What ever happened to the public option? You know, cutting the profit motive out of funding health care, so that people do not have to fight with their insurance companies or with hospitals just to get the treatment they need?
That was back when the government was actively thwarting the deployment of encryption on the Internet. Now we are stuck in a situation where our privacy is even easier to violate because hardly anything is encrypted or authenticated.
Which is also why this is not a battle that will be won with technology. Most people do not understand the extent to which their privacy is being violated or the implications of those violations, and only see the technical measures as getting in the way of what they want to do with their computers. The web companies know this, and that is why their websites are designed to fail if you disable technologies that are known to be used for tracking.
Yes, I know, someone is going to say, "Use Tor!" -- and I would have said the same thing not so long ago. Yet this is more complicated than just deploying privacy enhancing technologies.
We are talking about companies that have teams of hackers and computer scientists who are paid to find ways to break technical measures of protecting privacy. Substantial effort is needed to fight back, and most people are not willing to do the sorts of things that would be needed to protect their privacy. Disabling Flash, Silverlight, Java, and Javascript? Disabling cookies? These things make using the web very difficult these days, and as if that were not enough, there are malicious Tor exits that look for passwords and credit card data -- leaving users dependent on the very websites that are violating their privacy to protect it (by enabling TLS).
So unless someone has figured out a way to compel everyone to stop installing every trendy plugin, to give up on trendy Javascript-heavy websites, and to demand TLS from every website they connect to, we need to put some legal restrictions on data collection in places. Yes, I know, the big bad government interfering with business, but let's put it this way: do you want the big bad government to have access to vast logs of user activity (which is the next step after the corporations collect it -- the government either asks politely, demands it, or covertly acquires it)?
Which leaves us at the heart of the problem: the only organization in our society with the power needed to stop this has an interest in promoting it.
The rest of your comment is complete nonsense, you are doubling down on a completely broken premise that government should be running any program or any type of business at all
Funny how vast amounts of research, including ground-breaking research that ultimately finds its way into consumer products, is done by researchers using grant money from the government.
You are of an opinion that the free market is unable to create competition
No, I am of the opinion that the R&D costs associated with drug research are high, that the risks are high, and that the combination of risks and costs requires pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices to remain profitable. It is not a matter of competition, it is a matter of up-front costs, the risk that those up front costs will lead nowhere, and the need to cover not only the cost of developing successful drugs but also the cost of studying all of the unsuccessful drugs.
The problem is the government
Nope.
the problem is patents
Yup.
the problem is also FDA
Yes, but not for the reason you think. The problem is that the FDA evaluates the products of private enterprise almost exclusively, which leads to those businesses using their political influence to convince the FDA to give them favorable outcomes -- including the refusal to acknowledge the medical uses of drugs like marijuana and LSD. The solution is not to cut out the FDA, it is to cut out the pharmaceutical companies -- let the FDA evaluate drugs that come out of university research labs that have less profit motive, and give its permission for pharmaceutical companies to market those drugs as treatments for particular ailments.
any type of gov't involvement in health care
Nope.
tax code, income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes
OK, let's defund the military, stop the war on drugs, and cut numerous other overtly destructive policies that those taxes pay for. Then, instead of pretending that the free market will solve all of our problems, let's use that money to pay for better schools, better transportation, increased research, and other public benefits.
If you have gov't involved in anything, you get higher prices, less competition, more controls, lower quality, fewer choices in that area. This should be obvious by now.
Hm, that's funny, because our universities were decent places where people could become educated beyond the minimum vocational training they need back when states were bothering to adequately fund universities. Now that the government is withdrawing from directly higher education, we see an increased focus on vocational training coupled with a reduced focus on humanities or "broader picture" subjects (i.e. those subjects that teach people to think about the nature and structure of society, rather than just their immediate profession). Schools proudly declare that their graduates get high paying jobs, not that their graduates are improving society or making the world a better place.
What, you think that the government is to blame because of subsidized loans? The tuition required by private colleges, even those that are not prestigious or top-tier, effectively prices out anyone who does not come from an upper middle class or wealthy family. I guess free market fundamentalists think that is a good thing, that the poor can remain shackled by being less educated than the wealthy.
Keep capitalist approaches where they belong: industry, stock exchanges, banking, etc. Applying capitalist ideas to things like education and health care is just a covert way to establish and cement a rich aristocracy.
Of all the things that could be so much better with the American education system, I think the tile and physical building parts are... minimal.
Never discount the effect that the environment people work in has on those people. If it were just that the floor tiles are arranged in simple, periodic patterns, it would just be a minor footnote about aesthetics. The problem is that you have such floors in buildings where the classrooms are identically sized and shaped and are arranged in simple, periodic patterns; the desks have identical sizes and shapes, and are arranged in simple, periodic patterns (ranks and files); the windows are rectangles of identical size, arranged in a simple, periodic pattern that is synchronized with the classrooms. The doors are all identical -- identical colors, identical window locations, identical doorknobs. Classrooms are numbered, using a code that identifies the floor and location on that floor.
The entire design of many schools is based only on a single shape, the rectangle -- rooms are rectangles, desks are rectangles, doors are rectangles, windows are rectangles, desks are arranged in rectangular grids, and the building itself is just a giant rectangular parallelepiped, or if you are lucky perhaps several intersecting parallelepipeds (and the intersections are, naturally, at right angles).
It is a bureaucratic design that encourages bureaucratic thinking, and it is embedded in a larger bureaucracy, where everyone is identified by numbers and ranks, where forms are all based on the same shape and pattern (usually the rectangle), and where enforcement of the rules is considered to be a high ideal.
Oh, by the way, there are other, less oppressive ways to do things, even down to the floor tiles:
What are you going to do? Outlaw private funding into medical research? Outlaw results of such private research from being used to make money on the drug market?
No, I rather see the end of patents on drugs, and a vast increase in NIH and NSF funding for drug research. Let the scientists at universities develop new drugs, and let anyone who wants to produce them do so. If private companies want to compete with that, they are free to try.
The problem is exactly what you propose as a solution - government IN research with its patents and FDA and various subsidies, and you want to solve that problem... wait for it.... with more government.
No, the problem is not the government. John Galt's character is a sociopath, not a hero. The problem is a particular government program: patents granted on medicines. Here, on the other hand, is the sort of government program that should be expanded and used to substitute the system of pharmaceutical company protection:
Instead of giving pharmaceutical companies the right to deny new drugs to people who need them, we should put pharmaceutical companies in their proper place: producing drugs discovered by scientists, for the public, at prices that do not reflect the cost or risks of drug research. We need not raise taxes to pay for this research, we can simply stop paying for the world's largest prison population, end the war on drugs and all the damage it is doing to society, and use that money to achieve good ends.
Yet there is no annual fee to use a terminal in Mac OS X, which is exactly my point here -- right now, in Mac OS X, you can just open a terminal and do whatever you want. The biggest hurdle is finding the terminal itself, which is not even comparable to (a) requiring a separate computer and (b) having to pay an annual fee (even if it is a small fee). No, $99 won't drive people who can afford Apple products broke, but the hurdle of having to pay an annual fee and having to use another computer does discourage people who are not committed.
Sure, although with IOMMUs being widely deployed on PCs and hardware being more virtualization-friendly these days, it should not be long before running AutoCAD in a VM is not so annoying.
Clojure is becoming pretty popular these days, and there are plenty of not-so-trendy places where you see Scheme and Common Lisp being used. Also, do not forget that a certain widely used text editor is mostly written in Lisp, and that there are plenty of developers working on that editor.
Oh, yeah, and AutoCAD macros, but I am not sure how many people are writing those...
No, that is not a setting you can just choose; you need to pay Apple and/or get Apple's permission to enable that. It is not as simple as finding the terminal in Mac OS X.
However, there are indeed domains where a period of exclusive commercial exploitation makes sense. Drug research, movie production.
Disagree on both counts. Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines, and deny medicines to entire regions that are plagued by disease? We have also seen these companies push medications harder than those medications need to be pushed, pressuring doctors to give unnecessary and sometimes dangerous prescriptions, and pressuring politicians to keep easy-to-produce medicines illegal (and that means more than just marijuana).
As for movies, it is almost impossible to tell at this point whether or even if the movie industry has had financial problems resulting from online copyright infringement. We have seen them claim that blockbuster hits like Forrest Gump actually turned a loss, just to deny payment to people who foolishly requested a cut of the profits. With the questionable accounting practices we see in the entertainment industry, the cutthroat tactics that have nothing to do with copyrights, I am not sure that industry needs any government protection.
I cannot think of many weird,/. headline-grabbing Mac OS X hacks, except for getting the OS to run on non-Apple computers -- and those articles often involve Apple cracking down on such operations. Yet we have seen articles about BSD running on a toaster, GNU/Linux being used to control an anti-squirrel system in someone's backyard, etc.; we saw the rise of LiveCD and LiveUSB from GNU/Linux hackers; and there is one anecdote after another about unusual projects, yet hardly any having to do with Apple products. I know of exactly one hacker project that used an Apple computer without any attack from Apple, which is at a coffee shop in New York where the computer controls a system of tubes that move coffee beans and ultimately brew coffee.
So where is the Apple hacker culture? I know that it exists -- anything with a CPU will have a hacker community. Yet Apple does not merely fail to foster such a community (e.g. OpenDarwin), it actually fights back against it (e.g. the approach to Hackintosh makers -- and yes, companies that make hackable computers are an important part of any hacker community). I understand why Apple behaves this way, I understand that this is the sort of behavior that led Apple to be the most successful corporation on the planet and that lots of money has been made by it, but there can be little question that it has come at the cost of killing the hacker culture that once surrounded Apple.
what's left behind is a large group of programmers using their Macs (of any stripe, in my experience) to code for any platform
I do not deny that -- but when I see programmers using Apple products, I almost always see them using the higher end products. I have seen plenty of MacBook Pro toting programmers, plenty of PowerMac G5 workstations in use by programmers, and almost no MacBook Air or Mac Mini users writing software. There seems to be a slight bump among college students, but the overwhelming majority of hackers and programmers I see on college campuses are using Windows, GNU/Linux, or some open source BSD.
Maybe I am wrong: maybe there are so many programmers, sysadmins, and hackers who use low-end Apple computers that locking down the consumer line would be a disaster. It could be that I have the wrong idea about who is using Apple products, that what I have seen has been biased too heavily in favor of academia (where the Apple users are almost all non-technical people) and that the general approach in the "working world" is different. I would be surprised by this, though, given that when I was working at a corporation we were given high-end IBM Thinkpads (which should give you an idea about the timeframe), and that I cannot imagine that the sort of places that buy high end IBM or Dell laptops would buy low end Apple laptops for the same group of employees.
One appeal of the Mac environment is that I can move from my MBA to my MacPro or vice versa, pull my code and work seamlessly
Sure, but Apple is pushing the "air" version of the MacBook Pro line. I think it is reasonable to assume that what drew programmers to the MBA is the low weight, long battery life, and slim form factor -- and that those people will be buying the new MacBook Pro as more powerful replacements.
Take away the power of the lesser machine and you reduce the value of the MacPro
Except that instead of "taking away" power, Apple can just sell the power at a higher price. A consumer "Air" laptop that is locked down, and for some higher price, and an "Air Pro" that is not locked down.
Except that $4000 over 6 years is not even a blip on Apple's RADAR. Their revenue in just 3 months is roughly $40 billion -- that's ten millions times more in just 3 months than you gave them in 6 years.
It is also interesting that you purchased two iPhones and two iPods, but then turned around and said that if you could not install GNU/Linux on your Mac Mini, you would switch to Android. I guess you cannot be faulted for sticking to your principles, I am just a little confused as to what those principles might be.
Sure, but that is off to the side, and it is worded in a way that only someone with technical background can really understand. For someone who does not really understand what they are seeing, that says, "PCs get viruses, and Macs do not!"
I understand that you are being pedantic and just pointing out a technicality, but even that technicality is poorly founded. Sure, they do not explicitly say that Macs are immune to all viruses or malware. Yet they word things in a way to suggest that that is the case; they draw a stark distinction between Macs and systems that run Windows (and let's just ignore the Mac users that run Windows on their computer), they point out that all those Windows viruses do not affect Macs, then followup with statements about how Mac OS X is designed to defend against viruses. Anyone who interprets that as saying that there are no viruses for Mac OS X could easily be forgiven; the statement was written to be deliberately confusing without actually being false.
Any citation for the claim that access to the Terminal will be restricted in the future? Or that the putative restrictions will only apply to expensive "workstations"? Or is it just something you've been saying?
Just something I have been saying, based on where the general market for personal computers is moving and based on the enormous success Apple has had with its "App Store." There is a trend towards locked-down computing, and Apple is a leader in that category. So far, they have been nice enough to limit the lock-down to their iPad/iPhone/iPod line, but there is no real reason why their "consumer" MacBooks and Mac Mini systems could not be locked down. There would be plenty of money in it for them if they did that sort of thing.
Anyone can write software for the Mac
For now.
If it's for your own use, that's the end of the story
Yet that is not what we see with the iPad. You cannot plug in a keyboard and start hacking; you need another computer for that, for no reason other than the restrictions that were designed into iOS.
In the future, anyone can request a certificate that will permit distribution of their software
For a fee; again, look at what happens with iOS.
XCode runs on all Macs from Mini to MacPro
There is no reason for Apple not to demand that people pay for a "professional" system before they are allowed to write their own programs. Most consumers do not write software, and most of the money Apple is seeing from the App Store and from the general software ecosystem of their iPad/etc. line comes from programs written by people who use expensive workstations. There are a few big stories about some kid using his low-end Mac to write an app with lots of downloads, but look at who wrote the most popular apps in the store (scroll down):
Written by and copyrighted by corporations, including such big corporations as Disney and Sony. Do you think those places are buying their programmers Mac Minis, or the highest end workstations?
It is not as though Mac OS X has a strong developer community or open source ecosystem surrounding it. Yes, those things exist for Mac OS X, but the overwhelming majority of OS X users do not care -- they use proprietary software written by big companies like Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. The hacker culture surrounding Apple is dead; Woz is gone, the perception that users should be able to replace batteries or disks is fading, and the new approach is based on users having their computation managed by Apple.
Apple's OS is a lot of things, but it's still Unix based. If I want to do something, a terminal window is a click away
For now; I have been saying this for a long time, but Apple is moving towards a product line where only their most expensive workstations give users the freedom to open terminals or write their own software. People did not flee from iOS; they embraced it like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
The question is, by teaching kids in essence Camping/Survival Skills, are we really teaching them leadership?
Perhaps; at the very least, it teaches kids not to be afraid of the unknown, not to be hopelessly dependent on those around them (especially those in authority positions), and so forth.
Putting children in positions of authority, being able to give commands and take the consequences of such commands, are important leadership skills
Whereas a typical elementary school student in the US is subjected to the following treatment:
Sit at an assigned desk, arranged in a grid
Boring, repetetive assignments whose completion is a determining factor in their grades and ultimately their ability to advance to the next level of education
Systematic discipline systems in a well-defined power structure
One person who leads many; levels of leadership arranged as a tree
Forms, paperwork, scantrons, and other common bureaucratic designs
Flourescent lighting and uniform floor tiling
Regimented schedules, mandatory evacuation from the building at the end of the school day unless you have a specific, authorized reason to stick around.
Locked doors, locked cabinets, locked desks, chain link fences, bars and grates over the windows, locks and chains over the gates, security cameras around the perimeter of the building
Metal detectors and X-ray scans to enter the school; no expectation of privacy in lockers, desks, or even on a student's person. Contraband items are collected at the door -- cell phones, various tools, etc.
Computers that are programmed to thwart any deviation from the prescribed curriculum. Firewalls and invasions of online privacy, systems that block Tor and proxy servers, etc..
Police officers and guards patrolling the hallways, grounds, etc., looking for students who are not sitting in their assigned desks in their assigned classes (and heaven forbid those students are doing something that was not assigned!).
How many people could possibly be prepared for leadership of any sort after 13-14 years of such treatment? Yes I know, we had "good reasons" for all of the above, but the result has been that our children are sent to some kind of Orwellian nightmare for many hours each day.
I cannot speak for other nations, but in America, our schools are in desperate need of positive reform. We need to stop using an authoritarian approach to education, and start creating schools that students want to attend, rather than schools that students flee from.
People not being able to get the latest TV / MP3 / phone / iwhatever isn't a disaster
This. Right now, tech manufacturing is feeding the demand to do things like upgrade computers and phones every 18 months. We need to get used to the idea that the existence of a faster CPU with more cores does not imply a need to have one.
Well, that's how China does things. It is reasonable to think that a school or corporation might allow SSH but not Tor, since there are more obvious "legitimate" uses for SSH.
Slashdot Mirror
What ever happened to the public option? You know, cutting the profit motive out of funding health care, so that people do not have to fight with their insurance companies or with hospitals just to get the treatment they need?
That was back when the government was actively thwarting the deployment of encryption on the Internet. Now we are stuck in a situation where our privacy is even easier to violate because hardly anything is encrypted or authenticated.
Which is also why this is not a battle that will be won with technology. Most people do not understand the extent to which their privacy is being violated or the implications of those violations, and only see the technical measures as getting in the way of what they want to do with their computers. The web companies know this, and that is why their websites are designed to fail if you disable technologies that are known to be used for tracking.
Yes, I know, someone is going to say, "Use Tor!" -- and I would have said the same thing not so long ago. Yet this is more complicated than just deploying privacy enhancing technologies.
We are talking about companies that have teams of hackers and computer scientists who are paid to find ways to break technical measures of protecting privacy. Substantial effort is needed to fight back, and most people are not willing to do the sorts of things that would be needed to protect their privacy. Disabling Flash, Silverlight, Java, and Javascript? Disabling cookies? These things make using the web very difficult these days, and as if that were not enough, there are malicious Tor exits that look for passwords and credit card data -- leaving users dependent on the very websites that are violating their privacy to protect it (by enabling TLS).
So unless someone has figured out a way to compel everyone to stop installing every trendy plugin, to give up on trendy Javascript-heavy websites, and to demand TLS from every website they connect to, we need to put some legal restrictions on data collection in places. Yes, I know, the big bad government interfering with business, but let's put it this way: do you want the big bad government to have access to vast logs of user activity (which is the next step after the corporations collect it -- the government either asks politely, demands it, or covertly acquires it)?
Which leaves us at the heart of the problem: the only organization in our society with the power needed to stop this has an interest in promoting it.
The rest of your comment is complete nonsense, you are doubling down on a completely broken premise that government should be running any program or any type of business at all
Funny how vast amounts of research, including ground-breaking research that ultimately finds its way into consumer products, is done by researchers using grant money from the government.
You are of an opinion that the free market is unable to create competition
No, I am of the opinion that the R&D costs associated with drug research are high, that the risks are high, and that the combination of risks and costs requires pharmaceutical companies to raise their prices to remain profitable. It is not a matter of competition, it is a matter of up-front costs, the risk that those up front costs will lead nowhere, and the need to cover not only the cost of developing successful drugs but also the cost of studying all of the unsuccessful drugs.
The problem is the government
Nope.
the problem is patents
Yup.
the problem is also FDA
Yes, but not for the reason you think. The problem is that the FDA evaluates the products of private enterprise almost exclusively, which leads to those businesses using their political influence to convince the FDA to give them favorable outcomes -- including the refusal to acknowledge the medical uses of drugs like marijuana and LSD. The solution is not to cut out the FDA, it is to cut out the pharmaceutical companies -- let the FDA evaluate drugs that come out of university research labs that have less profit motive, and give its permission for pharmaceutical companies to market those drugs as treatments for particular ailments.
any type of gov't involvement in health care
Nope.
tax code, income taxes, corporate taxes, payroll taxes
OK, let's defund the military, stop the war on drugs, and cut numerous other overtly destructive policies that those taxes pay for. Then, instead of pretending that the free market will solve all of our problems, let's use that money to pay for better schools, better transportation, increased research, and other public benefits.
If you have gov't involved in anything, you get higher prices, less competition, more controls, lower quality, fewer choices in that area. This should be obvious by now.
Hm, that's funny, because our universities were decent places where people could become educated beyond the minimum vocational training they need back when states were bothering to adequately fund universities. Now that the government is withdrawing from directly higher education, we see an increased focus on vocational training coupled with a reduced focus on humanities or "broader picture" subjects (i.e. those subjects that teach people to think about the nature and structure of society, rather than just their immediate profession). Schools proudly declare that their graduates get high paying jobs, not that their graduates are improving society or making the world a better place.
What, you think that the government is to blame because of subsidized loans? The tuition required by private colleges, even those that are not prestigious or top-tier, effectively prices out anyone who does not come from an upper middle class or wealthy family. I guess free market fundamentalists think that is a good thing, that the poor can remain shackled by being less educated than the wealthy.
Keep capitalist approaches where they belong: industry, stock exchanges, banking, etc. Applying capitalist ideas to things like education and health care is just a covert way to establish and cement a rich aristocracy.
Of all the things that could be so much better with the American education system, I think the tile and physical building parts are... minimal.
Never discount the effect that the environment people work in has on those people. If it were just that the floor tiles are arranged in simple, periodic patterns, it would just be a minor footnote about aesthetics. The problem is that you have such floors in buildings where the classrooms are identically sized and shaped and are arranged in simple, periodic patterns; the desks have identical sizes and shapes, and are arranged in simple, periodic patterns (ranks and files); the windows are rectangles of identical size, arranged in a simple, periodic pattern that is synchronized with the classrooms. The doors are all identical -- identical colors, identical window locations, identical doorknobs. Classrooms are numbered, using a code that identifies the floor and location on that floor.
The entire design of many schools is based only on a single shape, the rectangle -- rooms are rectangles, desks are rectangles, doors are rectangles, windows are rectangles, desks are arranged in rectangular grids, and the building itself is just a giant rectangular parallelepiped, or if you are lucky perhaps several intersecting parallelepipeds (and the intersections are, naturally, at right angles).
It is a bureaucratic design that encourages bureaucratic thinking, and it is embedded in a larger bureaucracy, where everyone is identified by numbers and ranks, where forms are all based on the same shape and pattern (usually the rectangle), and where enforcement of the rules is considered to be a high ideal.
Oh, by the way, there are other, less oppressive ways to do things, even down to the floor tiles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topkapi_Scroll
What are you going to do? Outlaw private funding into medical research? Outlaw results of such private research from being used to make money on the drug market?
No, I rather see the end of patents on drugs, and a vast increase in NIH and NSF funding for drug research. Let the scientists at universities develop new drugs, and let anyone who wants to produce them do so. If private companies want to compete with that, they are free to try.
The problem is exactly what you propose as a solution - government IN research with its patents and FDA and various subsidies, and you want to solve that problem ... wait for it .... with more government.
No, the problem is not the government. John Galt's character is a sociopath, not a hero. The problem is a particular government program: patents granted on medicines. Here, on the other hand, is the sort of government program that should be expanded and used to substitute the system of pharmaceutical company protection:
http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
Instead of giving pharmaceutical companies the right to deny new drugs to people who need them, we should put pharmaceutical companies in their proper place: producing drugs discovered by scientists, for the public, at prices that do not reflect the cost or risks of drug research. We need not raise taxes to pay for this research, we can simply stop paying for the world's largest prison population, end the war on drugs and all the damage it is doing to society, and use that money to achieve good ends.
Yet there is no annual fee to use a terminal in Mac OS X, which is exactly my point here -- right now, in Mac OS X, you can just open a terminal and do whatever you want. The biggest hurdle is finding the terminal itself, which is not even comparable to (a) requiring a separate computer and (b) having to pay an annual fee (even if it is a small fee). No, $99 won't drive people who can afford Apple products broke, but the hurdle of having to pay an annual fee and having to use another computer does discourage people who are not committed.
Sure, although with IOMMUs being widely deployed on PCs and hardware being more virtualization-friendly these days, it should not be long before running AutoCAD in a VM is not so annoying.
Run it in a VM, using a fresh VM image before each use.
Or does AutoCAD have some horrible DRM system that would get in the way of that approach?
The Chinese are just sampling these designs to decide whether or not to buy.
There aren't many anyways
Clojure is becoming pretty popular these days, and there are plenty of not-so-trendy places where you see Scheme and Common Lisp being used. Also, do not forget that a certain widely used text editor is mostly written in Lisp, and that there are plenty of developers working on that editor.
Oh, yeah, and AutoCAD macros, but I am not sure how many people are writing those...
No, that is not a setting you can just choose; you need to pay Apple and/or get Apple's permission to enable that. It is not as simple as finding the terminal in Mac OS X.
However, there are indeed domains where a period of exclusive commercial exploitation makes sense. Drug research, movie production.
Disagree on both counts. Drug research should be publicly funded, for the benefit of the public and of humanity at large. Why should pharmaceutical companies get to extort money from people who desperately need medicines, and deny medicines to entire regions that are plagued by disease? We have also seen these companies push medications harder than those medications need to be pushed, pressuring doctors to give unnecessary and sometimes dangerous prescriptions, and pressuring politicians to keep easy-to-produce medicines illegal (and that means more than just marijuana).
As for movies, it is almost impossible to tell at this point whether or even if the movie industry has had financial problems resulting from online copyright infringement. We have seen them claim that blockbuster hits like Forrest Gump actually turned a loss, just to deny payment to people who foolishly requested a cut of the profits. With the questionable accounting practices we see in the entertainment industry, the cutthroat tactics that have nothing to do with copyrights, I am not sure that industry needs any government protection.
Maybe hacker culture has moved on to other niches, as you suggest
I am not even sure there is much debate about that one. WWDC is the only major Mac programming convention, and yet GNU/Linux has all of this:
/. headline-grabbing Mac OS X hacks, except for getting the OS to run on non-Apple computers -- and those articles often involve Apple cracking down on such operations. Yet we have seen articles about BSD running on a toaster, GNU/Linux being used to control an anti-squirrel system in someone's backyard, etc.; we saw the rise of LiveCD and LiveUSB from GNU/Linux hackers; and there is one anecdote after another about unusual projects, yet hardly any having to do with Apple products. I know of exactly one hacker project that used an Apple computer without any attack from Apple, which is at a coffee shop in New York where the computer controls a system of tubes that move coffee beans and ultimately brew coffee.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_conference
I cannot think of many weird,
So where is the Apple hacker culture? I know that it exists -- anything with a CPU will have a hacker community. Yet Apple does not merely fail to foster such a community (e.g. OpenDarwin), it actually fights back against it (e.g. the approach to Hackintosh makers -- and yes, companies that make hackable computers are an important part of any hacker community). I understand why Apple behaves this way, I understand that this is the sort of behavior that led Apple to be the most successful corporation on the planet and that lots of money has been made by it, but there can be little question that it has come at the cost of killing the hacker culture that once surrounded Apple.
what's left behind is a large group of programmers using their Macs (of any stripe, in my experience) to code for any platform
I do not deny that -- but when I see programmers using Apple products, I almost always see them using the higher end products. I have seen plenty of MacBook Pro toting programmers, plenty of PowerMac G5 workstations in use by programmers, and almost no MacBook Air or Mac Mini users writing software. There seems to be a slight bump among college students, but the overwhelming majority of hackers and programmers I see on college campuses are using Windows, GNU/Linux, or some open source BSD.
Maybe I am wrong: maybe there are so many programmers, sysadmins, and hackers who use low-end Apple computers that locking down the consumer line would be a disaster. It could be that I have the wrong idea about who is using Apple products, that what I have seen has been biased too heavily in favor of academia (where the Apple users are almost all non-technical people) and that the general approach in the "working world" is different. I would be surprised by this, though, given that when I was working at a corporation we were given high-end IBM Thinkpads (which should give you an idea about the timeframe), and that I cannot imagine that the sort of places that buy high end IBM or Dell laptops would buy low end Apple laptops for the same group of employees.
One appeal of the Mac environment is that I can move from my MBA to my MacPro or vice versa, pull my code and work seamlessly
Sure, but Apple is pushing the "air" version of the MacBook Pro line. I think it is reasonable to assume that what drew programmers to the MBA is the low weight, long battery life, and slim form factor -- and that those people will be buying the new MacBook Pro as more powerful replacements.
Take away the power of the lesser machine and you reduce the value of the MacPro
Except that instead of "taking away" power, Apple can just sell the power at a higher price. A consumer "Air" laptop that is locked down, and for some higher price, and an "Air Pro" that is not locked down.
Except that $4000 over 6 years is not even a blip on Apple's RADAR. Their revenue in just 3 months is roughly $40 billion -- that's ten millions times more in just 3 months than you gave them in 6 years.
It is also interesting that you purchased two iPhones and two iPods, but then turned around and said that if you could not install GNU/Linux on your Mac Mini, you would switch to Android. I guess you cannot be faulted for sticking to your principles, I am just a little confused as to what those principles might be.
Sure, but that is off to the side, and it is worded in a way that only someone with technical background can really understand. For someone who does not really understand what they are seeing, that says, "PCs get viruses, and Macs do not!"
I understand that you are being pedantic and just pointing out a technicality, but even that technicality is poorly founded. Sure, they do not explicitly say that Macs are immune to all viruses or malware. Yet they word things in a way to suggest that that is the case; they draw a stark distinction between Macs and systems that run Windows (and let's just ignore the Mac users that run Windows on their computer), they point out that all those Windows viruses do not affect Macs, then followup with statements about how Mac OS X is designed to defend against viruses. Anyone who interprets that as saying that there are no viruses for Mac OS X could easily be forgiven; the statement was written to be deliberately confusing without actually being false.
Any citation for the claim that access to the Terminal will be restricted in the future? Or that the putative restrictions will only apply to expensive "workstations"? Or is it just something you've been saying?
Just something I have been saying, based on where the general market for personal computers is moving and based on the enormous success Apple has had with its "App Store." There is a trend towards locked-down computing, and Apple is a leader in that category. So far, they have been nice enough to limit the lock-down to their iPad/iPhone/iPod line, but there is no real reason why their "consumer" MacBooks and Mac Mini systems could not be locked down. There would be plenty of money in it for them if they did that sort of thing.
Anyone can write software for the Mac
For now.
If it's for your own use, that's the end of the story
Yet that is not what we see with the iPad. You cannot plug in a keyboard and start hacking; you need another computer for that, for no reason other than the restrictions that were designed into iOS.
In the future, anyone can request a certificate that will permit distribution of their software
For a fee; again, look at what happens with iOS.
XCode runs on all Macs from Mini to MacPro
There is no reason for Apple not to demand that people pay for a "professional" system before they are allowed to write their own programs. Most consumers do not write software, and most of the money Apple is seeing from the App Store and from the general software ecosystem of their iPad/etc. line comes from programs written by people who use expensive workstations. There are a few big stories about some kid using his low-end Mac to write an app with lots of downloads, but look at who wrote the most popular apps in the store (scroll down):
https://www.apple.com/ipad/from-the-app-store/
Written by and copyrighted by corporations, including such big corporations as Disney and Sony. Do you think those places are buying their programmers Mac Minis, or the highest end workstations?
It is not as though Mac OS X has a strong developer community or open source ecosystem surrounding it. Yes, those things exist for Mac OS X, but the overwhelming majority of OS X users do not care -- they use proprietary software written by big companies like Apple, Adobe, and Microsoft. The hacker culture surrounding Apple is dead; Woz is gone, the perception that users should be able to replace batteries or disks is fading, and the new approach is based on users having their computation managed by Apple.
Apple's OS is a lot of things, but it's still Unix based. If I want to do something, a terminal window is a click away
For now; I have been saying this for a long time, but Apple is moving towards a product line where only their most expensive workstations give users the freedom to open terminals or write their own software. People did not flee from iOS; they embraced it like it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.
Also, contrary to the summary, it never claimed complete immunity to viruses, merely immunity to Windows viruses
Really, is that what it said? Hm, let's look at the link that you yourself posted, and see what the statement was:
With virtually no effort on your part, Mac OS X defends against viruses...
Download with peace of mind
Yeah, looks like they are claiming to be secure against viruses in general, not just Windows viruses.
The reality distortion field is what causes Apple fanboys to think that Apple invented the mouse.
The question is, by teaching kids in essence Camping/Survival Skills, are we really teaching them leadership?
Perhaps; at the very least, it teaches kids not to be afraid of the unknown, not to be hopelessly dependent on those around them (especially those in authority positions), and so forth.
Putting children in positions of authority, being able to give commands and take the consequences of such commands, are important leadership skills
Whereas a typical elementary school student in the US is subjected to the following treatment:
How many people could possibly be prepared for leadership of any sort after 13-14 years of such treatment? Yes I know, we had "good reasons" for all of the above, but the result has been that our children are sent to some kind of Orwellian nightmare for many hours each day.
I cannot speak for other nations, but in America, our schools are in desperate need of positive reform. We need to stop using an authoritarian approach to education, and start creating schools that students want to attend, rather than schools that students flee from.
People not being able to get the latest TV / MP3 / phone / iwhatever isn't a disaster
This. Right now, tech manufacturing is feeding the demand to do things like upgrade computers and phones every 18 months. We need to get used to the idea that the existence of a faster CPU with more cores does not imply a need to have one.
Well, that's how China does things. It is reasonable to think that a school or corporation might allow SSH but not Tor, since there are more obvious "legitimate" uses for SSH.
First result on Google:
http://www.csoonline.com/article/597063/network-security-three-open-source-options