the new methodology aims to deliver new features much more quickly while still maintaining backwards compatibility, security, and overall quality.
A style of management is only as good as its manager(s). We've had many, many methods of improving all three of those but as an industry we routinely and repeatedly turn it down for most applications over cost considerations. A new hybrid model of development won't change this -- continual pressure from inside the organization will eventually subvert any gains at the process level. Senior level management has to push this from the start -- only then would this or any other kind of methodology have a chance at achieving its goals.
I doubt that. Since she's trangendered, it it pretty likely that her mom knows all kinds of details about her that most moms don't know about their biological daughters. Either that, or her mom has disowned her, which is entirely on her mother.
First, why is the messenger more important than the message? It's bigoted. Secondly, and not that it's any of your fucking business -- but my mom doesn't know much about me because I'm gay. Our mothers generally disown us when we come out, gay, bi, transgendered, or otherwise. I'm not ashamed to tell my mom about my life she just has no interest in me anymore beyond the occasional "are you still alive" phone call, and pushing bibles or religious DVDs about burning in hell instead of the $50 in a card for christmas.
How do you expect this strategy to pan out if the bad outcome of the first round is death? (Like being foodless and waterless in a disaster area)
They'll die knowing their moral superiority is intact. A bunch of people came and modnuked me for pointing out that people's moral standing goes down as they become more desperate. It's a luxury good -- and only remains effective as long as it has some benefit. I didn't advocate immoral behavior, but I'm assumed to be simply because I pointed out the seedier aspects of humanity. Meanwhile, other people get modded up because they "defended" the inherent morality of people.
Where was inherent morality in Auschwitz? Or during the Black Plague? Or one of a thousand other human tragedies? This idea that somehow we're better than our ancestors has no basis in fact, science, or anthropology -- we're about the same as we were ten thousand years ago as far as our brains are concerned.
But here we are -- assuming that just because it's modern day we're "better" than our ancestors.
unless your an expert on every society and culture in the world you can't tell shit about what a given group of people are going to do.
Well, I know the difference between "your" and "you're", use proper punctuation and grammar, and try to avoid using offensive language except ironically or for emphasis. I believe I would pass better for an expert than you would, if our posting styles are representative.
there are cultural influences in how a group of people react that greatly influence how they will react to a situation.
If you have food, and I have a gun and am starving, do you truly believe cultural influences matter that much? Or perhaps you are just reluctant to entertain the prospect that morality is a social construct, nothing more than a set of coping mechanisms that we interpose between ourselves and our environment to ensure our survival? It is likely that you are taking the position you are out of a need to preserve your worldview rather than because you have made a critical study of human behavior.
haiti for example has a long history of violence and unrest, so it's no suprise there's lots of bottom feeders there willing to shoot at people helping them.
As opposed to in this country where our median incomes are far, far higher -- and so there were no incidences of looting in the aftermath of Katrina because of our moral superiority? In fact, one of the common threads you will find in any widespread disaster where the survival of large numbers of people is precarious, the first thing to go is any sense of order, civility, or morality.
I want idiots like Bill O'Reilly to have to live in the world that they created.
But I have to live in that world, too.
...only to be forced to wander the streets for days without food, water, or shelter because there's no money or help coming any time soon and no way off the island, maybe then they'll start to act like reasonable and decent human beings.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that a single tragedy, or even a long list of tragedies, would alter the trajectory of these people's lives. That, upon reflection, they would realize the error of their ways and return to the path of righteousness. The idea that better understanding of the world will lead to justice is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
Morality in the face of danger is what makes some people noble, and others scum. you are dead wrong that "everyone" will act like this when faced with hunger and thirst
When the cat's away the mice will play. I can't predict with much accuracy what any one person is going to do; but I can tell you what a group of people is going to do with a high degree of accuracy. The individual human can be compassionate, intelligent, and moral -- but human beings are dumb, irrational, and self-centered creatures and you and I both know it.
As to heroes; We manufacture the occasional hero because we need them, not because what they did was heroic (though incidentally, it often is). We lie all the time about heroics -- but we do it with the bestest of intentions. We need hope, and that need outweighs our desire for objectivity. Sometimes, a person with uncommon qualities becomes self-aware of this fact and acts selflessly for the good of the whole, even to his/her own detriment. It is not a coincidence that these people almost exclusively come from small towns or communities -- but I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to answer why that is.
You can't have it because O'Reilly and a bunch of others played the morality card, which always trumps common sense. The morality card states that all money collected must be diverted to [insert cause], and not stockpiled. The common sense card says disaster preparation requires a plan ahead of time -- you can't fuck around waiting to allocate resources when it hits. Which is exactly what has happened with Katrina, 9/11, Haiti, and many disasters yet to come. We've reduced our position from being proactive (being able to execute a rescue plan immediately because resources are already available) to reactive (waiting until resources are collected and organized before formulating and executing a plan).
But that's okay -- because we can feel good about contributing a dollar here and a dollar there towards those poor Haitians... you know... we'll get there and help them out... eventually...if there's any that are still alive by the time we're good and ready. The new American Way is to cut our noses off in spite of our face, and pressure on the short-term solution, the quick buy, the easy fix, and the fast profit.
And do you know why? Because the boomers need to milk the economy of every penny they can to pay for their exorbinant retirement package. They were raised believing that America would always be in a state of progress and growth, that we were the best, and competition with other countries was a joke. We grew complacent, and while they built out their infrastructure, we drove around in fat SUVs and bought big screen TVs, eschewing long term growth for the here-and-now creature comforts. And now... well now we are mighty fucked. And when people inevitably call me age-ist and that it's a generalization and blah blah blah -- I'll tell them this: you're right, it is discriminatory. It's also not wrong.
It has nothing to do with ham radio operators being targetted... I doubt they even knew (or cared) that the vehicles were filled with communication equipment.
If there's no law enforcement left, just how are the emergency supplies that are moving all to slowly going to wind up in the right hands?
The "right hands"? That's rather arrogant of you. If your city was just washed away or blown to bits, and there's tens of thousands of people roaming the streets looking for food, medical supplies, or anything useful and there's not a uniform in sight, what do you think happens after a few days and people start to get hungry and desperate basic essentials like clean water? In the middle of that, you've got a vehicle (maybe the first you've seen in days or weeks) with well-dressed people and boxes upon boxes of equipment -- you know what the first thought you're going to have is? Fuck! That's dinner. Get the gun.
Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford. It's like when you've got a person who's gone overboard and they're struggling to stay afloat -- the one thing you never ever ever do is jump in after them. That's a nice hollywood touch, but in the real world that person is desperate and will octopus-death-grip anything that's floating that comes near it -- which includes you. Then you'll both drown. Better to throw them the rope and let them save themselves. Maybe that's callous, but again -- your morality could get you (and others) killed. As such, it's a luxury in a crisis (at best).
- it would be a field day for attorneys as police destroyed people's cars (and other property) while they were chasing a criminal.
The standard answer used by many municipalities (and accepted by many courts) is that they are not liable. There won't be a field day -- it'll be something covered by insurance, and sucks to be you if you don't have any.
, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.
And that's the real story: Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition. My sister is like that -- she is fed a diet of fast food and microwave meals because her parents can't be bothered to cook a meal (two income family). I don't think its intentional, people just assume there's no problem if it can't be seen.
Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Using bold lettering to make a point makes you look like an ass and does nothing but make your post harder to read. That said, remember that spam is defined by the act as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)."
So even if I offer a legitimate service online -- advertising it via e-mail is subject to the CAN-SPAM act. Now, take that a step further -- what if I'm offering a web anonymization service? That goes on for awhile, no problem, until one day some pedophile uses the service and it makes headlines. Now a bunch of church organizations want to lynch the service provider (hi!) for providing a legitimate service that was used for illegitimate means. The natural reaction would be to protect yourself by not publishing your address, phone number, or office locations. It makes no sense to do so anyway, since your service is entirely online and requires no physical interaction with customers. But now you're left in the difficult position of -- how do you advertise? There are lots of things that are unpopular to advertise and invite criticism, but are nonetheless legitimate businesses.
Not all of us have a large corporation to hide behind -- an anonymity of the crowd as it were. So it harms individuals and small businesses who wish to solicit business that may be controversial.
When he talks about hiding in the crowd, he talks about hiding in the Tor crowd.
Let me rephrase this: Tor is not as resistant to traffic analysis as it is believed, because the Tor authors make assumptions about the state of surveillance on the network which are fundamentally flawed. Specifically, they believe that security is improved by obscuring the location of the node to peers. Because of this, routing paths between nodes are made longer, increasing the statistical likelihood that it will pass through a collection point.
Tor has limited utility -- if you initiate a connection domestically, to an international location that does not have access to the database mentioned earlier, then a degree of security is possible. But for protecting citizens against domestic spying by its government, Tor is inadequate. It may be inadequate in a wider theatre as well, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this post.
So what we're doing is eschewing personal privacy in exchange for... corporate privacy? It used to be years ago, I could setup a web server on a xDSL line from home and run a small business off of that. Of course, few people want to post their cell phone number (often their only number) online, or any other method of direct contact. Amongst other things, that would invite spam. So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal? So domains owned by individuals or sole-proprietorships are screwed, but corporations have little to worry about: They can just assign some random techie to be the contact for their domain.
There's a lot to be said for hiding in a crowd though.
Not when the IP headers of every packet sent through every major peer exchange point on this continent is recorded by this government, and the governments that control the intercontinental links each have peering arrangements so that said data is available on a reciprocal basis with other intelligence agencies operating under their respective governments worldwide.
Most TCP/IP sessions can be reconstructed for months after their original transmission, because the cost of storing said data is so low and there's an intelligence value in having it accessible. Thanks to delta compression algorithms, they don't need to store the complete packet log at each collection point -- because the data is largely the same.
All of this depends on an interesting fact about entropy: Very little of what you transmit is actually unique. Most of the traffic online is just a retransmit of something sent earlier, which makes the computational resources required to log all internet traffic and store it for months at a time make it a reasonably easy problem to solve. Easy, I mean, for a government with hundreds of millions to throw at the problem, not mere mortals like you or I. And of course there's ways to pair petabytes off the dataset using whitelisting and other data management methods.
It honestly impresses me that people think that the internet is a substantial barrier to this kind of intelligence gathering; Since it runs on the same networks, uses largely the same technologies, and is often run by the same companies that deliver telecommunications services... Which anyone will tell you give full access to their lines and equipment with the flashing of a badge and a post-it note. You don't even have to buy them a beer after.
Hiding in a crowd only works if you've done nothing to attract attention to yourself and can hide in statistical obscurity, surfing the noise floor. The moment you do anything even remotely interesting (and using Tor qualifies), bend over and kiss your anonymity goodbye.
The problem with Tor is that there's no way to detect compromises -- every node on the network could be compromised and you'd never know. Authors of botnets have greater anonymity than we do -- ironically because it's run by a central authority. An illegal and immoral one, yes, but one that comes with a measure of anonymity. Few botnet authors are actually caught even with the most primitive security methods. They don't even use encryption and they often can't be found...
Are there decent products and solutions out there for us mere mortals?
Just about anything will work -- unless your internet service provider sucks. Then you're kinda doomed. So do your homework on what low-latency providers are available or get a leased line between the sites.
So, in your opinion, the boundaries of 3D User Interfaces have been fully explored, no innovation is possible, and designers should stick to 2D graphics, or better yet, green screens?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Comeon -- you're asking a loaded question. Revolutionary design is about creating something that didn't exist before. Apple doesn't do that -- Apple takes existing ideas, repackages them, and then calls them new. That isn't to say that's not a useful or marketable service, but calling what the vast majority of Apple does "revolutionary" is a stretch. It's like "paradigm shift" -- everybody loved that phrase five years ago because it sounded progressive, edgy, etc.
My point stands: Just because Apple's doing it doesn't make it new.
...would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity.
Can someone give a safety analysis please? It's my understanding infrared energy can be refracted by the atmosphere or diffused when there is particulate -- and if the beam strength is high enough, there's the potential for it to scatter and hit an unintended target. You know, like your skull.
...here are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface...
Works of the US government are in the public domain.
Quite a few aren't.
USPS materials, artwork, design and all postage stamps as of January 1, 1978 or after are subject to copyright laws. Works produced by the Department of Commerce are exempt under the Standard Reference Data Act. It also doesn't apply to state or municipal governments, or "organized territories" under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government (Such as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, etc.) Only Florida and Minnesota routinely place their materials in the public domain. Many logos and emblems of federal government agencies are also protected. Executive Order 13526 (Signed by Obama in 2009) also establishes classifications of federal government work; National security interests pre-empt the release of information to the public in many cases.
Most works produced by the miliary are also protected, as are works by NASA (under Federal Acquisition Regulations). NASA, for example, while routinely releasing data for public use, remains copyrighted and they often release the work on a delay to allow researchers involved in their respective projects to publish their research ahead of publication of the raw data by NASA. Government contractors are also not required to release their work into the public domain. A contractor may assert claim to copyright in scientific and technical articles based on or containing data first produced in the performance of a contract and published in academic, technical or professional journals, symposia proceedings, or the like.
Note: Most of this information I lifted from various wikipedia pages and are direct quotes or paraphrasing of the same.
...the UK hasn't had the default access to government information that the US has...
Oh please! Just because our government makes more information available doesn't mean any of it is useful in determining what our government is doing. Anything interesting is blacked out and requires a dozen FOIA requests to get, or is locked away in perpetuity behind the justification of "National security". Getting timely, factual, and relevant information out of our government is like trying to get product out of those damnable plastic clamshells -- You could wind up seriously injuring yourself trying to get to it.
Reading the article (yeah yeah), he says nothing about the netbook being "dead" or even declining. Just your standard Slashdot editorial slant -- fabricating a headline out of thin air.
Any given technology can be said to exist in one of two states: Growing, or dying. About the only thing in the modern computer that's escaped decades of change is the lowly 3-pronged power cord, which is still backwards compatible with XT-class systems. Slashdot, in its rush to reach a conclusion, simply skipped dying and went right to dead. At the rate things are going, in a few years we'll need ways to describe a technology that was never born, that died, resurrected, and is now eating Balmer's head. Maybe we'll call it the zombiemonkeyboyification of a technology, who knows...
It's not going to be something you have instead of your computer at the office, or your gaming rig at home.
Maybe not, but humans like tools that are lightweight, versatile, reliable, and powerful. The diversity of computational devices is due to shuffling our priorities about those things around -- you can have powerful, but not lightweight. You can have versatile, but maybe not reliable. Or you can have reliable and lightweight, but kiss powerful goodbye. Technology advancements continually bring all of them closer to coexisting peacefully in a single Grand Unified Computational Device That Is The Answer To Life, Universe And Everything.
Just so Asus is aware. If the netbook is truly dead after only 26 (or so) months then you did not 'pioneer a new class of computer', you 'started a short-lived fad'.
What's fascinating is that we still even listen to the suits and their marketspeak. If I had a penny for everytime some guy in a suit thought he had the next "revolution in [tech]", I'd be a $1E+06. O_o Netbooks became popular because for a lot of people -- that's what they spend most of their time doing.
When my friends hangout at our apartment, we all bring our laptops. Life without internet is scary! But a number of us have internet on our iphones, or wifi on smartphones and other devices, and spending $250 to have a very small form-factor laptop that can do internet isn't a bad idea -- it's something to throw in the bag on the way out the door, just in case you need to check e-mail or google something quick. Netbooks filled a niche -- which is now being taken over by more capable smartphones and embedded devices. That niche, however, is very much still alive and advances in technology or price reductions on netbooks could easily revive them.
People don't care what you call the thing, as long as it does what they want it to... and it helps if it looks good doing it.
Slashdot Mirror
the new methodology aims to deliver new features much more quickly while still maintaining backwards compatibility, security, and overall quality.
A style of management is only as good as its manager(s). We've had many, many methods of improving all three of those but as an industry we routinely and repeatedly turn it down for most applications over cost considerations. A new hybrid model of development won't change this -- continual pressure from inside the organization will eventually subvert any gains at the process level. Senior level management has to push this from the start -- only then would this or any other kind of methodology have a chance at achieving its goals.
I doubt that. Since she's trangendered, it it pretty likely that her mom knows all kinds of details about her that most moms don't know about their biological daughters. Either that, or her mom has disowned her, which is entirely on her mother.
First, why is the messenger more important than the message? It's bigoted. Secondly, and not that it's any of your fucking business -- but my mom doesn't know much about me because I'm gay. Our mothers generally disown us when we come out, gay, bi, transgendered, or otherwise. I'm not ashamed to tell my mom about my life she just has no interest in me anymore beyond the occasional "are you still alive" phone call, and pushing bibles or religious DVDs about burning in hell instead of the $50 in a card for christmas.
How do you expect this strategy to pan out if the bad outcome of the first round is death? (Like being foodless and waterless in a disaster area)
They'll die knowing their moral superiority is intact. A bunch of people came and modnuked me for pointing out that people's moral standing goes down as they become more desperate. It's a luxury good -- and only remains effective as long as it has some benefit. I didn't advocate immoral behavior, but I'm assumed to be simply because I pointed out the seedier aspects of humanity. Meanwhile, other people get modded up because they "defended" the inherent morality of people.
Where was inherent morality in Auschwitz? Or during the Black Plague? Or one of a thousand other human tragedies? This idea that somehow we're better than our ancestors has no basis in fact, science, or anthropology -- we're about the same as we were ten thousand years ago as far as our brains are concerned.
But here we are -- assuming that just because it's modern day we're "better" than our ancestors.
unless your an expert on every society and culture in the world you can't tell shit about what a given group of people are going to do.
Well, I know the difference between "your" and "you're", use proper punctuation and grammar, and try to avoid using offensive language except ironically or for emphasis. I believe I would pass better for an expert than you would, if our posting styles are representative.
there are cultural influences in how a group of people react that greatly influence how they will react to a situation.
If you have food, and I have a gun and am starving, do you truly believe cultural influences matter that much? Or perhaps you are just reluctant to entertain the prospect that morality is a social construct, nothing more than a set of coping mechanisms that we interpose between ourselves and our environment to ensure our survival? It is likely that you are taking the position you are out of a need to preserve your worldview rather than because you have made a critical study of human behavior.
haiti for example has a long history of violence and unrest, so it's no suprise there's lots of bottom feeders there willing to shoot at people helping them.
As opposed to in this country where our median incomes are far, far higher -- and so there were no incidences of looting in the aftermath of Katrina because of our moral superiority? In fact, one of the common threads you will find in any widespread disaster where the survival of large numbers of people is precarious, the first thing to go is any sense of order, civility, or morality.
I want idiots like Bill O'Reilly to have to live in the world that they created.
But I have to live in that world, too.
...only to be forced to wander the streets for days without food, water, or shelter because there's no money or help coming any time soon and no way off the island, maybe then they'll start to act like reasonable and decent human beings.
You seem to be laboring under the delusion that a single tragedy, or even a long list of tragedies, would alter the trajectory of these people's lives. That, upon reflection, they would realize the error of their ways and return to the path of righteousness. The idea that better understanding of the world will lead to justice is one of mankind's oldest illusions.
Morality in the face of danger is what makes some people noble, and others scum. you are dead wrong that "everyone" will act like this when faced with hunger and thirst
When the cat's away the mice will play. I can't predict with much accuracy what any one person is going to do; but I can tell you what a group of people is going to do with a high degree of accuracy. The individual human can be compassionate, intelligent, and moral -- but human beings are dumb, irrational, and self-centered creatures and you and I both know it.
As to heroes; We manufacture the occasional hero because we need them, not because what they did was heroic (though incidentally, it often is). We lie all the time about heroics -- but we do it with the bestest of intentions. We need hope, and that need outweighs our desire for objectivity. Sometimes, a person with uncommon qualities becomes self-aware of this fact and acts selflessly for the good of the whole, even to his/her own detriment. It is not a coincidence that these people almost exclusively come from small towns or communities -- but I'll leave it as an excercise for the reader to answer why that is.
I want our old Red Cross back...
You can't have it because O'Reilly and a bunch of others played the morality card, which always trumps common sense. The morality card states that all money collected must be diverted to [insert cause], and not stockpiled. The common sense card says disaster preparation requires a plan ahead of time -- you can't fuck around waiting to allocate resources when it hits. Which is exactly what has happened with Katrina, 9/11, Haiti, and many disasters yet to come. We've reduced our position from being proactive (being able to execute a rescue plan immediately because resources are already available) to reactive (waiting until resources are collected and organized before formulating and executing a plan).
But that's okay -- because we can feel good about contributing a dollar here and a dollar there towards those poor Haitians... you know... we'll get there and help them out... eventually...if there's any that are still alive by the time we're good and ready. The new American Way is to cut our noses off in spite of our face, and pressure on the short-term solution, the quick buy, the easy fix, and the fast profit.
And do you know why? Because the boomers need to milk the economy of every penny they can to pay for their exorbinant retirement package. They were raised believing that America would always be in a state of progress and growth, that we were the best, and competition with other countries was a joke. We grew complacent, and while they built out their infrastructure, we drove around in fat SUVs and bought big screen TVs, eschewing long term growth for the here-and-now creature comforts. And now... well now we are mighty fucked. And when people inevitably call me age-ist and that it's a generalization and blah blah blah -- I'll tell them this: you're right, it is discriminatory. It's also not wrong.
It has nothing to do with ham radio operators being targetted... I doubt they even knew (or cared) that the vehicles were filled with communication equipment.
If there's no law enforcement left, just how are the emergency supplies that are moving all to slowly going to wind up in the right hands?
The "right hands"? That's rather arrogant of you. If your city was just washed away or blown to bits, and there's tens of thousands of people roaming the streets looking for food, medical supplies, or anything useful and there's not a uniform in sight, what do you think happens after a few days and people start to get hungry and desperate basic essentials like clean water? In the middle of that, you've got a vehicle (maybe the first you've seen in days or weeks) with well-dressed people and boxes upon boxes of equipment -- you know what the first thought you're going to have is? Fuck! That's dinner. Get the gun.
Morality is a luxury that not everybody can afford. It's like when you've got a person who's gone overboard and they're struggling to stay afloat -- the one thing you never ever ever do is jump in after them. That's a nice hollywood touch, but in the real world that person is desperate and will octopus-death-grip anything that's floating that comes near it -- which includes you. Then you'll both drown. Better to throw them the rope and let them save themselves. Maybe that's callous, but again -- your morality could get you (and others) killed. As such, it's a luxury in a crisis (at best).
What if you drive a car without a microprocessor system?
You use diesel.
- it would be a field day for attorneys as police destroyed people's cars (and other property) while they were chasing a criminal.
The standard answer used by many municipalities (and accepted by many courts) is that they are not liable. There won't be a field day -- it'll be something covered by insurance, and sucks to be you if you don't have any.
, usually resulting from famine or starvation during the early stages of childhood.
And that's the real story: Parents who have turned their children over to the television, computer, and daycare centers of the world and neglecting basic nutrition. My sister is like that -- she is fed a diet of fast food and microwave meals because her parents can't be bothered to cook a meal (two income family). I don't think its intentional, people just assume there's no problem if it can't be seen.
Although the ruling does not make use of WHOIS privacy illegal, it does serve as a clear message from the court that coupling the use of privacy services with intentional spamming will likely result in a violation of the CAN-SPAM act.
Using bold lettering to make a point makes you look like an ass and does nothing but make your post harder to read. That said, remember that spam is defined by the act as "any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service (including content on an Internet website operated for a commercial purpose)."
So even if I offer a legitimate service online -- advertising it via e-mail is subject to the CAN-SPAM act. Now, take that a step further -- what if I'm offering a web anonymization service? That goes on for awhile, no problem, until one day some pedophile uses the service and it makes headlines. Now a bunch of church organizations want to lynch the service provider (hi!) for providing a legitimate service that was used for illegitimate means. The natural reaction would be to protect yourself by not publishing your address, phone number, or office locations. It makes no sense to do so anyway, since your service is entirely online and requires no physical interaction with customers. But now you're left in the difficult position of -- how do you advertise? There are lots of things that are unpopular to advertise and invite criticism, but are nonetheless legitimate businesses.
Not all of us have a large corporation to hide behind -- an anonymity of the crowd as it were. So it harms individuals and small businesses who wish to solicit business that may be controversial.
When he talks about hiding in the crowd, he talks about hiding in the Tor crowd.
Let me rephrase this: Tor is not as resistant to traffic analysis as it is believed, because the Tor authors make assumptions about the state of surveillance on the network which are fundamentally flawed. Specifically, they believe that security is improved by obscuring the location of the node to peers. Because of this, routing paths between nodes are made longer, increasing the statistical likelihood that it will pass through a collection point.
Tor has limited utility -- if you initiate a connection domestically, to an international location that does not have access to the database mentioned earlier, then a degree of security is possible. But for protecting citizens against domestic spying by its government, Tor is inadequate. It may be inadequate in a wider theatre as well, but such an analysis is beyond the scope of this post.
So what we're doing is eschewing personal privacy in exchange for... corporate privacy? It used to be years ago, I could setup a web server on a xDSL line from home and run a small business off of that. Of course, few people want to post their cell phone number (often their only number) online, or any other method of direct contact. Amongst other things, that would invite spam. So along come these anonymization services so we can have an online presence without giving up our privacy -- and now that's been declared illegal? So domains owned by individuals or sole-proprietorships are screwed, but corporations have little to worry about: They can just assign some random techie to be the contact for their domain.
There's a lot to be said for hiding in a crowd though.
Not when the IP headers of every packet sent through every major peer exchange point on this continent is recorded by this government, and the governments that control the intercontinental links each have peering arrangements so that said data is available on a reciprocal basis with other intelligence agencies operating under their respective governments worldwide.
Most TCP/IP sessions can be reconstructed for months after their original transmission, because the cost of storing said data is so low and there's an intelligence value in having it accessible. Thanks to delta compression algorithms, they don't need to store the complete packet log at each collection point -- because the data is largely the same.
All of this depends on an interesting fact about entropy: Very little of what you transmit is actually unique. Most of the traffic online is just a retransmit of something sent earlier, which makes the computational resources required to log all internet traffic and store it for months at a time make it a reasonably easy problem to solve. Easy, I mean, for a government with hundreds of millions to throw at the problem, not mere mortals like you or I. And of course there's ways to pair petabytes off the dataset using whitelisting and other data management methods.
It honestly impresses me that people think that the internet is a substantial barrier to this kind of intelligence gathering; Since it runs on the same networks, uses largely the same technologies, and is often run by the same companies that deliver telecommunications services... Which anyone will tell you give full access to their lines and equipment with the flashing of a badge and a post-it note. You don't even have to buy them a beer after.
Hiding in a crowd only works if you've done nothing to attract attention to yourself and can hide in statistical obscurity, surfing the noise floor. The moment you do anything even remotely interesting (and using Tor qualifies), bend over and kiss your anonymity goodbye.
The problem with Tor is that there's no way to detect compromises -- every node on the network could be compromised and you'd never know. Authors of botnets have greater anonymity than we do -- ironically because it's run by a central authority. An illegal and immoral one, yes, but one that comes with a measure of anonymity. Few botnet authors are actually caught even with the most primitive security methods. They don't even use encryption and they often can't be found...
Are there decent products and solutions out there for us mere mortals?
Just about anything will work -- unless your internet service provider sucks. Then you're kinda doomed. So do your homework on what low-latency providers are available or get a leased line between the sites.
So, in your opinion, the boundaries of 3D User Interfaces have been fully explored, no innovation is possible, and designers should stick to 2D graphics, or better yet, green screens?
Have you stopped beating your wife yet? Comeon -- you're asking a loaded question. Revolutionary design is about creating something that didn't exist before. Apple doesn't do that -- Apple takes existing ideas, repackages them, and then calls them new. That isn't to say that's not a useful or marketable service, but calling what the vast majority of Apple does "revolutionary" is a stretch. It's like "paradigm shift" -- everybody loved that phrase five years ago because it sounded progressive, edgy, etc.
My point stands: Just because Apple's doing it doesn't make it new.
...would collect the Sun's energy and transmit it to Earth via an infrared laser, to provide electricity.
Can someone give a safety analysis please? It's my understanding infrared energy can be refracted by the atmosphere or diffused when there is particulate -- and if the beam strength is high enough, there's the potential for it to scatter and hit an unintended target. You know, like your skull.
...here are the ones who are dreaming about magic 3D interfaces and other experimental stuff, thinking that Apple would come up with a wondrous new interface...
Been there, done that
Works of the US government are in the public domain.
Quite a few aren't.
USPS materials, artwork, design and all postage stamps as of January 1, 1978 or after are subject to copyright laws. Works produced by the Department of Commerce are exempt under the Standard Reference Data Act. It also doesn't apply to state or municipal governments, or "organized territories" under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Government (Such as the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, etc.) Only Florida and Minnesota routinely place their materials in the public domain. Many logos and emblems of federal government agencies are also protected. Executive Order 13526 (Signed by Obama in 2009) also establishes classifications of federal government work; National security interests pre-empt the release of information to the public in many cases.
Most works produced by the miliary are also protected, as are works by NASA (under Federal Acquisition Regulations). NASA, for example, while routinely releasing data for public use, remains copyrighted and they often release the work on a delay to allow researchers involved in their respective projects to publish their research ahead of publication of the raw data by NASA. Government contractors are also not required to release their work into the public domain. A contractor may assert claim to copyright in scientific and technical articles based on or containing data first produced in the performance of a contract and published in academic, technical or professional journals, symposia proceedings, or the like.
Note: Most of this information I lifted from various wikipedia pages and are direct quotes or paraphrasing of the same.
...the UK hasn't had the default access to government information that the US has...
Oh please! Just because our government makes more information available doesn't mean any of it is useful in determining what our government is doing. Anything interesting is blacked out and requires a dozen FOIA requests to get, or is locked away in perpetuity behind the justification of "National security". Getting timely, factual, and relevant information out of our government is like trying to get product out of those damnable plastic clamshells -- You could wind up seriously injuring yourself trying to get to it.
Reading the article (yeah yeah), he says nothing about the netbook being "dead" or even declining. Just your standard Slashdot editorial slant -- fabricating a headline out of thin air.
Any given technology can be said to exist in one of two states: Growing, or dying. About the only thing in the modern computer that's escaped decades of change is the lowly 3-pronged power cord, which is still backwards compatible with XT-class systems. Slashdot, in its rush to reach a conclusion, simply skipped dying and went right to dead. At the rate things are going, in a few years we'll need ways to describe a technology that was never born, that died, resurrected, and is now eating Balmer's head. Maybe we'll call it the zombiemonkeyboyification of a technology, who knows...
It's not going to be something you have instead of your computer at the office, or your gaming rig at home.
Maybe not, but humans like tools that are lightweight, versatile, reliable, and powerful. The diversity of computational devices is due to shuffling our priorities about those things around -- you can have powerful, but not lightweight. You can have versatile, but maybe not reliable. Or you can have reliable and lightweight, but kiss powerful goodbye. Technology advancements continually bring all of them closer to coexisting peacefully in a single Grand Unified Computational Device That Is The Answer To Life, Universe And Everything.
Nachos?
Just so Asus is aware. If the netbook is truly dead after only 26 (or so) months then you did not 'pioneer a new class of computer', you 'started a short-lived fad'.
What's fascinating is that we still even listen to the suits and their marketspeak. If I had a penny for everytime some guy in a suit thought he had the next "revolution in [tech]", I'd be a $1E+06. O_o Netbooks became popular because for a lot of people -- that's what they spend most of their time doing.
When my friends hangout at our apartment, we all bring our laptops. Life without internet is scary! But a number of us have internet on our iphones, or wifi on smartphones and other devices, and spending $250 to have a very small form-factor laptop that can do internet isn't a bad idea -- it's something to throw in the bag on the way out the door, just in case you need to check e-mail or google something quick. Netbooks filled a niche -- which is now being taken over by more capable smartphones and embedded devices. That niche, however, is very much still alive and advances in technology or price reductions on netbooks could easily revive them.
People don't care what you call the thing, as long as it does what they want it to... and it helps if it looks good doing it.