Wow, tough call who to side with on this one - The pharmaceutical companies that would rather let women miscarry and kids die of leukemia than leave any money on the table; Or the government agency that would rather watch cancer victims die in agony and puking their guts out than let them toke up.
Can we just line both sides up against the wall, as a lesson to whomever we allow to replace them?
Umm, except for being able to provision exactly the OS you want and install whatever software you want? This cloud FUD is absurd.
...Until Amazon tells you they can no longer allow you to run Windows-20XX instances because the EU banned its anti-competitive calculator app, and your entire infrastructure depends on a feature basically unique to Windows-20XX.
Lacking control of your own IT assets does not count as "FUD", it counts as a very real business liability.
Just so we're clear, that "salesdrone" is making more per hour than you are with your bitcoin master plan
Absolutely true! Since I started mining BTC, I've made a mere 7.5 cents per hour (after factoring in electricity costs).
Except, of course, that I've made that rate 24/7/365.24 and don't actually need to do anything while it chugs away hour after hour, day after day, year after year, generating those BTC. My total time invested comes out to around a half hour (not counting my recreational programming time spent in writing my own mining client, block explorer, and desktop Gox ticker widget, to better understand how the whole system works).
So Bitcoin is anonymous, as long as you can pass the value through a non-Bitcoin conduit?
Well... Yes, but generally the "anonymous" argument only relates to using BTC to obtain real-world goods or services (or cash).
If you stay entirely in the domain of BTC, you have absolute, unwavering privacy. In a pure-BTC transaction between two private parties, no one but those two parties have any knowledge of what transpired or between whom, or even if the "two" parties differ or refer to the same physical person. I can send myself Bitcoins all day long, generating transaction chains thousands of entries long, and no one but me has any means whatsoever by which to differentiate between that vs those same Bitcoins passing between a thousand different people.
You could argue that you can trace every Bitcoin back to its original block, which holds true - But likewise, you can "trace" any US dollar via its serial number. And like a US dollar, you have absolutely no knowledge about the two-step-back owner.
Which means that anyone connecting into the application will have to deal with the changes imposed from the top down.
That holds true only for "cloud" computing, where you have absolutely no control over exactly what happens to the servers, to the applications, or even to your data.
For typical day-to-day applications, including enterprise-level server apps, you absolutely can control what happens, by simply not upgrading to the latest and greatest every three months like the vendor wants you to - And as a rule, you'll find most companies don't do so, staying as far behind the bleeding edge (often two "major" versions) as their service agreement allows.
In larger shops, this happens precisely because upgrading would break any custom in-house apps developed to interface with UberSystem9000. In smaller ones, simply because they don't have the resources to have two people dedicated to nothing but installing service packs 40+ hours a week.
Case in point, you can still find fortune-500s running on an NT4 infrastructure on the server side, and I would dare say the majority of business desktops still run XP.
I mine one block of 50 BitCoins. I use that that block to get 50 $5 Sears gift certificates (redeemable in-store) through BTCBuy. I redeem them (CA, ME, MA, and MO all require stores to cash out gift certificates with $5 or less on them) in-store for cash.
More realistically (and less likely to arouse suspicion from a salesdrone), I would just take a $250 gift cert and actually buy something I needed at Sears; but the protest-of-last-resort from the naysayers always runs along the lines of "but you didn't get cash for them!".
This leaves anyone interested in my transactions with:
1) An "address" to a BitCoin wallet;
2) A single throwaway email address; and if you really want to push it,
3) Some grainy in-store security camera footage of someone (not necessarily "me") cashing them out.
How do you not consider that "anonymous"? Congratulations, you've tracked "me" to the parking lot of a Starbucks within 50 miles of my house.
Now, also more realistic (and what I've actually done), you can shift your BTC to Gox, sell them on the exchange for USD, transfer them to Dwolla, and from there, you can spend it on just about anything you want.
However, the number of 2048-bit primes is so astronomically large (think ~10^600), that you're more likely to randomly guess the prime factors of a given key than you are to find a collision between any two RSA-4096 keys ever generated -- past, present, or future.
Very true, with one slight problem - We have no way to actually produce (non-trivial) guaranteed 2048-bit primes. Instead, in the real world we use likely primes via a combination of Fermat and Miller/Rabin testing.
TFA points out that, because we don't have good enough RNGs with which to seed these increasingly complex chains of lies, their reliability drops from one failure in 10^BigNumber keys down to (in the real world) 1 in a mere 500.
You still need a significant number of such RSA keys in which to search for the use of duplicate random numbers.
And that limits an attacker how? Even ignoring the vast numbers of "abandoned" keys you can find with a clever Google search, you can always just make them yourself. A small army of Chinese prisoners can beat mere 500:1 odds in the time it takes most of us to drink our morning coffee.
Everyone should visit the site with the threatening message. It's time to put the Slashdot effect to good use!:-)
Unfortunately, they don't have a feedback form.
Fortunately, if they mean that page at all threateningly, they will probably at least take a glance at the logs - So make sure to not just go to the base domain, but also
rnbxclusive.com/fuck_off_and_die_fascist_pigs
rnbxclusive.com/superinjunction_THIS_filth
rnbxclusive.com/couldnt_find_anyone_jaywalking_eh_thats_some_mighty_fine_police_work_there_lou.
You might have a web page where you can pull up your current electricity consumption and break it down by appliance. You might find a new refrigerator would pay for itself, or maybe that your old refrigerator is doing okay; either way you won't have to guess.
Posting this on a den-o'-geeks, you preach to the choir about the perks of a totally "smart" grid.
Most of us have no problem with envisioning the upsides. We have a problem with the massive downsides, however - Loss of privacy (search for "DEA electric bill"), loss of control over what I choose to use in my own home, loss of privacy (do you want your "personal massager" to report its usage?), the massively increased number of points of failure, loss of privacy ("So Mr. Smith, your wife would like you to explain to the court why your secretary charged her phone from an outlet in your bedroom 18 times over the past three months"), the possibility of hackers, etc.
I want an internal (to my house) pure-smart-grid with per-device consumption tracking and control. And I want my electric company to have absolutely zero visibility or control to any of that. My electric company, OTOH, wants the exact opposite - To make me pay to upgrade to their control-fetishists dream, while making me pay pay pay for even the most basic stats about my own goddamned use.
Fark 'em all. I'll pay 10x as much to go off-grid before I let anyone tell me how much of a resource I pay for I have permission to use at any given time.
TFA says that the money briquettes have a comparable energy to "brown coal" (aka Lignite), or about 2/3rds the energy of "normal" anthracite coal.
Heating a house in the US Northeast with anthracite takes between three and six tons per year.
So a mere 40-50 tons? Even keeping the house so cold you can see your breath, the amount of these briquettes they need to get rid of will, quite seriously, only heat 10-15 homes.
I truly applaud the vast improvement over burning their retired currency as mere waste, but this has zero impact on keeping a nation's poor from freezing to death in the winter.
It sounds as though his issue is with the site, not with Google. Google is just presenting information that exists -- it is the site that is the problem for him. So....doesn't he know a lawyer or two to address the site in question?
Great idea! Then he can learn the definition made popular by another "defamed" celeb, the "Streisand effect"!
TFA speaks correctly in pointing out that Santorum doesn't have a "Google" problem - His real problem centers around his unfortunate cranial-rectal insertion. OTOH, we all have a problem when whackjobs like that can ever made it to the public spotlight to spew their hate in the first place.
Yeah, that's the first thing I think about in an emergency. Logging on to twitter and posting some bullshit. How useful.
Well, I suppose that counts as the obvious symmetry to the jackasses who, watching someone burn to death in a wrecked car, will whip out their cell phones - Not for anything so mundane as calling for (never mind actually trying to) help, mind you, but to record it for YouTube.
We've become a society of narcissists and voyeurs. Welcome to the dawning of a new age.
Of course if the terms were unfavorable, you might not be interested in a valid contract, and just wanted to shut HR up... which is fine, but it's not an enforceable contract.
This.
The terms of such agreements, without exception, contain nothing even the slightest bit favorable to the employee. Going forward without a valid contract, complete with the possibility of having them send you packing at a moments notice, usually works out more favorably than agreeing to their boilerplate.
Especially when you explain to them that your contract negotiation technique was to say, "I don't like the terms of my contract, so I'll just ignore them"
Did you, uh, y'know, notice that most of my post addresses the fact that most (FTE) software engineers in the US don't work under contract? As made all the more obvious by the counterpoint of my last paragraph that basically says "if you actually do have a contract, make sure you produce nothing they can actually take away"?
No? Okay then. To summarize:
If you don't have a contract giving up right-X, then the default laws applicable to right-X still apply, regardless of what MegaCorp's "all your base are belong to us" BS "policies" have to say about it.
unless you can afford to lose that kind of money, you can't afford to sue anyone for any reason.
The FP author wouldn't need to sue in this case - His employer would need to sue him, which a court would laugh back to the stone ages (okay, realistically, he'd end up paying a few hundred bucks for an hour of some shyster's work filing a motion to dismiss). It takes a lot less effort to enforce your rights when you get them by default.
and, in any case, the OP already *has* a contract
Where did you get that information? The FP says "my employer has an IP policy that states that anything I do while under their employ is theirs". No matter how sternly worded, a "policy" does not equal a contract, even in the handful of non-"at-will" employment states.
you have two options
renegotiate your contract or quit.
Quitting sucks, plain and simple. Negotiating with HR/Legal generally reduces to either "suck it up" or quitting (possibly not by choice). So what does that leave? The really obvious third option that everyone in this discussion seems to have overlooked...
"Policies" don't mean a bucket load of sheep guts in court unless your employer has an actual signed contract with you granting them the rights to your work on your own time - Without that, they have nothing but one more vague threat to get rid of you for conduct unbecoming a serf. And, in most US states, they can already toss you on the street at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever or for any reason that doesn't violate federal anti-discrimination law. So threatening to get rid of you for one more reason than "nothing" amounts to just a few more squirts of piss in a barrel of raw sewage.
So the easiest course of action, in the absence of an actual, legally-binding transfer of rights? Just don't tell them, simple as that. Obviously that limits you from doing any real marketing of your side projects, but your company can do exactly one thing about it if they find out - Threaten to fire you if you don't give them your firstborn, then do so when you wisely refuse. Which they already could have done any time they wanted, so, same outcome as every other worst-case scenario except with a rather low probability of it ever happening.
Now, on the off chance you do actually have some formal contract spelling out the terms of your employment, you can still opt for "just don't tell them". It just comes with the extra condition that you need to do your side-work in an area they can't really "own" in any meaningful way - Network installations, fixing/upgrading little old ladies' computers, releasing your code anonymously into the PD, etc.
eg. How does a CD store the difference between 22kHz square/sine/sawtooth waves?
Whereas with vinyl, while a few researchers have found that you can actually reproduce nanoscale artifacts present on the pressing master, you completely obliterate all that detail the first time you actually play the thing by dragging a razor-sharp needle down the groove of soft, soft vinyl that contains all your nice sound information.
So before you play it, you have 60+kHz frequency response and >25dB stereo separation. The second time you play it, you have more like 12-16kHz response and <10db separation.
"But I can hear the difference in my $1600 retro clamshell-style headphones!"
These days we ought to be listening to 96kHz/24bit, the technology to reproduce it is ubiquitous.
With that, I will agree completely - And for a very small number of performances (mostly superstars and symphonic), you can get that as DVD-A. But for the rest, we've sadly headed in entirely the opposite direction, with crappy MP3s the de facto distribution standard for music now and for the near future.
And, FYI, you do not look out for yourself. You can't. No one can. No one is always alert, all the time, for any emergency.
Any of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow. It happens, and in the "real" world, you simply die and the worms get their turn. It doesn't matter how much of your taxes goes to maintaining the roads, to well-designed intersections, to free medical care for all. We all die when our turn comes.
So no, not a superman. Just a boring ol' mortal human who will take vigilance over nannyism any frickin' day of the week.
The Super Bowl is an obvious target for anyone who wants to kill a bunch of people to make some deluded point.
The government response to any other private "too big to secure" event consists of "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event". So, following your (entirely true) statement, the government should simply ban the superbowl.
If we follow your approach, then what does the government do?
Roads. Schools. Water. National defense (stress both the "national" and the "defense" parts of that). And although I'll throw "police" in there as well, I do so with the caveat that providing police protection for the populace at large does not equate to providing security for a private, for-profit event.
Besides, I feel much safer being looked after by the government.
I feel much safer looking after myself. And damned good that I do, because apparently during the superbowl, all the Big Eyes will look just that much less closely at all the other prime targets.
Al Qaeda didn't attack the WTC with an airplane to show the holes in our impenetrable airport security screening procedures; they did it because no one thought they'd use the airplanes themselves as weapons, only as a bargaining chip for hostages or money or guns.
So, if Al Qaeda attacks on superbowl Sunday, you can bet your eyeteeth they'll go for Six Flags Texas, or the Mall of America, or the Golden Gate bridge. Something totally unexpected, rather than walking into a highly visible trap.
That's all well and good until someone needs to get contact info, mail, and apps in and out of a company-purchased phone. An iTunes account is necessary to operate an iOS device.
I think the the GP fully understands that; it simply does not count as an acceptable solution.
Speaking as a member of a mid-sized IT team, I can respond to the FP's question very, very simple - "Leave it". Give us absolute enterprise-level control of our devices without the consumer-gimmicky BS, or GTFO(ff) my network.
In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
Actually, you have that about as backward as you possibly could.
I will never, ever finish playing all the great games from the 80s and 90s that I can pick up for under $5. And unlike in the 80s, even the crappiest of modern hardware can play them with all the bells and whistles cranked to the max.
Make no mistake, Steam has quite a few games I would like to play. But I have no interest in supporting the world they envision as the future of gaming, and don't exactly need to "go without" as a result.
Creating a file with appropriate timestamps is trivial.
Now now, don't lose faith, Citizen - Just try using them as a defense against a BS charge brought by an overzealous DA, and watch how quickly the government throws it out as complete crap!
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds to me like they were dumbing it down for people who find science "too hard".
And the very existence of this trial proves them right.
Wow, tough call who to side with on this one - The pharmaceutical companies that would rather let women miscarry and kids die of leukemia than leave any money on the table; Or the government agency that would rather watch cancer victims die in agony and puking their guts out than let them toke up.
Can we just line both sides up against the wall, as a lesson to whomever we allow to replace them?
Umm, except for being able to provision exactly the OS you want and install whatever software you want? This cloud FUD is absurd.
...Until Amazon tells you they can no longer allow you to run Windows-20XX instances because the EU banned its anti-competitive calculator app, and your entire infrastructure depends on a feature basically unique to Windows-20XX.
Lacking control of your own IT assets does not count as "FUD", it counts as a very real business liability.
Just so we're clear, that "salesdrone" is making more per hour than you are with your bitcoin master plan
Absolutely true! Since I started mining BTC, I've made a mere 7.5 cents per hour (after factoring in electricity costs).
Except, of course, that I've made that rate 24/7/365.24 and don't actually need to do anything while it chugs away hour after hour, day after day, year after year, generating those BTC. My total time invested comes out to around a half hour (not counting my recreational programming time spent in writing my own mining client, block explorer, and desktop Gox ticker widget, to better understand how the whole system works).
So Bitcoin is anonymous, as long as you can pass the value through a non-Bitcoin conduit?
.
Well... Yes, but generally the "anonymous" argument only relates to using BTC to obtain real-world goods or services (or cash)
If you stay entirely in the domain of BTC, you have absolute, unwavering privacy. In a pure-BTC transaction between two private parties, no one but those two parties have any knowledge of what transpired or between whom, or even if the "two" parties differ or refer to the same physical person. I can send myself Bitcoins all day long, generating transaction chains thousands of entries long, and no one but me has any means whatsoever by which to differentiate between that vs those same Bitcoins passing between a thousand different people.
You could argue that you can trace every Bitcoin back to its original block, which holds true - But likewise, you can "trace" any US dollar via its serial number. And like a US dollar, you have absolutely no knowledge about the two-step-back owner.
Which means that anyone connecting into the application will have to deal with the changes imposed from the top down.
That holds true only for "cloud" computing, where you have absolutely no control over exactly what happens to the servers, to the applications, or even to your data.
For typical day-to-day applications, including enterprise-level server apps, you absolutely can control what happens, by simply not upgrading to the latest and greatest every three months like the vendor wants you to - And as a rule, you'll find most companies don't do so, staying as far behind the bleeding edge (often two "major" versions) as their service agreement allows.
In larger shops, this happens precisely because upgrading would break any custom in-house apps developed to interface with UberSystem9000. In smaller ones, simply because they don't have the resources to have two people dedicated to nothing but installing service packs 40+ hours a week.
Case in point, you can still find fortune-500s running on an NT4 infrastructure on the server side, and I would dare say the majority of business desktops still run XP.
Bitcoin isn't anonymous.
I mine one block of 50 BitCoins. I use that that block to get 50 $5 Sears gift certificates (redeemable in-store) through BTCBuy. I redeem them (CA, ME, MA, and MO all require stores to cash out gift certificates with $5 or less on them) in-store for cash.
More realistically (and less likely to arouse suspicion from a salesdrone), I would just take a $250 gift cert and actually buy something I needed at Sears; but the protest-of-last-resort from the naysayers always runs along the lines of "but you didn't get cash for them!".
This leaves anyone interested in my transactions with:
1) An "address" to a BitCoin wallet;
2) A single throwaway email address; and if you really want to push it,
3) Some grainy in-store security camera footage of someone (not necessarily "me") cashing them out.
How do you not consider that "anonymous"? Congratulations, you've tracked "me" to the parking lot of a Starbucks within 50 miles of my house.
Now, also more realistic (and what I've actually done), you can shift your BTC to Gox, sell them on the exchange for USD, transfer them to Dwolla, and from there, you can spend it on just about anything you want.
However, the number of 2048-bit primes is so astronomically large (think ~10^600), that you're more likely to randomly guess the prime factors of a given key than you are to find a collision between any two RSA-4096 keys ever generated -- past, present, or future.
Very true, with one slight problem - We have no way to actually produce (non-trivial) guaranteed 2048-bit primes. Instead, in the real world we use likely primes via a combination of Fermat and Miller/Rabin testing.
TFA points out that, because we don't have good enough RNGs with which to seed these increasingly complex chains of lies, their reliability drops from one failure in 10^BigNumber keys down to (in the real world) 1 in a mere 500.
You still need a significant number of such RSA keys in which to search for the use of duplicate random numbers.
And that limits an attacker how? Even ignoring the vast numbers of "abandoned" keys you can find with a clever Google search, you can always just make them yourself. A small army of Chinese prisoners can beat mere 500:1 odds in the time it takes most of us to drink our morning coffee.
Everyone should visit the site with the threatening message. It's time to put the Slashdot effect to good use! :-)
Unfortunately, they don't have a feedback form.
Fortunately, if they mean that page at all threateningly, they will probably at least take a glance at the logs - So make sure to not just go to the base domain, but also
rnbxclusive.com/fuck_off_and_die_fascist_pigs
rnbxclusive.com/superinjunction_THIS_filth
rnbxclusive.com/couldnt_find_anyone_jaywalking_eh_thats_some_mighty_fine_police_work_there_lou.
Get creative.
You might have a web page where you can pull up your current electricity consumption and break it down by appliance. You might find a new refrigerator would pay for itself, or maybe that your old refrigerator is doing okay; either way you won't have to guess.
Posting this on a den-o'-geeks, you preach to the choir about the perks of a totally "smart" grid.
Most of us have no problem with envisioning the upsides. We have a problem with the massive downsides, however - Loss of privacy (search for "DEA electric bill"), loss of control over what I choose to use in my own home, loss of privacy (do you want your "personal massager" to report its usage?), the massively increased number of points of failure, loss of privacy ("So Mr. Smith, your wife would like you to explain to the court why your secretary charged her phone from an outlet in your bedroom 18 times over the past three months"), the possibility of hackers, etc.
I want an internal (to my house) pure-smart-grid with per-device consumption tracking and control. And I want my electric company to have absolutely zero visibility or control to any of that. My electric company, OTOH, wants the exact opposite - To make me pay to upgrade to their control-fetishists dream, while making me pay pay pay for even the most basic stats about my own goddamned use.
Fark 'em all. I'll pay 10x as much to go off-grid before I let anyone tell me how much of a resource I pay for I have permission to use at any given time.
Don't worry they're not screaming, that's just the air escaping as their atmosphere is boiled away.
"But though you may find this slightly macabre...
We prefer your extinction
to the loss of our job"
TFA says that the money briquettes have a comparable energy to "brown coal" (aka Lignite), or about 2/3rds the energy of "normal" anthracite coal.
Heating a house in the US Northeast with anthracite takes between three and six tons per year.
So a mere 40-50 tons? Even keeping the house so cold you can see your breath, the amount of these briquettes they need to get rid of will, quite seriously, only heat 10-15 homes.
I truly applaud the vast improvement over burning their retired currency as mere waste, but this has zero impact on keeping a nation's poor from freezing to death in the winter.
It sounds as though his issue is with the site, not with Google. Google is just presenting information that exists -- it is the site that is the problem for him. So....doesn't he know a lawyer or two to address the site in question?
Great idea! Then he can learn the definition made popular by another "defamed" celeb, the "Streisand effect"!
TFA speaks correctly in pointing out that Santorum doesn't have a "Google" problem - His real problem centers around his unfortunate cranial-rectal insertion. OTOH, we all have a problem when whackjobs like that can ever made it to the public spotlight to spew their hate in the first place.
Yeah, that's the first thing I think about in an emergency. Logging on to twitter and posting some bullshit. How useful.
Well, I suppose that counts as the obvious symmetry to the jackasses who, watching someone burn to death in a wrecked car, will whip out their cell phones - Not for anything so mundane as calling for (never mind actually trying to) help, mind you, but to record it for YouTube.
We've become a society of narcissists and voyeurs. Welcome to the dawning of a new age.
Of course if the terms were unfavorable, you might not be interested in a valid contract, and just wanted to shut HR up... which is fine, but it's not an enforceable contract.
This.
The terms of such agreements, without exception, contain nothing even the slightest bit favorable to the employee. Going forward without a valid contract, complete with the possibility of having them send you packing at a moments notice, usually works out more favorably than agreeing to their boilerplate.
Especially when you explain to them that your contract negotiation technique was to say, "I don't like the terms of my contract, so I'll just ignore them"
Did you, uh, y'know, notice that most of my post addresses the fact that most (FTE) software engineers in the US don't work under contract? As made all the more obvious by the counterpoint of my last paragraph that basically says "if you actually do have a contract, make sure you produce nothing they can actually take away"?
No? Okay then. To summarize:
If you don't have a contract giving up right-X, then the default laws applicable to right-X still apply, regardless of what MegaCorp's "all your base are belong to us" BS "policies" have to say about it.
unless you can afford to lose that kind of money, you can't afford to sue anyone for any reason.
The FP author wouldn't need to sue in this case - His employer would need to sue him, which a court would laugh back to the stone ages (okay, realistically, he'd end up paying a few hundred bucks for an hour of some shyster's work filing a motion to dismiss). It takes a lot less effort to enforce your rights when you get them by default.
and, in any case, the OP already *has* a contract
Where did you get that information? The FP says "my employer has an IP policy that states that anything I do while under their employ is theirs". No matter how sternly worded, a "policy" does not equal a contract, even in the handful of non-"at-will" employment states.
you have two options
renegotiate your contract or quit.
Quitting sucks, plain and simple. Negotiating with HR/Legal generally reduces to either "suck it up" or quitting (possibly not by choice). So what does that leave? The really obvious third option that everyone in this discussion seems to have overlooked...
"Policies" don't mean a bucket load of sheep guts in court unless your employer has an actual signed contract with you granting them the rights to your work on your own time - Without that, they have nothing but one more vague threat to get rid of you for conduct unbecoming a serf. And, in most US states, they can already toss you on the street at the drop of a hat, for no reason whatsoever or for any reason that doesn't violate federal anti-discrimination law. So threatening to get rid of you for one more reason than "nothing" amounts to just a few more squirts of piss in a barrel of raw sewage.
So the easiest course of action, in the absence of an actual, legally-binding transfer of rights? Just don't tell them, simple as that. Obviously that limits you from doing any real marketing of your side projects, but your company can do exactly one thing about it if they find out - Threaten to fire you if you don't give them your firstborn, then do so when you wisely refuse. Which they already could have done any time they wanted, so, same outcome as every other worst-case scenario except with a rather low probability of it ever happening.
Now, on the off chance you do actually have some formal contract spelling out the terms of your employment, you can still opt for "just don't tell them". It just comes with the extra condition that you need to do your side-work in an area they can't really "own" in any meaningful way - Network installations, fixing/upgrading little old ladies' computers, releasing your code anonymously into the PD, etc.
eg. How does a CD store the difference between 22kHz square/sine/sawtooth waves?
Whereas with vinyl, while a few researchers have found that you can actually reproduce nanoscale artifacts present on the pressing master, you completely obliterate all that detail the first time you actually play the thing by dragging a razor-sharp needle down the groove of soft, soft vinyl that contains all your nice sound information.
So before you play it, you have 60+kHz frequency response and >25dB stereo separation. The second time you play it, you have more like 12-16kHz response and <10db separation.
"But I can hear the difference in my $1600 retro clamshell-style headphones!"
These days we ought to be listening to 96kHz/24bit, the technology to reproduce it is ubiquitous.
With that, I will agree completely - And for a very small number of performances (mostly superstars and symphonic), you can get that as DVD-A. But for the rest, we've sadly headed in entirely the opposite direction, with crappy MP3s the de facto distribution standard for music now and for the near future.
And, FYI, you do not look out for yourself. You can't. No one can. No one is always alert, all the time, for any emergency.
Any of us could get hit by a bus tomorrow. It happens, and in the "real" world, you simply die and the worms get their turn. It doesn't matter how much of your taxes goes to maintaining the roads, to well-designed intersections, to free medical care for all. We all die when our turn comes.
So no, not a superman. Just a boring ol' mortal human who will take vigilance over nannyism any frickin' day of the week.
The Super Bowl is an obvious target for anyone who wants to kill a bunch of people to make some deluded point.
The government response to any other private "too big to secure" event consists of "okay then, if you can't secure it, you can't hold the event". So, following your (entirely true) statement, the government should simply ban the superbowl.
If we follow your approach, then what does the government do?
Roads. Schools. Water. National defense (stress both the "national" and the "defense" parts of that). And although I'll throw "police" in there as well, I do so with the caveat that providing police protection for the populace at large does not equate to providing security for a private, for-profit event.
Besides, I feel much safer being looked after by the government.
I feel much safer looking after myself. And damned good that I do, because apparently during the superbowl, all the Big Eyes will look just that much less closely at all the other prime targets.
Al Qaeda didn't attack the WTC with an airplane to show the holes in our impenetrable airport security screening procedures; they did it because no one thought they'd use the airplanes themselves as weapons, only as a bargaining chip for hostages or money or guns.
So, if Al Qaeda attacks on superbowl Sunday, you can bet your eyeteeth they'll go for Six Flags Texas, or the Mall of America, or the Golden Gate bridge. Something totally unexpected, rather than walking into a highly visible trap.
That's all well and good until someone needs to get contact info, mail, and apps in and out of a company-purchased phone. An iTunes account is necessary to operate an iOS device.
I think the the GP fully understands that; it simply does not count as an acceptable solution.
Speaking as a member of a mid-sized IT team, I can respond to the FP's question very, very simple - "Leave it". Give us absolute enterprise-level control of our devices without the consumer-gimmicky BS, or GTFO(ff) my network.
In other words it's going to look at lot more like Steam, and a lot less like the 1980's.
Actually, you have that about as backward as you possibly could.
I will never, ever finish playing all the great games from the 80s and 90s that I can pick up for under $5. And unlike in the 80s, even the crappiest of modern hardware can play them with all the bells and whistles cranked to the max.
Make no mistake, Steam has quite a few games I would like to play. But I have no interest in supporting the world they envision as the future of gaming, and don't exactly need to "go without" as a result.
Creating a file with appropriate timestamps is trivial.
Now now, don't lose faith, Citizen - Just try using them as a defense against a BS charge brought by an overzealous DA, and watch how quickly the government throws it out as complete crap!