Mod parent up. I don't know why more people haven't figured out this is how Apple operates. The only thing I can think of that they were publicly dismissive of and didn't ever do a 180 on is flash on mobile. And if Adobe had ever figured out how to make flash on mobile work well and hadn't abandoned the project, you can bet that Apple would have eventually included a flash compatible runtime (either written by Adobe or licensed from Adobe) while conveniently forgetting that they ever hated it.
Every time there is a launch event, the share price jumps in the days between the announcement of the event and the event itself as rumors run rampant, and then the price tanks after the event when the newly announced product doesn't have all of the unrealistic features that the analysts and fanboys predicted. The price then goes up slowly but steadily afterwards when the average consumer realizes that it is a pretty good product despite not having all those impossible features and the product sells like hotcakes.
Maybe they did think it was public domain due to its age. Maybe the manager who approved the design didn't even know about the swiss clock in question. Mistakes happen. What matters now is not that a copy was made, but what will be done about it. Will Apple change their design to a non-infrigning one, will they attempt to license the design, or will they force a lawsuit by insisting that the clock design isn't protected like Swiss Railway asserts it is? Only under that scenario can you compare Apple in this case to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung.
About as wrong as is humanly possible. Certain sub-organizations that claim to be offshoots of Anonymous such as Lulzsec may have a top down leadership structure, but Anonymous as a whole is much more of an idea than an organization.
Do you use different proxies for each browser? If not, you still have one IP address, probably geolocated (assuming a major ISP), associated with all four browsers. And unless you are very careful to use each browser for different specific tasks, Google probably has built a similar personality profile for each of the four records. So even though you may exist as four different records in Google's database, Google doesn't care whether you are one person or identical quadruplets as long as all four of you have similar predictable buying habits.
IANAPhysicist, but I have a wild and crazy idea simply based on what I have read in various books and wikipedia pages. I would love if someone with actual theoretical physics chops would tell me exactly why this won't work.
According to the wikipedia page on the Alcubierre drive, phenomena such as the Casimir effect constitute negative energy simply by having a lower amount of vacuum energy virtual particles between the plates. Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking radiation suggests that macroscopic phenomena (in his case black holes) can interact with such virtual particles turning them into 'real' particles. Perhaps a mechanism more practical than Casimir, yet less severe than a black hole could be found that would either reduce or "actualize" the virtual particles which could then be transported elsewhere resulting in a localized area of negative energy.
What they know is a lot of talking points and straw men that look like genuine knowledge to someone who isn't familiar with the subject matter. But this does not mean that they actually know the science behind the theories they claim to refute.
What geeks often forget, is that their dream geeky devices are either prohibitively expensive, or are subsidized by non-geeks. And for a neat device to be subsidized by non-geeks, it has to appeal to non-geeks. The economics of appealing to just geeks just isn't there in a commercial product as there are just too few geeks for every non-geek out there.
This:
I want a phone with a keyboard, a barometer, and a gyroscope. I want a phone that I can leisurely play music on my stereo with, without being tethered with wires or using lossy-codec A2DP Bluetooth. I want a phone which can actually power an external USB device, so I can add other features as-needed, such as RS-232 and/or RS-485 and/or real fucking Ethernet, or at least be able to plug a flash drive into it. And I want it to have a high-resolution IPS display.
may appeal to non-geeks, assuming that it is all done in such a way that it all works together in the least frustrating manner. Non-geeks tend to be less influenced and excited by spec bullet point lists as they are about the whole package and how painless it is to use. A non-geek would gladly give up one of those features in exchange for polish and usability for the remainder.
This:
And an unlocked bootloader. And freedom to build my own kernels. And a clear designation that the warranty of the hardware is unaffected by the state of the software.
the general non-geeky populace couldn't care less about. Therefore, it will be at the very bottom of a mainstream manufacturer's priority list.
This:
But I'm also willing to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a pocket computer that does this stuff.
is what you rarely hear from the geek crowd. Kudos. Usually, they just complain that the mainstream products don't match their ideal bullet point list without realizing that a mainstream product probably won't, as economics demands that the product appeal to non-geeks first and geeks after.
Perhaps there is an untapped market here for high-end devices targeted at geeks, that would have all the latest features as well as the freedom for the geeks to use those features as they deemed fit. Such a device would necessarily cost hundreds of dollars extra, but there just might be a demand for that.
Yes, there are certain sectors where a true workstation is desirable or even necessary. It will be a long time before applications like Autocad, Photoshop, or Final Cut Pro are usable in a thin client or client/server environment. But I have a feeling that the percentage of computer users in a professional or corporate environment who use resource intensive creative applications are the minority of such users. The vast majority of corporate computer users probably use Office, or programs like Dynamics GP or Salesforce, or whatever custom business app the IT department cooked up. Such use cases are perfect for a thin-client setup, as they are not resource intensive and a hosted setup is easier for IT to maintain.
So no, the PC is not dying, but it is becoming much more of a niche device belonging to the minority of business power users who need powerful PCs to do their job, and geeky individuals who want powerful PCs to play with. These two groups probably aren't large enough to sustain the PC business as we knew it in the 90's and 00's.
I'm sorry to say it, but power users are a geeky niche that don't really drive the general computing market at all. Most people who use computers professionally in a corporate environment (HP and Dell's target market) use them as glorified typewriters or to run some dedicated app, such as a finance package, required to do their job. The pendulum is swinging back, and the client/server architecture from the mainframe days is once again the way of the future. The corporate computer users don't need anything more than a thin client with their business app living in a server room. For such users, a powerful general-purpose computer is expensive overkill.
I think they are doing a real disservice to their students if they are really leaving them with the impression that they are going to be competent or even "speak the same language" as someone who has been doing it for years.
I took German classes in high school. I still remember some of it. Therefore, I speak the same language as somebody born and raised in Dusseldorf. I have no illusions that I am anywhere near fluent, and would have no idea what that Dusseldorfer was saying half the time. But technically we are both speaking the same language - German. It is just a matter of degree.
I think that it can be valuable for non IT people in a company that depends on IT (and what company doesn't these days?) to speak at least as much IT lingo as I speak German. There have been times where we are trying to explain why one person's request will take a day to complete, while another request may take a month. But no matter how much we dumb it down, their eyes still gloss over when we attempt to explain.
In the company that I work for, people are just starting to get to the point of asking the "is it possible" question. The previous IT regime (all of whom were fired for gross incompetence a year or two before I was hired) learned to beat down any and all feature requests on the software they were employed to write and maintain by declaring that it was literally (and I do mean literally) impossible to do even the most trivial things such as reordering the columns on a table of data, so as to avoid having to do any real work. The poor computer illiterate staff didn't know any better, and so learned to just stop asking.
I think it is well established and not denied by even the most rabid iFanboy that Apple doesn't doesn't come up with product concepts out of the blue. Yes, HD based mp3 players existed before the iPod. The GUI was invented by Xerox. And tablet computers existed for years before the iPad. But for some reason, none of these products sold at all statistically speaking. And I think it annoys the alpha nerds that Apple has time and time again been able to take these nascent technologies and somehow reinvent them so that ordinary people actually want them where they saw no need for them before. And so the nerds trot out the old fallacy that because Apple didn't actually invent any of these categories they must somehow be conning the populous into buying these products, begging the question that Apple's products are inherently completely identical to other products in the same category by nature of being in the same category. But logic dictates that a first gen iPod must somehow be fundamentally different from a Nomad despite them both being hard drive based mp3 players. Marketing can only go so far. If it was truly just marketing, then people would realize they were sold a load of crap. But iProducts also come at the top of consumer satisfaction surveys, which would be very difficult for even the best marketing company ever to pull off.
All that aside, I think the point still stands. If Apple used market research, focus groups, etc. to decide which product categories they would pursue, they never would have released a GUI PC, a hard disk mp3 player, a touchscreen smartphone, or a tablet computer. Because when Apple released each of those products, the marketplace had already 'decided' that they had no interest in such things. Apple had to figure out what each of those things needed for the marketplace to actually want it, which obviously you can't do with a focus group.
I think that the summary misses a major point. Sure there was a bit of hyperbole when Steve said that Apple never did market research. But every word that came out of that man's mouth was hyperbole. What I think Steve's point was is that Apple doesn't base their product categories on market research. They just use market research for refining products once the categories are established. They didn't base the idea to have an all-touchscreen smartphone, a high capacity hard-drive based mp3 player, or a GUI centric PC on market research. If they did, they would have found out that people were perfectly happy with their blackberry and symbian keyboard smartphones, their low capacity flash mp3 players, and their DOS based IBM PCs.
The most disturbing thing (I think) is that the CPSC is adopting a practice of shutting down retailers and distribution channels without going through the trouble of actually declaring a product as unsafe or hazardous, which denies businesses (and consumers) of their legal due process. I can more or less live with government regulation as long as it is subject to the rule of law, that there is accountability, and there is legal recourse.
This.
I am a far cry from your average libertarian, and actually like Obama for the most part. But this is way out of line for government interference in commerce. If buckyballs were in fact marketed to kids, then those selling them should fry. But in this case, it is clear that they were not.
Perhaps what could work, as opposed to an outright ban, would be some sort of waiver that the consumer has to sign before purchase acknowledging that it is a product for responsible adults, that the purchaser is a responsible adult, and that the seller is not held liable should the buyer fail to keep them out of the reach of a child who injures him/herself with them.
In what way was the handling of the retina display a major screw up? I don't follow the logic that putting a high dpi screen on a laptop makes it unusable for professionals. Is being able to see the individual pixels a requirement for productivity apps?
It seems logical to introduce new display technology to a middle of the road product that gives it the best value. High dpi screens are still expensive per square inch, so releasing it on a 17 inch product would be prohibitively expensive and releasing it on a 13 inch product would ruin its low price point. Releasing it on just the 15 inch pro allows them to ramp up economies of scale, and you can bet that the entire line will have retina displays once prices come down. Especially if competitors start putting high dpi screens on ultrabooks once prices are lower.
Interestingly enough, if you are comfortable at a command line, OSX is rather customizable. Yes, the GUI has been dumbed down recently to the great benefit of the 98% of computer users out there who aren't/. geeks. But the underlying feature sets you speak of have not been minimized at all. For computing enthusiasts, OSX still has a BSD-like CLI. And one of the available commands is the 'defaults' command that allows quite a bit of tweaking of the GUI. Many of the available tweaks are specifically for removing the dumbed-down GUI restrictions such as the "Are you sure you want to open this application?" dialog.
I'm not sure why this got modded down, other than because it said something vaguely positive about Apple which goes against the Apple hating/. hive mind. Everything AC said is true.
Single Sign-On technology only makes sense within a single organization. For example, if you get a loan from the same institution you do personal banking with, you may want the convenience of a single sign on to their loan system and their banking system. But in this case, you don't have to worry about privacy issues as it is already the same organization with access to both sets of data, even if they are two different systems in the back-end, possibly due to a corporate merger or something.
However, with cross-organizational single sign-on, it opens up a privacy can-of-worms. On one hand, I don't want to risk the possibility of someone hacking my google/microsoft/facebook/apple/etc. account and gaining access to my financial accounts. On the other hand, I don't want google/microsoft/facebook/apple/etc. to have access to my financial accounts in the first place.
I am not sure why this comment was modded down as there is a valid point here, though you seem to be setting up a false dichotomy between doing the wrong thing (war on heavy metals) vs. doing nothing (ignoring potential threats to a city's water supply). For every threat response, there needs to be a risk vs. reward analysis, lest the cure be worse than the disease. Yes, terrorism was a problem that needed to be addressed. The proper response was bolting cockpit doors shut, CIA investigation of terrorist cells, and political diplomacy with states known to harbor terrorists. (It is debatable whether that last one was done correctly or not.) The wrong response was security theater such as the TSA checkpoints. However, an even more wrong response would have been to blow off the problem and do nothing. Cyberwarfare is a definite potential threat that would be foolish to ignore. The question then, is not if to do something but what to do. I don't know any details of this legislation, so I don't know if it is more like a cockpit door lock or more like a TSA naked-scanner. But Obama is right, in that doing nothing is the wrong answer.
Iran's centrifuge controllers were isolated from the internet as well. Do all of the PCs on the entire train control network have their USB ports disabled and their CD trays glued shut to prevent social engineering tactics? For that matter, do all of the PCs have their ethernet cords soldered in to prevent malicious hackers from attaching their own infected hardware to the network? (God forbid should the network use wi-fi anywhere)
However, with Nuclear War, there was at least one other party who had the capability of using those methods, and quite possibly would have if it weren't for several decades of complex political maneuvering to prevent it. It would be foolish to suggest that there is no possibility that anybody else anywhere in the world would be pursuing the capability for cyberwarfare simply because only the US (and an ally) have historically done so.
Also, 'only one nation' is not accurate, unless you consider The United States and Israel to be a single country.
Unless your argument is that the US is being hypocritical, in that it uses cyberwarfare to promote its interests around the world, yet seeks to prevent others from doing so. In which case, you would have a point.
Stuxnet was still cyberwarfare. Just because it used a social engineering tactic to bridge the air gap doesn't change that fact. Just like having fighter jets doesn't make the navy not a navy.
Yes, a hypothetical secure closed network could be designed to not allow connections via the net or physical media. But the point is, even if your local water treatment plant or BNSF switching yard was on a closed network, the chances of there being at least one PC on that network with a working USB port is pretty damn high.
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Mod parent up. I don't know why more people haven't figured out this is how Apple operates. The only thing I can think of that they were publicly dismissive of and didn't ever do a 180 on is flash on mobile. And if Adobe had ever figured out how to make flash on mobile work well and hadn't abandoned the project, you can bet that Apple would have eventually included a flash compatible runtime (either written by Adobe or licensed from Adobe) while conveniently forgetting that they ever hated it.
Every time there is a launch event, the share price jumps in the days between the announcement of the event and the event itself as rumors run rampant, and then the price tanks after the event when the newly announced product doesn't have all of the unrealistic features that the analysts and fanboys predicted. The price then goes up slowly but steadily afterwards when the average consumer realizes that it is a pretty good product despite not having all those impossible features and the product sells like hotcakes.
You of course are referring to Burrell Smith, right?
Maybe they did think it was public domain due to its age. Maybe the manager who approved the design didn't even know about the swiss clock in question. Mistakes happen. What matters now is not that a copy was made, but what will be done about it. Will Apple change their design to a non-infrigning one, will they attempt to license the design, or will they force a lawsuit by insisting that the clock design isn't protected like Swiss Railway asserts it is? Only under that scenario can you compare Apple in this case to Samsung in Apple v. Samsung.
About as wrong as is humanly possible. Certain sub-organizations that claim to be offshoots of Anonymous such as Lulzsec may have a top down leadership structure, but Anonymous as a whole is much more of an idea than an organization.
Since first responders are usually firefighters, cleanup is usually done with a firehose in these situations.
Do you use different proxies for each browser? If not, you still have one IP address, probably geolocated (assuming a major ISP), associated with all four browsers. And unless you are very careful to use each browser for different specific tasks, Google probably has built a similar personality profile for each of the four records. So even though you may exist as four different records in Google's database, Google doesn't care whether you are one person or identical quadruplets as long as all four of you have similar predictable buying habits.
IANAPhysicist, but I have a wild and crazy idea simply based on what I have read in various books and wikipedia pages. I would love if someone with actual theoretical physics chops would tell me exactly why this won't work.
According to the wikipedia page on the Alcubierre drive, phenomena such as the Casimir effect constitute negative energy simply by having a lower amount of vacuum energy virtual particles between the plates. Stephen Hawking's theory of Hawking radiation suggests that macroscopic phenomena (in his case black holes) can interact with such virtual particles turning them into 'real' particles. Perhaps a mechanism more practical than Casimir, yet less severe than a black hole could be found that would either reduce or "actualize" the virtual particles which could then be transported elsewhere resulting in a localized area of negative energy.
What they know is a lot of talking points and straw men that look like genuine knowledge to someone who isn't familiar with the subject matter. But this does not mean that they actually know the science behind the theories they claim to refute.
What geeks often forget, is that their dream geeky devices are either prohibitively expensive, or are subsidized by non-geeks. And for a neat device to be subsidized by non-geeks, it has to appeal to non-geeks. The economics of appealing to just geeks just isn't there in a commercial product as there are just too few geeks for every non-geek out there.
This:
I want a phone with a keyboard, a barometer, and a gyroscope. I want a phone that I can leisurely play music on my stereo with, without being tethered with wires or using lossy-codec A2DP Bluetooth. I want a phone which can actually power an external USB device, so I can add other features as-needed, such as RS-232 and/or RS-485 and/or real fucking Ethernet, or at least be able to plug a flash drive into it. And I want it to have a high-resolution IPS display.
may appeal to non-geeks, assuming that it is all done in such a way that it all works together in the least frustrating manner. Non-geeks tend to be less influenced and excited by spec bullet point lists as they are about the whole package and how painless it is to use. A non-geek would gladly give up one of those features in exchange for polish and usability for the remainder.
This:
And an unlocked bootloader. And freedom to build my own kernels. And a clear designation that the warranty of the hardware is unaffected by the state of the software.
the general non-geeky populace couldn't care less about. Therefore, it will be at the very bottom of a mainstream manufacturer's priority list.
This:
But I'm also willing to pay hundreds of dollars extra for a pocket computer that does this stuff.
is what you rarely hear from the geek crowd. Kudos. Usually, they just complain that the mainstream products don't match their ideal bullet point list without realizing that a mainstream product probably won't, as economics demands that the product appeal to non-geeks first and geeks after.
Perhaps there is an untapped market here for high-end devices targeted at geeks, that would have all the latest features as well as the freedom for the geeks to use those features as they deemed fit. Such a device would necessarily cost hundreds of dollars extra, but there just might be a demand for that.
Yes, there are certain sectors where a true workstation is desirable or even necessary. It will be a long time before applications like Autocad, Photoshop, or Final Cut Pro are usable in a thin client or client/server environment. But I have a feeling that the percentage of computer users in a professional or corporate environment who use resource intensive creative applications are the minority of such users. The vast majority of corporate computer users probably use Office, or programs like Dynamics GP or Salesforce, or whatever custom business app the IT department cooked up. Such use cases are perfect for a thin-client setup, as they are not resource intensive and a hosted setup is easier for IT to maintain.
So no, the PC is not dying, but it is becoming much more of a niche device belonging to the minority of business power users who need powerful PCs to do their job, and geeky individuals who want powerful PCs to play with. These two groups probably aren't large enough to sustain the PC business as we knew it in the 90's and 00's.
I'm sorry to say it, but power users are a geeky niche that don't really drive the general computing market at all. Most people who use computers professionally in a corporate environment (HP and Dell's target market) use them as glorified typewriters or to run some dedicated app, such as a finance package, required to do their job. The pendulum is swinging back, and the client/server architecture from the mainframe days is once again the way of the future. The corporate computer users don't need anything more than a thin client with their business app living in a server room. For such users, a powerful general-purpose computer is expensive overkill.
I think they are doing a real disservice to their students if they are really leaving them with the impression that they are going to be competent or even "speak the same language" as someone who has been doing it for years.
I took German classes in high school. I still remember some of it. Therefore, I speak the same language as somebody born and raised in Dusseldorf. I have no illusions that I am anywhere near fluent, and would have no idea what that Dusseldorfer was saying half the time. But technically we are both speaking the same language - German. It is just a matter of degree.
I think that it can be valuable for non IT people in a company that depends on IT (and what company doesn't these days?) to speak at least as much IT lingo as I speak German. There have been times where we are trying to explain why one person's request will take a day to complete, while another request may take a month. But no matter how much we dumb it down, their eyes still gloss over when we attempt to explain.
In the company that I work for, people are just starting to get to the point of asking the "is it possible" question. The previous IT regime (all of whom were fired for gross incompetence a year or two before I was hired) learned to beat down any and all feature requests on the software they were employed to write and maintain by declaring that it was literally (and I do mean literally) impossible to do even the most trivial things such as reordering the columns on a table of data, so as to avoid having to do any real work. The poor computer illiterate staff didn't know any better, and so learned to just stop asking.
I think it is well established and not denied by even the most rabid iFanboy that Apple doesn't doesn't come up with product concepts out of the blue. Yes, HD based mp3 players existed before the iPod. The GUI was invented by Xerox. And tablet computers existed for years before the iPad. But for some reason, none of these products sold at all statistically speaking. And I think it annoys the alpha nerds that Apple has time and time again been able to take these nascent technologies and somehow reinvent them so that ordinary people actually want them where they saw no need for them before. And so the nerds trot out the old fallacy that because Apple didn't actually invent any of these categories they must somehow be conning the populous into buying these products, begging the question that Apple's products are inherently completely identical to other products in the same category by nature of being in the same category. But logic dictates that a first gen iPod must somehow be fundamentally different from a Nomad despite them both being hard drive based mp3 players. Marketing can only go so far. If it was truly just marketing, then people would realize they were sold a load of crap. But iProducts also come at the top of consumer satisfaction surveys, which would be very difficult for even the best marketing company ever to pull off.
All that aside, I think the point still stands. If Apple used market research, focus groups, etc. to decide which product categories they would pursue, they never would have released a GUI PC, a hard disk mp3 player, a touchscreen smartphone, or a tablet computer. Because when Apple released each of those products, the marketplace had already 'decided' that they had no interest in such things. Apple had to figure out what each of those things needed for the marketplace to actually want it, which obviously you can't do with a focus group.
I think that the summary misses a major point. Sure there was a bit of hyperbole when Steve said that Apple never did market research. But every word that came out of that man's mouth was hyperbole. What I think Steve's point was is that Apple doesn't base their product categories on market research. They just use market research for refining products once the categories are established. They didn't base the idea to have an all-touchscreen smartphone, a high capacity hard-drive based mp3 player, or a GUI centric PC on market research. If they did, they would have found out that people were perfectly happy with their blackberry and symbian keyboard smartphones, their low capacity flash mp3 players, and their DOS based IBM PCs.
The most disturbing thing (I think) is that the CPSC is adopting a practice of shutting down retailers and distribution channels without going through the trouble of actually declaring a product as unsafe or hazardous, which denies businesses (and consumers) of their legal due process. I can more or less live with government regulation as long as it is subject to the rule of law, that there is accountability, and there is legal recourse.
This.
I am a far cry from your average libertarian, and actually like Obama for the most part. But this is way out of line for government interference in commerce. If buckyballs were in fact marketed to kids, then those selling them should fry. But in this case, it is clear that they were not.
Perhaps what could work, as opposed to an outright ban, would be some sort of waiver that the consumer has to sign before purchase acknowledging that it is a product for responsible adults, that the purchaser is a responsible adult, and that the seller is not held liable should the buyer fail to keep them out of the reach of a child who injures him/herself with them.
In what way was the handling of the retina display a major screw up? I don't follow the logic that putting a high dpi screen on a laptop makes it unusable for professionals. Is being able to see the individual pixels a requirement for productivity apps?
It seems logical to introduce new display technology to a middle of the road product that gives it the best value. High dpi screens are still expensive per square inch, so releasing it on a 17 inch product would be prohibitively expensive and releasing it on a 13 inch product would ruin its low price point. Releasing it on just the 15 inch pro allows them to ramp up economies of scale, and you can bet that the entire line will have retina displays once prices come down. Especially if competitors start putting high dpi screens on ultrabooks once prices are lower.
Interestingly enough, if you are comfortable at a command line, OSX is rather customizable. Yes, the GUI has been dumbed down recently to the great benefit of the 98% of computer users out there who aren't /. geeks. But the underlying feature sets you speak of have not been minimized at all. For computing enthusiasts, OSX still has a BSD-like CLI. And one of the available commands is the 'defaults' command that allows quite a bit of tweaking of the GUI. Many of the available tweaks are specifically for removing the dumbed-down GUI restrictions such as the "Are you sure you want to open this application?" dialog.
I'm not sure why this got modded down, other than because it said something vaguely positive about Apple which goes against the Apple hating /. hive mind. Everything AC said is true.
Single Sign-On technology only makes sense within a single organization. For example, if you get a loan from the same institution you do personal banking with, you may want the convenience of a single sign on to their loan system and their banking system. But in this case, you don't have to worry about privacy issues as it is already the same organization with access to both sets of data, even if they are two different systems in the back-end, possibly due to a corporate merger or something.
However, with cross-organizational single sign-on, it opens up a privacy can-of-worms. On one hand, I don't want to risk the possibility of someone hacking my google/microsoft/facebook/apple/etc. account and gaining access to my financial accounts. On the other hand, I don't want google/microsoft/facebook/apple/etc. to have access to my financial accounts in the first place.
I am not sure why this comment was modded down as there is a valid point here, though you seem to be setting up a false dichotomy between doing the wrong thing (war on heavy metals) vs. doing nothing (ignoring potential threats to a city's water supply). For every threat response, there needs to be a risk vs. reward analysis, lest the cure be worse than the disease. Yes, terrorism was a problem that needed to be addressed. The proper response was bolting cockpit doors shut, CIA investigation of terrorist cells, and political diplomacy with states known to harbor terrorists. (It is debatable whether that last one was done correctly or not.) The wrong response was security theater such as the TSA checkpoints. However, an even more wrong response would have been to blow off the problem and do nothing. Cyberwarfare is a definite potential threat that would be foolish to ignore. The question then, is not if to do something but what to do. I don't know any details of this legislation, so I don't know if it is more like a cockpit door lock or more like a TSA naked-scanner. But Obama is right, in that doing nothing is the wrong answer.
Iran's centrifuge controllers were isolated from the internet as well. Do all of the PCs on the entire train control network have their USB ports disabled and their CD trays glued shut to prevent social engineering tactics? For that matter, do all of the PCs have their ethernet cords soldered in to prevent malicious hackers from attaching their own infected hardware to the network? (God forbid should the network use wi-fi anywhere)
However, with Nuclear War, there was at least one other party who had the capability of using those methods, and quite possibly would have if it weren't for several decades of complex political maneuvering to prevent it. It would be foolish to suggest that there is no possibility that anybody else anywhere in the world would be pursuing the capability for cyberwarfare simply because only the US (and an ally) have historically done so.
Also, 'only one nation' is not accurate, unless you consider The United States and Israel to be a single country.
Unless your argument is that the US is being hypocritical, in that it uses cyberwarfare to promote its interests around the world, yet seeks to prevent others from doing so. In which case, you would have a point.
Stuxnet was still cyberwarfare. Just because it used a social engineering tactic to bridge the air gap doesn't change that fact. Just like having fighter jets doesn't make the navy not a navy.
Yes, a hypothetical secure closed network could be designed to not allow connections via the net or physical media. But the point is, even if your local water treatment plant or BNSF switching yard was on a closed network, the chances of there being at least one PC on that network with a working USB port is pretty damn high.