On one hand, I like 300 gigs a disk, for making backups, assuming the media will offer consumer level burners.
On the other hand, I dread to see what next-gen DRM will be packaged with it. DIVX (not the codec, the Circuit City device) style, always-on DRM? Media that has to be "bound" to an account to be used and can't be resold (like some console games)? Built in embedded chips on the disks that do some critical decoding step?
Since I was having a will done up, I had a legal professional set things up. Slashdot and other legal "IANAL" stuff is fine, but for peace of mind (since there are tax ramifications), having an attorney get things started is the best way. There are other ways to DIY it, but I just wanted to do it right.
I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.
Of course, this means standardizing on a DRM process, rather than iBook/Kindle/Nook/Kobo/Google/etc. having their own systems... or even better, no DRM at all.
Voluntary payments work in smaller ecosystems. However as things get bigger, the tragedy of the commons starts happening. This is why an honor system peach stand in the middle of Maine works, while one near a busy city likely will be relieved of its fruit and cash box... perhaps just removed completely.
On the other hand, people are putting legitimate value into BitCoins. In the past, it was mainly miners who took computing power and electricity to create the currency. Now that mining is out of the hands of all but the massive ASIC machines, BitCoins are getting actual value as units of currency are exchanged for dollars, or oather material goods.
Does this mean BitCoins will stay up there? Who knows. What separates BitCoins from Beenz is the grassroots support for them (astroturfed or otherwise... who knows.) BitCoins are viewed as new and cool by the press, from a homeless person clicking on ads on Android to get BitCoins to pay for stuff to ransomware using BitCoins as the method of payment. So, they are very popular right now. Will it be a bubble like old dot-com stocks, or will it stay high like Apple? Who knows.
If I were to have my ideal currency, it would be a Chaumian one based on a precious metal or combination of metals. Gold is an OK candidate, but platinum, palladium, and others are also useful.
That way, if you get one unit of this currency, it translates to one troy ounce of metal.
Of course, this was done before (see eGold), but if done right starting from the ground up, it might be something acceptable by all parties.
There is a downside though... unlike a fiat currency which can expand to handle a booming market, a currency backed by a precious metal just may not have enough capital to flow into a new market, choking progress.
Of course, one can swap between the two currencies, for better or worse. Good times, go with a fiat currency. Bad times, one backed by material goods.
Very true. Most places have CCTV cameras... but that may not mean the store's LP will bother sending someone to stop someone who moves up with a pickup, snips a lock off with bolt cutters, tosses it in the bed, and drives off.
Friends of friends mainly. One should never mix business with friendship, but loaning to someone at the right time can be a good thing.
One person had his CNC sign making business grind to a halt due to his core mill having a clutch implode. A few thousand, and he is grinding signs again.
Another had a lucky break with livestock boosting headcount. So, a loan for additional feed got him a fairly large sum of cash when it came time to get the animals to market a few months later. I got my interest on the loan, he made his numbers when it came time to sell, win/win.
These are not large figures, and if the person defaults, I just charge it off in six months and move on. However, it does give returns in goodwill, if not interest payments.
What, you mean the latest news about a four game suspension from the Seahawks isn't news, or Dancing With the Stars new season?
No wonder why most of the clued Americans end up reading Al Jazeera these days when 5-10 years ago, AJ was joked about as the "terrorist news network". Thanks to an earlier reference, dw.de is another decent source (although all the above have their bias, and one can easily see it in the way their stuff is phrased.)
On a realistic note, the Europeans have a valid issue about this.
There are diplomatic solutions (trust, but verify), but there are also technological solutions. One of those could be passthrough encryption in one country before data is stored in another, where if company "A" wants to store data in their home country, the data from country "B" would have to be encrypted in that country by a key only held there. Of course, there is a lot of room to compromise keys (key management is in itself a major undertaking), but done right, it isn't impossible.
All of that is true. However, in the past, people said that MySpace would never die. FB has some long term obstacles:
1: Right now, they can keep expanding market by getting more and more info from their subscriber base. However, if some event happens where people start valuing privacy, people can leave in a heartbeat. There is nothing FB offers that G+, MySpace, or VK doesn't, other than being the central watering hole.
2: FB keeps getting new advertisers because they can promise more and more info from their subscription base. However, (and this is an extreme), once FB has cameras and mics on all subscriber computers live, all subscribers (and others) tracked in real-time, 24/7 a day, and each click forces a user to watch a 5 minute interstitial ad (then take a survey at the end),how can they monetize their existing base any more? Advertising on the Internet is already nearing saturation -- there is only so far a SEO-"enhanced" site can go nowadays. Advertising and scrutinizing every click and mouse wiggle of subscribers can only go so far.
Plus, there is more than just FB. There is a wave of companies whose sole purpose is to try to get advertising dollars and extract as much info as they can. When one clicks on a weblink on a popular site, it usually goes through outbrain.com, then 1-10 other sites for analysis, finally (if lucky) to the destination. All of those companies will be competing for advertiser dollars with FB sooner or later.
3: FB is tolerated by its subscriber base. With the only product they have being momentum, they are not "loved" like Apple (or even Samsung). People grumble at each UI or app change. This means another company that people have a higher opinion of can make away with FB's business.
4: FB isn't exclusive. People can be a member of FB, G+, VK, and other networks, So, on another level, FB has a layer of competition. If FB tries to be exclusive, people would bail.
5: FB has done a top job at taking over the world, but can it continue? They pushed out Orkut in Brazil. However, to expand from there, they have to fight QZone which is well entrenched, and VK. Since they are viewed as a US company, any major anti-US sentiment that pops up will cause people to leave them.
Needless to say, in its market, Facebook has done a damn good job at becoming the dominant player in every nation but Iran, Russia, and China. I don't want to state that their stock is overvalued because the sun never sets on them, but where do they go long term? Relying on advertising and not making a product can only go so far.
There is a psychological element too. At the company meetings, if you have Joe there who is decent, but is always there physically, versus Jack that you have to call or invite to a tele-conference, even though the remote person may be more skilled, people will know Joe and trust him, far more than Jack who is just a collection of pixels on a screen and a disembodied voice on a speaker.
I actually have a better use for the plastic bags:
When dry camping miles away from a paved road with my RV in below-freezing temperatures, where I have to blow out the water lines [1], I use the plastic bags to line the toilet. When done, I zip-tie it, put it inside another plastic bag, zip-tie that, and toss it in the garbage. With some alcohol wipes for the hands afterwards nearby, there is still an "ecch" factor, but it isn't bad.
[1]: I use compressed air to blow the water out, pour in cheap vodka, blow the lines out again. this way, any water in low spots that didn't get blown out is diluted enough by the ethanol so its freezing temperature is below what happens here in Texas.
So far, the best cycling setup I've encountered was a tandem bike, front/back panniers, backpacks, and a trailer. Then, at the grocery store, one person stood guard [1] while the other went in with the cart.
[1]: I live in Austin which is a pretty legendary hotspot for bike theft. If one secures their frame and wheels, they will come back to a bike sans fork, pedals, and seat. I've even seen bottom backets gone (and that takes some dedication on a thief's part.) So, one either uses Pinhead or Pitlocks, or takes other means to keep components on their steed.
A decentralized network of social networks likely will be a better replacement for Facebook than anything else, just like E-mail is decentralized for the most part.
The one thing keeping the dollar from hyperinflating is the fact that oil transactions are done in USD. A move to the basket system by OPEC... and there will be a world of hurt.
I wonder if BitCoin may end up being the world's "lingua franca" currency, sooner or later. The downside is that all transaction chains are public, but that can also be an upside to show that a business's books are legit.
I run my own incoming E-mail server at home. However, the incoming and outgoing mechanisms are pretty separate.
Incoming port 25 goes through the usual anti-spam measures.
Outgoing port 25 goes to either my ISP's SMTP server or a dedicated third party. Either way, Bog forbid and my server starts sending UCE, -outgoing- spam is corked, and I'm far more worried about spam coming from my domain than to it.
I use CDs as a place to park money for semi-long times. As an investment, meh. I've done worse [1].
These days, I focus on stocks that are stable, tough to kill, and don't feel bad ethically by owning them. RedHat comes to mind, because they actually expand the "pie" and make new things.
I also have done some personal loaning. A couple thousand lent to a farmer so he can increase his animal head count and have plenty of fowl ready to slaughter come T-day is one example. A bank wants to charge 15% APR, I do a loan for 5% APR, simple interest. To boot, I don't even have to worry about collecting if it isn't paid [2]. Come tax time, I toss the interest income on the 1040, call it done.
[1]: GM stock, now that was painful. Since the old stock was turned into bankrupt pieces, and new shares issued, it was a true loss.
[2]: I make it known that after six months, I charge the loan off my taxes, which means that the IRS will go after the person I loaned to, as the debt will be considered income, thus taxable. The threat of the IRS being sicced keeps the checks coming in far more than the threat of turning it over to any collection agency. This isn't a risk-free business, but it is a way to make money... and actually help the local economy, something that banks have stopped doing.
There is a point where advertising has a place as a market, but right now, sites like Facebook are playing the game of offering advertisers a bit more info, notching up the intrusiveness on subscribers just a bit more.
One can compare this to boiling the frog. But, there is a point where people will say enough is enough and move to another social network (even though VK is Russian, it functions closely enough to Facebook that the learning curve wouldn't be that difficult), or G+ (where there are actually intelligent conversations taking place because the signal to noise ratio is a lot better.)
There might even be room for a distributed service where one's E-mail address is used as an ID, and there are multiple services that pass messages, blogs, wall posts and such, done in such a way that it is presented to the user as one service. Instead of the cat pictures coming from John Doe, they come from John Doe (john_doe@someID) [1].
A decentralized social networking protocol may be the next evolution. It has been done in the past, from E-mail being from one big server to many SMTP servers.
One can even add to this a web of trust (although I wouldn't want to trust any social networking site with my public key data in general.)
[1]: Where someid is mapped by John Doe's "home" social network to his E-mail ID, but hidden from others.
Sorta... For some Motorola flip-phones, there was a PDA that snapped on the back which gave some primitive capabilities over an addressbook.
That is one thing I don't miss... the IT "bat belt" and carrying a cell phone, a PDA, a Blackberry (it was for text messages at the time), a satellite pager, and a MP3 player like a Nomad Jukebox. No, a smartphone isn't as good as each individually, but just one device to worry about is a lot easier than five.
I wonder if this would be a niche market for a company. Create an x86 motherboard that is epoxied tight, and the only thing coming out would be a serial port, a power port, a MicroSD card slot for the OS, and a SD card to handle data.
Maybe another version might have a USB connector for the keyboard and mouse (with the BIOS limiting the devices connected to those ports to just HIDs), and a VGA connector for the monitor.
Stick all this in a tamper-resistant aluminum case, and it might sell as a poor man's HSM for RSA keys. Copy what needs to be signed onto the SD card, sign it, copy it off.
Air gaps may not be perfect. If one gets physical access, then things are hosed. However it does do a good job at removing an entire type of attack, i.e. from remote. An attacker would have to have a "boots on the ground" presence in order to get software on the machine to use audio as a media layer with another machine to decode it.
Yes, it can be a threat, but it doesn't completely negate the benefits of air-gapping, and it is still prudent to keep the key signing boxes well off any network.
As always, if someone has access, no matter how sophisticated the defense, it likely can be bypassed somehow.
Very true, but after Google lost the Nortel battle, I think the fight for a large company may heat up. It is either fight in the auction, or fight the lawsuits from the parent company the very day the deal buying the company is sealed and the IP rights changed hands.
RIM has a lot more relevant patents which could be used for ammo on either side, so it might be that their best position is to show off their patent portfolio, similar to what Kodak did, which would attract buyers.
If you want investigative journalism, there is always Al Jazeera, who has their own bias, but in places that they don't have an axe to grind, it is surprisingly good.
I forgot the name, but there is a German news organization who is also quite good, provided it isn't an article about German interests or political parties.
There is also a Russian paper (whose name I forgot as well... and it is not Pravda) that also have some good articles on what is going on.
In the US, you have to go elsewhere to seek actual news. If you want propaganda, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will hand you all you can swallow.
You see exactly this in the pre-primary campagins that are starting right now in the US. During these, you will read some very extreme political platforms, and after that mess is over, then both sides try to move to the middle to pretend to be mainstream.
With all the sharp, strong, extreme talk, it is hard to state a simple, moderate platform that actually might address issues than kick them down the road.
Slashdot Mirror
On one hand, I like 300 gigs a disk, for making backups, assuming the media will offer consumer level burners.
On the other hand, I dread to see what next-gen DRM will be packaged with it. DIVX (not the codec, the Circuit City device) style, always-on DRM? Media that has to be "bound" to an account to be used and can't be resold (like some console games)? Built in embedded chips on the disks that do some critical decoding step?
Blecch.
Since I was having a will done up, I had a legal professional set things up. Slashdot and other legal "IANAL" stuff is fine, but for peace of mind (since there are tax ramifications), having an attorney get things started is the best way. There are other ways to DIY it, but I just wanted to do it right.
I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.
Of course, this means standardizing on a DRM process, rather than iBook/Kindle/Nook/Kobo/Google/etc. having their own systems... or even better, no DRM at all.
Voluntary payments work in smaller ecosystems. However as things get bigger, the tragedy of the commons starts happening. This is why an honor system peach stand in the middle of Maine works, while one near a busy city likely will be relieved of its fruit and cash box... perhaps just removed completely.
On the other hand, people are putting legitimate value into BitCoins. In the past, it was mainly miners who took computing power and electricity to create the currency. Now that mining is out of the hands of all but the massive ASIC machines, BitCoins are getting actual value as units of currency are exchanged for dollars, or oather material goods.
Does this mean BitCoins will stay up there? Who knows. What separates BitCoins from Beenz is the grassroots support for them (astroturfed or otherwise... who knows.) BitCoins are viewed as new and cool by the press, from a homeless person clicking on ads on Android to get BitCoins to pay for stuff to ransomware using BitCoins as the method of payment. So, they are very popular right now. Will it be a bubble like old dot-com stocks, or will it stay high like Apple? Who knows.
If I were to have my ideal currency, it would be a Chaumian one based on a precious metal or combination of metals. Gold is an OK candidate, but platinum, palladium, and others are also useful.
That way, if you get one unit of this currency, it translates to one troy ounce of metal.
Of course, this was done before (see eGold), but if done right starting from the ground up, it might be something acceptable by all parties.
There is a downside though... unlike a fiat currency which can expand to handle a booming market, a currency backed by a precious metal just may not have enough capital to flow into a new market, choking progress.
Of course, one can swap between the two currencies, for better or worse. Good times, go with a fiat currency. Bad times, one backed by material goods.
Very true. Most places have CCTV cameras... but that may not mean the store's LP will bother sending someone to stop someone who moves up with a pickup, snips a lock off with bolt cutters, tosses it in the bed, and drives off.
Friends of friends mainly. One should never mix business with friendship, but loaning to someone at the right time can be a good thing.
One person had his CNC sign making business grind to a halt due to his core mill having a clutch implode. A few thousand, and he is grinding signs again.
Another had a lucky break with livestock boosting headcount. So, a loan for additional feed got him a fairly large sum of cash when it came time to get the animals to market a few months later. I got my interest on the loan, he made his numbers when it came time to sell, win/win.
These are not large figures, and if the person defaults, I just charge it off in six months and move on. However, it does give returns in goodwill, if not interest payments.
What, you mean the latest news about a four game suspension from the Seahawks isn't news, or Dancing With the Stars new season?
No wonder why most of the clued Americans end up reading Al Jazeera these days when 5-10 years ago, AJ was joked about as the "terrorist news network". Thanks to an earlier reference, dw.de is another decent source (although all the above have their bias, and one can easily see it in the way their stuff is phrased.)
On a realistic note, the Europeans have a valid issue about this.
There are diplomatic solutions (trust, but verify), but there are also technological solutions. One of those could be passthrough encryption in one country before data is stored in another, where if company "A" wants to store data in their home country, the data from country "B" would have to be encrypted in that country by a key only held there. Of course, there is a lot of room to compromise keys (key management is in itself a major undertaking), but done right, it isn't impossible.
All of that is true. However, in the past, people said that MySpace would never die. FB has some long term obstacles:
1: Right now, they can keep expanding market by getting more and more info from their subscriber base. However, if some event happens where people start valuing privacy, people can leave in a heartbeat. There is nothing FB offers that G+, MySpace, or VK doesn't, other than being the central watering hole.
2: FB keeps getting new advertisers because they can promise more and more info from their subscription base. However, (and this is an extreme), once FB has cameras and mics on all subscriber computers live, all subscribers (and others) tracked in real-time, 24/7 a day, and each click forces a user to watch a 5 minute interstitial ad (then take a survey at the end),how can they monetize their existing base any more? Advertising on the Internet is already nearing saturation -- there is only so far a SEO-"enhanced" site can go nowadays. Advertising and scrutinizing every click and mouse wiggle of subscribers can only go so far.
Plus, there is more than just FB. There is a wave of companies whose sole purpose is to try to get advertising dollars and extract as much info as they can. When one clicks on a weblink on a popular site, it usually goes through outbrain.com, then 1-10 other sites for analysis, finally (if lucky) to the destination. All of those companies will be competing for advertiser dollars with FB sooner or later.
3: FB is tolerated by its subscriber base. With the only product they have being momentum, they are not "loved" like Apple (or even Samsung). People grumble at each UI or app change. This means another company that people have a higher opinion of can make away with FB's business.
4: FB isn't exclusive. People can be a member of FB, G+, VK, and other networks, So, on another level, FB has a layer of competition. If FB tries to be exclusive, people would bail.
5: FB has done a top job at taking over the world, but can it continue? They pushed out Orkut in Brazil. However, to expand from there, they have to fight QZone which is well entrenched, and VK. Since they are viewed as a US company, any major anti-US sentiment that pops up will cause people to leave them.
Needless to say, in its market, Facebook has done a damn good job at becoming the dominant player in every nation but Iran, Russia, and China. I don't want to state that their stock is overvalued because the sun never sets on them, but where do they go long term? Relying on advertising and not making a product can only go so far.
There is a psychological element too. At the company meetings, if you have Joe there who is decent, but is always there physically, versus Jack that you have to call or invite to a tele-conference, even though the remote person may be more skilled, people will know Joe and trust him, far more than Jack who is just a collection of pixels on a screen and a disembodied voice on a speaker.
I actually have a better use for the plastic bags:
When dry camping miles away from a paved road with my RV in below-freezing temperatures, where I have to blow out the water lines [1], I use the plastic bags to line the toilet. When done, I zip-tie it, put it inside another plastic bag, zip-tie that, and toss it in the garbage. With some alcohol wipes for the hands afterwards nearby, there is still an "ecch" factor, but it isn't bad.
[1]: I use compressed air to blow the water out, pour in cheap vodka, blow the lines out again. this way, any water in low spots that didn't get blown out is diluted enough by the ethanol so its freezing temperature is below what happens here in Texas.
So far, the best cycling setup I've encountered was a tandem bike, front/back panniers, backpacks, and a trailer. Then, at the grocery store, one person stood guard [1] while the other went in with the cart.
[1]: I live in Austin which is a pretty legendary hotspot for bike theft. If one secures their frame and wheels, they will come back to a bike sans fork, pedals, and seat. I've even seen bottom backets gone (and that takes some dedication on a thief's part.) So, one either uses Pinhead or Pitlocks, or takes other means to keep components on their steed.
A decentralized network of social networks likely will be a better replacement for Facebook than anything else, just like E-mail is decentralized for the most part.
The one thing keeping the dollar from hyperinflating is the fact that oil transactions are done in USD. A move to the basket system by OPEC... and there will be a world of hurt.
I wonder if BitCoin may end up being the world's "lingua franca" currency, sooner or later. The downside is that all transaction chains are public, but that can also be an upside to show that a business's books are legit.
I run my own incoming E-mail server at home. However, the incoming and outgoing mechanisms are pretty separate.
Incoming port 25 goes through the usual anti-spam measures.
Outgoing port 25 goes to either my ISP's SMTP server or a dedicated third party. Either way, Bog forbid and my server starts sending UCE, -outgoing- spam is corked, and I'm far more worried about spam coming from my domain than to it.
I use CDs as a place to park money for semi-long times. As an investment, meh. I've done worse [1].
These days, I focus on stocks that are stable, tough to kill, and don't feel bad ethically by owning them. RedHat comes to mind, because they actually expand the "pie" and make new things.
I also have done some personal loaning. A couple thousand lent to a farmer so he can increase his animal head count and have plenty of fowl ready to slaughter come T-day is one example. A bank wants to charge 15% APR, I do a loan for 5% APR, simple interest. To boot, I don't even have to worry about collecting if it isn't paid [2]. Come tax time, I toss the interest income on the 1040, call it done.
[1]: GM stock, now that was painful. Since the old stock was turned into bankrupt pieces, and new shares issued, it was a true loss.
[2]: I make it known that after six months, I charge the loan off my taxes, which means that the IRS will go after the person I loaned to, as the debt will be considered income, thus taxable. The threat of the IRS being sicced keeps the checks coming in far more than the threat of turning it over to any collection agency. This isn't a risk-free business, but it is a way to make money... and actually help the local economy, something that banks have stopped doing.
There is a point where advertising has a place as a market, but right now, sites like Facebook are playing the game of offering advertisers a bit more info, notching up the intrusiveness on subscribers just a bit more.
One can compare this to boiling the frog. But, there is a point where people will say enough is enough and move to another social network (even though VK is Russian, it functions closely enough to Facebook that the learning curve wouldn't be that difficult), or G+ (where there are actually intelligent conversations taking place because the signal to noise ratio is a lot better.)
There might even be room for a distributed service where one's E-mail address is used as an ID, and there are multiple services that pass messages, blogs, wall posts and such, done in such a way that it is presented to the user as one service. Instead of the cat pictures coming from John Doe, they come from John Doe (john_doe@someID) [1].
A decentralized social networking protocol may be the next evolution. It has been done in the past, from E-mail being from one big server to many SMTP servers.
One can even add to this a web of trust (although I wouldn't want to trust any social networking site with my public key data in general.)
[1]: Where someid is mapped by John Doe's "home" social network to his E-mail ID, but hidden from others.
Sorta... For some Motorola flip-phones, there was a PDA that snapped on the back which gave some primitive capabilities over an addressbook.
That is one thing I don't miss... the IT "bat belt" and carrying a cell phone, a PDA, a Blackberry (it was for text messages at the time), a satellite pager, and a MP3 player like a Nomad Jukebox. No, a smartphone isn't as good as each individually, but just one device to worry about is a lot easier than five.
I wonder if this would be a niche market for a company. Create an x86 motherboard that is epoxied tight, and the only thing coming out would be a serial port, a power port, a MicroSD card slot for the OS, and a SD card to handle data.
Maybe another version might have a USB connector for the keyboard and mouse (with the BIOS limiting the devices connected to those ports to just HIDs), and a VGA connector for the monitor.
Stick all this in a tamper-resistant aluminum case, and it might sell as a poor man's HSM for RSA keys. Copy what needs to be signed onto the SD card, sign it, copy it off.
The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Air gaps may not be perfect. If one gets physical access, then things are hosed. However it does do a good job at removing an entire type of attack, i.e. from remote. An attacker would have to have a "boots on the ground" presence in order to get software on the machine to use audio as a media layer with another machine to decode it.
Yes, it can be a threat, but it doesn't completely negate the benefits of air-gapping, and it is still prudent to keep the key signing boxes well off any network.
As always, if someone has access, no matter how sophisticated the defense, it likely can be bypassed somehow.
Very true, but after Google lost the Nortel battle, I think the fight for a large company may heat up. It is either fight in the auction, or fight the lawsuits from the parent company the very day the deal buying the company is sealed and the IP rights changed hands.
RIM has a lot more relevant patents which could be used for ammo on either side, so it might be that their best position is to show off their patent portfolio, similar to what Kodak did, which would attract buyers.
I have a feeling that RIM is going to be the next company fought over in the Apple/Microsoft versus Google/Samsung patent wars...
If you want investigative journalism, there is always Al Jazeera, who has their own bias, but in places that they don't have an axe to grind, it is surprisingly good.
I forgot the name, but there is a German news organization who is also quite good, provided it isn't an article about German interests or political parties.
There is also a Russian paper (whose name I forgot as well... and it is not Pravda) that also have some good articles on what is going on.
In the US, you have to go elsewhere to seek actual news. If you want propaganda, Fox, CNN, and MSNBC will hand you all you can swallow.
You see exactly this in the pre-primary campagins that are starting right now in the US. During these, you will read some very extreme political platforms, and after that mess is over, then both sides try to move to the middle to pretend to be mainstream.
With all the sharp, strong, extreme talk, it is hard to state a simple, moderate platform that actually might address issues than kick them down the road.