> Aren't you engaging in identity politics yourself by pulling out this argument?
No, that's a complete non-sequitur from what they said.
1,535 karma · joined June 2, 2013
No, that's a complete non-sequitur from what they said.
Are you the sort of person that tells people not to complain about the politics in your home country or to "move to China/North Korea if you don't like it here"? That would seem consistent with what you're saying.
This is illegal and unenforceable in many places in the world including the whole EU and California (only stuff done using company resources or relating to company work). I'm surprised at the other comments here that seem to be totally ignorant of this.
How do you get that? There was decades of prior experience both in computer science theory as well as practice, especially from the code breakers in WW2.
I'm not making any moral assumptions. I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of Apple's moral assumptions that they're making in their posting.
> It won't devolve into a malware-ridden mess that destroys the privacy and security of users.
Windows, GNU/Linux, and in fact Mac OS X itself, are all doing fine. The real security problem is elsewhere, it is disingenuous to use this as an excuse for monopolistic practises.
I'm not twisting anything into an evil act, read my words more closely.
Some of Apple's contributions to open source have been beneficial to the rest of us, because there are competitors to keep them in check in those areas they chose to do open source in.
You should have no doubt that, had those other competitors not existed, Apple's open source contributions would have been used to push a monopolistic advantage over other projects and organisations, and passed it off as "meeting their business needs".
They do not do open source out of any principle of generosity or co-operation with other projects, and much of their ecosystem is legally and technically hostile to supporting FOSS the "proper way". For example it is impossible to properly supply a GPL binary on an iPhone because in general you do not have the ability to install arbitrarily-modified versions of it, a very fundamental principle of the standard definition of Free Open Source Software.
Also I'm not sure why you cite Android vs iPhone since near-everything about an iPhone is proprietary.
Steve Jobs originally tried to keep the ObjC compiler frontend to GCC proprietary but was forced to open source it due to GPL requirements. Needless to say he hated the GPL ever since that episode and of course jumped on the opportunity to fund a competitor with a non-copyleft license.
They benefit substantially from open source and give very little back in concrete financial terms, yet complain that Spotify is asking the same thing and portray them as freeloaders. In reality, Apple are doing far more freeloading off of other projects than Spotify is doing off of them, legal or no.
What Apple have created in the App Store (a software package repository on an OS platform) is a monopolistic trust over what should be a free marketplace, like how regular GNU/Linux package repositories have worked for decades. This is exactly what "anti-trust" is supposed to prevent and the DoJ need to have the balls to start breaking up tech companies for this shit, just like they almost did to Microsoft.
Have you heard of "dumping"? What Apple does in its FOSS contributions is a similar thing - pour a ton of developer resources into critical FOSS projects so that they eventually control the development process and claim they are "contributing to open source", but in the end everyone that depends on these projects have to follow the direction that they set. LLVM/Clang is perhaps one exception, but even the Apple parts of that project's history have very obvious goals of undermining GCC since they hate the GPL's guts, counterbalanced by the legitimate need for a FOSS competitor to GCC that attracts enough non-Apple influence in the LLVM/Clang project to balance out the Apple influence.
Please Apple, pay all the open source projects that you use, a fair share of the revenue you generate on top of them.
Hypocrites.
What, except for the data of the two crashes happening? The person that wrote this statement is a fucking idiot.
We're making a lot of progress with Debian Rust packages and have automated away 90% of the ordinary Debian crap - which is needed in the general case but not for Rust where the constraints are very well-defined by Cargo - you only have to maintain two files (d/changelog and d/copyright) for the vast majority of Debian Rust crates.
OTOH we have done a ton of work making sagemath apt-get installable, and that works since about 2 years ago.
It's true that regulations sometimes are harmful, but this really depends on the specific circumstances, and I don't see an argument here for being anti-regulation in general.
A lot of governments especially those today, have come about via democratic revolutions or less-violent processes. As citizens of those places, many of them want their government to regulate corporations, especially since this is typically more effective than trying to boycott the corporation.
> I believe more competition would lead to better services than government (and corporations) offers in almost all areas. (To be clear, I'm not an anarchist, but the smaller the government, the better).
I also believe that competition is generally a good thing, but I don't believe that "small government" preserves competition. Those "natural monopolies" (as you defined, whatever that means) destroy their own competition by definition, and just because they are "natural" does not mean that they stay efficient, or that they don't abuse their own power.
That is not necessarily to say that I favor a large government, but in order to preserve competition, efficiency, and lack of abuse, we need to think of mechanisms other than simply "small government". If government regulations is the only mechanism we can think of for now, I'd rather we try that, than stick to "small government" for ideological reasons and let corporate power run amok.
> The biggest problem of government is that it simply wants to do more and more. Socialism gradually creeps in a step at a time, mostly unnoticed because each step is small and seems harmless.
This effect happens with large corporations too. First they provide good service, and everyone buys from them believing they will use their power well, and this seems harmless. Then sometimes they grow too powerful and start abusing their position (with or without help from government handouts) and consumers are negatively affected to different degrees.
> [..] big tech companies engaged in censorship, they're not essential services [..]
What is essential or not also depends on the context of history. It is not in human nature to require a banking system, but as you agree it's impractical to operate in society today without having access to banking services. It's also becoming very hard to operate in society without access to the internet and various other tech services that 99% of other people have access to.
Distinguishing having a de-jure monopoly on force vs a de-facto monopoly on something else is not a useful practical difference to make. Other quantitative aspects of the relationship are more important to the analysis, and you pointed out some of them yourself.
This artificial elevation of this "monopoly on force" pollutes other aspects of your analysis of reality, leading you to say things like "If you're just a lowly employee [..] you might think it doesn't matter to you" apparently without irony.
In some sense, a government does take money from me without asking. In some other sense, this relationship is consensual - individuals with more resources/power are free to move to the jurisdiction of a different government. Similarly, the degree to which some corporations "take" money from people depends on the circumstances. People have to live somewhere, eat something, etc, and this has a big influence on the corporations they must give their wealth to. So distinguishing governments from corporations is not particularly meaningful or interesting, and leads you to artificially exonerate some bad activities of corporations whilst incriminating some good activities of governments.
edit:
> Most land is privately owned, not by governments.
I changed to "physical control" because it was more relevant. Even "ownership" is a (very convincing) "legal fiction" whose power derives from the government's control over that land. If it were not able to maintain this control, another country could invade it. If you were able to actually control the land that you "own", then sure I might have to pay you taxes in order to live on it (or move somewhere else with better tax conditions).
This is what you choose to believe, to maintain your internal consistency in your own ideology. From the point of view of the law, it is the government's money after they tax you, and the government believes that it is their money, in order to maintain their internal consistency of their ideology that justifies their legitimacy. They "risk" their money on various government / societal ventures and their "profit" is their continual acceptance by the citizens.
In both cases, forgetting about the ideology, what happens in reality is a transfer of wealth. I have to pay a government in order to live on land that they have physical control of, I have to pay a corporation in order to eat food that they have physical control of, or obtain other essential life resources from them.
Some governments and corporations are so large they can't "go out of business" because they don't have competition indeed. Some are smaller and they have to cater to individual customer / citizen demands more readily.
So what is a tax that governments collect? It's simply an additional income that human people benefit from. [..]
If you're just a lowly citizen with no control or insight into a government's bureacracy [..]"
etc etc
Sorry, you can't have it both ways - pretend that corporations and governments are somehow different. The cognitive dissonance here is hilarious.
The "asshole reviewer" is definitely a thing.
> Yet ironically, it’s the U.S. and the U.K. — and more recently Australia — that have laws in place that can in fact compel a company to turn over data, or force a company to install backdoors.
Indeed, western national security politics is schizoprenic and hypocritical and can't be taken seriously.
Instead of worrying specifically so much about Huawei, put funding towards developing secure communications technologies that render backdoors in communications backbones obsolete. This would also protect your own citizens against your own overreaching intelligence services.
https://infinity0.github.io/droid-hacks/ for more technical tips, half-finished and badly-written.
I used both the words "truth" and "provable" in the correct and appropriate ways. Both are distinct concepts that form an important part of the theory.
This is a gross misinterpretation of Gödel's actual theorem that helps perpetuate irrational superstitious attitudes against science, mathematics, and logic.
What Gödel showed was that proofs are relative to some underlying axiomatic model and that for any particular axiomatic model there are always truths unprovable by it.
That doesn't mean "there are truths that humans can never prove", all it means is that we have to extend our axiomatic systems in order to prove some truths. (And whether they are true or false "in reality" is another question, to be determined empirically.)
A more accurate (and just-as-click-baity) way of interpreting Gödel's theorem is that "mathematicians and logicians will always have a job".