"even though the ad makes that comparison clear" to customers who know what 3G is. Of course, to most people it's just a buzzword thrown around that describes how cool this phone is. Where misleading advertising is concerned, "misleading" means to the common consumer, not the/. crowd.
I had figured there would be a lawsuit about these ads, though I admit I'd guessed wrong about what specifically they'd sue over. Without watching the original ads again and paying more attention to the wording, I can't really say if I think they crossed a line. Win or lose, I hope they think the legal hassle was worth it for what IMO isn't that clever an ad to begin with...
If B&N implemented any of those patents, and if they've raised patent claims (TFS is unclear on these points), then yes, it should protect them.
And maybe it will. At this stage of the game, the headline for Spring trying to enforce its patents would read "Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble Over Nook IP"... and look at that, the headline says just such a thing.
So you're either asking why they aren't doing exactly what they're doing, or your prematurely assuming that it will not work when nothing in TFS or TFA would lead to that conclusion.
I guess the moderators thing "bashes the U.S. legal system" is the definition of Insightful today.
Perhaps they did; I don't see where TFA says either way.
I'm not too familiar with trade secret law. My understanding is that you have to try to protect a trade secret for it to remain protected; so if they didn't get an agreement first, I'd have to guess they'd be out of luck.
I'm a little confused, in that TFS says (1) that this is a trade secret issue, but (2) that there are patents in place. I suppose that could mean that B&N avoided implementing the patents but still copied elements of the original design that were not patented?
"However, it's not only electricians who should be able to carry around pliers in Texas"
I'm not making a value judgement about the law. I'm addressing the comparison GP made between that law (and its application) vs. the laws governing theft of cable service (and their appilcation).
"It's almost as easy to click the link and RTFA as it is to complain about the summary..."
True, but it doesn't accomplish the same thing.
If you RTFA you find out where the error in TFS came from; complaining about the summary may or may not accomplish this.
If you complain, you draw attention to the poor quality of the summary. RTFA will not do this.
Now, you can argue about what good it does to draw attention to the summary - clearly it's not like the editors care what we think of their work. I can't argue with wanting to make a point, though, and I certainly don't get where the moderators come up with GP as a troll.
"Heck, in Texas it's illegal to walk around with a pair of wire cutters in your back pocket - "might be used for cattle rustling." So what are they going to do - arrest electricians on house calls? They're in violation of the law, but the application of the law doesn't make sense in that context. Electricians need wire cutters."
And the phrase in that context is where I expect it all comes crashing down.
See, the electrician doesn't get arrested, but the non-electrician doesn't get to say 'there are legitimate uses for this, so it's ok for me to have one too'. (Yeah, its an imperfect analogy, but don't blame me - it's your analogy, not mine.)
If legitimate uses make up the crux of his business, TFA did a poor job representing that fact. If he caters to legitimate users of these devices, then it's surprising that he's just now working on a list of what those legitimate uses might be. Sounds to me like he knowingly and deliberately profited from others' intent to break the law, whether or not he ever explicitly said "use this to steal bandwidth - here's how". That sure sounds like conspiracy to me.
But of course, that's just one man's opinion. I'm not on a jury here, and certainly haven't heard such evidence as will no doubt be shown in court. I'm just saying, based on how he's defending himself in these quotes, he sounds like he's trying to play dumb and stretch reasonable doubt.
Returning to his gun analogy - sure, arresting every gun-maker sounds dumb; but arresting every gun-maker who lets their web forum be used for discussion of armed robbery sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
With all due respect, it sounds like you want to blame everything negative about Chrome on one feature you don't like. Just sayin', the developers might have a reason to think that the rendering speed has something to do with the windowing system - they're a lot less likely to be just guessing and calling their guess "pretty sure".
But for the sake of argument - if the history files are the big slow-down for Chrome, why is that slowdown less pronounced on the X11 version?
I guess maybe I'm making bad assumptions, as I don't really know what Chrome's intent with multiple processes is... but I think the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't necessarily impact security and certainly wouldn't fully negate the multi-process approach's advantages.
The major advantage to keeping separate tasks in separate processes, it seems to me, is that they have separate memory spaces. I can't sneakily inject code into another task's buffers if I'm not in the same process. In particular, if the browser spawns a process to execute some plug-in or whatever, there's less risk that the plug-in or whatever can trick the browser into executing malicious code. (Or cause it to crash, but that's more "stability" than "security".)
In other words, the biggest security risk comes from two processes sharing the same process at the same time. I don't think re-use is as big a problem. Sure, if you did a bad job of wiping buffers, then in theory one process could see its predicessor's data; and I guess there are scenarios where that could be an issue, though I'm a little skeptical that a malicious process would go rooting around its uninitialized space "just in case" it was handed a process with something it would recognize as sensitive data from a previous task...
That is, of course, if you committed a criminal offense. There is no jail time for most forms of copyright infringement.
Oh, and also you're skipping a few steps involving lawyers, judges, and juries.
You've also forgotten the part where you get out of prison having served your sentence, and then you get back your cell phone, your land line, your computer, and your clothes.
And, with the exception of over-politicized "war on X" laws, the sentencing isn't prescribed inflexibly, but ratehr is codified as a set of guidelines applied by judge and/or jury on the basis of specific circumstances.
While I agree the OP was sloppy in his belief that the safe level is 0, your inference that he assumed you could "tap something once" and get a result shows that you didn't read his post carefully, or else don't understand what CW means.
And if we're talking about being sloppy, your claim that energy "doesn't build up" in resonance is equally sloppy.
If you're taking issue with the notion that the input can be "arbitrarily small", that's fine. Input has to exceed dissipation. In the context of t-waves resonating with DNA, I'm not going to attempt to comment on what the threshold would be.
However you seem to be taking issue with the phrase "build up", which I do not understand as that is exactly what happens.
Uh... resonance doesn't "boost" energy, but it does allow it to pile up in one place (which can effectively boost power). GP's characterization may be a little sloppy, but if I had to pick his statement vs. your claim that his statement is science fiction, I'd go with him.
For a somewhat dramatic example: There was a MythBusters episode talking about the supposed "earthquake machine" that Tesla is sometimes said to have created. They built a machine that would tap at whatever frequency they set, attached it to a bridge, and started tuning. Of course they did not reproduce the supposed Tesla results - which are absurd; if they thought it were possible they wouldn't be standing on the bridge - but they did (to Jamie's surprise) find a frequency at which the vibration of the bridge increased over time, to a point well beyond what a light tap from their machine would produce. Of course it would not have increased without bound - there are physical limits and complexities in the structure.
But: what was happening? The enrgy of each tap was being held in the structure of the bridge, each subsequent tap was adding to it faster than it could naturally dissipate, and it was "building up" to create motion waves they could feel at considerable distances.
This is why it takes a sustained note at a particular frequency to shatter glass.
GP is wrong (or at least, over-generalizing); but to be fair, I don't think you understood him.
He said "from a CW machine"; he must mean continuous wave. In other words, if you're being hit for a period of time with a wave of a single frequency, then it's possible that resonant effects at that frequency will be harmful even if the wave is very low-amplitude.
This is why marching formations break step on bridges.
Yeah, but that's just it - in the case of fusion, being able to do that is not a given. If it were, we'd have commercial fusion reactors on the grid. As I said, if they can be commercially viable excluding start-up costs, that's a huge deal even if it takes massive subsidies to get there.
Why would you provide huge subsidies to fusion plants? Because, if they can be made commercially viable they will return more value than the initial investment. Many things you depend on daily would not be commercially viable if start-up costs hadn't been subsidized. That does not mean that they are not now - after having gotten over that hump - commercially viable.
That also doesn't mean that all of them should have been subsidized. The artificial monopolies created through subsidy are dangerous and hard to regulate, and they try to avoid being regulated by hoping we'll forget how they wre created.
So if you want to argue that the subsidies are harmful, that's possible. You ought to be able to argue it on more honest grounds than claiming that the project cannot be commercially viable if it started with a subsidy, though.
You're confused. Every viable power plant produces more power than it consumes. That does not mean it's creating energy (i.e. violating thermodynamics); it means it is extracting more than enough energy from its fuel to power the plant itself.
Oh, I don't know. To be commercially viable it also has to produce substantially more power than it consumes on an ongoing basis. A fusion reactor that can do that would actually be a pretty big deal regardless of how it were funded...
You can always tell whether someone is trying to preach to the choir, or whether they really want to convince others of their viewpoint. It's too bad so few understand that publically making arguments that serve the former, actually hurts their cause with respect to the latter.
"After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
Really? "Won't somebody think of the children?" Kids can't be taught to spell if there are mis-spellings in some material they might see? Get off it. Strained argumetns like these only make you and your entire cause look desperate.
The problem with this technology is, if I buy a book and you change a few words to synonyms, then you haven't sold me what I bought. You've sold me a defective product, and I should be within my rights to sue you for it. (And yes, I think the same applies to mapmakers. If I buy a depiction of an areas geography, I expect every mark in that depiction to reflect a fact about that area. If some marks appear to but don't... you may think it's a "minor" change but it might make a difference to me. Map is defective should mean lawsuit.)
On the other hand, technology like this would be useful for enhancing full-text search capabilities. It's never about the technology, it's how you use it.
How did I know, as soon as I read TFS, that this sentiment would lead the discussion? For a community that claims to be "nerd"-centric, we have the highest concentration of luddites I've ever seen.
Yes, the nature of risk-pooling groups is that those who are positioned to skim from the pool have an incentive to keep 'high cost' or 'high risk' members out. They always have. They always will. And contrary to a few other posters' responses, public healthcare doesn't fix it - it merely ensures that the entity with the incentive to screw you is your government.
To keep any risk-pooling organization, private or public, from abusing increasing medical knowledge, there are two approaches. One of those (consumer pressure) will never happen, so that leaves regulation. I don't believe for a moment that a public system will be any easier to regulate in this regard; the private vs. public debate is pretty much orthogonal to this issue.
But the bottom line is, this technology will make health care more effective and less expensive. We're talking about less time, money, and lives wasted on attempted treatments that will not work. We're also talking about a new source of information for those trying to develop treatments - "hey, to fill that 7% - 10% gap, we need a treatment that works for this group".
The win-win is where there are two or more treatments, all reasonably affordable, each of which works for a different subset of people but we haven't previously known which will work for a given patient.
Will there be cases where one group is predicted to need more expensive treatment? Yes, at least in the short term. So regulate the ways in which insurance companies manage risk. Will lobbiests try to stop you? Yes, that's an imperfection in the system. The real question is, will you let them get by with it?
Slashdot Mirror
"even though the ad makes that comparison clear" to customers who know what 3G is. Of course, to most people it's just a buzzword thrown around that describes how cool this phone is. Where misleading advertising is concerned, "misleading" means to the common consumer, not the /. crowd.
I had figured there would be a lawsuit about these ads, though I admit I'd guessed wrong about what specifically they'd sue over. Without watching the original ads again and paying more attention to the wording, I can't really say if I think they crossed a line. Win or lose, I hope they think the legal hassle was worth it for what IMO isn't that clever an ad to begin with...
So if we can explain why you are who you are, then you are no longer responsible for being who you are? Neat.
If B&N implemented any of those patents, and if they've raised patent claims (TFS is unclear on these points), then yes, it should protect them.
And maybe it will. At this stage of the game, the headline for Spring trying to enforce its patents would read "Spring Design Sues Barnes & Noble Over Nook IP"... and look at that, the headline says just such a thing.
So you're either asking why they aren't doing exactly what they're doing, or your prematurely assuming that it will not work when nothing in TFS or TFA would lead to that conclusion.
I guess the moderators thing "bashes the U.S. legal system" is the definition of Insightful today.
Perhaps they did; I don't see where TFA says either way.
I'm not too familiar with trade secret law. My understanding is that you have to try to protect a trade secret for it to remain protected; so if they didn't get an agreement first, I'd have to guess they'd be out of luck.
I'm a little confused, in that TFS says (1) that this is a trade secret issue, but (2) that there are patents in place. I suppose that could mean that B&N avoided implementing the patents but still copied elements of the original design that were not patented?
"However, it's not only electricians who should be able to carry around pliers in Texas"
I'm not making a value judgement about the law. I'm addressing the comparison GP made between that law (and its application) vs. the laws governing theft of cable service (and their appilcation).
"It's almost as easy to click the link and RTFA as it is to complain about the summary..."
True, but it doesn't accomplish the same thing.
If you RTFA you find out where the error in TFS came from; complaining about the summary may or may not accomplish this.
If you complain, you draw attention to the poor quality of the summary. RTFA will not do this.
Now, you can argue about what good it does to draw attention to the summary - clearly it's not like the editors care what we think of their work. I can't argue with wanting to make a point, though, and I certainly don't get where the moderators come up with GP as a troll.
Why am I skeptical? What kind of question is that?
Describe a practical attack based on that principle, and I'll be less skeptical.
"Heck, in Texas it's illegal to walk around with a pair of wire cutters in your back pocket - "might be used for cattle rustling." So what are they going to do - arrest electricians on house calls? They're in violation of the law, but the application of the law doesn't make sense in that context. Electricians need wire cutters."
And the phrase in that context is where I expect it all comes crashing down.
See, the electrician doesn't get arrested, but the non-electrician doesn't get to say 'there are legitimate uses for this, so it's ok for me to have one too'. (Yeah, its an imperfect analogy, but don't blame me - it's your analogy, not mine.)
If legitimate uses make up the crux of his business, TFA did a poor job representing that fact. If he caters to legitimate users of these devices, then it's surprising that he's just now working on a list of what those legitimate uses might be. Sounds to me like he knowingly and deliberately profited from others' intent to break the law, whether or not he ever explicitly said "use this to steal bandwidth - here's how". That sure sounds like conspiracy to me.
But of course, that's just one man's opinion. I'm not on a jury here, and certainly haven't heard such evidence as will no doubt be shown in court. I'm just saying, based on how he's defending himself in these quotes, he sounds like he's trying to play dumb and stretch reasonable doubt.
Returning to his gun analogy - sure, arresting every gun-maker sounds dumb; but arresting every gun-maker who lets their web forum be used for discussion of armed robbery sounds like a pretty good idea to me.
With all due respect, it sounds like you want to blame everything negative about Chrome on one feature you don't like. Just sayin', the developers might have a reason to think that the rendering speed has something to do with the windowing system - they're a lot less likely to be just guessing and calling their guess "pretty sure".
But for the sake of argument - if the history files are the big slow-down for Chrome, why is that slowdown less pronounced on the X11 version?
I guess maybe I'm making bad assumptions, as I don't really know what Chrome's intent with multiple processes is... but I think the answer to your question is no, it wouldn't necessarily impact security and certainly wouldn't fully negate the multi-process approach's advantages.
The major advantage to keeping separate tasks in separate processes, it seems to me, is that they have separate memory spaces. I can't sneakily inject code into another task's buffers if I'm not in the same process. In particular, if the browser spawns a process to execute some plug-in or whatever, there's less risk that the plug-in or whatever can trick the browser into executing malicious code. (Or cause it to crash, but that's more "stability" than "security".)
In other words, the biggest security risk comes from two processes sharing the same process at the same time. I don't think re-use is as big a problem. Sure, if you did a bad job of wiping buffers, then in theory one process could see its predicessor's data; and I guess there are scenarios where that could be an issue, though I'm a little skeptical that a malicious process would go rooting around its uninitialized space "just in case" it was handed a process with something it would recognize as sensitive data from a previous task...
You haven't really thought this through, have you? Don't feel too bad; most people take to glib over-simplifications about data deidentification.
Maybe this will help.
That is, of course, if you committed a criminal offense. There is no jail time for most forms of copyright infringement.
Oh, and also you're skipping a few steps involving lawyers, judges, and juries.
You've also forgotten the part where you get out of prison having served your sentence, and then you get back your cell phone, your land line, your computer, and your clothes.
And, with the exception of over-politicized "war on X" laws, the sentencing isn't prescribed inflexibly, but ratehr is codified as a set of guidelines applied by judge and/or jury on the basis of specific circumstances.
But other than that, sure, same thing.
Thank you, Captain Obvious, I had no idea!
Since you missed the sarcasm in my previous post, I assume you'll miss the sarcasm in this one as well. As such I will translate:
"Yes, I am aware of that, as is everyone involved in the thread."
While I agree the OP was sloppy in his belief that the safe level is 0, your inference that he assumed you could "tap something once" and get a result shows that you didn't read his post carefully, or else don't understand what CW means.
And if we're talking about being sloppy, your claim that energy "doesn't build up" in resonance is equally sloppy.
If you're taking issue with the notion that the input can be "arbitrarily small", that's fine. Input has to exceed dissipation. In the context of t-waves resonating with DNA, I'm not going to attempt to comment on what the threshold would be.
However you seem to be taking issue with the phrase "build up", which I do not understand as that is exactly what happens.
Uh, yeah, because the keyboard you're using is a clear indicator of which language(s) you understand.
Uh... resonance doesn't "boost" energy, but it does allow it to pile up in one place (which can effectively boost power). GP's characterization may be a little sloppy, but if I had to pick his statement vs. your claim that his statement is science fiction, I'd go with him.
For a somewhat dramatic example: There was a MythBusters episode talking about the supposed "earthquake machine" that Tesla is sometimes said to have created. They built a machine that would tap at whatever frequency they set, attached it to a bridge, and started tuning. Of course they did not reproduce the supposed Tesla results - which are absurd; if they thought it were possible they wouldn't be standing on the bridge - but they did (to Jamie's surprise) find a frequency at which the vibration of the bridge increased over time, to a point well beyond what a light tap from their machine would produce. Of course it would not have increased without bound - there are physical limits and complexities in the structure.
But: what was happening? The enrgy of each tap was being held in the structure of the bridge, each subsequent tap was adding to it faster than it could naturally dissipate, and it was "building up" to create motion waves they could feel at considerable distances.
This is why it takes a sustained note at a particular frequency to shatter glass.
GP is wrong (or at least, over-generalizing); but to be fair, I don't think you understood him.
He said "from a CW machine"; he must mean continuous wave. In other words, if you're being hit for a period of time with a wave of a single frequency, then it's possible that resonant effects at that frequency will be harmful even if the wave is very low-amplitude.
This is why marching formations break step on bridges.
"Thus, wouldn't 1 and 4 lead to higher energy photons 'clocks running slower'"
It's been too long since I've really looked at relativity for me to agree or disagree with this bit, but let's assume you're right...
" thus propagating as a lower speed as viewed by an observer outside their gravity well "
I think not. Your clock has nothing to do with how fast I see you moving. That's why it's your clock and not mine.
Yeah, but that's just it - in the case of fusion, being able to do that is not a given. If it were, we'd have commercial fusion reactors on the grid. As I said, if they can be commercially viable excluding start-up costs, that's a huge deal even if it takes massive subsidies to get there.
Why would you provide huge subsidies to fusion plants? Because, if they can be made commercially viable they will return more value than the initial investment. Many things you depend on daily would not be commercially viable if start-up costs hadn't been subsidized. That does not mean that they are not now - after having gotten over that hump - commercially viable.
That also doesn't mean that all of them should have been subsidized. The artificial monopolies created through subsidy are dangerous and hard to regulate, and they try to avoid being regulated by hoping we'll forget how they wre created.
So if you want to argue that the subsidies are harmful, that's possible. You ought to be able to argue it on more honest grounds than claiming that the project cannot be commercially viable if it started with a subsidy, though.
You're confused. Every viable power plant produces more power than it consumes. That does not mean it's creating energy (i.e. violating thermodynamics); it means it is extracting more than enough energy from its fuel to power the plant itself.
Oh, I don't know. To be commercially viable it also has to produce substantially more power than it consumes on an ongoing basis. A fusion reactor that can do that would actually be a pretty big deal regardless of how it were funded...
You can always tell whether someone is trying to preach to the choir, or whether they really want to convince others of their viewpoint. It's too bad so few understand that publically making arguments that serve the former, actually hurts their cause with respect to the latter.
"After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
Really? "Won't somebody think of the children?" Kids can't be taught to spell if there are mis-spellings in some material they might see? Get off it. Strained argumetns like these only make you and your entire cause look desperate.
The problem with this technology is, if I buy a book and you change a few words to synonyms, then you haven't sold me what I bought. You've sold me a defective product, and I should be within my rights to sue you for it. (And yes, I think the same applies to mapmakers. If I buy a depiction of an areas geography, I expect every mark in that depiction to reflect a fact about that area. If some marks appear to but don't... you may think it's a "minor" change but it might make a difference to me. Map is defective should mean lawsuit.)
On the other hand, technology like this would be useful for enhancing full-text search capabilities. It's never about the technology, it's how you use it.
How did I know, as soon as I read TFS, that this sentiment would lead the discussion? For a community that claims to be "nerd"-centric, we have the highest concentration of luddites I've ever seen.
Yes, the nature of risk-pooling groups is that those who are positioned to skim from the pool have an incentive to keep 'high cost' or 'high risk' members out. They always have. They always will. And contrary to a few other posters' responses, public healthcare doesn't fix it - it merely ensures that the entity with the incentive to screw you is your government.
To keep any risk-pooling organization, private or public, from abusing increasing medical knowledge, there are two approaches. One of those (consumer pressure) will never happen, so that leaves regulation. I don't believe for a moment that a public system will be any easier to regulate in this regard; the private vs. public debate is pretty much orthogonal to this issue.
But the bottom line is, this technology will make health care more effective and less expensive. We're talking about less time, money, and lives wasted on attempted treatments that will not work. We're also talking about a new source of information for those trying to develop treatments - "hey, to fill that 7% - 10% gap, we need a treatment that works for this group".
The win-win is where there are two or more treatments, all reasonably affordable, each of which works for a different subset of people but we haven't previously known which will work for a given patient.
Will there be cases where one group is predicted to need more expensive treatment? Yes, at least in the short term. So regulate the ways in which insurance companies manage risk. Will lobbiests try to stop you? Yes, that's an imperfection in the system. The real question is, will you let them get by with it?
Patents don't reward "complexity". They reward innovation.
An invention can be extremely innovative, and yet easy to copy once you have one.
There are plenty of good arguments both for and against patents. Pretending the underlying issue patents address doesn't exist is not one of them.