When Carl Sagan sued Apple twice (2014)
engadget.com
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The three code names were all in the category of “bogus science,” and the association of Sagan with Piltdown Man and Cold Fusion was more of a jab turned insult. The “billions and billions” rationale sounds like an attempt to walk things back.
The industry was interesting (bizarre) at the time in that the engineers were more or less left to run their domain. Upper management might give the overall direction of what to work on but beyond that there was not a lot of middle or lower management that could tell engineers how to do that.
This left a lot of the responsibility (and authority if you will) in the hands of engineering to accomplish what the company wanted. And so engineers chose code names. To be sure too they were not meant for (sanitized by) the PR department — they were strictly at the whim of engineering.
Engineers don't want to have to put on a "marketing hat", or get marketing to sign off on a codename (for chrissakes).
That one of those code names leaked somehow and caused bad publicity for the company — that was management's/marketing's problem, not the engineer's.
We're in a more modern era now where the balance has shifted to a much more top-down model — diminishing the broader role engineers used to have.
To think otherwise is a much stronger arrogance
GP asserts that what the engineers did is wrong. They didn't say that the public should get to decide what codenames to use or anything like that. They simply pointed out the arrogance of the engineers, and they are right.
It's like a straw man, but specific to issues of morality.
"X is wrong".
"Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X? You want to completely regulate Y in case it leads to X?"
You just don't know what a fallacy is.
> Oh, so you want to jail every offender of X?
This is not what I'm saying. I'm disagreeing, and putting forward a stronger, opposite claim.
I am the same way, I tend to self censer because who wants to hear about the subtle intricacies of the bgp system. until they start to show interest, then you can't shut me up.
He doesn’t seem likely to be wildly better as a scientist than his peers, but being wildly better as a communicator has incredible differentiating value (and likely has a tailwind for the other scientists in terms of public support for science when it’s something they feel is almost within their grasp).
> Autorotation is the ability of a helicopter to in some situations have its rotors powered by the flow of air rather than the engine. In short, as the helicopter descends, the upward directed flow of air pushes through the rotors, makes them rotate faster, which in turn provides lift.
see the "dead man's curve" which relates to having an engine failure with insufficient height or lateral speed (helicopters shouldn't hover in place unless a good ways up) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter_height%E2%80%93velo...
But show them the original Sagan version. The CGI may be dated, but the material is far more thought provoking.
Find it hard to imagine anyone taking him seriously after seeing his Twitter account.
At the same time... If twitter existed back then, how would the famed scientists and communicators come out? Einstein, Feynman, Asimov, Clarke have all had pretty damming (defined at minimum as "unacceptable by modern cultural standards") behaviour come to light. Respected scientists and philosophers of 70s who are still alive have similarly gotten themselves into serious hot water on social media more recently.
Never meet your heroes and all that...
Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the other hand, is an edgelord with a PhD. He takes contrarian positions for the sake of generating controversy, often without understanding the underlying issues or forming a cohesive, reasoned argument. He appeals to emotion rather than logic, and is politically partisan and divisive rather than unifying.
The ability to have your research funded is a practical and existential problem for scientists. And I find it quite natural having issues with someone being able to achieve better outcomes through marketing and fame rather than through the quality of their work.
It's something I find aggravating with Google, OpenAI, and cie in the field of machine learning for example. The amount of marketing they benefit from, before their papers are even published, is unfair and anti-meritocratic. I don't want to have to do SEO to be able to stand on even ground with these people.
(And that's not to say Sagan wasn't a good scientist, or that his work communicating science wasn't useful.)
As someone who worked at a company that would do that AND engineers would reference that product by new or old code names, or class of products (yet another code name), or components of products (another name)…..by any number of code names…. that line made me shudder.
I hated keeping track of all those codenames.
But one does seriously attack the expertise of a scientist using the undefined phrases "crackpot" or "crank", which are not very far from "butt-head"
So while I think the ruling was correct in that the average person would not take the insult seriously, I can see why Sagan might have taken it seriously.
The first two communicate precisely what you've described, and are a significant charge to level at a scientist.
The last is a playground insult, meaning only "I don't like you" or "I think you're mean."
Apple Corp is usually the way I distinguish the two.
(Aw crap, am I going to be sued by the Carl Sagan estate for calling him a "villain"?)
[1] https://www.webdevelopersnotes.com/sosumi-the-famous-mac-ale...
I had to read that 3 times. I read that sentence as a Corporation... not wanting to settle with lucifer himself....
Not sure anyone is entitled to compensation just because a codename is their name.
I find it shameful to suggest the weaker opponent the one who has been wronged by a bigger corporation or celebrity should always shut up and leave the more powerful entitity do what they want. I find that disgraceful.
As soon as it was published in an article, it was no longer internal, just a code name.
Gone are the simple product portfolios where each model has a clear position and purpose within the line up. Now, the number of models is creeping up gradually with more and more overlap and less clarity of purpose between them.
Tim Cook's Apple may be very successful, but I will argue it is not a better Apple. And as the Steve Jobs in Private of the Silicon Valley, being better matters.
Jobs famously pared the Macs down to laptop/desktop and pro/consumer to create a grid of four platforms (of course this predates phones, watches, ipads...).
I suspect Jobs was over-correcting because he had to, because Apple was floundering. But the model matrix for the Macs are not a lot bigger than Job's 2 x 2 minimalist stable.
The idea that his "name" was a "brand" that had some commercial value is a joke. I don't think Johnny Carson was dropping his invites because of an Apple internal code name.