If the hurricanes are more powerful, that means they are using more energy, right? And my less than great understanding is that less energy equates to cooler temperatures (for a system), so does this mean the hurricanes are helping to cool the earth by converting excess heat into... well... something that's not heat( e.g. motion or water, wind, etc.)?
A hurricane (or tropical cyclone) is a heat engine. It takes the heat from the body of water (ocean) and dumps it into a cooler body (atmosphere) while doing work (moving lots of air).
I believe the oceans cool about 3 degrees C/K from this process, so it seems like it's a way for the oceans to cool themselves down - the warmer they get, they just spin off more hurricanes.
Of course, all that useful work energy ends up as heat per the laws of thermodynamics.
I suppose the "Paypal is not a bank" loophole is to allow anyone to actually receive money from credit card payments without a merchant account.
Otherwise two random people needing to pay each other will have to do so via cash, money order, cheque or other transfer mechanism. Most of those ways involve the postal service in some form - which while I'm sure USPS would be happy, it goes against the whole "internet shopping" thing where you can buy stuff without having to trudge down to the store.
And I'm fairly certain the you cannot substitute a Google Checkout or Amazon Payments account for a Paypal account unless you happen to be a business (required for merchant accounts).
And trust me, merchants accounts screw you over just as badly as Paypal does.
Batteries drain in storage, and I believe are usually shipped at 50% charge due to other issues with the stability of the batteries under shipping conditions.
Although since the Apple store has power, they could take half of them out and pre-charge them to 100% and give the buyers a choice. Or the buyer could probably charge in the store.
Actually, Apple's products don't tend to sit on shelves - from manufacture to the time it's sold, it'll probably be around a week, and most of it has been just waiting for the pallet to fill up, waiting for the shipper it pick it up, shipping it from China to the warehouse in the US, then distributing it out from there.
If you go by date codes, the whole process can easily be as little as 4 days (same week) to basically "last week". Since iPads and iPhones don't normally linger on shelves too long, Apple charges them up all the way so the user can use it immediately.
The 40% charge is a shipment charge for products that move slower as it's been empirically determined that it ages the batteries the slowest.
It's actually sort of unusual to find an Apple product out of the box that doesn't have 95+% charge. They just don't sit on shelves that long.
If only there were some way for me to tell which permissions an app will use when I install it!
You do realize that Android has been making it progressively harder? In ICS, the big fat "INSTALL" button is located at the top (instead of the bottom) so users can quickly tap Install, Install and never see the permission list.
Plus, a lot of permissions get grouped under "Other permissions" so you have to tap that in order tlo see the full permission list, so at best you see a few major permissions, and the rest are socked away.
Finally - Dancing Pigs. Users want to run the app, permissions list be damned. They click through the permission list like it was some EULA. They aren't going to read it.
Breathtakingly arrogant. I wonder what possible reasons they could have given to the judge to demand that a company which had previously registered a trademark should take it down because they graced the market by introducing a phone with a similar name.
I'm not surprise that Apple lost. I'm stunned that they litigated in the first place. Looks like the tables turned on them since they have now lost the rights to "iPhone" entirely. I'm betting that this was not what they expected.
Yeah, like Intel not expecting "Netbook" to be a trademarked term as well, and basically ending up on the wrong end of the lawsuit for selling Netbooks.
Sure, it's not a phone, but a portable computer, and it was owned by a little-known company, but it does happen. I think Intel also fought the trademark case vigourously but also lost in the end as the other company was still selling computers, though to a very niche market.
And no, they didn't lose the rights to iPhone. Just they just can't sell it as iPhone in Mexico (possibly - they could license after all if the other company wasn't making mobile phones and wanted some extra income). Like how Google couldn't call their webmail GMail in Europe for a time (until they purchased the trademark) (It went by GoogleMail then).
Heck, Linksys/Cisco had a very questionable claim on iPhone way back in 2007 (I think the only thing were a couple of marketing mockups of VoIP phones). Apple in the end licensed several trademarks.
And it's likely it'll be licensed - iFone is apparently some call center management software. Or perhaps Mexico would just get ApplePhones instead (like GoogleMail).
It might have helped had he bothered to defend himself, since he didn't the judge defaulted to the maximum penalty.
Why should the judge conclude he deserves the maximum penalty, he only heard one side.
Judges are suppsed to, you know, judge, not just assume the worst (or the best).
Easy - if you can't be bothered to show up to your own trial, the judge is free to implement whatever he wants, based on the wishes of the other party.
A trial lets both sides argue their cases, and a judge (and jury) decides which side has a more convincing argument and awards them some damages.
If one side (this can be the prosecution too) fails to show up, the judge is not going to postpone the trial (the other side made an effort to show up), but will assume that barring any extraordinary circumstances, that said person cares not about the case to even bother sending a representative.
And yes, if that's the case, the lawyer will ask for the maximum because he's not there to argue why he shouldn't receive the maximum.
Remember this the next time you contest a speeding ticket or parking ticket and the police officer fails to show. You don't want the judge to assume the ticket is valid and force you to argue the case, but you want the police officer to prove to the judge the ticket is valid, and for you to argue why the police offcer's argument is false.
The issue was that there were drivers that were dual-licensed BSD and GPL. The Linux people were taking this code, modifying it but only releasing it back as GPL (which was allowed by the copyright holder who had dual-licensed it). In a more general case, you can take BSD-licensed code and use it within a work that is ultimately GPLed and make all your additions to that code GPL, too. This means that the Linux/GPL side can freely use the work of the BSD people all they want, but the reverse is not true as you can not take GPL code and release it as BSD.
A bit simplistic because it ignores the political side of the equation. Because after all, BSD lets you take the BSD code and close-source it.
The real issue is that the GPL folks are constantly saying their license is the free-est and bestest license out there for openness and freedom. Especially since BSD allows "closed-sourcing" of code while the GPL doesn't.
And then you have GPL folks taking BSD code (doesn't have to be dual licensed if it's modified-BSD), and locking it up as GPL (perfectly legal = you can take BSD and make it commercially licensed). The rub is that any modifications and improvements to said GPL'd code is unavailable to the BSD folks.
So the BSD folks are "locked out" of the changes that the GPL folks made (similar to closed-sourcing), except they're also having the GPL folks shove it in their face "Nyaa nyaa nyaa, you can't have it back! GPL rulez! BSD sux!!"
TL; DR versions - the GPL folks are doing to BSD licensed code what the GPL folks have always argued why the GPL is better than BSD - anyone can take it and lock it up. Except it's the GPL doing the locking up, the supposedly "freer" license.
Please post any examples of drive-by malware downloads, etc. that were actually OS flaws.
Safari has/had nasty bugs that took advantage of the "auto-open safe files" default setting, which I think counts as they're distributed by the same vendor as the OS and it comes preinstalled.
I think QuickTime is similar as well a few malicious MOV files can get you hooped.
Bunches of flaws in the open-source software it comes with as well (though we usually attribute that to the software on Linux, and to OS X on OS X. So an Apache flaw would be reported as an Apache flaw on Linux, or an OS X "Webserver" flaw on OS X...).
This is the most expensive way to get fuel: you need a massive amount for a short time, and you need it consistently during that time.
The problem has been getting it from where you fuel up the tanker, to where it's needed. The fuel's cheap comparatively, but the trucks aren't really off-road vehicles. When you've got flooded streets, streets lined with debris, or streets that are completely gone, the trucks really can't make it in to resupply.
So the massive amount of fuel needed is needed right when the roads are some of the most treacherous or blocked completely. And sometimes, the only way is bucket brigade. The cost would be so astronomical that most companies would prefer to risk it.
Until we have reliable alternatives, coal and Oil will be used until they disappear completely.
Let me know when we have viable alternatives that won't be outsourced to China or other third world nation.
We have natural gas (methane), of which we have so much we literally burn it off because we don't use it up fast enough. And China, etc. haven't developed their natural gas wells yet (we export natural gas to Asia).
In fact, I'm guessing that once oil gets hard enough, we'll see a rise in natural gas vehicles as part of the mix. We can either burn it directly in an ICE, or use a fuel cell. Not as green since we still have CO2 emissions but it seems like a reasonable stopgap.
On more modern / powerful phones with larger screens, it is not the radio that is the dominant problem anymore. It is the screen.
If you are "Streaming video" for any length of time with a 4.5" screen phone, it is the screen using most of the battery, not the radio. Screen battery use is also bad because it even affects you in airplane mode.
Not to mention that cellular radios are extremely power efficient because they have to be. The power amp is only used for transmission, and only powered up the instant the radio needs to transmit, then shut down immediately afterwards.
The amount of power that streaming video takes is extremely low as the radio is mostly in receive mode, not transmit (it's sending acks and such but that's it).
In standby mode, the power budget is around 3mA or so to get your 300/500 hour standby time, and the radio is consuming roughly 90% of that as it has to maintain a ping to the base station, which involves transmitting. Of course, the power consumption spikes easily to 100+mA, but for such a brief period of time that it averages out as the radio basically keeps the transmitter powered off until it absolutely needs to transmit, and the receiver off as long as possible (receive power is still high, so the receiver is shut off when the phone isn't expecting an update from the base. If the base has a message, the base will hold it until the phone's timeslot comes up - power savings at the expense of latency).
The real technological wonder is being able to quickly turn on and turn off those parts of the radio - considering that traditionally you had to let them "warm up" to get on frequency. These days it's practically instantaneous.
Writing larger also allows for more space to edit, a very important aspect. Squeezing tons of text on a page is something you reserve for those 1-page double-sided cheat sheets, for normal writing it's better to write bigger - if you need to correct something, there's more space to write the correction, it's more legible, to boot, even the most atrocious handwriting cleans itself up when forced to make larger strokes.
Plus, always have a selection of sizes available. Fine tips are great on high-quality paper, but if you're using highly recycled paper, a medium tip is best as it doesn't clog Nothing's worse for a fine tip than poor quality paper.
Ok, you're joking, but many people actually believe that seatbelts and air bags are more dangerous than not having them, and I even doubted ABS. I was trained as a driver in the USAF and knew that in a skid the vehicle will travel farther than when the brakes are almost at skid level, and that when in a skid you have no steering whatsoever. It took a while to unlearn my Air Force training and stand on the brake in an emergency, but I have to tell you, the milliseconds a computer can react is far faster than the fastest human. My ABS has kept me from hitting stupid dogs, ignorant children, and idiots driving cars who don't look when they pull out, or slow for stop signs, more than once.
Well, airbags are more dangerous if used WITHOUT seatbelts. They actually do cause more injuries to the occupants that are wildly flying about the cabin. But used with seatbelts they are very effective. I think most modern cars disable the airbags if the occupant is not wearing seatbelts for that reason. (Of course, are there any places where wearing seatbelts for regular driving are still optional? Not counting special cases like ice road driving, for example (a seatbelt only impedes evacuation if you break through, and you're driving slow enough that even if you have an accident (... which seems difficult to do since well, you're going slow) it feels like hitting a speedbump).)
As for ABS - it turns out while you can threshold brake to demonstrate, in a real emergency most people can't and don't remember to, so the natural reaction to just stomp on the brakes works really well. The few who have to unlearn it typically have it strongly ingrained through training (more than what you get from normal driver training).
So their T&Cs is invalid because of a technicality, not because it limits consumer rights.
There needs to be baseline laws that guarantee a minimum amount of consumer protection, that can't be trumped by T&Cs, as Law > T&Cs.
Well, the political climate in the US is far too polarized for that stuff to happen. Introduce new regulations and you have the libertarians and those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism foaming. And the republicans will point to it as a way to destroy small business and thus, jobs.
So in the end you end up with watered down laws and other such things. Hell, look at the backlash that happened with the FTC wanted to investigate Google - anywhere from "Apple too!" to "they're doing nothing wrong!"
Or you could do what the EU does and mandate say, 2 year minimum warranties on durable goods, and at the same time they complain that they are being gouged for their stuff (which really ends up looking normal after import duties, VAT (added to base price), and the cost of an extended warranty - how often do you answer no to "Would you like an extended warranty?").
So on one hand, you want to have the flexibility of people to enter into contracts willingly on their own accord and on their own terms (I'm betting there'll be tons of people who'll give up their right to class-actoins for a few bucks off) with the need to protect consumers. It's a very fine line where you go in the continuum - be like the EU with strong protections, but also higher prices, or the US with weak protections, and lower prices. Try to stay in the middle and you'll find every new President will meddle with what a "fair" compromise is.
The problem has been that the PC market was so commoditized that the amount of money made is so little. Everyone cries for the sub-$500 laptop, so manufacturers comply, leading to cutting of corners everywhere - LCDs are expensive (especially high-res ones), GPUs, etc. CPUs, RAM and hard drives are cheap, so you can get ones with the best gigas for marketing.
The only reaosn we have manufacturers going for higher quality displays is because of well, Apple. Since Apple refuses to participate in the low end ("Macs are overpriced!") it means Apple hsa to constantly refine their PCs to make it worth the money.
E.g., use of full metal bodies, high res displays, SSDs, etc. They do this to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.
Heck, once you promise better margins to manufacturers, they start spending that money on R&D - see the ultrabook line. They all cost around the price of a Macbook Air, or easily double or triple what the low end laptops sell for. As a result, we get them with all sorts of different screen resolutions.
Basically in the race to produce the cheapest laptop, they've left the premium market to Apple, who appeals to those who like a laptop with clean lines, "exotic" materials and other things.
Oh, and Apple invested a lot of money making high-res displays - it's not as easy to build a 15" 2880x1800 screen as it is a 15" 1366x768 screen. First off, more pixels mean more transistors and greater chance of dead pixels, lowering yield. Second, being able to address those transistors and ensure the pixels are all good is a lot harder with the smaller pixel size. So Apple's pretty much owning all the R&D on that (especially with Sharp in financial trouble).
You would think that a company playing at something mildly important(like, oh being a CA for the Dutch government...) could, at very least, do basic things like store logs on WORM tape... Yes, those are overpriced compared to the normal ones; but they aren't that expensive.
Welcome to business. The same rules apply everywhere - try to cut as many corners as you can so the company can boast about huge profits and the CEO can pay for this space tourist ticket.
The only things that change are how far you can take it before you get caught, and what the penalties are. In thie case, it was basically closing up shop. Not the worst (they could've held the execs liable, for example)...
Other people are concerned about silly things like killing babies
If that actually happened, nerds would be as concerned about that as anyone else. But infanticide is already illegal.
You realize that you're making the anti-abortionist claim, right? The life begins at conception (and not at birth), thus abortion is illegal because it's infanticide.
The pro-life argument that life begins at birth means aborting a fetus is not infanticide and therefore, legal.
For the religious folk, it's a very important topic, and why the abortion debate has shifted long into when life begins, and whether or not aborting is the same as murder or infanticide.
That applies to both civil and criminal cases. For example if your car is caught speeding while someone else was driving they are liable, not you. If they can't be identified then that's too bad.
In a civil case of copyright infringement the burden of discovering who was pirating material is on the copyright holder. The courts have so far suggested than an IP address is not enough to secure victory, there has to be some other evidence pointing to the individual. That is very difficult to do because the copyright holder can't confiscate your PC or demand to check your router's settings - this is only a civil case, remember.
Incorrect. If your car registered to you is caught speeding, you are responsible unless you can prove it was someone else. You are, after all, letting someone else use your vehicle, and unless it was stolen, most people don't reasonably lend anyone their car. So either you know who drove the vehicle then, or you can prove the person in the photo is not you.
Copyright infringement is, currently, a criminal offense. The RIAA/MPAA use this to go on fishing expeditions to ge their name, then they drop the criminal case and then sue those people for money. (In a criminal trial, the money goes to the government, which is why you often have combined civil and criminal trials).
And should there be sufficient evidence, your computers and other associated electronic devices can be siezed for forensic examination.
And while an IP address doesn't equal a person, examination of a PC can tie a link between your online activities and the supposed pirate. Just ask Jammie Thomas who was convicted because her PC had her online identity which was linked to online activities.
We hear all this talk of how modded/hacked consoles are bad for the game developers and industry as a whole. If that's the case, why would the developers include a feature that can only be used on such a console? The real story here is not that your character may get deleted. Your character is not real. The story is that the developers of Borderlands 2 have decided that players who mod/hack their console are a market segment worth developing for. That's a real problem for the console manufacturers with real consequences because it flies in the face of their claims.
The bigger question is how Microsoft let multiplayer play on hacked Xbox360s
It's generally considered that Microsoft scans the Xbox when it connects to Live, and since the Xbox can't run unsigned code, it's trusted.
With this, connecting a modded Xbox to Live is generally a good way to get console banned on your account because Microsoft detects the mods. Especially since Microsoft pushed an update recently.
Now, it could be possible to hack your savegame though and make the necessary mods to your character, causing the dormant code to be "woken up". In this case, you're running signed game code (though untested, obsolete game paths), so your Xbox is completely original, you just hacked your save game. In which case it's a developer problem...
ARM 64's ISA is radically different than ARM32. All of the things that make Arm "ARM" are gone, such as conditional execution, having the program counter as general purpose register and more. Not only that, the binary encoding is totally different. The binary encoding for ARM64 is a total confusing mess compared to ARM32. I wouldn't say that ARM64 was a well designed ISA.
The binary encodings are a mess, yes, due mostly to the urge to adapt and produce some consistency with the AArch32 instructions. The ARM ABI has seriously evolved and the encoding possibilities are quite... nasty now if you look at ARMv7.
Thankfully, the assembler takes care of that for us.
Conditional execution is nice, but it really interferes with modern architectures. The ARMv8 core is a fully speculative, out-of-order with register renaming implementation. Conditional execution breaks this as the processor has to track more state since any combinations of instructions in the stream could have any combination of conditional execution.
Ditto the PC - it was nice to be able to jump by simply writing to the PC, but man does it complicate internal design if any instruction can arbitrarily move the PC to any register value. In the end, the few uses of conditional execution and the ability to move anything to the PC without using a branch or return style instruction was probably so limited, there was no point.
Oh, and there are 31 registers - X0 through X30. The 32nd register is special depending on the instruction - for ADD and SUB, "X31" means the stack pointer. For most other instructions, it means the zero register (reads as zero), something borrowed from MIPS, and allowing interesting register-only instruction forms to be used when the immediate value is zero. It does result in oddball uses though, like
SUB SP, 0, X0 ; Set SP. to play with the stack pointer.
If you're a system level programmer, AArch64 is MUCH nicer (no more damned coprocessors). I know, I've done a fair bit of it.
But seriously....would have been better to sell it to Seth MacFarlane, he showed a good bit of love for the franchise with his Family Guy send ups of it....
Seth Greene as well (Robot Chicken). In fact the two series usually "competed" on that topic.
On the other hand, I suppose Episode 7 will now feature wall-to-wall Macs, iPods, iPads, and iPhones... (I think Apple has a pretty big stake in Disney). All battling the (do no) evil Google empire and their droids.
HFT systems are located as close to the exchange's servers as they physically can be, because all the marketeers think it's bad juju to have a ping time above.01ms.
Needless to say, if the HFT systems go down, then the market's exchange servers 2 feet away will probably be down, as well.
If you're within the datacenter, there's a chance the trading computers are a bit further away from that actually. What happens is that the exchange actually ends up finding the longest cable they need to reach from the trading computer to the farthest rack, then they ensure that every cable from the trading computer any rack is that length. That way all the HFT traders who pay to be physically close in the data center aren't getting any advantage - there's just a huge coil of cable above the rack to ensure every rack gets the same latency. One could argue the coil of cable adds to latency by being an inductor, I suppose...
Yea, if you recall the iPhone was a big deal and then the App store was released after many people already had the HW.
Much easier to woo devs when you got a large install base, vs. trying to court them when most have not even heard of your HW/SW.
Actually the iPhone was a strange situation. Apple at that time (and still does) wanted devs to write web apps (and Apple worked hard to get geolocation, sensor data, and local storage in HTML5). But devs wanted a native SDK, and they kept clamoring. So much so that they hacked together an SDK from MacOS X headers so jailbroken iPhones could easily get apps.
Apple saw this and created an SDK and the App Store. (And still allows webapps to be released with no approval required at all).
It's very easy to attract developers when they're banging on your door begging to develop for your platform.
Buy an "iPhone" or one of hundreds of other smaller handsets.
You mean craptacular, right? If you want a GOOD android phone, they're all huge screens. A sub-4" flagship phone does not exist - the only ones are crap ass ones with little memory, poor resolution, a slow processor, or all three. And they run Froyo. Gingerbread if you're lucky.
It seems Android has stratified - 4" and smaller screen - crappy "free" smartphones. Larger than 4" and you can get some nice phones that show off Android.
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A hurricane (or tropical cyclone) is a heat engine. It takes the heat from the body of water (ocean) and dumps it into a cooler body (atmosphere) while doing work (moving lots of air).
I believe the oceans cool about 3 degrees C/K from this process, so it seems like it's a way for the oceans to cool themselves down - the warmer they get, they just spin off more hurricanes.
Of course, all that useful work energy ends up as heat per the laws of thermodynamics.
I suppose the "Paypal is not a bank" loophole is to allow anyone to actually receive money from credit card payments without a merchant account.
Otherwise two random people needing to pay each other will have to do so via cash, money order, cheque or other transfer mechanism. Most of those ways involve the postal service in some form - which while I'm sure USPS would be happy, it goes against the whole "internet shopping" thing where you can buy stuff without having to trudge down to the store.
And I'm fairly certain the you cannot substitute a Google Checkout or Amazon Payments account for a Paypal account unless you happen to be a business (required for merchant accounts).
And trust me, merchants accounts screw you over just as badly as Paypal does.
Actually, Apple's products don't tend to sit on shelves - from manufacture to the time it's sold, it'll probably be around a week, and most of it has been just waiting for the pallet to fill up, waiting for the shipper it pick it up, shipping it from China to the warehouse in the US, then distributing it out from there.
If you go by date codes, the whole process can easily be as little as 4 days (same week) to basically "last week". Since iPads and iPhones don't normally linger on shelves too long, Apple charges them up all the way so the user can use it immediately.
The 40% charge is a shipment charge for products that move slower as it's been empirically determined that it ages the batteries the slowest.
It's actually sort of unusual to find an Apple product out of the box that doesn't have 95+% charge. They just don't sit on shelves that long.
You do realize that Android has been making it progressively harder? In ICS, the big fat "INSTALL" button is located at the top (instead of the bottom) so users can quickly tap Install, Install and never see the permission list.
Plus, a lot of permissions get grouped under "Other permissions" so you have to tap that in order tlo see the full permission list, so at best you see a few major permissions, and the rest are socked away.
Finally - Dancing Pigs. Users want to run the app, permissions list be damned. They click through the permission list like it was some EULA. They aren't going to read it.
Yeah, like Intel not expecting "Netbook" to be a trademarked term as well, and basically ending up on the wrong end of the lawsuit for selling Netbooks.
Sure, it's not a phone, but a portable computer, and it was owned by a little-known company, but it does happen. I think Intel also fought the trademark case vigourously but also lost in the end as the other company was still selling computers, though to a very niche market.
And no, they didn't lose the rights to iPhone. Just they just can't sell it as iPhone in Mexico (possibly - they could license after all if the other company wasn't making mobile phones and wanted some extra income). Like how Google couldn't call their webmail GMail in Europe for a time (until they purchased the trademark) (It went by GoogleMail then).
Heck, Linksys/Cisco had a very questionable claim on iPhone way back in 2007 (I think the only thing were a couple of marketing mockups of VoIP phones). Apple in the end licensed several trademarks.
And it's likely it'll be licensed - iFone is apparently some call center management software. Or perhaps Mexico would just get ApplePhones instead (like GoogleMail).
Easy - if you can't be bothered to show up to your own trial, the judge is free to implement whatever he wants, based on the wishes of the other party.
A trial lets both sides argue their cases, and a judge (and jury) decides which side has a more convincing argument and awards them some damages.
If one side (this can be the prosecution too) fails to show up, the judge is not going to postpone the trial (the other side made an effort to show up), but will assume that barring any extraordinary circumstances, that said person cares not about the case to even bother sending a representative.
And yes, if that's the case, the lawyer will ask for the maximum because he's not there to argue why he shouldn't receive the maximum.
Remember this the next time you contest a speeding ticket or parking ticket and the police officer fails to show. You don't want the judge to assume the ticket is valid and force you to argue the case, but you want the police officer to prove to the judge the ticket is valid, and for you to argue why the police offcer's argument is false.
A bit simplistic because it ignores the political side of the equation. Because after all, BSD lets you take the BSD code and close-source it.
The real issue is that the GPL folks are constantly saying their license is the free-est and bestest license out there for openness and freedom. Especially since BSD allows "closed-sourcing" of code while the GPL doesn't.
And then you have GPL folks taking BSD code (doesn't have to be dual licensed if it's modified-BSD), and locking it up as GPL (perfectly legal = you can take BSD and make it commercially licensed). The rub is that any modifications and improvements to said GPL'd code is unavailable to the BSD folks.
So the BSD folks are "locked out" of the changes that the GPL folks made (similar to closed-sourcing), except they're also having the GPL folks shove it in their face "Nyaa nyaa nyaa, you can't have it back! GPL rulez! BSD sux!!"
TL; DR versions - the GPL folks are doing to BSD licensed code what the GPL folks have always argued why the GPL is better than BSD - anyone can take it and lock it up. Except it's the GPL doing the locking up, the supposedly "freer" license.
Safari has/had nasty bugs that took advantage of the "auto-open safe files" default setting, which I think counts as they're distributed by the same vendor as the OS and it comes preinstalled.
I think QuickTime is similar as well a few malicious MOV files can get you hooped.
Bunches of flaws in the open-source software it comes with as well (though we usually attribute that to the software on Linux, and to OS X on OS X. So an Apache flaw would be reported as an Apache flaw on Linux, or an OS X "Webserver" flaw on OS X...).
The problem has been getting it from where you fuel up the tanker, to where it's needed. The fuel's cheap comparatively, but the trucks aren't really off-road vehicles. When you've got flooded streets, streets lined with debris, or streets that are completely gone, the trucks really can't make it in to resupply.
So the massive amount of fuel needed is needed right when the roads are some of the most treacherous or blocked completely. And sometimes, the only way is bucket brigade. The cost would be so astronomical that most companies would prefer to risk it.
We have natural gas (methane), of which we have so much we literally burn it off because we don't use it up fast enough. And China, etc. haven't developed their natural gas wells yet (we export natural gas to Asia).
In fact, I'm guessing that once oil gets hard enough, we'll see a rise in natural gas vehicles as part of the mix. We can either burn it directly in an ICE, or use a fuel cell. Not as green since we still have CO2 emissions but it seems like a reasonable stopgap.
Not to mention that cellular radios are extremely power efficient because they have to be. The power amp is only used for transmission, and only powered up the instant the radio needs to transmit, then shut down immediately afterwards.
The amount of power that streaming video takes is extremely low as the radio is mostly in receive mode, not transmit (it's sending acks and such but that's it).
In standby mode, the power budget is around 3mA or so to get your 300/500 hour standby time, and the radio is consuming roughly 90% of that as it has to maintain a ping to the base station, which involves transmitting. Of course, the power consumption spikes easily to 100+mA, but for such a brief period of time that it averages out as the radio basically keeps the transmitter powered off until it absolutely needs to transmit, and the receiver off as long as possible (receive power is still high, so the receiver is shut off when the phone isn't expecting an update from the base. If the base has a message, the base will hold it until the phone's timeslot comes up - power savings at the expense of latency).
The real technological wonder is being able to quickly turn on and turn off those parts of the radio - considering that traditionally you had to let them "warm up" to get on frequency. These days it's practically instantaneous.
Well, airbags are more dangerous if used WITHOUT seatbelts. They actually do cause more injuries to the occupants that are wildly flying about the cabin. But used with seatbelts they are very effective. I think most modern cars disable the airbags if the occupant is not wearing seatbelts for that reason. (Of course, are there any places where wearing seatbelts for regular driving are still optional? Not counting special cases like ice road driving, for example (a seatbelt only impedes evacuation if you break through, and you're driving slow enough that even if you have an accident (... which seems difficult to do since well, you're going slow) it feels like hitting a speedbump).)
As for ABS - it turns out while you can threshold brake to demonstrate, in a real emergency most people can't and don't remember to, so the natural reaction to just stomp on the brakes works really well. The few who have to unlearn it typically have it strongly ingrained through training (more than what you get from normal driver training).
Well, the political climate in the US is far too polarized for that stuff to happen. Introduce new regulations and you have the libertarians and those who advocate laissez-faire capitalism foaming. And the republicans will point to it as a way to destroy small business and thus, jobs.
So in the end you end up with watered down laws and other such things. Hell, look at the backlash that happened with the FTC wanted to investigate Google - anywhere from "Apple too!" to "they're doing nothing wrong!"
Or you could do what the EU does and mandate say, 2 year minimum warranties on durable goods, and at the same time they complain that they are being gouged for their stuff (which really ends up looking normal after import duties, VAT (added to base price), and the cost of an extended warranty - how often do you answer no to "Would you like an extended warranty?").
So on one hand, you want to have the flexibility of people to enter into contracts willingly on their own accord and on their own terms (I'm betting there'll be tons of people who'll give up their right to class-actoins for a few bucks off) with the need to protect consumers. It's a very fine line where you go in the continuum - be like the EU with strong protections, but also higher prices, or the US with weak protections, and lower prices. Try to stay in the middle and you'll find every new President will meddle with what a "fair" compromise is.
The problem has been that the PC market was so commoditized that the amount of money made is so little. Everyone cries for the sub-$500 laptop, so manufacturers comply, leading to cutting of corners everywhere - LCDs are expensive (especially high-res ones), GPUs, etc. CPUs, RAM and hard drives are cheap, so you can get ones with the best gigas for marketing.
The only reaosn we have manufacturers going for higher quality displays is because of well, Apple. Since Apple refuses to participate in the low end ("Macs are overpriced!") it means Apple hsa to constantly refine their PCs to make it worth the money.
E.g., use of full metal bodies, high res displays, SSDs, etc. They do this to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.
Heck, once you promise better margins to manufacturers, they start spending that money on R&D - see the ultrabook line. They all cost around the price of a Macbook Air, or easily double or triple what the low end laptops sell for. As a result, we get them with all sorts of different screen resolutions.
Basically in the race to produce the cheapest laptop, they've left the premium market to Apple, who appeals to those who like a laptop with clean lines, "exotic" materials and other things.
Oh, and Apple invested a lot of money making high-res displays - it's not as easy to build a 15" 2880x1800 screen as it is a 15" 1366x768 screen. First off, more pixels mean more transistors and greater chance of dead pixels, lowering yield. Second, being able to address those transistors and ensure the pixels are all good is a lot harder with the smaller pixel size. So Apple's pretty much owning all the R&D on that (especially with Sharp in financial trouble).
Welcome to business. The same rules apply everywhere - try to cut as many corners as you can so the company can boast about huge profits and the CEO can pay for this space tourist ticket.
The only things that change are how far you can take it before you get caught, and what the penalties are. In thie case, it was basically closing up shop. Not the worst (they could've held the execs liable, for example)...
There's your problem. A sunny pleasant day doesn't have clouds! So by definition your cloud is gone.
Or put another way - cloud gone due to stretch of good weather.
You realize that you're making the anti-abortionist claim, right? The life begins at conception (and not at birth), thus abortion is illegal because it's infanticide.
The pro-life argument that life begins at birth means aborting a fetus is not infanticide and therefore, legal.
For the religious folk, it's a very important topic, and why the abortion debate has shifted long into when life begins, and whether or not aborting is the same as murder or infanticide.
Incorrect. If your car registered to you is caught speeding, you are responsible unless you can prove it was someone else. You are, after all, letting someone else use your vehicle, and unless it was stolen, most people don't reasonably lend anyone their car. So either you know who drove the vehicle then, or you can prove the person in the photo is not you.
Copyright infringement is, currently, a criminal offense. The RIAA/MPAA use this to go on fishing expeditions to ge their name, then they drop the criminal case and then sue those people for money. (In a criminal trial, the money goes to the government, which is why you often have combined civil and criminal trials).
And should there be sufficient evidence, your computers and other associated electronic devices can be siezed for forensic examination.
And while an IP address doesn't equal a person, examination of a PC can tie a link between your online activities and the supposed pirate. Just ask Jammie Thomas who was convicted because her PC had her online identity which was linked to online activities.
The bigger question is how Microsoft let multiplayer play on hacked Xbox360s
It's generally considered that Microsoft scans the Xbox when it connects to Live, and since the Xbox can't run unsigned code, it's trusted.
With this, connecting a modded Xbox to Live is generally a good way to get console banned on your account because Microsoft detects the mods. Especially since Microsoft pushed an update recently.
Now, it could be possible to hack your savegame though and make the necessary mods to your character, causing the dormant code to be "woken up". In this case, you're running signed game code (though untested, obsolete game paths), so your Xbox is completely original, you just hacked your save game. In which case it's a developer problem...
The binary encodings are a mess, yes, due mostly to the urge to adapt and produce some consistency with the AArch32 instructions. The ARM ABI has seriously evolved and the encoding possibilities are quite... nasty now if you look at ARMv7.
Thankfully, the assembler takes care of that for us.
Conditional execution is nice, but it really interferes with modern architectures. The ARMv8 core is a fully speculative, out-of-order with register renaming implementation. Conditional execution breaks this as the processor has to track more state since any combinations of instructions in the stream could have any combination of conditional execution.
Ditto the PC - it was nice to be able to jump by simply writing to the PC, but man does it complicate internal design if any instruction can arbitrarily move the PC to any register value. In the end, the few uses of conditional execution and the ability to move anything to the PC without using a branch or return style instruction was probably so limited, there was no point.
Oh, and there are 31 registers - X0 through X30. The 32nd register is special depending on the instruction - for ADD and SUB, "X31" means the stack pointer. For most other instructions, it means the zero register (reads as zero), something borrowed from MIPS, and allowing interesting register-only instruction forms to be used when the immediate value is zero. It does result in oddball uses though, like
SUB SP, 0, X0 ; Set SP.
to play with the stack pointer.
If you're a system level programmer, AArch64 is MUCH nicer (no more damned coprocessors). I know, I've done a fair bit of it.
Seth Greene as well (Robot Chicken). In fact the two series usually "competed" on that topic.
On the other hand, I suppose Episode 7 will now feature wall-to-wall Macs, iPods, iPads, and iPhones... (I think Apple has a pretty big stake in Disney). All battling the (do no) evil Google empire and their droids.
If you're within the datacenter, there's a chance the trading computers are a bit further away from that actually. What happens is that the exchange actually ends up finding the longest cable they need to reach from the trading computer to the farthest rack, then they ensure that every cable from the trading computer any rack is that length. That way all the HFT traders who pay to be physically close in the data center aren't getting any advantage - there's just a huge coil of cable above the rack to ensure every rack gets the same latency. One could argue the coil of cable adds to latency by being an inductor, I suppose...
Actually the iPhone was a strange situation. Apple at that time (and still does) wanted devs to write web apps (and Apple worked hard to get geolocation, sensor data, and local storage in HTML5). But devs wanted a native SDK, and they kept clamoring. So much so that they hacked together an SDK from MacOS X headers so jailbroken iPhones could easily get apps.
Apple saw this and created an SDK and the App Store. (And still allows webapps to be released with no approval required at all).
It's very easy to attract developers when they're banging on your door begging to develop for your platform.
You mean craptacular, right? If you want a GOOD android phone, they're all huge screens. A sub-4" flagship phone does not exist - the only ones are crap ass ones with little memory, poor resolution, a slow processor, or all three. And they run Froyo. Gingerbread if you're lucky.
It seems Android has stratified - 4" and smaller screen - crappy "free" smartphones. Larger than 4" and you can get some nice phones that show off Android.