This is getting a little far from Apple perhaps but it's fun to cite these cases of big companies throwing their weight around.
AT&T also tried to prevent the distribution by other companies of free covers for their phone books. They owned the phone book they'd given you. You did not have the right to put someone else's cover on it to protect it.
AT&T also tried to prevent a rancher from making an audio connection (phone speaker put next to radio microphone etc) from his phone to a radio so the rancher could make calls while driving around his ranch. That's the Carterfone case.
Marconi licensed, not sold, his radios to ships like the Titanic. The license prohibited communicating with non-Marconi radios. That lasted until WW1, when the US Navy said, stop that.
GE licensed the vacuum tubes in car battery chargers. The customer was prohibited from using the tube in a radio.
There was a similar case of a big company claiming that allowing users too much power would be very destructive. Guess what? They were totally wrong.
Up to the early 1980s, AT&T had a telephone monopoly, including owning the wires and phones in your house. You were legally required to use an AT&T repairman to add a new phone outlet in your house. When AT&T's monopoly was broken up, they were required to let customers own their own wiring and phones. The company predicted that customers were incompetents who would attach defective devices that would destroy the phone system.
Of course, AT&T is the monopoly that tried to block a company from selling a plastic and cardboard cone that would attach to your phone's microphone, which you could speak into with less interference. It's the hush-a-phone case.
Apple is just the latest company trying to prevent competition.
Marconi sending a radio signal across the Atlantic is a good example of an engineer doing something that the scientists said was impossible.
Since the earth is round and radio waves travel in a straight line, it should have been impossible to send a signal more than a few hundred miles.
In fact, they bounced off the ionosphere, which hadn't been discovered yet.
Marconi factoids:
In Newfoundland, the receiving end of Marconi's experiments, the undersea cable company, who had a legal monopoly on all trans-Atlantic communications, discovered or not, got an injunction forcing Marconi to stop his experiments and move elsewhere.
Marconi licensed, not sold, his radios, with a legal restriction prohibiting them from being used to talk to non-Marconi radios.
OTOH, in the 19th century there were several inexplicable observations, like the orbit of the moon. All except for the precession of Mercury eventually had classical explanations.
PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is an easy place for National Academy members to publish their papers. While their papers are externally reviewed, I don't think their papers always get the same rigorous review process that might happen at some other journals. It's a way for NAS members to publicize what they think is important.
The VW scam was uncovered in Europe because German cities' air was not getting cleaner, as it should have been as the cars were supposedly getting cleaner. So, the EU version of the US EPA measured tailpipe emissions on the streets, perhaps with a laser. This was years before the US discovered this. The problem was that hi levels inside the EU decided to ignore it.
Two New York State police from Troop C (Binghamton) were convicted and jailed for spoofing fingerprints (and possibly other physical evidence) about 20-30 years ago. IIRC, they used scotch tape to lift the print of the innocent person they wanted to frame and then deposited the print on the piece of evidence connected to the crime.
So, even w/o using computers, fingerprints can be faked. Physical evidence is not as solid as prosecutors claim, but we already knew that from several other convictions for faking evidence. However NYS troopers are, as a group, ethical.
From the linked article about deaths from GPS in Death Valley NP:
The mapping people at the National Parks Service were unable to contact a human being at Google to update their map, but could talk to Tom Tom.
I've heard that story also from other professional source.
That doesn't absolve stupidity, but still, it's nice when maps mark the important stuff. But then, Google maps violates most of the rules of good cartography.
Garmin's response to someone following their GPS half-way under a low bridge was, "Would you follow your GPS through a red light?"
Math is also fascinating because of how it can often work around impossibility proofs.
E.g., what class of polynomials is solvable depends on what elementary functions are allowed. With Jacobi theta functions, you can exactly solve quintics.
For another example, with cosine and acos, you can exactly solve cubic polynomials, w/o using cube roots. Better, if the solutions are real, then the solution does not require imaginary numbers, unlike if you solve with cube roots.
Making a false claim on a resume, even if not caught for years, has, in the last few years, gotten a senior MIT administrator and a company CEO fired.
The federal government sometimes checks items that are 20 years old on your resume.
Using an unaccredited PhD got some Ryerson University faculty in public trouble.
Don't even mislead or be ambiguous. If I read a resume that says, "attended Miskatonic", I assume 2 things. 1) The writer didn't graduate. 2) He wants me to think that he did.
Do not say that you attended Harvard if you went only to the Summer School.
Know your market. Some places value the degree quality and some do not. In the latter case, WGU or Excelsior are fine.
CS accreditation is optional and sets only a very low bar. MIT was not accredited until relatively recently. Accreditation is a hassle and everyone already knew that they were good.
Engineering accreditation is not optional. Stanford was threatened with losing their EE accreditation if they made a proposed change that probably would have been an improvement.
Vermont Yankee is also a lying incompetent organization.
They denied that there were tritium leaks although they knew. Then they said that they were unable to locate the leaks' source (and so couldn't fix them). IIRC, they also denied that the tritium was reaching the Connecticut River.
A few years ago, a wooden cooling tower collapsed from lack of maintenance (i.e., wood rots). Do you want to trust an organization that cannot maintain a simple wood structure with running an obsolete nuclear reactor?
In 1776 the Magna Carta was 550 years old. It had nothing to do with democracy, but supported the barons against the king. That was arguably a step backward. It became (wrongly) associated with democracy only hundreds of years later, when people were searching for precedents, even flawed ones, to support democracy.
Also, in 1776, most people in England did not have a vote. Look up rotten borough. There were three major reform bills in the 19th century that basically brought democracy to the UK.
In addition to plagarized theses, there are a lot of completely fictitious degrees being flaunted.
A few years ago a senior MIT administrator had to resign.
Last year there was the CEO of a tech company.
About 30 years ago, the President of the IEEE claimed to have a doctorate from a minor German university, but no one could find any record of it. However, his friends rallied around, and he was given an honorary doctorate.
Then there are the unaccredited doctorates. E.g., when Ryerson Polytechnic Institute was transitioning to Ryerson University a few decades ago, many of their faculty did not have doctorates. RU strongly encouraged doctorates, so a bunch of faculty got them from a degree mill in central Europe.
Finally, there's the faculty member at The King's College in Manhattan who lists himself as PhD, Princeton (ABD). ABD means that he does not actually have a PhD, but many readers might not know that.
I have a project that is not 'most work'. Matlab solves matrix problems for me that neither Mathematica nor any other package I've tried can. Matlab's competence shows in its description of mldivide, which is the key to my problem. It says that it tries A unless condition B is true, in which case it tries C,.... Mathematica says, trust us because we're so smart, with 1000s of routines, 1000000s of LOC etc. w/o going into details. All the free packages are jokes in this area. The only competition would be perhaps some C++ library. However Matlab probably hired its author to extend it for them.
Open SW is nice if you're not picky, but the commercial stuff, in many cases, does specialized things better.
The US invented NTSC first. It was a great achievement: - color being mostly upward and downward compatible with B&W. However, it was sensitive to phase errors in the transmitted signal. The Europeans invented PAL, which reverses the phase of alternate lines, to minimize that. Then the French invented SECAM (System Essentially Contrary to the American Method) just to be different.:-)
Seriously, standards have often been used to lock out competition.
The ship did have a safe room according to news reports. That's why the pirates took only the captain.
150 years ago, British Foreign Secretary Palmerston observed that "Taking a wasps' nest... is more effective than catching the wasps one by one". -
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7991512.stm
Also consider Julius Caesar's experience being taken by pirates. There was a politician who carried out his promise.
Indeed, that sort of anarchy in the 1920s is what forced the US to regulate airwaves. E.g., new offshore transmitters were blatantly overpowering other, established, stations that people wanted to hear.
Generally, the gummit doesn't wake up one day to say, "I'm bored, Let's regulate something new." It responds to actual problems.
The Sicilians have been partially successfully stopping lava from Etna for centuries. The bishop in Catania was ordering buildings torn down to stop an eruption in the 1680s IIRC. It's imperfect since the lava is massive, heavy, and coming downhill at you. But you can do a little. More recently in the eruption in 2002 or so, I believe that bulldozers and water were used. This was uphill a lot, not near Catania.
In the 1680s case, the townspeople then went uphill to try to break a lava tube, since they knew even then that the lava tubes enabled the lava to travel so far. However, that enraged the residents of the next town over, who thought that they might be the new recipients of the diverted lava.
The proposed solutions are nice but you can do something workable for much less money. My solution, which I've implemented, involves more work when the power fails but saves a lot of money.
All you really need to power are the furnace blower and fridge, and they need power only part of the time. You can use LED flashlights for light and a battery powered or 12V DC TV and radio.
For perhaps $100 you can get a 700W inverter that clips into your car battery and provides about 5 amps. That will run a small TV and your computer. You can get smaller inverters for less money. These inverters will not power serious motors, such as probably, your furnace blower. Indeed, they may damage a motor that uses them.
Details: These inverters produce a seriously non-sine wave with about 30% harmonics. The harmonics turn into heat in the motor. Also the inverter may not be able to supply the startup current, which might be over 3x the running current.
Another problem with inverters is that their non-sine wave is said to be bad for small AC-DC power supplies for battery chargers etc. I have not explored the meaning of "bad" since I have no spare power supplies to destroy.
To power my furnace blower, I got a 2000W Honda generator for about $900. Note that the 2000W is a shorttime load, the continuous load is a lot smaller. The Honda, unlike cheaper generators produces a true sine wave. It can also supply a large starting current.
I paid an electrician to change my furnace from hardwired to plug in. So, if there's a power failure, I unplug the furnace from the wall and plug it into my generator, which I would run outside the house.
Advantage of my solution: It costs $1200 and I have a portable generator and inverters I could take other places.
Disadvantages: It's not automatic; I have to refill the generator, etc. etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Read Shakespeare's Richard III.
George Plantagenet, 1st Duke of Clarence, was allegedly drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine on 18 February 1478.
23MJ of gasoline is about 1 litre, so by volume, gasoline has 1000x the energy density.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
This is getting a little far from Apple perhaps but it's fun to cite these cases of big companies throwing their weight around.
AT&T also tried to prevent the distribution by other companies of free covers for their phone books. They owned the phone book they'd given you. You did not have the right to put someone else's cover on it to protect it.
AT&T also tried to prevent a rancher from making an audio connection (phone speaker put next to radio microphone etc) from his phone to a radio so the rancher could make calls while driving around his ranch. That's the Carterfone case.
Marconi licensed, not sold, his radios to ships like the Titanic. The license prohibited communicating with non-Marconi radios. That lasted until WW1, when the US Navy said, stop that.
GE licensed the vacuum tubes in car battery chargers. The customer was prohibited from using the tube in a radio.
There was a similar case of a big company claiming that allowing users too much power would be very destructive. Guess what? They were totally wrong.
Up to the early 1980s, AT&T had a telephone monopoly, including owning the wires and phones in your house. You were legally required to use an AT&T repairman to add a new phone outlet in your house. When AT&T's monopoly was broken up, they were required to let customers own their own wiring and phones. The company predicted that customers were incompetents who would attach defective devices that would destroy the phone system.
Of course, AT&T is the monopoly that tried to block a company from selling a plastic and cardboard cone that would attach to your phone's microphone, which you could speak into with less interference. It's the hush-a-phone case.
Apple is just the latest company trying to prevent competition.
This sounds sort of like a scramjet.
Marconi sending a radio signal across the Atlantic is a good example of an engineer doing something that the scientists said was impossible.
Since the earth is round and radio waves travel in a straight line, it should have been impossible to send a signal more than a few hundred miles.
In fact, they bounced off the ionosphere, which hadn't been discovered yet.
Marconi factoids:
In Newfoundland, the receiving end of Marconi's experiments, the undersea cable company, who had a legal monopoly on all trans-Atlantic communications, discovered or not, got an injunction forcing Marconi to stop his experiments and move elsewhere.
Marconi licensed, not sold, his radios, with a legal restriction prohibiting them from being used to talk to non-Marconi radios.
OTOH, in the 19th century there were several inexplicable observations, like the orbit of the moon. All except for the precession of Mercury eventually had classical explanations.
PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences) is an easy place for National Academy members to publish their papers. While their papers are externally reviewed, I don't think their papers always get the same rigorous review process that might happen at some other journals. It's a way for NAS members to publicize what they think is important.
Not true, at least in cities.
The VW scam was uncovered in Europe because German cities' air was not getting cleaner, as it should have been as the cars were supposedly getting cleaner. So, the EU version of the US EPA measured tailpipe emissions on the streets, perhaps with a laser. This was years before the US discovered this. The problem was that hi levels inside the EU decided to ignore it.
Two New York State police from Troop C (Binghamton) were convicted and jailed for spoofing fingerprints (and possibly other physical evidence) about 20-30 years ago. IIRC, they used scotch tape to lift the print of the innocent person they wanted to frame and then deposited the print on the piece of evidence connected to the crime.
So, even w/o using computers, fingerprints can be faked. Physical evidence is not as solid as prosecutors claim, but we already knew that from several other convictions for faking evidence. However NYS troopers are, as a group, ethical.
But, fingerprint readers do look cool.
From the linked article about deaths from GPS in Death Valley NP:
The mapping people at the National Parks Service were unable to contact a human being at Google to update their map, but could talk to Tom Tom.
I've heard that story also from other professional source.
That doesn't absolve stupidity, but still, it's nice when maps mark the important stuff. But then, Google maps violates most of the rules of good cartography.
Garmin's response to someone following their GPS half-way under a low bridge was, "Would you follow your GPS through a red light?"
Math is also fascinating because of how it can often work around impossibility proofs.
E.g., what class of polynomials is solvable depends on what elementary functions are allowed. With Jacobi theta functions, you can exactly solve quintics.
http://mathoverflow.net/questi...
For another example, with cosine and acos, you can exactly solve cubic polynomials, w/o using cube roots. Better, if the solutions are real, then the solution does not require imaginary numbers, unlike if you solve with cube roots.
Making a false claim on a resume, even if not caught for years, has, in the last few years, gotten a senior MIT administrator and a company CEO fired.
The federal government sometimes checks items that are 20 years old on your resume.
Using an unaccredited PhD got some Ryerson University faculty in public trouble.
Don't even mislead or be ambiguous. If I read a resume that says, "attended Miskatonic", I assume 2 things. 1) The writer didn't graduate. 2) He wants me to think that he did.
Do not say that you attended Harvard if you went only to the Summer School.
Know your market. Some places value the degree quality and some do not. In the latter case, WGU or Excelsior are fine.
CS accreditation is optional and sets only a very low bar. MIT was not accredited until relatively recently. Accreditation is a hassle and everyone already knew that they were good.
Engineering accreditation is not optional. Stanford was threatened with losing their EE accreditation if they made a proposed change that probably would have been an improvement.
Vermont Yankee is also a lying incompetent organization.
In 1776 the Magna Carta was 550 years old. It had nothing to do with democracy, but supported the barons against the king. That was arguably a step backward. It became (wrongly) associated with democracy only hundreds of years later, when people were searching for precedents, even flawed ones, to support democracy.
Also, in 1776, most people in England did not have a vote. Look up rotten borough. There were three major reform bills in the 19th century that basically brought democracy to the UK.
In addition to plagarized theses, there are a lot of completely fictitious degrees being flaunted.
A few years ago a senior MIT administrator had to resign.
Last year there was the CEO of a tech company.
About 30 years ago, the President of the IEEE claimed to have a doctorate from a minor German university, but no one could find any record of it. However, his friends rallied around, and he was given an honorary doctorate.
Then there are the unaccredited doctorates. E.g., when Ryerson Polytechnic Institute was transitioning to Ryerson University a few decades ago, many of their faculty did not have doctorates. RU strongly encouraged doctorates, so a bunch of faculty got them from a degree mill in central Europe.
Finally, there's the faculty member at The King's College in Manhattan who lists himself as PhD, Princeton (ABD). ABD means that he does not actually have a PhD, but many readers might not know that.
In Churchill Manitoba, school buses routinely have a rifle strapped above the windshield, in case the driver should suddenly want to start shooting.
I have a project that is not 'most work'. Matlab solves matrix problems for me that neither Mathematica nor any other package I've tried can. Matlab's competence shows in its description of mldivide, which is the key to my problem. It says that it tries A unless condition B is true, in which case it tries C, .... Mathematica says, trust us because we're so smart, with 1000s of routines, 1000000s of LOC etc. w/o going into details. All the free packages are jokes in this area. The only competition would be perhaps some C++ library. However Matlab probably hired its author to extend it for them.
Open SW is nice if you're not picky, but the commercial stuff, in many cases, does specialized things better.
Seriously, standards have often been used to lock out competition.
In pmwiki, you can include LaTeX math with this:
http://www.pmwiki.org/wiki/Cookbook/JsMath
I've used it for some time and highly recommend it
The ship did have a safe room according to news reports. That's why the pirates took only the captain.
150 years ago, British Foreign Secretary Palmerston observed that "Taking a wasps' nest... is more effective than catching the wasps one by one". - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7991512.stm
Also consider Julius Caesar's experience being taken by pirates. There was a politician who carried out his promise.
After some research, I think that you're right. Sorry about the error; I was working off of an inaccurate story about Microsoft's problems in Europe.
IIRC, in Europe it is against the law merely to be too large.
Indeed, that sort of anarchy in the 1920s is what forced the US to regulate airwaves. E.g., new offshore transmitters were blatantly overpowering other, established, stations that people wanted to hear.
Generally, the gummit doesn't wake up one day to say, "I'm bored, Let's regulate something new." It responds to actual problems.
The Sicilians have been partially successfully stopping lava from Etna for centuries. The bishop in Catania was ordering buildings torn down to stop an eruption in the 1680s IIRC. It's imperfect since the lava is massive, heavy, and coming downhill at you. But you can do a little. More recently in the eruption in 2002 or so, I believe that bulldozers and water were used. This was uphill a lot, not near Catania.
In the 1680s case, the townspeople then went uphill to try to break a lava tube, since they knew even then that the lava tubes enabled the lava to travel so far. However, that enraged the residents of the next town over, who thought that they might be the new recipients of the diverted lava.
The proposed solutions are nice but you can do something workable for much less money. My solution, which I've implemented, involves more work when the power fails but saves a lot of money.
All you really need to power are the furnace blower and fridge, and they need power only part of the time. You can use LED flashlights for light and a battery powered or 12V DC TV and radio.
For perhaps $100 you can get a 700W inverter that clips into your car battery and provides about 5 amps. That will run a small TV and your computer. You can get smaller inverters for less money. These inverters will not power serious motors, such as probably, your furnace blower. Indeed, they may damage a motor that uses them.
Details: These inverters produce a seriously non-sine wave with about 30% harmonics. The harmonics turn into heat in the motor. Also the inverter may not be able to supply the startup current, which might be over 3x the running current.
Another problem with inverters is that their non-sine wave is said to be bad for small AC-DC power supplies for battery chargers etc. I have not explored the meaning of "bad" since I have no spare power supplies to destroy.
To power my furnace blower, I got a 2000W Honda generator for about $900. Note that the 2000W is a shorttime load, the continuous load is a lot smaller. The Honda, unlike cheaper generators produces a true sine wave. It can also supply a large starting current.
I paid an electrician to change my furnace from hardwired to plug in. So, if there's a power failure, I unplug the furnace from the wall and plug it into my generator, which I would run outside the house.
Advantage of my solution: It costs $1200 and I have a portable generator and inverters I could take other places.
Disadvantages: It's not automatic; I have to refill the generator, etc. etc.