Good for you, as long as everything goes perfectly as expected you'll be fine.
But then you're involved in an accident, get hurt, and suddenly you find out that the driver's insurance won't pay out because you're a paying passenger and he doesn't have insurance coverage for that. In case of official taxis, you won't have such an issue, guaranteed. There is a reason taxi licenses and so are in place in many parts of the world, and it's not to prevent competition. It's to protect customers, and if done correctly (admittedly often not done so) can enhance competition even.
Complaints are indeed primarily about the company, and its total lack of respect for the law - indeed they often actively and intentionally break the law (like in Amsterdam). Its drivers often make less than normal taxi drivers after deduction of all their cost. Just two of the common complaints against Uber.
You naturally hold the copyrights to your own work - so you can always publish it any way you like.
However if you start quoting other people's work in your own work, you may need a copyright license for those people's works - unless the quotes are so short they fall under fair use policies or so. And that appears to be the case here: the author used so much of someone else's copyrighted works (the diary of Goebbels in this case), that the copyright holders (Goebbels' estate) think it breaches copyright law, and on those grounds try to ban publication of the works in question. Simply removing/cutting down on those quotes should allow publication.
Search indexes are very expensive to make - lots of data to download and analyse to come anywhere near reasonable coverage of what's out there. Someone has to pay for it.
The amounts of data involved are huge. By the time you're done downloading such an index, even assuming you've got sufficient storage at hand, it's horribly outdated.
There is a reason there are no recent small search start-ups: you have to be pretty big to even consider this. When Google started, the Internet was a fraction of the size it's now, and even then Google's founders could use the massive computing resources of their university. Google's index nowadays is so big that they can not search it entirely themselves: different geographical locations tend to give different search results for the exact same query, as you're searching different subsets of the database.
Research requires you to be able to buy a copy and read it, so you may use the information held in it. That's the case with lots of works out there, such as all scientific research publications. They all fall under copyright, which doesn't seem to hinder research all too much. Sure public domain and online access may be convenient, you can instead walk over to your local university library and read it there.
Copying and republishing excerpts from another work may be restricted under copyright, or may fall under fair use. This is a different matter, and still won't hinder research. Nor does it have anything to do with censorship.
The original author is just using words as "hindering research" and "censorship" to push his case, meaning to me he's probably broken copyright law and strongly feels himself he is indeed at the wrong side of the law.
Every day I'm on the MTR or the bus I see numerous people around me writing away on their phones. Handwriting input is the norm, not the exception. It seems to work pretty well, considering the very few corrections they have to make.
Or is recognising and distinguishing between those thousands if not tens of thousands of different Chinese characters really that much easier than the 26 letters (well, make that 52 to account for capitals) in our alphabet? I always thought they'd use handwriting input because it's so darn hard to input Chinese on a regular keyboard, let alone a mobile phone keyboard. In contrast, entering English on a mobile phone keyboard, combined with automatic corrections, works quite well for me, not as good or as fast as a real keyboard but I think I still type way faster than I could possibly write on a phone or other mobile device.
The real question is now: now much of the effect is from the actual consumption of alcohol/cannabis, and how much is from the time spent consuming it?
A night spent in a bar drinking means generally you don't spend that time studying, and often results in a night with too little sleep. Same for smoking pot. These long nights of partying, and as a result less time spent in your books, certainly must have an effect as well.
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but 44 phonemes. I'd start there. Expand the alphabet to 44 letters; one letter per sound and double le(tt)ers are not necessary. Thus no ambiguity on how to spell a word; you spell it like it sounds. It would be like a metric system for speaking/spelling...in that it makes sense. So "two" becomes "tu" or maybe just "2" (wi yuz tu karakters wen won wil du?), "too" becomes "also", and "to" becomes anything...maybe "tob".
You nicely illustrate how incredibly hard this is to do correctly.
The word "to" would have to become "tu" (certainly not "tob" as it would sound more like "tahb" - the "ah" sound as in the "won" you use for "one") to keep in line with your previous examples, as it's pronounced exactly the same as "too" and "two". Furthermore you shouldn't use "also" without pointing out that the "o" in that word has to become a new letter, as you have used the letter "o" already in "won" (as phonetic spelling of the number "one").
This is also ignoring the constant spelling updates you'd have to perform to keep track with changes in pronunciation of different words over time (which, in part, is why we have so many spellings in English that do not fully match current pronunciation), or regional differences in pronunciation of various words: which version of English would be the standard? You won't even be able to say "British" or "American" as neither has a standard pronunciation but comes with huge regional differences. Those spelling updates will seriously mess up reading as a large part of reading is done by recognising the word as a whole, rather than looking at and parsing individual letters.
On the other hand, some languages like Latvian have settled down on their spelling only quite recently, and it's possible for a non-speaker like me to read out Latvian text and have native speakers understand what I say, while I have no idea of the meaning of the words, just reproducing the sounds. The same supposedly works in Hungarian, and probably some more languages.
1. Break up monopolies, reduce barriers to market entry, and encourage competition, or 2. Regulate the behavior of monopolies.
Net Neutrality attempts to do #2.
3. All of the above.
Natural monopolies should be regulated. This includes utilities (power, water, telephone) that rely on physical infrastructure. The owner of the infrastructure (the cables, the pipes), should be strictly regulated - and where possible being forced to allow competitors on their infrastructure. Ideally, owners of infrastructure and service providers using that infrastructure are separate.
The most obvious and easy to understand example is roads. The government builds roads and bridges, and everyone can use those roads and bridges - either for free, or against a fixed cost which is the same for everyone. Every driver pays the same toll to cross a bridge, based only on things like size/weight/type of the vehicle and maybe the time of the day, regardless of which company he works for. It's the same for everyone, roads are neutral.
In Europe, this has gone so far as to decouple rail roads from rail transport providers, power lines from power suppliers, telephone lines from telephone/ADSL Internet suppliers, etc. I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't always go smooth and there are issues, but the idea is the correct one. It's just really hard to execute well. Net neutrality is also an issue there, though generally the governments are highly in favour of net neutrality, and in the end we'll have full separation between providers of physical infrastructure (the cables in the ground), network service providers (the ISPs providing connectivity), and content providers (the individual web sites).
That'd be the ideal situation.
Low barrier of entry to the content market (everyone can set up a web site and be sure that all their potential customers can actually reach that site on equal footing with all other sites) which of course enhances competition. Low barrier of entry to the service provider market, as everyone can rent the required connectivity for a fixed, known price.
Physical infrastructure is a natural monopoly, very high barrier of entry, and therefore has to be highly regulated. This is something that I consider a prime government task, be it done directly, through a SOE, by appointing a commercial entity to do it, or even by forcing a commercial entity to open up their existing networks to the competition.
If only because of the enhanced cultural exchanges, and expanded possibilities for travel!
It's just a pity that the world's de-facto common language (English) is so hard to learn well... still glad I managed to master it, if only as second language (out of four) for me.
This handover from computer to human is what bugs me.
How to do this reliably?
Point in case: just yesterday I missed my bus stop on a routine commute, simply because I was too distracted by a stupid phone game. This is comparable to automated drives, as I do a stretch of city transport by hand (home to bus stop), there hop on the bus (human driven but from the passenger pov it could as well be a robot), take back control when I reach the exit point: press the button to get off and do the last bit of transit through city traffic by myself.
OK you can set an alarm - even for your bus stop there are phone apps that can do that - but what if the human doesn't react and the robot reaches the desired exit, or the end of the highway? No guarantee there is a place to stop (may be occupied by other soundly sleeping drivers).
More impressive would be for the car to drive from one end of New York to the other. During the day, avoiding highways, dealing with really chaotic traffic on narrow, poorly marked roads full of distractions and ambiguities.
Highways are simple. Traffic flows in one direction only, clearly marked and wide roads, no intersections, all roughly the same speed. No surprises. It's where by far the fewest accidents happen for human driven cars, even though it's boring and probably the part where human drivers pay least attention. Doing an hour of highways, ten hours of highways, 100 hours of highways - it's just more of the same. Now it's cross country, tomorrow it'll be cross country and back. And back again. As long as the fuel will last.
US jobs have to be the best paying in the world, as the cost of living there is also among the highest in the world, and the tax system there is probably one of the worst - if only because you have at least county level, state level, federal level taxes, and maybe a few sublevels and other kinds of taxes that have to be paid for and all have their different rules on what constitutes taxable income and what not. There is more to income and salary than just amounts of money.
After growing up and studying in a place, most people will stay there. A while back I heard that most people in this world (to the tune of >90%) get born, live their life, and die within a 20-30 km radius. Sure you always hear about ex-pats, people moving far away from home (I'm one of them), but overall most people stay close to home. That's the place they know, the place where their friends are, their families - for most people there is no good reason to leave home. Belgium is a fine place to live, I'm sure.
There are many Chinese that want to get to the US, but don't forget there are 1.3 billion Chinese out there. If just 0.1% of the mainland Chinese population wants to make this move, that's 1.3 million people queueing up - potentially adding 0.4% to the US population, and most of those end up in the university population, making the influx very visible.
In contrast, if 0.1% of the Americans is looking for a job in China (and really - I know quite some that moved this way out of their own free will, plus many that were asked by their company to do so), that'd be a mere 0.32 million, adding just.025% of the Chinese population. Barely noticeable.
How many accidents are due to pilot error (and would not have happened without pilots), and how many accidents did pilots actively prevent from happening? Only if the first is greater than the second, there may be an argument for doing away with human pilots on airliners.
The operational limits of a robot car are arguably much wider than those of a human.
No fatigue; radar that can see through fog and in the dark; no map reading errors and usually more up-to-date maps (I recall driving using 10 year old paper maps to get around); never taking calls while driving..
Given that operator handoff is most likely to happen either under relatively hairy conditions, or when some system failure has left the automated systems unable to cope,
Euhm... let me get this right... you expect cars to drive automatically, except when it gets difficult or something else unexpected happens it suddenly gives back control to the driver. That's what you mean, right?
Bad idea. Very bad idea. The driver is probably reading the paper, or is dozing off, or otherwise simply not paying attention to the road, as the car is doing the driving and he has nothing to do. He's not supposed to do anything about driving, as the car is in full automatic driving mode. Suddenly asking for attention, then expecting the driver to handle a difficult situation instantly, is asking for accidents. Many more than when the driver was in control already, and possibly sees the situation coming, so anyway has much more time to react.
To allow the driver to fully hand off control to the car, the car should be able to handle it all. The driver assist functions we have available on certain cars nowadays are a great start in working towards full control by the car: now the car will intervene in certain emergency situations, when that's all settled, we can think about giving off control of the rest of the ride as well. For fully automatic drive, the car should not rely on human intervention, ever.
Even if you can account for such things, how will your autonomous vehicle handle malfunctioning sensors? Aerospace has been working at this for decades and still hasn't figured it all out.
Detecting a malfunction in a sensor is hard, really hard. You'll need more than one sensor, preferably different types, to realise there's an error, and then you have to decide which of the contradictory sensor results is the correct one. As naturally sensors will always return slightly different results, you'll have to account for that as well.
So let's say we solved this. Then you know there's a problem. For an autonomous car it's simple: it could decide to continue (minor problem), or stop (e.g. tyre blow-out or other major problem that makes it unable to continue, or simply "I don't know how to handle this situation, so I pull over to the side of the road and stop to have my human overlords sort it out"). In the second scenario an automated call to the repair service could be included, so the human(s) in the car can continue to sleep while it's being fixed and after that be sent on their way again.
An airplane doesn't have this fail safe stop option, and needs to have human overlords present at all times to take control if something happens the programmers didn't foresee.
For both those numbers to be true Apple must be making about 40 times more profit per sale than Android.
And that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Samsung is massively profitable - but almost certainly their margins are lower than Apple's - if only because they develop about ten models for every one Apple model. After all, Apple just has iPhone in two, three incarnations, while Samsung has a whole lineup of phones.
Secondly, there are many, many companies in the Android phone market, many of whom must be loss making. It's just impossible with all that competition for all to be really profitable. That "compensates" for the high profits of Samsung, and pushes the whole Android segment down.
This was about firmware images provided on the web site of the manufacturer. Not about reading/modifying the firmware of a drive - which indeed we know is possible by design (otherwise this whole discussion would be pointless to begin with).
As many already pointed out: you can not trust the firmware image provided by the drive itself, for the simple reason that you have to talk to the very firmware you try to verify, and which may be compromised.
Think of the kid calling "are there any monsters under the bed?", and the monster under the bed answering "no!".
Copying some data is quite different from replacing data, and far easier to do unnoticed. The NSA copied existing SIM encryption keys; they did not attempt to replace them with their own keys or so.
It is pretty hard to detect an intrusion, access to data, and copying of that data. Especially if the attacker gets access through an authorised account by getting their hands on someone's login credentials.
It is much easier to detect the replacement of data: this can be done with e.g. automated cryptographic checksum tests against remotely stored known good checksums, or against a freshly compiled copy.
A lot of data will have to be replaced unnoticed (source code is being read by humans, who may detect changes if it happens to be the part they work with) to stand any chance of getting a compromised binary on someone else's site unnoticed.
All the malware part has to do is to read the rest of the software from disk upon boot, then hide that part of the drive from the OS. This way you could hide a pretty big piece of software on the disk, and with today 500 GB kind of capacities being the norm, the user won't notice unless they look really really carefully at the numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Good for you, as long as everything goes perfectly as expected you'll be fine.
But then you're involved in an accident, get hurt, and suddenly you find out that the driver's insurance won't pay out because you're a paying passenger and he doesn't have insurance coverage for that. In case of official taxis, you won't have such an issue, guaranteed. There is a reason taxi licenses and so are in place in many parts of the world, and it's not to prevent competition. It's to protect customers, and if done correctly (admittedly often not done so) can enhance competition even.
Complaints are indeed primarily about the company, and its total lack of respect for the law - indeed they often actively and intentionally break the law (like in Amsterdam). Its drivers often make less than normal taxi drivers after deduction of all their cost. Just two of the common complaints against Uber.
That's not what I said or meant.
You naturally hold the copyrights to your own work - so you can always publish it any way you like.
However if you start quoting other people's work in your own work, you may need a copyright license for those people's works - unless the quotes are so short they fall under fair use policies or so. And that appears to be the case here: the author used so much of someone else's copyrighted works (the diary of Goebbels in this case), that the copyright holders (Goebbels' estate) think it breaches copyright law, and on those grounds try to ban publication of the works in question. Simply removing/cutting down on those quotes should allow publication.
There are two issues with this.
Search indexes are very expensive to make - lots of data to download and analyse to come anywhere near reasonable coverage of what's out there. Someone has to pay for it.
The amounts of data involved are huge. By the time you're done downloading such an index, even assuming you've got sufficient storage at hand, it's horribly outdated.
There is a reason there are no recent small search start-ups: you have to be pretty big to even consider this. When Google started, the Internet was a fraction of the size it's now, and even then Google's founders could use the massive computing resources of their university. Google's index nowadays is so big that they can not search it entirely themselves: different geographical locations tend to give different search results for the exact same query, as you're searching different subsets of the database.
Research requires you to be able to buy a copy and read it, so you may use the information held in it. That's the case with lots of works out there, such as all scientific research publications. They all fall under copyright, which doesn't seem to hinder research all too much. Sure public domain and online access may be convenient, you can instead walk over to your local university library and read it there.
Copying and republishing excerpts from another work may be restricted under copyright, or may fall under fair use. This is a different matter, and still won't hinder research. Nor does it have anything to do with censorship.
The original author is just using words as "hindering research" and "censorship" to push his case, meaning to me he's probably broken copyright law and strongly feels himself he is indeed at the wrong side of the law.
Every day I'm on the MTR or the bus I see numerous people around me writing away on their phones. Handwriting input is the norm, not the exception. It seems to work pretty well, considering the very few corrections they have to make.
Or is recognising and distinguishing between those thousands if not tens of thousands of different Chinese characters really that much easier than the 26 letters (well, make that 52 to account for capitals) in our alphabet? I always thought they'd use handwriting input because it's so darn hard to input Chinese on a regular keyboard, let alone a mobile phone keyboard. In contrast, entering English on a mobile phone keyboard, combined with automatic corrections, works quite well for me, not as good or as fast as a real keyboard but I think I still type way faster than I could possibly write on a phone or other mobile device.
The real question is now: now much of the effect is from the actual consumption of alcohol/cannabis, and how much is from the time spent consuming it?
A night spent in a bar drinking means generally you don't spend that time studying, and often results in a night with too little sleep. Same for smoking pot. These long nights of partying, and as a result less time spent in your books, certainly must have an effect as well.
Easy spelling!
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but 44 phonemes. I'd start there. Expand the alphabet to 44 letters; one letter per sound and double le(tt)ers are not necessary. Thus no ambiguity on how to spell a word; you spell it like it sounds. It would be like a metric system for speaking/spelling...in that it makes sense. So "two" becomes "tu" or maybe just "2" (wi yuz tu karakters wen won wil du?), "too" becomes "also", and "to" becomes anything...maybe "tob".
You nicely illustrate how incredibly hard this is to do correctly.
The word "to" would have to become "tu" (certainly not "tob" as it would sound more like "tahb" - the "ah" sound as in the "won" you use for "one") to keep in line with your previous examples, as it's pronounced exactly the same as "too" and "two". Furthermore you shouldn't use "also" without pointing out that the "o" in that word has to become a new letter, as you have used the letter "o" already in "won" (as phonetic spelling of the number "one").
This is also ignoring the constant spelling updates you'd have to perform to keep track with changes in pronunciation of different words over time (which, in part, is why we have so many spellings in English that do not fully match current pronunciation), or regional differences in pronunciation of various words: which version of English would be the standard? You won't even be able to say "British" or "American" as neither has a standard pronunciation but comes with huge regional differences. Those spelling updates will seriously mess up reading as a large part of reading is done by recognising the word as a whole, rather than looking at and parsing individual letters.
On the other hand, some languages like Latvian have settled down on their spelling only quite recently, and it's possible for a non-speaker like me to read out Latvian text and have native speakers understand what I say, while I have no idea of the meaning of the words, just reproducing the sounds. The same supposedly works in Hungarian, and probably some more languages.
A government's role should be: (pick one)
1. Break up monopolies, reduce barriers to market entry, and encourage competition, or
2. Regulate the behavior of monopolies.
Net Neutrality attempts to do #2.
3. All of the above.
Natural monopolies should be regulated. This includes utilities (power, water, telephone) that rely on physical infrastructure. The owner of the infrastructure (the cables, the pipes), should be strictly regulated - and where possible being forced to allow competitors on their infrastructure. Ideally, owners of infrastructure and service providers using that infrastructure are separate.
The most obvious and easy to understand example is roads. The government builds roads and bridges, and everyone can use those roads and bridges - either for free, or against a fixed cost which is the same for everyone. Every driver pays the same toll to cross a bridge, based only on things like size/weight/type of the vehicle and maybe the time of the day, regardless of which company he works for. It's the same for everyone, roads are neutral.
In Europe, this has gone so far as to decouple rail roads from rail transport providers, power lines from power suppliers, telephone lines from telephone/ADSL Internet suppliers, etc. I'll be the first to admit that it doesn't always go smooth and there are issues, but the idea is the correct one. It's just really hard to execute well. Net neutrality is also an issue there, though generally the governments are highly in favour of net neutrality, and in the end we'll have full separation between providers of physical infrastructure (the cables in the ground), network service providers (the ISPs providing connectivity), and content providers (the individual web sites).
That'd be the ideal situation.
Low barrier of entry to the content market (everyone can set up a web site and be sure that all their potential customers can actually reach that site on equal footing with all other sites) which of course enhances competition. Low barrier of entry to the service provider market, as everyone can rent the required connectivity for a fixed, known price.
Physical infrastructure is a natural monopoly, very high barrier of entry, and therefore has to be highly regulated. This is something that I consider a prime government task, be it done directly, through a SOE, by appointing a commercial entity to do it, or even by forcing a commercial entity to open up their existing networks to the competition.
If only because of the enhanced cultural exchanges, and expanded possibilities for travel!
It's just a pity that the world's de-facto common language (English) is so hard to learn well... still glad I managed to master it, if only as second language (out of four) for me.
This handover from computer to human is what bugs me.
How to do this reliably?
Point in case: just yesterday I missed my bus stop on a routine commute, simply because I was too distracted by a stupid phone game. This is comparable to automated drives, as I do a stretch of city transport by hand (home to bus stop), there hop on the bus (human driven but from the passenger pov it could as well be a robot), take back control when I reach the exit point: press the button to get off and do the last bit of transit through city traffic by myself.
OK you can set an alarm - even for your bus stop there are phone apps that can do that - but what if the human doesn't react and the robot reaches the desired exit, or the end of the highway? No guarantee there is a place to stop (may be occupied by other soundly sleeping drivers).
More impressive would be for the car to drive from one end of New York to the other. During the day, avoiding highways, dealing with really chaotic traffic on narrow, poorly marked roads full of distractions and ambiguities.
Highways are simple. Traffic flows in one direction only, clearly marked and wide roads, no intersections, all roughly the same speed. No surprises. It's where by far the fewest accidents happen for human driven cars, even though it's boring and probably the part where human drivers pay least attention. Doing an hour of highways, ten hours of highways, 100 hours of highways - it's just more of the same. Now it's cross country, tomorrow it'll be cross country and back. And back again. As long as the fuel will last.
US jobs have to be the best paying in the world, as the cost of living there is also among the highest in the world, and the tax system there is probably one of the worst - if only because you have at least county level, state level, federal level taxes, and maybe a few sublevels and other kinds of taxes that have to be paid for and all have their different rules on what constitutes taxable income and what not. There is more to income and salary than just amounts of money.
After growing up and studying in a place, most people will stay there. A while back I heard that most people in this world (to the tune of >90%) get born, live their life, and die within a 20-30 km radius. Sure you always hear about ex-pats, people moving far away from home (I'm one of them), but overall most people stay close to home. That's the place they know, the place where their friends are, their families - for most people there is no good reason to leave home. Belgium is a fine place to live, I'm sure.
There are many Chinese that want to get to the US, but don't forget there are 1.3 billion Chinese out there. If just 0.1% of the mainland Chinese population wants to make this move, that's 1.3 million people queueing up - potentially adding 0.4% to the US population, and most of those end up in the university population, making the influx very visible.
In contrast, if 0.1% of the Americans is looking for a job in China (and really - I know quite some that moved this way out of their own free will, plus many that were asked by their company to do so), that'd be a mere 0.32 million, adding just .025% of the Chinese population. Barely noticeable.
How many accidents are due to pilot error (and would not have happened without pilots), and how many accidents did pilots actively prevent from happening? Only if the first is greater than the second, there may be an argument for doing away with human pilots on airliners.
Market share is relevant for reaching critical mass (which is what MS is missing in the phone world). Total market size is relevant for profits.
The operational limits of a robot car are arguably much wider than those of a human.
No fatigue; radar that can see through fog and in the dark; no map reading errors and usually more up-to-date maps (I recall driving using 10 year old paper maps to get around); never taking calls while driving..
Given that operator handoff is most likely to happen either under relatively hairy conditions, or when some system failure has left the automated systems unable to cope,
Euhm... let me get this right... you expect cars to drive automatically, except when it gets difficult or something else unexpected happens it suddenly gives back control to the driver. That's what you mean, right?
Bad idea. Very bad idea. The driver is probably reading the paper, or is dozing off, or otherwise simply not paying attention to the road, as the car is doing the driving and he has nothing to do. He's not supposed to do anything about driving, as the car is in full automatic driving mode. Suddenly asking for attention, then expecting the driver to handle a difficult situation instantly, is asking for accidents. Many more than when the driver was in control already, and possibly sees the situation coming, so anyway has much more time to react.
To allow the driver to fully hand off control to the car, the car should be able to handle it all. The driver assist functions we have available on certain cars nowadays are a great start in working towards full control by the car: now the car will intervene in certain emergency situations, when that's all settled, we can think about giving off control of the rest of the ride as well. For fully automatic drive, the car should not rely on human intervention, ever.
Even if you can account for such things, how will your autonomous vehicle handle malfunctioning sensors? Aerospace has been working at this for decades and still hasn't figured it all out.
Detecting a malfunction in a sensor is hard, really hard. You'll need more than one sensor, preferably different types, to realise there's an error, and then you have to decide which of the contradictory sensor results is the correct one. As naturally sensors will always return slightly different results, you'll have to account for that as well.
So let's say we solved this. Then you know there's a problem. For an autonomous car it's simple: it could decide to continue (minor problem), or stop (e.g. tyre blow-out or other major problem that makes it unable to continue, or simply "I don't know how to handle this situation, so I pull over to the side of the road and stop to have my human overlords sort it out"). In the second scenario an automated call to the repair service could be included, so the human(s) in the car can continue to sleep while it's being fixed and after that be sent on their way again.
An airplane doesn't have this fail safe stop option, and needs to have human overlords present at all times to take control if something happens the programmers didn't foresee.
For a user, the UI is the OS.
"... and provide an experience very much like the desktop"
Or does this mean that the desktop gets a phone-type experience again, like on Win 8?
For both those numbers to be true Apple must be making about 40 times more profit per sale than Android.
And that wouldn't surprise me at all.
Samsung is massively profitable - but almost certainly their margins are lower than Apple's - if only because they develop about ten models for every one Apple model. After all, Apple just has iPhone in two, three incarnations, while Samsung has a whole lineup of phones.
Secondly, there are many, many companies in the Android phone market, many of whom must be loss making. It's just impossible with all that competition for all to be really profitable. That "compensates" for the high profits of Samsung, and pushes the whole Android segment down.
Please read the thread before you reply.
This was about firmware images provided on the web site of the manufacturer. Not about reading/modifying the firmware of a drive - which indeed we know is possible by design (otherwise this whole discussion would be pointless to begin with).
As many already pointed out: you can not trust the firmware image provided by the drive itself, for the simple reason that you have to talk to the very firmware you try to verify, and which may be compromised.
Think of the kid calling "are there any monsters under the bed?", and the monster under the bed answering "no!".
If you don't have proper reading comprehension skills, you are unqualified to reply.
No-where did I try to say it's not a big deal.
Copying some data is quite different from replacing data, and far easier to do unnoticed. The NSA copied existing SIM encryption keys; they did not attempt to replace them with their own keys or so.
It is pretty hard to detect an intrusion, access to data, and copying of that data. Especially if the attacker gets access through an authorised account by getting their hands on someone's login credentials.
It is much easier to detect the replacement of data: this can be done with e.g. automated cryptographic checksum tests against remotely stored known good checksums, or against a freshly compiled copy.
A lot of data will have to be replaced unnoticed (source code is being read by humans, who may detect changes if it happens to be the part they work with) to stand any chance of getting a compromised binary on someone else's site unnoticed.
I doubt you need much, really.
All the malware part has to do is to read the rest of the software from disk upon boot, then hide that part of the drive from the OS. This way you could hide a pretty big piece of software on the disk, and with today 500 GB kind of capacities being the norm, the user won't notice unless they look really really carefully at the numbers.