Clear QAM signals over cable would work if Cable TV were a binary thing - you subscribe and you get all the channels, or you don't subscribe and you get nothing.
The cable box (or cable card) functions to limit the channels to the one you subscribe to. Channels in the basic package are usually transmitted unencrypted and can be tuned into without a cable box (I have my parents' TV set up this way). Pay channels and channels in higher tier packages are encrypted, and the cable box (which stores the decryption keys, same as a cable card) is used to decrypt them. As I have no interest in sports, and the most expensive channel in the non-movie channel lineup is ESPN, I rather prefer it this way. I just wish they'd regulate the price cable companies charge for a cable card to about $1-$2/mo. Some cable companies charge as much to rent a cable card as to rent a cable box.
Anyhow, this story isn't really about cable boxes. Those were taken care of with the Federal mandate requiring cable TV networks to provide cable cards. You can buy your own cable box or equivalent (like a HDHomeRun), rent a cable card from your cable company, and it'll work. What this story is really about is breaking the vertical monopoly the cable TV companies hold. They own the pipes going to your home (the physical cabling), and they also control what content flows through those pipes (the programming you subscribe to). Requiring TV channels to sell their content to third parties for viewing over the third party devices, and requiring cable TV companies to honor such agreements by relaying the programs to such devices (at a fixed fee paid for by the device manufacturer) breaks that monopoly.
It's analogous to how we tried to add competition to DSL lines. Your local phone company still owns the physical phone lines leading to your home. But they're required by law to allow other companies to sell DSL service over those lines. The DSL service is actually still provided by your local phone company, but instead of the Internet connection also being provided by them, it's provided by the third party DSL company (like Earthlink) who runs a major Internet connection to the phone company's central office. The third party DSL company pays the local company a fixed, regulated rate for the "last mile" DSL connection from the central office to the home.
The local phone company is in effect forced to lease their DSL lines out to other companies at a flat rate, with those companies providing the actual Internet connection. The same thing is done for gas and electricity in lots of places. One company owns the pipes, another (including usually a subsidiary of the company which owns the pipes) provides the content flowing through the pipes. That's why you can buy electricity from a supplier who uses mostly wind generators if you wish. The electricity you get doesn't actually come mostly from wind. But as long as they put as much electricity into the grid as you're paying for, the numbers all balance out in the accounting books.
The reason it hasn't worked so well for DSL is because of ambiguity when a problem occurs. Your DSL service goes down, you call Earthlink. They blame your Verizon phone line. You call Verizon, they blame Earthlink's Internet service. The customer is stuck with non-functional Internet while the company which owns the pipes (Verizon) and the company which provides the content (Earthlink) point fingers at each other. I had to deal with this a lot a former workplace (with a T1 line, whose market works the same way). The only way I could get anything fixed was to get Speakeasy (our T1 Internet provider) to call up Verizon (our phone line provider), and then in a big conference call force them to figure out exactly who is at fault and who should fix it.
Why can the media endorse a candidate, but not other corporations?
They can endorse a candidate, but they won't try to block ads or positive stories about the candidates they didn't endorse. Organizations like the media and Facebook survive by the appearance of impartiality. If they lose that, readers/users will abandon them. Would you still use Facebook if you thought they could be editing your Wall to remove any content they disagreed with?
MOV is just a container format (as are MP4 and AVI and MKV and a bunch of others) . Containers wrap up separate video, audio, subtitles, chapter lists, etc. files into one package so it's easier to move them around. The actual video file is usually h.264 (almost everything new) or MPEG4, the sound usually AAC or AC3 or MP3, subtitles are.srt or.sub, chapter lists are usually just a text file, etc. There are a bunch of other supported formats as well. Read all about them here.
When your computer "plays" a container file, it first demuxes (de-multiplexes, or separates out) the individual files, then uses the appropriate codec to play each one. That's why sometimes one MOV or AVI file will play fine while another does not - you are probably missing a required codec for the latter file, or your codec is out of date. "Support" for a container format is trivial, as it just amounts to what types of files are supported, what order you're putting the actual files in the container, and what kind of padding and indexing is added. Some containers add more features though, which is where you start getting into trouble with vulnerabilities. If you give your container format the ability to change the kitchen sink, then a browser extension which supports your container will allow a website to change the user's kitchen sink.
A long, long time ago, back in the RealPlayer days, Quicktime was an actual video format. But it's long since been superseded (it was rolled into MPEG4).
I always wondered why bathroom doors open inward. Shouldn't they open outward? You pull open the door with your dirty hands as you enter, do your business and wash up, and as you exit you can push open the door with your foot to avoid touching anything touched by people who didn't wash up.
Naw, based on Eldred v. Ashcroft, Congress can just approve a gag order extension every time the previous gag order is about to expire. And legally, it won't be "indefinite".
If you want to legally prohibit indefinite anything, you have to explicitly state that the copyright or gag order expires in x years with no extension or renewal possible. Otherwise the rules lawyers will walk all over you.
Also, there have been no battery fires, but aluminum feels pretty hot when it gets to 50C and people assumed their phones must be OMG about to CATCH FIRE!!
Not sure what Apple fanblog has been spreading that nonsense. Anyone familiar with Lithium-ion chemistry can tell you unequivocally that charged Li-ion batteries can catch fire when damaged or overcharged. You'd be a fool to dismiss it as anti-Apple rhetoric - click on related links to other brand Li-ion batteries catching fire if you feel this is somehow singling out Apple. They're all dangerous and need to be treated with respect for the potential damage they can do. It's why the FAA has banned them in checked baggage on passenger airliners (not that the passenger cabin is much better, but at least there are people there who will immediately notice the fire and try to put it out).
Third, the phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government, not to the shooter. It was a work phone assigned to the shooter. So the copyright for anything on the phone belongs to the government (or more precisely since the government cannot hold a copyright, there is no copyright). And thus even if your first two points were invalid, there is still no DMCA violation.
This is why I've said all along that this is a bad case for Apple to be pursuing this line of objection. Basically, Apple was refusing to help a phone's owner break into their own phone after they'd lost the password. Apple's reasoning carried out to its logical conclusion (contents of a phone belong to the user, not the entity which paid for the phone) would've jeopardized the entire practice of company-provided phones and parents buying phones for their kids, as well as made you liable for erasing a thief's data if you ever managed to recover your phone from a thief.
The FBI giving this hacker's business card to local law enforcement would constitute helping them, so both 1 and 2 are easily truthful. There is no inconsistency.
A co-worker at my lab was visiting the Pentagon for a meeting with one of his research sponsors. He visited the restroom at the same time as another guy with a stack of papers in his hand. He said hi and went in a stall, the other guy used a urinal. When he got out of the stall, he noticed the stack of papers on the sink. He called security and turned the papers over. They interviewed him briefly to get a description of the guy. As he was walking to his meeting, he passed by security escorting the guy out of the building, presumably to a waiting police car.
That's what happens and how quickly they happen when you mishandle classified materials. If you're not a favored politician.
The thing about arguing it that way is that there are two possible solutions, one of which is a lot easier to implement and enforce.
A) Force multinational corporations to comply with the same tax laws as small businesses.
or
B) Stop taxing corporations.
"But B is outlandish! Blasphemous even!" Let me ask you this: Do you believe in taxation without representation? Do you believe corporations deserve representation in government? For most people the answer is no, no. What's the logical conclusion regarding taxing corporations then?
The usual argument people bring up to counter this is that the people who own and/or work at the corporation already have representation - they're allowed to vote, so it's OK to tax their comopany. That argument doesn't fly because those people are already taxed (as individuals) the same as people who don't own or work for a corporation. What's your justification for taxing them more just because they own or work for a corporation?
"But the government would lose billions in tax revenue!" The economy doesn't work like that. All taxation is is diverting a certain percentage of the country's GDP to the government coffers. For the most part, where that money gets diverted from doesn't really matter.* If you eliminated all income taxes and shifted the entire tax burden to corporate taxes overnight, what would happen? Everyone would suddenly have (say) 25% more money, but would their purchasing power increase by 25%? Nope. Companies would be forced to raise their prices to pay for the new taxes, and the price of goods and services they sell would increase - exactly enough to wipe out the 25% extra money people gained. Per capita purchasing power increases can only originate from increased productivity. Taxation is just moving money from one purse to a different purse - it does not affect productivity
Neither do companies for that matter. Companies are just a shell - it's the people who work for that company who generate its productivity. People are the only source of productivity, so ultimately any tax burden is paid for by people regardless of what type of tax you use to collect it - income taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, import taxes, customs taxes, all of it is ultimately paid for by people. Think of the economy as a giant donut-shaped swimming pool (in reality it's a web but it's conceptually easier this way), and economic activity as the speed at which the water circles around. Individual people move that water around by paddling it (adding productivity to the economy). A company is just a group of people paddling together. Someone who is self-employed is paddling on his own. Taxes are just a diversion in this donut which directs about 35% of the water into government control, for the government to decide where the water should outflow. But it's always people who do the paddling regardless of whether they work as individuals, work for a corporation, or work for the government.
Eliminate corporate taxes and there's no incentive for these companies to shift income out of these countries. The money stays where it's needed,** and if the company is generating a lot of income in that country, it will keep money in that country to finance its operations. That money gets spent in that country, meaning more income and sales for that country to tax. **The exception would be profits distributed to owners/shareholders. But in a simplified tax structure like this, you could simply assess those people income tax based on (corporate dividend from that stock) * (percent of company income generated in country x) * (income tax rate in country x). Heck, you could even argue that a corporate tax is a simpler way to do just that. The drawback is that a multinational corporation exists in multiple countries simultaneously so a corporate tax creates an incentive to shift income out of countries with higher corporate taxes, whereas an individual can only exist in one country at a time. And
It gets worse. For decades, the politically correct social justice people have been telling us that it's discrimination when a person feels uncomfortable and discriminated against. That is, the intent of the party committing the act causing the discomfort is irrelevant, what's important is that someone was offended by their actions. e.g. Black family finds "negro" printed on their black sofa and are offended, never mind that the sofa was made in a Spanish-speaking country and negro is the Spanish word for black. Or sports columnist writes a story about Yao Ming's flagging performance titled "Chink in the armor." He's unaware that "chink" is also a racial slur, but that doesn't matter since the Chinese community is outraged.
Now someone feels uncomfortable that a person of the opposite sex is in their presumed unisex bathroom, but suddenly their feelings don't matter and it's the intent of the other person in the bathroom which is important? A little consistency would be nice.
They should've done the equivalent of 127.0.0.1 and returned the user's own geographic coordinates. That'd make it fun to watch the people who didn't bother learning exactly how the database worked when it couldn't determine the location. "OMG! Someone help me! The spam is coming from inside my house!"
We had these in the 1970s. Haptic feedback was provided by a speaker underneath which clicked every time a key was successfully pressed. They did pretty horribly in the market.
They're still around in a few places where their waterproof nature is useful (e.g. the fill buttons on soda dispensers). But they failed pretty miserably as keyboards because of the lack of tactile feedback - you couldn't tell by feel that your fingers were actually resting on the correct keys. The lack of movement when pressing was also pretty damning.
Not saying this won't succeed. A generation of kids weaned off of touchscreen phone keyboards may be more accepting of these limitations that those of us who grew up with the awesome keyboards on IBM Selectric typewriters. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Its hard to put on the Nobel prize when youre the leader of a nation that runs a secret torture prison. Obama made a concerted effort to close this prison, but largely failed when congress and senate majorities handed him a non-stop shit storm shutting down the government twice and attempting to repeal healthcare reform more than 45 times.
The healthcare reform plan you cite was passed when Obama's party had a majority in the House and Senate for 2 years, and a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate for 6 months. In fact that's precisely why the healthcare reform plan was passed with such alacrity - the Democratic party minimized debate to make sure it was pushed through before they could lose that fillibuster-proof majority.
That Obama didn't take advantage of that same window to close Guantanamo tells you either his "concerted effort" was not as concerted as you believe, or the Democratic party was not as enthusiastic about closing the base as you've led yourself to believe. Guantanamo wasn't an issue which suddenly came to the forefront in recent years. Shutting it down was one of Obama's first campaign pledges. You can't really blame the Republican party for his failure to keep that promise when his party was in control for his first 2 years, with literally no way for the Republicans to stop him for 6 months of those 2 years.
You experience reminds me of the story behind Post-It notes. Contrary to the faithful who believe in Jobs' divine insight into product perfection, a single person very rarely sees or can come up with the best potential use for a new invention. It's only when you distribute it to the masses that people can come up with innovative ways to use it. The inventor of the adhesive used in Post-It notes wasn't able to figure out a good way to use it and the company shelved it. A co-worker who thought of a use for it (sticking bookmarks in his choir book) could only think of that one use. It wasn't until they gave it to a bunch of secretaries to test that the myriad of possible uses for them were discovered.
Smart watches may succeed or fail. The only way we'll find out is for lots of different companies to come up with lots of different variants, which lots of different people buy and use in lots of different ways, with future iterations of that product modified to augment the popular uses that have been found. Innovation does not come from a single company creating a single product with a single vision limited to a single platform.
For those who don't/can't see it, basically these people are saying that because some men are guilty of assaulting women, they will generalize that stereotype to all men and prohibit them entirely. In one fell swoop they've legitimized stereotyping, discrimination based on stereotypes, and gender profiling.
To me, the acid test for any potentially discriminatory practice is simple algebra. Instead of a race or gender or whatever, replace it with a variable. Then apply the same formula to all other situations you can think of. This eliminates any personal biases you may have. "A taxi service for women" becomes "a taxi service for x". Substitute anything else for x. x = men. x = wealthy. x = whites. x = blacks. If any of those seems discriminatory, then the entire concept is likely discriminatory.
That is what you get when you apply the absolute binary standards of discrimination the PC crowd has advocated. If you apply (IMHO more sensible) looser standards which take into account real statistical differences (which may coincide with certain stereotypes), then services like this become allowable. If the rate of male on female assault in taxis greatly exceeds the rate of female on female assault, then there is justification for a service like this. But to get to this point, you first have to admit that men and women are different. Something the PC crowd has assiduously denied thus far. Otherwise you have no basis for generating separate statistics for men vs women in the first place.
"is currently" is the correct phrase. Kepler is in an Earth-trailing orbit with a 371 day period. So it is constantly moving further from the Earth (at least until it reaches opposition, after which it'll start to get closer). The orbit reduces interference from the Earth (RF, thermal, and gravitational) while requiring less energy than reaching the L2, L4, or L5 Lagrange points.
A computer-generated e-book with every possible melody using up to 10 notes of a chromatic scale (12 different frequencies in an octave, as shifting up or down an octave doesn't change the melody musically) would have a little over 10 billion entries. The first note can always be C because transposing a melody to a different key doesn't change the melody (that's the whole point of a chromatic scale). And rests can be covered by a null note (raising the total possible notes to 13). 13^9 = 10.6 billion. You could probably go up to 12 notes and still fit it on a single uncompressed HDD. Publish that online via a searchable website, file the copyright by sending the Library of Congress a hard drive with the complete "work", and start suing the music studios for copyright infringement for every new song they put out.
They have to protect themselves against trademark dilution, or they could lose the trademark. The more amenable solution would've been to give these guys a license to use those trademarks for their event for a paltry sum like $1. But I guess Disney wants all such events to require you pay the $100+ admission to Disneyland / Disneyworld.
And at this point, I don't think the franchise cares about any more advertising, free or not. It's pretty much reached the saturation point in mindshare.
This isn't some new capability, nor is it exclusive to the FBI. Hackers and script kiddies have turned it into an underground industry primarily aimed at spying on young women.
If you don't use your webcam, you'd be stupid not to cover it with tape. Comey isn't doing it because he knows the government can use it to spy on him as TFA and summary implies. He's doing it because he knows the emperor has no clothes and anyone can use it to spy on him.
It's the same problem which plagues nuclear power and many environmental standards. People incorrectly compare to a baseline of zero risk. There is no such thing as zero risk. Everyday objects you encounter give off radiation. Sunlight is hazardous and can cause cancer. But because people default to comparing to a zero baseline, they incorrectly decide that any radiation is bad. Or any raised cancer risk due to exposure to a chemical is unacceptable. Or any felon working as an Uber driver means Uber somehow screwed up.
Same thing with the suicides at Foxconn. Their worker suicide rate was lower than the suicide rate for the U.S. But because people were incorrectly comparing to a zero baseline, the perception was that Foxconn was doing something wrong and it became news. I even remember a hit piece making the rounds in the media years ago decrying the number of women in the military being raped. The Pentagon reviewed the numbers, and determined the frequency of rapes in the military was the same as in the general population. And if you factored in the age distribution of people in the service, the rape incident rate was substantially lower than among people of the same age in the general population. But again, comparing to a zero baseline led to the unrealistic expectation that there should be zero rapes.
"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." - Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Macromedia never asked for Flash to become the de facto web standard for multimedia on web pages. All they wanted to do was make a tool which allowed artists to stream animated video using less bandwidth than real video - very important in the early days of the Internet when people were connecting over dialup on 56 kbps modems. So rather than transmit ever frame, it'll let you transmit the spirtes of the animated characters and a background image, and scroll the background image as the sprites move around. Being an artist's tool, they added lots of features to help with the creation of animation. The features have gotten good enough that Flash is still being used for this purpose by animators making TV shows.
Flash became widely adopted on the web because the W3C dragged their feet for 15 years. Users wanted multimedia in web pages. Web designers wanted multimedia in web pages. A bunch of W3C people with sticks up their asses decided there shouldn't be multimedia in web pages (probably traumatized by the way the blink tag was abused), and refused to update the HTML standard to allow it (until HTML 5 was standardized a couple years ago). So web designers looked around for the next best thing, and hey! There's this thing called Flash. It's originally meant for creating animated videos, but it's flexible enough for us to add scripted multimedia to our web pages. Let's use that instead!
The situation is analogous to users wanting hammers, and stores wanting to sell hammers, but the government refusing to pass safety standards which would allow the sale of hammers. Then people realize they can buy rocks from a decorative landscaping store and use them as hammers. Soon everyone is using rocks as hammers, except that being rocks they frequently break and injure the user. Do you really think the rock-selling company should be liable for damage caused by people using their product in a manner in which it wasn't intended?
If I remember from last time an article about these showed up, they're not planning to power the aircraft with 100% electric. It's a hybrid. During ascent it can run the engines at full fuel burn like is done now. During cruise, instead of throttling back, it continues to run the engines at full burn for a while, partly to move the plane forward, partly to charge the batteries. Then it switches the fuel off and runs the engines off the batteries for a while. When the batteries are depleted, run off fuel at full burn again. Repeat.
Run this way, the engines can be optimized for maximum efficiency at just a single RPM (max thrust), instead of having to be optimized across a wide range of RPM. The fuel you save from the higher efficiency of optimizing for a single RPM can more than makes up for the extra weight of the batteries. The point of this project is to figure out what combination of battery size and RPM optimization profile yields the greatest overall fuel savings.
Any software designer worth his salt creating a firewall will also keep up to date on methods to bypass that firewall. So I'm not at all surprised he had a VPN all set up and handy.
The real point of the firewall is probably like the driving code in the U.S. With regular law, what you do is legal unless explicitly stated to be illegal. But by loading up the books with thousands of little laws that everyone occasionally violates in the course of their everyday lives, you invert that situation. The government can just ignore enforcement of the law for 99.9% of people, but if you raise their ire they can arrest you and cite you for violating all those little laws that everyone else breaks every day. You are guilty as a byproduct of living, the government just picks and chooses which of the guilty need to be punished.
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Clear QAM signals over cable would work if Cable TV were a binary thing - you subscribe and you get all the channels, or you don't subscribe and you get nothing.
The cable box (or cable card) functions to limit the channels to the one you subscribe to. Channels in the basic package are usually transmitted unencrypted and can be tuned into without a cable box (I have my parents' TV set up this way). Pay channels and channels in higher tier packages are encrypted, and the cable box (which stores the decryption keys, same as a cable card) is used to decrypt them. As I have no interest in sports, and the most expensive channel in the non-movie channel lineup is ESPN, I rather prefer it this way. I just wish they'd regulate the price cable companies charge for a cable card to about $1-$2/mo. Some cable companies charge as much to rent a cable card as to rent a cable box.
Anyhow, this story isn't really about cable boxes. Those were taken care of with the Federal mandate requiring cable TV networks to provide cable cards. You can buy your own cable box or equivalent (like a HDHomeRun), rent a cable card from your cable company, and it'll work. What this story is really about is breaking the vertical monopoly the cable TV companies hold. They own the pipes going to your home (the physical cabling), and they also control what content flows through those pipes (the programming you subscribe to). Requiring TV channels to sell their content to third parties for viewing over the third party devices, and requiring cable TV companies to honor such agreements by relaying the programs to such devices (at a fixed fee paid for by the device manufacturer) breaks that monopoly.
It's analogous to how we tried to add competition to DSL lines. Your local phone company still owns the physical phone lines leading to your home. But they're required by law to allow other companies to sell DSL service over those lines. The DSL service is actually still provided by your local phone company, but instead of the Internet connection also being provided by them, it's provided by the third party DSL company (like Earthlink) who runs a major Internet connection to the phone company's central office. The third party DSL company pays the local company a fixed, regulated rate for the "last mile" DSL connection from the central office to the home.
The local phone company is in effect forced to lease their DSL lines out to other companies at a flat rate, with those companies providing the actual Internet connection. The same thing is done for gas and electricity in lots of places. One company owns the pipes, another (including usually a subsidiary of the company which owns the pipes) provides the content flowing through the pipes. That's why you can buy electricity from a supplier who uses mostly wind generators if you wish. The electricity you get doesn't actually come mostly from wind. But as long as they put as much electricity into the grid as you're paying for, the numbers all balance out in the accounting books.
The reason it hasn't worked so well for DSL is because of ambiguity when a problem occurs. Your DSL service goes down, you call Earthlink. They blame your Verizon phone line. You call Verizon, they blame Earthlink's Internet service. The customer is stuck with non-functional Internet while the company which owns the pipes (Verizon) and the company which provides the content (Earthlink) point fingers at each other. I had to deal with this a lot a former workplace (with a T1 line, whose market works the same way). The only way I could get anything fixed was to get Speakeasy (our T1 Internet provider) to call up Verizon (our phone line provider), and then in a big conference call force them to figure out exactly who is at fault and who should fix it.
They can endorse a candidate, but they won't try to block ads or positive stories about the candidates they didn't endorse. Organizations like the media and Facebook survive by the appearance of impartiality. If they lose that, readers/users will abandon them. Would you still use Facebook if you thought they could be editing your Wall to remove any content they disagreed with?
MOV is just a container format (as are MP4 and AVI and MKV and a bunch of others) . Containers wrap up separate video, audio, subtitles, chapter lists, etc. files into one package so it's easier to move them around. The actual video file is usually h.264 (almost everything new) or MPEG4, the sound usually AAC or AC3 or MP3, subtitles are .srt or .sub, chapter lists are usually just a text file, etc. There are a bunch of other supported formats as well. Read all about them here.
When your computer "plays" a container file, it first demuxes (de-multiplexes, or separates out) the individual files, then uses the appropriate codec to play each one. That's why sometimes one MOV or AVI file will play fine while another does not - you are probably missing a required codec for the latter file, or your codec is out of date. "Support" for a container format is trivial, as it just amounts to what types of files are supported, what order you're putting the actual files in the container, and what kind of padding and indexing is added. Some containers add more features though, which is where you start getting into trouble with vulnerabilities. If you give your container format the ability to change the kitchen sink, then a browser extension which supports your container will allow a website to change the user's kitchen sink.
A long, long time ago, back in the RealPlayer days, Quicktime was an actual video format. But it's long since been superseded (it was rolled into MPEG4).
I always wondered why bathroom doors open inward. Shouldn't they open outward? You pull open the door with your dirty hands as you enter, do your business and wash up, and as you exit you can push open the door with your foot to avoid touching anything touched by people who didn't wash up.
The irony being that trees are a renewable resource, while the energy used to power these air dryers is often not.
Naw, based on Eldred v. Ashcroft, Congress can just approve a gag order extension every time the previous gag order is about to expire. And legally, it won't be "indefinite".
If you want to legally prohibit indefinite anything, you have to explicitly state that the copyright or gag order expires in x years with no extension or renewal possible. Otherwise the rules lawyers will walk all over you.
Not sure what Apple fanblog has been spreading that nonsense. Anyone familiar with Lithium-ion chemistry can tell you unequivocally that charged Li-ion batteries can catch fire when damaged or overcharged. You'd be a fool to dismiss it as anti-Apple rhetoric - click on related links to other brand Li-ion batteries catching fire if you feel this is somehow singling out Apple. They're all dangerous and need to be treated with respect for the potential damage they can do. It's why the FAA has banned them in checked baggage on passenger airliners (not that the passenger cabin is much better, but at least there are people there who will immediately notice the fire and try to put it out).
Third, the phone belongs to the San Bernardino County government, not to the shooter. It was a work phone assigned to the shooter. So the copyright for anything on the phone belongs to the government (or more precisely since the government cannot hold a copyright, there is no copyright). And thus even if your first two points were invalid, there is still no DMCA violation.
This is why I've said all along that this is a bad case for Apple to be pursuing this line of objection. Basically, Apple was refusing to help a phone's owner break into their own phone after they'd lost the password. Apple's reasoning carried out to its logical conclusion (contents of a phone belong to the user, not the entity which paid for the phone) would've jeopardized the entire practice of company-provided phones and parents buying phones for their kids, as well as made you liable for erasing a thief's data if you ever managed to recover your phone from a thief.
The FBI giving this hacker's business card to local law enforcement would constitute helping them, so both 1 and 2 are easily truthful. There is no inconsistency.
A co-worker at my lab was visiting the Pentagon for a meeting with one of his research sponsors. He visited the restroom at the same time as another guy with a stack of papers in his hand. He said hi and went in a stall, the other guy used a urinal. When he got out of the stall, he noticed the stack of papers on the sink. He called security and turned the papers over. They interviewed him briefly to get a description of the guy. As he was walking to his meeting, he passed by security escorting the guy out of the building, presumably to a waiting police car.
That's what happens and how quickly they happen when you mishandle classified materials. If you're not a favored politician.
The thing about arguing it that way is that there are two possible solutions, one of which is a lot easier to implement and enforce.
A) Force multinational corporations to comply with the same tax laws as small businesses.
or
B) Stop taxing corporations.
"But B is outlandish! Blasphemous even!" Let me ask you this: Do you believe in taxation without representation? Do you believe corporations deserve representation in government? For most people the answer is no, no. What's the logical conclusion regarding taxing corporations then?
The usual argument people bring up to counter this is that the people who own and/or work at the corporation already have representation - they're allowed to vote, so it's OK to tax their comopany. That argument doesn't fly because those people are already taxed (as individuals) the same as people who don't own or work for a corporation. What's your justification for taxing them more just because they own or work for a corporation?
"But the government would lose billions in tax revenue!" The economy doesn't work like that. All taxation is is diverting a certain percentage of the country's GDP to the government coffers. For the most part, where that money gets diverted from doesn't really matter.* If you eliminated all income taxes and shifted the entire tax burden to corporate taxes overnight, what would happen? Everyone would suddenly have (say) 25% more money, but would their purchasing power increase by 25%? Nope. Companies would be forced to raise their prices to pay for the new taxes, and the price of goods and services they sell would increase - exactly enough to wipe out the 25% extra money people gained. Per capita purchasing power increases can only originate from increased productivity. Taxation is just moving money from one purse to a different purse - it does not affect productivity
Neither do companies for that matter. Companies are just a shell - it's the people who work for that company who generate its productivity. People are the only source of productivity, so ultimately any tax burden is paid for by people regardless of what type of tax you use to collect it - income taxes, sales taxes, corporate taxes, import taxes, customs taxes, all of it is ultimately paid for by people. Think of the economy as a giant donut-shaped swimming pool (in reality it's a web but it's conceptually easier this way), and economic activity as the speed at which the water circles around. Individual people move that water around by paddling it (adding productivity to the economy). A company is just a group of people paddling together. Someone who is self-employed is paddling on his own. Taxes are just a diversion in this donut which directs about 35% of the water into government control, for the government to decide where the water should outflow. But it's always people who do the paddling regardless of whether they work as individuals, work for a corporation, or work for the government.
Eliminate corporate taxes and there's no incentive for these companies to shift income out of these countries. The money stays where it's needed,** and if the company is generating a lot of income in that country, it will keep money in that country to finance its operations. That money gets spent in that country, meaning more income and sales for that country to tax. **The exception would be profits distributed to owners/shareholders. But in a simplified tax structure like this, you could simply assess those people income tax based on (corporate dividend from that stock) * (percent of company income generated in country x) * (income tax rate in country x). Heck, you could even argue that a corporate tax is a simpler way to do just that. The drawback is that a multinational corporation exists in multiple countries simultaneously so a corporate tax creates an incentive to shift income out of countries with higher corporate taxes, whereas an individual can only exist in one country at a time. And
It gets worse. For decades, the politically correct social justice people have been telling us that it's discrimination when a person feels uncomfortable and discriminated against. That is, the intent of the party committing the act causing the discomfort is irrelevant, what's important is that someone was offended by their actions. e.g. Black family finds "negro" printed on their black sofa and are offended, never mind that the sofa was made in a Spanish-speaking country and negro is the Spanish word for black. Or sports columnist writes a story about Yao Ming's flagging performance titled "Chink in the armor." He's unaware that "chink" is also a racial slur, but that doesn't matter since the Chinese community is outraged.
Now someone feels uncomfortable that a person of the opposite sex is in their presumed unisex bathroom, but suddenly their feelings don't matter and it's the intent of the other person in the bathroom which is important? A little consistency would be nice.
They should've done the equivalent of 127.0.0.1 and returned the user's own geographic coordinates. That'd make it fun to watch the people who didn't bother learning exactly how the database worked when it couldn't determine the location. "OMG! Someone help me! The spam is coming from inside my house!"
We had these in the 1970s. Haptic feedback was provided by a speaker underneath which clicked every time a key was successfully pressed. They did pretty horribly in the market.
They're still around in a few places where their waterproof nature is useful (e.g. the fill buttons on soda dispensers). But they failed pretty miserably as keyboards because of the lack of tactile feedback - you couldn't tell by feel that your fingers were actually resting on the correct keys. The lack of movement when pressing was also pretty damning.
Not saying this won't succeed. A generation of kids weaned off of touchscreen phone keyboards may be more accepting of these limitations that those of us who grew up with the awesome keyboards on IBM Selectric typewriters. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
The healthcare reform plan you cite was passed when Obama's party had a majority in the House and Senate for 2 years, and a fillibuster-proof majority in the Senate for 6 months. In fact that's precisely why the healthcare reform plan was passed with such alacrity - the Democratic party minimized debate to make sure it was pushed through before they could lose that fillibuster-proof majority.
That Obama didn't take advantage of that same window to close Guantanamo tells you either his "concerted effort" was not as concerted as you believe, or the Democratic party was not as enthusiastic about closing the base as you've led yourself to believe. Guantanamo wasn't an issue which suddenly came to the forefront in recent years. Shutting it down was one of Obama's first campaign pledges. You can't really blame the Republican party for his failure to keep that promise when his party was in control for his first 2 years, with literally no way for the Republicans to stop him for 6 months of those 2 years.
You experience reminds me of the story behind Post-It notes. Contrary to the faithful who believe in Jobs' divine insight into product perfection, a single person very rarely sees or can come up with the best potential use for a new invention. It's only when you distribute it to the masses that people can come up with innovative ways to use it. The inventor of the adhesive used in Post-It notes wasn't able to figure out a good way to use it and the company shelved it. A co-worker who thought of a use for it (sticking bookmarks in his choir book) could only think of that one use. It wasn't until they gave it to a bunch of secretaries to test that the myriad of possible uses for them were discovered.
Smart watches may succeed or fail. The only way we'll find out is for lots of different companies to come up with lots of different variants, which lots of different people buy and use in lots of different ways, with future iterations of that product modified to augment the popular uses that have been found. Innovation does not come from a single company creating a single product with a single vision limited to a single platform.
For those who don't/can't see it, basically these people are saying that because some men are guilty of assaulting women, they will generalize that stereotype to all men and prohibit them entirely. In one fell swoop they've legitimized stereotyping, discrimination based on stereotypes, and gender profiling.
To me, the acid test for any potentially discriminatory practice is simple algebra. Instead of a race or gender or whatever, replace it with a variable. Then apply the same formula to all other situations you can think of. This eliminates any personal biases you may have. "A taxi service for women" becomes "a taxi service for x". Substitute anything else for x. x = men. x = wealthy. x = whites. x = blacks. If any of those seems discriminatory, then the entire concept is likely discriminatory.
That is what you get when you apply the absolute binary standards of discrimination the PC crowd has advocated. If you apply (IMHO more sensible) looser standards which take into account real statistical differences (which may coincide with certain stereotypes), then services like this become allowable. If the rate of male on female assault in taxis greatly exceeds the rate of female on female assault, then there is justification for a service like this. But to get to this point, you first have to admit that men and women are different. Something the PC crowd has assiduously denied thus far. Otherwise you have no basis for generating separate statistics for men vs women in the first place.
"is currently" is the correct phrase. Kepler is in an Earth-trailing orbit with a 371 day period. So it is constantly moving further from the Earth (at least until it reaches opposition, after which it'll start to get closer). The orbit reduces interference from the Earth (RF, thermal, and gravitational) while requiring less energy than reaching the L2, L4, or L5 Lagrange points.
A computer-generated e-book with every possible melody using up to 10 notes of a chromatic scale (12 different frequencies in an octave, as shifting up or down an octave doesn't change the melody musically) would have a little over 10 billion entries. The first note can always be C because transposing a melody to a different key doesn't change the melody (that's the whole point of a chromatic scale). And rests can be covered by a null note (raising the total possible notes to 13). 13^9 = 10.6 billion. You could probably go up to 12 notes and still fit it on a single uncompressed HDD. Publish that online via a searchable website, file the copyright by sending the Library of Congress a hard drive with the complete "work", and start suing the music studios for copyright infringement for every new song they put out.
They have to protect themselves against trademark dilution, or they could lose the trademark. The more amenable solution would've been to give these guys a license to use those trademarks for their event for a paltry sum like $1. But I guess Disney wants all such events to require you pay the $100+ admission to Disneyland / Disneyworld.
And at this point, I don't think the franchise cares about any more advertising, free or not. It's pretty much reached the saturation point in mindshare.
This isn't some new capability, nor is it exclusive to the FBI. Hackers and script kiddies have turned it into an underground industry primarily aimed at spying on young women.
If you don't use your webcam, you'd be stupid not to cover it with tape. Comey isn't doing it because he knows the government can use it to spy on him as TFA and summary implies. He's doing it because he knows the emperor has no clothes and anyone can use it to spy on him.
It's the same problem which plagues nuclear power and many environmental standards. People incorrectly compare to a baseline of zero risk. There is no such thing as zero risk. Everyday objects you encounter give off radiation. Sunlight is hazardous and can cause cancer. But because people default to comparing to a zero baseline, they incorrectly decide that any radiation is bad. Or any raised cancer risk due to exposure to a chemical is unacceptable. Or any felon working as an Uber driver means Uber somehow screwed up.
Same thing with the suicides at Foxconn. Their worker suicide rate was lower than the suicide rate for the U.S. But because people were incorrectly comparing to a zero baseline, the perception was that Foxconn was doing something wrong and it became news. I even remember a hit piece making the rounds in the media years ago decrying the number of women in the military being raped. The Pentagon reviewed the numbers, and determined the frequency of rapes in the military was the same as in the general population. And if you factored in the age distribution of people in the service, the rape incident rate was substantially lower than among people of the same age in the general population. But again, comparing to a zero baseline led to the unrealistic expectation that there should be zero rapes.
"Insisting on absolute safety is for people who don't have the balls to live in the real world." - Mary Shafer, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center
Macromedia never asked for Flash to become the de facto web standard for multimedia on web pages. All they wanted to do was make a tool which allowed artists to stream animated video using less bandwidth than real video - very important in the early days of the Internet when people were connecting over dialup on 56 kbps modems. So rather than transmit ever frame, it'll let you transmit the spirtes of the animated characters and a background image, and scroll the background image as the sprites move around. Being an artist's tool, they added lots of features to help with the creation of animation. The features have gotten good enough that Flash is still being used for this purpose by animators making TV shows.
Flash became widely adopted on the web because the W3C dragged their feet for 15 years. Users wanted multimedia in web pages. Web designers wanted multimedia in web pages. A bunch of W3C people with sticks up their asses decided there shouldn't be multimedia in web pages (probably traumatized by the way the blink tag was abused), and refused to update the HTML standard to allow it (until HTML 5 was standardized a couple years ago). So web designers looked around for the next best thing, and hey! There's this thing called Flash. It's originally meant for creating animated videos, but it's flexible enough for us to add scripted multimedia to our web pages. Let's use that instead!
The situation is analogous to users wanting hammers, and stores wanting to sell hammers, but the government refusing to pass safety standards which would allow the sale of hammers. Then people realize they can buy rocks from a decorative landscaping store and use them as hammers. Soon everyone is using rocks as hammers, except that being rocks they frequently break and injure the user. Do you really think the rock-selling company should be liable for damage caused by people using their product in a manner in which it wasn't intended?
If I remember from last time an article about these showed up, they're not planning to power the aircraft with 100% electric. It's a hybrid. During ascent it can run the engines at full fuel burn like is done now. During cruise, instead of throttling back, it continues to run the engines at full burn for a while, partly to move the plane forward, partly to charge the batteries. Then it switches the fuel off and runs the engines off the batteries for a while. When the batteries are depleted, run off fuel at full burn again. Repeat.
Run this way, the engines can be optimized for maximum efficiency at just a single RPM (max thrust), instead of having to be optimized across a wide range of RPM. The fuel you save from the higher efficiency of optimizing for a single RPM can more than makes up for the extra weight of the batteries. The point of this project is to figure out what combination of battery size and RPM optimization profile yields the greatest overall fuel savings.
Any software designer worth his salt creating a firewall will also keep up to date on methods to bypass that firewall. So I'm not at all surprised he had a VPN all set up and handy.
The real point of the firewall is probably like the driving code in the U.S. With regular law, what you do is legal unless explicitly stated to be illegal. But by loading up the books with thousands of little laws that everyone occasionally violates in the course of their everyday lives, you invert that situation. The government can just ignore enforcement of the law for 99.9% of people, but if you raise their ire they can arrest you and cite you for violating all those little laws that everyone else breaks every day. You are guilty as a byproduct of living, the government just picks and chooses which of the guilty need to be punished.