So does this mean I can put a sticker on my car that says: "By Reading this Bumper Sticker you agree...
No, but I think the Blizzard judge pretty much established that you can bind someone to a EULA if you sell your car to them. Furthermore, you don't need to disclose the contents (or existence!) of that EULA, until after you already have their money.
If you hate people who buy things from you, then you can probably have some good fun with that.
If your mother only uses her computer for Facebook and Turbotax but draws 100W while idle, then your mother needs building advice. Nudge her into moving to Ivy Bridge Core i3 (and use the integrated graphics; don't add graphics card) when they come out in a couple months.
(Actually if that's all she does, maybe even an Atom or Bobcat system will be enough, but in 2012 I don't recommend going that way.)
This makes as much sense as Facebook announcing they're going to build a PC.
Actually, when you put it that way, as strange as it seems, it sounds less insane. The phone market is already twisted beyond belief; many people buy their handheld PCs from their ISPs. Why not buy phones from an advertising middleman.. or from a cement mixing company or from a haberdasher or from religious iconography and spell component shop? Those are some bizarre and senseless ideas, I'll admit, yet they are no more bizarre than the status quo! Phones are a fucked-up market which can't possibly get worse.
How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Or not. What you mind find is you judge the validity of each journal using an amazingly weak and vulnerable algorithm. Solve that problem and you'll solve the paper problem.
As I'm getting older I'm realizing more and more that the hobbies I find intellectually satisfying are rarely something that can be plugged into a social component. ..
I'm finding that I have to divorce "intellectually stimulating" from "social interaction" more and more every day.
You're already half way to finding the exception, when you go out for drinks. Ever thought of making the drinks? Brewing is social and (somewhat) nerdy. Ok, it's not going to be as intellectually stimulating as programming (what ever could be?) but don't knock it.
Everyone knows it, but few people acknowledge it: Mobile web browsers absolutely suck.
I didn't know that. I do share the concerns about the amazing shittiness of the dominant mobile OSes, causing mobile browsers to stagnate. But even when (yeah, it's "when" not "if") that happens, I thought at least it won't be as bad as what happened a decade ago. Back in the day, I would have agreed with the (then) contemporary version of the above statement: Everyone knew MSIE6 and NN4 absolutely suck (even by the standards of the time), and all the good browsers were niche or off the beaten path. But in 2012 I really don't agree that the most popular mobile browsers suck. Mobile Safari and Android Browser both seem pretty good to me.
(In fact I'd say the web browsers are the only thing that makes those two platforms be tolerable at all. They're otherwise garbage and the fact that you can so easily web-browse on them is what saves them. But that's another topic.. not that I'm averse to topic-drift, as you'll soon see.)
No? What don't you like about the current mobile browsers? They sure seem pretty up-to-date on standards and rendering capabilites, if nothing else. (Nobody would have said that about MSIE6 or NN4.)
BTW, totally different topic. The Axis demo movie thing, the presenter's voice was doing something funny. When they were just showing screenshots, I heard a woman's voice. Then they occasionally shift back to the dude and it's a man's voice. But it's the same voice. Without the face, it's a woman. Anyone else hear this, or is it just me?
I'm sure this will be entirely reasonable, too. It won't be broken like ready.gov and all the other sites they spent tens of millions on. And I'm sure it'll only cost tens off millions more to make the accessible via mobile.
Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done. (30 days would be better, though.)
The constants above are obviously an over-generalization; the Apollo Program couldn't be done in 90 days better than in one year, though doing it in one year just might be better than doing it in ten years. But for making websites modern-touch-mobile friendly/formatted (as opposed to merely "working") setting the deadline to a few weeks is.. about right.
I'm talking about average only-does-email-and-facebook joe kind of person.
Oh, Linux users, that Joe Average.;-)
But seriously, what Joe Average is into, kind of depends on what Joe Average can easily and cheaply do. I remember when email was considered kind of weird by a lot of people. But things changed, because people all got autodial smartmodems -- err I mean -- they all got ISPs and web browsers. Make large storage cheaply available and maybe everyone will want to edit video.
Edit video.. you know, just like how all those Joe Average guys (and they all just happen to run Linux) currently use their computers to edit text. vidgrep -v mistakes < yesterday_kitten_recording.mkv | vsed 's/kitten/slightly_cuter_kitten/' | mkvawk -f "BEGIN { vid_overlay_print "Check out what my kitten did!" }" > fixed_kitten_recording.mkv
I think his point is that if grid-charged electric vehicles become sufficiently popular, then when I subsidize both coal and oil, I actually am being an idiot. I'll be paying extra to play those two directly competing techs against each other, at the espense of all other techs.
I was really bending over backwards to justify the existing subsidies but drinkypoo is just not playing along at all. He might be an enemy of the politburo; the KGB should keep an eye on that trouble-making bastard.
You don't think that private property should be protected by the government?
I'm glad the discussion didn't get hung up on whether or not we subsidize oil, and has moved on to whether or not it's a good idea to continue doing it.
Imagine seeing a robber break into your house
The cops do not protect you in a situation like that, and never have. I love cop movies as much as anyone else, but you are taking them way too seriously, if you think that cops will protect you or your property during a robbery. That is exactly the kind of situation where the role of protecting your and your property really is left to the citizenry itself.
If you are robbed, by all means call the cops later when you're safe, but For Fuck's Sake either immediately get out of the house to safety, or (alternative strategy) cock your shotgun as noisily as possible. The only protective role they might play, will be pre-emptive vs a hypothetical "next victim," in the sense that the perp may be identified and arrested later, almost certainly not at the scene of your robbery.
That isn't to say they don't protect in that last pre-emptive sense that I mentioned; they do. But that's almost all they do. In real life, nearly all protection at the tactical level is private. People adopt strategies such as the excellent and time-tested "be in a group" and "run away", banks employ private security guards and armored cars, house owners buy locks for their doors, bars have bouncers, money handlers are audited, and so on. Most security is private.
if the government does not protect individuals and businesses, then they will have to hire their own hired guns. Is that what you want?
For large-scale routine shipping, hell yes I do wish they hired their own guns. But somehow you've got me thinking of taxpayer-subsidized naval protection of shipping as being more precedented and routinely accepted than your robbery example, not less. In a way, you've almost brought me over to your side, by showing me how much weirder private property protection could be (I'm imagining government protecting people from robbery, by having a couple cops stationed inside every house). That was one of the cleverest rebuttals I have ever seen.
a US judge ruled that you cannot identify a "pirate" using an IP address
That judge was merely ruling on a legal matter; he wasn't ruling on business strategies. You (as well as ISPs) are still free to suspect anyone of anything, for any reason. Nobody can ever take that away from you. (We still even have racists, you know.)
The policy being discussed isn't a matter of legal punishment or liability; it's about previously-for-profit businesses opting to give inferior service to some customers, based on.. whatever.. so that those people will decide to stop being customers and stop paying the ISP every month.
Transitioning toward becoming non-profit is what happens to sectors that interact too much with Hollywood; talk with those people long enough and you too can start to think of the people who send you monthly payments, as the enemy. They will teach you how to say No whenever cash is waved in your face.
The next step for ISPs, one they get into a more regular habit of telling customers "no we don't want your money," should be to complain about falling revenues, and lobby government for more blatant subsidies. Perhaps there will be a "wire tax" where anyone who buys ethernet cables or wireless APs will pay a little extra, to fund their local cable TV franchise.
Politicians say things that they think will cause us to vote for them. When they say stupid shit, the fault isn't so much in the limited realm of "politics" but rather the much wider realm of all of us. Do most people argue in terms of evidence? You're not going to make politics become evidence-based, until you can answer that last question with a confident Yes.
..so that we don't have to. The last thing I want in November when electing congresspeople, senators, and presidents, is to be stuck with that responsibility. It's about time someone relieved us all from having to think about the kind of relationship we want there to be, between our government and its people.
I pay extra income tax to send my country's military forces halfway around the world, to provide security for privately-owned oil tankers full of privately-owned oil to pass through the Persian Gulf. I pay extra income tax in order to provide non-humanitarian "foreign aid" to several other governments in the oil-rich area, just to keep them (somewhat) friendly.
Even if I opt out of using subsidized oil, I don't get to opt out of paying for the subsidy. Why would I pay even more to subsidize Yet Another competing energy source? (Well, ok, let's not get fanatical about that.. I understand that we've all come to an agreement to subsidize coal by allowing the plants that burn it to dump their CO2 into the public atmosphere as an externality (there's the subsidy) instead of making them plant forests to soak it up, but coal isn't really a direct competitor to oil; it's used differently so by subsidizing both, I'm not really paying to back two sides against each other, which would be silly.)
Can we just get the Central Committee's existing government-planned subsidy payments transferred? Why does the politburo always go with oil and coal in their five year plans? I'd be willing to do a subsidy re-assignment, at least short-term. (Long-term.. well, actually I'm unsure about the wisdom of even having a Central Committee and all this economic planning, but that's another topic.)
but perhaps 62 grand for a degree in music should give us pause to reconsider a) why does a degree in music cost 62 grand
This is the real issue. For all the discussion about how educuation is paid for, the loans and the subsidies or lack thereof, the elephant in the room is that it's expensive at all.
Something inefficient is going on, that the cost of education seems to be increasing faster than other inflation. I tend to take a techie/optimist approach and assume it ought to be going down if anything, but even if we assume that tech is just totally useless (i.e. the "information age" is irrelevant to education) then I still don't see why paying people to stand in front of classes and lecture would have its costs go up faster than other things.
This is ignoring the whole textbook publishing aspect and the role tech plays in those costs. I don't think we even want to open that can of worms in this discussion. I'm saying even without that blatant ripoff, my ripoff detector is still going off. Something stinks.
iTunes is not supported on Linux, and works horribly in Wine. Amazon MP3 have downloaders for some old 32-bit versions of Linux, which is quite useless, but their Windows downloader works fine under Wine
Amazon's store can also be configured to snail mail you shiny discs, which work with every OS.
That depends on the part of the story that's being left out: How did the quarterback figure out who the infiltrator was? Figuring out Suzy is fake: easy. Figuring out that Suzy is the principal: social engineered (CNN story) or other (maybe Slashdot story).
You do realize that it is conceivable that the last two combatants could kill each other or the survivor might not live long enough to issue a verdict? And odd or even, if you have to fight until there is only one left standing, you have the same potential problem.
Not if you implement your combat system to fit the requirements. Serialize all attacks (they never happen simultaneously), and make delivering a deathblow and delivering a verdict be a single atomic operation. That way, if someone dies while delivering the verdict, the deathblow is rolled back and their previous opponent becomes alive again.
Lack of saying how to pay for it, might be a criticial key to the motivation.
First of all, remember "they" never pay for anything; it would be "we," If, say, our taxes were to go up n% in order to fund such an effort, some people might complain or watch where that n% goes, making it harder for whoever the beneficiary of this law is, to remain undetected.
On the other hand, if a new law doesn't say how to pay, but rather, simply demands that services be "certified insecure" (yeah, it needs a better name) where the insecurity certification authority is presumably whoever is buying this new law, and they are paid not by one government program, but by skimming a little bit from every business in the country individually, there's less to talk about.
When the government spends $40 billion on something, someone might ask an embarrassing question about it. When you spend an extra $400 per year amortized across all goods and services in order to pay for those things' advertising on your phone, which in turn funds your phone's developers, who have to pay $40000 for an insecurity audit, to prove that your phone will always reject attempts to communicate high-entropy data (i.e. can't be used as a dumb pipe by some secure application), then there's no good question to ask.
Things just cost more than they used to, and don't work as reliably as they used to, and that's how things are. That's just something for weirdos to bitch about, not for the press to ask about.
People are willing to pay anything, as long as it's not called a tax. Why do you think Republicans still get votes?
One of the interesting and anachronistic things about the original CALEA is that it applied to telecom providers. With IP, though, we tend to think of "providers" as just ISPs, totally orthogonal to the software you use.
The FBI is not ever going to be able to force VoIP or websites to be insecure, unless they switch their legislative focus from providers to the client software implementations. At this point, it does no good to make the networks themselves more insecure, because anyone with even half a brain is going to design protocols based on the assumption that the entire network is already hopelessly compromised. You don't even need to be a paranoid loon ranting about what the CIA is doing to your tooth-fillings at this point; you can use Googbook or Iran or malware-spreading h4xx0rs as your bogeyman. There are so many different possible threats on networks now, that it's not considered paranoid to suspect that at least one of them might be credibly real. The news is full every day of instances where it was real, so the only question is whether or not something is snooping you, and at this moment.
Legislating what software you're allowed to run, is the only way to go from here, which makes any sense at all. If they don't do that, then a new CALEA isn't even a new and more-threatening "Big Brother" law, nor is there really any civil rights vs law enforcement debate; it's going to merely be another cash grab for some lobbyists somewhere -- run of the mill corruption.
Yet, I see the words VoIP "provider" here, not "software" or "client" or "implementation" or whatever. If you run a well-designed VoIP client, or if you're pasting PGP-encrypted text into web forms and copying PGP-encrypted text from web pages, then a new law can't hope to accomplish anything.
So is this an attempt to regulate endpoint software, disguised (i.e. is there an actual legitimate civil rights vs crime prevention/deterrence debate here)? Or have they given up the pretense already? And if so, then who benefits from the economic waste associated with building more systems to intercept ciphertext? Telecom companies? Government contractors? I know I'm missing something.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but I think the Blizzard judge pretty much established that you can bind someone to a EULA if you sell your car to them. Furthermore, you don't need to disclose the contents (or existence!) of that EULA, until after you already have their money.
If you hate people who buy things from you, then you can probably have some good fun with that.
If your mother only uses her computer for Facebook and Turbotax but draws 100W while idle, then your mother needs building advice. Nudge her into moving to Ivy Bridge Core i3 (and use the integrated graphics; don't add graphics card) when they come out in a couple months.
(Actually if that's all she does, maybe even an Atom or Bobcat system will be enough, but in 2012 I don't recommend going that way.)
Actually, when you put it that way, as strange as it seems, it sounds less insane. The phone market is already twisted beyond belief; many people buy their handheld PCs from their ISPs. Why not buy phones from an advertising middleman .. or from a cement mixing company or from a haberdasher or from religious iconography and spell component shop? Those are some bizarre and senseless ideas, I'll admit, yet they are no more bizarre than the status quo! Phones are a fucked-up market which can't possibly get worse.
Wait a minute, are you suggesting that having spiders run my javascript x86 emulator which runs jruby scripts which mines bitcoins, isn't practical?
How do you, as a reader, judge whether a journal is real or not?
Move that decision (however it is that you're implementing it) from the journal to the paper.
Or not. What you mind find is you judge the validity of each journal using an amazingly weak and vulnerable algorithm. Solve that problem and you'll solve the paper problem.
You're already half way to finding the exception, when you go out for drinks. Ever thought of making the drinks? Brewing is social and (somewhat) nerdy. Ok, it's not going to be as intellectually stimulating as programming (what ever could be?) but don't knock it.
I was smoking ObamaYesWeCan. I saw "90 days" and thought maybe he had ordered them to not do it The Federal Way.
I was wrong. Whoever modded you troll, was wrong too. Turns out there is no (real) 90 day deadline. The president isn't serious. Again.
I didn't know that. I do share the concerns about the amazing shittiness of the dominant mobile OSes, causing mobile browsers to stagnate. But even when (yeah, it's "when" not "if") that happens, I thought at least it won't be as bad as what happened a decade ago. Back in the day, I would have agreed with the (then) contemporary version of the above statement: Everyone knew MSIE6 and NN4 absolutely suck (even by the standards of the time), and all the good browsers were niche or off the beaten path. But in 2012 I really don't agree that the most popular mobile browsers suck. Mobile Safari and Android Browser both seem pretty good to me.
(In fact I'd say the web browsers are the only thing that makes those two platforms be tolerable at all. They're otherwise garbage and the fact that you can so easily web-browse on them is what saves them. But that's another topic.. not that I'm averse to topic-drift, as you'll soon see.)
No? What don't you like about the current mobile browsers? They sure seem pretty up-to-date on standards and rendering capabilites, if nothing else. (Nobody would have said that about MSIE6 or NN4.)
BTW, totally different topic. The Axis demo movie thing, the presenter's voice was doing something funny. When they were just showing screenshots, I heard a woman's voice. Then they occasionally shift back to the dude and it's a man's voice. But it's the same voice. Without the face, it's a woman. Anyone else hear this, or is it just me?
Shit! Oh well, never mind what I said here then; it really is a boondoggle after all.
Actually, if there's a silver lining here (which happens to address that very point), it's the 90 day deadline. One thing I've learned is that if something needs to be ready in one year, it is pretty much guaranteed to suck and overrun its deadline (i.e. it won't really be ready in a year) and have its best features neutered and a lot of worthless crap done to it.
OTOH if someone needs something in two weeks, the techs just say "well, we have to do this, and we're already running out of time" and get it done and there aren't any meetings and expansion and nobody gets to add delays to it.
90 days is a bit long for this kind of thing, but it might be short enough that the job can get done. (30 days would be better, though.)
The constants above are obviously an over-generalization; the Apollo Program couldn't be done in 90 days better than in one year, though doing it in one year just might be better than doing it in ten years. But for making websites modern-touch-mobile friendly/formatted (as opposed to merely "working") setting the deadline to a few weeks is .. about right.
Oh, Linux users, that Joe Average. ;-)
But seriously, what Joe Average is into, kind of depends on what Joe Average can easily and cheaply do. I remember when email was considered kind of weird by a lot of people. But things changed, because people all got autodial smartmodems -- err I mean -- they all got ISPs and web browsers. Make large storage cheaply available and maybe everyone will want to edit video.
Edit video.. you know, just like how all those Joe Average guys (and they all just happen to run Linux) currently use their computers to edit text.
vidgrep -v mistakes < yesterday_kitten_recording.mkv | vsed 's/kitten/slightly_cuter_kitten/' | mkvawk -f "BEGIN { vid_overlay_print "Check out what my kitten did!" }" > fixed_kitten_recording.mkv
IMHO RAID1 came back from the grave, and is the true successor to RAID5. :-) The question is: how many mirrors?
I think his point is that if grid-charged electric vehicles become sufficiently popular, then when I subsidize both coal and oil, I actually am being an idiot. I'll be paying extra to play those two directly competing techs against each other, at the espense of all other techs.
I was really bending over backwards to justify the existing subsidies but drinkypoo is just not playing along at all. He might be an enemy of the politburo; the KGB should keep an eye on that trouble-making bastard.
I'm glad the discussion didn't get hung up on whether or not we subsidize oil, and has moved on to whether or not it's a good idea to continue doing it.
The cops do not protect you in a situation like that, and never have. I love cop movies as much as anyone else, but you are taking them way too seriously, if you think that cops will protect you or your property during a robbery. That is exactly the kind of situation where the role of protecting your and your property really is left to the citizenry itself.
If you are robbed, by all means call the cops later when you're safe, but For Fuck's Sake either immediately get out of the house to safety, or (alternative strategy) cock your shotgun as noisily as possible. The only protective role they might play, will be pre-emptive vs a hypothetical "next victim," in the sense that the perp may be identified and arrested later, almost certainly not at the scene of your robbery.
That isn't to say they don't protect in that last pre-emptive sense that I mentioned; they do. But that's almost all they do. In real life, nearly all protection at the tactical level is private. People adopt strategies such as the excellent and time-tested "be in a group" and "run away", banks employ private security guards and armored cars, house owners buy locks for their doors, bars have bouncers, money handlers are audited, and so on. Most security is private.
For large-scale routine shipping, hell yes I do wish they hired their own guns. But somehow you've got me thinking of taxpayer-subsidized naval protection of shipping as being more precedented and routinely accepted than your robbery example, not less. In a way, you've almost brought me over to your side, by showing me how much weirder private property protection could be (I'm imagining government protecting people from robbery, by having a couple cops stationed inside every house). That was one of the cleverest rebuttals I have ever seen.
That judge was merely ruling on a legal matter; he wasn't ruling on business strategies. You (as well as ISPs) are still free to suspect anyone of anything, for any reason. Nobody can ever take that away from you. (We still even have racists, you know.)
The policy being discussed isn't a matter of legal punishment or liability; it's about previously-for-profit businesses opting to give inferior service to some customers, based on .. whatever .. so that those people will decide to stop being customers and stop paying the ISP every month.
Transitioning toward becoming non-profit is what happens to sectors that interact too much with Hollywood; talk with those people long enough and you too can start to think of the people who send you monthly payments, as the enemy. They will teach you how to say No whenever cash is waved in your face.
The next step for ISPs, one they get into a more regular habit of telling customers "no we don't want your money," should be to complain about falling revenues, and lobby government for more blatant subsidies. Perhaps there will be a "wire tax" where anyone who buys ethernet cables or wireless APs will pay a little extra, to fund their local cable TV franchise.
Politicians say things that they think will cause us to vote for them. When they say stupid shit, the fault isn't so much in the limited realm of "politics" but rather the much wider realm of all of us. Do most people argue in terms of evidence? You're not going to make politics become evidence-based, until you can answer that last question with a confident Yes.
I pay extra income tax to send my country's military forces halfway around the world, to provide security for privately-owned oil tankers full of privately-owned oil to pass through the Persian Gulf. I pay extra income tax in order to provide non-humanitarian "foreign aid" to several other governments in the oil-rich area, just to keep them (somewhat) friendly.
Even if I opt out of using subsidized oil, I don't get to opt out of paying for the subsidy. Why would I pay even more to subsidize Yet Another competing energy source? (Well, ok, let's not get fanatical about that .. I understand that we've all come to an agreement to subsidize coal by allowing the plants that burn it to dump their CO2 into the public atmosphere as an externality (there's the subsidy) instead of making them plant forests to soak it up, but coal isn't really a direct competitor to oil; it's used differently so by subsidizing both, I'm not really paying to back two sides against each other, which would be silly.)
Can we just get the Central Committee's existing government-planned subsidy payments transferred? Why does the politburo always go with oil and coal in their five year plans? I'd be willing to do a subsidy re-assignment, at least short-term. (Long-term.. well, actually I'm unsure about the wisdom of even having a Central Committee and all this economic planning, but that's another topic.)
This is the real issue. For all the discussion about how educuation is paid for, the loans and the subsidies or lack thereof, the elephant in the room is that it's expensive at all.
Something inefficient is going on, that the cost of education seems to be increasing faster than other inflation. I tend to take a techie/optimist approach and assume it ought to be going down if anything, but even if we assume that tech is just totally useless (i.e. the "information age" is irrelevant to education) then I still don't see why paying people to stand in front of classes and lecture would have its costs go up faster than other things.
This is ignoring the whole textbook publishing aspect and the role tech plays in those costs. I don't think we even want to open that can of worms in this discussion. I'm saying even without that blatant ripoff, my ripoff detector is still going off. Something stinks.
Amazon's store can also be configured to snail mail you shiny discs, which work with every OS.
And even if you know a person by that name, then there's the next problem: authenticating. Hey Facebook, why no PGP signing of profile ids yet?
That depends on the part of the story that's being left out: How did the quarterback figure out who the infiltrator was? Figuring out Suzy is fake: easy. Figuring out that Suzy is the principal: social engineered (CNN story) or other (maybe Slashdot story).
Not if you implement your combat system to fit the requirements. Serialize all attacks (they never happen simultaneously), and make delivering a deathblow and delivering a verdict be a single atomic operation. That way, if someone dies while delivering the verdict, the deathblow is rolled back and their previous opponent becomes alive again.
Lack of saying how to pay for it, might be a criticial key to the motivation.
First of all, remember "they" never pay for anything; it would be "we," If, say, our taxes were to go up n% in order to fund such an effort, some people might complain or watch where that n% goes, making it harder for whoever the beneficiary of this law is, to remain undetected.
On the other hand, if a new law doesn't say how to pay, but rather, simply demands that services be "certified insecure" (yeah, it needs a better name) where the insecurity certification authority is presumably whoever is buying this new law, and they are paid not by one government program, but by skimming a little bit from every business in the country individually, there's less to talk about.
When the government spends $40 billion on something, someone might ask an embarrassing question about it. When you spend an extra $400 per year amortized across all goods and services in order to pay for those things' advertising on your phone, which in turn funds your phone's developers, who have to pay $40000 for an insecurity audit, to prove that your phone will always reject attempts to communicate high-entropy data (i.e. can't be used as a dumb pipe by some secure application), then there's no good question to ask.
Things just cost more than they used to, and don't work as reliably as they used to, and that's how things are. That's just something for weirdos to bitch about, not for the press to ask about.
People are willing to pay anything, as long as it's not called a tax. Why do you think Republicans still get votes?
One of the interesting and anachronistic things about the original CALEA is that it applied to telecom providers. With IP, though, we tend to think of "providers" as just ISPs, totally orthogonal to the software you use.
The FBI is not ever going to be able to force VoIP or websites to be insecure, unless they switch their legislative focus from providers to the client software implementations. At this point, it does no good to make the networks themselves more insecure, because anyone with even half a brain is going to design protocols based on the assumption that the entire network is already hopelessly compromised. You don't even need to be a paranoid loon ranting about what the CIA is doing to your tooth-fillings at this point; you can use Googbook or Iran or malware-spreading h4xx0rs as your bogeyman. There are so many different possible threats on networks now, that it's not considered paranoid to suspect that at least one of them might be credibly real. The news is full every day of instances where it was real, so the only question is whether or not something is snooping you, and at this moment.
Legislating what software you're allowed to run, is the only way to go from here, which makes any sense at all. If they don't do that, then a new CALEA isn't even a new and more-threatening "Big Brother" law, nor is there really any civil rights vs law enforcement debate; it's going to merely be another cash grab for some lobbyists somewhere -- run of the mill corruption.
Yet, I see the words VoIP "provider" here, not "software" or "client" or "implementation" or whatever. If you run a well-designed VoIP client, or if you're pasting PGP-encrypted text into web forms and copying PGP-encrypted text from web pages, then a new law can't hope to accomplish anything.
So is this an attempt to regulate endpoint software, disguised (i.e. is there an actual legitimate civil rights vs crime prevention/deterrence debate here)? Or have they given up the pretense already? And if so, then who benefits from the economic waste associated with building more systems to intercept ciphertext? Telecom companies? Government contractors? I know I'm missing something.