Right, but there's a difference between poor engineering and FCC regulation violations. And it seems like the plaintiffs are trying to twist the former into the latter, so they can get a free fix for their phone, because they don't want to take any of the usual, rational approaches to dealing with a defective product:
Returning the phone
Working around the issue (e.g. use a non-conductive sleeve, or put a coat of non-conductive clear nail polish over one of the exposed antenna, or even, as Jobs said "don't hold it like that")
Clearly they can't live without the latest and "greatest" iPhone, so they have no choice but to keep using the phone while whining about it in court.
Now, that said, if there really is an FCC regulations violation, it needs to be fixed, but this sounds like a bunch of whiny jackasses, not legitimate concerned consumers.
Yes, but the people behind this lawsuit are more interested in making the point publicly. Or more likely, they're weenies who can't live without the latest and greatest iPhone, so a boycott won't happen. So they do the next "best" thing: complain to "Mommy" (the courts) that mean old Apple sold them a less than perfect phone, twisting the language of FCC regs to make a poor product into a non-compliant product so they can demand a free fix.
Well, the Windows scheme only protects your password from malicious software if you never log in at all; once you're logged in any program can pull the passwords, even if you never load the browser. Firefox can only give up master password protected passwords if you launch the browser and provide the master password. And an extension exists to configure the Firefox password manager to "forget" the master password (which is never actually stored, but you know what I mean) after a few minutes, limiting the window of vulnerability further.
Beyond that, if you've got truly malicious software actively running on your computer at all times (not just some website that gets brief read access through an exploit), you're hosed no matter what. Even if you never use a password manager, they can read the password as you type it into the browser; it might take more time than decrypting a password store and forwarding the data in bulk, but it's just as effective over the long haul. It's a trade off between window of vulnerability, scale of breach, and hassle. No manager at all is a hassle (to remember all usernames and passwords), but it's the most secure, since you can only lose one password at a time, with narrow windows of vulnerability. Password managers mean the scale of breach potential increases (you can lose them all at once). Firefox with a master password narrows the window of vulnerability relative to IE, and the extension that re-locks the store narrows it further, at the cost of needing to remember and type the password store password.
I consider it a reasonable trade-off, given that I'm not going to remember the user name and password for every site I visit. Even if I wanted to use the same one everywhere (and I don't, because then one site breach means I lose everything), differing username and password requirements make that impossible, and frankly, my memory isn't good enough to track login info for fifty odd websites, including a dozen I visit only once or twice a year.
This is of course why Firefox (and I presume a few other browsers) have the option to protect your password cache with a master password. Instead of remembering every single user name and password, you can store them all behind encryption, but the key for this encryption is in your head, not the disk. Obviously still open to exploits if you're infected (pop up a fake window requesting the master password, hook the browser itself and read the keystrokes passed to it, etc.), but virtually any exploit that can grab the master password could grab the real passwords anyway, so the distinction is trivial. As long as your master password isn't "12345" of course.
Granted, I'm sure we'll eventually come up with situations where zettabytes are used. According to some surveys, the total amount of data stored worldwide is around 1.2 ZB, and it expected to increase by a factor of 44 over the next decade. However, that's a far cry from saying individual home users will be using zettabyte based drives. User "affordable" (<$10K) hard disks storing more than one MB were first available in 1981. It took us roughly 25 years to put out a drive with even one TB. Even if we ignore the physical limitations we're hitting with platter drives, that would still mean it would take another 25-30 years to hit exabytes, and half that again to hit zettabytes. And that assumes we come up with a home user scenario that can actually use that much data. Even at human eye resolutions, with 240 Hz and true 3D images, we'd be hard pressed to increase the cost of video storage by more than 10,000 times or so, which would only get us into the mid-TB range. A TB is to a ZB what a KB is to a TB; I'm not seeing a compelling case for ZB storage when even EB storage would hold tens of thousands of these hypothetical videos. And remember, the limit is per drive; nothing prevents you from installing two of them (well, aside from the lack of ZFS support in most major operating systems).
Yes, it can be used more generally, but I was using a specific, excessively precise definition for humor. Those more general definitions are still wrong in this instance though; USB is not a false outward show, pretense, or façade. It isn't pretending to be anything it's not. They are hiding implementation details behind a USB driver, but it's not some sort of elaborate disguise; you know exactly what you're getting. There is a distinction between hiding your flaws and disguising flaws as something else. Only the latter would count as a masquerade (take a look at your own definition; it only covers disguise, not concealment). Masking covers concealment as well as disguise, and would therefore be appropriate.
To your point 2: It won't work as a boot disk with *any* BIOS. My understanding is that no backwards compatible BIOS design would recognize disks above 2 TB in size. If you don't use the MBR disk format, you can exceed 2 TB, but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with. That's why we've had the push to switch to EFI/UEFI; they'll work with GPT (GUID Partitition Table) disks, which on top of enabling disks of near infinite (9.4 ZB) size, also adds a lot of data integrity features. Right now, if your MBR is corrupted, your disk dies, at least as far as 99% of users are concerned. GPT disks store the critical data in two locations, and CRC check the data so they can identify corruption (and use the backup data).
Also, you meant "masking" not "masquerading." Unless you really think there is a costume party out behind "USB headquarters," and disk limitations are in attendance.
If you want to be really pedantic, at birth, there are more boys than girls. Girls constitute a majority of the population because boys die more often, but at birth, the ratio is skewed in favor of boys. So even being a pedantic pain in the ass, you've made assumptions that invalidate your argument.
And when the law conflicts with the Constitution? Judicial review has been around since Madison. If the Judiciary can't "revoke" a law that directly conflicts with the Constitution, then the Constitution may as well not exist.
Similarly, the concept of common law (precedents established by the court without direct legislation) has existed since *long* before the U.S. was founded; we inherited it from the British along with a lot of other cultural and legal constructs. Removing it now would leave gigantic gaping holes in the legal system. Switching from a common law to a civil law system is non-trivial to say the least. Just because you happen to disagree with it doesn't mean everyone should hop on your 4th grade Civics class understanding of the design of government.
Of course, the trick is to inform the target in a way that doesn't inform those around them. My phone automatically lets out a "whoop" sort of noise when I call 911 which I believe is informing me that it is now making my location data available. This seems like a reasonable thing, but if you're calling to report a home invasion of some sort and you're hiding from the person who broke in, the loud whoop seems like a serious problem. In fact, any noise or light seems to be a problem in that sort of scenario.
There are a lot of organ donors who die, but in such a way that the organ is unsuitable for transplant (not to mention, I'm pretty sure we can't transplant lungs in any event). So all the organ donors currently "wasting" lungs will be able to provide them, as will many organ donors who die with organs they can't otherwise transplant; they may not be able to use the organ as is, but in many cases they can strip the cells and regrow an organ over the framework that remains.
Brains in anything but the lowest order animals are far too complex for us to:
Keep alive without access to a circulatory system for the time needed to perform the transfer
Reconnect properly at the other end. They're riddled with blood vessels, and you need to make sure the connection to the rest of the body's nervous system is restored. Blood vessels are (relatively) easy, but hooking up each individual neuron properly? Not possible, and if they aren't hooked up immediately, the host body's heart would stop, along with hundreds of other more or less vital processes.
Beyond that, it would be completely pointless. Learned behaviors, depending on the type, are known from experimentation (and the occasional "lucky" bit of brain damage) to reside in specific lobes of the brain (e.g. most trained reflexes are controlled by the cerebellum). We'd learn nothing except that the scientists involved are immoral. Particularly since a lot of the training would be for the original body; trying to control a dissimilar body would make it nigh impossible to display the effects of any training due to the difficulty in just figuring out how to breathe, move, etc.
Just FYI, they do pay dividends. Not huge dividends (they are a tech company), but as of right now, they're paying $0.52/share/year, and on the current stock price of $25.45/share, that's a dividend rate of a hair over 2%.
Not really. The tech crash cost a lot of its value, but since then, it's been roughly static. You'd make more money elsewhere, but counting the dividend, you'd be making money for several years now so long as you didn't sell at the bottom of the temporary troughs.
Pretty sure that the last quarter was during the recession...
They're comparing the last quarter to the quarter from a year ago. Last year we were at the low point in the recession, and this year we are (slowly) emerging from it. And of course, last year they were selling Vista which was unfairly maligned, while this year they were selling Windows 7, which was given an overly positive appraisal.
Yeah, kind of a no brainer here. Growth at a large company in a mostly saturated and slow-growing market during a recession is less than growth of a mid-size company in a largely uncontested and growing market during an economic boom. My god, it's the end of the world, sell all your MS stock!
The "recent Fortune Article" link is to the front page of CNN's Money website. Not exactly useful when the front page updates constantly. Can an admin fix the link in the submission?
e-Ink is more expensive than you think (I don't have a definitive price, but according to this link the cost to Amazon for the e-Ink display on the Kindle is $60 by itself). Tack on the cost of the processor, memory, networking gear, battery, casing, quality control, etc., and the supposed cost to Amazon is $185. Given that prices have probably dropped a bit since that report, I suspect they are making a small profit on each device (though of course the cost of warranty replacements probably removes even that). The money is in e-Book sales; each sale may be for less than the hardcover, and the publishers may take a large cut, but what remains is pure profit; sale and distribution of pure data is effectively free.
I get the impression it's not an automated process, or at least, not a solely automated process. There's no malware in the traditional sense at goatse.cx, but if it's reported as a malicious link it will probably get blocked anyway.
Well given that even nowadays, in non-industrial and hunter gatherer societies the age of first menstruation is close to 18, it's clearly possible for onset to occur that late. Given that disposable tampons and pads were uncommon, if not non-existent, it would be quite difficult for the whole society to hide it for long. Eventually you have to do the laundry, and blood soaked rags are hard to hide.
There are always proposals to replace MPG with gallons per hundred miles or something of that sort, since the latter would show the even decline. That said, it's mostly immaterial; the measurement doesn't match naive expectations, but it's still accurate. Increasing MPG means using less gas, and people aren't likely to think about it in terms more detailed than that.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but there's a difference between poor engineering and FCC regulation violations. And it seems like the plaintiffs are trying to twist the former into the latter, so they can get a free fix for their phone, because they don't want to take any of the usual, rational approaches to dealing with a defective product:
Clearly they can't live without the latest and "greatest" iPhone, so they have no choice but to keep using the phone while whining about it in court.
Now, that said, if there really is an FCC regulations violation, it needs to be fixed, but this sounds like a bunch of whiny jackasses, not legitimate concerned consumers.
Yes, but the people behind this lawsuit are more interested in making the point publicly. Or more likely, they're weenies who can't live without the latest and greatest iPhone, so a boycott won't happen. So they do the next "best" thing: complain to "Mommy" (the courts) that mean old Apple sold them a less than perfect phone, twisting the language of FCC regs to make a poor product into a non-compliant product so they can demand a free fix.
Well, the Windows scheme only protects your password from malicious software if you never log in at all; once you're logged in any program can pull the passwords, even if you never load the browser. Firefox can only give up master password protected passwords if you launch the browser and provide the master password. And an extension exists to configure the Firefox password manager to "forget" the master password (which is never actually stored, but you know what I mean) after a few minutes, limiting the window of vulnerability further.
Beyond that, if you've got truly malicious software actively running on your computer at all times (not just some website that gets brief read access through an exploit), you're hosed no matter what. Even if you never use a password manager, they can read the password as you type it into the browser; it might take more time than decrypting a password store and forwarding the data in bulk, but it's just as effective over the long haul. It's a trade off between window of vulnerability, scale of breach, and hassle. No manager at all is a hassle (to remember all usernames and passwords), but it's the most secure, since you can only lose one password at a time, with narrow windows of vulnerability. Password managers mean the scale of breach potential increases (you can lose them all at once). Firefox with a master password narrows the window of vulnerability relative to IE, and the extension that re-locks the store narrows it further, at the cost of needing to remember and type the password store password.
I consider it a reasonable trade-off, given that I'm not going to remember the user name and password for every site I visit. Even if I wanted to use the same one everywhere (and I don't, because then one site breach means I lose everything), differing username and password requirements make that impossible, and frankly, my memory isn't good enough to track login info for fifty odd websites, including a dozen I visit only once or twice a year.
This is of course why Firefox (and I presume a few other browsers) have the option to protect your password cache with a master password. Instead of remembering every single user name and password, you can store them all behind encryption, but the key for this encryption is in your head, not the disk. Obviously still open to exploits if you're infected (pop up a fake window requesting the master password, hook the browser itself and read the keystrokes passed to it, etc.), but virtually any exploit that can grab the master password could grab the real passwords anyway, so the distinction is trivial. As long as your master password isn't "12345" of course.
Mod parent informative; directly supports GGP's post.
Granted, I'm sure we'll eventually come up with situations where zettabytes are used. According to some surveys, the total amount of data stored worldwide is around 1.2 ZB, and it expected to increase by a factor of 44 over the next decade. However, that's a far cry from saying individual home users will be using zettabyte based drives. User "affordable" (<$10K) hard disks storing more than one MB were first available in 1981. It took us roughly 25 years to put out a drive with even one TB. Even if we ignore the physical limitations we're hitting with platter drives, that would still mean it would take another 25-30 years to hit exabytes, and half that again to hit zettabytes. And that assumes we come up with a home user scenario that can actually use that much data. Even at human eye resolutions, with 240 Hz and true 3D images, we'd be hard pressed to increase the cost of video storage by more than 10,000 times or so, which would only get us into the mid-TB range. A TB is to a ZB what a KB is to a TB; I'm not seeing a compelling case for ZB storage when even EB storage would hold tens of thousands of these hypothetical videos. And remember, the limit is per drive; nothing prevents you from installing two of them (well, aside from the lack of ZFS support in most major operating systems).
Yes, it can be used more generally, but I was using a specific, excessively precise definition for humor. Those more general definitions are still wrong in this instance though; USB is not a false outward show, pretense, or façade. It isn't pretending to be anything it's not. They are hiding implementation details behind a USB driver, but it's not some sort of elaborate disguise; you know exactly what you're getting. There is a distinction between hiding your flaws and disguising flaws as something else. Only the latter would count as a masquerade (take a look at your own definition; it only covers disguise, not concealment). Masking covers concealment as well as disguise, and would therefore be appropriate.
Sheesh. Can't believe I needed to explain that.
To your point 2: It won't work as a boot disk with *any* BIOS. My understanding is that no backwards compatible BIOS design would recognize disks above 2 TB in size. If you don't use the MBR disk format, you can exceed 2 TB, but MBR is the only format a BIOS can recognize and work with. That's why we've had the push to switch to EFI/UEFI; they'll work with GPT (GUID Partitition Table) disks, which on top of enabling disks of near infinite (9.4 ZB) size, also adds a lot of data integrity features. Right now, if your MBR is corrupted, your disk dies, at least as far as 99% of users are concerned. GPT disks store the critical data in two locations, and CRC check the data so they can identify corruption (and use the backup data).
Also, you meant "masking" not "masquerading." Unless you really think there is a costume party out behind "USB headquarters," and disk limitations are in attendance.
If you want to be really pedantic, at birth, there are more boys than girls. Girls constitute a majority of the population because boys die more often, but at birth, the ratio is skewed in favor of boys. So even being a pedantic pain in the ass, you've made assumptions that invalidate your argument.
And when the law conflicts with the Constitution? Judicial review has been around since Madison. If the Judiciary can't "revoke" a law that directly conflicts with the Constitution, then the Constitution may as well not exist.
Similarly, the concept of common law (precedents established by the court without direct legislation) has existed since *long* before the U.S. was founded; we inherited it from the British along with a lot of other cultural and legal constructs. Removing it now would leave gigantic gaping holes in the legal system. Switching from a common law to a civil law system is non-trivial to say the least. Just because you happen to disagree with it doesn't mean everyone should hop on your 4th grade Civics class understanding of the design of government.
Of course, the trick is to inform the target in a way that doesn't inform those around them. My phone automatically lets out a "whoop" sort of noise when I call 911 which I believe is informing me that it is now making my location data available. This seems like a reasonable thing, but if you're calling to report a home invasion of some sort and you're hiding from the person who broke in, the loud whoop seems like a serious problem. In fact, any noise or light seems to be a problem in that sort of scenario.
There are a lot of organ donors who die, but in such a way that the organ is unsuitable for transplant (not to mention, I'm pretty sure we can't transplant lungs in any event). So all the organ donors currently "wasting" lungs will be able to provide them, as will many organ donors who die with organs they can't otherwise transplant; they may not be able to use the organ as is, but in many cases they can strip the cells and regrow an organ over the framework that remains.
Beyond that, it would be completely pointless. Learned behaviors, depending on the type, are known from experimentation (and the occasional "lucky" bit of brain damage) to reside in specific lobes of the brain (e.g. most trained reflexes are controlled by the cerebellum). We'd learn nothing except that the scientists involved are immoral. Particularly since a lot of the training would be for the original body; trying to control a dissimilar body would make it nigh impossible to display the effects of any training due to the difficulty in just figuring out how to breathe, move, etc.
Just FYI, they do pay dividends. Not huge dividends (they are a tech company), but as of right now, they're paying $0.52/share/year, and on the current stock price of $25.45/share, that's a dividend rate of a hair over 2%.
Not really. The tech crash cost a lot of its value, but since then, it's been roughly static. You'd make more money elsewhere, but counting the dividend, you'd be making money for several years now so long as you didn't sell at the bottom of the temporary troughs.
Pretty sure that the last quarter was during the recession...
They're comparing the last quarter to the quarter from a year ago. Last year we were at the low point in the recession, and this year we are (slowly) emerging from it. And of course, last year they were selling Vista which was unfairly maligned, while this year they were selling Windows 7, which was given an overly positive appraisal.
Yeah, kind of a no brainer here. Growth at a large company in a mostly saturated and slow-growing market during a recession is less than growth of a mid-size company in a largely uncontested and growing market during an economic boom. My god, it's the end of the world, sell all your MS stock!
The "recent Fortune Article" link is to the front page of CNN's Money website. Not exactly useful when the front page updates constantly. Can an admin fix the link in the submission?
e-Ink is more expensive than you think (I don't have a definitive price, but according to this link the cost to Amazon for the e-Ink display on the Kindle is $60 by itself). Tack on the cost of the processor, memory, networking gear, battery, casing, quality control, etc., and the supposed cost to Amazon is $185. Given that prices have probably dropped a bit since that report, I suspect they are making a small profit on each device (though of course the cost of warranty replacements probably removes even that). The money is in e-Book sales; each sale may be for less than the hardcover, and the publishers may take a large cut, but what remains is pure profit; sale and distribution of pure data is effectively free.
Better than whitelists, where people decide what's good for you.
I get the impression it's not an automated process, or at least, not a solely automated process. There's no malware in the traditional sense at goatse.cx, but if it's reported as a malicious link it will probably get blocked anyway.
Why is the first post modded Redundant? It could be a lot of things, but Redundant seems to be a 100% inaccurate mod.
Well given that even nowadays, in non-industrial and hunter gatherer societies the age of first menstruation is close to 18, it's clearly possible for onset to occur that late. Given that disposable tampons and pads were uncommon, if not non-existent, it would be quite difficult for the whole society to hide it for long. Eventually you have to do the laundry, and blood soaked rags are hard to hide.
There are always proposals to replace MPG with gallons per hundred miles or something of that sort, since the latter would show the even decline. That said, it's mostly immaterial; the measurement doesn't match naive expectations, but it's still accurate. Increasing MPG means using less gas, and people aren't likely to think about it in terms more detailed than that.
To-may-to, to-mah-to. I'm perfectly happy calling it Tuesday if you like. A rose by any other name would smell as sweet and all that.