There's still a real danger that something like this will come to pass, especially when all the popular OSs come from centralised vendors upon whom pressure can be applied.
There's still a real danger that something like this will come to pass, especially when all the popular OSs come from centralised vendors upon whom pressure can be applied.
1. The law requires certain amount of Brazillian made bloatware stuff to be shipped with all phones. "Coincidentally" the software never ends being actually useful stuff, and is always the work of some company owned by a politician or by the friends and family of a politician.
2. To sell games in Brazil (physical board games and rpg books included) you must submit paperwork (of the dead tree kind) to the Ministry of Justice asking permission and asking for age rating. The government argues it is not censorship, only regulation, but it CAN legally refuse giving an age rating, de facto banning the game.
3. Possession, storage or even giving away games also fall in the previous point. It don't happened yet, but theoretically anyone can get up to two years in jail for owning a game that isn't rated by the Ministry of Justice.
4. Because of points 2 and 3, Brazil for many years didn't had the games categories in mobile stores (iTunes for example) and still to this day have less content than other countries in digital games platforms (Steam, Xbox Live, PSN...)
5. Brazil constitution banned censorship, and has freedom of expression explicitly protected, yet Brazil has more games judicially banned than China, usually on "morality" grounds, for example EverQuest was banned because it allowed players to do evil quests.
For one thing default porn filter installed on all laptops doesn't make any kind of sense given most of the population is over 18.
Opt in makes a lot more sense than opt out in this case.
Plus the fact that they are asking for money from the manufacturer and the customer to opt out makes it look like just another scheme to make money under the theme "it's for the children".
Honestly I'm calling BS on this. It's just some greedy politicians trying to squeeze money out of people for stupid reasons.
But, for reasons that are opaque to me, the intellectual tarpit of the hard right seems to have coughed up pornography as their newest social wedge issue.
And now we're seeing the next phase in the playbook, which is to push various degrees of insane legislation at the state or sometimes even local level, while at the same time they have an army of pundits working the media, beating the drum about "porn addiction" and generally trying to frame it as the latest "public health crisis".
I would not write it off as simply some greedy politicians. That's probably how it was sold to a particular group of self-interested politicians, in this particular instance. But there's a greater strategy at work (whether directed or as a sort of emergent behavior), and it fits together very neatly with other socially-conservative/authoritarian issues.
Not everyone would be counting LBJ's anti-porn commission as 'fairly recently.'
Even then, it only 'came out of nowhere' if you discount legislating porn as separate from the overall legislating morality platform that everything else you mention is an outgrowth of.
To be fair, politicians and computer policy has always been poor and the USA just voted someone in who asked a foreign power to find his opponents emails and uses the term "the cyber" frequently. In other words, I suspect its going to get worse before it gets better.
>a Central Authority that somehow dictates what must, and what cannot....
Append "be done" and that's the very definition of government. Typically humans without government is a recipe for failure, so its not the existence of government per-se that's the issue. The larger question is why government in many countries, including the USA, are failing on such an abysmal level for what should be basic tasks like regulating computer issues. The elephant in the room here seems to be a strong anti-intellectual atmosphere and strongman politics taking root and winning elections of late worldwide. Voters are seeking this stuff out. That's the problem.
I know that it's pretty probable that the whole DNC/DCleaks was done by a well known foreign power, but that doesn't mean Trump asked for it or know about it beforehand, right?
Since Hillary stated repeatedly that she (her lawyers) deleted the 30,000 emails, if Russia could "find" them at all, it would mean that either Hillary lied and had them backed up somewhere, or that Russia was in possession of them long before Trump jokingly asked for them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/28/us/politics/donald-trump-r...
It's pretty well documented, man.
I wasn't following the whole sadwagon, but I'm fully aware of how everything is sensationalized, hence I was asking for sources.
(Apparently this is still in production, and therefore presumably in today's modern "Smart TVs". Haven't heard anything about it for years)
I suppose the system could have been suborned to make all tv shows have the most strict rating blocking it on TV with the chip enabled... but if you have that power you can just turn off the TV signal. Anyway the lack of central control prevented it from being meaningful.
Also, Alan Kay said we have the same problem with books, and it's not a very important problem, etc.
It's mainly because hardware design is more expensive than software design. I've been working for a while on a side project that's going to be a standalone "appliance" of sorts, and it's much easier to basically punt on the hardware -- just toss a general-purpose SoC in there, with a big old touchscreen on top, and then do the entire UI in software -- than it is to iteratively design the UI in hardware, with traditional buttons, switches, LCD multiline displays, etc. Even though I think the overall UX is often much better with traditional hard controls (more tactile feedback, easier to use without looking or with vision impairments... long list).
3D printing is closing this gap a little, but it's still a heck of a lot easier to upload some new files to a touchscreen-based device and plop it in front of your testers than it is to produce a new version of a hard control panel.
So a monochrome screen and USB input are actually harder to find I take it?
I also noticed snapdragon doesn't do wired ethernet.
For some people, that's not a dystopia, it's a feature.