Except such stories are widely documented, tested, and shown to be more than people making something out of nothing. The most recent ones I've heard of involved cats in hospitals sleeping on patients's beds.
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
Non sequitur.
As usual, it's only a non sequitur if you don't understand it.
The belief in something (god) for which there is any amount of evidence (anything the deterministic laws of physics cannot explain, such as consciousness or the existence of the Universe itself), is perfectly rational. To completely deny the possibility that anything exists beyond what we see and know is irrational, because you can always posit that {All We See and Know} is a subset of a larger Universe.
Your typical Atheist will follow the line of thinking that leads one to believe everything is deterministic, and we know all there is. When you think along these lines, then an Atheist thinking logically (haven't seen a single one of these) MUST come to the conclusion that they are god. Consciousness can't be an illusion, as they often say, because an illusion is an error in perception, and perception is a function of consciousness. To put it another way, if consciousness is an illusion, then who is that illusion fooling? (This is the entire point of Cogito Ergo Sum. It is the only truth one can know - I exist.)
When an Atheist realizes that he is conscious, he must conclude one of the two following things: Either there is more than what we see and know (that account for the consciousness of himself, and possibly others), or that he is the only conscious being in the Universe, everyone else is a meat puppet, and thus he is god. The idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in an Atheist's philosophy is so abhorrent to the character and definition of an Atheist, that they must conclude they are god, or stop being an Atheist.
In terms of believing in god, "god" can be a dude from a specific religion, or just the external (to the known Universe) actor that affects our Universe in unseen ways. "God" could be nothing more than the force that created the Universe and stuck it in the Ronco Rotissery Oven. Set it and forget it!
Belief in any specific god, such as Cthulu or whatever a Tom Cruise believes in, can be shown to be irrational, but not illogical. Belief in god, some external actor existing outside of the set of all we know, is neither illogical nor irrational. To deny the possibility of god is both illogical and irrational.
Thus:
- A logical Atheist concluding that he is god is irrational because instead of admitting there is more than he knows, he chooses to believe he is god and did not know it until just now, is not omnipotent/omniscient, has no way to affect the Universe externally, and is somehow trapped within his own creation.
- A person who believes in a generic god, some external actor, is in fact rational, and because we cannot know which description of god is correct (since god is an external actor), you cannot categorically call all who believe in any specific gods irrational.
My original statement:
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
God is an irrational expression of the need for meaning in your life. Don't try and force your irrationality upon others.
Cogito Ergo Sum. But you? You're probably just a complex meat puppet governed by the deterministic laws of physics. Until you can prove that you are conscious/sentient/aware, I must conclude that I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, therefore, I am god.
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
With respect to the "dictionary attack," as pointed out recently on XKCD, use of a few random words would be a lot tougher for a computer to figure out than random letters/numbers/characters put together.
Absolutely not. That XKCD comic was just fucking wrong. As usual with XKCD.
Raw entropy only matters when your search pattern is random. Any attack that hopes to succeed on non-trivial passwords on a non-astronomical time scale will not be using a random search pattern. It will be using a dictionary-based attack, and will try single words, 2 words, 3 words,... up to some length of characters, well before trying patterns like 7{`G2we7+_+1\aW/.
While a four-word password may have a large amount of digital entropy, it has a low amount entropy when considered by a human. Password crackers are designed to try things from simple to complex, as considered by a human, precisely because humans tend to more easily remember them (and thus use).
Beyond that, his shitty comic refers to an attack against a remote service. Any remote service worth a damn will throttle log-in attempts to all hell, and eventually lock a user out until some other verification requirement is fulfilled. Any non-trivial password is sufficient for a well-behaved remote service. The problem occurs when the site gets hacked and the hashes get out. Then the only thing that protects you is the amount of time it would take to crack your password (with a big ol' GPU cluster courtesy of Amazon), and the amount of time you have to change it. If the site that got hacked is shitty and doesn't notice or notify users promptly, or if they use a standard crypto scheme (scheme != algorithm, scheme includes salting, number of rounds, etc.) and are susceptible to existing rainbow tables, or if they just fucking leaked your shit in plaintext, you're fucked.
Use complex passwords. Not fourstupidwordshere, but &5b3Pwv}|=1k. Deal with it.
Can't enter our server rooms with out special electronic keys. Not getting past our receptionists without a guest pass and someone to vouch for you to sign off on the guest pass.
A man with a plunger in his hand and a hustle in his step will be let in anywhere. Beyond that - when the rats chew through the wiring, how you gonna get into the server room? You're gonna call a locksmith or a guy with a drill and sledge. And beyond that what are you gonna do when someone trains rats to chew through your network cables?
plants able to extract energy from a wider frequency band than is currently possible with photosynthesis (Or even to do so more efficiently.)
and produce sugars from it to feed the modified bacteria living in symbiosis to directly produce diesel. The bacteria has already been created. All that is needed is the sugar.
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
I sort of agree with the AC - everything can backfire in some disastrous way. My daughter's piano teacher fell down some steps and bruised her arm. I got a splinter in my finger putting logs into the woodburner. Question is, is the risk worth it?
IMHO, yes.
Maybe if you didn't chop up her staircase for firewood she wouldn't have fallen. Maybe if you knocked her unconscious before throwing her in the oven with some more logs she wouldn't have struggled, and you wouldn't have gotten that splinter.
and you care so little, you'll go out of your way to make sure we all know how little you care.
Or maybe he cares little about Steve Jobs's hissy fit, and a lot about not getting shot in Compton. Maybe he cares enough about how little the police care about people getting shot, and how much they care about Apple's embarrassing fumbles, to make a post about it.
a) I know, I mentioned it in my post, that you quoted.
b) I know Gizmodo didn't try and sell it, and they they didn;t "find" it initially - they bought it. The point of talking about what is and isn't legal when you "find" something in California is that knowing purchasing stolen property is also a crime. I'm not accusing them of stealing the phone, I'm pointing out that they incriminated themselves by stating on their website that they bought the phone from a guy who had "attempted to return it to Apple".
The only difference is that gizmodo didn't find the prototype on the street, they paid the guy who was trying to unload it. But that's irrelevant. Going back to the wallet example... some bum on the street finds your dropped wallet and puts it up for sale on his blanket... you see it, buy it, and then see the ID inside... and then call the original onwer.
You might think it is irrelevant but it is *against the law in CA* to do what the guy who "found" the phone did, and to do what Gizmodo did, knowing that the guy did not own the phone himself. There is simply no getting around that fact, as inconvenient as it is, because it puts Apple as the non-bad-guy in a story on slashdot, but it's simply the reality of the matter.
If you purchased a wallet from a guy who said he found it on the street and you are pretty certain that it is not his, you are knowingly receiving stolen property by the strict definition of the law in CA which state found items must be reported. They cannot simply be sold on without that procedure.
You might not "see what is wrong" but the law doesn't work that way.
It is not against the law. Now matter how many asterisks you put around your little ranting phrases. Laws are written with a purpose, and to violate this law in a criminal fashion there has to be criminal intent. There was none - to the contrary, they went above and beyond what they were required by law to do. They contacted the probable owners themselves and offered to return the device. They could have just registered it as "a lost phone" at some podunk Sherrif's office, waited 2 weeks, and then taken it as their own.
Judges do this funny thing where the consider both the letter and spirit of laws. There's a reason Gizmodo won. They were right, Apple was wrong. Deal with it.
What "antenna issue"? The one that is so awful that Apple has sold many tens of millions of iPhone 4's, making the iPhone 4 the most popular smartphone out there? Even over a year after its release?
It bothers me when people say "just because Windows sold 400 million copies doesn't make it good," but then Apple apologists will use the same logic for the iPhone.
What's this red herring got to do with my post? Is it somehow meant to debunk the notion that people aren't having some sort of horrible experience with the iPhone 4's antenna?
This issue has been extremely exaggerated. Sales numbers back this up. At the time it was a big news story, people were saying this is some sort of critical flaw, that Apple would have to issue a recall, etc., etc.
Clearly none of that is the case.
But Slashdot is so extremely out of touch with reality, simply pointing out two very obvious fundamental flaws with jhoegl's post gets modded "Troll" simply because it isn't "rah-rah, let's hate Apple!" These flaws are so incontrovertible, you couldn't even actually address them, just bring up a red herring and call me an "apologist"!
It's truly pathetic around here these days.
Do we have to cover this again? Antennae are tuned to pick up specific frequencies. To tune an antenna, you adjust its electrical length. This is determined by the electrical properties of the antenna, as well as its length.
The iPhone 4's antenna is external. When a human hand bridges the edge of the phone where the antenna is, the electrical length is changed (humans are kind of wet, salty, conductive, and capacitive), and thus the antenna is detuned. This causes severe signal loss, on the order of 20 dBi or higher. This can cause call quality to degrade, calls to fail, data speeds to drop, etc.
Mitigation efforts were put in at the software level. These efforts basically consisted of: 1 - Hide the problem in the signal quality display. 2 - Jump around and look for different towers when you see a sudden drop in signal quality.
The external antenna is a severe design flaw and shows that there was no real world testing. If there was a variable resistor attached to the antenna, it could simply be retuned on the fly, though this of course is no substitute for a proper design.
I expect the iPhone 5 to either ditch the external antenna design, or to include a variable resistor to retune it on the fly. Either way they'll tell people it's their best antenna yet.
No, he's saying that few people specifically choose Windows, they choose a "computer". Windows is just what comes with a "computer". Few people who buy PCs buy it specifically for Windows.
Most people don't engage in the stupid platform wars that nerds do. They just really don't give a shit, just like they don't care which FPGA their TV set uses.
Few people specifically choose gasoline engines when the choose a "car". Gasoline engines are just what comes with a "car". Few people who buy cars buy them specifically for gasoline engines. Most people don't engage in the stupid drive wars that hipsters do. They just really don't give a shit, just like they don't care which FPGA their TV set uses.
See what I did there? Dismissing Windows or gasoline engines as "not specifically requested" does not work. Just because an item is not specifically requested, doesn't mean it is not commonly desired. Most prefer gasoline / Windows to diesel / Linux (too much hassle), hybrids / Macs (too much money and the only real benefit is your image), pure electrics / Unix (impractical, backwards for the environment), or solar cars / Whatever Google's trotting out (permanent beta).
It does not matter if it's 500V @ 1A, or 50V @ 10A. It's still the same amount of power. When that power runs through the cable's resistance, you get heat.
The resistance and length of existing USB 3.0 cables are fixed. No 100W solution can change them. Existing USB 3.0 cables were not rated for the voltage, current, or the heat resulting from the subsequent power draw, that this proposal is suggesting.
If you try to put 100W through an existing USB 3.0 cable, you will cause fires. There is absolutely no way around this.
Cables are rated for current draw at a given voltage. V cross A =... ?
The problem isn't "Can it be done?", the problem is "Can it be done in such a way that an old port or old cable will be guaranteed to not cause a fire?".
The answer is simply a big fat no. Existing USB 3.0 ports, controllers, and cables are not designed for that amount of power. Existing host devices aren't designed for that kind of power headroom either. You can get 100 W USB devices and hosts to safely communicate to legacy hosts and devices, but the cable is dumb.
Even if you were able to magically certify all existing USB 3.0 cables as safe for 100 watts, you would then have to deal with all the signal noise issues you'll end up with because of the increased voltages. Not just through the cables, but at the device and host end. Your standard ATX backplane has audio ports right next to USB ports. Even in USB 2.0 systems, the audio ports and chipsets in many systems pick up noise from the USB cables and chipsets because of their proximity. Just google for scroll wheel speaker noise, and you'll see how much of a problem this is already.
Like the plans to increase the maximum power for PoE, this will never work as a consumer product. Technically feasible, sure. Plays well with the existing USB specs, products, and users? Nope.
Linophiles pining after the fabled "Year of Linux on the Desktop" are missing the point by 10 years. The desktop is over. The future in the consumer computing space lies in Android/iOS types of applications.
You'll pry my desktop, monitor, full-size keyboard and mouse, and fully functional, locally-run operating systems and applications from my cold, dead, hands. Oh wait, no you won't. They're too heavy for you, and you'll be busy futzing around with your mobile thing of choice at 30% of the functionality, 10% of the performance, and 5% of the interface operability.
Nothing will ever replace the desktop for me. If the desktop is replaced for the masses, then that's your own fault for choosing inferiority because it's shiny or fits in the pocket on your hipster skinny jeans.
Call Of Duty vs Battlefield - who could possibly choose? Certainly nobody could ever like both! Brown bread vs white - when will the madness end? Blondes vs brunettes vs redheads - the human race is falling apart! Peanut butter vs jelly - the only choice at breakfast time is to cry:'( Coffee vs tea - the hot beverage industry will implode if we don't just CHOOSE ONE gods-damn-it!
Neither. Both series are shit. White bread because it tastes better, if you want healthy, don't eat bread. Brunettes. Jelly. Peanut butter is the devil's anal seepage. Hot chocolate. You get all the benefits of tea (because the benefits come about by drinking hot water), and you get something that tastes good without pouring endless cream and sugar into it like you have to do with coffee, and if you want, you can even get caffeinated versions.
Fire hazard? Huh? You seem like you know just about enough to be dangerous, but really just spew meaningless babble. You work in marketing?
My friend's gaming laptop has a 120W power brick. Nobody gives a shit. The supply provides a limited current, and the low-voltage cable has properly sized conductors and connector. That's all there's to it.
I can't see how providing a 100W, power-limited output from a USB port will cause a problem. The cabling obviously has to be designed to cope with the rated current of such a supply. Nobody would supply 100W over a 5V interface. Most likely USB3 will limit the current on the power pair to some sensible value, and then the power is upped by raising the voltage. To keep the cables affordable, I'm pretty sure that 100W will be provided at 48V, and that means about 2.1A of current. That's merely 4 times more current than the USB2 cables carry, and it means that the cross-sectional area of power conductors has to go up by the same factor. The diameter goes up by the square root of that. So the power pair will have conductors about twice as thick as the ones in the current USB cables, and perhaps the insulation will be a bit thicker, too. The overall diameter of a USB3 cable will be just a tad larger than current decent USB2 cables.
The problem with pushing 100 W through USB 3.0 is that existing USB 3.0 cables: 1: Exist. 2: Aren't certified to carry 100 W. 3: Are definitely too fucking thin to do so, and will cause fires. 4: Provide no method of saying "Hey I'm not rated for this!" before a USB devices starts to draw power.
If you want this to work, you need yet another cable and port, with new keying, to lock out the old USB 3.0 cables. At that point you may as well just provide dedicated pins.
Beyond that, 100W is a LOT of power. No laptop in the world is going to have the overhead power capacity to put out 100 extra watts. The vast majority of your OEM desktops won't, either. They already skimp on power for the front USB ports to save a nickel on the power supply.
Incidentally, if you ever come by a quantity of UPSes that you don't love very much, do as follows:
Turn them all off.
Connecting in a ring, each one powering the one next to it, and powered by the one behind.
Turn them on.
Observe the frantic beeping and relay clicking.
One time I was in Ironforge, and I managed to get a full train going. This means we had enough people to run around the main loop in iron forge (a perfect circle) such that person 2 used/follow on person 1, person 3 use it on 2, and person 1 used it on person n (I don't remember the total count).
Once person 1/folllowed person n, it was completely hands free. All anyone had to do was/train to make the tooooooot tooooooooooot noise and animation as the game moved us all around in a circle endlessly.
Correct. "Cyber warfare" is not warfare. "Cyber warfare" is equivalent to juvenile pranks or light espionage. The instant a foreign nation actually attacked us with them thar innernets is the instant we sever the cables, deny them access to our communication and GPS satellites, and send missiles over.
At most "cyber warfare" is a pointless first strike. Then you step up to warfare. It's much better to simply start with a real attack.
Consider attacks involving remove screen capturing and remote keystroke-capturing technology.
I wouldn't want to be viewing or enter any privileged data at such a conference. Simply typing a passphrase could expose you.
Such attacks are academic at best. Up there with "able to read deleted data unless you overwrite it at least a dozen times". And then you posit performing such an attack during a tech convention? I'd be more worried about contracting the hantavirus from rat shit in the hotel walls.
I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.
IE was the first major browser with per-tab processes, porn mode, tab coloring, TLD highlighting, hiding the menu bar by default, etc.
A single bar for search and navigation is pointless, and it breaks porn mode privacy when you have autocomplete on. You may as well argue for a single hole to stuff food into and shoot shit out of. It is trivial to make a navigation bar also function as a search bar when the entry isn't a URI. In fact, IE was the first to do this too.
Yes, you're on Slashdot, so you have to shit on IE. But at least get the factual things correct - IE was the originator of many of the features you love in Chrome. And everything else of any use was probably done by Opera or an FF/Opera plugin.
Slashdot Mirror
Confirmation bias.
Except such stories are widely documented, tested, and shown to be more than people making something out of nothing.
The most recent ones I've heard of involved cats in hospitals sleeping on patients's beds.
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
Non sequitur.
As usual, it's only a non sequitur if you don't understand it.
The belief in something (god) for which there is any amount of evidence (anything the deterministic laws of physics cannot explain, such as consciousness or the existence of the Universe itself), is perfectly rational. To completely deny the possibility that anything exists beyond what we see and know is irrational, because you can always posit that {All We See and Know} is a subset of a larger Universe.
Your typical Atheist will follow the line of thinking that leads one to believe everything is deterministic, and we know all there is. When you think along these lines, then an Atheist thinking logically (haven't seen a single one of these) MUST come to the conclusion that they are god. Consciousness can't be an illusion, as they often say, because an illusion is an error in perception, and perception is a function of consciousness. To put it another way, if consciousness is an illusion, then who is that illusion fooling? (This is the entire point of Cogito Ergo Sum. It is the only truth one can know - I exist.)
When an Atheist realizes that he is conscious, he must conclude one of the two following things: Either there is more than what we see and know (that account for the consciousness of himself, and possibly others), or that he is the only conscious being in the Universe, everyone else is a meat puppet, and thus he is god.
The idea that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in an Atheist's philosophy is so abhorrent to the character and definition of an Atheist, that they must conclude they are god, or stop being an Atheist.
In terms of believing in god, "god" can be a dude from a specific religion, or just the external (to the known Universe) actor that affects our Universe in unseen ways. "God" could be nothing more than the force that created the Universe and stuck it in the Ronco Rotissery Oven. Set it and forget it!
Belief in any specific god, such as Cthulu or whatever a Tom Cruise believes in, can be shown to be irrational, but not illogical.
Belief in god, some external actor existing outside of the set of all we know, is neither illogical nor irrational.
To deny the possibility of god is both illogical and irrational.
Thus:
- A logical Atheist concluding that he is god is irrational because instead of admitting there is more than he knows, he chooses to believe he is god and did not know it until just now, is not omnipotent/omniscient, has no way to affect the Universe externally, and is somehow trapped within his own creation.
- A person who believes in a generic god, some external actor, is in fact rational, and because we cannot know which description of god is correct (since god is an external actor), you cannot categorically call all who believe in any specific gods irrational.
My original statement:
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
Is perfectly valid, logical, and correct.
God is an irrational expression of the need for meaning in your life. Don't try and force your irrationality upon others.
Cogito Ergo Sum. But you? You're probably just a complex meat puppet governed by the deterministic laws of physics. Until you can prove that you are conscious/sentient/aware, I must conclude that I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, therefore, I am god.
(Just as it is not rational to assume I am the only conscious entity in the Universe, it is not categorically irrational to believe in God.)
It hasn't been finalized yet. Buying a company isn't like buying Twinkies or Cheetos, it can take months or even years to finalize a purchase.
It can take months or even years to "finalize a purchase" of Twinkies or Cheetos, too.
If you know what I mean.
(I'm talking about poop.)
With respect to the "dictionary attack," as pointed out recently on XKCD, use of a few random words would be a lot tougher for a computer to figure out than random letters/numbers/characters put together.
Absolutely not. That XKCD comic was just fucking wrong. As usual with XKCD.
Raw entropy only matters when your search pattern is random. ... up to some length of characters, well before trying patterns like 7{`G2we7+_+1\aW/.
Any attack that hopes to succeed on non-trivial passwords on a non-astronomical time scale will not be using a random search pattern. It will be using a dictionary-based attack, and will try single words, 2 words, 3 words,
While a four-word password may have a large amount of digital entropy, it has a low amount entropy when considered by a human. Password crackers are designed to try things from simple to complex, as considered by a human, precisely because humans tend to more easily remember them (and thus use).
Beyond that, his shitty comic refers to an attack against a remote service. Any remote service worth a damn will throttle log-in attempts to all hell, and eventually lock a user out until some other verification requirement is fulfilled. Any non-trivial password is sufficient for a well-behaved remote service.
The problem occurs when the site gets hacked and the hashes get out. Then the only thing that protects you is the amount of time it would take to crack your password (with a big ol' GPU cluster courtesy of Amazon), and the amount of time you have to change it.
If the site that got hacked is shitty and doesn't notice or notify users promptly, or if they use a standard crypto scheme (scheme != algorithm, scheme includes salting, number of rounds, etc.) and are susceptible to existing rainbow tables, or if they just fucking leaked your shit in plaintext, you're fucked.
Use complex passwords. Not fourstupidwordshere, but &5b3Pwv}|=1k. Deal with it.
How would an attacker cause a fire or a massive water leak in the server room?
Gasoline and a match, of course.
First it's on fire, and then the sprinkler systems flood the room.
Can't enter our server rooms with out special electronic keys. Not getting past our receptionists without a guest pass and someone to vouch for you to sign off on the guest pass.
A man with a plunger in his hand and a hustle in his step will be let in anywhere.
Beyond that - when the rats chew through the wiring, how you gonna get into the server room? You're gonna call a locksmith or a guy with a drill and sledge.
And beyond that what are you gonna do when someone trains rats to chew through your network cables?
plants able to extract energy from a wider frequency band than is currently possible with photosynthesis (Or even to do so more efficiently.)
and produce sugars from it to feed the modified bacteria living in symbiosis to directly produce diesel. The bacteria has already been created. All that is needed is the sugar.
In America, first you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
I sort of agree with the AC - everything can backfire in some disastrous way. My daughter's piano teacher fell down some steps and bruised her arm. I got a splinter in my finger putting logs into the woodburner. Question is, is the risk worth it?
IMHO, yes.
Maybe if you didn't chop up her staircase for firewood she wouldn't have fallen.
Maybe if you knocked her unconscious before throwing her in the oven with some more logs she wouldn't have struggled, and you wouldn't have gotten that splinter.
and you care so little, you'll go out of your way to make sure we all know how little you care.
Or maybe he cares little about Steve Jobs's hissy fit, and a lot about not getting shot in Compton.
Maybe he cares enough about how little the police care about people getting shot, and how much they care about Apple's embarrassing fumbles, to make a post about it.
a) I know, I mentioned it in my post, that you quoted.
b) I know Gizmodo didn't try and sell it, and they they didn;t "find" it initially - they bought it. The point of talking about what is and isn't legal when you "find" something in California is that knowing purchasing stolen property is also a crime. I'm not accusing them of stealing the phone, I'm pointing out that they incriminated themselves by stating on their website that they bought the phone from a guy who had "attempted to return it to Apple".
The only difference is that gizmodo didn't find the prototype on the street, they paid the guy who was trying to unload it. But that's irrelevant. Going back to the wallet example... some bum on the street finds your dropped wallet and puts it up for sale on his blanket... you see it, buy it, and then see the ID inside... and then call the original onwer.
You might think it is irrelevant but it is *against the law in CA* to do what the guy who "found" the phone did, and to do what Gizmodo did, knowing that the guy did not own the phone himself. There is simply no getting around that fact, as inconvenient as it is, because it puts Apple as the non-bad-guy in a story on slashdot, but it's simply the reality of the matter.
If you purchased a wallet from a guy who said he found it on the street and you are pretty certain that it is not his, you are knowingly receiving stolen property by the strict definition of the law in CA which state found items must be reported. They cannot simply be sold on without that procedure.
You might not "see what is wrong" but the law doesn't work that way.
It is not against the law. Now matter how many asterisks you put around your little ranting phrases.
Laws are written with a purpose, and to violate this law in a criminal fashion there has to be criminal intent. There was none - to the contrary, they went above and beyond what they were required by law to do. They contacted the probable owners themselves and offered to return the device. They could have just registered it as "a lost phone" at some podunk Sherrif's office, waited 2 weeks, and then taken it as their own.
Judges do this funny thing where the consider both the letter and spirit of laws. There's a reason Gizmodo won. They were right, Apple was wrong. Deal with it.
Cogito Ergo Sum
The only thing we can know is that we exist.
What "antenna issue"? The one that is so awful that Apple has sold many tens of millions of iPhone 4's, making the iPhone 4 the most popular smartphone out there? Even over a year after its release?
It bothers me when people say "just because Windows sold 400 million copies doesn't make it good," but then Apple apologists will use the same logic for the iPhone.
What's this red herring got to do with my post? Is it somehow meant to debunk the notion that people aren't having some sort of horrible experience with the iPhone 4's antenna?
This issue has been extremely exaggerated. Sales numbers back this up. At the time it was a big news story, people were saying this is some sort of critical flaw, that Apple would have to issue a recall, etc., etc.
Clearly none of that is the case.
But Slashdot is so extremely out of touch with reality, simply pointing out two very obvious fundamental flaws with jhoegl's post gets modded "Troll" simply because it isn't "rah-rah, let's hate Apple!" These flaws are so incontrovertible, you couldn't even actually address them, just bring up a red herring and call me an "apologist"!
It's truly pathetic around here these days.
Do we have to cover this again?
Antennae are tuned to pick up specific frequencies.
To tune an antenna, you adjust its electrical length. This is determined by the electrical properties of the antenna, as well as its length.
The iPhone 4's antenna is external. When a human hand bridges the edge of the phone where the antenna is, the electrical length is changed (humans are kind of wet, salty, conductive, and capacitive), and thus the antenna is detuned. This causes severe signal loss, on the order of 20 dBi or higher. This can cause call quality to degrade, calls to fail, data speeds to drop, etc.
Mitigation efforts were put in at the software level. These efforts basically consisted of:
1 - Hide the problem in the signal quality display.
2 - Jump around and look for different towers when you see a sudden drop in signal quality.
The external antenna is a severe design flaw and shows that there was no real world testing.
If there was a variable resistor attached to the antenna, it could simply be retuned on the fly, though this of course is no substitute for a proper design.
I expect the iPhone 5 to either ditch the external antenna design, or to include a variable resistor to retune it on the fly. Either way they'll tell people it's their best antenna yet.
No, he's saying that few people specifically choose Windows, they choose a "computer". Windows is just what comes with a "computer". Few people who buy PCs buy it specifically for Windows.
Most people don't engage in the stupid platform wars that nerds do. They just really don't give a shit, just like they don't care which FPGA their TV set uses.
Few people specifically choose gasoline engines when the choose a "car". Gasoline engines are just what comes with a "car". Few people who buy cars buy them specifically for gasoline engines. Most people don't engage in the stupid drive wars that hipsters do. They just really don't give a shit, just like they don't care which FPGA their TV set uses.
See what I did there?
Dismissing Windows or gasoline engines as "not specifically requested" does not work. Just because an item is not specifically requested, doesn't mean it is not commonly desired. Most prefer gasoline / Windows to diesel / Linux (too much hassle), hybrids / Macs (too much money and the only real benefit is your image), pure electrics / Unix (impractical, backwards for the environment), or solar cars / Whatever Google's trotting out (permanent beta).
Exercising one's choice to not deal with a particular vendor is the very quintessence of free market.
And encouraging others to follow in your footsteps because of nebulous, vague, unsubstantiated (and even unstated), claims is what?
It's FUD.
It does not matter if it's 500V @ 1A, or 50V @ 10A. It's still the same amount of power.
When that power runs through the cable's resistance, you get heat.
The resistance and length of existing USB 3.0 cables are fixed. No 100W solution can change them.
Existing USB 3.0 cables were not rated for the voltage, current, or the heat resulting from the subsequent power draw, that this proposal is suggesting.
If you try to put 100W through an existing USB 3.0 cable, you will cause fires.
There is absolutely no way around this.
Cables are rated for current draw at a given voltage. ... ?
V cross A =
The problem isn't "Can it be done?", the problem is "Can it be done in such a way that an old port or old cable will be guaranteed to not cause a fire?".
The answer is simply a big fat no. Existing USB 3.0 ports, controllers, and cables are not designed for that amount of power.
Existing host devices aren't designed for that kind of power headroom either.
You can get 100 W USB devices and hosts to safely communicate to legacy hosts and devices, but the cable is dumb.
Even if you were able to magically certify all existing USB 3.0 cables as safe for 100 watts, you would then have to deal with all the signal noise issues you'll end up with because of the increased voltages. Not just through the cables, but at the device and host end. Your standard ATX backplane has audio ports right next to USB ports. Even in USB 2.0 systems, the audio ports and chipsets in many systems pick up noise from the USB cables and chipsets because of their proximity.
Just google for scroll wheel speaker noise, and you'll see how much of a problem this is already.
Like the plans to increase the maximum power for PoE, this will never work as a consumer product. Technically feasible, sure. Plays well with the existing USB specs, products, and users? Nope.
Precisely.
Linophiles pining after the fabled "Year of Linux on the Desktop" are missing the point by 10 years. The desktop is over. The future in the consumer computing space lies in Android/iOS types of applications.
You'll pry my desktop, monitor, full-size keyboard and mouse, and fully functional, locally-run operating systems and applications from my cold, dead, hands.
Oh wait, no you won't. They're too heavy for you, and you'll be busy futzing around with your mobile thing of choice at 30% of the functionality, 10% of the performance, and 5% of the interface operability.
Nothing will ever replace the desktop for me. If the desktop is replaced for the masses, then that's your own fault for choosing inferiority because it's shiny or fits in the pocket on your hipster skinny jeans.
In other news this week:
Call Of Duty vs Battlefield - who could possibly choose? Certainly nobody could ever like both! :'(
Brown bread vs white - when will the madness end?
Blondes vs brunettes vs redheads - the human race is falling apart!
Peanut butter vs jelly - the only choice at breakfast time is to cry
Coffee vs tea - the hot beverage industry will implode if we don't just CHOOSE ONE gods-damn-it!
Neither. Both series are shit.
White bread because it tastes better, if you want healthy, don't eat bread.
Brunettes.
Jelly. Peanut butter is the devil's anal seepage.
Hot chocolate. You get all the benefits of tea (because the benefits come about by drinking hot water), and you get something that tastes good without pouring endless cream and sugar into it like you have to do with coffee, and if you want, you can even get caffeinated versions.
Any more brain busters?
I want a USB powered coffee machine that operates with the hypertext coffee pot control protocol.
Make it have more XML, and then people will buy it.
Fire hazard? Huh? You seem like you know just about enough to be dangerous, but really just spew meaningless babble. You work in marketing?
My friend's gaming laptop has a 120W power brick. Nobody gives a shit. The supply provides a limited current, and the low-voltage cable has properly sized conductors and connector. That's all there's to it.
I can't see how providing a 100W, power-limited output from a USB port will cause a problem. The cabling obviously has to be designed to cope with the rated current of such a supply. Nobody would supply 100W over a 5V interface. Most likely USB3 will limit the current on the power pair to some sensible value, and then the power is upped by raising the voltage. To keep the cables affordable, I'm pretty sure that 100W will be provided at 48V, and that means about 2.1A of current. That's merely 4 times more current than the USB2 cables carry, and it means that the cross-sectional area of power conductors has to go up by the same factor. The diameter goes up by the square root of that. So the power pair will have conductors about twice as thick as the ones in the current USB cables, and perhaps the insulation will be a bit thicker, too. The overall diameter of a USB3 cable will be just a tad larger than current decent USB2 cables.
The problem with pushing 100 W through USB 3.0 is that existing USB 3.0 cables:
1: Exist.
2: Aren't certified to carry 100 W.
3: Are definitely too fucking thin to do so, and will cause fires.
4: Provide no method of saying "Hey I'm not rated for this!" before a USB devices starts to draw power.
If you want this to work, you need yet another cable and port, with new keying, to lock out the old USB 3.0 cables.
At that point you may as well just provide dedicated pins.
Beyond that, 100W is a LOT of power. No laptop in the world is going to have the overhead power capacity to put out 100 extra watts.
The vast majority of your OEM desktops won't, either. They already skimp on power for the front USB ports to save a nickel on the power supply.
Incidentally, if you ever come by a quantity of UPSes that you don't love very much, do as follows:
Turn them all off.
Connecting in a ring, each one powering the one next to it, and powered by the one behind.
Turn them on.
Observe the frantic beeping and relay clicking.
One time I was in Ironforge, and I managed to get a full train going. /follow on person 1, person 3 use it on 2, and person 1 used it on person n (I don't remember the total count).
This means we had enough people to run around the main loop in iron forge (a perfect circle) such that person 2 used
Once person 1 /folllowed person n, it was completely hands free. All anyone had to do was /train to make the tooooooot tooooooooooot noise and animation as the game moved us all around in a circle endlessly.
It was a good day.
Correct.
"Cyber warfare" is not warfare. "Cyber warfare" is equivalent to juvenile pranks or light espionage.
The instant a foreign nation actually attacked us with them thar innernets is the instant we sever the cables, deny them access to our communication and GPS satellites, and send missiles over.
At most "cyber warfare" is a pointless first strike. Then you step up to warfare. It's much better to simply start with a real attack.
Consider attacks involving remove screen capturing and remote keystroke-capturing technology.
I wouldn't want to be viewing or enter any privileged data at such a conference. Simply typing a passphrase could expose you.
Such attacks are academic at best. Up there with "able to read deleted data unless you overwrite it at least a dozen times". And then you posit performing such an attack during a tech convention? I'd be more worried about contracting the hantavirus from rat shit in the hotel walls.
I don't get why they bullshit about it though. I mean look at Google Chrome, tabs each being separate process, plug-ins being a zygote process, a single bar for search and awesomebar functions, and the new tab screen is godly. Mozilla copied the separate plug-ins and processes (failing at it for a couple years), has run Mozilla Labs stuff recently for the single bar and the new tab screen to mimic Google Chrome... it's even gotten rid of the menu bar in a mimicry of Google Chrome. Then they claim that other browsers are the ones copying... when they're years behind. Right.
IE was the first major browser with per-tab processes, porn mode, tab coloring, TLD highlighting, hiding the menu bar by default, etc.
A single bar for search and navigation is pointless, and it breaks porn mode privacy when you have autocomplete on. You may as well argue for a single hole to stuff food into and shoot shit out of. It is trivial to make a navigation bar also function as a search bar when the entry isn't a URI. In fact, IE was the first to do this too.
Yes, you're on Slashdot, so you have to shit on IE. But at least get the factual things correct - IE was the originator of many of the features you love in Chrome. And everything else of any use was probably done by Opera or an FF/Opera plugin.