It might require an initial phone home before it'll start operating, but its unlikely that it would stop running should it lose connection. There's too many potential reasons that could happen without the user explicitly turning it off.
What you will likely lose though is things like the ability to change the temperature (because you can only do that through the screen which is actually just a front-end for myfridge.lg.com or whatever,) and of course you'd explicitly lose the advertised wifi features like being able to check if you need milk from your cell phone on your way home from work.
Really, any single person's personal information isn't all that important to LG or other companies. What's important is the aggregate of personal information across the entire consumer base and as long as most people are playing along, LG isn't going to be putting boatloads of effort into trying to get that last 0.1% of people who are actively fighting against them -- its an uphill battle at best and the marginal gains just aren't going to be worth the R&D costs. Their time is much better spent coming up with flashy feature 2.0 in order to convince consumers to buy their brand again in 3 years when their previous model breaks down.
You're in a very small minority. Most people expect appliances these days to last 3-10 years with zero maintenance -- in the sense that if it breaks down its either under warranty or it gets tossed since out-of-warranty repair usually costs more than the unit itself if you aren't capable (or willing) to do it yourself.
make it illegal to use devices that don't have current security patches
The rest of your post I agree with, but I can't see this happening. Simply because its unenforceable -- No matter how business-oriented the government, they're going to be hard-pressed to tell a poor family that they have to throw out their perfectly good fridge or stove or whatever when they can't afford a replacement. Its getting close to forced starvation at that point, and that won't really fly.
That's a pretty ungrounded suspicion. Mostly because there's basically no point in bothering. The vast majority of consumers will just plug in their wifi details in order to get the fancy new features without considering the implications so there's little reason to go to that much of an extreme to catch the odd guy who cares enough (or doesn't care enough) to give their new device the access it requests.
Not to mention the potential lawsuits when someone catches that kind of trickery. Companies can argue that you "agreed" to send them all of your private data in the EULA you didn't read, but they definitely won't have much ground to stand on if they start arbitrarily sending your information to all of your neighbors.
Luckily those are fairly rare these days. Pretty much all consumer APs come pre-configured with a default password setup for the wifi. The only open APs you find anymore are people who've managed to keep their ancient router running somehow or those who intentionally open it, which isn't very many people in either case.
Most business APs, even the free ones, at the very least require you to click OK on some sort of usage agreement before they'll route you publicly.
Open APs just aren't really all that common anymore. At least not around where I live. They still exist to be sure, but its not like the old days where 90% of them were just always available to anyone within range, and the fraction of open APs continues to go down as more and more of those ancient routers get replaced.
That one's actually practical reasons -- metal is heavy and expensive compared to plastic or even glass, and the glass in particular will last just as long as the metal (or perhaps longer since glass doesn't rust) if you don't do something stupid like smash it or put something excessively hot on it.
Your other examples though.. yeah.. progress and technology move forward and even though all those extra features add cost (rather than lowering it,) the niche markets for the dumber devices just aren't big enough to justify stocking them. Its all about supply and demand (and a failure of the general populace to understand or care about the privacy implications of their new toys.)
Who will be out of business in 3 months because none of the big box stores will stock their low-tech appliances.and vast majority of consumers love their shinies and don't know or don't care about the potential for privacy invasion that comes along with it.
Really, we're in a world with Facebook and Snapchat and other such things being absurdly popular with all of their well known privacy issues. Do you think anyone who uses those services is really going to care if LG knows that their milk is expired? Or at least enough people to open up any sort of significant niche?
Or alternatively you could not buy a fucking internet fridge.
For now. Give it 10 years and that may no longer be an option.. at least not if you want a new fridge.
Really, if companies would put their R&D efforts toward securing their crap instead of new and improved ways to invade privacy, IoT devices could potentially be very awesome.
Unfortunately I don't see that happening like.. ever.. without regulatory intervention, and governments these days seem to be even more on the low-security, zero-privacy bandwagon than the big companies so we can't expect much (good) from them either.
Even without a duration, pretty much any contract of this style (where one party has like 99.9% of the negotiating power) contains language to the effect that the company can unilaterally change the contract at any time and just like the original contract "negotiation," your only options are to bail completely or bend over with very close to zero middle ground.
Most of the time they'll require themselves to at least give advance notice (typically 30 days.) Of course, depending on the company and how sneaky they're trying to be with any particular contract change, "advanced notice" could be anywhere from an email or text message direct to your registered email address/phone# all the way down to a one-liner in a "notices" page buried somewhere on their website that you're responsible for monitoring if you care enough.
Who's freedom of speech is being violated here? They're still perfectly free to say whatever they want, and they'll have exactly as large an audience as they would have when the first amendment was added to the constitution. Their freedom of speech does not require your personal ability to listen.
And oddly enough, the first amendment doesn't cover the freedom to record nor broadcast whatever the hell you want to whomever you want whenever you want, given that those technologies didn't exist at the time.
Not to mention, nothing (that I know of) is preventing them from just reiterating the things that were said once they're out of the room, barring the odd thing that's discussed under secrecy status for one reason or another.
Whether or not banning personal live streams on the floor is a good idea is definitely an open question, but it doesn't really have any connection to free speech (other than free speech being the go-to of anyone who doesn't like something even vaguely related to a communications technology.)
Trouble is, nuclear effectively has to pay up front, in terms of higher regulatory and safety requirements, for potential damage that may or may not ever come to be (meltdown) while other forms of energy -- especially coal -- have historically had little or no limitations applied even though they're spewing environmentally and biologically damaging particulates for many, many decades (and that's just the burning -- the mines aren't exactly helping to clean up the planet either.)
Its changing for coal of course nowadays, but they've certainly had a good run of it and other forms of power are still not having to pay for any impacts they may eventually have on the planet.
We're only just beginning to recognize the impacts of wind power (primarily in the form of noise pollution,) and solar panels might be clean energy once manufactured but the manufacturing process has a non-zero impact and so forth. How much of that gets included in the price of a panel and how much is just left as an externality for whoever (or whatever) happens to live near the manufacturing plants?
I'm assuming that even in aggregate, solar and wind are still far cleaner than coal but that doesn't mean that there aren't still hidden costs somewhere along the chain that nobody's paying for (yet) that are acting as an effective but unquantifiable subsidy that nuclear just doesn't get to enjoy. Overall, that just makes it significantly more challenging for nuclear to compete.
Trouble with all of those is scale. There are few places in the world where the tides are strong enough to generate cost-effective tidal energy. Same with geothermal.
I don't know where you came up with solar on the moon. It doesn't face the sun any more than we do (the earth only sees one side of the moon, but the sun gets to see all of it -- there is no "dark side," and consequently there is no eternally sun-facing side either.)
Even if there was though, I'm not sure the energy losses due to transmitting from the moon to the earth would be all that much less significant than the energy "losses" due to bad weather when you're comparing against earth-based solar. Not to mention the costs involved with building and more importantly, operating and maintaining on a long-term basis, a solar farm plus associated energy transfer tech a quarter of a million miles away.
Not saying it couldn't possibly happen given enough time and technical development, but I don't see moon-based anything being a practical goal in the near- to mid- term.
the more this happens, the smarter WE (the consumers) will eventually get. right now, too many people trust their vendor and that's a big mistake. eventually we'll all learn NOT to enable 'teh shiney!' and just use the basic features without letting it go online.
You severely overestimate human intelligence. Most people will bitch for a while and when they don't get a solution they like, at best they'll switch to another brand that does exactly the same thing.
And 99% of the time, that will work just fine. Purely because these issues are relatively rare. Assume you're the one person in a million that gets sick from McDonalds food (like vomiting sick, not just long-term negative health effects) and so you start eating your fast food exclusively at Burger King.
Does that make you "smarter" or really have any impact on anything? Not especially. It just means you happened to lose the probability lottery one time and your behavior adjustment is, in the grand scheme of things, entirely irrelevant to anything beyond the name of your ground up cow sandwich. One person getting sick one time is statistically insignificant.
Of course if a particular McDonalds branch (or any other restaurant) ends up with a statistically significant number of incidents, then somebody in authority will take notice and either force the restaurant to correct the problem or force them to close their doors.
Whether that's McD's own corporate overlords, or a government agency or simply word of mouth forcing the issue due to the negative PR, it does end up getting corrected eventually (and most restaurants, no matter how shady, would prefer it not be due to word of mouth because that sort of negative PR has a habit of not going away even after you fix the problem especially with sites like Yelp and whatnot that trend toward the negative at the best of times and also never forget any negative comments that ever existed regardless of when or if the problem got fixed.)
Similarly with the TVs. One incident (with software downloaded from a potentially questionable source no less) does not make for statistical significance even if the affected person happens to be a writer on the internet.
And if the problem ever does reach statistical significance it won't be the consumers that change behavior (again, on a large scale -- any specific individual might.) It will be the manufacturer that identifies and corrects the issue as best they can.
Trouble is there's not really any viable alternative. Its not computationally feasible (or really even possible) to detect malicious software with any confidence. Antivirus and antimalware programs do their best using pattern matching and other heuristics but its far from a silver bullet -- its more along the lines of a stone pebble, and not even that when we're dealing with newly released exploits that haven't been detected or analyzed yet.
So that pretty much leaves two options: Let the user decide, or establish an authority that ALL software must register with. The latter is far more accurate of course (assuming that the authority actually reviews the software rather than just rubber-stamping anyone who pays them enough) and at the very least, establishes a paper trail (however tenuous) if malicious software does get through. This is essentially the "walled garden" approach used by Apple and other vendor-specific app stores.
Windows can't really follow that model -- there's far too much random software generated by far too many people that would just stop working and everybody would be rightly pissed off if suddenly they had to register every little in-house tool with Microsoft in order to install it on their company's machines. Even if MS allowed a third party entity to host the authentication system (to remove any question of antitrust or even just favoritism,) people still wouldn't want to do that.
Apple only got away with it for their app store because it was a brand new concept in a brand new ecosystem and so there was no historical applications to worry about. And even then its a relatively large annoyance if you want to build and distribute an "in-house" application without forcing all of your employee to jailbreak their iPhones.
So Microsoft is kind of screwed no matter what they do here.. if they just let everything through, then right back where we started.. if they just block everything then everyone gets pissy about their "freedoms".. and if they let the user decide on a case-by-case basis then we just discover that stupid people are still stupid.
Unfortunately at this point its really more of a social issue than a technical one, and social issues are notoriously hard to stamp out no matter what form of solution you attempt to impose, whether it be technical, legal, educational or otherwise.
Modern LGs come with a similar idiotic remote. They even took it one step further and threw in some accelerometers or IR tracking or something so that you have to swing it around like a Wii's bastard offspring, and if you want to try and use the D-pad controls to do anything, you have to make sure to hold the remote very very stable or the waggle will move the cursor and you'll accidentally hit some other button in the menu. Of course the cursor tracking itself is horrifically bad so even if you don't mind the pointless wrist strain you still can't really use the thing with any finesse.
Luckily, the remote from my old pre-stupidity LG works fine with both of my newer TVs so I just use that. (Well, I don't know how well it works with the "smart" features but I don't use those anyway so I don't personally care.)
computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam
So? Steam in particular is incredibly unintrusive unless you're actually trying to pirate the game, in which case it depends entirely on your definition of "fun" -- if you include the challenge of breaking DRM as "fun," then Steam and friends are far more interesting than "draw a black line on your CD."
some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
Again, so? Admittedly its annoying having to keep re-paying for something, but that doesn't intrinsically lower the functionality of the software. That's like saying your house is crap because you had to mortgage it instead of dropping $300+k on it in one shot. Not to mention there are free alternatives such as GIMP that are plenty sufficient for anybody who doesn't need 100% top end professional software (and it gets better all the time as well.)
many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd
Which basic freedoms are those? Programming languages, documentation for those languages and support forums are all many many many times more available now than they ever used to be. The only "freedom" you seem to think you're lacking is the freedom to pirate software. Even if you want to rant about walled garden distribution platforms, your old-school comparison is "no distribution platform at all." At best, you could get yourself included in a monthly magazine like the old Big Blue Disk things.
Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform
Again, a bit annoying but it doesn't really detract from "fun" in any significant manner. Heck if he wants to go old school, he can just unplug his internet connection and then he knows for sure that Windows isn't "spying" on him.
he will use Linux and Android
Linux sure, but Android? Does he seriously think Google doesn't "spy" on him? Google's entire business model is based on collecting your information, and at a lot more personal level than anything Win10 sends back to Microsoft.
using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this
Sony and Nintendo both definitely collect as much information as they think they can get away with regarding your gaming habits and other console usage, not to mention all of the "social" features included in both systems, payment card retention, etc. And of course Microsoft is Microsoft. If the 360 doesn't already have Win10-like "features," I'm sure they won't be far behind, in addition to doing basically all the same things the other major consoles do.
A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
Again, if you want to go old-school go ahead and unplug your computer from the internet. Problem solved. Oh and while ransomware is relatively new, viruses, crapware and other nasties have been around basically as long as floppy disks (with their pirated software) have been getting traded. Norton, McAfee and several other antivirus makers got their start under DOS, years before Windows was really a thing and many years before the Internet was publicly available.
I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics
So, its not as fun as the old days because it hasn't moved into the "new" days as fast as you'd personally like? That seems a bit of a contradiction.
the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have
By who's standard? Virtual boy is over 20 years old and it didn't become a "trend" because the hardware wasn't sufficiently powerful for anybody to care enough back then. Even today, there's still some question about whether VR is going to be a continuing trend or a
Its more a situation of reassuring them that they won't be stopped from doing what they're doing, which is probably quite welcome tidings for companies that are highly dependent on foreign (especially Asian) labor for their electronics components given that Trump based much of his campaign around xenophobia, isolationism and terminating trade relationships rather than improving them.
I have strong doubts that "just calling" the president is the same as just calling your buddy to go out for a beer.
It sounds to me more like a shorthand to suggest that Trump's open to personal meetings and discussions with specific business leaders rather than shuffling them off and waiting for the next industry gathering or whatever the normal operating procedure is.
Except government _can't_ think like a business. Its job is to protect its "citizens" (which used to be the people, but apparently is now businesses,) maintain order and defend the country from attacks.
The government's job is _NOT_ to make money at any cost. If it was, it would just run the presses 24/7. Sure the country would suffer horribly due to the massive inflation but who cares -- more money for the "business!" Literally making money in that case!
Sure its nice if taxes and tariffs and other government income can fully fund all of its expenditures, but that's not always plausible -- and they can't just cut out unprofitable "departments" in the same way a real business can because those offices and bureaus serve purposes beyond simple income generation.
Put it this way.. if the government was really wanting to act like a business, they'd just jack up your taxes by 10-20% and then all expenditures would be covered. I mean if you want to think in business terms, your taxes are essentially payment for services rendered and if the price of the service doesn't cover its cost, a "business" will simply increase the price. And its not like you can just take your money to a competing government (at least not for a reasonably large sample of "you.")
Lots of people say this, very few have (practical) plans for implementing it. Trouble with "cleaning up" this kind of crap is that it kind of has to start at the top -- and the top is exactly where the people benefiting such behaviors are sitting.
So in essence, you need to propose a way to convince the people at top to start implementing changes that directly harm their interests. I'm not saying it can't be done, but its going to take more than just saying something needs to be done and hoping it will happen on its own.
Either that or incite a revolution and just replace all the people at the top. But that's a pretty violent, and usually temporary, solution to the problem.
He doesn't have to be either their enemies nor beholden to them.
He could just want the same things they want -- big business running the show -- and is appointing them simply because he thinks they're the best people for the jobs given that goal.
Bloody/. reading everything so literally. Ok lets de-generalize a bit:
Most people don't like being censored by anyone for any reason.
I'm sure someone somewhere recognizes their lack of self control in whatever arena and is happy to be externally censored, but I'd be surprised if that was even a significant minority.
A decent percent of the people who would normally speak up in these situations are just afraid to speak up in these kind of cases
People who wouldn't bother speaking out regardless are probably still not going to speak out.
People hate being shat on by their government but they are more concerned with mosquito bites
Agreed. I say all this stuff but beyond Slashdot posts and "sign" the most of Openmedia.ca's campaigns, but beyond that I do a whole lot of sweet fuck all. Sure I vote but between modern "pick the least bad" politics and the fact that one vote out of 35million is only slightly more than meaningless, that's not really accomplishing much either.
Luckily for us normal people, there are folk who are willing to speak up against many issues, but that group diminishes in size significantly when there's jail time or hefty fines on the line, rather than just volunteer time and standing around at protests.
People didn't even create an uproar when innocuous websites appeared on the leaked blacklist such as that website belonging to a local dentist
Define "uproar." If you mean millions of people taking to the streets Arab Spring style well then no, of course not. But if you mean "a handful of dedicated people creating enough discussion to effect change" then you've got yourself an "uproar."
You're not going to find much of an uproar for a case which has actually been through the courts
The question is.. why not? The courts ruling in favor of media conglomerates based on laws written by the government isn't exactly a step up from the government acting directly.
Certainly it sounds like the judge didn't go too overboard in this instance -- particularly the lack of rolling injunction (which would almost certainly lead to another hidden blacklist since there'd be little to no further oversight in that case) but it still opens up the possibility of anyone who doesn't like a website opening up a potentially successful lawsuit based on some vague copyright claims.
Its not those specific sites that need to be fought for, its the concept of censorship in general that needs to be fought against before it just becomes the way of things and we've lost a little bit of freedom forever.
Future courts will get to look athe evidence, and hopefully consider just how ineffective this method is.
Quite likely. Unfortunately they'll likely take it as evidence that they need even more stringent blocking methods. Just ban all bittorrent traffic! And all unregistered VPN traffic (VPN registration system will only cost the taxpayers a few hundred million or so to setup.. no worries.) Hell while we're at it lets just ban all unregistered traffic that looks vaguely encrypted.. we've wanted to ban encryption for a while now, thanks for giving us the excuse!
And so on. We may be taking the long way around, but the West is slowly and steadily aiming to match China's level of internet freedom.
Slashdot Mirror
It might require an initial phone home before it'll start operating, but its unlikely that it would stop running should it lose connection. There's too many potential reasons that could happen without the user explicitly turning it off.
What you will likely lose though is things like the ability to change the temperature (because you can only do that through the screen which is actually just a front-end for myfridge.lg.com or whatever,) and of course you'd explicitly lose the advertised wifi features like being able to check if you need milk from your cell phone on your way home from work.
Really, any single person's personal information isn't all that important to LG or other companies. What's important is the aggregate of personal information across the entire consumer base and as long as most people are playing along, LG isn't going to be putting boatloads of effort into trying to get that last 0.1% of people who are actively fighting against them -- its an uphill battle at best and the marginal gains just aren't going to be worth the R&D costs. Their time is much better spent coming up with flashy feature 2.0 in order to convince consumers to buy their brand again in 3 years when their previous model breaks down.
20+ years with minimal maintenance
You're in a very small minority. Most people expect appliances these days to last 3-10 years with zero maintenance -- in the sense that if it breaks down its either under warranty or it gets tossed since out-of-warranty repair usually costs more than the unit itself if you aren't capable (or willing) to do it yourself.
make it illegal to use devices that don't have current security patches
The rest of your post I agree with, but I can't see this happening. Simply because its unenforceable -- No matter how business-oriented the government, they're going to be hard-pressed to tell a poor family that they have to throw out their perfectly good fridge or stove or whatever when they can't afford a replacement. Its getting close to forced starvation at that point, and that won't really fly.
That's a pretty ungrounded suspicion. Mostly because there's basically no point in bothering. The vast majority of consumers will just plug in their wifi details in order to get the fancy new features without considering the implications so there's little reason to go to that much of an extreme to catch the odd guy who cares enough (or doesn't care enough) to give their new device the access it requests.
Not to mention the potential lawsuits when someone catches that kind of trickery. Companies can argue that you "agreed" to send them all of your private data in the EULA you didn't read, but they definitely won't have much ground to stand on if they start arbitrarily sending your information to all of your neighbors.
Luckily those are fairly rare these days. Pretty much all consumer APs come pre-configured with a default password setup for the wifi. The only open APs you find anymore are people who've managed to keep their ancient router running somehow or those who intentionally open it, which isn't very many people in either case.
Most business APs, even the free ones, at the very least require you to click OK on some sort of usage agreement before they'll route you publicly.
Open APs just aren't really all that common anymore. At least not around where I live. They still exist to be sure, but its not like the old days where 90% of them were just always available to anyone within range, and the fraction of open APs continues to go down as more and more of those ancient routers get replaced.
Or buy a fridge with fucking metal shelves in it!
That one's actually practical reasons -- metal is heavy and expensive compared to plastic or even glass, and the glass in particular will last just as long as the metal (or perhaps longer since glass doesn't rust) if you don't do something stupid like smash it or put something excessively hot on it.
Your other examples though.. yeah.. progress and technology move forward and even though all those extra features add cost (rather than lowering it,) the niche markets for the dumber devices just aren't big enough to justify stocking them. Its all about supply and demand (and a failure of the general populace to understand or care about the privacy implications of their new toys.)
Who will be out of business in 3 months because none of the big box stores will stock their low-tech appliances.and vast majority of consumers love their shinies and don't know or don't care about the potential for privacy invasion that comes along with it.
Really, we're in a world with Facebook and Snapchat and other such things being absurdly popular with all of their well known privacy issues. Do you think anyone who uses those services is really going to care if LG knows that their milk is expired? Or at least enough people to open up any sort of significant niche?
Or alternatively you could not buy a fucking internet fridge.
For now. Give it 10 years and that may no longer be an option.. at least not if you want a new fridge.
Really, if companies would put their R&D efforts toward securing their crap instead of new and improved ways to invade privacy, IoT devices could potentially be very awesome.
Unfortunately I don't see that happening like.. ever.. without regulatory intervention, and governments these days seem to be even more on the low-security, zero-privacy bandwagon than the big companies so we can't expect much (good) from them either.
Even without a duration, pretty much any contract of this style (where one party has like 99.9% of the negotiating power) contains language to the effect that the company can unilaterally change the contract at any time and just like the original contract "negotiation," your only options are to bail completely or bend over with very close to zero middle ground.
Most of the time they'll require themselves to at least give advance notice (typically 30 days.) Of course, depending on the company and how sneaky they're trying to be with any particular contract change, "advanced notice" could be anywhere from an email or text message direct to your registered email address/phone# all the way down to a one-liner in a "notices" page buried somewhere on their website that you're responsible for monitoring if you care enough.
Who's freedom of speech is being violated here? They're still perfectly free to say whatever they want, and they'll have exactly as large an audience as they would have when the first amendment was added to the constitution. Their freedom of speech does not require your personal ability to listen.
And oddly enough, the first amendment doesn't cover the freedom to record nor broadcast whatever the hell you want to whomever you want whenever you want, given that those technologies didn't exist at the time.
Not to mention, nothing (that I know of) is preventing them from just reiterating the things that were said once they're out of the room, barring the odd thing that's discussed under secrecy status for one reason or another.
Whether or not banning personal live streams on the floor is a good idea is definitely an open question, but it doesn't really have any connection to free speech (other than free speech being the go-to of anyone who doesn't like something even vaguely related to a communications technology.)
Trouble is, nuclear effectively has to pay up front, in terms of higher regulatory and safety requirements, for potential damage that may or may not ever come to be (meltdown) while other forms of energy -- especially coal -- have historically had little or no limitations applied even though they're spewing environmentally and biologically damaging particulates for many, many decades (and that's just the burning -- the mines aren't exactly helping to clean up the planet either.)
Its changing for coal of course nowadays, but they've certainly had a good run of it and other forms of power are still not having to pay for any impacts they may eventually have on the planet.
We're only just beginning to recognize the impacts of wind power (primarily in the form of noise pollution,) and solar panels might be clean energy once manufactured but the manufacturing process has a non-zero impact and so forth. How much of that gets included in the price of a panel and how much is just left as an externality for whoever (or whatever) happens to live near the manufacturing plants?
I'm assuming that even in aggregate, solar and wind are still far cleaner than coal but that doesn't mean that there aren't still hidden costs somewhere along the chain that nobody's paying for (yet) that are acting as an effective but unquantifiable subsidy that nuclear just doesn't get to enjoy. Overall, that just makes it significantly more challenging for nuclear to compete.
Trouble with all of those is scale. There are few places in the world where the tides are strong enough to generate cost-effective tidal energy. Same with geothermal.
I don't know where you came up with solar on the moon. It doesn't face the sun any more than we do (the earth only sees one side of the moon, but the sun gets to see all of it -- there is no "dark side," and consequently there is no eternally sun-facing side either.)
Even if there was though, I'm not sure the energy losses due to transmitting from the moon to the earth would be all that much less significant than the energy "losses" due to bad weather when you're comparing against earth-based solar. Not to mention the costs involved with building and more importantly, operating and maintaining on a long-term basis, a solar farm plus associated energy transfer tech a quarter of a million miles away.
Not saying it couldn't possibly happen given enough time and technical development, but I don't see moon-based anything being a practical goal in the near- to mid- term.
the more this happens, the smarter WE (the consumers) will eventually get. right now, too many people trust their vendor and that's a big mistake. eventually we'll all learn NOT to enable 'teh shiney!' and just use the basic features without letting it go online.
You severely overestimate human intelligence. Most people will bitch for a while and when they don't get a solution they like, at best they'll switch to another brand that does exactly the same thing.
And 99% of the time, that will work just fine. Purely because these issues are relatively rare. Assume you're the one person in a million that gets sick from McDonalds food (like vomiting sick, not just long-term negative health effects) and so you start eating your fast food exclusively at Burger King.
Does that make you "smarter" or really have any impact on anything? Not especially. It just means you happened to lose the probability lottery one time and your behavior adjustment is, in the grand scheme of things, entirely irrelevant to anything beyond the name of your ground up cow sandwich. One person getting sick one time is statistically insignificant.
Of course if a particular McDonalds branch (or any other restaurant) ends up with a statistically significant number of incidents, then somebody in authority will take notice and either force the restaurant to correct the problem or force them to close their doors.
Whether that's McD's own corporate overlords, or a government agency or simply word of mouth forcing the issue due to the negative PR, it does end up getting corrected eventually (and most restaurants, no matter how shady, would prefer it not be due to word of mouth because that sort of negative PR has a habit of not going away even after you fix the problem especially with sites like Yelp and whatnot that trend toward the negative at the best of times and also never forget any negative comments that ever existed regardless of when or if the problem got fixed.)
Similarly with the TVs. One incident (with software downloaded from a potentially questionable source no less) does not make for statistical significance even if the affected person happens to be a writer on the internet.
And if the problem ever does reach statistical significance it won't be the consumers that change behavior (again, on a large scale -- any specific individual might.) It will be the manufacturer that identifies and corrects the issue as best they can.
Trouble is there's not really any viable alternative. Its not computationally feasible (or really even possible) to detect malicious software with any confidence. Antivirus and antimalware programs do their best using pattern matching and other heuristics but its far from a silver bullet -- its more along the lines of a stone pebble, and not even that when we're dealing with newly released exploits that haven't been detected or analyzed yet.
So that pretty much leaves two options: Let the user decide, or establish an authority that ALL software must register with. The latter is far more accurate of course (assuming that the authority actually reviews the software rather than just rubber-stamping anyone who pays them enough) and at the very least, establishes a paper trail (however tenuous) if malicious software does get through. This is essentially the "walled garden" approach used by Apple and other vendor-specific app stores.
Windows can't really follow that model -- there's far too much random software generated by far too many people that would just stop working and everybody would be rightly pissed off if suddenly they had to register every little in-house tool with Microsoft in order to install it on their company's machines. Even if MS allowed a third party entity to host the authentication system (to remove any question of antitrust or even just favoritism,) people still wouldn't want to do that.
Apple only got away with it for their app store because it was a brand new concept in a brand new ecosystem and so there was no historical applications to worry about. And even then its a relatively large annoyance if you want to build and distribute an "in-house" application without forcing all of your employee to jailbreak their iPhones.
So Microsoft is kind of screwed no matter what they do here.. if they just let everything through, then right back where we started.. if they just block everything then everyone gets pissy about their "freedoms".. and if they let the user decide on a case-by-case basis then we just discover that stupid people are still stupid.
Unfortunately at this point its really more of a social issue than a technical one, and social issues are notoriously hard to stamp out no matter what form of solution you attempt to impose, whether it be technical, legal, educational or otherwise.
Modern LGs come with a similar idiotic remote. They even took it one step further and threw in some accelerometers or IR tracking or something so that you have to swing it around like a Wii's bastard offspring, and if you want to try and use the D-pad controls to do anything, you have to make sure to hold the remote very very stable or the waggle will move the cursor and you'll accidentally hit some other button in the menu. Of course the cursor tracking itself is horrifically bad so even if you don't mind the pointless wrist strain you still can't really use the thing with any finesse.
Luckily, the remote from my old pre-stupidity LG works fine with both of my newer TVs so I just use that. (Well, I don't know how well it works with the "smart" features but I don't use those anyway so I don't personally care.)
the 360 doesn't already have Win10-like "features,"
Woops, I its the XBox One these days isn't it? Can you guess which console I prefer? Point still stands though.
computer games nowadays are tied to internet DRM like Steam
So? Steam in particular is incredibly unintrusive unless you're actually trying to pirate the game, in which case it depends entirely on your definition of "fun" -- if you include the challenge of breaking DRM as "fun," then Steam and friends are far more interesting than "draw a black line on your CD."
some crucial DCC software is available to rent only now (e.g. Photoshop)
Again, so? Admittedly its annoying having to keep re-paying for something, but that doesn't intrinsically lower the functionality of the software. That's like saying your house is crap because you had to mortgage it instead of dropping $300+k on it in one shot. Not to mention there are free alternatives such as GIMP that are plenty sufficient for anybody who doesn't need 100% top end professional software (and it gets better all the time as well.)
many "basic freedoms" of the old-school computer nerd
Which basic freedoms are those? Programming languages, documentation for those languages and support forums are all many many many times more available now than they ever used to be. The only "freedom" you seem to think you're lacking is the freedom to pirate software. Even if you want to rant about walled garden distribution platforms, your old-school comparison is "no distribution platform at all." At best, you could get yourself included in a monthly magazine like the old Big Blue Disk things.
Another said that Windows 10's spyware aspects made him give up on his beloved PC platform
Again, a bit annoying but it doesn't really detract from "fun" in any significant manner. Heck if he wants to go old school, he can just unplug his internet connection and then he knows for sure that Windows isn't "spying" on him.
he will use Linux and Android
Linux sure, but Android? Does he seriously think Google doesn't "spy" on him? Google's entire business model is based on collecting your information, and at a lot more personal level than anything Win10 sends back to Microsoft.
using consoles to game on instead of a PC because of this
Sony and Nintendo both definitely collect as much information as they think they can get away with regarding your gaming habits and other console usage, not to mention all of the "social" features included in both systems, payment card retention, etc. And of course Microsoft is Microsoft. If the 360 doesn't already have Win10-like "features," I'm sure they won't be far behind, in addition to doing basically all the same things the other major consoles do.
A third complained about zero privacy online, internet advertising, viruses, ransomware, hacking, crapware
Again, if you want to go old-school go ahead and unplug your computer from the internet. Problem solved. Oh and while ransomware is relatively new, viruses, crapware and other nasties have been around basically as long as floppy disks (with their pirated software) have been getting traded. Norton, McAfee and several other antivirus makers got their start under DOS, years before Windows was really a thing and many years before the Internet was publicly available.
I lamented that the hardware industry still hasn't given us anything resembling photorealistic realtime 3D graphics
So, its not as fun as the old days because it hasn't moved into the "new" days as fast as you'd personally like? That seems a bit of a contradiction.
the current VR trend arrived a full decade later than it should have
By who's standard? Virtual boy is over 20 years old and it didn't become a "trend" because the hardware wasn't sufficiently powerful for anybody to care enough back then. Even today, there's still some question about whether VR is going to be a continuing trend or a
Its more a situation of reassuring them that they won't be stopped from doing what they're doing, which is probably quite welcome tidings for companies that are highly dependent on foreign (especially Asian) labor for their electronics components given that Trump based much of his campaign around xenophobia, isolationism and terminating trade relationships rather than improving them.
He didn't have to be the best. He just had to be the runner up for worst.
I have strong doubts that "just calling" the president is the same as just calling your buddy to go out for a beer.
It sounds to me more like a shorthand to suggest that Trump's open to personal meetings and discussions with specific business leaders rather than shuffling them off and waiting for the next industry gathering or whatever the normal operating procedure is.
Except government _can't_ think like a business. Its job is to protect its "citizens" (which used to be the people, but apparently is now businesses,) maintain order and defend the country from attacks.
The government's job is _NOT_ to make money at any cost. If it was, it would just run the presses 24/7. Sure the country would suffer horribly due to the massive inflation but who cares -- more money for the "business!" Literally making money in that case!
Sure its nice if taxes and tariffs and other government income can fully fund all of its expenditures, but that's not always plausible -- and they can't just cut out unprofitable "departments" in the same way a real business can because those offices and bureaus serve purposes beyond simple income generation.
Put it this way.. if the government was really wanting to act like a business, they'd just jack up your taxes by 10-20% and then all expenditures would be covered. I mean if you want to think in business terms, your taxes are essentially payment for services rendered and if the price of the service doesn't cover its cost, a "business" will simply increase the price. And its not like you can just take your money to a competing government (at least not for a reasonably large sample of "you.")
start cleaning things up a bit
Lots of people say this, very few have (practical) plans for implementing it. Trouble with "cleaning up" this kind of crap is that it kind of has to start at the top -- and the top is exactly where the people benefiting such behaviors are sitting.
So in essence, you need to propose a way to convince the people at top to start implementing changes that directly harm their interests. I'm not saying it can't be done, but its going to take more than just saying something needs to be done and hoping it will happen on its own.
Either that or incite a revolution and just replace all the people at the top. But that's a pretty violent, and usually temporary, solution to the problem.
He doesn't have to be either their enemies nor beholden to them.
He could just want the same things they want -- big business running the show -- and is appointing them simply because he thinks they're the best people for the jobs given that goal.
Bloody /. reading everything so literally. Ok lets de-generalize a bit:
Most people don't like being censored by anyone for any reason.
I'm sure someone somewhere recognizes their lack of self control in whatever arena and is happy to be externally censored, but I'd be surprised if that was even a significant minority.
A decent percent of the people who would normally speak up in these situations are just afraid to speak up in these kind of cases
People who wouldn't bother speaking out regardless are probably still not going to speak out.
People hate being shat on by their government but they are more concerned with mosquito bites
Agreed. I say all this stuff but beyond Slashdot posts and "sign" the most of Openmedia.ca's campaigns, but beyond that I do a whole lot of sweet fuck all. Sure I vote but between modern "pick the least bad" politics and the fact that one vote out of 35million is only slightly more than meaningless, that's not really accomplishing much either.
Luckily for us normal people, there are folk who are willing to speak up against many issues, but that group diminishes in size significantly when there's jail time or hefty fines on the line, rather than just volunteer time and standing around at protests.
People didn't even create an uproar when innocuous websites appeared on the leaked blacklist such as that website belonging to a local dentist
Define "uproar." If you mean millions of people taking to the streets Arab Spring style well then no, of course not. But if you mean "a handful of dedicated people creating enough discussion to effect change" then you've got yourself an "uproar."
You're not going to find much of an uproar for a case which has actually been through the courts
The question is.. why not? The courts ruling in favor of media conglomerates based on laws written by the government isn't exactly a step up from the government acting directly.
Certainly it sounds like the judge didn't go too overboard in this instance -- particularly the lack of rolling injunction (which would almost certainly lead to another hidden blacklist since there'd be little to no further oversight in that case) but it still opens up the possibility of anyone who doesn't like a website opening up a potentially successful lawsuit based on some vague copyright claims.
Its not those specific sites that need to be fought for, its the concept of censorship in general that needs to be fought against before it just becomes the way of things and we've lost a little bit of freedom forever.
Future courts will get to look athe evidence, and hopefully consider just how ineffective this method is.
Quite likely. Unfortunately they'll likely take it as evidence that they need even more stringent blocking methods. Just ban all bittorrent traffic! And all unregistered VPN traffic (VPN registration system will only cost the taxpayers a few hundred million or so to setup.. no worries.) Hell while we're at it lets just ban all unregistered traffic that looks vaguely encrypted.. we've wanted to ban encryption for a while now, thanks for giving us the excuse!
And so on. We may be taking the long way around, but the West is slowly and steadily aiming to match China's level of internet freedom.