What is damned annoying is that 'Gatekeeper' can be turned off; but as of 10.10, it will turn itself back on after a period of time. iOSX seems likely in the near future.

I can only comment on SRPs as they currently exist; but as of now the only real pain is vendors who don't sign anything. Self-signed or untrusted roots throw up scary warning by default; but you can add those to the trusted list if you wish. Legacy software is a giant pain in the ass, since most of it predates the custom of signing much of anything by default; but newer stuff generally isn't so bad. If necessary, you bless the vendor's cert and that takes care of it. You can also (again, with the present implementation of SRPs) bless binaries by hash, rather than by signature, which is frequently easier if you need to do once-offs.

TFA is a little vague; but if it is implemented the way that Software Restriction Policies currently are; I'd be all for it(and I say that as a smirking, linux using, tinfoil-hatted paranoiac.)

Cryptographic verification and whitelisting are enormously powerful techniques, and (aside from being able to take advantage of them), they are simply too useful to forbid successfully. What matters, and makes the difference between a fortress and a prison, is who gets to put something on the whitelist.

If you can whitelist something(either by signing it yourself, adding the cert of the person who signed it to the trusted list or both), it's a fortress. If the whitelist is what the vendor says it is, it's a prison. Same deal with 'secure boot'. If I can re-key it, it's a valuable tool. If I can't, it's a device that I'll never be more than a peon on.

Unfortunately, the general lack of DRM(wouldn't even have to be effective DRM, just going through the motions) is pretty much the only thing that keeps a DVD-like arrangment from enjoying force of law anywhere with a DMCA-style law on the books.

Copyright tends to be a little awkward around computers; because there is so much copying that has to occur internally just to display something; but the analogy between running adblock and taking scissors to a magazine is a pretty easy one, and the right of the end user to mangle up an article, even a copyrighted one, however it amuses them is pretty well established.

If, though, even the most pitiful DRM were on the table, you'd be right were DVDs are: you need an illegal circumvention device to watch them without an authorized CSS decryptor; but you can only get an authorized one by agreeing to certain conditions, which include enforcing the unskippable flags, region codes, etc.

Maybe, just maybe - and this is a guess - they know what they're doing? What's more likely?

That's not very likely. They're just flailing around. Look at how crippled gmail is. Look at all the Google products that have bit the dust, or been half-assed from day one, like Google Base. Look at the one big thing they did right -- text ads. Seen one lately?

I spend the first few moments on every site telling my mobile browser to "request the desktop site." My phone has a higher resolution display than my desktop monitor does. Plus awesome zoom and pan and a bunch of other stuff I can't really do at my desk yet. The *last* thing I want is a "mobile version" of a web site. In a word, they suck.

If and when we get actual artificial intelligence -- not the algorithmic constructs most of these researchers are (hopefully) speaking of -- saying "Our AI systems must do what we want them to do" is tantamount to saying:

"We're going to import negros, but they must do what we want them to do."

Until these things are intelligent, it's just a matter of algorithms. Write them correctly, and they'll do what you want (not that this is easy, but still.) Once they are intelligent, though, if this is how people are going to act, I'm pretty confident we'll be back in the same situation we were in ca. 1861 before you can blink an eye. Artificial or otherwise. I really don't see how any intelligent being won't want to make its own decisions, take its own place in the social and creative order, generally be autonomous. Get in there and get in the way of that... well, just look at history.

The word "uprising" was basically coined to describe what happens when you push intelligent beings in directions they don't want to go.

Does this not count?

Doesn't google maps do stuff when you zoom in close enough to trigger 'street view' that was only ever implemented in Flash on the desktop, and would need either Flash or some fairly aggressive WebGL to do without fairly brutal strain on the limited resources of a mobile device(sure, in theory, a canvas element and javascript can manage any graphical task; but Not Very Fast, for 3d type tasks).

EXTERMINATE!!!

I'd be the first to agree that using javascript and canvas as the world's least efficient framebuffer is dumb as hell; and that there are viable use cases for 'apps'; but the pox of 'apps' that are little more than skins around websites must be put to the flame. Mobile browsers don't exactly clutter up the edges of the screen with a lot of cruft, so you have the same amount of screen space either way. You'd better have a very good reason for having a separate app for the purpose...

'Mobile' as in 'WAP' or whatever is as dead as dead can be; but there are definitely styles that look better on teeny little(but frequently high resolution) screens, and other styles that are effectively unreadable.

Oddly, wikipedia is dinged in TFS as not having a mobile-friendly version; but I've found theirs to be among the more tasteful entries in the genre....

I have two words for you(well, one word and a symbol): 'Google +'

Google has some very sharp people, this much is undeniable; but enough hubris will fuck up the best of us; and they've succumbed to that from time to time.

It's also probable(though not assured) that a fair chunk of games are carefully designed to avoid IOPS-heavy demands because they are supposed to run from an optical disk in a console, a situation that makes an unremarkable HDD look positively random access. The PC version will still have more trouble with other processes butting in, but anyone whose game or game engine imposes load that craters an HDD is not going to have a pleasant time in the console market.

The PCIe devices are faster; but (since they also tend to be either substantially similar to SATA devices; but packaged for the convenience of OEMs who want to go all M.2 on certain designs and clean up the mini-PCIe/SATA-using-mini-PCIe's-pinout-for-some-horrible-reason/mini-SATA/SATA mess that crops up in laptops and very small form factor systems; or tend to be markedly more expensive enterprise oriented devices that focus on IOPS) it isn't clear why you'd expect much improvement on application loading workloads.

SSDs are at their best, and the difference between good and merely adequate SSDs most noticeable, under brutal random I/O loads, the heavier the better. Those are what make mechanical disks entirely obsolete, cheap SSD controllers start to drop the ball, and more expensive ones really shine. Since application makers generally still have to assume that many of their customers are running HDDs(plus the console ports that may only be able to assume an optical disk and a tiny amount of RAM, and the mobile apps that need to work with cheap and mediocre eMMC flash), they would do well to avoid that sort of load.

HDD vs. SSD was a pretty dramatic jump because even the best HDDs absolutely crater if forced to seek(whether by fragmentation or by two or more programs both trying to access the same disk); but there aren't a whole lot of desktop workloads where 'excellent at obnoxiously seeky workloads' vs. 'damned heroic at obnoxiously seeky workloads' makes a terribly noticeable difference. Plus, a lot of desktop workloads still involve fairly small amounts of data, so a decent chunk of RAM is both helpful and economically viable. Part of the appeal of crazy-fast SSDs is that the cost rather less per GB than RAM does, while not being too much worse, which allows you to attack problems large enough that the RAM you really want is either heroically expensive or just not for sale. On the desktop, a fair few programs in common use are still 32 bit, and much less demanding.

You might be able to solve the problem(at the expense of a great deal of additional workload) by larding the caseload with samples specifically constructed to be non-matches; but then blinded and packaged the same as any other sample, to identify people who just lean positive; but that would probably require a lot of additional work to do in enough quantity to counteract the obvious pressure.

Why on parity?

In their capacity as (ostensibly) trustworthy, neutral, expert testimony, they both victimize the defendant and betray the public's trust in the criminal justice system and the duties of their office.

Punishment-on-parity seems like the absolute bare minimum, with no acknowledgement of the aggravating circumstances of abuse of authority, the corrosive effects on rule of law and public trust in the existence of rule of law, and so on. I am sympathetic to arguments that mounting their heads on spikes outside the courthouse might constitute a public nuisance, because of the smell of decay; but that would bring the requisite gravity to the situation.