The parents never intend to give the kids access to the password or the credit card, the broken iOS design does that for them.
IF the owner has bought ANYTHING from the marketplace the past 15 minutes before the kid starts Smurfville: Poof the money is gone. Non-technical people will not understand that the default options for password caching can cause this.
There is no poor parenting involved here at all, just broken design (from Apple), fraud (creators of Smurfville) and poor technical skills in the general population.
What part is irresponsible on the parents part? 1) Letting the kids play with an iDevice? 2) Having a credit card linked to their own iTunes account (NOT the kids account, 4 year olds doesn't have one) 3) Letting the kids play with an iDevice within 15 minutes of the parent buying something *totally* unrelated with the iTunes account?
In a normal persons head, none of the above should result in hundreds or thousands of $ charged to their credit card, yet that's what happens.
And just to be clear, selling virtual goods at $99 a pop in a game meant for children is in itself totally unacceptable.
That caching is very short - I know that Im typing my password in once or twice a day on my iPad! So why is the parent typing in their password constantly?
Now you're just being stupid. For the fraud to work the kids just have to have access to the device with a cached password once, there is no "typing in their password constantly ".
For the record the cache time is 15 minutes. So if the kids happen to play within 15 minutes of the parents buying anything, there's a high probability of hundreds or thousands of $ being charged to the account. This only needs to happen for a very small percentage of users to become very profitable.
Stop trying to exonerate the parents from blame.
Stop trying to exonerate Apple from blame. They help facilitate fraud. Walled garden my ass.
Well, to do in-app purchases on the iPhone or iPad, you need to confirm your iTunes password - why do the kids have that? And if the apps are doing purchases directly (which is against Apples rules...) then they need to input card details - why do the kids have those?
Wrong. iOS caches the password from marketplace purchases, and is used in-game without any dialogs until the cache timeout is reached.
Its not a straight "click here - oooh look we just debited your account a hundred bucks", there are already road blocks in place.
Whatever roadblocks are in place, they are not sufficient. There's been examples of in-game purchases for over $1000 with cached passwords.
Besides, what kind of a parent links a credit card to a childs iTunes account? Where are these kids getting $99 to spend on crap?
Most children in the target audience for the Smufts use their parents phone / ipad, not their own. We're talking 3-6 year old kids, and a GUI that deliberately obfuscates buy process to hide the fact that it involves real money. The entire business model is "tricking children".
If there ever was anything the walled garden of Apple should protect the iPeople from, it's fraud like this.
This is simply not true. You cannot "train" you immune system. Letting the immune system fight the flu does not make it better at fighting anything else. The end result for the immune system after fighting a virus infection is the same as you get by taking a vaccine; anti-bodies.
The historical "strengthening" of the immune system by letting it fight it's own battles only works on a population level. Those with a weak immune system dies; the ones who survive doesn't get stronger (but the % of the population with a strong immune system increases). Some ant-vaccination wackos base their argument on this (we serve evolution by letting the weak die).
That's only true if you set the price of a hd slot and sata connector to $0. If you're only getting one or two disks $0 might be correct. If you're filling up hotswap bays and sata connectors on raid controllers the per slot price will can be anything from $20 to *a lot*.
The slot price in my homeserver is about $70. That made it cheaper for me to get 1.5TB drives back when they cost twice as much as 1TB drives. The NAS at my parents place has a per slot price of $125. This is all consumer grade equipment. For enterprise use the per slot price could be much higher (not that you'd want to the drive from the story in such a setup).
22" widescreens are practically free. No matter the size of your company, if your buying new displays smaller than 22" for people you pay to work for you; you're wasting money. Big time.
The difference between a Dell 17" and a 23" wide screen is about $20 (not US prices). Increased productivity will pay for that $20 the first hour/week/month (depending on officedrone wages).
Does anybody turn over their banking info without seeing the SSL indications from their browser?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: Most people doesn't know what SSL is. More than enough people would fall for it to make it worthwhile. And it's not as if it's hard to get a SSL certificate.
And how much property tax would Linux Torvalds need to pay to keep Microsoft from buying all rights to the Linux kernel?
The 1% (or 0.1%) tax is a better idea than the 1000x license cost insanity, but not by very much - it doesn't address the most broken part of the current system - the length of the protection. Unless the tax is dependent on the total protection time it will change nothing.
The mandated requirement to sell all rights to anyone offering 100x the yearly tax is just nuts; why would you introduce something that adds so much uncertainty and with such possibilities for devastating results for the creator? What happens when your competitor buys the rights to your low level driver/component/etc that has no value outside your product/program/service but suddenly your competitor can keep your from selling any of your products/services. Todays problems with patent trolls will be peanuts compared to this.
A system based on this would favor big companies with deep pockets; too much in the IP world already favor large companies - this would only make it worse. There's a hundred ways this could go horribly wrong.
The purchaseable license would be license to use, not to redistribute.
Doesn't matter, if the work enters public domain after 7 (or 15) years unless the copyright holder pays the renewal fee. The problem is that with the described model the cost of renewal would be determined by the copyright holders business model, not the value of the work or the protected time period.
As I said, it was an interesting idea, but it's too complicated and too biased towards mass distribution.
It's not going to be a problem just for specialized software. Any artist producing and selling artwork with a limited number of copies (or only the original), whould have the same problem. If anyone can copy their work after 7 (or 15) years unless they pay 10-100 times their original income from the work. What would that do to the value of a limited numbered series of copies?
Copyright laws needs a rewrite, the protection period needs to be significantly reduced and some form of renewal method must be included to make sure orphan works enter public domain earlier. The 1000x license cost renewal fee combined with compulsory licensing just isn't the way to go.
7 years is a very short time for some types of software (embedded stuff, simulation software, oil&gass related, finance).
It would also work as a strong incentive against licensing the source code with the software. For some types of software it's common to provide source code and allow modifications, as long as the yearly license fee is paid. You'd never do that if the customer could take the code and become your competitor after 7 years. You'd be surprised if you knew how much of the interesting parts of the software you use today is more than 7 years old.
In addition to that, there's a lot of stuff depending on copyright that isn't sold. What price would you put on the linux kernel? Depending on who you buy it from it could be free, or it could cost thousands of dollars. How much should the copyright holders pay to keep the linux kernel from 2002 to enter the public domain? And who should have to pay? Everyone with a copyright claim in the source files, or just the main copyright holder?
Interesting idea, but it will only work for mass market works. Software if often produced with less than 1000 customers in the target market. How will you ever make money if you have to pay 1000 times your license fee, and only sell a handful licenses? I've been involved in software production in one form or other for 12 years, and I've yet not seen one project were we could sell more than 1000 licenses.
Instead of having a system that scales with the license cost, the system should scale with time. First 7 years: $0 Next 7 years: $100 Next 7 years: $2000 Next 7 years: $40000 Next 7 years: $800000 etc.
But it's important to remember: The people pushing for extended copyrights are not very concerned with the income from works about to expire; they are more concerned about the effect competition from works with expired copyrights would have on new stuff.
"Perfect" would be 683 lumens per watt, so you need to compare 613 (683-70) to 553 (683-150) - around 90% of the heat of a CFL.
Ehh no? That's only correct if you have have a set power consumption. 10W of LED will produce 90% of heat from a 10W CFL. But you'd not use a 10W LED as replacement for a 10W CFL, you'd use a 5W LED.
If you need 3000 lumen to light up a room, you need 20W of LEDs. To get the same amount of light from CFLs you need 40W of CFLs. You should end up with at least twice as much heat from the CFLs. (With 150 lumen / Watt LEDs and 75 lumen / Watt CFLs).
Most of the tech in the story has the feeling of something just beyond the horizon, something that could come true soon. And still, the effects on society is enormous. It's a bit frightening, for the first time I felt it was possible that I might end up feeling left behind and belonging to the technologically impaired.
This would not be legal everywhere. Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
, gasoline can be made from more things than just oil.
Coal, natural gas, and biomass.
The cost of those processes are high, and the environmental impact is not reduced compared to oil (for coal and natural gas). Solutions like this will be (a small) part of the solution to diminishing oil resources, but we need better solutions to replace most of the oil-based energy consumption.
The conversion solutions have rather high energy requirements, and a coal->electricity->battery->motor->road solution has a lower energy loss than coal->gasoline->engine->road.
A gradual rise in oil taxation should help reduce the oil-usage where it's not needed. ~5-25% of todays personal transport needs could be handled by existing el-vehicles (depending on population density). With next-gen el or hybrid vehicles this could rise to twice that, and by 2020 (where is when I wanted to gas price to reach $20+) el or plug-in hybrid could cover the needs of ~80% of the population in densely populated areas, and perhaps over 50% in less densely populated areas.
If gas prices are kept in the $2-$4 interval there will be little incentive to change. The impact and likelihood of a "peak-oil" event will be greater in this scenario.
Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving.
Reckless or distracted driving is (somewhat) subjective, those laws will only be used when something happens. If you want the problem to go away, you need to pull people over for doing it and the fine must be substantial.
Where I live the fine is $200 for using a phone without handsfree while driving (roughly one fine pr 500 inhabitants were handed out last year). Unfortunately that doesn't seem like a high enough fine to get people to change their behavior. It might help if the fine was raised to the same level as the Italian fine, about $1000.
I already pay $8 / gallon, so do most of Europe, and it's WAY to low. There's just no incentive to save fuel.
A recent study on the impact of price on fuel consumption concluded with a recommandation of trippling existing fuel costs (to about $24 / gallon).
If you civilization requires gas prices below $4 / gallon to survive, you should start planning for it's demise. It will not survive, nor should it.
Oil is a finite resource, and it's price will rise faster than the growth of the global economy in the coming years. In addition the cost of repairing the damage caused by burning oil must be included in the price.
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The parents never intend to give the kids access to the password or the credit card, the broken iOS design does that for them.
IF the owner has bought ANYTHING from the marketplace the past 15 minutes before the kid starts Smurfville: Poof the money is gone.
Non-technical people will not understand that the default options for password caching can cause this.
There is no poor parenting involved here at all, just broken design (from Apple), fraud (creators of Smurfville) and poor technical skills in the general population.
What part is irresponsible on the parents part?
1) Letting the kids play with an iDevice?
2) Having a credit card linked to their own iTunes account (NOT the kids account, 4 year olds doesn't have one)
3) Letting the kids play with an iDevice within 15 minutes of the parent buying something *totally* unrelated with the iTunes account?
In a normal persons head, none of the above should result in hundreds or thousands of $ charged to their credit card, yet that's what happens.
And just to be clear, selling virtual goods at $99 a pop in a game meant for children is in itself totally unacceptable.
That caching is very short - I know that Im typing my password in once or twice a day on my iPad! So why is the parent typing in their password constantly?
Now you're just being stupid.
For the fraud to work the kids just have to have access to the device with a cached password once, there is no "typing in their password constantly ".
For the record the cache time is 15 minutes. So if the kids happen to play within 15 minutes of the parents buying anything, there's a high probability of hundreds or thousands of $ being charged to the account. This only needs to happen for a very small percentage of users to become very profitable.
Stop trying to exonerate the parents from blame.
Stop trying to exonerate Apple from blame. They help facilitate fraud.
Walled garden my ass.
Well, to do in-app purchases on the iPhone or iPad, you need to confirm your iTunes password - why do the kids have that? And if the apps are doing purchases directly (which is against Apples rules...) then they need to input card details - why do the kids have those?
Wrong.
iOS caches the password from marketplace purchases, and is used in-game without any dialogs until the cache timeout is reached.
Its not a straight "click here - oooh look we just debited your account a hundred bucks", there are already road blocks in place.
Whatever roadblocks are in place, they are not sufficient. There's been examples of in-game purchases for over $1000 with cached passwords.
Besides, what kind of a parent links a credit card to a childs iTunes account? Where are these kids getting $99 to spend on crap?
Most children in the target audience for the Smufts use their parents phone / ipad, not their own.
We're talking 3-6 year old kids, and a GUI that deliberately obfuscates buy process to hide the fact that it involves real money.
The entire business model is "tricking children".
If there ever was anything the walled garden of Apple should protect the iPeople from, it's fraud like this.
Read in the context of the P and GP.
Just trying to poke holes in the "truth by rhetorical question" technique the AC uses.
In the civilized world children (age varies by country, here it's 15 years) are not held to purchases above trivial sums without the parents consent.
Cool! I didn't know that. But I think what I said still holds true for viruses.
This is simply not true.
You cannot "train" you immune system. Letting the immune system fight the flu does not make it better at fighting anything else.
The end result for the immune system after fighting a virus infection is the same as you get by taking a vaccine; anti-bodies.
The historical "strengthening" of the immune system by letting it fight it's own battles only works on a population level. Those with a weak immune system dies; the ones who survive doesn't get stronger (but the % of the population with a strong immune system increases). Some ant-vaccination wackos base their argument on this (we serve evolution by letting the weak die).
That's only true if you set the price of a hd slot and sata connector to $0. If you're only getting one or two disks $0 might be correct.
If you're filling up hotswap bays and sata connectors on raid controllers the per slot price will can be anything from $20 to *a lot*.
The slot price in my homeserver is about $70. That made it cheaper for me to get 1.5TB drives back when they cost twice as much as 1TB drives. The NAS at my parents place has a per slot price of $125. This is all consumer grade equipment. For enterprise use the per slot price could be much higher (not that you'd want to the drive from the story in such a setup).
22" widescreens are practically free.
No matter the size of your company, if your buying new displays smaller than 22" for people you pay to work for you; you're wasting money. Big time.
The difference between a Dell 17" and a 23" wide screen is about $20 (not US prices). Increased productivity will pay for that $20 the first hour/week/month (depending on officedrone wages).
Does anybody turn over their banking info without seeing the SSL indications from their browser?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: Most people doesn't know what SSL is. More than enough people would fall for it to make it worthwhile.
And it's not as if it's hard to get a SSL certificate.
And how much property tax would Linux Torvalds need to pay to keep Microsoft from buying all rights to the Linux kernel?
The 1% (or 0.1%) tax is a better idea than the 1000x license cost insanity, but not by very much - it doesn't address the most broken part of the current system - the length of the protection. Unless the tax is dependent on the total protection time it will change nothing.
The mandated requirement to sell all rights to anyone offering 100x the yearly tax is just nuts; why would you introduce something that adds so much uncertainty and with such possibilities for devastating results for the creator? What happens when your competitor buys the rights to your low level driver/component/etc that has no value outside your product/program/service but suddenly your competitor can keep your from selling any of your products/services. Todays problems with patent trolls will be peanuts compared to this.
A system based on this would favor big companies with deep pockets; too much in the IP world already favor large companies - this would only make it worse. There's a hundred ways this could go horribly wrong.
The purchaseable license would be license to use, not to redistribute.
Doesn't matter, if the work enters public domain after 7 (or 15) years unless the copyright holder pays the renewal fee. The problem is that with the described model the cost of renewal would be determined by the copyright holders business model, not the value of the work or the protected time period.
As I said, it was an interesting idea, but it's too complicated and too biased towards mass distribution.
It's not going to be a problem just for specialized software. Any artist producing and selling artwork with a limited number of copies (or only the original), whould have the same problem. If anyone can copy their work after 7 (or 15) years unless they pay 10-100 times their original income from the work. What would that do to the value of a limited numbered series of copies?
Copyright laws needs a rewrite, the protection period needs to be significantly reduced and some form of renewal method must be included to make sure orphan works enter public domain earlier. The 1000x license cost renewal fee combined with compulsory licensing just isn't the way to go.
7 years is a very short time for some types of software (embedded stuff, simulation software, oil&gass related, finance).
It would also work as a strong incentive against licensing the source code with the software. For some types of software it's common to provide source code and allow modifications, as long as the yearly license fee is paid. You'd never do that if the customer could take the code and become your competitor after 7 years. You'd be surprised if you knew how much of the interesting parts of the software you use today is more than 7 years old.
In addition to that, there's a lot of stuff depending on copyright that isn't sold. What price would you put on the linux kernel? Depending on who you buy it from it could be free, or it could cost thousands of dollars. How much should the copyright holders pay to keep the linux kernel from 2002 to enter the public domain? And who should have to pay? Everyone with a copyright claim in the source files, or just the main copyright holder?
Interesting idea, but it will only work for mass market works.
Software if often produced with less than 1000 customers in the target market.
How will you ever make money if you have to pay 1000 times your license fee, and only sell a handful licenses?
I've been involved in software production in one form or other for 12 years, and I've yet not seen one project were we could sell more than 1000 licenses.
Instead of having a system that scales with the license cost, the system should scale with time.
First 7 years: $0
Next 7 years: $100
Next 7 years: $2000
Next 7 years: $40000
Next 7 years: $800000
etc.
But it's important to remember: The people pushing for extended copyrights are not very concerned with the income from works about to expire; they are more concerned about the effect competition from works with expired copyrights would have on new stuff.
"Perfect" would be 683 lumens per watt, so you need to compare 613 (683-70) to 553 (683-150) - around 90% of the heat of a CFL.
Ehh no?
That's only correct if you have have a set power consumption. 10W of LED will produce 90% of heat from a 10W CFL. But you'd not use a 10W LED as replacement for a 10W CFL, you'd use a 5W LED.
If you need 3000 lumen to light up a room, you need 20W of LEDs. To get the same amount of light from CFLs you need 40W of CFLs. You should end up with at least twice as much heat from the CFLs. (With 150 lumen / Watt LEDs and 75 lumen / Watt CFLs).
LEDs are move efficient than CFLs.
Typical CFL 60 Lumen/Watt. Good CFL 70 Lumen/Watt.
Typical LED 90 Lumen/Watt. Good LED 140-150 Lumen/Watt.
So true.
Most of the tech in the story has the feeling of something just beyond the horizon, something that could come true soon. And still, the effects on society is enormous. It's a bit frightening, for the first time I felt it was possible that I might end up feeling left behind and belonging to the technologically impaired.
It's not a real problem.
Several options exists to install apps to the SD-card.
It's also possible for individual apps (like games) to store everything but the executable on the SD-card.
This would not be legal everywhere.
Discriminating based on mental abilities would be just as illegal as discrimination based on ethnicity, religion or sex in many European countries.
, gasoline can be made from more things than just oil.
Coal, natural gas, and biomass.
The cost of those processes are high, and the environmental impact is not reduced compared to oil (for coal and natural gas). Solutions like this will be (a small) part of the solution to diminishing oil resources, but we need better solutions to replace most of the oil-based energy consumption.
The conversion solutions have rather high energy requirements, and a coal->electricity->battery->motor->road solution has a lower energy loss than coal->gasoline->engine->road.
A gradual rise in oil taxation should help reduce the oil-usage where it's not needed. ~5-25% of todays personal transport needs could be handled by existing el-vehicles (depending on population density). With next-gen el or hybrid vehicles this could rise to twice that, and by 2020 (where is when I wanted to gas price to reach $20+) el or plug-in hybrid could cover the needs of ~80% of the population in densely populated areas, and perhaps over 50% in less densely populated areas.
If gas prices are kept in the $2-$4 interval there will be little incentive to change. The impact and likelihood of a "peak-oil" event will be greater in this scenario.
Just about any sane jurisdiction that allows driving already has laws against various forms of reckless or distracted driving.
Reckless or distracted driving is (somewhat) subjective, those laws will only be used when something happens.
If you want the problem to go away, you need to pull people over for doing it and the fine must be substantial.
Where I live the fine is $200 for using a phone without handsfree while driving (roughly one fine pr 500 inhabitants were handed out last year).
Unfortunately that doesn't seem like a high enough fine to get people to change their behavior. It might help if the fine was raised to the same level as the Italian fine, about $1000.
Tax oil, spend it on R&D on alternative sources (or as you put it, assassinating anti-nuclear-power dimwit).
A gradually increasing tax on oil, combined with heavy investments in alternative solutions will reduce or remove any potential "peak oil" problems.
I already pay $8 / gallon, so do most of Europe, and it's WAY to low. There's just no incentive to save fuel.
A recent study on the impact of price on fuel consumption concluded with a recommandation of trippling existing fuel costs (to about $24 / gallon).
If you civilization requires gas prices below $4 / gallon to survive, you should start planning for it's demise. It will not survive, nor should it.
Oil is a finite resource, and it's price will rise faster than the growth of the global economy in the coming years. In addition the cost of repairing the damage caused by burning oil must be included in the price.
The Audi A2, VW Polo and Golf are MUCH smaller cars.