It's not *that* revolutionary. A few months ago, I used the same general principle..
Well, that's the thing. The general principle is ancient. Using parametrics where each output maps to its own relatively prime cycle to get a very long period.. shit, I was doing that 27 years ago on my Vic20 to make some pretty graphs. (Really.) x=cos(t/7); y=sin(t/13); Graph it, varying "t"; it's purty. And it's pretty damn unlikely that I was the first person to discover (not invent) it; anyone fucking around is eventually going to stumble onto this kind of stuff.
But this is about background images (and not just background images, but background images on web pages), and I sure as hell wasn't doing that on my Vic20.
This reminds me the basic difficulty with patents. The ideas themselves often really aren't new, so they're not only obvious in hindsight, but they're even obvious to everyone without hindsight if you ever find yourself working on a problem in a certain area, but if you never end up working on the problems, you're never going to use the idea, so a guy really can be first to do something so basic, in 2011. (Whether this guy actually is, I don't know.) Sure, if you were ever assigned the problem of generating an image with a long period, you might invent this. But did you? (Have you ever needed to generate a background image with a long period? If so, then very likely might have done this. If not, then you just wouldn't ever come up with it.)
And then some poor schmuck of a patent examiner is supposed to make a judgement call that people in general think is fair. No chance; he's doomed to fail, no matter which way he goes.
All that aside, it's a cool idea and props to the guy. Just don't fucking patent it, ok?;-)
I'm also curious to see just how useful this specific technique is for things other than website backgrounds. For example, you couldn't use it (at least without modification) for most 3D object textures, because it only introduces variation along one axis.
Heh heh.. don't worry, you'll have the any-dimensional case figured out in a few minutes, if you haven't already.:-)
For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the expert who tells it to us and believing what they tell us.
I think what you mean to say is:
For most people, science is really a matter of trusting the consensus of thousands of experts who are all ruthlessly looking for ways to find flaws in each others conclusions.
Even Feynman was not a god, handing down tablets containing truths or demands which must be accepted. Maybe no one understands quantum physics, but lots of people definitely do understand every niggling detail of what Feynman said about quantum physics, and finding a mistake in Feynman, is a surefire path to fame (and frankly, money too).
If the word "faith" is really appropriate here (and I'm not sure it quite is), it's a faith that human nature is competitive. But surprise surprise, if you're really doubtful about that, you can actually use science to investigate that, and you won't need to trust experts; you can do the experiments yourself. And there won't be any hairy math either.
The only real faith that science relies upon, is the belief that what we observe is reality. If you think you're living in The Matrix then you can't trust science (for all you know, even gravity and light are totally made-up things which don't really exist). But thinking that is also going to require faith, too, because there is just simply nothing you'll ever perceive which will even suggest that it may be so.
The funny part about your post is that you think PGP doesn't suffer from the exact same set of problems
It doesn't suffer from the problem, because it's based on accepting the idea that you're never fully sure. That is how real life works. Some people are confident that their government never makes mistakes and issues ID to the wrong people, combined with a personal confidence that they are very good at spotting fake IDs. And some people aren't sure about both of those things at all, so they want to see two IDs. And in some redneck backwater, you damn well know there's someone who cares nothing about these IDs, and he'll tell you "we don't like strangers around here" simply based on whether or not he knows you, or maybe he'll make an exception if "..well, I ne'er seen you before, but Bubba here says you're his cousin who moved off to live with the city folks, so.. ok, I won't shoot you." OpenPGP can handle all this, depending on whatever it is that the user wants.
You can't get through life if you trust no one
No, you can't get through life if you never accept risk or if you fail to act whenever you are faced with ambiguity. X.509 ignores the whole topic of risk and distills it down to you either trusting a certification or not. It models 0% confidence and 100% confidence just fine, and yet these are almost never accurate measurements of the real situation.
I have no urge to personally meet all the people I communicate with regularly in order to exchange keys, nor do I have any need/want to force hundreds of thousands of people using my websites to come visit me in person so we can exchange keys in order to do secure communications.
You don't have to. If you trust Comodo, you can let Comodo do all that, just like you're doing with X.509 right now. What OpenPGP lets you do, is add on to that, have backup trust paths in place in parallel, should the day ever come that you alter your opinion about Comodo's trustworthiness or competence. And it lets you meet in person for any situations where that happens to be convenient, so that if you're ever talking to that person, instead of your browser telling you "this is probably who we think it is" it can say "we're almost completely sure."
X.509 has no concept of "probably" or "maybe" or "iffy" and yet that's something we need. When you're on a site that has only been identified to you by the Turkish intelligence service, it is astoundingly lame that with X.509 you can't have an encrypted connection without fully trusting the Turkish intelligence service. Dude, it is healthy to not trust the Turkish intelligence service; even if they're good guys and not out to get you (no need to be paranoid here), you probably don't know jack shit about them. They're nothing to you. That is the reality of the situation and your computer ought to be able to model it and represent it to you, instead of oversimplifying the way it does right now.
The way to win is to give them all the permissions that they demand, but have the things they access which you don't want them to, be unreal. Don't say no to them; jam them.
It sounds like what Android needs, is an Android emulator. Let apps access everything they want to, but how reliable is the information that it'll get them?
If Pandora really wants to know that I happen to spend 183 days a year at the south pole and then sudden travel north at 18000MPH on the first day of autumn, and that my best friend's email address is abuse@spamhouse.org, I say let them know these things.
In spite of France's funniness about certain things (crypto) about ten years ago when I was jurisdiction-shopping, they came out on top in various ways, and Gandi's own policies were some of the best among registrars, so.. yep, I ended up with them too. Every year when I pay, my bank freaks out that some company over in France is pulling money out of my account.;-)
I never thought the crypto problems in France would impact how I use a registrar, though. Now I see. Bad news.
They won't do it, but one way they could, would be to try to serve their customers while also using their superior technology. Broadcast is just plain more efficient than transmitting each identical packet n times where n is the number of users. More efficient means lower cost -- a competitive advantage.
In theory they could offer you everything you are getting right now, but either cheaper or better. If you're streaming for free, they could stream to you at a higher bitrate / less jitter / etc (or even "stream" at slower-than-realtime; i.e. not stream at all, and timeshift, getting you "perfect" bitrate and no jitter at all -- sort of like what bittorrent users enjoy, except massively more efficient). If you're streaming for pay (e.g. Netflix) they could offer it at a lower cost to you, because their cost would be lower than Netflix's cost.
Since they are neglecting the give-the-people-want-the-want aspect, though, they have a disadvantage that is more than canceling out their advantage. The catch there is that the disadvantage only applies to "critical" customers who think about what they're getting for how much money. I know people who still pay a month satellite or cable TV bill, and if you say those expensive services that also include many long of commercial breaks is "over," that's complete news to them. There's a lot of inertia out there, which typical Slashdot users wouldn't be able to identify with.
Geez, just look at the context of this. We're talking about fucking iPads, a product of the very same old school of thought, where you'll take what is offered rather than get what you want. People are still buying into the walled garden like it's a good idea, rather than horrifically retro. How is cable TV any different than that? Its days are over?! Maybe for you and me, but for many, it's not over at all.
Make the CA aware that should any illegal activity be done using unqualified names that the CA will held legally responsible
A certification is a statement of opinion. (And furthermore, it is a statement by a complete stranger who has no relationship with you and owes you jack shit.) The sooner we learn this, the sooner we will start to work on real solutions to the problems (i.e. switch to OpenPGP). If you charge CAs with complicity, you are just legitimizing the flawed idea behind our current CA infrastructure and reinforcing the idea that certifications are some kind of sacrosanct objective statements of truth (or in this case, negligent or malicious statements of falsehood), yet that position is a complete denial of reality.
People treating CAs whom they have never personally met and have a relationship with, as fully trusted, is what has really failed here. In real life (as opposed to the internet fantasy) you can't fully trust a faceless CA's (Comodo, Verisign, whatever) statement that keyid xxx is so-and-so, any more than you can trust a stranger on the street to hold your wallet for an hour while you step away. Let's end the fantasy, instead of going to court and demanding that the delusion be continued to be given respect.
They came for alcohol long ago. Maybe it's different in your state, but in mine, alcohol is already heavily taxed and it's regulated to such an extreme degree that anyone works with it, fantasizes that they had the freedom enjoyed by people who seek organic certification for sausages made from reprocessed fetus fission fuel.
Unless you homebrew, anything you do involving alcohol has Mr. Government riding on your back, looking over your shoulder, holding one of your hands, and somehow from that position, managing to stare threateningly into your eyes while sternly pointing, and hatefully muttering through clenched teeth, "I'm gonna fucking get you. How dare you make or sell alcohol!?!"
The social engineering actually happened years before the "attack." Someone has been going around to businesses and telling them that it's ok for non-experts (i.e. people who don't know that loading a "document" into MS Word or MS excel is equivalent to "chmod u+x document;./document") to run MS Office on computers that have email or other internet access.
RSA's blog about this is sickening. They act like this is a new type of attack, comparing to having your radar-defended country attacked by stealth bombers. Yet in real life, everybody has known about this risk and been talking about it for 15-20 years. Yes, even the fact that the attacker should send the "document" to the right person (if for no other reason, to get that person's permissions, rather than to exploit anything special about their behavior, other than their willingness to execute untrusted "documents"). The only thing new about this, is that this is the first time it ever happened to RSA themselves (that they know of).
This is all Microsoft. It never would have worked, if Excel spreadsheets were actually "documents" (as we think of that word) rather than executable programs. It is fucking insane that people email that kind of thing around. If someone emails you an Excel spreadsheet, you should consider that equivalent to someone emailing you a program with the subject line, "Here, run this. I want your computer."
See, the people that have dumbphones aren't interested in smart phones..
.. but will end up with one anyway, because they don't really cost all that much more to make. Android has already reduced the software cost to $0.00. Please don't tell me you're betting on electronics(!) staying expensive. Today's $600 widget is $50 tomorrow and free with every box of Count Chocula the day after that.
Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.
It was 666624. And that's one (excellent!) way to write out the number.
You can say that as 6.66624*10^5 or (for computer people) 6.66624E5 and that's just as good, if weird-looking.
You can also round that off, and say 6.66*10^5 or 6.66E5 and that is perfectly correct, if imprecise.
You can even say 666 thousand and that's right, too. Think of that as a shorthand Englishy way of using scientific notation. Or use a "k" suffix. (*)
But 666000 is wrong, just as 6.66000*10^5 would be wrong. You're pretending you have 6 significant figures, but you rounded off. Don't specify those trailing zeros unless you really measured them as zeros.
This concludes today's lesson in condescending pedantry. I hope you learned something.
(*) Or is it "K"? Find out in tomorrow's condescending pedantry lesson!
Aside from the privacy and security problems I have with it..do I REALLY need a new, overly convenient way to spend more fucking money?
The thing about short-range networking, is that is has many uses. Like any other tech, some are stupid and some are smart.
Getting people to spend money is how you justify the tech to assholes. Some assholes are powerful. For example, if the iPhone had a spend-money-by-NFC API that got Apple a cut of each transaction, they might have been more inclined to keep the IPhone up-to-date.
Then in real life, you use the tech for what it's actually useful for. More realistically useful applications for NFC leap to mind pretty easily. e.g. Put your phone next to your wife's phone when you're asleep, and let them negotiate the OTP that you'll be using for the next day's conversations... (Low-power IR used to be the way you explained this to people in the past, but IR isn't "cool" anymore. And that's ok. NFC is just as good, probably even better (though surely more expensive to implement).)
The idea is to use the tech for things that nobody in power really gives a fuck about (or is even hostile to), but to get them to pay to include it, thinking that you'll do something stupid with it, like using it to give manufacturers a cut of all your transactions.;-)
In the old days, tech was motivated by use demand; build a better mousetrap and people will want it. The phone market isn't really going that way, so you need to use tricks like dual-use techs. Always throw a fake use-case to the assholes. You don't have to use it; just get them thinking that a certain aspect of the better mousetrap gives them (rather than their customers) some kind of angle.
In the more specific case of linux, you might also want to see the COPYING file, which is a modified version of the GPL v2 that explicitly states that using the header files to access kernel services doesn't create a derivative work
While I share RMS' opinion about factual descriptions of interfaces and data formats not being copyrightable (for Linux or anything else), this is a bogus argument for that view.
A license cannot define what a derivative work is; copyright law does that. At most, Linux's license can grant permission to people to use some parts of it in non-GPLed derivative works; it can't say whether or not you have done something that requires that permission.
Never pay attention to any wording in a license that tells you whether or not you have already become bound by that license. Anything in the license on that topic exists merely to persuade you (or to put it as nicely as possible, to "inform" you) of a certain point of view. This applies to everything from the BSD licenses to the nastiest proprietary ones. Only consult the license after you have determined that you want to do something that copyright law wouldn't, by default, permit you to do.
I can't believe the animosity in schools when someone open disagrees with the "theory" of evolution
The thing about theories is that it's usually pointless to say you either agree or disagree with them. Theories simply are. That doesn't mean they're accurate but whenever you state your disagreement with a theory, you're kind of expected to mention why you think you've spotted a problem with it.
Imagine you're talking with someone and the topic of gravity comes up, and they suddenly blurt out, "I disagree with Einstein's theory of gravity." The next thing that person says, is either going to be amazingly profound, or just as amazingly inane and utterly unrelated to the strengths or weaknesses of gravity theory. But before that person says anything, just what is your attitude going to be at that moment? How often does it happen, and when it does, how often is the speaker serious?
Well, the weird thing about gravity, is that when someone disagrees with the theory, they've usually actually given it a lot of thought. So far, in the last century, all the people who did that were either wrong or took their secret to their deathbed, but at least when "I disagree with the theory of gravity" it uttered, the next sentence really is often at least related to the topic of gravity. How often? I dunno, but let's call it x(g). Gravity isn't challenged very often. How often? Oh, let's just call that y(g). What I'm getting at is that the chances of having a good, as opposed to tedious-and-irrelevant, "I don't believe in gravity" discussion is x(g)/y(g).
Now compare that to evolution. For some reason, whenever someone says they disagree with evolutionary theory, their next sentence is always inane, and almost never related to the theory of evolution. Instead, we get things like
"It just doesn't seem right."
"That's not what I was taught."
"How does evolution explain what happened before the big bang?"
"It hasn't been proven."
That's x(e). And for some reason, in spite of evolution being an older, much-more-tested, and down-to-earth and intuitive theory than relativity, people attack it fairly often. That's y(e). The chances of an evolution-denier improving your life, as opposed to making it more tedious, is x(e)/y(e). x(e) is less than x(g), and y(e) is greater than y(g). So x(e)/y(e) is far less than x(g)/y(g).
So now let's go back to whatever it is that you're thinking when someone says "I disagree with Einstein's theory of gravity." Let's face it: you know the next thing you hear isn't really going to be for real. Sure, it might be, but someone is about to say something very tired and lame. Yet for all your pessimism, it is a genuinely interesting and exciting possibility, compared to the diarrhea that you're pretty much guaranteed to hear after someone blurts out, "I don't believe in the theory of evolution." The next thing that person says, is never serious or interesting, it never points out any evidence that evolution might be incorrect, it never points out evidence that might lead to formulation of a rival theory, and it never talks about an idea for an experiment that could be used to test a rival idea thereby turning it into a theory. It's always inane crap. Always. x(e) is zero. And y(e) is fucking huge. We're even talking about it on Slashdot right now, as opposed to say, gravity.
Compared to gravity deniers, evolution deniers suck. They have nothing to contribute.
So now do you understand the animosity? They're already acting weird by telling people their conclusion first, rather than starting with introducing their evidence, and they always disappoint even after they fumble past that awkward introduction. That's why "disagreeing" with evolution doesn't get respect. Maybe some day, someone will point out something interesting, and then explain that it's why they "di
It doesn't ban discriminating against quacks based on the idea of creationism, just the theory of creationism. If someone wants to put forth a theory of intelligent design, that would be great, because to date, no one has ever formulated one (or if they did, they kept it a big secret instead of publishing it).
Then if some quack wants to work on creationism, then they can either do the work and become the first (in which case, all is forgiven and I'll be happy to eat some humble pie; and really, it would be ok for the university to pay a settlement or have to hire the guy back, because such an event would put them on the map in quite a big way -- the first intelligent design scientist is going to be outrageously famous and this will rub off on his employer), or they can get fired for saying they're working on science and then never actually doing anything. You can still fire people for fraud or laziness, can't you?
When they try to use this radical new exemption, where people don't have to be accountable as long as they're working on the "theory of intelligent design," cross-examine them and make them state the theory. Have them come up with any piece of evidence that led them to formulate the theory, or any test for it. In every science, those are very easy things to do. When the creationist fails to do it (as all of them always have) then you've shown that there was no "conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design," so the weird new law isn't applicable to that particular situation. Case dismissed.
The solution to quack "science" is to play their game and talk about the ideas as science. Nothing is as devastating to the fraud, as what this strategy exposes.
RSA states they are communicating directly with customers with hardening advise.
How do they know they're communicating directly with their customers? They're giving advice to someone, and their customers are receiving advice from someone, but...
Google should know very well by this point that you can't just copy GPL code and change the license on it.
Typically, C header files aren't code; they're basically interface definitions. They're facts, which describe the format of data passed to, and received from, functions.
Typically.
TFA says that some of them contain inline function definitions, and that might change the situation, though. Kinda depends on the "code" in question. Good luck enforcing a copyright on "int plus_one(int n) { return n+1; }"
Google might have screwed up, but it's hardly a slam-dunk. To figure this out, people need to look at the header files in question, rather than read laymen's descriptions of what happened. (And when someone blandly says "Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files" without immediately explaining the very unlikely assertion that those header files actually contain 2.5 megabytes of code, I'm prejudiced into thinking that person is a layman.)
Oh, and quoting Linus' opinion on this matter is silly. He's not a lawyer (no, I'm not one either) and he's the same guy who says Nvidia drivers aren't derived works of the kernel. And while that doesn't make him wrong about this, it does make him inconsistent, since the very idea that Nvidia compiled their drivers without Linux header files, is preposterous. You can't have it both ways.
The tracking is done thanks to the fact that your provider knows what cell tower you are connected to. I don't see how this issue could be solved, even with a fully free software phone.
Why is your phone connecting to a cell tower, when you probably have wifi nearby? Because it was programmed to do that, in spite of the fact that it shouldn't need to do that whenever there happens to be a more sensible route. Proprietary phone software doesn't care that sometimes it makes a lot more sense to use other networks than the cell network; proprietary phone software is written to make the users dependent upon the cell network provider. Some phones won't even use wifi at all for any purpose unless you are paying a cell network provider for "data." (How fucked up is that? I get why they do that, but the means of doing it, is that they use proprietary software to enforce the broken behavior.)
A phone running Free Software wouldn't be talking to cell towers all the time when it doesn't need to, because Free Software is intended to serve the interests of users above the interests of other parties. Using cell networks isn't dumb but if you think about it for just a few seconds, that should be the route of last resort. Cell is the slowest, the physically furthest (compare distance to your wifi router to distance to cell tower -- what does that imply about power requirements?), shared among more users, etc. Use it, but only when you don't have anything better.
This is the tip of the iceberg. There are all kinds of crazy things about phones that we wouldn't tolerate on our desktops.
I am pretty amazed that someone wouldn't think this issue can be (mostly) solved, especially since the biggest-payoff solutions involve running better software, which just happens to be the very context of your remark.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, that's the thing. The general principle is ancient. Using parametrics where each output maps to its own relatively prime cycle to get a very long period .. shit, I was doing that 27 years ago on my Vic20 to make some pretty graphs. (Really.) x=cos(t/7); y=sin(t/13); Graph it, varying "t"; it's purty. And it's pretty damn unlikely that I was the first person to discover (not invent) it; anyone fucking around is eventually going to stumble onto this kind of stuff.
But this is about background images (and not just background images, but background images on web pages), and I sure as hell wasn't doing that on my Vic20.
This reminds me the basic difficulty with patents. The ideas themselves often really aren't new, so they're not only obvious in hindsight, but they're even obvious to everyone without hindsight if you ever find yourself working on a problem in a certain area, but if you never end up working on the problems, you're never going to use the idea, so a guy really can be first to do something so basic, in 2011. (Whether this guy actually is, I don't know.) Sure, if you were ever assigned the problem of generating an image with a long period, you might invent this. But did you? (Have you ever needed to generate a background image with a long period? If so, then very likely might have done this. If not, then you just wouldn't ever come up with it.)
And then some poor schmuck of a patent examiner is supposed to make a judgement call that people in general think is fair. No chance; he's doomed to fail, no matter which way he goes.
All that aside, it's a cool idea and props to the guy. Just don't fucking patent it, ok? ;-)
Heh heh.. don't worry, you'll have the any-dimensional case figured out in a few minutes, if you haven't already. :-)
I think what you mean to say is:
Even Feynman was not a god, handing down tablets containing truths or demands which must be accepted. Maybe no one understands quantum physics, but lots of people definitely do understand every niggling detail of what Feynman said about quantum physics, and finding a mistake in Feynman, is a surefire path to fame (and frankly, money too).
If the word "faith" is really appropriate here (and I'm not sure it quite is), it's a faith that human nature is competitive. But surprise surprise, if you're really doubtful about that, you can actually use science to investigate that, and you won't need to trust experts; you can do the experiments yourself. And there won't be any hairy math either.
The only real faith that science relies upon, is the belief that what we observe is reality. If you think you're living in The Matrix then you can't trust science (for all you know, even gravity and light are totally made-up things which don't really exist). But thinking that is also going to require faith, too, because there is just simply nothing you'll ever perceive which will even suggest that it may be so.
It doesn't suffer from the problem, because it's based on accepting the idea that you're never fully sure. That is how real life works. Some people are confident that their government never makes mistakes and issues ID to the wrong people, combined with a personal confidence that they are very good at spotting fake IDs. And some people aren't sure about both of those things at all, so they want to see two IDs. And in some redneck backwater, you damn well know there's someone who cares nothing about these IDs, and he'll tell you "we don't like strangers around here" simply based on whether or not he knows you, or maybe he'll make an exception if "..well, I ne'er seen you before, but Bubba here says you're his cousin who moved off to live with the city folks, so.. ok, I won't shoot you." OpenPGP can handle all this, depending on whatever it is that the user wants.
No, you can't get through life if you never accept risk or if you fail to act whenever you are faced with ambiguity. X.509 ignores the whole topic of risk and distills it down to you either trusting a certification or not. It models 0% confidence and 100% confidence just fine, and yet these are almost never accurate measurements of the real situation.
You don't have to. If you trust Comodo, you can let Comodo do all that, just like you're doing with X.509 right now. What OpenPGP lets you do, is add on to that, have backup trust paths in place in parallel, should the day ever come that you alter your opinion about Comodo's trustworthiness or competence. And it lets you meet in person for any situations where that happens to be convenient, so that if you're ever talking to that person, instead of your browser telling you "this is probably who we think it is" it can say "we're almost completely sure."
X.509 has no concept of "probably" or "maybe" or "iffy" and yet that's something we need. When you're on a site that has only been identified to you by the Turkish intelligence service, it is astoundingly lame that with X.509 you can't have an encrypted connection without fully trusting the Turkish intelligence service. Dude, it is healthy to not trust the Turkish intelligence service; even if they're good guys and not out to get you (no need to be paranoid here), you probably don't know jack shit about them. They're nothing to you. That is the reality of the situation and your computer ought to be able to model it and represent it to you, instead of oversimplifying the way it does right now.
The way to win is to give them all the permissions that they demand, but have the things they access which you don't want them to, be unreal. Don't say no to them; jam them.
It sounds like what Android needs, is an Android emulator. Let apps access everything they want to, but how reliable is the information that it'll get them?
If Pandora really wants to know that I happen to spend 183 days a year at the south pole and then sudden travel north at 18000MPH on the first day of autumn, and that my best friend's email address is abuse@spamhouse.org, I say let them know these things.
In spite of France's funniness about certain things (crypto) about ten years ago when I was jurisdiction-shopping, they came out on top in various ways, and Gandi's own policies were some of the best among registrars, so .. yep, I ended up with them too. Every year when I pay, my bank freaks out that some company over in France is pulling money out of my account. ;-)
I never thought the crypto problems in France would impact how I use a registrar, though. Now I see. Bad news.
They won't do it, but one way they could, would be to try to serve their customers while also using their superior technology. Broadcast is just plain more efficient than transmitting each identical packet n times where n is the number of users. More efficient means lower cost -- a competitive advantage.
In theory they could offer you everything you are getting right now, but either cheaper or better. If you're streaming for free, they could stream to you at a higher bitrate / less jitter / etc (or even "stream" at slower-than-realtime; i.e. not stream at all, and timeshift, getting you "perfect" bitrate and no jitter at all -- sort of like what bittorrent users enjoy, except massively more efficient). If you're streaming for pay (e.g. Netflix) they could offer it at a lower cost to you, because their cost would be lower than Netflix's cost.
Since they are neglecting the give-the-people-want-the-want aspect, though, they have a disadvantage that is more than canceling out their advantage. The catch there is that the disadvantage only applies to "critical" customers who think about what they're getting for how much money. I know people who still pay a month satellite or cable TV bill, and if you say those expensive services that also include many long of commercial breaks is "over," that's complete news to them. There's a lot of inertia out there, which typical Slashdot users wouldn't be able to identify with.
Geez, just look at the context of this. We're talking about fucking iPads, a product of the very same old school of thought, where you'll take what is offered rather than get what you want. People are still buying into the walled garden like it's a good idea, rather than horrifically retro. How is cable TV any different than that? Its days are over?! Maybe for you and me, but for many, it's not over at all.
A certification is a statement of opinion. (And furthermore, it is a statement by a complete stranger who has no relationship with you and owes you jack shit.) The sooner we learn this, the sooner we will start to work on real solutions to the problems (i.e. switch to OpenPGP). If you charge CAs with complicity, you are just legitimizing the flawed idea behind our current CA infrastructure and reinforcing the idea that certifications are some kind of sacrosanct objective statements of truth (or in this case, negligent or malicious statements of falsehood), yet that position is a complete denial of reality.
People treating CAs whom they have never personally met and have a relationship with, as fully trusted, is what has really failed here. In real life (as opposed to the internet fantasy) you can't fully trust a faceless CA's (Comodo, Verisign, whatever) statement that keyid xxx is so-and-so, any more than you can trust a stranger on the street to hold your wallet for an hour while you step away. Let's end the fantasy, instead of going to court and demanding that the delusion be continued to be given respect.
"set up the cert properly" means to tell the mobile device about your CA.
They came for alcohol long ago. Maybe it's different in your state, but in mine, alcohol is already heavily taxed and it's regulated to such an extreme degree that anyone works with it, fantasizes that they had the freedom enjoyed by people who seek organic certification for sausages made from reprocessed fetus fission fuel.
Unless you homebrew, anything you do involving alcohol has Mr. Government riding on your back, looking over your shoulder, holding one of your hands, and somehow from that position, managing to stare threateningly into your eyes while sternly pointing, and hatefully muttering through clenched teeth, "I'm gonna fucking get you. How dare you make or sell alcohol!?!"
The social engineering actually happened years before the "attack." Someone has been going around to businesses and telling them that it's ok for non-experts (i.e. people who don't know that loading a "document" into MS Word or MS excel is equivalent to "chmod u+x document; ./document") to run MS Office on computers that have email or other internet access.
RSA's blog about this is sickening. They act like this is a new type of attack, comparing to having your radar-defended country attacked by stealth bombers. Yet in real life, everybody has known about this risk and been talking about it for 15-20 years. Yes, even the fact that the attacker should send the "document" to the right person (if for no other reason, to get that person's permissions, rather than to exploit anything special about their behavior, other than their willingness to execute untrusted "documents"). The only thing new about this, is that this is the first time it ever happened to RSA themselves (that they know of).
This is all Microsoft. It never would have worked, if Excel spreadsheets were actually "documents" (as we think of that word) rather than executable programs. It is fucking insane that people email that kind of thing around. If someone emails you an Excel spreadsheet, you should consider that equivalent to someone emailing you a program with the subject line, "Here, run this. I want your computer."
Dumbphones will go the way of word processing machines and PDAs. There just won't be a reason to make them, even if many people are satisfied by them, because the smartphone can serve both markets.
It was 666624. And that's one (excellent!) way to write out the number.
You can say that as 6.66624*10^5 or (for computer people) 6.66624E5 and that's just as good, if weird-looking.
You can also round that off, and say 6.66*10^5 or 6.66E5 and that is perfectly correct, if imprecise.
You can even say 666 thousand and that's right, too. Think of that as a shorthand Englishy way of using scientific notation. Or use a "k" suffix. (*)
But 666000 is wrong, just as 6.66000*10^5 would be wrong. You're pretending you have 6 significant figures, but you rounded off. Don't specify those trailing zeros unless you really measured them as zeros.
This concludes today's lesson in condescending pedantry. I hope you learned something.
(*) Or is it "K"? Find out in tomorrow's condescending pedantry lesson!
The thing about short-range networking, is that is has many uses. Like any other tech, some are stupid and some are smart.
Getting people to spend money is how you justify the tech to assholes. Some assholes are powerful. For example, if the iPhone had a spend-money-by-NFC API that got Apple a cut of each transaction, they might have been more inclined to keep the IPhone up-to-date.
Then in real life, you use the tech for what it's actually useful for. More realistically useful applications for NFC leap to mind pretty easily. e.g. Put your phone next to your wife's phone when you're asleep, and let them negotiate the OTP that you'll be using for the next day's conversations... (Low-power IR used to be the way you explained this to people in the past, but IR isn't "cool" anymore. And that's ok. NFC is just as good, probably even better (though surely more expensive to implement).)
The idea is to use the tech for things that nobody in power really gives a fuck about (or is even hostile to), but to get them to pay to include it, thinking that you'll do something stupid with it, like using it to give manufacturers a cut of all your transactions. ;-)
In the old days, tech was motivated by use demand; build a better mousetrap and people will want it. The phone market isn't really going that way, so you need to use tricks like dual-use techs. Always throw a fake use-case to the assholes. You don't have to use it; just get them thinking that a certain aspect of the better mousetrap gives them (rather than their customers) some kind of angle.
Because you vote against being able to use it as you please.
The device ships defective by design, you know this, you buy it anyway, and your sale goes down in history as Yet Another Satisfied Customer.
Just Say No. It's easy.
While I share RMS' opinion about factual descriptions of interfaces and data formats not being copyrightable (for Linux or anything else), this is a bogus argument for that view.
A license cannot define what a derivative work is; copyright law does that. At most, Linux's license can grant permission to people to use some parts of it in non-GPLed derivative works; it can't say whether or not you have done something that requires that permission.
Never pay attention to any wording in a license that tells you whether or not you have already become bound by that license. Anything in the license on that topic exists merely to persuade you (or to put it as nicely as possible, to "inform" you) of a certain point of view. This applies to everything from the BSD licenses to the nastiest proprietary ones. Only consult the license after you have determined that you want to do something that copyright law wouldn't, by default, permit you to do.
This just further proves: Julian Assange is a traitor to America!
The thing about theories is that it's usually pointless to say you either agree or disagree with them. Theories simply are. That doesn't mean they're accurate but whenever you state your disagreement with a theory, you're kind of expected to mention why you think you've spotted a problem with it.
Imagine you're talking with someone and the topic of gravity comes up, and they suddenly blurt out, "I disagree with Einstein's theory of gravity." The next thing that person says, is either going to be amazingly profound, or just as amazingly inane and utterly unrelated to the strengths or weaknesses of gravity theory. But before that person says anything, just what is your attitude going to be at that moment? How often does it happen, and when it does, how often is the speaker serious?
Well, the weird thing about gravity, is that when someone disagrees with the theory, they've usually actually given it a lot of thought. So far, in the last century, all the people who did that were either wrong or took their secret to their deathbed, but at least when "I disagree with the theory of gravity" it uttered, the next sentence really is often at least related to the topic of gravity. How often? I dunno, but let's call it x(g). Gravity isn't challenged very often. How often? Oh, let's just call that y(g). What I'm getting at is that the chances of having a good, as opposed to tedious-and-irrelevant, "I don't believe in gravity" discussion is x(g)/y(g).
Now compare that to evolution. For some reason, whenever someone says they disagree with evolutionary theory, their next sentence is always inane, and almost never related to the theory of evolution. Instead, we get things like
That's x(e). And for some reason, in spite of evolution being an older, much-more-tested, and down-to-earth and intuitive theory than relativity, people attack it fairly often. That's y(e). The chances of an evolution-denier improving your life, as opposed to making it more tedious, is x(e)/y(e). x(e) is less than x(g), and y(e) is greater than y(g). So x(e)/y(e) is far less than x(g)/y(g).
So now let's go back to whatever it is that you're thinking when someone says "I disagree with Einstein's theory of gravity." Let's face it: you know the next thing you hear isn't really going to be for real. Sure, it might be, but someone is about to say something very tired and lame. Yet for all your pessimism, it is a genuinely interesting and exciting possibility, compared to the diarrhea that you're pretty much guaranteed to hear after someone blurts out, "I don't believe in the theory of evolution." The next thing that person says, is never serious or interesting, it never points out any evidence that evolution might be incorrect, it never points out evidence that might lead to formulation of a rival theory, and it never talks about an idea for an experiment that could be used to test a rival idea thereby turning it into a theory. It's always inane crap. Always. x(e) is zero. And y(e) is fucking huge. We're even talking about it on Slashdot right now, as opposed to say, gravity.
Compared to gravity deniers, evolution deniers suck. They have nothing to contribute.
So now do you understand the animosity? They're already acting weird by telling people their conclusion first, rather than starting with introducing their evidence, and they always disappoint even after they fumble past that awkward introduction. That's why "disagreeing" with evolution doesn't get respect. Maybe some day, someone will point out something interesting, and then explain that it's why they "di
It doesn't ban discriminating against quacks based on the idea of creationism, just the theory of creationism. If someone wants to put forth a theory of intelligent design, that would be great, because to date, no one has ever formulated one (or if they did, they kept it a big secret instead of publishing it).
Then if some quack wants to work on creationism, then they can either do the work and become the first (in which case, all is forgiven and I'll be happy to eat some humble pie; and really, it would be ok for the university to pay a settlement or have to hire the guy back, because such an event would put them on the map in quite a big way -- the first intelligent design scientist is going to be outrageously famous and this will rub off on his employer), or they can get fired for saying they're working on science and then never actually doing anything. You can still fire people for fraud or laziness, can't you?
When they try to use this radical new exemption, where people don't have to be accountable as long as they're working on the "theory of intelligent design," cross-examine them and make them state the theory. Have them come up with any piece of evidence that led them to formulate the theory, or any test for it. In every science, those are very easy things to do. When the creationist fails to do it (as all of them always have) then you've shown that there was no "conduct of research relating to the theory of intelligent design," so the weird new law isn't applicable to that particular situation. Case dismissed.
The solution to quack "science" is to play their game and talk about the ideas as science. Nothing is as devastating to the fraud, as what this strategy exposes.
How do they know they're communicating directly with their customers? They're giving advice to someone, and their customers are receiving advice from someone, but ...
Typically, C header files aren't code; they're basically interface definitions. They're facts, which describe the format of data passed to, and received from, functions.
Typically.
TFA says that some of them contain inline function definitions, and that might change the situation, though. Kinda depends on the "code" in question. Good luck enforcing a copyright on "int plus_one(int n) { return n+1; }"
Google might have screwed up, but it's hardly a slam-dunk. To figure this out, people need to look at the header files in question, rather than read laymen's descriptions of what happened. (And when someone blandly says "Google copied 2.5 megabytes of code from more than 700 Linux kernel header files" without immediately explaining the very unlikely assertion that those header files actually contain 2.5 megabytes of code, I'm prejudiced into thinking that person is a layman.)
Oh, and quoting Linus' opinion on this matter is silly. He's not a lawyer (no, I'm not one either) and he's the same guy who says Nvidia drivers aren't derived works of the kernel. And while that doesn't make him wrong about this, it does make him inconsistent, since the very idea that Nvidia compiled their drivers without Linux header files, is preposterous. You can't have it both ways.
Billions show you made the right decision about whether to be right or wrong.
Stallman never demanded anything; he doesn't have a gun. Stallman is trying to persuade you.
Why is your phone connecting to a cell tower, when you probably have wifi nearby? Because it was programmed to do that, in spite of the fact that it shouldn't need to do that whenever there happens to be a more sensible route. Proprietary phone software doesn't care that sometimes it makes a lot more sense to use other networks than the cell network; proprietary phone software is written to make the users dependent upon the cell network provider. Some phones won't even use wifi at all for any purpose unless you are paying a cell network provider for "data." (How fucked up is that? I get why they do that, but the means of doing it, is that they use proprietary software to enforce the broken behavior.)
A phone running Free Software wouldn't be talking to cell towers all the time when it doesn't need to, because Free Software is intended to serve the interests of users above the interests of other parties. Using cell networks isn't dumb but if you think about it for just a few seconds, that should be the route of last resort. Cell is the slowest, the physically furthest (compare distance to your wifi router to distance to cell tower -- what does that imply about power requirements?), shared among more users, etc. Use it, but only when you don't have anything better.
This is the tip of the iceberg. There are all kinds of crazy things about phones that we wouldn't tolerate on our desktops.
I am pretty amazed that someone wouldn't think this issue can be (mostly) solved, especially since the biggest-payoff solutions involve running better software, which just happens to be the very context of your remark.