When we used to hold the Soviet Union up to the light, we'd point to their jailing and beating and disappearances of dissidents and say "The USSR is a police state!"
Nothing's changed here except the geography. These tactics are still police state tactics, no matter which dictator-wannabe is practicing them.
If uber isn't paying the same entry fees to the market as existing taxis, then it is unfair competition for the taxis. However, it should be about opening the regulation since there is obviously a market need not being met by taxis. There is no stopping the taxi companies from investing in an app and backend analytics to direct routes and reserve rides. If taxis wanted to innovate, they would, but instead, they enjoy state protection.
It's not just "state protection". Taxi operators have sheltered themselves beneath a mountain of protectionist regulations and artificially limited numbers of licenses that they themselves lobbied for. Ostensibly the regulations were touted as "public safety measures", but they were designed expressly to prevent or delay actual competition from taking away their business. The result has been inflated prices for everyone, and full bank accounts for the taxi companies. Meanwhile, they publicly bemoan all the "regulatory burden" they have to operate under! And after all that phony acting, they still have the nerve to complain that a competitor is "unfair"? Entitled pricks, all of them. I hope Über / Lÿft / Whüever takes all their lunch money.
It could be that "crazy fast" is the main goal they're looking for. The NSA has an immense amount of compute that they can throw at cryptographic problems to try to brute force them. Reducing the amount of CPU it would take to test each guess increases their capacity by the same factor.
Now, all they have to do is make sure people use crappy PRNGs, and the NSA will be picking up the bar tab at the next FIVE EYES conference.
Yes, the neural network was extensively trained on a body of actual reviews that Yelp had deemed "real". And when tested by Mechanical Turks, the generated reviews were statistically almost indistinguishable from the real human-generated reviews. Which turns out to be frightening. If you read the whole paper, you'll see Appendix B has a small sample set of generated reviews.
The good news is that all of those training reviews must have included mostly reviews by stupid, biased, and uncultured people. That means the neural net's output looks just as banal. Whether or not they were "real" or "computer generated" or flagged as "helpful" or "cool" is essentially immaterial - if you were reading them yourself, you'd probably skip right over them simply because they're utterly worthless.
The bad news is that because these useless reviews are still acceptable to so many people (and go unflagged by the shill-detection algorithms) that they do contribute to the star rating, which might turn you on or off to a place even before you read the reviews.
Glad to know that computers can output trash as quickly as humans can.
If you read the full paper, you would see that one of the fake review detection algorithms is measuring the number of reviews posted around the same time, which often indicates the company may have paid some people to write a bunch of glowing reviews. Their suggested solution to avoid this detection is to have the AI post the computer-generated reviews at a slower pace, so it doesn't trigger the algorithm.
The irony is that when computers output trash slower than the humans output trash, the trash-outputting computers are better at fooling trash-detecting computers into believing they are human than the actual trash-outputting humans.
As I replied to every other poster above who also missed the point, Jobs made a manure cart full of mistakes, including in UI. Debating Jobs' brilliance or success or tyrannical nature or thieving skills was not my point.
My point is that even though Jobs proved* that usability is the most important quality in software, the software industry still doesn't even recognize that usability is an aspect of quality.
* By "proved" I mean that when you tally up $$$ and use them as a scorecard, Apple was more successful than everyone else.
It doesn't really matter to the argument if it was Jobs or someone else who originated the designs. As you say, he was the dictator, and as I said, that's how he made all the money.
But my original point was not to answer the question "how did Steve Jobs make all his money?" It was "The software industry still doesn't understand that usability is quality, even after Jobs proved that it is."
Those were mistakes, and mistakes are human. While Jobs was on the right track of usability, he certainly made a lot of fecal-encrusted decisions.
Like you, I loathed the horrible "printed circle" iPod control - the first time I encountered one I was frustrated by it for half an hour, and eventually had to ask someone for help! The person who helped was happy to show me an older iPod that had a physical wheel, which actually was intuitive. But the printed circle was only one of the many stupid design failures Apple made.
Another Apple failure was the perfectly circular hockey-puck mouse on the first gen iMacs. I grabbed the mouse, moved the mouse up, and the cursor slopped to the side. Every single time I grabbed that mouse, I had to reorient it. There's something about the soft edges of arcs and perfect circularity that Apple really likes, but they completely stink when they come to usability.
In more modern times, Apple has added more and more "gestures" to the iPhone. "Gesture" is simply a word that means "completely invisible and non-intuitive UI." They're generally actions that you may discover through contact with other humans, but would never discover on your own. Given enough practice, they might become part of your nature - until someone changes the meanings of the gestures! IMHO, the world needs to "Just Swipe Left" to swiping left.
Topping off the issues is that it's been difficult to criticize Apple for these failures, because the forums are still populated with rabid Apple fans who continue to insist that Jobs was God on Earth, and that his every decision was divinely perfect. That kind of religion-based dishonesty is fine for getting people to teach their kids about Santa Claus, but it doesn't provide good feedback for making a product better.
Because the industry has been collectively blinded by the engineers who built it, and has been for decades.
Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Software Quality. This page is essentially a summary of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge topic on software quality and it represents the collective wisdom of decades of work. Now search the page looking for the word "usability". It's not even listed as one of the attributes of quality! Usability is still something just pasted on after a product is under construction, and is considered far too late in the process to make any foundational or architectural software changes needed to make a product more usable.
That's where Steve Jobs made all the money. He understood that he had to make it usable first, and worry about function and feature completeness later (or never.) He understood that the humans who actually touched his machines were the people he had to impress. Apparently, though, he was a singular entity at Apple, and nobody since him has demonstrated comprehension of this foundational lesson. So new iPhone UIs get designed by Apple committees, and are as lackluster and difficult to use as any Windows device. Windows designers, in turn, are under pressure to copy the success of the iPhone with UI failures like Metro, instead of working on their own usability issues. And Android developers each design whatever they think might work for their special snowflake apps, leaving the users befuddled with difficult to find features and overly technical functionality.
They're all describing a mutual path that may look circularly iterative and fast paced, but is instead the trajectory resulting from their swirling around a drain.
We have to stop seeing usability from our own biased perspectives (which come from us insiders, are highly technical, and tend to value function over form), and instead test repeatedly to ensure our products are usable and desirable by actual average consumers. We have to stop changing UI elements and procedures our customers depend on - they don't want to relearn our products just because we changed to the Flat-UI-of-the-Month. And we have to learn that chasing fashions is fine for clothing, but not for software.
The CEO is the only one who can make the changes all the way down. If the CEO's written policy is "don't install slimeware on our client's machines", then that message is going to get passed down to the VPs and Directors. If their jobs and bonuses are at risk because they let a manager install slimeware, they're going to say "Teams, don't install slimeware." And if the engineers know that if they get caught installing slimeware they will be tarred and feathered, they won't do it.
Therefore, to solve the problem you might try to throw a few CEOs in jail now, and keep throwing them in jail until the rest get the message. Much cheaper than prosecuting hundreds of engineers and middle managers. Seems like a good idea, right?
The real problem is that everyone knows it's darn profitable to install slimeware on client computers. All it will really do is get the rest of the C level execs in the industry to hire better lawyers, to find legally defensible loopholes around the rules, and to "donate" more to various "pro-business" politicians in order to change the laws. And you and I will still end up with slimeware in our new PCs.
The part I don't get is why people use AccuWeather. The National Weather Service has extremely high quality forecasts right there on their web page, and if you visit http://mobile.weather.gov/ in your iOS device and tap "Share/Add To Home Screen", it's wrapped up behind an icon and "acts" like an app. As a plus, you've already paid for them with your taxes. And they have no privacy violating trackers on their page, not even a google analytics link.
Most importantly, you're not feeding some shitty company who has been trying to make the National Weather Service lock up our public weather data, and who bought and paid for a U.S. senator for exactly that purpose.
Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.
You didn't run that idea all the way through the Capitalism 101 grinder: "if people will buy it, and you can make money selling it, sell it!" It's the practical application of the century-old P.T. Barnum quote, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Anyway, I've learned not to begrudge people for buying or selling useless-to-me items, just because I disapprove of their lack of utility. Why not? Because I'm not in their shoes, and I don't know what motivates them or makes them happy. Besides, I certainly don't want somebody else questioning my every purchase, just because they lack my imagination.
You fail history. Not so far back, they had bounties to get rid of vermin like rats and snakes. Do you know what people did? They bred rats and snakes to turn in for the bounties. When the bounty got canceled, they fine free market advocates doing this dumped the vermin (alive) since it wasn't profitable to kill and dispose of them via the bounty anymore.
Once you get a plastic bottle breeding program going, I think the world is going to have a completely different set of problems than people using them to scam recycling booths.
That's a nice solution for you; it's a very fortunate thing for you that you live in a land with an unspoiled, clean underground aquifer.
Some countries, like India, have no clean aquifers anymore; the ground water is infected, so well water must be filtered before drinking it. You can trust the filters in your home to work, but you can't trust that any old source of "drinking water" is properly filtered (there are many schemers about.) So when you're out in public, you buy bottled water. And then you dispose of the bottle - it is recommended you crush it so it can't easily be refilled (by schemers.)
I still wonder if the "jumping the air gap" capability of Stuxnet was added as a diversion to protect an inside agent at Natanz. It seems like a sketchy plan to rely on someone inserting an infected USB stick into the isolated network. Instead, they may have had an anti-war sympathizer on the inside who didn't want to be a part of weaponizing their uranium, and who agreed to insert the stick as long as it couldn't be traced back to them.
Remember, the Stuxnet operation had to cross the air gap three times. The first time was to load recon software onto the target to map out the SCADA network. They had to identify, count, and map out the variable frequency controllers; the various devices and sensors that were later spoofed; the controller, everything. Once installed, the recon software was going to require some time to perform its activity. Next, once the data had been gathered, it had to be exfiltrated from the isolated network, which required a reverse hop across the air gap. Then, the team had to study the map and build the targeting software - Stuxnet was crafted specifically to attack only this exact network, and it did so by looking for a set of very specific device signatures on it - more than 5 arrays of more than 32 high-speed variable frequency controllers, etc. Building and testing this software undoubtedly took some amount of time, during which the malware would have been sitting idle, and would have been at risk of detection. Finally, deploying the attack software required a third trip across the air gap.
To me, Stuxnet was too big to gamble its success on someone "accidentally" inserting an infected USB stick back and forth across the gap three different times. I suppose if they had knowledge that their procedure was "make configuration changes on system A every Monday, copy it to USB stick marked 'Secure USB stick, Air Gap Only!', test changes on system B on Tuesday, insert into system C on production network on Wednesday", they might have been able to leverage that kind of cycle. But nobody has publicly provided documentation on how crossing the USB gap occurred.
Hmm. Now that I think about it even more, it's possible that the recon could have been done by copying the production SCADA configuration information from an engineer's workstation on the outside of the air-gapped network. That would reduce the need for the air gap to a single trip, but it would be risky: how would you be certain that you're looking at an exact map of production, and not someone's simulated network for testing purposes? One mistake and the attack would be a dud; it's so complex that you're not going to get a lot of second chances.
Have you read how the NSA performs their intercepts? They use a server called FOXACID which is inserted into the network closer to the target than the target's actual desired server. FOXACID responds quicker than the legitimate server and performs the MITM handshake. That's how they can then decrypt the messages.
Saving the packets for later would mean they get nothing.
Except the whole point of HTTPS is that the government only knows you visited https://example.com/ and not which page on example.com you visited.
Technically the monitor can't see the whole URL. Monitoring only lets you see that they resolved the name example.com, and that they then visited port 443 on that site. The network traffic is encrypted and you can't be sure if they visited index.html or not.
I realize this is probably what you meant, and is just splitting hairs, but it pays to be accurate.
> I wouldn't claim there are none, but we have pretty strong evidence that if there are any, they're used sparingly and in a very targeted way.
His very words you quoted clearly said there is no evidence of a surreptitious drift-net attack.
The Great Firewall is a drift-net, but it is an open secret that China does so. Anyone technical can look at their certificate chain and see if their communications are being intercepted. And China has no lack of people with the skills needed to detect that tampering.
Instead, what's being claimed is that the NSA is doing some technically undetectable certificate replacement at a global scale, but there is just no evidence for those claims. Sure, they can violate one guy's computer, but they do so one suspect at a time. If they did it to the entire country, it would get noticed.
What this means is that such tampering is detectable by experts. That means if "they" were doing wholesale attacks on all traffic, it would be caught. Since pervasive tampering isn't evident here, that means they probably aren't drift-net trawling random internet traffic. Sure, they may be intercepting certain suspects' traffic, but that's not the same thing as Big Brother watching every conversation.
Seriously though, how can a golf ball have 11 patents on it?
Read Costco's reply to the court, in which each patent is listed along with Acushnet's claims and Costco's rebuttal. You can look the patents up online at the USPTO web site. Let's look at a few, shall we?
Patent# 6,994,638 - Golf balls comprising highly-neutralized acid polymers. Abstract A golf ball comprising a core comprised of a polymer containing an acid group fully-neutralized by an organic acid or a salt, a cation source, or a suitable base thereof, the core having a first Shore D hardness, a compression of no greater than about 90, and a diameter of between about 1.00 inches and about 1.64 inches; and a cover layer comprising ionomeric copolymers and terpolymers, ionomer precursors, thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers, polybutadiene rubber, balata, grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, non-grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, single-site polymers, high-crystalline acid polymers and their ionomers, or cationic ionomers.
What is claimed is:
1. A golf ball comprising: a core comprising a center and an outer core layer, the center comprising a thermoset polybutadiene rubber composition having a first hardness; and the outer core layer comprising a polymer comprised of an acid group fully-neutralized by an organic acid or a salt of the organic acid, and a cation source or a suitable base of the cation source; and having a second hardness; and an inner cover layer and an outer cover layer comprising ionomeric copolymers and terpolymers, ionomer precursors, thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers, polybutadiene rubber, balata, grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, non-grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, single-site polymers, high-crystalline acid polymers and their ionomers, polyurethnnes, polyureas, polyurethane-ureas; polyurea-urethanes; or cationic ionomers; wherein the first hardness is from about 50 Shore A to about 55 Shore D and first hardness is less than the second Shore D hardness by at least about 10 points.
Here's Costco's rebuttal:
11. Costco is not infringing any valid claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,994,638 (“the ’638patent”). Acushnet has accused Costco of infringing claim 1 of the 638 patent. Costco’s sales of the KS golf ball do not constitute infringement of claim 1 of the 638 patent, however, because, among other things, the Shore D hardness of the center core of the KS ball is not “at least about 10 points” less than the Shore D hardness of the outer core. 12. The 638 patent is invalid under 35 U.S.C. 102, 103 and/or 112. The claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 102 and/or 103, for example, in light of U.S. Patent No. 6,468,169 and other prior art publications and activities
Clearly, a lot of chemistry work went into this patent to make the balls have a certain elasticity. Costco says that their balls do not have the same properties, therefore they did not infringe upon this claim.
Here's another:
Patent# 8,123,632 - Multi-layer golf ball Abstract Golf balls consisting of a dual core and a dual cover are disclosed. The dual core consists of an inner core layer formed from a rubber composition and an outer core layer formed from a highly neutralized polymer composition.
Here's the claim in question:
"17. A golf ball consisting essentially of: an inner core layer formed from a rubber composition and having a diameter of from 1.100 inches to 1.400 inches, a center hardness (H.sub.center) of 50 Shore C or greater, and an outer surface hardness of 65 Shore C or greater; an outer core layer formed from a highly neutralized polymer composition and having an outer surface hardness (H.sub.outer core) of 75 Shore C or greater; an inner cover layer formed from a thermoplastic composition and having a material hardness (H.
Just another reason to SHORTEN the length of patents for none drug inventions. There is NO reason on earth that a patent on a golf ball needs to be 20 years
Why not? Is the research into the aerodynamic characteristics of a golf ball more or less worthy than the research into the hydrodynamic characteristics of a blood vessel stent? For that matter, someone who keeps active as a golfer is likely to be healthier longer than someone who is sedentary and requires drugs and other medical interventions to live. Certainly you'd agree that the sporting goods companies have done more good for public health than Martin Shkreli ever did as CEO of a drug company.
Research is research, and the law says that inventors can profit from their inventions. I'm sorry you don't like that.
Your business has absolutely nothing to do with what you want to sell... it has absolutely everything to do with what your customers want to buy.
"But we can shift that paradigm! This time, we'll plan better, we just need to educate our consumers."
Well, at least they taught their consumers a valuable lesson: Sony, famously guilty for shitting on the rights of virtually everyone through their crappy DRM-enabled hardware, still sold way more consoles than Microsoft.
Microsoft just has never excelled at building what customers want.
Nokia and everyone else had phones with Java, so Microsoft shipped WinCE phones - that didn't sell. Apple came out with their DRM-encumbered iPod, so Microsoft followed it up with the DRM encumbered Zune - that didn't sell. Apple came out with the iPhone with the walled app garden; so Microsoft shipped Windows Phones with a walled garden - that didn't sell. Steam and Sony and Nintendo came out with DRM encumbered games; so Microsoft shipped the XBox One - that sold quite a few, but sucked.
Their two biggest problems are that they want to use services as license enforcement gateways, and that their stiffest competition to their Software V3.0 is their own Software V2.0. Nothing new in Office has been worth buying upgrades since about 2007, yet they have managed to convince some people to upgrade to Office 2010, 2013, and now Office365.
And people are getting more and more fed up with the constant greed. LibreOffice has caught up to about Office 2007 in terms of maturity, which is good enough for a lot of people and companies. Linux has caught fire in the corporate world, overthrowing WIndows Servers by the millions. Cloud computing is moving companies to outsource their hardware data centers. Azure is competent in this arena, but cloud computing is already close to a commodity - there's not a lot of value Microsoft can add over the other big players.
It's weird, but at the core it's an existential crisis for one of the world's largest companies. They are desperately trying to figure out something to sell that will still be in demand 10 years from now.
I do the same when looking for a restaurant - find a negative review and they'll tell you everything good about the place that they don't understand.
This. I use this same strategy when evaluating any product. Read a few good reviews, sure, but I need to read a few of the top negative reviews to figure out if the product actually has weaknesses that matter to me, or if it's just been purchased by a few users with unrealistic expectations.
The good thing about negative reviews is they usually aren't placed there by the business or by a sock puppet/SEO, so the dishonest reviews are at least more transparent. If some jerk with a grudge posts a 1 star review, they'll often include a whole sob story about how this company was unfair to them because they didn't immediately replace the broken thing the user dropped on a concrete floor.
To throw another wrench into the decision matrix, an ischemic stroke is caused by a clot that has been jammed into a narrow blood vessel. If the patient is not particularly healthy he may have fragile arterial walls, in which case the clot can damage the artery. Ironically, this may lead to the clot doing its intended task, becoming the thing preventing the damaged artery from hemorrhaging. In these rare and undiagnosable cases, responsibly using tPA (or spider venom) to dissolve the clot can actually lead to a hemorrhagic stroke.
Slashdot Mirror
When we used to hold the Soviet Union up to the light, we'd point to their jailing and beating and disappearances of dissidents and say "The USSR is a police state!"
Nothing's changed here except the geography. These tactics are still police state tactics, no matter which dictator-wannabe is practicing them.
If uber isn't paying the same entry fees to the market as existing taxis, then it is unfair competition for the taxis. However, it should be about opening the regulation since there is obviously a market need not being met by taxis. There is no stopping the taxi companies from investing in an app and backend analytics to direct routes and reserve rides. If taxis wanted to innovate, they would, but instead, they enjoy state protection.
It's not just "state protection". Taxi operators have sheltered themselves beneath a mountain of protectionist regulations and artificially limited numbers of licenses that they themselves lobbied for. Ostensibly the regulations were touted as "public safety measures", but they were designed expressly to prevent or delay actual competition from taking away their business. The result has been inflated prices for everyone, and full bank accounts for the taxi companies. Meanwhile, they publicly bemoan all the "regulatory burden" they have to operate under! And after all that phony acting, they still have the nerve to complain that a competitor is "unfair"? Entitled pricks, all of them. I hope Über / Lÿft / Whüever takes all their lunch money.
It could be that "crazy fast" is the main goal they're looking for. The NSA has an immense amount of compute that they can throw at cryptographic problems to try to brute force them. Reducing the amount of CPU it would take to test each guess increases their capacity by the same factor.
Now, all they have to do is make sure people use crappy PRNGs, and the NSA will be picking up the bar tab at the next FIVE EYES conference.
Yes, the neural network was extensively trained on a body of actual reviews that Yelp had deemed "real". And when tested by Mechanical Turks, the generated reviews were statistically almost indistinguishable from the real human-generated reviews. Which turns out to be frightening. If you read the whole paper, you'll see Appendix B has a small sample set of generated reviews.
The good news is that all of those training reviews must have included mostly reviews by stupid, biased, and uncultured people. That means the neural net's output looks just as banal. Whether or not they were "real" or "computer generated" or flagged as "helpful" or "cool" is essentially immaterial - if you were reading them yourself, you'd probably skip right over them simply because they're utterly worthless.
The bad news is that because these useless reviews are still acceptable to so many people (and go unflagged by the shill-detection algorithms) that they do contribute to the star rating, which might turn you on or off to a place even before you read the reviews.
Glad to know that computers can output trash as quickly as humans can.
If you read the full paper, you would see that one of the fake review detection algorithms is measuring the number of reviews posted around the same time, which often indicates the company may have paid some people to write a bunch of glowing reviews. Their suggested solution to avoid this detection is to have the AI post the computer-generated reviews at a slower pace, so it doesn't trigger the algorithm.
The irony is that when computers output trash slower than the humans output trash, the trash-outputting computers are better at fooling trash-detecting computers into believing they are human than the actual trash-outputting humans.
As I replied to every other poster above who also missed the point, Jobs made a manure cart full of mistakes, including in UI. Debating Jobs' brilliance or success or tyrannical nature or thieving skills was not my point.
My point is that even though Jobs proved* that usability is the most important quality in software, the software industry still doesn't even recognize that usability is an aspect of quality.
* By "proved" I mean that when you tally up $$$ and use them as a scorecard, Apple was more successful than everyone else.
It doesn't really matter to the argument if it was Jobs or someone else who originated the designs. As you say, he was the dictator, and as I said, that's how he made all the money.
But my original point was not to answer the question "how did Steve Jobs make all his money?" It was "The software industry still doesn't understand that usability is quality, even after Jobs proved that it is."
Those were mistakes, and mistakes are human. While Jobs was on the right track of usability, he certainly made a lot of fecal-encrusted decisions.
Like you, I loathed the horrible "printed circle" iPod control - the first time I encountered one I was frustrated by it for half an hour, and eventually had to ask someone for help! The person who helped was happy to show me an older iPod that had a physical wheel, which actually was intuitive. But the printed circle was only one of the many stupid design failures Apple made.
Another Apple failure was the perfectly circular hockey-puck mouse on the first gen iMacs. I grabbed the mouse, moved the mouse up, and the cursor slopped to the side. Every single time I grabbed that mouse, I had to reorient it. There's something about the soft edges of arcs and perfect circularity that Apple really likes, but they completely stink when they come to usability.
In more modern times, Apple has added more and more "gestures" to the iPhone. "Gesture" is simply a word that means "completely invisible and non-intuitive UI." They're generally actions that you may discover through contact with other humans, but would never discover on your own. Given enough practice, they might become part of your nature - until someone changes the meanings of the gestures! IMHO, the world needs to "Just Swipe Left" to swiping left.
Topping off the issues is that it's been difficult to criticize Apple for these failures, because the forums are still populated with rabid Apple fans who continue to insist that Jobs was God on Earth, and that his every decision was divinely perfect. That kind of religion-based dishonesty is fine for getting people to teach their kids about Santa Claus, but it doesn't provide good feedback for making a product better.
Because the industry has been collectively blinded by the engineers who built it, and has been for decades.
Take a look at the Wikipedia entry for Software Quality. This page is essentially a summary of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge topic on software quality and it represents the collective wisdom of decades of work. Now search the page looking for the word "usability". It's not even listed as one of the attributes of quality! Usability is still something just pasted on after a product is under construction, and is considered far too late in the process to make any foundational or architectural software changes needed to make a product more usable.
That's where Steve Jobs made all the money. He understood that he had to make it usable first, and worry about function and feature completeness later (or never.) He understood that the humans who actually touched his machines were the people he had to impress. Apparently, though, he was a singular entity at Apple, and nobody since him has demonstrated comprehension of this foundational lesson. So new iPhone UIs get designed by Apple committees, and are as lackluster and difficult to use as any Windows device. Windows designers, in turn, are under pressure to copy the success of the iPhone with UI failures like Metro, instead of working on their own usability issues. And Android developers each design whatever they think might work for their special snowflake apps, leaving the users befuddled with difficult to find features and overly technical functionality.
They're all describing a mutual path that may look circularly iterative and fast paced, but is instead the trajectory resulting from their swirling around a drain.
We have to stop seeing usability from our own biased perspectives (which come from us insiders, are highly technical, and tend to value function over form), and instead test repeatedly to ensure our products are usable and desirable by actual average consumers. We have to stop changing UI elements and procedures our customers depend on - they don't want to relearn our products just because we changed to the Flat-UI-of-the-Month. And we have to learn that chasing fashions is fine for clothing, but not for software.
The CEO is the only one who can make the changes all the way down. If the CEO's written policy is "don't install slimeware on our client's machines", then that message is going to get passed down to the VPs and Directors. If their jobs and bonuses are at risk because they let a manager install slimeware, they're going to say "Teams, don't install slimeware." And if the engineers know that if they get caught installing slimeware they will be tarred and feathered, they won't do it.
Therefore, to solve the problem you might try to throw a few CEOs in jail now, and keep throwing them in jail until the rest get the message. Much cheaper than prosecuting hundreds of engineers and middle managers. Seems like a good idea, right?
The real problem is that everyone knows it's darn profitable to install slimeware on client computers. All it will really do is get the rest of the C level execs in the industry to hire better lawyers, to find legally defensible loopholes around the rules, and to "donate" more to various "pro-business" politicians in order to change the laws. And you and I will still end up with slimeware in our new PCs.
The part I don't get is why people use AccuWeather. The National Weather Service has extremely high quality forecasts right there on their web page, and if you visit http://mobile.weather.gov/ in your iOS device and tap "Share/Add To Home Screen", it's wrapped up behind an icon and "acts" like an app. As a plus, you've already paid for them with your taxes. And they have no privacy violating trackers on their page, not even a google analytics link.
Most importantly, you're not feeding some shitty company who has been trying to make the National Weather Service lock up our public weather data, and who bought and paid for a U.S. senator for exactly that purpose.
The problem is not that I'd pay $1200 for an iPhone 8. The problem is my wife will.
Just because you can, doesn't mean that you should.
You didn't run that idea all the way through the Capitalism 101 grinder: "if people will buy it, and you can make money selling it, sell it!" It's the practical application of the century-old P.T. Barnum quote, "There's a sucker born every minute."
Anyway, I've learned not to begrudge people for buying or selling useless-to-me items, just because I disapprove of their lack of utility. Why not? Because I'm not in their shoes, and I don't know what motivates them or makes them happy. Besides, I certainly don't want somebody else questioning my every purchase, just because they lack my imagination.
You fail history. Not so far back, they had bounties to get rid of vermin like rats and snakes. Do you know what people did? They bred rats and snakes to turn in for the bounties.
When the bounty got canceled, they fine free market advocates doing this dumped the vermin (alive) since it wasn't profitable to kill and dispose of them via the bounty anymore.
Once you get a plastic bottle breeding program going, I think the world is going to have a completely different set of problems than people using them to scam recycling booths.
That's a nice solution for you; it's a very fortunate thing for you that you live in a land with an unspoiled, clean underground aquifer.
Some countries, like India, have no clean aquifers anymore; the ground water is infected, so well water must be filtered before drinking it. You can trust the filters in your home to work, but you can't trust that any old source of "drinking water" is properly filtered (there are many schemers about.) So when you're out in public, you buy bottled water. And then you dispose of the bottle - it is recommended you crush it so it can't easily be refilled (by schemers.)
I still wonder if the "jumping the air gap" capability of Stuxnet was added as a diversion to protect an inside agent at Natanz. It seems like a sketchy plan to rely on someone inserting an infected USB stick into the isolated network. Instead, they may have had an anti-war sympathizer on the inside who didn't want to be a part of weaponizing their uranium, and who agreed to insert the stick as long as it couldn't be traced back to them.
Remember, the Stuxnet operation had to cross the air gap three times. The first time was to load recon software onto the target to map out the SCADA network. They had to identify, count, and map out the variable frequency controllers; the various devices and sensors that were later spoofed; the controller, everything. Once installed, the recon software was going to require some time to perform its activity. Next, once the data had been gathered, it had to be exfiltrated from the isolated network, which required a reverse hop across the air gap. Then, the team had to study the map and build the targeting software - Stuxnet was crafted specifically to attack only this exact network, and it did so by looking for a set of very specific device signatures on it - more than 5 arrays of more than 32 high-speed variable frequency controllers, etc. Building and testing this software undoubtedly took some amount of time, during which the malware would have been sitting idle, and would have been at risk of detection. Finally, deploying the attack software required a third trip across the air gap.
To me, Stuxnet was too big to gamble its success on someone "accidentally" inserting an infected USB stick back and forth across the gap three different times. I suppose if they had knowledge that their procedure was "make configuration changes on system A every Monday, copy it to USB stick marked 'Secure USB stick, Air Gap Only!', test changes on system B on Tuesday, insert into system C on production network on Wednesday", they might have been able to leverage that kind of cycle. But nobody has publicly provided documentation on how crossing the USB gap occurred.
Hmm. Now that I think about it even more, it's possible that the recon could have been done by copying the production SCADA configuration information from an engineer's workstation on the outside of the air-gapped network. That would reduce the need for the air gap to a single trip, but it would be risky: how would you be certain that you're looking at an exact map of production, and not someone's simulated network for testing purposes? One mistake and the attack would be a dud; it's so complex that you're not going to get a lot of second chances.
Have you read how the NSA performs their intercepts? They use a server called FOXACID which is inserted into the network closer to the target than the target's actual desired server. FOXACID responds quicker than the legitimate server and performs the MITM handshake. That's how they can then decrypt the messages.
Saving the packets for later would mean they get nothing.
Except the whole point of HTTPS is that the government only knows you visited https://example.com/ and not which page on example.com you visited.
Technically the monitor can't see the whole URL. Monitoring only lets you see that they resolved the name example.com, and that they then visited port 443 on that site. The network traffic is encrypted and you can't be sure if they visited index.html or not.
I realize this is probably what you meant, and is just splitting hairs, but it pays to be accurate.
> I wouldn't claim there are none, but we have pretty strong evidence that if there are any, they're used sparingly and in a very targeted way.
His very words you quoted clearly said there is no evidence of a surreptitious drift-net attack.
The Great Firewall is a drift-net, but it is an open secret that China does so. Anyone technical can look at their certificate chain and see if their communications are being intercepted. And China has no lack of people with the skills needed to detect that tampering.
Instead, what's being claimed is that the NSA is doing some technically undetectable certificate replacement at a global scale, but there is just no evidence for those claims. Sure, they can violate one guy's computer, but they do so one suspect at a time. If they did it to the entire country, it would get noticed.
What this means is that such tampering is detectable by experts. That means if "they" were doing wholesale attacks on all traffic, it would be caught. Since pervasive tampering isn't evident here, that means they probably aren't drift-net trawling random internet traffic. Sure, they may be intercepting certain suspects' traffic, but that's not the same thing as Big Brother watching every conversation.
Seriously though, how can a golf ball have 11 patents on it?
Read Costco's reply to the court, in which each patent is listed along with Acushnet's claims and Costco's rebuttal. You can look the patents up online at the USPTO web site. Let's look at a few, shall we?
Patent# 6,994,638 - Golf balls comprising highly-neutralized acid polymers.
Abstract
A golf ball comprising a core comprised of a polymer containing an acid group fully-neutralized by an organic acid or a salt, a cation source, or a suitable base thereof, the core having a first Shore D hardness, a compression of no greater than about 90, and a diameter of between about 1.00 inches and about 1.64 inches; and a cover layer comprising ionomeric copolymers and terpolymers, ionomer precursors, thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers, polybutadiene rubber, balata, grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, non-grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, single-site polymers, high-crystalline acid polymers and their ionomers, or cationic ionomers.
What is claimed is:
1. A golf ball comprising: a core comprising a center and an outer core layer, the center comprising a thermoset polybutadiene rubber composition having a first hardness; and the outer core layer comprising a polymer comprised of an acid group fully-neutralized by an organic acid or a salt of the organic acid, and a cation source or a suitable base of the cation source; and having a second hardness; and an inner cover layer and an outer cover layer comprising ionomeric copolymers and terpolymers, ionomer precursors, thermoplastics, thermoplastic elastomers, polybutadiene rubber, balata, grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, non-grafted metallocene-catalyzed polymers, single-site polymers, high-crystalline acid polymers and their ionomers, polyurethnnes, polyureas, polyurethane-ureas; polyurea-urethanes; or cationic ionomers; wherein the first hardness is from about 50 Shore A to about 55 Shore D and first hardness is less than the second Shore D hardness by at least about 10 points.
Here's Costco's rebuttal:
11. Costco is not infringing any valid claims of U.S. Patent No. 6,994,638 (“the ’638patent”). Acushnet has accused Costco of infringing claim 1 of the 638 patent. Costco’s sales of the KS golf ball do not constitute infringement of claim 1 of the 638 patent, however, because, among other things, the Shore D hardness of the center core of the KS ball is not “at least about 10 points” less than the Shore D hardness of the outer core.
12. The 638 patent is invalid under 35 U.S.C. 102, 103 and/or 112. The claims are invalid under 35 U.S.C. 102 and/or 103, for example, in light of U.S. Patent No. 6,468,169 and other prior art publications and activities
Clearly, a lot of chemistry work went into this patent to make the balls have a certain elasticity. Costco says that their balls do not have the same properties, therefore they did not infringe upon this claim.
Here's another:
Patent# 8,123,632 - Multi-layer golf ball
Abstract
Golf balls consisting of a dual core and a dual cover are disclosed. The dual core consists of an inner core layer formed from a rubber composition and an outer core layer formed from a highly neutralized polymer composition.
Here's the claim in question:
"17. A golf ball consisting essentially of: an inner core layer formed from a rubber composition and having a diameter of from 1.100 inches to 1.400 inches, a center hardness (H.sub.center) of 50 Shore C or greater, and an outer surface hardness of 65 Shore C or greater; an outer core layer formed from a highly neutralized polymer composition and having an outer surface hardness (H.sub.outer core) of 75 Shore C or greater; an inner cover layer formed from a thermoplastic composition and having a material hardness (H.
Just another reason to SHORTEN the length of patents for none drug inventions. There is NO reason on earth that a patent on a golf ball needs to be 20 years
Why not? Is the research into the aerodynamic characteristics of a golf ball more or less worthy than the research into the hydrodynamic characteristics of a blood vessel stent? For that matter, someone who keeps active as a golfer is likely to be healthier longer than someone who is sedentary and requires drugs and other medical interventions to live. Certainly you'd agree that the sporting goods companies have done more good for public health than Martin Shkreli ever did as CEO of a drug company.
Research is research, and the law says that inventors can profit from their inventions. I'm sorry you don't like that.
Your business has absolutely nothing to do with what you want to sell... it has absolutely everything to do with what your customers want to buy.
"But we can shift that paradigm! This time, we'll plan better, we just need to educate our consumers."
Well, at least they taught their consumers a valuable lesson: Sony, famously guilty for shitting on the rights of virtually everyone through their crappy DRM-enabled hardware, still sold way more consoles than Microsoft.
Microsoft just has never excelled at building what customers want.
Nokia and everyone else had phones with Java, so Microsoft shipped WinCE phones - that didn't sell.
Apple came out with their DRM-encumbered iPod, so Microsoft followed it up with the DRM encumbered Zune - that didn't sell.
Apple came out with the iPhone with the walled app garden; so Microsoft shipped Windows Phones with a walled garden - that didn't sell.
Steam and Sony and Nintendo came out with DRM encumbered games; so Microsoft shipped the XBox One - that sold quite a few, but sucked.
Their two biggest problems are that they want to use services as license enforcement gateways, and that their stiffest competition to their Software V3.0 is their own Software V2.0. Nothing new in Office has been worth buying upgrades since about 2007, yet they have managed to convince some people to upgrade to Office 2010, 2013, and now Office365.
And people are getting more and more fed up with the constant greed. LibreOffice has caught up to about Office 2007 in terms of maturity, which is good enough for a lot of people and companies. Linux has caught fire in the corporate world, overthrowing WIndows Servers by the millions. Cloud computing is moving companies to outsource their hardware data centers. Azure is competent in this arena, but cloud computing is already close to a commodity - there's not a lot of value Microsoft can add over the other big players.
It's weird, but at the core it's an existential crisis for one of the world's largest companies. They are desperately trying to figure out something to sell that will still be in demand 10 years from now.
I do the same when looking for a restaurant - find a negative review and they'll tell you everything good about the place that they don't understand.
This. I use this same strategy when evaluating any product. Read a few good reviews, sure, but I need to read a few of the top negative reviews to figure out if the product actually has weaknesses that matter to me, or if it's just been purchased by a few users with unrealistic expectations.
The good thing about negative reviews is they usually aren't placed there by the business or by a sock puppet/SEO, so the dishonest reviews are at least more transparent. If some jerk with a grudge posts a 1 star review, they'll often include a whole sob story about how this company was unfair to them because they didn't immediately replace the broken thing the user dropped on a concrete floor.
To throw another wrench into the decision matrix, an ischemic stroke is caused by a clot that has been jammed into a narrow blood vessel. If the patient is not particularly healthy he may have fragile arterial walls, in which case the clot can damage the artery. Ironically, this may lead to the clot doing its intended task, becoming the thing preventing the damaged artery from hemorrhaging. In these rare and undiagnosable cases, responsibly using tPA (or spider venom) to dissolve the clot can actually lead to a hemorrhagic stroke.