MS has enough assets to never go bankrupt. Even without any sales they could continue paying all their staff for a considerable amount of time - there aren't many, if any, companies in the world that can do the same.
Maybe they should have continued on the Symbia route. That at least they had control over. It was something that - for better or worse - made them stand out, made them different from the rest. Windows Phone doesn't - well, actually it does, because no other manufacturers are interested in the system. Which is pretty damning towards Windows Phone in itself.
I also just read the Samsung story about how they're molding Android into something of their own. That's smart: that's a company that innovates for themselves, that takes something that works and improves on it to stand out from the crowd. Samsung is now a highly profitable mobile phone maker; their competition that uses a stock Android struggles to be seen in the crowded marketplace. Apple of course has it's own system (like Nokia could have done with Symbian), which makes them stand out, too.
Nokia however has indeed chosen to link the success of their company to the success of a product of another company. Just a product - MS could drop Windows Phone and survive just fine, a move which would instantly kill off Nokia. That in itself is a very risky move. The lack of innovation coming out of Redmond notwithstanding. The total lack of success from Windows Phone makes me wonder how long before MS will indeed drop it.
In which case all issues (save the last) are old issues. Not too important.
Instead of sueing, a simple warning by e-mail to the source of the leak will most likely do. Close account of subcriber if warnings are found to be repeatedly ignored (i.e. newer issues are found online).
Just that with the sheer amount of data collected they're going to need thousands of people to pour over it. The more data, the more people you need to process it all. Automated analyses can do only so much - it can only flag interesting bits that humans then have to look at in more detail.
And with all the arcane and obscure laws on file, pretty much everyone can be found breaking one or two of such laws at any time. That they find "only" 9% breaking the law, just means they should train their officers better.
Especially considering that the story is released almost a year after the alleged threat would have taken place.
More conveniently, it is mere weeks since PRISM was exposed, and with governments scrambling to save their credibility, they need such stories, proving how useful it is.
TSA, NSA... what's in a name. It's all the same to me... an unaccountable, highly secretive, out of control part of an overseas government I should have nothing to do with.
It is simply the familiar frog in the water story.
Nixon, no I don't remember, that's before my time and not from my area. His actions came out in the open all of a sudden, unexpectedly, the water suddenly heated up and the frog jumped.
Fast forward to Sept 2001. US had just been attacked by some madmen, let's call them "terrorists". Anything goes to prevent that from happening again, so your government can make great strides, like the Patriot act and other covert surveillance laws were suddenly fully acceptable, and have become the new baseline.
Slowly but surely the screws are tightened. Body scanners in airports (starting at the smaller ones, then silently spreading out). Liquid bans, shoe bans - everything in reaction to some incident (attacks that ranged between unsuccessful and not actually attempted). The water heats up, but the frog is happy, not realising it heats up.
Then Snowden comes along, telling the world how bad it really is: akin to dumping a large volume of scorching hot water in the pot. Now the frog jumps, it's too hot.
Poor TSA. Poor US government. Poor FBI, CIA, etc. They had Facebook et. al. so nicely lined up, slowly getting everyone used to having their secrets out in the open for everyone. Bit by bit. Occasionally "accidentally" resetting privacy controls, slowly letting out that nothing is deleted really (merely hidden when a user asks "delete"), automatically scanning for faces in other people's photos.
It didn't work in the end. The TSA got too greedy, they skipped some steps, hoping they could keep it secret long enough for the frogs to get heated up far enough that by the time it came out it'd be a non-issue, it'd be normal.
They'll try again, for sure. Lessons learned from this mishap, they'll try again. Nixon did it with a single office, that'd be a non-story by now. Nothing compared to what the TSA is doing. The water is heated up far enough by now.
Of course, it's the process how to find the bug, and later update the remote device, that's interesting. I know fixing bugs is often just a few keystrokes - after spending hours or days searching for the cause.
I recall the news saying "Snowden is on a plane to Moscow". So that must have been during the flight already.
Then about the airport: news reports said that a transit passenger is not allowed to remain in the transit area, they must stay in the hotel. Also they are not allowed to leave their room until shortly before their connecting flight departs. So if Snowden is staying at the airport, and has not entered Russia, he must be in that hotel.
Indeed no-one has seen him or has been able to contact him there, and journalists have tried hard, including by staying at that hotel and calling all other rooms (he probably just ignores these calls). However he's also not known to have left on another flight: no-one reported seeing him boarding another flight from Moscow.
His letters requesting asylum however were reported to be posted from the transit hotel at that airport, so it is quite likely he actually is there.
It won't take long before we'll know what happened, now asylum has been offered.
However a flywheel at municipal level must be pretty huge, to store a large amount of energy: you'll want it to be able to supply power in the hundreds of kW, if not MW range, for a significant amount of time. I'm not sure whether I'd like to have anything like it near me: the problem is that as this is stored as kinetic energy, if anything goes wrong with it mechanically, it's going to have parts flying everywhere at massive speeds and over great distances.
Also I'm not sure how easy it is to recover energy from a flywheel, i.e. a generator at variable speed, that has to supply to a net at a fixed 50 or 60 Hz frequency.
The Google ads that I click most, and the Google ads of my campaigns that were clicked most (I haven't used ad campaigns for a few years now) are the CONTENT related ones. Just the ads that are placed next to search results, and targeting the search keywords entered by the user (i.e. content) and geographic area (related to the user's current IP address and browser's preferred language). I quite often search for things that are new to me, yet Google gives me the info I need (both in the form of ads and direct search results). That can't be a result of profiling.
Ads posted at various non-search web sites I generally find useless and off-topic. Whether they are targeting my profile or the site's content I can't tell.
The difference between Google and Microsoft, is that Google has the search engine, and that's the ultimate moment to place content related ads. People that search for a product are interested in that product there and then, so that's the people you have to target with advertisements of that product.
Microsoft doesn't have this; they may resell ads for third-party sites but as I said they're not as effective as search engine ads. They think it may help to target users by profile, well I'm not convinced.
Snowden was not distributing political leaflets; he broke a pledge of secrecy, and the contract with his employer. That are non-political crimes.
He most certainly did it for political reasons, the laws he broke though were not political laws. He is not prosecuted for his political ideas. That his motives were political doesn't make the law he broke political - just like someone killing a politician for not agreeing with that politician is a murderer, not a political prisoner, and won't be able to get political asylum anywhere, or at least not easily.
And for extradition requests, I really don't know what proof (if any) the requesting country has to offer.
I don't browse on my phone, only play some games or use other apps.
I see advertising when I happen to have wifi on (no mobile data) - and what I notice time and again is that the advertising is exclusively for other apps. No general products or brands are being advertised, only other apps, and those apps are either games or gambling related things.
Which makes me wonder: is it really me? Or is it geographically different? Or do general advertisers really shun the mobile in-app advertising realm?
If they ignore them, the ads are obviously irrelevant, and the targeting failed. If an ad is really relevant and useful for the user, they wouldn't be ignored.
I don't understand why advertisers are so eager to profile users. Really. Now with ABP I don't see many ads, largely because they're usually so obtrusive and irritating, but that's another story.
The advertiser's key mistake is that they try to target users. The only thing about a user they should target (to make ads useful) is geographic location. E.g. when I'm looking for restaurants, I'd be happy to see advertisements of restaurants near me. I'm looking for restaurants in Mongkok, show me ads of restaurants in Mongkok, not those in Central. Wasting my time.
Another thing: when reading/., I'm interested in IT related stuff. Show me IT related ads, and I may be interested in them. Don't show me football related ads just because I've been browsing a bunch of football sites before. Similarly, when browsing football sites, show me sports related ads, not IT related ads because I visit/. ten times daily.
Gender, age, etc - it all matters so much less. The web sites themselves tend to filter that out very much already, as many web sites target a very specific audience with an often quite narrow interest.
For example on/. you find males with high education, that are working in the IT field. On mylittlepony.com you find young girls that are in primary or maybe junior secondary school. On recipies.com you find desperate housewives. And if I, a fairly typical/. demographic, may visit mylittlepony.com then probably I'm looking for a present for my (imaginary) daughter, and may be very interested in promotions related to that toy. I'd be quite irritated to see the same IT related advertising I may call useful when placed on/..
As a side note: the original ads by Google tried to do just that: relevant ads, depending on the content of the page. Somehow though it never seemed to work well. I always get very relevant, and often useful, ads when doing searches - when I see those text ads in web pages they're often totally irrelevant. From my own campaigns I also got far higher click-through rates on the google.com main site, than on their "affiliate sites" or however they call it. As in >10 times higher rates.
Countries spying on each other is very different than what happened here. Countries were trying to uncover each other's trade and military secrets, to gauge one another's strengths and weaknesses - typically for use in international relations ranging from trade agreements to warfare. And I wouldn't be surprised if the various EU countries are still spying on one another big time.
Snooping on the private lives of ordinary citizens was rarely if ever part of the equation.
I don't have too much problems with the ordinary spying. It's basically what Snowden has done: he went after state secrets, in this case to expose them. In that sense he's a traditional-type spy. It keeps international relations in check: it allows countries to know more about the other, and in general I believe it can prevent many wars from taking place. Foreign embassies are of course hotbeds for spying activities, one of the reasons to have those embassies is to learn more about the host countries.
What the NSA has done is a major step further. They're nondiscriminatory collecting personal information about private citizens. About basically everyone. They don't target specific persons of interest, or even groups of interest. They just spy on everyone, and want to do this in absolute secrecy: no-one is allowed to know that such spying operations even exist.
As an ordinary citizen that has never even set foot in the USA, I am not of interest for any normal spy. I am not of interest to the local police. I live an ordinary life, or at least I try to, and am not at all happy with the idea that someone somewhere is trying to collect data about me. Trying to find out whether I might have any "terrorist tendencies" or whatever. The ultimate pre-crime situation.
And as an ordinary citizen I am of course totally powerless against some huge foreign entity. To use the Internet, I'm dependent on the USA's connections. There is no way around it. No legal protection (as they're outside my jurisdiction). Ordinary citizens don't even have the option to spy back like countries spy reciprocally - well most of us don't, Snowden managed to do just that.
while funny it costs you a lot of money: the second (outgoing) line you need, the extra calling cost for the outgoing call - plus it has your own lines occupied.
My office telephone number was one digit off of the number of a hotel. So occasionally (once a month or so) we would get calls for people enquiring for the hotel.
So when hiring I told my new secretary that if she answered a call and got the question "how much do you charge for a night?" that this caller most likely expected to have a hotel on the phone, and was just enquiring for a room. And indeed we have had exact that kind of calls.
Hotel changed their main number a few years ago so those calls have stopped.
Slashdot Mirror
It wasn't MS buying them.
It was them deciding to buy a certain MS product (Windows Phone doesn't come for free) as part of their own main product.
MS has enough assets to never go bankrupt. Even without any sales they could continue paying all their staff for a considerable amount of time - there aren't many, if any, companies in the world that can do the same.
Nokia is doomed with this mindset. Totally.
Maybe they should have continued on the Symbia route. That at least they had control over. It was something that - for better or worse - made them stand out, made them different from the rest. Windows Phone doesn't - well, actually it does, because no other manufacturers are interested in the system. Which is pretty damning towards Windows Phone in itself.
I also just read the Samsung story about how they're molding Android into something of their own. That's smart: that's a company that innovates for themselves, that takes something that works and improves on it to stand out from the crowd. Samsung is now a highly profitable mobile phone maker; their competition that uses a stock Android struggles to be seen in the crowded marketplace. Apple of course has it's own system (like Nokia could have done with Symbian), which makes them stand out, too.
Nokia however has indeed chosen to link the success of their company to the success of a product of another company. Just a product - MS could drop Windows Phone and survive just fine, a move which would instantly kill off Nokia. That in itself is a very risky move. The lack of innovation coming out of Redmond notwithstanding. The total lack of success from Windows Phone makes me wonder how long before MS will indeed drop it.
In which case all issues (save the last) are old issues. Not too important.
Instead of sueing, a simple warning by e-mail to the source of the leak will most likely do. Close account of subcriber if warnings are found to be repeatedly ignored (i.e. newer issues are found online).
Just that with the sheer amount of data collected they're going to need thousands of people to pour over it. The more data, the more people you need to process it all. Automated analyses can do only so much - it can only flag interesting bits that humans then have to look at in more detail.
Don't let your employees access any data that you don't want them to release. Period.
If no-one can access it, your sensitive data becomes useless.
And with all the arcane and obscure laws on file, pretty much everyone can be found breaking one or two of such laws at any time. That they find "only" 9% breaking the law, just means they should train their officers better.
Especially considering that the story is released almost a year after the alleged threat would have taken place.
More conveniently, it is mere weeks since PRISM was exposed, and with governments scrambling to save their credibility, they need such stories, proving how useful it is.
TSA, NSA... what's in a name. It's all the same to me... an unaccountable, highly secretive, out of control part of an overseas government I should have nothing to do with.
It is simply the familiar frog in the water story.
Nixon, no I don't remember, that's before my time and not from my area. His actions came out in the open all of a sudden, unexpectedly, the water suddenly heated up and the frog jumped.
Fast forward to Sept 2001. US had just been attacked by some madmen, let's call them "terrorists". Anything goes to prevent that from happening again, so your government can make great strides, like the Patriot act and other covert surveillance laws were suddenly fully acceptable, and have become the new baseline.
Slowly but surely the screws are tightened. Body scanners in airports (starting at the smaller ones, then silently spreading out). Liquid bans, shoe bans - everything in reaction to some incident (attacks that ranged between unsuccessful and not actually attempted). The water heats up, but the frog is happy, not realising it heats up.
Then Snowden comes along, telling the world how bad it really is: akin to dumping a large volume of scorching hot water in the pot. Now the frog jumps, it's too hot.
Poor TSA. Poor US government. Poor FBI, CIA, etc. They had Facebook et. al. so nicely lined up, slowly getting everyone used to having their secrets out in the open for everyone. Bit by bit. Occasionally "accidentally" resetting privacy controls, slowly letting out that nothing is deleted really (merely hidden when a user asks "delete"), automatically scanning for faces in other people's photos.
It didn't work in the end. The TSA got too greedy, they skipped some steps, hoping they could keep it secret long enough for the frogs to get heated up far enough that by the time it came out it'd be a non-issue, it'd be normal.
They'll try again, for sure. Lessons learned from this mishap, they'll try again. Nixon did it with a single office, that'd be a non-story by now. Nothing compared to what the TSA is doing. The water is heated up far enough by now.
Of course, it's the process how to find the bug, and later update the remote device, that's interesting. I know fixing bugs is often just a few keystrokes - after spending hours or days searching for the cause.
The interesting part is not so much that people make mistakes, it is how they are solved.
I recall the news saying "Snowden is on a plane to Moscow". So that must have been during the flight already.
Then about the airport: news reports said that a transit passenger is not allowed to remain in the transit area, they must stay in the hotel. Also they are not allowed to leave their room until shortly before their connecting flight departs. So if Snowden is staying at the airport, and has not entered Russia, he must be in that hotel.
Indeed no-one has seen him or has been able to contact him there, and journalists have tried hard, including by staying at that hotel and calling all other rooms (he probably just ignores these calls). However he's also not known to have left on another flight: no-one reported seeing him boarding another flight from Moscow.
His letters requesting asylum however were reported to be posted from the transit hotel at that airport, so it is quite likely he actually is there.
It won't take long before we'll know what happened, now asylum has been offered.
Maybe, maybe not.
Centralised storage is easy to manage of course.
However a flywheel at municipal level must be pretty huge, to store a large amount of energy: you'll want it to be able to supply power in the hundreds of kW, if not MW range, for a significant amount of time. I'm not sure whether I'd like to have anything like it near me: the problem is that as this is stored as kinetic energy, if anything goes wrong with it mechanically, it's going to have parts flying everywhere at massive speeds and over great distances.
Also I'm not sure how easy it is to recover energy from a flywheel, i.e. a generator at variable speed, that has to supply to a net at a fixed 50 or 60 Hz frequency.
The Google ads that I click most, and the Google ads of my campaigns that were clicked most (I haven't used ad campaigns for a few years now) are the CONTENT related ones. Just the ads that are placed next to search results, and targeting the search keywords entered by the user (i.e. content) and geographic area (related to the user's current IP address and browser's preferred language). I quite often search for things that are new to me, yet Google gives me the info I need (both in the form of ads and direct search results). That can't be a result of profiling.
Ads posted at various non-search web sites I generally find useless and off-topic. Whether they are targeting my profile or the site's content I can't tell.
The difference between Google and Microsoft, is that Google has the search engine, and that's the ultimate moment to place content related ads. People that search for a product are interested in that product there and then, so that's the people you have to target with advertisements of that product.
Microsoft doesn't have this; they may resell ads for third-party sites but as I said they're not as effective as search engine ads. They think it may help to target users by profile, well I'm not convinced.
Snowden was not distributing political leaflets; he broke a pledge of secrecy, and the contract with his employer. That are non-political crimes.
He most certainly did it for political reasons, the laws he broke though were not political laws. He is not prosecuted for his political ideas. That his motives were political doesn't make the law he broke political - just like someone killing a politician for not agreeing with that politician is a murderer, not a political prisoner, and won't be able to get political asylum anywhere, or at least not easily.
And for extradition requests, I really don't know what proof (if any) the requesting country has to offer.
I don't browse on my phone, only play some games or use other apps.
I see advertising when I happen to have wifi on (no mobile data) - and what I notice time and again is that the advertising is exclusively for other apps. No general products or brands are being advertised, only other apps, and those apps are either games or gambling related things.
Which makes me wonder: is it really me? Or is it geographically different? Or do general advertisers really shun the mobile in-app advertising realm?
If they ignore them, the ads are obviously irrelevant, and the targeting failed. If an ad is really relevant and useful for the user, they wouldn't be ignored.
I don't understand why advertisers are so eager to profile users. Really. Now with ABP I don't see many ads, largely because they're usually so obtrusive and irritating, but that's another story.
The advertiser's key mistake is that they try to target users. The only thing about a user they should target (to make ads useful) is geographic location. E.g. when I'm looking for restaurants, I'd be happy to see advertisements of restaurants near me. I'm looking for restaurants in Mongkok, show me ads of restaurants in Mongkok, not those in Central. Wasting my time.
Another thing: when reading /., I'm interested in IT related stuff. Show me IT related ads, and I may be interested in them. Don't show me football related ads just because I've been browsing a bunch of football sites before. Similarly, when browsing football sites, show me sports related ads, not IT related ads because I visit /. ten times daily.
Gender, age, etc - it all matters so much less. The web sites themselves tend to filter that out very much already, as many web sites target a very specific audience with an often quite narrow interest.
For example on /. you find males with high education, that are working in the IT field. On mylittlepony.com you find young girls that are in primary or maybe junior secondary school. On recipies.com you find desperate housewives. And if I, a fairly typical /. demographic, may visit mylittlepony.com then probably I'm looking for a present for my (imaginary) daughter, and may be very interested in promotions related to that toy. I'd be quite irritated to see the same IT related advertising I may call useful when placed on /..
As a side note: the original ads by Google tried to do just that: relevant ads, depending on the content of the page. Somehow though it never seemed to work well. I always get very relevant, and often useful, ads when doing searches - when I see those text ads in web pages they're often totally irrelevant. From my own campaigns I also got far higher click-through rates on the google.com main site, than on their "affiliate sites" or however they call it. As in >10 times higher rates.
And that won't happen, for legal reasons.
Snowden is a wanted criminal in the US. He is not, by legal definition, a political refugee who faces persecution at home for his ideas.
The only reason a European country might provide him refuge, is if he would face the death penalty upon return to the US.
Countries spying on each other is very different than what happened here. Countries were trying to uncover each other's trade and military secrets, to gauge one another's strengths and weaknesses - typically for use in international relations ranging from trade agreements to warfare. And I wouldn't be surprised if the various EU countries are still spying on one another big time.
Snooping on the private lives of ordinary citizens was rarely if ever part of the equation.
I don't have too much problems with the ordinary spying. It's basically what Snowden has done: he went after state secrets, in this case to expose them. In that sense he's a traditional-type spy. It keeps international relations in check: it allows countries to know more about the other, and in general I believe it can prevent many wars from taking place. Foreign embassies are of course hotbeds for spying activities, one of the reasons to have those embassies is to learn more about the host countries.
What the NSA has done is a major step further. They're nondiscriminatory collecting personal information about private citizens. About basically everyone. They don't target specific persons of interest, or even groups of interest. They just spy on everyone, and want to do this in absolute secrecy: no-one is allowed to know that such spying operations even exist.
As an ordinary citizen that has never even set foot in the USA, I am not of interest for any normal spy. I am not of interest to the local police. I live an ordinary life, or at least I try to, and am not at all happy with the idea that someone somewhere is trying to collect data about me. Trying to find out whether I might have any "terrorist tendencies" or whatever. The ultimate pre-crime situation.
And as an ordinary citizen I am of course totally powerless against some huge foreign entity. To use the Internet, I'm dependent on the USA's connections. There is no way around it. No legal protection (as they're outside my jurisdiction). Ordinary citizens don't even have the option to spy back like countries spy reciprocally - well most of us don't, Snowden managed to do just that.
plus the fact that most people don't even speak English to begin with - even on the Internet it may by now very well have become a minority language.
while funny it costs you a lot of money: the second (outgoing) line you need, the extra calling cost for the outgoing call - plus it has your own lines occupied.
My office telephone number was one digit off of the number of a hotel. So occasionally (once a month or so) we would get calls for people enquiring for the hotel.
So when hiring I told my new secretary that if she answered a call and got the question "how much do you charge for a night?" that this caller most likely expected to have a hotel on the phone, and was just enquiring for a room. And indeed we have had exact that kind of calls.
Hotel changed their main number a few years ago so those calls have stopped.