This is sort of misleading. They appear to have a $100 open pilot module, 4 RC hobbyist brushless motors and props, an hd go pro camera. a 4 channel radio control transmitter and reciever, I assume a high output lithium ion battery and charger. The only part that seems to come from the hardware store is some glue and duct tape. The article mentions that originally all this stuff was mounted to some aluminum rods purchased at home depot, but the rods were replaced with carbon fiber parts. I don't think the source of those parts was mentioned.
Not to mention that if an effect is real and measurable, it will have anecdotal evidence.
I think it's pretty indisputable that electronic devices can cause interference in other devices be they tvs, radios, or airplanes. Is a cell phone going to bring down a plane? I seriously doubt it, but i'd like to think that aviation as a rule is a risk averse field. Why use up resources chasing after these ghosts when the simple solution is just turn your cell phones off?
What the airlines should probably do is offer reward miles to people who turn their phones off promptly on the plane.
Maybe the checkpoints helped to reduce drunk driving, but the number of accidents caused by people looking for checkpoints on their iphones while driving went up.
I am guilty of buying a hat or a key every so often in Team Fortress 2. Essentially i'm essentially paying a couple bucks a month over the year to keep my favorite game going. Of course, that isn't really presented as a subscription. it just happens to fulfill the same role as one.
On top of that, my friends and I run a server (Team Funcom TF2 [no affiliation with funcom the game company anymore], come play it's a great server) we pitch in every year for hosting. So yeah. Someone somewhere is paying for hosting. I really don't expect a company to eternally host game and other servers.
I see nothing wrong with their model. Of course if they want people to continue to pay, they have to put out something that's good. Hardly anybody thinks they are wasting their money if they feel they are getting something good in return.
I'm not trying to say that apple is in the right here. I didn't even say i was for design patents. I may have made a bad choice of words as i hadn't properly identified that "more just" didn't move them across the spectrum to awesome patents. I just meant less offensive than a software patent. the gp proclaimed design patents to be the worst of all. I wondered why.
Designs cant be patented, designs like logo's can be trademarked or even copyrighted. Blueprints can be patented
You say a blueprint can be patented. What is a blueprint if not relative measurements? If a design can be expressed as such, it seems closer to something patentable than a patent for functionality. There is still the concept that something must be novel to be patented, and I'm sure we're in agreement that rounded corners are not.
I don't know if an NDA is legally binding. I do know that it's a record that you promised not to tell about the magic you saw. If you break the NDA it wouldn't be libel for the holder of the NDA to call you out on it. As someone who signs NDAs from time to time, I keep to the rules not out of fear of legal recourse, but I just don't want a reputation as an NDA breaker.
I'm pretty sure if I signed an NDA and in turn was told that the company's secret to success was soylent green, they would have a hard time suing me for disclosing that. Then again, it all depends on how deep this soylent green thing runs.
It is my opinion that Apple's design (ornamental?) patents [wikipedia.org] or look and feel patents do disgust me more than other functional oriented patents....
That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.
So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. As a consumer i'd kind of like a choice in how my phone looks.
It's the fact that someone can patent an algorithm, like displaying a full screen launch image prior to loading the application to give the system a feeling of responsiveness, that i find egregious.
maybe i'm weird, but i like trailers. In many cases, the trailers are better than the movie. You see a couple minutes of just the best parts and you get to use your imagination to weave together a cool story. I've often said i wouldn't mind sitting in a theater and watching an hour of trailers. I wouldn't want to pay for it though. If i could do it for free i think i'd find it preferable to seeing an actual movie. Actually i've done that plenty at home by piping hd quicktime trailers to my tv.
that's a pretty good point. There's usually more people lined up at security than there are on a plane. If a terrorist wanted to cause a lot of damage, the crowd at the security bottleneck is a much better target than the plane anyway.
OR... do we just want people to think it was a super secret stealth helicopter? If our enemies think we have these really awesome stealth helicopters that will decloak right over your house at the last minute, they probably don't want to mess with us.
maybe the chinese and the pakistanis will be pouring over a bin of fiberglass and disposable razor parts for years trying to figure out the secret.
What if there was a language where each block was a character? then you could string them together to form more complex commands, variable names, and flow control! If you wanted to add the values in the A and B blocks, you would just put a + block between them. you could then use the assignment block to put the resulting value into the C block! you'd probably never need to learn more than 50 or so blocks and you could do just about ANYTHING with that!
I think the clear answer to all those questions is none of that has ever mattered for Linux. This has been standard operating procedure for linux, well, since Linus posted his first kernel. People have lived with those same issues and done perfectly fine so i assume they are all moot points.
My car is going on 6 years old. The rOads i drive it on are atill the same. So yeah, im happy to keep it. The roads My iphOne drives on will likely be obsoleted in 2.
It says Foxconn is fairly evil. These aren't Apple plants. I'm not saying apple is a saint, but TFA doesn't say that Apple requested these conditions. It just draws some correlations to Apple by mentioning that these plants make stuff for them.
During peak periods of demand for the iPad, workers were made to take only one day off in 13.
To me that says the owners of Foxconn promised Apple a certain number of iPads and probably promised their other clients stuff and they made sure their people made that stuff damnit. It also seems pretty clear that the factories are the ones forcing people to sign these agreements, not Apple.
AFIK Apple continues to deal with these people, so that's damning, but the article never says that Apple is making these decisions.
What is it about work that disqualifies the people there from being your friends? They are people. People have jobs. They aren't that much different that people who don't work there except they are guaranteed to have at least one thing in common with you. Statistically speaking, they should be prime candidates for friendship. They do the same job as you. They probably have a similar level of education. They probably have a lot in common with you.
I've always found work friendships to be pretty strong. It seems to me there's something valuable in a friend who understands what i do each day. I have a lot of good friends who are not programmers. It's hard to have a conversation with them about how awesome my build script is.
Honestly, you look a little suspicious if your ip is downloading tons of kiddie porn. I wouldn't advocate your door being kicked in or a midnight beat down. That's clearly mistreatment. You being investigated, potentially arrested, and having your gear confiscated doesn't seem entirely out of line. That's not guilty until proven innocent. That's just trying to prove you guilty.
Now, if everyone had their wifi open, I expect it would be a lot more common to fail to find anyone at the node that the router says downloaded the porn. You would probably also notice different download patterns. Right now, if a kiddie porn downloader finds open wifi, he will use it a lot. It makes that network indistinguishable from the guy who is downloading in his own home. If wifi was always open, that guy would probably go from place to place. One or two wrong downloads would cease to look suspicious.
I see too unfortunate side effects. We would need a lot of martyrs to go through the system and establish new statistics. The actual criminals would become much harder to find.
I can imagine the architecture meeting that took place.
engineer 1, "hey! you know what would help us get more accurate location? if we kept a cache of the locations of nearby cell towers on the device."
engineer 2. "Yeah! and if it was timestamped, we might be able to deduce movement patterns and provide even MORE ACCURATE DATA! WIN!"
jr programmer: "guys, wouldn't this pose a privacy risk? we would be storing a history of areas the phone went to. people are sensitive about that."
engineer 2: "Nah. people willingly post their exact location to social networks all the time. they WANT to share this data. this will help them share the data better. besides the cell provider has all this data already. what difference does it make if it's in one more spot?"
The team leaves the room [pan left to the corner]. A dark thin figure emerges from the shadows.
Steve Jobs: "excellent. all is going according to my plan. Soon I and I alone will know the locations of all AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile towers! The world will bow before me! heh heh heh! MU HA HA! HA HA HA HAAAA! ooo! ow, my kidney hurt from that."
ok. maybe that last part didn't happen exactly like that.
You also shouldn't take pictures. Even if they aren't geocoded, they still implicitly identify some location. Actually, it's probably best just to leave the phone off all the time. the cell companies have access to your location. It's only a matter of time before they realize there's a potential gold mine in that data.
That's preposterous. They aren't going to stop you and take your phone for no reason other than snooping. If you happened to be wearing a casio F91W wristwatch, then you were just asking for it.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless you want to gather data on how bats avoid UAVs
This is sort of misleading. They appear to have a $100 open pilot module, 4 RC hobbyist brushless motors and props, an hd go pro camera. a 4 channel radio control transmitter and reciever, I assume a high output lithium ion battery and charger. The only part that seems to come from the hardware store is some glue and duct tape. The article mentions that originally all this stuff was mounted to some aluminum rods purchased at home depot, but the rods were replaced with carbon fiber parts. I don't think the source of those parts was mentioned.
Not to mention that if an effect is real and measurable, it will have anecdotal evidence.
I think it's pretty indisputable that electronic devices can cause interference in other devices be they tvs, radios, or airplanes. Is a cell phone going to bring down a plane? I seriously doubt it, but i'd like to think that aviation as a rule is a risk averse field. Why use up resources chasing after these ghosts when the simple solution is just turn your cell phones off?
What the airlines should probably do is offer reward miles to people who turn their phones off promptly on the plane.
Maybe the checkpoints helped to reduce drunk driving, but the number of accidents caused by people looking for checkpoints on their iphones while driving went up.
I am guilty of buying a hat or a key every so often in Team Fortress 2. Essentially i'm essentially paying a couple bucks a month over the year to keep my favorite game going. Of course, that isn't really presented as a subscription. it just happens to fulfill the same role as one.
On top of that, my friends and I run a server (Team Funcom TF2 [no affiliation with funcom the game company anymore], come play it's a great server) we pitch in every year for hosting. So yeah. Someone somewhere is paying for hosting. I really don't expect a company to eternally host game and other servers.
I see nothing wrong with their model. Of course if they want people to continue to pay, they have to put out something that's good. Hardly anybody thinks they are wasting their money if they feel they are getting something good in return.
I'm not trying to say that apple is in the right here. I didn't even say i was for design patents. I may have made a bad choice of words as i hadn't properly identified that "more just" didn't move them across the spectrum to awesome patents. I just meant less offensive than a software patent. the gp proclaimed design patents to be the worst of all. I wondered why.
Designs cant be patented, designs like logo's can be trademarked or even copyrighted. Blueprints can be patented
You say a blueprint can be patented. What is a blueprint if not relative measurements? If a design can be expressed as such, it seems closer to something patentable than a patent for functionality. There is still the concept that something must be novel to be patented, and I'm sure we're in agreement that rounded corners are not.
I don't know if an NDA is legally binding. I do know that it's a record that you promised not to tell about the magic you saw. If you break the NDA it wouldn't be libel for the holder of the NDA to call you out on it. As someone who signs NDAs from time to time, I keep to the rules not out of fear of legal recourse, but I just don't want a reputation as an NDA breaker.
I'm pretty sure if I signed an NDA and in turn was told that the company's secret to success was soylent green, they would have a hard time suing me for disclosing that. Then again, it all depends on how deep this soylent green thing runs.
It is my opinion that Apple's design (ornamental?) patents [wikipedia.org] or look and feel patents do disgust me more than other functional oriented patents ....
That's an interesting stance. It's always seemed to me that design patents seem inherintly more just. After all, there should be an infinite number of ways of designing the look and feel of your interface.
So apple patented the design of a home screen consisting of rectangular icons with a 1:1 aspect ratio and corners clipped by a circle with a diameter 90% of the width. Why wouldn't I, as a competitor, want to make a product that looked different? Mine will have round icons instead. problem solved. Yeah, some people just want to make a knockoff product that looks like an iphone. Design patents make that hard. I have a hard time feeling sorry for them. As a consumer i'd kind of like a choice in how my phone looks.
It's the fact that someone can patent an algorithm, like displaying a full screen launch image prior to loading the application to give the system a feeling of responsiveness, that i find egregious.
maybe i'm weird, but i like trailers. In many cases, the trailers are better than the movie. You see a couple minutes of just the best parts and you get to use your imagination to weave together a cool story. I've often said i wouldn't mind sitting in a theater and watching an hour of trailers. I wouldn't want to pay for it though. If i could do it for free i think i'd find it preferable to seeing an actual movie. Actually i've done that plenty at home by piping hd quicktime trailers to my tv.
that's a pretty good point. There's usually more people lined up at security than there are on a plane. If a terrorist wanted to cause a lot of damage, the crowd at the security bottleneck is a much better target than the plane anyway.
OR... do we just want people to think it was a super secret stealth helicopter? If our enemies think we have these really awesome stealth helicopters that will decloak right over your house at the last minute, they probably don't want to mess with us.
maybe the chinese and the pakistanis will be pouring over a bin of fiberglass and disposable razor parts for years trying to figure out the secret.
my guess is it crashed because the seal team wanted to practice blowing up a helicopter.
build skynet.
thanks for that. I wasn't familiar with Brainf*ck.
What if there was a language where each block was a character? then you could string them together to form more complex commands, variable names, and flow control! If you wanted to add the values in the A and B blocks, you would just put a + block between them. you could then use the assignment block to put the resulting value into the C block! you'd probably never need to learn more than 50 or so blocks and you could do just about ANYTHING with that!
I think the clear answer to all those questions is none of that has ever mattered for Linux. This has been standard operating procedure for linux, well, since Linus posted his first kernel. People have lived with those same issues and done perfectly fine so i assume they are all moot points.
My car is going on 6 years old. The rOads i drive it on are atill the same. So yeah, im happy to keep it. The roads My iphOne drives on will likely be obsoleted in 2.
During peak periods of demand for the iPad, workers were made to take only one day off in 13.
To me that says the owners of Foxconn promised Apple a certain number of iPads and probably promised their other clients stuff and they made sure their people made that stuff damnit. It also seems pretty clear that the factories are the ones forcing people to sign these agreements, not Apple.
AFIK Apple continues to deal with these people, so that's damning, but the article never says that Apple is making these decisions.
animals kissing (completely not goatse or anything)
What is it about work that disqualifies the people there from being your friends? They are people. People have jobs. They aren't that much different that people who don't work there except they are guaranteed to have at least one thing in common with you. Statistically speaking, they should be prime candidates for friendship. They do the same job as you. They probably have a similar level of education. They probably have a lot in common with you.
I've always found work friendships to be pretty strong. It seems to me there's something valuable in a friend who understands what i do each day. I have a lot of good friends who are not programmers. It's hard to have a conversation with them about how awesome my build script is.
Maybe you don't have the right job.
Honestly, you look a little suspicious if your ip is downloading tons of kiddie porn. I wouldn't advocate your door being kicked in or a midnight beat down. That's clearly mistreatment. You being investigated, potentially arrested, and having your gear confiscated doesn't seem entirely out of line. That's not guilty until proven innocent. That's just trying to prove you guilty.
Now, if everyone had their wifi open, I expect it would be a lot more common to fail to find anyone at the node that the router says downloaded the porn. You would probably also notice different download patterns. Right now, if a kiddie porn downloader finds open wifi, he will use it a lot. It makes that network indistinguishable from the guy who is downloading in his own home. If wifi was always open, that guy would probably go from place to place. One or two wrong downloads would cease to look suspicious.
I see too unfortunate side effects. We would need a lot of martyrs to go through the system and establish new statistics. The actual criminals would become much harder to find.
I can imagine the architecture meeting that took place.
engineer 1, "hey! you know what would help us get more accurate location? if we kept a cache of the locations of nearby cell towers on the device."
engineer 2. "Yeah! and if it was timestamped, we might be able to deduce movement patterns and provide even MORE ACCURATE DATA! WIN!"
jr programmer: "guys, wouldn't this pose a privacy risk? we would be storing a history of areas the phone went to. people are sensitive about that."
engineer 2: "Nah. people willingly post their exact location to social networks all the time. they WANT to share this data. this will help them share the data better. besides the cell provider has all this data already. what difference does it make if it's in one more spot?"
The team leaves the room [pan left to the corner]. A dark thin figure emerges from the shadows.
Steve Jobs: "excellent. all is going according to my plan. Soon I and I alone will know the locations of all AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile towers! The world will bow before me! heh heh heh! MU HA HA! HA HA HA HAAAA! ooo! ow, my kidney hurt from that."
ok. maybe that last part didn't happen exactly like that.
You also shouldn't take pictures. Even if they aren't geocoded, they still implicitly identify some location. Actually, it's probably best just to leave the phone off all the time. the cell companies have access to your location. It's only a matter of time before they realize there's a potential gold mine in that data.
That's preposterous. They aren't going to stop you and take your phone for no reason other than snooping. If you happened to be wearing a casio F91W wristwatch, then you were just asking for it.
maybe while they're at it, they could stop considering putting certain arrangements of molecules into other arrangements of molecules a crime as well.