I don't think it's fair to dismiss the OIT hypothesis as a Hindu nationalist thing. I wrote some more about it in a comment on this article, but it actually just seems like the most likely explanation given the evidence.
Arguing the archeology, genetics, and (grudgingly, it's barely a science) linguistics is totally fair but I'd like to see more open-minded debate on the data.
The Mitanni (1500 BCE) and the Tarim Basin mummies partially Indian DNA are important points to address, but the Sarasvati river dating has to force a dramatic re-think of how Indo-European languages spread.
I am reluctant to engage with this, but... Sigh...
I have to ask... How do you explain the Anatolian languages?
Or what seems like a very clear progression: Sintashta -> Andronovo -> BMAC -> Indo-Aryan.
A long history in the subcontinent that predates BMAC does not imply linguistic continuity.
There's such an overwhelming set of evidence linguistic and materially... there's a reason why, yes, it's just Hindu nationalists/fundamentalists parroting this position.
Splitting the argument into two pieces is most concise:
1) Sarasvati river paleochannel radiocarbon dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit (<=3000 BCE)
I talked about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42330343
This is by far the strongest piece of evidence that the Kurgan model for IE language diffusion, which has Indo-European languages entering India circa ~1500 BCE, is grossly incorrect.
We now know the Sarasvati, the most prominent river mentioned in archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit texts, began to desiccate and disappear in 2600 BCE. That desiccation process is actually mentioned in later Sanskrit works like the Mahabharata, in Sanskrit that has significantly linguistically evolved.
There are hundreds of urban sites along the now-dried Sarasvati riverbed which have now been discovered, like Bhirrana, with cultural continuity back to 7500 BCE. But let's steelman the Kurgan model and assume there was a replacement of this advanced urban society's language by IE-speaking Steppe nomads, that left no archeological trace whatsoever. This still means that Indo-European languages were in India at least by 3000 BCE, making this the oldest attested Indo-European language in the world.
I would challenge you to explain how the Sarasvati paleochannel evidence doesn't completely break the Kurgan model. Even leaving aside the Sanskrit corpus which does not remember any migration or original homeland of the Aryans before India.
2) Anatolian languages (1800 BCE)
The earliest hard chronology of Hittite is the Anitta text of the Kussara (1800 BCE). The linguistic analysis (such as it is, linguistics isn't the hardest science, much less so than radiocarbon dating) implies this IE branch diverged early. Like the dating of Rig Vedic Sanskrit to at least 3000 BCE, it's likely the Hittite language was evolving for hundreds of years before this.
Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
We do know there were widespread cultural and economic ties between India and the Middle East at least as far back as 3300 BCE. IVC seals and finely-wrought carnelian beads were discovered in the royal Sumerian tombs in Ur, and many texts described the thriving economic trade between these two regions. Indian DNA has been found in Syria in 2500 BCE. The Mittani in ~1500 BCE are an even clearer example, with Rig Vedic deities, a military elite, and a horse-training text that are distinctly Indo-Aryan, not even Indo-Iranian.
In other words, cultural and human diffusion from India to the Middle East was already happening hundreds of years before the first attested Anatolian IE language is found in the Hittite.
And we know it was happening in the other direction (east) as well. The Tarim Basim mummies had Indian genetic markers, implying the Tocharian branch of IE may have also arisen out of India.
The IVC culture had a bigger population than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined. It was an advanced and urbanized culture. There were major environmental shocks that caused mass migrations. There has been migration out of India from at least 3300 BCE to the common era with the Gypies / Romani.
Is it so hard to believe IE languages could have come from such a place?
> Did IVC settlers directly migrate to Anatolia? Was there a cultural domino effect spilling out from the IVC to the BMAC, then either north through the Caucasus or south through Iran / Mesopotamia? We don't know.
Except the directional flow of what you're describing here is exactly opposite of what the archeological evidence shows.. with clear material cultural continuity in an eastern/south-eastern direction from the Black Sea to south Asia.
It's likely that when the Indo-Iranian languages arrived in south Asia they were already in the process of heavy fusing with local cultures, esp in the BMAC. References in Sanskrit writings about events that may precede Sanskrit speaking doesn't prove anything. There are plenty of cases of elite language replacement, and it's likely an elite class spoke IE and potentially even translated and wrote down non-IE oral histories.
Cultures are not necessarily languages or "peoples." Language replacement is a common phenomenon. India can be India with an insanely long deep amazing history that the world recognizes as rich and powerful and ancient... without being the origin of one of the languages spoken there.
In any case, non-IE languages continue to prosper in the subcontinent, and probably did even more so among regular people back then. Which is very much not the case for the central European region, unless you count the crazy linguistic patchwork in the Caucasus (which is heavily divided up by mountains).
Anatolian divergence happened very early, so much so that it has an entirely different gender system than all other IE languages. And lacked common IE words related to horse riding, chariots, metal-working, etc. By the time of the written documents you describe, it had already diverged into several distinct languages, implying a long history in the region. Likely a founding population that made its way around the Black Sea on some path.
And a similar phenomenon to India: established itself as a local elite over a population that spoke a different language, and kept oral histories and eventually wrote in their own language about the gods and stories of the people they fused with.
Anyways, the strongest evidence is in the common IE vocabulary -- esp around plants and animals -- which is strongly biased towards the temperate climate around the steppe.
You're not explaining how the Sarasvati river evidence, which is radiocarbon dated, does not fully contradict your position.
Do you really believe, in good faith, that the most parsimonious explanation is that a small group of IE-speaking nomads entered India 500+ years after the Sarasvati was drying and population centers had been abandoned, then re-purposed the entire history of the "native" population, wrote themselves completely out of this re-purposing with no memory of where the nomads themselves came from, and then at least hundreds of years after that re-wrote the story of the desiccation of the river (in significantly evolved, non-Rig Vedic Sanskrit) to read as if it was occurring then, ~1000+ years after it actually occurred?
Occam's razor here is clear.
The Rig Vedic speakers were in India when the Sarasvati was a fully flowing river pre-3000 BCE, they documented the drying of the river in later Sanskrit texts, and the Rig Vedic IE corpus was created by at least 3000 BCE based on the radiocarbon dating of the Sarasvati's paleochannel.
This strengthens the Out-of-India hypothesis for Indo-European languages. The hardest evidence we have is the paleoarcheology of the Sarasvati river.
The peak flow of the Sarasvati was 10,000 BCE - 3000 BCE. Tectonic shifts and climate change caused the river to dwindle from 2600 BCE - 1900 BCE. From ~1900 BCE on the river fully desiccated and no longer reached the Arabian Sea.
We see hundreds of urban sites along the dried path of the ancient Sarasvati. For example, Bhirrana in northern India which has its earliest radiocarbon-dated layers at 7500 BCE.
There is cultural continuity between the early IVC sites (7000 BCE) and later (3000 - 2000 BCE) sites.
Now connect this with the vast corpus of Sanskrit works, particularly archaic Rig Vedic Sanskrit. We know the Sarasvati was described as perennial and large river reaching the sea in those works.
Later Sanskrit texts like the Mahabharata, with language features implying hundreds or thousands of years of linguistic evolution, describe the river dwindling and eventually disappearing "underground".
This means Rig Vedic Sanskrit was being used in parallel with the extremely large and advanced urban society in the Indus Valley Civilization (IVC), which was larger than Egypt and Mesopotamia combined, at least in 3000 BCE.
The drying of the Sarasvati, which is known to have preceded vast migrations from the northwest Indian subcontinent to the northeast Gangetic plain, may have well forced climate-change migrants north into Central Asia, Mesopotamia and the steppes as well in the gradual lead-up to the Sarasvati's full collapse.
The current idea that Indo-European language entered India ~1500 BCE is completely incorrect, and oddly there's been no attempt to re-formulate the Indo-European language origins theory to match the data.
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When companies centralized and controlled app downloads, they did it primarily to make more money. Now their greed ends in the loss of real human rights. When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution, and the effects on society in the U.S. and abroad will be continue to ripple for years to come.
It's like Obama was fond of reminding tech CEO's when they'd start pontificating on leadership... “Government will never run the way Silicon Valley runs because, by definition, democracy is messy. This is a big, diverse country with a lot of interests and a lot of disparate points of view. And part of government’s job, by the way, is dealing with problems that nobody else wants to deal with.
“Sometimes I talk to CEOs, they come in and they start telling me about leadership, and here’s how we do things. And I say, well, if all I was doing was making a widget or producing an app, and I didn’t have to worry about whether poor people could afford the widget, or I didn’t have to worry about whether the app had some unintended consequences … then I think those suggestions are terrific."
> Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution, and the effects on society in the U.S. and abroad will be continue to ripple for years to come.
How do you interpret that China, a pseudo-capitalist country, bans skype and its because of the greed and avarice of private capital.
This is textbook china. It was before and there is no reason it won't be this way for decades to come.
Because if iOS didn't prohibit installation of apps from anywhere but it's app store then this would be much less problematic.
But Apple does, because it decided at the start of the platform that being able to take a 30% cut and defend it's own weak services applications from competition was worth more than the inevitable human rights problems a closed app platform presents.
Clearly the ability to take a cut of all app sales was a huge part of that decision, but was far from the only one. Security and easy of use are also very important. My grandma can install apps on her tablet no problem. But telling her to go to {domain}.com => downloads => download the 64bit windows executable and then find the file and run it, is a totally different story. Not to mention how many people will just google the name of the app, click the first link, and look for any link that says download and click next, next, next until they've succesfully added a bunch of spyware and 7 more IE tool bars.
Clearly Apple's decision is based on paternalism, which most people don't appreciate when it's combined with government power. Compare:
"Clearly the ability to eliminate opposing viewpoints was a huge part of the Chinese government's decision, but was far from the only one. Stability and economic prosperity are also very important. My grandma can obey simple laws. But telling her to go to research contradictory political perspectives and decide the correct course of action is a completely different story. Not to mention how many people will just vote for the candidate that pushes their emotional buttons, and read whatever crap on Facebook and click next, next, next until they've elected Donald Trump."
The core problem with trusted computing is that users are never allowed to install their own root certificate. My grandmother should be able to install a root that someone she trusts controls, which will include but not be limited to the OS vendor.
"Hey grandma, run this and click Ok. Nevermind, just let me see it for a minute." Don't be a ridiculous strawman, everyone has friends or family they trust that are better aligned to their cause than multinational hardware vendors.
How do you make sure that grandma only does this if you tell her but not if the app she wants to watch that movie in or that email with your brother's address in the from field tell her to?
In the world of Linux distribution, they can have multiple independent repositories. When adding another one, you usually import their PGP key to establish trust. When you install Google Chrome on Linux, you will add another repository that will be responsible for further Google Chrome updates.
In the Android world, multiple app stores exist. There are stores by Amazon, Yandex, Baidu, etc.
If Apple wanted, similar mechanism could be made for iOS too.
You say that Apple is doing this for its own financial interest yet on the other hand Yandex, Baidu, Google, Facebook and all the other companies also have to obey local laws, and are just as bad if not worse since their system of persistent user tracking is far more insidious.
Don't like Apple? Don't buy their products. Your involvement with them ends there. Don't like Google? You can't avoid them no matter what OS you are using, no matter what browser you're using etc.
You must elaborate that more, because I can't see it.
> Yandex, Baidu, Google, Facebook and all the other companies also have to obey local laws,
Sure, but the option of third party app stores opens also option of sideloading. In the case of Apple, when Apple says no, you are without the app, period.
> and are just as bad if not worse since their system of persistent user tracking is far more insidious.
Not sure about their tracking, but they do not have an equivalent of Play Services on the devices. If you want to be really sure, use F-Droid or apps stores with the principles of F-Droid.
> Don't like Google? You can't avoid them no matter what OS you are using, no matter what browser you're using etc.
That's not true. When you use Google Search, Gmail or Youtube, it's you who entered the URL into the location bar. You can stop doing that exactly the same way, like you can not purchase Apple products.
>Sure, but the option of third party app stores opens also option of sideloading. In the case of Apple, when Apple says no, you are without the app, period.
This is a non-issue that people have brought up countless times. First of all, are we in agreement that app stores and other legal entities have to obey local laws? So your point is moot. Side loading is possible on iOS. You don’t even need to own a Mac to develop for iOS. [1,2,3,4] There is also the open web to fall back on.
And you are incorrect about user tracking. Just a day ago Google was caught tracking users even when location services are turned off. [5] And please educate yourself about modern ad tracking [6]
> This is a non-issue that people have brought up countless times.
Does not make their argument right or correct.
> First of all, are we in agreement that app stores and other legal entities have to obey local laws?
Proactive censorship, company policies or business interests do not align to local laws 1:1. Porn, BitTorrent, gab.ai or countless other banned applications are not illegal, yet you are not going to be able to install them on your Apple device.
> Side loading is possible on iOS.
By jailbreaking?
> You don’t even need to own a Mac to develop for iOS.
We are not talking about development, but about loading a binary on the device and running it. TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.
> And you are incorrect about user tracking. Just a day ago Google was caught tracking users even when location services are turned off.
On Android devices with Play Store (aka Google proprietary app) installed. And they apologized for that, and are removing it.
> And please educate yourself about modern ad tracking
If you are concerned about ad tracking and you don't use any adblocker, at least educate yourself about capabilities of the current browsers[1].
>Proactive censorship, company policies or business interests do not align to local laws 1:1. Porn, BitTorrent, gab.ai or countless other banned applications are not illegal, yet you are not going to be able to install them on your Apple device.<
"Banned applications are not illegal"; that's an oxymoron.
Side loading has been done on iOS. Refer to Apple Developer Enterprise Program. [1] Cardiogram has also successfully side-loaded apps on iOS. [2] But it seems I won't be able to convince you since you cannot agree that a curated marketplace has value and that people desire this.
>We are not talking about development, but about loading a binary on the device and running it. TWO DIFFERENT THINGS.<
Refer to the two links cited below.
>On Android devices with Play Store (aka Google proprietary app) installed. And they apologized for that, and are removing it.<
That's a SEPARATE Google tracking issue (hur hur) in April 2017. Did you even read the link I posted? It was discovered 2 days ago now.
Ultimately, Apple has to obey the law in China. The "wisdom" of allowing side-loading to sidestep public policy issues exposes a wide target that is prone to abuse and leads to bad outcomes.
> "Banned applications are not illegal"; that's an oxymoron.
I don't follow your logic there, care to elaborate? Banning is done by Apple; legality is determined by courts, based on laws. Has any of these apps ruled illegal by court? Of course not. As I already wrote, company policies are not 1:1 map to laws, there's much more that goes into them, especially things like business interests and partnerships, but also things like ideology or subjective moral judgement.
> Refer to Apple Developer Enterprise Program. [1]
You can't be serious. So your grandmother is going to found a company, then get a DUNS number, so she can sideload an app?
The second link says exactly nothing about sideloading. On contrary, it has big Apple Store button.
> But it seems I won't be able to convince you since you cannot agree that a curated marketplace has value and that people desire this.
For convincing, it helps to have valid, logical arguments.
You don't seem to understand, that curated marketplace and sideloading are not mutually exclusive. Those, who want that marketplace, can choose from curated selection. Those, who want to sideload, can. In your model, where the curation is enforced on everyone, it is being turned into control for what's allowed and what is not.
> Ultimately, Apple has to obey the law in China. The "wisdom" of allowing side-loading to sidestep public policy issues exposes a wide target that is prone to abuse and leads to bad outcomes.
Ultimately, by allowing side-loading they are not responsible for whatever the user side loads at all, because they do not control this distribution channel. Just like Microsoft is not responsible for whatever you run on your Windows machine and Linus Torvalds is not responsible for whatever you run on your Linux machine.
>I don't follow your logic there, care to elaborate? Banning is done by Apple; legality is determined by courts, based on laws. Has any of these apps ruled illegal by court? Of course not. As I already wrote, company policies are not 1:1 map to laws, there's much more that goes into them, especially things like business interests and partnerships, but also things like ideology or subjective moral judgement.<
This is literally the third line of the article: "We have been notified by the Ministry of Public Security that a number of voice over internet protocol apps do not comply with local law. Therefore these apps have been removed from the app store in China."
>You can't be serious. So your grandmother is going to found a company, then get a DUNS number, so she can sideload an app?<
You said you can't side-load apps and that's the proof that you can. This is how companies deploy apps that are not on the App Store. And this has nothing to do with grandparents, it's two separate things. I remain unconvinced that it's easier to sideload an app from dubious sources than downloading from a sanctioned App Store.
>The second link says exactly nothing about sideloading. On contrary, it has big Apple Store button.<
The App Store is the official way to get into the Cardiaogram program. You can join the mRhythm study which is not offered on the App Store. They send you an email link and you tap on the link. Then you download the profile and the app. And that's how you sideload apps.
So I've provided 2 real-life examples of how side-loading is done on iOS.
>You don't seem to understand, that curated marketplace and sideloading are not mutually exclusive. Those, who want that marketplace, can choose from curated selection. Those, who want to sideload, can. In your model, where the curation is enforced on everyone, it is being turned into control for what's allowed and what is not.<
I agree that in an ideal world, having both a curated marketplace/walled garden and the option to sideload would be good. In practice, the closest to this idealized model is actually iOS and not Android, because Android even in its most "official" form is sponsored by a company whose business is to spy on its users (refer to earlier citation about being busted by Quartz). We can keep arguing in circles about "open source" and "code audits" but Ken Thompson pretty much shut that down with his Turing award lecture. [1] As of a few days ago, Google has consistently been shown to be untrustworthy.
> This is literally the third line of the article: "We have been notified by the Ministry of Public Security that a number of voice over internet protocol apps do not comply with local law. Therefore these apps have been removed from the app store in China."
Meanwhile, we moved the discussion from a narrower issue of the article to a wider issue of sideloading in general.
> You said you can't side-load apps and that's the proof that you can. This is how companies deploy apps that are not on the App Store. And this has nothing to do with grandparents, it's two separate things. I remain unconvinced that it's easier to sideload an app from dubious sources than downloading from a sanctioned App Store.
You still can't in general. Only in very specific, narrow situations, blessed by Apple. Your feelings about ease of side loading vs. app store are irrelevant, as we are talking about running software that Apple for various reasons might not approve of.
> In practice, the closest to this idealized model is actually iOS
In practice, you can run only things that Apple approves. Not good enough.
>Meanwhile, we moved the discussion from a narrower issue of the article to a wider issue of sideloading in general.<
Refer to earlier explanation of tiresome.
>You still can't in general. Only in very specific, narrow situations, blessed by Apple. Your feelings about ease of side loading vs. app store are irrelevant, as we are talking about running software that Apple for various reasons might not approve of.<
What are these "narrow" and "specific" situations you speak of? If you wish to distribute apps in jurisdictions where they are banned, I don't see why Apple is obliged to help you break the law. As for the side-loading capability, I have yet to encounter anyone who has had problems with Apple restricting their ability to side-load while enrolled under their enterprise program. Hell you can even use TestFlight to push your "beta" apps to "beta-testers" in perpetuity.
>In practice, you can run only things that Apple approves. Not good enough.<
Besides the links provided earlier, you can also have your own runtimes on iOS. e.g. Filemaker, Wolfram are doing this. [1] Python has been on iOS for at least 5 years. [2]
In all seriousness, this was an unintentionally hilarious comment. You can be against walled gardens, but one of best arguments for their existence is because grandmas in general can't be trusted to install root certs.
Google pretty much solved this issue with sideloaded apps.
Nobody is stopping you from downloading only from the store. But if you want, you can also download from outside of the store. As a bonus, Google even checks those apps for malware (but like any antivirus, it's mostly based on signatures + some relatively weak machine learning that won't stop original new malware until it gets reported by someone).
The Play Store may also be slightly less secure than the App Store, but that's mainly a factor of Google not doing any manual reviews. But this is a different issue. My point is that there's no reason why Apple couldn't allow sideloading, too.
Trading some freedom (to run whatever code/apps. you want) for the security afforded by a centrally run repository is definitely a reasonable one to make, but the same mechanisms can be co-opted and used in ways that aren't in the users' interests.
It's a difficult line to draw IMO - providing _any_ way to bypass it opens the non-technical user up to malicious software (to varying degrees), but if all platforms (or even just all the major ones) become so locked down, IMO that's a big loss in itself.
That's because Windows does not have any sandboxing, although that seems to be changing with Windows 10 version 1709.
iOS apps are still sandboxed just like apps from the App Store when you sideload them using Xcode. That's all you would need to install Skype, and sandboxing is what keeps iOS secure, not the App Store. The App Store review is mostly about weeding out obvious junk and enforcing Apple's business model.
> Because if iOS didn't prohibit installation of apps from anywhere but it's app store then this would be much less problematic.
I love Android and I love the fact that I can sideload apps from f-droid or elsewhere. But I've seen firsthand that (by children, e.g.) sideloading apps can result in a cascade of horrible device security problems.
We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.
In any case, I don't think Apple's decision is strictly motivated by "being able to take a 30% cut". Apple has shown a commitment to security in their public statements and their devices' design. However, I'll grant that profit was certainly part of the motivation.
> We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.
Or we could just take the time tested solution from the desktop world and you could give your kids non-admin accounts that doesn't let them install random stuff. The android security model is nothing but security theater in practice.
> We can blame the user or we can save them from themselves. shrug this seems like a genuinely hard problem and I wish there was an android-but-requires-several-command-line-adb-steps-to-permit-sideloading.
I don't. It should be available to non-technical users. It needs to be available to non-technical users. If anything, Android is too complex already.
>I don't. It should be available to non-technical users. It needs to be available to non-technical users.
Why should it be available to non-technical users? What will they possibly gain from being able to be tricked into installing a keylogger on their phone?
I don't think it's a given that full permissions on a device imply that a user will be able to run their device the way they want to. Permissions are necessary but insufficient. The other part is knowledge and ability. With permission but not knowledge, the user experience gets worse not better.
No, but the user will be able to run their device in the way that they want to. I'm not supporting no protections, but you should always let the user override those protections at the end of the day if they so choose.
How do you convince yourself that one of the(if not the) biggest government in the world forces a company's hand by force is not to blame, but the company who is the victim of such force is actually at fault.
Super Mario Run is a 220mb app, and it was downloaded 40 million times in 4 days. That's 8.8 petabytes of data transferred, for one app in 4 days.
A lot of apps don't go the in-app-purchase route, they rely on advertising, and if using e.g. Google's ad network, Apple gets just the $99/year to host who knows how many millions of downloads of the app.
No one claimed Apple doesn't make money on the App Store, but to claim that it's some massive profit machine for Apple is ignoring the reality of what it costs to host all the apps Apple makes just $99/year from.
Nintendo don't pay 8 billion dollars for Apple to hose Super Mario Run.
They paid $99 a year, or maybe $299 a year if they have an enterprise account.
Sure, Apple doubtless made a lot of money from people buying IAP for that game, but as I said, a lot of games and even utility apps don't monetise via IAP or selling the app itself - they rely on advertising, which Apple likely gets $0 from.
But hey, way to completely twist what I said to make a stupid fucking joke.
But democracy isn't the only alternative, or the best one.
What we are really discussing is totalitarian regimes. One is Apple, a top down secretive corporation with policies, dictating what will happen. The other is China, which like many Communist countries uses the "will of the people" as a surrogate for its own desires.
Representative democracy can have same issues. Take for example Prohibition, or the current war on drugs. And many other things.
I think that when it comes to PLATFORMS, there should be no barrier to entry. I would go further and say that I want there to be CENTRALIZED COLLABORATION on a platform, and not competition (eg of browser makers). But the platform must implement every extension that becomes popular enough. In other words when an app or extension becomes popular enough, it should be incorporated into the platform as one standard.
Think of how much headache would be solved and how much more could have been done if there were no browser quirks, and only one major browser.
The difference is that ANYONE should be able to build their own browser extension or website. ANYONE should be able to host it on the internet accessible to all. And if it gets popular enough it gets added to the feature list for EVERYONE.
However, this is a different form of governance - nothing is RESTRICTED from people and they are free to try new things.
>I want there to be CENTRALIZED COLLABORATION on a platform, and not competition (eg of browser makers)
>only one major browser
>nothing is RESTRICTED from people and they are free to try new things
What happens when one does a new attempt at a browser, that cannot be merged into the original major browser when it gets big enough?
For a simple example, suppose Google Chrome was the only major browser in such a model. One day, someone decides that C++ is too prone to vulnerabilities, and creates a new browser, called Firefox, based on Rust (on an entirely new codebase). What will happen when Firefox becomes sufficiently large to be considered major?
If it can't get merged due to something fundamental, then it can be a competitor. But that's a very rare case. The vasy majority of extensions are eminently able to be incorporated into the core.
Baloney. Pre-AppStore, you could only download a Windows binary version of Skype, and it was not the official Skype version. I didn't have Windows, but the download looked pretty sketchy. You can bet your last dollar that the Chinese government could listen in on your conversation. When Microsoft bought Skype, they de-P2P'ed it. You can bet all the dollars you wisely didn't bet earlier that a condition of Microsoft continuing to operate in China was that they enable the government to listen in. So now you just can't Skype at all. Doesn't have anything to do centralized app stores, and everything to do with a paranoid Chinese government.
> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution
It sounds like you're not at all familiar with the prior 230 years of American history as it pertains to Capitalism and the free press. Just as one example era, see 1880 to 1930. The market economy in the US was very lightly regulated, today it's extremely regulated. There were hardly any restrictions on press ownership during that time. There were few means to know who owned or influenced which entities, including the newspapers. Literal direct bribery was legal in most regards politically.
Today, the US is barely clinging to being a Capitalist nation. This is an era of innocence compared to when the US was a full-blown Capitalist nation. A better title now is mixed economy. Nearly all industry is extremely regulated. Taxation is extremely high compared to the first 150 years of US history. Government intervention into the economy is the highest it has ever been. At a time in which the US is the least Capitalistic it has been in its entire history, you're choosing to start blaming Capitalism for the weakness of the free press. You're missing a comically large error in the premise.
>When companies centralized and controlled app downloads, they did it primarily to make more money. Now their greed ends in the loss of real human rights.
Well, the Chinese get the right their chats to be surveilled by their own state (in their own platforms) - as opposed to being surveilled by the US (on Skype and such platforms).
The problem in this case isn’t centralized App Stores. It’s software that relies on a centralized server. If Skype we’re still P2P, then maybe it could evade the Great Firewall a bit easier. But it’s not, and China will just ban the Skype servers and render the app useless, even if you’re able to side load it.
Centralized control has made things a lot more secure. The fact that centralization also makes government interference easier is definitely a big negative. However, you can always go compile the app from source and install it that way, or sideload the app onto your device on iOS. It's not 2009, there are official ways to do this from Apple including for free.
> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information. Today, capitalism and naked avarice have broken the back of this key democratic institution,
What makes you say this? I seriously don't follow.
> When America was founded, the fourth pillar of government was the free press, i.e. the gatekeepers of information.
The free press wasn't a pillar of government. When America was founded, the "free press" was pretty much propaganda outlets owned by and used by the wealthy to attack each other.
One of our oldest newspapers ( NY Post ) was founded by Alexander Hamilton purely to attack Thomas Jefferson.
The press was never gatekeepers of information. The free press was "fake news" straight from the get-go. Even before the founding of the US, during the colonial period, they were political propaganda tools. If you are interested, go read about what Benjamin Franklin's colonial printing history.
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The best way to cheaply remove CO2 is to plant more trees. The simplest solution is still the best: it requires no new technology, can scale itself when the trees reproduce and is eminently accessible to all sorts of people, all around the globe. As an added benefit, some trees can even give fruit... which are delicious.
Quote from the article: "Climate scientists have calculated the effect of increasing forest cover on surface temperature. Their conclusion is that planting trees in the tropics would lead to cooling, but in colder regions, it would cause warming."
Don't forget: when a tree dies, the CO2 it absorbed is (indirectly) released back into the atmosphere. Unless you store the wood somewhere and keep it from being consumed by nature.
On an individual tree level, yes. But planting trees usually implies either:
- Designating new areas for entire forests to be grown (which all together is a store of CO2, even if individuals die and rot)
- Many individual trees in towns/cities, which would presumably be replanted if they die and so, again, in summation are a store of CO2.
Or just encourage everyone to have oak panelling, wood floors, and a huge excess of fine wooden furniture
Arguing the archeology, genetics, and (grudgingly, it's barely a science) linguistics is totally fair but I'd like to see more open-minded debate on the data.
The Mitanni (1500 BCE) and the Tarim Basin mummies partially Indian DNA are important points to address, but the Sarasvati river dating has to force a dramatic re-think of how Indo-European languages spread.