Hard drives preloaded with malware would be a problem, but that's not what this is about. Hardware drivers run as part of the operating system kernel. If you get malware (or just buga) in your kernel, you're screwed. There's no way for any anti-malware system to detect or remove it because the security software has to get it's information from the kernel. So it is very important to protect the kernel.
In order to protect the kernel from malicious or crappy code, it won't load any untrusted modules as part of the kernel. Since device drivers are kernel modules which become part of the kernel, they must be trusted (signed) or they aren't loaded.
So there is a balance here - there is a good reason to not run any random code as part of the kernel, but that has the effect of using only the default OSX driver unless the drive manufacturer gets their driver signed. That means drive-specific features don't work without a signed driver.
Unfortunately, drive manufacturers screwed up trim support, so it ended up being a drive-specific feature. You can't just call trim() per the standard without knowing how that specific drive handles it. Some drives will lose data if you do.
At the endof the day, that's the cause of the problem - drive manufacturers sold hardware that would lose data if used according to the standard.
Thanks for your work on that. I'm npt familiar with graphics programming at all since my work always uses either a cli or browser-based GUI, but I do have some Macs around for testing and such.
Your first sentence somewhat saves the post from your subject line. It should be remembered that Comcast already was split up. Last year, half the company was called Time Warner. Comcast has bought lots of cable operators and they sucked when they were seperate. They sucked because they could - each little company had a government franchise over a particular area, an enforced monopoly ensuring no competition. If they were split like the baby Bells were formed from ma Bell, we'd have exactly the same situation that we had five years ago.
What's needed is competitive pressure to improve service and lower rates. An obvious mechanism to do this is to forbid cities from making it effectively illegal to compete. That can be seen as equal protection - the laws of the ciry of Houston government shouldn't establish Comcast as the only provider allowed to build a network, forbidding competition from over builders. Unlike a forced split, that's also consistent with principles of freedom.
Until recently, there was the practical problem of the economics of building a competing coax network. Few companies wanted to risk spending millions building where Comcast already has a network in place. There is a unique opportunity right now, though, as all-fiber networks begin to replace the cable plant. Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber. That means we're in a time period right now where smaller, better, newer companies can and will compete directly with Comcast , where state and city governments allow them to.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
> it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Just at the federal level alone (think just the interstate highways), along with any taxes you're paying, we're incurring $10,000 per person of debt each year. If there are 3 people in your family, that's $30,000 per year your family will have to pay back sooner or later. Right now, we owe $62,000 each ($156,000 per family) .
Is that "each person pays a little" or "each person pays a lot"?
I've noticed over time that you like using the word equivocation. Let me suggest that since you like word, you might be interested in looking it up to see EXACTLY what it means, then maybe using Google to see how other people use it.
I believe the derivation is equi (equal) and voca (as in vocal), meaning to say two things equally, to avoid taking either side. When asked who was most qualified to be chief, the president said that Ms. Smith had 15 years of related experience, and Mr. Jones had 10 years working as the assistant chief.
A president who leans socialist and Comcast are trying to sell the American public on something, telling us that it will result in "a free and open internet". We better take a real close look at this, because it reminds me of a certain group who presented another with a large wooden horse.
I forgot to say, don't completely dismiss the possibility of a targeted attack. A few years ago there was a guy who didn't have access to any top secret information or anything. He worked on software for factory machine parts and stuff. For example, he might work on a large servo, translating the command "turn 30 degrees" to electrical impulses to the motor's magnets. He sure doesn't seem like a high-value target.
He turns out that the motors and stuff he worked on were being used by another company who built larger modules from motors, gears, etc. Those modules were, in turn, used to make chemistry lab equipment such as centrifuges. Centrifuges used in Iran. So servo firmware guy WAS target zero for stuxnet.
* The above narrative is roughly correct. Maybe the firmware-writing employee was a she, not a he, we don't know exactly which employee was hit first. We do know it came in through that company.
The SD* interface doesn't have the _same_ problem that USB does, ie badusb. It has other issues, though, and an SD card could made malicious. The issue with USB is that a USB device can be / act as storage, a keyboard, a mouse, a camera, etc. You can plug in a USB device which you think is just a memory stick, but unbeknownst to you you, it's also acting as a keyboard and "typing" commands to your computer. A pure SD card interface supports _only_ storage devices, so they can't act as keyboards. They therefore can't directly attack the host device in the same way that USB can.
Android does have some support for SDIO, though, which allows a card to act as a camera, wifi card, or keyboard. I *don't* think Android will by default use an SDIO input device. It's possible that it will, though. I may have to emulate such a card with a microcontroller and see what happens when it is plugged in to various iOS and Android devices. If it works, you just witnessed the birth of badsd, as I haven't heard of anyone doing that before.
What an SD card could do on a pure SD storage interface is muck with any files you put on the card. Suppose you installed towelroot or supersu on the SD card. The controller on the card could inject malware into the executable, and that malware would then be run with the same privileges you have - full root access if you root your phone, or the same access the apps have. Along with injecting malware into your files, the trojan SD card could send your files to the attacker. Wifi adapters can be made that small, so any data saved to the card could be sent to the attacker via the built-in wifi.
Your best defense in that case might be "at 1/5th the price of what is available in the US". A trojaned card like that is going to cost some money to make, particularly the version with built-in wifi. It wouldn't make sense to sell a million of them on Alibaba, losing money on all of them. They would more likely be used in a targeted attack - "mistakenly dropped" on the premises of a defense contractor or R&D lab, maybe even advertised on on a forum likely targets tend to visit, such as one related to aerospace engineering or large-scale investments.
One step you could take to protect yourself would be to write and read back some known files of various types and compare their SHA hashes within a VM. The card should return a bit-by-bit identical copy of the file that you copied to it. If you save an.exe or.apk file and it comes back changed, that would be a bad sign. I'd like to hear from anyone who experiences tat so we can investigate further.
You can add a fingerprint without changing the data. One way is by timing. A 10 Mbps cable modem, for example, can send at maybe 50 Mbps for 100 milliseconds, then it stops for a 400ms to average 10 Mbps, the speed you paid for. If I want to mark a traffic flow I'm relaying, I can send the packets out in burts of 120KB, 60KB, 120KB, 60KB. Assuming a sufficiently uncongested network, that pattern will be visible several routers further down the line.
I've relayed precisely the data I was sent, I just modulated the rate at which I sent it.
TFA says (assumes?) that these people's brains measure the tiny difference in how long it takes for the echo to come back. Perhaps, but for every doubling of distance, the strength (spl) of the echo drops by about 90%. That seems like a much, much easier thing for humans to detect. I know the change in reflected volume is obvious when I'm driving next to a concrete wall versus an open lane.
-- Technical details --
Yes, my subject line says "loud", then I gave a measurement in sound pressure level (SPL). I know they aren't exactly the same thing, but the subject line has limited characters and I wanted to get the idea across in a way that is easily understood.
How do I figure the 90% reduction? It's supposed to be 6db, or about 75% reduction right? For a point sound source in free air, yes. This can be analyzed as two sources in free air - source to target, then target to source. The SPL hitting the wall is reduced by 75%, which directly reduces the amount of echo at the wall by 75%. That echo then travels twice as far going back, for another 75% reduction. Additionally, there is the frequency-dependent damping effect, which also varies by humidity. "High frequency" clicks will have significant damping as well, which is also relative to distance.
What you say would be true for 99.999% of web sites. Since Firefox has a couple hundred million users or whatever they can make advertising deals directly with advertisers including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Netflix, etc. For a multi-million transaction, there's no need to give a cut to a middle-man.
There are two root causes here. First, the US federal government has massively abused it's constitutional authority to "collect taxes" and written hundreds of thousands of pages of "tax" law about what you can and can't do. With such a tangled mess of law, it's unavoidable that there will be huge loopholes. All of those loopholes would go away with a simple tax law - you pay x%, period.
Some of the largest corporations in world are getting millions of dollars of tax payer cash to pay for the FOR-PROFIT power plants, due to refundable tax credits for renewable energy. Refundable means they can pay a NEGATIVE tax rate. If the feds stopped abusing the power to tax in a million different ways, we wouldn't end up with all of these loopholes.
The other underlying problem is something that most every other country has figured out. Only this US has this particular problem. If something is made in Germany, by German workers, and sold in German stores to German consumers, which country is trying to tax that? The USA! It's no wonder that German companies don't want to pay US taxes on sales in Germany. Apple is a multinational- they are just as much a German company as they are a US company.
A pity, really. In my eyes, the language of the last paragraph would be wonderfully disingenuous, if it had been an intentional attempt to attain its actual impact.
Okay, if you prefer we ignore the first paragraph and pretend that only I wrote the last paragraph. Let's see what the last paragraph says:
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, WE THEN HAVE TO ASK WHAT OTHER ATTRIBUTES ARE REQUIRED FOR SOMETHING TO BE PROTECTABLE. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law....
You're just really not on your A game today, are you? Or, perhaps, you really want to Oracle to lose, but can't think of any better reason than because "I don't like Oracle". I don't like Oracle either, but that's a really crapy way to set national policy, policy that will affect many, many other situations.
Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
Specifically, the Mozilla foundation had revenue of $5.8 million in 2004, when Firefox was launched as a branch of Seamonkey, the Mozilla browser. They still had some support from Netscape, who had developed the browser while they were worth as much as $17 BILLION. Really, Firefox was created by Netscape, a mutli-billion dollar company.
I suspect they are thinking that it sure was nice to have Google paying them millions of dollars for so long, but with Chrome already having twice as many users, Google won't need to keep doing that. They've built an organization that has expenses in the hundreds of millions. Close to 90% of that is for using Google as the default search. Right now, Google has the power to make the Mozilla foundation vanish. That means, of course, that Google can exercise power over them just by a vague threat, or even simply expressing displeasure with a Mozilla decision.
Each November the foundation releases their financial statement. When preparing this financial statement and the last one, they must have seen that the reliance on Google is a problem. They made some small deals with other companies, like including Bing as an _option_ users can set as their default search, but the other deals don't come close to covering their expenses. So to stop being completely reliant on Google, they need some other revenue stream. Somebody sketched a proposal for how they could run ads in a fairly unobtrusive way, in a way that doesn't seem sneaky or underhanded, and that revenue could cover their expenses.
I don't want ads in my browser. I think clumsily adding ads to Firefox could backfire in a huge way. I also think it would be stupid for the Firefox devs to NOT be looking at clever ways to include fairly acceptable ads, new ideas on how they could generate ad revenue if needed without pissing everyone off.
It CAN be done, and even without being all too clever. Slashdot users are generally less tolerant of ads than the general population, yet there are ads here. We deal with it in one way or another and those ads make money. If Firefox can find some elegant ways to place ads and avoid being dependent on Google, they would be smart to at least have that _plan_ ready in case Google stops paying.
Again, I don't WANT ads in Firefox. I also don't WANT to die, but I do buy life insurance so my family has some protection if that happens.
> what possible reason can there still be to do it by hand any more?
My baby daughter will probably always have a smartphone / calculator with her when she grows up. She'll have a tool that can so arithmetic for her. Yet, I plan to teach her arithmetic with jelly beans, hands on, doing it manually, so that she UNDERSTANDS what multiplication is all about. Once she really understands it, she'll know when and how to use it. She can then use the calculator as a shortcut, but use it effectively.
I do the same with my employees. First, they learn the process manually so they understand it. Then, they use the automated tools. Whwn the automated tool doesn't work or needs an extra argument because of a special case, the employee can handle it because they understand what the tool is trying to do. One of our most recent hires improved the main automation tool considerably, something he couldn't have done without first truly understanding what it does by having gone through the process manually.
I'm a giant nerd who can't throw a ball, can't dance, can't sing, and that's given me time to develop some skills that give me a reputation as a bit of a programming and sysadmin savant. Someone calls up with a problem and they start by saying "it's really strange, a lot of people ", I interrupt "hold on one second. Yep, the time must be set wrong on one of your web servers. You're using a cluster, right?" Aghast, they say yep, two weeks ago they switched from a single server to a true cluster. A large part of the "magic" is simply understanding the stack from top to bottom. Not USING assembly or C, but being CAPABLE of doing so, so I can imagine what the PHP calls are doing, what the code would look in C. Then I can picture what the system calls must be, and what that means to the drive heads. I'm darn sure not expert in C, in.Net, or most anything else, but I've done just enough low level stuff to picture what curl must be doing in memory as it fetches a web page.
That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable.
Your reply:
You're implicitly assuming the claim in question: whether or not an API is "property", i.e., protected by copyright.
Reading comprehension problem? I explicitly stated, not once but twice, that the fact that it's valuable not settle the question of whether it's protectable. It fully answers, and only answers, the assertion made above that it's worthless and "_nothing_".
> I drive relay boards > We have three here already, and I'm probably about to add a fourth.
If you need to drive a lot of relays, you might consider a serial-to-parallel chip feeding a ULN2803 octal darlington array. That's about $2.50 of electronics per eight relays. With connectors and such, call it $0.50-$1 per relay. You can connect up to 256 addressable serial-to-parallel chips to a single IO on one Pi (or a PC, through a $2 level shifter). So for the price of another Pi, you can add 35-70 more relay outputs to your existing Pi.
As I mentioned, there is a large overlap between the applications people use Pis and Arduino for. That was one example I have recent personal experience with. If you want a computer with a few GB of RAM, there are several thousand options to choose from. We don't need one more 2-4GB computer.
Here at work, people have built essentially the same project (USB control of relays) with three different platforms, an Arduino, an rPi, and an old Pentium with MBs of RAM. All three did the job.
The Pi processor runs 44 times as fast as the Arduino, meaning it was 44 times as fast as needed for the purpose it was used for. The Pi has 512 MB of RAM, the Arduino accomplished the same task and has 2 Kb of RAM. The Pi has up to 16 GB of flash storage, the Arduino 32 KB.
So they ALREADY did "up the specs" to about 50 times as powerful as needed for these types of tasks. The Arduino used for the project cost $5-$10, the Pi $35.
Suppose the Pi had 2 GB of RAM and cost $150, would you suggest that they "up the specs" to 4 GB and $250? If that's what you want, you can get it here: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell... The Pi isn't a desktop computer. It's designed for particular types of tasks, and those tasks don't need gigs of ram. In fact, looking at the Pi-related web sites and the Arduino related web sites, the applications are often very similar, which indicates that the Pi is way over-speced for the many of the applications it is used for.
When I started my web hosting business we offered servers that ran Linux, just like the Pi does. The standard dedicated server had 256 MB of RAM, the upgraded option had 512 MB - just like the Pi. Web sites served hundreds of GBs of traffic every month off those 512 MB servers. Why does the Pi need more?
Headlines are supposed to be brief, not redundant. This headline could be chopped in half without losing anything, the second half is just redundant. Just say "President Obama Backs Regulation", or since this is a nerd site, "President Obama Backs Regulation of *".
It doesn't matter what it is, Obama wants it under government control.
Slashdot Mirror
Hard drives preloaded with malware would be a problem, but that's not what this is about. Hardware drivers run as part of the operating system kernel. If you get malware (or just buga) in your kernel, you're screwed. There's no way for any anti-malware system to detect or remove it because the security software has to get it's information from the kernel. So it is very important to protect the kernel.
In order to protect the kernel from malicious or crappy code, it won't load any untrusted modules as part of the kernel. Since device drivers are kernel modules which become part of the kernel, they must be trusted (signed) or they aren't loaded.
So there is a balance here - there is a good reason to not run any random code as part of the kernel, but that has the effect of using only the default OSX driver unless the drive manufacturer gets their driver signed. That means drive-specific features don't work without a signed driver.
Unfortunately, drive manufacturers screwed up trim support, so it ended up being a drive-specific feature. You can't just call trim() per the standard without knowing how that specific drive handles it. Some drives will lose data if you do.
At the endof the day, that's the cause of the problem - drive manufacturers sold hardware that would lose data if used according to the standard.
Thanks for your work on that. I'm npt familiar with graphics programming at all since my work always uses either a cli or browser-based GUI, but I do have some Macs around for testing and such.
Your first sentence somewhat saves the post from your subject line. It should be remembered that Comcast already was split up. Last year, half the company was called Time Warner. Comcast has bought lots of cable operators and they sucked when they were seperate. They sucked because they could - each little company had a government franchise over a particular area, an enforced monopoly ensuring no competition. If they were split like the baby Bells were formed from ma Bell, we'd have exactly the same situation that we had five years ago.
What's needed is competitive pressure to improve service and lower rates. An obvious mechanism to do this is to forbid cities from making it effectively illegal to compete. That can be seen as equal protection - the laws of the ciry of Houston government shouldn't establish Comcast as the only provider allowed to build a network, forbidding competition from over builders. Unlike a forced split, that's also consistent with principles of freedom.
Until recently, there was the practical problem of the economics of building a competing coax network. Few companies wanted to risk spending millions building where Comcast already has a network in place. There is a unique opportunity right now, though, as all-fiber networks begin to replace the cable plant. Competitive overbuilders can sometimes build their own fiber network at a lower cost than Comcast's bureaucracy can replace the Comcast cable network with fiber. That means we're in a time period right now where smaller, better, newer companies can and will compete directly with Comcast , where state and city governments allow them to.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
Perhaps we both should look up the word. While we're at it, let's look up Obama's preferred policy, "single payer". Wouldn't it be interesting if the two terms were synonymous.
When we look up socialism, I suspect we'll find it has something to do with the government's role in the economy. Let's look up the change in the extent of the government's role in the economy over the last six years.
> it's called "public investment", each person pays a little bit so that everyone can use the thing, think "public roads"
Just at the federal level alone (think just the interstate highways), along with any taxes you're paying, we're incurring $10,000 per person of debt each year. If there are 3 people in your family, that's $30,000 per year your family will have to pay back sooner or later. Right now, we owe $62,000 each ($156,000 per family) .
Is that "each person pays a little" or "each person pays a lot"?
I've noticed over time that you like using the word equivocation. Let me suggest that since you like word, you might be interested in looking it up to see EXACTLY what it means, then maybe using Google to see how other people use it.
I believe the derivation is equi (equal) and voca (as in vocal), meaning to say two things equally, to avoid taking either side.
When asked who was most qualified to be chief, the president said that Ms. Smith had 15 years of related experience, and Mr. Jones had 10 years working as the assistant chief.
A president who leans socialist and Comcast are trying to sell the American public on something, telling us that it will result in "a free and open internet". We better take a real close look at this, because it reminds me of a certain group who presented another with a large wooden horse.
I forgot to say, don't completely dismiss the possibility of a targeted attack. A few years ago there was a guy who didn't have access to any top secret information or anything. He worked on software for factory machine parts and stuff. For example, he might work on a large servo, translating the command "turn 30 degrees" to electrical impulses to the motor's magnets. He sure doesn't seem like a high-value target.
He turns out that the motors and stuff he worked on were being used by another company who built larger modules from motors, gears, etc. Those modules were, in turn, used to make chemistry lab equipment such as centrifuges. Centrifuges used in Iran. So servo firmware guy WAS target zero for stuxnet.
* The above narrative is roughly correct. Maybe the firmware-writing employee was a she, not a he, we don't know exactly which employee was hit first. We do know it came in through that company.
The SD* interface doesn't have the _same_ problem that USB does, ie badusb. It has other issues, though, and an SD card could made malicious. The issue with USB is that a USB device can be / act as storage, a keyboard, a mouse, a camera, etc. You can plug in a USB device which you think is just a memory stick, but unbeknownst to you you, it's also acting as a keyboard and "typing" commands to your computer. A pure SD card interface supports _only_ storage devices, so they can't act as keyboards. They therefore can't directly attack the host device in the same way that USB can.
Android does have some support for SDIO, though, which allows a card to act as a camera, wifi card, or keyboard. I *don't* think Android will by default use an SDIO input device. It's possible that it will, though. I may have to emulate such a card with a microcontroller and see what happens when it is plugged in to various iOS and Android devices. If it works, you just witnessed the birth of badsd, as I haven't heard of anyone doing that before.
What an SD card could do on a pure SD storage interface is muck with any files you put on the card. Suppose you installed towelroot or supersu on the SD card. The controller on the card could inject malware into the executable, and that malware would then be run with the same privileges you have - full root access if you root your phone, or the same access the apps have. Along with injecting malware into your files, the trojan SD card could send your files to the attacker. Wifi adapters can be made that small, so any data saved to the card could be sent to the attacker via the built-in wifi.
Your best defense in that case might be "at 1/5th the price of what is available in the US". A trojaned card like that is going to cost some money to make, particularly the version with built-in wifi. It wouldn't make sense to sell a million of them on Alibaba, losing money on all of them. They would more likely be used in a targeted attack - "mistakenly dropped" on the premises of a defense contractor or R&D lab, maybe even advertised on on a forum likely targets tend to visit, such as one related to aerospace engineering or large-scale investments.
One step you could take to protect yourself would be to write and read back some known files of various types and compare their SHA hashes within a VM. The card should return a bit-by-bit identical copy of the file that you copied to it. If you save an .exe or .apk file and it comes back changed, that would be a bad sign. I'd like to hear from anyone who experiences tat so we can investigate further.
You can add a fingerprint without changing the data. One way is by timing. A 10 Mbps cable modem, for example, can send at maybe 50 Mbps for 100 milliseconds, then it stops for a 400ms to average 10 Mbps, the speed you paid for. If I want to mark a traffic flow I'm relaying, I can send the packets out in burts of 120KB, 60KB, 120KB, 60KB. Assuming a sufficiently uncongested network, that pattern will be visible several routers further down the line.
I've relayed precisely the data I was sent, I just modulated the rate at which I sent it.
Lamport, creator of LaTex, just rode the coattails of Donald Knuth, known as the creator of Tex. ;)
TFA says (assumes?) that these people's brains measure the tiny difference in how long it takes for the echo to come back. Perhaps, but for every doubling of distance, the strength (spl) of the echo drops by about 90%. That seems like a much, much easier thing for humans to detect. I know the change in reflected volume is obvious when I'm driving next to a concrete wall versus an open lane.
-- Technical details --
Yes, my subject line says "loud", then I gave a measurement in sound pressure level (SPL). I know they aren't exactly the same thing, but the subject line has limited characters and I wanted to get the idea across in a way that is easily understood.
How do I figure the 90% reduction? It's supposed to be 6db, or about 75% reduction right? For a point sound source in free air, yes. This can be analyzed as two sources in free air - source to target, then target to source. The SPL hitting the wall is reduced by 75%, which directly reduces the amount of echo at the wall by 75%. That echo then travels twice as far going back, for another 75% reduction. Additionally, there is the frequency-dependent damping effect, which also varies by humidity. "High frequency" clicks will have significant damping as well, which is also relative to distance.
What you say would be true for 99.999% of web sites. Since Firefox has a couple hundred million users or whatever they can make advertising deals directly with advertisers including Microsoft, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Netflix, etc. For a multi-million transaction, there's no need to give a cut to a middle-man.
There are two root causes here. First, the US federal government has massively abused it's constitutional authority to "collect taxes" and written hundreds of thousands of pages of "tax" law about what you can and can't do. With such a tangled mess of law, it's unavoidable that there will be huge loopholes. All of those loopholes would go away with a simple tax law - you pay x%, period.
Some of the largest corporations in world are getting millions of dollars of tax payer cash to pay for the FOR-PROFIT power plants, due to refundable tax credits for renewable energy. Refundable means they can pay a NEGATIVE tax rate. If the feds stopped abusing the power to tax in a million different ways, we wouldn't end up with all of these loopholes.
The other underlying problem is something that most every other country has figured out. Only this US has this particular problem. If something is made in Germany, by German workers, and sold in German stores to German consumers, which country is trying to tax that? The USA! It's no wonder that German companies don't want to pay US taxes on sales in Germany. Apple is a multinational- they are just as much a German company as they are a US company.
A pity, really. In my eyes, the language of the last paragraph would be wonderfully disingenuous, if it had been an intentional attempt to attain its actual impact.
Okay, if you prefer we ignore the first paragraph and pretend that only I wrote the last paragraph. Let's see what the last paragraph says:
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, WE THEN HAVE TO ASK WHAT OTHER ATTRIBUTES ARE REQUIRED FOR SOMETHING TO BE PROTECTABLE. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law. ...
You're just really not on your A game today, are you? Or, perhaps, you really want to Oracle to lose, but can't think of any better reason than because "I don't like Oracle". I don't like Oracle either, but that's a really crapy way to set national policy, policy that will affect many, many other situations.
Firefox existed before it was a huge business and it will still exist if the huge business aspect falls apart.
Specifically, the Mozilla foundation had revenue of $5.8 million in 2004, when Firefox was launched as a branch of Seamonkey, the Mozilla browser. They still had some support from Netscape, who had developed the browser while they were worth as much as $17 BILLION. Really, Firefox was created by Netscape, a mutli-billion dollar company.
> What is Firefox thinking?
I suspect they are thinking that it sure was nice to have Google paying them millions of dollars for so long, but with Chrome already having twice as many users, Google won't need to keep doing that. They've built an organization that has expenses in the hundreds of millions. Close to 90% of that is for using Google as the default search. Right now, Google has the power to make the Mozilla foundation vanish. That means, of course, that Google can exercise power over them just by a vague threat, or even simply expressing displeasure with a Mozilla decision.
Each November the foundation releases their financial statement. When preparing this financial statement and the last one, they must have seen that the reliance on Google is a problem. They made some small deals with other companies, like including Bing as an _option_ users can set as their default search, but the other deals don't come close to covering their expenses. So to stop being completely reliant on Google, they need some other revenue stream. Somebody sketched a proposal for how they could run ads in a fairly unobtrusive way, in a way that doesn't seem sneaky or underhanded, and that revenue could cover their expenses.
I don't want ads in my browser. I think clumsily adding ads to Firefox could backfire in a huge way. I also think it would be stupid for the Firefox devs to NOT be looking at clever ways to include fairly acceptable ads, new ideas on how they could generate ad revenue if needed without pissing everyone off.
It CAN be done, and even without being all too clever. Slashdot users are generally less tolerant of ads than the general population, yet there are ads here. We deal with it in one way or another and those ads make money. If Firefox can find some elegant ways to place ads and avoid being dependent on Google, they would be smart to at least have that _plan_ ready in case Google stops paying.
Again, I don't WANT ads in Firefox. I also don't WANT to die, but I do buy life insurance so my family has some protection if that happens.
> what possible reason can there still be to do it by hand any more?
My baby daughter will probably always have a smartphone / calculator with her when she grows up. She'll have a tool that can so arithmetic for her. Yet, I plan to teach her arithmetic with jelly beans, hands on, doing it manually, so that she UNDERSTANDS what multiplication is all about. Once she really understands it, she'll know when and how to use it. She can then use the calculator as a shortcut, but use it effectively.
I do the same with my employees. First, they learn the process manually so they understand it. Then, they use the automated tools. Whwn the automated tool doesn't work or needs an extra argument because of a special case, the employee can handle it because they understand what the tool is trying to do. One of our most recent hires improved the main automation tool considerably, something he couldn't have done without first truly understanding what it does by having gone through the process manually.
I'm a giant nerd who can't throw a ball, can't dance, can't sing, and that's given me time to develop some skills that give me a reputation as a bit of a programming and sysadmin savant. Someone calls up with a problem and they start by saying "it's really strange, a lot of people ", I interrupt "hold on one second. Yep, the time must be set wrong on one of your web servers. You're using a cluster, right?" Aghast, they say yep, two weeks ago they switched from a single server to a true cluster. A large part of the "magic" is simply understanding the stack from top to bottom. Not USING assembly or C, but being CAPABLE of doing so, so I can imagine what the PHP calls are doing, what the code would look in C. Then I can picture what the system calls must be, and what that means to the drive heads. I'm darn sure not expert in C, in .Net, or most anything else, but I've done just enough low level stuff to picture what curl must be doing in memory as it fetches a web page.
I said:
That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable.
Your reply:
You're implicitly assuming the claim in question: whether or not an API is "property", i.e., protected by copyright.
Reading comprehension problem? I explicitly stated, not once but twice, that the fact that it's valuable not settle the question of whether it's protectable. It fully answers, and only answers, the assertion made above that it's worthless and "_nothing_".
> I drive relay boards
> We have three here already, and I'm probably about to add a fourth.
If you need to drive a lot of relays, you might consider a serial-to-parallel chip feeding a ULN2803 octal darlington array. That's about $2.50 of electronics per eight relays. With connectors and such, call it $0.50-$1 per relay. You can connect up to 256 addressable serial-to-parallel chips to a single IO on one Pi (or a PC, through a $2 level shifter). So for the price of another Pi, you can add 35-70 more relay outputs to your existing Pi.
As I mentioned, there is a large overlap between the applications people use Pis and Arduino for. That was one example I have recent personal experience with. If you want a computer with a few GB of RAM, there are several thousand options to choose from. We don't need one more 2-4GB computer.
If the exec has too many passwords at work to remember easily, of course they will write them down.
Solutions to that include SSO, IDM, etc.
Here at work, people have built essentially the same project (USB control of relays) with three different platforms, an Arduino, an rPi, and an old Pentium with MBs of RAM. All three did the job.
The Pi processor runs 44 times as fast as the Arduino, meaning it was 44 times as fast as needed for the purpose it was used for. The Pi has 512 MB of RAM, the Arduino accomplished the same task and has 2 Kb of RAM. The Pi has up to 16 GB of flash storage, the Arduino 32 KB.
So they ALREADY did "up the specs" to about 50 times as powerful as needed for these types of tasks. The Arduino used for the project cost $5-$10, the Pi $35.
Suppose the Pi had 2 GB of RAM and cost $150, would you suggest that they "up the specs" to 4 GB and $250? If that's what you want, you can get it here:
http://www.walmart.com/ip/Dell...
The Pi isn't a desktop computer. It's designed for particular types of tasks, and those tasks don't need gigs of ram. In fact, looking at the Pi-related web sites and the Arduino related web sites, the applications are often very similar, which indicates that the Pi is way over-speced for the many of the applications it is used for.
When I started my web hosting business we offered servers that ran Linux, just like the Pi does. The standard dedicated server had 256 MB of RAM, the upgraded option had 512 MB - just like the Pi. Web sites served hundreds of GBs of traffic every month off those 512 MB servers. Why does the Pi need more?
Headlines are supposed to be brief, not redundant. This headline could be chopped in half without losing anything, the second half is just redundant. Just say "President Obama Backs Regulation", or since this is a nerd site, "President Obama Backs Regulation of *".
It doesn't matter what it is, Obama wants it under government control.