Checking if a binary search tree is balanced is something a student has to do, you usually have to write these sorts of things once or twice in your entire career.
So very true. Arrays, vectors, lists, hash tables, maps, stacks? Depending on the language, I've interacted with all of those and similar structures on a regular basis. But graphs, trees, and heaps? Other than allocating memory from the heap, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a single time I've directly interacted with any of them since leaving grad school, and the notion that my entry into a country could be denied because of that is appalling. If a customs agent decided to start grilling me over something like that, I'd be incensed.
Though, to be fair, if a customs agent asked me something like that, I expect I'd just treat it like an actual interview and start asking all sorts of questions to get them to fill in the unstated assumptions. Things would fall apart pretty quickly, I imagine.
If you pay a courier to pick up a package and deliver it to you by a set time, it's your problem if any of the following happen: A) They claim they lack the infrastructure to do the job. You're the victim of false advertising.
B) They ask the sender for money to do the job you already paid for. You're the victim of fraud.
C) They intentionally fail to perform the job you paid for. You're the victim of a breach of contract.
Comcast's customers were paying a subscription fee. That fee was supposed to cover the delivery of packets at the best speed possible according to the terms of their subscription, regardless of where those packets were coming from. Comcast claimed they lacked the infrastructure, asked the sender for money, and is alleged to have intentionally failed to perform the job their customers paid for. The latter two happen to be problems that impact Netflix as well, but all three of those are Comcast's customer's problems, whether or not Netflix is involved.
A lot of this stuff really just comes around to mindsets. It's true of the businesses and true of the individuals who work at them.
One of the smartest pieces I ever read about the differences between how software shops approach business was a piece from the co-founder of The Omni Group that compared farming vs. mining. The Silicon Valley bubble has a strange obsession with "mining" schemes and exit strategies that leave rubble in their wake. That mindset permeates the culture, with many of them living as if they were oblivious to the fact that outside of their bubble most people lead happier, more fulfilled lives by going out of their way to avoid working and living in those sorts of conditions.
Speaking personally, I had a few offers on the table when I was a fresh out of grad school several years ago. One was for $50K/yr at a small software consulting company in a town most people have never heard of. One was for some interesting government work in D.C. at $75K/yr.. The last was for $75K/yr + stock options at a startup in Austin that was on course to have a big IPO soon.
I took the first one. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
The location has a low cost of living, delightful people, decent schools, and is populous enough to provide all of the benefits associated with the suburbs of a major city. The company is averse to overtime, small enough that we all know each other, big enough to attract a diverse set of clients, provides incredible benefits, and takes great pride in its work. I get to enjoy the satisfaction each night of a job well done without having to take my work home with me.
My income has increased modestly to $65K since accepting the job, which is easily enough for my wife and I to... - Live off my income alone - Enjoy a 7 minute traffic-free commute at 30mph - Have an 1800 sqft. house on 1/3 acre - Have a $580/mo. mortgage as our only debt - Donate $10,000+/year to charity - Enjoy big vacations on a regular basis - Have time for family, friends, and ourselves - Give my wife ample time for charitable service - Retire early if we keep on as we have been
And all of that for a take-home pay that's roughly comparable to what the guy in the summary is paying in rent alone.
I mean, I get it. Prior to getting married, my wife was making $65K/yr in D.C., which was only enough to rent a small basement that was an hour commute from where she worked. When we were deciding whether to move there or here, it was pretty obvious which choice was the right one. Likewise, I've occasionally checked on that Austin startup over the last few years as a "what if". Turns out that after their last round of funding and claims they were going to hire 100 more people in advance of an IPO, the execs mostly all left to found a new startup and the company quietly announced layoffs.
It sounds like the guy in the summary has wants that outstrip his income. Hopefully he'll come to terms with the reality of his situation sooner rather than later, and maybe even wake up to the fact that there are viable alternatives that will provide not only a better quality of life, but may even provide more spending money.
You're quite correct that it's not actually ownership and that I misspoke in saying it was. Thank you for that correction.
That said, the idea that it is a mere privilege instead of a right is demonstrably false, given that the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution refers to this idea as an "exclusive right" secured to the author of the work. As you said, it only exists for a particular duration and there are other limitations placed on it, but it clearly is a right. You can quibble over whether we should call it "copyright" or not, but it's undeniable that the right exists, regardless of what we choose to call it.
Of course, the degree to which copyright succeeds at implementing that right is a subject for some debate. I agree that copyright laws (and other IP-related laws) have gotten out of control and are in desperate need of reform, but that's a separate topic over the oughtness of the situation, rather than its reality, and I honestly don't feel like hashing that topic out right now.
So, swinging back around to the quote you originally pulled from my previous comment, what I should have said was that you can't copy the DVD because doing so would infringe on their exclusive rights to the material they authored. Again, there's the question of whether or not things should be that way, but there's no denying that that's how things work today.
Having admittedly not had any firsthand experience with this, I'd imagine that during the setup process for adding their account or devices they'd be forced to agree to the same onerous terms and conditions, thus circumventing the issue.
Cool solar cells.... by blocking the sunlight *facepalm*.
No. It seems you missed the part in the article where they said you'd first need to remove the mirror backing in order to use it with solar cells. I.e. It would let (nearly) all of the light through while still providing the heat dissipation properties.
Also I'm thinking how big a deal is the "not blocked by the atmosphere" really, I mean it's not like heat reflected of a little building significantly changes the ambient temperature.
Controlling how light and heat get reflected from buildings is of growing importance to architects and engineers. Unfortunately, buildings melting cars is a thing that has happened, and urban heat islands are a contributing factor to global warming. Plus, if you can reduce the ambient temperature by pushing the energy out into space, you've effectively reduced your cooling needs, which is a double win.
I'm willing to accept that it probably can't be copyrighted.
That doesn't mean you can't put a license on it. And there are plenty of licenses to choose from. One must be pretty close to suitable.
There's neither a need for a license, nor would a license have any meaning in this context. The whole purpose of a license is to disclaim or enumerate the rights being retained by the copyright holder. If the works belongs to the public domain, a license has no meaning and any attempt to attach a license would be an attempt to (fraudulently) assert rights that only belong to the owner of the material, of which there is none.
Setting those concerns aside, there are a few licenses that approximate to varying degrees the rights provided by public domain works (e.g. MIT or BSD), but attaching them to these documents to describe the rights of users would be like saying that the UN charter is the official document Americans should use to understand their right to free speech, rather than the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The laws regarding works in the public domain would still be the governing rules here, rather than whatever license they attached, so it makes no sense to attach a license in the first place.
So the same thing goes for a DVD, since you own it, after you purchased it?
It does, hence the First-sale doctrine, which is the foundation on which things like the video rental industry are built. Now, your rights do have limits, of course, among them being that you can't infringe on their right of ownership by copying the DVDs as much as you want and selling the copies for a profit, given that they still own the rights to the content on that DVD, but you own the DVD itself, so you can do with it as you please.
You've got that backwards: it is, which is why there is a story. Lawmakers regularly pass new laws to make it explicitly clear that rights do, in fact, extend to particular areas. Our rights already exist there, but our ability to exercise them has been obstructed, and lawmakers are pushing back.
Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to prevent people from exercising their rights (e.g. licensing instead of selling, adding terms of usage that limit rights, etc., most of which have yet to be challenged heavily in court since the manufacturers are trying to avoid setting a precedent they don't like), and states are starting to push back, saying that those rights cannot be given up as a condition of sale or use.
Yes it is. If you own the item, then all of the rights of ownership are to be afforded to you. You get to do with it as you please, and that includes repairing it.
It's a derived right, to be sure, but it is a right, nonetheless.
Yeah, I'm waiting for this fad to pass. Anyone who doesn't live by themselves is better served by a flat display. And those that do live alone get a marginal benefit, at best. Certainly not worth the aesthetic annoyance of how it sits against the wall, nor the fact that it's subpar if you ever do get someone to watch things with you.
If I choose to purchase a device that, by design, records everything I say, then I've voluntarily sacrificed my right to privacy in exchange for the benefits afforded by the device.
That's an assertion on your part, not a fact.
Mea culpa, I overstated things, so you're quite right in calling me out. What I intended to convey was that when you permit a third-party to record anything you say in your home, you've compromised the protections provided by your right to privacy, which should be a factual statement we can agree on. You still have the right, of course, but it's impossible to exercise it to its full extent while permitting an intrusion of any sort.
The police certainly are within their rights to seek a warrant to obtain information so long as is it relative to the case. They may not however use warrants to conduct fishing expeditions on the off-chance that information might be found that might be relevant to the case.
What you seem to be suggesting (that they may not search when something only might be found) sounds like it'd require them to have a crystal ball to know the contents of the recordings before they could ask for them. Instead, the police require probable cause to get a search warrant, and they have it here, given that the device was in the home where the victim's body was found and that the recordings are from the time leading up to its discovery, which would've been when the crime was committed. That's sufficient reason for a prudent person to believe that a search of the recordings will turn up evidence of the crime.
I've never actually talked to him, nor am I a customer, but I want to see him succeed since it's clear that he's providing a useful service to a number of people. Plus, if he gets big enough to expand just a tiny bit further into town, he may actually reach my house, which would let me ditch the big-name ISP I'm incredibly dissatisfied with.
I'd take it to mean ISPs like Brazos WiFi, a small ISP that operates in the rural areas close to where I live. It was started about a decade back by a lone tech guy who was frustrated that none of the major ISPs were serving the town he lived in. At this point, it's his full-time job and he's putting up a handful of new towers every year to expand his region, improve his service, and lower his prices. I'd imagine he has customers in the low thousands at this point, since he's serving several rural towns and has even started getting into the outskirts of the main cities in the area.
The summary does a poor job of explaining Amazon's point (which isn't to say it's a good point anyway). Amazon doesn't seem to be saying that Alexa has rights, so much as it's saying that you or I or anyone else who owns an Echo has rights, and that those rights would be trampled if this warrant was served.
Their line of argumentation seems to be the following: 1) People have a First Amendment right to say and express anything they want in the privacy of their home (which is true)
2) If people aren't secure in their privacy, we've stripped them of their right to express themselves freely (also true)
3) If the police could hear anything anyone has said, it would have a "chilling effect" because people wouldn't be secure in their privacy (yup)
4) The police are asking for days' worth of audio without any direct evidence it has anything to do with the crime (true, I guess)
5) Thus, if they granted the police access to those recordings, they would be compromising the rights of Alexa users everywhere (wait...what?)
The problem with their logic is, of course, that the police aren't forcing anyone to buy an Alexa device. If I choose to purchase a device that, by design, records everything I say, then I've voluntarily sacrificed my right to privacy in exchange for the benefits afforded by the device. It's not the police's fault that I've done so, and they're entirely within their rights to seek a warrant for the information that I've served up on a platter.
This isn't blanket police surveillance, like Amazon appears to be asserting. This is a blanket devaluation of and disregard for the importance of privacy. Amazon is trying to protect us from the consequences of our poor choices, not because they're interested in protecting our interests, but rather because their business depends on having no consequences for using their products. If people actually understood just how creepy Alexa and similar products are, they'd stop inviting them into their homes. Amazon is worried that a case like this will shine light on Alexa's privacy-destroying behavior.
Sacrificing one's privacy should never be treated lightly.
A 10 million strong botnet would need +/- 3 years per key under ideal circumstances here.
Aren't you off by a few orders of magnitude there? 6,500 years of computation time divided by 10,000,000 bots would be about 5 hours and 42 minutes, not 3 years.
Even your hypothetical 10,000-strong botnet could do it in about 8 months, which might be well worth it if it meant being able to hijack a cert that could be leveraged in interesting ways (e.g. using it to sign your malware as an official update for the company).
As the poster had in fact said: >It's NOT just citing sources and peer review...
I don't see anyone saying that in this thread, nor in the summary. Where did you pull that quote from?
As for the central idea I was trying to convey, I said it right at the start of my post: citations and peer reviews are necessary but insufficient. I suppose the shorter version of what I then went on to say is that citations and peer reviews are tools that enable us to build a network of trust, and a network of trust is a tool that can be used to establish the credibility of information, but at the end of the day tools are only useful if people are actually using them, and for that we need to teach critical thinking.
They already had this. It's called citing your sources and peer review.
Having read countless research papers that fit your criteria, I can tell you that citing your sources and being peer reviewed are not nearly sufficient. They're necessary steps, to be sure, but I've read more than my fair share of papers from conferences or journals, some even associated with reputable organizations, that were nothing but complete bunk. What you need are citations to trustworthy sources and to be reviewed by trustworthy peers.
And that's the crux of the issue: this is about establishing a network of trust. Citations and peer reviews are an important part of that process, but the notion that they are sufficient in and of themselves misses the point. After all, how is a layperson supposed to know that the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is a reputable professional society that has strict ethical and legal obligations, and that the information attributable to it is likely to be trustworthy, but that the American Association for Mechanical Engineers (AAME, which I hope is a fictional entity, but who I apologize to if they actually exist) is a front that's been created by a group to push its own agenda? We see this sort of thing happening all the time in medical, environmental, and other fields that are overshadowed by partisan politics.
Moreover, even if we do manage to establish a network of trust, we still need people to actually trust it in order for it to be useful. How do we do that? By teaching them to think critically and to recognize BS. When they do, they'll naturally gravitate towards trustworthy sources that provide verifiable information. With a world full of people espousing "alternative facts", the very notion of a network of trust can become political, so it's important to train people to pursue the truth even when it doesn't jibe with what they want to believe, otherwise they'll be perfectly content reading peer-reviewed nonsense filled with citations to worthless publications.
It's a shame that fact-based reporting and analysis has become viewed as politically driven, but that's the world we live in. I do agree that citations and peer reviews are necessary, useful tools, but we need to train people to not only use those tools but to also recognize when there's a problem causing them to come up short.
Agreed. As I'd imagine is the case with most people, I didn't know what to get some people for the holidays until closer to Christmas, so I wasn't able to make a single, bulk purchase. As a result, I never had a single cart that was anywhere close to the $49 minimum. It ended up being cheaper to buy individual items directly from the manufacturers than to purchase them a few at a time from Amazon. In the end, Amazon only sold me one item this last Christmas, whereas in prior years I've done the bulk of my shopping on the site.
We stopped using Prime because we were getting less value out of the service than what it cost (YMMV), then our shopping on Amazon dropped off a cliff when they jacked the minimum up to $49. I was beginning to suspect that I'd barely use the site any more, but with the minimum dropping back down again, they may actually attract some of our business again.
Previously Gatekeeper had the option to to run apps from "Anywhere", that option has now been removed from GateKeeper settings
The option to run unsigned apps (i.e. apps from "Anywhere") still exists, but rather than being a global setting, it's now handled on a one-off basis by bringing up the contextual menu on any unsigned app and telling it to Open. I think it provides a warning about the risks and then confirms that you want to still open it, but after that it'll run just like any other app, no more warnings or anything. In the last year or two, I've only encountered one unsigned app that required I go through that process, and I'd consider myself a fairly advanced user (as I imagine most other people here would).
Avoiding the MAS is becoming more difficult for Mac users.
In practice, I don't think this is actually the case. Again, I've only encountered one unsigned app in the last year or two. Were that not the case, I might agree, but the vast majority of Mac developers seem to have a certificate at this point, and the second option you listed is the default one, so their apps run with default settings, which means that no one is really being pushed to the MAS. And stories like the ones being described in the summary are becoming increasingly common. Indications seem to point towards MAS usage being in decline for the last few years among advanced users, and novice users are dwindling too as their attention is increasingly drawn towards mobile platforms.
I do agree that macOS is converging on iOS, but I think we're still a good few years away from it becoming that locked down.
Lots of things may happen. For now, if the machine is working for you better than anything else you've looked into, keep using it. Simple as that.
As to your concerns, even if Apple decided to do what you said, it wouldn't be an immediate concern. You'd be able to keep using your existing machines for years as people worked on creating/polishing alternatives, given that there'd be nothing forcing you to "upgrade". By the time you needed to purchase an alternative, there'd not only be plenty of them available, there would also be plenty of blogs and other resources providing advice as to which ones suit your specific needs.
All of which is to say, leave tomorrow's concerns for tomorrow. Don't worry about them today.
To be clear, this is about the Mac App Store (MAS), not the (iOS) App Store. In both cases, you're effectively paying Apple a cut of the profits in order to make your product more accessible to consumers. In the case of the iOS App Store, it's pretty obvious that the 15%/30% cut is worth it, since if your app isn't there, it isn't for sale as far as 99.9% of people are concerned (even though that's not strictly the case).
But the MAS? Its value proposition has always been questionable.
For one, purchasing patterns are drastically different between mobile and PC. Consumers typically already know what Mac apps they plan to buy, rather than browse-shopping like they do on iOS, so whether the app is in the MAS or on a website makes no difference. As such, developers don't lose much from pulling out, or, in many cases, what they lose in unit sales is more than made up in reduced overhead.
Making matters worse for the MAS, it's oftentimes the case that the version of the app sold in the MAS is both more expensive and has less features than the one sold on their website. The MAS has a number of requirements (e.g. strict sandboxing) that make certain features virtually impossible to implement, so the apps in the MAS are oftentimes missing key features found in the direct-sale versions, or they might be lagging behind by a few versions due to the app store review process that all updates need to go through. And because developers don't see much benefit from the MAS, many of them simply tack on a 30% premium for the version sold through the MAS, that way they can recoup the cost. But even in the case that the developer doesn't price it higher, there's no way to offer upgrade pricing for loyal customers, so MAS users end up paying full price for subsequent versions, rather than being able to get a discount that the developer might be offering on direct sales.
All of which is to say, the MAS is a somewhat hostile environment to both developers AND users, so it's not surprising that niche apps aimed power users (i.e. the ones most likely to know how to use a browser to find software) are seeing improved numbers after pulling out of the MAS.
Absolute gibberish. Start capitalizing only the words that should be capitalized.
Headline capitalization has been a special case in the English language for centuries, so what the editors did here is appropriate, but even if you were to capitalize it normally it would still be "Overeager investors seeking Snap buy Snap Interactive instead", which doesn't do much to help you understand the situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Checking if a binary search tree is balanced is something a student has to do, you usually have to write these sorts of things once or twice in your entire career.
So very true. Arrays, vectors, lists, hash tables, maps, stacks? Depending on the language, I've interacted with all of those and similar structures on a regular basis. But graphs, trees, and heaps? Other than allocating memory from the heap, I'd be hard-pressed to think of a single time I've directly interacted with any of them since leaving grad school, and the notion that my entry into a country could be denied because of that is appalling. If a customs agent decided to start grilling me over something like that, I'd be incensed.
Though, to be fair, if a customs agent asked me something like that, I expect I'd just treat it like an actual interview and start asking all sorts of questions to get them to fill in the unstated assumptions. Things would fall apart pretty quickly, I imagine.
If you pay a courier to pick up a package and deliver it to you by a set time, it's your problem if any of the following happen:
A) They claim they lack the infrastructure to do the job. You're the victim of false advertising.
B) They ask the sender for money to do the job you already paid for. You're the victim of fraud.
C) They intentionally fail to perform the job you paid for. You're the victim of a breach of contract.
Comcast's customers were paying a subscription fee. That fee was supposed to cover the delivery of packets at the best speed possible according to the terms of their subscription, regardless of where those packets were coming from. Comcast claimed they lacked the infrastructure, asked the sender for money, and is alleged to have intentionally failed to perform the job their customers paid for. The latter two happen to be problems that impact Netflix as well, but all three of those are Comcast's customer's problems, whether or not Netflix is involved.
A lot of this stuff really just comes around to mindsets. It's true of the businesses and true of the individuals who work at them.
One of the smartest pieces I ever read about the differences between how software shops approach business was a piece from the co-founder of The Omni Group that compared farming vs. mining. The Silicon Valley bubble has a strange obsession with "mining" schemes and exit strategies that leave rubble in their wake. That mindset permeates the culture, with many of them living as if they were oblivious to the fact that outside of their bubble most people lead happier, more fulfilled lives by going out of their way to avoid working and living in those sorts of conditions.
Speaking personally, I had a few offers on the table when I was a fresh out of grad school several years ago. One was for $50K/yr at a small software consulting company in a town most people have never heard of. One was for some interesting government work in D.C. at $75K/yr.. The last was for $75K/yr + stock options at a startup in Austin that was on course to have a big IPO soon.
I took the first one. It was one of the best decisions I've ever made.
The location has a low cost of living, delightful people, decent schools, and is populous enough to provide all of the benefits associated with the suburbs of a major city. The company is averse to overtime, small enough that we all know each other, big enough to attract a diverse set of clients, provides incredible benefits, and takes great pride in its work. I get to enjoy the satisfaction each night of a job well done without having to take my work home with me.
My income has increased modestly to $65K since accepting the job, which is easily enough for my wife and I to...
- Live off my income alone
- Enjoy a 7 minute traffic-free commute at 30mph
- Have an 1800 sqft. house on 1/3 acre
- Have a $580/mo. mortgage as our only debt
- Donate $10,000+/year to charity
- Enjoy big vacations on a regular basis
- Have time for family, friends, and ourselves
- Give my wife ample time for charitable service
- Retire early if we keep on as we have been
And all of that for a take-home pay that's roughly comparable to what the guy in the summary is paying in rent alone.
I mean, I get it. Prior to getting married, my wife was making $65K/yr in D.C., which was only enough to rent a small basement that was an hour commute from where she worked. When we were deciding whether to move there or here, it was pretty obvious which choice was the right one. Likewise, I've occasionally checked on that Austin startup over the last few years as a "what if". Turns out that after their last round of funding and claims they were going to hire 100 more people in advance of an IPO, the execs mostly all left to found a new startup and the company quietly announced layoffs.
It sounds like the guy in the summary has wants that outstrip his income. Hopefully he'll come to terms with the reality of his situation sooner rather than later, and maybe even wake up to the fact that there are viable alternatives that will provide not only a better quality of life, but may even provide more spending money.
You're quite correct that it's not actually ownership and that I misspoke in saying it was. Thank you for that correction.
That said, the idea that it is a mere privilege instead of a right is demonstrably false, given that the Copyright Clause of the U.S. Constitution refers to this idea as an "exclusive right" secured to the author of the work. As you said, it only exists for a particular duration and there are other limitations placed on it, but it clearly is a right. You can quibble over whether we should call it "copyright" or not, but it's undeniable that the right exists, regardless of what we choose to call it.
Of course, the degree to which copyright succeeds at implementing that right is a subject for some debate. I agree that copyright laws (and other IP-related laws) have gotten out of control and are in desperate need of reform, but that's a separate topic over the oughtness of the situation, rather than its reality, and I honestly don't feel like hashing that topic out right now.
So, swinging back around to the quote you originally pulled from my previous comment, what I should have said was that you can't copy the DVD because doing so would infringe on their exclusive rights to the material they authored. Again, there's the question of whether or not things should be that way, but there's no denying that that's how things work today.
Having admittedly not had any firsthand experience with this, I'd imagine that during the setup process for adding their account or devices they'd be forced to agree to the same onerous terms and conditions, thus circumventing the issue.
Cool solar cells.... by blocking the sunlight *facepalm*.
No. It seems you missed the part in the article where they said you'd first need to remove the mirror backing in order to use it with solar cells. I.e. It would let (nearly) all of the light through while still providing the heat dissipation properties.
Also I'm thinking how big a deal is the "not blocked by the atmosphere" really, I mean it's not like heat reflected of a little building significantly changes the ambient temperature.
I take it you're unaware of urban heat islands?
Controlling how light and heat get reflected from buildings is of growing importance to architects and engineers. Unfortunately, buildings melting cars is a thing that has happened, and urban heat islands are a contributing factor to global warming. Plus, if you can reduce the ambient temperature by pushing the energy out into space, you've effectively reduced your cooling needs, which is a double win.
I'm willing to accept that it probably can't be copyrighted.
That doesn't mean you can't put a license on it. And there are plenty of licenses to choose from. One must be pretty close to suitable.
There's neither a need for a license, nor would a license have any meaning in this context. The whole purpose of a license is to disclaim or enumerate the rights being retained by the copyright holder. If the works belongs to the public domain, a license has no meaning and any attempt to attach a license would be an attempt to (fraudulently) assert rights that only belong to the owner of the material, of which there is none.
Setting those concerns aside, there are a few licenses that approximate to varying degrees the rights provided by public domain works (e.g. MIT or BSD), but attaching them to these documents to describe the rights of users would be like saying that the UN charter is the official document Americans should use to understand their right to free speech, rather than the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights. The laws regarding works in the public domain would still be the governing rules here, rather than whatever license they attached, so it makes no sense to attach a license in the first place.
So the same thing goes for a DVD, since you own it, after you purchased it?
It does, hence the First-sale doctrine, which is the foundation on which things like the video rental industry are built. Now, your rights do have limits, of course, among them being that you can't infringe on their right of ownership by copying the DVDs as much as you want and selling the copies for a profit, given that they still own the rights to the content on that DVD, but you own the DVD itself, so you can do with it as you please.
It's not, or this wouldn't be a story.
You've got that backwards: it is, which is why there is a story. Lawmakers regularly pass new laws to make it explicitly clear that rights do, in fact, extend to particular areas. Our rights already exist there, but our ability to exercise them has been obstructed, and lawmakers are pushing back.
Manufacturers have gone to great lengths to prevent people from exercising their rights (e.g. licensing instead of selling, adding terms of usage that limit rights, etc., most of which have yet to be challenged heavily in court since the manufacturers are trying to avoid setting a precedent they don't like), and states are starting to push back, saying that those rights cannot be given up as a condition of sale or use.
Yes it is. If you own the item, then all of the rights of ownership are to be afforded to you. You get to do with it as you please, and that includes repairing it.
It's a derived right, to be sure, but it is a right, nonetheless.
Yeah, I'm waiting for this fad to pass. Anyone who doesn't live by themselves is better served by a flat display. And those that do live alone get a marginal benefit, at best. Certainly not worth the aesthetic annoyance of how it sits against the wall, nor the fact that it's subpar if you ever do get someone to watch things with you.
That's a novel argument. This is a 4th amendment issue, and they have a warrant. Amazon's argument is specious.
It's not a novel argument. It's something the courts have already upheld, but I do agree with the rest of what you said.
You really should look up a definition for probable cause, since nothing you said resembles it, and it's what I was talking about.
If I choose to purchase a device that, by design, records everything I say, then I've voluntarily sacrificed my right to privacy in exchange for the benefits afforded by the device.
That's an assertion on your part, not a fact.
Mea culpa, I overstated things, so you're quite right in calling me out. What I intended to convey was that when you permit a third-party to record anything you say in your home, you've compromised the protections provided by your right to privacy, which should be a factual statement we can agree on. You still have the right, of course, but it's impossible to exercise it to its full extent while permitting an intrusion of any sort.
The police certainly are within their rights to seek a warrant to obtain information so long as is it relative to the case. They may not however use warrants to conduct fishing expeditions on the off-chance that information might be found that might be relevant to the case.
What you seem to be suggesting (that they may not search when something only might be found) sounds like it'd require them to have a crystal ball to know the contents of the recordings before they could ask for them. Instead, the police require probable cause to get a search warrant, and they have it here, given that the device was in the home where the victim's body was found and that the recordings are from the time leading up to its discovery, which would've been when the crime was committed. That's sufficient reason for a prudent person to believe that a search of the recordings will turn up evidence of the crime.
I've never actually talked to him, nor am I a customer, but I want to see him succeed since it's clear that he's providing a useful service to a number of people. Plus, if he gets big enough to expand just a tiny bit further into town, he may actually reach my house, which would let me ditch the big-name ISP I'm incredibly dissatisfied with.
I'd take it to mean ISPs like Brazos WiFi, a small ISP that operates in the rural areas close to where I live. It was started about a decade back by a lone tech guy who was frustrated that none of the major ISPs were serving the town he lived in. At this point, it's his full-time job and he's putting up a handful of new towers every year to expand his region, improve his service, and lower his prices. I'd imagine he has customers in the low thousands at this point, since he's serving several rural towns and has even started getting into the outskirts of the main cities in the area.
I'd consider that a mom and pop ISP.
The summary does a poor job of explaining Amazon's point (which isn't to say it's a good point anyway). Amazon doesn't seem to be saying that Alexa has rights, so much as it's saying that you or I or anyone else who owns an Echo has rights, and that those rights would be trampled if this warrant was served.
Their line of argumentation seems to be the following:
1) People have a First Amendment right to say and express anything they want in the privacy of their home (which is true)
2) If people aren't secure in their privacy, we've stripped them of their right to express themselves freely (also true)
3) If the police could hear anything anyone has said, it would have a "chilling effect" because people wouldn't be secure in their privacy (yup)
4) The police are asking for days' worth of audio without any direct evidence it has anything to do with the crime (true, I guess)
5) Thus, if they granted the police access to those recordings, they would be compromising the rights of Alexa users everywhere (wait...what?)
The problem with their logic is, of course, that the police aren't forcing anyone to buy an Alexa device. If I choose to purchase a device that, by design, records everything I say, then I've voluntarily sacrificed my right to privacy in exchange for the benefits afforded by the device. It's not the police's fault that I've done so, and they're entirely within their rights to seek a warrant for the information that I've served up on a platter.
This isn't blanket police surveillance, like Amazon appears to be asserting. This is a blanket devaluation of and disregard for the importance of privacy. Amazon is trying to protect us from the consequences of our poor choices, not because they're interested in protecting our interests, but rather because their business depends on having no consequences for using their products. If people actually understood just how creepy Alexa and similar products are, they'd stop inviting them into their homes. Amazon is worried that a case like this will shine light on Alexa's privacy-destroying behavior.
Sacrificing one's privacy should never be treated lightly.
A 10 million strong botnet would need +/- 3 years per key under ideal circumstances here.
Aren't you off by a few orders of magnitude there? 6,500 years of computation time divided by 10,000,000 bots would be about 5 hours and 42 minutes, not 3 years.
Even your hypothetical 10,000-strong botnet could do it in about 8 months, which might be well worth it if it meant being able to hijack a cert that could be leveraged in interesting ways (e.g. using it to sign your malware as an official update for the company).
As the poster had in fact said: >It's NOT just citing sources and peer review...
I don't see anyone saying that in this thread, nor in the summary. Where did you pull that quote from?
As for the central idea I was trying to convey, I said it right at the start of my post: citations and peer reviews are necessary but insufficient. I suppose the shorter version of what I then went on to say is that citations and peer reviews are tools that enable us to build a network of trust, and a network of trust is a tool that can be used to establish the credibility of information, but at the end of the day tools are only useful if people are actually using them, and for that we need to teach critical thinking.
They already had this. It's called citing your sources and peer review.
Having read countless research papers that fit your criteria, I can tell you that citing your sources and being peer reviewed are not nearly sufficient. They're necessary steps, to be sure, but I've read more than my fair share of papers from conferences or journals, some even associated with reputable organizations, that were nothing but complete bunk. What you need are citations to trustworthy sources and to be reviewed by trustworthy peers.
And that's the crux of the issue: this is about establishing a network of trust. Citations and peer reviews are an important part of that process, but the notion that they are sufficient in and of themselves misses the point. After all, how is a layperson supposed to know that the American Society for Mechanical Engineers (ASME) is a reputable professional society that has strict ethical and legal obligations, and that the information attributable to it is likely to be trustworthy, but that the American Association for Mechanical Engineers (AAME, which I hope is a fictional entity, but who I apologize to if they actually exist) is a front that's been created by a group to push its own agenda? We see this sort of thing happening all the time in medical, environmental, and other fields that are overshadowed by partisan politics.
Moreover, even if we do manage to establish a network of trust, we still need people to actually trust it in order for it to be useful. How do we do that? By teaching them to think critically and to recognize BS. When they do, they'll naturally gravitate towards trustworthy sources that provide verifiable information. With a world full of people espousing "alternative facts", the very notion of a network of trust can become political, so it's important to train people to pursue the truth even when it doesn't jibe with what they want to believe, otherwise they'll be perfectly content reading peer-reviewed nonsense filled with citations to worthless publications.
It's a shame that fact-based reporting and analysis has become viewed as politically driven, but that's the world we live in. I do agree that citations and peer reviews are necessary, useful tools, but we need to train people to not only use those tools but to also recognize when there's a problem causing them to come up short.
Agreed. As I'd imagine is the case with most people, I didn't know what to get some people for the holidays until closer to Christmas, so I wasn't able to make a single, bulk purchase. As a result, I never had a single cart that was anywhere close to the $49 minimum. It ended up being cheaper to buy individual items directly from the manufacturers than to purchase them a few at a time from Amazon. In the end, Amazon only sold me one item this last Christmas, whereas in prior years I've done the bulk of my shopping on the site.
We stopped using Prime because we were getting less value out of the service than what it cost (YMMV), then our shopping on Amazon dropped off a cliff when they jacked the minimum up to $49. I was beginning to suspect that I'd barely use the site any more, but with the minimum dropping back down again, they may actually attract some of our business again.
Previously Gatekeeper had the option to to run apps from "Anywhere", that option has now been removed from GateKeeper settings
The option to run unsigned apps (i.e. apps from "Anywhere") still exists, but rather than being a global setting, it's now handled on a one-off basis by bringing up the contextual menu on any unsigned app and telling it to Open. I think it provides a warning about the risks and then confirms that you want to still open it, but after that it'll run just like any other app, no more warnings or anything. In the last year or two, I've only encountered one unsigned app that required I go through that process, and I'd consider myself a fairly advanced user (as I imagine most other people here would).
Avoiding the MAS is becoming more difficult for Mac users.
In practice, I don't think this is actually the case. Again, I've only encountered one unsigned app in the last year or two. Were that not the case, I might agree, but the vast majority of Mac developers seem to have a certificate at this point, and the second option you listed is the default one, so their apps run with default settings, which means that no one is really being pushed to the MAS. And stories like the ones being described in the summary are becoming increasingly common. Indications seem to point towards MAS usage being in decline for the last few years among advanced users, and novice users are dwindling too as their attention is increasingly drawn towards mobile platforms.
I do agree that macOS is converging on iOS, but I think we're still a good few years away from it becoming that locked down.
Lots of things may happen. For now, if the machine is working for you better than anything else you've looked into, keep using it. Simple as that.
As to your concerns, even if Apple decided to do what you said, it wouldn't be an immediate concern. You'd be able to keep using your existing machines for years as people worked on creating/polishing alternatives, given that there'd be nothing forcing you to "upgrade". By the time you needed to purchase an alternative, there'd not only be plenty of them available, there would also be plenty of blogs and other resources providing advice as to which ones suit your specific needs.
All of which is to say, leave tomorrow's concerns for tomorrow. Don't worry about them today.
To be clear, this is about the Mac App Store (MAS), not the (iOS) App Store. In both cases, you're effectively paying Apple a cut of the profits in order to make your product more accessible to consumers. In the case of the iOS App Store, it's pretty obvious that the 15%/30% cut is worth it, since if your app isn't there, it isn't for sale as far as 99.9% of people are concerned (even though that's not strictly the case).
But the MAS? Its value proposition has always been questionable.
For one, purchasing patterns are drastically different between mobile and PC. Consumers typically already know what Mac apps they plan to buy, rather than browse-shopping like they do on iOS, so whether the app is in the MAS or on a website makes no difference. As such, developers don't lose much from pulling out, or, in many cases, what they lose in unit sales is more than made up in reduced overhead.
Making matters worse for the MAS, it's oftentimes the case that the version of the app sold in the MAS is both more expensive and has less features than the one sold on their website. The MAS has a number of requirements (e.g. strict sandboxing) that make certain features virtually impossible to implement, so the apps in the MAS are oftentimes missing key features found in the direct-sale versions, or they might be lagging behind by a few versions due to the app store review process that all updates need to go through. And because developers don't see much benefit from the MAS, many of them simply tack on a 30% premium for the version sold through the MAS, that way they can recoup the cost. But even in the case that the developer doesn't price it higher, there's no way to offer upgrade pricing for loyal customers, so MAS users end up paying full price for subsequent versions, rather than being able to get a discount that the developer might be offering on direct sales.
All of which is to say, the MAS is a somewhat hostile environment to both developers AND users, so it's not surprising that niche apps aimed power users (i.e. the ones most likely to know how to use a browser to find software) are seeing improved numbers after pulling out of the MAS.
Absolute gibberish. Start capitalizing only the words that should be capitalized.
Headline capitalization has been a special case in the English language for centuries, so what the editors did here is appropriate, but even if you were to capitalize it normally it would still be "Overeager investors seeking Snap buy Snap Interactive instead", which doesn't do much to help you understand the situation.