the more they stay the same. You might think I’m addressing subject of this post, but i’m actually referring to the comments. I haven’t looked at Slashdot in a long time, and i come back to find that it consists almost entirely of sometimes interesting articles followed by countless replies where people just argue and argue about something being good or bad. exhausting.

Libertarianism is like Leninism: a fascinating, internally consistent political theory with some good underlying points that, regrettably, makes prescriptions about how to run human society that can only work if we replace real messy human beings with frictionless spherical humanoids of uniform density (because it relies on simplifying assumptions about human behavior which are unfortunately wrong).

Ridiculous. I can list plenty of gripes I have about the NYTimes, but not knowing any conservatives certainly isn't one of them. They give PLENTY of op-ed space to regular columnists Ross Douthat, David Brooks, Bret Stephens, etc, and often publish outside editorials from such luminaries as Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton.

Meanwhile, their non-opinion stories are generally FACTUALLY accurate, as far as it goes, but they have placed their thumb on the scale in the way in which they choose whether to cover certain stories or to ignore certain stories. So the fact that in 2016 the Times ran breathless front page stories about Hillary's email non-stop for months and months while declining to particularly drill down on most of Donald Trump's myriad scandals and defects while generally giving him ample coverage and publicity. They also gave extensive coverage about Benghazi for all the many months that that was being made a deal about in Congress.

They did the exact same thing all throughout the Bill Clinton era, relentlessly reporting and hyping every single "scandal" that the vast right-wing conspiracy dreamed up, while routinely failing to cover many similarly scandalous issues involving many Republicans.

Not sure why any supposed liberals would slant their coverage like that.

Not entirely sure what you're going on about here. I've landed in Facebook Jail 3 times recently, each time because their algorithm simply flagged certain words and phases it deemed to "violate community standards". The length of each trip to jail went from 12 hours to 24 hours to 3 days, and I have several friends who have been in it quite a bit going back quite a long time. I don't think it's any kind of secret that Facebook Jail is a thing that exists. And anyway, it doesn't block you from signing into Facebook, it merely blocks you from posting anything, writing any comments, or even simply clicking "Like" on anything. But Messenger continues to work, and I definitely told several people I was in jail WHILE I was in jail, along with WHY, and I'm guessing that one-on-one Messenger conversations don't get monitored at all (that would be horrible), I certainly never got any penalty in my Messenger conversations saying the exact same things that I was jailed for when I made them in public.

Meanwhile, really don't grasp what Facebook has to do with Slashdot one way or the other. My Slashdot account isnt using Facebook to sign in, I can't fathom any scenario where either being in Facebook Jail, or simply not having a Facebook account at all, would somehow stop me from signing into Slashdot or posting something.

By the way, what I got sentenced to jail for each time was making mildly derogatory comments about a certain cohort of people. Phrases that tripped their algorithm include "white grievance rage monkeys" (my description of the sort of people who would enjoy the new Fox late-night "comedy" show starring Greg Gutfeld and most Fox viewers more generally, and "cracker" which I used when making a comment reacting to Mike Huckabee's tweet that he had "decided to 'identify' as Chinese. Coke will like me, Delta will agree with my 'values' and I'll probably get shoes from Nike & tickets to.@MLB games. Ain't America great?"

Meanwhile, Facebook is A-OK with holocaust deniers peddling their views openly. Mark Zuckerberg is on record defending their right to free speech on the grounds that you can't really know what's in a person's heart and they may have sincerely held beliefs that the holocaust never happened. Also, if you're organizing an insurrection against U.S. government, or conducting a genocide in some distant land, or doing a military coup, Facebook does not seem terribly interested in tamping down on these sorts of topics.

In July 2020, out of the blue, without any warning, my Apple ID was also locked for unspecified "security reasons." I kept getting redirected to a page on appleid.apple.com to unlock my account by supplying answers to various security questions, but it always ended in failure. Also, some of the time I was asked to supply a recovery key.

As a result, I lost access to my entire music library, which I had begun collecting digitally in the late 90s when iTunes first came out and ripping and organizing MP3s become common and easy. I ripped hundreds of CDs that I had been buying since about 1992. After the iTunes Music Store launched, I even bought probably $300-$400 worth of music over the next 10-15 years. At some point, I subscribed to iTunes Match so that I could get all my stuff uploaded to the iCloud Music Library, which to me seemed awesome because suddenly my whole music collection was available on my iPhone without having to sync it manually or having to pick and choose the stuff I wanted synced, and also available on multiple devices. Eventually I switched to an Apple Music subscription. All the while, in addition to purchased iTunes Music Store tracks and the stuff on Apple Music that I had added to my library, there was also all of my ripped CDs, as well as a fair amount of content I got elsewhere (downloaded from various places—a lot of it was stuff I would never be able to get again because it was, say, DJ sets that I could no longer get from the original place). All of this was either uploaded or matched into iCloud Music Library, and this worked flawlessly for several years.

I also lost the ability to use iMessage, all of my App Store purchases were now dead-ended and not updatable, and thanks to the Find My/Activation Lock system, I was not able to sign-out of my Apple ID/iCloud account on my iPhone, and thus I couldn't set it up with a new one, and thus iMessage and the App Store and various other features were just dead to me. I basically had to go to Sprint and report my phone lost/stolen to get a replacement phone ($150 deductible in spite of paying $15 a month for their insurance for years). A little while later, I managed to figure out a way to bypass the Activation Lock (not sure if I discovered some sort of bug/exploit or just an obscure, non-advertised method) and consequently I was able to wipe the phone and theoretically I could get it carrier unlocked and put a new SIM in it and perhaps use it again or possibly sell it, though I haven't tried to do any of that stuff yet.

I was also using the iCloud Drive (Desktop and Documents) to store all of my data, and also storing all my photos on iCloud, but thankfully all of that was data still also lived on two laptop hard drives so I didn't lose anything. Also, bizarrely, though I had been using iCloud Keychain, somehow all of that data was also preserved on one of the laptops and after I got it setup to use a brand new Apple ID, it picked all of those passwords up again for me.

Probably for me the most traumatic loss was that of the music library. Yeah yeah yeah, I should have maintained local copies of everything, BUT it was like 400 GB of music in total and my MacBook Pro only has a 128 GB SSD and it was already usually fairly full even without the music. Trying to connect an external drive and pointing iTunes/Music to it and clicking "download" for everything would have taken DAYS (at least) to download everything, and since I was constantly adding new stuff to it, it seemed like it would always be out of date or I would have to maintain that backup version all the time.

Anyway, I have always been very fastidious about keeping all of the info for any 2-factor authentication schemes I have enabled (recovery keys, backup codes, QR codes, etc), and I even had one labeled "Apple ID recovery key", however it was a 14-character key from an earlier era before Apple implemented their iCloud-based 2-factor authentication system, and at some point whenever they moved to that system, they also moved to 28-character recovery keys, and somehow, completely inexplicably to me, I never seem to have saved that key anywhere.

I was so upset and angry and frustrated that I ended up getting an attorney friend to write a strongly-worded letter to somebody I found on Apple's executive leadership page, and within 24 hours I was contacted by someone from Apple (different person) that I spent like 10 days interacting with trying to get this fixed, but in the end, they were pretty much (a) never actually managed to explain WHY my account had even been locked to begin with, and (b) basically said that once an account had enabled use of a recovery key, it was impossible to undo that AND it was technically impossible for them to unlock it or access it or do anything with it. I also had to cancel the credit card that it was being charged to, because they claimed to not even be able to terminate the account or at least terminate that particular billing method, and the only way to get it to stop was by cancelling the card completely. But the account still lives on, because I still get weekly emails from when I was signed up as an Apple Developer, and occasionally I get other stuff, all addressed to that particular email address (which was not an Apple-provided address), and I am basically powerless to stop it.

I was so very upset when this happened that I wanted to shout about it here and anywhere else I could think of that would have an audience, but I eventually just moved on.

I'm not sure how anyone could amass $14,000 worth of irreplaceable digital DRM'd content, but I can certainly sympathize with this person, and I hope his lawsuit at least causes Apple to consider redesigning some of their security systems to make situations like this not as fatal.

Don't really want to get into the whole walled garden/DRM/cloud vs. local debate. Yes, I made some mistakes in my setup, and those have been corrected going forward. But this is still a very shitty thing for Apple or any other large company to do to a customer with no recourse, and it is absolutely very traumatic.

-Pete

Since the bulk of macOS and iOS actually falls into /bin /sbin /usr /var and so on, can you explain what separating /System would gain anyone? Unless Apple decides to completely rewrite the folder locations of the BSD subsystem, this would never work.

LOL. Steve Jobs was "fired" in 1985, a full decade before the internet ever became even remotely a mainstream thing, and when Microsoft made it's "substantial monetary investment" in 1997 ($150 million), it was a PR stunt in conjunction with a pledge from Microsoft that it was committed to continuing Office for Mac for the next 5 years. This investment was in the form of non-voting shares, and Microsoft subsequently sold all of them for a huge profit. At the time, Apple was already on the rebound, and even though it was certainly low on cash, it still had roughly $600 million. Apple never needed Microsoft's money, they never came remotely close to running out of money. They certainly COULD have, but they didn't, and claiming that Microsoft rescued them is ludicrous. What saved them was buying NeXT and getting Steve Jobs back in the bargain.

I had to wade through 100+ posts debating capitalism vs libertarianism vs communism vs socialism before finding even one post mentioning the lawsuit this topic is supposed to be about. Why do I even bother reading this site anymore?

Honestly, in case it wasn't apparent on casual reading, I was being just slightly sarcastic in my previous post. I'm not in any position to say what will end up happening, either with the overall success of iPhones, in general or in any specific market segment (such as enterprise), or in how Apple will or will not address the needs of certain markets by, for example, allowing for the extension of iPhones with third-party applications. I'm merely a 15 year IT professional, Macintosh system engineer, longtime Apple enthusiast who has been around long enough that I think I have intuition about these things that might be just slightly better than the average bear.

I'm not claiming the iPhone will be an unqualified smash success, including or especially in the enterprise market. My sarcastic smart ass post was mainly aimed at those people who take a pessimistic view, but apparently just KNOW that they are absolutely correct in their views and predictions, and state their thoughts unequivocally. I'd like to know where they get their information, because while they may have legitimate points to make and have valid opinions about things, I don't know where they get off acting like they just know everything there is to know, they have factored in every variable, envisioned every future scenario, and can state their OPINIONS with absolutely no trace of humility or acknowledgement of the fact that they, like myself, are going on limited information and the widespread inability of the majority of human beings to know future events ahead of time. I'm much less annoyed by opposing views than I am by people who argue from the position that they are utterly and infallibly correct. I would be the first to qualify a statement as being just an opinion, based on limited information, subject to factors I may not be aware of and thus fail to take into consideration, etc. Everything out of my mouth should be taken with a grain of salt, as is generally the case for almost everybody. It just bugs me when other people either don't realize, or just fail to acknowledge, the limits of their own knowledge and experience and the fact that their views are just as subject to unknown factors, missing or incorrectly understood details, etc.

A plea for some humility, in other words.....