You can do it on the iPhone as well, you just need to pay your $99/year fee and hope the Apple employee who reviews it isn't having a bad day and rejects your app "just because".
Ahh, yes. Like his fanatical rant about the evils of DRM in books, and how it could be used to control what we were allowed to read, right? glad that one never happened.
It'd be a lot easier to dismiss RMS as a "nut" if he wasn't right so damn often.
Fanatics make terrible representatives for a cause, because in a world with billions of people, the chance to get even part of what you want, without some sorts of compromise, is non-existent.
The problems of "compromising" is that far too often, all you get is to screw over the views of both sides of the debate. Sometimes the world really is black and white.
Much, much cleaner than Coal, Gas and Oil and more easily implemented at large scales than Wind and Solar, not to mention considerably cheaper than the latter.
Flickr isn't part of any government, and I see nothing that suggests they took the photos down under the orders of one. So, dick move? yeah, reprehensible? sure, but censorship? not really.
I already said what I wanted to say: you cannot declare that the US wants to keep that information secret when the overwhelming part of the US didn't even know the information existed before the leak, and given popular reactions its likely most people either don't care about it or are actively interested in knowing more.
As for it being an action "against the US" the same argument applies: it doesn't look like most people *feel* hurt by it, only the US government, therefore claiming it was against the entirety of the US sounds more like a way of rallying support for your viewpoint in the name of nationalism and less like a fair and neutral viewpoint of the situation.
In short: the US is not its government, stop confusing the two either accidentally or intentionally, as it doesn't help your argument.
We could go about all day about whether this information should have been classified Secret/Top Secret, but as it stands right now, WikiLeaks leaked information that the US government wants to keep secret. That makes it an action against the US government.
Fixed that for you. A subtle, but important distinction, particularly with a government that likes to make enemies of its own populace.
We do have ethics in everything we do, it's just the values of some people are drastically different from yours and mine and that it so happens that those kind of people are the ones in power in this world.
You've heard about the law that mandates publicly-traded companies to maximize profits, right? well, that one was born out of a similar ethical belief that many powerful individuals hold for themselves.
Dunno if you can do such a thing on the Apple store (I do think they had a prohibition on apps that depends on other apps), but one alternative would be to create a system of "plugins" that give owners of the original app the extended functionality, and make each plugin available individually on the Apple store, much like Steam does for videogames' DLC. That way you'd leverage Apple's own system to handle payment and such, avoiding the need to handle that inside your own app.
As an atheist, I understand though not share your viewpoint on the matter. However, under your view of the situation, wouldn't prayer be a nonsensical response in this case? if it was God's plan and He knows best, there's little chance of changing His plans just because we didn't like them, much like your parents and your intentions of going out at midnight when you were nine.
The way I see it, regardless of your faith or lack thereof, the best way to go around it is help as much as you can and leave prayer for when you want to get in touch with your spiritual side and have nothing better to do.
No, I think that the certification process covers so little that a modern OS can ignore UNIX design philosophy almost completely and still pass it. Which should be obvious if you've ever looked at the actual specifications.
No, they get to determine who has the legal right to use the UNIX trademark, nothing else. Trademarks are legal names, not concepts, not design philosophies, do not try to conflate them just because you want to make your OS of choice look better.
As long as that thing is good, and as long as Microsoft is ok with it.
Or as long as we don't have to ask Microsoft about it.
Most of.NET is an open standard, and while the remaining parts *are* a patent minefield, last I checked Mono was gonna keep both of them separate for those unfortunate enough to live in a country that allows software patents, and IIRC they weren't the most interesting parts of the framework anyways.
Besides, even if we did have problems with patented software, we should be throwing the entirety of the FFMpeg project to the trashbin first, as that's covered by patents owned by about half the industry rather than just Microsoft.
By definition, if an operating system is certified as complying with the Single Unix Specification, it has followed the Unix design.
Wrong. By definition, if an operating system is certifying with the Single Unix Specification, it is allowed to use the UNIX trademark in their advertising, nothing more than that. The fact that the specification was made decades after UNIX itself should make that obvious enough.
UNIX isn't a set of libraries you have to implement, it's not a bunch of binaries you have to emulate, it's a particular design philosophy and one OSX does not follow outside the very, very small part of the OS that's tailored specifically to pass the UNIX certification and little else.
The problem is that people will often start blaming at this point, when they hear these statements. They'll say, "It's nvidia's fault for not doing X" or "it's your fault because you didn't do Y" or "it's the upstream maintainer's fault because he didn't do Z". Which is, unfortunately, completely missing the point: when you are using a system to get a task done, fault does not matter.
Yes, it does. If it's NVidia's fault, then bitching to your distro's packagers about it is as useless as complaining to my waitress that my car broke down on my way to the restaurant: it may serve to take out my own frustrations, but it'll do nothing to solve the problem at hand on addition to causing an unrelated person unnecessary grief.
Even the most hardcore OSX user would readily admit it follows MacOS' design decisions rather than UNIX', and the reason why that doesn't sit well with Linux users ought to be obvious. So no, your example actually favors the GP's argument than otherwise.
Honestly, I don't think anyone has a problem with the GUI anymore, not even our grandmas (mine certainly doesn't). Even GNOME and KDE are pretty damn good for most users these days, and for us part of the geekier crowds we've still got projects like Openbox and Awesome marching ahead.
The problems, rather, lie in areas such as solid OOTB support for hardware both popular and obscure, and various kinds of software and codecs with problematic licenses. Meaning, even grandma can easily play a Theora movie on the default Ubuntu install, but it requires a certain amount of computer savvy to play one encoded in h.264/AAC with hardware acceleration.
The difficulty I think the GP was talking about, lies in all the compromises we'd have to make as a community to attract all the corporations required to provide such support, and to fulfill the arcane legalese in their licensing frameworks. You just can't do that without sacrificing some of the freedoms we take for granted today, which is why like the GP I'm not sure we should.
Because all it takes is for a single significant player to decide not to support one of the codecs in order for the other to gain dominance over the whole market. And since Apple went crying and bitching to the W3C that they weren't ever gonna implement a Free codec because they didn't wanna, we need a counterpoint for the WebM/Theora side in order to have a meaningful debate instead of the zealots going all "iOS doesn't support it, therefore it's dead". Not that it has stopped them, but at least Firefox and Chrome's marketshare has made the more rational elements pause for a bit.
And then there's the potential legal issues with a heavily patented codec for Free Software, both present and future.
In the case of Apple it's politics: they really don't like competition, and the h.264 licenses ensure the barrier of entry is high enough they don't have to worry about some puny little dev team disrupting their marketplace with some shiny new browser.
In the case of Google however, it's *also* about politics, but a slightly different take: they really don't like monopolies and oligopolies, since they tend to make dirtying and eliminating Google their first priority (see also: Bing, iPhone), and putting a Free codec in the standard ensures the big guys can't use the h.264 patents as a club to squash smaller competitors with.
Essentially, it comes down to whether you like seeing the web in the hands of a few or not. If you were around during the IE6 days, I assume you'll understand if I say I'm on Google's side in this one then.
it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
We won't, and the whole point of standards is that we shouldn't have to.
This is not the time for you technophiles to go spreading your political agenda at the cost of everyone else, this is the time for us to unite and get it right the first time around with a proper, Free standard for the web, just as all its predecessors have been.
Not really. Fact is, most of the appeal of televised sports is the illusion that you could be doing those things, given a particularly lucky streak. Of course, in reality you'd need a lot more than that, including but not limited to hitting jackpot in the proverbial genetic lottery, but that's something our willing suspension of disbelief deals with far better than chrome-plated constructs interacting in a moon-like gravity.
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You can do it on the iPhone as well, you just need to pay your $99/year fee and hope the Apple employee who reviews it isn't having a bad day and rejects your app "just because".
Yeah, he is. If the GP had been referring to Knuth, he would've left out the "one of" ;)
Ahh, yes. Like his fanatical rant about the evils of DRM in books, and how it could be used to control what we were allowed to read, right? glad that one never happened.
It'd be a lot easier to dismiss RMS as a "nut" if he wasn't right so damn often.
Fanatics make terrible representatives for a cause, because in a world with billions of people, the chance to get even part of what you want, without some sorts of compromise, is non-existent.
Obligatory XKCD.
The problems of "compromising" is that far too often, all you get is to screw over the views of both sides of the debate. Sometimes the world really is black and white.
No, that's just hobby.
I'm sorry, what were you saying about strawmans again?
Much, much cleaner than Coal, Gas and Oil and more easily implemented at large scales than Wind and Solar, not to mention considerably cheaper than the latter.
Flickr isn't part of any government, and I see nothing that suggests they took the photos down under the orders of one. So, dick move? yeah, reprehensible? sure, but censorship? not really.
I already said what I wanted to say: you cannot declare that the US wants to keep that information secret when the overwhelming part of the US didn't even know the information existed before the leak, and given popular reactions its likely most people either don't care about it or are actively interested in knowing more.
As for it being an action "against the US" the same argument applies: it doesn't look like most people *feel* hurt by it, only the US government, therefore claiming it was against the entirety of the US sounds more like a way of rallying support for your viewpoint in the name of nationalism and less like a fair and neutral viewpoint of the situation.
In short: the US is not its government, stop confusing the two either accidentally or intentionally, as it doesn't help your argument.
We could go about all day about whether this information should have been classified Secret/Top Secret, but as it stands right now, WikiLeaks leaked information that the US government wants to keep secret. That makes it an action against the US government.
Fixed that for you. A subtle, but important distinction, particularly with a government that likes to make enemies of its own populace.
We do have ethics in everything we do, it's just the values of some people are drastically different from yours and mine and that it so happens that those kind of people are the ones in power in this world.
You've heard about the law that mandates publicly-traded companies to maximize profits, right? well, that one was born out of a similar ethical belief that many powerful individuals hold for themselves.
Dunno if you can do such a thing on the Apple store (I do think they had a prohibition on apps that depends on other apps), but one alternative would be to create a system of "plugins" that give owners of the original app the extended functionality, and make each plugin available individually on the Apple store, much like Steam does for videogames' DLC. That way you'd leverage Apple's own system to handle payment and such, avoiding the need to handle that inside your own app.
As an atheist, I understand though not share your viewpoint on the matter. However, under your view of the situation, wouldn't prayer be a nonsensical response in this case? if it was God's plan and He knows best, there's little chance of changing His plans just because we didn't like them, much like your parents and your intentions of going out at midnight when you were nine.
The way I see it, regardless of your faith or lack thereof, the best way to go around it is help as much as you can and leave prayer for when you want to get in touch with your spiritual side and have nothing better to do.
No, I think that the certification process covers so little that a modern OS can ignore UNIX design philosophy almost completely and still pass it. Which should be obvious if you've ever looked at the actual specifications.
No, they get to determine who has the legal right to use the UNIX trademark, nothing else. Trademarks are legal names, not concepts, not design philosophies, do not try to conflate them just because you want to make your OS of choice look better.
As long as that thing is good, and as long as Microsoft is ok with it.
Or as long as we don't have to ask Microsoft about it.
Most of .NET is an open standard, and while the remaining parts *are* a patent minefield, last I checked Mono was gonna keep both of them separate for those unfortunate enough to live in a country that allows software patents, and IIRC they weren't the most interesting parts of the framework anyways.
Besides, even if we did have problems with patented software, we should be throwing the entirety of the FFMpeg project to the trashbin first, as that's covered by patents owned by about half the industry rather than just Microsoft.
By definition, if an operating system is certified as complying with the Single Unix Specification, it has followed the Unix design.
Wrong. By definition, if an operating system is certifying with the Single Unix Specification, it is allowed to use the UNIX trademark in their advertising, nothing more than that. The fact that the specification was made decades after UNIX itself should make that obvious enough.
UNIX isn't a set of libraries you have to implement, it's not a bunch of binaries you have to emulate, it's a particular design philosophy and one OSX does not follow outside the very, very small part of the OS that's tailored specifically to pass the UNIX certification and little else.
The problem is that people will often start blaming at this point, when they hear these statements. They'll say, "It's nvidia's fault for not doing X" or "it's your fault because you didn't do Y" or "it's the upstream maintainer's fault because he didn't do Z". Which is, unfortunately, completely missing the point: when you are using a system to get a task done, fault does not matter.
Yes, it does. If it's NVidia's fault, then bitching to your distro's packagers about it is as useless as complaining to my waitress that my car broke down on my way to the restaurant: it may serve to take out my own frustrations, but it'll do nothing to solve the problem at hand on addition to causing an unrelated person unnecessary grief.
Even the most hardcore OSX user would readily admit it follows MacOS' design decisions rather than UNIX', and the reason why that doesn't sit well with Linux users ought to be obvious. So no, your example actually favors the GP's argument than otherwise.
Honestly, I don't think anyone has a problem with the GUI anymore, not even our grandmas (mine certainly doesn't). Even GNOME and KDE are pretty damn good for most users these days, and for us part of the geekier crowds we've still got projects like Openbox and Awesome marching ahead.
The problems, rather, lie in areas such as solid OOTB support for hardware both popular and obscure, and various kinds of software and codecs with problematic licenses. Meaning, even grandma can easily play a Theora movie on the default Ubuntu install, but it requires a certain amount of computer savvy to play one encoded in h.264/AAC with hardware acceleration.
The difficulty I think the GP was talking about, lies in all the compromises we'd have to make as a community to attract all the corporations required to provide such support, and to fulfill the arcane legalese in their licensing frameworks. You just can't do that without sacrificing some of the freedoms we take for granted today, which is why like the GP I'm not sure we should.
It's one of the perks of operating a multi-billion dollar business: you can easily afford any paywall your competitors try to burden you with.
Sucks for everyone else, though, and thankfully Google is well aware of that.
Because all it takes is for a single significant player to decide not to support one of the codecs in order for the other to gain dominance over the whole market. And since Apple went crying and bitching to the W3C that they weren't ever gonna implement a Free codec because they didn't wanna, we need a counterpoint for the WebM/Theora side in order to have a meaningful debate instead of the zealots going all "iOS doesn't support it, therefore it's dead". Not that it has stopped them, but at least Firefox and Chrome's marketshare has made the more rational elements pause for a bit.
And then there's the potential legal issues with a heavily patented codec for Free Software, both present and future.
In the case of Apple it's politics: they really don't like competition, and the h.264 licenses ensure the barrier of entry is high enough they don't have to worry about some puny little dev team disrupting their marketplace with some shiny new browser.
In the case of Google however, it's *also* about politics, but a slightly different take: they really don't like monopolies and oligopolies, since they tend to make dirtying and eliminating Google their first priority (see also: Bing, iPhone), and putting a Free codec in the standard ensures the big guys can't use the h.264 patents as a club to squash smaller competitors with.
Essentially, it comes down to whether you like seeing the web in the hands of a few or not. If you were around during the IE6 days, I assume you'll understand if I say I'm on Google's side in this one then.
it's completely free of charge for at least another 5 years - by which time we will have probably moved on to something better.
We won't, and the whole point of standards is that we shouldn't have to.
This is not the time for you technophiles to go spreading your political agenda at the cost of everyone else, this is the time for us to unite and get it right the first time around with a proper, Free standard for the web, just as all its predecessors have been.
Not really. Fact is, most of the appeal of televised sports is the illusion that you could be doing those things, given a particularly lucky streak. Of course, in reality you'd need a lot more than that, including but not limited to hitting jackpot in the proverbial genetic lottery, but that's something our willing suspension of disbelief deals with far better than chrome-plated constructs interacting in a moon-like gravity.