... but most phones can be considered "net devices" these days, certainly an increasing number have browsers of some sort. And nearly none of those have flash.
(Frankly, I'm kind of glad. I don't really want to think what flash-animated websites would do to my phone's battery life...)
But then consider the budget that goes into making the massive 3D graphics, including modern rendering and lighting techniques, R+D, possible budget for voice actors
Objection, your honor, irrelevance.
Hollywood movies cost a hell of a lot more to make than games on average, and a hell of a lot more to distribute (building theaters & running projectors costs more than distributing DVD boxes), and yet they sell tickets for $10. Or you can buy the thing and watch it all you want for $20-$25.
Price is determined by what the market will bear, not by what it costs to make things. The game companies have been guessing too high for a while.
There have been several recent games I've wanted to grab, but at $60 a pop I haven't done it. But I've impule-bought several older ones (stronghold 2, battle for middle earth) out of the bargain bin for $15 a pop. If they dropped the price on new games down a bit, I'd end up spending more.
Based on that quote, they recognize that its not viable in the current market, and that average energy costs would have to increase by a factor of 15 to 20 times in order to make it viable. They think that the trends in energy cost are going to go that way.
No matter what happens to energy costs, space based solar cannot outcompete ground based solar. Space based solar can collect roughly twice as much power as ground based. (It's lit twice as long because there's no night, gains a bit from not having atmospheric reflection, but loses a bit in transmission.). So, ~2x power from the same array.
But what's the additional cost to put it up? The optimists think we might get the shipment costs of launch down to $100 per pound. Right now it's more like $10,000.
It is much, MUCH cheaper just to build twice as many solar arrays on the ground. Even if you have to build 5 times as many to have them close to where you need them, it is still dramatically cheaper than putting the damn things in orbit.
Prices CANNOT go high enough to make orbital solar competitive, because they would make ground-based solar competitive long before we got there.
Net apps are great, but their performance in many areas is unavoidably way below that of native apps. When you can do everything with JS, you can be reasonably speedy if the processing requirements aren't huge and your browser doesn't leak memory too badly. (Dammit, Firefox!)
But when you need to persist data, you have to spawn an ajax query and that 1/10 to 1/4 second (even over a fast network connection) just isn't comparable from the user perspective to hitting a local HD. As local mass storage switches from HD to solid-state over the next couple of years, the difference between native and web apps is going to increase, not decrease.
Besides, half of these things are going to be ad-supported, right? At least in my experience, the performance of most websites has decreased the last 3 years or so as they hit and increasing number of different servers. It's typical for a single page to load content, ads, local javascript, stylesheets, and analytics from 10 or more pages. Each of these connections triggers its own DNS query. Every connection and every DNS lookup has a %age chance of hanging for a few seconds due to network traffic, server load, or what have you - as a result almost 10% of web pages I try to load these days stall for a few seconds. Do you really want that kind of crap going on in the background while you're developing? I don't.
Hah! Just reminded of a most annoying example! Slashdot, for me, loads pretty much instantly. But every time I post and click that "preview" button, there's a five-second wait before the preview actually shows up. That'll be fun, and additional five seconds for every classfile save in my IDE...
While I love those games as much as the next guy (I am particularly enjoying Fallout 3 at the moment), I've found that similar experiences without the blood are just as much fun.
Oni was a fighting/shooting game in a future, grim, urban environment. Later stages of the game were just about post-apocalyptic. And yet, it didn't have blood, and it was an remains one of my favorite game experiences.
I certainly get a rise out of the bloody gib-explosions in Fallout 3, but I'm not as convinced as you that I wouldn't enjoy the game if they were absent. I think there's an initial shock value to the gore that's fun, but beyond that I'm more interested in playing the game. And the gore isn't necessary to it.
(On the other hand, I don't think the gore is harmful, either.)
...Feinstein does not have my support. She barely supports democratic issues, and is of extremely authoritarian mindset. Verging on fascist in some cases. And I'm a libertarian-leaning democrat, so this pretty much pisses me off.
Aside from being beholden to the media industry (which most California democrats are, sadly), she also:
Supports a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning (so much for free speech)
Has blocked domestic partnership rights for same-sex couples (so much for equal rights)
Works to ban gun ownership, but has her own concealed carry permit and uses it (so much for equal protection of the laws)
Supported GWB far too often
Frequently votes against liberal causes I care about
She's the worst kind of supporter of excessive government control over our lives that you'll find outside of the Republican party. There are plenty of Republicans I like better than Dianne Feinstein.
I detest her. Fortunately, I like Barbara Boxer pretty well.
(Note - can't figure out how to eliminate the blank first bullet. There's no LI tag there,/. is adding it somehow.)
... No, really. The change in technology from broadcast to cable and and the internets solves the paradox.
Omnidirectional high-energy broadcast is a profligate waste of energy. We are increasingly switching to cable, fiber optic, directional transmission, and low-power networks of short-range transmitters like Wi-Fi and cell networks. As a result, within 100 years, you won't be able to detect earth's radio signature from more than a couple light years out for this reason. The same will be true of other advanced civilizations.
In the 1950s when the "Fermi Paradox" was coined, broadcasting was still growing, and extrapolations of that growth led to the belief that "advanced civilizations" would be spewing out significant fractions of a star's output as radio waves. Those extrapolations were simply wrong - technology took a sharp left.
Advanced civilizations will likely be maximally efficient with their energy, and thus silent from a passive-detection point of view.
This is exactly what I will do when my puppy passes on - he is getting pretty old. He was a street rescue, and my next dog will also be a rescue (though more likely from a shelter).
However, I can certainly understand the temptation. I've had a lot of dogs, but none ever with such an ideal temperament as my current loyal companion:
* Energetic enough to run and hike
* Totally mellow the rest of the time
* Never destructive / chewing of anything other than plush toys
* Never slobbery
* Doesn't lick
* Very independent - with food and water I can leave him alone for even 2-3 days, much like a cat.
* Very gentle. Extremely good even with children who pull his fur.
* Not a barker at all.
* Implicitly trusting of humans, never aggressive or fearful of guests.
* Very polite - no begging for food (ever!)
* He ask for attention/petting but give up quickly and lie by your feet if you're busy. (which is good, since I work at home).
This combination of traits I've never seen in any other dog or breed... not even close... and I've known dozens of dogs. He's a mix, and we're not sure of what - my best guess is 50/50 Malamute/Border Collie, but with none of the collie hyperactivity or neuroticism, and all of the malamute sociability.
This dog I would be seriously tempted to clone, if it were possible, or even establish a new breed. His temperament makes him a perfect pet for many kinds of people.
Package up the old computer with archival media and instructions to open it again in 10 years.
Instruct the folks in 2019 to replace the batteries and re-burn copies of all the discs to fresh archival media. Then have them add their own computer to the capsule, re-seal, and store it until 2029. Repeat every 10 years.
In 50 years you have not one old broken computer that won't work, but a series of old computers, one for each decade, each of which has been refreshed and refurbished every decade so that they all work. Much more likely to succeed, and much more interesting to boot.
Give me the frames of such an animation and I can trivially write a program that simulates persistence of vision by smearing the pixels over time, thus making it solvable by a computer.
Likewise. I am a fluent touchtypist on both layouts, and I find dvorak to be both faster and more comfortable.
I also find the difference to be significantly greater on a keyboard with sound ergonomic layout and minimal finger travel, like the kinesis contoured. Though I'm a programmer and not a trained typist, just from use I can pretty easily type around 100wpm on a kinesis + dvorak.
There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team.
I'm also a space nut, and I agree with you completely. A simple look at cost/benefit, even back-of-the envelope, makes it entirely clear how silly orbital solar is.
1) Benefits - how much energy can an orbital solar array produce, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? About twice as much - it's lit for 24 instead of 12 hours. (plus benefit of always-perpendicular incident radiation, but minus losses in conversion & transmission.) Ultimately, ~2x power from the same array.
2) Costs - how much does it cost to put that solar array in orbit, and build the microwave transmission system, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? Answer: an awful lot more than 2x. More like 100x.
Paying 100x cost for 2x the power generation is not anyone's idea of good economics. End of story.
It's just so much cheaper to simply build twice the arrays on the ground, even if you have to build huge power storage facilities or around-the-world ultra-high-voltage power lines to funnel energy to the night side of the planet.
Maybe in 100 years we'll have a developed space industry that can build them, up there, on the cheap. But certainly not any time soon.
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
This is total B.S. borne from political correctness. You want to believe that all religions were created equal and that religion itself is never actually the cause of violence, but that simply isn't so.
Some religions, either because of the contents of their holy books or because of the associated culture, are far more prone to incite violence than others.
If you really believe that all religions are used to justify extremism and violence, then I challenge you to show me examples. Particularly for the Jain, Wicca, and Quaker faiths, all of which have some form of "do no harm" as a fundamental principle of their faith.
And IE will support it around 2015, which means web developers will be able to use it shortly after that!
Hooray!
I love Firefox. I use it almost exclusively myself. I live by Firebug.
But until you convince the rest of the planet to use it (or Safari, Opera, or anything that's not IE), then don't keep telling me what great things it supports. Because honestly, when 70% of my clients' userbase uses IE, it doesn't matter for damn what features Firefox supports because I can't use them.
If they've sped up the front end consistently, then I would be very happy.
My primary complaint with Vista is how long UI operations take. Opening windows, dragging them around, launching applications etc. all seem to take place in something approximating geologic time.
Once I have a high-performance app open (say a game), the game itself runs pretty quickly. It's the getting there that's a problem.
No thanks. I'll give a shit what color he is mainly because it's a pretty damn good gauge of how far America has come along in terms of overcoming some nasty racism.
We have come a long way in reducing racism. We've passed the hate to the next down the line.
Here's a vastly oversimplified view of the line:
1830: Americans hate and persecute the Irish immigrants.
1890: Americans (now including the Irish) persecute the Polish and other Eastern European immigrants.
All along: American whites (including Irish and Polish) persecute blacks.
20th century: American whites (and many blacks!) fear and persecute latino immigrants.
Yesterday, on the day the USA first elects a black president, three states passed constitutional amendments making gays second-class citizens with fewer rights. In California, nearly 70% of blacks and hispanics voted for Proposition 8.
Yes, we just pass the fear and hate on down the line. Human mass psychology seems incapable of producing happiness without having an "outsider" group to loathe and persecute.
Honestly, I'm fucking thrilled about Obama, but I'm starting to see the "moving past racism" thing as just another turn of the hate wheel.
Right now the arrow is pointing at Gays and Muslims and atheists. I wonder who will be the target(s) in 2030?
drawing a big black rectangle is 10x faster and there is no way you can de-obfuscate that
That's not entirely true. There was an article a couple years back about a technique for recovering redacted text with pretty high reliability.
It used the fact that most standard fonts have variable spacing, and that once you've determined the font you can model that only certain combinations of letters will actually fit in the space of the redacted word or words. Combined with a dictionary and bayesian matching based on nearby words, you can often figure out what words would have fit into a redacted rectangle. Or at least limit it to a fairly small pool of possibilities.
They demonstrated it on a redacted government document, and pulled out some places where the redacted words had to be "Iran" and "Ahmedinejad" etc., because nothing else both fit and made sense. If it's a monospaced font, you know the exact number of letters of the redacted text.
I can't find the original link, but here's a paper that describes some of the techniques available for "cracking" blackout redaction. (some apply only to magic-marker-type redaction, but others apply even to electronic black-rectangle redaction).
Their extremely honest willingness to let you use your bandwidth as you see fit, [etc.]
...and their ability to keep up with the industry in other countries. A couple years ago I was shocked to hear that Korean, Scandinavian, and Japanese homes were regularly getting inexpensive > 100 Mb/s data lines. Last week,/. reported that Japanese telcos are rolling out Gigabit fiber for $55/mo.
And yet this week one of my clients is still struggling to get a reliable 1 Mb/s connection to their office, right here in the middle of Los Angeles. They are currently paying $150/mo for a DSL line that ain't working. Even if it worked, that's almost a factor of 3000 increase in the cost per Mb/s relative to the new stuff in Japan.
I'm a little entrenched and short on options for that approach. I have about 15 years of time, experience and thousands in software invested in working with their platform(s).
Products I love from a company with some policies I hate is still a better than my other option: products I hate from a company I also hate.
If I spent a few thousand to get new copies of all my Adobe stuff, I could in principle switch my business over to Windows. Hooray. Then I'd detest my own job, too. I work with Windows daily (at clients' offices) and by the end of an hour I'm ready to pull my own fingernails out. An ineffectual political statement ain't worth that.
They would get the message really quick then.
I highly doubt that the departure of one geek would change anything. The fact that I already use Linux for servers instead of OS X server doesn't seem to have influenced Apple a hell of a lot. Why should I expect that switching desktops would have any more effect? I'm just one guy.
I suppose I could become a lumberjack and avoid computers altogether, but I don't own enough lingerie for that.
Slashdot Mirror
... but most phones can be considered "net devices" these days, certainly an increasing number have browsers of some sort. And nearly none of those have flash.
(Frankly, I'm kind of glad. I don't really want to think what flash-animated websites would do to my phone's battery life...)
But then consider the budget that goes into making the massive 3D graphics, including modern rendering and lighting techniques, R+D, possible budget for voice actors
Objection, your honor, irrelevance.
Hollywood movies cost a hell of a lot more to make than games on average, and a hell of a lot more to distribute (building theaters & running projectors costs more than distributing DVD boxes), and yet they sell tickets for $10. Or you can buy the thing and watch it all you want for $20-$25.
Price is determined by what the market will bear, not by what it costs to make things. The game companies have been guessing too high for a while.
There have been several recent games I've wanted to grab, but at $60 a pop I haven't done it. But I've impule-bought several older ones (stronghold 2, battle for middle earth) out of the bargain bin for $15 a pop. If they dropped the price on new games down a bit, I'd end up spending more.
Based on that quote, they recognize that its not viable in the current market, and that average energy costs would have to increase by a factor of 15 to 20 times in order to make it viable. They think that the trends in energy cost are going to go that way.
No matter what happens to energy costs, space based solar cannot outcompete ground based solar. Space based solar can collect roughly twice as much power as ground based. (It's lit twice as long because there's no night, gains a bit from not having atmospheric reflection, but loses a bit in transmission.). So, ~2x power from the same array.
But what's the additional cost to put it up? The optimists think we might get the shipment costs of launch down to $100 per pound. Right now it's more like $10,000.
It is much, MUCH cheaper just to build twice as many solar arrays on the ground. Even if you have to build 5 times as many to have them close to where you need them, it is still dramatically cheaper than putting the damn things in orbit.
Prices CANNOT go high enough to make orbital solar competitive, because they would make ground-based solar competitive long before we got there.
I'm going to remain skeptical.
Net apps are great, but their performance in many areas is unavoidably way below that of native apps. When you can do everything with JS, you can be reasonably speedy if the processing requirements aren't huge and your browser doesn't leak memory too badly. (Dammit, Firefox!)
But when you need to persist data, you have to spawn an ajax query and that 1/10 to 1/4 second (even over a fast network connection) just isn't comparable from the user perspective to hitting a local HD. As local mass storage switches from HD to solid-state over the next couple of years, the difference between native and web apps is going to increase, not decrease.
Besides, half of these things are going to be ad-supported, right? At least in my experience, the performance of most websites has decreased the last 3 years or so as they hit and increasing number of different servers. It's typical for a single page to load content, ads, local javascript, stylesheets, and analytics from 10 or more pages. Each of these connections triggers its own DNS query. Every connection and every DNS lookup has a %age chance of hanging for a few seconds due to network traffic, server load, or what have you - as a result almost 10% of web pages I try to load these days stall for a few seconds. Do you really want that kind of crap going on in the background while you're developing? I don't.
Hah! Just reminded of a most annoying example! Slashdot, for me, loads pretty much instantly. But every time I post and click that "preview" button, there's a five-second wait before the preview actually shows up. That'll be fun, and additional five seconds for every classfile save in my IDE...
While I love those games as much as the next guy (I am particularly enjoying Fallout 3 at the moment), I've found that similar experiences without the blood are just as much fun.
Oni was a fighting/shooting game in a future, grim, urban environment. Later stages of the game were just about post-apocalyptic. And yet, it didn't have blood, and it was an remains one of my favorite game experiences.
I certainly get a rise out of the bloody gib-explosions in Fallout 3, but I'm not as convinced as you that I wouldn't enjoy the game if they were absent. I think there's an initial shock value to the gore that's fun, but beyond that I'm more interested in playing the game. And the gore isn't necessary to it.
(On the other hand, I don't think the gore is harmful, either.)
...Feinstein does not have my support. She barely supports democratic issues, and is of extremely authoritarian mindset. Verging on fascist in some cases. And I'm a libertarian-leaning democrat, so this pretty much pisses me off.
Aside from being beholden to the media industry (which most California democrats are, sadly), she also:
She's the worst kind of supporter of excessive government control over our lives that you'll find outside of the Republican party. There are plenty of Republicans I like better than Dianne Feinstein.
I detest her. Fortunately, I like Barbara Boxer pretty well.
(Note - can't figure out how to eliminate the blank first bullet. There's no LI tag there, /. is adding it somehow.)
... No, really. The change in technology from broadcast to cable and and the internets solves the paradox.
Omnidirectional high-energy broadcast is a profligate waste of energy. We are increasingly switching to cable, fiber optic, directional transmission, and low-power networks of short-range transmitters like Wi-Fi and cell networks. As a result, within 100 years, you won't be able to detect earth's radio signature from more than a couple light years out for this reason. The same will be true of other advanced civilizations.
In the 1950s when the "Fermi Paradox" was coined, broadcasting was still growing, and extrapolations of that growth led to the belief that "advanced civilizations" would be spewing out significant fractions of a star's output as radio waves. Those extrapolations were simply wrong - technology took a sharp left.
Advanced civilizations will likely be maximally efficient with their energy, and thus silent from a passive-detection point of view.
This is exactly what I will do when my puppy passes on - he is getting pretty old. He was a street rescue, and my next dog will also be a rescue (though more likely from a shelter).
However, I can certainly understand the temptation. I've had a lot of dogs, but none ever with such an ideal temperament as my current loyal companion:
* Energetic enough to run and hike
* Totally mellow the rest of the time
* Never destructive / chewing of anything other than plush toys
* Never slobbery
* Doesn't lick
* Very independent - with food and water I can leave him alone for even 2-3 days, much like a cat.
* Very gentle. Extremely good even with children who pull his fur.
* Not a barker at all.
* Implicitly trusting of humans, never aggressive or fearful of guests.
* Very polite - no begging for food (ever!)
* He ask for attention/petting but give up quickly and lie by your feet if you're busy. (which is good, since I work at home).
This combination of traits I've never seen in any other dog or breed ... not even close ... and I've known dozens of dogs. He's a mix, and we're not sure of what - my best guess is 50/50 Malamute/Border Collie, but with none of the collie hyperactivity or neuroticism, and all of the malamute sociability.
This dog I would be seriously tempted to clone, if it were possible, or even establish a new breed. His temperament makes him a perfect pet for many kinds of people.
Screw Crysis! I'm still waiting on the processor that can play the ascii-based Dwarf Fortress at a decent framerate.
Maybe all I needed is a little liquid helium...
Package up the old computer with archival media and instructions to open it again in 10 years.
Instruct the folks in 2019 to replace the batteries and re-burn copies of all the discs to fresh archival media. Then have them add their own computer to the capsule, re-seal, and store it until 2029. Repeat every 10 years.
In 50 years you have not one old broken computer that won't work, but a series of old computers, one for each decade, each of which has been refreshed and refurbished every decade so that they all work. Much more likely to succeed, and much more interesting to boot.
Give me the frames of such an animation and I can trivially write a program that simulates persistence of vision by smearing the pixels over time, thus making it solvable by a computer.
In the long run, CAPTCHAs are doomed.
Likewise. I am a fluent touchtypist on both layouts, and I find dvorak to be both faster and more comfortable.
I also find the difference to be significantly greater on a keyboard with sound ergonomic layout and minimal finger travel, like the kinesis contoured. Though I'm a programmer and not a trained typist, just from use I can pretty easily type around 100wpm on a kinesis + dvorak.
There is so much potential for reaping energy savings on land, without having to resort to dangerous space flights and risky, massive construction projects in orbit, that it's amazing that this proposal is even being looked at by the transition team.
I'm also a space nut, and I agree with you completely. A simple look at cost/benefit, even back-of-the envelope, makes it entirely clear how silly orbital solar is.
1) Benefits - how much energy can an orbital solar array produce, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? About twice as much - it's lit for 24 instead of 12 hours. (plus benefit of always-perpendicular incident radiation, but minus losses in conversion & transmission.) Ultimately, ~2x power from the same array.
2) Costs - how much does it cost to put that solar array in orbit, and build the microwave transmission system, relative to the same size solar array on Earth? Answer: an awful lot more than 2x. More like 100x.
Paying 100x cost for 2x the power generation is not anyone's idea of good economics. End of story.
It's just so much cheaper to simply build twice the arrays on the ground, even if you have to build huge power storage facilities or around-the-world ultra-high-voltage power lines to funnel energy to the night side of the planet.
Maybe in 100 years we'll have a developed space industry that can build them, up there, on the cheap. But certainly not any time soon.
Basically violence has nothing to do with religion. People will use ANY religion as an excuse to justify their view they they are right and everyone else is wrong.
This is total B.S. borne from political correctness. You want to believe that all religions were created equal and that religion itself is never actually the cause of violence, but that simply isn't so.
Some religions, either because of the contents of their holy books or because of the associated culture, are far more prone to incite violence than others.
If you really believe that all religions are used to justify extremism and violence, then I challenge you to show me examples. Particularly for the Jain, Wicca, and Quaker faiths, all of which have some form of "do no harm" as a fundamental principle of their faith.
From the summary:
Wow. This many years and y'all still believe in Santa Claus?
The longest word I can type with my left hand is "okupukupu", you QWERTY-using insensitive clods!
[15:44:56] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{14,\}$' /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words /usr/share/dict/words
[15:44:58] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{13,\}$'
[15:45:04] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{12,\}$'
[15:45:07] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{11,\}$'
[15:45:12] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{10,\}$'
[15:45:16] ~$ grep -i '^[pyaoeuiqjkx]\{9,\}$'
okupukupu
Numerical consistency does not exist in Star Trek.
From Stardates, to warp speeds / travel times / distances, to chronologies from series to series, they just don't add up and never have.
If you let go of that, grasshopper, and enjoy the stories (instead of the numbers), you will be happier.
And IE will support it around 2015, which means web developers will be able to use it shortly after that!
Hooray!
I love Firefox. I use it almost exclusively myself. I live by Firebug.
But until you convince the rest of the planet to use it (or Safari, Opera, or anything that's not IE), then don't keep telling me what great things it supports. Because honestly, when 70% of my clients' userbase uses IE, it doesn't matter for damn what features Firefox supports because I can't use them.
Because "doing it justice" would mean somehow designing a game where the the more you play, the further away end gets!
That would require some impressive new technology, to say the least...
If they've sped up the front end consistently, then I would be very happy.
My primary complaint with Vista is how long UI operations take. Opening windows, dragging them around, launching applications etc. all seem to take place in something approximating geologic time.
Once I have a high-performance app open (say a game), the game itself runs pretty quickly. It's the getting there that's a problem.
No thanks. I'll give a shit what color he is mainly because it's a pretty damn good gauge of how far America has come along in terms of overcoming some nasty racism.
We have come a long way in reducing racism. We've passed the hate to the next down the line.
Here's a vastly oversimplified view of the line:
1830: Americans hate and persecute the Irish immigrants.
1890: Americans (now including the Irish) persecute the Polish and other Eastern European immigrants.
All along: American whites (including Irish and Polish) persecute blacks.
20th century: American whites (and many blacks!) fear and persecute latino immigrants.
Yesterday, on the day the USA first elects a black president, three states passed constitutional amendments making gays second-class citizens with fewer rights. In California, nearly 70% of blacks and hispanics voted for Proposition 8.
Yes, we just pass the fear and hate on down the line. Human mass psychology seems incapable of producing happiness without having an "outsider" group to loathe and persecute.
Honestly, I'm fucking thrilled about Obama, but I'm starting to see the "moving past racism" thing as just another turn of the hate wheel.
Right now the arrow is pointing at Gays and Muslims and atheists. I wonder who will be the target(s) in 2030?
drawing a big black rectangle is 10x faster and there is no way you can de-obfuscate that
That's not entirely true. There was an article a couple years back about a technique for recovering redacted text with pretty high reliability.
It used the fact that most standard fonts have variable spacing, and that once you've determined the font you can model that only certain combinations of letters will actually fit in the space of the redacted word or words. Combined with a dictionary and bayesian matching based on nearby words, you can often figure out what words would have fit into a redacted rectangle. Or at least limit it to a fairly small pool of possibilities.
They demonstrated it on a redacted government document, and pulled out some places where the redacted words had to be "Iran" and "Ahmedinejad" etc., because nothing else both fit and made sense. If it's a monospaced font, you know the exact number of letters of the redacted text.
I can't find the original link, but here's a paper that describes some of the techniques available for "cracking" blackout redaction. (some apply only to magic-marker-type redaction, but others apply even to electronic black-rectangle redaction).
And yet this week one of my clients is still struggling to get a reliable 1 Mb/s connection to their office, right here in the middle of Los Angeles. They are currently paying $150/mo for a DSL line that ain't working. Even if it worked, that's almost a factor of 3000 increase in the cost per Mb/s relative to the new stuff in Japan.
I'm a little entrenched and short on options for that approach. I have about 15 years of time, experience and thousands in software invested in working with their platform(s).
Products I love from a company with some policies I hate is still a better than my other option: products I hate from a company I also hate.
If I spent a few thousand to get new copies of all my Adobe stuff, I could in principle switch my business over to Windows. Hooray. Then I'd detest my own job, too. I work with Windows daily (at clients' offices) and by the end of an hour I'm ready to pull my own fingernails out. An ineffectual political statement ain't worth that.
I highly doubt that the departure of one geek would change anything. The fact that I already use Linux for servers instead of OS X server doesn't seem to have influenced Apple a hell of a lot. Why should I expect that switching desktops would have any more effect? I'm just one guy.
I suppose I could become a lumberjack and avoid computers altogether, but I don't own enough lingerie for that.
As a full-time Apple user with three macs and an iPhone ... I couldn't agree more.
I love their products, I hate their politics and Gestapo behavior with respect to consumers and the market.
The NDA gag-order on the iPhone SDK got dropped**, and in the same week their monopolistic practices got nailed by the courts. Happy Apple consumer.
**out of fear of developers going to Android, no doubt.