If you think the "context menu" key is useless, can I assume you've never had to navigate Windows on a computer where the mouse is missing or broken? I never plan on using a windows machine without a mouse, but I have had several situations where I was stuck without a functioning mouse, and some developer(Microsoft or someone else) stuck some very important function in a context menu.
DNS is overrated. With IPv6 and no shortage of adresses the only ones who *need* DNS are those who badly want you to remember their spiffy domain names, so they can put it an ads.
Ok, without looking, what's the IPv6 address for Slashdot? What's that you say, you'll just google it? What's the IPv6 address for Google, then? Ok, you don't know, so you'll write it down. But what do you do when Google changes the location of their datacenter and the IP address for google.com changes?
These problems may not be insoluble, but it's likely that any solution will look something like DNS.
Well either each of us has to individually try to figure out which signers are trustworthy, or else you need something like an authority to tell you who to trust.
Your citations are vague at best. Your Princeton definition has "well founded" in one of the three definitions, and you're drawing a lot of meaning out of that. The wikipedia article (which is not meaningfully authoritative) acknowledges that a theory which cannot be tested is a theory, but not a useful theory.
Regardless, I'm sure there are pedantic douchebags working at Princeton and editing wikipedia articles. At least give me a great scientific or philosophic mind from >75 years ago who makes this kind of distinction on the word "theory". Then I'll consider the issue more seriously.
It seems like there are potential problems here. With 4LW, I still need to memorize a set of 4 unrelated words for each site, and there's basically a single point of failure. Plus, as the article points out, it assumes a single domain name per IP address, and also IPv6 will complicate things.
P2P DNS seems like a good idea, but getting DNS from random services seems open to attack. One way around this would be to have signed DNS records, but then you still need some kind of authority for the signing. I don't know that I really understand IDONS. I mean, to be totally honest, I'm not sure I really understand any of these alternatives.
Of course, you're going to need some kind of DNS. Things will only get worse when IPv6 gets going. Ideally I'd like to see something that is decentralized, includes record signing, allows for SSL public keys to be kept in DNS records (thereby eliminating most of the need for CAs), and does not allow for domain squatting or phishing to such an extreme degree. Anything fit that bill?
Yeah, you've basically been very, very misinformed. Scientific theories are theories first. The theory of relativity was a theory, and from it various people devised testable hypotheses, which were then tested and verified. Since the hypotheses were verified, the theory was given a lot of credibility, but the theory was a theory as soon as it was formulated. Same with the theory of evolution-- it was a theory as soon as Darwin put it together.
Anyone who tells you different is a pedantic douchebag who's trying to redefine well established words in some silly attempt to serve their political agendas.
Well are we necessarily talking about scientific theories or any theory at all? There are certainly theories which can't be tested.
Even in the scientific process, you come up with a theory first and from that devise a hypothesis that can be tested. Scientific theories where nobody can think of a way to test it won't generally get a lot of credence and don't become accepted, but they happen. But devising a theory and figuring out whether it can be proven are really two different steps.
The device also features a jail-breaking mode. It's fully available for you to break into.
So it will require jailbreaking, but they'll provide the ability to do that. Of course, since they're planning on having other integrators actually produce these machines, it will probably end up like Android-- theoretically open, but by many practical measures the devices are closed.
Yeah, the thing is that Mozilla has every right to enable tracking of it's users, in much the same way that we have every right to fork the browser or use something else.
I don't think the relatively low risk is a complete argument against these security measures, but it's a good thing to keep in mind in order to have a little perspective. Basically we're still freaking out over an event from 9 years ago because it killed 3,000 people. Meanwhile something like 300,000 people have died in car accidents and 3,000,000 people have died from smoking.
Plane crashes are spectacular and emotionally jarring, and they grab our attention. But really, taking a step back for a second, how great is the danger? I can understand why people would freak out, but is the level of fear rational? For a hijacker to repeat the 9/11 attacks today, they'd have to get past a stronger cockpit door, the gun that the pilot has access to, and a plane full of passengers who wouldn't now expect the hijacker to ultimately land the plane safely. The whole situation is different now.
Sadly, the sacrifice of liberty for the illusion of security isn't even a scam that someone is running on us. We're demanding it. We're basically jumping up and down screaming, "Oh my GOD! 9/11 happened! Please strip search us all to make sure nothing dangerous ever happens anywhere!"
We want the security theater. We don't care that it's ineffective. And everyone has to play along so that when the next attack happens, they can say, "It's not my fault, I was strip searching everyone!" You can't blame the TSA; they're just covering their own asses.
Right. You can define journalist in some particular way, setting some requirements. You might say, "In order to be a journalist, you need to work for a large newspaper or magazine with a circulation over [whatever]." But what are we really talking about here? It seems to me that we're talking about the Bill of Rights and "freedom of the press". So lets look at the text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Yeah, so no talk of "journalists" per se, let alone a legal definition that would restrict those freedoms to a particular professional class. Basically the amendment says that the government can't stop you from saying/publishing whatever you want.
Of course, there are limits to the first amendment freedoms, but I don't see any reasonable argument to the effect of "Assange isn't a journalist, so his freedom of speech should not be protected."
Yes, but there's a very important difference. What scares/bothers me about the idea of "If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear..." is the idea that my personal life will be dragged into the open and scrutinized. Part of the fear is that big scary organizations will use this as a weapon to oppress me, but largely I just think that there should be a division between my personal actions and my public actions in any kind of official capacity, and that the personal actions should be private.
On the other hand, we're talking about the big scary organizations that we're afraid of, so I don't have a problem with us (the people) having a weapon against them. Also, we're talking about actions taken in an official capacity, and not private actions.
So, just to give some examples to make it clear, I believe that the head of the FBI doesn't have any particular right to know how I spend my weekends, just so long as my actions are legal. However, I believe that, as long as it doesn't compromise national security or any criminal investigations, we generally have the right to know what the head of the FBI does when he's at work, in his capacity as the head of the FBI.
The government does not generally have a right to know what I'm doing in my personal time, but we generally have a right to know what our government is doing with the authority that we grant them.
I've also seen the bug in Safari on OSX. Intermittent, but I've seen it. I could even see that the text was pasted in and then immediately cleared out. I assumed it was some kind of JavaScript bug on Slashdot itself.
My experience wasn't just that it was "complicated to use", but that it was probably the buggiest and most useless OS I've ever experienced. It had some nice features, but it was so rare to get everything working properly so the feature-set was irrelevant. I've had to use and support Windows-based phones in the past, and I considered them effectively unusable.
I don't know exactly how it all works, but it does seem that iOS will keep certain things in memory until the memory is needed. Either way, memory is limited (I think it's only 256M in the iPad), so Apple is smart to force developers to deal with what happens when their application is dumped into the background and the memory needs to be freed up. Given that the internal storage is flash, suspending the application to disk is not as slow as it might be, and it provides a pretty transparent experience so long as app developers do things correctly.
What's your point? Yes, Android also employs techniques to avoid real multitasking by suspending applications which aren't running. Seems to me that this is a validation of Apple's way of doing things. To the extent that Android devices don't limit multitasking, it explains why they often get really awful battery life.
It seems to me that the smart way to do it would be to have the Netflix app stay open and running, but automatically pause
Why is that smarter than suspending the entire application to disk, saving your place in the movie, and resuming when you go back to the Netflix app? Both ways make sure you don't lose your place. Keeping the full Netflix app running in the background just takes up system resources, which are limited.
Who watches the watchmen? Apparently Wikileaks does. See, the government was supposed to be the watchmen who protected us from criminals and other aggressive powers. The press was supposed to be watching them, but they instead became part of the system. Now Assange and company are airing people's dirty laundry instead.
So what you're really asking is, who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen? As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants the job can have it. But then who will watch them?
Well that's kind of the point. On the iPhone platform, and WP7 for that matter, multitasking in all its forms is enabled by the application developer.
Meh. Poor performance can always be achieved by the application developer. Apple can't force other people to make sensible choices. Now if you want to argue that Apple's APIs are insufficient-- well, I don't know, maybe they are. If the reason Netflix's app behaves badly is that iOS doesn't permit it to behave well, then that's Apple's fault. If Apple provides the API and Netflix doesn't use it properly, then that's on Netflix.
But I still say, "Who needs real multitasking on a phone?" What I need from Netflix's app is a good suspend/resume routine. I don't need Netflix to decode video in the background when it's not being displayed. All it's going to do is kill my battery life and steal processor cycles from whatever else I'm doing on that phone.
If this is the case, if I'm switching between my ebook and wikipedia, wouldn't it be more efficient to keep the ebook in memory, than to clear memory, close the application, re initialize the application, and then load the book back into memory?
Depends on what you're keeping in memory and what you're doing when the application is "closed". We're talking about a computer with limited processing power, limited battery power, and limited memory, but fast internal storage.
So here's the issue: if you're talking about a single PDF viewer running in the background while you take a quick look at a single webpage, then yeah, it might be just as well to keep the PDF viewer running. But where do you draw the line? You can have a lot of different applications running at once, and if you have a bunch running in the background, you're going to start running out of resources quickly.
So the smart thing to do for these sorts of devices is what Apple has done. They provide programmers with the APIs to run things in the background if it's something that really makes sense (playing audio, for example) while also providing an API to suspend the current state of the application to disk. This way they basically allow developers to give the users most of the benefits of multitasking while preventing the need for users to track/manage application usage. The alternative is basically that I (as the user) need to be very watchful about background applications and constantly close unused applications in order to get decent performance.
The other alternative would be to provide beefed up system specs (more processor/RAM, larger battery, making a thicker/heavier and more expensive device) as well as providing better application management. At that point, you may as well buy a Macbook Air.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think the "context menu" key is useless, can I assume you've never had to navigate Windows on a computer where the mouse is missing or broken? I never plan on using a windows machine without a mouse, but I have had several situations where I was stuck without a functioning mouse, and some developer(Microsoft or someone else) stuck some very important function in a context menu.
DNS is overrated. With IPv6 and no shortage of adresses the only ones who *need* DNS are those who badly want you to remember their spiffy domain names, so they can put it an ads.
Ok, without looking, what's the IPv6 address for Slashdot? What's that you say, you'll just google it? What's the IPv6 address for Google, then? Ok, you don't know, so you'll write it down. But what do you do when Google changes the location of their datacenter and the IP address for google.com changes?
These problems may not be insoluble, but it's likely that any solution will look something like DNS.
Well either each of us has to individually try to figure out which signers are trustworthy, or else you need something like an authority to tell you who to trust.
Your citations are vague at best. Your Princeton definition has "well founded" in one of the three definitions, and you're drawing a lot of meaning out of that. The wikipedia article (which is not meaningfully authoritative) acknowledges that a theory which cannot be tested is a theory, but not a useful theory.
Regardless, I'm sure there are pedantic douchebags working at Princeton and editing wikipedia articles. At least give me a great scientific or philosophic mind from >75 years ago who makes this kind of distinction on the word "theory". Then I'll consider the issue more seriously.
It seems like there are potential problems here. With 4LW, I still need to memorize a set of 4 unrelated words for each site, and there's basically a single point of failure. Plus, as the article points out, it assumes a single domain name per IP address, and also IPv6 will complicate things.
P2P DNS seems like a good idea, but getting DNS from random services seems open to attack. One way around this would be to have signed DNS records, but then you still need some kind of authority for the signing. I don't know that I really understand IDONS. I mean, to be totally honest, I'm not sure I really understand any of these alternatives.
Of course, you're going to need some kind of DNS. Things will only get worse when IPv6 gets going. Ideally I'd like to see something that is decentralized, includes record signing, allows for SSL public keys to be kept in DNS records (thereby eliminating most of the need for CAs), and does not allow for domain squatting or phishing to such an extreme degree. Anything fit that bill?
Yeah, you've basically been very, very misinformed. Scientific theories are theories first. The theory of relativity was a theory, and from it various people devised testable hypotheses, which were then tested and verified. Since the hypotheses were verified, the theory was given a lot of credibility, but the theory was a theory as soon as it was formulated. Same with the theory of evolution-- it was a theory as soon as Darwin put it together.
Anyone who tells you different is a pedantic douchebag who's trying to redefine well established words in some silly attempt to serve their political agendas.
Well are we necessarily talking about scientific theories or any theory at all? There are certainly theories which can't be tested.
Even in the scientific process, you come up with a theory first and from that devise a hypothesis that can be tested. Scientific theories where nobody can think of a way to test it won't generally get a lot of credence and don't become accepted, but they happen. But devising a theory and figuring out whether it can be proven are really two different steps.
Well they said:
The device also features a jail-breaking mode. It's fully available for you to break into.
So it will require jailbreaking, but they'll provide the ability to do that. Of course, since they're planning on having other integrators actually produce these machines, it will probably end up like Android-- theoretically open, but by many practical measures the devices are closed.
Yeah, the thing is that Mozilla has every right to enable tracking of it's users, in much the same way that we have every right to fork the browser or use something else.
The question in both cases is, is it worth it?
I don't think the relatively low risk is a complete argument against these security measures, but it's a good thing to keep in mind in order to have a little perspective. Basically we're still freaking out over an event from 9 years ago because it killed 3,000 people. Meanwhile something like 300,000 people have died in car accidents and 3,000,000 people have died from smoking.
Plane crashes are spectacular and emotionally jarring, and they grab our attention. But really, taking a step back for a second, how great is the danger? I can understand why people would freak out, but is the level of fear rational? For a hijacker to repeat the 9/11 attacks today, they'd have to get past a stronger cockpit door, the gun that the pilot has access to, and a plane full of passengers who wouldn't now expect the hijacker to ultimately land the plane safely. The whole situation is different now.
Sadly, the sacrifice of liberty for the illusion of security isn't even a scam that someone is running on us. We're demanding it. We're basically jumping up and down screaming, "Oh my GOD! 9/11 happened! Please strip search us all to make sure nothing dangerous ever happens anywhere!"
We want the security theater. We don't care that it's ineffective. And everyone has to play along so that when the next attack happens, they can say, "It's not my fault, I was strip searching everyone!" You can't blame the TSA; they're just covering their own asses.
Right. You can define journalist in some particular way, setting some requirements. You might say, "In order to be a journalist, you need to work for a large newspaper or magazine with a circulation over [whatever]." But what are we really talking about here? It seems to me that we're talking about the Bill of Rights and "freedom of the press". So lets look at the text:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
Yeah, so no talk of "journalists" per se, let alone a legal definition that would restrict those freedoms to a particular professional class. Basically the amendment says that the government can't stop you from saying/publishing whatever you want.
Of course, there are limits to the first amendment freedoms, but I don't see any reasonable argument to the effect of "Assange isn't a journalist, so his freedom of speech should not be protected."
Yes, but there's a very important difference. What scares/bothers me about the idea of "If you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to fear..." is the idea that my personal life will be dragged into the open and scrutinized. Part of the fear is that big scary organizations will use this as a weapon to oppress me, but largely I just think that there should be a division between my personal actions and my public actions in any kind of official capacity, and that the personal actions should be private.
On the other hand, we're talking about the big scary organizations that we're afraid of, so I don't have a problem with us (the people) having a weapon against them. Also, we're talking about actions taken in an official capacity, and not private actions.
So, just to give some examples to make it clear, I believe that the head of the FBI doesn't have any particular right to know how I spend my weekends, just so long as my actions are legal. However, I believe that, as long as it doesn't compromise national security or any criminal investigations, we generally have the right to know what the head of the FBI does when he's at work, in his capacity as the head of the FBI.
The government does not generally have a right to know what I'm doing in my personal time, but we generally have a right to know what our government is doing with the authority that we grant them.
From L Nexus S specs page:
Quad-Band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
Tri-Band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700
AT&T's HSPA bands are 850 and 1900 (I can't find a good authoritative source).
I've also seen the bug in Safari on OSX. Intermittent, but I've seen it. I could even see that the text was pasted in and then immediately cleared out. I assumed it was some kind of JavaScript bug on Slashdot itself.
My experience wasn't just that it was "complicated to use", but that it was probably the buggiest and most useless OS I've ever experienced. It had some nice features, but it was so rare to get everything working properly so the feature-set was irrelevant. I've had to use and support Windows-based phones in the past, and I considered them effectively unusable.
Maybe you had better luck.
I don't know exactly how it all works, but it does seem that iOS will keep certain things in memory until the memory is needed. Either way, memory is limited (I think it's only 256M in the iPad), so Apple is smart to force developers to deal with what happens when their application is dumped into the background and the memory needs to be freed up. Given that the internal storage is flash, suspending the application to disk is not as slow as it might be, and it provides a pretty transparent experience so long as app developers do things correctly.
What's your point? Yes, Android also employs techniques to avoid real multitasking by suspending applications which aren't running. Seems to me that this is a validation of Apple's way of doing things. To the extent that Android devices don't limit multitasking, it explains why they often get really awful battery life.
It's needlessly complicated, and one of the many reasons why Windows Mobile was junk.
It seems to me that the smart way to do it would be to have the Netflix app stay open and running, but automatically pause
Why is that smarter than suspending the entire application to disk, saving your place in the movie, and resuming when you go back to the Netflix app? Both ways make sure you don't lose your place. Keeping the full Netflix app running in the background just takes up system resources, which are limited.
Who watches the watchmen? Apparently Wikileaks does. See, the government was supposed to be the watchmen who protected us from criminals and other aggressive powers. The press was supposed to be watching them, but they instead became part of the system. Now Assange and company are airing people's dirty laundry instead.
So what you're really asking is, who watches the watchmen who watch the watchmen? As far as I'm concerned, anyone who wants the job can have it. But then who will watch them?
Jobs said Android was a good choice if you wanted porn. I don't know if that counts.
Well that's kind of the point. On the iPhone platform, and WP7 for that matter, multitasking in all its forms is enabled by the application developer.
Meh. Poor performance can always be achieved by the application developer. Apple can't force other people to make sensible choices. Now if you want to argue that Apple's APIs are insufficient-- well, I don't know, maybe they are. If the reason Netflix's app behaves badly is that iOS doesn't permit it to behave well, then that's Apple's fault. If Apple provides the API and Netflix doesn't use it properly, then that's on Netflix.
But I still say, "Who needs real multitasking on a phone?" What I need from Netflix's app is a good suspend/resume routine. I don't need Netflix to decode video in the background when it's not being displayed. All it's going to do is kill my battery life and steal processor cycles from whatever else I'm doing on that phone.
If this is the case, if I'm switching between my ebook and wikipedia, wouldn't it be more efficient to keep the ebook in memory, than to clear memory, close the application, re initialize the application, and then load the book back into memory?
Depends on what you're keeping in memory and what you're doing when the application is "closed". We're talking about a computer with limited processing power, limited battery power, and limited memory, but fast internal storage.
So here's the issue: if you're talking about a single PDF viewer running in the background while you take a quick look at a single webpage, then yeah, it might be just as well to keep the PDF viewer running. But where do you draw the line? You can have a lot of different applications running at once, and if you have a bunch running in the background, you're going to start running out of resources quickly.
So the smart thing to do for these sorts of devices is what Apple has done. They provide programmers with the APIs to run things in the background if it's something that really makes sense (playing audio, for example) while also providing an API to suspend the current state of the application to disk. This way they basically allow developers to give the users most of the benefits of multitasking while preventing the need for users to track/manage application usage. The alternative is basically that I (as the user) need to be very watchful about background applications and constantly close unused applications in order to get decent performance.
The other alternative would be to provide beefed up system specs (more processor/RAM, larger battery, making a thicker/heavier and more expensive device) as well as providing better application management. At that point, you may as well buy a Macbook Air.
That sounds like it might be poor programming on Netflix's part, not necessarily a problem with the OS.