You guys created it to help sell things, obviously. That tech, once created, can also be used for law enforcement, in the "good" countries, and suppression and oppression, in the "bad" countries.
One assemblyman can not just "edit" the bill without the rest of the committee approving the changes. The committee is majority Democrats. So he is not alone in trying to undermine NN. Perhaps he is the only one willing to do so openly, since "in committee" votes are often secret in California. There is more to this story that what is in TFA.
I'm sure they'll find a way to blame Republicans despite their 2/3 majority.
TFA is light on details (basically just the summary), but I'm a bit confused as to what makes this tech separate from the existing E911 tech we've had as a requirement for a decade.
Fundamentally, E911 Phase 2 was already going to be using device sensors when available I thought, and not just the triangulated position (correct to ~ 300m, but possibly not good enough in an emergency). Is RapidSOS just a service-mark for the engine calculating this? Why not leverage the existing device data? Simply force on loc settings using the existing low-level code that already handles 911 calling within all US handsets (which is what allows even a firmware-locked phone to dial out).
On older MacOS operating systems, the Resource Fork, the predecessor to the.ds_store, would occasionally store the file's data.
Honestly, I wish we were still using Resource Forks for this kind of thing. They were elegant so long as the underlying file system understood WTF was going on. The rise of the Internet and PC-interoperability meant the rise of Binhex and other rarer arcane formats, but it really does seem like Apple decided to drop Resource Forks at precisely the time other file systems were coming around to support forked files and additions were being made to low-level tools to deal with them.
Now Mac UDF disks are filled with hidden folders instead of using FS-level mechanisms for keeping data together.
That, and the loss of meaningful OSTypes and Creator Codes are sometimes what I miss the most about the classic Mac OS system software.
Also, these Slashdot pull quotes in the Washington Post are awesome:
In one virtual gathering place for technology buffs yesterday--the Slashdot Web site--Managing Editor Robin Miller kicked off a rollicking debate over the merger with this screed: "Now you'll be able to get all your Internet needs, from connectivity to content to shopping, delivered by a single experienced company. No more need to deal with Web sites that stray from the party line, take risks . . . or any of that other messy old-fashioned 'Internet as anarchy' stuff.
"To get online in the future, all you'll need to do is plug in your computer, turn off your brain, and enjoy!"
If nothing else, AOL Time Warner will toil in a media environment that's undergoing a whirlwind evolution. No one can say with any certainty, for example, whether in a few years most consumers will go onto the Internet from their televisions, or whether tomorrow's TV viewers will watch their favorite shows on their computer screens.
What's likely, however, is that high-speed Internet service will soon become a mass-market phenomenon. Access to the Internet via fatter cable lines is about 100 times faster than traditional phone and modem connections. And control over broadband is considered pivotal to the health of both companies, said Mark Berman, an analyst at Mediaweek.com, an online trade publication.
95% of people will not know the difference, nor notice it in their general use.
Not notice the difference between an OS running on SSD and not? No way.
Do they *need* SSD? Probably not. But virtually eliminating IO bottlenecks allows many other functions to proceed faster... and not talking just about boot speed and initial load here.
My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.
My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.
Technology for technology's sake is a waste of money and I'm afraid that computers have reached the appliance stage for regular consumers.
I used to think that, but washer/dryer tech (even aside from phone integration and whatnot) has indeed improved massively, even from 10 years ago.
I made a decent-midrange washer/dryer purchase in 2003 and replaced them with a pair of LG uprights on Black Friday around 2011. They used 1/8th (literally) the water/gas and got my clothes notable cleaner, with less fabric damage and fading, and with cheaper per-load detergent (HE).
I moved in 2016 into a place without a gas hookup, so for a while was using a small-space washer-dryer combo from 2006. The difference in wash quality was astonishing, several loads requiring more than one wash despite using proper detergent and loading. Replaced them last year with a newer version of my last LG's and haven't looked back. Also, they have a 10 year drive warranty, and Home Depot tacked on another 5 year warranty beyond that. Delivery and haul-away was an extra 50 bucks.
Seriously. Replace your old washer/dryer. It's worth it.
I swear 95% of the arguments and complaints and "let's mess with the business model!" movements are complaints from Comcast customers about Comcast.
As a former ISP employee who doesn't live in a Comcast area, complaints about how your ISP's service sucks is not a persuasive argument for how the rest of the industry has to function. I'm really sorry, but if you have a problem with your cable monopoly, take it up with your local representatives to find a solution. Or switch services to something else.
Plenty of the rest of us think this is a workable solution for dealing with the fact that Netflix and Youtube can something comprise almost half of all domestic internet data traffic during peak periods. Running any size ISP isn't cheap, and your ISP horror story doesn't mandate changes everywhere else.
Because in many places there is ONLY 1 ISP and they can do whatever they want. They will now double the price and half the speed, and then ask you for even more to get back what you already had.
Many areas? Probably. It's a big country. But here's the kicker: 4G Wireless is "good enough" in many cases for a good video/OTT phone internet experience (and, let's face it, video is what consumers want here...). The vast majority of America that's not completely rural has reasonable competition for internet service when you add in wireless providers and maybe a MiFi device.
Is it as good as the cable vs DSL competition at par we had in the dot-com era? No, it's not. Is it good enough? Pretty much.
If this were tied to something independent of Facebook and broadly agreed on, maybe it would work. Minimum BBB score required, for example. But if Facebook (or any of the tech giants) try to do this itself it really just invites further regulation. Commercial advertising is the primary mechanism by which the tech giants exert economic control, as between Facebook, Google/AdWords/DoubleClick, and Twitter they control something like 90% of the online advertising market.
I don't trust Silicon Valley with that kind of power and I don't really think anyone else should either. Outsource it - don't try to Change the World.
Yes, having no Internet access is a bad deal for Virginians, but maybe the state representative should be doing something about that instead of bitching to Amtrak.
That's great, and I encourage local co-ops to help build (probably wireless) infrastructure to help those residents get online.
In the meantime, people need to get on trains. I realize Amtrak service sucks sometimes, but I'd hope we don't have trains more than 3-4 years late.
I actually had to think long and hard when I saw this. The only ads I remember seeing were in the Microsoft Store panels on the Start menu that I turned off. Hardly any worse than the paid positioning present in the Apple/App Store or Google Play.
I use a bootleg copy of Win10E on my home LAN. Buttery smooth. If you're using Pro, you're doing it wrong.
Honestly, this just feels odd. I've been using Windows 10 Pro since an upgrade from 8.1 a while back and.... it feels pretty buttery smooth already, to be honest.
I totally understand that there are issues for corporate IT not wanting to have to move to Enterprise but being forced to do it, but as a "pro-sumer" Windows desktop user I have to say I've been pretty impressed with Windows 10 Pro.
If you look at "ping" for example which is an suid program its behavior depends on calling process name. There are not really two versions of ping on disk. There is one program that behaves differently depending on whether it is executed as "ping" or "ping6" because it checks calling name and changes internal behavior accordingly.
I'm convinced "modern" Windows/java devs don't know about the existence of $0.
The size increase due to stuff like netstat and ifconfig is trivial. Where the bloat comes from is needing python, java, javascript, often in various versions to make a system run. There is absolutely no reason this crap needs to be mandatory. And talk about expanding the attack surface.
The Windows developers are the ones bringing idiotic crap like java and javascript in as system requirements.
Shell and Perl, on the other hand, have a long, long history on *nix systems, and projects like systemd that saw removal of it as a goal are based on Utopian philosophical goals, not any rational discussion on attack surface or utility, unless you're trying to create a 16MB distro or something (which they aren't).
Python there's a slightly stronger case for, but in the 2000's it emerged as a near-defacto standard for a wide variety of system tooling, with more ability than Shell and less syntactic complexity than perl in its preferred domain.
Of course, none of that is a great argument for removing a 70K C binary or practically forcing others to.
The Secret Service isn't the highest level one, just the one with direct responsibility for the personal safety of the executives. It's usually referred to in abbreviations as "USSS" (United States Secret Service), possibly for just that reason actually.
8 years of undergrad (long story) and I heard that on several occasions at my west-coast state university. Moreso after going back in the 2008-2011 time frame than in the late 90s time frame.
I was in a lot of humanities classes and the comments invariably came from the more left-wing professors. Ironically, it wasn't the pure thought ones (I ended up with a Philosophy BA), but the Political Science/Sociology ones that were usually the worst.
End to end encryption is fine, but Google (for once) is doing the right thing by having a telco standard instead of an over-the-top app sending God-knows-what.
Would I like to see end-to-end encryption? Yes. I'd like to see SS7 issues fixed first. There are plenty of E2E secure messaging solutions out there and I can't see why RCS is worse than MMS as a solution for enchanced SMS service.
At the very least, this is a fully interoperable system, not tied to Google, Inc or any specific carrier.
Tim Cook takes cheap shots at anyone in tech who is a Billionaire and isn't Apple.
The question isn't if he is right or wrong. The question is - what is his motivation?
Actually, no. The question is whether he is right or wrong. Stop trying to qui bono everything -- it's actually possible to have a discussion and come to conclusions based solely on rational argument and debate, ya know.
Hopefully, the Tech Awakening we're experiencing in the US at a consumer level might trickle upwards into actual products as well.
No way in hell I'm going to rely on something I have to use a remote service for, which is no doubt collecting and storing as many bits of data as possible. I don't need human-sounding-voice *that* badly that I can't wait for someone to figure out how to get 95% of this does and run on a few cores, or perhaps spare GPU capacity.
Not really. Japan excelled in electromechanical manufacturing and design, but failed to follow up within the "software will eat the world" revolution. They're even further behind now in the "AI will eat the software" phase. Not to mention the existing demographic problems with a death-spiral-level birthrate and there's not a huge economic future outside of entertainment.
That's fine -- it's an insular enough country, and it will certainly fare better technology-wise than many other countries will -- but its 1980s powerhouse days are behind it.
Facebook could legitimately feel that terms were broken, or they might not. They might or might not choose to enforce those terms against customers that they "like" (no pun intended) that just so happen to be affiliated with the other side. There's a normal liberatarian-ish response to just say that private companies can do whatever they want, but the Social Networks are *so* powerful (80%+ engagement, 90%+ ad revenue if you include Google AdWords) that removal of that is a huge competitive disadvantage to disfavored candidates and parties.
We already have some regulations requiring equal broadcasting time and access to over-the-air political ads during a campaign season, which were developed during the time when TV was the most important demographic advertising source around. In 2018, this is social media.
We need real regulation of the handling of personal data and ad networks, to prevent tech industry's overwhelming power being used only for candidates its employees specifically support. These aren't just "regular companies" any more... They have more day-to-day power over American culture than Standard Oil ever did, and unless/until real anti-trust regulation happens and data storage is handled independently from advertising, we need to ensure the situation doesn't get more and more worse.
Why can't we all just get along and all the companies get together to combine their funds to roll out 1 super fibre connection to every home etc between them then sell access to it that way they all get a cut.
We basically had that for a while when ILECs were forced to allow other DSL providers to colocate their equipment at the telco Central Office and resell the underlying line as DSL. Ultimately, the market collapse, however.
Broadband access with different technologies seems fine, but if we're going to re-roll fiber everywhere it probably means a massive government ownership of the lines. That said, the availability of "good enough" broadband over wireless technologies in a large chunk of the US changes some of the equation. Outside of HD media streaming (i.e., Cable TV), you don't really need more bandwidth than you can get through 4G/LTE. And for those needing more, the market will probably end up justifying the cost of a rollout.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd also say that story elements that Clarke talks about in the book "Lost Worlds of 2001" would make fine additions to a movie remake.
Mod parent up. I'd love to see some of those elements used in something released too...
You guys created it to help sell things, obviously. That tech, once created, can also be used for law enforcement, in the "good" countries, and suppression and oppression, in the "bad" countries.
Maybe next time think before you tech.
One assemblyman can not just "edit" the bill without the rest of the committee approving the changes. The committee is majority Democrats. So he is not alone in trying to undermine NN. Perhaps he is the only one willing to do so openly, since "in committee" votes are often secret in California. There is more to this story that what is in TFA.
I'm sure they'll find a way to blame Republicans despite their 2/3 majority.
TFA is light on details (basically just the summary), but I'm a bit confused as to what makes this tech separate from the existing E911 tech we've had as a requirement for a decade.
E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_9-1-1#Requirements
Fundamentally, E911 Phase 2 was already going to be using device sensors when available I thought, and not just the triangulated position (correct to ~ 300m, but possibly not good enough in an emergency). Is RapidSOS just a service-mark for the engine calculating this? Why not leverage the existing device data? Simply force on loc settings using the existing low-level code that already handles 911 calling within all US handsets (which is what allows even a firmware-locked phone to dial out).
On older MacOS operating systems, the Resource Fork, the predecessor to the .ds_store, would occasionally store the file's data.
Honestly, I wish we were still using Resource Forks for this kind of thing. They were elegant so long as the underlying file system understood WTF was going on. The rise of the Internet and PC-interoperability meant the rise of Binhex and other rarer arcane formats, but it really does seem like Apple decided to drop Resource Forks at precisely the time other file systems were coming around to support forked files and additions were being made to low-level tools to deal with them.
Now Mac UDF disks are filled with hidden folders instead of using FS-level mechanisms for keeping data together.
That, and the loss of meaningful OSTypes and Creator Codes are sometimes what I miss the most about the classic Mac OS system software.
... Got the T-shirt:
https://slashdot.org/story/00/01/10/0816250/aol-and-time-warner-confirm-merger-plans
Also, these Slashdot pull quotes in the Washington Post are awesome:
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2000/01/11/aol-to-acquire-time-warner-in-record-183-billion-merger/92bdb300-0f48-4dfd-ae7e-38d9aec6417a/?utm_term=.d94ff7b431e7
95% of people will not know the difference, nor notice it in their general use.
Not notice the difference between an OS running on SSD and not? No way.
Do they *need* SSD? Probably not. But virtually eliminating IO bottlenecks allows many other functions to proceed faster... and not talking just about boot speed and initial load here.
My washer uses tech from 20 years ago. It cost $250 delivered. The latest washers cost nearly $1,000.
My clothes still come out clean. And the Dryer dries them.
Technology for technology's sake is a waste of money and I'm afraid that computers have reached the appliance stage for regular consumers.
I used to think that, but washer/dryer tech (even aside from phone integration and whatnot) has indeed improved massively, even from 10 years ago.
I made a decent-midrange washer/dryer purchase in 2003 and replaced them with a pair of LG uprights on Black Friday around 2011. They used 1/8th (literally) the water/gas and got my clothes notable cleaner, with less fabric damage and fading, and with cheaper per-load detergent (HE).
I moved in 2016 into a place without a gas hookup, so for a while was using a small-space washer-dryer combo from 2006. The difference in wash quality was astonishing, several loads requiring more than one wash despite using proper detergent and loading. Replaced them last year with a newer version of my last LG's and haven't looked back. Also, they have a 10 year drive warranty, and Home Depot tacked on another 5 year warranty beyond that. Delivery and haul-away was an extra 50 bucks.
Seriously. Replace your old washer/dryer. It's worth it.
I swear 95% of the arguments and complaints and "let's mess with the business model!" movements are complaints from Comcast customers about Comcast.
As a former ISP employee who doesn't live in a Comcast area, complaints about how your ISP's service sucks is not a persuasive argument for how the rest of the industry has to function. I'm really sorry, but if you have a problem with your cable monopoly, take it up with your local representatives to find a solution. Or switch services to something else.
Plenty of the rest of us think this is a workable solution for dealing with the fact that Netflix and Youtube can something comprise almost half of all domestic internet data traffic during peak periods. Running any size ISP isn't cheap, and your ISP horror story doesn't mandate changes everywhere else.
Because in many places there is ONLY 1 ISP and they can do whatever they want. They will now double the price and half the speed, and then ask you for even more to get back what you already had.
Many areas? Probably. It's a big country. But here's the kicker: 4G Wireless is "good enough" in many cases for a good video/OTT phone internet experience (and, let's face it, video is what consumers want here...). The vast majority of America that's not completely rural has reasonable competition for internet service when you add in wireless providers and maybe a MiFi device.
Is it as good as the cable vs DSL competition at par we had in the dot-com era? No, it's not. Is it good enough? Pretty much.
If this were tied to something independent of Facebook and broadly agreed on, maybe it would work. Minimum BBB score required, for example. But if Facebook (or any of the tech giants) try to do this itself it really just invites further regulation. Commercial advertising is the primary mechanism by which the tech giants exert economic control, as between Facebook, Google/AdWords/DoubleClick, and Twitter they control something like 90% of the online advertising market.
I don't trust Silicon Valley with that kind of power and I don't really think anyone else should either. Outsource it - don't try to Change the World.
Yes, having no Internet access is a bad deal for Virginians, but maybe the state representative should be doing something about that instead of bitching to Amtrak.
That's great, and I encourage local co-ops to help build (probably wireless) infrastructure to help those residents get online.
In the meantime, people need to get on trains. I realize Amtrak service sucks sometimes, but I'd hope we don't have trains more than 3-4 years late.
The ads don't bother you?
I actually had to think long and hard when I saw this. The only ads I remember seeing were in the Microsoft Store panels on the Start menu that I turned off. Hardly any worse than the paid positioning present in the Apple/App Store or Google Play.
Are there other ads that I'm just blanking on?
I use a bootleg copy of Win10E on my home LAN. Buttery smooth. If you're using Pro, you're doing it wrong.
Honestly, this just feels odd. I've been using Windows 10 Pro since an upgrade from 8.1 a while back and.... it feels pretty buttery smooth already, to be honest.
I totally understand that there are issues for corporate IT not wanting to have to move to Enterprise but being forced to do it, but as a "pro-sumer" Windows desktop user I have to say I've been pretty impressed with Windows 10 Pro.
If you look at "ping" for example which is an suid program its behavior depends on calling process name. There are not really two versions of ping on disk. There is one program that behaves differently depending on whether it is executed as "ping" or "ping6" because it checks calling name and changes internal behavior accordingly.
I'm convinced "modern" Windows/java devs don't know about the existence of $0.
The size increase due to stuff like netstat and ifconfig is trivial. Where the bloat comes from is needing python, java, javascript, often in various versions to make a system run. There is absolutely no reason this crap needs to be mandatory. And talk about expanding the attack surface.
The Windows developers are the ones bringing idiotic crap like java and javascript in as system requirements.
Shell and Perl, on the other hand, have a long, long history on *nix systems, and projects like systemd that saw removal of it as a goal are based on Utopian philosophical goals, not any rational discussion on attack surface or utility, unless you're trying to create a 16MB distro or something (which they aren't).
Python there's a slightly stronger case for, but in the 2000's it emerged as a near-defacto standard for a wide variety of system tooling, with more ability than Shell and less syntactic complexity than perl in its preferred domain.
Of course, none of that is a great argument for removing a 70K C binary or practically forcing others to.
The Secret Service isn't the highest level one, just the one with direct responsibility for the personal safety of the executives. It's usually referred to in abbreviations as "USSS" (United States Secret Service), possibly for just that reason actually.
8 years of undergrad (long story) and I heard that on several occasions at my west-coast state university. Moreso after going back in the 2008-2011 time frame than in the late 90s time frame.
I was in a lot of humanities classes and the comments invariably came from the more left-wing professors. Ironically, it wasn't the pure thought ones (I ended up with a Philosophy BA), but the Political Science/Sociology ones that were usually the worst.
End to end encryption is fine, but Google (for once) is doing the right thing by having a telco standard instead of an over-the-top app sending God-knows-what.
Would I like to see end-to-end encryption? Yes. I'd like to see SS7 issues fixed first. There are plenty of E2E secure messaging solutions out there and I can't see why RCS is worse than MMS as a solution for enchanced SMS service.
At the very least, this is a fully interoperable system, not tied to Google, Inc or any specific carrier.
That's a Good Thing.
Tim Cook takes cheap shots at anyone in tech who is a Billionaire and isn't Apple.
The question isn't if he is right or wrong. The question is - what is his motivation?
Actually, no. The question is whether he is right or wrong. Stop trying to qui bono everything -- it's actually possible to have a discussion and come to conclusions based solely on rational argument and debate, ya know.
Hopefully, the Tech Awakening we're experiencing in the US at a consumer level might trickle upwards into actual products as well.
No way in hell I'm going to rely on something I have to use a remote service for, which is no doubt collecting and storing as many bits of data as possible. I don't need human-sounding-voice *that* badly that I can't wait for someone to figure out how to get 95% of this does and run on a few cores, or perhaps spare GPU capacity.
Would think they would benefit greatly.
Not really. Japan excelled in electromechanical manufacturing and design, but failed to follow up within the "software will eat the world" revolution. They're even further behind now in the "AI will eat the software" phase. Not to mention the existing demographic problems with a death-spiral-level birthrate and there's not a huge economic future outside of entertainment.
That's fine -- it's an insular enough country, and it will certainly fare better technology-wise than many other countries will -- but its 1980s powerhouse days are behind it.
Here's the problem with this:
Facebook could legitimately feel that terms were broken, or they might not. They might or might not choose to enforce those terms against customers that they "like" (no pun intended) that just so happen to be affiliated with the other side. There's a normal liberatarian-ish response to just say that private companies can do whatever they want, but the Social Networks are *so* powerful (80%+ engagement, 90%+ ad revenue if you include Google AdWords) that removal of that is a huge competitive disadvantage to disfavored candidates and parties.
We already have some regulations requiring equal broadcasting time and access to over-the-air political ads during a campaign season, which were developed during the time when TV was the most important demographic advertising source around. In 2018, this is social media.
We need real regulation of the handling of personal data and ad networks, to prevent tech industry's overwhelming power being used only for candidates its employees specifically support. These aren't just "regular companies" any more... They have more day-to-day power over American culture than Standard Oil ever did, and unless/until real anti-trust regulation happens and data storage is handled independently from advertising, we need to ensure the situation doesn't get more and more worse.
He wants his subject matter back...
Voices From the Hellmouth
The Price of Being Different
Eric, Dylan, and Mary of Doom
Columbine Student on VG Violence
Seriously, no one on Slashdot already posting these? Yikes.
Why can't we all just get along and all the companies get together to combine their funds to roll out 1 super fibre connection to every home etc between them then sell access to it that way they all get a cut.
We basically had that for a while when ILECs were forced to allow other DSL providers to colocate their equipment at the telco Central Office and resell the underlying line as DSL. Ultimately, the market collapse, however.
Broadband access with different technologies seems fine, but if we're going to re-roll fiber everywhere it probably means a massive government ownership of the lines. That said, the availability of "good enough" broadband over wireless technologies in a large chunk of the US changes some of the equation. Outside of HD media streaming (i.e., Cable TV), you don't really need more bandwidth than you can get through 4G/LTE. And for those needing more, the market will probably end up justifying the cost of a rollout.