You might not want to. However, some of us have a different lifestyle and may have different concerns. It would be an ideal car for people who spend most of their time in their car commuting and can charge it every night. Given the large reduction in fuel and pollution costs some might consider that worthwhile.
In my case I have 48 solar panels on top of my house and the ability to charge an electric vehicle for free. Yes, I will be getting an EV when costs of being at the bleeding edge of development are reduced.
Almost certainly the guy who posed the video is being used by someone who passed him the tape.
The real whistle blower is probably a higher level functionary who wanted the tape released to discredit a political enemy and able to protect this guy, for now. How long the poster will continue to be protected is anyone's guess.
The newly minted Standing Committee of the Politburu (the 9 folks who rule China) have made it clear that corruption is a major issue. However, previous Standing Committees have said the same and even started efforts to tackle it. These efforts haven't lasted long enough to make a small dent in the problem, never mind eradicate it.
The problem is that all levels of politicians and bureaucrats benefit greatly from corruption. Lower level bureaucrats want to become rich, higher level bureaucrats and they have no reason to rock the boat for themselves or their bureaucratic and political superiors.
I wonder how long these sorts of grass roots efforts will be tolerated. China has repeatedly shown that they can bury anything on their portion of the internet given sufficient incentive.
As a counter argument, about a year ago a bystander with a gun killed an off-duty ATF agent who was struggling with a pharmacy robbery suspect who had a gun. The bystander thought he was shooting the bad guy, but he shot and killed a 20-year Federal agent who had a wife and two kids and was at the pharmacy to pick up cancer drugs for his dad. Then a cop killed the suspect.
Anonymous claims to be a bunch people with like aims and no leadership. So this may be just some person who happened to get hold of the info and published it claiming to be Anonymous or Anti-sec or whomever. The claim that the data came from the FBI is unsupported - proof would be some additional data from the same system such as logs, etc. which have not been produced.
My personal guess is that the most likely source is some social networking site and the guy is saying it's the FBI as some sort of disinformation. It's possible but unlikely that both Apple and the FBI are outright lying about the source. There are all sorts of other possibilities.
A neighbor had a similar problem several years ago - but that was with her bank account. Someone convinced the online support person to help her and as a result she lost the contents of her checking and savings accounts. No, the bank did not refund the money.
All this shows is that if a hacker knows enough about you to convince someone else that they are you, you can lose a great deal. This guy should count himself lucky.
It's a very fine line between providing good customer support and helping them, and being hard-nosed and losing a customer. When I was pick-pocketed in Paris it was a major issue getting a new American Express card to pay my hotel bill - the AMEX agent apologized for the incredible amount the fact checking that was needed, but they did provide superb help when I did manage to pass their validation checks.
The Samsung designs cannot be introduced because Samsung produced them too late in the discovery process. The concern is that they were late because they wanted to prevent Apple from doing additional discovery around the newly revealed designs. Only Samsung knows why the designs were not revealed earlier, but they effectively managed to prevent Apple from examining the evidence around the designs. Perhaps Apple believes this is because Samsung can't produce evidence that these designs were generated when they claim they were done, but were actually produced later.
The magistrate judge in charge of discovery took notice when Apple complained. Samsung appealed several times to the trial judge but she backed up the magistrate judge.
Now the judge is concerned that Samsung are trying to influence the jury by getting their undiscovered evidence to jury members by a different route.
Why exactly should Apple be doing a security scan for non-Apple malware? If the various app stores are responsible for checking for non-executable viruses on all platforms then Google Play should be looking for malware applicable to Windows, Apple or Linux. And by this logic the Windows store (when it appears) should be checking for malware on all platforms also.
It's hard enough to stay on top of malware for your own platform, why should vendors be on top of malware aimed at other platforms? Especially as the malware files would never be executed on those platforms as they are inside non-executable containers, and the OS would have no reason to look inside those containers.
It's not likely that anything will be done to harden the US infrastructure without legislation. The necessary work requires money to be spent and neither public nor private organizations will do that unless there is some sort of legal requirement that they do so.
People who think the president was "over the top" have little imagination - I'm quite certain there are some very bright people in various countries working to create a series of Stuxnet type products to attack the infrastructure of Western nations. Be in no doubt, no nation has a monopoly on brains or computer technology. Access to details of of Western infrastructure is either openly available or have already been stolen. Figuring out the weak spots and how to attack them probably isn't that hard.
However, it's not obvious exactly how to solve the problem. It's not obvious that the current cybersecurity bill will help. The sad fact is that it's been written by lawyers and politicians who have no idea about the technological challenges and how to resolve them, so they are doing what they know - add bureaucracy. Until computer scientists and engineers are taking the lead nothing worthwhile will be done.
No, Google is being fined for taking advantage of a bug in Apple's software to make money, rather than reporting the issue to Apple so they could fix it. Heck, there's even a menu item in Safari to "Report bugs to Apple..." You seem to be blaming the victim for the poor choices of the person taking advantage of them - if someone accidentally leaves a window unlocked that doesn't translate into a right to burgle the house.
Unethical is one way to describe Google's behavior. Another way to describe it is criminal, as clearly Google was obtaining unauthorized access to a computer. You know, the sort of thing that gets people time in prison.
That's a problem with corporate law - companies have all the rights of people, but only one real responsibility - to make money. Minor fines for major infractions do not deter criminal behavior.
In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
Familiarity with how your business operates
Longer term institutional memory
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.
Sometimes patents are not useful, but sometimes they are.
Intuitive Surgical have spent many millions developing surgical robotics and even more millions getting the products certified and convincing doctors (some of the most conservative people around) that they can be used safely. It's reasonable that they receive substantial rewards for their work for some limited time period. It's far, far less expensive to develop the second example of a brand new concept. It's reasonable to assume that absent some legal impairment Intuitive products would be quickly copied and their prices undercut.
Truly novel products are EXACTLY why patents are are still needed. This is especially true for medical devices that can directly benefit humanity. Just because we have a substantial number of unfortunate software patents doesn't mean that the concept, when properly applied, isn't valid. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
500 million is a huge windfall for the small agency that conducted the sting. Unfortunately it gives them the resources to setup and entrap other large companies.
I think this should be "Fortunately". When I was in chemotherapy, my capecitabene tablets cost $1600 for a 2 week supply, or I could buy them from an on-line pharmacy for $650. It was tempting to save a bunch of money but I didn't because that medication was too important for me to trust an unknown supplier. One of other patients at my clinic told me that he ordered some from an online pharmacy in the US (or so he thought) and they arrived in an anonymous envelope from Guyana and with a size, shape and color different from the tablets supplied by local pharmacies. Fake? No way to tell for sure. But how many unsuspecting people are dying from pharmacies supplying fake medications? I don't know, nobody knows.
Cutting off the ways to advertise these places is a good idea. You think it's "unfortunate" that Google was caught and you decry the methods used to go after Google. I think that this is a great way for the government to help save people's lives by enforcing reasonable and necessary laws.
Right now, the ARM architecture equates to tablets and phones for many, maybe most people.
However, a number of companies (Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and others) have announced that they are developing ARM processors to challenge Intel in laptops and desktop systems. Probably they are going with ARM because Intel is being somewhat uncooperative (and maybe anticompetitive) by not letting them have licenses that would allow them to produce x86 compatible systems.
For these companies, having Windows on their ARM systems is vital. However, we shouldn't be short-sighted - restricting the ability for ARM systems to boot anything but Windows will (in the long run) benefit Intel, AMD, Via, etc. as much as it will benefit Microsoft by restricting which operating systems the upcoming ARM based systems can boot. They will either run Windows or they will run everything else, depending on the boot ROM in the system. Guess which most will chose.
Just as important, 8 of the 9 members of the PolitBuro Standing Committee (the highest and most powerful decision-making body in China) are engineers by profession. The most popular profession in the US Congress is lawyer.
I know which I would expect to get things right over the long haul.
You believe you have better algorithms than the competition. Starting a company is hard enough without giving Christmas presents to the competition. Keep everything closed while the company is young and vulnerable. Open source your code later if it won't help the competition AND you believe it will add value to your company. How far would Google have progressed if they had open sourced their search engine ten minutes after they had it working?
Frankly, if you have to ask this question you aren't really serious about succeeding.
They may well be right in thinking their data will be more accessible to the US government.
If I were an overseas competitor, I'd certainly use this as a reason to not to use a US provider. In a heartbeat.
The law of unintended consequences bites the US yet again.
This wouldn't be an issue if the US government hadn't acted the way it has over the last 10 years. The US government has so little trust overseas that people have no trouble thinking the worst of it. Karma is a bitch.
I remember when a megabyte of RAM dropped to under $1,000,000, when we switched from core to semiconductor technology circa 1972. And we thought it a great advance.
According to TFA, he did apply for a license and was refused by the DOJ. He's appealing that decision.
The fact remains that a useful product to purify water cheaply is no longer available because the government wants to control the active ingredient, and is willing to make the product unavailable as "collateral damage". I would guess some other collateral damage is the people who may end up with diseases because they drink water that isn't purified, and the percentage that die as a result.
I think YOU miss the point. HP and Dell (for example) have very large suppliers in China. Probably much bigger than Apple as they are much bigger manufacturers. Does anyone even ask HP, Dell, or any of the myriad other manufacturers who employ foreign companies to supply parts or labor about how well their suppliers comply with local laws?
Do you expect Apple to monitor all their suppliers for compliance with local laws? Isn't law enforcement a function of the local government? Do you think it's Apple's job to be enforce the local laws applicable to every supplier in every foreign country? Do you hold other manufacturers to the same standard? If not, why not?
Apple has actually spent money trying to get their Chinese suppliers to be better people. In fact, they are the only company that has produced an annual report on the subject. I really wish people would give as much attention to other manufacturers as they do to Apple. It isn't the biggest manufacturer by a long way and if anything it's better than other multinationals, not worse. What's so special about Apple's manufacturing operations?
oh, I don't know. Perhaps because each of the parties agreed to a contract with Facebook, and he's ordering them to break that contract - when Facebook isn't even a party to the case.
In this case it's no big deal at all. But a judicial order that involves deliberately breaking two contracts that were agreed with an uninvolved third party is not exactly what you'd expect to see. Maybe that's normal in divorce courts, no experience there.
So if certain countries want to have the U.S. removed from certain U.N. affliates, all they have to do is vote the Palestinians as members and the U.S. will defund their contributions. Consequently the U.S will have no vote, and no influence as it's no longer providing any funding.
Thus the U.S. has given countries who don't like the U.S. some power over the U.S. ability to influence U.N. organizations. The law of unintended consequences.
UNESCO is one of the most highly regarded and wide-spread agencies for cultural preservation in the World. There is a fundamental flaw in a law predicating U.S. contributions to the United Nations and U.N. affiliates on their members voting a certain way. UNESCO does not control its members and how they vote.
The fact that a majority of UNESCO members want to grant admission to a Palestinian state is no reason for the U.S. to "pick up its marbles and go home." UNESCO would be better with U.S. participation. The U.S. would be better off by participating in UNESCO.
This law should be repealed before the US has removed itself from every UN organization in the world.
Slashdot Mirror
You might not want to. However, some of us have a different lifestyle and may have different concerns. It would be an ideal car for people who spend most of their time in their car commuting and can charge it every night. Given the large reduction in fuel and pollution costs some might consider that worthwhile.
In my case I have 48 solar panels on top of my house and the ability to charge an electric vehicle for free. Yes, I will be getting an EV when costs of being at the bleeding edge of development are reduced.
Almost certainly the guy who posed the video is being used by someone who passed him the tape.
The real whistle blower is probably a higher level functionary who wanted the tape released to discredit a political enemy and able to protect this guy, for now. How long the poster will continue to be protected is anyone's guess.
The newly minted Standing Committee of the Politburu (the 9 folks who rule China) have made it clear that corruption is a major issue. However, previous Standing Committees have said the same and even started efforts to tackle it. These efforts haven't lasted long enough to make a small dent in the problem, never mind eradicate it.
The problem is that all levels of politicians and bureaucrats benefit greatly from corruption. Lower level bureaucrats want to become rich, higher level bureaucrats and they have no reason to rock the boat for themselves or their bureaucratic and political superiors.
I wonder how long these sorts of grass roots efforts will be tolerated. China has repeatedly shown that they can bury anything on their portion of the internet given sufficient incentive.
As a counter argument, about a year ago a bystander with a gun killed an off-duty ATF agent who was struggling with a pharmacy robbery suspect who had a gun. The bystander thought he was shooting the bad guy, but he shot and killed a 20-year Federal agent who had a wife and two kids and was at the pharmacy to pick up cancer drugs for his dad. Then a cop killed the suspect.
Intervening After Robbery, an Off-Duty A.T.F. Agent Is Killed
It's a long way from introducing a bill to getting it through Congress and signed by the President.
Anonymous claims to be a bunch people with like aims and no leadership. So this may be just some person who happened to get hold of the info and published it claiming to be Anonymous or Anti-sec or whomever. The claim that the data came from the FBI is unsupported - proof would be some additional data from the same system such as logs, etc. which have not been produced.
My personal guess is that the most likely source is some social networking site and the guy is saying it's the FBI as some sort of disinformation. It's possible but unlikely that both Apple and the FBI are outright lying about the source. There are all sorts of other possibilities.
A neighbor had a similar problem several years ago - but that was with her bank account. Someone convinced the online support person to help her and as a result she lost the contents of her checking and savings accounts. No, the bank did not refund the money.
All this shows is that if a hacker knows enough about you to convince someone else that they are you, you can lose a great deal. This guy should count himself lucky.
It's a very fine line between providing good customer support and helping them, and being hard-nosed and losing a customer. When I was pick-pocketed in Paris it was a major issue getting a new American Express card to pay my hotel bill - the AMEX agent apologized for the incredible amount the fact checking that was needed, but they did provide superb help when I did manage to pass their validation checks.
The Samsung designs cannot be introduced because Samsung produced them too late in the discovery process. The concern is that they were late because they wanted to prevent Apple from doing additional discovery around the newly revealed designs. Only Samsung knows why the designs were not revealed earlier, but they effectively managed to prevent Apple from examining the evidence around the designs. Perhaps Apple believes this is because Samsung can't produce evidence that these designs were generated when they claim they were done, but were actually produced later.
The magistrate judge in charge of discovery took notice when Apple complained. Samsung appealed several times to the trial judge but she backed up the magistrate judge.
Now the judge is concerned that Samsung are trying to influence the jury by getting their undiscovered evidence to jury members by a different route.
Why exactly should Apple be doing a security scan for non-Apple malware? If the various app stores are responsible for checking for non-executable viruses on all platforms then Google Play should be looking for malware applicable to Windows, Apple or Linux. And by this logic the Windows store (when it appears) should be checking for malware on all platforms also.
It's hard enough to stay on top of malware for your own platform, why should vendors be on top of malware aimed at other platforms? Especially as the malware files would never be executed on those platforms as they are inside non-executable containers, and the OS would have no reason to look inside those containers.
It's not likely that anything will be done to harden the US infrastructure without legislation. The necessary work requires money to be spent and neither public nor private organizations will do that unless there is some sort of legal requirement that they do so.
People who think the president was "over the top" have little imagination - I'm quite certain there are some very bright people in various countries working to create a series of Stuxnet type products to attack the infrastructure of Western nations. Be in no doubt, no nation has a monopoly on brains or computer technology. Access to details of of Western infrastructure is either openly available or have already been stolen. Figuring out the weak spots and how to attack them probably isn't that hard.
However, it's not obvious exactly how to solve the problem. It's not obvious that the current cybersecurity bill will help. The sad fact is that it's been written by lawyers and politicians who have no idea about the technological challenges and how to resolve them, so they are doing what they know - add bureaucracy. Until computer scientists and engineers are taking the lead nothing worthwhile will be done.
No, Google is being fined for taking advantage of a bug in Apple's software to make money, rather than reporting the issue to Apple so they could fix it. Heck, there's even a menu item in Safari to "Report bugs to Apple..." You seem to be blaming the victim for the poor choices of the person taking advantage of them - if someone accidentally leaves a window unlocked that doesn't translate into a right to burgle the house.
Unethical is one way to describe Google's behavior. Another way to describe it is criminal, as clearly Google was obtaining unauthorized access to a computer. You know, the sort of thing that gets people time in prison.
That's a problem with corporate law - companies have all the rights of people, but only one real responsibility - to make money. Minor fines for major infractions do not deter criminal behavior.
In-house staff provide a number of advantages:
Quicker response from people who actually work for the same orgainzation
Dedicated staff rather than whoever is free at the moment
Familiarity with how your business operates
Longer term institutional memory
Which taken together provide long term cost savings, mostly because you are investing in your own resources.
At least you are less likely to be training someone who will be working for your competitor on his next project.
Sometimes patents are not useful, but sometimes they are.
Intuitive Surgical have spent many millions developing surgical robotics and even more millions getting the products certified and convincing doctors (some of the most conservative people around) that they can be used safely. It's reasonable that they receive substantial rewards for their work for some limited time period. It's far, far less expensive to develop the second example of a brand new concept. It's reasonable to assume that absent some legal impairment Intuitive products would be quickly copied and their prices undercut.
Truly novel products are EXACTLY why patents are are still needed. This is especially true for medical devices that can directly benefit humanity. Just because we have a substantial number of unfortunate software patents doesn't mean that the concept, when properly applied, isn't valid. Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
500 million is a huge windfall for the small agency that conducted the sting. Unfortunately it gives them the resources to setup and entrap other large companies.
I think this should be "Fortunately". When I was in chemotherapy, my capecitabene tablets cost $1600 for a 2 week supply, or I could buy them from an on-line pharmacy for $650. It was tempting to save a bunch of money but I didn't because that medication was too important for me to trust an unknown supplier. One of other patients at my clinic told me that he ordered some from an online pharmacy in the US (or so he thought) and they arrived in an anonymous envelope from Guyana and with a size, shape and color different from the tablets supplied by local pharmacies. Fake? No way to tell for sure. But how many unsuspecting people are dying from pharmacies supplying fake medications? I don't know, nobody knows.
Cutting off the ways to advertise these places is a good idea. You think it's "unfortunate" that Google was caught and you decry the methods used to go after Google. I think that this is a great way for the government to help save people's lives by enforcing reasonable and necessary laws.
Right now, the ARM architecture equates to tablets and phones for many, maybe most people.
However, a number of companies (Qualcomm, NVIDIA, and others) have announced that they are developing ARM processors to challenge Intel in laptops and desktop systems. Probably they are going with ARM because Intel is being somewhat uncooperative (and maybe anticompetitive) by not letting them have licenses that would allow them to produce x86 compatible systems.
For these companies, having Windows on their ARM systems is vital. However, we shouldn't be short-sighted - restricting the ability for ARM systems to boot anything but Windows will (in the long run) benefit Intel, AMD, Via, etc. as much as it will benefit Microsoft by restricting which operating systems the upcoming ARM based systems can boot. They will either run Windows or they will run everything else, depending on the boot ROM in the system. Guess which most will chose.
Just as important, 8 of the 9 members of the PolitBuro Standing Committee (the highest and most powerful decision-making body in China) are engineers by profession. The most popular profession in the US Congress is lawyer.
I know which I would expect to get things right over the long haul.
You believe you have better algorithms than the competition. Starting a company is hard enough without giving Christmas presents to the competition. Keep everything closed while the company is young and vulnerable. Open source your code later if it won't help the competition AND you believe it will add value to your company. How far would Google have progressed if they had open sourced their search engine ten minutes after they had it working?
Frankly, if you have to ask this question you aren't really serious about succeeding.
Four thoughts:
They may well be right in thinking their data will be more accessible to the US government.
If I were an overseas competitor, I'd certainly use this as a reason to not to use a US provider. In a heartbeat.
The law of unintended consequences bites the US yet again.
This wouldn't be an issue if the US government hadn't acted the way it has over the last 10 years. The US government has so little trust overseas that people have no trouble thinking the worst of it. Karma is a bitch.
I remember when a megabyte of RAM dropped to under $1,000,000, when we switched from core to semiconductor technology circa 1972. And we thought it a great advance.
Now get off my lawn, noob.
Yes.
According to TFA, he did apply for a license and was refused by the DOJ. He's appealing that decision.
The fact remains that a useful product to purify water cheaply is no longer available because the government wants to control the active ingredient, and is willing to make the product unavailable as "collateral damage". I would guess some other collateral damage is the people who may end up with diseases because they drink water that isn't purified, and the percentage that die as a result.
I think YOU miss the point. HP and Dell (for example) have very large suppliers in China. Probably much bigger than Apple as they are much bigger manufacturers. Does anyone even ask HP, Dell, or any of the myriad other manufacturers who employ foreign companies to supply parts or labor about how well their suppliers comply with local laws?
Do you expect Apple to monitor all their suppliers for compliance with local laws? Isn't law enforcement a function of the local government? Do you think it's Apple's job to be enforce the local laws applicable to every supplier in every foreign country? Do you hold other manufacturers to the same standard? If not, why not?
Apple has actually spent money trying to get their Chinese suppliers to be better people. In fact, they are the only company that has produced an annual report on the subject. I really wish people would give as much attention to other manufacturers as they do to Apple. It isn't the biggest manufacturer by a long way and if anything it's better than other multinationals, not worse. What's so special about Apple's manufacturing operations?
oh, I don't know. Perhaps because each of the parties agreed to a contract with Facebook, and he's ordering them to break that contract - when Facebook isn't even a party to the case.
In this case it's no big deal at all. But a judicial order that involves deliberately breaking two contracts that were agreed with an uninvolved third party is not exactly what you'd expect to see. Maybe that's normal in divorce courts, no experience there.
So if certain countries want to have the U.S. removed from certain U.N. affliates, all they have to do is vote the Palestinians as members and the U.S. will defund their contributions. Consequently the U.S will have no vote, and no influence as it's no longer providing any funding.
Thus the U.S. has given countries who don't like the U.S. some power over the U.S. ability to influence U.N. organizations. The law of unintended consequences.
UNESCO is one of the most highly regarded and wide-spread agencies for cultural preservation in the World. There is a fundamental flaw in a law predicating U.S. contributions to the United Nations and U.N. affiliates on their members voting a certain way. UNESCO does not control its members and how they vote.
The fact that a majority of UNESCO members want to grant admission to a Palestinian state is no reason for the U.S. to "pick up its marbles and go home." UNESCO would be better with U.S. participation. The U.S. would be better off by participating in UNESCO.
This law should be repealed before the US has removed itself from every UN organization in the world.