I grew up in Texas and have lived here all of my life. The resistance to evolution can be summed up in one sentence:
"You can't tell me what to fuckin' believe!"
And yet, unless they converted later in life of their own free will, that's exactly what they let someone else do, every Sunday (maybe more) by a preacher, and every day by their parents as they were growing up.
They're unable and unwilling to recognize their "independence" is an illusion.
The developer of the X-Plane flight simulator is also fighting the patent troll suing him for using a Google-approved and provided API for verifying Android purchases. He's fighting using his own money too, which lawyers have advised could cost him $1.5 million even if he wins.
They aren't the only dev who this troll is suing, though I believe they're one of the few who's actually big enough (barely) to mount a defence. Google has refused to offer legal or even token moral support for their developers, and the API is probably still in place in the latest version, a Trojan horse waiting to happen to other unsuspecting devs.
I disagree, people who mistake humour for a call to vigilantism and then join in need to take personal responsibility for their stupidity. In some ways it's better that we find out who they are and limit the harm they can do, rather than trying to ban the humour. Especially if they are a TV news channel rather than an individual.
I disagree with your disagreement in this case. You can take the idiots to task for being clueless to sarcasm and raining vigilante justice on the wrong people, for not taking personal responsibility, etc but this ignores two things:
1) you can't un-ruin any lives they've harmed. One idiot missing the/sarcasm tag spawns more idiots who miss the/sarcasm tag and are convinced this ID'd person "got away with it" 2) especially online, it can be difficult to ID the actual people who are doing harm to innocent people
It's like saying you don't need to watch when you cross a street because you have the right of way and drivers need to take personal responsibility for watching for pedestrians at all times. It's a nice fantasy, the reality is that even though you're 100% right, you and your family/friends will suffer far greater loss than the person in the vehicle that hits you.
It would be far easier to obtain your fingerprints from systems that already have it stored as a much simpler data, i.e. any number of government databases.
1) more people/connected systems have access to it, compared to a single component on a single device 2) since lifted prints are only surface-level images, that's all they've bothered to store in those systems
Now a casual device like the iPhone wants your fingerprint. That means that if I were to use my thumb for that and lose my phone, the person who finds it could theoretically extract my thumb print data (even if Apple says you can't: they got the actual device so I will assume it is possible, even if hard), and use that to clear immigration.
There's theory and there's practice. In theory, if a hacker managed to access/.'s database, they can obtain your password. But, assuming/. follows the latest security best practices, your actual password isn't stored at all... it'll be a value obtained by bcrypt-ing your password (salt + hashing used to be okay, but the advent of powerful GPUs seems to be this method's Achilles' heel). In practice this makes it very difficult to discover your original password.
The analogy doesn't quite hold because fingerprint matching has to be a slightly fuzzy or inexact method, but if done right (remember Apple didn't come up with this themselves, they bought a company that did nothing but security solutions), it would take more resources than even most organized crime have to reconstruct the original digital representation.
And even then, what would they do with it? They can't graft it onto the fingerprint system of another device, possibly not even another iPhone if each A7 chip's security module has their own unique ID and encryption/decryption keys. And as others have said, there's far easier ways to get just the surface fingerprint details.
Time will tell though. The gauntlet has been thrown down, and there'll be no shortage of attempts to hack it and gain notoriety as the group that cracked Apple's much-vaunted security.
They are the preventer of progress, destroyer of compatibility. At one point they decided they had destroyed every competing browser vendor, declared their browser "done" and fired the team who produced... IE6.
I don't understand. They didn't stop progress - Firefox and Chrome were developed and went past IE, along with the rest of technology to the point where Microsoft is now caught on the left foot because THEY didn't progress.
Firefox v1 wasn't released until 3 *years* after IE6 went public. It then took several years of active PR efforts and reports on IE6's serious security issues before IE share was driven convincingly below 75% and management finally started "allowing" web application development to include standards compatibility and testing (fortunately I'd already been doing that for several years at that point).
Even at that point, Microsoft managed to screw with web developers. IE7, 8 and 9 each had their own non-standard quirks that broke workarounds for earlier versions, so you were left with, for example, stylesheets that the major standards-compliant browsers worked with 99% of the time... then separate workarounds for IE6, 7, 8 and 9.
IE didn't even fully support PNG translucency until 2011! Until v9 there were still issues like a PNG's translucent pixels showing up as flat gray when using them as background images.
Then there were Javascript performance issues. One implementation circa 2007 required Javascript processing of an AJAX response to produce a list of about a dozen items, each with multiple clickable actions. It took Firefox 2-3 seconds to produce the results on the page. The then-new IE7 took 5 seconds. IE6--the vast majority of our users at the time--took over 10 seconds. In the initial delivery by the vendor, they actually loaded all 8 of these lists, every time that page loaded. Firefox took 10-15 seconds, IE7 took 30 seconds, but IE6 took 1.5 *minutes* to process the inline XML. Poor implementation to be sure, but it illustrated just how behind and inefficient both IE were.
I suppose we "let them become a problem" by trying to improve our web applications by incorporating more modern techniques... some of them close to a decade old by that point, i.e. 3-4 generations by tech standards... but as a web developer I can say with no uncertainty that IE6 and 7, and even IE8 to a lesser degree, were serious roadblocks on the road to producing a more modern web experience.
In cases like this, they kinda have to, or else no-one will buy Cisco again, or the customer who just had to settle will then sue Cisco for all their losses.
I think we just figured out why the court ruled this way. As if there wasn't enough overpriced work for IP lawyers, their bros on the bench are determined to generate even more revenue for the IP legal "industry".
In any event, while the Israeli method does involve scrutinizing everyone's responses to the security agents' questions, it also allows profiling of passengers according to national origin, race or religion. Barring major changes to law, the USA is not able to adopt their methods entirely.
Seeing as they're ignoring the highest law of the land (Constitution) on any number of issues, why would they need major changes to law before trying this?
Yes, I was punching, kicking, and otherwise beating the crap out of this random person. It was the fact they put their arms up to shield their face that resulted in such a horrible beating. I bare no fault what so ever for his actions which, despite being performed after I started the beating, are still somehow the reason for the beating.
Also known as "resisting arrest" when charges are laid.
And that's what really annoys me when I see idiots complaining after every refresh that Apple will just release a new model in just a few weeks or months with minor changes. I don't challenge valid criticisms, like outrageous price bumps for more storage, they're falling behind on wanted features (a consequence of taking TOO LONG to release new models), or even their suppliers' working conditions (though they are hypocritically silent when told the working conditions are as bad or worse at their competitors'), but that false one is total malicious ignorance.
Fortunately there's an effective response to that: point out that Samsung will have released over 25 smartphone models in 2013 alone, and dare them to show the same scorn at Samsung for releasing so many models with minor feature differences. No one spouting their false accusation has ever replied after being slapped across the face with that revelation.
2) A weak president that German politicians see no downside to prodding/angering.
What exactly would a "strong" US president be doing before this, or do in response to this? Public or behind-the-scene threats against allies who don't fall in line? Start military action against an enemy nation? Tough-guy talk at press briefings?
Canada doesn't seem to have a fee to register a political party, but registration *does* require verified signatures and detailed info of 250 electors (on separate forms) as party members, plus information on party officers.
So we have an even lower financial barrier to entry, but a lot of paperwork and effort needed to canvas people to be party members. This seems to be enough that the number of fringe parties are limited... we have only 18 registered federal parties at the moment, just 5 of which are of any real significance.
Does Australia have a similar requirement for X number of signed and verified voter info forms to support the registration?
Election volunteers are forbidden to give voters any information about candidates to reduce likelihood of malicious or inaccurate influence, and it makes absolute perfect sense.
It is not the fault of the system nor the election volunteers if the voters didn't do their damn homework before showing up to vote.
It's the responsibility as a voting citizen to be informed, just as much as it is to expect a representative to have read the entire text of the bill before voting on it. In this case it's obvious many voters didn't even know the name of the candidate of the party they wanted to vote for, and were going by party name alone.
When the people make a massive mistake in democracy, it's still their decision to make. Look at the american elections for the last 20 years. Both sides will say the people made mistakes.
The American system is different in that voting is voluntary and not quite as complicated. Also there's not a whole host of parties with similar sounding names. If you wanted to vote properly in Australia on the weekend you had to number 110 boxes on a ballot paper about 1 metre wide. I WISH I WAS JOKING!
I didn't think you could get more complicated than the American system... Other than having to rank candidates for MPs/representatives (far better than first-past-the-post), what do Australians have to vote for on their federal ballots?
Unelected senators here is also a huge issue, but thankfully we don't waste time voting for sheriffs, judges, attorneys general, treasurer, auditor etc even at provincial or municipal levels (and they in turn focus on doing their jobs, not pandering to public opinion to win votes).
/. can get away with that because it has a proven and AFAIK unique moderation system which prevents anonymous troll and spam comments from having much impact.
The only time I "use" Paypal is when a merchant uses them for credit card transactions. No link to my actual bank account, and I at least have a reliable way via my card provider to contest any charges.
A Dick Tracy / Michael Knight comm-watch, or a Star Trek comm-badge, plays well on screen. In real life speakerphones in public means zero privacy, sound quality and loudness are such that you can't hear it well in public unless it's right up to your ear, or it's so loud and clear it disturbs everyone within arm's length.
And of course, a lot of people text more than they talk now--also something this watch can't do.
Sure you could whip out the parent device in public to work around this, but that undercuts a big reason for having this watch in the first place.
A better example than iPhone would've been the iPad. There was very vocal demand for an OSX tablet to go up against Windows-based tablet PCs--far more than there was demand for an upscaled iOS device. Smart money said shortly after its introduction that the iPad was doomed because there was no demand for such a limited device. And yet the iPad quickly outsold all "traditional" tablet PCs ever made.
Supply and demand is like the proverbial chicken and the egg. There can be an vague and frankly meaningless demand for just about anything, but providing the supply of something very specific (and factors like how it's implemented,, price, how it's marketed, etc) can bring specific demands into focus and drive it up.
Re:The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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Any chance your friend can use that MBA/TB-GPU setup to get some fps stats on the X-Plane demo with most settings on or near max?
I don't know anyone who does that with voice conferencing or even speaker phone now, let alone video chat.
Text messaging, an even more primitive way to communicate (historically speaking; telegraph came long before the telephone), has also replaced a lot of realtime voice calls, such that people sometimes spend more time with remote friends than the ones they're with.
To be sure, the Game of Thrones season finale saw a lot of "reaction" videos, but I think those were more set up by friends/family who knew what was coming.
Re:The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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Serious question: what do you do that you could not do with a mini + thunderbolt enclosure?
Run X-Plane at decent quality and performance. A 2012 MBP is my still my main machine, but I did the math and my flightsim rig had to be a custom-built PC with Windows 7.
Re:The OS is good, but the hardware pushes me away
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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· Score: 1
Has your friend with the 11" MBA pushed 60fps graphics out onto an external 1080p screen, which has over 50% more pixels?
Another iMac user ran benchmarks that showed last year's lower-end GT650M had an internal PCIe host-device bandwidth 2-3x the *maximum* bandwidth of Thunderbolt.
True, you'll still get better results than the integrated Intel HD4000, and it'll free up RAM being used as VRAM, but there's almost no point Thunderbolt-ing any GPU better than a low-end GPU from 2011, anything faster is bottlenecked.
Re:If by "looking good", you mean "looking like iO
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Inside OS X Mavericks
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It's like they reversed the up/down rotation on an aircraft or switched left-right steering in a car. Yeah, you can get used to it, but then whenever you use a non-Apple product it feels weird again.
Poor choice for your first analogy, because natural scrolling behaves *exactly* like the up-down pitch on an aircraft. Pull control toward you on a plane (drag finger towards you on trackpad), your view goes up; push away, your view goes down. I think you've inadvertently hit upon a concept that should make Apple's method instantly intuitive for every pilot and flight-sim enthusiast.
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I grew up in Texas and have lived here all of my life. The resistance to evolution can be summed up in one sentence:
"You can't tell me what to fuckin' believe!"
And yet, unless they converted later in life of their own free will, that's exactly what they let someone else do, every Sunday (maybe more) by a preacher, and every day by their parents as they were growing up.
They're unable and unwilling to recognize their "independence" is an illusion.
The developer of the X-Plane flight simulator is also fighting the patent troll suing him for using a Google-approved and provided API for verifying Android purchases. He's fighting using his own money too, which lawyers have advised could cost him $1.5 million even if he wins.
They aren't the only dev who this troll is suing, though I believe they're one of the few who's actually big enough (barely) to mount a defence. Google has refused to offer legal or even token moral support for their developers, and the API is probably still in place in the latest version, a Trojan horse waiting to happen to other unsuspecting devs.
I disagree, people who mistake humour for a call to vigilantism and then join in need to take personal responsibility for their stupidity. In some ways it's better that we find out who they are and limit the harm they can do, rather than trying to ban the humour. Especially if they are a TV news channel rather than an individual.
I disagree with your disagreement in this case. You can take the idiots to task for being clueless to sarcasm and raining vigilante justice on the wrong people, for not taking personal responsibility, etc but this ignores two things:
1) you can't un-ruin any lives they've harmed. One idiot missing the /sarcasm tag spawns more idiots who miss the /sarcasm tag and are convinced this ID'd person "got away with it"
2) especially online, it can be difficult to ID the actual people who are doing harm to innocent people
It's like saying you don't need to watch when you cross a street because you have the right of way and drivers need to take personal responsibility for watching for pedestrians at all times. It's a nice fantasy, the reality is that even though you're 100% right, you and your family/friends will suffer far greater loss than the person in the vehicle that hits you.
It would be far easier to obtain your fingerprints from systems that already have it stored as a much simpler data, i.e. any number of government databases.
1) more people/connected systems have access to it, compared to a single component on a single device
2) since lifted prints are only surface-level images, that's all they've bothered to store in those systems
Now a casual device like the iPhone wants your fingerprint. That means that if I were to use my thumb for that and lose my phone, the person who finds it could theoretically extract my thumb print data (even if Apple says you can't: they got the actual device so I will assume it is possible, even if hard), and use that to clear immigration.
There's theory and there's practice. In theory, if a hacker managed to access /.'s database, they can obtain your password. But, assuming /. follows the latest security best practices, your actual password isn't stored at all... it'll be a value obtained by bcrypt-ing your password (salt + hashing used to be okay, but the advent of powerful GPUs seems to be this method's Achilles' heel). In practice this makes it very difficult to discover your original password.
The analogy doesn't quite hold because fingerprint matching has to be a slightly fuzzy or inexact method, but if done right (remember Apple didn't come up with this themselves, they bought a company that did nothing but security solutions), it would take more resources than even most organized crime have to reconstruct the original digital representation.
And even then, what would they do with it? They can't graft it onto the fingerprint system of another device, possibly not even another iPhone if each A7 chip's security module has their own unique ID and encryption/decryption keys. And as others have said, there's far easier ways to get just the surface fingerprint details.
Time will tell though. The gauntlet has been thrown down, and there'll be no shortage of attempts to hack it and gain notoriety as the group that cracked Apple's much-vaunted security.
I don't understand. They didn't stop progress - Firefox and Chrome were developed and went past IE, along with the rest of technology to the point where Microsoft is now caught on the left foot because THEY didn't progress.
Firefox v1 wasn't released until 3 *years* after IE6 went public. It then took several years of active PR efforts and reports on IE6's serious security issues before IE share was driven convincingly below 75% and management finally started "allowing" web application development to include standards compatibility and testing (fortunately I'd already been doing that for several years at that point).
Even at that point, Microsoft managed to screw with web developers. IE7, 8 and 9 each had their own non-standard quirks that broke workarounds for earlier versions, so you were left with, for example, stylesheets that the major standards-compliant browsers worked with 99% of the time... then separate workarounds for IE6, 7, 8 and 9.
IE didn't even fully support PNG translucency until 2011! Until v9 there were still issues like a PNG's translucent pixels showing up as flat gray when using them as background images.
Then there were Javascript performance issues. One implementation circa 2007 required Javascript processing of an AJAX response to produce a list of about a dozen items, each with multiple clickable actions. It took Firefox 2-3 seconds to produce the results on the page. The then-new IE7 took 5 seconds. IE6--the vast majority of our users at the time--took over 10 seconds. In the initial delivery by the vendor, they actually loaded all 8 of these lists, every time that page loaded. Firefox took 10-15 seconds, IE7 took 30 seconds, but IE6 took 1.5 *minutes* to process the inline XML. Poor implementation to be sure, but it illustrated just how behind and inefficient both IE were.
I suppose we "let them become a problem" by trying to improve our web applications by incorporating more modern techniques... some of them close to a decade old by that point, i.e. 3-4 generations by tech standards... but as a web developer I can say with no uncertainty that IE6 and 7, and even IE8 to a lesser degree, were serious roadblocks on the road to producing a more modern web experience.
In cases like this, they kinda have to, or else no-one will buy Cisco again, or the customer who just had to settle will then sue Cisco for all their losses.
I think we just figured out why the court ruled this way. As if there wasn't enough overpriced work for IP lawyers, their bros on the bench are determined to generate even more revenue for the IP legal "industry".
In any event, while the Israeli method does involve scrutinizing everyone's responses to the security agents' questions, it also allows profiling of passengers according to national origin, race or religion. Barring major changes to law, the USA is not able to adopt their methods entirely.
Seeing as they're ignoring the highest law of the land (Constitution) on any number of issues, why would they need major changes to law before trying this?
Yes, I was punching, kicking, and otherwise beating the crap out of this random person.
It was the fact they put their arms up to shield their face that resulted in such a horrible beating. I bare no fault what so ever for his actions which, despite being performed after I started the beating, are still somehow the reason for the beating.
Also known as "resisting arrest" when charges are laid.
And that's what really annoys me when I see idiots complaining after every refresh that Apple will just release a new model in just a few weeks or months with minor changes. I don't challenge valid criticisms, like outrageous price bumps for more storage, they're falling behind on wanted features (a consequence of taking TOO LONG to release new models), or even their suppliers' working conditions (though they are hypocritically silent when told the working conditions are as bad or worse at their competitors'), but that false one is total malicious ignorance.
Fortunately there's an effective response to that: point out that Samsung will have released over 25 smartphone models in 2013 alone, and dare them to show the same scorn at Samsung for releasing so many models with minor feature differences. No one spouting their false accusation has ever replied after being slapped across the face with that revelation.
We trust the American people... it's just your damn government we have a problem with.
Well, it's staggeringly stupid to trust the American people. We're the ones responsible for the American government.
Not to mention what TV shows Hollywood keeps making and renewing.
2) A weak president that German politicians see no downside to prodding/angering.
What exactly would a "strong" US president be doing before this, or do in response to this? Public or behind-the-scene threats against allies who don't fall in line? Start military action against an enemy nation? Tough-guy talk at press briefings?
Canada doesn't seem to have a fee to register a political party, but registration *does* require verified signatures and detailed info of 250 electors (on separate forms) as party members, plus information on party officers.
So we have an even lower financial barrier to entry, but a lot of paperwork and effort needed to canvas people to be party members. This seems to be enough that the number of fringe parties are limited... we have only 18 registered federal parties at the moment, just 5 of which are of any real significance.
Does Australia have a similar requirement for X number of signed and verified voter info forms to support the registration?
Election volunteers are forbidden to give voters any information about candidates to reduce likelihood of malicious or inaccurate influence, and it makes absolute perfect sense.
It is not the fault of the system nor the election volunteers if the voters didn't do their damn homework before showing up to vote.
It's the responsibility as a voting citizen to be informed, just as much as it is to expect a representative to have read the entire text of the bill before voting on it. In this case it's obvious many voters didn't even know the name of the candidate of the party they wanted to vote for, and were going by party name alone.
When the people make a massive mistake in democracy, it's still their decision to make. Look at the american elections for the last 20 years. Both sides will say the people made mistakes.
The American system is different in that voting is voluntary and not quite as complicated. Also there's not a whole host of parties with similar sounding names. If you wanted to vote properly in Australia on the weekend you had to number 110 boxes on a ballot paper about 1 metre wide. I WISH I WAS JOKING!
I didn't think you could get more complicated than the American system... Other than having to rank candidates for MPs/representatives (far better than first-past-the-post), what do Australians have to vote for on their federal ballots?
Here's a Canadian federal election ballot. Unfortunately it is a FPTP system, but you're literally in and out of there in minutes.
Unelected senators here is also a huge issue, but thankfully we don't waste time voting for sheriffs, judges, attorneys general, treasurer, auditor etc even at provincial or municipal levels (and they in turn focus on doing their jobs, not pandering to public opinion to win votes).
/. can get away with that because it has a proven and AFAIK unique moderation system which prevents anonymous troll and spam comments from having much impact.
The only time I "use" Paypal is when a merchant uses them for credit card transactions. No link to my actual bank account, and I at least have a reliable way via my card provider to contest any charges.
A timepiece that tells time? That's crazy talk!
A timepiece that sets its own time so it doesn't drift faster or slower over days or weeks? Yep, definitely crazy talk!
A Dick Tracy / Michael Knight comm-watch, or a Star Trek comm-badge, plays well on screen. In real life speakerphones in public means zero privacy, sound quality and loudness are such that you can't hear it well in public unless it's right up to your ear, or it's so loud and clear it disturbs everyone within arm's length.
And of course, a lot of people text more than they talk now--also something this watch can't do.
Sure you could whip out the parent device in public to work around this, but that undercuts a big reason for having this watch in the first place.
A better example than iPhone would've been the iPad. There was very vocal demand for an OSX tablet to go up against Windows-based tablet PCs--far more than there was demand for an upscaled iOS device. Smart money said shortly after its introduction that the iPad was doomed because there was no demand for such a limited device. And yet the iPad quickly outsold all "traditional" tablet PCs ever made.
Supply and demand is like the proverbial chicken and the egg. There can be an vague and frankly meaningless demand for just about anything, but providing the supply of something very specific (and factors like how it's implemented,, price, how it's marketed, etc) can bring specific demands into focus and drive it up.
Any chance your friend can use that MBA/TB-GPU setup to get some fps stats on the X-Plane demo with most settings on or near max?
I don't know anyone who does that with voice conferencing or even speaker phone now, let alone video chat.
Text messaging, an even more primitive way to communicate (historically speaking; telegraph came long before the telephone), has also replaced a lot of realtime voice calls, such that people sometimes spend more time with remote friends than the ones they're with.
To be sure, the Game of Thrones season finale saw a lot of "reaction" videos, but I think those were more set up by friends/family who knew what was coming.
Serious question: what do you do that you could not do with a mini + thunderbolt enclosure?
Run X-Plane at decent quality and performance. A 2012 MBP is my still my main machine, but I did the math and my flightsim rig had to be a custom-built PC with Windows 7.
Has your friend with the 11" MBA pushed 60fps graphics out onto an external 1080p screen, which has over 50% more pixels?
Another iMac user ran benchmarks that showed last year's lower-end GT650M had an internal PCIe host-device bandwidth 2-3x the *maximum* bandwidth of Thunderbolt.
True, you'll still get better results than the integrated Intel HD4000, and it'll free up RAM being used as VRAM, but there's almost no point Thunderbolt-ing any GPU better than a low-end GPU from 2011, anything faster is bottlenecked.
It's like they reversed the up/down rotation on an aircraft or switched left-right steering in a car. Yeah, you can get used to it, but then whenever you use a non-Apple product it feels weird again.
Poor choice for your first analogy, because natural scrolling behaves *exactly* like the up-down pitch on an aircraft. Pull control toward you on a plane (drag finger towards you on trackpad), your view goes up; push away, your view goes down. I think you've inadvertently hit upon a concept that should make Apple's method instantly intuitive for every pilot and flight-sim enthusiast.