It's probably too late for java to overtake flash in that market segment, but if Sun had originally done this, they would have probably won the web war. The two biggest complaints about java are, the JRE is too big to download, and the programs take too long to start. This is 99% of people's impression of java. They don't care that it's perhaps one of the best general purpose languages out there right now. They care it takes 10 seconds longer than flash to run a simple program. Sun should have never half-assed that aspect. Either do it right or don't do it at all.
The direct physical evidence against Reiser is limited, but police have built a detailed circumstantial case. In this day and age I didn't know you could take a murder to trial purely on circumstance. I'll admit it's extremely weird, but do they actually think they can convict him beyond a reasonable doubt in this day and age with no direct evidence? It almost seems irresponsible to try otherwise. No body. No DNA. No weapons of any sort found. Basically they have more evidence for Jimmy Hoffa's murder than they do this one. Heck, good luck proving she was actually murdered!
When the hell did we start trusting companies that purposefully screw us to the 10th degree and try to hide it more than we trust a company that is very open about what they do and go to extreme efforts to make the public happy? Google is, in no way, shape, or form evil. What's happened is, many of the major corporations are saying "oh shit, people are going to start expecting google-like service from us and that's really going to screw up our bottom line". In fact, I feel like there are funded, multi-corporation, organized, Google-FUD campaigns out there that put all this garbage into people's heads.
A company that has rendered my computer useless many times because of a false WGA positive? That's evil. A company that injects false TCP flags into sessions to "shape" bandwidth? That's evil. A company that renders a 600 dollar phone useless because I installed a 3rd party program? That's evil.
In fact, the only thing I can recall that google has done ever even remotely evil is a censored version of google search in China. That was a VERY calculated move and they were very open about the decision. Google has actually expressed regret for not standing up for what is right. But this PALES in comparison to the crap other US companies have pulled in China. This includes border-line slave labor and the turning over of information that has led to the death of many innocent people. On the evilness scale, what google did in China was like a.0005 compared to the things other US companies do. Yet we somehow turn a blind eye to them and get up in arms about Google?
I've always wondered what would be possible if humans were regularly experimented on in the same fashion. Of course it's unethical, but I bet we'd have humans that can live 300 years and run 10,000 miles at a clip if we cut out the middle man;)
Nothing is free. The Nigerian government may get paid to use Windows, but MS is going to expect a few things from them. Pro-MS legislation? Voting toward MS in international votes? Requiring outside documents be MS friendly? I doubt they are getting free money with no expectation of favors.
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. It only tells you one component that is meaningless by itself. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.
You could very well replace the name "Russia" in the article with "United States" and I don't think it would surprise most here. I guess the pro-kremlin bloggers would then be Fox News?
I see a lot of comments it will be open source projects or open source project backers. I reeeeeeally don't think they will be the largest purchasers. Many people don't realize how many software companies have products that modify the behavior of MS products. There have to be at least thousands. Think of all the products that do file system operations. All the products that work with Outlook and Exchange. All the products that work with Office. Anti virus/malware programs. Pretty much any program that is in any way, shape, or form, dependent on how an MS product does things will probably want to purchase specs.
There's no excuse for using Google for anything. This suggests that google is so fundamentally evil none of their products can be trusted.
Considering Google's #1 motive seems to be to collect as much information as possible on the public There's no evidence that google is in any way, shape, or form, trying to acquire information specifically on the public. This little modifier makes it seem like google's ultimate goal is to know everything about everyone, regardless of the price paid. Google's real searching goal is to collect as much publicly available information on all subjects as possible. That's a huge difference. The GP wants to make it seem somehow Google has plans to control people via privileged information.
it really makes you question their ultimate goals and wonder about how such a young company got so much funding so quickly to become the monolith they are. I can't even begin to fathom what they are suggesting here. Maybe that the NSA somehow funds google and there's some covert CIA plan to use google to take over the world? I think the ultimate gist of the quote is somehow google gets secret funding from some entity that ultimately wants total control over the world. The real reason google became so successful so quickly is because their leaders and founders are really really smart (shocking, I know). Most large tech companies are large because they got into the game early and made OK products w/ a little bit of strong arming. Google actually got into the market fairly late in the game with many many obstacles to overcome. They become popular based of products that were so superior people took a step back and said "why are we still using this garbage when google X is so much better". That takes a lot for people to do.
So you just end up trusting another organization with all your searching needs instead? An organization that isn't under constant public scrutiny and has little/no motive for actually keeping your searches private? Seems a little misplaced to me...
I'm not sure when people started trusting Oracle, MS, Sun, Apple, etc, more than Google. Every one of the previously mentioned companies have burned me with marketing schemes, mistrust, EULA's, and flat out lies... except Google. This technology shift is going to happen regardless. I'd MUCH rather have Google housing my information than Microsoft. Google has never abused my trust.
People cry constantly about Google having too much information. They have just as much information as everyone else. They are just so much smarter they can index it and search it instantly. When Google abuses my information I'll stop trusting them. But when they've given me consistently high quality software for free, never mislead me or lied to me, well... I'm sure as hell quicker to support a company with such a great track record than a company that makes it its business to deceive its customers.
I recently bought a laptop with Vista on it from newegg. I knew I was going to have to try and get an XP disc from the OEM, but I didn't realize how easy it would be. I just called and asked and they are sending it for free. I guess there must be considerable demand if it was that easy. Two of my friends bought computers when Vista first came out and tried to get XP on them from the OEM. It was basically impossible and just ended up putting pirated copies of XP when the computers came. Funny how there's such a change of attitude from the OEM's when they start losing customers because they are selling something very few want.
Is that choosing commercial or proprietary software based on the notion you get better support is a myth. I can't even tell you how many PHB's I know that are scared to do anything without a support contract. The moral of the story: Your people should be able to solve 99.9% of all software problems on their own and rely on support as little as possible. Most support contracts I've dealt with have been mostly useless and we've generally had to solve all the hard problems in house. I've pretty much lost faith in support contracts meaning anything other than "a company to sue when things go wrong". But suing a company doesn't bring back lost customers and it doesn't bring back a company that doesn't exist anymore. Blaming others is a great cop out, but I'd never base a business around the blame game.
Scoffing at the low number of users running anti-virus is misplaced. Anti-virus software gives a false sense of security. Real security is just being careful what you do. I've never run anti-virus software and my computer is fine. I know dozens of people who run it and get viruses constantly. I think the problem is assuming you actually need anti-virus software rather than the low number of users running it.
I work for a municipality and frankly, municipal wifi is #102,448 on our list of priorities. Why? It's SUPER expensive with very little benefit. My city has a population of almost 200,000. To cover a city of our size we'd literally need hundreds of access points @ a cost of millions of dollars. We are a technical staff of only about 10. Can you imagine 10 people being tasked with trying to maintain hundreds of access points? When you've got hundreds of anything electronic out in the field, a certain percentage is always going to be broken. So you've got this project that needs constant maintenance that's extremely expensive and resource intensive. If we're reaaaally lucky we may get 200 people using it on a regular basis. We're talking about a project of millions to benefit 200 people that probably already have internet access anyway.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather spend those millions to benefit a school and get educational software into Florida's failing schools. Or hell, open an entire new school so kids don't have to wake up an hour earlier to be bussed half way across the city. There are just so many way this money could be used better. That's why municipal wifi doesn't take off.
I never said they were the same, I said they all use basically the same software and major distributions are all of very high quality. I wouldn't exactly call Linspire or Gentoo "major" distros, but RHEL/Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu/Debian, are all very very very similar. I've been working with Linux and Unix in general for over 10 years and once you know what's under the hood, you realize distro wars are silly because they are all basically the same. What differs are high level configuration tools and support contracts. Regarding Windows interoperability, do you think MS has hacked together some super compatible version of Samba for Novell that Red Hat or Ubuntu don't have access to?
and customers that already have a Windows investment say it seems to make sense to pick the Linux that works with Windows Which is pure marketing because all the major distributions work equally well (or not well) with Windows. What I guess people still don't get is you pay for a support contract, not the distribution. All the major distributions are all basically of the same quality and use almost the exact same software. Maaaaaaybe a few configuration tools are different, but they are configuring the same software so it doesn't matter.
Windows mobile is the biggest sham ever. There, I said it. Lemme explain...
At my job everyone used to have blackberrys w/ Nextel. Their data network at the time sucked big time (may or may not still be the case). So as the phones aged and everyone got tired of Nextel, we switched to Cingular. I'm not 100% sure why we changed the phones, but a few Windows guys started looking at Windows Mobile based phones. The key features for this were suppose to be
* Since it's Windows, there is a huge array of applications
* Since it has Internet Explorer, we can use all of our websites and IE quirks
* Since it's Windows and windows has a standard API, our windows programmers could write programs for it
* Basically every advantage you can think of for a full blown version of Windows compacted into a phone
Well we got them. Started using them. Crash. But not a normal crash. Remember, these are phones. So you'd spend the whole morning wondering why you haven't gotten any calls yet and it turns out the phone froze. This is completely unacceptable for a phone. I got used to checking my phone every hour to make sure it didn't need to be rebooted.
But heck, rebooting a phone every once in awhile isn't a huge deal to be able to use almost every Windows application ever! Out of all the smartphone OS's I've dealt with, in reality, Windows Mobile has the least amount of quality applications available for it. A lot of standard things everyone did on the Blackberry's were lost simply because there was no Windows Mobile equivalent program. It turns out most developers have no interest in porting their apps to Windows Mobile. Why not? Well this brings me to the next point...
We've had these phones 2 years, and not a single one of our Windows developers has written a program for it. Why? Because touting it as anything like regular Windows development is a flat out lie. Writing programs for a mobile phone is nothing like a traditional application. They couldn't use many/most of their normal development tools. Writing for limited hardware is a whole different ballpark. Microsoft tried to take their traditional developers and throw them into the mobile phone arena, and those developers simply aren't equipped to do it, and get discouraged and don't write anything for the platform.
Every advantage that relied on the fact "it's basically Windows" went right out the window because, in reality, it's nothing like desktop versions of Windows. We were left with an experience that was significantly worse than the Blackberry's. So guess what? We're getting rid of thousands of dollars worth of phones because the experience truly is that bad. We're going back to Blackberry.
The funny thing about articles like this is there are always "experts" crying about shortcomings in Linux, yet the people actually making the phones are going toward Linux. In reality their criticisms don't hold enough weight to actually discourage the Linux train from rolling. I have recently begun to make the observation that people who actually develop for and use Linux don't have the same concerns as the analysts. Analysts cry "fragmentation", however in the actual Linux community it really isn't a problem. I've yet to run into the developer that says "oh man, I'm going to have to recode so much of this app for Ubuntu from Red Hat. This is going to suck...". Or what about the user "I've used Red Hat before but this Ubuntu is so damn confusing to get used to". The people that seem to criticize the most seem to have the least amount of Linux experience and form their opinions mostly on hearsay.
Eh, I don't think it would be as much as a stumbling block as you'd think. Apple would just include a "Run me first" DVD that would install everything without prompts. If they did it right, it would only be 10-15 minutes additional setup time. I think they'd make that trade for the opportunity for a much more level playing field.
CC has a chance of 99.9999% of getting away scott free. Most likely the family is fuming mad and suing anyone and anything. I doubt they even understand what creative commons is and were unreasonable when their lawyer tried to explain to them. The CC suit will be dropped. Most likely Virgin will settle out of court.
Also, ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? Did Virgin actually expect to go onto flickr, use someone's image without specifically asking (whether legally entitled or not), and not expect to get sued? ESPECIALLY someone who may be a minor. I'm not even talking about consulting with lawyers or risk management before doing such, but common fucking sense. 99% of the population would sue if their picture was featured in such an ad. It has nothing to do with what is legal, but a) common fucking sense and realizing you'll probably lose your job for such a stunt and b) knowing there will be nothing positive for the company that comes out of this.
Again, the insulting thing about this isn't the legal portion, but that Virgin would be so fucking stupid to pull such a stunt.
I brought a GP2X handheld gamesystem and a scientific calculator to the airport once. I almost died laughing as two airport security agents mulled over the two for almost ten minutes. I heard whispers like "maybe one is a remote detonation device for the other?" and "Do you think it could be used to hijack the planes control system?". The people supposedly keeping us safe are morons and can't tell the difference between a breadboard full of LED's and a real threat. And that's what is disturbing. We are giving up all these rights, and we aren't actually in any way, shape, or form safer. If these people have such little understanding of electronics, someone could easily gut a PSP and fool these clowns. It's a dog and pony show at best, and at worst we've given up basic civil liberties.
Slashdot Mirror
It's probably too late for java to overtake flash in that market segment, but if Sun had originally done this, they would have probably won the web war. The two biggest complaints about java are, the JRE is too big to download, and the programs take too long to start. This is 99% of people's impression of java. They don't care that it's perhaps one of the best general purpose languages out there right now. They care it takes 10 seconds longer than flash to run a simple program. Sun should have never half-assed that aspect. Either do it right or don't do it at all.
When the hell did we start trusting companies that purposefully screw us to the 10th degree and try to hide it more than we trust a company that is very open about what they do and go to extreme efforts to make the public happy? Google is, in no way, shape, or form evil. What's happened is, many of the major corporations are saying "oh shit, people are going to start expecting google-like service from us and that's really going to screw up our bottom line". In fact, I feel like there are funded, multi-corporation, organized, Google-FUD campaigns out there that put all this garbage into people's heads.
.0005 compared to the things other US companies do. Yet we somehow turn a blind eye to them and get up in arms about Google?
A company that has rendered my computer useless many times because of a false WGA positive? That's evil. A company that injects false TCP flags into sessions to "shape" bandwidth? That's evil. A company that renders a 600 dollar phone useless because I installed a 3rd party program? That's evil.
In fact, the only thing I can recall that google has done ever even remotely evil is a censored version of google search in China. That was a VERY calculated move and they were very open about the decision. Google has actually expressed regret for not standing up for what is right. But this PALES in comparison to the crap other US companies have pulled in China. This includes border-line slave labor and the turning over of information that has led to the death of many innocent people. On the evilness scale, what google did in China was like a
I've always wondered what would be possible if humans were regularly experimented on in the same fashion. Of course it's unethical, but I bet we'd have humans that can live 300 years and run 10,000 miles at a clip if we cut out the middle man ;)
Nothing is free. The Nigerian government may get paid to use Windows, but MS is going to expect a few things from them. Pro-MS legislation? Voting toward MS in international votes? Requiring outside documents be MS friendly? I doubt they are getting free money with no expectation of favors.
Measuring computer performance in Hz is like buying a car based on red line RPMs. It only tells you one component that is meaningless by itself. Just like a car needs torque to give rpm's context, processors need how many instructions can be completed per cycle to be compared to the frequency. I've lost faith in the MHz race and generally look at benchmarks closest to the intended purpose of the processor.
You could very well replace the name "Russia" in the article with "United States" and I don't think it would surprise most here. I guess the pro-kremlin bloggers would then be Fox News?
http://www.tcpalm.com/news/2007/oct/20/30sheriff-says-hell-put-radar-back-in-cars/
Can't be that accurate if even after calibration they are suspect.
I get 32.33 (repeating of course).
I see a lot of comments it will be open source projects or open source project backers. I reeeeeeally don't think they will be the largest purchasers. Many people don't realize how many software companies have products that modify the behavior of MS products. There have to be at least thousands. Think of all the products that do file system operations. All the products that work with Outlook and Exchange. All the products that work with Office. Anti virus/malware programs. Pretty much any program that is in any way, shape, or form, dependent on how an MS product does things will probably want to purchase specs.
There's no excuse for using Google for anything. This suggests that google is so fundamentally evil none of their products can be trusted. Considering Google's #1 motive seems to be to collect as much information as possible on the public There's no evidence that google is in any way, shape, or form, trying to acquire information specifically on the public. This little modifier makes it seem like google's ultimate goal is to know everything about everyone, regardless of the price paid. Google's real searching goal is to collect as much publicly available information on all subjects as possible. That's a huge difference. The GP wants to make it seem somehow Google has plans to control people via privileged information. it really makes you question their ultimate goals and wonder about how such a young company got so much funding so quickly to become the monolith they are. I can't even begin to fathom what they are suggesting here. Maybe that the NSA somehow funds google and there's some covert CIA plan to use google to take over the world? I think the ultimate gist of the quote is somehow google gets secret funding from some entity that ultimately wants total control over the world. The real reason google became so successful so quickly is because their leaders and founders are really really smart (shocking, I know). Most large tech companies are large because they got into the game early and made OK products w/ a little bit of strong arming. Google actually got into the market fairly late in the game with many many obstacles to overcome. They become popular based of products that were so superior people took a step back and said "why are we still using this garbage when google X is so much better". That takes a lot for people to do.
So you just end up trusting another organization with all your searching needs instead? An organization that isn't under constant public scrutiny and has little/no motive for actually keeping your searches private? Seems a little misplaced to me...
I'm not sure when people started trusting Oracle, MS, Sun, Apple, etc, more than Google. Every one of the previously mentioned companies have burned me with marketing schemes, mistrust, EULA's, and flat out lies... except Google. This technology shift is going to happen regardless. I'd MUCH rather have Google housing my information than Microsoft. Google has never abused my trust.
People cry constantly about Google having too much information. They have just as much information as everyone else. They are just so much smarter they can index it and search it instantly. When Google abuses my information I'll stop trusting them. But when they've given me consistently high quality software for free, never mislead me or lied to me, well... I'm sure as hell quicker to support a company with such a great track record than a company that makes it its business to deceive its customers.
I recently bought a laptop with Vista on it from newegg. I knew I was going to have to try and get an XP disc from the OEM, but I didn't realize how easy it would be. I just called and asked and they are sending it for free. I guess there must be considerable demand if it was that easy. Two of my friends bought computers when Vista first came out and tried to get XP on them from the OEM. It was basically impossible and just ended up putting pirated copies of XP when the computers came. Funny how there's such a change of attitude from the OEM's when they start losing customers because they are selling something very few want.
Is that choosing commercial or proprietary software based on the notion you get better support is a myth. I can't even tell you how many PHB's I know that are scared to do anything without a support contract. The moral of the story: Your people should be able to solve 99.9% of all software problems on their own and rely on support as little as possible. Most support contracts I've dealt with have been mostly useless and we've generally had to solve all the hard problems in house. I've pretty much lost faith in support contracts meaning anything other than "a company to sue when things go wrong". But suing a company doesn't bring back lost customers and it doesn't bring back a company that doesn't exist anymore. Blaming others is a great cop out, but I'd never base a business around the blame game.
Scoffing at the low number of users running anti-virus is misplaced. Anti-virus software gives a false sense of security. Real security is just being careful what you do. I've never run anti-virus software and my computer is fine. I know dozens of people who run it and get viruses constantly. I think the problem is assuming you actually need anti-virus software rather than the low number of users running it.
Duluth in the house!!!
I work for a municipality and frankly, municipal wifi is #102,448 on our list of priorities. Why? It's SUPER expensive with very little benefit. My city has a population of almost 200,000. To cover a city of our size we'd literally need hundreds of access points @ a cost of millions of dollars. We are a technical staff of only about 10. Can you imagine 10 people being tasked with trying to maintain hundreds of access points? When you've got hundreds of anything electronic out in the field, a certain percentage is always going to be broken. So you've got this project that needs constant maintenance that's extremely expensive and resource intensive. If we're reaaaally lucky we may get 200 people using it on a regular basis. We're talking about a project of millions to benefit 200 people that probably already have internet access anyway.
I don't know about you, but I'd much rather spend those millions to benefit a school and get educational software into Florida's failing schools. Or hell, open an entire new school so kids don't have to wake up an hour earlier to be bussed half way across the city. There are just so many way this money could be used better. That's why municipal wifi doesn't take off.
I never said they were the same, I said they all use basically the same software and major distributions are all of very high quality. I wouldn't exactly call Linspire or Gentoo "major" distros, but RHEL/Fedora, Suse, Ubuntu/Debian, are all very very very similar. I've been working with Linux and Unix in general for over 10 years and once you know what's under the hood, you realize distro wars are silly because they are all basically the same. What differs are high level configuration tools and support contracts. Regarding Windows interoperability, do you think MS has hacked together some super compatible version of Samba for Novell that Red Hat or Ubuntu don't have access to?
Windows mobile is the biggest sham ever. There, I said it. Lemme explain...
At my job everyone used to have blackberrys w/ Nextel. Their data network at the time sucked big time (may or may not still be the case). So as the phones aged and everyone got tired of Nextel, we switched to Cingular. I'm not 100% sure why we changed the phones, but a few Windows guys started looking at Windows Mobile based phones. The key features for this were suppose to be
* Since it's Windows, there is a huge array of applications
* Since it has Internet Explorer, we can use all of our websites and IE quirks
* Since it's Windows and windows has a standard API, our windows programmers could write programs for it
* Basically every advantage you can think of for a full blown version of Windows compacted into a phone
Well we got them. Started using them. Crash. But not a normal crash. Remember, these are phones. So you'd spend the whole morning wondering why you haven't gotten any calls yet and it turns out the phone froze. This is completely unacceptable for a phone. I got used to checking my phone every hour to make sure it didn't need to be rebooted.
But heck, rebooting a phone every once in awhile isn't a huge deal to be able to use almost every Windows application ever! Out of all the smartphone OS's I've dealt with, in reality, Windows Mobile has the least amount of quality applications available for it. A lot of standard things everyone did on the Blackberry's were lost simply because there was no Windows Mobile equivalent program. It turns out most developers have no interest in porting their apps to Windows Mobile. Why not? Well this brings me to the next point...
We've had these phones 2 years, and not a single one of our Windows developers has written a program for it. Why? Because touting it as anything like regular Windows development is a flat out lie. Writing programs for a mobile phone is nothing like a traditional application. They couldn't use many/most of their normal development tools. Writing for limited hardware is a whole different ballpark. Microsoft tried to take their traditional developers and throw them into the mobile phone arena, and those developers simply aren't equipped to do it, and get discouraged and don't write anything for the platform.
Every advantage that relied on the fact "it's basically Windows" went right out the window because, in reality, it's nothing like desktop versions of Windows. We were left with an experience that was significantly worse than the Blackberry's. So guess what? We're getting rid of thousands of dollars worth of phones because the experience truly is that bad. We're going back to Blackberry.
The funny thing about articles like this is there are always "experts" crying about shortcomings in Linux, yet the people actually making the phones are going toward Linux. In reality their criticisms don't hold enough weight to actually discourage the Linux train from rolling. I have recently begun to make the observation that people who actually develop for and use Linux don't have the same concerns as the analysts. Analysts cry "fragmentation", however in the actual Linux community it really isn't a problem. I've yet to run into the developer that says "oh man, I'm going to have to recode so much of this app for Ubuntu from Red Hat. This is going to suck...". Or what about the user "I've used Red Hat before but this Ubuntu is so damn confusing to get used to". The people that seem to criticize the most seem to have the least amount of Linux experience and form their opinions mostly on hearsay.
Eh, I don't think it would be as much as a stumbling block as you'd think. Apple would just include a "Run me first" DVD that would install everything without prompts. If they did it right, it would only be 10-15 minutes additional setup time. I think they'd make that trade for the opportunity for a much more level playing field.
CC has a chance of 99.9999% of getting away scott free. Most likely the family is fuming mad and suing anyone and anything. I doubt they even understand what creative commons is and were unreasonable when their lawyer tried to explain to them. The CC suit will be dropped. Most likely Virgin will settle out of court.
Also, ARE YOU FUCKING SERIOUS? Did Virgin actually expect to go onto flickr, use someone's image without specifically asking (whether legally entitled or not), and not expect to get sued? ESPECIALLY someone who may be a minor. I'm not even talking about consulting with lawyers or risk management before doing such, but common fucking sense. 99% of the population would sue if their picture was featured in such an ad. It has nothing to do with what is legal, but a) common fucking sense and realizing you'll probably lose your job for such a stunt and b) knowing there will be nothing positive for the company that comes out of this.
Again, the insulting thing about this isn't the legal portion, but that Virgin would be so fucking stupid to pull such a stunt.
I brought a GP2X handheld gamesystem and a scientific calculator to the airport once. I almost died laughing as two airport security agents mulled over the two for almost ten minutes. I heard whispers like "maybe one is a remote detonation device for the other?" and "Do you think it could be used to hijack the planes control system?". The people supposedly keeping us safe are morons and can't tell the difference between a breadboard full of LED's and a real threat. And that's what is disturbing. We are giving up all these rights, and we aren't actually in any way, shape, or form safer. If these people have such little understanding of electronics, someone could easily gut a PSP and fool these clowns. It's a dog and pony show at best, and at worst we've given up basic civil liberties.