Can't remember. It was at least a year ago, maybe two. It might have been a case about searches, wiretapping, GPS, or something similar. My recollection was that his reasoning limited the decision (and thus the burden on the government to obtain a warrant) more than it should have. But again, it has been too long for me to remember the details. IANAL. I just play one on Slashdot.
Amusingly, that would almost invariably result in a better and more well-reasoned decision, IMO.... Excluding cases that were unanimous or nearly unanimous, I can only think of one case I've ever looked at where I agreed with Justice Thomas, and even then, although I agreed with his decision, I disagreed with the reasoning that led him to that decision.
The TSA is a magic tiger-scaring stone. A very, very expensive tiger scaring stone. Not just in the money sense but in the freedom sense and the inalienable rights sense.
One might also argue that the TSA is doing exactly what it was designed to do. By making all but the richest Americans (the ones who can afford private jets) go through these searches, they are gradually wearing down the public, conditioning them to accept regular intrusive searches and limitations on travel. This was one of the first things the Nazis did, too. It makes it harder for the peons to rise up and overthrow the government after they start doing the really bad stuff.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that sort of thinking is happening (at least consciously) in the halls of Congress. What I'm saying is that the purpose for those freedoms that the DHS is pissing all over is precisely to minimize the chances of the really bad stuff happening later. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!"
The more we tear down those freedoms, the closer we come to being another autocratic or oligarchic hellhole instead of a democracy. It is precisely for that reason that every true, patriotic American has a duty to defend the Constitution against these attacks in whatever way he or she can, and to resist any government actions that go against its spirit to the maximum extent allowable by law and, if need be, with acts of peaceful civil disobedience that are not allowable by law as well.
The real issue isn't sandboxing per se, it's that Apple's sandbox model is very restrictive. For example, you need to get special permission from Apple to send AppleEvents to another application. Compared to say Android, which has defined permissions for "access contacts" or "edit calendar events", the OS X sandbox pretty much silos the entire app and does not allow much if any IPC.
That's simply not true.
Yes, you need permission to send Apple Events, and you need to specify which app you want to control. The reason for this is that Apple Events are intended as a way for one app to control another app. The purpose of a sandbox is to enforce user intent, which is impossible if applications are controlling other applications and posing as the user. Put another way, there are basically no limits to what you can do with "tell application Finder...", up to and including copying or moving files into and out of your sandbox directory (a location where you have permission to read and write files) which means that allowing Apple Events would provide a trivial way to bypass the entire file access portion of the sandbox security model.
Similarly, some other low-level IPC mechanisms (shared memory, for example) are disallowed (if memory serves) because they are pretty serious violations in the separation between applications.
Distributed objects is disallowed because it does not provide enough of a permissions model to be made secure, as I understand it.
However, the most common (and safest) form of IPC, TCP networking, is allowed, and so is network service discovery and advertisement. You just need a networking entitlement. If you want to be a network daemon, you need a network server entitlement. If you want to make outgoing connections, you need a network client entitlement. If you want to do both, you need both. TCP is the preferred way to do interprocess communication because it is a clean message passing API that can't readily cause catastrophic side effects (unlike mach_msg_overwrite, for example).
Oh, yeah, and the Mac sandbox does, in fact, have separate entitlements for access to personal information, including one for the calendar, one for the address book, and one for location services.
Do you actually know anything about Apple's sandboxing model or are you just making it up as you go along?
The only difference now is that Apple is defining a sandbox profile for normal applications and forcing developers to use it if they want their application in the App Store. It is not a whitelist of applications, it's just a default security policy that applications must work with. This is like Microsoft requiring applications to work as non-Administrator users for the Designed For... certification, or a Linux distribution rejecting suid root apps from the default repository.
Well, it's more like a range of default security policies tailored to the application, but yes. Apple has created a series of multiple high-level sandbox profile options that your app can choose from, depending on what it needs to do. If you are selling your apps on the Mac App Store, Apple vets those options to ensure that they make sense based on what your application does. If you aren't selling your app on the Mac App Store, this does not affect you at all, though you are strongly encouraged to sandbox your app because doing so makes the platform more robust against viruses, etc. At that point, the onus is on you to make sure that the options you choose are sane.
The big thing that makes the 10.7 App Sandbox different from the prior incarnations is the addition of PowerBox. By moving the open and save dialogs into a separate (system-provided) application that has the ability to add entitlements (capabilities) to your application's sandbox on the fly, it means that your app can access the files that the user specifies, and nothing else (outside of your app's personal scratch space). This is a significant win for security, as it puts the user directly in charge of what files an application can access.
I could go on for a while about privilege separation and techniques for making your app more secure, but that's a bit out of scope for this discussion forum. Go read App Sandbox Design Guide if you want more details.
Also, according to MacWorld, the original deadline was November (Source: MacWorld). The news is that Apple pushed the deadline out by four months, not that Apple is going to require sandboxing. That story is so out of date that when I first heard it, I fell off my dinosaur.
ot believing in gods is a religion as much as not collecting stamps is a hobby.
It is if you then spend half your day going around stamp collecting conventions telling everyone that stamp collecting is dumb and useless.
If you really believe religion is as virtuous, rational and honorable as you say, why do you label atheists as religious as though religious were a dirty smear?
Because to the people I'm talking about (who are just a small subset of the world's atheists, BTW), it is. What I think or believe about religion is irrelevant. In effect, what I'm saying is, "Pot, meet kettle."
Please don't try and paint him as a believer in any particular religion.
I never said he was. I said he believed in a creator. He was basically a deist as far as I can tell, e.g. God kicked off the universe job and let it run. The big difference between deists and other religious groups are that the other religious groups believe God is watching the console and occasionally attaching a debugger to tweak the values of variables here and there.
The bigotry of the nonbeliever is for me nearly as funny as the bigotry of the believer.
or
I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.
In other words, Einstein would more properly be described as a deist, not an atheist.
What we have here is a false dichotomy. Many folks with religious beliefs merely believe that some things that aren't explained by science might be the hand of God, which is subtly but significantly different from the position you describe. Such an attitude does not mean that we should not use science to learn what we can, but rather shows a humble acceptance that some truths may be fundamentally impossible to grasp from within the confines of our universe. They would argue that we may never be able to explain why certain laws of the universe are true, but that does not mean that we should stop trying, as the more we learn about the universe, the more we inevitably learn about its creator.
The lazy use God as an excuse to stop trying. The true believers use God as a reason to do so. That's why throughout history, a fair amount of scientific discovery has been done by the Church and the faithful, from Copernicus to Mendel. Heck, even Sir Francis Bacon—to many, the founder of modern science—was religious.
While we're at it, let's add a few more to that list. Kepler, Galilei, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Planck, Einstein—you know, all those people who were so important to science that we named measurements, laws, or cages after most of them—all held some belief in a higher power, creator, or similar. Yet no sane person could claim that their impact on modern science was anything less than amazing and groundbreaking.
The fundamentalist-atheist claim that religion and science are fundamentally at odds is no less a religious belief than traditional theistic religions, and more to the point, is an utterly arrogant belief that effectively spits on the countless contributions of the religious to the very foundations of science as we know it today. And although it is held with the same arrogant religious fervor as the beliefs of the most devout faithful, it is a comically naïve belief built on nothing more solid than smugness and the believer's own desire to feel superior to someone else, usually to make themselves feel less inferior. Frankly, whenever I see such rubbish, it almost makes me ashamed of the human race as a whole.
As Einstein put it, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Claims to the contrary demand extraordinary proof.
Given the rising level of discontent? My guess would be whichever leaders are still alive after American Spring.
For about the last decade, I've been saying that I expect to see an armed overthrow of the U.S. government in my lifetime. It's not a pleasant thought, but it is nearly inevitable; the aristocracy has simply become too powerful relative to the plebes. If history has taught us anything, it is that you can't allow that sort of a wealth and power gap to grow too big, or else the French Revolution happens.
Unless you're at least a little bit of a motorhead, you might argue that all carbs look alike. And, even a motorhead will have to admit that most automotive carbs look superficially alike. But, there were several contemporary patents granted.
Carburetors don't have to maintain drop-in compatibility with existing infrastructure. Thus, there's a lot of flexibility in their design.
With software, in order to be useful, you need to be able to encode and decode the same file formats, and there is often exactly one way to do this from a mathematical perspective. That is why software patents are bad—because a compatible implementation must use the same mathematics, and it is impossible to do so without violating the patent.
That said, I'd settle for a law that says that no patent covering any storage or transmission format used for content produced by end users is valid. This would eliminate what is by far the most objectionable aspect of software patents—the ability to trap the user's data behind a compatibility paywall, effectively holding the user's data hostage.
Yes, it does, because two of the three or four sides to this argument have mutually exclusive solutions to the problem.
If the people claiming that CO2 is the cause are right, then lowering CO2 levels will make the problem better.
If the people claiming that water vapor is the cause and that CO2 actually reduces global warming in the presence of significant water vapor, then we need to lower water vapor. More to the point, if they are right, then reducing CO2 will make the problem worse.
While you're signing things, I just wrote one with a similar concept, but applying it to the federal budget: cut the budget from the bottom up (incentives and changes to surplus handling) instead of the top down (axing entire programs based on politics).
I'm so fed up with politicians on both sides of the aisle whining about the budget while not taking even the most basic steps to actually reduce the budget in any meaningful way. The flaws in the system are glaringly obvious. How about all you blowhards in Congress and the White House actually fix the flaws instead of spending your entire careers pandering to your political base. Just saying. (Not that any of them will read this, but....)
Or find yourself a cheaper school. Fourteen grand for tuition and housing is insane. Where are you going? A UC campus? Remember that you're paying for the cost of living. You can get a better education (smaller class sizes, more personal interaction with faculty) for a lot less money if you attend a smaller state school out in the boonies somewhere.
Most state universities outside of large cities tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven grand per year for tuition. Even after you add in housing at another couple of grand, you're still well under $10k per year.
Then apply for every scholarship, work-study position, or other campus job you can come up with. Between those things, you ought to be able to get that down even further.
If so, then this is a good example of why you need to test your products thoroughly before you ship them. Once your product is perceived to be slow, it's very hard to destroy that misperception, even if you fix whatever problem caused the slowness....
No, it's proof that people will only buy non-apple tablets when they can get $500 of hardware for $100.
No, it's proof that when you have two products at the same price point, one of which is inferior in almost every way—bigger, heavier, no rear-facing camera, slower CPU (or maybe it's just the higher overhead of WebOS), no native apps, limited selection of apps, less display brightness—people will choose the better product.... About the only hardware advantage the TouchPad had was stereo speakers....
If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.
If you're going to compete at a price point, you have to at least come close to hitting all the major bullet-point hardware features of the other products at that price point. If not, expect your sales to be disappointing. The only time this isn't true is if you have some other major design enhancement that blows away the competition in some other area, and even then, it takes years for something that subtle to result in significant disruption in an established market. It's unclear whether HP had that with WebOS. What is clear is that they were not willing to stick it out in that market long enough to find out.
I'm suddenly envisioning a terrorist spending millions of dollars and enduring decades of political hearings to get permission to lay a rail line leading up to the White House, and the government being dumb enough to let them.
It would be funny if it weren't so damn plausible.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't remember. It was at least a year ago, maybe two. It might have been a case about searches, wiretapping, GPS, or something similar. My recollection was that his reasoning limited the decision (and thus the burden on the government to obtain a warrant) more than it should have. But again, it has been too long for me to remember the details. IANAL. I just play one on Slashdot.
Amusingly, that would almost invariably result in a better and more well-reasoned decision, IMO.... Excluding cases that were unanimous or nearly unanimous, I can only think of one case I've ever looked at where I agreed with Justice Thomas, and even then, although I agreed with his decision, I disagreed with the reasoning that led him to that decision.
No, the verb "bless" does not imply "more than anyone else".
One might also argue that the TSA is doing exactly what it was designed to do. By making all but the richest Americans (the ones who can afford private jets) go through these searches, they are gradually wearing down the public, conditioning them to accept regular intrusive searches and limitations on travel. This was one of the first things the Nazis did, too. It makes it harder for the peons to rise up and overthrow the government after they start doing the really bad stuff.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that sort of thinking is happening (at least consciously) in the halls of Congress. What I'm saying is that the purpose for those freedoms that the DHS is pissing all over is precisely to minimize the chances of the really bad stuff happening later. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "A government afraid of its citizens is a Democracy. Citizens afraid of government is tyranny!"
The more we tear down those freedoms, the closer we come to being another autocratic or oligarchic hellhole instead of a democracy. It is precisely for that reason that every true, patriotic American has a duty to defend the Constitution against these attacks in whatever way he or she can, and to resist any government actions that go against its spirit to the maximum extent allowable by law and, if need be, with acts of peaceful civil disobedience that are not allowable by law as well.
God bless the USA.
American
Department of
Homeland
Defence
Can't it be both?
That's simply not true.
Yes, you need permission to send Apple Events, and you need to specify which app you want to control. The reason for this is that Apple Events are intended as a way for one app to control another app. The purpose of a sandbox is to enforce user intent, which is impossible if applications are controlling other applications and posing as the user. Put another way, there are basically no limits to what you can do with "tell application Finder ...", up to and including copying or moving files into and out of your sandbox directory (a location where you have permission to read and write files) which means that allowing Apple Events would provide a trivial way to bypass the entire file access portion of the sandbox security model.
Similarly, some other low-level IPC mechanisms (shared memory, for example) are disallowed (if memory serves) because they are pretty serious violations in the separation between applications.
Distributed objects is disallowed because it does not provide enough of a permissions model to be made secure, as I understand it.
However, the most common (and safest) form of IPC, TCP networking, is allowed, and so is network service discovery and advertisement. You just need a networking entitlement. If you want to be a network daemon, you need a network server entitlement. If you want to make outgoing connections, you need a network client entitlement. If you want to do both, you need both. TCP is the preferred way to do interprocess communication because it is a clean message passing API that can't readily cause catastrophic side effects (unlike mach_msg_overwrite, for example).
Oh, yeah, and the Mac sandbox does, in fact, have separate entitlements for access to personal information, including one for the calendar, one for the address book, and one for location services.
Do you actually know anything about Apple's sandboxing model or are you just making it up as you go along?
Well, it's more like a range of default security policies tailored to the application, but yes. Apple has created a series of multiple high-level sandbox profile options that your app can choose from, depending on what it needs to do. If you are selling your apps on the Mac App Store, Apple vets those options to ensure that they make sense based on what your application does. If you aren't selling your app on the Mac App Store, this does not affect you at all, though you are strongly encouraged to sandbox your app because doing so makes the platform more robust against viruses, etc. At that point, the onus is on you to make sure that the options you choose are sane.
The big thing that makes the 10.7 App Sandbox different from the prior incarnations is the addition of PowerBox. By moving the open and save dialogs into a separate (system-provided) application that has the ability to add entitlements (capabilities) to your application's sandbox on the fly, it means that your app can access the files that the user specifies, and nothing else (outside of your app's personal scratch space). This is a significant win for security, as it puts the user directly in charge of what files an application can access.
I could go on for a while about privilege separation and techniques for making your app more secure, but that's a bit out of scope for this discussion forum. Go read App Sandbox Design Guide if you want more details.
Also, according to MacWorld, the original deadline was November (Source: MacWorld). The news is that Apple pushed the deadline out by four months, not that Apple is going to require sandboxing. That story is so out of date that when I first heard it, I fell off my dinosaur.
It is if you then spend half your day going around stamp collecting conventions telling everyone that stamp collecting is dumb and useless.
Because to the people I'm talking about (who are just a small subset of the world's atheists, BTW), it is. What I think or believe about religion is irrelevant. In effect, what I'm saying is, "Pot, meet kettle."
I never said he was. I said he believed in a creator. He was basically a deist as far as I can tell, e.g. God kicked off the universe job and let it run. The big difference between deists and other religious groups are that the other religious groups believe God is watching the console and occasionally attaching a debugger to tweak the values of variables here and there.
We can quote Einstein, too.
or
In other words, Einstein would more properly be described as a deist, not an atheist.
What we have here is a false dichotomy. Many folks with religious beliefs merely believe that some things that aren't explained by science might be the hand of God, which is subtly but significantly different from the position you describe. Such an attitude does not mean that we should not use science to learn what we can, but rather shows a humble acceptance that some truths may be fundamentally impossible to grasp from within the confines of our universe. They would argue that we may never be able to explain why certain laws of the universe are true, but that does not mean that we should stop trying, as the more we learn about the universe, the more we inevitably learn about its creator.
The lazy use God as an excuse to stop trying. The true believers use God as a reason to do so. That's why throughout history, a fair amount of scientific discovery has been done by the Church and the faithful, from Copernicus to Mendel. Heck, even Sir Francis Bacon—to many, the founder of modern science—was religious.
While we're at it, let's add a few more to that list. Kepler, Galilei, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, Faraday, Kelvin, Planck, Einstein—you know, all those people who were so important to science that we named measurements, laws, or cages after most of them—all held some belief in a higher power, creator, or similar. Yet no sane person could claim that their impact on modern science was anything less than amazing and groundbreaking.
The fundamentalist-atheist claim that religion and science are fundamentally at odds is no less a religious belief than traditional theistic religions, and more to the point, is an utterly arrogant belief that effectively spits on the countless contributions of the religious to the very foundations of science as we know it today. And although it is held with the same arrogant religious fervor as the beliefs of the most devout faithful, it is a comically naïve belief built on nothing more solid than smugness and the believer's own desire to feel superior to someone else, usually to make themselves feel less inferior. Frankly, whenever I see such rubbish, it almost makes me ashamed of the human race as a whole.
As Einstein put it, "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind." Claims to the contrary demand extraordinary proof.
Chemotherapy drugs.... Desperate people are often willing to take desperate risks.
What an amazing coincidence. A 64-bit arm ISA was just announced last week.
I hope they continue in the tradition and call it the "leg" instruction set.
There is still considerable debate about whether millimeter wave emissions can damage DNA. Not all damage is from ionization.
Given the rising level of discontent? My guess would be whichever leaders are still alive after American Spring.
For about the last decade, I've been saying that I expect to see an armed overthrow of the U.S. government in my lifetime. It's not a pleasant thought, but it is nearly inevitable; the aristocracy has simply become too powerful relative to the plebes. If history has taught us anything, it is that you can't allow that sort of a wealth and power gap to grow too big, or else the French Revolution happens.
Just saying.
Carburetors don't have to maintain drop-in compatibility with existing infrastructure. Thus, there's a lot of flexibility in their design.
With software, in order to be useful, you need to be able to encode and decode the same file formats, and there is often exactly one way to do this from a mathematical perspective. That is why software patents are bad—because a compatible implementation must use the same mathematics, and it is impossible to do so without violating the patent.
That said, I'd settle for a law that says that no patent covering any storage or transmission format used for content produced by end users is valid. This would eliminate what is by far the most objectionable aspect of software patents—the ability to trap the user's data behind a compatibility paywall, effectively holding the user's data hostage.
Untrue. Both fossil fuel combustion and nuclear power produce significant amounts of water vapor.
Yes, it does, because two of the three or four sides to this argument have mutually exclusive solutions to the problem.
If the people claiming that CO2 is the cause are right, then lowering CO2 levels will make the problem better.
If the people claiming that water vapor is the cause and that CO2 actually reduces global warming in the presence of significant water vapor, then we need to lower water vapor. More to the point, if they are right, then reducing CO2 will make the problem worse.
While you're signing things, I just wrote one with a similar concept, but applying it to the federal budget: cut the budget from the bottom up (incentives and changes to surplus handling) instead of the top down (axing entire programs based on politics).
I'm so fed up with politicians on both sides of the aisle whining about the budget while not taking even the most basic steps to actually reduce the budget in any meaningful way. The flaws in the system are glaringly obvious. How about all you blowhards in Congress and the White House actually fix the flaws instead of spending your entire careers pandering to your political base. Just saying. (Not that any of them will read this, but....)
Or find yourself a cheaper school. Fourteen grand for tuition and housing is insane. Where are you going? A UC campus? Remember that you're paying for the cost of living. You can get a better education (smaller class sizes, more personal interaction with faculty) for a lot less money if you attend a smaller state school out in the boonies somewhere.
Most state universities outside of large cities tend to be somewhere in the neighborhood of six or seven grand per year for tuition. Even after you add in housing at another couple of grand, you're still well under $10k per year.
Then apply for every scholarship, work-study position, or other campus job you can come up with. Between those things, you ought to be able to get that down even further.
If so, then this is a good example of why you need to test your products thoroughly before you ship them. Once your product is perceived to be slow, it's very hard to destroy that misperception, even if you fix whatever problem caused the slowness....
No, it's proof that when you have two products at the same price point, one of which is inferior in almost every way—bigger, heavier, no rear-facing camera, slower CPU (or maybe it's just the higher overhead of WebOS), no native apps, limited selection of apps, less display brightness—people will choose the better product.... About the only hardware advantage the TouchPad had was stereo speakers....
If they were getting $500 of hardware for $500, the TouchPad would not have sold so poorly. The fact is that it lacked a number of fairly significant bullet-point features that the iPad had for the same price. Therefore, if the iPad is $500 worth of hardware, then the TouchPad wasn't. Period.
If you're going to compete at a price point, you have to at least come close to hitting all the major bullet-point hardware features of the other products at that price point. If not, expect your sales to be disappointing. The only time this isn't true is if you have some other major design enhancement that blows away the competition in some other area, and even then, it takes years for something that subtle to result in significant disruption in an established market. It's unclear whether HP had that with WebOS. What is clear is that they were not willing to stick it out in that market long enough to find out.
I'm suddenly envisioning a terrorist spending millions of dollars and enduring decades of political hearings to get permission to lay a rail line leading up to the White House, and the government being dumb enough to let them.
It would be funny if it weren't so damn plausible.
Great. Now it's just a question of how long it will be before we go to war with Betelgeuse.