What I don't understand is why that much crime is going uninvestigated. Why aren't there dedicated law enforcement units working in major metropolitan areas to recover these phones? In most jurisdictions, they are valuable enough to qualify the theft as grand larceny. What's more, each cell phone has a built-in tracking device accurate to within a few meters, and have microphones and cameras built in! These aren't exactly difficult crimes to solve.
And yet, the US imprisons more people than any other country in the world. That holds if you measure per capita, or even count the total. The US as a land of freedom and opportunity is a complete and utter myth today, if it was ever true.
Ordinarily, I'm all for a good roasting of our country. There's so very many things to choose from! But this isn't one of them. The per capita rate of imprisonment has little to do with the freedoms and opportunities present here, if anything. A high incarceration rate doesn't erase our public education system or other social programs. It doesn't counter our large economy, which despite its recent faltering still brings tens of thousands of people a year into the country (legally and illegally) to start a better life.
The incarceration rate is a problem, just not one tied to the other things you mentioned. The biggest reason for it is that our Constitution makes all criminal records public. This means that employers can use a person's criminal record as a basis for employment -- and anyone who has served time will tell you, the only job you'll get after you get out is flipping burgers or telemarketing. Shit jobs. Jobs that can't even pay the rent. And when you put a bunch of criminals together for years at a go, surprise -- they tell each other things. They teach each other. Every person that goes to jail for one crime comes out knowing how to do fifty more. And it doesn't take many weeks of being hungry and cold all the time before they decide that crime pays more than staying straight does. Our system creates career criminals because their debt to society is rarely ever satisfied: We let them loose in the general population as second-class citizens, and then wonder why a group treated as cheap slave labor turns to crime.
Except that well over 90% of people charged with federal crimes ever see a trial. Is it because they are just that accurate? No, it's because they punish people for exercising their right to a trial, by cutting them breaks if they forfeit that right.
It's 86%, and it's not because they're getting cut a break. It's because of confessions. When you're pulled over for speeding, and the officer asks how fast you were going, what do you say? You don't want to lie, of course, so you tell him you were going a little bit over the limit. And you see, right there -- you just admitted to a crime, not ten seconds after the cop met you. No deal making, no cutting breaks, nothing. Interrogations work the same way -- most people talk. They want to tell their story. And that's how they get you.
Face it, the US is an authoritarian hell hole with very little to recommend it above other authoritarian hell holes. The idea that the US is exceptional in any way when it somes to freedom, liberty, justice, the voice of the people, is all baseless jingoistic nonsense.
I don't know what a "jingo" is, but we're not an authoritarian hell hole. If you want to see what that looks like, hop over to most parts of central Africa. Or the middle east. I define authoritarian hell hole as places where RPGs and guns are mounted on civilian vehicles, and everyone is a corrupt ex-soldier. You think you're badass? I saw a picture a week ago where a woman was carrying her 4 month old child on her back, so she could keep her hands free to hold an automatic assault rifle. So please, save the melodrama about how we're a "hell hole". This country has problems. A lot of problems. Big you-can-drive-a-bus-through-them problems. But so does every other country. And when you look at it on the whole, we're still doing alright. Not great, not exceptional, but alright. We get a 'C'.
How is it innovation to take something that sucks and xerox it 64 times? AMDs chips consume more power and perform less computational operations, compared to Intel chips. They've been behind the curve and falling farther for awhile; And it has everything to do with poor management. AMD is not an argument for competition driving innovation. Pick a better example.
It's not a honeypot if the information provided is accurate. If the TSA is encoding the screening level on the barcode, then adversaries can use that information to enhance the success rate of smuggling something past security.
Those of us who've seen what happens when we invest time and money in Microsoft's other pet project platforms aren't about to jump on Windows Phone 8.
Fair enough... but you're not the only type of agent in the market: There's programmers fresh out of college who can't find regular work and decide instead to download an SDK and make something, and don't know any better.
Gone are the days when your company supported Microsoft's latest or else .
Corporate IT just called. They want to have a word with you about that comment in one of the meeting rooms on that empty and unused floor with no security cameras. Microsoft may not have that kind of pull for smart phones, but when it comes to Windows and Office, you bet your sweet ass it's supported "or else".
The correct response to this kind of press is to say "We have developers! Tons of developers! They're falling out of the sky, honest!" The smart phone market long ago stopped being about features and now turns on the number of apps. All the phones have GPS, megapixel cameras, touch screen interface, etc. In terms of hardware features, they're largely the same. So they have to differentiate themselves on the basis of apps. And what kinds of apps are popular? Games.
People loooove screwing off at work with Angry Birds and Farmville. So the smart phone market is not that much different from the game console market in that regard: Sales of hardware are based on how many new and exciting games are available for that platform. Now yes, it is in reality not that simple -- the app market isn't just games, but the idea is the same: The number of popular apps is strongly correlated to the number of units shipping. So regardless of how many developers the platform has, Microsoft needs to be out there screaming "Developers! We have them! Oh yes, developers, developers, developers!" Preferrably without monkey man on stage saying it, but even a dancing fat guy is better than nothing.
That's the only strategy that will work if Microsoft doesn't want another dead on arrival platform launch. Sorta like, say, the Dreamcast.
Social justice is a code word for Marxism. 'Nuff said.
Another hand wave. I never used the "code word". I also didn't use the secret handshake or the special hand signal. What I did ask for was that people consider the consequences of their decisions, politically and personally. In other words, I asked for personal responsibility. People like you remind me that there is a growing subset of americans that think any call for responsibility is socialism, communism, marxism, etc. They believe that consequences can be reduced to dollar signs. Something is good and responsible if it makes a profit, and bad and irresponsible if it results in a debt.
I don't know what you want to call that ideology, but it is morally debased and corrupt to its very core: There is more to life than money.
The rest is some pseudo-socialist rant. Move along, nothing to see here.
I think that's a hand wave on your part. You're just slapping a label on the author's assertions and then jettisoning them without analyzing it and providing a reasoned response. The author is simply stating that every candle lights the darkness around it -- but it still casts a shadow. The question here is not whether Google (or any company, organization, or group) has done wrong, but whether the good outweighs the bad. And has it?
Is the ability to search the internet using a proprietary algorithm and database almost instantly worth the steady erosion of our privacy and corresponding loss of civil liberty? Our founding fathers made the vote anonymous for a reason -- and in that day and age, the right to peacefully assemble was also the right to anonymously assemble. Nobody back then anticipated that every public moment of our lives would be stored in a giant machine, and be replayable at the touch of a button in perpetuity. The loss of anonymity means that people who might otherwise become politically active now don't. It means the vote itself is corrupted because people talk about it amongst each other less. It means the mass media gains more sway over popular opinion because what they watch on TV isn't going into a government database, unlike assembling for protest or discussion... which results in arrests and being placed on "no fly" lists. Google provides blogging services, and as a result of using them, many citizens have wound up on such lists. This is proven, documented fact, not "pseudo-socialist" ranting.
And the author is right: Technology can't fix social problems. And fundamentally, that's what we're discussing, and that's what you missed. Information Technology is fundamentally about improving reliability, efficiency, and speed of digital systems. It says nothing about the process we're making more efficient or reliable. What would you say to speed cameras everywhere? Or black boxes that record everything you do and then fine you? Be honest with yourself: How many weeks would it take before you were hopelessly in debt if every single moment you spent behind the wheel was audited by a police officer... forever?
Sudden advances in IT expose latent social problems. Our legal system doesn't move as quickly as our industry does, and so there's a gap between the time a problem (like privacy) is discovered, and a socially-acceptable solution is found and implimented. That gap is growing year over year because our legal system isn't getting any faster, but our technology is. So you can wave your hand and say "nothing to see here", if you want... but truthfully, you're young and naive and that's what's on display here, not some insightful social commentary. There are real problems here, and although the author may not have articulated it as clearly as I have, it's still clear what his underlying point is.
Self-regulation has failed in almost every industry -- sooner or later, dollar signs flash in someone's eyes, and it doesn't matter whether it's ethical or not, only whether it's legal or not. And increasingly, what's legal and what isn't comes down to the balance in your bank account. Is that the society we want to live in? If the answer is no, then we need to start thinking about how to find a socially-acceptable way to even the differences between our ever plodding along legal system with an industry that measures progress in milliseconds.
The only ones to believe the RIAA are the politicians they bought off.
Well, that's not entirely true. Anyone not on the "free lunch" bandwagon understands that the creators of these works should be compensated. And copyright is what makes the GPL and its many related licenses possible. In fact, Linux as you know it wouldn't exist without copyright. The problem isn't copyright as an idea -- it's copyright as it is implimented today. These politicians were sold on the idea that the current implimentation is the best, quite literally. The argument is that protections are needed for the way business is done today, otherwise that business would evaporate, leading to a loss of jobs, income, etc. Most politicians are lawyers, not economists, and certainly not "technologists". They don't understand the finer nuances of the market, nor how technology interoperates with it. They are therefore incapable of conceptualizing any alternative to the status quo, and absent that, their default vote is to support it.
But people like us, the technologically-literate, are painfully aware of how limiting current copyright is, and how disadvantaging it is to newcomers to the market and consumers as a whole. We can see new ways of doing business that (and this has been proven multiple times!) satisfy multiple goals of personal use, fair use, time shifting, etc., while also providing a source of revenue to the creators of these works that, thanks to decreased distribution costs would earn them more money. The entertainment industry as an aggregate entity would make more money with a less restrictive public policy. You know this. I know this. The authors know this. But the politicians and the general public don't, because they're only hearing from one side: The side that has a lot of money to burn to make sure it's the only side they hear.
In the few cases where the public became aware of how the industry works, the response was swift and overwhelmingly against it. SOPA, ACTA, CISPA... many attempts have been made, and even when it's been behind closed doors, shrouded in "national security", eventually it gets leaked and everyone involved gets roasted for it. This is a system that depends on misdirection, deception at the highest levels, and heavy spending on marketing and public relations to maintain itself. It has co-opted our legal and judicial systems and is now trying to insinuate itself into the private sector as well via policies and procedures designed to further defray the costs of maintaining this expensive superstructure that makes everyone a criminal.
The size of the brain isn't the determining factor in intelligence; Its surface area is. It's well-known that stress can cause structural differences in the brain, as does a wide variety of environmental conditions. But when you consider that a child can lose half of their brain and still go on to have a full range of mental faculties, and appear completely normal to any outside observer, it's clear size doesn't really matter... it's the number of interconnections between cells that seems to be what is important... and specifically, how and where those interconnections are made.
Occupy doesn't work like that. They all get together and via a complex process of hand signals indicate what they like and don't like. Then they break up into smaller committees, and subcommittees, and breakaway groups, each with their own ideas of what ought to be done about a thing. After several months, nothing has been done, the fort has burned down, the police have kicked everyone out of the park, and the only thing they have in common is that they blame the government for their utter inability to organize. It's mostly the 18-25 crowd that populates the meetings... dreamers, not doers.
And like hermit crabs, they're also total dicks to each other -- which is why anyone inspired to go to one of these meetings quickly becomes uninspired by the amount of petty political infighting and bickering.
Does it deal with rooted phones intelligently by assuming the device is malicious or does it deal with rooted phones stupidly by assuming the device is perfectly trustworthy?
Perhaps it deals with all phones the same way: As clients, with strict checking of data integrity and verification. Client side security is an oxymoron.
Most of what's out there isn't by the person's choice -- crappy privacy controls, people reposting, revenge photos, and leaked e-mail signatures... most of what google picks up about the average person was put there by a corporation that is trying to monetize that private data by making it public.
A camera that can tell me if I'm about to be asked "Do I look fat in this dress?"
Not really an innovation; It doesn't take an intelligent camera to know what comes next. Specifically, it doesn't matter which way you answer, you're still not getting laid tonight. Now, a camera that can text you before your significant other even asks if you want to go shopping with her and provide a list of socially-acceptable excuses would be an innovation. It would also break several laws of physics, notably that timey whimey wibbly wobbley...
In my native Europe as much as in your great & free US: More surveillance state. More police state. More security craze. Where is this going to stop ? When are ordinary, yet intelligent people going to refuse to live in and contribute to such a state ?
When an outside force interrupts the process. Every police state fell not because of internal pressures, but because something external to it caused a slight shift which then energized the population into revolt.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity of modern microchips. What you're describing simply isn't feasible for any chip of even modest complexity. To hunt for backdoors, you would really need to look at the HDL files, and even then, it wouldn't be hard to hide something malicious in one of the hundreds of test modes.
No, I think you are grossly underestimating the resources of the global intelligence community.
You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now.
Really? Walk over to any electronics item in your house and flip it over. Made in ______ [fill in the blank]. And please explain to me how being the chief supplier of a thing is a problem for said supplier... because OPEC is the chief supplier of oil and nobody considers them disadvantaged.
Now, I agree that we spend waaay too much on our military, and but your attitude is way too negative. I get that there's a lot of anti-American propaganda on the internet, and it's easy to be taken in by it, but it's mostly baseless.
Why do people hate us Americans? New survey reveals it's because we're bombing them! Apparently, 100% of the respondents stated they didn't like getting blown up.
The Chinese people aren't a bunch of worker ants, emotionlessly toiling away for the good of the hive. The media likes to present them that way, just as they used to do with Japan, because it's scary, and scared people consume more news.
I have an ex-pat friend who lives in China, and in fact works for China Telecom. They're not emotionless, but they are worker ants. Look up how many people have died during the construction of, er... any major public works project. Ever. Even the Great Wall of China has bodies buried in it. No, really... sometimes people fell in, and they just poured clay in over them and kept going.
The truth is much more banal. England's a perfect example of a "fallen" superpower, and they seem to be doing quite alright.
Yeah. They were only barely able to sack an island in south america a few years ago. That's the only recent military victory they can speak to... and two of the ships in that convoy were commercial freighters. Britain's navy was once to be feared, and their empire literally spanned the globe. While they are "doing alright" in terms of quality of life for its citizens and it has a stable and developed government... they're a mere shadow of what they once were. So "doing quite alright" is a subjective view of things.
It's not a trade war disguised as national security, it's national security disguised as a trade war. There's been no evidence presented of any backdoors. I'm quite certain that by now, many intelligence organizations have taken the chips apart and scanned them down and if they'd found anything there would have been a reaction. But there hasn't been -- it's just been hints, allegations, and rumor. It's disinformation, because there's no truth to go on, just more communist red-baiting. Not to say China doesn't have the resources, and doesn't have a long and inglorious history of electronic espionage... but so does France and nobody says a peep about them.
The United States isn't worried about China because it poses a military threat, or a "cyber" threat, or a terrorist threat... they're scared shitless because this country has clubbed and beaten its rivals over the head with economic policies and rules. China has us by the balls on rare earth metals, and most of our consumer electronics are made in Asia. If they decide to play economic hardball, we're going to lose. For a country that's grown complacent being able to pick up a phone and make every other country on the planet bend over and drop their pants to please the all-mighty american dollar... we're fucking terrified that there's a couple billion people about to industrialize and their economy is a jaugernaut. It won't be long before our military is the only thing remarkable about our country -- and it won't be sustainable without a solid economy to back it.
In 20 years, we're going to be facing the same situation the Soviet Union did: They died because they tried to maintain their military at the expense of their economy. This is a game we're going to lose, badly. That's why every trade sanction, disinformation campaign, and high profile story about places like FoxConn are desperately sought after by our military and economic leaders... if China manages to develop its economy much more, we're screwed.
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
No, it's called maturity. It can happen as early as your late 20s, but typically it takes until the mid-30s to manifest. Other symptoms include being in bed by midnight, not being as good as you remember at first-person shooter games, and drinking coffee with a reasonable amount of sugar and creamer rather than dumping the lot into every cup and having a quarter-inch of sludge at the bottom.
Slashdot Mirror
What I don't understand is why that much crime is going uninvestigated. Why aren't there dedicated law enforcement units working in major metropolitan areas to recover these phones? In most jurisdictions, they are valuable enough to qualify the theft as grand larceny. What's more, each cell phone has a built-in tracking device accurate to within a few meters, and have microphones and cameras built in! These aren't exactly difficult crimes to solve.
And yet, the US imprisons more people than any other country in the world. That holds if you measure per capita, or even count the total. The US as a land of freedom and opportunity is a complete and utter myth today, if it was ever true.
Ordinarily, I'm all for a good roasting of our country. There's so very many things to choose from! But this isn't one of them. The per capita rate of imprisonment has little to do with the freedoms and opportunities present here, if anything. A high incarceration rate doesn't erase our public education system or other social programs. It doesn't counter our large economy, which despite its recent faltering still brings tens of thousands of people a year into the country (legally and illegally) to start a better life.
The incarceration rate is a problem, just not one tied to the other things you mentioned. The biggest reason for it is that our Constitution makes all criminal records public. This means that employers can use a person's criminal record as a basis for employment -- and anyone who has served time will tell you, the only job you'll get after you get out is flipping burgers or telemarketing. Shit jobs. Jobs that can't even pay the rent. And when you put a bunch of criminals together for years at a go, surprise -- they tell each other things. They teach each other. Every person that goes to jail for one crime comes out knowing how to do fifty more. And it doesn't take many weeks of being hungry and cold all the time before they decide that crime pays more than staying straight does. Our system creates career criminals because their debt to society is rarely ever satisfied: We let them loose in the general population as second-class citizens, and then wonder why a group treated as cheap slave labor turns to crime.
Except that well over 90% of people charged with federal crimes ever see a trial. Is it because they are just that accurate? No, it's because they punish people for exercising their right to a trial, by cutting them breaks if they forfeit that right.
It's 86%, and it's not because they're getting cut a break. It's because of confessions. When you're pulled over for speeding, and the officer asks how fast you were going, what do you say? You don't want to lie, of course, so you tell him you were going a little bit over the limit. And you see, right there -- you just admitted to a crime, not ten seconds after the cop met you. No deal making, no cutting breaks, nothing. Interrogations work the same way -- most people talk. They want to tell their story. And that's how they get you.
Face it, the US is an authoritarian hell hole with very little to recommend it above other authoritarian hell holes. The idea that the US is exceptional in any way when it somes to freedom, liberty, justice, the voice of the people, is all baseless jingoistic nonsense.
I don't know what a "jingo" is, but we're not an authoritarian hell hole. If you want to see what that looks like, hop over to most parts of central Africa. Or the middle east. I define authoritarian hell hole as places where RPGs and guns are mounted on civilian vehicles, and everyone is a corrupt ex-soldier. You think you're badass? I saw a picture a week ago where a woman was carrying her 4 month old child on her back, so she could keep her hands free to hold an automatic assault rifle. So please, save the melodrama about how we're a "hell hole". This country has problems. A lot of problems. Big you-can-drive-a-bus-through-them problems. But so does every other country. And when you look at it on the whole, we're still doing alright. Not great, not exceptional, but alright. We get a 'C'.
When it's wet, the clouds go down
I fail to see how this is informative; It's patently obvious that electricity and water doesn't mix, cloud or no cloud.
Competition drives innovation.
How is it innovation to take something that sucks and xerox it 64 times? AMDs chips consume more power and perform less computational operations, compared to Intel chips. They've been behind the curve and falling farther for awhile; And it has everything to do with poor management. AMD is not an argument for competition driving innovation. Pick a better example.
Solution: Set SSID to "Have You Tried 'password'?"
It's not a honeypot if the information provided is accurate. If the TSA is encoding the screening level on the barcode, then adversaries can use that information to enhance the success rate of smuggling something past security.
Public Service Announcement:
Don't hack with a web cam plugged in.
Nah, who am I kidding. If that actually happened they'd keep Wall Street closed.
Well, now that you mention it...
Those of us who've seen what happens when we invest time and money in Microsoft's other pet project platforms aren't about to jump on Windows Phone 8.
Fair enough... but you're not the only type of agent in the market: There's programmers fresh out of college who can't find regular work and decide instead to download an SDK and make something, and don't know any better.
Gone are the days when your company supported Microsoft's latest or else .
Corporate IT just called. They want to have a word with you about that comment in one of the meeting rooms on that empty and unused floor with no security cameras. Microsoft may not have that kind of pull for smart phones, but when it comes to Windows and Office, you bet your sweet ass it's supported "or else".
The correct response to this kind of press is to say "We have developers! Tons of developers! They're falling out of the sky, honest!" The smart phone market long ago stopped being about features and now turns on the number of apps. All the phones have GPS, megapixel cameras, touch screen interface, etc. In terms of hardware features, they're largely the same. So they have to differentiate themselves on the basis of apps. And what kinds of apps are popular? Games.
People loooove screwing off at work with Angry Birds and Farmville. So the smart phone market is not that much different from the game console market in that regard: Sales of hardware are based on how many new and exciting games are available for that platform. Now yes, it is in reality not that simple -- the app market isn't just games, but the idea is the same: The number of popular apps is strongly correlated to the number of units shipping. So regardless of how many developers the platform has, Microsoft needs to be out there screaming "Developers! We have them! Oh yes, developers, developers, developers!" Preferrably without monkey man on stage saying it, but even a dancing fat guy is better than nothing.
That's the only strategy that will work if Microsoft doesn't want another dead on arrival platform launch. Sorta like, say, the Dreamcast.
Social justice is a code word for Marxism. 'Nuff said.
Another hand wave. I never used the "code word". I also didn't use the secret handshake or the special hand signal. What I did ask for was that people consider the consequences of their decisions, politically and personally. In other words, I asked for personal responsibility. People like you remind me that there is a growing subset of americans that think any call for responsibility is socialism, communism, marxism, etc. They believe that consequences can be reduced to dollar signs. Something is good and responsible if it makes a profit, and bad and irresponsible if it results in a debt.
I don't know what you want to call that ideology, but it is morally debased and corrupt to its very core: There is more to life than money.
With that out of the way, why do people neglect the power they have as consumers in the market?
I have only one question for you: Do you feel powerful?
The rest is some pseudo-socialist rant. Move along, nothing to see here.
I think that's a hand wave on your part. You're just slapping a label on the author's assertions and then jettisoning them without analyzing it and providing a reasoned response. The author is simply stating that every candle lights the darkness around it -- but it still casts a shadow. The question here is not whether Google (or any company, organization, or group) has done wrong, but whether the good outweighs the bad. And has it?
Is the ability to search the internet using a proprietary algorithm and database almost instantly worth the steady erosion of our privacy and corresponding loss of civil liberty? Our founding fathers made the vote anonymous for a reason -- and in that day and age, the right to peacefully assemble was also the right to anonymously assemble. Nobody back then anticipated that every public moment of our lives would be stored in a giant machine, and be replayable at the touch of a button in perpetuity. The loss of anonymity means that people who might otherwise become politically active now don't. It means the vote itself is corrupted because people talk about it amongst each other less. It means the mass media gains more sway over popular opinion because what they watch on TV isn't going into a government database, unlike assembling for protest or discussion... which results in arrests and being placed on "no fly" lists. Google provides blogging services, and as a result of using them, many citizens have wound up on such lists. This is proven, documented fact, not "pseudo-socialist" ranting.
And the author is right: Technology can't fix social problems. And fundamentally, that's what we're discussing, and that's what you missed. Information Technology is fundamentally about improving reliability, efficiency, and speed of digital systems. It says nothing about the process we're making more efficient or reliable. What would you say to speed cameras everywhere? Or black boxes that record everything you do and then fine you? Be honest with yourself: How many weeks would it take before you were hopelessly in debt if every single moment you spent behind the wheel was audited by a police officer... forever?
Sudden advances in IT expose latent social problems. Our legal system doesn't move as quickly as our industry does, and so there's a gap between the time a problem (like privacy) is discovered, and a socially-acceptable solution is found and implimented. That gap is growing year over year because our legal system isn't getting any faster, but our technology is. So you can wave your hand and say "nothing to see here", if you want... but truthfully, you're young and naive and that's what's on display here, not some insightful social commentary. There are real problems here, and although the author may not have articulated it as clearly as I have, it's still clear what his underlying point is.
Self-regulation has failed in almost every industry -- sooner or later, dollar signs flash in someone's eyes, and it doesn't matter whether it's ethical or not, only whether it's legal or not. And increasingly, what's legal and what isn't comes down to the balance in your bank account. Is that the society we want to live in? If the answer is no, then we need to start thinking about how to find a socially-acceptable way to even the differences between our ever plodding along legal system with an industry that measures progress in milliseconds.
The only ones to believe the RIAA are the politicians they bought off.
Well, that's not entirely true. Anyone not on the "free lunch" bandwagon understands that the creators of these works should be compensated. And copyright is what makes the GPL and its many related licenses possible. In fact, Linux as you know it wouldn't exist without copyright. The problem isn't copyright as an idea -- it's copyright as it is implimented today. These politicians were sold on the idea that the current implimentation is the best, quite literally. The argument is that protections are needed for the way business is done today, otherwise that business would evaporate, leading to a loss of jobs, income, etc. Most politicians are lawyers, not economists, and certainly not "technologists". They don't understand the finer nuances of the market, nor how technology interoperates with it. They are therefore incapable of conceptualizing any alternative to the status quo, and absent that, their default vote is to support it.
But people like us, the technologically-literate, are painfully aware of how limiting current copyright is, and how disadvantaging it is to newcomers to the market and consumers as a whole. We can see new ways of doing business that (and this has been proven multiple times!) satisfy multiple goals of personal use, fair use, time shifting, etc., while also providing a source of revenue to the creators of these works that, thanks to decreased distribution costs would earn them more money. The entertainment industry as an aggregate entity would make more money with a less restrictive public policy. You know this. I know this. The authors know this. But the politicians and the general public don't, because they're only hearing from one side: The side that has a lot of money to burn to make sure it's the only side they hear.
In the few cases where the public became aware of how the industry works, the response was swift and overwhelmingly against it. SOPA, ACTA, CISPA... many attempts have been made, and even when it's been behind closed doors, shrouded in "national security", eventually it gets leaked and everyone involved gets roasted for it. This is a system that depends on misdirection, deception at the highest levels, and heavy spending on marketing and public relations to maintain itself. It has co-opted our legal and judicial systems and is now trying to insinuate itself into the private sector as well via policies and procedures designed to further defray the costs of maintaining this expensive superstructure that makes everyone a criminal.
The size of the brain isn't the determining factor in intelligence; Its surface area is. It's well-known that stress can cause structural differences in the brain, as does a wide variety of environmental conditions. But when you consider that a child can lose half of their brain and still go on to have a full range of mental faculties, and appear completely normal to any outside observer, it's clear size doesn't really matter... it's the number of interconnections between cells that seems to be what is important... and specifically, how and where those interconnections are made.
Occupy doesn't work like that. They all get together and via a complex process of hand signals indicate what they like and don't like. Then they break up into smaller committees, and subcommittees, and breakaway groups, each with their own ideas of what ought to be done about a thing. After several months, nothing has been done, the fort has burned down, the police have kicked everyone out of the park, and the only thing they have in common is that they blame the government for their utter inability to organize. It's mostly the 18-25 crowd that populates the meetings... dreamers, not doers.
And like hermit crabs, they're also total dicks to each other -- which is why anyone inspired to go to one of these meetings quickly becomes uninspired by the amount of petty political infighting and bickering.
Does it deal with rooted phones intelligently by assuming the device is malicious or does it deal with rooted phones stupidly by assuming the device is perfectly trustworthy?
Perhaps it deals with all phones the same way: As clients, with strict checking of data integrity and verification. Client side security is an oxymoron.
You shouldn't be surprised when people view it.
Most of what's out there isn't by the person's choice -- crappy privacy controls, people reposting, revenge photos, and leaked e-mail signatures... most of what google picks up about the average person was put there by a corporation that is trying to monetize that private data by making it public.
A camera that can tell me if I'm about to be asked "Do I look fat in this dress?"
Not really an innovation; It doesn't take an intelligent camera to know what comes next. Specifically, it doesn't matter which way you answer, you're still not getting laid tonight. Now, a camera that can text you before your significant other even asks if you want to go shopping with her and provide a list of socially-acceptable excuses would be an innovation. It would also break several laws of physics, notably that timey whimey wibbly wobbley...
In my native Europe as much as in your great & free US: More surveillance state. More police state. More security craze. Where is this going to stop ? When are ordinary, yet intelligent people going to refuse to live in and contribute to such a state ?
When an outside force interrupts the process. Every police state fell not because of internal pressures, but because something external to it caused a slight shift which then energized the population into revolt.
If only one of those files is a MP3, the RIAA is going to have an orgasm.
Correction: Evilgasm.
You are grossly underestimating the complexity of modern microchips. What you're describing simply isn't feasible for any chip of even modest complexity. To hunt for backdoors, you would really need to look at the HDL files, and even then, it wouldn't be hard to hide something malicious in one of the hundreds of test modes.
No, I think you are grossly underestimating the resources of the global intelligence community.
You're also overestimating China's position. There are plenty of rare earth metals outside of China. It's actually to China's detriment that they're the chief supplier right now.
Really? Walk over to any electronics item in your house and flip it over. Made in ______ [fill in the blank]. And please explain to me how being the chief supplier of a thing is a problem for said supplier... because OPEC is the chief supplier of oil and nobody considers them disadvantaged.
Now, I agree that we spend waaay too much on our military, and but your attitude is way too negative. I get that there's a lot of anti-American propaganda on the internet, and it's easy to be taken in by it, but it's mostly baseless.
Why do people hate us Americans? New survey reveals it's because we're bombing them! Apparently, 100% of the respondents stated they didn't like getting blown up.
The Chinese people aren't a bunch of worker ants, emotionlessly toiling away for the good of the hive. The media likes to present them that way, just as they used to do with Japan, because it's scary, and scared people consume more news.
I have an ex-pat friend who lives in China, and in fact works for China Telecom. They're not emotionless, but they are worker ants. Look up how many people have died during the construction of, er... any major public works project. Ever. Even the Great Wall of China has bodies buried in it. No, really... sometimes people fell in, and they just poured clay in over them and kept going.
The truth is much more banal. England's a perfect example of a "fallen" superpower, and they seem to be doing quite alright.
Yeah. They were only barely able to sack an island in south america a few years ago. That's the only recent military victory they can speak to... and two of the ships in that convoy were commercial freighters. Britain's navy was once to be feared, and their empire literally spanned the globe. While they are "doing alright" in terms of quality of life for its citizens and it has a stable and developed government... they're a mere shadow of what they once were. So "doing quite alright" is a subjective view of things.
It's not a trade war disguised as national security, it's national security disguised as a trade war. There's been no evidence presented of any backdoors. I'm quite certain that by now, many intelligence organizations have taken the chips apart and scanned them down and if they'd found anything there would have been a reaction. But there hasn't been -- it's just been hints, allegations, and rumor. It's disinformation, because there's no truth to go on, just more communist red-baiting. Not to say China doesn't have the resources, and doesn't have a long and inglorious history of electronic espionage... but so does France and nobody says a peep about them.
The United States isn't worried about China because it poses a military threat, or a "cyber" threat, or a terrorist threat... they're scared shitless because this country has clubbed and beaten its rivals over the head with economic policies and rules. China has us by the balls on rare earth metals, and most of our consumer electronics are made in Asia. If they decide to play economic hardball, we're going to lose. For a country that's grown complacent being able to pick up a phone and make every other country on the planet bend over and drop their pants to please the all-mighty american dollar... we're fucking terrified that there's a couple billion people about to industrialize and their economy is a jaugernaut. It won't be long before our military is the only thing remarkable about our country -- and it won't be sustainable without a solid economy to back it.
In 20 years, we're going to be facing the same situation the Soviet Union did: They died because they tried to maintain their military at the expense of their economy. This is a game we're going to lose, badly. That's why every trade sanction, disinformation campaign, and high profile story about places like FoxConn are desperately sought after by our military and economic leaders... if China manages to develop its economy much more, we're screwed.
Is post-geek a label? As in, one who used to pay attention to the excessive details of digging deep into how something works, but now has graduated into the realization that one can do whatever one needs to do with just about any tools or platform or system and no longer has a need to scrutinize so strongly because one's skills are good enough to weather any circumstances regardless of the technological changes?
No, it's called maturity. It can happen as early as your late 20s, but typically it takes until the mid-30s to manifest. Other symptoms include being in bed by midnight, not being as good as you remember at first-person shooter games, and drinking coffee with a reasonable amount of sugar and creamer rather than dumping the lot into every cup and having a quarter-inch of sludge at the bottom.