If your home has "low security" as a default option such as an unlocked window or a door that does not have adaquate protection, people can break into them and steal all of your nice stuff.
The problem is Active X. I mean what if every home in America was made by a company who was promoting their fancy new locks that always turn easily and are quick to install. Now imagine those locks have 2 settings, let anyone in, or don't let anyone in. As a home owner you can either choose to let people in the door, or not, but can't give out keys to select people, or restrict entry to a certain level. That is a problem.
Active X is a POS. It can run programs on your hard drive, or not. You can grant a site complete access to your computer, or not. How about some simple granularity? How about a sandbox? I mean Java is way, way, way ahead here.
Microsoft makes it pretty clear that arbitrary code can be ran from a web page in the security dialog.
What is lacking is sandboxing. Here is a typical example. I go to a site to use a service. It has an active X control. I need to use the control, but don't fully trust them. My options are A) find another service, or B) run it and hope for the best. That is unacceptable. There needs to be an option C) run it in a sandbox, and don't let it read my files, or overwrite anything. I mean this is not brain surgery here. Java can do it, and Sun does not have the OS code.
Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves.
I strongly disagree. For quite some time I hoped that Apple would pick up the Mozilla source and run with it. Instead they picked up the Konquerer source and ran with it. It was probably a good engineering decision on their part and it resulted in corporate sponsorship for a second open source rendering engine. This helps open standards and keeps web developers from writing gecko specific code to go with their IE specific code.
I've used open office, and a huge number of other word processors, and layout programs. There is huge room for improvement over either OpenOffice or Word. I'd like to see some of the best features of Word, OpenOffice, Indesign, and Framemaker all put together with some top notch usability. I don't think Pages will be there in it's first iteration, and maybe never. But from what I have seeing it may be a better, and more flexible base than OpenOffice would have been. That is not to say that I don't think support for open formats is not important. They have a good start on compatibility but seem to be lacking support for OpenOffice, Latex, PNG, SVG, and a few others. Also, I hope their native format is XML based, like Keynote. Ideally, they will have a plug-in format so any developers can easily incorporate import/export filters to a given format.
Basically what I am saying is that while I appreciate OpenOffice, I'd much rather see a system designed right from the ground up, rather than another Word clone, regardless of the quality.
Looks like adding a photo to a page of text will be very easy in Pages, with the text adapting automatically.
This is a problem I would like to see solved well for once. Basically, I see lots of programs that allow you to add a graphic to text. Some let you position it on a page, and allow text to flow around, some place it with the text, so that it moves as text is added (potentially causing layout problems). What would be ideal is to be able place a graphic and associate text with that graphic. So I'd like to insert a diagram, and attach a caption, and then associate both with a few paragraphs of text. I don't care where it goes, so long as it is near that text, and the layout looks good. This feature would make Indesign, Quark, Framemaker, and Word designers all eat their hats.
XML can cause more problems than it solves...I am a firm believer in using the right tool for the job, XML just isn't it in this instance.
Umm, lets see keynote is text, graphics, and other misc data in presentation format. That sounds pretty much exactly what XML was designed for. Pages is more of the same, with some absolute positioning for the layout. It is still a very good fit. The advantage of XML is that if someone wants to import it, or export to it, or do anything with it, there are piles of code in every language imaginable already written and freely available to parse, store, read, write, search, collate, transform, replace, etc. This is time tested, well proven code, with validation. Using something else just makes things hard on everyone else, slows down compatibility, and annoys everyone else who has moved to XML, like OpenOffice, Word, KOffice, etc.
Incidentally, won't you come across problems with sending folders, they don't seem as portable as an individual file.
I take it you are not a mac user. The native application format (.app) is just a folder with all the resources and compiled binaries contained therein. It has been the standard since OSX was introduced and I have not heard of any problems with moving or storing them. The added bonus is if a user wants to grab some graphics or sounds from an application, they can just browse the *.app/Contents/Resources/ folder, rather than trying to parse some consolidated binary. It also makes it easy to include multiple binaries in an application for different platforms, or hardware. I imagine this will also make it possible to easily include older format versions for backwards compatibility, if the designers want to include such a feature in either Pages or Keynote. Basically, it is a very good idea.
The Mac needs a good, stable, simple to use GUI FTP client. I don't want to use a CLI tool for FTP
What percentage of people know what FTP is and care? Well this is Slashdot so probably about 85%. What percentage know what FTP is, care, and don't just use the CLI for FTP? I'd say maybe 5%. I'm sure there are a few people who want a GUI FTP client, and are not satisfied with the 50 or so programs that appeared when I put 'osx' and 'ftp' into google. Most people, however, do not use FTP anymore. My most common file transfer mechanisms are, throw up a web page with a download for a person, send files via ichat's transfer mechanism, remotely mount a volume, and ssh then scp. I haven't used FTP in quite a while. I think you are a rare exception.
anyone who thinks Safari is not the best browser doesn't use it
I use Safari. I'm using it right now. But it is certainly not the best for everyone. Mozilla has some very nice security features, that are not available in Safari. Omniweb has some very nice features that I have not seen in any other browsers. If you are doing web development it's edit in place features are a huge timesaver. Safari is very good, and is certainly not slacking, but it is on par with several other browsers, not way ahead of the pack.
No, this is wrong. I expect the operating system to support the hardware I paid for to the max, not artificially keep me from getting the most of my property. This really, really pisses me off when I think about it: No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that limits your graphics card purely for marketing reasons.
You seem to be very poorly informed. Do a little research. You will find a surprising number of hardware devices that are identical to other offerings from that vendor, aside from software configuration. I work at a high end security solutions company. We have boxes that we ship with the same hardware, the same software, but a different configuration. The price difference is up to $40K. This is by no means uncommon. The price of a product is not the cost of production. It is what the market will bear. In many cases this means you have multiple price points that you need to sell to, and the only differentiation is features. If you are pissed about ibooks, well it's time you started looking at everything else you buy starting with video cards.
Civil disobedience isn't just ignoring a law, though. It's an attempt to force that law to change.
Civil disobedience is just that, not obeying a law. In any case, no one obeys the laws. Most people obey a small subset of the laws, and have no idea what 99% of the laws are. This includes police officers who are supposed to be enforcing the laws and lawyers who are responsible for both prosecution and defense. Laws themselves are not too relevant. Enforced laws are a different matter. The problem is that certain laws are enforced, in some cases and not others, and the enforcement is determined by law enforcement, and those who can influence either law enforcement or the courts through money or influence.
people involved in civil disobedience generally take the penalty for their actions without bitching
Umm, if that were the case you would never have heard of civil disobedience. A large part of famous civil disobedience cases was making a stink, being heard, and complaining about the laws, and their unfairness.
People have little to do with laws, and laws are most irrelevant to people. Occasionally the government tries to enforce an unpopular law and, as I mentioned earlier, the result is either a substantial portion of the people are imprisoned and crime and corruption both increase dramatically, or the law is no longer enforced and people do whatever it is that they want to do. Whether the law is repealed or not, makes little difference. In my state it is illegal for women to swear and to have sex before you are married. I'd say the civil disobedience in those cases is pretty extreme. Very few people obey those laws, the police do not enforce them, and everyone goes on with their lives. The problem with copyright is that the people don't want it, and corporations do. Corporations have money and influence to try to get the laws enforced (and passed in the first place). This will simply be a matter of whether we will have crime and corruption because there is an unpopular law being enforced, or whether the law will be repealed, ignored, or just disobeyed.
the pre-conditions for communism to arise are not met. there is not a surplus of necessities. we simply can not feed/cloth/house everyone. scarcity still exists, and as such, communism is an inefficient economic system.
I'm not sure that this is a given. Much of the scarcity in the U.S. is artificial. We pay farmers not to grow crops. Much of can also be attributed to inefficient distribution of resources. 20% of the wealth is in the hands of 1% of the populace. If the world were to devote it's resources to feeding, clothing, housing, and educating every man woman and child I have little doubt that there would sufficient resources for the task.
This is, however, very unlikely to happen. Individuals covet power over others, and personal benefits over helping others and fairness. I think it is important to note that a balance of capitalism and socialism is probably the ideal productive environment. The difference between the communist and capitalism models is basically the difference between competition and collaboration. Competition drives people to prove themselves, but collaboration allows the sharing of resources and brain-power. The trick is finding the right balance of the two for any given goal.
My personal guess is that collaboration to provide the basics for survival and collaboration within small groups that compete with each other for more scarce resources is probably the most harmonious yet still productive combination. It may be, however, that collaboration on the scale of communities, or even countries is more manageable, or efficient for larger projects. Pretty much anyone who lectures me about the virtues of either capitalism or communism over the other strikes me as the kind of polarized thinker that would assert that either competition or collaboration is always the best. Extremists always get a little blinded by their convictions if for no reason other than to defend their egos.
f you disobey a law because you don't like it... well, you've knowingly violated the social contract, and earned the penalty.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the history of civil disobedience in the U.S.? Laws are not social contracts. I never agreed to any of them, voted for any of them, signed any papers, etc. A contract is an agreement between two parties. Your comments were probably stated more or less verbatim with regard to segregation, suffrage, slave ownership, and prohibition. The people have very little to do with the laws, and no one even knows what the laws are. There are a few commonly known laws, but most people just live their lives obeying or breaking the laws and are left alone. If the government tries to enforce a law that a significant portion of the population does not agree with either the law is overturned by popular demand, or a significant portion of the populace is put in jail (see the war on drugs). If the second occurs you end up with rampant secondary crime, organized crime, and more government corruption.
In any case, I have no ethical responsibility to obey any law. Just because a bunch of people decide they are in charge, and write a law does not mean I am magically bound to obey it. I am only bound to obey agreements into which I entered willingly, with good faith, and in which the other party has upheld their end of the bargain.
it is a better deal to pay $99 to upgrade or $199 for new install every 4 years or so (Windows) vs a year and a half (OS X) for $129.
Why are you upgrading? I mean if each upgrade is about equal, and OSX upgrades 3 times faster, then OS X is pulling away as the better OS constantly. You seem to act as if upgrades are some sort of a necessary evil. Damn I have to pay money and get a better OS. You don't you know. The old OS will work fine. If you want to buy every other one, that works too. I mean maybe MS will screw you and stop giving you security fixes for old versions, but Apple has been rolling out security fixes for all their old versions. You only have to pay for new features, not bug fixes.
Windows do tend to change a lot of things and those are free
They do? like what? SP2 was the most radical update in any service pack ever, as far as I can recall. It changed some default settings and fixed bugs. What new features were in any service packs?
Your arguments thus far boil down to "Apple gets things done faster, so I have to pay them sooner " which is true if you actually buy all upgrades, but you also get a better product. If you want to spend money at the same rate as you would to upgrade Windows you can. You just have to wait longer between upgrading and get this, you still get a better product.
The term you are looking for is "linguistic negativity index." In addition to meaning, many words are categorized by linguists as having a particular negativity index for a given culture. For example 'shit' and 'feces' have the same meaning, but 'shit' provokes a greater negative reaction in the U.S. Communist has a much higher negativity index than socialist which has a higher negativity index than sharer. The negativity index is strongly linked to the history of its use. Most people heard a lot of negative propaganda about communists, and negative tones used when speaking the word so in our culture it has taken on a very high negativity index rating.
It is the time between releases that is called into question, not the difference in version numbers.
That is hilarious. The difference between two products is the time between their availability, not the qualitative differences between the products? So you can release the same thing every two years and it is OK to charge for it, but if you release radical new features every 6 months, they should be free. I think someone is smoking something.
The law is wrong. It is as wrong as not letting women and blacks vote. It is as wrong as imprisoning people whose ancestors are from a country you are at war with. I will not obey it. If you don't like it, tough shit.
We are in a time period of blaming everyone else for our problems. Personally, I spent the time protecting myself and my car from issues. Yeah, they could probably still crash into me but I have at least closed most of the holes in the armor plate that I know of. If you are on the expressway without a armor plate/defensive weapons and using a car without a cow catcher and driving the roads without crash protection and Killer robot car detection I really don't feel sorry for you.
We've all heard the cars and computers analogy plenty of times by now. The fact is a sixteen year old kid in siberia can destroy and exploit thousands of computers with a worm that took him 4 hours to modify. And it happens all the time. And computer dealers are still selling insecure systems, that require tons of add-ons to protect them from exterior threats and their own unreliability. When I buy a car I don't have to buy armor plate, and a backup gas tank, and a cow catcher, and a 20mm cannon, and hire private security forces in order to drive to the grocery store. The average consumer does not expect to have to get a firewall, a virus scanner, a new browser, an adware scanner, a popup blocker, and a backup raid in order to buy a book from Amazon. The typical consumer computer is a piece of junk and every consumer should be able to get their money back after they were sold a shoddy, poorly planned, fragile piece of expensive junk.
Perosnally I place a lot of the blame squarely with MS. If they had not stifled and destroyed innovation in the industry, and removed all competition, people would not have to put up with this crap. They could buy from someone else. Unfortunately, that is not a reality in today's market. Maybe consumers will get sick of it, and get the DOJ to actually do something some day. Or maybe MS will become so bloated smaller companies will be able to break their monopoly. In the mean time, buy a Mac, buy a Walmart Linux box, buy anything without Windows.
But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind
If by "the best intellectual property system" you mean we ignore intellectual property rights of those outside our country while we are developing, have a huge spurt of growth during which we ignore intellectual property within the U.S. and then big companies form around pools of capital, and stabilize the status quo by getting the government to enforce patents, well then you are a wacko. Because that is pretty much what the U.S. did, and it is pretty much what every other country did, or is doing.
If you against the artist's wishes, then it's stealing.
No it is copyright infringement. To be stealing you have to actually take away something from another person.
Don't be so sure that the artists want to free up their music
I have no doubt that many artists, especially in the commercialized American music scene, want nothing more than to be paid as much money as possible. Be that as it may, fighting DRM is not a matter of freeing music. It is a matter of not paying for the same music again and again, and being able to do what you want with music again and again. I have no doubt that Chevy would like to be paid every time to take your car to a new country. I have no doubt that they would like to be paid every five years for cars rather than once. If all the car makers got together and agreed to implement hardware that made this happen, I would argue that their illegal monopoly was infringing upon my rights, just as fervently.
Big companies have paid our politicians to pass laws that benefit them at the expense of the people. They had increased the length of copyright to a ridiculous degree, and have stolen a huge portion of our musical, literary, and video history and culture and hidden it away where no one can ever see it. They have not upheld their end of the bargain that was supposed to be copyright. This is the same as if a law was passed that said everyone would stop buying foods from overseas under the condition that American companies would ramp up supplies and make American food just as cheap, plentiful, and varied in 10 years time. So we do that, and the American food producers get rich, and pay politicians off, and get a law passed that says they actually have 20 years, and they get more rich, so they pass a law that says it will be 100 years, ad infinum. We make a sacrifice, they make promises which they never make good on, get rich, and screw us. At this point, I would not object to ripping of the media companies any way. I don't think it is morally wrong to hack their bank accounts and take some of the money back. I have certainly don't have any problem with people who have decided they no longer agree to the deal (since they did not hold up their end) and are no longer willing to stop copying whatever they want. Can't you see what has been taken from you? How many artists have had their life's work stolen away by the greed of a few. How many great works of art are gone forever? Screw the RIAA, MPAA, and the publishing industry. Let them rot.
I guess you think AutoCAD and ArcGIS are "silly apps."
I believe the author was imply that the apps are silly because they tie you to windows, which is a pretty horrible fate for some of us. Honestly, I use both platforms, and I use the mac when given the option because it does run better. Providing support for an application across a variety of platforms is a significant feature. I know some places where Windows is completely verboten for security reasons, and some of these places would probably be using ArcGIS with their satellite photography. Luckily there are good alternatives for the Mac to ArcGIS, (although not for AutoCAD that I know of).
To summarize, yes, both of those apps are silly for only running on Windows.
I bought a 12 inch Powerbook last May. I wouldn't recommend one to my worst enemy.
I picked mine up used. I use it every day at work, and at home, and carry it back and forth. It has one ding in the front that was there when I got it, but has not had any hardware problems at all. It gets banged around plenty too. I've dropped it three or four times already because my case strap kept coming loose.
Even though I have not had any problems, I'm planning on going with the applecare extension when I've had it for a year old (coming up soon). The plan is not too expensive considering how much parts cost for them. I highly recommend it to anyone who buys a powerbook.
hey don't exactly have a blazing processor, and they will likely act sluggish if the touted features of Tiger are actually as power/graphics hungry as the ZDNet article kinda mentions
I suspect it will run Tiger better than it does Panther. Every OS X release since the beta has run faster, not slower. In one case new features were added that required a minimum amount of video RAM to be functional. The system still runs better than it did with the old version, just some of the pretty graphics are toned down. Basically what I am trying to say is, yes it will almost certainly run tiger, yes tiger will run better than panther, and maybe you will be able to run all of the new features.
Stop complicating the black and white nature of wrong and right.
Right and wrong is a wholly subjective judgment. Trying to establish iron clad rules as to what is right and what is wrong was debunked thousands of years ago when the first person asked if stealing bread from the wealthy to feed their starving children was wrong. Anyone who is actually interested in either understanding a problem or working to correct it, needs to understand the causes of a problem. Claiming that people chose to do something because they are evil, is a stupid oversimplification.
I never at any point claimed that people are not responsible for their own actions, nor did I claim that society as a whole is responsible for anything (a ridiculous concept). What I said was that if we want to stop violence, the first step is trying to figure out why people behave violently. If you were miseducated, taught a different value system from birth, treated as worthless by a large number of authority figures, treated unfairly by those authority figures, and basically given no real opportunity to better yourself, then I dare say you would be a very different person. People are shaped by their environment.
but I can't see how it could be argued that the same number of criminals will have guns if they are legal as if they are illegal.
That is not what I said. I said that it would not significantly alter the availability, and that it would not decrease the amount of violent crime committed with guns. You see when criminals are not afraid that someone will be shooting back, they tend to scale up their operations. Numbers on this can easily be referenced in locations like Britain and Australia, whose own gun bans have resulted in large increases in both gun violence and other types of violence.
A citizen in the city has no reason to own a gun. The power to pull a trigger and end a life should not be in the hands of anyone but trained law enforcement or military.
Please take responsibility for yourself. The police are not here to coddle or protect you. They are here to arrest those who break the laws. Ask some police officers how they feel about you delegating your personal safety to them. You seem to think that you (and everyone else who is not a policeman or military) is too irresponsible to have power or rights. Lets hand it over to someone else. Well the police don't want it. The politicians do. If you think giving more power to them is going to help, then you should have your responsibility shirking little head examined.
If you feel that you are not responsible enough to own a gun, fine don't. But don't expect the police to protect you, and don't try to take away everyone else's rights. The government has enough power, too much most likely. Your trust in the government, rather than the people it is supposed to represent is foolishness itself.
Even with fully automatic weapons do you think it would be possible to stop our military? Minor nuisance at best. Ask some Iraqi insurgents if that's been sufficient for them.
The Iraqi people fighting our occupation are doing pretty well considering the technology gap. But there are many big differences between the U.S. army in Iraq and the U.S. army in the U.S. First, a good portion of the military would side with a rebellion that included any significant portion of U.S. citizens. Second, U.S. citizens have better education, and weaponry than the Iraqi. Third, If the government of the U.S. was oppressing the people of the U.S. a significant number of us could get to members of that government (they live here too not thousands of miles away across an ocean).
Yes, I think personal firearms could make a big difference.
Slashdot Mirror
If your home has "low security" as a default option such as an unlocked window or a door that does not have adaquate protection, people can break into them and steal all of your nice stuff.
The problem is Active X. I mean what if every home in America was made by a company who was promoting their fancy new locks that always turn easily and are quick to install. Now imagine those locks have 2 settings, let anyone in, or don't let anyone in. As a home owner you can either choose to let people in the door, or not, but can't give out keys to select people, or restrict entry to a certain level. That is a problem.
Active X is a POS. It can run programs on your hard drive, or not. You can grant a site complete access to your computer, or not. How about some simple granularity? How about a sandbox? I mean Java is way, way, way ahead here.
Microsoft makes it pretty clear that arbitrary code can be ran from a web page in the security dialog.
What is lacking is sandboxing. Here is a typical example. I go to a site to use a service. It has an active X control. I need to use the control, but don't fully trust them. My options are A) find another service, or B) run it and hope for the best. That is unacceptable. There needs to be an option C) run it in a sandbox, and don't let it read my files, or overwrite anything. I mean this is not brain surgery here. Java can do it, and Sun does not have the OS code.
Apple should do a Safari (Darwin, Cups, GCC...) here and admit that they can't produce a first rate office suite by themselves.
I strongly disagree. For quite some time I hoped that Apple would pick up the Mozilla source and run with it. Instead they picked up the Konquerer source and ran with it. It was probably a good engineering decision on their part and it resulted in corporate sponsorship for a second open source rendering engine. This helps open standards and keeps web developers from writing gecko specific code to go with their IE specific code.
I've used open office, and a huge number of other word processors, and layout programs. There is huge room for improvement over either OpenOffice or Word. I'd like to see some of the best features of Word, OpenOffice, Indesign, and Framemaker all put together with some top notch usability. I don't think Pages will be there in it's first iteration, and maybe never. But from what I have seeing it may be a better, and more flexible base than OpenOffice would have been. That is not to say that I don't think support for open formats is not important. They have a good start on compatibility but seem to be lacking support for OpenOffice, Latex, PNG, SVG, and a few others. Also, I hope their native format is XML based, like Keynote. Ideally, they will have a plug-in format so any developers can easily incorporate import/export filters to a given format.
Basically what I am saying is that while I appreciate OpenOffice, I'd much rather see a system designed right from the ground up, rather than another Word clone, regardless of the quality.
Looks like adding a photo to a page of text will be very easy in Pages, with the text adapting automatically.
This is a problem I would like to see solved well for once. Basically, I see lots of programs that allow you to add a graphic to text. Some let you position it on a page, and allow text to flow around, some place it with the text, so that it moves as text is added (potentially causing layout problems). What would be ideal is to be able place a graphic and associate text with that graphic. So I'd like to insert a diagram, and attach a caption, and then associate both with a few paragraphs of text. I don't care where it goes, so long as it is near that text, and the layout looks good. This feature would make Indesign, Quark, Framemaker, and Word designers all eat their hats.
XML can cause more problems than it solves...I am a firm believer in using the right tool for the job, XML just isn't it in this instance.
Umm, lets see keynote is text, graphics, and other misc data in presentation format. That sounds pretty much exactly what XML was designed for. Pages is more of the same, with some absolute positioning for the layout. It is still a very good fit. The advantage of XML is that if someone wants to import it, or export to it, or do anything with it, there are piles of code in every language imaginable already written and freely available to parse, store, read, write, search, collate, transform, replace, etc. This is time tested, well proven code, with validation. Using something else just makes things hard on everyone else, slows down compatibility, and annoys everyone else who has moved to XML, like OpenOffice, Word, KOffice, etc.
Incidentally, won't you come across problems with sending folders, they don't seem as portable as an individual file.
I take it you are not a mac user. The native application format (.app) is just a folder with all the resources and compiled binaries contained therein. It has been the standard since OSX was introduced and I have not heard of any problems with moving or storing them. The added bonus is if a user wants to grab some graphics or sounds from an application, they can just browse the *.app/Contents/Resources/ folder, rather than trying to parse some consolidated binary. It also makes it easy to include multiple binaries in an application for different platforms, or hardware. I imagine this will also make it possible to easily include older format versions for backwards compatibility, if the designers want to include such a feature in either Pages or Keynote. Basically, it is a very good idea.
The Mac needs a good, stable, simple to use GUI FTP client. I don't want to use a CLI tool for FTP
What percentage of people know what FTP is and care? Well this is Slashdot so probably about 85%. What percentage know what FTP is, care, and don't just use the CLI for FTP? I'd say maybe 5%. I'm sure there are a few people who want a GUI FTP client, and are not satisfied with the 50 or so programs that appeared when I put 'osx' and 'ftp' into google. Most people, however, do not use FTP anymore. My most common file transfer mechanisms are, throw up a web page with a download for a person, send files via ichat's transfer mechanism, remotely mount a volume, and ssh then scp. I haven't used FTP in quite a while. I think you are a rare exception.
anyone who thinks Safari is not the best browser doesn't use it
I use Safari. I'm using it right now. But it is certainly not the best for everyone. Mozilla has some very nice security features, that are not available in Safari. Omniweb has some very nice features that I have not seen in any other browsers. If you are doing web development it's edit in place features are a huge timesaver. Safari is very good, and is certainly not slacking, but it is on par with several other browsers, not way ahead of the pack.
No, this is wrong. I expect the operating system to support the hardware I paid for to the max, not artificially keep me from getting the most of my property. This really, really pisses me off when I think about it: No other operating system creator around, not Microsoft and certainly not Linux or FreeBSD, would even dream about writing something that limits your graphics card purely for marketing reasons.
You seem to be very poorly informed. Do a little research. You will find a surprising number of hardware devices that are identical to other offerings from that vendor, aside from software configuration. I work at a high end security solutions company. We have boxes that we ship with the same hardware, the same software, but a different configuration. The price difference is up to $40K. This is by no means uncommon. The price of a product is not the cost of production. It is what the market will bear. In many cases this means you have multiple price points that you need to sell to, and the only differentiation is features. If you are pissed about ibooks, well it's time you started looking at everything else you buy starting with video cards.
Civil disobedience isn't just ignoring a law, though. It's an attempt to force that law to change.
Civil disobedience is just that, not obeying a law. In any case, no one obeys the laws. Most people obey a small subset of the laws, and have no idea what 99% of the laws are. This includes police officers who are supposed to be enforcing the laws and lawyers who are responsible for both prosecution and defense. Laws themselves are not too relevant. Enforced laws are a different matter. The problem is that certain laws are enforced, in some cases and not others, and the enforcement is determined by law enforcement, and those who can influence either law enforcement or the courts through money or influence.
people involved in civil disobedience generally take the penalty for their actions without bitching
Umm, if that were the case you would never have heard of civil disobedience. A large part of famous civil disobedience cases was making a stink, being heard, and complaining about the laws, and their unfairness.
People have little to do with laws, and laws are most irrelevant to people. Occasionally the government tries to enforce an unpopular law and, as I mentioned earlier, the result is either a substantial portion of the people are imprisoned and crime and corruption both increase dramatically, or the law is no longer enforced and people do whatever it is that they want to do. Whether the law is repealed or not, makes little difference. In my state it is illegal for women to swear and to have sex before you are married. I'd say the civil disobedience in those cases is pretty extreme. Very few people obey those laws, the police do not enforce them, and everyone goes on with their lives. The problem with copyright is that the people don't want it, and corporations do. Corporations have money and influence to try to get the laws enforced (and passed in the first place). This will simply be a matter of whether we will have crime and corruption because there is an unpopular law being enforced, or whether the law will be repealed, ignored, or just disobeyed.
the pre-conditions for communism to arise are not met. there is not a surplus of necessities. we simply can not feed/cloth/house everyone. scarcity still exists, and as such, communism is an inefficient economic system.
I'm not sure that this is a given. Much of the scarcity in the U.S. is artificial. We pay farmers not to grow crops. Much of can also be attributed to inefficient distribution of resources. 20% of the wealth is in the hands of 1% of the populace. If the world were to devote it's resources to feeding, clothing, housing, and educating every man woman and child I have little doubt that there would sufficient resources for the task.
This is, however, very unlikely to happen. Individuals covet power over others, and personal benefits over helping others and fairness. I think it is important to note that a balance of capitalism and socialism is probably the ideal productive environment. The difference between the communist and capitalism models is basically the difference between competition and collaboration. Competition drives people to prove themselves, but collaboration allows the sharing of resources and brain-power. The trick is finding the right balance of the two for any given goal.
My personal guess is that collaboration to provide the basics for survival and collaboration within small groups that compete with each other for more scarce resources is probably the most harmonious yet still productive combination. It may be, however, that collaboration on the scale of communities, or even countries is more manageable, or efficient for larger projects. Pretty much anyone who lectures me about the virtues of either capitalism or communism over the other strikes me as the kind of polarized thinker that would assert that either competition or collaboration is always the best. Extremists always get a little blinded by their convictions if for no reason other than to defend their egos.
f you disobey a law because you don't like it... well, you've knowingly violated the social contract, and earned the penalty.
Perhaps you are unfamiliar with the history of civil disobedience in the U.S.? Laws are not social contracts. I never agreed to any of them, voted for any of them, signed any papers, etc. A contract is an agreement between two parties. Your comments were probably stated more or less verbatim with regard to segregation, suffrage, slave ownership, and prohibition. The people have very little to do with the laws, and no one even knows what the laws are. There are a few commonly known laws, but most people just live their lives obeying or breaking the laws and are left alone. If the government tries to enforce a law that a significant portion of the population does not agree with either the law is overturned by popular demand, or a significant portion of the populace is put in jail (see the war on drugs). If the second occurs you end up with rampant secondary crime, organized crime, and more government corruption.
In any case, I have no ethical responsibility to obey any law. Just because a bunch of people decide they are in charge, and write a law does not mean I am magically bound to obey it. I am only bound to obey agreements into which I entered willingly, with good faith, and in which the other party has upheld their end of the bargain.
it is a better deal to pay $99 to upgrade or $199 for new install every 4 years or so (Windows) vs a year and a half (OS X) for $129.
Why are you upgrading? I mean if each upgrade is about equal, and OSX upgrades 3 times faster, then OS X is pulling away as the better OS constantly. You seem to act as if upgrades are some sort of a necessary evil. Damn I have to pay money and get a better OS. You don't you know. The old OS will work fine. If you want to buy every other one, that works too. I mean maybe MS will screw you and stop giving you security fixes for old versions, but Apple has been rolling out security fixes for all their old versions. You only have to pay for new features, not bug fixes.
Windows do tend to change a lot of things and those are free
They do? like what? SP2 was the most radical update in any service pack ever, as far as I can recall. It changed some default settings and fixed bugs. What new features were in any service packs?
Your arguments thus far boil down to "Apple gets things done faster, so I have to pay them sooner " which is true if you actually buy all upgrades, but you also get a better product. If you want to spend money at the same rate as you would to upgrade Windows you can. You just have to wait longer between upgrading and get this, you still get a better product.
Communist is a trigger word.
The term you are looking for is "linguistic negativity index." In addition to meaning, many words are categorized by linguists as having a particular negativity index for a given culture. For example 'shit' and 'feces' have the same meaning, but 'shit' provokes a greater negative reaction in the U.S. Communist has a much higher negativity index than socialist which has a higher negativity index than sharer. The negativity index is strongly linked to the history of its use. Most people heard a lot of negative propaganda about communists, and negative tones used when speaking the word so in our culture it has taken on a very high negativity index rating.
It is the time between releases that is called into question, not the difference in version numbers.
That is hilarious. The difference between two products is the time between their availability, not the qualitative differences between the products? So you can release the same thing every two years and it is OK to charge for it, but if you release radical new features every 6 months, they should be free. I think someone is smoking something.
That's the law, if you don't like it, tough shit.
The law is wrong. It is as wrong as not letting women and blacks vote. It is as wrong as imprisoning people whose ancestors are from a country you are at war with. I will not obey it. If you don't like it, tough shit.
Ahh, my bad. In future consider using quotation marks for quotations.
We are in a time period of blaming everyone else for our problems. Personally, I spent the time protecting myself and my car from issues. Yeah, they could probably still crash into me but I have at least closed most of the holes in the armor plate that I know of. If you are on the expressway without a armor plate/defensive weapons and using a car without a cow catcher and driving the roads without crash protection and Killer robot car detection I really don't feel sorry for you.
We've all heard the cars and computers analogy plenty of times by now. The fact is a sixteen year old kid in siberia can destroy and exploit thousands of computers with a worm that took him 4 hours to modify. And it happens all the time. And computer dealers are still selling insecure systems, that require tons of add-ons to protect them from exterior threats and their own unreliability. When I buy a car I don't have to buy armor plate, and a backup gas tank, and a cow catcher, and a 20mm cannon, and hire private security forces in order to drive to the grocery store. The average consumer does not expect to have to get a firewall, a virus scanner, a new browser, an adware scanner, a popup blocker, and a backup raid in order to buy a book from Amazon. The typical consumer computer is a piece of junk and every consumer should be able to get their money back after they were sold a shoddy, poorly planned, fragile piece of expensive junk.
Perosnally I place a lot of the blame squarely with MS. If they had not stifled and destroyed innovation in the industry, and removed all competition, people would not have to put up with this crap. They could buy from someone else. Unfortunately, that is not a reality in today's market. Maybe consumers will get sick of it, and get the DOJ to actually do something some day. Or maybe MS will become so bloated smaller companies will be able to break their monopoly. In the mean time, buy a Mac, buy a Walmart Linux box, buy anything without Windows.
But the idea that the United States has led in creating companies, creating jobs, because we've had the best intellectual-property system--there's no doubt about that in my mind
If by "the best intellectual property system" you mean we ignore intellectual property rights of those outside our country while we are developing, have a huge spurt of growth during which we ignore intellectual property within the U.S. and then big companies form around pools of capital, and stabilize the status quo by getting the government to enforce patents, well then you are a wacko. Because that is pretty much what the U.S. did, and it is pretty much what every other country did, or is doing.
If you against the artist's wishes, then it's stealing.
No it is copyright infringement. To be stealing you have to actually take away something from another person.
Don't be so sure that the artists want to free up their music
I have no doubt that many artists, especially in the commercialized American music scene, want nothing more than to be paid as much money as possible. Be that as it may, fighting DRM is not a matter of freeing music. It is a matter of not paying for the same music again and again, and being able to do what you want with music again and again. I have no doubt that Chevy would like to be paid every time to take your car to a new country. I have no doubt that they would like to be paid every five years for cars rather than once. If all the car makers got together and agreed to implement hardware that made this happen, I would argue that their illegal monopoly was infringing upon my rights, just as fervently.
Big companies have paid our politicians to pass laws that benefit them at the expense of the people. They had increased the length of copyright to a ridiculous degree, and have stolen a huge portion of our musical, literary, and video history and culture and hidden it away where no one can ever see it. They have not upheld their end of the bargain that was supposed to be copyright. This is the same as if a law was passed that said everyone would stop buying foods from overseas under the condition that American companies would ramp up supplies and make American food just as cheap, plentiful, and varied in 10 years time. So we do that, and the American food producers get rich, and pay politicians off, and get a law passed that says they actually have 20 years, and they get more rich, so they pass a law that says it will be 100 years, ad infinum. We make a sacrifice, they make promises which they never make good on, get rich, and screw us. At this point, I would not object to ripping of the media companies any way. I don't think it is morally wrong to hack their bank accounts and take some of the money back. I have certainly don't have any problem with people who have decided they no longer agree to the deal (since they did not hold up their end) and are no longer willing to stop copying whatever they want. Can't you see what has been taken from you? How many artists have had their life's work stolen away by the greed of a few. How many great works of art are gone forever? Screw the RIAA, MPAA, and the publishing industry. Let them rot.
I guess you think AutoCAD and ArcGIS are "silly apps."
I believe the author was imply that the apps are silly because they tie you to windows, which is a pretty horrible fate for some of us. Honestly, I use both platforms, and I use the mac when given the option because it does run better. Providing support for an application across a variety of platforms is a significant feature. I know some places where Windows is completely verboten for security reasons, and some of these places would probably be using ArcGIS with their satellite photography. Luckily there are good alternatives for the Mac to ArcGIS, (although not for AutoCAD that I know of).
To summarize, yes, both of those apps are silly for only running on Windows.
I bought a 12 inch Powerbook last May. I wouldn't recommend one to my worst enemy.
I picked mine up used. I use it every day at work, and at home, and carry it back and forth. It has one ding in the front that was there when I got it, but has not had any hardware problems at all. It gets banged around plenty too. I've dropped it three or four times already because my case strap kept coming loose.
Even though I have not had any problems, I'm planning on going with the applecare extension when I've had it for a year old (coming up soon). The plan is not too expensive considering how much parts cost for them. I highly recommend it to anyone who buys a powerbook.
hey don't exactly have a blazing processor, and they will likely act sluggish if the touted features of Tiger are actually as power/graphics hungry as the ZDNet article kinda mentions
I suspect it will run Tiger better than it does Panther. Every OS X release since the beta has run faster, not slower. In one case new features were added that required a minimum amount of video RAM to be functional. The system still runs better than it did with the old version, just some of the pretty graphics are toned down. Basically what I am trying to say is, yes it will almost certainly run tiger, yes tiger will run better than panther, and maybe you will be able to run all of the new features.
Stop complicating the black and white nature of wrong and right.
Right and wrong is a wholly subjective judgment. Trying to establish iron clad rules as to what is right and what is wrong was debunked thousands of years ago when the first person asked if stealing bread from the wealthy to feed their starving children was wrong. Anyone who is actually interested in either understanding a problem or working to correct it, needs to understand the causes of a problem. Claiming that people chose to do something because they are evil, is a stupid oversimplification.
I never at any point claimed that people are not responsible for their own actions, nor did I claim that society as a whole is responsible for anything (a ridiculous concept). What I said was that if we want to stop violence, the first step is trying to figure out why people behave violently. If you were miseducated, taught a different value system from birth, treated as worthless by a large number of authority figures, treated unfairly by those authority figures, and basically given no real opportunity to better yourself, then I dare say you would be a very different person. People are shaped by their environment.
Stop oversimplifying a complex problem.
but I can't see how it could be argued that the same number of criminals will have guns if they are legal as if they are illegal.
That is not what I said. I said that it would not significantly alter the availability, and that it would not decrease the amount of violent crime committed with guns. You see when criminals are not afraid that someone will be shooting back, they tend to scale up their operations. Numbers on this can easily be referenced in locations like Britain and Australia, whose own gun bans have resulted in large increases in both gun violence and other types of violence.
A citizen in the city has no reason to own a gun. The power to pull a trigger and end a life should not be in the hands of anyone but trained law enforcement or military.
Please take responsibility for yourself. The police are not here to coddle or protect you. They are here to arrest those who break the laws. Ask some police officers how they feel about you delegating your personal safety to them. You seem to think that you (and everyone else who is not a policeman or military) is too irresponsible to have power or rights. Lets hand it over to someone else. Well the police don't want it. The politicians do. If you think giving more power to them is going to help, then you should have your responsibility shirking little head examined.
If you feel that you are not responsible enough to own a gun, fine don't. But don't expect the police to protect you, and don't try to take away everyone else's rights. The government has enough power, too much most likely. Your trust in the government, rather than the people it is supposed to represent is foolishness itself.
Even with fully automatic weapons do you think it would be possible to stop our military? Minor nuisance at best. Ask some Iraqi insurgents if that's been sufficient for them.
The Iraqi people fighting our occupation are doing pretty well considering the technology gap. But there are many big differences between the U.S. army in Iraq and the U.S. army in the U.S. First, a good portion of the military would side with a rebellion that included any significant portion of U.S. citizens. Second, U.S. citizens have better education, and weaponry than the Iraqi. Third, If the government of the U.S. was oppressing the people of the U.S. a significant number of us could get to members of that government (they live here too not thousands of miles away across an ocean).
Yes, I think personal firearms could make a big difference.