A friend of mine wants a button on his desk that causes certain MS employees to suffer instant and explosive diarrhea whenever he pushes the large and easy to access button. The ribbon toolbar guy is high on his list.

I am not sure that Samsung could have come up with features that would make me want to buy their TV less unless they simply went with slapstick comedy. Spontaneous combustion? Radiation hazard? Randomly calls in SWAT teams?

Or maybe they have more subtle comedy offering coming where they partially morph your face onto all the fat and ugly people who appear on your screen. Or send subliminal messages suggesting that your spouse should have an affair.

But for now they at least seem to be violating our privacy coming and going. I wonder what MBA thinking results in this crap. There are many reasons I would never buy a GM but onstar sits right at the top of the pile for similar reasons that I will not now buy a Samsung TV.

An excellent place to start would be to look to see what stopped Senator Joseph McCarthy and the equally insane House Un-American Activities Committee. Senator Joseph McCarthy couldn't have shown much better that people like him exist and the system shouldn't exist that enables them. The present day NSA insanity is a Senator Joseph McCarthy wet dream. He had to claw and scrape for the pittance of data he had which the NSA would now laugh at as a joke as they probably gather more data in millionths of a second than Senator Joseph McCarthy gathered the whole time he terrorized the US.

Lessons that should have been learned from the House Un-American Activities Committee is that they could do far more damage than the people they were hunting ever dreamed they could.

So we have the NSA doing their damnedest to repeat history so the key would be to repeat history as to how to stop it. The key seemed to be when the Senate voted to censure him which was such a wonderful humiliation that the asshat died from alcoholism a few years later. So what the senate should do is to identify the few key players who are supporting the NSA and turf them this would then take the wind out of their civil rights violating sales making them an easy target for further reforms that should one by one effectively shut them down.

The final key would be to make a complete list of all the things good they have done and a complete list of bad things they have done. I suspect that in the end that it would be like a surgeon who used a 9mm pistol as his primary method of surgically removing zits. Yes he got the zits but the collateral damage was just not worth it and it would have been better for him not to have operated at all.

To me this is quite simple. Terrorists are first and foremost defined by their criminal activities. Thus use the traditional laws to go after and punish them. I don't care why the guy put a bomb in his underwear. He put a bomb in his underwear!!! I don't think that it counts as misdemeanour if looked at as just a normal crime. I don't care why the guy shot the cartoonist. He shot someone. If any of the above was part of a larger plan then there is a conspiracy which is another serious crime. If there is enough evidence to get a wiretap then a judge will issue a warrant. These are not complicated things. If anything makes it complicated it might be that it involves having to liaise with some international counterparts.

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.