"You exhibit the same problem as those who blindly support the idea that "security by obscurity is no security at all," in that you appear to dismiss the fact that security isn't made of one thing or another, but the sum of all the efforts to make something secure."
Almost all security comes through some form of obscurity - you password, private key, pre-shared key, or heck even your one time pad are only secure because no one else knows them. In the and all security comes down to obscurity - so no, I do not think I am one that falls to that.
What you fail to understand - and searching on Apple iPhone exploits shows - is that the pre-screening Apple gives has *no bearing on the security of the phone*.
Apple screening is based on, as far as anyone can discern, other criteria. Indeed, without source code and truly rigorous testing that you couldn't afford it *has* to be that way.
Nor are the immune to the description you give of the G1's - ask anyone with any hardware before the 3G where all their shiny new updates are. My bet is since Apple has none they are sitting on the same vulnerabilities that they were when their last update was applied - well unless Apple has figured out how to update without patching.
I do not find apples "sandboxing" (which they aren't doing at all - they are simply saying you can only buy software at your local Best Buy which is *not* sandboxing - they are a walled garden, not a sandbox) to be useful from a security point of view because it gives me *nothing* that enhances that. Google really doesn't either - while the OS certainly does real sandboxing (which apple doesn't at all) installing applications generally requires you to give blanket permission that pretty much break this as a security feature too.
khchung finds the lack of flexibility to be invigorating as he/she doesn't have to worry over user interface. They somehow - as you do - equate only being able install one of three video players instead of one of five as "security". Neither one is more or less secure than the other - the space of apps you have is *not* security or sandboxing. Each trades flexibility for a smaller set of skills to learn, *not* a tradeoff in security.
If anything Googles real sandboxing with explicit permissions is *better* security - at least without a true OS hack they can't get at anything outside the sandbox you do not explicitly give permissions for. Sadly even a simple flashlight app generally wants internet access and all sorts of crap - Google really needs finer grained permissions.
In this particular case we are talking a patent - this means that with the full force of more than one countries judicial system *no one else is allowed to do this* without permission from the person who says they came up with the idea. So yea, if there is prior art then it is *very important*. If it had been first to market, or heck even a copyright where the *specific* implementation is protected then things would be great. But no, this is a patent wherein *how* you do it isn't near as important as *what* you are doing.
So lets say you come up with a MUCH better solution that they have - Oh well, you have to pay them royalties that they get to choose the price of (I have not seen - but who gets to use your specific idea that is copyrightable or does it sit as unusable until the patents expire?). Never mind that your solution is completely different, they have the patent on getting said message to the recipient utilizing the best methods chosen by an agent. That's *really* broad - indeed my aside is a paradox, two unmovable things collide (patent and copyright). In most other things that are patentable that doesn't occur - the idea of a perpetual motion machine is *not* patentable yet if someone found a way to break a few laws of physics it would be. Copyright and Patents do not have the same overlaps. In this case, as most software patents do, they are patenting the concept of a perpetual motion machine. Copyright already works well in that space, same thing for business model patents - the just do not make sense.
As such we have every obligation to complain about it too. I too dislike Facebook and Apple, but that still doesn't make this a Good Thing.
The iPhone *is* a general purpose computer, as such it has all the risks associated with it.
The fact that *you* are only allowed the bits they want to let you see may make you feel like it isn't, but from a security standpoint (of which I was primarily addressing) it is a general purpose computer. This limits how much *you* do, not how much a hacker/phreaker can do.
Of course, I do agree that I'm talking over most iPhone users heads (apparently yours included), but not in the way you mean. A large portion of Apple users confuse the limited distribution of the app store to be some form of security - it is not.
If you want a device that you are only allowed to do what someone else lets you do then the iPhone is a great choice in the "smart phone" market - no doubt about that. That may very well make the device simpler for you to use and there isn't much argument there - that is a personal preference (though I have yet to see any one confused by an Android phone that wasn't just as confused on an iPhone, however I have seen more than one frustrated that the iPhone will not let them do what they want and are happy when Android does). However security that is not.
As such I find no security difference and a great deal of usability difference. Most people do and find one or the other the "better" choice. The people who think and work in the way Apple wants you to find the iPhone great so stick with it (you obviously do) - no argument there - but most people either don't really care (the phone is as much a fashion statement as anything) or prefer to make the phone fit themselves instead of themselves fit the phone.
I'm not sure how that attitude is going to sink Android and have the iPhone ride the wave into the future, but oh well, that attitude and same argument sure helped the Macintosh ride the wave of the future as a dominate force in the 90's - I'm sure it will do the same this time. Apple has made good money over the years by giving that smaller market segment *exactly* what they want, no reason to figure that is going to change and if you are a part of that segment I suggest you purchase their products (as I said in my original post - there are people I would suggest them too).
Until smart phone manufacturers realize that they are making general purpose computing devices we will see this. To some there is a "war" going on between Apple and Android but that really misses the issue - in this respect trying to figure out which is the "better" on is like trying to figure out if Frosted Flakes or Fruit Loops is the better breakfast cereal - it is personal preference and there are most likely "better" solutions out there (and as a disclaimer I am an Android user - Droid One).
Until one side truly figures this out I'll stick with Android if for nothing else than I can get the functionality I want. With Apple I have to buy into their idea on how their devices fit into my life and I, well, do not. If Apple truly had this superior model than I would go for it, but as far as I can see I get the worst of both worlds - lack of specialized apps (as those are often, for unknown reasons, rejected from their app store and there are one or two I would like) along with just as many vulnerabilities (and those usually require you store that info on the phone - which until/unless they secure them I do not). So I currently see Apple as having those issues yet none of the "rewards" of going with them.
There are a handfull of people I know I would still recommend the iPhone too, but unless they already know the iPhone platform over the Android and are still asking others about it that is rare. Sadly it isn't because Android is truly better, but because if all else is equal then the flexibility of the Android system is superior and pretty much everything else is equal. Apple has remained where they are for a *long* time because they haven't figured this out too - though I also have to say they have not died because they ignore it too (their model of revenue find this irrelevant, which means they will not "win" but really can not "loose").
Not only that, but it is *one of your primary selling points* then it is also something important.
Lets face it, one of the issues going on now with American politics is that both sides have run a small govt keep their nose out of your business mostly honest politicians and what we have is crooked lets see how much of your money we can spend and tell you what to do (though argue about what part of your life we can control) politicians. Republicans failed it and the democrats busted them hard for it, democrats failed even worse, and now we have a populace that didn't really vote *for* anything but simply against something (and with a two party system that means that you got the spend over all less and intrude in ways you aren't quite as angry about but still think they all ought to jump off a cliff with no parachute politician). Frankly the smart phone market isn't that far off as an analogy.
In that sense none of the offered solutions are really ideal - Android is trying to move so fast with features that they aren't fixing security issues. New versions are out so fast there is almost no way that any manufacturer (even if they wanted too - and most do not as the market is realistically pushing less than one year hardware updates so major profits for carriers *and* manufacturers) could keep up porting the official releases to their device. Apple's head is so far in the sand (usually because to admit failure kills their image - image being almost totally what their major sales are based on) that things like this are rarely fixed. Heck we had a remote root exploit for iOS and it was billed as a *feature* and a month later a MUCH less severe remote root for the Android was a colossal failure of their security model. Even on a fairly technical site that *should* know better (here) it causes multi-hundred post arguments.
Basically the smart phone device is still not a mature product where time is spent on "lesser" issues. Lesser based on how it affects sales - if it isn't causing people to flock somewhere else then run with it. Apple will run with the "walled garden" approach as being totally secure until they can not - it isn't like this is the first major breach and a HUGE number of their customers will ignore it and tell everyone they can about how secure and unhackable everything is on them because of that. Even in this posts comments it isn't hard to find that - that this is unimportant because no major known attack vectors have used it: Otherwise known as Security Through Obscurity. Then again I have to note that the same is true of iOS's competitors (who are totally insecure because of the freedom allowed) - no widely known security breaches. Oh we can all point to individual ones and argue over if the were scripts, trojans, viruses, or whatever (what, exactly, was the remote rooting with an Apple produced PDF reader?), yet the potential remains there. That is the essence of security through obscurity - it is security in that no one has taken advantage of it, not because it is secure by design.
I'll 100% agree this is not an Apple only thing just as much as I'll agree this hurts Apple more than others - that they wall this sort of thing out of their garden is a *LARGE* part of what many are paying for. There are several things that can happen. One is that a real attack vector takes advantage of this - frankly it is a matter of time. It may be Apple, it may be Google, it may be someone else - but it is going to happen. When it does that entity is going to take it hard, further any of the others that do not fix theirs are going to get hit too (chances are it will cause a shift in attacks and as we know Security Through Obscurity isn't Security, especially once obscurity goes away). There are going to be lots of falls - frankly I think this to be the most likely.
Next is that one of them matures enough to to fix things to be secure - this mainly means a real hack/phreak never really hit the wild until now. Of those I expect Google to be the first as they at least seem to know the issue is t
"When the GOP demonizes "tax and spend" as the other party's problem, they mean "spend on domestic social programs" and deliberately exclude US military spending. I think that's a pretty accurate summary, actually."
I'll tend to agree there - most conservative feel that money spent on "defense" to be worth it and do not see it as something that should have caps. They see spending on social programs as propping up people who will not work for whatever reason.
"When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day"
And this is where the democrats lost - a billion a day is roughly 365 billion a year. We are looking at more than trillion new spending - MUCH more than a billion a day. You can include *everything* the Republicans have ever spent in the history of the us and almost not equal what we have (for one thing the Democrats accepted that spending on "defense" too). Running on anti-fiscal largess and the subsequent spending is one of the main things that killed the Democrats. That money also went to something that was truly unpopular so as far as "affect on the voters mind" double it. Many will put up with spending when they feel it is needed, spend on things that they feel aren't (regardless of if it is) let alone truly *unwanted* and you get even worse, further have a great deal of why you were elected to be a low spender and it is even worse. Thus the total rape of the so called "Blue Dog Democrat" who weren't as Blue Dog as what they ran as.
"If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too."
To a liberal/leftist. To a conservative not so much. To a centrist I do not know - centrists are much harder to gauge as they tend to still be hard with their ideas, just have a mix of them. I rather guess that the "best" in terms of winning votes right now would be to exclude military spending, be more discrete in where we spend on it, fix social security (not really sure what this means though - *long* post there), scrap HCR and start over (even if it takes years to work out), and mostly try and move back from your party's extremes.
As a concept I do not think it is going to fail - even in Podunct Tennessee (of which many places I am around certainly qualify, though I live in "metropolitan Tennessee" as much as it exists) you pretty much have total coverage. Yea I have relatives without electricity, without running water from municipal pipes, and all sorts of "primitive things" but they *choose* to do so in nearly every case. I can't think of any of them that could not go someplace that had those modern conveniences if they truly wanted and, frankly, the ones that rig up DC generators, an array of car batteries, and have homemade dc/ac converter to run their TV and computer (which gets a cell phone tower) understand those mystic things called "computers" better than their so referenced more advanced relatives. Indeed it is amusing to hear them talk - a rare mix of truly uneducated and truly knowledgeable.
If internet connectivity is the make/break part of this it is there good enough - after all it isn't like this is the first or only device to rely on the "cloud". It doesn't take a PhD in Computer Science to figure out how to cope with the example you give - indeed apps do so today and it is part of the standards of any technology that relies on cloud computing.
The bigger issues are why? Android and iOS do pretty much everything one would want on such a slim device - why go with *another* software stack like ChromOS? Yea, it "does" more but then there are netbooks which are 105% harder to lug around and do 150% the tasks. Of course I have to add I still find tablets to be in the same boat - the few people I know that love them have all the issues I do lugging a laptop around yet have none of the benefits - yet they think they are grand. I'll wait and see - however the occasional disconnect is *not* going to cause the issues you describe even on current products. Nor is coverage that spotty either.
Nor does an OpenBSD user excel on either Linux or Windows - they are three different worlds. You do not state, but imply, that someone that knows BSD knows those other systems. You either do so through intention (dishonesty) or through lack of thinking your argument out (ignorance), either one isn't particularly good.
The problem that the *BSD versions have for large acceptance is why? The big draw of it - security from the ground up - isn't really useful in most places. You need that at your firewall and router (usually one in the same for small to medium companies or a home network) and those are better handled by a hardware/software stack that is specifically designed for that. I've always been somewhat surprised at how few use this over other solutions, but as long as they work and are cheaper than rolling my own - I guess I do not care. My guess is that the savings from using a truly secure OS would not be passed on but would ends up with corp X getting a larger profit and that is their business, not mine.
For larger companies - again why? Cisco solutions are a better combination of performance and costs. The OpenBSD box is never going to perform as well as the Cisco 28xx series and is no more secure so why go that way? You aren't going to be able to pull from a cheaper OpenBSD admin group and save costs there - chances are they wil cost more than a Cisco Certified engineer.
The draw is going to be towards equipment manufacturers - I've never understood why some use Linux over one of the *BSD groups - or for those few that really need the flexibility that a custom configured gateway device in a secure environment is important. Performance blows for general purpose hardware compared to specialized ones today. Ten years ago they rocked, routers and firewalls on general purpose hardware was the the higher end of the market - today purchase a solution from Cisco if you really need it.
The other end is if some OEM picks it up and runs with it as a base system - that is following the Apple Mac-OS model. I would *love* to see a truly secure kernel and basic system available on the desktop for most personal use. Indeed Apple could have been that in a general sense, but they have their own issues regarding walled gardens and control of the "user experience". Nothing wrong with those, but also not my choice as I do not like their idea of a "user experience". The market is still ripe for a truly secure and open platform that is fairly simply to use. No reason we can't have all of those, just as we currently stand pick any two.
True to some extent - but as someone who lives in said small comunity here is what happens:
Person A - which you describe - comes in and buys a great deal of things of up. They have all sorts of "grand" ideas about making this a cheap place to live that is just like home. They distribute that money to 10 or more locals and then go to city/county council meetings and expect to be "heard" (and sometimes give good money to be done so too). Turns out that not only did they have to give away thier money to do so but they now are a handful against the crowd and they... fail in their quest. Life goes on, there is one transplant amongst the myriad that like where they are and unless they can convince the locals that their way is the Right One they aren't going to work.
At best they may form their own local groups and our system of trying to concentrate power locally may allow them to make their own regulations (I can certainly point you towards communities that do so), but even then they end up not working. For instance, we have a huge issue with Game - namely deer that eat everything and stand in the road (which them get hit by cars and cause serious injury and deaths). Most communities allow them to be hunted under managed guidelines - they get good fees from licenses and the population is controlled. Not so from those 1m+ transplants from California - deer need to be trapped and moved elsewhere. Turns out "elsewhere" doesn't want your deer as they have all they can deal with now - so they are stuck with them. There isn't a large enough portion of Tennessee they can buy to move them.
Ultimately there is a point where economies of scale just do not work. For people who are in the "poor" areas it is difficult to move up (in some cases the sale of your property - even in 100% is in equity - isn't enough for a down payment for the new area) and for those in "rich" areas they think they cant take over. In the end you still end up being one person - in some economies that can mean a lot, in others not so much. In our system - of which your post is in response too - it turns out we are one person and money rarely gets as much as people think it does. After all in order to leverage it you *must* use at and at that point you empower *many* who do not feel the way you do (and if they do feel the way you do, then it wasn't your money that got it done). In South Korea - no idea. Even then in the long run the influx of money (and resultant flow of jobs from one expensive area to another cheap one) will only stabilize global costs.
If the form factor is external and held in our hands they will *look* like cell phones, though would be called something else (much as if someone in the 90's saw a blu-ray they would call it a "cd" - not correct but not exactly wrong either). Cell phones have become about as small and thin as is realistically usable by humans (in the early 2000's there were some fairly funny comedic sketches about it) - indeed with smart phones the trend is *larger* phones. There is no reason to think that if we can time travel that we can't have a device that communicates back to our "real" time. There is perfectly good reasons to think that they would look and basically function (with respect t how one holds it and talks into it) like a cell phone. There are many technologies that reach that point, that is where development either has to shift totally away from that (say creating implants - which who knows if they would be popular or not) or to areas that aren't about functionality (say getting rid of the cell towers and moving to something better). My current set of winter clothes is WAY more sophisticated than even something worn ten years ago let alone 150 - yet I'm sure people even 5000 years ago could figure out what they were and how to use them, development was in materials, not functionality.
There is nothing about what happens that particularly excludes or even makes it unlikely to be a time traveler *in the film* or even given logic assuming time travel is possible. Its just that time travel is, most likely as you say, not going to be possible and even it is then it was still more likely that they either filmed some person a little of their rocker that just happens to be talking into an inert device or it is something we haven't thought of. The person is making that mistake that if the two options are "time traveler" and "I do not know, something else" that means there is a 50/50 chance of either when in reality "I do not know" is orders of magnitude more likely. The person in question certainly looks to be talking on a cell phone, but as stated above there were similar shaped hearing aids there were around then - much more likely something like that than time travel.
Androids VM makes a great deal of the "fragmentation" go away too, you write towards it and for the most part it will work pretty anywhere a device has what you give it for your manifest. Of the options you will most likely need to test against (say screen size) the VM that runs on your PC is perfectly fine for that. The possibility of running into a strange device that needs a special work around is MUCH slimmer than getting bitten by Apples fragmentation. Android is really only fragmented in the way Windows or Linux is - lots of different hardware and UI options out there but you are basically writing against a known common API and you don't have to test against every possible thing out there. Apple is MUCH worse in that it isn't abstracted nearly as much and there are real differences - it is much more similar to when we went from the 2.4 to the 2.6 kernel in Linux and you often had to do major changes depending on which system your software was going to run on and it was expected you would do both.
However, FUD is easier to fight as you can pick exactly the scenario where you win. Unfortunately for Apple it means you just kicked the pants off something that doesn't exist and if the real market competitor is competing against what you *actually* do you loose in the long run. It wouldn't be the first time Apple was poised to truly dominate a market, a competitor came out, and Apple competed with a fictional version of them and as such lost. When PC's began catching up in the graphics arena they certainly did that and their laptops phenomenal growth fizzled when they did it too. Neither market really failed (they make decent enough products and a large percentage of their customers are EXTREMELY loyal - many will even believe the FUD too), but instead of being a VERY distant second or third they could have been totally dominate.
Further business is about *total* costs - which as often as not are *not* simply up front parts costs.
There are arguments in many places over the cost per Gb of a solid data farm - after all you can purchase 1tb disks at around 80 dollars (and that is for the fast ones) - so raid those guys up, buy three and you save save save!!!! Yea, until you find that doesn't solve data retention, data integrity (oh - you mean you purchase drives that really only does parity or substandard check-sums? Oh bother that you lost that business critical transaction and no one can recover it), or you are down three days because someone has to track down where to get the part that you need, order it, install it, and verify that it works. Suddenly the "costs" are MUCH higher than if you just payed someone who does that, only that, and does it right all day long and you have no issues.
Ultimately most sysadmins will mistake their work environment for their home environment only once - if they are lucky they will still retain their job afterward. After that these ideas are studiously avoided until the next generation can't figure out why the previous one did it that way (they are idiots of course - no one *ever* thought about rolling their own and your generation is the first to even come up with that phrase).
A small to medium company can't maintain the staff needed for critical computing - let alone truly mission critical computing. They will mostly sit on their hands for hours, days, weeks, and probably months on end. For someplace that really has a tight ship maybe even years on end - but when it happens the cost of it *not* being fixed is higher than said expense. Few large companies can even do that - they have to be large enough that with their MTBF they can have a fully busy staff - that is *rare* as most things are fairly reliable. Best bet is to pay someone enough that they can make a profit and they can spread their expertise out amongst enough companies that they have busy staff. It will cost a greater amount than simply rolling you own does up front, but long term is MUCH better. That is the cost you are paying is for insurance, not parts.
I can't say if Dell provides this service for that cost - but as the OP learned the hard way you aren't just paying for hardware to your door. What you can accept in your home may not be acceptable in your work place. I wish the person asking in this article the best of luck - I suspect that they are going to learn some lessons the hard way.
It depends on what you are doing - there are applications that need speed but will rarely push much data on a monthly basis.
For instance we have a product that runs on phones that can use the 3g connection for public safety communications back to the home base for communications (this particular application includes visual elements too - if they simply need voice there is a telephone connection that avoids this). It is basically unusable for that application in the vast majority of the country even as a backup let alone for a primary means of communication. Connections are spotty, dropped packets happen quite often even on good solid connections, latencies are atrocious, basically unusable. It works great through a WiFi connection - no problems whatsoever. It doesn't use a lot of data monthly because it is only use when an ongoing incident is happening, lots of data over short periods.
It becomes truly important in some areas like that - the classic example is if someone is asking permission to shoot and kill someone and the response is "don't shoot" and the "don't" gets cut off - it is a real problem. There have been times where it takes over a minute for the message to reliably get there. Most of us will never have that occur but if you are in a security and disaster response arena it is quite important - people can and will die over that type of thing. Smart phones (and the resultant data networks) are so geared towards web browsing and checking e-mails where those things are irrelevant they have basically made it impossible to use for a great number of applications that it would be ideal for.
I haven't been able to test any 4G networks, but some of the other engineers I work with (a different company than the one I'm on - we resell and do custom software on some of their products) has basically said that while the 4G networks they have tested are quite a bit better and you can really tell the difference whilst "normal" internet tasks, it still is so focused on non-mission critical tasks that the carriers simply do not care about anything else and have made no attempts to make it better. We have seen that too in our other line of products (storage and disaster recovery products for mission critical transactional machines - credit card processors, 911 call processing, and a few stock exchanges) and some of even the server class hardware accepts error rates that we simply can not. It can be tough to find providers that truly understand that some people can't accept problems that are just fine for video games, web browsing, and using a word processor. In all of those cases the question is "If you have been shot and are calling 911 would you want your call going through that?". That is why voice connections are so heavily regulated and downtime is heavily fined - data not so much.
So yea, care about speed too - it could potentially one day save your life. There are many more applications that for these data pathways than just web browsing and streaming video.
We have no privacy on the internet - it is something no matter how much we want it to be otherwise, how much it ought to be that way, you can just forget it. Someone can reply to me all they want and nothing will change this. We do understand this principle in some ways - look at the recording industry and music sharing. We tell them that their old model of thinking is outdated because of the way the internet operates. That they just need to learn to live with it as there is nothing one can do about it - the only recourse is through legislation and that will not work in the long run. We tell them no matter how much they want otherwise it just isn't the Way Things Work - same here.
Ultimately this type of privacy no longer exists - they aren't intruding into something you have protected (which is another matter - that is still viable for many things), they are mining things you said in public. If you say it in public then it isn't "privacy" - the only thing different now is that the information is persistent and index-able.
Such is life on the internet - you choice is amongst four different things: Accept it and act accordingly, rail against it and be run over, pretend it doesn't happen and get run over, or never use the internet. You have no other choices.
After all, look at how many different combination of hardware you have on it, not to mention that you aren't even running in a VM as you do in Android. No one outside of mission critical solutions thinks about testing on everything it may run on, I do not know why some developers seem to think they have to have 300 Android handsets to test on. But then it seems they are primarily Apple developers that are getting into Android too so I'll chalk it up to still in the learning process (either that or they will eventually go broke/give up trying to do something they do not need too).
Further it's not like Apple is any better - try writing one app that runs on the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad, you can but for many apps it is a nightmare to do. Now you also have fragmentation there based on what the device can and can not support (many devices are not upgradable to iOS 4, are too slow to run apps, or do not even have the piece of hardware you need). Users have no way of knowing this without either reading reviews or trying it - on Android you tell it what you require and it handles that end of it. Indeed, of the different systems out there that have varied hardware (and Apple's iDevices certainly fit that bill) Android is one of the easiest to develop for. If you choose to do like some iPhone devs and only care about the one device you can do that on Android too - nothing stopping you, but that doesn't make it any less fragmented.
Frankly Apple and their hardcore development group are chasing shadows with this and wasting time. They are fighting against reality and, eventually, reality is going to win. It wouldn't be the first time Apple did it either - always easier to attack a straw man instead of the real thing, but especially true in markets attacking the straw man doesn't win in the long term. Apple would probably be in a much stronger position if they spent that energy on competing with something that actually exists instead of something they wished exists.
Sadly this is lost to so many today. For the most part put lots of math, create a model, and talk about it and you have "science" never mind that the process leaves you with nothing better than "inconclusive" because there are MANY different ways to interpret what went on. Science is a process, you can apply science from religious beliefs to trouble shooting your automobile's engine not running and you can do so without a single piece of traditional math (you will need logic however). You can create the worlds most sophisticated model replete with math only three other people on the planet can understand and you no more gave evidence towards you hypothesis than if you flipped a coin to choose between two guesses.
If you learn to read scientific articles you can read and critique *any* scientific paper out there - there is no need to understand the underlying principles. You will not be able to verify or critique those principles, but you certainly can the process used (and if the math is something you are familiar with you can look for proper practices there too even if you do not really know what it implies). That is, however, a dying skill and even in our worlds top facilities few are able to do that (I was lucky enough that the group I worked with at Oak Ridge National Labs was sticklers for doing that) - most are enamored either with the math or with funding - mostly the latter. It is difficult to teach and mostly makes other "scientists" mad at you because, well, you hurt their funding.
For myself there is no bigger fear for our future than this as it goes down to our ability to understand and verify what is going on - our inability to do this (especially coupled with out ability to affect changes) means that we are truly working on nothing more than guesses, and not even really educated ones at that. This goes well beyond science too, we have lost our underpinnings in being able to verify that something works and instead are - to use a vulgar phrase - so enamored with our belly-buttons that we can see anything else (otherwise known as navel gazing). If you can get the equation to balance then it *must* be true and then both sides square off for a battle when *neither* side is remote accurate. We are all 10-20 years from total anihilation from so many sources that are totally natural and could never harm us we should either all be finding Jesus or Allah within the moment or we will live forever. What this means is that we have degenerated into who has the best media sources - is CNN or FoxNews who you prefer? Neither one of them are worth a flip if you want real news, however for those that really like staring at their navels this is a truly important question and the answer affects so many other things.
Sadly both sides are navel gazing and forgot what real science is - it is no longer a contest of who is the closest to being correct but who can be the most persuasive with their propaganda. I do not care if you a thinking if religious/atheist, global warming/deniers, or whatever other dichotomy you are picturing me railing against (each side always figures I'm a card carrying member of the other) chances are you are correct. To use another vulgar (with the popular sense of the term instead of the traditional this time): they both suck donkey balls.
I do not have a free pocket - I have to carry two large items with me. One is my wallet, that usually resides in one pocket and it can't be my back one as arthritis in my hip is HIGHLY aggravated by sitting on the wallet. I also have to carry an epi-pen kit due to a severe allergy to seafood (unlucky enough to be fish, shellfish, *and* mollusks) - not only would this also aggravate my arthritis but the pens do not do very well being sat on any more than the phone does. So belt clip for me.
But then even when I was young I never really cared much about fashion anyway - comfortable blue jeans, a plain black button or pullover shirt, and decent shoes (if I can find any that fit me) and I'm pretty much happy anywhere. At 35 I find myself even less interested in what the ~18 year olds think about things like a belt clip for my phone. I also tend to find it sad the few my age or older that do worry over that type of stuff too, most seem to have other issues. Judging by the amount sold and the number of people wearing them I'm not that alone in that regards either - however the always worn blue-tooth ear phone bugs the crap out of everyone and after about the first six months or so they were out you rarely see one (not only do you look like an idiot but they aren't comfortable *or* functional).
Further there is a LOT of testing goes into those things. Yea we tend to take a toilet seat for granted but one many of those airplanes and especially things like submarines *every* part is critical. Some engineer has to plan out pretty much everything that can occur to it and make sure that it either doesn't fail or fails in such a way that it doesn't become mission critical - that is expensive and, as you say, when they are only buying 50 of them it really drives the per unit costs up.
I do work in mission critical computing and it is shocking how many SCSI terminators, USB cables, SATA cables, heck even raid controllers have an "acceptable" failure rate (uncaught) that is totally unacceptable when it is either millions of dollars per minute or often peoples lives on the line running through your equipment. Yea, we used to sell SCSI terminators at 1500 dollars piece, but when the countries stock exchange, New York cities 9-11 servers, or citi-banks central credit card processing servers count on it *working* it isn't that expensive. That's why EMC can charge the outrageous prices they do and why those data farms cost so much, it isn't the hardware that is the primary cost.
A toilet seat having a.1% chance of falling off your seat at home is just fine, a.001% chance of one falling off and becoming debris in an aircraft that will probably need to make high-g maneuvers is not. They are paying to make sure that it doesn't become a fairly heavy flying object. So even after tooling up per specifications I bet there was en extensive testing phase that went along with it too.
Similar thing is true for many of the "wasted" science - the part that made it not a waste was never reported. When I was at Oak Ridge National Labs we made the news for figuring out why a shower curtain pulls in when you take a shower instead of puffing out. I do not recall the exact amount spent but it was in the millions. Lots of carping about a waste of time - it was "obvious" (and the "obvious" answer was right too - moving air lowers pressure on the inside). However what the real science was about is that real life didn't follow the model with its margin of error - indeed it was well outside of it. The study modeled down to a molecular level, they eventually found some link with heat and water vapor (I don't recall exactly - I'm a computer scientist so outside of the opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs, and critiquing the methodology I can't do much). The big news about it around the lab was that the discovery was estimated to save several billion in fuel costs in the Aviation industry over the next 10 years. That little tidbit of information was never talked about, just the colossal "waste", the fact was it was an unknown effect and the easiest/cheapest to measure model was a shower. They could have tripled the budget and built a special made lab for it and sounded more "science like" (and is, later on, what they started to do to avoid bad press - yep, good thing people caught that govt waste).
Maybe - I do not necessarily disagree with that either. There may be a large number of other reasons we aren't told, we are only hearing his side of the story too. My bet is that the vast vast majority of people who were *actually* doing something got caught before doing it they would raise a fuss about being watched and would take advantage of the current political climate in certain groups to have knee jerk reactions to anything the govt does. I seriously doubt most would admit to being a subversive. The same would be true if we only talked to the law enforcement side - I'm betting they have have some good logical reasoning to do this that ignores the other sides view of the matter too.
However, in this particular case what we *have* heard from the Law Enforcement side is that there was no court ordered placement of the device. *That* is truly wrong. A large part of why we are supposed to tolerate this type of intrusion into our privacy is that it went through many checks and balances to happen and for many many decades it certainly has done so. One entity, carrying the full weight of the Federal govt, did this with *no* oversight whatsoever. *That* is why many groups (and while it changes some based on who is President, it is slowly becoming a universal idea) have afore mentioned knee jerk reaction.
There was a time when, for the most part, we believed the authorities because of what they had to go through to do this type of thing. We knew that enough different types of people had signed off on it that saying "There is a reason" was *mostly* good enough. There has never been a perfect system and sometimes it didn't work - but over all those things were rare. However for quite a while (well before 9/11 - ask the Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas families that the ATF/FBI went after) there has been a sever erosion of those checks and balances with the power inevitably going towards the govt - and specifically the executive branch. I can't really say when it started either, I can say that it became blatant enough during Bush Jr's tenure that it was obvious and all but the most partisan deny that. Further all but the most partisan find it obvious that Obama has not only failed to reverse or halt that course but has done everything he can to further making Bush Jr's term look good. Unless *both* parties go through a major internal change I suspect that the next couple of Presidents will do the same thing too, it's just a question of if they will have an "R" or "D" after their name and which parts of our lives they will enact draconian one sided controls on.
The officer was giving sworn testimony - it is generally considered "truthful" and gives them the ability to ask for it. He had a right to refuse it, did so, and lost his case mostly because of that. Think of this as being tried for murder, having plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict and your main defense is "the person is alive, you could talk to them all you want if I would tell you where they aren't, but ney ney I don't have to so I'm not". That's probably not going to be persuasive to Jurors and certainly isn't a fifth amendment violation if you get convicted because of your inability to prove your innocence - fifth amendment means he doesn't have to give they keys and he didn't. They had enough other evidence to convict so he mainly just threw away his chance to overturn all their evidence.
Not giving his encryption keys isn't exactly being used against him as much giving the prosecution a good solid reason as to why they didn't have the pictures. I suppose he may have had other illegal things on his computer and giving the keys would have shown that (maybe the guy was running one of the largest warez and music sharing sites on the planet), while he would have shot a big hole in their case there they could still prosecute. Plus I'm sure if he thwarted that case they would have been out to teach him a lesson and done so. However all that is irrelevant to the case, they had enough evidence to convict without the pictures and he gave them a perfectly reasonable answer to the question of "But where are the pictures?" - "Defendant is taking his fifth amendment rights and refusing to give over his encryption keys, therefore we can not produce them". It doesn't even need a negative connotation to the jurors - if he didn't have them he simply threw away his main defense as the prosecutions case was strong enough as long as they had a reasonable excuse to not produce them - which he gave them.
Frankly that's what usually happens when you plead the fifth during a trial - it rarely helps you out once something has made it past the prosecutors desk and a grand jury. It's really only of help if the authorities show up to your door and demand access or during the buildup of evidence before the trial (that and to stop laws like the one in the article). It isn't a magic bullet that gets you out of trouble, if you are far enough along that you are having to plead it on trial that generally means you did it and they have enough other evidence to convict. It's mainly just trying to keep the slam dunk away from the prosecution - its rarely anything other than a desperation tactic, not because it taints opinions but because its really only useful when you did something incriminating but didn't do it well enough to not leave so many other little droppings of what you did around to not get noticed. The case quoted here is exactly that, it helped the prosecution enough (otherwise they would have had to produce the pictures) that I can't believe his lawyer didn't pressure him to release them if he was innocent. There are times where it is something one has to do and helps during a trial, but more often than not it isn't.
Yea, because we all know Apple wouldn't let that happen. (but don't worry, they do not associate it with you - they just associate it with the co-ordinates of where you live and work so it is totally anonymous).
Face it, your phone is a little general purpose computer that happens to have the ability to talk to cell networks. Treat it as such and you will be happy, pretend it isn't and you are going to get bit. If developers have access to that information, the ability to transmit it anywhere, and it is really difficult to track if they are doing that then I can assure you that it occurs VERY often. Apple isn't remotely immune to it, their app approval process doesn't include inspecting source code. If this can make it through then you can be sure gathering GPS data and sending it over a socket can occur and does.
All Apple does is give you a false sense of security.
...idiots or trying to drum up publicity (my bet is the second).
Really - IMDB can't do what they want them to and remain a reliable source of movie information. IMDB clearly told them what was needed: be at a late enough period of production or at release so they can tell it isn't simply a hobby or publicity stunt or have a major publisher sign off. So they resubmitted without *any* of that happening and *gasp* got rejected each time! I mean, there is only one explanation right - they are protecting Amazon.com business of selling movies!!!!!! BitTorrent is a *distribution method*, not a distributor. They are following their rules for self published movies and those are in place for a reason. It's like complaining that a CentOS repository will not take your half baked project like sourceforge would - after all you have other half baked projects that made it! It's not some grand conspiracy, they list professionally made published movies and some publishers are reliable enough that they allow them to "pre-publish" information. Any other database that is looking for a similar reputation (again, take a community accepted CentOS repository) and they have to do the same thing. Nothing wrong with either way and there is place for both, but do not expect one striving for the higher reputation to take anything.
Further this is what you pay publishers to do and is the tradeoff one pays for saving that money. To use another computer analogy no reason you can't self publish your own x.509 certificate, set up a secure server, and rely totally on that. Just do not complain when people do not trust it like they would a certificate signed by Verisign - you are not really paying for the distribution, you are paying for the trust and connections that the publisher (or CA) has. Lots of examples there too - have your home for sale by owner? You aren't going to get the ability to advertise like a real-estate agent would. Service your own equipment? The place you purchased your items from aren't going to refund your money because you hit something with a hammer you were not supposed too. Yea, they have a few other movies with them but I bet they were not added unless: the movie was released, at the end of production, or had a publisher backing it. Even then one has to note the number of movies that are "in production" and never make it, by that observation the standards are already low.
IMDB is *not* looking to be a repository for information on any and all movies out there (they aren't looking to be a sourceforge of movies, they are looking to be a community wide accepted CentOS repository). Yea, some "real" movies may very well end up with much worse production values than this one - but they aren't going to take your word for it. If they release a quality movie and IMDB refuses *then* lets blast them, until then these guys are only marginally better then me submitting my upcoming movie to IMDB.
The last place I worked was a "union shop" - Oak Ridage National Labs. So, let me tell you why I have an obviously irrational dislike of unions.
So, you have an Ethernet card go bad (back when they were not integrated into the mother boards). You had to deal with the Teamsters, Electricians, and the carpenters to get it changed. Only the teamsters can move things. Typically speaking your computer isn't where everything can be taken off so if that monitor needs moved or the box needs moved around to get access to it then you have the have the teamsters do it. Next only electricians are allowed to plug/unplug wires and you cards. Lastly carpenters are the only ones that can take a screw out or put it in. Further you always get a minimum of two workers at a minimum of an hour each. You can't schedule them all at one time (after all they are busy people and no one knows when they will get to you) so you have to do each one, wait until the finish, and schedule another. If you are a high enough in the corporate hierarchy you can get several at a time - but it costs you.
So, now back to the dead card - you need to first call the teamsters in to move your monitor and/or box. Next the electricians have to come over and unplug the unit. Then you get the carpenters to come out to take the screws out of the back of the machine. Now back to the teamsters to take the case off (it is moving it). Then the carpenters come back out and take the screws out that are holding you card in place. Then the electricians have to back called in to change the card out. Now we do the whole things in reverse - carpenters to put the screws back in, teamsters to put the case back on, carpenters to put those screws in, electricians to plug the computer back up, and the teamsters to move it back into place.
If you violate any of that and do it yourself (and get caught) it is one of only two things that are immediate termination (the other - for reasons beyond me - were to sleep while on the premises no matter how long you had been there). And people *did* get fired over it - even full staff scientists got removed for it from time to time. Indeed, you *would* (not could) get a grievance filed for simply having a screwdriver (leathermans were a touchy subject too), and that pretty much always resulted in a hefty fine to your project.
There are some ways around it - for example service contracts with outside companies for equipment, those outside companies get to service their own equipment - but do that in more than just a few cases and the unions will not only be ultra strict but will also take days to get to any request you have (as I said they are busy people so one can't expect them to be at your beck and call). The other is to realize that they are also strict about their working hours - so wait until they go home, close your door and lock it, and replace the part yourself. However you can't do the latter if you do not know how (for example the secretaries rarely know how to tear a computer apart and no one asks someone else to do something that could potentially get both people fired), if the part is tagged as inventory and tracked by their asset management software, or if you are unlucky enough to be in an open space that can't be closed and locked.
I'm going to assume that you do not find the above "sane" - I certainly didn't. Lots of good science goes on there despite a great deal of that type of crap (most simply risk their jobs, we all certainly did). If you *do* find that sane then I'm actually offended that you may find me "otherwise sane". Unions in the US have spiraled out of control over the last few decades. Having never worked in the UK I can't say how it is there - I can say the above isn't that strange for unionized labor pools in the US and there are quite a few places that are worse. If the people are "otherwise sane" then it may behoove you to *ask* why they have the anti-union attitude - they may very well have a sane reasons for that one too.
"Android has a hidden danger - malware has already been found in the wild that attack Android phones."
So does the iPhone - there have even been a few that have made it to the front pages of Slashdot. One of the Apple "hidden dangers", as you call them, is some strange confidence that Apple doesn't have these bugs and people act accordingly. Indeed their PDF reader had a remote root exploit that makes any and all Android exploits pale in comparison. Heck, even *the store itself* has been compromised on at least one occasion (most likely by multiple different people too) and a large number of unauthorized purchases initiated by said intruders.
However, that really doesn't matter that much with respect to what environment to learn and frankly matters little to most people (note how many use Windows). If you want to develop mobile application then it would be suggested that you learn iOS, Android, and RIM.
Except that most of the kernel *is* written by professionals in their spare time, not amateurs. There was a time the latter was true but somewhere along the lines (generally in the late 1990's early 2000's) companies started seeing Linux as a way to push testing and some development costs out of house (IBM for one) and their engineers began spending time on it. Some full time but most more or less a "skunk works" type of thing - officially supported by their employers as something to do when they didn't have more pressing work to do. Up until then most serious server jobs were done with a variant of one of the big Unix's or a *BSD if they wanted some "free" license - still even today there are some features that have not made it into the kernel because of the lack of full time engineers.
Where these types of projects really shine isn't in the development phase - it really does take someone that is a professional to write a good task scheduler, memory manager, hot swappable subsystem, and most other kernel features (drivers, OTOH, often are done by amateurs and their quality certainly varies) - it is in the testing phase. Thousands of eyes see every new change in such a variety that no QA lab could *ever* do something similar. Again, to use some of the changes that happened early in this century - IBM drove a great deal of development of some of the kernel subsystems due to this reason, once they made it "good enough" for their needs it was MUCH cheaper to maintain, the loss of control was OK because over all the community is skilled (I was involved in another project with a few of the full time engineers working on it back then).
In the case of "mixing" I think one could work out a similar system that takes advantage of "many ears" instead of "many eyes". One could most likely even do so in an automated way - have a community vote on which sounds better for instance (it would have to be more complex than a straight vote, but the idea would still be there). You could then have "forks" where one that likes heavy bass sounds get their mixes from there, others that like muted sounds from another, one that likes the "loudness" from another, basically the same way there are a number of different Linux variants to meet different needs and wants. I know I would prefer a more "live" sound - I MUCH prefer the tones (along with all the little imperfections) I get from my live equipment than what I get on recordings. Hearing the pick hit the guitar strings, the bright ringing of the electric bass, and the sounds of the drummer sticks hitting the skins or brass truly make a live performance to me. Even recording of live performances seek to remove those "imperfections" but they are what give music it flavor to me (the exception is acoustical recording where they leave a great deal of those inflections in). I would love to see mixes that have all of those - it is like eating a home cooked meal vs one that a machine automated from beginning to end, the variations are what make it great.
Indeed given that you *could* have a community mixing that had *no* professionals, effectively a search for a maxima and if done well it should allow radical changes that may produce something great. That's not going to happen in software, a true amateur is *not* going to happen upon a really good task scheduler and implement it. Open Source does something similar as far as searching for optimum solutions, but much of it requires experts to even get something that works for the vast majority of it. Even then most of the projects still need a highly competent core of engineers who do final approval whereas mixing could be truly anarchic.
Slashdot Mirror
"You exhibit the same problem as those who blindly support the idea that "security by obscurity is no security at all," in that you appear to dismiss the fact that security isn't made of one thing or another, but the sum of all the efforts to make something secure."
Almost all security comes through some form of obscurity - you password, private key, pre-shared key, or heck even your one time pad are only secure because no one else knows them. In the and all security comes down to obscurity - so no, I do not think I am one that falls to that.
What you fail to understand - and searching on Apple iPhone exploits shows - is that the pre-screening Apple gives has *no bearing on the security of the phone*.
Apple screening is based on, as far as anyone can discern, other criteria. Indeed, without source code and truly rigorous testing that you couldn't afford it *has* to be that way.
Nor are the immune to the description you give of the G1's - ask anyone with any hardware before the 3G where all their shiny new updates are. My bet is since Apple has none they are sitting on the same vulnerabilities that they were when their last update was applied - well unless Apple has figured out how to update without patching.
I do not find apples "sandboxing" (which they aren't doing at all - they are simply saying you can only buy software at your local Best Buy which is *not* sandboxing - they are a walled garden, not a sandbox) to be useful from a security point of view because it gives me *nothing* that enhances that. Google really doesn't either - while the OS certainly does real sandboxing (which apple doesn't at all) installing applications generally requires you to give blanket permission that pretty much break this as a security feature too.
khchung finds the lack of flexibility to be invigorating as he/she doesn't have to worry over user interface. They somehow - as you do - equate only being able install one of three video players instead of one of five as "security". Neither one is more or less secure than the other - the space of apps you have is *not* security or sandboxing. Each trades flexibility for a smaller set of skills to learn, *not* a tradeoff in security.
If anything Googles real sandboxing with explicit permissions is *better* security - at least without a true OS hack they can't get at anything outside the sandbox you do not explicitly give permissions for. Sadly even a simple flashlight app generally wants internet access and all sorts of crap - Google really needs finer grained permissions.
In this particular case we are talking a patent - this means that with the full force of more than one countries judicial system *no one else is allowed to do this* without permission from the person who says they came up with the idea. So yea, if there is prior art then it is *very important*. If it had been first to market, or heck even a copyright where the *specific* implementation is protected then things would be great. But no, this is a patent wherein *how* you do it isn't near as important as *what* you are doing.
So lets say you come up with a MUCH better solution that they have - Oh well, you have to pay them royalties that they get to choose the price of (I have not seen - but who gets to use your specific idea that is copyrightable or does it sit as unusable until the patents expire?). Never mind that your solution is completely different, they have the patent on getting said message to the recipient utilizing the best methods chosen by an agent. That's *really* broad - indeed my aside is a paradox, two unmovable things collide (patent and copyright). In most other things that are patentable that doesn't occur - the idea of a perpetual motion machine is *not* patentable yet if someone found a way to break a few laws of physics it would be. Copyright and Patents do not have the same overlaps. In this case, as most software patents do, they are patenting the concept of a perpetual motion machine. Copyright already works well in that space, same thing for business model patents - the just do not make sense.
As such we have every obligation to complain about it too. I too dislike Facebook and Apple, but that still doesn't make this a Good Thing.
The iPhone *is* a general purpose computer, as such it has all the risks associated with it.
The fact that *you* are only allowed the bits they want to let you see may make you feel like it isn't, but from a security standpoint (of which I was primarily addressing) it is a general purpose computer. This limits how much *you* do, not how much a hacker/phreaker can do.
Of course, I do agree that I'm talking over most iPhone users heads (apparently yours included), but not in the way you mean. A large portion of Apple users confuse the limited distribution of the app store to be some form of security - it is not.
If you want a device that you are only allowed to do what someone else lets you do then the iPhone is a great choice in the "smart phone" market - no doubt about that. That may very well make the device simpler for you to use and there isn't much argument there - that is a personal preference (though I have yet to see any one confused by an Android phone that wasn't just as confused on an iPhone, however I have seen more than one frustrated that the iPhone will not let them do what they want and are happy when Android does). However security that is not.
As such I find no security difference and a great deal of usability difference. Most people do and find one or the other the "better" choice. The people who think and work in the way Apple wants you to find the iPhone great so stick with it (you obviously do) - no argument there - but most people either don't really care (the phone is as much a fashion statement as anything) or prefer to make the phone fit themselves instead of themselves fit the phone.
I'm not sure how that attitude is going to sink Android and have the iPhone ride the wave into the future, but oh well, that attitude and same argument sure helped the Macintosh ride the wave of the future as a dominate force in the 90's - I'm sure it will do the same this time. Apple has made good money over the years by giving that smaller market segment *exactly* what they want, no reason to figure that is going to change and if you are a part of that segment I suggest you purchase their products (as I said in my original post - there are people I would suggest them too).
Until smart phone manufacturers realize that they are making general purpose computing devices we will see this. To some there is a "war" going on between Apple and Android but that really misses the issue - in this respect trying to figure out which is the "better" on is like trying to figure out if Frosted Flakes or Fruit Loops is the better breakfast cereal - it is personal preference and there are most likely "better" solutions out there (and as a disclaimer I am an Android user - Droid One).
Until one side truly figures this out I'll stick with Android if for nothing else than I can get the functionality I want. With Apple I have to buy into their idea on how their devices fit into my life and I, well, do not. If Apple truly had this superior model than I would go for it, but as far as I can see I get the worst of both worlds - lack of specialized apps (as those are often, for unknown reasons, rejected from their app store and there are one or two I would like) along with just as many vulnerabilities (and those usually require you store that info on the phone - which until/unless they secure them I do not). So I currently see Apple as having those issues yet none of the "rewards" of going with them.
There are a handfull of people I know I would still recommend the iPhone too, but unless they already know the iPhone platform over the Android and are still asking others about it that is rare. Sadly it isn't because Android is truly better, but because if all else is equal then the flexibility of the Android system is superior and pretty much everything else is equal. Apple has remained where they are for a *long* time because they haven't figured this out too - though I also have to say they have not died because they ignore it too (their model of revenue find this irrelevant, which means they will not "win" but really can not "loose").
Not only that, but it is *one of your primary selling points* then it is also something important.
Lets face it, one of the issues going on now with American politics is that both sides have run a small govt keep their nose out of your business mostly honest politicians and what we have is crooked lets see how much of your money we can spend and tell you what to do (though argue about what part of your life we can control) politicians. Republicans failed it and the democrats busted them hard for it, democrats failed even worse, and now we have a populace that didn't really vote *for* anything but simply against something (and with a two party system that means that you got the spend over all less and intrude in ways you aren't quite as angry about but still think they all ought to jump off a cliff with no parachute politician). Frankly the smart phone market isn't that far off as an analogy.
In that sense none of the offered solutions are really ideal - Android is trying to move so fast with features that they aren't fixing security issues. New versions are out so fast there is almost no way that any manufacturer (even if they wanted too - and most do not as the market is realistically pushing less than one year hardware updates so major profits for carriers *and* manufacturers) could keep up porting the official releases to their device. Apple's head is so far in the sand (usually because to admit failure kills their image - image being almost totally what their major sales are based on) that things like this are rarely fixed. Heck we had a remote root exploit for iOS and it was billed as a *feature* and a month later a MUCH less severe remote root for the Android was a colossal failure of their security model. Even on a fairly technical site that *should* know better (here) it causes multi-hundred post arguments.
Basically the smart phone device is still not a mature product where time is spent on "lesser" issues. Lesser based on how it affects sales - if it isn't causing people to flock somewhere else then run with it. Apple will run with the "walled garden" approach as being totally secure until they can not - it isn't like this is the first major breach and a HUGE number of their customers will ignore it and tell everyone they can about how secure and unhackable everything is on them because of that. Even in this posts comments it isn't hard to find that - that this is unimportant because no major known attack vectors have used it: Otherwise known as Security Through Obscurity. Then again I have to note that the same is true of iOS's competitors (who are totally insecure because of the freedom allowed) - no widely known security breaches. Oh we can all point to individual ones and argue over if the were scripts, trojans, viruses, or whatever (what, exactly, was the remote rooting with an Apple produced PDF reader?), yet the potential remains there. That is the essence of security through obscurity - it is security in that no one has taken advantage of it, not because it is secure by design.
I'll 100% agree this is not an Apple only thing just as much as I'll agree this hurts Apple more than others - that they wall this sort of thing out of their garden is a *LARGE* part of what many are paying for. There are several things that can happen. One is that a real attack vector takes advantage of this - frankly it is a matter of time. It may be Apple, it may be Google, it may be someone else - but it is going to happen. When it does that entity is going to take it hard, further any of the others that do not fix theirs are going to get hit too (chances are it will cause a shift in attacks and as we know Security Through Obscurity isn't Security, especially once obscurity goes away). There are going to be lots of falls - frankly I think this to be the most likely.
Next is that one of them matures enough to to fix things to be secure - this mainly means a real hack/phreak never really hit the wild until now. Of those I expect Google to be the first as they at least seem to know the issue is t
"When the GOP demonizes "tax and spend" as the other party's problem, they mean "spend on domestic social programs" and deliberately exclude US military spending. I think that's a pretty accurate summary, actually."
I'll tend to agree there - most conservative feel that money spent on "defense" to be worth it and do not see it as something that should have caps. They see spending on social programs as propping up people who will not work for whatever reason.
"When you include US military spending as part of "spend", you will find that the GOP is worse on "tax and spend" than the Dems. They started a war that costs the US $1B a day"
And this is where the democrats lost - a billion a day is roughly 365 billion a year. We are looking at more than trillion new spending - MUCH more than a billion a day. You can include *everything* the Republicans have ever spent in the history of the us and almost not equal what we have (for one thing the Democrats accepted that spending on "defense" too). Running on anti-fiscal largess and the subsequent spending is one of the main things that killed the Democrats. That money also went to something that was truly unpopular so as far as "affect on the voters mind" double it. Many will put up with spending when they feel it is needed, spend on things that they feel aren't (regardless of if it is) let alone truly *unwanted* and you get even worse, further have a great deal of why you were elected to be a low spender and it is even worse. Thus the total rape of the so called "Blue Dog Democrat" who weren't as Blue Dog as what they ran as.
"If the GOP proposes a balanced budget that included the military budget and preserving Social Security, they'd be worth listening too."
To a liberal/leftist. To a conservative not so much. To a centrist I do not know - centrists are much harder to gauge as they tend to still be hard with their ideas, just have a mix of them. I rather guess that the "best" in terms of winning votes right now would be to exclude military spending, be more discrete in where we spend on it, fix social security (not really sure what this means though - *long* post there), scrap HCR and start over (even if it takes years to work out), and mostly try and move back from your party's extremes.
As a concept I do not think it is going to fail - even in Podunct Tennessee (of which many places I am around certainly qualify, though I live in "metropolitan Tennessee" as much as it exists) you pretty much have total coverage. Yea I have relatives without electricity, without running water from municipal pipes, and all sorts of "primitive things" but they *choose* to do so in nearly every case. I can't think of any of them that could not go someplace that had those modern conveniences if they truly wanted and, frankly, the ones that rig up DC generators, an array of car batteries, and have homemade dc/ac converter to run their TV and computer (which gets a cell phone tower) understand those mystic things called "computers" better than their so referenced more advanced relatives. Indeed it is amusing to hear them talk - a rare mix of truly uneducated and truly knowledgeable.
If internet connectivity is the make/break part of this it is there good enough - after all it isn't like this is the first or only device to rely on the "cloud". It doesn't take a PhD in Computer Science to figure out how to cope with the example you give - indeed apps do so today and it is part of the standards of any technology that relies on cloud computing.
The bigger issues are why? Android and iOS do pretty much everything one would want on such a slim device - why go with *another* software stack like ChromOS? Yea, it "does" more but then there are netbooks which are 105% harder to lug around and do 150% the tasks. Of course I have to add I still find tablets to be in the same boat - the few people I know that love them have all the issues I do lugging a laptop around yet have none of the benefits - yet they think they are grand. I'll wait and see - however the occasional disconnect is *not* going to cause the issues you describe even on current products. Nor is coverage that spotty either.
Nor does an OpenBSD user excel on either Linux or Windows - they are three different worlds. You do not state, but imply, that someone that knows BSD knows those other systems. You either do so through intention (dishonesty) or through lack of thinking your argument out (ignorance), either one isn't particularly good.
The problem that the *BSD versions have for large acceptance is why? The big draw of it - security from the ground up - isn't really useful in most places. You need that at your firewall and router (usually one in the same for small to medium companies or a home network) and those are better handled by a hardware/software stack that is specifically designed for that. I've always been somewhat surprised at how few use this over other solutions, but as long as they work and are cheaper than rolling my own - I guess I do not care. My guess is that the savings from using a truly secure OS would not be passed on but would ends up with corp X getting a larger profit and that is their business, not mine.
For larger companies - again why? Cisco solutions are a better combination of performance and costs. The OpenBSD box is never going to perform as well as the Cisco 28xx series and is no more secure so why go that way? You aren't going to be able to pull from a cheaper OpenBSD admin group and save costs there - chances are they wil cost more than a Cisco Certified engineer.
The draw is going to be towards equipment manufacturers - I've never understood why some use Linux over one of the *BSD groups - or for those few that really need the flexibility that a custom configured gateway device in a secure environment is important. Performance blows for general purpose hardware compared to specialized ones today. Ten years ago they rocked, routers and firewalls on general purpose hardware was the the higher end of the market - today purchase a solution from Cisco if you really need it.
The other end is if some OEM picks it up and runs with it as a base system - that is following the Apple Mac-OS model. I would *love* to see a truly secure kernel and basic system available on the desktop for most personal use. Indeed Apple could have been that in a general sense, but they have their own issues regarding walled gardens and control of the "user experience". Nothing wrong with those, but also not my choice as I do not like their idea of a "user experience". The market is still ripe for a truly secure and open platform that is fairly simply to use. No reason we can't have all of those, just as we currently stand pick any two.
True to some extent - but as someone who lives in said small comunity here is what happens:
Person A - which you describe - comes in and buys a great deal of things of up. They have all sorts of "grand" ideas about making this a cheap place to live that is just like home. They distribute that money to 10 or more locals and then go to city/county council meetings and expect to be "heard" (and sometimes give good money to be done so too). Turns out that not only did they have to give away thier money to do so but they now are a handful against the crowd and they ... fail in their quest. Life goes on, there is one transplant amongst the myriad that like where they are and unless they can convince the locals that their way is the Right One they aren't going to work.
At best they may form their own local groups and our system of trying to concentrate power locally may allow them to make their own regulations (I can certainly point you towards communities that do so), but even then they end up not working. For instance, we have a huge issue with Game - namely deer that eat everything and stand in the road (which them get hit by cars and cause serious injury and deaths). Most communities allow them to be hunted under managed guidelines - they get good fees from licenses and the population is controlled. Not so from those 1m+ transplants from California - deer need to be trapped and moved elsewhere. Turns out "elsewhere" doesn't want your deer as they have all they can deal with now - so they are stuck with them. There isn't a large enough portion of Tennessee they can buy to move them.
Ultimately there is a point where economies of scale just do not work. For people who are in the "poor" areas it is difficult to move up (in some cases the sale of your property - even in 100% is in equity - isn't enough for a down payment for the new area) and for those in "rich" areas they think they cant take over. In the end you still end up being one person - in some economies that can mean a lot, in others not so much. In our system - of which your post is in response too - it turns out we are one person and money rarely gets as much as people think it does. After all in order to leverage it you *must* use at and at that point you empower *many* who do not feel the way you do (and if they do feel the way you do, then it wasn't your money that got it done). In South Korea - no idea. Even then in the long run the influx of money (and resultant flow of jobs from one expensive area to another cheap one) will only stabilize global costs.
Yes, to some extent.
If the form factor is external and held in our hands they will *look* like cell phones, though would be called something else (much as if someone in the 90's saw a blu-ray they would call it a "cd" - not correct but not exactly wrong either). Cell phones have become about as small and thin as is realistically usable by humans (in the early 2000's there were some fairly funny comedic sketches about it) - indeed with smart phones the trend is *larger* phones. There is no reason to think that if we can time travel that we can't have a device that communicates back to our "real" time. There is perfectly good reasons to think that they would look and basically function (with respect t how one holds it and talks into it) like a cell phone. There are many technologies that reach that point, that is where development either has to shift totally away from that (say creating implants - which who knows if they would be popular or not) or to areas that aren't about functionality (say getting rid of the cell towers and moving to something better). My current set of winter clothes is WAY more sophisticated than even something worn ten years ago let alone 150 - yet I'm sure people even 5000 years ago could figure out what they were and how to use them, development was in materials, not functionality.
There is nothing about what happens that particularly excludes or even makes it unlikely to be a time traveler *in the film* or even given logic assuming time travel is possible. Its just that time travel is, most likely as you say, not going to be possible and even it is then it was still more likely that they either filmed some person a little of their rocker that just happens to be talking into an inert device or it is something we haven't thought of. The person is making that mistake that if the two options are "time traveler" and "I do not know, something else" that means there is a 50/50 chance of either when in reality "I do not know" is orders of magnitude more likely. The person in question certainly looks to be talking on a cell phone, but as stated above there were similar shaped hearing aids there were around then - much more likely something like that than time travel.
Yep, very much so.
Androids VM makes a great deal of the "fragmentation" go away too, you write towards it and for the most part it will work pretty anywhere a device has what you give it for your manifest. Of the options you will most likely need to test against (say screen size) the VM that runs on your PC is perfectly fine for that. The possibility of running into a strange device that needs a special work around is MUCH slimmer than getting bitten by Apples fragmentation. Android is really only fragmented in the way Windows or Linux is - lots of different hardware and UI options out there but you are basically writing against a known common API and you don't have to test against every possible thing out there. Apple is MUCH worse in that it isn't abstracted nearly as much and there are real differences - it is much more similar to when we went from the 2.4 to the 2.6 kernel in Linux and you often had to do major changes depending on which system your software was going to run on and it was expected you would do both.
However, FUD is easier to fight as you can pick exactly the scenario where you win. Unfortunately for Apple it means you just kicked the pants off something that doesn't exist and if the real market competitor is competing against what you *actually* do you loose in the long run. It wouldn't be the first time Apple was poised to truly dominate a market, a competitor came out, and Apple competed with a fictional version of them and as such lost. When PC's began catching up in the graphics arena they certainly did that and their laptops phenomenal growth fizzled when they did it too. Neither market really failed (they make decent enough products and a large percentage of their customers are EXTREMELY loyal - many will even believe the FUD too), but instead of being a VERY distant second or third they could have been totally dominate.
Further business is about *total* costs - which as often as not are *not* simply up front parts costs.
There are arguments in many places over the cost per Gb of a solid data farm - after all you can purchase 1tb disks at around 80 dollars (and that is for the fast ones) - so raid those guys up, buy three and you save save save!!!! Yea, until you find that doesn't solve data retention, data integrity (oh - you mean you purchase drives that really only does parity or substandard check-sums? Oh bother that you lost that business critical transaction and no one can recover it), or you are down three days because someone has to track down where to get the part that you need, order it, install it, and verify that it works. Suddenly the "costs" are MUCH higher than if you just payed someone who does that, only that, and does it right all day long and you have no issues.
Ultimately most sysadmins will mistake their work environment for their home environment only once - if they are lucky they will still retain their job afterward. After that these ideas are studiously avoided until the next generation can't figure out why the previous one did it that way (they are idiots of course - no one *ever* thought about rolling their own and your generation is the first to even come up with that phrase).
A small to medium company can't maintain the staff needed for critical computing - let alone truly mission critical computing. They will mostly sit on their hands for hours, days, weeks, and probably months on end. For someplace that really has a tight ship maybe even years on end - but when it happens the cost of it *not* being fixed is higher than said expense. Few large companies can even do that - they have to be large enough that with their MTBF they can have a fully busy staff - that is *rare* as most things are fairly reliable. Best bet is to pay someone enough that they can make a profit and they can spread their expertise out amongst enough companies that they have busy staff. It will cost a greater amount than simply rolling you own does up front, but long term is MUCH better. That is the cost you are paying is for insurance, not parts.
I can't say if Dell provides this service for that cost - but as the OP learned the hard way you aren't just paying for hardware to your door. What you can accept in your home may not be acceptable in your work place. I wish the person asking in this article the best of luck - I suspect that they are going to learn some lessons the hard way.
It depends on what you are doing - there are applications that need speed but will rarely push much data on a monthly basis.
For instance we have a product that runs on phones that can use the 3g connection for public safety communications back to the home base for communications (this particular application includes visual elements too - if they simply need voice there is a telephone connection that avoids this). It is basically unusable for that application in the vast majority of the country even as a backup let alone for a primary means of communication. Connections are spotty, dropped packets happen quite often even on good solid connections, latencies are atrocious, basically unusable. It works great through a WiFi connection - no problems whatsoever. It doesn't use a lot of data monthly because it is only use when an ongoing incident is happening, lots of data over short periods.
It becomes truly important in some areas like that - the classic example is if someone is asking permission to shoot and kill someone and the response is "don't shoot" and the "don't" gets cut off - it is a real problem. There have been times where it takes over a minute for the message to reliably get there. Most of us will never have that occur but if you are in a security and disaster response arena it is quite important - people can and will die over that type of thing. Smart phones (and the resultant data networks) are so geared towards web browsing and checking e-mails where those things are irrelevant they have basically made it impossible to use for a great number of applications that it would be ideal for.
I haven't been able to test any 4G networks, but some of the other engineers I work with (a different company than the one I'm on - we resell and do custom software on some of their products) has basically said that while the 4G networks they have tested are quite a bit better and you can really tell the difference whilst "normal" internet tasks, it still is so focused on non-mission critical tasks that the carriers simply do not care about anything else and have made no attempts to make it better. We have seen that too in our other line of products (storage and disaster recovery products for mission critical transactional machines - credit card processors, 911 call processing, and a few stock exchanges) and some of even the server class hardware accepts error rates that we simply can not. It can be tough to find providers that truly understand that some people can't accept problems that are just fine for video games, web browsing, and using a word processor. In all of those cases the question is "If you have been shot and are calling 911 would you want your call going through that?". That is why voice connections are so heavily regulated and downtime is heavily fined - data not so much.
So yea, care about speed too - it could potentially one day save your life. There are many more applications that for these data pathways than just web browsing and streaming video.
We have no privacy on the internet - it is something no matter how much we want it to be otherwise, how much it ought to be that way, you can just forget it. Someone can reply to me all they want and nothing will change this. We do understand this principle in some ways - look at the recording industry and music sharing. We tell them that their old model of thinking is outdated because of the way the internet operates. That they just need to learn to live with it as there is nothing one can do about it - the only recourse is through legislation and that will not work in the long run. We tell them no matter how much they want otherwise it just isn't the Way Things Work - same here.
Ultimately this type of privacy no longer exists - they aren't intruding into something you have protected (which is another matter - that is still viable for many things), they are mining things you said in public. If you say it in public then it isn't "privacy" - the only thing different now is that the information is persistent and index-able.
Such is life on the internet - you choice is amongst four different things: Accept it and act accordingly, rail against it and be run over, pretend it doesn't happen and get run over, or never use the internet. You have no other choices.
After all, look at how many different combination of hardware you have on it, not to mention that you aren't even running in a VM as you do in Android. No one outside of mission critical solutions thinks about testing on everything it may run on, I do not know why some developers seem to think they have to have 300 Android handsets to test on. But then it seems they are primarily Apple developers that are getting into Android too so I'll chalk it up to still in the learning process (either that or they will eventually go broke/give up trying to do something they do not need too).
Further it's not like Apple is any better - try writing one app that runs on the iPod, iPhone, and the iPad, you can but for many apps it is a nightmare to do. Now you also have fragmentation there based on what the device can and can not support (many devices are not upgradable to iOS 4, are too slow to run apps, or do not even have the piece of hardware you need). Users have no way of knowing this without either reading reviews or trying it - on Android you tell it what you require and it handles that end of it. Indeed, of the different systems out there that have varied hardware (and Apple's iDevices certainly fit that bill) Android is one of the easiest to develop for. If you choose to do like some iPhone devs and only care about the one device you can do that on Android too - nothing stopping you, but that doesn't make it any less fragmented.
Frankly Apple and their hardcore development group are chasing shadows with this and wasting time. They are fighting against reality and, eventually, reality is going to win. It wouldn't be the first time Apple did it either - always easier to attack a straw man instead of the real thing, but especially true in markets attacking the straw man doesn't win in the long term. Apple would probably be in a much stronger position if they spent that energy on competing with something that actually exists instead of something they wished exists.
Sadly this is lost to so many today. For the most part put lots of math, create a model, and talk about it and you have "science" never mind that the process leaves you with nothing better than "inconclusive" because there are MANY different ways to interpret what went on. Science is a process, you can apply science from religious beliefs to trouble shooting your automobile's engine not running and you can do so without a single piece of traditional math (you will need logic however). You can create the worlds most sophisticated model replete with math only three other people on the planet can understand and you no more gave evidence towards you hypothesis than if you flipped a coin to choose between two guesses.
If you learn to read scientific articles you can read and critique *any* scientific paper out there - there is no need to understand the underlying principles. You will not be able to verify or critique those principles, but you certainly can the process used (and if the math is something you are familiar with you can look for proper practices there too even if you do not really know what it implies). That is, however, a dying skill and even in our worlds top facilities few are able to do that (I was lucky enough that the group I worked with at Oak Ridge National Labs was sticklers for doing that) - most are enamored either with the math or with funding - mostly the latter. It is difficult to teach and mostly makes other "scientists" mad at you because, well, you hurt their funding.
For myself there is no bigger fear for our future than this as it goes down to our ability to understand and verify what is going on - our inability to do this (especially coupled with out ability to affect changes) means that we are truly working on nothing more than guesses, and not even really educated ones at that. This goes well beyond science too, we have lost our underpinnings in being able to verify that something works and instead are - to use a vulgar phrase - so enamored with our belly-buttons that we can see anything else (otherwise known as navel gazing). If you can get the equation to balance then it *must* be true and then both sides square off for a battle when *neither* side is remote accurate. We are all 10-20 years from total anihilation from so many sources that are totally natural and could never harm us we should either all be finding Jesus or Allah within the moment or we will live forever. What this means is that we have degenerated into who has the best media sources - is CNN or FoxNews who you prefer? Neither one of them are worth a flip if you want real news, however for those that really like staring at their navels this is a truly important question and the answer affects so many other things.
Sadly both sides are navel gazing and forgot what real science is - it is no longer a contest of who is the closest to being correct but who can be the most persuasive with their propaganda. I do not care if you a thinking if religious/atheist, global warming/deniers, or whatever other dichotomy you are picturing me railing against (each side always figures I'm a card carrying member of the other) chances are you are correct. To use another vulgar (with the popular sense of the term instead of the traditional this time): they both suck donkey balls.
I do not have a free pocket - I have to carry two large items with me. One is my wallet, that usually resides in one pocket and it can't be my back one as arthritis in my hip is HIGHLY aggravated by sitting on the wallet. I also have to carry an epi-pen kit due to a severe allergy to seafood (unlucky enough to be fish, shellfish, *and* mollusks) - not only would this also aggravate my arthritis but the pens do not do very well being sat on any more than the phone does. So belt clip for me.
But then even when I was young I never really cared much about fashion anyway - comfortable blue jeans, a plain black button or pullover shirt, and decent shoes (if I can find any that fit me) and I'm pretty much happy anywhere. At 35 I find myself even less interested in what the ~18 year olds think about things like a belt clip for my phone. I also tend to find it sad the few my age or older that do worry over that type of stuff too, most seem to have other issues. Judging by the amount sold and the number of people wearing them I'm not that alone in that regards either - however the always worn blue-tooth ear phone bugs the crap out of everyone and after about the first six months or so they were out you rarely see one (not only do you look like an idiot but they aren't comfortable *or* functional).
Further there is a LOT of testing goes into those things. Yea we tend to take a toilet seat for granted but one many of those airplanes and especially things like submarines *every* part is critical. Some engineer has to plan out pretty much everything that can occur to it and make sure that it either doesn't fail or fails in such a way that it doesn't become mission critical - that is expensive and, as you say, when they are only buying 50 of them it really drives the per unit costs up.
I do work in mission critical computing and it is shocking how many SCSI terminators, USB cables, SATA cables, heck even raid controllers have an "acceptable" failure rate (uncaught) that is totally unacceptable when it is either millions of dollars per minute or often peoples lives on the line running through your equipment. Yea, we used to sell SCSI terminators at 1500 dollars piece, but when the countries stock exchange, New York cities 9-11 servers, or citi-banks central credit card processing servers count on it *working* it isn't that expensive. That's why EMC can charge the outrageous prices they do and why those data farms cost so much, it isn't the hardware that is the primary cost.
A toilet seat having a .1% chance of falling off your seat at home is just fine, a .001% chance of one falling off and becoming debris in an aircraft that will probably need to make high-g maneuvers is not. They are paying to make sure that it doesn't become a fairly heavy flying object. So even after tooling up per specifications I bet there was en extensive testing phase that went along with it too.
Similar thing is true for many of the "wasted" science - the part that made it not a waste was never reported. When I was at Oak Ridge National Labs we made the news for figuring out why a shower curtain pulls in when you take a shower instead of puffing out. I do not recall the exact amount spent but it was in the millions. Lots of carping about a waste of time - it was "obvious" (and the "obvious" answer was right too - moving air lowers pressure on the inside). However what the real science was about is that real life didn't follow the model with its margin of error - indeed it was well outside of it. The study modeled down to a molecular level, they eventually found some link with heat and water vapor (I don't recall exactly - I'm a computer scientist so outside of the opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs, and critiquing the methodology I can't do much). The big news about it around the lab was that the discovery was estimated to save several billion in fuel costs in the Aviation industry over the next 10 years. That little tidbit of information was never talked about, just the colossal "waste", the fact was it was an unknown effect and the easiest/cheapest to measure model was a shower. They could have tripled the budget and built a special made lab for it and sounded more "science like" (and is, later on, what they started to do to avoid bad press - yep, good thing people caught that govt waste).
Maybe - I do not necessarily disagree with that either. There may be a large number of other reasons we aren't told, we are only hearing his side of the story too. My bet is that the vast vast majority of people who were *actually* doing something got caught before doing it they would raise a fuss about being watched and would take advantage of the current political climate in certain groups to have knee jerk reactions to anything the govt does. I seriously doubt most would admit to being a subversive. The same would be true if we only talked to the law enforcement side - I'm betting they have have some good logical reasoning to do this that ignores the other sides view of the matter too.
However, in this particular case what we *have* heard from the Law Enforcement side is that there was no court ordered placement of the device. *That* is truly wrong. A large part of why we are supposed to tolerate this type of intrusion into our privacy is that it went through many checks and balances to happen and for many many decades it certainly has done so. One entity, carrying the full weight of the Federal govt, did this with *no* oversight whatsoever. *That* is why many groups (and while it changes some based on who is President, it is slowly becoming a universal idea) have afore mentioned knee jerk reaction.
There was a time when, for the most part, we believed the authorities because of what they had to go through to do this type of thing. We knew that enough different types of people had signed off on it that saying "There is a reason" was *mostly* good enough. There has never been a perfect system and sometimes it didn't work - but over all those things were rare. However for quite a while (well before 9/11 - ask the Ruby Ridge and Waco Texas families that the ATF/FBI went after) there has been a sever erosion of those checks and balances with the power inevitably going towards the govt - and specifically the executive branch. I can't really say when it started either, I can say that it became blatant enough during Bush Jr's tenure that it was obvious and all but the most partisan deny that. Further all but the most partisan find it obvious that Obama has not only failed to reverse or halt that course but has done everything he can to further making Bush Jr's term look good. Unless *both* parties go through a major internal change I suspect that the next couple of Presidents will do the same thing too, it's just a question of if they will have an "R" or "D" after their name and which parts of our lives they will enact draconian one sided controls on.
The officer was giving sworn testimony - it is generally considered "truthful" and gives them the ability to ask for it. He had a right to refuse it, did so, and lost his case mostly because of that. Think of this as being tried for murder, having plenty of circumstantial evidence to convict and your main defense is "the person is alive, you could talk to them all you want if I would tell you where they aren't, but ney ney I don't have to so I'm not". That's probably not going to be persuasive to Jurors and certainly isn't a fifth amendment violation if you get convicted because of your inability to prove your innocence - fifth amendment means he doesn't have to give they keys and he didn't. They had enough other evidence to convict so he mainly just threw away his chance to overturn all their evidence.
Not giving his encryption keys isn't exactly being used against him as much giving the prosecution a good solid reason as to why they didn't have the pictures. I suppose he may have had other illegal things on his computer and giving the keys would have shown that (maybe the guy was running one of the largest warez and music sharing sites on the planet), while he would have shot a big hole in their case there they could still prosecute. Plus I'm sure if he thwarted that case they would have been out to teach him a lesson and done so. However all that is irrelevant to the case, they had enough evidence to convict without the pictures and he gave them a perfectly reasonable answer to the question of "But where are the pictures?" - "Defendant is taking his fifth amendment rights and refusing to give over his encryption keys, therefore we can not produce them". It doesn't even need a negative connotation to the jurors - if he didn't have them he simply threw away his main defense as the prosecutions case was strong enough as long as they had a reasonable excuse to not produce them - which he gave them.
Frankly that's what usually happens when you plead the fifth during a trial - it rarely helps you out once something has made it past the prosecutors desk and a grand jury. It's really only of help if the authorities show up to your door and demand access or during the buildup of evidence before the trial (that and to stop laws like the one in the article). It isn't a magic bullet that gets you out of trouble, if you are far enough along that you are having to plead it on trial that generally means you did it and they have enough other evidence to convict. It's mainly just trying to keep the slam dunk away from the prosecution - its rarely anything other than a desperation tactic, not because it taints opinions but because its really only useful when you did something incriminating but didn't do it well enough to not leave so many other little droppings of what you did around to not get noticed. The case quoted here is exactly that, it helped the prosecution enough (otherwise they would have had to produce the pictures) that I can't believe his lawyer didn't pressure him to release them if he was innocent. There are times where it is something one has to do and helps during a trial, but more often than not it isn't.
Yea, because we all know Apple wouldn't let that happen. (but don't worry, they do not associate it with you - they just associate it with the co-ordinates of where you live and work so it is totally anonymous).
Face it, your phone is a little general purpose computer that happens to have the ability to talk to cell networks. Treat it as such and you will be happy, pretend it isn't and you are going to get bit. If developers have access to that information, the ability to transmit it anywhere, and it is really difficult to track if they are doing that then I can assure you that it occurs VERY often. Apple isn't remotely immune to it, their app approval process doesn't include inspecting source code. If this can make it through then you can be sure gathering GPS data and sending it over a socket can occur and does.
All Apple does is give you a false sense of security.
...idiots or trying to drum up publicity (my bet is the second).
Really - IMDB can't do what they want them to and remain a reliable source of movie information. IMDB clearly told them what was needed: be at a late enough period of production or at release so they can tell it isn't simply a hobby or publicity stunt or have a major publisher sign off. So they resubmitted without *any* of that happening and *gasp* got rejected each time! I mean, there is only one explanation right - they are protecting Amazon.com business of selling movies!!!!!! BitTorrent is a *distribution method*, not a distributor. They are following their rules for self published movies and those are in place for a reason. It's like complaining that a CentOS repository will not take your half baked project like sourceforge would - after all you have other half baked projects that made it! It's not some grand conspiracy, they list professionally made published movies and some publishers are reliable enough that they allow them to "pre-publish" information. Any other database that is looking for a similar reputation (again, take a community accepted CentOS repository) and they have to do the same thing. Nothing wrong with either way and there is place for both, but do not expect one striving for the higher reputation to take anything.
Further this is what you pay publishers to do and is the tradeoff one pays for saving that money. To use another computer analogy no reason you can't self publish your own x.509 certificate, set up a secure server, and rely totally on that. Just do not complain when people do not trust it like they would a certificate signed by Verisign - you are not really paying for the distribution, you are paying for the trust and connections that the publisher (or CA) has. Lots of examples there too - have your home for sale by owner? You aren't going to get the ability to advertise like a real-estate agent would. Service your own equipment? The place you purchased your items from aren't going to refund your money because you hit something with a hammer you were not supposed too. Yea, they have a few other movies with them but I bet they were not added unless: the movie was released, at the end of production, or had a publisher backing it. Even then one has to note the number of movies that are "in production" and never make it, by that observation the standards are already low.
IMDB is *not* looking to be a repository for information on any and all movies out there (they aren't looking to be a sourceforge of movies, they are looking to be a community wide accepted CentOS repository). Yea, some "real" movies may very well end up with much worse production values than this one - but they aren't going to take your word for it. If they release a quality movie and IMDB refuses *then* lets blast them, until then these guys are only marginally better then me submitting my upcoming movie to IMDB.
The last place I worked was a "union shop" - Oak Ridage National Labs. So, let me tell you why I have an obviously irrational dislike of unions.
So, you have an Ethernet card go bad (back when they were not integrated into the mother boards). You had to deal with the Teamsters, Electricians, and the carpenters to get it changed. Only the teamsters can move things. Typically speaking your computer isn't where everything can be taken off so if that monitor needs moved or the box needs moved around to get access to it then you have the have the teamsters do it. Next only electricians are allowed to plug/unplug wires and you cards. Lastly carpenters are the only ones that can take a screw out or put it in. Further you always get a minimum of two workers at a minimum of an hour each. You can't schedule them all at one time (after all they are busy people and no one knows when they will get to you) so you have to do each one, wait until the finish, and schedule another. If you are a high enough in the corporate hierarchy you can get several at a time - but it costs you.
So, now back to the dead card - you need to first call the teamsters in to move your monitor and/or box. Next the electricians have to come over and unplug the unit. Then you get the carpenters to come out to take the screws out of the back of the machine. Now back to the teamsters to take the case off (it is moving it). Then the carpenters come back out and take the screws out that are holding you card in place. Then the electricians have to back called in to change the card out. Now we do the whole things in reverse - carpenters to put the screws back in, teamsters to put the case back on, carpenters to put those screws in, electricians to plug the computer back up, and the teamsters to move it back into place.
If you violate any of that and do it yourself (and get caught) it is one of only two things that are immediate termination (the other - for reasons beyond me - were to sleep while on the premises no matter how long you had been there). And people *did* get fired over it - even full staff scientists got removed for it from time to time. Indeed, you *would* (not could) get a grievance filed for simply having a screwdriver (leathermans were a touchy subject too), and that pretty much always resulted in a hefty fine to your project.
There are some ways around it - for example service contracts with outside companies for equipment, those outside companies get to service their own equipment - but do that in more than just a few cases and the unions will not only be ultra strict but will also take days to get to any request you have (as I said they are busy people so one can't expect them to be at your beck and call). The other is to realize that they are also strict about their working hours - so wait until they go home, close your door and lock it, and replace the part yourself. However you can't do the latter if you do not know how (for example the secretaries rarely know how to tear a computer apart and no one asks someone else to do something that could potentially get both people fired), if the part is tagged as inventory and tracked by their asset management software, or if you are unlucky enough to be in an open space that can't be closed and locked.
I'm going to assume that you do not find the above "sane" - I certainly didn't. Lots of good science goes on there despite a great deal of that type of crap (most simply risk their jobs, we all certainly did). If you *do* find that sane then I'm actually offended that you may find me "otherwise sane". Unions in the US have spiraled out of control over the last few decades. Having never worked in the UK I can't say how it is there - I can say the above isn't that strange for unionized labor pools in the US and there are quite a few places that are worse. If the people are "otherwise sane" then it may behoove you to *ask* why they have the anti-union attitude - they may very well have a sane reasons for that one too.
"Android has a hidden danger - malware has already been found in the wild that attack Android phones."
So does the iPhone - there have even been a few that have made it to the front pages of Slashdot. One of the Apple "hidden dangers", as you call them, is some strange confidence that Apple doesn't have these bugs and people act accordingly. Indeed their PDF reader had a remote root exploit that makes any and all Android exploits pale in comparison. Heck, even *the store itself* has been compromised on at least one occasion (most likely by multiple different people too) and a large number of unauthorized purchases initiated by said intruders.
However, that really doesn't matter that much with respect to what environment to learn and frankly matters little to most people (note how many use Windows). If you want to develop mobile application then it would be suggested that you learn iOS, Android, and RIM.
Except that most of the kernel *is* written by professionals in their spare time, not amateurs. There was a time the latter was true but somewhere along the lines (generally in the late 1990's early 2000's) companies started seeing Linux as a way to push testing and some development costs out of house (IBM for one) and their engineers began spending time on it. Some full time but most more or less a "skunk works" type of thing - officially supported by their employers as something to do when they didn't have more pressing work to do. Up until then most serious server jobs were done with a variant of one of the big Unix's or a *BSD if they wanted some "free" license - still even today there are some features that have not made it into the kernel because of the lack of full time engineers.
Where these types of projects really shine isn't in the development phase - it really does take someone that is a professional to write a good task scheduler, memory manager, hot swappable subsystem, and most other kernel features (drivers, OTOH, often are done by amateurs and their quality certainly varies) - it is in the testing phase. Thousands of eyes see every new change in such a variety that no QA lab could *ever* do something similar. Again, to use some of the changes that happened early in this century - IBM drove a great deal of development of some of the kernel subsystems due to this reason, once they made it "good enough" for their needs it was MUCH cheaper to maintain, the loss of control was OK because over all the community is skilled (I was involved in another project with a few of the full time engineers working on it back then).
In the case of "mixing" I think one could work out a similar system that takes advantage of "many ears" instead of "many eyes". One could most likely even do so in an automated way - have a community vote on which sounds better for instance (it would have to be more complex than a straight vote, but the idea would still be there). You could then have "forks" where one that likes heavy bass sounds get their mixes from there, others that like muted sounds from another, one that likes the "loudness" from another, basically the same way there are a number of different Linux variants to meet different needs and wants. I know I would prefer a more "live" sound - I MUCH prefer the tones (along with all the little imperfections) I get from my live equipment than what I get on recordings. Hearing the pick hit the guitar strings, the bright ringing of the electric bass, and the sounds of the drummer sticks hitting the skins or brass truly make a live performance to me. Even recording of live performances seek to remove those "imperfections" but they are what give music it flavor to me (the exception is acoustical recording where they leave a great deal of those inflections in). I would love to see mixes that have all of those - it is like eating a home cooked meal vs one that a machine automated from beginning to end, the variations are what make it great.
Indeed given that you *could* have a community mixing that had *no* professionals, effectively a search for a maxima and if done well it should allow radical changes that may produce something great. That's not going to happen in software, a true amateur is *not* going to happen upon a really good task scheduler and implement it. Open Source does something similar as far as searching for optimum solutions, but much of it requires experts to even get something that works for the vast majority of it. Even then most of the projects still need a highly competent core of engineers who do final approval whereas mixing could be truly anarchic.