Comment Re:Please develop for my dying platform! (Score 1) 307
Sounds like a buying opportunity... for put options....
Sounds like a buying opportunity... for put options....
But where he is being completely batshit illogical is where he argues that once app platforms are common carriers, the users must give equal treatment to the platforms rather than the other way around. To use the previous example, it would be as if the government mandated that if you offered to ship something via UPS, you must also offer to ship it via FedEx. Such a mandate has never happened, and probably never will.
Not offer to ship it. Ship it. With physical products, the analogy can't really work, but the closest equivalent would be mandating that companies take bids when working government contracts....
Either way, though, the idea is absurd for several reasons: platforms can't easily be compatible with one another, you can't realistically expect companies to design software for platforms that they're unfamiliar with, and there's not even a guarantee that it would be possible for a company like Apple to port their software to Blackberry, because the OS may lack required functionality under the hood. Add to that the risk of giving anyone who creates a platform with ten users the right to demand that Apple port iMessage to their token platform, and you can see how such a law would quickly spiral out of control.
What the Blackberry CEO should really be asking for is a law mandating that all protocols and exchange formats be open (with reasonable documentation) and free of any patent encumbrances that are fundamental to any implementation of the protocol. Such a law would ensure that Blackberry could freely implement iMessage compatibility themselves. And the right way to argue for such a law is twofold:
The extent to which the second argument applies depends to some degree on the ephemerality of the communication, of course.
As a happy side effect, such a law would have the benefit of putting an end to patents on technologies like GSM, CDMA, LTE, etc. for the same reasons.
Sorry. I can't take any solution that runs on PHP seriously. Especially one with such a history of horrid bugs and remote exploits.
If you're talking about WordPress, then I would agree. It has a long history of security problems, mainly because it was written in an era when PHP was too popular for its own good.
Anyone suggesting PHP as a solution is quite obviously a moron.
The problem isn't PHP. The problem is PHP coders. When PHP was in its heyday, it made basic website CGI coding simple enough to attract a lot of coders who didn't have much experience. A lot of PHP code was written during that period. The result is that a lot of PHP software (much of which is still in common use) was written by people with minimal programming experience.
To make matters worse, the initial MySQL API in PHP was disastrous. (That's not PHP's fault, mind you; the same API was used in C and every other language at the time.) Most PHP software out there was written before the modern, parameterized syntax became available, so statistically speaking, the overwhelming majority of PHP code that uses MySQL probably contains security holes.
If you take a group of people who have solid programming backgrounds today, give them a two-week training course on PHP, then spend another two weeks on PHP-specific security and design issues, and insist that they use parameterized queries exclusively, you'll end up with good software. Unfortunately, this approach precludes the use of any software currently available unless you're willing to spend the time to do a detailed security audit.
Oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that those pixel counts were for adult-size heads. Scale accordingly for younger kids.
I've done just that - only from the back row. You can easily attach teleconverters if you want zoom
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Okay, six pixels was an exaggeration—in a small hall, by my math (based on photos I've taken with other cameras), an 8MP iPhone would yield faces ranging from 26 to 50 pixels tall. With a 6D, a full-pixel crop at 40mm isn't great, but it is usable for people near the front of the stage By the time you get down to a 10MP APS-C sensor, it is barely usable for people at the front of the stage, and is useless for people near the back. Scale that down to 8 MP and it won't be. Add in the extra noise from a tiny sensor, and it wouldn't even be close to usable.
And there's also the shutter speed problem. By my math, if I'd used an iPhone to shoot photos of a stage last week instead of my 6D, at the iPhone's maximum usable ISO, I'd have been limited to a 1/50th of a second shutter speed, which without optical IS is way too slow for my taste.
Once you start adding teleconverters, yes, a phone can be a serviceable tool, albeit with a long list of caveats—the inability to quickly change the zoom length (AFAIK, they're all prime teleconverters, not true zooms), manual focus, fragility, focal plane inconsistency because of mount flex, and so on—none of which are show-stoppers, but all of which lead to significantly diminished "keeper rates". It's the difference between 20% of your shots being keepers and 95% of them being keepers. Mind you, I enjoy playing with manual focus primes every so often, but I'd never use one as my main lens. It's just too much work for the reward you get.
... and frankly lots of people are willing to use digital zoom also.
Don't get me started on digital zooms. You might as well just crop the photo afterwards; you'll get the same result, but you might actually get other interesting stuff in the photo if you don't use one.
It doesn't matter how good the sensor, camera, or lens are really - because the entire non-smartphone camera market is shrinking rapidly.
I think you're misinterpreting the numbers. The market at the low end is contracting because cell phones are cutting into it. The market at the high end is contracting because neither Canon nor Nikon is really innovating much. If each generation has only small, incremental improvements, people are going to upgrade their gear less and less frequently.
Nobody is replacing their DSLRs with cell phones, within some small epsilon. At best, cell phones can replace DSLRs for outdoor portrait photography, when you're within a few feet from the subject. On the opposite extreme, if you try to use a cell phone to take photos of your kid's stage play, you'll annoy everyone by standing up in the front row, and you'll still only get shots with blown-out faces that are six pixels by six pixels in size and so severely smeared by motion blur that nobody would be recognizable even if you could fix those first three problems.... All the while, the parent with the real camera might be taking amazing close-ups with a 300mm (or longer) lens on a full-frame camera from the back of the auditorium.
Of course, half the time, the parent with the real camera has a lens that's too short to be usable and hasn't learned enough about the camera to avoid getting blown-out shots. Unfortunately, some of those folks get discouraged and never upgrade their gear. Fortunately, there's a steady supply of people who can't be bothered to learn the basics, so them getting discouraged isn't a big problem market-wise.
To be fair, I never said it was a good idea.
So you decide that you need to hold those keys in escrow, and use them to decrypt only specific messages upon a court order. After all, you really shouldn't be providing those keys to nearly two-hundred different governments, for the reasons listed above. But now you have a different problem—one of how to keep that key protected yourself, knowing that if it ever gets out, the entire security model of your software is broken, both for new messages and existing ones.
If you try hard enough, you can come up with all sorts of crazy schemes to minimize the risk of disclosure, such as keeping those encrypted session keys yourself rather than attaching them to the message (and now you have a colossal storage problem), having multiple public keys that have to be used in combination to decrypt a message (and now you have a hit-by-a-car problem), etc.
Basically, it's an awful idea, with far too many problems to enumerate. But the fact that the software is Open Source really isn't one of those problems.
The problem is that you can't give the capability to decrypt by law... it's open source software, so no backdoors, and if you don't have the key you can't decipher.
Nothing is stopping them from requiring that all software encrypt a copy of the session key (or whatever) with a second public key (which the government can decrypt with their private key). OSS can do that just as easily as closed-source software. Sure, it would be obvious to anyone looking at the code, but the law wouldn't exactly be a secret, either.
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite.
Let's substitute "Ferrari" for "Fiber" and try that on for size: "I want a Ferrari. Take my money! Here is my $5000! Why aren't greedy corporations giving me my Ferrari for $5000? We need a law to force greedy corporations to give everybody a Ferrari for $5000! Then the poor will finally get the same transportation as the rich! It's a question of fairness!"
All right. Let's do that. I say "I want a Ferrari. I'm willing to pay the entire cost of the Ferrari, and I'm willing to pay the costs for you to stick a Ferrari on a truck and bring it to me. And they said, "No, we don't sell Ferraris to people who live in your area because there are too many people who can't afford one." See how irrational your argument just became when you use an accurate analogy?
Besides, a car is not an educational tool in any meaningful sense. The poor are not harmed in their ability to stop being poor by being able to buy an overpriced automobile. That makes the entire analogy irrelevant.
Keep pace with??? Sunnyvale has average download speeds of 40 Mbps, far above G8, EU and world-wide averages.
But it hasn't kept pace with nearby communities. And until just a few months back, my neighborhood was stuck at 3 Mbps, which is far behind just about everybody. I'm not sure what Comcast is offering, now that they've moved in, but... well, they're Comcast—a single viable option from a monopoly that sets all the rules, take it or leave it.
Besides, you're focusing on a single community, which keeps you from having to acknowledge the pattern of abuse that prevents the poor from having real options. Choice is good.
Is your Latin a little rusty? An "argumentum ad hominem" would be to say "your argument is wrong because you are a greedy and ignorant human being". That is not at all what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that you are a greedy and ignorant human being because of the arguments you make.
One implies the other. Your argument that I'm a greedy and ignorant being is making assumptions based on my position, and you're using those an assumptions to attack me personally as a means to attack the position. The latter half is effectively an ad hominem, and the reasoning is also basically circular.
(I did learn, however, that you have a lousy taste in music.)
Actually, no, you didn't. You only think you did, because you jumped to wrong conclusions based on incomplete information—specifically, you're assuming that all liturgical music is bad music. A lot of it is, sure, and particularly a lot of the modern stuff, but....
I was referring to the Citizens United case but
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So was I. Citizens United was about overturning part of McCain-Feingold/BCRA.
And isn't it wonderful that they actually had blackout periods restricting when we are allowed to make political speech? I guess I am supposed to rejoice at the 270 days they still allowed free speech instead of focusing on the 90 where they removed it.
AFAIK, it isn't 90 days around any election; it's 90 days around an election that the person in question is running in. So not 270 days, but rather 640 days for the House, 1370 for the President, and 2100 for the Senate. In relative terms, that's a pretty small window.
That's simply not true. News organizations were explicitly excluded from limits by McCain-Feingold. If anything, their exception was probably too broad, as it potentially allowed them to editorially declare their support for a candidate during the blackout period while denying that right to non-media companies.
Free speech has limits. It always has. Companies can't lie in ads. You can't shout "fire" in a crowded theater. And so on. One particular category of limits is frequently not a first amendment violation: time, place, and manner restrictions. Examples include limits on sale of porn mags within a block of an elementary school (place), bans on protests near cemeteries during funerals (place and time), and limits on size and style of signage for businesses (manner). Those restrictions are allowable if the law is:
My opinion has nothing to do with ignoring the first amendment, and everything to do with having a deep understanding of it and of how the courts have interpreted it for several decades. Come back when you've taken at least one class on communications law or constitutional law, and we can have a serious conversation on the subject.
Exactly, it's about you wanting others to give you money. All the rest is a smokescreen. It's no different when Blackwater, the cable companies, or the prison union go to Congress with their hands open. They also say "but it's for everybody's good!".
What the h*** are you talking about? I'm asking to pay for a service, shouting "Take my money!" and they're not doing it. Wanting others to give me money? Quite the opposite. I'd willingly pay the entire cost of running a fiber to my house up front if anyone would do it.
No, it's because right now, they'd make less money on it than elsewhere and because they have limited capacity to put in fiber and backbone. Rushing out service to your area is going to cost them dearly, both in opportunity cost and inefficiency. They are not going to accept lower profits, they are going to raise prices; the simplest way for them to raise prices is to charge a premium for the new fiber service and to eliminate all low-cost, slower services. And so your "poor kids" now have to pay $70/month for fiber, instead of $12.95/month for basic DSL.
First, most parts of the world can't get DSL for $12.95 per month. Even Earthlink's horrible offering isn't that cheap.
Second, a sizable percentage of poor areas are either outside the reach of DSL or don't have DSL-enabled COs, which means they already pay a higher bill for cable Internet.
Third, what makes you think that the people running the fiber have any say whatsoever in the cost or availability of DSL? Most of those cheap DSL services aren't provided by the phone company; they're provided by CLECs. And thanks to government regulations, once that DSLAM is set up for DSL service, the phone company is generally required to lease line access to third parties, and the cost of that lease is usually limited by law. Yes, there are some exceptions, like if you allow the phone company to rewire you for FTTN, but that's your individual decision, and is unaffected by the availability of fiber.
Basically, the results you're afraid of are simply impossible. They can't happen. And even if they could, it's really, really easy to provide tax credits to fix the problem if it happens, making your argument based on completely irrational fear rather than any sort of realistic concern.
What policies like this really end up doing is redistributing money from the politically weak (mostly poor folks) to an educated intellectual elite like you. And you add insult to injury by pretending that enriching yourself that way is for everybody else's good.
Enriching myself? How is expecting the quality of Internet service in my community to keep pace with the rest of the world "enriching myself"? There's a difference between enriching yourself and refusing to let yourself and your neighbors get walked on by a bunch of greedy corporate f**ks. I guarantee that the things I propose will not cause poor people to be unfairly burdened. How can I say that? Because we ALREADY DID IT TWICE—ONCE WITH PHONE LINES, AND AGAIN WITH DSL. The poor were not unfairly burdened by having access to either of those technologies, both of which had the properties that I described.
This discussion is seriously making me mad at this point. Your reasoning is unsound, and about half of your argument seems to be ad hominem attacks on someone who regularly writes software and gives it away, who composes music and gives at least some of it away, who spends nine hours a week doing liturgical music rehearsals and performances (unpaid), and so on. I use my talents to for the benefit of others. A lot. Before you go attacking me and claiming that I'm somehow greedy and trying to steal from the poor, you might want to get your facts straight. I fight for the poor because I believe everyone deserves the chances that I had. Nothing more, nothing less.
Not precisely. Any intolerant philosophy can be countered by rational argument, but first you have to get the person to actually start listening. In the case of terrorists (foreign or domestic, religious or otherwise), that doesn't work because the second part can't be done for various reasons. However, in the case of people thinking about joining a terrorist group, that can work to some degree, because they haven't yet closed themselves off to argument.
Unfortunately, most governments don't even try. For example, the U.S. government's war on terror primarily fans the flames rather than countering the philosophy. They fight unnecessary wars that kill innocent people, thus turning those innocents' friends and relatives against them, resulting in a steady stream of people who are angry at the western world, who are then prime targets for radicalization. They lock innocent people up for decades without a trial, thus giving people even more reason to hate them. Then, when they find out that someone might be becoming radicalized, they monitor them, often going so far as to encourage them to commit fake crimes so that they'll get caught and can spend the rest of their lives in prison, rather than attacking the rot of hate by countering it with rational argument. All of these things make people hate the West even more.
In short, I'm pretty sure the U.S. government is doing almost everything it possibly can to encourage extremist behavior. What I don't understand is why. Are they trying to bring about the end of the world, or are they really that clueless?
Just to be clear, I'm not trying to justify the horrible actions of people who use bombs to try to kill as many people as possible, most of whom likely had little or nothing to do with whatever they're angry about, many of whom might even agree with them, at least in principle. I'm just saying that many of the attacks are undeniably at least partially the fault of the western world for fomenting hatred among the people of the Middle East and for failing to take even the slightest actions to counter that hatred among people that it knew were heading down that path. It's a bit like not locking your doors and then wondering why your insurance company won't pay for your missing widescreen TV....
The only true way to fight hate is to face it head on, by teaching people not to hate. If you manage to do that—if the very idea of hating others becomes so antithetical to everyone's core beliefs that nobody joins hate groups—then eventually they'll go away by attrition.
Just saying.
Do not use the blue keys on this terminal.
