Is that some kind of architectural limit, or has somebody neglected to remove the "stop the machine from thrashing horribly" heuristics from back when 16GB desktops were science fiction?
I would be fascinated to know whether there is a difference, and how large a difference, between how well people can identify computer players and how well they think that they can...
Given the amount of game-studying undertaken by people sufficiently advanced in chess to actually have an opinion, it'd be pretty tricky to blind such a test properly; but I just have to wonder whether a 'weird computer move I can't understand' would be described in completely different terms by somebody who thinks that there is a human making it.
You didn't "mess up", except in the very limited and weasely sense that you 'miscalculated the level of bullshit that you could get away with'.
I'm pretty sure that you didn't just trip on your way into the state senate and accidentally draft and pass a bill. That would be "messing up". You can't do something that complex just by accident.
While the attempt to simultaneously diminish your guilt and 'take responsibility' is rather cute, it is entirely false. Everyone who assisted in passing this bill didn't "mess up", they quite deliberately tried to get away with something. The only 'error' involved was miscalculating what they could get away with.
Having a distinct TLD, rather than just a series of domain names that you have to collect manually, or assemble by some keyword mechanism, or some other messy setup, doesn't make blocking any easier, it just makes identifying your targets easier.
It doesn't make your censorship mechanism any more sophisticated. ISP DNS server mandates are still the easiest and cheapest and least disruptive to constituencies who matter. Mandating that ISPs block attempts to reach 3rd party DNS servers isn't too much harder or more expensive; but is much more likely to make a mess of some number of 'legitimate' applications used by constituencies who matter. Selectively rewriting or blocking DNS lookups for specific TLDs is more difficult and expensive; but a bit less disruptive.
I suspect that this is a mixture of pandering to the clueless moralists and creating new niches for registrars to make money for comparatively little effort; but it does make assembling a target list somewhat easier(with the exception of the, likely extremely high, percentage of porn outfits who have a domain name in a second TLD...)
My understanding was that Chess, while significantly less intractable than some games, was still something that you needed a fairly serious computer to play well fast enough to be tournament legal.
Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought, or were these guys sufficiently low-level players that some quite ordinary software was deemed sufficiently likely to be better? I'd assume that you wouldn't take the risk of being caught cheating unless you were fairly confident that it would boost your odds of winnning, which would imply a belief that you were substantially worse than whatever software they had access to.
I'm pretty sure that Virtualbox and Xen are(in addition to architectural differences) aimed at substantially different uses of virtualization.
Virtualbox, though there is nothing specifically stopping you from using it otherwise, is pretty much aimed at the "second and/or test OS on primary desktop" use case. Run whatever primary OS, run a small number of secondary OSes or virtual test boxes because RAM is cheaper than a rats nest of towers and KVM switches. This shows in the fairly simple configuration, easy support for peripheral-passthrough and graphical guest OS window, and lack of interest in things like automated guest migration.
Xen, by contrast, is aimed much more at the "pool of VM servers supporting some large number of VM instances that are mostly there to interact over network only" style. Nothing prevents you from setting up your desktop as the dom0 OS, and using it like Virtualbox; but it would be a pain and not clearly beneficial. On the other hand, you get much more concern for large memory spaces, guest migration, and similar things.
This isn't a precise analogy(since I suspect that they share somewhat more, just for cost reasons); but asking "Why use Xen when you could use Virtualbox?" is sort of like asking "Why use VMware ESX when you could use VMware Workstation?"
I haven't quite decided on whether it exists to be censored, or as some sort of unwholesome baptists/bootleggers coalition between those who want censorship to be easier and those who want smut to be yet more profitable(and some of that cash to go to them).
A given human-readable domain name in some TLD just has to be DNS-able back to an IP with something on it in order to be functional. There is no requirement that it be the only domain name that points back to that IP, or that it only point back to one IP. Given that, I'd expect that a fair slice of the.xxx names will simply be purchased by porn outfits who are already online under.com,.net, or others and will point back to exactly the same IPs and servers. Those will represent easy money for whoever runs.xxx; but blocking them will achieve very little, since they will just be a second alias pointing to something that is already pointed to by 'respectable' domains(or obscure TLDs that are super cheap, and who cares as long as our pagerank is good).
Anybody who is.xxx only will, indeed, be fairly easily censored; but that won't be too helpful to the powers-that-be unless someone manages to require all smut to show up only on.xxx(and how exactly would that be accomplished? Individual nations can restrict use of their own TLDs, or make operating porn servers criminal, or what have you; but nation X can't really tell smut.net in nation Y what TLDs it can or can't have domain names in...) Whether or not.xxx is largely a tool of people who just want another TLD to spin money from(not as bad as those "hey, let's let literally any string be a TLD!" nuisances; but in the same vein...), or whether there is a bloc of ignorant moralists who think that.xxx will magically force all the smut into that one area, where it can be blocked, or whether the moralist bloc is playing a long game, and the eventual plan is some sort of legislative shove is not yet clear to me...
I suspect that any real displeasure would come from Primesense, rather than Microsoft(or, from Microsoft because of a contractual obligation to Primesense)...
The Kinect is, by a substantial margin, the cheapest available version of Primesense's proprietary ranging and imaging setup. It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only remotely consumer-available one that is a freestanding USB device. They might have scored some embedded design wins somewhere, maybe vending machines or such; but other than that your options are 1). Kinect 2). Talk to Primesense and open the checkbook.
Clearly, Kinect has volume that Primesense could only dream of in other cases, so I'm sure that the small per-unit fees are just fine by them. However, they almost certainly wanted Kinect to be a "for silly little games on xbox only" item, to allow price discrimination and the continued sale of their much higher margin, albeit lower volume, specialty products.
Now that Kinect can plug into basically any standard PC, and has a decent set of OSS 3rd party supporting software, it is harder for them to do that. They can still, presumably, sell upgraded versions of the hardware, to people who really need extra resolution, or a bigger field of view or something; but the floor for basic customers is now "under $200 at Gamestop" rather than "We'd be overjoyed to have your permission to pay only $2k for an academic-only licence..."
As long as it doesn't threaten their cryptographic walled garden, I'm sure MS doesn't care. Units sold are units sold, and they aren't eating a loss on them. Primsense might be less than happy, depending on how their numbers shake down, though...
It could also be that the reference design is a bit... optimistic... about thermals(or case in that render is supposed to be 3/4 cm of solid aluminum...) It is possible that MS was just jumpy after the RROD incidents; but I'm guessing that they didn't add some extra volume and a fan just because they really wanted some moving parts and a higher BOM cost.
Apparently the laser dot-pattern projector unit even has a peltier element(according to iFixit's teardown). That means both higher costs and nontrivially increased power requirements. It also suggests that reliable operation of that critical part requires not merely good heat dissipation(for which a little chunk of finned copper and some airflow are sufficient) but temperature stability.
I'm not going to accuse Primesense of lying, they know their product better than I do; but the Kinect's thermal design suggests that either MS is seriously gun-shy about overheating incidents, or the technology being used is touchier than one might expect, or expect to cool in that reference enclosure.
The hardware(though apparently not the supporting software used on the XB360) is basically pure Primesense. However, given the 'you-have-to-ask-and-don't-want-to-know' pricing of previous Primesense-based products, it was quite nice of Microsoft to deliver the first one priced for the mass market...
If I remember the loophole correctly, ICE claims the authority to pursue their border-protection functions within ~100 miles of the border. It's only 2/3ds of the US, so the fact that they don't follow the same rules as cops is hardly an issue...
And I really hope that they crash into something inanimate before they kill somebody else; but is anybody else pretty creeped out by the notion that secret checkpoints along public roads sounds more like an idea borrowed from a 60's era communist villain(Your papers, citizen...) than a good idea?
Just start talking in slightly more stilted language(try "Guilty of disseminating information harmful to public safety") and you'll be basically indistinguishable from the average translated kangaroo-court verdict...
Given that it's a thinly veiled application of Smith's 1776 examination of how selfish actors can end up achieving surprisingly positive effects and externalities(arguably to be found, in less formal language, in Mandeville's 1705 Fable of the Bees...) to the question of what Google is up to in terms of the health of the internet, I wouldn't claim too much original insight....
As you note, though, my bafflement about how I managed to be "anti-corporate" is only increasing. All I really did was apply a vaguely Smith-esque examination of "invisible hand" effects of profit seeking agents to a classic model of a self-interested corporation...
I would argue that, just as "trusting" Google means putting an excessively human face on a non-human construct, the notion of Google "stabbing us in the back" does as well.
Barring executive bungling, Google can reasonably be expected to continuously act in its perceived interests. On the minus side, this means tracking you to operate their advertising operations. On the plus side, this means viewing others who would wish to do so as competitors, and a comparatively high unwillingness to "play ball" in order to tap foreign markets(compared to say, Yahoo...). Given their dependence on customers having mostly open internet access in order to access their services and see their ads, it also likely includes opposition to ISPs or tivoized devices that attempt to collect rents on their gatekeeper status(In Google's ideal world, they likely wouldn't mind if they were the option being enforced; but in a world of deep-pocketed competitors, and competitors with well entrenched OS and hardware businesses(Apple, Microsoft, News Corporation, etc.) they have more to lose than they have to win by making access to specific sites/services a bidding war at the ISP level). They also are likely in favor of security between the user and the host(since they are the host) and there are potential competitors/advertisement injectors(like Phorm) and such lurking in between them and the user; but likely to be against legal controls on their storage of potentially interesting information.
Even today, they deliver a mixed bag of good and bad, largely, though arguably not wholly, predicted by their business interests. As those evolve, expect the mixture of costs and benefits delivered to evolve alongside them.
Compared to most of the alternatives, I would say that Google's business interests are more strongly aligned with my interests for the internet than are those of most any other corporation of nontrivial size, I would just caution against viewing them as either friend or enemy. They follow their interests. At present, those converge fairly well, comparatively speaking, with those of users. If, after some change, they diverge, Google will continue to follow their interests, same as always.
I'm curious to know what about my post marks it as "anti-corporate". As best I can tell, I started from a wholly orthodox account of how corporations operate and worked from there.
Corporations are complex systems designed to serve the (typically financial) interests of their owners. Within the limits imposed by the principal-agent problem, this is supposed to mean that the people who run the corporation serve the interests of the shareholders, by some combination of upping stock prices or issuing dividends.
Because of that, trying to infer the behavior of a corporation from the human motives of the guys at the top is typically going to be a bad model: one should instead expect that the corporation will act in the interests of its shareholders.
I was under the impression that that was pretty much the standard model of corporate behavior. If that counts as "anti-corporate"(rather than, say, somebody actually challenging the notion of 'limited liability investments', or even just asserting that having mercilessly self-interested entities around is a bad idea...), then what kind of bowing and scraping would I need to engage in to be "pro corporate"?
That would, one suspects, make throttling and censorship pretty easy to detect...
That's the handy thing about such a tool: unless fantastically mal-architected, it is pretty likely that anybody who messes with access to it is up to no good. The real target is those who try to keep their hands clean while simultaneously bringing out the iron fist.
I don't trust Google's altruism further than I can throw it(though it is likely that the founders are better than the outside CEO in that regard...); but it is somewhat convenient that Google's business model and business interests happen to be fairly strongly aligned with most of the internet's virtues.
It cannot be ignored that they want to data-mine you to dump ad impressions down your consumer gullet; but this does mean that they view anybody else trying to do so as "competition" rather than "our bestest buddies in profit"(as with ISPs and Phorm/NSA for instance).
Similarly, their desire to operate communications services without hindrance is not identical to an ideological stance in favor of freedom; but the end results are substantially closer than are those of entities that wish to hinder communications services in order to raise prices, or prevent "piracy", or the like.
I don't trust them; but I would say that their self-interest aligns atypically well with much(though certainly not all) of what would want from the ideal internet. I do trust them to follow their self interest. I would certainly prefer the internet according to some genuinely freedom-focused entity; but those tend to be penniless ragtag optimists, rather than corporate behemoths....
Vaguely related: it is reported this morning that an F-15E crash landed(apparently without the assistance of hostile fire). Luckily it fell near a rebel position, so the locals gave the flight crew an enthusiastic reception and they were recovered without incident; but that is still 30+ million in hardware that fell out of the sky without any AA systems even working.
Given the disparity in GDP between Libya and the western coalition currently air-striking, this obviously isn't the start of an unwinnable war of attrition or anything; but modern air wars are expensive, even if they are the equivalent of kicking someobody while they are down. The better you are at hiding/disguising/spamming/decoying your real assets, the longer your enemies have to keep doing expensive things. You can't easily win that way; but if you are lucky they'll lose interest and leave you to your little civil war...
I'd agree there. Any handoff to team telco is going to have all the charms of the post-soviet oligarchical "privatization", where a very juicy piece of public property is sweethearted away by one of a few well connected entities. ISM band really ought to get it(or, perhaps, a special form of licensed band, where any piece of hardware conforming to some open industry spec may freely use it, so that you get most of the ISM freedom; but without arc welders and cheapo analog video blasters playing hell. That would be a little tricky to get right; but is conceptually interesting.)
The kernel of my argument, though, is that use of that hiqh-quality spectrum by legacy broadcasters is actually not much better, it just has the advantage of being a folly a generation or more old, which eases the sting a bit, and of taking its pound of flesh in advertisements and opportunity costs, rather than direct hits to the credit card. I do think that there is a valid public-interest argument in favor of universal baseline availability of news, politics, safety alerts, and the like available swiftly, at low cost, and with no particular technological sophistication needed(whether TV "news" actually provides this is open to debate...), and those are areas where broadcast is both historically and technologically a good model.
Beyond that fairly narrow(in purpose and in bandwidth) public interest argument, though, I find myself extremely skeptical that OTA broadcast can possibly make better use of scarce bandwidth than can the robustly innovative users of the ISM band. This especially so given that high-bandwidth video, for all but time-critical applications, is something USPS can kick virtually any data link's ass at, and is available across the country for peanuts. Obviously, at some point, "public interest" is basically a polite way of saying "what I think people should want", and ends up in a simple clash of tastes; but I think that the occupants of the miserable little ISM slice have more than proven their worthiness of more and better spectrum...
The only exception that I could think of(though I don't know if Libya has tried it) might be the use of RF decoys to draw the (extremely expensive) firepower of the attacking air forces away from more valuable targets.
If you skip all the sophistication required to make any use of the return signal, and just focus on pumping out the microwaves, you could probably knock something together that looks enough like an actual radar system(particularly a mobile one, since the adversary couldn't discount it based on satellite data, as they could a static installation) to require an airstrike at low cost and with minimal technical sophistication.
As noted, I haven't heard of Libya doing this; but it might be a reasonably sensible strategy for somebody in their position, where they just don't have the anti-aircraft capacity to engage the attacking aircraft in any serious way: the fakes would help absorb some percentage of the damage at very low cost, and help keep enemy aircraft flying around in locations where dumb AA fire and/or short-range-guidance-only SAMs might hit some with sufficient luck... Anything that they actually care about, though, is presumably going to stay very quiet and pretend that it isn't home.
Some people's brains shut down the moment their tribe goes to war against the evil subhumans from the tribe across the hill. I think that that basically explains that vein of criticism.
Libya's air defense systems have a strong 'Red and Retro' flavor to them; but they have a reasonable number of airbases and SAM sites. Unless the ongoing fighting has left those in total shambles, they almost certainly have listening capabilities superior to the hobbyist level(if only because autocratic armed forces tend to encounter less hassle with neighbors and zoning when putting up antennas) and probably some active radar as well. It isn't clear that they have the capability to hit much of the more modern force attacking them; but they aren't exactly cowering in primitive awe because they don't know what a radio receiver is.
You old-timers probably also remember the web back when it was computationally uneconomic for your ISP and an unknown number of its commercial and/or three-letter buddies to data-mine your every click... Why, back in your day, there probably weren't even massive multinational botnets bouncing zero-days off every likely-looking bit of code in your system.
What we really need is a second flavor of SSL cert: Signed certs offer some protection against MITM(within the limits of the competence and/or benevolence of the surprisingly large number of entities that your browser trusts...); but are costly.
Self-signed give you the crypto goodness; but all default browsers look at you like you've just axe-murdered your mother if you try to enter a site that presents one; because anybody can generate a cert for any domain.
Ideally, there would be something like a "stability cert": Like a self-sign, it wouldn't actually represent any assurance that you are anybody in particular; but you would, upon generating it, upload it to one or more trusted repositories which would datestamp it. By that means, a visitor to your domain couldn't tell who "you" are; but they could determine whether or not "you" is the same entity that they were yesterday, or a likely MITM...
Rather like a cryptographic variant of usernames on forums like this one. My username, like a self-signed cert, is attested to by nobody, and provides no trustworthy information about my real identity. However, if a post appears "by fuzzyfuzzyfungus" you know that whoever wrote it is the possessor of the same login credentials as whoever posted previously under that name.
For many purposes, this would arguably be as good, and cheaper, than the full SSL-cert-attested-to-by-Verisign arrangement. When dealing with a bank or something, it matters that you are, in fact, dealing with Bank of America Inc. When reading Joe Bloggs' Blog, knowing that 'Joe Bloggs' is actually John Smith of 123 Centerville, NH is unhelpful and definitely not worth the cert money. Knowing that he is the same 'Joe Bloggs' has operated that site since its opening is helpful, and would be cheaper.
I suspect that some are merely clueless, and some are mostly concerned with preventing persistent "lockout" type attacks at the lowest possible cost. You'll notice, for instance, that most sites that authenticate over HTTPS, then drop back to HTTP, go back to HTTPS and demand the original password if you try to do things like change the password(and possibly certain other operations considered sensitive), even if you have the session ID.
Obviously, that does nothing to prevent assorted public-wifi hilarity; but it makes it comparatively difficult(difficult enough that social engineering or just guessing that the password is 'password123' because they always are is easier) to permanently compromise the account and generate a customer support/being flagged as a spam host cost problem.
Webmasters who think that this is actually good security are fools. Webmasters who think that it blocks a certain class of especially costly attacks, while being much cheaper than full HTTPS, are entirely correct. And, given how little one pays for access to many sites that do this, they probably don't care too much unless something attracts mainstream attention *cough*firesheep*cough*...
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Is that some kind of architectural limit, or has somebody neglected to remove the "stop the machine from thrashing horribly" heuristics from back when 16GB desktops were science fiction?
I would be fascinated to know whether there is a difference, and how large a difference, between how well people can identify computer players and how well they think that they can...
Given the amount of game-studying undertaken by people sufficiently advanced in chess to actually have an opinion, it'd be pretty tricky to blind such a test properly; but I just have to wonder whether a 'weird computer move I can't understand' would be described in completely different terms by somebody who thinks that there is a human making it.
You didn't "mess up", except in the very limited and weasely sense that you 'miscalculated the level of bullshit that you could get away with'.
I'm pretty sure that you didn't just trip on your way into the state senate and accidentally draft and pass a bill. That would be "messing up". You can't do something that complex just by accident.
While the attempt to simultaneously diminish your guilt and 'take responsibility' is rather cute, it is entirely false. Everyone who assisted in passing this bill didn't "mess up", they quite deliberately tried to get away with something. The only 'error' involved was miscalculating what they could get away with.
Having a distinct TLD, rather than just a series of domain names that you have to collect manually, or assemble by some keyword mechanism, or some other messy setup, doesn't make blocking any easier, it just makes identifying your targets easier.
It doesn't make your censorship mechanism any more sophisticated. ISP DNS server mandates are still the easiest and cheapest and least disruptive to constituencies who matter. Mandating that ISPs block attempts to reach 3rd party DNS servers isn't too much harder or more expensive; but is much more likely to make a mess of some number of 'legitimate' applications used by constituencies who matter. Selectively rewriting or blocking DNS lookups for specific TLDs is more difficult and expensive; but a bit less disruptive.
I suspect that this is a mixture of pandering to the clueless moralists and creating new niches for registrars to make money for comparatively little effort; but it does make assembling a target list somewhat easier(with the exception of the, likely extremely high, percentage of porn outfits who have a domain name in a second TLD...)
My understanding was that Chess, while significantly less intractable than some games, was still something that you needed a fairly serious computer to play well fast enough to be tournament legal.
Has the state of the art in fact advanced more significantly than I thought, or were these guys sufficiently low-level players that some quite ordinary software was deemed sufficiently likely to be better? I'd assume that you wouldn't take the risk of being caught cheating unless you were fairly confident that it would boost your odds of winnning, which would imply a belief that you were substantially worse than whatever software they had access to.
I'm pretty sure that Virtualbox and Xen are(in addition to architectural differences) aimed at substantially different uses of virtualization.
Virtualbox, though there is nothing specifically stopping you from using it otherwise, is pretty much aimed at the "second and/or test OS on primary desktop" use case. Run whatever primary OS, run a small number of secondary OSes or virtual test boxes because RAM is cheaper than a rats nest of towers and KVM switches. This shows in the fairly simple configuration, easy support for peripheral-passthrough and graphical guest OS window, and lack of interest in things like automated guest migration.
Xen, by contrast, is aimed much more at the "pool of VM servers supporting some large number of VM instances that are mostly there to interact over network only" style. Nothing prevents you from setting up your desktop as the dom0 OS, and using it like Virtualbox; but it would be a pain and not clearly beneficial. On the other hand, you get much more concern for large memory spaces, guest migration, and similar things.
This isn't a precise analogy(since I suspect that they share somewhat more, just for cost reasons); but asking "Why use Xen when you could use Virtualbox?" is sort of like asking "Why use VMware ESX when you could use VMware Workstation?"
I haven't quite decided on whether it exists to be censored, or as some sort of unwholesome baptists/bootleggers coalition between those who want censorship to be easier and those who want smut to be yet more profitable(and some of that cash to go to them).
.xxx names will simply be purchased by porn outfits who are already online under .com, .net, or others and will point back to exactly the same IPs and servers. Those will represent easy money for whoever runs .xxx; but blocking them will achieve very little, since they will just be a second alias pointing to something that is already pointed to by 'respectable' domains(or obscure TLDs that are super cheap, and who cares as long as our pagerank is good).
.xxx only will, indeed, be fairly easily censored; but that won't be too helpful to the powers-that-be unless someone manages to require all smut to show up only on .xxx(and how exactly would that be accomplished? Individual nations can restrict use of their own TLDs, or make operating porn servers criminal, or what have you; but nation X can't really tell smut.net in nation Y what TLDs it can or can't have domain names in...) Whether or not .xxx is largely a tool of people who just want another TLD to spin money from(not as bad as those "hey, let's let literally any string be a TLD!" nuisances; but in the same vein...), or whether there is a bloc of ignorant moralists who think that .xxx will magically force all the smut into that one area, where it can be blocked, or whether the moralist bloc is playing a long game, and the eventual plan is some sort of legislative shove is not yet clear to me...
A given human-readable domain name in some TLD just has to be DNS-able back to an IP with something on it in order to be functional. There is no requirement that it be the only domain name that points back to that IP, or that it only point back to one IP. Given that, I'd expect that a fair slice of the
Anybody who is
I suspect that any real displeasure would come from Primesense, rather than Microsoft(or, from Microsoft because of a contractual obligation to Primesense)...
The Kinect is, by a substantial margin, the cheapest available version of Primesense's proprietary ranging and imaging setup. It is also, to the best of my knowledge, the only remotely consumer-available one that is a freestanding USB device. They might have scored some embedded design wins somewhere, maybe vending machines or such; but other than that your options are 1). Kinect 2). Talk to Primesense and open the checkbook.
Clearly, Kinect has volume that Primesense could only dream of in other cases, so I'm sure that the small per-unit fees are just fine by them. However, they almost certainly wanted Kinect to be a "for silly little games on xbox only" item, to allow price discrimination and the continued sale of their much higher margin, albeit lower volume, specialty products.
Now that Kinect can plug into basically any standard PC, and has a decent set of OSS 3rd party supporting software, it is harder for them to do that. They can still, presumably, sell upgraded versions of the hardware, to people who really need extra resolution, or a bigger field of view or something; but the floor for basic customers is now "under $200 at Gamestop" rather than "We'd be overjoyed to have your permission to pay only $2k for an academic-only licence..."
As long as it doesn't threaten their cryptographic walled garden, I'm sure MS doesn't care. Units sold are units sold, and they aren't eating a loss on them. Primsense might be less than happy, depending on how their numbers shake down, though...
It could also be that the reference design is a bit... optimistic... about thermals(or case in that render is supposed to be 3/4 cm of solid aluminum...) It is possible that MS was just jumpy after the RROD incidents; but I'm guessing that they didn't add some extra volume and a fan just because they really wanted some moving parts and a higher BOM cost.
Apparently the laser dot-pattern projector unit even has a peltier element(according to iFixit's teardown). That means both higher costs and nontrivially increased power requirements. It also suggests that reliable operation of that critical part requires not merely good heat dissipation(for which a little chunk of finned copper and some airflow are sufficient) but temperature stability.
I'm not going to accuse Primesense of lying, they know their product better than I do; but the Kinect's thermal design suggests that either MS is seriously gun-shy about overheating incidents, or the technology being used is touchier than one might expect, or expect to cool in that reference enclosure.
The hardware(though apparently not the supporting software used on the XB360) is basically pure Primesense. However, given the 'you-have-to-ask-and-don't-want-to-know' pricing of previous Primesense-based products, it was quite nice of Microsoft to deliver the first one priced for the mass market...
If I remember the loophole correctly, ICE claims the authority to pursue their border-protection functions within ~100 miles of the border. It's only 2/3ds of the US, so the fact that they don't follow the same rules as cops is hardly an issue...
And I really hope that they crash into something inanimate before they kill somebody else; but is anybody else pretty creeped out by the notion that secret checkpoints along public roads sounds more like an idea borrowed from a 60's era communist villain(Your papers, citizen...) than a good idea?
Just start talking in slightly more stilted language(try "Guilty of disseminating information harmful to public safety") and you'll be basically indistinguishable from the average translated kangaroo-court verdict...
Bigger problems are hard to solve and may involve controversy, or even taking one for the team by endorsing an unpopular solution. That sucks.
Saving the children from drunk drivers and Supporting Our Police, on the other hand, is easy and nearly risk free!
Given that it's a thinly veiled application of Smith's 1776 examination of how selfish actors can end up achieving surprisingly positive effects and externalities(arguably to be found, in less formal language, in Mandeville's 1705 Fable of the Bees...) to the question of what Google is up to in terms of the health of the internet, I wouldn't claim too much original insight....
As you note, though, my bafflement about how I managed to be "anti-corporate" is only increasing. All I really did was apply a vaguely Smith-esque examination of "invisible hand" effects of profit seeking agents to a classic model of a self-interested corporation...
I would argue that, just as "trusting" Google means putting an excessively human face on a non-human construct, the notion of Google "stabbing us in the back" does as well.
Barring executive bungling, Google can reasonably be expected to continuously act in its perceived interests. On the minus side, this means tracking you to operate their advertising operations. On the plus side, this means viewing others who would wish to do so as competitors, and a comparatively high unwillingness to "play ball" in order to tap foreign markets(compared to say, Yahoo...). Given their dependence on customers having mostly open internet access in order to access their services and see their ads, it also likely includes opposition to ISPs or tivoized devices that attempt to collect rents on their gatekeeper status(In Google's ideal world, they likely wouldn't mind if they were the option being enforced; but in a world of deep-pocketed competitors, and competitors with well entrenched OS and hardware businesses(Apple, Microsoft, News Corporation, etc.) they have more to lose than they have to win by making access to specific sites/services a bidding war at the ISP level). They also are likely in favor of security between the user and the host(since they are the host) and there are potential competitors/advertisement injectors(like Phorm) and such lurking in between them and the user; but likely to be against legal controls on their storage of potentially interesting information.
Even today, they deliver a mixed bag of good and bad, largely, though arguably not wholly, predicted by their business interests. As those evolve, expect the mixture of costs and benefits delivered to evolve alongside them.
Compared to most of the alternatives, I would say that Google's business interests are more strongly aligned with my interests for the internet than are those of most any other corporation of nontrivial size, I would just caution against viewing them as either friend or enemy. They follow their interests. At present, those converge fairly well, comparatively speaking, with those of users. If, after some change, they diverge, Google will continue to follow their interests, same as always.
I'm curious to know what about my post marks it as "anti-corporate". As best I can tell, I started from a wholly orthodox account of how corporations operate and worked from there.
Corporations are complex systems designed to serve the (typically financial) interests of their owners. Within the limits imposed by the principal-agent problem, this is supposed to mean that the people who run the corporation serve the interests of the shareholders, by some combination of upping stock prices or issuing dividends.
Because of that, trying to infer the behavior of a corporation from the human motives of the guys at the top is typically going to be a bad model: one should instead expect that the corporation will act in the interests of its shareholders.
I was under the impression that that was pretty much the standard model of corporate behavior. If that counts as "anti-corporate"(rather than, say, somebody actually challenging the notion of 'limited liability investments', or even just asserting that having mercilessly self-interested entities around is a bad idea...), then what kind of bowing and scraping would I need to engage in to be "pro corporate"?
That would, one suspects, make throttling and censorship pretty easy to detect...
That's the handy thing about such a tool: unless fantastically mal-architected, it is pretty likely that anybody who messes with access to it is up to no good. The real target is those who try to keep their hands clean while simultaneously bringing out the iron fist.
I don't trust Google's altruism further than I can throw it(though it is likely that the founders are better than the outside CEO in that regard...); but it is somewhat convenient that Google's business model and business interests happen to be fairly strongly aligned with most of the internet's virtues.
It cannot be ignored that they want to data-mine you to dump ad impressions down your consumer gullet; but this does mean that they view anybody else trying to do so as "competition" rather than "our bestest buddies in profit"(as with ISPs and Phorm/NSA for instance).
Similarly, their desire to operate communications services without hindrance is not identical to an ideological stance in favor of freedom; but the end results are substantially closer than are those of entities that wish to hinder communications services in order to raise prices, or prevent "piracy", or the like.
I don't trust them; but I would say that their self-interest aligns atypically well with much(though certainly not all) of what would want from the ideal internet. I do trust them to follow their self interest. I would certainly prefer the internet according to some genuinely freedom-focused entity; but those tend to be penniless ragtag optimists, rather than corporate behemoths....
Vaguely related: it is reported this morning that an F-15E crash landed(apparently without the assistance of hostile fire). Luckily it fell near a rebel position, so the locals gave the flight crew an enthusiastic reception and they were recovered without incident; but that is still 30+ million in hardware that fell out of the sky without any AA systems even working.
Given the disparity in GDP between Libya and the western coalition currently air-striking, this obviously isn't the start of an unwinnable war of attrition or anything; but modern air wars are expensive, even if they are the equivalent of kicking someobody while they are down. The better you are at hiding/disguising/spamming/decoying your real assets, the longer your enemies have to keep doing expensive things. You can't easily win that way; but if you are lucky they'll lose interest and leave you to your little civil war...
I'd agree there. Any handoff to team telco is going to have all the charms of the post-soviet oligarchical "privatization", where a very juicy piece of public property is sweethearted away by one of a few well connected entities. ISM band really ought to get it(or, perhaps, a special form of licensed band, where any piece of hardware conforming to some open industry spec may freely use it, so that you get most of the ISM freedom; but without arc welders and cheapo analog video blasters playing hell. That would be a little tricky to get right; but is conceptually interesting.)
The kernel of my argument, though, is that use of that hiqh-quality spectrum by legacy broadcasters is actually not much better, it just has the advantage of being a folly a generation or more old, which eases the sting a bit, and of taking its pound of flesh in advertisements and opportunity costs, rather than direct hits to the credit card. I do think that there is a valid public-interest argument in favor of universal baseline availability of news, politics, safety alerts, and the like available swiftly, at low cost, and with no particular technological sophistication needed(whether TV "news" actually provides this is open to debate...), and those are areas where broadcast is both historically and technologically a good model.
Beyond that fairly narrow(in purpose and in bandwidth) public interest argument, though, I find myself extremely skeptical that OTA broadcast can possibly make better use of scarce bandwidth than can the robustly innovative users of the ISM band. This especially so given that high-bandwidth video, for all but time-critical applications, is something USPS can kick virtually any data link's ass at, and is available across the country for peanuts. Obviously, at some point, "public interest" is basically a polite way of saying "what I think people should want", and ends up in a simple clash of tastes; but I think that the occupants of the miserable little ISM slice have more than proven their worthiness of more and better spectrum...
The only exception that I could think of(though I don't know if Libya has tried it) might be the use of RF decoys to draw the (extremely expensive) firepower of the attacking air forces away from more valuable targets.
If you skip all the sophistication required to make any use of the return signal, and just focus on pumping out the microwaves, you could probably knock something together that looks enough like an actual radar system(particularly a mobile one, since the adversary couldn't discount it based on satellite data, as they could a static installation) to require an airstrike at low cost and with minimal technical sophistication.
As noted, I haven't heard of Libya doing this; but it might be a reasonably sensible strategy for somebody in their position, where they just don't have the anti-aircraft capacity to engage the attacking aircraft in any serious way: the fakes would help absorb some percentage of the damage at very low cost, and help keep enemy aircraft flying around in locations where dumb AA fire and/or short-range-guidance-only SAMs might hit some with sufficient luck... Anything that they actually care about, though, is presumably going to stay very quiet and pretend that it isn't home.
Some people's brains shut down the moment their tribe goes to war against the evil subhumans from the tribe across the hill. I think that that basically explains that vein of criticism.
Libya's air defense systems have a strong 'Red and Retro' flavor to them; but they have a reasonable number of airbases and SAM sites. Unless the ongoing fighting has left those in total shambles, they almost certainly have listening capabilities superior to the hobbyist level(if only because autocratic armed forces tend to encounter less hassle with neighbors and zoning when putting up antennas) and probably some active radar as well. It isn't clear that they have the capability to hit much of the more modern force attacking them; but they aren't exactly cowering in primitive awe because they don't know what a radio receiver is.
You old-timers probably also remember the web back when it was computationally uneconomic for your ISP and an unknown number of its commercial and/or three-letter buddies to data-mine your every click... Why, back in your day, there probably weren't even massive multinational botnets bouncing zero-days off every likely-looking bit of code in your system.
What we really need is a second flavor of SSL cert: Signed certs offer some protection against MITM(within the limits of the competence and/or benevolence of the surprisingly large number of entities that your browser trusts...); but are costly.
Self-signed give you the crypto goodness; but all default browsers look at you like you've just axe-murdered your mother if you try to enter a site that presents one; because anybody can generate a cert for any domain.
Ideally, there would be something like a "stability cert": Like a self-sign, it wouldn't actually represent any assurance that you are anybody in particular; but you would, upon generating it, upload it to one or more trusted repositories which would datestamp it. By that means, a visitor to your domain couldn't tell who "you" are; but they could determine whether or not "you" is the same entity that they were yesterday, or a likely MITM...
Rather like a cryptographic variant of usernames on forums like this one. My username, like a self-signed cert, is attested to by nobody, and provides no trustworthy information about my real identity. However, if a post appears "by fuzzyfuzzyfungus" you know that whoever wrote it is the possessor of the same login credentials as whoever posted previously under that name.
For many purposes, this would arguably be as good, and cheaper, than the full SSL-cert-attested-to-by-Verisign arrangement. When dealing with a bank or something, it matters that you are, in fact, dealing with Bank of America Inc. When reading Joe Bloggs' Blog, knowing that 'Joe Bloggs' is actually John Smith of 123 Centerville, NH is unhelpful and definitely not worth the cert money. Knowing that he is the same 'Joe Bloggs' has operated that site since its opening is helpful, and would be cheaper.
I suspect that some are merely clueless, and some are mostly concerned with preventing persistent "lockout" type attacks at the lowest possible cost. You'll notice, for instance, that most sites that authenticate over HTTPS, then drop back to HTTP, go back to HTTPS and demand the original password if you try to do things like change the password(and possibly certain other operations considered sensitive), even if you have the session ID.
Obviously, that does nothing to prevent assorted public-wifi hilarity; but it makes it comparatively difficult(difficult enough that social engineering or just guessing that the password is 'password123' because they always are is easier) to permanently compromise the account and generate a customer support/being flagged as a spam host cost problem.
Webmasters who think that this is actually good security are fools. Webmasters who think that it blocks a certain class of especially costly attacks, while being much cheaper than full HTTPS, are entirely correct. And, given how little one pays for access to many sites that do this, they probably don't care too much unless something attracts mainstream attention *cough*firesheep*cough*...