It's not free. There's a limited time free (and more or less mandatory) upgrade for users of Windows 7 and up, but anyone buying a new computer is paying for it, And while it's nice of them to offer the free upgrade to Windows 7 users, people running Windows 8 are kind of entitled to the upgrade, given how crappy and short-lived Windows 8 was (Windows 10 is more like Windows 8.2).
The difference is: those other people did not deserve to be arrested. For finding a vulnerability and subsequently selling shell access, this guy does deserve it.
Maybe it speaks more of the weakness of the witnesses. I don't buy the idea that the concept or the importance of an API cannot be explained to a layperson of average intelligence. I'm not sure I'm on board with that breakfast menu analogy either.
Just watch the pilot episode of Lexx to see how that is going to suck:
Robo-defense: "My client - [Zev Bellringer of B3K] - is innocent of the charge of failing to perform her wifely duties, and throws herself upon the mercy of this court, secure in the knowledge that His Shadow's wisdom will prevail upon these proceedings"
Robo-judge: "You - [Zev Bellringer of B3K] - have been found guilty of failing to perform your wifely duties, and humiliating your husband in the temple. You are therefore sentenced to be transformed into a love slave, and to be given to Seminary 166145 to be used for their pleasure, may His Merciful Shadow fall upon you"
BF4 is my multiplayer FPS at the moment and I think it's pretty good. There's no huge imbalance in weaponry; the better ones are not insanely more powerful than the basic set, and while you will not do nearly as well if you're stuck with just ironsights instead of modern optics, it doesn't take much effort to earn a couple of upgrades to even the odds. You'd have to be utterly mad to actually pay for battlepacks, and doing so isn't going to give you much of an edge.
With that said, I do look forward to BF1, and I hope it'll bring back some of the atmosphere that BF1942 had.
I'm more into the Battefield series that sacrifice some realism to make the game easier / more fun (i.e. appeal to a different crowd). And of the series I think I enjoyed the WW2 one (BF 1942) the most: simple weapons and vehicles, enjoyable dogfighting in airplanes, and so on. Combat was mostly up close and personal. The later BF editions are still good but with modern weaponry they have lost some of their charm... and you can't fly your jet in a straight line for over 5 seconds or you're off the map. Speaking of which: those guys who made the Desert Combat mod that introduced modern vehicles into BF1942 did a better job on those vehicles than EA did in BF2.
But ambiance aside, gameplay itself will be te deciding factor. I was pretty exited about Star Wars Battlefront, but I went and got my money back after a few hours of play (easy enough on Steam)... the game just didn't feel right.
I don't mind DLC if companies don't get too greedy. Sure, companies use it to milk customers and charge $50 for a game + $20 for the first expansion pack or two that should have been included in the $50 game itself. But you can often get an early bird "deluxe" edition that gives you the game plus the first 5 expansion packs for $70 or so... which is a decent deal if the game actually turns out to be enjoyable. And releasing the packs later gives the publisher an opportunity to include findings from the field into the design of the newer levels. They could do a study up front as well but that's much more expensive.
I got the deluxe version of BF4 when that came out. The initial game did feel a bit light but the subsequent DLC more than made up for it... no idea if they were good value for money individually; I've no idea what they cost as I didn't have to pay for them. But the packs themselves were mostly pretty decent. Note that I have never touched the single player part of the game, I'm strictly doing multiplayer.
Even so, 1080 is an odd name. It's a bit like selling an SD video device with the word "VHS" in the name... in a Blu-ray era. Even most larger low end displays are running at a vertical resolution of 1200 these days.
Also note that there isn't actually any evidence that any crimes were committed by anyone mentioned in any of the documents in question.
Like hell there isn't. The documents themselves do not mention crimes but they certainly are proof of crime. There is no law against setting up anonymous corporations and sticking your money in there, but you still have to declare that money to internal revenue. Hiding your money by using this construction is tax evasion, not avoidance.
I don't think so, because a great many patents become obvious once published
That is not what "obvious to someone skilled in the arts" means. It means: would this have been obvious to someone solving the problem at hand without prior knowledge of the patented solution. In case of putting HTML files on CD-ROMS, using XOR to draw a cursor, or that sort of thing, the answer must be Yes.
Some further reading
On the other hand, if it was patented before the idea became obvious to anyone "skilled in the art", then this was not an abuse and you should pay them.
No, no, no. Just being first shouldn't be enough to gain a patent. Putting an HTML file on a CD-ROM is obvious to anyone skilled in the art, even if it hasn't been done before. Think for a moment... in the future we may have.ai files containing precooked artificial intelligences trained for a specific task. These files don't exist yet, but I can already imagine that we'll put them on Blu-rays. Or in cellphones. Or send them over the net. Should I be granted a patent on doing that just because I speculated about this first? No. Yet this is exactly the sort of crap that IV come up with; using think tanks to speculate about nonexistent but obvious ways of doing things, then rushing to the patent office for a bit of intellectual land-grab.
If something is patented, it may still be declared obvious to someone skilled in the art after the fact, and be subsequently overturned. That's the way it is and should be. The only problem is that even ridiculously obvious patents hardly ever get revoked.
I thought the energy density gap between batteries and jet fuel was greater than a factor 15-30. Batteries are still being improved, and getting the energy density into the same ballpark doesn't seem completely impossible. Of course there's also the actual propulsion to consider; you need something able to put out as much power as a jet engine and at the same efficiency. But all in all it seems a lot more feasible than it did only a few years ago.
Not sure if solar panels on the airplane make sense though. Wing area of a 737 is around 250m^2, say you get the same again on the fuselage, and you end up with 500m^2. Cover it in solar panels generating around 200W/m^2 = 100kW. That's not even 2% of the power required to keep a 737 at altitude (7.2MW). I just grabbed these figures off the web so they are probably not very accurate, but it looks like there's not much point using solar panels on regularly shaped airplanes (as opposed to the typical solar powered ones, which look more like sailplanes)
From the article: “The U.S. is set apart from other G20 countries by the sheer variety of tax exemptions for fossil fuel producers”. So that's only a problem in the US. In my own country, there is little or no subsidy on fossil fuels, loads of subsidies on alternative energy sources, and unbelievable taxes on cars powered by fossil fuels. For certain models, the special car tax (which amounts to a carbon tax) exceeds the factory price, and then you still have to pay VAT. All-electric vehicles are exempt from this special tax, and EV's are still kind of expensive for what they offer compared to regular cars.
I'm all for pushing for renewables, and subsidizing them to a reasonable degree in order to make them economically attractive and drive further R&D and cost reductions. It's worked here for solar. I also have to applaud Musk for making EVs exiting and (with the new model) affordable as well. But I can't see this tech (or our electric grid) evolving fast enough to be able to ban sales of non-EVs by 2026, which is what our parliament apparently wants to do.
According to TFS, they removed the feature from Windows Pro only, not Enterprise. Home users don't care about group policy and enterprise users are already using Enterrpise; this move is to get small / medium businesses to move to the more expensive Enterprise version as well.
They have introduced checklists here as well recently, and they were oh so proud of coming up with this wonderful "new" tool that pilots have been using for about 80 years. What took doctors so long to follow suit?
One magazine (might have been the Economist) called medical care the "least innovative industry" a few years ago. Not medical technology or medicine, both of which are making tremendous strides, but the way we organize and administer that care.
That's where a typical home automation setup may give you an advantage over a regular alarm system. You can have it set up so that it will warn *you* instead of the cops, and let you check out the house on your cell phone using security cameras. You can then call the cops: over here they will try to respond quickly if you tell them that your house is being burgled right this minute.
That was my thought as well. High-tech attacks are becoming more prevalent with car thieves; they use replacement ECUs, devices to hack into the car's electronic locks, and GPS / GSM jammers to disable Lojack-type protection. They go to such lengths because car security got to the point where a low-tech attack is likely to get you nowhere. But low tech attacks are still enough to get you into most homes. Hackers fiddle with lockpicks, create fake master keys or keys for lock bumping, explore weaknesses of specific brands and types of locks. Regular burglars will just brute-force their way in or exploit typical weaknesses in windows and doors. Even disregarding more "advanced" techniques like flipping a lock with a credit card, or the "Bulgarian method" (snapping a Eurocilinder lock with a wrench), a lot of homes are amazingly easy to get into.
I know of plenty of people who would act or have acted as this guy said he would, and those are all low income or middle class people. The richer people get, the more protective they get of their surroundings, but every class has its arseholes. This has very little to do with him being a rich CEO.
Hardly. The other uncertaintly is how well we can detect intelligent life on other planets. Maybe it's there but we can't see it. We've only just begun finding exoplanets to begin with, and at this stage we can discern or estimate a few properties like temperature, climates and atmosphere. So far we've found just a handful of planets where life (as we know it) might exist.
If a civilisation like ours existed on another planet, even one relatively close to us, how hard would it be to pick up their transmissions if they are not actively trying to contact us? Perhaps alien societies are much like ours: no warp drive, no Ansible, little or no interplanetary traffic (so no huge transmitters beaming into space), just electromagnetic radiation confined to the immediate area of one planet. Not something that's going to show up bright and clear on our own detectors, even if we train them directly at the that planet.
This. The guys sitting on the non-exec boards or renumeration boards are mostly from the same pool of people who are directors themselves in other companies. One hand washes the other... They're basically stealing from the shareholders, who mostly don't mind because the large institutional investors like pension funds are run by the same guys.
If much of the work is writing, formatting and reviewing these papers, how hard would it be for a group of scientists, a university, or an enterprising individual to set up an indie science journal? Doesn't have to be free, but charge a reasonable subscription or access fee and use that to pay for hosting, some staff, and perhaps even printing. If so many scientists are dissatisfied with Elsevier, perhaps they could devote their time to a better alternative instead?
Slashdot Mirror
It's not free. There's a limited time free (and more or less mandatory) upgrade for users of Windows 7 and up, but anyone buying a new computer is paying for it, And while it's nice of them to offer the free upgrade to Windows 7 users, people running Windows 8 are kind of entitled to the upgrade, given how crappy and short-lived Windows 8 was (Windows 10 is more like Windows 8.2).
The difference is: those other people did not deserve to be arrested. For finding a vulnerability and subsequently selling shell access, this guy does deserve it.
Maybe it speaks more of the weakness of the witnesses. I don't buy the idea that the concept or the importance of an API cannot be explained to a layperson of average intelligence. I'm not sure I'm on board with that breakfast menu analogy either.
try hard to make things more complex to outsiders than they have to be
If that accusation ever came from a lawyer or a judge, I'd say that's the pot calling the kettle black.
Teaching AI by letting students interact with a souped-up chatbot sounds a bit like teaching them auto repair by taking them for a drive.
Just watch the pilot episode of Lexx to see how that is going to suck:
Robo-defense: "My client - [Zev Bellringer of B3K] - is innocent of the charge of failing to perform her wifely duties, and throws herself upon the mercy of this court, secure in the knowledge that His Shadow's wisdom will prevail upon these proceedings"
Robo-judge: "You - [Zev Bellringer of B3K] - have been found guilty of failing to perform your wifely duties, and humiliating your husband in the temple. You are therefore sentenced to be transformed into a love slave, and to be given to Seminary 166145 to be used for their pleasure, may His Merciful Shadow fall upon you"
BF4 is my multiplayer FPS at the moment and I think it's pretty good. There's no huge imbalance in weaponry; the better ones are not insanely more powerful than the basic set, and while you will not do nearly as well if you're stuck with just ironsights instead of modern optics, it doesn't take much effort to earn a couple of upgrades to even the odds. You'd have to be utterly mad to actually pay for battlepacks, and doing so isn't going to give you much of an edge.
With that said, I do look forward to BF1, and I hope it'll bring back some of the atmosphere that BF1942 had.
I'm more into the Battefield series that sacrifice some realism to make the game easier / more fun (i.e. appeal to a different crowd). And of the series I think I enjoyed the WW2 one (BF 1942) the most: simple weapons and vehicles, enjoyable dogfighting in airplanes, and so on. Combat was mostly up close and personal. The later BF editions are still good but with modern weaponry they have lost some of their charm... and you can't fly your jet in a straight line for over 5 seconds or you're off the map. Speaking of which: those guys who made the Desert Combat mod that introduced modern vehicles into BF1942 did a better job on those vehicles than EA did in BF2.
... the game just didn't feel right.
But ambiance aside, gameplay itself will be te deciding factor. I was pretty exited about Star Wars Battlefront, but I went and got my money back after a few hours of play (easy enough on Steam)
I don't mind DLC if companies don't get too greedy. Sure, companies use it to milk customers and charge $50 for a game + $20 for the first expansion pack or two that should have been included in the $50 game itself. But you can often get an early bird "deluxe" edition that gives you the game plus the first 5 expansion packs for $70 or so... which is a decent deal if the game actually turns out to be enjoyable. And releasing the packs later gives the publisher an opportunity to include findings from the field into the design of the newer levels. They could do a study up front as well but that's much more expensive.
I got the deluxe version of BF4 when that came out. The initial game did feel a bit light but the subsequent DLC more than made up for it... no idea if they were good value for money individually; I've no idea what they cost as I didn't have to pay for them. But the packs themselves were mostly pretty decent. Note that I have never touched the single player part of the game, I'm strictly doing multiplayer.
Even so, 1080 is an odd name. It's a bit like selling an SD video device with the word "VHS" in the name... in a Blu-ray era. Even most larger low end displays are running at a vertical resolution of 1200 these days.
Also note that there isn't actually any evidence that any crimes were committed by anyone mentioned in any of the documents in question.
Like hell there isn't. The documents themselves do not mention crimes but they certainly are proof of crime. There is no law against setting up anonymous corporations and sticking your money in there, but you still have to declare that money to internal revenue. Hiding your money by using this construction is tax evasion, not avoidance.
I don't think so, because a great many patents become obvious once published
That is not what "obvious to someone skilled in the arts" means. It means: would this have been obvious to someone solving the problem at hand without prior knowledge of the patented solution. In case of putting HTML files on CD-ROMS, using XOR to draw a cursor, or that sort of thing, the answer must be Yes. Some further reading
On the other hand, if it was patented before the idea became obvious to anyone "skilled in the art", then this was not an abuse and you should pay them.
No, no, no. Just being first shouldn't be enough to gain a patent. Putting an HTML file on a CD-ROM is obvious to anyone skilled in the art, even if it hasn't been done before. Think for a moment... in the future we may have .ai files containing precooked artificial intelligences trained for a specific task. These files don't exist yet, but I can already imagine that we'll put them on Blu-rays. Or in cellphones. Or send them over the net. Should I be granted a patent on doing that just because I speculated about this first? No. Yet this is exactly the sort of crap that IV come up with; using think tanks to speculate about nonexistent but obvious ways of doing things, then rushing to the patent office for a bit of intellectual land-grab.
If something is patented, it may still be declared obvious to someone skilled in the art after the fact, and be subsequently overturned. That's the way it is and should be. The only problem is that even ridiculously obvious patents hardly ever get revoked.
They dump the fuel before landing.
I thought the energy density gap between batteries and jet fuel was greater than a factor 15-30. Batteries are still being improved, and getting the energy density into the same ballpark doesn't seem completely impossible. Of course there's also the actual propulsion to consider; you need something able to put out as much power as a jet engine and at the same efficiency. But all in all it seems a lot more feasible than it did only a few years ago.
Not sure if solar panels on the airplane make sense though. Wing area of a 737 is around 250m^2, say you get the same again on the fuselage, and you end up with 500m^2. Cover it in solar panels generating around 200W/m^2 = 100kW. That's not even 2% of the power required to keep a 737 at altitude (7.2MW). I just grabbed these figures off the web so they are probably not very accurate, but it looks like there's not much point using solar panels on regularly shaped airplanes (as opposed to the typical solar powered ones, which look more like sailplanes)
From the article: “The U.S. is set apart from other G20 countries by the sheer variety of tax exemptions for fossil fuel producers”. So that's only a problem in the US. In my own country, there is little or no subsidy on fossil fuels, loads of subsidies on alternative energy sources, and unbelievable taxes on cars powered by fossil fuels. For certain models, the special car tax (which amounts to a carbon tax) exceeds the factory price, and then you still have to pay VAT. All-electric vehicles are exempt from this special tax, and EV's are still kind of expensive for what they offer compared to regular cars.
I'm all for pushing for renewables, and subsidizing them to a reasonable degree in order to make them economically attractive and drive further R&D and cost reductions. It's worked here for solar. I also have to applaud Musk for making EVs exiting and (with the new model) affordable as well. But I can't see this tech (or our electric grid) evolving fast enough to be able to ban sales of non-EVs by 2026, which is what our parliament apparently wants to do.
According to TFS, they removed the feature from Windows Pro only, not Enterprise. Home users don't care about group policy and enterprise users are already using Enterrpise; this move is to get small / medium businesses to move to the more expensive Enterprise version as well.
Is there a decent video of the launch and landing? That Verge article is just animated GIFs and tweets.
They have introduced checklists here as well recently, and they were oh so proud of coming up with this wonderful "new" tool that pilots have been using for about 80 years. What took doctors so long to follow suit?
One magazine (might have been the Economist) called medical care the "least innovative industry" a few years ago. Not medical technology or medicine, both of which are making tremendous strides, but the way we organize and administer that care.
That's where a typical home automation setup may give you an advantage over a regular alarm system. You can have it set up so that it will warn *you* instead of the cops, and let you check out the house on your cell phone using security cameras. You can then call the cops: over here they will try to respond quickly if you tell them that your house is being burgled right this minute.
That was my thought as well. High-tech attacks are becoming more prevalent with car thieves; they use replacement ECUs, devices to hack into the car's electronic locks, and GPS / GSM jammers to disable Lojack-type protection. They go to such lengths because car security got to the point where a low-tech attack is likely to get you nowhere. But low tech attacks are still enough to get you into most homes. Hackers fiddle with lockpicks, create fake master keys or keys for lock bumping, explore weaknesses of specific brands and types of locks. Regular burglars will just brute-force their way in or exploit typical weaknesses in windows and doors. Even disregarding more "advanced" techniques like flipping a lock with a credit card, or the "Bulgarian method" (snapping a Eurocilinder lock with a wrench), a lot of homes are amazingly easy to get into.
I know of plenty of people who would act or have acted as this guy said he would, and those are all low income or middle class people. The richer people get, the more protective they get of their surroundings, but every class has its arseholes. This has very little to do with him being a rich CEO.
Hardly. The other uncertaintly is how well we can detect intelligent life on other planets. Maybe it's there but we can't see it. We've only just begun finding exoplanets to begin with, and at this stage we can discern or estimate a few properties like temperature, climates and atmosphere. So far we've found just a handful of planets where life (as we know it) might exist.
If a civilisation like ours existed on another planet, even one relatively close to us, how hard would it be to pick up their transmissions if they are not actively trying to contact us? Perhaps alien societies are much like ours: no warp drive, no Ansible, little or no interplanetary traffic (so no huge transmitters beaming into space), just electromagnetic radiation confined to the immediate area of one planet. Not something that's going to show up bright and clear on our own detectors, even if we train them directly at the that planet.
This. The guys sitting on the non-exec boards or renumeration boards are mostly from the same pool of people who are directors themselves in other companies. One hand washes the other... They're basically stealing from the shareholders, who mostly don't mind because the large institutional investors like pension funds are run by the same guys.
If much of the work is writing, formatting and reviewing these papers, how hard would it be for a group of scientists, a university, or an enterprising individual to set up an indie science journal? Doesn't have to be free, but charge a reasonable subscription or access fee and use that to pay for hosting, some staff, and perhaps even printing. If so many scientists are dissatisfied with Elsevier, perhaps they could devote their time to a better alternative instead?