What WP7 brings to the table is perfect compatibility with MS Exchange servers and MS Office file formats. By "WP has perfect compatibility with Exchange" I of course mean "MS would make sure every other phone out there would have less than perfect compatibility with Exchange". So that's really the selling point of WP7, except of course MS can't say that out loud.
I would favor more preemptive and swift action to prevent future attacks like this coming cyberwar
See, there are things where military is really really really inefficient - usually the ones where you have no idea who or where the enemy is. I.e. imagine that you have an "attack" - let's say someone exploiting SCADA system - coming from let's say Toronto. This could be:
A "cyber-attack" from a hostile maple-syrup drinking hockey-watching enemy state, aboot to be followed by an invasion, eh ?
An act of an individual citizen acting w/o Canadian govt knowledge
Zombie computer being controlled by someone outside of Canada
And the most important thing: you have no idea which one it is. So to treat this as a military attack is just stupid.
Actually this is kind of amazing: we have wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - the later two having nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever - but the guy who actually attacked US was from our "ally" Saudi Arabia and he was living inside our "ally" Pakistan. In a mansion, no less. It's great that we finally killed the bastard, but I have to wonder how much of the whole "war on terror" effort is spent on actually killing terrorists vs. doing useless things that create new terrorists.
So essentially Bing does aggregation and caching of Google's results, exactly the same way Google News aggregates and caches stories from news outlets like NY Times, AP, etc ? And Google is outraged because it's freedom of information when they do it with other people's publicly accessible web sites, but it's morally wrong when someone else does it to their publicly accessible web site ?
But now that there's an obvious business reason *not* to operate in China (the threat of being hacked by individuals whose actions may or may not have been sanctioned by the government), Larry and Sergei find themselves in the position to steer Google, the organization, in a different direction.
This is one argument I've never understood - it's not like Chinese government could only hack into companies with physical presence in China. If it's about hacking - pulling out of China won't help Google in any way. If it's about censorship - yeah, really, it wasn't a problem for more than five years, but now it suddenly is ?!? If it's about finding a nice excuse to leave Chinese market after getting beaten by Baidu - well, that at least is plausible.
How are you going to make it expensive to do something illegal? Are you going to pass a law?
Increase the risk of getting caught for doing something illegal. In this particular case - pass a law stating that every illegal immigrant who reports his employer gets a 5 years of compensation (funded from fines payed by employer) and a fast-track to legal immigration.
Define "them". China is a country with a large number of pirated (and therefore unpatched) Windows installations. Many of those machines are part of spam botnets and so on. You have no way of knowing who is controlling those machines. If those people could hack into US govt computers, it's pretty damn likely they could hack into Chinese govt computers too, and use those as a relay. The probability of Chinese govt being incompetent in this case is way much higher than the probability of them being both technically competent and malicious.
Ok on many other points, but, I just cannot even come close to believing this was the motivation. I mean, we certainly aren't benefiting in any manner from Iraqi oil.
It isn't shipped to us for free, nor used really to repay any war costs, etc.
If the war was for oil, and US imperialism to take over that country for oil, I'd have thought we'd at least have seen the oil benefits by now.
The goal of war was not to make oil cheaper for you the regular American. Instead the idea was that several corporations affiliated with Bush administration (i.e. halliburton, Exxon, etc) will get exclusive contracts on Iraqi oil (and as military contractors during wartime, see Halliburton again, Blackwater). Iraq was was not profitable for United States as a country, but it certainly was profitable for Dick Cheney as an individual. So "we" has seen the oil benefits, it's just that you and me aren't part of that "we" crowd.
Next, I don't buy it because it's not feasible. How many NSA agents would it take to monitor ALL Internet traffic. That means bit torrents, email (including spam), web traffic (html), tunnels, ATM transactions, credit card transactions, Windows updates, NNTP porn, remote backups, YouTube videos, streaming radio stations and so on. There is just way too much crap flowing over the wires to monitor it all. The NSA, CIA, FBI, US Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force and National Guard combined wouldn't have the man power to monitor that much data. Please tell me you're kidding. They use reasonably modern computers to extract obvious information s.a. URLs of sites visited (extracted from HTTP header, nowdays this could be done even on a router), search engine keywords (same thing), email addresses (parsing SMTP, again pretty easy), etc. Take a look at what Wireshark could do, for example. There are no humans watching every email/HTTP request/etc. Packet sniffer determines that there is an instant messenger chat, picks up the word "terrorist", flags the IP address, matches IP to a specific AT&T customer and increases a counter in some database which indicates the probability of you being a terrorist. If you live in NYC and decided to visit your relatives for Christmas, and while you were away your teenage neighbor used your WiFi to chat with his friends about Counter-Strike match - do you really believe there will be some human reviewing your case before system puts you on "no-fly" list and prevents you from coming back ?!? This stuff is all automatic, there is some heuristic rule that determines whether you could travel by airplane or hold a job in a bank or buy a fertilizer - just like there is a heuristic rule that helps Clippy to determine if you are writing a letter. It's a fully automatic system with no independent review or right to appeal.
How else do you fight terrorism? What would you suggest (other than that warm fuzzy "leave them alone and they'll leave us alone BS)". How would you FIGHT terrorism. We could sell less weapons to nations like Saudi Arabia, where 15 out of 19 1-11 hijackers were from. If we give them $10 billions in arms sales instead of $20 billion we gave them last summer, terrorist funding will be cut in half. We could alienate less Muslims and instead work with Muslim communities to identify terrorists - British police was able to prevent attack on airplanes thanks to tips from Muslim community in London. Instead of monitoring AT&T internet connections, we could monitor items like guns and explosives - as of today there weren't a single terrorist attack committed purely with iPhones and used DSL modems. We could actually secure access to things like ports and chemical plants instead of trying to identify every single crazy person on Earth that might possibly try to attack them.
Apple uses EFI in Intel-based Macs instead of regular BIOS. This is the same reason why you need BootCamp to emulate BIOS in order to boot Windows on an Intel Mac.
They started promoting a political agenda by the 80's (I think they actually started doing so from day one, but I'm not sure), by lobbying against SDI. SDI was many things, but it was not a science issue.
Well, they (UCS) didn't just "lobby against SDI". Instead, they very specifically pointed out that: (1) SDI as proposed is unworkable and (2) it's technologically impossible to implement anything that achieves stated goals of SDI without some radical breakthroughs in our understanding of physics. That is pure science. If Dept. of Energy suddenly decides to fund "perpetual motion" machine, opposing that won't be political either.
Because the only other options in most areas are dial-up (slow), cellular (slow and expensive) and satellite (crazy latency). Infinitely large number of broadband options (two, that is) are only available in big cities like NYC. And even then both ISPs could be doing this and you still will be screwed.
Brandenburg v Ohio overturned the Schenck v United States decision which also outlawed such things as speaking out against the draft, good thing we had intelligent justices in 1969.
from Wikipedia article, the very first sentence:
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action. Do you have a special definition of "imminent lawless action" that somehow excludes actual military coup ?
RCTV WAS told Chavez was stepping down, in fact there was even "video of it" that they aired.
And they refused to air any comment from Chavez or any other government official for 2 days prior to coup. In fact, during the coup RCTV and Venevisión were specifically thanked by at least one coup leader for their assistance. And after Chavez came back into power RCTV refused to air information about that. This is very far from being "just told" that Chavez stepped down.
They where just the only one's that didn't play Chavez's game.
Actually majority of commercial TV stations supported the coup. The thing is, Hugo Chavez is an evil dictator who prefers to brutally attack his innocent opponents using the blood-chilling tactic of withdrawing TV station licenses when they expire, in full accordance with the law. It's almost exactly like Vlad the Impaler, if Vlad was refusing to renew broadcast licenses instead of impaling his opponents.
You mean like calling the winner in a tight race when all the polls in a state aren't even closed yet? then having to correct it which led to a long drawn out situation that to this date, die hard believers still won't accept the true winner?
There's a huge distance between reporting the latest exit poll incorrectly (the real election results are determined by Electoral College couple of months later, anyway) and directly misrepresenting president's speech during an emergency.
Imagine that on 9/11/2001 one of American TV stations aired a fake statement from Bush surrendering to al-Quaida in his official capacity as a president - isn't that pretty much the same as screaming "Fire" in crowded theater ? Our TV stations don't do shit like that in the first place, but if they did their licenses most likely will be revoked.
When you have brave men and women losing their lives because of the information some news station decided was newsworthy enough to tell the enemy about, and they still have their license, I seriously don't think anything will invoke treason charges on the station.
Again, how about a fake statement claiming that Bush decided to surrender to al-Quaida ? Besides, when Geraldo Rivera disclosed his unit's location in Iraq, he was asked by the military to leave Iraq immediately. If the whole station was acting like Geraldo, they would asked to leave. If they were acting like Geraldo inside USA where they can't be asked to leave - well, they might loose their license.
If it was a tv station that was trying to oust a leader they didn't like -- say, impleach Bush -- they'd be all for it and declare any pull of the license as retaliatory and censorship.
You don't understand the situation. RCTV didn't just call for Chavez to stand down - during the military coup it reported that Chavez decided to stand down when he in fact didn't. Imagine that there was an armed group of people dragging Bush out of White House and TV stations claiming that Bush agreed to leave willingly - is that okay with you ?
It is in fact illegal in USA to scream "Fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. I would assume it's also illegal to claim that president of a country decided to leave his post when he didn't.
The Bush Administration wouldn't get away with shutting down CNN. The best they could do is stop cooperating and making life hard for CNN, but not shut it down because we here in America still love our freedom.
Well, CNN nad NBC are bad examples. During 2002 military coup RCTV reported that Chavez "denounced" his presidency when in fact he didn't. Imagine that a rogue military group took over White House and CNN claimed that president resigned when in fact he didn't. That's pretty much what happened in Venezuela.
Would FCC renew a broadcasting license for a station that did something like that ? None of our TV stations would try anything like that in the first place, but if one of them tried I'm pretty sure it will be considered treason.
In case of Estonia an asshole named Anders (Estonian leader - my sincerest apologies to all other assholes for the comparison) referred to buried WWII veterans as "marauders" on public TV, before trying to move the statue. Quite obviously, people got pissed off. Some teenagers wrote graffiti on the streets in Tallin, others threw eggs onto police cars. The more nerdy ones arranged DDOS attacks. Blaming this on Russian government is is kinda like like saying that Tony Blair is responsible for soccer fans fighting each other.
The only real question here is why the hell Estonian government doesn't have a dedicated network outside of Internet.
He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
Precisely, the way it works in Baghdad. Once a bad Iraqi shows up, a group of good Iraqis shoot him and violence stops right there. Works like a charm in practice, which is why Baghdad is one of the safest places on Earth, as opposed tho those crazy gun-control places like Sweden.
Of course it does, but then your competitor has an incentive to expand and upgrade their service so that they can charge lower prices. How can the model not take *that* into account?
Umm, could you please list all those competitors Verizon, SBC and Qwest have in their respective rural areas ? I rest my case.
Again, are you sure he's the only one whose rights were violated ? How could you be sure, if our judicial system is no longer transparent ? Do you simply trust the government and 'intelligence data' it receives ? They are the same people who either lied about Iraq WMDs or were actually dumb enough to believe in those WMDs - either way they were dead wrong based on 'classified intelligence'. Checks and balances are there for a reason. Besides, if the govt could actually prove in court of law that suspect is indeed a terrorist, habeas corpus won't help him in any way.
Now if they start calling drug dealers or jay walkers "terrorism suspects", then I'm with you. As of now, I have neither seen nor heard of that happening.
Will you hear or see that happening ? With jay walkers not being able to face their accusers in court, because their right to habeas corpus is suspended ?
Once our justice system stops being transparent, how could you possibly know if it is being abused ?
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What WP7 brings to the table is perfect compatibility with MS Exchange servers and MS Office file formats.
By "WP has perfect compatibility with Exchange" I of course mean "MS would make sure every other phone out there would have less than perfect compatibility with Exchange".
So that's really the selling point of WP7, except of course MS can't say that out loud.
I would favor more preemptive and swift action to prevent future attacks like this coming cyberwar
See, there are things where military is really really really inefficient - usually the ones where you have no idea who or where the enemy is.
I.e. imagine that you have an "attack" - let's say someone exploiting SCADA system - coming from let's say Toronto.
This could be:
And the most important thing: you have no idea which one it is. So to treat this as a military attack is just stupid.
Actually this is kind of amazing: we have wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya - the later two having nothing to do with 9/11 whatsoever - but the guy who actually attacked US was from our "ally" Saudi Arabia and he was living inside our "ally" Pakistan. In a mansion, no less.
It's great that we finally killed the bastard, but I have to wonder how much of the whole "war on terror" effort is spent on actually killing terrorists vs. doing useless things that create new terrorists.
So essentially Bing does aggregation and caching of Google's results, exactly the same way Google News aggregates and caches stories from news outlets like NY Times, AP, etc ? And Google is outraged because it's freedom of information when they do it with other people's publicly accessible web sites, but it's morally wrong when someone else does it to their publicly accessible web site ?
But now that there's an obvious business reason *not* to operate in China (the threat of being hacked by individuals whose actions may or may not have been sanctioned by the government), Larry and Sergei find themselves in the position to steer Google, the organization, in a different direction.
This is one argument I've never understood - it's not like Chinese government could only hack into companies with physical presence in China. If it's about hacking - pulling out of China won't help Google in any way. If it's about censorship - yeah, really, it wasn't a problem for more than five years, but now it suddenly is ?!? If it's about finding a nice excuse to leave Chinese market after getting beaten by Baidu - well, that at least is plausible.
How are you going to make it expensive to do something illegal? Are you going to pass a law?
Increase the risk of getting caught for doing something illegal. In this particular case - pass a law stating that every illegal immigrant who reports his employer gets a 5 years of compensation (funded from fines payed by employer) and a fast-track to legal immigration.
Define "them". China is a country with a large number of pirated (and therefore unpatched) Windows installations. Many of those machines are part of spam botnets and so on. You have no way of knowing who is controlling those machines. If those people could hack into US govt computers, it's pretty damn likely they could hack into Chinese govt computers too, and use those as a relay. The probability of Chinese govt being incompetent in this case is way much higher than the probability of them being both technically competent and malicious.
The goal of war was not to make oil cheaper for you the regular American. Instead the idea was that several corporations affiliated with Bush administration (i.e. halliburton, Exxon, etc) will get exclusive contracts on Iraqi oil (and as military contractors during wartime, see Halliburton again, Blackwater). Iraq was was not profitable for United States as a country, but it certainly was profitable for Dick Cheney as an individual. So "we" has seen the oil benefits, it's just that you and me aren't part of that "we" crowd.
How else do you fight terrorism? What would you suggest (other than that warm fuzzy "leave them alone and they'll leave us alone BS)". How would you FIGHT terrorism. We could sell less weapons to nations like Saudi Arabia, where 15 out of 19 1-11 hijackers were from. If we give them $10 billions in arms sales instead of $20 billion we gave them last summer, terrorist funding will be cut in half. We could alienate less Muslims and instead work with Muslim communities to identify terrorists - British police was able to prevent attack on airplanes thanks to tips from Muslim community in London. Instead of monitoring AT&T internet connections, we could monitor items like guns and explosives - as of today there weren't a single terrorist attack committed purely with iPhones and used DSL modems. We could actually secure access to things like ports and chemical plants instead of trying to identify every single crazy person on Earth that might possibly try to attack them.
Apple uses EFI in Intel-based Macs instead of regular BIOS.
This is the same reason why you need BootCamp to emulate BIOS in order to boot Windows on an Intel Mac.
Azureus has both OSX port, and Telnet UI plugin. It also has HTML web UI, which works fine with my cell phone (Nokia 9500, uses Opera).
First, the exact quote is this: A poll taken by the UCS of 549 randomly selected members of the American Physical Society found that SDI was criticized as "a step in the wrong direction" by 54 percent of the respondents who did not oppose other military R&D; 29 percent were in favor. . In other words, we're talking about generally pro-military R&D people opposing SDI (also, in a left-leaning liberal mathematics numbers above 50% are considered a majority).
Second, this is a poll taken in 1986. The whole SDI disaster started in 1983, Ashton Carter from MIT provided scientific criticism against SDI when testifying for Congress back in 1984. The "science says this can't possibly work" part came first, political advocacy and polling came afterwards.
Well, they (UCS) didn't just "lobby against SDI". Instead, they very specifically pointed out that: (1) SDI as proposed is unworkable and (2) it's technologically impossible to implement anything that achieves stated goals of SDI without some radical breakthroughs in our understanding of physics. That is pure science. If Dept. of Energy suddenly decides to fund "perpetual motion" machine, opposing that won't be political either.
You're joking, but because of this law there's literally no way for radio news station to report what Dick Cheney said to Sen. Patrick Leathy on a Senate Floor.
Because the only other options in most areas are dial-up (slow), cellular (slow and expensive) and satellite (crazy latency).
Infinitely large number of broadband options (two, that is) are only available in big cities like NYC. And even then both ISPs could be doing this and you still will be screwed.
from Wikipedia article, the very first sentence:
Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969), was a United States Supreme Court case based on the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. It held that government cannot punish inflammatory speech unless it is directed to inciting and likely to incite imminent lawless action. Do you have a special definition of "imminent lawless action" that somehow excludes actual military coup ?
RCTV WAS told Chavez was stepping down, in fact there was even "video of it" that they aired.
And they refused to air any comment from Chavez or any other government official for 2 days prior to coup. In fact, during the coup RCTV and Venevisión were specifically thanked by at least one coup leader for their assistance. And after Chavez came back into power RCTV refused to air information about that. This is very far from being "just told" that Chavez stepped down.
They where just the only one's that didn't play Chavez's game.
Actually majority of commercial TV stations supported the coup. The thing is, Hugo Chavez is an evil dictator who prefers to brutally attack his innocent opponents using the blood-chilling tactic of withdrawing TV station licenses when they expire, in full accordance with the law. It's almost exactly like Vlad the Impaler, if Vlad was refusing to renew broadcast licenses instead of impaling his opponents.
There's a huge distance between reporting the latest exit poll incorrectly (the real election results are determined by Electoral College couple of months later, anyway) and directly misrepresenting president's speech during an emergency.
Imagine that on 9/11/2001 one of American TV stations aired a fake statement from Bush surrendering to al-Quaida in his official capacity as a president - isn't that pretty much the same as screaming "Fire" in crowded theater ? Our TV stations don't do shit like that in the first place, but if they did their licenses most likely will be revoked.
When you have brave men and women losing their lives because of the information some news station decided was newsworthy enough to tell the enemy about, and they still have their license, I seriously don't think anything will invoke treason charges on the station.
Again, how about a fake statement claiming that Bush decided to surrender to al-Quaida ? Besides, when Geraldo Rivera disclosed his unit's location in Iraq, he was asked by the military to leave Iraq immediately. If the whole station was acting like Geraldo, they would asked to leave. If they were acting like Geraldo inside USA where they can't be asked to leave - well, they might loose their license.
You don't understand the situation. RCTV didn't just call for Chavez to stand down - during the military coup it reported that Chavez decided to stand down when he in fact didn't.
Imagine that there was an armed group of people dragging Bush out of White House and TV stations claiming that Bush agreed to leave willingly - is that okay with you ?
It is in fact illegal in USA to scream "Fire" in a crowded theater when there is no fire. I would assume it's also illegal to claim that president of a country decided to leave his post when he didn't.
Well, CNN nad NBC are bad examples. During 2002 military coup RCTV reported that Chavez "denounced" his presidency when in fact he didn't. Imagine that a rogue military group took over White House and CNN claimed that president resigned when in fact he didn't. That's pretty much what happened in Venezuela.
Would FCC renew a broadcasting license for a station that did something like that ? None of our TV stations would try anything like that in the first place, but if one of them tried I'm pretty sure it will be considered treason.
Well, your big mistake is assuming this sort of thing is somehow centrally organized.
Remember an incident with US spy plane and Chinese fighter jet ?
It resulted into a hacking contest between US and China without any "official" guidance.
In case of Estonia an asshole named Anders (Estonian leader - my sincerest apologies to all other assholes for the comparison) referred to buried WWII veterans as "marauders" on public TV, before trying to move the statue. Quite obviously, people got pissed off. Some teenagers wrote graffiti on the streets in Tallin, others threw eggs onto police cars. The more nerdy ones arranged DDOS attacks. Blaming this on Russian government is is kinda like like saying that Tony Blair is responsible for soccer fans fighting each other.
The only real question here is why the hell Estonian government doesn't have a dedicated network outside of Internet.
If you want to make a prediction, make it right:
No wireless. Less space than Nomad. Lame.
He got away with it *both* times because the law emasculates the citizen from carrying a weapon at all times. If there were no restrictions on concealed carry, more people would carry. If V. Tech (like may schools) didn't ban firearms on its grounds, it's probable that some people in either group would have been armed and could have defended themselves.
Precisely, the way it works in Baghdad. Once a bad Iraqi shows up, a group of good Iraqis shoot him and violence stops right there. Works like a charm in practice, which is why Baghdad is one of the safest places on Earth, as opposed tho those crazy gun-control places like Sweden.
Umm, could you please list all those competitors Verizon, SBC and Qwest have in their respective rural areas ? I rest my case.
Again, are you sure he's the only one whose rights were violated ?
How could you be sure, if our judicial system is no longer transparent ?
Do you simply trust the government and 'intelligence data' it receives ?
They are the same people who either lied about Iraq WMDs or were actually dumb enough to believe in those WMDs - either way they were dead wrong based on 'classified intelligence'.
Checks and balances are there for a reason.
Besides, if the govt could actually prove in court of law that suspect is indeed a terrorist, habeas corpus won't help him in any way.
Will you hear or see that happening ? With jay walkers not being able to face their accusers in court, because their right to habeas corpus is suspended ?
Once our justice system stops being transparent, how could you possibly know if it is being abused ?