I, for one, believe that the protection of our precious children from this terrible gateway drug requires firm action:
Sale of "listening paraphernalia" to those under the age of 21, or procurement of the same for those under 21 by those over, must be forbidden.
All devices, such as personal computers, that have undeniable legitimate uses, but are at risk of misuse, must have the SNR of any audio-frequency outputs capped at a value that will discourage their misuse. Electronic signal generators and DACs in the 20-20,000Hz range shall be sold only to licensed electrical engineers, with appropriate permits.
Any deliberate misuse of legal low-fidelity audio-frequency hardware in the production of "industrial" "electroglitch" or "ambient electronica" shall be a felony punishable under the Analog Waveforms Act.
The FAA shall have 180 days to draft suitable exemptions under which microphone equipped blimps, zeppelins, and gliders may be able to freely patrol our skies and hunt down illicit "jam sessions" and recording operations.
The production and importation of cheap, potent, illicit audio devices from the pacific rim shall be addressed by more aggressive customs controls, the training of op-amp sniffing dogs, and "Plan Taiwan": a collaboration between American and Taiwanese investigative and security forces to root out and destroy illicit "amp fabs" and consumer-electronics assembly labs.
In deference to tradition, the sentence for possessing an audio-device with proletarian associations, such as a "tape player" or "ghetto blaster", shall be substantially stiffer than that for possessing an overpriced Bose system.
True, I should have been more specific: You can write in one of the.Net languages and use those libraries and use available tools to convert your work to a binary that will work on an iPhone.
If you try to use the CIL representation, which will work in other CLR supporting systems, you will get exactly nothing. My thinking in the above post was that(if it came to that, and MS's own platform didn't go anywhere), they could probably tap the increasing number of line-of-business applications being written as.Net CIL by offering a CLR implementation for license to makers of Android/Meego/whoever wins the "not Apple" wars.
The money wouldn't be as juicy as their own mobile OS; but it would certainly be better than nothing, and leverage their existing strength in enterprise software and development tools.
Nevertheless, he manages it. Humans aren't exactly know for their long memories or logical consistency.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that he as the "classical robber baron" thing going on, in an age where that is largely extinct. Back in the robber baron days, you had highly recognizable individuals who piled up huge fortunes by dubiously ethical/legal means(monopoly power on a scale that actually made the Sherman antitrust act popular, shooting strikers, that sort of thing); but then spent a pretty substantial chunk of it on pieces of civic infrastructure with their name on them.
Today, when so many fortunes are either in the hands of people who have nothing more than their yacht named after them, or in the hands of largely opaque capital management groups that studiously avoid having any recognizable personalities whatsoever, classical robber-baronism is practically charming...
There are some truly hardcore protestants who are dead serious about the Pope being a 6-armed antichrist-whore-of-babylon; enough to say so in public(and a fair slice of the evangelical protestant leadership will confirm, if not shout from the rooftops, that Catholicism is a false faith); but day-to-day, the cynical(but effective) narrative of "Our Judeo-Christian heritage" actually holds a lot of sway.
Pragmatically speaking, the less conservative a protestant or catholic is, the less likely they are to worry about their doctrinal differences and just have a vague respect for religious authority figures of most stripes. The more conservative they are, the more likely it is that they hate the guts of one another's theology; but the more likely it is that they, pragmatically, recognize that they share a common cause in ending abortion, putting women and homos in their place, fighting liberalism and secularism, and so forth. In practice, this means that they are generally willing to bury the hatchet on things like "transubstantiation or consubstantiation" until they've finished with abolishing modernity. Heck, in their observer capacity at the UN, the Vatican was even willing to overlook Muslim polygamy(for which spousal benefits are available, for UN employees), and lobby with the OIC against the same benefits being extended to homosexual dyadic relationships...)
Thus, I would expect that the Pope, by virtue of the cool hat and invisible friend, would enjoy some respect from all but fire-breathing uber-protestants and smirking atheists. The only thing that has bumped him down the rankings this time is that whole "decades of covering up the repeated rape of countless children" thing.
That is why they added a plugin architecture and an app store:
As long as a given saint or ritual has been approved by the Vatican for compatibility with the main codebase, any catholic individual or institution is free to snap it in to his/her/its devotional architecture, with each addition delivering its own fresh and exciting mixture of content, sightseeing destinations, and spiritual services.
(and, in practice, their is fairly broad acceptance of those catholics who, looking for a leaner, less resource-hungry, faith, use 'cLite' or similar tools to strip theoretically-required-but-architecturally-optional modules out of the base install.)
Why the inherent veneration of anybody whose followers can draw a halo around their heads?
The Dali Lama, while he certainly strikes me as a nice, chill kind of guy, totally wouldn't mind having some people like him in the neighborhood, is a living PR machine on a scale that makes any president look like a piker: "Hey little kid, we've determined, by the traditions handed down through centuries of theocratic feudalism, that you are the reincarnated Lama." "Ok, so, I guess that I get to live in exile and jet-set around making serene and innoffensive to everyone except the Chinese statements about freedom and human dignity and stuff, with somebody else picking up the bill?" "Yeah, pretty much. As long as you aren't a total prick about it, you'll come out smelling like roses."
And the Pope? Our current bishop of Rome is, undoubtedly, a smart guy; but he is a pure reactionary water-carrier(and probable un-indicted criminal for his work during his 'congregation for the doctrine of the faith' days) for an organization that freely veers between covering up criminality and giving terrible health and family planning advice to desperately poor people. For fun, he occasionally appears in a cloth-of-gold robe on the steps of his gigantic marble live-in-museum-of-priceless-art to give a talk on how charity is a virtue and money-hungry atheism is a scourge upon the world.
I am deeply under-impressed with our current president, as I was sort of hoping to move away from our policies of unending foreign adventurism and unrestrained abuses by ever-multiplying clandestine agencies; but the idea that the Dali Lama or Pope deserve much in the way of respect and esteem seems pretty dodgy.
Given that ol' Bill has both the philanthropic bleedinghearts and the sociopathic profit Uber Alles demographic absolutely sewn up, I'm surprised he didn't rank higher...
Once you take those two slices out of the American population, what've you got left, the 30-odd% of total Jesus freaks?
I would be somewhat surprised if we saw "stock" linux ARM-books ship in any quantity, given how fast Linux netbooks seem to have withered(though plenty of the ones that ship with Windows do just fine with linux, once loaded).
On the other hand, if it runs Android and isn't Tivoized or proprietary-blobbed all to hell, it's pretty much ready to run stock linux in the usual sense. I assume that, if only for the sake of attempted differentation, somebody is going to throw an android tablet with a folding keyboard attached out there...
I suspect that, with the right motivation, an NT-cored OS can get well down into the target range(after all, the fancy workstations that NT used to run on are now bettered by the higher end smartphones). To replace CE for all but hard real time applications, that might even be the correct course of action.
I suspect that their problem is more with third party(and, for that matter, a lot of first party) software. The Windows software ecosystem, and the typical 'use case' set of Windows software, hasn't run well in under a GB of RAM(and 1024x768 with a mouse) in a while. Twisting third party and Office Department arms on that subject is going to be the real trick.
It would require comparatively radical changes(and possibly a cut to precious, precious margins); but it seems to me that both companies have a potential major asset that they could rely on in this "Post-PC" environment:
For intel's part, their chip designs at the low-power end are mediocre and not as profitable as their Xeons and soak-the-gamers parts. However, their fabs are among the best. Were they to announce that some lucky ARM SoC maker could(for a large pile of quite public cold cash and some quiet restrictions designed to keep their product in tablets and away from Intel's bread and butter) be the only one in the industry to be fabbing their otherwise pedestrian wares on one of the smallest, lowest-power processes in the industry... Doing this would, of course, pretty much scotch their attempts to compete in the area with Atom parts, since their plan has been to die-shrink those until they can compete, so offering the competition matching die-shrinks means that that will take forever; but offering the competition die-shrinks will mean a profit per tablet/phone/whatever now, not in "just a few quarters from now, when cargo pants come back into style".
For Microsoft's part, it remains to be seen how well "Windows Phone 7" will end up doing; but, if nothing else, they have.NET/Silverlight/XNA, which is theoretically cross platform/cross architecture, and(while Apple would never touch that with somebody else's 10 foot pole), a few modifications would produce something that could be licenced to makers of Android gear that would allow it to run(nearly unmodified).NET/Silverlight/XNA applications, produced in quantity by MS's generally well regarded developer tools. Not their preferred solution, of course, since selling OSes is more lucrative than selling runtimes(Hey Adobe, how's that "flash lite" licensing revenue working out for you?); but nothing in the relevant licenses would forbid the production of "Android for Enterprise", which takes a more or less stock build of Android; but has support for CLR software and a few interface layers to the android UI/notifications/address book. They've made money selling application software to Mac users for years, so this wouldn't be the world's most shocking departure, if Windows on tablet/phone doesn't really pan out...
Your proposed reductio ad absurdem is actually a pretty decent example: The two are not fundamentally and utterly different, both cellphones and landlines are capable of making voice calls, just as both "cyberwar" and conventional war are ways of applying pressure to foreigners you don't like; but the broad similarities obscure a vast number of salient differences:
Your old-school landline was associated with a place, in that its area code probably actually meant something, it was physically terminated in a given building(which, if a residence, quite likely had more occupants than phone lines). Also, billing may well have drawn a distinction between "local" and "long distance". It was further localized in that, unless specifically unlisted, it would be printed in the local telephone directory.
Your cellphone, by contrast, is more typically connected with a person. Odds are that its area code is nearly arbitrary, it is listed in no phone books, and its billing is flat at least within an entire country, if not more broadly. It is not at all uncommon for a household to have a cell per person, and, since there is no physical hookup, even people without addresses commonly have them.
There are also the broader social changes: social event organization certainly isn't the same if you can only call somebody when you are both in a building with a phone. Just ask an old person about the rise of the spontaneous "eh, we'll figure it out as we go and text you" model of social planning. That simply didn't work with the old material culture. Never mind the(less notable in the wealthy west; but dramatic among the poor here and abroad) change from "you basically can't get a line run and provisioned for less than $$ a month; but the calls cost essentially nothing" to "calls cost $/minute; but you can literally get a phone and some starter minutes at any corner store for 15-20bucks".
Also, of course, we have the fact that landline phones work very well as dumb extensions of the network. The older ones are even powered by it. Thus, the landline world has seen an almost complete dichotomy: phones, which have remained dumb as bricks, with the exception of message machines, and modem-connected computers, which are wholly free of telco control and treat the network as a dumb pipe. Cellphones, on the other hand, have to be pretty sophisticated devices just to work, so they started sprouting additional features early; but were always much more creatures of the carriers. Hence the continuing differences between the evolution of the "smartphone" and the evolution of internet-connected devices with their heritage in modem-linked PCs.
I don't wish to claim that yours is precisely analogous to "war" vs. "cyberwar"; but I would very much claim that it does demonstrate the sort of important changes that an apparently simple switch can hide. My contention would be that somebody trying to approach a "cyberwar" based on the "war" part would be roughly like somebody trying to use a bleeding-edge smartphone by looking things up in the phone book and attempting to rotary dial the touch screen.
That is why Apple is impressive: anybody can(and many do) kick out press releases about whatever humdrum marchitecture or rebranding initiative they are vomiting on the public today; but Apple has an RDF so strong that there is an entire industry of "analyst" hacks who do that for them, entirely voluntarily...
Did anything about my comment suggest that either espionage or sabotage would not see updates to electronic means? Historically, those two have always closely followed the material culture of their targets, and I see no reason why this will be any different. If anything, that is more or less why "cyberwar" is such a gapingly stupid analogy: "cyber" activity is, to the degree it resembles any prior activity, espionage and sabotage much more than warfare.
Is that the term "cyberwar" is pretty stupid. In fact, it isn't just stupid, it is so misleading(intentionally or otherwise) that letting it slip into your lexicon makes you dumber.
"war" carries with it a strong series of historical associations, lessons learned, rules of thumb, rules, likelihoods, etc. Virtually none of them really map all that well into the area of computer security. If you use the term "cyberwar", though, you are implicitly trying to mash those (comfortingly familiar) concepts into a badly-fitting new environment. In a much less serious vein, this is why most movies that feature a "hacking" sequence usually make hacking look like beating a video game- because video games are "computery"; but they work very hard to simulate familiar rules.
Electronic attacks are a costly problem and, if some idiot connects the wrong control systems to the internet, or a laptop to the wrong control systems, potentially a dangerous one; but trying to map them into the historical concepts of "war" just doesn't work very well.
My thinking was that, in any given area, there are going to be multiple players on multiple distinct bands of spectrum. The overall supply of usable RF is, indeed, pretty much a hard cap; but there are different players with different slices(and different bands propagate differently, in addition to any clever directional antenna widgetry...)
Overall specrum is, indeed, a lousy Supply variable; but with devices that have support for multiple bands(which seems to be the trend) moving between usable bands based on "supply" at each band seems plausible enough.
You really have to hand it to Apple: Very few other companies garner headlines for what amounts to "Pre-release software build indicates that version N+1 of product X will incorporate version N+1 of the assorted off-the-shelf hardware that went into version N".
Seriously. There is a reasonably limited set of companies with performance-oriented ARM SoC designs. There is a similarly fairly limited set of GPU options for power constrained scenarios. Shockingly enough, Apple(just like everybody else) is pretty much going to combine the most recent one of each that they can shoehorn into their design and production process and go from there.
In other news, the next Mac Pro will probably have a newly released Xeon in it...
It seems like a huge number of potentially interesting technical solutions have a messy social problem sitting in their way.
In wonder if that is the real reason why engineers are statistically more likely to be driven to extremism? All those elegant systems, and models, and protocols, being sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value by besuited simians...
I'm guessing that it would go over about as well as poor old "cablecard", which was largely murdered in the cradle despite being far less radical.(Or, for that matter, if SIM unlocking is too scary for them, this idea would have them shitting bricks, since it amounts to phones that automatically swap SIMs every second or so, depending on price...)
In theory, though, there would be nothing preventing "traditional" style cellphone contracts(other than cheaper competition potentially making them foolish).
I deliberately modeled the notion on that of electronic market trading, in which context a traditional cell contract would be, in essence, a "minutes/SMS/data option contract". Instead of buying my minutes at the market price where and when I need them, I purchase an "option" on X minutes, Y SMSes and Z megabytes to be delivered in the following month, at a set rate(presumably for a discount over the expected spot prices).
Again, having to have a finance degree just to make a phone call won't really appeal to most people, so I would invoke the "sane defaults" notion and hope for the best; but the explicit parallels to common financial instruments, along with automated transaction engines, open up some fascinating possibilities for enthusiasts(as well as, in theory, helping networks cope with congestion: heavily congested regions would be more expensive for spot-price users, encouraging them to moderate usage; but they would also be most profitable for local wifi operators, temporary telco cell trucks, etc. to set up shop...)
Iridium was a total clusterfuck for Motorola, who basically ended up paying many of the capital costs and then having to write off the whole thing.
On the other hand, the (definitely in no way whatsoever US clandestine services connected, just like everybody else in McLean, Virginia...) group of private investors who snapped up a fully functional constellation for $25 million have been doing just fine with it.
The moral of the story seems to be that there is absolutely no way that satellite phones can(in the face of cheap terrestrial calls) justify their startup costs; but if some sucker eats those for you in bankruptcy, it is a perfectly viable business....
P2P would(barring some very clever design or a focus more or less exclusively on walkie-talkie use cases) likely be a poor candidate for cell phone use(lousy latency, uncertain availability, battery life of nodes...) P2P works pretty well for cheap transfers of big files; but somewhat less well for low-bandwidth, but latency sensitive, stuff.
The system that I would like to see would be a radically free market(and thus, likely never to be seen in the cellular arena) system of phones that electronically bid for resources in real time, from carriers within range who dynamically compete for customers in real time.
Consider a basic example: I have a cellphone with a GSM module that can see two or three carriers' towers, and a wifi module that can detect a number of access points. I open my address book, or start typing in a number. Detecting that I am going to be making a call, my phone checks the rate information being broadcast from the wireless links visible to it: it then silently routes the call out through whichever offers the lowest rate. In order to prevent surprises, the user could, of course, set "absolute ceiling", "manual verify", and "warn but continue" price thresholds within their phone's bidding engine. Towers, for their part, could dynamically adjust prices, down to the operator's set floor, in order to keep themselves busy but not over-saturated.
Data would be handled in a similar manner: cell towers and wifi access points could broadcast their willingness to provide, and rate(at home, of course, your router would treat you as a special case of free access, to ensure that you always used the bandwidth you had already paid for, and applications requiring data could choose based on price.
Since most people would not want to trouble themselves with the details, phones would, ideally, ship with some sensible defaults and a few heuristic rules(ie. if I almost always make long calls to contact X, and very short ones to contact Y, select a carrier for contact X based on lowest expected price for a long call, and select a carrier for contact Y based on lowest expected price for a short call). For those who did wish to dig deep and twiddle all the knobs, the tools for expressing and solving optimization problems in multiple constraints to computer systems are not exactly terra incognita. The real propellerheads could have their handsets algorithmically trading off between lower and higher power-requirement connections based on batterly life and location/time based estimates of next charge, and whatever other variables they felt like including...
It really depends on how broadly you draw the term "prior art".
Various dubiously scientific(but, by luck or judgement, approximately correct) application of the principle of vaccination can be found going back a significant way. The canonical western example is Jenner's 1769 use of cowpox, which conveniently happens to be close enough to smallpox to generate immunity; but not close enough to be, well, smallpox. I'm fairly sure that there are various earlier examples of similar stuff that didn't get "textbookized" quite as thoroughly; but I'm not sure offhand. More sophisticated and systematic techniques for artificial attenuation of diseases that don't have convenient natural counterparts came later; but are still not news(though specific advances in that art may well be, as the requirements vary by organism...)
As for the notion of using damaged individuals to destroy or modify wild populations, the canonical starting point is probably Knipling and Bushland's 1958 development of the sterile insect technique. This one works on a number of insects who mate once, then lay their eggs. You saturate the environment with sterile(usually irradiated) males, and the females that they mate with lay unfertilized eggs. Population crash. The eradication of the screwworm by the US Department of Agriculture from the entire southern and south-western United States was its big debut. For reasons of efficiency, they extended the program all the way to Panama, which offers a convenient choke-point where control continues to this day.
However, those are fairly broad-brush "prior art", and the patent system generally doesn't work like that. Either they fucked up, or MS is patenting(as numerous other entities have) one of the zillions of little tweaks, refinements, and less 'heroic-theory-of-discovery'-friendly advances in medicine and parasite control.
Broad-brush, their proposal doesn't sound wildly novel; but with biology, the devil is in the details(when you are lucky. If you aren't lucky, the devil is in the details of the symbiotic gastrointestinal flora of the devil in the details...)
The FCC doesn't actually do much to stop genuinely bad actors(unless they are flagrant and high-powered enough to be worth triangulating and busting). They do a reasonably decent job of making sure that devices in the legitimate supply chain do more or less what they say on the tin, in terms of RF havoc.
They don't do much at all about super-dodgy Chinese video-blasters, or dumb kids who manage to get the 1Kw magnetron and drive circuit out of a microwave without electrocuting themselves(incidentally, unless you know exactly what you are doing. Don't.)
I assume that, since mobile devices generally lean on some sort of hardware acceleration(and generally less versatile acceleration than GPUs on the PC side, where a simple driver update can probably change what most of the newer chipsets are capable of...), they do nothing for the moment. Further, since the issue with H.264 has always been with patent licensing, not implementation copyright licensing, they can presumably just kick the issue to the OEMs: "Sure, you are welcome to include H.264 support, if you or your chipset vendor have secured the appropriate patent stuff, no business of ours..." Given the terms of the Android licensing, they can't stop OEMs from catering to whatever web video formats they want, nor can they rely on anything but time to flush out older handsets and set top boxes and so forth and introduce new ones.
I suspect, though, that whatever SoC is at the heart of the next "Google's-bestest-Android-version-launch-buddy's-unlocked-flagship-device" will do hardware WebM decode...
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I, for one, believe that the protection of our precious children from this terrible gateway drug requires firm action:
Sale of "listening paraphernalia" to those under the age of 21, or procurement of the same for those under 21 by those over, must be forbidden.
All devices, such as personal computers, that have undeniable legitimate uses, but are at risk of misuse, must have the SNR of any audio-frequency outputs capped at a value that will discourage their misuse. Electronic signal generators and DACs in the 20-20,000Hz range shall be sold only to licensed electrical engineers, with appropriate permits.
Any deliberate misuse of legal low-fidelity audio-frequency hardware in the production of "industrial" "electroglitch" or "ambient electronica" shall be a felony punishable under the Analog Waveforms Act.
The FAA shall have 180 days to draft suitable exemptions under which microphone equipped blimps, zeppelins, and gliders may be able to freely patrol our skies and hunt down illicit "jam sessions" and recording operations.
The production and importation of cheap, potent, illicit audio devices from the pacific rim shall be addressed by more aggressive customs controls, the training of op-amp sniffing dogs, and "Plan Taiwan": a collaboration between American and Taiwanese investigative and security forces to root out and destroy illicit "amp fabs" and consumer-electronics assembly labs.
In deference to tradition, the sentence for possessing an audio-device with proletarian associations, such as a "tape player" or "ghetto blaster", shall be substantially stiffer than that for possessing an overpriced Bose system.
True, I should have been more specific: You can write in one of the .Net languages and use those libraries and use available tools to convert your work to a binary that will work on an iPhone.
.Net CIL by offering a CLR implementation for license to makers of Android/Meego/whoever wins the "not Apple" wars.
If you try to use the CIL representation, which will work in other CLR supporting systems, you will get exactly nothing. My thinking in the above post was that(if it came to that, and MS's own platform didn't go anywhere), they could probably tap the increasing number of line-of-business applications being written as
The money wouldn't be as juicy as their own mobile OS; but it would certainly be better than nothing, and leverage their existing strength in enterprise software and development tools.
Nevertheless, he manages it. Humans aren't exactly know for their long memories or logical consistency.
I suspect it has to do with the fact that he as the "classical robber baron" thing going on, in an age where that is largely extinct. Back in the robber baron days, you had highly recognizable individuals who piled up huge fortunes by dubiously ethical/legal means(monopoly power on a scale that actually made the Sherman antitrust act popular, shooting strikers, that sort of thing); but then spent a pretty substantial chunk of it on pieces of civic infrastructure with their name on them.
Today, when so many fortunes are either in the hands of people who have nothing more than their yacht named after them, or in the hands of largely opaque capital management groups that studiously avoid having any recognizable personalities whatsoever, classical robber-baronism is practically charming...
There are some truly hardcore protestants who are dead serious about the Pope being a 6-armed antichrist-whore-of-babylon; enough to say so in public(and a fair slice of the evangelical protestant leadership will confirm, if not shout from the rooftops, that Catholicism is a false faith); but day-to-day, the cynical(but effective) narrative of "Our Judeo-Christian heritage" actually holds a lot of sway.
Pragmatically speaking, the less conservative a protestant or catholic is, the less likely they are to worry about their doctrinal differences and just have a vague respect for religious authority figures of most stripes. The more conservative they are, the more likely it is that they hate the guts of one another's theology; but the more likely it is that they, pragmatically, recognize that they share a common cause in ending abortion, putting women and homos in their place, fighting liberalism and secularism, and so forth. In practice, this means that they are generally willing to bury the hatchet on things like "transubstantiation or consubstantiation" until they've finished with abolishing modernity. Heck, in their observer capacity at the UN, the Vatican was even willing to overlook Muslim polygamy(for which spousal benefits are available, for UN employees), and lobby with the OIC against the same benefits being extended to homosexual dyadic relationships...)
Thus, I would expect that the Pope, by virtue of the cool hat and invisible friend, would enjoy some respect from all but fire-breathing uber-protestants and smirking atheists. The only thing that has bumped him down the rankings this time is that whole "decades of covering up the repeated rape of countless children" thing.
That is why they added a plugin architecture and an app store:
As long as a given saint or ritual has been approved by the Vatican for compatibility with the main codebase, any catholic individual or institution is free to snap it in to his/her/its devotional architecture, with each addition delivering its own fresh and exciting mixture of content, sightseeing destinations, and spiritual services.
(and, in practice, their is fairly broad acceptance of those catholics who, looking for a leaner, less resource-hungry, faith, use 'cLite' or similar tools to strip theoretically-required-but-architecturally-optional modules out of the base install.)
Why the inherent veneration of anybody whose followers can draw a halo around their heads?
The Dali Lama, while he certainly strikes me as a nice, chill kind of guy, totally wouldn't mind having some people like him in the neighborhood, is a living PR machine on a scale that makes any president look like a piker: "Hey little kid, we've determined, by the traditions handed down through centuries of theocratic feudalism, that you are the reincarnated Lama." "Ok, so, I guess that I get to live in exile and jet-set around making serene and innoffensive to everyone except the Chinese statements about freedom and human dignity and stuff, with somebody else picking up the bill?" "Yeah, pretty much. As long as you aren't a total prick about it, you'll come out smelling like roses."
And the Pope? Our current bishop of Rome is, undoubtedly, a smart guy; but he is a pure reactionary water-carrier(and probable un-indicted criminal for his work during his 'congregation for the doctrine of the faith' days) for an organization that freely veers between covering up criminality and giving terrible health and family planning advice to desperately poor people. For fun, he occasionally appears in a cloth-of-gold robe on the steps of his gigantic marble live-in-museum-of-priceless-art to give a talk on how charity is a virtue and money-hungry atheism is a scourge upon the world.
I am deeply under-impressed with our current president, as I was sort of hoping to move away from our policies of unending foreign adventurism and unrestrained abuses by ever-multiplying clandestine agencies; but the idea that the Dali Lama or Pope deserve much in the way of respect and esteem seems pretty dodgy.
Given that ol' Bill has both the philanthropic bleedinghearts and the sociopathic profit Uber Alles demographic absolutely sewn up, I'm surprised he didn't rank higher...
Once you take those two slices out of the American population, what've you got left, the 30-odd% of total Jesus freaks?
Hey, never underestimate the power of "Has never covered up a massive multinational paedophilia ring" on your CV...
I would be somewhat surprised if we saw "stock" linux ARM-books ship in any quantity, given how fast Linux netbooks seem to have withered(though plenty of the ones that ship with Windows do just fine with linux, once loaded).
On the other hand, if it runs Android and isn't Tivoized or proprietary-blobbed all to hell, it's pretty much ready to run stock linux in the usual sense. I assume that, if only for the sake of attempted differentation, somebody is going to throw an android tablet with a folding keyboard attached out there...
I suspect that, with the right motivation, an NT-cored OS can get well down into the target range(after all, the fancy workstations that NT used to run on are now bettered by the higher end smartphones). To replace CE for all but hard real time applications, that might even be the correct course of action.
I suspect that their problem is more with third party(and, for that matter, a lot of first party) software. The Windows software ecosystem, and the typical 'use case' set of Windows software, hasn't run well in under a GB of RAM(and 1024x768 with a mouse) in a while. Twisting third party and Office Department arms on that subject is going to be the real trick.
It would require comparatively radical changes(and possibly a cut to precious, precious margins); but it seems to me that both companies have a potential major asset that they could rely on in this "Post-PC" environment:
.NET/Silverlight/XNA, which is theoretically cross platform/cross architecture, and(while Apple would never touch that with somebody else's 10 foot pole), a few modifications would produce something that could be licenced to makers of Android gear that would allow it to run(nearly unmodified) .NET/Silverlight/XNA applications, produced in quantity by MS's generally well regarded developer tools. Not their preferred solution, of course, since selling OSes is more lucrative than selling runtimes(Hey Adobe, how's that "flash lite" licensing revenue working out for you?); but nothing in the relevant licenses would forbid the production of "Android for Enterprise", which takes a more or less stock build of Android; but has support for CLR software and a few interface layers to the android UI/notifications/address book. They've made money selling application software to Mac users for years, so this wouldn't be the world's most shocking departure, if Windows on tablet/phone doesn't really pan out...
For intel's part, their chip designs at the low-power end are mediocre and not as profitable as their Xeons and soak-the-gamers parts. However, their fabs are among the best. Were they to announce that some lucky ARM SoC maker could(for a large pile of quite public cold cash and some quiet restrictions designed to keep their product in tablets and away from Intel's bread and butter) be the only one in the industry to be fabbing their otherwise pedestrian wares on one of the smallest, lowest-power processes in the industry... Doing this would, of course, pretty much scotch their attempts to compete in the area with Atom parts, since their plan has been to die-shrink those until they can compete, so offering the competition matching die-shrinks means that that will take forever; but offering the competition die-shrinks will mean a profit per tablet/phone/whatever now, not in "just a few quarters from now, when cargo pants come back into style".
For Microsoft's part, it remains to be seen how well "Windows Phone 7" will end up doing; but, if nothing else, they have
Your proposed reductio ad absurdem is actually a pretty decent example: The two are not fundamentally and utterly different, both cellphones and landlines are capable of making voice calls, just as both "cyberwar" and conventional war are ways of applying pressure to foreigners you don't like; but the broad similarities obscure a vast number of salient differences:
Your old-school landline was associated with a place, in that its area code probably actually meant something, it was physically terminated in a given building(which, if a residence, quite likely had more occupants than phone lines). Also, billing may well have drawn a distinction between "local" and "long distance". It was further localized in that, unless specifically unlisted, it would be printed in the local telephone directory.
Your cellphone, by contrast, is more typically connected with a person. Odds are that its area code is nearly arbitrary, it is listed in no phone books, and its billing is flat at least within an entire country, if not more broadly. It is not at all uncommon for a household to have a cell per person, and, since there is no physical hookup, even people without addresses commonly have them.
There are also the broader social changes: social event organization certainly isn't the same if you can only call somebody when you are both in a building with a phone. Just ask an old person about the rise of the spontaneous "eh, we'll figure it out as we go and text you" model of social planning. That simply didn't work with the old material culture. Never mind the(less notable in the wealthy west; but dramatic among the poor here and abroad) change from "you basically can't get a line run and provisioned for less than $$ a month; but the calls cost essentially nothing" to "calls cost $/minute; but you can literally get a phone and some starter minutes at any corner store for 15-20bucks".
Also, of course, we have the fact that landline phones work very well as dumb extensions of the network. The older ones are even powered by it. Thus, the landline world has seen an almost complete dichotomy: phones, which have remained dumb as bricks, with the exception of message machines, and modem-connected computers, which are wholly free of telco control and treat the network as a dumb pipe. Cellphones, on the other hand, have to be pretty sophisticated devices just to work, so they started sprouting additional features early; but were always much more creatures of the carriers. Hence the continuing differences between the evolution of the "smartphone" and the evolution of internet-connected devices with their heritage in modem-linked PCs.
I don't wish to claim that yours is precisely analogous to "war" vs. "cyberwar"; but I would very much claim that it does demonstrate the sort of important changes that an apparently simple switch can hide. My contention would be that somebody trying to approach a "cyberwar" based on the "war" part would be roughly like somebody trying to use a bleeding-edge smartphone by looking things up in the phone book and attempting to rotary dial the touch screen.
That is why Apple is impressive: anybody can(and many do) kick out press releases about whatever humdrum marchitecture or rebranding initiative they are vomiting on the public today; but Apple has an RDF so strong that there is an entire industry of "analyst" hacks who do that for them, entirely voluntarily...
Did anything about my comment suggest that either espionage or sabotage would not see updates to electronic means? Historically, those two have always closely followed the material culture of their targets, and I see no reason why this will be any different. If anything, that is more or less why "cyberwar" is such a gapingly stupid analogy: "cyber" activity is, to the degree it resembles any prior activity, espionage and sabotage much more than warfare.
Is that the term "cyberwar" is pretty stupid. In fact, it isn't just stupid, it is so misleading(intentionally or otherwise) that letting it slip into your lexicon makes you dumber.
"war" carries with it a strong series of historical associations, lessons learned, rules of thumb, rules, likelihoods, etc. Virtually none of them really map all that well into the area of computer security. If you use the term "cyberwar", though, you are implicitly trying to mash those (comfortingly familiar) concepts into a badly-fitting new environment. In a much less serious vein, this is why most movies that feature a "hacking" sequence usually make hacking look like beating a video game- because video games are "computery"; but they work very hard to simulate familiar rules.
Electronic attacks are a costly problem and, if some idiot connects the wrong control systems to the internet, or a laptop to the wrong control systems, potentially a dangerous one; but trying to map them into the historical concepts of "war" just doesn't work very well.
My thinking was that, in any given area, there are going to be multiple players on multiple distinct bands of spectrum. The overall supply of usable RF is, indeed, pretty much a hard cap; but there are different players with different slices(and different bands propagate differently, in addition to any clever directional antenna widgetry...)
Overall specrum is, indeed, a lousy Supply variable; but with devices that have support for multiple bands(which seems to be the trend) moving between usable bands based on "supply" at each band seems plausible enough.
You really have to hand it to Apple: Very few other companies garner headlines for what amounts to "Pre-release software build indicates that version N+1 of product X will incorporate version N+1 of the assorted off-the-shelf hardware that went into version N".
Seriously. There is a reasonably limited set of companies with performance-oriented ARM SoC designs. There is a similarly fairly limited set of GPU options for power constrained scenarios. Shockingly enough, Apple(just like everybody else) is pretty much going to combine the most recent one of each that they can shoehorn into their design and production process and go from there.
In other news, the next Mac Pro will probably have a newly released Xeon in it...
It seems like a huge number of potentially interesting technical solutions have a messy social problem sitting in their way.
In wonder if that is the real reason why engineers are statistically more likely to be driven to extremism? All those elegant systems, and models, and protocols, being sacrificed on the altar of shareholder value by besuited simians...
I'm guessing that it would go over about as well as poor old "cablecard", which was largely murdered in the cradle despite being far less radical.(Or, for that matter, if SIM unlocking is too scary for them, this idea would have them shitting bricks, since it amounts to phones that automatically swap SIMs every second or so, depending on price...)
In theory, though, there would be nothing preventing "traditional" style cellphone contracts(other than cheaper competition potentially making them foolish).
I deliberately modeled the notion on that of electronic market trading, in which context a traditional cell contract would be, in essence, a "minutes/SMS/data option contract". Instead of buying my minutes at the market price where and when I need them, I purchase an "option" on X minutes, Y SMSes and Z megabytes to be delivered in the following month, at a set rate(presumably for a discount over the expected spot prices).
Again, having to have a finance degree just to make a phone call won't really appeal to most people, so I would invoke the "sane defaults" notion and hope for the best; but the explicit parallels to common financial instruments, along with automated transaction engines, open up some fascinating possibilities for enthusiasts(as well as, in theory, helping networks cope with congestion: heavily congested regions would be more expensive for spot-price users, encouraging them to moderate usage; but they would also be most profitable for local wifi operators, temporary telco cell trucks, etc. to set up shop...)
Iridium was a total clusterfuck for Motorola, who basically ended up paying many of the capital costs and then having to write off the whole thing.
On the other hand, the (definitely in no way whatsoever US clandestine services connected, just like everybody else in McLean, Virginia...) group of private investors who snapped up a fully functional constellation for $25 million have been doing just fine with it.
The moral of the story seems to be that there is absolutely no way that satellite phones can(in the face of cheap terrestrial calls) justify their startup costs; but if some sucker eats those for you in bankruptcy, it is a perfectly viable business....
P2P would(barring some very clever design or a focus more or less exclusively on walkie-talkie use cases) likely be a poor candidate for cell phone use(lousy latency, uncertain availability, battery life of nodes...) P2P works pretty well for cheap transfers of big files; but somewhat less well for low-bandwidth, but latency sensitive, stuff.
The system that I would like to see would be a radically free market(and thus, likely never to be seen in the cellular arena) system of phones that electronically bid for resources in real time, from carriers within range who dynamically compete for customers in real time.
Consider a basic example: I have a cellphone with a GSM module that can see two or three carriers' towers, and a wifi module that can detect a number of access points. I open my address book, or start typing in a number. Detecting that I am going to be making a call, my phone checks the rate information being broadcast from the wireless links visible to it: it then silently routes the call out through whichever offers the lowest rate. In order to prevent surprises, the user could, of course, set "absolute ceiling", "manual verify", and "warn but continue" price thresholds within their phone's bidding engine. Towers, for their part, could dynamically adjust prices, down to the operator's set floor, in order to keep themselves busy but not over-saturated.
Data would be handled in a similar manner: cell towers and wifi access points could broadcast their willingness to provide, and rate(at home, of course, your router would treat you as a special case of free access, to ensure that you always used the bandwidth you had already paid for, and applications requiring data could choose based on price.
Since most people would not want to trouble themselves with the details, phones would, ideally, ship with some sensible defaults and a few heuristic rules(ie. if I almost always make long calls to contact X, and very short ones to contact Y, select a carrier for contact X based on lowest expected price for a long call, and select a carrier for contact Y based on lowest expected price for a short call). For those who did wish to dig deep and twiddle all the knobs, the tools for expressing and solving optimization problems in multiple constraints to computer systems are not exactly terra incognita. The real propellerheads could have their handsets algorithmically trading off between lower and higher power-requirement connections based on batterly life and location/time based estimates of next charge, and whatever other variables they felt like including...
It really depends on how broadly you draw the term "prior art".
Various dubiously scientific(but, by luck or judgement, approximately correct) application of the principle of vaccination can be found going back a significant way. The canonical western example is Jenner's 1769 use of cowpox, which conveniently happens to be close enough to smallpox to generate immunity; but not close enough to be, well, smallpox. I'm fairly sure that there are various earlier examples of similar stuff that didn't get "textbookized" quite as thoroughly; but I'm not sure offhand. More sophisticated and systematic techniques for artificial attenuation of diseases that don't have convenient natural counterparts came later; but are still not news(though specific advances in that art may well be, as the requirements vary by organism...)
As for the notion of using damaged individuals to destroy or modify wild populations, the canonical starting point is probably Knipling and Bushland's 1958 development of the sterile insect technique. This one works on a number of insects who mate once, then lay their eggs. You saturate the environment with sterile(usually irradiated) males, and the females that they mate with lay unfertilized eggs. Population crash. The eradication of the screwworm by the US Department of Agriculture from the entire southern and south-western United States was its big debut. For reasons of efficiency, they extended the program all the way to Panama, which offers a convenient choke-point where control continues to this day.
However, those are fairly broad-brush "prior art", and the patent system generally doesn't work like that. Either they fucked up, or MS is patenting(as numerous other entities have) one of the zillions of little tweaks, refinements, and less 'heroic-theory-of-discovery'-friendly advances in medicine and parasite control.
Broad-brush, their proposal doesn't sound wildly novel; but with biology, the devil is in the details(when you are lucky. If you aren't lucky, the devil is in the details of the symbiotic gastrointestinal flora of the devil in the details...)
The FCC doesn't actually do much to stop genuinely bad actors(unless they are flagrant and high-powered enough to be worth triangulating and busting). They do a reasonably decent job of making sure that devices in the legitimate supply chain do more or less what they say on the tin, in terms of RF havoc.
They don't do much at all about super-dodgy Chinese video-blasters, or dumb kids who manage to get the 1Kw magnetron and drive circuit out of a microwave without electrocuting themselves(incidentally, unless you know exactly what you are doing. Don't.)
I assume that, since mobile devices generally lean on some sort of hardware acceleration(and generally less versatile acceleration than GPUs on the PC side, where a simple driver update can probably change what most of the newer chipsets are capable of...), they do nothing for the moment. Further, since the issue with H.264 has always been with patent licensing, not implementation copyright licensing, they can presumably just kick the issue to the OEMs: "Sure, you are welcome to include H.264 support, if you or your chipset vendor have secured the appropriate patent stuff, no business of ours..." Given the terms of the Android licensing, they can't stop OEMs from catering to whatever web video formats they want, nor can they rely on anything but time to flush out older handsets and set top boxes and so forth and introduce new ones.
I suspect, though, that whatever SoC is at the heart of the next "Google's-bestest-Android-version-launch-buddy's-unlocked-flagship-device" will do hardware WebM decode...
"Those who freely open video codecs on a wide scale will someday freely open people on a wide scale."
-Concerned Citizens for the MPEG LA