If software is speech, then it can't be patented or protected as intellectual property.
Err, what? You might be right in principle about patenting (software patents are problematic, but the courts have largely ruled them valid nevertheless, and its the courts who have the final say, not us) but speech gets protected as intellectual property all the time. Every movie, every novel, even actual speeches are intellectual property and are protected via copyright law.
Could Apple do this without compromising everyone? From what I know, I wouldn't see why not. Should they? In this case, probably not. When presented with a warrant from a federal court? I don't see what gives technology a special pass that virtually no other area of personal privacy enjoys.
In the Apple-vs-FBI case, the 'special pass' was/is the first amendment -- in particular, software has been determined to constitute a form of speech, and the first amendment is interpreted to mean that the government cannot compel an individual (or in this case, a corporation, like Apple) to speak.
If Apple had a mechanism to unlock a phone without writing new software, the legal situation might be different, but they (quite deliberately) don't.
Don't know, I'm cheering because I never have to target the Win32 API ever again. If I can completely forget about HANDLE and DWORD my life will be happy
That would be awesome, but somehow I doubt this product is going to give you that. For one thing, I suspect that any program you write using this API will only run on Windows boxes that have UbuntuWindowsThingy installed, i.e. almost none of them. So if you want to write Windows software that the vast majority of Windows users can just download, install, and run, without having to download a big Linux-compatibility-package first, you'll need a different solution. (If I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me!)
Why stop at calling it "the Dark Net"? If they referred to it as the "Super Evil Kitten-Punching Net of Doom", they could probably get 9 out of 10 people to oppose it.
Liberals object precisely because they know it will be peaceful, setting a precedent for wider lawful use of guns.
We Liberals have no objections to this. I like empirical evidence as much as the next guy; so let's run the experiment and see what happens. It really is an ideal test-case for the more-guns-means-more-safety hypothesis.
People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible.
I think that is a mischaracterization. What most people are actually worried about is rather the possibility of a nuclear meltdown that results in significant amounts of radioactive material being released into the environment, which could render the surrounding area largely uninhabitable for decades or longer. That is something that clearly is possible, as demonstrated at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Saying that won't ever happen again in the future (because reasons) isn't particularly convincing, since that is what the designers and operators of those nuclear power plants promised also.
So many other sources of blue light, it won't help unless you're a teenager with your nose glued to the damn thing.
It's intended for use at night, e.g. for those who tend to read their iWhatever while in bed. In that case it will likely be the only source of light in the room.
So Republicans are manning the shit-cannons against a judge they themselves admit is perfectly well-qualified for the position, a judge they themselves praised and recommended, and they can't even explain why they are doing it... and their irrational behavior is somehow Obama's fault. Doesn't Obama know only white presidents get to nominate supreme court justices?
They shouldn't tell anybody where the security keys are. Might be in Ireland, might be in Cambodia...good luck proving where they physically reside when no-one known to be in the reach of the court system even knows (or can be proven to know) where it is.
If Apple was really clever (and maybe they are), they'd keep the key in a dozen or so multiple pieces, with each piece residing in a different country. In order to sign a new iOS release they'd have to forward the binary to each country in turn to get the next part of the signing done.
A bit of a pain in the ass for the release manager, but on the plus side it would make legal strong-arming much more difficult since to acquire the whole key would require the cooperation of a dozen different governments.
And that's aside from the value of iOS, for which Apple would have to be compensated. Can you begin to imagine what that would be? Or the additional court cases to determine said value?
No problem -- President Trump will build that backdoor and make Apple pay for it.
The real cost of solar is in labor, land, and maintenance (which isn't nothing, despite what you have heard).
Indeed, but progress is being made on reducing those costs as well. Innovation doesn't happen only in the manufacturing side of things -- labor, siting, and maintenance costs can be (and are) reduced as well.
If the US stopped burning coal/oil/gas tomorrow, the price of those things would drop like a brick
Indeed, the price would drop, but not down to zero. It would drop down to somewhere just above the price that is required for the coal/oil/gas mining companies to cover their costs. And if people aren't willing to pay at least that much for it, then the coal/oil/gas mining companies will simply stop mining it, since there's no point for them to continue operations if they can't make at least a minimal profit from doing so.
So that's the real end-game: renewable power so cheap that it's no longer worth digging various crap out of the ground and transporting it to market, and thus most of the fossil-fuels companies go the way of the buggy-whip manufacturers.
Any change in climate due to mankind is largely committed at this point. A few more solar panels and a few more wind farms won't change that.
Adding renewables (actually: reducing emissions) won't fix the damage that has already been incurred, but it will definitely reduce the amount of additional damage in the future.
It's the difference between accepting a bad situation and minimizing the damage as much as possible, vs deciding instead to continue making the situation worse.
So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
This will continue to be true until it's not. Every year solar gets cheaper, while most other energy sources get more expensive. At some point (probably within 5-10 years) solar will be the same price as (or less than) traditional power, at which point the subsidies can go away, and solar will still sell. Until then, the subsidies are how we get from here to there -- the only way to improve the product is to build a market and sell the product, to build up the economies of scale and the necessary experience.
No, the easy fix is to never update software from anywhere other than the developer's website. Has the bonus feature of always working now and forever on every OS.
You have a lot of faith in the incorruptibility of your DNS server, I see.:)
We got those already, it's just that the intelligent driving algorithm is currently implemented via a human driver.
It's a lot cheaper that way, and a lot harder to trace (since a computer-driven car is necessarily going to be communicating with other computers and leaving audit trails everywhere, whereas you can buy a used beater van off of Craigslist with cash and drive it to your target without leaving any forensic trail at all)
I figure there's a lot less threat if the Chinese government spies on me.
I wouldn't worry too much about the Chinese government either; but I would worry about Chinese hackers one day using your phone to empty your bank account and max out your credit cards.
I have no idea why they are making electric cars. What they need to do is make an electric van and an electric truck.
Agreed. Also, Serena Williams should stop wasting her time playing tennis. What she really needs to do is take up golf, she'd be much more successful at that. I know this because I am an expert on these things.
Nothing can be made idiot proof, because idiots are so ingenious.
True, but in this case wouldn't a $30 sign on the buoy, saying something like "underwater intake pipes -- SEVERE HAZARD -- NO SCUBA DIVING WITHIN 500 feet" have avoided the whole incident? (Assuming the divers are telling the truth about not realizing what the buoy represented, of course -- if they did know and wanted to investigate anyway, then there's not a whole lot that can be done about that)
That's not a convincing argument -- even if we assume for the sake of argument that every insurance company is greedy and unscrupulous, competition between insurance companies keeps a cap on insurance prices.
I don't see how the introduction of autonomous cars would change that dynamic.
Old people will lobby and/or vote with their feet in order to get the cost of autonomous vehicle insurance down to a minimum.
Every year insurance companies and government double the price for human drivers as their comparative risk keeps going up compared to autonomous vehicles that will only keep improving.
I don't follow. Why would the presence of safer autonomous vehicles make the cost of traditional auto insurance rise?
I can see why having a safer vehicle would make insuring that safer vehicle cheaper -- I don't see why it would make insuring other vehicles more expensive, since they would not be any less safe than they were previously.
Slashdot Mirror
If software is speech, then it can't be patented or protected as intellectual property.
Err, what? You might be right in principle about patenting (software patents are problematic, but the courts have largely ruled them valid nevertheless, and its the courts who have the final say, not us) but speech gets protected as intellectual property all the time. Every movie, every novel, even actual speeches are intellectual property and are protected via copyright law.
Could Apple do this without compromising everyone? From what I know, I wouldn't see why not. Should they? In this case, probably not. When presented with a warrant from a federal court? I don't see what gives technology a special pass that virtually no other area of personal privacy enjoys.
In the Apple-vs-FBI case, the 'special pass' was/is the first amendment -- in particular, software has been determined to constitute a form of speech, and the first amendment is interpreted to mean that the government cannot compel an individual (or in this case, a corporation, like Apple) to speak.
If Apple had a mechanism to unlock a phone without writing new software, the legal situation might be different, but they (quite deliberately) don't.
Don't know, I'm cheering because I never have to target the Win32 API ever again. If I can completely forget about HANDLE and DWORD my life will be happy
That would be awesome, but somehow I doubt this product is going to give you that. For one thing, I suspect that any program you write using this API will only run on Windows boxes that have UbuntuWindowsThingy installed, i.e. almost none of them. So if you want to write Windows software that the vast majority of Windows users can just download, install, and run, without having to download a big Linux-compatibility-package first, you'll need a different solution. (If I'm wrong about this, someone please correct me!)
Why stop at calling it "the Dark Net"? If they referred to it as the "Super Evil Kitten-Punching Net of Doom", they could probably get 9 out of 10 people to oppose it.
Feh.
Liberals object precisely because they know it will be peaceful, setting a precedent for wider lawful use of guns.
We Liberals have no objections to this. I like empirical evidence as much as the next guy; so let's run the experiment and see what happens. It really is an ideal test-case for the more-guns-means-more-safety hypothesis.
Guns at the convention is a REALLY bad idea.
According to the NRA (and therefore the Republican Party), guns are NEVER a bad idea.
How do you tell the over the top rightists from the parody over the top rightists?
You can't. Hell, many of the posters themselves probably aren't sure anymore which category they are in on any particular day.
People are also scared that nuclear plants can blow up like a bomb, but this is complete impossible.
I think that is a mischaracterization. What most people are actually worried about is rather the possibility of a nuclear meltdown that results in significant amounts of radioactive material being released into the environment, which could render the surrounding area largely uninhabitable for decades or longer. That is something that clearly is possible, as demonstrated at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Saying that won't ever happen again in the future (because reasons) isn't particularly convincing, since that is what the designers and operators of those nuclear power plants promised also.
So many other sources of blue light, it won't help unless you're a teenager with your nose glued to the damn thing.
It's intended for use at night, e.g. for those who tend to read their iWhatever while in bed. In that case it will likely be the only source of light in the room.
It should be an avocation that you are willing and eager to undertake. Otherwise, don't have a kid.
I think your batteries are dead in your sarcasm detector -- better get that checked ;)
So Republicans are manning the shit-cannons against a judge they themselves admit is perfectly well-qualified for the position, a judge they themselves praised and recommended, and they can't even explain why they are doing it... and their irrational behavior is somehow Obama's fault. Doesn't Obama know only white presidents get to nominate supreme court justices?
They shouldn't tell anybody where the security keys are. Might be in Ireland, might be in Cambodia...good luck proving where they physically reside when no-one known to be in the reach of the court system even knows (or can be proven to know) where it is.
If Apple was really clever (and maybe they are), they'd keep the key in a dozen or so multiple pieces, with each piece residing in a different country. In order to sign a new iOS release they'd have to forward the binary to each country in turn to get the next part of the signing done.
A bit of a pain in the ass for the release manager, but on the plus side it would make legal strong-arming much more difficult since to acquire the whole key would require the cooperation of a dozen different governments.
And that's aside from the value of iOS, for which Apple would have to be compensated. Can you begin to imagine what that would be? Or the additional court cases to determine said value?
No problem -- President Trump will build that backdoor and make Apple pay for it.
The real cost of solar is in labor, land, and maintenance (which isn't nothing, despite what you have heard).
Indeed, but progress is being made on reducing those costs as well. Innovation doesn't happen only in the manufacturing side of things -- labor, siting, and maintenance costs can be (and are) reduced as well.
If the US stopped burning coal/oil/gas tomorrow, the price of those things would drop like a brick
Indeed, the price would drop, but not down to zero. It would drop down to somewhere just above the price that is required for the coal/oil/gas mining companies to cover their costs. And if people aren't willing to pay at least that much for it, then the coal/oil/gas mining companies will simply stop mining it, since there's no point for them to continue operations if they can't make at least a minimal profit from doing so.
So that's the real end-game: renewable power so cheap that it's no longer worth digging various crap out of the ground and transporting it to market, and thus most of the fossil-fuels companies go the way of the buggy-whip manufacturers.
Any change in climate due to mankind is largely committed at this point. A few more solar panels and a few more wind farms won't change that.
Adding renewables (actually: reducing emissions) won't fix the damage that has already been incurred, but it will definitely reduce the amount of additional damage in the future.
It's the difference between accepting a bad situation and minimizing the damage as much as possible, vs deciding instead to continue making the situation worse.
So it really comes down to the fact that all this solar makes sense only if you count on a whole pile of tax dollars.
This will continue to be true until it's not. Every year solar gets cheaper, while most other energy sources get more expensive. At some point (probably within 5-10 years) solar will be the same price as (or less than) traditional power, at which point the subsidies can go away, and solar will still sell. Until then, the subsidies are how we get from here to there -- the only way to improve the product is to build a market and sell the product, to build up the economies of scale and the necessary experience.
No, the easy fix is to never update software from anywhere other than the developer's website. Has the bonus feature of always working now and forever on every OS.
You have a lot of faith in the incorruptibility of your DNS server, I see. :)
Intelligent Driving Explosive Device
We got those already, it's just that the intelligent driving algorithm is currently implemented via a human driver.
It's a lot cheaper that way, and a lot harder to trace (since a computer-driven car is necessarily going to be communicating with other computers and leaving audit trails everywhere, whereas you can buy a used beater van off of Craigslist with cash and drive it to your target without leaving any forensic trail at all)
I figure there's a lot less threat if the Chinese government spies on me.
I wouldn't worry too much about the Chinese government either; but I would worry about Chinese hackers one day using your phone to empty your bank account and max out your credit cards.
I'm going to send my car over to your house to pick you up and drive you here, so that we can discuss the "No true Scotsman" fallacy over coffee. :)
Friendly? I'm a jerk; does that mean I get replaced soon?
No, but you may get transferred over to the help desk :)
I have no idea why they are making electric cars. What they need to do is make an electric van and an electric truck.
Agreed. Also, Serena Williams should stop wasting her time playing tennis. What she really needs to do is take up golf, she'd be much more successful at that. I know this because I am an expert on these things.
Nothing can be made idiot proof, because idiots are so ingenious.
True, but in this case wouldn't a $30 sign on the buoy, saying something like "underwater intake pipes -- SEVERE HAZARD -- NO SCUBA DIVING WITHIN 500 feet" have avoided the whole incident? (Assuming the divers are telling the truth about not realizing what the buoy represented, of course -- if they did know and wanted to investigate anyway, then there's not a whole lot that can be done about that)
Because automobile insurance is a scam.
That's not a convincing argument -- even if we assume for the sake of argument that every insurance company is greedy and unscrupulous, competition between insurance companies keeps a cap on insurance prices.
I don't see how the introduction of autonomous cars would change that dynamic.
Old people will lobby and/or vote with their feet in order to get the cost of autonomous vehicle insurance down to a minimum.
Pure speculation.
Every year insurance companies and government double the price for human drivers as their comparative risk keeps going up compared to autonomous vehicles that will only keep improving.
I don't follow. Why would the presence of safer autonomous vehicles make the cost of traditional auto insurance rise?
I can see why having a safer vehicle would make insuring that safer vehicle cheaper -- I don't see why it would make insuring other vehicles more expensive, since they would not be any less safe than they were previously.