I suspect that there are two(or three, depending on how you cut them up) factors at work:
1. Yes, some people do need flash, for various reasons. Not as many as used to need it; but still some.
2. Given that Adobe, spurned by Apple, is in full breakup/rebound mode, alternately calling Apple at odd hours and leaving sobbing voice mails, and vowing that they don't need Apple, there are plenty of other device makers who are just as good, and Flash 10.1 will be not sucking on anything that isn't a 2+GHz wintel any day now; adding "Flash Support" is a relatively cheap and easy way for any non-Apple device maker to pick up a marketing bullet point, and possibly some of the users from point #1.
2(a)/3. Part of the reason that Apple doesn't need Flash is that they are the big fish. Loads of websites that do, in fact, require flash, have kicked out Apps that substitute for whatever functions were provided by flash. The Youtube app, and every other video app out there, various dedicated games, etc, etc. If you are not the big fish(and, in terms of 3rd party app development, RIM definitely isn't) you cannot depend on 3rd party providers going out of their way to build a native application just to support you. Ergo, you have to tailor your device to consume whatever their website dishes out.
What piques my curiosity, though is this "flash accelerator" hardware. If it is simply something like Broadcom's "CrystalHD", which Adobe could conceivably use to accelerate h.264 "flash video", then that is probably a good design decision; but nothing novel or wildly interesting. What would be much more interesting(and, to my knowledge, not previously seen) would be an actionscript accelerator, along the lines of the java acceleration that some embedded chipsets have. In addition to its novelty, actionscript is pretty damn similar to javascript. This would suggest, for certain purposes, hardware acceleration of javascript might be possible...
The trouble with tablet Photoshop is that, while Photoshop's base specs are only modestly outrageous(in fine Adobe tradition), its real-world spec requirements, among the sort of users serious enough to buy specialized hardware, can be absolutely stratospheric for absolutely unavoidable reasons of the "Nope, that's pretty much just how much RAM working on a 35 megapixel image at reasonable bit depth and adequate speed takes" flavor. You could probably do "Photoshop-lite" tasks easily enough on iPad hardware(and I think that there are already a few apps of that flavor); but advertising a "Photoshop tablet" would be hard because if you kept it as a svelte tablet design(probably CULV based to spare Adobe an ARM port), your performance will make anyone who is enough of a photoshop junkie to buy such a thing cry. If you pack enough power to satisfy the junkie crowd, you'll get something that looks (and weighs) like the bastard child of a LAN Party Desktop Replacement gamer laptop and a General Dynamics Mil-Spec tactical tablet PC.
The other problem is that Photoshop also has scads of keyboard shortcuts that make experienced users much more efficient. A tablet would be OK for parts of the job; but serious photoshoppers would cry bitter tears if their keyboards were taken away.
The Cintiq has a "fuck you, what are you going to do about it?" price point; but that's because it is pretty much what all the photoshoppers lust over.
I doubt the crappiness of the computer is to blame(if anything, the opposite).
Taking "computer" to mean "x86 wintel", which is almost certainly the correct assumption in this case, you can't even buy a computer today(except possibly by making GoodWill an offer for their doorstop) that is within a factor of 10 of the suckiness of the computers that served entire universities and research institutes back in the day.
I remember, back in my elementary/middle school days, computers(Apple IIs, at the time, went very well with the onion on your belt) were just getting cheap enough for the district I was in to get some, with the assistance of the more enthusiastic parents.
There was a great deal of excitement about them; but much of it seemed to be on the part of people who didn't grasp that "information" and "knowledge" are, in fact, distinct things. Since kids are fairly quick on the uptake, we quickly realized that, if we turned down the difficultly level of the "educational" portion of the educational games(RIP MECC), we could get to the "game" part more quickly and easily. I'm assuming that access to youtube and myspace, had they existed at the time, would not have improved our results.
I am, therefore, completely unsurprised to hear that computer access basically just reinforces whatever trajectory the student was already on(which, don't get me wrong, is hardly 100% poor kids screwed, wealthy ones fine. There are some very motivated poor kids, and some monied but heavily slacktastic ones. Trouble is, though, that among children without much internal motivation, wealth almost certainly does strongly correlate with external motivation, supplied by parents/tutors/etc.) . The internet is basically the best thing ever to happen to the self motivated(yes, public libraries were/are good as well; but having easy access to things like software, communication with fellow enthusiasts, and inexpensive supplies of esoteric hardware, in addition to information, arguably make the internet even better). It is slightly less good; but still pretty good, for the externally motivated. However, it also offers untold lifetimes of easily accessible distraction to the unmotivated and/or unsupervised. It probably still beats TV; because you have to be vaguely literate to move from one video to another; but that isn't saying much.
No need to wonder if there is somebody out there.(though they are no longer an independent entity, having merged with Lexis-Nexis under the Reed Elsevier banner, thus assembling an even more comprehensive collection...)
Arguably, one of the strengths of the scientific endeavor is that it does not, in theory, actually demand any particular belief state at all(In practice, of course, human psychology being what it is, is probably does exert a bit of a push).
In principle, somebody who believes that he is a brain in a jar being lied to by a Cartesian evil Genius could do science exactly as well as your stock empiricist, so long as they were both equally willing to use experimental methods, deductive logic, statistics, and so forth.
I was attempting to satirize the fact that any sort of government spending on social programs tends to fall victim to the backlash against the terrifying(but largely unverified) "Welfare Queen"(which, again regardless of statistics, is an explicitly racially identified character); while even the most transparently pointless dicking around with porky corporate contracts does not arouse the same ire.
Somehow, as long as the government spending results in some sort of corporate product(even if it is wholly ill-suited, grossly over budget, or simply canceled partway through) it avoids the dread stigma of being "welfare"(for some reason, farm subsidies also seem to escape this). On the other hand, if there is some chance that a poor person of the colored persuasion might get their hands on a thin slice, it instantly becomes "welfare", which is self-evidently an unsustainable "entitlement program" that is destroying America's moral fiber even as it wrecks its finances.
Incidentally, outright genocide just made a little dent. The anomaly between 1990 and 2000 is visible; but in terms of long-term growth rates, turning the entire country into an abattoir had about the same effect as a slight bump in the condom supply would have.
Do you honestly think some senators are demanding the use of a solid fuel booster made by a US arms contractor deep in Mormonland because of some Obamunist pro-muslim conspiracy?
Even Glenn Beck couldn't come up with a conspiracy theory looney enough to link those two phenomena...
I don't think that there is any one silver-bullet solution; I just think that the allocation of responsibility to the helpless rather than to the responsible is A)massively unjust and B) definitely does retard the development of better methods.
The fact that a bank will hand somebody a loan for some thousands because they know a couple pieces of biographic trivia about me is idiotic; but I am OK with that. It's their money, if they think that they can maximize profits by trading off security for convenience, more power to them. What really pisses me off, though, is that, after they do that, I am the "victim of identity theft" who has to watch his credit report forever, and fight an endless battle by certified mail with some Kafkaesque division of Equifax in order to rectify things. In a remotely just world, the response would be "You, a financial institution who really ought to know better, gave some guy ten grand because he knew a few pieces of public information? You dumb shit, I guess you are out the money."
There is no perfect defense against fraud; but I bet they'd come up with something better than what we currently have, if the costs fell on them.
Your post is arguably correct in its claims; but really misses the point.
Yes, it is arguably the case that it is the submitter's fault that somebody made off with some personal trivia concerning him. However, are those trivia valuable in themselves? No. They are just some random chunks of data. Why are they valuable? Because all kinds of third parties will, idiotically, accept knowledge of them as being identical to being the submitter, and do things like hand out loans. The value and the danger of what would otherwise be some innocuous little strings are 100% the faults of various other parties, who treat them as being equivalent to identity because it is cheap and convenient, and then will turn around and smear the submitter's record when their own incompetence catches up with them.
Do you honestly think that spending a great deal of blood and treasure propping up a deeply corrupt and questionably competent puppet government(that isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism and enlightenment values itself) is going to have the slightest positive effect in terms of arresting the spread of particularly illiberal strains of Islam?
If so, I'd recommend talking to the Shah of Iran about that.... Or, for that matter, cast your eyes upon our recent successful transformation of Iraq from a brutal secular dictatorship into a deeply corrupt, increasingly authoritarian and theocratic quasi-democracy. Definitely a trillion or two well spent.
Let's be real clear here: I have not the slightest fondness for islamic radicals. I consider them every bit as epistemologically contemptible as any other Abrahamic monotheist and, statistically speaking, much more likely to be nasty about it. However, the notion that our fucking around in the middle east is doing the slightest bit of good in terms of arresting their spread strikes me as risible and completely indefensible on any but the most evidence-blind jingoistic grounds.
The submitter of TFA(TFAS?) has swallowed the "identity theft" myth, and all its deliberately problematic implications, hook, line and sinker.
Whoever came up with the concept of "identity theft" needs to be given an award for sheer chutzpah, then clubbed to death. The problem isn't "identity theft", an "identity" in this context is simply a bunch of information that is only copied, not destroyed or removed when compromised. The problem is bank fraud and various other sorts of fraud perpetrated by people using those data, against institutions who, in a masterful display of doublethink, simultaneously ask you for your SSN when you do anything more sophisticated than taking 20 bucks out of the ATM and treat the SSN like a double-secret-super password that only you could possibly know, on the strength of which loans will be granted, accounts opened, and so forth.
However, by using the term "identity theft", the implication is created that you are the responsible party. As a token, whoever was responsible for the breach might be forced by law or bad PR to offer you a year of credit monitoring or something; but that doesn't address the root problem: banks, and other such institutions will accept laughably trivial factoids as incontrovertible evidence that somebody is you, and then try to stick you with the bag when the mistake is discovered. The problem isn't that somebody knows my mother's maiden name and my SSN, the problem is that numerous financial institutions and other such entities will happily accept possession of those facts as evidence that just about anybody is actually me. However, because it is "identity theft", I'm the one who has to watch my credit vigilantly forever, and wonder what might bubble up on a background check done in my name, rather than it being "bank fraud" or "inadequate police work", which would place the burden of responsibility on the party who ought to be responsible.
Between public records and massive data breaches, virtually all "identity" information is effectively public knowledge. Any institution who treats possession of that information as proof of identity should be treated as guilty of gross negligence, and responsible for the consequences. The idea that if those pesky consumers were just a little more careful, we wouldn't have this issue, is as elegantly malicious as it is utterly wrong.
The problem isn't "deciding on a new standard"(though there certainly can be engineering challenges and whatnot), the problem is that the W3C doesn't have any power beyond a modicum of respect and whatever consensus it can hammer out.
They could pump out purely theoretical standards, either with no real implementations, or an alpha implementation stashed on somebody's git repo somewhere, all they like, as fast as their merry little legs could carry them; but that would be basically meaningless.
The delay comes out of the fact that, unless enough parties from the various browser makers can be convinced to care, the standard is dead on arrival. Politicking is slow.
I think that the general sensation of "lack of novelty" derives from the fact that we've been forcing plants to produce cellulose fibers, then processing them into various sorts of sheet material, since sometime before the advent of recorded history. In most of those cases, we've even been using fusion-driven desalination to water the plants...
I wouldn't touch Apple's gilded cage with a 10 foot pole(unless someone for whom it isn't 'just working' pays me enough to touch it for them); but my impression of their strategy is that it is a mixture of cynical customer milking(you don't get margins like theirs otherwise) and a certain flavor of engineering perfectionism(which, on the one hand, is largely what allows them to get away with the first part; but can also bite them in the margins and the customer satisfaction: consider all the Time Capsules that would be alive today if they had gone with a super-cheap generic 12v brick instead of a more expensive, and thermal death prone, internal PSU...)
The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, and I think that it is fair to say that they engage in both.
Because hardware cannot be patched, any feature delay(whether a legitimate delay caused by having a fairly small engineering team, or an instance of cynical milking) tends to look and feel like milking, and have similar economic consequences.
With software, it is harder to argue that there is a cynical economic strategy at work; because (with iPhones) software upgrades are not paid for, so the delay has no profit, only a PR cost. They might make a few bucks off the iPod Touch users; but I'd be shocked if the money made by nickel and diming them is worth a delay that might reduce the number of comparatively high-roller iPhone users they have raked in and locked into contract at a given time. The only aspect of their software strategy that is arguably "milking" is tying relatively trivial features of their OS bundled applications to OSX upgrades, in order to encourage people who don't care about APIs, or wouldn't know one if it bit them in the ass, to update anyway.
This is a situation where, I suspect, Apple will not follow unless placed under real pressure.
Look at Apple's release model, particularly for iDevice stuff, it is the very opposite of "early and often". They are totally willing to take flack(cut and paste, MMS, multitasking, etc.) for as long as necessary in the service of delivering what they consider to be the "right" solution. Obviously, they do do iterated development as well(just ask anybody who had to endure OSX before about 10.3...); but Apple, in the present day, has a strong bias against "good enough and a lot faster/cheaper" type stuff.
Releasing an environment explicitly designed to lower the barrier to entry for application creation would have an effect precisely contrary to Apple's design aesthetic and integration philosophy. Consider the analogy of MS Access in the context of Win32 desktop software. On the one hand, the existence of that application is probably responsible for the existence of more utterly rubbish "applications" than just about anything else on earth. On the other hand, it has allowed millions of people who are basically nonprogrammers to hack together "good enough" applications to solve the weird little application-specific problems that are important to them or their business, and which are too small to pay for a real developer.
Google's "App Inventor" will very likely have similar results: large numbers of people who would otherwise be unable to create any software will create bad software that is "good enough" because, while bad, it is precisely tailored to problems that they care about. Apple could, in all likelihood, create such a system if they were so inclined; but there are two reasons to suspect that they won't(again, unless they find themselves under really heavy competitive pressure, which they haven't yet. Android has grown phenomenally; but mostly by sniping geeks, eating the WinMo and legacy-Palm markets, and pretty much crushing the "high end dumbphone", not by cutting the iPhone user base): One, Apple currently has the substantial majority of 3rd party developers, and many of the ones considered to be doing the best work. Two, "good enough" makes Steve cry, and the programs that will come out of any bar-lowering super-simple application development environment will just ooze "good enough" from every pore...
It has to be a special kind of laziness, though, or laziness combined with severe environmental limitations.
The wheel wasn't invented by the guy willing to carry loads the hard way; but while he was busy sweating over wheel prototypes, his even lazier counterpart was fanning himself in the shade while his slaves carried the heavy loads....
In this case, Chu is the US Secretary of Energy. That almost certainly means a base salary in the 100k+ range. Not "rich beyond the dreams of avarice"; but not a position where need makes innovation the lazier approach than work.
Oh, I have no doubt that, if they thought they had a shot at it, the feds would be shoving propaganda down every last tube in the series, social networks included.
I'm just deeply unconvinced that something like Facebook, or any Facebook-esque clone, is a particularly effective medium for the US to spread political unrest in China(now, I can see a much stronger case for the US encouraging the spread of Facebook, ideally the real thing just so that we can make a buck on the side, or Facebook-esque sites within China, on the theory that they will magnify the effects of existing Chinese governmental problems).
Something like Voice of America, whether it is effective or not, is relatively easy for the government to set up. Some radio hardware in the nearest friendly or at least not hostile location, just enough native language speakers to translate the programs, and a friendly news desk to churn out the message. Getting the same effect from a social networking site is harder. Or, rather, getting a precise analog of that effect is pretty easy: just set up a VOA fan page/RSS feed/twitter whatever that people can choose to follow(and the state can probably block, in many cases). Using the social network more subtly and effectively is hard. Even the most sympathetic Chinese are going to be pissed if they are getting machine-generated spam from CIA fronts; because everyone hates machine generated spam. And it isn't bloody likely that we have anywhere near enough analysts who speak reasonably idiomatic Chinese and don't have better things to do to actually infiltrate social networks on a personal level and do message shaping.
Here is my guess: China, despite the authoritarian pretensions of its central government, has a great deal of trouble with corruption and mismanagement at the local level. When you combine that with a somewhat wild-west quasi-capitalist expansion, you get a recipe for a nearly constant stream of stories of abuses that would get all but the most dogmatically statist Chinese citizens upset. People's land basically being stolen by thugs with the connivance of local officials, blatantly illegal pollution poisoning people, fake baby formula with no actual nutritional content killing a few hundred babies by slow starvation, that sort of thing. The state doesn't generally approve of this sort of thing, often executing the perps; but it also generally does not approve of any spread of broader popular discontent about it. Some local anger is unavoidable; but censorship is frequently employed to slow the broader spread of the message until damage control and spin can be done. These are the sorts of situations where social networking tools could really make that task more difficult. Everybody is linked to their school buddies from back home, and their college buddies from wherever, and their work people from where they are now. Some nasty provincial scandal occurs back home, your highschool friend who stayed local tells you about it, you get upset and tell your college and work friends...
If that is the sense in which China believes that the US is "using Facebook to spread political unrest", they may well be right. I'm sure the Feds aren't exactly crying bitter tears over that effect, and they may even be taking more direct actions in its favor(overt and covert cooperation between strategic corporations and nation states is neither new nor exclusive to the US...). If, on the other hand, they are suggesting that facebook is full of CIA agents pretending to be popular schoolgirls or something, they are either lying or dreaming. The CIA might wish that that were so; but there just is no way that they have enough Chinese-speaking agents to have any real effect on Chinese areas of facebook, and everybody hates spam, so simply bombarding Chinese users with machine messages would be counterproductive.
Given that this "Super Hi-Vision" did include a specially built camera capable of doing 60 FPS at that resolution, I give the engineers involved credit for that part of the system. There may also have been some interesting FPGA work done to compress the result in reasonable time. Aside from that, though, the whole thing seems like a stunt.
My point with the generated graphics was just that, if you are talking about videos actually shot with a camera at some specified frame rate, there is, in fact, a meaningful "highest resolution". If no camera presently built can do more than YxZ pixels at 24 FPS, or 60 FPS, or whatever you prefer; then it is meaningful to say that YxZ pixels is the "highest resolution".
If you are talking about CGI, the output resolution is limited only by storage space and patience. In theory, there is still a "highest resolution" since there is a finite amount of digital storage currently available on earth(might be a cute problem to use as a test of somebody's ability to make sensible estimates; but otherwise of no real interest).
I have no reason to believe that, in practice, pure CGI outfits are rasterizing to resolutions any higher than their camera-using counterparts are shooting; but they could if they wanted to, while the camera crowd would need new hardware.
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect that there are two(or three, depending on how you cut them up) factors at work:
1. Yes, some people do need flash, for various reasons. Not as many as used to need it; but still some.
2. Given that Adobe, spurned by Apple, is in full breakup/rebound mode, alternately calling Apple at odd hours and leaving sobbing voice mails, and vowing that they don't need Apple, there are plenty of other device makers who are just as good, and Flash 10.1 will be not sucking on anything that isn't a 2+GHz wintel any day now; adding "Flash Support" is a relatively cheap and easy way for any non-Apple device maker to pick up a marketing bullet point, and possibly some of the users from point #1.
2(a)/3. Part of the reason that Apple doesn't need Flash is that they are the big fish. Loads of websites that do, in fact, require flash, have kicked out Apps that substitute for whatever functions were provided by flash. The Youtube app, and every other video app out there, various dedicated games, etc, etc. If you are not the big fish(and, in terms of 3rd party app development, RIM definitely isn't) you cannot depend on 3rd party providers going out of their way to build a native application just to support you. Ergo, you have to tailor your device to consume whatever their website dishes out.
What piques my curiosity, though is this "flash accelerator" hardware. If it is simply something like Broadcom's "CrystalHD", which Adobe could conceivably use to accelerate h.264 "flash video", then that is probably a good design decision; but nothing novel or wildly interesting. What would be much more interesting(and, to my knowledge, not previously seen) would be an actionscript accelerator, along the lines of the java acceleration that some embedded chipsets have. In addition to its novelty, actionscript is pretty damn similar to javascript. This would suggest, for certain purposes, hardware acceleration of javascript might be possible...
The trouble with tablet Photoshop is that, while Photoshop's base specs are only modestly outrageous(in fine Adobe tradition), its real-world spec requirements, among the sort of users serious enough to buy specialized hardware, can be absolutely stratospheric for absolutely unavoidable reasons of the "Nope, that's pretty much just how much RAM working on a 35 megapixel image at reasonable bit depth and adequate speed takes" flavor. You could probably do "Photoshop-lite" tasks easily enough on iPad hardware(and I think that there are already a few apps of that flavor); but advertising a "Photoshop tablet" would be hard because if you kept it as a svelte tablet design(probably CULV based to spare Adobe an ARM port), your performance will make anyone who is enough of a photoshop junkie to buy such a thing cry. If you pack enough power to satisfy the junkie crowd, you'll get something that looks (and weighs) like the bastard child of a LAN Party Desktop Replacement gamer laptop and a General Dynamics Mil-Spec tactical tablet PC.
The other problem is that Photoshop also has scads of keyboard shortcuts that make experienced users much more efficient. A tablet would be OK for parts of the job; but serious photoshoppers would cry bitter tears if their keyboards were taken away.
The Cintiq has a "fuck you, what are you going to do about it?" price point; but that's because it is pretty much what all the photoshoppers lust over.
I doubt the crappiness of the computer is to blame(if anything, the opposite).
Taking "computer" to mean "x86 wintel", which is almost certainly the correct assumption in this case, you can't even buy a computer today(except possibly by making GoodWill an offer for their doorstop) that is within a factor of 10 of the suckiness of the computers that served entire universities and research institutes back in the day.
I remember, back in my elementary/middle school days, computers(Apple IIs, at the time, went very well with the onion on your belt) were just getting cheap enough for the district I was in to get some, with the assistance of the more enthusiastic parents.
There was a great deal of excitement about them; but much of it seemed to be on the part of people who didn't grasp that "information" and "knowledge" are, in fact, distinct things. Since kids are fairly quick on the uptake, we quickly realized that, if we turned down the difficultly level of the "educational" portion of the educational games(RIP MECC), we could get to the "game" part more quickly and easily. I'm assuming that access to youtube and myspace, had they existed at the time, would not have improved our results.
I am, therefore, completely unsurprised to hear that computer access basically just reinforces whatever trajectory the student was already on(which, don't get me wrong, is hardly 100% poor kids screwed, wealthy ones fine. There are some very motivated poor kids, and some monied but heavily slacktastic ones. Trouble is, though, that among children without much internal motivation, wealth almost certainly does strongly correlate with external motivation, supplied by parents/tutors/etc.) . The internet is basically the best thing ever to happen to the self motivated(yes, public libraries were/are good as well; but having easy access to things like software, communication with fellow enthusiasts, and inexpensive supplies of esoteric hardware, in addition to information, arguably make the internet even better). It is slightly less good; but still pretty good, for the externally motivated. However, it also offers untold lifetimes of easily accessible distraction to the unmotivated and/or unsupervised. It probably still beats TV; because you have to be vaguely literate to move from one video to another; but that isn't saying much.
No need to wonder if there is somebody out there.(though they are no longer an independent entity, having merged with Lexis-Nexis under the Reed Elsevier banner, thus assembling an even more comprehensive collection...)
Arguably, one of the strengths of the scientific endeavor is that it does not, in theory, actually demand any particular belief state at all(In practice, of course, human psychology being what it is, is probably does exert a bit of a push).
In principle, somebody who believes that he is a brain in a jar being lied to by a Cartesian evil Genius could do science exactly as well as your stock empiricist, so long as they were both equally willing to use experimental methods, deductive logic, statistics, and so forth.
Apparently I mis-calibrated my sarcasm.
I was attempting to satirize the fact that any sort of government spending on social programs tends to fall victim to the backlash against the terrifying(but largely unverified) "Welfare Queen"(which, again regardless of statistics, is an explicitly racially identified character); while even the most transparently pointless dicking around with porky corporate contracts does not arouse the same ire.
Somehow, as long as the government spending results in some sort of corporate product(even if it is wholly ill-suited, grossly over budget, or simply canceled partway through) it avoids the dread stigma of being "welfare"(for some reason, farm subsidies also seem to escape this). On the other hand, if there is some chance that a poor person of the colored persuasion might get their hands on a thin slice, it instantly becomes "welfare", which is self-evidently an unsustainable "entitlement program" that is destroying America's moral fiber even as it wrecks its finances.
Incidentally, outright genocide just made a little dent. The anomaly between 1990 and 2000 is visible; but in terms of long-term growth rates, turning the entire country into an abattoir had about the same effect as a slight bump in the condom supply would have.
Do you honestly think some senators are demanding the use of a solid fuel booster made by a US arms contractor deep in Mormonland because of some Obamunist pro-muslim conspiracy?
Even Glenn Beck couldn't come up with a conspiracy theory looney enough to link those two phenomena...
I don't think that there is any one silver-bullet solution; I just think that the allocation of responsibility to the helpless rather than to the responsible is A)massively unjust and B) definitely does retard the development of better methods.
The fact that a bank will hand somebody a loan for some thousands because they know a couple pieces of biographic trivia about me is idiotic; but I am OK with that. It's their money, if they think that they can maximize profits by trading off security for convenience, more power to them. What really pisses me off, though, is that, after they do that, I am the "victim of identity theft" who has to watch his credit report forever, and fight an endless battle by certified mail with some Kafkaesque division of Equifax in order to rectify things. In a remotely just world, the response would be "You, a financial institution who really ought to know better, gave some guy ten grand because he knew a few pieces of public information? You dumb shit, I guess you are out the money."
There is no perfect defense against fraud; but I bet they'd come up with something better than what we currently have, if the costs fell on them.
Remember, it's only "welfare" if there is a risk that poor darkies might get a few crumbs of it...
Your post is arguably correct in its claims; but really misses the point.
Yes, it is arguably the case that it is the submitter's fault that somebody made off with some personal trivia concerning him. However, are those trivia valuable in themselves? No. They are just some random chunks of data. Why are they valuable? Because all kinds of third parties will, idiotically, accept knowledge of them as being identical to being the submitter, and do things like hand out loans. The value and the danger of what would otherwise be some innocuous little strings are 100% the faults of various other parties, who treat them as being equivalent to identity because it is cheap and convenient, and then will turn around and smear the submitter's record when their own incompetence catches up with them.
Do you honestly think that spending a great deal of blood and treasure propping up a deeply corrupt and questionably competent puppet government(that isn't exactly a hotbed of liberalism and enlightenment values itself) is going to have the slightest positive effect in terms of arresting the spread of particularly illiberal strains of Islam?
If so, I'd recommend talking to the Shah of Iran about that.... Or, for that matter, cast your eyes upon our recent successful transformation of Iraq from a brutal secular dictatorship into a deeply corrupt, increasingly authoritarian and theocratic quasi-democracy. Definitely a trillion or two well spent.
Let's be real clear here: I have not the slightest fondness for islamic radicals. I consider them every bit as epistemologically contemptible as any other Abrahamic monotheist and, statistically speaking, much more likely to be nasty about it. However, the notion that our fucking around in the middle east is doing the slightest bit of good in terms of arresting their spread strikes me as risible and completely indefensible on any but the most evidence-blind jingoistic grounds.
The submitter of TFA(TFAS?) has swallowed the "identity theft" myth, and all its deliberately problematic implications, hook, line and sinker.
Whoever came up with the concept of "identity theft" needs to be given an award for sheer chutzpah, then clubbed to death. The problem isn't "identity theft", an "identity" in this context is simply a bunch of information that is only copied, not destroyed or removed when compromised. The problem is bank fraud and various other sorts of fraud perpetrated by people using those data, against institutions who, in a masterful display of doublethink, simultaneously ask you for your SSN when you do anything more sophisticated than taking 20 bucks out of the ATM and treat the SSN like a double-secret-super password that only you could possibly know, on the strength of which loans will be granted, accounts opened, and so forth.
However, by using the term "identity theft", the implication is created that you are the responsible party. As a token, whoever was responsible for the breach might be forced by law or bad PR to offer you a year of credit monitoring or something; but that doesn't address the root problem: banks, and other such institutions will accept laughably trivial factoids as incontrovertible evidence that somebody is you, and then try to stick you with the bag when the mistake is discovered. The problem isn't that somebody knows my mother's maiden name and my SSN, the problem is that numerous financial institutions and other such entities will happily accept possession of those facts as evidence that just about anybody is actually me. However, because it is "identity theft", I'm the one who has to watch my credit vigilantly forever, and wonder what might bubble up on a background check done in my name, rather than it being "bank fraud" or "inadequate police work", which would place the burden of responsibility on the party who ought to be responsible.
Between public records and massive data breaches, virtually all "identity" information is effectively public knowledge. Any institution who treats possession of that information as proof of identity should be treated as guilty of gross negligence, and responsible for the consequences. The idea that if those pesky consumers were just a little more careful, we wouldn't have this issue, is as elegantly malicious as it is utterly wrong.
The problem isn't "deciding on a new standard"(though there certainly can be engineering challenges and whatnot), the problem is that the W3C doesn't have any power beyond a modicum of respect and whatever consensus it can hammer out.
They could pump out purely theoretical standards, either with no real implementations, or an alpha implementation stashed on somebody's git repo somewhere, all they like, as fast as their merry little legs could carry them; but that would be basically meaningless.
The delay comes out of the fact that, unless enough parties from the various browser makers can be convinced to care, the standard is dead on arrival. Politicking is slow.
I think that the general sensation of "lack of novelty" derives from the fact that we've been forcing plants to produce cellulose fibers, then processing them into various sorts of sheet material, since sometime before the advent of recorded history. In most of those cases, we've even been using fusion-driven desalination to water the plants...
I wouldn't touch Apple's gilded cage with a 10 foot pole(unless someone for whom it isn't 'just working' pays me enough to touch it for them); but my impression of their strategy is that it is a mixture of cynical customer milking(you don't get margins like theirs otherwise) and a certain flavor of engineering perfectionism(which, on the one hand, is largely what allows them to get away with the first part; but can also bite them in the margins and the customer satisfaction: consider all the Time Capsules that would be alive today if they had gone with a super-cheap generic 12v brick instead of a more expensive, and thermal death prone, internal PSU...)
The two strategies are not mutually exclusive, and I think that it is fair to say that they engage in both.
Because hardware cannot be patched, any feature delay(whether a legitimate delay caused by having a fairly small engineering team, or an instance of cynical milking) tends to look and feel like milking, and have similar economic consequences.
With software, it is harder to argue that there is a cynical economic strategy at work; because (with iPhones) software upgrades are not paid for, so the delay has no profit, only a PR cost. They might make a few bucks off the iPod Touch users; but I'd be shocked if the money made by nickel and diming them is worth a delay that might reduce the number of comparatively high-roller iPhone users they have raked in and locked into contract at a given time. The only aspect of their software strategy that is arguably "milking" is tying relatively trivial features of their OS bundled applications to OSX upgrades, in order to encourage people who don't care about APIs, or wouldn't know one if it bit them in the ass, to update anyway.
Luckily, XP x64 was always basically immune anyway. It's pretty hard to get 0wn3d when you can't find a NIC driver...
This is a situation where, I suspect, Apple will not follow unless placed under real pressure.
Look at Apple's release model, particularly for iDevice stuff, it is the very opposite of "early and often". They are totally willing to take flack(cut and paste, MMS, multitasking, etc.) for as long as necessary in the service of delivering what they consider to be the "right" solution. Obviously, they do do iterated development as well(just ask anybody who had to endure OSX before about 10.3...); but Apple, in the present day, has a strong bias against "good enough and a lot faster/cheaper" type stuff.
Releasing an environment explicitly designed to lower the barrier to entry for application creation would have an effect precisely contrary to Apple's design aesthetic and integration philosophy. Consider the analogy of MS Access in the context of Win32 desktop software. On the one hand, the existence of that application is probably responsible for the existence of more utterly rubbish "applications" than just about anything else on earth. On the other hand, it has allowed millions of people who are basically nonprogrammers to hack together "good enough" applications to solve the weird little application-specific problems that are important to them or their business, and which are too small to pay for a real developer.
Google's "App Inventor" will very likely have similar results: large numbers of people who would otherwise be unable to create any software will create bad software that is "good enough" because, while bad, it is precisely tailored to problems that they care about. Apple could, in all likelihood, create such a system if they were so inclined; but there are two reasons to suspect that they won't(again, unless they find themselves under really heavy competitive pressure, which they haven't yet. Android has grown phenomenally; but mostly by sniping geeks, eating the WinMo and legacy-Palm markets, and pretty much crushing the "high end dumbphone", not by cutting the iPhone user base): One, Apple currently has the substantial majority of 3rd party developers, and many of the ones considered to be doing the best work. Two, "good enough" makes Steve cry, and the programs that will come out of any bar-lowering super-simple application development environment will just ooze "good enough" from every pore...
EBCDIC?
It has to be a special kind of laziness, though, or laziness combined with severe environmental limitations.
The wheel wasn't invented by the guy willing to carry loads the hard way; but while he was busy sweating over wheel prototypes, his even lazier counterpart was fanning himself in the shade while his slaves carried the heavy loads....
In this case, Chu is the US Secretary of Energy. That almost certainly means a base salary in the 100k+ range. Not "rich beyond the dreams of avarice"; but not a position where need makes innovation the lazier approach than work.
Oh, I have no doubt that, if they thought they had a shot at it, the feds would be shoving propaganda down every last tube in the series, social networks included.
I'm just deeply unconvinced that something like Facebook, or any Facebook-esque clone, is a particularly effective medium for the US to spread political unrest in China(now, I can see a much stronger case for the US encouraging the spread of Facebook, ideally the real thing just so that we can make a buck on the side, or Facebook-esque sites within China, on the theory that they will magnify the effects of existing Chinese governmental problems).
Something like Voice of America, whether it is effective or not, is relatively easy for the government to set up. Some radio hardware in the nearest friendly or at least not hostile location, just enough native language speakers to translate the programs, and a friendly news desk to churn out the message. Getting the same effect from a social networking site is harder. Or, rather, getting a precise analog of that effect is pretty easy: just set up a VOA fan page/RSS feed/twitter whatever that people can choose to follow(and the state can probably block, in many cases). Using the social network more subtly and effectively is hard. Even the most sympathetic Chinese are going to be pissed if they are getting machine-generated spam from CIA fronts; because everyone hates machine generated spam. And it isn't bloody likely that we have anywhere near enough analysts who speak reasonably idiomatic Chinese and don't have better things to do to actually infiltrate social networks on a personal level and do message shaping.
Here is my guess: China, despite the authoritarian pretensions of its central government, has a great deal of trouble with corruption and mismanagement at the local level. When you combine that with a somewhat wild-west quasi-capitalist expansion, you get a recipe for a nearly constant stream of stories of abuses that would get all but the most dogmatically statist Chinese citizens upset. People's land basically being stolen by thugs with the connivance of local officials, blatantly illegal pollution poisoning people, fake baby formula with no actual nutritional content killing a few hundred babies by slow starvation, that sort of thing. The state doesn't generally approve of this sort of thing, often executing the perps; but it also generally does not approve of any spread of broader popular discontent about it. Some local anger is unavoidable; but censorship is frequently employed to slow the broader spread of the message until damage control and spin can be done. These are the sorts of situations where social networking tools could really make that task more difficult. Everybody is linked to their school buddies from back home, and their college buddies from wherever, and their work people from where they are now. Some nasty provincial scandal occurs back home, your highschool friend who stayed local tells you about it, you get upset and tell your college and work friends...
If that is the sense in which China believes that the US is "using Facebook to spread political unrest", they may well be right. I'm sure the Feds aren't exactly crying bitter tears over that effect, and they may even be taking more direct actions in its favor(overt and covert cooperation between strategic corporations and nation states is neither new nor exclusive to the US...). If, on the other hand, they are suggesting that facebook is full of CIA agents pretending to be popular schoolgirls or something, they are either lying or dreaming. The CIA might wish that that were so; but there just is no way that they have enough Chinese-speaking agents to have any real effect on Chinese areas of facebook, and everybody hates spam, so simply bombarding Chinese users with machine messages would be counterproductive.
Given that this "Super Hi-Vision" did include a specially built camera capable of doing 60 FPS at that resolution, I give the engineers involved credit for that part of the system. There may also have been some interesting FPGA work done to compress the result in reasonable time. Aside from that, though, the whole thing seems like a stunt.
My point with the generated graphics was just that, if you are talking about videos actually shot with a camera at some specified frame rate, there is, in fact, a meaningful "highest resolution". If no camera presently built can do more than YxZ pixels at 24 FPS, or 60 FPS, or whatever you prefer; then it is meaningful to say that YxZ pixels is the "highest resolution".
If you are talking about CGI, the output resolution is limited only by storage space and patience. In theory, there is still a "highest resolution" since there is a finite amount of digital storage currently available on earth(might be a cute problem to use as a test of somebody's ability to make sensible estimates; but otherwise of no real interest).
I have no reason to believe that, in practice, pure CGI outfits are rasterizing to resolutions any higher than their camera-using counterparts are shooting; but they could if they wanted to, while the camera crowd would need new hardware.