There are several problems with progress bars: 1) there are some tasks for which progress -- and even present state -- are not easily measurable. For example, your Li-ion batteries look to be in pretty much the same state when you have anywhere from 10% - 100% power remaining. It's not enough to be able to program a progress bar: you have to have knowledge of the thing being metered to do it right.
2) There are some tasks for which the total workload is not readily known. If you have a simple (light on metadata) filesystem with many nested directories and fragmented files, you have no idea what the full scope of the workload is until it's either almost done, or unless you do some pre-processing. Metadata collected in advance (file size info) can help, but it's basically the same thing: you're pre-processing before you know what or what you'll need the data for. And naturally, this pre-processing can be hefty for a few rare cases.
3) For some operations, progress so far doesn't strictly map to remaining workload: your algorithm could handle the fast, "low-hanging fruit" first.
4) On complex systems, time spent and progress don't map well to time remaining. As I said before, some portions of the workload could be inherently faster (as with some coding/decoding problems). The system or signal path could impose unusual delays, then relieve them, spoiling the calculation. The bar has to account for this with some knowledge of the system outside the algorithm. In other words, it's not enough to understand the problem, you also have to understand progress bars.
5) The progress bar only matters when the user is in a hurry. If you were comfortable with a very coarse granularity ("Come back in about an hour") you probably wouldn't care about the ticking of the bar. The edge cases define user's perception of the bar's effectiveness.
6) The bar actually conveys more information than progress. The bar is actually used more than it should be -- that is, instead of the hourglass/spinning clock/spinner -- because it conveys more information that the user demands: "Yes, I'm really working. No, I haven't locked up. No, I'm not in an infinite loop, trying to free up a non-existent resource, or waiting for input to a hidden prompt. Yes, I promise we will get there at some point if you just sit there patiently and refrain from bothering your nephew 'because he knows computers'." For tasks where the progress bar moves imperceptibly, you usually also have a message to the extent of, "I'm manipulating this data point now. Notice it's different than the data point I was working with 5 minutes ago. See, progress! Not locked."
In general, you probably need to take a multi-prog attack to user notification: aspinner for pre-processing and simple tasks that will complete in under a second, a progress bar based on pre-processing for longer tasks, and some sort of very nebulous, "come back in an hour; I'm working on it," dialog for really long tasks.
The issue here is his particular job in intelligence. An extramarital affair, heavy drug use, or anything of the like is a job liability (not just a political liability) in public policy because it opens an opportunity for blackmail. That's the first problem. The second problem is that even if nobody finds out, you still have no idea what he's telling his mistress, or when they'll break up and she'll start talking. We can presume that whatever level of commitment she has in the relationship, it's probably not as high an investment as, say, his wife has in their marriage. Eventually, it will end.
Furthermore, since this whole thing is also supposed to remain a secret, that also minimizes the amount of overt protection he can afford his mistress. (This would be more of an issue, say, during the height of Cold War, when kidnapping an intelligence chief's mistress for interrogation might one day be a tempting enough target for an enemy agency. Still, it's a possibility.) There are a whole slew of operational issues built into the secrecy of this that make mistresses a bad idea for anyone in intel, with the reasons becoming more important the higher up the chain of command you go.
So now he's come clean. Doesn't that short-circuit the danger of a secret mistress? Sort of, but now you have the inherent personnel problem: it's hard to tell your operational agents about the dangers of secret affairs when you're doing it yourself.
Then you have the underlying issue of character: if he can't remain loyal to a marriage, why should we assume he can remain loyal to his country. I know that sounds like a leap. It is. But it's still the sort of question that needs to be asked. Secret societies -- even extremely popular ones, like the Masons -- have small secrets like handshakes, passwords, and rituals for a reason: if you can't trust a man with a trivial secret like a handshake, you sure as hell can't trust him with a big, juicy secret. Discipline has to be developed, and lack of discipline anywhere is a bad sign in the long run. Hell, military intelligence frowns on anyone who has more than two drinks per meal as being risky.
Voting went fine, but they ran out of "I voted!" stickers! How could this happen?? How else can I vent my smug satisfaction at having exercised my same-freedom-everyone-else-also-has?
Maybe next time you'll vote early and get one of the plentiful "I Voted Early" stickers (with 200% more smugness).
Because you signed a document giving them those rights. Oh sorry, I meant: because you signed a document requiring you to invite them over and have them observe the place. Whether they asked for it or not.
First, note that "we" (am I to understand this to mean Americans? Texans?) did not sign such a document. We signed a document in good faith that we as a nation abide by. We are a federal republic, and the powers of the federal government that made that agreement are limited, and the document reflects that in the boilerplate. Believe it or not, in this country, officials can't use a treaty to bypass the defining legal framework of our nation.
It is also illegal to bar OSCE observers from observing. As you yourself observed: there is no such thing as "technically legal".
They are not barred. But they do have to keep 100' feet away. (For those not familiar with feet, that's about 30 meters.) That's the law. The law that the treaty respects. Because it would be illegal for the treaty not to. I'm sorry you live a country either small enough or tightly-governed enough to not have a concept of federalism. But here in the U.S., both state and federal laws are applicable.
Tell me, if I ":%s/America/Iran/g" in this story, would you then be arguing that the Ayatollah has every right to kick whomsoever out as long as it complies with his laws?
Just curious how double your standards are.
I don't see any articles about America. I see an article about Texas. And where Texas is concerned, we tend to say, "thank you for coming; don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."
First, a question: why should foreign nationals working on behalf of an international organization have more access to proceedings than United States citizens - whether civilian, or state or federal authorities -- are currently allowed by law?
Second, there is no such thing as "technically legal". There is legal and there is illegal. It is illegal for the observers to be within 100'. It is illegal for pretty much anyone to be within 100', except for voters and designated, trained administrators.
Third, let's look at the sections quoted by dinifinity above:
"(8) The participating States consider that the presence of observers, both foreign and domestic, can enhance the electoral process for States in which elections are taking place. They therefore invite observers from any other CSCE participating States and any appropriate private institutions and organizations who may wish to do so to observe the course of their national election proceedings, to the extent permitted by law."
And they are. The extent permitted by Texas State law is "so long as you keep 100' away, just like everyone else doing exit polls, campaigning for specific candidates/propositions/constitutional ammendments, and and anyone else who might influence the election by mere proximity.
They will also endeavour to facilitate similar access for election proceedings held below the national level. Such observers will undertake not to interfere in the electoral proceedings." (page 7)
The United states is endeavoring to the extent they are able. As a matter of Constitutional law, there' not much more they can do. Federal election laws do not provide for strong federal oversight of state elections. Nor should they as a matter of federalism, since one would expect the federal government to have more power to coerce voters and influence state elections than any one state has of coercing voters to influence national elections. The issue the OSCE complains of in the linked document amounts to saying, "the United States is not organized like other countries, and that's a nuisance for us from a regulatory perspective." It would be simpler to enforce uniform requirements if the U.S. were like, say, England or France, with a strong central government and provincial governments in all cases subservient to that central government. Then they could apply nation-wide sanctions to effect a national change. But it's not, and they can't.
The OSCE could always try to sue in federal court if they feel the law is in error. So far, they have not done so. So far, this comment from Abbot is little different from the AG pre-emptivly reminding any group to obey the law, and there will be no special treatment. No different that a protestor rally.
Of course, we ARE following our own laws. The issue in this case is that an international group is complaining about our laws. (What? Our neighbors have an issue with how we do things in our house? Well, let me just put on my "give a fuck" boots and walk over to talk it out....)
And the last election? Barack Obama. He won pretty handily.... Wait, you're not still talking about the Bush/Gore election, are you? That was in 2000. Twelve years ago.
The main thing you have to remember about aggressive traders is that they're actually both smarter and dumber than you'd expect. That is, they're smart enough to recognize that most of their money is not made by spotting winners or losers early enough to get on the winning team. No, most of their money is stolen in fits by outracing other investors when things suddenly change. If we're lucky, they usually have a counterpart somewhere who is responsible for shepherding a reserve of cash, slowly built up by investing in solid companies as they build, so that the life and death of the aggressive portfolio is not also the life and death of the company.
The aggressive traders know a lot of their job comes down to timing, that the value they gain and trade is temporary, and that eventually the whole thing will melt down around them. Eventually, they will be the slow guy getting beat by faster guys. The large scale and small scale objectives are similar: get in on the rising edge, get yours, and get out before the whole thing goes to hell. Collapse is not an "if", it's a "when". The first thing they look for is always "when do I pull out?"
Everyone expects reports after the bell. That way, there's time to actually read and reflect, and everyone starts on a similar footing when trading resumes in the morning. Just as importantly, everyone knows and expects that they'll start on a similar footing in the morning.
If it were released during the trading day, there'd be pressure to analyse the document (and I use the phrase loosely here) as quickly as possible, so you can sell while it's still high or buy when it's still low, before most people have had a chance to process the new information. Most of the time, this means jumping on a single factor and reacting strongly.
Of course, then other people wouldn't actually need read the document. They would just see the line trending, say, up and then figure that someone who can analyse better and more quickly than they has seen a value increase and is now buying. So they would buy. And why not? As long as they're on the rising edge, and can recognize a peak/plateau, they can sell at the peak and still make money. So this compressed window leads to panicked decisions based on incomplete information which is multiplied across the market. Very disruptive.
Now, imagine if the report were not only released during trading, but _unexpectedly_ so. Not only would you have information, you would have information that the majority of actors don't have. You would have an advantage over them, one that will evaporate in a matter of minutes or hours. Once the trading halted for the day, the advantage would be lost. So they would move even more quickly and panicked than if they had been expecting the report during trading (which, of course, no one was).
The phenomenon you describe -- trying to profit off of the correction when the initial trend is proven to be based on incorrect assumptions -- would then drag the trading artificially in the opposite direction. It's like kicking and oscillator. And, of course, there's no reason that a smaller group of investors couldn't capitalize on the over-correction, and another group on the re-correction, and so on. Maybe the price "rings" for a long, long time before it settles to a more representative value. Maybe it gets so low or high that non-linear effects ("buy at..."/"sell at..." directives) come into play and either dampen or excite the oscillation further. Maybe the stock just bottoms out -- that is to say, the investors buying or selling lose enough money at once that they can't make call, even though the stock they hold may have value.
It's hard to say. But considering that it's all an artifact of traders trying to capitalize on the stupidity of other traders, and not at all a matter of the real price of the stock, it sounds like the kind of thing you want to discourage as much as possible.
On a related note: based on the chaos caused by automated trading routines of late, I think we can expect more limits and delays on trading to be mandated in the future.
An alternative interpretation: Jimmy's girlfriend Sally takes his badge to class and drops off his homework. Jimmy is truant, but the school is getting state money, so at an administrative level, who cares? The teacher notices he's absent (though apparently can't notice Sally walking past the scanner twice a day. There's homework for him, but it's pretty poor since he never attends and his class discussion grade is, predictably, zero. While Jimmy is truant, he takes up a life of crime. After he gets caught on camera, he points to the school's RFID system as an alibi. Not surprisingly, the cops don't believe it, the administrators say they have no real faith in it, the teacher confirms he was out and never comes, and they can probably figure out that Sally was scanning the badge for him. Or, the cops just use common sense, say "we don't believe you" and arrest him based on real evidence a hell of a lot stronger than an ID chip location.
Jimmy is now in jail. Sally doesn't scan his badge anymore. The school no longer receives $30 a day for Jimmy.... but it did receive about $3000 more than they would have off of a truant kid like Jimmy than if they hadn't had the RFID system.
So really what is the down side to this system for anyone involved as compared to what happens now?
That was my first thought as well. With the increase in On-Demand content, they're already running pretty low. (Ever come home and find a "this channel is temporarily unavailable" message?) It's also a good reason to start phasing out non-HD boxes (provided your provider doesn't still charge more for an HD box). Eventually getting rid of the low-res channels and carrying only the HD channels would free up a little more bandwidth.
...email servers and clients pretty much handle the technical side already. All you need is a new "social" interface.
This about it. A social network needs first and foremost a list of contacts, their unique identifiers, and lists that partition your big "everyone I know list" into smaller lists like "friends" or "coworkers" or "SPAM/blocked/ex-friends/people I know but just hate". The address book is also the most basic, not-strictly-necessary feature of any email client.
You would like to be able to push data (updates, tweets) to everyone who matters instantaneously, or in a very quick, timely manner. This is the main point of email. A social network website just stores your mailing lists and fills in the "to" field for you.
In a distributed version of such a network, there are additional complications and benefits. You have to have background processes to poll other servers (nodes) to fetch data, to make sure that all archives stay in agreement and don't lose data, that there are fail-over and reconciliation mechanisms for when communication is not possible (there may or may not be new data that I'm missing). This isn't trivial to implement, but it's also not foreign ground. It's not too different from what a news group client does, with a little torrent-like dynamic peer management. Newsgroup readers are generally built and bundled with the software that had the most interface and back-end similarities to it... the email a client. You would have a lot of data to collect from new friends, but the fact that you actually know each poster means that the more of the data pulled will be relevant to you than it was back in the newsgroup days.
You would like to be reminded or actively informed of certain information (birthdays, events). Calendars are built into every modern mail system, as is the ability to invite/require people at meetings and events.
You would like to play games and compare scores with people you specifically know. All of Facebook's games are flash-based (run on the local machine anyway) with some state information (scoreboard) tied to a third party server. Other than the fact this is a browser job more than a mail client job, this is already mundane, and nothing would change on a new system except for better visibility into the API, and control over what servers you connect to and what data you release. You could store a small, cookie-like fie for each game which friends could compare to their own to dynamically generate a "my friends only" scoreboard for them to compare to, if you for some reason don't want to expose your friend list to a particular game. In other words, games are "least facebook-y" aspect of facebook.
You would like to be able to set up "public" pages not tied to any person (groups, events). To continue the email metaphor, this is just a mass email chain with a specific subject line. The network makes sure that reminders are enforced, people don't "fall off" the chain (the only valid reply to a group-style message is "reply all"), and you have a body of data (history) that you want to be available to people who join later. The last bit produces some overhead, as the group is essentially a "pseudo-friend", whose friend list is identical to the member list. In a distributed system, multiple nodes will have to have to responsibility of maintaining this data, so that it's not lost if some large number of nodes decide to drop it simultaneously -- for example, if every such node is actually a user running his own server, and all of them leave the group simultaneously. This is not trivial, but is also not impossible. It will take some basic management (no more members = no more group) and perhaps some interface changes ("This event is two years old. Can we delete this stuff yet? )" or "do you want to archive this event to your local machine permanently?") but it can be done.
Furthermore, everyone today has an email client. Each of those is tied to a server that receives and stores data even when the client is not connected. So long as each message
I'm going to reply to this because even though it's satire, it's the closest major post to what I actually came to say.
Rather than blaming the dehumanizing effects of the interface, the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, or the fact that there's still no good way to punch someone over the internet, has anyone considered that the web just throws you together with people you hate a lot more often than real life does?
In waking life, people meet at places where they have to be (school or work), or through networks of people they already associate with (family and friends), and only somewhat rarely in situations where they meet people about whom they know nothing and to whom they have no social ties (bars). Even if you go someplace with a lot of strangers who all came together for some external cause (say, a concert) you never insert yourself into strangers' conversations, or listen in on them.
Online, you interact almost exclusively with people you know nothing about and only "met" online. You may share a common interest -- technology, a certain game, a fondness for goofy cat pictures -- that brought you into the same "space", but that's about it. And the medium is such that you HAVE to listen in on these people's conversation. You have to participate in their conversation to participate in your own. There's only one conversation. That's why you came to the page/board/forum.
In real life, if you realized you were talking to a person you hate, who is so annoying and antithetical to your own opinions that you just have no reason to keep listening to him, you would excuse yourself (or tell him off), then walk away. And then you're done. You never need interact with that person again, at least not beyond that across-the-room glare that says "oh, you... you're here. You stay over there, I'll stay over here." Online, you can ignore him or tell him off, but he doesn't leave the conversation. He's still there. Because it's still his conversation too. If you want to talk about news for nerds, Warhammer, or lolcats on a given board, he will continue to be there, and you will continue to piss each other off. Even if the board design lets you "ignore" him (that is, preemptively hide his posts), it may riddle your conversation with holes.
Really, your only choices are to leave, to be a little miserable every time he shows up in "your" conversation, or to tell him off so badly that he leaves once and for all. And this doesn't just go for one person. It goes for several people, on any sufficiently large site you may visit. And I think that contributes a lot to the combative nature of online discussions.
To say nothing of the fact that the version as a number doesn't matter. The purpose of the version is to distinguish between different version of the same product so you know what's compatible, what broke, where to start debugging, etc. Most major OS releases don't even come close to being "the same product" from a user perspective, and the other factors are all issues that developers care about and end users pretty much shouldn't have to.
For things like Windows and OSX, all the differentiation that matters to developers comes from long strings representing the most recent build/service pack. For customers buying software packages -- who can expect the software to work reasonably no matter when or if they got the latest upgrade to a component they've never heard of -- you only need one distinguishing name. Why _would_ you choose to use a number? Why not just a year? After all, you didn't drive to work today in your Ford Four Door Sedan v56.2.3.
Of all the axes to grind, I can't for the life of me figure out why the submitter would care about _this_.
Why is no one talking about the cost to fuel economy?
Because if you're paying too much to go fast, you probably also don't mind paying too much to fuel the trip. It's a non-issue.
Or is this Texas' way of saying "Fuck you!" to the new government mandate of 54.5 MPG that will take effect in a number of years.
I am a big believer in the politics of spite -- spite being an under-appreciated force in human behavior -- and I still can't figure out how governments work in this crazy little scenario you've concocted. The MPG requirements are a problem for manufacturers. It doesn't affect that state at all. And even if it did, it still doesn't in any way say "fuck you" to the requirement. Again, it's a complete non-issue.
Texas doesn't even ALLOW currency anymore, or have toll booths. You drive through with TxTag (a radio transponder like EZpass for you Yankees out there). If you don't have one, you're mailed a bill based on a photo of your license plate. And a fine. And you better hurry up and pay before that $2.50 bill becomes $125.00. Regardless, I can assure you that the true speed will be at least 85 (because that's the speed we all drive on 70 and 75 mph highways).
Toll roads between cities in Texas are relatively new. Large cities like Dallas and Houston have had a few toll lanes to ease congestion, but that was it. Nobody wanted them, except for Rick Perry.
Toll roads make no sense in Texas, because pretty much everyone on a Texas road has already paid taxes to cover the road. The number of non-commerical non-Texans on Texas highways is negligible. It takes a solid day of driving to get out of the state starting in Austin. No one is going to "cut through" Texas on their daily commute the way they might New York or Connecticut. The only way you would have drivers regularly using a Texas road without paying taxes would be if they were working in Texas but living in another state, as Texas has no income tax. (It all comes from property and sales tax.) Again, the number of people doing that is negligible.
The sad thing is, this is actually pretty consistent with how the courts have worked for a long, long time now. (IANAL, grain of salt, etc.):
There are essentially two arguments here. First, the cellphone pings off of cell towers to identify nearby towers with best service for hand off. Even if this process wasn't wireless, your agent (the phone) would be actively attempting to engage the agent of a publicly-available private service (the tower). This is similar to how it may (and has) been argued that you have no expectation of privacy to traffic between some servers, or to emails that are stored on a third-party server, because that third party can read any of them at will. For phones, the content of a call is protected by wiretapping laws. But the connections used to establish quality of service for a future call which may never be placed? This ruling states that that is not protected. This is ultimately similar to the question of how private are the ADDRESSES printed on your private mail are (which, since they need to be public for delivery, is not very).
Second, the connection is wireless, and the phone does emit a signal. This is a second way the ruling states that a phone may be tracked. If you're just tossing your private radiation out into a public space, well, then it's fair game for anyone who can detect it. This is pretty much the same logic that makes radiation detectors legal for counter-terrorism uses, and thermal imaging legal for tracking down hidden grow-houses. (Note that some jurisdictions have passed separate laws specifically illegalizing such practices, but some still let it fly.) The logic on this isn't too far out there, either: it's just an extension of a physical argument to technological space. In particular, it's an extension of the question of how much of an expectation of privacy you have for private goings on that are visible from public land. Can you expect your pot farm to be somewhat hidden by privacy laws if you have it on private land? What if you have no fence? What about a fence that's just too short to block the view from a building across the street? What about the case of a passer-by in a helicopter near your property? What about satellite imagery?
Another old ruling that was in the news recently upheld the container interpretation of a cell-phone's data. It was argued that a cell phone's data is not protected from search because it is similar to the data of a pager, which was previously decided to be unprotected. Pagers were not protected because they are simply containers of numbers, akin to an address book, which was also searchable. (The earlier analysis overlooks the fact that pagers are not address books, since they record reals numbers traceable to people who DEFINITELY DID try to contact you, as opposed to numbers that may or may not be real, for people that you may or may not try to contact at some point. The newer analysis just ignores how many non-phone-like things a modern phone does.)
The main issue here is that if it's legal for a human to do something, a group of humans using technology to do the same thing 100 times better, then 1000 times over is still legal. At the point where quantity becomes a quality all its own, legislators need to step in and acknowledge that the game has changed, because jurists will almost never do that on their own. Another issue is that jurists often work from precedent, and try to apply the general, technology-agnostic case to the modern, technology driven case. Generally, that's a pretty good idea, but you have to be careful to recognize when a preceding metaphor no longer represents reality (e.g. a smart phone is like a cell phone that is like a pager that is like an address book that is not that private).
Another huge problem is that implementation and application are important, and a sound decision from general terms can mean a lot of grief in the real world. For example, consider locks. Locks do not protect your house. Most of them are too flimsy to offer real resistance, especially on a wooden doo
I agree completely, even though I'm part of the group for whom the browser is much more toy than work. Here are some pet peeves I've had with Firefox:
1) inconsistent UI design across platforms. The browser was supposed to be cross-platform. I've found that phrase is quite broad. That can mean it compiles in different environments, that the code is general enough that it can be compiled to run on different hardware, that a version can be run on any major operating system, and that the user experience will be consistent across operating systems. They did a really good job with the first three points, and dropped the ball on the last. At one point I had similar versions of Firefox on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu boxes, and all were slightly different. They were trying to conform to user expectations for each given system, but it made Firefox a headache for people who moved between systems. The good thing about browsers is that they're your gateway to the internet, and the good thing about the internet is it's as platform agnostic as anything we've ever made. It's probably only irritating to a few people like me, but it's seems pointless that the UI for Ubuntu would have different colors, different icons, different menus, and different text for the same piece of software. Is there really any point to giving "options" to Windows users, but "preferences" to Ubuntu users?
2) inconsistent UI design across versions on the same platform Every time a major update came out, they changed the icon set, and changed enough of the underlying CSS markup for the interface to break a good number of extensions. Most of the time, the changes were so superficial that there was no reason for them to be made. Later changes were more dramatic, like the star system for bookmarks that they cribbed from Flock, but those also tended to break other things than display. More than anything, it tended to piss a lot of us off.
3) Feature creep/Bloat Firefox started to pick up a lot of features that just don't need to be in most people's browser. For example, the Google-driven anti-phishing whitelist and/or URL-checking service. Sure, you could disable these things with preferences, but the code is still there, the CPU cycles still need to be spent to check the preferences, and you still have to take the time to lookup and disable them. Pre-fetching is another feature of dubious value. Other features, like "ping" died on the vine. (For those who don't remember, Mozilla argued that the ping feature was valuable because advertisers were going to track users no matter what. For the good of the internet, the ping feature would allow webpages to embed a silent callback address, allowing advertisers to track us in the most efficient, low-traffic way possible. Isn't it great how Mozilla looks out for us?)
There are more services now than I care to keep track of. As an experiment, go to about:config and filter based on "http". Did you know that the browser may interact with all of those sites? Do you know WHEN it interacts with all of them?
Most of the services they add are unnecessary for the majority of users. The extensions system is the crown jewel of Firefox, and there's no reason to bless dubious features like safebrowsing and force them on everyone, while very popular extensions can be broken at the drop of a hat. Firefox should have official extensions, and removing dubious features should be as easy as disabling an unwanted extension. Most AV systems already interface with Firefox this way.
4) No respect for add-ons The typical open-source movement "f*** you" is "if you don't like it, why don't you change it yourself." It's somehow reasonable for everyone to learn to code in addition to their real job, rather than ask the people whose real job IS coding (most Mozilla contributors are paid) to justify themselves. Also, ignore the fact that Firefox is a huge moving target, that addons theoretically have to be updated as often as the browser, and that developers have to support multiple firefox versions (becaus
The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body, nor could it even cope with such a task if it decided to seize an opportunity. It is a patchwork of bodies, funds, institutions, and loose alliances. It is basically a loose network of international do-gooders, with a completely useless general assembly and an incredibly important security council. That's why there's so much pressure lately to expand the security council to include more countries, rotate countries out, and have them handle more mundane issues like pollution as a "global risk". They're the only body set up to make a resolution then actually back it up.
And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S. It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy), which have successfully promoted as just good, fully human values in the past century. It relies on the U.S. for a lot of funding, and almost all of its strength. When the U.S. forgets about the UN, both suffer, because the UN has the unenviable task of taking all the good parts of long-term U.S. policy and convincing other countries to go along with it despite how pissed off they get over the bad parts of short-term U.S. policy. They are the sly left and strong right hands of the same philosophy.
What this is is balkanization by the back-door. The long-feared balkanization of the internet has already happened, with countries like Iran and China essentially experiencing completely different 'nets than other parts of the world. And it will continue to splinter. What the movement in the ITU is about is ameliorating the worst parts of balkanization, when reclusive regimes find that the accidentally broke something they would rather keep. They want to be able to censor gracefully, with someone in their corner to get things fixed when their ridiculous schemes bite them technically. While I can sympathize with countries who don't feel entirely comfortable with the net in American hands, dumping this much power into a relatively new, weak body of the UN can only serve oppressive regimes.
IANAL, but can't you just get around this by calling yourself a search engine and falling back on the DMCA's safe harbor rules?
"Introducing myBlock, the web's first completely physically aware search engine, powered by Google! Search for terms that apply to you and get results that apply to your city, town, or state... all visually displayed using Google Maps technology! We're still in beta, but we're growing every day.
"We currently crawl and index up to... [1]... pages! Stay tuned for more!"
Granted, you could catch flack for not obeying robots.txt (which you aren't legally required to do, and which these sites already probably avoid anyway). It's probably also a good idea to see what you can do to establish a business relationship with Google (read: pay them something) to avoid having the rug pulled out from under you on the mapping front. But otherwise, is there even a bar for what legally constitutes a search engine?
99% of the user base doesn't need some given functionality of the PC that the other 1% depend on.
About 80% of the user base can think of some functionality that puts them in one of those "1%" groups. For some it's 3D graphics. For some, it's computing power. For some it's the layout capability that a large screen+mouse+keys offers. For most, it's the ability to type... with all of their digits.
It may eventually get to the point where PC hardware is just a big (very big) tablet with a mount and connections for network, keyboard,and mouse, but it still will be a PC.
What kind of bullshit logic is that? Something is broken, everyone hates it, so let's put all our efforts in making the alternatives better? How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it? You know, it's open-source and all.
The unspoken argument here is that the complainers are no longer trying to contribute to PHP by providing feedback. Rather, they have determined that PHP is fundamentally terrible at doing the work it's been recruited to do. Fixing it to be "the best possible wrong tool for the job" would not be productive.
Because it looks like it should work, you don't have the benefit of understanding that it doesn't until you've wasted your time using it and have probably committed a good deal of your project to it trying to make it work. Hence, most people using it today are less concerned with improving future iterations than they are with killing the damn thing by warning people away from it. Because if nobody uses it, nobody has to support it.
If this still sounds peculiar to you, remember this is pretty much exactly what happened to kick off the second browser wars. IE sucked, people complained constantly, Microsoft did nothing (because why would they?), and eventually enough talented people were fed up to get the old Mozilla code up to speed.
I remember when Marvel did stuff like this in '90s. Does this company do it better? Maybe. But it's still not that novel an approach, and I doubt the reason these motion comics failed to take off before was because of a lack of good tools. There comes a time when you either want a comic, or a cartoon, but not something that's an awkward combination of the two. When you get right down to it, wants the difference here between the Flash cartoons that have been around for ages (Aside from starting with prettier cutouts drawn by professional illustrators)?
The main problem with comics on a screen (any screen) these days is that humans can focus in close on a printed page fairly easily, but readers suck at zooming and moving around a large image. So you can either see the page art then zoom in to actually read the text (repeated), or you can read panels at a time (zooming in to see, say, 1/6th of the page) and miss the full impact of the occasional full-page or two-page spread. There's still some room for technology to move in and help the issue -- maybe allow publishers to tag pages as "shock spread" so you see the full art first, no matter what, before returning the reader to a close-in panel view -- but screen resolution is a limit to the experience.
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There are several problems with progress bars:
1) there are some tasks for which progress -- and even present state -- are not easily measurable. For example, your Li-ion batteries look to be in pretty much the same state when you have anywhere from 10% - 100% power remaining. It's not enough to be able to program a progress bar: you have to have knowledge of the thing being metered to do it right.
2) There are some tasks for which the total workload is not readily known. If you have a simple (light on metadata) filesystem with many nested directories and fragmented files, you have no idea what the full scope of the workload is until it's either almost done, or unless you do some pre-processing. Metadata collected in advance (file size info) can help, but it's basically the same thing: you're pre-processing before you know what or what you'll need the data for. And naturally, this pre-processing can be hefty for a few rare cases.
3) For some operations, progress so far doesn't strictly map to remaining workload: your algorithm could handle the fast, "low-hanging fruit" first.
4) On complex systems, time spent and progress don't map well to time remaining. As I said before, some portions of the workload could be inherently faster (as with some coding/decoding problems). The system or signal path could impose unusual delays, then relieve them, spoiling the calculation. The bar has to account for this with some knowledge of the system outside the algorithm. In other words, it's not enough to understand the problem, you also have to understand progress bars.
5) The progress bar only matters when the user is in a hurry. If you were comfortable with a very coarse granularity ("Come back in about an hour") you probably wouldn't care about the ticking of the bar. The edge cases define user's perception of the bar's effectiveness.
6) The bar actually conveys more information than progress. The bar is actually used more than it should be -- that is, instead of the hourglass/spinning clock/spinner -- because it conveys more information that the user demands: "Yes, I'm really working. No, I haven't locked up. No, I'm not in an infinite loop, trying to free up a non-existent resource, or waiting for input to a hidden prompt. Yes, I promise we will get there at some point if you just sit there patiently and refrain from bothering your nephew 'because he knows computers'." For tasks where the progress bar moves imperceptibly, you usually also have a message to the extent of, "I'm manipulating this data point now. Notice it's different than the data point I was working with 5 minutes ago. See, progress! Not locked."
In general, you probably need to take a multi-prog attack to user notification: aspinner for pre-processing and simple tasks that will complete in under a second, a progress bar based on pre-processing for longer tasks, and some sort of very nebulous, "come back in an hour; I'm working on it," dialog for really long tasks.
The issue here is his particular job in intelligence. An extramarital affair, heavy drug use, or anything of the like is a job liability (not just a political liability) in public policy because it opens an opportunity for blackmail. That's the first problem. The second problem is that even if nobody finds out, you still have no idea what he's telling his mistress, or when they'll break up and she'll start talking. We can presume that whatever level of commitment she has in the relationship, it's probably not as high an investment as, say, his wife has in their marriage. Eventually, it will end.
Furthermore, since this whole thing is also supposed to remain a secret, that also minimizes the amount of overt protection he can afford his mistress. (This would be more of an issue, say, during the height of Cold War, when kidnapping an intelligence chief's mistress for interrogation might one day be a tempting enough target for an enemy agency. Still, it's a possibility.) There are a whole slew of operational issues built into the secrecy of this that make mistresses a bad idea for anyone in intel, with the reasons becoming more important the higher up the chain of command you go.
So now he's come clean. Doesn't that short-circuit the danger of a secret mistress? Sort of, but now you have the inherent personnel problem: it's hard to tell your operational agents about the dangers of secret affairs when you're doing it yourself.
Then you have the underlying issue of character: if he can't remain loyal to a marriage, why should we assume he can remain loyal to his country. I know that sounds like a leap. It is. But it's still the sort of question that needs to be asked. Secret societies -- even extremely popular ones, like the Masons -- have small secrets like handshakes, passwords, and rituals for a reason: if you can't trust a man with a trivial secret like a handshake, you sure as hell can't trust him with a big, juicy secret. Discipline has to be developed, and lack of discipline anywhere is a bad sign in the long run. Hell, military intelligence frowns on anyone who has more than two drinks per meal as being risky.
Voting went fine, but they ran out of "I voted!" stickers! How could this happen?? How else can I vent my smug satisfaction at having exercised my same-freedom-everyone-else-also-has?
Maybe next time you'll vote early and get one of the plentiful "I Voted Early" stickers (with 200% more smugness).
TX - Austin
Careful, they might just jump ahead to directly buying Joss Whedon.
So I wasn't the only one to have that reaction.
Because you signed a document giving them those rights.
Oh sorry, I meant: because you signed a document requiring you to invite them over and have them observe the place. Whether they asked for it or not.
First, note that "we" (am I to understand this to mean Americans? Texans?) did not sign such a document. We signed a document in good faith that we as a nation abide by. We are a federal republic, and the powers of the federal government that made that agreement are limited, and the document reflects that in the boilerplate. Believe it or not, in this country, officials can't use a treaty to bypass the defining legal framework of our nation.
It is also illegal to bar OSCE observers from observing.
As you yourself observed: there is no such thing as "technically legal".
They are not barred. But they do have to keep 100' feet away. (For those not familiar with feet, that's about 30 meters.) That's the law. The law that the treaty respects. Because it would be illegal for the treaty not to. I'm sorry you live a country either small enough or tightly-governed enough to not have a concept of federalism. But here in the U.S., both state and federal laws are applicable.
Tell me, if I ":%s/America/Iran/g" in this story, would you then be arguing that the Ayatollah has every right to kick whomsoever out as long as it complies with his laws?
Just curious how double your standards are.
I don't see any articles about America. I see an article about Texas. And where Texas is concerned, we tend to say, "thank you for coming; don't let the door hit you on the ass on the way out."
First, a question: why should foreign nationals working on behalf of an international organization have more access to proceedings than United States citizens - whether civilian, or state or federal authorities -- are currently allowed by law?
Second, there is no such thing as "technically legal". There is legal and there is illegal. It is illegal for the observers to be within 100'. It is illegal for pretty much anyone to be within 100', except for voters and designated, trained administrators.
Third, let's look at the sections quoted by dinifinity above:
"(8) The participating States consider that the presence of observers, both foreign and domestic, can enhance the electoral process for States in which elections are taking place. They therefore invite observers from any other CSCE participating States and any appropriate private institutions and organizations who may wish to do so to observe the course of their national election proceedings, to the extent permitted by law."
And they are. The extent permitted by Texas State law is "so long as you keep 100' away, just like everyone else doing exit polls, campaigning for specific candidates/propositions/constitutional ammendments, and and anyone else who might influence the election by mere proximity.
They will also endeavour to facilitate similar access for election proceedings held below the national level. Such observers will undertake not to interfere in the electoral proceedings." (page 7)
The United states is endeavoring to the extent they are able. As a matter of Constitutional law, there' not much more they can do. Federal election laws do not provide for strong federal oversight of state elections. Nor should they as a matter of federalism, since one would expect the federal government to have more power to coerce voters and influence state elections than any one state has of coercing voters to influence national elections. The issue the OSCE complains of in the linked document amounts to saying, "the United States is not organized like other countries, and that's a nuisance for us from a regulatory perspective." It would be simpler to enforce uniform requirements if the U.S. were like, say, England or France, with a strong central government and provincial governments in all cases subservient to that central government. Then they could apply nation-wide sanctions to effect a national change. But it's not, and they can't.
The OSCE could always try to sue in federal court if they feel the law is in error. So far, they have not done so. So far, this comment from Abbot is little different from the AG pre-emptivly reminding any group to obey the law, and there will be no special treatment. No different that a protestor rally.
Of course, we ARE following our own laws. The issue in this case is that an international group is complaining about our laws. (What? Our neighbors have an issue with how we do things in our house? Well, let me just put on my "give a fuck" boots and walk over to talk it out....)
And the last election? Barack Obama. He won pretty handily....
Wait, you're not still talking about the Bush/Gore election, are you? That was in 2000. Twelve years ago.
The main thing you have to remember about aggressive traders is that they're actually both smarter and dumber than you'd expect. That is, they're smart enough to recognize that most of their money is not made by spotting winners or losers early enough to get on the winning team. No, most of their money is stolen in fits by outracing other investors when things suddenly change. If we're lucky, they usually have a counterpart somewhere who is responsible for shepherding a reserve of cash, slowly built up by investing in solid companies as they build, so that the life and death of the aggressive portfolio is not also the life and death of the company.
The aggressive traders know a lot of their job comes down to timing, that the value they gain and trade is temporary, and that eventually the whole thing will melt down around them. Eventually, they will be the slow guy getting beat by faster guys. The large scale and small scale objectives are similar: get in on the rising edge, get yours, and get out before the whole thing goes to hell. Collapse is not an "if", it's a "when". The first thing they look for is always "when do I pull out?"
Everyone expects reports after the bell. That way, there's time to actually read and reflect, and everyone starts on a similar footing when trading resumes in the morning. Just as importantly, everyone knows and expects that they'll start on a similar footing in the morning.
If it were released during the trading day, there'd be pressure to analyse the document (and I use the phrase loosely here) as quickly as possible, so you can sell while it's still high or buy when it's still low, before most people have had a chance to process the new information. Most of the time, this means jumping on a single factor and reacting strongly.
Of course, then other people wouldn't actually need read the document. They would just see the line trending, say, up and then figure that someone who can analyse better and more quickly than they has seen a value increase and is now buying. So they would buy. And why not? As long as they're on the rising edge, and can recognize a peak/plateau, they can sell at the peak and still make money. So this compressed window leads to panicked decisions based on incomplete information which is multiplied across the market. Very disruptive.
Now, imagine if the report were not only released during trading, but _unexpectedly_ so. Not only would you have information, you would have information that the majority of actors don't have. You would have an advantage over them, one that will evaporate in a matter of minutes or hours. Once the trading halted for the day, the advantage would be lost. So they would move even more quickly and panicked than if they had been expecting the report during trading (which, of course, no one was).
The phenomenon you describe -- trying to profit off of the correction when the initial trend is proven to be based on incorrect assumptions -- would then drag the trading artificially in the opposite direction. It's like kicking and oscillator. And, of course, there's no reason that a smaller group of investors couldn't capitalize on the over-correction, and another group on the re-correction, and so on. Maybe the price "rings" for a long, long time before it settles to a more representative value. Maybe it gets so low or high that non-linear effects ("buy at ..."/"sell at ..." directives) come into play and either dampen or excite the oscillation further. Maybe the stock just bottoms out -- that is to say, the investors buying or selling lose enough money at once that they can't make call, even though the stock they hold may have value.
It's hard to say. But considering that it's all an artifact of traders trying to capitalize on the stupidity of other traders, and not at all a matter of the real price of the stock, it sounds like the kind of thing you want to discourage as much as possible.
On a related note: based on the chaos caused by automated trading routines of late, I think we can expect more limits and delays on trading to be mandated in the future.
An alternative interpretation:
Jimmy's girlfriend Sally takes his badge to class and drops off his homework. Jimmy is truant, but the school is getting state money, so at an administrative level, who cares? The teacher notices he's absent (though apparently can't notice Sally walking past the scanner twice a day. There's homework for him, but it's pretty poor since he never attends and his class discussion grade is, predictably, zero. While Jimmy is truant, he takes up a life of crime. After he gets caught on camera, he points to the school's RFID system as an alibi. Not surprisingly, the cops don't believe it, the administrators say they have no real faith in it, the teacher confirms he was out and never comes, and they can probably figure out that Sally was scanning the badge for him. Or, the cops just use common sense, say "we don't believe you" and arrest him based on real evidence a hell of a lot stronger than an ID chip location.
Jimmy is now in jail. Sally doesn't scan his badge anymore. The school no longer receives $30 a day for Jimmy.... but it did receive about $3000 more than they would have off of a truant kid like Jimmy than if they hadn't had the RFID system.
So really what is the down side to this system for anyone involved as compared to what happens now?
That was my first thought as well. With the increase in On-Demand content, they're already running pretty low. (Ever come home and find a "this channel is temporarily unavailable" message?) It's also a good reason to start phasing out non-HD boxes (provided your provider doesn't still charge more for an HD box). Eventually getting rid of the low-res channels and carrying only the HD channels would free up a little more bandwidth.
...email servers and clients pretty much handle the technical side already. All you need is a new "social" interface.
This about it. A social network needs first and foremost a list of contacts, their unique identifiers, and lists that partition your big "everyone I know list" into smaller lists like "friends" or "coworkers" or "SPAM/blocked/ex-friends/people I know but just hate". The address book is also the most basic, not-strictly-necessary feature of any email client.
You would like to be able to push data (updates, tweets) to everyone who matters instantaneously, or in a very quick, timely manner. This is the main point of email. A social network website just stores your mailing lists and fills in the "to" field for you.
In a distributed version of such a network, there are additional complications and benefits. You have to have background processes to poll other servers (nodes) to fetch data, to make sure that all archives stay in agreement and don't lose data, that there are fail-over and reconciliation mechanisms for when communication is not possible (there may or may not be new data that I'm missing). This isn't trivial to implement, but it's also not foreign ground. It's not too different from what a news group client does, with a little torrent-like dynamic peer management. Newsgroup readers are generally built and bundled with the software that had the most interface and back-end similarities to it... the email a client. You would have a lot of data to collect from new friends, but the fact that you actually know each poster means that the more of the data pulled will be relevant to you than it was back in the newsgroup days.
You would like to be reminded or actively informed of certain information (birthdays, events). Calendars are built into every modern mail system, as is the ability to invite/require people at meetings and events.
You would like to play games and compare scores with people you specifically know. All of Facebook's games are flash-based (run on the local machine anyway) with some state information (scoreboard) tied to a third party server. Other than the fact this is a browser job more than a mail client job, this is already mundane, and nothing would change on a new system except for better visibility into the API, and control over what servers you connect to and what data you release. You could store a small, cookie-like fie for each game which friends could compare to their own to dynamically generate a "my friends only" scoreboard for them to compare to, if you for some reason don't want to expose your friend list to a particular game. In other words, games are "least facebook-y" aspect of facebook.
You would like to be able to set up "public" pages not tied to any person (groups, events). To continue the email metaphor, this is just a mass email chain with a specific subject line. The network makes sure that reminders are enforced, people don't "fall off" the chain (the only valid reply to a group-style message is "reply all"), and you have a body of data (history) that you want to be available to people who join later. The last bit produces some overhead, as the group is essentially a "pseudo-friend", whose friend list is identical to the member list. In a distributed system, multiple nodes will have to have to responsibility of maintaining this data, so that it's not lost if some large number of nodes decide to drop it simultaneously -- for example, if every such node is actually a user running his own server, and all of them leave the group simultaneously. This is not trivial, but is also not impossible. It will take some basic management (no more members = no more group) and perhaps some interface changes ("This event is two years old. Can we delete this stuff yet? )" or "do you want to archive this event to your local machine permanently?") but it can be done.
Furthermore, everyone today has an email client. Each of those is tied to a server that receives and stores data even when the client is not connected. So long as each message
I'm going to reply to this because even though it's satire, it's the closest major post to what I actually came to say.
Rather than blaming the dehumanizing effects of the interface, the disinhibiting effect of anonymity, or the fact that there's still no good way to punch someone over the internet, has anyone considered that the web just throws you together with people you hate a lot more often than real life does?
In waking life, people meet at places where they have to be (school or work), or through networks of people they already associate with (family and friends), and only somewhat rarely in situations where they meet people about whom they know nothing and to whom they have no social ties (bars). Even if you go someplace with a lot of strangers who all came together for some external cause (say, a concert) you never insert yourself into strangers' conversations, or listen in on them.
Online, you interact almost exclusively with people you know nothing about and only "met" online. You may share a common interest -- technology, a certain game, a fondness for goofy cat pictures -- that brought you into the same "space", but that's about it. And the medium is such that you HAVE to listen in on these people's conversation. You have to participate in their conversation to participate in your own. There's only one conversation. That's why you came to the page/board/forum.
In real life, if you realized you were talking to a person you hate, who is so annoying and antithetical to your own opinions that you just have no reason to keep listening to him, you would excuse yourself (or tell him off), then walk away. And then you're done. You never need interact with that person again, at least not beyond that across-the-room glare that says "oh, you... you're here. You stay over there, I'll stay over here." Online, you can ignore him or tell him off, but he doesn't leave the conversation. He's still there. Because it's still his conversation too. If you want to talk about news for nerds, Warhammer, or lolcats on a given board, he will continue to be there, and you will continue to piss each other off. Even if the board design lets you "ignore" him (that is, preemptively hide his posts), it may riddle your conversation with holes.
Really, your only choices are to leave, to be a little miserable every time he shows up in "your" conversation, or to tell him off so badly that he leaves once and for all. And this doesn't just go for one person. It goes for several people, on any sufficiently large site you may visit. And I think that contributes a lot to the combative nature of online discussions.
To say nothing of the fact that the version as a number doesn't matter. The purpose of the version is to distinguish between different version of the same product so you know what's compatible, what broke, where to start debugging, etc. Most major OS releases don't even come close to being "the same product" from a user perspective, and the other factors are all issues that developers care about and end users pretty much shouldn't have to.
For things like Windows and OSX, all the differentiation that matters to developers comes from long strings representing the most recent build/service pack. For customers buying software packages -- who can expect the software to work reasonably no matter when or if they got the latest upgrade to a component they've never heard of -- you only need one distinguishing name. Why _would_ you choose to use a number? Why not just a year? After all, you didn't drive to work today in your Ford Four Door Sedan v56.2.3.
Of all the axes to grind, I can't for the life of me figure out why the submitter would care about _this_.
Why is no one talking about the cost to fuel economy?
Because if you're paying too much to go fast, you probably also don't mind paying too much to fuel the trip. It's a non-issue.
Or is this Texas' way of saying "Fuck you!" to the new government mandate of 54.5 MPG that will take effect in a number of years.
I am a big believer in the politics of spite -- spite being an under-appreciated force in human behavior -- and I still can't figure out how governments work in this crazy little scenario you've concocted. The MPG requirements are a problem for manufacturers. It doesn't affect that state at all. And even if it did, it still doesn't in any way say "fuck you" to the requirement. Again, it's a complete non-issue.
Texas doesn't even ALLOW currency anymore, or have toll booths. You drive through with TxTag (a radio transponder like EZpass for you Yankees out there). If you don't have one, you're mailed a bill based on a photo of your license plate. And a fine. And you better hurry up and pay before that $2.50 bill becomes $125.00. Regardless, I can assure you that the true speed will be at least 85 (because that's the speed we all drive on 70 and 75 mph highways).
Toll roads between cities in Texas are relatively new. Large cities like Dallas and Houston have had a few toll lanes to ease congestion, but that was it. Nobody wanted them, except for Rick Perry.
Toll roads make no sense in Texas, because pretty much everyone on a Texas road has already paid taxes to cover the road. The number of non-commerical non-Texans on Texas highways is negligible. It takes a solid day of driving to get out of the state starting in Austin. No one is going to "cut through" Texas on their daily commute the way they might New York or Connecticut. The only way you would have drivers regularly using a Texas road without paying taxes would be if they were working in Texas but living in another state, as Texas has no income tax. (It all comes from property and sales tax.) Again, the number of people doing that is negligible.
The sad thing is, this is actually pretty consistent with how the courts have worked for a long, long time now. (IANAL, grain of salt, etc.):
There are essentially two arguments here. First, the cellphone pings off of cell towers to identify nearby towers with best service for hand off. Even if this process wasn't wireless, your agent (the phone) would be actively attempting to engage the agent of a publicly-available private service (the tower). This is similar to how it may (and has) been argued that you have no expectation of privacy to traffic between some servers, or to emails that are stored on a third-party server, because that third party can read any of them at will. For phones, the content of a call is protected by wiretapping laws. But the connections used to establish quality of service for a future call which may never be placed? This ruling states that that is not protected. This is ultimately similar to the question of how private are the ADDRESSES printed on your private mail are (which, since they need to be public for delivery, is not very).
Second, the connection is wireless, and the phone does emit a signal. This is a second way the ruling states that a phone may be tracked. If you're just tossing your private radiation out into a public space, well, then it's fair game for anyone who can detect it. This is pretty much the same logic that makes radiation detectors legal for counter-terrorism uses, and thermal imaging legal for tracking down hidden grow-houses. (Note that some jurisdictions have passed separate laws specifically illegalizing such practices, but some still let it fly.) The logic on this isn't too far out there, either: it's just an extension of a physical argument to technological space. In particular, it's an extension of the question of how much of an expectation of privacy you have for private goings on that are visible from public land. Can you expect your pot farm to be somewhat hidden by privacy laws if you have it on private land? What if you have no fence? What about a fence that's just too short to block the view from a building across the street? What about the case of a passer-by in a helicopter near your property? What about satellite imagery?
Another old ruling that was in the news recently upheld the container interpretation of a cell-phone's data. It was argued that a cell phone's data is not protected from search because it is similar to the data of a pager, which was previously decided to be unprotected. Pagers were not protected because they are simply containers of numbers, akin to an address book, which was also searchable. (The earlier analysis overlooks the fact that pagers are not address books, since they record reals numbers traceable to people who DEFINITELY DID try to contact you, as opposed to numbers that may or may not be real, for people that you may or may not try to contact at some point. The newer analysis just ignores how many non-phone-like things a modern phone does.)
The main issue here is that if it's legal for a human to do something, a group of humans using technology to do the same thing 100 times better, then 1000 times over is still legal. At the point where quantity becomes a quality all its own, legislators need to step in and acknowledge that the game has changed, because jurists will almost never do that on their own. Another issue is that jurists often work from precedent, and try to apply the general, technology-agnostic case to the modern, technology driven case. Generally, that's a pretty good idea, but you have to be careful to recognize when a preceding metaphor no longer represents reality (e.g. a smart phone is like a cell phone that is like a pager that is like an address book that is not that private).
Another huge problem is that implementation and application are important, and a sound decision from general terms can mean a lot of grief in the real world. For example, consider locks. Locks do not protect your house. Most of them are too flimsy to offer real resistance, especially on a wooden doo
Pretty much all engineering can be described as, "will solve second order differential equations for food."
I agree completely, even though I'm part of the group for whom the browser is much more toy than work. Here are some pet peeves I've had with Firefox:
1) inconsistent UI design across platforms.
The browser was supposed to be cross-platform. I've found that phrase is quite broad. That can mean it compiles in different environments, that the code is general enough that it can be compiled to run on different hardware, that a version can be run on any major operating system, and that the user experience will be consistent across operating systems. They did a really good job with the first three points, and dropped the ball on the last. At one point I had similar versions of Firefox on Windows, Mac, and Ubuntu boxes, and all were slightly different. They were trying to conform to user expectations for each given system, but it made Firefox a headache for people who moved between systems. The good thing about browsers is that they're your gateway to the internet, and the good thing about the internet is it's as platform agnostic as anything we've ever made. It's probably only irritating to a few people like me, but it's seems pointless that the UI for Ubuntu would have different colors, different icons, different menus, and different text for the same piece of software. Is there really any point to giving "options" to Windows users, but "preferences" to Ubuntu users?
2) inconsistent UI design across versions on the same platform
Every time a major update came out, they changed the icon set, and changed enough of the underlying CSS markup for the interface to break a good number of extensions. Most of the time, the changes were so superficial that there was no reason for them to be made. Later changes were more dramatic, like the star system for bookmarks that they cribbed from Flock, but those also tended to break other things than display. More than anything, it tended to piss a lot of us off.
3) Feature creep/Bloat
Firefox started to pick up a lot of features that just don't need to be in most people's browser. For example, the Google-driven anti-phishing whitelist and/or URL-checking service. Sure, you could disable these things with preferences, but the code is still there, the CPU cycles still need to be spent to check the preferences, and you still have to take the time to lookup and disable them. Pre-fetching is another feature of dubious value. Other features, like "ping" died on the vine. (For those who don't remember, Mozilla argued that the ping feature was valuable because advertisers were going to track users no matter what. For the good of the internet, the ping feature would allow webpages to embed a silent callback address, allowing advertisers to track us in the most efficient, low-traffic way possible. Isn't it great how Mozilla looks out for us?)
There are more services now than I care to keep track of. As an experiment, go to about:config and filter based on "http". Did you know that the browser may interact with all of those sites? Do you know WHEN it interacts with all of them?
Most of the services they add are unnecessary for the majority of users. The extensions system is the crown jewel of Firefox, and there's no reason to bless dubious features like safebrowsing and force them on everyone, while very popular extensions can be broken at the drop of a hat. Firefox should have official extensions, and removing dubious features should be as easy as disabling an unwanted extension. Most AV systems already interface with Firefox this way.
4) No respect for add-ons
The typical open-source movement "f*** you" is "if you don't like it, why don't you change it yourself." It's somehow reasonable for everyone to learn to code in addition to their real job, rather than ask the people whose real job IS coding (most Mozilla contributors are paid) to justify themselves. Also, ignore the fact that Firefox is a huge moving target, that addons theoretically have to be updated as often as the browser, and that developers have to support multiple firefox versions (becaus
The fear of a one-world government is unfounded. The UN is not set up to function as such a body, nor could it even cope with such a task if it decided to seize an opportunity. It is a patchwork of bodies, funds, institutions, and loose alliances. It is basically a loose network of international do-gooders, with a completely useless general assembly and an incredibly important security council. That's why there's so much pressure lately to expand the security council to include more countries, rotate countries out, and have them handle more mundane issues like pollution as a "global risk". They're the only body set up to make a resolution then actually back it up.
And, while this may sound a little patronizing to other nations, the UN is at it's most effective when it is aligned with the U.S. It promotes what used to be first and foremost "American values" (real values, like democracy, human rights, an autonomy), which have successfully promoted as just good, fully human values in the past century. It relies on the U.S. for a lot of funding, and almost all of its strength. When the U.S. forgets about the UN, both suffer, because the UN has the unenviable task of taking all the good parts of long-term U.S. policy and convincing other countries to go along with it despite how pissed off they get over the bad parts of short-term U.S. policy. They are the sly left and strong right hands of the same philosophy.
What this is is balkanization by the back-door. The long-feared balkanization of the internet has already happened, with countries like Iran and China essentially experiencing completely different 'nets than other parts of the world. And it will continue to splinter. What the movement in the ITU is about is ameliorating the worst parts of balkanization, when reclusive regimes find that the accidentally broke something they would rather keep. They want to be able to censor gracefully, with someone in their corner to get things fixed when their ridiculous schemes bite them technically. While I can sympathize with countries who don't feel entirely comfortable with the net in American hands, dumping this much power into a relatively new, weak body of the UN can only serve oppressive regimes.
IANAL, but can't you just get around this by calling yourself a search engine and falling back on the DMCA's safe harbor rules?
"Introducing myBlock, the web's first completely physically aware search engine, powered by Google! Search for terms that apply to you and get results that apply to your city, town, or state... all visually displayed using Google Maps technology! We're still in beta, but we're growing every day.
"We currently crawl and index up to... [1]... pages! Stay tuned for more!"
Granted, you could catch flack for not obeying robots.txt (which you aren't legally required to do, and which these sites already probably avoid anyway). It's probably also a good idea to see what you can do to establish a business relationship with Google (read: pay them something) to avoid having the rug pulled out from under you on the mapping front. But otherwise, is there even a bar for what legally constitutes a search engine?
99% of the user base doesn't need some given functionality of the PC that the other 1% depend on.
About 80% of the user base can think of some functionality that puts them in one of those "1%" groups. For some it's 3D graphics. For some, it's computing power. For some it's the layout capability that a large screen+mouse+keys offers. For most, it's the ability to type... with all of their digits.
It may eventually get to the point where PC hardware is just a big (very big) tablet with a mount and connections for network, keyboard ,and mouse, but it still will be a PC.
What kind of bullshit logic is that? Something is broken, everyone hates it, so let's put all our efforts in making the alternatives better? How about contributing to PHP and fixing what you're bitching about instead of, well, bitching about it? You know, it's open-source and all.
The unspoken argument here is that the complainers are no longer trying to contribute to PHP by providing feedback. Rather, they have determined that PHP is fundamentally terrible at doing the work it's been recruited to do. Fixing it to be "the best possible wrong tool for the job" would not be productive.
Because it looks like it should work, you don't have the benefit of understanding that it doesn't until you've wasted your time using it and have probably committed a good deal of your project to it trying to make it work. Hence, most people using it today are less concerned with improving future iterations than they are with killing the damn thing by warning people away from it. Because if nobody uses it, nobody has to support it.
If this still sounds peculiar to you, remember this is pretty much exactly what happened to kick off the second browser wars. IE sucked, people complained constantly, Microsoft did nothing (because why would they?), and eventually enough talented people were fed up to get the old Mozilla code up to speed.
I remember when Marvel did stuff like this in '90s. Does this company do it better? Maybe. But it's still not that novel an approach, and I doubt the reason these motion comics failed to take off before was because of a lack of good tools. There comes a time when you either want a comic, or a cartoon, but not something that's an awkward combination of the two. When you get right down to it, wants the difference here between the Flash cartoons that have been around for ages (Aside from starting with prettier cutouts drawn by professional illustrators)?
The main problem with comics on a screen (any screen) these days is that humans can focus in close on a printed page fairly easily, but readers suck at zooming and moving around a large image. So you can either see the page art then zoom in to actually read the text (repeated), or you can read panels at a time (zooming in to see, say, 1/6th of the page) and miss the full impact of the occasional full-page or two-page spread. There's still some room for technology to move in and help the issue -- maybe allow publishers to tag pages as "shock spread" so you see the full art first, no matter what, before returning the reader to a close-in panel view -- but screen resolution is a limit to the experience.