It's an interesting case. Moreso because the government isn't really "declining to take action against climate change", is it? At least the current administration acknowledges hat AGW is a problem, and they have some policies to address it. The real question is: what should they be doing, and are they doing enough? There was a similar case here in the Netherlands, where an environmental group sued the government and won. In that case the judges simply said: "government must abide by the treaties they signed, including the Kyoto one", noting that the country wasn't meeting the agreed emission goals. But in this case, I don't think a judge could have ordered the government to sign and ratify the treaty in the first place, merely to uphold the agreements therein.
In this case, what could a judge order the government to do? Reduce emissions by X? Build N wind farms? Sign some treaties? I imagine that a settlement would boil down to whatever gets negotiated between gov't and environmentalists, but... wouldn't it be a funny-as-hell joke on the plaintiffs if a judge ordered the government to fund 20 new nuclear power plants to help meet CO2 reduction goals?
The Dutch ruling has similar interesting side effects: it turns out there are many other treaties and agreements not being kept, and apparently we can now have the court force the government to respect those treaties. For example, the rule ("recommendation") in the NATO treaty about military spending, and the subsequent 2014 agreement of the "freeloading countries" to increase spending and at least approach the minimum agreed amount. Not quite what those environmentalists were after...
the software industry's propensity to follow a Logan's Run-like purging of more experienced developers.
Wow... if there ever was an apt analogy, this is it. Actually, it is a little bit worse than that. In most places I worked, programming is not just seen as a young man's game, but as a job that you do before you get a real job like manager or team lead or architect or business analyst. A bit like getting started working in the mail room. After a year or 3 of coding you are an "experienced programmer", after 5 you are a "senior developer", and after 8 years... you are a loser. Small wonder so many of our software development projects turn to utter shit.
Only if you think you can apply Agile and 2 week sprints to *everything*, including the "thinky parts". What that leads to is incomplete software architecture, and class / data models that do no cater well to all use cases => nasty refactoring. I found that in a lot of software projects I participated in, as well as my own projects... I am a terrible cowboy coder.
However, I've had a few projects that have been very well designed from the get-go, with a thorough design that stands up to chaning requirements. Agile is a perfectly fine approach to develop or extend that kind of software.
Does USB-C require a minimum gauge or amp rating? Or must devices negotiate a lower power if they detect a voltage drop on the wire exceeding a certain value?
You'd still need to run that wiring. The great thing about Hue is that it's a drop-in replacement for regular bulbs, no further installation is required.
The bulbs themselves are not on the Internet directly, but on a Zigbee network, connecting to a Hue hub. The hub may or may not be connected to the internet (it doesn't need to be).
What I understand from the article is that the attack doesn't use the internet or exploit the WLAN, but subverts the Zigbee network. You need to be fairly close to hook into that, hence the use of a drone. Wardriving would work just as well. I'm not sure how vulnerable Zigbee networks are in general, but it must be pretty weak; I've messed with software designed to "steal" bulbs off a network (in order to add non-Hue bulbs to a Hue network)
The competing Z-wave standard will have similar issues: it is fairly easy for a device to trick itself into the network, and Z-Wave also supports wireless firmware updates (though very few actual devices implement it). At least the newer Z-Wave chips support encrypted links that make this stuff a lot harder... I guess the designers who came up with the first iteration thought that obscurity and the need for proximity were enough of a deterrent.
Hue uses a hub, which you can isolate from the internet if you want to. The hub is paired directly with the app or with other home automation hubs. And that is the way to keep such setups moderately safe.
Apple should be held to the same standards. The question is whether or not they have been "doing it wrong". And if you get a ruling from the tax office, it's not unreasonable to assume that everything is a-ok.
Collecting back taxes from the point where the investigation started sounds fair though, and I was not aware that this was the case.
I'm in the EU, and I am against these tax deals or tax breaks for corporations as they do amount to unfair government subsidies and unfair competition amongst nations. With that said, I also believe that a country or its IRS should not be able to go back on a tax deal retroactively, not unless the entity with which the deal was made presented fraudulent information in order to get the deal. And a country should not be forced to go back on such a deal either. Apple worked within the law, got a favorable tax ruling, and should not be punished when the deal turns out to be invalid. Else, what are these tax rulings worth?
And before you say "we shouldn't have them at all", our IRS makes them all the time. As a freelancer working out of an Ltd, I got a tax ruling stating how much salary I should pay myself as a "director-major shareholder" (there's a minimum based on the kind of company and revenue). I would hate for them to come back to me and say "we were not allowed to fix your minimum salary at X, it is now X * 3 for the past 5 years and you owe us income tax and social security premiums over the difference."
Ireland should be punished, not Apple, and the EU is right to enforce these rules. How Ireland should be punished is left as an exercise for the reader...
Being able to thrust continuously instead of doing a short, powerful burn has a big impact on your trajectory and can dramatically reduce travel time. Although one week to Mars would require a higher thrust-to-mass ratio than this thing can deliver. Disclaimer: all my knowledge of orbital mechanics comes from playing Kerbal
Total per missile cost = (R&D cost + Tooling cost) / N + per missile production cost. If N decreases by a factor of 10 and the per missile cost goes up by a factor of 10, then all the costs are in R&D and setting up the production line, after that the costs of producing each missile would be 0.
It's about development plus production costs. If these guns and ammo require a lot of expensive R&D to develop, and your client ends up ordering these for 3 ships instead of the originally planned 27, then you can reasonably ask a higher price per item. How much more? If you know that the military is happy to pay whatever, and that they will sell the notion that 100% of the cost is R&D and production costs are near 0 to whomever it is in the US that holds the purse strings, then apparently you can ask 10x the price.
If most people knew the history of DeBeers, they wouldn't even wear synthetic diamonds for fear of being accused of wearing the real deal and subsequently being tarred & feathered (bio-tar and synthetic feathers of course).
There's an intermediate step, and companies have learned to do it reasonably well in IT: do what McDonalds did. Reorganize the work so that it can be done by an army of cheap, replacable labour instead of a handful of ace professionals. The works isn't quite ready for robots or AI, but using strict processes to dumb down and compartimentalize the work means that you now can get away by having much cheaper workers. You do need more of them... at first I was surprised how much more, and how companies thought that this was a good and cost effective solution. But since then I've learned that offshoring has other benefits. For one: if you have only cheap workers with a narrow, well defined skill set, then you can get away with managing them as resources instead of people. Need 5 more of X or 3 less of Y? Need to temporarily replace a sick Z? That can be painlessly arranged if you have 100s of these to go around. If you have only 10 who do the same work, that problem becomes much harder and you quickly find yourself having to deal with individuals, with individual skill sets.
This only affects taste though, not sugar cravings or your metabolism. Is insuling production affected only by actual sugar ingestion, or by the taste of sweetness?
Maybe these companies are chiefly interested in the patents alone, the individual clever bits in the product rather than complete product. Then again, Google have invested in a similar device of their own, which wasn't even AR but a simple HUD. They know that if a product like this takes off, they'll want to be on board so they can rape us 6 ways from Sunday for whatever data this thing will collect.
Apart from the device, I am curious about their software. Proper AR will need to do some fairly clever things in software, and needs to do them at a fair clip: building a 3D model of the surroundings and object recognition, for example. And unless that stuff gets bundled into a usable SDK, no one will write software for it. And in the end, that's what this device will need to turn it from a toy into a tool: useful applications, not Pokemon and virtual office workers. I'm sure people have tons of great ideas for this device, but will they be able to write the software to turn them into reality?
That's not always unreasonable, though. If the company has already announced the launch date or signed on customers, then pushing out that date can be costly in terms of money or reputation. At that stage, assess the data from whatever tests you have performed thus far, and tell management whether there may still be bugs that will make the whole thing crash and burn, or that it's likely that any undiscovered bug will only cause minor issues. In other words: inform them of the risks, and of the uncertainty in your assessment. It's up to them to weigh that against the business risks of not launching, decide, and then accept the risk of that decision. And make damn sure about that last part: never put yourself or your team in a position where the responsibility of an overly hasty launch comes back to you.
It's very risky, as people seem to like Apple's "courageous" choices less and less (myself included). In the old days, it was said that Apple did not design for a market or a target demographic or a focus group, they designed for Steve Jobs; a clever guy with good taste. Now that he's gone, Apple are struggling to keep up that important image. I can well imagine what goes through the heads of their design guys when Cook announces that they "need to make bold decisions for the next model iPhone." Something like "Oh dear god no they are going to kill the touch screen next!!!1!".
iPhone: works great if it does what you need it to do out of the box, which it does for many people. If it doesn't, it sucks.
Android: works great if you choose the right device, vendor (and even service provider), and spend some time tweaking it. If you don't, it sucks.
The iPhone works well for me, if I can't see the walls around the garden I don't care about them, and I don't want to have to tweak my phone (install 3rd party tools or remove crapware) to make it work well. I hate my stock Android device (that I use for work) with a passion, but that's just me.
One thing though: I start bumping into those Apple walls more and more often, and so do other ordinary people. For example: speech recognition, which is incredibly useful in certain applications like home automation, and something that people want. App developers have been able to hook into Google's speech stuff for donkeys years now, but on iOS Apple only recently announced the eagerly awaited 3rd party access to the Siri API... which turns out to be exceedingly clunky and limited to only 6 domains: ride booking, online payments, messaging, that sort of thing. No home automation, not yet and probably not ever because Apple have their own HA offering: HomeKit. Which is still very much in its infancy and not very good even in basic setups, because it doesn't play nice with other kit. More walls... That's something that Apple need to be careful about; if this happens once too often, people will switch.
I see a lot of people switch to Android because of the wider selection of phones and the mostly lower prices. But I see a lot of former iPhone users swiching back to Apple after having tried Android for a bit. If you can afford it and you're not a power user, the iPhone is a pretty good choice, I vastly prefer it over my Android (work) phone. My mother-in-law, a complete computer illiterate who got an Android phone as her first smart phone, is now switching to iPhone after having tried my old one for a bit. They are bloody expensive though...
When you send people to Mars, you need a whole lot of extra mass compared to a lunar trip. This is all "useless" mass necessary to keep a couple of meatbags alive during the much longer journey: food, water, extra shielding, workout equipment, a larger habitat. That translates to extra fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
It's an interesting case. Moreso because the government isn't really "declining to take action against climate change", is it? At least the current administration acknowledges hat AGW is a problem, and they have some policies to address it. The real question is: what should they be doing, and are they doing enough? There was a similar case here in the Netherlands, where an environmental group sued the government and won. In that case the judges simply said: "government must abide by the treaties they signed, including the Kyoto one", noting that the country wasn't meeting the agreed emission goals. But in this case, I don't think a judge could have ordered the government to sign and ratify the treaty in the first place, merely to uphold the agreements therein.
In this case, what could a judge order the government to do? Reduce emissions by X? Build N wind farms? Sign some treaties? I imagine that a settlement would boil down to whatever gets negotiated between gov't and environmentalists, but... wouldn't it be a funny-as-hell joke on the plaintiffs if a judge ordered the government to fund 20 new nuclear power plants to help meet CO2 reduction goals?
The Dutch ruling has similar interesting side effects: it turns out there are many other treaties and agreements not being kept, and apparently we can now have the court force the government to respect those treaties. For example, the rule ("recommendation") in the NATO treaty about military spending, and the subsequent 2014 agreement of the "freeloading countries" to increase spending and at least approach the minimum agreed amount. Not quite what those environmentalists were after...
the software industry's propensity to follow a Logan's Run-like purging of more experienced developers.
Wow... if there ever was an apt analogy, this is it. Actually, it is a little bit worse than that. In most places I worked, programming is not just seen as a young man's game, but as a job that you do before you get a real job like manager or team lead or architect or business analyst. A bit like getting started working in the mail room. After a year or 3 of coding you are an "experienced programmer", after 5 you are a "senior developer", and after 8 years... you are a loser. Small wonder so many of our software development projects turn to utter shit.
Only if you think you can apply Agile and 2 week sprints to *everything*, including the "thinky parts". What that leads to is incomplete software architecture, and class / data models that do no cater well to all use cases => nasty refactoring. I found that in a lot of software projects I participated in, as well as my own projects... I am a terrible cowboy coder.
However, I've had a few projects that have been very well designed from the get-go, with a thorough design that stands up to chaning requirements. Agile is a perfectly fine approach to develop or extend that kind of software.
That beats: "We apologise for the fault in the statuses. We will visit each of the affected users in person to 'true up'"
Does USB-C require a minimum gauge or amp rating? Or must devices negotiate a lower power if they detect a voltage drop on the wire exceeding a certain value?
You'd still need to run that wiring. The great thing about Hue is that it's a drop-in replacement for regular bulbs, no further installation is required.
The bulbs themselves are not on the Internet directly, but on a Zigbee network, connecting to a Hue hub. The hub may or may not be connected to the internet (it doesn't need to be).
What I understand from the article is that the attack doesn't use the internet or exploit the WLAN, but subverts the Zigbee network. You need to be fairly close to hook into that, hence the use of a drone. Wardriving would work just as well. I'm not sure how vulnerable Zigbee networks are in general, but it must be pretty weak; I've messed with software designed to "steal" bulbs off a network (in order to add non-Hue bulbs to a Hue network)
The competing Z-wave standard will have similar issues: it is fairly easy for a device to trick itself into the network, and Z-Wave also supports wireless firmware updates (though very few actual devices implement it). At least the newer Z-Wave chips support encrypted links that make this stuff a lot harder... I guess the designers who came up with the first iteration thought that obscurity and the need for proximity were enough of a deterrent.
Hue uses a hub, which you can isolate from the internet if you want to. The hub is paired directly with the app or with other home automation hubs. And that is the way to keep such setups moderately safe.
Apple should be held to the same standards. The question is whether or not they have been "doing it wrong". And if you get a ruling from the tax office, it's not unreasonable to assume that everything is a-ok.
Collecting back taxes from the point where the investigation started sounds fair though, and I was not aware that this was the case.
Funny (Score:-1, Insightful)
Yeah, that is funny...
I'm in the EU, and I am against these tax deals or tax breaks for corporations as they do amount to unfair government subsidies and unfair competition amongst nations. With that said, I also believe that a country or its IRS should not be able to go back on a tax deal retroactively, not unless the entity with which the deal was made presented fraudulent information in order to get the deal. And a country should not be forced to go back on such a deal either. Apple worked within the law, got a favorable tax ruling, and should not be punished when the deal turns out to be invalid. Else, what are these tax rulings worth?
And before you say "we shouldn't have them at all", our IRS makes them all the time. As a freelancer working out of an Ltd, I got a tax ruling stating how much salary I should pay myself as a "director-major shareholder" (there's a minimum based on the kind of company and revenue). I would hate for them to come back to me and say "we were not allowed to fix your minimum salary at X, it is now X * 3 for the past 5 years and you owe us income tax and social security premiums over the difference."
Ireland should be punished, not Apple, and the EU is right to enforce these rules. How Ireland should be punished is left as an exercise for the reader...
A little Google never hurt anyone... but here's an article with a few links.
shifting the clock by 1 hour doesn't do a damn thing other than cause headaches
And heart attacks, as a recent study shows. They measured a statistically significant spike on the few days after the clock is turned forward.
Being able to thrust continuously instead of doing a short, powerful burn has a big impact on your trajectory and can dramatically reduce travel time. Although one week to Mars would require a higher thrust-to-mass ratio than this thing can deliver. Disclaimer: all my knowledge of orbital mechanics comes from playing Kerbal
Total per missile cost = (R&D cost + Tooling cost) / N + per missile production cost. If N decreases by a factor of 10 and the per missile cost goes up by a factor of 10, then all the costs are in R&D and setting up the production line, after that the costs of producing each missile would be 0.
It's about development plus production costs. If these guns and ammo require a lot of expensive R&D to develop, and your client ends up ordering these for 3 ships instead of the originally planned 27, then you can reasonably ask a higher price per item. How much more? If you know that the military is happy to pay whatever, and that they will sell the notion that 100% of the cost is R&D and production costs are near 0 to whomever it is in the US that holds the purse strings, then apparently you can ask 10x the price.
If most people knew the history of DeBeers, they wouldn't even wear synthetic diamonds for fear of being accused of wearing the real deal and subsequently being tarred & feathered (bio-tar and synthetic feathers of course).
but then why not just automate?
There's an intermediate step, and companies have learned to do it reasonably well in IT: do what McDonalds did. Reorganize the work so that it can be done by an army of cheap, replacable labour instead of a handful of ace professionals. The works isn't quite ready for robots or AI, but using strict processes to dumb down and compartimentalize the work means that you now can get away by having much cheaper workers. You do need more of them... at first I was surprised how much more, and how companies thought that this was a good and cost effective solution. But since then I've learned that offshoring has other benefits. For one: if you have only cheap workers with a narrow, well defined skill set, then you can get away with managing them as resources instead of people. Need 5 more of X or 3 less of Y? Need to temporarily replace a sick Z? That can be painlessly arranged if you have 100s of these to go around. If you have only 10 who do the same work, that problem becomes much harder and you quickly find yourself having to deal with individuals, with individual skill sets.
This only affects taste though, not sugar cravings or your metabolism. Is insuling production affected only by actual sugar ingestion, or by the taste of sweetness?
Maybe these companies are chiefly interested in the patents alone, the individual clever bits in the product rather than complete product. Then again, Google have invested in a similar device of their own, which wasn't even AR but a simple HUD. They know that if a product like this takes off, they'll want to be on board so they can rape us 6 ways from Sunday for whatever data this thing will collect.
Apart from the device, I am curious about their software. Proper AR will need to do some fairly clever things in software, and needs to do them at a fair clip: building a 3D model of the surroundings and object recognition, for example. And unless that stuff gets bundled into a usable SDK, no one will write software for it. And in the end, that's what this device will need to turn it from a toy into a tool: useful applications, not Pokemon and virtual office workers. I'm sure people have tons of great ideas for this device, but will they be able to write the software to turn them into reality?
That's not always unreasonable, though. If the company has already announced the launch date or signed on customers, then pushing out that date can be costly in terms of money or reputation. At that stage, assess the data from whatever tests you have performed thus far, and tell management whether there may still be bugs that will make the whole thing crash and burn, or that it's likely that any undiscovered bug will only cause minor issues. In other words: inform them of the risks, and of the uncertainty in your assessment. It's up to them to weigh that against the business risks of not launching, decide, and then accept the risk of that decision. And make damn sure about that last part: never put yourself or your team in a position where the responsibility of an overly hasty launch comes back to you.
It's very risky, as people seem to like Apple's "courageous" choices less and less (myself included). In the old days, it was said that Apple did not design for a market or a target demographic or a focus group, they designed for Steve Jobs; a clever guy with good taste. Now that he's gone, Apple are struggling to keep up that important image. I can well imagine what goes through the heads of their design guys when Cook announces that they "need to make bold decisions for the next model iPhone." Something like "Oh dear god no they are going to kill the touch screen next!!!1!".
iPhone: works great if it does what you need it to do out of the box, which it does for many people. If it doesn't, it sucks.
Android: works great if you choose the right device, vendor (and even service provider), and spend some time tweaking it. If you don't, it sucks.
The iPhone works well for me, if I can't see the walls around the garden I don't care about them, and I don't want to have to tweak my phone (install 3rd party tools or remove crapware) to make it work well. I hate my stock Android device (that I use for work) with a passion, but that's just me.
One thing though: I start bumping into those Apple walls more and more often, and so do other ordinary people. For example: speech recognition, which is incredibly useful in certain applications like home automation, and something that people want. App developers have been able to hook into Google's speech stuff for donkeys years now, but on iOS Apple only recently announced the eagerly awaited 3rd party access to the Siri API... which turns out to be exceedingly clunky and limited to only 6 domains: ride booking, online payments, messaging, that sort of thing. No home automation, not yet and probably not ever because Apple have their own HA offering: HomeKit. Which is still very much in its infancy and not very good even in basic setups, because it doesn't play nice with other kit. More walls... That's something that Apple need to be careful about; if this happens once too often, people will switch.
I see a lot of people switch to Android because of the wider selection of phones and the mostly lower prices. But I see a lot of former iPhone users swiching back to Apple after having tried Android for a bit. If you can afford it and you're not a power user, the iPhone is a pretty good choice, I vastly prefer it over my Android (work) phone. My mother-in-law, a complete computer illiterate who got an Android phone as her first smart phone, is now switching to iPhone after having tried my old one for a bit. They are bloody expensive though...
When you send people to Mars, you need a whole lot of extra mass compared to a lunar trip. This is all "useless" mass necessary to keep a couple of meatbags alive during the much longer journey: food, water, extra shielding, workout equipment, a larger habitat. That translates to extra fuel.