The Supreme Court is very obviously staffed with a bunch of technologically-incompetent idiots and we need to change the constitution so we can get rid of them and vote every last one of their dumb asses out now.
Consider putting the blame where it belongs: Samsung put many of the best minds in the industry at presenting their case, and they failed to convince the original Jury, they failed to convince the US Circuit Court, and they failed to sway the SCOTUS. Samsung's team failed, and they failed spectacularly: The patents are now among the few whose validity is affirmed by the SCOTUS.
If there was a failure, it's Samsung's, not the Court's.
I'm sure the irony is lost on nobody that Apple dumped "Slide to unlock" a year ago with iOS10.
The BB 10 OS is derived from QNX, which BlackBerry bought when they realized their own OS was a POS that couldn't scale into the future. (Very much like Apple declaring Copland a lost cause, and started deciding between BeOS and NeXTSTEP in 1996).
QNX is one of the premier embedded RTOS's, and is used in the majority of the automotive industry, including most automobile infotainment systems.
Licensing fees from QNX is probably one of BlackBerry's largest remaining revenue sources at this point.
especially after all CNN has done to advance the notion of biased news reporting
Partisans and pundits have always labeled those who don't support their own views as biased or liars. They did it in the Roman Republic; they continue to do so today.
And, as in the past, these partisans and pundits don't like it when anybody calls out their gaslighting.
I seem to recall the article I read about the associated geoengineering which placed the cost at ~$4-5 T , which is manageable for the US economy alone.
That's enticing for a few reasons:
* It's a "quick fix" where politicians ignore consequences, just like we do with all the other problems we create for ourselves. * It's a hell of a lot cheaper than many of the predicted costs. * The chemtrail crowd will be completely vindicated once aircraft start dumping tons of SO2 and metal aerosols into the atmosphere. * Two words: Pink Sky.
It's a siren's call to all in thrall of hydrocarbons.
When KDE 4's first end-user version (not the development version that so many people mistook for end-user suitability) was released, it was a bit rough around the edges, but it already functioned and performed better than KDE 3 in most ways. A few minor KDE 4 releases later, and KDE 3 became quite painful to use by comparison.
I couldn't agree more. The real fault with KDE4 was that few took the KDE team seriously when they said that the first few "releases" of KDE4 were developer previews.
Users ignored the warnings because they wanted the shiny.
In my ("reddest of red", "right to work", and "at-will employment") state, lawmakers, the courts, and voters lost patience with masses of abusive employers.
Unemployment benefits are managed by the state, and employers have virtually no say in the matter.
Those experiencing a layoff, RIF, or whatever euphemism the employer tries to call mass termination, receive unemployment benefits with no qualifications.
Victims of maiming, cancer, serious illness, etc. -- where not going to work isn't a choice, will receive unemployment benefits.
Effectively, if you show up to work, you have to commit a crime to be denied benefits.
The qualification for unemployment benefit is low, and the reason is pretty simple: unemployment benefits are ultimately less taxing to the state's economy than the bankruptcies, foreclosures, homelessness, welfare, and crime we see without unemployment benefits.
What difference does it make that Google encrypts data in-house? Google is the one holding the keys, and they're as much a problem as any government monitoring.
Google is doing its users a disservice by making any claims that they can "secure" a fundamentally insecure messaging system.
The current industry titans have no interest in providing customers with truly secure messaging. Every company does its best to insert themselves as a man in the middle -- as if they are somehow trustworthy.
Even Facebook and Google adopting the Signal are the companies inserting themselves as a man in the middle to collect metadata. God forbid if they were to interoperate, and Google or Facebook doesn't get to see both sides of the conversation.
Is anybody still under the impression that Orwell's "Big Brother" can only be a government?
The rise of "Big Brother" is being missed because everybody's convinced it can only come from the Government... and not from friendly corporations, who only have our best interests at heart.
Regardless, the government will just have keyloggers built into the BIOS. The manufacturers are the weak link here.
Keyloggers are a well-known problem -- and one for which security solutions are designed to mitigate. U2F was designed to be secure with a keylogger installed (because spyware is a thing). There are completely open, easily manufactured designs of U2F keys.
GPG cards similarly have an open design, and are designed such that the keys can't be recovered from the device -- and the critical decryption is done on the GPG card.
There's also Coreboot, Libreboot, and OpenFirmware before that -- all open source BIOSes you can audit and compile yourself.
Electronics hobbyists design entire computers -- from PC board design and manufacture (at home) all the way to working Linux computers with internet access. Completely from scratch.
The reality is that the skills and tools to bypass such spying is common, widespread, and well published. Many who have the skills are thrilled when somebody shows an interest in their hobby, and eagerly assist anyone who asks.
The ultimate problem here is that companies still control all your data.
A lot of services have the encryption handled at the user endpoint - the company only handles encrypted data for which they have no key.
As far as the company is concerned, you're feeding them pool of random numbers.
For Law enforcement, encoded documents aren't new problem. Law enforcement (and militaries) have been unable to read ciphertexts for far longer than computers have been around. Classical ciphers have often proven impossible to crack. Parts of Kryptos have yet to be deciphered, even by the NSA. The FBI still puzzles over letters written in prison, and POW's, knowing their letters are going to be read by their captors, write subtly enciphered letters to their loved ones at home.
Alternatively, there are also documents like the Voynich Manuscript or the Rohonc Codex, where we have no idea if it even is ciphered, or just gibberish. (These manuscripts aren't all that different from a custom binary file format)
Saving cost isnâ(TM)t the issue - itâ(TM)s the volume of space a headphone jack occupies, which is huge for the interior of a phone. The thinking all manufacturers are following is: we get more space if we can put the audio through the USB port. They do it already (I play audio from my phone to my car via USB).
An NFC antenna is easy: a trace on the pcboard is enough. The iPhone 6â(TM)s (first google hit because Iâ(TM)m lazy) is a piece of ribbon Cable - requiring very little internal volume.
NFC is typically built in to the same chip as WiFi & Bluetooth. Thereâ(TM)s no âoeextra partâ taking up space, and the price delta is less than a penny. (One advantage of a modern 14 nm process is that a few million transistors are negligible in cost and size)
A headphone jack takes up half a cubic centimeter, and will never get smaller. Connectors are never cheap. ($0.50 in lots of 200k for a 3.5mm jack)
The fact is that every major phone manufacturer has dropped the headphone jack like a hot potato - with Lenovo/Motorola announcing phones without a jack even before Apple did, and others within weeks of Appleâ(TM)s announcement.
Much like PS/2 peripherals, the world is shifting from the old, single purpose interconnect and moving to USB. Also like PS/2, if you want to use the old interface, you get to use a dongle.
Itâ(TM)s not even remotely unprecedented in consumer electronics. VGA and the other analog video standards are all but gone now. Itâ(TM)s rare to find anything in a store that can use Composite video, to say nothing for component video or S-Video.
Still, it will be hard to know how many sales Google will lose because people will buy a phone that has a jack instead, so this is all pretty much wild speculation all around.
Every major competitor to Google I can think of has already dumped the headphone jack, itâ(TM)s hard to see it as a competitive loss to Google. That ship has not only sailed, but itâ(TM)s reached its destination and unloaded its cargo.
New phones (including Appleâ(TM)s) output standard USB audio and metadata.
Instead of having special connectors for laptop power supplies, keyboards, mice, headphones, speakers, disk drives, game and other HID devices... they are all converging to use USB.
Quite clearly, that hasnâ(TM)t proven to be a problem for Apple, Samsung, Essential, or LG
Why should Google expect anything different?
The ability to use wired headphones remains in all cases, and the (often included) dongles havenâ(TM)t proven to be a problem to hundreds of millions of users.
And I say that as a guy who has been using one of the dongles for his headphones for at lease six months now.
Google (and Samsung, LG, and most others) have the same motivation Apple had:
* They can collect device usage metrics, and know exactly how much time people spend listening on wired vs wireless devices * They therefore have hard numbers for many customers use a headphone jack, and how often * They took the data and made a cost/benefit decision for which is better: using the limited space inside the case for a DAC, Amplifier, and headphone jack, or use the space for a bigger CPU, battery, etc.
At the end of the day, space inside a phone is premium real estate, and the $0.50-0.75 headphone jack takes a lot of it. If only half of your users use of the jack, then you've wasted both the space and the part.
- Your entire device chain supports AptX - You actually buy into AptX having higher quality because "more bits".
AptX is Qualcomm's effort at licensing out a 1980's-era codec, and sells "more bits is better" (much like $1,000 "audiophile" optical cables, magic rocks, and so on.) Honestly, AptX is decades older (and less sophisticated) than Bluetooth's SBC.
Out of curiosity, what makes Postscript good and TrueType bad?
Both are two part with outline fonts for printers, and have raster fonts (and hinting) for screens, and both are ancient compared to Graphite, AAT, and OpenType.
I know PostScript is ~5 years older, and had better support in professional printing for a time...
But what makes PostScript âoebetterâ than TrueType? That it came first?
It's important to consider the first Cable TV systems: A lot of people live in areas where they couldn't receive broadcasts off the air -- they were out of range, had mountains in the way, etc.
Generally enthusiasts in the area built a own high performance antenna system in a good spot for reception, and ran the necessary wiring. They built a distribution network, and shared with their community. Adding the cable & maintaining it isn't free, so they started charging their neighbors money to maintain the network.
That particular problem hasn't gone away -- I know a few nearby areas where there is no OTA reception, in spite of being within 20 km of a transmitter that's on top of a 3,000 m mountain top. Cable & Satellite are the only way they are going to get OTA channels.
Slashdot Mirror
Deflation.
And yet, Artist's Shit, sold for €275,000.
The Supreme Court is very obviously staffed with a bunch of technologically-incompetent idiots and we need to change the constitution so we can get rid of them and vote every last one of their dumb asses out now.
Consider putting the blame where it belongs: Samsung put many of the best minds in the industry at presenting their case, and they failed to convince the original Jury, they failed to convince the US Circuit Court, and they failed to sway the SCOTUS. Samsung's team failed, and they failed spectacularly: The patents are now among the few whose validity is affirmed by the SCOTUS.
If there was a failure, it's Samsung's, not the Court's.
I'm sure the irony is lost on nobody that Apple dumped "Slide to unlock" a year ago with iOS10.
The BB 10 OS is derived from QNX, which BlackBerry bought when they realized their own OS was a POS that couldn't scale into the future. (Very much like Apple declaring Copland a lost cause, and started deciding between BeOS and NeXTSTEP in 1996).
QNX is one of the premier embedded RTOS's, and is used in the majority of the automotive industry, including most automobile infotainment systems.
Licensing fees from QNX is probably one of BlackBerry's largest remaining revenue sources at this point.
especially after all CNN has done to advance the notion of biased news reporting
Partisans and pundits have always labeled those who don't support their own views as biased or liars. They did it in the Roman Republic; they continue to do so today.
And, as in the past, these partisans and pundits don't like it when anybody calls out their gaslighting.
They literally invented CDMA, the foundational technology for 3G,
History appears to disagree. CDMA was invented by the Soviets, with research going as far back as 1935.
Qualcomm developed the first Cellular network that used CDMA under contract to AirTouch, (which eventually merged to Verizon).
That said: LTE uses OFDMA (downlink) and SC-FDMA (uplink). It's an entirely different beast than CDMA.
3G does have some relevance as a backwards-compatibility option, but its relevance is rapidly diminishing, with LTE covering the vast majority of the lower 48 states.
A lot of the thread is centered around an episode of Futurama
What could POSSIBLY go wrong?!
I seem to recall the article I read about the associated geoengineering which placed the cost at ~$4-5 T , which is manageable for the US economy alone.
That's enticing for a few reasons:
* It's a "quick fix" where politicians ignore consequences, just like we do with all the other problems we create for ourselves.
* It's a hell of a lot cheaper than many of the predicted costs.
* The chemtrail crowd will be completely vindicated once aircraft start dumping tons of SO2 and metal aerosols into the atmosphere.
* Two words: Pink Sky.
It's a siren's call to all in thrall of hydrocarbons.
When KDE 4's first end-user version (not the development version that so many people mistook for end-user suitability) was released, it was a bit rough around the edges, but it already functioned and performed better than KDE 3 in most ways. A few minor KDE 4 releases later, and KDE 3 became quite painful to use by comparison.
I couldn't agree more. The real fault with KDE4 was that few took the KDE team seriously when they said that the first few "releases" of KDE4 were developer previews.
Users ignored the warnings because they wanted the shiny.
I'm in one of the states TFA states has layoffs.
In my ("reddest of red", "right to work", and "at-will employment") state, lawmakers, the courts, and voters lost patience with masses of abusive employers.
Unemployment benefits are managed by the state, and employers have virtually no say in the matter.
Those experiencing a layoff, RIF, or whatever euphemism the employer tries to call mass termination, receive unemployment benefits with no qualifications.
Victims of maiming, cancer, serious illness, etc. -- where not going to work isn't a choice, will receive unemployment benefits.
Effectively, if you show up to work, you have to commit a crime to be denied benefits.
The qualification for unemployment benefit is low, and the reason is pretty simple: unemployment benefits are ultimately less taxing to the state's economy than the bankruptcies, foreclosures, homelessness, welfare, and crime we see without unemployment benefits.
No kidding. The AC described something that is criminal in every jurisdiction I've ever heard of.
What difference does it make that Google encrypts data in-house? Google is the one holding the keys, and they're as much a problem as any government monitoring.
Google is doing its users a disservice by making any claims that they can "secure" a fundamentally insecure messaging system.
The current industry titans have no interest in providing customers with truly secure messaging. Every company does its best to insert themselves as a man in the middle -- as if they are somehow trustworthy.
Even Facebook and Google adopting the Signal are the companies inserting themselves as a man in the middle to collect metadata. God forbid if they were to interoperate, and Google or Facebook doesn't get to see both sides of the conversation.
Is anybody still under the impression that Orwell's "Big Brother" can only be a government?
The rise of "Big Brother" is being missed because everybody's convinced it can only come from the Government... and not from friendly corporations, who only have our best interests at heart.
Regardless, the government will just have keyloggers built into the BIOS. The manufacturers are the weak link here.
Keyloggers are a well-known problem -- and one for which security solutions are designed to mitigate. U2F was designed to be secure with a keylogger installed (because spyware is a thing). There are completely open, easily manufactured designs of U2F keys.
GPG cards similarly have an open design, and are designed such that the keys can't be recovered from the device -- and the critical decryption is done on the GPG card.
There's also Coreboot, Libreboot, and OpenFirmware before that -- all open source BIOSes you can audit and compile yourself.
Electronics hobbyists design entire computers -- from PC board design and manufacture (at home) all the way to working Linux computers with internet access. Completely from scratch.
The reality is that the skills and tools to bypass such spying is common, widespread, and well published. Many who have the skills are thrilled when somebody shows an interest in their hobby, and eagerly assist anyone who asks.
The ultimate problem here is that companies still control all your data.
A lot of services have the encryption handled at the user endpoint - the company only handles encrypted data for which they have no key.
As far as the company is concerned, you're feeding them pool of random numbers.
For Law enforcement, encoded documents aren't new problem. Law enforcement (and militaries) have been unable to read ciphertexts for far longer than computers have been around. Classical ciphers have often proven impossible to crack. Parts of Kryptos have yet to be deciphered, even by the NSA. The FBI still puzzles over letters written in prison, and POW's, knowing their letters are going to be read by their captors, write subtly enciphered letters to their loved ones at home.
Alternatively, there are also documents like the Voynich Manuscript or the Rohonc Codex, where we have no idea if it even is ciphered, or just gibberish. (These manuscripts aren't all that different from a custom binary file format)
Always the same bullshit.
There's a certain amount of authenticity and credibility to bullshit.
This is pure chickenshit, as bullshit is far less petty.
Saving cost isnâ(TM)t the issue - itâ(TM)s the volume of space a headphone jack occupies, which is huge for the interior of a phone. The thinking all manufacturers are following is: we get more space if we can put the audio through the USB port. They do it already (I play audio from my phone to my car via USB).
An NFC antenna is easy: a trace on the pcboard is enough. The iPhone 6â(TM)s (first google hit because Iâ(TM)m lazy) is a piece of ribbon Cable - requiring very little internal volume.
Itâ(TM)s all about real estate.
Are you kidding?
NFC is typically built in to the same chip as WiFi & Bluetooth. Thereâ(TM)s no âoeextra partâ taking up space, and the price delta is less than a penny. (One advantage of a modern 14 nm process is that a few million transistors are negligible in cost and size)
A headphone jack takes up half a cubic centimeter, and will never get smaller. Connectors are never cheap. ($0.50 in lots of 200k for a 3.5mm jack)
The fact is that every major phone manufacturer has dropped the headphone jack like a hot potato - with Lenovo/Motorola announcing phones without a jack even before Apple did, and others within weeks of Appleâ(TM)s announcement.
Much like PS/2 peripherals, the world is shifting from the old, single purpose interconnect and moving to USB. Also like PS/2, if you want to use the old interface, you get to use a dongle.
Itâ(TM)s not even remotely unprecedented in consumer electronics. VGA and the other analog video standards are all but gone now. Itâ(TM)s rare to find anything in a store that can use Composite video, to say nothing for component video or S-Video.
Still, it will be hard to know how many sales Google will lose because people will buy a phone that has a jack instead, so this is all pretty much wild speculation all around.
Every major competitor to Google I can think of has already dumped the headphone jack, itâ(TM)s hard to see it as a competitive loss to Google. That ship has not only sailed, but itâ(TM)s reached its destination and unloaded its cargo.
New phones (including Appleâ(TM)s) output standard USB audio and metadata.
Instead of having special connectors for laptop power supplies, keyboards, mice, headphones, speakers, disk drives, game and other HID devices... they are all converging to use USB.
And Iâ(TM)m OK with that standardization
Quite clearly, that hasnâ(TM)t proven to be a problem for Apple, Samsung, Essential, or LG
Why should Google expect anything different?
The ability to use wired headphones remains in all cases, and the (often included) dongles havenâ(TM)t proven to be a problem to hundreds of millions of users.
And I say that as a guy who has been using one of the dongles for his headphones for at lease six months now.
Why does any sort of physical contact have to be part of the equation? Wireless charging has been a thing for several years at this point.
There have been technologies which charge bluetooth devices wirelessly from several feet away demonstrated at CES in 2015.
There are even people working on AA batteries which charge wirelessly.
Even Apple is on the wireless charging bandwagon, including their AirPods which charge wirelessly.
Google (and Samsung, LG, and most others) have the same motivation Apple had:
* They can collect device usage metrics, and know exactly how much time people spend listening on wired vs wireless devices
* They therefore have hard numbers for many customers use a headphone jack, and how often
* They took the data and made a cost/benefit decision for which is better: using the limited space inside the case for a DAC, Amplifier, and headphone jack, or use the space for a bigger CPU, battery, etc.
At the end of the day, space inside a phone is premium real estate, and the $0.50-0.75 headphone jack takes a lot of it. If only half of your users use of the jack, then you've wasted both the space and the part.
AptX only matters if:
- Your entire device chain supports AptX
- You actually buy into AptX having higher quality because "more bits".
AptX is Qualcomm's effort at licensing out a 1980's-era codec, and sells "more bits is better" (much like $1,000 "audiophile" optical cables, magic rocks, and so on.) Honestly, AptX is decades older (and less sophisticated) than Bluetooth's SBC.
Out of curiosity, what makes Postscript good and TrueType bad?
Both are two part with outline fonts for printers, and have raster fonts (and hinting) for screens, and both are ancient compared to Graphite, AAT, and OpenType.
I know PostScript is ~5 years older, and had better support in professional printing for a time...
But what makes PostScript âoebetterâ than TrueType? That it came first?
First glances are often misleading.
It's important to consider the first Cable TV systems: A lot of people live in areas where they couldn't receive broadcasts off the air -- they were out of range, had mountains in the way, etc.
Generally enthusiasts in the area built a own high performance antenna system in a good spot for reception, and ran the necessary wiring. They built a distribution network, and shared with their community. Adding the cable & maintaining it isn't free, so they started charging their neighbors money to maintain the network.
That particular problem hasn't gone away -- I know a few nearby areas where there is no OTA reception, in spite of being within 20 km of a transmitter that's on top of a 3,000 m mountain top. Cable & Satellite are the only way they are going to get OTA channels.