The key here is to separate the presentation layer from the actual document layer, to segregate them If you try to do them together you get the walled garden approach where every trivial document has to be manually ported to every new platform. That gets old fast. That's why we invented markup languages.
The layout decisions, and how non-document features such as your control buttons are handled, MUST all be done on the client in the end. Only that final client knows (or has any business knowing) the exact nature of the output device.
You raise many reasons why this is not trivial to do properly as if they argued against my point, but the opposite is true. BECAUSE it is difficult to do properly, it makes sense to put in the effort properly once on each device, and then use a generic, universal sort of interface to reach all your documents. Something like, oh, a web browser and html for instance. (When you are talking about controls of any sort you are clearly outside the scope of TeX.)
That would actually be a liquid that kills beards. Still not accurate.
Homicide, however, fits perfectly in this case. Would-be pedants take note, m-w are idiots and always have been. If you cant find several places where they are wrong and you know they are wrong, you are not qualified to engage in pedantry.
Al Qaeda are a bunch of murderous thugs. They get and should get no sympathy whatsoever. But it's the US governments own responses which gives them grounds to curry sympathy. This is why they wanted us in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and beyond. Our government had its own reasons to want to do this, but in the end the result is the same.
So when you draw lines on your mental map and you are thinking about enemy of my enemy, keep in mind that Al Qaeda and the Feds may be better seen as allies, for the moment at least, rather than enemies. Oh, they dont like each other. But they have been strengthening each others hands and playing together to common goals for a long time. In Afghanistan during the soviet period, in the balkans, and right now in Syria. Al Qaeda, contentless US Press releases to the contrary, was weak and nearly powerless in 2002, and today it has a presence in countries from Mali to Indonesia, and can even field an army (by all accounts the strongest and most successful in the entire opposition) to contend in the Syrian Civil War.
And the US is backing them, there, much as we did in the Balkans not so very long ago. What's really going on here?
"Actually, a judge has yet to find whether it's OK or not. The admissibility of the evidence in these cases is going to hinge on whether or not it was collected through legal means."
But regardless of whether or not the judge decides to admit the evidence, we wont see any of these agents arrested and sent to prison for what they did.
"There was a time when everybody thought information and presentation should be separated, and layout should be left to algorithms. Well, that idea failed."
Nonsense. The idea works brilliantly.
Oh, you mean it was rejected by marketing and 'design?' Marketing always wants something new, it can be deeply inferior and that's just fine, that just makes it easier to sell the next piece of crap. Design just wants an excuse to keep fingerpainting and getting paid for it, and in the process they usually find new and interesting ways to break a UI (but never seem all that concerned about fixing one.)
TeX is far superior to any sort of Word Processor, but no one is going to make a mint off it so you will have to figure that out by yourself instead of letting the ads tell you what to do.
Making an app to do something that is already handled just fine in my browser sounds like a waste of time and effort anyhow.
Looks pretty cumbersome. I have yet to see any other input device that could match my keyboard. Over 100 distinct signals, each available in a fraction of a second, and better yet you can string those signals together to make words and string them together into sophisticated commands. A good keyboard will do well in excess of 100 words per minute if you practice with it!
In comparison everything else seems slow, primitive, cumbersome. Perhaps one day this device will develop into something important, but it aint there yet.
"Alcohol'ism' (apparently, from the word construction, this is a religious or philosophical belief in the divinity of alcohol, how bizarre)"
It's actually the religious doctrine that says that the creator made (at least some, possibly all) people in such a way that a single drink of anything alcoholic will inevitably lead to alcohol abuse and self-destruction which they are completely powerless to stop. Adherents consider each day they manage to go sober a miracle - and also, unsurprisingly, often fall off the wagon and validate the other side of their belief as well.
Ma Bell was a statutory monopoly. The current situation in cellphones is a statutory oligopoly. For most people, the difference is academic.
"If you live in a large city, there are frequently many smaller companies giving some choice."
I dont currently live in a large city, and even when I did I frequently left it. What's the point of having a mobile phone that only works in a small area like that anyway?
Small competitors may rise and fall with coverage in a few areas providing a viable alternative for a few people, but for the rest of us there are a handful of choices which collude, have little fear of competition, and are really just structured as machines to separate us from our money while giving the absolute minimum in service back.
And this is not just cellphones. Many areas of the economy are in the same shape right now. This is why everyone outsources everything to India. The corporate office gets rich on the profits, and the customers are captive. What are they going to do, switch to the other company? The other companies already did the same thing, so the same crap will happen there too. Shut up, pay up, or f off. All delivered with that delightful hindi accent.
Nothing against hindis. Our problems are not their fault, they are just trying to make a living themselves.
It's the 'deciders' here in the US who are driving all this and getting rich off it while the rest of us get screwed.
I do agree with a lot of what you said. Not all. There are many countries where the police seem nearly as bad as ours, starting in southern Europe.
"Can you give even a single example of a freedom that Americans have that most other countries don't?"
Yeah, the right to bear arms. A very important, fundamental right, that other countries uniformly disrespect. The first amendment is also much stronger here than any other country I am aware of, at least in theory.
In practice... we're in deep trouble. But the rest of the world is not in such great shape as you make it sound.
First off there isnt even an act of Congress authorizing this, as Senator Wyden has been telling anyone that would listen for many months now, they have invented a contorted and artificial interpretation of a law that doesnt actually say what they want it to say. And beyond that, you and the General both need to repeat American Government 101, because even if Congress really had explicitly authorized this it would still be just as illegal. Congress has no authority to alter the Constitution, and any law that Congress passes that violates the Constitution is null and void.
The blowback from these policies is as inevitable as it was predictable. Whatever minor national security benefits this circus might have produced will never come anywhere near making up for the longterm damage it's done. And the longer we keep pulling this bs the more lead we inject into our own feet.
"Enough said. And we feed them our money for petroleum by the boatload . Fu***** disgusting sons of bitches. May their crotches be infested by the fleas of a thousand Afghan camels and their arms be too short to scratch."
So wait, you are calling Mr Badawi a savage? He cant be, he's the victim here, but in your dichotomy of us and them he is clearly one of them.
No, the savage is not Mr Badawi, it's the judge, and it's also the other judges and the various other functionaries of the government that keep it running. That's a minority of the country, and they have stayed in power for a very long time, in large part because our government supports them.
That is they support the savages 'them', not the Mr Badawi and the other unfortunate Saudi commoners that they oppress 'them'. Our government supports the other 'them', Mr Badawi's them, occasionally, with a nice word and a high-sounding pronouncement, but when push comes to shove they still get no respect - and we still keep propping up their corrupt and oppressive governments. Not just in Saudi, lots of places. All around that region just for a start.
And our own unfortunate commoners are, in some cases, still wondering why they hate us.:(
"The new revelation here is that a relatively low-level guy could easily search through the database looking for everything they want. That lapse in security is actually surprising, even if you have a low opinion of the NSA."
It's not really surprising at all, without any particularly negative opinion of the agency involved beyond expecting that they are more concerned with the tasks immediately before them than with the legality of what they are doing and the long term affects on the republic. This is negative, yes, but it hardly applies to them, in this they and the rest of the government unfortunately mirror a large portion of the public.
Any sort of security or accountability layers here would be seen as needless mickey-mouse nonsense getting in the way of them doing their jobs. And that's exactly why our founding fathers were far-sighted in denying the government the authority to run this sort of operation in the first place. The power to snoop like this is simply too much power for any individual or institution to be trusted with. Power corrupts.
In many cases (UK and Germany for example) they appear to have special access facilitated by their indigenous counterparts (at least in part because they can effectively nullify their own privacy laws by giving an ally who is not bound by them access and 'cooperating.')
It would be a bit surprising if the Russian (or Chinese) services were so willing to cooperate, however. Ironically because they do not have any worries about pretending to follow such laws themselves, but still. Others have mentioned that these appear to coincide with Embassies in placement, but any connection leading to the Embassy itself is surely going to be very carefully shielded in either of those countries, which would limit their utility somewhat. Then again we dont necessarily understand exactly what they are doing with these servers either so that might not be a problem.
I can think of at least one rather devious and nearly undetectable way such a server could be used to further the program, but I wont mention it on the off chance I give someone else the idea.
"One solution would be to place a cap on the donations that one company of individual could make, but then you'd soon see dodgy accounting being used to work around it - things like companies giving a few thousand employees 'bonuses' on the implicit understanding they must donate to a certain candidate, or creating lots of semi-independent front companies who can each make the maximum donation."
There's really no way to enforce such a law effectively across the board. In order to have any deterrent value, the penalties would have to be draconian, and the chance of the law winding up tyrannical (by coming into conflict with the first amendment.)
Individuals should, and must, have a right to express themselves by spending their own money on speech. Some individuals being wealthier than others, that is unequal, and those that worship equality will never quit moaning about it, but those that place liberty higher than equality know that for the greater good (the first amendment, in the US context) that's unavoidable.
BUT that doesnt mean that a corporation gets any rights qua corporation. The free speech rights of each employee and each stockholder and each officer personally can be preserved without inventing a new person here - the corporation is simply a legal fiction created by the state to begin with. This is a big part of the problem I am afraid, but nowhere near all of it - we were well down this road before that ruling.
"It'd be just as easy to put a back-door in a Windows I/O driver as it would the BIOS."
Much easier actually, trivial drivers are often quite bloated and there is plenty of space to hide stuff in. BIOS spaces still tend to be tighter and get more scrutiny.
"A very "American" sentiment, approximately equivalent to the "thinking" that led to the US marked inferiority in decryption and signals intelligence in the 1930's which in turn allowed Pear Harbour to happen"
Historically incorrect. Signals intelligence was actually very good, FDR was reading every cable sent to and from the Embassy, as well as lots of military chatter. Intercepted cables identified the time of the attack and enough information was available to anticipate the target as well. This information was not passed on to Pearl, but that's a different problem entirely.
In the absence of a credible replacement for the Soviet Union the NSA along with lot of other cold war institutions (and industry) just don't need to be funded at anything like their former levels for national security reasons (though I agree they shouldnt be abolished entirely.) Just as the we could not get rid of prohibition era departments and wound up repurposing them for 'the war on drugs' (invented for the purpose of preserving their budgets) the same thing has happened after the cold war, with each big budget casting about for a way to make sure that it continues to grow, rather than getting cut back.
On the micro level it's all so understandable but on the macro level it's destroying the USA.
Slashdot Mirror
The key here is to separate the presentation layer from the actual document layer, to segregate them If you try to do them together you get the walled garden approach where every trivial document has to be manually ported to every new platform. That gets old fast. That's why we invented markup languages.
The layout decisions, and how non-document features such as your control buttons are handled, MUST all be done on the client in the end. Only that final client knows (or has any business knowing) the exact nature of the output device.
You raise many reasons why this is not trivial to do properly as if they argued against my point, but the opposite is true. BECAUSE it is difficult to do properly, it makes sense to put in the effort properly once on each device, and then use a generic, universal sort of interface to reach all your documents. Something like, oh, a web browser and html for instance. (When you are talking about controls of any sort you are clearly outside the scope of TeX.)
"You could start with draconian punishments for interception of private communications."
That would be a good idea in a country of laws.
In our current state, however, only 'the little people' would ever be charged, while official criminals simply ignore the law with impunity.
That would actually be a liquid that kills beards. Still not accurate.
Homicide, however, fits perfectly in this case. Would-be pedants take note, m-w are idiots and always have been. If you cant find several places where they are wrong and you know they are wrong, you are not qualified to engage in pedantry.
Al Qaeda are a bunch of murderous thugs. They get and should get no sympathy whatsoever. But it's the US governments own responses which gives them grounds to curry sympathy. This is why they wanted us in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and beyond. Our government had its own reasons to want to do this, but in the end the result is the same.
So when you draw lines on your mental map and you are thinking about enemy of my enemy, keep in mind that Al Qaeda and the Feds may be better seen as allies, for the moment at least, rather than enemies. Oh, they dont like each other. But they have been strengthening each others hands and playing together to common goals for a long time. In Afghanistan during the soviet period, in the balkans, and right now in Syria. Al Qaeda, contentless US Press releases to the contrary, was weak and nearly powerless in 2002, and today it has a presence in countries from Mali to Indonesia, and can even field an army (by all accounts the strongest and most successful in the entire opposition) to contend in the Syrian Civil War.
And the US is backing them, there, much as we did in the Balkans not so very long ago. What's really going on here?
"Actually, a judge has yet to find whether it's OK or not. The admissibility of the evidence in these cases is going to hinge on whether or not it was collected through legal means."
But regardless of whether or not the judge decides to admit the evidence, we wont see any of these agents arrested and sent to prison for what they did.
"There was a time when everybody thought information and presentation should be separated, and layout should be left to algorithms. Well, that idea failed."
Nonsense. The idea works brilliantly.
Oh, you mean it was rejected by marketing and 'design?' Marketing always wants something new, it can be deeply inferior and that's just fine, that just makes it easier to sell the next piece of crap. Design just wants an excuse to keep fingerpainting and getting paid for it, and in the process they usually find new and interesting ways to break a UI (but never seem all that concerned about fixing one.)
TeX is far superior to any sort of Word Processor, but no one is going to make a mint off it so you will have to figure that out by yourself instead of letting the ads tell you what to do.
Making an app to do something that is already handled just fine in my browser sounds like a waste of time and effort anyhow.
Looks pretty cumbersome. I have yet to see any other input device that could match my keyboard. Over 100 distinct signals, each available in a fraction of a second, and better yet you can string those signals together to make words and string them together into sophisticated commands. A good keyboard will do well in excess of 100 words per minute if you practice with it!
In comparison everything else seems slow, primitive, cumbersome. Perhaps one day this device will develop into something important, but it aint there yet.
"Alcohol'ism' (apparently, from the word construction, this is a religious or philosophical belief in the divinity of alcohol, how bizarre)"
It's actually the religious doctrine that says that the creator made (at least some, possibly all) people in such a way that a single drink of anything alcoholic will inevitably lead to alcohol abuse and self-destruction which they are completely powerless to stop. Adherents consider each day they manage to go sober a miracle - and also, unsurprisingly, often fall off the wagon and validate the other side of their belief as well.
See also "Twelve Steps to Hell."
Ma Bell was a statutory monopoly. The current situation in cellphones is a statutory oligopoly. For most people, the difference is academic.
"If you live in a large city, there are frequently many smaller companies giving some choice."
I dont currently live in a large city, and even when I did I frequently left it. What's the point of having a mobile phone that only works in a small area like that anyway?
Small competitors may rise and fall with coverage in a few areas providing a viable alternative for a few people, but for the rest of us there are a handful of choices which collude, have little fear of competition, and are really just structured as machines to separate us from our money while giving the absolute minimum in service back.
And this is not just cellphones. Many areas of the economy are in the same shape right now. This is why everyone outsources everything to India. The corporate office gets rich on the profits, and the customers are captive. What are they going to do, switch to the other company? The other companies already did the same thing, so the same crap will happen there too. Shut up, pay up, or f off. All delivered with that delightful hindi accent.
Nothing against hindis. Our problems are not their fault, they are just trying to make a living themselves.
It's the 'deciders' here in the US who are driving all this and getting rich off it while the rest of us get screwed.
If you want to see the free market fix things, you first have to have a free market.
The cellphone market in the US is just about the furthest thing from a free market imaginable.
I do agree with a lot of what you said. Not all. There are many countries where the police seem nearly as bad as ours, starting in southern Europe.
"Can you give even a single example of a freedom that Americans have that most other countries don't?"
Yeah, the right to bear arms. A very important, fundamental right, that other countries uniformly disrespect. The first amendment is also much stronger here than any other country I am aware of, at least in theory.
In practice... we're in deep trouble. But the rest of the world is not in such great shape as you make it sound.
First off there isnt even an act of Congress authorizing this, as Senator Wyden has been telling anyone that would listen for many months now, they have invented a contorted and artificial interpretation of a law that doesnt actually say what they want it to say. And beyond that, you and the General both need to repeat American Government 101, because even if Congress really had explicitly authorized this it would still be just as illegal. Congress has no authority to alter the Constitution, and any law that Congress passes that violates the Constitution is null and void.
The blowback from these policies is as inevitable as it was predictable. Whatever minor national security benefits this circus might have produced will never come anywhere near making up for the longterm damage it's done. And the longer we keep pulling this bs the more lead we inject into our own feet.
"Enough said. And we feed them our money for petroleum by the boatload . Fu***** disgusting sons of bitches. ."
May their crotches be infested by the fleas of a thousand Afghan camels and their arms be too short to scratch
So wait, you are calling Mr Badawi a savage? He cant be, he's the victim here, but in your dichotomy of us and them he is clearly one of them.
No, the savage is not Mr Badawi, it's the judge, and it's also the other judges and the various other functionaries of the government that keep it running. That's a minority of the country, and they have stayed in power for a very long time, in large part because our government supports them.
That is they support the savages 'them', not the Mr Badawi and the other unfortunate Saudi commoners that they oppress 'them'. Our government supports the other 'them', Mr Badawi's them, occasionally, with a nice word and a high-sounding pronouncement, but when push comes to shove they still get no respect - and we still keep propping up their corrupt and oppressive governments. Not just in Saudi, lots of places. All around that region just for a start.
And our own unfortunate commoners are, in some cases, still wondering why they hate us. :(
Hmm you are right I cant get anything but a blank page there. The Guardian you would expect to be a little more sane in their architecture right now.
Hmm? I am running noscript and dont have anything else on that page allowed but their own domain. Not even googleapis, and it is working fine for me.
"The new revelation here is that a relatively low-level guy could easily search through the database looking for everything they want. That lapse in security is actually surprising, even if you have a low opinion of the NSA."
It's not really surprising at all, without any particularly negative opinion of the agency involved beyond expecting that they are more concerned with the tasks immediately before them than with the legality of what they are doing and the long term affects on the republic. This is negative, yes, but it hardly applies to them, in this they and the rest of the government unfortunately mirror a large portion of the public.
Any sort of security or accountability layers here would be seen as needless mickey-mouse nonsense getting in the way of them doing their jobs. And that's exactly why our founding fathers were far-sighted in denying the government the authority to run this sort of operation in the first place. The power to snoop like this is simply too much power for any individual or institution to be trusted with. Power corrupts.
In many cases (UK and Germany for example) they appear to have special access facilitated by their indigenous counterparts (at least in part because they can effectively nullify their own privacy laws by giving an ally who is not bound by them access and 'cooperating.')
It would be a bit surprising if the Russian (or Chinese) services were so willing to cooperate, however. Ironically because they do not have any worries about pretending to follow such laws themselves, but still. Others have mentioned that these appear to coincide with Embassies in placement, but any connection leading to the Embassy itself is surely going to be very carefully shielded in either of those countries, which would limit their utility somewhat. Then again we dont necessarily understand exactly what they are doing with these servers either so that might not be a problem.
I can think of at least one rather devious and nearly undetectable way such a server could be used to further the program, but I wont mention it on the off chance I give someone else the idea.
There appears to be at minimum a 3 day buffer within which everyone and everything is effectively wiretapped.
"One solution would be to place a cap on the donations that one company of individual could make, but then you'd soon see dodgy accounting being used to work around it - things like companies giving a few thousand employees 'bonuses' on the implicit understanding they must donate to a certain candidate, or creating lots of semi-independent front companies who can each make the maximum donation."
There's really no way to enforce such a law effectively across the board. In order to have any deterrent value, the penalties would have to be draconian, and the chance of the law winding up tyrannical (by coming into conflict with the first amendment.)
Individuals should, and must, have a right to express themselves by spending their own money on speech. Some individuals being wealthier than others, that is unequal, and those that worship equality will never quit moaning about it, but those that place liberty higher than equality know that for the greater good (the first amendment, in the US context) that's unavoidable.
BUT that doesnt mean that a corporation gets any rights qua corporation. The free speech rights of each employee and each stockholder and each officer personally can be preserved without inventing a new person here - the corporation is simply a legal fiction created by the state to begin with. This is a big part of the problem I am afraid, but nowhere near all of it - we were well down this road before that ruling.
The paper without the codes is not the paper, doh.
Why has the market not solved it?
Because there is no free market at work here. "Intellectual property law" prevents it.
"It'd be just as easy to put a back-door in a Windows I/O driver as it would the BIOS."
Much easier actually, trivial drivers are often quite bloated and there is plenty of space to hide stuff in. BIOS spaces still tend to be tighter and get more scrutiny.
"Most of the really useful editing and review happens after formatting"
Then that is what needs to change. It is far more efficient to do this right - edit in an editor, typeset it once the text is done.
Equations and other things may not look as pretty, but you want your editors to focus on content rather than presentation anyway.
LaTeX isnt good for editing because it is not an editor.
It's amazing how much difficulty people cause themselves by insisting on using the right tool for the wrong job.
"A very "American" sentiment, approximately equivalent to the "thinking" that led to the US marked inferiority in decryption and signals intelligence in the 1930's which in turn allowed Pear Harbour to happen"
Historically incorrect. Signals intelligence was actually very good, FDR was reading every cable sent to and from the Embassy, as well as lots of military chatter. Intercepted cables identified the time of the attack and enough information was available to anticipate the target as well. This information was not passed on to Pearl, but that's a different problem entirely.
In the absence of a credible replacement for the Soviet Union the NSA along with lot of other cold war institutions (and industry) just don't need to be funded at anything like their former levels for national security reasons (though I agree they shouldnt be abolished entirely.) Just as the we could not get rid of prohibition era departments and wound up repurposing them for 'the war on drugs' (invented for the purpose of preserving their budgets) the same thing has happened after the cold war, with each big budget casting about for a way to make sure that it continues to grow, rather than getting cut back.
On the micro level it's all so understandable but on the macro level it's destroying the USA.