salient
So I doubt Microsoft will have any chance at that market either. Android pours 1.5 million new units into the market every day, or about 500 million per year, and that's before these mainstream "good enough" $50 smartphones arrive, which I think will help Android double its unit grow rate within 12-18 months. Everything else will get drowned out.
It's interesting that while it's "low margins" for IBM because IBM has higher cost structures, Lenovo thinks it's actually a very profitable business:
“Lenovo has been trying to break into servers for a while as a new growth engine,” Moel said. “It could be good for Lenovo based on the right price.”
This is why Intel will never be safe in the server market, either, if ARM chip makers eat up the PC market (and they will do that), while also dominating the mobile market.
So I'll wait a year longer or so until 1+ Gbps Wi-Fi arrives in laptops and also in routers (second wave of 802.11ac routers will do that, first wave isn't quite there yet). By then SSD prices should be a little lower, too.
They only started caring about power consumption when it was already obvious to everyone that ARM is going to pose a threat to them eventually. I think if everyone sees something that's by definition not "paranoia". To be paranoid, you have to see and believe something before others see it.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/13/intel-fined-1-45-billion-...
Or are you saying they should form a Super PAC? But in that case, it won't exactly be "traditional lobbying", would it? It would be just paying politicians to do what they're asking them. I don't know whether that would be good or bad given the current corrupt lobbying system that the government has gotten accustomed to, but at least we should call it what it is before we dive in.
Ron Wyden, Mark Udall and Rand Paul's bill also I think sounded better than the USA Freedom Act. I always forget its name because they chose a pretty bad and long one ("intelligence oversight something"). So I hope you keep working on passing those (or others like it), too, and don't stop at the USA Freedom Act (or try getting some amendments to that pushed, too).
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/09/nsa-gchq-illega...
https://www.aclu.org/meet-jack-or-what-government-could-do-a...
Also, if you think them knowing your location like this is scary, wait until we have self-driving cars, that will have built-in kill switches in them or some kind of remote control, you know, for "updates". Getting rid of people (journalists especially - Michael Hastings anyone?) in "accidents" will never be easier.
The technology does have some major disadvantages like a smaller field of view compared to Oculus, but perhaps they can fix that. After all, VR headsets like Oculus also had very small field of views before, too.
To me, having the image projected onto your retina seems like a technology that has greater potential for virtual reality, even if it starts with a slightly bigger handicap than Oculus did.
http://reviews.cnet.com/wearable-tech/avegant-glyph/4505-349...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0VCj7VKvFk&feature=youtu.be...
There could also be done a lot of revolutionary new things with movies, like seeing through a character's eyes, etc (cameras mounted to the main character Google Glass style?). Even watching a normal movie on Oculus Rift is probably going to be a better experience than going to the cinema, because you could virtualize the cinema in front of you, and recreate that atmosphere.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2013/12/archaic-but-widel...
Does anyone know if LTE security is that much better? I imagine that even if the ciphers are good, there are probably a ton of ways for agencies like NSA or even FBI to intercept the calls before being encrypted, even without warrants.
[1] - http://ces.cnet.com/8301-35296_1-57616860/mpaa-joins-web-sta...
The sad thing is that they don't even have to be that on purpose. They collect so much data on every person, that NSA is going to use them as a frontend anyway, which is exactly what they did, until they discovered what NSA was doing recently, and made some changes, by encrypting data in transit within their network. However, I still don't think they are encrypting data at rest. So if NSA breaks their transit encryption again, they will be free to collect all the data again.
The day when Google can naturally be seen as an enemy of the Internet and human privacy has come. Up until SOPA/ITU they could still be seen as a net ally, because they did help with some pretty big issues against the Internet. But from now on, I don't think they will be doing anything as major in favor of the users, while they are doing major actions against users of the Internet, such as trying to kill the privacy law in EU. So they are a net enemy to the Internet already.
While they've created that "campaign" with some other big companies against the NSA, the goal of the campaign itself sounds very weak to me. They're just trying to be more transparent with what they can tell people about what the government is requesting of them. I think they could do so much more, such as joining Mozilla's "StopWatching.us" movement. The reason they aren't doing that? Because Google is "watching us", and they probably believe joining such a campaign would be detrimental to their business, even if fighting for user privacy is the right thing to do.
So whether they have a clear stated goal of "killing privacy worldwide" the way NSA does, or not, it doesn't matter. Because the incentives to do just that are too strong for them, and they are pushing them in that direction anyway. For them to stop doing that would require rethinking their business model that's based on "tracking everything" (which I think should happen), and align themselves with the users.
It's also true that Google's lobbying budget has increased quite rapidly over the past few years. Initially I thought it was just to get self-driving cars allowed, and Google Fiber, which I was mostly fine with because in the case of Google Fiber I knew many states had poor laws against any competition to local monopolies, and in the case of self-driving cars, while regulation needs to be carefully weighed, I also think it should happen sooner rather than later.
But now I think they're going to use more and more of that money to either kill strong privacy laws, in US, and EU or other places, and also to try and pass new laws that allows them to do more surveillance of users [1].
[1] - https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/11/surveillance_...
Pirate has just too many negative connotations. Would someone create a party called the "Communist Party" in a democracy today? Even if their intentions would seem much different than the "old communists", I think it would have too much trouble getting off the ground (in any democratic country, not just US, where it's impossible for any third party to get off the ground).
This is also why I dislike the names darknet or darkmail. Prosecutors in US are bad enough as they are [1] (and remember Cameron Ortiz? [2]). Imagine them having to explain what a "pirate browser" or a "dark net" is to a jury. They'd say that they clearly named it that way because their intent was evil from the beginning (even if the tool may be technologically "neutral"), and they intend it for doing bad stuff with it. And I imagine the jury, who wouldn't know any better, would tend to buy it.
And I also agree completely that normal people may try to stay away from having something called "Pirate Browser" on their desktop.
I think I understand why people usually choose such names for their projects. They want to rally their supporters faster, people who really get what it's about, but I think it would do just as well based on what it does, and not because of its name, with that early adopter crowd, since they will understand what it's about and what it does.
[1] - http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/opinion/sunday/rampant-pro...
[2] - https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/remove-united-stat...
http://torrentfreak.com/how-the-pirate-bay-plans-to-beat-cen...
I don't get this argument. Why do they have to be used for something else after "you're done with them"? You've made your profit with them (since if you aren't going to make a profit with them, you aren't going to buy them in the first place), so what else would you use them for?
The ASIC's serve a purpose: mining Bitcoin and maintaining the Bitcoin network. I don't get why there has to be "something else" they need to be useful for. Bitcoin is the point.
Wow. How about no, Google? I started noticing a trend about a year or two ago and I realized that there may come a time when Google will be an "active persistent threat" against the Internet, because instead of adapting to a business model that aligns with the users, they will become increasingly more aggressive with their surveillance of users, and if say Internet users eventually decided they want more end-to-end security and anonymity on the web, Google would do everything in their power to fight against that and against them.
It seems that's coming sooner, rather than later. Google is already heavily lobbying the EU and calling the data privacy bill "dead", hoping that it will become self-fulfilling prophecy.
Google is trying to kill proper privacy laws in EU because they will make "less" money otherwise in Europe. Well, tough luck, Google. As an European, I'd rather not use Google than have much weaker data and privacy laws, especially after the whole NSA thing when American companies can't be trusted anymore anyway.
Either way, security at the application level on the Internet seems quite broken. We need easy to implement strong security at the Transport and IP levels. Google (or IETF, rather) should be experimenting with a CurveCP-like protocols to encrypt all the packets on the Internet to replace TCP. That's what I'd really like to see.