The MacBook litigation was exactly about that - how several professionals who were well trained with color perception put two displays side by side and saw different levels of quality.
On a more basic level, Apple misrepresented the product hoping that majority of the customers do not have enough of technical expertise or physical ability to detect the fraud on their own. Apple was wrong, and had to pay for that.
To put this issue in different terms, suppose I sell you an audio amplifier, for a hefty premium, that claims to have 0.0001% distortion in range from 1 Hz to 1,000,000 Hz. You buy the thing and find out that the amp yields an atrocious 0.1% distortion in range 20-20,000 Hz, and is a total disaster outside of that range. You come to me and complain, and I tell you that "nobody has audio sources outside of 20-20K range, and besides average ears can't hear that level of distortion anyway." At very least you'd be mad at me that you paid all that extra money for nothing and bought an amp that is only slightly shinier than an average Chinese deal that Wal-Mart has on sale.
This is also equivalent to many other possible frauds - making cars that are not "safer" in a crash because most people don't crash cars; drugs that kill users if overdosed by 10% because most people take drugs as directed; computers that instead of 300 GB HDD have 60 GB HDDs because most people don't know the difference and don't have that much data anyway...
if I put something down on a table in my front yard while I go inside and get a drink, not realizing someone will come along and take it, have I made an offer to that someone to distribute what I've left laying there?
IANAL, but first let's change the scenario to remove the usual theft: someone makes a photocopy of a book that you left on that table while getting a drink.
In this case, do you have any obligation to anyone (such as the publisher) to protect the book from copying, while not explicitly facilitating the copying? (there is no copier nearby, and there is no sticker that says "Copy me!")
I don't believe there is any such requirement. The legal piece in a book says "No part of this book may be reproduced..." but does not place any obligations on someone who is not copying. If you copy you may be liable; however if you do not prevent copying there is not much they can do to you, short of tagging you as an co-conspirator. For example, if you borrow a book from a library there is absolutely no way the library can know ahead of time (or at any time, actually) that you intend to scan the book and upload the e-text somewhere.
Yes, I am sure that's what they said at Apple. "Those suckers will never figure out what we sold them!" This is just another proof of "corporate honesty" being an oxymoron.
Nuclear weapons are only usable for MAD. See Iran. Bush threatens Iran with nuclear bombing, and Iran says "you won't dare." And Iran is probably right. Bombing Iran will be more devastating to the USA than bombing a major US city. How, for example, about the world-wide trade and travel ban against the USA? And that is the mildest possible response against such an attack. David Gerrold depicted a similar scenario in "The War Against The Chtorr" series. There the USA started the war, lost it, and was placed under a number of humiliating restrictions by the rest of the world. (Then, of course, The Chtorr came, but that's a different subject.)
It depends. I work at a place where a janitors' badge doesn't open the door to my room. So s/he can enter and clean only during regular hours, when people are present to observe what's happening. Most of security people can't enter either.
An agnostic believes that certain claims can not be proven or disproven. He may have some reasoning to support his position, but a certain amount of conjecture is still required. It is not a religious belief, but rather preponderance of evidence.
It is not necessary to have a large dimming resistor. You simply can alter the forward bias on the LED, thus changing its emission. The catch is that LEDs are current driven, and different LEDs will have slightly different brightness under the same voltage. This can be reduced by small balancing resistors. In other words, it's not a problem.
Disable SMS on your phone. It is useless anyhow, and costs 100x more than a voice call. Then if anyone claims that you sent them something, tell them to ask the phone company.
Uzbekistan has "inherited" some nukes from the USSR and as a fairly "unstable" nation, it's best to make friends with them.
It is not so. Russia collected all the nukes, mainly because other republics had neither need nor capabilities to deal with them.
Also, Uzbekistan is the most stable Muslim nation on Earth because its President, Islam Karimov, maintains a strict discipline and forgives nothing. He learned much from Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein, and then added his own innovative methods. Unfortunately, very few people lived to tell more.
JFK was personally involved with Cuba, bullets were fired and missiles were moved back and forth. I can understand his actions, they were related to contemporary events. However JFK is dead for quite some time, as well as some of Presidents who followed him. Mistreating Cuba for half a century is no more reasonable as whipping your dog daily, for 20 years, for him chewing your shoe when he was a puppy.
Even if it's detectable, which they are, it's always a pain in the ass when you're trying to find a jet with the same radar signature of large bird
Most birds, large or small, never fly at 600-800 mph. And no practical fixed wing aircraft can fly as slow as 24 mph (as an unladen European Swallow does, of course.) A filter for that major difference in returns is trivial.
How about this instead? Just make and sell your damn invention.
A sci-fi writer invents a viable ion syringe (where, say, the drug is delivered as a stream of ions that are accelerated by an electric field and penetrate the unbroken skin.) Should he abandon his writing career and become a pharmacologist, an MD, and a genius businessman to "make and sell his damn invention"?
It does seem far more practical to just sell the patent to someone who is better equipped to deal with manufacturing and selling. It offers less money but less pain too, and many people value their time. So next time I invent a Multi-tool don't expect me to round up VCs and Angels for financing. It's too hard. I've done my job already (inventing) and have no interest in business.
IMO, the patent trolls are most awful not because they hold valid patents for truly novel devices. If a patent exists for a replicator (ST) then it will be licensed by many manufacturers, gladly and for any fee (they will duly replicate more money:-) The trolls are the worst when they come up with an obscure, unrelated or outright submarine patent on some modern technology that developed on its own without ever seeing the patent. And that follows from the concept that inventor's rights begin when the patent office sees the patent. The rights should start when the public sees the invention.
Someone needs to tell that to Toyota; in their foolishness they used two electrically and mechanically coupled motor-generators to build a variable transmission for Prius. I wonder why didn't they notice that those hundreds of thousands of manufactured Priuses can't move?:-)
Sorcha Faal thinks Bush ordered to have the cables damaged as a payback for the humiliation during his trip to Saudi Arabia: link
Another, also likely reason is to prevent Saudis from accessing the SWIFT network (read the link about the why.) This, however, is just delaying the inevitable.
Then all the images, PDFs and other binaries that people send (or include into HTML email) would be blocked. I don't know how many minutes it would take for the angry customers to bring the ISP down.
Alternatively, if it does land, a B-2 will certainly turn the landing zone into a smoking many-thousand degree crater seconds or minutes later.
I'm not sure how this B-2 scenario is going to work if the satellite falls deep within the territory of China or Russia. Gary Powers does not work for the US Government any more.
We are completely speculating here, but if the guy wants to sell the software or show it as some kind of investment he needs to demonstrate that he, and he alone, is the owner of it. By owner here I mean a person who can do anything he wants with it. GPL specifically disallows that, as this incident illustrates, and the author is somewhat constrained in his dealing in the code.
For example, he could have been approached about buying his project and continuing it as a closed source under some corporate umbrella. Or he is one of the founders of a new startup and needs to throw something in to get some shares. One thing is likely, though - money is involved somehow.
And ebooks don't come close to the readability, convenience, and utility of an actual book.
This theory is not true for more and more people in the world with every passing day. It is already untrue to me. Books are large, heavy and vulnerable to damage or loss or just your normal wear & tear. Digital books are not subject to that, you can make a backup (see DRM and the whole thread) and keep the book intact in almost all circumstances. You can search in e-books; they have as much color as the author wants; the access devices can read it to you if you are not in position to read yourself. If the DRM allows, you can copy and paste quotes from an ebook without retyping and risking some unintentional misquote. Everyone on the planet has access (maybe for pay) to any e-book since storing a copy is practically zero cost to a publisher. Infinite number of copies can be made (by the copyright holder) without any drain of finite resources of the planet. Paper is not free, far from it; paper mills are polluting environment and eating trees. Paper books are also not interactive, you can't download a corrected version - and all books have errors. E-books also allow you to add comments to the content without damaging the book itself.
As far as I know, the old school still maintains that reading on paper is easier. Well, if it's easier for them then they are welcome to keep reading on dead trees. For me it is just as easy to read on an LCD. Resolution of modern LCD is good enough for any reading I ever do. Add anti-aliasing and hardly anyone with a normal eyesight can tell a difference; it may even be easier to read on a common LCD as opposed to some junk paper that they tend to use in paperback books. Lighting is also important; it is sure easy to read a font printed on a 2,000 dpi printer on a perfect paper, in perfect daylight. But reading a newspaper in a typical room, printed on a worst paper ever, with ink that smears on your fingers, illuminated by a light that is somewhere on the wall - this is not a good reading environment. In such a case (of which I believe there are plenty) a good reader with controlled brightness of the screen, guaranteed no-smear ink, nice smooth font will easily exceed paper in usability.
This is one of the strong points of the OLPC initiative, by the way. It is very difficult to distribute tens of millions of textbooks to children every year (just as difficult as to collect the previous year's undamaged books from them.) And if you want to study something else, above and beyond the standard course, forget it - the student may never find the right book if the nearest library is 1000 miles away (or only 100 miles, but without a car and fuel it might be on the Moon with the same effect.) Many countries have more than one language, and that is another level of the problem with paper books - you never know where they are needed and how many. Electronic textbooks can be distributed for free to anyone who wants them, and there is no incremental cost per copy, and there are no "unsold copies" to be disposed of. Any country who buys OLPC can afford electronic textbooks.
One question is whether the engines could have developed the needed additional power in time - how late was the thrust deficit noticed, compared the normal expected lag in engine response? The report gives the impression that the pilots believed they commanded something that was feasible, and it did not happen.
The pilots had about one minute between the detection of the failure and hitting the grass. The [working] engines are certainly able to go all the way from idle to takeoff power within that time (actually, in far less, as any air traveler knows.)
That means either that the autothrottles are not at fault
There is a post somewhere above this one where the poster tells that on 777 autothrottle works through the pilot's controls, physically moving the levers. This way the pilot can overrule the automatic controls by just forcing the levers to the desired position (and then presumably the autothrottle detects that and disengages.) So if this is true then the autothrottle is not at fault here.
It is indeed far more convenient to blame the pilots, regardless of the real cause. However in this case Boeing and BA and Rolls Royce have no such an easy way out. The airplane was on autopilot when the error occurred. Pilots involved themselves only when they had to, after the failure was apparent. In addition, they have megabytes of data intact on all flight data recorders, and they won't be allowed to change even a single bit of that, since these companies are not the investigators.
I guess a very powerful, always-on jammer could have reached an aircraft at 600 ft. However, airplanes are designed to be illuminated with radar beams, obviously. The metal frame of the airplane shields the inside space (and the inside space is also shielded from the outside.) So the possibility of an external signal getting to an internal equipment (other than via the proper path through an antenna) is fairly low, IMO.
Another data point to consider is that the failure was not transient. Normally if you introduce some noise into the channel then you lose some symbols here and there, or the clock even. But the higher level protocols take care of that. Pull the network cable, for example - your SSH session will stay alive for half a minute, until TCP timers run out. I am sure that in an airplane loss of a message will be first noticed and logged, then reported as a potential trouble, and if it continues then some other emergency action will be taken. But if the error ceases to be then the message gets through and you can continue using the controlled device.
Since the malfunction occurred quite far from the airport, and it did not fix itself after the aircraft moved away from a possible jammer location, then in my uneducated opinion the relevant controls just "wedged" somewhere, asking for a hard reset. It will take some Boeing engineers with the diagrams to find out where two independent engine control paths merge or at least get close to each other. And they still have the physical electronics of the airplane, most of it probably undamaged. On top of that they have every single bit from every single flight data recorder, and those are of improved type that record more parameters than usual.
In addition, if the two engines are identical (as they should be) and have the same firmware loaded into their controllers, then the same command sent to both engines could easily take them out at the same time. It could be a fairly complicated sequence, for example, but as long as both engines are operated by another computer (autopilot / autothrottle) then you can be fairly sure that the two engines would be as much in sync with each other as possible, and the "ping of death", so to say, would affect both.
There is a crime of attempted murder. There is no crime of attempted infringement (an infringement is not a crime to begin with.) As Yoda would say, "you infringe or you do not, there is no try."
Slashdot Mirror
That is shell (bash). Useful if you want something like this:
On a more basic level, Apple misrepresented the product hoping that majority of the customers do not have enough of technical expertise or physical ability to detect the fraud on their own. Apple was wrong, and had to pay for that.
To put this issue in different terms, suppose I sell you an audio amplifier, for a hefty premium, that claims to have 0.0001% distortion in range from 1 Hz to 1,000,000 Hz. You buy the thing and find out that the amp yields an atrocious 0.1% distortion in range 20-20,000 Hz, and is a total disaster outside of that range. You come to me and complain, and I tell you that "nobody has audio sources outside of 20-20K range, and besides average ears can't hear that level of distortion anyway." At very least you'd be mad at me that you paid all that extra money for nothing and bought an amp that is only slightly shinier than an average Chinese deal that Wal-Mart has on sale.
This is also equivalent to many other possible frauds - making cars that are not "safer" in a crash because most people don't crash cars; drugs that kill users if overdosed by 10% because most people take drugs as directed; computers that instead of 300 GB HDD have 60 GB HDDs because most people don't know the difference and don't have that much data anyway ...
IANAL, but first let's change the scenario to remove the usual theft: someone makes a photocopy of a book that you left on that table while getting a drink.
In this case, do you have any obligation to anyone (such as the publisher) to protect the book from copying, while not explicitly facilitating the copying? (there is no copier nearby, and there is no sticker that says "Copy me!")
I don't believe there is any such requirement. The legal piece in a book says "No part of this book may be reproduced..." but does not place any obligations on someone who is not copying. If you copy you may be liable; however if you do not prevent copying there is not much they can do to you, short of tagging you as an co-conspirator. For example, if you borrow a book from a library there is absolutely no way the library can know ahead of time (or at any time, actually) that you intend to scan the book and upload the e-text somewhere.
Yes, I am sure that's what they said at Apple. "Those suckers will never figure out what we sold them!" This is just another proof of "corporate honesty" being an oxymoron.
Nuclear weapons are only usable for MAD. See Iran. Bush threatens Iran with nuclear bombing, and Iran says "you won't dare." And Iran is probably right. Bombing Iran will be more devastating to the USA than bombing a major US city. How, for example, about the world-wide trade and travel ban against the USA? And that is the mildest possible response against such an attack. David Gerrold depicted a similar scenario in "The War Against The Chtorr" series. There the USA started the war, lost it, and was placed under a number of humiliating restrictions by the rest of the world. (Then, of course, The Chtorr came, but that's a different subject.)
It depends. I work at a place where a janitors' badge doesn't open the door to my room. So s/he can enter and clean only during regular hours, when people are present to observe what's happening. Most of security people can't enter either.
An agnostic believes that certain claims can not be proven or disproven. He may have some reasoning to support his position, but a certain amount of conjecture is still required. It is not a religious belief, but rather preponderance of evidence.
It is not necessary to have a large dimming resistor. You simply can alter the forward bias on the LED, thus changing its emission. The catch is that LEDs are current driven, and different LEDs will have slightly different brightness under the same voltage. This can be reduced by small balancing resistors. In other words, it's not a problem.
To make sure that the attachments can not be decoded.
Disable SMS on your phone. It is useless anyhow, and costs 100x more than a voice call. Then if anyone claims that you sent them something, tell them to ask the phone company.
It is not so. Russia collected all the nukes, mainly because other republics had neither need nor capabilities to deal with them.
Also, Uzbekistan is the most stable Muslim nation on Earth because its President, Islam Karimov, maintains a strict discipline and forgives nothing. He learned much from Joseph Stalin and Saddam Hussein, and then added his own innovative methods. Unfortunately, very few people lived to tell more.
JFK was personally involved with Cuba, bullets were fired and missiles were moved back and forth. I can understand his actions, they were related to contemporary events. However JFK is dead for quite some time, as well as some of Presidents who followed him. Mistreating Cuba for half a century is no more reasonable as whipping your dog daily, for 20 years, for him chewing your shoe when he was a puppy.
Most birds, large or small, never fly at 600-800 mph. And no practical fixed wing aircraft can fly as slow as 24 mph (as an unladen European Swallow does, of course.) A filter for that major difference in returns is trivial.
A sci-fi writer invents a viable ion syringe (where, say, the drug is delivered as a stream of ions that are accelerated by an electric field and penetrate the unbroken skin.) Should he abandon his writing career and become a pharmacologist, an MD, and a genius businessman to "make and sell his damn invention"?
It does seem far more practical to just sell the patent to someone who is better equipped to deal with manufacturing and selling. It offers less money but less pain too, and many people value their time. So next time I invent a Multi-tool don't expect me to round up VCs and Angels for financing. It's too hard. I've done my job already (inventing) and have no interest in business.
IMO, the patent trolls are most awful not because they hold valid patents for truly novel devices. If a patent exists for a replicator (ST) then it will be licensed by many manufacturers, gladly and for any fee (they will duly replicate more money :-) The trolls are the worst when they come up with an obscure, unrelated or outright submarine patent on some modern technology that developed on its own without ever seeing the patent. And that follows from the concept that inventor's rights begin when the patent office sees the patent. The rights should start when the public sees the invention.
Someone needs to tell that to Toyota; in their foolishness they used two electrically and mechanically coupled motor-generators to build a variable transmission for Prius. I wonder why didn't they notice that those hundreds of thousands of manufactured Priuses can't move? :-)
Another, also likely reason is to prevent Saudis from accessing the SWIFT network (read the link about the why.) This, however, is just delaying the inevitable.
Then all the images, PDFs and other binaries that people send (or include into HTML email) would be blocked. I don't know how many minutes it would take for the angry customers to bring the ISP down.
I'm not sure how this B-2 scenario is going to work if the satellite falls deep within the territory of China or Russia. Gary Powers does not work for the US Government any more.
We are completely speculating here, but if the guy wants to sell the software or show it as some kind of investment he needs to demonstrate that he, and he alone, is the owner of it. By owner here I mean a person who can do anything he wants with it. GPL specifically disallows that, as this incident illustrates, and the author is somewhat constrained in his dealing in the code.
For example, he could have been approached about buying his project and continuing it as a closed source under some corporate umbrella. Or he is one of the founders of a new startup and needs to throw something in to get some shares. One thing is likely, though - money is involved somehow.
This theory is not true for more and more people in the world with every passing day. It is already untrue to me. Books are large, heavy and vulnerable to damage or loss or just your normal wear & tear. Digital books are not subject to that, you can make a backup (see DRM and the whole thread) and keep the book intact in almost all circumstances. You can search in e-books; they have as much color as the author wants; the access devices can read it to you if you are not in position to read yourself. If the DRM allows, you can copy and paste quotes from an ebook without retyping and risking some unintentional misquote. Everyone on the planet has access (maybe for pay) to any e-book since storing a copy is practically zero cost to a publisher. Infinite number of copies can be made (by the copyright holder) without any drain of finite resources of the planet. Paper is not free, far from it; paper mills are polluting environment and eating trees. Paper books are also not interactive, you can't download a corrected version - and all books have errors. E-books also allow you to add comments to the content without damaging the book itself.
As far as I know, the old school still maintains that reading on paper is easier. Well, if it's easier for them then they are welcome to keep reading on dead trees. For me it is just as easy to read on an LCD. Resolution of modern LCD is good enough for any reading I ever do. Add anti-aliasing and hardly anyone with a normal eyesight can tell a difference; it may even be easier to read on a common LCD as opposed to some junk paper that they tend to use in paperback books. Lighting is also important; it is sure easy to read a font printed on a 2,000 dpi printer on a perfect paper, in perfect daylight. But reading a newspaper in a typical room, printed on a worst paper ever, with ink that smears on your fingers, illuminated by a light that is somewhere on the wall - this is not a good reading environment. In such a case (of which I believe there are plenty) a good reader with controlled brightness of the screen, guaranteed no-smear ink, nice smooth font will easily exceed paper in usability.
This is one of the strong points of the OLPC initiative, by the way. It is very difficult to distribute tens of millions of textbooks to children every year (just as difficult as to collect the previous year's undamaged books from them.) And if you want to study something else, above and beyond the standard course, forget it - the student may never find the right book if the nearest library is 1000 miles away (or only 100 miles, but without a car and fuel it might be on the Moon with the same effect.) Many countries have more than one language, and that is another level of the problem with paper books - you never know where they are needed and how many. Electronic textbooks can be distributed for free to anyone who wants them, and there is no incremental cost per copy, and there are no "unsold copies" to be disposed of. Any country who buys OLPC can afford electronic textbooks.
The pilots had about one minute between the detection of the failure and hitting the grass. The [working] engines are certainly able to go all the way from idle to takeoff power within that time (actually, in far less, as any air traveler knows.)
That means either that the autothrottles are not at fault
There is a post somewhere above this one where the poster tells that on 777 autothrottle works through the pilot's controls, physically moving the levers. This way the pilot can overrule the automatic controls by just forcing the levers to the desired position (and then presumably the autothrottle detects that and disengages.) So if this is true then the autothrottle is not at fault here.
It is indeed far more convenient to blame the pilots, regardless of the real cause. However in this case Boeing and BA and Rolls Royce have no such an easy way out. The airplane was on autopilot when the error occurred. Pilots involved themselves only when they had to, after the failure was apparent. In addition, they have megabytes of data intact on all flight data recorders, and they won't be allowed to change even a single bit of that, since these companies are not the investigators.
Another data point to consider is that the failure was not transient. Normally if you introduce some noise into the channel then you lose some symbols here and there, or the clock even. But the higher level protocols take care of that. Pull the network cable, for example - your SSH session will stay alive for half a minute, until TCP timers run out. I am sure that in an airplane loss of a message will be first noticed and logged, then reported as a potential trouble, and if it continues then some other emergency action will be taken. But if the error ceases to be then the message gets through and you can continue using the controlled device.
Since the malfunction occurred quite far from the airport, and it did not fix itself after the aircraft moved away from a possible jammer location, then in my uneducated opinion the relevant controls just "wedged" somewhere, asking for a hard reset. It will take some Boeing engineers with the diagrams to find out where two independent engine control paths merge or at least get close to each other. And they still have the physical electronics of the airplane, most of it probably undamaged. On top of that they have every single bit from every single flight data recorder, and those are of improved type that record more parameters than usual.
In addition, if the two engines are identical (as they should be) and have the same firmware loaded into their controllers, then the same command sent to both engines could easily take them out at the same time. It could be a fairly complicated sequence, for example, but as long as both engines are operated by another computer (autopilot / autothrottle) then you can be fairly sure that the two engines would be as much in sync with each other as possible, and the "ping of death", so to say, would affect both.
There is a crime of attempted murder. There is no crime of attempted infringement (an infringement is not a crime to begin with.) As Yoda would say, "you infringe or you do not, there is no try."