How Did I Miss This Tripe?

@Jesse Arguing points in the FSF’s post just isn’t worth it. It’d be like argu­ing with the TimeCube guy.

I hope they have some REAL hate saved up for the Nintendo DS, the PSP, all the cell car­ri­ers and all their software/media offer­ings, and the dozens upon dozens of other mobile devices and plat­forms out there that run sim­i­larly… No? How odd.

@Jesse: I see the train from ad-hominem town pulled in (look up the term if it con­fuses you). The FSF’s “argu­ment” boils down to “But, you guys, why doesn’t any­one lis­ten to me, any­thing we don’t agree with is evil; I’m being super ser­ial.” They are an intel­lec­tual joke; their “argu­ments” were crap; and I delight in yelling at stu­pid peo­ple. I also enjoy scar­ing chil­dren and beat­ing pup­pies. Deal with it.

FSF is a lit­tle daft on this one. Location ser­vice can be turn off as a sys­tem pref­er­ence. There are no free apps.…OK let’s ignore the free apps you can down­load at the itunes store, if you jail­break your iPhone you can use a ton of free apps that are out there.…some of those apps are becom­ing free apps on the itunes store. It does not play DRM free for­mats like Ogg Vorbis and Theora. So the hell what. It plays MP3 and AAC files that are DRM free.….and some of those DRM free files are ones I bought from Apple.

Does Apple refuse some pro­grams on the app store? I hope so! There is noth­ing worse than crappy, bug rid­den soft­ware on a device as impor­tant as a phone. Windows pro­grams, before they put out UI guide­lines, were always great to track down where the devel­oper decided to put the pref­er­ence menu item. Microsoft still have not fol­lowed all the guide­lines they set forth in their own UI stan­dards. I think the biggest prob­lem the FSF is hav­ing with the iPhone is that it is pop­u­lar and it is mak­ing money. God for­bid any­one mak­ing money on a product.

@The Angry Drunk:

From what I can tell, you’re the engi­neer on that train, mak­ing sev­eral trips daily. Sure, you don’t out­right say “the argu­ment is wrong because they suck” but that’s still the effect of lit­ter­ing your dia­tribe with swears and insults directed at them. Gods only know what your intent is with that, I sup­pose it’s your style but that doesn’t mean I can’t call you on it.

Your sum­mary of their argu­ment is a total car­i­ca­ture and focuses on about 15% of their over­all essay. Did you actu­ally go read their arti­cle or are you just respond­ing to Gina Sattrapi at LifeHacker? What you’re assert­ing as their argu­ment is some kind hybrid between inter­pre­ta­tion and pro­jec­tion. Perhaps “interprojection”?

When one of your refu­ta­tions is to laugh and dis­miss the point, that smacks of the same kind of elit­ism you seem to imag­ine them entertaining.

Re: Location

Here’s the fun part. Yes, the cell phone com­pa­nies know where your iPhone is, even if you turn off location-based ser­vices. But to that same degree, so does any OpenMoko or Nokia or Android.

http://​www​.fcc​.gov/​c​g​b​/​c​o​n​s​u​m​e​r​f​a​c​t​s​/​w​i​r​e​l​e​s​s​9​1​1​s​r​v​c​.​h​tml

Because it’s required by law for find­ing out where a 911 call came from. The dif­fer­ence is that the iPhone allows apps, if the user so chooses, to access that same infor­ma­tion. So this means Android, OpenMoko, etc, are one of two things:

Like Apple, they ‘lock out’ the devel­oper from the sys­tem by deny­ing this func­tion­al­ity. Oooh! Evil closed system!

or,

Like Apple, they ‘let oth­ers track you’ by allow­ing this func­tion­al­ity. Oooh! Evil spy­ing system!

Dear Drunken Jerk,

Tripe is a won­der­ful, hon­est, straight­for­ward food. The right thing to do with it is to fry it up, wrap it in a grilled tor­tilla with salsa, onion and cilantro, and use it to help soak up the tequila in your stom­ach. The right thing to do with an FSF skreed is to use it to wipe your ass. Please note the difference.

Summary for the slow: tacos de tri­pas = yummy. FSF = yucky. Thank you for your time. And go sup­port your local taco cart guy, like, now.

I think that while the FSF state­ment may have been over-dramatic and mis­led, they’re exactly right. If you care about the beliefs that they care about, you shouldn’t buy the iPhone. THAT’S all they’re say­ing, and com­ments on this page have said the same thing – if you care about those rights, don’t buy the iPhone.

No one likes poorly con­structed argu­ments, and reac­tionary rants are pretty enter­tain­ing. We all have our posi­tions, beliefs, etc., but there are MUCH big­ger prob­lems to spend our time on, as a @Gene pointed out.

@Steve Fisher

Did you read the arti­cle at FSF’s web­site? It’s decid­edly more lucid than any of TimeCube guy’s rants.

Any of the points can be con­tested rea­son­ably, there’s no need to sum­mar­ily declare it invalid and ideological.

Fuck the FSF and their clue­less bull­shit. I don’t want to fuck with my phone — I want to use it. I don’t want to play crap on Ogg or what­ever free for­mat is out there. I don’t want to have open source that expects me to fix my god­damn device.

Freetards can use their crappy, boxy Linux hand­helds with 1 hour bat­tery life and incom­pre­hen­si­ble user interface.

If I want to write and sell an app and make money its my right. Piss off.

Hahaha… weakly veiled fluff piece to pro­mote that land mine called the FreeRunner. Jebus FSF is retarded can they name any other phone on the mar­ket that allows as more con­trol than the iPhone? i think not

@Jesse: “Ridicule is the only weapon which can be used against unin­tel­li­gi­ble propo­si­tions.” — Thomas Jefferson

Um, and then some shit about fiat and top­i­cal­ity. Thank you judge.

By the way, there is prob­a­bly no big­ger drain on our emer­gency ser­vices per­son­nel than ass­holes phon­ing in bogus 911 calls from their cell phones. I could only wish the gov­ern­ment had bet­ter means than cell tower tri­an­gu­la­tion to locate said indi­vid­u­als. They don’t. So quit your whin­ing and fear mongering.

@Jesse — Yes, I’ve been read­ing the FSF for years. He is more lucid, but that wasn’t my point. My point was he has an equal grip on real­ity and equal zealotry in push­ing it on oth­ers. There’s absolutely no point in argu­ing with a zealot. Facts just don’t mat­ter, as we see from the story you’re defending.

Actually it isn’t “com­plete and utter enti­tle­ment bull­shit” to expect a cell­phone maker to have the free­dom to offer the hard­ware unlocked. Its a mat­ter of pub­lic law. I’m in the Netherlands and the iPhone here HAS to be unlocked and able to be sold inde­pen­dent of any car­rier. I think that’s good for cus­tomers and the cell­phone maker. Apple has noth­ing to do with it, its a mat­ter of reg­u­la­tion to keep the mar­ket open. In the states, you can see the effect of the fail­ure to keep some mar­kets open in wire­less car­ri­ers, cable sys­tems and inter­net providers. Corporate social­ism in action. The com­pa­nies them­selves have noth­ing to do with it. Regulation does.

@Ay Karamba:

Government “reg­u­la­tion” fails to impress me. I’ve worked in gov­ern­ment and the one point I took home from the expe­ri­ence is that gov­ern­ment is utterly incom­pe­tent at almost every­thing it does, espe­cially “regulation.”

The mar­kets are already open. Buy a dif­fer­ent phone if you dis­agree with AT&T or any other car­rier. Nobody is forc­ing you to use an iPhone.

And, no, I fail to see why a com­pany should be forced to sell you a prod­uct in a par­tic­u­lar manner.

@Ay Karamba: Good for the Dutch, I heard you can get some great weed and wooden shoes there too. But it is “enti­tle­ment bull­shit.” Apple doesn’t owe you an iPhone. If you don’t like the car­rier options, buy a dif­fer­ent fuck­ing phone.

@Ay Karamba: And here’s the sen­si­ble posi­tion regard­ing car­rier choice. In the U.S. no man­u­fac­turer is required to pro­vide an unlocked phone, but at the same time they are pre­vented from using the DMCA to take action against any user who chooses to unlock their phone.

Um, you peo­ple do realise that with­out the con­tri­bu­tions of these “free­tards”, your iPhone would be run­ning OS 9 (or some­thing equally shit), right? BTW, the fact that it’s run­ning OS X, and that one devel­ops soft­ware for it using the same tools and APIs, should be a clue that per­haps it does count as a com­puter of some kind. (“It’s not! Look, I’m hold­ing it in my hand and mak­ing phone calls on it!” Er, right. OK. See you in the funny papers.)

Yes, the FSF argu­ment isn’t put par­tic­u­larly well (espe­cially the bit about pri­vacy). Yes, most Free Software has shit usabil­ity, and god knows that I’d much rather use an iPhone than what­ever the cur­rent state of OpenMoko or Android is. Trouble is, most of the argu­ments appear lit­tle more than “Freaky beardy guy hates my shiny new toy! BAD beardy man! BAD!” And then they have the gall to com­plain about irra­tional zealotry?

If I had to pick which kind of zealot I’d rather meet in a dark alley… I’d pick the Apple kind. Because they have fuck-all atten­tion span.

I agree with what every­one has said, except the those I don’t agree with. They really need to get their facts straight. It’s not rocket sci­ence, what they are say­ing is obvi­ously wrong. But the peo­ple who I agree with are right. However, one of the peo­ple who I don’t agree with made a good point some­where, and I agree with that, but it doesn’t con­tra­dict my posi­tion that those who I agree with have won the argument.

FSF ver­sion of the iPhone.

Buy all your parts at cheap bastard-R-Us Take the week­end to assem­ple them, some sol­der­ing may be required. Connect your phone to a ser­ial con­nec­tion du this boot image use wget or curses to find the libraires you may want do the ./configure;make;make install song and dance find the appli­ca­tions you may want do the ./configure;make;make install song and dance now find a car­rier that will let you put it on your net­work and then another car­rier if you don’t like the first one you got

Agreed, this works (it’s a LONG shot, but for sake of argue­ment it could), but I’d rather give some­one $200 and have it work­ing rel­a­tively quickly. Let’s assume you’re con­sult­ing at $50 and hour, this “free” phone actu­ally cost you $2,400+ (assum­ing this was a week­end project)

Disclaimer: I use HP-UX, Linux and Windows at work, I’m 100% Mac at home. I use gcc, perl adn python daily. I also pay for things when I don’t want to mess with it.

I don’t agree with me

@diskgrinder: well I do agree with me

What’s an opion?