While i have no intention of drawing moral equivalencies: in the US, watching child pornography videos can earn you felony jail time and permanent registration on a sex offenders list. Agree or disagree with the punishment, watching a video resulting in jail time is not without precedent, even stateside.
Aren't there employees at facebook and NSA and the like who have to spend all day looking at material that might be child pornography to verify it is indeed such? Do they have to get special clearance or something so it's guaranteed they'll never be prosecuted for it?
Come to Chile. It's stable and safe, people are warm, and nature is gorgeous. I moved here 3 years ago instead of Canada and can't be happier.
The government barely cares about any kind of surveillance and there's no cultural trait to obsessively control everything. Chile also was the first country to sign a net neutrality law.
THE U.S. DEPARTMENT OF STATE HAS ASSESSED SAN JOSE AS BEING A HIGH-THREAT LOCATION FOR CRIME DIRECTED AT OR AFFECTING OFFICIAL U.S. GOVERNMENT INTERESTS.
Above the generous threshold of about 128 bits, any given number is vanishingly unlikely to have been derived through any other process. If your 134-byte file turns out to be valid SVG for the Cartoon Network logo, then functionally speaking it is the Cartoon Network logo because it's incredibly unlikely you just pulled those particular 1072 bits out of your ass.
Similarly, if you are in possession of a 30-million digit binary number that happens to be valid h264 for an ISIS recruitment video, "oh what a stunning coincidence" isn't going to wash.
So "files are just binary numbers" doesn't get you anywhere, at all.
To be more specific, it is a number used as an argument to a function. The bit stream input into a video decoding algorithm is what makes the video. The video binary itself is mostly nonsense.
But the other way to look at is that it would be possible to have a set of data that is essentially illegal to use one function on and legal for another function to be used. Could someone unknowingly generate or acquire a set of data that is illegal to access and own? There has already been cases of terrorists hiding information within legal media.
It's a little deceptive to label these kinds of sentiments as contrary to the premise of innovation.
Experiments, by nature, require expendable resources, but an finished appliance intended for a consumer, with no end-user-servicable internals is not the sort of thing you want to have spewing garbage in all directions.
The reality though, is that we're all being railroaded down strict paths of planned obsolesence that are integrated into business models from day one.
Yours and my waste should not be interpretted as an unforced error. It's carefully planned, with the intent to fund more plannings sessions to forecast more waste.
...at least down among these lower eschelons we inhabit (speaking for myself, so as not to make assumptions about who reads this), and then there are those who ride above it all and skim from the fruits of our obesity.
There are side channels for places like apartment complexes that want a much longer device lifespan and are willing to pay for it. Planned obsolesce is much more common on the 'mass market' channels than the industrial channels.
You really can still buy refrigerators that will last 30 years. They just don't have built in ice makers etc.
PS: The 50-200% premium may seem steep, but if it lasts 5x as long then you more than break even.
As a consumer a Sub Zero fridge tends to last over 20 years on average. And significantly longer than that if you clean the condenser annually.
Past that, Arctic Air for example has commercial refrigerators which will last 30+ years if you do some occasional repairs. Though, they really don't look like home units.
> There are side channels for places like apartment complexes that want a much longer device lifespan and are willing to pay for it. Planned obsolesce is much more common on the 'mass market' channels than the industrial channels.
Most apartment building were I've lived have these washing rooms, yes. Yeah, those machines are built like tanks and probably last at least a few decades. The size and weight of these machines are also more like a tank than what you'd normally consider a washing machine, so you wouldn't want one of those in your own apartment.. :)
The political implications tied to self-driving cars are all scary.
The political implications tied to self-driving trains are not.
The difference being the rails that bind and inhibit true autonomy.
An internet of two-ton things hurtling at 60+ MPH should not be an idea tossed about dismissively. It should at least be locked into track systems, or loops as training wheels, for baby's first sentient AI.
Those 'two-ton things' are already hurtling at 60+ MPH with human drivers, who are distracted by cell-phones, radio, birds, etc. or are under the influence of something. I find the thought of human drivers being replaced by AI very comforting to be honest.
SkyJack is a drone engineered to autonomously seek out,
hack, and wirelessly take over other drones within wifi
distance, creating an army of zombie drones under your
control.
...and then:
No authentication or encryption is used by the Parrot
to secure the connection with the pilot.
It's actually just a wireless network that you connect to and send commands to the Parrot. It makes it really easy to control it from your laptop. There is a library for it that makes it possible to be up and running in under 5 minutes.
And so, if you look at the pictures, you'll see an interesting number denoting the quantity of plutonium powering the device. It's not measured in grams, or even micrograms, or any unit of mass, as would be common with ordinary materials. Instead, the quantity of plutonium is measured in curies.
And is there a means of converting curies to mass?
Well, sort of... except radioactive decay generally means the original mass of a sample of material has been steadily converting itself into something else over time, so to provide a measurement of mass might not be a practical piece of information later on, and given the application in these circumstances, the gross weight of the device is more relevant than the mass of the plutonium therein, and the power provided by the plutonium, and how hot the slug is, turns out to be the more interesting number.
So what's a curie?
The term "specific activity" is defined as the amount
of radioactivity - or the decay rate - of a particular
radionuclide per unit mass of the radionuclide. For
example, the specific activity of Ra-226 is 1, meaning
that one gram of Ra-226 contains one (1) curie (assumed
to be uniformly distributed throughout that mass)
http://www.iem-inc.com/information/tools/specific-activities
And, so based on all those pictures, the devices seem to average ~2.0 to ~4.3 curies of plutonium.
The specific radioactivity of plutonium, according to the above source, is:
Pu-238 - 1.7E1
So, approximately one or two grams per device.
Based on all this information, I bet harvesting plutonium pacemakers would be way more lucrative than stealing kidneys.
The mystery behind the prevalence and your exposure to each of these font faces can be answered in two words: Microsoft Windows.
Each can also be associated with particular versions and sections of the MS Windows user interface, and thus time periods as well. With these four fonts, each being sans serif, the raster representations of them were carefully measured by Microsoft, to provide users with highly legible, practical type faces.
Arial: the oldest of the standardized MS font package shipped with Windows, and used heavily on printed marketing materials and as logo type since Windows 95 and maybe earlier. The flagship font for Microsoft for many years, contributing greatly to its prevalence.
Tahoma: with Windows 2000, tahoma was the default UI font, with lucida console being used by notepad.exe (although notepad and the UI were both configurable), and many of the font fields where users entered data. This held its position until roughly 2007. People used it because they new it would be reliably present.
Verdana: 2nd only to helvetica among many digital graphic designers, and the helvetica stand-in on windows. In fact, because of the absence of helvetica by default on windows (you had to download it ,or purchase it, or 3rd party software that came with it), as opposed to macintosh which provided helvetica in it's font set out-of-the box, and yet the market share of microsoft dominating over apple, more websites balanced their design to render well with verdana over helvetica. More often than not, you'll see CSS styles applied in the following order: helvetica, verdana, arial, sans serif.
Calibri: the reasons you dislike this font are two. reason one, the much-hated windows vista is where this font made its debut as the interface default on windows, so there's probably some negative psychological aftertaste hanging in the air, what with all the pain vista inflicted. reason two: the abominable CLEARTYPE sub-pixel font renderer which first appeared with Internet Explorer 8 on windows XP, but became pervasive and omni-present with windows vista, and truly made vista look like SHIT. Screenshots of text on vista were forever contaminated by cleartype. the groupthink of focus group testing produced nigh-infallible statistics absolutely proving to so many very important decision making people that discriminating users who know, always preferred cleartype. I suspect that the testing was influenced by the display monitors tested on. cleartype rendering was improved by the time Windows 7 was released, and monitors were better by then too, but no one cared, and Microsoft's market momentum was absolutely destroyed by then, so it didn't (and doesn't) matter anymore.
Which leaves us with the two serif fonts you made mention of...
Georgia: again, a Microsoft font. I think this is gaining popularity among Windows Phone users, but I'm not entirely certain of this.
That leads us to the inevitable...
Times New Roman: the un-killable highlander of fonts. There's a reason why it's used everywhere as the de-facto, ultra-generic fall-back default, especially in web browsers. Everyone can use it royalty free, and it's the one thing, even blood-thirsty competitors will reliably provide as common ground across platforms. They won't get sued for it. Strangely, even though it may be used royalty free, it's not truly a public domain font. (...owned by News Corp? weird.)
I was going to make a Windows-centric comment, but my career has been so Windows-centric that I'm actually not sure what's Windows and what's not (because I've had such limited experience with "what's not").
As to the rest of your reply - just wow. And thank you. Such a detailed and amazingly interesting analysis that cuts to the heart of my career through something as seemingly distinct as font selection. I appreciate you taking the time to share it.
I just want to say I recently fired up an old ThinkPad from 1999 and man, pixels were big back then. I opened up Word '98 and started typing and those big, pixelated, non-antialiased Times New Roman letters looked fantastic on that old screen.
I've stopped thinking about this in terms of mass surveillance, and re-arranged my perception, to align with a different world view. Namely:
If we weren't surprised to learn that exploration
throughout history was all about conquest, power
projection, fortification and exploitation, and we
wouldn't be surprised to learn that in the future,
deep space exploration proved to hold similar outcomes,
then why should we be surprised to learn that virtual
spaces of imagined information across inert transmission
mediums should experience these sorts of things.
This is to say, the militarization of hypothetical realms,
just like the oceans, and just like outer space, was
probably always inevitable.
So, with that in mind, that there are people arming themselves to the teeth and enforcing doctrines and demarcations, and patrolling every last iota of territory available to them, is a fact no less ugly than, say, aerial bombardment, but when mortal humans find themselves gifted with potent advantages over their peers, these things happen.
Now comes the time when new virtual territories will likely be carved out. Programming languages that don't use reserved keywords of English origins. Mathematical models for address spaces incompatible with TCP/IP of any version. Other, alternative internets that refuse to be compatible with The Internet as we know it.
The Internet being an American invention, has been dominated by America, and is very obviously patrolled broadly and deeply by American paramilitary entities, in much the same way that American nuclear powered vessels patrol the earth's oceans.
Given the capacity for computation that one can assume must exist, at this point, the only thing that would surprise me, would be if those that had conceived of an internet in general, hadn't actually hypothesized and accounted for this sort of fault and fracture in their models of social behavior and technological progress at the outset of all this, back in the early 1970's.
Part of me wonders if a Snowden-like figure wasn't part of the equation to begin with. Columbus, after all, didn't sail into the Atlantic expecting to fall off the edge of the world.
Reading words? Looking at pictures? Watching a video? Felony jail time? Really?
This is policy that any sane person would resist.