Thanks for the quick explanation. This is kind of hilariously unfortunate, since it has the potential to undermine the reliability of lots of documents.
The right to freely use communication technology is very deeply connected to the right to free speech. That is why the 1st amendment included the freedom of "the press". When they mention freedom of the press, they aren't talking about "the freedom of an organized industry of reporters" that we have come to know as "the press". They're talking about the freedom to use printing presses. Literally.
And there's a reason for it being mentioned. They knew that the freedom of speech doesn't mean a whole lot if the government can quash your ability to distribute what you say. That is, being free to speak to yourself, without the ability to have your message reach others, is not having free speech.
So yes, having free, unfettered, secure Internet access is exactly a "freedom of speech" issue.
And why should I take the governments word for it that I have nothing to fear?
Here are some other likely outcomes:
* Consent, with attitude of "what have I got to hide." Result: In the course of a search, the police find something that causes trouble for you. It may be something which is not illegal, but still makes the police suspicious, causing further harassment. It may be that it's not illegal at all, but it's simply private information which is compromising. It may be that the police were asking to search you in the first place because they had an agenda (e.g. they have a personal grudge, or a quota to fill), and even finding nothing doesn't stop them from harassing you.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Same as above.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Police become frustrated and continue to harass you, rationalizing that you're "probably hiding something."
* No consent, hiding behind "you can't do that, it's my rights, blah blah blah." Result: Same as above.
* No consent, and a violent reaction like spitting on a cop: Violent beat-down.
Now I'm not saying that my outcomes *will happen* or even that they're more likely than your outcomes. I'm just saying that your outcomes are relatively optimistic, and mine are certainly not unheard of. I would argue that part of the reason we don't see more outcomes like the ones I offer is that the courts, as well as public opinion, have done a decent job of coming down hard on police abuses. Still, these kinds of things happen with some frequency. The outcomes I list don't even really accuse the police of corruption or illegal activity. It only assumes that the police are human, and may sometimes act out of suspicion, cynicism, anger, or frustration.
Are you intending to disagree with me? Because I feel like you're backing up my point. My point was that people already use different services and have access to different things. "The Internet" is not exactly a single network where traffic is all unfettered and everyone has access to the same things. It's instead a collection of networks that are connected to each other in various ways.
It's still a global network, and will continue to be a global network even if it's balkanized. Your business network is part of "the Internet" even though it's protected by a firewall. You might use different servers and services, but it's still all connected.
The Internet has never been so uniform a thing as what this summary implies. Different countries have been filtering access, providing different services, etc. Even in cases where access is unfettered, there are still language barriers, cultural barriers, an geographic barriers. I don't access Russian sites and services very much because I don't speak Russian, I don't live in Russia, and I'm not Russian. But we can still access many of the same sites, and we can still send email to each other.
To protect national security is one thing, but to conduct non-national security operations using the data seems to me to be a blatant violation of the constitution.
Except that part of the reason for the Bill of Rights is specifically to protect the citizens from having the government infringe on their rights for "national security" reasons. Saying it's for "national security" doesn't make it better, really.
What the founders feared, what the Bill of Rights was intended to be a protection against, was an oppressive government using its power to subdue people who opposed the government. So the First Amendment is not saying, "You have the freedom to express yourself artistically," so much as, "You have the freedom to speak out *against the government*." The Second Amendment is not saying, "You're allowed to have guns for hunting purposes," as much as, "You have the right to have military weapons *to protect yourself from the government*." And the 4th Amendment was not really focused on preventing overzealous police officers as much as it was about preventing the government from going after dissidents, rifling through their lives, looking for a pretext to arrest them.
It's really all about protecting people from the danger of a government using "national security" as a pretext for shutting down dissent. This NSA stuff is *exactly* what the founding fathers were worried about.
1) " for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans' privacy rights"
The act of spying & collecting this data didn't already pass this threashold?
Well I think it really illustrates something that the NSA believes that this data can't be provided to anyone else, because *then* it would be a violation of privacy. You know, like the ATF asks for access to the data, and the NSA goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't let anyone see this information. It's private information on US citizens. Having access to a store of this information is a fourth amendment violation waiting to happen!" It kind of kills the argument that it's ok for the NSA to have it, unless you first assume that the NSA is some kind of special government agency that is allowed to violate the constitution.
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think your hostility is unwarranted. Frankly, you come off much worse than the guy you're responding to. For one thing, disagreeing with someone is no reason to call someone an idiot.
That aside, anti-GM groups and vegetarians have a wide variety of reasons for their beliefs and actions. I know anti-GM people who have good, well thought out reasons, but I also know some who are just anti-science. I know vegetarians who don't eat meat because they're concerned about animal welfare, economic inequality, environmental issues, health issues, or some combination of those. I also know some who just don't like the taste. I also know some for whom it's a fashion statement.
Don't try to paint over everything with the same brush. There will be some people who are afraid of this meat simply because it was "grown in a lab" which makes it comparable to Frankenstein's monster somehow. Frankly, I'm a bit concerned about the meat because I haven't read enough about what they're actually doing to know that they're not doing something strange, dangerous, or unethical. At this point, it's just my own ignorance, but I'm not going to promote the whole thing and tell people it's fine when I don't actually know what they're doing.
Right, I forgot about that. What might be funny is to pick up after the end of "The Fires of Pompeii" to have the ancient Roman character, played by Peter Capaldi, pull out a pocket watch and open it up, restoring his memories.
I don't love it, but I'll reserve judgment until I see it. I think I mostly don't like the fact that he's already appeared in the series as another character. Sure, Karen Gillan also appeared in a previous episode before becoming Amy Pond, but she was so heavily made up you wouldn't recognize her. They had Eve Myles play different characters, but at least they had a fun little nod to that fact. So maybe it's fine.
I guess I do like the fact that they're going with someone who will probably be darker and less goofy than Smith.
I think there's a big problem here that isn't really about protocols or technical matters. Taking a step back from specific proposals for replacing protocols, part of the problem is that we can't agree on a vision for email in the future. Some people want really complicated formatting and media embedding, while others want to return to a text-only world with attachments. Most of us want to do away with spam, but lots of big companies still want to be able to market to us through email. Some people want end-to-end encryption as a security feature, while others view it as a security threat, and still others believe it's an unnecessary inconvenience. Some people want email to provide some kind of authentication that it's coming from the person it purports to be coming from, while others are more interested in making sure email can remain anonymous.
I think if you really want to overhaul email, you first need to get some big players to come to a consensus on what the desired endpoint of development looks like. People keep running off to try to develop replacement protocols and UIs without really even thinking through the goal first.
Aside from identity verification, spam filtering, and end-to-end encryption, there are some pretty obvious issues that I think people regularly miss:
Labels, tags, and metadata: Many different groups have developed methods for tagging emails, but these tags don't really transfer. Gmail has labels. Microsoft Exchange has categories. Thunderbird has tags. Apple Mail has different colored flags. These methods aren't meaningfully compatible, so Gmail labels get turned into folders by mail clients. Microsoft categories don't show up in clients. Mail color flags and Thunderbird labels are held in the client itself, I believe, so they'll be lost outside of the local cache you have on your client. And on top of it all, there's no real way to send an email with tags that your recipient will receive if you were inclined to do that.
Long term storage/tracking/archiving/searching: The amounts of email that we send and receive has become overwhelming, and people are regularly trying to send big attachments. There are a lot of different commercial products and services to help with this issue, but there's not really a great standard solution for managing the situation. Some of them even run contrary to each other-- e.g. products like "YouSendIt" or "Dropbox" may help solve the issue of sending large attachments, but by not including the attachment in the email itself, mail archives may end up with a dead link in place of the original content. It would be nice to have a comprehensive solution to all this. I see too many people these days with 50GB mailboxes and no great way of managing all that storage. I'd like to see some best practices and open standards being supported cross-platform.
Competing communication methods and accounts: We have tons of different competing methods of communication, and it's not clear why we need them all. I myself have several email accounts, SMS accounts, IM accounts, weblogs, forum memberships, phone numbers, voicemail accounts, social networking accounts, etc. Some of the redundancy is intentional on my part, but a lot of it is because I've been forced to create these accounts to talk to different people. I need a gmail account to participate in hangouts. I need a AOL account to talk to people on AIM. I have some accounts just to remain anonymous, to give to possible spammers and such, and other similar reasons. I believe we should try to look at these different communication methods comprehensively, and figure out what we're trying to do with each one, how they should be implemented, and how they should be stored. For example, I'm not sure we need SMS, email, and IM as three different protocols of communication. Maybe we just need different interfaces depending on the situation in which we're using them, but they can all pass through the same communication gateways using a consistent protocol.
Funny, because I could see the same idea being used to argue this point the other way. You could think of the 'perfect' as "having native support for all devices", and the 'good' being "native support for a smaller selection devices that they can reasonably support". They've chosen the 'good'.
You talk about screetching fanboys, but all this amounts to is an entity choosing to prioritize a platform that has made it easier for them to start development. You are the one reading malice into a decision of practicality. Who's the screetching fanboy?
Yeah, I have an aversion to anything that states, as an absolute, that evolution "favors" anything. Evolution is not a conscious force that picks sides, deciding what is good and what is bad. The only thing that evolution favors is 'that which survives', and it's heavily contextual. A trait that enables survival in one circumstance might hinder survival in another circumstance.
Evolution doesn't judge. 'That which survives' is not inherently or morally superior to 'that which does not survive'. The 'that which survives' is not inherently better at surviving than 'that which does not survive'. It was just better at surviving in specific circumstance that it was in. Or sometimes, it might even be that it just got lucky-- it just happened to survive. Luck of the draw.
Really? Rupert Grint? I suppose there have been some references to the Doctor wanting to be a ginger, but I don't really see Ron Weasley pulling it off.
It's just what needs to happen when law enforcement receives a report. It's not unique to terrorism. Even if there's no specific evidence of a crime, as was the case here, the police might still need to investigate.
Like, even if you called the police and said, "My neighbor Joe keeps talking about killing his wife, and I'm concerned that he seems very serious about it. He bought a gun recently and I know that he's been searching online for information about how to dispose of a corpse." In a case like that, the police shouldn't simply ignore your call. There may be innocent explanations for all of it, but they have to at least look into it a little, see if Joe has any history of violence, and probably talk to you (the caller), Joe, and his wife.
If the FBI was monitoring your communications, they picked up with word "bomb" being used, and they started investigating, I would blame them. If they get a report from a private citizen to the effect of, "I think that guy might be building a bomb so that he can commit an act of terrorism!" then they *have to* look into that. Even if they just do a very cursory investigation to see if there's anything to it, they can't just ignore that kind of claim.
As to the employer, I said I don't *necessarily* blame him. Maybe the employee was a total psycho. Maybe he talked about how he wanted to kill people with bombs, and then the employer stumbled across a search history full of sites with explicit instructions on how to build bombs, and potential target areas for bombings. I don't know. Maybe the employer is a paranoid douche, and maybe he is just a normal guy caught in an awkward situation.
The devices might only have one purpose, but there might be other purposes for searching for it other than to build one. Reading this story made me want to google "pressure cooker bomb" just to see what it is. So then I would be searching for simple curiosity. A week from now, if I were trying to find a link to this story about a man being investigated for terrorism, I might google "pressure cooker bomb" because it's a detail I remember from the story. So then my interest might be in electronic privacy, and not bombs at all. In fact, I've now written the word "bomb" several times in this post. It's a suspicious word, but what I'm talking about here actually has very little to do with actual bombs. I just made a "bomb" related google search, just now, looking for information to support my arguments.
Aside from that, I'm not even sure I agree that bombs have no practical use other than terrorism. Maybe he wanted to build a small bomb, under safe conditions, as a method of learning about science/chemistry/construction. Maybe he wanted to blow something up, out in the middle of nowhere, for entertainment. Maybe he had a tree stump on some rural patch of property that he wanted to remove, and he got it into his head that he wanted to blow it up with a bomb. Maybe this guy is interested, not for terrorism, but for the purposes of general idiocy.
I don't necessarily blame the employer for reporting it, since he may have had legitimate reasons for concern. I don't blame the FBI for investigating it, because they kind of have to investigate something like this once it's reported. But I do blame you for implying that there's no valid reason to ever search for "bomb" unless you're a terrorist.
I would wonder if it's just the light/dark that's doing it, though. I didn't read the study so I don't know how this study was done, but I will verify that when I go camping for a few days or more, there are lots of things about my lifestyle that changes. For one thing, I'm not watching TV, playing video games, or working. I am also generally exerting myself more by hiking around, engaging in other strenuous physical activity, and perhaps carrying a heavy pack. I have a completely different diet when camping-- my daily intake of hotdogs and toast marshmellows goes through the roof. I'm usually camping with friends, so there is a lot more positive social time than in my normal life. The sleeping arrangements are generally uncomfortable, so oversleeping is discouraged.
There are a lot of factors that might change your sleeping habits.
Also, much as I might like some Microsoft bashing, I think it's dumb to criticize a technology company for copying others. In science and technology, you're *supposed* to build off of other people's work. Otherwise, you're reinventing the wheel.
So if you're going to criticize Microsoft for copying others, it only makes sense to me if they make a substandard copy that offers no advantages. Even if it's an equivalent copy to the best thing around, that's still doing a pretty good job.
Yeah, I remember that. It was almost as funny as when they had so many recalls that they had to spend absurd amounts of money to replace most of the XBox user-base's hardware. Or when they released the Kin phone and it failed miserably? Hilarious.
It's fun remembering Microsoft's failures. And it's impressive that Microsoft still squeezes enough money out of Windows and Office to keep paying for these failures.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again...
Well, insofar as they're trying to avoid another XP, as a OS that people are attached to and are uncomfortable moving away from, they're doing an awfully good job. I don't foresee people becoming attached to Windows 8 no matter how long they use it.
... and claiming that they want to ban it in order to protect children. Because then it puts any opponents to the ban in the position of seeming to say, "I don't want to protect children."
And I think what you'll find is that, in each case, the proposed ban is just a way to get a foot in the door, so that they can build more invasive systems for monitoring and filtering what we access in general.
Their major customer has been IT departments. The software is designed to be managed by and for the needs of those departments.
Yeah, except that don't really service those customers very well either. Even in IT departments, Microsoft's approach is to try to force you to buy products rather than making them easy to deal with.
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Thanks for the quick explanation. This is kind of hilariously unfortunate, since it has the potential to undermine the reliability of lots of documents.
The right to freely use communication technology is very deeply connected to the right to free speech. That is why the 1st amendment included the freedom of "the press". When they mention freedom of the press, they aren't talking about "the freedom of an organized industry of reporters" that we have come to know as "the press". They're talking about the freedom to use printing presses. Literally.
And there's a reason for it being mentioned. They knew that the freedom of speech doesn't mean a whole lot if the government can quash your ability to distribute what you say. That is, being free to speak to yourself, without the ability to have your message reach others, is not having free speech.
So yes, having free, unfettered, secure Internet access is exactly a "freedom of speech" issue.
And why should I take the governments word for it that I have nothing to fear?
Here are some other likely outcomes:
* Consent, with attitude of "what have I got to hide." Result: In the course of a search, the police find something that causes trouble for you. It may be something which is not illegal, but still makes the police suspicious, causing further harassment. It may be that it's not illegal at all, but it's simply private information which is compromising. It may be that the police were asking to search you in the first place because they had an agenda (e.g. they have a personal grudge, or a quota to fill), and even finding nothing doesn't stop them from harassing you.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Same as above.
* Consent, but without the friendly attitude. Result: Police become frustrated and continue to harass you, rationalizing that you're "probably hiding something."
* No consent, hiding behind "you can't do that, it's my rights, blah blah blah." Result: Same as above.
* No consent, and a violent reaction like spitting on a cop: Violent beat-down.
Now I'm not saying that my outcomes *will happen* or even that they're more likely than your outcomes. I'm just saying that your outcomes are relatively optimistic, and mine are certainly not unheard of. I would argue that part of the reason we don't see more outcomes like the ones I offer is that the courts, as well as public opinion, have done a decent job of coming down hard on police abuses. Still, these kinds of things happen with some frequency. The outcomes I list don't even really accuse the police of corruption or illegal activity. It only assumes that the police are human, and may sometimes act out of suspicion, cynicism, anger, or frustration.
Are you intending to disagree with me? Because I feel like you're backing up my point. My point was that people already use different services and have access to different things. "The Internet" is not exactly a single network where traffic is all unfettered and everyone has access to the same things. It's instead a collection of networks that are connected to each other in various ways.
It's still a global network, and will continue to be a global network even if it's balkanized. Your business network is part of "the Internet" even though it's protected by a firewall. You might use different servers and services, but it's still all connected.
The Internet has never been so uniform a thing as what this summary implies. Different countries have been filtering access, providing different services, etc. Even in cases where access is unfettered, there are still language barriers, cultural barriers, an geographic barriers. I don't access Russian sites and services very much because I don't speak Russian, I don't live in Russia, and I'm not Russian. But we can still access many of the same sites, and we can still send email to each other.
To protect national security is one thing, but to conduct non-national security operations using the data seems to me to be a blatant violation of the constitution.
Except that part of the reason for the Bill of Rights is specifically to protect the citizens from having the government infringe on their rights for "national security" reasons. Saying it's for "national security" doesn't make it better, really.
What the founders feared, what the Bill of Rights was intended to be a protection against, was an oppressive government using its power to subdue people who opposed the government. So the First Amendment is not saying, "You have the freedom to express yourself artistically," so much as, "You have the freedom to speak out *against the government*." The Second Amendment is not saying, "You're allowed to have guns for hunting purposes," as much as, "You have the right to have military weapons *to protect yourself from the government*." And the 4th Amendment was not really focused on preventing overzealous police officers as much as it was about preventing the government from going after dissidents, rifling through their lives, looking for a pretext to arrest them.
It's really all about protecting people from the danger of a government using "national security" as a pretext for shutting down dissent. This NSA stuff is *exactly* what the founding fathers were worried about.
1) " for fear they could be misused in ways that violate Americans' privacy rights" The act of spying & collecting this data didn't already pass this threashold?
Well I think it really illustrates something that the NSA believes that this data can't be provided to anyone else, because *then* it would be a violation of privacy. You know, like the ATF asks for access to the data, and the NSA goes, "Whoa, whoa, whoa. We can't let anyone see this information. It's private information on US citizens. Having access to a store of this information is a fourth amendment violation waiting to happen!" It kind of kills the argument that it's ok for the NSA to have it, unless you first assume that the NSA is some kind of special government agency that is allowed to violate the constitution.
I'm not the guy you're responding to, but I think your hostility is unwarranted. Frankly, you come off much worse than the guy you're responding to. For one thing, disagreeing with someone is no reason to call someone an idiot.
That aside, anti-GM groups and vegetarians have a wide variety of reasons for their beliefs and actions. I know anti-GM people who have good, well thought out reasons, but I also know some who are just anti-science. I know vegetarians who don't eat meat because they're concerned about animal welfare, economic inequality, environmental issues, health issues, or some combination of those. I also know some who just don't like the taste. I also know some for whom it's a fashion statement.
Don't try to paint over everything with the same brush. There will be some people who are afraid of this meat simply because it was "grown in a lab" which makes it comparable to Frankenstein's monster somehow. Frankly, I'm a bit concerned about the meat because I haven't read enough about what they're actually doing to know that they're not doing something strange, dangerous, or unethical. At this point, it's just my own ignorance, but I'm not going to promote the whole thing and tell people it's fine when I don't actually know what they're doing.
I think we already did that.
I bet it you wrapped it in bacon and slathered it with butter, it would taste pretty nice.
Right, I forgot about that. What might be funny is to pick up after the end of "The Fires of Pompeii" to have the ancient Roman character, played by Peter Capaldi, pull out a pocket watch and open it up, restoring his memories.
I don't love it, but I'll reserve judgment until I see it. I think I mostly don't like the fact that he's already appeared in the series as another character. Sure, Karen Gillan also appeared in a previous episode before becoming Amy Pond, but she was so heavily made up you wouldn't recognize her. They had Eve Myles play different characters, but at least they had a fun little nod to that fact. So maybe it's fine.
I guess I do like the fact that they're going with someone who will probably be darker and less goofy than Smith.
I think there's a big problem here that isn't really about protocols or technical matters. Taking a step back from specific proposals for replacing protocols, part of the problem is that we can't agree on a vision for email in the future. Some people want really complicated formatting and media embedding, while others want to return to a text-only world with attachments. Most of us want to do away with spam, but lots of big companies still want to be able to market to us through email. Some people want end-to-end encryption as a security feature, while others view it as a security threat, and still others believe it's an unnecessary inconvenience. Some people want email to provide some kind of authentication that it's coming from the person it purports to be coming from, while others are more interested in making sure email can remain anonymous.
I think if you really want to overhaul email, you first need to get some big players to come to a consensus on what the desired endpoint of development looks like. People keep running off to try to develop replacement protocols and UIs without really even thinking through the goal first.
Aside from identity verification, spam filtering, and end-to-end encryption, there are some pretty obvious issues that I think people regularly miss:
Funny, because I could see the same idea being used to argue this point the other way. You could think of the 'perfect' as "having native support for all devices", and the 'good' being "native support for a smaller selection devices that they can reasonably support". They've chosen the 'good'.
You talk about screetching fanboys, but all this amounts to is an entity choosing to prioritize a platform that has made it easier for them to start development. You are the one reading malice into a decision of practicality. Who's the screetching fanboy?
Yeah, I have an aversion to anything that states, as an absolute, that evolution "favors" anything. Evolution is not a conscious force that picks sides, deciding what is good and what is bad. The only thing that evolution favors is 'that which survives', and it's heavily contextual. A trait that enables survival in one circumstance might hinder survival in another circumstance.
Evolution doesn't judge. 'That which survives' is not inherently or morally superior to 'that which does not survive'. The 'that which survives' is not inherently better at surviving than 'that which does not survive'. It was just better at surviving in specific circumstance that it was in. Or sometimes, it might even be that it just got lucky-- it just happened to survive. Luck of the draw.
Really? Rupert Grint? I suppose there have been some references to the Doctor wanting to be a ginger, but I don't really see Ron Weasley pulling it off.
It's just what needs to happen when law enforcement receives a report. It's not unique to terrorism. Even if there's no specific evidence of a crime, as was the case here, the police might still need to investigate.
Like, even if you called the police and said, "My neighbor Joe keeps talking about killing his wife, and I'm concerned that he seems very serious about it. He bought a gun recently and I know that he's been searching online for information about how to dispose of a corpse." In a case like that, the police shouldn't simply ignore your call. There may be innocent explanations for all of it, but they have to at least look into it a little, see if Joe has any history of violence, and probably talk to you (the caller), Joe, and his wife.
If the FBI was monitoring your communications, they picked up with word "bomb" being used, and they started investigating, I would blame them. If they get a report from a private citizen to the effect of, "I think that guy might be building a bomb so that he can commit an act of terrorism!" then they *have to* look into that. Even if they just do a very cursory investigation to see if there's anything to it, they can't just ignore that kind of claim.
As to the employer, I said I don't *necessarily* blame him. Maybe the employee was a total psycho. Maybe he talked about how he wanted to kill people with bombs, and then the employer stumbled across a search history full of sites with explicit instructions on how to build bombs, and potential target areas for bombings. I don't know. Maybe the employer is a paranoid douche, and maybe he is just a normal guy caught in an awkward situation.
The devices might only have one purpose, but there might be other purposes for searching for it other than to build one. Reading this story made me want to google "pressure cooker bomb" just to see what it is. So then I would be searching for simple curiosity. A week from now, if I were trying to find a link to this story about a man being investigated for terrorism, I might google "pressure cooker bomb" because it's a detail I remember from the story. So then my interest might be in electronic privacy, and not bombs at all. In fact, I've now written the word "bomb" several times in this post. It's a suspicious word, but what I'm talking about here actually has very little to do with actual bombs. I just made a "bomb" related google search, just now, looking for information to support my arguments.
Aside from that, I'm not even sure I agree that bombs have no practical use other than terrorism. Maybe he wanted to build a small bomb, under safe conditions, as a method of learning about science/chemistry/construction. Maybe he wanted to blow something up, out in the middle of nowhere, for entertainment. Maybe he had a tree stump on some rural patch of property that he wanted to remove, and he got it into his head that he wanted to blow it up with a bomb. Maybe this guy is interested, not for terrorism, but for the purposes of general idiocy.
I don't necessarily blame the employer for reporting it, since he may have had legitimate reasons for concern. I don't blame the FBI for investigating it, because they kind of have to investigate something like this once it's reported. But I do blame you for implying that there's no valid reason to ever search for "bomb" unless you're a terrorist.
I would wonder if it's just the light/dark that's doing it, though. I didn't read the study so I don't know how this study was done, but I will verify that when I go camping for a few days or more, there are lots of things about my lifestyle that changes. For one thing, I'm not watching TV, playing video games, or working. I am also generally exerting myself more by hiking around, engaging in other strenuous physical activity, and perhaps carrying a heavy pack. I have a completely different diet when camping-- my daily intake of hotdogs and toast marshmellows goes through the roof. I'm usually camping with friends, so there is a lot more positive social time than in my normal life. The sleeping arrangements are generally uncomfortable, so oversleeping is discouraged.
There are a lot of factors that might change your sleeping habits.
Also, much as I might like some Microsoft bashing, I think it's dumb to criticize a technology company for copying others. In science and technology, you're *supposed* to build off of other people's work. Otherwise, you're reinventing the wheel.
So if you're going to criticize Microsoft for copying others, it only makes sense to me if they make a substandard copy that offers no advantages. Even if it's an equivalent copy to the best thing around, that's still doing a pretty good job.
Yeah, I remember that. It was almost as funny as when they had so many recalls that they had to spend absurd amounts of money to replace most of the XBox user-base's hardware. Or when they released the Kin phone and it failed miserably? Hilarious.
It's fun remembering Microsoft's failures. And it's impressive that Microsoft still squeezes enough money out of Windows and Office to keep paying for these failures.
I have noticed though Windows 8 is going through an annual update and my hunch is they are trying to avoid another XP again...
Well, insofar as they're trying to avoid another XP, as a OS that people are attached to and are uncomfortable moving away from, they're doing an awfully good job. I don't foresee people becoming attached to Windows 8 no matter how long they use it.
... and claiming that they want to ban it in order to protect children. Because then it puts any opponents to the ban in the position of seeming to say, "I don't want to protect children."
And I think what you'll find is that, in each case, the proposed ban is just a way to get a foot in the door, so that they can build more invasive systems for monitoring and filtering what we access in general.
Their major customer has been IT departments. The software is designed to be managed by and for the needs of those departments.
Yeah, except that don't really service those customers very well either. Even in IT departments, Microsoft's approach is to try to force you to buy products rather than making them easy to deal with.