Yeah that's a very promising concept, which is may or may not eventually work well at scale. Hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy.
It sounds really great and works, in practical terms, at small scale - much like solar energy in the 1950s (and somewhat still today).
> * it's funny how "Americans" (not from the entire continent!) use only USA as example of "a country":P
The US is the country where I can vote and otherwise influence policy, so it makes more sense for me to discuss what US policy should be versus what Germany's policy should be.
It's funny how "Europeans" (not the entire continent) currently aren't sure where the live - Europe/EU or Belgium or whatever "country" they live in. Be careful with that, guys - a bunch of states in North America were convinced to join a federation, an alliance in which they delegated a specific list of powers to the union government, declaring that: -- The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people. --
The union government completely ignored the list of things they were allowed to do, of course, and starting acting as *the* government of the whole federation, completely usurping almost all power from from the constituent states.
You *can* do all that stuff. It's expensive to buy and maintain the batteries and auxiliary equipment, most lots of people *could* do it. Do you do so, do you use only electricity from your own solar panels?
If so, congratulations. Do you also drive to work? There's a bid difference between 6-7 watts for an LED in a room versus 10,000 watts to charge your Tesla.
Along with mechanical considerations, another issue with increasing RPM is transonic effects at certain points along the blade. The tips of the blades currently move at nearly 200 MPH. That means airflow at certain points alomg the airfoil is probably close 250- 300 MPH relative to the blade. At 500 MPH (mach 0.7) things start getting real weird, there are a lot of problems. So much so that it was once believed that going faster than mach 1 was impossible. It turns out that planes can fly at mach 1.3, but the range between mach 0.7 and mach 1.2 is a bitch. All of that to say, you can't allow the blades to spin twice as fast because then transonic effects ruin your day.
> Do they apply a mechanical brake? Turn the paddles away from the wind?
Yes and yes, both are used. Sometimes the blades / sails fold up completely out of the wind. Many techniques are used, but you hit on the two most common.
> Since you seem to know more about this than the average person here
I've studied it a bit. One particular research paper I read was very informative; I wish I could remember the author's name in order to pass that along. There are two people who comment here who know more about the subject than I do.
> It seems like stronger wind = faster spinning = more electricity.
Yeah stronger wind = a LOT more power, and could be a LOT more electricity, if you had infinitely strong, infinitely light materials with no friction.
> Are they designed to only generate power at a specific RPM or something?
Yeah they are designed to produce power most of the time, meaning they operate at the lowest normal wind speed. All the parts, from the bearings to the wire gauges etc are designed for that low-normal speed. To work well at higher speed (and MUCH higher power), they'd have to be designed differently and therefore not work at lower speed. Obviously there's a lot of engineering, but one example is easy enough to picture, a bearing. Imagine a shaft and bearing designed to handle 500 horsepower. You grab the shaft and try to turn it with your hands. It's probably not going to turn - a big beefy part designed for a lot of power will have a lot of friction.
Did I just tell you to imagine grabbing your shaft in your hand and feeling the friction?
> natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.
Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason. That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.
> All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning
Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.
Suppose you just want to be a cheerleader, so you just sing the praises of solar electric, and pretend that it can replace, rather than supplement, other sources. Then you end up encouraging people to think solar is "the answer" and they therefore oppose natural gas and nuclear infrastructure, leaving you stuck burning coal for 50 years longer than necessary. That's what has happened. We could have gotten rid of coal in the US by 1975. We're still burning a shit-ton of coal, which spews radiative substances directly into the air, because rather than talking honestly about an energy mix that actually works, half the population decided to romanticize solar and wind, and avoid mentioning in what ways they don't work so well. If, 50 years ago, the leaders of Greenpeace said what you said above (use solar when you can, natural gas and nuclear when you can't), we wouldn't be burning coal today.
> Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?
Unfortunately they don't produce more power when the wind is stronger than normal, and as you mentioned most have to be shut down for storm winds.
That sucks because the power of the wind is proportional to the CUBE of it's velocity. Wind at 40 MPH has 64 times as much power as wind at 10 MPH, but we can't harvest all that extra power. Instead, power captured by turbines is basically capped at their normal production, so power output only falls with lower wind speeds, it doesn't increase with higher speeds.
This is really frustrating, being unable to capture most of the available power on windy days, but it's unlikely to change. The difference in the amount of force applied to the turbine and it's parts is really significant. Imagine trying to build a keyboard that works with light touches on the keys, and also works well when you bang it with a hammer.
Rei mentioned a lot of interesting factors. The bottom line, the tldr, is basically:
We can store energy from afternoon sun for a few hours and use it to cook dinner. On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
Another HUGE factor is energy needs versus current electricity usage. Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses with natural gas and heating oil, transportation is by diesel and gasoline. One European country that brags about its clean solar energy burns trash for heating, as well as diesel. If we want electric cars, electric trucks, electric heating, etc we're going to need eight times as much electricity as we have now. So suppose there was a major breakthrough in physics that allowed us to store as much electricity as California currently needs for a cloudy week. That would still be only 12% of their ENERGY needs for the week.
> Both of us know that ISIS (Daesh please, it is more insulting) would not give a damn about copyright or even paying you and would just take it anyway.
That's why the medium matters. You suggested a creator shouldn't be allowed to decide which medium is used for distribution. If I'm required by law to post all of the code code on the internet, the goat-fuckers will of course take it. If the code, at least the sensitive parts, is supplied to the aid workers embedded in a piece of hardware, it's a lot harder for Daesh to get, and especially harder for them to get many of them.
Therefore, while probably more than half the code I've written in my career in publicly available on Github or similar places, some is intentionally available only to approved customers. For fifteen years some groups of bad guys have been trying to figure out exactly how certain elements of my security code work, and for fifteen years I've been able to mislead them with decoys because I don't have to put the code on Github for them to see.
> There you attempt character assassination, to what point? Your entire paragraph is semantically null i.e. worthless. In fact so is the rest of the post. > If you had nothing but self adulation and denigrating of others to say why did you even post?
Can you point me to what sentence you're talking about, because I re-read my post and I don't see anywhere that I said anything about you. I mentioned the KKK and Daesh as examples of people I don't want to work for; is that the "character assasination" you're talking about?
> Saying 'law should' is not proposing a law.... > Or have you decided that law is unnecessary?
As mentioned in my post, I've decided that new laws are generally ham-fisted, a blunt instrument. Additionally, 99.9% of the stuff that matters is already covered by existing law. Therefore, when one's first thought is "there ought to be a law" that's normally a mistake. My default position, my starting point until there is evidence otherwise, is that new laws are likely to cause more / worse problems than they solve, therefore we should be careful when we start down the road of "there ought to be a law".
I also believe generally that if you make a table, that's your table for you to use as you see fit. You can invite me to sit at your table or not. If you make a coat, it's your coat. You can keep it for yourself, you can offer to sell it to me, you can give it to me as a gift, or you can trade it to me. It's yours because you made it. If you make a computer program or tou make a song, it's your program, your song. You made it, you can do what you want with it, as a general rule. Not an absolute rule, but generally. I respect that even if I'm slightly annoyed because I'd like to sit at your table or burn a copy of your song to jam out to.
While most of my work is in security, and a long explanation would be necessary to understand an example, here are two simple examples I can share.
I wrote some software that would be very useful to spammers, and I've owned a couple of hosting companies. In both I "selected my audience", I declined to sell the software or hosting services to spamming scumbags. I think it's good that I can, and most people do, decline to provide software and services to spammers. I even put the following in my license file to make it easier to use my copyright against spammers:
License cost to use this software for legitimate opt-in mailing: $150 License cost to use this software for sending spam: $250,000
That would give my lawyer a (weak) basis to sue spammers for the cost of the license they failed to purchase, $250,000.
Another, less ethically clear but real example is from back in the 1990s when Microsoft's motto was "always be evil". At the time Microsoft was in legal trouble all around the world because they were constantly fucking everyone over. I wrote some which I gave away free. Sun distributed some of my software with their OS. I didn't want Microsoft using my work for evil, so my license was that everyone could use my work, for free, except Microsoft. If Microsoft wanted to use my work as part of Windows, they'd need a license from me that didn't allow it to be easily used for evil.
> example; You Tube videos that 'have not been made available in your country'.
That's quite frustrating, I'm sure.
> Once someone has decided to commercially share they should not be permitted to 'select' an audience or even a specific distribution channel.
So if I write some software for United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, designed to help aid workers avoid danger, I have to sell the system to ISIS as well? While it's certainly frustrating to have trouble watching your favorite Bieber video in the format you most prefer, I may create software systems that actually impact the world, that affect your safety and security. I think I would be very irresponsible for many creators to be indifferent to how their creations are used, and by whom.
Personally, I would go so far as to say that if an artist doesn't want their best-known work to become known as the theme song of the Donald Trump (or worse, the KKK) they should be able to decline that license.
I'd gladly write stuff for Unicef at alow price and I think I'm within my rights to then decline to sell it at the same price to Martin Shkreli or Ahmadinejad.
Again I do understand your frustration, yet dictating things through law is always ham-fisted. One must be careful about the unintended consequences because every law has unintended consequences - often MOST of the instances to which a law applies aren't the types of cases it was intended for.
> Apple better have a really good explanation for why they did enable this moron to do so while being able to disable him.
Here are a couple of really good explanations:
Yes, Apple could make the phone completely lock itself any time it's moving. Customers, who like to like to use their phones while riding in cars and buses, would then not buy their product, they'd sell no phones, and nobody would be protected. A few parents might want this safety feature on their kids' phones, so maybe they'd still sell a few iphones to parents based on advertising the safety features, but mostly it would put Apple out of the phone business.
The phone could try to guess whether the person is a passenger or if they're driving. Sometimes it would guess wrong, of course. When it wrongly guess that a passenger was the driver, the passenger's phone would lock up and annoy the hell out of customers. Back to explanation #1. Worse, sometimes it would guess "passenger" when in fact the person was driving. The parents who bought the phones based on the advertised safety feature which would actually fail often would then sue Apple every time a crash occurs.
> Let's understand the REAL issue here; the PATENT prevented everyone else from implementing a safety.
Clearly Apple's patent didn't cause Apple to not implement it, so what do you think caused that? I would think that customers want to use their phones while riding in cars, buses, etc. Customers won't buy buy a phone that locks itself when moving.
Suppose Apple tries to get really clever and try to guess whether the person using the phone is the driver or a passenger, and they advertise this "safety feature". Obviously it's not going to guess correctly all the time - sometimes it'll annoy passengers who it thinks are driving, but worse sometimes it would guess "passenger" when the person is in fact driving. An advertised safety feature that often fails is obviously a huge liability. The parents of the teenager who crashes while using her iPhone will sue Apple, saying "web bought our daughter an iPhone because you said it has this safety feature. Your safety feature didn't work, you owe us $20 million." There would be plenty of other paths to liability, of course. Suppose Apple blocks video chat but not phone calls. Teenager talking on iPhone crashes. Parents sue "you could have prevented phone calls while driving, your feature that blocks Facetime proves you can and know you should. You failed to block phone calls, you us $20 million too".
Until Fortran was developed, humans used to write code telling the computer what to do. Since the late 1950s, we've been writing a high-level description, then a computer program writes the program that actually gets executed.
Nowadays, there's frequently a computer program, such as a browser, which accepts our high-level description of the task and interprets it before generating more specific instructions for another piece of software, an api library, which creates more specific instructions for another piece of software, such as a graphics library, which generates instructions for a graphics driver, which generates code used by a microcode implementation, which is the actual machine code that runs on the processor.
ALREADY the programming for the machine is produced by software, running code produced by software, which runs code produced by software. That's been true for 60 years, so pardon me if I'm not too concerned about the idea of a software program that creates software programs. Those are called "interpreters", "compilers", and "microcode", and they are exactly the tools that allow software engineers to be so productive.
> FB certainly could have replicated Instagram for a lot less than a billion dollars
Maybe. Microsoft tried to build a social network and failed (so.cl). Google tried and failed (Google+). Facebook did manage to build one social network successfully, but there's little certainty that they could build another one and have success.
As someone else said, they could build most of the SOFTWARE the powers the site for several thousand dollars, but that's not where the value is.
> What does "bipartisan support" mean in a system with 7 parties
It's supported by the bi party, the party of bi people, of course.
> Eo the US American journalists have no vocabulary to describe the reality outside of their country?
This reminds me of the story last week about the federal government of France. Huh? Federalism in France? For a fraction of a second I thought you made the same mistake when you mentioned the federal government of Germany, but then I realized Germany is in fact a federation, federal is the proper term.
> (*) I hope I haven't missed any party.
I hope you didn't miss last night's party, it was rockin.
That post was interesting, thanks. One of the co-founders of the company I work for is a Russian-speaking gentleman who came to the US from Ukraine, I think. We had offices in Ukraine until recently. It would be interesting to hear what Misha thinks of all this.
if (usa.spies)
usa.get_leverage();
china.spies = true;
russia.spies = true;
For non-programmers, Russia, and especially China, will do this regardless of whether the US does it. In theory, it could be reduced by treating an electronic attack the same as a physical attack; China isn't going to bomb the USA. However in practice it's very difficult to know whether a cyber attack is state-sponsored or not. An attack by Russian people isn't necessarily an attack by Russia.
So what we're left with is the very difficult job of strengthening defenses. Fortunately, this has a great side-effect - systems that don't fail even when being attacked are systems that don't fail when not under attack. Secure systems are reliable systems.
I work for an information security company. All of us should really know better, and yet we do occasionally click the phish bait sent out by corporate security. After being caught once, we start being more careful - at least for six months to a year. I think it's a good idea. Corpsec doesn't need to really scold us or anything, just informing us "you clicked on a fake email" is enough to raise our awareness.
This was informative and it is a common mistake to think that "applied for patent related to X" means "patented X". The Slashdot summary tells us only that the application is something *related to* magnets on ear buds, it could be something truly novel, unique and complex having to do with the magnet that's needed to drive the tiny speaker in the earbuds, and preventing (or even using) interference from multiple magnets.
It's also important to keep in mind that a patent application is not a patent. Applications sometimes get kicked back and are revised multiple times, due to prior art or other issues.
In this particular case, there actually is an issue of novelty, of prior art. Apple's patent application, at least the initial filing, is for a device that has all (not some) of the following characteristics: Earbuds With a retaining arm that goes around the back of the ear Magnets in the arm Magnets in the earbud body Attraction between the magnets in the arm and in those in the earbud body hold the assembly in place
There is a legitimate argument that given the prior art of magnetic earrings, which are commonplace, and earbuds with retaining arms, which are also commonplace, it may be obvious to one skilled in the art that you could put magnets in the retaining arm.
After submitting, I realized part of my post was probably unclear. Currently, I mostly write tools to find known vulnerabilities. If you didn't install the security patches on patch Tuesday, my tools will discover that. If you're still using an outdated cipher, my tools detect that. Brand new vulnerabilities are a different department located in a different country.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah that's a very promising concept, which is may or may not eventually work well at scale. Hydrocarbons are a very effective way to store and transport energy.
It sounds really great and works, in practical terms, at small scale - much like solar energy in the 1950s (and somewhat still today).
> * it's funny how "Americans" (not from the entire continent!) use only USA as example of "a country" :P
The US is the country where I can vote and otherwise influence policy, so it makes more sense for me to discuss what US policy should be versus what Germany's policy should be.
It's funny how "Europeans" (not the entire continent) currently aren't sure where the live - Europe/EU or Belgium or whatever "country" they live in. Be careful with that, guys - a bunch of states in North America were convinced to join a federation, an alliance in which they delegated a specific list of powers to the union government, declaring that:
--
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
--
The union government completely ignored the list of things they were allowed to do, of course, and starting acting as *the* government of the whole federation, completely usurping almost all power from from the constituent states.
You *can* do all that stuff. It's expensive to buy and maintain the batteries and auxiliary equipment, most lots of people *could* do it. Do you do so, do you use only electricity from your own solar panels?
If so, congratulations. Do you also drive to work? There's a bid difference between 6-7 watts for an LED in a room versus 10,000 watts to charge your Tesla.
> faster spinning = more electricity.
Along with mechanical considerations, another issue with increasing RPM is transonic effects at certain points along the blade. The tips of the blades currently move at nearly 200 MPH. That means airflow at certain points alomg the airfoil is probably close 250- 300 MPH relative to the blade. At 500 MPH (mach 0.7) things start getting real weird, there are a lot of problems. So much so that it was once believed that going faster than mach 1 was impossible. It turns out that planes can fly at mach 1.3, but the range between mach 0.7 and mach 1.2 is a bitch. All of that to say, you can't allow the blades to spin twice as fast because then transonic effects ruin your day.
> Do they apply a mechanical brake? Turn the paddles away from the wind?
Yes and yes, both are used. Sometimes the blades / sails fold up completely out of the wind. Many techniques are used, but you hit on the two most common.
> Since you seem to know more about this than the average person here
I've studied it a bit. One particular research paper I read was very informative; I wish I could remember the author's name in order to pass that along. There are two people who comment here who know more about the subject than I do.
> It seems like stronger wind = faster spinning = more electricity.
Yeah stronger wind = a LOT more power, and could be a LOT more electricity, if you had infinitely strong, infinitely light materials with no friction.
> Are they designed to only generate power at a specific RPM or something?
Yeah they are designed to produce power most of the time, meaning they operate at the lowest normal wind speed. All the parts, from the bearings to the wire gauges etc are designed for that low-normal speed. To work well at higher speed (and MUCH higher power), they'd have to be designed differently and therefore not work at lower speed. Obviously there's a lot of engineering, but one example is easy enough to picture, a bearing. Imagine a shaft and bearing designed to handle 500 horsepower. You grab the shaft and try to turn it with your hands. It's probably not going to turn - a big beefy part designed for a lot of power will have a lot of friction.
Did I just tell you to imagine grabbing your shaft in your hand and feeling the friction?
> natural gas burning plants could handle 10x their normal load to cover for idle solar panels.
Yep, natural gas and nuclear can provide power when solar isn't providing enough at the moment, for whatever reason. That's a great mix. The cheapest, cleanest energy when it's available, reliable energy that's still clean and reasonably cheap when the more preferred energy isn't sufficient at the moment.
> All of the "problems" with solar energy are very easily solvable [by using natural gas instead] and most are hardly even worth mentioning
Whether or not it's worth an honest analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of different sources of energy depends on whether you want to actually solve some problem, such as environmental problems, or you just want to be a cheerleader for your "team", without actually accomplishing anything.
Suppose you just want to be a cheerleader, so you just sing the praises of solar electric, and pretend that it can replace, rather than supplement, other sources. Then you end up encouraging people to think solar is "the answer" and they therefore oppose natural gas and nuclear infrastructure, leaving you stuck burning coal for 50 years longer than necessary. That's what has happened. We could have gotten rid of coal in the US by 1975. We're still burning a shit-ton of coal, which spews radiative substances directly into the air, because rather than talking honestly about an energy mix that actually works, half the population decided to romanticize solar and wind, and avoid mentioning in what ways they don't work so well. If, 50 years ago, the leaders of Greenpeace said what you said above (use solar when you can, natural gas and nuclear when you can't), we wouldn't be burning coal today.
> Germany generates something like 20-30% of their power from solar and they are routinely cloudy there.
Something like 2% of their energy. 20% of their domestically produced electricity (they import).
> Wouldn't wind farms produce more power during a storm? Or do they have to be shut down?
Unfortunately they don't produce more power when the wind is stronger than normal, and as you mentioned most have to be shut down for storm winds.
That sucks because the power of the wind is proportional to the CUBE of it's velocity. Wind at 40 MPH has 64 times as much power as wind at 10 MPH, but we can't harvest all that extra power. Instead, power captured by turbines is basically capped at their normal production, so power output only falls with lower wind speeds, it doesn't increase with higher speeds.
This is really frustrating, being unable to capture most of the available power on windy days, but it's unlikely to change. The difference in the amount of force applied to the turbine and it's parts is really significant. Imagine trying to build a keyboard that works with light touches on the keys, and also works well when you bang it with a hammer.
Rei mentioned a lot of interesting factors. The bottom line, the tldr, is basically:
We can store energy from afternoon sun for a few hours and use it to cook dinner.
On the other hand, when a big storm system covers half the US for a week, there's no storage that is going to come anywhere close to providing a week of energy for half the country.
Another HUGE factor is energy needs versus current electricity usage. Right now, most of the world's energy usage isn't electricity. We heat homes and businesses with natural gas and heating oil, transportation is by diesel and gasoline. One European country that brags about its clean solar energy burns trash for heating, as well as diesel. If we want electric cars, electric trucks, electric heating, etc we're going to need eight times as much electricity as we have now. So suppose there was a major breakthrough in physics that allowed us to store as much electricity as California currently needs for a cloudy week. That would still be only 12% of their ENERGY needs for the week.
> Both of us know that ISIS (Daesh please, it is more insulting) would not give a damn about copyright or even paying you and would just take it anyway.
That's why the medium matters. You suggested a creator shouldn't be allowed to decide which medium is used for distribution. If I'm required by law to post all of the code code on the internet, the goat-fuckers will of course take it. If the code, at least the sensitive parts, is supplied to the aid workers embedded in a piece of hardware, it's a lot harder for Daesh to get, and especially harder for them to get many of them.
Therefore, while probably more than half the code I've written in my career in publicly available on Github or similar places, some is intentionally available only to approved customers. For fifteen years some groups of bad guys have been trying to figure out exactly how certain elements of my security code work, and for fifteen years I've been able to mislead them with decoys because I don't have to put the code on Github for them to see.
> There you attempt character assassination, to what point? Your entire paragraph is semantically null i.e. worthless. In fact so is the rest of the post.
> If you had nothing but self adulation and denigrating of others to say why did you even post?
Can you point me to what sentence you're talking about, because I re-read my post and I don't see anywhere that I said anything about you. I mentioned the KKK and Daesh as examples of people I don't want to work for; is that the "character assasination" you're talking about?
> Saying 'law should' is not proposing a law. ...
> Or have you decided that law is unnecessary?
As mentioned in my post, I've decided that new laws are generally ham-fisted, a blunt instrument. Additionally, 99.9% of the stuff that matters is already covered by existing law. Therefore, when one's first thought is "there ought to be a law" that's normally a mistake. My default position, my starting point until there is evidence otherwise, is that new laws are likely to cause more / worse problems than they solve, therefore we should be careful when we start down the road of "there ought to be a law".
I also believe generally that if you make a table, that's your table for you to use as you see fit. You can invite me to sit at your table or not. If you make a coat, it's your coat. You can keep it for yourself, you can offer to sell it to me, you can give it to me as a gift, or you can trade it to me. It's yours because you made it. If you make a computer program or tou make a song, it's your program, your song. You made it, you can do what you want with it, as a general rule. Not an absolute rule, but generally. I respect that even if I'm slightly annoyed because I'd like to sit at your table or burn a copy of your song to jam out to.
While most of my work is in security, and a long explanation would be necessary to understand an example, here are two simple examples I can share.
I wrote some software that would be very useful to spammers, and I've owned a couple of hosting companies. In both I "selected my audience", I declined to sell the software or hosting services to spamming scumbags. I think it's good that I can, and most people do, decline to provide software and services to spammers. I even put the following in my license file to make it easier to use my copyright against spammers:
License cost to use this software for legitimate opt-in mailing: $150
License cost to use this software for sending spam: $250,000
That would give my lawyer a (weak) basis to sue spammers for the cost of the license they failed to purchase, $250,000.
Another, less ethically clear but real example is from back in the 1990s when Microsoft's motto was "always be evil". At the time Microsoft was in legal trouble all around the world because they were constantly fucking everyone over. I wrote some which I gave away free. Sun distributed some of my software with their OS. I didn't want Microsoft using my work for evil, so my license was that everyone could use my work, for free, except Microsoft. If Microsoft wanted to use my work as part of Windows, they'd need a license from me that didn't allow it to be easily used for evil.
There's an app for that. Have you installed it?
> example; You Tube videos that 'have not been made available in your country'.
That's quite frustrating, I'm sure.
> Once someone has decided to commercially share they should not be permitted to 'select' an audience or even a specific distribution channel.
So if I write some software for United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, designed to help aid workers avoid danger, I have to sell the system to ISIS as well? While it's certainly frustrating to have trouble watching your favorite Bieber video in the format you most prefer, I may create software systems that actually impact the world, that affect your safety and security. I think I would be very irresponsible for many creators to be indifferent to how their creations are used, and by whom.
Personally, I would go so far as to say that if an artist doesn't want their best-known work to become known as the theme song of the Donald Trump (or worse, the KKK) they should be able to decline that license.
I'd gladly write stuff for Unicef at alow price and I think I'm within my rights to then decline to sell it at the same price to Martin Shkreli or Ahmadinejad.
Again I do understand your frustration, yet dictating things through law is always ham-fisted. One must be careful about the unintended consequences because every law has unintended consequences - often MOST of the instances to which a law applies aren't the types of cases it was intended for.
> Apple better have a really good explanation for why they did enable this moron to do so while being able to disable him.
Here are a couple of really good explanations:
Yes, Apple could make the phone completely lock itself any time it's moving. Customers, who like to like to use their phones while riding in cars and buses, would then not buy their product, they'd sell no phones, and nobody would be protected. A few parents might want this safety feature on their kids' phones, so maybe they'd still sell a few iphones to parents based on advertising the safety features, but mostly it would put Apple out of the phone business.
The phone could try to guess whether the person is a passenger or if they're driving. Sometimes it would guess wrong, of course. When it wrongly guess that a passenger was the driver, the passenger's phone would lock up and annoy the hell out of customers. Back to explanation #1. Worse, sometimes it would guess "passenger" when in fact the person was driving. The parents who bought the phones based on the advertised safety feature which would actually fail often would then sue Apple every time a crash occurs.
> Let's understand the REAL issue here; the PATENT prevented everyone else from implementing a safety.
Clearly Apple's patent didn't cause Apple to not implement it, so what do you think caused that? I would think that customers want to use their phones while riding in cars, buses, etc. Customers won't buy buy a phone that locks itself when moving.
Suppose Apple tries to get really clever and try to guess whether the person using the phone is the driver or a passenger, and they advertise this "safety feature". Obviously it's not going to guess correctly all the time - sometimes it'll annoy passengers who it thinks are driving, but worse sometimes it would guess "passenger" when the person is in fact driving. An advertised safety feature that often fails is obviously a huge liability. The parents of the teenager who crashes while using her iPhone will sue Apple, saying "web bought our daughter an iPhone because you said it has this safety feature. Your safety feature didn't work, you owe us $20 million." There would be plenty of other paths to liability, of course. Suppose Apple blocks video chat but not phone calls. Teenager talking on iPhone crashes. Parents sue "you could have prevented phone calls while driving, your feature that blocks Facetime proves you can and know you should. You failed to block phone calls, you us $20 million too".
Until Fortran was developed, humans used to write code telling the computer what to do. Since the late 1950s, we've been writing a high-level description, then a computer program writes the program that actually gets executed.
Nowadays, there's frequently a computer program, such as a browser, which accepts our high-level description of the task and interprets it before generating more specific instructions for another piece of software, an api library, which creates more specific instructions for another piece of software, such as a graphics library, which generates instructions for a graphics driver, which generates code used by a microcode implementation, which is the actual machine code that runs on the processor.
ALREADY the programming for the machine is produced by software, running code produced by software, which runs code produced by software. That's been true for 60 years, so pardon me if I'm not too concerned about the idea of a software program that creates software programs. Those are called "interpreters", "compilers", and "microcode", and they are exactly the tools that allow software engineers to be so productive.
> FB certainly could have replicated Instagram for a lot less than a billion dollars
Maybe. Microsoft tried to build a social network and failed (so.cl). Google tried and failed (Google+). Facebook did manage to build one social network successfully, but there's little certainty that they could build another one and have success.
As someone else said, they could build most of the SOFTWARE the powers the site for several thousand dollars, but that's not where the value is.
> What does "bipartisan support" mean in a system with 7 parties
It's supported by the bi party, the party of bi people, of course.
> Eo the US American journalists have no vocabulary to describe the reality outside of their country?
This reminds me of the story last week about the federal government of France. Huh? Federalism in France? For a fraction of a second I thought you made the same mistake when you mentioned the federal government of Germany, but then I realized Germany is in fact a federation, federal is the proper term.
> (*) I hope I haven't missed any party.
I hope you didn't miss last night's party, it was rockin.
That post was interesting, thanks. One of the co-founders of the company I work for is a Russian-speaking gentleman who came to the US from Ukraine, I think. We had offices in Ukraine until recently. It would be interesting to hear what Misha thinks of all this.
if (usa.spies)
usa.get_leverage();
china.spies = true;
russia.spies = true;
For non-programmers, Russia, and especially China, will do this regardless of whether the US does it. In theory, it could be reduced by treating an electronic attack the same as a physical attack; China isn't going to bomb the USA. However in practice it's very difficult to know whether a cyber attack is state-sponsored or not. An attack by Russian people isn't necessarily an attack by Russia.
So what we're left with is the very difficult job of strengthening defenses. Fortunately, this has a great side-effect - systems that don't fail even when being attacked are systems that don't fail when not under attack. Secure systems are reliable systems.
I work for an information security company. All of us should really know better, and yet we do occasionally click the phish bait sent out by corporate security. After being caught once, we start being more careful - at least for six months to a year. I think it's a good idea. Corpsec doesn't need to really scold us or anything, just informing us "you clicked on a fake email" is enough to raise our awareness.
This was informative and it is a common mistake to think that "applied for patent related to X" means "patented X". The Slashdot summary tells us only that the application is something *related to* magnets on ear buds, it could be something truly novel, unique and complex having to do with the magnet that's needed to drive the tiny speaker in the earbuds, and preventing (or even using) interference from multiple magnets.
It's also important to keep in mind that a patent application is not a patent. Applications sometimes get kicked back and are revised multiple times, due to prior art or other issues.
In this particular case, there actually is an issue of novelty, of prior art. Apple's patent application, at least the initial filing, is for a device that has all (not some) of the following characteristics:
Earbuds
With a retaining arm that goes around the back of the ear
Magnets in the arm
Magnets in the earbud body
Attraction between the magnets in the arm and in those in the earbud body hold the assembly in place
There is a legitimate argument that given the prior art of magnetic earrings, which are commonplace, and earbuds with retaining arms, which are also commonplace, it may be obvious to one skilled in the art that you could put magnets in the retaining arm.
After submitting, I realized part of my post was probably unclear. Currently, I mostly write tools to find known vulnerabilities. If you didn't install the security patches on patch Tuesday, my tools will discover that. If you're still using an outdated cipher, my tools detect that. Brand new vulnerabilities are a different department located in a different country.