Apple has no friends because they are (for better or worse) setting the standard in the mobile space. And Android fans, before you dash off a reply filled with breathless indignation, consider that the mobile space is larger than "smartphone share". Apple is the largest single manufacturer of smartphones & tablets, and also the most profitable manufacturer, and still holds the lead when you consider "all iOS devices," rather than just "smartphones." Everybody wants a piece of that pie.
Google has the most friends because they came to a party filled with hardware manufacturers watching their prospects dim in the wake of Apple's success with iOS devices, and said "Hey guys, here's this free shit that will let you compete with Apple[1], just slap it on your phones and it'll be a success!"
[1] - Subtext: "Guise, all you haz to do is cede control of your platform to an advertising company, and trust that we'll never do anything that would conflict with your interests and finances, like god forbid, refuse to release the source code or demand more control over the features you ship with our free system - that'll never happen because we're open and committed to free stuff. Or at least, committed to complaining about Apple's lack of openness."
Being open to new ideas and new people doesn't mean accepting everything that someone else does or says uncritically, or agreeing with it. There are very few issues in the world where there is no legitimate room for compromise or multiple approaches, and as you rightly note, illegal actions should be among those things.
If you look at the tone & content of "political debate" in the United States, you see a lot of people treating their pet issue as if it's absolutely the only possible way any rational thinking person would believe, and they treat other people accordingly: "You don't think we should drill in ANWR? You're a socialist terrorist sympathizer who wants to create death panels!" "You don't believe that government should guarantee universal healthcare? You're a stupid creationist who hates the poor!"
There is room for civil, and even friendly, disagreement and debate. But when every issue is framed as a non-negotiable objective conclusion that "any right-thinking person must agree with," we end up with a political climate much like what we see here in the US, where any disagreement with any element of your group's beliefs is viewed as an existential threat to the group. Not every opinion has to be so critically important that we can tolerate no person who doesn't agree with ours. What a boring world that would be if nobody ever challenged you or allowed you to challenge them.
I suspect for the same reasons you're posting to/., instead of helping to feed and cloth the poor, or campaigning for better childhood education - humans tend to be shallow, self-absorbed narcissists, and often need a kick in the ass to jolt them out of their narrow frame of reference to gather some perspective. I make no claim that I'm immune to this tendency. I have several exes who would also gleefully tell you that I can be a prick, so if you absolutely must feel that you're not subject to the same foibles, there's your consolation prize.
The apparent difference is, I'm able to notice, and laugh about it, when I see it happen to myself, or in others. Not everything we do is "suprsrsbsns." Taking the time to complain on Slashdot about how someone has "Finally" introduced this functionality, complete with smug condescension over how trivially obvious the idea was years ago, and how "if we only knew how many people" made a wrong turn, we'd understand how important this really was... well, it's apparent that somebody's got an inflated sense of the importance of this issue in the world, and I find that amusing.
If "bad online maps" is an issue that keeps you up nights, you're in sore need of perspective. You're certainly free to criticize me for poking fun, but consider this fair warning - I'll probably just be amused by your frowning disapproval, as well.
I'm not endorsing that kind of action, but it is how we behave as a species.
Really, I don't think that the tendency to "tribalize" is as poisonous as many people like to suggest. For instance, there's nothing *wrong* with a group of African, Mexican, Venezuelan, Chinese, Korean, French, etc., immigrants electing to live, work, and associate with one another. They have shared cultures, shared backgrounds, shared languages - these are the things we fashion bonds of friendship from.
The real danger lies in the hardening of attitudes towards people outside your particular grouping that can come along with this tendency to segregate ourselves with like-minded people. Being open to meeting and learning from people outside your group without hostility is the key differentiator. Being *open* to diversity while tending to cluster together into groups with shared interests and values is a far better state of affairs than paying lip service to diversity while shouting down anybody who happens to disagree with or place different values on your tribe's shared values and interests.
Be honest - you started off on Facebook looking up the cutie from your Freshman Physics class, just like everybody else who joined Facebook when it was focused on networking with people "local" to you, even if you didn't know them personally.
Oh you're so terribly clever. I bet sheeple refuse to put up with you for very long because of your rapier-sharp wit, and not at all because you're an obnoxious boor.
Saving a handful of people the trouble of a u-turn or a three-point turn when they realize they made a wrong turn? This is truly god's work, friend.
It's often overlooked in favor of high-profile "causes" like "feeding and clothing the poor" and "providing quality medical care to people who've never had it" and (it's okay to roll your eyes) "childhood education." But it's just as important - perhaps even MORE important, in fact!
Did you know: In the last days of her life, Mother Teresa was overheard to remark, "If only I hadn't wasted my time in India, I could have donated time to something truly worthy, like OpenStreetMaps." You can look it up, I bet Wikipedia will back me up on this. If not, there's some sort of equally truthy information about her somewhere in her Wikipedia entry, you can bet on it.
The crowdsourcing phenomenon has taught me that fifty million Elvis fans really CAN'T be wrong.
Agreed - there's a lot of unnecessarily lurid prose about privacy and Facebook. When it comes to privacy, Benjamin Franklin said it best: "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead."
I'd say the most embarrassing tidbit to be found on my Facebook profile would be my revelation that I enjoy the music of Bruce Springsteen. Imagine, if you can, the horror and dismay of my parents and family and friends when their image of me - indeed, what they had assumed was the solid bedrock of their lives - was shattered irreparably by my coming-out as a Springsteen fan.
There's a point at which HD porn becomes entirely too clinical and detailed, too. Sometimes fuzzy lower-def is simply much more flattering, for the same reason that they don't have bright lights in strip clubs.
Some of the shots included in pornos include would be MUCH less flattering in higher definition. Do you really want to see every razor bump, pimple, blemish, grain of makeup, or wrinkle on your favorite performer in larger-than-life detail?
You have (potentially) multiple active endpoints, all connecting to the same central server. The central server needs to track whether you're in http or https mode for your session, and apply those settings across all your connections - keeping in mind you could have 1..N pages open to Facebook at any given moment.
Consider this scenario: 1) Window 1 - Sign in to facebook (https), and check your news feed, seeing what your friends are up to; 2) Window 2 - Open a Tetris Battle game session; disable https because you need to battle some tetris with your friends; 3) Tab back to Window 1 a few minutes later, and refresh your connection to your news feed to see what your friends are up to now;
Now stop and consider - what does FB do? You have a game open with http only, but your original tab was served up over https; Should it re-enable https for your session, and perhaps wreck your game in Window 2? That would make a lot of people very annoyed with FB - "You keep breaking my game, FB, HATECHOO."
A very simple way to be sure that you go back to https is to force all the endpoints connected from a given system to reconnect (thus the log out, and back in cycle). I'm sure that FB could put some time and effort into functionality that would detect that you have a game session active, and leave your settings alone, but swap them back if your game session has timed out or been closed; Or they could find a way to serve you non-game data over https, but that all requires engineering time and effort, and it may not be a high priority for them to accomplish.
I'd be interested in even a poorly-articulated response to the second question, because I'm at a loss to see how trusting J. Random Developer with access to your profile would make you comfortable with your "privacy" on Facebook. HTTPS helps prevent session hijacking and things like that, but let's be honest, that sort of an attack is generally going to be opportunistic anyway; if you're connecting from a reasonably secured home network, the likelihood that you'll be singled out by a hacker is fairly low. But there's an awful lot of interesting data that a developer with access to the profiles of 2 million people could aggregate across its 2 million users, don't you think? They have incentive to do so (it could make them some money), and they have opportunity to do so.
Differences in scope - WoW data is valuable, regardless of who the owner is, because you can strip the characters of gear, gold, etc., and convert that gold into hard currency in the real world by selling it to the "black market" - gold sellers, who will turn around and sell it back to other players. An individual's Facebook data is not so valuable on a case-by-case basis. This is why hackers go after the central data stores of these companies, rather than hacking a hundred thousand accounts individually.
If somebody hacks your Facebook account, they might get some embarrassing stuff about you if you're dumb enough to post embarrassing data to Facebook, but there's not a lot of readily salable bits on Facebook. Marketing and advertising relies on large aggregate data sets; Knowing that YOU, specifically, really love Beanie Babies doesn't really help an advertising and marketing company develop an ad campaign. Knowing that 100,000 people who all like certain things ALSO tend to really love Beanie Babies... that might be useful information, but Facebook is already selling THAT information to the marketers, so there's very little need or demand for a "black market" source of this data, especially because hacking FB's accounts would also piss off a large company with a lot of money and a legal team on staff. Hacking your Facebook page will piss YOU off, but you're probably not going to unleash a team of bloodthirsty lawyers on the hacker. You'll just change your password, and moan about how people suck for a while.
$15/month, generally. And I suspect that Blizzard has already recouped the costs of developing the authenticator & associated infrastructure, since it will help them reduce "my account was hacked" complaints & restores, which in turn means less customer service staffing required; Keeping warm bodies (even minimum wage) in a seat 16x5 is a lot more expensive than devoting some spare cycles on a server rack to handling the additional authentication load.
If Facebook becomes a significant target with many accounts being hacked like WoW accounts, two-factor authentication like the Blizzard Mobile Authenticator might be a wise cost-saving investment for them.
As far as paying to have it on Facebook... I'm not sure I'd see much value to it. I'd rather have it on financial services first, that's for sure. If FB offered a "premium" - i.e., 'ad-free, your data is all yours to control and we won't use it in any advertising, etc.' - even then, I'm not sure I'd trust it, simply because posting your "secrets" up in the cloud seems rather... un-secret. I don't post anything I consider remotely 'private / sensitive / secret' now, and I doubt I'd change that behavior even with an ad-free FB service available.
"Sorry! We can't display this content while you're viewing Facebook over a secure connection (https). Would you like to temporarily switch to a regular connection (http) to use this app? You will have a secure connection upon your next login." (Continue) (Cancel)
It disables https for the current login, it doesn't change the setting in your profile for all time. It clearly asks if you'd like to switch, and allows you to say "No, I'd rather not." I think that's a fairly reasonable default behavior.
If you're playing games on Facebook and allowing apps access to your profile, it's likely that your "privacy" isn't very "private" anyway. Worrying about not being on https while you use Facebook apps and games is sort of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, isn't it?
Sure, their lifes may not be easy, but who's is these days. It doesn't have to be easy.
Ah yes, it's the lot of the artist to suffer and sacrifice so that he may enlighten and uplift his fellow humans, is that the platitude we're on to next?
All men are not born equally creative. If you truly valued art and creativity, you would not pay lip service to it in one breath, and in the next breath suggest that it should be nothing more than a hobby for people to pursue in their spare time outside their "real job". If you want people to create lots of things for you to enjoy, it is in your own best interests to support the creative endeavors of the people whose art you value. That means, allowing them to make a living at it, not standing over them with a whip demanding that they produce something new and interesting to alleviate your boredom.
If you want to argue that the distribution model for creative work is increasingly digital, and thus the middlemen in the MPAA and RIAA and record labels are increasingly irrelevant and doomed, I'm right there with you. I think we're going to see a lot more work produced independently by the artists themselves, and distributed digitally, which will be a boon to artists.
But, if you want to argue that you have some intrinsic "right" to the product of someone else's creative time & efforts without offering them anything in consideration in return, then I will call you a hypocrite and a leech.
Yeah, except they're not laughing with you, they're laughing AT you.
Just like most people snicker and roll their eyes when Jon Stewart (or a similar show) does a "feature" on the Jedi "religion". It's not because they think it's such clever societal commentary, it's because they think these people are loons who are completely disconnected from the real world.
Those who charge for "I.P." are doing it out of greed. It is time the human race grows up, and realizes there is more to life then money.
What a trite, mealy-mouthed platitude. Will you be the first to swear a vow of poverty and do without money or any other standard of exchange for goods & services? Or will you be one of the autocrats who "volunteers" to administer the system out of the goodness of your heart?
Why don't you actually talk to people who create in their spare time.
You think it's that simple, huh? Why don't you also ask those same people if they'd like to pursue their music/photography/painting/sculpting/dance/acting/whatever as a full-time profession, where they could make a living creating things that other people value?
I bet that just-about-100% of them would say that they'd love to be able to make a living at it.
If you neuter the ability of anybody to make a living doing creative things, then you will end up with a large amount of really bad youtube videos, some shitty "electronica" remixes, and some shitty fan fiction that was... written in peoples' spare time. I love Firefly as much as the next Slashdotter, but I don't necessarily think a world where Firefly fan fiction is the gold standard is really a great outcome. I think the word would be poorer as a result if we sacrificed things like the Godfather and Casablanca on the altar of preventing people from making a living producing their art.
Here's the thing: if Britney Spears produces an album, and asks you to pay $15 for a copy, why do you feel entitled to the product of her efforts without giving her something of value in return? Obviously, you have received something of value - the enjoyment of the music you're listening to. If you don't believe it's worth that much money, don't pay it - but what gives you the right to say "Sorry, I don't agree with that price, but I'm going to take a copy for myself anyway?"
1) movies are not necessary for life, nor are they naturally-occurring phenomena in nature; 2) Greed has to do with an outsize desire for something; It doesn't require that you wanting (or taking) lots of it create a scarcity for someone else;
If you desire vast quantities of something which requires time, effort, and investment by other people to create, then yes, that is greed. The cost of duplication is a fractional amount of the value of the time and effort that went into creating it. And it's probably one of the smaller fractions, once you break it all down, and greed is marked by an intense desire to possess something, not by whether or not that something is scarce.
Maybe you only want to make sure that your kids don't buy things without your oversight? By keeping the password to yourself and having them ask you to buy things for them?
And maybe you also want to steer your car with your feet and never stop for a red light! Just because you want to do these things doesn't mean you'll find the exact functionality you're demanding.
There is a way to accomplish your stated goal of "making sure the kids don't buy things without your oversight," and it's implemented right now in the phone. By all means, offer suggestions for a better way to accomplish this if you have a brilliant idea - go submit a suggestion to Apple, I'm sure they'd love to hear real feedback from real customers about how their technology could be improved. But let's drop this whole "I will SUE YOU TO HELL" e-Tough rhetoric as a pointless waste that's entirely irrelevant to the point.
If your goal is "Make sure that your kids don't buy things without your oversight," then disabling all in-app purchases is a completely trivial way to do this. It's turned off; if they want it turned on so they can make more purchases, they come to you and say, "Gee Dad, I really want some blah for my blahblah game." If you think it's an allowable expense, you enable in-app purchases, let the purchase go through, then disable further purchases. While you're at it, you can spend the 2 minutes it will take you to do this to have a conversation with your kid! Or not, I know that kids can be a bother, which is why we buy expensive toys to babysit them in the first place, amirite?
You have the oversight you're demanding. Your only issue seems to be that Apple implements it in a different way than YOU would, and that this makes you angry for some reason.
Which part of "disable it across the board" wasn't clear? You don't need to vet everything, simply disallow everything by default.
If your kid tries to buy something in game, they won't be able to; this means they will need to ask you, "Mom/Dad, can I buy some eCarrots to feed My Little Ponies?" You can then consider whether this is a wise investment of your money, and set some limits and rules on a case-by-case basis.
And frankly, taking an active interest in the games your child is playing might not make you the worst parent in the world, either. You know, rather than let the device babysit them while you play your own games.
And if you think it's too hard to change a handful of parental control settings on your device, consider whether or not you'd allow a stranger to babysit your child without spending even a few moments getting to know them and finding out their name.
As if purchasing an expensive device to babysit your child wasn't bad enough, you want us to feel sympathy for parents who can't even spend a few moments disabling in-app purchases on that device? Tough shit.
Slashdot Mirror
Apple has no friends because they are (for better or worse) setting the standard in the mobile space. And Android fans, before you dash off a reply filled with breathless indignation, consider that the mobile space is larger than "smartphone share". Apple is the largest single manufacturer of smartphones & tablets, and also the most profitable manufacturer, and still holds the lead when you consider "all iOS devices," rather than just "smartphones." Everybody wants a piece of that pie.
Google has the most friends because they came to a party filled with hardware manufacturers watching their prospects dim in the wake of Apple's success with iOS devices, and said "Hey guys, here's this free shit that will let you compete with Apple[1], just slap it on your phones and it'll be a success!"
[1] - Subtext: "Guise, all you haz to do is cede control of your platform to an advertising company, and trust that we'll never do anything that would conflict with your interests and finances, like god forbid, refuse to release the source code or demand more control over the features you ship with our free system - that'll never happen because we're open and committed to free stuff. Or at least, committed to complaining about Apple's lack of openness."
Be careful. If you make him really angry, he will eviscerate you and salt the earth with your blood!
Or maybe he'll just tweet something and pair a snarky hashtag with it.
Are we upset at this because having cash reserves is never a good thing for the health of your company?
Being open to new ideas and new people doesn't mean accepting everything that someone else does or says uncritically, or agreeing with it. There are very few issues in the world where there is no legitimate room for compromise or multiple approaches, and as you rightly note, illegal actions should be among those things.
If you look at the tone & content of "political debate" in the United States, you see a lot of people treating their pet issue as if it's absolutely the only possible way any rational thinking person would believe, and they treat other people accordingly:
"You don't think we should drill in ANWR? You're a socialist terrorist sympathizer who wants to create death panels!"
"You don't believe that government should guarantee universal healthcare? You're a stupid creationist who hates the poor!"
There is room for civil, and even friendly, disagreement and debate. But when every issue is framed as a non-negotiable objective conclusion that "any right-thinking person must agree with," we end up with a political climate much like what we see here in the US, where any disagreement with any element of your group's beliefs is viewed as an existential threat to the group. Not every opinion has to be so critically important that we can tolerate no person who doesn't agree with ours. What a boring world that would be if nobody ever challenged you or allowed you to challenge them.
I suspect for the same reasons you're posting to /., instead of helping to feed and cloth the poor, or campaigning for better childhood education - humans tend to be shallow, self-absorbed narcissists, and often need a kick in the ass to jolt them out of their narrow frame of reference to gather some perspective. I make no claim that I'm immune to this tendency. I have several exes who would also gleefully tell you that I can be a prick, so if you absolutely must feel that you're not subject to the same foibles, there's your consolation prize.
The apparent difference is, I'm able to notice, and laugh about it, when I see it happen to myself, or in others. Not everything we do is "suprsrsbsns." Taking the time to complain on Slashdot about how someone has "Finally" introduced this functionality, complete with smug condescension over how trivially obvious the idea was years ago, and how "if we only knew how many people" made a wrong turn, we'd understand how important this really was... well, it's apparent that somebody's got an inflated sense of the importance of this issue in the world, and I find that amusing.
If "bad online maps" is an issue that keeps you up nights, you're in sore need of perspective. You're certainly free to criticize me for poking fun, but consider this fair warning - I'll probably just be amused by your frowning disapproval, as well.
Really, I don't think that the tendency to "tribalize" is as poisonous as many people like to suggest. For instance, there's nothing *wrong* with a group of African, Mexican, Venezuelan, Chinese, Korean, French, etc., immigrants electing to live, work, and associate with one another. They have shared cultures, shared backgrounds, shared languages - these are the things we fashion bonds of friendship from.
The real danger lies in the hardening of attitudes towards people outside your particular grouping that can come along with this tendency to segregate ourselves with like-minded people. Being open to meeting and learning from people outside your group without hostility is the key differentiator. Being *open* to diversity while tending to cluster together into groups with shared interests and values is a far better state of affairs than paying lip service to diversity while shouting down anybody who happens to disagree with or place different values on your tribe's shared values and interests.
s/meet/bang/g;
Be honest - you started off on Facebook looking up the cutie from your Freshman Physics class, just like everybody else who joined Facebook when it was focused on networking with people "local" to you, even if you didn't know them personally.
Oh you're so terribly clever. I bet sheeple refuse to put up with you for very long because of your rapier-sharp wit, and not at all because you're an obnoxious boor.
Saving a handful of people the trouble of a u-turn or a three-point turn when they realize they made a wrong turn? This is truly god's work, friend.
It's often overlooked in favor of high-profile "causes" like "feeding and clothing the poor" and "providing quality medical care to people who've never had it" and (it's okay to roll your eyes) "childhood education." But it's just as important - perhaps even MORE important, in fact!
Did you know: In the last days of her life, Mother Teresa was overheard to remark, "If only I hadn't wasted my time in India, I could have donated time to something truly worthy, like OpenStreetMaps." You can look it up, I bet Wikipedia will back me up on this. If not, there's some sort of equally truthy information about her somewhere in her Wikipedia entry, you can bet on it.
The crowdsourcing phenomenon has taught me that fifty million Elvis fans really CAN'T be wrong.
Agreed - there's a lot of unnecessarily lurid prose about privacy and Facebook. When it comes to privacy, Benjamin Franklin said it best: "Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead."
I'd say the most embarrassing tidbit to be found on my Facebook profile would be my revelation that I enjoy the music of Bruce Springsteen. Imagine, if you can, the horror and dismay of my parents and family and friends when their image of me - indeed, what they had assumed was the solid bedrock of their lives - was shattered irreparably by my coming-out as a Springsteen fan.
There's a point at which HD porn becomes entirely too clinical and detailed, too. Sometimes fuzzy lower-def is simply much more flattering, for the same reason that they don't have bright lights in strip clubs.
Some of the shots included in pornos include would be MUCH less flattering in higher definition. Do you really want to see every razor bump, pimple, blemish, grain of makeup, or wrinkle on your favorite performer in larger-than-life detail?
You have (potentially) multiple active endpoints, all connecting to the same central server. The central server needs to track whether you're in http or https mode for your session, and apply those settings across all your connections - keeping in mind you could have 1..N pages open to Facebook at any given moment.
Consider this scenario:
1) Window 1 - Sign in to facebook (https), and check your news feed, seeing what your friends are up to;
2) Window 2 - Open a Tetris Battle game session; disable https because you need to battle some tetris with your friends;
3) Tab back to Window 1 a few minutes later, and refresh your connection to your news feed to see what your friends are up to now;
Now stop and consider - what does FB do? You have a game open with http only, but your original tab was served up over https; Should it re-enable https for your session, and perhaps wreck your game in Window 2? That would make a lot of people very annoyed with FB - "You keep breaking my game, FB, HATECHOO."
A very simple way to be sure that you go back to https is to force all the endpoints connected from a given system to reconnect (thus the log out, and back in cycle). I'm sure that FB could put some time and effort into functionality that would detect that you have a game session active, and leave your settings alone, but swap them back if your game session has timed out or been closed; Or they could find a way to serve you non-game data over https, but that all requires engineering time and effort, and it may not be a high priority for them to accomplish.
I'd be interested in even a poorly-articulated response to the second question, because I'm at a loss to see how trusting J. Random Developer with access to your profile would make you comfortable with your "privacy" on Facebook. HTTPS helps prevent session hijacking and things like that, but let's be honest, that sort of an attack is generally going to be opportunistic anyway; if you're connecting from a reasonably secured home network, the likelihood that you'll be singled out by a hacker is fairly low. But there's an awful lot of interesting data that a developer with access to the profiles of 2 million people could aggregate across its 2 million users, don't you think? They have incentive to do so (it could make them some money), and they have opportunity to do so.
Differences in scope - WoW data is valuable, regardless of who the owner is, because you can strip the characters of gear, gold, etc., and convert that gold into hard currency in the real world by selling it to the "black market" - gold sellers, who will turn around and sell it back to other players. An individual's Facebook data is not so valuable on a case-by-case basis. This is why hackers go after the central data stores of these companies, rather than hacking a hundred thousand accounts individually.
If somebody hacks your Facebook account, they might get some embarrassing stuff about you if you're dumb enough to post embarrassing data to Facebook, but there's not a lot of readily salable bits on Facebook. Marketing and advertising relies on large aggregate data sets; Knowing that YOU, specifically, really love Beanie Babies doesn't really help an advertising and marketing company develop an ad campaign. Knowing that 100,000 people who all like certain things ALSO tend to really love Beanie Babies... that might be useful information, but Facebook is already selling THAT information to the marketers, so there's very little need or demand for a "black market" source of this data, especially because hacking FB's accounts would also piss off a large company with a lot of money and a legal team on staff. Hacking your Facebook page will piss YOU off, but you're probably not going to unleash a team of bloodthirsty lawyers on the hacker. You'll just change your password, and moan about how people suck for a while.
$15/month, generally. And I suspect that Blizzard has already recouped the costs of developing the authenticator & associated infrastructure, since it will help them reduce "my account was hacked" complaints & restores, which in turn means less customer service staffing required; Keeping warm bodies (even minimum wage) in a seat 16x5 is a lot more expensive than devoting some spare cycles on a server rack to handling the additional authentication load.
If Facebook becomes a significant target with many accounts being hacked like WoW accounts, two-factor authentication like the Blizzard Mobile Authenticator might be a wise cost-saving investment for them.
As far as paying to have it on Facebook... I'm not sure I'd see much value to it. I'd rather have it on financial services first, that's for sure. If FB offered a "premium" - i.e., 'ad-free, your data is all yours to control and we won't use it in any advertising, etc.' - even then, I'm not sure I'd trust it, simply because posting your "secrets" up in the cloud seems rather... un-secret. I don't post anything I consider remotely 'private / sensitive / secret' now, and I doubt I'd change that behavior even with an ad-free FB service available.
Here's what Facebook says:
It disables https for the current login, it doesn't change the setting in your profile for all time. It clearly asks if you'd like to switch, and allows you to say "No, I'd rather not." I think that's a fairly reasonable default behavior.
If you're playing games on Facebook and allowing apps access to your profile, it's likely that your "privacy" isn't very "private" anyway. Worrying about not being on https while you use Facebook apps and games is sort of closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, isn't it?
That may be true. If that's the case, shouldn't this "religion" be subjected to the same derision and scorn you're offering the rest?
Which is... exactly the point I made.
Ah yes, it's the lot of the artist to suffer and sacrifice so that he may enlighten and uplift his fellow humans, is that the platitude we're on to next?
All men are not born equally creative. If you truly valued art and creativity, you would not pay lip service to it in one breath, and in the next breath suggest that it should be nothing more than a hobby for people to pursue in their spare time outside their "real job". If you want people to create lots of things for you to enjoy, it is in your own best interests to support the creative endeavors of the people whose art you value. That means, allowing them to make a living at it, not standing over them with a whip demanding that they produce something new and interesting to alleviate your boredom.
If you want to argue that the distribution model for creative work is increasingly digital, and thus the middlemen in the MPAA and RIAA and record labels are increasingly irrelevant and doomed, I'm right there with you. I think we're going to see a lot more work produced independently by the artists themselves, and distributed digitally, which will be a boon to artists.
But, if you want to argue that you have some intrinsic "right" to the product of someone else's creative time & efforts without offering them anything in consideration in return, then I will call you a hypocrite and a leech.
Yeah, except they're not laughing with you, they're laughing AT you.
Just like most people snicker and roll their eyes when Jon Stewart (or a similar show) does a "feature" on the Jedi "religion". It's not because they think it's such clever societal commentary, it's because they think these people are loons who are completely disconnected from the real world.
What a trite, mealy-mouthed platitude. Will you be the first to swear a vow of poverty and do without money or any other standard of exchange for goods & services? Or will you be one of the autocrats who "volunteers" to administer the system out of the goodness of your heart?
You think it's that simple, huh? Why don't you also ask those same people if they'd like to pursue their music/photography/painting/sculpting/dance/acting/whatever as a full-time profession, where they could make a living creating things that other people value?
I bet that just-about-100% of them would say that they'd love to be able to make a living at it.
If you neuter the ability of anybody to make a living doing creative things, then you will end up with a large amount of really bad youtube videos, some shitty "electronica" remixes, and some shitty fan fiction that was... written in peoples' spare time. I love Firefly as much as the next Slashdotter, but I don't necessarily think a world where Firefly fan fiction is the gold standard is really a great outcome. I think the word would be poorer as a result if we sacrificed things like the Godfather and Casablanca on the altar of preventing people from making a living producing their art.
Here's the thing: if Britney Spears produces an album, and asks you to pay $15 for a copy, why do you feel entitled to the product of her efforts without giving her something of value in return? Obviously, you have received something of value - the enjoyment of the music you're listening to. If you don't believe it's worth that much money, don't pay it - but what gives you the right to say "Sorry, I don't agree with that price, but I'm going to take a copy for myself anyway?"
Two points:
1) movies are not necessary for life, nor are they naturally-occurring phenomena in nature;
2) Greed has to do with an outsize desire for something; It doesn't require that you wanting (or taking) lots of it create a scarcity for someone else;
If you desire vast quantities of something which requires time, effort, and investment by other people to create, then yes, that is greed. The cost of duplication is a fractional amount of the value of the time and effort that went into creating it. And it's probably one of the smaller fractions, once you break it all down, and greed is marked by an intense desire to possess something, not by whether or not that something is scarce.
And maybe you also want to steer your car with your feet and never stop for a red light! Just because you want to do these things doesn't mean you'll find the exact functionality you're demanding.
There is a way to accomplish your stated goal of "making sure the kids don't buy things without your oversight," and it's implemented right now in the phone. By all means, offer suggestions for a better way to accomplish this if you have a brilliant idea - go submit a suggestion to Apple, I'm sure they'd love to hear real feedback from real customers about how their technology could be improved. But let's drop this whole "I will SUE YOU TO HELL" e-Tough rhetoric as a pointless waste that's entirely irrelevant to the point.
If your goal is "Make sure that your kids don't buy things without your oversight," then disabling all in-app purchases is a completely trivial way to do this. It's turned off; if they want it turned on so they can make more purchases, they come to you and say, "Gee Dad, I really want some blah for my blahblah game." If you think it's an allowable expense, you enable in-app purchases, let the purchase go through, then disable further purchases. While you're at it, you can spend the 2 minutes it will take you to do this to have a conversation with your kid! Or not, I know that kids can be a bother, which is why we buy expensive toys to babysit them in the first place, amirite?
You have the oversight you're demanding. Your only issue seems to be that Apple implements it in a different way than YOU would, and that this makes you angry for some reason.
Which part of "disable it across the board" wasn't clear? You don't need to vet everything, simply disallow everything by default.
If your kid tries to buy something in game, they won't be able to; this means they will need to ask you, "Mom/Dad, can I buy some eCarrots to feed My Little Ponies?" You can then consider whether this is a wise investment of your money, and set some limits and rules on a case-by-case basis.
And frankly, taking an active interest in the games your child is playing might not make you the worst parent in the world, either. You know, rather than let the device babysit them while you play your own games.
I think more like, "We're not going to make any money off this, so why bother keeping it? Let the kids have their toys."
Disable in-app purchases across the board. Then your kid will ask you if they can buy something, and you can evaluate each request on its merits.
Funny, there's a pretty simple way to prevent in-app purchases built right in.
And if you think it's too hard to change a handful of parental control settings on your device, consider whether or not you'd allow a stranger to babysit your child without spending even a few moments getting to know them and finding out their name.
As if purchasing an expensive device to babysit your child wasn't bad enough, you want us to feel sympathy for parents who can't even spend a few moments disabling in-app purchases on that device? Tough shit.