Hmm, so any story of the form "X is a problem, but some people find a solution" is "contradictory, fallacious"?
This would make, BTW, virtually every story about a new invention designed to solve some pre-existing problem (which is 99% of inventions) "contradictory, fallacious".
It's not 12 years old. 12 years (or is it 13?) is when the first version of XP was released, but XP continued to be sold for nearly the entire decade. And unlike GNU/Linux, where you can just download a newer version of the effected component and expect virtually everything to work, upgrading to Vista/7/8/8.1 requires paying money and upgrading the entire system at the same time, pretty much expecting breakages, and new hardware requirements.
Which is not to suggest Microsoft should be supporting it. With proprietary operating systems, I kinda feel there needs to be a greater understanding of the consequences of handing your testicles to a company that has to make a profit to survive.
I think it was fairly obvious from the GP's complaint about the representative make-up that he was already aware of this. What he was asking was why.
Your "+4 Informative" comment is essentially not merely repeating the basis of the questioner's question back to him, but then complaining he doesn't know why he's asking the question in the first place. It's spectacularly unhelpful.
FWIW, the reason you should have given is that the original purpose of providing states with equal numbers of representatives in one house of Representatives was reflective of the USA's status as a Union of States, and that its purpose is historical. Like all historical conventions, it certainly should be reviewed from time to time. Proponents would suggest that by giving weight to arbitrarily drawn bordered land instead of people, the Senate more likely to come to agreements based upon reason rather than public opinion; however others would argue that there's no sign it does do that, and that the make-up simply provides disproportionate weight to political viewpoints that reflect a small ideologically far-right minority, rather than supportive of the country as a whole.
In other words, the GP has a right to be concerned, as the reasons for the equal votes per state rule do not appear to be relevant today, in theory or in practice.
It sounds to me as if you're confusing refactoring, where existing, good, well tested, code is kept, and reorganized so that it's more maintainable, extendible, and better suited to current needs, with rewriting, where good code is thrown out and new code is written introducing new bugs.
Well, that just means each Bitcoin is worth 3.1 Jesuses, proving it's a better currency because scarcity is the only thing that matters when picking a currency, duh!
Only if it's sub-VGA. 720P cameras are required to play the sound of a Bolex 16 Reflex camera in operation. 1080P cameras need to sound like an Edison Kinetograph, not so much for history's sake, but because the IP lobbying he did was so significant they're still passing bills Edison lobbied for after his death. The Kinetograph patents require a 59c per camera payment to his estate, and are due to expire some time in 2063.
Well, in the same way as "You know also stirred up racial tensions to an extreme in order to achieve political power?" might be a legitimate use of a Hitler analogy, there are occasions a "Think of the children" comment is also legitimate. As in most parents here are a tad concerned about the idea that little Jessica's MacBook could be used by perverts to take pictures of her.
We need a variant of Godwin's law about people who react to any analogy involving a specific thing as being an abuse of that analogy..
In an enterprise it's massively easier to do it without being caught, as long as you're in Tech Services, which is one of the groups most likely to want to make use of this hack...
As in "HR here, We suspect John Doe is snorting cocaine at his desk when nobody's looking, is there any way you could secretly record what he's doing?"
1. A5/1 is the "insecure, intended for export" cipher. Any US or European operator that uses it is not following recommendations.
2. It was cracked in the early 1990s. It would be bizarre if the NSA didn't know how to read it. Like I said, it was never intended to be secure by its creators. As in - GCHQ, the NSA's UK ally, has ALWAYS known how to crack it.
3. One problem with intercepting a GSM mobile call would be dealing with the fact that, as soon as you move away from the transmitting device, you're having to deal with interference from neighboring cells. Which is why any intelligence agency worth its salt isn't going to do that terribly often. What they'd do is install the tap on the operator's network.
So, in short, this article is claiming the NSA "can do" something, but only in non-Western countries, that it's unlikely to need to do given the fact the alternatives are way easier, and that we know it "can do" anyway, and knew it in the mid-1990s, and probably figured it could do right from the beginning given the close relationship between the NSA and CCHQ. This is news... why?
While I'm not in favor of banning racist speech, I should say that unlike some here I'm not blind to the consequences. I appreciate that you have the best of intentions and you may even believe what you're saying, but not every moral position can be backed up by a practical argument - in the end, we have to decide what kind of society we want to live in, and whether we wish to live our values even if, on occasion, there are negative consequences.
Racism can and does have deadly consequences, and the free, unchecked, expression of racism can, does, and will in the future, allow those who'd otherwise avoid going down certain roads knowing social ostrification follows, to follow a path that leads to discrimination, violence and death, directly or indirectly. The rise of Hitler, or conversely the enforcement of the constitution against the south, did not have zero effect on the amount of non-state-sanctioned racial violence.
As a basic example, over the last 12 years I've seen an alarming increase in the amount of anti-Muslim hate speech. This has translated into acts of violence and even terrorism against ordinary, non-violent, Muslims (or people idiots think are Muslims like Sikhs...) It's hard to believe that without a body of people claiming that most Muslims are anti-American terrorists, shored up with a litany of often dubious, and frequently irrelevant, attacks on Islam, that this degree of violence would be occurring.
Should those who promote Anti-Muslim hatred be jailed? Of course not. That would be to undermine our values and what we stand for. But our values are successfully abused by evil people, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise, and invent bogus "practical" arguments to defend our values, which have always been moral, and moral alone.
Not even that really. You ALWAYS needed third party apps to bring up the screen.
Here's the deal. This was never an end user feature. It was a screen that required additional software to actually bring up. It wasn't documented. I'm not even sure how anyone found out about it - my guess is someone trawling through the source code. Google's assertion that this wasn't meant to ever be released appears to be completely genuine and the apparent insinuation by the summary that Google isn't telling the truth is absurd and unfounded.
This is not to argue that the feature wouldn't be welcome. But as someone who used the equivalent functionality in CyanogenMod for a while, I can confirm that turning off permissions dynamically in this way requires quite a bit more care than it might appear at first - apps did crash when apparently denied features quite reasonably, even when you might think they'd have to cater for that situation anyway. I'd deny network privileges to an app, and see it crash, even though it would work without problems when the privilege was given but the network was unavailable for technical reasons.
Unfortunately, because Google has (objectively) gone to shit lately, and because they've lost some goodwill in their recent move towards closing much of Android ecosystem, combined with Facebook and Apple's paid anti-Google shilling campaign, this story is being presented as yet more evidence that Google is doing something wrong.
They're not. They've removed an undocumented part of the operating system that required third party software to access in the first place, that attempted to do something that requires thought, care, and planning. Good. Now, le'ts hope they finish what they started, and release a working version.
My understanding is that the NSA is a pretty large organization and that it's involved in rather a lot of signals intelligence type operations. It's doubtful, in the majority of cases, that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is likely to be involved in the particular scandal of the day you want addressed.
I appreciate this view isn't going to be popular here, where most commenters seem to think that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is guaranteed to be directly involved in reading their emails, which they're obviously doing because they want to root out subversives and blackmail them, rather than because the NSA might, I dunno, be going overboard and doing illegitimate things for a legitimate cause (like tackling terrorism or even spying on rival governments.)
Nexus devices don't have them because somebody at Google doesn't seem to like them.
Unfortunately I get the impression sometimes that there are influential people at Google who think that the iPhone is popular because you can't insert an SD card, can't change the battery, and because the battery life is crap, rather than because it's user friendly.
Yes, that WAS my point. One of them, anyway. In order to override ANY U.S. law, it first has to be ratified by the Senate.
Technically true, but remember that a treaty is usually a combination of clauses, not just one, all of which need to be agreed to. If the Senate agrees that the good clauses are something they want then they have to decide whether the bad ones are something that can be tolerated or not.
Now, based upon this, and based upon the fact the Senate can't just pass amendments or similar in the usual way, and given the fact that SOPA is pretty much what the political establishment wants in this country, do you think we stand much of a chance of seeing this treaty go unratified?
Well perhaps, but to play Devil's advocate: this isn't a game.
There are two parts to DRM when combined with an anti-circumvention law. The first is the one that exists anyway: to attempt to make it as difficult as practically possible for someone to gain unrestricted access to the raw content. The other - which the DMCA (and its apparent German equivalent) adds - is to add legal liabilities for creating, possessing and/or using the tools, however easy, that break that encryption, should they ever come into being.
Us nerds have a tendency to misread laws and assume that rather than it being a reflection of the intent of the authors, that the language used is arbitrary and written by dolts to be interpreted in the widest possible context. Specifically we look at words like "effective" and rather than interpreting it in the context of the rest of the law, we go off on tangents and ask whether something is effective using other definitions within different contexts.
Is, for example, CSS effective? Well, I'd argue it is in context. It requires you use a specialized tool, designed specifically to break CSS, in order to access the content. It meets the definition in context. It doesn't meet the definition if you change the subject and say "Well, in 1998 it protected content, but does it now? Is it easy to find the tools needed to circumvent it?", but that's not the definition of effective that's implied by the context of the legislation - which is why better lawyers than us are not making that claim when protecting, say, Real Networks.
As for ROT-13.... well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My guess is it wouldn't, because ROT-13 doesn't require knowledge of any secrets beyond the fact it's being used to begin with, and the "tool" used to decrypt it is already built-in to a billion email, USENET, and so on clients. At the very least, if SuperdooperRayVD 4K discs in 2020 are encrypted using ROT-13, they'd have great difficulty persuading judges that millions of pre-existing USENET clients from the 1990s are illegal.
How long until "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becomes a mental illness?
Probably in the same timeframe as "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becoming a crime.
Seriously, this is not a particular reason to object to "mental illness" definitions, any more than putting criminals in prison is a reason to object to laws. Any power can be abused. But some abusable powers are necessary. The question is whether you're willing, as an honest citizen, to be vigilant.
"If The Button's there, it's there to be pressed. That's what buttons are for" - "Conservative Party Manifesto, Election 1983" from Steve Bell's If....
The geekworld keeps claiming that. And yet turn Flash off, and your browser seems to be unable to watch 75% of the videos out there, including 75% of what's on Youtube after you've gone to youtube.com/html5 and "turned on" the amazing innovative feature of using your browser's built-in video player (WTF Google? Why is this not default? You know HTML5 contains backward compatible fall-back options, right?)
I predict that in two years time Flash will still be installed on almost every desktop and still be used on a regular basis by most desktop users.
No he doesn't have it backwards. The (campaigning part of the) NRA has specifically demanded crackdowns on the mentally ill in response to the latest shootings. The NRA (again, the lobbying group) is generally considered a right wing group by most standards, to the right generally of the core NRA's members indeed.
I see no upswell of demand that mental illness definitions become more relaxed by the right. While the left has generally been supportive of moderating things like the DSM to avoid harmless consensual sexual activity (until relatively recently, BDSM, for instance, was considered a mental disorder.)
Which completely ignores not only the other points I made but the market dominance Google has and their influence on other companies.
No, it doesn't. It answers almost all your "points", it's just that particular line was the clearest elucidation of the underlying crap your post was based upon. And pouring on more crap by suggesting that Google's "influence" with other companies has any bearing on whether they allow you to install third party applications they don't personally wish to support in any way is adding insult to, well, insult.
Point 1: It has no bearing on how strongly CyanogenMod advertises the possibility that their app might or might not void a warranty on whether it does, and whether Google should include software that does on a store that specifically exists as a way to ensure people can easily find apps that meet a particular standard. Google might have an obligation to relax those standards if people cannot use anyone but Google to obtain apps, but that's not the case, and further, there's little point in Google having a store if they don't enforce standards.
Point 2: Leaving aside the fact that you've conflated "damaging a device" with "voiding a device's warranty", again, this has no bearing on any issue here, given Google has no obligation to relax standards if its standards do not prevent people from being able to distribute software that doesn't meet them. As they can. Because Google has no monopoly.
Point 3: Already dealt with directly.
Point 4: Google is not "unilaterally deciding for all users" anything. Again, Google has no obligation to relax its standards if its standards do not prevent people from being able to distribute software that doesn't meet them. As they can. Because Google has no monopoly.
There's plenty to criticize about recent Google management of Android from a pro-freedom point of view, in particular Google's decision to encourage developers to rely upon Google Play Services (an API, and no, you don't have to use the Google Play store if you want to distribute an app that uses the Google Play Services API, so don't even go there) to avoid fragmentation, when the API is proprietary and available only to OHA members.
But Google has an absolute right, more so than Apple, more so than Microsoft, to ban apps from its store. And while I'd hope it never decides to go the Apple path and ban apps from competitors due to largely arbitrary anti-competitive criteria, a basic test of whether an app fails a reasonable set of rules - for example, because an app is likely to cause many users to lose the warranty protection on their devices - isn't just reasonable, it's desirable. Enforcing standards means Google Play has some value, rather than simply an unregulated marketplace akin to a back-alley in a red light district.
As for market dominance, at least stay on topic. We're talking about a free app. You don't need to get those from an app store. CyanogenMod just needs to add a link to the APK from its website. That's it. Does Google have market dominance for app stores for most Android devices? Sure. But let's complain about that when we see evidence they're abusing it. When they're using their dominance to actively prevent people from using things they don't like, not simply deciding not to support a particular product because of the potential of that product to hold Google liable for something not under Google's control, knowing that people who really want the app can get it and install it anyway.
you are still sacrificing the freedom to do what you want with the device that you own at Google's will. Google has made itself the gatekeeper by implementing that store and by seeing itself as the total arbiter of what is the best interest of their users.
Not even close.
Look, I'm not sure why it needs repeating, but let's repeat it again. Just because iDevices are locked to the iTunes store does NOT mean Android devices are locked to the Google Play store.
Calling Google the "gatekeeper" implies that it has absolute control over what you install on your unhacked device.
That's, quite simply, bullshit. Google has no such control. Android is not tied to any one app store. Google's sole advantage is in having a default app store on most Android devices. It has no monopoly, and you are not required to use it.
You can download APKs and install them directly. You can install the Amazon App Store and install apps through there. There are many other independent app stores you can install on your device.
The slavery comparison isn't merely offensive and over the top, it's a point blank lie. Knock it off.
Well presumably if they removed that statement because it was a mischaracterization of what Google said, then Google said it was in violation of the ToS.
It sounds to me, to be honest, that this was a difficult decision from Google's point of view. I say this because the fact it voided the warranty was obvious from the beginning, and this is a high profile project that would have been closely watched by Google from the beginning. The fact they took several days to eject the app from the store suggests they didn't actually want to, but felt obliged to either because they were under pressure from other members of the OHA, or simply because they didn't want to set a difficult precedent.
Because Musk is a rebel, a man who says what he means and means what he says (except when he's making shit up, but, hey, don't we all), he's a.com success story and he's gonna turn this world upside down gosh darn it unlike those suits at Ford and Nissan and GM and stuff! LEAVE ELON ALLOOOONNEEEE!
Seriously, like I've said before, I hope he's successful at moving the automotive industry away from gasoline and over to to electric cars, but I don't think nerds should automatically assume he's a fount of all wisdom. The hyperloop thing in particular just left me cold and pissed off, an interesting technology promoted in bad faith in an attempt to derail a minor competitive threat, destroying the re-establishment of transportation alternatives in the process.
(And does anyone here remember just how terrible PayPal was before eBay took it over?)
I'm not saying the media hasn't always been fair to Musk and Tesla in particular. Some of the reviews, from the NYT and the BBC, were clearly not even attempting to paint a fair picture. But the fires thing? I'm not even sure it's fair to criticize press coverage, most of which has been about Tesla's newsworthy response. Indeed, the first I heard of the Model S fires was in news stories about Musk's tweets and blog entries on the subject.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, so any story of the form "X is a problem, but some people find a solution" is "contradictory, fallacious"?
This would make, BTW, virtually every story about a new invention designed to solve some pre-existing problem (which is 99% of inventions) "contradictory, fallacious".
It's not 12 years old. 12 years (or is it 13?) is when the first version of XP was released, but XP continued to be sold for nearly the entire decade. And unlike GNU/Linux, where you can just download a newer version of the effected component and expect virtually everything to work, upgrading to Vista/7/8/8.1 requires paying money and upgrading the entire system at the same time, pretty much expecting breakages, and new hardware requirements.
Which is not to suggest Microsoft should be supporting it. With proprietary operating systems, I kinda feel there needs to be a greater understanding of the consequences of handing your testicles to a company that has to make a profit to survive.
I think it was fairly obvious from the GP's complaint about the representative make-up that he was already aware of this. What he was asking was why.
Your "+4 Informative" comment is essentially not merely repeating the basis of the questioner's question back to him, but then complaining he doesn't know why he's asking the question in the first place. It's spectacularly unhelpful.
FWIW, the reason you should have given is that the original purpose of providing states with equal numbers of representatives in one house of Representatives was reflective of the USA's status as a Union of States, and that its purpose is historical. Like all historical conventions, it certainly should be reviewed from time to time. Proponents would suggest that by giving weight to arbitrarily drawn bordered land instead of people, the Senate more likely to come to agreements based upon reason rather than public opinion; however others would argue that there's no sign it does do that, and that the make-up simply provides disproportionate weight to political viewpoints that reflect a small ideologically far-right minority, rather than supportive of the country as a whole.
In other words, the GP has a right to be concerned, as the reasons for the equal votes per state rule do not appear to be relevant today, in theory or in practice.
It sounds to me as if you're confusing refactoring, where existing, good, well tested, code is kept, and reorganized so that it's more maintainable, extendible, and better suited to current needs, with rewriting, where good code is thrown out and new code is written introducing new bugs.
Refactoring does not take "years". Ever.
Well, that just means each Bitcoin is worth 3.1 Jesuses, proving it's a better currency because scarcity is the only thing that matters when picking a currency, duh!
Only if it's sub-VGA. 720P cameras are required to play the sound of a Bolex 16 Reflex camera in operation. 1080P cameras need to sound like an Edison Kinetograph, not so much for history's sake, but because the IP lobbying he did was so significant they're still passing bills Edison lobbied for after his death. The Kinetograph patents require a 59c per camera payment to his estate, and are due to expire some time in 2063.
Well, in the same way as "You know also stirred up racial tensions to an extreme in order to achieve political power?" might be a legitimate use of a Hitler analogy, there are occasions a "Think of the children" comment is also legitimate. As in most parents here are a tad concerned about the idea that little Jessica's MacBook could be used by perverts to take pictures of her.
We need a variant of Godwin's law about people who react to any analogy involving a specific thing as being an abuse of that analogy..
In an enterprise it's massively easier to do it without being caught, as long as you're in Tech Services, which is one of the groups most likely to want to make use of this hack...
As in "HR here, We suspect John Doe is snorting cocaine at his desk when nobody's looking, is there any way you could secretly record what he's doing?"
I was unaware that it is against US law for a US Federal agency tasked with intercepting communications of non-Americans to spy on China.
1. A5/1 is the "insecure, intended for export" cipher. Any US or European operator that uses it is not following recommendations.
2. It was cracked in the early 1990s. It would be bizarre if the NSA didn't know how to read it. Like I said, it was never intended to be secure by its creators. As in - GCHQ, the NSA's UK ally, has ALWAYS known how to crack it.
3. One problem with intercepting a GSM mobile call would be dealing with the fact that, as soon as you move away from the transmitting device, you're having to deal with interference from neighboring cells. Which is why any intelligence agency worth its salt isn't going to do that terribly often. What they'd do is install the tap on the operator's network.
So, in short, this article is claiming the NSA "can do" something, but only in non-Western countries, that it's unlikely to need to do given the fact the alternatives are way easier, and that we know it "can do" anyway, and knew it in the mid-1990s, and probably figured it could do right from the beginning given the close relationship between the NSA and CCHQ. This is news... why?
While I'm not in favor of banning racist speech, I should say that unlike some here I'm not blind to the consequences. I appreciate that you have the best of intentions and you may even believe what you're saying, but not every moral position can be backed up by a practical argument - in the end, we have to decide what kind of society we want to live in, and whether we wish to live our values even if, on occasion, there are negative consequences.
Racism can and does have deadly consequences, and the free, unchecked, expression of racism can, does, and will in the future, allow those who'd otherwise avoid going down certain roads knowing social ostrification follows, to follow a path that leads to discrimination, violence and death, directly or indirectly. The rise of Hitler, or conversely the enforcement of the constitution against the south, did not have zero effect on the amount of non-state-sanctioned racial violence.
As a basic example, over the last 12 years I've seen an alarming increase in the amount of anti-Muslim hate speech. This has translated into acts of violence and even terrorism against ordinary, non-violent, Muslims (or people idiots think are Muslims like Sikhs...) It's hard to believe that without a body of people claiming that most Muslims are anti-American terrorists, shored up with a litany of often dubious, and frequently irrelevant, attacks on Islam, that this degree of violence would be occurring.
Should those who promote Anti-Muslim hatred be jailed? Of course not. That would be to undermine our values and what we stand for. But our values are successfully abused by evil people, and we shouldn't pretend otherwise, and invent bogus "practical" arguments to defend our values, which have always been moral, and moral alone.
Not even that really. You ALWAYS needed third party apps to bring up the screen.
Here's the deal. This was never an end user feature. It was a screen that required additional software to actually bring up. It wasn't documented. I'm not even sure how anyone found out about it - my guess is someone trawling through the source code. Google's assertion that this wasn't meant to ever be released appears to be completely genuine and the apparent insinuation by the summary that Google isn't telling the truth is absurd and unfounded.
This is not to argue that the feature wouldn't be welcome. But as someone who used the equivalent functionality in CyanogenMod for a while, I can confirm that turning off permissions dynamically in this way requires quite a bit more care than it might appear at first - apps did crash when apparently denied features quite reasonably, even when you might think they'd have to cater for that situation anyway. I'd deny network privileges to an app, and see it crash, even though it would work without problems when the privilege was given but the network was unavailable for technical reasons.
Unfortunately, because Google has (objectively) gone to shit lately, and because they've lost some goodwill in their recent move towards closing much of Android ecosystem, combined with Facebook and Apple's paid anti-Google shilling campaign, this story is being presented as yet more evidence that Google is doing something wrong.
They're not. They've removed an undocumented part of the operating system that required third party software to access in the first place, that attempted to do something that requires thought, care, and planning. Good. Now, le'ts hope they finish what they started, and release a working version.
Well, no, at least, not the last bit.
My understanding is that the NSA is a pretty large organization and that it's involved in rather a lot of signals intelligence type operations. It's doubtful, in the majority of cases, that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is likely to be involved in the particular scandal of the day you want addressed.
I appreciate this view isn't going to be popular here, where most commenters seem to think that $RANDOM_NSA_EMPLOYEE is guaranteed to be directly involved in reading their emails, which they're obviously doing because they want to root out subversives and blackmail them, rather than because the NSA might, I dunno, be going overboard and doing illegitimate things for a legitimate cause (like tackling terrorism or even spying on rival governments.)
Unfortunately I get the impression sometimes that there are influential people at Google who think that the iPhone is popular because you can't insert an SD card, can't change the battery, and because the battery life is crap, rather than because it's user friendly.
Technically true, but remember that a treaty is usually a combination of clauses, not just one, all of which need to be agreed to. If the Senate agrees that the good clauses are something they want then they have to decide whether the bad ones are something that can be tolerated or not.
Now, based upon this, and based upon the fact the Senate can't just pass amendments or similar in the usual way, and given the fact that SOPA is pretty much what the political establishment wants in this country, do you think we stand much of a chance of seeing this treaty go unratified?
Well perhaps, but to play Devil's advocate: this isn't a game.
There are two parts to DRM when combined with an anti-circumvention law. The first is the one that exists anyway: to attempt to make it as difficult as practically possible for someone to gain unrestricted access to the raw content. The other - which the DMCA (and its apparent German equivalent) adds - is to add legal liabilities for creating, possessing and/or using the tools, however easy, that break that encryption, should they ever come into being.
Us nerds have a tendency to misread laws and assume that rather than it being a reflection of the intent of the authors, that the language used is arbitrary and written by dolts to be interpreted in the widest possible context. Specifically we look at words like "effective" and rather than interpreting it in the context of the rest of the law, we go off on tangents and ask whether something is effective using other definitions within different contexts.
Is, for example, CSS effective? Well, I'd argue it is in context. It requires you use a specialized tool, designed specifically to break CSS, in order to access the content. It meets the definition in context. It doesn't meet the definition if you change the subject and say "Well, in 1998 it protected content, but does it now? Is it easy to find the tools needed to circumvent it?", but that's not the definition of effective that's implied by the context of the legislation - which is why better lawyers than us are not making that claim when protecting, say, Real Networks.
As for ROT-13.... well, maybe it is, maybe it isn't. My guess is it wouldn't, because ROT-13 doesn't require knowledge of any secrets beyond the fact it's being used to begin with, and the "tool" used to decrypt it is already built-in to a billion email, USENET, and so on clients. At the very least, if SuperdooperRayVD 4K discs in 2020 are encrypted using ROT-13, they'd have great difficulty persuading judges that millions of pre-existing USENET clients from the 1990s are illegal.
Probably in the same timeframe as "disagreeing with the politics of the ruling party" becoming a crime.
Seriously, this is not a particular reason to object to "mental illness" definitions, any more than putting criminals in prison is a reason to object to laws. Any power can be abused. But some abusable powers are necessary. The question is whether you're willing, as an honest citizen, to be vigilant.
"If The Button's there, it's there to be pressed. That's what buttons are for" - "Conservative Party Manifesto, Election 1983" from Steve Bell's If....
The geekworld keeps claiming that. And yet turn Flash off, and your browser seems to be unable to watch 75% of the videos out there, including 75% of what's on Youtube after you've gone to youtube.com/html5 and "turned on" the amazing innovative feature of using your browser's built-in video player (WTF Google? Why is this not default? You know HTML5 contains backward compatible fall-back options, right?)
I predict that in two years time Flash will still be installed on almost every desktop and still be used on a regular basis by most desktop users.
No he doesn't have it backwards. The (campaigning part of the) NRA has specifically demanded crackdowns on the mentally ill in response to the latest shootings. The NRA (again, the lobbying group) is generally considered a right wing group by most standards, to the right generally of the core NRA's members indeed.
I see no upswell of demand that mental illness definitions become more relaxed by the right. While the left has generally been supportive of moderating things like the DSM to avoid harmless consensual sexual activity (until relatively recently, BDSM, for instance, was considered a mental disorder.)
No, it doesn't. It answers almost all your "points", it's just that particular line was the clearest elucidation of the underlying crap your post was based upon. And pouring on more crap by suggesting that Google's "influence" with other companies has any bearing on whether they allow you to install third party applications they don't personally wish to support in any way is adding insult to, well, insult.
Point 1: It has no bearing on how strongly CyanogenMod advertises the possibility that their app might or might not void a warranty on whether it does, and whether Google should include software that does on a store that specifically exists as a way to ensure people can easily find apps that meet a particular standard. Google might have an obligation to relax those standards if people cannot use anyone but Google to obtain apps, but that's not the case, and further, there's little point in Google having a store if they don't enforce standards.
Point 2: Leaving aside the fact that you've conflated "damaging a device" with "voiding a device's warranty", again, this has no bearing on any issue here, given Google has no obligation to relax standards if its standards do not prevent people from being able to distribute software that doesn't meet them. As they can. Because Google has no monopoly.
Point 3: Already dealt with directly.
Point 4: Google is not "unilaterally deciding for all users" anything. Again, Google has no obligation to relax its standards if its standards do not prevent people from being able to distribute software that doesn't meet them. As they can. Because Google has no monopoly.
There's plenty to criticize about recent Google management of Android from a pro-freedom point of view, in particular Google's decision to encourage developers to rely upon Google Play Services (an API, and no, you don't have to use the Google Play store if you want to distribute an app that uses the Google Play Services API, so don't even go there) to avoid fragmentation, when the API is proprietary and available only to OHA members.
But Google has an absolute right, more so than Apple, more so than Microsoft, to ban apps from its store. And while I'd hope it never decides to go the Apple path and ban apps from competitors due to largely arbitrary anti-competitive criteria, a basic test of whether an app fails a reasonable set of rules - for example, because an app is likely to cause many users to lose the warranty protection on their devices - isn't just reasonable, it's desirable. Enforcing standards means Google Play has some value, rather than simply an unregulated marketplace akin to a back-alley in a red light district.
As for market dominance, at least stay on topic. We're talking about a free app. You don't need to get those from an app store. CyanogenMod just needs to add a link to the APK from its website. That's it. Does Google have market dominance for app stores for most Android devices? Sure. But let's complain about that when we see evidence they're abusing it. When they're using their dominance to actively prevent people from using things they don't like, not simply deciding not to support a particular product because of the potential of that product to hold Google liable for something not under Google's control, knowing that people who really want the app can get it and install it anyway.
Not even close.
Look, I'm not sure why it needs repeating, but let's repeat it again. Just because iDevices are locked to the iTunes store does NOT mean Android devices are locked to the Google Play store.
Calling Google the "gatekeeper" implies that it has absolute control over what you install on your unhacked device.
That's, quite simply, bullshit. Google has no such control. Android is not tied to any one app store. Google's sole advantage is in having a default app store on most Android devices. It has no monopoly, and you are not required to use it.
You can download APKs and install them directly. You can install the Amazon App Store and install apps through there. There are many other independent app stores you can install on your device.
The slavery comparison isn't merely offensive and over the top, it's a point blank lie. Knock it off.
Good point. I just hope that your earnest heartfelt petition to the editors of Slashdot is heard and they change the summary ;-)
Well presumably if they removed that statement because it was a mischaracterization of what Google said, then Google said it was in violation of the ToS.
It sounds to me, to be honest, that this was a difficult decision from Google's point of view. I say this because the fact it voided the warranty was obvious from the beginning, and this is a high profile project that would have been closely watched by Google from the beginning. The fact they took several days to eject the app from the store suggests they didn't actually want to, but felt obliged to either because they were under pressure from other members of the OHA, or simply because they didn't want to set a difficult precedent.
Because Musk is a rebel, a man who says what he means and means what he says (except when he's making shit up, but, hey, don't we all), he's a .com success story and he's gonna turn this world upside down gosh darn it unlike those suits at Ford and Nissan and GM and stuff! LEAVE ELON ALLOOOONNEEEE!
Seriously, like I've said before, I hope he's successful at moving the automotive industry away from gasoline and over to to electric cars, but I don't think nerds should automatically assume he's a fount of all wisdom. The hyperloop thing in particular just left me cold and pissed off, an interesting technology promoted in bad faith in an attempt to derail a minor competitive threat, destroying the re-establishment of transportation alternatives in the process.
(And does anyone here remember just how terrible PayPal was before eBay took it over?)
I'm not saying the media hasn't always been fair to Musk and Tesla in particular. Some of the reviews, from the NYT and the BBC, were clearly not even attempting to paint a fair picture. But the fires thing? I'm not even sure it's fair to criticize press coverage, most of which has been about Tesla's newsworthy response. Indeed, the first I heard of the Model S fires was in news stories about Musk's tweets and blog entries on the subject.
Disclaimer: I own some TSLA shares.