As usual for an invasion of privacy or violation of fundamental rights, the UK got there first. In England, you get your DNA taken and stored simply if you get arrested - you don't even need to be charged, let alone convicted.
So by that logic, the police shouldn't take and store the fingerprints of anyone they arrest, because they haven't been charged or convicted. Yet the police have been doing exactly that for more than 100 years.
Those "fundamental rights" you complain about were lost a long time ago. All that has changed is that the police are now running a swab through the arrestee's mouth rather than inking his fingers, or forcing his hand onto a scanner.
A common Slashdot meme is to complain how the general public panics over a new technology, even though nothing fundamentally changes in how people use it. So why are Slashdotters getting so worked up about DNA sampling? It is a logical outgrowth of modern technology applied to century-old police procedures.
Well, if I had a magic wand to wave, I'd abolish every College of Education at every university in the U.S.A, and require that all teachers have degrees in the subjects that they teach (e.g. mathematics, history, physics, etc.).
Degrees in education boomed beginning in the late 50's to early 60's, which happens to correspond very nicely with the start of the decline in K-12 education. Based on my own observation of many B.S.Ed. graduates, I believe there's a great deal of causation behind that correlation.
Hiring teachers on the basis of "knowing how to teach" has been about as successful as hiring managers on the basis of "knowing how to manage". The consequences have been even worse - a badly run company can be turned around by new management, but badly-educated children are much, much harder to fix.
One of my co-workers is Russian, and he still keeps in touch with friends and family back home. We've been discussing the recent anti-government protests in Moscow, and he says that the government-controlled media (which includes all of TV and radio, and many of the newspapers) has gone into overdrive accusing the U.S. for being behind almost everything that's currently going wrong in Russia. In his words, "Blaming America is all they have left."
Implying that the U.S. is responsible for their spacecraft failure is just part of that game. Russia has been launching spacecraft for decades, and it is silly to think that they didn't learn how to deal with contingencies such as deliberate jamming long ago.
Unless you've personally verified every single line of code in the OS, you're not really better off. You're just hoping that others have verified every single line of code, and unless you've verified that they're all trustworthy, you're just hoping that's true, too.
Exactly. Even the open source community is built on a massive foundation of blind trust, because perhaps one user in a hundred thousand will actually look at the source. Otherwise, no matter if it's open or closed, the average user says, "That looks neat, I'm gonna install that".
A personal anecdote: my open source theft recovery package for Macs has several thousand users. All of the source (with comments) is bundled with the installer, yet I often get questions from users about what the program does "under the hood", when they could easily learn the answer themselves by reading the source code.
The overwhelming majority of users seem to like open source because it's free, not because it is theoretically more secure. I might have been collecting private information from the users of my program for the past three years, and I often wonder if a single one of them would have bothered to check the source in all that time.
The best attack vector for any malware is incredibly simple: bundle it into something useful, and then give it away. You can guarantee that some people will install it (for the same reason they'll pick up and use a "lost" USB memory stick), because it is human nature to want to take advantage of something that is freely given.
My phone resides in my pocket. Even if I left it on the dash of my car, the casing is only so large, even on my Galaxy S II. I don't see how even the most efficient of solar panels in the most effective of locations would provide enough power.
It's noble of them to try, but at the moment I'm not surprised this was the outcome.
I don't doubt that Nokia's engineers did some quick calculations and told their managers that solar charging wouldn't be practical before this project even got started.
And then the managers said: "It doesn't matter. It'll look great in a press release. The environmentalists will love it. Do it anyway."
So they're unsuccessful because they have no support, and they have no support because their complaints are so common that they're not interesting? And your solution is to "get out and vote"? Really?
And what's your solution? A revolution? Burn it all down? Execute and imprison the rich and powerful for being "enemies of the people"? Sure, just look at history to figure out how that will turn out. First the upper class is destroyed, and then the middle and lower class start fingering their neighbors, and before all is said and done, OWS will be purging their own leaders at gunpoint.
Yes, the solution IS "get out and vote". And the rallying cry should be "No more private financing of elections!" That is one point ANY rational person on either side of the political spectrum would be able to support. Elect politicians who will pledge to enact a system of 100% publicly funded national elections. Push and keep pushing that message.
Change the election funding laws, and 90% of everything that the Tea Party and the OWS are angry about will become fixable.
There seems to be a cycle in protests, regardless of what the cause is: 1. Anger. 2. Protest. 3. Realisation of futility. 4. Giving up. Occasionally, very occasionally, the protest might actually succeed.... but more often than not, protesters are simply ignored.
And the reason they're ignored is because (surprise!) they don't have the popular support they pretend they have.
The whole "99% vs. 1%" meme was a joke from the beginning. So you're unhappy with the way things are going in this country? Get in line. You can make a real difference by volunteering and getting people out to vote in the next election (e.g. the Tea Party, which actually accomplished something in that respect), not by sitting in a squatter's camp and making a nuisance / laughingstock of yourself.
The Occupy movement made entertaining press for a while, but their 15 minutes of fame is just about over. Time to move on, people.
I can offer my own opinion of this phenomenon: the bad is driving out the good. Fewer competent writers are bothering to edit Wikipedia articles nowadays. Not only do contributions get reverted / deleted by editors who think they "own" the article, but good writers simply get tired of fixing the semi-literate ramblings of people who cannot write a coherent sentence.
It's the old axiom that incompetent people cannot recognize their own incompetence, and so do not realize that their "contributions" are not improving the article, but instead are making it worse. Eventually the good contributors get tired of sweeping back the ocean with a broom, and just walk away from Wikipedia.
If Apple didn't take out a patent on a concept like this, you can guarantee that some patent troll would, and would sue both Apple and Google, along with everyone else in the marketplace. That's the way the system works nowadays.
Patents aren't just offensive weapons; they're defensive weapons as well. Apple and Google have huge patent portfolios, and both have too much leverage to win any major court battle against the other. At best, it would be mutually assured destruction, and do nothing but enrich a lot of lawyers.
What patents like this actually do is protect Apple (and Google, and everyone else) from the bottom-feeding trolls. You either file these "obvious" patents, or you can bet your bottom dollar some slimeball will instead, and take you to court.
Your only tablet choices, unfortunately, are bad or none.
Engineering lectures have lots of schematics, equations, and diagrams, so keyboard entry alone just doesn't cut it. You have to use a pen.
For myself (as an instructor), I use a Fujitsu tablet combined with OneNote to manage and organize my notes. It is your typical Windows tablet abomination, painful and clumsy to operate, with your hand constantly brushing against the terribly placed scroll control, but it is better than nothing. The "feel" of the pen on the screen doesn't match the feel of pen on paper, and no matter how you calibrate the screen, the pen registration is never quite right at the edges. The hassle was still worth it to me because I needed some way to edit my course notes and generate PDF copies on demand, but I wouldn't recommend it to a student trying to take notes during lecture.
A tablet for handwritten notes is one of those markets that I fervently wish Apple would enter. At least we'd have one vendor that might get it right, as opposed to all the Windows kludges out there. But for now, I'd recommend taking notes on paper, then scanning them into some soft copy format.
As for recording the lecture: DON'T. Take notes. It forces you to engage your mind during the lecture, and dramatically improves your recall of the material. Recording a lecture just means you're forcing yourself to sit through it twice. Take good notes during lecture and you'll save yourself a lot of time and effort afterwards.
Unless US govt declassify the area, permit tours, photos, etc. but until then Area 51 remains a good place for conspiracies, movie plots, whatever.
It wouldn't do a bit of good. Even if the U.S. government declassified every object and scrap of paper from Roswell and Area 51, and showed that there was zero evidence of alien visitation, the conspiracy theorists would just claim that the "real" evidence was still hidden or had been destroyed.
Trying to prove to a conspiracy theorist that aliens aren't visiting Earth is like trying to prove to a religious man that God doesn't exist. No amount of evidence will sway him; it is a matter of faith, not facts.
The majority of bitcoins is in the hands of a handful who cash in large quantities from time to time thus crashing the market.
Excellent point, and in fact Bitcoin may be one of the cleverest moneymaking scams in recent memory.
No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto, the purported creator of the Bitcoin protocol, really is. Assuming Bitcoin ever achieved widespread adoption, he and a handful of early adopters would become the richest people on earth by default. When I pointed this out to a Bitcoin "true believer", his response was along the lines of "Well, he's a genius and deserves it." Yes, but if in fact "Mr. Nakamoto" is simply a syndicate of very clever scammers, then we would effectively be turning over a huge portion of the world's wealth to a criminal enterprise. No government is EVER going to allow that to happen.
No cryptographic currency is ever going to gain any traction if it makes early adopters obscenely wealthy just by default. Consequently, the only way anyone will ever make money from Bitcoin is via speculation. The people pushing Bitcoin are appealing to the same mentality (and lack of logic) you see with believers in gold currency. Given the long history of scams involving precious metals, there is clearly no lack of potential victims willing to throw away their money.
I assume the early Bitcoin adopters are cashing in before the entire house of cards collapses. If that was Satoshi Nakamoto's intent from the start, then my hat is off to him for committing what is essentially the perfect crime.
Tablets don't have to be a fad. But Windows may yet kill the perception of tablets as useful, in the public's eyes, and then we'd be back to only Apple fanbois carrying tablets. Which would be ok, I guess, except for those of us who need an SD card slot. Or a USB port. Or a replaceable battery. Or Flash support. Or a form factor smaller than 10". Sorry, I meant to stop at SD card, but I always get carried away. Parenthetically, do we know if Apple has shown any signs of relaxing any of these restrictions now that Jobs is gone? Just wondering'.
You know, every one of these "features" you want could be found on every tablet computer manufactured before the advent of the iPad. The problem is, no one bought them or cared about them, because they all sucked.
If Apple were crazy enough to turn the iPad 3 into the potpourri of features you wanted, it would looked exactly like the Wintel abominations that have failed so miserably in the marketplace - and be no more successful.
How many computer or electronic device makers have Chinese plants producing their circuit boards for them? Last I checked, Apple was only one of MANY. Yet this article makes it sound like Apple, alone, is at fault here for not making good on their claim that they're committed to driving the highest standards of social responsibility throughout their supply base.
The reason that they are focusing on Apple is because Apple will not pay protection money to organizations like Greenpeace. When other computer companies are criticized by an environmental organization, they make large "donations" to that organization, and the press releases stop.
Apple refuses to pay the Danegeld, and in fact actually tries to do something about cleaning up their supply chain. Any way you cut it, China is an environmental nightmare, and everyone is contributing to the problem, but Apple is the main target because they won't "cooperate" with Greenpeace and their ilk.
The hidden military is ran by the most top notch scientists in the world working on back engineering technology either not from earth, or hidden technology on each that was discovered using our tax dollars (but we don't get to see anything from this research, it trickles down over the years)
Conspiracy theories always amuse me. Tell me, Mr. AC, how much more advanced than us are your space aliens? A hundred years more advanced? Two hundred? A thousand? After all, they're flying interstellar spacecraft at FTL velocities, something that we have no glimmering how to do yet.
So exactly what electronics technology did we reverse-engineer from that crashed flying saucer? Bipolar IC technology? Nope, pretty much obsolete today. Standard bulk CMOS with field oxide isolation? Nope, pretty much obsolete. 2-D gate MOSFETs? Nope, about to be superseded by FinFETs. For that matter, what if we wind up transitioning to nanotech diamond- or carbon-based technology over the next 20 years, making silicon obsolete? Is that what the flying saucer contained? Diamond-based nanotech electronics?
So how did we examine a device far more advanced than anything we have today, yet know how to build its most primitive precursors? Somehow, we were smart enough to infer the entire line of technological development for integrated circuits from a single damaged device, yet were too dumb to figure out how to invent any of it ourselves. It would be like handing a modern cellphone to a man from the 18th century, and expecting him to start building crystal radios and vacuum tube logic gates, but be unable to figure out Ohm's Law on his own.
That, of course, is the essence of any conspiracy theory. The perpetrators must be brilliant geniuses and drooling idiots, both at the same time.
I have some advice for you, Mr. AC. Go to your library, start with the papers written by Clerk Maxwell, and learn some physics by reading some of the literally hundreds of thousands of papers that trace our development of transistors and IC technology. Once you have a glimmering of understanding about modern microelectronics, you may finally realize how laughable the "we got our tech from space aliens" theory really is.
nor do we have any effective control over the FCC's preventing any significant use of the RF spectrum by the people, reserving that for corporations exclusively (speaking as an EE with extra class ARO and (now) general commercial licenses, btw.)
As a licensed amateur myself, I'm curious what you would envision as a "significant use of the RF spectrum by the people". The garbage you can hear on SSB is bad enough, and we hams are licensed and tested. My guess is that any move to "open" the spectrum to the lay public would result in something like 4chan without the good manners and taste.:-)
I'm no big fan of the FCC, but the RF spectrum is too valuable to be ruined by a tragedy of the commons. It needs supervision and oversight, or it becomes worthless to everyone.
Why do you need a machine to vote? Why not just pencil in an X next to the candidate's name like they do in other countries?
Umm, because in the rare circumstance that the difference in votes falls within the margin of error of spoiled ballots, the Democrats and Republicans begin a long drawn-out battle over who gets to count and interpret what those spoiled ballots mean? Like what happened 11 years ago in Florida during the U.S. presidential election?
The switch to electronic voting didn't happen without a reason (at least in the U.S.) The intent was to eliminate spoiled ballots and determine to an absolute certainty who won the election. It didn't work out that way, but that was the idea.
Of course, the federal and state governments screwed up electronic voting in their usual fashion, and now everyone is calling for a return to paper and punch ballots, which will work just fine - until the next big election that is very, very close. And then you'll hear the hue and cry for electronic voting again - lather, rinse, repeat...
In what way is mathematics (as realized in the form of bitcoin) a scam?
The "scam" is in how the proponents of Bitcoin constantly try to promote artificial scarcity with a resource that, by definition, is infinite in size.
There are an infinite number of mathematical codes that could be arbitrarily called "money". They might not be called "bitcoins", but they will be completely equivalent to bitcoins in value. So what is so special about BTC, beyond the hype that its speculators keep promoting for their own benefit? By any rational mathematical definition, bitcoins are worthless.
Defending an unregulated alternative to government fiat currency is certainly defending freedom.
Not if that "alternative currency" is little more than a pump-and-dump scheme created to enrich its early adopters at the expense of latecomers.
The bitcoin concept might actually have a shred of respectability if anyone knew the true identity of its creator. For all we know, "Satoshi Nakamoto" is the front for a syndicate that has figured out the perfect crime: release the code for a worthless pseudo-currency after reserving a huge chunk of all possible "coins" for yourself and your cronies, hype said pseudo-currency to build a speculator's market, and then sell off your "coins" via dozens of anonymous proxies before the scam collapses.
I'm supposed to hate electronic voting, but support a wholly electronic currency?
Not only that, you're supposed to despise the RIAA and MPAA for trying to enforce artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity environment, yet embrace artificial scarcity with Bitcoins - apparently because the greedy parties in this instance happen to be "us".
The short and dirty version is "If you asked a bunch of libertarians to design a digital currency, this is what you'd get".
I'd amend that to "If you asked a bunch of libertarians who wanted to put the world's economies back on the gold standard...". Because really, when you think about it, that's what bitcoin is supposed to be - digital gold.
Consider the parallels to gold coinage: a finite worldwide supply, "mining" becomes more difficult as time goes by, and the amount of money in circulation can be reduced by coins being hidden or lost, but never artificially increased. Furthermore, the statements you'll hear from the BTC crowd are exactly like the statements from the gold money crowd - bitcoins will herald in a new era of economic prosperity, bitcoins cannot be manipulated by governments creating more of them, etc. In effect, you've got a community of speculators who are trying to make their own "gold", and get rich by doing it, provided they can make the rest of us buy into the idea. (The historical failure of gold-backed currency in modern economies seems to completely escape all of them.)
However, there is a very big difference between BTC and gold. While it is true that you cannot create more BTC, anyone (or any government) can certainly create a competing digital currency that has as much "value" as bitcoins. Who is to say that a bitcoin has more or less value than any other cryptographically-signed digital coinage? Nothing more than public opinion, and that can be manipulated.
Ultimately, I expect the BTC standard to fail, and when it does, you'll hear exactly the same claims of government / commercial manipulation / sabotage that you hear from believers in gold currency. In that respect, there will be no difference in BTC and gold at all.
However, part of me wonders if this is the case, since if, by giving my password to five people, I was competing with five others as to whether I could watch something (since the first person to start a stream locks all others out the service until they have finished), I would be rather less inclined to hand out my password, unless I was retreating to an Internet-free environment for a fixed period.
If Netflix is locking out other IP addresses while a stream is playing, then that's where they're screwing up. Netflix is missing an obvious technological fix for password sharing.
Netflix should preemptively honor any streaming request at any time, and just switch the stream to the latest device requesting it, even if a program is currently playing on another device.
I doubt many people will be inclined to hand out their Netflix password to a dozen friends once they get into a Saturday afternoon "grab-the-stream" war with people they can't even see. It'll be like a bunch of kids fighting over the TV remote. Password sharing will become a non-issue if it makes the service unusable.
But it's the truth: There is no real proof that anyone named "P.J." exists, and it is a perfectly reasonable speculation that "P.J." was / is in fact a consortium of paid shills for IBM.
SCO's little mind game worked on you, didn't it?
During the trial SCO made a claim to the court that P.J. was not a real person, but an IBM shill. IBM vehemently denied that claim, again to the court.
If you've had any experience with the law, one thing you'll have learned is that judges hate is to be lied to. I guarantee you that SCO had some private investigators check on P.J. Had any evidence existed that P.J. was an IBM shill, I also guarantee you that SCO would have presented that evidence to the court with trumpets blaring. What better way to prove to the judge that IBM was the bad guy?
On the other hand, it would have been pointless for SCO to publicly prove that P.J. was a real person. It would have made them look like paranoid idiots, and it would only have helped IBM. So SCO said nothing more, and instead just let the accusation itself continue to taint P.J. It's one of the oldest dirty tricks in the book, and it clearly worked on you.
Is P.J. a real person? No doubt in my mind. Is "Pamela Jones" her real name? Who knows? Pen names and pseudonyms are as old as reporting itself. But if P.J. was an IBM shill, I am certain that SCO would have presented ironclad proof long ago.
There's more OSX and Linux malware out there than you might think. Especially OSX.
One of the Windows users I work with says the same thing. Like you, he can't provide any examples either.
And if you're talking about those instances of trojans that rely on social engineering, what anti-virus program can defend against a user who willingly types in an administrative password and installs the malware on his own?
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So by that logic, the police shouldn't take and store the fingerprints of anyone they arrest, because they haven't been charged or convicted. Yet the police have been doing exactly that for more than 100 years.
Those "fundamental rights" you complain about were lost a long time ago. All that has changed is that the police are now running a swab through the arrestee's mouth rather than inking his fingers, or forcing his hand onto a scanner.
A common Slashdot meme is to complain how the general public panics over a new technology, even though nothing fundamentally changes in how people use it. So why are Slashdotters getting so worked up about DNA sampling? It is a logical outgrowth of modern technology applied to century-old police procedures.
Well, if I had a magic wand to wave, I'd abolish every College of Education at every university in the U.S.A, and require that all teachers have degrees in the subjects that they teach (e.g. mathematics, history, physics, etc.).
Degrees in education boomed beginning in the late 50's to early 60's, which happens to correspond very nicely with the start of the decline in K-12 education. Based on my own observation of many B.S.Ed. graduates, I believe there's a great deal of causation behind that correlation.
Hiring teachers on the basis of "knowing how to teach" has been about as successful as hiring managers on the basis of "knowing how to manage". The consequences have been even worse - a badly run company can be turned around by new management, but badly-educated children are much, much harder to fix.
One of my co-workers is Russian, and he still keeps in touch with friends and family back home. We've been discussing the recent anti-government protests in Moscow, and he says that the government-controlled media (which includes all of TV and radio, and many of the newspapers) has gone into overdrive accusing the U.S. for being behind almost everything that's currently going wrong in Russia. In his words, "Blaming America is all they have left."
Implying that the U.S. is responsible for their spacecraft failure is just part of that game. Russia has been launching spacecraft for decades, and it is silly to think that they didn't learn how to deal with contingencies such as deliberate jamming long ago.
Exactly. Even the open source community is built on a massive foundation of blind trust, because perhaps one user in a hundred thousand will actually look at the source. Otherwise, no matter if it's open or closed, the average user says, "That looks neat, I'm gonna install that".
A personal anecdote: my open source theft recovery package for Macs has several thousand users. All of the source (with comments) is bundled with the installer, yet I often get questions from users about what the program does "under the hood", when they could easily learn the answer themselves by reading the source code.
The overwhelming majority of users seem to like open source because it's free, not because it is theoretically more secure. I might have been collecting private information from the users of my program for the past three years, and I often wonder if a single one of them would have bothered to check the source in all that time.
The best attack vector for any malware is incredibly simple: bundle it into something useful, and then give it away. You can guarantee that some people will install it (for the same reason they'll pick up and use a "lost" USB memory stick), because it is human nature to want to take advantage of something that is freely given.
I don't doubt that Nokia's engineers did some quick calculations and told their managers that solar charging wouldn't be practical before this project even got started.
And then the managers said: "It doesn't matter. It'll look great in a press release. The environmentalists will love it. Do it anyway."
And what's your solution? A revolution? Burn it all down? Execute and imprison the rich and powerful for being "enemies of the people"? Sure, just look at history to figure out how that will turn out. First the upper class is destroyed, and then the middle and lower class start fingering their neighbors, and before all is said and done, OWS will be purging their own leaders at gunpoint.
Yes, the solution IS "get out and vote". And the rallying cry should be "No more private financing of elections!" That is one point ANY rational person on either side of the political spectrum would be able to support. Elect politicians who will pledge to enact a system of 100% publicly funded national elections. Push and keep pushing that message.
Change the election funding laws, and 90% of everything that the Tea Party and the OWS are angry about will become fixable.
And the reason they're ignored is because (surprise!) they don't have the popular support they pretend they have.
The whole "99% vs. 1%" meme was a joke from the beginning. So you're unhappy with the way things are going in this country? Get in line. You can make a real difference by volunteering and getting people out to vote in the next election (e.g. the Tea Party, which actually accomplished something in that respect), not by sitting in a squatter's camp and making a nuisance / laughingstock of yourself.
The Occupy movement made entertaining press for a while, but their 15 minutes of fame is just about over. Time to move on, people.
I can offer my own opinion of this phenomenon: the bad is driving out the good. Fewer competent writers are bothering to edit Wikipedia articles nowadays. Not only do contributions get reverted / deleted by editors who think they "own" the article, but good writers simply get tired of fixing the semi-literate ramblings of people who cannot write a coherent sentence.
It's the old axiom that incompetent people cannot recognize their own incompetence, and so do not realize that their "contributions" are not improving the article, but instead are making it worse. Eventually the good contributors get tired of sweeping back the ocean with a broom, and just walk away from Wikipedia.
Too many people are missing the point.
If Apple didn't take out a patent on a concept like this, you can guarantee that some patent troll would, and would sue both Apple and Google, along with everyone else in the marketplace. That's the way the system works nowadays.
Patents aren't just offensive weapons; they're defensive weapons as well. Apple and Google have huge patent portfolios, and both have too much leverage to win any major court battle against the other. At best, it would be mutually assured destruction, and do nothing but enrich a lot of lawyers.
What patents like this actually do is protect Apple (and Google, and everyone else) from the bottom-feeding trolls. You either file these "obvious" patents, or you can bet your bottom dollar some slimeball will instead, and take you to court.
Your only tablet choices, unfortunately, are bad or none.
Engineering lectures have lots of schematics, equations, and diagrams, so keyboard entry alone just doesn't cut it. You have to use a pen.
For myself (as an instructor), I use a Fujitsu tablet combined with OneNote to manage and organize my notes. It is your typical Windows tablet abomination, painful and clumsy to operate, with your hand constantly brushing against the terribly placed scroll control, but it is better than nothing. The "feel" of the pen on the screen doesn't match the feel of pen on paper, and no matter how you calibrate the screen, the pen registration is never quite right at the edges. The hassle was still worth it to me because I needed some way to edit my course notes and generate PDF copies on demand, but I wouldn't recommend it to a student trying to take notes during lecture.
A tablet for handwritten notes is one of those markets that I fervently wish Apple would enter. At least we'd have one vendor that might get it right, as opposed to all the Windows kludges out there. But for now, I'd recommend taking notes on paper, then scanning them into some soft copy format.
As for recording the lecture: DON'T. Take notes. It forces you to engage your mind during the lecture, and dramatically improves your recall of the material. Recording a lecture just means you're forcing yourself to sit through it twice. Take good notes during lecture and you'll save yourself a lot of time and effort afterwards.
It wouldn't do a bit of good. Even if the U.S. government declassified every object and scrap of paper from Roswell and Area 51, and showed that there was zero evidence of alien visitation, the conspiracy theorists would just claim that the "real" evidence was still hidden or had been destroyed.
Trying to prove to a conspiracy theorist that aliens aren't visiting Earth is like trying to prove to a religious man that God doesn't exist. No amount of evidence will sway him; it is a matter of faith, not facts.
Excellent point, and in fact Bitcoin may be one of the cleverest moneymaking scams in recent memory.
No one knows who Satoshi Nakamoto, the purported creator of the Bitcoin protocol, really is. Assuming Bitcoin ever achieved widespread adoption, he and a handful of early adopters would become the richest people on earth by default. When I pointed this out to a Bitcoin "true believer", his response was along the lines of "Well, he's a genius and deserves it." Yes, but if in fact "Mr. Nakamoto" is simply a syndicate of very clever scammers, then we would effectively be turning over a huge portion of the world's wealth to a criminal enterprise. No government is EVER going to allow that to happen.
No cryptographic currency is ever going to gain any traction if it makes early adopters obscenely wealthy just by default. Consequently, the only way anyone will ever make money from Bitcoin is via speculation. The people pushing Bitcoin are appealing to the same mentality (and lack of logic) you see with believers in gold currency. Given the long history of scams involving precious metals, there is clearly no lack of potential victims willing to throw away their money.
I assume the early Bitcoin adopters are cashing in before the entire house of cards collapses. If that was Satoshi Nakamoto's intent from the start, then my hat is off to him for committing what is essentially the perfect crime.
And we like our "no income tax" in Tennessee. Screw you, Oregon.
One way or the other you're going to pay the piper, and having one national standard will make things much easier for all concerned.
You know, every one of these "features" you want could be found on every tablet computer manufactured before the advent of the iPad. The problem is, no one bought them or cared about them, because they all sucked.
If Apple were crazy enough to turn the iPad 3 into the potpourri of features you wanted, it would looked exactly like the Wintel abominations that have failed so miserably in the marketplace - and be no more successful.
The reason that they are focusing on Apple is because Apple will not pay protection money to organizations like Greenpeace. When other computer companies are criticized by an environmental organization, they make large "donations" to that organization, and the press releases stop.
Apple refuses to pay the Danegeld, and in fact actually tries to do something about cleaning up their supply chain. Any way you cut it, China is an environmental nightmare, and everyone is contributing to the problem, but Apple is the main target because they won't "cooperate" with Greenpeace and their ilk.
Conspiracy theories always amuse me. Tell me, Mr. AC, how much more advanced than us are your space aliens? A hundred years more advanced? Two hundred? A thousand? After all, they're flying interstellar spacecraft at FTL velocities, something that we have no glimmering how to do yet.
So exactly what electronics technology did we reverse-engineer from that crashed flying saucer? Bipolar IC technology? Nope, pretty much obsolete today. Standard bulk CMOS with field oxide isolation? Nope, pretty much obsolete. 2-D gate MOSFETs? Nope, about to be superseded by FinFETs. For that matter, what if we wind up transitioning to nanotech diamond- or carbon-based technology over the next 20 years, making silicon obsolete? Is that what the flying saucer contained? Diamond-based nanotech electronics?
So how did we examine a device far more advanced than anything we have today, yet know how to build its most primitive precursors? Somehow, we were smart enough to infer the entire line of technological development for integrated circuits from a single damaged device, yet were too dumb to figure out how to invent any of it ourselves. It would be like handing a modern cellphone to a man from the 18th century, and expecting him to start building crystal radios and vacuum tube logic gates, but be unable to figure out Ohm's Law on his own.
That, of course, is the essence of any conspiracy theory. The perpetrators must be brilliant geniuses and drooling idiots, both at the same time.
I have some advice for you, Mr. AC. Go to your library, start with the papers written by Clerk Maxwell, and learn some physics by reading some of the literally hundreds of thousands of papers that trace our development of transistors and IC technology. Once you have a glimmering of understanding about modern microelectronics, you may finally realize how laughable the "we got our tech from space aliens" theory really is.
As a licensed amateur myself, I'm curious what you would envision as a "significant use of the RF spectrum by the people". The garbage you can hear on SSB is bad enough, and we hams are licensed and tested. My guess is that any move to "open" the spectrum to the lay public would result in something like 4chan without the good manners and taste. :-)
I'm no big fan of the FCC, but the RF spectrum is too valuable to be ruined by a tragedy of the commons. It needs supervision and oversight, or it becomes worthless to everyone.
Will the USPTO accept payment in BTC instead? :-)
Umm, because in the rare circumstance that the difference in votes falls within the margin of error of spoiled ballots, the Democrats and Republicans begin a long drawn-out battle over who gets to count and interpret what those spoiled ballots mean? Like what happened 11 years ago in Florida during the U.S. presidential election?
The switch to electronic voting didn't happen without a reason (at least in the U.S.) The intent was to eliminate spoiled ballots and determine to an absolute certainty who won the election. It didn't work out that way, but that was the idea.
Of course, the federal and state governments screwed up electronic voting in their usual fashion, and now everyone is calling for a return to paper and punch ballots, which will work just fine - until the next big election that is very, very close. And then you'll hear the hue and cry for electronic voting again - lather, rinse, repeat ...
The "scam" is in how the proponents of Bitcoin constantly try to promote artificial scarcity with a resource that, by definition, is infinite in size.
There are an infinite number of mathematical codes that could be arbitrarily called "money". They might not be called "bitcoins", but they will be completely equivalent to bitcoins in value. So what is so special about BTC, beyond the hype that its speculators keep promoting for their own benefit? By any rational mathematical definition, bitcoins are worthless.
Not if that "alternative currency" is little more than a pump-and-dump scheme created to enrich its early adopters at the expense of latecomers.
The bitcoin concept might actually have a shred of respectability if anyone knew the true identity of its creator. For all we know, "Satoshi Nakamoto" is the front for a syndicate that has figured out the perfect crime: release the code for a worthless pseudo-currency after reserving a huge chunk of all possible "coins" for yourself and your cronies, hype said pseudo-currency to build a speculator's market, and then sell off your "coins" via dozens of anonymous proxies before the scam collapses.
Not only that, you're supposed to despise the RIAA and MPAA for trying to enforce artificial scarcity in a post-scarcity environment, yet embrace artificial scarcity with Bitcoins - apparently because the greedy parties in this instance happen to be "us".
I'd amend that to "If you asked a bunch of libertarians who wanted to put the world's economies back on the gold standard ...". Because really, when you think about it, that's what bitcoin is supposed to be - digital gold.
Consider the parallels to gold coinage: a finite worldwide supply, "mining" becomes more difficult as time goes by, and the amount of money in circulation can be reduced by coins being hidden or lost, but never artificially increased. Furthermore, the statements you'll hear from the BTC crowd are exactly like the statements from the gold money crowd - bitcoins will herald in a new era of economic prosperity, bitcoins cannot be manipulated by governments creating more of them, etc. In effect, you've got a community of speculators who are trying to make their own "gold", and get rich by doing it, provided they can make the rest of us buy into the idea. (The historical failure of gold-backed currency in modern economies seems to completely escape all of them.)
However, there is a very big difference between BTC and gold. While it is true that you cannot create more BTC, anyone (or any government) can certainly create a competing digital currency that has as much "value" as bitcoins. Who is to say that a bitcoin has more or less value than any other cryptographically-signed digital coinage? Nothing more than public opinion, and that can be manipulated.
Ultimately, I expect the BTC standard to fail, and when it does, you'll hear exactly the same claims of government / commercial manipulation / sabotage that you hear from believers in gold currency. In that respect, there will be no difference in BTC and gold at all.
If Netflix is locking out other IP addresses while a stream is playing, then that's where they're screwing up. Netflix is missing an obvious technological fix for password sharing.
Netflix should preemptively honor any streaming request at any time, and just switch the stream to the latest device requesting it, even if a program is currently playing on another device.
I doubt many people will be inclined to hand out their Netflix password to a dozen friends once they get into a Saturday afternoon "grab-the-stream" war with people they can't even see. It'll be like a bunch of kids fighting over the TV remote. Password sharing will become a non-issue if it makes the service unusable.
SCO's little mind game worked on you, didn't it?
During the trial SCO made a claim to the court that P.J. was not a real person, but an IBM shill. IBM vehemently denied that claim, again to the court.
If you've had any experience with the law, one thing you'll have learned is that judges hate is to be lied to. I guarantee you that SCO had some private investigators check on P.J. Had any evidence existed that P.J. was an IBM shill, I also guarantee you that SCO would have presented that evidence to the court with trumpets blaring. What better way to prove to the judge that IBM was the bad guy?
On the other hand, it would have been pointless for SCO to publicly prove that P.J. was a real person. It would have made them look like paranoid idiots, and it would only have helped IBM. So SCO said nothing more, and instead just let the accusation itself continue to taint P.J. It's one of the oldest dirty tricks in the book, and it clearly worked on you.
Is P.J. a real person? No doubt in my mind. Is "Pamela Jones" her real name? Who knows? Pen names and pseudonyms are as old as reporting itself. But if P.J. was an IBM shill, I am certain that SCO would have presented ironclad proof long ago.
One of the Windows users I work with says the same thing. Like you, he can't provide any examples either.
And if you're talking about those instances of trojans that rely on social engineering, what anti-virus program can defend against a user who willingly types in an administrative password and installs the malware on his own?