Yeah, when I read the title, I was also thinking that for Farnell, the Raspberry Pi was just one item among thousands for sale.
But then I went on and read TFS, which says that "the Pi raked in 16 percent of the company's total revenue last year". So their catalogue may be thicker than your fist, but the RPI still accounts for 1/6 of their business. I doubt any other product in their catalogue comes close.
And that's really what I find strange, because if you think APIs are creative and copyrighted, when if not in the Google case are they infringed?
Well, from a straight-forward reading of the law, it is possible for a method of expression to be subject to copyright, but also essentially always subject to fair use. Which would seem to be what the court has found. I guess a similar case could be made for e.g. a political speech – sure, it's subject to copyright, but by its very nature, any third-party use is almost inevitably fair use.
Along with the Artistic License, it is actually the only open source license I know of that has been tested in court. It makes sense that there's not much to go to court over with a BSD-like license, but it'd be nice to have the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License tested.
It doesn't matter if designing an API is hard... at least not in the US, which does not follow the sweat of the brow doctrine.
It does matter if API design involves substantial creativity. If the API design is not simple and obvious, and if the work to design the API is a substantially creative endeavor, the API becomes eligible for copyright, and indeed, this is what the courts have now found (at least in the specific case of the Java APIs).
As much as I don't like the idea of copyrightable APIs, I can't really fault the ruling.
Fortunately, the court has now also ruled that using APIs is fair use, which is an essential ruling from an interoperability PoV. And despite this op-ed piece, I'm certain that most companies will be relieved that there are limits to Oracle's absurd attempts to squeeze money of out any company that use Java.
Personally, I'm just happy that the company I work for chose C#/.NET as the scripting platform for customers, not Java. It was touch-and-go there for a while, but Microsoft and.NET has turned out to be much more trustworthy platform stewards than Sun/Oracle and Java.
Actually, hydrogen has its place as energy storage... specifically, as grid-scale energy storage with efficiencies comparable to pumped storage. (Good luck trying to fit that in a car, though.)
Power to gas (and gas to electricity+heat) does not quite reach the efficiency of battery storage, but it is comparable to pumped storage and the storage capacity of the gas network of many countries is so immense that it makes up for it.
Batteries can then be used for short-term load shifting, while pumped storage and P2G can be used for long-term load shifting... even shifting season to season, e.g. using excess solar power generated during the summer to heat houses during the winter.
Nonsense! To quote then-prime minister of Denmark (and later secretary general of NATO) Fogh Rasmussen, summarizing his government's energy policy, "Hydrogen is a promising future energy source, it is good business and good for the environment".
See, it's not just oil and automotive executives!;-)
As they say, it's hard to make a person understand something if his job depends on him not understanding it...
(Did I mention that his political party receives significant funding from the oil industry? Or that his government signed a lucrative 40-year concession with the same oil industry over the objections of the government's own experts in what has been described as a $10 billion give-away? Ah, politics.)
The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection
Fortunately, a government lab worker with inside access stealing a deadly bioweapon and using it in a terrorist attack is the kind of thing that only happens in the movies. Right?
The important thing to realize is that this isn't a new VM, nor a new set of APIs. Just like asm.js, it's still JavaScript, executed inside the same JavaScript VM as the browser already uses. WebAssembly is about delivering that JavaScript in an optimized format: binary instead of text (for smaller downloads and improved parse speed), and enforcing a JavaScript profile that enables improved JIT'ing (like asm.js).
As such, the attack surface is the same. There is no new way to fingerprint the browser either (well, besides 1 bit of "Does this browser support WebAssembly, yes/no?").
WebAssembly will benefit all complex JS applications, and is a must for the very complex ones. Currently, one of the big problems with running Unity games in the Chrome browser is the memory and CPU requirements of parsing the game JavaScript code. Not running the game code, but just parsing/compiling it, which will often cause the Chrome tab to crash for larger games. WebAssembly solves this problem (among others).
I don't know if Unreal comes with a "better" camera out of the box (they do enable a lot of shiny but expensive effects by default, where Unity gives you a more bare bones rendering by default). In either engine, I'm fairly confident that the camera is what you make it. See e.g. this tech talk on procedural cinematography in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. As for physics, both Unity and Unreal 3D physics are powered by the latest NVIDIA PhysX, so I'll wager that most (if not all) differences you're seeing in this area comes down to the games, not the engines.
Disclosure: I work at Unity, but am not an engine expert.
In Denmark, the number of asylum applications in 2015 was 18,492. That's applicants, the number actually granted asylum is significantly lower. So far, it seems the trend for 2016 will be less Syrian refugees (as most of those who are able to flee have already done so), and more refugees from comparatively peaceful countries in Africa and Asia (e.g. Afghanistan). Where almost all Syrian asylum seekers received asylum, that is not the case for refugees from other countries. As such, while the number of applicants might rise, the number of people actually granted asylum in 2016 is not expected to grow significantly.
When you then factor in that most of the expenses of receiving and processing these refugees is paid from money already allocated to foreign aid, it becomes quite clear that no, asylum seekers are not making a significant dent in the overall budget.
Now I can look for the next link in the chain: Why is it ignored by the very people it is aimed at?
That is, indeed, a very good question. I don't have a good answer, but I'm guessing it's for the same reasons that the majority of victims of Islamic State are other muslims. Religion is often an excuse or even a catalyst for violence (and these days, the religion is most commonly Islam). But the underlying reasons are often much more complicated, manifold and hard to decipher, and IS is probably the most complex threat the West have faced since... well, possibly ever.
(Man, to actually wish for the "simpler times" of terrorism...)
When Ayatollah Khamenei comes out and says publicly that attacks on civilians are unacceptable and he publicly denounces all terrorists and calls for no attacks against civilians, then I'll be impressed...
Where is the fatwa that declares all terrorism un-islamic and cleares up that terrorists won't go to get 72 virgins and in fact they'll go to the deepest pits of hell (or whatever the islam equivalent, I'm not an expert)?
They are doing no such thing. [...] PPAPI (Chrome / Opera), NPAPI (Firefox due to be phased out), and ActiveX (IE due to be phased out).
Did you just rebut my claim that plugin support is being phased out by mentioning three incompatible plugin systems, two of which are end-of-life? Neither Firefox, Microsoft Edge (nor Safari for that matter) are slated to gain PPAPI support.
PPAPI plugins are only supported in Chrome and its variants, and usage is dismal. Of plugins that were most popular just two years ago, neither Silverlight (end-of-life), Unity Webplayer (end-of-life), the Google Earth plugin, Java, the Google Hangouts plugin nor the Facebook Videos plugin are available as PPAPI.
PPAPI is in practice an internal Chrome API to be used with built-in modules (not plugins) such as Flash, the PDF viewer and NaCL.
All the above mentioned plugins are being supplanted by various HTML 5 features, with the possible exception of Java (which is just dying, as an in-browser technology). The native browser features aren't all there yet; Unity's native WebGL offering is still struggling with audio and video fidelity, but the gap is closing quickly. Already, Unity reports that compiling C# to.NET IL, IL to C++, and then C++ to asm.js JavaScript, and executing the result in Firefox, yields slightly better performance than executing the original IL in the (admitedly, somewhat dated) Mono runtime normally used in Unity.
"Flash gets special treatment due to its market share, but make no mistake, the browser manufacturers are looking to kill it as soon as reasonably possible, too."
If this is true, it's only because they've found more obtrusive and abusive ways to advertise to us that are more difficult to block.
The elimination of plugins is happening for entirely technical reasons. Microsoft obviously has their own Silverlight plugin, support for which is also gone in their latest browser.
HTML 5 is the future, also for ads. AdBlock etc. handle them without problems.
Like it or not, all the major browsers are phasing out plugin support. Microsoft and Chrome has already dropped support for plugins other than Flash, and Mozilla is about to do the same. Flash gets special treatment due to its market share, but make no mistake, the browser manufacturers are looking to kill it as soon as reasonably possible, too.
Before complaining about mbed TLS's GPLv2 license, you should probably be aware that OpenSSL uses its own application-specific license, which is not OSI approved. The license contains an advertising clause similar to the original BSD license; that makes OpenSSL both GPL-incompatible and a general PITA to work with.
In fact, I'd wager that almost every time OpenSSL is redistributed, it's done in violation of the license. When was the last time you saw a product advertising that "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit"? That text has to appear whenever you advertise any OpenSSL-based crypto functionality.
The license is technically libre, but only by the skin of its teeth...
Interestingly, the same issue exists for 0^0 (x^0 = 1 and 0^x = 0 for any x), but here IEEE floating point has standardized on a result of 1, instead of raising an exception.
At least if you do it you're pampered and it's safe, unless you act out (say run to one particular statue and piss on it, or grope a female soldier)
Right. According to the above mentioned Travel Warning from the U.S. State Department, the following then qualifies as "acting out" and can be cause for arrest:
* involvement in unsanctioned religious and/or political activities (whether those activities took place inside or outside North Korea)
* unauthorized or unescorted travel inside North Korea
* unauthorized interaction with the local population, including unauthorized attempts to speak directly to North Korean citizens
* exchanging currency with an unauthorized vendor
* taking unauthorized photographs
* shopping at stores not designated for foreigners
(The warning then goes on to say that "If DPRK authorities permit you to keep your cell phone upon entry into the country, please keep in mind that you have no right to privacy in North Korea and should assume your communications are monitored." So at least some things are just like in the US.)
The NoCrack authors mention this briefly in their paper (PDF). They call the approach you describe "stateless password managers", and briefly describe some of the drawbacks of the approach:
Chiasson et al. conducted a usability study of both PwdHash and Password
Multiplier and found the majority of users could not successfully use them as intended to generate strong passwords.
Another usability challenge is dealing with sites with a password policy banning the output of the password hash.
But yeah, I'm not convinced the problems they highlight are intractable, nor that NoCrack solves them.
Slashdot Mirror
You have high thoughts about the medical insurance industry and insurance coverage in the US pre-Obama-care.
But it's a good point that a case like this is unlikely to arise in a country with universal healthcare.
Yeah, when I read the title, I was also thinking that for Farnell, the Raspberry Pi was just one item among thousands for sale.
But then I went on and read TFS, which says that "the Pi raked in 16 percent of the company's total revenue last year". So their catalogue may be thicker than your fist, but the RPI still accounts for 1/6 of their business. I doubt any other product in their catalogue comes close.
the litigant [placed] a container, known to her to be filled with a dangerous liquid, between her legs while trying to operate a moving vehicle.
WTF? She was sitting in the passenger seat of a parked car!
Having received life-threatening third-degree burns and undergone a skin graft procedure, she asked for $20,000 to cover the medical expenses.
And that's really what I find strange, because if you think APIs are creative and copyrighted, when if not in the Google case are they infringed?
Well, from a straight-forward reading of the law, it is possible for a method of expression to be subject to copyright, but also essentially always subject to fair use. Which would seem to be what the court has found. I guess a similar case could be made for e.g. a political speech – sure, it's subject to copyright, but by its very nature, any third-party use is almost inevitably fair use.
But I agree, it's still messed up.
The GPL has been tested in court numerous times, both in the US and in the EU.
Along with the Artistic License, it is actually the only open source license I know of that has been tested in court. It makes sense that there's not much to go to court over with a BSD-like license, but it'd be nice to have the Apache License or the Mozilla Public License tested.
It doesn't matter if designing an API is hard... at least not in the US, which does not follow the sweat of the brow doctrine.
It does matter if API design involves substantial creativity. If the API design is not simple and obvious, and if the work to design the API is a substantially creative endeavor, the API becomes eligible for copyright, and indeed, this is what the courts have now found (at least in the specific case of the Java APIs). As much as I don't like the idea of copyrightable APIs, I can't really fault the ruling.
Fortunately, the court has now also ruled that using APIs is fair use, which is an essential ruling from an interoperability PoV. And despite this op-ed piece, I'm certain that most companies will be relieved that there are limits to Oracle's absurd attempts to squeeze money of out any company that use Java.
Personally, I'm just happy that the company I work for chose C#/.NET as the scripting platform for customers, not Java. It was touch-and-go there for a while, but Microsoft and .NET has turned out to be much more trustworthy platform stewards than Sun/Oracle and Java.
Actually, hydrogen has its place as energy storage... specifically, as grid-scale energy storage with efficiencies comparable to pumped storage. (Good luck trying to fit that in a car, though.)
Power to gas (and gas to electricity+heat) does not quite reach the efficiency of battery storage, but it is comparable to pumped storage and the storage capacity of the gas network of many countries is so immense that it makes up for it.
Batteries can then be used for short-term load shifting, while pumped storage and P2G can be used for long-term load shifting... even shifting season to season, e.g. using excess solar power generated during the summer to heat houses during the winter.
Nonsense! To quote then-prime minister of Denmark (and later secretary general of NATO) Fogh Rasmussen, summarizing his government's energy policy, "Hydrogen is a promising future energy source, it is good business and good for the environment".
See, it's not just oil and automotive executives! ;-)
As they say, it's hard to make a person understand something if his job depends on him not understanding it...
(Did I mention that his political party receives significant funding from the oil industry? Or that his government signed a lucrative 40-year concession with the same oil industry over the objections of the government's own experts in what has been described as a $10 billion give-away? Ah, politics.)
The only truly dangerous situation would be if someone stole it, mass produced it and intentionally caused a mass infection
Fortunately, a government lab worker with inside access stealing a deadly bioweapon and using it in a terrorist attack is the kind of thing that only happens in the movies. Right?
The important thing to realize is that this isn't a new VM, nor a new set of APIs. Just like asm.js, it's still JavaScript, executed inside the same JavaScript VM as the browser already uses. WebAssembly is about delivering that JavaScript in an optimized format: binary instead of text (for smaller downloads and improved parse speed), and enforcing a JavaScript profile that enables improved JIT'ing (like asm.js).
As such, the attack surface is the same. There is no new way to fingerprint the browser either (well, besides 1 bit of "Does this browser support WebAssembly, yes/no?").
WebAssembly will benefit all complex JS applications, and is a must for the very complex ones. Currently, one of the big problems with running Unity games in the Chrome browser is the memory and CPU requirements of parsing the game JavaScript code. Not running the game code, but just parsing/compiling it, which will often cause the Chrome tab to crash for larger games. WebAssembly solves this problem (among others).
I don't know if Unreal comes with a "better" camera out of the box (they do enable a lot of shiny but expensive effects by default, where Unity gives you a more bare bones rendering by default). In either engine, I'm fairly confident that the camera is what you make it. See e.g. this tech talk on procedural cinematography in Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak. As for physics, both Unity and Unreal 3D physics are powered by the latest NVIDIA PhysX, so I'll wager that most (if not all) differences you're seeing in this area comes down to the games, not the engines.
Disclosure: I work at Unity, but am not an engine expert.
Your numbers are factually incorrect.
In Denmark, the number of asylum applications in 2015 was 18,492. That's applicants, the number actually granted asylum is significantly lower. So far, it seems the trend for 2016 will be less Syrian refugees (as most of those who are able to flee have already done so), and more refugees from comparatively peaceful countries in Africa and Asia (e.g. Afghanistan). Where almost all Syrian asylum seekers received asylum, that is not the case for refugees from other countries. As such, while the number of applicants might rise, the number of people actually granted asylum in 2016 is not expected to grow significantly.
When you then factor in that most of the expenses of receiving and processing these refugees is paid from money already allocated to foreign aid, it becomes quite clear that no, asylum seekers are not making a significant dent in the overall budget.
The last few Tarantino films have been pretty big budget, so I think whatever Tarantino wants, Tarantino gets.
I think GP's point was that the last few Tarantino films have also been pretty bad... like the last few Star Wars films. YMMV, obviously.
Now I can look for the next link in the chain: Why is it ignored by the very people it is aimed at?
That is, indeed, a very good question. I don't have a good answer, but I'm guessing it's for the same reasons that the majority of victims of Islamic State are other muslims. Religion is often an excuse or even a catalyst for violence (and these days, the religion is most commonly Islam). But the underlying reasons are often much more complicated, manifold and hard to decipher, and IS is probably the most complex threat the West have faced since... well, possibly ever.
(Man, to actually wish for the "simpler times" of terrorism...)
When Ayatollah Khamenei comes out and says publicly that attacks on civilians are unacceptable and he publicly denounces all terrorists and calls for no attacks against civilians, then I'll be impressed...
I guess a statement from the prime minster of Iran is not enough to impress?
(Not sure why you think the Iran religious leaders would approve of the attacks. You do realize Iran is fighting against Islamic State, right?)
Where is the fatwa that declares all terrorism un-islamic and cleares up that terrorists won't go to get 72 virgins and in fact they'll go to the deepest pits of hell (or whatever the islam equivalent, I'm not an expert)?
You're probably looking for the 2010 Fatwa on Terrorism and Suicide Bombings.
When was the last time a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist flew a plane into a building full of people while praising their God?
2010, I believe? No evidence of his last words, though.
(There's no Wikipedia "List of terrorist attacks by plane", so I might have missed incidents.)
They are doing no such thing. [...] PPAPI (Chrome / Opera), NPAPI (Firefox due to be phased out), and ActiveX (IE due to be phased out).
Did you just rebut my claim that plugin support is being phased out by mentioning three incompatible plugin systems, two of which are end-of-life? Neither Firefox, Microsoft Edge (nor Safari for that matter) are slated to gain PPAPI support.
PPAPI plugins are only supported in Chrome and its variants, and usage is dismal. Of plugins that were most popular just two years ago, neither Silverlight (end-of-life), Unity Webplayer (end-of-life), the Google Earth plugin, Java, the Google Hangouts plugin nor the Facebook Videos plugin are available as PPAPI. PPAPI is in practice an internal Chrome API to be used with built-in modules (not plugins) such as Flash, the PDF viewer and NaCL.
All the above mentioned plugins are being supplanted by various HTML 5 features, with the possible exception of Java (which is just dying, as an in-browser technology). The native browser features aren't all there yet; Unity's native WebGL offering is still struggling with audio and video fidelity, but the gap is closing quickly. Already, Unity reports that compiling C# to .NET IL, IL to C++, and then C++ to asm.js JavaScript, and executing the result in Firefox, yields slightly better performance than executing the original IL in the (admitedly, somewhat dated) Mono runtime normally used in Unity.
"Flash gets special treatment due to its market share, but make no mistake, the browser manufacturers are looking to kill it as soon as reasonably possible, too." If this is true, it's only because they've found more obtrusive and abusive ways to advertise to us that are more difficult to block.
The elimination of plugins is happening for entirely technical reasons. Microsoft obviously has their own Silverlight plugin, support for which is also gone in their latest browser.
HTML 5 is the future, also for ads. AdBlock etc. handle them without problems.
Like it or not, all the major browsers are phasing out plugin support. Microsoft and Chrome has already dropped support for plugins other than Flash, and Mozilla is about to do the same. Flash gets special treatment due to its market share, but make no mistake, the browser manufacturers are looking to kill it as soon as reasonably possible, too.
Offer up a version of the the package that is small enough to be audited in detail so that there are very very very few bugs with it.
I think they said they had it down to 6k?
Amazon's package depends on OpenSSL. What they've essentially done is to build an OpenSSL version that's 6k bigger than the existing monster.
Before complaining about mbed TLS's GPLv2 license, you should probably be aware that OpenSSL uses its own application-specific license, which is not OSI approved. The license contains an advertising clause similar to the original BSD license; that makes OpenSSL both GPL-incompatible and a general PITA to work with.
In fact, I'd wager that almost every time OpenSSL is redistributed, it's done in violation of the license. When was the last time you saw a product advertising that "This product includes software developed by the OpenSSL Project for use in the OpenSSL Toolkit"? That text has to appear whenever you advertise any OpenSSL-based crypto functionality.
The license is technically libre, but only by the skin of its teeth...
Interestingly, the same issue exists for 0^0 (x^0 = 1 and 0^x = 0 for any x), but here IEEE floating point has standardized on a result of 1, instead of raising an exception.
Wikipedia on 0^0
At least if you do it you're pampered and it's safe, unless you act out (say run to one particular statue and piss on it, or grope a female soldier)
Right. According to the above mentioned Travel Warning from the U.S. State Department, the following then qualifies as "acting out" and can be cause for arrest:
* involvement in unsanctioned religious and/or political activities (whether those activities took place inside or outside North Korea)
* unauthorized or unescorted travel inside North Korea
* unauthorized interaction with the local population, including unauthorized attempts to speak directly to North Korean citizens
* exchanging currency with an unauthorized vendor
* taking unauthorized photographs
* shopping at stores not designated for foreigners
(The warning then goes on to say that "If DPRK authorities permit you to keep your cell phone upon entry into the country, please keep in mind that you have no right to privacy in North Korea and should assume your communications are monitored." So at least some things are just like in the US.)
The NoCrack authors mention this briefly in their paper (PDF). They call the approach you describe "stateless password managers", and briefly describe some of the drawbacks of the approach:
Chiasson et al. conducted a usability study of both PwdHash and Password Multiplier and found the majority of users could not successfully use them as intended to generate strong passwords. Another usability challenge is dealing with sites with a password policy banning the output of the password hash.
But yeah, I'm not convinced the problems they highlight are intractable, nor that NoCrack solves them.