If Apple signed a contract they should honor it, not take the goods then welch on the deal when it's time to pay for them.
1) Apple actually is honoring the contract inasmuch as they should, given that they're contesting the legality of it in court. With the court's permission, they've been setting the money aside in an escrow account, with interest, pending the case's outcome.
2) This whole case started because Qualcomm was breaking the terms of the contract by failing to pay Apple $1 billion in rebates that were owed in the year prior to the case being launched. Qualcomm was contractually obligated to make rebate payments to Apple to cover the manufacturers' licensing fees, that way Apple wouldn't have to pay to license IP that had already been licensed. Qualcomm stopped making those payments (for no apparent reason, I'll add), so Apple sued.
3) If a contract contains illegal, illicit, or invalid terms, it's (at least in part) not binding. Given that recent US case law came down fairly clearly on Apple's side with regards to patent exhaustion (and that regulatory bodies around the world have been nailing Qualcomm to the wall for this practice), it seems likely that this part of their contract will be invalidated and will need to be reworked or removed.
4) Regardless of the legality of the contract, Apple was seemingly content to abide by it so long as the rebate payments kept coming in (i.e. so long as Qualcomm's illicit behavior didn't affect their bottom line), but with Qualcomm failing to make those rebate payments and the courts setting strong precedent against behavior like Qualcomm's around that time, Apple wasn't about to let Qualcomm's lack of payments slide.
If you want to make an argument that Apple is acting unethically, the better place to look at isn't their contract with Qualcomm, but rather how they're handling their manufacturers. Apple ordered its manufacturers to withhold their licensing payments from Qualcomm until the case is resolved, and added some teeth to their order by withholding those funds from their manufacturers. Those funds aren't being held in escrow (so far as I know), and their manufacturers aren't paying those funds to Qualcomm, meaning that Qualcomm is doubly put out, since they're not getting licensing fees from either the manufacturers OR Apple until this case is resolved.
That's Apple playing hardball there, and if you want to object to some aspect of their behavior with regards to this case, that's where I'd start.
Given that the RAM is user upgradeable, just as it was in many of the previous generations (though not the last gen or two), I'm going to go with a resounding "no".
I converted...the wrong way. Instead of dividing by 1000, I multiplied, so I'm off by six orders of magnitude. The correct number, as many of the other replies have already noted, is about 0.023 MJ/L.
you would be storing ~23MJ in each cubic meter of cavern
Wow. So, to put that claim in perspective, there's a Wikipedia page listing energy densities of common storage media. Having converted CAES from MJ/m^3 to MJ/L, here are some highlights for comparison:
In skimming the CNBC article for an answer, it looks like the issue is regarding production goals, rather than production itself. I.e. did they knowingly make unrealistic claims regarding their production goals. So, not exactly fake news, but definitely not a clear picture of what's going on from the snippet in the summary.
So, two stories about tracking packages at the USPS:
1) Earlier this year my wife and I ordered a piece of furniture on eBay (a flat-pack, DIY assembly sort of thing for some cheap storage we needed). The furniture didn't arrive on time, and the seller was unresponsive, so we initiated a dispute ten days after the original delivery date. The day that eBay was set to close the dispute in our favor by default, the seller suddenly posts a tracking number that proves the item was delivered to our ZIP code two days before the guaranteed delivery date.
So, off to the USPS office we went to sort things out, figuring that someone had misrouted or stolen our package. The guy there was able to pull up the tracking number and quickly discovered that, rather than being delivered to our address, our package had been delivered to a local Cracker Barrel restaurant instead. "Cracker Barrel has our furniture?!", my wife asked incredulously. "Furniture? No. It's a padded envelope from Amazon", came the reply. He flipped his screen around to show us the picture of the package, taken by the postman as it was being delivered to Cracker Barrel. The man in the office was kind enough to print out a copy of that image, which clearly showed a medium-sized padded envelope bearing the tracking number given to eBay by the seller.
With that printout in hand (as well as the fact that the online tracking information listed the item as being a lightweight package), we were able to successfully appeal the decision and receive a full refund. Oh, but first we had to file a criminal complaint to the FBI, submit proof we had done so to eBay, and then receive notice from eBay that they were only extending the courtesy of a refund to us this one time, but that we'd be on the hook for the payment if anything like this (i.e. someone takes our money without sending us anything) should happen again.
To say the least, my wife hasn't used eBay ever since (and I've only used it via a credit card so that I can initiate a chargeback if need be), but, man, did the USPS come through for us that time.
=====
2) A music store where my wife worked once rented an instrument to a customer who absconded with the instrument without ever making a payment. After multiple attempts at contacting the person failed, the store tried to file criminal charges so that they could make an insurance claim. The police told them that they needed to prove they had attempted to contact the customer first, which meant sending a letter via certified mail, as you do in these situations.
Fast forward a month and my wife was on the phone with USPS because the letter's tracking information showed that after going to the correct city on day one, it then took a detour on day three to a city a few hundred miles away, which is where it had been for the remainder of the last month. Once she was able to get on the phone to talk to the support representative, the rep agreed that the letter was simply lost, told her that the store would need to send another letter, and suggested that maybe the store should send it via certified mail this time...words that the rep promptly ate once they realized it had been sent via certified mail.
For an extra dose of irony, my wife spent 15 minutes on hold before she was able to talk to the support representative. As she waited on hold, she was told repeatedly by a pre-recorded loop that if she had any concerns about her letters or packages arriving, she should use certified mail. It's apparently guaranteed to arrive.
Otherwise, reading comprehension clearly isn't your strong suit. I already said that all 32-bit models were cut off at iOS 10, but I also pointed out that none of them were affected by the stuff related to the battery. The "slowdown" was a feature limited to iPhone 6 and newer devices running iOS 10.2.1 and later. No 32-bit devices ever received the "slowdown" in the first place, meaning that none of them were ever affected by it, meaning that there was never a need for them to have an ability to deactivate it, meaning that they don't need iOS 11 in order to avoid the "slowdown". They're fine where they are on iOS 10.
Moreover, I'm not sure what your link is supposed to prove, given that it's only a few sentences long, none of which actually addresses anything I said.
There was no attempt at that time to refute the stories by Apple and others at that time.
You're confusing two different incidents. The reason there wasn't an attempt to refute the 2016 firmware incident you're talking about is because it actually happened. Apple has even talked about it publicly. From Apple's response to Bloomberg:
We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.
The 2016 firmware incident in which a single SuperMicro server in a test environment received a malware update is real. The 2015 hardware incident alleged by Bloomberg—in which a malicious chip was physically placed on the boards—has zero factual basis as of yet and zero corroboration from outside sources.
Moreover, as I've already pointed out to you in previous comments, SuperMicro didn't lose Amazon as a customer in 2017 like you're claiming. From Amazon's response to Bloomberg (same link as above):
Additionally, in June 2018, researchers made public reports of vulnerabilities in SuperMicro firmware. As part of our standard operating procedure, we notified affected customers promptly, and recommended they upgrade the firmware in their appliances.
Amazon was still using SuperMicro as of earlier this year. SuperMicro did lose a big customer, but it apparently wasn't Amazon.
The issue you're talking about is an unrelated incident dealing with firmware, NOT the hardware issue that Bloomberg is reporting.
The firmware incident from 2016 that you're talking about is indeed what led Apple to dump SuperMicro. That said, Apple has been open about that incident and even mentioned it explicitly in their initial response to Bloomberg's article, suggesting that—as you just did—Bloomberg confused the 2016 situation with the hardware incident alleged by Bloomberg. I would have hoped you'd have known better, since I already told you all of this just a few weeks ago.
As for what the firmware incident involved, in short, SuperMicro let a board get by them that had malware on it. As far as Apple could tell, it was an incidental infection that wasn't targeted at them in any way, but it pointed to such a lapse in SuperMicro's QA process that SuperMicro could no longer be trusted as a supplier. Again, that's a separate issue from Bloomberg's claims that there were malicious chips physically placed on boards back in 2015.
The slowdown was applied in v10.2.1. The setting to deactivate the slowdown was applied in v11. The number of devices that 10.2.1 affected is far greater than the number eligible for v11 and beyond.
Not true. The peak power draw fix (what you're referring to as a "slowdown") was only applied to the iPhone 6 and newer models, every single one of which is eligible for both iOS 11 and iOS 12, and most or all of which will almost certainly be eligible for iOS 13 next year. As such, and contrary to your claim, literally every device affected was eligible for iOS 11 and beyond.
It's true that a number of phones (i.e. all 32-bit models) got cut off by upgrade from iOS 10 to iOS 11, but not a single one of them were affected by the "slowdown", and some devices that weren't affected (e.g. the 2013 iPhone 5s that I still use as my everyday phone) were eligible for the upgrade regardless. If anything, my 5s has been running faster and getting better battery life ever since upgrading to iOS 12, despite the fact that it was never affected.
Every organization involved has a strong, strong motive to deny this
That isn't even remotely true. Were the story true in part or whole, they'd have plenty of reasons to make couched denials or to keep their mouths shut, but they wouldn't have any reason to make the categorical denials they've been making. Categorical denials can come back to bite them.
If it later came out that Bloomberg was right, but that Apple and Amazon had chosen to make categorical denials despite knowing better, we'd lose count at the number of lawsuits and criminal charges filed against them. They'd have knowingly misled their shareholders, repeatedly engaged in fraud in public statements, and lied to Congress, among other crimes and illicit activities. And both companies have had C-level executives signing their names to these statements, including those being made to Congress, meaning that real people are putting themselves on the hook for what these companies are claiming. There would be jail time.
Had they come out with couched, non-denial denials that made it clear that they were merely denying certain facts of the story, that'd be one thing, but they're all outright saying that Bloomberg got the story wrong, and not just in part, but in full inasmuch as it relates to each of them. Apple says that they have no awareness of the things they're supposedly aware of. Amazon says the same. The FBI says the same. Other newspapers have been unable to come up with any corroborating evidence. Bloomberg has failed to produce a single person with firsthand knowledge who is willing to speak on the record, let alone produce the chip itself, which would be the smoking gun that could silence all criticism.
Also, it's clear you don't even know what the implications are of the alleged chips. Amazon allegedly picked up these boards when it acquired Elemental. They weren't a part of AWS. Hell, they weren't even connected to the Internet. And Apple allegedly had these boards in their data centers (side note: Apple never even had the number of SuperMicro boards that Bloomberg claimed were affected), so we're not talking about a phone compromise.
Moreover, Apple and Amazon allegedly knew about these boards back in 2015, yet Apple didn't dump SuperMicro until 2016, and Amazon was still using SuperMicro boards as of just a few months ago. Are you telling me that they kept using boards from SuperMicro for a year or three after finding out about this issue?
The origins of "shibboleth" are Biblical and go back to Old Testament times. To make a long story short, enemy foreigners couldn't pronounce "sh", so anyone stopped at the border was asked to say "shibboleth". People who pronounced it "sibboleth" were put to death as an enemy spies. Since then, a shibboleth has come to simply mean anything that can be used to distinguish between two groups of people, be it a code word, belief, or practice.
It doesn't matter if the US agrees or not. What Germany is proposing is that the EU implements a minimum global tax rate for companies that do business in the EU. So if the minimum global rate is say 10% and the US levies 15% all is well. If the US only levies 5% then the EU will collect the other 5%. Numbers made up.
How would it change anything then? The US already collects taxes on overseas operations for all US-based corporations, effectively instituting exactly this sort of minimum tax. Any taxes paid overseas can be deducted from the taxes that are owed to the US. If enough taxes are paid overseas, no taxes are owed to the US for those overseas operations.
I think where the US system goes off the rails is that it allows US corporations to avoid paying those taxes by keeping the money overseas more or less indefinitely. The US corporations can't repatriate that money to the US without incurring the taxes owed on it—so they keep it overseas as long as they can in the hope that the US will vote in a President and Congress that will offer them a tax holiday—but keeping it over there in the meantime means that they get to go years with an effective tax rate that's near 0%, thus rightfully pissing off all of the locals.
Close the loophole by compelling them to repatriate the money and they'll quickly become more amenable to higher tax rates elsewhere, since they'd face them at home anyway.
There are checks you can do but they get expensive in a hurry. Doing these sorts of checks at a domain level was actually part of my research in grad school, but it was several orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to go from “how many domains link to X” to “how many domains link to the domains that link to X”, which was significantly more difficult for the spammers to abuse.
Back then, we’d see them register 10,000 domains just to prop up 1, then get a refund on 9,999 of them within the one-week window when they could get a full refund, meaning that they were only out the cost of one domain. The eventual fix for that particular proble:was to add a non-refundable portion to each registration fee. Those $0.05 fees wouldn’t matter to legitimate people, but unscrupulous sorts quickly found their tactics too expensive to use, at least for awhile.
Anyway, podcasts are a lot harder to do since the only registration is an account creation, which costs nothing. Aside from adding weight to long-time accounts, I’m not sure what you could do, and that’s just delay the problem.
Why did both Apple and Amazon dump SuperMicro at roughly the same time?
They didn't. Apple dumped SuperMicro in 2016 (i.e. a year after they allegedly found the chips) after an unrelated firmware incident. Amazon was still using SuperMicro boards as of earlier this year, which they even mentioned in their initial response to Bloomberg:
[I]n June 2018, researchers made public reports of vulnerabilities in SuperMicro firmware. As part of our standard operating procedure, we notified affected customers promptly, and recommended they upgrade the firmware in their appliances.
I don't know where people got the false idea that they dumped SuperMicro at the same time. Moreover, if these malicious chips were real, the timeline makes no sense. Apple discovered these chips back in mid-2015, but then didn't dump SuperMicro for a full year? And Amazon knew about them too in 2015, but then didn't dump SuperMicro for three full years? It makes no sense.
My phone wasn’t ringing. The call really just wasn’t going through for some reason. A voice mail from them came through about 10 minutes later on my phone. And yeah, they were basically calling from down the hall and around a corner.
You do realize ejection seats aren't the only way to save the crew, right? For example, there was this Soyuz' launch a few days ago...
Whether you realize it or not, your entire first post is predicated on the false belief that Challenger's crew capsule didn't survive the explosion. It did. And because the crew cabin survived the explosion (and the crew died later on in a different manner than you thought), there's no reason to believe that the Soyuz' approach of using parachutes and heat shielding on the cabin wouldn't have been sufficient to save the crew. Simple as that.
Of course, to retrofit the orbiter to actually make all of that happen, the crew cabin would have needed to be redesigned as a capsule, with the ability to rapidly decouple the capsule from the rest of the orbiter. That adds technical complexity, introduces new sources for failure, takes up valuable space, adds weight, and costs a lot of money, so I get why they didn't want to do it.
Even so, there's no reason to believe that things would have turned out any differently for this week's astronauts had they suffered an incident during launch that was akin to what happened to Challenger. Both crew cabins were intact after their incidents. The difference was that one had parachutes to slow their fall while the other landed hard.
Against my better judgment, and for the first time in months, I actually answered a call from an unknown number a few days ago. The call was coming in on my wife's phone, which I was holding for her at the time as I waited for her to finish up with whatever it was that was indisposing her. She's been getting multiple robocalls every day, so I was expecting more of the same. Honestly, I'm not even sure why I answered, since I was absolutely convinced it was a robocall. Maybe I was just bored.
Pausing the show I was watching on my tablet, I tentatively raised the phone and said, "Hello", intentionally withholding my name or any other identifying information that could be sold for profit or otherwise used by someone unscrupulous.
"Hello, is this Mr. [my last name]?", came the reply from a real human being speaking in a perfect American accent. Talk about odd and unexpected, especially so since they were asking for me specifically, but they were calling my wife's phone.
"Yes, this is he."
"Oh, good. We've been trying to reach you on your phone for the last 10 minutes, but the call hasn't gone through. This is the nurse's station at the hospital. Your wife is out of surgery and awake. You can bring your things from the waiting area and come back to see her in room Blue-3 now."
Right. I was supposed to be expecting a call from an unknown number...
Had the Soyuz rocket exploded, which is what happened with Challenger, NO "safety mechanisms" would've helped and they would have died in the same manner.
It's widely assumed that most—possibly all—of the Challenger crew not only survived the breakup of the orbiter (which, incidentally, was due to aerodynamic issues following the explosion, rather than the explosion itself), but were, in fact, conscious for at least part of the fall. After all, the crew cabin was intact after the breakup, the estimated g-forces involved in the breakup likely weren't sufficient to cause major injury, there weren't signs of catastrophic decompression in the cabin, multiple air packs had been manually activated and showed usage consistent with the amount of time they were falling, and manually-operated controls that would have been relevant to re-establishing power in the event of an emergency had been toggled to non-launch positions.
So, actually, safety mechanisms might have saved Challenger's crew, though those mechanisms would have come at a cost beyond just the money involved, such as needing to reduce crew sizes rather substantially in order to make room for the safety mechanisms.
Slashdot Mirror
If Apple signed a contract they should honor it, not take the goods then welch on the deal when it's time to pay for them.
1) Apple actually is honoring the contract inasmuch as they should, given that they're contesting the legality of it in court. With the court's permission, they've been setting the money aside in an escrow account, with interest, pending the case's outcome.
2) This whole case started because Qualcomm was breaking the terms of the contract by failing to pay Apple $1 billion in rebates that were owed in the year prior to the case being launched. Qualcomm was contractually obligated to make rebate payments to Apple to cover the manufacturers' licensing fees, that way Apple wouldn't have to pay to license IP that had already been licensed. Qualcomm stopped making those payments (for no apparent reason, I'll add), so Apple sued.
3) If a contract contains illegal, illicit, or invalid terms, it's (at least in part) not binding. Given that recent US case law came down fairly clearly on Apple's side with regards to patent exhaustion (and that regulatory bodies around the world have been nailing Qualcomm to the wall for this practice), it seems likely that this part of their contract will be invalidated and will need to be reworked or removed.
4) Regardless of the legality of the contract, Apple was seemingly content to abide by it so long as the rebate payments kept coming in (i.e. so long as Qualcomm's illicit behavior didn't affect their bottom line), but with Qualcomm failing to make those rebate payments and the courts setting strong precedent against behavior like Qualcomm's around that time, Apple wasn't about to let Qualcomm's lack of payments slide.
If you want to make an argument that Apple is acting unethically, the better place to look at isn't their contract with Qualcomm, but rather how they're handling their manufacturers. Apple ordered its manufacturers to withhold their licensing payments from Qualcomm until the case is resolved, and added some teeth to their order by withholding those funds from their manufacturers. Those funds aren't being held in escrow (so far as I know), and their manufacturers aren't paying those funds to Qualcomm, meaning that Qualcomm is doubly put out, since they're not getting licensing fees from either the manufacturers OR Apple until this case is resolved.
That's Apple playing hardball there, and if you want to object to some aspect of their behavior with regards to this case, that's where I'd start.
Given that the RAM is user upgradeable, just as it was in many of the previous generations (though not the last gen or two), I'm going to go with a resounding "no".
1m^2 = 1000L, not the other way around!
So it's 0.023MJ/L.
Yeah, despite knowing that 1 m^3 = 1000 L, I failed at math by multiplying instead of dividing, hence why I was off by six orders of magnitude.
Thanks for the correction, I really appreciate it!
Yup, I apparently suffered a brain fart and multiplied when I should've divided. And then repeated that same mistake when double-checking myself.
*shrug*
Just having one of those days, I guess.
Anyway, thanks for the correction!
I converted...the wrong way. Instead of dividing by 1000, I multiplied, so I'm off by six orders of magnitude. The correct number, as many of the other replies have already noted, is about 0.023 MJ/L.
Your conversion for CAES energy density is incorrect.
23 MJ/cubic meter * 1 cubic meter/1000 L = 0.023 MJ/L
Yeah, for some reason it got into my head that I should multiply instead of divide. Thanks for the correction!
I did double-check, but I had a double-brain-fart, apparently. Thanks for the correction!
I think you went the wrong way.
Yup, exactly right. Multiplied when I should've divided. Oops! Thanks for the correction, and the numbers suddenly make a LOT more sense.
you would be storing ~23MJ in each cubic meter of cavern
Wow. So, to put that claim in perspective, there's a Wikipedia page listing energy densities of common storage media. Having converted CAES from MJ/m^3 to MJ/L, here are some highlights for comparison:
- Lithium Ion Battery: 0.9 - 2.63 MJ/L
- Alkaline Battery: 1.3 MJ/L
- Flywheel: 5.3 MJ/L
- Gunpowder: 5.9-12.9 MJ/L
- Gasoline: 34.2 MJ/L
- Coal: 38 MJ/L
- Carbohydrates: 43 MJ/L
- Protein: 105.1 MJ/L
- Tritium: 158 MJ/L
- Deuterium: 15,822 MJ/L
- CAES: 23,000 MJ/L
- Plutonium 238: 43,277,631 MJ/L
- Thorium (in a breeder): 1,539,842,000 MJ/L
- Uranium (in a breeder): 929,214,000 MJ/L
I didn't double-check the math on your quote, but if true, that's crazy.
In skimming the CNBC article for an answer, it looks like the issue is regarding production goals, rather than production itself. I.e. did they knowingly make unrealistic claims regarding their production goals. So, not exactly fake news, but definitely not a clear picture of what's going on from the snippet in the summary.
So, two stories about tracking packages at the USPS:
1) Earlier this year my wife and I ordered a piece of furniture on eBay (a flat-pack, DIY assembly sort of thing for some cheap storage we needed). The furniture didn't arrive on time, and the seller was unresponsive, so we initiated a dispute ten days after the original delivery date. The day that eBay was set to close the dispute in our favor by default, the seller suddenly posts a tracking number that proves the item was delivered to our ZIP code two days before the guaranteed delivery date.
So, off to the USPS office we went to sort things out, figuring that someone had misrouted or stolen our package. The guy there was able to pull up the tracking number and quickly discovered that, rather than being delivered to our address, our package had been delivered to a local Cracker Barrel restaurant instead. "Cracker Barrel has our furniture?!", my wife asked incredulously. "Furniture? No. It's a padded envelope from Amazon", came the reply. He flipped his screen around to show us the picture of the package, taken by the postman as it was being delivered to Cracker Barrel. The man in the office was kind enough to print out a copy of that image, which clearly showed a medium-sized padded envelope bearing the tracking number given to eBay by the seller.
With that printout in hand (as well as the fact that the online tracking information listed the item as being a lightweight package), we were able to successfully appeal the decision and receive a full refund. Oh, but first we had to file a criminal complaint to the FBI, submit proof we had done so to eBay, and then receive notice from eBay that they were only extending the courtesy of a refund to us this one time, but that we'd be on the hook for the payment if anything like this (i.e. someone takes our money without sending us anything) should happen again.
To say the least, my wife hasn't used eBay ever since (and I've only used it via a credit card so that I can initiate a chargeback if need be), but, man, did the USPS come through for us that time.
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2) A music store where my wife worked once rented an instrument to a customer who absconded with the instrument without ever making a payment. After multiple attempts at contacting the person failed, the store tried to file criminal charges so that they could make an insurance claim. The police told them that they needed to prove they had attempted to contact the customer first, which meant sending a letter via certified mail, as you do in these situations.
Fast forward a month and my wife was on the phone with USPS because the letter's tracking information showed that after going to the correct city on day one, it then took a detour on day three to a city a few hundred miles away, which is where it had been for the remainder of the last month. Once she was able to get on the phone to talk to the support representative, the rep agreed that the letter was simply lost, told her that the store would need to send another letter, and suggested that maybe the store should send it via certified mail this time...words that the rep promptly ate once they realized it had been sent via certified mail.
For an extra dose of irony, my wife spent 15 minutes on hold before she was able to talk to the support representative. As she waited on hold, she was told repeatedly by a pre-recorded loop that if she had any concerns about her letters or packages arriving, she should use certified mail. It's apparently guaranteed to arrive.
This is a lie. I am literally holding one of the 32-bit devices to which the final update of v10.2.1 was applied. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I don't know what you're holding, but it isn't a 32-bit device stuck on 10.2.1, since there aren't any 32-bit devices that had 10.2.1 as their final update. Every single 32-bit device eligible for 10.2.1 was eligible for updates through at least 10.3.3.
Otherwise, reading comprehension clearly isn't your strong suit. I already said that all 32-bit models were cut off at iOS 10, but I also pointed out that none of them were affected by the stuff related to the battery. The "slowdown" was a feature limited to iPhone 6 and newer devices running iOS 10.2.1 and later. No 32-bit devices ever received the "slowdown" in the first place, meaning that none of them were ever affected by it, meaning that there was never a need for them to have an ability to deactivate it, meaning that they don't need iOS 11 in order to avoid the "slowdown". They're fine where they are on iOS 10.
Moreover, I'm not sure what your link is supposed to prove, given that it's only a few sentences long, none of which actually addresses anything I said.
There was no attempt at that time to refute the stories by Apple and others at that time.
You're confusing two different incidents. The reason there wasn't an attempt to refute the 2016 firmware incident you're talking about is because it actually happened. Apple has even talked about it publicly. From Apple's response to Bloomberg:
We are deeply disappointed that in their dealings with us, Bloomberg’s reporters have not been open to the possibility that they or their sources might be wrong or misinformed. Our best guess is that they are confusing their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which we discovered an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of our labs. That one-time event was determined to be accidental and not a targeted attack against Apple.
The 2016 firmware incident in which a single SuperMicro server in a test environment received a malware update is real. The 2015 hardware incident alleged by Bloomberg—in which a malicious chip was physically placed on the boards—has zero factual basis as of yet and zero corroboration from outside sources.
Moreover, as I've already pointed out to you in previous comments, SuperMicro didn't lose Amazon as a customer in 2017 like you're claiming. From Amazon's response to Bloomberg (same link as above):
Additionally, in June 2018, researchers made public reports of vulnerabilities in SuperMicro firmware. As part of our standard operating procedure, we notified affected customers promptly, and recommended they upgrade the firmware in their appliances.
Amazon was still using SuperMicro as of earlier this year. SuperMicro did lose a big customer, but it apparently wasn't Amazon.
The issue you're talking about is an unrelated incident dealing with firmware, NOT the hardware issue that Bloomberg is reporting.
The firmware incident from 2016 that you're talking about is indeed what led Apple to dump SuperMicro. That said, Apple has been open about that incident and even mentioned it explicitly in their initial response to Bloomberg's article, suggesting that—as you just did—Bloomberg confused the 2016 situation with the hardware incident alleged by Bloomberg. I would have hoped you'd have known better, since I already told you all of this just a few weeks ago.
As for what the firmware incident involved, in short, SuperMicro let a board get by them that had malware on it. As far as Apple could tell, it was an incidental infection that wasn't targeted at them in any way, but it pointed to such a lapse in SuperMicro's QA process that SuperMicro could no longer be trusted as a supplier. Again, that's a separate issue from Bloomberg's claims that there were malicious chips physically placed on boards back in 2015.
How can a several billion dollar company, ($15b in net income -2017), be fined less that 0.04% of profit?
It's even worse than that, since you're off by an order of magnitude: $646,000 / $15B ~= 0.004%
The slowdown was applied in v10.2.1. The setting to deactivate the slowdown was applied in v11. The number of devices that 10.2.1 affected is far greater than the number eligible for v11 and beyond.
Not true. The peak power draw fix (what you're referring to as a "slowdown") was only applied to the iPhone 6 and newer models, every single one of which is eligible for both iOS 11 and iOS 12, and most or all of which will almost certainly be eligible for iOS 13 next year. As such, and contrary to your claim, literally every device affected was eligible for iOS 11 and beyond.
It's true that a number of phones (i.e. all 32-bit models) got cut off by upgrade from iOS 10 to iOS 11, but not a single one of them were affected by the "slowdown", and some devices that weren't affected (e.g. the 2013 iPhone 5s that I still use as my everyday phone) were eligible for the upgrade regardless. If anything, my 5s has been running faster and getting better battery life ever since upgrading to iOS 12, despite the fact that it was never affected.
Every organization involved has a strong, strong motive to deny this
That isn't even remotely true. Were the story true in part or whole, they'd have plenty of reasons to make couched denials or to keep their mouths shut, but they wouldn't have any reason to make the categorical denials they've been making. Categorical denials can come back to bite them.
If it later came out that Bloomberg was right, but that Apple and Amazon had chosen to make categorical denials despite knowing better, we'd lose count at the number of lawsuits and criminal charges filed against them. They'd have knowingly misled their shareholders, repeatedly engaged in fraud in public statements, and lied to Congress, among other crimes and illicit activities. And both companies have had C-level executives signing their names to these statements, including those being made to Congress, meaning that real people are putting themselves on the hook for what these companies are claiming. There would be jail time.
Had they come out with couched, non-denial denials that made it clear that they were merely denying certain facts of the story, that'd be one thing, but they're all outright saying that Bloomberg got the story wrong, and not just in part, but in full inasmuch as it relates to each of them. Apple says that they have no awareness of the things they're supposedly aware of. Amazon says the same. The FBI says the same. Other newspapers have been unable to come up with any corroborating evidence. Bloomberg has failed to produce a single person with firsthand knowledge who is willing to speak on the record, let alone produce the chip itself, which would be the smoking gun that could silence all criticism.
Also, it's clear you don't even know what the implications are of the alleged chips. Amazon allegedly picked up these boards when it acquired Elemental. They weren't a part of AWS. Hell, they weren't even connected to the Internet. And Apple allegedly had these boards in their data centers (side note: Apple never even had the number of SuperMicro boards that Bloomberg claimed were affected), so we're not talking about a phone compromise.
Moreover, Apple and Amazon allegedly knew about these boards back in 2015, yet Apple didn't dump SuperMicro until 2016, and Amazon was still using SuperMicro boards as of just a few months ago. Are you telling me that they kept using boards from SuperMicro for a year or three after finding out about this issue?
Come on.
The origins of "shibboleth" are Biblical and go back to Old Testament times. To make a long story short, enemy foreigners couldn't pronounce "sh", so anyone stopped at the border was asked to say "shibboleth". People who pronounced it "sibboleth" were put to death as an enemy spies. Since then, a shibboleth has come to simply mean anything that can be used to distinguish between two groups of people, be it a code word, belief, or practice.
And, as always, there's an obligatory xkcd on the issue: https://www.xkcd.com/806/
In a fun case of fiction becoming fact, a number of systems have actually added the code word mentioned in that xkcd strip.
It doesn't matter if the US agrees or not. What Germany is proposing is that the EU implements a minimum global tax rate for companies that do business in the EU. So if the minimum global rate is say 10% and the US levies 15% all is well. If the US only levies 5% then the EU will collect the other 5%. Numbers made up.
How would it change anything then? The US already collects taxes on overseas operations for all US-based corporations, effectively instituting exactly this sort of minimum tax. Any taxes paid overseas can be deducted from the taxes that are owed to the US. If enough taxes are paid overseas, no taxes are owed to the US for those overseas operations.
I think where the US system goes off the rails is that it allows US corporations to avoid paying those taxes by keeping the money overseas more or less indefinitely. The US corporations can't repatriate that money to the US without incurring the taxes owed on it—so they keep it overseas as long as they can in the hope that the US will vote in a President and Congress that will offer them a tax holiday—but keeping it over there in the meantime means that they get to go years with an effective tax rate that's near 0%, thus rightfully pissing off all of the locals.
Close the loophole by compelling them to repatriate the money and they'll quickly become more amenable to higher tax rates elsewhere, since they'd face them at home anyway.
There are checks you can do but they get expensive in a hurry. Doing these sorts of checks at a domain level was actually part of my research in grad school, but it was several orders of magnitude more computationally expensive to go from “how many domains link to X” to “how many domains link to the domains that link to X”, which was significantly more difficult for the spammers to abuse.
Back then, we’d see them register 10,000 domains just to prop up 1, then get a refund on 9,999 of them within the one-week window when they could get a full refund, meaning that they were only out the cost of one domain. The eventual fix for that particular proble:was to add a non-refundable portion to each registration fee. Those $0.05 fees wouldn’t matter to legitimate people, but unscrupulous sorts quickly found their tactics too expensive to use, at least for awhile.
Anyway, podcasts are a lot harder to do since the only registration is an account creation, which costs nothing. Aside from adding weight to long-time accounts, I’m not sure what you could do, and that’s just delay the problem.
Why did both Apple and Amazon dump SuperMicro at roughly the same time?
They didn't. Apple dumped SuperMicro in 2016 (i.e. a year after they allegedly found the chips) after an unrelated firmware incident. Amazon was still using SuperMicro boards as of earlier this year, which they even mentioned in their initial response to Bloomberg:
[I]n June 2018, researchers made public reports of vulnerabilities in SuperMicro firmware. As part of our standard operating procedure, we notified affected customers promptly, and recommended they upgrade the firmware in their appliances.
I don't know where people got the false idea that they dumped SuperMicro at the same time. Moreover, if these malicious chips were real, the timeline makes no sense. Apple discovered these chips back in mid-2015, but then didn't dump SuperMicro for a full year? And Amazon knew about them too in 2015, but then didn't dump SuperMicro for three full years? It makes no sense.
My phone wasn’t ringing. The call really just wasn’t going through for some reason. A voice mail from them came through about 10 minutes later on my phone. And yeah, they were basically calling from down the hall and around a corner.
You do realize ejection seats aren't the only way to save the crew, right? For example, there was this Soyuz' launch a few days ago...
Whether you realize it or not, your entire first post is predicated on the false belief that Challenger's crew capsule didn't survive the explosion. It did. And because the crew cabin survived the explosion (and the crew died later on in a different manner than you thought), there's no reason to believe that the Soyuz' approach of using parachutes and heat shielding on the cabin wouldn't have been sufficient to save the crew. Simple as that.
Of course, to retrofit the orbiter to actually make all of that happen, the crew cabin would have needed to be redesigned as a capsule, with the ability to rapidly decouple the capsule from the rest of the orbiter. That adds technical complexity, introduces new sources for failure, takes up valuable space, adds weight, and costs a lot of money, so I get why they didn't want to do it.
Even so, there's no reason to believe that things would have turned out any differently for this week's astronauts had they suffered an incident during launch that was akin to what happened to Challenger. Both crew cabins were intact after their incidents. The difference was that one had parachutes to slow their fall while the other landed hard.
Against my better judgment, and for the first time in months, I actually answered a call from an unknown number a few days ago. The call was coming in on my wife's phone, which I was holding for her at the time as I waited for her to finish up with whatever it was that was indisposing her. She's been getting multiple robocalls every day, so I was expecting more of the same. Honestly, I'm not even sure why I answered, since I was absolutely convinced it was a robocall. Maybe I was just bored.
Pausing the show I was watching on my tablet, I tentatively raised the phone and said, "Hello", intentionally withholding my name or any other identifying information that could be sold for profit or otherwise used by someone unscrupulous.
"Hello, is this Mr. [my last name]?", came the reply from a real human being speaking in a perfect American accent. Talk about odd and unexpected, especially so since they were asking for me specifically, but they were calling my wife's phone.
"Yes, this is he."
"Oh, good. We've been trying to reach you on your phone for the last 10 minutes, but the call hasn't gone through. This is the nurse's station at the hospital. Your wife is out of surgery and awake. You can bring your things from the waiting area and come back to see her in room Blue-3 now."
Right. I was supposed to be expecting a call from an unknown number...
Had the Soyuz rocket exploded, which is what happened with Challenger, NO "safety mechanisms" would've helped and they would have died in the same manner.
By impacting water at 200 g after they survived the explosion but had no way to safely get out during the subsequent fall?
It's widely assumed that most—possibly all—of the Challenger crew not only survived the breakup of the orbiter (which, incidentally, was due to aerodynamic issues following the explosion, rather than the explosion itself), but were, in fact, conscious for at least part of the fall. After all, the crew cabin was intact after the breakup, the estimated g-forces involved in the breakup likely weren't sufficient to cause major injury, there weren't signs of catastrophic decompression in the cabin, multiple air packs had been manually activated and showed usage consistent with the amount of time they were falling, and manually-operated controls that would have been relevant to re-establishing power in the event of an emergency had been toggled to non-launch positions.
So, actually, safety mechanisms might have saved Challenger's crew, though those mechanisms would have come at a cost beyond just the money involved, such as needing to reduce crew sizes rather substantially in order to make room for the safety mechanisms.