When working at various companies, I always monitored the stock price. Invariably, the few days prior to major announcement the stock volumes would go crazy.
Invariably someone will slip up and do something to give the game away and such traffic analysis will give the game away. All that is required is that someone look.
This is especially true for government conspiracy. For the most part, too many people have to be involved, and too many people are looking.
Apps is the key word. The big security issue is that IE is not a web browser so much as a generic application front end. It was and is a tool to allow application designers a method by which they can work around the MS Windows version incompatibilities, as well as design for a wide variety of hardware. As a innocent side effect, large portions of the internet at one time required windows. On an intranet this is a good thing. On the internet this is not such a good thing as one cannot trust the arbitrary web site you go to for news and such. Neither should destinations on the internet be as concerned with exact page layout as the intranet, which a much more controlled group of machines.
So here Microsoft is doing not such a terrible thing. It will still lead designers to write code that should not be deployed on the internet, but that is not a MS issue. That is a corporate discipline issue. The corporate is going to have to have separate specs for internet and intranet code. This is nothing new on the usability front. One of the biggest issues, to me, is that corporate do not have such separate specs, and therefore do such silly things as for customers to learn an arcane corporate structure that changes randomly.
This is likely not be a casual things. It looks like the tool costs $200, and then at least $100 to read the stick. And while text data is going be easily acquired, the thing only has a gig of RAM. Enough to acquire all the data of a regular phone, but it is likely to choke on a smart phone with 4-32 GB or memory.
Then of course it is only going to download at the speed of the phone, so it is in no way instantaneous. There is a warning on the product that says downloading an entire phone could take hours. It is clearly designed to steal text data. Again, at only 1 GB it will choke on any multimedia files in a smart phone.
The company also appears to have tool to take data from Garmin devices, so maybe that is upcoming too.
In the end I am not sure that this adds to the danger, beyond the script kiddie factor. There are clearly ways to unlock phones without knowing the code. It seems to me that you could spend $300 on a portable computer, get a dock cable, and just sync with whatever phone you like. This would certainly not take 'hours', and one could acquire more than 1 GB. This to me a much more credible threat profile. The key is smaller, but in most cases, for instance valet parking, the size is not necessarily a detriment.
More importantly, they both come from states that depend on a corrupt government. The bridge to nowhere. Water rights for building luxury homes with pools and palm trees in an area where no sane person would build. The population knows that they require a corrupt politician. Alaska just renominated their indicted politician. Likewise, McCain had no problem convincing people he was reformed after the Keating five, and continues to do so even after improperly using his wife's corporate jets.
It looks like it will be more of the same in the entitlement economy. We don't earn money, we marry into it or take it from the peasants. Anything to avoid an honest days work.
I am trying to think back and cannot remember if the ownership disclaimer was always present? I almost want to say it was added after some discussion on the ownership of the content, which was brought to head by the publication of a certain book by a certain/. highly controversial person. Or perhaps it was in response to the DMCA,
I often thought the ownership of comments was a bit vague, and often wonder why it did not include 'transfer of all publication rights into perpetuity" or the like. Perhaps that would open other legal issues.
In any case, I believe that it has always been clear that accounts cannot be deleted, and comments are never deleted, only moderated. We all have posted stuff that we felt were silly the next day, but we don't all whine to our parents. Of course, that is what scared kids do, and it does no good to make fun of them.
OTOH, this is a cautionary tale that may be benefit to the kiddies using the internet. Perhaps that sex tape you posted as a joke when you were a senior in high school, and has been mirrored on 20 sites, and can't be gotten rid of, might be an issue when you try to apply for a job.
Apple, Inc is a mature company with products that generate constant profits. Google is new company that has benefited from the fact that few people have more money than they know what to do with, and just need to invest it anything that looks halfway honest, and needs breeds of financial instruments that help hide whether a company is profitable of not. That last statement may sound a bit harsh, but banks, expert in fraudulent financial instruments, were able to create the illusion of profit in what we now know was in fact was not the case.
We don't know if Google will work in the long run. And in the long run I am thinking AOL. Google's success depends on the advertising market tolerating secretive and random marketize techniques which appear to be abuse of the near monopoly that Google now has in advertising. The success is also dependent on the ability of cheap commodity severs to provide six nines service, externalizing the majority of the cost of content creation to third parties, and externalizing the majority of infrastructure costs to the taxpayer. I am not saying that at some point their house of cards will fall al a AOL, but I am not quite sure how they are going to make money off cloud computing, other than selling personal information collecting from the love letters of their users to third parties.
All Apple has to do is come up with the next cool thing that people will pay for. This is not a simple thing, but something that Apple has been doing with some success for quite a while. We now see a diversification outside of computers, so, when the Mac OS does become something that is not limited to any machine, and when, by the same rules, MS is not able to limit OEM versions to run only on the machine it was originally shipped with, Apple will be able to enter this brave new work of zero profit computer equipment with new consumer appliances.
This example would tend to support the claim that apple did nothing wrong. Clearly 'all the internet' is hyperbolic, but so is 'all terrain vehicle'. If we take ATV literally, then one would assume that a driver could chose any land area on earth and use the vehicle to navigate it. This clearly not true. There is much land in New Mexico, for instance, that would not be navigable by an ATV.
The term ATV is not interpreted in that way. It is interpreted in the exact way the parent suggested. While a normal car typically is intended only for specially prepared surfaces, an ATV can be used in many instances where the surface is not specially prepared. A rational person would not think one could drive an ATV down the an arbitrary wall of the grand canyon. Using the same logic, many phones require special prepared content. Many phones cannot access standard HTML, or use standard STMP or POP. These phones cannot access the internet, but only the subset that has been rewritten for certain mobile devices. The iPhone, like the ATV, does not require such specially prepared roads for the information highway. It would be quite reasonable to say that in the same way an ATV is 'all terrain', the iPhone is 'all internet'.
The analogy even works better if you see that the typical ATV is not street legal, and can mostly be ridden in undeveloped areas, much like the iPhone cannot be used on overly developed website that typically depend on Flash and Java. An ATV can be used in most reasonable places, except for developed roads, and the iPhone can be used everywhere, except for Flash and Java.
Within context, all the internet is a valid claim. If we worry that it cannot access every part due to lack of ability to read every page, then we should expect the UK to force Apple to put a disclaimer on all Macintoshes that while the computers does have internet access, the machines cannot access the significant part of the web that is still written for IE.
At the end of the day, I suspect this is a fear of the iPhone. These ad executives are scared to death because as more people surf with iPhones, they are losing money on their flash ads and java based phishing sites.
Exactly what I was thinking. MS gets lots of blame for security, but it is not all their fault. For instance, my bank pops up ads and uses interstitials, thus promoting low security behavior. A significant part of the blame is a result of the needs of the ad based internet economy.
This economy is OK as long as 80% of the users are still on stock IE. They have to look at the ads, allow the tracking cookies, which supports the rest of us. But what happens to the value of the little google flash app when 80% of the users block it? Likely what happened when 20% of us started blocking ads. The ads will become more intrusive, and more of a security risk. Which continues the death spiral.
This could be construed as a simple attack against google, which we would expect from MS, and in part it probably is. But part of it is a legitimate attempt to deflect some critism.
With respect to Virginia, it might have more to do with who lives there rather than how densely they live. One might think that there is quite a bit bandwidth going into AOL and that makes it easy to offer elsewhere. There is also a question of the kind of bandwidth Arlington has as compared to the rest of the state.
Using either criteria, it is a mystery why Delaware is not on the list.
the freedom to develop and release software and hardware under the license that suits you.
You have the freedom to develop software under whatever license you wish. If you want to develop software under absolute freedom, go and develop software and put it in the public domain. Now, of course, you can't just take someone elses work, claim it as yours, and then release it. What you could do it go out, earn lots of money, buy code, and then release in the public domain so that other could do whatever they wish. You would be the hero to the entire world. Statues would be built in your honor.
Of course what would happen then is someone would take the public domain code, change it, copyright it, and then sue anyone tried to use the original product. Embrace and extend was not invented by MS, you know. Disney was embracing, extending, and copyrighting and suing anyone who drew a mouse on a sheet of paper long before there were microcomputers for MS to monopolize. In fact the story goes that RMS went to the formal GNU approach because the informal approach EMACS to be closed.
But don't let that stop you from putting all your work in the public domain. That way everyone will have the freedom to use the way they want, and develop your code and release it under any license they wish. That is, after all, the only fair thing to do.
There are three different issues here. One issue is the use, the other issue is the manufacture, and the third is disposal. There are all sorts of thing that do pose a risk during use, but do during manufacture and disposal. For instance asbestos, quartz, and gasoline.
The manufacture of GaAs is scary, and therefore the safety precautions are all about avoid immediate death, not cancer. And since there should be no contact between the GaAs product and any worker until after the product is packaged and sealed, I am not sure what the manufacture issue would, other than a mistake could kill everyone at the plant. Use should not be a problem. Which leads to disposal, and decay, and leeching of of the Arsenic. It could be that a solar panel has enough Arsenic to be above the legal ppm limit, and therefore does pose a risk as defined by that limit when it is disposed.
In all honesty I think America is getting a little tired of the corporation externalizing the costs of these risks to the taxpayer. There was a time when such externalization was ok because wages were high, taxes were low, and the deficit was nothing to worry about. Now I think the old people, who vote, are asking why they have to give up social security just so someone can continue to pull in multimillions of dollars a week.
To be sure the past 50 years has taught us that there is not free lunch, and all technology has risk. But we are still not taking the risk assessment seriously. For instance, nanotech, which exists because compounds behave differently at that small a scale than they do at the conventional macro scale, has been shown to migrate through the skin into the body. We don't really know what it does inside the body, maybe nothing. I mean, for instance, we have carbon all over our body, don't we? It probably is ok, but there is risk. Just like everything else. And are all the manufacturers who is putting this stuff in products considering that risk, or just assuming the taxpayers will bail them out.
Bradbury is one of the influential authors from the golden age of science fiction. This was a cool time when people were buying books and magazines and a writer could make a good living writing. Lok at the intro to Fahrenheit 451. He needed to sell a story, so he went to the library, put coins in a typewriter, and wrote. It was amazing.
What makes these guys cool is that they could have probably just gotten away with writing crap, like so many authors do today, or they could have tried to prove they were smarter than everyone else by writing 'literature'. But they didn't. They wrote stuff that socially relevant and accessible to the people. As a result we have a good history or the social views of technology and cultural issues of the time. As they die we are losing first hand history from people who made living by objectively observing it and then writing it down in entertaining form.
So all these kids that think this is not relevant, well that because we know watch tv instead of read. No one becomes a scientist because of pulp fiction. Now everyone watches TV. Which is no so good because the bandwidth of TV is nowhere near as wide as the bandwidth of pulp fiction, so the vision and opinions tend to be limited and sanitized to what will attract sufficient viewers to pay the 200K it would take to develop a script, instead of the 20K it would take to buy a story. Of course, everyone now wants to be a millionaire overnight, so likely would think it was too much to develop a story and only get 20K.
The legacy of books that these guys left us is awesome. It is techy writing, unabashedly, unapologetically, and willingly. I will take this time to thank bradbury for the writing, be it science fiction, fantasy, or just fiction.
Most people have high negatives, It ultimately depends what people want to believe. No one wanted to believe that W Buh is a drug addict and his compulsive drunk driving illustrated extremely uncompansionatae and irresponsible behavior, that is until he started taking vacations every other week. Hmm, reminds me of a guy I once worked with that absolutely had to have an hour and half for lunch, to toke up.
OTOH, many were perfectly willing to believe that McCain had an illigimate child by a black women(note the race card was played by Bush), that McCain was gay and had a secret lover, and the Cindy was a drug addict(what a clever play, redirect the truth by pointing it to another).
The conservative attack dogs will be out in force to make all the inadequate feel insecure. You know that job you are not qualified for but got because you are white? It will now go to a qualified non-white person. Oops, you should have graduated from high school! You know all the sweetheart contracts you get because all your white friends are connected? Now everyone is connected, so you might lose some of them. What a travesty those minorities getting in our on our graft that we worked so hard and bribed so many people to get!
This will be a cleaner race as niether candidates has done anything that bad, and about all we can expect is the republicans to make up things to scare people, just as they have done with Bush. On the democratic side, I am not sure what traction they can get with things like McCain abandoning his first wife, I mean wife abandonment did not hurt gingrinch with social conservatives. I doubt anyone understands that use of his wife's jet during the primaries were probably illegal, and no conservative wants to believe this or anything else.
So, in faith based politics it is what one wants to believe, not the truth, revealed or otherwise. Obama could not select Hillary because the conservative wackos are already scared to death of a black man, even a half black man, and if a women were introduced they would likely go postal. So, we to their inadequacies by introducing a white man of vice president. That way, if worse comes worse, perhaps an organization like the Army of God will take out the black man, and we will have a white man in the throne one again.
Most people screwed up when the masses began to get computers and go online. Established firms got distracted and tried things that were too aggressive. New firms took the so-called long tail too literally and overextended themselves. Newspapers are not going bankrupt. They just have to refocus. Phone companies are not going bankrupt, they are just consolidated to meet the new demand. Most of the early dot com firms are gone, and that is mostly due to bad business based on sugar plum business plans.
I was still using a terminal based computing until the 90's. Perhaps my terminal was a microcomputer running kermit, but it was terminal dialed into a mainframe. It may seem strange to those who were not present that someone would develop a dedicated terminal based application instead of writing an app for a GPC. An IBM XT for $8,000? And then spend another $500 for the terminal program? Hardware was not cheap in 1985. The $4000 for a Macintosh and $3000 for a Compaq were considered quite reasonable.
What I find truly annoying of a technology site is that people make fun of those innovators that tried to do something interesting, even if it the wrong thing. It sometimes seems that we are so obsessed with people copy existing ideas in an effort to make them cheaper, which is certainly important, that we forget that all our cool stuff would not available with the risk taking inventors and early adopters that we all laugh at.
Any commercial entity has to understand what it can and cannot do with it's licensed assets. IMHO, the issue with software that given for no or little cost, but with other limitations attached, is that there is no salesperson who job is to spell those limitations out in detail. This means that you have to either understand the strings yourself or pay someone to explain it to you. This is a necessary expense as violating the GLP license is as much theft as having an unlicensed copy of MS Windows 95 or your corporate network. I think that most would agree that folding a unlicensed product into a commercial product is not defensible. In many cases, commercial interests now have the option of gain that license through cash or through a number of innovative non-cash options. It is certainly not free, but even holding up a convenience store has costs.
It depends what you call the sub-mini notebook. My first two mini notebooks were the Tandy 100 and 200. Could do most of what a the microcomputer could do, but at a fraction of the cost. Ten year later there was the Apple eMate. None of these ran the same OS as the bigger machines, but we were not compulsive about every machine we owned running the same OS. That did not happen until MS convinced the masses that this was necessary.
So, the one laptop per child may usher some interesting innovations, but it is increasingly looking like it will just push the price of a laptop down even further, and since MS is the only OS provider that can provide software at negative net cost, at least for a while, this means that MS will gain even more traction into the market. I wish OLPC would have worked, but everyone seemed to be using it solely to renegotiate terms with MS.
Once again, what happened to the fiscal conservative arm of the republican party. Have they been totally consumed by the socially conservatives types who want the government to pay for all their pet faith based projects, like eliminating muslims, no matter what the cost.
It is insane to think that any lackey who hates his neighbor or gets cut off in traffic can open a case file and waste tax money and other opportunities cost. Those Army of God fanatics who are going to kill doctors, don't worry about them, we don't have the resources, all the agents are busy harassing this guy who whistled at my girlfriend.
I think that too many people just see this as a privacy issue. It is a chain of command issue, where we the people of the United states, grant certain powers to our federal government, and through the first amendment make sure that there is due process before the government can restrict our actions. This was an explicit effort to prevent King George from stealing all our money by spending it willy nilly on his prince. Unfortunately the new King George does not respect those restrictions, and like the Prince, feels that the purpose of the peasants to fund his and his friends extravagant lifestyle.
Seems like test like this were run last year as well. Product was mislabeled and sold as a product that was percieved to be more desirable. The funny thing is that, as shown here, most people cannot tell the difference, which begs the question of whether it matters that a product was substituted. Sure, from a legal and honesty perspective yes. But if a restaurant that was serving tilapia, and pricing it as such, would the diner have enjoyed it as much? In addition, I seem to recall restaurants are subbing food because the real product is either not available or prohibitively expensive, so the diner would be denied the experience of dining just because ingredients are not available.
Again, if the restaurants substituted food, they are being dishonest and should face whatever legal consequences occur. OTOH, sometimes we humans are willfully gullible just so we can enjoy the experience of eating without having to pay for it. We drink fruit drinks with almost no fruit, eat beef burritos with almost no beef, and heart healthy omelets with almost no eggs. Life, in many cases, is a fiction, and the only issue are those that believe it. Although the tech is cool, we are not going to reduce our meals to a science experiment.
further comments suggest that it might be used against systems with weaker protection, such as HDTV, bluetooth, mobile telephone networks. So no, the secure stuff is still secure. In any case, the secure stuff is seldom broken by breaking the encryption. The secure stuff is broken by social and other backdoor attacks.
Not exactly so. Accuracy means that we have measured something close to a true value. In terms of science, this means the time needed for a cesium-133 atom to perform 9,192,631,770 complete oscillations. It is true that in terms of winning a single race accuracy is not important. A photo will do.
In quantifying a races around the same time, however, something else, namely precision becomes an issue. The racers can be measures in whatever time units, say jankles, but to compare time between races, there must be some confidence that the clocks will keep precise jankles, up to the limits that we wish to time the race. For instance, one runner might have a 1.173 jankle time, and the other might have a 1.172 jankle time. We have to know that the precision of the instrument is greater than 0.01 jankle, otherwise the times are equivalent. Again, not so important if the only issue is who one the race, but important if one is quantifying 'the win'.
Accuracy enters when making the statement 'Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world.' There are two defensible interpretation of this somewhat dubious statement. One is that the olympics attract the best athletes, Bolt beat all the other athletes in a fair race, therefore with the domain of olympics runners, he is the fastest man in the world. This, as the parent mentions, requires nothing more than a photo at the finish.
However, there is another intepretation that says of all the runners we have time, Bolt is the fastest. This requires an accurate clock that measures the same time interval, which we label a s second, as all the other clocks we have used in the past to measure the race times. Not only that but the clock is precise enough to make the 9.72 second finish significant from the previous 9.74 second record. This idea of accuracy and precision might be what is called constancy. This requires a high level of technology and control.
I have written code in low level languages, and written code in high level languages, and find the issue is skill and discipline. To be specific, when on does not know who to use a hammer, then everything does look like a thumb. OTOH, when one codes in Java, everything looks like a condominium. When one codes in C# everything looks like an office park. One advantage of C++ is that it allows some enforcement of rules, but allows the skilled coder to relax those rules when some justified. Again, it requires someone with skill to know the difference.
An interesting thing is I have written some highly structured code in some rather low level languages. To do so required a skilled architect and an agreement between developers that we were going to honor the rules, even if the complier did not punish us. It can be an expensive way to develop, as competent computer people costs money, which is why it is often more economical to allow the complier to do the thinking.
I am no fan of the 'long tail', but for music that is not pop or otherwise mass market, the CDs days are numbers. Except for concerts, the availability of indie music is limited. I increasing go to iTunes to download albums that are not otherwise available. I have even been at concerts where the artist directed me to iTunes, presumable because the cost of pressing and transporting every CD is impractical.
Furthermore i have notice that pop CDS are often cheaper than download, if not at retail then certainly in the used market. It is senseless to buy Rihanna when I could go down to the record store and buy it for a dollar less on the resell rack, or $10 new, delivered.
What concerns me about these endless suits is the amount of money they represent. Surely not all of the costs are paid for by the participants. Surely there would significant cost savings to the taxpayer if these frivolous suits, which are primarily issued by corporate entities looking to minimize competitions, were severely punished. I can't imagine what a judge would do if I went to a judge and sued, for instance, Exxon Mobil because a IP linked to their firm showed up on my log during an attack. i would hope the judge would dismiss and force me to pay additional fines.
It is certainly the government;s responsibility to help maintain the laws, but what has happened to the normal fiscal responsibility we apply to these things. We don't stop everyone who is speeding. We don't staff police departments so that every person who steals a CD from a car is prosecuted. Yet our court system is being overwhelmed by companies who stand to lose a $20 cd sale due to copyright infringement.
This situation is getting worse. The FBI wants to open a case with no probable cause. Each case represents a finite amount of expenditure of taxpayer money. In times past, we had some assurance that money spent was used to investigate a legitimate crime with legitimate suspects. Now we could have massive amount of waste due to an agent not liking his new neighbor.
Honestly, when Apple put out Safari without a built in flash blocker, it spelt the beginning of the end. Apple now, like MS, treats users as a means to generate a long term profit stream, not like a customer who paid a huge amount of money for a machine and expects to be treated as a customer.
Fortunately there is camino. Unfortunately most people don't use it. Flash is really enemy #1 in terms of security, and it would be nice if Adobe would build in a mandatory stop/start button into the specification. Fortunately, there is still no flash on the iPhone, and if we are lucky there never will be.
By this argument, windows users are not a target audience. Windows users use windows because everyone pirates it. Just look at the effort MS goes through, to the point of alienating customers, to make people buy MS Windows. I don't know anyone who pays for MS Windows software voluntarily. Everyone either pirates it of gets it as part of enterprise licensing. The only difference with *nix is the theft is legal.
There was a joke ten years back that the only people who bought software were Apple users. In fact, these users were the who generated the real profit for MS Office, and that is why MS rewarded then with software that actually worked. Of course this lasted until it became clear that MS Office on mac gave users a reason not to use MS Windows, and even though the profit on MS Office was nice, the monopoly of MS Windows kind of dwarfed it.
In any case, in the real world, advertisers and content developers who make long term profit do not count on the long term continuing trend of third parties. *nix users are going to become a demographic, and they will generate a profit for those who are creative enough to exploit them. Either flash will be part of that or it won't. It is kind of like MS not being part of the google experience, or, for the longest time, not part of any backbone of the internet. Ignore emerging markets at your own risk.
Slashdot Mirror
Invariably someone will slip up and do something to give the game away and such traffic analysis will give the game away. All that is required is that someone look.
This is especially true for government conspiracy. For the most part, too many people have to be involved, and too many people are looking.
So here Microsoft is doing not such a terrible thing. It will still lead designers to write code that should not be deployed on the internet, but that is not a MS issue. That is a corporate discipline issue. The corporate is going to have to have separate specs for internet and intranet code. This is nothing new on the usability front. One of the biggest issues, to me, is that corporate do not have such separate specs, and therefore do such silly things as for customers to learn an arcane corporate structure that changes randomly.
Then of course it is only going to download at the speed of the phone, so it is in no way instantaneous. There is a warning on the product that says downloading an entire phone could take hours. It is clearly designed to steal text data. Again, at only 1 GB it will choke on any multimedia files in a smart phone.
The company also appears to have tool to take data from Garmin devices, so maybe that is upcoming too.
In the end I am not sure that this adds to the danger, beyond the script kiddie factor. There are clearly ways to unlock phones without knowing the code. It seems to me that you could spend $300 on a portable computer, get a dock cable, and just sync with whatever phone you like. This would certainly not take 'hours', and one could acquire more than 1 GB. This to me a much more credible threat profile. The key is smaller, but in most cases, for instance valet parking, the size is not necessarily a detriment.
It looks like it will be more of the same in the entitlement economy. We don't earn money, we marry into it or take it from the peasants. Anything to avoid an honest days work.
I often thought the ownership of comments was a bit vague, and often wonder why it did not include 'transfer of all publication rights into perpetuity" or the like. Perhaps that would open other legal issues.
In any case, I believe that it has always been clear that accounts cannot be deleted, and comments are never deleted, only moderated. We all have posted stuff that we felt were silly the next day, but we don't all whine to our parents. Of course, that is what scared kids do, and it does no good to make fun of them.
OTOH, this is a cautionary tale that may be benefit to the kiddies using the internet. Perhaps that sex tape you posted as a joke when you were a senior in high school, and has been mirrored on 20 sites, and can't be gotten rid of, might be an issue when you try to apply for a job.
We don't know if Google will work in the long run. And in the long run I am thinking AOL. Google's success depends on the advertising market tolerating secretive and random marketize techniques which appear to be abuse of the near monopoly that Google now has in advertising. The success is also dependent on the ability of cheap commodity severs to provide six nines service, externalizing the majority of the cost of content creation to third parties, and externalizing the majority of infrastructure costs to the taxpayer. I am not saying that at some point their house of cards will fall al a AOL, but I am not quite sure how they are going to make money off cloud computing, other than selling personal information collecting from the love letters of their users to third parties.
All Apple has to do is come up with the next cool thing that people will pay for. This is not a simple thing, but something that Apple has been doing with some success for quite a while. We now see a diversification outside of computers, so, when the Mac OS does become something that is not limited to any machine, and when, by the same rules, MS is not able to limit OEM versions to run only on the machine it was originally shipped with, Apple will be able to enter this brave new work of zero profit computer equipment with new consumer appliances.
The term ATV is not interpreted in that way. It is interpreted in the exact way the parent suggested. While a normal car typically is intended only for specially prepared surfaces, an ATV can be used in many instances where the surface is not specially prepared. A rational person would not think one could drive an ATV down the an arbitrary wall of the grand canyon. Using the same logic, many phones require special prepared content. Many phones cannot access standard HTML, or use standard STMP or POP. These phones cannot access the internet, but only the subset that has been rewritten for certain mobile devices. The iPhone, like the ATV, does not require such specially prepared roads for the information highway. It would be quite reasonable to say that in the same way an ATV is 'all terrain', the iPhone is 'all internet'.
The analogy even works better if you see that the typical ATV is not street legal, and can mostly be ridden in undeveloped areas, much like the iPhone cannot be used on overly developed website that typically depend on Flash and Java. An ATV can be used in most reasonable places, except for developed roads, and the iPhone can be used everywhere, except for Flash and Java.
Within context, all the internet is a valid claim. If we worry that it cannot access every part due to lack of ability to read every page, then we should expect the UK to force Apple to put a disclaimer on all Macintoshes that while the computers does have internet access, the machines cannot access the significant part of the web that is still written for IE.
At the end of the day, I suspect this is a fear of the iPhone. These ad executives are scared to death because as more people surf with iPhones, they are losing money on their flash ads and java based phishing sites.
This economy is OK as long as 80% of the users are still on stock IE. They have to look at the ads, allow the tracking cookies, which supports the rest of us. But what happens to the value of the little google flash app when 80% of the users block it? Likely what happened when 20% of us started blocking ads. The ads will become more intrusive, and more of a security risk. Which continues the death spiral.
This could be construed as a simple attack against google, which we would expect from MS, and in part it probably is. But part of it is a legitimate attempt to deflect some critism.
Using either criteria, it is a mystery why Delaware is not on the list.
You have the freedom to develop software under whatever license you wish. If you want to develop software under absolute freedom, go and develop software and put it in the public domain. Now, of course, you can't just take someone elses work, claim it as yours, and then release it. What you could do it go out, earn lots of money, buy code, and then release in the public domain so that other could do whatever they wish. You would be the hero to the entire world. Statues would be built in your honor.
Of course what would happen then is someone would take the public domain code, change it, copyright it, and then sue anyone tried to use the original product. Embrace and extend was not invented by MS, you know. Disney was embracing, extending, and copyrighting and suing anyone who drew a mouse on a sheet of paper long before there were microcomputers for MS to monopolize. In fact the story goes that RMS went to the formal GNU approach because the informal approach EMACS to be closed.
But don't let that stop you from putting all your work in the public domain. That way everyone will have the freedom to use the way they want, and develop your code and release it under any license they wish. That is, after all, the only fair thing to do.
The manufacture of GaAs is scary, and therefore the safety precautions are all about avoid immediate death, not cancer. And since there should be no contact between the GaAs product and any worker until after the product is packaged and sealed, I am not sure what the manufacture issue would, other than a mistake could kill everyone at the plant. Use should not be a problem. Which leads to disposal, and decay, and leeching of of the Arsenic. It could be that a solar panel has enough Arsenic to be above the legal ppm limit, and therefore does pose a risk as defined by that limit when it is disposed.
In all honesty I think America is getting a little tired of the corporation externalizing the costs of these risks to the taxpayer. There was a time when such externalization was ok because wages were high, taxes were low, and the deficit was nothing to worry about. Now I think the old people, who vote, are asking why they have to give up social security just so someone can continue to pull in multimillions of dollars a week.
To be sure the past 50 years has taught us that there is not free lunch, and all technology has risk. But we are still not taking the risk assessment seriously. For instance, nanotech, which exists because compounds behave differently at that small a scale than they do at the conventional macro scale, has been shown to migrate through the skin into the body. We don't really know what it does inside the body, maybe nothing. I mean, for instance, we have carbon all over our body, don't we? It probably is ok, but there is risk. Just like everything else. And are all the manufacturers who is putting this stuff in products considering that risk, or just assuming the taxpayers will bail them out.
What makes these guys cool is that they could have probably just gotten away with writing crap, like so many authors do today, or they could have tried to prove they were smarter than everyone else by writing 'literature'. But they didn't. They wrote stuff that socially relevant and accessible to the people. As a result we have a good history or the social views of technology and cultural issues of the time. As they die we are losing first hand history from people who made living by objectively observing it and then writing it down in entertaining form.
So all these kids that think this is not relevant, well that because we know watch tv instead of read. No one becomes a scientist because of pulp fiction. Now everyone watches TV. Which is no so good because the bandwidth of TV is nowhere near as wide as the bandwidth of pulp fiction, so the vision and opinions tend to be limited and sanitized to what will attract sufficient viewers to pay the 200K it would take to develop a script, instead of the 20K it would take to buy a story. Of course, everyone now wants to be a millionaire overnight, so likely would think it was too much to develop a story and only get 20K.
The legacy of books that these guys left us is awesome. It is techy writing, unabashedly, unapologetically, and willingly. I will take this time to thank bradbury for the writing, be it science fiction, fantasy, or just fiction.
OTOH, many were perfectly willing to believe that McCain had an illigimate child by a black women(note the race card was played by Bush), that McCain was gay and had a secret lover, and the Cindy was a drug addict(what a clever play, redirect the truth by pointing it to another).
The conservative attack dogs will be out in force to make all the inadequate feel insecure. You know that job you are not qualified for but got because you are white? It will now go to a qualified non-white person. Oops, you should have graduated from high school! You know all the sweetheart contracts you get because all your white friends are connected? Now everyone is connected, so you might lose some of them. What a travesty those minorities getting in our on our graft that we worked so hard and bribed so many people to get!
This will be a cleaner race as niether candidates has done anything that bad, and about all we can expect is the republicans to make up things to scare people, just as they have done with Bush. On the democratic side, I am not sure what traction they can get with things like McCain abandoning his first wife, I mean wife abandonment did not hurt gingrinch with social conservatives. I doubt anyone understands that use of his wife's jet during the primaries were probably illegal, and no conservative wants to believe this or anything else.
So, in faith based politics it is what one wants to believe, not the truth, revealed or otherwise. Obama could not select Hillary because the conservative wackos are already scared to death of a black man, even a half black man, and if a women were introduced they would likely go postal. So, we to their inadequacies by introducing a white man of vice president. That way, if worse comes worse, perhaps an organization like the Army of God will take out the black man, and we will have a white man in the throne one again.
I was still using a terminal based computing until the 90's. Perhaps my terminal was a microcomputer running kermit, but it was terminal dialed into a mainframe. It may seem strange to those who were not present that someone would develop a dedicated terminal based application instead of writing an app for a GPC. An IBM XT for $8,000? And then spend another $500 for the terminal program? Hardware was not cheap in 1985. The $4000 for a Macintosh and $3000 for a Compaq were considered quite reasonable.
What I find truly annoying of a technology site is that people make fun of those innovators that tried to do something interesting, even if it the wrong thing. It sometimes seems that we are so obsessed with people copy existing ideas in an effort to make them cheaper, which is certainly important, that we forget that all our cool stuff would not available with the risk taking inventors and early adopters that we all laugh at.
Any commercial entity has to understand what it can and cannot do with it's licensed assets. IMHO, the issue with software that given for no or little cost, but with other limitations attached, is that there is no salesperson who job is to spell those limitations out in detail. This means that you have to either understand the strings yourself or pay someone to explain it to you. This is a necessary expense as violating the GLP license is as much theft as having an unlicensed copy of MS Windows 95 or your corporate network. I think that most would agree that folding a unlicensed product into a commercial product is not defensible. In many cases, commercial interests now have the option of gain that license through cash or through a number of innovative non-cash options. It is certainly not free, but even holding up a convenience store has costs.
So, the one laptop per child may usher some interesting innovations, but it is increasingly looking like it will just push the price of a laptop down even further, and since MS is the only OS provider that can provide software at negative net cost, at least for a while, this means that MS will gain even more traction into the market. I wish OLPC would have worked, but everyone seemed to be using it solely to renegotiate terms with MS.
It is insane to think that any lackey who hates his neighbor or gets cut off in traffic can open a case file and waste tax money and other opportunities cost. Those Army of God fanatics who are going to kill doctors, don't worry about them, we don't have the resources, all the agents are busy harassing this guy who whistled at my girlfriend.
I think that too many people just see this as a privacy issue. It is a chain of command issue, where we the people of the United states, grant certain powers to our federal government, and through the first amendment make sure that there is due process before the government can restrict our actions. This was an explicit effort to prevent King George from stealing all our money by spending it willy nilly on his prince. Unfortunately the new King George does not respect those restrictions, and like the Prince, feels that the purpose of the peasants to fund his and his friends extravagant lifestyle.
Again, if the restaurants substituted food, they are being dishonest and should face whatever legal consequences occur. OTOH, sometimes we humans are willfully gullible just so we can enjoy the experience of eating without having to pay for it. We drink fruit drinks with almost no fruit, eat beef burritos with almost no beef, and heart healthy omelets with almost no eggs. Life, in many cases, is a fiction, and the only issue are those that believe it. Although the tech is cool, we are not going to reduce our meals to a science experiment.
further comments suggest that it might be used against systems with weaker protection, such as HDTV, bluetooth, mobile telephone networks. So no, the secure stuff is still secure. In any case, the secure stuff is seldom broken by breaking the encryption. The secure stuff is broken by social and other backdoor attacks.
In quantifying a races around the same time, however, something else, namely precision becomes an issue. The racers can be measures in whatever time units, say jankles, but to compare time between races, there must be some confidence that the clocks will keep precise jankles, up to the limits that we wish to time the race. For instance, one runner might have a 1.173 jankle time, and the other might have a 1.172 jankle time. We have to know that the precision of the instrument is greater than 0.01 jankle, otherwise the times are equivalent. Again, not so important if the only issue is who one the race, but important if one is quantifying 'the win'.
Accuracy enters when making the statement 'Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world.' There are two defensible interpretation of this somewhat dubious statement. One is that the olympics attract the best athletes, Bolt beat all the other athletes in a fair race, therefore with the domain of olympics runners, he is the fastest man in the world. This, as the parent mentions, requires nothing more than a photo at the finish.
However, there is another intepretation that says of all the runners we have time, Bolt is the fastest. This requires an accurate clock that measures the same time interval, which we label a s second, as all the other clocks we have used in the past to measure the race times. Not only that but the clock is precise enough to make the 9.72 second finish significant from the previous 9.74 second record. This idea of accuracy and precision might be what is called constancy. This requires a high level of technology and control.
An interesting thing is I have written some highly structured code in some rather low level languages. To do so required a skilled architect and an agreement between developers that we were going to honor the rules, even if the complier did not punish us. It can be an expensive way to develop, as competent computer people costs money, which is why it is often more economical to allow the complier to do the thinking.
Furthermore i have notice that pop CDS are often cheaper than download, if not at retail then certainly in the used market. It is senseless to buy Rihanna when I could go down to the record store and buy it for a dollar less on the resell rack, or $10 new, delivered.
It is certainly the government;s responsibility to help maintain the laws, but what has happened to the normal fiscal responsibility we apply to these things. We don't stop everyone who is speeding. We don't staff police departments so that every person who steals a CD from a car is prosecuted. Yet our court system is being overwhelmed by companies who stand to lose a $20 cd sale due to copyright infringement.
This situation is getting worse. The FBI wants to open a case with no probable cause. Each case represents a finite amount of expenditure of taxpayer money. In times past, we had some assurance that money spent was used to investigate a legitimate crime with legitimate suspects. Now we could have massive amount of waste due to an agent not liking his new neighbor.
Fortunately there is camino. Unfortunately most people don't use it. Flash is really enemy #1 in terms of security, and it would be nice if Adobe would build in a mandatory stop/start button into the specification. Fortunately, there is still no flash on the iPhone, and if we are lucky there never will be.
There was a joke ten years back that the only people who bought software were Apple users. In fact, these users were the who generated the real profit for MS Office, and that is why MS rewarded then with software that actually worked. Of course this lasted until it became clear that MS Office on mac gave users a reason not to use MS Windows, and even though the profit on MS Office was nice, the monopoly of MS Windows kind of dwarfed it.
In any case, in the real world, advertisers and content developers who make long term profit do not count on the long term continuing trend of third parties. *nix users are going to become a demographic, and they will generate a profit for those who are creative enough to exploit them. Either flash will be part of that or it won't. It is kind of like MS not being part of the google experience, or, for the longest time, not part of any backbone of the internet. Ignore emerging markets at your own risk.