Yeah, because it seems perfectly reasonable for my OS to require me to call the developer periodically in order to remain functional. I'm shocked the contractor who built my house doesn't periodically change the keys to the front door so that I can validate every 6 months that I do, in fact, still own the house. Or that my car doesn't connect electronically every few months to make sure I still have the manufacturer's permission to drive it.
Why would anyone have a problem with this sort of thing? As long as any malfunction can probably be fixed with a phonecall, I don't see how anything could possibly go wrong.
Hmmm... I wonder if that's a defense. Like, "I was about to register as a subversive group, at which time I realized I was no longer subversive and so I didn't have to register. I again became subversive, but when I decided to register, I again ceased to be subversive. Since I couldn't be subversive and register at the same time, I was never able to register."
England did think of it, and they tried to stop the colonists from meeting up, which is precisely why "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" was put into the first amendment.
I don't know how to reconcile those competing objectives by design. One necessitates open systems and standards, the other needs lockdowns and safeguards on data.
I don't think that's the conflict. You can have open systems and standards for security and privacy. Openness is in conflict with something like DRM, but not so much if you're talking about private key encryption in general. (SSL and GPG being fairly good examples)
The bigger problem, I think, is that there's a conflict between security and accessibility. Security requires a certain level of knowledge, and it can be inconvenient. On the Internet today, there's a lot of focus on making things as accessible as possible and easy for a novice to pick up on. For example, if you remove all cookies and user tracking on websites, then you can't really have site-wide preferences and online shopping carts don't work very well.
So yes, it's a trade-off. For the time being, we as a society have demonstrated that we're much more interested in accessibility and convenience than security and privacy.
A little more egregious than that. They intentionally deviated from HTML standards to cause incompatibilities with other browsers, and they used "security" updates to reset IE as the default browser.
Well also they put various hooks into the OS so that, regardless of what you set as your default browser, when you clicked on a link within the OS, IE might come up. There were even allegations that they designed some Windows updates specifically to break competing browsers and cause them to crash.
Anyway, it's not *exactly* the same thing, but it's still pretty crummy that Apple won't allow alternative browsers and mail clients. There was a rumor at one point that AT&T was requiring Apple to control application distribution to prevent things like VoIP and tethering, but there's really no excuse for preventing alternate browsers.
I'm a bit of an Apple fan, but they really need to just open up the iPhone and iPad and allow people to download whatever applications you want. For as much as Apple is benefiting right now from open source projects, they should understand the importance of openness.
Well it's really no weirder than thinking that all "terrorists" are somehow allied. Seriously, some people seem to think that "terrorists" are all a bunch of Muslims that know each other and plan attacks together. Like it makes sense to have a "war on terror" when it's a bunch of disparate groups who may or may not have similar ideologies.
Well and let's be honest, the Internet just isn't a private place at this point.
When it comes to Internet communication, I don't think you get much more private than email, and yet I don't know a single person who bothers to encrypt their email as a matter of course. I don't. I have email sitting in multiple different accounts on servers owned by various companies. I know that there are employees at each company who are capable of reading my email if they choose to. I think they shouldn't and I hope they don't, but my email still isn't encrypted.
On the whole, we rely on really big numbers to keep us safe on the Internet. There are probably billions of email accounts in the world, and each of us it hoping that our email isn't interesting enough for anyone else to bother to look at. Whether you know it or not, that's largely what you're relying on to keep your privacy: your relative unimportance.
It's so much weirder to me that, with all the lack of real privacy online, people expect privacy on sites where the sole purpose of the site is to broadcast personal information about yourself.
you've still shared it with someone who believes that you have no right to privacy, and that if - as their CEO puts it - you don't want someone to know about you doing something, don't do it.
In fairness, he didn't say you had no right to privacy, and the quote is often taken out of context. It was in the context of saying:
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
So he's not saying, "screw you, I don't value your privacy." He's giving a warning that your information is probably not as private as you'd hope regardless of what service providers you're using. Microsoft also keeps records of searches for some amount of time (I believe it's at least 6 months) and they *will* turn that information over to the government. You know what? Your ISP has records of your web surfing, and will probably turn it over to the government if asked. Assuming you don't host your own email, there are employees at your email service provider who can read your email. These are things you should know.
His advice may be a little flippant, but it's not bad. If there's something that you would be totally ashamed if people found out you were doing it, then you should probably at least consider not doing it. That's true regardless of whether that "something" takes place on the Internet. Of course, the Internet, as it exists today, isn't any good at securing privacy. Most people don't encrypt their email, which means even if you want to, you can't. Websites keep track of which IP requests come from and your ISP keeps records of your IP. Unless you're rerouting encrypted traffic through proxies, you have TONS of information out in the open. It would be irresponsible of Google to claim that they can ensure your privacy.
So I'd put it this way: If you absolutely cannot afford to let anyone know that you've done certain things online, then you should either be taking strong enough measures to secure your own privacy that Google couldn't track you if they wanted to, or else you should just not be involved in those activities. Otherwise, you're just taking your chances.
I'd say the much more valid grounds for concern with Google is that, with all the services they offer, it's such one-stop-shopping for anyone looking to invade your privacy.
There are also a lot of ways to make life miserable for Verizon employees and executives besides a DDoS, some of them even legal. If I pissed off everyone at 4chan and only got a DDoS attack, I'd consider myself lucky.
Also, heavier vehicles do more damage to whatever they hit. A Honda Civic smashing into a wall is one thing, but I wouldn't want to be in a Honda Civic that gets hit by a Hummer.
One thing to consider is that, if we ever got regular passenger vehicles to be substantially lighter, then we could pass additional safety regulations for vehicles above a certain weight. There are going to have to be trucks on the road, and so we have to account for that, but there's no real reason why Hummers can't be made subject to additional rules as to when and where you can drive them, if not made illegal for street use altogether.
Lighter vehicles don't necessarily mean less safety. A lot of the danger from car crashes comes not from speed alone, but by the massive amount of momentum of an extremely heavy machine going very fast. If all of our vehicles were much lighter, then we'd all be much safer.
Even people famous for endless tinkering still like a simple, clean user experience once in a while...
... especially if it's something like a phone.
Honestly, I'm not a super-geeky tech genius, but I like to screw around with computers and that has lead to a career in IT. However, I learned a long time ago that I like to keep a separation between "the gadgets that I tinker with" and "the gadgets I depend on." The two can't really be the same, because if I'm screwing around with something long enough, I *will* break it. I'll probably also fix it, but it might take hours or days.
I wan't my phone to work all the time, and therefore I don't want a phone that I need to tinker with.
Well people are psychologically built to defer to authority figures (not all the time, but often), and our natural notion of "authority figures" are people who are stronger, better looking, and more popular. It's unfortunate.
More likely, no one thinks he's famous enough to warrant free stuff. People like... I don't know... Beyonce might get a free phone sent to her in the hopes that she'll be seen talking on it, caught by the paparazzi or whatever. How often is Linus being stalked by paparazzi?
Otherwise reviewers might get free stuff to review, but to my knowledge Linus isn't famous for his reviews. In the case of someone like Bill Gates, he probably wouldn't go into Verizon's local store and ask for a free Windows-based phone or something. He'd more likely email some executive he knows at Motorola (or whoever) and ask to have one sent to him. I don't think Torvalds fits into any of these categories.
to organise your notes you not only read them again, you actually HAVE to understand what you have written down.
Yes, well that was definitely a good side effect. I started doing it because I HAD to organize my notes and type them up shortly after writing them if I wanted to understand what I had written down. My handwriting is terrible and the notes I take are all chicken scratch shorthand for random ideas that even I don't understand a few weeks after I take them. I need to rewrite them within a couple days, or it will become meaningless gibberish even to me.
I would pay a _lot_ of money for a 8.5x11" screen that had enough resolution to behave like my old gridded engineering paper.
Well I might go for an iPad or something like it (assuming you can get a stylus and a decent drawing app), but I still wonder if that would work as well for me. I suspect that I'm used to the texture of paper and the sort of resistance it gives while drawing, and a stylus on a smooth surface might not be as comfortable, at least not at first.
Also, I really wonder how my brain would deal with not having physical pages. I know lots of people will probably say, "what's the difference?" and I admit that it's weird, but I suspect that understanding I have certain pages that actually exist in a certain order plays into how I take notes. If you virtualize all that and turn the pages into computer files, I think I'd process that differently, and it might change the way I take notes-- for better or for worse.
Sounds like your classes are just too easy to justify notes. That happens, but wait until you want to be really really good at something hard. You'll want good note-taking skills.
Yeah, this sort of thing is why pen & paper can still beat a laptop. If you're just jotting down some ideas or writing out a linear outline, then laptops can be good, especially considering that a lot of people under 30 write pretty slowly by hand and can type relatively quickly. However, if your notes contain a lot of mathematical symbols or technical diagrams, those things can be hard to input quickly with a keyboard and mouse.
And even if your notes don't need symbols, typing notes can get wonky, depending on the subject and what kind of note-taker you are. In my notes, you always see things scrawled all over the page, laid out in a web with some things circled and big arrows drawn all over the place. Sometimes it also helps me concentrate if I can doodle (I don't know why). Back in college I learned that if I really wanted to learn something, I had to take notes by hand, and then go back and organize my notes in a more linear way and type them up. That's my general recommendation on how to handle things, but different people are different and YMMV.
Some of it may be helped by something with a touchscreen and stylus, but I'm not sure pen and paper aren't still superior.
There's nothing wrong with taking notes or not taking notes on any particular piece of information. The problem is that teachers have apparently spent the last several decades trying to instruct their students that they must *always* take notes and that "taking notes" amounts to writing down everything the teacher said.
The notes that you take should be for yourself. The instructor mentions a term that you don't recognize? Write it down so you can look it up later. The instructor describes something in detail that you don't think you'll remember later? Write it down so you'll remember it later. Something your instructor says triggers an idea, or suddenly causes you to understand something you hadn't understood before? Write it down.
Proper note taking is a skill, and you do benefit from putting things down on paper. I know it makes people feel super-smart to sit back and say, "That's ok, I'll remember it." In the end, though, you'll be outperformed by "stupid" people who've learned how to take proper notes and process those notes later. You simply can't hold everything in your head at once.
Oh, I'd totally want 4chan to make the acceptance speech. That'd teach the Nobel Prize committee. I just don't even want to imagine what they'd do with the prize money.
That makes it sound a little too innocuous for my tastes. It's not like 95% of emails are spam, but they're all sitting on a server somewhere and no one has to deal with them, so it's fine. For your car analogy to work for me, it would have to be more like "95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. They're littering the highways, but we can steer around them."
My mail server is seeing a little less than this-- only 85% of incoming email is spam. Still, that means that I have to filter all of that, and meanwhile it takes up storage space and eats small amounts of bandwidth. Every once in a while something gets through, plus valid emails get filtered so I still have to sort through my junk mailbox. It's not killing me or anything, but let's not pretend like this isn't a problem.
I don't think sites like Hulu have DRM in their video files but rather they use Flash to obscure the source of the video so that you can't download it.
To give some perspective, the iphone renders the HTML5 test at about 0.5 fps.
Yeah, but I bet the iPhone renders the Flash test... not at all.
Look, HTML5 is new, and it may be that the standard will need to be improved some more and Apple's implementation needs to be optimized. For now, developers targeting these mobile devices should probably write native programs for best performance. However, I for one am kind of glad Apple is throwing their weight behind a standard rather than some proprietary plugin that, in spite of being around for 15 years, hasn't been shown to have more than limited use, runs like crap, and crashes constantly.
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Yeah, because it seems perfectly reasonable for my OS to require me to call the developer periodically in order to remain functional. I'm shocked the contractor who built my house doesn't periodically change the keys to the front door so that I can validate every 6 months that I do, in fact, still own the house. Or that my car doesn't connect electronically every few months to make sure I still have the manufacturer's permission to drive it.
Why would anyone have a problem with this sort of thing? As long as any malfunction can probably be fixed with a phonecall, I don't see how anything could possibly go wrong.
Hmmm... I wonder if that's a defense. Like, "I was about to register as a subversive group, at which time I realized I was no longer subversive and so I didn't have to register. I again became subversive, but when I decided to register, I again ceased to be subversive. Since I couldn't be subversive and register at the same time, I was never able to register."
England did think of it, and they tried to stop the colonists from meeting up, which is precisely why "the right of the people peaceably to assemble" was put into the first amendment.
I don't know how to reconcile those competing objectives by design. One necessitates open systems and standards, the other needs lockdowns and safeguards on data.
I don't think that's the conflict. You can have open systems and standards for security and privacy. Openness is in conflict with something like DRM, but not so much if you're talking about private key encryption in general. (SSL and GPG being fairly good examples)
The bigger problem, I think, is that there's a conflict between security and accessibility. Security requires a certain level of knowledge, and it can be inconvenient. On the Internet today, there's a lot of focus on making things as accessible as possible and easy for a novice to pick up on. For example, if you remove all cookies and user tracking on websites, then you can't really have site-wide preferences and online shopping carts don't work very well.
So yes, it's a trade-off. For the time being, we as a society have demonstrated that we're much more interested in accessibility and convenience than security and privacy.
I didn't mean to imply that it used to be a private place, but rather that we could choose to make it more private in the future if we wished to.
A little more egregious than that. They intentionally deviated from HTML standards to cause incompatibilities with other browsers, and they used "security" updates to reset IE as the default browser.
Well also they put various hooks into the OS so that, regardless of what you set as your default browser, when you clicked on a link within the OS, IE might come up. There were even allegations that they designed some Windows updates specifically to break competing browsers and cause them to crash.
Anyway, it's not *exactly* the same thing, but it's still pretty crummy that Apple won't allow alternative browsers and mail clients. There was a rumor at one point that AT&T was requiring Apple to control application distribution to prevent things like VoIP and tethering, but there's really no excuse for preventing alternate browsers.
I'm a bit of an Apple fan, but they really need to just open up the iPhone and iPad and allow people to download whatever applications you want. For as much as Apple is benefiting right now from open source projects, they should understand the importance of openness.
Well it's really no weirder than thinking that all "terrorists" are somehow allied. Seriously, some people seem to think that "terrorists" are all a bunch of Muslims that know each other and plan attacks together. Like it makes sense to have a "war on terror" when it's a bunch of disparate groups who may or may not have similar ideologies.
Well and let's be honest, the Internet just isn't a private place at this point.
When it comes to Internet communication, I don't think you get much more private than email, and yet I don't know a single person who bothers to encrypt their email as a matter of course. I don't. I have email sitting in multiple different accounts on servers owned by various companies. I know that there are employees at each company who are capable of reading my email if they choose to. I think they shouldn't and I hope they don't, but my email still isn't encrypted.
On the whole, we rely on really big numbers to keep us safe on the Internet. There are probably billions of email accounts in the world, and each of us it hoping that our email isn't interesting enough for anyone else to bother to look at. Whether you know it or not, that's largely what you're relying on to keep your privacy: your relative unimportance.
It's so much weirder to me that, with all the lack of real privacy online, people expect privacy on sites where the sole purpose of the site is to broadcast personal information about yourself.
you've still shared it with someone who believes that you have no right to privacy, and that if - as their CEO puts it - you don't want someone to know about you doing something, don't do it.
In fairness, he didn't say you had no right to privacy, and the quote is often taken out of context. It was in the context of saying:
If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
So he's not saying, "screw you, I don't value your privacy." He's giving a warning that your information is probably not as private as you'd hope regardless of what service providers you're using. Microsoft also keeps records of searches for some amount of time (I believe it's at least 6 months) and they *will* turn that information over to the government. You know what? Your ISP has records of your web surfing, and will probably turn it over to the government if asked. Assuming you don't host your own email, there are employees at your email service provider who can read your email. These are things you should know.
His advice may be a little flippant, but it's not bad. If there's something that you would be totally ashamed if people found out you were doing it, then you should probably at least consider not doing it. That's true regardless of whether that "something" takes place on the Internet. Of course, the Internet, as it exists today, isn't any good at securing privacy. Most people don't encrypt their email, which means even if you want to, you can't. Websites keep track of which IP requests come from and your ISP keeps records of your IP. Unless you're rerouting encrypted traffic through proxies, you have TONS of information out in the open. It would be irresponsible of Google to claim that they can ensure your privacy.
So I'd put it this way: If you absolutely cannot afford to let anyone know that you've done certain things online, then you should either be taking strong enough measures to secure your own privacy that Google couldn't track you if they wanted to, or else you should just not be involved in those activities. Otherwise, you're just taking your chances.
I'd say the much more valid grounds for concern with Google is that, with all the services they offer, it's such one-stop-shopping for anyone looking to invade your privacy.
Sorry if I'm being too stupid and helpless, but any chance anyone knows were to get a pre-built liveCD image to test this out?
There are also a lot of ways to make life miserable for Verizon employees and executives besides a DDoS, some of them even legal. If I pissed off everyone at 4chan and only got a DDoS attack, I'd consider myself lucky.
Also, heavier vehicles do more damage to whatever they hit. A Honda Civic smashing into a wall is one thing, but I wouldn't want to be in a Honda Civic that gets hit by a Hummer.
One thing to consider is that, if we ever got regular passenger vehicles to be substantially lighter, then we could pass additional safety regulations for vehicles above a certain weight. There are going to have to be trucks on the road, and so we have to account for that, but there's no real reason why Hummers can't be made subject to additional rules as to when and where you can drive them, if not made illegal for street use altogether.
Lighter vehicles don't necessarily mean less safety. A lot of the danger from car crashes comes not from speed alone, but by the massive amount of momentum of an extremely heavy machine going very fast. If all of our vehicles were much lighter, then we'd all be much safer.
Even people famous for endless tinkering still like a simple, clean user experience once in a while...
... especially if it's something like a phone.
Honestly, I'm not a super-geeky tech genius, but I like to screw around with computers and that has lead to a career in IT. However, I learned a long time ago that I like to keep a separation between "the gadgets that I tinker with" and "the gadgets I depend on." The two can't really be the same, because if I'm screwing around with something long enough, I *will* break it. I'll probably also fix it, but it might take hours or days.
I wan't my phone to work all the time, and therefore I don't want a phone that I need to tinker with.
Well people are psychologically built to defer to authority figures (not all the time, but often), and our natural notion of "authority figures" are people who are stronger, better looking, and more popular. It's unfortunate.
More likely, no one thinks he's famous enough to warrant free stuff. People like... I don't know... Beyonce might get a free phone sent to her in the hopes that she'll be seen talking on it, caught by the paparazzi or whatever. How often is Linus being stalked by paparazzi?
Otherwise reviewers might get free stuff to review, but to my knowledge Linus isn't famous for his reviews. In the case of someone like Bill Gates, he probably wouldn't go into Verizon's local store and ask for a free Windows-based phone or something. He'd more likely email some executive he knows at Motorola (or whoever) and ask to have one sent to him. I don't think Torvalds fits into any of these categories.
Well it doesn't need to make it impossible; it only needs to make it difficult or complicated enough to appease the content owners.
to organise your notes you not only read them again, you actually HAVE to understand what you have written down.
Yes, well that was definitely a good side effect. I started doing it because I HAD to organize my notes and type them up shortly after writing them if I wanted to understand what I had written down. My handwriting is terrible and the notes I take are all chicken scratch shorthand for random ideas that even I don't understand a few weeks after I take them. I need to rewrite them within a couple days, or it will become meaningless gibberish even to me.
I would pay a _lot_ of money for a 8.5x11" screen that had enough resolution to behave like my old gridded engineering paper.
Well I might go for an iPad or something like it (assuming you can get a stylus and a decent drawing app), but I still wonder if that would work as well for me. I suspect that I'm used to the texture of paper and the sort of resistance it gives while drawing, and a stylus on a smooth surface might not be as comfortable, at least not at first.
Also, I really wonder how my brain would deal with not having physical pages. I know lots of people will probably say, "what's the difference?" and I admit that it's weird, but I suspect that understanding I have certain pages that actually exist in a certain order plays into how I take notes. If you virtualize all that and turn the pages into computer files, I think I'd process that differently, and it might change the way I take notes-- for better or for worse.
Sounds like your classes are just too easy to justify notes. That happens, but wait until you want to be really really good at something hard. You'll want good note-taking skills.
Yeah, this sort of thing is why pen & paper can still beat a laptop. If you're just jotting down some ideas or writing out a linear outline, then laptops can be good, especially considering that a lot of people under 30 write pretty slowly by hand and can type relatively quickly. However, if your notes contain a lot of mathematical symbols or technical diagrams, those things can be hard to input quickly with a keyboard and mouse.
And even if your notes don't need symbols, typing notes can get wonky, depending on the subject and what kind of note-taker you are. In my notes, you always see things scrawled all over the page, laid out in a web with some things circled and big arrows drawn all over the place. Sometimes it also helps me concentrate if I can doodle (I don't know why). Back in college I learned that if I really wanted to learn something, I had to take notes by hand, and then go back and organize my notes in a more linear way and type them up. That's my general recommendation on how to handle things, but different people are different and YMMV.
Some of it may be helped by something with a touchscreen and stylus, but I'm not sure pen and paper aren't still superior.
Eh? No.
There's nothing wrong with taking notes or not taking notes on any particular piece of information. The problem is that teachers have apparently spent the last several decades trying to instruct their students that they must *always* take notes and that "taking notes" amounts to writing down everything the teacher said.
The notes that you take should be for yourself. The instructor mentions a term that you don't recognize? Write it down so you can look it up later. The instructor describes something in detail that you don't think you'll remember later? Write it down so you'll remember it later. Something your instructor says triggers an idea, or suddenly causes you to understand something you hadn't understood before? Write it down.
Proper note taking is a skill, and you do benefit from putting things down on paper. I know it makes people feel super-smart to sit back and say, "That's ok, I'll remember it." In the end, though, you'll be outperformed by "stupid" people who've learned how to take proper notes and process those notes later. You simply can't hold everything in your head at once.
Oh, I'd totally want 4chan to make the acceptance speech. That'd teach the Nobel Prize committee. I just don't even want to imagine what they'd do with the prize money.
That makes it sound a little too innocuous for my tastes. It's not like 95% of emails are spam, but they're all sitting on a server somewhere and no one has to deal with them, so it's fine. For your car analogy to work for me, it would have to be more like "95% of cars are rusty old heaps of crap that can't move. They're littering the highways, but we can steer around them."
My mail server is seeing a little less than this-- only 85% of incoming email is spam. Still, that means that I have to filter all of that, and meanwhile it takes up storage space and eats small amounts of bandwidth. Every once in a while something gets through, plus valid emails get filtered so I still have to sort through my junk mailbox. It's not killing me or anything, but let's not pretend like this isn't a problem.
I don't think sites like Hulu have DRM in their video files but rather they use Flash to obscure the source of the video so that you can't download it.
To give some perspective, the iphone renders the HTML5 test at about 0.5 fps.
Yeah, but I bet the iPhone renders the Flash test... not at all.
Look, HTML5 is new, and it may be that the standard will need to be improved some more and Apple's implementation needs to be optimized. For now, developers targeting these mobile devices should probably write native programs for best performance. However, I for one am kind of glad Apple is throwing their weight behind a standard rather than some proprietary plugin that, in spite of being around for 15 years, hasn't been shown to have more than limited use, runs like crap, and crashes constantly.