On the rare occasion that weapons aren't just built for the sake of defense industry profits and dig-hole-fill-hole economic stimulus, the USA almost always uses/sells them for bad purposes.
This statement is way too charged to respond to in any depth. You are framing the discussion in a way that says nearly every bit of military spending is: 1) Intended to line the pockets of a few rich executives in the defense/aerospace industry; 2) Intended to just circulate money around the economy with no real military benefit; 3) Intended for sale to oppressive third parties who will use the technology poorly;
Cite some examples, please, and then we might have a useful discussion of whether or not your assertion that "almost all" defense spending falls into one of those categories is justified, and then talk about the waste and injustice that they inevitably cause.
And even with all the expenditure, a massive bureaucratic weapons procurement process inevitably leaves troops rather badly equipped as we saw in the recent Iraq war.
Yes, it does often do that - and I would consider this a very-nearly criminal act on the part of the civilian & military leadership. To deploy troops into a warzone without them having a plan in place to supply those troops with the best equipment we have available for them to accomplish their mission is monstrous. I will acknowledge the practical realities that dictate that we must at times move lightly equipped units which are capable of rapid functional deployment - typically, Airborne / ranger / recon / special-ops type units - into a warzone to get "boots on the ground," not having a plan to get those troops the support they need and the best equipment we have available as soon as possible is wrong, unjust, immoral, and rightly deserving of the loudest criticism we can muster - when it happens, it is a huge failing of the military & civilian leadership.
Sure, you could argue that Kuwait was a construct of the western powers after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but if you want to argue that, then you must also concede that modern Iraq is primarily a result of that same process. In which case, Iraq had no more "right" to Kuwait than anybody else. We can argue the merits of carving up the Ottoman Empire after world war 1 ad nauseam, and point out how it laid the groundwork for much of the conflict in the present middle east, but you can't say "Kuwait was historically governed by Basra" without also conceding that modern day Iraq, which encompassed modern day Basra, had very little resemblance to the Basra that used to govern Kuwait.
But what if our Western governments are currently almost exclusively involving themselves in offensive wars for the protection of special interests?
Then it is up to us to elect wiser politicians and stop this trend, and demand more emphasis on diplomacy. As I noted in my final sentence, "it is also your moral responsibility to ensure that your government does not misuse those tools for immoral ends." I am not saying diplomacy is irrelevant or useless by any means, it should always be the first, and most heavily used "weapon" in international relations. That governments will use weapons of war immorally is not an issue with the weapons of war themselves - it is an issue with the governments being elected. I'm not saying the way things are is perfect, and that no changes or further regulation are needed.
Why not just double funding to the military?
Because there are practical limits to the size and amount of money you can spend on your military without running the rest of your country into the ground.
Why not require criminals to act as human shields?
Because it would be immoral to force someone to give their life in defense of something they have not volunteered to serve.
Why not pre-emptively nuke every country which looks at you wrongly, just to ensure that all American and British soldiers' lives are kept intact?
Because a war that wants to have a claim at being "justifiable" should make serious (reasonable) attempts to limit the deaths of non-combatants and limit collateral damage.
Finally, I do find it difficult to understand why people have such a respect for the lives of their own military vs the lives of civilians in an enemy country.
Because they are *my* military. I - through my lawfully elected government - am asking them to put their lives in grave danger on my behalf, and am asking them to walk a tremendously fine line - do violence to those who oppose them and their mission, and do little-or-no harm to those who are peaceful non-combatants. Yes, civilians are killed during a war. It is unfortunate, and I am sorry for all of those civilians who are killed. But if you look at the development of weaponry you're decrying the development of, huge amounts of development - smart bombs, camera-equipped drones, night vision advancements, laser-guided and satellite-guided cruise missiles - all of this is aimed at *precision* - being able to strike *exactly* at the target you wish to, while minimizing damage to surrounding people & infrastructure.
Is the aim of war to defend our country against invaders (so why Kosovo?)? To defend peaceful traders against tyrants? To reduce human suffering? To protect our interests home and abroad?
I would say that a legitimate, justifiable, moral war could be fought on any of these grounds. Defending your country against invaders is certainly reasonable; protecting traders against tyrants is simply a subset of "protecting our interests at home and abroad," and I believe that these are also legitimate aims of war where diplomacy and regulation have failed. And reducing human suffering is also a le
I think you're both partially right. I don't think the goal is to "blast the crops with enough microwaves to cook them," I think the point is "warm the plants & fruit/vegetables a few degrees so that frost doesn't accumulate on them. In other words, put out enough radiation to keep your oranges & trees at a comfortable 50 degrees ("or even room temperature-ish"), even if the air gets down to 30 degrees. The point isn't to bombard them with microwaves until they're cooked, it's to warm the plant just enough to keep frost from forming on the leaves and fruit.
I doubt that this thing is bombarding the crops all night with high intensity microwaves, it's probably got temperature sensors tied to it, to cycle the microwave emitter on and off just enough to keep the plants in their "optimal" temperature range.
And, full disclosure: I do not currently work for a defense contractor, but I have interviewed with several, most recently for a job in which I would have been working on several military aircraft control systems for BAE. I declined the job offer because the pay offered was not what I had hoped for, and we couldn't reach an agreeable number. If the pay had been in line with what I wanted, I would have had no moral issue with accepting the position whatsoever, and would certainly have no issue with applying for (or working at) a defense contractor in the future.
Your original question is certainly weighted and strongly indicative of what you consider moral - go back and reread it, and tell me if there's any way to interpret that except that you believe it to be a monstrously immoral decision, since you can't conceive of or offer any rationale that would be moral?
And for the record, you implying something doesn't mean that I have had your morality forced on me, or that I agree with, or accept, your implication.:)
I responded in earnest to one of your posts above - I hope you'll read that response, and I hope you'll make an earnest attempt to understand, if not agree.
First, can you agree that "war" - with all its ugliness, misery, and violence - is sometimes a moral and justifiable course of action? You don't have to agree that it always is, or even that it "frequently" is - but if we can't agree that some use of military force is morally justified, then we have no basis for discussion, and I'll call you a smelly treehugging hippie, you can call me a dirty miltaristic ape, and we can stop the conversation right there.
If we can agree that sometimes war is justifiable, then let's back up and consider a couple wars that we can probably consider to be justified - the NATO involvement in the Kosovo war, and the UN involvement in Operation Desert Storm back in the early 90's. Both of these involved HEAVY multilateral diplomacy from NATO & the UN, and in both cases, diplomacy failed. I don't want to bring the current conflicts in Afghanistan & Iraq into this because both are fraught with politics far beyond the scope of whether or not the conflict there is justifiable, and I've no wish to sit here engaging in "Bush Lied People Died" / "Freedom Fries for Patriots" bumper-sticker-level bullshit soundbites - it's counterproductive, and neither side is capable of being objective about it.
So, diplomacy failed in Kosovo & Kuwait, and regrettably, the only course left was to deploy military forces in order to end the fighting in Kosovo & to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. In other words - American, Canadian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, British, Irish, French, German, Belgian, Spanish etc (name a country if yours was involved and isn't on this list - it's not an exhaustive list by any means) boys and girls were going to be fed into a meat grinder in order to accomplish the goals that diplomacy had failed to achieve. This is a horrible decision, and should never be made lightly and without long, sober thought.
Now, is where we're going to diverge I suspect. In a case like that, where young men and women are being deployed into a warzone on behalf of me and/or the rightfully elected government of my country, I consider it my absolute moral imperative to provide those young men and women with the best weapons and defensive tools my mind can create for them, in the hopes that every single one of them will come home to their families and other loved ones safely. If that means they're facing down people with machetes and rocks with an M-60 and a Blackhawk helicopter, I don't give a shit about the force imbalance there - if the citizens of the country that we're facing were too poor or too immoral to provide their own young men and women with better weapons, that's not my problem - they're not acting on the behalf of my government, they're not acting on behalf of me, and if it were up to me, they'd lay down those rocks and machetes, make nice, and let all of the young men and women from MY country come home.
Asking an 18 year old from New Orleans (or Galway, or Beijing, or Moscow, or... name our city) to charge a hardened bunker full of Serbs with nothing to lose, using nothing but a pistol and a folding knife because we've "abandoned defense research" is immoral. Suggesting that telling a group of 18 year olds pinned down in a deadly ambush that "sorry, we don't have any A-10's available to provide close air support because we've abandoned defense research and engaged in arms limitation treaties, looks like your toast kids" is fucking monstrous, and should be considered a war crime on the part of the military those young men and women belong to.
What it boils down to is this: if war is occasionally, unfortunately, justifiable & necessary, then you prepare to prosecute that war as hard, deadly, and effectively as you can. That means it is moral to develop new weapons in the service of that aim, and that it is immoral to not protect and arm your troops as well as you can afford & design. If you are willing to ask someone to fight and die for your country in the military, you owe it to
Why is working for Raytheon (or any other defense contractor) implied to be an *immoral* choice?
I'm interested.
("Make love not war" is naive nonsense, of course - why really? Is it just that you don't bother thinking through the consequences of trying to live in a dangerous world without any means for defending yourself?)
Yep, because google's not an advertising company, and would never want to, say, install an app that brings you the "great new feature" of automatically pinging their servers with a GPS coordinate and downloading location-relevant ads right to your phone!
Point is - you aren't offered a choice. Point is - you aren't being asked, "is it okay if we do this?" I don't care what the feature is, I'd take severe issue with someone deciding, "here you need this." And let's be honest - updates aren't always flawless... if Google bricks my phone accidentally, will I be able to recover any important data I might have had on there?
And one other note on pricing - everything I can find about T-Mobile's offering of the Samsung "Vibrant" & AT&T's offering of the Samsung "Captivate" is speculating that it will be offered at $199; AT&T is offering the iPhone 4 for $199 for the 16GB model, and $299 for the 32GB model.
Considering the wikipedia article about the Galaxy S states that it was selling without a contract for nearly $780 USD (SG$1098) when launched in Singapore, I think it's likely you'll see this selling in the $199 - $299 on T-Mobile & AT&T. So, it's expandable to up to 32GB with a 16GB MicroSD card - which, on newegg, appear to cost about $50-$75 USD, putting the Galaxy S more or less at the same price as the iPhone 4 for comparable storage - $25 cheaper, perhaps? I'd call that "nearly as expensive."
And when you're talking about devices whose dimensions are given in millimeters, those millimeters of difference are noticeable. You can't claim that all of the devices you named are thinner than the iPhone when they are, in fact, not. You're the one who brought up "thinner with user replaceable batteries" as criteria for this discussion.
And when you consider the *volume* of the devices, the iPhone 4 is nearly 15,000 cubic mm smaller in total volume than the Galaxy S, while providing what appears to be significantly better battery life, even if the Galaxy S lives up to every minute of it's supposed 393 minutes of 3G talk time, per the Wikipedia page I cited above.
So, what accounts for that difference in size? You already identified it: user replaceable battery, micro SD, and USB socket. I will certainly concede that the Galaxy S is a "reasonably usable size" given its features, but your claim that it's "thinner and has better battery performance" than the iPhone while maintaining a user-serviceable battery is simply not true.
As I said before, losing those components means Apple can fill more of the case with a non-user-serviceable battery, which means they can either make the phone smaller (in this case thinner) or make the battery bigger (for better performance). Either way, there *is* a discernible benefit to the consumer. Whether or not that benefit outweighs the loss of the removable battery is a subjective judgement that each user must make. For many people, the fewer moving / removable parts and better performance of the iPhone are clearly acceptable trade-offs to make, or they wouldn't be buying the iPhone.
But nowhere in the article, or in the Android Marketplace TOS (Section 2.4) do they state that "only those copies downloaded from the Marketplace will be remotely deleted."
Are they deleting any copy, no matter where it was from? Can they tell the difference remotely between a copy that was downloaded from the Marketplace and one that was installed by the user via other means?
Are you comfortable with that? Are you sure what sort of restrictions Google has imposed on themselves?
I never said "apple is just as open as Android," I said "it sounds like Android isn't as free and open as people seem to enjoy trumpeting every time the iPhone is mentioned."
Quick baseline - how many apps have you written for your own Android device? And how many apps have you installed that didn't come from the Marketplace? And were you even aware of this clause in the Marketplace's terms of service before today's article? I'm genuinely curious.
Absolutely. I have seen some very good stuff around the newer 2.x versions of Android, and my limited exposure to the Nexus One leads me to believe that it's a remarkably good device, and I'm sure the Droid & HTC stuff coming out now & over the next year will be, as well.
And I'm happy to see that - it will only mean Apple has to keep working hard to keep up in the iPhone, and perhaps HP/Palm with WebOS, and even Microsoft with Windows Phone. I want there to be lots of vigorous competition in this space, even if I never purchase a Palm or Windows or Android device (I currently own an iPhone 3G, full disclosure).
I'm sorry you feel I'm putting words in your mouth.
In that case, please explain to me how your comment that "Just becasue -we- realize this doesn't mean the Canadian law enforcement realizes this." can be taken as anything other than a commentary on how smart the average slashdotter is, compared to the average person working in canadian law enforcement?
There are a host of other reasons other than "public ridicule" that makes this a "bad idea". I cited the public ridicule effect due to the simple fact that this happening during the G20 summit means that this will be all over the press as a result - it's international news, not just "some crackpot got busted with what we thought were explosives in his backyard, turns out we were wrong, ha ha!" written up in the local paper.
Samsung Galaxy S: Dimensions: 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 millimeters (77795.0 cubic mm volume) Battery: 1500 mAh, rated for 393 minutes of 3G talk time. Announced: March, 2010
HTC Hero: Dimensions: 112 x 56.2 x 14.35 millimeters (90324.6 cubic mm volume) Battery: 1350 mAh, rated for 470 minutes of GSM talk time. Announced: June, 2009
Nexus One: Dimensions: 119 x 59.8 x 11.5 millimeters (81836.3 cubic mm volume) Battery: 1400 mAh, rated for "up to 10 hours" of talk time, or "up to 5 hours" of browsing. Available: January 5, 2010
iPhone 3GS: Dimensions: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 millimeters (88222.4 cubic mm volume) Battery: 1219 mAh, rated for "up to 12 hours" of talk time (2G, 5hrs 3G), or "up to 5 hours" of browsing. Available: June, 2009
iPhone 4: Dimensions: 115.2 x 58.66 x 9.3 millimeters (62846.0 cubic mm volume) Battery: 1420 mAh, rated for "up to 14 hours" of talk time (2G, 7 hrs 3G), or "up to 6 hours" of browsing. Available: June, 2010
Your original point was that "many" other phones are slimmer AND provide more battery life with a user-serviceable battery than the iPhone. So please, identify for me which one in the list above is clearly slimmer and provides a significantly higher battery life, as per the marketing specs all of these manufacturers provide? Even the iPhone 3GS, which was admittedly a bit thicker than the Galaxy & Nexus, is quite competitive in terms of battery performance against the other phones.
After a year I can buy a genuine new one for £5 and get my original battery performance back where as a chump with an iPhone has to pay £50 for the same thing.
My iPhone 3G is just about 2 years old right now. I have never replaced the battery. I have not noticed a significant battery degradation over the life of the phone so far - I use it in a pretty consistent fashion, and use it pretty heavily for phone conferences for work, browsing the web, checking email, and even use it as an ipod at the gym. The battery is expected to hold 80% of it's maximum charge through ~400 recharge cycles. This means that, even if you do a full charge/discharge every day, it would need to be replaced approximately once every 13.5 months. Most normal usage doesn't approach the level of a full charge/discharge cycle every day; 2 years on, and mine is still going strong.
I won't bother explaining to you how, in a device that is 14.3mm thick, a plastic wall that is "only 1mm thick" is actually a significant amount of thickness. I'm sure you have a passing familiarity with 3-dimensional space, though you seem obstinate in refusing to believe that 2 objects cannot physically occupy the same space.
Thing is there are plenty of rival phones which have better battery life and are thinner than an iPhone
Such as? Please provide me with a few examples that are both thinner, and have proven to have better battery life, than an iPhone. You can't make a claim like that without backing it up with some sort of data.
your argument does not make much sense anyway, for example what does having an irregularly shaped battery have to do with anything?
It has everything to do with maximizing the volume of the battery inside the case - you lose all the contacts, casing, plastic guides, latches, and other "stuff" that comes with making a user-serviceable battery. Much of that space that would have been taken up by those components can now be devoted to holding battery cells, which means the volume of the battery is larger, which means there's more juice in the battery to power the device.
Why would they be harder to replace than any of the many other custom batteries that you find in phones?
Because as soon as you start making them user-serviceable, you have to build in the aforementioned latches, contacts, insulation, guides and supports, etc. Look at the inside of your battery compartment, and think about how much volume is taken up by the compartment, versus the volume of all the plastic and metal surrounding the battery compartment. Then ask whether or not a significantly larger battery could be dropped into that space if all the support components were gone.
Batteries should be recycled, but so should all the other electronic components in your cell phone anyway. Drop the whole thing in the hands of a proper recycling program, you shouldn't be recycling the battery and binning the rest.
The hypocrisy is evident in the treatment of Apple (with their "draconian controls") and the emphasis on how much open and more free Android is.
So open and free that Google will feel free to reach out and delete stuff from your phone if it feels it shouldn't be there.
I don't object to the idea of a curated experience, and in fact, I think it's what many (perhaps most) users actually want. I just wish people here on slashdot would stop pretending that something being "Android" miraculously means it's free of any controls or restrictions. This case proves it, and it'll be interesting to see exactly how often this sort of functionality gets used.
Friends say Mr. Sonne spoke openly about testing the limits of summit security by broadcasting police movements he could hear on a public radio band via Twitter, and had talked about wanting to buy items online that would "trigger some flags."
"He's got some extreme ideas about how to go about testing these things," said Seth Hardy, who has known Mr. Sonne for several years.
And if he was "just testing," he still was behaving suspiciously - intentionally so, and now gets to find out exactly how good the security is at the G20 summit. When police see somebody behaving suspiciously and believe they could pose a threat, it is the job of those officers to stop the person from being a threat.
Misunderstandings are possible, but when the guy has, as reported, publicly stated his intention to test the security without any coordination with those security services, how exactly would you have them react? Ignore him?
Difficult to know that, without knowing how they accomplished the feat of deleting software remotely. How do they know you have that particular piece of software installed? Did they query handsets and ask for a list of installed software? Did they simply push down a blanket "delete software named X" command? What if I wanted to keep that software on my handset for some reason, like say, I'm the researcher that wrote it, or a similar research with an interest in this software?
A third party taking control of your device for even a few moments has a lot of privacy and control implications if you stop to think about it.
His friends have reported that he "told them he was going to test security," by monitoring communications, sending emails with suspicious keywords, and the like.
Did you RTFA or any of the associated coverage at all? "Publicly stating" doesn't necessarily mean he disseminated his intent to everybody in the world, with affirmative confirmation that we all knew what he was about.
I don't use Android Marketplace. I'm pointing out the blatant hypocrisy inherent in Slashdot's 'prevailing wisdom' that Android is completely free of controls, and iOS is so locked down as to be unusable - as if it's a fact of nature that Google = Good / Apple = Bad, rather than an opinion about a service that, as you correctly state, both companies provide that adds value.
Re:You also can't load code onto your microwave
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iPhone 4 News Roundup
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Let's use your same rhetorical game, but flip the script!
iPhone owner's decision making process: "I like the idea of somebody else reviewing the apps so I have less to worry about, and the device works really well, therefore I'll buy it."
Android device owner's decision making process: "FOSS-gasm!" or "A rabid neckbeard on Slashdot can't shut the fuck up about how his device is the most amazing thing ever, and everything else sucks balls, so it MUST be true!"
Sorry, that doesn't fly, try again. The iPhone 3GS is one of the most expensive handsets available through AT&T.
There are numerous other phones available for a much lower price. You can't say that "subsidies" are the reason people are buying iPhones, when other handsets cost significantly less than the iPhone with a subsidy.
Apple removes apps from the store, they do not remove apps from your device.
Google nukes it, and then lets you reinstall it if you want? Why go through the theater of nuking it from devices then? "It's SO INSECURE that we have to take control of your phone and remove it. But don't worry, you can always put your phone back to being insecure later."
Slashdot Mirror
This statement is way too charged to respond to in any depth. You are framing the discussion in a way that says nearly every bit of military spending is:
1) Intended to line the pockets of a few rich executives in the defense/aerospace industry;
2) Intended to just circulate money around the economy with no real military benefit;
3) Intended for sale to oppressive third parties who will use the technology poorly;
Cite some examples, please, and then we might have a useful discussion of whether or not your assertion that "almost all" defense spending falls into one of those categories is justified, and then talk about the waste and injustice that they inevitably cause.
Yes, it does often do that - and I would consider this a very-nearly criminal act on the part of the civilian & military leadership. To deploy troops into a warzone without them having a plan in place to supply those troops with the best equipment we have available for them to accomplish their mission is monstrous. I will acknowledge the practical realities that dictate that we must at times move lightly equipped units which are capable of rapid functional deployment - typically, Airborne / ranger / recon / special-ops type units - into a warzone to get "boots on the ground," not having a plan to get those troops the support they need and the best equipment we have available as soon as possible is wrong, unjust, immoral, and rightly deserving of the loudest criticism we can muster - when it happens, it is a huge failing of the military & civilian leadership.
Sure, you could argue that Kuwait was a construct of the western powers after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, but if you want to argue that, then you must also concede that modern Iraq is primarily a result of that same process. In which case, Iraq had no more "right" to Kuwait than anybody else. We can argue the merits of carving up the Ottoman Empire after world war 1 ad nauseam, and point out how it laid the groundwork for much of the conflict in the present middle east, but you can't say "Kuwait was historically governed by Basra" without also conceding that modern day Iraq, which encompassed modern day Basra, had very little resemblance to the Basra that used to govern Kuwait.
Then it is up to us to elect wiser politicians and stop this trend, and demand more emphasis on diplomacy. As I noted in my final sentence, "it is also your moral responsibility to ensure that your government does not misuse those tools for immoral ends." I am not saying diplomacy is irrelevant or useless by any means, it should always be the first, and most heavily used "weapon" in international relations. That governments will use weapons of war immorally is not an issue with the weapons of war themselves - it is an issue with the governments being elected. I'm not saying the way things are is perfect, and that no changes or further regulation are needed.
Because there are practical limits to the size and amount of money you can spend on your military without running the rest of your country into the ground.
Because it would be immoral to force someone to give their life in defense of something they have not volunteered to serve.
Because a war that wants to have a claim at being "justifiable" should make serious (reasonable) attempts to limit the deaths of non-combatants and limit collateral damage.
Because they are *my* military. I - through my lawfully elected government - am asking them to put their lives in grave danger on my behalf, and am asking them to walk a tremendously fine line - do violence to those who oppose them and their mission, and do little-or-no harm to those who are peaceful non-combatants. Yes, civilians are killed during a war. It is unfortunate, and I am sorry for all of those civilians who are killed. But if you look at the development of weaponry you're decrying the development of, huge amounts of development - smart bombs, camera-equipped drones, night vision advancements, laser-guided and satellite-guided cruise missiles - all of this is aimed at *precision* - being able to strike *exactly* at the target you wish to, while minimizing damage to surrounding people & infrastructure.
I would say that a legitimate, justifiable, moral war could be fought on any of these grounds. Defending your country against invaders is certainly reasonable; protecting traders against tyrants is simply a subset of "protecting our interests at home and abroad," and I believe that these are also legitimate aims of war where diplomacy and regulation have failed. And reducing human suffering is also a le
I think you're both partially right. I don't think the goal is to "blast the crops with enough microwaves to cook them," I think the point is "warm the plants & fruit/vegetables a few degrees so that frost doesn't accumulate on them. In other words, put out enough radiation to keep your oranges & trees at a comfortable 50 degrees ("or even room temperature-ish"), even if the air gets down to 30 degrees. The point isn't to bombard them with microwaves until they're cooked, it's to warm the plant just enough to keep frost from forming on the leaves and fruit.
I doubt that this thing is bombarding the crops all night with high intensity microwaves, it's probably got temperature sensors tied to it, to cycle the microwave emitter on and off just enough to keep the plants in their "optimal" temperature range.
And, full disclosure: I do not currently work for a defense contractor, but I have interviewed with several, most recently for a job in which I would have been working on several military aircraft control systems for BAE. I declined the job offer because the pay offered was not what I had hoped for, and we couldn't reach an agreeable number. If the pay had been in line with what I wanted, I would have had no moral issue with accepting the position whatsoever, and would certainly have no issue with applying for (or working at) a defense contractor in the future.
Your original question is certainly weighted and strongly indicative of what you consider moral - go back and reread it, and tell me if there's any way to interpret that except that you believe it to be a monstrously immoral decision, since you can't conceive of or offer any rationale that would be moral?
And for the record, you implying something doesn't mean that I have had your morality forced on me, or that I agree with, or accept, your implication. :)
I responded in earnest to one of your posts above - I hope you'll read that response, and I hope you'll make an earnest attempt to understand, if not agree.
Let's set the basis for discussion.
First, can you agree that "war" - with all its ugliness, misery, and violence - is sometimes a moral and justifiable course of action? You don't have to agree that it always is, or even that it "frequently" is - but if we can't agree that some use of military force is morally justified, then we have no basis for discussion, and I'll call you a smelly treehugging hippie, you can call me a dirty miltaristic ape, and we can stop the conversation right there.
If we can agree that sometimes war is justifiable, then let's back up and consider a couple wars that we can probably consider to be justified - the NATO involvement in the Kosovo war, and the UN involvement in Operation Desert Storm back in the early 90's. Both of these involved HEAVY multilateral diplomacy from NATO & the UN, and in both cases, diplomacy failed. I don't want to bring the current conflicts in Afghanistan & Iraq into this because both are fraught with politics far beyond the scope of whether or not the conflict there is justifiable, and I've no wish to sit here engaging in "Bush Lied People Died" / "Freedom Fries for Patriots" bumper-sticker-level bullshit soundbites - it's counterproductive, and neither side is capable of being objective about it.
So, diplomacy failed in Kosovo & Kuwait, and regrettably, the only course left was to deploy military forces in order to end the fighting in Kosovo & to restore Kuwaiti sovereignty. In other words - American, Canadian, Chinese, Russian, Japanese, British, Irish, French, German, Belgian, Spanish etc (name a country if yours was involved and isn't on this list - it's not an exhaustive list by any means) boys and girls were going to be fed into a meat grinder in order to accomplish the goals that diplomacy had failed to achieve. This is a horrible decision, and should never be made lightly and without long, sober thought.
Now, is where we're going to diverge I suspect. In a case like that, where young men and women are being deployed into a warzone on behalf of me and/or the rightfully elected government of my country, I consider it my absolute moral imperative to provide those young men and women with the best weapons and defensive tools my mind can create for them, in the hopes that every single one of them will come home to their families and other loved ones safely. If that means they're facing down people with machetes and rocks with an M-60 and a Blackhawk helicopter, I don't give a shit about the force imbalance there - if the citizens of the country that we're facing were too poor or too immoral to provide their own young men and women with better weapons, that's not my problem - they're not acting on the behalf of my government, they're not acting on behalf of me, and if it were up to me, they'd lay down those rocks and machetes, make nice, and let all of the young men and women from MY country come home.
Asking an 18 year old from New Orleans (or Galway, or Beijing, or Moscow, or... name our city) to charge a hardened bunker full of Serbs with nothing to lose, using nothing but a pistol and a folding knife because we've "abandoned defense research" is immoral. Suggesting that telling a group of 18 year olds pinned down in a deadly ambush that "sorry, we don't have any A-10's available to provide close air support because we've abandoned defense research and engaged in arms limitation treaties, looks like your toast kids" is fucking monstrous, and should be considered a war crime on the part of the military those young men and women belong to.
What it boils down to is this: if war is occasionally, unfortunately, justifiable & necessary, then you prepare to prosecute that war as hard, deadly, and effectively as you can. That means it is moral to develop new weapons in the service of that aim, and that it is immoral to not protect and arm your troops as well as you can afford & design. If you are willing to ask someone to fight and die for your country in the military, you owe it to
Why is working for Raytheon (or any other defense contractor) implied to be an *immoral* choice?
I'm interested.
("Make love not war" is naive nonsense, of course - why really? Is it just that you don't bother thinking through the consequences of trying to live in a dangerous world without any means for defending yourself?)
Yep, because google's not an advertising company, and would never want to, say, install an app that brings you the "great new feature" of automatically pinging their servers with a GPS coordinate and downloading location-relevant ads right to your phone!
Point is - you aren't offered a choice. Point is - you aren't being asked, "is it okay if we do this?" I don't care what the feature is, I'd take severe issue with someone deciding, "here you need this." And let's be honest - updates aren't always flawless... if Google bricks my phone accidentally, will I be able to recover any important data I might have had on there?
If it's google software, it's "Perfectly Secure Browser (Beta!)" and will remain so for a good couple years before it reaches v 1.0.
And one other note on pricing - everything I can find about T-Mobile's offering of the Samsung "Vibrant" & AT&T's offering of the Samsung "Captivate" is speculating that it will be offered at $199; AT&T is offering the iPhone 4 for $199 for the 16GB model, and $299 for the 32GB model.
Considering the wikipedia article about the Galaxy S states that it was selling without a contract for nearly $780 USD (SG$1098) when launched in Singapore, I think it's likely you'll see this selling in the $199 - $299 on T-Mobile & AT&T. So, it's expandable to up to 32GB with a 16GB MicroSD card - which, on newegg, appear to cost about $50-$75 USD, putting the Galaxy S more or less at the same price as the iPhone 4 for comparable storage - $25 cheaper, perhaps? I'd call that "nearly as expensive."
And when you're talking about devices whose dimensions are given in millimeters, those millimeters of difference are noticeable. You can't claim that all of the devices you named are thinner than the iPhone when they are, in fact, not. You're the one who brought up "thinner with user replaceable batteries" as criteria for this discussion.
And when you consider the *volume* of the devices, the iPhone 4 is nearly 15,000 cubic mm smaller in total volume than the Galaxy S, while providing what appears to be significantly better battery life, even if the Galaxy S lives up to every minute of it's supposed 393 minutes of 3G talk time, per the Wikipedia page I cited above.
So, what accounts for that difference in size? You already identified it: user replaceable battery, micro SD, and USB socket. I will certainly concede that the Galaxy S is a "reasonably usable size" given its features, but your claim that it's "thinner and has better battery performance" than the iPhone while maintaining a user-serviceable battery is simply not true .
As I said before, losing those components means Apple can fill more of the case with a non-user-serviceable battery, which means they can either make the phone smaller (in this case thinner) or make the battery bigger (for better performance). Either way, there *is* a discernible benefit to the consumer. Whether or not that benefit outweighs the loss of the removable battery is a subjective judgement that each user must make. For many people, the fewer moving / removable parts and better performance of the iPhone are clearly acceptable trade-offs to make, or they wouldn't be buying the iPhone.
But nowhere in the article, or in the Android Marketplace TOS (Section 2.4) do they state that "only those copies downloaded from the Marketplace will be remotely deleted."
Are they deleting any copy, no matter where it was from? Can they tell the difference remotely between a copy that was downloaded from the Marketplace and one that was installed by the user via other means?
Are you comfortable with that? Are you sure what sort of restrictions Google has imposed on themselves?
I never said "apple is just as open as Android," I said "it sounds like Android isn't as free and open as people seem to enjoy trumpeting every time the iPhone is mentioned."
Quick baseline - how many apps have you written for your own Android device? And how many apps have you installed that didn't come from the Marketplace? And were you even aware of this clause in the Marketplace's terms of service before today's article? I'm genuinely curious.
Absolutely. I have seen some very good stuff around the newer 2.x versions of Android, and my limited exposure to the Nexus One leads me to believe that it's a remarkably good device, and I'm sure the Droid & HTC stuff coming out now & over the next year will be, as well.
And I'm happy to see that - it will only mean Apple has to keep working hard to keep up in the iPhone, and perhaps HP/Palm with WebOS, and even Microsoft with Windows Phone. I want there to be lots of vigorous competition in this space, even if I never purchase a Palm or Windows or Android device (I currently own an iPhone 3G, full disclosure).
I'm sorry you feel I'm putting words in your mouth.
In that case, please explain to me how your comment that "Just becasue -we- realize this doesn't mean the Canadian law enforcement realizes this." can be taken as anything other than a commentary on how smart the average slashdotter is, compared to the average person working in canadian law enforcement?
There are a host of other reasons other than "public ridicule" that makes this a "bad idea". I cited the public ridicule effect due to the simple fact that this happening during the G20 summit means that this will be all over the press as a result - it's international news, not just "some crackpot got busted with what we thought were explosives in his backyard, turns out we were wrong, ha ha!" written up in the local paper.
Okay, let's compare:
Samsung Galaxy S:
Dimensions: 122.4 x 64.2 x 9.9 millimeters (77795.0 cubic mm volume)
Battery: 1500 mAh, rated for 393 minutes of 3G talk time.
Announced: March, 2010
HTC Hero:
Dimensions: 112 x 56.2 x 14.35 millimeters (90324.6 cubic mm volume)
Battery: 1350 mAh, rated for 470 minutes of GSM talk time.
Announced: June, 2009
Nexus One:
Dimensions: 119 x 59.8 x 11.5 millimeters (81836.3 cubic mm volume)
Battery: 1400 mAh, rated for "up to 10 hours" of talk time, or "up to 5 hours" of browsing.
Available: January 5, 2010
iPhone 3GS:
Dimensions: 115.5 x 62.1 x 12.3 millimeters (88222.4 cubic mm volume)
Battery: 1219 mAh, rated for "up to 12 hours" of talk time (2G, 5hrs 3G), or "up to 5 hours" of browsing.
Available: June, 2009
iPhone 4:
Dimensions: 115.2 x 58.66 x 9.3 millimeters (62846.0 cubic mm volume)
Battery: 1420 mAh, rated for "up to 14 hours" of talk time (2G, 7 hrs 3G), or "up to 6 hours" of browsing.
Available: June, 2010
Your original point was that "many" other phones are slimmer AND provide more battery life with a user-serviceable battery than the iPhone. So please, identify for me which one in the list above is clearly slimmer and provides a significantly higher battery life, as per the marketing specs all of these manufacturers provide? Even the iPhone 3GS, which was admittedly a bit thicker than the Galaxy & Nexus, is quite competitive in terms of battery performance against the other phones.
My iPhone 3G is just about 2 years old right now. I have never replaced the battery. I have not noticed a significant battery degradation over the life of the phone so far - I use it in a pretty consistent fashion, and use it pretty heavily for phone conferences for work, browsing the web, checking email, and even use it as an ipod at the gym. The battery is expected to hold 80% of it's maximum charge through ~400 recharge cycles. This means that, even if you do a full charge/discharge every day, it would need to be replaced approximately once every 13.5 months. Most normal usage doesn't approach the level of a full charge/discharge cycle every day; 2 years on, and mine is still going strong.
I won't bother explaining to you how, in a device that is 14.3mm thick, a plastic wall that is "only 1mm thick" is actually a significant amount of thickness. I'm sure you have a passing familiarity with 3-dimensional space, though you seem obstinate in refusing to believe that 2 objects cannot physically occupy the same space.
Such as? Please provide me with a few examples that are both thinner, and have proven to have better battery life, than an iPhone. You can't make a claim like that without backing it up with some sort of data.
It has everything to do with maximizing the volume of the battery inside the case - you lose all the contacts, casing, plastic guides, latches, and other "stuff" that comes with making a user-serviceable battery. Much of that space that would have been taken up by those components can now be devoted to holding battery cells, which means the volume of the battery is larger, which means there's more juice in the battery to power the device.
Because as soon as you start making them user-serviceable, you have to build in the aforementioned latches, contacts, insulation, guides and supports, etc. Look at the inside of your battery compartment, and think about how much volume is taken up by the compartment, versus the volume of all the plastic and metal surrounding the battery compartment. Then ask whether or not a significantly larger battery could be dropped into that space if all the support components were gone.
Batteries should be recycled, but so should all the other electronic components in your cell phone anyway. Drop the whole thing in the hands of a proper recycling program, you shouldn't be recycling the battery and binning the rest.
The hypocrisy is evident in the treatment of Apple (with their "draconian controls") and the emphasis on how much open and more free Android is.
So open and free that Google will feel free to reach out and delete stuff from your phone if it feels it shouldn't be there.
I don't object to the idea of a curated experience, and in fact, I think it's what many (perhaps most) users actually want. I just wish people here on slashdot would stop pretending that something being "Android" miraculously means it's free of any controls or restrictions. This case proves it, and it'll be interesting to see exactly how often this sort of functionality gets used.
From this page:
And if he was "just testing," he still was behaving suspiciously - intentionally so, and now gets to find out exactly how good the security is at the G20 summit. When police see somebody behaving suspiciously and believe they could pose a threat, it is the job of those officers to stop the person from being a threat.
Misunderstandings are possible, but when the guy has, as reported, publicly stated his intention to test the security without any coordination with those security services, how exactly would you have them react? Ignore him?
Difficult to know that, without knowing how they accomplished the feat of deleting software remotely. How do they know you have that particular piece of software installed? Did they query handsets and ask for a list of installed software? Did they simply push down a blanket "delete software named X" command? What if I wanted to keep that software on my handset for some reason, like say, I'm the researcher that wrote it, or a similar research with an interest in this software?
A third party taking control of your device for even a few moments has a lot of privacy and control implications if you stop to think about it.
So you're saying next quarter is *definitely* the quarter of the Android smartphone?
His friends have reported that he "told them he was going to test security," by monitoring communications, sending emails with suspicious keywords, and the like.
Did you RTFA or any of the associated coverage at all? "Publicly stating" doesn't necessarily mean he disseminated his intent to everybody in the world, with affirmative confirmation that we all knew what he was about.
I don't use Android Marketplace. I'm pointing out the blatant hypocrisy inherent in Slashdot's 'prevailing wisdom' that Android is completely free of controls, and iOS is so locked down as to be unusable - as if it's a fact of nature that Google = Good / Apple = Bad, rather than an opinion about a service that, as you correctly state, both companies provide that adds value.
Let's use your same rhetorical game, but flip the script!
iPhone owner's decision making process: "I like the idea of somebody else reviewing the apps so I have less to worry about, and the device works really well, therefore I'll buy it."
Android device owner's decision making process: "FOSS-gasm!" or "A rabid neckbeard on Slashdot can't shut the fuck up about how his device is the most amazing thing ever, and everything else sucks balls, so it MUST be true!"
The latter is what worries me.
Sorry, that doesn't fly, try again. The iPhone 3GS is one of the most expensive handsets available through AT&T.
There are numerous other phones available for a much lower price. You can't say that "subsidies" are the reason people are buying iPhones, when other handsets cost significantly less than the iPhone with a subsidy.
Apple removes apps from the store, they do not remove apps from your device.
Google nukes it, and then lets you reinstall it if you want? Why go through the theater of nuking it from devices then? "It's SO INSECURE that we have to take control of your phone and remove it. But don't worry, you can always put your phone back to being insecure later."