Economies are built on nothing more than perception... it's all about perception and mood.
The best we can hope for is rationalizing after the fact.
To an extent, but at the same time, we should acknowledge that there is such a thing as poor judgement and terrible predictions. You can say, "There's no objective measure of value," but if someone pays $10,000 for a normal slice of Wonder Bread, we can say that they overpaid. If they bought it because they predicted the cost of Wonder Bread would skyrocket in the next two days, we can say that was a bad prediction.
I mean, yes, value is never completely objective, and there's always uncertainty to prediction. However, some things are more valuable than others, and some predictions are better than others.
I hate to bring this to a political place, but I feel like there's a bit of irony and double-think here. I've heard Republicans and "conservatives" saying that suburban and rural locations need help, while vilifying cities as playgrounds for detached elites. I've even heard this kind of statement that the rural areas are "the new inner cities".
But meanwhile, they're also holding onto the idea that cities are decaying liberal wastelands, populated by lazy degenerate criminals and "welfare queens". They've spent decades complaining that the people in the inner city need to take responsibility for their own lives, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But now rural areas are the "new inner city", but it's not their fault. It's economic factors beyond their control. They're not responsible, and don't need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Even when describing the problem in terms of the "inner city", they're often still failing to recognize the similarity between this "new inner city" and the old inner city that they continue to criticize.
Maybe it's time we recognize that the government has a role to play in alleviating the burden of poverty, whether the poverty occurs in the inner city or in rural areas.
The worst that could reasonably happen is that we make a mistake and kill someone that was going to die anyway. So what's the big deal?
Well first, I'd like to point out that we're all going to "die anyway". If you're taking the position that it doesn't matter what you do to a person if they end up dead anyway, then it's equivalent to claiming that it doesn't matter what you do to people. So I think we should accept that it does matter what happens to people if they are "going to die anyway." You might help them live longer, or you might kill them more quickly. You might improve their quality of life, or you might degrade it. If you take someone who would die anyway, and make that life shorter, and degrade their quality of life, that matters.
But even then, making someone's life shorter and worse is not the worst thing that could plausibly happen. For example, in a few decades, we could find out that we hadn't understood exactly how DNA and this editing technology works, and that we've introduced a new genetic disease that's less easy to repair. This new disease has now been spread to the descendants of the people who had this repair done. And if we start using this technology willy-nilly, we might find that instead of a handful of people with the current genetic diseases, we have hundreds of people with a new disease that's even worse.
That's just one idea. It might not be likely but I don't think it's ridiculous to think that we don't fully understand how all this stuff works yet. Part of the problem with this kind of new technology is, by nature of being new, we might not even know what the risks and downsides are yet. It's very difficult to assess the risks of an activity that hasn't been done before, and so one of the risks that needs to be assessed is, "The risk of something completely unknown that we haven't even thought of yet."
It makes sense to have a little forethought and anticipate which kinds of problems you might run into, and how you might deal with them should they arise.
For every problem technology "solves", it creates 10 new ones.
If this statement was supposed to mean "technology makes things 10 times worse," then you're right to call BS. However, it's true that while new technology solves problems, it also creates new ones.
For example, the smart phone has changes the way we live, solving many problems. It's easy to get ahold of people. It's easier to do business on the go. With GPS and maps, it's almost impossible to get lost unless you can't get a signal. We have immediate access to all kinds of media, almost anywhere in the world.
However, there are also loads of associated problems. Everything from the need to keep your battery charged to the adverse effects of social change from ever-present social networking apps, they're "problems". It doesn't mean the new problems outweigh the old ones that technology solves, but at the same time, you'd have to be blind to think that new technology is simply an absolute good thing.
And once you recognize that there can be drawbacks to technological advancement, you have to acknowledge the possibility of a technology where the problems it creates outweigh the benefits. A lot of people might argue, for example, that the world would be a better place if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons.
Still, even if we concede that we'd be better if some technology weren't invented, we aren't able to un-invent it. We have to figure out if there's a way to regulate it to prevent the negative uses and unintended consequences don't get out of control.
Then a new disruptive technology will come along and start the process all over again.
Not likely. If the past few decades have been any indication, storage capacities will grow and available bandwidth will increase, and people's idea of "small" will grow. Mobile apps will be 2 GB, and people will be saying, "Man, these app sizes are growing out of control. Remember the good old days when an app like this would only be 1 GB?"
It used to be Gartner earning its pay from Microsoft arguing that "anything open source can not be up to date ipso facto".
I do think it's worth acknowledging that there will at least tend to be different strengths/weaknesses to different development models. For example, I think it's fair to say that open source software tends to have a little bit of a "design by committee" feel, since projects are often, at least to some extent, literally designed by a committee.**
Similar, I think there's truth to the idea that FOSS doesn't tend to be cutting edge stuff. It's far easier for a company like Apple or Microsoft to make a bold decision to pursue some particular innovation, and then to throw a bunch of resources at making it happen ASAP. It's a lot harder when you have to get a bunch of different developers onboard, and then figure out where the money is coming from.
However, I'd say that FOSS has different strengths. It tends to be more stable. It's less likely to drop designs and features that people like and appreciate. If a project does drop an important feature, it can be forked. It's easier for disparate interests to collaborate. FOSS has so many strengths that I don't think it's terrible to concede that a proprietary development model can't also have advantages.
And I'd say the same thing about the argument made in the article. I'm not a photographer, so I'm not going to try to argue about the particular claim that Android phones are "years behind" iPhones. However, I think it's fair to say that there are advantages to the development model of there being a single company that produces both the hardware and software for a device. If the company wants to produce a particular feature, there aren't really other companies that need to be convinced or taken into account. They can set the whole team, hardware and software, to the idea of creating the best implementation. It can be approached from a holistic perspective, rather than the hardware people tinkering on hardware and the software people tinkering in software. You don't need to worry about the difficulty of collaborating with partners who are also competitors.
That's not to say that it's an inherently better development model, but just that it has some advantages. Often, when there are multiple ways of doing the same thing, each will have certain advantages over the others.
** You'll notice I'm putting a lot of qualifying phrases like, "tends to" or "to some extent". I'm sure someone can point out a project where this idea doesn't hold up, but I think the point still holds.
Yeah, part of what made me think of this is that I've read other writers talk about the problem in general, not related to Trump. Basically, the idea of satire is to point out issues by exaggerating them to the point of absurdity. When the issue they'd like to indicate is already absurd, it makes it difficult to create effective satire.
I wonder what the writers of Veep think about all this. The whole show is sort of, "Wouldn't it be funny if the President [originally the Vice President] were an incompetent narcissist? We could create all kinds of absurd scenarios involving terrible decisions, people backstabbing each other, etc."
This last season wasn't very good. Maybe it was just because they looked at reality and said, "Well how are we supposed to satirize this?"
Well insofar as they're saying that they obtained data from browser extensions, incognito mode might help. In Chrome's ingcognito mode, for example, extensions are disabled by default. You have to go into your extensions' settings and check a box that says "Allow in incognito" for them to remain active.
However, in all honesty, there are other ways that you're being tracked.
Will they solve the problem of circumventing this technology with a photo of the person?
I thought the idea was to have multiple front-facing cameras to get more of a 3D image of a person's face. If so, wouldn't that prevent a 2D photo from working? Still, I suppose someone could make a 3D model of your face. I'm not sure facial recognition can get around that problem, unless the facial recognition is able to scan for some level of detail that can't normally be reproduced.
Will law enforcement officials unlock your phone by holding it up to your face?
Any biometric ("something you are") is susceptible to this sort of thing. For a finger print scanner, what's to stop the police from sliding your thumb across it?
And to be fair, any kind of "something you have" authentication is possibly susceptible to the police confiscating your token. Even if the authentication is based on "something you know", there's a possibility that it might be learned by the police. For example, if the question is, "What's your mother's maiden name?" they might be able to look that up. Even if it's an arbitrary password, there's the possibility of torture, or using some other method to compel you to tell them.
Largely what protects us in society is that we have a set of rules, and enough transparency to know when someone is breaking those rules. If you want police to not be allowed to unlock your phone, one of the best things you can do is to work to create laws that classify that kind of search as illegal, and the evidence as inadmissible. Then, you should push for policies to make sure that police operations are performed in a transparent way, and that police are held accountable for any misdeeds.
Looking for a magical technology to prevent police abuse is a bit silly, especially if you're not willing to push for the laws and oversight to make sure police abuse is punished.
When will they add a self destruct button for my phone?
Do you mean a single, easily accessible button that will destroy all of the information on your phone? That'll never happen. There isn't enough demand to justify the inevitable shit-storm that will come when people start pressing it accidentally.
Well I can think of a way to think about "privacy' and "accountability" working together, instead of being complete opposites. I don't know how to execute it, but I don't think it's impossible.
The basic model would be similar to this forum here, actually. I can sign in and identify myself when I want to, and then it's verifiable that I am who I say I am. Or at least, by posting a comment as "nine-times', I'm verifying at least that I have the credentials for this account. There isn't much information about who "nine-times" is other than what I wish to share, but I can verify that I own that identity by signing into it. When I'm signed in under that identity, I also gain access to make use of the reputation earned by that identity.
Also, even though Slashdot is a public site, by signing in, I get access to some messages and information that others might not have access to.
If I don't wish to sign in, I can post as an "Anonymous Coward". Or even if I am signed in, I can opt to post as an "Anonymous Coward". If I choose to do either of those things, my reputation is zeroed out for as long as I'm operating anonymously. My behavior isn't significantly inhibited, but my comments will fall below most filtering thresholds, unless my comment is modded up.
So if we were to apply that sort of model to the Internet at large, it seems like the goal should make it so you can easily and unambiguously identify your activity and traffic as an identity of your choosing, whether it correlates to your real identity or not. And then, also, you should be allowed to make your traffic anonymous and reasonably untraceable, but with a negative impact to your reputation. That is, I should be able to send email under my real name, or as nine-times, and have people know for sure that it's being sent by the claimed identity. I should also be able to send email anonymously, though it might greatly increase the chances of being marked as spam. Perhaps there might still be other factors that would make it less likely that an anonymous message would be marked as spam, similar to the way that AC messages can still be modded up.
And then, regardless of all of that, we should be able to ensure that only the desired recipient of the message is able to read it.
So with that kind of setup, you do have privacy, accountability, and anonymity. Anonymous traffic is less accountable, but also much more likely to be ignored.
As I understand it, there's nothing inherently wrong with unmasking. Identities should remain masked until there is a valid reason, but complaining about "unmasking" itself is like complaining about police searches. It's possible for searches to be done properly, and it's possible for them to be done abusively.
So now, in the midst of Trump's administration melting down, Trump and his people are clearly trying to throw up distractions. Fire people. Send the new guy out into the media to trash talk his colleagues. Find a DNC staffer that's accused of a crime. Claim Clinton was colluding with the Russians. It doesn't really matter if it's relevant or makes sense, just so long as you can knock the Russia investigation off the front page.
And in that context, on of Trump's pals-- a guy who had to step aside from an important part of his job due to misconduct-- brings up the vague charge that someone in the Obama administration may have unmasked some people. Did that happen? We don't know. Was it illegal? No idea. Was it even improper? He's implying it was, but not giving any information that's remotely specific.
So I'm not really going to argue that there weren't unmasking requests of some people for some reason. I'm sure that happened. Exactly who and why, and how many, I don't know. But Nunes was part of the campaign that's now under investigation, and he's played this game of, "I'm going to make vague allegations with no evidence and hope it distracts people," before. That's what forced him to step aside from the Russia investigation in the first place. There's no reason to listen to him now.
Installing multiple AV products is a bad idea. As the summary states, they tend to conflict with each other. Sometimes one will detect the other AV as malware and quarantine some of their files. I've also seen situations where installing multiple AV products will break things (e.g. the networking stack will stop working).
At its best, antivirus software is a necessary evil. It's going to have a negative impact on performance, and will probably inhibit legitimate functionality at some point. You should assume that your antivirus software is only going to catch old and obvious malware, and not rely on it for your system security. In that context, the best choice in antivirus software is the one that is least obtrusive, and using multiple products at the same time is counter-productive.
There could be any number of reasons why people would be hesitant to comment. Do you really want to wade into that nonsense? Do you want to dignify the accusation with a response? Are you able to explain what really went on without releasing classified material?
It's been less than a day since a guy with very little credibility made some wild accusations. You're right that I haven't seen any credible people refute him yet, but I also haven't seen any credible people back him up. I think it makes a lot of sense to at least wait until someone with even a modicum of credibility has commented before drawing any definite conclusions.
Not really. I'm not arguing that a logical argument is invalid because of the person making it. I'm claiming that facts are in question because of the credibility of the person claiming them. It's not fallacious reasoning to be dubious of an untrustworthy person's unverified claims.
Right. It's a "vast left-wing conspiracy" that includes every major news organization and every one of the US intelligence organizations. Trump's campaign didn't collude with the Russians any more than Bill Clinton got a blow job from an intern.
It's also worth noting that the "Intelligence Chairman" in question is Devin Nunes. He was part of the Trump campaign, and had to recuse himself from the Russia probe because he was providing more information to the White House about the investigation than he was providing to the investigation.
I'm not saying that these accusations couldn't possibly be true. I'm saying the accuser isn't remotely credible. This is clearly yet another attempted smoke screen to help Trump cover his crimes.
I think it's fair to disregard the accusation until someone credible steps forward with real information.
Well my point was that they could have a much more limited "browser" and then a more capable "web app framework". So you could have a cross-platform framework for making complex, capable applications that have the capabilities of a native app without compromising the security and simplicity of the browsing experience.
I think that's just one potential problem, as an example of a larger issue: It's not clear that we all want web browsers to enable web apps to be more like native applications.
I wouldn't say that web developers have earned enough trust that I want them to have more power over how my computer behaves. Aside from all the malware, there are ongoing issues with advertising and pop-ups. I don't want websites to be able to access my location. I don't want websites to be able to decide to store things on my computer. I don't want websites to be able to send me notifications.
I know this sounds silly to some people, but I've long argued in favor of splitting modern web browsers into two different types of programs:
1) Web browser: An application that renders HTML documents. Content is more or less static. You can embed video or have some forms to fill out, and maybe there's some limited animation/scripting support, but the basic idea that the browser renders documents and media. It does not provide a lot of interactivity.
2) Web-App framework: A framework that will render and execute highly interactive web applications.
Though the line between these two uses is often blurred, they're actually two very different uses of web browsers, that just happen to use a lot of the same languages and technologies. Importantly, they have very different security needs. The web browser needs to be very open, since people will browse to any number of different websites during a given day, and don't need many restrictions on what should be read-only static content. The framework, on the other hand, provides a lot of scripting capabilities with ever-increasing control of the computer you're working on, and therefore should allow the user to control exactly what each app has access to, including being able to place restrictions on which web apps are permitted to run at all.
Google, of course, isn't thinking about this separation. They're selling an OS that runs their web browser, and nothing else. They're going to want the browser to have deep access into that system so that they can replicate the experience of a native app, an experience which many people find preferable. Also, they don't have much reason to be concerned about the security implications of giving web applications control over the device, since there isn't anything on the device other than web applications.
Reminds me a little of Theranos. The quick version of the story is this:
A college student comes up with an idea. Her professors tell her it won't work. She ignores the professors, and drops out of college and starts a company to develop the idea. People love the story of a 19 year old genius girl founding a revolutionary medical testing company, and invest heavily.
The company continued to operate for years, and was considered to be worth billions of dollars, in spite of the fact that the technology never worked. Apparently, it wasn't even that she did a good job hiding things, it was that nobody looked too closely. They were too infatuated with the narrative. No one ever insisted on any kind of independent testing to see if the technology was real.
It's worth noting that Dr. King wasn't really after "peaceful protests". To think he was looking for everything to be peaceful diminishes both how smart and tough the civil rights protesters were.
The story you were probably told was that MLK and other protesters just wanted to have a nice, peaceful sit-in, and then the police came in and ruined it by getting violent. That's not quite right. It's sort of true, but not quite. They went looking for venues of protest where they'd elicit a violent reaction. Having things turn violent was kind of the point. They wanted the public to see white supremacists
beating up innocent black people. They were relying on the idea that there were a large number of Americans who would tolerate smaller injustices against black people (e.g. not being allowed to use a specific water fountain), but who would not tolerate larger injustices (e.g. being viciously beaten by police without any defensible reason).
So to achieve that goal, it was incredibly important that the protesters weren't violent. Any violence on their part would allow people to excuse the violence against them. If people see the police beating up or even killing violent rioters, most won't be too upset with the police, or feel too much sympathy for the rioters. However, if people see police beating up a nice, respectful, non-violent protester who doesn't even defend himself, then many of them will be upset with the police and sympathetic to the protester. The latter was the scenario that the protesters were trying to create.
So MLK demanded that his protesters be completely non-violent, but that's not the same as saying he wanted a non-violent protest. If he hadn't wanted violence, he could have had protests in safer ways and in safer areas. He could have protested among people who already agreed with his cause. instead, he protested among the KKK.
Tech people suck at empathy --your post is an example against letting us tech people make important decisions.
It might show that, or it might show that you're really bad at metaphors. You compared removing MS Paint from the default install to killing a person's grandmother. And now you're saying that the reason it's bad to murder someone's grandmother is because of "network effects", including needing to hire a new person to make noodles...?
I wasn't even dismissing the possibility that MS Paint might be important. I started by asking if someone could clarify why people were upset by losing it.
Of course, power users don't care that for every one of us that can google an alternative, there are dozens of regular Joes that will each contribute to wastes of time as we try to level the playing field.
This sentence *almost* makes sense, but I'm still not sure exactly what you're going for. Regardless, you don't even need to google for an alternative if you don't want to. Windows 10 now included "Paint 3D", which can also be used for the things that "Paint" has been used for. If those regular Joes are so clueless that they don't know how to use Google, they probably won't even know the difference.
At least, I might guess that. I'm not sure, because no one has really answered my question as to why people are so upset. It may be that people are upset at the loss of some functionality of MS Paint that I'm unaware of, or unaware that people are making use of it.
Going back to network effects here, imagine if the internet decided to shut down mail apps and POP3 / IMAP overnight.
Unless you don't have any idea what you're talking about, you know that's very different from Microsoft no longer including Paint in the default Windows install. So not only are you bad at metaphors, but also bad at hypothetical examples.
Wisconsin has been selected as part of a new effort. That started with Apple directing Foxconn to investigate the possibility of opening plants in the US as a result of Donald Trump's election win and the associated expectations around changes in import costs.
I kind of doubt that. Why would a company make a huge investment in response to expectations of a tax that isn't actually expected to happen? It seems more likely that this is something that they were going to do anyway, and Trump's real accomplishment has been to convince Apple/Foxconn to let him take credit.
Slashdot Mirror
Economies are built on nothing more than perception... it's all about perception and mood.
The best we can hope for is rationalizing after the fact.
To an extent, but at the same time, we should acknowledge that there is such a thing as poor judgement and terrible predictions. You can say, "There's no objective measure of value," but if someone pays $10,000 for a normal slice of Wonder Bread, we can say that they overpaid. If they bought it because they predicted the cost of Wonder Bread would skyrocket in the next two days, we can say that was a bad prediction.
I mean, yes, value is never completely objective, and there's always uncertainty to prediction. However, some things are more valuable than others, and some predictions are better than others.
I hate to bring this to a political place, but I feel like there's a bit of irony and double-think here. I've heard Republicans and "conservatives" saying that suburban and rural locations need help, while vilifying cities as playgrounds for detached elites. I've even heard this kind of statement that the rural areas are "the new inner cities".
But meanwhile, they're also holding onto the idea that cities are decaying liberal wastelands, populated by lazy degenerate criminals and "welfare queens". They've spent decades complaining that the people in the inner city need to take responsibility for their own lives, and pull themselves up by their bootstraps.
But now rural areas are the "new inner city", but it's not their fault. It's economic factors beyond their control. They're not responsible, and don't need to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. Even when describing the problem in terms of the "inner city", they're often still failing to recognize the similarity between this "new inner city" and the old inner city that they continue to criticize.
Maybe it's time we recognize that the government has a role to play in alleviating the burden of poverty, whether the poverty occurs in the inner city or in rural areas.
The worst that could reasonably happen is that we make a mistake and kill someone that was going to die anyway. So what's the big deal?
Well first, I'd like to point out that we're all going to "die anyway". If you're taking the position that it doesn't matter what you do to a person if they end up dead anyway, then it's equivalent to claiming that it doesn't matter what you do to people. So I think we should accept that it does matter what happens to people if they are "going to die anyway." You might help them live longer, or you might kill them more quickly. You might improve their quality of life, or you might degrade it. If you take someone who would die anyway, and make that life shorter, and degrade their quality of life, that matters.
But even then, making someone's life shorter and worse is not the worst thing that could plausibly happen. For example, in a few decades, we could find out that we hadn't understood exactly how DNA and this editing technology works, and that we've introduced a new genetic disease that's less easy to repair. This new disease has now been spread to the descendants of the people who had this repair done. And if we start using this technology willy-nilly, we might find that instead of a handful of people with the current genetic diseases, we have hundreds of people with a new disease that's even worse.
That's just one idea. It might not be likely but I don't think it's ridiculous to think that we don't fully understand how all this stuff works yet. Part of the problem with this kind of new technology is, by nature of being new, we might not even know what the risks and downsides are yet. It's very difficult to assess the risks of an activity that hasn't been done before, and so one of the risks that needs to be assessed is, "The risk of something completely unknown that we haven't even thought of yet."
It makes sense to have a little forethought and anticipate which kinds of problems you might run into, and how you might deal with them should they arise.
For every problem technology "solves", it creates 10 new ones.
If this statement was supposed to mean "technology makes things 10 times worse," then you're right to call BS. However, it's true that while new technology solves problems, it also creates new ones.
For example, the smart phone has changes the way we live, solving many problems. It's easy to get ahold of people. It's easier to do business on the go. With GPS and maps, it's almost impossible to get lost unless you can't get a signal. We have immediate access to all kinds of media, almost anywhere in the world.
However, there are also loads of associated problems. Everything from the need to keep your battery charged to the adverse effects of social change from ever-present social networking apps, they're "problems". It doesn't mean the new problems outweigh the old ones that technology solves, but at the same time, you'd have to be blind to think that new technology is simply an absolute good thing.
And once you recognize that there can be drawbacks to technological advancement, you have to acknowledge the possibility of a technology where the problems it creates outweigh the benefits. A lot of people might argue, for example, that the world would be a better place if we hadn't invented nuclear weapons.
Still, even if we concede that we'd be better if some technology weren't invented, we aren't able to un-invent it. We have to figure out if there's a way to regulate it to prevent the negative uses and unintended consequences don't get out of control.
Then a new disruptive technology will come along and start the process all over again.
Not likely. If the past few decades have been any indication, storage capacities will grow and available bandwidth will increase, and people's idea of "small" will grow. Mobile apps will be 2 GB, and people will be saying, "Man, these app sizes are growing out of control. Remember the good old days when an app like this would only be 1 GB?"
It used to be Gartner earning its pay from Microsoft arguing that "anything open source can not be up to date ipso facto".
I do think it's worth acknowledging that there will at least tend to be different strengths/weaknesses to different development models. For example, I think it's fair to say that open source software tends to have a little bit of a "design by committee" feel, since projects are often, at least to some extent, literally designed by a committee.**
Similar, I think there's truth to the idea that FOSS doesn't tend to be cutting edge stuff. It's far easier for a company like Apple or Microsoft to make a bold decision to pursue some particular innovation, and then to throw a bunch of resources at making it happen ASAP. It's a lot harder when you have to get a bunch of different developers onboard, and then figure out where the money is coming from.
However, I'd say that FOSS has different strengths. It tends to be more stable. It's less likely to drop designs and features that people like and appreciate. If a project does drop an important feature, it can be forked. It's easier for disparate interests to collaborate. FOSS has so many strengths that I don't think it's terrible to concede that a proprietary development model can't also have advantages.
And I'd say the same thing about the argument made in the article. I'm not a photographer, so I'm not going to try to argue about the particular claim that Android phones are "years behind" iPhones. However, I think it's fair to say that there are advantages to the development model of there being a single company that produces both the hardware and software for a device. If the company wants to produce a particular feature, there aren't really other companies that need to be convinced or taken into account. They can set the whole team, hardware and software, to the idea of creating the best implementation. It can be approached from a holistic perspective, rather than the hardware people tinkering on hardware and the software people tinkering in software. You don't need to worry about the difficulty of collaborating with partners who are also competitors.
That's not to say that it's an inherently better development model, but just that it has some advantages. Often, when there are multiple ways of doing the same thing, each will have certain advantages over the others.
** You'll notice I'm putting a lot of qualifying phrases like, "tends to" or "to some extent". I'm sure someone can point out a project where this idea doesn't hold up, but I think the point still holds.
Yeah, part of what made me think of this is that I've read other writers talk about the problem in general, not related to Trump. Basically, the idea of satire is to point out issues by exaggerating them to the point of absurdity. When the issue they'd like to indicate is already absurd, it makes it difficult to create effective satire.
I wonder what the writers of Veep think about all this. The whole show is sort of, "Wouldn't it be funny if the President [originally the Vice President] were an incompetent narcissist? We could create all kinds of absurd scenarios involving terrible decisions, people backstabbing each other, etc."
This last season wasn't very good. Maybe it was just because they looked at reality and said, "Well how are we supposed to satirize this?"
It's not just HP. It's a bunch of equipment-- some of it not even that old.
Oh well. You'll have to buy a new one.
Well insofar as they're saying that they obtained data from browser extensions, incognito mode might help. In Chrome's ingcognito mode, for example, extensions are disabled by default. You have to go into your extensions' settings and check a box that says "Allow in incognito" for them to remain active.
However, in all honesty, there are other ways that you're being tracked.
Will they solve the problem of circumventing this technology with a photo of the person?
I thought the idea was to have multiple front-facing cameras to get more of a 3D image of a person's face. If so, wouldn't that prevent a 2D photo from working? Still, I suppose someone could make a 3D model of your face. I'm not sure facial recognition can get around that problem, unless the facial recognition is able to scan for some level of detail that can't normally be reproduced.
Will law enforcement officials unlock your phone by holding it up to your face?
Any biometric ("something you are") is susceptible to this sort of thing. For a finger print scanner, what's to stop the police from sliding your thumb across it?
And to be fair, any kind of "something you have" authentication is possibly susceptible to the police confiscating your token. Even if the authentication is based on "something you know", there's a possibility that it might be learned by the police. For example, if the question is, "What's your mother's maiden name?" they might be able to look that up. Even if it's an arbitrary password, there's the possibility of torture, or using some other method to compel you to tell them.
Largely what protects us in society is that we have a set of rules, and enough transparency to know when someone is breaking those rules. If you want police to not be allowed to unlock your phone, one of the best things you can do is to work to create laws that classify that kind of search as illegal, and the evidence as inadmissible. Then, you should push for policies to make sure that police operations are performed in a transparent way, and that police are held accountable for any misdeeds.
Looking for a magical technology to prevent police abuse is a bit silly, especially if you're not willing to push for the laws and oversight to make sure police abuse is punished.
When will they add a self destruct button for my phone?
Do you mean a single, easily accessible button that will destroy all of the information on your phone? That'll never happen. There isn't enough demand to justify the inevitable shit-storm that will come when people start pressing it accidentally.
Well I can think of a way to think about "privacy' and "accountability" working together, instead of being complete opposites. I don't know how to execute it, but I don't think it's impossible.
The basic model would be similar to this forum here, actually. I can sign in and identify myself when I want to, and then it's verifiable that I am who I say I am. Or at least, by posting a comment as "nine-times', I'm verifying at least that I have the credentials for this account. There isn't much information about who "nine-times" is other than what I wish to share, but I can verify that I own that identity by signing into it. When I'm signed in under that identity, I also gain access to make use of the reputation earned by that identity.
Also, even though Slashdot is a public site, by signing in, I get access to some messages and information that others might not have access to.
If I don't wish to sign in, I can post as an "Anonymous Coward". Or even if I am signed in, I can opt to post as an "Anonymous Coward". If I choose to do either of those things, my reputation is zeroed out for as long as I'm operating anonymously. My behavior isn't significantly inhibited, but my comments will fall below most filtering thresholds, unless my comment is modded up.
So if we were to apply that sort of model to the Internet at large, it seems like the goal should make it so you can easily and unambiguously identify your activity and traffic as an identity of your choosing, whether it correlates to your real identity or not. And then, also, you should be allowed to make your traffic anonymous and reasonably untraceable, but with a negative impact to your reputation. That is, I should be able to send email under my real name, or as nine-times, and have people know for sure that it's being sent by the claimed identity. I should also be able to send email anonymously, though it might greatly increase the chances of being marked as spam. Perhaps there might still be other factors that would make it less likely that an anonymous message would be marked as spam, similar to the way that AC messages can still be modded up.
And then, regardless of all of that, we should be able to ensure that only the desired recipient of the message is able to read it.
So with that kind of setup, you do have privacy, accountability, and anonymity. Anonymous traffic is less accountable, but also much more likely to be ignored.
As I understand it, there's nothing inherently wrong with unmasking. Identities should remain masked until there is a valid reason, but complaining about "unmasking" itself is like complaining about police searches. It's possible for searches to be done properly, and it's possible for them to be done abusively.
So now, in the midst of Trump's administration melting down, Trump and his people are clearly trying to throw up distractions. Fire people. Send the new guy out into the media to trash talk his colleagues. Find a DNC staffer that's accused of a crime. Claim Clinton was colluding with the Russians. It doesn't really matter if it's relevant or makes sense, just so long as you can knock the Russia investigation off the front page.
And in that context, on of Trump's pals-- a guy who had to step aside from an important part of his job due to misconduct-- brings up the vague charge that someone in the Obama administration may have unmasked some people. Did that happen? We don't know. Was it illegal? No idea. Was it even improper? He's implying it was, but not giving any information that's remotely specific.
So I'm not really going to argue that there weren't unmasking requests of some people for some reason. I'm sure that happened. Exactly who and why, and how many, I don't know. But Nunes was part of the campaign that's now under investigation, and he's played this game of, "I'm going to make vague allegations with no evidence and hope it distracts people," before. That's what forced him to step aside from the Russia investigation in the first place. There's no reason to listen to him now.
Installing multiple AV products is a bad idea. As the summary states, they tend to conflict with each other. Sometimes one will detect the other AV as malware and quarantine some of their files. I've also seen situations where installing multiple AV products will break things (e.g. the networking stack will stop working).
At its best, antivirus software is a necessary evil. It's going to have a negative impact on performance, and will probably inhibit legitimate functionality at some point. You should assume that your antivirus software is only going to catch old and obvious malware, and not rely on it for your system security. In that context, the best choice in antivirus software is the one that is least obtrusive, and using multiple products at the same time is counter-productive.
There could be any number of reasons why people would be hesitant to comment. Do you really want to wade into that nonsense? Do you want to dignify the accusation with a response? Are you able to explain what really went on without releasing classified material?
It's been less than a day since a guy with very little credibility made some wild accusations. You're right that I haven't seen any credible people refute him yet, but I also haven't seen any credible people back him up. I think it makes a lot of sense to at least wait until someone with even a modicum of credibility has commented before drawing any definite conclusions.
Not really. I'm not arguing that a logical argument is invalid because of the person making it. I'm claiming that facts are in question because of the credibility of the person claiming them. It's not fallacious reasoning to be dubious of an untrustworthy person's unverified claims.
Right. It's a "vast left-wing conspiracy" that includes every major news organization and every one of the US intelligence organizations. Trump's campaign didn't collude with the Russians any more than Bill Clinton got a blow job from an intern.
It's also worth noting that the "Intelligence Chairman" in question is Devin Nunes. He was part of the Trump campaign, and had to recuse himself from the Russia probe because he was providing more information to the White House about the investigation than he was providing to the investigation.
I'm not saying that these accusations couldn't possibly be true. I'm saying the accuser isn't remotely credible. This is clearly yet another attempted smoke screen to help Trump cover his crimes.
I think it's fair to disregard the accusation until someone credible steps forward with real information.
Well my point was that they could have a much more limited "browser" and then a more capable "web app framework". So you could have a cross-platform framework for making complex, capable applications that have the capabilities of a native app without compromising the security and simplicity of the browsing experience.
I think that's just one potential problem, as an example of a larger issue: It's not clear that we all want web browsers to enable web apps to be more like native applications.
I wouldn't say that web developers have earned enough trust that I want them to have more power over how my computer behaves. Aside from all the malware, there are ongoing issues with advertising and pop-ups. I don't want websites to be able to access my location. I don't want websites to be able to decide to store things on my computer. I don't want websites to be able to send me notifications.
I know this sounds silly to some people, but I've long argued in favor of splitting modern web browsers into two different types of programs:
1) Web browser: An application that renders HTML documents. Content is more or less static. You can embed video or have some forms to fill out, and maybe there's some limited animation/scripting support, but the basic idea that the browser renders documents and media. It does not provide a lot of interactivity.
2) Web-App framework: A framework that will render and execute highly interactive web applications.
Though the line between these two uses is often blurred, they're actually two very different uses of web browsers, that just happen to use a lot of the same languages and technologies. Importantly, they have very different security needs. The web browser needs to be very open, since people will browse to any number of different websites during a given day, and don't need many restrictions on what should be read-only static content. The framework, on the other hand, provides a lot of scripting capabilities with ever-increasing control of the computer you're working on, and therefore should allow the user to control exactly what each app has access to, including being able to place restrictions on which web apps are permitted to run at all.
Google, of course, isn't thinking about this separation. They're selling an OS that runs their web browser, and nothing else. They're going to want the browser to have deep access into that system so that they can replicate the experience of a native app, an experience which many people find preferable. Also, they don't have much reason to be concerned about the security implications of giving web applications control over the device, since there isn't anything on the device other than web applications.
Reminds me a little of Theranos. The quick version of the story is this:
A college student comes up with an idea. Her professors tell her it won't work. She ignores the professors, and drops out of college and starts a company to develop the idea. People love the story of a 19 year old genius girl founding a revolutionary medical testing company, and invest heavily.
The company continued to operate for years, and was considered to be worth billions of dollars, in spite of the fact that the technology never worked. Apparently, it wasn't even that she did a good job hiding things, it was that nobody looked too closely. They were too infatuated with the narrative. No one ever insisted on any kind of independent testing to see if the technology was real.
It's worth noting that Dr. King wasn't really after "peaceful protests". To think he was looking for everything to be peaceful diminishes both how smart and tough the civil rights protesters were.
The story you were probably told was that MLK and other protesters just wanted to have a nice, peaceful sit-in, and then the police came in and ruined it by getting violent. That's not quite right. It's sort of true, but not quite. They went looking for venues of protest where they'd elicit a violent reaction. Having things turn violent was kind of the point. They wanted the public to see white supremacists beating up innocent black people. They were relying on the idea that there were a large number of Americans who would tolerate smaller injustices against black people (e.g. not being allowed to use a specific water fountain), but who would not tolerate larger injustices (e.g. being viciously beaten by police without any defensible reason).
So to achieve that goal, it was incredibly important that the protesters weren't violent. Any violence on their part would allow people to excuse the violence against them. If people see the police beating up or even killing violent rioters, most won't be too upset with the police, or feel too much sympathy for the rioters. However, if people see police beating up a nice, respectful, non-violent protester who doesn't even defend himself, then many of them will be upset with the police and sympathetic to the protester. The latter was the scenario that the protesters were trying to create.
So MLK demanded that his protesters be completely non-violent, but that's not the same as saying he wanted a non-violent protest. If he hadn't wanted violence, he could have had protests in safer ways and in safer areas. He could have protested among people who already agreed with his cause. instead, he protested among the KKK.
Tech people suck at empathy --your post is an example against letting us tech people make important decisions.
It might show that, or it might show that you're really bad at metaphors. You compared removing MS Paint from the default install to killing a person's grandmother. And now you're saying that the reason it's bad to murder someone's grandmother is because of "network effects", including needing to hire a new person to make noodles...?
I wasn't even dismissing the possibility that MS Paint might be important. I started by asking if someone could clarify why people were upset by losing it.
Of course, power users don't care that for every one of us that can google an alternative, there are dozens of regular Joes that will each contribute to wastes of time as we try to level the playing field.
This sentence *almost* makes sense, but I'm still not sure exactly what you're going for. Regardless, you don't even need to google for an alternative if you don't want to. Windows 10 now included "Paint 3D", which can also be used for the things that "Paint" has been used for. If those regular Joes are so clueless that they don't know how to use Google, they probably won't even know the difference.
At least, I might guess that. I'm not sure, because no one has really answered my question as to why people are so upset. It may be that people are upset at the loss of some functionality of MS Paint that I'm unaware of, or unaware that people are making use of it.
Going back to network effects here, imagine if the internet decided to shut down mail apps and POP3 / IMAP overnight.
Unless you don't have any idea what you're talking about, you know that's very different from Microsoft no longer including Paint in the default Windows install. So not only are you bad at metaphors, but also bad at hypothetical examples.
Wisconsin has been selected as part of a new effort. That started with Apple directing Foxconn to investigate the possibility of opening plants in the US as a result of Donald Trump's election win and the associated expectations around changes in import costs.
I kind of doubt that. Why would a company make a huge investment in response to expectations of a tax that isn't actually expected to happen? It seems more likely that this is something that they were going to do anyway, and Trump's real accomplishment has been to convince Apple/Foxconn to let him take credit.