I think the 21st point was say at waist level :P

It isn't a requirement that they provide the HD versions, just *a* version. In many cases they will encrypt the HD version of the channel but leave the SD version clear.

You seem to be missing the point that people don't want it to be trivial to save the h264 file to disk and then redistribute it. If someone in the right zone can just download the link to the file, those that feel they need DRM/content control won't be using it. Heck, even Youtube makes it non-trivial(to most users) to download the actual FLV to preserve it, even without Youtube using DRM on that particular file.

Not saying that is good or bad, just pointing out why your argument about IP doesn't address the desire for a 'secure' client.

A lot of it comes down to resources. In general, it is just quicker to develop using the Adobe stuff and get a product out the door. Most people forget that Actionscript 3 is javascript essentially. If you ignore typing (disable the warnings), you can pretty much copy pure js code directly over.

MXML is obviously somewhat different than HTML, but in my mind at least, it is more rational, since it wasn't designed by committee. Like you set something hidden, you just do 'visible="false"'. You don't have to mess with the style in the same way. And I LOVE bind variables in a scripting language. Having the runtime handle all of the updating for you automatically is such a time saver. Using visible="{xmlUser.lastResult.user}" to show hide UI elements if the user is logged in, etc.

When HTML5 has some cool unified dev tools (man, debugging in Flex Builder is so much nicer than say Firebug to me), 95% market penetration, and the 3rd party libraries have shaken out (like jQuery has to some extent),
and you don't have to test your shit on every single browser just to make sure it didn't break, and the performance starts nearing Flash some more...and all of that can happen while Flash/Actionscript stands still and doesn't add any new features...then I will be on board with HTML5 as the Flash killer :P

* There are the occasional browser incompatibilities in Flash that drive me batshit: Having a problem where some, not all, Firefox installs only on OSX have mouse coordinate issues when dragging. And overall if Macromedia (and now Adobe) has done a better job on OSX/Linux support there would be a lot less bitching.

Yea thats why I always use IE or Safari for debugging, depending on my OS. I hate having my browser hung when I need to look up a bug online, etc.

IE has its own problems though with Flash debugging. You have to remember to always close the pp from the browser window and not terminate it with Flex Builder, or it orphans the process because of the whole ieuser.exe sandboxing thing.

It is 'spooky' correlation at a distance, not action. An analogy: Say you have two balls, red and blue. You have someone put them into black boxes (hidden from you) and give one to you and one to someone else. That other person takes theirs home. When you open your box, and 'take the measurement' and observe you have the blue ball, you 'instantaneously' know that the other person has the red one.

The quantum complication is that while the red and blue balls are in a definite state the entire time due to the infeasibility of isolating a macro-sized object like a ball from all other atoms and photons, the entangled particles are not in a definite state, depending on your interpretation of Quantum Mechanics.

There are 3 major interpretations of quantum mechanics, and this has different implications for each. In the Copenhagen interpretation, the measurement causes the quantum wave function to 'collapse' into a particular state. This is generally where the term spooky comes from, since that came out of the Bohr/Einstein discussions. In the non-local hidden variables interpretation, then some hidden variable that acts non-locally causes actual definite particles to travel through the quantum wave probabilities (ie. the particles where never in an indeterminant state). In the Many Worlds interpretation, the universe enters into a superposition of both basis states (|you observing red, ball is red> and |you observing blue, ball is blue>, you are simply part of the quantum interactions), 'branching' so to speak, but that doesn't affect the fact that in each branch observing red means you know the other is blue and vice versa.

Someone else mentioned Bell's Theorem. Bell's theorem only rules out local hidden variables, not non-local hidden variables. since it is one of the major interpretations in quantum mechanics that is still viable, though those non-local effects can be considered spooky.

Just finished The Teaching Company's QM video series, so blame them :P

I think the point Loconut was making is that ReCaptcha does not 'further' machine OCR (ie. it doesn't improve the recognition algorithms used by the OCR software), instead using humans used to 'OCR' words that otherwise aren't legible.

Sorry to double post just remembered the other reason why Windows Media Center volume issues are such a pain:

When you have WMC in the foreground playing audio, no other audio on the system works...You can't hear email dings, IM's or Skype ringing.

(I assume you are trolling, but I will play).

No, not really. An app that makes sounds is by definition an audio player. The question isn't or shouldn't be 'if Apple wanted', but what the user wants.

I think the whole attitude that somehow the desire for volume control in a particular application is somehow wrong or inelegant is the real problem. I got the same attitude when I asked for uTorrent to make the font it uses for the grid configurable (to make it larger). 'Just use the OS font setting.' Except that doesn't work. I am using RDP to see my machine that runs uTorrent, and adjusting DPI is not one of the options when you are RDPing. Perhaps RDP should allow for the DPI setting (maybe it does in some non-obvious place), but my point is there may be very valid reasons why you would want to adjust something without having to use some global setting. They got all pissy when I listed the 15 apps I was running on my machine at the time and all but one of them allowed separate configuration of the font.

I would bet though, that in this case what the user really wants is the ability to control Flash volume from within Safari, primarily, since this is presumably where most of the audio comes from (or QuickTime possibly). It may not technically be possible because of that, but it probably is.

I also think that holding up 'Windows' (not Shoe Puppet, but other posters in this thread) as that model is a real problem, since they actively defeat their own technology when it comes to HDCP and Windows Media Center. Specifically, you can't do things like adjust the volume using the system volume in Windows Media Center if you are using SPDIF outputs. You are required to use you amp's volume control, because adjusting the volume in the OS would require decrypting the audio stream or some horseshit. You also aren't allowed to do things like have volume come out of SPDIF and analog jacks at the same time. All of which was previously possible in XP before HDCP.

Yea I saw that this morning and had already replied on that post.

More bad PR, fine. I think it is a lack of imagination to think that it took some exceptional set of circumstances for this to happen inadvertently or without malice/nefarious intent, or that any promise not to do it again will be non-absolute.

It is also possible they intended to do this all along and record all of our unencrypted data for marketing purposes. I am the optimist.

Exactly.

Yes I am content to argue that 'is' means 'is', to rebut your failed attempts to show that my analogies are wrong. That's apparently what this conversation has devolved to.

I have already indicated that it was bad karma and probably not good for business and PR. I think it would have been wrong for them to use the data for anything intentionally. We could of course argue the definition of wrong...

Correct. Asked and answered, but I will try again. It is plausible 'standard best practices' development techniques were applied in the development of the original code, which had the purpose or, as a developmental aid, effect of logging the packet data present on the network adapter when scanning for Wifi Access Points. (It is likely these were not Google developers at all at this stage, as they were likely using OSS tools like airodump-ng.) It is plausible that subsequent developer, either did not realize that the 3rd party code had this logging effect, or as a developer did not realize that logging the data in this particular scenario would be a privacy issue, since they were probably NAL, and developers as a rule try and avoid involving lawyers in their day to day work.

By your definition, any bug or inadvertent behavior in any application ever is due to incompetence. Then fine, I will admit that Google is 'incompetent' by that definition, since it would encompass 'the entire human race'. It would be interesting to see how that logic would apply to something like neural network/chaotic systems programming...wait, no it wouldn't.

So you agree then...

Yes, my words, my opinion based on the apparent contrarian nature of this discourse.

That's how analogies work. You take some specific scenario, make some generalization and apply it to another scenario with similar features. The semantic equality between logging and 'dumping memory' is pretty straightforward IN MY OPINION. You will probably disagree.

No I am contesting whether they did anything ILLEGAL and actionable, and I am contesting your analysis that only intentional 'malice' or incompetence (in the sense of gross negligence, as opposed to) leads to an accidental capture of the data, as opposed to just standard programming practice of logging all inputs, in particular when 3rd party/team code is reused for a particular subset of its features and you don't realize the logging is taking place.

You have a strange sense of logic to be able to extrapolate to that. Businesses do plenty of things intentionally and inadvertently that do not rise to the level of illegality that are then apologized for. Examples of things companies do that are not popular (OUTRAGEOUS!) that might lead to some sort of apology/acknowledgment/promise to avoid doing in the future: Comcast throttling services selectively, Apple banning 3rd party toolkit based apps, spilling oil into a body of water by accident when drilling, recording everything employees do on their computers and phone conversations, listening to or viewing communications when employees use employer supplied phones,.... etc etc etc.

And bad PR isn't just a hot air with no financial impact, it affects the company financially by lowering their 'Goodwill' the accounting term used to describe their perception in the marketing place, which has actual value. Goodwill is more elastic though, and ongoing/continued good behavior and honesty tend to make it rebound over time.

And I think you thinking the crash dump analogy is dumb, just means you are a little close minded about this. You've made up your mind that Google is evil and needs to be punished.

The crash dump example is exactly analogous. The were LOGGING the data. A highly plausible reason they were logging the data is because if the program crashed (or a subsequent program in the data processing chain that processed the output of the app that logged the data) they would want to have the logged data to replay or recover their efforts. If the dataset got corrupted, the cost of reproducing the dataset (having the special vehicles re-drive the route) is so high that, as a matter of Cover Your Ass, any decent programmer would have logged that data in a way that allowed the dataset to be regenerated.

Over-competence, as opposed to incompetence at least from a programmers perspective, is a more likely rational in my opinion. I think it is also possible that they data collection methods were developed in the US (where everything they did is probably legal, we shall see) and then deployed internationally and this might have been missed (review: creates debug log, move on...) without realizing that it was potentially more of an issue there.

Again, given the amount of PR, there is no way that Google has 'gotten a pass'. They have already been punished in the 'court of opinion'. The question becomes, what else.

If my rational makes no sense whatsoever to you, in answer to '3) people...have no case' then I certainly hope you are never on a jury with serious consequences.

I was just quoting you: 'you're saying it's "understandable" that Google should want to violate people's privacy?'

So my question is: What do you think should happen to Google? What is the outcome that you think is just? Are you tilting at windmills or do you actually have something in mind besides outrage?

Should executives go to jail? Should an independent commission be established by the UN to investigate? Should Google pay every man woman and child in 28 countries that might have been 'violated', some amount of money? Does Google need to cease to exist because of this? Is bad PR enough? Be broken up into separate companies? How about a donation/creation to/of a Wifi Education charity?

1) Data in a crash dump isn't a feature.

2) It's orthogonal to the current case -- the users has to take an action to submit a crash dump

3) If there's something wrong there, condemn that too. Don't use it to let other offenders off the hook.

1) It is to a developer, since the data may be what caused the crash.

2) The user had to set up an open wifi in this case. Open wifi is used for many things that are legal and don't 'take advantage of the ignorant'. Logging the packets was bad karma, sure, and certainly in retrospect bad for business.

3) Fine condemn it. Condemning doesn't mean 'file a frivolous or gold-digging lawsuit because my privacies were bruised'.

I'm not saying it is a perfect analogy, I am just trying to understand why it is so important to you that Google should suffer any more than they have (PR wise) for this particular instance, or what you think a remedy would look like.

Because that is what the OP is about: "Google's Streetview Privacy Snafu Prompts Lawsuit"

We will know if Google's actions were illegal when they are convicted of something.

You are the one claiming they 'wanted' to 'violate' people's 'privacy' in this case. I am not saying that is 'understandable', you are just taking everything as a paranoid attack. I said that making the kind of mistake that Google did, by reusing code that had unintended (by their statements) consequences is understandable and plausible, and that a good faith effort to remedy the problem should be taken as such.

Again, you can try and twist things all you want, but I don't give frivolous lawsuit happy people slack, not 'tech-phobic' users.

You must be trying to intentionally misread what I am saying I guess. I said that there is a difference between wired and wireless communications in the law.

I would expect that the first police that realized that their communications could be overheard would be considered 'novices', and they probably 'expected' privacy. I don't need to demonstrate that a novice user with open wifi expects privacy, I just have to prove that there are reasonable expectation of the lack of privacy by the 'violator', such as the availability of Open commercial Wifi access points and the inability to distinguish between them.

Just as long as they are allowed to 'err' at all, by accidentally including code that has unintended consequences, and then be allowed to fix it.

'Okay' and 'legal' are two separate discussions.

Yes, and you haven't used hyperbole AT ALL either in this discussion, lol. Goose, meet gander.

Fine, they were wrong before. I happen to have a little optimism left that they are being as truthful as they can be in this scenario, and that their inaccurate statement before was an honest mistake. You can choose not to.

It may be lame, but most excuses are. "Why didn't you take out the trash?" "I was watching TV."

Yes, that is exactly what I am saying. Google was sent here by God to do His work and you shall bow down before them, heathen.

Haha, you are hilarious. Kettle, pot, meet black. Anyway, your blanket statements about how Google's development practices are incompetent, etc., and how code reviews and code coverage would have somehow caught every possible issue with the code, is precisely what I was saying were unreasonable, and provided examples as to why they were unreasonable. You can call that a straw man, but that doesn't make it so.

This is a fallacy if there ever was one. I write something with .Net. I test and debug it. I use some compiled 3rd party library. Then a bug appears in said .Net or 3rd party libraries, or it logs some information that while typically helpful to the developer, in this case has the unintended consequence of violating privacy. Heck, look as submitting stack traces when an application crashes on Windows. It has a privacy statement that the stack trace might contain private information, because someone once realized that they shouldn't have collected that information, and then fixed it.

No I give them a 'get a lot of bad PR for making a dumb mistake' pass. Just not a 'you need to be sued' pass. Your argument about 'people who don't know' is a slippery slope in my opinion. Tell that to a used car salesman, haha (god, please don't take that as anything but a joke.) I don't think Google's actions rise to the level of 'taking advantage of people's ignorance', given the open commercial wifi arguments, and the lack of action on the data (and to be honest the lack of any useful potential action on a few packets).

Never! Especially when they aren't invalid.

And we both made some blanket statements on development practices, to try and determine the reasonableness/likelihood of Google actions being accidental or inadvertent, so it is germaine.