Posts by BenWilson
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Paul Brislen,
I realized only recently that the family changing rooms at pools are actually meant for father-daughter and mother-son combos. I'm just hogging it, when my boys and I are perfectly safe to expose to the perpetual shower hogging old men soaping their balls, of the standards men's changing room, and walking barefoot through piss to change on wet seats and floor is our lot in life.
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I, too, was lucky enough to have tribes and wild spaces in my childhood.
Playing on the street with the local kids used to be thing when I was little. Lots of memories of swimming completely unsupervised at the beach (by which I mean we were supposed to go to the swimming pool, but decided to spend the entry money on something to eat and to swim for free) from as young as 7. Pt Erin is right next to all the beaches of Herne Bay, after all.
Homemade trollies were also a thing. Low slung wooden vehicles with rope or foot steering, no suspension or brakes, on which we took on steeper and steeper roads wearing nothing but shorts and t-shirts. Bicycles were a way of making us safer.
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Unless I was very quick, Bob would clamber into the upper boughs, almost invisible in the greenery. “No, I’m not coming down. I’m living in this tree now. I don’t live in Christchurch any more.”
My older brother cured me of this annoying habit by the ingeniously simple method of shaking the branches until I was too terrified to stay up there. This kind of mentoring prepared me for primary school, where targeting the little'uns in bullrush and brandy was as obvious as collecting low hanging fruit.
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Southerly: My Life As a Palm Tree, in reply to Danielle,
Less validating recently was my youngest discovering how to lock me into the toilet.
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My solution to having a child who won't stop talking until he falls asleep, and another child who won't go to bed without far too many stories, was to put them together. You can set your watch by their bedtime now.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Matthew Poole,
The software does. These things are never implemented in ASIC, they’re always done in software.
You can't control hardware if it isn't even there. There is no onus on any manufacturer of Android phones to put this IR thing into the camera, or any other feature for that matter. They don't have to have GPS hardware, and even if they do, there's nothing to stop them having a hardware switch to physically power the circuitry down, if they can't trust the underlying code.
Apple has a focus on gaining market share in business
Maybe they could make a special business targeted no-civil-liberties phone, but outside of that market it would not sell well. Businesses have opted into controlling their staff since forever, and mostly staff have always had to suck on it. It's been a basic assumption in workplaces since I began working that the firm could look at pretty much all of what I do, except for in the toilet, and I could be held accountable for any and all of it. But they're opt-in fascisms.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Matthew Poole,
Google can’t implement shit like this in secret because there are a dozen companies and hundreds (if not thousands) of individuals looking through the code of every release of Android to find undocumented features which can be hooked into to make a better user experience.
Yes, and also they don't control the hardware anyway.
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If that means implementing a technology that keeps the Feds happy in order to become preferred supplier to government, they’ll do it in a heartbeat, because that sells it to CEOs and CEOs sell it to IT who then sell it to the whole company.
That is rather predicated around their corporate customers outnumbering all the others, something I find highly unlikely.
Also, it's not a feature that could be kept secret, unless it's just never used. There's hundreds of people involved in the production of the technology, if not thousands. Then there's those who might use it. Not to mention anyone noticing it being used on them.
It wouldn't be ethics stopping them. It would be that it would be a dumb idea for their bottom line.
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Matthew Poole,
I don't disbelieve that they'd patent the idea, but they haven't put either of those patents into use, have they?
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Hard News: The Real Threat, in reply to Ian Dalziel,
If that's true, it would just be a reason not to buy an Apple. There is quite literally no reason for anyone to want that feature in their device, and a lot of reasons to not want it. So I do find it hard to believe they would really put it in.
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