So lets just post all the nuke launch codes to wikileaks too, how bout that? After all, there shouldnt be ANY secrets in the government!
That's bullshit, Assange himself said on numerous occasions that he does think that governments, like any large organizations, do need to have secrets.
OMG, I'm scared to death that they are going to start charging me for this stuff. But, but, but, wait a minute, I only look at my Facebook page once every couple of weeks, certainly don't use it as a twitter substitute (which I also don't use). I only rarely look at a YouTube Video and am unlikely to download NetFlix videos over the net until they support Linux. And then there is the fact that I've only got a Net10/LG NTLG300GB cell phone without one of those fancy displays that is on an expired usage contract [1].
So as far as I can tell, the only "newsworthy" aspect of this is that the evil phone companies are attempting to tax (cough extort) money from those wealthy enough to own (or have a contract) that supports a "fancy phone" habit and/or those who have nothing better to do than waste time updating their Facebook pages or watching NetFlix on their phone [2].
God, I hope that some liberal congressperson gets wind of this and arm twists the FCC to stop this evil corporate activity which would apparently discriminate against those in the 10-20 y.o age group.
My net. This appears to be a "lottery"-like tax on those who don't have better things to do with their time/money. YMMV.
1. Means I have to go down to Walmart or BestBuy and buy some minutes to reactivate it. 2. Because surveys have found that most "engineers" (aka those who have better things to do with the time like actually build something) view Facebook as a complete waste of time and the only Netflix videos they are interested in watching would be the new update to Tron to see if it lives up all the money being spent advertising it.
They probably just don't want to worry about getting sued.
I think I heard that line before... And then APPLE went after HTC waving ridiculous software patents, while their buddies at Microsoft covered the other big player: Motorola. Oracle is attacking Google directly...
Mayer said Google is looking at what she called "contextual discovery" as a way to evolve search - pushing information out to people before they've started to look for it, based on factors such as their web browsing history or current location. "We're starting to play around with some new concepts in how to find information," she said. "Can we take location and a user's context and figure out what piece of information they need? It's kind of search without search. Mayer sees this push or pre-emptive search as a complement to traditional web browsing, perhaps living in a panel on a web browser offering users another way to discover relevant or timely data. She said social recommendations will be a key part of this next generation of search - the company launched a Social Search feature in 2009 - while location-enabled mobile devices offer even more scope for Google to "figure out what the next most useful piece of information is" and push it out to the user. "If you're sitting in a restaurant, can we pull up the menu? And can we pull up a menu that isn't the menu that the waiter would have just handed you, but a social menu - where you can see what other people have ordered, what other people like, how's it's been marked up," she said. [...] She added: "The idea is to push information to people."
I believe this can be incredibly useful and cool. It's kinda futuristic too
One thing that Levinas defines as universally bad is "causing suffering and humiliation" (unwanted of course, BDSM folks are obvious exceptions). But in this case, this is not enough. One might claim that the offending facebook post caused him undue mental torment. Levinas also has a positive definition of ethics. As I said, "Totality and Infinity" is one of the most difficult books I ever read, so this short summary doesn't do justice for its complexitiy and richness. However, I'll try.
Basically, he says that we have to have an infinite desire for the Other - which includes the desire for the Other's otherness as well. Sounds redundant, I know, but bear with me for a moment. This desire has two components, one is the desire to know (that is, basic human curiousity) and the other is the desire to preserve the otherness of the Other. An opposing movement is what he calls a totalizing movement. He defines it by the presumption that we can have total knowledge of the Other, that is, we can strip the Other of all it's secrets, achieving a total knowledge of the other (therefore robbing it from it's very otherness: once we believe that our knowledge of the other is Total, the image we have and It becomes the same). At this point he introduces the metaphor of the Face of the Other, and the movement towards the other as communication (we question the other to know more). In fact, he says that this otherness is the very basis of communication - once the Other has no secrets, there isn't much to talk about. Therefore we question the Other to know more (curiousity) but also question the totality of our knowledge at every point, simultaneously possessing the desire to preserve some measure of otherness.
I know all this seems far fetched, but the point, I believe, is that curiousity is one leg on which ethical behaviour stands on, the other being not only a respect for the otherness of the Other, but even love for this otherness, that feeds back to our own curiosity, keeping the discourse on going. The first step of every authoritarian entity is to deny the possiblity of discourse, to forbid language so to speak, the very means by which otherness can be expressed, approached, and cherished.
Levinas himself was religious (jew) - but interestingly, according to his own tenets, one can deduce that religions in general are totalizing - they do not allow for an infinite universe. Well, of course I don't know all religions, but let's just say that all religions that pose an entity that possesses a totality of knowledge, an All Knowing God are by nature totalizing. In an infinite universe, such totality is impossible. In fact, the very definition of infinity is something beyond (+1), something that is not part of the totality of any system. The Other's secret that must be preserved as well as approached via discourse.
Anyway, I'm not sure this all makes sense to anybody, but if you want to read an intellectually challenging book, I highly recommend Totality and Infinity. As far as I know, it's one of the very few attempts to define ethics in absolute terms... most of what we consider "western values" are relativistic, their truth(s) easily traced back to a very specific context, to an ontology.
Also, the stuff I wrote about e-ink vs. LCD - I know that many would find no difference between the two technologies, in other words, some people can read just fine on an LCD. I'm not one of them. For me, e-ink is far more pleasant to look at. Moreover, I started to go out for reading to breath a bit of fresh air and just be outside - sitting on the terrace of a cafe, in a park, on the beach beneath a shade... and that's where e-ink readers really shine and LCDs, including the iPAD, sucks balls. Indoors, in dim light/no light LCDs have an advantage, but I still find it better to use my Sony Reader with a lamp than reading on a screen with backlight.
Your last statement is true on one hand, and is completely irrelevant on the other. The advantage of Android is that you don't need a major carrier to carry your app. You can post it in the market that offers the most users/best conditions. You can post it outside the market, on your own website. You can ask people to test it on message boards. In other words, this time we not only have free distribution channels, there are free distribution channels competing for developer attention.
Sorry I can't help you... If you are into thinkering, and want something like the N1, try the HTC Desire - I heard the hardware is very very similar, and it's pretty hackable. You can load up Android vanilla on it, or any custom ROM you can find on xda-developers.
These standards create better products that are deemed superior. Once that catches on, then others trying to compete will HAVE to match those standards in order for them to sell. This is a good thing for everyone. For example, Japanese cars were (and some still argue are) far superior than US cars. In order to stay in business US car manufacturers HAD to improve their design and quality standards to even compete with the Japanese. Now, US cars are much better quality than they were in the 70s, 80s and 90s and this is a good thing for everyone.
While we are at cars, lets take the analogy a bit further. What if American manufacturers, instead of competing and trying to improve their products, started litigating against Japanese companies, asking the courts to ban imports of cars with infringing technologies. What if the courts granted their requests. Fast forward to today's patent wars. APPLE wants HTC gone from the US market. Nevermind that HTC was first one of the first companies to develop wireless touch devices, and that they designed the Palm Treo 650 and the iPaq, built the first WinMo phone, built the first Windows Mobile 3G phone, built the first 4G phone (close to two years ago)...
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Apple found itself in the uncomfortable position of having to compete - the first time in over two years - which is a HUGE time frame in such a fast moving market. Their reaction to the emerging Android and other platforms?
1) Tried to enforce an EULA on their SDK that would have prevented developers coding apps for multiple platforms. That failed after a massive backlash, so next
2) They sued NOKIA (have no clue why, NOKIA has no big presence in the US market), than they sued HTC over ridiculous software/ideas patents, which is just a proxy attack on Android. Their buddies at MS sued the other successful Android handset developer, Motorola, but again, the main target here is Android.
3)????
Not sure what (3) is going to be. Part of me wishes that the courts granted everything Apple dreams of. Go ahead and remove all HTC (Android) phones from the US market. Bye bye EVO, Desire, etc. Remove all NOKIA. Remove all the Droids. Remove all INSERT NEXT APPLE LITIGATION TARGET HERE. Then see how happy customers are with their limited choices on top of the already ridiculous carrier lock-ins.
...but given this statement:
Sculley talks openly about Jobs and Apple, admits it was a mistake to hire him to run the company and that he knows little about computers.
I find it very difficult to believe that the man who has presided over Apple's astonishing march back into relevancy over the last couple decades could possibly be labeled "a mistake".
RTFA - he refers to himself, not Jobs.
Steve Jobs is a minimalist, heavy-handed, hard-driving, design-obsessed prick?!? Not exactly news.
And I'll say it once again. Considering the observation that Sculley makes that MS is all about hiring geeks and smart people and Apple is all about hiring designers and marketers ("Apple is a designers company, not an engineers company," as he says), it still amazes me that MS is so bashed on
Well, there is more to the interview than that, although I'd say yours is a fair summary. Still, I'd recommend everyone RTFA, it's an interesting, deeply personal account of the way Jobs works, and the reasons for Apple's phenomenal success. It is even more interesting how Jobs has changed in the past few years compared to Scully's account. One point that stands out in this interview is Jobs rejection of looking at anything the competition does, or others do in general. Yes, he had his own heroes like Akio Morita and SONY, but generally he was far less obsessed with what others do than today.
His attack on Android in the latest quarterly earnings press conference was positively hysteric:
"We think Android is very, very fragmented"
"We think integrated will trump fragmented"
"... we will triumph over Google's fragmented approach"
"...where PCs have the same interface, Android is very fragmented
The new bogeyman: fragmented FRAGMENTED FRAGMENTED!!!
There's a nice spin in there. At any given time, all important apps will be present in all markets (or at least the top three markets). What really happens here is that markets are actually forced to compete with each other a) for developers b) for users (markets that would demand exclusivity would simply die, even if anyone was stupid enough to pull something like that). This is good news for everyone, and the antithesis of everything Apple stands for. No matter how much he SJ tries to spin it, fragmentation is not a problem. Here's another real jam, the app itself (TweetDeck) was discussed earlier here on Slashdot.
"Twitter client, Twitter Deck [sic], recently launched their app for Android. They reported that they had to contend with more than 100 different versions of Android software on 244 different handsets. The multiple hardware and software iterations present developers a daunting challenge." Steve Jobs
Here is what the developers had to say about Jobs' remark:
Did we at any point say it was a nightmare developing for Android? Errr nope, no we didn't. It wasn't."
Indeed I recall reading their blog post about this, and the tone was more along the lines of "look how cool it is that TweetDeck runs on the craziest, wackiest combinations of ROMS and hardware. Looking at the list, it's amazing indeed (10 NOKIA N900, and even a few iPhone 3GS
You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred. -- Superchicken
