If the web does not have DRM then consumers can only use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an app (plug-ins are on their way out).
But what is being proposed, is identical to that. Consumers will only be able to use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an implementation of their proprietary EME plugin.
If DRM is a standardized part of the web then anyone with a standards compliant browser can access those services.
This is where the confusion lies. Nobody is suggesting making DRM itself a standardized part of the web; you're rooting for a side which isn't in the fight. They're talking about making a non-standard DRM component (something just as unportable as Flash and Silverlight, and subject to its ONE CREATOR'S whims) have standard API for the browser to use. This is a tiny little issue; Flash already used a defacto-standard API for the browser to inferface with. Such a defacto interface isn't maybe as good as a well-described one, so you could see this new API as a minor step forward, but it comes with the cost of legitimizing and endorsing something which is just completely ridiculous.
I want the choice to be able to stray beyond the dominant platforms and still use Netflix.
That is not being offered by this HTML5 compromise, and it won't get you closer to that. If Netflix, as the one and only party in the world who will have the closed trade secret to make the Netflix decrypter, should decide to ever see fit to allow the specific non-dominant platform that you're thinking of, to join the list of platforms they support by making a Netflix plugin for it, they're just as likely to decide to allow an app on that platform.
Allowing you to watch Netflix, is not something that is being standardized. That aspect would remain as closed as Flash's DRM. This is how all DRM must always be. The only way Netflix can ever be standardized such that you will be permitted to use it on a device of your choosing, is if they drop the DRM.
Or if they were to standardize the DRM itself, I suppose that would work. But they wouldn't want to do that, since the whole point of DRM is to keep people from implementing it!:-)
In the partisan difference of opinion between the two different positions, "television ought to be funny" and "television ought to not be funny" it's true that I generally try to re-enforce my existing, inflexible, I-will-never-take-opposition-seriously-or-open-my-mind-to-reason partisan view.
I actually do sometimes watch non-comedies, though. Hannibal isn't funny; it takes opposite side in the partisan debate. (I'm not sure I like this show, though. Coincidence?) GoT isn't funny; that's another one from the other side; radically different than Jon Stewart's take on TV. Mad Men usually isn't funny. You know what, though? Even among these exceptions, it seems like there's always a joke here 'n' there. Holy crap, dude, I wonder if you're right. Am I only being exposed to one side of the comedy debate? Is this why I stopped watching Jim Lehrer? Honestly, his show is the only one I can think of, where I can't remember anything funny ever happening. Even David Attenborough sometimes doesn't exactly joke, but shows something funny anyway.
And of course, if you're getting you news from nbc, cbs or abc along with cnn the information presented comes down to "some reporting or none at all."
Who? Aren't those TV stations from last century? I get my news from whoever news.google.com is linking to today.
BTW, I think Google is great and I need to buy their stock and the government is overregulating them and all of the court cases against them are unfair and all their competitors totally suck. But that's just a coincidence!
(But seriously: television news? Really? If ever I get news from TV, it's The Daily Show.mp4. I don't even watch Jim Lehrer anymore! Somehow the PVR's most recent 5 recordings always just sit there, unwatched, each one replaced a week later by a new one that I also don't spend the time to watch. I keep thinking, maybe some day I'll go back to watching TV news. Yep, I keep thinking that. And the years go by.)
Metal detectors also detect metal knives/box-cutters/scissors/skewers - not just guns.
Yes, and they also detect keys and coins.
It is possible to buy ceramic knives, although I believe the cooking knives have a metal slug in the handle to make them show up on metal detectors.
My point is that it's stupid to depend on people remembering, or forcing them, to add metal to things in order to show up. That's just telling the world how to circumvent the detection tech. Which means that if someone wants to go undetected, they'll be able to do it. If Congress is worried about ceramic knives, then they ought to be telling security people to work on detecting ceramic knives, instead of asking people to put metal slugs in them so that they'll become compatible with some obsolete tech.
My way of avoiding viruses, isn't to mail all@* something like "if you send me a virus, please pad it with whatever numbers will make its checksum become 0xDEAFBEEF." You'd laugh at me if I did that, but that's analogous to what we're talking about here.
How about Fast and Furious? Will we finally learn how much of a role Obama played in that?
Unlike whatever unsubstantiated 911-truther new-age-shakra-measuring black-cat-fearing fantasy you have about Benghazi, F&F was a real scandal where the government was objectively working against its own people. I seriously doubt the president is going to want to talk about that much.
Or how about opening up the data on how much the FBI knew about the Tsarnaevs ahead of time?
Meh. Unlike F&F (active malice toward the people) that was the usual mere incompetence at worst and I'm not even sure it was that. What's there to know? How is that going to be interesting to anyone?
But if they're plastic, then shouldn't they not set off metal detectors? If someone's looking for metal, a plastic gun is irrelevant. That seems perfectly ok, unless.. oh no. Oh no. Oh please, god no. Please don't tell me people are trying to use metal detectors as gun detectors. No! OMG! Is this why they keep asking me to take my keys out of my pocket at the airport?! Holy shit, you mean they weren't really interested in my keys, and they were fucking with ME all along, over something that had nothing to do with me, since I never carry a gun?
That's sarcasm but also there's truth in it. At some point, someone got the bright idea that guns were always metal, so metal detectors seemed like a way to detect guns. And that was an ok hack. I don't blame anymore for that. But when gun tech moved on, and they started legislating that the old hack still had to work, that was stupid. All that does is create an expense for good guys (have to add un-needed metal to gun) and won't detecct an actual bad guy (since he has no reason to add metal to his gun). This is just more evidence that Congress shouldn't ever try to legislate tech, since they always get it wrong.
When metal detectors became obsolete as weapons detectors, we should have accepted and acknowleged it, not pretended they still worked and passed laws that everyone is required to join in on the illusion. Acknowledging it would have encouraged people to come up with better ideas and maybe made things safer. Instead, we got... this bullshit: security theater where someone can literally be found guilty of a crime for not acting the part.
physical media inherently requires that the media be broadly compatible with a wide range of products by multiple companies, because the mere existence of the physical media necessitates that compatibility.
Ah, so you've never bought a Sony product (audio recorder or camera). I didn't realize there were people like you out there, and it gives me hope. Keep up the good pattern, for it has given you an idealism that I, for one, find very fresh and exciting.;-)
On to your real point...
Actually, by digital content, I meant "non-gratis digital downloads and streaming", though I'll readily admit that DRM does make the problem worse... With digital downloads, all of those barriers that previously kept content providers honest no longer matter. Up until the point at which consumer backlash kicks in, there's nothing preventing having a hundred different competing devices, none of which can read content created for any of the others.
DRM doesn't make the problem worse ; it makes the problem, as it's the main proprietary component which makes interoperability difficult (and illegal, thanks to DMCA). Without the DRM, you could replace those hundred competing devices or software components, with one which you have forced to work with all the hundred different "standards." Or you'd have filters/converters that, say, take Netflix content and converts it to something your Amazon-spec player can handle (or vice-versa). Even your narrowly-defined "digital content" definition ultimately has its problems really because of DRM and the proprietary format (the two are closely realted). It's not because it's digital or because it was a non-gratis digital download.
Please, have a look at this example: https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/live-at-the-beacon-theater. What you'll see is something that fits your definition of non-gratis digital download in every way. I'll admit you can't use it as a frisbee, but really, it doesn't threaten to increase the proliferation of players. It's not going to result in another wall-wart or yet another weird app that you have to install. Whatever player already you have, will very likely work with what he's selling. A thousand other content creators, none of them working together or united by a single store which forces a technical constraint upon them, could do that and it would all just work. Digital content is not a problem; it's a good thing and solves more problems than it creates. Just keep away from the proprietary stuff.
Digital was never a problem, and was maybe the best thing to ever happen for interoperability. I bet your 25 year old music CDs still work great, and the fact they're digital, is probably why you don't ever actually spin the discs to listen to their music anymore.;-) Don't be dissin' digital content; let's be clear what the real problem is.
Except once you think about it, you don't actually know anyone who bought a Kindle for themself, do you? Kindles are the ultimate thoughtless "gift." Like a turd, but with less feeling.
It's not the electrical engineers; it's the software guys. The scenario isn't that an attacker shorts something out; it's that he tricks machines into thinking there's a higher risk of shorting something out (or conceivably: brownouts from overuse).
You can build an electric grid as reliably as you want, but if my software doesn't believe you, and decides to draw lower power when it mistakenly thinks others are drawing more power than they really are, then my software can be DoSed.
You just fired the wrong guy. But thanks for protecting my job. Maybe this union idea isn't as stupid and unethical as I thought it was.;-)
When I RTFAed, the impression I got is that the charging stations cooperate with one another and trust one another. That is, one charging station can influence the behavior of others. Furthermore it's supposedly relatively easy to get a charging station's signing key and then impersonate that charging station. That is, I can say I'm a nearby charging station who si charging 100 cars right now, and thereby persuade other charging systems that right now isn't a good time for them to charge their cars, or charge them slowly. DoS, via lying about a resource being scarcer than it really is.
The ease of impersonation is not really an EV issue, but rather a defect in how these particlar EV charging systems work. The machines are not well-protected.
The reason the impersonation matters (why the cooperation and trust happens in the first place) is where the EV-specific tech comes in. Gas pumps scale better than electricity "pumps," because they're buffered by gas stations' storage tanks. If ten gas stations are all working at the same time, it doesn't put extra pressure on the gas-delivery tankers, the way that ten charging stations working at the same time, puts pressure on the shared electricity system.
This is not EV FUD; no implications were made that EV should be avoided. It's a call to people to protect their EV chargers, make the keys harder to get, or have chargers deal with the trust issues different, or buffer the energy at night so they don't need to cooperate with one another, etc.
If there's FUD, it's against certain manufacturers.
US companies are looking for any reason to disqualify US candidates to justify their greed, I mean need for "importing non-local, lower-waged talent".
Even if I were to accept that at face value, my point is: WTF does it have to do with a browser test? A browser test is going to filter out the same fraction of US applicants as non-US applicants.
Suppose I'm an employer in your fantasy bearded-Spock universe, with an agenda of hiring non-US workers. 5 US workers apply for my position, and 5 Indians. I want to hire the Indians and I'll use any excuse I can think of, to justify it. So I say, "Aha, let's look at the browsers they used. People who use IE on Windows, Safari on Mac OS, or Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04, I'll just cross off the list of applicants because they're dumber-than-average for not installing a different browser." Are you saying this is going to change my resulting pool to have more Indian applicants than US applicants?
I would understand you argument, if the "test" involved (ok, I'm about to reach into my jar of stereotypes and make an ass of myself, but this is the Internet so let's just do it) ruling out people who don't like spicy food. Then I'd have 2 US applicants and 4 Indian applicants. A spicy food test works for my anti-US agenda. But how the fuck do browsers help my agenda?
Show me the stats, where non-US people are more likely to install Chromium on their Ubuntu system than Americans are, or that they'll install Firefox on their Windows more than Americans do, etc. Because that's what you're saying, right? If that's not what you're saying, then explain how the bullshit test does help their secret agenda of not hiring US applicants, because I don't get it.
To me, your conspiracy theory doesn't make sense even within your paranoid reality. It's like a 9/11 truther going on about how we know the US government blew up WTC and the evidence is.. OS/2, man, OS/2!
How did "U.S." get into this and NickGnome's comments? It isn't present in the context at all, unless you're saying that people in the US have an unusual bias toward keeping distribution-default browsers, whereas non-US people are more likely to install something else.
"Scientists claim to have discovered a new species of pterodactyl, but this claim is really just a thinly veiled attempt to undermine OS/2." Such a statement would be paranoid unless you've got evidence that OS/2 was written by people who are also paleontologists who have published papers saying they already discovered all of the pterodactyls. If that's what you're saying and you can back it up, then ok, the new-pterodactyl claim is maybe an ad-hominem attack on OS/2. But without the OS/2-pterodactyl link, it's bullshit.
Just as your the anti-US conspiracy theory is obviously bullshit, unless you have a US-defaultbrowser link. Do you?
Now it's time for Coca Cola to release a Coke Phone that shows you exciting recipes on its home screen. Ooooh, Jack 'n' Coke? Gotta try that!
Maybe Ford will release a phone, whose home screen shows you your current fuel remaining as miles, and tells you which recurring maintenance is next needed. And whenever you're driving, it locks itself for our safety.
Wanna see my pets.com cat-owner's phone? If you really love your cat, surely you have one of these. It makes sure that you don't forget to always have enough cat toys around.
Maybe Amazon will release a phone that can read ebooks that were purchased on Ama-- oh wait.
Some of these ideas may seem stupid, but they're fundamentally no stupider than the product in TFA. Take some arbitrary specialized service or brand, and sell a phone based on using it. Thanks, Facebook, for getting it into everyone's heads, that now anyone can sell a phone.
If the fruits of their own labor are untaxed, and the fruits of your own labor are taxed, then you're going to be pissed. You might be a little confused about whom you should be pissed at, but you know something unfair is going on.
Griping is definitely a good thing in a situation like this, and should be highly encouraged. That's nice of you to explain to people that Google isn't the real enemy in this situation; Google isn't reaching into your and my wallets at lunchtime, but if you don't remind people who is doing that, then the anger has to go somewhere, and unusually stupid people just might put it on you.;-)
Everyone should get a taxfree lunch. Wait, that's not fair to the restaurants which are only open for breakfast. Or dinner. Or the bars. Or the theaters people go to after dinner. Or the company that sold me the tires I use to drive to the restaurant. Ultimately, taking all this to the conclusion, it's how people get pissed at that fact the tax system has any exceptions at all. Are taxes a necessary evil or not?
If taxes are really a necessary evil, then we ought to be going out of our way to inflict harm upon Google at lunch time. Seriously. If they (or anyone else) is not suffering, then we're doing it wrong. (Don't call me evil for saying that; evil is the premise of the argument.)
OTOH, if taxes aren't a necessary evil, then quit hurting me!
A scary reminder of how insecure ALL money is in the computer age....
I applaud the creation of Bitcoin, but really, would you trust your $10,000 more on a server somewhere or in an FDIC-covered bank?
Think about what you just implied: that banks are so insecure, that they need insurance to deal with their likelihood of failure. That only serves to support the point that all money storage is insecure.
Of course, it only works, if one mistakenly thinks of banks as an extreme case, one of the more secure ones. If you view banks as being of, say, average security, then you can start to think in terms of doing things well, and there's probably no good reason bitcoin wallets can't be done well. It might be interesting to try. Anyone working on it?
FWIW, I'm not against insurance, but I do think that if a system encourages the average user to rely on it as a no-brainer which everyone ought to choose to pay for (and face it: FDIC, like anything else, can't possibly be free), that's a poor testament to the system's security. It also raises questions as to the cost. And creepily, I don't see insurance premiums coming out of my checking account. That makes me wonder if FDIC is unusually expensive/corrupt, if its costs must be so hidden. Yet another reason people ought to work to try to make bitcoin more viable.
Atheists have what could be called negative faith. They believe that there is no God. An affirmative belief in some idea with no evidence is faith.
Not if, just like agnostics, they don't deny the possibility. We all know it's possible that elves exist. But lacking any evidence of elves, most of us "aelvists" and believe elves do not exist. The affirmative belief-without-evidence in the nonexistence of elves, isn't faith; it's whitelisting, the strategy of rejecting unfounded ideas by default.
If there's faith here (maybe this is what you're talking about?), it's this: reality can be observed.
What possible tests could characters in a book use to prove, not necessarily absolutely, but even just beyond all reasonable doubt, that they are just characters in a book (and in turn, that an author actually exists)?
Go back a chapter in the book. How did they ever get to the point where the topic comes up? What happened within their perception and experience, which caused them to suspect they might be characters? All the interesting and relevant stuff happens before any of them even begin to attempt a proof; you can even leave the proof dialog out of the story altogether.
Why would a reasonable person keep $800,000 in cash, in their car?
Why would a reasonable/noncriminal person have a safe or hidden compartment at all? Why would a reasonable/noncriminal person ever have anything small and valuable, outside of a safe-deposit in the bank?
Do you think that all(most?) safes and hidden compartments are signs of intent to commit wrongdoing? The intent of every single one of them, is that some day, someone is going to put something unusually valuable inside of it. Unless you think safes and hidden compartments should be just plain banned, then you think there must be some kind of legitimate, non-criminal use for them. "Reasonable" or not, we know for sure that at least some noncriminals sometimes store things.
It's probably pretty unusual for the random guy on the street to be carrying tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars. And it's unusual for a car to have a safe. But once you BIAS YOUR SELECTION toward people who have safes in their cars (which is exactly what every single one of Anaya's service calls would have been), is finding a huge wad of cash inside of one them, really all that weird, or event a hint that something criminal is going on? In 100% of the cases where a customer is anxious to open their broken car safe, it's either because they have something valuable they want to get into it, or something valuable that they want to get out of it.
Unless you think hidden compartments themselves are a red flag, and the whole business of creating them is all just a bullshit cover story for smuggers, then Anaya was being a dick when he got pissed at the customer for having $800k. Turns out he was right that the customer was a smuggler, but he was right by luck, or right because of other clues (e.g. the "brick" discussion that was alleged to have taken place), not because of the $800k.
Why would a reasonable person be wearing a stormtooper mask? That's pretty suspicious. Until you ask the fucking question at comic-con! Know what I mean? When interacting with any of his customers, Anaya was in a mask-AT-comic-con situation. In abnormal context, the abnormal is normal.
As for our weird seizure laws and the magic $10k number, I don't know why you brought that up. Anaya was neither a banker nor a cop. People who carry lots of cash may indeed need to be careful to keep documentation on them at all times, but unless the person who is confronting you is a banker or a cop, then anyone who starts asking you questions about your money, is more likely to be a mugger, than a "concerned citizen." What would your attitude be, if someone without any authority or unusual obligations, started asking you to justify your possessions?
Pretending they are harmless undermines other points.
Nobody's suggesting doing anything remotely like that. They're merely suggesting legalizing it. Let the consequences of your drug use be the consequences, without artificially adding more. It's bad enough as-is, without the government making a bad situation worse.
Slashdot Mirror
But what is being proposed, is identical to that. Consumers will only be able to use services like Netflix where Netflix deigns to create an implementation of their proprietary EME plugin.
This is where the confusion lies. Nobody is suggesting making DRM itself a standardized part of the web; you're rooting for a side which isn't in the fight. They're talking about making a non-standard DRM component (something just as unportable as Flash and Silverlight, and subject to its ONE CREATOR'S whims) have standard API for the browser to use. This is a tiny little issue; Flash already used a defacto-standard API for the browser to inferface with. Such a defacto interface isn't maybe as good as a well-described one, so you could see this new API as a minor step forward, but it comes with the cost of legitimizing and endorsing something which is just completely ridiculous.
That is not being offered by this HTML5 compromise, and it won't get you closer to that. If Netflix, as the one and only party in the world who will have the closed trade secret to make the Netflix decrypter, should decide to ever see fit to allow the specific non-dominant platform that you're thinking of, to join the list of platforms they support by making a Netflix plugin for it, they're just as likely to decide to allow an app on that platform.
Allowing you to watch Netflix, is not something that is being standardized. That aspect would remain as closed as Flash's DRM. This is how all DRM must always be. The only way Netflix can ever be standardized such that you will be permitted to use it on a device of your choosing, is if they drop the DRM.
Or if they were to standardize the DRM itself, I suppose that would work. But they wouldn't want to do that, since the whole point of DRM is to keep people from implementing it! :-)
Maybe, if they get noticed. These obscure little companies can fly under the radar for quite a while, sometimes.
In the partisan difference of opinion between the two different positions, "television ought to be funny" and "television ought to not be funny" it's true that I generally try to re-enforce my existing, inflexible, I-will-never-take-opposition-seriously-or-open-my-mind-to-reason partisan view.
I actually do sometimes watch non-comedies, though. Hannibal isn't funny; it takes opposite side in the partisan debate. (I'm not sure I like this show, though. Coincidence?) GoT isn't funny; that's another one from the other side; radically different than Jon Stewart's take on TV. Mad Men usually isn't funny. You know what, though? Even among these exceptions, it seems like there's always a joke here 'n' there. Holy crap, dude, I wonder if you're right. Am I only being exposed to one side of the comedy debate? Is this why I stopped watching Jim Lehrer? Honestly, his show is the only one I can think of, where I can't remember anything funny ever happening. Even David Attenborough sometimes doesn't exactly joke, but shows something funny anyway.
Who? Aren't those TV stations from last century? I get my news from whoever news.google.com is linking to today.
BTW, I think Google is great and I need to buy their stock and the government is overregulating them and all of the court cases against them are unfair and all their competitors totally suck. But that's just a coincidence!
(But seriously: television news? Really? If ever I get news from TV, it's The Daily Show.mp4. I don't even watch Jim Lehrer anymore! Somehow the PVR's most recent 5 recordings always just sit there, unwatched, each one replaced a week later by a new one that I also don't spend the time to watch. I keep thinking, maybe some day I'll go back to watching TV news. Yep, I keep thinking that. And the years go by.)
Yes, and they also detect keys and coins.
My point is that it's stupid to depend on people remembering, or forcing them, to add metal to things in order to show up. That's just telling the world how to circumvent the detection tech. Which means that if someone wants to go undetected, they'll be able to do it. If Congress is worried about ceramic knives, then they ought to be telling security people to work on detecting ceramic knives, instead of asking people to put metal slugs in them so that they'll become compatible with some obsolete tech.
My way of avoiding viruses, isn't to mail all@* something like "if you send me a virus, please pad it with whatever numbers will make its checksum become 0xDEAFBEEF." You'd laugh at me if I did that, but that's analogous to what we're talking about here.
They publish it right here: https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/countrytemplate_ly.html. What coverup? Do you have any verbs, or just a place name? FWIW, Wikipedia's page is much better, but that's to be expected.
Unlike whatever unsubstantiated 911-truther new-age-shakra-measuring black-cat-fearing fantasy you have about Benghazi, F&F was a real scandal where the government was objectively working against its own people. I seriously doubt the president is going to want to talk about that much.
Meh. Unlike F&F (active malice toward the people) that was the usual mere incompetence at worst and I'm not even sure it was that. What's there to know? How is that going to be interesting to anyone?
But if they're plastic, then shouldn't they not set off metal detectors? If someone's looking for metal, a plastic gun is irrelevant. That seems perfectly ok, unless .. oh no. Oh no. Oh please, god no. Please don't tell me people are trying to use metal detectors as gun detectors. No! OMG! Is this why they keep asking me to take my keys out of my pocket at the airport?! Holy shit, you mean they weren't really interested in my keys, and they were fucking with ME all along, over something that had nothing to do with me, since I never carry a gun?
That's sarcasm but also there's truth in it. At some point, someone got the bright idea that guns were always metal, so metal detectors seemed like a way to detect guns. And that was an ok hack. I don't blame anymore for that. But when gun tech moved on, and they started legislating that the old hack still had to work, that was stupid. All that does is create an expense for good guys (have to add un-needed metal to gun) and won't detecct an actual bad guy (since he has no reason to add metal to his gun). This is just more evidence that Congress shouldn't ever try to legislate tech, since they always get it wrong.
When metal detectors became obsolete as weapons detectors, we should have accepted and acknowleged it, not pretended they still worked and passed laws that everyone is required to join in on the illusion. Acknowledging it would have encouraged people to come up with better ideas and maybe made things safer. Instead, we got ... this bullshit: security theater where someone can literally be found guilty of a crime for not acting the part.
Ah, so you've never bought a Sony product (audio recorder or camera). I didn't realize there were people like you out there, and it gives me hope. Keep up the good pattern, for it has given you an idealism that I, for one, find very fresh and exciting. ;-)
On to your real point...
DRM doesn't make the problem worse ; it makes the problem, as it's the main proprietary component which makes interoperability difficult (and illegal, thanks to DMCA). Without the DRM, you could replace those hundred competing devices or software components, with one which you have forced to work with all the hundred different "standards." Or you'd have filters/converters that, say, take Netflix content and converts it to something your Amazon-spec player can handle (or vice-versa). Even your narrowly-defined "digital content" definition ultimately has its problems really because of DRM and the proprietary format (the two are closely realted). It's not because it's digital or because it was a non-gratis digital download.
Please, have a look at this example: https://buy.louisck.net/purchase/live-at-the-beacon-theater. What you'll see is something that fits your definition of non-gratis digital download in every way. I'll admit you can't use it as a frisbee, but really, it doesn't threaten to increase the proliferation of players. It's not going to result in another wall-wart or yet another weird app that you have to install. Whatever player already you have, will very likely work with what he's selling. A thousand other content creators, none of them working together or united by a single store which forces a technical constraint upon them, could do that and it would all just work. Digital content is not a problem; it's a good thing and solves more problems than it creates. Just keep away from the proprietary stuff.
s/Digital/Proprietary Formatted/
Digital was never a problem, and was maybe the best thing to ever happen for interoperability. I bet your 25 year old music CDs still work great, and the fact they're digital, is probably why you don't ever actually spin the discs to listen to their music anymore. ;-) Don't be dissin' digital content; let's be clear what the real problem is.
Except once you think about it, you don't actually know anyone who bought a Kindle for themself, do you? Kindles are the ultimate thoughtless "gift." Like a turd, but with less feeling.
Why do you want the government to be your water company? They just put flourine in your water, to keep you re-electing communists.
It's not the electrical engineers; it's the software guys. The scenario isn't that an attacker shorts something out; it's that he tricks machines into thinking there's a higher risk of shorting something out (or conceivably: brownouts from overuse).
You can build an electric grid as reliably as you want, but if my software doesn't believe you, and decides to draw lower power when it mistakenly thinks others are drawing more power than they really are, then my software can be DoSed.
You just fired the wrong guy. But thanks for protecting my job. Maybe this union idea isn't as stupid and unethical as I thought it was. ;-)
When I RTFAed, the impression I got is that the charging stations cooperate with one another and trust one another. That is, one charging station can influence the behavior of others. Furthermore it's supposedly relatively easy to get a charging station's signing key and then impersonate that charging station. That is, I can say I'm a nearby charging station who si charging 100 cars right now, and thereby persuade other charging systems that right now isn't a good time for them to charge their cars, or charge them slowly. DoS, via lying about a resource being scarcer than it really is.
The ease of impersonation is not really an EV issue, but rather a defect in how these particlar EV charging systems work. The machines are not well-protected.
The reason the impersonation matters (why the cooperation and trust happens in the first place) is where the EV-specific tech comes in. Gas pumps scale better than electricity "pumps," because they're buffered by gas stations' storage tanks. If ten gas stations are all working at the same time, it doesn't put extra pressure on the gas-delivery tankers, the way that ten charging stations working at the same time, puts pressure on the shared electricity system.
This is not EV FUD; no implications were made that EV should be avoided. It's a call to people to protect their EV chargers, make the keys harder to get, or have chargers deal with the trust issues different, or buffer the energy at night so they don't need to cooperate with one another, etc.
If there's FUD, it's against certain manufacturers.
Even if I were to accept that at face value, my point is: WTF does it have to do with a browser test? A browser test is going to filter out the same fraction of US applicants as non-US applicants.
Suppose I'm an employer in your fantasy bearded-Spock universe, with an agenda of hiring non-US workers. 5 US workers apply for my position, and 5 Indians. I want to hire the Indians and I'll use any excuse I can think of, to justify it. So I say, "Aha, let's look at the browsers they used. People who use IE on Windows, Safari on Mac OS, or Firefox on Ubuntu 12.04, I'll just cross off the list of applicants because they're dumber-than-average for not installing a different browser." Are you saying this is going to change my resulting pool to have more Indian applicants than US applicants?
I would understand you argument, if the "test" involved (ok, I'm about to reach into my jar of stereotypes and make an ass of myself, but this is the Internet so let's just do it) ruling out people who don't like spicy food. Then I'd have 2 US applicants and 4 Indian applicants. A spicy food test works for my anti-US agenda. But how the fuck do browsers help my agenda?
Show me the stats, where non-US people are more likely to install Chromium on their Ubuntu system than Americans are, or that they'll install Firefox on their Windows more than Americans do, etc. Because that's what you're saying, right? If that's not what you're saying, then explain how the bullshit test does help their secret agenda of not hiring US applicants, because I don't get it.
To me, your conspiracy theory doesn't make sense even within your paranoid reality. It's like a 9/11 truther going on about how we know the US government blew up WTC and the evidence is .. OS/2, man, OS/2!
How did "U.S." get into this and NickGnome's comments? It isn't present in the context at all, unless you're saying that people in the US have an unusual bias toward keeping distribution-default browsers, whereas non-US people are more likely to install something else.
"Scientists claim to have discovered a new species of pterodactyl, but this claim is really just a thinly veiled attempt to undermine OS/2." Such a statement would be paranoid unless you've got evidence that OS/2 was written by people who are also paleontologists who have published papers saying they already discovered all of the pterodactyls. If that's what you're saying and you can back it up, then ok, the new-pterodactyl claim is maybe an ad-hominem attack on OS/2. But without the OS/2-pterodactyl link, it's bullshit.
Just as your the anti-US conspiracy theory is obviously bullshit, unless you have a US-defaultbrowser link. Do you?
I wonder how many CO2-eating tree saplings you can buy and plant, with a bitcoin.
Now it's time for Coca Cola to release a Coke Phone that shows you exciting recipes on its home screen. Ooooh, Jack 'n' Coke? Gotta try that!
Maybe Ford will release a phone, whose home screen shows you your current fuel remaining as miles, and tells you which recurring maintenance is next needed. And whenever you're driving, it locks itself for our safety.
Wanna see my pets.com cat-owner's phone? If you really love your cat, surely you have one of these. It makes sure that you don't forget to always have enough cat toys around.
Maybe Amazon will release a phone that can read ebooks that were purchased on Ama-- oh wait.
Some of these ideas may seem stupid, but they're fundamentally no stupider than the product in TFA. Take some arbitrary specialized service or brand, and sell a phone based on using it. Thanks, Facebook, for getting it into everyone's heads, that now anyone can sell a phone.
Is your business selling a phone yet? Why not?
I don't get your point.
Are you saying the court found that you can record Fox but not record PBS? I couldn't find that in TFA.
Or are you suggesting that Fox should move toward qualifying as a "faith-based initiative?" ;-)
If the fruits of their own labor are untaxed, and the fruits of your own labor are taxed, then you're going to be pissed. You might be a little confused about whom you should be pissed at, but you know something unfair is going on.
Griping is definitely a good thing in a situation like this, and should be highly encouraged. That's nice of you to explain to people that Google isn't the real enemy in this situation; Google isn't reaching into your and my wallets at lunchtime, but if you don't remind people who is doing that, then the anger has to go somewhere, and unusually stupid people just might put it on you. ;-)
Everyone should get a taxfree lunch. Wait, that's not fair to the restaurants which are only open for breakfast. Or dinner. Or the bars. Or the theaters people go to after dinner. Or the company that sold me the tires I use to drive to the restaurant. Ultimately, taking all this to the conclusion, it's how people get pissed at that fact the tax system has any exceptions at all. Are taxes a necessary evil or not?
If taxes are really a necessary evil, then we ought to be going out of our way to inflict harm upon Google at lunch time. Seriously. If they (or anyone else) is not suffering, then we're doing it wrong. (Don't call me evil for saying that; evil is the premise of the argument.)
OTOH, if taxes aren't a necessary evil, then quit hurting me!
Think about what you just implied: that banks are so insecure, that they need insurance to deal with their likelihood of failure. That only serves to support the point that all money storage is insecure.
Of course, it only works, if one mistakenly thinks of banks as an extreme case, one of the more secure ones. If you view banks as being of, say, average security, then you can start to think in terms of doing things well, and there's probably no good reason bitcoin wallets can't be done well. It might be interesting to try. Anyone working on it?
FWIW, I'm not against insurance, but I do think that if a system encourages the average user to rely on it as a no-brainer which everyone ought to choose to pay for (and face it: FDIC, like anything else, can't possibly be free), that's a poor testament to the system's security. It also raises questions as to the cost. And creepily, I don't see insurance premiums coming out of my checking account. That makes me wonder if FDIC is unusually expensive/corrupt, if its costs must be so hidden. Yet another reason people ought to work to try to make bitcoin more viable.
640 miles should be enough for anyone.
Not if, just like agnostics, they don't deny the possibility. We all know it's possible that elves exist. But lacking any evidence of elves, most of us "aelvists" and believe elves do not exist. The affirmative belief-without-evidence in the nonexistence of elves, isn't faith; it's whitelisting, the strategy of rejecting unfounded ideas by default.
If there's faith here (maybe this is what you're talking about?), it's this: reality can be observed.
Go back a chapter in the book. How did they ever get to the point where the topic comes up? What happened within their perception and experience, which caused them to suspect they might be characters? All the interesting and relevant stuff happens before any of them even begin to attempt a proof; you can even leave the proof dialog out of the story altogether.
Why would a reasonable/noncriminal person have a safe or hidden compartment at all? Why would a reasonable/noncriminal person ever have anything small and valuable, outside of a safe-deposit in the bank?
Do you think that all(most?) safes and hidden compartments are signs of intent to commit wrongdoing? The intent of every single one of them, is that some day, someone is going to put something unusually valuable inside of it. Unless you think safes and hidden compartments should be just plain banned, then you think there must be some kind of legitimate, non-criminal use for them. "Reasonable" or not, we know for sure that at least some noncriminals sometimes store things.
It's probably pretty unusual for the random guy on the street to be carrying tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars. And it's unusual for a car to have a safe. But once you BIAS YOUR SELECTION toward people who have safes in their cars (which is exactly what every single one of Anaya's service calls would have been), is finding a huge wad of cash inside of one them, really all that weird, or event a hint that something criminal is going on? In 100% of the cases where a customer is anxious to open their broken car safe, it's either because they have something valuable they want to get into it, or something valuable that they want to get out of it.
Unless you think hidden compartments themselves are a red flag, and the whole business of creating them is all just a bullshit cover story for smuggers, then Anaya was being a dick when he got pissed at the customer for having $800k. Turns out he was right that the customer was a smuggler, but he was right by luck, or right because of other clues (e.g. the "brick" discussion that was alleged to have taken place), not because of the $800k.
Why would a reasonable person be wearing a stormtooper mask? That's pretty suspicious. Until you ask the fucking question at comic-con! Know what I mean? When interacting with any of his customers, Anaya was in a mask-AT-comic-con situation. In abnormal context, the abnormal is normal.
As for our weird seizure laws and the magic $10k number, I don't know why you brought that up. Anaya was neither a banker nor a cop. People who carry lots of cash may indeed need to be careful to keep documentation on them at all times, but unless the person who is confronting you is a banker or a cop, then anyone who starts asking you questions about your money, is more likely to be a mugger, than a "concerned citizen." What would your attitude be, if someone without any authority or unusual obligations, started asking you to justify your possessions?
Nobody's suggesting doing anything remotely like that. They're merely suggesting legalizing it. Let the consequences of your drug use be the consequences, without artificially adding more. It's bad enough as-is, without the government making a bad situation worse.