The budget for this dwarfs even the most bloated estimate of a mission to Mars. Or a permanent moon base with a focus on research on possible space resources (water, metals, maybe even He3). Pie in the sky projects that have possibility of bearing fruit.
I agree the article seems dodgy at best. But this is still precious dollars devoted to a dubious goal. On the other hand if I were a military hawk, I'd insist on advanced drone development with pilots sitting in a heavy-bomber sized mothership (I don't want a totally autonomous Skynet system).
Besides, gold has never been a good money substitute except for the very rich, and they probably already have their wealth stashed away some place abroad. Gold's value comes from having lots of it. If you want to buy a house having a few pounds could help you. But if you have just a few ounces of gold, how would you spend it? Shave it to buy a loaf of bread?
I suspect said sale is designed simply to create buzz, that Canonical is making a phone OS that "real" people (and not just geeks) want. Maybe having respectable numbers sold would get the bigger Chinese manufacturers or even Uncle Sammy interested? It's the tried and sometimes true strategy of guerilla marketing. Or maybe we can compare it to the thousands of fan-fic writers and film makers hoping to get picked up by a big name agent/publisher/studio, etc and be the next 50 Shades of Gray?
Nope, what the average coder can do can be done cheaper overseas or through fairly simple AI algorithms backed by massive crowd-sourced data sets, something similar to methods used by Google in in Goolge Translate or in its reCaptcha systems.
Just like in an empire or communist party, the conflicting reports/retractions make it increasingly obvious that some infighting is going on in Redmond. Interesting is who gets purged.
"Then of course there is the human body. The body does not NEED exercise to build muscle..."
If you're going the gene mod route with regard the human body, why not just genetically engineer humans to want to eat less? Should be simpler than turning us all into Arnold Schwarzenegger and save a couple of million of cows and chickens from the endless cycle of rebirth (after we butcher them for one final barbeque).
"The binary blobs are themselves dangerous - driver software is typically running with very high security clearance, and you have absolutely NO idea what is going on inside those blobs."
Then why not rewrite the (opensource) driver so the only thing it does is upload the binary blob to the graphics card? Then you're back to present behavior, a graphics card that runs closed-source microcode. Has anyone performed a security audit of any of today's top desktop CPUs?
The idea solution would be nothing less than building your own openware CPU/GPU.
"Or do you compile your distro youself after reviwing every line of code? useful idiot!"
No need to be melodramatic about it. With the Unix/Linux model of security, you don't need to review every line of code yourself unless you're a non-American intelligence agency (at which point you also need to xray the CPU for "hard"-coded backdoors).
Typically you need to "only" pore over the source code for the kernel and everything else that runs with root privileges (I know this is still a massive undertaking but significantly less daunting than examining the entire OS). So if you want to be reasonably secure, you'd compile the kernel and system utils yourself (doable in Debian/Ubuntu using "apt-get source src-package" followed by a forced install of the resulting self-compiled package).
This is the premise around which the OpenBSD developers base their claim of being the most secure Unix-like operating system. If the base OS is secure, you can be much less fussy over the source code for the Gimp, LibreOffice, VLC and other FOSSware, provided you don't run the programs as root.
The question remains for Microsoft will the base OS compile from source the way one can compile LInux and BSD from source?
Okay I'm being pedantic but stealing is quite a broad word and in some mostly archaic or figurative senses, unlicensed copying of copyrighted works can be considered a form of stealing (i.e. taking without permission). No, I don't think copying is stealing in the modern sense of shoplifting or carjacking but that's just the way the language is. Somewhat similar to some ancient poetic use of the word rape to mean kidnapping (e.g Rape of the Sabine Women).
The problem is when the person arguing for draconian copyright laws deliberately "confuses" the different senses of the word stealing. To "steal" a song online has an entirely different effect from shoplifting a CD in a store. The store loses its copy of the CD to the shoplifter. On the other hand, the number of copies is incremented++ whenever you "pirate" a song.
The problem is that copyright has been treated as a right similar to free speech and real world property rights, maybe not as essential but still something that a person "naturally" deserves. Sure copying is stealing in some non-legal senses of the word "steal", and of course, there are no really natural rights since even the right to life is forfeit in certain circumstances (like when you have a dynamite strapped to your waist and running toward a group of people threatening to blow them up). But copyright has no analogs or equivalents among other animal species.
A tiger or dog marks its territory in an act that parallels the property rights of a person living in a capitalist democracy or tribal rights in a tribal society. On the other hand, a monkey imitating another monkey's fruit gathering skills isn't attacked or harmed for the mere act of aping the possibly beneficial behavior. Copyright is clearly an artificial construct, a hack to "promote" technological or cultural progress rather than as an end into itself. Forgetting this goal is why we're in this copy-tyrannical mess.
Claiming that social mobility is possible for your descendants is practically the same as what Elon Musk, the Mars Society and similar space colonization (or settlement for those hate the C word) groups are advocating. You really have no guarantee that "your" next generation will be better off or some political whacko or would-be despot isn't going to hijack their future and turn Earth or country into a war-zone or just slightly better a peaceful police state. Still multi-generational planning is a nice thought. I don't really blame the Libertarian survivalists and the space nut jobs for thinking even further ahead.
"There is little evidence that links crime rates to prevalence of violence on TV or in video games, although there is some evidence that video games reduce crime by keeping young men off the street during their prime crime years (age 15-24)."
A corollary to this is that widespread pornography is responsible for the decline in the developed world's population because of the increasing numbers of young men who would rather watch it than do it.
I think the risk is better compared to the probability of two people sharing the same birthday within a given group. You don't need to have 365 people for the probability of having shared birthdays reach 99 percent. The wiki article states its better (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem):
"In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox[1] concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people."
So you don't need some house wrecking boulder striking the Earth every year for us to decide as a species that we should start preparing some sort of planetary defence shield.
Mod parent up. Too sleepy to try to work this out in detail, but what struck me about most of the solutions is that it assumes a person is walking following the lines in some gigantic desktop globe. So straight lines "down" (south) and "up" (north), which should cancel out the longitudinal movement. And then a curve ball along the latitude. Would the gravitational force be strong enough at such a scale to bend the path of someone walking west into a spacetime-like curvature?
"Yes, it does. It doesn't matter what luck you get, being able to 'be' a character requires talent. If you don't believe me why don't you get on a microphone and do a passable impression of Mr. Burns reading a scene from Hamlet. There might be 14 million in it for you!"
It also requires luck to "be" a character, as you say it. We think that Harry Shears is Mr. Burns because that's what twenty or more so years of the Simpsons taught us to expect as the voice of a modern day Scrooge. If another moderately capable voice actor got the role when the casting was done, we'd think He is the only actor that can do justice to the role.
Incidentally top Japanese voice actors get paid much less, and just look at how much more "anime" gets produced, rather than just a few notable American cartoons.
"It is no more wrong to call piracy theft than it is to call it the same if you tap into your neighbor's cable so that you can get cable without paying for it."
There's a big difference between tapping a neighbor's cable and pirating a movie off the Internet. An unlicensed cable connection generally involves one connection/source, your neighbor's. But if you want to download from the Internet the same number of movies you could watch from an unlicensed cable connection, you can choose from more than one source, from the various file-sharing sites to torrents uploaded by thousands of different individuals.
To summarize the difference:
Illegal cable connection: one source (your neighbors). Internet movie pirating: many sources (unless you're the sort who watches only one movie)
A bit creepy maybe. But how's this different from installing a GPS on a company car? As other posters have pointed out, it's a work issued phone. So if you're being monitored by your use of company property, then don't use it unless you're at work. Leave the car/smartphone at the office. Get another car/phone for your personal needs.
There are other technical solutions like turning off the cellphone. Or put it inside a microwave oven (just remember to take it out before you pop in your burito). It would be another matter if the GPS thingy was being embedded into her skin/scalp.
Maybe someone can port a text mode browser like Lynx, Elinks or W3M or something really hardcore, a command-line browser like edbrowse (http://edbrowse.org/). Then we don't have to worry about all the panning and dragging around the small screen.
Want to have the most crisis-proof career? Then start living the life of a survivalist. The idea is to grow, build and fix as much of everything you need. Then as a sideline, get any job that doesn't pay starvation wages and give you enough time off to starting growing, building and fixing the things you need. Make sure the stuff that you can't DIY is merely a luxury not an essential when worst comes to worst (nuclear winter, zombie apocalypse, asteroid impact, etc). Or at least make sure the thing is easily repaired rather than an iGadget only a service center halfway across the country can fix. Then you can use the income you get from your taxable job to buy your iPad, aPhone or electric scooter.
In the future our algorithmic overlords will decide for what's good in everything we do, from our gadgets to our leaders to our lovers. It would be a technological utopia for the sheeple, a dystopia for the freethinkers. Rather than war, it's our Facebook likes, Google searches, Amazon (Alibaba?) buys, aggregated and analysed by machines, that will bring about the Matrix.
In the future the human race will be divided into Apples and oranges. The masses will be the oranges, while the Apples will be the genetically sequenced elite with access to not just the latest medical technology but the biometric clearance to become part of the ruling technocratic class.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe the software was working the way it should but not the way the humans intended it to? Like the killer robots/AI of sci-fi.
The budget for this dwarfs even the most bloated estimate of a mission to Mars. Or a permanent moon base with a focus on research on possible space resources (water, metals, maybe even He3). Pie in the sky projects that have possibility of bearing fruit.
I agree the article seems dodgy at best. But this is still precious dollars devoted to a dubious goal. On the other hand if I were a military hawk, I'd insist on advanced drone development with pilots sitting in a heavy-bomber sized mothership (I don't want a totally autonomous Skynet system).
Besides, gold has never been a good money substitute except for the very rich, and they probably already have their wealth stashed away some place abroad. Gold's value comes from having lots of it. If you want to buy a house having a few pounds could help you. But if you have just a few ounces of gold, how would you spend it? Shave it to buy a loaf of bread?
I suspect said sale is designed simply to create buzz, that Canonical is making a phone OS that "real" people (and not just geeks) want. Maybe having respectable numbers sold would get the bigger Chinese manufacturers or even Uncle Sammy interested? It's the tried and sometimes true strategy of guerilla marketing. Or maybe we can compare it to the thousands of fan-fic writers and film makers hoping to get picked up by a big name agent/publisher/studio, etc and be the next 50 Shades of Gray?
Nope, what the average coder can do can be done cheaper overseas or through fairly simple AI algorithms backed by massive crowd-sourced data sets, something similar to methods used by Google in in Goolge Translate or in its reCaptcha systems.
Now wait, maybe she has blinking LED sensitivity? That's a serious issue, especially when you have nothing to do all day but stare at blinking LEDs.
Just like in an empire or communist party, the conflicting reports/retractions make it increasingly obvious that some infighting is going on in Redmond. Interesting is who gets purged.
"Then of course there is the human body. The body does not NEED exercise to build muscle..."
If you're going the gene mod route with regard the human body, why not just genetically engineer humans to want to eat less? Should be simpler than turning us all into Arnold Schwarzenegger and save a couple of million of cows and chickens from the endless cycle of rebirth (after we butcher them for one final barbeque).
Obviously, sir, you haven't bought a computer in the last fifteen years. "Modern" BIOS are bloatware aka UEFI.
"The binary blobs are themselves dangerous - driver software is typically running with very high security clearance, and you have absolutely NO idea what is going on inside those blobs."
Then why not rewrite the (opensource) driver so the only thing it does is upload the binary blob to the graphics card? Then you're back to present behavior, a graphics card that runs closed-source microcode. Has anyone performed a security audit of any of today's top desktop CPUs?
The idea solution would be nothing less than building your own openware CPU/GPU.
"Or do you compile your distro youself after reviwing every line of code? useful idiot!"
No need to be melodramatic about it. With the Unix/Linux model of security, you don't need to review every line of code yourself unless you're a non-American intelligence agency (at which point you also need to xray the CPU for "hard"-coded backdoors).
Typically you need to "only" pore over the source code for the kernel and everything else that runs with root privileges (I know this is still a massive undertaking but significantly less daunting than examining the entire OS). So if you want to be reasonably secure, you'd compile the kernel and system utils yourself (doable in Debian/Ubuntu using "apt-get source src-package" followed by a forced install of the resulting self-compiled package).
This is the premise around which the OpenBSD developers base their claim of being the most secure Unix-like operating system. If the base OS is secure, you can be much less fussy over the source code for the Gimp, LibreOffice, VLC and other FOSSware, provided you don't run the programs as root.
The question remains for Microsoft will the base OS compile from source the way one can compile LInux and BSD from source?
"Violating copyright is NOT stealing"
Okay I'm being pedantic but stealing is quite a broad word and in some mostly archaic or figurative senses, unlicensed copying of copyrighted works can be considered a form of stealing (i.e. taking without permission). No, I don't think copying is stealing in the modern sense of shoplifting or carjacking but that's just the way the language is. Somewhat similar to some ancient poetic use of the word rape to mean kidnapping (e.g Rape of the Sabine Women).
The problem is when the person arguing for draconian copyright laws deliberately "confuses" the different senses of the word stealing. To "steal" a song online has an entirely different effect from shoplifting a CD in a store. The store loses its copy of the CD to the shoplifter. On the other hand, the number of copies is incremented++ whenever you "pirate" a song.
The problem is that copyright has been treated as a right similar to free speech and real world property rights, maybe not as essential but still something that a person "naturally" deserves. Sure copying is stealing in some non-legal senses of the word "steal", and of course, there are no really natural rights since even the right to life is forfeit in certain circumstances (like when you have a dynamite strapped to your waist and running toward a group of people threatening to blow them up). But copyright has no analogs or equivalents among other animal species.
A tiger or dog marks its territory in an act that parallels the property rights of a person living in a capitalist democracy or tribal rights in a tribal society. On the other hand, a monkey imitating another monkey's fruit gathering skills isn't attacked or harmed for the mere act of aping the possibly beneficial behavior. Copyright is clearly an artificial construct, a hack to "promote" technological or cultural progress rather than as an end into itself. Forgetting this goal is why we're in this copy-tyrannical mess.
Claiming that social mobility is possible for your descendants is practically the same as what Elon Musk, the Mars Society and similar space colonization (or settlement for those hate the C word) groups are advocating. You really have no guarantee that "your" next generation will be better off or some political whacko or would-be despot isn't going to hijack their future and turn Earth or country into a war-zone or just slightly better a peaceful police state. Still multi-generational planning is a nice thought. I don't really blame the Libertarian survivalists and the space nut jobs for thinking even further ahead.
"There is little evidence that links crime rates to prevalence of violence on TV or in video games, although there is some evidence that video games reduce crime by keeping young men off the street during their prime crime years (age 15-24)."
A corollary to this is that widespread pornography is responsible for the decline in the developed world's population because of the increasing numbers of young men who would rather watch it than do it.
I think the risk is better compared to the probability of two people sharing the same birthday within a given group. You don't need to have 365 people for the probability of having shared birthdays reach 99 percent. The wiki article states its better (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem):
"In probability theory, the birthday problem or birthday paradox[1] concerns the probability that, in a set of n randomly chosen people, some pair of them will have the same birthday. By the pigeonhole principle, the probability reaches 100% when the number of people reaches 367 (since there are 366 possible birthdays, including February 29). However, 99.9% probability is reached with just 70 people, and 50% probability with 23 people."
So you don't need some house wrecking boulder striking the Earth every year for us to decide as a species that we should start preparing some sort of planetary defence shield.
That's why I eat only organisms without a digestive tract.
Mod parent up. Too sleepy to try to work this out in detail, but what struck me about most of the solutions is that it assumes a person is walking following the lines in some gigantic desktop globe. So straight lines "down" (south) and "up" (north), which should cancel out the longitudinal movement. And then a curve ball along the latitude. Would the gravitational force be strong enough at such a scale to bend the path of someone walking west into a spacetime-like curvature?
"Yes, it does. It doesn't matter what luck you get, being able to 'be' a character requires talent. If you don't believe me why don't you get on a microphone and do a passable impression of Mr. Burns reading a scene from Hamlet. There might be 14 million in it for you!"
It also requires luck to "be" a character, as you say it. We think that Harry Shears is Mr. Burns because that's what twenty or more so years of the Simpsons taught us to expect as the voice of a modern day Scrooge. If another moderately capable voice actor got the role when the casting was done, we'd think He is the only actor that can do justice to the role.
Incidentally top Japanese voice actors get paid much less, and just look at how much more "anime" gets produced, rather than just a few notable American cartoons.
"It is no more wrong to call piracy theft than it is to call it the same if you tap into your neighbor's cable so that you can get cable without paying for it."
There's a big difference between tapping a neighbor's cable and pirating a movie off the Internet. An unlicensed cable connection generally involves one connection/source, your neighbor's. But if you want to download from the Internet the same number of movies you could watch from an unlicensed cable connection, you can choose from more than one source, from the various file-sharing sites to torrents uploaded by thousands of different individuals.
To summarize the difference:
Illegal cable connection: one source (your neighbors).
Internet movie pirating: many sources (unless you're the sort who watches only one movie)
A bit creepy maybe. But how's this different from installing a GPS on a company car? As other posters have pointed out, it's a work issued phone. So if you're being monitored by your use of company property, then don't use it unless you're at work. Leave the car/smartphone at the office. Get another car/phone for your personal needs.
There are other technical solutions like turning off the cellphone. Or put it inside a microwave oven (just remember to take it out before you pop in your burito). It would be another matter if the GPS thingy was being embedded into her skin/scalp.
Maybe someone can port a text mode browser like Lynx, Elinks or W3M or something really hardcore, a command-line browser like edbrowse (http://edbrowse.org/). Then we don't have to worry about all the panning and dragging around the small screen.
Want to have the most crisis-proof career? Then start living the life of a survivalist. The idea is to grow, build and fix as much of everything you need. Then as a sideline, get any job that doesn't pay starvation wages and give you enough time off to starting growing, building and fixing the things you need. Make sure the stuff that you can't DIY is merely a luxury not an essential when worst comes to worst (nuclear winter, zombie apocalypse, asteroid impact, etc). Or at least make sure the thing is easily repaired rather than an iGadget only a service center halfway across the country can fix. Then you can use the income you get from your taxable job to buy your iPad, aPhone or electric scooter.
In the future our algorithmic overlords will decide for what's good in everything we do, from our gadgets to our leaders to our lovers. It would be a technological utopia for the sheeple, a dystopia for the freethinkers. Rather than war, it's our Facebook likes, Google searches, Amazon (Alibaba?) buys, aggregated and analysed by machines, that will bring about the Matrix.
In the future the human race will be divided into Apples and oranges. The masses will be the oranges, while the Apples will be the genetically sequenced elite with access to not just the latest medical technology but the biometric clearance to become part of the ruling technocratic class.