If they sell you an SUV for $20k and deliver you a compact car, the dealer is certainly liable, even if that compact car is exactly what they received from Ford. The issue isn't that the recordings were defective - the issue is that what was sold was misrepresented. It is certainly the duty of a reseller to correctly represent what was being sold.
Again you missed the point. If you paid $20K for a Ford Escape, did you get a Ford Escape from the dealership?
In my example, no. Hence the dealer is liable.
Did Apple or AMC ever tell the plaintiff that Season 5 was 16 episodes? Apple certainly didn't as Apple doesn't know (and I think doesn't care).
Well, after they get sued for a few million dollars hopefully they'll care a bit more. If they didn't specify the number of episodes, then they sold the entire season - whatever is reasonable and customary. Neither the seller or vendor gets to decide what is reasonable and customary - that is decided by what everybody else is doing. If they want to be different, the onus is on them to be different.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
Prove how? Step 1: he must prove liability. Step 2: he must prove damages. The most he can prove is that he thought he was getting a huge discount. But that is a tough argument to make that not getting discount = damages.
Not getting a discount means spending more money than was advertised. That is obviously damage - a monetary loss is the simplest form of damages to claim in court. As far as liability goes - that seems to be what we're arguing over.
As for punitive damages, you are completely jumping the gun. Punitive damages comes in when there sort of additional action of behavior. What is Apple accused of doing in the worst light is selling a product from AMC with AMC setting the pricing and product control.
What Apple is doing in the worst light is selling something and delivering something else, blaming somebody else for it, and forcing people to sue them en masse to get their money back.
As far as compensatory damages go - you say I missed the point and yet I only claimed $11 in damages for him, which to me seems to be the discount he thought he was getting. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing on.
Because in law, I paid money != damages. In this case the plaintiff paid full price for something. He wasn't overcharged above retail. Now if the plaintiff had it in writing that he was supposed to pay $X for Y amount, that's a different story (like in newspaper ads, shelf price). All he has is $X amount for Season Pass with the number of season episodes not defined by Apple or AMC. In a place other than Apple's website from an interview with someone not in charge of pricing or product control, he thought Season 5 would transitively get him 16 episodes on iTunes. AMC wasn't clear on this but the plaintiff also made an assumption.
Sure, but the plaintiff's assumption was based on what everybody does. If I sell you Ford Focus for $15k and deliver a toy car, I'm going to get sued, because nobody would see that price and description and think of a toy car. Apple sold a season of a TV series, and they didn't deliver what they sold.
Behavior being egregious has nothing to do with whether no one else is doing it. Behavior being egregious has to do with it being shockingly bad or unconscionable.
egregious adjective absurd, appalling, arrant, bizarre, excessive, e
If you pay a Ford dealership $20000 for a car and you have a problem with the fuel mileage is that really the dealer's fault. The dealer sold you the car as they got it from Ford.
If they sell you an SUV for $20k and deliver you a compact car, the dealer is certainly liable, even if that compact car is exactly what they received from Ford. The issue isn't that the recordings were defective - the issue is that what was sold was misrepresented. It is certainly the duty of a reseller to correctly represent what was being sold.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
First of all you missed the point damages. The most the plaintiff can prove is that he wasn't going to get the discount he thought he was getting.
As far as compensatory damages go - you say I missed the point and yet I only claimed $11 in damages for him, which to me seems to be the discount he thought he was getting. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing on.
Second "egregious" only really applies of Apple did something no one was doing. Apple is doing want everyone from Amazon to MS is doing: selling the product as-is from AMC.
Behavior being egregious has nothing to do with whether no one else is doing it. Behavior being egregious has to do with it being shockingly bad or unconscionable. It is possible for an entire industry to be uniformly engaged in egregious behavior. In any case, egregious is whatever a jury decides it is - judges basically read the definition of the term and the jury fills in what they want to assess, if anything. It isn't uncommon to have $1 in compensatory damages and $1M in punitive damages.
Usually punitive damages result when the defendant seems likely to repeat their behavior. I don't believe Apple is admitting any wrongdoing here, and the compensatory damages are only $11 after a long trial, so it would seem that punitive damages would be necessary if the goal is actually to change their behavior.
All Apple needs to do is just state up-front how many episodes are in the season, or what period of original TV airtime is covered by the pass. By all means they can make the studios specify that when they put the pass up for sale, and Apple can just enforce it. The issue was that they used generic wording that customarily means one thing and in the end they delivered something else. If the NY Yankees sold a season pass and then in June sent out a letter telling everybody that if they wanted tickets after July 1st they'd have to buy another one there would certainly be a lawsuit unless this was specified up-front when the tickets were first sold. They used a term that has always been used to mean one thing to sell something else.
You think Season 5 is 16 episodes. You have no standing in a contract between Apple and AMC any more than you can tell the store that you get more chips. You have a problem with a product, take it up with the manufacturer.
If I pay Apple $22, I have a contract with Apple, implied or written. I certainly have standing to sue them if I didn't get what they sold me. Whether season 5 is 8 or 16 episodes is a matter of fact/law to be determined by a judge and jury. I'm sure they'll take AMC's opinion into account.
The second thing is what are the damages? In this case, the fan had to pay normal price for a season. That's it. He wasn't going to get a 40% discount that he might have thought he was getting. Apple and Amazon sold the eight episodes at $22. Based on pricing if the buyer thought he was getting 16 episodes for $22 that's 40% off. Even if he wins, he can't prove damages.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
I'm sure his lawyer wouldn't be spending money on the case if he didn't think he has a shot.
If you just look at things simply and empirically, it is very easy to test these questions.
Sure, if you don't care about getting the right answer. When it comes to human health, every complicated question has a simple answer, which is wrong. If you want to look at things empirically then you have to control for the placebo effect, and for that matter do a controlled experiment in the first place. Both of those elements are extremely difficult to pull off when it comes to diet. Maybe if you lock people in cages and puree all the food and mask the flavor you can feed people a controlled diet for a few years without them having any idea what they're eating, but good luck getting that past the board of ethics. Or I guess you could implant cannulas in them like they do with rats.
If you're just looking for a bunch of anecdotes then just browse the internet and you'll find people claiming that everything from whole wheat bread to bacon to Twinkies is responsible for everything from living to the age of 102 to dropping dead from a stroke at age 14. Millions of people live lives that are medically exceptional in some way, and millions of people have unusual diets, so there will be lots of intersections of these whether there is a true relationship or not.
So, everybody has their pet theory and happily professes it, while lobbying the government to punish all those people who practice the wrong religion (thereby increasing healthcare costs).
I'm all for science, but precious little in the healthcare industry really qualifies as science, and almost nothing in the diet industry does, unless you're talking about mice. It isn't that nobody tries - the problem is that you can never really know what your test subjects are doing unless you can cage them up, and you can never really control the genetics unless you breed boys and mothers/sisters for 14 generations. Do that with people and you'll get results that are as reproducible as what we get with rats, but obviously we can't do that. Oh, and if you really want to understand how people tick start knocking out genes - that will make the cannulas and controlled breeding seem really tame.
Good luck getting the US government to agree on your claim of grains being harmful.
That's the point - there really isn't agreement. The two of us might be agreed, but if the evidence were really that incontrovertible there wouldn't be so much debate.
Ultimately Apple advertised a season pass for Season 5 on their website, profited from the sales of that season, and delivered content for something that virtually any consumer would not consider the entire Season.
They can argue all the above in court, but I doubt any jury would buy it. If you sell me Season 5, you need to deliver Season 5. Apple could refund the purchase to anybody who was mislead and say that they had nothing to do with it, and that would probably allow them to escape liability if they did it before they got to trial. However, they control the store - they could remove the show from their store at any time as being fraudulent, just as Ebay or Amazon does when third parties list items that are misleading.
No differentiation?...Yea...nothing different there for your $100
So why would anybody buy the 5C? That is the lack of differentiation in my eyes - the only advantage of the 5C is price, and there is very little advantage there (~15%).
Doing what you suggested would tick off the police and wouldn't sell more phones. Maybe if the average phone purchaser could appreciate the suggestion you're making Apple might consider it.
Doesn't sound to me like is easily spoof able with anything but a super-high-res fingerprint scanner and some way to 3D print fakes that both map the contours accurately enough while also providing a capacitive bridge.
Seems like the simplest solution is to just grab the owner's finger and push it against the button. That's the problem with most biometric systems - providing a biometric only proves (at best) that the owner is present, not that the owner consents to unlocking the device.
The difference now is that the iPhone 5 has been recast as the 5C, and is not shipped alongside the 5S. Instead, it is still a higher priced product, although not nearly as pricey as the 5S, and the 4S is free with contract.
Free with contract? Contracts typically only knock $200 off the price - so free with contract amounts to a $450 phone. That is a LOT to pay for a two-year-old device in a market where people tend to replace them biannually.
Early death saves the government money, living a long time costs the government.
Sure, but there is a big cost-difference between being healthy right until you die from a cerebral aneurysm vs dying after suffering with type-2 diabetes for 15 years. The diseases associated with obesity tend to be pretty expensive.
Good luck generating 100%-accurate data for anything related to diet in humans without violating a bazillion ethical codes. You could merely institute draconian monitoring of your test subjects in which case you'll end up kicking everybody out of every group but the junk-food group for non-compliance. Or, you could just lock all your test subjects in cages and feed them rations of the appropriate type, allowing them to nearly starve if they refuse to eat them.
Feeding tests in lab rats are fairly practical, tests with humans are anything but, mostly for the reasons we already agree on. That's why everybody has their favorite diet and an argument about why it is better than all the others.
That's not what happened. AMC says Season 5 is in two seasons. Not Apple.
That is the entire problem. If Apple said Season 5 was two seasons, then they would be doing nothing wrong. They just sold a season pass for Season 5 without declaring in advance that it was for only half a season.
Apple doesn't know what a "season" is.
Then they were negligent. The consumer certainly doesn't know what it is. It is the duty of the vendor of a good to know what they're selling. How can Apple sell a "season" if they don't know what a "season" is? If they couldn't be sure about AMC's terms then they shouldn't have sold any season passes until they were sure. If AMC changed the rules after-the-fact they should just let users download the entire season and dare AMC to sue them - AMC can't change the contract after they signed it.
So yes, "golden rice" might solve a problem, in the sense that it would fool culturally-bound people who are unwilling to forego rice as their staple food. But it's hardly the only way.
That sounds like the "obesity isn't a problem - just eat less" solution. Sounds nice in paper, and yet millions of people are expected to end their lives early at considerable taxpayer expense "simply" because they don't "want" to eat less.
Changing culture isn't easy, and changing eating habits is extremely difficult. By all means try to get them to eat sweet potatoes, but until you manage to change the entire Asian culture at least a few people who might otherwise develop blindness might avoid it from switching to a different brand of rice.
But you don't sue the dealership if the problem was with the car and nothing the dealership did.
Sure, but if I order and pay for an SUV from the dealership and they deliver me a a compact car, I'm going to want my money back. That isn't the fault of the manufacturer - the dealer misrepresented what they sold.
It is fine if the studio decides to split a TV series in two - Apple just needs to clearly advertise what is being sold and all is well. If they sell you a season and deliver half a season, the fault is entirely their own. They can always deliver both half seasons for the single half-season price - they just might have to take a loss on it if they have to pay 2x the cost to the studio. Chances are they won't let that happen though.
If you're selling a product and take money from somebody, you have to deliver what you sold them. If circumstances beyond your control cause you to not be able to make good on your promise, then at the very least you need to refund the money, not keep it and deliver half a product for the cost of the whole.
If Apple is simply a middleman or distributor selling a product based on the content holder's wishes they are more likely to be dismissed from the case.
Not likely. If I buy a car from the Toyota dealer, and I get it home and it doesn't run, I sue Toyota. I don't sue some company that made the engine. Toyota sold me a CAR, which includes an engine. The fact that they bought the engine from somebody else doesn't change the fact that they sold me something defective.
The same is true of Apple - they sold a season pass. Now, maybe they didn't have the legal right to sell a season pass, but they sold one all the same. If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge the fact that I don't own the bridge only makes more more liable, not less.
There's of course the real risk that Google forks Linux over this.
Just like how Red Hat has forked Linux over this?
I doubt they'll really fork it, per se. Red Hat ships old kernel versions with patches backported far beyond what the kernel team is willing to support. They still upstream their patches, and they have every intent to migrate to a newer kernel in line with their own processes.
But sure, they could always stick an ABI translation layer on the kernel that they maintain, much as Nvidia already does (albeit only for their own driver).
Cosmic rays at sea level? Affecting magnetic tape recording quality? That's utterly absurd. Cite or shut it.
J. F. Ziegler, The Background In Detectors Caused By Sea Level Cosmic Rays, Nuclear Instruments and Methods 191, 419, (1981).
Don't have access to read it myself, but WP and the title suggest that these are appropriate. Certainly there is cosmic ray flux at sea level - WP states, "Cosmic rays constitute a fraction of the annual radiation exposure of human beings on the Earth, averaging 0.39 mSv out of a total of 3 mSv per year (13% of total background) for the Earth's population."
As far as changes to magnetic tape quality - why not? If a cosmic ray strikes an atom that is part of a magnetic domain, there is every reason to think that it will affect the orientation of its contribution to the magnetic field of that domain. You certainly won't hear the effects of a single particle collision, but the argument was that analog was better than digital because there is no limit of quantization. If there REALLY is no limit of quantization then there is no limit to the damage you must consider from a cosmic ray particle. The power of a digital format is that until the damage surpasses some threshold there is no impact to the final read of the data, because it IS quantized.
If you want to talk about scientific evidence, then I'd submit that all evidence indicates that modern lossless digital recording formats are indistinguishable from analog when listened to by human ears.
The magnetic bits start to lose their little minds after 10 yrs.
The magnetic bits start to "lose their minds" as soon as they're recorded. With analog every little comic ray particle that hits the tape changes the recording. It just takes 10 years until that adds up into something you can actually hear. If you think that analog is better than digital because digital is quantized, then every one of those imperceptible cosmic ray impacts is utter destruction, since you can't perceive the defects in modern digital audio formats either.
Technically, it does. There are no samples with tape. The resolution of the waveform is limited only by physics... it's not infinitely resolute, but theoretically goes all the way down to Plank limits, far beyond the limits of even 32-bit digital. Tape does add noise. But the noise sounds good. It is no different, however, from an effect.
If you want "good noise" just run your audio through an appropriate digital filter and you can get all the noise you want.
Your signal theoretically only goes down to the time constant of the recording hardware, which I can assure you doesn't have a wavelength comparable to Plank limits. Your tape faithfully records detail at 32-bits worth of dynamic range in the same way that your eyeballs faithfully perceive the light from the cosmic horizon when you look at the blindingly-white sky at night.
A 32-bit, 48kHz digital recording is completely indistinguishable from the original source when perceived by human ears. I'll grant you that the effects of the sampling rate would be noticed by electronic test equipment. You're only going to notice the effects of the dynamic range in a well-designed circuit - 2^32 is a very large number.
How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?
How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding of a particular type of audio tape is common enough to have players in the future?
Given nothing but a set of specifications, it will be a LOT easier to play a digital audio file than a spool of tape. if the specs are lost chances are the audio file will be a lot easier to reverse engineer than the spool of tape.
There is nothing about magnetic tape that makes it magically future-proof.
The NSA hires plenty of PhDs in mathematics. I know of at least one personally and I am not really involved in math circles. Where else would one get a job? There just aren't nearly as many teaching positions as there are graduates.
Granted today Wall Street hires many. However, many would consider cryptography a more interesting problem. Also, Wall Street hiring PhDs in math is a fairly new phenomenon - they weren't doing that back in the 90s, and yet there was still a glut of PhDs floating around in math. It isn't like a PhD mathematician working for the NSA would get stale - they're probably far more exposed to breakthroughs than anybody in academia since they also get to read all the classified research.
The NSA has a budget measured in billions of dollars. You can do a lot of good research for that kind of money.
Since this policy is never likely to change, I can't see why anyone is surprised Linux has still never made it on the desktop.
Who exactly is surprised by this? Certainly not those who created the policy. The purpose of the policy was not to make Linux popular on the desktop, or anywhere else for that matter. The creators of the policy do not profit from Linux, so its popularity isn't really a big concern.
Hmm - that might or might not be the cause. I do play the cello and can sing reasonably well. I wouldn't put myself among the masters when it comes to intonation, but in general I would say that my intonation is quite good.
On the other hand, I have a friend who can sing harmony with just about anything by ear with excellent intonation and she definitely noticed the effect. This friend also has anomic aphasia, so who knows - there are a bunch of different neurological anomalies between us...
After googling for the McGurk Effect and watching a bunch of videos I have concluded that I can't really sense this effect at all. I'll take their word that most people can.
Probably what is more interesting is some of the info on Wikipedia about the sorts of things that make the effect more or less pronounced. I'd be interested in the results for the average Slashdotter - I suspect that things like mild autism are much more common here.
Slashdot Mirror
If they sell you an SUV for $20k and deliver you a compact car, the dealer is certainly liable, even if that compact car is exactly what they received from Ford. The issue isn't that the recordings were defective - the issue is that what was sold was misrepresented. It is certainly the duty of a reseller to correctly represent what was being sold.
Again you missed the point. If you paid $20K for a Ford Escape, did you get a Ford Escape from the dealership?
In my example, no. Hence the dealer is liable.
Did Apple or AMC ever tell the plaintiff that Season 5 was 16 episodes? Apple certainly didn't as Apple doesn't know (and I think doesn't care).
Well, after they get sued for a few million dollars hopefully they'll care a bit more. If they didn't specify the number of episodes, then they sold the entire season - whatever is reasonable and customary. Neither the seller or vendor gets to decide what is reasonable and customary - that is decided by what everybody else is doing. If they want to be different, the onus is on them to be different.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
Prove how? Step 1: he must prove liability. Step 2: he must prove damages. The most he can prove is that he thought he was getting a huge discount. But that is a tough argument to make that not getting discount = damages.
Not getting a discount means spending more money than was advertised. That is obviously damage - a monetary loss is the simplest form of damages to claim in court. As far as liability goes - that seems to be what we're arguing over.
As for punitive damages, you are completely jumping the gun. Punitive damages comes in when there sort of additional action of behavior. What is Apple accused of doing in the worst light is selling a product from AMC with AMC setting the pricing and product control.
What Apple is doing in the worst light is selling something and delivering something else, blaming somebody else for it, and forcing people to sue them en masse to get their money back.
As far as compensatory damages go - you say I missed the point and yet I only claimed $11 in damages for him, which to me seems to be the discount he thought he was getting. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing on.
Because in law, I paid money != damages. In this case the plaintiff paid full price for something. He wasn't overcharged above retail. Now if the plaintiff had it in writing that he was supposed to pay $X for Y amount, that's a different story (like in newspaper ads, shelf price). All he has is $X amount for Season Pass with the number of season episodes not defined by Apple or AMC. In a place other than Apple's website from an interview with someone not in charge of pricing or product control, he thought Season 5 would transitively get him 16 episodes on iTunes. AMC wasn't clear on this but the plaintiff also made an assumption.
Sure, but the plaintiff's assumption was based on what everybody does. If I sell you Ford Focus for $15k and deliver a toy car, I'm going to get sued, because nobody would see that price and description and think of a toy car. Apple sold a season of a TV series, and they didn't deliver what they sold.
Behavior being egregious has nothing to do with whether no one else is doing it. Behavior being egregious has to do with it being shockingly bad or unconscionable.
egregious adjective absurd, appalling, arrant, bizarre, excessive, e
If you pay a Ford dealership $20000 for a car and you have a problem with the fuel mileage is that really the dealer's fault. The dealer sold you the car as they got it from Ford.
If they sell you an SUV for $20k and deliver you a compact car, the dealer is certainly liable, even if that compact car is exactly what they received from Ford. The issue isn't that the recordings were defective - the issue is that what was sold was misrepresented. It is certainly the duty of a reseller to correctly represent what was being sold.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
First of all you missed the point damages. The most the plaintiff can prove is that he wasn't going to get the discount he thought he was getting.
As far as compensatory damages go - you say I missed the point and yet I only claimed $11 in damages for him, which to me seems to be the discount he thought he was getting. I'm not sure what exactly you're disagreeing on.
Second "egregious" only really applies of Apple did something no one was doing. Apple is doing want everyone from Amazon to MS is doing: selling the product as-is from AMC.
Behavior being egregious has nothing to do with whether no one else is doing it. Behavior being egregious has to do with it being shockingly bad or unconscionable. It is possible for an entire industry to be uniformly engaged in egregious behavior. In any case, egregious is whatever a jury decides it is - judges basically read the definition of the term and the jury fills in what they want to assess, if anything. It isn't uncommon to have $1 in compensatory damages and $1M in punitive damages.
Usually punitive damages result when the defendant seems likely to repeat their behavior. I don't believe Apple is admitting any wrongdoing here, and the compensatory damages are only $11 after a long trial, so it would seem that punitive damages would be necessary if the goal is actually to change their behavior.
All Apple needs to do is just state up-front how many episodes are in the season, or what period of original TV airtime is covered by the pass. By all means they can make the studios specify that when they put the pass up for sale, and Apple can just enforce it. The issue was that they used generic wording that customarily means one thing and in the end they delivered something else. If the NY Yankees sold a season pass and then in June sent out a letter telling everybody that if they wanted tickets after July 1st they'd have to buy another one there would certainly be a lawsuit unless this was specified up-front when the tickets were first sold. They used a term that has always been used to mean one thing to sell something else.
You think Season 5 is 16 episodes. You have no standing in a contract between Apple and AMC any more than you can tell the store that you get more chips. You have a problem with a product, take it up with the manufacturer.
If I pay Apple $22, I have a contract with Apple, implied or written. I certainly have standing to sue them if I didn't get what they sold me. Whether season 5 is 8 or 16 episodes is a matter of fact/law to be determined by a judge and jury. I'm sure they'll take AMC's opinion into account.
The second thing is what are the damages? In this case, the fan had to pay normal price for a season. That's it. He wasn't going to get a 40% discount that he might have thought he was getting. Apple and Amazon sold the eight episodes at $22. Based on pricing if the buyer thought he was getting 16 episodes for $22 that's 40% off. Even if he wins, he can't prove damages.
It sounds like he can prove $22 in compensatory damages fairly trivially using the very argument you just presented (or at least $11 if you consider half the episodes made good on). Multiply that by however many Apple sold if it becomes a class action, and add in punitive damages if the behavior is deemed egregious.
I'm sure his lawyer wouldn't be spending money on the case if he didn't think he has a shot.
If you just look at things simply and empirically, it is very easy to test these questions.
Sure, if you don't care about getting the right answer. When it comes to human health, every complicated question has a simple answer, which is wrong. If you want to look at things empirically then you have to control for the placebo effect, and for that matter do a controlled experiment in the first place. Both of those elements are extremely difficult to pull off when it comes to diet. Maybe if you lock people in cages and puree all the food and mask the flavor you can feed people a controlled diet for a few years without them having any idea what they're eating, but good luck getting that past the board of ethics. Or I guess you could implant cannulas in them like they do with rats.
If you're just looking for a bunch of anecdotes then just browse the internet and you'll find people claiming that everything from whole wheat bread to bacon to Twinkies is responsible for everything from living to the age of 102 to dropping dead from a stroke at age 14. Millions of people live lives that are medically exceptional in some way, and millions of people have unusual diets, so there will be lots of intersections of these whether there is a true relationship or not.
So, everybody has their pet theory and happily professes it, while lobbying the government to punish all those people who practice the wrong religion (thereby increasing healthcare costs).
I'm all for science, but precious little in the healthcare industry really qualifies as science, and almost nothing in the diet industry does, unless you're talking about mice. It isn't that nobody tries - the problem is that you can never really know what your test subjects are doing unless you can cage them up, and you can never really control the genetics unless you breed boys and mothers/sisters for 14 generations. Do that with people and you'll get results that are as reproducible as what we get with rats, but obviously we can't do that. Oh, and if you really want to understand how people tick start knocking out genes - that will make the cannulas and controlled breeding seem really tame.
Good luck getting the US government to agree on your claim of grains being harmful.
That's the point - there really isn't agreement. The two of us might be agreed, but if the evidence were really that incontrovertible there wouldn't be so much debate.
Ultimately Apple advertised a season pass for Season 5 on their website, profited from the sales of that season, and delivered content for something that virtually any consumer would not consider the entire Season.
They can argue all the above in court, but I doubt any jury would buy it. If you sell me Season 5, you need to deliver Season 5. Apple could refund the purchase to anybody who was mislead and say that they had nothing to do with it, and that would probably allow them to escape liability if they did it before they got to trial. However, they control the store - they could remove the show from their store at any time as being fraudulent, just as Ebay or Amazon does when third parties list items that are misleading.
No differentiation?...Yea...nothing different there for your $100
So why would anybody buy the 5C? That is the lack of differentiation in my eyes - the only advantage of the 5C is price, and there is very little advantage there (~15%).
Doing what you suggested would tick off the police and wouldn't sell more phones. Maybe if the average phone purchaser could appreciate the suggestion you're making Apple might consider it.
Doesn't sound to me like is easily spoof able with anything but a super-high-res fingerprint scanner and some way to 3D print fakes that both map the contours accurately enough while also providing a capacitive bridge.
Seems like the simplest solution is to just grab the owner's finger and push it against the button. That's the problem with most biometric systems - providing a biometric only proves (at best) that the owner is present, not that the owner consents to unlocking the device.
The difference now is that the iPhone 5 has been recast as the 5C, and is not shipped alongside the 5S. Instead, it is still a higher priced product, although not nearly as pricey as the 5S, and the 4S is free with contract.
Free with contract? Contracts typically only knock $200 off the price - so free with contract amounts to a $450 phone. That is a LOT to pay for a two-year-old device in a market where people tend to replace them biannually.
Early death saves the government money, living a long time costs the government.
Sure, but there is a big cost-difference between being healthy right until you die from a cerebral aneurysm vs dying after suffering with type-2 diabetes for 15 years. The diseases associated with obesity tend to be pretty expensive.
Good luck generating 100%-accurate data for anything related to diet in humans without violating a bazillion ethical codes. You could merely institute draconian monitoring of your test subjects in which case you'll end up kicking everybody out of every group but the junk-food group for non-compliance. Or, you could just lock all your test subjects in cages and feed them rations of the appropriate type, allowing them to nearly starve if they refuse to eat them.
Feeding tests in lab rats are fairly practical, tests with humans are anything but, mostly for the reasons we already agree on. That's why everybody has their favorite diet and an argument about why it is better than all the others.
That's not what happened. AMC says Season 5 is in two seasons. Not Apple.
That is the entire problem. If Apple said Season 5 was two seasons, then they would be doing nothing wrong. They just sold a season pass for Season 5 without declaring in advance that it was for only half a season.
Apple doesn't know what a "season" is.
Then they were negligent. The consumer certainly doesn't know what it is. It is the duty of the vendor of a good to know what they're selling. How can Apple sell a "season" if they don't know what a "season" is? If they couldn't be sure about AMC's terms then they shouldn't have sold any season passes until they were sure. If AMC changed the rules after-the-fact they should just let users download the entire season and dare AMC to sue them - AMC can't change the contract after they signed it.
So yes, "golden rice" might solve a problem, in the sense that it would fool culturally-bound people who are unwilling to forego rice as their staple food. But it's hardly the only way.
That sounds like the "obesity isn't a problem - just eat less" solution. Sounds nice in paper, and yet millions of people are expected to end their lives early at considerable taxpayer expense "simply" because they don't "want" to eat less.
Changing culture isn't easy, and changing eating habits is extremely difficult. By all means try to get them to eat sweet potatoes, but until you manage to change the entire Asian culture at least a few people who might otherwise develop blindness might avoid it from switching to a different brand of rice.
But you don't sue the dealership if the problem was with the car and nothing the dealership did.
Sure, but if I order and pay for an SUV from the dealership and they deliver me a a compact car, I'm going to want my money back. That isn't the fault of the manufacturer - the dealer misrepresented what they sold.
It is fine if the studio decides to split a TV series in two - Apple just needs to clearly advertise what is being sold and all is well. If they sell you a season and deliver half a season, the fault is entirely their own. They can always deliver both half seasons for the single half-season price - they just might have to take a loss on it if they have to pay 2x the cost to the studio. Chances are they won't let that happen though.
If you're selling a product and take money from somebody, you have to deliver what you sold them. If circumstances beyond your control cause you to not be able to make good on your promise, then at the very least you need to refund the money, not keep it and deliver half a product for the cost of the whole.
If Apple is simply a middleman or distributor selling a product based on the content holder's wishes they are more likely to be dismissed from the case.
Not likely. If I buy a car from the Toyota dealer, and I get it home and it doesn't run, I sue Toyota. I don't sue some company that made the engine. Toyota sold me a CAR, which includes an engine. The fact that they bought the engine from somebody else doesn't change the fact that they sold me something defective.
The same is true of Apple - they sold a season pass. Now, maybe they didn't have the legal right to sell a season pass, but they sold one all the same. If I sell you the Brooklyn Bridge the fact that I don't own the bridge only makes more more liable, not less.
There's of course the real risk that Google forks Linux over this.
Just like how Red Hat has forked Linux over this?
I doubt they'll really fork it, per se. Red Hat ships old kernel versions with patches backported far beyond what the kernel team is willing to support. They still upstream their patches, and they have every intent to migrate to a newer kernel in line with their own processes.
But sure, they could always stick an ABI translation layer on the kernel that they maintain, much as Nvidia already does (albeit only for their own driver).
Cosmic rays at sea level? Affecting magnetic tape recording quality? That's utterly absurd. Cite or shut it.
J. F. Ziegler, The Background In Detectors Caused By Sea Level Cosmic Rays, Nuclear Instruments and Methods 191, 419, (1981).
Don't have access to read it myself, but WP and the title suggest that these are appropriate. Certainly there is cosmic ray flux at sea level - WP states, "Cosmic rays constitute a fraction of the annual radiation exposure of human beings on the Earth, averaging 0.39 mSv out of a total of 3 mSv per year (13% of total background) for the Earth's population."
As far as changes to magnetic tape quality - why not? If a cosmic ray strikes an atom that is part of a magnetic domain, there is every reason to think that it will affect the orientation of its contribution to the magnetic field of that domain. You certainly won't hear the effects of a single particle collision, but the argument was that analog was better than digital because there is no limit of quantization. If there REALLY is no limit of quantization then there is no limit to the damage you must consider from a cosmic ray particle. The power of a digital format is that until the damage surpasses some threshold there is no impact to the final read of the data, because it IS quantized.
If you want to talk about scientific evidence, then I'd submit that all evidence indicates that modern lossless digital recording formats are indistinguishable from analog when listened to by human ears.
The magnetic bits start to lose their little minds after 10 yrs.
The magnetic bits start to "lose their minds" as soon as they're recorded. With analog every little comic ray particle that hits the tape changes the recording. It just takes 10 years until that adds up into something you can actually hear. If you think that analog is better than digital because digital is quantized, then every one of those imperceptible cosmic ray impacts is utter destruction, since you can't perceive the defects in modern digital audio formats either.
Technically, it does. There are no samples with tape. The resolution of the waveform is limited only by physics... it's not infinitely resolute, but theoretically goes all the way down to Plank limits, far beyond the limits of even 32-bit digital. Tape does add noise. But the noise sounds good. It is no different, however, from an effect.
If you want "good noise" just run your audio through an appropriate digital filter and you can get all the noise you want.
Your signal theoretically only goes down to the time constant of the recording hardware, which I can assure you doesn't have a wavelength comparable to Plank limits. Your tape faithfully records detail at 32-bits worth of dynamic range in the same way that your eyeballs faithfully perceive the light from the cosmic horizon when you look at the blindingly-white sky at night.
A 32-bit, 48kHz digital recording is completely indistinguishable from the original source when perceived by human ears. I'll grant you that the effects of the sampling rate would be noticed by electronic test equipment. You're only going to notice the effects of the dynamic range in a well-designed circuit - 2^32 is a very large number.
How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding is common enough to have decoders in the future?
How will a regular musician know if the format or encoding of a particular type of audio tape is common enough to have players in the future?
Given nothing but a set of specifications, it will be a LOT easier to play a digital audio file than a spool of tape. if the specs are lost chances are the audio file will be a lot easier to reverse engineer than the spool of tape.
There is nothing about magnetic tape that makes it magically future-proof.
The NSA is not interested in Cryptography PhDs.
The NSA hires plenty of PhDs in mathematics. I know of at least one personally and I am not really involved in math circles. Where else would one get a job? There just aren't nearly as many teaching positions as there are graduates.
Granted today Wall Street hires many. However, many would consider cryptography a more interesting problem. Also, Wall Street hiring PhDs in math is a fairly new phenomenon - they weren't doing that back in the 90s, and yet there was still a glut of PhDs floating around in math. It isn't like a PhD mathematician working for the NSA would get stale - they're probably far more exposed to breakthroughs than anybody in academia since they also get to read all the classified research.
The NSA has a budget measured in billions of dollars. You can do a lot of good research for that kind of money.
Since this policy is never likely to change, I can't see why anyone is surprised Linux has still never made it on the desktop.
Who exactly is surprised by this? Certainly not those who created the policy. The purpose of the policy was not to make Linux popular on the desktop, or anywhere else for that matter. The creators of the policy do not profit from Linux, so its popularity isn't really a big concern.
Hmm - that might or might not be the cause. I do play the cello and can sing reasonably well. I wouldn't put myself among the masters when it comes to intonation, but in general I would say that my intonation is quite good.
On the other hand, I have a friend who can sing harmony with just about anything by ear with excellent intonation and she definitely noticed the effect. This friend also has anomic aphasia, so who knows - there are a bunch of different neurological anomalies between us...
After googling for the McGurk Effect and watching a bunch of videos I have concluded that I can't really sense this effect at all. I'll take their word that most people can.
Probably what is more interesting is some of the info on Wikipedia about the sorts of things that make the effect more or less pronounced. I'd be interested in the results for the average Slashdotter - I suspect that things like mild autism are much more common here.