Power doesn't automatically require complexity, it just means that you may need better UI designers. This is a problem that has long plagued many open source projects.
It matters if you actually want the product adopted so that you can brag that it's popular and not just functional. If you fly in the face of convention and don't actually explain your reasons for doing so, then it just sounds like you're avoiding responsibility by failing to release a 1.0 product. It's not just cool because commercial companies do it, it's a logical and mathematically sound approach to doing things that's been around even before computers adopted it. Iterations should be done in whole numbers; the integer "1" indicates that it's a complete unit. "0.24" makes it appear that the developers have deep-seated insecurities about their abilities and a morbid fear of criticism.
When somebody doesn't get paid for a product they've created, then somebody's committing a crime and it's not the creator. While the software industry's figures may be greatly exaggerated to support their arguments, saying that it's not theft is also not completely true. At the very least it's exploitation and freeloading, which are despicable if not actually illegal.
If you don't want to pay for it that's your choice, but don't try to justify it. You are taking something for nothing. If you truly thought the product had no value, you wouldn't take it (i.e. nothing for nothing). It's only fair.
I agree. The system being exploited by scrupulous bastards is par for the course, and it's the industry that created the mess. They *like* things the way they are, because it allows them to abuse the system in a way that benefits them.
He's also basing his argument on sales three years in the future. Even if there wasn't an iPad to compete, anybody with any experience with the tech industry knows that's a ridiculous statement to make. He even says "will" sell instead of "expected to" or "predicted to". Ooh. Maybe he's psychic?
Unfortunately, the criticism is pretty self-serving. The FSF is saying how this clearly illustrates their point that free software is the only way to go, but pretends not to notice that their free software doesn't do any good unless they have hardware to run it on. Until there is an equivalent competitor to the iPad that is also open-source friendly (which will literally never happen), then people are just going to have to deal with Apple and Adobe's competition with each other. Apple is trying to protect its own customer base by ensuring they have a good experience on their hardware. I *want* that. Adobe wants to subvert the application development structure of the mobile computing market for their own financial gain, and in doing so, threatens to ruin my day by encouraging the development of second-rate, lowest-common-denominator software that doesn't actually take full advantage of the capabilities of the device and hampers Apple's attempts to upgrade the operating system should Adobe decide that it's not in their best interests to upgrade their software to keep up with Apple's development cycle. They would, in effect, have a say in that development cycle, which would result in a bunch of pissed-off users who blame it on Apple.
Adobe has a terrible track record in their arrogant disregard for their supposed partners, or even their customers. They are very strongly driven by what they determine to be the most profitable direction to go in at any given moment, and spend the rest of the time smiling and playing lip service as if it was all part of some bigger plan. They have over a decade-long history of burning Apple and specifically in the area of OS development cycles, which has forced their users to refrain from upgrading their operating systems (or even better, forced them to buy all-new hardware), just to cater to Adobe's dictates.
The FSF may have a philosophical interest in this argument, but even they should acknowledge that the users are the ones who need to be taken care of, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to do. When there is an open-source friendly, comparable product released in the next year or so, then they will have a leg to stand on, but until then, they're offering nothing for something; not exactly a bargain.
Every operating system, by definition, is proprietary. It requires that you play by its rules, and if your code isn't supported, then tough luck for you. Just because Windows and Intel are de facto standards doesn't make them open standards. Blaming Steve Jobs for saying that he doesn't want his platform on his hardware device supplanted by a secondary platform that could potentially become a de facto standard as well seems a bit short-sighted. If Flash did the same for Linux, and great chunks of the Linux applications available were replaced with Flash-compiled equivalents, you can bet that there would be complaints in the same vein.
Right back atcha, Mr. Obnoxious Brit! Just because you spell it "tyre" doesn't make it right, it just makes you stubborn. The spelling changed because it's a living language.:)
Transmitting copyrighted material for the purposes of making another copy is, in fact, a very cut-and-dried example of copyright infringement. It doesn't matter where the destination is, whether it be your DVD burner or someone else's computer - if a copy of the data is made, then you've broken copyright. Furthermore, if the copy is transmitted to someone else for them to use as they see fit, then it's also theft.
You don't have to like the fact that the decent thing to do would be to pay people for what they create, but you could at least stop trying to justify not paying them.
As a resident of Japan, I officially have to carry around my foreigner's registration card at all times. Also, just as will happen in Arizona, a police officer may attempt to check my papers, but is legally restricted from doing so unless he has probable cause. Many foreigners get harassed this way, anyway. Rumor has it that you can turn it around on the officer and ask for his ID, which will usually get them to back down. Again, the same rules should apply in the states.
Quid pro quo, as a blonde, white man I'm usually left alone, because it's assumed that I belong to the right group of foreigners. A black friend of mine, also an American, has been stopped once or twice a year for six years. Where Japanese have a hard time is when they discriminate against other Asian ethnicities, since they look like everyone else. That's where Arizona may run into difficulties as well, since they have a large population of Hispanic Americans.
Facebook did let people know time and time again, and people just kept using it. I think the government is right to step in here; I don't consider somebody sharing all my information with strangers and marketing firms a "feature", nor am I unhappy to have it taken away. The other option would be a class-action lawsuit, which could take forever, and requires a lawyer who believes he can make money off of it before he's going to do anything to help.
The government is acting according to the voice of the people. That's their job.
I never found floppies to be useful even when they were mainstream; they simply were too unreliable to store data on. I bought into Zip disks as soon as they were released and never looked back. Even that's nostalgic, thinking back to the day when 100MB per disk was generous! Man, I loved my Zip drive.
So a mere decade-plus-a-bit after Apple announced that they would no longer be including a floppy drive on their computers, one company finally announces that they're no longer going to be producing them by next year? Talk about your technology lag.
And this is exactly why you aren't allowed to rule the world.
Just because a sterilizer civilization seems plausible on paper doesn't mean that it's actually going to happen, nor that we should adopt that posture based on the conjecture of a science fiction story. The last time people started believing made-up stuff like that, we got Scientology, and we all know where *that* went.
Seriously, the mathematician's answer to population control is never an answer at all. If you're willing to make that argument, why not argue in favor of killing off all of the inhabitants of our own planet that we deem unfit or in direct competition with our own objectives? The fact of the matter is, other alien species are going to develop under roughly similar biological imperatives as we have. While we do have a nasty habit of enslaving and exploiting each other (as do ants), we very rarely wipe out every single living inhabitant of a given region strictly for the purposes of preemptively protecting ourselves. This isn't just because of superior morals or compassion, but also because it's a horrible waste of resources, and really doesn't serve any purpose to forward our own agendas whatsoever. Why would this change on the cosmic scale?
At the very least, if we get destroyed because we failed to destroy every developing civilization we happen across, then at least we avoid dying as hypocrites who justify mass murder on a galactic scale as being some sort of ethical imperative. The mitigating arguments don't sound any better, either; the human race as zookeeper Borg? Yay, humanity!
Yes, it's possible that there will be conflicts. Of course, since most conflicts arise out of competition over resources, I think it's safe to say that we're eons away from filling up the Milky Way with colonies of any type that are going to start stepping on other peoples' toes. In the meantime, the argument in favor of *starting* a galactic conflict in order to *avoid* a galactic conflict doesn't make a lot of sense. We're much more likely to be wiped out by a stray asteroid in the next 100 years than we are by some sort of fantastic black-hole device in the next thousand, and the best part is, it will look like a complete accident.
Apple's publicly traded, too, but that hasn't stopped them. The thing is, Adobe has jerked Apple around for years, *especially* where the Flash player is concerned. It's slower and buggier on Macs, and Adobe shows little incentive in improving the situation. Couple that with the fact that there have been times in the past where Adobe has stopped development on the Mac at times where they felt like it just wasn't worth the revenue anymore (Premiere), and I have little sympathy left over for them.
As many people have pointed out, Apple is preventing Adobe from creating some de facto pseudo-programming standard on the iPhone and iPad that both drags the platform down in quality and also locks Apple into having to wait for Adobe's permission to update their own platform. Adobe has already screwed their Mac users over several times in the past by failing to support OSX releases, and when they do get around to fixing the problem, it's often been a paid upgrade to the tune of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. As an Adobe customer, even I don't like them. They've got a long row to hoe before they'll get any sympathy from their own customer base, let alone Apple.
It seems a bit fuzzy, doesn't it? If they're saying they're not going to host the servers themselves, then they're absolutely within their rights. If they say that they're not going to allow people to access Usenet no matter where it's hosted, then they're breaking net neutrality.
I suspect it comes down to who you hang out with as to how your views of Japan are shaped. Many of my friends are in their 20s and 30s and get their news from the paper or television. Even my computer-savvy friends hardly use RSS at all; the only aggregators they frequently use are what they can get through Yahoo! Japan and YouTube.
I've been here 8 years and taught at several high schools, and young people with no wherewithal beyond their cell phones also rely on the paper for their news (if nothing else, for the special deals on concerts and movies that are often included).
As for young people speaking English in Japan, Japan ranks as one of the lowest countries in the world, let alone Asia, in English speaking ability. This is a problem I work on daily to try to fix, and this at a school with an English-intensive course.
Trust me, most young Japanese people below college age have no idea what the Japan Times is, and less desire to try to read it unless forced to for class (which at our school they do via photocopies from the physical paper).
Density doesn't necessarily drive popularity. However, Japan is unique in its group mindset, where a lot of people are happy to do things just because everyone else does.
Also, Japanese are strongly traditional and have a cultural appreciation for things like newspapers. They like to share, for one; they can clip articles; and a paper is viewed as more economical and frugal (doesn't require electricity).
Japanese are incredibly protective of their copyrights and deeply dislike giving anything away for free - they want to get paid for what they do. Also, the newspaper culture is huge here (as the parent said) and despite Japan's image of being on the cutting edge of technology, people prefer having a paper in front of them rather than having to sit in front of a computer (most homes typically have only one).
Too. Many periods. And truisms are always wrong. How soon does justice have to be served to make the deadline? Seven days? Seven months? Seven years is incredible for a case that was patently (har har) ridiculous, but it's over with and the bad guys lost. This is a Good Thing (tm).
If the media is so great that people are willing to pirate it, then the creators are justified in getting paid. Just because something can be pirated for free doesn't diminish its value. It's just going to be an ongoing, ugly battle between users and creators until a good balance can be struck, and some sort of DRM is probably going to have to be a part of that. Some people argue that digital distribution has relegated the distributors to the scrapheap of history. By the same token, you could say that fair use is also relegated to that same scrapheap, if for no other reason than the necessity to keep funding the media the consumers seem so desperate to consume. If a fair price could be set for a movie download and the distribution channels were truly that pervasive, then people would have no need to give their friends anything beyond a recommendation to download the movie.
Yeah, that quote made me blink. They're basically saying that they're going to advocate using litigation as a means to get paid? I think that the government would have something to say about it if their court systems were being used as a standardized distribution channel for the movie industry. Talk about your ill-gotten gains. Not to mention using taxpayer money to sue the taxpayers (via the same court systems) and thus "monetize their alternative distribution channel". Cheeky.
Those cases all involve known sperm donors who are friends of the mothers, participated without a contract, and then continued to be involved in the child's life afterwards explicitly as their father. In the case of clinics, they specifically make you sign paperwork absolving them of all liability.
It's not double-dipping if they deliver the DLC before the fact; it's just geography. If you were to wait a month and then download it for $5, would you consider it double-dipping? The explanation in TFA is pretty clear and makes sense, even if it's annoying. Burnout Paradise did the same thing for the same reasons. It's a practical solution to a technical problem. This actually allows "have" and "have-not" friends to play together without forcing them to upgrade as a group. That's actually more generous to the players, not more greedy.
Nobody has a moral right to do crime. Just because something is easy to do and you can convince yourself that it's justified because you don't think they're Good People doesn't grant any kind of justification for your actions.
Of course, I'm replying to an AC, which means he'll probably never read it.
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Power doesn't automatically require complexity, it just means that you may need better UI designers. This is a problem that has long plagued many open source projects.
It matters if you actually want the product adopted so that you can brag that it's popular and not just functional. If you fly in the face of convention and don't actually explain your reasons for doing so, then it just sounds like you're avoiding responsibility by failing to release a 1.0 product. It's not just cool because commercial companies do it, it's a logical and mathematically sound approach to doing things that's been around even before computers adopted it. Iterations should be done in whole numbers; the integer "1" indicates that it's a complete unit. "0.24" makes it appear that the developers have deep-seated insecurities about their abilities and a morbid fear of criticism.
When somebody doesn't get paid for a product they've created, then somebody's committing a crime and it's not the creator. While the software industry's figures may be greatly exaggerated to support their arguments, saying that it's not theft is also not completely true. At the very least it's exploitation and freeloading, which are despicable if not actually illegal.
If you don't want to pay for it that's your choice, but don't try to justify it. You are taking something for nothing. If you truly thought the product had no value, you wouldn't take it (i.e. nothing for nothing). It's only fair.
I agree. The system being exploited by scrupulous bastards is par for the course, and it's the industry that created the mess. They *like* things the way they are, because it allows them to abuse the system in a way that benefits them.
He's also basing his argument on sales three years in the future. Even if there wasn't an iPad to compete, anybody with any experience with the tech industry knows that's a ridiculous statement to make. He even says "will" sell instead of "expected to" or "predicted to". Ooh. Maybe he's psychic?
Unfortunately, the criticism is pretty self-serving. The FSF is saying how this clearly illustrates their point that free software is the only way to go, but pretends not to notice that their free software doesn't do any good unless they have hardware to run it on. Until there is an equivalent competitor to the iPad that is also open-source friendly (which will literally never happen), then people are just going to have to deal with Apple and Adobe's competition with each other. Apple is trying to protect its own customer base by ensuring they have a good experience on their hardware. I *want* that. Adobe wants to subvert the application development structure of the mobile computing market for their own financial gain, and in doing so, threatens to ruin my day by encouraging the development of second-rate, lowest-common-denominator software that doesn't actually take full advantage of the capabilities of the device and hampers Apple's attempts to upgrade the operating system should Adobe decide that it's not in their best interests to upgrade their software to keep up with Apple's development cycle. They would, in effect, have a say in that development cycle, which would result in a bunch of pissed-off users who blame it on Apple.
Adobe has a terrible track record in their arrogant disregard for their supposed partners, or even their customers. They are very strongly driven by what they determine to be the most profitable direction to go in at any given moment, and spend the rest of the time smiling and playing lip service as if it was all part of some bigger plan. They have over a decade-long history of burning Apple and specifically in the area of OS development cycles, which has forced their users to refrain from upgrading their operating systems (or even better, forced them to buy all-new hardware), just to cater to Adobe's dictates.
The FSF may have a philosophical interest in this argument, but even they should acknowledge that the users are the ones who need to be taken care of, and that's exactly what Apple is trying to do. When there is an open-source friendly, comparable product released in the next year or so, then they will have a leg to stand on, but until then, they're offering nothing for something; not exactly a bargain.
Every operating system, by definition, is proprietary. It requires that you play by its rules, and if your code isn't supported, then tough luck for you. Just because Windows and Intel are de facto standards doesn't make them open standards. Blaming Steve Jobs for saying that he doesn't want his platform on his hardware device supplanted by a secondary platform that could potentially become a de facto standard as well seems a bit short-sighted. If Flash did the same for Linux, and great chunks of the Linux applications available were replaced with Flash-compiled equivalents, you can bet that there would be complaints in the same vein.
Right back atcha, Mr. Obnoxious Brit! Just because you spell it "tyre" doesn't make it right, it just makes you stubborn. The spelling changed because it's a living language. :)
Transmitting copyrighted material for the purposes of making another copy is, in fact, a very cut-and-dried example of copyright infringement. It doesn't matter where the destination is, whether it be your DVD burner or someone else's computer - if a copy of the data is made, then you've broken copyright. Furthermore, if the copy is transmitted to someone else for them to use as they see fit, then it's also theft.
You don't have to like the fact that the decent thing to do would be to pay people for what they create, but you could at least stop trying to justify not paying them.
As a resident of Japan, I officially have to carry around my foreigner's registration card at all times. Also, just as will happen in Arizona, a police officer may attempt to check my papers, but is legally restricted from doing so unless he has probable cause. Many foreigners get harassed this way, anyway. Rumor has it that you can turn it around on the officer and ask for his ID, which will usually get them to back down. Again, the same rules should apply in the states.
Quid pro quo, as a blonde, white man I'm usually left alone, because it's assumed that I belong to the right group of foreigners. A black friend of mine, also an American, has been stopped once or twice a year for six years. Where Japanese have a hard time is when they discriminate against other Asian ethnicities, since they look like everyone else. That's where Arizona may run into difficulties as well, since they have a large population of Hispanic Americans.
Facebook did let people know time and time again, and people just kept using it. I think the government is right to step in here; I don't consider somebody sharing all my information with strangers and marketing firms a "feature", nor am I unhappy to have it taken away. The other option would be a class-action lawsuit, which could take forever, and requires a lawyer who believes he can make money off of it before he's going to do anything to help.
The government is acting according to the voice of the people. That's their job.
I never found floppies to be useful even when they were mainstream; they simply were too unreliable to store data on. I bought into Zip disks as soon as they were released and never looked back. Even that's nostalgic, thinking back to the day when 100MB per disk was generous! Man, I loved my Zip drive.
So a mere decade-plus-a-bit after Apple announced that they would no longer be including a floppy drive on their computers, one company finally announces that they're no longer going to be producing them by next year? Talk about your technology lag.
And this is exactly why you aren't allowed to rule the world.
Just because a sterilizer civilization seems plausible on paper doesn't mean that it's actually going to happen, nor that we should adopt that posture based on the conjecture of a science fiction story. The last time people started believing made-up stuff like that, we got Scientology, and we all know where *that* went.
Seriously, the mathematician's answer to population control is never an answer at all. If you're willing to make that argument, why not argue in favor of killing off all of the inhabitants of our own planet that we deem unfit or in direct competition with our own objectives? The fact of the matter is, other alien species are going to develop under roughly similar biological imperatives as we have. While we do have a nasty habit of enslaving and exploiting each other (as do ants), we very rarely wipe out every single living inhabitant of a given region strictly for the purposes of preemptively protecting ourselves. This isn't just because of superior morals or compassion, but also because it's a horrible waste of resources, and really doesn't serve any purpose to forward our own agendas whatsoever. Why would this change on the cosmic scale?
At the very least, if we get destroyed because we failed to destroy every developing civilization we happen across, then at least we avoid dying as hypocrites who justify mass murder on a galactic scale as being some sort of ethical imperative. The mitigating arguments don't sound any better, either; the human race as zookeeper Borg? Yay, humanity!
Yes, it's possible that there will be conflicts. Of course, since most conflicts arise out of competition over resources, I think it's safe to say that we're eons away from filling up the Milky Way with colonies of any type that are going to start stepping on other peoples' toes. In the meantime, the argument in favor of *starting* a galactic conflict in order to *avoid* a galactic conflict doesn't make a lot of sense. We're much more likely to be wiped out by a stray asteroid in the next 100 years than we are by some sort of fantastic black-hole device in the next thousand, and the best part is, it will look like a complete accident.
Apple's publicly traded, too, but that hasn't stopped them. The thing is, Adobe has jerked Apple around for years, *especially* where the Flash player is concerned. It's slower and buggier on Macs, and Adobe shows little incentive in improving the situation. Couple that with the fact that there have been times in the past where Adobe has stopped development on the Mac at times where they felt like it just wasn't worth the revenue anymore (Premiere), and I have little sympathy left over for them.
As many people have pointed out, Apple is preventing Adobe from creating some de facto pseudo-programming standard on the iPhone and iPad that both drags the platform down in quality and also locks Apple into having to wait for Adobe's permission to update their own platform. Adobe has already screwed their Mac users over several times in the past by failing to support OSX releases, and when they do get around to fixing the problem, it's often been a paid upgrade to the tune of hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars. As an Adobe customer, even I don't like them. They've got a long row to hoe before they'll get any sympathy from their own customer base, let alone Apple.
It seems a bit fuzzy, doesn't it? If they're saying they're not going to host the servers themselves, then they're absolutely within their rights. If they say that they're not going to allow people to access Usenet no matter where it's hosted, then they're breaking net neutrality.
I suspect it comes down to who you hang out with as to how your views of Japan are shaped. Many of my friends are in their 20s and 30s and get their news from the paper or television. Even my computer-savvy friends hardly use RSS at all; the only aggregators they frequently use are what they can get through Yahoo! Japan and YouTube.
I've been here 8 years and taught at several high schools, and young people with no wherewithal beyond their cell phones also rely on the paper for their news (if nothing else, for the special deals on concerts and movies that are often included).
As for young people speaking English in Japan, Japan ranks as one of the lowest countries in the world, let alone Asia, in English speaking ability. This is a problem I work on daily to try to fix, and this at a school with an English-intensive course.
Trust me, most young Japanese people below college age have no idea what the Japan Times is, and less desire to try to read it unless forced to for class (which at our school they do via photocopies from the physical paper).
Density doesn't necessarily drive popularity. However, Japan is unique in its group mindset, where a lot of people are happy to do things just because everyone else does.
Also, Japanese are strongly traditional and have a cultural appreciation for things like newspapers. They like to share, for one; they can clip articles; and a paper is viewed as more economical and frugal (doesn't require electricity).
Japanese are incredibly protective of their copyrights and deeply dislike giving anything away for free - they want to get paid for what they do. Also, the newspaper culture is huge here (as the parent said) and despite Japan's image of being on the cutting edge of technology, people prefer having a paper in front of them rather than having to sit in front of a computer (most homes typically have only one).
Too. Many periods. And truisms are always wrong. How soon does justice have to be served to make the deadline? Seven days? Seven months? Seven years is incredible for a case that was patently (har har) ridiculous, but it's over with and the bad guys lost. This is a Good Thing (tm).
If the media is so great that people are willing to pirate it, then the creators are justified in getting paid. Just because something can be pirated for free doesn't diminish its value. It's just going to be an ongoing, ugly battle between users and creators until a good balance can be struck, and some sort of DRM is probably going to have to be a part of that. Some people argue that digital distribution has relegated the distributors to the scrapheap of history. By the same token, you could say that fair use is also relegated to that same scrapheap, if for no other reason than the necessity to keep funding the media the consumers seem so desperate to consume. If a fair price could be set for a movie download and the distribution channels were truly that pervasive, then people would have no need to give their friends anything beyond a recommendation to download the movie.
Yeah, that quote made me blink. They're basically saying that they're going to advocate using litigation as a means to get paid? I think that the government would have something to say about it if their court systems were being used as a standardized distribution channel for the movie industry. Talk about your ill-gotten gains. Not to mention using taxpayer money to sue the taxpayers (via the same court systems) and thus "monetize their alternative distribution channel". Cheeky.
Those cases all involve known sperm donors who are friends of the mothers, participated without a contract, and then continued to be involved in the child's life afterwards explicitly as their father. In the case of clinics, they specifically make you sign paperwork absolving them of all liability.
Exactly how far through the phone conversation did they get before they figured out you were a guy?
It's not double-dipping if they deliver the DLC before the fact; it's just geography. If you were to wait a month and then download it for $5, would you consider it double-dipping? The explanation in TFA is pretty clear and makes sense, even if it's annoying. Burnout Paradise did the same thing for the same reasons. It's a practical solution to a technical problem. This actually allows "have" and "have-not" friends to play together without forcing them to upgrade as a group. That's actually more generous to the players, not more greedy.
Nobody has a moral right to do crime. Just because something is easy to do and you can convince yourself that it's justified because you don't think they're Good People doesn't grant any kind of justification for your actions.
Of course, I'm replying to an AC, which means he'll probably never read it.