In case you didn't know this, Apple's App store uses the "walled-garden" model. Basically they review all software and developers need to obey strict guideline to be approved. Between online porn, social networks and cyberbullying I don't really think malware on the App store is much of an issue.
PCs are of course different, but consider that before Windows XP there was hardly such thing as restricted accounts on PCs. Sure, malware was sometimes a problem (even without user interaction) but we grew up fine with the "reckless" amount of control we had on our PCs. If anything things have gotten much much safer between improved Windows security, firewalls and paranoid anti-virus software.
If you really want to have total control over what your kids do then I guess that's up to you. The technology of today makes it possible to completely monitor them, in the digital as well as the real world. Being overprotective is probably a natural kind of development.
No, not crazy. I'd say you just like being authoritarian. If you don't trust your kids with a computer maybe you should just not let them have one. Almost every computer/game machine made so far has operated in a way that "trusts" kids to use them. What sort of harmful stuff can they get on the App store anyway which they couldn't get on the web? Credit card info is of course another matter, one which I would put on a different level of security than "let my kids download doodle jump on their iPad".
Kids under 13 can't have an Apple account. A few years ago it was 18. Maybe now they've got some kind of parent managed account like you describe, but if so all this stuff is pretty recent.
This is the same problem 99% of security experts seem to not understand: If you require passwords for everything that dilutes the security for when it's really needed. If the parents only had to type the password when they spend real money, they would realize that they need to keep it safe. Heck, the amount of times iOS bugged me about my password I wouldn't be surprised if some parents just said "screw it, the password's hunter2. Don't buy anything though". Just to stop their kids from bugging them every 5 minutes.
spoken like someone whos never actually driven a car, or who does so afraid every moment of dying. look, if the car responds like you want it to, you're doing it right. end of story.
Spoken like 90% of all the ignorant schmucks out there who've never lost control of a car before they have a crash. I bet you've never understeered a car going at speed have you?
the accident report from the on scene officer (re: subject matter expert whose report goes to the court) is what matters.
Whatever. The point is that it's impossible to prove distraction (where would you set the bar on this anyway?) in a way that would stand up in court. The sensible thing to do is to send a clear message to the people who think driving with one hand is a good idea that they need to stop that shit.
Same with USB I suppose. Apple had absolutely nothing to do with it...other than being the first major computer manufacturer to standardize on it and make it viable for peripheral makers to start building for thereby overcoming the chicken/egg problem fairly efficiently. Same with OpenGL, they've done nothing!
Well, if you want to credit anyone for solving the chicken-and-egg problem you'd have to credit the likes of Dell and Compaq who still had to included legacy ports. Apple left these out and on top of that got to charge for an overpriced mouse.
It's considered that the iMac sparked the whole USB revolution...
"Is considered" is just a way of pushing a narrative with no real evidence or reason. When you look at the facts you see that USB was a standard designed by PC manufacturers and had been used for years before the iMac came out. Yes, it wasn't really popular until USB 1.1, but even here PC makers had been pushing it on their models so that even before the iMac came out practically every new PC had USB ports, supported in Windows 98, thus solving the chicken-and-egg problem (the same way they done it for all subsequent USB revisions).
Here's the thing: back in 1998 there was little to no reason to use USB devices. As you pointed out USB Mice/Keyboards were more expensive and unnecessary. Flash drives hadn't been invented and almost every PCs had internal floppy drives. Printing was *slower* over USB than over parallel. Modems made sense, but by then the market had started to move towards internal or Ethernet modems anyway. My first USB device was an Altec lansing 2.1 speaker system which for some obscure reason had a USB connection and I couldn't figure out why. When USB did catch on it was for stuff where it actually made a lot of sense: Joysticks and Scanners initially. Then when SD card readers, webcams and thumb drives came out they used USB. I think it's quite disingenuous to claim that this was all thanks to the fact that Apple made it's customers buy USB mice and floppy drives. The former didn't become popular amongst PC users until many years later and the latter was never popular.
Can't speak for nowadays because I don't use iTunes any more, but I remember that going back when I registered it was not possible to create an account without a credit card or an equivalent debit service. This was one of the European iTunes stores.
I'm glad they tried something new rather than expect people to pay to pay for the same damn OS again and again which is what we've come to expect. My only problem with Metro is that it's nowhere near as developed as it needs to be and you're pretty much reliant on desktop mode, which makes it like Windows 7 just a bit worse.
Which is an even bigger resource hog. You'd think 1 GB of RAM would be enough for a few open tabs of blog and news sites wouldn't you? Not anymore apparently.
Possibly, but thats just a red herring. The issue was whether releasing unspecific information to the public can reasonably be considered passing information to the enemy.
Whether the website was foreign or not is in no way meaningful as the material was intended to be made public. It's just bullshit loaded language. A whistleblower should use the the most secure channel possible and that happened to be wikileaks. As we have seen it has been traditional media who have screwed up the most.
i say get rid of all these various laws and replace them with one simple one: do what you want behind the wheel, but if you get into an accident and negligence/distraction was a root cause go to jail, lose license, pay all costs.
Yeah, cause that will work really well when the burden of proof is on the state prosecutor. And who cares about road fatalities anyway?
Really? What is more efficient? If you're thinking of something like the toolbar-based equation editors in Word and the like, please try typing your next paper using nothing but a point-and-click keyboard, and you'll soon figure out why they haven't taken off.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't saying word is any better. LaTex is by-far my favourite way to typeset equations. (although I find Libreoffice's syntax to be more concise). But that doesn't make it less tedious.
That's another little irony, because the serious charting and drawing packages for TeX also produce more practical and professional-looking illustrations than a lot of supposedly high-end drawing packages today.
Maybe. I don't know which "serious charting and drawing packages" you're referring to or what your criteria for "professional-looking illustrations" are though. I'm sure with a specific workflow you can find a niche where a Tex package does something better than anything else. But I was referring to graphics placement rather than rendering. When writing articles and reports which use a variety of external images it is very difficult to get it to look how I envision. I usually put extra effort into it and get them to look great (within the limitations) but most people seem to give up or just aren't as obsessed about the look as I am.
Funny, the only one that actually refers to a scientific paper looking into it (the middle link) seems to suggest that hands-free sets are an improvement (though they reason in their conclusion that because they slow down less they might be more dangerous. They don't substantiate this however).
The first link basically says that people who talk on their phones a lot are also simply bad drivers. And the third link simply establishes the obvious fact that conversations are distracting anyway.
Yeah, you probably *feel* as distracted when talking hands free, but when it comes down to a split-second evasive maneuver you'll find out why steering wheels are supposed to be used with two hands.
Maybe banning hands-free sets would indeed be a good idea too, but reasoning that we may as well not care about handheld phones because everything's a distraction is just wrong and stupid.
They all seem to require manually digging through the code to get things to look right though. And when I said graphics are expected to look shit I was referring to the fact that most scientific publications, even reputable ones, often have shittily designed and placed graphics. The fact that you could have made it 10x as legible by making your graphic full width or using some creative design won't matter because journals want articles to look the same way they have done for 150 years.
Okay, if you want to stay out of trouble don't involve countries with deliberately retarded currency laws. Transferring 10.00 Euros to practically anywhere else results in a received amount of €8.20. So that's €1.90 in fees. Ten cents for transfer fees, and a fixed €1.80 withdrawal fee. It's the withdrawal fee that makes the small transactions relatively expensive. You can accumulate funds to lessen the impact of the withdrawal fee. As I've mentioned the transfer fee caps out at 50 cents.
Of course you could argue that most people will want to use currency conversion, and that's where they charge the usual 2.5%. (I recall it being somewhat cheaper, but maybe they changed it since being rebranded). But if you're happy accepting the same currency you can look to exchange it elsewhere. Compare this to Bitpay who offer precious little information about the cost of conversion or withdrawal.
Now all of this makes me sound like a shill for Skrill (haha), but their service really isn't spectacular. All they do is offer money transfers for a flat fee. But there's nothing inherently superior about Bitpay, other than the gimmick using bitcoins. Even for short-term money transfers I would probably feel better using a service which relies on regular currency.
And you seem to miss the point about buyer fraud: The whole point of bitcoin is that transactions are verified and secure. If someone were to successfully pull off buyer fraud that would mean the whole bitcoin system is broken.
That's why GPS units specifically advise you not to pull over to set a destination. Sheesh do people really need someone to tell them they'r being distracted?
What a load of bullshit. All the link says is that having a conversaton on a handsfree set still impedes driving. Nowhere does it say it's as dangerous as driving one-hand on the wheel or looking at the keypad of your screen.
The funny thing is that Tex is most popular in STEM fields where it's the most frustrating. Yeah, it looks great, but typing that amount of markup for a few lines of equations is hardly efficient. And the only condolence with the layout of graphics is that people almost expect them to look shit. But when all you're writing is text, the chaptering, the cross-referencing functions and all the add-on packages are perfect.
Well, that's only an issue if you started your PhD with the single goal of employment opportunities. And in that case you should have researched the potential jobs to start with. As for professorship it's simply a mathematical truth that your chances are slim. How many doctorates will a single professor award in his career on average? Dozens! Take the reciprocal of this value and you can work out that you better start looking elsewhere for a job.
Well yeah, on one hand it's just a trivial UI feature that isn't really necessary. But on the other hand it's about the anti-competitive business tactics of one of the worlds biggest corporations that drove one of the most popular phone makers to the edge of bankruptcy and attempts to stifle the healthy competition which makes the innovations you mentioned viable in the first place.
I don't know what you mean by "effective medium of exchange" as contrasted with "favored medium of exchange for certain types of goods".
Your "transaction niche" as it were. Just because people use it to pay for lots of stuff doesn't mean it's stable or that people are confident enough to use it for their savings or doing international business. Take the Turkish lira: Very useful if you're going on holiday, but the less you change and the sooner you use it up the better. If you're doing big business, you need to be reasonably sure that the currency you're using has some long-term predictability. You can't be going from transaction to transaction all the time. You need cash. If that "cash" is in bitcoins and something goes wrong you're fucked.
For the type of transactions that bitcoin is good for, where its difficult to defend against fraud, 1% is pretty darn low. Also, bitpay isn't bitcoin, there are a lot of other ways to acquire and sell bitcoin.
What type of fraud are you talking about here? Due to the nature of Bitcoin it's pretty darn secure against bounced payments. It can't do anything after the transaction has taken place though. Bitpay doesn't seem to offer any kind of buyer's protection so how exactly does fraud come into this equation whatsoever? Moneybookers do the same thing but their fees cap out at 65 cents.
If people were to get their paychecks in bitcoins they might find it convenient, but the whole "use money to buy bitcoins, use bitcoins to buy stuff" model is more complicated than "use money to buy stuff".
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In case you didn't know this, Apple's App store uses the "walled-garden" model. Basically they review all software and developers need to obey strict guideline to be approved. Between online porn, social networks and cyberbullying I don't really think malware on the App store is much of an issue.
PCs are of course different, but consider that before Windows XP there was hardly such thing as restricted accounts on PCs. Sure, malware was sometimes a problem (even without user interaction) but we grew up fine with the "reckless" amount of control we had on our PCs. If anything things have gotten much much safer between improved Windows security, firewalls and paranoid anti-virus software.
If you really want to have total control over what your kids do then I guess that's up to you. The technology of today makes it possible to completely monitor them, in the digital as well as the real world. Being overprotective is probably a natural kind of development.
No, not crazy. I'd say you just like being authoritarian. If you don't trust your kids with a computer maybe you should just not let them have one. Almost every computer/game machine made so far has operated in a way that "trusts" kids to use them. What sort of harmful stuff can they get on the App store anyway which they couldn't get on the web?
Credit card info is of course another matter, one which I would put on a different level of security than "let my kids download doodle jump on their iPad".
Kids under 13 can't have an Apple account. A few years ago it was 18.
Maybe now they've got some kind of parent managed account like you describe, but if so all this stuff is pretty recent.
This is the same problem 99% of security experts seem to not understand: If you require passwords for everything that dilutes the security for when it's really needed.
If the parents only had to type the password when they spend real money, they would realize that they need to keep it safe. Heck, the amount of times iOS bugged me about my password I wouldn't be surprised if some parents just said "screw it, the password's hunter2. Don't buy anything though". Just to stop their kids from bugging them every 5 minutes.
spoken like someone whos never actually driven a car, or who does so afraid every moment of dying. look, if the car responds like you want it to, you're doing it right. end of story.
Spoken like 90% of all the ignorant schmucks out there who've never lost control of a car before they have a crash. I bet you've never understeered a car going at speed have you?
the accident report from the on scene officer (re: subject matter expert whose report goes to the court) is what matters.
Whatever. The point is that it's impossible to prove distraction (where would you set the bar on this anyway?) in a way that would stand up in court. The sensible thing to do is to send a clear message to the people who think driving with one hand is a good idea that they need to stop that shit.
Same with USB I suppose. Apple had absolutely nothing to do with it...other than being the first major computer manufacturer to standardize on it and make it viable for peripheral makers to start building for thereby overcoming the chicken/egg problem fairly efficiently. Same with OpenGL, they've done nothing!
Well, if you want to credit anyone for solving the chicken-and-egg problem you'd have to credit the likes of Dell and Compaq who still had to included legacy ports. Apple left these out and on top of that got to charge for an overpriced mouse.
It's considered that the iMac sparked the whole USB revolution...
"Is considered" is just a way of pushing a narrative with no real evidence or reason. When you look at the facts you see that USB was a standard designed by PC manufacturers and had been used for years before the iMac came out. Yes, it wasn't really popular until USB 1.1, but even here PC makers had been pushing it on their models so that even before the iMac came out practically every new PC had USB ports, supported in Windows 98, thus solving the chicken-and-egg problem (the same way they done it for all subsequent USB revisions).
Here's the thing: back in 1998 there was little to no reason to use USB devices. As you pointed out USB Mice/Keyboards were more expensive and unnecessary. Flash drives hadn't been invented and almost every PCs had internal floppy drives. Printing was *slower* over USB than over parallel. Modems made sense, but by then the market had started to move towards internal or Ethernet modems anyway.
My first USB device was an Altec lansing 2.1 speaker system which for some obscure reason had a USB connection and I couldn't figure out why.
When USB did catch on it was for stuff where it actually made a lot of sense: Joysticks and Scanners initially. Then when SD card readers, webcams and thumb drives came out they used USB. I think it's quite disingenuous to claim that this was all thanks to the fact that Apple made it's customers buy USB mice and floppy drives. The former didn't become popular amongst PC users until many years later and the latter was never popular.
At least until relatively recently Apple required the password to be entered even for free downloads and updates of existing apps.
Can't speak for nowadays because I don't use iTunes any more, but I remember that going back when I registered it was not possible to create an account without a credit card or an equivalent debit service. This was one of the European iTunes stores.
I'm glad they tried something new rather than expect people to pay to pay for the same damn OS again and again which is what we've come to expect. My only problem with Metro is that it's nowhere near as developed as it needs to be and you're pretty much reliant on desktop mode, which makes it like Windows 7 just a bit worse.
Which is an even bigger resource hog. You'd think 1 GB of RAM would be enough for a few open tabs of blog and news sites wouldn't you? Not anymore apparently.
Possibly, but thats just a red herring. The issue was whether releasing unspecific information to the public can reasonably be considered passing information to the enemy.
Whether the website was foreign or not is in no way meaningful as the material was intended to be made public. It's just bullshit loaded language.
A whistleblower should use the the most secure channel possible and that happened to be wikileaks. As we have seen it has been traditional media who have screwed up the most.
one handed or two handed, no real difference.
That seems like a dubious claim to say the least.
i say get rid of all these various laws and replace them with one simple one: do what you want behind the wheel, but if you get into an accident and negligence/distraction was a root cause go to jail, lose license, pay all costs.
Yeah, cause that will work really well when the burden of proof is on the state prosecutor. And who cares about road fatalities anyway?
Really? What is more efficient? If you're thinking of something like the toolbar-based equation editors in Word and the like, please try typing your next paper using nothing but a point-and-click keyboard, and you'll soon figure out why they haven't taken off.
Don't get me wrong. I wasn't saying word is any better. LaTex is by-far my favourite way to typeset equations. (although I find Libreoffice's syntax to be more concise). But that doesn't make it less tedious.
That's another little irony, because the serious charting and drawing packages for TeX also produce more practical and professional-looking illustrations than a lot of supposedly high-end drawing packages today.
Maybe. I don't know which "serious charting and drawing packages" you're referring to or what your criteria for "professional-looking illustrations" are though. I'm sure with a specific workflow you can find a niche where a Tex package does something better than anything else.
But I was referring to graphics placement rather than rendering. When writing articles and reports which use a variety of external images it is very difficult to get it to look how I envision. I usually put extra effort into it and get them to look great (within the limitations) but most people seem to give up or just aren't as obsessed about the look as I am.
Funny, the only one that actually refers to a scientific paper looking into it (the middle link) seems to suggest that hands-free sets are an improvement (though they reason in their conclusion that because they slow down less they might be more dangerous. They don't substantiate this however).
The first link basically says that people who talk on their phones a lot are also simply bad drivers. And the third link simply establishes the obvious fact that conversations are distracting anyway.
Yeah, you probably *feel* as distracted when talking hands free, but when it comes down to a split-second evasive maneuver you'll find out why steering wheels are supposed to be used with two hands.
Maybe banning hands-free sets would indeed be a good idea too, but reasoning that we may as well not care about handheld phones because everything's a distraction is just wrong and stupid.
They all seem to require manually digging through the code to get things to look right though.
And when I said graphics are expected to look shit I was referring to the fact that most scientific publications, even reputable ones, often have shittily designed and placed graphics. The fact that you could have made it 10x as legible by making your graphic full width or using some creative design won't matter because journals want articles to look the same way they have done for 150 years.
Okay, if you want to stay out of trouble don't involve countries with deliberately retarded currency laws. Transferring 10.00 Euros to practically anywhere else results in a received amount of €8.20.
So that's €1.90 in fees. Ten cents for transfer fees, and a fixed €1.80 withdrawal fee. It's the withdrawal fee that makes the small transactions relatively expensive. You can accumulate funds to lessen the impact of the withdrawal fee. As I've mentioned the transfer fee caps out at 50 cents.
Of course you could argue that most people will want to use currency conversion, and that's where they charge the usual 2.5%. (I recall it being somewhat cheaper, but maybe they changed it since being rebranded). But if you're happy accepting the same currency you can look to exchange it elsewhere. Compare this to Bitpay who offer precious little information about the cost of conversion or withdrawal.
Now all of this makes me sound like a shill for Skrill (haha), but their service really isn't spectacular. All they do is offer money transfers for a flat fee. But there's nothing inherently superior about Bitpay, other than the gimmick using bitcoins. Even for short-term money transfers I would probably feel better using a service which relies on regular currency.
And you seem to miss the point about buyer fraud: The whole point of bitcoin is that transactions are verified and secure. If someone were to successfully pull off buyer fraud that would mean the whole bitcoin system is broken.
That's why GPS units specifically advise you not to pull over to set a destination. Sheesh do people really need someone to tell them they'r being distracted?
What a load of bullshit. All the link says is that having a conversaton on a handsfree set still impedes driving. Nowhere does it say it's as dangerous as driving one-hand on the wheel or looking at the keypad of your screen.
The funny thing is that Tex is most popular in STEM fields where it's the most frustrating. Yeah, it looks great, but typing that amount of markup for a few lines of equations is hardly efficient. And the only condolence with the layout of graphics is that people almost expect them to look shit.
But when all you're writing is text, the chaptering, the cross-referencing functions and all the add-on packages are perfect.
Well, that's only an issue if you started your PhD with the single goal of employment opportunities. And in that case you should have researched the potential jobs to start with.
As for professorship it's simply a mathematical truth that your chances are slim. How many doctorates will a single professor award in his career on average? Dozens! Take the reciprocal of this value and you can work out that you better start looking elsewhere for a job.
It's a perception thing I guess. But other than the tech sites all media seemed much more sympathetic to Apple than Samsung in their court case.
Well yeah, on one hand it's just a trivial UI feature that isn't really necessary. But on the other hand it's about the anti-competitive business tactics of one of the worlds biggest corporations that drove one of the most popular phone makers to the edge of bankruptcy and attempts to stifle the healthy competition which makes the innovations you mentioned viable in the first place.
I don't know what you mean by "effective medium of exchange" as contrasted with "favored medium of exchange for certain types of goods".
Your "transaction niche" as it were. Just because people use it to pay for lots of stuff doesn't mean it's stable or that people are confident enough to use it for their savings or doing international business. Take the Turkish lira: Very useful if you're going on holiday, but the less you change and the sooner you use it up the better.
If you're doing big business, you need to be reasonably sure that the currency you're using has some long-term predictability. You can't be going from transaction to transaction all the time. You need cash. If that "cash" is in bitcoins and something goes wrong you're fucked.
For the type of transactions that bitcoin is good for, where its difficult to defend against fraud, 1% is pretty darn low. Also, bitpay isn't bitcoin, there are a lot of other ways to acquire and sell bitcoin.
What type of fraud are you talking about here? Due to the nature of Bitcoin it's pretty darn secure against bounced payments. It can't do anything after the transaction has taken place though. Bitpay doesn't seem to offer any kind of buyer's protection so how exactly does fraud come into this equation whatsoever? Moneybookers do the same thing but their fees cap out at 65 cents.
If people were to get their paychecks in bitcoins they might find it convenient, but the whole "use money to buy bitcoins, use bitcoins to buy stuff" model is more complicated than "use money to buy stuff".