"While I agree with the gist of your post, I have to mention that a nuclear deterrent is a cost-effective way of ensuring that you don't get invaded."
Who is going to invade Britain? The last successful invasion was in 1066, IIRC.
Who is going to attack Britain? It's traditional enemies are now politically tied to it through the European Union, and the Russians just aren't interested any more (despite Putin's posturing). Anyone else is too far away, and has nothing to gain by attacking Britain.
It's standard practice when you ask for public money to be spent on the military that you identify likely threats, and base your spending requests on the minimum needed to counter them. In British politics the case simply hasn't been made for Trident.
The current system in Britain seems to be to say "things might change and we may need the security later" without identifying the likelihood of changes. That is basing your defence spending on paranoia, not evidence (it's the old, flawed Precautionary Principle again). It's basically the same as saying "we have to spend a fortune on the military because no-one knows whether aliens might invade the earth at some point in the future". That's just special interests asking for a blank cheque.
It makes no sense for Canada to have a military that is focused on anything other than UN peacekeeping. Now that the cold war is over, Canada has no enemies. What on earth do you need a huge military for if you have no enemies? Other than the United States (which could probably buy Canada if it really wanted to), who is in a position to invade Canada?
Who has reason to strike Canada when Canadians will pretty much give you anything if you ask nicely and say you like hockey.
The answer is no-one. Canada has no need for a cold war level military.
"I like your idea about preventing collusion but have no idea how to implement it."
Neither do I, other than introducing a paid "judiciary" of impartial non editors who periodically banned the worst offenders (if you use the site much, you probably know the people I am talkin about). But I can't see Wikipedians accepting that.
If there was a general, simple answer to the problem, the libertarians could have their society tomorrow.
It's not that bad. I am an academic, and I have found a few things regarding my field in Wikipedia that I think are incorrect. But then again, I have found inaccuracies that are just as bad in Britannica, so I guess it is just what happens in non specialist encyclopaedias.
Apart from the tendency of articles to get messy, Wikipedia only suffers from organized or semi-organized groups gaming the open system. The glaring examples of this are most of the Wikipedia articles to do with Israel and Palestine. The hotly contested nature of the subject has led to some really bad behaviour on the part of editors and admins and the information in them tends to be ridiculous and POV.
If Wikipedia is to really work, then it needs to have some system for preventing collusion. It works best when individuals edit alone, and other individuals edit those edits alone. Once you have gangs trying to force a POV on an article, the open nature of the format becomes a hindrance to accuracy.
I guess that, if the article is correct, that it's good news for the anarchist revolutionaries among us. One of the major problems for anarchist revolutionaries is working out just who is a member of the bourgeoisie that you will have to imprison, hang, make work as janitors, etc. when the revolution comes, and who the proletarians are who will own everything. It would be very convenient if they just listed themselves on the internet.
"War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world."
I don't know what model it is and I don't have the manual to hand. I live in Korea, and this is a phone with DMB and basically every widget known to Korean cell phone users (if you've been here you'll know that means a lot). Koreans tend to be pretty contemptuous when they talk about cell phones in the US and Canada, and with good reason.
Really? I watched the original demo back in January, and after that I knew how to use it. I'd never held one in my hand, but if you gave me an iPhone I bet I could get all the stuff to work in a couple of minutes without using a manual.
Contrast that with my Samsung WinMobile smartphone. The manual for that is about half an inch thick (I still can't remember how to do some of the things on it). The software that is bundled has inconsistent interfaces. Nothing seems to work in a predictable way on it and the touchscreen is tiny, requires a crap stylus, has buttons all over it, and looks like ass. And, although it was a free gift from my employer, it costs more than the iPhone.
The iPhone is the original Macintosh of smartphones. The only difference is that you don't have to keep swapping disks out of it, but most people would think that a good thing.
The iPhone is going to be a massive success because a lot of people would like the functionality of a smartphone, but have been put off by the poor usability of previous efforts.
I'm all for terrorists blowing up American women and children in shopping malls, butt fucking US POWs and torturing innocent civilians... if that's in my nation's interests......see how that rationale works...power worshiping pig.
Don't for a minute believe that the Canadian government necessarily knows what is going on. Chances are that they don't, even though these things are taking place in their own country.
20 years ago I would have thought such claims to be paranoid conspiracies. I remember rumours about the existence of ECHELON, and strenuous denials of its existence from my own government (the government of New Zealand) and other involved governments. Then, five or six years ago, the Australians admitted it existed, and that is now an established fact.
So, shouldn't members of the New Zealand governments of the 1970s-80s be held responsible for misleading the public? You would think so, since they built an ECHELON station at Waihopai in New Zealand (I remember lefties at the time correctly identifying its purpose, and being mocked for their troubles).
In fact, the New Zealand government of the time was blameless, because THEY didn't even know. That's right. The New Zealand government allowed a satellite tracking station to be built in our country, and had no idea that it was part of ECHELON. David Lange, the Prime Minister at the time later expressed his disgust when the truth came out (in a book he wrote the forward to). You can read it here
I don't believe you can have real oversight of such a system.
Instead, the public have to rely on whistle blowers and leakers, who may or may not have a personal agenda.
The more a government tends to secrecy, the more tyrannical it becomes. Secrets being kept for their own sake, and so on. The usual excuse is that we need to spy on other governments because they are spying on us. But as we know from the few tidbits we have been thrown, it's just as likely that the government is spying on its own citizens. Left wing groups have been saying this for years, and no-one believed them, but they were right. The current government is so disdainful of public opinion that it doesn't even bother to deny it.
I hate that echelon crap. It's despicable that those sacks of shit are monitoring my international phone calls.
It wouldn't be so bad if a large proportion of Americans weren't authoritarians who think it is OK for the government to spy on you, because nothing will happen if you aren't doing anything wrong.
"There is even a sex toy you can plug into the iPhone dock connector and it vibrates to the beat of the music and gives you a very tactile ring when calls come in."
Oh God. Really?
That's going to make for some interesting phone calls.
Ring ring... ring ring... "Hellllloooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhh".
Yes, but what would have happened if online sales of music were dominated by WMA. Microsoft would effectively control the paid online distribution of music. Ask yourself how much that would suck. People disliked that Apple had to use a proprietary format to sell music online, but we now know that they didn't want to. I don't think I would say the same about Microsoft. If the format is not proprietary to them, then its not in the interest of Microsoft to promote.
Everyone knows that mp3 is OK, but the quality is not as good as AAC or WMA at similar bitrates. Would you rather have improved codecs in an open format like AAC or a format controlled by Microsoft? I'll take the open format thanks.
I'm starting to wonder if Jobs believes he can dethrone Microsoft. I don't mean that he thinks that Apple will replace Microsoft, but that Apple will force third party developers to open standards and free us from the tentacles of the Redmond beast. He's already done it with music. Now he seems to be trying internet browsers. What next?
This is going to happen. Apple killed WMA as a standard. Safari is going to kill IE as a standard.
How?
The iPhone and mobile browsing.
Mobile browsing has been the red headed step child of the internet. It sucks. The iPhone seems like it will remedy that, and no other company seems to be in a position to compete with it, or will be in a position to do so for some time. That means that Safari will likely become a standard for mobile browsing, as long as the iPhone emulates the iPod and becomes a massive hit. What we will then have is a market in which Microsoft cannot compete because the iPhone will not run IE, just as the iPod did not use WMA. The iPhone will do for mobile internet what the iPod did for digital music... or at least that is Apple's bet. The iPod didn't establish a closed standard for digital music (and won't once Steve realizes his dream of DRM free music). What the iPod did was killed Microsoft's attempt to force Microsoft software as the standard.
I predict that mobile browsing will become indispensable to ordinary people in a way that it isn't now (I never use the web on my Winmobile phone because it sucks). If it is indispensable, then site designers will have to code for it, and that means abandoning an IE only policy. Imagine the hate calls banks will get along the lines of "Hey mofos!!! I can't check my bank balance on my phone!!" THAT will be the effective end of IE as a standard.
Safari for Windows, is, as I said below, just an insurance policy to make sure that whatever works on the iPhone will also work on your desktop (in case Microsoft tries to make things difficult by making iPhone sites display funny).
Microsoft better hope for one of two things. Either (a) the iPhone is a flop; or (b) the iPhone is a success, but mobile browsing never really takes off. Would you want to bet against either one?
Mobile browsing has always sucked. The iPhone promises to change that. If the iPhone is anywhere near as popular as the iPod, then people will simply have to code their sites to be compatible with it. Why make your sites incompatible with the most popular mobile browser?
I think I understand Jobs' reasoning. It's all about Web 2.0 and compatibility between desktop and mobile browsing.
Let's say the iPhone is a huge hit in the way that the iPod is a huge hit. Let's say it revolutionizes mobile web browsing (I think people spend too much time looking at the interface, the phone apps and the iPod app - the "real" internet "in your pocket" is the big deal). The iPod being a hit meant that iTunes became a standard on desktop PCs.
So if the iPhone is a success, people will spend a lot of time browsing sites on it, and people will write Web 2.0 sites for it. Simply put, if the iPhone is a mega hit, Safari becomes the standard for mobile internet browsing, and IE mobile is finished (I have it. It sucks anyway). I think this will happen. Safari marketshare is going to shoot up as more people use their iPhones to access the web (this is why I think that devs whining about the lack of an iPhone SDK is dumb. Web 2.0 is the way to go).
But no-one is going to spend all their time browsing on their phone. People will want to use the same 2.0 sites on their desktop machines. Do you really think that Apple can trust Microsoft or the Firefox devs to make sure that IE and Firefox will be compatible with all the sites that are aimed at iPhone users?
Wouldn't it suck if you were using a great Web 2.0 interactive site on your iPhone and you got to your desk and discovered it didn't work properly with your desktop browser?
Wouldn't it suck if it was hard to sync your bookmarks between your phone and your desktop browsers?
By allowing Safari for Windows, Apple is basically saying: "All you other guys better support Safari, because it will rule mobile browsing. If you think that you can create trouble for the iPhone by making it hard for sites to be compatible with both the iPhone and Windows desktop browsing, then we're going to stop that by telling everyone that if their favourite sites work on their phone, but not their desktop, that they can download a browser that will make it work on the desktop. And added to that, we are going to make it super easy to sync bookmarks between Safari on the desktop and Safari on the phone. People will want a seamless experience between their mobile browsing and their browsing on traditional computers. Ignore this at your peril."
If Apple comes to rule mobile browsing, then it will be in a powerful position to determine web standards. Safari is insurance against others who might rock the boat.
A lot of Windows users downloaded iTunes, even though they didn't have an iPod. A lot of people just like it (and of course many people hate it). The same will probably be true of Safari.
There are of course many things to fix, but it is a beta. I'm guessing there will be a few people who want a simple, easy to use browser without endless sets of extensions and widgets. I was that person years ago when a simple browser called "Phoenix" was released, and that's why I used it. Now Firefox is not the simple browser it used to be.
Of course/. posters and other tech people who love complicated software with millions of customization options aren't going to like it. But for many people less is more.
FTR I now use Omniweb, which was well worth the small registration fee.
The answer to your first question is because you already do pay for lots of things that you don't use, and other people pay for things that they use, but you don't. That's just life. People who want to work out exactly what they owe based on what they use are a species of fetishist. It's inefficient to do that for everything. We may as well grow up and accept the fact that its just easier the other way. As I said before, my position will not be convincing to market fundamentalists or Libertarians, but in the real world no-one makes policy with them in mind anyway (because they are a minority and no-one really cares about them).
In most societies healthy people don't use the healthcare system as much as unhealthy people do. Yet we know if we try to make everyone pay as they go, that the result is inefficient and unwieldy. That's why Americans pay far more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than Canadians do, yet receive worse care overall.
As for the question of how much they should be paid. That is essentially the same question as how much we should spend on health care or education. That is ultimately to be decided by the voters. Questions about corruption are similarly misguided. The answer is the same one that holds everywhere: effective oversight. It generally works. Again, the only people who will really complain are those who complain about state funding on principle. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't.
Your complaints don't really have much merit in that they are too general and would also apply to other examples of publicly funded institutions. But we already have such institutions that work well enough. Personally, I think it is much harder to work out how much to spend on healthcare than it would be to track what music is popular. Television networks already know how to track ratings with a high degree of accuracy (in the case of a product that is provided free to users). There's no reason why that can't happen with music.
"People will make all kinds of rationalisation to justify taking other peoples work for free."
That's true, but they may in some cases be correct. In this case, technology is in the process of rendering barriers to the free flow of information obsolete. DRM and all other forms of copy protection are just feeble attempts to stop it. The power is now in the hands of the users. You can complain all you like about it, but that is a fact. All the lawmaking in the world won't be able to stop people either, and nor will technology.
Rationalisations either way are futile in cases like this. People can come up with rationalisations as to why masturbation should be prevented, but it's idle talk, since people will continue to do it because there is no efficient way of stopping them.
In any case, there is no a priori reason why content should not be provided free to end users, as long as some method of promoting its creation is in place. Lots of things in our society are provided by means of non market mechanisms. Scholarly research is the obvious one. Health care (in most modern societies) is another. There's no reason why entertainers who supply music cannot be paid from general taxation based on the measured popularity of their products. The technology exists to make such a scheme workable. Additionally, there are obvious benefits in having such content available for free to the end user.
Apart from the Libertarians, who seem to object to taxation even when it demonstrably makes life easier, there's not much to complain about in such a proposal. Sometimes new technology makes new markets possible, sometimes it renders old ones impossible. That's just life in the modern world.
"The problem is, their philosophy never scales up to the whole of society. Why the fuck should I pay to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, it was made anyway, and I probably wouldn't have paid for it right? so what's the harm?"
If you already paid for it through general taxation, why would you care? Why not agitate for a workable solution, instead of acting like King Canute? There's very little you can do about piracy by appealing to the pirates or by trying to use the law against them. Might as well take a stand on firm ground instead.
Read some of Kaplan's columns. I hadn't until I read this story.
He's a pretty fanatical anti-Islamic writer. It's no surprise that some people would not want to counter him in print. To call Kaplan a journalist in the evaluative sense of the term is a stretch.
This reminded me of the recent Finkelstein tenure case. Some people abuse systems in order to harm or silence those with whom they disagree.
You are whining because it turns out that the Greenies were right, and by and large the right wing were wrong. The right will now pay the price for backing the wrong horse, and the green movement will reap some benefits. That's the way the world works, whether we like it or not.
So what you seem to be saying is that you don't want to believe in climate change because the solution seems to be anti-libertarian (it need not necessarily be).
Yours are the ravings of a fanatic. The idea is to let the world determine your beliefs, not the other way around.
I don't think that's good enough. For the betterment of humanity, everyone needs to have free access to every academic book ever written. I'm not saying that authors should not be paid, because hardly anyone would write books if they weren't paid, but that an alternative funding scheme needs to be found... and soon. Most academic books are funded by salaries paid from the public purse, so why not go that extra bit further? Anyone who has had to trudge around a research library or request books on interloan knows what a pain this is. Copyright as it is serves as an impediment to the furtherance of humankind. I'm not asking for Harry Potter to be provided free of charge, or the latest paperback porn, but I think it is reasonable to ask that all academic books have free access enabled.
There's no reason why, when I sit down at my computer, that I should not have the sum total of human knowledge at my disposal. Providing this would be a direct benefit to many and an indirect benefit to all, so there is a good case for public funding.
This and other posts are hilarious. You can almost smell the fear.
Apple is going to sell shiploads of these things, and all the fud and whining in the world will not stop it. It has nothing to do with Apple fans. There simply aren't enough Apple fanboys around to account for the success of the iPod. The truth is that it was a success because it was about the easiest and simplest player to use and it was marketed reasonably well. I know a lot of older non-techie people who hate gadgets, but love their iPod, for the simple reason that it takes about 30 seconds to learn how to use it.
The same goes for the iPhone. If you've watched the keynote, you pretty much know how to use everything that's on the phone. If you've watched the commercials, you know enough to use it. I've had a Samsung smartphone with Windows Mobile on it for five months and I still don't know how to use all the stuff on it (the manual is so arcane that you just end up forgetting stuff).
But/. is not the place for such musings. People here seem to like tech that requires a PhD in order to use. Being able to use some hideously complicated piece of equipment to perform a simple task is a source of distinction on this site. In the real world (fairly or no) it is regarded as a symptom of a mental disease. This is not a phone designed for geeks. It is a phone designed to sell in large numbers and make money.
The fact that some people in this thread have an irrational hatred for Apple doesn't change the fact that this will be the hottest tech item in recent memory. I'm wondering if the Cabbage Patch doll wars will be upon us once more (Jobs has basically said he hopes so, which makes him look a bit of an ass). Still, it is highly likely there is much link fodder in this thread for future gloaters.
I've seen some of these so-called "debunkings". They do nothing other than raise doubts (which anyone can do about almost anything) without sufficient evidence to confirm those doubts. If you look around, you can find debunkings of the so-called "debunkings".
But there's an obvious reason not to even bother with that: the debunkings of TRWNBT are all, as far as I can see, produced by opposition supporters. In contrast, the Revolution Will Not Be Televised was made by a bunch of Irish state broadcasters who just happened to be there at the time. Can anyone tell me why RTE has any reason to be biased? I can tell you plenty of reasons why the opposition supporters have reason to be biased. The RTE people simply reported what happened. Anything else is just someone trying to spread disinformation.
Whatever Chavez has done, he has not yet refused to hold elections and he has been elected numerous times now in elections that have been certified by observers as legitimate. So the opposition should just suck it up. And who cares about that TV station. IIRC, they are the ones that used to refer to Chavez as "the nigger" on air. If a US TV station using the public airwaves said that about Jesse Jackson, it would be pulled in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
"While I agree with the gist of your post, I have to mention that a nuclear deterrent is a cost-effective way of ensuring that you don't get invaded."
Who is going to invade Britain? The last successful invasion was in 1066, IIRC.
Who is going to attack Britain? It's traditional enemies are now politically tied to it through the European Union, and the Russians just aren't interested any more (despite Putin's posturing). Anyone else is too far away, and has nothing to gain by attacking Britain.
It's standard practice when you ask for public money to be spent on the military that you identify likely threats, and base your spending requests on the minimum needed to counter them. In British politics the case simply hasn't been made for Trident.
The current system in Britain seems to be to say "things might change and we may need the security later" without identifying the likelihood of changes. That is basing your defence spending on paranoia, not evidence (it's the old, flawed Precautionary Principle again). It's basically the same as saying "we have to spend a fortune on the military because no-one knows whether aliens might invade the earth at some point in the future". That's just special interests asking for a blank cheque.
It makes no sense for Canada to have a military that is focused on anything other than UN peacekeeping. Now that the cold war is over, Canada has no enemies. What on earth do you need a huge military for if you have no enemies? Other than the United States (which could probably buy Canada if it really wanted to), who is in a position to invade Canada?
Who has reason to strike Canada when Canadians will pretty much give you anything if you ask nicely and say you like hockey.
The answer is no-one. Canada has no need for a cold war level military.
"I like your idea about preventing collusion but have no idea how to implement it."
Neither do I, other than introducing a paid "judiciary" of impartial non editors who periodically banned the worst offenders (if you use the site much, you probably know the people I am talkin about). But I can't see Wikipedians accepting that.
If there was a general, simple answer to the problem, the libertarians could have their society tomorrow.
It's not that bad. I am an academic, and I have found a few things regarding my field in Wikipedia that I think are incorrect. But then again, I have found inaccuracies that are just as bad in Britannica, so I guess it is just what happens in non specialist encyclopaedias.
Apart from the tendency of articles to get messy, Wikipedia only suffers from organized or semi-organized groups gaming the open system. The glaring examples of this are most of the Wikipedia articles to do with Israel and Palestine. The hotly contested nature of the subject has led to some really bad behaviour on the part of editors and admins and the information in them tends to be ridiculous and POV.
If Wikipedia is to really work, then it needs to have some system for preventing collusion. It works best when individuals edit alone, and other individuals edit those edits alone. Once you have gangs trying to force a POV on an article, the open nature of the format becomes a hindrance to accuracy.
I guess that, if the article is correct, that it's good news for the anarchist revolutionaries among us. One of the major problems for anarchist revolutionaries is working out just who is a member of the bourgeoisie that you will have to imprison, hang, make work as janitors, etc. when the revolution comes, and who the proletarians are who will own everything. It would be very convenient if they just listed themselves on the internet.
No doubt the same Orwell who wrote this:
"War, it will be seen, accomplishes the necessary destruction, but accomplishes it in a psychologically acceptable way. In principle it would be quite simple to waste the surplus labour of the world by building temples and pyramids, by digging holes and filling them up again, or even by producing vast quantities of goods and then setting fire to them. But this would provide only the economic and not the emotional basis for a hierarchical society. What is concerned here is not the morale of masses, whose attitude is unimportant so long as they are kept steadily at work, but the morale of the Party itself. Even the humblest Party member is expected to be competent, industrious, and even intelligent within narrow limits, but it is also necessary that he should be a credulous and ignorant fanatic whose prevailing moods are fear, hatred, adulation, and orgiastic triumph. In other words it is necessary that he should have the mentality appropriate to a state of war. It does not matter whether the war is actually happening, and, since no decisive victory is possible, it does not matter whether the war is going well or badly. All that is needed is that a state of war should exist. The splitting of the intelligence which the Party requires of its members, and which is more easily achieved in an atmosphere of war, is now almost universal, but the higher up the ranks one goes, the more marked it becomes. It is precisely in the Inner Party that war hysteria and hatred of the enemy are strongest. In his capacity as an administrator, it is often necessary for a member of the Inner Party to know that this or that item of war news is untruthful, and he may often be aware that the entire war is spurious and is either not happening or is being waged for purposes quite other than the declared ones: but such knowledge is easily neutralized by the technique of doublethink. Meanwhile no Inner Party member wavers for an instant in his mystical belief that the war is real, and that it is bound to end victoriously, with Oceania the undisputed master of the entire world."
I don't know what model it is and I don't have the manual to hand. I live in Korea, and this is a phone with DMB and basically every widget known to Korean cell phone users (if you've been here you'll know that means a lot). Koreans tend to be pretty contemptuous when they talk about cell phones in the US and Canada, and with good reason.
"The iPhone is nothing special."
Really? I watched the original demo back in January, and after that I knew how to use it. I'd never held one in my hand, but if you gave me an iPhone I bet I could get all the stuff to work in a couple of minutes without using a manual.
Contrast that with my Samsung WinMobile smartphone. The manual for that is about half an inch thick (I still can't remember how to do some of the things on it). The software that is bundled has inconsistent interfaces. Nothing seems to work in a predictable way on it and the touchscreen is tiny, requires a crap stylus, has buttons all over it, and looks like ass. And, although it was a free gift from my employer, it costs more than the iPhone.
The iPhone is the original Macintosh of smartphones. The only difference is that you don't have to keep swapping disks out of it, but most people would think that a good thing.
The iPhone is going to be a massive success because a lot of people would like the functionality of a smartphone, but have been put off by the poor usability of previous efforts.
I'm all for terrorists blowing up American women and children in shopping malls, butt fucking US POWs and torturing innocent civilians... if that's in my nation's interests... ...see how that rationale works ...power worshiping pig.
Don't for a minute believe that the Canadian government necessarily knows what is going on. Chances are that they don't, even though these things are taking place in their own country.
20 years ago I would have thought such claims to be paranoid conspiracies. I remember rumours about the existence of ECHELON, and strenuous denials of its existence from my own government (the government of New Zealand) and other involved governments. Then, five or six years ago, the Australians admitted it existed, and that is now an established fact.
So, shouldn't members of the New Zealand governments of the 1970s-80s be held responsible for misleading the public? You would think so, since they built an ECHELON station at Waihopai in New Zealand (I remember lefties at the time correctly identifying its purpose, and being mocked for their troubles).
In fact, the New Zealand government of the time was blameless, because THEY didn't even know. That's right. The New Zealand government allowed a satellite tracking station to be built in our country, and had no idea that it was part of ECHELON. David Lange, the Prime Minister at the time later expressed his disgust when the truth came out (in a book he wrote the forward to). You can read it here
http://www.fas.org/irp/eprint/sp/sp_f1.htm
So Canadians should be worried. There's a reasonable chance that the Canadian government is being kept in the dark.
I don't believe you can have real oversight of such a system.
Instead, the public have to rely on whistle blowers and leakers, who may or may not have a personal agenda.
The more a government tends to secrecy, the more tyrannical it becomes. Secrets being kept for their own sake, and so on. The usual excuse is that we need to spy on other governments because they are spying on us. But as we know from the few tidbits we have been thrown, it's just as likely that the government is spying on its own citizens. Left wing groups have been saying this for years, and no-one believed them, but they were right. The current government is so disdainful of public opinion that it doesn't even bother to deny it.
I hate that echelon crap. It's despicable that those sacks of shit are monitoring my international phone calls.
It wouldn't be so bad if a large proportion of Americans weren't authoritarians who think it is OK for the government to spy on you, because nothing will happen if you aren't doing anything wrong.
"There is even a sex toy you can plug into the iPhone dock connector and it vibrates to the beat of the music and gives you a very tactile ring when calls come in." Oh God. Really? That's going to make for some interesting phone calls. Ring ring... ring ring... "Hellllloooooooooooooooohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh hhhhhh".
Yes, but what would have happened if online sales of music were dominated by WMA. Microsoft would effectively control the paid online distribution of music. Ask yourself how much that would suck. People disliked that Apple had to use a proprietary format to sell music online, but we now know that they didn't want to. I don't think I would say the same about Microsoft. If the format is not proprietary to them, then its not in the interest of Microsoft to promote.
Everyone knows that mp3 is OK, but the quality is not as good as AAC or WMA at similar bitrates. Would you rather have improved codecs in an open format like AAC or a format controlled by Microsoft? I'll take the open format thanks.
I'm starting to wonder if Jobs believes he can dethrone Microsoft. I don't mean that he thinks that Apple will replace Microsoft, but that Apple will force third party developers to open standards and free us from the tentacles of the Redmond beast. He's already done it with music. Now he seems to be trying internet browsers. What next?
This is going to happen. Apple killed WMA as a standard. Safari is going to kill IE as a standard.
How?
The iPhone and mobile browsing.
Mobile browsing has been the red headed step child of the internet. It sucks. The iPhone seems like it will remedy that, and no other company seems to be in a position to compete with it, or will be in a position to do so for some time. That means that Safari will likely become a standard for mobile browsing, as long as the iPhone emulates the iPod and becomes a massive hit. What we will then have is a market in which Microsoft cannot compete because the iPhone will not run IE, just as the iPod did not use WMA. The iPhone will do for mobile internet what the iPod did for digital music... or at least that is Apple's bet. The iPod didn't establish a closed standard for digital music (and won't once Steve realizes his dream of DRM free music). What the iPod did was killed Microsoft's attempt to force Microsoft software as the standard.
I predict that mobile browsing will become indispensable to ordinary people in a way that it isn't now (I never use the web on my Winmobile phone because it sucks). If it is indispensable, then site designers will have to code for it, and that means abandoning an IE only policy. Imagine the hate calls banks will get along the lines of "Hey mofos!!! I can't check my bank balance on my phone!!" THAT will be the effective end of IE as a standard.
Safari for Windows, is, as I said below, just an insurance policy to make sure that whatever works on the iPhone will also work on your desktop (in case Microsoft tries to make things difficult by making iPhone sites display funny).
Microsoft better hope for one of two things. Either (a) the iPhone is a flop; or (b) the iPhone is a success, but mobile browsing never really takes off. Would you want to bet against either one?
YES!!!!
Mobile browsing has always sucked. The iPhone promises to change that. If the iPhone is anywhere near as popular as the iPod, then people will simply have to code their sites to be compatible with it. Why make your sites incompatible with the most popular mobile browser?
I think I understand Jobs' reasoning. It's all about Web 2.0 and compatibility between desktop and mobile browsing.
Let's say the iPhone is a huge hit in the way that the iPod is a huge hit. Let's say it revolutionizes mobile web browsing (I think people spend too much time looking at the interface, the phone apps and the iPod app - the "real" internet "in your pocket" is the big deal). The iPod being a hit meant that iTunes became a standard on desktop PCs.
So if the iPhone is a success, people will spend a lot of time browsing sites on it, and people will write Web 2.0 sites for it. Simply put, if the iPhone is a mega hit, Safari becomes the standard for mobile internet browsing, and IE mobile is finished (I have it. It sucks anyway). I think this will happen. Safari marketshare is going to shoot up as more people use their iPhones to access the web (this is why I think that devs whining about the lack of an iPhone SDK is dumb. Web 2.0 is the way to go).
But no-one is going to spend all their time browsing on their phone. People will want to use the same 2.0 sites on their desktop machines. Do you really think that Apple can trust Microsoft or the Firefox devs to make sure that IE and Firefox will be compatible with all the sites that are aimed at iPhone users?
Wouldn't it suck if you were using a great Web 2.0 interactive site on your iPhone and you got to your desk and discovered it didn't work properly with your desktop browser?
Wouldn't it suck if it was hard to sync your bookmarks between your phone and your desktop browsers?
By allowing Safari for Windows, Apple is basically saying: "All you other guys better support Safari, because it will rule mobile browsing. If you think that you can create trouble for the iPhone by making it hard for sites to be compatible with both the iPhone and Windows desktop browsing, then we're going to stop that by telling everyone that if their favourite sites work on their phone, but not their desktop, that they can download a browser that will make it work on the desktop. And added to that, we are going to make it super easy to sync bookmarks between Safari on the desktop and Safari on the phone. People will want a seamless experience between their mobile browsing and their browsing on traditional computers. Ignore this at your peril."
If Apple comes to rule mobile browsing, then it will be in a powerful position to determine web standards. Safari is insurance against others who might rock the boat.
I don't understand the problem.
/. posters and other tech people who love complicated software with millions of customization options aren't going to like it. But for many people less is more.
A lot of Windows users downloaded iTunes, even though they didn't have an iPod. A lot of people just like it (and of course many people hate it). The same will probably be true of Safari.
There are of course many things to fix, but it is a beta. I'm guessing there will be a few people who want a simple, easy to use browser without endless sets of extensions and widgets. I was that person years ago when a simple browser called "Phoenix" was released, and that's why I used it. Now Firefox is not the simple browser it used to be.
Of course
FTR I now use Omniweb, which was well worth the small registration fee.
The answer to your first question is because you already do pay for lots of things that you don't use, and other people pay for things that they use, but you don't. That's just life. People who want to work out exactly what they owe based on what they use are a species of fetishist. It's inefficient to do that for everything. We may as well grow up and accept the fact that its just easier the other way. As I said before, my position will not be convincing to market fundamentalists or Libertarians, but in the real world no-one makes policy with them in mind anyway (because they are a minority and no-one really cares about them).
In most societies healthy people don't use the healthcare system as much as unhealthy people do. Yet we know if we try to make everyone pay as they go, that the result is inefficient and unwieldy. That's why Americans pay far more as a percentage of GDP on healthcare than Canadians do, yet receive worse care overall.
As for the question of how much they should be paid. That is essentially the same question as how much we should spend on health care or education. That is ultimately to be decided by the voters. Questions about corruption are similarly misguided. The answer is the same one that holds everywhere: effective oversight. It generally works. Again, the only people who will really complain are those who complain about state funding on principle. I'm a pragmatist, so I don't.
Your complaints don't really have much merit in that they are too general and would also apply to other examples of publicly funded institutions. But we already have such institutions that work well enough. Personally, I think it is much harder to work out how much to spend on healthcare than it would be to track what music is popular. Television networks already know how to track ratings with a high degree of accuracy (in the case of a product that is provided free to users). There's no reason why that can't happen with music.
"People will make all kinds of rationalisation to justify taking other peoples work for free."
That's true, but they may in some cases be correct. In this case, technology is in the process of rendering barriers to the free flow of information obsolete. DRM and all other forms of copy protection are just feeble attempts to stop it. The power is now in the hands of the users. You can complain all you like about it, but that is a fact. All the lawmaking in the world won't be able to stop people either, and nor will technology.
Rationalisations either way are futile in cases like this. People can come up with rationalisations as to why masturbation should be prevented, but it's idle talk, since people will continue to do it because there is no efficient way of stopping them.
In any case, there is no a priori reason why content should not be provided free to end users, as long as some method of promoting its creation is in place. Lots of things in our society are provided by means of non market mechanisms. Scholarly research is the obvious one. Health care (in most modern societies) is another. There's no reason why entertainers who supply music cannot be paid from general taxation based on the measured popularity of their products. The technology exists to make such a scheme workable. Additionally, there are obvious benefits in having such content available for free to the end user.
Apart from the Libertarians, who seem to object to taxation even when it demonstrably makes life easier, there's not much to complain about in such a proposal. Sometimes new technology makes new markets possible, sometimes it renders old ones impossible. That's just life in the modern world.
"The problem is, their philosophy never scales up to the whole of society. Why the fuck should I pay to see the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, it was made anyway, and I probably wouldn't have paid for it right? so what's the harm?"
If you already paid for it through general taxation, why would you care? Why not agitate for a workable solution, instead of acting like King Canute? There's very little you can do about piracy by appealing to the pirates or by trying to use the law against them. Might as well take a stand on firm ground instead.
Read some of Kaplan's columns. I hadn't until I read this story.
He's a pretty fanatical anti-Islamic writer. It's no surprise that some people would not want to counter him in print. To call Kaplan a journalist in the evaluative sense of the term is a stretch.
This reminded me of the recent Finkelstein tenure case. Some people abuse systems in order to harm or silence those with whom they disagree.
Not an ad hominem argument.
Nice try though.
You are whining because it turns out that the Greenies were right, and by and large the right wing were wrong. The right will now pay the price for backing the wrong horse, and the green movement will reap some benefits. That's the way the world works, whether we like it or not.
So what you seem to be saying is that you don't want to believe in climate change because the solution seems to be anti-libertarian (it need not necessarily be).
Yours are the ravings of a fanatic. The idea is to let the world determine your beliefs, not the other way around.
I don't think that's good enough. For the betterment of humanity, everyone needs to have free access to every academic book ever written. I'm not saying that authors should not be paid, because hardly anyone would write books if they weren't paid, but that an alternative funding scheme needs to be found... and soon. Most academic books are funded by salaries paid from the public purse, so why not go that extra bit further? Anyone who has had to trudge around a research library or request books on interloan knows what a pain this is. Copyright as it is serves as an impediment to the furtherance of humankind. I'm not asking for Harry Potter to be provided free of charge, or the latest paperback porn, but I think it is reasonable to ask that all academic books have free access enabled.
There's no reason why, when I sit down at my computer, that I should not have the sum total of human knowledge at my disposal. Providing this would be a direct benefit to many and an indirect benefit to all, so there is a good case for public funding.
This and other posts are hilarious. You can almost smell the fear.
/. is not the place for such musings. People here seem to like tech that requires a PhD in order to use. Being able to use some hideously complicated piece of equipment to perform a simple task is a source of distinction on this site. In the real world (fairly or no) it is regarded as a symptom of a mental disease. This is not a phone designed for geeks. It is a phone designed to sell in large numbers and make money.
Apple is going to sell shiploads of these things, and all the fud and whining in the world will not stop it. It has nothing to do with Apple fans. There simply aren't enough Apple fanboys around to account for the success of the iPod. The truth is that it was a success because it was about the easiest and simplest player to use and it was marketed reasonably well. I know a lot of older non-techie people who hate gadgets, but love their iPod, for the simple reason that it takes about 30 seconds to learn how to use it.
The same goes for the iPhone. If you've watched the keynote, you pretty much know how to use everything that's on the phone. If you've watched the commercials, you know enough to use it. I've had a Samsung smartphone with Windows Mobile on it for five months and I still don't know how to use all the stuff on it (the manual is so arcane that you just end up forgetting stuff).
But
The fact that some people in this thread have an irrational hatred for Apple doesn't change the fact that this will be the hottest tech item in recent memory. I'm wondering if the Cabbage Patch doll wars will be upon us once more (Jobs has basically said he hopes so, which makes him look a bit of an ass). Still, it is highly likely there is much link fodder in this thread for future gloaters.
Yeah right.
I've seen some of these so-called "debunkings". They do nothing other than raise doubts (which anyone can do about almost anything) without sufficient evidence to confirm those doubts. If you look around, you can find debunkings of the so-called "debunkings".
But there's an obvious reason not to even bother with that: the debunkings of TRWNBT are all, as far as I can see, produced by opposition supporters. In contrast, the Revolution Will Not Be Televised was made by a bunch of Irish state broadcasters who just happened to be there at the time. Can anyone tell me why RTE has any reason to be biased? I can tell you plenty of reasons why the opposition supporters have reason to be biased. The RTE people simply reported what happened. Anything else is just someone trying to spread disinformation.
Whatever Chavez has done, he has not yet refused to hold elections and he has been elected numerous times now in elections that have been certified by observers as legitimate. So the opposition should just suck it up. And who cares about that TV station. IIRC, they are the ones that used to refer to Chavez as "the nigger" on air. If a US TV station using the public airwaves said that about Jesse Jackson, it would be pulled in short order.