See, that's the interesting thing in this discussion.
* With Flash, one must use Adobe tools to create the content and Adobe tools to view the content. The content itself may or may not be free, but the means to manipulate it are not. * With Apple iPhad*, one must use Apple tools to develop applications, but the device itself can view most open content. * With HTML5, one may use any tools to create the content and any tools to view the content. (Though H.264 has some patent and licensing encumbrance iirc.)
HTML5 is clearly IMHO more open than Flash. (It'd be even more open with Ogg, but still it's a big improvement over Flash.)
A common theme about Apple and Flash is that Apple is hurting itself by not using Flash, and that's seen as a bad thing. Another is that Apple should be doing more to promote open standards. But somehow, even when one takes these together to see that Apple is hurting itself to promote more open standards, Apple is still the bad guy.:-)
Typically in an enterprise situation the business is more concerned with preserving the confidentiality of data than it is with recovering hardware, which is why Blackberry and Apple both have remote-wipe capabilities built into their phones. By public accounts, the lost phone was remotely wiped within 24 hours of the loss. Once wiped, the phone would no longer respond to incoming calls. The carrier also presumably would have deactivated the SIM when asked as well. (Though as the SIMs are all numbered, the dead one should still have been usable buy the carrier to find the subscriber.)
At any rate, it appears California law imposes a duty on the finder of property independent of the actions taken by the loser of the property.
Another question worth asking: why didn't the finder turn it in to the bar's lost-and-found?
The current windows malware threat is not fully addressable by training. Some exploits are hitting people who have done nothing wrong. By all means train people, just be aware that no single measure will fully solve that issue.
I could certainly do with more editor interface consistency, and some finer-grained control over post visibility. But that said, it is Good Enough for most of what I want to do in social media, nicely relegating Facebook to a distant afterthought. Obviously our mileage varies, not least because you measure in kilometers.:-p
"He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number."
That's a start - and more effort than I had previously heard about - but still is not really enough considering what the finder had. Not because it was some precious unreleased Apple device, but because it was a GSM cellphone. A finder could easily have popped out the SIM card to look at its labeling.* From there, a finder could have contacted the carrier and asked that the carrier request the subscriber to give him a call for return of the device. It defies belief that none of these experienced tech journalists would have realized this possibility existed.
The finder and the journalists had ample opportunity to do this right, but they chose not to. Now the consequences are upon them, and it's hard for me to work up much sympathy.
[*: Given there's only one carrier in the US which is known to use that SIM form factor, it shouldn't have been much of a challenge to discover the carrier even absent a SIM label.]
Hah! I did not know that. And here I was reading the comments to see if anyone had recommended Multiply already...
Anyway. Yes, I second the Multiply suggestion. A couple years ago about fifty slashdot journalers moved over there en masse, and have generally had few (but nonzero*) reasons to regret it. it's a much, much better platform for conversations than facebook is, while allowing vastly richer media than slashdot.
Keep up the good work.
[*: I think Multiply admins were a bit too hasty with a banhammer in one particular case. But it's not the free-for-all scrum of slashdot, so maybe the culture change was just a bit too abrupt.]
T-Mobile, and they did not give me the owner's information. They also declined to take custody of the phone. They did, however, call the owner's alternate contact number and give him the phone number at which I suggested he call me. Once he called me, it was not hard to complete the return.
One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.
No obvious way to identify the owner, aside from it being a suspected pre-release product bearing the logo of a notoriously secretive and controlling manufacturer, the SIM card used by only one domestic carrier, the IMEI number, and the serial number you mean?
I do agree that it's fair to speculate on a legal duty to attempt find the owner or the lack thereof. As the saying goes, IANAL. But to say that some experienced tech journalists had no plausible way of attempting to determine the real owner of any found cell phone is laughable.
Hell, I have returned a found dead-battery cell phone to its owner before, based on nothing more than a visit to the carrier, never even powered it on. Cell phones are identifiable six ways to Sunday. It's not that hard.
Their conduct was not "questionably" immoral. There's no question at all. Doing the right thing was easy, but instead they received property that certainly was not theirs - which may well have been stolen* - and documented its destruction for their profit. If there is a law on the books in their jurisdiction stating a duty to attempt return and Apple chooses to pursue charges, they're cooked.
[*: Perhaps the person who gave it to them acquired it via a deliberate leak. Or perhaps he acquired it through a mugging. We don't know, and neither does Gizmodo.]
"Blatant stealing? I think not. There may be an obligation to find the owner if it is possible, like a name on it or check the address book, but other than that who are you going to trust to get it to the rightful owner? The bartender? The police?"
The Gizmodo article notes that Apple has stated it lost a device and would like it back, so I'm thinking they would not have much difficulty finding the rightful owner. Given that, I think it's fair to say they have not fulfilled any legal duty to return it that they may have.
So yeah, I think the idea that there's some criminal liability here to be pretty plausible.
I like ad-supported sites, I really do. It's a good business model for making lots of content available free to the end user, and I think that goal is worth a certain amount of bother from advertisers. That's why - until very recently - I have not run ad blockers.
But two things have happened recently which have forced me into it. One, on my home Mac my kid started complaining about the sexualized content of ads on the otherwise benign sites he visits. Okay, kid, here's adblockplus for firefox.
Two, ads appear to have become a significant vector for windows malware. Yes it is silly that I have to use windows at all at work, but that said the fact remains: advertising systems do not vet their content well enough to be trustworthy. Therefore, purely as a matter of self defense, I am obliged to block ads on the Windows browser I use.
I would like to let arstechnica have all their ad revenue, I really would. They're a very fine publication. But unless they can demonstrate a chain of trust in their advertising, I can't whitelist them.
"Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions -- and price -- had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start."
Oh, that sort of thing always ends well./sarcasm
I thought the previous administration had thought itself good at business dealings?
Fair enough, but there's a stack of common prerequisites needed for a serious effort at either approach. A low-earth-orbit automated refueling depot would be the keystone of many potential long-term or long-range programs. Of course, like any keystone there's a couple big stacks of other stuff that need to be built to make it happen. It's not a very sexy goal for a program, but it's what's needed.
They're the ones cheering at the cancellation of Pork In Space.
I'd certainly like to see a viable human spaceflight program, building our way out to Luna, Mars, and beyond. Problem is, Constellation wasn't it. Constellation was treated as an excuse to pay aerospace giants megatons of money to develop a new launcher which would - at best - just barely achieve its aims. NASA appears to no longer be capable of serious launcher development, because the industry lobbyists own the politicians, and the politicians own the engineers specifying how the industry's products must perform. I am dead certain NASA engineers can do fine, fine work, but they haven't been free to do what they do best.
With the new approach, this counterproductive cycle is at least interrupted and hopefully broken.
She is on record as saying she does not believe in perpetual copyright, and has derided the Sonny Bono act as so outrageous as to actually weaken copyright in the long run.* It is probably worth considering, however, that she is currently still alive, and thus has a pretty clear and legitimate interest in the way her wholly-owned work is used.
She states that she thinks the Author's Guild has no business negotiating away her rights to her work given that she's not a member. That is not at all the same thing as supporting perpetual copyright.
[*: And she's very much correct, no? With de facto perpetual copyright in place, who is inclined to respect any copyright any more?]
I won't say never, because people who say "That'll never be practical!" are inevitably made to look like idiots at some point. That said, it's hard to imagine this working well for punching applications.
This process seems to have some inherent disadvantages for punching holes. Compared to an ordinary turret punch, the tooling will be very expensive and will take a tremendous amount more power to operate. It is also not clear if EMP tools will be able to punch arbitrary shapes, or how the press would operate in an industrial setting without damaging its own working area or doing Something Unfortunate with the waste metal, or if it can operate at anything like the speed of a flywheel-driven punch. The may of course be certain applications where it will become valuable or even indispensable, but for general-purpose punching, I don't see it.
For forming applications it's a very interesting idea, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it works on iPhone. Not very well, mind you, but it is controllable with swipes.
Have a Nice Day, Adobe!
Starring Steve Jobs as Dr. Frank-N-Furter, a Transplanted Transcoder from Transylvaniaaaaaa.
I stand corrected. Is there an open viewer for Flash content as well?
See, that's the interesting thing in this discussion.
* With Flash, one must use Adobe tools to create the content and Adobe tools to view the content. The content itself may or may not be free, but the means to manipulate it are not.
* With Apple iPhad*, one must use Apple tools to develop applications, but the device itself can view most open content.
* With HTML5, one may use any tools to create the content and any tools to view the content. (Though H.264 has some patent and licensing encumbrance iirc.)
HTML5 is clearly IMHO more open than Flash. (It'd be even more open with Ogg, but still it's a big improvement over Flash.)
A common theme about Apple and Flash is that Apple is hurting itself by not using Flash, and that's seen as a bad thing. Another is that Apple should be doing more to promote open standards. But somehow, even when one takes these together to see that Apple is hurting itself to promote more open standards, Apple is still the bad guy. :-)
Personally I find that hilarious.
[*: iPhone+iPod +iPad]
Typically in an enterprise situation the business is more concerned with preserving the confidentiality of data than it is with recovering hardware, which is why Blackberry and Apple both have remote-wipe capabilities built into their phones. By public accounts, the lost phone was remotely wiped within 24 hours of the loss. Once wiped, the phone would no longer respond to incoming calls. The carrier also presumably would have deactivated the SIM when asked as well. (Though as the SIMs are all numbered, the dead one should still have been usable buy the carrier to find the subscriber.)
At any rate, it appears California law imposes a duty on the finder of property independent of the actions taken by the loser of the property.
Another question worth asking: why didn't the finder turn it in to the bar's lost-and-found?
The current windows malware threat is not fully addressable by training. Some exploits are hitting people who have done nothing wrong. By all means train people, just be aware that no single measure will fully solve that issue.
I could certainly do with more editor interface consistency, and some finer-grained control over post visibility. But that said, it is Good Enough for most of what I want to do in social media, nicely relegating Facebook to a distant afterthought. Obviously our mileage varies, not least because you measure in kilometers. :-p
Iirc the new device uses the same sort of miniature SIM that the iPad does, and that SIM form factor is currently used in the US by AT&T alone.
But even if it were two carriers, it still wouldn't be too hard. [shrug]
"He reached for a phone and called a lot of Apple numbers and tried to find someone who was at least willing to transfer his call to the right person, but no luck. No one took him seriously and all he got for his troubles was a ticket number."
That's a start - and more effort than I had previously heard about - but still is not really enough considering what the finder had. Not because it was some precious unreleased Apple device, but because it was a GSM cellphone. A finder could easily have popped out the SIM card to look at its labeling.* From there, a finder could have contacted the carrier and asked that the carrier request the subscriber to give him a call for return of the device. It defies belief that none of these experienced tech journalists would have realized this possibility existed.
The finder and the journalists had ample opportunity to do this right, but they chose not to. Now the consequences are upon them, and it's hard for me to work up much sympathy.
[*: Given there's only one carrier in the US which is known to use that SIM form factor, it shouldn't have been much of a challenge to discover the carrier even absent a SIM label.]
Sun passess behind planet, our state thrown into darkness!
(This was so obviously going to happen I don't understand why it is considered news.)
Hah! I did not know that. And here I was reading the comments to see if anyone had recommended Multiply already...
Anyway. Yes, I second the Multiply suggestion. A couple years ago about fifty slashdot journalers moved over there en masse, and have generally had few (but nonzero*) reasons to regret it. it's a much, much better platform for conversations than facebook is, while allowing vastly richer media than slashdot.
Keep up the good work.
[*: I think Multiply admins were a bit too hasty with a banhammer in one particular case. But it's not the free-for-all scrum of slashdot, so maybe the culture change was just a bit too abrupt.]
T-Mobile, and they did not give me the owner's information. They also declined to take custody of the phone. They did, however, call the owner's alternate contact number and give him the phone number at which I suggested he call me. Once he called me, it was not hard to complete the return.
FYI:
Does that look good for Gizmodo?
No obvious way to identify the owner, aside from it being a suspected pre-release product bearing the logo of a notoriously secretive and controlling manufacturer, the SIM card used by only one domestic carrier, the IMEI number, and the serial number you mean?
I do agree that it's fair to speculate on a legal duty to attempt find the owner or the lack thereof. As the saying goes, IANAL. But to say that some experienced tech journalists had no plausible way of attempting to determine the real owner of any found cell phone is laughable.
Hell, I have returned a found dead-battery cell phone to its owner before, based on nothing more than a visit to the carrier, never even powered it on. Cell phones are identifiable six ways to Sunday. It's not that hard.
Their conduct was not "questionably" immoral. There's no question at all. Doing the right thing was easy, but instead they received property that certainly was not theirs - which may well have been stolen* - and documented its destruction for their profit. If there is a law on the books in their jurisdiction stating a duty to attempt return and Apple chooses to pursue charges, they're cooked.
[*: Perhaps the person who gave it to them acquired it via a deliberate leak. Or perhaps he acquired it through a mugging. We don't know, and neither does Gizmodo.]
"Blatant stealing? I think not. There may be an obligation to find the owner if it is possible, like a name on it or check the address book, but other than that who are you going to trust to get it to the rightful owner? The bartender? The police?"
The Gizmodo article notes that Apple has stated it lost a device and would like it back, so I'm thinking they would not have much difficulty finding the rightful owner. Given that, I think it's fair to say they have not fulfilled any legal duty to return it that they may have.
So yeah, I think the idea that there's some criminal liability here to be pretty plausible.
Do you suppose Steve Jobs might still be upset about the long delays in Adobe's release of OSX/Intel native products?
Nah.
Now the price has gone up to TEN million!
I like ad-supported sites, I really do. It's a good business model for making lots of content available free to the end user, and I think that goal is worth a certain amount of bother from advertisers. That's why - until very recently - I have not run ad blockers.
But two things have happened recently which have forced me into it. One, on my home Mac my kid started complaining about the sexualized content of ads on the otherwise benign sites he visits. Okay, kid, here's adblockplus for firefox.
Two, ads appear to have become a significant vector for windows malware. Yes it is silly that I have to use windows at all at work, but that said the fact remains: advertising systems do not vet their content well enough to be trustworthy. Therefore, purely as a matter of self defense, I am obliged to block ads on the Windows browser I use.
I would like to let arstechnica have all their ad revenue, I really would. They're a very fine publication. But unless they can demonstrate a chain of trust in their advertising, I can't whitelist them.
"Many of the deals are called 'undefinitized contracts,' meaning that the terms, conditions -- and price -- had not been set before NASA ordered the work to start."
Oh, that sort of thing always ends well. /sarcasm
I thought the previous administration had thought itself good at business dealings?
Fair enough, but there's a stack of common prerequisites needed for a serious effort at either approach. A low-earth-orbit automated refueling depot would be the keystone of many potential long-term or long-range programs. Of course, like any keystone there's a couple big stacks of other stuff that need to be built to make it happen. It's not a very sexy goal for a program, but it's what's needed.
They're the ones cheering at the cancellation of Pork In Space.
I'd certainly like to see a viable human spaceflight program, building our way out to Luna, Mars, and beyond. Problem is, Constellation wasn't it. Constellation was treated as an excuse to pay aerospace giants megatons of money to develop a new launcher which would - at best - just barely achieve its aims. NASA appears to no longer be capable of serious launcher development, because the industry lobbyists own the politicians, and the politicians own the engineers specifying how the industry's products must perform. I am dead certain NASA engineers can do fine, fine work, but they haven't been free to do what they do best.
With the new approach, this counterproductive cycle is at least interrupted and hopefully broken.
She is on record as saying she does not believe in perpetual copyright, and has derided the Sonny Bono act as so outrageous as to actually weaken copyright in the long run.* It is probably worth considering, however, that she is currently still alive, and thus has a pretty clear and legitimate interest in the way her wholly-owned work is used.
She states that she thinks the Author's Guild has no business negotiating away her rights to her work given that she's not a member. That is not at all the same thing as supporting perpetual copyright.
[*: And she's very much correct, no? With de facto perpetual copyright in place, who is inclined to respect any copyright any more?]
I won't say never, because people who say "That'll never be practical!" are inevitably made to look like idiots at some point. That said, it's hard to imagine this working well for punching applications.
This process seems to have some inherent disadvantages for punching holes. Compared to an ordinary turret punch, the tooling will be very expensive and will take a tremendous amount more power to operate. It is also not clear if EMP tools will be able to punch arbitrary shapes, or how the press would operate in an industrial setting without damaging its own working area or doing Something Unfortunate with the waste metal, or if it can operate at anything like the speed of a flywheel-driven punch. The may of course be certain applications where it will become valuable or even indispensable, but for general-purpose punching, I don't see it.
For forming applications it's a very interesting idea, though.
Everyone mail their old cell phones to Sir Terry Pratchett, stat!
Neal Stephenson's laptop is not really relevant, because the last several books from him were written with a fountain pen.