And "technically" a pharmacist is just a drug dealer. But would you fill your prescriptions from a guy standing on a street corner?
The answer of course is no for obvious reasons. And those obvious reasons also apply when discussing exchanging currencies in banks vs some guy you arrange to meet in a parking lot or wherever.
Liberty Reserve had a similar system of transferring funds and unsurprisingly it was used in the main by criminals looking to launder money between countries. So good luck with your "local bitcoin" merchants since they're likely the exact same money launderers and just about as trustworthy.
Bitcoins leave a digital trail wherever they go because it distributes the transaction chains over P2P . I'm quite certain it's with the government's capability to visualize the flow of bitcoins if they so felt, figure out who is hoarding them and so forth. I suppose certain countermeasures could be used to confuse the picture somewhat e.g. shattering bitcoins, sending them flying through a web of "laundering" services and reconstituting them, using multiple wallets but at the end of the day there is still a trail leading from person X to person Y. I doubt many people would go to those lengths and if they did they're probably singling themselves out by such activity.
Technically sophisticated users shouldn't have reliable service?
The point I was making is that AOL achieved reliability by dumbing the UI down to what the lowest common denominator was capable of. Not because that represented the optimum user experience but because they dreaded customers choking up their call centres by "confusing" them with features.
I think more likely it's because they're following the AOL model. They have a high percentage of non technical users (and morons) and therefore the service should be ultra simple and ultra reliable. They most likely fear the cost of support calls and customer churn caused by a service that "confuses" customers.
On the flip side it makes their service maddeningly retarded at times especially in families where adult and kid viewing habits are munged into one unholy meaningless mess and there is no easy way to clean it out or hide recently watched videos. Supposedly profiles are coming soon where different members of the family can split out their recommendations but I'll reserve judgement until I see it.
Just because they use HTML 5 does not mean they are cross platform. They could and probably will set the video tag to point to an encrypted stream and the browser will be expected to decrypt it and meet other criteria that stops it from being easily ripped on the fly.
I expect they would develop a standalone client if it were economically viable to do so, or there was a media framework that properly supported the copy protection they obviously require to deliver their service to a platform.
As it is, you can watch Netflix on Linux by using Wine to run the Windows Firefox and Silverlight plugin.
In an organ transplant your body can reject the organ. In a head transplant the body could reject the head. At that point your royally fucked. Though I guess if you're looking at a head transplant you probably are anyway.
I wouldn't be surprised if individual member states are bugging each other routinely to obtain an advantage when it comes to trade talks, treaty agreements and all the rest. I wonder how the EU even manages to police that let alone develop its own pan-European security agency with which to counter international threats.
The Windows 7 desktop is demonstrably better than XP in a number of ways. The most fundamental way is that on a modern PC with a GPU, every window lives in a surface so the amount of context switching / swapping caused by invalidating a window or moving it is minimal. That alone makes the experience better. But it also benefits from lots of little things like being able to pin apps to the task bar, thumbnail previews, an improved start menu etc.
I really don't take the contention that XP is better with much seriousness at all. Even Vista's desktop was pretty usable but it just ate too much memory and had a few bottlenecks. Since I can and do run Windows 7 on a netbook I'm more than happy with its performance.
More likely it's a bargaining chip. Samsung can pretend, semi-seriously to have a viable alternative to Android but if they get whatever they want in negotiations Tizen will pushed off the nearest cliff.
That surprised me too. Metro apps are really slow to fire up and so gimped in terms of functionality that unless I was walking around in tablet mode I wouldn't see any point in most of them at all. The most frustrating thing is that if you flip away from an app then more often than not it doesn't restore to the state where it was left. I might understand this behaviour in a 512MB RAM phone, but not in an 4GB+swap laptop. It's stupid behaviour.
Also, the left edge of the screen only shows running apps+desktop, not programs running on the desktop. So I can quickly switch to some retarded metro weather app but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom won't let me switch to Firefox or Eclipse running on the desktop. I must switch to the desktop and activate the app. It's just bad design.
About the only metro app I like is the Netflix app whose simplicity suits the service and which is vastly more attractive that the Android client. Most of the other apps are barely worth the time of day.
I think it's more complex than that. Windows 7 is actually a very good desktop OS and most enterprises are happy to stick with it. So they used Windows 8 a bit like they did Vista, to introduce radical changes knowing they'd enjoy another OS revision to lock it down into an enterprise friendly condition.
So Microsoft used Windows 8 to make a beeline for tablet land. Can't blame them for that. What I can blame them for is that even for desktop users, i.e. those who don't need enterprise solutions for backup/patching/admin have suffered an inferior desktop experience which could have been better than what was delivered. Metro has lots of stupid usability problems with a keyboard / mouse which have easy remedies and Windows 8 shouldn't have shipped without fixing them.
What I've read of 8.1 suggests it's little more than a band aid. Stuff like 1/2 size tiles is useful for cutting metro bloat, but why aren't there expanding folders? Why can't I ctrl+wheel to zoom in and out to show more stuff? Why isn't there a mini-metro attached to the start button? And so on.
All that said, most of the problems in Windows 8 are cosmetic and centred around franken-metro-desktop. In use the OS is extremely responsive and stable. It's just the front end which is the problem.
Most reasonable, rational people would recognize it is a fraud. The problem is there are a lot of unreasonable, irrational people who don't. I suppose the same could be said of most religions but generally mainstream religions they don't have people screaming at walls, "disconnecting" from families, harassing ex-members, tithing substantial portions of their earnings, taking out second mortgages to buy training materials, or working as virtual slaves on billion year contracts. The more ridicule this horrible nasty money grubbing cult gets the better for everyone.
On the subject of tax exemption, it's a wonder to me that *any* religion qualifies for exemption unless it is transparently not-for-profit, i.e. all money going in is accounted for in its operations with limits on the salaries, expenses and other overheads of that organisation. If it cannot do that to the satisfaction of the revenue services, it should lose exemption. Religion or not.
Voice encryption and data encryption are going to behave in different ways. A voice conversation is likely to be one person talking for a few seconds and then the other end and vice versa. Data traffic is likely to be continuous and highly bidirectional in nature with a bias towards the recipient. Anyway I'm sure that the encryption used could have a backdoor key or low entropy so governments could peek in if they wanted while keeping casual snoopers out and increasing the bandwidth capacity by using it more efficiently.
Perhaps you are comfortable having facing someone wearing a camera strapped to their heads, who may or may not be recording you, who may or may not even be paying attention to what you are saying, who may even be augmenting your appearance for their private amusement. But I guarantee there are many people who would not. For a similar effect try videoing people on a train or in a social situation and see how they appreciate it. Wearing Google Glass is an invitation to get into arguments and receive free punches by friends and total strangers alike.
The main requirement for WebGL is the driver supports OpenGL ES 2.0 and an extension which says it's "robust", i.e. it does additional range checking and recovery so it can't be abused by a site and cause a BSOD. Browsers may also implement a whitelist / blacklist of drivers which are known to be good or bad and act accordingly.
But it's obviously an additional attack surface which is largely outside of a browser's control and it requires the driver author to declare robustness but how does it know? It's a bit like the safe for scripting bit on ActiveX controls. Therefore while I think WebGL is a good feature to have I would hope that browsers either disable it by default, disable cross frame support and ask on a site by site basis whenever JS attempts to access the API via the canvas.
On the flipside moving functionality like graphics and audio which used to be executed in a Flash plugin into the browser is probably a good idea in the long term.
Most of those things are covered by European Charter on Human Rights or subsequent treaties. So basically yes every country in the EU will have non-discrimination laws, laws to protect freedom of expression & religion, laws that limit detention by the police and so on. Each country might implement the treaties in a different way and place certain limits on what a person may do in public. For example someone could be a street preacher but if they preached hatred or incited violence they're going to get arrested in most places.
Multi-user environment and (to a certain degree) laptop theft
Then use file permissions, access control lists and disk level encryption. The original assertion was encryption should be done in the browser and I'm pointing out it's worthless there. Even disk level encryption and ACLs won't protect you from a trojan. Once your OS is rooted by a trojan you may as well give up thinking any of your data is secure because it isn't. Encryption might help with laptop theft but that's nothing to do with the browser.
I've seen the randomized storage paths. I can't say I'm overly impressed since cookies are not stored here and neither will this other kind of information they are talking about.
Most browsers use a random path for the storage of profile data, i.e. the browser's cookies, bookmarks, session history, stored passwords etc. Adobe Flash Player also uses a randomized path for its shared objects.
No. Encryption key in this case should be based on hardware and should be unique. The user shouldn't even need to put it in. If one website can access another website's information because of browser or O.S. flaws, it's another layer to crack.
I agree that the Wii's problems were compounded in a few other ways. First off Nintendo pitched the console at casual owners - people who couldn't discern good games from bad and didn't buy many titles anyway. So attach rates sucked publishers frequently lamented the poor sales of their titles to justify not trying harder.
Second because the Wii was not on the same development tier as the PC, PS3 and 360. These platforms were in the same performance ballpark and could share most of their code, and game assets. So development and testing could be pooled to some extent. Whereas the Wii was sitting out in the hinterland by itself and franchises would farm out the work to their B teams in Shanghai or wherever to get it done cheap and quick.
And piracy pulled the rug completely.
Anyway Nintendo really seems to be really slow on the take up of stopping piracy. Maybe that's why they charge an arm and a leg for their consoles knowing they profit from piracy even if third parties don't. But it may also explain the backlash against the Wii U. Perhaps 3rd parties are just pissed off at Nintendo in so many ways that they've given up even trying.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer of course is no for obvious reasons. And those obvious reasons also apply when discussing exchanging currencies in banks vs some guy you arrange to meet in a parking lot or wherever.
Liberty Reserve had a similar system of transferring funds and unsurprisingly it was used in the main by criminals looking to launder money between countries. So good luck with your "local bitcoin" merchants since they're likely the exact same money launderers and just about as trustworthy.
Bitcoins leave a digital trail wherever they go because it distributes the transaction chains over P2P . I'm quite certain it's with the government's capability to visualize the flow of bitcoins if they so felt, figure out who is hoarding them and so forth. I suppose certain countermeasures could be used to confuse the picture somewhat e.g. shattering bitcoins, sending them flying through a web of "laundering" services and reconstituting them, using multiple wallets but at the end of the day there is still a trail leading from person X to person Y. I doubt many people would go to those lengths and if they did they're probably singling themselves out by such activity.
Technically sophisticated users shouldn't have reliable service?
The point I was making is that AOL achieved reliability by dumbing the UI down to what the lowest common denominator was capable of. Not because that represented the optimum user experience but because they dreaded customers choking up their call centres by "confusing" them with features.
Mozilla manages to provide an NPAPI interface to proprietary plugins. I see no reason whatsoever that it can't provide an API for video plugins.
On the flip side it makes their service maddeningly retarded at times especially in families where adult and kid viewing habits are munged into one unholy meaningless mess and there is no easy way to clean it out or hide recently watched videos. Supposedly profiles are coming soon where different members of the family can split out their recommendations but I'll reserve judgement until I see it.
Just because they use HTML 5 does not mean they are cross platform. They could and probably will set the video tag to point to an encrypted stream and the browser will be expected to decrypt it and meet other criteria that stops it from being easily ripped on the fly.
As it is, you can watch Netflix on Linux by using Wine to run the Windows Firefox and Silverlight plugin.
In an organ transplant your body can reject the organ. In a head transplant the body could reject the head. At that point your royally fucked. Though I guess if you're looking at a head transplant you probably are anyway.
Good for one packet of Alpine strawberry seeds, golden plough, or Hawaiian shirt.
I wouldn't be surprised if individual member states are bugging each other routinely to obtain an advantage when it comes to trade talks, treaty agreements and all the rest. I wonder how the EU even manages to police that let alone develop its own pan-European security agency with which to counter international threats.
Sew their mouth shut instead. "Tell me Mr Mortgage Investors Corporation director what good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?"
I really don't take the contention that XP is better with much seriousness at all. Even Vista's desktop was pretty usable but it just ate too much memory and had a few bottlenecks. Since I can and do run Windows 7 on a netbook I'm more than happy with its performance.
What is a "standard application"?
More likely it's a bargaining chip. Samsung can pretend, semi-seriously to have a viable alternative to Android but if they get whatever they want in negotiations Tizen will pushed off the nearest cliff.
Also, the left edge of the screen only shows running apps+desktop, not programs running on the desktop. So I can quickly switch to some retarded metro weather app but Microsoft in their infinite wisdom won't let me switch to Firefox or Eclipse running on the desktop. I must switch to the desktop and activate the app. It's just bad design.
About the only metro app I like is the Netflix app whose simplicity suits the service and which is vastly more attractive that the Android client. Most of the other apps are barely worth the time of day.
So Microsoft used Windows 8 to make a beeline for tablet land. Can't blame them for that. What I can blame them for is that even for desktop users, i.e. those who don't need enterprise solutions for backup/patching/admin have suffered an inferior desktop experience which could have been better than what was delivered. Metro has lots of stupid usability problems with a keyboard / mouse which have easy remedies and Windows 8 shouldn't have shipped without fixing them.
What I've read of 8.1 suggests it's little more than a band aid. Stuff like 1/2 size tiles is useful for cutting metro bloat, but why aren't there expanding folders? Why can't I ctrl+wheel to zoom in and out to show more stuff? Why isn't there a mini-metro attached to the start button? And so on.
All that said, most of the problems in Windows 8 are cosmetic and centred around franken-metro-desktop. In use the OS is extremely responsive and stable. It's just the front end which is the problem.
On the subject of tax exemption, it's a wonder to me that *any* religion qualifies for exemption unless it is transparently not-for-profit, i.e. all money going in is accounted for in its operations with limits on the salaries, expenses and other overheads of that organisation. If it cannot do that to the satisfaction of the revenue services, it should lose exemption. Religion or not.
Voice encryption and data encryption are going to behave in different ways. A voice conversation is likely to be one person talking for a few seconds and then the other end and vice versa. Data traffic is likely to be continuous and highly bidirectional in nature with a bias towards the recipient. Anyway I'm sure that the encryption used could have a backdoor key or low entropy so governments could peek in if they wanted while keeping casual snoopers out and increasing the bandwidth capacity by using it more efficiently.
At least Google Glass devices can be removed. Having one surgically implanted is pretty stupid regardless of the tenuous reasons offered for doing so.
Perhaps you are comfortable having facing someone wearing a camera strapped to their heads, who may or may not be recording you, who may or may not even be paying attention to what you are saying, who may even be augmenting your appearance for their private amusement. But I guarantee there are many people who would not. For a similar effect try videoing people on a train or in a social situation and see how they appreciate it. Wearing Google Glass is an invitation to get into arguments and receive free punches by friends and total strangers alike.
But it's obviously an additional attack surface which is largely outside of a browser's control and it requires the driver author to declare robustness but how does it know? It's a bit like the safe for scripting bit on ActiveX controls. Therefore while I think WebGL is a good feature to have I would hope that browsers either disable it by default, disable cross frame support and ask on a site by site basis whenever JS attempts to access the API via the canvas.
On the flipside moving functionality like graphics and audio which used to be executed in a Flash plugin into the browser is probably a good idea in the long term.
Most of those things are covered by European Charter on Human Rights or subsequent treaties. So basically yes every country in the EU will have non-discrimination laws, laws to protect freedom of expression & religion, laws that limit detention by the police and so on. Each country might implement the treaties in a different way and place certain limits on what a person may do in public. For example someone could be a street preacher but if they preached hatred or incited violence they're going to get arrested in most places.
Multi-user environment and (to a certain degree) laptop theft
Then use file permissions, access control lists and disk level encryption. The original assertion was encryption should be done in the browser and I'm pointing out it's worthless there. Even disk level encryption and ACLs won't protect you from a trojan. Once your OS is rooted by a trojan you may as well give up thinking any of your data is secure because it isn't. Encryption might help with laptop theft but that's nothing to do with the browser.
I've seen the randomized storage paths. I can't say I'm overly impressed since cookies are not stored here and neither will this other kind of information they are talking about.
Most browsers use a random path for the storage of profile data, i.e. the browser's cookies, bookmarks, session history, stored passwords etc. Adobe Flash Player also uses a randomized path for its shared objects.
No. Encryption key in this case should be based on hardware and should be unique. The user shouldn't even need to put it in. If one website can access another website's information because of browser or O.S. flaws, it's another layer to crack.
That's not the point I was addressing.
Second because the Wii was not on the same development tier as the PC, PS3 and 360. These platforms were in the same performance ballpark and could share most of their code, and game assets. So development and testing could be pooled to some extent. Whereas the Wii was sitting out in the hinterland by itself and franchises would farm out the work to their B teams in Shanghai or wherever to get it done cheap and quick.
And piracy pulled the rug completely.
Anyway Nintendo really seems to be really slow on the take up of stopping piracy. Maybe that's why they charge an arm and a leg for their consoles knowing they profit from piracy even if third parties don't. But it may also explain the backlash against the Wii U. Perhaps 3rd parties are just pissed off at Nintendo in so many ways that they've given up even trying.