Kudos for your religion analogy, very well worded.
Well, the moderators are frothing at the mouth over some of my "devil's advocate" posts lately. Like pointing out the United States isn't all sunshine and unicorns in an earlier thread today... it's been from -1, Troll to +5 insightful a half dozen times already. It really has nothing to do with the strength of my argument, but the fact that the moderators on slashdot these days have a lower tolerance for cognitive dissonance because fewer and fewer of them are highly educated and experienced within the fields Slashdot used to cater to -- science, technology, and engineering. Now it's become a cesspool of fanboys who may have enthusiasm for those things but not enough experience with it to recognize their own limitations, or that there is more than one right answer (or sometimes no right answers, which is a terrible thing for a young geek to learn).
As you can see now, it's currently, "+2, offtopic", in spite of the fact that the whole premise of my post is explaining how we lost the web the author is reminiscing about! And they probably marked me down because I used an example that was politically charged. I chose that example precisely because it illustrates why the web has changed: The general population is full of prejudice and intolerance. Slashdot used to be exempt from that, but like I said -- as the less-experienced and knowledgable have flooded the forums, it has seen an influx of those values as evidenced by both the comments and the moderation.
Since the buyout, Slashdot has gained more mainstream attention (thanks, Dice, for spending all that money on choice SEO placement...) as an aggregate news site, but it's lost its original values -- those insighful and in-depth, and often humorous, posts that you and I remember and love. And don't let my high UID fool you... I had a 4 digit once. Then a troll hacked my account.:)
we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world.
No we haven't. They're just no longer in the majority. It's like religions: In the United States, for example, everyone's on about how the 0.5% of atheists that exist here are oppressing the christians' (who make up 76%) right to celebrate their christmas holiday. Please -- I'm just using this as an example, no flames! But elsewhere in the world, it's dominated by muslims, or jews, or hindus, or whatever. And within each of those communities, those values are the dominant ones.
The web was originally created by academics, scientists, engineers, and people from these fields are collaborative. They're peers, and they broker in knowledge sharing and exchange. It's very different than the hierarchy that most of society is based on. Now that "most of society" has moved onto the web, they've taken their values with them. The web is simply a communications medium; It does not have a morality.
I find the US' anti-UN attitude as irritating as you do, but it's not just the US.
But I'm not talking about those other countries because I don't live in them. I live in this one, not those. And regardless of how few or many other people agree with the position, we're not doing it for the same reasons -- we're doing it because the Republicans have their panties in a knot about supporting UN actions regardless of how humanitarian and cost free the signing of a given treaty would be. So all this crap about how the ITU treaty being wrong and such may be valid, but that's not what I'm addressing -- I'm addressing the fact that the United States wouldn't sign it even if it created the perfect utopia, fed all the hungry people of the world, and cured all disease. And only that fact.
What's worse though, even if we were to sign it, it would mean nothing because of our past record of violating treaties. How many times does a person have to lie to you before you stop trusting them? The international community has to ask that question every time they look at a treaty they've signed with us now because of how many times we've backed out of something we signed because we no longer agreed with it. Well... I don't agree with having to pay taxes -- but I don't get to stop paying them. Unless, of course, I'm armed with nuclear bombs and millions of soldiers, in which case I suppose I could do whatever I want. And that's sorta the point here. Treaties signed by us don't matter -- our word is not what people are going off of anymore, it's our massive armaments.
while citing exactly zero facts to support your arguments and pointing out exactly zero treaties that the U.S. has "violated".
A correctable problem, if you'd just ask nicely instead of being a total jerk and assuming that just because I didn't list them means they don't exist and I'm therefore wrong.
List of Notable Treaties the US has withdrawn from (broken)
Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty; Signed 1972, withdrawn 2001.
Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention (BWC) and Draft Proposal. Signed 1972, ratified 1975, withdrawn 2001.
Chemical Weapons Convention. Signed 1993, ratified 1997. Originally would have allowed countries to inspect other countries (including the US) for evidence of banned chemical weapons production. The treaty was modified to exempt only the United States from it.
There's also a number of treaties we haven't signed that are notable. For example, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Convention on Discrimination of Women (Iran and Sudan are amongst the very few countries that also haven't signed on), Convention on the Rights of the Child (142 have signed so far), Mine Ban Treaty, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There's also a number of treaties that, while we haven't formally withdrawn from or issued a statement on, we're in clear violation of and have stated our intent to continue doing so. Guantanamo Bay, for example, is a violation of numerous Geneva Conventions.
I think the only reason you were modded "+5 Insightful" was because of your anti-American rant, not due to actual logic.
Yes, and now I'm -1, Troll, apparently due to your pro-american rant, not due to actual logic. You missed my point -- I wasn't discussing the pros or cons of the treaty, but rather that it doesn't matter whether we sign it or not. I was mocking the idea that the United States has any diplomatic currency left to spend after we've pulled out of so many treaties and failed to sign others even when they're clearly aligned with our ideological values and would cost us nothing! We talk about how we're "world leaders" and a "beacon of hope" and the "police of the world", but it's a joke. It's total propaganda. And everybody else except the citizens here who've grown up on CNN and Fox News know that.
When I was talking about how the internet moved out of the basement 30 years ago, what I meant was that the government hasn't been directly involved in it for some time. It's already out of the control of the government -- it's being controlled by private american companies with no oversight, no laws to govern them, etc. So why would it matter if we signed the treaty or not? The government has no actual control! It'd be like me signing a contract to put you on the moon -- I have no way to deliver.
Well, not if they don't sign. That's kind of the point. If you don't sign it doesn't apply. And they won't sign. That sounds entirely reasonable.
I was referring to them backing out of, rejecting, or not acknowledging, a few dozen treaties lately, not honoring extradition requests while stealing other citizens out of their own beds in other countries without that government's consent, and withdrawing from the Geneva diplomatic conventions, etc. When you've violated so many of your own treaties (Hello, Native Americans! How 'ya doin'?) your word no longer means anything. Treaties are contracts between countries... if you don't honor them, they become meaningless.
Whether they sign or don't sign isn't the problem: It's that the signature wouldn't mean anything anyway. But I can't blame you guys for having such terminally short memories... just ask Julian Assange about international treaty law. Or did you forget about him already?:/
Not signing a treaty in the first place because you don't like whats in it is a sound and rational thing to do.
That's not why the treaty wasn't signed. Lay off on the koolaid; Even Jon Stewart on the Daily Show dedicated a full 15 minutes to mocking the stupidity of not signing the treaty. Even "Binders full of women" Romney only got half that time of being mocked for that comment.
Don't do it GRAIL! You have so much still to live for! Remember the brave Rovers! They're still out there, long after their parents abandoned them, staring up at the red sky. Believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything! Call the satellite suicide hotline now.
Treaties no longer apply to the United States. Our promises aren't worth the paper they're printed on. We've withdrawn from more of them than we've signed. Even a purely declarative treaty about the rights of the disabled -- with no enforcement provisions at all, we rejected because we didn't want to be perceived as supporting anything from the UN! And the irony is, the treaty was modeled after our own Medicare program. We've become like Darth Vader when it comes to our treaties: "I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further." I find it as absolutely no surprise they won't sign the ITU treaty... though it probably has less to do with control over the internet than the admission that something that started here is now better pretty much everywhere else but here. Mobile phones cost a fortune, our internet service is overpriced crap, and yet we cling to the idea that because we gave birth to it, it's ours. Yeah, okay mom. The internet moved out of the house 30 years ago. It has a life of its own now, and apparently, you don't even want to call and see it anymore except on birthdays and holidays.
And he'd be right. Look, I'm normally a night owl but this week they got me in training and I have to wake up at 4 in the fucking morning... so if I'm off by a decimal point here or there, it's not surprising. I'm not going to care too much about 0.45% when we're talking about something as petty as spam.:)
I've had similar experiences with Spamhaus btw, they decided to nix my upstream provider and when I complained I was told that I should use another ISP because mine wasn't well liked.
I've had problems like that with them as well. The thing is, Google et al. do provide very good spam filters. Out of the thousand or so spam messages that hit my mailbox every month, only about 5 make it through. A 99.95% success rate is nothing to sneeze at, so credit where credit is due. But the problem here is still architectural -- very few people respond to spam so the odds are very high that responses are to legitimate e-mail. Higher, I would think, than the 99.95% rate above. Multiple responses to the same address should override any spam-rating system they have automatically, and if not, there should at least be a 'white list' option for users to bypass the filter in the event of a failure such as this.
Neither option exists, and there is no remediation pathway available. The author (correctly) concludes this is deliberate and not merely a process oversight. Such is the nature of operations where the profit margins are so tiny that any support would obliterate it. Google only provides gmail so it can mine keywords and phrases from your e-mails to build a marketing profile and then target advertisements at you. Despite the very low rate of success here, it still beats the cost of the hardware maintenance and bandwidth when aggregated over a few hundred million regular users. But the only support incentive here is customer retention, and the support provided is very minimal and highly automated (as the author has discovered). This guy isn't a google customer -- he's trying to contact google customers, which places him in the "liability" column, not the "asset" column. Unless this guy can show that hundreds of thousands of Google customers are impacted and the impact is severe enough for them to switch, or consider switching, to another provider, there is no incentive for Google to even read his complaint, no matter how justified or rational, or easy to fix.
That's the free market problem he's run into: He thinks he's a customer, but he isn't. He's a service. And one that costs google more to support than any potential revenue that may be generated. The business decision here is clear, if not very friendly.
Possibly because the last person who attempted to dial that particular emergency service wound up speaking to someone in another country before giving up, sending a e-mail, and then waiting while his coworkers slowly went insane from a head wound, foot injury, etc., and dropped unconscious. When he'd finally had enough of the waiting game, they busted into the room and bludgeoned him with the door. It's not exactly what I'd call a ringing endorsement. *cough*
I'd go with '911' simply because the keys are opposite each other; "112" could result in some fat fingering for one. For two, most switches use the first digit being a "1" to denote the beginning of a long distance call. I can imagine calling for emergency services and then asking "Okay, well what country am I speaking with?" Going with '112' breaks a perfectly good standard in a country that at least has a standard phone number format. Try calling India sometime for an example of what a lack of phone number format standards can cause.
The whole point of a standard is to reduce confusion... the one thing in an emergency situation that you don't want.
until this is the most-downloaded app in the store? One day? A few hours?
Try "the moment it showed up." It hasn't even been available for 8 hours yet and it already has tens of thousands of downloads. People haven't even gotten out of bed yet, and it's the most downloaded app of the day.
Yeah. Apparently Apple has finally figured out that killing your customers isn't good business./snark This is the first time Apple has had to swallow its pride and admit that something they made failed so disasterously that even the Reality Distortion Field created by thousands of spin doctors and lawyers collapsed. They'll probably fix that problem though when they switch to 16nm fabrication though for their chip plants. Battery life and minaturization of lawyers has always been a major shortcoming of their product line.
I hope it can disrupt the connectivity oligopoly that reigns at the moment. North America's connectivity is, on average, twice as bad as Romania in 30 something position. Lets do this!
There's only one resource the government cannot absolutely control and manipulate at the behest of their corporate masters: The air. If you want better internet, a free and open internet, that is resistant to censorship and manipulation of commercial interests, you're going to have to start with making a wireless technology that is capable of sending data at a high rate of speed over considerable distance, be resistant to jamming and fading, and even more resistant to being triangulated and traced back to its source.
Mesh networking technologies and protocols are not robust yet, owing to the simple problem that once you're part of the network, as a peer you can overwhelm any of your neighbors with a denial of service attack. Anonymity seems incompatible with a trust network, the only effective defense in a truly decentralized communications medium from the widescale propagation of such tactics.
Encryption and onion-routing can prevent tampering or surveillance, to a point. But with all of these technologies assembled together, it's almost a given that a vulnerability or weakness in the infrastructure will be discovered -- it's simply too complex. And then you have the problem of upgrading to eradicate the problem. As we've seen with IPv6 deployment, even when the hardware and technology is mature and developed, migrating to new protocols is something many are resistant to, despite offering the same services and only enhancing existing infrastructure; There are no real drawbacks.
Software defined radio may one day provide us with the raw tools to create a global wireless network that can operate securely and independently of the control of even the largest governments on the planet, but the technology and availability of materials isn't there yet -- it's still too cost-prohibitive, not just from an R&D perspective (it would take thousands of people worldwide coordinating the build up of such a device, and many tens of thousands to deploy it), but also from the fact that to organize that many people is impossible to do covertly, and given the consequences if it were to succeed, every major government on the planet would devote large amounts of law enforcement resources to preventing it.
That said, criminals are already taking the first baby-steps towards this technology -- a massive wireless communications network is running in Mexico that the drug cartels are using (by kidnapping telco and RF engineers!) for exactly this purpose. Although it is still very primitive and the equipment easy enough to locate, it's already proving a real headache and far more feasible than anyone anticipated.
They wouldn't be the first country to put defence spending before welfare and basic services. Slashdot posters often point out how much the US could do for its people, for science and for humanity in general if it didn't spend so much on the military.
The problem was aptly summed up some four thousand years ago by Sun Tzu, who noted that once you start beating your people and become a tyrant, your only path is to become an even worse tyrant. Once you start, you can't stop until you're doomed.
Many have tried. They're all awaiting trial now or in jail. The main purpose of law enforcement is to maintain the status quo. You're not going to beat the system working within it or exposing yourself to it. That's been proven since the 60s in this country when, depite massive public opinion against it, the war in Vietnam continued. It's going to take more than words, banners, and a few picket lines to fix this problem -- our law makers do not listen even when they are surrounded by thousands of angry voters, because they know that voting and protest are both ineffectual. If you manage to get rid of one bad politician, another will take his/her place. The amount of effort required to overcome the bureaucratic inertia reinforcing and protecting these laws and legal mechanisms to extract money from the poor and give them to the rich is beyond the capability of even hundreds of thousands of organized citizens.
I cannot see this changing short of a major civil uprising.
... leading to an excessive drain on time and resources of the lower courts.
You do realize that they recently agreed to kill the class action lawsuit, a legal tool designed specifically to address this problem, right? The courts don't give a damn about the "time and resources" of the courts. Criminals can rot in jail for months or years before trial, who cares? Oh wait, many of them are innocent? Well they can't be that innocent, or they wouldn't have been arrested to begin with. In the few cases where people (not corporations) have organized to overwhelm the courts, they simply changed their procedures and rubber stamped them all into jail or with large fines. See also: Every major protest in the United States in the past 40 years. Hell, they prebuild jails complete with offices next to them for the public defenders, who they also fly them in from other states just to be on hand for those pesky outbreaks of First Amendmentitus.
Please. Efficiency is not a goal here. Destroying your very will to live is. You will accede to the wishes of your corporate overlords, or be buried in so many civil and criminal procedures that you'll wish you were dead.
Slashdot Mirror
Kudos for your religion analogy, very well worded.
Well, the moderators are frothing at the mouth over some of my "devil's advocate" posts lately. Like pointing out the United States isn't all sunshine and unicorns in an earlier thread today... it's been from -1, Troll to +5 insightful a half dozen times already. It really has nothing to do with the strength of my argument, but the fact that the moderators on slashdot these days have a lower tolerance for cognitive dissonance because fewer and fewer of them are highly educated and experienced within the fields Slashdot used to cater to -- science, technology, and engineering. Now it's become a cesspool of fanboys who may have enthusiasm for those things but not enough experience with it to recognize their own limitations, or that there is more than one right answer (or sometimes no right answers, which is a terrible thing for a young geek to learn).
As you can see now, it's currently, "+2, offtopic", in spite of the fact that the whole premise of my post is explaining how we lost the web the author is reminiscing about! And they probably marked me down because I used an example that was politically charged. I chose that example precisely because it illustrates why the web has changed: The general population is full of prejudice and intolerance. Slashdot used to be exempt from that, but like I said -- as the less-experienced and knowledgable have flooded the forums, it has seen an influx of those values as evidenced by both the comments and the moderation.
Since the buyout, Slashdot has gained more mainstream attention (thanks, Dice, for spending all that money on choice SEO placement...) as an aggregate news site, but it's lost its original values -- those insighful and in-depth, and often humorous, posts that you and I remember and love. And don't let my high UID fool you... I had a 4 digit once. Then a troll hacked my account. :)
Wasn't aware that Julian Assange was charged with breaking international treaty law. At least not yet anyway.
He wasn't charged with it; He was the victim.
we've abandoned core values that used to be fundamental to the web world.
No we haven't. They're just no longer in the majority. It's like religions: In the United States, for example, everyone's on about how the 0.5% of atheists that exist here are oppressing the christians' (who make up 76%) right to celebrate their christmas holiday. Please -- I'm just using this as an example, no flames! But elsewhere in the world, it's dominated by muslims, or jews, or hindus, or whatever. And within each of those communities, those values are the dominant ones.
The web was originally created by academics, scientists, engineers, and people from these fields are collaborative. They're peers, and they broker in knowledge sharing and exchange. It's very different than the hierarchy that most of society is based on. Now that "most of society" has moved onto the web, they've taken their values with them. The web is simply a communications medium; It does not have a morality.
That said... I miss the old days too.
I find the US' anti-UN attitude as irritating as you do, but it's not just the US.
But I'm not talking about those other countries because I don't live in them. I live in this one, not those. And regardless of how few or many other people agree with the position, we're not doing it for the same reasons -- we're doing it because the Republicans have their panties in a knot about supporting UN actions regardless of how humanitarian and cost free the signing of a given treaty would be. So all this crap about how the ITU treaty being wrong and such may be valid, but that's not what I'm addressing -- I'm addressing the fact that the United States wouldn't sign it even if it created the perfect utopia, fed all the hungry people of the world, and cured all disease. And only that fact.
What's worse though, even if we were to sign it, it would mean nothing because of our past record of violating treaties. How many times does a person have to lie to you before you stop trusting them? The international community has to ask that question every time they look at a treaty they've signed with us now because of how many times we've backed out of something we signed because we no longer agreed with it. Well... I don't agree with having to pay taxes -- but I don't get to stop paying them. Unless, of course, I'm armed with nuclear bombs and millions of soldiers, in which case I suppose I could do whatever I want. And that's sorta the point here. Treaties signed by us don't matter -- our word is not what people are going off of anymore, it's our massive armaments.
Perhaps, Vint Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee are better experts in how the Internet works, though?
They probably are, but they're not as funny, and they aren't commenting on the UN treaty about disabled people in that article.
while citing exactly zero facts to support your arguments and pointing out exactly zero treaties that the U.S. has "violated".
A correctable problem, if you'd just ask nicely instead of being a total jerk and assuming that just because I didn't list them means they don't exist and I'm therefore wrong.
List of Notable Treaties the US has withdrawn from (broken)
There's also a number of treaties we haven't signed that are notable. For example, the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, Convention on Discrimination of Women (Iran and Sudan are amongst the very few countries that also haven't signed on), Convention on the Rights of the Child (142 have signed so far), Mine Ban Treaty, Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC).
There's also a number of treaties that, while we haven't formally withdrawn from or issued a statement on, we're in clear violation of and have stated our intent to continue doing so. Guantanamo Bay, for example, is a violation of numerous Geneva Conventions.
I think the only reason you were modded "+5 Insightful" was because of your anti-American rant, not due to actual logic.
Yes, and now I'm -1, Troll, apparently due to your pro-american rant, not due to actual logic. You missed my point -- I wasn't discussing the pros or cons of the treaty, but rather that it doesn't matter whether we sign it or not. I was mocking the idea that the United States has any diplomatic currency left to spend after we've pulled out of so many treaties and failed to sign others even when they're clearly aligned with our ideological values and would cost us nothing! We talk about how we're "world leaders" and a "beacon of hope" and the "police of the world", but it's a joke. It's total propaganda. And everybody else except the citizens here who've grown up on CNN and Fox News know that.
When I was talking about how the internet moved out of the basement 30 years ago, what I meant was that the government hasn't been directly involved in it for some time. It's already out of the control of the government -- it's being controlled by private american companies with no oversight, no laws to govern them, etc. So why would it matter if we signed the treaty or not? The government has no actual control! It'd be like me signing a contract to put you on the moon -- I have no way to deliver.
Well, not if they don't sign. That's kind of the point. If you don't sign it doesn't apply. And they won't sign. That sounds entirely reasonable.
I was referring to them backing out of, rejecting, or not acknowledging, a few dozen treaties lately, not honoring extradition requests while stealing other citizens out of their own beds in other countries without that government's consent, and withdrawing from the Geneva diplomatic conventions, etc. When you've violated so many of your own treaties (Hello, Native Americans! How 'ya doin'?) your word no longer means anything. Treaties are contracts between countries... if you don't honor them, they become meaningless.
Whether they sign or don't sign isn't the problem: It's that the signature wouldn't mean anything anyway. But I can't blame you guys for having such terminally short memories... just ask Julian Assange about international treaty law. Or did you forget about him already? :/
Not signing a treaty in the first place because you don't like whats in it is a sound and rational thing to do.
That's not why the treaty wasn't signed. Lay off on the koolaid; Even Jon Stewart on the Daily Show dedicated a full 15 minutes to mocking the stupidity of not signing the treaty. Even "Binders full of women" Romney only got half that time of being mocked for that comment.
Don't do it GRAIL! You have so much still to live for! Remember the brave Rovers! They're still out there, long after their parents abandoned them, staring up at the red sky. Believe in yourself and you can accomplish anything! Call the satellite suicide hotline now.
Treaties no longer apply to the United States. Our promises aren't worth the paper they're printed on. We've withdrawn from more of them than we've signed. Even a purely declarative treaty about the rights of the disabled -- with no enforcement provisions at all, we rejected because we didn't want to be perceived as supporting anything from the UN! And the irony is, the treaty was modeled after our own Medicare program. We've become like Darth Vader when it comes to our treaties: "I have altered our agreement. Pray I do not alter it further." I find it as absolutely no surprise they won't sign the ITU treaty... though it probably has less to do with control over the internet than the admission that something that started here is now better pretty much everywhere else but here. Mobile phones cost a fortune, our internet service is overpriced crap, and yet we cling to the idea that because we gave birth to it, it's ours. Yeah, okay mom. The internet moved out of the house 30 years ago. It has a life of its own now, and apparently, you don't even want to call and see it anymore except on birthdays and holidays.
...application of technology and not one utterance of "boffin"??!?!? I demand satisfaction!
You're from Cardiff, aren't you?
And he'd be right. Look, I'm normally a night owl but this week they got me in training and I have to wake up at 4 in the fucking morning... so if I'm off by a decimal point here or there, it's not surprising. I'm not going to care too much about 0.45% when we're talking about something as petty as spam. :)
I've had similar experiences with Spamhaus btw, they decided to nix my upstream provider and when I complained I was told that I should use another ISP because mine wasn't well liked.
I've had problems like that with them as well. The thing is, Google et al. do provide very good spam filters. Out of the thousand or so spam messages that hit my mailbox every month, only about 5 make it through. A 99.95% success rate is nothing to sneeze at, so credit where credit is due. But the problem here is still architectural -- very few people respond to spam so the odds are very high that responses are to legitimate e-mail. Higher, I would think, than the 99.95% rate above. Multiple responses to the same address should override any spam-rating system they have automatically, and if not, there should at least be a 'white list' option for users to bypass the filter in the event of a failure such as this.
Neither option exists, and there is no remediation pathway available. The author (correctly) concludes this is deliberate and not merely a process oversight. Such is the nature of operations where the profit margins are so tiny that any support would obliterate it. Google only provides gmail so it can mine keywords and phrases from your e-mails to build a marketing profile and then target advertisements at you. Despite the very low rate of success here, it still beats the cost of the hardware maintenance and bandwidth when aggregated over a few hundred million regular users. But the only support incentive here is customer retention, and the support provided is very minimal and highly automated (as the author has discovered). This guy isn't a google customer -- he's trying to contact google customers, which places him in the "liability" column, not the "asset" column. Unless this guy can show that hundreds of thousands of Google customers are impacted and the impact is severe enough for them to switch, or consider switching, to another provider, there is no incentive for Google to even read his complaint, no matter how justified or rational, or easy to fix.
That's the free market problem he's run into: He thinks he's a customer, but he isn't. He's a service. And one that costs google more to support than any potential revenue that may be generated. The business decision here is clear, if not very friendly.
Works out pretty well for the tobacco industry.
Tobacco takes 30 years to kill people. Apple's product takes mere hours.
why can't we standardise on that?
Possibly because the last person who attempted to dial that particular emergency service wound up speaking to someone in another country before giving up, sending a e-mail, and then waiting while his coworkers slowly went insane from a head wound, foot injury, etc., and dropped unconscious. When he'd finally had enough of the waiting game, they busted into the room and bludgeoned him with the door. It's not exactly what I'd call a ringing endorsement. *cough*
I'd go with '911' simply because the keys are opposite each other; "112" could result in some fat fingering for one. For two, most switches use the first digit being a "1" to denote the beginning of a long distance call. I can imagine calling for emergency services and then asking "Okay, well what country am I speaking with?" Going with '112' breaks a perfectly good standard in a country that at least has a standard phone number format. Try calling India sometime for an example of what a lack of phone number format standards can cause.
The whole point of a standard is to reduce confusion... the one thing in an emergency situation that you don't want.
Apple maps were obviously a large regression from Google maps, so it's good to have that finally fixed.
You must be using the Apple definition of "fixed", which is similar to the Apple definition of an "upgrade": You get a new one.
You must only be using it to go between your house and the Apple PR department office then.
Apple's PR office isn't in Apple Maps. If he tried using it to get there, then that slashdot post was probably his last act on Earth.
until this is the most-downloaded app in the store? One day? A few hours?
Try "the moment it showed up." It hasn't even been available for 8 hours yet and it already has tens of thousands of downloads. People haven't even gotten out of bed yet, and it's the most downloaded app of the day.
Yeah. Apparently Apple has finally figured out that killing your customers isn't good business. /snark This is the first time Apple has had to swallow its pride and admit that something they made failed so disasterously that even the Reality Distortion Field created by thousands of spin doctors and lawyers collapsed. They'll probably fix that problem though when they switch to 16nm fabrication though for their chip plants. Battery life and minaturization of lawyers has always been a major shortcoming of their product line.
I hope it can disrupt the connectivity oligopoly that reigns at the moment. North America's connectivity is, on average, twice as bad as Romania in 30 something position. Lets do this!
There's only one resource the government cannot absolutely control and manipulate at the behest of their corporate masters: The air. If you want better internet, a free and open internet, that is resistant to censorship and manipulation of commercial interests, you're going to have to start with making a wireless technology that is capable of sending data at a high rate of speed over considerable distance, be resistant to jamming and fading, and even more resistant to being triangulated and traced back to its source.
Mesh networking technologies and protocols are not robust yet, owing to the simple problem that once you're part of the network, as a peer you can overwhelm any of your neighbors with a denial of service attack. Anonymity seems incompatible with a trust network, the only effective defense in a truly decentralized communications medium from the widescale propagation of such tactics.
Encryption and onion-routing can prevent tampering or surveillance, to a point. But with all of these technologies assembled together, it's almost a given that a vulnerability or weakness in the infrastructure will be discovered -- it's simply too complex. And then you have the problem of upgrading to eradicate the problem. As we've seen with IPv6 deployment, even when the hardware and technology is mature and developed, migrating to new protocols is something many are resistant to, despite offering the same services and only enhancing existing infrastructure; There are no real drawbacks.
Software defined radio may one day provide us with the raw tools to create a global wireless network that can operate securely and independently of the control of even the largest governments on the planet, but the technology and availability of materials isn't there yet -- it's still too cost-prohibitive, not just from an R&D perspective (it would take thousands of people worldwide coordinating the build up of such a device, and many tens of thousands to deploy it), but also from the fact that to organize that many people is impossible to do covertly, and given the consequences if it were to succeed, every major government on the planet would devote large amounts of law enforcement resources to preventing it.
That said, criminals are already taking the first baby-steps towards this technology -- a massive wireless communications network is running in Mexico that the drug cartels are using (by kidnapping telco and RF engineers!) for exactly this purpose. Although it is still very primitive and the equipment easy enough to locate, it's already proving a real headache and far more feasible than anyone anticipated.
They wouldn't be the first country to put defence spending before welfare and basic services. Slashdot posters often point out how much the US could do for its people, for science and for humanity in general if it didn't spend so much on the military.
The problem was aptly summed up some four thousand years ago by Sun Tzu, who noted that once you start beating your people and become a tyrant, your only path is to become an even worse tyrant. Once you start, you can't stop until you're doomed.
Please. Someone go after them.
Many have tried. They're all awaiting trial now or in jail. The main purpose of law enforcement is to maintain the status quo. You're not going to beat the system working within it or exposing yourself to it. That's been proven since the 60s in this country when, depite massive public opinion against it, the war in Vietnam continued. It's going to take more than words, banners, and a few picket lines to fix this problem -- our law makers do not listen even when they are surrounded by thousands of angry voters, because they know that voting and protest are both ineffectual. If you manage to get rid of one bad politician, another will take his/her place. The amount of effort required to overcome the bureaucratic inertia reinforcing and protecting these laws and legal mechanisms to extract money from the poor and give them to the rich is beyond the capability of even hundreds of thousands of organized citizens.
I cannot see this changing short of a major civil uprising.
... leading to an excessive drain on time and resources of the lower courts.
You do realize that they recently agreed to kill the class action lawsuit, a legal tool designed specifically to address this problem, right? The courts don't give a damn about the "time and resources" of the courts. Criminals can rot in jail for months or years before trial, who cares? Oh wait, many of them are innocent? Well they can't be that innocent, or they wouldn't have been arrested to begin with. In the few cases where people (not corporations) have organized to overwhelm the courts, they simply changed their procedures and rubber stamped them all into jail or with large fines. See also: Every major protest in the United States in the past 40 years. Hell, they prebuild jails complete with offices next to them for the public defenders, who they also fly them in from other states just to be on hand for those pesky outbreaks of First Amendmentitus.
Please. Efficiency is not a goal here. Destroying your very will to live is. You will accede to the wishes of your corporate overlords, or be buried in so many civil and criminal procedures that you'll wish you were dead.