I am unable to imagine that. For me, my phone is an annoyance. It interrupts me, the only thing it has that is useful for me is mobile internet (that I use rarely), emergencies, and music.
How can one get so dependent on a piece of technology you ultimately do not really own?
I get that the Hacker News crowd maybe a bit more anti-social, but how do we continuously ignore what's going on in the general population (HN == anti-Facebook, anti-Big Bang Theory, basically, anything that's popular)?
Have you been to a concert? A family reunion? A movie? People waiting in line? People are looking at their phones constantly, even to the point, where they're ignoring everything else around them.
Yes, people live in their phones. It's so obvious.
Yup. I do, too. I understand better than most people the trade off and what price I'm paying, but he reality is, I accepted it a while ago. I keep my daughter off of all social media (she's not quite 2) because I know one day she'll be more dependent on it than I am (writing this on an iPhone) and I want her to be able to create her own digital identity and not be stuck with hundreds of baby photos defining her before she gets a chance to.
But that knowledge comes from how my wife and I use our pocket computers (because "phone" at this point is ridiculous, "mobile" is at least a bit more generic). I'm say, half way through my life. I can worry to death and stand against and whatever, or I can get on with life, and appreciate the convenience provided in the short amount of time I have left. It's just admitting it to myself. Once that's done (and it is) I can get beyond grandstanding and just cheer for encryption and join the EFF (I am a member) and so on, hoping to have some impact on pushing the privacy needle to one side vs the other, because we're going to use these things daily, likely no matter what.
The best theory of the formation of the universe is the Big Bang Theory. I check HN at least daily (often far more), and I haven't seen any posts regarding alternative theories or poking holes in the Big Bang Theory.
What origin of the universe theory does the HN zeitgeist advocate?
I'm new to HN and the main thing I notice ( and like) is that people here don't seem so obsessed with mundane rubbish.
BBT as example - low level comedy with canned laughter that relies on silly stereotypes for literally everything. Faux-geeks love it - the people who 'know everything about tech and gadgets' but can't read a line of code, the populist sciencey crowd rather than the science people themselves.
I'm not american so maybe just cultural difference but everything about is always seemed too try-hard and populist.
If HN spurns those hangeronners then I'm happy. Happy-ish anyway.
While the value of watching a "rubbish" comedy (or TV for that matter) certainly is debatable, the content of the show, or at least the accuracy of the physics jokes, are spot on. They are pretty rigorous in their joke fact checking :
>A lot of the humor is over the heads of the general audience.
>But there are jokes inside of jokes, and for those who
>recognize the science, they’re hilarious. The show takes this
>stuff so seriously that it employs a UCLA physics professor
>to make sure it gets it right.
>Case in point: In a 2009 episode, “The Jiminy Conjecture,”
>Sheldon and Howard heard a chirp and then argued over which
>variety of cricket made the sound.
>On the whiteboard in the background is Dolbear’s law, which
>states the relationship between the air temperature and the
>rate at which crickets chirp.
>“I went to a Dolbear presentation at Tufts, and they talked
>about this, in like 1989,” says one high-profile fan of the
>show, Seamus Blackley, one of the creators of Microsoft’s
>original Xbox game console. “I remembered it!”
>“Once I realized what was going on, it was awesome,” added
>Mr. Blackley, who is also trained in physics. “It’s the No. 1
>show, and it has actual physics in it.”
I'm just not sure there's ever been a show that's attempted to deliver comedy around Schrodinger's Cat or Quantum Uncertainty. They do a phenomenal job with comedy surrounding such technical subjects, but just by acknowledging my fondness for the show, puts me in a minority here.
Why do you not just own a cheap flip phone and an ipod then?
Ownership is something of a nebulous concept in the digital era - copyright and licensing is far more important. You may own the device outright, but that's largely immaterial. The value of the device is in its access to the network and licensed content - music, ebooks, GPS, traffic, internet, texting, fb, chat, etc. Aside from a platform to consume content and access the network, the physical device itself offers little more than a camera.
> Why do you not just own a cheap flip phone and an ipod then?
> Ownership is something of a nebulous concept in the digital era
Richard Stallman told us that any piece of software that you cannot modify but someone else can has to be considered as malware. In this sense about any mobile phone must be considered as malicious, since there is (besides OsmocomBB, for which using is of dubious legality) no free baseband processor. Even more imporatant mobile phones are location tracking and bugging devices with built-in telephony functions. Thus it is no question why owning a mobile phone is a very bad idea in general (I know very few applications of mobile phones that justify these large flaws).
Data collected by Apple produced by your activity for things like product metrics, improvements, Siri, traffic data / directions or whatever they decide fits their business model at a later date.
The collection of which you can decline during the setup process. Further, even if Apple could be said to own the analytics data you're talking about, they certainly don't make any claim over my data; that is to say, the information I choose to store on my phone.
Can you opt out of App store analytics? What about data collected from Siri[0], of which Apple says it can hold on to for two years[1]?
By disabling these services you are severely limiting the advertised functionality and features of a device you purchased.
From Apple's privacy policy[2]:
>We also collect data in a form that does not, on its own, permit direct association with any specific individual. We may collect, use, transfer, and disclose non-personal information for any purpose. The following are some examples of non-personal information that we collect and how we may use it:
>We may collect information such as occupation, language, zip code, area code, unique device identifier, referrer URL, location, and the time zone where an Apple product is used so that we can better understand customer behavior and improve our products, services, and advertising.
>We may collect information regarding customer activities on our website, iCloud services, and iTunes Store and from our other products and services. This information is aggregated and used to help us provide more useful information to our customers and to understand which parts of our website, products, and services are of most interest. Aggregated data is considered non-personal information for the purposes of this Privacy Policy.
>We may collect and store details of how you use our services, including search queries. This information may be used to improve the relevancy of results provided by our services. Except in limited instances to ensure quality of our services over the Internet, such information will not be associated with your IP address.
From your reply:
>they certainly don't make any claim over my data; that is to say, the information I choose to store on my phone.
I was unclear, I never meant to imply they own the information you store on your phone.
How does Apple prevent you from modifying your phone? Sure you'll void your warrantee, but other than that I'm pretty sure you can do what you want with your phone.
The DMCA, for one. If there is a copyright protection mechanism on the phone, Apple has the right to prevent you from defeating said copyright protection. The language is generic enough that anything you want to modify or use on the device is subject to their approval.
To illustrate this point, imagine your phone is a rather complicated DVD player. DVDs have copyright protection, and as such, you may not modify your DVD player or DVD discs to extract or modify (or even play!) the DVDs on an unlicensed player. Similarly, you may not do anything remotely like that with Apple copyright-protected music or video files, or any other digital media copyright-protected by Apple. This means if suddenly all the data on your phone were bundled up and "protected" by Apple, you would have no right to said data, other than the right to use them the way Apple wants you to.
Of course, the DMCA has been amended over the years to allow exemptions to this (which are reviewed again every three years). Some allow jailbreaking, some allow remixing of media. Some allow disabled people to read their e-books (yes, this was illegal for a while due to the DMCA). You can only carrier-unlock your phone if you bought it before 2013 (seriously). Oh, and tablets/smartwatches can only be jailbroken since 2015.
A 2010 ruling determined that even if your purchase a phone, you do not own its software - you are merely leasing the phone software from Apple according to their EULA. You may find a way to modify their software, but you'll also be breaking the law.
That qualifier at the end is because Apple does their very best to prevent this sort of thing, and any time you see it being done, it means someone is exploiting a security vulnerability which will surely be patched.
> a piece of technology you ultimately do not really own
You can just buy a phone in cash, then you own it. Not owning your phone is a choice. Even if you're on a contract (at least here in the Netherlands), the phone is often legally yours, you're just paying it off.
If Apple (or anybody else) controls root access to the phone or if they can force software updates onto the phone, then you don't actually own the phone.
I'm not sure that logic really holds, what part of the definition of ownership specifies this? If you drive your car without insurance it can be forcibly taken from you, does that mean nobody truly owns their car?
Toyota doesn't[1] get to modify your car without your permission. And yes, this means "nobody" owns the stuff they buy when someone else controls it.
I take it you haven't seen Copy Doctorow's incredibly important talk[2] on this subject, which is the followup to his well-known talk about the War On General Purpose Computing. Never mind the car - if we don't stop this crap now, it won't be long before we see someone's prosthetic legs or cochlear implant "repossess itself".
[1] Actually, cars are starting to have the same problems where they can be updated remotely, in addition to the copyright crap involving John Deere's explicit claim that you don't ever own their hardware.
How can one get so dependent on a piece of technology you ultimately do not really own?