That percentage is there to pay apple for the development and operation of the app store ecosystem. Apple is paying for that ecosystem every day in the form of developer salaries and massive infrastructure costs.
Uh, no. Apple distributes free apps for free whether they offer in-app purchases or not. Apple gets rewarded for that by people buying hardware for which there are lots of apps available. Therefore, it is entirely nonsensical to suggest that because an app is tied to a subscription service, that Apple somehow deserves a cut of those services solely because they provided the ability to download an app that consumes those services.
And that argument fundamentally falls apart for another reason: The only reason Spotify is distributed by Apple is because Apple will not allow companies to distribute their own apps. Therefore those costs of distributing the app via the App Store are entirely Apple's decision, forced upon Spotify by Apple, not the other way around. Apple doesn't get to dictate that everyone must use their distribution mechanism, and then turn around and claim that because other folks used their distribution mechanism, suddenly they owe Apple a percentage of their income in perpetuity. I understand that Apple wants that, but it certainly isn't owed to them.
Frankly, this is a bit like Ford changing the gasoline filler connector and requiring every gas station to use their special filler, then demanding a percentage of the cost of every gallon of gas pumped through that nozzle. The fact that anybody puts up with it from Apple is, frankly, amazing, and there's a reason most of the major players have chosen to present an unfriendly login screen with no hints of how to get an account, rather than giving up a huge chunk of their revenue to a company that has done basically nothing to earn a huge chunk of their monthly revenue.
And most of the big companies that haven't been non-user-friendly about it (e.g. Facebook) have gotten permission from Apple to ignore that part of the App Store rules. Yeah, Facebook takes credit cards for Ad purchasing right in the app. No in-app purchases. This makes Apple's position even more legally tenuous, IMO, because they'll make exceptions for Facebook, but won't make exceptions for a company whose services are in direct competition with an Apple-branded service. Danger, Will Robinson!
To suggest that Apple gets to use the app store for free is one of the silliest things I have ever seen.
It is not free, but it is nearly free. The proportional costs for Apple Music's use of the store (payment system) are negligible. Realistically, because Apple aggregates billing for multiple services and gets preferential treatment for being such a huge vendor with such a low charge reversal rate, I'd imagine their cost for operating the billing system is less than 2% of the cost of the subscription. The difference between that number and 30% (or even 15%) represents a major competitive advantage.
Our screwy guidelines apply equally to all app developers except us. ..
Emphasis added.
Statement autocompleted.
Apple doesn't have to pay their exorbitant percentage to somebody else. Therefore, even though their app is pedantically following the same rules, they're paying money to themselves, which means they are not, in any meaningful way, in the same position as third-party vendors. This is open-and-shut anticompetitive behavior by Apple. They're competing directly against other App Store vendors, and have given themselves preferential treatment. So those vendors should get special treatment to alleviate this serious antitrust violation. Anything short of that is quite likely to be per se illegal.
And Apple's General Counsel should know this, which means he is deliberately distorting reality with his letter. I can only assume that this means Apple is not just violating the law, but willfully violating the law, which means treble damages. Enjoy your lawsuit, Cupertino.
Why aren't we using more client side SSL certificates, these could be issued by Twitter or something for their purposes. Why are passwords still being used?
It wouldn't matter whether a third party had access to a password or a client cert; they'd still have access to the account. Passwords are only bad because of keyloggers and guessability. When neither of those two is involved in the hack, there's no benefit to using certs.
Technically, they only know about the ones who didn't know that they'd save money buy buying the subscription on the website, which is likely to be a dwindling number over time, or at best, a continuous stream of newbies who eventually realize their mistake and start subscribing directly.
Your proposed solution sounds good, but my issue with it is that the App Store does not cost Apple $0 to operate. So if they gave away their 30%, that would harm them disproportionately since they would then also have to provide for their App Store team.
The app store is entirely an orthogonal issue. Spotify is a free app, so Apple would still be obligated to distribute it for free even if Spotify stopped selling subscriptions in the app and presented only a login screen, thus forcing users to do a Google search for the website and buy a subscription there. So it doesn't make sense to treat those normal costs of doing business as part of the value added by Apple's in-app purchases.
So by my math, other than the fairly negligible benefit of customer convenience (only updating your credit card in one place instead of two every few years), the only real value that Apple's in-app purchases provide is the purchasing system itself, which is measured in the low single-digit percent territory, at least for customers the size of Spotify. (The benefit is bigger for smaller companies, of course, because they won't get the preferential merchant account rates and people will be less comfortable giving unknown companies their credit cards... but again, that doesn't apply in this case.)
So maybe not 30%, but how about 25%? That would roughly balance the scales.
Nice straw man. Apple could just as easily mandate one-click cancellation of subscriptions purchased through third-party billing systems as a condition for putting an app in the App Store. Nothing about such requirements requires using Apple's massively overpriced payment system.
The real problem here occurs when you have hyper-competitive markets like song-streaming. Spotify, AM, Pandora, they all fight every contract and deal they make for fractions of pennies due to the micro-margins and huge throughput in their business models.
That's not really the problem; I mean yes, it is part of the problem, but it is not the core problem. If every vendor had to pay that percentage for Apple's payment processing, those companies could continue to fight for every cent, but they would be competing on equal terms. The problem is that Apple itself is in the music streaming market, and by requiring everyone else to use Apple's payment service (on which Apple makes a profit) instead of much cheaper third-party payment services, it is effectively granting Apple an unfair competitive advantage over everyone else in that space, because they can choose to not take the extra profit on the transactions themselves, and thus can offer their own music service for considerably less money than anyone else.
Now if Apple is willing to give 30% of their Apple Music revenue to music charities to level the playing field, that's fine (and musicians everywhere would love it if they did), but otherwise, what they're doing is blatantly anticompetitive, in addition to undeniably harming consumers by tricking iOS users into paying a higher price for the same goods and services solely because they happen to have downloaded the app and subscribed through the app rather than going to the company's website and buying a subscription before downloading the app. (BTW, I reject the entire notion that Apple "brought those customers to the table". Most people who get apps do so after hearing about them outside the App Store. Almost nobody I know has ever discovered anything in the App Store without searching for it; the store is just too big for that to be practical.)
The thing is, lots of folks pointed out all of these problems way back when Apple first announced their in-app purchase rules, and it has been an ongoing battle ever since. Eventually, it is going to come down to an antitrust suit, which Apple is likely to lose. And that will also be bad for consumers, because the app store rules do have a valid purpose—making it so that users don't have to give out their credit card to every random app that they do business with.
IMO, the only solution that won't harm consumers is for Apple to change their rules so that the "in-app purchases only" rule has an explicit exception for subscriptions to services that are also available on non-mobile platforms via a website. This would basically cover all the interesting edge cases, would cause Apple minimal financial impact in the long run, and would prevent this from turning into an ugly lawsuit where everyone loses.
The ability to hide cameras is nothing new, and making them orders of magnitude smaller doesn't change that much; it was already possible to hide a camera in ways that would be almost impossible to discover accidentally. The reason we don't have cameras hidden everywhere is that you have to provide power and a communication channel, both of which take up considerable amounts of space, and thus make it much easier to detect the cameras. This doesn't change that.
That's great for things that run in a controlled environment and for things you tend not to plug and unplug on a regular basis.
No, it isn't even true in those situations. There are certain classes of late-onset failure that are alarmingly common in computers, most of which involve thermal stress on solder balls (with the GPUs being the worst offenders). These problems don't usually start to show up in large quantities until after the first year, but reduce the machines to doorstops within the first three or four.
IMO, anything with a GPU should have a minimum five-year warranty, and the warranty should automatically be extended by a year every time they repair it. That's the only way it will ever cost the manufacturers enough to get them to put pressure on the GPU manufacturers to fix their designs....
Who pays to retrofit all existing shipping tonnage? How is your new "modern" ship with those unnecesarily complex systems and failure points requiring increased maintenance competitive in the market? Hint: Nobody will, and it isn't.
The question wasn't whether anybody would be willing to do it, but rather whether it was practical to create. If your definition of practical has to extend to whether it would be practical to replace all shipping boxes in the world, then clearly the answer is "no", but that would be true for any solution that anyone could possibly come up with, no matter how simple, because there are just too many shipping boxes in use.
And the reason it probably won't happen isn't technical, but rather statistical; the odds of pirates attacking an unmanned freighter are tiny, and the expected losses are so small relative to the value of the total cargo shipped that the ability to submerge to prevent piracy would not be worth the cost.
With that said, if the lack of security crew on the boats eventually results in piracy becoming more popular by several orders of magnitude, then at some point you'll reach a threshold beyond which it actually would make sense to submerge the cargo to protect it. And at that point, the market will decide that it makes sense, and they'll start building submersible transport ships and sea boxes that are waterproof down to a few hundred feet underwater. Unless and until that happens, obviously, it won't.
First, each container must be airtight and watertight (appropriate gaskets, etc.) to at least 200 feet, and locked using an electronic lock with no external access other than by plugging in a special controller that powers up the lock and uses RSA or EC crypto to authenticate itself to the lock controller. Second, to protect itself against pirates, the interior of the ship must be airtight and watertight to several thousand feet of pressure, and must have appropriate pumps and chambers such that when attacked, it can pump all of the air from one set of chambers into another, while allowing water to take up the space.
Pirates get on the boat. Boat submerges. Pirates end up in the drink.
The truth is the computer has to assess the situation exactly like a human brain using sensors which have a finite accuracy and some uncertainity on the readings.
Yes and no. Yes, it has to assess the situation much like a human brain would by taking inputs and choosing a course of action. No, it isn't at all like a human brain. For one thing, an autonomous car has a lot more information at its disposal than a human brain does. In particular, it has multiple cameras, so it doesn't have to look to see if the left lane is clear for an emergency evasion. It already knows. Those critical milliseconds can often make the difference between a good outcome and a bad one.
For that matter, an autonomous car can have cameras where human vision can't penetrate. It has no blind spots in which other cars and pedestrians can hide. It can potentially see over other vehicles to recognize brake lights that a human can't see. And so on. It knows whether anybody is tailgating it, and can reduce the risk of getting rear-ended by blinking, then braking twice as hard a second later than it otherwise would.
And potentially, cars could communicate with one another, allowing them to know about bad road conditions when they're a mile away, allowing it ample time to slow down before the ice patch. And they could coordinate braking to make it possible for them to tailgate safely, thus increasing traffic density without the slowdowns and backups that we have now (which are a leading cause of wrecks).
So at least in theory, autonomous cars can be orders of magnitude better at driving than any human driver is capable of being, by virtue of being able to see things that people can't and communicate in ways that people can't. The only question is how long it will take before they exceed human driving abilities so much that we ban manual cars.:-)
I thought the USB 2 portion of the USB C cable was dedicated, while the four high-speed lanes are capable of carrying anything?
By my reading of the Wikipedia article, it looks like the alternate mode can take over the slow lanes, too, but it could be wrong, or I could have read it wrong.:-)
I thought the USB-2 only mode was when alternate mode took over all four high-speed lanes, which means you can still run Thunderbolt 40Gbps and get USB 2 accessories on the same cable.
That's correct. AFAIK, Thunderbolt 3 takes all four of the fast lanes, though. I mean, I guess it is technically a multi-lane setup, so if you were using only half the Thunderbolt lanes for Thunderbolt, you could ostensibly use USB 3.0 over it, but I don't know if that's actually an allowed configuration.
The alternate modes have the option of taking over basically every data pin. Whether they do or not is dependent on the alternates. If Thunderbolt 3 only takes over the four high-speed lanes, then yes, I suppose the port technically is still USB, though at that point, it is only USB 2.0.
My point was that in Thunderbolt mode, the protocol it is using to drive high-speed devices is Thunderbolt at that point, not USB.
So for all the bluster of how the UK is doomed for leaving the EU, it seems several countries in Europe are doing fine
Doomed is too strong a word, but bear in mind that there's a big difference between never agreeing to join an economic community and telling that community to eff off. If this goes forward, they'll be at the mercy of the remaining EU members, hoping that the EU members don't decide to stick it to them out of spite, and I'd argue that the EU has little to lose by doing so at that point....
Yep, as a German I can only say, don't let the door hit you on your way out.
Even we uncouth Americans recognize the UK for what it is—a country that liked to be in the EU whenever it suited them, to the extent that they wanted to be, but also pretended that none of the rules applied to them. They've basically been an EU nation in name only for as long as I can remember. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the EU didn't throw them out years ago.
And as everyone predicted, the pound is tanking without the strength of the EU to prop it up. If the EU really wanted to have fun, they could probably make the UK economy collapse completely by refusing to trade with them. The impact on the rest of the EU would be small compared with the impact on the UK. Then in five years, they could offer to reluctantly let the UK back in with an exchange rate of two pounds to the Euro, but only if they actually started acting like real members of the EU. Some of the EU member nations might well decide to do that just out of spite.
Frankly, I'm surprised the pound is still worth as much as it is, given how tenuous their economic outlook is without the backing of the EU. I suspect that things will get a lot worse for the UK before they stabilize. The good news is that the U.K. can expect plenty of us yanks coming as tourists next summer when a pound is only worth 75 cents. Cheers.
But nobody moves large quantities of content between devices.
I do. I do it every time I import photos from my DSLR. I move tens of gigabytes at a time from the camera to a computer. In some cases, I then painfully upload tens of gigabytes to a server in another state so that other folks can enjoy the pics as well. That last part takes weeks, thanks to (IIRC) 768 kbps DSL upload speeds. I don't move them to my phone because my phone can't hold any meaningful percentage of my photos anyway. I also don't access them online very often, because it is an order of magnitude too slow.
We don't use our phones to edit the next Pixar film. 99% of my time on a mobile device is spent on apps that require connectivity anyway.
Ah, but what you're missing is that the main reason we don't use mobile devices for more things is that they have inadequate storage and no good way to move content into and out of them. Otherwise, people would be doing video editing on iPads far more than they do. I mean, the editing workflow of slicing things and dragging chunks around lends itself to a touch interface, but it needs hundreds of gigabytes of storage backing it (not to mention lots of CPU behind it).
That is one of the arguments that the defendant's attorney should make during the actual trial—that there's no proof that the person in question actually downloaded the content in question, as opposed to potentially being a victim of all the other malware that he downloaded.
Then on page 47 see the section headed "Defendant Has No Reasonable Expectation of Privacy in His Computer", which STARTS with a bit about IP address, but then goes on to cover other information retrieved from the computer. The reasoning (excuse) given is that because your computer could be hacked, you have no reasonable expectation that it won't be. Per well-established precedent, no "reasonable expectation of privacy" means no fourth amendment protection.
What it actually said was that the defendant, by intentionally going on a kiddie porn website, should have been aware that getting hacked was a possibility, and should have been careful enough to avoid getting hacked. Because the defendant was not careful, the defendant had already effectively given up any expectation privacy on that computer, and the government's further intrusion was akin to looking through a broken window shade. Although I don't agree with that sentiment, the ruling is far narrower than you're interpreting it to be.
Also, it's a district court, so it doesn't create binding precedent. It literally affects only this one case. If we start to see more and more rulings making such claims under different circumstances, it might be worth getting concerned over, but this is barely even peaking above the court system's noise floor.
I agree that the claim that they didn't need a warrant was pushing things a bit far, and fortunately, the current justice dept. policy does require one, even though they also say that they don't believe that they need one.
That said, it's a district court, so no binding precedent was set. It is pretty much just the opinion of one judge, and its effects are no farther reaching than this specific case.
But the state didn't lie except by misrepresenting a phone home executable as kiddie porn. That's not really any different from pretending that you're going to sell someone drugs as part of a drug bust, etc.
Now to play devil's advocate, there's reason to question whether it should be lawful for the government to continue actually operating an illegal business as part of its efforts to catch criminals (as opposed to just pretending to run it). Unfortunately, that isn't what the defendant's attorney argued, so we don't know whether that argument (which IMO is a much stronger legal argument) would have played out in the courts.
Only if you mean mean Thunderbolt 3 (which happens to be based on a USB-C connector, but is not USB). Boy, will that cause consumer confusion, what with them sticking USB-C on the MacBook just months before Thunderbolt 3 was ready....
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Facebook gets preferential treatment. Why shouldn't Spotify?
Citation please?
Launch Facebook on iOS. Tap "More". Tap "More" in the resulting list. Tap "Ads Manager". Tap "Get Started". Tap "Billing". Tap "Add Card".
Uh, no. Apple distributes free apps for free whether they offer in-app purchases or not. Apple gets rewarded for that by people buying hardware for which there are lots of apps available. Therefore, it is entirely nonsensical to suggest that because an app is tied to a subscription service, that Apple somehow deserves a cut of those services solely because they provided the ability to download an app that consumes those services.
And that argument fundamentally falls apart for another reason: The only reason Spotify is distributed by Apple is because Apple will not allow companies to distribute their own apps. Therefore those costs of distributing the app via the App Store are entirely Apple's decision, forced upon Spotify by Apple, not the other way around. Apple doesn't get to dictate that everyone must use their distribution mechanism, and then turn around and claim that because other folks used their distribution mechanism, suddenly they owe Apple a percentage of their income in perpetuity. I understand that Apple wants that, but it certainly isn't owed to them.
Frankly, this is a bit like Ford changing the gasoline filler connector and requiring every gas station to use their special filler, then demanding a percentage of the cost of every gallon of gas pumped through that nozzle. The fact that anybody puts up with it from Apple is, frankly, amazing, and there's a reason most of the major players have chosen to present an unfriendly login screen with no hints of how to get an account, rather than giving up a huge chunk of their revenue to a company that has done basically nothing to earn a huge chunk of their monthly revenue.
And most of the big companies that haven't been non-user-friendly about it (e.g. Facebook) have gotten permission from Apple to ignore that part of the App Store rules. Yeah, Facebook takes credit cards for Ad purchasing right in the app. No in-app purchases. This makes Apple's position even more legally tenuous, IMO, because they'll make exceptions for Facebook, but won't make exceptions for a company whose services are in direct competition with an Apple-branded service. Danger, Will Robinson!
It is not free, but it is nearly free. The proportional costs for Apple Music's use of the store (payment system) are negligible. Realistically, because Apple aggregates billing for multiple services and gets preferential treatment for being such a huge vendor with such a low charge reversal rate, I'd imagine their cost for operating the billing system is less than 2% of the cost of the subscription. The difference between that number and 30% (or even 15%) represents a major competitive advantage.
Statement autocompleted.
Apple doesn't have to pay their exorbitant percentage to somebody else. Therefore, even though their app is pedantically following the same rules, they're paying money to themselves, which means they are not, in any meaningful way, in the same position as third-party vendors. This is open-and-shut anticompetitive behavior by Apple. They're competing directly against other App Store vendors, and have given themselves preferential treatment. So those vendors should get special treatment to alleviate this serious antitrust violation. Anything short of that is quite likely to be per se illegal.
And Apple's General Counsel should know this, which means he is deliberately distorting reality with his letter. I can only assume that this means Apple is not just violating the law, but willfully violating the law, which means treble damages. Enjoy your lawsuit, Cupertino.
It wouldn't matter whether a third party had access to a password or a client cert; they'd still have access to the account. Passwords are only bad because of keyloggers and guessability. When neither of those two is involved in the hack, there's no benefit to using certs.
Technically, they only know about the ones who didn't know that they'd save money buy buying the subscription on the website, which is likely to be a dwindling number over time, or at best, a continuous stream of newbies who eventually realize their mistake and start subscribing directly.
The app store is entirely an orthogonal issue. Spotify is a free app, so Apple would still be obligated to distribute it for free even if Spotify stopped selling subscriptions in the app and presented only a login screen, thus forcing users to do a Google search for the website and buy a subscription there. So it doesn't make sense to treat those normal costs of doing business as part of the value added by Apple's in-app purchases.
So by my math, other than the fairly negligible benefit of customer convenience (only updating your credit card in one place instead of two every few years), the only real value that Apple's in-app purchases provide is the purchasing system itself, which is measured in the low single-digit percent territory, at least for customers the size of Spotify. (The benefit is bigger for smaller companies, of course, because they won't get the preferential merchant account rates and people will be less comfortable giving unknown companies their credit cards... but again, that doesn't apply in this case.)
So maybe not 30%, but how about 25%? That would roughly balance the scales.
Nice straw man. Apple could just as easily mandate one-click cancellation of subscriptions purchased through third-party billing systems as a condition for putting an app in the App Store. Nothing about such requirements requires using Apple's massively overpriced payment system.
Netflix isn't competing against an Apple-owned subscription video service. If that changes, you can bet their lawsuit will follow within days.
That's not really the problem; I mean yes, it is part of the problem, but it is not the core problem. If every vendor had to pay that percentage for Apple's payment processing, those companies could continue to fight for every cent, but they would be competing on equal terms. The problem is that Apple itself is in the music streaming market, and by requiring everyone else to use Apple's payment service (on which Apple makes a profit) instead of much cheaper third-party payment services, it is effectively granting Apple an unfair competitive advantage over everyone else in that space, because they can choose to not take the extra profit on the transactions themselves, and thus can offer their own music service for considerably less money than anyone else.
Now if Apple is willing to give 30% of their Apple Music revenue to music charities to level the playing field, that's fine (and musicians everywhere would love it if they did), but otherwise, what they're doing is blatantly anticompetitive, in addition to undeniably harming consumers by tricking iOS users into paying a higher price for the same goods and services solely because they happen to have downloaded the app and subscribed through the app rather than going to the company's website and buying a subscription before downloading the app. (BTW, I reject the entire notion that Apple "brought those customers to the table". Most people who get apps do so after hearing about them outside the App Store. Almost nobody I know has ever discovered anything in the App Store without searching for it; the store is just too big for that to be practical.)
The thing is, lots of folks pointed out all of these problems way back when Apple first announced their in-app purchase rules, and it has been an ongoing battle ever since. Eventually, it is going to come down to an antitrust suit, which Apple is likely to lose. And that will also be bad for consumers, because the app store rules do have a valid purpose—making it so that users don't have to give out their credit card to every random app that they do business with.
IMO, the only solution that won't harm consumers is for Apple to change their rules so that the "in-app purchases only" rule has an explicit exception for subscriptions to services that are also available on non-mobile platforms via a website. This would basically cover all the interesting edge cases, would cause Apple minimal financial impact in the long run, and would prevent this from turning into an ugly lawsuit where everyone loses.
I think you mean 1983. 1963 was the Dr. Who episode with the same title.
The ability to hide cameras is nothing new, and making them orders of magnitude smaller doesn't change that much; it was already possible to hide a camera in ways that would be almost impossible to discover accidentally. The reason we don't have cameras hidden everywhere is that you have to provide power and a communication channel, both of which take up considerable amounts of space, and thus make it much easier to detect the cameras. This doesn't change that.
No, it isn't even true in those situations. There are certain classes of late-onset failure that are alarmingly common in computers, most of which involve thermal stress on solder balls (with the GPUs being the worst offenders). These problems don't usually start to show up in large quantities until after the first year, but reduce the machines to doorstops within the first three or four.
IMO, anything with a GPU should have a minimum five-year warranty, and the warranty should automatically be extended by a year every time they repair it. That's the only way it will ever cost the manufacturers enough to get them to put pressure on the GPU manufacturers to fix their designs....
The question wasn't whether anybody would be willing to do it, but rather whether it was practical to create. If your definition of practical has to extend to whether it would be practical to replace all shipping boxes in the world, then clearly the answer is "no", but that would be true for any solution that anyone could possibly come up with, no matter how simple, because there are just too many shipping boxes in use.
And the reason it probably won't happen isn't technical, but rather statistical; the odds of pirates attacking an unmanned freighter are tiny, and the expected losses are so small relative to the value of the total cargo shipped that the ability to submerge to prevent piracy would not be worth the cost.
With that said, if the lack of security crew on the boats eventually results in piracy becoming more popular by several orders of magnitude, then at some point you'll reach a threshold beyond which it actually would make sense to submerge the cargo to protect it. And at that point, the market will decide that it makes sense, and they'll start building submersible transport ships and sea boxes that are waterproof down to a few hundred feet underwater. Unless and until that happens, obviously, it won't.
First, each container must be airtight and watertight (appropriate gaskets, etc.) to at least 200 feet, and locked using an electronic lock with no external access other than by plugging in a special controller that powers up the lock and uses RSA or EC crypto to authenticate itself to the lock controller. Second, to protect itself against pirates, the interior of the ship must be airtight and watertight to several thousand feet of pressure, and must have appropriate pumps and chambers such that when attacked, it can pump all of the air from one set of chambers into another, while allowing water to take up the space.
Pirates get on the boat. Boat submerges. Pirates end up in the drink.
Problem solved.
Yes and no. Yes, it has to assess the situation much like a human brain would by taking inputs and choosing a course of action. No, it isn't at all like a human brain. For one thing, an autonomous car has a lot more information at its disposal than a human brain does. In particular, it has multiple cameras, so it doesn't have to look to see if the left lane is clear for an emergency evasion. It already knows. Those critical milliseconds can often make the difference between a good outcome and a bad one.
For that matter, an autonomous car can have cameras where human vision can't penetrate. It has no blind spots in which other cars and pedestrians can hide. It can potentially see over other vehicles to recognize brake lights that a human can't see. And so on. It knows whether anybody is tailgating it, and can reduce the risk of getting rear-ended by blinking, then braking twice as hard a second later than it otherwise would.
And potentially, cars could communicate with one another, allowing them to know about bad road conditions when they're a mile away, allowing it ample time to slow down before the ice patch. And they could coordinate braking to make it possible for them to tailgate safely, thus increasing traffic density without the slowdowns and backups that we have now (which are a leading cause of wrecks).
So at least in theory, autonomous cars can be orders of magnitude better at driving than any human driver is capable of being, by virtue of being able to see things that people can't and communicate in ways that people can't. The only question is how long it will take before they exceed human driving abilities so much that we ban manual cars. :-)
By my reading of the Wikipedia article, it looks like the alternate mode can take over the slow lanes, too, but it could be wrong, or I could have read it wrong. :-)
That's correct. AFAIK, Thunderbolt 3 takes all four of the fast lanes, though. I mean, I guess it is technically a multi-lane setup, so if you were using only half the Thunderbolt lanes for Thunderbolt, you could ostensibly use USB 3.0 over it, but I don't know if that's actually an allowed configuration.
The alternate modes have the option of taking over basically every data pin. Whether they do or not is dependent on the alternates. If Thunderbolt 3 only takes over the four high-speed lanes, then yes, I suppose the port technically is still USB, though at that point, it is only USB 2.0.
My point was that in Thunderbolt mode, the protocol it is using to drive high-speed devices is Thunderbolt at that point, not USB.
Doomed is too strong a word, but bear in mind that there's a big difference between never agreeing to join an economic community and telling that community to eff off. If this goes forward, they'll be at the mercy of the remaining EU members, hoping that the EU members don't decide to stick it to them out of spite, and I'd argue that the EU has little to lose by doing so at that point....
Even we uncouth Americans recognize the UK for what it is—a country that liked to be in the EU whenever it suited them, to the extent that they wanted to be, but also pretended that none of the rules applied to them. They've basically been an EU nation in name only for as long as I can remember. Frankly, I'm disappointed that the EU didn't throw them out years ago.
And as everyone predicted, the pound is tanking without the strength of the EU to prop it up. If the EU really wanted to have fun, they could probably make the UK economy collapse completely by refusing to trade with them. The impact on the rest of the EU would be small compared with the impact on the UK. Then in five years, they could offer to reluctantly let the UK back in with an exchange rate of two pounds to the Euro, but only if they actually started acting like real members of the EU. Some of the EU member nations might well decide to do that just out of spite.
Frankly, I'm surprised the pound is still worth as much as it is, given how tenuous their economic outlook is without the backing of the EU. I suspect that things will get a lot worse for the UK before they stabilize. The good news is that the U.K. can expect plenty of us yanks coming as tourists next summer when a pound is only worth 75 cents. Cheers.
I do. I do it every time I import photos from my DSLR. I move tens of gigabytes at a time from the camera to a computer. In some cases, I then painfully upload tens of gigabytes to a server in another state so that other folks can enjoy the pics as well. That last part takes weeks, thanks to (IIRC) 768 kbps DSL upload speeds. I don't move them to my phone because my phone can't hold any meaningful percentage of my photos anyway. I also don't access them online very often, because it is an order of magnitude too slow.
Ah, but what you're missing is that the main reason we don't use mobile devices for more things is that they have inadequate storage and no good way to move content into and out of them. Otherwise, people would be doing video editing on iPads far more than they do. I mean, the editing workflow of slicing things and dragging chunks around lends itself to a touch interface, but it needs hundreds of gigabytes of storage backing it (not to mention lots of CPU behind it).
That is one of the arguments that the defendant's attorney should make during the actual trial—that there's no proof that the person in question actually downloaded the content in question, as opposed to potentially being a victim of all the other malware that he downloaded.
What it actually said was that the defendant, by intentionally going on a kiddie porn website, should have been aware that getting hacked was a possibility, and should have been careful enough to avoid getting hacked. Because the defendant was not careful, the defendant had already effectively given up any expectation privacy on that computer, and the government's further intrusion was akin to looking through a broken window shade. Although I don't agree with that sentiment, the ruling is far narrower than you're interpreting it to be.
Also, it's a district court, so it doesn't create binding precedent. It literally affects only this one case. If we start to see more and more rulings making such claims under different circumstances, it might be worth getting concerned over, but this is barely even peaking above the court system's noise floor.
I agree that the claim that they didn't need a warrant was pushing things a bit far, and fortunately, the current justice dept. policy does require one, even though they also say that they don't believe that they need one.
That said, it's a district court, so no binding precedent was set. It is pretty much just the opinion of one judge, and its effects are no farther reaching than this specific case.
But the state didn't lie except by misrepresenting a phone home executable as kiddie porn. That's not really any different from pretending that you're going to sell someone drugs as part of a drug bust, etc.
Now to play devil's advocate, there's reason to question whether it should be lawful for the government to continue actually operating an illegal business as part of its efforts to catch criminals (as opposed to just pretending to run it). Unfortunately, that isn't what the defendant's attorney argued, so we don't know whether that argument (which IMO is a much stronger legal argument) would have played out in the courts.
Only if you mean mean Thunderbolt 3 (which happens to be based on a USB-C connector, but is not USB). Boy, will that cause consumer confusion, what with them sticking USB-C on the MacBook just months before Thunderbolt 3 was ready....