Google has nowhere near that level of stranglehold
Yeah, there are a couple of major differences. First, isn't Chrome open source? At least most of it? It's hard to argue that Chrome is ensuring vendor lock-in to the extent that the source code is available to be forked. But also, Chrome isn't really able to leverage such a dominant OS to force the browser on people. There's Android and ChromeOS, but neither really give Google the level of control over the computer market that Microsoft had back in the day. Web developers are generally not going to create websites that won't work in Firefox and Safari.
Documentaries or films are speech, not a campaign contribution.
Well it seems that was part of the dispute: How do you distinguish between a documentary film with a political slant and a campaign commercial pretending to be a documentary?
The answer seems to be: You can't. Not really.
None of that changes that Citizens United doesn't produce bona fide documentaries. They produce campaign advertisements disguised as documentaries. It's sort of like how late-night infomercials sometimes pretend to be talk shows. They're ads.
Do you really think the government should be in the business of saying that Michael Moore's films are documentaries and were therefore OK but Citizens United's were campaign spending and hence were not?
Well first, to give a direct and simple answer: Yes, the government should be "in the business" of deciding what legally constitutes a campaign contribution, and what does not.
To explain a bit more, the government should have some role in regulating campaign contributions, in order to prevent bribery and other forms of undue influence. Once you accept that, then before the government can even consider whether a given campaign contribution is legal, it needs to decide what constitutes a "campaign contribution". There needs to be some legal basis for that decision, and the law should be applied evenly and fairly, but absolutely the government needs to "be in the business" of deciding what's a campaign contribution and what's not.
Now, how that gets applied is an additional question on top of that. Part of the distinction that the government apparently ended up making is that Michael Moore is a "bona fide" filmmaker, and Citizen's United is not. I wouldn't argue that should be the only factor in deciding a case like that, but it seems reasonable to include that distinction as part of the decision-making process. Michael Moore has a long career of making documentaries on a variety of subjects. Sure, there is a definite political slant to most of his films, but it's clear that he's not just making a political campaign ad masquerading as a documentary.
What I was really pointing out, though, was the irony of engaging in a bunch of behaviors and doing what they can to become a "bona fide" filmmaker, intentionally so that they could then create political campaign advertisements masquerading as documentaries. In case you're not quite getting it, "bona fide" basically means "in good faith". They're intentionally trying to subvert the law so that they'll have to be considered "bona fide" filmmakers. They're acting in bad faith to meet the legal requirement of acting in good faith. Hence, irony.
Now what does the government do about that? If the meet any legal standards for acting in good faith, and there's no legal evidence that they're acting in bad faith, then it's true the government probably needs to treat them as "bona fide" filmmakers. That's the nature of the law. There still might be other legal restrictions that will prevent them from doing some of the things they'd like to, but they'll have to be treated as "bona fide" even though they clearly aren't.
In the wake of these decisions, Citizens United sought to establish itself as a bona fide commercial film maker before the 2008 elections, producing several documentary films between 2005 and 2007.
It's kind of funny. They behaved inauthentically and deceptively in order to establish that they were acting in good faith, so that they could abuse the law.
Does anyone just sell a stock Android tablet with good hardware, that can be updated to the latest Android as it's released? Whenever I've looked into it, it's always like, every manufacturer has their own Android tweaks that some people think are decent and some people think are terrible, and you have to wait for the manufacturer to port those tweaks to the new version of Android before you can upgrade. I don't really get why tablets can't be more like desktops/laptops. I don't need Dell to make a special version of Windows or Linux for each laptop model in order to upgrade to the latest version.
Does anyone make a nice 7" tablet running stock Android, pretty much guaranteed to get the latest updates as long as the hardware is capable of running it?
I'm not sure what features there really are to add to a simple IMAP/POP client.
And that's the thing, I really think that a project like Thunderbird should pick a lane and stick in it. Do you want to be a IMAP/POP client? Cool. Be that. Keep it simple, and make it robust, secure, and fast.
Or else, be ambitious and try to be Outlook. That's fine. You can be a groupware client. But that also needs a server side to be really practical. You can't just perpetually dump half-assed features into the client end and think that's a path forward.
I'd love to see a real competitor to the Outlook/Exchange ecosystem with open source and open standards, and if someone were ambitious enough to make a real play for that, I'd applaud them. It seems like everyone is abandoning the whole idea, though, in favor of cloud hosted solutions (either O365 or G Suite), so I don't see that happening. Failing that, I think they should probably just quit faffing about and make a nice, rock-solid, no-nonsense POP/IMAP client.
Even the "couple of criminal convictions" you mention have nothing to do with what you're talking about.
Nothing to do with it? They were convicted of lying to the FBI when the FBI was investigating the Russian interference in the election. How does that have "nothing to do with" the Russian investigation in the election?
I don't know if you're a paid shill, or just a misinformed loon who buys into every story from Fox and Friend or Infowars. If the latter, do a little research before commenting.
As a private citizen, Trump Jr. is allowed to speak to anybody he wants. It's called freedom of speech.
As a part of a presidential campaign, he is not allowed to solicit assistance from hostile foreign intelligence agencies.
The person Trump Jr. spoke to was not a representative of the Russian government.
Did you read the emails? Listen to Trump Jr's own story about the meeting? She wasn't a "representative" in the sense of an elected official, but she was talking to the campaign on behalf of the Russian government. The email chain even indicates that it was part of an ongoing campaign by the Russian government, not a one-off. According to Trump Jr's own story, she wanted to talk about Russian sanctions. The whole issue of Russian adoptions is about the sanctions.
Nobody in the Trump campaign had the CAPACITY to help Russia
If they hadn't gotten caught conspiring with Russia, they very well might have had the capacity to drop sanctions against Russia, which is clearly what Russia was after. Even Trump Jr.'s story indicates that Russia was offering to fix the election in exchange for dropping sanctions once they were in office.
Just lie after lie uncovered about meeting with Russians. Just that.
Well, there are the lies about all the various meetings that people had with Russians. And then there's the fact that many of them improper and some arguably illegal. Donald Trump Jr. met with a representative of the Russian government to discuss the Russians helping with the election in exchange for dropping Russian sanctions. The Russians did help the Trump campaign, and then Flynn promised the Russians that they would drop sanctions. Trump went on TV and asked the Russians to release Clinton's emails if they had it. Trump's campaign manager was laundering money that Putin's friends had paid him.
There's tons of evidence of various shapes and sizes. We now have a couple of criminal convictions, even. There's just no direct evidence that Trump was aware of a particular crime being committed by his campaign. But... that's the evidence available to the public. We know crimes were committed and the Trump campaign solicited aid from the Russian government just with the evidence that has become public. We don't know what evidence Mueller has.
I understand your point but you haven't shown how not patching on bare metal is less secure than not patching on the cloud.
That's not his argument. His argument is, your internal IT probably sucks and isn't patching. And more than patching, they might have introduced a bunch of other attack vectors because they don't really know what they're doing, whereas major cloud providers have security experts on staff.
The other thing you haven't mentioned is why it would be more secure to host an OS which is hosted on a OS which is hosted on bare metal.
I also don't think that was the argument. Though honestly, it generally makes sense to virtualize your servers rather than install on bare-metal, even if you're not putting those VMs "in the cloud". Yes, it does have the potential to add some avenues of attack, but the additional security risks are minimal as long as you're using a decent hypervisor and you have reasonable security practices. The reasons to virtualize are generally not related to security.
My point in all this is that when you pass control to someone who you can't completely evaluate...
Yes, I agree that this is a concern when dealing with cloud providers. How much do you trust a company like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon? Do you trust them to employ good security people and conduct good security practices? You won't be able to evaluate them, so you have to trust them. Honestly, I don't trust them entirely.
But you know who I trust less? Most IT people. If you pick a random organization, whether it's a government agency or private business, and then ask, "Would you rather have their IT staff running your infrastructure, or have Google running it?" I would almost certainly say "Google".
However, the idea that this will improve security is laughable.
It depends on how well their in-house services are maintained. I wouldn't be so sure that all of the government agencies have great, or even competent, IT staff, or even a sensible person deciding the budget. And I don't even say that as a slam against the government. In my experience, very few companies have a competent IT staff.
But if you have some crappy old unpatched and unmaintained IT infrastructure, then moving it to a cloud provider where the infrastructure is managed and maintained by experts can be a substantial security improvement. I'd sooner trust the security of Office 365 mail hosting than the security of most companies' internal Exchange server.
Now, I think there's a different issue that makes me uneasy when thinking about all of this: I'm just not sure the government should be outsourcing their IT at all. If they use Office 365 for their email for example, what happens when they're considering some anti-trust action against Microsoft? Can Microsoft be trusted not to peek at relevant communications? If someone needs help and contacts support, is it possible that a Microsoft employee would see something compromising? If the government did something that Microsoft didn't like, could Microsoft potentially shut off their service in retaliation?
I haven't thought much about it before, but I'm actually thinking that there should be a government intelligence agency devoted entirely to defensive cyber-security. That is, their directive should bar them from surveillance or pro-active spying of any kind, and focus entirely on developing systems and protocols that protect data, and have very strict controls on what information it can share with other intelligence agencies. Maybe there's something like that already, but an organization like that should run the government's email and servers and make sure the security is top notch, and completely free of possible conflicts of interest.
As things stand, you can't get Disney films on Netflix
That's not true. I remember seeing Moana on there recently. They have a bunch of Marvel films. The Marvel TV shows are produced jointly by Netflix and Disney. Rogue One is on Netflix. I think there may be a Pixar film or two.
I'm not arguing with your larger point, which is that Disney has gotten awfully big, and we should be on the lookout for anticompetitive practices. However, it's not true that there's no Disney content on Netflix.
It's not the biggest problem, but it's one that I've seen a lot and isn't often recognized: Trying to fix organizational problems with IT systems.
What I mean is, if people aren't doing their jobs because management won't enforce the rules, you can't fix that by putting in an automated system that notifies people that they aren't doing their jobs. If people don't know how to do the job because they're dumb and untrained, you can't just give them a sign-in to online training courses and expect them to catch up.
Things like management and training take effort and attention, and until AI gets clever enough to make managers obsolete, an automated system isn't going to do it.
It's one thing to create edited video that fools a casual observer, and another that stands up to forensic analysis.
I don't know how far we are from having undetectable fakes. I don't know if we can stop that from happening, and I don't know what we do if we reach that point. I could see there being something where each camera manufacturer embeds certificate in each camera, which can then be used to digitally sign each frame of video. I'm sure there'd be downsides and it wouldn't make things absolutely tamper-proof, but it could make undetectable forgeries harder to create.
I suspect there will be a bit of an arms race between forgers and people trying to make forgeries difficult, sort of the same way the government keeps creating anti-counterfeit measures for money. It doesn't 100% stop counterfeiters, but it generally makes it possible to detect counterfeit money if you're looking for it.
But they will, and there will be many, not just Bitcoin.
I don't think so, on a few different levels and for a few different reasons.
First, as to why there won't be many: It's too much to keep track of. You need to verify the integrity of each cryptocurrency and keep track of the exchange rate. It's not like people are just going to accept a cryptocurrency because it's been invented. So if cryptocurrencies do take hold, people will likely adopt a small number of well regulated ones. Far from providing a currency outside of government control, people will probably only accept a currency en masse if/when governmental bodies audit the generation of the currency and insure digital bitcoin wallets as bank accounts.
I don't think that will happen, though, at least not with Bitcoin. The market is going to crash, even if only because it has become so speculative. That's going to hurt people's trust in it.
What's more, as it stands, I've been hearing the transaction cost is too high. The energy costs of mining are too high. I'm not an expert on those subjects, but it just doesn't sound sustainable.
That's fine, if as a statistician you want to ignore anecdotal evidence. When looked at it narrowly through the scope of statistics, of course anecdotal evidence is going to come up as unreliable. Statistics deals with large datasets, and treats each data point the same.
However, from the standpoint of someone who is generally intelligent, or even from the standpoint of a scientist, anecdotal evidence is very important. A smart person can evaluate each example with some skepticism, and even one event can be instructive. For science, investigation often starts when during observation, some anecdotal evidence is noticed. One could argue that science is ultimately a process of turning anecdotal evidence into statistical evidence to determine whether it's reliable enough.
But you're a statistician. Fine, we won't tell you how to be a statistician. I'm just telling you how to avoid being an idiot with a stick up your butt.
I agree completely. And I don't even think the fitness tracking is doing anything by itself.
You get healthier when you change your behavior. I think keeping track of your progress helps keep you motivates, and helps you understand the effect your behavior is having. When you keep track of how far or long you're running, you can see your endurance improve. When you track your weight, you can see whether your behavior is causing weight loss. When you take a break, you can see your endurance drop off and your weight increase. Being able to see all that helps you adjust what your doing, and can encourage you to keep up the behavior.
Honestly, you could do the same thing by manually tracking your weight and your workouts. Fitness trackers just make some of that more convenient.
That's great, just stick with it! I think the problem with a lot of these things is, if you don't keep up the new behaviors, it won't continue to work. But I agree that keeping track of your progress is hugely encouraging, and it helps you know when you're doing the right thing.
I have anecdotal evidence that says otherwise. I've lost 50 pounds in the last year, and I'd give some of the credit to fitness tracking. Once I was collecting data on my health, the part of me that used to obsessively play CRPGs took over, and I started trying to improve all my stats. I believe taking regular measurements and gamifying the whole thing really helped me achieve my goals.
Now you can point out that it's only anecdotal evidence, but you shouldn't always ignore anecdotal evidence. If fitness tracking worked for one person, that means it can work. It just might not work for everyone in all situations. I could see someone thinking, subconsciously, "Well I'm tracking my fitness now, so I'm going to get healthier, so I don't have to worry as much about my diet and exercise." Obviously that's not going to work. Still, even if it turns out to be generally true that fitness trackers don't lead to weight loss, I'm pretty sure it's not true that fitness trackers can't offer weight-loss benefits.
You ask the question, "Are There Any Good Smartwatches Or Fitness Trackers?" when you already know the answer. Your real question, which you then go on to ask, is "Are there any smartwatches that fit my specific use case, personal desires, and arbitrary taste?"
You think Android is cool and want an android watch. You think FitBit makes the best fitness trackers, but that opinion doesn't seem to be based on anything particular. But your ultimate judgement is based on which ones you think are cool vs nerdy. You don't want to spend much money and you think everything is overpriced. Oh, and you don't like Apple in general.
Great. That's you. But you're not asking if there are good devices. You're saying, "Here are a bunch of devices that I personally like for arbitrary reasons." I guess nothing knocks your socks off, none of it is perfect, or you wouldn't be asking the question. But if there was a great perfect device that everyone agreed on, it'd likely take over the market and you would have heard of it.
And then the whole thing is wrapped up by the most useless statement ever: "The purchase decision, as with everything tech, depends on the features you want at the price you're willing to pay."
It would not surprise me if you were destitute in two weeks, and it would not surprise me that you are going to wish you actually did this.
I think one of the mistakes people make is in trying to judge these things in hindsight. Basically, they look at where things are now, and think, "The smart thing would have been to sink my life's savings into bitcoin a few years ago, and now I'd be a millionaire."
But that's not true. I mean, it might be that you'd be a millionaire now, but that doesn't mean it's the "smart thing". It's a dangerous gamble. In hindsight you know that it would have paid off, but that doesn't mean it would have been a smart decision at the time.
It's like betting on the winner of the Super Bowl 5 years from now. Sure, if you somehow knew who would win the Super Bowl 5 years from now, you could probably get great odds by placing your bet now and make a boatload of money. However, since it's so entirely speculative, there is no team for which betting that they'll with the Super Bowl in 2023 is a smart bet.
This creates a paradoxical asymmetry. At almost every moment up until now, it would have been a profitable investment to put all of your money into bitcoin, looking at it now, in the past tense. However, at every one of those moments, it would have been a poor investment to put all of your money into bitcoin, looking at it at the time, in the present tense.
In abstract, sure, but that's an oversimplification. It's like if people were talking about the dangers of heroin use, and you said, "Well it's not really bad for you since we all die eventually."
Slashdot Mirror
Google has nowhere near that level of stranglehold
Yeah, there are a couple of major differences. First, isn't Chrome open source? At least most of it? It's hard to argue that Chrome is ensuring vendor lock-in to the extent that the source code is available to be forked. But also, Chrome isn't really able to leverage such a dominant OS to force the browser on people. There's Android and ChromeOS, but neither really give Google the level of control over the computer market that Microsoft had back in the day. Web developers are generally not going to create websites that won't work in Firefox and Safari.
Documentaries or films are speech, not a campaign contribution.
Well it seems that was part of the dispute: How do you distinguish between a documentary film with a political slant and a campaign commercial pretending to be a documentary?
The answer seems to be: You can't. Not really.
None of that changes that Citizens United doesn't produce bona fide documentaries. They produce campaign advertisements disguised as documentaries. It's sort of like how late-night infomercials sometimes pretend to be talk shows. They're ads.
Do you really think the government should be in the business of saying that Michael Moore's films are documentaries and were therefore OK but Citizens United's were campaign spending and hence were not?
Well first, to give a direct and simple answer: Yes, the government should be "in the business" of deciding what legally constitutes a campaign contribution, and what does not.
To explain a bit more, the government should have some role in regulating campaign contributions, in order to prevent bribery and other forms of undue influence. Once you accept that, then before the government can even consider whether a given campaign contribution is legal, it needs to decide what constitutes a "campaign contribution". There needs to be some legal basis for that decision, and the law should be applied evenly and fairly, but absolutely the government needs to "be in the business" of deciding what's a campaign contribution and what's not.
Now, how that gets applied is an additional question on top of that. Part of the distinction that the government apparently ended up making is that Michael Moore is a "bona fide" filmmaker, and Citizen's United is not. I wouldn't argue that should be the only factor in deciding a case like that, but it seems reasonable to include that distinction as part of the decision-making process. Michael Moore has a long career of making documentaries on a variety of subjects. Sure, there is a definite political slant to most of his films, but it's clear that he's not just making a political campaign ad masquerading as a documentary.
What I was really pointing out, though, was the irony of engaging in a bunch of behaviors and doing what they can to become a "bona fide" filmmaker, intentionally so that they could then create political campaign advertisements masquerading as documentaries. In case you're not quite getting it, "bona fide" basically means "in good faith". They're intentionally trying to subvert the law so that they'll have to be considered "bona fide" filmmakers. They're acting in bad faith to meet the legal requirement of acting in good faith. Hence, irony.
Now what does the government do about that? If the meet any legal standards for acting in good faith, and there's no legal evidence that they're acting in bad faith, then it's true the government probably needs to treat them as "bona fide" filmmakers. That's the nature of the law. There still might be other legal restrictions that will prevent them from doing some of the things they'd like to, but they'll have to be treated as "bona fide" even though they clearly aren't.
In the wake of these decisions, Citizens United sought to establish itself as a bona fide commercial film maker before the 2008 elections, producing several documentary films between 2005 and 2007.
It's kind of funny. They behaved inauthentically and deceptively in order to establish that they were acting in good faith, so that they could abuse the law.
Does anyone just sell a stock Android tablet with good hardware, that can be updated to the latest Android as it's released? Whenever I've looked into it, it's always like, every manufacturer has their own Android tweaks that some people think are decent and some people think are terrible, and you have to wait for the manufacturer to port those tweaks to the new version of Android before you can upgrade. I don't really get why tablets can't be more like desktops/laptops. I don't need Dell to make a special version of Windows or Linux for each laptop model in order to upgrade to the latest version.
Does anyone make a nice 7" tablet running stock Android, pretty much guaranteed to get the latest updates as long as the hardware is capable of running it?
I'm not sure what features there really are to add to a simple IMAP/POP client.
And that's the thing, I really think that a project like Thunderbird should pick a lane and stick in it. Do you want to be a IMAP/POP client? Cool. Be that. Keep it simple, and make it robust, secure, and fast.
Or else, be ambitious and try to be Outlook. That's fine. You can be a groupware client. But that also needs a server side to be really practical. You can't just perpetually dump half-assed features into the client end and think that's a path forward.
I'd love to see a real competitor to the Outlook/Exchange ecosystem with open source and open standards, and if someone were ambitious enough to make a real play for that, I'd applaud them. It seems like everyone is abandoning the whole idea, though, in favor of cloud hosted solutions (either O365 or G Suite), so I don't see that happening. Failing that, I think they should probably just quit faffing about and make a nice, rock-solid, no-nonsense POP/IMAP client.
Even the "couple of criminal convictions" you mention have nothing to do with what you're talking about.
Nothing to do with it? They were convicted of lying to the FBI when the FBI was investigating the Russian interference in the election. How does that have "nothing to do with" the Russian investigation in the election?
I don't know if you're a paid shill, or just a misinformed loon who buys into every story from Fox and Friend or Infowars. If the latter, do a little research before commenting.
As a private citizen, Trump Jr. is allowed to speak to anybody he wants. It's called freedom of speech.
As a part of a presidential campaign, he is not allowed to solicit assistance from hostile foreign intelligence agencies.
The person Trump Jr. spoke to was not a representative of the Russian government.
Did you read the emails? Listen to Trump Jr's own story about the meeting? She wasn't a "representative" in the sense of an elected official, but she was talking to the campaign on behalf of the Russian government. The email chain even indicates that it was part of an ongoing campaign by the Russian government, not a one-off. According to Trump Jr's own story, she wanted to talk about Russian sanctions. The whole issue of Russian adoptions is about the sanctions.
Nobody in the Trump campaign had the CAPACITY to help Russia
If they hadn't gotten caught conspiring with Russia, they very well might have had the capacity to drop sanctions against Russia, which is clearly what Russia was after. Even Trump Jr.'s story indicates that Russia was offering to fix the election in exchange for dropping sanctions once they were in office.
Great argument.
Since you're argument is "IS NOT!" I think the only appropriate counter argument is "IS TOO!"
Flynn and Papadopoulos.
Oh, right, but those aren't "real" convictions of "real" crimes. And that guy over there isn't a true Scotsman.
Just lie after lie uncovered about meeting with Russians. Just that.
Well, there are the lies about all the various meetings that people had with Russians. And then there's the fact that many of them improper and some arguably illegal. Donald Trump Jr. met with a representative of the Russian government to discuss the Russians helping with the election in exchange for dropping Russian sanctions. The Russians did help the Trump campaign, and then Flynn promised the Russians that they would drop sanctions. Trump went on TV and asked the Russians to release Clinton's emails if they had it. Trump's campaign manager was laundering money that Putin's friends had paid him.
There's tons of evidence of various shapes and sizes. We now have a couple of criminal convictions, even. There's just no direct evidence that Trump was aware of a particular crime being committed by his campaign. But... that's the evidence available to the public. We know crimes were committed and the Trump campaign solicited aid from the Russian government just with the evidence that has become public. We don't know what evidence Mueller has.
I understand your point but you haven't shown how not patching on bare metal is less secure than not patching on the cloud.
That's not his argument. His argument is, your internal IT probably sucks and isn't patching. And more than patching, they might have introduced a bunch of other attack vectors because they don't really know what they're doing, whereas major cloud providers have security experts on staff.
The other thing you haven't mentioned is why it would be more secure to host an OS which is hosted on a OS which is hosted on bare metal.
I also don't think that was the argument. Though honestly, it generally makes sense to virtualize your servers rather than install on bare-metal, even if you're not putting those VMs "in the cloud". Yes, it does have the potential to add some avenues of attack, but the additional security risks are minimal as long as you're using a decent hypervisor and you have reasonable security practices. The reasons to virtualize are generally not related to security.
My point in all this is that when you pass control to someone who you can't completely evaluate...
Yes, I agree that this is a concern when dealing with cloud providers. How much do you trust a company like Google, Microsoft, or Amazon? Do you trust them to employ good security people and conduct good security practices? You won't be able to evaluate them, so you have to trust them. Honestly, I don't trust them entirely.
But you know who I trust less? Most IT people. If you pick a random organization, whether it's a government agency or private business, and then ask, "Would you rather have their IT staff running your infrastructure, or have Google running it?" I would almost certainly say "Google".
However, the idea that this will improve security is laughable.
It depends on how well their in-house services are maintained. I wouldn't be so sure that all of the government agencies have great, or even competent, IT staff, or even a sensible person deciding the budget. And I don't even say that as a slam against the government. In my experience, very few companies have a competent IT staff.
But if you have some crappy old unpatched and unmaintained IT infrastructure, then moving it to a cloud provider where the infrastructure is managed and maintained by experts can be a substantial security improvement. I'd sooner trust the security of Office 365 mail hosting than the security of most companies' internal Exchange server.
Now, I think there's a different issue that makes me uneasy when thinking about all of this: I'm just not sure the government should be outsourcing their IT at all. If they use Office 365 for their email for example, what happens when they're considering some anti-trust action against Microsoft? Can Microsoft be trusted not to peek at relevant communications? If someone needs help and contacts support, is it possible that a Microsoft employee would see something compromising? If the government did something that Microsoft didn't like, could Microsoft potentially shut off their service in retaliation?
I haven't thought much about it before, but I'm actually thinking that there should be a government intelligence agency devoted entirely to defensive cyber-security. That is, their directive should bar them from surveillance or pro-active spying of any kind, and focus entirely on developing systems and protocols that protect data, and have very strict controls on what information it can share with other intelligence agencies. Maybe there's something like that already, but an organization like that should run the government's email and servers and make sure the security is top notch, and completely free of possible conflicts of interest.
As things stand, you can't get Disney films on Netflix
That's not true. I remember seeing Moana on there recently. They have a bunch of Marvel films. The Marvel TV shows are produced jointly by Netflix and Disney. Rogue One is on Netflix. I think there may be a Pixar film or two.
I'm not arguing with your larger point, which is that Disney has gotten awfully big, and we should be on the lookout for anticompetitive practices. However, it's not true that there's no Disney content on Netflix.
It's not the biggest problem, but it's one that I've seen a lot and isn't often recognized: Trying to fix organizational problems with IT systems.
What I mean is, if people aren't doing their jobs because management won't enforce the rules, you can't fix that by putting in an automated system that notifies people that they aren't doing their jobs. If people don't know how to do the job because they're dumb and untrained, you can't just give them a sign-in to online training courses and expect them to catch up.
Things like management and training take effort and attention, and until AI gets clever enough to make managers obsolete, an automated system isn't going to do it.
It's one thing to create edited video that fools a casual observer, and another that stands up to forensic analysis.
I don't know how far we are from having undetectable fakes. I don't know if we can stop that from happening, and I don't know what we do if we reach that point. I could see there being something where each camera manufacturer embeds certificate in each camera, which can then be used to digitally sign each frame of video. I'm sure there'd be downsides and it wouldn't make things absolutely tamper-proof, but it could make undetectable forgeries harder to create.
I suspect there will be a bit of an arms race between forgers and people trying to make forgeries difficult, sort of the same way the government keeps creating anti-counterfeit measures for money. It doesn't 100% stop counterfeiters, but it generally makes it possible to detect counterfeit money if you're looking for it.
But they will, and there will be many, not just Bitcoin.
I don't think so, on a few different levels and for a few different reasons.
First, as to why there won't be many: It's too much to keep track of. You need to verify the integrity of each cryptocurrency and keep track of the exchange rate. It's not like people are just going to accept a cryptocurrency because it's been invented. So if cryptocurrencies do take hold, people will likely adopt a small number of well regulated ones. Far from providing a currency outside of government control, people will probably only accept a currency en masse if/when governmental bodies audit the generation of the currency and insure digital bitcoin wallets as bank accounts.
I don't think that will happen, though, at least not with Bitcoin. The market is going to crash, even if only because it has become so speculative. That's going to hurt people's trust in it.
What's more, as it stands, I've been hearing the transaction cost is too high. The energy costs of mining are too high. I'm not an expert on those subjects, but it just doesn't sound sustainable.
That's fine, if as a statistician you want to ignore anecdotal evidence. When looked at it narrowly through the scope of statistics, of course anecdotal evidence is going to come up as unreliable. Statistics deals with large datasets, and treats each data point the same.
However, from the standpoint of someone who is generally intelligent, or even from the standpoint of a scientist, anecdotal evidence is very important. A smart person can evaluate each example with some skepticism, and even one event can be instructive. For science, investigation often starts when during observation, some anecdotal evidence is noticed. One could argue that science is ultimately a process of turning anecdotal evidence into statistical evidence to determine whether it's reliable enough.
But you're a statistician. Fine, we won't tell you how to be a statistician. I'm just telling you how to avoid being an idiot with a stick up your butt.
I agree completely. And I don't even think the fitness tracking is doing anything by itself.
You get healthier when you change your behavior. I think keeping track of your progress helps keep you motivates, and helps you understand the effect your behavior is having. When you keep track of how far or long you're running, you can see your endurance improve. When you track your weight, you can see whether your behavior is causing weight loss. When you take a break, you can see your endurance drop off and your weight increase. Being able to see all that helps you adjust what your doing, and can encourage you to keep up the behavior.
Honestly, you could do the same thing by manually tracking your weight and your workouts. Fitness trackers just make some of that more convenient.
That's great, just stick with it! I think the problem with a lot of these things is, if you don't keep up the new behaviors, it won't continue to work. But I agree that keeping track of your progress is hugely encouraging, and it helps you know when you're doing the right thing.
I have anecdotal evidence that says otherwise. I've lost 50 pounds in the last year, and I'd give some of the credit to fitness tracking. Once I was collecting data on my health, the part of me that used to obsessively play CRPGs took over, and I started trying to improve all my stats. I believe taking regular measurements and gamifying the whole thing really helped me achieve my goals.
Now you can point out that it's only anecdotal evidence, but you shouldn't always ignore anecdotal evidence. If fitness tracking worked for one person, that means it can work. It just might not work for everyone in all situations. I could see someone thinking, subconsciously, "Well I'm tracking my fitness now, so I'm going to get healthier, so I don't have to worry as much about my diet and exercise." Obviously that's not going to work. Still, even if it turns out to be generally true that fitness trackers don't lead to weight loss, I'm pretty sure it's not true that fitness trackers can't offer weight-loss benefits.
You ask the question, "Are There Any Good Smartwatches Or Fitness Trackers?" when you already know the answer. Your real question, which you then go on to ask, is "Are there any smartwatches that fit my specific use case, personal desires, and arbitrary taste?"
You think Android is cool and want an android watch. You think FitBit makes the best fitness trackers, but that opinion doesn't seem to be based on anything particular. But your ultimate judgement is based on which ones you think are cool vs nerdy. You don't want to spend much money and you think everything is overpriced. Oh, and you don't like Apple in general.
Great. That's you. But you're not asking if there are good devices. You're saying, "Here are a bunch of devices that I personally like for arbitrary reasons." I guess nothing knocks your socks off, none of it is perfect, or you wouldn't be asking the question. But if there was a great perfect device that everyone agreed on, it'd likely take over the market and you would have heard of it.
And then the whole thing is wrapped up by the most useless statement ever: "The purchase decision, as with everything tech, depends on the features you want at the price you're willing to pay."
It would not surprise me if you were destitute in two weeks, and it would not surprise me that you are going to wish you actually did this.
I think one of the mistakes people make is in trying to judge these things in hindsight. Basically, they look at where things are now, and think, "The smart thing would have been to sink my life's savings into bitcoin a few years ago, and now I'd be a millionaire."
But that's not true. I mean, it might be that you'd be a millionaire now, but that doesn't mean it's the "smart thing". It's a dangerous gamble. In hindsight you know that it would have paid off, but that doesn't mean it would have been a smart decision at the time.
It's like betting on the winner of the Super Bowl 5 years from now. Sure, if you somehow knew who would win the Super Bowl 5 years from now, you could probably get great odds by placing your bet now and make a boatload of money. However, since it's so entirely speculative, there is no team for which betting that they'll with the Super Bowl in 2023 is a smart bet.
This creates a paradoxical asymmetry. At almost every moment up until now, it would have been a profitable investment to put all of your money into bitcoin, looking at it now, in the past tense. However, at every one of those moments, it would have been a poor investment to put all of your money into bitcoin, looking at it at the time, in the present tense.
In abstract, sure, but that's an oversimplification. It's like if people were talking about the dangers of heroin use, and you said, "Well it's not really bad for you since we all die eventually."