I have read several articles and reports by economists and geologists claiming this fracking boom is a bubble. The estimate of 100 years worth of gas is overstated. It seems 25 years worth of gas is more likely, less if gas exports are allowed. Then the bubble bursts. The shale oil bubble is worse, 80% of shale oil comes from two rapidly declining deposits, so unless replacements deposits are found that bubble bursts in ten years or so,. Also, we haven't even started talking about limiting factors like environmental issues and the increasing cost of maintaining production levels as the best deposits are used up. As usual everybody is so busy dancing to the buzz they don't stop to think.
Apple decided the only way they can differentiate their iPhone 5s amidst all the comments that they are no longer innovative is to create a competitive market based on useless CPU performance numbers, just like what Apple did with Retina displays. Before Retina, nobody cared about pixel density. Before A7, nobody cared about CPU performance or its bittyness. Before the iPhone 5s camera, nobody cared about the size of the CCD pixel on their phone camera.
Dude, It's not that long ago that articles like this slashvertisment were plastered all over the web accompanied by comments filled with enthusiastic boasts by hoards of Android fans detailing how iPhone performance sucks ass. Even if blisteringly fast benchmark performance is pretty low down on the list of most people out to buy a smartphone I still can't fault Apple for trying to put a sock in the collective mouth of the Android community. There is a certain personal satisfaction to be had from making the choir of hard core Android fans shut up about benchmarks until Samsung comes up with a still faster device (hopefully free of benchmark cheating this time) even if the customers will probably hardly notice this stupid pissing contest.
The hilarious part of all of this is we’re still talking about small gains in performance.
The hilarious part of all this is that most people really don't give a rat's as about performance when selecting a phone or even a tablet. The criteria are things like: how does it handle? How intuitive is the UI? Can I watch my favorite online video feeds on this thing? Are any buttons in annoying palaces? What's the price? Does this thing have software to view and edit MS Office files I get sent by mail? The only performance tests these smartphone and tablet things usually get is playing around with a display example in the shop and seeing if the UI is nice and snappy. Nobody excepts tech nerds gives a rats ass that a Samsun Galaxy 4 get a few more FPS in Modern Combat than an iPhone 5.
Actually, this sounds like a Tim Cook fluff piece, like someone is trying to make a subtle point about how Apple is going to be all good because it has Steve Cook, or Tim Jobs -- whatever -- just buy their stock and iPhones.
Sour grapes.... It's kind of hard to argue with the success of the iPod/iPone/iPad series. Google with it's Android OS was only able to trump the market share of a single company by setting loose an entire hoard of Android licensees on Apple. If they had tried to go the same route as Apple and offer a single premium price GooglePhone competitor to the iPhone, Android would probably be a footnote today in mobile OS history today. You can peddle your sour grapes here as much as you want, it's still impressive that the biggest competitor of the Android hoard by any yardstick is one company with two phone models and tablet two models on offer that doesn't even try to compete with the race-to-the-bottom priced devices that accounted for much of Android's impressive growth in mobile OS market share when Android dethroned Symbian in the medium and low-end device market.
Since when does a foreign citizen who actively works AGAINST the interests of the US government allowed freedoms to enter the United States?
If he was encouraging people to make bombing attacks on US soil, or encouraging the southern states to take another crack at secession, I'd concede your point but this guy is being denied entry for exercising freedom of speech. If another country, your ally, is spying on you, surely you are well within your rights to petition your own leader to do something about it? Or perhaps you think that it would be acceptable for the UK government to deny entry to any US citizen who criticized BP over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? This is a clear case of sore-loser syndrome.
In other news, a Danish TV station I was watching yesterday had one of those round table discussions where everybody was scratching their heads over this strange situation. One of the panelists cited a survey that found that Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
Unless the poll asked about policies without using the term 'socialism'.
All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.
There was a survey on CNN yesterday. They asked which party is acting like a spoiled child:
* Obama 47% * Democrats 58% * Republicans 69%
In other news, a Danish TV station I was watching yesterday had one of those round table discussions where everybody was scratching their heads over this strange situation. One of the panelists cited a survey that found that Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
Has this "preventing terrorism" lead to anything up until now?
A pile of civilians in the Middle East whose relatives became unintended casualties in the war on terror and who are now living in misery in a war-zone because of it. It's important to resist terror but some terror related problems could probably be solved by doing something other than dropping bombs on them, like for example unfreezing relations with Iran.
I'm no global warming denier, but at this point I think there's a simple harsh reality to accept: it doesn't matter how efficient we make things that run on fossil fuels, we're going to burn them all. At best with all of our "green initiatives" we might spread out burning those fuels over an extra few decades - a century at best, but over geologic timescales any delay we induce is pretty meaningless. Every bit of it is going to be burnt and released into the atmosphere.
Once they're all gone, THEN we'll be forced to adopt new more clean sources of energy. We just have to pray that by the time all the fossil fuels are burnt the planet isn't screwed up beyond any hope of recovery (ie, still habitable).
Every so often I get depressed and am tempted to think like you do. Then I have to remind myself that the guy who survives after being stranded in the outback with little hope of survival isn't the guy who convinces himself the situation is hopeless, it's they guy has hope and who breaks the seemingly insurmountable problem of survival down into manageable chunks and then tackles the chunks one at a time. What keeps me hopeful is what is happening in Germany where a conservative government is working on an energy transition effort to renewables. Their stated goals are:
1) Greenhouse gas reductions: 80–95% reduction by 2050 2) Renewable energy targets: 60% share by 2050 (renewables broadly defined as hydro, solar and wind power) 3) Energy efficiency: electricity efficiency up by 50% by 2050 4) An associated research and development drive
I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, some of the costs of this effort have been passed from industry to consumers but that looks like a fixable problem to me and at least the Germans are actually doing something other than deluding themselves into believing that climate change isn't going to be a problem and that the melting of the icecaps is a plus because we'll be able to drill for more oil and gas. So far they have managed to increase the market share of renewables from 5% in 1999 to 22.9% in 2012 which is quite a bit over the European average and the rate is climbing. I live abroad and only come to Germany every one or two years and let me tell you the difference has been noticeable over the last few years. Each time I go there I see more electric cars (they don't clog up the streets but I never used to see any a few years ago), more solar panels, more farms with methane collectors and more wind turbines. We are in a big mess environmentally and climatically but if a bunch of christian conservatives can be convinced to back an energy transition effort to renewables on this scale there must be some hope. Convincing ourselves that the world is irreversibly destined to go to hell in a handbasket isn't going to do anything more than ensure that we are half defeated before we even start trying to cleaning up the mess for real.
What you're experiencing is called cognitive dissonance. The idea that other people could prefer something that you yourself do not approve of can be difficult for those who cling to their beliefs as if they were some kind of religion. But companies aren't gods, and the choice of smart phone isn't a faith. They are products, and different people will make different choices based on what they value. Some will choose simply for the size or apparent superiority of the feature list, and others will choose based on finesse or ease any of a number of other factors. Those are their choices, and the fact that you made a different choice does not in any way mean that your choice should apply to everyone else.
Perhaps a bit of introspection on your part as to why you hold your beliefs so dear would be helpful.
The same can be applied to Apple zealots like yourself. When there are superior products available for less money, why buy Apple/
Because it's not a superior product.
Woosh.... and, woosh.... I didn't see him make any statement that would peg him as an Apple fanboy to somebody who is not an Android fundamentalist, nor did he explicitly say that Apple is better than Android. All he did was make a (apparently correct) diagnosis of cognitive dissonance. His only major point is that different people define superior product in different ways and that you two should get over it. Everything you two have said in those posts, and most of what you are likely to say in any future posts on this subject, just confirms his diagnosis of cognitive dissonance.
Trivial will be running a crack on the limited number of hashes that can be generated by the phone's sampler for fingerprint images.
The problem with this is not where it has started, as a simple PIN replacement for iPhones. It is where this is headed, now that Apple has used their marketing position to deliver Biometric authentication as a security technology in the mainstream.
People who are good at technology problem-solving are often equipped with exactly wrong type of mental orientation for examining implication or cross-disciplinary context. So? You get a reasonable PIN replacement for your iPhone, that reduces auto-collisions by people unlocking their phones while driving. Nice.
You also get this as a cure-all for the password problem, as an option on every device you interact with, over the next 4 years. I don't care if it is thumbprint, retina-scan or gut-biome that is measured. This will lower security and introduce as-yet-unforseen compromises.
I'd paint the lens on this thing, with black enamel.
Firstly I refer you to my previous post: a) They [the NSA/Russan Mafia/hackers-with-a-200-IQ] probably have more efficient ways to get into your device than stealing it and hacking it by lifting your greasy fingerprints.
Secondly: I also think think that messing about with the limited number of hashes that can be generated by the phone's sampler for fingerprint images is either going to defeat the vast majority of run-of-the-mill phone thieves or be time consuming enough for them not to bother. They will just fence the device to somebody who will eventually wipe it and sell it on Ebay, and that still makes this scanner better than having no passcode at all. This sensor is not intended to keep out hackers or some intelligence agency, it is intended to make phones that would otherwise have no passcode too time consuming to crack for the average thief to bother with it.
I have some of concerns about this technology but somebody running a crack on the fingerprint hashes or cracking the sensor with latex copies of my prints are all scenarios that are father down my list than, for example, the NSA twisting Apple's arm to force them to hand over biometric information so that US intelligence services can use it for nefarious purposes (and that is not at the top of the list of things that worry me either).
sounds really trivial to break. I can see all kinds of kids doing this.
Known vector. Gummy-bear attack.
The core issue is that you leave copies of your authenticator EVERYWHERE. It's as if you dropped 85% accurate copies of your smartcard on every item you touched - with random 15% damage to the material - and a card reader designed for 15% error in reads.
Any such scheme is going to be subject to this kind of impersonation or gaming. This is why biometrics are always a bad ID choice. Also, the A/D conversion is low-entropy, among other problems.
There's a false assumption, that because I can uniquely identify another person with 99.999% accuracy, based on your sound, shape and appearance, that therefore this is the best way a machine should do so. It is a falsehood that is reinforced by a misleading intuitive perception. The core issue concerns the questions related to what constitutes "identity" and an "authentication factor" in systems. Neither of these correlate to actual persons or their real-world characteristics in a unique and meaningful way, that is not also subject to spoofing, injecting or revocation DoS.
Let's say you get your grubby hands on an iPhone 5S and are immediately overcome by an irresistible urge to crack it open.
1) Getting the victim to pose his finger for a 2400dpi photo is not an option so you'd have to bag the device and dust it for prints since you'll probably need to make the prints more visible. I suppose you could get the hang of that in about half an hour if you are a novice with a print dusting sets you bought online. 2) Find a good thumb print. There is no guarantee that the print on the button sensor surface is any good nor is there a certainty that there is a usable print anywhere on the phone. I suppose you could monitor your victim and steal some of his drinking glasses and coffee cups but that means 'trivial' goes out the window right there. 3) For the sake of argument let's say you get 1 and 2 right and find a good print on the sensor surface or somewhere else on the phone, eliminating the need to poke around stealing coffee cups and drinking glasses. You now have still have to do what it says in the article and the photo processing, printing and latex covering that sounds like quite a bit more than 10 minutes of work, especially if you have never done it before.
That does not sound exactly trivial to me. Trivial is faking your way past Google's face recognition-login feature with a picture of the phone's owner. You could conceivably do that by borrowing his phone, snapping a picture of him with your iPad and using the image in the iPad to log into his phone... Ooops! somebody already went and did that and it looks like a 20 second operation. Going through the above procedure to defeat the fingerprint scanner takes what? A hour? The average pick-pocket would probably not bother and the time it takes to crack phones this way with no guarantee of reward would make it un-economcal for criminal bands to crack phones on a large scale (in the hope of finding account numbers or dirty pictures for a blackmailing,... or whatever) which means that this is way better security than no passcode at all. If you are carrying data valuable enough to make it worth while to go through this exercise to retrieve it you should put a 20 character password on your iPhone or consider putting the data on an IronKey in stead. And yes I know the NSA can probably pull this off in 10 minutes or less but if you have the NSA after you:
a) They probably have more efficient ways to get into your device than stealing it and hacking it by lifting your greasy fingerprints. b) You have bigger things to worry about than somebody reading your e-mail... like getting snatched and sent to a secret jail for a course of water-boarding, or being on the shortlist for a drone strike.
tl:dr; If you're a first year art student, you will absolutely love iOS 7. If you prefer to have some visual cues on what is content and what is part of the interface, you may want to hold off until Apple allows graphic designers capable of using more than one color back on the team.
Ok... I wouldn't buy any of the iPhone 5C line except the white one simply because of the super bright preschooler's toy colours. Similarly I can't say I'm a fan of the colours choices they made in the OS or the flat buttons either. As to the lack of traditional visual cues on what is content and what is part of the interface and what is not? What Ives and his team has done with the iOS 7 interface is move it closer to the style used in web-apps and the web today has it's own rules about what is clickable and what is not and those rules are not what they used to be in the dot-com bubble back in the 1990s. It didn't take me long to get used to a lack of traditional visual cues in iOS 7 because I am already familiar with it from browsing modern web pages where traditional interface elements have often disappeared or been modded with Cascading Style Sheets until they are unrecognisable. Where there used to be HTML buttons there are now pictures, and clickable links who used to be easy to distinguish because they were blue and underlined now look like any other highlighted text much of the time thanks again to CSS. Somehow I still manage to browse the web so I think I can handle iOS 7 even if I don't agree with some of Ive's aesthetic choices. I'm also not the kind of person who abhors any kind of change, If that was the case I'd still be punching away at a Windows XP laptop, or in my case, more likely an Old Pentium laptop running MWM on top of Slackware.
Worst offender is the new lock screen. Why did they decide to make me wait an extra 1/2-1 seconds after hitting the power or home button to turn it on so that can "gracefully" fade in from black before giving me access to the "slide to unlock"? It's maddening.
I just pulled my iPhone 4S out of my pocket, tried the lock screen thing several times and.... no, I still can't understand why somebody can get that worked up about this. Quite frankly I didn't even notice that delay until I read your post.
Biblical creationists believe that evolution undermines the idea of divine creation, specifically the idea that man is created in God's image. This is a very important belief for them. Without it, their world crumbles.
When you present them with facts and evidence supporting evolution, they're not dispassionately evaluating the evidence, but desperately trying to avoid confronting it, to the point of profound intellectual dishonesty.
They are what used to be called neurotic, irrational and disturbed in one specific area or about one specific thing, but otherwise relatively functional human beings, able to work, raise families, etc, etc.
The answer to the question of why Biblical Creationists are like this is the same as the answer to the question of why some people are holocaust deniers, or Marxists, or followers of any other ideology or belief that is in obvious defiance of objective reality. They have invested their sense of self into this belief, and they cannot abandon that belief without sacrificing their sense of self along with it.
So they hold on to that belief, no matter what.
Arrgggh.... Rationalists debating religionists as if the latter were rational, and religionists fighting back as if rationalists were religions... talk about a total disconnect. Mind you, I can see the need to oppose these creationist (and extreme right/left wing) bozos at every turn and I do it myself whenever I come across a particularly noisy specimen but it is frustrating as hell. Sometimes after debating these people I get the feeling I should change my name to Sisyphus (the guy punished in Hades with an endless task).
You raise a good point, and there's actually a lot of evidence proving you correct. There have been more than a few security vulnerabilities that have persisted in the code for various widely-used pieces of open-source software for years. One was even found and patched but then quickly reverted without anyone noticing.
What people fail to understand is that proper security reviews are more than "let's just take a look at the code and make sure that it's not sending email to the NSA." You also can't perform a proper review with a bunch of hobbyist coders, you need highly-trained experts. Every single line of code needs to be checked, double checked, and triple checked against every single other line in the code to make sure that there isn't anything that could possibly compromise the security of the system. These failures are always subtle and usually unintentional.
This is best summed up with an example. Any idiot can look at the code and say "wait a second, this code copies the decryption key and sends an email to the NSA!" Only a very methodical search with a lot of people can say "hey, we've determined that this implementation of this specific part of this specific algorithm probably doesn't have a large amount of randomness over a long period of time. It likely decays such that the complexity is reduced to such and such a number of bits after such and such an amount of time and in these specific situations. This is a problem!"
You are right. The problem is that there are, and always will be, fewer experts checking for subtle errors like this and we haven't even begun to consider cleverly hidden weaknesses that are injected into complex pieces of software like encryption APIs or entire FOSS foundations set up by the NAS/CIA/MI6/FSB and other intelligence agencies with the deliberate aim of popularising compromised software. The basic lesson seems to be what Al-Qaeda learned a decade ago. If you want to be really secure, couriers and offline communications are the way to go. The Russians have even gone a step further and moved all super sensitive material to paper and use typewriters instead of computers. It is way harder to steal a paper intelligence report that is typed up in a limited number of carefully tracked hard copies that you have to sign for and who stay in a secure environment than it is to hack somebody's supposedly secure Blackberry/Android/iOS device and steal the PDF of that intelligence report from the e-mail attachments folder.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
What I find fascinating about conservatives is that a large portion of them does not only chooses to be ignorant, they revel in being ignorant and declaring war on science. Conservative pundits can say what they want, pull out all the old slogans and call dissenting voices 'communists' and 'socialists' but even the old Soviet Union did not revel in ignorance. The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
Stop messing with his selective memory algorithms.
The phrase '$1 Billion' gets people to sit up and notice.
But most of this work won't benefit the Linux community and software at large, at least directly. It will be ancillary improvements; where something gets re-written/improved/fixed due to issues on the POWER architecture that happen to benefit everyone else too.
This is work that ensures there are usable alternatives to Intel based equipment. I would have thought that benefits the Linux community at large directly... unless one is most at home in a x86-64 monoculture:-)
Someone needs to not only go after the trolls, but go after the law license of the Attorneys representing them as well. Get a couple of lawyers disbarred and watch the lawsuits end!
Probably the same way that the US Navy got my contact information to harass me when I was in high school. The school just gets authority to collect it and to hell with your wishes. Compared with the years of harassment and insults from the jack asses at the Navy, this is of somewhat lesser concern.
The US military has been known to procure it's harassment lists from professional private sector list brokers.
But, it's still a concern, the last thing we need is to condition kids to think that it's normal for schools to spy on your behavior outside of school hours.
This is one of those damned if you do damned if you don't situations. You can criticize this all you want and you are right, watching student's social media is plain creepy. However, after the next time some deranged student walks into a school and kills 20+ of his fellow students you will also be able to criticize the school district quite justifiably. After all, this student had been blogging about his intentions on social media for weeks and nobody took any notice. Why weren't the school authorities and law enforcement reading those Facebook posts and doing something about it? I suppose then that the manner and extent of the monitoring would tend to matter. Apparently these guys are using keyword searches of a list of social media accounts to flagtop potentially troubled students for monitoring by professionals (presumably: psychiatrists, ex. cops, ex. social workers). The problem from my POW is not so much the monitoring as what they are searching for. Are they just flagging suicidal students, potentially borderline postal students or bullying victims? Or are they going North Korean on the kids and flagging things that are well within freedom of speech boundaries such as: criticising religion, criticizing the war in Iraq, criticizing the school system or will I be getting calls from the school district because my daughter is blogging about Wiccanism and that offends somebodys christian fundamentalist sensibilities? That would be both wrong and considerably more creepy than just trying to prevent suicides, bullying and shootings. I don't see an easy alternative to this other than doing no monitoring at all in which case you should not criticize the school district if they miss some blog post by a student who then goes off and does something tragic.
It's more like they didn't have much else for the iPhone 5S, just the fingerprint sensor. Everything else is either the same or a slight improvement, like the camera.
Really? I could say the same about the last two iterations of a whole gaggle of Android devices. Is the point you are trying to make that that we have reached 'Peak Smartphone'? If that is the case the obvious follow up question is: Did that just dawn on you? (because the rest of us have known this for a while now)
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I have read several articles and reports by economists and geologists claiming this fracking boom is a bubble. The estimate of 100 years worth of gas is overstated. It seems 25 years worth of gas is more likely, less if gas exports are allowed. Then the bubble bursts. The shale oil bubble is worse, 80% of shale oil comes from two rapidly declining deposits, so unless replacements deposits are found that bubble bursts in ten years or so,. Also, we haven't even started talking about limiting factors like environmental issues and the increasing cost of maintaining production levels as the best deposits are used up. As usual everybody is so busy dancing to the buzz they don't stop to think.
I might not care as much about performance as I care about battery life, and a rating of that is performance/Watt.
Ditto, that's probably the only part of a benchmark test that I really care about.
Apple decided the only way they can differentiate their iPhone 5s amidst all the comments that they are no longer innovative is to create a competitive market based on useless CPU performance numbers, just like what Apple did with Retina displays. Before Retina, nobody cared about pixel density. Before A7, nobody cared about CPU performance or its bittyness. Before the iPhone 5s camera, nobody cared about the size of the CCD pixel on their phone camera.
Dude, It's not that long ago that articles like this slashvertisment were plastered all over the web accompanied by comments filled with enthusiastic boasts by hoards of Android fans detailing how iPhone performance sucks ass. Even if blisteringly fast benchmark performance is pretty low down on the list of most people out to buy a smartphone I still can't fault Apple for trying to put a sock in the collective mouth of the Android community. There is a certain personal satisfaction to be had from making the choir of hard core Android fans shut up about benchmarks until Samsung comes up with a still faster device (hopefully free of benchmark cheating this time) even if the customers will probably hardly notice this stupid pissing contest.
The hilarious part of all of this is we’re still talking about small gains in performance.
The hilarious part of all this is that most people really don't give a rat's as about performance when selecting a phone or even a tablet. The criteria are things like: how does it handle? How intuitive is the UI? Can I watch my favorite online video feeds on this thing? Are any buttons in annoying palaces? What's the price? Does this thing have software to view and edit MS Office files I get sent by mail? The only performance tests these smartphone and tablet things usually get is playing around with a display example in the shop and seeing if the UI is nice and snappy. Nobody excepts tech nerds gives a rats ass that a Samsun Galaxy 4 get a few more FPS in Modern Combat than an iPhone 5.
Actually, this sounds like a Tim Cook fluff piece, like someone is trying to make a subtle point about how Apple is going to be all good because it has Steve Cook, or Tim Jobs -- whatever -- just buy their stock and iPhones.
Sour grapes.... It's kind of hard to argue with the success of the iPod/iPone/iPad series. Google with it's Android OS was only able to trump the market share of a single company by setting loose an entire hoard of Android licensees on Apple. If they had tried to go the same route as Apple and offer a single premium price GooglePhone competitor to the iPhone, Android would probably be a footnote today in mobile OS history today. You can peddle your sour grapes here as much as you want, it's still impressive that the biggest competitor of the Android hoard by any yardstick is one company with two phone models and tablet two models on offer that doesn't even try to compete with the race-to-the-bottom priced devices that accounted for much of Android's impressive growth in mobile OS market share when Android dethroned Symbian in the medium and low-end device market.
That's definitely unamerican behaviour!
Yeah, now you guys will have to rename Linux to Patriotix or Freedomnix or... ummm... something like that.
Since when does a foreign citizen who actively works AGAINST the interests of the US government allowed freedoms to enter the United States?
If he was encouraging people to make bombing attacks on US soil, or encouraging the southern states to take another crack at secession, I'd concede your point but this guy is being denied entry for exercising freedom of speech. If another country, your ally, is spying on you, surely you are well within your rights to petition your own leader to do something about it? Or perhaps you think that it would be acceptable for the UK government to deny entry to any US citizen who criticized BP over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill? This is a clear case of sore-loser syndrome.
In other news, a Danish TV station I was watching yesterday had one of those round table discussions where everybody was scratching their heads over this strange situation. One of the panelists cited a survey that found that Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
Unless the poll asked about policies without using the term 'socialism'.
Actually they just asked if people were in favor of "the US going communist" or not. The data apparently comes from a Sen. Michael Bennet:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/11/16/congress-approval-rating-porn-polygamy_n_1098497.html
All the news stories have been about "which political party should we blame."
You want to know who to blame? All of the twits who have been cheering on "their team" while this has been going on, instead of pressuring their representatives to do their job. The members of Congress -- in both major parties -- feel no pressure to actually resolve the situation, because they've managed to trick their supporters in the media into giving them a pass while they wasted time instead of actually trying to come up with a solution that has a chance of working.
There was a survey on CNN yesterday. They asked which party is acting like a spoiled child:
* Obama 47%
* Democrats 58%
* Republicans 69%
In other news, a Danish TV station I was watching yesterday had one of those round table discussions where everybody was scratching their heads over this strange situation. One of the panelists cited a survey that found that Congress has a 10% approval rating which it amused him to contrast with the fact that apparently socialism/communism has an 11% approval rating with the US public. If those percentages are correct, that last one is surprising. I figured the approval rating for socialism in the USA would be hardly measurable.
Has this "preventing terrorism" lead to anything up until now?
A pile of civilians in the Middle East whose relatives became unintended casualties in the war on terror and who are now living in misery in a war-zone because of it. It's important to resist terror but some terror related problems could probably be solved by doing something other than dropping bombs on them, like for example unfreezing relations with Iran.
Legalize heroin.
No, no, no... we can still solve the drug problem if we just drop more bombs on it.
I'm no global warming denier, but at this point I think there's a simple harsh reality to accept: it doesn't matter how efficient we make things that run on fossil fuels, we're going to burn them all. At best with all of our "green initiatives" we might spread out burning those fuels over an extra few decades - a century at best, but over geologic timescales any delay we induce is pretty meaningless. Every bit of it is going to be burnt and released into the atmosphere.
Once they're all gone, THEN we'll be forced to adopt new more clean sources of energy. We just have to pray that by the time all the fossil fuels are burnt the planet isn't screwed up beyond any hope of recovery (ie, still habitable).
Every so often I get depressed and am tempted to think like you do. Then I have to remind myself that the guy who survives after being stranded in the outback with little hope of survival isn't the guy who convinces himself the situation is hopeless, it's they guy has hope and who breaks the seemingly insurmountable problem of survival down into manageable chunks and then tackles the chunks one at a time. What keeps me hopeful is what is happening in Germany where a conservative government is working on an energy transition effort to renewables. Their stated goals are:
1) Greenhouse gas reductions: 80–95% reduction by 2050
2) Renewable energy targets: 60% share by 2050 (renewables broadly defined as hydro, solar and wind power)
3) Energy efficiency: electricity efficiency up by 50% by 2050
4) An associated research and development drive
I'm not saying it's the perfect solution, some of the costs of this effort have been passed from industry to consumers but that looks like a fixable problem to me and at least the Germans are actually doing something other than deluding themselves into believing that climate change isn't going to be a problem and that the melting of the icecaps is a plus because we'll be able to drill for more oil and gas. So far they have managed to increase the market share of renewables from 5% in 1999 to 22.9% in 2012 which is quite a bit over the European average and the rate is climbing. I live abroad and only come to Germany every one or two years and let me tell you the difference has been noticeable over the last few years. Each time I go there I see more electric cars (they don't clog up the streets but I never used to see any a few years ago), more solar panels, more farms with methane collectors and more wind turbines. We are in a big mess environmentally and climatically but if a bunch of christian conservatives can be convinced to back an energy transition effort to renewables on this scale there must be some hope. Convincing ourselves that the world is irreversibly destined to go to hell in a handbasket isn't going to do anything more than ensure that we are half defeated before we even start trying to cleaning up the mess for real.
Just my 0.02€
What you're experiencing is called cognitive dissonance. The idea that other people could prefer something that you yourself do not approve of can be difficult for those who cling to their beliefs as if they were some kind of religion. But companies aren't gods, and the choice of smart phone isn't a faith. They are products, and different people will make different choices based on what they value. Some will choose simply for the size or apparent superiority of the feature list, and others will choose based on finesse or ease any of a number of other factors. Those are their choices, and the fact that you made a different choice does not in any way mean that your choice should apply to everyone else.
Perhaps a bit of introspection on your part as to why you hold your beliefs so dear would be helpful.
The same can be applied to Apple zealots like yourself. When there are superior products available for less money, why buy Apple/
Because it's not a superior product.
Woosh.... and, woosh.... I didn't see him make any statement that would peg him as an Apple fanboy to somebody who is not an Android fundamentalist, nor did he explicitly say that Apple is better than Android. All he did was make a (apparently correct) diagnosis of cognitive dissonance. His only major point is that different people define superior product in different ways and that you two should get over it. Everything you two have said in those posts, and most of what you are likely to say in any future posts on this subject, just confirms his diagnosis of cognitive dissonance.
Trivial will be running a crack on the limited number of hashes that can be generated by the phone's sampler for fingerprint images.
The problem with this is not where it has started, as a simple PIN replacement for iPhones. It is where this is headed, now that Apple has used their marketing position to deliver Biometric authentication as a security technology in the mainstream.
People who are good at technology problem-solving are often equipped with exactly wrong type of mental orientation for examining implication or cross-disciplinary context. So? You get a reasonable PIN replacement for your iPhone, that reduces auto-collisions by people unlocking their phones while driving. Nice.
You also get this as a cure-all for the password problem, as an option on every device you interact with, over the next 4 years. I don't care if it is thumbprint, retina-scan or gut-biome that is measured. This will lower security and introduce as-yet-unforseen compromises.
I'd paint the lens on this thing, with black enamel.
Firstly I refer you to my previous post:
a) They [the NSA/Russan Mafia/hackers-with-a-200-IQ] probably have more efficient ways to get into your device than stealing it and hacking it by lifting your greasy fingerprints.
Secondly: I also think think that messing about with the limited number of hashes that can be generated by the phone's sampler for fingerprint images is either going to defeat the vast majority of run-of-the-mill phone thieves or be time consuming enough for them not to bother. They will just fence the device to somebody who will eventually wipe it and sell it on Ebay, and that still makes this scanner better than having no passcode at all. This sensor is not intended to keep out hackers or some intelligence agency, it is intended to make phones that would otherwise have no passcode too time consuming to crack for the average thief to bother with it.
I have some of concerns about this technology but somebody running a crack on the fingerprint hashes or cracking the sensor with latex copies of my prints are all scenarios that are father down my list than, for example, the NSA twisting Apple's arm to force them to hand over biometric information so that US intelligence services can use it for nefarious purposes (and that is not at the top of the list of things that worry me either).
sounds really trivial to break. I can see all kinds of kids doing this.
Known vector. Gummy-bear attack.
The core issue is that you leave copies of your authenticator EVERYWHERE. It's as if you dropped 85% accurate copies of your smartcard on every item you touched - with random 15% damage to the material - and a card reader designed for 15% error in reads.
Any such scheme is going to be subject to this kind of impersonation or gaming. This is why biometrics are always a bad ID choice. Also, the A/D conversion is low-entropy, among other problems.
There's a false assumption, that because I can uniquely identify another person with 99.999% accuracy, based on your sound, shape and appearance, that therefore this is the best way a machine should do so. It is a falsehood that is reinforced by a misleading intuitive perception. The core issue concerns the questions related to what constitutes "identity" and an "authentication factor" in systems. Neither of these correlate to actual persons or their real-world characteristics in a unique and meaningful way, that is not also subject to spoofing, injecting or revocation DoS.
Let's say you get your grubby hands on an iPhone 5S and are immediately overcome by an irresistible urge to crack it open.
1) Getting the victim to pose his finger for a 2400dpi photo is not an option so you'd have to bag the device and dust it for prints since you'll probably need to make the prints more visible. I suppose you could get the hang of that in about half an hour if you are a novice with a print dusting sets you bought online.
2) Find a good thumb print. There is no guarantee that the print on the button sensor surface is any good nor is there a certainty that there is a usable print anywhere on the phone. I suppose you could monitor your victim and steal some of his drinking glasses and coffee cups but that means 'trivial' goes out the window right there.
3) For the sake of argument let's say you get 1 and 2 right and find a good print on the sensor surface or somewhere else on the phone, eliminating the need to poke around stealing coffee cups and drinking glasses. You now have still have to do what it says in the article and the photo processing, printing and latex covering that sounds like quite a bit more than 10 minutes of work, especially if you have never done it before.
That does not sound exactly trivial to me. Trivial is faking your way past Google's face recognition-login feature with a picture of the phone's owner. You could conceivably do that by borrowing his phone, snapping a picture of him with your iPad and using the image in the iPad to log into his phone... Ooops! somebody already went and did that and it looks like a 20 second operation. Going through the above procedure to defeat the fingerprint scanner takes what? A hour? The average pick-pocket would probably not bother and the time it takes to crack phones this way with no guarantee of reward would make it un-economcal for criminal bands to crack phones on a large scale (in the hope of finding account numbers or dirty pictures for a blackmailing, ... or whatever) which means that this is way better security than no passcode at all. If you are carrying data valuable enough to make it worth while to go through this exercise to retrieve it you should put a 20 character password on your iPhone or consider putting the data on an IronKey in stead. And yes I know the NSA can probably pull this off in 10 minutes or less but if you have the NSA after you:
a) They probably have more efficient ways to get into your device than stealing it and hacking it by lifting your greasy fingerprints.
b) You have bigger things to worry about than somebody reading your e-mail... like getting snatched and sent to a secret jail for a course of water-boarding, or being on the shortlist for a drone strike.
tl:dr; If you're a first year art student, you will absolutely love iOS 7. If you prefer to have some visual cues on what is content and what is part of the interface, you may want to hold off until Apple allows graphic designers capable of using more than one color back on the team.
Ok ... I wouldn't buy any of the iPhone 5C line except the white one simply because of the super bright preschooler's toy colours. Similarly I can't say I'm a fan of the colours choices they made in the OS or the flat buttons either. As to the lack of traditional visual cues on what is content and what is part of the interface and what is not? What Ives and his team has done with the iOS 7 interface is move it closer to the style used in web-apps and the web today has it's own rules about what is clickable and what is not and those rules are not what they used to be in the dot-com bubble back in the 1990s. It didn't take me long to get used to a lack of traditional visual cues in iOS 7 because I am already familiar with it from browsing modern web pages where traditional interface elements have often disappeared or been modded with Cascading Style Sheets until they are unrecognisable. Where there used to be HTML buttons there are now pictures, and clickable links who used to be easy to distinguish because they were blue and underlined now look like any other highlighted text much of the time thanks again to CSS. Somehow I still manage to browse the web so I think I can handle iOS 7 even if I don't agree with some of Ive's aesthetic choices. I'm also not the kind of person who abhors any kind of change, If that was the case I'd still be punching away at a Windows XP laptop, or in my case, more likely an Old Pentium laptop running MWM on top of Slackware.
Worst offender is the new lock screen. Why did they decide to make me wait an extra 1/2-1 seconds after hitting the power or home button to turn it on so that can "gracefully" fade in from black before giving me access to the "slide to unlock"? It's maddening.
I just pulled my iPhone 4S out of my pocket, tried the lock screen thing several times and .... no, I still can't understand why somebody can get that worked up about this. Quite frankly I didn't even notice that delay until I read your post.
Biblical creationists believe that evolution undermines the idea of divine creation, specifically the idea that man is created in God's image. This is a very important belief for them. Without it, their world crumbles.
When you present them with facts and evidence supporting evolution, they're not dispassionately evaluating the evidence, but desperately trying to avoid confronting it, to the point of profound intellectual dishonesty.
They are what used to be called neurotic, irrational and disturbed in one specific area or about one specific thing, but otherwise relatively functional human beings, able to work, raise families, etc, etc.
The answer to the question of why Biblical Creationists are like this is the same as the answer to the question of why some people are holocaust deniers, or Marxists, or followers of any other ideology or belief that is in obvious defiance of objective reality. They have invested their sense of self into this belief, and they cannot abandon that belief without sacrificing their sense of self along with it.
So they hold on to that belief, no matter what.
Arrgggh.... Rationalists debating religionists as if the latter were rational, and religionists fighting back as if rationalists were religions... talk about a total disconnect. Mind you, I can see the need to oppose these creationist (and extreme right/left wing) bozos at every turn and I do it myself whenever I come across a particularly noisy specimen but it is frustrating as hell. Sometimes after debating these people I get the feeling I should change my name to Sisyphus (the guy punished in Hades with an endless task).
You raise a good point, and there's actually a lot of evidence proving you correct. There have been more than a few security vulnerabilities that have persisted in the code for various widely-used pieces of open-source software for years. One was even found and patched but then quickly reverted without anyone noticing.
What people fail to understand is that proper security reviews are more than "let's just take a look at the code and make sure that it's not sending email to the NSA." You also can't perform a proper review with a bunch of hobbyist coders, you need highly-trained experts. Every single line of code needs to be checked, double checked, and triple checked against every single other line in the code to make sure that there isn't anything that could possibly compromise the security of the system. These failures are always subtle and usually unintentional.
This is best summed up with an example. Any idiot can look at the code and say "wait a second, this code copies the decryption key and sends an email to the NSA!" Only a very methodical search with a lot of people can say "hey, we've determined that this implementation of this specific part of this specific algorithm probably doesn't have a large amount of randomness over a long period of time. It likely decays such that the complexity is reduced to such and such a number of bits after such and such an amount of time and in these specific situations. This is a problem!"
You are right. The problem is that there are, and always will be, fewer experts checking for subtle errors like this and we haven't even begun to consider cleverly hidden weaknesses that are injected into complex pieces of software like encryption APIs or entire FOSS foundations set up by the NAS/CIA/MI6/FSB and other intelligence agencies with the deliberate aim of popularising compromised software. The basic lesson seems to be what Al-Qaeda learned a decade ago. If you want to be really secure, couriers and offline communications are the way to go. The Russians have even gone a step further and moved all super sensitive material to paper and use typewriters instead of computers. It is way harder to steal a paper intelligence report that is typed up in a limited number of carefully tracked hard copies that you have to sign for and who stay in a secure environment than it is to hack somebody's supposedly secure Blackberry/Android/iOS device and steal the PDF of that intelligence report from the e-mail attachments folder.
Actually, it doesn't need to be blamed on Murdoch -- our government are the ones who don't want to hear facts and instead want to make decisions based on ideology.
They've basically cut funding for basic research, decided that anything which doesn't directly benefit industry is a waste of money, and told government scientists they're not allowed to say anything related to their researcher without a government rep being on hand to manage the spin and ensure the message is consistent with the crap the government tells us.
They don't want pesky facts getting in the way of what they want to say.
Rupert Murdoch has surprisingly little influence on our news from what I can tell.
What I find fascinating about conservatives is that a large portion of them does not only chooses to be ignorant, they revel in being ignorant and declaring war on science. Conservative pundits can say what they want, pull out all the old slogans and call dissenting voices 'communists' and 'socialists' but even the old Soviet Union did not revel in ignorance. The communists did many things wrong but they at least they saw some value in scientific research and managed to turn Russia from a medieval kingdom into a modern technologically advanced country.
Obama and the left gave banks most of their goodies a few years ago.
The $700 billion bailout through TARP was authorized by Bush, not Obama. (While the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act was passed by a Democrat-controlled Congress, it was not a purely Democratic measure. In both houses, it received the support of the majority of congresscritters from both parties, and indeed needed support from both sides of the aisle to pass.)
Clinton deregulated the banks.
Well...
The Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act (GLB) repealing part of Glass-Steagall was passed while Clinton was president, certainly. Of course, the original bill was introduced in both House and Senate by Republicans - who controlled both houses at the time - and supported by a majority of mostly-Republicans in the House, and exclusively by Republicans in the Senate. The final bill produced by the conference committee was passed by veto-proof margins in both House and Senate; Clinton couldn't actually have stopped it.
Left unsaid in your comment is the implicit suggestion that the subprime mortgage crisis was precipitated by GLB, or that GLB made the crisis worse. While GLB has a number of flaws - and I would not say that it represented good public policy - it is debatable whether or not the subprime mortgage crisis can fairly be laid at its feet. There are credible arguments made that even prior to GLB's deregulation there was nothing in law that prevented investment banks from merging, from investing in the risky instruments that helped precipitate the crisis, or from keeping their books in the ways they did to conceal the problem until everything came crashing down. Some respectable individuals have even whispered that GLB may have slightly softened the impact, as banks that merged investment and depository institutions actually performed better during the crisis than investment-only firms.
Funny how you forget all of that.
Funny the...interesting...way you choose to remember all of that.
Stop messing with his selective memory algorithms.
The phrase '$1 Billion' gets people to sit up and notice.
But most of this work won't benefit the Linux community and software at large, at least directly. It will be ancillary improvements; where something gets re-written/improved/fixed due to issues on the POWER architecture that happen to benefit everyone else too.
This is work that ensures there are usable alternatives to Intel based equipment. I would have thought that benefits the Linux community at large directly ... unless one is most at home in a x86-64 monoculture :-)
Someone needs to not only go after the trolls, but go after the law license of the Attorneys representing them as well. Get a couple of lawyers disbarred and watch the lawsuits end!
You know thats not a bad idea at all.
True, but drone strikes would be more fun.
Probably the same way that the US Navy got my contact information to harass me when I was in high school. The school just gets authority to collect it and to hell with your wishes. Compared with the years of harassment and insults from the jack asses at the Navy, this is of somewhat lesser concern.
The US military has been known to procure it's harassment lists from professional private sector list brokers.
But, it's still a concern, the last thing we need is to condition kids to think that it's normal for schools to spy on your behavior outside of school hours.
This is one of those damned if you do damned if you don't situations. You can criticize this all you want and you are right, watching student's social media is plain creepy. However, after the next time some deranged student walks into a school and kills 20+ of his fellow students you will also be able to criticize the school district quite justifiably. After all, this student had been blogging about his intentions on social media for weeks and nobody took any notice. Why weren't the school authorities and law enforcement reading those Facebook posts and doing something about it? I suppose then that the manner and extent of the monitoring would tend to matter. Apparently these guys are using keyword searches of a list of social media accounts to flagtop potentially troubled students for monitoring by professionals (presumably: psychiatrists, ex. cops, ex. social workers). The problem from my POW is not so much the monitoring as what they are searching for. Are they just flagging suicidal students, potentially borderline postal students or bullying victims? Or are they going North Korean on the kids and flagging things that are well within freedom of speech boundaries such as: criticising religion, criticizing the war in Iraq, criticizing the school system or will I be getting calls from the school district because my daughter is blogging about Wiccanism and that offends somebodys christian fundamentalist sensibilities? That would be both wrong and considerably more creepy than just trying to prevent suicides, bullying and shootings. I don't see an easy alternative to this other than doing no monitoring at all in which case you should not criticize the school district if they miss some blog post by a student who then goes off and does something tragic.
It's more like they didn't have much else for the iPhone 5S, just the fingerprint sensor. Everything else is either the same or a slight improvement, like the camera.
Really? I could say the same about the last two iterations of a whole gaggle of Android devices. Is the point you are trying to make that that we have reached 'Peak Smartphone'? If that is the case the obvious follow up question is: Did that just dawn on you? (because the rest of us have known this for a while now)