The government has been in the Internet since day one. They built the damn thing after all, and its commercial history has been governed by federal laws--most recently the 1996 Telecomm Act. Anyone who tells you we should "keep the goverment out of the Internet" is trying to sell you a bridge. They're in there...the question is, are they preserving common carrier so you can serve an anti-Comcast Web site to Comcast subscribers? Or will they give Comcast the power to filter content as well as BitTorrent? Make your choice wisely.
Once the data has reached the end of it's retention schedule it can be destroyed, and no this is not destruction of Government Property or Data as somebody previously posted. It is more akin to tossing out the spoiled milk in the fridge than anything. However some data never expires There is a federal law that is very clear that all data related to the Office of the President and Vice President have an expiration time of "never." The only way any data is allowed to be destroyed is through prior consultation with the National Archivist.
but if we had to keep every shred of every piece of data collected through normal day to day operations every tiny municipality in the nation would require multi-terrabyte storage arrays. Obviously that would be overkill for tiny municipalities and so the Presidential Records Act does not apply to them. However it does apply to the White House, who can easily afford arrays of whatever size needed to retain data as directed by law.
"National security" does not in any way supersede the Presidential Records Act. In fact as federal law, passed by the Congress and signed by the President, the Presidential Records Act defines national security with respect to presidential records.
I hope that was a troll because if not, I'm feeling pretty depressed about my country right now. We're supposed to be a nation of laws.
I have a Motorola V325, which takes a USB data cable. I'm able to sync contacts and calendar with my Mac, but only by fooling the Apple sync service into thinking it's a different Motorola phone. There is absolutely no way to get pics off the phone over USB with cracking the firmware with a hex editor. This is something the phone can do, but Verizon has purposefully blocked with software. If I want pics taken with the phone I have to send them to myself one at a time, paying for each transfer. Instead I just pretend that my phone doesn't have a camera.
Apple is not the only successful company that Jobs has led. In fact they even reference his success with Pixar in the article. What they don't talk about (because it is inconvenient to the central thesis) is that Jobs was famously hands-off on the filmmaking at Pixar. He rarely even visited because he did not like to drive that far. Taken from a different point of view--a Pixar point of view--one could write a profile of the "Steve Jobs management style" that is almost totally at odds with this one.
Google runs its servers on Linux, but with propietary tweaks. The Google search ranking algorithm is at least as secret at Apple's product roadmap, and they are no more forthcoming with their product roadmap than Apple is (remember all the random answers and stonewalling that met questions about Google's plans on a mobile phone prior to the Android announcement).
To be a large, public, consumer company you have to keep some things secret for a variety of reasons. You don't want to telegraph strategy to your competitors. You want to release things with a splash to earn unpaid media coverage. You don't want to be held legally liable for stock price movements based on R&D projects that might never get released. etc.
Apple is very closed and secretive about some things, but quite open about others. Like Google their core OS kernel is open source. Like Google they employ commonly available technologies--http, MP3, H264, AAC, Unix, USB, ATA, 802.11, etc.--but put them together in unique ways to create new products.
Then have the grace to accept your own decision and the trade-off it creates. I'm not questioning your decision, just the loud complaining that seems to accompany it.
The amount you are paid for applying your knowledge has less to do with the quality of your knowledge than how long you have been with the company... That's because knowledge is not a distinguishing factor, it is merely a cost of entry. The distinguishing factor is effectiveness, which can involve many different things. If you're a genius engineer, you can be a dick and it's overlooked because you're so effective. But if you're not, professionalism, respect, collaboration, etc come into play. I'm guessing from your posts here that those might not be strong suits for you.
From any given graduating class from any school, some will succeed more than others. You can either bitch and moan about that, or figure out why that is and how you can stay on the upside of the discrepancy. Fairness has little to do with it--as with most things in life.
Compared some European nations, the U.S. has many problems with things like health care, sick leave, vacation, workers' rights, etc. On the other hand, it's way easier to start and grow a new business in the U.S. than it is in those nations.
This is especially true in industries with a high number of contract workers--you can work for a temp agency for a while, making a good name and good contacts, then quit the temp agency and sign contracting agreements directly. Or, you can start your own company--by using contractors, but doing things right that the other companies (now your competitors) do wrong. I live in DC and on Craigslist alone there are usually a bunch of listings for start-ups looking for contract workers.
I'm not saying it's easy--I know it's difficult to start and grow a successful business. But even the mental exercise of thinking it through can put some things in perspective.
No, but the Internet is a little skewed, don't you think? "Reviews" are often "criticisms", especially when anonymity and charged opinion is concerned. Definitely true, but on the other hand I tend to take anonymous reviews on the Internet, especially the real foamy-mouth bashing ones, with a large grain of salt. I would expect that this site would probably get a similar reaction from most of its readers. I mean, if the average rating on the site is like -10, then I think a lot of people will figure out that it's not exactly a balanced representative sample of society.
I was just visiting some friends who are living in Palau and we went right by this cave on a snorkeling trip. One of the friends is a PA (physician's assistant) and recently served as the medical support for a crew shooting an episode of the Discovery show "Bone Detective." One of their sites was this cave.
The archaeology and anthropology of Palau is poorly researched and there is little known about the ancient cultures that lived there. My wife is an anthropologist who works at the Smithsonian and had trouble finding much material on Palau to read before travelled there.
The archaeology may also be endangered. On a sea kayaking trip in Nikko Bay, off the island of Babeldaob, we visited another cave that was known to have bones in it. But the bones were gone, and there was evidence of a hasty digging project in the floor of the cave. It was definitely not a research dig--no gridlines, no brushes or sifts, just a big hole that had clearly been dug with a shovel. We speculated that the recent attention had inspired some people to collect antiquities to sell. Hopefully that does not accelerate.
"Net neutrality" revolves around the legal principle of common carrier, which applies only to networks.
The iPhone is a piece of property that you purchase. You have every right to do whatever you want to it, but Apple is not legally obligated to help you.
If Apple starts suing people who hack their own iPhone, I'll be at the front of the line complaining. I doubt they will though, because that is very shaky legal ground. Your property rights have nothing to do with Apple being "anticompetitive." They are based on common law principles that go back hundreds of years. But as I noted, those rights do not extend to forcing Apple to provide the SDK you want.
There's a difference between not providing support and using legal means to restrict the usage. Apple isn't just not supporting the SDK (which would be fine), they're saying that you LEGALLY cannot do this with your phone and the SDK. That is a meaningless distinction--any restriction must ultimately come down to a legal basis. I think the distinction you're looking for is the difference between legally limiting their SDK, and legally preventing you from doing any hacking on your phone whatsoever.
What Apple is not doing, and have never done, is to legally go after people who hack the phone without using the official SDK. They have never even so much as sent a threatening letter to the jailbreak folks.
There is no legal duty whatsoever to provide an SDK for an electronics device. Your legal rights to do whatever you want to your phone do not extend to forcing Apple to provide an official SDK to allow it. The law cuts both ways--you have the right to do what you want to your property, but you also have the sole responsibility for doing it.
There's no SDK for a microwave, not even a limited one.
No one's stopping people from running whatever the hell they want on their iPhone either. Apple has not sued, attacked, harassed, or taken any legal action whatsoever against the jailbreak folks. Even the "bricking" software updates were announced ahead of time and could be refused by the owner. They haven't helped them--true. But neither has my microwave manufacturer.
If you don't want the restrictions, don't use the official SDK. You will face no legal action whatsoever for doing whatever you want to the phone you own. But Apple is not legally obligated to help you do anything to the phone you own either. There is absolutely no legal duty for a company to make any electronics device a software platform. If you want to hack your phone, go right ahead, you have every right, but don't expect a helping hand. Can't have it both ways.
It's a blessing that MS actually managed to prevent Apple from owning the desktop OS market, as the tie-in with hardware too would make the IT world a much less innovative, and much more expensive place to be. On the other hand today a huge percentage of the Windows PCs out there in consumerland are infected, exploited, buggy, and problematic to use. But, the only way to prevent that is to lock down the ecosystem a bit. OS companies are apparently damned no matter what they do.
The jailbreak apps are broken by updates because they use security exploits to install. Apple closes those exploits (as they should) to improve the security of their product.
When it comes to officially supported development environments, Apple is no more likely than any other platform company to shoot themselves in the foot by choking off existing apps.
In fact, Apple has a recent history of legacy platform support that is pretty good. The switch to OS X included the Classic environment to support older software for a time. Cocoa and Carbon had equal status as development environments for years. Rosetta transparently handled PowerPC code when they switched to Intel.
An iPhone JVM implemented by Sun through the official SDK can't escape Apple's notice. If it's allowed to released, I see no reason to believe that it would be choked out later.
I've wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn't changed from 20 years ago.
Because it works. But much of computer interface HAS changed, quite a bit. Compare the original Mac OS with OS X--there are hundreds of differences, many subtle, some very significant. The interface of Windows has changed dramatically from 3.1 to Vista. Taskbars and search are two examples of significant changes.
Are there points of similarity? Of course--telephones still have numeric keypads, after all. Dining rooms chairs are about the same size and general design as they were 100 years ago. That's the way interface design works--you keep the stuff that works and improve the stuff that doesn't.
This idea that it's not significant change unless it's radically different is popular for journalists and marketers. They're looking for a dramatic story to tell or sell. That doesn't make it insightful or true though.
It's not like companies haven't been trying radically different interfaces for the past two decades. Windows alone has been trying pen- and speech-based interfaces for decades. They haven't replaced the GUI because they're simply not as useful to most people.
The only reason the iPhone interface works as it does is because the standard UI fails on such a small form factor. Tiled windows, mouse and keyboard aren't going anywhere on laptops though. At most you'll see things like multitouch made available as optional components--just like handwriting and speech recognition are today on Windows.
Portions of the iPhone interface are allegedly protected by patents. I haven't personally checked, but it may be that there are things the iPhone does that would be infringing if done by Android. Not an issue for individual hackers, but I would not expect a commercial manufacturer to risk a suit with a clear violation.
I wish we could get to the point where we don't give these people credibility via recognition. In the grand old days of more than a decade ago, it was difficult to communicate publicly without conveying credibility, because there were only a few communication vehicles--and thus each one carried measurable credibility. If one wanted to argue on a mass scale against creationism, there were only newspapers, magazines, and television programs. In any given local market there were only a set number of each. Thus to address an issue in one of these vehicles implied that it was an issue worth addressing.
This is no longer true. There are now practically infinite outlets for public communication due to technological changes that make it easy to create, publish, and find messages globally. Today those who wish to attack evolution can communicate publicly very easily on their own, and are reaching mass audiences whether they are acknowledged by science or not.
Science can no longer sit on its perch--it can no longer be choosy about what it chooses to engage. There are innumerable blogs, Web sites, YouTube videos, message board comments, e-newsletters, banner ads, books, etc out there marketing the views against established science like evolution. It is essential that they are met by equivalent communications that point out their fallacies, errors, biases, etc.
This idea that if we ignore it, it will go away, is dangerously outmoded IMO. It's pointless to worry about handing ammunition to your enemies...almost all ammunition is free now. We've just got to fight it out every chance we get.
You've written a very long post, but I just want to point out some mistakes and bad assumptions.
Turns out, the 'cultural traits' under consideration have to do with structural versus decorative 'design traits' of Polynesian canoes. Yes. That this duality can now be imposed with our superior hindsight, is the basis for the study. Such distinctions were far less clear to the ancient Polynesians than they are to you and me. At some point in the past, someone had to make that distinction for the very first time. In early societies it was most certainly NOT clear whether the braid pattern of rope or the carvings of the gods were more important to long-term survival. It was only over time that such distinctions could be made--and that is the process to which this study refers.
Starting with the same basic design, the same resources, and the same problem, one must consider the possibility that there's really not a lot of room for drift in the basic parameters of Polynesian canoe making; that in a finite amount of time one reaches a local maximum in design optimization, and learns not to wander too far from it. Stating that a local maximum is reached in finite time does not shed illumination on the process of actually reaching that maximum. Again--that's the focus of the study.
I think that, upon closer investigation, the researchers will find that the standard Polynesian fish-gathering and/or travel platform is now made of metal, and has an engine; furthermore, they will be unable to find a 'missing link' - half canoe, half trawler - that demonstrates that the former evolved into the latter. And if you study the natural history of New Zealand, you will today find stoats, but find no fossil precursors to them. The problem is one of connecting previously isolated ecosystems. Do not make the mistake of conflating physical boats with the cultural concept of "boat."
Furthermore, there does not seem to be any analysis demonstrating that the 'critical' design differences were actually responses to the environments in which the canoes found themselves, rather than just the (highly constrained) random walk of generation after generation of personal preference. This seems to betray a lack of understanding of evolutionary theory--speciation does not occur as a response to environmental differences; it occurs independently--as a kind of (semi-)random walk. The environment is one factor in determining the success of a change, but it does not itself drive or initiate change. Put another way--in a completely unchanging environment, evolution still occurs so long as any biological change can result in a competitive advantage.
There is no evidence that there is any sort of constraint placed by the construction process on the rate of change between one iteration of the design and the next. None needed--this was a comparative study. Even if you imagine very fast rates of change in structural design, the aesthetics changed even faster. And as the article notes, this particular type of statistical study is fairly common in studying genetic evolution.
"Natural" is a word of many meanings, but in the context of the scientific theory of evolution, it implies merely the absence of supernatural influence.
Your attempt to draw a distinction between human intelligence and "natural" reflects a dualistic mode of thinking that is itself unscientific and outdated. From the view of science, human intelligence and culture are as natural as any pack of wolves culling a herd.
Furthermore, the concept of fitness can only be applied in retrospect whether you're talking about genes or ideas, because the fitness can only be measured by subsequent success. A human designing a canoe has no more ability to foretell future events than a strand of DNA expressing a protein. Even now we can design a boat for today, but can we really predict the state of boat design in 100 years? Did the inventor of the transistor predict the Core 2 Duo chip? It seems obvious to me that human ideas undergo a speciation and winnowing process that is similar to genetic evolution. The unpredictability of markets demonstrates that we cannot foretell our paths.
Slashdot Mirror
The government has been in the Internet since day one. They built the damn thing after all, and its commercial history has been governed by federal laws--most recently the 1996 Telecomm Act. Anyone who tells you we should "keep the goverment out of the Internet" is trying to sell you a bridge. They're in there...the question is, are they preserving common carrier so you can serve an anti-Comcast Web site to Comcast subscribers? Or will they give Comcast the power to filter content as well as BitTorrent? Make your choice wisely.
"National security" does not in any way supersede the Presidential Records Act. In fact as federal law, passed by the Congress and signed by the President, the Presidential Records Act defines national security with respect to presidential records.
I hope that was a troll because if not, I'm feeling pretty depressed about my country right now. We're supposed to be a nation of laws.
I have a Motorola V325, which takes a USB data cable. I'm able to sync contacts and calendar with my Mac, but only by fooling the Apple sync service into thinking it's a different Motorola phone. There is absolutely no way to get pics off the phone over USB with cracking the firmware with a hex editor. This is something the phone can do, but Verizon has purposefully blocked with software. If I want pics taken with the phone I have to send them to myself one at a time, paying for each transfer. Instead I just pretend that my phone doesn't have a camera.
What a waste of technology.
Apple is not the only successful company that Jobs has led. In fact they even reference his success with Pixar in the article. What they don't talk about (because it is inconvenient to the central thesis) is that Jobs was famously hands-off on the filmmaking at Pixar. He rarely even visited because he did not like to drive that far. Taken from a different point of view--a Pixar point of view--one could write a profile of the "Steve Jobs management style" that is almost totally at odds with this one.
Google runs its servers on Linux, but with propietary tweaks. The Google search ranking algorithm is at least as secret at Apple's product roadmap, and they are no more forthcoming with their product roadmap than Apple is (remember all the random answers and stonewalling that met questions about Google's plans on a mobile phone prior to the Android announcement).
To be a large, public, consumer company you have to keep some things secret for a variety of reasons. You don't want to telegraph strategy to your competitors. You want to release things with a splash to earn unpaid media coverage. You don't want to be held legally liable for stock price movements based on R&D projects that might never get released. etc.
Apple is very closed and secretive about some things, but quite open about others. Like Google their core OS kernel is open source. Like Google they employ commonly available technologies--http, MP3, H264, AAC, Unix, USB, ATA, 802.11, etc.--but put them together in unique ways to create new products.
Then have the grace to accept your own decision and the trade-off it creates. I'm not questioning your decision, just the loud complaining that seems to accompany it.
And running active AV all the time is more like walking around all day every day wearing a condom, just in case you have sex with a hooker.
Running AV all the time is like walking around all the time wearing a condom, just in case you have sex with a hooker.
From any given graduating class from any school, some will succeed more than others. You can either bitch and moan about that, or figure out why that is and how you can stay on the upside of the discrepancy. Fairness has little to do with it--as with most things in life.
Compared some European nations, the U.S. has many problems with things like health care, sick leave, vacation, workers' rights, etc. On the other hand, it's way easier to start and grow a new business in the U.S. than it is in those nations.
This is especially true in industries with a high number of contract workers--you can work for a temp agency for a while, making a good name and good contacts, then quit the temp agency and sign contracting agreements directly. Or, you can start your own company--by using contractors, but doing things right that the other companies (now your competitors) do wrong. I live in DC and on Craigslist alone there are usually a bunch of listings for start-ups looking for contract workers.
I'm not saying it's easy--I know it's difficult to start and grow a successful business. But even the mental exercise of thinking it through can put some things in perspective.
I was just visiting some friends who are living in Palau and we went right by this cave on a snorkeling trip. One of the friends is a PA (physician's assistant) and recently served as the medical support for a crew shooting an episode of the Discovery show "Bone Detective." One of their sites was this cave.
The archaeology and anthropology of Palau is poorly researched and there is little known about the ancient cultures that lived there. My wife is an anthropologist who works at the Smithsonian and had trouble finding much material on Palau to read before travelled there.
The archaeology may also be endangered. On a sea kayaking trip in Nikko Bay, off the island of Babeldaob, we visited another cave that was known to have bones in it. But the bones were gone, and there was evidence of a hasty digging project in the floor of the cave. It was definitely not a research dig--no gridlines, no brushes or sifts, just a big hole that had clearly been dug with a shovel. We speculated that the recent attention had inspired some people to collect antiquities to sell. Hopefully that does not accelerate.
"Net neutrality" revolves around the legal principle of common carrier, which applies only to networks.
The iPhone is a piece of property that you purchase. You have every right to do whatever you want to it, but Apple is not legally obligated to help you.
If Apple starts suing people who hack their own iPhone, I'll be at the front of the line complaining. I doubt they will though, because that is very shaky legal ground. Your property rights have nothing to do with Apple being "anticompetitive." They are based on common law principles that go back hundreds of years. But as I noted, those rights do not extend to forcing Apple to provide the SDK you want.
What Apple is not doing, and have never done, is to legally go after people who hack the phone without using the official SDK. They have never even so much as sent a threatening letter to the jailbreak folks.
There is no legal duty whatsoever to provide an SDK for an electronics device. Your legal rights to do whatever you want to your phone do not extend to forcing Apple to provide an official SDK to allow it. The law cuts both ways--you have the right to do what you want to your property, but you also have the sole responsibility for doing it.
There's no SDK for a microwave, not even a limited one.
No one's stopping people from running whatever the hell they want on their iPhone either. Apple has not sued, attacked, harassed, or taken any legal action whatsoever against the jailbreak folks. Even the "bricking" software updates were announced ahead of time and could be refused by the owner. They haven't helped them--true. But neither has my microwave manufacturer.
If you don't want the restrictions, don't use the official SDK. You will face no legal action whatsoever for doing whatever you want to the phone you own. But Apple is not legally obligated to help you do anything to the phone you own either. There is absolutely no legal duty for a company to make any electronics device a software platform. If you want to hack your phone, go right ahead, you have every right, but don't expect a helping hand. Can't have it both ways.
The jailbreak apps are broken by updates because they use security exploits to install. Apple closes those exploits (as they should) to improve the security of their product.
When it comes to officially supported development environments, Apple is no more likely than any other platform company to shoot themselves in the foot by choking off existing apps.
In fact, Apple has a recent history of legacy platform support that is pretty good. The switch to OS X included the Classic environment to support older software for a time. Cocoa and Carbon had equal status as development environments for years. Rosetta transparently handled PowerPC code when they switched to Intel.
An iPhone JVM implemented by Sun through the official SDK can't escape Apple's notice. If it's allowed to released, I see no reason to believe that it would be choked out later.
Because it works. But much of computer interface HAS changed, quite a bit. Compare the original Mac OS with OS X--there are hundreds of differences, many subtle, some very significant. The interface of Windows has changed dramatically from 3.1 to Vista. Taskbars and search are two examples of significant changes.
Are there points of similarity? Of course--telephones still have numeric keypads, after all. Dining rooms chairs are about the same size and general design as they were 100 years ago. That's the way interface design works--you keep the stuff that works and improve the stuff that doesn't.
This idea that it's not significant change unless it's radically different is popular for journalists and marketers. They're looking for a dramatic story to tell or sell. That doesn't make it insightful or true though.
It's not like companies haven't been trying radically different interfaces for the past two decades. Windows alone has been trying pen- and speech-based interfaces for decades. They haven't replaced the GUI because they're simply not as useful to most people.
The only reason the iPhone interface works as it does is because the standard UI fails on such a small form factor. Tiled windows, mouse and keyboard aren't going anywhere on laptops though. At most you'll see things like multitouch made available as optional components--just like handwriting and speech recognition are today on Windows.
Portions of the iPhone interface are allegedly protected by patents. I haven't personally checked, but it may be that there are things the iPhone does that would be infringing if done by Android. Not an issue for individual hackers, but I would not expect a commercial manufacturer to risk a suit with a clear violation.
This is no longer true. There are now practically infinite outlets for public communication due to technological changes that make it easy to create, publish, and find messages globally. Today those who wish to attack evolution can communicate publicly very easily on their own, and are reaching mass audiences whether they are acknowledged by science or not.
Science can no longer sit on its perch--it can no longer be choosy about what it chooses to engage. There are innumerable blogs, Web sites, YouTube videos, message board comments, e-newsletters, banner ads, books, etc out there marketing the views against established science like evolution. It is essential that they are met by equivalent communications that point out their fallacies, errors, biases, etc.
This idea that if we ignore it, it will go away, is dangerously outmoded IMO. It's pointless to worry about handing ammunition to your enemies...almost all ammunition is free now. We've just got to fight it out every chance we get.
Sexual selection is a culling that involves no forces external to the population. Yet it is an important factor in natural selection.
"Natural" is a word of many meanings, but in the context of the scientific theory of evolution, it implies merely the absence of supernatural influence.
Your attempt to draw a distinction between human intelligence and "natural" reflects a dualistic mode of thinking that is itself unscientific and outdated. From the view of science, human intelligence and culture are as natural as any pack of wolves culling a herd.
Furthermore, the concept of fitness can only be applied in retrospect whether you're talking about genes or ideas, because the fitness can only be measured by subsequent success. A human designing a canoe has no more ability to foretell future events than a strand of DNA expressing a protein. Even now we can design a boat for today, but can we really predict the state of boat design in 100 years? Did the inventor of the transistor predict the Core 2 Duo chip? It seems obvious to me that human ideas undergo a speciation and winnowing process that is similar to genetic evolution. The unpredictability of markets demonstrates that we cannot foretell our paths.