You find me a human driver who never makes a mistake, and I'll find you someone who has little need for ABS, ESC and their friends.
No human can outperform a modern ABS system using manual cadence braking. ABS is essentially cadence braking judged at the speed of a computer and applied to each wheel independently.
You don't need to control a skid you never got into.
And speaking of skids, for driving on public roads under normal conditions, I don't know what handbrake turns have to do with the price of fish.
It's the combination of Wifi/remote accessable parts of a system, that once gotten into leads to total control.
Exactly. Think how many people run WiFi in their homes that is insecure. Now imagine a world where every script kiddie with a grudge can kill everyone on each of those homes just by running some software they found on the Internet.
Why does anyone need the ability to mess around with starting my car remotely, ever? I see no need to start my car if I'm not in the driver's seat, and if I'm in the driver's seat and we've got cell reception why I can't I just turn the key or push the button?
Accident detection and related safety systems absolutely should be independent of engine control and the like. Why can't they be? (If your answer involves having both the normal control systems and the safety systems relying on common sensors, please consider that there is a significant likelihood that if an accident happened it was precisely because something electronic or sensor-related failed, and therefore you really want redundancy here.)
As for recovering my car in case of theft... Unless you are suggesting that someone is going to take over control of my car and auto-pilot it home against the will of someone physically in the driver's seat, again I don't buy it. And if you are suggesting that, I really don't want that system in my car. If I'm in the driver's seat and responsible for what happens with my vehicle, then any system that someone could use to take over lawfully and drive my car is also by definition vulnerable to being taken over unlawfully and used to crash my car, and I know which one I am more concerned about.
It would be truly horrible if people had to concentrate on their driving rather than the six-channel, streaming video playing on their dashboard while they blend margaritas.
No doubt, but it would be more horrible if modern systems for things like braking and traction control went away. People who've grown up with cars that are full of three-letter technologies like ABS and EBD might not appreciate how much more skill is required to drive a car safely at the same speeds and in the same environments without these driver aids.
It's kinda terrifying that the people making fast, heavy lumps of metal with computerised control systems don't already routinely isolate those control systems from any other computerised technologies in the vehicle, particularly any that can interact remotely. They shouldn't need to be publicly admonished about the dangers of these situations. Don't these organisations employ actual engineers any more?
But given that it does seem to be necessary to make a public display of this -- which presumably removes any plausible deniability if the auto makers do get sued after an accident later, so I can believe it will at least get their attention -- I'm glad it seems to be a responsible group with the right motivations who are starting the ball rolling. If it were just a bunch of lawyers or insurers, the general public could write the campaign off as the signatories just looking out for their own interests.
Totally agreed about the G'Kar/Londo/Vir storylines. The non-human characters often got the best personal storylines and character development in B5, because the human officers (and Delenn as a notable exception to the non-human rule) tended to be tied up in moving the main plot arc forwards much of the time. Lennier was another non-human who had a diverse range of relationships with other characters and developed well through the series, at least until his completely implausible Toby Ziegler style character transplant near the end.
Except that the series jumped the shark when Sherdian came back from the dead, which was always part of the arc.
FWIW, I never saw it that way. With the powerful races that are in play by that point in the show, it needed someone from the younger races to do something that appears miraculous from our perspective to put us in the same league and make the final outcome to the main plot arc credible. What happened to Sheridan was that something, and it was clear from well before the critical event that the older races knew and understood things about what was happening that the younger races in the show and, by extension, we as the viewers did not, so personally I didn't find it either out of character or a random deus ex machina twist.
Season 5 is best viewed as a collection of disparate standalone stories, of which there are actually a few redeeming ones.
There I definitely agree. JMS didn't get to finish things quite the way he'd hoped, with the potential cancellation after season 4 obviously causing some reordering and early resolution of major plotlines, and things like losing a major cast member for related reasons that they couldn't fix in time when they did get the green light for season 5. However, a few of the individual episodes in season 5, particularly the ones that looked at the station and characters we had become so familiar with from a very different perspective, were some of the best single episodes of the whole series IMHO. There's a great little moment at the end of "A View from the Gallery", where something happens just in time, and it puts the often grand themes and seemingly awesomely powerful characters we normally see in the show in a very different light.
I wonder whether a reboot of the main series is the best way to go, though. It's hard to believe anyone could play characters like G'Kar and Londo with the brilliant individual performances and wonderful chemistry of the original actors. I can watch the new Star Trek films and enjoy a big space fight with the best of them, but I don't see Kirk and Spock, I see a different ship, a different crew, and a very different (read: Hollywood) style. It's more like ST:TNG compared to ST:TOS, a familiar environment but different characters and stories. I'm not sure trying to retell the original B5 story with a bigger screen, a bigger budget, bigger SFX, and none of the original magic is a winning move (although if there's anyone who could pull something like that off, JMS would be the one, and if they manage some exceptional casting as well then it might be worth watching).
Nearly 100 years ago, the same kinds of busybodies were trying to outlaw radios in cars, since that was "obviously" a distraction for the driver. News flash - the vast majority of the time, people (yep, even the ones that don't live in your hipster high-rise) are more than capable of enough multitasking to deal with both driving and another task.
Are you seriously arguing that anyone who thinks using a HUD to display tweets and text messages is dangerous must be a busybody?
If you are then you are the guy those laws are written for, so the authorities can take you off the road before your arrogance kills someone.
I try to avoid using obscure abbreviations, but "IME" is one of the most common abbreviations on the Internet. Maybe next time, instead of flaming, you could just look it up and learn something?
YMMV of course, but on this issue I find mine is unfortunately very consistent. FOSS projects with good usability and user documentation are rare things, while leading commercial/proprietary software frequently got to its dominant position by being better in these respects than its competition.
I personally believe this enough to spend a lot of money on the software I use. Apparently enough other people are concerned about it that there are hundreds of posts in this discussion without many posts seriously questioning that the problem exists -- and this is Slashdot, which is about as pro-FOSS a forum as you're ever going to find on-line.
While your points about the snail's pace of web "standards" development are fair, it's also important not to go too far the other way. Not so long ago, another browser became dominant in market share through pushing new but not widely supported features its own way, and people started making web sites that were written specifically to work with that browser rather than any common standard.
That browser was Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, and the result was IE6.
HUD's don't require you to take your eyes off the road.
Ideally, no. In practice, IME we aren't quite there yet: the focal distance for current in-car HUDs still tends to be significantly shorter than where a driver should normally be looking. However, it's still interesting to consider whether even the HUDs we have available today are an improvement on static instrument consoles, where the driver also has to look down/over, as well as changing focus to an even closer range.
Hopefully it goes without saying that using this kind of technology to display anything that isn't immediately relevant to driving (such as the notifications shown on their site right now) is crazy.
However, in a few years, I can imagine that navigation systems will use a combination of eye-tracking and HUD technology to skip the stylised graphics we use today and just highlight the required driving line directly on the road ahead. My other big wish for this kind of technology is enhancements for when visibility is poor: think night vision/IR with additional highlights on hazards such as a car ahead slowing down sharply or a pedestrian moving toward the road. Those kinds of qualitative improvements in driver awareness could save a lot of lives and a lot of time, not to mention the general frustration that sometimes comes with driving in unfamiliar places today.
You're misunderstanding that section of the DPA. It's about allowing journalists and the like to work with personal data so they can prepare a piece for publication, because otherwise it could become impossible for people like investigative journalists to even keep notes on their research, which is considered important enough to the public interest to merit special protection.
The section you quoted is not about the end result of any search research and preparation. It grants no special exemption to the usual privacy and data protection obligations for the publication itself.
It's a bit ironic to me that in trying to aim for the future, Microsoft is taking for granted and ultimately risking the core audience on which they've had a solid lock for the past twenty years.
That was my big take away from the article as well.
There are exactly two major Microsoft product lines I have any interest in, either professionally or personally: Windows and Office. One remains by far the most flexible platform for a general purpose computing device today. The other remains the standard for word processing and spreadsheets. All of these are useful to me almost every day.
However, I really have no interest in "the cloud" for everyday computing needs. As I've suggested many times, I think Microsoft really missed a trick by chasing the cloud hype instead of pushing "private clouds" -- a model with very practical arguments in its favour and where their breadth of products would have given them a distinct advantage over any other major tech firm today. But storing all my personal stuff or my sensitive business documents off-site, accessed over inherently unreliable and slow connections, with unknown security and privacy implications? I assumed that was a joke until I realised big businesses weren't laughing.
Similarly, I have no interest in paying recurring revenues for software that isn't either constantly adding significant value or dramatically better than anything I can get as a one-off purchase. For me personally, no software has ever met that benchmark so far. I do use properly licensed copies of things like MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, and I would and did happily pay for major upgrades that added significant value from time to time. But a rental model for everyday software that is so stagnant they couldn't get people to upgrade any other way? No thanks. There were and are many things these software companies could do that would be worth a lot of money to me, but why would they bother when they can just phone it in and rely on the lock-in lemmings to keep their bank account topped up anyway?
And I have even less interest in half-baked devices with ambiguous use cases. I'm typing this on a real keyboard, with a real mouse next to me, and a set of monitors that would make your puny 300+dpi tabletconvertiblenettopsurface with its physically small screen cry. Every now and then I have to suffer using a laptop in a meeting, and even the good ones are so pathetic compared to real workstations in every possible respect except portability that I cry. Nadella is welcome to promote a word processor running on a device with no keyboard. I'll take my 100ish error-free wpm typing speed and punctuation I can input with fewer than three not-real-key presses, thanks.
I think all of the above are basically hype-driven rather than benefit-driven. The cloud has some advantages, but they are oversold. Recurring revenues will be great until the benefits almost inevitably start to tail off compared to what people got before, the bean counters start protesting, and some young upstart company becomes the next Microsoft by adopting the radical policy of making useful software and selling it without a rental EULA full of catches. And these multi-purpose tablet/laptop hybrids are just Jacks of all trades so far: they lack the convenience of a phone or small tablet, and they cost significantly more than a proper laptop of otherwise similar spec with little practical advantage unless you really need touch-based input (which almost nothing running on such hardware today actually does).
So a strategy based on this will probably be very successful in the short term, when purchasing decisions made by suits at Fortune 500 companies are still driven by the hype, but if^Wwhen the correction happens -- and in some cases there are already signs that the hype is fading, and with hybrid devices it's not clear they will ever really take off in the first place -- Microsoft is going to be a mighty big ship to steer on a radically different course, with its two biggest engines poorly maintained and running well below capacity.
That's almost certainly what the industry now seems to call retargeting: you visit a vendor's site and either a bug belonging to the ad network or some sort of code added by the vendor themselves notifies the network that you were there, and possibly which page(s) or item(s) you appeared to be interested in.
The vendor can then use whether you'd been there before as a criteria for targeting their ads, and the network can prioritise showing you those ads in whatever allowance they have because in general they are much more likely to convert (not to mention being less annoying for the user, since if it's done properly then it's more likely that the ads will be of some relevance/interest rather than random spam).
This doesn't work very well at all if the vendor doesn't also indicate the completion of a successful sale to the network, though, as it leaves no way to remove you from the set of people likely to be interested in something once you already did make a typically one-time purchase. That's when you get that annoying "I already bought this!!!!11!!1eleven!" feeling.
I will just wind up using proprietary software with proper documentation.
Same here.
I love the idea of Open Source, community-driven projects, and I'm happy when they provide useful software to people for no cost, and I'm happy that there are people providing competition for the big name software companies.
I'm also a busy person. If I've got work to do or something important to finish personally, then realistically the cost of buying more polished commercial/proprietary software can often be justified instantly.
That might be because it has comprehensive documentation, but much the same applies to the usual FOSS weaknesses: ease of use, or compatibility with industry standards, convenient availability of professional consultancy and training, and so on.
(Of course, I am similarly sceptical about proprietary commercial software where the documentation or ease of use don't justify the high prices sometimes asked. This isn't about FOSS, it's about whether it's worth spending real money to get a much more practically useful product.)
Here's the problem: Facebook will never not show you an ad.
I'm not sure whether that's strictly true, but I'm also not sure why it's relevant. Even if we assume Facebook intends to show a fixed X amount of ads to each user per visit/unit of time/number of other entries in their feed, Facebook ads run on an auction system. The targeting available to advertisers is quite objective about who is and isn't included in the potential audience, and any given ad is only going to be shown to qualified users. But those qualifications can be as simple as the country you're in or being a friend of someone with a certain interest, so even if someone hasn't given much information themselves, there are always things that Facebook have a very high probability of determining correctly.
Sounds like you're saying Apple made the mistake of letting consumers make their own choices.
Yes and no. They let their platform get taken over by the kind of users who will choose to buy $1 "make your iPhone a torch" applications, which makes it less appealing to users who might pay more money for better apps.
Would you like to walk into a restaurant and have the cashier or waiter tell you what to order?
In some of the best restaurants in the world, that is exactly what happens, but that's not really the point.
A better analogy would be to say that you won't go to a fine dining restaurant and find plastic cheeseburger and fries at fast food prices on the menu.
Millions of people voluntarily give all kinds of relevant information about themselves to Facebook. Even without any serious data mining, and ignoring the people who deliberately create garbage data accounts, Facebook probably already have more accurate demographic data about their users than most advertising channels. For example, knowing about major life events like someone getting married or having a baby are advertising gold for some markets.
At the scale they're working on, even trivial analysis of the underlying graph is probably quite informative as well. If 60% of your friends are interested in a certain thing, there's a fair chance you are too, even if you didn't explicitly indicate this.
These posts are getting very long, so I'll gloss over a few areas where it seems we basically agree anyway and pick up on some of the more interesting points...
Our most mainstream news, stuff like ABC world news is designed to present a quick 30 minute overview of world events in terms of mainstream (i.e. the two political parties) opinion for a semi-interested audience.
Funnily enough, ABC was exactly the network I had in mind as I wrote my previous comments. We get the ABC nightly news bulletin shown on our own BBC News channel, and sometimes the degree of dumbing down, "patriotic" chest-thumping, and overtly biased commentary literally makes my cringe. It's awful. Maybe that's just the main bulletin and some of its other content is better?
Like you, we have other more "heavyweight" news sources available here in the UK, but the good ol' BBC is probably about as mainstream as it gets. For all the claims of bias it receives (it's a big target, and people of all political persuasions seem to claim it's biased against them any time they get negative coverage) I think overall it does pretty well. Certainly no-one with a reasonably well-educated, middle-class kind of background here is going to take the tabloid stuff too seriously with that kind of alternative.
Out of genuine curiosity, what would you consider to be "good" and reasonably neutral news media in the US?
You all have a much more regulated environment where average people get less say in their news coverage but get a better quality product as a result of getting that less say. Though I will say that when I talk to Europeans they don't seem particularly educated. For example virtually every political conversation I have with a European where they start discussing policy has to start with a basic education that the USA does not have a parliamentary system. If you are doing such a great job informing people, then why is it that even the 5% most educated don't they know the absolute basics like that?
That comment surprises me. I've no reason to doubt your personal experience, but I do wonder what kind of Europeans you're talking to if such basic misunderstandings are so universal. Granted I'm not the average UK guy in this respect -- I'm a geek who spends a fair bit of time on-line discussing stuff with other geeks from all round the world, and I'm lucky enough to have had very good education and come from a stable, middle class background -- but I can't imagine that anyone I know who takes an interests in these kinds of political issues wouldn't be aware that not everyone in the world uses a parliamentary system of government. I expect most who have had any significant discussions about the US at least understand the general separation of powers idea at the executive/legislature/judiciary level, even if they don't necessarily know the intricacies of your legislative structure and so on.
I think that might have been a fair criticism 10 years ago. Today no. Are parties are rather distinct policy wise. Americans have two parties. One advocates for: higher taxes, more regulation, more redistribution. The other advocates for: lower taxes, less regulation, more concentration of wealth. That's a pretty clear cut choice.
That's an interesting perspective, but not one I see from here. Obviously it's true that the Democrats and Republicans generally argue for different things as their principles. But when you look at the policies they have actually implemented in government, and compare it to the breadth of opinion you get even among mainstream parties across Europe, it doesn't look like there's all that much difference between them in the big picture.
For example, it's taken until the Obama administration for anyone to even try implementing universal healthcare. That is something many (though of course not all) in Europe would consider a basic requirement for any civilised society in the 21st century.
How is a European judge going to throw an American in jail?
Again, I emphasize that I was talking somewhat hyperbolically before.
But in case you wanted a genuine answer, it is actually rather easy. Firstly, they'd go after the corporate officers based on Europe. Secondly, if any corporate officer who was American ever entered Europe (even flying over European airspace or in temporary transit through a connection at a European airport) they would be subject to arrest.
If Europeans want products run in accordance with European law and culture they should create them, and stop using American products.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. Particularly in regard to the Internet, control of infrastructure, exporting of laws, and surveillance, the US is not a popular country in Europe right now. Major US tech companies are already protesting about the damage to their reputations and ultimately profits that has been caused by various US government actions in recent years.
For example, there are already on-line services that guarantee to store data only within the EEA, so the data protection rules about exports don't apply, and this is already becoming a commercial advantage for them over their US competitors. There are already questions being asked openly in security-sensitive organisations about whether once unquestioned US brands like Cisco, Dell and Apple are appropriate suppliers for computing and communications equipment. Now that governments have started doing things like seizing domain names, it is probably only a matter of time before ICANN loses its overall authority as well.
As far as I can see, there is absolutely no possible upside to any of this for US businesses, and ultimately for the US economy and government. And it has effectively been brought about by the US doing exactly what we were talking about -- using dubious mechanisms to export its laws and culture abroad -- for some time now. The only difference is that this time, some of the rest of the world decided to do the same thing back, and the US doesn't like it when that sort of thing happens. It's used to everyone taking for granted that keeping the US friendly will be more important in the long run and letting minor transgressions slide is diplomatically justified, but in the current European political climate that assumption isn't what it used to be.
You aren't going to get very far with that argument with Americans. Most Americans have seen what governments that have ultimate control of what opinions their citizens can or cannot hold look like.
I realise that there is a relatively strong cultural distinction here.
I would first point out in return that many Europeans have seen what government power looks like when too many people know too much personal information about everyone. I have friends here in the UK whose families fled Germany and German-occupied territory during WW2. I have personally talked to people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who were literally lucky to escape with their lives. There is a reason that privacy is a big issue in Europe, and in particular in places like Germany and France.
I would also point out that this case had nothing to do with state suppression of free speech. It was a case brought by a private individual, under reasonable circumstances, according to the same law that applies to everyone here. There was no inherent imbalance of power, where a mighty state imposed censorship on a citizen whose views disagreed with those of the current political administration. If anything, the imbalance of power was in favour of Google, and this was just the law reminding the big guy that it applies equally to him too.
Finally, with the greatest of respect, I have to dispute your characterisation of Americans. The people of the US today allow their opinions to be dictated by powerful organisations all the time.
Your media do it: I've seen the major US TV networks, and the blatant bias in their presentation of news stories is almost comical to someone who's used to international coverage. It's not as if we don't have the same issues to deal with, but even the most reputable of US TV networks is barely above what we would call tabloid journalism (which is very much a derogatory term here -- tabloids have a reputation for peddling exactly the kinds of half-truths and semi-factual stories we are talking about).
Your creative industries do it: As we've discussed elsewhere on Slashdot recently, the US is by far the biggest supporter of IP protections in the world, and has no problems using diplomatic and political leverage to export its cultural preferences to as much of the rest of the world as it can in that department.
And of course, your politicians certainly do it: The US government today is among the most transparently bought-and-paid-for by powerful special interest groups in the entire first world, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows that the kind of negative campaigning you alluded to happens, too. And yet, as a society you continue voting for one of the two big parties that, again, by international standards are barely distinct on the political spectrum (and ironically much more pro-big-government than many mainstream political parties across Europe).
European politicians have always objected to the American "negative advertising" for example. Many European journalists think it actually leads to better elections where politicians not only present the good stuff but their opponents are able to present the bad stuff.
I have yet to meet that journalist.
Here in the UK we see a lot of criticism, sometimes more overt than others, of the policies and track records of competing political parties. That is as it should be.
What we see relatively rarely is the outright character assassination that seems to be de rigeur in US politics. Sometimes the major parties do try it, if they really want to get rid of a particular personality among their competition. To be fair, sometimes they do also succeed, but more often I think it just winds up being a plague on both their houses and a distraction from the real issues. It is, as we say here, not playing cricket.
Perhaps this plays into your point that the negative comments should be allowed, and of course we do culturally accept them up to a point
I used to live right next to one of the UK's national reference libraries. I'm well aware of what they do.
But that argument is missing the point. This isn't about whether information exists at all. It isn't about whether a historian who is willing to spend time properly investigating something should be able to look up the facts.
This is about whether information -- specifically, information that is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive -- is easily available to a vast audience for negligible effort and cost. The practical consequences of dubious and/or misleading information that is widely distributed are much worse for innocent individuals than the practical consequences of such information if it is only looked up by people who care enough to make a significant effort to find it and who are probably looking for other related information as well. Scale matters.
The essence of the technologies might not have changed, but their implications have changed dramatically. A friend photographing you having a good night out and e-mailing that picture to you is a fun memory for you to share. 853 people photographing you incidentally over the course of a few days and uploading their snaps along with accompanying time and place metadata to a photo sharing web site where they are run through image recognition and thereby connected with your own profiles in other database? That is starting to look like someone you don't know has a pretty detailed picture of your life, and chances are that anything they do with that picture will be in their interests rather than yours.
There are certainly two ways to attack this problem: much more transparency or much less. And I have some sympathy with the idea that radical transparency is a better solution, at least in theory.
The trouble is that in practice, radical transparency only works if you can reach a fairly extreme position, where all or at least a heavy majority of relevant information is available and where everyone interested in the topic will give equal weight to all of it. That is, everyone must speak with the same voice, and everyone must listen to everyone else equally before forming opinions and making decisions.
I'm not sure that is ever going to be a realistic goal, at least not without radical changes in society probably taking place over several generations. As jd pointed out, we are a long way from that sort of idealised culture today and almost all of us are too quick to make judgements, even when those judgements might have a profoundly unfair effect on someone else.
In the meantime, in the real world we live in today, the further you move in that direction the worse things become for the victims. And that is why, although I have some sympathy with the radical transparency philosophy, on balance I support reasonable measures to actively defend privacy and keep personal data in confidence in preference to greater freedom of speech.
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You find me a human driver who never makes a mistake, and I'll find you someone who has little need for ABS, ESC and their friends.
No human can outperform a modern ABS system using manual cadence braking. ABS is essentially cadence braking judged at the speed of a computer and applied to each wheel independently.
You don't need to control a skid you never got into.
And speaking of skids, for driving on public roads under normal conditions, I don't know what handbrake turns have to do with the price of fish.
It's the combination of Wifi/remote accessable parts of a system, that once gotten into leads to total control.
Exactly. Think how many people run WiFi in their homes that is insecure. Now imagine a world where every script kiddie with a grudge can kill everyone on each of those homes just by running some software they found on the Internet.
I'm afraid I don't buy your examples.
Why does anyone need the ability to mess around with starting my car remotely, ever? I see no need to start my car if I'm not in the driver's seat, and if I'm in the driver's seat and we've got cell reception why I can't I just turn the key or push the button?
Accident detection and related safety systems absolutely should be independent of engine control and the like. Why can't they be? (If your answer involves having both the normal control systems and the safety systems relying on common sensors, please consider that there is a significant likelihood that if an accident happened it was precisely because something electronic or sensor-related failed, and therefore you really want redundancy here.)
As for recovering my car in case of theft... Unless you are suggesting that someone is going to take over control of my car and auto-pilot it home against the will of someone physically in the driver's seat, again I don't buy it. And if you are suggesting that, I really don't want that system in my car. If I'm in the driver's seat and responsible for what happens with my vehicle, then any system that someone could use to take over lawfully and drive my car is also by definition vulnerable to being taken over unlawfully and used to crash my car, and I know which one I am more concerned about.
It would be truly horrible if people had to concentrate on their driving rather than the six-channel, streaming video playing on their dashboard while they blend margaritas.
No doubt, but it would be more horrible if modern systems for things like braking and traction control went away. People who've grown up with cars that are full of three-letter technologies like ABS and EBD might not appreciate how much more skill is required to drive a car safely at the same speeds and in the same environments without these driver aids.
It's kinda terrifying that the people making fast, heavy lumps of metal with computerised control systems don't already routinely isolate those control systems from any other computerised technologies in the vehicle, particularly any that can interact remotely. They shouldn't need to be publicly admonished about the dangers of these situations. Don't these organisations employ actual engineers any more?
But given that it does seem to be necessary to make a public display of this -- which presumably removes any plausible deniability if the auto makers do get sued after an accident later, so I can believe it will at least get their attention -- I'm glad it seems to be a responsible group with the right motivations who are starting the ball rolling. If it were just a bunch of lawyers or insurers, the general public could write the campaign off as the signatories just looking out for their own interests.
Totally agreed about the G'Kar/Londo/Vir storylines. The non-human characters often got the best personal storylines and character development in B5, because the human officers (and Delenn as a notable exception to the non-human rule) tended to be tied up in moving the main plot arc forwards much of the time. Lennier was another non-human who had a diverse range of relationships with other characters and developed well through the series, at least until his completely implausible Toby Ziegler style character transplant near the end.
Except that the series jumped the shark when Sherdian came back from the dead, which was always part of the arc.
FWIW, I never saw it that way. With the powerful races that are in play by that point in the show, it needed someone from the younger races to do something that appears miraculous from our perspective to put us in the same league and make the final outcome to the main plot arc credible. What happened to Sheridan was that something, and it was clear from well before the critical event that the older races knew and understood things about what was happening that the younger races in the show and, by extension, we as the viewers did not, so personally I didn't find it either out of character or a random deus ex machina twist.
Season 5 is best viewed as a collection of disparate standalone stories, of which there are actually a few redeeming ones.
There I definitely agree. JMS didn't get to finish things quite the way he'd hoped, with the potential cancellation after season 4 obviously causing some reordering and early resolution of major plotlines, and things like losing a major cast member for related reasons that they couldn't fix in time when they did get the green light for season 5. However, a few of the individual episodes in season 5, particularly the ones that looked at the station and characters we had become so familiar with from a very different perspective, were some of the best single episodes of the whole series IMHO. There's a great little moment at the end of "A View from the Gallery", where something happens just in time, and it puts the often grand themes and seemingly awesomely powerful characters we normally see in the show in a very different light.
I wonder whether a reboot of the main series is the best way to go, though. It's hard to believe anyone could play characters like G'Kar and Londo with the brilliant individual performances and wonderful chemistry of the original actors. I can watch the new Star Trek films and enjoy a big space fight with the best of them, but I don't see Kirk and Spock, I see a different ship, a different crew, and a very different (read: Hollywood) style. It's more like ST:TNG compared to ST:TOS, a familiar environment but different characters and stories. I'm not sure trying to retell the original B5 story with a bigger screen, a bigger budget, bigger SFX, and none of the original magic is a winning move (although if there's anyone who could pull something like that off, JMS would be the one, and if they manage some exceptional casting as well then it might be worth watching).
Nearly 100 years ago, the same kinds of busybodies were trying to outlaw radios in cars, since that was "obviously" a distraction for the driver. News flash - the vast majority of the time, people (yep, even the ones that don't live in your hipster high-rise) are more than capable of enough multitasking to deal with both driving and another task.
Are you seriously arguing that anyone who thinks using a HUD to display tweets and text messages is dangerous must be a busybody?
If you are then you are the guy those laws are written for, so the authorities can take you off the road before your arrogance kills someone.
I try to avoid using obscure abbreviations, but "IME" is one of the most common abbreviations on the Internet. Maybe next time, instead of flaming, you could just look it up and learn something?
YMMV of course, but on this issue I find mine is unfortunately very consistent. FOSS projects with good usability and user documentation are rare things, while leading commercial/proprietary software frequently got to its dominant position by being better in these respects than its competition.
I personally believe this enough to spend a lot of money on the software I use. Apparently enough other people are concerned about it that there are hundreds of posts in this discussion without many posts seriously questioning that the problem exists -- and this is Slashdot, which is about as pro-FOSS a forum as you're ever going to find on-line.
While your points about the snail's pace of web "standards" development are fair, it's also important not to go too far the other way. Not so long ago, another browser became dominant in market share through pushing new but not widely supported features its own way, and people started making web sites that were written specifically to work with that browser rather than any common standard.
That browser was Internet Explorer in the late 1990s, and the result was IE6.
HUD's don't require you to take your eyes off the road.
Ideally, no. In practice, IME we aren't quite there yet: the focal distance for current in-car HUDs still tends to be significantly shorter than where a driver should normally be looking. However, it's still interesting to consider whether even the HUDs we have available today are an improvement on static instrument consoles, where the driver also has to look down/over, as well as changing focus to an even closer range.
Hopefully it goes without saying that using this kind of technology to display anything that isn't immediately relevant to driving (such as the notifications shown on their site right now) is crazy.
However, in a few years, I can imagine that navigation systems will use a combination of eye-tracking and HUD technology to skip the stylised graphics we use today and just highlight the required driving line directly on the road ahead. My other big wish for this kind of technology is enhancements for when visibility is poor: think night vision/IR with additional highlights on hazards such as a car ahead slowing down sharply or a pedestrian moving toward the road. Those kinds of qualitative improvements in driver awareness could save a lot of lives and a lot of time, not to mention the general frustration that sometimes comes with driving in unfamiliar places today.
You're misunderstanding that section of the DPA. It's about allowing journalists and the like to work with personal data so they can prepare a piece for publication, because otherwise it could become impossible for people like investigative journalists to even keep notes on their research, which is considered important enough to the public interest to merit special protection.
The section you quoted is not about the end result of any search research and preparation. It grants no special exemption to the usual privacy and data protection obligations for the publication itself.
It's a bit ironic to me that in trying to aim for the future, Microsoft is taking for granted and ultimately risking the core audience on which they've had a solid lock for the past twenty years.
That was my big take away from the article as well.
There are exactly two major Microsoft product lines I have any interest in, either professionally or personally: Windows and Office. One remains by far the most flexible platform for a general purpose computing device today. The other remains the standard for word processing and spreadsheets. All of these are useful to me almost every day.
However, I really have no interest in "the cloud" for everyday computing needs. As I've suggested many times, I think Microsoft really missed a trick by chasing the cloud hype instead of pushing "private clouds" -- a model with very practical arguments in its favour and where their breadth of products would have given them a distinct advantage over any other major tech firm today. But storing all my personal stuff or my sensitive business documents off-site, accessed over inherently unreliable and slow connections, with unknown security and privacy implications? I assumed that was a joke until I realised big businesses weren't laughing.
Similarly, I have no interest in paying recurring revenues for software that isn't either constantly adding significant value or dramatically better than anything I can get as a one-off purchase. For me personally, no software has ever met that benchmark so far. I do use properly licensed copies of things like MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite, and I would and did happily pay for major upgrades that added significant value from time to time. But a rental model for everyday software that is so stagnant they couldn't get people to upgrade any other way? No thanks. There were and are many things these software companies could do that would be worth a lot of money to me, but why would they bother when they can just phone it in and rely on the lock-in lemmings to keep their bank account topped up anyway?
And I have even less interest in half-baked devices with ambiguous use cases. I'm typing this on a real keyboard, with a real mouse next to me, and a set of monitors that would make your puny 300+dpi tabletconvertiblenettopsurface with its physically small screen cry. Every now and then I have to suffer using a laptop in a meeting, and even the good ones are so pathetic compared to real workstations in every possible respect except portability that I cry. Nadella is welcome to promote a word processor running on a device with no keyboard. I'll take my 100ish error-free wpm typing speed and punctuation I can input with fewer than three not-real-key presses, thanks.
I think all of the above are basically hype-driven rather than benefit-driven. The cloud has some advantages, but they are oversold. Recurring revenues will be great until the benefits almost inevitably start to tail off compared to what people got before, the bean counters start protesting, and some young upstart company becomes the next Microsoft by adopting the radical policy of making useful software and selling it without a rental EULA full of catches. And these multi-purpose tablet/laptop hybrids are just Jacks of all trades so far: they lack the convenience of a phone or small tablet, and they cost significantly more than a proper laptop of otherwise similar spec with little practical advantage unless you really need touch-based input (which almost nothing running on such hardware today actually does).
So a strategy based on this will probably be very successful in the short term, when purchasing decisions made by suits at Fortune 500 companies are still driven by the hype, but if^Wwhen the correction happens -- and in some cases there are already signs that the hype is fading, and with hybrid devices it's not clear they will ever really take off in the first place -- Microsoft is going to be a mighty big ship to steer on a radically different course, with its two biggest engines poorly maintained and running well below capacity.
That's almost certainly what the industry now seems to call retargeting: you visit a vendor's site and either a bug belonging to the ad network or some sort of code added by the vendor themselves notifies the network that you were there, and possibly which page(s) or item(s) you appeared to be interested in.
The vendor can then use whether you'd been there before as a criteria for targeting their ads, and the network can prioritise showing you those ads in whatever allowance they have because in general they are much more likely to convert (not to mention being less annoying for the user, since if it's done properly then it's more likely that the ads will be of some relevance/interest rather than random spam).
This doesn't work very well at all if the vendor doesn't also indicate the completion of a successful sale to the network, though, as it leaves no way to remove you from the set of people likely to be interested in something once you already did make a typically one-time purchase. That's when you get that annoying "I already bought this!!!!11!!1eleven!" feeling.
I will just wind up using proprietary software with proper documentation.
Same here.
I love the idea of Open Source, community-driven projects, and I'm happy when they provide useful software to people for no cost, and I'm happy that there are people providing competition for the big name software companies.
I'm also a busy person. If I've got work to do or something important to finish personally, then realistically the cost of buying more polished commercial/proprietary software can often be justified instantly.
That might be because it has comprehensive documentation, but much the same applies to the usual FOSS weaknesses: ease of use, or compatibility with industry standards, convenient availability of professional consultancy and training, and so on.
(Of course, I am similarly sceptical about proprietary commercial software where the documentation or ease of use don't justify the high prices sometimes asked. This isn't about FOSS, it's about whether it's worth spending real money to get a much more practically useful product.)
Here's the problem: Facebook will never not show you an ad.
I'm not sure whether that's strictly true, but I'm also not sure why it's relevant. Even if we assume Facebook intends to show a fixed X amount of ads to each user per visit/unit of time/number of other entries in their feed, Facebook ads run on an auction system. The targeting available to advertisers is quite objective about who is and isn't included in the potential audience, and any given ad is only going to be shown to qualified users. But those qualifications can be as simple as the country you're in or being a friend of someone with a certain interest, so even if someone hasn't given much information themselves, there are always things that Facebook have a very high probability of determining correctly.
Sounds like you're saying Apple made the mistake of letting consumers make their own choices.
Yes and no. They let their platform get taken over by the kind of users who will choose to buy $1 "make your iPhone a torch" applications, which makes it less appealing to users who might pay more money for better apps.
Would you like to walk into a restaurant and have the cashier or waiter tell you what to order?
In some of the best restaurants in the world, that is exactly what happens, but that's not really the point.
A better analogy would be to say that you won't go to a fine dining restaurant and find plastic cheeseburger and fries at fast food prices on the menu.
Millions of people voluntarily give all kinds of relevant information about themselves to Facebook. Even without any serious data mining, and ignoring the people who deliberately create garbage data accounts, Facebook probably already have more accurate demographic data about their users than most advertising channels. For example, knowing about major life events like someone getting married or having a baby are advertising gold for some markets.
At the scale they're working on, even trivial analysis of the underlying graph is probably quite informative as well. If 60% of your friends are interested in a certain thing, there's a fair chance you are too, even if you didn't explicitly indicate this.
These posts are getting very long, so I'll gloss over a few areas where it seems we basically agree anyway and pick up on some of the more interesting points...
Our most mainstream news, stuff like ABC world news is designed to present a quick 30 minute overview of world events in terms of mainstream (i.e. the two political parties) opinion for a semi-interested audience.
Funnily enough, ABC was exactly the network I had in mind as I wrote my previous comments. We get the ABC nightly news bulletin shown on our own BBC News channel, and sometimes the degree of dumbing down, "patriotic" chest-thumping, and overtly biased commentary literally makes my cringe. It's awful. Maybe that's just the main bulletin and some of its other content is better?
Like you, we have other more "heavyweight" news sources available here in the UK, but the good ol' BBC is probably about as mainstream as it gets. For all the claims of bias it receives (it's a big target, and people of all political persuasions seem to claim it's biased against them any time they get negative coverage) I think overall it does pretty well. Certainly no-one with a reasonably well-educated, middle-class kind of background here is going to take the tabloid stuff too seriously with that kind of alternative.
Out of genuine curiosity, what would you consider to be "good" and reasonably neutral news media in the US?
You all have a much more regulated environment where average people get less say in their news coverage but get a better quality product as a result of getting that less say. Though I will say that when I talk to Europeans they don't seem particularly educated. For example virtually every political conversation I have with a European where they start discussing policy has to start with a basic education that the USA does not have a parliamentary system. If you are doing such a great job informing people, then why is it that even the 5% most educated don't they know the absolute basics like that?
That comment surprises me. I've no reason to doubt your personal experience, but I do wonder what kind of Europeans you're talking to if such basic misunderstandings are so universal. Granted I'm not the average UK guy in this respect -- I'm a geek who spends a fair bit of time on-line discussing stuff with other geeks from all round the world, and I'm lucky enough to have had very good education and come from a stable, middle class background -- but I can't imagine that anyone I know who takes an interests in these kinds of political issues wouldn't be aware that not everyone in the world uses a parliamentary system of government. I expect most who have had any significant discussions about the US at least understand the general separation of powers idea at the executive/legislature/judiciary level, even if they don't necessarily know the intricacies of your legislative structure and so on.
I think that might have been a fair criticism 10 years ago. Today no. Are parties are rather distinct policy wise. Americans have two parties. One advocates for: higher taxes, more regulation, more redistribution. The other advocates for: lower taxes, less regulation, more concentration of wealth. That's a pretty clear cut choice.
That's an interesting perspective, but not one I see from here. Obviously it's true that the Democrats and Republicans generally argue for different things as their principles. But when you look at the policies they have actually implemented in government, and compare it to the breadth of opinion you get even among mainstream parties across Europe, it doesn't look like there's all that much difference between them in the big picture.
For example, it's taken until the Obama administration for anyone to even try implementing universal healthcare. That is something many (though of course not all) in Europe would consider a basic requirement for any civilised society in the 21st century.
But who in ma
How is a European judge going to throw an American in jail?
Again, I emphasize that I was talking somewhat hyperbolically before.
But in case you wanted a genuine answer, it is actually rather easy. Firstly, they'd go after the corporate officers based on Europe. Secondly, if any corporate officer who was American ever entered Europe (even flying over European airspace or in temporary transit through a connection at a European airport) they would be subject to arrest.
If Europeans want products run in accordance with European law and culture they should create them, and stop using American products.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for, because you might just get it. Particularly in regard to the Internet, control of infrastructure, exporting of laws, and surveillance, the US is not a popular country in Europe right now. Major US tech companies are already protesting about the damage to their reputations and ultimately profits that has been caused by various US government actions in recent years.
For example, there are already on-line services that guarantee to store data only within the EEA, so the data protection rules about exports don't apply, and this is already becoming a commercial advantage for them over their US competitors. There are already questions being asked openly in security-sensitive organisations about whether once unquestioned US brands like Cisco, Dell and Apple are appropriate suppliers for computing and communications equipment. Now that governments have started doing things like seizing domain names, it is probably only a matter of time before ICANN loses its overall authority as well.
As far as I can see, there is absolutely no possible upside to any of this for US businesses, and ultimately for the US economy and government. And it has effectively been brought about by the US doing exactly what we were talking about -- using dubious mechanisms to export its laws and culture abroad -- for some time now. The only difference is that this time, some of the rest of the world decided to do the same thing back, and the US doesn't like it when that sort of thing happens. It's used to everyone taking for granted that keeping the US friendly will be more important in the long run and letting minor transgressions slide is diplomatically justified, but in the current European political climate that assumption isn't what it used to be.
You aren't going to get very far with that argument with Americans. Most Americans have seen what governments that have ultimate control of what opinions their citizens can or cannot hold look like.
I realise that there is a relatively strong cultural distinction here.
I would first point out in return that many Europeans have seen what government power looks like when too many people know too much personal information about everyone. I have friends here in the UK whose families fled Germany and German-occupied territory during WW2. I have personally talked to people who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and who were literally lucky to escape with their lives. There is a reason that privacy is a big issue in Europe, and in particular in places like Germany and France.
I would also point out that this case had nothing to do with state suppression of free speech. It was a case brought by a private individual, under reasonable circumstances, according to the same law that applies to everyone here. There was no inherent imbalance of power, where a mighty state imposed censorship on a citizen whose views disagreed with those of the current political administration. If anything, the imbalance of power was in favour of Google, and this was just the law reminding the big guy that it applies equally to him too.
Finally, with the greatest of respect, I have to dispute your characterisation of Americans. The people of the US today allow their opinions to be dictated by powerful organisations all the time.
Your media do it: I've seen the major US TV networks, and the blatant bias in their presentation of news stories is almost comical to someone who's used to international coverage. It's not as if we don't have the same issues to deal with, but even the most reputable of US TV networks is barely above what we would call tabloid journalism (which is very much a derogatory term here -- tabloids have a reputation for peddling exactly the kinds of half-truths and semi-factual stories we are talking about).
Your creative industries do it: As we've discussed elsewhere on Slashdot recently, the US is by far the biggest supporter of IP protections in the world, and has no problems using diplomatic and political leverage to export its cultural preferences to as much of the rest of the world as it can in that department.
And of course, your politicians certainly do it: The US government today is among the most transparently bought-and-paid-for by powerful special interest groups in the entire first world, and everyone knows it. Everyone knows that the kind of negative campaigning you alluded to happens, too. And yet, as a society you continue voting for one of the two big parties that, again, by international standards are barely distinct on the political spectrum (and ironically much more pro-big-government than many mainstream political parties across Europe).
European politicians have always objected to the American "negative advertising" for example. Many European journalists think it actually leads to better elections where politicians not only present the good stuff but their opponents are able to present the bad stuff.
I have yet to meet that journalist.
Here in the UK we see a lot of criticism, sometimes more overt than others, of the policies and track records of competing political parties. That is as it should be.
What we see relatively rarely is the outright character assassination that seems to be de rigeur in US politics. Sometimes the major parties do try it, if they really want to get rid of a particular personality among their competition. To be fair, sometimes they do also succeed, but more often I think it just winds up being a plague on both their houses and a distraction from the real issues. It is, as we say here, not playing cricket.
Perhaps this plays into your point that the negative comments should be allowed, and of course we do culturally accept them up to a point
You've never been to a state library have you?
I used to live right next to one of the UK's national reference libraries. I'm well aware of what they do.
But that argument is missing the point. This isn't about whether information exists at all. It isn't about whether a historian who is willing to spend time properly investigating something should be able to look up the facts.
This is about whether information -- specifically, information that is inaccurate, inadequate, irrelevant or excessive -- is easily available to a vast audience for negligible effort and cost. The practical consequences of dubious and/or misleading information that is widely distributed are much worse for innocent individuals than the practical consequences of such information if it is only looked up by people who care enough to make a significant effort to find it and who are probably looking for other related information as well. Scale matters.
The essence of the technologies might not have changed, but their implications have changed dramatically. A friend photographing you having a good night out and e-mailing that picture to you is a fun memory for you to share. 853 people photographing you incidentally over the course of a few days and uploading their snaps along with accompanying time and place metadata to a photo sharing web site where they are run through image recognition and thereby connected with your own profiles in other database? That is starting to look like someone you don't know has a pretty detailed picture of your life, and chances are that anything they do with that picture will be in their interests rather than yours.
The solution to bad speech is more speech.
There are certainly two ways to attack this problem: much more transparency or much less. And I have some sympathy with the idea that radical transparency is a better solution, at least in theory.
The trouble is that in practice, radical transparency only works if you can reach a fairly extreme position, where all or at least a heavy majority of relevant information is available and where everyone interested in the topic will give equal weight to all of it. That is, everyone must speak with the same voice, and everyone must listen to everyone else equally before forming opinions and making decisions.
I'm not sure that is ever going to be a realistic goal, at least not without radical changes in society probably taking place over several generations. As jd pointed out, we are a long way from that sort of idealised culture today and almost all of us are too quick to make judgements, even when those judgements might have a profoundly unfair effect on someone else.
In the meantime, in the real world we live in today, the further you move in that direction the worse things become for the victims. And that is why, although I have some sympathy with the radical transparency philosophy, on balance I support reasonable measures to actively defend privacy and keep personal data in confidence in preference to greater freedom of speech.