They promised to remove Extension support several years ago, with some foolish idea that they could drive people to use their "jet" thing. Not only was Jet utter crap, but the outcry at the threat of removing extensions echoed for a long time in their ears. I don't think they have enough remaining customers to make good on that stupid promise again.
The only reason I've remained loyal to Firefox is the extension model works so well. I can live with most of their ugly and awkward UI changes, even though they're all user-unfriendly and I hate everything about them. Extensions have replaced some of the missing needed features they've removed. But the main thing is there is no reason to use any browser that doesn't run NoScript. There's no reason to contact any server of a resource if I have no intention of loading or viewing said resource. And all the major alternatives are worse. Chrome is actively sending browsing habits directly into the world's largest advertising company, and I have no desire to feed that rapacious tiger. Microsoft's old offerings are laughably as insecure as swiss cheese, and their new browser phones home with practically every keypress.
Yes, I could run privoxy, but that's a really awkward approach when compared to NoScript's brilliant rules engine. But if the only choice becomes running through a filtering proxy, then I'm no longer bound to Firefox. May as well use the built in browsers at that point - they're less hassle.
Because there's precedent for "voluntary" activities not actually being voluntary. Many years ago, there was a very large US automobile maker who had a secret hidden step in the hiring process. They'd hand the prospective employee a form to fill out for taking a "voluntary" charitable deduction from your paycheck. It turned out that if he filled out a zero, he was shown the door because they didn't want to hire anyone who wasn't charitable.
So, apply that kind of mentality here. "Welcome to EvilCorp, here's your Fitbit. You should know that EvilCorp has a Fitbit challenge to see which company division can get the most steps, and I'm proud to say that our division always beats the accounting department because everyone in our department participates. Of course you don't want to let us down, do you?"
Now ask yourself: Is that employee voluntarily providing his health data?
What difference could that data possibly make to an employer? What if the HR department is told to control the costs of providing long term disability benefits, so they decide to put out a sliding scale: healthy employees pay $5/week, non-healthy employees pay $10/week. And they assign your "healthy" status based on whether or not you get 10,000 steps a day, and whether or not you use tobacco. How much of that is voluntary? How much of that should be permitted?
Just keeping the health data outside the company solves the root problem. Hiring an outside insurance company does that now; there are plenty of laws (HIPAA/Privacy) that ensure they don't share the health data back with the employer. It certainly doesn't have to be the government.
So if the Dutch company wants to help their employees become healthier while still complying with the laws, all they have to do is reimburse the price of a Fitbit to any employee who provides a valid receipt. They certainly don't need access to the employees' accounts on fitbit.com. According to their laws, they also shouldn't provide an EvilCorp Fitness Challenge group. That's what the company I work for did; although since we're in the US, there are no similar privacy restrictions on employers sponsoring their own challenge groups.
And Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications (BFOQs) are always the allowed exception. You can't be forced to hire a blind truck driver. But there is no BFOQ that requires someone to wear a fitness tracker.
The storage is in Flash RAM, not a hard drive, but they can probably get a copy of the encrypted data. That's not a problem.
What is a problem is that AES-256 has no known weaknesses for this kind of situation. AES-256 in this case means the key is exactly one random number between 0 and 2 to the 256th power (2^256). That's not just a big number, that's a mind-blowingly big number. kIf every molecule in the entire universe was an advanced supercomputer capable of testing a billion billion keys per second, and had been testing every second since the moment of the big bang, you still wouldn't have found the right key yet.
They can brute force the PIN, but only with cooperation of the OS.
The health department doesn't profit from food poisoning. Responding to suspected food poisoning is an expensive use of their scarce resources; they'd much rather be on the enforcement side doing inspections, preventing outbreaks so they don't have to react to them.
But you're right, an "I'm Sick" app might be a great way to help researchers pinpoint food-borne illness vectors. I've read that they've been data mining various social media sites to try to track back some of the previous infections at places like Chipotle. This would just be another tool in the shed. Assuming people use it, of course.
On the newest iPhones (A7 processor and newer), the Secure Enclave enforces the rules. This is a coprocessor chip with code baked in during manufacture and is implicitly trusted. It also has the AES-256 algorithm and key that protects the storage. The key is locked in the silicon with no way to extract it; the chip manufacturer doesn't keep it and Apple never has it. In order to access the encrypted storage, the request must pass through the SE. The class keys that are used are derived from the baked-in key and the passcode. 10 invalid passcode attempts and the chip will erase the encryption keys.
For the San Bernadino killers' iPhones, they have older iPhones where this is logic part of the iOS software. Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do. Had the murderers been using an iPhone 6 (or maybe even the iPhone 5S) not even Apple would be able to break them. The only options I see there might be physically dissecting the chip and somehow reading the bits from the flash storage in the chip. That's been done on the older, unsophisticated chips like those found in credit cards, but I've never heard of a researcher able to read data from the nanometer-scale chips in use in the Apple CPUs. Maybe the NSA has someone in house who could do that, but we civilians have no way of knowing what goes on in those labs.
Back in the eighties, I was opening a bank account and the guy told me to pick a PIN. I pulled out my trusty Casio programmer's calculator, hit the random button 4 times, and wrote down the last digit of each.
Which is monumentally STUPID! That leads to people writing it down just so they can remember it. I can see my idiot brother even writing it on the card so he doesn't have to remember it!
People get all panicked about "writing down their passwords." I have never seen a case where a hacker was able to reach through the internet and shoulder surf that piece of paper. Offline analog storage has a much better security profile than the average bureaucrat's Excel spreadsheet full of passwords.
Sure, local attacks on the paper are possible, but extremely rare when compared to online attacks. Paper records have a much lower risk profile.
I think it was a defective idiot trap. Anyone ignoring the warning buoys right next to a nuclear plant, and then deliberately bypassing the safety grates is by definition an idiot, and the mechanism was designed to chop the idiot up into fish bait. Score another failure for nuclear plant engineers.
When you vote in a primary election, you sign a piece of paper attesting to your party affiliation as a matter of public record. That means the parties and the state already have your name and address with your political affiliation. It is not a secret, it's long been harvested.
This is slightly different. This is correlating political candidates with advertising demographic data. They already know when a phone is used to check NASCAR results or is used to shop for lawn-mowers. What they did is identify which phones went to which primary polling place. By looking at places that had highly lopsided outcomes they were able to figure out that NASCAR fans supported Clinton, and lawn-mower owners in Iowa chose Trump.
It's also not a given that they have collected your name and address. iPhones have an advertising privacy setting that determine whether or not your phone delivers a unique static token to the iAd companies. Turn the setting off and that phone delivers only a common "do-not-track" ID, preventing the marketers from establishing relationships between your specific phone ID and the ad.
This intel will be used by the various campaigns in the next states to hold primaries to make sure "get out and vote for Hillary" messages are played on the NASCAR channel, and "get out and vote for Trump" booths appear at the Home and Garden Shows. While that's odious enough, the J.Edgar Hoover wannabees in the FBI will simply make use of the actual public voter registration lists. The more nefarious conspiracy-related schemes imagined will involve Joseph McCarthy clones in smoke-filled rooms, poring over data gathered from automated license plate readers, facial recognition cameras, IMSI catchers, and Bluetooth sniffers hidden around all the polling places.
The summary is very misleading. Apple's compliance has only been in recovering unprotected data. They have never provided access into the Secure Enclave to recover the keys, and have never recovered data encrypted by those keys before.
The FBI hopes that by whipping up national hatred for these mass murderers it will spark a public outcry in favor of forcing vendors to provide defective encryption, U.S. government access to escrow keys, or other back door. Many Americans have been taught by the fear-mongers running the talk radio business to be so craven that they'll agree to any violation of anyone's rights because 'terrorists'.
Shamir is also being disingenuous when he said, "even though Apple has helped in countless cases, they decided not to comply this time." Apple's cooperation in the prior cases was in recovering unencrypted data. They have never provided a way to decrypt data when they don't have the keys, or recover keys locked in the secure enclave.
The corporate equivalent of conservative politicians offering 'Thoughts and Prayers' after every mass shooting (instead of doing anything to stop recurrences).
Not arguing that it's a lame response, but what else can they actually do in response to a breach? Saying "don't have the breach in the first place" is not a valid argument because perfect security simply doesn't exist, especially when it involves humans making judgment calls as to whether or not to question the CEO's urgent request.
Seriously, if you have a more efficacious solution, please post it.
The problem is with the algorithms used, not the capabilities of computers. If done right, for this specific task at hand, a computer would beat a human every time. For example, a computer looking at a 2x2 pixel square image of a letter could compare it against what it knows every character scaled down to 2x2 looks like under various scaling algorithms, the brightness levels of the four available pixels, and tell you with very high accuracy what it's looking at. A human, on the other hand, would have no clue.
For a specific task, sure, you can do all kinds of computer optimizations to make the recognition easier. But the experiment you are describing isn't valid in the general case where you have no idea what the context is. Have a look at the paper. These fragments of pictures could be the letter "Y" rendered in Arial Ultra Bold Italic on a white sign at twilight, an eagle in flight across a blue sky, or an X-ray of an artery. With nobody to say "this is from a font directory", or "this photo was taken outside by the river", the list of possibilities is just too large - doesn't matter if it's a person or a computer vision algorithm.
Clearly you have never seen my uncle drive. Despite a lifetime of practice, at no point in his life could he have ever bested any of the current self-driving cars, never mind the advances we'll likely see in the next decade.
Keep in mind there are still people on the roads who hold licenses that were granted before driving tests were required.
5 to 10 external power supplies in the average U.S. household
That means somewhere in the U.S., there are about 20 wart-free houses that are offsetting my house. I recently hauled a cardboard box filled with them to the recycler; they were just the old ones from dead electronics. And I didn't even toss all of them; I kept another full box as replacements.
I have to agree with the OP, at least in a literal sense. Vacuum tubes were indeed "marvels", as people marveled at their function; so to call them marvelous is absolutely correct. You can also say they work marvelously well when compared to electrical devices such as relays. He didn't claim they were efficient, cool, small, low-voltage, short-lived, solid-state, distortion-free, or noise-rejecting. Doesn't mean they weren't marvels.
No, we're all too focused on "Who's fault is it?" and nobody has properly considered "What do we do about it?"
We know exactly what to do about it: move to less convenient fuels (excuse me, "renewables") , adopt less comfortable living conditions (aka "reduce energy consumption"), reduce the amount of disposable consumer goods in our lives, etc. And those of us in the developed world have to cut enough from our carbon budgets to make allowances for the populations of the developing nations who want to better their standards of living, a move that is guaranteed to build resentment on both sides of the equation.
What you're missing here (either honestly or deliberately) is that the problem is ongoing, and that because it's caused by economic activity, the people who are profiting from it want to continue to profit from it, and they are actively working to derail efforts to correct or even acknowledge the problem.
And those of us in the developed world are not too excited about fixing it. The benefit we get from fossil fueled energy is great and immediate; the impact we feel from CO2 emissions is so low we have to be 40 years old before we have enough experience to notice the impact on our own lives. Rising water levels on a few tropical islands is a long way from stepping on a gas pedal in North Dakota.
So yeah, we need to do both: stop the people who are encouraging the growth of the problem, and we have to accept some sacrifices as a result. Neither is fun, so... you first.
Every single argument I've ever heard from the "deniers" is based on either a real lack of understanding of science, or they've assumed an argumentative position based on their political leanings. They don't understand the difference between weather and climate. They don't understand trends or statistical sampling. They don't understand the difference between tolerances and allowances, accuracy and precision, or how averages are computed. They don't understand how data from ice cores is calibrated and tested. They don't understand how geologic climate data works. They make faulty assumptions about CO2 data collection methods.
And you know what? That's OK. Not everyone can be expected to learn all that. But if they can't, then they at least need the honesty to either try to learn from people who do understand, or at least refrain from echoing arguments made by others - because those others aren't making those arguments out of pure stupidity. They are making them to advance their political agenda, or to at least delay someone else's agenda.
In any collection of people, there will be some "deniers" who will not listen to reason, meaning we will never see unanimity. The trick is recognizing when enough rational people have accepted the arguments. Once the percentage of "deniers" drops far enough below the population of rational people, it's time to stop trying to convince everyone and moving on to accomplish tasks. We have to know when the delays have run their course, because nothing will ever get done if we wait for every last denier to come into accordance.
As far as your argument goes, there are 50 years of science, 150 years of direct climate measurements, thousands of years of indirect climate measurements, and geological evidence going back much further. I think climate science is a lot further along than still trying to establish first principles.
While I agree that emulating the parts of the iOS ecosystem that we all hate (the walled garden, and the over-dependence on for-rent services) was their biggest mistake, I just don't have the same loathing for Microsoft as I do for Apple. Apple innovated the walled garden model, and got millions of fanbois to promote it. Apple is like an abusive spouse, constantly telling their users they're too damn stupid to own anything as cool as their gear; and yet those people are grateful. Apple is straight up evil.
Microsoft just copied everything Apple did, stupidly hoping they'd stumble upon some magical formula for success. But it always seemed like somewhere deep inside Microsoft there was a tension caused by really talented people who knew the whole Apple idea was evil, and were trying to do the right thing. So I can't hate them as much.
All it needed to say was "Project Loon, Google's balloon-borne internet platform,..."
But I'm glad i provided you with the chance to swear like a Tourette's victim and contribute nothing of value to humanity. That's OK, I'm sure you must make your mother proud in other ways.
You're maybe a better coder than I or people I've worked with. I find the majority of my time isn't spent "writing" it is spent finding the stupid little errors like a != that should be an == or forgetting to do a null check etc.
You'd probably benefit from a good static code analyzer. While they can't catch errors in logic where your code doesn't meet your requirements, even the simple ones can catch a lot of dumb things like skipped null checks, boundary violations, pointer violations, memory leaks, etc. The better tools are very sophisticated and can do deep examinations, and will track your code quality over time. They are also available as IDE plugins, you can run them on a build server, or both. They can save you hours of time checking for those stupid little errors.
Slashdot Mirror
They promised to remove Extension support several years ago, with some foolish idea that they could drive people to use their "jet" thing. Not only was Jet utter crap, but the outcry at the threat of removing extensions echoed for a long time in their ears. I don't think they have enough remaining customers to make good on that stupid promise again.
The only reason I've remained loyal to Firefox is the extension model works so well. I can live with most of their ugly and awkward UI changes, even though they're all user-unfriendly and I hate everything about them. Extensions have replaced some of the missing needed features they've removed. But the main thing is there is no reason to use any browser that doesn't run NoScript. There's no reason to contact any server of a resource if I have no intention of loading or viewing said resource. And all the major alternatives are worse. Chrome is actively sending browsing habits directly into the world's largest advertising company, and I have no desire to feed that rapacious tiger. Microsoft's old offerings are laughably as insecure as swiss cheese, and their new browser phones home with practically every keypress.
Yes, I could run privoxy, but that's a really awkward approach when compared to NoScript's brilliant rules engine. But if the only choice becomes running through a filtering proxy, then I'm no longer bound to Firefox. May as well use the built in browsers at that point - they're less hassle.
Because there's precedent for "voluntary" activities not actually being voluntary. Many years ago, there was a very large US automobile maker who had a secret hidden step in the hiring process. They'd hand the prospective employee a form to fill out for taking a "voluntary" charitable deduction from your paycheck. It turned out that if he filled out a zero, he was shown the door because they didn't want to hire anyone who wasn't charitable.
So, apply that kind of mentality here. "Welcome to EvilCorp, here's your Fitbit. You should know that EvilCorp has a Fitbit challenge to see which company division can get the most steps, and I'm proud to say that our division always beats the accounting department because everyone in our department participates. Of course you don't want to let us down, do you?"
Now ask yourself: Is that employee voluntarily providing his health data?
What difference could that data possibly make to an employer? What if the HR department is told to control the costs of providing long term disability benefits, so they decide to put out a sliding scale: healthy employees pay $5/week, non-healthy employees pay $10/week. And they assign your "healthy" status based on whether or not you get 10,000 steps a day, and whether or not you use tobacco. How much of that is voluntary? How much of that should be permitted?
Just keeping the health data outside the company solves the root problem. Hiring an outside insurance company does that now; there are plenty of laws (HIPAA/Privacy) that ensure they don't share the health data back with the employer. It certainly doesn't have to be the government.
So if the Dutch company wants to help their employees become healthier while still complying with the laws, all they have to do is reimburse the price of a Fitbit to any employee who provides a valid receipt. They certainly don't need access to the employees' accounts on fitbit.com. According to their laws, they also shouldn't provide an EvilCorp Fitness Challenge group. That's what the company I work for did; although since we're in the US, there are no similar privacy restrictions on employers sponsoring their own challenge groups.
And Bona Fide Occupational Qualifications (BFOQs) are always the allowed exception. You can't be forced to hire a blind truck driver. But there is no BFOQ that requires someone to wear a fitness tracker.
No. Brute force has limits.
The storage is in Flash RAM, not a hard drive, but they can probably get a copy of the encrypted data. That's not a problem.
What is a problem is that AES-256 has no known weaknesses for this kind of situation. AES-256 in this case means the key is exactly one random number between 0 and 2 to the 256th power (2^256). That's not just a big number, that's a mind-blowingly big number. kIf every molecule in the entire universe was an advanced supercomputer capable of testing a billion billion keys per second, and had been testing every second since the moment of the big bang, you still wouldn't have found the right key yet.
They can brute force the PIN, but only with cooperation of the OS.
In other words, if you take away the sources of food poisoning, you're taking away my opportunity to enjoy projectile vomiting.
They call that the "ruptured intestine fallacy"
The health department doesn't profit from food poisoning. Responding to suspected food poisoning is an expensive use of their scarce resources; they'd much rather be on the enforcement side doing inspections, preventing outbreaks so they don't have to react to them.
But you're right, an "I'm Sick" app might be a great way to help researchers pinpoint food-borne illness vectors. I've read that they've been data mining various social media sites to try to track back some of the previous infections at places like Chipotle. This would just be another tool in the shed. Assuming people use it, of course.
On the newest iPhones (A7 processor and newer), the Secure Enclave enforces the rules. This is a coprocessor chip with code baked in during manufacture and is implicitly trusted. It also has the AES-256 algorithm and key that protects the storage. The key is locked in the silicon with no way to extract it; the chip manufacturer doesn't keep it and Apple never has it. In order to access the encrypted storage, the request must pass through the SE. The class keys that are used are derived from the baked-in key and the passcode. 10 invalid passcode attempts and the chip will erase the encryption keys.
For a much better description, read this: https://www.apple.com/business... starting from page 10.
For the San Bernadino killers' iPhones, they have older iPhones where this is logic part of the iOS software. Therefore, a change to iOS is capable of altering the 10-strikes rule on their devices, and that's what the FBI is asking Apple to do. Had the murderers been using an iPhone 6 (or maybe even the iPhone 5S) not even Apple would be able to break them. The only options I see there might be physically dissecting the chip and somehow reading the bits from the flash storage in the chip. That's been done on the older, unsophisticated chips like those found in credit cards, but I've never heard of a researcher able to read data from the nanometer-scale chips in use in the Apple CPUs. Maybe the NSA has someone in house who could do that, but we civilians have no way of knowing what goes on in those labs.
Back in the eighties, I was opening a bank account and the guy told me to pick a PIN. I pulled out my trusty Casio programmer's calculator, hit the random button 4 times, and wrote down the last digit of each.
So, no. You're not alone.
Which is monumentally STUPID! That leads to people writing it down just so they can remember it. I can see my idiot brother even writing it on the card so he doesn't have to remember it!
People get all panicked about "writing down their passwords." I have never seen a case where a hacker was able to reach through the internet and shoulder surf that piece of paper. Offline analog storage has a much better security profile than the average bureaucrat's Excel spreadsheet full of passwords.
Sure, local attacks on the paper are possible, but extremely rare when compared to online attacks. Paper records have a much lower risk profile.
I think it was a defective idiot trap. Anyone ignoring the warning buoys right next to a nuclear plant, and then deliberately bypassing the safety grates is by definition an idiot, and the mechanism was designed to chop the idiot up into fish bait. Score another failure for nuclear plant engineers.
When you vote in a primary election, you sign a piece of paper attesting to your party affiliation as a matter of public record. That means the parties and the state already have your name and address with your political affiliation. It is not a secret, it's long been harvested.
This is slightly different. This is correlating political candidates with advertising demographic data. They already know when a phone is used to check NASCAR results or is used to shop for lawn-mowers. What they did is identify which phones went to which primary polling place. By looking at places that had highly lopsided outcomes they were able to figure out that NASCAR fans supported Clinton, and lawn-mower owners in Iowa chose Trump.
It's also not a given that they have collected your name and address. iPhones have an advertising privacy setting that determine whether or not your phone delivers a unique static token to the iAd companies. Turn the setting off and that phone delivers only a common "do-not-track" ID, preventing the marketers from establishing relationships between your specific phone ID and the ad.
This intel will be used by the various campaigns in the next states to hold primaries to make sure "get out and vote for Hillary" messages are played on the NASCAR channel, and "get out and vote for Trump" booths appear at the Home and Garden Shows. While that's odious enough, the J.Edgar Hoover wannabees in the FBI will simply make use of the actual public voter registration lists. The more nefarious conspiracy-related schemes imagined will involve Joseph McCarthy clones in smoke-filled rooms, poring over data gathered from automated license plate readers, facial recognition cameras, IMSI catchers, and Bluetooth sniffers hidden around all the polling places.
The summary is very misleading. Apple's compliance has only been in recovering unprotected data. They have never provided access into the Secure Enclave to recover the keys, and have never recovered data encrypted by those keys before.
The FBI hopes that by whipping up national hatred for these mass murderers it will spark a public outcry in favor of forcing vendors to provide defective encryption, U.S. government access to escrow keys, or other back door. Many Americans have been taught by the fear-mongers running the talk radio business to be so craven that they'll agree to any violation of anyone's rights because 'terrorists'.
Shamir is also being disingenuous when he said, "even though Apple has helped in countless cases, they decided not to comply this time." Apple's cooperation in the prior cases was in recovering unencrypted data. They have never provided a way to decrypt data when they don't have the keys, or recover keys locked in the secure enclave.
The corporate equivalent of conservative politicians offering 'Thoughts and Prayers' after every mass shooting (instead of doing anything to stop recurrences).
Not arguing that it's a lame response, but what else can they actually do in response to a breach? Saying "don't have the breach in the first place" is not a valid argument because perfect security simply doesn't exist, especially when it involves humans making judgment calls as to whether or not to question the CEO's urgent request.
Seriously, if you have a more efficacious solution, please post it.
The problem is with the algorithms used, not the capabilities of computers. If done right, for this specific task at hand, a computer would beat a human every time. For example, a computer looking at a 2x2 pixel square image of a letter could compare it against what it knows every character scaled down to 2x2 looks like under various scaling algorithms, the brightness levels of the four available pixels, and tell you with very high accuracy what it's looking at. A human, on the other hand, would have no clue.
For a specific task, sure, you can do all kinds of computer optimizations to make the recognition easier. But the experiment you are describing isn't valid in the general case where you have no idea what the context is. Have a look at the paper. These fragments of pictures could be the letter "Y" rendered in Arial Ultra Bold Italic on a white sign at twilight, an eagle in flight across a blue sky, or an X-ray of an artery. With nobody to say "this is from a font directory", or "this photo was taken outside by the river", the list of possibilities is just too large - doesn't matter if it's a person or a computer vision algorithm.
Clearly you have never seen my uncle drive. Despite a lifetime of practice, at no point in his life could he have ever bested any of the current self-driving cars, never mind the advances we'll likely see in the next decade.
Keep in mind there are still people on the roads who hold licenses that were granted before driving tests were required.
5 to 10 external power supplies in the average U.S. household
That means somewhere in the U.S., there are about 20 wart-free houses that are offsetting my house. I recently hauled a cardboard box filled with them to the recycler; they were just the old ones from dead electronics. And I didn't even toss all of them; I kept another full box as replacements.
I have to agree with the OP, at least in a literal sense. Vacuum tubes were indeed "marvels", as people marveled at their function; so to call them marvelous is absolutely correct. You can also say they work marvelously well when compared to electrical devices such as relays. He didn't claim they were efficient, cool, small, low-voltage, short-lived, solid-state, distortion-free, or noise-rejecting. Doesn't mean they weren't marvels.
</nits_picked>
No, we're all too focused on "Who's fault is it?" and nobody has properly considered "What do we do about it?"
We know exactly what to do about it: move to less convenient fuels (excuse me, "renewables") , adopt less comfortable living conditions (aka "reduce energy consumption"), reduce the amount of disposable consumer goods in our lives, etc. And those of us in the developed world have to cut enough from our carbon budgets to make allowances for the populations of the developing nations who want to better their standards of living, a move that is guaranteed to build resentment on both sides of the equation.
What you're missing here (either honestly or deliberately) is that the problem is ongoing, and that because it's caused by economic activity, the people who are profiting from it want to continue to profit from it, and they are actively working to derail efforts to correct or even acknowledge the problem.
And those of us in the developed world are not too excited about fixing it. The benefit we get from fossil fueled energy is great and immediate; the impact we feel from CO2 emissions is so low we have to be 40 years old before we have enough experience to notice the impact on our own lives. Rising water levels on a few tropical islands is a long way from stepping on a gas pedal in North Dakota.
So yeah, we need to do both: stop the people who are encouraging the growth of the problem, and we have to accept some sacrifices as a result. Neither is fun, so ... you first.
Every single argument I've ever heard from the "deniers" is based on either a real lack of understanding of science, or they've assumed an argumentative position based on their political leanings. They don't understand the difference between weather and climate. They don't understand trends or statistical sampling. They don't understand the difference between tolerances and allowances, accuracy and precision, or how averages are computed. They don't understand how data from ice cores is calibrated and tested. They don't understand how geologic climate data works. They make faulty assumptions about CO2 data collection methods.
And you know what? That's OK. Not everyone can be expected to learn all that. But if they can't, then they at least need the honesty to either try to learn from people who do understand, or at least refrain from echoing arguments made by others - because those others aren't making those arguments out of pure stupidity. They are making them to advance their political agenda, or to at least delay someone else's agenda.
In any collection of people, there will be some "deniers" who will not listen to reason, meaning we will never see unanimity. The trick is recognizing when enough rational people have accepted the arguments. Once the percentage of "deniers" drops far enough below the population of rational people, it's time to stop trying to convince everyone and moving on to accomplish tasks. We have to know when the delays have run their course, because nothing will ever get done if we wait for every last denier to come into accordance.
As far as your argument goes, there are 50 years of science, 150 years of direct climate measurements, thousands of years of indirect climate measurements, and geological evidence going back much further. I think climate science is a lot further along than still trying to establish first principles.
While I agree that emulating the parts of the iOS ecosystem that we all hate (the walled garden, and the over-dependence on for-rent services) was their biggest mistake, I just don't have the same loathing for Microsoft as I do for Apple. Apple innovated the walled garden model, and got millions of fanbois to promote it. Apple is like an abusive spouse, constantly telling their users they're too damn stupid to own anything as cool as their gear; and yet those people are grateful. Apple is straight up evil.
Microsoft just copied everything Apple did, stupidly hoping they'd stumble upon some magical formula for success. But it always seemed like somewhere deep inside Microsoft there was a tension caused by really talented people who knew the whole Apple idea was evil, and were trying to do the right thing. So I can't hate them as much.
All it needed to say was "Project Loon, Google's balloon-borne internet platform, ..."
But I'm glad i provided you with the chance to swear like a Tourette's victim and contribute nothing of value to humanity. That's OK, I'm sure you must make your mother proud in other ways.
I have no idea what Project Loon is. One line to explain it in the summary would have been nice.
I always thought the banana problem in computer programming was funny. Now there are two banana problems. When will they end?
You're maybe a better coder than I or people I've worked with. I find the majority of my time isn't spent "writing" it is spent finding the stupid little errors like a != that should be an == or forgetting to do a null check etc.
You'd probably benefit from a good static code analyzer. While they can't catch errors in logic where your code doesn't meet your requirements, even the simple ones can catch a lot of dumb things like skipped null checks, boundary violations, pointer violations, memory leaks, etc. The better tools are very sophisticated and can do deep examinations, and will track your code quality over time. They are also available as IDE plugins, you can run them on a build server, or both. They can save you hours of time checking for those stupid little errors.