You forget what Jobs told Obama at one of their final meetings (and was reported in NYT): even if Apple wanted to charge the price of what it would cost to make it in the USA, they could never find the volume and quality (willingness) of a factory full of engineers to design and build with the flexibility they want.
In my mind, handing over source code might be less damaging than handing over encryption keys, which is what the DOJ was suggesting at one point in their brief/response to the All Writs Order...
Let the regime posture and threaten all it wants. They're in enough trouble already with gas prices in the toilet, a state budget about to collapse, and a discontent/unemployed population that is chomping at the bit for reform of the ruling classes....
As stated in the subsequently linked article, it is not some weird mystery / secret what words are flagged. Dept. of Treasury maintains an easily accessible list of "Specially Designated Nationals" which is their compilation of probably most/all of the keywords that will be searched to find if there are matches.
In this case, "ISIS" is all over that document, like in 30 different places.
More relevantly, it's a wake up notice to share-everything 20-y.o.s to be aware that not everything is a happy go lucky social media commenting platform with no consequences. And Venmo should make that clearer to users that the comment field is not just a joke.
To quote Bill Clinton, I guess it depends heavily on what he means by the phrases "the greater good", "backdoor", "impenetrable, and "doing what's right". It seems his definitions of those terms differ greatly from mine.
Authors want everything to go their way, but the reality of the power balance is that they are producers of creative works, not marketers of them. (by and large). Time to admit that the pendulum has swung to where the people/entities who can aggregate and find information are even more valuable than the ones who produce the elements of that information.
They're unhappy if Google (or anyone) puts their entire works online, and also unhappy if Google puts just snippets of their works online. What do they want, to be able to pick and choose exactly what passages get to be indexed and put into search?
The heart of the matter is that this is a dispute over the money to be gathered from selling creative works, not the incentives for creating that work (which many people incorrectly buy the story that losing patent/copyright protection will strip away -- I never met an author who wrote because they had copyright protection). Authors will still continue to write, artists will still continue to record -- they will simply get less margin on each book, while actually probably getting even more exposure and marketing than they would on their own (or without Google).
Let's not be such eager shills for Keurig's attempts to fix up its image, shall we? Their priority isn't doing good for the environment or the customer, it's doing whatever it takes to makes customers think that they're doing good for the environment -- so that they recover their sales revenues after the customer-fucking DRM attempt with Keurig 2.0 that got them tarred and feathered.
One point of view is that Facebook is inherently making some sort of decisions about which stories to prioritize / have appear in people's feeds, search results, etc. (whether explicitly or through the tuning of the algorithms), so it is already taking a point of view on how an issue like Donald Trump should be handled. That position, right now, might be "nothing", but it is a position.
To take another example, when you Google some offensive terms, Google will show you or give you an explanation of why those results have risen to the top.
Who decides whether some issue rises to the level that it should get some explanation or special treatment? And who decides what the right side of it is -- such that the "democractic" search results should be interfered with? Then, what's the action to be taken, and what outcome is the action attempting to accomplish? Here, the goal would be contributing to someone losing a political race. That's very different from explaining a search result difference... And the problem is that these issues are not imminent threats, like a bomb or child abduction or terrorist threat. They are ideas, not yet actions. That is a hard line to cross, to figure out when it rises to a threshold to act.
Finally remember, as a insightful saying goes, "neutrality or refusal to take a position generally favors the aggressor in a fight". But knowing what to do instead of whether to stay neutral is a very different question.
What an embarrassment, not just that a company gets banned from providing health services, but that the misrepresentations and malpractices rise to a level so severe that a CEO gets personally banned from the industry. And for the COO (Sunny Balwani) who was threatening low level employees for telling the truth, may he never be employed again by anyone who knows better.
Perhaps it was a case of having too much fame too soon, and feeling the pressure to lie to cover the failures/shortcoming? If only the truth and exposure had come sooner. There are plenty of entrepreneurs and good ideas out there that deserve the publicity + funding that she got, but didn't because they weren't so well connected.
That's funny. I would've said something almost exactly the opposite in terms of brand image:
"Sprint -- oh, you mean you still live with your parents?"
T-mobile has some of the better international roaming-included and no-contract cancellation policies around. And they are significantly cheaper than ATT and Verizon.
That said, I'm also one step away from moving over to Google Fi.
I know that it's good to be charitable in personal views, and public policy. And you should not make the process onerous. But having no verification of disability by some authority is going to lead to abuse of this entitlement. And it just has to be a small fraction of people who take advantage, to undermine trust that the taxpayer is not being ripped off.
This is significant money being given forgiven. The administration would serve themselves better if they put up even small, reasonable checks on who is able to actually get this benefit.
Just like how you start to get very mad at people who are able to abuse handicapped parking spots because the govt is totally lax about who get to use this benefit (not just who has the placard, but who uses it). Trust in the appearance of public institutions is just as important as actual functioning -- a small number of cases of fraud and abuse can undermine it.
When someone finally finds the people who write and extort with this kind of ransomware, they should slowly and painfully delete body parts one by one until they pay up...
Nice idea, but news bulletin to Japanese government: Crime is already nonexistent in Japan compared to every other destination for foreign visitors, and ease of payment isn't what's keeping people from visiting.
How about you make the country more affordable to visit instead?
I will be happy to be proven wrong, but I do not believe fundamentally the chemistry of batteries will ever be able to allow for profitable or sustainable passenger aircraft, because batteries do not even come close to approaching the energy density afforded by liquid fuels. If this were anything other than flight, where weight is paramount, it might be workable (and obviously is in land transport).
Liquid fuels like kerosene have energy densities on the order of 40-50 MJ/kg, while batteries (of any type available) right now range from 0.5-1.0 MJ/kg.
You simply cannot overcome this large a performance gap if you're talking about these categories of fuels, especially since the weight of fuel dominates the mass of any large / long distance aircraft. We're not talking about a factor of a few here, this is a factor of 100x missing energy density.
Part of the benefit of hybrids in cars, too, is that the idle time they spend can be turned into electric consumption at much lower energy usage than keeping a gas engine spinning. Airplanes spend very little time idling.
Ok, if somehow the on-demand flight services industry takes off (Uber for airplanes, short distance, personal travel), then maybe small battery/hybrid aircraft might be viable, but we will simply not find a battery-chemistry-based improvement on liquid fuels. The compressed energy of millions of years of dinosaurs and plants cannot be beaten, and there's a reason for it...
I am really looking forward to reading the legislative drivel that comes out of these Senators' staffs' iPads just one month after this single news story broke.
I'm sure that these smart Congressional interns will easily be able to understand and improve upon the original All Writs Act that the Founding Fathers came up with, after years-worth of thought and debate among the intellectual giants of that age.
Anyone interested in watching a person being confronted with the first bits of evidence of malfeasance and totally being guilty is here: http://www.theguardian.com/new... . Icelandic PM walks out of interview
If there's an alien civilization out there that: 1) can detect us, 2) wants to fuck with us, and 3) has the means to travel here in a reasonable time (hundreds of light years) -- then I think we have way bigger problems than trying to fool them with lasers -- assuming we even know which planet it is...
Since when does humor come without someone's expense? Every single goddammed change in some publicly-used application is going to have someone complaining that something inadvertently bad happened because of it. In 1 billion people, you can find someone, somewhere who used it incorrectly. I for one am glad for many people to be amused for one day at the expense of a few people who didn't look carefully enough.
Basically, anything where the business model is to rely on your inertia and hassle of cancelling the service, and the high pressure sales tactics to stay when you finally call them up? I constantly find it amazing that there are businesses that survive on this principle...
It almost seems like government is helpless or has thrown up its hands in dealing with the root causes of the problem, which is the responsibility of government.
The problem is not that people aren't getting paid enough. That is what is called a symptom (for the layman). The problem is that too many people want to live and work in California, for fucks sake! This is the root of housing issues, unaffordability, income disparity, etc. in California. When will people realize that?
Increasing minimum wage just adds to the fundamental pressures here. People are being paid below this new minimum wage because.... There are people willing to work for less than the minimum wage! Do you really think increasing the wage will make the housing crunch better? Make it overall more affordable and possible to live here?
We need policies that make it less expensive to live here, not more. But of course those are the policies that are hard to come up with, and inconvenient -- so yeah, let's just ignore those.
Well, actually, we don't need to leave it to a bunch of internet commenters to decide this issue -- there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for, when a cyber vulnerability is known, but not yet disclosed to the public:
The considerations described here (in whether to reveal or keep secret a vulnerability) cover:
-- How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems? --
Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk? --
How much harm could an adversary nation or criminal group do with knowledge of this vulnerability? --
How likely is it that we would know if someone else was exploiting it? --
How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability? --
Are there other ways we can get it? --
Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it? --
How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability? --
Can the vulnerability be patched or otherwise mitigated?
In this case, I might argue that this is becoming so well known (though the technical specifics have not been revealed), that the FBI/US had better tell Apple to make sure that other users of the affected phones can be secured -- while the intelligence value of the exploit is rapidly decreasing due to its publicity.
So, the government misrepresented in its original filing that, "Apple must be compelled to provide the backdoor to unlock the phone, because we have no other means of doing so".
Always interesting how a party can be motivated to do the impossible when you force them to think about it hard enough.
Hah... Doomed to fail, or make only very little difference, unless the company also leads social change as a national brand.
Korean work culture is all kinds of fucked up, and everyone is unwillingly complicit. Everyone does it, for some unknown reason, so you feel you have to do it too.
Examples:
-- Expected late working hours until the boss leaves, sometimes >10pm, because showing your face at work is more valued than the work itself getting done. And the boss probably feels pressure to stay late, to not appear lazy. Very little actual work gets done in those late hours.
-- Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours, and not only that but also shady, overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars. If you don't partake you're viewed as not part of the team.
-- If you get home early for some reason (say 10pm), your wife asks you if something is wrong at work?
-- Even kids are in on the ingrained culture - they go to cram schools into the late hours past midnight, to prep for college entrance exams. Good training for later life.
Something is deeply wrong with this culture, which one big company might be able change if it threw itself headlong at the problem and declared certain practices forbidden - to help change the "understood practices". But I doubt that is the extent they're willing to go.
The sad thing is that if you take a Korean and transplant him/her to a different culture, they would do just fine living a normal, not fucked-up lifestyle as in their home country.
Slashdot Mirror
You forget what Jobs told Obama at one of their final meetings (and was reported in NYT): even if Apple wanted to charge the price of what it would cost to make it in the USA, they could never find the volume and quality (willingness) of a factory full of engineers to design and build with the flexibility they want.
"Those jobs are not coming back."
In my mind, handing over source code might be less damaging than handing over encryption keys, which is what the DOJ was suggesting at one point in their brief/response to the All Writs Order...
Yeah, not really. Saudi's budget breakeven oil price is >$100 per barrel.
Let the regime posture and threaten all it wants. They're in enough trouble already with gas prices in the toilet, a state budget about to collapse, and a discontent/unemployed population that is chomping at the bit for reform of the ruling classes....
As stated in the subsequently linked article, it is not some weird mystery / secret what words are flagged. Dept. of Treasury maintains an easily accessible list of "Specially Designated Nationals" which is their compilation of probably most/all of the keywords that will be searched to find if there are matches.
In this case, "ISIS" is all over that document, like in 30 different places.
More relevantly, it's a wake up notice to share-everything 20-y.o.s to be aware that not everything is a happy go lucky social media commenting platform with no consequences. And Venmo should make that clearer to users that the comment field is not just a joke.
To quote Bill Clinton, I guess it depends heavily on what he means by the phrases "the greater good", "backdoor", "impenetrable, and "doing what's right". It seems his definitions of those terms differ greatly from mine.
Sorry, I meant publishers -- the power balance has shifted away from the publishers...
Authors want everything to go their way, but the reality of the power balance is that they are producers of creative works, not marketers of them. (by and large). Time to admit that the pendulum has swung to where the people/entities who can aggregate and find information are even more valuable than the ones who produce the elements of that information.
They're unhappy if Google (or anyone) puts their entire works online, and also unhappy if Google puts just snippets of their works online. What do they want, to be able to pick and choose exactly what passages get to be indexed and put into search?
The heart of the matter is that this is a dispute over the money to be gathered from selling creative works, not the incentives for creating that work (which many people incorrectly buy the story that losing patent/copyright protection will strip away -- I never met an author who wrote because they had copyright protection). Authors will still continue to write, artists will still continue to record -- they will simply get less margin on each book, while actually probably getting even more exposure and marketing than they would on their own (or without Google).
Let's not be such eager shills for Keurig's attempts to fix up its image, shall we? Their priority isn't doing good for the environment or the customer, it's doing whatever it takes to makes customers think that they're doing good for the environment -- so that they recover their sales revenues after the customer-fucking DRM attempt with Keurig 2.0 that got them tarred and feathered.
One point of view is that Facebook is inherently making some sort of decisions about which stories to prioritize / have appear in people's feeds, search results, etc. (whether explicitly or through the tuning of the algorithms), so it is already taking a point of view on how an issue like Donald Trump should be handled. That position, right now, might be "nothing", but it is a position.
To take another example, when you Google some offensive terms, Google will show you or give you an explanation of why those results have risen to the top.
Who decides whether some issue rises to the level that it should get some explanation or special treatment? And who decides what the right side of it is -- such that the "democractic" search results should be interfered with? Then, what's the action to be taken, and what outcome is the action attempting to accomplish? Here, the goal would be contributing to someone losing a political race. That's very different from explaining a search result difference... And the problem is that these issues are not imminent threats, like a bomb or child abduction or terrorist threat. They are ideas, not yet actions. That is a hard line to cross, to figure out when it rises to a threshold to act.
Finally remember, as a insightful saying goes, "neutrality or refusal to take a position generally favors the aggressor in a fight". But knowing what to do instead of whether to stay neutral is a very different question.
What an embarrassment, not just that a company gets banned from providing health services, but that the misrepresentations and malpractices rise to a level so severe that a CEO gets personally banned from the industry. And for the COO (Sunny Balwani) who was threatening low level employees for telling the truth, may he never be employed again by anyone who knows better.
Perhaps it was a case of having too much fame too soon, and feeling the pressure to lie to cover the failures/shortcoming? If only the truth and exposure had come sooner. There are plenty of entrepreneurs and good ideas out there that deserve the publicity + funding that she got, but didn't because they weren't so well connected.
That's funny. I would've said something almost exactly the opposite in terms of brand image:
"Sprint -- oh, you mean you still live with your parents?"
T-mobile has some of the better international roaming-included and no-contract cancellation policies around. And they are significantly cheaper than ATT and Verizon.
That said, I'm also one step away from moving over to Google Fi.
I know that it's good to be charitable in personal views, and public policy. And you should not make the process onerous. But having no verification of disability by some authority is going to lead to abuse of this entitlement. And it just has to be a small fraction of people who take advantage, to undermine trust that the taxpayer is not being ripped off.
This is significant money being given forgiven. The administration would serve themselves better if they put up even small, reasonable checks on who is able to actually get this benefit.
Just like how you start to get very mad at people who are able to abuse handicapped parking spots because the govt is totally lax about who get to use this benefit (not just who has the placard, but who uses it). Trust in the appearance of public institutions is just as important as actual functioning -- a small number of cases of fraud and abuse can undermine it.
When someone finally finds the people who write and extort with this kind of ransomware, they should slowly and painfully delete body parts one by one until they pay up...
Nice idea, but news bulletin to Japanese government: Crime is already nonexistent in Japan compared to every other destination for foreign visitors, and ease of payment isn't what's keeping people from visiting.
How about you make the country more affordable to visit instead?
I will be happy to be proven wrong, but I do not believe fundamentally the chemistry of batteries will ever be able to allow for profitable or sustainable passenger aircraft, because batteries do not even come close to approaching the energy density afforded by liquid fuels. If this were anything other than flight, where weight is paramount, it might be workable (and obviously is in land transport).
Liquid fuels like kerosene have energy densities on the order of 40-50 MJ/kg, while batteries (of any type available) right now range from 0.5-1.0 MJ/kg.
You simply cannot overcome this large a performance gap if you're talking about these categories of fuels, especially since the weight of fuel dominates the mass of any large / long distance aircraft. We're not talking about a factor of a few here, this is a factor of 100x missing energy density.
Part of the benefit of hybrids in cars, too, is that the idle time they spend can be turned into electric consumption at much lower energy usage than keeping a gas engine spinning. Airplanes spend very little time idling.
Ok, if somehow the on-demand flight services industry takes off (Uber for airplanes, short distance, personal travel), then maybe small battery/hybrid aircraft might be viable, but we will simply not find a battery-chemistry-based improvement on liquid fuels. The compressed energy of millions of years of dinosaurs and plants cannot be beaten, and there's a reason for it...
I am really looking forward to reading the legislative drivel that comes out of these Senators' staffs' iPads just one month after this single news story broke.
I'm sure that these smart Congressional interns will easily be able to understand and improve upon the original All Writs Act that the Founding Fathers came up with, after years-worth of thought and debate among the intellectual giants of that age.
Anyone interested in watching a person being confronted with the first bits of evidence of malfeasance and totally being guilty is here: http://www.theguardian.com/new... .
Icelandic PM walks out of interview
If there's an alien civilization out there that: 1) can detect us, 2) wants to fuck with us, and 3) has the means to travel here in a reasonable time (hundreds of light years) -- then I think we have way bigger problems than trying to fool them with lasers -- assuming we even know which planet it is...
Since when does humor come without someone's expense? Every single goddammed change in some publicly-used application is going to have someone complaining that something inadvertently bad happened because of it. In 1 billion people, you can find someone, somewhere who used it incorrectly. I for one am glad for many people to be amused for one day at the expense of a few people who didn't look carefully enough.
Would this apply equally to:
-- gym memberships?
-- credit cards?
-- cell phone plans?
-- America Online?
Basically, anything where the business model is to rely on your inertia and hassle of cancelling the service, and the high pressure sales tactics to stay when you finally call them up? I constantly find it amazing that there are businesses that survive on this principle...
It almost seems like government is helpless or has thrown up its hands in dealing with the root causes of the problem, which is the responsibility of government.
The problem is not that people aren't getting paid enough. That is what is called a symptom (for the layman). The problem is that too many people want to live and work in California, for fucks sake! This is the root of housing issues, unaffordability, income disparity, etc. in California. When will people realize that?
Increasing minimum wage just adds to the fundamental pressures here. People are being paid below this new minimum wage because.... There are people willing to work for less than the minimum wage! Do you really think increasing the wage will make the housing crunch better? Make it overall more affordable and possible to live here?
We need policies that make it less expensive to live here, not more. But of course those are the policies that are hard to come up with, and inconvenient -- so yeah, let's just ignore those.
Well, actually, we don't need to leave it to a bunch of internet commenters to decide this issue -- there is an actual process described as "equities review" which the Executive Branch is responsible for, when a cyber vulnerability is known, but not yet disclosed to the public:
https://www.whitehouse.gov/blo...>href=https://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2014/04/28/heartbleed-understanding-when-we-disclose-cyber-vulnerabilities
The considerations described here (in whether to reveal or keep secret a vulnerability) cover:
-- How much is the vulnerable system used in the core internet infrastructure, in other critical infrastructure systems, in the U.S. economy, and/or in national security systems?
-- Does the vulnerability, if left unpatched, impose significant risk?
-- How much harm could an adversary nation or criminal group do with knowledge of this vulnerability?
-- How likely is it that we would know if someone else was exploiting it?
-- How badly do we need the intelligence we think we can get from exploiting the vulnerability?
-- Are there other ways we can get it?
-- Could we utilize the vulnerability for a short period of time before we disclose it?
-- How likely is it that someone else will discover the vulnerability?
-- Can the vulnerability be patched or otherwise mitigated?
In this case, I might argue that this is becoming so well known (though the technical specifics have not been revealed), that the FBI/US had better tell Apple to make sure that other users of the affected phones can be secured -- while the intelligence value of the exploit is rapidly decreasing due to its publicity.
So, the government misrepresented in its original filing that, "Apple must be compelled to provide the backdoor to unlock the phone, because we have no other means of doing so".
Always interesting how a party can be motivated to do the impossible when you force them to think about it hard enough.
Hah... Doomed to fail, or make only very little difference, unless the company also leads social change as a national brand.
Korean work culture is all kinds of fucked up, and everyone is unwillingly complicit. Everyone does it, for some unknown reason, so you feel you have to do it too.
Examples:
-- Expected late working hours until the boss leaves, sometimes >10pm, because showing your face at work is more valued than the work itself getting done. And the boss probably feels pressure to stay late, to not appear lazy. Very little actual work gets done in those late hours.
-- Expected drinks with colleagues after work into the late hours, and not only that but also shady, overtly sexist atmospheres and goings-on at bars. If you don't partake you're viewed as not part of the team.
-- If you get home early for some reason (say 10pm), your wife asks you if something is wrong at work?
-- Even kids are in on the ingrained culture - they go to cram schools into the late hours past midnight, to prep for college entrance exams. Good training for later life.
Something is deeply wrong with this culture, which one big company might be able change if it threw itself headlong at the problem and declared certain practices forbidden - to help change the "understood practices". But I doubt that is the extent they're willing to go.
The sad thing is that if you take a Korean and transplant him/her to a different culture, they would do just fine living a normal, not fucked-up lifestyle as in their home country.