How about something simple: a sure-fire, non-circumventable, non-spoofable way to turn the device OFF? Removable batteries are going the way of the dodo for some valid reasons, but some of us would still like a way to ensure that no mobile rootkit is turning off the screen while leaving the microphones and cameras on.
>Remember the Christian Whackjobs who blew themselves to bits in the middle of a marketplace?
I'll see your acts of terrorism and raise you using child soldiers to do it. Say hello to Uganda's Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.
>What about the widespread rioting when the state helped finance a picture of their God in a jar of urine?
Oooh, did I mention that it's the same Uganda where legislators have repeatedly proposed making homosexuality a capital offense? Three guesses what religion those legislators follow!
>How about when the mormons beheaded their prisoner on film and published it?
Replace "beheaded" with a lynch mob raiding his home and shooting him to death, and you have a description of what *other Christians* did to the founder of Mormonism himself, Joseph Smith.
What a crappy post. Nokia would be an extremely poor fit for Apple culturally, technologically, logistically, and managerially. Chalk me up with the other posters who suspect the author of wanting to cash out their Nokia stock.
It sounds as if the author is describing a resentful employee. Whether (s)he's brilliant or not is pretty immaterial to that issue.
Frankly, if the person's contributions were as pivotal to the success of the company as the piece makes them sound, and the employee didn't get to enjoy a fair share of the rewards of that effort, they have some justification for being resentful.
nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe the Party line.
Hear, hear. We might be on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, but democracy is dead if we allow that to mean we can't have a civilized conversation with each other about the issues. Kudos to you for putting your beliefs out there for examination and peer review, and shame on the people who are trying to silence you instead of responding to your cogent and valuable posts.
What surprises me isn't the criticism/phobia of Russia. Russia is a kind of scary, totalitarian place run by mafias who are run by the FSB.
What surprises me is that we seem to have forgotten that we can't criticize and be afraid of Russia for doing exactly the same shit we do, only on a smaller scale than we do it on.
If Russia is evil for doing this, and we do this, then ___________.
>Confusion is a great tactic. Make them so mad they can't think straight, and you reduce their total effectiveness.
It's a great tactic in war, not so much as a way for the civilian public to operate in peacetime, against other civilians.
The most likely consequence of ruining discussions on the public internet is simply to move those discussions off the public internet, which then becomes solely an outlet for both sides' contrived propaganda, robbing the public of the value of watching and participating in the dialog.
In the long term, this is just shooting ourselves in the foot.
>Iran funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel. I still don't see how that changes our conversation.
The US funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel.
>I didn't say that it was surprising, and I'd love to know what isn't "honest" about saying that Iran's involvement in Iraq can be characterized as destabilization efforts.
Because Iran's goal isn't to destabilize Iraq, but instead to safeguard their interests and the interests of Shiites in Iraq. Considering the US toppled Iraq's government, would you characterize Operation Iraqi Freedom as "destabilization efforts"? I doubt you would, at least in any other context.
>Right, but it's not like Mossad executed the plan without political direction.
Is that an assumption that you're making, or do you have some specific evidence of that being the case?
>It sounds like Mossad has agents working within Iran carrying out targeted assassinations, using agents they recruited under the guise of the CIA. Isn't that successful?
When it pisses off your only benefactor by exposing them to unnecessary danger, I really wouldn't call that "having your shit together".
>At the same time, I recognize that Israel is probably the most sane place in that part of the world right now.
Like I said, you are in the bag for Israel.
> The sad fact is that an Arab Israeli is significantly better off in almost any way then their counterparts in the Arab states.
That's the sort of nonsensical thing one hears exclusively from people who are in the bag for Israel. Arab Israelis face monumental discrimination and challenge. They are not even allowed to marry freely. Compare that to UAE where every citizen receives their share of oil revenues in the form of a $40k/annum check from their government. It is transparently ludicrous to suggest that the standard of living for an Arab is higher in Israel than, for example, UAE.
>You started it:
No, I simply said that you were making claims outside the established facts, which you were. I didn't go on to speculate as to your motivations for doing so.
Kind of cool. This is one way that Cold War era bombers were to guide themselves to targets. It is also one reason why, during the Cold War, the US Government took such an interest in radio broadcasters, with plans in place to "randomly" black out most stations and restrict all remaining transmissions to specific Civil Defense frequencies.
I see "a difference", but I don't see how it changes the conversation. It seems like a semantic argument.
The difference between Iran being "in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding" and Iran having "supported a Lebanese Shi'ite political party that has occasionally had skirmishes with Israel" is much, much more than semantic! You make it sound as if Iran and Israel have been at war.
I was referring to their involvement in Iraq.
Not really an honest characterization of that, either. Iran is the capital of the Shia world, it is unsurprising that they would vie for influence in a majority Shiite nation like Iraq, particularly one that is their neighbor.
I'd say that Israel is making a pretty big political gamble by pretending to be the CIA - but it doesn't sound like Mossad messed up in any way.
It seems like they pissed the CIA off quite a bit, and endangered the American public by potentially exposing us to retaliation for their actions.
You seem to be very one-sided in your analysis of the Iran-Israeli relationship
No, I don't. You only think so because you yourself are very biased, in the same way that a Fox News enthusiast thinks that all the other media is too liberal. You are clearly "in the bag" for Israel, and consequently your scales are off. I'm being completely fair and fact-based, while you're advocating a cause using hyperbole, exaggeration, hypocrisy, misstatement, and when all of that fails, mud-slinging.
so I was insinuating that all your news came from sites with a anti-Zionist leaning.
You were engaging in an ad hominem attack against me, rather than addressing any of the points that I've been making.
Iran has very actively and apologetically supported Hezbollah practically since the founding of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
Right, but you didn't say "Iran has supported a Lebanese Shi'ite political party that has occasionally had skirmishes with Israel". You said that Iran had been involved in "almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding". Do you see the difference? What you said isn't even remotely true.
So then Spain wouldn't have a legitimate grievance if Americans were aiding groups who were attacking their troops?
Not necessarily. Hell, we sometimes aid groups that are attacking its own troops. In Syria we're aiding groups that are affiliated with Al Qaeda(!). Not that the bar is that high, but it is actually much harder than you think to engage in the sort of international alliance building that nations do without at least inadvertently sending some of that money to people who will do bad things with it.
Iran's "involvement" mostly included destabilization efforts - things like arms and support for sectarian violence.
I think that's not really an honest characterization of the relationship between Iran and the main Shi'ite religious political party in Lebanon.
No, Mossad actually has their shit together most of the time.
Did you read that article?
Why do I get the idea that your "facts" all come from a certain type of website?
I'm guessing that you don't mean "respected international affairs periodical websites"? Just come out and say what you mean. What are you trying to say?
> Do you think part of this may be that the French and Swiss are on average much healthier than the typical U.S. citizen?
I doubt it is a very big part of it because the numbers are just too huge... we're not spending a few percent more, we're spending over double the per capita GDP expenditure in places like the UK, which (no offense) is not a lot more healthy generally than the US.
That said, seeing some numbers would be interesting.
>I think that it is likely true that Americans are a higher risk to insurance companies.
I think the implication that Americans' fatness is taking our per capita GDP health care expenditure to nearly 20% without even managing to cover everyone is pretty wild, especially without any evidence supporting it.
More likely is that our system is just really bloated and inefficient, like it has been in so many countries until the past 20-30 years, when most modern societies reformed their health care system into a national system.
Except that it isn't public health care. It is private health care, mandated publicly. You'll notice private companies handle health insurance like Aetna, Blue Cross, and so on. And they still will. These companies are not going away.
Which is, ironically, why this legislation sucks.
Americans pay 16-18% of our per capita GDP in health care costs. France and Switzerland, the two consistently highest rated health care systems on planet Earth, which both offer true universal coverage to all their citizens, cost their people around 11% of per capita GDP.
You will not hear these numbers being touted by Democrats, Republicans, or the media. It isn't in there interests for you to understand how bad things have really gotten in the USA.
>Iran has been in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding.
That isn't the case at all. Israel's military has, since the 1979 revolution, actually never had a single publicly-known confrontation with Iran. Iran has never attacked Israel.
> They actively worked to sabotage American efforts in Iraq
That is a lot of bullshit. Iran is Iraq's next door neighbor, that would be like a Spanish person complaining about America sabotaging their efforts in Mexico. Of course we're going to want some involvement in Mexican society - they are right next door. It is even more justifiable for Iran - most Iraqis are actually Shiites who had been living under and being oppressed by the thumb of the secularist-Sunni Ba'ath regime. Iran is the Shiite capital of the world.
>They have been caught recently trying to play CIA in several different countries.
How is Iran pointing a gun at anyone's head? Even assuming that they are fully intending to develop nuclear weapons, which is a point of view that even the US intelligence community does not concur with, that couldn't really be said to be pointing a gun at anyone's head.
I guess my point is that even calling it an agreement is wrong. If I point a gun at you and demand the deed to your house, to then assert that we've come to an agreement about the house's ownership is like something a gangster might say, but not an accurate description of events.
Open source's character is fundamentally at odds with the precepts exemplified by Apple. The Open Source movement is one of, by, and for developers -- programmers who primarily want to make things easier on themselves by developing rad tools. On the other hand, Apple's philosophy has always been "make it hard on the programmers, to make it easy on the users". The APIs are highly abstracted, the human interface guidelines are extremely complex and precise, and the walled garden concept is taking it all to the next level.
I'm inclined to believe that each side has its merits and drawbacks, and that neither is the overall better choice in any universal sense. With that said, I'm glad there's as much competition at the OS level as we have these days.
I think it is pretty short-sighted to believe that this sort of sabotage will not lead to deaths. But even if it were never to amounts to that in a direct way, enormous amounts of harm can be done to societies.
Negotiation while committing acts of war against the other party is essentially duress, which is prohibited during international negotiations by international law and which can reasonably be argued to invalidate any agreement made under it, just as it would if someone made you sign over the deed to your house by pointing a gun at your head.
The Common Malware Enumeration list matured into the Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization project a while ago. We could use that pretty effectively.
Great stuff. We could do a lot of extra auditing and processing, even potentially at the hardware level, if we were willing to make the trade in time and memory. With our recent relative abundance in those areas and the costs of our presently lax security, doing something more than plugging fingers into the dam seems prudent.
There is an alternative. As a species, if we treated all this labor, resource, and knowledge "capital" as an investment opportunity, we could direct our efforts towards goals like outward colonization. The benefits to this path would be enormous - it could be possible to forever stave off the possibility of human extinction in the event of planetary-scale disaster or even nefarious human intent, by extending the presence of human life beyond the reach of any single person or collective who might wish to harm them.
It would require an enormous combined effort, the modern equivalent of the ancients constructing their giant pyramids. Unfortunately, this sort of solution appears to require a level of organization/cooperation/functionality/sanity that our species presently lacks and is seemingly not on the cusp of developing.
Slashdot Mirror
How about something simple: a sure-fire, non-circumventable, non-spoofable way to turn the device OFF? Removable batteries are going the way of the dodo for some valid reasons, but some of us would still like a way to ensure that no mobile rootkit is turning off the screen while leaving the microphones and cameras on.
>Remember the Christian Whackjobs who blew themselves to bits in the middle of a marketplace?
I'll see your acts of terrorism and raise you using child soldiers to do it. Say hello to Uganda's Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord's Resistance Army.
>What about the widespread rioting when the state helped finance a picture of their God in a jar of urine?
Oooh, did I mention that it's the same Uganda where legislators have repeatedly proposed making homosexuality a capital offense? Three guesses what religion those legislators follow!
>How about when the mormons beheaded their prisoner on film and published it?
Replace "beheaded" with a lynch mob raiding his home and shooting him to death, and you have a description of what *other Christians* did to the founder of Mormonism himself, Joseph Smith.
What a crappy post. Nokia would be an extremely poor fit for Apple culturally, technologically, logistically, and managerially. Chalk me up with the other posters who suspect the author of wanting to cash out their Nokia stock.
It sounds as if the author is describing a resentful employee. Whether (s)he's brilliant or not is pretty immaterial to that issue.
Frankly, if the person's contributions were as pivotal to the success of the company as the piece makes them sound, and the employee didn't get to enjoy a fair share of the rewards of that effort, they have some justification for being resentful.
nothing says "I can't win an argument" like organizing a movement to silence the few of us around here who don't toe the Party line.
Hear, hear. We might be on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum, but democracy is dead if we allow that to mean we can't have a civilized conversation with each other about the issues. Kudos to you for putting your beliefs out there for examination and peer review, and shame on the people who are trying to silence you instead of responding to your cogent and valuable posts.
What surprises me isn't the criticism/phobia of Russia. Russia is a kind of scary, totalitarian place run by mafias who are run by the FSB.
What surprises me is that we seem to have forgotten that we can't criticize and be afraid of Russia for doing exactly the same shit we do, only on a smaller scale than we do it on.
If Russia is evil for doing this, and we do this, then ___________.
>Confusion is a great tactic. Make them so mad they can't think straight, and you reduce their total effectiveness.
It's a great tactic in war, not so much as a way for the civilian public to operate in peacetime, against other civilians.
The most likely consequence of ruining discussions on the public internet is simply to move those discussions off the public internet, which then becomes solely an outlet for both sides' contrived propaganda, robbing the public of the value of watching and participating in the dialog.
In the long term, this is just shooting ourselves in the foot.
The only problem is that is Assange is throwing in with people like Putin and Chavez
Errr, how is he doing that?
I'll just leave this here...
>Iran funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel. I still don't see how that changes our conversation.
The US funds, equips, and trains people who are at war with Israel.
>I didn't say that it was surprising, and I'd love to know what isn't "honest" about saying that Iran's involvement in Iraq can be characterized as destabilization efforts.
Because Iran's goal isn't to destabilize Iraq, but instead to safeguard their interests and the interests of Shiites in Iraq. Considering the US toppled Iraq's government, would you characterize Operation Iraqi Freedom as "destabilization efforts"? I doubt you would, at least in any other context.
>Right, but it's not like Mossad executed the plan without political direction.
Is that an assumption that you're making, or do you have some specific evidence of that being the case?
>It sounds like Mossad has agents working within Iran carrying out targeted assassinations, using agents they recruited under the guise of the CIA. Isn't that successful?
When it pisses off your only benefactor by exposing them to unnecessary danger, I really wouldn't call that "having your shit together".
>At the same time, I recognize that Israel is probably the most sane place in that part of the world right now.
Like I said, you are in the bag for Israel.
> The sad fact is that an Arab Israeli is significantly better off in almost any way then their counterparts in the Arab states.
That's the sort of nonsensical thing one hears exclusively from people who are in the bag for Israel. Arab Israelis face monumental discrimination and challenge. They are not even allowed to marry freely. Compare that to UAE where every citizen receives their share of oil revenues in the form of a $40k/annum check from their government. It is transparently ludicrous to suggest that the standard of living for an Arab is higher in Israel than, for example, UAE.
>You started it:
No, I simply said that you were making claims outside the established facts, which you were. I didn't go on to speculate as to your motivations for doing so.
Kind of cool. This is one way that Cold War era bombers were to guide themselves to targets. It is also one reason why, during the Cold War, the US Government took such an interest in radio broadcasters, with plans in place to "randomly" black out most stations and restrict all remaining transmissions to specific Civil Defense frequencies.
I see "a difference", but I don't see how it changes the conversation. It seems like a semantic argument.
The difference between Iran being "in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding" and Iran having "supported a Lebanese Shi'ite political party that has occasionally had skirmishes with Israel" is much, much more than semantic! You make it sound as if Iran and Israel have been at war.
I was referring to their involvement in Iraq.
Not really an honest characterization of that, either. Iran is the capital of the Shia world, it is unsurprising that they would vie for influence in a majority Shiite nation like Iraq, particularly one that is their neighbor.
I'd say that Israel is making a pretty big political gamble by pretending to be the CIA - but it doesn't sound like Mossad messed up in any way.
It seems like they pissed the CIA off quite a bit, and endangered the American public by potentially exposing us to retaliation for their actions.
You seem to be very one-sided in your analysis of the Iran-Israeli relationship
No, I don't. You only think so because you yourself are very biased, in the same way that a Fox News enthusiast thinks that all the other media is too liberal. You are clearly "in the bag" for Israel, and consequently your scales are off. I'm being completely fair and fact-based, while you're advocating a cause using hyperbole, exaggeration, hypocrisy, misstatement, and when all of that fails, mud-slinging.
so I was insinuating that all your news came from sites with a anti-Zionist leaning.
You were engaging in an ad hominem attack against me, rather than addressing any of the points that I've been making.
Iran has very actively and apologetically supported Hezbollah practically since the founding of the Iranian Islamic Republic.
Right, but you didn't say "Iran has supported a Lebanese Shi'ite political party that has occasionally had skirmishes with Israel". You said that Iran had been involved in "almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding". Do you see the difference? What you said isn't even remotely true.
So then Spain wouldn't have a legitimate grievance if Americans were aiding groups who were attacking their troops?
Not necessarily. Hell, we sometimes aid groups that are attacking its own troops. In Syria we're aiding groups that are affiliated with Al Qaeda(!). Not that the bar is that high, but it is actually much harder than you think to engage in the sort of international alliance building that nations do without at least inadvertently sending some of that money to people who will do bad things with it.
Iran's "involvement" mostly included destabilization efforts - things like arms and support for sectarian violence.
I think that's not really an honest characterization of the relationship between Iran and the main Shi'ite religious political party in Lebanon.
No, Mossad actually has their shit together most of the time.
Did you read that article?
Why do I get the idea that your "facts" all come from a certain type of website?
I'm guessing that you don't mean "respected international affairs periodical websites"? Just come out and say what you mean. What are you trying to say?
> Do you think part of this may be that the French and Swiss are on average much healthier than the typical U.S. citizen?
I doubt it is a very big part of it because the numbers are just too huge... we're not spending a few percent more, we're spending over double the per capita GDP expenditure in places like the UK, which (no offense) is not a lot more healthy generally than the US.
That said, seeing some numbers would be interesting.
>I think that it is likely true that Americans are a higher risk to insurance companies.
I think the implication that Americans' fatness is taking our per capita GDP health care expenditure to nearly 20% without even managing to cover everyone is pretty wild, especially without any evidence supporting it.
More likely is that our system is just really bloated and inefficient, like it has been in so many countries until the past 20-30 years, when most modern societies reformed their health care system into a national system.
Except that it isn't public health care. It is private health care, mandated publicly. You'll notice private companies handle health insurance like Aetna, Blue Cross, and so on. And they still will. These companies are not going away.
Which is, ironically, why this legislation sucks.
Americans pay 16-18% of our per capita GDP in health care costs. France and Switzerland, the two consistently highest rated health care systems on planet Earth, which both offer true universal coverage to all their citizens, cost their people around 11% of per capita GDP.
You will not hear these numbers being touted by Democrats, Republicans, or the media. It isn't in there interests for you to understand how bad things have really gotten in the USA.
>Iran has been in almost continuous hostile action with Israel since that country's founding.
That isn't the case at all. Israel's military has, since the 1979 revolution, actually never had a single publicly-known confrontation with Iran. Iran has never attacked Israel.
> They actively worked to sabotage American efforts in Iraq
That is a lot of bullshit. Iran is Iraq's next door neighbor, that would be like a Spanish person complaining about America sabotaging their efforts in Mexico. Of course we're going to want some involvement in Mexican society - they are right next door. It is even more justifiable for Iran - most Iraqis are actually Shiites who had been living under and being oppressed by the thumb of the secularist-Sunni Ba'ath regime. Iran is the Shiite capital of the world.
>They have been caught recently trying to play CIA in several different countries.
I think you are thinking of Mossad, which was recently accused by the CIA of pretending to be the CIA while making contact with anti-regime terrorist group MEK in Iran.
>The idea that Iran is somehow passive in this whole mess is not very hard to dismiss.
I guess that is true, as long as you're willing to go well outside of the facts.
How is Iran pointing a gun at anyone's head? Even assuming that they are fully intending to develop nuclear weapons, which is a point of view that even the US intelligence community does not concur with, that couldn't really be said to be pointing a gun at anyone's head.
I guess my point is that even calling it an agreement is wrong. If I point a gun at you and demand the deed to your house, to then assert that we've come to an agreement about the house's ownership is like something a gangster might say, but not an accurate description of events.
Open source's character is fundamentally at odds with the precepts exemplified by Apple. The Open Source movement is one of, by, and for developers -- programmers who primarily want to make things easier on themselves by developing rad tools. On the other hand, Apple's philosophy has always been "make it hard on the programmers, to make it easy on the users". The APIs are highly abstracted, the human interface guidelines are extremely complex and precise, and the walled garden concept is taking it all to the next level.
I'm inclined to believe that each side has its merits and drawbacks, and that neither is the overall better choice in any universal sense. With that said, I'm glad there's as much competition at the OS level as we have these days.
I think it is pretty short-sighted to believe that this sort of sabotage will not lead to deaths. But even if it were never to amounts to that in a direct way, enormous amounts of harm can be done to societies.
Negotiation while committing acts of war against the other party is essentially duress, which is prohibited during international negotiations by international law and which can reasonably be argued to invalidate any agreement made under it, just as it would if someone made you sign over the deed to your house by pointing a gun at your head.
This just confirms my long-standing suspicion that Mark Cuban is a seriously smart dude.
The Common Malware Enumeration list matured into the Malware Attribute Enumeration and Characterization project a while ago. We could use that pretty effectively.
Great stuff. We could do a lot of extra auditing and processing, even potentially at the hardware level, if we were willing to make the trade in time and memory. With our recent relative abundance in those areas and the costs of our presently lax security, doing something more than plugging fingers into the dam seems prudent.
There is an alternative. As a species, if we treated all this labor, resource, and knowledge "capital" as an investment opportunity, we could direct our efforts towards goals like outward colonization. The benefits to this path would be enormous - it could be possible to forever stave off the possibility of human extinction in the event of planetary-scale disaster or even nefarious human intent, by extending the presence of human life beyond the reach of any single person or collective who might wish to harm them.
It would require an enormous combined effort, the modern equivalent of the ancients constructing their giant pyramids. Unfortunately, this sort of solution appears to require a level of organization/cooperation/functionality/sanity that our species presently lacks and is seemingly not on the cusp of developing.