prange

Sure - anyone is capable of doing something bad in the future.

But, it is utterly dishonest to claim they are doing it now if you have no evidence.

If it is controlled by corporate interests, it is not free.

No it isn’t. The direction of development is controlled by the need for funding.

I agree that submitting bug reports or patches is an important contribution.

I don’t see how that relates to market share, since regular users won’t do that.

It’s not really ‘free’ if it has to produce ad revenue.

For clarification - if you either contribute code or money to Firefox, you are clearly supporting the existence of a free browser.

I don’t see how just using it does. So if you aren’t contributing to it you may as well use the browser with the best feature set for your use case.

> the fact that Twitter is a customer service channel

This is circular reasoning. Nowhere is it established that Twitter is a customer service channel.

Other parts of your in your first paragraph makes sense, but are also non-obvious and reflects expertise and evidence collecting on your part.

Plenty of large companies do also use Twitter for PR rather than customer service.

Unless clearly stated otherwise, there is no reason for anyone to treat an official Twitter account as anything other than an official statement by a corporation, no different from their official blog, or website.

What makes you think a customer service rep is operating the official Twitter account for a $40+BN company?

> I wouldn't seriously consider using a non-free application for something as essential as everyday web browsing.

Why? Are you considering forking Firefox?

When you said that, my first thought was - that would be for open source gun designs.

Of course it’s actually already a real thing: http://www.gathub.com/?p=28

Perhaps the client is an ‘American Jedi’.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/american-jedi-documentary_n_5...

Very true. My point was that you don’t have to use ticketing as a control mechanism - you can use it however you like and it doesn’t imply distrust. Similarly you can have an overbearing or micromanaging boss whether or not ticketing is used.

It’s not as simple as that. ‘Talking’ doesn’t create a reference where you can see what’s been done yet, and of course people leave teams or get sick etc. so there are many reasons to want to see what was and wasn’t completed.

> which makes it difficult to learn how to hack

This doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. It’s true that you can’t rebuild the kernel or os services, or modify the system very much at all so if that is the kind of hacking you want to learn, then you shouldn’t use a Mac.

However, if by ‘learn to hack’ you mean ‘learn to code applications and services’, then Macs are great. You can learn both Apple’s proprietary stuff and all of the significant open source tooling and languages.

It has more features, reviews generally indicate improvements, and consumers are choosing it.

Anyone claiming that it is getting worse is making an extraordinary claim that needs data to support it.

> When your business partners are world governments, unfortunately mass suffering is the table stakes.

You haven’t mentioned any suffering Apple is causing.

If you mean to say anyone who does business with a government is causing untold suffering, then I guess you are advancing an anarchist agenda. Fair enough.

> cheap laborers who subsist on a standard-of-living magnitudes below you or I

Orders of magnitude above the average in China, a developing country.

Isn’t this just Sinophobia?

> Working to manage it seems to be the best alternative.

Yeah - I tend to agree.

You don’t need to explain, but I am actually interested. I don’t see it as hair splitting.

My point is that Trump may not be president now, but it seems you see that as a binary viewpoint.

He is currently head of a large political organization that pre-dates the FBI which made him president once and may do so again.

He hasn’t stopped existing, nor has the organization that supports him any more than the FBI has.

So I simply disagree that one is tangible and the other is not.

“Incredible human suffering”? This doesn’t seem like a serious comment.

That doesn’t make sense. Saying the FBI should be defunded is explicitly speculating about what hasn’t happened yet.

Your quote again doesn’t reflect our actual conversation. It’s heavily edited.

What basic question do you claim I didn’t answer? Try asking it in once sentence.

> it seems to take only the inevitable one or two odd instances of corruption to start the rot that will bring it down

This seems to be based on the premise that there could ever be a system that was somehow perfectly free or corruption to begin with.

I think that’s far fetched. I think all human systems are messy and are going to contain some instances of corruption.

The question is simply whether the level of corruption reaches the level that cancels out the benefits of the system as a whole, or not.

Apple Maps has traffic jam data. For that matter, my DVD based navigation in my 10 year old car gets real time traffic updates.

Neither of them involve using my position data to let ads track me.

Additionally nothing stops you from using Google Maps on iOS, or Waze for that matter, another Google Mapping product renowned for good traffic data.

In any case it sounds like you would prefer tighter integration of Google products into the OS, and have no problem with them collecting data on you.

In this case why not just use Android?

If you think being concerned about Trump, who is widely agreed to still be in control of one of the two US Political Parties, is just far off ‘speculation’ to you, then I’m very surprised you care about an old FBI dossier on Aretha Franklin.

He wasn’t being investigated when he was in office.

Have you considered the possibility that the purpose of a question is to discover what other people think?

There are many interesting possible answers to the question. You are welcome to offer one, or as I have already said ask a clarifying question if you don’t understand.

From the guidelines:

“Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.”

I suggest that you might want to stop looking for political ‘points’ to argue against, and consider just having an open discussion.

It’s obviously not declining. More and more people are choosing it.

You said it was my point, and you put it in quotes. If you weren’t intending to make it look like something I said, you wouldn’t have needed to make it look like a quote. You were being deliberately misleading.

You are now asking what my point is, which shows that you don’t actually know, so you were obviously stating a falsehood when you claimed to know as a ’fact’ what my point was.

> Especially when you already knew the answer before asking it?

Believing you can read other people’s minds is a symptom of psychosis.

“Apple has practically unlimited resources and power”

This statement isn’t grounded in reality. If it were, it would make more sense to be angry that they haven’t solved world hunger and ended the threat of nuclear war.

Are you actually claiming that to be a real event?

The only thing of note about it seems to be you personally making a statement at work that honestly doesn’t sound a million miles away from what Steve Jobs or Jony Ive might have said.

They were famously never satisfied, even though they thought their products were the best.