Government, at it's best, is an intermediary to determine where one person's liberties end and another's begins. For example, I might insist that I have the liberty to take your property, but this infringes on your liberty to keep your own property. The government steps in and sets rules. It might limit some liberties but it's needed to ensure that society doesn't descend into anarchy.
When government goes too far, though, it begins restricting liberties in the name of preserving government power or to protect some "ruling class" from "the rabble." This could come in the form of "protecting against terrorism" by limiting free speech and increasing government surveillance or it could come in overly restrictive voter registration laws that are actually intended to keep poor people from voting. In China's case, it's the politicians flexing their muscles and saying "We've decided we don't like X so now nobody can have X!"
It is much cheaper to cook a meal for a family than to buy fast food but it takes effort.
This is where "cheap, but bad for you fast-food" wins out over "healthy home cooked meals", unfortunately. Some families have both parents working - sometimes multiple jobs per parent. In addition, you might have a single parent house. So "free time" to cook meals is nonexistent. It might not be healthy, but stopping at McDonald's to feed the kids or using a microwave meal (loaded with sodium because apparently that's the only spice frozen meals use) before going to your second job gets the kids fed for many people. It might result in more health issues later, but it's a matter of having to deal with current fires and having no time to prevent future ones.
BMI isn't a great indicator for whether someone is overweight or not. A few years back, I got serious about weight loss. I was at 255 and really not feeling good. I watched what I ate (did a Weight Watchers-style thing) and eventually got down to 175. For the first time, I wasn't overweight as far as BMI was concerned. I was normal weight. Everyone who saw me, though, told me that I looked too skinny. (The first time in my life I had ever heard those words referencing me.) Sure enough, I had bones sticking out everywhere. I've found that my ideal weight is about 190. BMI-wise, that's still overweight, but it's good for me.
Anyway, why can't I watch Doctor Who, any of the Indiana Jones, Star Wars, AI,...well, everything by Lucas or Speilberg on NetFlix?
Blame the content owners, not Netflix. If it were up to Netflix, they'd put everything online and you'd be able to stream any movie/TV show ever made at any time. The problem is that each show is owned by someone and Netflix needs to negotiate rights to stream with each company. Some companies demand a ton of money and their content isn't worth it. Others sign exclusive deals with other providers. Still others refuse to put any of their content online or start their own online service thinking they'll be "the next Netflix" when they are anything but. (I'm looking at you, CBS All Access.)
There was also a movement by the content owners awhile back to starve Netflix. They saw Netflix growing in popularity and felt threatened so they decided as a group to withhold popular content from Netflix and only give them older, "B-Level" content. The theory was that Netflix's popularity would plummet and people would stay with cable TV so the content owners could keep getting richer fast. Instead, Netflix has begun producing its own content which insulates them from this kind of attack. Combined with the increase in people streaming and thus the increased pressure to put shows on streaming services, this ruined the content owners' plan, but Netflix still needs to negotiate and pay for each block of shows.
I had the several cans of soda I tried to carry on in 2010 confiscated and thrown out, along with my unopened sunscreen that was apparently 2 whopping ounces over the limit. Which was rather annoying, as sunscreen is like $10 and the plane didn't carry Dr. Pepper...
And, of course, they threw it all out in a big bin right by the security line. All those "potentially explosive" liquids just dumped in one area. Either the reasoning for dumping this stuff is disingenuous or they're just stupid. Or both. My money's on both.
The only post-911 security improvements that need to be kept are the reinforced, locked cabin door and passenger willingness to rise up against a hijacker. The former means that a would-be hijacker can't overpower the crew and take control of the aircraft. The latter means that passengers recognize that a hijacking doesn't mean "fly to Cuba, sit through a tense standoff where the hujackers demand something, and then everyone goes home rattled but safe so long as they keep quiet." Instead, a hijacking now means "you're going to die if you don't rise up and fight back." (Granted, you might die if you rise up also, but your odds of dying are 100% in a post-911 hijacking if you don't fight back.)
All the other stuff is security theater designed to make politicians look like they're "doing something" and also to funnel dollars to companies providing the scanning machines.
Some of the people here, some of the ones I communicate with off-list, have had in my home, and have visited in my travels - some of them, have children that are younger than these shenanigans from SCO.
My oldest son was born in the same year that the SCO-IBM lawsuit began - albeit five months later. He's having his Bar Mitzvah later this year. My youngest son is turning 9 in a couple of months and was born in the thick of the SCO-IBM/SCO-Novell/SCO-Everyone muck.
You might have mistaken. This isn't my app. This was developed by someone else (LlamaLab). I just downloaded and used the app.
As far as prompts go, I have to correct my previous statement. (I was typing from memory.) I just looked it up and there are separate apps for things like "Automate Network", "Automate Storage", "Automate location", etc. Each app has permissions just for it's particular area and each app is listed in the Google Play store. The overarching Automate app simplifies the install by not requiring you to search for the particular app to be installed to get the required permissions. Instead, you click a "Get these permissions" button and a standard Google Play install/permissions prompt appears. Once it's done, the button changes to "Remove these permissions" which will let you uninstall the app if you want to revoke the permissions.
I'm not on Marshmallow. I'm still running Android 5.1. The appearance is of installing "sub-apps" (albeit from the main app, not from the Google Play store). You need camera access, you need to have the application's camera module installed which will request the appropriate access.
I used IFTTT for all of about twenty seconds. It seemed interesting but once you advance beyond "take this data and send it to Twitter, take that data and send it to Facebook", it becomes useless. I wanted to use my smartphone's built-in abilities more and IFTTT wasn't giving me the capabilities. I found an app called Automate that lets you set up a process flow to do things such as upload to Google Drive or an FTP server, send e-mails, take photos with the camera, etc.
Wisely, the app comes with minimal permissions and you need to enable further permissions as scripts require them. For example, I wrote a script that takes a photo of someone if they don't put in my correct unlock code and e-mails that photo to me. Of course, before this script could work, I needed to grant Automate access to my camera. If I remove the script, I can easily disable the access and keep Automate from accessing the camera in the future. Much more powerful than IFTTT.
No security is perfect. This was a large government organization with physical possession of the phone paying a software agency with experience in digital forensics (in other words - retrieving data thought to be lost). It's not impossible to protect against this, but it can be trickier. From what I've read, the newer iPhones have more baked in security and would have been orders of magnitude harder to crack.
The big victory here is that Apple wasn't forced by the courts to unlock this phone "just this one time." Had they been forced to do it, one time would have turned into two, three, five, a hundred, etc. There is no precedent for the next time when the FBI or other law enforcement agencies come to Apple (or other phone manufacturers) demanding that they weaken security because "terrorism."
I meant things like communications would have taken longer. In order to tell people five villages over "Send your strongest men with weapons and supplies to attack the enemy on this date" would have taken a longer amount of time back then than it would now. Some people assume that this slower communication means that they couldn't have possibly pulled it off, but it just means there was more planning involved - thinking about who to send as messengers by which routes to get the word spread the fastest. Just because they couldn't post "Need strong men, weapons, supplies for a battle in 2 weeks. #BattleOverTheBridge" on Twitter doesn't mean organizing this was impossible.
And you're right that a lack of red tape could mean that some things might have been done quicker back then. Also, because they didn't worry about ramifications that we worry about, they could simply not bother to plan for them and speed the process along more.
Or it scarred the survivors so much that they refused to talk about it. Plenty of people who return don't want to talk about what happened on the battlefield. It's not like the movies where you have a misfit group who has an entertaining time for a few hours until the credits roll. It's a horrible, gruesome affair - and ancient wars were likely even more horrible since they would have been fought in close combat with sharp weapons. The fighters could have been tripping over half-dead warriors, stepping in pools of blood, and seeing sights that no normal person could see and not be affected by.
If civilization continues to progress for another 3,000 years, then the people in the year 5,016 will likely stereotype us as savages that just barely survived and couldn't plan anything massive simply because we didn't have access to futuristic technologies that they had. Sure, it might take us weeks or months to do things that people in 5,016 might do in a day, but we can still get it done. Similarly, while we might be able to organize and stage a battle of this magnitude in days, this doesn't mean that people around 1200 BCE couldn't do it at all. It just might have taken them longer to pull it together.
Researchers achieve 57Gbps through fiber optic lines. In local news, I'm still stuck at 15Mbps because Time Warner Cable is a local monopoly and thus has no incentive to upgrade their speeds.
All government spending must be localised, no tax payer dollars, not one cent to be spent on imported products or services, directly or indirectly.
So how would government buy their computer systems? Are there computer systems make 100% in the US - meaning every chip and component comes from the United States and is assembled here?
We also have the added fun of Asperger's Syndrome in the mix. At times it's hard to tell what's puberty and what's Asperger's. He also will overreact to some things and underreact to others due to not reading social cues properly. He's barely understanding pre-puberty social rules and he's going to have girls/dating tossed in the mix all too soon. My dad skills are going to get a major workout in the next few years.
I would never do this. I would certainly never load my kids' Android tablets up with a NES emulator with dozens of games that I loved playing back in the day such as Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past.
My oldest is 12 and we've clearly headed straight for teen-attitude. Shouting matches at us declaring that he hates us, we treat him like a child, and we've got to treat him like an adult... followed quickly by refusal to do things we tell him to do because he's busy playing video games/watching TV... followed by shouting at us again for taking away said video games/TV.
I certainly hope there's a light at the end of this tunnel we're entering.
Slashdot Mirror
I propose we set the scores to Morse Code.
(Will this post be rated . . . . . Funny or . . . - - Insightful?)
Government, at it's best, is an intermediary to determine where one person's liberties end and another's begins. For example, I might insist that I have the liberty to take your property, but this infringes on your liberty to keep your own property. The government steps in and sets rules. It might limit some liberties but it's needed to ensure that society doesn't descend into anarchy.
When government goes too far, though, it begins restricting liberties in the name of preserving government power or to protect some "ruling class" from "the rabble." This could come in the form of "protecting against terrorism" by limiting free speech and increasing government surveillance or it could come in overly restrictive voter registration laws that are actually intended to keep poor people from voting. In China's case, it's the politicians flexing their muscles and saying "We've decided we don't like X so now nobody can have X!"
Or at least a user-settable option. "I was rated 101 Insightful!"
This is where "cheap, but bad for you fast-food" wins out over "healthy home cooked meals", unfortunately. Some families have both parents working - sometimes multiple jobs per parent. In addition, you might have a single parent house. So "free time" to cook meals is nonexistent. It might not be healthy, but stopping at McDonald's to feed the kids or using a microwave meal (loaded with sodium because apparently that's the only spice frozen meals use) before going to your second job gets the kids fed for many people. It might result in more health issues later, but it's a matter of having to deal with current fires and having no time to prevent future ones.
BMI isn't a great indicator for whether someone is overweight or not. A few years back, I got serious about weight loss. I was at 255 and really not feeling good. I watched what I ate (did a Weight Watchers-style thing) and eventually got down to 175. For the first time, I wasn't overweight as far as BMI was concerned. I was normal weight. Everyone who saw me, though, told me that I looked too skinny. (The first time in my life I had ever heard those words referencing me.) Sure enough, I had bones sticking out everywhere. I've found that my ideal weight is about 190. BMI-wise, that's still overweight, but it's good for me.
And to people who don't use commas, it's the difference between:
Let's eat, grandma.
and:
Let's eat grandma.
I'm glad that mine wasn't the only mind that immediately jumped to Spaceballs.
Blame the content owners, not Netflix. If it were up to Netflix, they'd put everything online and you'd be able to stream any movie/TV show ever made at any time. The problem is that each show is owned by someone and Netflix needs to negotiate rights to stream with each company. Some companies demand a ton of money and their content isn't worth it. Others sign exclusive deals with other providers. Still others refuse to put any of their content online or start their own online service thinking they'll be "the next Netflix" when they are anything but. (I'm looking at you, CBS All Access.)
There was also a movement by the content owners awhile back to starve Netflix. They saw Netflix growing in popularity and felt threatened so they decided as a group to withhold popular content from Netflix and only give them older, "B-Level" content. The theory was that Netflix's popularity would plummet and people would stay with cable TV so the content owners could keep getting richer fast. Instead, Netflix has begun producing its own content which insulates them from this kind of attack. Combined with the increase in people streaming and thus the increased pressure to put shows on streaming services, this ruined the content owners' plan, but Netflix still needs to negotiate and pay for each block of shows.
And, of course, they threw it all out in a big bin right by the security line. All those "potentially explosive" liquids just dumped in one area. Either the reasoning for dumping this stuff is disingenuous or they're just stupid. Or both. My money's on both.
The only post-911 security improvements that need to be kept are the reinforced, locked cabin door and passenger willingness to rise up against a hijacker. The former means that a would-be hijacker can't overpower the crew and take control of the aircraft. The latter means that passengers recognize that a hijacking doesn't mean "fly to Cuba, sit through a tense standoff where the hujackers demand something, and then everyone goes home rattled but safe so long as they keep quiet." Instead, a hijacking now means "you're going to die if you don't rise up and fight back." (Granted, you might die if you rise up also, but your odds of dying are 100% in a post-911 hijacking if you don't fight back.)
All the other stuff is security theater designed to make politicians look like they're "doing something" and also to funnel dollars to companies providing the scanning machines.
My oldest son was born in the same year that the SCO-IBM lawsuit began - albeit five months later. He's having his Bar Mitzvah later this year. My youngest son is turning 9 in a couple of months and was born in the thick of the SCO-IBM/SCO-Novell /SCO-Everyone muck.
You might have mistaken. This isn't my app. This was developed by someone else (LlamaLab). I just downloaded and used the app.
As far as prompts go, I have to correct my previous statement. (I was typing from memory.) I just looked it up and there are separate apps for things like "Automate Network", "Automate Storage", "Automate location", etc. Each app has permissions just for it's particular area and each app is listed in the Google Play store. The overarching Automate app simplifies the install by not requiring you to search for the particular app to be installed to get the required permissions. Instead, you click a "Get these permissions" button and a standard Google Play install/permissions prompt appears. Once it's done, the button changes to "Remove these permissions" which will let you uninstall the app if you want to revoke the permissions.
I'm not on Marshmallow. I'm still running Android 5.1. The appearance is of installing "sub-apps" (albeit from the main app, not from the Google Play store). You need camera access, you need to have the application's camera module installed which will request the appropriate access.
I used IFTTT for all of about twenty seconds. It seemed interesting but once you advance beyond "take this data and send it to Twitter, take that data and send it to Facebook", it becomes useless. I wanted to use my smartphone's built-in abilities more and IFTTT wasn't giving me the capabilities. I found an app called Automate that lets you set up a process flow to do things such as upload to Google Drive or an FTP server, send e-mails, take photos with the camera, etc.
Wisely, the app comes with minimal permissions and you need to enable further permissions as scripts require them. For example, I wrote a script that takes a photo of someone if they don't put in my correct unlock code and e-mails that photo to me. Of course, before this script could work, I needed to grant Automate access to my camera. If I remove the script, I can easily disable the access and keep Automate from accessing the camera in the future. Much more powerful than IFTTT.
No security is perfect. This was a large government organization with physical possession of the phone paying a software agency with experience in digital forensics (in other words - retrieving data thought to be lost). It's not impossible to protect against this, but it can be trickier. From what I've read, the newer iPhones have more baked in security and would have been orders of magnitude harder to crack.
The big victory here is that Apple wasn't forced by the courts to unlock this phone "just this one time." Had they been forced to do it, one time would have turned into two, three, five, a hundred, etc. There is no precedent for the next time when the FBI or other law enforcement agencies come to Apple (or other phone manufacturers) demanding that they weaken security because "terrorism."
I meant things like communications would have taken longer. In order to tell people five villages over "Send your strongest men with weapons and supplies to attack the enemy on this date" would have taken a longer amount of time back then than it would now. Some people assume that this slower communication means that they couldn't have possibly pulled it off, but it just means there was more planning involved - thinking about who to send as messengers by which routes to get the word spread the fastest. Just because they couldn't post "Need strong men, weapons, supplies for a battle in 2 weeks. #BattleOverTheBridge" on Twitter doesn't mean organizing this was impossible.
And you're right that a lack of red tape could mean that some things might have been done quicker back then. Also, because they didn't worry about ramifications that we worry about, they could simply not bother to plan for them and speed the process along more.
Or it scarred the survivors so much that they refused to talk about it. Plenty of people who return don't want to talk about what happened on the battlefield. It's not like the movies where you have a misfit group who has an entertaining time for a few hours until the credits roll. It's a horrible, gruesome affair - and ancient wars were likely even more horrible since they would have been fought in close combat with sharp weapons. The fighters could have been tripping over half-dead warriors, stepping in pools of blood, and seeing sights that no normal person could see and not be affected by.
If civilization continues to progress for another 3,000 years, then the people in the year 5,016 will likely stereotype us as savages that just barely survived and couldn't plan anything massive simply because we didn't have access to futuristic technologies that they had. Sure, it might take us weeks or months to do things that people in 5,016 might do in a day, but we can still get it done. Similarly, while we might be able to organize and stage a battle of this magnitude in days, this doesn't mean that people around 1200 BCE couldn't do it at all. It just might have taken them longer to pull it together.
Researchers achieve 57Gbps through fiber optic lines. In local news, I'm still stuck at 15Mbps because Time Warner Cable is a local monopoly and thus has no incentive to upgrade their speeds.
So how would government buy their computer systems? Are there computer systems make 100% in the US - meaning every chip and component comes from the United States and is assembled here?
We also have the added fun of Asperger's Syndrome in the mix. At times it's hard to tell what's puberty and what's Asperger's. He also will overreact to some things and underreact to others due to not reading social cues properly. He's barely understanding pre-puberty social rules and he's going to have girls/dating tossed in the mix all too soon. My dad skills are going to get a major workout in the next few years.
I would never do this. I would certainly never load my kids' Android tablets up with a NES emulator with dozens of games that I loved playing back in the day such as Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past.
This is how Skynet really decided to eliminate all humans. It plugged itself into the Internet and 24 hours later started making Terminators.
My oldest is 12 and we've clearly headed straight for teen-attitude. Shouting matches at us declaring that he hates us, we treat him like a child, and we've got to treat him like an adult... followed quickly by refusal to do things we tell him to do because he's busy playing video games/watching TV... followed by shouting at us again for taking away said video games/TV.
I certainly hope there's a light at the end of this tunnel we're entering.