I think you underestimate what Comcast et al are trying to do to the Internet, with the help of various convenient politicians.
Things like the .xxx proposal and opposition to net neutrality are steps towards the same kind of 'clean, curated experience' you get on the iPhone today.
Thankfully they seem to be getting knocked back every time they try, but only with great expense and effort from groups like the EFF. And they keep on trying new ways to ruin the Internet all the time.
Exactly. And when they are nicely concentrated under the .xxx TLD, they will be easier to filter, no pesky URL lists that are difficult (=expensive) to maintain.
Yeah, that's good. A lot of people want to filter them. There'd be no way to keep pornographic or sexual content constrained to a .xxx domain even if regulations were implemented to try to make it so. I see it as a convenience for consumers, not governments; if we get to the point where the government is censoring the internet, I don't think the fact that there's an .xxx TLD is going to be that big of a deal. They'd all just bleed over into .com space again surreptitiously.
See how well they're doing stopping piracy of normal media? They'll do even worse stopping pornography. There's nothing to fear from a .xxx domain.
How certain are you of this? Would you be able to successfully defend every photograph or email you have ever produced against obscenity charges? I think, if it came down to it, the courts could find a hell of a lot of inadvertent pornographers out there.
Note I said 'could': Selective enforcement of over-broad laws is a boon and a horrible threat, because it implies everyone is guilty of something, so the government could pound anyone who bothers them if it chose to.
What goes in the .xxx domain? Who decides? One man's pornography is another man's art, unless you have a burning conviction that you should decide what other people get to look at. One woman's abortion advice is another woman's gross obscenity.
At first glance, it seems like a great idea, but as soon as you get into the details it's a nightmare. What .xxx and similar proposals mean is that someone, somewhere, possibly in another country and with values wildly at variance with yours, gets to censor the Internet for you. It's not a service I consider worth having.
Wait, is the proposal for all pornographic sites to be necessarily limited to .xxx? If it is, then I agree that it's a matter of concern. If it isn't, then I don't see your point.
What's the point, then, of a walled garden if it doesn't have a wall around it? cookiecaper says "There's nothing to fear from a .xxx domain" but if that's the case then, de facto, there's nothing to be gained from it either except a bit of marketing edge. If the argument is for "safety", then it has to be compulsory. And even if it doesn't start as compulsory, the "Think of the children!" brigade will soon start lobbying for it to be made so.
For someone born in China, who may be deeply patriotic about their country but hates their government; for them it is a catch 22 because they could move abroad but that means a big sacrifice.
No-one is forcing you to use an iPhone or an iPad; if you disagree with Apple's policies then walk down the street and buy an alternative product, or don't develop apps for the App Store.
Apple can dictate policies that irritate developers and content publishers because they have a better product offering to the consumers plus a critical mass of app offerings in the App store and they know it. If Microsoft had a superior tablet offering that everyone was raving about and an Android-based phone was kicking Apples ass in terms of iPhone sales, then perhaps Apple's stance would be more lenient.
Superior for a particularly humorless, prudish type of consumer apparently, but I don't care about that. What I do care about is the stark discrepancy between what "hackers" claim to be and what turns out to be the truth.
Well, as a developer/hacker, you should care what smartphone the majority of consumers use if you wish to reach the biggest possible audience (as an app developer). Even if they are "humourless and prudish". This is more a relection of Steve Jobs taste I think, than of consumers' taste.
If you are a hacker (and not an app developer) who has a major problem with Apple's policies, then you are absolutely corrrect; it would be highly hypocritical to both own an iPhone/iPad and hold that view simultaneously.
I imagine Steve Jobs as The Patrician in Terry Pratchett's Discworld series:
"Ankh-Morpork had dallied with many forms of government and had ended up with that form of democracy known as One Man, One Vote. The Patrician was the Man; he had the Vote."
Au contraire, Ankh-Morpork is a very liberal city. Anyone can do whatever they like, provided they don't step on toes of someone organized - then it is up to them (the organized group) to clean up the competition using market forces.
The are no bullshit rules and laws, just thought out recommendations to make the city run as well-oiled machine.
I was thinking more of the (relatively few) cases where someone ends up on the Patrician's bad side:
"The Patrician could not tolerate mime artists. It was a strange aversion, but there you are. Anyone in baggy trousers and a white face who tried to ply their art anywhere within Ankh's crumbling walls would very quickly find themselves in a scorpion pit, one wall of which was painted the advice: Learn The Words."
For the Patrician it was mimes, for Jobs presumably Flash, bikinis and now also satire ;-)
What metaphor? He didn't say "If Apple was a country, it'd be China". That's a metaphor. He said "If Steve Jobs ran a country, it'd be China". That's a hypothetical.
And really, do we want to go there? Did several million people die during the cultural revolution, several hundred die during Tianamen, and the continuing abuse of human rights, just so we could crack jokes about Jobs? It seems a bit in poor taste. Otherwise, let's just go whole hog, call him Hitler, paint a moustache on his portrait, and Godwin the whole thing.
...and tech issues are not cars, but we use car analogies anyway. Just because you can't take an metaphor and make it line up 100% does not make the metaphor worthless.
Many car analogies are often wrong. Perhaps you can explain to me the benefit of that metaphor. From what I gather, the insinuation is that Steve Jobs has a restrictive grip on the App Store. Now, comparing Apple to China is a pretty inflammatory statement, so the metaphor must have a substantial point to make in order to justify the hyperbole. From what I see, this is just another snappy Apple-bashing one-liner (which contribute practically nothing to the discussion). Perhaps I'm wrong, but in that case I'd really like to be filled in.
You mean running an app store with a forced monopoly on its respective platform and a (albeit not 100%) monopoly on the wider smartphone app market. Yes, it is similar in some ways.
However, this is not necessary for the statement "If Steve Jobs ran a country, it would be China" to be accurate. It need merely be shown that the general principles Jobs abides by match up in some general way to the philosophy of China. Whether his current company is similar in any way to a country is irrelevant — just whether his actions could lead one to believe he'd run a country that way.
I would argue that most companies are indeed dictatorships, but that is ignoring the complexities of the shareholders and investors.
Even if we do make such a simplification, I generally see Apple as a benevolent dictatorship, based on their impressive track record of making life better for the average person, despite occasionally questionable behavior.
Sometimes I wish the United States was a benevolent dictatorship, if only so that Obama could be more productive.
