salient

Look at it this way: it makes killing people with targeted missiles that much cheaper, which means they will want to do more of it, not just to "important targets", but to "associated targets", too.

It's basically the NSA equivalent of mass spying. If spying becomes so cheap that they can just do it to everyone, then they're thinking "why not"? Same with drone striking. If it ends up costing them only like $10,000 per target - why not kill the associated forces, too? You know...just to be on the "safe side".

Exactly. If they don't really know what it is, then they should've left it alone for now.

So is this the Bluestar or not?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_BlueStar

2015 would be on track for the Bluestar, but I remember Musk saying this year that it was basically delayed until 2017, which was pretty disappointing. I wonder what changed.

Either way, $20,000 Tesla in 2018 then? It would follow Tesla's strategy of releasing a new car every 3 years that costs half as much as the previous one. Even a $25,000 one would be very nice. If I were them I'd try to make it my goal to have a $20,000 car by 2020 (like those nice renewable energy goals).

I think in the 2020's electric cars will become mainstream, and most new sold cars would be electric, due to the mainstream price-point they will reach, and the mainstream-level mileage they would get by then.

According to Musk batteries improve the capacity (at the same price point) by 5-8 percent per year, which is a little slow, but still great news for electric cars in the long term, considering they can get batteries for half the price or double the mileage every 10 years.

Yes, they keep saying that as if all the collected data wasn't already "looked at" through keyword alerts or similar systems, or that they wouldn't give themselves permission to look manually at someone's data anyway.

Also last I checked, the 4th Amendment prohibits unreasonable searches (I would think searching/fishing for elements in the data through autonomous systems, is still called "searching", no?) and seizures (i.e. collections).

I'll leave this here:

http://www.theverge.com/2013/12/15/5214452/60-minutes-softba...

Maybe not shut down, but I imagine if the US did something truly bad (nuking an innocent country?), and there would be strong worldwide outrage to the point that everyone would boycott - or even riot - against American companies abroad, that would be pretty bad for US, and I assume/hope something they're not willing to risk.

That being said, the US is becoming quite a scary country, with how far it has expanded its military power all over the world, and the technological advancements (mass surveillance, drone attacks, future autonomous combat robots, etc), are only going to make this a bigger problem for the world.

The thing is it probably wouldn't be as scary, if everyone else could be assured that the US public has quite a good grip on its own government, and that we can expect them to act pretty rationally and reasonably. Unfortunately, that doesn't really seem to be the case, which amplifies the fear about US becoming too strong. For all we know we're just one president/government away from US starting to act truly evil (although many would say they are already doing that).

It would be nice if Whatsapp, which is so popular, would help make its users a lot more secure by adopting end-to-end encryption, perhaps like what TextSecure v2 is using.

Getting people to use services with proper encryption is going to be a very slow process unless we convince/pressure the big ones to do it.

Too bad it hasn't happened to AT&T (and other carriers), too. AT&T especially has been pretty dismissive to shareholders caring about its relationship with the NSA:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131208/00473825498/att-te...

Just use a camera with OIS instead!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbd7TtKrDFc

Look at it this way. If Android wouldn't have existed, Samsung would've gone with Bada, LG with their own Bada-inspired clone with no binary compatibility with Samsung's OS, Sony would've made their own, too, HTC, and Motorola the same. Would that be a better situation?

Even if Microsoft got ahead and released Windows Phone early (which they didn't), you would've still had "hardware fragmentation" for developers. You would need to work with different resolutions, just like today, and with hardware from 600 Mhz ARM11 to quad-core 2.3 Ghz CPU's (same for GPU's).

And of course WP would need to be on the same amount of hardware Android is today, not just on the 5 models it is today due to the poor adoption. And it would need to support more than just Qualcomm's chips, and same goes for other components. The point is, the situation wouldn't be much better.

So Android did solve what could've been a big problem, and it's almost as good as it gets for this kind of situation (it can be better, but that requires not just technical solutions, but commitment from other OEM's too, to actually do what Google is asking them in order to further standardize the platform, but unfortunately many still want to go in their own directions).

The truth is this things are "no worse" than they were with other platforms before, it's just that Apple made it "better" for developers, but only because they got lucky (sort of speak) to get hundreds of millions of people to buy just one device that developers need to target - and get away with releasing it only once a year.

That's pretty unheard of, and it's the exception that proves the rule, I'd say. If you want everything to be "just like iOS", you'd probably have to get all of the world's inhabitants to use the same device - the iPhone. But that's kind of ridiculous, isn't it?

He meant 4.1/4.2/4.3/4.4. Obviously there are huge differences between 2.3 and 4, and even 3, which barely existed anyway.

Now we know why IBM was one of the main companies to lobby for keeping the covered business method in the new anti-patent troll bill, along with Microsoft. They were getting ready to sue other companies with that kind of patents.

Surely we can create a better jobs program with that money?

This is because they want to obfuscate as much as possible what is being done within the agency. If everything was logged, and you knew exactly who did what, it would be a lot easier to audit the agency, which is what they don't want. So they have a conflict of interest here. Make everything auditable, trackable and searchable, or risk other leaks.

Is this US only?

The "don't be evil" mantra is going to be an order of magnitude more important in the future, than it has been so far - that is if Google still cares about following that mantra.

You only need to read the news about what the government is doing with drones abroad, or with military equipment at home to think at worse case scenarios.

And more than a half a century later, nothing changed:

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-fbi-hatched-some-crazy-te...

> Whereas in Nazi Germany the state dominated economic actors, in inverted totalitarianism, corporations through political contributions and lobbying, dominate the United States, with the government acting as the servant of large corporations. This is considered "normal" rather than corrupt

Indeed. As a non-American, I find it quite absurd that corporations can "donate money" to change a Congressman's opinion on a law, and then support them in Congress when passing new bills. As far as I know that's what bribing is pretty much anywhere else. So US has in effect legalized bribing, and almost everyone in US seems to think that's "normal" and okay, and that there's "little corruption" in US, when in fact the whole government wreaks of "legalized" corruption.

Does that happen in other countries, too? Sure. Bribing is everywhere. But at least we see it for what it is, and even if we don't catch them in the act, there can be investigations later, and have them arrested. Good luck doing that in US - ever.

Will this work only for Americans? Is there a minimum deposit amount?

The intelligence of the dog is limited. I guess it depends on whether we'll let such robots have limited intelligence, too, or we'll give them access to everything, and make them as smart as they can be (much smarter than us).

Google really is building Skynet, isn't it? And the Terminators, too...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SD6Okylclb8

Which often doesn't end well.

Wow, Keith Alexander is such an asshole.

> This is analogous to a hostage-taker taking 50 people hostage, shooting 10 and then say, "If you give me full amnesty, I'll let the other 40 go."

Yeah, except he didn't actually get anyone killed, you asshole! It just embarrassed NSA and the US government, and uncovered that they were spying on allies and for economic reasons, not just to protect against terrorists - you know, as they were lying to the public that they were doing. Worse, not just spying on them, but actually launching attacks against them, to protect their interests.

They are using the same stupid analogy as the one they used for Manning, saying his leaks will probably end up getting a lot of people killed - none of that ever happened, but they kept pushing that argument till the end.

> GEN. ALEXANDER: I do. I think people have to be held accountable for their actions. … Because what we don't want is the next person to do the same thing.

Oh, I fully agree with him here. So how about we punish Alexander for his crimes against the Constitution, and make sure no future NSA/USCC chief ever does the same again? That goes for Obama, too, which I strongly believe deserves impeachment over this. Even today he has absolutely no intention of changing the NSA. So what's the solution, if not impeachment?! He wasn't just doing these abuses in the past - he wants to keep doing them. So I don't see other alternative.

ARM has the momentum, compared to MIPS.

For the same reason Apple is making its own custom ARM CPU right now - it can be highly integrated with whatever they want it to be, and it has exactly what they need, and none of the stuff they don't need. You can build solutions that are much more custom with ARM.

So is Google:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-12-12/google-said-to-mull...

Going by their recent announcement of Mali T760, it seems global illumination is coming with it next year:

> Other features of the ARM Mali-T760 GPU include YCrCb frame buffer output and hardware assisted global illumination. Both are designed to increase fidelity and balance memory bandwidth to the system.

http://malideveloper.arm.com/engage-with-mali/introducing-th...

I found this much more amusing, and it shows just how "real" Oculus VR can be to people, to the point where it physically affects their movements:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n9po7_2hYaU

I hope it wasn't just an "accident" and Google really was working on a way to make it work for both developers and users, and perhaps it was there much like the ART runtime is in there, even though it's not ready for primetime.

I think Google can make it work, but they need to be committed to it. Surely there's a way for the apps to gracefully transition to not needing certain permissions. Google just needs to introduce the proper rules for developers to make this work.