"We built the original infrastructure. The original backbone was developed here, and nearly all the funding came from US sources. Everyuthing else is an extension of that, and built on that framework."
We did, and that much is true. But even that is not the point here.
TFA is all about the major SERVICES being in the U.S. And they are. Why? Not because we built the infrastructure. But because we innovated and built them. It's called capitalism.
"Let me elucidate, responsibility doesn't end with your vote."
Do you know what the word "elucidate" means? It means "to make lucid" or "to explain". But you have elucidated nothing. You merely repeated yourself yet again.
If you want to make an argument, then make it. How do you claim I am responsible for politicians doing things that I actively oppose? Please elucidate, if you can. Actually, this time, rather than simply repeating your claim that I am somehow responsible for the actions of other people I do not know or like.
"Your raving defense is a classic sign that you know you're in the wrong but it clashes so much with that pretty picture you have of yourself inside your head."
I'm haven't been "raving" at all. I simply explained, in a way that I was fairly sure you would not misinterpret. It seems I was wrong about that. But somehow I doubt other readers are having the same trouble understanding what I wrote.
"There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable."
Of course there is. Even people who believe in predetermination do not claim that everything is predictable. (Obviously that's not a comment on physics.) But if you are using the word "deterministic" in a way that includes probabilistic, then we are using the word two different ways, which could explain the misunderstanding here.
Not sure how old you are, but we had unlimited LOCAL phone service. Which was some arbitrary boundary set by the phone company. You then had to PAY for long distance.
How do I know? Long distance relationships means long distance charges back in my college days.
Try reading my comment again. I wrote unlimited LOCAL calling. But the other point I made was that then, it was also all copper. There was no fiber. Today, the actual cost (not price) of voice communication between Seattle and New York is less than it was for across town in the all-copper days.
I abdicate nothing. Not a single one of my representatives, at either a state or federal level, was someone *I* voted for. But just in case you still want to be unjustifiably insulting: yes, I did vote.
As of today, they haven't been representing ME or my interests. And I'm not responsible for them being there, I voted for somebody else. So don't give me this "abdication" sh*t.
"I have, all along, asked for examples of what you or anyone else is thinking of when they use the term "fine grained access", so far I have seen zero examples."
The context should already have been clear to you. Do you see anybody else asking me to explain?
But, just for you, here are some examples:
Allowing GPS location access, but not cell-tower or wifi location access.
Allowing wifi access but not cellular data access (this one could be especially helpful to people on limited plans).
Allowing accelerometer or gyro (position) access without location access.
Allowing access to contacts, but no other access. Or vice versa.
Etc. There are many combinations, because there are so many devices and services on a modern phone.
The original post was not about location. It was about personal data, period, from a variety of sensors. Just what is finer grained than "your location"? How exactly would you break it out beyond that and ask the user in a way that made sense?""
All right, if you want to nitpick:
It was about access to data, from sensors, in a fine-grained manner, AFTER the app was installed.
I might not have stated "after" specifically, but I felt it was pretty clear from the context. iOS and Android have always asked permission beforehand, so if that isn't what I meant, there would have been no point to my comment.
"You do know that this shady government entity is populated by your fellow countrymen right?"
Committee members are people. A committee is not.
Bureaucrats are people. (An especially loathsome class of people, but people nonetheless.) Bureaucracies are not.
Politicians are people (who also often tend to be lowlifes). Politics are not.
Of course I know that the government is made up of people (though it is not, itself, "people"). But I don't really give a damn whether it is made of people or ants or gerbils. If it's incompetent, it's incompetent. And in recent years, it has very definitely shown itself to be less than the sum of its parts.
We know (there have been many studies) that committees generally tend to make worse decisions that individuals. We know that while people may be smart, crowds are stupid. The fact that the government is composed of people does not mean that "it", as an entity, is worthy of the same respect due people.
"That is incorrect. It always asked you about access to GPS from third party apps. Over time they added more permissions (like contacts and photos) but right from the start the system was designed so that access to some resources was protected. It's only the scope that has changed."
They ALL, ALWAYS have asked about gross GPS access. The discussion here was about "fine-grained control" over various kinds of location data.
"Down for whom? Google makes the news when their down for anyone, but AFAIK they're still running 5 9s average across the user base (I guess they have had 1 5-minute outage for everyone).
Down here is good enough for me. If they are down in my area (which is a metropolitan area) for a given amount of time, it is only reasonable to presume that they are down a similar amount of time for others. And it is probably worse in rural areas.
If you're saying "my IT department has better than 5 9s uptime for the intranet services", well, frankly I'm skeptical.
"My IT department" is me, a development machine, and a server or two. But the same held when I was working in an office. Google, Yahoo, or Amazon would go down, while our office machines kept chugging away. You can believe it or not.
Out of genuine curiosity, can you point me to evidence showing the universe is non-deterministic? I'm not sure how one would go about making that kind of observation.
A few hundred libraries full of philosophy books.
The evidence that the universe is non-deterministic is all around you. After all, science says that what you perceive with your own eyes, by definition, is "objective". (That's where the word "objective" came from.) Therefore, despite some flawed arguments to the contrary, there is lots of objective evidence that you have free will, which is contrary to the concept of determinism.
Also, many quantum events are probabilistic, not deterministic. You can pick up almost any authoritative book on quantum mechanics to prove that one.
"It's past time for municipalities throughout the country - and whole states, even - to reclaim the easements that telecommunications companies rely on unless they can start meeting some very strict (and escalating) service quality targets."
I wouldn't even say "unless". Do it anyway.
We used to have unlimited telephone service -- locally, anyway, but that was before fiber backbones -- for a fixed low fee. And the company behind that -- Ma Bell -- made money hand over fist.
We now have unlimited phone data plans for prices that are getting into the reasonable range.
And now the cable companies want to start charging more? They're committing suicide if they do.
"I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve, i.e. the least-consuming ~90% of users. Then charge per unit over that threshold. If this over comes to pass it should be paired with a requirement that providers treat all packets the same, regardless of source and destination."
Bandwidth has nothing to do with usage caps. I'm already paying an outrageous premium for bandwidth that people in other "western" nations take for granted.
"There's an experimental control panel called "App Ops" buried in vanilla Android 4.3 that allows turning individual permissions on and off for individual applications."
Sure. But Google is only allowing that due to customer demand... it is contrary to their Android business model. And it still isn't in wide use... as of today, most phones won't run Android 4.3.
"What exactly did you have in mind? iOS already offers fine grained control over application access to things like contacts, your camera, location, etc. Also you are asked at the time the application wants to use each resource, not up front when you install the app"
Pardon me. You are correct, although it did not start out that way. Apple added that control later. So it was still originally designed in such a way as to allow intrusion.
"The probabilities are not simply chained - whatever the cloud provider does for you, you stop doing internally, or what's the point?"
You missed my point. I wrote *IF* you are chaining your dependencies together. Obviously not everybody does that.
"The only point of the cloud is that the economy of scale allows for a better service. If it doesn't, it's just a buzzword. The only way I can see local service having better uptime than a worthwhile cloud service is if the local service can have planned downtime with no negative impact at all (which is true far less than IT seems to think, but does exist, especially for personal stuff)."
Well, then, you might as well drop Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, because every one of them, every year, has been down longer than my local system has been down in the last 5 years.
"It gets hot in there, and Johnson is always farting."
Considering that the federal government has repeatedly proved itself to be inept at "managing" the economy, or healthcare, or pretty much anything else for that matter, I have to wonder whether it should be trusted with nuclear weapons.
"In my direct experience the majority of hardcore contributors and long-time editors are complete ideologues and giant assholes who are extraordinarily hostile to any outsiders or differing thought."
Exactly. This form of "cyber-squatting" has been a very big problem.
It is made worse by the fact that these "ideologues" have often thoroughly studied all the esoteric Wikipedia rules, and so can say "this should be disallowed under Rule 24" or some such, against anything with an opposing view.
"Personally I'd expect either better components or a significantly better price."
To a large degree, you're paying for both freedom and lack of subsidies.
Android and iOS environments are full of apps that track you and your behaviors behind your back. Despite the lip service Apple and Google give to the practice, both of those OSes were fundamentally designed to allow that. (Otherwise, why isn't there finer-grained control over what information those applications can access? That would be pretty easy to do.)
Firefox OS is different. The company is independent, it is non-profit, it is dedicated to freedom, choice, privacy and security.
Slashdot Mirror
"The cardholder then does a chargeback. The bank will refund the cardholder and take it from the retailer, so the retailer assumes all risk."
I understand all this. But when you refuse a huge percentage of purchases because a small percentage of them are fraud, you hurt your business.
Repeat: I won't do business with you. If you don't like that, find some other way to change your business model.
"We built the original infrastructure. The original backbone was developed here, and nearly all the funding came from US sources. Everyuthing else is an extension of that, and built on that framework."
We did, and that much is true. But even that is not the point here.
TFA is all about the major SERVICES being in the U.S. And they are. Why? Not because we built the infrastructure. But because we innovated and built them. It's called capitalism.
So... it's going to see my address is Florida but I'm making an online purchase from Toronto? And disallow it?
That's probably the last time I'd do business with that company.
"Let me elucidate, responsibility doesn't end with your vote."
Do you know what the word "elucidate" means? It means "to make lucid" or "to explain". But you have elucidated nothing. You merely repeated yourself yet again.
If you want to make an argument, then make it. How do you claim I am responsible for politicians doing things that I actively oppose? Please elucidate, if you can. Actually, this time, rather than simply repeating your claim that I am somehow responsible for the actions of other people I do not know or like.
"Your raving defense is a classic sign that you know you're in the wrong but it clashes so much with that pretty picture you have of yourself inside your head."
I'm haven't been "raving" at all. I simply explained, in a way that I was fairly sure you would not misinterpret. It seems I was wrong about that. But somehow I doubt other readers are having the same trouble understanding what I wrote.
"There is a difference, my friend, between deterministic and predictable."
Of course there is. Even people who believe in predetermination do not claim that everything is predictable. (Obviously that's not a comment on physics.) But if you are using the word "deterministic" in a way that includes probabilistic, then we are using the word two different ways, which could explain the misunderstanding here.
"Ah, you didn't vote them in so you have no responsibility for what they do.
Do you see what you did there?"
Ah, distorting my meaning.
Do you see what you did there?
Let's be more specific: I am not responsible for politicians who have been doing things that I have actively been opposing for all of my adult life.
Is that clear enough for you? Or are you going to continue to try to play armchair psychologist?
Not sure how old you are, but we had unlimited LOCAL phone service. Which was some arbitrary boundary set by the phone company. You then had to PAY for long distance.
How do I know? Long distance relationships means long distance charges back in my college days.
Try reading my comment again. I wrote unlimited LOCAL calling. But the other point I made was that then, it was also all copper. There was no fiber. Today, the actual cost (not price) of voice communication between Seattle and New York is less than it was for across town in the all-copper days.
I abdicate nothing. Not a single one of my representatives, at either a state or federal level, was someone *I* voted for. But just in case you still want to be unjustifiably insulting: yes, I did vote.
As of today, they haven't been representing ME or my interests. And I'm not responsible for them being there, I voted for somebody else. So don't give me this "abdication" sh*t.
"I have, all along, asked for examples of what you or anyone else is thinking of when they use the term "fine grained access", so far I have seen zero examples."
The context should already have been clear to you. Do you see anybody else asking me to explain?
But, just for you, here are some examples:
Allowing GPS location access, but not cell-tower or wifi location access.
Allowing wifi access but not cellular data access (this one could be especially helpful to people on limited plans).
Allowing accelerometer or gyro (position) access without location access.
Allowing access to contacts, but no other access. Or vice versa.
Etc. There are many combinations, because there are so many devices and services on a modern phone.
The original post was not about location. It was about personal data, period, from a variety of sensors. Just what is finer grained than "your location"? How exactly would you break it out beyond that and ask the user in a way that made sense?""
All right, if you want to nitpick:
It was about access to data, from sensors, in a fine-grained manner, AFTER the app was installed.
I might not have stated "after" specifically, but I felt it was pretty clear from the context. iOS and Android have always asked permission beforehand, so if that isn't what I meant, there would have been no point to my comment.
"You do know that this shady government entity is populated by your fellow countrymen right?"
Committee members are people. A committee is not.
Bureaucrats are people. (An especially loathsome class of people, but people nonetheless.) Bureaucracies are not.
Politicians are people (who also often tend to be lowlifes). Politics are not.
Of course I know that the government is made up of people (though it is not, itself, "people"). But I don't really give a damn whether it is made of people or ants or gerbils. If it's incompetent, it's incompetent. And in recent years, it has very definitely shown itself to be less than the sum of its parts.
We know (there have been many studies) that committees generally tend to make worse decisions that individuals. We know that while people may be smart, crowds are stupid. The fact that the government is composed of people does not mean that "it", as an entity, is worthy of the same respect due people.
"Wow. Another ignorant poster who is somehow under the impression that things have gotten *worse* since Bush left office."
Wow. Another poster who misinterpreted somebody else's post and goes off on a political diatribe.
"And that's in spite of a Republican-controlled House that simply refuses to vote on anything that might make Obama look good."
And what might those things be? What, in your opinion, would make Obama look good? Let's see:
Bailouts? (It might have been Bush's idea but it was Obama who did it.) Did that make him look good?
Increased foreign wars, after he had vowed to decrease them immediately? Did that make him look good?
Inflationary monetary policy? A recession we still aren't out of? Massively increased debt and deficit? Do those make him look good?
Obamacare? Is that making him look good?
Increased domestic surveillance, when he had vowed to decrease it, immediately? Does that make him look good?
Increased intrusion into constitutional rights, when he had spoken out against it in his campaign? Does that make him look good?
Hmmm. Making a serious effort to be as objective as I can, I would still have to say no, no, no, no, no, and no.
"That is incorrect. It always asked you about access to GPS from third party apps. Over time they added more permissions (like contacts and photos) but right from the start the system was designed so that access to some resources was protected. It's only the scope that has changed."
They ALL, ALWAYS have asked about gross GPS access. The discussion here was about "fine-grained control" over various kinds of location data.
"Down for whom? Google makes the news when their down for anyone, but AFAIK they're still running 5 9s average across the user base (I guess they have had 1 5-minute outage for everyone).
Down here is good enough for me. If they are down in my area (which is a metropolitan area) for a given amount of time, it is only reasonable to presume that they are down a similar amount of time for others. And it is probably worse in rural areas.
If you're saying "my IT department has better than 5 9s uptime for the intranet services", well, frankly I'm skeptical.
"My IT department" is me, a development machine, and a server or two. But the same held when I was working in an office. Google, Yahoo, or Amazon would go down, while our office machines kept chugging away. You can believe it or not.
Out of genuine curiosity, can you point me to evidence showing the universe is non-deterministic? I'm not sure how one would go about making that kind of observation.
A few hundred libraries full of philosophy books.
The evidence that the universe is non-deterministic is all around you. After all, science says that what you perceive with your own eyes, by definition, is "objective". (That's where the word "objective" came from.) Therefore, despite some flawed arguments to the contrary, there is lots of objective evidence that you have free will, which is contrary to the concept of determinism.
Also, many quantum events are probabilistic, not deterministic. You can pick up almost any authoritative book on quantum mechanics to prove that one.
"It's past time for municipalities throughout the country - and whole states, even - to reclaim the easements that telecommunications companies rely on unless they can start meeting some very strict (and escalating) service quality targets."
I wouldn't even say "unless". Do it anyway.
We used to have unlimited telephone service -- locally, anyway, but that was before fiber backbones -- for a fixed low fee. And the company behind that -- Ma Bell -- made money hand over fist.
We now have unlimited phone data plans for prices that are getting into the reasonable range.
And now the cable companies want to start charging more? They're committing suicide if they do.
"I could get behind a hybrid plan. Base cost for a base level of bandwidth. Base should cover the "long tail" of the usage curve, i.e. the least-consuming ~90% of users. Then charge per unit over that threshold. If this over comes to pass it should be paired with a requirement that providers treat all packets the same, regardless of source and destination."
Bandwidth has nothing to do with usage caps. I'm already paying an outrageous premium for bandwidth that people in other "western" nations take for granted.
"There's an experimental control panel called "App Ops" buried in vanilla Android 4.3 that allows turning individual permissions on and off for individual applications."
Sure. But Google is only allowing that due to customer demand... it is contrary to their Android business model. And it still isn't in wide use... as of today, most phones won't run Android 4.3.
"What exactly did you have in mind? iOS already offers fine grained control over application access to things like contacts, your camera, location, etc. Also you are asked at the time the application wants to use each resource, not up front when you install the app"
Pardon me. You are correct, although it did not start out that way. Apple added that control later. So it was still originally designed in such a way as to allow intrusion.
And Android still hasn't gotten it straight.
"The probabilities are not simply chained - whatever the cloud provider does for you, you stop doing internally, or what's the point?"
You missed my point. I wrote *IF* you are chaining your dependencies together. Obviously not everybody does that.
"The only point of the cloud is that the economy of scale allows for a better service. If it doesn't, it's just a buzzword. The only way I can see local service having better uptime than a worthwhile cloud service is if the local service can have planned downtime with no negative impact at all (which is true far less than IT seems to think, but does exist, especially for personal stuff)."
Well, then, you might as well drop Google, Yahoo, and Amazon, because every one of them, every year, has been down longer than my local system has been down in the last 5 years.
"It gets hot in there, and Johnson is always farting."
Considering that the federal government has repeatedly proved itself to be inept at "managing" the economy, or healthcare, or pretty much anything else for that matter, I have to wonder whether it should be trusted with nuclear weapons.
"In my direct experience the majority of hardcore contributors and long-time editors are complete ideologues and giant assholes who are extraordinarily hostile to any outsiders or differing thought."
Exactly. This form of "cyber-squatting" has been a very big problem.
It is made worse by the fact that these "ideologues" have often thoroughly studied all the esoteric Wikipedia rules, and so can say "this should be disallowed under Rule 24" or some such, against anything with an opposing view.
"Personally I'd expect either better components or a significantly better price."
To a large degree, you're paying for both freedom and lack of subsidies.
Android and iOS environments are full of apps that track you and your behaviors behind your back. Despite the lip service Apple and Google give to the practice, both of those OSes were fundamentally designed to allow that. (Otherwise, why isn't there finer-grained control over what information those applications can access? That would be pretty easy to do.)
Firefox OS is different. The company is independent, it is non-profit, it is dedicated to freedom, choice, privacy and security.
News at 11.
"Frankly, I'm amazed the PPACA website came out as well as it did."
Have you looked at the code behind it? I have. You probably have no idea just how bad "as well as it did" is.
It's completely ridiculous. No joke. Full of mistakes a first-day javascript programmer would not make... more than once.