That, or easy replicator technology means that people can use PADDs like we would use paper notes - after all, even in the 21st century, humans are still very fond of using physical objects to represent abstract concepts (like writing down the parts of a flow chart on post-it notes and rearranging them manually, instead of using that monstrosity that is Visio), so I don't see why the 24th would be significantly different. After all, it makes perfect sense to humans to say "this PADD contains stuff on subject A, I'll stick it on the corner of my desk for later" or "I need to read through these PADDs in a certain order, so I'll stack them like that" or "instead of screwing around sending you this data wirelessly, I'll just hand you my PADD".
If you could make iPads as easily as you print out a sheet of paper, wouldn't you be able to find uses for a ton of them?
Why is it okay for a CEO to steal $20k, but not okay for a peon to do the same?
It's a matter of perspective. Let's pretend the board has said that having the CEO is worth twenty million dollars a year. If he misappropriates $20,000 worth of company funds, it's equivalent to a peon with a $30k salary stealing $30 worth of office supplies. I'm sure everyone on Slashdot has hit that limit - those post-its and permanent markers add up, you know.
I'm sure things like this happen all the time, and we just don't hear about them because the companies involved don't make a fuss; as another poster pointed out, this is almost certainly an issue because someone else had an axe to grind with him, and the $20k was just an easy way in.
Well maybe, but we're talking different orders of magnitude. A smelter, for instance, would dump a shitload more heat than even the largest data center - after all, the data center's goal in life is to perform useful computation, and heat is an unwanted side-effect; a smelter's goal in life is to make things hot, so heat is something they make and eventually have to get rid of. That's why when you hear about thermal pollution it's almost always coming from heavy industry, not things like data centers and apartment complexes.
I wouldn't be surprised if a data center's total heat output falls below regulated levels, which is how they managed to pull in investment.
Hell, even if they're not allowed to dump heat out into the ocean, there'd still be plenty of benefits - ocean temperatures are usually far more moderate than inland temperatures, so you have to spend significantly less money accounting for varying temperatures in your design. They're also apparently mooring in San Fransisco, and, well, I'll just leave you with this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:
The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.
70% were against Pelosicare of 2009 (according to national polls)
70% of surveyed toddlers were against bathing. When confronted with the fact that their European friend Jack does, in fact, take baths, they said "well but Jack's not like me! Bathing wouldn't work, my situation is entirely different!"
You're also completely ignoring the issue with batteries - a hybrid's batteries have to be replaced about every five years, I believe. If you pay for that yourself (IOW it's not covered under warranty or something), it'll be several thousand dollars that a non-hybrid car wouldn't have to pay.
I just don't see any advantge at all, maybe some loopholes that haven't been caught yet but won't take long to close.
You've got a heatsink the size of the entire ocean sitting under your datacenter. I thought that was the main reason why they wanted to do this - run some radiators along the inside of your hull (or even poke them outside) and you've got all the cold you could ever use. Hell, if your systems are robust enough, you could even use filtered ocean water.
I'm actually quite unclear on what the difference between someone with an H1-B visa and someone who has signed an indentured servitude contract is. Even the terms are similar - indentured servants sign a contract for three to seven years, receive housing, clothing and food in return for their labor, and must remain with the contractor until the end of their terms. H1-B Visas are valid for only three years which can be extended up to six, the workers are generally paid just barely enough to cover food, clothing and housing, and although in theory someone with an H1-B visa can change jobs, in practice it is almost impossible given their fragile status.
I guess indentured servitude was such a good idea, we just couldn't let it go?
Yeah, exactly - that's my favorite comeback when people say that Gates dropped out of college and still did well.
"He dropped out, and all he had to fall back on was a million dollar trust fund his parents set up in his name"
Seriously, Bill Gates wasn't successful just because of his skills; he was successful because his parents gave him a huge leg up. Even if he hadn't been the businessman he is, he still would be at least a multi-millionaire right now. He just happened to have talent and be in the right place at the right time.
Most games are also pirated just fine with DRM. It really doesn't do much either way.
And I buy stuff from Steam because they frequently have the best prices. $7 for Gratuitous Space Battles + all the expansion packs this weekend? I'm sold!
Your analysis is off. For any game (but especially a single-player indie game like this), DRM strong enough to pose a continuing challenge to the pirates is impractical if not impossible (see Ubisoft's massive cock-up, and they have orders of magnitude more resources than Amanita Design). Therefore, the set of people who would have bought the game if there were sufficiently strong DRM does not exist, because it would have been impossible to implement sufficiently strong DRM.
Further, I would wager that you are leaving out a significant group of people: those who pirate it because it's there. I've known several people like this, a sort of digital hoarder whose goal seems to be to mirror the entire Internet. They wouldn't have bought the game at all if it wasn't available for piracy; they might not even realize they have the game, having just played it long enough for the "this game is pirated!" ping to hit Amanita's servers (or, if they're counting torrents, having never played the game at all).
I would not be surprised if those sorts of people make up a significant fraction of those who pirated the game - and Machinarium is awesome enough that this $5 piracy amnesty offer might cause some of them to pay up.
That's actually not true, and the E2 analysis is flawed. Just because Pi is irrational and has an infinite decimal expansion does not mean that the distribution of numbers uniform, which is what the E2 analysis assumes.
As an example, let's define some number Pi9 such that its decimal expansion is exactly like Pi's, but all nines are replaced with zero. Clearly, this number is also irrational just like Pi is, but no matter how hard you look you'll never find the number "9" in it.
In a similar fashion, you're not actually guaranteed to find anything in Pi; it may very well work out that no such copyrighted work exists therein.
Is the bit of fulmination we're seeing from outside the government a symptom of some serious pressure being applied within? I mean first it was Marc Thiessen calling for the United States Government to basically declare war against a person, and now this irrational command.
I just can't help but wonder if these things aren't just signs of a lot of behind-the-scenes scurrying.
My wife went to an all-girls private high school, one of the best schools in the area period. Nearly 100% of the girls who went there would go on to college, and a large portion of them went on to really good schools.
Guess how they manage to get near-100% college acceptance rates and excellent educational outcomes? If you were dumb, too slow or just plain lazy, they kicked you out. The worst part is that this didn't start in high school - in order to go to her high school, you almost had to go to one of the associated private K-8 schools in the area. By the time the kids were entering into high school, all of the underachievers had been kicked out already and sent to public schools; any kids who started slacking too much in high school would also be removed. What made it worse for my wife was that they tended to choose whether or not they accepted your siblings based on your achievements, so my wife had to do well in order for them to even consider accepting her sisters. It makes a certain kind of sense, after all - intelligence and capacity for achievement do tend to run in families - but it still sounds inhumane.
Believe me, if we passed legislation that allowed public schools to pick and choose which children they teach like private schools do, educational achievement in public schools would go through the roof. Unfortunately, we just can't do that - in this world of specialization and two working parents, society has to provide a minimum standard of education.
Positive rights define two classes of people: people who are entitled to receive something from someone else, and another class of people who are required to produce a surplus in order to satisfy the first group. There's a name for this kind of arrangement but I'll let you figure that out on your own.
Not necessarily; I'm not sure exactly how reCAPTCHA works, but in theory they don't know one of the words - in fact, that other word may very well be unknowable, due to smearing or just not being a word (that happened to me the other day actually, I got one word and one thing that looked like a Farsi character). Thus, if you successfully guess the correct thing for the "known" word, it doesn't really matter what you guess for the "unknown" word as long as it's close or at least something a human might type.
Therefore, making the big assumption that this system correctly guesses both "known" and "unknown" words with equal chance, the algorithm's expected "win" percentage would be about 17%, not 1% as you claim.
Of course, I bet you anything that if reCAPTCHA gets a lot of wrong answers from a given IP address, they'll start sending pairs of known words in order to detect this sort of thing and to prevent pollution of their databases. That would give this algorithm a 1% win chance.
No, it explicitly does not. Freedom is, if anything, the antithesis of civilization.
Who is truly free? The loner who lives out in the wilderness by himself, or the cosmopolitan city dweller?
The loner, of course - he is free to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, restricted only by the requirement that he provide for his own needs. He is unbound by social restrictions, by financial needs, by the necessities of cooperation. Indeed, depending on how he supports himself, he probably even "works" far fewer hours than the city dwellers - I believe nomads need to spend something like three or four hours per day hunting and gathering to provide enough food for themselves, depending on the environment.
The city dweller, on the other hand, is far less free. In order to provide for his own needs, he must spend far more time working; in order to maintain his social status, he must perform social activities. He is restricted in innumerable ways - wearing the wrong clothes might reduce his status, being a jerk will make his job harder and in fact risk losing it, killing and skinning a squirrel in public will almost certainly get him arrested - but as a tradeoff, he can call upon the powers of his civilization.
The loner doesn't have electricity; the city dweller does. The loner doesn't have access to reliable medicine; the city dweller does. The loner doesn't have access to other people, but the city dweller does. The city dweller has men with guns who enforce his property rights; the loner must do that himself. The city dweller has access to goods from all over the world; the loner only has that which he makes himself.
And why does the city dweller gain these extra privileges? Because he sacrifices of himself to further his civilization. Judging from your signature, you're something of a Christian; surely you understand that sort of self-sacrifice for the good of all people, even if it is only on the scale of eight hours per day? After all, the city dweller might work in a shipping concern that brings foreign goods to other people, the city dweller might work at a power plant that provides power to his neighbors; he gives up some of his freedoms and some of his time and ability in order to provide something for other people, and in return they give far more back to him.
When we become civilized, we give up a great many of our freedoms - but in return, we gain the ability to call upon and rely upon the abilities of our civilization. That is why reciprocation is the fundamental unit of civilization; I give part of my time and energy and freedom to my people, and they give back to me; the benefit we get in return is far greater than the initial sacrifice, but we still must give up that initial investment. For some reason, people seem to forget that - they forget that you can't just take back those freedoms you gave up initially, and expect civilization to still work. It's like saying "well the table is in place, so I'm going to take the table legs back and use them for myself".
Keep in mind that I'm not saying we give up all our freedoms, or even that it's necessary to subsume yourself in the civilization like some mindless drone - however, the freedoms we give up (like the freedom to be a douchebag and not cooperate, or the freedom to keep all of everything you make, or the freedom skin squirrels in public) are freedoms we can't just take back and assume civilization will remain standing.
Oh really? Then why did I get a shitload of Flashblock "blocked" icons, of various sizes, everywhere, and zero functionality? Maybe it was early on in the beta and they were using an earlier, Flash-ier version, or maybe it's because Firefox wasn't HTML5-y enough for Wave so they used some sort of Flash fallback plugin.
All I know is that: 1. It was unusable 1a. It was unusable due to Flashblock, which I ascertained due to the ridiculous number of "blocked Flash area" icons on the page 2. I couldn't figure out which domain to whitelist in Flashblock to make it work. 3. It was not worth my time to figure out how to fix Google's broken stuff.
And yet reciprocation forms the basis of all civilization. If we want to form a stable software society, it must be based on reciprocation; otherwise, we will maintain this current state of disjointed, warring software fiefdoms led by dictators indefinitely.
It seemed to interact horrifically with Flashblock - the windows just did nothing, I couldn't view any of the tutorials, IIRC I couldn't even click on half of the links. It basically looked like a bunch of funkily cut up frames.
I whitelisted the Wave website (I assumed it was the root of whatever page I was looking at right then) and it still didn't work. I wasn't about to disable Flashblock for some website that didn't do anything and whose purpose I honestly didn't understand, so I said "screw this" and looked at pictures of cats with bad grammar.
The moral of this story? Cats are funny. Oh and also don't be an idiot and use Flash for every little thing.
Wuthering Heights is basically a trash romance novel, it just happens to be an OLD trash romance novel and one that people latched on to as being "classic" for that reason.
Yeah, that's the problem a lot of classics have - Wuthering Heights was the first trash romance novel, and it defined the genre that we now think of as "trash romance novels".
I'm not saying you should force kids to read things they don't want to - hell, I didn't start reading novels until I found the Belgariad in middle school, and that thing was David Edding's attempt at making an entertaining story that followed every single fantasy trope to the letter - but I'm just pointing out that a lot of the reason why we think some classics are so cliche is because they invented those cliches.
Actually, I just wanted to point out that if you RTFA (instead of just WTFV), you'll see that Lady Ada does in fact acknowledge that the USB spec says some things. Here, I'll quote it for you:
We thought "is there a enumeration chip inside every charger?" but since thats expensive and kind of overkilly we decided instead to read up on the USB protocol (go Jan!) In particular, in her fantastic book there's a part about the low level signaling states. Since you want to get the iPod charging, but NOT make it try to enumerate, we figured that we should see if there was some sort of special state you could put the data lines into that would say "no computer is attached but there is power". Turns out there is! Its called the SEI and occurs when BOTH data lines are at 3V. For mega details, read this chapter
And if you did watch the video, you'll notice that around 1 minute she says "for iPhones and iPods, they actually use these data lines in kinda... non-standard ways", with obvious hesitation before "non-standard".
The USB standard can say one thing, but if actual in practice implementations vary significantly, then something that conforms to the standard in theory can be non-standard in practice.
She's glossing over that distinction and this whole discussion by just saying "non-standard" in the video, since spending five minutes talking about this would not be conducive to the demonstration she was performing.
Slashdot Mirror
That, or easy replicator technology means that people can use PADDs like we would use paper notes - after all, even in the 21st century, humans are still very fond of using physical objects to represent abstract concepts (like writing down the parts of a flow chart on post-it notes and rearranging them manually, instead of using that monstrosity that is Visio), so I don't see why the 24th would be significantly different. After all, it makes perfect sense to humans to say "this PADD contains stuff on subject A, I'll stick it on the corner of my desk for later" or "I need to read through these PADDs in a certain order, so I'll stack them like that" or "instead of screwing around sending you this data wirelessly, I'll just hand you my PADD".
If you could make iPads as easily as you print out a sheet of paper, wouldn't you be able to find uses for a ton of them?
It's a matter of perspective. Let's pretend the board has said that having the CEO is worth twenty million dollars a year. If he misappropriates $20,000 worth of company funds, it's equivalent to a peon with a $30k salary stealing $30 worth of office supplies. I'm sure everyone on Slashdot has hit that limit - those post-its and permanent markers add up, you know.
I'm sure things like this happen all the time, and we just don't hear about them because the companies involved don't make a fuss; as another poster pointed out, this is almost certainly an issue because someone else had an axe to grind with him, and the $20k was just an easy way in.
When they stop caring about money.
Well maybe, but we're talking different orders of magnitude. A smelter, for instance, would dump a shitload more heat than even the largest data center - after all, the data center's goal in life is to perform useful computation, and heat is an unwanted side-effect; a smelter's goal in life is to make things hot, so heat is something they make and eventually have to get rid of. That's why when you hear about thermal pollution it's almost always coming from heavy industry, not things like data centers and apartment complexes.
I wouldn't be surprised if a data center's total heat output falls below regulated levels, which is how they managed to pull in investment.
Hell, even if they're not allowed to dump heat out into the ocean, there'd still be plenty of benefits - ocean temperatures are usually far more moderate than inland temperatures, so you have to spend significantly less money accounting for varying temperatures in your design. They're also apparently mooring in San Fransisco, and, well, I'll just leave you with this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:
70% of surveyed toddlers were against bathing. When confronted with the fact that their European friend Jack does, in fact, take baths, they said "well but Jack's not like me! Bathing wouldn't work, my situation is entirely different!"
You're also completely ignoring the issue with batteries - a hybrid's batteries have to be replaced about every five years, I believe. If you pay for that yourself (IOW it's not covered under warranty or something), it'll be several thousand dollars that a non-hybrid car wouldn't have to pay.
You've got a heatsink the size of the entire ocean sitting under your datacenter. I thought that was the main reason why they wanted to do this - run some radiators along the inside of your hull (or even poke them outside) and you've got all the cold you could ever use. Hell, if your systems are robust enough, you could even use filtered ocean water.
I'm actually quite unclear on what the difference between someone with an H1-B visa and someone who has signed an indentured servitude contract is. Even the terms are similar - indentured servants sign a contract for three to seven years, receive housing, clothing and food in return for their labor, and must remain with the contractor until the end of their terms. H1-B Visas are valid for only three years which can be extended up to six, the workers are generally paid just barely enough to cover food, clothing and housing, and although in theory someone with an H1-B visa can change jobs, in practice it is almost impossible given their fragile status.
I guess indentured servitude was such a good idea, we just couldn't let it go?
Yeah, exactly - that's my favorite comeback when people say that Gates dropped out of college and still did well.
"He dropped out, and all he had to fall back on was a million dollar trust fund his parents set up in his name"
Seriously, Bill Gates wasn't successful just because of his skills; he was successful because his parents gave him a huge leg up. Even if he hadn't been the businessman he is, he still would be at least a multi-millionaire right now. He just happened to have talent and be in the right place at the right time.
Most games are also pirated just fine with DRM. It really doesn't do much either way.
And I buy stuff from Steam because they frequently have the best prices. $7 for Gratuitous Space Battles + all the expansion packs this weekend? I'm sold!
Your analysis is off. For any game (but especially a single-player indie game like this), DRM strong enough to pose a continuing challenge to the pirates is impractical if not impossible (see Ubisoft's massive cock-up, and they have orders of magnitude more resources than Amanita Design). Therefore, the set of people who would have bought the game if there were sufficiently strong DRM does not exist, because it would have been impossible to implement sufficiently strong DRM.
Further, I would wager that you are leaving out a significant group of people: those who pirate it because it's there. I've known several people like this, a sort of digital hoarder whose goal seems to be to mirror the entire Internet. They wouldn't have bought the game at all if it wasn't available for piracy; they might not even realize they have the game, having just played it long enough for the "this game is pirated!" ping to hit Amanita's servers (or, if they're counting torrents, having never played the game at all).
I would not be surprised if those sorts of people make up a significant fraction of those who pirated the game - and Machinarium is awesome enough that this $5 piracy amnesty offer might cause some of them to pay up.
No, the executives are ten times more important, so they'll have to attend a ten-day long ethics training seminar in Hawaii.
Yeah, slide 52 (paraphrased) is as follows:
I assume he means "firewalls" by "FW". Seriously, you can't even bother to spell out "firewall" in a presentation?
That's actually not true, and the E2 analysis is flawed. Just because Pi is irrational and has an infinite decimal expansion does not mean that the distribution of numbers uniform, which is what the E2 analysis assumes.
As an example, let's define some number Pi9 such that its decimal expansion is exactly like Pi's, but all nines are replaced with zero. Clearly, this number is also irrational just like Pi is, but no matter how hard you look you'll never find the number "9" in it.
In a similar fashion, you're not actually guaranteed to find anything in Pi; it may very well work out that no such copyrighted work exists therein.
Is the bit of fulmination we're seeing from outside the government a symptom of some serious pressure being applied within? I mean first it was Marc Thiessen calling for the United States Government to basically declare war against a person, and now this irrational command.
I just can't help but wonder if these things aren't just signs of a lot of behind-the-scenes scurrying.
Exactly!
My wife went to an all-girls private high school, one of the best schools in the area period. Nearly 100% of the girls who went there would go on to college, and a large portion of them went on to really good schools.
Guess how they manage to get near-100% college acceptance rates and excellent educational outcomes? If you were dumb, too slow or just plain lazy, they kicked you out. The worst part is that this didn't start in high school - in order to go to her high school, you almost had to go to one of the associated private K-8 schools in the area. By the time the kids were entering into high school, all of the underachievers had been kicked out already and sent to public schools; any kids who started slacking too much in high school would also be removed. What made it worse for my wife was that they tended to choose whether or not they accepted your siblings based on your achievements, so my wife had to do well in order for them to even consider accepting her sisters. It makes a certain kind of sense, after all - intelligence and capacity for achievement do tend to run in families - but it still sounds inhumane.
Believe me, if we passed legislation that allowed public schools to pick and choose which children they teach like private schools do, educational achievement in public schools would go through the roof. Unfortunately, we just can't do that - in this world of specialization and two working parents, society has to provide a minimum standard of education.
Not necessarily; I'm not sure exactly how reCAPTCHA works, but in theory they don't know one of the words - in fact, that other word may very well be unknowable, due to smearing or just not being a word (that happened to me the other day actually, I got one word and one thing that looked like a Farsi character). Thus, if you successfully guess the correct thing for the "known" word, it doesn't really matter what you guess for the "unknown" word as long as it's close or at least something a human might type.
Therefore, making the big assumption that this system correctly guesses both "known" and "unknown" words with equal chance, the algorithm's expected "win" percentage would be about 17%, not 1% as you claim.
Of course, I bet you anything that if reCAPTCHA gets a lot of wrong answers from a given IP address, they'll start sending pairs of known words in order to detect this sort of thing and to prevent pollution of their databases. That would give this algorithm a 1% win chance.
You could just, you know, stop playing.
(though with Civ, that's definitely easier said than done.)
No, it explicitly does not. Freedom is, if anything, the antithesis of civilization.
Who is truly free? The loner who lives out in the wilderness by himself, or the cosmopolitan city dweller?
The loner, of course - he is free to do whatever he wants, whenever he wants, restricted only by the requirement that he provide for his own needs. He is unbound by social restrictions, by financial needs, by the necessities of cooperation. Indeed, depending on how he supports himself, he probably even "works" far fewer hours than the city dwellers - I believe nomads need to spend something like three or four hours per day hunting and gathering to provide enough food for themselves, depending on the environment.
The city dweller, on the other hand, is far less free. In order to provide for his own needs, he must spend far more time working; in order to maintain his social status, he must perform social activities. He is restricted in innumerable ways - wearing the wrong clothes might reduce his status, being a jerk will make his job harder and in fact risk losing it, killing and skinning a squirrel in public will almost certainly get him arrested - but as a tradeoff, he can call upon the powers of his civilization.
The loner doesn't have electricity; the city dweller does. The loner doesn't have access to reliable medicine; the city dweller does. The loner doesn't have access to other people, but the city dweller does. The city dweller has men with guns who enforce his property rights; the loner must do that himself. The city dweller has access to goods from all over the world; the loner only has that which he makes himself.
And why does the city dweller gain these extra privileges? Because he sacrifices of himself to further his civilization. Judging from your signature, you're something of a Christian; surely you understand that sort of self-sacrifice for the good of all people, even if it is only on the scale of eight hours per day? After all, the city dweller might work in a shipping concern that brings foreign goods to other people, the city dweller might work at a power plant that provides power to his neighbors; he gives up some of his freedoms and some of his time and ability in order to provide something for other people, and in return they give far more back to him.
When we become civilized, we give up a great many of our freedoms - but in return, we gain the ability to call upon and rely upon the abilities of our civilization. That is why reciprocation is the fundamental unit of civilization; I give part of my time and energy and freedom to my people, and they give back to me; the benefit we get in return is far greater than the initial sacrifice, but we still must give up that initial investment. For some reason, people seem to forget that - they forget that you can't just take back those freedoms you gave up initially, and expect civilization to still work. It's like saying "well the table is in place, so I'm going to take the table legs back and use them for myself".
Keep in mind that I'm not saying we give up all our freedoms, or even that it's necessary to subsume yourself in the civilization like some mindless drone - however, the freedoms we give up (like the freedom to be a douchebag and not cooperate, or the freedom to keep all of everything you make, or the freedom skin squirrels in public) are freedoms we can't just take back and assume civilization will remain standing.
Oh really? Then why did I get a shitload of Flashblock "blocked" icons, of various sizes, everywhere, and zero functionality? Maybe it was early on in the beta and they were using an earlier, Flash-ier version, or maybe it's because Firefox wasn't HTML5-y enough for Wave so they used some sort of Flash fallback plugin.
All I know is that:
1. It was unusable
1a. It was unusable due to Flashblock, which I ascertained due to the ridiculous number of "blocked Flash area" icons on the page
2. I couldn't figure out which domain to whitelist in Flashblock to make it work.
3. It was not worth my time to figure out how to fix Google's broken stuff.
And yet reciprocation forms the basis of all civilization. If we want to form a stable software society, it must be based on reciprocation; otherwise, we will maintain this current state of disjointed, warring software fiefdoms led by dictators indefinitely.
I tried it once.
It seemed to interact horrifically with Flashblock - the windows just did nothing, I couldn't view any of the tutorials, IIRC I couldn't even click on half of the links. It basically looked like a bunch of funkily cut up frames.
I whitelisted the Wave website (I assumed it was the root of whatever page I was looking at right then) and it still didn't work. I wasn't about to disable Flashblock for some website that didn't do anything and whose purpose I honestly didn't understand, so I said "screw this" and looked at pictures of cats with bad grammar.
The moral of this story? Cats are funny. Oh and also don't be an idiot and use Flash for every little thing.
Yeah, that's the problem a lot of classics have - Wuthering Heights was the first trash romance novel, and it defined the genre that we now think of as "trash romance novels".
I'm not saying you should force kids to read things they don't want to - hell, I didn't start reading novels until I found the Belgariad in middle school, and that thing was David Edding's attempt at making an entertaining story that followed every single fantasy trope to the letter - but I'm just pointing out that a lot of the reason why we think some classics are so cliche is because they invented those cliches.
Actually, I just wanted to point out that if you RTFA (instead of just WTFV), you'll see that Lady Ada does in fact acknowledge that the USB spec says some things. Here, I'll quote it for you:
And if you did watch the video, you'll notice that around 1 minute she says "for iPhones and iPods, they actually use these data lines in kinda... non-standard ways", with obvious hesitation before "non-standard".
The USB standard can say one thing, but if actual in practice implementations vary significantly, then something that conforms to the standard in theory can be non-standard in practice.
She's glossing over that distinction and this whole discussion by just saying "non-standard" in the video, since spending five minutes talking about this would not be conducive to the demonstration she was performing.