Mmm. I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning. You and I can run conway's game of Life on a computer, fast enough to update an entire screen in real time and see things evolve. GPU's are awesome.
But if you and I are the analogues for the nodes in that Life simulation, we have no concept of how much time passes between each simulation step. For all we know, it could take aeons of what we would perceive to be our timebase for the simulation of every Tp (Planck Time). We would never know any different.
The argument of resource is equally unconvincing - to the (strangely, intelligent:-) nodes in our hypothetical game of Life, the very idea of simulating a complex environment is outlandish, but to us it's a simple situation, taking up next to no resources. The expectation is that the next "level up" that would be running our reality as a simulation would be just as much of a difference (or more) to us, as we are to the game of Life. Ad infinitum, of course.
I'm assuming he's saying we're not *in* the simulation. We *are* part of the simulation. It's not that there's no other more advanced society out there, it's that this entire universe is being simulated and we're part of that simulation. In the same way as we, relatively pitifully, can simulate star motion as universes collide by specifying the base rules and then letting matter interact.
When you think about it, there's a lot that's pretty fishy about our reality
The whole speed-of-light being a constant thing. That's just weird. Special relativity. Really ?
Wave/Particle duality. Yeah...
Quantum entanglement. Uh-huh ?
...
I'm a physicist, and I find these weird. To take Musk's argument for a second, they do seem to smack of approximation code in and around the boundary conditions of a simulation... "Nothing will ever go that fast apart from light, so let's just simplify those parameters a bit"...
Perhaps we're not in some grand experiment. Perhaps we're in a 7-years-old's school science-fair project...
Plus, if you were simulating a universe, and you intended to seed life, that's probably pretty hard. Doing it multiple times could be a lot harder. Perhaps the very scarcity of life (as far as we know) in the universe is an indication of it *being* a simulation...
... the scientists change the rules. Let's hope our overlords are willing to let the experiment run, even if people start to publicise this as a theory. On the plus side, we'd never know it if we're a simulation. Everything will just go offline instantaneously.
And I think it'd be cool if that jesus guy was just someone who figured out a cheat code to our reality. Then the ban-hammer came down, of course...
With "hundreds", hell, even tens of *thousands* of people experiencing a problem, it's still a tiny, tiny percentage of systems. The problem is that when your userbase is in the millions, a 0.1% problem is a *huge* problem. Apple shipped ~4,500,000 systems in 1Q16 according to IDC, just how are they supposed to find a problem that affects as-close-to-zero-percent-of-systems-as-makes-no-difference ? You can QA until you're blue in the face, but it's not going to catch *everything*.
The bad news for Apple is that (a) Apple fans are vocal when things don't "just work", and (b) it's only going to get worse. It's particularly bad for Apple because they have far fewer product lines than most PC retailers, so a problem that affects one line has a disproportionately large effect compared to other manufacturers. On the other hand, the upside is that because there are relatively few product lines, the problem is easier to track down, isolate, and eliminate.
So, as userbase grows, there are going to be more and more cases like this - some failure mode, followed by an outcry on forums, followed by (hopefully) a fix. Apple's problem is to try and make sure this doesn't affect their image of having computers that "just work"...
Not to get in the way of your anti-US rant, but... as *if* Top Gear was ever about the cars... *that's funny*
Bashing the yanks like this just isn't on, old boy. There's so many other things you can legitimately bash them for because, well, they're human (like everyone else). The thing is, they really do know their shit about cars, they just have a different style over here - witness the Top Gear episode where all three of "the boys" enjoyed the road trip across the US in their muscle cars.
Hey, I'm not a natural born citizen. I've *always* been a target. First thing they did was treat me like a criminal and force me to give them my fingerprints if I wanted a green card...
Yup. Just moved all my personal stuff to hostpoint.ch.
They give you free SSL, ssh access, and they need a warrant before they'll release anything, *and* they'll tell you if a warrant has been issued.
I've got nothing to hide. My life is disturbingly normal and boring, but it's the principle of the thing. I don't think government should rifle through every piece of my postal mail, and I don't think they should do the same to my email / digital data either.
I think the point is we're talking about 2 different things. The standard interpretation of universe simulation isn't that you're simulating something of equal complexity, it's that you're simulating something of lesser complexity. In our case, we might simulate (say) a 2D plane within our 3D reality.
To any entity simulated in that 2D plane, that is its reality. It could conceive perhaps of a 3D world, but wouldn't have any experience of it, and probably wouldn't intrinsically understand it. From our perspective, however, the 2D world is a vast simplification and we could dedicate only a reasonable amount of computing power to run the simulation at a fair level of complexity, even today.
Of course, when we run the simulation, in order to make it easier to code, we might put arbitrary limits on some things. We might say "nothing can move faster than c, or that the Planck distance is the smallest unit we'll simulate, or provide boundary conditions in extrema that mean we have to treat particles as waves on occasion... Or then again, perhaps this universe is the equivalent of a school science project to some higher-order being's twelve year old, and these are all reasonable simplifications for a limited project...
There's no recursion here. The simulation is trivial to its owner, but all of reality to its contained entities
The "contained universe must be simpler" statement I can agree with, but I don't get your point about time. If we are a simulation, time itself is being simulated. I can run a universe simulation backwards and forwards by billions of years in the blink of an eye, because outside of the simulation, simulated time is just a number. The same remains true every time time you jump up a level in reality.
It's pretty common parlance in any simulation to regard "the universe" as whatever the simulation model is. Let's do a thought experiment:
My universe is going to be the XOR model of two possible inputs. There are only 4 possible outcomes of these two input states, and my simulation is so simple (to me) that I don't even need to use a computer, I can write a truth table. Is it really impossible for you to imagine that a system as seemingly complex as the universe is to us, is as simple to some higher-level being as the 2-input XOR model is to us ?
And if it's so simple for them to conceive of such a thing, it's not out of the ordinary in *their* universe, so it's not going to be resource-hungry from their perspective. My advice to the OP to read "Flatland" was serious, not condescending. The book is simple and slightly outdated, but the reason it's a classic is that it conveys the concepts clearly and well.
There really is no way for us to tell if we're being simulated or not. If we are, it'll really make that whole God thing a bit of a laugh though, huh ? As someone else posited earlier on, perhaps Jesus was just some dude who came across the cheat-code before being banhammered...
I'm not saying he's right, but you're not thinking it through.
If I simulate a universe on a computer, how does it change or destroy the real thing ? That comment's not even *wrong*. The simulation is simply the expression of a mathematical model, and the (exhaustive) application of that model to a set of virtual objects. There's no need to destroy anything.
As for energy use, again, you're not thinking it through. If I simulate a universe in a computer, the energy used is minimal (on the scale of energy available in my universe). The assumption is that as you jump upwards through successive levels of simulation, the reality gets, for lack of a better word, bigger. That means orders of magnitude more resources are available, or more dimensions, or whatever is necessary to make what we're experiencing as reality to be trivial.
Someone ought to read "Flatland". It's not Neil.
The suspicion of our universe being a simulation is partly due to the weird-as-fuck nature of reality as we start probing deeper and deeper. Waves *and* particles ? Really ? I have a PhD in physics, and that *still* sounds more like a boundary condition on simulation than anything else proposed as to why it ought to be the case...
If both time and space are quantised to the extent that we're the simulation, there's some interesting corollaries to do with numerical instability - basically that the computational steps in time have to be below a certain limit or spatial anomalies will occur, and vice versa.
To be fair, assuming no race conditions, we'd never know if they took us offline. We could be running then stopping and running then stopping, and as long as the state was preserved, we'd never know (being part of that state).
"stop the world, I want to get off" just became a real thing...
From the post above mine, which I was replying to:
"Apple products are supposed to be designed for regular people and Apple ecosystem is supposed to be closed so they can control quality. Fail and fail."
"Fail and fail" is generally considered to be uncomplimentary. Just FYI.
My mother has a Mac. She's 6000 miles away. Number of support calls needed over the past several years ? 0.
I installed it at Xmas one year when I was over there, and since then have had zero trouble with it. Now my brother has to maintain my father's PC now and then (example: he clicked the UPS email when UPS were indeed delivering that day), but *fortunately* he's only a couple of hundred miles away/s
I stand by the statement. For people like my mother, Apple computers are indeed better.
Away bollocks. You're just trying to score cheap points.
There is no way my mother (not speaking for OP's grandmother here) will ever open Terminal.app, let alone type in 'git clone xxxxx'. She doesn't know what 'download.com' *is*. For people like my mother, Apple computers are indeed better.
For tech-savvy developers (i.e. People who know what './configure' is, or 'make', following the step-by-step instructions for disabling SIP is trivial. Or, you know, they can just install macports (standard install package from a dmg), change their path to put/opt/local/bin first and then type 'sudo port install git'. Problem solved.or they can use fink, or they can use brew, or, since they're so up on git and they could just clone the git repository, build and install it themselves.
SIP is a good thing, even though it's a pain in my arse as a kernel extension developer. Sure, if a vulnerability shows up, there are more steps to fix it, but it will almost certainly be fixed in the next s/w update now, there are ways around the problem, and in general SIP stops malicious apps from replacing system binaries even when they have compromised the root account.
But hey, let's bash Apple huh ? Having actually read the post on the authors site, it reads like a six-year-old wrote it. It's full of biased opinion and even starts off with a chicken-little "oh the world is ending" allegory about those poor innocent small-business developers.
I wonder if the author went the responsible route of filing a radar with Apple and seeing what they'd do about it before announcing that the end of the world is nigh, or whether she just tried to score cheap internet points to bolster her own biased viewpoint about Apple products in general. Really, I wonder/s
She's just a paranoid old woman who's so scared about "the terrorists" that she's willing to give up... what's the line ? Oh yeah, "essential liberty"... sounds familiar somehow.
I happen to work on De Anza Blvd, and I was looking out the window when the proverbial was hitting the fan with Apple and the FBI, there was suddenly a cavalcade of blacked-out sedans overriding the lights sequence, with police blowing their horn as someone (my assumption here is that it was the senator, no-one else really gets that level of police co-operation) halted the normal traffic lights sequence so this entire entourage could turn into Infinite Loop.
So, Diane was going to yell at Tim. I have some reasonable hope that Tim told her to stick it where the sun don't shine, but I think he's more polite (not to mention politically astute) than I, so I'm sure he came up with a gentlemanly way to say it.
The good news is that she won't be re-elected because she's not going to run any more. She's too old (thank $deity) so we have a chance of getting someone in who isn't a complete fucking moron when it comes to national security. There's no way this state will elect a republican, so we're stuck with her until then. She gets a lot of votes, and I really hope that's just people voting along party lines because if people actually *want* her policies, well... shit, time to leave.
It was an iPhone 5c. It doesn't have the "secure enclave" that later models have, and is nowhere near as secure as these recent models, and by "recent", I mean anything that's a 5s or above.
I'm reasonably certain that Apple's security team will have a larger remit on the next phone, to the extent that the secure enclave is invulnerable even to Apple (the above link speculates that it currently is not, and would therefore be vulnerable to a court warrant akin to the recent furore).
Anyone who read the article would realise that they were planning on doing exactly that. There is, in fact, a 6-prong plan to make Apple entirely independent of third parties. Part of this involves designing and building their own servers.
Personally I'd be interested in knowing if they're going to use ARM processors... Those A9X are pretty darn good in terms of computing power per watt.
When I was young and at college, I used to think this way. Then I grew up, moved out of the country, and realised just what a gem the BBC really is. Until you've experienced the advert-laden projectile stream of vomit of fully commercialised television without anything like the BBC to restrain it, you don't realise what you've got.
Let me put it this way. Even if I never watched any of the programs, I would gladly pay the equivalent of a license fee over here in the states just for the moderating effect the BBC would have on other channels. I can seriously watch a 40 minute show that has 10 minutes of adverts interspersed; to rub salt into the wound, they do a summary of everything they're about to show you in the next 10 minutes as the first 2 minutes of that 10 minute segment, just so there's no interest in actually watching the program; and finally to add insult to the injury, I then get TV executives complaining that I'm stealing programming if I skip through the adverts using a DVR. I have about 600 channels of shit to watch. Great.
It's a bit like the NHS. Everyone likes to moan about it, but that's because you're all basically used to having it around and have started to take it for granted. You don't really get the perspective of the true horror of not having it until it's gone, and by then it's too late. Living elsewhere can give you that experience. Try it, and I think you might change your viewpoint.
All IMHO and based on the assumption that you don't currently live outside the UK. If you do, well, I don't know what to say to you then:) I guess we just disagree.
Any government-funded process usually has government control. The BBC is not controlled by the government, not funded by the government (although I agree they're involved with the mechanics of the funding process) and was established by royal charter.
The BBC are frequently critical of government policies (as well as shadow-cabinet policies. Try watching politicians of all walks squirm on News Night, for example - although I believe Jeremy Paxman has retired from the program now, he was a shark amongst goldfish when interviewing politicians. It'd be interesting to see a real "defend yourself and your policies" 1:1 interview like this over here on US television. I don't think any of the networks would have the balls to run it though.
The BBC aren't above lampooning important members of the government either. On "Have I got news for you?" (A topical quiz/panel entertainment show), when Roy Hattersley failed to appear for the 4 June 1993 episode — it was the third time he had cancelled at the last minute — he was replaced with a tub of lard (credited as "The Rt. Hon. Tub of Lard MP"), as it was "liable to give much the same performance and imbued with many of the same qualities". Roy was... a little overweight...
IMHO, the BBC are rightly regarded as being as impartial as you can get with a national broadcaster, and they actually fulfill the important (to any democracy) role of the 4th estate, being critical when necessary and not shying away from controversy when its demanded. They have suffered in recent years of trying to always appear unbiased by covering both "sides" of the story when any reasonable person might conclude there's only one side really, but hey, I'd rather have it that way round than the other.
The BBC is one of, if not the, pre-eminent news organization(s) on the planet. Their funding is (IMHO) a good part of why that's the case. They truly have nothing to fear from government oversight (they do after all get to report on any overly-intrusive government actions) and they have the guaranteed resources of a national broadcaster to execute on their charter. It's all pretty good.
They could have a reasonable argument to be a de-facto communications carrier due to iMessage. Whether that would be sufficient protection is another question - I don't know the law, so perhaps you have to be registered under some category for the protection to kick in.
Slashdot Mirror
Mmm. I'm not sure I agree with the reasoning. You and I can run conway's game of Life on a computer, fast enough to update an entire screen in real time and see things evolve. GPU's are awesome.
But if you and I are the analogues for the nodes in that Life simulation, we have no concept of how much time passes between each simulation step. For all we know, it could take aeons of what we would perceive to be our timebase for the simulation of every Tp (Planck Time). We would never know any different.
The argument of resource is equally unconvincing - to the (strangely, intelligent :-) nodes in our hypothetical game of Life, the very idea of simulating a complex environment is outlandish, but to us it's a simple situation, taking up next to no resources. The expectation is that the next "level up" that would be running our reality as a simulation would be just as much of a difference (or more) to us, as we are to the game of Life. Ad infinitum, of course.
I'm assuming he's saying we're not *in* the simulation. We *are* part of the simulation. It's not that there's no other more advanced society out there, it's that this entire universe is being simulated and we're part of that simulation. In the same way as we, relatively pitifully, can simulate star motion as universes collide by specifying the base rules and then letting matter interact.
When you think about it, there's a lot that's pretty fishy about our reality
I'm a physicist, and I find these weird. To take Musk's argument for a second, they do seem to smack of approximation code in and around the boundary conditions of a simulation... "Nothing will ever go that fast apart from light, so let's just simplify those parameters a bit"...
Perhaps we're not in some grand experiment. Perhaps we're in a 7-years-old's school science-fair project...
Plus, if you were simulating a universe, and you intended to seed life, that's probably pretty hard. Doing it multiple times could be a lot harder. Perhaps the very scarcity of life (as far as we know) in the universe is an indication of it *being* a simulation...
Food for thought.
... the scientists change the rules. Let's hope our overlords are willing to let the experiment run, even if people start to publicise this as a theory. On the plus side, we'd never know it if we're a simulation. Everything will just go offline instantaneously.
And I think it'd be cool if that jesus guy was just someone who figured out a cheat code to our reality. Then the ban-hammer came down, of course...
With "hundreds", hell, even tens of *thousands* of people experiencing a problem, it's still a tiny, tiny percentage of systems. The problem is that when your userbase is in the millions, a 0.1% problem is a *huge* problem. Apple shipped ~4,500,000 systems in 1Q16 according to IDC, just how are they supposed to find a problem that affects as-close-to-zero-percent-of-systems-as-makes-no-difference ? You can QA until you're blue in the face, but it's not going to catch *everything*.
The bad news for Apple is that (a) Apple fans are vocal when things don't "just work", and (b) it's only going to get worse. It's particularly bad for Apple because they have far fewer product lines than most PC retailers, so a problem that affects one line has a disproportionately large effect compared to other manufacturers. On the other hand, the upside is that because there are relatively few product lines, the problem is easier to track down, isolate, and eliminate.
So, as userbase grows, there are going to be more and more cases like this - some failure mode, followed by an outcry on forums, followed by (hopefully) a fix. Apple's problem is to try and make sure this doesn't affect their image of having computers that "just work"...
Not to get in the way of your anti-US rant, but ... as *if* Top Gear was ever about the cars ... *that's funny*
Bashing the yanks like this just isn't on, old boy. There's so many other things you can legitimately bash them for because, well, they're human (like everyone else). The thing is, they really do know their shit about cars, they just have a different style over here - witness the Top Gear episode where all three of "the boys" enjoyed the road trip across the US in their muscle cars.
Source: Am Brit.
Hey, I'm not a natural born citizen. I've *always* been a target. First thing they did was treat me like a criminal and force me to give them my fingerprints if I wanted a green card...
Yup. Just moved all my personal stuff to hostpoint.ch.
They give you free SSL, ssh access, and they need a warrant before they'll release anything, *and* they'll tell you if a warrant has been issued.
I've got nothing to hide. My life is disturbingly normal and boring, but it's the principle of the thing. I don't think government should rifle through every piece of my postal mail, and I don't think they should do the same to my email / digital data either.
I think the point is we're talking about 2 different things. The standard interpretation of universe simulation isn't that you're simulating something of equal complexity, it's that you're simulating something of lesser complexity. In our case, we might simulate (say) a 2D plane within our 3D reality.
To any entity simulated in that 2D plane, that is its reality. It could conceive perhaps of a 3D world, but wouldn't have any experience of it, and probably wouldn't intrinsically understand it. From our perspective, however, the 2D world is a vast simplification and we could dedicate only a reasonable amount of computing power to run the simulation at a fair level of complexity, even today.
Of course, when we run the simulation, in order to make it easier to code, we might put arbitrary limits on some things. We might say "nothing can move faster than c, or that the Planck distance is the smallest unit we'll simulate, or provide boundary conditions in extrema that mean we have to treat particles as waves on occasion... Or then again, perhaps this universe is the equivalent of a school science project to some higher-order being's twelve year old, and these are all reasonable simplifications for a limited project...
There's no recursion here. The simulation is trivial to its owner, but all of reality to its contained entities
The "contained universe must be simpler" statement I can agree with, but I don't get your point about time. If we are a simulation, time itself is being simulated. I can run a universe simulation backwards and forwards by billions of years in the blink of an eye, because outside of the simulation, simulated time is just a number. The same remains true every time time you jump up a level in reality.
It's pretty common parlance in any simulation to regard "the universe" as whatever the simulation model is. Let's do a thought experiment:
My universe is going to be the XOR model of two possible inputs. There are only 4 possible outcomes of these two input states, and my simulation is so simple (to me) that I don't even need to use a computer, I can write a truth table. Is it really impossible for you to imagine that a system as seemingly complex as the universe is to us, is as simple to some higher-level being as the 2-input XOR model is to us ?
And if it's so simple for them to conceive of such a thing, it's not out of the ordinary in *their* universe, so it's not going to be resource-hungry from their perspective. My advice to the OP to read "Flatland" was serious, not condescending. The book is simple and slightly outdated, but the reason it's a classic is that it conveys the concepts clearly and well.
There really is no way for us to tell if we're being simulated or not. If we are, it'll really make that whole God thing a bit of a laugh though, huh ? As someone else posited earlier on, perhaps Jesus was just some dude who came across the cheat-code before being banhammered...
I'm not saying he's right, but you're not thinking it through.
If I simulate a universe on a computer, how does it change or destroy the real thing ? That comment's not even *wrong*. The simulation is simply the expression of a mathematical model, and the (exhaustive) application of that model to a set of virtual objects. There's no need to destroy anything.
As for energy use, again, you're not thinking it through. If I simulate a universe in a computer, the energy used is minimal (on the scale of energy available in my universe). The assumption is that as you jump upwards through successive levels of simulation, the reality gets, for lack of a better word, bigger. That means orders of magnitude more resources are available, or more dimensions, or whatever is necessary to make what we're experiencing as reality to be trivial.
Someone ought to read "Flatland". It's not Neil.
The suspicion of our universe being a simulation is partly due to the weird-as-fuck nature of reality as we start probing deeper and deeper. Waves *and* particles ? Really ? I have a PhD in physics, and that *still* sounds more like a boundary condition on simulation than anything else proposed as to why it ought to be the case...
I'm not sure what hippies are, so I doubt it, but I do understand what politeness and manners (and their opposites) are.
If both time and space are quantised to the extent that we're the simulation, there's some interesting corollaries to do with numerical instability - basically that the computational steps in time have to be below a certain limit or spatial anomalies will occur, and vice versa.
And vice versa. :)
To be fair, assuming no race conditions, we'd never know if they took us offline. We could be running then stopping and running then stopping, and as long as the state was preserved, we'd never know (being part of that state).
"stop the world, I want to get off" just became a real thing...
From the post above mine, which I was replying to:
"Apple products are supposed to be designed for regular people and Apple ecosystem is supposed to be closed so they can control quality. Fail and fail."
"Fail and fail" is generally considered to be uncomplimentary. Just FYI.
My mother has a Mac. She's 6000 miles away. Number of support calls needed over the past several years ? 0.
I installed it at Xmas one year when I was over there, and since then have had zero trouble with it. Now my brother has to maintain my father's PC now and then (example: he clicked the UPS email when UPS were indeed delivering that day), but *fortunately* he's only a couple of hundred miles away /s
I stand by the statement. For people like my mother, Apple computers are indeed better.
Away bollocks. You're just trying to score cheap points.
There is no way my mother (not speaking for OP's grandmother here) will ever open Terminal.app, let alone type in 'git clone xxxxx'. She doesn't know what 'download.com' *is*. For people like my mother, Apple computers are indeed better.
For tech-savvy developers (i.e. People who know what './configure' is, or 'make', following the step-by-step instructions for disabling SIP is trivial. Or, you know, they can just install macports (standard install package from a dmg), change their path to put /opt/local/bin first and then type 'sudo port install git'. Problem solved.or they can use fink, or they can use brew, or, since they're so up on git and they could just clone the git repository, build and install it themselves.
SIP is a good thing, even though it's a pain in my arse as a kernel extension developer. Sure, if a vulnerability shows up, there are more steps to fix it, but it will almost certainly be fixed in the next s/w update now, there are ways around the problem, and in general SIP stops malicious apps from replacing system binaries even when they have compromised the root account.
But hey, let's bash Apple huh ? Having actually read the post on the authors site, it reads like a six-year-old wrote it. It's full of biased opinion and even starts off with a chicken-little "oh the world is ending" allegory about those poor innocent small-business developers.
I wonder if the author went the responsible route of filing a radar with Apple and seeing what they'd do about it before announcing that the end of the world is nigh, or whether she just tried to score cheap internet points to bolster her own biased viewpoint about Apple products in general. Really, I wonder /s
If your grandmother is checking out code from a git repository (and much kudos to her if so) then she won't have a problem disabling SIP...
She's just a paranoid old woman who's so scared about "the terrorists" that she's willing to give up ... what's the line ? Oh yeah, "essential liberty" ... sounds familiar somehow.
I happen to work on De Anza Blvd, and I was looking out the window when the proverbial was hitting the fan with Apple and the FBI, there was suddenly a cavalcade of blacked-out sedans overriding the lights sequence, with police blowing their horn as someone (my assumption here is that it was the senator, no-one else really gets that level of police co-operation) halted the normal traffic lights sequence so this entire entourage could turn into Infinite Loop.
So, Diane was going to yell at Tim. I have some reasonable hope that Tim told her to stick it where the sun don't shine, but I think he's more polite (not to mention politically astute) than I, so I'm sure he came up with a gentlemanly way to say it.
The good news is that she won't be re-elected because she's not going to run any more. She's too old (thank $deity) so we have a chance of getting someone in who isn't a complete fucking moron when it comes to national security. There's no way this state will elect a republican, so we're stuck with her until then. She gets a lot of votes, and I really hope that's just people voting along party lines because if people actually *want* her policies, well... shit, time to leave.
If you believe *anything* in the Daily Mail, I have a Loch Ness Monster to sell you.
Actually, given the readership of the Daily Mail, this could be the missing link!
Step 1: Locate Daily Mail reader
Step 2: "Sell" Daily Mail reader the Loch Ness monster. <---- This is the new bit!
Step 3: Profit!
It was an iPhone 5c. It doesn't have the "secure enclave" that later models have, and is nowhere near as secure as these recent models, and by "recent", I mean anything that's a 5s or above.
See https://www.apple.com/business... for the gory details, or https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog... for a more readable version, but basically the secure enclave is designed to prevent brute-force attacks like the FBI wanted to use.
I'm reasonably certain that Apple's security team will have a larger remit on the next phone, to the extent that the secure enclave is invulnerable even to Apple (the above link speculates that it currently is not, and would therefore be vulnerable to a court warrant akin to the recent furore).
Anyone who read the article would realise that they were planning on doing exactly that. There is, in fact, a 6-prong plan to make Apple entirely independent of third parties. Part of this involves designing and building their own servers.
Personally I'd be interested in knowing if they're going to use ARM processors... Those A9X are pretty darn good in terms of computing power per watt.
When I was young and at college, I used to think this way. Then I grew up, moved out of the country, and realised just what a gem the BBC really is. Until you've experienced the advert-laden projectile stream of vomit of fully commercialised television without anything like the BBC to restrain it, you don't realise what you've got.
Let me put it this way. Even if I never watched any of the programs, I would gladly pay the equivalent of a license fee over here in the states just for the moderating effect the BBC would have on other channels. I can seriously watch a 40 minute show that has 10 minutes of adverts interspersed; to rub salt into the wound, they do a summary of everything they're about to show you in the next 10 minutes as the first 2 minutes of that 10 minute segment, just so there's no interest in actually watching the program; and finally to add insult to the injury, I then get TV executives complaining that I'm stealing programming if I skip through the adverts using a DVR. I have about 600 channels of shit to watch. Great.
It's a bit like the NHS. Everyone likes to moan about it, but that's because you're all basically used to having it around and have started to take it for granted. You don't really get the perspective of the true horror of not having it until it's gone, and by then it's too late. Living elsewhere can give you that experience. Try it, and I think you might change your viewpoint.
All IMHO and based on the assumption that you don't currently live outside the UK. If you do, well, I don't know what to say to you then :) I guess we just disagree.
The difference is lack of control.
Any government-funded process usually has government control. The BBC is not controlled by the government, not funded by the government (although I agree they're involved with the mechanics of the funding process) and was established by royal charter.
The BBC are frequently critical of government policies (as well as shadow-cabinet policies. Try watching politicians of all walks squirm on News Night, for example - although I believe Jeremy Paxman has retired from the program now, he was a shark amongst goldfish when interviewing politicians. It'd be interesting to see a real "defend yourself and your policies" 1:1 interview like this over here on US television. I don't think any of the networks would have the balls to run it though.
The BBC aren't above lampooning important members of the government either. On "Have I got news for you?" (A topical quiz/panel entertainment show), when Roy Hattersley failed to appear for the 4 June 1993 episode — it was the third time he had cancelled at the last minute — he was replaced with a tub of lard (credited as "The Rt. Hon. Tub of Lard MP"), as it was "liable to give much the same performance and imbued with many of the same qualities". Roy was ... a little overweight...
IMHO, the BBC are rightly regarded as being as impartial as you can get with a national broadcaster, and they actually fulfill the important (to any democracy) role of the 4th estate, being critical when necessary and not shying away from controversy when its demanded. They have suffered in recent years of trying to always appear unbiased by covering both "sides" of the story when any reasonable person might conclude there's only one side really, but hey, I'd rather have it that way round than the other.
The BBC is one of, if not the, pre-eminent news organization(s) on the planet. Their funding is (IMHO) a good part of why that's the case. They truly have nothing to fear from government oversight (they do after all get to report on any overly-intrusive government actions) and they have the guaranteed resources of a national broadcaster to execute on their charter. It's all pretty good.
Maybe.
They could have a reasonable argument to be a de-facto communications carrier due to iMessage. Whether that would be sufficient protection is another question - I don't know the law, so perhaps you have to be registered under some category for the protection to kick in.