That depends on what it means to be written in HTML5.
For instance, does it mean that the YouTube app would have to use the same video player that Google serves to desktop visitors? Because if so, perhaps MS wanted it to be possible to have an experience that isn't awful. Seriously: I've used multiple browsers on multiple desktop platforms, and I don't know how by far the biggest video website in its genre has a player that is so bad.
If you look around the thread, you'll see some people (e.g. DrXym) who comment that the native apps' experience on Android and iOS is substantially better than using m.youtube.com in the platform's web browser. It's totally possible that Google's "use HTML5 OMG!" demand makes it impossible to make an app that works as well.
I'd love to see a Google rebuttal to the MS blog post, and hear what the other side has to say.
It wasn't OCRing, just compressing badly, so that a block of the image with one number that looked close enough to another block with a different number (say a 6 and an 8) was being replaced by the second block. This is why it only showed up on text that was already quite small.
This exact thing happened a few years ago to another provider, Hushmail.
How do you know that? Because you don't know what lavabit was ordered to do or provide.
Suppose Lavabit was ordered to install software or turn over information (e.g. SSL key) that would potentially compromise all users of the service. It is certainly conceivable that they were ordered to do so. And that would be a hell of a lot different from turning over information on a few specific targets.
Uh oh! Fairbanks, Alaska is in play now! It's been 72 hours, and San Diego to Fairbanks is only 61 hours' drive! Better send an AMBER alert to Fairbanks!
Euros are money. Does that mean the SEC can regulate them?
IANAL, but I suspect if you tried running a ponzi scheme while in the US but only took Euros, the latter fact wouldn't help you much against the SEC. That'd be a pretty huge loophole (admittedly diminished by the fact that "you must give me Euros to participate" would be a bit of a tell -- but I bet you could disguise that fact reasonably well).
As for what happens here to cause Apple to do this - cheap adapters are cheap. There is often ZERO regard to safety, including things like basic creepage and clearance
IMO Apple's stance exacerbates that problem, not solves it. It makes legitimate "made for iPhone" adapters more expensive and thus makes cheapass counterfeit crap more attractive by comparison.
Youc an convert a standard USB charging charger to an Apple one with a few resistors, and an Apple one to a standard just as easily.
You consider modding your charger "easily"? I wouldn't trust a $500 piece of equipment to my handiwork, especially considering we're talking about good and bad chargers! I've soldered a few things before, and I suspect Cheapass Counterfeit Crap, LLC would have a better chance at producing a safe charger than me.
If every single comment was exactly about the article at hand, you'd have a point, but there also wouldn't be much discussion.
But they're not, nor should they be. And this particular thread was started by someone asking "why does Apple like to use proprietary chargers/connectors so much in the first place".
And like I said, my comment applies equally to chargers as it does to cables. Apple isn't the only company capable of making decent gadgets.
I'm sure there are people working on that. But it's not like you can snap your fingers and the bed bug fairy will deliver a fix. In the meantime, people have to rely on traditional extermination methods, and traditional extermination methods require that you be aware that traditional extermination methods are necessary. And that's what the work described by the article is addressing...
600 miles away can be a 7 or so hour drive depending on the stops and how fast you can go.
I'm guessing someone who recently committed murder and kidnapping wouldn't want to push 90mph, though I haven't really driven in CA.
Except that it wasn't even 7 hours after, it was more than 24 hours after. The chances that the guy was even in CA at that point seem pretty remote. News articles say that their best info is that he was headed to Canada or Texas; both of those are more than easily reachable in well under that time. Heck, according to Google maps it'd probably be possible to get completely across Texas to New Orleans, or almost to Edmonton, CA in that time.
I'm aware of that, but that's hardly relevant here.
I suspect we're talking past each other a bit.:-) Here's my interpretation:
tlhlngan said "Wow, [girlintraining's post] is so wrong", and you responded to tlhlngan by saying "How is it wrong?". And while "wrong" was the arguably the wrong word to use on tlhlngan's part, the DES/AES comparison by girlintraining was irrelevant.
However, and here is where I think I may have made a jump (perhaps justified, perhaps not), while girlintraining's statement about DES/AES wasn't wrong if taken completely literally, it did reflect a misunderstanding on girlintraining's part (unless I yet have something to learn). And in that sense, I think "wrong" is a perfectly fine word for tlhlngan to have used. (I didn't know what that misunderstanding was at the point of tlhlngan's post, but I felt it was reasonably clear there was one.)
So when you asked "why's it wrong", I answered the question I interpreted it as -- but not what you asked.:-)
What kind of phone do you have? It's not a text message that was sent, and phones have to have explicit support. It's a reasonably new "feature", so believable that it wouldn't be present.
The radius needs to be quite wide, because a person can travel a great distance in a car in a short period of time. 800 miles would not be unreasonable depending on when the missing child was reported.
By that reasoning, at the time the AMBER alert was issued, it would have been justifiable to announce it to about 1/2 of the continental US.
Reasoning: - The kidnapping occurred no later than ~8pm Sunday - The earliest AMBER alerts (according to the summary) started around ~11pm Monday; let's be kind and say that they started around 8pm - That gives 24 hours for the kidnapper to get somewhere - If the kidnapper drove at 60 mph for that time (that is... moderately realistic if he planned for it), he'd be able to clear 1,440 miles - The entire west coast up to Seattle would be in fairly easy range; Austin would be in range; Houston is barely out of range according to 1440 miles (though Google Maps estimates it at under 21 hours, and puts New Orleans at 25 hrs); Omaha is a bit out of range by 1440 miles (but in range per Google Maps's estimate of 22:40); Sheridan, WY and the Montana border are in range
And that's just counting what he'd be able to do by the time the alert was issued. Want them to plan ahead for where he might be in another 12 hours? Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, etc. are all in fairly easy range; Tampa, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh are maybe possible.
Happily you can simply turn off the alert on your phone and remove any random chance you might save someones life, so can can avoid a slightly annoying buzzing that lasts for a few seconds.
I feel that both positions are overstating things. Saying "a slightly annoying buzzing that lasts for a few seconds" is a dramatic understatement from what people saying it sounds like. (I can't find a sample of what it sounds like.) Being woken up is more than a "slight" annoyance, and there are plenty of situations where being suddenly startled by an unfamiliar loud noise can cause far more damage than "a slight annoyance."
Those probably make sense for a tornado warning or something like that, but not an AMBER alert. Virtually no one is going to do anything other than roll over and go back to sleep. It sounds like phone manufacturers went too far towards making it obnoxious for that case -- it seems quite unlikely that there would be many cases where a massive alert would garner a response that wouldn't be achieved through a simple text message alert for example.
If you find a noisy phone to be too distracting to drive and you don't want the messages anyway, why not just disable them?
How many people knew that it would even have been an option? If it weren't for this and the previous NYC story, I wouldn't have known about it.
(My phone doesn't support it I'm pretty sure.)
Do you nearly get into accidents when a blaring fire truck goes by or is it only a loud cell phone that distracts you to the point where you nearly crash?
If a firetruck suddenly appeared out of thin air, it may well do so.
It's not just the loudness it sounds like (having never heard such an alert) but the suddenness and unfamiliarity.
Worse if the alert says "Incoming nuclear missiles. Evacuate your town immediately. Don't trust radio or TV."
"Be careful to protect your precious bodily fluids."
I do wonder how long it will be until someone figures out how to hack the system and uses it to send out repeated "Presidential Alerts" in the middle of the night -- those alerts can't be blocked by any phone settings.
I bet they can be blocked by turning the phone off. Kinda sucks if you use it for an alarm (I do this) and doesn't address your fundamental point, but it'd be a stopgap solution.
You're missing my point, which is that companies other than Apple exist and many of them make good products. Just because there are companies that make really bad products too doesn't negate that fact.
I think you've missed the point. The sort of chargers you are suggesting people buy are the very ones that have been injuring people.
Um, yes and no.
I have yet to have my phone burst into flames, and I've charged it through a microUSB cable from my computer for... well, years. And believe me, it's not a $20 microUSB cable.
Actually, this is probably what I have, and that costs £1.84, or under $3. Is Apple really $17 better at making USB cables than Nokia? Or perhaps you're suggesting that my Gigabyte motherboard or Enermax PSU is just waiting to kill me through my phone?
I'm not denying that there are cheap, poor-quality counterfeits. But that's a different issue. There are lots of companies that are perfectly capable of making decent hardware. Apple using a proprietary cable reduces the choices you have of good quality replacements in order to gain, from the perspective of a non-Apple user, almost nothing aside from the opportunity to give Apple more money.
(Things are different for some of their other connectors, like the magnetic power cord.)
You are technically correct, but certainly the quickest and most direct proof is to show a general solution for an NP-complete problem that runs in P time
You don't know that for certain; it is conceivable (if seemingly unlikely) that the easiest proof and the first found could be non-constructive.
(Remember, to prove that a problem is in P you not only have to come up with a P algorithm for it but then you have to prove that the algorithm is actually in P. It could be that any algorithm for a (currently-considered) NP-complete problem is complex with a staggeringly complicated proof that it's in P at all.)
And factoring is an NP-complete problem.
This is a bit of a nit, but factoring isn't known to be NP-complete; from what I can tell, it's actually widely believed to be in an intermediate class between P and NP. (No P algorithm is known, as you note, but there is a sub-exponential algorithm for it, which violates a widely-held belief that NP-complete problems are necessarily exponential.)
Current law bans marijuana which is easily grown yourself, and while I pretty strongly disagree with said law I wouldn't go nearly so far as to decry it as Orwellian.
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That depends on what it means to be written in HTML5.
For instance, does it mean that the YouTube app would have to use the same video player that Google serves to desktop visitors? Because if so, perhaps MS wanted it to be possible to have an experience that isn't awful. Seriously: I've used multiple browsers on multiple desktop platforms, and I don't know how by far the biggest video website in its genre has a player that is so bad.
If you look around the thread, you'll see some people (e.g. DrXym) who comment that the native apps' experience on Android and iOS is substantially better than using m.youtube.com in the platform's web browser. It's totally possible that Google's "use HTML5 OMG!" demand makes it impossible to make an app that works as well.
I'd love to see a Google rebuttal to the MS blog post, and hear what the other side has to say.
There's almost no way they're using Flash. It's probably just a normal video player with some addon features specific to YouTube.
It wasn't OCRing, just compressing badly, so that a block of the image with one number that looked close enough to another block with a different number (say a 6 and an 8) was being replaced by the second block. This is why it only showed up on text that was already quite small.
How do you know that? Because you don't know what lavabit was ordered to do or provide.
Suppose Lavabit was ordered to install software or turn over information (e.g. SSL key) that would potentially compromise all users of the service. It is certainly conceivable that they were ordered to do so. And that would be a hell of a lot different from turning over information on a few specific targets.
As a WI resident, Feingold was freaking awesome. His was the one loss I was really sad about in 2010.
Because there was another story on it four stories earlier.
Uh oh! Fairbanks, Alaska is in play now! It's been 72 hours, and San Diego to Fairbanks is only 61 hours' drive! Better send an AMBER alert to Fairbanks!
IANAL, but I suspect if you tried running a ponzi scheme while in the US but only took Euros, the latter fact wouldn't help you much against the SEC. That'd be a pretty huge loophole (admittedly diminished by the fact that "you must give me Euros to participate" would be a bit of a tell -- but I bet you could disguise that fact reasonably well).
IMO Apple's stance exacerbates that problem, not solves it. It makes legitimate "made for iPhone" adapters more expensive and thus makes cheapass counterfeit crap more attractive by comparison.
You consider modding your charger "easily"? I wouldn't trust a $500 piece of equipment to my handiwork, especially considering we're talking about good and bad chargers! I've soldered a few things before, and I suspect Cheapass Counterfeit Crap, LLC would have a better chance at producing a safe charger than me.
If every single comment was exactly about the article at hand, you'd have a point, but there also wouldn't be much discussion.
But they're not, nor should they be. And this particular thread was started by someone asking "why does Apple like to use proprietary chargers/connectors so much in the first place".
And like I said, my comment applies equally to chargers as it does to cables. Apple isn't the only company capable of making decent gadgets.
I'm sure there are people working on that. But it's not like you can snap your fingers and the bed bug fairy will deliver a fix. In the meantime, people have to rely on traditional extermination methods, and traditional extermination methods require that you be aware that traditional extermination methods are necessary. And that's what the work described by the article is addressing...
I'm guessing someone who recently committed murder and kidnapping wouldn't want to push 90mph, though I haven't really driven in CA.
Except that it wasn't even 7 hours after, it was more than 24 hours after. The chances that the guy was even in CA at that point seem pretty remote. News articles say that their best info is that he was headed to Canada or Texas; both of those are more than easily reachable in well under that time. Heck, according to Google maps it'd probably be possible to get completely across Texas to New Orleans, or almost to Edmonton, CA in that time.
I suspect we're talking past each other a bit. :-) Here's my interpretation:
tlhlngan said "Wow, [girlintraining's post] is so wrong", and you responded to tlhlngan by saying "How is it wrong?". And while "wrong" was the arguably the wrong word to use on tlhlngan's part, the DES/AES comparison by girlintraining was irrelevant.
However, and here is where I think I may have made a jump (perhaps justified, perhaps not), while girlintraining's statement about DES/AES wasn't wrong if taken completely literally, it did reflect a misunderstanding on girlintraining's part (unless I yet have something to learn). And in that sense, I think "wrong" is a perfectly fine word for tlhlngan to have used. (I didn't know what that misunderstanding was at the point of tlhlngan's post, but I felt it was reasonably clear there was one.)
So when you asked "why's it wrong", I answered the question I interpreted it as -- but not what you asked. :-)
What kind of phone do you have? It's not a text message that was sent, and phones have to have explicit support. It's a reasonably new "feature", so believable that it wouldn't be present.
By that reasoning, at the time the AMBER alert was issued, it would have been justifiable to announce it to about 1/2 of the continental US.
Reasoning:
- The kidnapping occurred no later than ~8pm Sunday
- The earliest AMBER alerts (according to the summary) started around ~11pm Monday; let's be kind and say that they started around 8pm
- That gives 24 hours for the kidnapper to get somewhere
- If the kidnapper drove at 60 mph for that time (that is... moderately realistic if he planned for it), he'd be able to clear 1,440 miles
- The entire west coast up to Seattle would be in fairly easy range; Austin would be in range; Houston is barely out of range according to 1440 miles (though Google Maps estimates it at under 21 hours, and puts New Orleans at 25 hrs); Omaha is a bit out of range by 1440 miles (but in range per Google Maps's estimate of 22:40); Sheridan, WY and the Montana border are in range
And that's just counting what he'd be able to do by the time the alert was issued. Want them to plan ahead for where he might be in another 12 hours? Chicago, Indianapolis, Atlanta, etc. are all in fairly easy range; Tampa, Pittsburgh, and Raleigh are maybe possible.
I feel that both positions are overstating things. Saying "a slightly annoying buzzing that lasts for a few seconds" is a dramatic understatement from what people saying it sounds like. (I can't find a sample of what it sounds like.) Being woken up is more than a "slight" annoyance, and there are plenty of situations where being suddenly startled by an unfamiliar loud noise can cause far more damage than "a slight annoyance."
Those probably make sense for a tornado warning or something like that, but not an AMBER alert. Virtually no one is going to do anything other than roll over and go back to sleep. It sounds like phone manufacturers went too far towards making it obnoxious for that case -- it seems quite unlikely that there would be many cases where a massive alert would garner a response that wouldn't be achieved through a simple text message alert for example.
At 2:22am with regards to an event hundreds of miles away? I bet they are...
How many people knew that it would even have been an option? If it weren't for this and the previous NYC story, I wouldn't have known about it.
(My phone doesn't support it I'm pretty sure.)
If a firetruck suddenly appeared out of thin air, it may well do so.
It's not just the loudness it sounds like (having never heard such an alert) but the suddenness and unfamiliarity.
"Be careful to protect your precious bodily fluids."
I bet they can be blocked by turning the phone off. Kinda sucks if you use it for an alarm (I do this) and doesn't address your fundamental point, but it'd be a stopgap solution.
You're missing my point, which is that companies other than Apple exist and many of them make good products. Just because there are companies that make really bad products too doesn't negate that fact.
Um, yes and no.
I have yet to have my phone burst into flames, and I've charged it through a microUSB cable from my computer for... well, years. And believe me, it's not a $20 microUSB cable.
Actually, this is probably what I have, and that costs £1.84, or under $3. Is Apple really $17 better at making USB cables than Nokia? Or perhaps you're suggesting that my Gigabyte motherboard or Enermax PSU is just waiting to kill me through my phone?
I'm not denying that there are cheap, poor-quality counterfeits. But that's a different issue. There are lots of companies that are perfectly capable of making decent hardware. Apple using a proprietary cable reduces the choices you have of good quality replacements in order to gain, from the perspective of a non-Apple user, almost nothing aside from the opportunity to give Apple more money.
(Things are different for some of their other connectors, like the magnetic power cord.)
You don't know that for certain; it is conceivable (if seemingly unlikely) that the easiest proof and the first found could be non-constructive.
(Remember, to prove that a problem is in P you not only have to come up with a P algorithm for it but then you have to prove that the algorithm is actually in P. It could be that any algorithm for a (currently-considered) NP-complete problem is complex with a staggeringly complicated proof that it's in P at all.)
This is a bit of a nit, but factoring isn't known to be NP-complete; from what I can tell, it's actually widely believed to be in an intermediate class between P and NP. (No P algorithm is known, as you note, but there is a sub-exponential algorithm for it, which violates a widely-held belief that NP-complete problems are necessarily exponential.)
How could they cell you a $20 cable to plug your phone into your computer if you could just buy a microUSB cable for 65 cents from monoprice?
Why does it have to be Orwellian?
Current law bans marijuana which is easily grown yourself, and while I pretty strongly disagree with said law I wouldn't go nearly so far as to decry it as Orwellian.
Yes, but the AC's (excellent) point is that P != "tractable". So factorization can be in P, but still not be tractable in a meaningful sense.