369 karma · joined July 23, 2015
I think any kind of skullduggery is fair game at this stage when you just want to "get it to work". For me the rule of thumb to go beyond this point is the commit (or push if I'm using git). After that point you lose control of it. Other people see it, and start to poke around and change things and retrospectively delivering on your good intentions to provide "done" code becomes more difficult. Always do a personal review before letting your code out of it's box. Of course if you can find somebody who's interested get their feedback too ...
Your mistake here is thinking "people" are one coherent group when in fact what you're describing here is (probably) two different ends of a polarised discussion! You're probably in a more moderate central position (generally satisfied iphone owner). It may or may not be a good thing that apple is so controversial that they provoke such vigorous discussion (my personal take is that it is), but that not everybody is satisfied with "good enough" isn't a reason to silence discussion. Particularly when as a brand they're pitched as high end rather than just good enough.
Salience: facts are more prominent from either highlighting or frequency.
Priming: Recently noted topics may be recalled with less effort.
Recency: Memories from more recent times are more readily accessible.
I'd happily settle for this. I've met many's the type that were just rude, and layed you off anyway. I'll take a bit of manners with my daily beating any day!
and that seems to be regardless of whether you're any good or not.
Apple is a devices company first and foremost. The services augment these devices. To say that services are some kind of a way forward for growth neglects the fact that these devices are a gating factor for these services.
Services are an enticing revenue model because they guarantee a steady income, while developing a good device experience is "hard". But it's a hard way to make money, with your revenue constantly consumed by labour costs. Only "products" can provide the kind growth a devices company needs. Leo Apotheker got caught up in this with HP - thankfully wiser minds prevailed and they backed out before it was too late.
But that is "using" technology. Not "crippling" it. I am sympathetic to the needs of the state, and I believe there should be some attempt to meet these needs, but with oversight, and with proper procedures and protections.
It's one thing to say James Bond doesn't have time to call back to 'M' to get permission to plant a bug but James isn't a massively industrialised automated spying operation. I'd give him sole dispensation on national security grounds but that doesn't scale up to the level that GCHQ and NSA were doing. The more actors involved the greater the possibilities for systematic abuse and that has to be acknowledged, and those questions answered.
With regards to "Treat terrorism as just another crime, nothing special," I feel that the problem with terrorism, as it is called is the fact that it is coordinated and targeted. It is more like "organised crime" but it has the specific goal literally of creating terror, whereas the interests of organised crime are purely commercial and if you don't get in their way they won't get in yours.
The issue is with people going around creating terror in a coordinated way, which undermines the authority of the state, and many people's feeling of safety.
Of course that still leaves the question of how do you respond to it, but simply "accepting that the potential for crime, even mass murder, is a necessity for a free society" is similar to me to accepting that a waterfall software development model is a natural emergent phenomenon, inevitable and should thus be embraced. It's a mode of thought that never has a happy ending.
Just to yank myself back on topic again, terrorism is thought to be similar to a child who wants his way and keeps escalating negative attention seeking tactics to the point where you either acquiesce (thus reinforcing the negative behaviour), or you smack the child (at best only a temporary solution, that could lead to further escalations if not sooner, then later in life - could even put you in front of a judge).
"Smacking the child" is what the west has been trying so far.
My personal opinion is that there is no universal generalised "third option", though intricate behavioural theories abound. I would take the opinion that every child is an individual and must be dealt with, and respected as such. It may be as simple as giving them something else to occupy themselves.
> your mom
Do you mean a "competing app", in which case it's fair game. Do you mean a straight copy? You might have a discussion there, but why involve Chinese people?
Do you mean something like [legit] "ReactOS" which is a reimplementation of Windows XP? That satisfies the needs of a wider unserved market that still needs it?
Or some hypothetical "vigilante localised" app for people who need it in their own language. Sounds fair enough if the developer isn't serving that market.
I was infuriated to discover when I bought one on my computer in work it was then just about impossible to transfer it to any device that I could actually want to listen to it on (without resorting to hacks, or the analogue hole - through which it would have amounted to about 6 CDs of content).
The licence was not transferable to other devices either so I couldn't just download it again either.
In the case of cloning: You deny the progenitor the claim to its creation.
In the case of downloads: You make a copy of something. Whether it equates to a lost sale or not is a the point of contention. In many cases it may simply be the case that the product is unavailable, at all, or through conventional distribution channels.
In fairness that goes to a certain extent for cloning as well, but the big issue there is an unwitting consumer can buy a clone thinking it's the real thing, with possible consequences for the consumer, and perhaps even damaging the image of the creator of the original product.