I'm not a fan of Apple (nor a detractor), but even I can see that this story has zero value as news, but the content of TFA is arranged to deliver misleading understanding of the events for max sensationalism.
1) This has nothing really to do with Apple. The employee's decision was independent of official corporate direction, since it has no policy to prohibit in-house U.S. domestic sales to people suspected of being from Iran.
2) It definitely DOES NOT come across as "racial profiling". The reported reasoning behind the discrimination concerned the customer's country of origin (or destination), not the race.
3) I wonder what the employee was really thinking at the time, like, if the employee referred to a manager, or what. Did he fear for his job? Was he afraid he would violate a policy or law by making the sale, because he had an inadequate understanding of policies and laws? Does Apple have the right to refuse to do business with anyone?
4) It's amusing to read the employee's assessment (his unjust "racial profiling") was totally accurate. Apparently the customer's friend WAS from Iran.
Why would the "reference board [run] hot and loud" ? AMD has the engineers to develop this stunning achievement, but not the engineers or the time or money to indicate a recommended cooling solution?
Once again - Generating Meeting Requests? That's certainly a good reason to ban a product. That's all I use my phone for!
Dude, that is just hilarious. I wouldn't call it a phone if it didn't have that functionality, anymore than I would call a body ogan an eye if its understood function weren't to "see" (to keep it brief).
Funny how when Company XYZ does something that offends the privacy concerns of just about everyone, some slashdot user who likes Company XYZ shrugs and dismisses the ethical, moral, and possibly legal infractions under the non-argument "caveat emptor".
Hell, more often than not hackers theft of private computer data (err, sorry "duplication") and re-posting of it to public (sorry, "whistleblowing") is celebrated: You can steal from Company XYZ, but you can't steal from User 1990235630 ? Government ABC shouldn't track my data, but User 12363247 and Company XYZ(2) can ?
Sorry, but "don't use it" just isn't good enough. Anymore than government ABC shouldn't access my data, neither should these companies be doing what I understand them NOT to be allowed to do. The terms of service is two ways, mind you. It's not a contract just for my behavior. It's a contract for theirs. It establishes a mutual understanding of what we can and (most often) cannot do to each other and each other's stuff. These companies don't hold up their end of the bargain as expressed to us during the initial agreement, so "don't use it" doesn't place culpability of my privacy violations squarely on my shoulders.
I wish the majority ethical consensus on Slashdot would get just a little more consistent across these types of stories.
Repeat the study, reproduce the results many times in many different populations and cultures. I am inclined to call these findings are bullshit.
Just fx. Liebniz and Newton were obsessively religious, and both had minds that were among the most analytical in human history. Scores of systematic theologians (whose very occupation is an exercise in analytical thinking) are all the more zealous for it. Cosmologists often have bizarre religious beliefs, the more they look at the stars, the stronger their conviction in their peculiar faiths. Count them in your population, and you'd only find them brazened in their faith by analytical thinking.
It's just a fodder cannon designed to mark an unfounded distinction the general atheist populace can appeal to in order to mock the religious. Religious? Well, science proved to us the other day that you're not analytical so.... your argument never even existed by definition...., etc. etc.
But since you disagree with me, I'm sure you'll claim I'm not analytical and probably religious. Or call me a troll. *shrugs*
I believe you. The loss of Steve Jobs, sadly, impacted the dedication to quality and that sense of pride surrounding their commitment to truly technically inspiring Apple products. QA is there which means untested or essentially unnecessary features can't ship, and that's good, but the fact they can't take the time to test them when it means a more beautiful and worthwhile product, that's bad.
I was obviously joking about battery life because they've used that claim to dismiss a half dozen technologies even under Steve Jobs, I was being sardonic, I think that's the word...
It's not like the idea alone wasn't pitched around to a thousand companies since 1980. And then after TNG came out, and it was technically feasible to produce such a device, and everyone thought about how to make one, it's not like a WORKING idea didn't emerge which was pitched around to a thousand companies since 1991.
So I'm not sure the point of the post. Is it MS fucked up somehnow? Is this some attempt to bash MS? Cos MS always fucks up, according to Slashdot, right? That's why I get minus points, called a troll and flamebait, when I say something pro-MS around Slashdot? (Or when I complain about being mislabelled a trolll and flamebait.) I mean just cos MS passed up on it doesn't mean a thing about MS since a t housand other companies also passed up on it. MS didn't fuck up, they just didn't have the benefit of the retrospective determinism we have now looking back to then - the truth is such a device had no business existing in 1991 and would have been a bad BUSINESS move. MS was struggling just to push its core competency (OS and dev tools) at the time, remember? They didn't have the power to buy up patents in unproven markets with technologies that were hardly worth the effort at the time?
So really, what is the point of this post? Cos really all I get walking from it is "MS Sucks somehow, reason 0xFF49"
With so many so-called "software engineers", that explains why there is just so much bad software out there. Not everyone has the discipline to turn their software development practices into engineering work. In my experience a lot of software engineers are really just, well,... coders... ?
It's poor reasoning to think that a reduction of piracy will mean an increase in market shares, as though those two variables are causally linked and somehow have inversely proportional growth. I would be surprised in the rates of growth of these two variables are not causally linked, though. But that's because loss in sales in the music industry is calculated by estimating the total volume of pirated music, and then multiplying that by the music's marketable value. So 100,000 albums pirated at $10 a copy means the industry "lost" $1 million. But it doesn't follow a certain percentage of those who pirated the album would have purchased it - many would rather not have the album at all than pay the costs to own it. So the labels are still at a loss - they need people both NOT to steal the music, AND to purchase it. Anyways, so if you stopped 80,000 of those 100k pirated copies from going out, it necessarily follows the industry's monetary "loss" will go down as well. It does not translate to a growth in profit or market share. Those variables aren't even linked for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't make sense to staticize them or correlate them in a way the industry itself isn't even doing. This isn't rocket science, people. It's not even high school algebra.
... Show of hands. How many of you think it's OK for a single artist to pursue getting money over a copyright dispute, i.e. collecting money for "lost sales" and due to misappropriation of the artists' material (which is what happened here)? Now how many of you think it's wrong for a GROUP of people, say, a record label, or a group of record labels, to seek the same monetary compensation for misappropriation of material they own? Huh....
I enjoyed that thoroughly. Just like Mythical Man-Month is required reading in virtually all CS programs, something like this needs to be adapted and given as required reading, too - with more anectdotal details of the failure and solutions and costs, and with more pragmatic approaches to avoiding pitfalls, of course. Really good find for us. Thanks/. editors.
Mods, how does this drivel from benjfowler get 4 Insightful while I get a -1 Troll whenever I applaud a Microsoft product? Can't you leave your politics out of tech, please? His post is nothing but flame bait and you know it. We have "The right don't like science" [citation needed], we have "The right are racist" [citation needed], we have "the Right love to bomb people" [citation needed], we have "the right put company over science" [citation needed]. End result? A bunch of meandering, random and wild accusations intended to incense anyone who si not benjfowler. And it's a +4 Insightful ???
Physicists claimed the evolution of language was based on some characterization of words of vocalization pattern and energy usage, the idea being that languages which afford more efficient energy requirements to the speaker tend to survive by natural selection process, just as animals in any environment evolve physical characteristics that are specifically adapted to efficient energy usage in that environment.
I don't understand. The OPERA experiment blamed on a data link cable seems pretty specious and.. well let's demonstrate that then. In the mean time, how do we measure the passage of time itself? I see that it is not a quantized value; it is the measurement, not a thing to be measured; but it doesn't make sense to me. Events, such as a photon changing position, must occur in discrete intervals, right? How do we know nothing occurs during these intervals? This is a stupid question but I'm very curious for reference material. I'm not too dumb to understand the math, I just never really thought about the subject before, so fill me in on the details guys.
To illustrate my point, I'm pretty sure we both would agree that unregistered guns are used in a lot of violent crime. So do you think it would be reasonable to have a local group of concerned citizens search your house looking for some? Hand you some forms demanding you list what weapons you do have, and tell you that if you have any guns that aren't properly registered, you'll be in trouble? Offer bribes to people you know and offer them cash if they can recall seeing you with a gun?
OK, that's actually a pretty good analogy... And honestly when I think about it in those terms, you're right, the tactics do seem out of hand.
No, I'm NOT flame baiting mods, so leave it alone. Now anyways, how is this any different than, say, offering a reward towards the solving of any other crime... theft, murder, whatever. So Microsoft pays people to report on what, technically (i.e. according to the law) is illegal, and you have a problem with that... do you have a problem with people paying to help solve crimes in general? Or is it just because MS or copyright is involved (these are dirty words here on Slashdot...)
I myself participated in one of these software audits on the local high school and it wasn't some horrific nightmare, none of us viewed it as a violation of our inalienable rights, or whatever nauseatin form of torture TFA is making the process out to be. We found 50 or so unlicensed softwares and got that fixed, we self-reported and didn't get penalized. and MS has a right to be compensated for its products, especially since we were receiving support from them for various services.
The death of the encyclopedia is similar to the death of the dictionary and thesaurus: Nothing replaced these things, they simply lost utility to the average person. We no longer need to look up big words because the way we communicate with a small diction is sufficient; we no longer need a general knowledge reference like print or even online encyclopedias because the average person rarely makes reference to such knowledge anymore. Chemists have chemistry books, lawyers have law books, etc. etc. knowledge is specialized. 50 years ago, 70 years ago, hell 200 years ago it was fashionable to know a lot of general things about a lot of general things. Today, it's just not the case. It's not the PC that did this. It's fashion. It's natural selection.
At your bank, your "digital space" money copy corresponds to a real world valuable asset. There is a huge difference between that and a scan or photocopy of money.
Users of download services such as file upload sites or Usenet or P2P services like SLSK do often pay for the privelage of being able to download copies of original IP like music, tv episodes and movies. This proves that there is an intrinsic value to such copies; they can be exchanged as goods for money or other goods and/or services. But a digital copy of cash cannot be exchanged in such manner. It's becoming increasingly embarassing for me to be a programmer when I have to be associated with moron ideas like this one by default.
I see people typing on ipads in the class rooms taking notes. I assume they sync later to the pc or laptop in their dorms for real processing in Word or whatever. For some reason the small back pack trend of the mid-late 90's is back, and I'm sure tablets are to blame. Even guys are wearing half-size or small backpacks where tablets easily fit.
Input: Any text. Output: "Buy (any text) online in canada! Available at your local shopping mart!!!! Great deals (any text) secrets they don't want you to know!!"
Demanding someone return property under the threat of violence is not itself violence. I don't need to rely on Big Brother to do every god damn thing for me.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a fan of Apple (nor a detractor), but even I can see that this story has zero value as news, but the content of TFA is arranged to deliver misleading understanding of the events for max sensationalism.
1) This has nothing really to do with Apple. The employee's decision was independent of official corporate direction, since it has no policy to prohibit in-house U.S. domestic sales to people suspected of being from Iran.
2) It definitely DOES NOT come across as "racial profiling". The reported reasoning behind the discrimination concerned the customer's country of origin (or destination), not the race.
3) I wonder what the employee was really thinking at the time, like, if the employee referred to a manager, or what. Did he fear for his job? Was he afraid he would violate a policy or law by making the sale, because he had an inadequate understanding of policies and laws? Does Apple have the right to refuse to do business with anyone?
4) It's amusing to read the employee's assessment (his unjust "racial profiling") was totally accurate. Apparently the customer's friend WAS from Iran.
Why would the "reference board [run] hot and loud" ? AMD has the engineers to develop this stunning achievement, but not the engineers or the time or money to indicate a recommended cooling solution?
Once again - Generating Meeting Requests? That's certainly a good reason to ban a product. That's all I use my phone for!
Dude, that is just hilarious. I wouldn't call it a phone if it didn't have that functionality, anymore than I would call a body ogan an eye if its understood function weren't to "see" (to keep it brief).
If you want privacy, don't sign up to Facebook.
Funny how when Company XYZ does something that offends the privacy concerns of just about everyone, some slashdot user who likes Company XYZ shrugs and dismisses the ethical, moral, and possibly legal infractions under the non-argument "caveat emptor".
Hell, more often than not hackers theft of private computer data (err, sorry "duplication") and re-posting of it to public (sorry, "whistleblowing") is celebrated: You can steal from Company XYZ, but you can't steal from User 1990235630 ? Government ABC shouldn't track my data, but User 12363247 and Company XYZ(2) can ?
Sorry, but "don't use it" just isn't good enough. Anymore than government ABC shouldn't access my data, neither should these companies be doing what I understand them NOT to be allowed to do. The terms of service is two ways, mind you. It's not a contract just for my behavior. It's a contract for theirs. It establishes a mutual understanding of what we can and (most often) cannot do to each other and each other's stuff. These companies don't hold up their end of the bargain as expressed to us during the initial agreement, so "don't use it" doesn't place culpability of my privacy violations squarely on my shoulders.
I wish the majority ethical consensus on Slashdot would get just a little more consistent across these types of stories.
Repeat the study, reproduce the results many times in many different populations and cultures. I am inclined to call these findings are bullshit.
.... your argument never even existed by definition. ..., etc. etc.
Just fx. Liebniz and Newton were obsessively religious, and both had minds that were among the most analytical in human history. Scores of systematic theologians (whose very occupation is an exercise in analytical thinking) are all the more zealous for it. Cosmologists often have bizarre religious beliefs, the more they look at the stars, the stronger their conviction in their peculiar faiths. Count them in your population, and you'd only find them brazened in their faith by analytical thinking.
It's just a fodder cannon designed to mark an unfounded distinction the general atheist populace can appeal to in order to mock the religious. Religious? Well, science proved to us the other day that you're not analytical so
But since you disagree with me, I'm sure you'll claim I'm not analytical and probably religious. Or call me a troll. *shrugs*
I believe you. The loss of Steve Jobs, sadly, impacted the dedication to quality and that sense of pride surrounding their commitment to truly technically inspiring Apple products. QA is there which means untested or essentially unnecessary features can't ship, and that's good, but the fact they can't take the time to test them when it means a more beautiful and worthwhile product, that's bad.
I was obviously joking about battery life because they've used that claim to dismiss a half dozen technologies even under Steve Jobs, I was being sardonic, I think that's the word...
It's not like the idea alone wasn't pitched around to a thousand companies since 1980. And then after TNG came out, and it was technically feasible to produce such a device, and everyone thought about how to make one, it's not like a WORKING idea didn't emerge which was pitched around to a thousand companies since 1991.
So I'm not sure the point of the post. Is it MS fucked up somehnow? Is this some attempt to bash MS? Cos MS always fucks up, according to Slashdot, right? That's why I get minus points, called a troll and flamebait, when I say something pro-MS around Slashdot? (Or when I complain about being mislabelled a trolll and flamebait.) I mean just cos MS passed up on it doesn't mean a thing about MS since a t housand other companies also passed up on it. MS didn't fuck up, they just didn't have the benefit of the retrospective determinism we have now looking back to then - the truth is such a device had no business existing in 1991 and would have been a bad BUSINESS move. MS was struggling just to push its core competency (OS and dev tools) at the time, remember? They didn't have the power to buy up patents in unproven markets with technologies that were hardly worth the effort at the time?
So really, what is the point of this post? Cos really all I get walking from it is "MS Sucks somehow, reason 0xFF49"
Simple as that. That's their core philosophy. Batter life. IPv4 got it. IPv6 don't.
With so many so-called "software engineers", that explains why there is just so much bad software out there. Not everyone has the discipline to turn their software development practices into engineering work. In my experience a lot of software engineers are really just, well, ... coders... ?
It's poor reasoning to think that a reduction of piracy will mean an increase in market shares, as though those two variables are causally linked and somehow have inversely proportional growth. I would be surprised in the rates of growth of these two variables are not causally linked, though. But that's because loss in sales in the music industry is calculated by estimating the total volume of pirated music, and then multiplying that by the music's marketable value. So 100,000 albums pirated at $10 a copy means the industry "lost" $1 million. But it doesn't follow a certain percentage of those who pirated the album would have purchased it - many would rather not have the album at all than pay the costs to own it. So the labels are still at a loss - they need people both NOT to steal the music, AND to purchase it. Anyways, so if you stopped 80,000 of those 100k pirated copies from going out, it necessarily follows the industry's monetary "loss" will go down as well. It does not translate to a growth in profit or market share. Those variables aren't even linked for the purposes of this discussion, it doesn't make sense to staticize them or correlate them in a way the industry itself isn't even doing. This isn't rocket science, people. It's not even high school algebra.
... Show of hands. How many of you think it's OK for a single artist to pursue getting money over a copyright dispute, i.e. collecting money for "lost sales" and due to misappropriation of the artists' material (which is what happened here)? Now how many of you think it's wrong for a GROUP of people, say, a record label, or a group of record labels, to seek the same monetary compensation for misappropriation of material they own? Huh....
I enjoyed that thoroughly. Just like Mythical Man-Month is required reading in virtually all CS programs, something like this needs to be adapted and given as required reading, too - with more anectdotal details of the failure and solutions and costs, and with more pragmatic approaches to avoiding pitfalls, of course. Really good find for us. Thanks /. editors.
Mods, how does this drivel from benjfowler get 4 Insightful while I get a -1 Troll whenever I applaud a Microsoft product? Can't you leave your politics out of tech, please? His post is nothing but flame bait and you know it. We have "The right don't like science" [citation needed], we have "The right are racist" [citation needed], we have "the Right love to bomb people" [citation needed], we have "the right put company over science" [citation needed]. End result? A bunch of meandering, random and wild accusations intended to incense anyone who si not benjfowler. And it's a +4 Insightful ???
Physicists claimed the evolution of language was based on some characterization of words of vocalization pattern and energy usage, the idea being that languages which afford more efficient energy requirements to the speaker tend to survive by natural selection process, just as animals in any environment evolve physical characteristics that are specifically adapted to efficient energy usage in that environment.
I don't understand. The OPERA experiment blamed on a data link cable seems pretty specious and.. well let's demonstrate that then. In the mean time, how do we measure the passage of time itself? I see that it is not a quantized value; it is the measurement, not a thing to be measured; but it doesn't make sense to me. Events, such as a photon changing position, must occur in discrete intervals, right? How do we know nothing occurs during these intervals? This is a stupid question but I'm very curious for reference material. I'm not too dumb to understand the math, I just never really thought about the subject before, so fill me in on the details guys.
To illustrate my point, I'm pretty sure we both would agree that unregistered guns are used in a lot of violent crime. So do you think it would be reasonable to have a local group of concerned citizens search your house looking for some? Hand you some forms demanding you list what weapons you do have, and tell you that if you have any guns that aren't properly registered, you'll be in trouble? Offer bribes to people you know and offer them cash if they can recall seeing you with a gun?
OK, that's actually a pretty good analogy... And honestly when I think about it in those terms, you're right, the tactics do seem out of hand.
No, I'm NOT flame baiting mods, so leave it alone. Now anyways, how is this any different than, say, offering a reward towards the solving of any other crime... theft, murder, whatever. So Microsoft pays people to report on what, technically (i.e. according to the law) is illegal, and you have a problem with that... do you have a problem with people paying to help solve crimes in general? Or is it just because MS or copyright is involved (these are dirty words here on Slashdot...)
I myself participated in one of these software audits on the local high school and it wasn't some horrific nightmare, none of us viewed it as a violation of our inalienable rights, or whatever nauseatin form of torture TFA is making the process out to be. We found 50 or so unlicensed softwares and got that fixed, we self-reported and didn't get penalized. and MS has a right to be compensated for its products, especially since we were receiving support from them for various services.
The death of the encyclopedia is similar to the death of the dictionary and thesaurus: Nothing replaced these things, they simply lost utility to the average person. We no longer need to look up big words because the way we communicate with a small diction is sufficient; we no longer need a general knowledge reference like print or even online encyclopedias because the average person rarely makes reference to such knowledge anymore. Chemists have chemistry books, lawyers have law books, etc. etc. knowledge is specialized. 50 years ago, 70 years ago, hell 200 years ago it was fashionable to know a lot of general things about a lot of general things. Today, it's just not the case. It's not the PC that did this. It's fashion. It's natural selection.
At your bank, your "digital space" money copy corresponds to a real world valuable asset. There is a huge difference between that and a scan or photocopy of money.
Users of download services such as file upload sites or Usenet or P2P services like SLSK do often pay for the privelage of being able to download copies of original IP like music, tv episodes and movies. This proves that there is an intrinsic value to such copies; they can be exchanged as goods for money or other goods and/or services. But a digital copy of cash cannot be exchanged in such manner. It's becoming increasingly embarassing for me to be a programmer when I have to be associated with moron ideas like this one by default.
Offer a Markov chain text gen on that shit and I'll pay $1 for the app as well
I see people typing on ipads in the class rooms taking notes. I assume they sync later to the pc or laptop in their dorms for real processing in Word or whatever. For some reason the small back pack trend of the mid-late 90's is back, and I'm sure tablets are to blame. Even guys are wearing half-size or small backpacks where tablets easily fit.
You need to own a tablet to get a girlfriend? Weak. Your game sucks I take it.
Input: Any text. Output: "Buy (any text) online in canada! Available at your local shopping mart!!!! Great deals (any text) secrets they don't want you to know!!"
Demanding someone return property under the threat of violence is not itself violence. I don't need to rely on Big Brother to do every god damn thing for me.