That only means that the UK government doesn’t have access to the backdoor.

Exactly they built one for the Chinese government. It's not if they have a back door it's who gets to use it

according to the snowden documents it is quite obvious that if the US government had a backdoor then the UK government would have one through five eyes

It’s possible that the back door already exists, and they already have it. So if they had conducted unlawful surveillance using these methods, then they may have to come up with some plausible explanation as to how they got that information legally. You could imagine a scenario where there is no plausible explanation for how the information could have been legally obtained. If they codify the use of the back door into law, then there is no need for all this theater.

One of my favorite conspiracy theories is that this is what the CIA Stargate program was. You don’t leak the existence of informants or satellites because you just got the information from “a psychic“.

He already had the product, what would he be going up against?

People in China know. Believe me they know.

Knowing is not enough.

We all know that advertising and marketing is manipulation, yet even the most contrarian among us are still influenced it.

Well that’s the kicker right? Mao gave way for later leaders who lifted China out of poverty. The normalization of all this craziness is what led the USA to where it is today. Two quite different trajectories.

Not very different. In fact, both endpoints seem very similar, even though the starts were different.

If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China.

> If anything, the US is still far away from as bad as China

That is a matter of opinion

I am unsure about social conditions within the countries ( freedom Vs. economic security -hard to compare)

But in international relations the USA has been a rouge state for many decades (e.g. tjr Gulf of Tonkin deception). The USA pretends to care about "values", but does not, it cares about it's own interests

China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests

The USA has institutionalised hypocrisy. China sins her own sins in the open

The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners

> China is plain speaking and cares, openly and transparently, about its interests

Hum... Are you from the US or Europe?

The amount of propaganda circulating worldwide about how China is helping propel all developing nations into modernity with infrastructure investment is just ridiculous. (And yeah, there's half a truth in it, like all useful propaganda.)

> The USA is much worse than China - to foreigners

The USA is such a hellhole that millions want to come here, legally or otherwise.

And yet it all circles back.

We used Peano arithmetic when doing C++ template metaprogramming anytime a for loop from 0..n was needed. It was fun and games as long as you didn't make a mistake because the compiler errors would be gnarly. The Haskell people still do stuff like this, and I wouldn't be surprised if someone were doing it in Scala's type system as well.

Also, the PLT people are using lattices and categories to formalize their work.

Yeah you can't really have a foliage map without a drought map to accompany it. The fall colors are a fickle thing. Last year's was pretty drab in lower NY. The year before it was quite good.

We can hope that they both fail. :o)

> This reads like it was written by a developer 'who doesn't get marketing'.

At first, I didn’t know what to say about the article other than to agree to something about it that I couldn’t put a finger on. But now it makes sense.

Developers really can’t be faulted to hate LinkedIn specifically because it’s marketing. It’s just pure noise to signal. It’s pure promotion.

Yeah, and it’s an interesting problem because for a lot of casual photos, most people won’t care. But once you do care, there’s suddenly no recourse.

Folks will say it’s just the focal length. But can you crop when your sensor is already that small?

This does not address the detrimental parts of computational photography.

Which I’m personally failing to witness consistently by the “evidence” in this article.

Most of the photo examples here were somewhere between “I can’t tell a significant difference” and “flip a coin and you might find people who prefer the iPhone result more.”

Even less of a difference when they’re printed out and put in a 5x7” frame.

Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0. You already own one. You were going to buy a smartphone anyway for other things. So if we are going to sit and argue about quality we still have to figure out what dollar value these differences are worth to people.

And the “evidence” is supposedly that people aren’t getting their phone photos printed out. But let’s not forget the fact that you literally couldn’t see your film photos without printing them when we were using film cameras.

> Keep in mind the cost of a smartphone camera is $0.

Many people buy a more expensive smartphone specifically for the better camera module. These are expensive devices! It's good marketing that you perceive that as "free", but in reality, I spend way less money on my fancy camera (new models every five years), than my iPhone-loving friends on their annual upgrades.

I can see a noticeable loss of detail in the iPhone sample photos. Personally, I prefer cameras that prioritize capturing more detail over simply producing visually pleasing images. Detailed photos offer much more flexibility for post-processing.

The problem with computational photography is that it uses software to make photos "look good" for everyday users. That may be an advantage for those users but it is basically a non-starter for a photographer because it makes it a crapshoot to take photos which predictably and faithfully render the scene.

Lots of apps gives you other options for how to process the image data.

I've had a bunch of "high-end" digital SLRs and they (and the software processing the raw files) do plenty computational processing as well.

I completely agree that all else being equal it's possible to get photos with better technical quality from a big sensor, big lens, big raw file; but this article is more an example of "if you take sloppy photos with your phone camera you get sloppy photos".

This made me ask, is there a (perhaps Swift) API to get the raw pixels coming in from the camera, if there is such a thing? I mean, before any processing, etc.

Your brain also uses software to make what you see look good