Do you know what's really funny? Even as you smirk at Apple and Apple's customers you totally expect Apple to come up with a better product than Samsung is able to.
But: Don't call it a watch. Or only if you call your smartphone a "pocket watch" just because it can display the time and you have it in your pocket.
I think selecting features that make sense and executing this in a way that you want to use them is the really hard thing here. Just squeezing a small Android device with a tiny screen and battery into a huge watch isn't going to make it sell.
The thing that always scrambles my brain when thinking of this is consciousness:
If you can do that, if you make a digital copy of ones brain, then logically you can "install" it into multiple bodies. So lets say you do that.. You die and they install a copy of your brain into two bodies. Picture yourself waking up.. as two people? To the outside world these two would behave as you would, but where is the conscious you. The one that's staring that the computer screen right now. How does that duplicate or even what the hell is that.
I generally consider myself scientifically minded and am an athiest, but this aspect of things always throws me through a loop.
I really don't see what's so complicated about that. There would be two individual people thinking they're you (and both would be right), with all your memories and whatever but they wouldn't have any more or less a "common consciousness" than any other two people. From that moment on they would have different experiences, would think, see, do and learn different things and would slowly become more and more different over the years. Not totally different (they would be very similar), but very much like identical twins who still are two people.
Only people who exercise some magic (or religious) thinking about their consciousness or "soul" being somehow a magic entity that cannot be copied or multiplied without still hanging together in a ghostly way have a problem with thinking this through.
Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.
So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.
Germans may pay more per kWh of energy, but in absolute terms they still pay less because they consume much less energy.
I'm paying 22 Euros a month (100% solar/hydro/wind), that's $30. How much do you pay? If I'm paying twice as much, you're paying $15, right? Right? Come on, tell me.
Unix (in some incarnation) is running the world. It runs on servers, on embedded systems and basically all tablets and smartphones (both Android and iOS are Unix).
I cannot believe I'm wasting 30 seconds on this. Die, Slashdot, die.
I don't think there was actually a functional ICBM available during WW2, although the V-2 came close, I don't think it was capable of achieving a stable orbit.
The V2 was FAR from orbit or anything like that. About an order of magnitude or more from orbit in fact.
Yes, but: Encryption already exists, so we need to change it from a server-client relationship to a peer-peer relationship. Adding it to HTTP is easy: Simply embed the public key in the 'GET' request. The server can encrypt all responses so only the client computer can decrypt it.
Excuse me, but why should this work? "They" would just intercept the GET request, replace the key with another one they have the private key for, intercept the response, decrypt it, and encrypt it again with your key to send it along to you. Make a scheme like that a "standard" and they would make this kind of MITM attack standard.
Encryption without authentication is worthless. Trying to make it work is like trying to invent a perpetuum mobile.
We should do this, and make user-friendly encryption tools more widely available to the non-geek community as well.
Tools are not the problem. The problem is that at a certain scale you need some infrastructure to distribute and authenticate encryption keys and at that point you'll run into the same problem we're at now: You have third parties you'll have to trust. Doesn't matter then if you have to trust them not to hand over your data (like Google and ISPs do) or your encryption keys.
It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem.
You let the whole world use the internet for over a decade, with everyone thinking/believing that their data is reasonably private.
Seriously? When I started using the internet in 1992 as a 14 year old, I assumed that the NSA had access to everything on the internet. The Room 641A story in 2006 pretty much confirmed that.
There's still a difference in thinking that the NSA can have access to everything (but uses this only in very specific cases) or that it does this as a matter of course, with secret laws and secret courts, lying about it and even stores data of people who are in no way suspicious. It's a matter of scale and of trust.
Anyone else notice that instead of going to Russia, Obama decided to visit Sweden?
“Swedish military and civilian intelligence organizations are strong and reliable partners [of USA] on a range of key issues Due to domestic political considerations, the extent of this cooperation is not widely known within the Swedish government and it would be useful to acknowledge this cooperation privately, as public mention of the cooperation would open up the government to domestic criticism.”
how a compression that may lead to documents altered in such a way (numbers replaced by other numbers) can be considered fit for use in a photocopier. This can lead to very real, expensive and even dangerous problems down the line.
I would use Tor only on a netbook with no HD, booting from an internal read-only USB stick off the webcam USB line (I would want no webcam anyway) into a preconfigured Linux (or *BSD just to maximize obscurity). The actual boot partition would be encrypted. A text-mode browser like lynx would deal with javascript and other nonsense thoroughly. I would use it only on public or otherwise free or available networks not connected in any way to me. I would make sure the WiFi card would use a fresh random MAC for every connection. External USB and Ethernet ports would be physically disconnected or glued shut and the case sealed. It would have a switch soldered in to disconnect battery power.
And one day we will be allowed to choose between a red and a blue World President and will have to buy everything from a handful of incredibly rich companies? Yeah, great. You can keep that kind of democracy and capitalism.
Use a tracking setup with face recognition that is able to aim two not too weak lasers right into the eyes of a burglar. He won't do very much burgling ever again! Don't forget to remind any legitimate visitors to wear laser-proof glasses though.
But seriously, lasers are great. What you could do is replacing a floodlight with a setup consisting of a laser and moving mirrors that projects a grid onto your property. This would give you very low light levels and still instant visibility of everything that moves out there (since it would deform the grid).
all of this seems to be true only for people who take vitamin pills. People who get their vitamins by eating lots of fruits and vegetables STILL live longer and are healthier. May have other reasons than vitamins though.
I've decided quite a while ago that eating meat, fish, vegetables and fruit is fine. I also add as much salt as I like and have no fear of fat and oils. What I try to avoid is sugar and basically anything ready-made. Which often means I can walk right through a supermarket and out at the other end without finding anything I would want to eat. The shelves are full of "products" and very empty of foods.
The nice thing about a diet of meat, fish, vegetables and fruit is that it's almost impossible to get obese.
I don't understand. I don't care about the occasional request for data. Transparency would be good, but it's not the key issue. What I am worried about is the claim that the NSA has a splitter so that they can siphon off all the data they need. Google and Microsoft claim that the NSA does not have a backdoor, and does not have "direct" access. But if they're splitting off all the data, and have been given the encryption keys, isn't this all a bit irrelevant?
A "splitter" isn't all that easy here. What they would get with a splitter is an endless stream of often highly complex API data, HTTP from web apps and other data over a dozen protocols. The NSA would basically need to replicate all the systems of Facebook, Google, MS etc. to make any sense out of that.
I think the "no direct" access just means that the NSA has some equipment in these companies that they can control from the outside (via a web interface or so) which can select users and keywords to sieve through whatever data the company is receiving much further in. This then wouldn't be a "direct access" to the systems of the company (rather a indirect access), but still a highly selective and structured way to get at the data they're interested in.
If Google REALLY would try to do what it could do in some fields instead of rather helplessly fumbling around often enough, it could very soon get into a dominating position that wouldn't be good for anyone.
I think people underestimate the extremely central point in which Google has comfortably positioned itself. We should be happy about every lackluster move Google does. And of course it is reigned in by being an advertisement business which means that it doesn't really care about anything that isn't connected to selling more ads. This explains a lot of the half-heartedness it displays in many things. It's just not worth the effort to destroy other businesses if you can't make money out of it.
People recommend all kinds of webappy RSS-readers instead of Google Reader. But the actual point of Google Reader was not that it was a web app. The point was that it was a backend and API for reading and syncing your news with hundreds of clients on all platforms that used Google Reader as a way to sync your stuff.
NONE of all the other services, apps, websites, browser extensions that are trying to do the same actually do the same. With Google Reader as a de-facto standard for that there was real competition between applications that all worked with the same backend. What we have now is full fragmentation into dozens or hundreds of incompatible services.
What we not have (and won't get) is the one thing that would be able to replace Google Reader: An open standard that could be supported by all kinds of clients and servers which then would work seamlessly which each other.
That so few people understand this is baffling. Sometimes I think that the Internet is turning from a network based on open standards into a set of proprietary and incompatible services is just natural: People want this and even many geeks don't understand the difference.
Me? I suppose I will use the opportunity to kick that habit. I have been reading dozens of feeds daily for many years and I don't think I really got anything out of it but wasted time. The world is crazy anyway, I won't change it and getting angry every day isn't actually worth it.
Jailbreaking is a personal choice..Apple, nor any other company should be allowed to tell me what I can do with my purchased hardware. If I want to take a chance by jailbreaking my phone it should be up to me.
But how does your phone know it's you who's jailbreaking it?
Watertight security even when you have physical access to a device has two sides: It protects your data (and may allow you to brick the phone remotely) but it also locks you out. It's very hard to have one but not the other.
"Money is a sign of poverty" as the Culture says (it has no money). But it did transcend the lust for power in the most straight way: By being almost limitlessly powerful, to make that clear. The technology of the Culture is very much god-like.
I really like how in his Culture sex-changes are not only possible but common, with the usual course changing between the sexes one or more times and bearing a child being something even most men do at least once. But then, with at least 400 years at your disposal exploring how it is being a man/woman is something even the most extreme homophobes would try sooner or later... Ranting gets boring after one or two hundred years I guess.
Anyway, if you're a tight-minded human the Culture will induce rages for you, no doubt. They have no problems with drugs too, with all those drug glands engineered in. It's the most liberal, anarchistic (and stinking rich and powerful to the point of godlikeness) society you can think of. Or better, even in ways you probably even couldn't think of, this kind of super-power imagination is one of Bank's many merits.
Yeah, when I first read about his diagnosis and prognosis I thought "We're at that really awkward point in which we can find out what someone is suffering from and that and when he will die of it but still can't do anything about it". This is incredibly sad.
You can basically start with whatever book you want, especially since Banks didn't write them in the order they were published anyway.
I would recommend either "Player of Games" or "Surface Detail". The first takes a while before it really takes off but gives you a good grounding into the Culture and has a pretty much single-track and fascinating plot. The latter is more complicated but is full of good stuff (like a murdered and revived slave girl on a revenge mission and some whistle-blower aliens exploring the AI after-live hells of their species).
But frankly, all are read-worthy. You won't stop before you have read them all anyway. His non-SF books are good too, especially since some of them veer quite a bit into the fantastic. "Transition" isn't actually SF, but anything involving things like travelling between parallel worlds is close enough for me...
Iain M. Banks not only managed to revive SF to a point of being relevant once again (to me at least), he also managed to make up a future and a culture that was worth it. He may be dead now but he left something really precious: A possible world that is both interesting and (mostly) peaceful and fun.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you know what's really funny? Even as you smirk at Apple and Apple's customers you totally expect Apple to come up with a better product than Samsung is able to.
Nobody knows, that's the problem.
But: Don't call it a watch. Or only if you call your smartphone a "pocket watch" just because it can display the time and you have it in your pocket.
I think selecting features that make sense and executing this in a way that you want to use them is the really hard thing here. Just squeezing a small Android device with a tiny screen and battery into a huge watch isn't going to make it sell.
The thing that always scrambles my brain when thinking of this is consciousness:
If you can do that, if you make a digital copy of ones brain, then logically you can "install" it into multiple bodies. So lets say you do that.. You die and they install a copy of your brain into two bodies. Picture yourself waking up.. as two people? To the outside world these two would behave as you would, but where is the conscious you. The one that's staring that the computer screen right now. How does that duplicate or even what the hell is that.
I generally consider myself scientifically minded and am an athiest, but this aspect of things always throws me through a loop.
I really don't see what's so complicated about that. There would be two individual people thinking they're you (and both would be right), with all your memories and whatever but they wouldn't have any more or less a "common consciousness" than any other two people. From that moment on they would have different experiences, would think, see, do and learn different things and would slowly become more and more different over the years. Not totally different (they would be very similar), but very much like identical twins who still are two people.
Only people who exercise some magic (or religious) thinking about their consciousness or "soul" being somehow a magic entity that cannot be copied or multiplied without still hanging together in a ghostly way have a problem with thinking this through.
But at what cost?
Apparently Germans pay 2+ times the price that Americans pay.
So essentially this news story is stating that Germans are setting new records at getting fucked by their inefficient electricity generation strategy.
Germans may pay more per kWh of energy, but in absolute terms they still pay less because they consume much less energy.
I'm paying 22 Euros a month (100% solar/hydro/wind), that's $30. How much do you pay? If I'm paying twice as much, you're paying $15, right? Right? Come on, tell me.
Neckbeard teasing? Or what?
Unix (in some incarnation) is running the world. It runs on servers, on embedded systems and basically all tablets and smartphones (both Android and iOS are Unix).
I cannot believe I'm wasting 30 seconds on this. Die, Slashdot, die.
I don't think there was actually a functional ICBM available during WW2, although the V-2 came close, I don't think it was capable of achieving a stable orbit.
The V2 was FAR from orbit or anything like that. About an order of magnitude or more from orbit in fact.
Yes, but: Encryption already exists, so we need to change it from a server-client relationship to a peer-peer relationship. Adding it to HTTP is easy: Simply embed the public key in the 'GET' request. The server can encrypt all responses so only the client computer can decrypt it.
Excuse me, but why should this work? "They" would just intercept the GET request, replace the key with another one they have the private key for, intercept the response, decrypt it, and encrypt it again with your key to send it along to you. Make a scheme like that a "standard" and they would make this kind of MITM attack standard.
Encryption without authentication is worthless. Trying to make it work is like trying to invent a perpetuum mobile.
We should do this, and make user-friendly encryption tools more widely available to the non-geek community as well.
Tools are not the problem. The problem is that at a certain scale you need some infrastructure to distribute and authenticate encryption keys and at that point you'll run into the same problem we're at now: You have third parties you'll have to trust. Doesn't matter then if you have to trust them not to hand over your data (like Google and ISPs do) or your encryption keys.
It's not a technical problem, it's a political problem.
You let the whole world use the internet for over a decade, with everyone thinking/believing that their data is reasonably private.
Seriously? When I started using the internet in 1992 as a 14 year old, I assumed that the NSA had access to everything on the internet. The Room 641A story in 2006 pretty much confirmed that.
There's still a difference in thinking that the NSA can have access to everything (but uses this only in very specific cases) or that it does this as a matter of course, with secret laws and secret courts, lying about it and even stores data of people who are in no way suspicious. It's a matter of scale and of trust.
Anyone else notice that instead of going to Russia, Obama decided to visit Sweden?
“Swedish military and civilian intelligence organizations are strong and reliable partners [of USA] on a range of key issues Due to domestic political considerations, the extent of this cooperation is not widely known within the Swedish government and it would be useful to acknowledge this cooperation privately, as public mention of the cooperation would open up the government to domestic criticism.”
(From a leaked US cable)
the Minds of Iain M. Banks which partly run in hyperspace to get around this pesky speed of light limit when processing things.
OK, that's all.
how a compression that may lead to documents altered in such a way (numbers replaced by other numbers) can be considered fit for use in a photocopier. This can lead to very real, expensive and even dangerous problems down the line.
I would use Tor only on a netbook with no HD, booting from an internal read-only USB stick off the webcam USB line (I would want no webcam anyway) into a preconfigured Linux (or *BSD just to maximize obscurity). The actual boot partition would be encrypted. A text-mode browser like lynx would deal with javascript and other nonsense thoroughly. I would use it only on public or otherwise free or available networks not connected in any way to me. I would make sure the WiFi card would use a fresh random MAC for every connection. External USB and Ethernet ports would be physically disconnected or glued shut and the case sealed. It would have a switch soldered in to disconnect battery power.
I'm too lazy for that though.
And one day we will be allowed to choose between a red and a blue World President and will have to buy everything from a handful of incredibly rich companies? Yeah, great. You can keep that kind of democracy and capitalism.
Use a tracking setup with face recognition that is able to aim two not too weak lasers right into the eyes of a burglar. He won't do very much burgling ever again! Don't forget to remind any legitimate visitors to wear laser-proof glasses though.
But seriously, lasers are great. What you could do is replacing a floodlight with a setup consisting of a laser and moving mirrors that projects a grid onto your property. This would give you very low light levels and still instant visibility of everything that moves out there (since it would deform the grid).
all of this seems to be true only for people who take vitamin pills. People who get their vitamins by eating lots of fruits and vegetables STILL live longer and are healthier. May have other reasons than vitamins though.
I've decided quite a while ago that eating meat, fish, vegetables and fruit is fine. I also add as much salt as I like and have no fear of fat and oils. What I try to avoid is sugar and basically anything ready-made. Which often means I can walk right through a supermarket and out at the other end without finding anything I would want to eat. The shelves are full of "products" and very empty of foods.
The nice thing about a diet of meat, fish, vegetables and fruit is that it's almost impossible to get obese.
I don't understand. I don't care about the occasional request for data. Transparency would be good, but it's not the key issue. What I am worried about is the claim that the NSA has a splitter so that they can siphon off all the data they need. Google and Microsoft claim that the NSA does not have a backdoor, and does not have "direct" access. But if they're splitting off all the data, and have been given the encryption keys, isn't this all a bit irrelevant?
A "splitter" isn't all that easy here. What they would get with a splitter is an endless stream of often highly complex API data, HTTP from web apps and other data over a dozen protocols. The NSA would basically need to replicate all the systems of Facebook, Google, MS etc. to make any sense out of that.
I think the "no direct" access just means that the NSA has some equipment in these companies that they can control from the outside (via a web interface or so) which can select users and keywords to sieve through whatever data the company is receiving much further in. This then wouldn't be a "direct access" to the systems of the company (rather a indirect access), but still a highly selective and structured way to get at the data they're interested in.
If Google REALLY would try to do what it could do in some fields instead of rather helplessly fumbling around often enough, it could very soon get into a dominating position that wouldn't be good for anyone.
I think people underestimate the extremely central point in which Google has comfortably positioned itself. We should be happy about every lackluster move Google does. And of course it is reigned in by being an advertisement business which means that it doesn't really care about anything that isn't connected to selling more ads. This explains a lot of the half-heartedness it displays in many things. It's just not worth the effort to destroy other businesses if you can't make money out of it.
People recommend all kinds of webappy RSS-readers instead of Google Reader. But the actual point of Google Reader was not that it was a web app. The point was that it was a backend and API for reading and syncing your news with hundreds of clients on all platforms that used Google Reader as a way to sync your stuff.
NONE of all the other services, apps, websites, browser extensions that are trying to do the same actually do the same. With Google Reader as a de-facto standard for that there was real competition between applications that all worked with the same backend. What we have now is full fragmentation into dozens or hundreds of incompatible services.
What we not have (and won't get) is the one thing that would be able to replace Google Reader: An open standard that could be supported by all kinds of clients and servers which then would work seamlessly which each other.
That so few people understand this is baffling. Sometimes I think that the Internet is turning from a network based on open standards into a set of proprietary and incompatible services is just natural: People want this and even many geeks don't understand the difference.
Me? I suppose I will use the opportunity to kick that habit. I have been reading dozens of feeds daily for many years and I don't think I really got anything out of it but wasted time. The world is crazy anyway, I won't change it and getting angry every day isn't actually worth it.
Jailbreaking is a personal choice..Apple, nor any other company should be allowed to tell me what I can do with my purchased hardware. If I want to take a chance by jailbreaking my phone it should be up to me.
But how does your phone know it's you who's jailbreaking it?
Watertight security even when you have physical access to a device has two sides: It protects your data (and may allow you to brick the phone remotely) but it also locks you out. It's very hard to have one but not the other.
"Money is a sign of poverty" as the Culture says (it has no money). But it did transcend the lust for power in the most straight way: By being almost limitlessly powerful, to make that clear. The technology of the Culture is very much god-like.
I really like how in his Culture sex-changes are not only possible but common, with the usual course changing between the sexes one or more times and bearing a child being something even most men do at least once. But then, with at least 400 years at your disposal exploring how it is being a man/woman is something even the most extreme homophobes would try sooner or later... Ranting gets boring after one or two hundred years I guess.
Anyway, if you're a tight-minded human the Culture will induce rages for you, no doubt. They have no problems with drugs too, with all those drug glands engineered in. It's the most liberal, anarchistic (and stinking rich and powerful to the point of godlikeness) society you can think of. Or better, even in ways you probably even couldn't think of, this kind of super-power imagination is one of Bank's many merits.
Yeah, when I first read about his diagnosis and prognosis I thought "We're at that really awkward point in which we can find out what someone is suffering from and that and when he will die of it but still can't do anything about it". This is incredibly sad.
You can basically start with whatever book you want, especially since Banks didn't write them in the order they were published anyway.
I would recommend either "Player of Games" or "Surface Detail". The first takes a while before it really takes off but gives you a good grounding into the Culture and has a pretty much single-track and fascinating plot. The latter is more complicated but is full of good stuff (like a murdered and revived slave girl on a revenge mission and some whistle-blower aliens exploring the AI after-live hells of their species).
But frankly, all are read-worthy. You won't stop before you have read them all anyway. His non-SF books are good too, especially since some of them veer quite a bit into the fantastic. "Transition" isn't actually SF, but anything involving things like travelling between parallel worlds is close enough for me...
Iain M. Banks not only managed to revive SF to a point of being relevant once again (to me at least), he also managed to make up a future and a culture that was worth it. He may be dead now but he left something really precious: A possible world that is both interesting and (mostly) peaceful and fun.
I'm really thankful for that.