But everyone does it. The UK has a system of subsidies for movie production (Lottery money, mostly). Uwe Boll's financial success came from exploiting the German system of subsidies to make films that were subsidised for more than their production cost, making it impossible for them to do anything but profit. The US approach is less open subsidies than tax breaks, both official and a policy of openly tolerating accounting practices that would be considered illegal in any other industry.
Or throw their money and expert knowledge behind linux. It might mean a bit of restructuring - they'd probably want their own organisation making whatever distro they go with - but it could be done. Not likely to happen though, because most OEM manufacturers don't wish to also be software companies.
Self-modifying or dynamically generated code is the big one. It's essential to make a decently performing web browser: If you can't have it, the performance penalty for running javascript is a few orders of magnitude. On metro, Internet Explorer gets to use it, but MS don't allow anyone else to for 'security reasons.' So even if someone were to port Firefox to metro-ARM for use on Windows RT or phone devices, it'd be unuseably slow.
Most people who use computers these days have a very minimal idea of how they work. You don't truely understand this until you work in tech support. I could tell you some horror stories...
- The user who organised their files for years by using file->save as on word, because they didn't know you could click 'my computer' or 'my documents' and get a window intended for the task. - The user who accidentially associated PDF files with word and could only report the problem as 'my email broke.' - The user who had to call helpdesk for instruction on how to launch Word, after the shortcut was shuffled off the start menu quick-list.
Many users don't get the concept of a program. Or a URL. Or a file - they know there is a little picture they click on to open a document, but they think this little picture *is* the document. That's why you see so many of them attaching shortcuts to emails. They don't even know what an operating system is - and they are incapable of understanding, as they lack the foundational knowledge of how computers work. Now imagine the tech support nightmare that would come from giving them linux, even a polished distro.
For thirty years the technology industry has strived to make computers so easy, so simple that any untrained user can use them productively. Well, we succeeded, and now we must deal with the consequence. We've created a situation where any untrained user can sit at their computer and do their job, getting on with their objective without wasting overhead time on studying the technology itsself. That's good thing, mostly. The down-side is that if anything changes, even the most trivial thing, they are completly unprepared.
They probably don't 'need' AT&T to Verizon to send data, beyond allowing that tap in the first place. The places the NSA would need cooperation are the commonly-utilised SSL-accessed services, primarily Facebook and Google mail/docs. Can't just fiber-tap those, and even if you could it'd be a nightmare trying to reconstruct things from taps alone. Having access to their databases would make utilising the information a lot easier.
Legal reform looks unlikely bordering impossible, so what other approaches are there? The crypto-anarchists have a partial solution at least - introduction of technologies designed to be more resistant to monitoring and control. That could certainly bother any monitoring agency, be they the NSA or someone more aggressive in political control like the Chinese government, for example. The problem with that, aside from all the overhead it can impose, is that it requires some level of active interest - and most internet users just want to go on facebook or argue on blog comments, they don't want to have to learn about public-key infrastructure or even deal with port forwarding.
More likely just plain judge selection. Common enough technique, though usually used by prosecutors. For someone well-connected into the legal system - someone who knows schedules, who will be busy and when - it isn't hard to have some influence over which judge a case will come before. Just got to bias events towards one sympathetic to the government position.
If you're refering to WW2, they didn't surrender immediately. They were one of the first to declare war on Germany after the unprovoked German invasion of Poland. True, their government surrended soon after - but even then much of the french military defied the order and continued fighting, simply joining forces with whichever local allied power would accept their aid. Their civilian resistance effort also went down in legend - a campaign of intelligence gathering, covert communication and outright sabotage that significently hindered German efforts to transport troops and material through the country and brought vital information to the allies.
Their surrender, though quick, was not given easily: It was only forced by a series of catastropic strategic defeats. It was only when the German army was standing at the fringe of a defenceless Paris that the surrender was hastily given, with government leaders fearful of the immense loss of civilian lives (Not to mention their own) should the capital be attacked.
There are many things which, though legal and quite harmless, are nontheless seen as socially unacceptable to the point of endangering family relationships, social access and employment. Internet pornography is one of them. It's also a very commonplace one.
I just happen to perfer the written word to photographs.
Most people have more to fear from employers than the NSA.
Not all, though. We know from recent Snowden leaks that the NSA has been collecting information on the pornography usage of individuals critical of the US for purposes of blackmail, it's not beyond consideration that they may use such techniques against grassroots activists. Organise the next Tea Party or Operation Wall Street event, upset enough of the rich and powerful, and discover soon after that somehow a list of every kinky chat service and image board you visit has found its way into the hands of the local press along with proof of shared identity. Or maybe those incredibly racist rants you made when you were fourteen and didn't know better.
I've certainly plenty of skeletons in the closet. Never mind the political and religious views. 'Raven' isn't a name, it's a species identifier for a character I use in some adult roleplay settings to play all manner of perverse things, largely involving tentacles. Given I also have a job which involves working with children, a blackmailer could have a field day if they knew my real identity.
Their moderation policy is always, always biased. Usually in several different ways.
A very common one I've noticed is in comment length - on just about any news site, the site moderators really don't want to see essay-length comments appear that eclipse the story they are commenting on. So you'll see lots of 'I support X' or 'I oppose X' comments and people making quick, soundbitey remarks - but never any detailed, critical analysis or discussion of the subject at hand.
Then there is the bias to try not to get sued: They block comments that could be taken as libelous. This is quite a problem they they (deliberately or inadvertently) post an article supporting a crackpot, and the commenters swarm in to point out that the Professor of Truthology they are interviewing got his diploma in the mail from a college hosted in a two-room hut and is widely considered a laughing stock at best, or an outright fraud at worst. Comes up a lot in issues like alternative medicine.
You've got the plain old political bias: Publications on the left don't want commenters from the right arguing on their story and offending their readership, and vice versa. Readers like to see views they already agree with.
Then there is resistance to corrections: When the publication makes a factual error, it's embarrassing to have it pointed out by commenters.
All employers now run the 'google background check' on applicants. I imagine it's now a matter of routine for people to be turned down for a job because the potential boss doesn't like their political leanings or believes their religious or anti-religious views may cause workplace friction. It just doesn't get reported because it's very hard to prove - all the injured party gets is the form 'your application has not been successful' letter, with no indication of reason.
I've seen a similar one. A person who's blog I used to debate on got drawn into a long-running dispute. It ended with him buying a domain name to impersonate their blog and using their alias to post material apparently calling for the abolition of age-of-consent laws and justifying child sexual abuse.
When I last saw the blog, there were no more commenters - they all left along with me, terrified of becoming his next target.
That particular danger was triggered by politics - he was one of those super-patriot types who plastered their blog with american flags and justified their actions as defending their country against the liberal cancer that was trying to destroy it from within. Plenty of other extremist nutcases on the internet with different triggers though, including some very trivial ones. Fans of Bieber have been known to turn quite psychopathic upon seeing him insulted.
I'm less worried about the government monitoring me than my current/future employers. They all run google-checks on applicants now - if they found out I've insulted every major religion, that's going to make me look like someone who might cause friction in the workplace.
There are similar problems with booting linux on (non-trashcan) mac pros due to a not-quite-normal EFI boot process, and running linux at all on the retina macbook proes due to a not-quite-normal ACPI implimentation that crashes the kernal during hardware detection. Both can be worked around, it's just awkward having to resort to complex hackery for something that should be so simple as booting an OS.
Plus there are many, many, many instances of malicious apps getting through screening, and even phones have been compromised through all sorts of exploits.
Fully off-grid systems are something of a practical problem. You need space for batteries, maintainance for those batteries, and everything specced for peak demand (ie, winter when the panels give least power) and enough runtime to operate through a few days of freakishly sunless weather.
I'd like to see someone try more small-scale co-op systems. Like off-grid, except with links to just your neighboring houses and an intelligent exchange system so if one house needed a bit of extra power for a couple of days it could ask those next door to send over their excess. On distances so short it wouldn't even need to be AC, which simplifies engineering.
I recall something about an event at the hack-a-day site years ago. They put up instructions as an april fools joke to make a an 'emergency power lead' - just a piece of cable with a plug on each end you used to connect a generator to your house socket. The assumption being that no-one on the site could be so incredibly ignorant of basic electrical engineering as to make such a dangerous device. Turned out some people were, so the site had to add expliclt notices that the idea was a joke.
Isolate? The American grid is constantly running on the edge of cascade failure due to under-investment. It's so bad that in 2003, a single breaker tripped at a seemingly unimportant substation and knocked out power to fifty million homes, from Ohio all the way into Canada.
Fluorine-doped stanene, and it's only been shown to work in some speculative modeling. Never in a laboratory demonstration.
There's no theoretical reason it can't be one, but the theory behind superconductors isn't fully understood so progress advances only slowly through trial and error.
Slashdot Mirror
But everyone does it. The UK has a system of subsidies for movie production (Lottery money, mostly). Uwe Boll's financial success came from exploiting the German system of subsidies to make films that were subsidised for more than their production cost, making it impossible for them to do anything but profit. The US approach is less open subsidies than tax breaks, both official and a policy of openly tolerating accounting practices that would be considered illegal in any other industry.
Or Unmanned Aerial Vehicle. I assumed that was the meaning, as it's more common, and 'UUV' referred to a waterborne one.
There is plenty of crapware bundled on many android devices too - and it is typically impossible to remove short of rooting the phone.
Or throw their money and expert knowledge behind linux. It might mean a bit of restructuring - they'd probably want their own organisation making whatever distro they go with - but it could be done. Not likely to happen though, because most OEM manufacturers don't wish to also be software companies.
Self-modifying or dynamically generated code is the big one. It's essential to make a decently performing web browser: If you can't have it, the performance penalty for running javascript is a few orders of magnitude. On metro, Internet Explorer gets to use it, but MS don't allow anyone else to for 'security reasons.' So even if someone were to port Firefox to metro-ARM for use on Windows RT or phone devices, it'd be unuseably slow.
Most people who use computers these days have a very minimal idea of how they work. You don't truely understand this until you work in tech support. I could tell you some horror stories...
- The user who organised their files for years by using file->save as on word, because they didn't know you could click 'my computer' or 'my documents' and get a window intended for the task.
- The user who accidentially associated PDF files with word and could only report the problem as 'my email broke.'
- The user who had to call helpdesk for instruction on how to launch Word, after the shortcut was shuffled off the start menu quick-list.
Many users don't get the concept of a program. Or a URL. Or a file - they know there is a little picture they click on to open a document, but they think this little picture *is* the document. That's why you see so many of them attaching shortcuts to emails. They don't even know what an operating system is - and they are incapable of understanding, as they lack the foundational knowledge of how computers work. Now imagine the tech support nightmare that would come from giving them linux, even a polished distro.
For thirty years the technology industry has strived to make computers so easy, so simple that any untrained user can use them productively. Well, we succeeded, and now we must deal with the consequence. We've created a situation where any untrained user can sit at their computer and do their job, getting on with their objective without wasting overhead time on studying the technology itsself. That's good thing, mostly. The down-side is that if anything changes, even the most trivial thing, they are completly unprepared.
They probably don't 'need' AT&T to Verizon to send data, beyond allowing that tap in the first place. The places the NSA would need cooperation are the commonly-utilised SSL-accessed services, primarily Facebook and Google mail/docs. Can't just fiber-tap those, and even if you could it'd be a nightmare trying to reconstruct things from taps alone. Having access to their databases would make utilising the information a lot easier.
Legal reform looks unlikely bordering impossible, so what other approaches are there? The crypto-anarchists have a partial solution at least - introduction of technologies designed to be more resistant to monitoring and control. That could certainly bother any monitoring agency, be they the NSA or someone more aggressive in political control like the Chinese government, for example. The problem with that, aside from all the overhead it can impose, is that it requires some level of active interest - and most internet users just want to go on facebook or argue on blog comments, they don't want to have to learn about public-key infrastructure or even deal with port forwarding.
Do not taunt Happy Fun Ball
Not sure how to power a UAV. At that distance solar power is very limited.
If someone could remake that in 3d, and allow for multiplayer interactions and controllable bots, there is so much more potential in the concept.
More likely just plain judge selection. Common enough technique, though usually used by prosecutors. For someone well-connected into the legal system - someone who knows schedules, who will be busy and when - it isn't hard to have some influence over which judge a case will come before. Just got to bias events towards one sympathetic to the government position.
If you're refering to WW2, they didn't surrender immediately. They were one of the first to declare war on Germany after the unprovoked German invasion of Poland. True, their government surrended soon after - but even then much of the french military defied the order and continued fighting, simply joining forces with whichever local allied power would accept their aid. Their civilian resistance effort also went down in legend - a campaign of intelligence gathering, covert communication and outright sabotage that significently hindered German efforts to transport troops and material through the country and brought vital information to the allies.
Their surrender, though quick, was not given easily: It was only forced by a series of catastropic strategic defeats. It was only when the German army was standing at the fringe of a defenceless Paris that the surrender was hastily given, with government leaders fearful of the immense loss of civilian lives (Not to mention their own) should the capital be attacked.
There are many things which, though legal and quite harmless, are nontheless seen as socially unacceptable to the point of endangering family relationships, social access and employment. Internet pornography is one of them. It's also a very commonplace one.
I just happen to perfer the written word to photographs.
Most people have more to fear from employers than the NSA.
Not all, though. We know from recent Snowden leaks that the NSA has been collecting information on the pornography usage of individuals critical of the US for purposes of blackmail, it's not beyond consideration that they may use such techniques against grassroots activists. Organise the next Tea Party or Operation Wall Street event, upset enough of the rich and powerful, and discover soon after that somehow a list of every kinky chat service and image board you visit has found its way into the hands of the local press along with proof of shared identity. Or maybe those incredibly racist rants you made when you were fourteen and didn't know better.
I've certainly plenty of skeletons in the closet. Never mind the political and religious views. 'Raven' isn't a name, it's a species identifier for a character I use in some adult roleplay settings to play all manner of perverse things, largely involving tentacles. Given I also have a job which involves working with children, a blackmailer could have a field day if they knew my real identity.
Their moderation policy is always, always biased. Usually in several different ways.
A very common one I've noticed is in comment length - on just about any news site, the site moderators really don't want to see essay-length comments appear that eclipse the story they are commenting on. So you'll see lots of 'I support X' or 'I oppose X' comments and people making quick, soundbitey remarks - but never any detailed, critical analysis or discussion of the subject at hand.
Then there is the bias to try not to get sued: They block comments that could be taken as libelous. This is quite a problem they they (deliberately or inadvertently) post an article supporting a crackpot, and the commenters swarm in to point out that the Professor of Truthology they are interviewing got his diploma in the mail from a college hosted in a two-room hut and is widely considered a laughing stock at best, or an outright fraud at worst. Comes up a lot in issues like alternative medicine.
You've got the plain old political bias: Publications on the left don't want commenters from the right arguing on their story and offending their readership, and vice versa. Readers like to see views they already agree with.
Then there is resistance to corrections: When the publication makes a factual error, it's embarrassing to have it pointed out by commenters.
All employers now run the 'google background check' on applicants. I imagine it's now a matter of routine for people to be turned down for a job because the potential boss doesn't like their political leanings or believes their religious or anti-religious views may cause workplace friction. It just doesn't get reported because it's very hard to prove - all the injured party gets is the form 'your application has not been successful' letter, with no indication of reason.
I've seen a similar one. A person who's blog I used to debate on got drawn into a long-running dispute. It ended with him buying a domain name to impersonate their blog and using their alias to post material apparently calling for the abolition of age-of-consent laws and justifying child sexual abuse.
When I last saw the blog, there were no more commenters - they all left along with me, terrified of becoming his next target.
That particular danger was triggered by politics - he was one of those super-patriot types who plastered their blog with american flags and justified their actions as defending their country against the liberal cancer that was trying to destroy it from within. Plenty of other extremist nutcases on the internet with different triggers though, including some very trivial ones. Fans of Bieber have been known to turn quite psychopathic upon seeing him insulted.
I'm less worried about the government monitoring me than my current/future employers. They all run google-checks on applicants now - if they found out I've insulted every major religion, that's going to make me look like someone who might cause friction in the workplace.
It's Apple's fault.
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux/hardware.html
There are similar problems with booting linux on (non-trashcan) mac pros due to a not-quite-normal EFI boot process, and running linux at all on the retina macbook proes due to a not-quite-normal ACPI implimentation that crashes the kernal during hardware detection. Both can be worked around, it's just awkward having to resort to complex hackery for something that should be so simple as booting an OS.
Plus there are many, many, many instances of malicious apps getting through screening, and even phones have been compromised through all sorts of exploits.
Fully off-grid systems are something of a practical problem. You need space for batteries, maintainance for those batteries, and everything specced for peak demand (ie, winter when the panels give least power) and enough runtime to operate through a few days of freakishly sunless weather.
I'd like to see someone try more small-scale co-op systems. Like off-grid, except with links to just your neighboring houses and an intelligent exchange system so if one house needed a bit of extra power for a couple of days it could ask those next door to send over their excess. On distances so short it wouldn't even need to be AC, which simplifies engineering.
I recall something about an event at the hack-a-day site years ago. They put up instructions as an april fools joke to make a an 'emergency power lead' - just a piece of cable with a plug on each end you used to connect a generator to your house socket. The assumption being that no-one on the site could be so incredibly ignorant of basic electrical engineering as to make such a dangerous device. Turned out some people were, so the site had to add expliclt notices that the idea was a joke.
Isolate? The American grid is constantly running on the edge of cascade failure due to under-investment. It's so bad that in 2003, a single breaker tripped at a seemingly unimportant substation and knocked out power to fifty million homes, from Ohio all the way into Canada.
Fluorine-doped stanene, and it's only been shown to work in some speculative modeling. Never in a laboratory demonstration.
There's no theoretical reason it can't be one, but the theory behind superconductors isn't fully understood so progress advances only slowly through trial and error.