Computer science is the study of software at a broad level
Wrong. Computer Science is the study of Algorithms.
First, what, precisely, do you think algorithms are, if not computer software?
Second, no, computer science is broader than the study of algorithms. That's pretty much the definition of theoretical computer science. Computer science can also include subjects like:
Software engineering methodologies.
Human-computer interaction
Programming language theory
Computer networking
These have almost nothing to do with studying algorithms, but they all fall squarely within the realm of computer science.
Paywalled article. Given that I can't read the article, I can only assume it is based on lots of incorrect assumptions.
An average two-bedroom apartment in SF costs ~$4,000/mo., or $48k/year. Food for a family of four costs under $1,000 per month, so we're up to $60k. Renter's insurance will cost you half a grand, and car insurance will probably add another grand for two cars. If you use public transit frequently instead of driving, that will probably balance out. Either way, you're in the ballpark of $62k. Utilities might add another two or three grand. So $65k. If you decide to go with private school for those two kids, you're up to $95 or so. Factor in taxes, and that's only about $140,000 of income. Factor in 15% for retirement savings, and you're still only at $165k. And that's if you're living in SF with a family of four.
What the heck are people doing? Buying a new car every year?
In the SF area, they are offering $122k to entry level programmers. That is not "bottom feeding". It is ridiculously high. My company (San Jose) offers fresh "BS in CS" grads between $80-100k, and we have no problem getting people from SJSU or even Berkeley.
The ones offering $122k to entry-level programmers are probably in SF. That extra $20k either covers the cost of driving your car for an hour and a half from someplace with only moderately insane housing prices or covers the difference in the cost of an apartment up in the city, at your option....
I would strongly disagree with your comment about inability to hang onto experienced people at $145k. That's more than adequate to live comfortably in the Bay Area unless you're burning your money frivolously. And once your salary exceeds the amount you need to live comfortably, you're not likely to change jobs just to make a little more. Instead, other factors become your primary considerations—good coworkers, job satisfaction, commute satisfaction, adequate time off, etc.
In other words, if your company can't retain experienced people at $145k, maybe you should consider moving your company off the peninsula down to the South Bay or even over the hill so that it is a reverse commute. Allow more telecommuting. Hire more people to bring workload down. Add company shutdowns on Thanksgiving week and between Christmas and New Year's. Give everyone an extra two or three days of paid vacation every year. Get rid of managers who don't play well with others. And so on. You'll find your retention rate improves markedly.
The Kindle is kind of popular but that's just an eReader. Not something you put personal data on.
Sure. You pay them with a breath of fresh air. Who would use a credit card?
When we talk about personal data, we mean the union of private personally identifiable information (name, address, phone number, SSN) and information that users create. A credit card number is neither.
You do enter your name when you buy something with a card, but that's the least private piece of PII, and is likely to be present on any device you own anyway, making that not personal data in any meaningful sense except when combined with other private data, such as browsing habits.
A credit card number is a disposable identifier. It identifies your account, not you, and is valid only until the card number is canceled due to theft or whatever. And your liability in the event of theft is zero. This makes CCN theft a problem for CC companies and vendors, but not really a concern for you as the user.
With that said, I do disagree with the original poster for different reasons. There is a definite privacy impact here. People's reading choices can be very personal, and there is enough PII to at least potentially identify the owner (name plus the location where the device was found/stolen). When you combine that with someone's penchant for reading stories about [insert regionally taboo topic here] and their copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, you suddenly know more than any third party rightfully should know about someone even without having what most people would think of as "personal data".
In my high school, Algebra II was a combination of vector math (e.g. for solving systems of equations) and statistics. There wasn't any trig or precalculus, IIRC. That was what the precalculus/"advanced math" class was for. So in my mind, the notion of replacing Algebra II with statistics is almost a non-change. The problem, apparently, is that some schools teach a bunch of stuff in Algebra II that really should be left for a later class, presumably because of insufficient numbers of years to teach the material.
IMO, the basic ideas of algebra ought to be introduced in first grade, even if it is no more than a basic computer programming class that gives you some notion of a variable as a stand-in for a number. Then use the concepts more and more through the years so that by the time you get to high school, nobody needs to take an algebra class.
The same is true for statistics. It would be useful for kids to understand statistics by the time they're in junior high school science, and they really need to know it before they start taking high school science. Start introducing the concepts a little bit at a time in the elementary school curriculum, and that problem goes away.
Computer science is the study of software at a broad level, including software design methodologies (practical CS) and problem complexity (theoretical CS). The first is science (a social science, specifically), because you can experiment with different methodologies, see how they perform, and draw conclusions. The second is more of a theoretical science because you're studying the way computers behave and modeling real-world systems in simplified terms and hopefully verifying how those models relate to real-world behavior, though the latter part is often ignored by theoreticians.
What if just stopping means the truck behind you plows into you and you DIE?
Then either they're following way too closely or your brake lights aren't working?:-) But seriously, I did say that the computer would continue to steer, which presumably would mean steering to the best of its ability towards a shoulder or other safe place to stop, rather than slamming on the brakes at maximum pressure right in front of a speeding semi.
There has to be a full set of manual controls in order for people inside and outside the car to be safe!
The thing is, if you have a full set of manual controls, then you, the driver, are at least partially responsible if anything goes wrong, even if you aren't driving, because you could have taken over, and therefore should have taken over. And in many situations, the ability to take over is actually undesirable. For example, consider a tired or drunk person who falls unconscious behind the wheel and ends up hitting the manual steering wheel in a way that causes it to go across the median and into oncoming traffic. That person and the people in the oncoming vehicle(s) would have been better off had the vehicle provided no manual controls beyond a stop button.
What if swerving to the left or right is what's best, but it's not what your autonomous system would do? Then what?
What if you think that swerving to the left or right is what's best, but your autonomous vehicle knows that there's a vehicle coming towards you in the left lane and a motorcycle that you can't see in your rearview mirror who is lane-splitting on your right? A driving computer being right when you're wrong should be far more likely than the reverse, because a computer is capable of processing many, many more input sources than a human can. If we aren't to that point, then the vehicles shouldn't on the highway. And when we pass that point, then the human is far more likely to cause an accident by taking over than to prevent one, and it is safer to not have the manual controls at all.
but what, then, about driving places you can't plan on driving to? Offroad? Just 'driving around' for fun, no actual destination?
Tell your car which direction to go, and it should be capable of continuing in that direction until it runs out of road or gas, whichever comes first, and it should then come to a stop safely. There's no reason that an automated vehicle inherently requires an explicit destination. The overall driving functionality is almost exactly the same whether there's a destination programmed in or just a direction.
Why are you trying so hard to avoid the question? We all agree that it is not a good idea, that was not the question. Is it safe?
Is it safe? Of course not. It is just orders of magnitude safer than racing down the highway at 80 in a 55 zone.
Do you also think it's safe to fire a gun at random in a room full of people? I probably only have a 1% chance of killing someone, so that makes it "safe" and reasonable to you?
That falls clearly under reckless disregard for human safety. Drawing a gun in a crowded room, even if you don't shoot it, puts people's lives in danger. Even before you shoot, people near you are likely to trample each other trying to get away. And if you do shoot, such a reaction is almost assured. So there's almost a 100% chance of serious injury or loss of life if you draw a gun in a crowded room and shoot it, even if you deliberately shoot it in a way where the bullet can't hit anyone.
Stopping on a road is orders of magnitude less dangerous than pulling out a loaded gun in a crowded room. Cars stop on a road all the time, and the overwhelming majority of the time of the time, the biggest harm it causes is causing a traffic backup that makes people late to work. To put the risk in perspective, the closest thing that we have statistics for are secondary accidents, where one traffic accident causes a second accident in the backup. The probability of an accident in a traffic backup is somewhere on the order of 0.5%–1.5%, and that's all secondary accidents, including minor fender-benders where somebody cuts into somebody's side while changing lanes at 2 MPH in the backup.
Now, here's where we multiply. About half of one percent of accidents result in a fatality. When we multiply that out, stopping your car has about 25 ten-thousandths of one percent chance of killing someone. So statistically speaking, you'd expect, on average, a little over two deaths if you stopped your car in a driving lane 100,000 times, give or take. That's why deaths in secondary accidents are so rare that you can't even find statistics for them.
And that's based on actual accidents, where you have multiple vehicles stopped in a lane for half an hour or longer, as compared with a single vehicle stopped for a couple of minutes. So that probably reduces the odds of a fatal crash by another order of magnitude. In other words, this really was approximately a one-in-a-million long shot.
So no, no reasonable person could possibly expect that stopping on the road would cause a death, much less multiple deaths. You're five times as likely to die from a lightning strike over the course of your life than to kill someone by making a single illegal stop in the middle of a busy freeway. From a safety perspective, that makes such a stop only slightly unsafe, not grossly negligent (which is the standard that you would need to prove if you wanted any sort of vehicular manslaughter charges to stick in the U.S., typically, to the best of my understanding).
As I predicted, your responses are all systems that operate within a very much mechanically-limited scope, not anything like a free-ranging over-the-road vehicle that can literally go anywhere, including over a cliff, off a bridge, into a crowd of people, or into an immovable object (like a concrete abutment, or the side of a building) at fatal speeds;
By such a strict standard, there's nothing in the world that could possibly qualify other than an autonomous car, except possibly an autonomous boat or airplane. Other than that, every other means of passenger conveyance has some sort of mechanical limitation to its scope.
But all of those things I listed have many of the same problems that autonomous cars do (people jumping out in front of trains, starting and stopping in the right places, obeying speed limits set based on the safety of specific stretches, determining when it is safe to start driving (e.g. ensuring that everyone is either in the vehicle or out of it, etc.), and none of them necessarily have operators inside the vehicles to ensure their safety.
... the final one of which, I very much wish to point out, is a human element, since all rail systems are ultimately monitored by a human being, somewhere, who also has the ability to bring it to a complete stop. Not even close to the same thing as a so-called 'autonomous car'.
You're assuming that an autonomous car won't have a way for the passengers to bring the vehicle to a complete stop? That seems pretty unlikely. Even if humans are unable to drive the vehicles in manual mode, I'd expect them to always have a failsafe system that, upon holding down the power button, cuts off power to the motor(s) and engages the brakes while the computer continues to steer. Assuming, of course, that there's a human in the vehicle to do so.
... the real problem is that the private key is kept in NAND memory, not the flash memory...
NAND memory is flash memory. Depending on which key you're talking about, either:
The disk encryption key is stored on disk on the 5c. The secure enclave wasn't added until the 5s.
The hardware key consists of burned out fuses inside the CPU. The PIN is entangled with that key. It cannot be readily retrieved in software. You can, however, use acid to remove part of the chip and then using an electron microscope or similar.
The OS erases the disk encryption key after a certain number of tries. However, in the hands of professional attackers, that isn't very valuable, because the key itself is still stored in the normal flash rather than inside a dedicated crypto coprocessor. As a result, you can interpose hardware between the CPU and the flash part to simulate writes using RAM so that the flash data is not actually modified and can be reset trivially to its original values. This is the most sane attack strategy. It involves unsoldering the flash part and adding hardware in the middle. This is slow, but I see no reason that it can't be done unless I'm missing something subtle about the hardware.
I didn't say it was a good idea. It disrupts traffic and greatly increases the odds of minor accidents because of vehicles merging to pass you, not to mention posing a significant risk of a minor, low-speed crash if drivers don't notice the vehicle in time to fully stop.
However, a reasonable person wouldn't expect a stopped car to cause a 70 MPH collision in a 55 MPH speed zone. You'd expect drivers to be starting out at the speed limit +/- 5 MPH rather than +25 MPH. You'd expect them to slow down, merge, and avoid the obstacle like a competent driver would, rather than slam right into the obstacle like somebody who isn't paying the slightest bit of attention to the road. And so on. That sort of accident requires gross negligence on the part of the other driver.
More importantly, had the motorcycle been traveling at the speed limit (55 MPH) instead of 80 MPH, the cycle would have been going at most 40 MPH at the time of impact, and probably slower. At 40 MPH, the odds of a double fatality are about one in 200. At the 70 MPH estimated impact speed, the odds of a double fatality rise to about one in four. That's a factor of fifty difference, and that's without factoring in the fact that the motorcyclist likely could have avoided the crash entirely at a slower speed by merging into the other lane, so it is probably more like a factor of several hundred difference.
Based on that, the car's driver is less than 1% responsible for those deaths.... That's stretching the definition of negligent manslaughter pretty badly, IMO.
Problem 2) You are wrong about most people not having those requirements. While most people are not a 17 year old, nor are they a 71 year old, most people HAVE a 17 year old kid or a 71 year old relative. Those that don't have a 17 year old neighbor or a 71 year old neighbor. The question is whether they want these people, who drive on the same roads as they do, to drive themselves, or to use a driverless car.
Not just them. Add long-haul truckers to that list—people who operate on the minimum number of hours of sleep allowed by law to get goods to a particular destination on time. Self-driving trucks will also enable us to significantly reduce the number of trucks on problematic roads and during problematic times of day. For example, we could ban all large trucks on CA Highway 17. It would take longer for them to go around through Watsonville on the flat roads, but with an automated truck, that would matter a lot less. That would significantly reduce traffic accidents by removing all the vehicles that have to follow the 35 MPH truck speed limit, allowing both lanes to consistently flow at 50 MPH.
There are a number of ways of doing that, ranging from simply storing every variable twice in two different memory locations to having two identical computers that must agree with each other.
The first one won't help if the bit flip causes the program code to become corrupt, or causes the value in a register to get modified and written to both locations. The only real redundancy is complete redundancy, which means at least two identical computers, and ideally, three, with a voting algorithm where the two that agree overrule the one that doesn't, and a "check computer" light popping on when that happens.
Lots of subway systems, Disney's monorail, etc. come pretty close. The only manual control is an emergency stop. All the steering (track changes), speed, etc. is fully automated and outside the driver's control, AFAIK. And in many cases, there's no driver.
Worse, by driving a slower speed, they cause an increase in wrecks around them. Big differences in speed between the slowest and fastest traffic are a major contributing factor to accidents because of how many people end up passing them (often aggressively) and how much road rage happens in the resulting backup. So although they might personally be safer, they cause a net decrease in overall road safety once you factor in the other vehicles on the road.
Reaction time isn't just the 0.whatever seconds it takes you to react to a stimulus you're alert to. It's also the amount of time it takes you to notice the stimulus in the first place. IIRC the majority of collisions are caused by distracted drivers.
More than that, you can only react to problems that you can actually see. A self-driving car can be continuously checking traffic data, reacting to problems before it can optically see them so that you don't have to slam on the brakes to avoid piling into a bunch of stopped cars just around the corner.
You're right, reaction time isn't an issue if you're driving properly. But people don't drive properly, and that doesn't only cause reaction time to be important, but also impacts negatively on their reaction time.
Actually, I'd argue that this is only partially true. People are driving properly for the number of cars on the road and the size of the road. They just aren't compensating sufficiently for humans' relatively poor reaction time and inability to see five cars ahead of them. A self-driving car with a camera pod up on top can see over other vehicles, spot problems farther ahead, and react more quickly. So a self-driving car can safely drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 70 MPH whereas a human driver could never do so safely.
That's another reason why self-driving cars are so badly needed. It isn't just that human failings (inattentiveness in particular) cause wrecks, but also that human vision limitations and limited multitasking capabilities make roads much less efficient.
That negligence was factored into the law when they decided to make blocking traffic an infraction, not an offense that can result in jail time. If you want to treat the negligence as somehow more important than that, then you would have to make a claim that a reasonable person would expect blocking traffic to have that sort of outcome in this particular circumstance.
Vehicular manslaughter generally requires recklessness, which usually requires that the person be aware of the likelihood of stopping causing a fatal collision and exhibiting gross disregard for that risk. At least in my mind, no reasonable person would expect that stopping a car on a highway would cause a motorcyclist to hit the back of his or her car at 70 MPH, particularly if there's a second driving lane. Most people are aware of their surroundings, and travel at a speed that isn't grossly above the speed limit, and as such, most people assume that other drivers will do the same. A driver has to make not one, but several serious errors to end up in a 70 MPH fatal collision with a stopped vehicle.
Congratulations. You've joined a very elite group of people who own UHD movies. And in principle, I very much respect your right to make backups—all three of you—but in practice, unless and until there are enough people who actually care about UHD, I wouldn't expect anybody to spend much effort on trying to crack the DRM.
What you missed is that some roads -- typically Interstates -- require vehicles to maintain a certain speed (hence the "no farm vehicles" signs). I would say that 0 mph was an insufficient speed.
Although that is true, that offense is typically an infraction (at least in the U.S.). By contrast, exceeding the speed limit by 25 MPH (80 in a 55 zone) would normally be a misdemeanor. If both parties committed some sort of traffic violation leading to a wreck, you'd expect blame to fall upon the driver whose violation was more serious.
To add further justification for that opinion, in this case, there's no practical difference between stopping to help ducklings and stopping because of a sudden traffic backup, an animal in the road, or a wreck. If traffic been stopped for any of those reasons, the motorcyclist would still have died because his grossly excessive speed did not leave him adequate time to stop when he found traffic suddenly stopped around the corner. So IMO, the car driver should have been issued a citation for an infraction for illegally obstructing the highway, but she should not have had any culpability in the death of the motorcyclists. That culpability should fall squarely on either the motorcycle driver (if the road's speed limit was reasonable) or the government (if a review found it to be too fast based on the limited visibility around that corner).
That's pretty screwed up. In the U.S., she might get a ticket, but the cyclist would be found to be 100% at fault for the wreck. Speed limit on the roads in the U.S. are, by law, required to be set such that a vehicle moving at the limit would have adequate time to stop even if there's a vehicle stopped or other obstruction on the road, and that's probably true in Canada as well. If a vehicle approaching from behind fails to stop, regardless of the reason why the vehicle fails to stop, that vehicle should always be at fault unless the front vehicle shifted into the lane in front of another car and then immediately slammed on the brakes.
I find it particularly mind-boggling that the judge found that the motorcyclist's grossly excessive speed was not a significant factor. The motorcyclist was going 80 in a 55 zone. That's 145% of the posted speed limit. The motorcyclist would have gotten automatic jail time for that sort of gross recklessness in most of the U.S., had he survived. More to the point, had he been traveling the speed limit, he would have had almost twice as long to slow down, and likely would have been able to dodge the car entirely.
As for the Google situation, legally, it likely depends on how far back the bus driver was when the Google car started around. With that said, San Francisco bus drivers are (or so I'm told by friends who are crazy enough to actually drive there) notorious for not stopping for cars stopped in bus lanes. Google's car needs to make the assumption that Muni buses never yield the right of way even if they legally should. Anything less is just inviting an accident.:-)
The more fundamental problem is that the sole advantage of physical media is not having to use a network connection. That means it works everywhere, whether you have Internet access or not. If you have to have a network connection to watch movies, you might as well watch the movie on Netflix (assuming you aren't on a metered-by-the-byte Internet service, anyway). It might be slightly lower quality right now, but only because people aren't demanding the higher quality. When that changes, that will change.
Additionally, most movies just don't benefit from Ultra HD.
You misspelled "" (the empty string). As in: printf("Additionally, movies ""just don't benefit from Ultra HD.");
Fewer and fewer people are buying physical media at this point, choosing to pay a small fee to Netflix et al for a continuous supply of new content. The few who still do buy physical media are mostly those behind the technology curve, which means they mostly don't own Ultra HD TVs or players. As a standard, Ultra HD is basically stillborn.
Sure, many people buy an Ultra HD TV if they're replacing hardware, simply because other aspects of the image quality make them a better purchase. (The resolution is irrelevant at normal viewing distances, and this is true regardless of the size of your TV, because your eye exhibits angular resolution.)
Similarly, many people will eventually buy an Ultra HD Blu-Ray player as they displace the standard models price-wise. Unfortunately for the studios, almost nobody will replace their existing players until the hardware breaks, which means that it will be a really, really long time before the studios can stop shipping new movies in normal Blu-Ray format, which will still be rippable. And most people will continue to buy their movies in that format, rather than have to deal with multiple copies of each movie for their various players.
This brings me to the main reason why these discs won't be cracked for a while: nobody actually cares. Everybody knows that there's little real-world benefit to the extra resolution, and the extra size of the underlying data can be considerable, depending. This means:
No movie pirates will care whether it is possible to rip them, because they'll prefer the smaller and less battery-draining (but otherwise functionally equivalent) Blu-Ray format anyway.
Nobody who buys movies and wants to make backups will buy the Ultra HD discs in the first place, so they won't care about whether they can back them up. (And even if they did, assuming the new Digital Bridge feature catches on, this isn't likely to be a significant target market for ripping software.)
In short, these companies are engaging in an insane cat and mouse game to "protect" intellectual property in a format that is likely to be purchased by a fraction of a percent of movie viewers even in the best-case scenario, and that would still be watched by about that same fraction of a percent even if the movie studios made unencrypted Ultra HD ISOs available for free in torrent form. Nobody cares about Ultra HD.
Whaaat??? Galoob v. Nintendo did nothing of the sort, the court found that a "product that allowed users to alter codes transmitted between video gaming console and game cartridge did not infringe console manufacturer’s exclusive right, under federal copyright law, to create derivative works". Your interpretation is wildly creative.
Because it held that the manufacturer didn't create the derivative work. One reason for this was that the manufacturer did not use any of the other manufacturer's code or other creative work in their own work. The other reason was that the customer did the actual creation by the act of running the cartridge through the Game Genie. Those exact same two arguments preclude kernel modules from being considered derivative works unless they borrow Linux kernel code.
Your link provides little in the way of case law and a lot in the way of speculation. You might consider doing a little more research yourself, perhaps focusing on the GPL paragraph 5 observation that "nothing else grants you permission to modify or distribute the Program or its derivative works". Canonical proposes to distribute the Zfs binary and Linux binary together. Their argument that the GPL v2 grants them the right to do this is very leaky indeed.
The GPL also says that mere aggregation does not trigger those provisions. Canonical proposes to distribute the ZFS binary and the Linux binary separately as a loadable module and a kernel binary. That falls squarely into the "mere aggregation" category.
[1] Title 17, Chapter 1, Section 117a(1) [cornell.edu]
Eek, a straw man that conflates copying with derivation. Let's just forget about that.
That's not a straw man. Prosecution for creating a derivative work cannot happen unless the work is in "concrete or permanent form". That bit of copyright law means that the mere act of loading a piece of software does not legally create a copy in concrete or permanent form. Therefore, the result cannot be an infringing derivative work. My opinion in the matter is further supported by parts of the opinion in Galoob and was later affirmed by the 9th circuit in Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.. So it is very unlikely that a loadable kernel module could ever be considered a derivative work unless it incorporates actual code borrowed from the kernel.
Further, this particular LKM is merely a port to the Linux kernel interfaces of an existing filesystem that is available on multiple platforms. That means it is in effect a standalone work whose connection to the Linux kernel is purely supportive. Per Micro Star v. FormGen Inc., that also means that it cannot be considered a derivative work.
So before the Linux ZFS port could be considered a derivative work of the Linux kernel, you'd pretty much have to throw away all the existing case law in this area and start over. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's about as likely as Obama winning reelection for a third term as POTUS.
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First, what, precisely, do you think algorithms are, if not computer software?
Second, no, computer science is broader than the study of algorithms. That's pretty much the definition of theoretical computer science. Computer science can also include subjects like:
These have almost nothing to do with studying algorithms, but they all fall squarely within the realm of computer science.
I included taxes in that estimate already... and child care, though perhaps not quite enough for young children.
Paywalled article. Given that I can't read the article, I can only assume it is based on lots of incorrect assumptions.
An average two-bedroom apartment in SF costs ~$4,000/mo., or $48k/year. Food for a family of four costs under $1,000 per month, so we're up to $60k. Renter's insurance will cost you half a grand, and car insurance will probably add another grand for two cars. If you use public transit frequently instead of driving, that will probably balance out. Either way, you're in the ballpark of $62k. Utilities might add another two or three grand. So $65k. If you decide to go with private school for those two kids, you're up to $95 or so. Factor in taxes, and that's only about $140,000 of income. Factor in 15% for retirement savings, and you're still only at $165k. And that's if you're living in SF with a family of four.
What the heck are people doing? Buying a new car every year?
The ones offering $122k to entry-level programmers are probably in SF. That extra $20k either covers the cost of driving your car for an hour and a half from someplace with only moderately insane housing prices or covers the difference in the cost of an apartment up in the city, at your option....
I would strongly disagree with your comment about inability to hang onto experienced people at $145k. That's more than adequate to live comfortably in the Bay Area unless you're burning your money frivolously. And once your salary exceeds the amount you need to live comfortably, you're not likely to change jobs just to make a little more. Instead, other factors become your primary considerations—good coworkers, job satisfaction, commute satisfaction, adequate time off, etc.
In other words, if your company can't retain experienced people at $145k, maybe you should consider moving your company off the peninsula down to the South Bay or even over the hill so that it is a reverse commute. Allow more telecommuting. Hire more people to bring workload down. Add company shutdowns on Thanksgiving week and between Christmas and New Year's. Give everyone an extra two or three days of paid vacation every year. Get rid of managers who don't play well with others. And so on. You'll find your retention rate improves markedly.
When we talk about personal data, we mean the union of private personally identifiable information (name, address, phone number, SSN) and information that users create. A credit card number is neither.
You do enter your name when you buy something with a card, but that's the least private piece of PII, and is likely to be present on any device you own anyway, making that not personal data in any meaningful sense except when combined with other private data, such as browsing habits.
A credit card number is a disposable identifier. It identifies your account, not you, and is valid only until the card number is canceled due to theft or whatever. And your liability in the event of theft is zero. This makes CCN theft a problem for CC companies and vendors, but not really a concern for you as the user.
With that said, I do disagree with the original poster for different reasons. There is a definite privacy impact here. People's reading choices can be very personal, and there is enough PII to at least potentially identify the owner (name plus the location where the device was found/stolen). When you combine that with someone's penchant for reading stories about [insert regionally taboo topic here] and their copy of the Anarchist Cookbook, you suddenly know more than any third party rightfully should know about someone even without having what most people would think of as "personal data".
In my high school, Algebra II was a combination of vector math (e.g. for solving systems of equations) and statistics. There wasn't any trig or precalculus, IIRC. That was what the precalculus/"advanced math" class was for. So in my mind, the notion of replacing Algebra II with statistics is almost a non-change. The problem, apparently, is that some schools teach a bunch of stuff in Algebra II that really should be left for a later class, presumably because of insufficient numbers of years to teach the material.
IMO, the basic ideas of algebra ought to be introduced in first grade, even if it is no more than a basic computer programming class that gives you some notion of a variable as a stand-in for a number. Then use the concepts more and more through the years so that by the time you get to high school, nobody needs to take an algebra class.
The same is true for statistics. It would be useful for kids to understand statistics by the time they're in junior high school science, and they really need to know it before they start taking high school science. Start introducing the concepts a little bit at a time in the elementary school curriculum, and that problem goes away.
Computer science is the study of software at a broad level, including software design methodologies (practical CS) and problem complexity (theoretical CS). The first is science (a social science, specifically), because you can experiment with different methodologies, see how they perform, and draw conclusions. The second is more of a theoretical science because you're studying the way computers behave and modeling real-world systems in simplified terms and hopefully verifying how those models relate to real-world behavior, though the latter part is often ignored by theoreticians.
Then either they're following way too closely or your brake lights aren't working? :-) But seriously, I did say that the computer would continue to steer, which presumably would mean steering to the best of its ability towards a shoulder or other safe place to stop, rather than slamming on the brakes at maximum pressure right in front of a speeding semi.
The thing is, if you have a full set of manual controls, then you, the driver, are at least partially responsible if anything goes wrong, even if you aren't driving, because you could have taken over, and therefore should have taken over. And in many situations, the ability to take over is actually undesirable. For example, consider a tired or drunk person who falls unconscious behind the wheel and ends up hitting the manual steering wheel in a way that causes it to go across the median and into oncoming traffic. That person and the people in the oncoming vehicle(s) would have been better off had the vehicle provided no manual controls beyond a stop button.
What if you think that swerving to the left or right is what's best, but your autonomous vehicle knows that there's a vehicle coming towards you in the left lane and a motorcycle that you can't see in your rearview mirror who is lane-splitting on your right? A driving computer being right when you're wrong should be far more likely than the reverse, because a computer is capable of processing many, many more input sources than a human can. If we aren't to that point, then the vehicles shouldn't on the highway. And when we pass that point, then the human is far more likely to cause an accident by taking over than to prevent one, and it is safer to not have the manual controls at all.
Tell your car which direction to go, and it should be capable of continuing in that direction until it runs out of road or gas, whichever comes first, and it should then come to a stop safely. There's no reason that an automated vehicle inherently requires an explicit destination. The overall driving functionality is almost exactly the same whether there's a destination programmed in or just a direction.
You sound like Sarah Palin, don'tcha know.
Is it safe? Of course not. It is just orders of magnitude safer than racing down the highway at 80 in a 55 zone.
That falls clearly under reckless disregard for human safety. Drawing a gun in a crowded room, even if you don't shoot it, puts people's lives in danger. Even before you shoot, people near you are likely to trample each other trying to get away. And if you do shoot, such a reaction is almost assured. So there's almost a 100% chance of serious injury or loss of life if you draw a gun in a crowded room and shoot it, even if you deliberately shoot it in a way where the bullet can't hit anyone.
Stopping on a road is orders of magnitude less dangerous than pulling out a loaded gun in a crowded room. Cars stop on a road all the time, and the overwhelming majority of the time of the time, the biggest harm it causes is causing a traffic backup that makes people late to work. To put the risk in perspective, the closest thing that we have statistics for are secondary accidents, where one traffic accident causes a second accident in the backup. The probability of an accident in a traffic backup is somewhere on the order of 0.5%–1.5%, and that's all secondary accidents, including minor fender-benders where somebody cuts into somebody's side while changing lanes at 2 MPH in the backup.
Now, here's where we multiply. About half of one percent of accidents result in a fatality. When we multiply that out, stopping your car has about 25 ten-thousandths of one percent chance of killing someone. So statistically speaking, you'd expect, on average, a little over two deaths if you stopped your car in a driving lane 100,000 times, give or take. That's why deaths in secondary accidents are so rare that you can't even find statistics for them.
And that's based on actual accidents, where you have multiple vehicles stopped in a lane for half an hour or longer, as compared with a single vehicle stopped for a couple of minutes. So that probably reduces the odds of a fatal crash by another order of magnitude. In other words, this really was approximately a one-in-a-million long shot.
So no, no reasonable person could possibly expect that stopping on the road would cause a death, much less multiple deaths. You're five times as likely to die from a lightning strike over the course of your life than to kill someone by making a single illegal stop in the middle of a busy freeway. From a safety perspective, that makes such a stop only slightly unsafe, not grossly negligent (which is the standard that you would need to prove if you wanted any sort of vehicular manslaughter charges to stick in the U.S., typically, to the best of my understanding).
By such a strict standard, there's nothing in the world that could possibly qualify other than an autonomous car, except possibly an autonomous boat or airplane. Other than that, every other means of passenger conveyance has some sort of mechanical limitation to its scope.
But all of those things I listed have many of the same problems that autonomous cars do (people jumping out in front of trains, starting and stopping in the right places, obeying speed limits set based on the safety of specific stretches, determining when it is safe to start driving (e.g. ensuring that everyone is either in the vehicle or out of it, etc.), and none of them necessarily have operators inside the vehicles to ensure their safety.
You're assuming that an autonomous car won't have a way for the passengers to bring the vehicle to a complete stop? That seems pretty unlikely. Even if humans are unable to drive the vehicles in manual mode, I'd expect them to always have a failsafe system that, upon holding down the power button, cuts off power to the motor(s) and engages the brakes while the computer continues to steer. Assuming, of course, that there's a human in the vehicle to do so.
NAND memory is flash memory. Depending on which key you're talking about, either:
The OS erases the disk encryption key after a certain number of tries. However, in the hands of professional attackers, that isn't very valuable, because the key itself is still stored in the normal flash rather than inside a dedicated crypto coprocessor. As a result, you can interpose hardware between the CPU and the flash part to simulate writes using RAM so that the flash data is not actually modified and can be reset trivially to its original values. This is the most sane attack strategy. It involves unsoldering the flash part and adding hardware in the middle. This is slow, but I see no reason that it can't be done unless I'm missing something subtle about the hardware.
I didn't say it was a good idea. It disrupts traffic and greatly increases the odds of minor accidents because of vehicles merging to pass you, not to mention posing a significant risk of a minor, low-speed crash if drivers don't notice the vehicle in time to fully stop.
However, a reasonable person wouldn't expect a stopped car to cause a 70 MPH collision in a 55 MPH speed zone. You'd expect drivers to be starting out at the speed limit +/- 5 MPH rather than +25 MPH. You'd expect them to slow down, merge, and avoid the obstacle like a competent driver would, rather than slam right into the obstacle like somebody who isn't paying the slightest bit of attention to the road. And so on. That sort of accident requires gross negligence on the part of the other driver.
More importantly, had the motorcycle been traveling at the speed limit (55 MPH) instead of 80 MPH, the cycle would have been going at most 40 MPH at the time of impact, and probably slower. At 40 MPH, the odds of a double fatality are about one in 200. At the 70 MPH estimated impact speed, the odds of a double fatality rise to about one in four. That's a factor of fifty difference, and that's without factoring in the fact that the motorcyclist likely could have avoided the crash entirely at a slower speed by merging into the other lane, so it is probably more like a factor of several hundred difference.
Based on that, the car's driver is less than 1% responsible for those deaths.... That's stretching the definition of negligent manslaughter pretty badly, IMO.
Not just them. Add long-haul truckers to that list—people who operate on the minimum number of hours of sleep allowed by law to get goods to a particular destination on time. Self-driving trucks will also enable us to significantly reduce the number of trucks on problematic roads and during problematic times of day. For example, we could ban all large trucks on CA Highway 17. It would take longer for them to go around through Watsonville on the flat roads, but with an automated truck, that would matter a lot less. That would significantly reduce traffic accidents by removing all the vehicles that have to follow the 35 MPH truck speed limit, allowing both lanes to consistently flow at 50 MPH.
The first one won't help if the bit flip causes the program code to become corrupt, or causes the value in a register to get modified and written to both locations. The only real redundancy is complete redundancy, which means at least two identical computers, and ideally, three, with a voting algorithm where the two that agree overrule the one that doesn't, and a "check computer" light popping on when that happens.
Lots of subway systems, Disney's monorail, etc. come pretty close. The only manual control is an emergency stop. All the steering (track changes), speed, etc. is fully automated and outside the driver's control, AFAIK. And in many cases, there's no driver.
Worse, by driving a slower speed, they cause an increase in wrecks around them. Big differences in speed between the slowest and fastest traffic are a major contributing factor to accidents because of how many people end up passing them (often aggressively) and how much road rage happens in the resulting backup. So although they might personally be safer, they cause a net decrease in overall road safety once you factor in the other vehicles on the road.
More than that, you can only react to problems that you can actually see. A self-driving car can be continuously checking traffic data, reacting to problems before it can optically see them so that you don't have to slam on the brakes to avoid piling into a bunch of stopped cars just around the corner.
Actually, I'd argue that this is only partially true. People are driving properly for the number of cars on the road and the size of the road. They just aren't compensating sufficiently for humans' relatively poor reaction time and inability to see five cars ahead of them. A self-driving car with a camera pod up on top can see over other vehicles, spot problems farther ahead, and react more quickly. So a self-driving car can safely drive in bumper-to-bumper traffic at 70 MPH whereas a human driver could never do so safely.
That's another reason why self-driving cars are so badly needed. It isn't just that human failings (inattentiveness in particular) cause wrecks, but also that human vision limitations and limited multitasking capabilities make roads much less efficient.
That negligence was factored into the law when they decided to make blocking traffic an infraction, not an offense that can result in jail time. If you want to treat the negligence as somehow more important than that, then you would have to make a claim that a reasonable person would expect blocking traffic to have that sort of outcome in this particular circumstance.
Vehicular manslaughter generally requires recklessness, which usually requires that the person be aware of the likelihood of stopping causing a fatal collision and exhibiting gross disregard for that risk. At least in my mind, no reasonable person would expect that stopping a car on a highway would cause a motorcyclist to hit the back of his or her car at 70 MPH, particularly if there's a second driving lane. Most people are aware of their surroundings, and travel at a speed that isn't grossly above the speed limit, and as such, most people assume that other drivers will do the same. A driver has to make not one, but several serious errors to end up in a 70 MPH fatal collision with a stopped vehicle.
Congratulations. You've joined a very elite group of people who own UHD movies. And in principle, I very much respect your right to make backups—all three of you—but in practice, unless and until there are enough people who actually care about UHD, I wouldn't expect anybody to spend much effort on trying to crack the DRM.
:-)
Although that is true, that offense is typically an infraction (at least in the U.S.). By contrast, exceeding the speed limit by 25 MPH (80 in a 55 zone) would normally be a misdemeanor. If both parties committed some sort of traffic violation leading to a wreck, you'd expect blame to fall upon the driver whose violation was more serious.
To add further justification for that opinion, in this case, there's no practical difference between stopping to help ducklings and stopping because of a sudden traffic backup, an animal in the road, or a wreck. If traffic been stopped for any of those reasons, the motorcyclist would still have died because his grossly excessive speed did not leave him adequate time to stop when he found traffic suddenly stopped around the corner. So IMO, the car driver should have been issued a citation for an infraction for illegally obstructing the highway, but she should not have had any culpability in the death of the motorcyclists. That culpability should fall squarely on either the motorcycle driver (if the road's speed limit was reasonable) or the government (if a review found it to be too fast based on the limited visibility around that corner).
That's pretty screwed up. In the U.S., she might get a ticket, but the cyclist would be found to be 100% at fault for the wreck. Speed limit on the roads in the U.S. are, by law, required to be set such that a vehicle moving at the limit would have adequate time to stop even if there's a vehicle stopped or other obstruction on the road, and that's probably true in Canada as well. If a vehicle approaching from behind fails to stop, regardless of the reason why the vehicle fails to stop, that vehicle should always be at fault unless the front vehicle shifted into the lane in front of another car and then immediately slammed on the brakes.
I find it particularly mind-boggling that the judge found that the motorcyclist's grossly excessive speed was not a significant factor. The motorcyclist was going 80 in a 55 zone. That's 145% of the posted speed limit. The motorcyclist would have gotten automatic jail time for that sort of gross recklessness in most of the U.S., had he survived. More to the point, had he been traveling the speed limit, he would have had almost twice as long to slow down, and likely would have been able to dodge the car entirely.
As for the Google situation, legally, it likely depends on how far back the bus driver was when the Google car started around. With that said, San Francisco bus drivers are (or so I'm told by friends who are crazy enough to actually drive there) notorious for not stopping for cars stopped in bus lanes. Google's car needs to make the assumption that Muni buses never yield the right of way even if they legally should. Anything less is just inviting an accident. :-)
The more fundamental problem is that the sole advantage of physical media is not having to use a network connection. That means it works everywhere, whether you have Internet access or not. If you have to have a network connection to watch movies, you might as well watch the movie on Netflix (assuming you aren't on a metered-by-the-byte Internet service, anyway). It might be slightly lower quality right now, but only because people aren't demanding the higher quality. When that changes, that will change.
You misspelled "" (the empty string). As in: printf("Additionally, movies ""just don't benefit from Ultra HD.");
Fewer and fewer people are buying physical media at this point, choosing to pay a small fee to Netflix et al for a continuous supply of new content. The few who still do buy physical media are mostly those behind the technology curve, which means they mostly don't own Ultra HD TVs or players. As a standard, Ultra HD is basically stillborn.
Sure, many people buy an Ultra HD TV if they're replacing hardware, simply because other aspects of the image quality make them a better purchase. (The resolution is irrelevant at normal viewing distances, and this is true regardless of the size of your TV, because your eye exhibits angular resolution.)
Similarly, many people will eventually buy an Ultra HD Blu-Ray player as they displace the standard models price-wise. Unfortunately for the studios, almost nobody will replace their existing players until the hardware breaks, which means that it will be a really, really long time before the studios can stop shipping new movies in normal Blu-Ray format, which will still be rippable. And most people will continue to buy their movies in that format, rather than have to deal with multiple copies of each movie for their various players.
This brings me to the main reason why these discs won't be cracked for a while: nobody actually cares. Everybody knows that there's little real-world benefit to the extra resolution, and the extra size of the underlying data can be considerable, depending. This means:
In short, these companies are engaging in an insane cat and mouse game to "protect" intellectual property in a format that is likely to be purchased by a fraction of a percent of movie viewers even in the best-case scenario, and that would still be watched by about that same fraction of a percent even if the movie studios made unencrypted Ultra HD ISOs available for free in torrent form. Nobody cares about Ultra HD.
Because it held that the manufacturer didn't create the derivative work. One reason for this was that the manufacturer did not use any of the other manufacturer's code or other creative work in their own work. The other reason was that the customer did the actual creation by the act of running the cartridge through the Game Genie. Those exact same two arguments preclude kernel modules from being considered derivative works unless they borrow Linux kernel code.
The GPL also says that mere aggregation does not trigger those provisions. Canonical proposes to distribute the ZFS binary and the Linux binary separately as a loadable module and a kernel binary. That falls squarely into the "mere aggregation" category.
That's not a straw man. Prosecution for creating a derivative work cannot happen unless the work is in "concrete or permanent form". That bit of copyright law means that the mere act of loading a piece of software does not legally create a copy in concrete or permanent form. Therefore, the result cannot be an infringing derivative work. My opinion in the matter is further supported by parts of the opinion in Galoob and was later affirmed by the 9th circuit in Micro Star v. FormGen Inc.. So it is very unlikely that a loadable kernel module could ever be considered a derivative work unless it incorporates actual code borrowed from the kernel.
Further, this particular LKM is merely a port to the Linux kernel interfaces of an existing filesystem that is available on multiple platforms. That means it is in effect a standalone work whose connection to the Linux kernel is purely supportive. Per Micro Star v. FormGen Inc., that also means that it cannot be considered a derivative work.
So before the Linux ZFS port could be considered a derivative work of the Linux kernel, you'd pretty much have to throw away all the existing case law in this area and start over. I'm not saying it can't happen, but it's about as likely as Obama winning reelection for a third term as POTUS.