Because even a very "high" accuracy machine system is still going to add a significant barrier to automatically cracking the results, especially if Google continues altering reCAPTCHA like they do. While you won't eliminate 100% of attackers, you can eliminate the vast majority, and slow down the attackers that do get through. The alternative is to use nothing, and believe me: you absolutely do not want that. The Internet would be 99.99999999% spam almost overnight if that happened.
That is possible to do. I know game companies have played around with loading the essential parts first, so you can play it when it is only half-downloaded. I am frankly surprised Valve hasn't done work on that for Steam, but I think the problem is it requires a ton of optimization about ordering, since you need to decide exactly what should be downloaded in exactly what order or you will end up with significant hiccups in gameplay (or straight-up crashing). That takes a lot of time to do, and when most game companies can't even remove all the bugs before they ship, I doubt it will become very widespread.
Pre-loading is, of course, a perfectly good option for new releases, but it still prevents an impulsive buy-and-play-immediately, which is (in my experience) a significant part of the attractiveness of consoles. It also requires foresight and that people keep the console on for extended periods of time (while not playing). Not a huge barrier, but it's still present.
With modern games weighing in at a hefty 5-20GB (depending, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less), even a fairly high speed connection will take hours to download the whole thing, unless you are running FIOS (which most people aren't). Even a 10Mbs connection will take an hour for a 5GB game, assuming it can max out, and that puts a lot of strain on the servers. Disc distributing makes far more sense, especially for consoles which tend to have a "put in the disc and play immediately" attitude.
Mind you, some of the big distributors would absolutely love download-only games, since that would effectively destroy the used-game market and help with piracy issues somewhat. I wouldn't be terribly shocked if many of them decide to not actually use a physical distribution method.
And, of course, DVD/Bluray disc playing is, in my experience, a very significant usage of consoles already, so it would be silly to omit that (except for the movie studios, who again would love to sell you a second, digital and digitally-DRMed version of every movie you already own). But it would remove far too much incentive for people to buy the console, and with the competition between the two sides, neither can risk the other gaining that advantage.
Never mind the people who actually pay the bill are the taxpayers, not the government. But most people never seem to remember that, maybe because most of the people who will end up paying the most are either the rich (right now, and note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, necessarily, it just makes it a lot easier to get behind government spending when it isn't coming out of your pocket) or the young (later, when the country is $100 trillion in debt, which obviously is a bad thing).
Why bother calibrating it? Just have them buy a new phone every year. Win-win, as far as Softbank is concerned (for that matter, the consumers might not even mind that much).
RIM still made $3.64 billion in revenue last year, for $197.5 million in profit (a huge drop from last year, but they are still making money). RIM definitely could still succeed, but not like this. They are still a massive company with a huge name-brand, they just need to figure out how to use that. It may be unlikely, but I wouldn't mind seeing them succeed: more competition in the smartphone industry could be a very good thing. I'd hate to see it turn into a pure Android/iOS duopoly with no chance of a third competitor (Windows Phone... doesn't really count).
::cough:: Jury of our peers. What exactly is it you think juries DO to reach a verdict?
Sit in court for days/weeks/months, listen to both sides' arguments and evidence, and assemble for a period of discussion among themselves for as long as it takes to reach a decision (after, of course, being vetted by both sides and the judge). The Internet... well, let's just say it tends to be a little less objective, far less informed, and significantly more hasty than that, 99% of the time. Would you want random Youtube commentators to decide your verdict in a trial?
Believe it or not, communism does not blatantly violate everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights and so we were kind of lacking on the support and moral high ground for that war.
Not true. To quote from Marx's Communist Manifesto:
[The Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
In other words, the only way to establish a Communist society is through violent revolution, which inherently infringes on others rights to life and/or freedom. The entire Manifesto is riddled with calls to violent revolution against the existing social order, and every communist society since (that I know of) has begun that way: through violence and bloodshed.
And I'm not even going into the question of whether property is a Universal right (which I believe it is, or at the very least a necessary prerequisite to freedom), which Communism absolutely inherently opposes by its very definition.
Or, in even simpler English, people tend to believe what they want to believe and education doesn't change that, it just means they can rationalize away their own beliefs better. Everyone does this, some people are just more or less subtle about doing so. Note that doesn't mean one side isn't right, but it certainly can mean large portions of one side are right for the wrong reasons. Science is actually rife with those kinds of people, and always has been.
Interesting tidbit: Galileo believed that the tides were caused by and evidence of the motion of the Earth around the sun, and was completely 100% totally wrong (in fact, his arguments were manifestly against the observations). His conclusion was correct, but his "proof" of it was complete and utter bullshit.
Why would a "God" need to perform an experiment, when He already knows the outcome? It is all irrational nonsense, fabricated stories no more substantial than children's fairy tales.
Why do people have children, when they know they will one day die? Because humans are worth creating, for their own sake. The end of the "experiment" is irrelevant: some things are done simply because they are worth doing.
And the answer is... don't know yet. But we're one step closer to knowing!... maybe, if they did the calculations right, and got all the parameters right, and our theories about how the universe works at a very low level are reasonably accurate. Then, we might be a little bit closer to knowing!
Possibly not, though, this could all be a blind end. But, that is how science works: it gets to something like the right answer, eventually.
I can't see the point in pursuing automated drivers. I mean, even if you could get them to work well 99% of the time, that 1% failure (or even.001% failure) would be just unacceptable.
And in this magic world you live in human drivers work right 100% of the time? For that matter, car breakdowns can cause accidents too, and we more than accept those. A.001% failure rate would certainly be acceptable (although "rate" is, in this case, ambiguous: do you mean.001% of driverless cars would ever crash?) That is vastly superior current percentages, which is roughly 2-3% per year. Even 1% failure rate per year would be a significant improvement over human drivers. And there really aren't that many hazards on the highway or especially freeways. In residential neighborhoods? Maybe, but that is a relatively small fraction of driving which can be overcome by having humans as backups, or highly cautious software. For most driving, you stay between the lines, note the position of nearby cars, and break to avoid any obstacles. A computer can perform those functions better than most humans, since it can track every single car nearby and their exact speed, trajectory, behavior patterns, etc. Humans cannot.
The Cobra is a widely used and available helicopter. The US uses the chassis for forest fighting: they aren't exactly difficult to find or examine closely. They probably could have bought one on the open market (maybe even indirectly from the US itself). Nuclear weapons are slightly harder to find.
However, with that said, the problem with building a nuclear weapon has never been (not for 40-50 years or so) the design. That is actually quite easy, most physics graduates could probably design you one. The basic design of basic nuclear weapons* is pretty simple, once you know what you are doing. You can find sketch-ups on Wikipedia. The problem is getting refined nuclear material that actually works in a nuclear weapon, and more importantly, actually testing the weapon. Easy to do for a helicopter: very difficult for a nuclear weapon.
*NB: thermonuclear weapons are a considerably different, and considerably more difficult, story. But they don't really need those.
However, if you have many companies on the market, the possibility that someone will cut prices and undercut you record profits prevents you from keeping prices high. With basically only two companies in the market, the fear of that happening is minimal, especially since both know the other is making a lot of money as well, and understandably wants to keep making that money at those margins (while a third company might be willing to sacrifice margins for increased volume). It's not collusion, but it certainly isn't good for consumers and shouldn't have happened.
They probably couldn't shut off the oxygen without access to the compartments themselves, especially if the control room was on fire (which apparently it was). Same with sealing the rooms: if they can't get to the rooms, it's hard to seal them off. Ideally, I suppose there would be automated systems capable of shutting off air and sealing specific sections, but these subs are a 40 year old design, and this one was in for a refit, so I don't imagine it has systems capable of that. You normally want a sub to keep supplying air to every section, and you certainly don't want an automated system glitching and shutting it off, so even if you could install such a system, it might not be worth it. Barring that, doing it manually would probably be possible, except for the part where the section you want to seal off is already on fire.
"Disabling", not deleting. Windows services are pretty easy to disable (Administrative Tools-> Services), such that the computer will start malfunctioning, without deleting them. The really important ones can't normally be turned off from the GUI, but there are ways around that. Turning them back on is pretty trivial, unless you go too far and can't actually boot the machine (in which case Safe Mode should still work).
Hardly surprising their tech know-how was stone-age. If they were actually competent, they wouldn't be running some lame over-the-phone scam like this. They would either be working a legitimate job or running a large-scale botnet somewhere. The vast majority of criminals are stupid, because smart people either don't get into crime or don't do low-level crap like this.
A CA signed certificate is still required (well, unless you want a self-signed warning on every browser). This system just allows you to verify for repeated visitors that a new, un-TACK-signed certificate isn't being used. The CA signing is still required to verify a) that the host hasn't been breached (in which case the TACK key would be lost, since as I understand it they retain the private key) and b) that first-time visitors can get a moderately-trustworthy (or at least the same as currently exists) session. This system would require that both the host and the CA are compromised. It's somewhat similar to the Convergence system that was proposed before, only instead of having cloud-sourced verification of the certificate, you have the host verify (based on past experience) that the certificate is valid. By itself, it isn't very secure, but in addition to the present system it adds a great deal of security.
I wouldn't consider "with codecs" and "without codecs" flavors, exactly, since they don't really change the install at all. More like "legally covering our asses." They don't even have direct links to the downloads in TFA.
It's DARPA, so neither really. Just them doing things to see if they can, which is 99% of what DARPA does. Also encouraging innovation and experimentation... which again, is what DARPA is all about.
The judge will be deciding the damages on the 9 line RangeCheck function which was found to be infringed. So there is a damages phase, of sorts. The 9 lines include some blank lines. RangeCheck is a function to check if an array index is between zero inclusive and some upper bound. I imagine that Oracle has been severely financially damaged by Google having copied this highly sophisticated function.
The judge has already warned Oracle that he think a high-school student could write that function and not to expect much in damages from it, so I'm thinking OP's "a few thousand" might be a little optimistic for Oracle. It may well end up being in the hundreds (and it could be even lower, depending on how much of as example the judge wants to set).
Except that Google and Bing don't also have access to your address book (well, unless you use an Android and wear a tinfoil hat), and aren't generally used to write mails (well, unless you use Gmail/Hotmail, but I'm assuming IBM doesn't). Siri basically has access to everything on your phone, at least in theory. The exact data it collects is unknown, and probably perfectly innocent, but if you don't actually know, and cannot verify it, it is better to assume it is everything.
Even if Apple doesn't do anything with the data, their is very much a risk that data could be hacked, which could give the hackers access to every email, search, and potentially personal detail on your iPhone. That is a massive security hole.
Yes, getting 100+ miles high is the easy part - getting that high with 17,000 MPH of sideways velocity is where it gets tricky. Without that much sideways velocity, you just fall back down.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say both are pretty tricky.
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Because even a very "high" accuracy machine system is still going to add a significant barrier to automatically cracking the results, especially if Google continues altering reCAPTCHA like they do. While you won't eliminate 100% of attackers, you can eliminate the vast majority, and slow down the attackers that do get through. The alternative is to use nothing, and believe me: you absolutely do not want that. The Internet would be 99.99999999% spam almost overnight if that happened.
That is possible to do. I know game companies have played around with loading the essential parts first, so you can play it when it is only half-downloaded. I am frankly surprised Valve hasn't done work on that for Steam, but I think the problem is it requires a ton of optimization about ordering, since you need to decide exactly what should be downloaded in exactly what order or you will end up with significant hiccups in gameplay (or straight-up crashing). That takes a lot of time to do, and when most game companies can't even remove all the bugs before they ship, I doubt it will become very widespread.
Pre-loading is, of course, a perfectly good option for new releases, but it still prevents an impulsive buy-and-play-immediately, which is (in my experience) a significant part of the attractiveness of consoles. It also requires foresight and that people keep the console on for extended periods of time (while not playing). Not a huge barrier, but it's still present.
With modern games weighing in at a hefty 5-20GB (depending, sometimes a bit more, sometimes less), even a fairly high speed connection will take hours to download the whole thing, unless you are running FIOS (which most people aren't). Even a 10Mbs connection will take an hour for a 5GB game, assuming it can max out, and that puts a lot of strain on the servers. Disc distributing makes far more sense, especially for consoles which tend to have a "put in the disc and play immediately" attitude.
Mind you, some of the big distributors would absolutely love download-only games, since that would effectively destroy the used-game market and help with piracy issues somewhat. I wouldn't be terribly shocked if many of them decide to not actually use a physical distribution method.
And, of course, DVD/Bluray disc playing is, in my experience, a very significant usage of consoles already, so it would be silly to omit that (except for the movie studios, who again would love to sell you a second, digital and digitally-DRMed version of every movie you already own). But it would remove far too much incentive for people to buy the console, and with the competition between the two sides, neither can risk the other gaining that advantage.
Never mind the people who actually pay the bill are the taxpayers, not the government. But most people never seem to remember that, maybe because most of the people who will end up paying the most are either the rich (right now, and note I'm not saying this is a bad thing, necessarily, it just makes it a lot easier to get behind government spending when it isn't coming out of your pocket) or the young (later, when the country is $100 trillion in debt, which obviously is a bad thing).
Why bother calibrating it? Just have them buy a new phone every year. Win-win, as far as Softbank is concerned (for that matter, the consumers might not even mind that much).
RIM still made $3.64 billion in revenue last year, for $197.5 million in profit (a huge drop from last year, but they are still making money). RIM definitely could still succeed, but not like this. They are still a massive company with a huge name-brand, they just need to figure out how to use that. It may be unlikely, but I wouldn't mind seeing them succeed: more competition in the smartphone industry could be a very good thing. I'd hate to see it turn into a pure Android/iOS duopoly with no chance of a third competitor (Windows Phone... doesn't really count).
::cough:: Jury of our peers. What exactly is it you think juries DO to reach a verdict?
Sit in court for days/weeks/months, listen to both sides' arguments and evidence, and assemble for a period of discussion among themselves for as long as it takes to reach a decision (after, of course, being vetted by both sides and the judge). The Internet... well, let's just say it tends to be a little less objective, far less informed, and significantly more hasty than that, 99% of the time. Would you want random Youtube commentators to decide your verdict in a trial?
Believe it or not, communism does not blatantly violate everyone's rules of Universal Human Rights and so we were kind of lacking on the support and moral high ground for that war.
Not true. To quote from Marx's Communist Manifesto:
[The Communists] openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.
In other words, the only way to establish a Communist society is through violent revolution, which inherently infringes on others rights to life and/or freedom. The entire Manifesto is riddled with calls to violent revolution against the existing social order, and every communist society since (that I know of) has begun that way: through violence and bloodshed.
And I'm not even going into the question of whether property is a Universal right (which I believe it is, or at the very least a necessary prerequisite to freedom), which Communism absolutely inherently opposes by its very definition.
Or, in even simpler English, people tend to believe what they want to believe and education doesn't change that, it just means they can rationalize away their own beliefs better. Everyone does this, some people are just more or less subtle about doing so. Note that doesn't mean one side isn't right, but it certainly can mean large portions of one side are right for the wrong reasons. Science is actually rife with those kinds of people, and always has been.
Interesting tidbit: Galileo believed that the tides were caused by and evidence of the motion of the Earth around the sun, and was completely 100% totally wrong (in fact, his arguments were manifestly against the observations). His conclusion was correct, but his "proof" of it was complete and utter bullshit.
The voices in your head told you that?
Why would a "God" need to perform an experiment, when He already knows the outcome? It is all irrational nonsense, fabricated stories no more substantial than children's fairy tales.
Why do people have children, when they know they will one day die? Because humans are worth creating, for their own sake. The end of the "experiment" is irrelevant: some things are done simply because they are worth doing.
So, uhhhh... How?
And the answer is... don't know yet. But we're one step closer to knowing!... maybe, if they did the calculations right, and got all the parameters right, and our theories about how the universe works at a very low level are reasonably accurate. Then, we might be a little bit closer to knowing!
Possibly not, though, this could all be a blind end. But, that is how science works: it gets to something like the right answer, eventually.
I can't see the point in pursuing automated drivers. I mean, even if you could get them to work well 99% of the time, that 1% failure (or even .001% failure) would be just unacceptable.
And in this magic world you live in human drivers work right 100% of the time? For that matter, car breakdowns can cause accidents too, and we more than accept those. A .001% failure rate would certainly be acceptable (although "rate" is, in this case, ambiguous: do you mean .001% of driverless cars would ever crash?) That is vastly superior current percentages, which is roughly 2-3% per year. Even 1% failure rate per year would be a significant improvement over human drivers. And there really aren't that many hazards on the highway or especially freeways. In residential neighborhoods? Maybe, but that is a relatively small fraction of driving which can be overcome by having humans as backups, or highly cautious software. For most driving, you stay between the lines, note the position of nearby cars, and break to avoid any obstacles. A computer can perform those functions better than most humans, since it can track every single car nearby and their exact speed, trajectory, behavior patterns, etc. Humans cannot.
The Cobra is a widely used and available helicopter. The US uses the chassis for forest fighting: they aren't exactly difficult to find or examine closely. They probably could have bought one on the open market (maybe even indirectly from the US itself). Nuclear weapons are slightly harder to find.
However, with that said, the problem with building a nuclear weapon has never been (not for 40-50 years or so) the design. That is actually quite easy, most physics graduates could probably design you one. The basic design of basic nuclear weapons* is pretty simple, once you know what you are doing. You can find sketch-ups on Wikipedia. The problem is getting refined nuclear material that actually works in a nuclear weapon, and more importantly, actually testing the weapon. Easy to do for a helicopter: very difficult for a nuclear weapon.
*NB: thermonuclear weapons are a considerably different, and considerably more difficult, story. But they don't really need those.
However, if you have many companies on the market, the possibility that someone will cut prices and undercut you record profits prevents you from keeping prices high. With basically only two companies in the market, the fear of that happening is minimal, especially since both know the other is making a lot of money as well, and understandably wants to keep making that money at those margins (while a third company might be willing to sacrifice margins for increased volume). It's not collusion, but it certainly isn't good for consumers and shouldn't have happened.
They probably couldn't shut off the oxygen without access to the compartments themselves, especially if the control room was on fire (which apparently it was). Same with sealing the rooms: if they can't get to the rooms, it's hard to seal them off. Ideally, I suppose there would be automated systems capable of shutting off air and sealing specific sections, but these subs are a 40 year old design, and this one was in for a refit, so I don't imagine it has systems capable of that. You normally want a sub to keep supplying air to every section, and you certainly don't want an automated system glitching and shutting it off, so even if you could install such a system, it might not be worth it. Barring that, doing it manually would probably be possible, except for the part where the section you want to seal off is already on fire.
"Disabling", not deleting. Windows services are pretty easy to disable (Administrative Tools-> Services), such that the computer will start malfunctioning, without deleting them. The really important ones can't normally be turned off from the GUI, but there are ways around that. Turning them back on is pretty trivial, unless you go too far and can't actually boot the machine (in which case Safe Mode should still work).
Hardly surprising their tech know-how was stone-age. If they were actually competent, they wouldn't be running some lame over-the-phone scam like this. They would either be working a legitimate job or running a large-scale botnet somewhere. The vast majority of criminals are stupid, because smart people either don't get into crime or don't do low-level crap like this.
A CA signed certificate is still required (well, unless you want a self-signed warning on every browser). This system just allows you to verify for repeated visitors that a new, un-TACK-signed certificate isn't being used. The CA signing is still required to verify a) that the host hasn't been breached (in which case the TACK key would be lost, since as I understand it they retain the private key) and b) that first-time visitors can get a moderately-trustworthy (or at least the same as currently exists) session. This system would require that both the host and the CA are compromised. It's somewhat similar to the Convergence system that was proposed before, only instead of having cloud-sourced verification of the certificate, you have the host verify (based on past experience) that the certificate is valid. By itself, it isn't very secure, but in addition to the present system it adds a great deal of security.
I wouldn't consider "with codecs" and "without codecs" flavors, exactly, since they don't really change the install at all. More like "legally covering our asses." They don't even have direct links to the downloads in TFA.
It's DARPA, so neither really. Just them doing things to see if they can, which is 99% of what DARPA does. Also encouraging innovation and experimentation... which again, is what DARPA is all about.
The judge will be deciding the damages on the 9 line RangeCheck function which was found to be infringed. So there is a damages phase, of sorts. The 9 lines include some blank lines. RangeCheck is a function to check if an array index is between zero inclusive and some upper bound. I imagine that Oracle has been severely financially damaged by Google having copied this highly sophisticated function.
The judge has already warned Oracle that he think a high-school student could write that function and not to expect much in damages from it, so I'm thinking OP's "a few thousand" might be a little optimistic for Oracle. It may well end up being in the hundreds (and it could be even lower, depending on how much of as example the judge wants to set).
Well, Microsoft won an import ban against Motorola for a patent on "generating meeting requests", so I'd say turnabout is fair play, in this case.
Although you are right about the damages, in a way: how are all those red-ringed XBOX 360s supposed to get replaced now? *ducks*
Google is evil.
Ah, right. Let me check: timestamp of post matches that of article, 4 post history all on Google/MS discussions (all today). Oh look, a shill!
Gah, I mean "...and aren't generally used to write emails" and "there is very much a risk..." I need more coffee.
Except that Google and Bing don't also have access to your address book (well, unless you use an Android and wear a tinfoil hat), and aren't generally used to write mails (well, unless you use Gmail/Hotmail, but I'm assuming IBM doesn't). Siri basically has access to everything on your phone, at least in theory. The exact data it collects is unknown, and probably perfectly innocent, but if you don't actually know, and cannot verify it, it is better to assume it is everything.
Even if Apple doesn't do anything with the data, their is very much a risk that data could be hacked, which could give the hackers access to every email, search, and potentially personal detail on your iPhone. That is a massive security hole.
Yes, getting 100+ miles high is the easy part - getting that high with 17,000 MPH of sideways velocity is where it gets tricky. Without that much sideways velocity, you just fall back down.
I'm just gonna go ahead and say both are pretty tricky.