No, you're an oxymoron! Haha that one never gets old.
But seriously, you're still going on about the locked room. I specifically said it didn't need to be a locked room. The parent post didn't say it needed to be locked - just a "computer room". A corner of a living room.
Ultimately you just have to trust your children to use the computer under your rules, and thereby use your parenting powers to enforce using the computers in communal areas.
After all, if - as you suggest - a child is determined enough to get onto facebook after hours that they'll learn how to pick a lock and then stay awake until everyone has gone to bed and fallen asleep, before creeping down and breaking into the computer room, I'm pretty sure they'll be determined enough to figure out a way around your DNS settings.
Ultimately you can't keep control over your children forever, and at some point you just have to trust that you have trained them well and let go of the bike and see if they fall over. Take sensible precautions; while they get used to the internet on their own computers, make sure they're somewhere you can keep an eye on them - not spy on their every move, just make sure they're not stripping off on their webcam for a 54 year old man in his underwear.
The point is that technical solutions aren't always the answer.
He didn't say a locked room, just a common area designated as a "computer room". Putting the computers in a common area (be it a locked computer room or the corner of a living room) so you can keep a general eye on what they're doing, and you solve all of the content issues.
Tell your children that they can use the computer from 6am to 10pm. You don't need to lock them away in a room - if they obey, that's their sleep cycles protected. Punish them if you catch them sneaking off to use chat rooms at 2am. Hell, unplug the router and hide it in your bedroom if you don't think you can trust them.
Installing a complicated access and content filter costs more money and time to set up, and more to keep running. Just sit down with the children, explain the rules, and use your usual parenting skills to impose them.
That's not what he's asking - he likes to put his debug print statements at the start of a line to make it obvious where to pull them out when debugging later. Automatic indentation is not a solution to his problem.
@Unequivocal: Exactly, it sucks. I do exactly the same thing in other languages, but you can't do it in Python. I resort to dropping a debug() function into my code, and then:
Function here()
line 1 does some stuff
line 2 if statement
inside the if
debug(debug info to console)
line 3 more stuff
It's not ideal, but at least that way you can search for it afterwards. It does have the added bonus feature of being able to change debug() to return without doing anything when you make your code live, just in case you left a debug statement somewhere.
Re-read his example - he was saying in languages with braces it's obvious that you want e() if (c), and the compiler can check that; without braces in python it's one keystroke's difference, or a dodgy copy/paste.
Explicit braces does help code clarity. Also it annoys me when people argue the significant whitespace is good for beginners because it enforces good coding style, because it does not. Not only that, but it often gets in the way for non-beginners.
For example, long().chained().method().calls() can only be split inside brackets unless you use the god-awful \, which makes the code harder to read and/or harder to refactor.
Not to mention that you can make multiple();statements();on();one();line() - again, python thinks it's fine, but that's not good code style. You can't do brace matching to jump to the top/bottom of a code block, and you have to use "pass" to show you really did mean to leave that placeholder method empty for now, rather than just typing {} to come back to later.
About 75% of my work is in python at the moment, and there are many things I like about it, but saying that it enforces good coding style simply isn't true - in every language there will always be a way for bad programmers to write bad code. At least if you hand me a horrifically-formatted piece of perl, c# or javascript, you can just send it through a reformatter, which will be able to change indentation based on brackets and give you code which is laid out perfectly, without needing to worry that the whitespace it just added has broken the functionality.
It's not as if python saves us from that problem - not all indentation is equal. I frequently run into code that uses two spaces or a tab character for indentation, whereas I use 4 spaces. If I'm copy/pasting a snippet from documentation or a snippet site, I need to make sure its indentation is the same as mine. Not to mention what happens if you copy it from or paste it into a source where leading whitespace is lost. Trying to paste a few lines of python code in a chat client is frustrating at best.
Now, if you'd said that the lack of braces makes code more concise vertically, that it makes it look "cleaner" then I may agree, but if you want to teach people to write good code, teach them re-usable language-independent style guidelines at the same time you teach them algorithm design etc - the compiler is the wrong place to learn good code layout.
Well I apologise, those last 4 words weren't intended as Apple-hating bile, merely highlighting the obviously inaccurate conclusion of the original article which I can only assume comes from bias on the part of the author.
I was simply agreeing with the parent that the only reason that there's no technical reason that Apple should block Adobe from providing Flash for the iPhone or iPad, so therefore there must be another reason: money, and control of the software that runs on their platform.
But most of that the content is broken by your own definition.
Well yes, totally, but it's still nice to be able to access flash websites on the go if I want to find out information about ie a restaurant etc.
Anybody that thinks this is all on Apple is a Macromedia apologist/fanboy.
Well, I'm not a Macromedia/Adobe apologist/fanboy - for me their overpriced bloated products are up there with Apple and Microsoft, and rival the latter for the bug-ridden-code crown - but I do think that this lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad is all on Apple, because it is.
Flash absolutely has a world of problems of its own, and the fact that Apple ban it delights me because it will hopefully mean that people will move even further away from it than they already have over the past few years.
But it does work well enough on the desktop, so Apple don't need to do anything to fix it - they just need to let Adobe provide an installation package. If something written in Flash doesn't work, that's down to the developer. If something is broken about the Flash implementation, that's down to Adobe. Apple could just stand back and say "It's not our problem".
As I said, there isn't a question of whether Flash can run on an iphone or ipad - as it quite clearly can - the only reason is because Apple want to retain absolute control over the software on their platform so that they get a cut of all sales. Fair enough, but articles saying that "Apple won't let it run because hover will not work" miss the point by such a wide margin that you have to wonder whether they're written by an idiot or a shill.
As an aside, considering how Microsoft have been hammered by IE anti-trust cases, I do wonder how much worse the reaction would have been if they'd blocked any other browser from running on Windows. I know it's a different situation, mostly because Apple don't control enough of the phone market for it to have a monopoly, but it's still an interesting comparison.
I really wish I had mod points, you're exactly right there.
The reason that inability to hover "never gets talked about" is that everybody competent knows that if something is important, don't hide it behind hover - it's almost always bad for usability and accessibility. Any website or web application that relies on hover effects is, quite frankly, broken. Sure, it may look nice and be convenient, but there should always be an alternative accessible way to navigate through an application.
If my 3 year old N95 runs Flash and can display content reasonably, there's no technical reason that the iphone/ipad can't too. Apple's decision to miss out Flash has nothing to do with performance or usability, and everything to do with money. Anyone who claims differently is a deluded apologist Apple fanboy.
My understanding is that they've got a special censoring proxy. A more reasonable option would seem to me to be a multiple choice question in the settings:
- "Use Opera's proxy for users outside China"
- "Use Opera's proxy for users inside China"
- "Use a different proxy"
- "Don't use Opera's proxy at all"
China can block the external proxy, and the browser can then auto-sense which Opera proxy to use, or let you bypass it altogether and go straight to the great firewall. That way everyone's happy.
Personally I'd prefer it if I didn't have to go through Opera's proxy; it may make things faster, but I always see it as another point in the chain where things can go wrong (security, privacy etc), and seems redundant when my phone's on a LAN. Do any recent versions let you turn it off?
I'd have thought because of noise and attenuation? Having said that I did used to run an audio cable from one side of my home to the other, never noticed any problems - but then I'm no audiophile.
You'd still need to sort out speakers, and figure out a way to control it, but I'd have thought it would be fairly straight-forward to set up an IR controller or start/stop/next buttons to play a pre-defined playlist.
FWIW my post wasn't flamebait. I don't agree with what you've said in your post, but don't want to get into a big theological argument - we obviously disagree strongly, but in so doing risk straying away from the point, which was that creationism is a belief, whereas evolution is a fact.
My point was that due to the history of how the bible was created and has been passed down through the generations, it seems illogical to assume that it is the literal word of god. You are free to believe that it is the literal word of god, that's fine, but you can't prove it to someone who doesn't share your belief. There is no evidence to support it.
To believe in creationism is to believe that there is an omnipotent being who created our reality, led us to adopt scientific methods to try to understand it, and littered our universe with things for us to discover that would imply that he did not create humans in one day, and that we're the result of the process of evolution.
Frankly I can't see why evolution and creationism can't live side by side - why can't God-worshippers say "Well, there's all this compelling irrefutable scientific evidence that life on earth came about through evolution, so I guess that's how God created us". Isn't it possible that God just dictated the bible in terms that would have made sense to Abraham thousands of years ago, so He skipped out all the stuff about dinosaurs and DNA?
But given we are having this argument, it seems not. Nonetheless, evolution is a fact, a scientifically proven fact, and it is futile to try to pretend otherwise. It happens all around us - bacteria evolve to resist certain antibiotics, butterflies evolve to survive in a rapidly changing environment - it happens all the time. The difference between evolution and creation is that evolution can be proven to someone who doesn't initially believe it to be true, provided they are prepared to consider the evidence.
I do find the whole subject of religion fascinating; as you may have gathered, I'm not a believer in any deity, but I am open to listen to those who do believe, and I respect that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want to. Having said that, I feel strongly that evolution should be taught and discussed as the facts dictate, and that religious beliefs should be kept separate.
The church has managed to adapt to irrefutable challenges from the scientific community many times in the past, and I am sure it will again - but eventually the facts will win.
Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact. There is scientific evidence all around that proves it, not least fossil records and DNA analysis.
Another fact is that creationist crackpots are basing their beliefs on a book that was put together by committee hundreds of years ago. It cannot be taken literally as the word of God, because that is not what it is. It is a collection of stories written by humans over the past couple of thousand years, stories which reflect the morals, superstitions and prejudices of the societies of their times. It's a fascinating insight into the hopes and fears of our ancestors who lacked the scientific knowledge to explain the world around them, but you cannot take it as anything more than that.
The irony is that Bible-based societies have already thrown out large parts because they don't like them - for example, they rejected the parts of the bible which advocate stoning adulterous wives or disobedient children, with the notable exception of a few extreme Islamic groups. But then people hold up sentences right next to it as irrefutable proof that homosexuality is the work of Satan? And that in 4004 BC God created the heavens and earth and a near-infinite number of stars and galaxies in just 7 days, and then went to all the trouble of coming up with all this fake evidence proving evolution, which he weaved into every living cell just to fuck with us 6000 years later? Christ.
Besides, it's not like the contractors downloaded "Bob's IT Dashboard" and changed the logo - by the sounds of things, they just used open source libraries to reduce the development time.
Better than the BBC, for example, who insist on rolling their own libraries for everything, while on the taxpayer's time.
It has never been the case that everyone who liked a work paid for it. Just about everyone thinks -- or at least behaves as if they think -- that it is on many occasions fair to enjoy creative works without paying for them.
No, but it has always been the case that everyone who owned a work (or at least a license to use it) was legally obliged to pay for it. This reduces widespread adoption, and in particular blocks mainstream hardware implementations for fear of legal action.
Make content sharing legal like the pirate party want, and sooner or later you'll get netgear/linksys/belkin/apple/ms et al releasing affordable set-top boxes which browse torrent-esque sites, pull down music and videos, and play them straight into your tv for free. A bit like apple/ms already do, only with P2P.
The kind of thing that a minority of tech-savvy people are doing today without regard for the consequences will be available to the masses, and nobody sane would ever pay for content again.
With convenience of watching the latest releases at home while the costs are reduced to near zero, cinema attendance would suffer, and most films wouldn't stand a chance of making all their money back.
The only people who would stand a chance making money out of content in the short term would be those who can create a compelling way to package and deliver the content with a subscription or ad-supported revenue model. But even they would struggle in the long-term as hardware manufacturers try to undercut each other. The only real cost would be ISP bandwidth.
Making content free to share would ultimately kill all modern sources of professional-quality content. We would be reduced to theatres, concerts and youtube shorts of students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.
So instead of bleating that content wants to be free and that we should all live in some hippy copyrightless utopia, I'd prefer to be a bit more realistic and wait for the content industry to figure out they can make more money by embracing the internet than trying to fight it. It'll happen eventually.
I buy books I own; if I did go to the library, I'd pay library fees and they'd buy the books in. If I borrow my girlfriend's books and read those, she paid for them - and I give them back. This is legal, and in no way the same as it being legal for millions of people to go onto a P2P network and permanently download an exact copy of the book without giving the author any money.
Pay-per-joke is comparing apples to oranges - but I'd certainly expect to pay for a joke book, and don't think it would be fair to expect a recording of a comedian's performance which I didn't pay for.
I do pay for every song I own. I pay for songs I hear on the radio by listening to their adverts. If I sing to myself in the shower then I'm not performing it to anyone; if anything I'm practicing. If I sang it to 500 people in a field, and charged them access the performance, then yes, I should pay performance royalties.
If we were talking about making it legal for me to upload a video to YouTube of me singing in the shower, then yes, you may have a case for arguing that copyright law is unfair.
However, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the Pirate Party wanting to make it legal to copy a track or film off a CD or DVD, put it on a P2P network, and let millions of people get an identical copy of the original without any money going to the people involved in creating the content. I can't see how anyone thinks that is fair.
You and I may not like Britney Spears, but then we don't have to buy her music. A lot of people must like her though, because she keeps doing very well in the charts and on tour.
I don't like a lot of new music, but equally, there's a lot that I do. Some of it reached me via last.fm, but most of it reached me through the mainstream radio. If the people making the music weren't getting money for their efforts, that music wouldn't have reached me. Not to mention the books and films I've enjoyed reading and watching lately.
The current system is far from perfect, but the system that the pirate party are proposing would not only harm the content industries, but the content creators themselves - not just the manufactured pop mega-stars that you and I dislike, but the skilled and talented musicians, actors, authors, designers, and programmers who are merely making a fair living creating things.
I get the impression that they are bleeding the customer dry whenever I see people getting fines running into the tens of thousands for sharing a handful of tracks. A $2 million dollar fine for sharing 24 tracks.
When I see the industry saying that paying for a track on a CD doesn't entitle you to copy that onto your PC or portable MP3 player, and that you have to buy another copy.
When I hear about how the people want to extend copyright past any reasonable length to reasonably ensure income for the author.
When you look at a CD on an online shop and see it's half the price of electronic delivery from the same place.
When a CD of an album that came out in 1984 is 3 times the price of a 2008 straight-to-DVD film.
When "Gone with the Wind" - which came out in 1939, has made hundreds of millions of dollars since then, still holds the record for domestic box office, and whose main actors have been dead for at least 30-40 years - is still more expensive on DVD than films that came out in 2008.
The customer may may be paying a relatively fair price when compared to 1939, but that doesn't make it fair.
Yes, you can be an amateur musician playing music for the fun of it while you keep a day job. But to create anything of quality while you're doing a full-time job and would be incredibly difficult, especially if you had a family and wanted to play music with others.
I know a musician who had to leave his band because it got to the point where he didn't have enough time to practice with the others, get his work done and spend any time with his wife. Of course he didn't give it up altogether, but he had to give up any chance of doing it really well. Equally, his bandmates had to give up their full-time jobs to put the time into their practice. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything properly.
Just look at orchestras; the good ones are made up of full-time professionals. The ones made up of amateurs meeting once a week may get most of the notes in the right order, but they will lack the polish and precision of people who have the hours to practice to pull a performance up from amateur to professional.
And that's just the performance. You then have to find a composer with the skill, experience and time to create something worth listening to. A conductor or producer to make sure everything goes in the right place. You have to find someone with the time, expertise and equipment to record it.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that all of the effort that goes into creating an excellent recording should have to be done for free. If you spend all of that time building skills and creating something beautiful, you should be able to protect it legally for a reasonable amount of time.
If you remove money from creating music, books and films, you can only be left with amateurs who create amateur content with amateur production values. I'd prefer to continue to pay for quality.
Indeed you didn't; other people in this thread have said as much though, so it was partly in answer to those, and partly pre-empting a similar response.
If it's legal to share content with friends or strangers for free, on P2P networks or whatever, it will get mainstream hardware support, and everyone from grandchild to grandparent will have something hooked up to their TV that can download everything for free. They'll never pay a penny more, and they'd be stupid to do otherwise.
When there's no money coming in, people who make films and music will get no money to pay their bills, so they'll go do something that will.
There would never be another big-budget film with quality actors, soundtrack, story and effects. We'd be left watching old movies before the law was passed, and no-budget university students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.
So no thanks, I'll continue to wait and hope the **AA figure out they can make more money out of working with their customers rather than against them. And until then, I'm sure a lot of other people will be happy with illegal P2P.
That's not what I'm saying. I said that they need to adopt and provide a service that meets consumer demand, at a reasonable price in the new internet-based world.
However, the piracy party seem to be saying that all content should be available to everyone for free, entirely legally. Who is going to go make a big-budget film when they can't make any money out of it?
And don't give me "all big budget films these days are crap, people should do it for the love of art" - how is hundreds of people spending years of their lives working on something going to pay their rent?
I know you're a troll and all, but I actually agree with your point (though not how you made it).
There's a fine line between fair and unfair use. If I like a film, money should go to the people involved in creating it and bringing it to my screen. If I like music, money should go to the people involved in creating it and bringing it to my speakers.
Sharing for non-commercial gain was fine back in the days of copying tapes for your friends at school. A group of you could club together, buy a tape each, and share them between you to get a good collection. Sure, the content creators might not get all the money they wanted, but they'd get all your pocket money. And all the pocket money from similar groups of kids all around the country.
But things have changed with the internet. Now only one person in one country has to buy it, and suddenly the group size changes from a handful of close friends into an anonymous P2P network millions strong. No industry could survive something like that - and I'm not just talking about the RIAA et all who would no longer be able to rape producers and consumers alike, I'm talking about there not being enough money around to invest in creating quality content for us in the first place.
It's all very well saying that if the content is good people will go out and buy it anyway - but once you make it legal, mainstream hardware manufacturers will come along with P2P-enabled set-top boxes which will bring convenience to the mass market, and there will be no reason for anyone to go out and buy any content. It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that recent court cases and fines have gone too far, and totally disagree with things like the three-strike law. The industry is used to having it their own way for too long, and they have to realise that their days of bleeding the customer dry are numbered. Piracy and P2P are here, and no matter what they try, it's not going anywhere. They should be adopting their business models to take full use of technology, and provide affordable, legal and practical methods of content delivery. No DRM, no ridiculous fines for piracy; instead of us vs them, they should be working with us to say "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
But behind all of this, there must be a legal framework to say what's right and what's wrong. Something that says "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
I have always said that the only way to keep your e-mail address safe from spammers is to not give it out at all. Although Google may be doing it now, it's been perfectly possible for as long as computing power has been available cheaply to the spammers (ie botnets).
About 4 years ago I conducted an experiment with anti-spam techniques for the comments on my blog. One of the things I tried was a bit of javascript which added a validation field to the form. The spammers kept on as if it wasn't there, which meant they had to be evaluating javascript.
And the thing is, once your obsfucation measures are broken by the spammers, because of places like archive.org the internet never forgets - so you can't claw it back. You can update your obsfucation code on your site, but there's nothing stopping the spammers from simply trawling the archives and mirrors to find it there.
The only way to protect your e-mail address is to never send it client-side - always put it behind a form and a server-side mailing script.
I wonder if that's actually something against it. Say what you like about games, but at least they teach children that if you persevere at something you'll eventually succeed.
Although I guess my relentless practice and eventual awesome skill with quake didn't translate through to relentless revision and eventual awesome skill with exams. Which is why I failed most of them and am now unemployable.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you're an oxymoron! Haha that one never gets old.
But seriously, you're still going on about the locked room. I specifically said it didn't need to be a locked room. The parent post didn't say it needed to be locked - just a "computer room". A corner of a living room.
Ultimately you just have to trust your children to use the computer under your rules, and thereby use your parenting powers to enforce using the computers in communal areas.
After all, if - as you suggest - a child is determined enough to get onto facebook after hours that they'll learn how to pick a lock and then stay awake until everyone has gone to bed and fallen asleep, before creeping down and breaking into the computer room, I'm pretty sure they'll be determined enough to figure out a way around your DNS settings.
Ultimately you can't keep control over your children forever, and at some point you just have to trust that you have trained them well and let go of the bike and see if they fall over. Take sensible precautions; while they get used to the internet on their own computers, make sure they're somewhere you can keep an eye on them - not spy on their every move, just make sure they're not stripping off on their webcam for a 54 year old man in his underwear.
Technology is not a replacement for parenting.
The point is that technical solutions aren't always the answer.
He didn't say a locked room, just a common area designated as a "computer room". Putting the computers in a common area (be it a locked computer room or the corner of a living room) so you can keep a general eye on what they're doing, and you solve all of the content issues.
Tell your children that they can use the computer from 6am to 10pm. You don't need to lock them away in a room - if they obey, that's their sleep cycles protected. Punish them if you catch them sneaking off to use chat rooms at 2am. Hell, unplug the router and hide it in your bedroom if you don't think you can trust them.
Installing a complicated access and content filter costs more money and time to set up, and more to keep running. Just sit down with the children, explain the rules, and use your usual parenting skills to impose them.
That's not what he's asking - he likes to put his debug print statements at the start of a line to make it obvious where to pull them out when debugging later. Automatic indentation is not a solution to his problem.
@Unequivocal: Exactly, it sucks. I do exactly the same thing in other languages, but you can't do it in Python. I resort to dropping a debug() function into my code, and then:
Function here()
line 1 does some stuff
line 2 if statement
inside the if
debug(debug info to console)
line 3 more stuff
It's not ideal, but at least that way you can search for it afterwards. It does have the added bonus feature of being able to change debug() to return without doing anything when you make your code live, just in case you left a debug statement somewhere.
Re-read his example - he was saying in languages with braces it's obvious that you want e() if (c), and the compiler can check that; without braces in python it's one keystroke's difference, or a dodgy copy/paste.
Explicit braces does help code clarity. Also it annoys me when people argue the significant whitespace is good for beginners because it enforces good coding style, because it does not. Not only that, but it often gets in the way for non-beginners.
For example, long().chained().method().calls() can only be split inside brackets unless you use the god-awful \, which makes the code harder to read and/or harder to refactor.
Not to mention that you can make multiple();statements();on();one();line() - again, python thinks it's fine, but that's not good code style. You can't do brace matching to jump to the top/bottom of a code block, and you have to use "pass" to show you really did mean to leave that placeholder method empty for now, rather than just typing {} to come back to later.
About 75% of my work is in python at the moment, and there are many things I like about it, but saying that it enforces good coding style simply isn't true - in every language there will always be a way for bad programmers to write bad code. At least if you hand me a horrifically-formatted piece of perl, c# or javascript, you can just send it through a reformatter, which will be able to change indentation based on brackets and give you code which is laid out perfectly, without needing to worry that the whitespace it just added has broken the functionality.
It's not as if python saves us from that problem - not all indentation is equal. I frequently run into code that uses two spaces or a tab character for indentation, whereas I use 4 spaces. If I'm copy/pasting a snippet from documentation or a snippet site, I need to make sure its indentation is the same as mine. Not to mention what happens if you copy it from or paste it into a source where leading whitespace is lost. Trying to paste a few lines of python code in a chat client is frustrating at best.
Now, if you'd said that the lack of braces makes code more concise vertically, that it makes it look "cleaner" then I may agree, but if you want to teach people to write good code, teach them re-usable language-independent style guidelines at the same time you teach them algorithm design etc - the compiler is the wrong place to learn good code layout.
Well I apologise, those last 4 words weren't intended as Apple-hating bile, merely highlighting the obviously inaccurate conclusion of the original article which I can only assume comes from bias on the part of the author.
I was simply agreeing with the parent that the only reason that there's no technical reason that Apple should block Adobe from providing Flash for the iPhone or iPad, so therefore there must be another reason: money, and control of the software that runs on their platform.
But most of that the content is broken by your own definition.
Well yes, totally, but it's still nice to be able to access flash websites on the go if I want to find out information about ie a restaurant etc.
Anybody that thinks this is all on Apple is a Macromedia apologist/fanboy.
Well, I'm not a Macromedia/Adobe apologist/fanboy - for me their overpriced bloated products are up there with Apple and Microsoft, and rival the latter for the bug-ridden-code crown - but I do think that this lack of Flash on the iPhone and iPad is all on Apple, because it is.
Flash absolutely has a world of problems of its own, and the fact that Apple ban it delights me because it will hopefully mean that people will move even further away from it than they already have over the past few years.
But it does work well enough on the desktop, so Apple don't need to do anything to fix it - they just need to let Adobe provide an installation package. If something written in Flash doesn't work, that's down to the developer. If something is broken about the Flash implementation, that's down to Adobe. Apple could just stand back and say "It's not our problem".
As I said, there isn't a question of whether Flash can run on an iphone or ipad - as it quite clearly can - the only reason is because Apple want to retain absolute control over the software on their platform so that they get a cut of all sales. Fair enough, but articles saying that "Apple won't let it run because hover will not work" miss the point by such a wide margin that you have to wonder whether they're written by an idiot or a shill.
As an aside, considering how Microsoft have been hammered by IE anti-trust cases, I do wonder how much worse the reaction would have been if they'd blocked any other browser from running on Windows. I know it's a different situation, mostly because Apple don't control enough of the phone market for it to have a monopoly, but it's still an interesting comparison.
I really wish I had mod points, you're exactly right there.
The reason that inability to hover "never gets talked about" is that everybody competent knows that if something is important, don't hide it behind hover - it's almost always bad for usability and accessibility. Any website or web application that relies on hover effects is, quite frankly, broken. Sure, it may look nice and be convenient, but there should always be an alternative accessible way to navigate through an application.
If my 3 year old N95 runs Flash and can display content reasonably, there's no technical reason that the iphone/ipad can't too. Apple's decision to miss out Flash has nothing to do with performance or usability, and everything to do with money. Anyone who claims differently is a deluded apologist Apple fanboy.
My understanding is that they've got a special censoring proxy. A more reasonable option would seem to me to be a multiple choice question in the settings:
- "Use Opera's proxy for users outside China"
- "Use Opera's proxy for users inside China"
- "Use a different proxy"
- "Don't use Opera's proxy at all"
China can block the external proxy, and the browser can then auto-sense which Opera proxy to use, or let you bypass it altogether and go straight to the great firewall. That way everyone's happy.
Personally I'd prefer it if I didn't have to go through Opera's proxy; it may make things faster, but I always see it as another point in the chain where things can go wrong (security, privacy etc), and seems redundant when my phone's on a LAN. Do any recent versions let you turn it off?
I'd have thought because of noise and attenuation? Having said that I did used to run an audio cable from one side of my home to the other, never noticed any problems - but then I'm no audiophile.
Perhaps look at a bifferboard? http://bifferos.bizhat.com/
£29 for a tiny low-voltage machine that can play a wav that's being streamed over the network. Someone wrote a howto here: http://sites.google.com/site/bifferboard/Home/howto/use-bifferboard-as-network-audio-player
You'd still need to sort out speakers, and figure out a way to control it, but I'd have thought it would be fairly straight-forward to set up an IR controller or start/stop/next buttons to play a pre-defined playlist.
Probably because they work for Murdoch, and are merely writing what he tells them to.
FWIW my post wasn't flamebait. I don't agree with what you've said in your post, but don't want to get into a big theological argument - we obviously disagree strongly, but in so doing risk straying away from the point, which was that creationism is a belief, whereas evolution is a fact.
My point was that due to the history of how the bible was created and has been passed down through the generations, it seems illogical to assume that it is the literal word of god. You are free to believe that it is the literal word of god, that's fine, but you can't prove it to someone who doesn't share your belief. There is no evidence to support it.
To believe in creationism is to believe that there is an omnipotent being who created our reality, led us to adopt scientific methods to try to understand it, and littered our universe with things for us to discover that would imply that he did not create humans in one day, and that we're the result of the process of evolution.
Frankly I can't see why evolution and creationism can't live side by side - why can't God-worshippers say "Well, there's all this compelling irrefutable scientific evidence that life on earth came about through evolution, so I guess that's how God created us". Isn't it possible that God just dictated the bible in terms that would have made sense to Abraham thousands of years ago, so He skipped out all the stuff about dinosaurs and DNA?
But given we are having this argument, it seems not. Nonetheless, evolution is a fact, a scientifically proven fact, and it is futile to try to pretend otherwise. It happens all around us - bacteria evolve to resist certain antibiotics, butterflies evolve to survive in a rapidly changing environment - it happens all the time. The difference between evolution and creation is that evolution can be proven to someone who doesn't initially believe it to be true, provided they are prepared to consider the evidence.
I do find the whole subject of religion fascinating; as you may have gathered, I'm not a believer in any deity, but I am open to listen to those who do believe, and I respect that everyone is entitled to believe whatever they want to. Having said that, I feel strongly that evolution should be taught and discussed as the facts dictate, and that religious beliefs should be kept separate.
The church has managed to adapt to irrefutable challenges from the scientific community many times in the past, and I am sure it will again - but eventually the facts will win.
Evolution is not a theory, it's a fact. There is scientific evidence all around that proves it, not least fossil records and DNA analysis.
Another fact is that creationist crackpots are basing their beliefs on a book that was put together by committee hundreds of years ago. It cannot be taken literally as the word of God, because that is not what it is. It is a collection of stories written by humans over the past couple of thousand years, stories which reflect the morals, superstitions and prejudices of the societies of their times. It's a fascinating insight into the hopes and fears of our ancestors who lacked the scientific knowledge to explain the world around them, but you cannot take it as anything more than that.
The irony is that Bible-based societies have already thrown out large parts because they don't like them - for example, they rejected the parts of the bible which advocate stoning adulterous wives or disobedient children, with the notable exception of a few extreme Islamic groups. But then people hold up sentences right next to it as irrefutable proof that homosexuality is the work of Satan? And that in 4004 BC God created the heavens and earth and a near-infinite number of stars and galaxies in just 7 days, and then went to all the trouble of coming up with all this fake evidence proving evolution, which he weaved into every living cell just to fuck with us 6000 years later? Christ.
Exactly.
Besides, it's not like the contractors downloaded "Bob's IT Dashboard" and changed the logo - by the sounds of things, they just used open source libraries to reduce the development time.
Better than the BBC, for example, who insist on rolling their own libraries for everything, while on the taxpayer's time.
It has never been the case that everyone who liked a work paid for it. Just about everyone thinks -- or at least behaves as if they think -- that it is on many occasions fair to enjoy creative works without paying for them.
No, but it has always been the case that everyone who owned a work (or at least a license to use it) was legally obliged to pay for it. This reduces widespread adoption, and in particular blocks mainstream hardware implementations for fear of legal action.
Make content sharing legal like the pirate party want, and sooner or later you'll get netgear/linksys/belkin/apple/ms et al releasing affordable set-top boxes which browse torrent-esque sites, pull down music and videos, and play them straight into your tv for free. A bit like apple/ms already do, only with P2P.
The kind of thing that a minority of tech-savvy people are doing today without regard for the consequences will be available to the masses, and nobody sane would ever pay for content again.
With convenience of watching the latest releases at home while the costs are reduced to near zero, cinema attendance would suffer, and most films wouldn't stand a chance of making all their money back.
The only people who would stand a chance making money out of content in the short term would be those who can create a compelling way to package and deliver the content with a subscription or ad-supported revenue model. But even they would struggle in the long-term as hardware manufacturers try to undercut each other. The only real cost would be ISP bandwidth.
Making content free to share would ultimately kill all modern sources of professional-quality content. We would be reduced to theatres, concerts and youtube shorts of students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.
So instead of bleating that content wants to be free and that we should all live in some hippy copyrightless utopia, I'd prefer to be a bit more realistic and wait for the content industry to figure out they can make more money by embracing the internet than trying to fight it. It'll happen eventually.
I buy books I own; if I did go to the library, I'd pay library fees and they'd buy the books in. If I borrow my girlfriend's books and read those, she paid for them - and I give them back. This is legal, and in no way the same as it being legal for millions of people to go onto a P2P network and permanently download an exact copy of the book without giving the author any money.
Pay-per-joke is comparing apples to oranges - but I'd certainly expect to pay for a joke book, and don't think it would be fair to expect a recording of a comedian's performance which I didn't pay for.
I do pay for every song I own. I pay for songs I hear on the radio by listening to their adverts. If I sing to myself in the shower then I'm not performing it to anyone; if anything I'm practicing. If I sang it to 500 people in a field, and charged them access the performance, then yes, I should pay performance royalties.
If we were talking about making it legal for me to upload a video to YouTube of me singing in the shower, then yes, you may have a case for arguing that copyright law is unfair.
However, we're not talking about that. We're talking about the Pirate Party wanting to make it legal to copy a track or film off a CD or DVD, put it on a P2P network, and let millions of people get an identical copy of the original without any money going to the people involved in creating the content. I can't see how anyone thinks that is fair.
You and I may not like Britney Spears, but then we don't have to buy her music. A lot of people must like her though, because she keeps doing very well in the charts and on tour.
I don't like a lot of new music, but equally, there's a lot that I do. Some of it reached me via last.fm, but most of it reached me through the mainstream radio. If the people making the music weren't getting money for their efforts, that music wouldn't have reached me. Not to mention the books and films I've enjoyed reading and watching lately.
The current system is far from perfect, but the system that the pirate party are proposing would not only harm the content industries, but the content creators themselves - not just the manufactured pop mega-stars that you and I dislike, but the skilled and talented musicians, actors, authors, designers, and programmers who are merely making a fair living creating things.
I get the impression that they are bleeding the customer dry whenever I see people getting fines running into the tens of thousands for sharing a handful of tracks. A $2 million dollar fine for sharing 24 tracks.
When I see the industry saying that paying for a track on a CD doesn't entitle you to copy that onto your PC or portable MP3 player, and that you have to buy another copy.
When I hear about how the people want to extend copyright past any reasonable length to reasonably ensure income for the author.
When you look at a CD on an online shop and see it's half the price of electronic delivery from the same place.
When a CD of an album that came out in 1984 is 3 times the price of a 2008 straight-to-DVD film.
When "Gone with the Wind" - which came out in 1939, has made hundreds of millions of dollars since then, still holds the record for domestic box office, and whose main actors have been dead for at least 30-40 years - is still more expensive on DVD than films that came out in 2008.
The customer may may be paying a relatively fair price when compared to 1939, but that doesn't make it fair.
Yes, you can be an amateur musician playing music for the fun of it while you keep a day job. But to create anything of quality while you're doing a full-time job and would be incredibly difficult, especially if you had a family and wanted to play music with others.
I know a musician who had to leave his band because it got to the point where he didn't have enough time to practice with the others, get his work done and spend any time with his wife. Of course he didn't give it up altogether, but he had to give up any chance of doing it really well. Equally, his bandmates had to give up their full-time jobs to put the time into their practice. There just aren't enough hours in the day to do everything properly.
Just look at orchestras; the good ones are made up of full-time professionals. The ones made up of amateurs meeting once a week may get most of the notes in the right order, but they will lack the polish and precision of people who have the hours to practice to pull a performance up from amateur to professional.
And that's just the performance. You then have to find a composer with the skill, experience and time to create something worth listening to. A conductor or producer to make sure everything goes in the right place. You have to find someone with the time, expertise and equipment to record it.
I'm sorry, but I don't think that all of the effort that goes into creating an excellent recording should have to be done for free. If you spend all of that time building skills and creating something beautiful, you should be able to protect it legally for a reasonable amount of time.
If you remove money from creating music, books and films, you can only be left with amateurs who create amateur content with amateur production values. I'd prefer to continue to pay for quality.
Indeed you didn't; other people in this thread have said as much though, so it was partly in answer to those, and partly pre-empting a similar response.
If it's legal to share content with friends or strangers for free, on P2P networks or whatever, it will get mainstream hardware support, and everyone from grandchild to grandparent will have something hooked up to their TV that can download everything for free. They'll never pay a penny more, and they'd be stupid to do otherwise.
When there's no money coming in, people who make films and music will get no money to pay their bills, so they'll go do something that will.
There would never be another big-budget film with quality actors, soundtrack, story and effects. We'd be left watching old movies before the law was passed, and no-budget university students prancing around in abandoned campus car parks wielding make-pretend light sabers.
So no thanks, I'll continue to wait and hope the **AA figure out they can make more money out of working with their customers rather than against them. And until then, I'm sure a lot of other people will be happy with illegal P2P.
That's not what I'm saying. I said that they need to adopt and provide a service that meets consumer demand, at a reasonable price in the new internet-based world.
However, the piracy party seem to be saying that all content should be available to everyone for free, entirely legally. Who is going to go make a big-budget film when they can't make any money out of it?
And don't give me "all big budget films these days are crap, people should do it for the love of art" - how is hundreds of people spending years of their lives working on something going to pay their rent?
I know you're a troll and all, but I actually agree with your point (though not how you made it).
There's a fine line between fair and unfair use. If I like a film, money should go to the people involved in creating it and bringing it to my screen. If I like music, money should go to the people involved in creating it and bringing it to my speakers.
Sharing for non-commercial gain was fine back in the days of copying tapes for your friends at school. A group of you could club together, buy a tape each, and share them between you to get a good collection. Sure, the content creators might not get all the money they wanted, but they'd get all your pocket money. And all the pocket money from similar groups of kids all around the country.
But things have changed with the internet. Now only one person in one country has to buy it, and suddenly the group size changes from a handful of close friends into an anonymous P2P network millions strong. No industry could survive something like that - and I'm not just talking about the RIAA et all who would no longer be able to rape producers and consumers alike, I'm talking about there not being enough money around to invest in creating quality content for us in the first place.
It's all very well saying that if the content is good people will go out and buy it anyway - but once you make it legal, mainstream hardware manufacturers will come along with P2P-enabled set-top boxes which will bring convenience to the mass market, and there will be no reason for anyone to go out and buy any content. It would destroy the content creators overnight, and then we'd get no quality content.
Don't get me wrong - I agree that recent court cases and fines have gone too far, and totally disagree with things like the three-strike law. The industry is used to having it their own way for too long, and they have to realise that their days of bleeding the customer dry are numbered. Piracy and P2P are here, and no matter what they try, it's not going anywhere. They should be adopting their business models to take full use of technology, and provide affordable, legal and practical methods of content delivery. No DRM, no ridiculous fines for piracy; instead of us vs them, they should be working with us to say "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
But behind all of this, there must be a legal framework to say what's right and what's wrong. Something that says "if you like something, pay for it - it's only fair".
It has been happening for quite some time.
I have always said that the only way to keep your e-mail address safe from spammers is to not give it out at all. Although Google may be doing it now, it's been perfectly possible for as long as computing power has been available cheaply to the spammers (ie botnets).
About 4 years ago I conducted an experiment with anti-spam techniques for the comments on my blog. One of the things I tried was a bit of javascript which added a validation field to the form. The spammers kept on as if it wasn't there, which meant they had to be evaluating javascript.
And the thing is, once your obsfucation measures are broken by the spammers, because of places like archive.org the internet never forgets - so you can't claw it back. You can update your obsfucation code on your site, but there's nothing stopping the spammers from simply trawling the archives and mirrors to find it there.
The only way to protect your e-mail address is to never send it client-side - always put it behind a form and a server-side mailing script.
I wonder if that's actually something against it. Say what you like about games, but at least they teach children that if you persevere at something you'll eventually succeed.
Although I guess my relentless practice and eventual awesome skill with quake didn't translate through to relentless revision and eventual awesome skill with exams. Which is why I failed most of them and am now unemployable.
Never mind.
Yes, but the amount of traffic used by that will be dwarfed by the amount used on a desktop client.