You know, that actually sounds halfway plausible. Wouldn't it be crazy if the entity who finally got the US patent system reformed ended up being RIAA/MPAA? Of course, in that scenario, "reformed" would probably end up meaning some scheme where any digital file produced or consumed within the US or any country that has an internet connection to the US has to pay them a fee...
IANAL, but that's essentially the idea behind FRAND patents (i.e., those which the inventors have agreed to license for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms). When you chooses to license using that model, it basically means that you can get a nominal reimbursement (because, after all, you did have to do some work to develop it) for each license, but that is pretty much it. Also, what is considered "nominal" is pretty low (as far as intellectual property goes, anyway) and strongly enforced by the courts. Furthermore, once you go FRAND with a patent, you usually can't really go back, so licensees have a guarantee that they aren't going to get it at a reasonable rate today during the adoption phase, but then see the price go up 500% when some contract runs out.
HEVC, however, is not a FRAND patent, though they would likely see much higher adoption if they were (probably similar to H.264, since they essentially used a de facto FRAND approach).
It's actually not that uncommon. The criminal trial can certainly weigh heavily on a civil trial, but there are completely different (~95% vs. 51%) standards of evidentiary burden. It's not hard to imagine meeting one without meeting the other. And nowhere does the law, Constitution, or any basis of our judicial system state that being "not guilty" makes you in any way entirely free of any responsibility.
Actually, I've never really thought about it, but cancer is not that different from a zombie. It is a cell that should have died (self-destruction by apoptosis or recognized as abnormal by nearby phagocytes), but didn't, and precisely because of what should've gotten it killed, is now behaving abnormally and often in a way where it is trying to replace the remaining normal entities with more of itself.
No, hope is a belief that the world and everything in it has potential energy, and that under the right circumstances that can be converted into "kinetic" energy (i.e., the force of change). It is the belief that just because the ball is not moving does not mean the ball cannot move. It also means that just because a person believes that they have no value (or perhaps even currently do not seem to have much value) does not mean that they are, in fact, incapable of having value or of someday recognizing what their value is or could be.
If "enlightenment" means believing that the world cannot be anything other than it, in its present state, currently is, then I do not want to be enlightened, because my enlightenment would be invalidated one nanosecond later, since even in that time the world would have done that which I had assumed to be impossible, and changed.
That's actually a really interesting point. It sounds like you're suggesting that maybe the US is so successful because European companies just know that to create a product in a way that would be hugely successful would be corporate suicide, because if it does end up being successful, then you will regret it. Basically, better to have 7 products that have 5% market share each than 1 product that has 50% market share, because once you cross a certain threshold, regulation will eat up more than that 15% difference. In other words, a "keep your head low" mentality...
I've never heard this before (though in some ways it's really just a recapitulation of one of the core tenets of capitalism, which has plenty of faults itself), and I'm not saying I necessarily believe it -- I just find the idea itself interesting. Can any other Europeans speak to whether or not there might be anything to this (preferably without too much vitriol)?
So, if I want to make a call using Verizon (lowest chance of dropped calls), but don't mind using Sprint for my data (its OK if that goes in and out for me, not as critical), but then use AT&T for my texts (for some reason they seem to go through faster since most of my friends are AT&T users), I can do that on the same phone, simultaneously, as long as the radios support all those networks, right? I'm not like restricted to some kind of bundle, am I?
The problem, though, is that anyone has a monopoly when you get specific enough. The airlines have a "monopoly" on the food they serve while you are on their flight. What if I want Au Bon Pain? I can't get it (and ABP can't sell it there, even if they want to), because a set of specific circumstances limit me while I am on the flight. I have to buy the airline's "gourmet sandwich," if that's what I want. It isn't a real monopoly, though, because those circumstances are not universal and I could easily either work around them (bring my own food) or choose a different airline.
If they want to claim that Google is monopolizing "computing devices that are mobile phones (specific 1), running Android (specific 2), that have access to the Play Store (specific 3)," then we are talking about a pretty specific set of circumstances, any of which could easily be varied using existing viable alternatives for each specific circumstance. If you go to eat at a microbrewery, you don't get to complain when they promote their own beer.
From TFA... "But the new study details observations of low-mass stars forming within reach of the galactic center. The findings lend support to the argument that "adult" stars observed in this region formed near the black hole."
I didn't dig into the study that the article itself was referencing, but at the very least the summary was an accurate representation of the article. Or were you just trolling?
By the way, just to be clear, I strongly dislike entitled people who walk around doing things like wandering obliviously while using smartphones then expect the rest of the world to revolve around them and adapt accordingly.
Yeah, that probably was pretty funny. Except that, when accounting for the retail cost of the phone, you almost certainly caused over $500 of damage. Then, when you charged him with assault (which would be dismissed), he would have your name and would then charge you with felony vandalism, for which you would be convicted, probably summarily. Now you can't vote in most states, carry a firearm, or get a decent job. Oopsies!
I think you make an argument worth making, but your argument is about the application of tools, not the tools themselves. If the military and/or intelligence communities are being told to achieve objectives (or are even internally setting objectives) that do more harm than good, then they should be redirected. Even so, just like the military shouldn't lose their guns or cops shouldn't lose the ability to arrest people if they are arresting the wrong people, the intelligence community should not lose the tools that allow them to operate.
To argue that any element of the government is operating suboptimally is often not a difficult argument to make. To say that they (any element of government) should be eliminated or neutered altogether is something else entirely, and I feel like that should be approached with great caution.
I wasn't arguing that everyone should be happy about this. I would imagine that, if China found out about something like this, they would be quite upset. Similarly to how upset they would be when they found a spy in their government. That doesn't mean that our intelligence community shouldn't be trying to do exactly that and, presumably, vice versa (and, I would imagine, each is both trying and succeeding).
To address your other point: I think that, if there is evidence that industrial espionage against the US has been facilitated by NSA backdoors, then the backdoors pose a greater risk than benefit to national security (assuming that the loss from such espionage is, again, greater than intelligence gained). This is all risk/benefit -- that's their job. I would be totally fine with Coke losing their formula to China if that means that they are also able to interdict intelligence that prevents a major attuU.S. (or foreign, if sufficiently significant) soil.
But, to be clear, you are right that part of this equation was the assumption that the U.S. was far superior to all other states in their ability to detect and utilize such backdoors. This has become far less true in recent years, and these policies by their risky nature do require careful constant re-evaluation. Furthermore, there is also something to be said for the inability to "revert" the changes in many of these backdoors, such as in hardware -- so if you later decide that these pose more risk to industry than benefit to national security, you're just SOL on existing backdoors. That makes it crucial that the element of longitudinal uncertainty be taken into account in the initial decisionmaking; hopefully it is, but admittedly foresight is often not government's strong suit...
No, quite the opposite. At the same time, though, what would happen if every soldier's gun had a chip that required "command approval" before any member of a squad could start firing? Sure, individual soldiers kill the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons, all the time. Hopefully, though, most of the time it is for the right reasons. And regardless, to place such restrictions on them limits their ability to safely carry out their intended purpose to such a degree that it is a problem.
The idea is that, if they *do* overstep their boundaries, then that should be handled appropriately (and that is a valid point of criticism with more domestic recent events). But to claim that the intelligence community, whose job is to move about undetected, should be telling people, "you know, these floors make it easy for someone to sneak in undetected. You should replace them with these other floors, where no one would be able to sneak in at all," would be exactly the opposite of their intended job.
They are the intelligence community, not our national cybersecurity consulting firm, and they only ought to be notifying the public if the risk to national security involved in leaving the vulnerability open is greater than the risk to national security involved in losing the intelligence that could be gained from it.
I'm not sure how I see that this is a good thing. I know it's fun to hate on the intelligence community (I've done it too), especially when we feel like our own rights have been infringed, but are we really saying that we are in favor of anything which hampers the West's ability to take clandestine actions against other states? After all the complaining we do about Congress and all the bureaucracy that comes along with anything usually related to government, we are then saying that absolutely every hostile action should be subject to the same oversight that produces exactly that molasses-like barrier to actual results?
It is without question that, at times, the intelligence community must have overstepped its bounds, as any entity with that much power would on occasion. Maybe in their case that happens far more often than it should. But does that really mean they should have no real power at all?
Not necessarily true -- any piece of equipment or software that is built to be truly reliable should be able to operate in such a way that it can "fail gracefully" -- i.e., it should have fail conditions and algorithms to manage those, rather than just assuming "this is built so well that fail conditions are impossible." To do otherwise is like programming and just assuming that an exception will never be thrown, because you programmed it so well and accounted for every possible environmental variable.
Actually, the founding fathers did foresee this. The idea, per the Federalist Papers, was to maximize the involvement of special interests so that no one group would be able to gain dominance. This was one of the reasons why Washington opposed a 2-party system: he felt that it essentially consolidated everything down to a set of 2 special interests rather than a wide spread, which defeated the purpose. Presumably, though, that consolidation is the same thing that happens with super PACs vs. individual contributions, so while several founding fathers probably would've been in favor of super PACs too (given the power that comes along with them), that probably would not have included Washington, likely the most fair and certainly least power-seeking along them.
I certainly hope the DSM won't be forsaken, because if it is, then no one will have a definitive way to diagnose autism or anything else psychiatric. Using biological markers (i.e., fMRI, structural imaging studies [MRI, CT], etc.) was the original hope for DSM-5 around the time that DSM-IV-TR was completed (2000), but when the time to write DSM-5 came around, there wasn't enough data to define any such markers with any remote degree of validity.
Trust me, most of us (at least those that take insurance) don't get paid much for sitting there trying to figure out what diagnosis someone has (even though some of us, myself included, still enjoy the human side to that interaction and wish it were still present in more of medicine); for many, it would be much easier if we could do like the internists, send you to get an MRI, and get a diagnosis faxed back to us. Tons of researchers are spending tons of money to try to get us to those biomarkers. Jumping the gun and throwing out the current system without a remotely valid one to replace it, however, is not the answer.
There's a good chance this won't work. If a company has a hold on your account (i.e., they have let the credit card company know they intend to make a transaction within the near future so that those funds will be reserved -- this is usually placed as soon as you rent the car), then the corresponding actual transaction will still go through even if the credit card number changes.
Exactly. No one intrinsically likes regulation of any kind -- we only do it because it's necessary, and by participating in the process of regulation, we have some hope of at least shaping it. DRM isn't inherently the devil. Without DRM, we would still be going to Blockbuster or, at best, waiting for our red envelopes to watch any non-pirated movies. I'm no fan of DRM by any stretch, but acting like it is absolute evil and could never result in anything good makes us just as bad as the **AAs. DRM actually can be done right... just ask Valve.
It says "Putting “1-2-3” on the pad’s top row instead of the bottom (the configuration used, then as now, on adding machines and calculators) was also born of Mr. Karlin’s group: they found it made for more accurate dialing." I think when they said "the configuration used" they were referring to "the bottom" rather than the entire preceding phrase. Admittedly though, whatever they meant, it wasn't very clear.
Although it wasn't based on research, it actually is fairly intuitive. Given that calculators were probably most commonly used in finance initially, I would guess that the most common number used (possibly even now) would be 0. Placing that most common number at the thumb position has clear utility, similar to that of the spacebar. My guess is that that served as the anchor, with the other numbers logically flowing from there.
Obviously, all of this is coming out of my ass, but like I said, I don't think it's entirely illogical (though I also think that, for its own purpose, the phone's layout is equally logical, and emulating the calculator on a dialpad would have made the phone look ridiculous when it was released).
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Of course! Then, when that day comes, we can all go listen to all our public domain Beatles music to celebrate.
You know, that actually sounds halfway plausible. Wouldn't it be crazy if the entity who finally got the US patent system reformed ended up being RIAA/MPAA? Of course, in that scenario, "reformed" would probably end up meaning some scheme where any digital file produced or consumed within the US or any country that has an internet connection to the US has to pay them a fee...
IANAL, but that's essentially the idea behind FRAND patents (i.e., those which the inventors have agreed to license for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory" terms). When you chooses to license using that model, it basically means that you can get a nominal reimbursement (because, after all, you did have to do some work to develop it) for each license, but that is pretty much it. Also, what is considered "nominal" is pretty low (as far as intellectual property goes, anyway) and strongly enforced by the courts. Furthermore, once you go FRAND with a patent, you usually can't really go back, so licensees have a guarantee that they aren't going to get it at a reasonable rate today during the adoption phase, but then see the price go up 500% when some contract runs out.
HEVC, however, is not a FRAND patent, though they would likely see much higher adoption if they were (probably similar to H.264, since they essentially used a de facto FRAND approach).
It's actually not that uncommon. The criminal trial can certainly weigh heavily on a civil trial, but there are completely different (~95% vs. 51%) standards of evidentiary burden. It's not hard to imagine meeting one without meeting the other. And nowhere does the law, Constitution, or any basis of our judicial system state that being "not guilty" makes you in any way entirely free of any responsibility.
Actually, I've never really thought about it, but cancer is not that different from a zombie. It is a cell that should have died (self-destruction by apoptosis or recognized as abnormal by nearby phagocytes), but didn't, and precisely because of what should've gotten it killed, is now behaving abnormally and often in a way where it is trying to replace the remaining normal entities with more of itself.
No, hope is a belief that the world and everything in it has potential energy, and that under the right circumstances that can be converted into "kinetic" energy (i.e., the force of change). It is the belief that just because the ball is not moving does not mean the ball cannot move. It also means that just because a person believes that they have no value (or perhaps even currently do not seem to have much value) does not mean that they are, in fact, incapable of having value or of someday recognizing what their value is or could be.
If "enlightenment" means believing that the world cannot be anything other than it, in its present state, currently is, then I do not want to be enlightened, because my enlightenment would be invalidated one nanosecond later, since even in that time the world would have done that which I had assumed to be impossible, and changed.
That's actually a really interesting point. It sounds like you're suggesting that maybe the US is so successful because European companies just know that to create a product in a way that would be hugely successful would be corporate suicide, because if it does end up being successful, then you will regret it. Basically, better to have 7 products that have 5% market share each than 1 product that has 50% market share, because once you cross a certain threshold, regulation will eat up more than that 15% difference. In other words, a "keep your head low" mentality...
I've never heard this before (though in some ways it's really just a recapitulation of one of the core tenets of capitalism, which has plenty of faults itself), and I'm not saying I necessarily believe it -- I just find the idea itself interesting. Can any other Europeans speak to whether or not there might be anything to this (preferably without too much vitriol)?
So, if I want to make a call using Verizon (lowest chance of dropped calls), but don't mind using Sprint for my data (its OK if that goes in and out for me, not as critical), but then use AT&T for my texts (for some reason they seem to go through faster since most of my friends are AT&T users), I can do that on the same phone, simultaneously, as long as the radios support all those networks, right? I'm not like restricted to some kind of bundle, am I?
The problem, though, is that anyone has a monopoly when you get specific enough. The airlines have a "monopoly" on the food they serve while you are on their flight. What if I want Au Bon Pain? I can't get it (and ABP can't sell it there, even if they want to), because a set of specific circumstances limit me while I am on the flight. I have to buy the airline's "gourmet sandwich," if that's what I want. It isn't a real monopoly, though, because those circumstances are not universal and I could easily either work around them (bring my own food) or choose a different airline.
If they want to claim that Google is monopolizing "computing devices that are mobile phones (specific 1), running Android (specific 2), that have access to the Play Store (specific 3)," then we are talking about a pretty specific set of circumstances, any of which could easily be varied using existing viable alternatives for each specific circumstance. If you go to eat at a microbrewery, you don't get to complain when they promote their own beer.
From TFA... "But the new study details observations of low-mass stars forming within reach of the galactic center. The findings lend support to the argument that "adult" stars observed in this region formed near the black hole." I didn't dig into the study that the article itself was referencing, but at the very least the summary was an accurate representation of the article. Or were you just trolling?
Claim 14 is an independent claim (https://www.google.com/patents/US8678321).
By the way, just to be clear, I strongly dislike entitled people who walk around doing things like wandering obliviously while using smartphones then expect the rest of the world to revolve around them and adapt accordingly.
I just hate bullies even more.
Yeah, that probably was pretty funny. Except that, when accounting for the retail cost of the phone, you almost certainly caused over $500 of damage. Then, when you charged him with assault (which would be dismissed), he would have your name and would then charge you with felony vandalism, for which you would be convicted, probably summarily. Now you can't vote in most states, carry a firearm, or get a decent job. Oopsies!
I think you make an argument worth making, but your argument is about the application of tools, not the tools themselves. If the military and/or intelligence communities are being told to achieve objectives (or are even internally setting objectives) that do more harm than good, then they should be redirected. Even so, just like the military shouldn't lose their guns or cops shouldn't lose the ability to arrest people if they are arresting the wrong people, the intelligence community should not lose the tools that allow them to operate.
To argue that any element of the government is operating suboptimally is often not a difficult argument to make. To say that they (any element of government) should be eliminated or neutered altogether is something else entirely, and I feel like that should be approached with great caution.
I wasn't arguing that everyone should be happy about this. I would imagine that, if China found out about something like this, they would be quite upset. Similarly to how upset they would be when they found a spy in their government. That doesn't mean that our intelligence community shouldn't be trying to do exactly that and, presumably, vice versa (and, I would imagine, each is both trying and succeeding).
To address your other point: I think that, if there is evidence that industrial espionage against the US has been facilitated by NSA backdoors, then the backdoors pose a greater risk than benefit to national security (assuming that the loss from such espionage is, again, greater than intelligence gained). This is all risk/benefit -- that's their job. I would be totally fine with Coke losing their formula to China if that means that they are also able to interdict intelligence that prevents a major attuU.S. (or foreign, if sufficiently significant) soil.
But, to be clear, you are right that part of this equation was the assumption that the U.S. was far superior to all other states in their ability to detect and utilize such backdoors. This has become far less true in recent years, and these policies by their risky nature do require careful constant re-evaluation. Furthermore, there is also something to be said for the inability to "revert" the changes in many of these backdoors, such as in hardware -- so if you later decide that these pose more risk to industry than benefit to national security, you're just SOL on existing backdoors. That makes it crucial that the element of longitudinal uncertainty be taken into account in the initial decisionmaking; hopefully it is, but admittedly foresight is often not government's strong suit...
No, quite the opposite. At the same time, though, what would happen if every soldier's gun had a chip that required "command approval" before any member of a squad could start firing? Sure, individual soldiers kill the wrong people, and for the wrong reasons, all the time. Hopefully, though, most of the time it is for the right reasons. And regardless, to place such restrictions on them limits their ability to safely carry out their intended purpose to such a degree that it is a problem.
The idea is that, if they *do* overstep their boundaries, then that should be handled appropriately (and that is a valid point of criticism with more domestic recent events). But to claim that the intelligence community, whose job is to move about undetected, should be telling people, "you know, these floors make it easy for someone to sneak in undetected. You should replace them with these other floors, where no one would be able to sneak in at all," would be exactly the opposite of their intended job.
They are the intelligence community, not our national cybersecurity consulting firm, and they only ought to be notifying the public if the risk to national security involved in leaving the vulnerability open is greater than the risk to national security involved in losing the intelligence that could be gained from it.
I'm not sure how I see that this is a good thing. I know it's fun to hate on the intelligence community (I've done it too), especially when we feel like our own rights have been infringed, but are we really saying that we are in favor of anything which hampers the West's ability to take clandestine actions against other states? After all the complaining we do about Congress and all the bureaucracy that comes along with anything usually related to government, we are then saying that absolutely every hostile action should be subject to the same oversight that produces exactly that molasses-like barrier to actual results?
It is without question that, at times, the intelligence community must have overstepped its bounds, as any entity with that much power would on occasion. Maybe in their case that happens far more often than it should. But does that really mean they should have no real power at all?
Not necessarily true -- any piece of equipment or software that is built to be truly reliable should be able to operate in such a way that it can "fail gracefully" -- i.e., it should have fail conditions and algorithms to manage those, rather than just assuming "this is built so well that fail conditions are impossible." To do otherwise is like programming and just assuming that an exception will never be thrown, because you programmed it so well and accounted for every possible environmental variable.
Actually, the founding fathers did foresee this. The idea, per the Federalist Papers, was to maximize the involvement of special interests so that no one group would be able to gain dominance. This was one of the reasons why Washington opposed a 2-party system: he felt that it essentially consolidated everything down to a set of 2 special interests rather than a wide spread, which defeated the purpose. Presumably, though, that consolidation is the same thing that happens with super PACs vs. individual contributions, so while several founding fathers probably would've been in favor of super PACs too (given the power that comes along with them), that probably would not have included Washington, likely the most fair and certainly least power-seeking along them.
I certainly hope the DSM won't be forsaken, because if it is, then no one will have a definitive way to diagnose autism or anything else psychiatric. Using biological markers (i.e., fMRI, structural imaging studies [MRI, CT], etc.) was the original hope for DSM-5 around the time that DSM-IV-TR was completed (2000), but when the time to write DSM-5 came around, there wasn't enough data to define any such markers with any remote degree of validity.
Trust me, most of us (at least those that take insurance) don't get paid much for sitting there trying to figure out what diagnosis someone has (even though some of us, myself included, still enjoy the human side to that interaction and wish it were still present in more of medicine); for many, it would be much easier if we could do like the internists, send you to get an MRI, and get a diagnosis faxed back to us. Tons of researchers are spending tons of money to try to get us to those biomarkers. Jumping the gun and throwing out the current system without a remotely valid one to replace it, however, is not the answer.
There's a good chance this won't work. If a company has a hold on your account (i.e., they have let the credit card company know they intend to make a transaction within the near future so that those funds will be reserved -- this is usually placed as soon as you rent the car), then the corresponding actual transaction will still go through even if the credit card number changes.
I've heard we're protected by The Doctor.
Exactly. No one intrinsically likes regulation of any kind -- we only do it because it's necessary, and by participating in the process of regulation, we have some hope of at least shaping it. DRM isn't inherently the devil. Without DRM, we would still be going to Blockbuster or, at best, waiting for our red envelopes to watch any non-pirated movies. I'm no fan of DRM by any stretch, but acting like it is absolute evil and could never result in anything good makes us just as bad as the **AAs. DRM actually can be done right... just ask Valve.
It says "Putting “1-2-3” on the pad’s top row instead of the bottom (the configuration used, then as now, on adding machines and calculators) was also born of Mr. Karlin’s group: they found it made for more accurate dialing." I think when they said "the configuration used" they were referring to "the bottom" rather than the entire preceding phrase. Admittedly though, whatever they meant, it wasn't very clear.
Although it wasn't based on research, it actually is fairly intuitive. Given that calculators were probably most commonly used in finance initially, I would guess that the most common number used (possibly even now) would be 0. Placing that most common number at the thumb position has clear utility, similar to that of the spacebar. My guess is that that served as the anchor, with the other numbers logically flowing from there.
Obviously, all of this is coming out of my ass, but like I said, I don't think it's entirely illogical (though I also think that, for its own purpose, the phone's layout is equally logical, and emulating the calculator on a dialpad would have made the phone look ridiculous when it was released).