I thought that they found Sadam's porno stash in his basement, "Weapons of Ass Destruction."

The key question is why do governments want them down so badly?

The government so desperately wants these videos down and routinely makes claims that these videos are radicalizing people (not proven but still doesn't change anything). But this doesn't make sense. The videos don't really cost money. They aren't going against some vested interest of a lobby group. So why are they so desperate?

The answer is clear. They make the bureaucrats look bad. How can they claim that any given battle has been won or an area "pacified" if videos crop up showing their opponents doing what they want where they want? Bush jr claimed that the war was over but very quickly both the media and the internet proved him very very wrong. But if he had complete control over the information we might have only been able to speculate as to why so many soldiers were dying in "accidents". Instead he was humiliated and his legacy largely ruined.

And this is the crux of real power; the control of information. Look at the power that Snowden has managed to take away. Not all of it but even in the UK the courts have just delivered a gut punch that mightn't ever have happened without his release of the information and caused such potential for a power shift.

So while I don't really want more power to groups like ISIS. I am 100% sure that I don't want more power in the hands of the US or any other western government. So ignore any argument that they might make about keeping the children safe and remember that this is a quest for power over information pure and simple.

My answer to this is WRONG!!!!

http://appleinsider.com/articl...

I am not saying that you can throw your DLSR away but quite simply when phones are good enough for what this guy says then they are good enough for 99% of people who take pictures. That doesn't leave much audience left except for snobs and a few pros. Thus if they want to get any of that 99% they can't only be screwing around with ISO type features and need to find some wins for the average person even if it somehow involves ISO in the background.

A simple test would be to walk around grabbing everyone in a 10 block radius and asking them to define ISO as it relates to a camera. That will then be the true test of what features are important.

If some Brit had been caught sneeking around and reading the GCHQ data or even reading some politician's or top policeman's traffic that guy would be in jail right now with little prospect of being out before a few decades had come to pass. Yet these douche nozzles won't even get so much as an ASBO. Justice is blind, nobody is above the law? Total and purified BS.

My daughter is presently in India and was in Africa before that. She has been using her iPhone 5s to take pictures and basically it looks like she is just scanning them from NatGeo.(She isn't a natgeo photog) They are completely stunning. She also has a DLSR with her but she hasn't sent any photos because that is a pain. With the iPhone all she has to do is find Wifi and up they go.

The key test here is that she doesn't have a SIM card in that phone. So she is literally using it primarily for its camera and using it in preference to a hard core DLSR that she is very familiar with.

So while I am not a fan of stupid features in a camera(I'm looking at you sepia tone) I think that the critical thing that the camera companies need to do is to make sure that they are focusing on a few key features. One is to make it way way easier to get the pictures off the camera. I don't want this to be a dedicated software thing or some kind of crap where they have an online service where they try to have a value add but something where I can walk into a wifi hotspot and start sending them wherever the hell I want.

The next feature set I want will take advantage of the larger lenses. So night vision from hell. Maybe thermal vision would be cool. Super duper slow mo and I am talking like 200 fps minimum and ideally reaching out to 1000 frames. These are things that a tiny lens camera just can't do.

The last thing to keep in mind is that the number of professionals using almost any given camera is pretty much zero. So have a pro mode that is off by default. I will never set the ISO, I will never pretty much set anything like that. So keep those features hidden. A great example of this stupid catering to professionals with a camera that isn't professional is a Sony Cybershot that I have. It will record mov(or something common) up to around 720 but at 1080 it goes to some stupid DVD ready format. Who the hell uses DVDs? Basically it just means that to use the HD format I then have to upload the videos and convert the mess to mp4 or something from the last decade. What a pain. I would not have purchased the camera had I known that the 1080 format was stupid. On top of that I need to have a charger to charge the battery. No USB plug. It does have some uber-proprietary Sony plug for something. So basically did the Sony designers even know about the Home PC when they made this camera?

Here is a winning feature: The real camera's photographs show up on your phone's built in photo album when it is nearby so that you can then do what you want with them. Not just what the MBAs at the camera company will allow you to do. Everyone has a phone that they know how to use well. So take the awesome pictures on the camera and do the rest with the phone. Probably way better than trying to put android on the camera and just making a crappy android interface. I don't need crappy version of instagram on my camera.

I think the key is that while the government is on at least shaky ground with these warrants the ground is solid when it comes to the inability to compel someone to lie.

With the law often the key is that every link in a chain must be solid. A simple example is when someone runs into a line of cars parked at a light. Each car will technically only be easily able to sue the one behind it and in the end the guy who caused the crash will end up eating all the costs. But this is usually made a smooth process by the insurance companies who will use common sense and figure everything out. But if it turned out that nobody had insurance then it would have to largely proceed one lawsuit at a time up the chain and it would be a horrible mess.

Basically this is why lawyers end up going to school for so long. If you sue your neighbour for his dog pooping on your lawn it might only be slightly complicated. But once you get into multiparty stuff like a product liability lawsuit this is where the lawyers start arguing points that seem stupid. For in that example how liable is the store that sold you the stroller that broke your baby?

So for human beings we can see the chain of what triggered what. But the law only really sees the links.

There could also be a note on every user's account where they are told that there have been no secret legal demands for their data. Then of course this would vanish if there was one.

Then there could even be a next next level canary where you could have a thing in your account profile that would have one canary for every single data seeking organization. Thus only certain ones would disappear. This would certainly scream first amendment among other generally unexplored legal area. But most importantly it would give people the ability they should have had all along which was to challenge any warrant both the companies and the individual. Right now people have been having trouble challenging this stuff in court because they couldn't "Prove" that they were a victim. This might cross that threshold of proof.

Minimally it would allow these massive companies to finally have a toehold in which to bring their legal teams into action and cause serious problems for these bozos who think that they have found an easy backdoor to violating our rights.

Worst database I ever worked on was the billing system for a telco. All fields text fields except for the automatically generated ID field. Thanks Lotus Notes and your IT Mall School training for that gem.

Oh and the data input had pulldowns as a suggestion. So you could type Hal and it would suggest Halifax. But if you wanted you could just type Helifax and use that. This allowed for the easy addition of new towns and cities because in this small region they seemed to think we would be getting new towns and cities all the time when in fact it probably would have been safe to store that list in the BIOS.

I have worked with many very large data sets or very important data sets covering large numbers of people (not that big just complex). In both cases my first fight was with the data itself. I don't know how many databases I would get into with fields (all in one table) like phone, phone_num, number_phone, phonenum, and then usually a magical set like phone1, phone2, phone3, and phone2a.

Or I would have lat longs for customers that put them in 100 miles off the coast of Nova Scotia (not sable island either). Or a mostly good lat longs but if they couldn't get one then they would use the lat long of the nation's capital resulting in 20% of the customers residing in any given nation's capital which also then obscured the actual number of customers in the nation's capital.

And then dates, can nobody ever get dates right. A favourite is that round one of the system will only record the day of a transaction but later they expand their collection to the hour and minute but now the old dates are all at noon or something. So when you try to find the usage pattern of users there will be this massive spike at noon and a scattering of transactions in the rest of the day. Try and run that through a Bayesian analysis.

I can go on and on with one of my recent favorites is a phone company database where many phone calls never begin, or never end.

So I think the big bucks is not in doing an ML processing of their data using some ingenious Hadoop crap but to maybe use ML to clean the data up. And by the way if someone has a tilde(~) in their name your OCR needs to be shot.

Pascal is one of those languages like Powerbuilder and even Java that people learn the one language and then drag it through the decades kicking and screaming. At least with Java the language is being kept somewhat fresh but I don't think there is much I respect less in the computer world than a one language programmer.

I cooked up a homebrew 8bit OS on my ATMega chip. I now demand that Netflix port their system over to my OS. Plus I still have a C64 in the closet so that needs netflix pronto. Then the computer in my car I believe is running that Vx stuff for combustion so it should get netflix as that is probably a more common OS than android. Then on top of all that I completely demand that my TI-89 gets netflix.

And that is just netflix. I have been waiting for a TI-89 version of Halo for way too long. Who do I sue? I want to sue someone for that omission!!! And I believe that someone released a doom for TI-89 so it clearly can be done.

For restaurant website or something similar then there are all kinds of out of the box solutions that rock. But the moment that something new needs to be done often using anything like wordpress is going to be a knife fight with everyone getting stabbed.

The usual sign that the out of the box solution has failed is that the project looks 90% done in the first week. But then ten weeks later the project is still roughly 90% done.

For instance I would not want to implement Wikipedia using any out of the box solution. I would not want to implement Reddit, or slashdot, or pretty much any major website using an out of the box solution. Although I could probably make a close knockoff of slashdot using wordpress it would be those final features that would probably stall as I effectively was forced to rewrite wordpress. Then wordpress would come out with an upgrade and then I would have to re-rewrite the changes.

Lastly in these days of SEO being critical to a website getting any joy from google speed is critical. So a hand tooled site that is 1% better than a typical bulky framework site will simply do better in search (all other things being equal) so while 1% might not be a seemingly worthwhile performance gain it is one of those cases where you don't have to outrun the lion just your fellow tourists.

And not bathing or really any grooming pretty much.

There are many fields where everyone needs to pitch in and the collective efforts sum up to a result. Digging ditches would be an example. Teaching would be another. One brilliant teacher can't teach millions; but one brilliant teacher can raise the bar with the rest expected to follow. But in theoretical science being a hard working slightly intelligent person is only going to result in a mild contribution at best. Only a very very few extremely brilliant people move things forward. In the more applied areas of science such as food testing hard work is a perfectly viable substitute for brilliance. It really annoys me when the mediocre try and say all the great science is now done by groups. That is true in that all the mediocre science is done by groups of mediocre scientists. But it is still the Feynman sitting alone in a room who make the leaps that everyone else then follows and fills in the blanks.

I see this in Computer Science every day. There are those vast majority of programmers who are rarely using any math beyond X++ and there are those who are taking an ML and figuring out ways to take some aspect of it to the next level.

Rarely is the brilliance separate from hard work but 99% of PhD theses could be and are completely ignored. That was a whole lot of hard work that went into them. But then there are people like Higgs who's hard work + brilliance resulted in the creation of the LHC to verify his brilliance; done by groups of people who worked very hard. I suspect that many of the best bits of the LHC were created by a very very small number of very brilliant people while the rest was plodded in to place by the merely very smart.

This is a perfect example of hiring a bunch of MBAs who then use terms like "Low hanging fruit" and change the company from technology company to high pressure cell outlet with junky high margin accessories.

I love when the darlings of the MBA world like Blockbuster turn out to be so riddled with cancer that they can't survive.

My next prediction is that the MBA riddled aviation world is next. The whole concept of "calculated misery" where they shrink seats not only to pack more people onto the plane but so that they can charge extra for getting what should actually be a mandated minimum leg room is classic MBA "cunning" that will blow up in their BSchool faces. The only problem is that the bastards are the sort who weasel their way into "retention" bonuses.

But to any CEOs who might read slashdot, right now go to HR and tell them to fire every MBA even if they are doing a non financial related job as their Machiavellian training is probably causing massive misery for anyone around them.