright reform.
Security can be widely deployed by enterprise IT, OS vendors, and possibly some hardware OEMs. The larger the footprint, the easier it is for such real security to be rolled out. The thing is, while some IT departments have very good security, just as many have terrible. Hardware vendors are unlikely to have the expertise and are unlikely to be able to profit using an integrated security platform as a differentiator. This pretty much leaves OS vendors. MS has a monopoly so they don't have much financial motivation to dump money into it. Apple doesn't really have a malware problem, with most users never seeing any malware let alone making a purchasing decision based upon the fear of OS insecurity. Linux is fragmented, has little in the way of malware problems, and has niche versions for those worried about it.
I'm convinced malware is largely solvable. It will never be completely eliminated by the vast majority could be filtered out if we implemented some of the cool new security schemes used in high security environments. But who's going to do it? Maybe Apple or a Linux vendor if somehow they grow large enough or their platform is targeted enough. Maybe if MS were broken up into multiple companies with the IP rights to Windows, they're start competing to make a more secure product than their new rival. Other than that, we just have to sit in the mess we've made.
So you stop looking at IE-only pages. You stop using IE.
I'd love to and mostly I have, but unfortunately I still have to deal with things like my state's tax collection and my bank's fraud reporting pages.
Why would Google make a choice?
To provide a better experience for their customers going forward and to help promote the progress of Web technologies using the free market instead of allowing a single company to determine the rate of that progress.
It is your time/battery that is wasted while looking at flash videos/applications, your "principle"s are being insulted, so you "boycott" flash.
I do boycott Flash as much as possible, but I, as an individual don't have much influence on the market and most people don't have the expertise to make good choices themselves. That's why it is important that large, technology companies recognize the importance and value of open standards and promote them as well.
Google is not here to make value judgements.
I guess that depends upon what you mean by "value judgements". They have, in the past determined the value of open standards and worked hard to promote those standards when building services and applications. They certainly judged that the openness of the standards were important and went to great lengths to make some of those technologies more open.
It just wants to give the best device, make some money on the side, and maybe most of all - popularize mobile internet usage and make a shitload of more money from its primary competency.
Of course they want to make money, but Google often takes the long view, spending more money now to push more openness in the future to insure that revenue for as long as possible. In this instance, they're taking a shorter view to try to gain more market share from Apple right away, at the cost of keeping the state of the art less advanced.
Must you look up to your device/software makers to make value judgements for you?
Google has market position, as does Apple, MS, RIM, and a few others. They have leverage individuals lack. I can boycott Flash, but that does little to nothing to change the market. When Apple or Google boycotts Flash, major Web sites and developers take notice and start moving to more open technologies. That's why I'm sad Google hasn't done more to push open technologies using their market position.
I was reading a while ago that while print newspapers are dying, a few niche papers are actually doing very well. The most profitable being local police blotter info reprinted with pictures with mugshots etc. I foresee this whole business moving to the Web along with local news. There is already a Web site that provides hosting for 10 local newspapers in my area. Likely someone will come up with a Web site for communities where amateur reporters as well as a few on staff writers will consolidate news relevant to a local area and live off the advertising revenue.
This is why no one is going to seriously use the HTML5 video tag. What advantage does HTML5 offer over Flash for web designers when you have to worry about supporting multiple codecs because no one can agree on a standard codec to use.
HTML5 video for some codecs will be built into some browsers. HTML5 video for specific codecs will be available as a plug-in for pretty much all browsers. Flash is available as plug-in for some browsers. Thus, assuming you want to reach the maximum number of users, you'll probably need a plug-in for a while, but HTML5 reaches more all told. I expect developers will implement both. As to why HTML5 video will win in the end, you can only get working Flash from Adobe, but you can get HTML5 video from anyone, thus lower costs and more competition.
The tag is something I would expect to see from Microsoft, not the W3C.
And yet it is still significantly more open and competitive than Flash.
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What the hell kind of "basketball and other sports" were your cousins playing??? They can barely walk now?
Basketball, baseball, tennis, and track, for the most part. Two of the three suffered serious ankle injury multiple times. One of them has a blown out knee in addition. Both problems were the result of repetitive high impact compounding sport related injury.
Everyone I know who has played sports from elementary school through high school graduation walks around just fine now that we are middle-aged.
High school and college level competitive sports, or the occasional game? Last I looked sports related injury accounted for something like 40% of all injuries resulting in long term disability among people under the age of 55. I sure know plenty of people with shin splints and the like as a result of high impact sports like running and basketball.
Is hulu big enough yet to have original content? FOX NBC CBS and ABC will have to truly embrace the streaming stuff, and I think they have to a certain extent, so perhaps they won't go the way of the newspaper!
You do know Hulu is jointly owned by Fox, NBC, and ABC right? It's their way of making sure Web content is bottlenecked the same way as cable TV. They're even moving to a pay model, offering only subscription service to iPhone users and starting to put portions of the content behind a paywall. ABC has started pulling out though, so maybe it will fail. A better way to test original content on the Web are the YouTube and Netflix original content.
run a marathon . . . get[] nothing in return
In typical Slashdot fashion, anti-exercise trolls come out of the woodworks!
I did plenty of physical activities that damaged my body growing up and even I recognize the difference. Being opposed to getting kids to run marathons or compete in sports that are damaging is not anti-exercise. Marathons are pretty hard on the body, high impact on the joints. My cousins played basketball and several other sports and now they hobble around barely able to walk properly while not even middle aged yet. Calling opposition to marathons anti-exercise is like calling people who don't like poison ivy anti-plant people. A lot of us encourage healthy exercise while still not encouraging kids to exercise in ways that likely damage them permanently.
I finally bailed on my cable a little while ago. There were a lot of problems, including spotty internet service. The cable subscription included basic TV service, but only because that was cheaper than internet by itself. The rates kept going up and up for no reason. Then they call me and tell me they're no longer going to support my cable modem and I can't buy a new one, I have to rent one from them or they won't support it... but they'll still provide the service... oh and the rates are going up as well. Whatever, I'm too busy to mess with it. Then the cable goes dark because by still providing the service to an unsupported cable modem they meant, we'll shut it off because we don't have the MAC address in our list and charge you anyway... but not tell our customer service department that's what we're doing. After three service calls without the two departments figuring it out, I told them to just cancel the bloody service. Then, of course, they offer me discounted rates, when it is way, way, way too late. Luckily DSL rates had just dropped to be about the same price. AT&T has a monster bureaucracy too, but at least they have reliable service.
Just to jump in quickly, what macro-economic model do you subscribe to? Almost every one I've seen that has not basically failed us entirely, predicts that any system with levels of capitalism such as we've had for the last 20 years or so, will collapse upon itself due to wealth condensation. That's exactly what has happened numerous times in numerous places. That's what preceded and most economist believe created the Great Depression. That's what we had going into this depression.
I don't mean they're socialists either, just that most countries exist somewhere in the shades fo grey not at the ends of the spectrum.
All functioning economies are shades of grey, ours included, blending capitalism and socialism, but the more extreme an economy becomes in either direction, the less stable it becomes. Our taxation policies certainly took a sharp turn towards extreme capitalism in the 80's and numerous economists have been saying right along what was going to happen. Our banking crisis, for example, was in large part due to banks making loans that they knew would fail and finding ways to gamble that they would... something that would not be a problem if wealth was distributed more and there were an increasing instead of decreasing number of people with a realistic chance of accumulating wealth over their lifetimes.
"rewriting history" is just accusation against someone that doesn't believe your incorrect version of history.
"Rewriting history" means just that. The objection is they are changing what is taught as history to be something other than what the documents and supporting evidence that we have shows it to be, in favor of what non-experts who haven't done any research but do have a political agenda want it to be.
The federal government doesn't get to say what history is, neither do you.
Both the federal and state governments are forbidden from promoting any specific religion and with very good reason. If you bothered to read the writings of the founding fathers you'd see some excellent explanations as to why this is the case. Now you have a state government trying to convince the citizenry that is not the case, using tax dollars; which is likely illegal under the exact provision they're trying to convince people does not exist... all this while admitting they are not "experts" and haven't done any "research" on the topic.
It is entirely up to interpretation if allowing prayer in schools constitutes an "establishment of religion"...
Likewise your statement is open to interpretation. You probably meant "is" in a way that means "is not". Since it would be impossible to look at all the context surrounding your writing or research your ideas further we'll have to teach people to be skeptical of the meaning of your comment.
encourage high school students to question the legal doctrine of church-state separation -- a sore point for social conservative groups who disagree with court decisions that have affirmed the doctrine, including the ban on school-sponsored prayer.
While there are numerous problems with the curriculum, isn't teaching students to be skeptical of government a good thing?
No. Teaching them to be skeptical of the government in general is a good thing. Teaching them to be skeptical about certain, well established, historical occurrences is not a good thing. They are not teaching kids to be skeptical of the government, but to question the history researched by many,many historians in favor of history as these politicians would like it to be.
Is[sic] the actual text, it says nowhere about "separation of church and state" it comes down to interpretation if school prayer is a violation of establishing a national religion.
No, which is why we have to read all the letters and essays written by the people who wrote that portion of the constitution. Clearly it was written by Locke who made his views on the matter very clear. You can go read them yourself. Jefferson coined the phrase "separation of church and state" but it was just a catchier phrasing of Locke's idea.
As for "interpretation of school prayer" that's a vague term. It's perfectly legal to pray in schools or other public institutions. It's not legal to promote any particular religion when acting as an agent of the government and public schools are government institutions. I don't see that this is open to much interpretation at all.
Teaching students to question government.
Because you're overgeneralizing. Teaching students to be skeptical of a well established principal of founding fathers is not teaching them to be skeptical of the government. It's teaching them to be skeptical of history as supported by the facts. It's analogous to teaching kids to be skeptical of the fact that George Washington was a man. Sure that's what the government wants you to think, but while we don't have any fancy facts or historical records, you have to be skeptical. Washington may have been a woman, probably was, just dressed as a man so she could get things done in a male chauvinist dominated society.
They might be integral but that still don't equate to use; children of a family might use resources but they certainly don't own or control them.
Sure they do. They control how much electricity or water to consume, paid for by the family as a whole.
First off the "atomic family" is named for the hierarchical structure of the family unit, top down control.
Actually, that's not true. The atomic family named for the model of a central pair of parents with children "surrounding" them. It was used to differentiate from the extended family.
Secondly, every organisation that exists is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. So no, the "atomic family" is nowhere near a model for communism of any stripe.
Not all organizations share resources in a greater portion of the economy, certainly not resources significant enough to qualify as what is economically termed a communist cell. Lots of organizations have less cooperative models and few share the majority of resources in the way a family does. Normally communes or larger cell sizes are the model for communism, but families are the same model on a very small scale.
Can you clarify for us, what economist called the family unit communist
Sure, Bernstein mentions that in several of his works. I know I've seen it elsewhere too.
and please exclude any marxist ideologues trying to make out that their worldview is somehow natural?
I don't even know what you mean by that. Marxists certainly can be economists and communism is a fairly natural and basic concept of economics. I don't know anyone can claim to be an economist without having read and understood Marxism, even if they disagree with a lot of the models it puts forth.
Fortunately, there is a man in America with the power to save these poor people. His name is Steve Jobs.
What's interesting s Apple is one of the very few companies that not only has requirements for their suppliers with regard to working conditions, but has actually been performing and openly publishing their audits of those suppliers and requiring changes from them. The last time they published such an audit, the press picked it up and spun it as Apple being evil even though Apple found and stopped rights abuses at their factory. The fact that press has been so sensationalist and so willing to go after Apple that they misrepresent the fact to this extent (look at how many of these articles are calling out Apple specifically despite none of them actually saying this plant makes Apple products, just a plant run by Foxconn the company that makes Apple hardware) seems like they are completely failing to provide the information needed by the people.
This isn't the norm. Sounds to me like Apple must have done something already...
Actually, Apple has been one of the few companies actually holding their suppliers responsible for working conditions to some extent. The last series of articles bashing Apple for the treatment of workers at Foxconn were the result of Apple investigating working conditions, fining Foxconn, and requiring Foxconn to improve conditions (which was then spun in the press as "terrible conditions at Apple factories"). Other companies do business with Foxconn and haven't been as strict doing audits. They occasionally make the press when investigative reporters or human rights organizations find abuses, but I don't know any that actually publish regular audits of their policies.
This is the place where iPhones and iPads are manufactured.
Do you have a citation for that? All the articles I've read just say a Foxconn factory, then talk about what Foxconn makes. None of them specify what Foxconn makes at that factory that I've seen.
Communism is not an economic term and a political movement, it is an economic system that requires by definition a stateless government run as a pure democracy.
I know about the origins of the term, but we're not talking history here."Communism" and "socialism" are both political movements based upon philosophies. But then "capitalism" originally referred to a more oligarchical system as well where economy was controlled by a subset of extreme wealth. It has sense changed meaning in both everyday use and in terms of economics.
Most families have a definite leader, or at least pair of leaders. The family unit is pretty much always either a monarchy or an oligarchy, depending on whether or not one of the parents submits all authority to the other.
You're both missing the point and failing to see the distinction of economics and politics. The family unit may be governed in different ways, totalitarian, oligarchy, or democracy. Economically it is communism, because it is sharing resources together, but within a larger economy. By viewing it outside the context of the larger economy, you lose sight of what makes it communist in the economic sense. An atomic family may be governed like a totalitarian regime internally and exist within a larger democratic country. The fact that they share economic resources and bargain collectively with the rest of the economy, makes them an example of communism (the economic term).
Pure communism...
Again, you're talking about the political movement. Economically, all economies are a mix of capitalism, socialism, and communism. In economic terms, the degree to which these are prevalent. Economist talk about how many and what size of communist cells are in an economy. Ironically, the US has been becoming more communist of late, but just because extended family sizes are growing. Extreme communism is where cell sizes grow to very large, likely unsustainable sizes, but this is very rare. More common is extreme socialism, where the degree to which an entire economy is centrally owned/controlled grows to the point where it becomes easy for totalitarianism to take root in the government. Of course such a situation is often referred to as "communism" but only because that term is so overloaded.
Eh no, you jumped from the ownership of resources to the use of resources, these are two different things.
Ownership and control are integral. We're talking about economics.
In the "atomic family" one or two people own the resources and distribute them to the rest of the family.
In the atomic family, one person could make all the decisions, or both parents could decide together, or the whole family could vote on all important decisions. That's more akin to politics, however, Economically speaking, they're all communism, because it is a subset of society sharing resources within the larger scope of society. The first would be communist totatilitarianism and the last communist democracy.
The main difference between co-ops and shares in a company is co-ops are comprised of several different interlocking companies
I don't know what you're talking about. I was referring to co-op stores, common in much of the US. None of the ones I've seen are comprised of several interlocking companies.
...similar to the Keiretsus in Japan, and I don't think anyone would call them communist.
No one would call the atomic family communist either, except for economists. The term "communism" has come to mean a number of different things, kind of like "republicanism". Few people would consider the Democratic party's primaries to be "republicanism" but in fact it does follow the model of a republic more closely than other parties in the US. When there came about such a things as the "communist party" the term became hopelessly mired in myriad and contradictory meanings that have nothing to do with "communism" the economic term.
How do you propose we identify whether the software is doing "something normal" or "something strange" ?
First of all require ACLs as part of applications, second profile normal use cases for common types of applications and make sure users can see those profiles to make sure they make sense, third require apps to be signed, and fourth, vet those ACLs either as the OS vendor, using third party security greylists, or a combination of both in a weighted manner. But that's just a quick outline, there have been a number of very good papers written on this topic, and demonstrations of working code, just not moved into the mainstream.
This means a user installs an app, they know where it is from, the OS knows what the developer claims it will do and the user knows the type of app (game, web app, etc. By default it is significantly sandboxed and if it says "web app" when the user doesn't want it talking to the web, that raises a red flag.
How are you going to account for situations where the definitions are wrong ?
99% of the time, there is no reason an app would need to break out of a fairly restrictive default sandbox, unless it is doing something the user doesn't want. Thus users can become accustomed to only being bothered once or twice, ever, unless they are encountering malware. When an app does need to exceed the sandbox, they can have it well vetted by whoever supplies the ACL so customers are not bothered, or the user can grant it permission after clicking through some scary looking explanations (with a proper UI) that they're handing over control of their computer to a third party and trusting that third party with everything from now on. On current systems users might ignore such a warning, but if this is the only time they ever see it, that's a lot less likely, which is why all the current useless UAC type garbage has to go.
Windows in terms of openness, maybe a little ahead because of Darwin is more open source than the NT kernel, although you can get bits and pieces of either OS under funny semi-open licenses.
I'd say OS X is more open in terms of development because it relies upon open standards such as OpenGL, OpenAL, OpenCL, etc. for development instead of closed, MS proprietary technologies like DirectX.
The hardware for Macs is not very open though compared to PCs, although after the switch to x86 it has improved.
How is Mac hardware any more or less open than any other PC OEM? It's a little different (EFI instead of BIOS) but no more or less open that I know of.
You're confusing communism and totalitarianism
How would communism work in the real world (ie. not everyone agrees) without totalitarianism ?
Communism is an overloaded term. Being both an economic term and a political movement makes it pretty difficult to discuss without first defining terms. Economically capitalism is individually owned resources, socialism is government owned resources, and communism is resources shared by a subset of society. Economically speaking, the atomic family sharing a home and groceries and electrical bills is communism with extremely small cell sizes. Co-op stores, monasteries, and traditional communes are communism applied with slightly larger communist cell sizes.
But I think what you're talking about is socialism. There is a connection between totalitarianism and socialism, in that the more socialism is prevalent in an economy, the more centralized resources are, the easier it is for someone to take control and establish a totalitarian regime. That doesn't mean you can't have extreme levels of socialism in a completely democratic system of government, it's just more difficult to maintain.
... maybe suicides happen every so often at all factories and we just notice this because it's the factory that makes iPhones?
Actually, while the title says "iPhone Factory" none of the articles I found make that claim. They just say it is at a factory run by Foxconn, the company that makes iPhones. Most of the articles are less Apple focused and mention the other products they make too, since no one seems to know what this particular factory makes.
A big part of social engineering is that users don't have the patience for the sorts of full explanations required to implement that.
Why would they need patience if you provide them with immediate verification of who they're talking to, if they're affiliated with who they claim, and if what they are doing is a normal procedure or something strange?
Consider Microsoft's new UAC system, for example—that's close to what you described,
No, not really.
but users tend to either just hit "yes" as quickly as possible to get on with their work
UAC is a study in how operant conditioning can be used to undermine the purpose of a user interface. It's a classic example of the OK/Cancel pitfall documented in numerous UI design books. If you force users to click a button, the same button, in the same place, over and over and over again when there is no real need to do so, all you do is condition them to click a button and ignore the useless UI. Dialogue boxes should be for the very rare occasion when default security settings are being overridden, otherwise the false positive rate undermines the usefulness. Dialogue boxes should be fairly unique and the buttons should change based upon the action being taken. If your dialogue box says "yes" or anything other than an action verb, you've already failed. Further UAC is still a failure of control. Users don't want to authorize a program to either have complete control of their computer or not run. Those are shitastic options. They need to be told how much trust to put in an application and want the option to run a program but not let it screw up their computer. Where's the "this program is from an untrusted source and has not been screened: (run it in a sandbox and don't let it see my personal data)(don't run it)(view advanced options)" dialogue box?
I'm convinced malware is largely solvable.
Not as long as social engineering is possible.
Social engineering relies upon deceiving a user and getting the user to authorize someone they don't know to do something they don't want. By making sure the user is informed of who is contacting them and what exactly that person is doing, as well as making sure something very similar is never required, yes we can eliminate pretty much all cases of social engineering as it is generally understood.
Wait...is this a case where anti-copyright people are complaining about someone stealing their stuff?
Where did you see the word "stealing"? All I saw were complaints that a company was illegally copying and reproducing images in violation of copyright law. I'm not sure where you get the idea that the people posting comments here are "anti-copyright" either, although personally I'm in favor of a lot of copyright reform.
Security can be widely deployed by enterprise IT, OS vendors, and possibly some hardware OEMs. The larger the footprint, the easier it is for such real security to be rolled out. The thing is, while some IT departments have very good security, just as many have terrible. Hardware vendors are unlikely to have the expertise and are unlikely to be able to profit using an integrated security platform as a differentiator. This pretty much leaves OS vendors. MS has a monopoly so they don't have much financial motivation to dump money into it. Apple doesn't really have a malware problem, with most users never seeing any malware let alone making a purchasing decision based upon the fear of OS insecurity. Linux is fragmented, has little in the way of malware problems, and has niche versions for those worried about it.
I'm convinced malware is largely solvable. It will never be completely eliminated by the vast majority could be filtered out if we implemented some of the cool new security schemes used in high security environments. But who's going to do it? Maybe Apple or a Linux vendor if somehow they grow large enough or their platform is targeted enough. Maybe if MS were broken up into multiple companies with the IP rights to Windows, they're start competing to make a more secure product than their new rival. Other than that, we just have to sit in the mess we've made.
So you stop looking at IE-only pages. You stop using IE.
I'd love to and mostly I have, but unfortunately I still have to deal with things like my state's tax collection and my bank's fraud reporting pages.
Why would Google make a choice?
To provide a better experience for their customers going forward and to help promote the progress of Web technologies using the free market instead of allowing a single company to determine the rate of that progress.
It is your time/battery that is wasted while looking at flash videos/applications, your "principle"s are being insulted, so you "boycott" flash.
I do boycott Flash as much as possible, but I, as an individual don't have much influence on the market and most people don't have the expertise to make good choices themselves. That's why it is important that large, technology companies recognize the importance and value of open standards and promote them as well.
Google is not here to make value judgements.
I guess that depends upon what you mean by "value judgements". They have, in the past determined the value of open standards and worked hard to promote those standards when building services and applications. They certainly judged that the openness of the standards were important and went to great lengths to make some of those technologies more open.
It just wants to give the best device, make some money on the side, and maybe most of all - popularize mobile internet usage and make a shitload of more money from its primary competency.
Of course they want to make money, but Google often takes the long view, spending more money now to push more openness in the future to insure that revenue for as long as possible. In this instance, they're taking a shorter view to try to gain more market share from Apple right away, at the cost of keeping the state of the art less advanced.
Must you look up to your device/software makers to make value judgements for you?
Google has market position, as does Apple, MS, RIM, and a few others. They have leverage individuals lack. I can boycott Flash, but that does little to nothing to change the market. When Apple or Google boycotts Flash, major Web sites and developers take notice and start moving to more open technologies. That's why I'm sad Google hasn't done more to push open technologies using their market position.
I was reading a while ago that while print newspapers are dying, a few niche papers are actually doing very well. The most profitable being local police blotter info reprinted with pictures with mugshots etc. I foresee this whole business moving to the Web along with local news. There is already a Web site that provides hosting for 10 local newspapers in my area. Likely someone will come up with a Web site for communities where amateur reporters as well as a few on staff writers will consolidate news relevant to a local area and live off the advertising revenue.
This is why no one is going to seriously use the HTML5 video tag. What advantage does HTML5 offer over Flash for web designers when you have to worry about supporting multiple codecs because no one can agree on a standard codec to use.
HTML5 video for some codecs will be built into some browsers. HTML5 video for specific codecs will be available as a plug-in for pretty much all browsers. Flash is available as plug-in for some browsers. Thus, assuming you want to reach the maximum number of users, you'll probably need a plug-in for a while, but HTML5 reaches more all told. I expect developers will implement both. As to why HTML5 video will win in the end, you can only get working Flash from Adobe, but you can get HTML5 video from anyone, thus lower costs and more competition.
The tag is something I would expect to see from Microsoft, not the W3C.
And yet it is still significantly more open and competitive than Flash.