Not that this settlement gives Google any exclusive rights either. The settlement explicitly says all granted rights are non-exclusive, and copyright holders are still free to authorise any other party to do the same thing.
2) don't allow Google to be the only one to do it.
Where does it say no-one else is allowed to do this? Section 2.4 of the Agreement explicitly says any rights granted to Google are non-exclusive, and copyright holders can happily authorise any other party to do the same things.
It's wrong to let a single private company break everybody's copyrights and punish everyone else who wants to do it.
You mean, like the CRIA, and their "unpaid list" (which got settled by them paying a fraction of the owed royalties, with no penalties and no liability, while they simultaneously sued others for punitive damages many thousands of times greater)?
And there was no "good faith" involved there - the vast majority of copyright holders were not only alive and well, but actively demanding their unpaid royalties.
From the Amended Settlement Agreement, Article II (italics added):
2.4 Non-Exclusivity of Authorizations. The authorizations granted to Google in this Amended Settlement Agreement are non-exclusive only, and nothing in this Amended Settlement Agreement shall be construed as limiting any Rightsholder’s right to authorize, through the Registry or otherwise, any Person, including direct competitors of Google, to use his, her or its Books or Inserts in any way, including ways identical to those provided for under this Amended Settlement Agreement.
So can you tell us precisely which exclusive rights are being granted, and what section of the ASA grants them?
*All* of the following have to be true, to infringe on Claim 1:
* It must be a portable, multifunction computer device with a touch screen * It must use accelerometers * It must orient the display according to the accelerometers * It must detect a specific finger gesture from the user, on or near the touch screen * In response to the *gesture*, it switches orientation, and *locks* it * If you rotate the device to the new orientation, it detects that, then unlocks it
A device must do *all* of the above things in order to infringe, not just the first 3 or 4. So it's not a patent on re-orienting by accelerometers, but on overriding the orientation with a gesture.
Claims 2-6 are even more specific cases of Claim 1. All the remaining claims are slight variations on the above (7-12 patent the device itself, rather than the method etc).
...providing broadband services with initial speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (mbps), rising to 1 gigabit per second (gbps) in 2012, and with the capacity for further upgrades in the future...
Doesn't matter if they win or not. The Greens, who will have the balance of power in the Senate, have said they're opposed to any mandatory filtering, so the government would be unable to pass any filtering bills anyway.
Not all workloads translate to the specialised SIMD arrays that are modern GPUs. There is still a need for large arrays of more general-purpose computing, as well as a need for fast single core computers (not all jobs can be computed in parallel either).
I write visual effects software in C++ and in OpenCL. Where OpenCL is practical, GPUs can be 10x faster, but there are still many cases when it's too awkward or has too much overhead to use a GPU.
Would you say that 86% of his predictions were obvious? Would you have said that in '98?
Granted, the ability to accurately predict the unexpected is more useful (and harder), but plenty of things that seemed obvious at the time haven't really come to pass (a lot of people expected flying cars by now, for example). I'd say accuracy was generally a more useful trait for predictions than non-obviousness, though of course you can take that to ridiculous extremes, as in your example.
Sure, I don't dispute that. Meaningless or not though, he's still right, even if a prediction like that doesn't make him a useful futurist.
Even so, technologies do get abandoned. In this particular case, the technology for head-mounted displays was relatively rare (labs + military) at the time, and now is available commercially in a much cheaper & more developed form, making it a lot closer to the sort of mainstream usage Kurzweil likely envisaged. Though I guess you wanted you could argue that he was wrong nonetheless, since it's still a pretty niche technology, not mainstream.
Regarding #5, I wasn't referring to text-only translation, but to real-time, speech-to-speech translation. You speak into the phone in English, it speaks back in Spanish, and vice versa. I'd argue that this would satisfy a '98 perspective (even though it only takes place while talking to someone locally, not remotely, though that's just a matter of coupling it to a voip app).
1. Without getting bogged down in technicalities over what is/isn't considered wearable, just because PDAs existed in 1998 doesn't the rise of smartphones any less relevant. You could argue it's an obvious and meaningless prediction, but so what? It's still right.
2. I agree that speech-to-text isn't close to the majority of text yet of course, but more importantly, I don't think it's technically capable of filling that role any time soon. Given the rate of speaker-independent improvements I'd say it will happen, but is more than a few years away, so call this a Fail.
3. Again, pre-existence doesn't invalidate the prediction. I'd call this Correct, but only because the prediction was relatively vague about degree of acceptance (since it's still a long way off being common).
4. Layered dies are not uncommon, layered silicon exists but is uncommon. Good enough.
5. Google's Translate app runs on a phone, will accept speech in one language, and produce speech in another. Unless you want to argue that it has to do it while actually calling someone (a technicality in my books), I'd call that Correct. And even just the pure text translation capabilities are completely different in approach and capabilities from electronic dictionaries, so you can't describe that as an "incremental update" (and even if you did, it's still Correct).
6. Agreed, Fail. Not for some years yet.
7. We went with Intelligent Cars instead, and they do actually work rather well, as Google and MIT have demonstrated. They don't yet work well enough for day-to-day use, but considering that only 3 years ago they couldn't navigate an uncluttered road at all, and now they can manage cities, full traffic, pedestrians etc, I wouldn't bet against them being better than the "average" human driver in 99.9% of cases in 5 more years. However, they'll have to be even better than that to be socially accepted, and he's still too far off in his timeframe (not to mention mispredicting the approach), so I'll call this a Fail too.
So by my count, that's 4 Corrects to 3 Fails, though some Corrects aren't exactly unexpected, and some Fails will very likely happen soon. So he's no Nostradamus in my books, and you couldn't set your clock by his dates, but you have to agree he's pretty close about the general *direction* of where technology is going (as you'd expect from someone who's clearly no idiot, and who's taken the time to do some research).
I'm curious to hear how a global investment in switching to low-carbon power generation - money invested in new businesses - would cost more than the impact of widespread floods & droughts on agriculture (especially in already-dry or low-lying countries) and population displacement (millions of potential refugees created), coastal erosion (on high-value property) from sea-level rises, coral bleaching (and resulting tourism impacts) - which is largely money lost forever, when land and infrastructure are destroyed. Certainly the costs will ruin many developing countries entirely.
And how many actual climate scientists do you know? Or are you basing your opinion solely on the behaviour of non-scientist celebrities, particularly the ones with the flashy lifestyles that get reported on the most?
How much behaviour of these people are you considering? Do you include all their public statements, their publications, their home life, their choice of daily transport, the amount of money they (privately and through their businesses) donate to climate research, "green" power generation and other carbon-reducing initiatives, the carbon-combating actions they or their businesses have directly taken, or the public awareness they've raised? Or do you look only at the actions that are pointed out to you by "news" sources that reinforce rather than challenge your pre-existing ideas?
Have you even considered what the consequences will be if your sources are similarly mislead, all the many objective research papers are accurate as claimed, and the vast majority of climate scientists' conclusions are in fact right?
"See, when you have enough money, you don't need to reduce usage. You just pay others to clean up for you."
Yep, that's what I say to myself each week as I watch the council garbage guys haul off my rubbish & recycling.
So long as the price of this service meets the *full* cost of providing it (including sustainable disposal & recycling etc), and provides a reasonable living for all involved, I have no problem with this.
It's a visual effects app for studios. Speed is paramount, and access to advanced OpenGL and OpenCL shaders is pretty crucial too (and impossible under a VM, until relatively recently). Niche, but not really vanishing.
When breakpointing or simply *looking* at your code overlaps the UI and triggers refresh events that derail the code path you're attempting to debug, you'll quickly be begging for that extra monitor...
I think you'll find there's a high correlation between "plans that have tethering blocked" and "plans with 'unlimited' data". With no clear monthly limit, carriers want to discourage you from using more than the "average" amount of data, which tethering frequently does.
For plans with limited data (i.e. you have to pay more if you want to use more) then the reverse is usually true - carriers encourage data use as it directly increases their income, and there are rarely restrictions on tethering (certainly true of pretty much all data plans here in AU, where we never had an 'unlimited' option).
Good points here - the db is clearly tracking nearby cell towers and not the phone itself, as you say. This db may well be used solely for location lookups, though we have no real evidence of what it's actually used for, AFAIK. In any case, Apple has stated that location data (wi-fi IDs as well as cell IDs) is only transmitted to Apple when the Location Services switch is on, which sounds reasonable enough to me.
What I'm still curious about is, why does this history go back so far? Surely only your recent location history would be of much benefit for lookups - does it really need to keep track of where you were a year ago, to the point of even backing up this location log?
Secondly, why are there multiple entries for cell towers? A location cache for fast lookups would need store only one entry per cell tower (as I think someone said the Android equivalent has), but apparently consolidated.db keeps multiple entries for each cell tower, which seems redundant for a lookup cache.
And finally, there are the timestamps associated with each entry. Can anyone tell me why timestamps might be of use, in a lookup cache? I can't think of any good use for them. While consolidated.db may well be used as a location cache, it seems to me it must be used for more than that as well, or Apple wouldn't have bothered to record multiple, timestamped entries, let alone kept it around, fully backed up, for so long. Apple could surely keep its own log of your location, if you have enabled Location Services and allowed your phone to tell them, but might they perhaps be storing this history and transmitting some/all of it when/if you eventually do allow it?
Like, ever. In fact, Apple's even going to the bother of specifically backing up this log. When was the last time you ever heard of a *cache* being backed up?
At least on iOS no application can see that data, untrue of Android.
More true of Android than iOS. On both platforms, access to the file requires root, so no ordinary mobile application can see that data on either system, short of jailbreaking/rooting. However, iOS backs up its log to a (by default) non-encrypted, accessible archive on its host PC, where it can be read by any old user app, whereas Android doesn't.
Yeah, a couple of days vs the entire life of the phone; not really the same thing. There's a substantial difference between a cache that gets overwritten and a permanent, backed-up log.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that this settlement gives Google any exclusive rights either. The settlement explicitly says all granted rights are non-exclusive, and copyright holders are still free to authorise any other party to do the same thing.
2) don't allow Google to be the only one to do it.
Where does it say no-one else is allowed to do this? Section 2.4 of the Agreement explicitly says any rights granted to Google are non-exclusive, and copyright holders can happily authorise any other party to do the same things.
It's wrong to let a single private company break everybody's copyrights and punish everyone else who wants to do it.
You mean, like the CRIA, and their "unpaid list" (which got settled by them paying a fraction of the owed royalties, with no penalties and no liability, while they simultaneously sued others for punitive damages many thousands of times greater)?
And there was no "good faith" involved there - the vast majority of copyright holders were not only alive and well, but actively demanding their unpaid royalties.
From the Amended Settlement Agreement, Article II (italics added):
2.4 Non-Exclusivity of Authorizations. The authorizations granted to Google
in this Amended Settlement Agreement are non-exclusive only, and nothing in this
Amended Settlement Agreement shall be construed as limiting any Rightsholder’s right
to authorize, through the Registry or otherwise, any Person, including direct competitors
of Google, to use his, her or its Books or Inserts in any way, including ways identical to
those provided for under this Amended Settlement Agreement.
So can you tell us precisely which exclusive rights are being granted, and what section of the ASA grants them?
*All* of the following have to be true, to infringe on Claim 1:
* It must be a portable, multifunction computer device with a touch screen
* It must use accelerometers
* It must orient the display according to the accelerometers
* It must detect a specific finger gesture from the user, on or near the touch screen
* In response to the *gesture*, it switches orientation, and *locks* it
* If you rotate the device to the new orientation, it detects that, then unlocks it
A device must do *all* of the above things in order to infringe, not just the first 3 or 4. So it's not a patent on re-orienting by accelerometers, but on overriding the orientation with a gesture.
Claims 2-6 are even more specific cases of Claim 1. All the remaining claims are slight variations on the above (7-12 patent the device itself, rather than the method etc).
Sacrificing modpoints to say this:
...providing broadband services with initial speeds of up to 100 megabits per second (mbps), rising to 1 gigabit per second (gbps) in 2012, and with the capacity for further upgrades in the future...
Taken from NBNCo's Overview PDF.
Doesn't matter if they win or not. The Greens, who will have the balance of power in the Senate, have said they're opposed to any mandatory filtering, so the government would be unable to pass any filtering bills anyway.
Not all workloads translate to the specialised SIMD arrays that are modern GPUs. There is still a need for large arrays of more general-purpose computing, as well as a need for fast single core computers (not all jobs can be computed in parallel either).
I write visual effects software in C++ and in OpenCL. Where OpenCL is practical, GPUs can be 10x faster, but there are still many cases when it's too awkward or has too much overhead to use a GPU.
Would you say that 86% of his predictions were obvious? Would you have said that in '98?
Granted, the ability to accurately predict the unexpected is more useful (and harder), but plenty of things that seemed obvious at the time haven't really come to pass (a lot of people expected flying cars by now, for example). I'd say accuracy was generally a more useful trait for predictions than non-obviousness, though of course you can take that to ridiculous extremes, as in your example.
I said it made the prediction meaningless.
Sure, I don't dispute that. Meaningless or not though, he's still right, even if a prediction like that doesn't make him a useful futurist.
Even so, technologies do get abandoned. In this particular case, the technology for head-mounted displays was relatively rare (labs + military) at the time, and now is available commercially in a much cheaper & more developed form, making it a lot closer to the sort of mainstream usage Kurzweil likely envisaged. Though I guess you wanted you could argue that he was wrong nonetheless, since it's still a pretty niche technology, not mainstream.
Regarding #5, I wasn't referring to text-only translation, but to real-time, speech-to-speech translation. You speak into the phone in English, it speaks back in Spanish, and vice versa. I'd argue that this would satisfy a '98 perspective (even though it only takes place while talking to someone locally, not remotely, though that's just a matter of coupling it to a voip app).
1. Without getting bogged down in technicalities over what is/isn't considered wearable, just because PDAs existed in 1998 doesn't the rise of smartphones any less relevant. You could argue it's an obvious and meaningless prediction, but so what? It's still right.
2. I agree that speech-to-text isn't close to the majority of text yet of course, but more importantly, I don't think it's technically capable of filling that role any time soon. Given the rate of speaker-independent improvements I'd say it will happen, but is more than a few years away, so call this a Fail.
3. Again, pre-existence doesn't invalidate the prediction. I'd call this Correct, but only because the prediction was relatively vague about degree of acceptance (since it's still a long way off being common).
4. Layered dies are not uncommon, layered silicon exists but is uncommon. Good enough.
5. Google's Translate app runs on a phone, will accept speech in one language, and produce speech in another. Unless you want to argue that it has to do it while actually calling someone (a technicality in my books), I'd call that Correct. And even just the pure text translation capabilities are completely different in approach and capabilities from electronic dictionaries, so you can't describe that as an "incremental update" (and even if you did, it's still Correct).
6. Agreed, Fail. Not for some years yet.
7. We went with Intelligent Cars instead, and they do actually work rather well, as Google and MIT have demonstrated. They don't yet work well enough for day-to-day use, but considering that only 3 years ago they couldn't navigate an uncluttered road at all, and now they can manage cities, full traffic, pedestrians etc, I wouldn't bet against them being better than the "average" human driver in 99.9% of cases in 5 more years. However, they'll have to be even better than that to be socially accepted, and he's still too far off in his timeframe (not to mention mispredicting the approach), so I'll call this a Fail too.
So by my count, that's 4 Corrects to 3 Fails, though some Corrects aren't exactly unexpected, and some Fails will very likely happen soon. So he's no Nostradamus in my books, and you couldn't set your clock by his dates, but you have to agree he's pretty close about the general *direction* of where technology is going (as you'd expect from someone who's clearly no idiot, and who's taken the time to do some research).
He claims 86%.
Got any alternate figures, or some sci-fi authors we can compare to?
Why would the new tags not have anything written on them? Article never says that they won't.
Obviously not all destinations will be equipped to handle these RFID tags, so they'd have to have written codes as well, like always.
It will be cheaper to mitigate the effects than it would be to prevent them from happening.
[citation needed] (IPCC WGII might disagree) .
I'm curious to hear how a global investment in switching to low-carbon power generation - money invested in new businesses - would cost more than the impact of widespread floods & droughts on agriculture (especially in already-dry or low-lying countries) and population displacement (millions of potential refugees created), coastal erosion (on high-value property) from sea-level rises, coral bleaching (and resulting tourism impacts) - which is largely money lost forever, when land and infrastructure are destroyed. Certainly the costs will ruin many developing countries entirely.
And how many actual climate scientists do you know? Or are you basing your opinion solely on the behaviour of non-scientist celebrities, particularly the ones with the flashy lifestyles that get reported on the most?
How much behaviour of these people are you considering? Do you include all their public statements, their publications, their home life, their choice of daily transport, the amount of money they (privately and through their businesses) donate to climate research, "green" power generation and other carbon-reducing initiatives, the carbon-combating actions they or their businesses have directly taken, or the public awareness they've raised? Or do you look only at the actions that are pointed out to you by "news" sources that reinforce rather than challenge your pre-existing ideas?
Have you ever heard of sampling bias or confirmation bias?
Have you even considered what the consequences will be if your sources are similarly mislead, all the many objective research papers are accurate as claimed, and the vast majority of climate scientists' conclusions are in fact right?
"See, when you have enough money, you don't need to reduce usage. You just pay others to clean up for you."
Yep, that's what I say to myself each week as I watch the council garbage guys haul off my rubbish & recycling.
So long as the price of this service meets the *full* cost of providing it (including sustainable disposal & recycling etc), and provides a reasonable living for all involved, I have no problem with this.
Shouldn't you be basing your judgements on the scientific data, rather than how some random non-scientists are behaving?
It's a visual effects app for studios. Speed is paramount, and access to advanced OpenGL and OpenCL shaders is pretty crucial too (and impossible under a VM, until relatively recently). Niche, but not really vanishing.
Well, unless you're debugging an app that doesn't run so well under a VM (like ours).
Would've, but the lights had gone.
When breakpointing or simply *looking* at your code overlaps the UI and triggers refresh events that derail the code path you're attempting to debug, you'll quickly be begging for that extra monitor ...
I'd like to nominate the BkLy (about 5.5e26 bytes) as the new official information metric, to replace the sadly outdated LoC.
For comparison, there are about 50 teraLoCs to the BkLy, or 2 attoBkLy in a LoC.
I think you'll find there's a high correlation between "plans that have tethering blocked" and "plans with 'unlimited' data". With no clear monthly limit, carriers want to discourage you from using more than the "average" amount of data, which tethering frequently does.
For plans with limited data (i.e. you have to pay more if you want to use more) then the reverse is usually true - carriers encourage data use as it directly increases their income, and there are rarely restrictions on tethering (certainly true of pretty much all data plans here in AU, where we never had an 'unlimited' option).
Good points here - the db is clearly tracking nearby cell towers and not the phone itself, as you say. This db may well be used solely for location lookups, though we have no real evidence of what it's actually used for, AFAIK. In any case, Apple has stated that location data (wi-fi IDs as well as cell IDs) is only transmitted to Apple when the Location Services switch is on, which sounds reasonable enough to me.
What I'm still curious about is, why does this history go back so far? Surely only your recent location history would be of much benefit for lookups - does it really need to keep track of where you were a year ago, to the point of even backing up this location log?
Secondly, why are there multiple entries for cell towers? A location cache for fast lookups would need store only one entry per cell tower (as I think someone said the Android equivalent has), but apparently consolidated.db keeps multiple entries for each cell tower, which seems redundant for a lookup cache.
And finally, there are the timestamps associated with each entry. Can anyone tell me why timestamps might be of use, in a lookup cache? I can't think of any good use for them. While consolidated.db may well be used as a location cache, it seems to me it must be used for more than that as well, or Apple wouldn't have bothered to record multiple, timestamped entries, let alone kept it around, fully backed up, for so long. Apple could surely keep its own log of your location, if you have enabled Location Services and allowed your phone to tell them, but might they perhaps be storing this history and transmitting some/all of it when/if you eventually do allow it?
Apple just didn't bother to clear it out as soon.
Like, ever. In fact, Apple's even going to the bother of specifically backing up this log. When was the last time you ever heard of a *cache* being backed up?
At least on iOS no application can see that data, untrue of Android.
More true of Android than iOS. On both platforms, access to the file requires root, so no ordinary mobile application can see that data on either system, short of jailbreaking/rooting. However, iOS backs up its log to a (by default) non-encrypted, accessible archive on its host PC, where it can be read by any old user app, whereas Android doesn't.
Yeah, a couple of days vs the entire life of the phone; not really the same thing. There's a substantial difference between a cache that gets overwritten and a permanent, backed-up log.