So is Apple going to explain why they gave all the UDID of their devices to the FBI?
I know everybody's racing to see conspiracy here -- and that may well end up being the case -- but there might be a simpler explanation for how the FBI got these: From sniffing open WiFi hotspots.
It's possible that the Bureau, perhaps in cahoots with other three-letter agencies, exploited an undisclosed bug that produced the UDID (the technical composition of which is well documented). If so, it wouldn't be any great feat of science to sniff common open-air networks at places like Starbucks, airports, hotels. That's how I'd do it.
But understand that it will cause massive unhappiness for the majority of cases where(for example) one's 75 year-old grandmother, who has forgotten her password and can't figure out how she phrased the answer to the security question, is about to permanently lose access to the last 5 years of her grand-children's emails.
This is a problem that bites both ends. Consider this real-world scenario that happened to me last week:
I work for a senior care organization. One of our resident, a cheerful 92-year-old woman, uses her AT&T email frequently to communicate with family and friends; she's fairly savvy, actually. However, she is starting to suffer from cognitive problems, which have caused her to forget her password. When we tried to reset her password and walked through security questions, she's also having trouble remembering the answers to those questions. We called AT&T and explained the situation, but they understandably (and rightfully) treated our request as a hostile attempt to access the account and would not help us.
She's the legitimate owner of her account -- how can she be helped? This may seem like an extreme situation, but these problems will only increase as we all continue our digital lives and begin to age.
Password and account verification is a difficult problem to solve. If there's a silver bullet, I haven't heard of it yet.
I appreciate your passion, but you have a lot of things wrong. Chiefly this: HTML5 is not a singular entity, but rather a broad description of several emerging web technologies. I launched one of the first commercial HTML5 sites on the Web, and in the years since, the meaning of "HTML5" has already changed significantly, and that's okay.
The semantic HTML tags are less than useless, because they're based on a now obsolete statistical analysis of common ids/classes.
Nearly every site on the Internet has a header and footer, though; sides/sidebars are pretty common too.
Effectively you can't infer any meaning from the semantic tags anymore because it's such a fucking hash up as to what they're even going to mean due to different people going different ways on them.
I'd like to introduce you to the complexity of human language. This isn't a problem specific to HTML5, or HTML, or heavens, even markup languages. People use words and descriptions in different ways. There is not now, never was, and never will be a singular and coherent semantic structure. What's an article to one person is a section to another.
It's important to note that the specs you rail against go to great lengths to avoid enforcing a rigid semantic context. The new HTLM5 elements aren't complete, and nobody ever claimed they were. Their role is purposefully vague, giving web authors new markup tags that infer some semantic structure without enforcing precision. I mean, how many hundreds of roles does the good old tag play? Semantically it indicates a heading of some sort, but what that means, precisely, is intentionally undefined -- and it works great.
The solution to your problem is XML, wherein authors can markup every document with precisely-semantic tags. We tried that with XHTML, and it turned out to be a solution in search of a problem. HTML, with its imprecision, is fine for markup because it's good enough and broad enough that we can do what we want. And when it isn't -- for example, when it fails to define a drawing canvas for complex visual manipulation -- then a new branch (HTML5) was developed. Repeat ad infinitum.
Also, note that I'm talking about just the HTML5 spec here, I have little problem with for example, CSS3.
This is where your argument runs off the rails. You're incensed by HTML5, which has a pretty widely-accepted core implementation, but you have "little problem" with CSS3, which is also incomplete and an ever-changing amalgam of over 50(!) modules, of which only four are in a somewhat-settled state of definition? Come on.
Imagine my horror when I encountered the term "Responsive web design" the other day, apparently it's about creating device/resolution independent web designs. Yeah, great one kiddies who coined that term, we already figured this out some years back.
The "kiddie" who developed responsive web design was Ethan Marcotte, a highly-respected designer and one of the principle authors of new web design techniques. Responsive design was first presented in A List Apart, the leading journal for web design techniques. Responsive web design chiefly involves the use of CSS3 (remember? that thing you have "little problem" with?) media queries in its implementation. And it has nothing to do with resolution independence, but rather, about dynamically adapting both content and layout to a variety of different usage roles (desktop, mobile, etc.).
Again, I appreciate your passion, but it's heavily misinformed. Sure, HTML5 has problems, and they're no secret -- they've been debated ad nauseum since WHATWG first convened. But the fact is that there is a generally-agreed-upon HTML5 baseline, it's in wide use across the Web, and it's enabled some pretty terrific new sites and apps. This will continue, regardless of hand-wringing about standards and forks. The Web adapts.
This technology isn't particularly new -- telehealth has been around in some forms for a few decades, but it's definitely taking off now.
One of the benefits not mentioned is that, in addition to 'remote monitoring,' telehealth services generate a huge amount of useful data for clinicians. Our telehealth program collects weight, blood pressure, pulse, and (for diabetic patients) blood sugar readings daily. It takes less than five minutes for the patient to do these tests.
In turn, their physician and care team have daily medical data, and can detect subtle changes much more quickly than a weekly nurse visit or occasional office visits. The only other setting where you have daily vitals monitoring is an in-patient hospital or care facility; now we can have it in people's houses. And the patients generally love it -- they feel a sense of security knowing that their health is being monitored.
I suspect many of the misgivings about remote-wipe policies have to do with the clarity of explanation. Explain to users clearly what ‘remote wipe’ means, and what they can do to protect their data.
Just today, I wrote a new document for our users about our remote wipe policy and how, with iOS 4.2, they can too thanks to Find My iPhone. Here’s what I wrote, under the heading ‘A brief but important note about your privacy and data:’
“It’s important you know that the locating feature of Find My iPhone is tied to your own, personal Apple ID. This feature is not accessible by anyone else in the company, including the IT department, and cannot be used to track or determine your location. We respect your privacy.
“On the other hand, the IT department can immediately erase your iPhone’s data should it be lost or stolen. This would cause everything on your iPhone to be erased, including pictures, music, and apps — not just company data. Therefore, we recommend you connect and sync your iPhone to iTunes regularly to ensure that any personal data on your iPhone is backed up.”
Companies have a right to secure their smartphones —there’s a lot of data on them. End users have a right to protect their personal, non-company data. These are not mutually exclusive. Can we agree?
The OLPC XO was very easy to use, yet somehow Sugar/Linux doesn't get the same sort of attention Mac OS X or iOS do.
What real-world questions did the OLPC XO answer? I've never used one, so I honestly have no idea.
For as many people as bought the various Apple products, Macs in the XP and Vista era answered the question, "Would you like your computer to not be a malware-infested heap of frustration?", the iPod answered the question, "Would you like to carry all your CDs in a fun little pocket-sized box?", and the iPhone answered the question, "Would you like to carry the Internet in your pocket?" Not really novel stuff, but it was packaged thoughtfully and it made sense to a lot of people without requiring a great amount of explanation. The iPad is arguably the first major Apple product in a while that doesn't immediately scratch an obvious itch. Its selling point is more along the lines of, "A lot of what you do with your computer, in a smaller, sleeker package."
Again, I don't think it's rocket science. Apple built what their own people thought would be great, and lo and behold, a couple million other people thought it was great too. Sure, Apple is a slick marketer (although Apple's marketing budget is in line with other tech companies its size: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/28/apples-2009-ad-budget-half-a-billion/) and gets a lot of free love from pop culture, but it would be myopic to suggest that this is much more than sugar-coating on an already solid and aggressive business model.
Go back about five years in the archives of most tech publications and you can find similar stories about "The coming onslaught of iPod competitors." Look how that worked out.
For some reason, the tech community believes that the commoditize-and-cannabalize cycle that typified the 1980s and 1990s is a perpetual law. It isn't, and Apple's success this decade is a resounding rejoinder to that view. Apple's products aren't, in all respects, better than the competitors; what they are is more polished, more refined, and an order of magnitude easier to pick up on and figure out on your own.
The typical screeds about how Apple's success is due to marketing prowess, reality distortion fields, media sycophancy, etc. are all a bunch of red herrings. Apple makes great products, and it's a real shame that more companies haven't picked up on how they do it and why. It's not rocket science to diligently refine your products while at the same time planning their long-term placement growth; it's just more involved than most companies want to be.
So sure, I'm sure there will be an onslaught of cheaper, different tablets that mindless consumers (Who, I might add, the tech community still believes to be largely ignorant about technology. You know, in 2010.) will buy up and the iPad will be dead. It's impossible that, say, every single one of the competitor tablets will be inferior in one or more significant ways that fails to make an appreciable dent in the iPad's adoption rate. Equally impossible that Apple would refine the iPad beyond its current iteration to entice new customers. I mean, really.
I'm not giving Apple the keys to the kingdom carte blanche, as heaven knows they've made their share of mistakes, but on the whole, I think they've been too successful, too visionary, and too aggressive to continue this endless narrative about how, just when they're about to succeed, the commodity tech market comes up aces and wins the hand.
I'm assuming you're talking about web video; if not, this info won't be applicable. The 'Video for Everybody' project at Camen Design has put a lot of work into cross-platform HTML5 video, and the test page has an extensive compatibility matrix for both desktop and mobile platforms.
I'm speaking purely for the United States here. The first thing that came to mind was this great scene from the movie Apollo 13 where engineers are told they have to fit a square filter in a round hole using only the elements on the table. First reaction? They dive right in.
So to use this as an example, it sometimes feels like we've lost the raw brilliance and creativity that allowed us to put human beings on the moon. And we did it years before the development of advanced composites, sophisticated integrated circuits, and computer modeling. The moon missions were calculated with slide rules; even the astronauts had to be skilled mathematicians.
In that sense, it feels like our creativity is on the wane. On the other hand, perhaps it's just changing form.
True, we haven't put anybody on the moon in a while, but we've instead built a giant worldwide interconnected computer network. We've built a search engine that aggregates and indexes it all. We've built touchscreen devices that can make phone calls, access websites, pinpoint your location to within 30 feet using satellites hundreds of miles in the sky, and put it all into a tiny package that slips into your pocket and runs all day on a battery charge.
That's pretty creative, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. So I don't necessarily know that we're less creative today; I see the emotional and anecdotal evidence for it, but the contrary evidence suggests that we're still exceptionally creative and eclectic with our skills.
The list should more accurately be called, "Top 500 publicly-acknowledged supercomputers." You can go right on thinking that the US NSA, British MI6, and even some private industries (AT&T?) don't have vastly larger supers that are not publicly disclosed.
If there's one thing history teaches about rumors regarding upcoming Apple products, it's that nobody talking knows anything.
That's not always the case; sometimes, far from it. The source for this information comes from John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. It's well known, and John says as much, that he has sources inside Apple. As a reliable critic ('critic' as in Ebert, not hostility) of Apple, it seems his sources are either known to the company and the leaks are green-lighted, or else Apple simply doesn't care enough about smaller announcements to ferret out the mole. I'd bet heavily on the former.
John doesn't always make predictions of a declarative nature, but when he does, you can more or less take them as stated fact; for example, his "predictions" for last year's WWDC.
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader.
So am I. Here's a recent example: Toxic Waters, a series that ran late last year. The Times put a lot of time - and thus, money - into researching the series, combing through the data (and filing the FOIAs, etc.), as well as the interactive features, which were well done.
Murdock has ushered in the era of factless journalism and pure opinion as news.
"Reinstated," not "ushered in." Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Hearst and Pulitzer, whose yellow journalism more or less defined the conditions to which Murdoch is now returning his media empire.
The good news is that these things seem to be cyclical. The bad news is that, if Hearst and Pulitzer are any indication, it takes a somewhat cataclysmic event (such as the Spanish-American War) to shake people into their senses and start demanding across-the-board accountability.
It's water under the bridge, but in hindsight, it would have been better to not create the alternate TLDs.cm,.co. While I'm at it, tell me there's a good reason we have augmented reality iPhones and 60 MPG cars but not web browsers that autocorrect non-existent TLDs.
Seriously, why doesn't every browser have a "I don't live in Cameroon or Colombia; auto-correct.cm and.co to.com, don't warn me when doing it, and don't bother me about this again" option? (I know, I know,.hosts and/or Firefox extensions. Still.)
I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.
According to this comment post on Engadget, it was a contractor working for Danger/Microsoft who screwed up a SAN upgrade and caused the data loss. Obviously, take this with a grain of salt until it's substantiated:
"I've been getting the straight dope from the inside on this. Let me assure you, your data IS gone. Currently MS is trying to get the devices to sync the data they have back to the service as a form of recovery.
It's not a server failure. They were upgrading their SAN, and they outsourced it to a Hitachi consulting firm. There was room for a backup of the data on the SAN, but they didn't do it (some say they started it but didn't wait for it to complete). They upgraded the SAN, screwed it up and lost all the data.
All the apps in the developer store are gone too.
This is surely the end of Danger. I only hope it's the end of those involved who screwed this up and the MS folks who laid off and drove out anyone at Danger who knew what they were doing.
It would be much buggier, less stable, and more bloated, due to its need to support a whole range of hardware, rather than a narrowly constricted band. Apple will not license OS X. There is zero financial incentive for them to do so; they already print their own money by selling their own hardware. Apple's primary business is *not* to sell software.
I don't see the point you're making. You might as well have contrasted nine-year disparate statements about RAM size. Over nine years, Apple's stance towards Java has changed; what's wrong with that? In 2000, Java seemed to have a wider path on the desktops than it does in 2009. Other languages and runtime environments have grown up around Java in the subsequent nine years, and to Apple's thinking, the other languages (such as Objective-C 2.0) allow for building better software than Java allows.
Apple's stance appears to be, right or wrong, that Java on the desktop and mobile devices is no longer the best way to develop and deploy software, and thus, they've allowed the Java implementation in OS X to grow long in the tooth, and have outright declined to port it to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy.
MAD is a doctrine; that is, a dogma of belief; it is, more accurately, a statement of condition about the geopolitical theatre. In any case, it is neither a policy nor a hypothesis. By definition, it is untestable, because the first time it is tested is the last time it is testable. MAD is often held up as a policy that is "effective," but it is not, because its efficacy will never, and can never, be established. MAD simply means, "the condition within which major nuclear powers have not yet engaged in a large-scale offensive nuclear exchange" (emphasis mine). The "not yet" is a vitally important point. The MAD doctrine categorically does not and will not prevent a nuclear exchange. In other words, it is not a policy of safeguard. MAD means that the possibility -- indeed, the likelihood -- of nuclear conflict is still very real.
This is the whole point of non-proliferation, and is the fundamental and scientifically demonstrable reason why non-proliferation is the only safeguard against nuclear exchange.
More to the point, the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" is a euphamism which has the look-alike appearance of a military policy; however, the more accurate rendition of the doctrine is "Global Nuclear Annihilation."
Maybe not, but if she's getting the launch codes, I sure as hell care about whether she is counting on the Rapture.
If she is counting on a rapture, she is hoping for a time when "the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first" (I Thessalonians 4:16, which is the 'classic' rapture text). There isn't much anywhere in the theology of rapture that would have any bearing on nuclear war. In general, conservative Christianity feigns violence.
The latter is easily accessible from the trunk and can be used with standard jumper cables to start someone else's car or similar functions.
A fellow Prius owner here. Everything I've come across indicates that the 12V is insufficient for jump-starting other vehicles, and that doing so may even damage the electronics. Have you actually jumped another car from yours before? If so, I'm curious how you did it (if at all different from a standard jump).
Why not just buy a Civic or a Fit? They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff. (Emphasis mine.)
Your comment answers the question, though most people don't know it.
You said, "fancy hybrid stuff," which is most people's assumption: Better gas mileage, but more complicated and more to repair. In fact, series/parallel hybrid engines like Toyota's 'Synergy Drive' are less complicated and need less service than a traditional ICE -- which is why I own one and won't ever go back. Because the car is propelled partially by the electric motor (a standard brushless DC), the ICE can idle or be shut completely off, reducing wear on the engine. Furthermore, the computer controls ICE throttling, the ICE runs at optimal efficiency more often.
Then you have things like the air conditioner being run completely off the electric motor (e.g. it's no longer on the drive belt), the transmission being an electronically-controlled CVT, the drive-by-wire steering, and the regenerative braking, which handles up to 80% of the car's braking power and drastically increases brake life. The list goes on.
I like the fact that my Prius gets great gas mileage, but it's the overall design of the engine that made me decide to buy one. The gas mileage is just icing on the cake.
But towards the end, he actually said that the American constitution provides an exception to "for the Executive to suspend Habeas Corpus in time of WAR or insurrection" (emphasis mine). It doesn't. And there's no way a professional at that level made that big a mistake. [...] The framers chose all their words carefully, and it says: [...] INVASION, not War."
He was probably thinking of and referring to Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeus corpus and imprisoned Confederate sympathizers without trials (sound familiar?). Lincoln wrote in his proclamation:
"That the writ of habeas corpus is suspended in respect to all persons arrested, or who are now, or hereafter during the rebellion shall be, imprisoned in any fort, camp, arsenal, military prisons, or other place of confinement, by any military authority, or by the sentence of any court-martial or military commission."
(It's worth noting that Jefferson Davis enacted similar measures in the south.)
Habeus corpus was also suspended by President Grant in a motion against the Ku Klux Klan, by Roosevelt during World War II (see Ex parte Quirin), and was limited in scope by President Clinton following the Oklahoma City bombing.
While I agree with you that the president doesn't have the authority to curtail habeus corpus, there is abundant historical precedent for the wide interpretation of "rebellion or invasion." Nevertheless, the SCOTUS did exactly what it was designed to do by curtailing the executive declaration and bringing it under the proper purview of the judiciary branch. This is a textbook example of "checks and balances between the various branches of the United States federal government" as you get.
I would assume only a fool would write off two of the largest tech companies in the country (with a combined revenue of 57.33B).
Twenty years ago, many wise and learned economists protested the warnings of a few mavericks who followed the automotive industry and saw dark clouds rolling into Detroit, saying, "Only a fool would write off the three largest automobile manufacturers in the world (with a combined revenue of hundreds of billions)."
If the past twelve months have shown us anything, they have shown us that economics is an art, not a science, and as such is not fettered by laws of causality. Many people believed that oil would not rocket 25% or even 30% past $100/barrel. Many people believed that food and agriculture costs were far enough divorced from energy costs that an increase in the latter would not substantially contribute to an increase in the former. And many, many people believed that housing was an "investment" that would never substantially depreciate in value.
You are looking at the economic world of 2008 through the wrong end of the telescope. Microsoft and Yahoo! may have a "combined" revenue of $57.33B (though Microsoft accounts for the lion's share of that) but their future prosperity -- even existence -- is hardly a given. Both companies have demonstrated amply in recent history that they are full of institutional inertia that, true to form, demonstrates Newton's principle that a body set into motion will thus continue in motion.
Slashdot Mirror
So is Apple going to explain why they gave all the UDID of their devices to the FBI?
I know everybody's racing to see conspiracy here -- and that may well end up being the case -- but there might be a simpler explanation for how the FBI got these: From sniffing open WiFi hotspots.
It's possible that the Bureau, perhaps in cahoots with other three-letter agencies, exploited an undisclosed bug that produced the UDID (the technical composition of which is well documented). If so, it wouldn't be any great feat of science to sniff common open-air networks at places like Starbucks, airports, hotels. That's how I'd do it.
But understand that it will cause massive unhappiness for the majority of cases where(for example) one's 75 year-old grandmother, who has forgotten her password and can't figure out how she phrased the answer to the security question, is about to permanently lose access to the last 5 years of her grand-children's emails.
This is a problem that bites both ends. Consider this real-world scenario that happened to me last week:
I work for a senior care organization. One of our resident, a cheerful 92-year-old woman, uses her AT&T email frequently to communicate with family and friends; she's fairly savvy, actually. However, she is starting to suffer from cognitive problems, which have caused her to forget her password. When we tried to reset her password and walked through security questions, she's also having trouble remembering the answers to those questions. We called AT&T and explained the situation, but they understandably (and rightfully) treated our request as a hostile attempt to access the account and would not help us.
She's the legitimate owner of her account -- how can she be helped? This may seem like an extreme situation, but these problems will only increase as we all continue our digital lives and begin to age.
Password and account verification is a difficult problem to solve. If there's a silver bullet, I haven't heard of it yet.
(an editor at Gizmodo)
And furthermore, Mat Honan works for Wired, not Gizmodo.
I appreciate your passion, but you have a lot of things wrong. Chiefly this: HTML5 is not a singular entity, but rather a broad description of several emerging web technologies. I launched one of the first commercial HTML5 sites on the Web, and in the years since, the meaning of "HTML5" has already changed significantly, and that's okay.
The semantic HTML tags are less than useless, because they're based on a now obsolete statistical analysis of common ids/classes.
Nearly every site on the Internet has a header and footer, though; sides/sidebars are pretty common too.
Effectively you can't infer any meaning from the semantic tags anymore because it's such a fucking hash up as to what they're even going to mean due to different people going different ways on them.
I'd like to introduce you to the complexity of human language. This isn't a problem specific to HTML5, or HTML, or heavens, even markup languages. People use words and descriptions in different ways. There is not now, never was, and never will be a singular and coherent semantic structure. What's an article to one person is a section to another.
It's important to note that the specs you rail against go to great lengths to avoid enforcing a rigid semantic context. The new HTLM5 elements aren't complete, and nobody ever claimed they were. Their role is purposefully vague, giving web authors new markup tags that infer some semantic structure without enforcing precision. I mean, how many hundreds of roles does the good old tag play? Semantically it indicates a heading of some sort, but what that means, precisely, is intentionally undefined -- and it works great.
The solution to your problem is XML, wherein authors can markup every document with precisely-semantic tags. We tried that with XHTML, and it turned out to be a solution in search of a problem. HTML, with its imprecision, is fine for markup because it's good enough and broad enough that we can do what we want. And when it isn't -- for example, when it fails to define a drawing canvas for complex visual manipulation -- then a new branch (HTML5) was developed. Repeat ad infinitum.
Also, note that I'm talking about just the HTML5 spec here, I have little problem with for example, CSS3.
This is where your argument runs off the rails. You're incensed by HTML5, which has a pretty widely-accepted core implementation, but you have "little problem" with CSS3, which is also incomplete and an ever-changing amalgam of over 50(!) modules, of which only four are in a somewhat-settled state of definition? Come on.
Imagine my horror when I encountered the term "Responsive web design" the other day, apparently it's about creating device/resolution independent web designs. Yeah, great one kiddies who coined that term, we already figured this out some years back.
The "kiddie" who developed responsive web design was Ethan Marcotte, a highly-respected designer and one of the principle authors of new web design techniques. Responsive design was first presented in A List Apart, the leading journal for web design techniques. Responsive web design chiefly involves the use of CSS3 (remember? that thing you have "little problem" with?) media queries in its implementation. And it has nothing to do with resolution independence, but rather, about dynamically adapting both content and layout to a variety of different usage roles (desktop, mobile, etc.).
Again, I appreciate your passion, but it's heavily misinformed. Sure, HTML5 has problems, and they're no secret -- they've been debated ad nauseum since WHATWG first convened. But the fact is that there is a generally-agreed-upon HTML5 baseline, it's in wide use across the Web, and it's enabled some pretty terrific new sites and apps. This will continue, regardless of hand-wringing about standards and forks. The Web adapts.
This technology isn't particularly new -- telehealth has been around in some forms for a few decades, but it's definitely taking off now.
One of the benefits not mentioned is that, in addition to 'remote monitoring,' telehealth services generate a huge amount of useful data for clinicians. Our telehealth program collects weight, blood pressure, pulse, and (for diabetic patients) blood sugar readings daily. It takes less than five minutes for the patient to do these tests.
In turn, their physician and care team have daily medical data, and can detect subtle changes much more quickly than a weekly nurse visit or occasional office visits. The only other setting where you have daily vitals monitoring is an in-patient hospital or care facility; now we can have it in people's houses. And the patients generally love it -- they feel a sense of security knowing that their health is being monitored.
I suspect many of the misgivings about remote-wipe policies have to do with the clarity of explanation. Explain to users clearly what ‘remote wipe’ means, and what they can do to protect their data.
Just today, I wrote a new document for our users about our remote wipe policy and how, with iOS 4.2, they can too thanks to Find My iPhone. Here’s what I wrote, under the heading ‘A brief but important note about your privacy and data:’
Companies have a right to secure their smartphones —there’s a lot of data on them. End users have a right to protect their personal, non-company data. These are not mutually exclusive. Can we agree?
The OLPC XO was very easy to use, yet somehow Sugar/Linux doesn't get the same sort of attention Mac OS X or iOS do.
What real-world questions did the OLPC XO answer? I've never used one, so I honestly have no idea.
For as many people as bought the various Apple products, Macs in the XP and Vista era answered the question, "Would you like your computer to not be a malware-infested heap of frustration?", the iPod answered the question, "Would you like to carry all your CDs in a fun little pocket-sized box?", and the iPhone answered the question, "Would you like to carry the Internet in your pocket?" Not really novel stuff, but it was packaged thoughtfully and it made sense to a lot of people without requiring a great amount of explanation. The iPad is arguably the first major Apple product in a while that doesn't immediately scratch an obvious itch. Its selling point is more along the lines of, "A lot of what you do with your computer, in a smaller, sleeker package."
Again, I don't think it's rocket science. Apple built what their own people thought would be great, and lo and behold, a couple million other people thought it was great too. Sure, Apple is a slick marketer (although Apple's marketing budget is in line with other tech companies its size: http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2009/10/28/apples-2009-ad-budget-half-a-billion/) and gets a lot of free love from pop culture, but it would be myopic to suggest that this is much more than sugar-coating on an already solid and aggressive business model.
Go back about five years in the archives of most tech publications and you can find similar stories about "The coming onslaught of iPod competitors." Look how that worked out.
For some reason, the tech community believes that the commoditize-and-cannabalize cycle that typified the 1980s and 1990s is a perpetual law. It isn't, and Apple's success this decade is a resounding rejoinder to that view. Apple's products aren't, in all respects, better than the competitors; what they are is more polished, more refined, and an order of magnitude easier to pick up on and figure out on your own.
The typical screeds about how Apple's success is due to marketing prowess, reality distortion fields, media sycophancy, etc. are all a bunch of red herrings. Apple makes great products, and it's a real shame that more companies haven't picked up on how they do it and why. It's not rocket science to diligently refine your products while at the same time planning their long-term placement growth; it's just more involved than most companies want to be.
So sure, I'm sure there will be an onslaught of cheaper, different tablets that mindless consumers (Who, I might add, the tech community still believes to be largely ignorant about technology. You know, in 2010.) will buy up and the iPad will be dead. It's impossible that, say, every single one of the competitor tablets will be inferior in one or more significant ways that fails to make an appreciable dent in the iPad's adoption rate. Equally impossible that Apple would refine the iPad beyond its current iteration to entice new customers. I mean, really.
I'm not giving Apple the keys to the kingdom carte blanche, as heaven knows they've made their share of mistakes, but on the whole, I think they've been too successful, too visionary, and too aggressive to continue this endless narrative about how, just when they're about to succeed, the commodity tech market comes up aces and wins the hand.
I'm assuming you're talking about web video; if not, this info won't be applicable. The 'Video for Everybody' project at Camen Design has put a lot of work into cross-platform HTML5 video, and the test page has an extensive compatibility matrix for both desktop and mobile platforms.
Be aware that if you're targeting Android, its implementation of HTML5 video is lackluster (for now; I'd expect this to get better soon). Details of the problems, and a few solutions, can be found here: http://www.broken-links.com/2010/07/08/making-html5-video-work-on-android-phones/.
I'm speaking purely for the United States here. The first thing that came to mind was this great scene from the movie Apollo 13 where engineers are told they have to fit a square filter in a round hole using only the elements on the table. First reaction? They dive right in.
So to use this as an example, it sometimes feels like we've lost the raw brilliance and creativity that allowed us to put human beings on the moon. And we did it years before the development of advanced composites, sophisticated integrated circuits, and computer modeling. The moon missions were calculated with slide rules; even the astronauts had to be skilled mathematicians.
In that sense, it feels like our creativity is on the wane. On the other hand, perhaps it's just changing form.
True, we haven't put anybody on the moon in a while, but we've instead built a giant worldwide interconnected computer network. We've built a search engine that aggregates and indexes it all. We've built touchscreen devices that can make phone calls, access websites, pinpoint your location to within 30 feet using satellites hundreds of miles in the sky, and put it all into a tiny package that slips into your pocket and runs all day on a battery charge.
That's pretty creative, and it's showing no signs of slowing down. So I don't necessarily know that we're less creative today; I see the emotional and anecdotal evidence for it, but the contrary evidence suggests that we're still exceptionally creative and eclectic with our skills.
The list should more accurately be called, "Top 500 publicly-acknowledged supercomputers." You can go right on thinking that the US NSA, British MI6, and even some private industries (AT&T?) don't have vastly larger supers that are not publicly disclosed.
If there's one thing history teaches about rumors regarding upcoming Apple products, it's that nobody talking knows anything.
That's not always the case; sometimes, far from it. The source for this information comes from John Gruber over at Daring Fireball. It's well known, and John says as much, that he has sources inside Apple. As a reliable critic ('critic' as in Ebert, not hostility) of Apple, it seems his sources are either known to the company and the leaks are green-lighted, or else Apple simply doesn't care enough about smaller announcements to ferret out the mole. I'd bet heavily on the former.
John doesn't always make predictions of a declarative nature, but when he does, you can more or less take them as stated fact; for example, his "predictions" for last year's WWDC.
Name an important piece of investigative journalism done by the Times in the last ten years. I can't. And I'm a regular reader.
So am I. Here's a recent example: Toxic Waters, a series that ran late last year. The Times put a lot of time - and thus, money - into researching the series, combing through the data (and filing the FOIAs, etc.), as well as the interactive features, which were well done.
Murdock has ushered in the era of factless journalism and pure opinion as news.
"Reinstated," not "ushered in." Before Rupert Murdoch, there was Hearst and Pulitzer, whose yellow journalism more or less defined the conditions to which Murdoch is now returning his media empire.
The good news is that these things seem to be cyclical. The bad news is that, if Hearst and Pulitzer are any indication, it takes a somewhat cataclysmic event (such as the Spanish-American War) to shake people into their senses and start demanding across-the-board accountability.
It's water under the bridge, but in hindsight, it would have been better to not create the alternate TLDs .cm, .co. While I'm at it, tell me there's a good reason we have augmented reality iPhones and 60 MPG cars but not web browsers that autocorrect non-existent TLDs.
Seriously, why doesn't every browser have a "I don't live in Cameroon or Colombia; auto-correct .cm and .co to .com, don't warn me when doing it, and don't bother me about this again" option? (I know, I know, .hosts and/or Firefox extensions. Still.)
I wrote this here years ago, but it bears repeating: Libertarianism is the carrying out of fascism by other means. The one thing it precisely does not guarantee is liberty.
"Epic fail" doesn't begin to describe this one.
It would be much buggier, less stable, and more bloated, due to its need to support a whole range of hardware, rather than a narrowly constricted band. Apple will not license OS X. There is zero financial incentive for them to do so; they already print their own money by selling their own hardware. Apple's primary business is *not* to sell software.
I don't see the point you're making. You might as well have contrasted nine-year disparate statements about RAM size. Over nine years, Apple's stance towards Java has changed; what's wrong with that? In 2000, Java seemed to have a wider path on the desktops than it does in 2009. Other languages and runtime environments have grown up around Java in the subsequent nine years, and to Apple's thinking, the other languages (such as Objective-C 2.0) allow for building better software than Java allows.
Apple's stance appears to be, right or wrong, that Java on the desktop and mobile devices is no longer the best way to develop and deploy software, and thus, they've allowed the Java implementation in OS X to grow long in the tooth, and have outright declined to port it to the iPhone/iPod Touch OS.
The nuke has very effectively prevented WWIII from happening as the deterrent of MAD has proven to be histories most effective peace policy.
MAD is a doctrine; that is, a dogma of belief; it is, more accurately, a statement of condition about the geopolitical theatre. In any case, it is neither a policy nor a hypothesis. By definition, it is untestable, because the first time it is tested is the last time it is testable. MAD is often held up as a policy that is "effective," but it is not, because its efficacy will never, and can never, be established. MAD simply means, "the condition within which major nuclear powers have not yet engaged in a large-scale offensive nuclear exchange" (emphasis mine). The "not yet" is a vitally important point. The MAD doctrine categorically does not and will not prevent a nuclear exchange. In other words, it is not a policy of safeguard. MAD means that the possibility -- indeed, the likelihood -- of nuclear conflict is still very real.
This is the whole point of non-proliferation, and is the fundamental and scientifically demonstrable reason why non-proliferation is the only safeguard against nuclear exchange.
More to the point, the phrase "Mutually Assured Destruction" is a euphamism which has the look-alike appearance of a military policy; however, the more accurate rendition of the doctrine is "Global Nuclear Annihilation."
Maybe not, but if she's getting the launch codes, I sure as hell care about whether she is counting on the Rapture.
If she is counting on a rapture, she is hoping for a time when "the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first" (I Thessalonians 4:16, which is the 'classic' rapture text). There isn't much anywhere in the theology of rapture that would have any bearing on nuclear war. In general, conservative Christianity feigns violence.
The latter is easily accessible from the trunk and can be used with standard jumper cables to start someone else's car or similar functions.
A fellow Prius owner here. Everything I've come across indicates that the 12V is insufficient for jump-starting other vehicles, and that doing so may even damage the electronics. Have you actually jumped another car from yours before? If so, I'm curious how you did it (if at all different from a standard jump).
Why not just buy a Civic or a Fit? They're both pretty nice compact cars that get fantastic mileage (~34mpg) without any fancy hybrid stuff. (Emphasis mine.)
Your comment answers the question, though most people don't know it.
You said, "fancy hybrid stuff," which is most people's assumption: Better gas mileage, but more complicated and more to repair. In fact, series/parallel hybrid engines like Toyota's 'Synergy Drive' are less complicated and need less service than a traditional ICE -- which is why I own one and won't ever go back. Because the car is propelled partially by the electric motor (a standard brushless DC), the ICE can idle or be shut completely off, reducing wear on the engine. Furthermore, the computer controls ICE throttling, the ICE runs at optimal efficiency more often.
Then you have things like the air conditioner being run completely off the electric motor (e.g. it's no longer on the drive belt), the transmission being an electronically-controlled CVT, the drive-by-wire steering, and the regenerative braking, which handles up to 80% of the car's braking power and drastically increases brake life. The list goes on.
I like the fact that my Prius gets great gas mileage, but it's the overall design of the engine that made me decide to buy one. The gas mileage is just icing on the cake.
He was probably thinking of and referring to Abraham Lincoln, who suspended habeus corpus and imprisoned Confederate sympathizers without trials (sound familiar?). Lincoln wrote in his proclamation:
(It's worth noting that Jefferson Davis enacted similar measures in the south.)
Habeus corpus was also suspended by President Grant in a motion against the Ku Klux Klan, by Roosevelt during World War II (see Ex parte Quirin), and was limited in scope by President Clinton following the Oklahoma City bombing.
While I agree with you that the president doesn't have the authority to curtail habeus corpus, there is abundant historical precedent for the wide interpretation of "rebellion or invasion." Nevertheless, the SCOTUS did exactly what it was designed to do by curtailing the executive declaration and bringing it under the proper purview of the judiciary branch. This is a textbook example of "checks and balances between the various branches of the United States federal government" as you get.
I would assume only a fool would write off two of the largest tech companies in the country (with a combined revenue of 57.33B).
Twenty years ago, many wise and learned economists protested the warnings of a few mavericks who followed the automotive industry and saw dark clouds rolling into Detroit, saying, "Only a fool would write off the three largest automobile manufacturers in the world (with a combined revenue of hundreds of billions)."
If the past twelve months have shown us anything, they have shown us that economics is an art, not a science, and as such is not fettered by laws of causality. Many people believed that oil would not rocket 25% or even 30% past $100/barrel. Many people believed that food and agriculture costs were far enough divorced from energy costs that an increase in the latter would not substantially contribute to an increase in the former. And many, many people believed that housing was an "investment" that would never substantially depreciate in value.
You are looking at the economic world of 2008 through the wrong end of the telescope. Microsoft and Yahoo! may have a "combined" revenue of $57.33B (though Microsoft accounts for the lion's share of that) but their future prosperity -- even existence -- is hardly a given. Both companies have demonstrated amply in recent history that they are full of institutional inertia that, true to form, demonstrates Newton's principle that a body set into motion will thus continue in motion.