My boys (if I remember correctly) got onto good sleep schedules by the third month. Of course, just as you think you've got this parenting thing down, more challenges present themselves. Right now, I'm dealing with hormones causing pre-teen attitude. Trust me, there are days when I long for my oldest to be 5 weeks old again. (Of course, then I remember The Seven Diaper Diaper Change and that feeling passes.)
Not to mention that a woman's body needs time to recover before it goes through pregnancy again. Having a child isn't like ordering something from Amazon. You don't just get a package one day, open it up, and there's your baby. The woman's body goes through some radical changes followed by something the size of a watermelon getting shoved through an opening the size of an orange. Needless to say, this last part leaves the woman's body in need of time to heal up. If you want to get permanently castrated, just hint at the possibility of making another child to a woman who's just given birth. Just wait for the rest of us to get safely out of the room first and put on some noise canceling headphones.
Congrats on the new baby. (11 weeks is mostly new.) I hope he/she is settling into a routine. Despite sleep deprivation, I still remember those early months and am so glad my boys (now 12 and 8) mostly sleep through the night. My wife quit her job also after our second. The cost of child care would have eaten up all of her income so it made more sense for her to become a stay-at-home mother. I've got to admit that I envied her at times when I'd come home to hear "He did this for the first time today" and I was stuck at work instead.
When I first went to work for my company, I told them that my day ended when I left the office. I was fine with emergency work ("the server's not responding! we need you to come in and reboot it!") but not normal "we expect that you'll work on this application on Saturday and Sunday also" work. This was pre-kids, so my rationale wasn't anything related to having children.
My rationale came from seeing my father work. He'd go to work at 5am, come home about 6pm with a stack of work, eat, sign into his office, and then work until 10pm. On the weekend, he came home with an even bigger stack of work. When I asked him why he did so much work, he answered "My boss expects it from me." I pointed out that his boss only expected that much work because he put in that much work, but he couldn't continue the conversation - he had work to do. I didn't want this to become me so I set the ground rules right from the start.
(By the way, after all that work, my father wasn't given a promotion or a raise. He was fired at around 60. Nobody would hire a 60 year old because they figured he was just retiring in a few years and they could hire a young guy for much less. So he retired and he's never been happier.)
Not to mention that the first three months are the "hell months" when the baby has no set schedule and the parents are severely sleep deprived (and would likely not be very productive workers). That's 12 or 13 of the 20 weeks right there.
This leave is for the extra burden of raising a child during its first few months, which is far greater than it is later in life. So this leave is for the act of raising a child.
And for any childless people who are thinking "well, the first few months of a baby's life are a cakewalk. It eats, it sleeps, you change a few diapers, no problem. It doesn't even move if you put it down", then think again. I've had two kids. I love them dearly and still think having kids is totally worth it (though I don't act like people who don't want kids are crazy - different strokes and all). Still, I warn all new parents about the "hell months."
While your child-to-be is in utero, it doesn't need to have a schedule. If it needs to feed, the umbilical cord takes care of it. If it needs to expel waste (pee since it doesn't poop until it is born), the woman's body processes out the waste. It can sleep or wake, at any time. After birth, though, the baby needs to rely on the parents for feeding, changing, etc. Since the baby can't say "Hey, I'd really like to eat now", it cries. It cries loud. You think you get annoyed when some baby is crying in the store, think how the mother feels since she's tried feeding it, changing it, rocking it, burping it, and it won't stop crying.
Oh, and did I mention that the mother has had 3 hours of sleep in the past 5 days?
The new baby has no schedule. It can cry at any moment for any reason and it's up to you, the new parent, to take care of it. It doesn't matter that it cried at 10pm to be fed, 11:15pm to be changed, 1am to be changed again, and 1:30am just because it was fussy. It'll still cry at 2:03am for no apparent reason. Then, it won't cry for 5 hours and you should sleep but you can't because you are expecting that cry to happen at any moment. And just as you fall asleep, it cries again. It takes about three months of this for the baby to develop a schedule.
And lest any men think that their wives will just get up to take care of the baby, I was the "night shift" with my boys. My wife was exhausted after taking care of them all day. Besides, if she picked them up at night, they'd smell milk and think "feeding time" not "time to sleep." If I picked them up, they'd think "no milk and this guy's rocking us, time for sleep." Of course, putting them down could wake them up so I'd rest my eyes while standing and rocking them. It's amazing how little sleep you can function on!
If any non-parent wants to simulate this, connect a loud buzzer to a random timer. Have it go off at all hours of the night (and day) and require that you hit one of five buttons (again, randomly chosen) to shut it off. Have a fifty-fifty chance that the buzzer will go off ten seconds after you hit the right button with a new "right button" randomly picked. This should give you some idea of what new parents go through (though it will still be easier).
So don't envy these new parents for their 20 week "vacations." Chances are, they are using that time to keep their sanity in check and get some order re-established in their households so they can come back into work and be productive instead of barely functional zombies.
The FBI attorney is (purposefully?) confusing possible and probable as well as level of risk. Is it possible that terrorists will see WhatsApp's encryption, flock there, and plot a huge attack resulting in many deaths unseen by law enforcement? Certainly. It is also possible that the terrorists will wake up tomorrow morning realizing that this whole "kill everyone different than us" thing is idiotic, will drop their weapons, and take up a less destructive hobby. Both are possible, but are also not very probable. The recent attacks have been planned using SMS and other unencrypted communication methods. If law enforcement can't catch them when they're not encrypting, why go through the bother of deploying encryption?
As far as of level risk goes, there were 32,727 deaths due to terrorism worldwide in 2014 (Source). Even adding all terrorism deaths together since 2006 gives 161,834. Remember, this is worldwide. If we wanted to limit this to US deaths from terrorism, we'd get 303 American deaths from 2004-2014 (Source). In contrast, 2014 had 17.6 million identity theft victims in the US alone. (Source)
This all means that you have almost a 639,000 times greater risk of being an identity theft victim than a terrorism victim. Granted, I doubt many people are going to use WhatsApp to share information that could be used in identity theft, but this isn't the FBI vs. WhatsApp any more than it was just the FBI vs. Apple. It's the FBI vs Encryption. They want to see encryption either go away or be backdoored so they can get in at any time. Unfortunately, if this were to happen, a lot more people would find themselves vulnerable to various scams and the number of terrorists captured would be at or near zero.
This isn't even "trading liberty for security" as much as it is "trading security for some nebulous promise of possible security later on."
Except "majority rule" can also lead to the majority oppressing the minority. The majority of people in this country are Christian. Does this mean that I (as a Jew) or someone who is an atheist should be forced to pray to Jesus Christ? After all, the majority of people in this country pray to him, so majority has to rule, right? Or maybe, since the majority of people love people of the opposite gender, opposite-gender relationships should be mandated and same-sex relationships banned.
Just because something satisfies what the majority does or even wants, doesn't make it the right thing to do and certainly doesn't mean that everyone who does differently should be forced to bend to the will of the majority.
It could also be a way for the MPAA to test the waters for anti-piracy laws even further in their favor. If RightsCorp succeeds and their browser hijacking program is upheld as legal (remote chance but still a possibility), the MPAA steps in with their own "cut off the pirates" programs. If RightsCorp fails (as is likely) and is torn to shreds by the courts, the MPAA gasps in feigned shock about how anyone would think that a program like this would be allowed. Then they scale back their plans a bit until they find out just how far they can push it and still be allowed.
This would be nice except it could be sidelined by the MPAA member companies (and other big content owners) donating large funds to politicians to make this extortion scheme legal. At the very least, they could have their politicians work their influence to make sure that no "MPAA extortion scheme" sees the light of day or that, if it does, they are given a cheapo plea bargain deal that requires no admission of guilt. "We'll settle without saying we did anything wrong and will pay $1 million. In unrelated news, we expect to pull in $2 million from the next batch of victims."
Even if there's a bias, they can eliminate it by taking two readings and then reacting as follows:
Left-Left => Ditch the result and try again Left-Right => Direct the user left Right-Left => Direct the user right Right-Right => Ditch the result and try again
This should even out any bias and leave you with a 50-50 result.
That cartoon villain level of planning isn't needed at all. There are gaping holes in the TSA security net. They take the "security" out of "security theater"
Not to mention the huge security hole before you hit the TSA checkpoint. Especially if you are in a large airport during a busy time of the year.
TSA: "We spent $14 million to make our security process safer and more effective!" Terrorists: "That's nice. We think we'll detonate our bombs in this nice, crowded security line. Not only will we kill a lot of people, but then you'll shut down this airport for days wrecking even more havoc on people's travel plans."
I have a $0.01 alternative to this randomizer app.... Flip a fair coin. Designate one side of the penny Heads, and the other side tails....
I recently read "Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things" to my eight year old. One of the (many) interesting substories involved "fair coins." Lauren's money isn't taken in Userland because her quarters can't be guaranteed as fair. However, someone points out that you can make any coin a fair coin by flipping it twice. If both flips result in the same side, you ignore it and flip two more times. If the two flips have differing sides, you take the first side.
It was also self-limited to Sony customers. Granted, you didn't get to approve the trojan install, but once it was public you could avoid it by avoiding Sony. With this plan, Rightscorp will get your ISP to redirect your traffic purely based on "we say this person is a dirty pirate." If they're mistaken? Oh well, either prove it to them (without using the Internet, mind you) or pay up. And you can't say "don't pirate and this won't happen to you" because there's no guarantee that Rightscorp's pirate identification methods will be foolproof. You can get caught in the web simply because some data entry clerk at Rightscorp typed an IP address in wrong.
I'd go the "rip the copy you legally bought into another format" route instead of the "download from the Pirate Bay" route. The weird thing, though, is that the MPAA would consider both to be copyright violations of equal magnitude and would prosecute them the same if they could. The only thing stopping them is that it's hard to detect when a computer rips a DVD/Blu-Ray. (Especially if you don't share them and just use them for your own personal use.) It's easier to see if a computer is downloading something and automatically sharing it at the same time. If they could get a "magic ripper detector", though, I have no doubt I'd be sued for $750 - $150,000 for each legally purchased movie I ripped.
I am guessing they are relying on the old "make the cost less than that of hiring a lawyer" strategy that patent trolls use.
This is EXACTLY what they are counting on. Suppose I were sued for downloading/distributing Random Movie via this method. They lock my browser (how, I have no clue) and I can't go online. Now, let's also suppose that I was innocent. Perhaps their software was flawed (I was distributing a public domain movie clip called "Just Another Random Movie") or maybe there was a typo in the IP address entry (entered.215 when they should have entered.251). In any event, they were accusing me without merit.
My recourse would be to respond to their accusation by hiring a lawyer, mounting a "Not Guilty" defense, and hoping that they didn't sway the judge with technical sounding (but ultimately false) evidence. I'd have to hope that my lawyer would work pro-bono during this case, would need to endure the media looking into my private life and labeling me some sort of hacker/pirate (and all the fallout that would cause professionally), and would need to dedicate a lot of time/effort/stress to my defense.
Or I could take a quick, relatively inexpensive settlement and avoid all that.
Sadly, most people would take the settlement so they could just get on with their lives. I know I'd be very tempted to sign it.
It's legalized Mafia tactics. "That's a nice life you have there. It'd be a shame if your reputation were dragged through the mud, you lost your job, tons of cash, and years of your life to a lawsuit. Just sign here and you'll be 'protected' against all that from happening. If not..." *knocks browser off shelf, shattering it to a million pieces to prove a point*
You don't hear about the ones that fail because well... they failed.
That's exactly my point. People look at folks like Steve Jobs and see a bunch of people who dropped out of college or didn't go at all and who become huge successes. They think "well, if I drop out of college, I'll be a huge success." What they don't see are the hundreds or thousands of people who dropped out and are miserable failures for every big success. It's like posting photos of a spotless home but really just cropping out the mess. It gives a false impression of the actual situation.
I'm the dad of a 12 year old son. If something were to happen to him, I'd be devastated and would want any scrap of memory of him to cling to. Any last photo or video would be as precious to me as a ton of gold. My knee-jerk reaction is to cry out "Apple, please unlock this phone for this grieving father."
Of course, we all know that knee-jerk reactions are rarely the right ones. After I got past my initial would-be response, I realized just what was being asked here. This is the same request that the FBI was making. Unlock "just this one" iPhone. Let's assume Apple grants this request. Let's also leave the police/FBI out of this so as not to muddy the waters. (Though, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they wouldn't pounce the second this request was granted.) After this iPhone is unlocked, another grieving parent would make a similar request. And then another one. Maybe a parent of a runaway who happens to have his/her kid's phone would ask for an unlocking. And then the parent of a teen they suspect to be suicidal. The unlock requests would pour in and would expand in scope until the security on the phones was worthless.
Not only that, but Apple would have to decide the merits of each case - a virtual minefield. One wrong unlock and they gave the contents of the phone to someone who really shouldn't have it (maybe an abusive parent trying to track down a teen who just escaped that situation) or refused to unlock for someone who is in the exact situation they've unlocked for in the past. Either way would be horrible PR.
I feel for this dad, I really do. I wish him and his family the best and hope he finds peace after his son's death. Still, I couldn't in good conscience support unlocking the phone. I really do wish there was some way of retrieving the photos without a special "we promise it's a one time thing" unlock - and maybe Apple can help with that. Other than that, though, this is one of those cases where "doing the right thing" either hurts a small number of people right now or a large number of people later on. Either way, you're going to hurt someone and I'd side with protecting everyone else's privacy over helping a grieving dad.
My oldest son is 12 (turning 13 soon) and I recently gave him an e-mail address to use for class. I informed him that I have the password to his account so I can check it to make sure he's being safe online. I also told him if he tries changing the password without first informing me (whether because he wants to keep me out or whether he fears someone else knows his password), I've taken steps to allow me to reset the password and re-gain entry.
I'm sure that he'll eventually earn enough trust to have an e-mail account (and one day social media accounts) without me constantly looking over his virtual shoulder, but he'll need to earn it.
I wonder what the stats are about percentage of college dropouts (or never even attended college) who successfully started their own company vs percentage of college dropouts who tried to start their own company and failed vs percentage of college graduates who did the same. You hear all these stories of "So-And-So dropped out of college and started a multi-million-dollar company" but you don't hear the "So-And-So dropped out of college, tried to start his own business, failed miserably six months in amassing a ton in personal debt, and went to live in his parents' basement for the next three years while he tried to dig himself out of debt" stories.
I saw the "mic drop" feature last night before it was pulled. It was a button right next to the Send button and the same size as the Send button. It said Send plus an outline image of a hand dropping a mic but that could be easily missed. The color was different than the normal buttons, but, again, this could easily be missed in the rush to click Send. The difference between the two buttons wasn't stark enough and confusion was going to happen. The joke wasn't horrible, but they could have made it the two buttons different enough to avoid mistaken clicking.
Slashdot Mirror
My boys (if I remember correctly) got onto good sleep schedules by the third month. Of course, just as you think you've got this parenting thing down, more challenges present themselves. Right now, I'm dealing with hormones causing pre-teen attitude. Trust me, there are days when I long for my oldest to be 5 weeks old again. (Of course, then I remember The Seven Diaper Diaper Change and that feeling passes.)
Not to mention that a woman's body needs time to recover before it goes through pregnancy again. Having a child isn't like ordering something from Amazon. You don't just get a package one day, open it up, and there's your baby. The woman's body goes through some radical changes followed by something the size of a watermelon getting shoved through an opening the size of an orange. Needless to say, this last part leaves the woman's body in need of time to heal up. If you want to get permanently castrated, just hint at the possibility of making another child to a woman who's just given birth. Just wait for the rest of us to get safely out of the room first and put on some noise canceling headphones.
Congrats on the new baby. (11 weeks is mostly new.) I hope he/she is settling into a routine. Despite sleep deprivation, I still remember those early months and am so glad my boys (now 12 and 8) mostly sleep through the night. My wife quit her job also after our second. The cost of child care would have eaten up all of her income so it made more sense for her to become a stay-at-home mother. I've got to admit that I envied her at times when I'd come home to hear "He did this for the first time today" and I was stuck at work instead.
When I first went to work for my company, I told them that my day ended when I left the office. I was fine with emergency work ("the server's not responding! we need you to come in and reboot it!") but not normal "we expect that you'll work on this application on Saturday and Sunday also" work. This was pre-kids, so my rationale wasn't anything related to having children.
My rationale came from seeing my father work. He'd go to work at 5am, come home about 6pm with a stack of work, eat, sign into his office, and then work until 10pm. On the weekend, he came home with an even bigger stack of work. When I asked him why he did so much work, he answered "My boss expects it from me." I pointed out that his boss only expected that much work because he put in that much work, but he couldn't continue the conversation - he had work to do. I didn't want this to become me so I set the ground rules right from the start.
(By the way, after all that work, my father wasn't given a promotion or a raise. He was fired at around 60. Nobody would hire a 60 year old because they figured he was just retiring in a few years and they could hire a young guy for much less. So he retired and he's never been happier.)
Not to mention that the first three months are the "hell months" when the baby has no set schedule and the parents are severely sleep deprived (and would likely not be very productive workers). That's 12 or 13 of the 20 weeks right there.
And for any childless people who are thinking "well, the first few months of a baby's life are a cakewalk. It eats, it sleeps, you change a few diapers, no problem. It doesn't even move if you put it down", then think again. I've had two kids. I love them dearly and still think having kids is totally worth it (though I don't act like people who don't want kids are crazy - different strokes and all). Still, I warn all new parents about the "hell months."
While your child-to-be is in utero, it doesn't need to have a schedule. If it needs to feed, the umbilical cord takes care of it. If it needs to expel waste (pee since it doesn't poop until it is born), the woman's body processes out the waste. It can sleep or wake, at any time. After birth, though, the baby needs to rely on the parents for feeding, changing, etc. Since the baby can't say "Hey, I'd really like to eat now", it cries. It cries loud. You think you get annoyed when some baby is crying in the store, think how the mother feels since she's tried feeding it, changing it, rocking it, burping it, and it won't stop crying.
Oh, and did I mention that the mother has had 3 hours of sleep in the past 5 days?
The new baby has no schedule. It can cry at any moment for any reason and it's up to you, the new parent, to take care of it. It doesn't matter that it cried at 10pm to be fed, 11:15pm to be changed, 1am to be changed again, and 1:30am just because it was fussy. It'll still cry at 2:03am for no apparent reason. Then, it won't cry for 5 hours and you should sleep but you can't because you are expecting that cry to happen at any moment. And just as you fall asleep, it cries again. It takes about three months of this for the baby to develop a schedule.
And lest any men think that their wives will just get up to take care of the baby, I was the "night shift" with my boys. My wife was exhausted after taking care of them all day. Besides, if she picked them up at night, they'd smell milk and think "feeding time" not "time to sleep." If I picked them up, they'd think "no milk and this guy's rocking us, time for sleep." Of course, putting them down could wake them up so I'd rest my eyes while standing and rocking them. It's amazing how little sleep you can function on!
If any non-parent wants to simulate this, connect a loud buzzer to a random timer. Have it go off at all hours of the night (and day) and require that you hit one of five buttons (again, randomly chosen) to shut it off. Have a fifty-fifty chance that the buzzer will go off ten seconds after you hit the right button with a new "right button" randomly picked. This should give you some idea of what new parents go through (though it will still be easier).
So don't envy these new parents for their 20 week "vacations." Chances are, they are using that time to keep their sanity in check and get some order re-established in their households so they can come back into work and be productive instead of barely functional zombies.
The FBI attorney is (purposefully?) confusing possible and probable as well as level of risk. Is it possible that terrorists will see WhatsApp's encryption, flock there, and plot a huge attack resulting in many deaths unseen by law enforcement? Certainly. It is also possible that the terrorists will wake up tomorrow morning realizing that this whole "kill everyone different than us" thing is idiotic, will drop their weapons, and take up a less destructive hobby. Both are possible, but are also not very probable. The recent attacks have been planned using SMS and other unencrypted communication methods. If law enforcement can't catch them when they're not encrypting, why go through the bother of deploying encryption?
As far as of level risk goes, there were 32,727 deaths due to terrorism worldwide in 2014 (Source). Even adding all terrorism deaths together since 2006 gives 161,834. Remember, this is worldwide. If we wanted to limit this to US deaths from terrorism, we'd get 303 American deaths from 2004-2014 (Source). In contrast, 2014 had 17.6 million identity theft victims in the US alone. (Source)
This all means that you have almost a 639,000 times greater risk of being an identity theft victim than a terrorism victim. Granted, I doubt many people are going to use WhatsApp to share information that could be used in identity theft, but this isn't the FBI vs. WhatsApp any more than it was just the FBI vs. Apple. It's the FBI vs Encryption. They want to see encryption either go away or be backdoored so they can get in at any time. Unfortunately, if this were to happen, a lot more people would find themselves vulnerable to various scams and the number of terrorists captured would be at or near zero.
This isn't even "trading liberty for security" as much as it is "trading security for some nebulous promise of possible security later on."
You want the editors to do their jobs? That's unpossible!
Based on how Quanta makes their router, I think you post your bank account information and wait for the money to come rolling in.
Except "majority rule" can also lead to the majority oppressing the minority. The majority of people in this country are Christian. Does this mean that I (as a Jew) or someone who is an atheist should be forced to pray to Jesus Christ? After all, the majority of people in this country pray to him, so majority has to rule, right? Or maybe, since the majority of people love people of the opposite gender, opposite-gender relationships should be mandated and same-sex relationships banned.
Just because something satisfies what the majority does or even wants, doesn't make it the right thing to do and certainly doesn't mean that everyone who does differently should be forced to bend to the will of the majority.
It could also be a way for the MPAA to test the waters for anti-piracy laws even further in their favor. If RightsCorp succeeds and their browser hijacking program is upheld as legal (remote chance but still a possibility), the MPAA steps in with their own "cut off the pirates" programs. If RightsCorp fails (as is likely) and is torn to shreds by the courts, the MPAA gasps in feigned shock about how anyone would think that a program like this would be allowed. Then they scale back their plans a bit until they find out just how far they can push it and still be allowed.
This would be nice except it could be sidelined by the MPAA member companies (and other big content owners) donating large funds to politicians to make this extortion scheme legal. At the very least, they could have their politicians work their influence to make sure that no "MPAA extortion scheme" sees the light of day or that, if it does, they are given a cheapo plea bargain deal that requires no admission of guilt. "We'll settle without saying we did anything wrong and will pay $1 million. In unrelated news, we expect to pull in $2 million from the next batch of victims."
I roll to dodge the Rapiscan line. *1* Rats.
Ok. I roll to dodge to pass the scan without any anomalies. *2* Failed.
Ok, so anomalies are found. I roll to protect against the TSA pat-down. *1* Failed.
Even if there's a bias, they can eliminate it by taking two readings and then reacting as follows:
Left-Left => Ditch the result and try again
Left-Right => Direct the user left
Right-Left => Direct the user right
Right-Right => Ditch the result and try again
This should even out any bias and leave you with a 50-50 result.
Not to mention the huge security hole before you hit the TSA checkpoint. Especially if you are in a large airport during a busy time of the year.
TSA: "We spent $14 million to make our security process safer and more effective!"
Terrorists: "That's nice. We think we'll detonate our bombs in this nice, crowded security line. Not only will we kill a lot of people, but then you'll shut down this airport for days wrecking even more havoc on people's travel plans."
I recently read "Lauren Ipsum: A Story About Computer Science and Other Improbable Things" to my eight year old. One of the (many) interesting substories involved "fair coins." Lauren's money isn't taken in Userland because her quarters can't be guaranteed as fair. However, someone points out that you can make any coin a fair coin by flipping it twice. If both flips result in the same side, you ignore it and flip two more times. If the two flips have differing sides, you take the first side.
In other words:
Heads-Heads or Tails-Tails = Flip again.
Heads-Tails = Heads
Tails-Heads = Tails
Even if there's a bias towards one side, it will be cancelled out and the flip would be fair.
It was also self-limited to Sony customers. Granted, you didn't get to approve the trojan install, but once it was public you could avoid it by avoiding Sony. With this plan, Rightscorp will get your ISP to redirect your traffic purely based on "we say this person is a dirty pirate." If they're mistaken? Oh well, either prove it to them (without using the Internet, mind you) or pay up. And you can't say "don't pirate and this won't happen to you" because there's no guarantee that Rightscorp's pirate identification methods will be foolproof. You can get caught in the web simply because some data entry clerk at Rightscorp typed an IP address in wrong.
I'd go the "rip the copy you legally bought into another format" route instead of the "download from the Pirate Bay" route. The weird thing, though, is that the MPAA would consider both to be copyright violations of equal magnitude and would prosecute them the same if they could. The only thing stopping them is that it's hard to detect when a computer rips a DVD/Blu-Ray. (Especially if you don't share them and just use them for your own personal use.) It's easier to see if a computer is downloading something and automatically sharing it at the same time. If they could get a "magic ripper detector", though, I have no doubt I'd be sued for $750 - $150,000 for each legally purchased movie I ripped.
This is EXACTLY what they are counting on. Suppose I were sued for downloading/distributing Random Movie via this method. They lock my browser (how, I have no clue) and I can't go online. Now, let's also suppose that I was innocent. Perhaps their software was flawed (I was distributing a public domain movie clip called "Just Another Random Movie") or maybe there was a typo in the IP address entry (entered .215 when they should have entered .251). In any event, they were accusing me without merit.
My recourse would be to respond to their accusation by hiring a lawyer, mounting a "Not Guilty" defense, and hoping that they didn't sway the judge with technical sounding (but ultimately false) evidence. I'd have to hope that my lawyer would work pro-bono during this case, would need to endure the media looking into my private life and labeling me some sort of hacker/pirate (and all the fallout that would cause professionally), and would need to dedicate a lot of time/effort/stress to my defense.
Or I could take a quick, relatively inexpensive settlement and avoid all that.
Sadly, most people would take the settlement so they could just get on with their lives. I know I'd be very tempted to sign it.
It's legalized Mafia tactics. "That's a nice life you have there. It'd be a shame if your reputation were dragged through the mud, you lost your job, tons of cash, and years of your life to a lawsuit. Just sign here and you'll be 'protected' against all that from happening. If not..." *knocks browser off shelf, shattering it to a million pieces to prove a point*
That's exactly my point. People look at folks like Steve Jobs and see a bunch of people who dropped out of college or didn't go at all and who become huge successes. They think "well, if I drop out of college, I'll be a huge success." What they don't see are the hundreds or thousands of people who dropped out and are miserable failures for every big success. It's like posting photos of a spotless home but really just cropping out the mess. It gives a false impression of the actual situation.
I'm the dad of a 12 year old son. If something were to happen to him, I'd be devastated and would want any scrap of memory of him to cling to. Any last photo or video would be as precious to me as a ton of gold. My knee-jerk reaction is to cry out "Apple, please unlock this phone for this grieving father."
Of course, we all know that knee-jerk reactions are rarely the right ones. After I got past my initial would-be response, I realized just what was being asked here. This is the same request that the FBI was making. Unlock "just this one" iPhone. Let's assume Apple grants this request. Let's also leave the police/FBI out of this so as not to muddy the waters. (Though, we shouldn't delude ourselves into thinking they wouldn't pounce the second this request was granted.) After this iPhone is unlocked, another grieving parent would make a similar request. And then another one. Maybe a parent of a runaway who happens to have his/her kid's phone would ask for an unlocking. And then the parent of a teen they suspect to be suicidal. The unlock requests would pour in and would expand in scope until the security on the phones was worthless.
Not only that, but Apple would have to decide the merits of each case - a virtual minefield. One wrong unlock and they gave the contents of the phone to someone who really shouldn't have it (maybe an abusive parent trying to track down a teen who just escaped that situation) or refused to unlock for someone who is in the exact situation they've unlocked for in the past. Either way would be horrible PR.
I feel for this dad, I really do. I wish him and his family the best and hope he finds peace after his son's death. Still, I couldn't in good conscience support unlocking the phone. I really do wish there was some way of retrieving the photos without a special "we promise it's a one time thing" unlock - and maybe Apple can help with that. Other than that, though, this is one of those cases where "doing the right thing" either hurts a small number of people right now or a large number of people later on. Either way, you're going to hurt someone and I'd side with protecting everyone else's privacy over helping a grieving dad.
My oldest son is 12 (turning 13 soon) and I recently gave him an e-mail address to use for class. I informed him that I have the password to his account so I can check it to make sure he's being safe online. I also told him if he tries changing the password without first informing me (whether because he wants to keep me out or whether he fears someone else knows his password), I've taken steps to allow me to reset the password and re-gain entry.
I'm sure that he'll eventually earn enough trust to have an e-mail account (and one day social media accounts) without me constantly looking over his virtual shoulder, but he'll need to earn it.
I wonder what the stats are about percentage of college dropouts (or never even attended college) who successfully started their own company vs percentage of college dropouts who tried to start their own company and failed vs percentage of college graduates who did the same. You hear all these stories of "So-And-So dropped out of college and started a multi-million-dollar company" but you don't hear the "So-And-So dropped out of college, tried to start his own business, failed miserably six months in amassing a ton in personal debt, and went to live in his parents' basement for the next three years while he tried to dig himself out of debt" stories.
He was counting in binary.
I saw the "mic drop" feature last night before it was pulled. It was a button right next to the Send button and the same size as the Send button. It said Send plus an outline image of a hand dropping a mic but that could be easily missed. The color was different than the normal buttons, but, again, this could easily be missed in the rush to click Send. The difference between the two buttons wasn't stark enough and confusion was going to happen. The joke wasn't horrible, but they could have made it the two buttons different enough to avoid mistaken clicking.