You make an excellent case that their are understandable socio-political reasons why the system wound up being designed in a broken way.
That does not change the fact that any system that generates a $30,000 cell phone bill must be considered broken.
Certainly we might be able to see why it is difficult to prevent such a result given the current system; Certainly it might be difficult in the extreme to convince the relevant players to fix the system.
But concluding that a $30,000 cell phone bill is the correct result because that's what the system generated and you can't see an easy way to avoid it is not reasonable. Where I work in we have a class of bugs we call "Erroneous without regard to user action". That's what a $30,000 cell phone bill is: it's a wrong result no matter what the user did.
Exactly what causes this plainly broken result, and exactly how hard it is to do better I can't say. But I suspect one factor is that the system is designed by people who, when it is pointed out that the system is plainly broken, call the messenger "dumbass".
But that's just my opinion, you're welcome to disagree, if you're a dumbass.
All laws take liberties away from someone. Sometimes they do it to ensure other liberties for other people. We take away companies liberty to refuse people goods, services, employment, etc based on the color of their skin or their gender, for example. I call this a good thing.
Pardon the bluntness, but that's BS. If they weren't uncomfortable with homosexuals in the first place, explaining it to their kid wouldn't be a problem. Hell, it wouldn't come up if the parent didn't make a big deal about something needing explanation.
My 4 year old sons best friend from preschool has two mommies. He has on a couple occasions expressed the thought that this was a good or bad deal based on whether he's feeling closer to me or my wife; he may have noticed that this is less usual, but what's to explain? His friend has two mommies because both her parents are women. They're her parents because they fell in love and decided to start a family. This is neither complicated nor particularly interesting to a child unless or until an adult get's all flustered by it.
The whole fear of explaining sex to children who aren't mature enough to "handle" it is irrational in the first place. My daughter (7) has gotten to the point where she comes up with questions about where babies come from that, yes, make me uncomfortable. But I do my best to give simple, factual answers. It's helpful to remember that sex and sexuality may be complicated. emotion-laden topics for teenagers and adults, but small children just don't have that baggage. They don't care about it in any way different from the five hundred other topics they wonder about in a typical day.
I'm sure you know all sorts of details about the quirks of the system that make this hard. Quirks you consider immutable truths. But I defy you to describe what in the nature of electromagnetic radiation prevents it from transmitting pricing data. Beyond that, if the system you and others have designed is incapable of calculating and quoting a price for the service you are selling, it doesn't matter why. The system blows.
If the purpose of detecting is to avoid drawing too much current, drawing the current is not a reasonable solution.
Possibly I still misunderstand what you are saying, but I cannot figure out an interpretation of your original comment that isn't either wrong or nonsensical. Perhaps I was ruder than necessary in my last comment, but posting "no, you're wrong" with t a link to a long Wikipedia article that doesn't explain anything of what you're saying is kind of obnoxious.
One should be concerned with what Apple's position is here if one bought an iPhone, because regardless of your opinion on whether it is right or wrong, Apple certainly does stop some activities people undertake with their phones.
I always liked "Peaches", but mostly because I already liked the John Prine song ("Spanish Pipedream") that I assume partly inspired it. Do any actual fans of theirs know if they've drawn that connection explicitly?
I never remember them on the radio, but I bought their album in a pre-iTunes whim/quest to own all recorded covers of "Kick Out the Jams". (Theirs is amongst the best, maybe because it's amongst the least faithful.)
"until the sixteenth amendment, income taxes were unconstitutional"
They were certainly constitutional. There was debate as to whether they were examples of a "capitation or other direct tax" which would, under Article 1, section 9, require that they be levied on states proportionally to population. The courts were ruling (not terribly consistently of clearly) that they were direct taxes for certain sources of income, but not others. My understanding (IANAL) of the distinction between direct and indirect taxes leads me to conclude the court was just wrong, as most supporters of the sixteenth amendment thought at the time.
The sixteenth amendment cleaned all that up, but taxes on income were always constitutional. It was only a matter of whether they had to be proportional to state populations (which would be stupid, IMO) or not.
Wow, that would be a great argument if you had made one. Or if your link said anything to support you. Or if you understood anything about basic electronics.
That article discusses the various ways in which a supply circuit (the USB hub) can limit the amount of current a load (the device plugged in) is able to draw. But the load (device) cannot "detect" available current except by trying to draw it and seeing if it gets it. Until the current flows there is only potential, i.e. voltage.
Exactly. "Designed to last 90 days" presumably means something like "Designed to have a 95% chance of lasting 90 days". Which probably means it has a 90% chance of lasting 180 days, an 80% chance of lasting 360 days...
I don't know what confidence threshold NASA uses, maybe more than 95%. So the 5 years these lasted is lucky, but not so completely off the charts as it might seem.
That would be contrary to the standard, and while I said "All manner of devices ignore this", it's really mostly cheap stuff that does; manufacturers of expensive stuff like phones care if they can put the real USB-certified logo on their packaging etc.
The better solution would be for the phone to happily connect to a driver for a generic class of devices if it's specific driver wasn't there. You wouldn't get any fancy features specific to that phone, but you could still ask nicely for more power. My camera does this; with the right driver it does various fancy stuff (I don't actually know what, I don't use any of it), but on any random computer it looks like a generic drive full of image files. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not actually any sort of expert on USB, so I don't know if there is some good technical reason why the phone can't charge fast and obey the spec.
Strictly as a matter of law, Judges have sufficient discretion to decide that what someone is telling them is plainly ridiculous, and to discount it on that basis.
I'm saying, having a blackjack-specific app running on your iPhone while sitting at an blackjack table is going to be taken as a prima-facie indicator of intent. Accidentally happening to bump your iPhone into running a card-counting app while sitting at a blackjack table is not a possibility that's going to get you a reasonable doubt. It's arguably a stupid enough suggestion to get you cited for contempt.
I believe the current copyright model, devised when the invention of the printing press overturned the previous model, is problematically out of step. Technological advances have upset it, but the model has not caught up. Some advocate simple abolition, but I think that is obviously flawed, as it doesn't address the very real problems copyright was originally devised in response to. I don't claim to know what the right answer is, but I call "nothing" a crazy answer, along with a smiley face, because it's friendlier than calling people stupid.
If the hub is cheap and dumb, the same thing as if you plug in 1 device drawing 2 amps. At some point, the power supply will blow a fuse, trip a breaker, or melt. Probably it will brown out first, supplying less than 5V, and forcing your device(s) into a power range it can handle that way.
That's why the standard exists and would be a good idea.
You don't (and can't) "detect" power on a line, nor can a hub "throw" power at them.
The hub is supposed to keep the voltage at 5V. How many amps that causes to flow through a device is up to the device, which is supposed to be smart enough to limit itself to 100mA until has gotten permission via software to draw more. All manner of devices ignore this because it's a few cents cheaper to not include those electronics, and just pull whatever you feel like. Hub makers must deal with this or have their products melt and not sell, so they deal. But it's the device that is wrong. No machine maker in their right mind will include a port that can't supply 500mA right off the bat, because the standard is so universally ignored.
All sorts of devices pull whatever power they can get regardless. It's so common that a port that doesn't supply 500mA regardless of enumeration must be considered de-facto defective.
It may adhere to the spec, but if half the stuff made with the right plug on the end doesn't work when you plug it in, no consumer will care. And in fact, pretty much every USB port you find will happily supply 500mA to anything you stick across the relevant pins.
As for the RAZR, I assume the driver supports other functions, it really ought work as some generic 500mA consuming device for just charging.
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"there has been some talk of moving the ISS to L5, L3, or moon orbit"
Not by anyone with a remote clue what they are talking about.
Right, because before now there hasn't been any life support systems...
The confidence estimates were presumably made for mars in the first place, so this is irrelevant.
You make an excellent case that their are understandable socio-political reasons why the system wound up being designed in a broken way.
That does not change the fact that any system that generates a $30,000 cell phone bill must be considered broken.
Certainly we might be able to see why it is difficult to prevent such a result given the current system; Certainly it might be difficult in the extreme to convince the relevant players to fix the system.
But concluding that a $30,000 cell phone bill is the correct result because that's what the system generated and you can't see an easy way to avoid it is not reasonable. Where I work in we have a class of bugs we call "Erroneous without regard to user action". That's what a $30,000 cell phone bill is: it's a wrong result no matter what the user did.
Exactly what causes this plainly broken result, and exactly how hard it is to do better I can't say. But I suspect one factor is that the system is designed by people who, when it is pointed out that the system is plainly broken, call the messenger "dumbass".
But that's just my opinion, you're welcome to disagree, if you're a dumbass.
All laws take liberties away from someone. Sometimes they do it to ensure other liberties for other people. We take away companies liberty to refuse people goods, services, employment, etc based on the color of their skin or their gender, for example. I call this a good thing.
Pardon the bluntness, but that's BS. If they weren't uncomfortable with homosexuals in the first place, explaining it to their kid wouldn't be a problem. Hell, it wouldn't come up if the parent didn't make a big deal about something needing explanation.
My 4 year old sons best friend from preschool has two mommies. He has on a couple occasions expressed the thought that this was a good or bad deal based on whether he's feeling closer to me or my wife; he may have noticed that this is less usual, but what's to explain? His friend has two mommies because both her parents are women. They're her parents because they fell in love and decided to start a family. This is neither complicated nor particularly interesting to a child unless or until an adult get's all flustered by it.
The whole fear of explaining sex to children who aren't mature enough to "handle" it is irrational in the first place. My daughter (7) has gotten to the point where she comes up with questions about where babies come from that, yes, make me uncomfortable. But I do my best to give simple, factual answers. It's helpful to remember that sex and sexuality may be complicated. emotion-laden topics for teenagers and adults, but small children just don't have that baggage. They don't care about it in any way different from the five hundred other topics they wonder about in a typical day.
I'm sure you know all sorts of details about the quirks of the system that make this hard. Quirks you consider immutable truths. But I defy you to describe what in the nature of electromagnetic radiation prevents it from transmitting pricing data. Beyond that, if the system you and others have designed is incapable of calculating and quoting a price for the service you are selling, it doesn't matter why. The system blows.
...People will ever care what ral8158 has to say? He'll ever be around?
No. Not for real.
If the purpose of detecting is to avoid drawing too much current, drawing the current is not a reasonable solution.
Possibly I still misunderstand what you are saying, but I cannot figure out an interpretation of your original comment that isn't either wrong or nonsensical. Perhaps I was ruder than necessary in my last comment, but posting "no, you're wrong" with t a link to a long Wikipedia article that doesn't explain anything of what you're saying is kind of obnoxious.
One should be concerned with what Apple's position is here if one bought an iPhone, because regardless of your opinion on whether it is right or wrong, Apple certainly does stop some activities people undertake with their phones.
I always liked "Peaches", but mostly because I already liked the John Prine song ("Spanish Pipedream") that I assume partly inspired it. Do any actual fans of theirs know if they've drawn that connection explicitly?
I never remember them on the radio, but I bought their album in a pre-iTunes whim/quest to own all recorded covers of "Kick Out the Jams". (Theirs is amongst the best, maybe because it's amongst the least faithful.)
"until the sixteenth amendment, income taxes were unconstitutional"
They were certainly constitutional. There was debate as to whether they were examples of a "capitation or other direct tax" which would, under Article 1, section 9, require that they be levied on states proportionally to population. The courts were ruling (not terribly consistently of clearly) that they were direct taxes for certain sources of income, but not others. My understanding (IANAL) of the distinction between direct and indirect taxes leads me to conclude the court was just wrong, as most supporters of the sixteenth amendment thought at the time.
The sixteenth amendment cleaned all that up, but taxes on income were always constitutional. It was only a matter of whether they had to be proportional to state populations (which would be stupid, IMO) or not.
Dude, by all means be outraged, but at least know what you're talking about:
http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/06/06/scotus.medical.marijuana/index.html
I know a decision really sucks when I agree with a dissent written by Clarence Thomas: "If Congress can regulate this, they can regulate anything"
Interesting. I've definitely pulled 500mA with totally dumb device.
How did you test?
Wow, that would be a great argument if you had made one. Or if your link said anything to support you. Or if you understood anything about basic electronics.
That article discusses the various ways in which a supply circuit (the USB hub) can limit the amount of current a load (the device plugged in) is able to draw.
But the load (device) cannot "detect" available current except by trying to draw it and seeing if it gets it. Until the current flows there is only potential, i.e. voltage.
Exactly. "Designed to last 90 days" presumably means something like "Designed to have a 95% chance of lasting 90 days". Which probably means it has a 90% chance of lasting 180 days, an 80% chance of lasting 360 days...
I don't know what confidence threshold NASA uses, maybe more than 95%. So the 5 years these lasted is lucky, but not so completely off the charts as it might seem.
That would be contrary to the standard, and while I said "All manner of devices ignore this", it's really mostly cheap stuff that does; manufacturers of expensive stuff like phones care if they can put the real USB-certified logo on their packaging etc.
The better solution would be for the phone to happily connect to a driver for a generic class of devices if it's specific driver wasn't there. You wouldn't get any fancy features specific to that phone, but you could still ask nicely for more power. My camera does this; with the right driver it does various fancy stuff (I don't actually know what, I don't use any of it), but on any random computer it looks like a generic drive full of image files. In the interest of full disclosure, I'm not actually any sort of expert on USB, so I don't know if there is some good technical reason why the phone can't charge fast and obey the spec.
Strictly as a matter of law, Judges have sufficient discretion to decide that what someone is telling them is plainly ridiculous, and to discount it on that basis.
I'm saying, having a blackjack-specific app running on your iPhone while sitting at an blackjack table is going to be taken as a prima-facie indicator of intent. Accidentally happening to bump your iPhone into running a card-counting app while sitting at a blackjack table is not a possibility that's going to get you a reasonable doubt. It's arguably a stupid enough suggestion to get you cited for contempt.
I believe the current copyright model, devised when the invention of the printing press overturned the previous model, is problematically out of step. Technological advances have upset it, but the model has not caught up. Some advocate simple abolition, but I think that is obviously flawed, as it doesn't address the very real problems copyright was originally devised in response to. I don't claim to know what the right answer is, but I call "nothing" a crazy answer, along with a smiley face, because it's friendlier than calling people stupid.
If the hub is cheap and dumb, the same thing as if you plug in 1 device drawing 2 amps. At some point, the power supply will blow a fuse, trip a breaker, or melt. Probably it will brown out first, supplying less than 5V, and forcing your device(s) into a power range it can handle that way.
That's why the standard exists and would be a good idea.
Ahh, the old "Judges aren't allowed to call bullshit" defense. Good luck with that.
You don't (and can't) "detect" power on a line, nor can a hub "throw" power at them.
The hub is supposed to keep the voltage at 5V. How many amps that causes to flow through a device is up to the device, which is supposed to be smart enough to limit itself to 100mA until has gotten permission via software to draw more. All manner of devices ignore this because it's a few cents cheaper to not include those electronics, and just pull whatever you feel like. Hub makers must deal with this or have their products melt and not sell, so they deal. But it's the device that is wrong. No machine maker in their right mind will include a port that can't supply 500mA right off the bat, because the standard is so universally ignored.
Which is a lovely spec, but it's fiction.
All sorts of devices pull whatever power they can get regardless. It's so common that a port that doesn't supply 500mA regardless of enumeration must be considered de-facto defective.
It may adhere to the spec, but if half the stuff made with the right plug on the end doesn't work when you plug it in, no consumer will care. And in fact, pretty much every USB port you find will happily supply 500mA to anything you stick across the relevant pins.
As for the RAZR, I assume the driver supports other functions, it really ought work as some generic 500mA consuming device for just charging.
Oh, OK. I mean, that's crazy, but at least it's internally-consistent-crazy. :)
"Personally, I think anything that can be copied really shouldn't be copyrightable"
Um, what? You shouldn't be able to copyright anything to which copyright could possibly apply? Maybe you think copyright shouldn't exist at all?