Actually, I think that comes to about one third of the 60%, meaning that 20% of all the installs of apps that use Pinch are pirated. I assume that Pinch charges for its library, so they would likely be tracking few, if any, free apps. They may be in some low-priced apps, but probably not that many of those, either. So that 20% may well amount to something like 1% or fewer of all installs. On my phone, free or 99-cent apps comprise roughly 95% of the installed base; I know of only one that uses Pinch (out of 91 installed over the included apps).
It's also very unlikely that many free apps are pirated. The Gamasutra article suggests that low-priced apps are also pirated, but that article contains only anecdotes, no numbers. Probably not many 99-cent apps either. So his 34% of 60% is likely to be a rather small number by this analysis as well.
Looking at it another way, let's take the only real numbers that they give: 38% of the four million jailbroken phones have used a pirated app - about a milllion and a half. Assuming that you need a jailbroken phone to run pirated apps, about 15% of extant iPhones can do so. Roughly 5% actually do. So 95% of iPhones do not run pirated apps. Both articles assert that the vast majority of pirated apps are by users who would not buy the application from the app store. I'd have to conclude that piracy is not a significant problem on the iPhone.
Looking at the developer who said that 96% of his users were pirate installs, the game is either overpriced, uninteresting. or hard to find in the app store. At $6.99, I'm very unlikely to buy any application - especially one that sounds like a storybook for kids. On the other hand, I just paid significantly more than that for an edition of the (concise) OED for my phone. Of course, it's probably close to the cheapest edition of it that one can buy... In any case, given the "pirates wouldn't buy anyway" principle, app store sales are a 95% accurate indicator of the popularity of your application.
The bottom line is that the numbers that he gives are purely a PR exercise, designed to fuel indignation and scare developers into thinking that their work will be stolen. And incidentally to boost sales for Pinch Media. They do sell a decent library, from what I have read, and the monitoring feature is a valuable capability. But scare tactics, however well-established a strategy in the security industry, tend to work mostly on the uninformed.
I still read every day, but my page count is down by probably a factor of ten. That's part of it, but not all. Commenting, and having your comments upmodded, seems to help. Doing M2 doesn't seem to make any difference. I never get the reminder, but you can always go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl. I hate the new form, though.
One factor is how much you read. If you read too much, you don't get mod points. I went four years between mod points, when I was reading Slashdot a lot. I don't read nearly as many pages as I used to, and I get mod points once or twice a week.
If you have to use magnetic containment to keep the reaction going, it's not a star. "Star" is not a synonym for "nuclear fusion reaction" - except in breathless news reports written at a primary school reading level.
A few years back, the trend in armor-piercing rounds was the teflon-coated brass round. They are now banned, though not for the Teflon coating (which wears off in the barrel or peels away in flight), but because of the hard cores.
Anyone know what this is, and if it's anything more that a marketing superlative? The only Google hits for the phrase are this story.
Sounds like marketing-speak for "gee-whiz super-powerful gun", though I suppose that it could be some arrangement of barrels that tests the stuff with various caliber rounds. I'm not sure why one would bother with such a thing.
Why name your UI innovation in a way that suggest that it makes things less clear? This looks like an interesting phone, but that seems to me to be a weird name for a UI. Also, I'd prefer to sacrifice the keyboard for a thinner profile, given that it has at least as good a screen keyboard implementation as the iPhone.
I agree with your point about no protection not being the best protection, but I don't think that the statistics that you cite demonstrate the point that you are trying to make. The notion that motorcycle crashes in general have a greater incidence of fatality means that behavior that causes crashes will correlate better with motorcycle fatalities than with passenger vehicle fatalities.
A more meaningful number would be something like the number of crashes per vehicle mile. Or perhaps the number of injury-producing crashes per vehicle mile. Even then, a conclusion might be slippery, because motorcycles do not tend to get into minor accidents like parking lot fender-benders, but even a minor motorcycle accident is more likely to produce an injury than a passenger car accident.
He's not just a "security researcher" - he's an official blogger for Zscaler, a "cloud security" vendor. Essentially, they seem to provide security-checking proxies. My take is that he would have a vested interest in portraying the iPhone (or any platform not protected by Zscaler) as insecure.
The PhishTank list has 2279 entries. I'd be interested to know how many he tried, and which ones.
Yes, saying that it's a choice is not going to help someone much in overcoming depression. I've seen cognitive-behavioral therapy work, but it's not an easy cure. There is a lot of work involved. From (observed) experience, long-term antidepressant medication is not the answer. In the short term, it can be helpful, but it's detrimental in the long term, particularly when the patient depends on it.
Some people can do this on their own. Most can't.
And you're right that everyone has those moments. Even people who are generally happy and well-adjusted. It's a part of life. Feel the sadness and loss, even wallow in it a bit - it's a fundamental part of the human condition. It's only bad when you build your life around it, and can't escape.
Well said. The key here is choice. You've made choices to alter both the course and tenor of your life. Being happy is not something that happens to one, it is a choice that one makes. Not always easy (and often very hard), but possible. I've known others who have turned their life around in similar fashion, and they have my highest respect.
The extent to which they locked down the Razr is the reason that I am no longer a Verizon customer. They were way too willing to cripple the phone so that they could charge me for services.
I have an iPhone now. I'm not wild about everything that Apple and AT&T do, but I'm much happier with them than Verizon.
Cohen had her face face slashed in a bar a couple of years ago (also here). My guess would be that this lawsuit was an effort to find out if the same guy was after her again.
There's a little more to this than anonymous insults on the Internet, and in this case it is probably justifiable to reveal the blogger's identity. Ideally, the police would look into it and determine whether or not the blogger is a threat (without making his identity public), but they likely do not have time to investigate anonymous Internet insults.
As has been mentioned, the real issue is seeing. The time difference to reach a person over a thirty meter distance is negligible. This is mostly because you don't jump in and swim across the pool. You walk quickly to the closest approach, and then - only if there is no alternative - you jump (not dive) into the pool.
I worked as a lifeguard for five or six years, mostly two-hour stints for indoor pools. I never worked a shift alone - if only one lifeguard showed up, the pool closed (or did not open). Normal complement was three, so that we were covered for things like trips to the restroom. The other standing rule was that you didn't sit down - not in the elevated chairs, and not in a chair at the side of the pool. We were expected to walk the pool. roughly opposite. The rationale was not distance to potential problems, it was so that we would see what was happening.
One guard might be sufficient if there are only a few people swimming, say four or five. I'd be disinclined to work such a pool, though.
0.3% does indeed correspond to a rate of 0.003. That's what the article said, but it's not what the summary said. The summary said "The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate." Omitting the "percent" changes the actual value by a factor of 100 from what the article says.
0.3 would be terrible - three out of ten false positives. 0.3 percent - what the article actually says - is not too bad. But current techniques allow me to check the spam bin for such messages. This technique would pretty much preclude that capability, since the mail would never arrive at the server. I'm not sure that a rate of 0.003 would be acceptable under those circumstances.
No, the HumVees were the originals. A Hummer is just a big, heavy HumVee-style body on an SUV chassis. At least, that's what they are now. The H1 was closer to the military version. Hummer on Wikipedia.
The other factor is that voting machines give instant feedback. With an optical scan ballot, for instance, you mark a space and feed it through the reader. That's it - no actual feedback on who that vote counted for. Unless you check your ballot carefully, you're not going to notice any mistakes. Whereas the electronic machine seems to make it pretty apparent.
But this "government limiting its own power" never seems to go where one would wish it to. They all want to look good on national security (particularly on the run up to the election), and a shallow look sees that as associated with a strong central government.
But real security can't rest on trampling the essential liberties of the people (citizens or not). There is not much understanding of that in Washington, or they mostly prefer willful disregard.
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Actually, I think that comes to about one third of the 60%, meaning that 20% of all the installs of apps that use Pinch are pirated. I assume that Pinch charges for its library, so they would likely be tracking few, if any, free apps. They may be in some low-priced apps, but probably not that many of those, either. So that 20% may well amount to something like 1% or fewer of all installs. On my phone, free or 99-cent apps comprise roughly 95% of the installed base; I know of only one that uses Pinch (out of 91 installed over the included apps).
It's also very unlikely that many free apps are pirated. The Gamasutra article suggests that low-priced apps are also pirated, but that article contains only anecdotes, no numbers. Probably not many 99-cent apps either. So his 34% of 60% is likely to be a rather small number by this analysis as well.
Looking at it another way, let's take the only real numbers that they give: 38% of the four million jailbroken phones have used a pirated app - about a milllion and a half. Assuming that you need a jailbroken phone to run pirated apps, about 15% of extant iPhones can do so. Roughly 5% actually do. So 95% of iPhones do not run pirated apps. Both articles assert that the vast majority of pirated apps are by users who would not buy the application from the app store. I'd have to conclude that piracy is not a significant problem on the iPhone.
Looking at the developer who said that 96% of his users were pirate installs, the game is either overpriced, uninteresting. or hard to find in the app store. At $6.99, I'm very unlikely to buy any application - especially one that sounds like a storybook for kids. On the other hand, I just paid significantly more than that for an edition of the (concise) OED for my phone. Of course, it's probably close to the cheapest edition of it that one can buy... In any case, given the "pirates wouldn't buy anyway" principle, app store sales are a 95% accurate indicator of the popularity of your application.
The bottom line is that the numbers that he gives are purely a PR exercise, designed to fuel indignation and scare developers into thinking that their work will be stolen. And incidentally to boost sales for Pinch Media. They do sell a decent library, from what I have read, and the monitoring feature is a valuable capability. But scare tactics, however well-established a strategy in the security industry, tend to work mostly on the uninformed.
I still read every day, but my page count is down by probably a factor of ten. That's part of it, but not all. Commenting, and having your comments upmodded, seems to help. Doing M2 doesn't seem to make any difference. I never get the reminder, but you can always go to http://slashdot.org/metamod.pl. I hate the new form, though.
One factor is how much you read. If you read too much, you don't get mod points. I went four years between mod points, when I was reading Slashdot a lot. I don't read nearly as many pages as I used to, and I get mod points once or twice a week.
If you have to use magnetic containment to keep the reaction going, it's not a star. "Star" is not a synonym for "nuclear fusion reaction" - except in breathless news reports written at a primary school reading level.
It's a fusion reaction. Just say that. No stars here, no power from the sun. Nuclear fusion.
A few years back, the trend in armor-piercing rounds was the teflon-coated brass round. They are now banned, though not for the Teflon coating (which wears off in the barrel or peels away in flight), but because of the hard cores.
Anyone know what this is, and if it's anything more that a marketing superlative? The only Google hits for the phrase are this story.
Sounds like marketing-speak for "gee-whiz super-powerful gun", though I suppose that it could be some arrangement of barrels that tests the stuff with various caliber rounds. I'm not sure why one would bother with such a thing.
Not only that, but Asimov wrote about this in 1952!
Why name your UI innovation in a way that suggest that it makes things less clear? This looks like an interesting phone, but that seems to me to be a weird name for a UI. Also, I'd prefer to sacrifice the keyboard for a thinner profile, given that it has at least as good a screen keyboard implementation as the iPhone.
I agree with your point about no protection not being the best protection, but I don't think that the statistics that you cite demonstrate the point that you are trying to make. The notion that motorcycle crashes in general have a greater incidence of fatality means that behavior that causes crashes will correlate better with motorcycle fatalities than with passenger vehicle fatalities.
A more meaningful number would be something like the number of crashes per vehicle mile. Or perhaps the number of injury-producing crashes per vehicle mile. Even then, a conclusion might be slippery, because motorcycles do not tend to get into minor accidents like parking lot fender-benders, but even a minor motorcycle accident is more likely to produce an injury than a passenger car accident.
He's not just a "security researcher" - he's an official blogger for Zscaler, a "cloud security" vendor. Essentially, they seem to provide security-checking proxies. My take is that he would have a vested interest in portraying the iPhone (or any platform not protected by Zscaler) as insecure.
The PhishTank list has 2279 entries. I'd be interested to know how many he tried, and which ones.
Yes, saying that it's a choice is not going to help someone much in overcoming depression. I've seen cognitive-behavioral therapy work, but it's not an easy cure. There is a lot of work involved. From (observed) experience, long-term antidepressant medication is not the answer. In the short term, it can be helpful, but it's detrimental in the long term, particularly when the patient depends on it.
Some people can do this on their own. Most can't.
And you're right that everyone has those moments. Even people who are generally happy and well-adjusted. It's a part of life. Feel the sadness and loss, even wallow in it a bit - it's a fundamental part of the human condition. It's only bad when you build your life around it, and can't escape.
Well said. The key here is choice. You've made choices to alter both the course and tenor of your life. Being happy is not something that happens to one, it is a choice that one makes. Not always easy (and often very hard), but possible. I've known others who have turned their life around in similar fashion, and they have my highest respect.
The extent to which they locked down the Razr is the reason that I am no longer a Verizon customer. They were way too willing to cripple the phone so that they could charge me for services.
I have an iPhone now. I'm not wild about everything that Apple and AT&T do, but I'm much happier with them than Verizon.
Aoife Clancy had fun with it, the last time I heard her sing live. Rather a different sort of thing, for a midwestern US audience.
There's also Eithne, though that's a bit more well-known these days.
Cohen had her face face slashed in a bar a couple of years ago (also here). My guess would be that this lawsuit was an effort to find out if the same guy was after her again.
There's a little more to this than anonymous insults on the Internet, and in this case it is probably justifiable to reveal the blogger's identity. Ideally, the police would look into it and determine whether or not the blogger is a threat (without making his identity public), but they likely do not have time to investigate anonymous Internet insults.
As has been mentioned, the real issue is seeing. The time difference to reach a person over a thirty meter distance is negligible. This is mostly because you don't jump in and swim across the pool. You walk quickly to the closest approach, and then - only if there is no alternative - you jump (not dive) into the pool.
When I taught lifesaving, the most important principle was this: don't turn a single drowning into a double drowning by acting rashly. Things can very easily go wrong. Which is more dangerous in the home, a gun or a swimming pool?
I worked as a lifeguard for five or six years, mostly two-hour stints for indoor pools. I never worked a shift alone - if only one lifeguard showed up, the pool closed (or did not open). Normal complement was three, so that we were covered for things like trips to the restroom. The other standing rule was that you didn't sit down - not in the elevated chairs, and not in a chair at the side of the pool. We were expected to walk the pool. roughly opposite. The rationale was not distance to potential problems, it was so that we would see what was happening.
One guard might be sufficient if there are only a few people swimming, say four or five. I'd be disinclined to work such a pool, though.
0.3% does indeed correspond to a rate of 0.003. That's what the article said, but it's not what the summary said. The summary said "The approach catches spam 70 percent of the time, with a 0.3 false positive rate." Omitting the "percent" changes the actual value by a factor of 100 from what the article says.
0.3 would be terrible - three out of ten false positives. 0.3 percent - what the article actually says - is not too bad. But current techniques allow me to check the spam bin for such messages. This technique would pretty much preclude that capability, since the mail would never arrive at the server. I'm not sure that a rate of 0.003 would be acceptable under those circumstances.
It needs this response, though:
There, fixed that for you.
In order to get italics with the current stylesheet, use <em> tags.
No, the HumVees were the originals. A Hummer is just a big, heavy HumVee-style body on an SUV chassis. At least, that's what they are now. The H1 was closer to the military version. Hummer on Wikipedia.
The other factor is that voting machines give instant feedback. With an optical scan ballot, for instance, you mark a space and feed it through the reader. That's it - no actual feedback on who that vote counted for. Unless you check your ballot carefully, you're not going to notice any mistakes. Whereas the electronic machine seems to make it pretty apparent.
But this "government limiting its own power" never seems to go where one would wish it to. They all want to look good on national security (particularly on the run up to the election), and a shallow look sees that as associated with a strong central government.
But real security can't rest on trampling the essential liberties of the people (citizens or not). There is not much understanding of that in Washington, or they mostly prefer willful disregard.
And something that this discussion needs: probably cause vs. reasonable suspicion.
Here. Hasn't been active for a couple of years, though.