Week 1: "Zimmerman's guilty, hang him!"
Week 10: "Oh, maybe he wasn't, unhang him. We can't? Oh..."
While I certainly don't agree with GP's (sarcastic) position, this is really an argument against capital punishment, which, (barring invasive mind-reading technology) will always kill innocent people.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. If you have access to a user's account, you can set a binary to run when a user logs in on Linux without administrator privileges. You can call gksudo to put up a dialog asking for administrative privileges so you can modify other users' files as well, or just put up the dialog yourself and hope the user enters their password. This is exactly the same level of security as on OS X. If there's a reason this doesn't work on Linux, you have not communicated it.
It's unclear to me where the
Google bought Motorola Mobility. Now instead of being unhappy that they have to pay a patent fee for online video, they stand to make a boatload of money off of Motorola's H.264 patents and/or use these patents to settle other patent lawsuits. Is it much of a surprise that they haven't dropped H.264 support in Chrome?
Waterfox is a bad idea. It's like 32-bit Firefox, but with comparatively little testing. A test failure on 64-bit Windows isn't reason to back out a patch on mozilla-central, and the number of nightly/aurora/beta testers is much smaller than the number of testers for 32-bit Firefox. Firefox's JavaScript engine is actually as a 32-bit build than as a 64-bit build. If I were you, I'd wait until there's an official 64-bit build, unless you have some very good reason not to.
Of course, I think I can't upgrade because the latest firefox doesn't support Windows 2000 anymore, and this machine running XP probably won't happen (I don't think XP SP3 works on 512MB anymore).
Fx 10 supports Windows 2000. There was talk of dropping it in some later release, but that hasn't happened yet, and Fx 10 ESR will be supported for a full year.
Of course, on other systems, I play around with profiles a lot, and FF4 got rid of the profile manager. They made it separate trial download, and I'm not sure if they ever re-incorporated profile manager back in.
This simply isn't true. I do development work with Firefox and I don't remember the profile manager ever disappearing during the entire Fx4 beta cycle. It's definitely been there from Fx4 final to Fx10.
No, that doesn't fix it. LLVM bitcode is not architecture-independent.
"Google has offered Native Client and Dart to compete performance-wise, but those are non-standard, Google-specific technologies..."
The conditions surrounding the use of these technologies are no different then SPDY, which is being adopted by Amazon and Mozilla, and is on its way to becoming standardized.
No one wants to use Dart because it doesn't provide any benefits that couldn't also be provided by extending JavaScript, which is something Mozilla, MS, and Google are all working on. This is why no one else wants to implement it, and Google knew no one else wanted to implement it before it was even announced. I'm not even sure if Google intends for Dart to be used, as opposed to using it to try to push specific features through TC39.
No one wants to use Native Client because it will tie the web to specific CPU architectures. Comparing this to ActiveX is appropriate in some way, because it puts additional restrictions on what devices can access the web. If Native Client had come of age at the same time as JavaScript, real smartphone platforms would be probably still not exist, since websites would require x86 processors to run. Intel has only recently announced x86 chips that can provide decent performance while fitting the power profile of a mobile device, and only after getting their ass kicked for many years as the mobile market has continued to grow.
Gotta agree, native networked apps have some big advantages - fast local processing, local gfx elements, cached local data, richer GUI etc.
The only advantage NaCl has is that it's faster. localStorage supports cached local data. Graphics and UI are the same as any other web app.
But a NaCl (or similar) app could work just as well as a mobile app does.
A web app could work just as well as an NaCl app does, except that anything computationally intensive would either happen more slowly or need to be done server-side. I don't think this is really a huge limitation. It seems better to me than locking all mobile devices to one platform forever.
If NaCl would become a standard across browsers, then we would also have an explosion in new, proprietary, closed-source web libraries and applications that work only on certain platforms. The current state of the web forces just about everything to be open source and work everywhere. This is a good thing!
On top of this, if you are doing something so processor-intensive that empscripten or a transpiler isn't satisfactory, then you probably shouldn't be doing it in a web browser. NaCl isn't platform-independent, and PNaCl isn't any less of a hack than emscripten, just a bit faster.
Why are we talking about contact lists? According to the article, very few App Store and Cydia apps leaked your address book. The only things more than 1% of apps "stole" were your device ID and your location. And WRT to the address book, the difference between the App Store and Cydia isn't statistically significant.
Works for sale under copyright (or otherwise available to the public and controlled by copyright) are not private. My contact details are. After all, you do NOT get copyright on your contact details, do you.
Therefore there is no logical fallacy in decrying privacy violation but decrying piracy's mischaracterisations by the content industry.
I agree.
There's also the little fact that piracy isn't stealing, so even if you want even stronger copyright, you will only be honest if you refute the statement that piracy is stealing.
I also agree. But you are completely ignoring the point I'm trying to make, which is that submitting device information to a server described in this article isn't stealing either and it's equally misleading characterize it as theft no matter how you feel about it.
A third reason is that none of these, either your misrepresentations, or the facts, are logical fallacies.
Look up "false analogy" in your dictionary. If it doesn't have it, try Wikipedia.
Don't be obtuse. Whatever your stance on obtaining a copy of a more or less freely available* item of media, it's completely different from obtaining data about an individual without their consent.
I completely agree, but I also think that obtaining data about an individual without their consent is completely different from theft, especially when that data comes in the form of a device ID, which is not really about an individual, but about a device that the individual owns.
I'm not trying to equate invasion of privacy with piracy. They aren't the same thing, and I don't think they are.
I'm asking why many people make the (correct, in my view) observation that piracy isn't stealing, but then make the same logical fallacy when it comes to privacy.
In particular, I think it's absurd that GP thinks that submitting the device ID, which isn't much more personally identifying than an IP address, is theft.
Why is it that the same people who claim that pirating movies isn't stealing claim that copying your data is?
(And in this case, "steal your data" mostly means send your device ID to a server, which has arguable legitimate uses.)
Ya'll hear about the geometer who went to the beach to catch some rays and became a tangent ?
