He said Solaris and its predecessors. Solaris is just a marketing term though its often associated with the switch from BSD to System V. SunOS dates back to the early eighties.
I, personally, used SunOS for a few days back in 1988.
Sun were contributing to free software long before it became popular for pseudo-open-source enthusiasts to hate them, and even did so when they themselves weren't terribly sure how much they supported the concept. From OpenLook to OpenOffice, from Solaris to the recent Java announcement, I don't think there's much one can complain about in terms of their contributions to free software.
They're good people, the world is definitely better off for them, and the free software world especially.
Sorry, but no, whether you can find some idiot defining it that way or not, the use of "literally" to mean "figuratively" isn't extending the language, it's removing a word from the vocabulary by effectively removing any useful definition it may once have had. You, and others who use it this way, are making it much harder to communicate a basic concept.
It's like "Honest" being redefined as "1. Truthful. 2. Completely fraudulant". Over time, the result is nobody can use the word "Honestly" any more with any meaning attached. Unlike "literally" though, at least a synonym (truthful) would still exist, I can't think of one for "literally".
Your use is incorrect and, may I say, utterly moronic. You defense is even more so.
Actually, SCO (back when it was called Caldera) invented Open Source back in 1996. Yes, that's before the OSI thing, though after the foundation of the FSF.
Consider especially the boy-bands of the late 90s. It was literally a money-making machine owned from the industry from start to finish.
Hmmm, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. None of the boy bands, to my recollection, looked anything like anything I see here. Could you have possibly meant "figuratively" where you wrote "literally" above?
I've never used it, but I believe the usual pattern is that the latest version of something contains the device drivers for the one device you need support for, except that it's actually for a similarly named chipset from the same company and doesn't actually work with your card, but it does feel slightly faster, but has a whopping great memory leak that means you have to reboot your computer every few days.
Cingular has 3G in some areas. T-Mobile is rolling it out this year at some point but hasn't yet. Until it's available in your area, you're limited to EDGE which has high latency and generally tops out around 100kbps.
Cingular generally charges by the kilobyte and finding a plan that will work with a device connected over Bluetooth isn't straightfoward. All of T-Mobile's plans are flat rate. Their basic $6/month plan offers unlimited traffic but has some port blocks. Right now it seems usable for most applications, web browsing (including SSL) and SSH work fine. T-Mobile doesn't do anything to prevent you from using the service with a laptop.
I don't know if any of this will change with UMTS (3G GSM.) A year ago, I'd have said probably not, but the whole proprietary route is something T-Mobile seems to be slowly embracing so I wouldn't bet on it.
The majority of people I know on T-Mobile were attracted to it because of the quality of the network and the use of GSM. Their coverage around here seems to be substantially better than the other 1900MHz carriers (Sprint PCS, Verizon), and only slightly worse than the 800MHz carriers (Alltel and Cingular, in this area), but at much higher quality than any of those four.
T-Mobile is the current name of the old Voicestream network, which built a very high reputation back when they were far from being the cheapest network around.
Yes, many of T-Mobile's customers buy their own phones. T-Mobile is a standard GSM carrier, and their network and SIM cards work with any GSM phones that are suitably unlocked and work on T-Mobile's 1900MHz frequencies.
The summary is wrong, the restriction only applies to phones T-Mobile sells, and it appears to be a software restriction as opposed to a contractual rule. It sucks, it really, really, sucks, there's no need for it, but that said the summary, and even to some extent the article, makes it look much, much, worse than it actually is.
You'll still better off using T-Mobile rather than Verizon or Sprint PCS. The quality is higher (in most areas), there are less call drops (in most areas), and you have the freedom to pick and choose the device you want to use and always have unrestricted devices available to you.
Whether this will always be the case isn't clear. T-Mobile's openness is one of the things that has attracted many customers to it, but lately it's been going the proprietary route for many types of service. The "My Faves" service plans, for example, require proprietary firmware on supported phones. You can't subscribe without buying such a phone, and I believe your ability to use the major feature of the service plan (unlimited calling to five selected numbers) is limited to work only when you use compatible phones.
One has to hope this is a blip, as is the (pointless) banning of Java apps, and that the old Voicestream we knew and loved is still living underneath.
FWIW "redrawing a simple window" has gotten harder over the last few years. Users expect the underlying windowing/graphics system to support things like opaque window dragging, and even more recently translucent windows. The latter really is extremely processor intensive, and the former assumes the existance of plenty of RAM and the programmer has to allow for various strategies for making that work.
nd as to Iraq, I notice we haven't been attacked since we stood up and showed the world that we aren't the Paper Tigers they thought we were.
Exactly how stupid, how brain-numblingly inbeceilic, do you have to be to write something like the above?
Who, exactly, has thought at any time during the last fifty years that America was a "paper tiger"?
Why, exactly, would terrorists even think it's necessary to attack the US on US soil (which I assume is what you mean, because the US and its allies face attacks every fucking day in Iraq) if the US is doing exactly what they want them to do, and showing no signs of stopping? (ie toppling Bin Laden's most hated regime, and stirring up enough shit there to put all of the governments that constitute Bin Laden's other enemies in deep trouble)?
And since when has it been justified to just invade a random country to prove you're not a "Paper tiger" nobody's ever claimed you were in the first place?
You take the anvil, go on top of a very tall cliff, and drop it on your prey. Works also with grand pianos and safes in place of the anvils.
Be aware however that it's not foolproof. If you're standing on a ledge and you let go of the anvil, you may find it's you and the ledge that drops, not the anvil. There's also the risk that you'll miss the roadrunner, and the anvil will instead bounce back up, higher than when you dropped it, and fall on your head. You will then be pushed through the ledge and plummet to the ground. The anvil will then fall on you. As will the ledge.
Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.
It's a little like someone thinking that the way to change the root password is to vi/etc/passwd and insert "secret123" in the second column. By the time they're realized they're not the expert they thought they were, it's too late. And the real answer was to use the "passwd" tool. Why did they do it? Maybe there was a bug in the OS. Perhaps "passwd" didn't work, and so they edited/etc/passwd instead. But why the hell would they edit it? Why not report the problem and let someone who knows what the actual issue is get them the fix?
Alan Cox actually does a reasonable job of explaining why ESR has, essentially, blamed the wrong people for this here. There was a problem. Instead of ESR asking for help, he blindly used the sledgehammer to try to fix the issue himself, despite not knowing what the problem was and what the consequences would be of him using the sledgehammer.
Realistically, I don't think this has anything to do with ESR having a package management meltdown. On some level I suspect ESR knows full well that an ordinary user would never have pulled the same stunt he did, and that he bears the consequences for screwing with something he really didn't know enough about. I think this has to do with being frustrated and "out of love" with Fedora, in much the same way as marriages often break apart supposedly because He never passes the sugar, or She never makes the tea. Ubuntu? Well, of course, it's different, it's popular, and it's populist.
I just don't see the need for press attention over it, or the drama queen act.
The article actually links to answers.com's mirrored copy of the libel, which makes for interesting reading. Without wishing to repeat the libelous allegation itself, it essentially comprises of Zoeller supposedly confessing to a large number of relatively unpleasant personality flaws and associated actions.
Given the way its presented, I can understand someone wanting compensation after reading that about themselves.
That's actually what makes it worse. This is almost like Paris Hilton switching from Slackware to Gentoo and Slashdot covering it as a major story.
At the end of the day, I'm surprised ESR considers it important enough to be pompous about. I'm amazed that so many outlets are covering it. In the great scheme of things, this is celebrity gossip, not a great open source/free software "event".
Personally, I'd like to see ESR's response to these rebuffs.
You might. I don't.
You know, I've switched OSes a few times. I've expressed disappointment in one and gone to another. Sometimes you just end up more comfortable in another platform. Of course, you might use one incident as some kind of last straw, but it's not really the case. You tolerated that for a long time. It's more telling that you care about the incident, not that the incident in any way validates your beliefs.
The same thing is going on here.
The thing that bothers me is... I don't know why I'm expected to care. I know ESR is a widely known figure in the OSS community, one who did much of the political footwork in the late nineties, but he (a) isn't as influential (or so I thought) as he once was, and (b) he's talking about switching from RedHat (or whatever it's called today) to Fedora. As if this is a major thing.
This really is egomania and celebritymania at its finest. There is no reason this should be on the front page. This is not a significant switch by any stretch of the imagination. Quite frankly, Alan Cox shouldn't even care about this. I clicked on the article thinking there was more to it than ESR changing his distro, but no, quite seriously, that's what's going on here. Why is this news? And why did ESR expect, writing in his most pompous "It's the end of the world for RedHat because I'm not using it any more" tone, it to be news?
Right now we have 2.5G and 3G networks, all of which are relatively low bandwidth and high latency. That's slowly changing, but this is an industry that considers sub-100ms ping times "really really good". Everything that's bad about CDMA2000 and UMTS's W-CDMA will be fixed "RSN", always. EV-DO was supposed to fix 1xRTT. EV-DO Rev. A was supposed to fix EV-DO Rev. 0. EV-DO Rev. B will be available and solves all your problems (right.) HSDPA will solve all the problems with W-CDMA. HSUPA will solve all the problems with HSDPA. Yeah. Right. All of these suck. Even once the latency and bandwidth issues are dealt with, none of these standards are particularly power efficient if you're always connected, which you'd have to be if you want incoming Skype calls.
Building VoIP on top of current wireless data networks is a non-starter. It's stupid. The quality of the underlying TCP/IP transport is lousy, and third parties like Skype do not even have enough information to be able to determine if there's enough bandwidth for a call when they initiate one (imagine at peak time if everyone's phone calls suddenly dropped because there were slightly too many simultaneous calls in a cell. No, not just those trying to initiate new calls, I mean everyone already on a call.)
The probable solution is "4G", technologies like UMTS revision 8 (the Long Term Evolution project) and UMB, both of which are works in progress and are not expected to be even proposed as standards until late this year. They throw out CDMA and use OFDMA based systems. But it'll probably not be until 2010 until these networks start to become widespread. These networks, unlike todays, are designed from the ground up to be "All-IP", low latency, high bandwidth, and to use VoIP to implement mobile telephony. Even here though, there's a certain amount of work being done to make sure the VoIP implementations will be viable and that issues like congestion during peak times are dealt with, and that means running arbitrary protocols like Skype's isn't necessarily going to be as useful as people might think.
Skype is asking not merely for something that's arguably not reasonable yet, but something that'll not even help it in the slightest. I can just imagine how running Skype over EDGE will feel, and how much good it'll do for Skype users... and Skype's reputation.
Skype: it's in your best interests to wait. If you want, ask the FCC to mandate that future 4G networks are open, but please, please, don't try this with the existing networks, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.
There have been successful patent suits against Microsoft, notably the recent ActiveX one, and they're always extremely disruptive.
If I were Ballmer, no matter how much I may dislike competition from Free Software and see patents as a potential battering ram against it (and they're of limited utility against FS anyway), I would see the sheer disruption and difficulty innovating that patents bring as overwhelmingly being the major issue.
If patents worked against Free Software, it would have died a long time ago. The distributed nature of the software's developers, the number of groups that maintain it in countries immune from software patent laws, the interoperability demanded by Microsoft's own customers that patents undermine, make it a poor weapon, usable mostly for FUD and little else.
The V-chip should, in theory, do what you want, and it attracted howls of protest at the time. Which was something I never understood, because the V-chip, to me, made censorship (at least, in terms of "community values" BS) obsolete. There was no longer any excuse for it.
I'm pretty sure that if the Queen vetoed a law that made it illegal to have a name starting with the letter A, it would be parliament, not the monarchy, that would fall.
The royal perogative is the last resort against tyranny, and vetoing such a law would strike me and just about everyone else as a legitimate exericse of that last resort. Saying the Monarch would fall for vetoing that law is like invoking Godwin because someone called Mussolini a fascist.
have a very visible presence in traffic so that people could see that they are keeping tabs on it. Instead, they hide in the bushes so that drivers can't see them, and when people do see them they tend to slam on their breaks to slow down before they get checked. It can be argued that this causes way more accidents than speeding, but it is beside the point.
This logic really doesn't follow. There is absolutely no way the police can be visible to every driver at every time. Therefore the police have to do something else other than be visible to every driver. The most obvious is to make every driver believe there's a serious risk that there may be an officer looking at them.
How, exactly, do you do that by making all cops visible? If you have a policy of making the police completely visible at all times, then a motorist will know when there's no cop looking at him.
Hiding is a perfectly legitimate means of traffic enforcement. It provides a deterent. If you have so many cops that you don't need to hide to enforce traffic laws, then arguably there's a much bigger civil liberties issue than anyone could possibly imagine.
Apple has said publicly that the phones will be locked, and indeed has described people who unlock phones as "bad guys".
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He said Solaris and its predecessors. Solaris is just a marketing term though its often associated with the switch from BSD to System V. SunOS dates back to the early eighties.
I, personally, used SunOS for a few days back in 1988.
The details of the recall are here. Essentially, if you have a battery of model type 92P1131, then you need to be concerned.
Sun were contributing to free software long before it became popular for pseudo-open-source enthusiasts to hate them, and even did so when they themselves weren't terribly sure how much they supported the concept. From OpenLook to OpenOffice, from Solaris to the recent Java announcement, I don't think there's much one can complain about in terms of their contributions to free software.
They're good people, the world is definitely better off for them, and the free software world especially.
Sorry, but no, whether you can find some idiot defining it that way or not, the use of "literally" to mean "figuratively" isn't extending the language, it's removing a word from the vocabulary by effectively removing any useful definition it may once have had. You, and others who use it this way, are making it much harder to communicate a basic concept.
It's like "Honest" being redefined as "1. Truthful. 2. Completely fraudulant". Over time, the result is nobody can use the word "Honestly" any more with any meaning attached. Unlike "literally" though, at least a synonym (truthful) would still exist, I can't think of one for "literally".
Your use is incorrect and, may I say, utterly moronic. You defense is even more so.
Actually, SCO (back when it was called Caldera) invented Open Source back in 1996. Yes, that's before the OSI thing, though after the foundation of the FSF.
Scary, huh?
Hmmm, I'm going to have to disagree with you there. None of the boy bands, to my recollection, looked anything like anything I see here. Could you have possibly meant "figuratively" where you wrote "literally" above?
I've never used it, but I believe the usual pattern is that the latest version of something contains the device drivers for the one device you need support for, except that it's actually for a similarly named chipset from the same company and doesn't actually work with your card, but it does feel slightly faster, but has a whopping great memory leak that means you have to reboot your computer every few days.
Cingular has 3G in some areas. T-Mobile is rolling it out this year at some point but hasn't yet. Until it's available in your area, you're limited to EDGE which has high latency and generally tops out around 100kbps.
Cingular generally charges by the kilobyte and finding a plan that will work with a device connected over Bluetooth isn't straightfoward. All of T-Mobile's plans are flat rate. Their basic $6/month plan offers unlimited traffic but has some port blocks. Right now it seems usable for most applications, web browsing (including SSL) and SSH work fine. T-Mobile doesn't do anything to prevent you from using the service with a laptop.
I don't know if any of this will change with UMTS (3G GSM.) A year ago, I'd have said probably not, but the whole proprietary route is something T-Mobile seems to be slowly embracing so I wouldn't bet on it.
You must be confusing them with Sprint PCS.
The majority of people I know on T-Mobile were attracted to it because of the quality of the network and the use of GSM. Their coverage around here seems to be substantially better than the other 1900MHz carriers (Sprint PCS, Verizon), and only slightly worse than the 800MHz carriers (Alltel and Cingular, in this area), but at much higher quality than any of those four.
T-Mobile is the current name of the old Voicestream network, which built a very high reputation back when they were far from being the cheapest network around.
Yes, many of T-Mobile's customers buy their own phones. T-Mobile is a standard GSM carrier, and their network and SIM cards work with any GSM phones that are suitably unlocked and work on T-Mobile's 1900MHz frequencies.
The summary is wrong, the restriction only applies to phones T-Mobile sells, and it appears to be a software restriction as opposed to a contractual rule. It sucks, it really, really, sucks, there's no need for it, but that said the summary, and even to some extent the article, makes it look much, much, worse than it actually is.
You'll still better off using T-Mobile rather than Verizon or Sprint PCS. The quality is higher (in most areas), there are less call drops (in most areas), and you have the freedom to pick and choose the device you want to use and always have unrestricted devices available to you.
Whether this will always be the case isn't clear. T-Mobile's openness is one of the things that has attracted many customers to it, but lately it's been going the proprietary route for many types of service. The "My Faves" service plans, for example, require proprietary firmware on supported phones. You can't subscribe without buying such a phone, and I believe your ability to use the major feature of the service plan (unlimited calling to five selected numbers) is limited to work only when you use compatible phones.
One has to hope this is a blip, as is the (pointless) banning of Java apps, and that the old Voicestream we knew and loved is still living underneath.
FWIW "redrawing a simple window" has gotten harder over the last few years. Users expect the underlying windowing/graphics system to support things like opaque window dragging, and even more recently translucent windows. The latter really is extremely processor intensive, and the former assumes the existance of plenty of RAM and the programmer has to allow for various strategies for making that work.
Exactly how stupid, how brain-numblingly inbeceilic, do you have to be to write something like the above?
Who, exactly, has thought at any time during the last fifty years that America was a "paper tiger"?
Why, exactly, would terrorists even think it's necessary to attack the US on US soil (which I assume is what you mean, because the US and its allies face attacks every fucking day in Iraq) if the US is doing exactly what they want them to do, and showing no signs of stopping? (ie toppling Bin Laden's most hated regime, and stirring up enough shit there to put all of the governments that constitute Bin Laden's other enemies in deep trouble)?
And since when has it been justified to just invade a random country to prove you're not a "Paper tiger" nobody's ever claimed you were in the first place?
You take the anvil, go on top of a very tall cliff, and drop it on your prey. Works also with grand pianos and safes in place of the anvils.
Be aware however that it's not foolproof. If you're standing on a ledge and you let go of the anvil, you may find it's you and the ledge that drops, not the anvil. There's also the risk that you'll miss the roadrunner, and the anvil will instead bounce back up, higher than when you dropped it, and fall on your head. You will then be pushed through the ledge and plummet to the ground. The anvil will then fall on you. As will the ledge.
That's my guess.
Keywords like -force are there for a reason. They're intended for use by someone who knows what they're doing. The system didn't force ESR to use them, it simply was the case that ESR didn't know what he needed to do and used the wrong "system override" to try to do it. Ordinary users would, quite simply, never have destroyed their system in the way ESR did, because of some limitation being imposed by their system.
It's a little like someone thinking that the way to change the root password is to vi /etc/passwd and insert "secret123" in the second column. By the time they're realized they're not the expert they thought they were, it's too late. And the real answer was to use the "passwd" tool. Why did they do it? Maybe there was a bug in the OS. Perhaps "passwd" didn't work, and so they edited /etc/passwd instead. But why the hell would they edit it? Why not report the problem and let someone who knows what the actual issue is get them the fix?
Alan Cox actually does a reasonable job of explaining why ESR has, essentially, blamed the wrong people for this here. There was a problem. Instead of ESR asking for help, he blindly used the sledgehammer to try to fix the issue himself, despite not knowing what the problem was and what the consequences would be of him using the sledgehammer.
Realistically, I don't think this has anything to do with ESR having a package management meltdown. On some level I suspect ESR knows full well that an ordinary user would never have pulled the same stunt he did, and that he bears the consequences for screwing with something he really didn't know enough about. I think this has to do with being frustrated and "out of love" with Fedora, in much the same way as marriages often break apart supposedly because He never passes the sugar, or She never makes the tea. Ubuntu? Well, of course, it's different, it's popular, and it's populist.
I just don't see the need for press attention over it, or the drama queen act.
The article actually links to answers.com's mirrored copy of the libel, which makes for interesting reading. Without wishing to repeat the libelous allegation itself, it essentially comprises of Zoeller supposedly confessing to a large number of relatively unpleasant personality flaws and associated actions.
Given the way its presented, I can understand someone wanting compensation after reading that about themselves.
That's actually what makes it worse. This is almost like Paris Hilton switching from Slackware to Gentoo and Slashdot covering it as a major story.
At the end of the day, I'm surprised ESR considers it important enough to be pompous about. I'm amazed that so many outlets are covering it. In the great scheme of things, this is celebrity gossip, not a great open source/free software "event".
Yeah, sorry, I meant Ubuntu, I don't know I typed "Fedora"...
You might. I don't.
You know, I've switched OSes a few times. I've expressed disappointment in one and gone to another. Sometimes you just end up more comfortable in another platform. Of course, you might use one incident as some kind of last straw, but it's not really the case. You tolerated that for a long time. It's more telling that you care about the incident, not that the incident in any way validates your beliefs.
The same thing is going on here.
The thing that bothers me is... I don't know why I'm expected to care. I know ESR is a widely known figure in the OSS community, one who did much of the political footwork in the late nineties, but he (a) isn't as influential (or so I thought) as he once was, and (b) he's talking about switching from RedHat (or whatever it's called today) to Fedora. As if this is a major thing.
This really is egomania and celebritymania at its finest. There is no reason this should be on the front page. This is not a significant switch by any stretch of the imagination. Quite frankly, Alan Cox shouldn't even care about this. I clicked on the article thinking there was more to it than ESR changing his distro, but no, quite seriously, that's what's going on here. Why is this news? And why did ESR expect, writing in his most pompous "It's the end of the world for RedHat because I'm not using it any more" tone, it to be news?
That's true, I never thought of it like that. Good point.
I don't think it's even a matter of that.
Right now we have 2.5G and 3G networks, all of which are relatively low bandwidth and high latency. That's slowly changing, but this is an industry that considers sub-100ms ping times "really really good". Everything that's bad about CDMA2000 and UMTS's W-CDMA will be fixed "RSN", always. EV-DO was supposed to fix 1xRTT. EV-DO Rev. A was supposed to fix EV-DO Rev. 0. EV-DO Rev. B will be available and solves all your problems (right.) HSDPA will solve all the problems with W-CDMA. HSUPA will solve all the problems with HSDPA. Yeah. Right. All of these suck. Even once the latency and bandwidth issues are dealt with, none of these standards are particularly power efficient if you're always connected, which you'd have to be if you want incoming Skype calls.
Building VoIP on top of current wireless data networks is a non-starter. It's stupid. The quality of the underlying TCP/IP transport is lousy, and third parties like Skype do not even have enough information to be able to determine if there's enough bandwidth for a call when they initiate one (imagine at peak time if everyone's phone calls suddenly dropped because there were slightly too many simultaneous calls in a cell. No, not just those trying to initiate new calls, I mean everyone already on a call.)
The probable solution is "4G", technologies like UMTS revision 8 (the Long Term Evolution project) and UMB, both of which are works in progress and are not expected to be even proposed as standards until late this year. They throw out CDMA and use OFDMA based systems. But it'll probably not be until 2010 until these networks start to become widespread. These networks, unlike todays, are designed from the ground up to be "All-IP", low latency, high bandwidth, and to use VoIP to implement mobile telephony. Even here though, there's a certain amount of work being done to make sure the VoIP implementations will be viable and that issues like congestion during peak times are dealt with, and that means running arbitrary protocols like Skype's isn't necessarily going to be as useful as people might think.
Skype is asking not merely for something that's arguably not reasonable yet, but something that'll not even help it in the slightest. I can just imagine how running Skype over EDGE will feel, and how much good it'll do for Skype users... and Skype's reputation.
Skype: it's in your best interests to wait. If you want, ask the FCC to mandate that future 4G networks are open, but please, please, don't try this with the existing networks, you'll be shooting yourself in the foot.
There have been successful patent suits against Microsoft, notably the recent ActiveX one, and they're always extremely disruptive.
If I were Ballmer, no matter how much I may dislike competition from Free Software and see patents as a potential battering ram against it (and they're of limited utility against FS anyway), I would see the sheer disruption and difficulty innovating that patents bring as overwhelmingly being the major issue.
If patents worked against Free Software, it would have died a long time ago. The distributed nature of the software's developers, the number of groups that maintain it in countries immune from software patent laws, the interoperability demanded by Microsoft's own customers that patents undermine, make it a poor weapon, usable mostly for FUD and little else.
The V-chip should, in theory, do what you want, and it attracted howls of protest at the time. Which was something I never understood, because the V-chip, to me, made censorship (at least, in terms of "community values" BS) obsolete. There was no longer any excuse for it.
I'm pretty sure that if the Queen vetoed a law that made it illegal to have a name starting with the letter A, it would be parliament, not the monarchy, that would fall.
The royal perogative is the last resort against tyranny, and vetoing such a law would strike me and just about everyone else as a legitimate exericse of that last resort. Saying the Monarch would fall for vetoing that law is like invoking Godwin because someone called Mussolini a fascist.
This logic really doesn't follow. There is absolutely no way the police can be visible to every driver at every time. Therefore the police have to do something else other than be visible to every driver. The most obvious is to make every driver believe there's a serious risk that there may be an officer looking at them.
How, exactly, do you do that by making all cops visible? If you have a policy of making the police completely visible at all times, then a motorist will know when there's no cop looking at him.
Hiding is a perfectly legitimate means of traffic enforcement. It provides a deterent. If you have so many cops that you don't need to hide to enforce traffic laws, then arguably there's a much bigger civil liberties issue than anyone could possibly imagine.
Apple has said publicly that the phones will be locked, and indeed has described people who unlock phones as "bad guys".