This case is a perfect example of why this sort of data should be encrypted on the device and in no way accessible to anyone except the owner.
That ship has sailed. Like email, SMS texts are sent unencrypted. And it's going to take a herculean effort coordinating thousands of companies servicing billions of people to change it to something more secure. We've been trying to do just that with email for 20+ years and it's gone nowhere.
I'm not sure what the solution is. This sort of stuff seems to happen all the time - PHP being the most egregious example I can think of (even its authors admit it's just a bunch of hacks tacked on every time someone needed new functionality). Maybe people need to stop coming up with half-assed implementations "just to get it working" thinking they can "fix it up later"?
The battery on my Nexus 5 began malfunctioning just shy of a year old. When new it would last me the entire workday with about 20% remaining by 10pm. But now it would drain normally to about 40% (about 2-3 pm in my workday), then drop to 0% in the next 45 minutes. I tried all sorts of battery reset and calibration apps, and various discharge/charge to full tricks to try to fix it. Finally I called Google. To make sure the problem wasn't being caused by an app, they asked me to boot the phone into safe mode and do another battery rundown test. In safe mode, only the apps which were originally installed on the phone are allowed to run.
Holy crap! Even with the bad battery it lasted 2 days 20 hours before dying.
The ink-jet cartridges measure their print out volume based on the number of droplets deposited. A +/- 5% change in ink droplet diameter represents a +/- 15% change in volume. When dealing with really small feature sizes, variable temperatures, and variable viscosities, it is really tough to control droplet diameter exactly. The result is that the ink-cartridge manufacturers need to overfill their cartridges to guarantee that some customer in some corner case doesn't experience a rash of cartridges that run out early.
IMHO that's a pathetic argument. Why the hell are you estimating ink usage when it's possible to directly measure remaining ink? The old Canon printers used transparent ink cartridges. A sensor shone a light through the ink reservoir (right side in the pic), and when the light was unimpeded, it knew the cartridge was empty. Every Canon cartridge I replaced was in fact completely empty (except for a little ink in the sponge material directly above the outlet.
This is a simple problem, made unnecessarily complex solely as a means to make customers buy more ink.
Even if you're not worried about wireless reliability, security, and interference issues (and you should be!), it will still never process credit card transactions as fast as a Gigabit wired connection.
As I said last time this came up, current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel. That is, if you transmit your signal at -45 dB, then everyone else using that same channel sees -45 dB of noise. Your signal is noise to them, and interferes with their signal.
Beam-forming and MIMO (multipath) techniques being used in 802.11ac subvert this assumption. For a visual analogy, it's why you can see your smartphone display in the sunlight, even though the sun is much, much brighter (its signal strength at optical wavelengths far exceeds your phone display's signal strength). Although the sun is very bright, the light it gives off is highly directional. By using sensors (the lens structure of your eyes) which can "tune in" to light coming from a narrow angle, you can basically filter out all that sunlight noise and pull out a clear signal from the smartphone display.
So the way wifi is progressing, you're going to be able to transmit almost as if you were the only person transmitting on those wavelengths. The only time you'll get interference from other wifi transmissions is if a radio source is directly in line with your source. And even that can be overcome with multipath techniques (similar to how a wide-aperture camera lens can selectively blur the background while keeping the subject in sharp focus).
Speed, bandwidth, interference, and reliability won't be the issue. Security will be.
Assuming the courts haven't seen any reason to seize the money, MasterCard shouldn't be able to decide who you're permitted to give money to or not. I should not have to justify my spending habits to the bank any more than I need to justify my food habits at the grocery store.
You're assuming a credit card transaction is between you and the merchant. It's not. It's actually two separate transactions - the first is between the credit card company and the merchant, the second between you and the credit card company. Just as you have the right to decide which credit card companies you wish to do business with, the credit card company has the right to decide which merchants it wishes to do business with.
The proper grocery store analogy would be Bob runs a grocery delivery service. You tell Bob you'd like some chips and beer from the ABC grocery store. Bob tells you he doesn't buy from the ABC grocery store, and declines to make that purchase for you.
The problem isn't that MasterCard is deciding not to service these (alleged) pirate merchants. The problem is there is so little competition in the credit card industry that a single actor making a decision like this is a huge deal. To the market, a boycott is simply an opportunity for someone else to make money. If Visa, MasterCard, and Amex didn't have a stranglehold on the credit card transaction industry, some other credit card company would simply swoop in and eagerly gobble up the business of servicing the blacklisted merchants. The copyright industry cannot enforce an industry-wide ban against certain merchants unless the government decides to do so, or they get all credit card processors to go along with it willingly. The latter is a lot easier with only 3 companies controlling most of the business.
For instance if you can visualize a blood knot or a spider hitch or bimini twist in your mind then you can see the points at which the friction occurs and how the knot is lock stopped and how it works. For an experience fisherman this can become fairly easy but only with practice, for someone who never ties complex knots or conceives of how they might fail this is a very difficult task.
Another fisherman put it best. There are basically two types of knots. Stop knots, where loops press up against each other to prevent slippage. These always break at less than the line's breaking strength due to the stresses at the sharp angles in and around the loops. The blood knot is a stop knot.
And friction knots - like a Chinese finger trap where increased friction from tension in the line keeps the knot from slipping. These usually have higher breaking strength than the line. The Bimini twist is a friction knot. Probably the best example of a pure friction "knot" is when you splice hollow braid. There is no knot per se. The friction of the weave in the hollow braid against the line inside it holds everything in place - exactly like a Chinese finger trap.
I think mathematicians and topologists are only interested in the first kind of knot, whereas the second kind is actually functionally superior especially when connecting lines of different diameter. All the best braid to mono knots are friction knots using multiple wraps to create the friction.
It's all about balance. If you've got socially well-adjusted programmers who are getting their sex/female contact fix outside of work, then your method works great.
But it seems these companies have figured out a way to tap into the (huge) supply of socially mal-adjusted male programmers who aren't getting that sex fix outside of work. These guys usually already spend their free time doing interesting work, so giving them more of it at their job doesn't really help. But they're getting little to no dating or sex. With a little "creative" motivation which balances out that imbalance in their lives, they make them as productive as socially well-adjusted programmers. Even if that balance is an illusion (although who knows, maybe the confidence they gain dealing with pretty girls at the workplace may help them land a real date).
I lived a while in Japan so I get it It's not easy to explain. Japanese, Indonesian, and Philippine culture (I'm sure there are others but I only know this about those three) emphasize... group orientation I guess? The group is more important than its members. To sacrifice for the group is good. Therefore one must be encouraging to others, even at the cost of self-expression. Therefore, in turn, keeping up apparent enthusiasm is vital.
That's Confucianism in a nutshell. The welfare of your group (be it family, clique, gang, school, company, city, province, or country) is more important than any individual's welfare. Once you grok that, a lot of Asian culture starts to make sense.
The concept is not alien to the West: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
So... I'm at another university and have another take on this, which is that freedom and security are often inversely related.
My university is pretty locked down when it comes to security, and it's also annoying as @#(! if you need to do anything creative or nonstandard research-wise.
That's how I remember it. When I was at MIT, there wasn't really a centralized IT administration per se. I mean sure there was for the general campus-wide network and the public computer labs. But if your research lab wanted a block of IP addresses, it got it and was free to administer it any way it wanted. IT delivered the network access you requested, then got out of the way so you could do whatever it is you thought you needed to do with it. Once you got the IP block (or even a single IP address), it was your network, not IT's.
- Uber sets the price - Uber prohibits drivers from offering services outside of the Uber App
- Uber drivers are an integral part of Uber's business - Uber drivers cannot subcontract - Uber drivers are trained by Uber [I assume you mean "must be trained by Uber"] - Uber drivers must follow specific procedures
- Uber drivers can quit or be fired at any time
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to business. But if the points I've highlighted are true, then I completely agree with this ruling. I thought Uber was just running the equivalent of a dating service - hooking up drivers with passengers. But the more I read, the more it sounds like they're running a taxi company.
Imagine if you owned a business and wanted to sell to the highest bidder, but the government steps in and says sorry, you have to sell to the lowest bidder because "we" think it is better. Do you really want that?
Imagine if your neighbour opens a toxic dump on his yard, but the government steps in and says sorry, you have to follow zoning laws because "we" think it is better. Do you really want that?
I don't disagree with the toxic dump example. But how exactly is a media publication which makes virtual goods in any way analogous to a physical dump whose detrimental physical effects can extend beyond the borders of your neighbor's yard? Or are there roving bands of geeky thugs I don't know about who kidnap you and force you to watch the Nat Geo channel, thus allowing its content to "spill over" onto unwilling people?
I gave up trying to comply with their requirements.
1) Checked baggage is for things like clothes, toothpaste, etc. Stuff that's easy to replace if it's stolen. The airline has been known to lose checked bags you know, even if TSA does their job perfectly.
2) Valuables go in my carry-on luggage. For me that's my laptop and all my camera gear. To save space, some of the cheaper accessories may go in my checked in bag (I put my laptop's mouse in my checked bag once because it was either that or a $700 lens - I can live with a trackpad for 8 hours).
3) Anything that's valuable and won't fit in my carry-on luggage gets shipped via a courier like FedEx who flies their own planes and doesn't have to deal with TSA. Insured. (This is not a 100% guarantee - FedEx, UPS, etc. sometimes put cargo on passenger airliners, where it's subject to TSA inspection. But hopefully the insurance will still cover any damage/theft.) This also saves you a ton of hassle getting into and out of the airport - normally I just have one carry-on bag and one carry-on sized suitcase that's checked. Sometimes shipping stuff like this is actually cheaper than the checked bag fee most airlines now charge.
I want to murder someone.
It's illegal the murder someone with poison.
It's illegal to murder someone with a knife.
It's illegal to murder someone with an ax....
Oh poor me, they've made it so there is no legal way to do what I want to do!
The obvious answer is of course "don't murder at all".
That's the same kind of thinking that gives us a police state - assume everyone is guilty and act accordingly.
The "obvious" answer is one that allows ownership of poisons, knives, and axes, without having the state assume you're a murderer if you possess such items, and so they have the right to demand on a whim that you turn over all such items and records pertaining to said items. Yet still allow the state to have access to such records if they have reasonable evidence that a murder was committed with them.
Personally, I don't think the U.S. has any right to Microsoft's records stored overseas. If they have reason to believe Microsoft did something illegal and want access to data Microsoft is storing in Ireland, then they should present their evidence to Ireland, and Ireland can file the legal paperwork requiring Microsoft turn such records over to the U.S. The issue here is analogous to extradition - a crime (and evidence of it) was committed in one country, but the perpetrator is residing in another country. We already have extradition treaties to deal with such circumstances. We just need to update them to also cover digital records (evidence). The approach the U.S. is taking violates centuries of accepted legal precedent - a country cannot apply its laws outside its borders.
Yes this opens the possibility of some country like the Bahamas declaring they'll never "extradite" digital records to another country, and companies flocking to store their data their to hide it from government warrants. The proper response then would be for a country to ban companies storing data in the Bahamas from doing business in their country. The bigger headache is actually the criss-cross. Microsoft stores EU records in the U.S., and stores U.S. records in the EU, just to make it more difficult for both governments even if proper extradition treaties exist.
Similarly, if there is no legal way to do cloud storage of financial records in both the US and Germany at the same time, then legally you can't provide such a service. It's not an impossible position, it simply means that can't conveniently do exactly what they want to do.
You're seriously misunderstanding the issue if you think this is about cloud storage. The data has to be stored somewhere, even if it's not accessible remotely. Even if Microsoft were only storing data pertaining to EU sales in the EU, the U.S. government's stance is that since Microsoft is a U.S. company, they can get access to that data. Even if giving the U.S. govt that data without an EU warrant violates EU privacy laws. Microsoft is put into a catch-22, where they must either violate U.S. law or violate EU law, and the only way to avoid the catch-22 is to do business in the U.S. or the EU, but not both. That's why the U.S. government's position on this is stupid. It's not a mere "inconvenience" as you seem to think it is.
Whether you believe in 4k or not, it's coming. It so happens that making a 4k TV is a lot more expensive than making a 4k camera sensor, so we're getting the cameras first. All that means is that the video you shot of your kid's first steps will be viewable in 1080p today, but will be viewable in 4k in the future when the 4k TVs come down enough in price that they become standard.
I seriously doubt the actual intent here is to help track down stolen electronics. When is the last time the police ever helped anyone recover their stolen electronics?
The real intent is probably to build up a database of MAC addresses and their locations at any given time. So later when they're investigating a homicide, they can cross-reference the database, and say "Ah hah, John Doe's phone was at the scene of the crime at the time the blurry surveillance camera video shows someone killing the clerk at the Kwik-E-Mart." Same thing they try to do with license plate scanners. If all they're looking for is stolen cars, then it just needs to scan and beep when a license plate matches a stolen car. But no, they store the location of every car scanned for months or years so they can retroactively track your movements.
The key is to strike some sort of balance. If the FBI has a court-issued warrant saying they can eavesdrop in real-time on a text conversation between two people's phones, then there's really not much room for one to argue that their privacy rights should override the warrant. Being able to eavesdrop in on conversations over a communications network after a warrant has been granted has been a well-established legal process for close to a century.
What you don't want is the FBI slurping up everything they can get their hands on, no warrant, just because it's unencrypted or they have the keys to the server room at Apple (or Verizon or AT&T). Which apparently is what the NSA did.
Android uses regular SMS for texts, which was never encrypted on any OS. The FBI would be asking the carriers for copies of those, unless it's over the Google Hangouts app using a Google Voice number, in which case they'd have to ask Google.
Apple runs the iPhone texts over their own iMessage service, which has a gateway to SMS for messages sent to non-iPhone users. (Which is also a problem since if you used to have an iPhone but switched to any other phone, Apple keeps iMessage texts sent to you within iMessage and blackholes them to a non-existant iPhone, instead of forwarding them over the SMS gateway to your new phone. Part of their user lock-in strategy. They're actually fighting in court for the right to keep doing this, instead of not being dicks and fixing it.)
How was the Apple II better or superior to the Commodore, TRS 80, Sinclaire Pet, or whatever the hell was out during the 1980's? Jobs provided much success so people could use the Apple II and bring in the revenue.
The Apple II was expandable by adding in cards in the expansion slots. A formula which the IBM PC later copied to huge success. The Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 400/800, etc. were kinda like today's consoles - one size fits all. If you wanted a computer which could be specialized for what you were going to do, the Apple II was pretty much the only game in town.
I am a fan of Steve Jobs for marketing and his CEO abilities. If it were not for Steve Jobs the Mac would not still be here. Actually Apple finally killed the floppy drive and gave us USB. The original iMacs were so popular it finally got the peripheral makers on board which benefited the PC.
Ironically, you show one of the other things Jobs was great at - causing people to give Apple credit for stuff they never did nor invented. Apple didn't give us USB. They gave us IEEE 1394. Also known as Firewire, which is probably familiar only to Mac users since its market was almost entirely limited to Macs. USB was a PC thing. I could dig up volumes of quotes from Mac fans explaining why USB sucked and Firewire was superior. (I use and fix both PCs and Macs, so always kept up to date on both platforms.)
Apple killed off the 3.5" floppy prematurely IMHO. The PC platform held onto it until CD-Rs became common. The Macs had a time gap where the need for external storage ended up being satisfied by Iomega Zip disks. The original version of my graduate thesis is on a Zip disk somewhere in storage. I'll probably never be able to read it again, while I can still read 3.5" floppies and CD-Rs. Though to be fair, there was a large time and space gap from 1.44 MB floppies to 682 MB CDs.
Apple tries to predict industry moves and shift their platform in that direction a year or two ahead of time. They've missed more than they've gotten it right. They got the 3.5" floppy right (replaced 5.25" and 8" floppies). I give them credit for Postscript even though it never caught on widely - because it could do a whole lot more than regular printer interfaces. They missed with Appletalk (Novell Netware and later Ethernet became the standard, which Apple later added). They missed with SCSI (PATA, aka IDE became the standard). They missed with Firewire (USB 1/2 became the standard, which Apple later added). They killed off the optical drive at about the right time. They got Displayport right, though it took nearly a decade for monitor resolutions to run up against the limits of DVI and HDMI. They missed with Thunderbolt (Lightning) as USB 3.0 became the standard, which Apple later added. USB-C seems like it'll be adopted by both Apple and the PC simultaneously, so I can't really give them credit for that one.
Unfortunately most Apple fans remember only the things they got right, and conveniently forget the things they got wrong.
Steve also saved us somewhat from a more evil MS. When the iPhone came out WindowsCE finally died! Remember you could only buy something from the carrier store like $4 for a crappy.mid syntthasized ringtone etc?
Windows CE and phones were mostly orthogonal. An oversight by Microsoft which Palm and later Blackberry exploited to great success. WinCE (which later became Windows Mobile) was mostly a PDA platform. At the time (1990s) everyone know PDAs and smartphones were going to converge. They just didn't know if the PDAs would pick up phone capabilities, or if smartphones were going to become general enough computers to act as a PDA. Well, everyone except apparently Microsoft. They put little to no effort into adding phone capabilities to WinCE. HP tried, but it was a kludgy mess that never went anywhere because Microsoft refused to modify the
What really pissed me off about the data harvesting that Microsoft is doing with these updates is how Microsoft callously has ignored any wishes I had previously stated regarding my preferences for not harvesting data from my computers.
What else is new? Every couple months I have to deal with forms from my banks and credit cards asking if they can share my person info for marketing purposes. Never mind that I've told them no every single time. Every year they ask again, and require me to re-state "no", sign it, and stuff their irregularly-sized response sheet in one of my envelopes (no pre-addressed envelope provided), pay for postage, and take the time to drop it in a mailbox. And if I forget to do it, that is assumed to be equivalent to me giving them permission to sell my info to advertisers. Because the law says they're supposed to assume I want my private info to become public unless I explicitly tell them no every year.
It's not about how much you make (revenue) , it's about how much you keep (profit).
Which flies straight in the face of the common (mis)belief that Apple hardware is better because it's more expensive.
Remember the quarterly smartphone sales numbers earlier this year which showed Apple making something like 90% of the profit in the industry? Most of the press spun it as Android phones having a profitability problem (they don't - their profit margin is exactly the same as the rest of the computer industry). Nobody bothered to crunch the numbers. If you do (profit / units sold), you'll find the "Apple tax" for buying an iPhone is $18.8 billion / 74.5 million = $252 per phone. That is, $252 of your purchase price doesn't pay for any better hardware or software or industrial designers or artists or even the guy in the mail room. It goes straight into the bank accounts of Apple and its stockholders as profit.
The real thieves are whomever specified and ordered all those Macbooks for school kids. Overpriced status hardware that will mean nothing to rooms full of impatient adolescents.
Let me preface this by stating that I think most programs to use computers in school are trash, and less effective than traditional teaching methods. Of course they make sense in specialized courses like intro to CS, but not for teaching regular courses.
That said, if you start with the assumption that having the kids use a computer is helpful, then "status" hardware will in fact mean a lot to the kids. Back in the 1990s I set up my aunt's household with a dialup Internet account. I picked AT&T as their ISP because at the time they had the most dialup nodes, best reliability, and lowest wait time for a free modem, all at a reasonable cost. When I visited the following week, I learned that the jr. high daughter had canceled the AT&T account and switched them to AOL (which was substantially worse). Because among her peer group, it was oh so important to have that @aol.com in her email address.
So if your premise is to try to get the kids to use the computers, then using status-symbol hardware is certainly one way to promote it. I should also point out though that Apple has had a very strong educational program since the 1970s. The computers in the "Computer Math" course I took in jr. high in the early 1980s were all Apple II+s. This is one niche Microsoft has mostly ignored, while they sought out higher profits in the business sector. Google is not ignoring it though, and a lot of schools are using inexpensive Chromebooks instead of Macs.
This is one of the problems with a rating system which allows dislikes. To quote from my earliesr posts on the topic: The average ranking is not rank = (up - down) like you'd think.. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. Unfortunately, p1 and p2 aren't perfect, and a certain percentage of them will vote stuff up/down just because it makes them comfortable/uncomfortable. If they canceled each other out, there would be no problem. But if the size of p2 is >> p1, then that small percentage of p2 can be larger than all of p1. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
For an apolitical, non-religious example, consider Windows vs. Linux. Say Windows users outnumber Linux users 50:1. Now imagine if a search engine let you rate search results based on whether they were useful or not useful, which is then used to prioritize subsequent search results. In every population, there's going to be an idiot segment who votes stuff down simply because the search result was irrelevant it was to their query, not because they thought it was wrong. Consequently, if a search for hard disk repartitioning brings up four Windows sites and one Linux site as the top results, the Linux site is going to have 50x as many downvotes from those idiot users who never specified Windows in their search but were upset that an "irrelevant" Linux site was included in the search results. If the idiot segment of the Windows population exceeds 2% (numerically equivalent to 100% of the Linux population), that Linux site will end up with a negative rating regardless of how useful or informative it is.
In this case, if a % of p2 is a government-directed smear campaign in control of millions of voters, it can be sufficient to overwhelm p1 and bury a YouTube video with dislikes. (For similar reasons, it's folly to allow non-democratic nations to participate in democratic votes like in the UN. You end up with things the Commission on Human Rights controlled by a bunch of countries who don't respect human rights simply because they have the majority of votes.)
I suspect rating systems fall under similar limitations as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and there's no way to develop a perfect rating system. So you need to dispense with the notion that there is one "best" rating system. One is not better than another, they simply tell you different things about what the population is thinking.
To its credit, YouTube still allows you to see the raw number of likes and dislikes, so you can simply ignore the dislike count if you wish. It would be good though if they let you customize their search algorithm per individual account, so you could give more or less weight to certain things like number of likes or dislikes. That would dilute the impact of (purported) smear campaigns like this, as well as drive the SEO people nuts.
GDP is not bad. The reason it's commonly used is because you need a certain level of productivity to sustain a population. You need to be able to produce enough food, clothing, and shelter for each person, so a certain minimum level of productivity per capita is required. Productivity beyond that can go to a variety of uses, ranging from research into new medical procedures, development of new technology which increases productivity even more, or (on the flip side) materialistic things like solid gold toilet seats.
While happiness should be a goal, it can never be the primary goal because it is not self-sustaining. You can dope up the entire population on morphine and they will be extremely happy. They will also die within a month because nobody is producing the food they need to survive.
Productivity was easier to measure back in the hunter-gatherer days when each individual had to collect enough food to feed himself, and build his own clothing and shelter. The entire reason the modern economy developed is because having each person learn every trade like this is extremely inefficient. It's much better to have one person devote himself solely to farming, another solely to hunting, another solely to building homes, and another solely to making clothing. When you split tasks up like this, each person can concentrate on and learn more about their sole task in depth, improve upon it, and productivity per capita increases.
But then it's no longer possible to directly compare people's productivity. How many bushels of corn equals a house? That's where money and the market economy come in - those allow you to value different kinds of productivity using a common currency. A bushel of corn is worth $x, a house is worth $y, and now you can figure out how many bushels of corn equal a house. And when you add up the productivity of everyone in the country, you get GDP. Divide it by the number of people and you get productivity per capita, which is then comparable to productivity when each person had to be completely self-sufficient and do everything himself.
If you wish to factor in things like pollution and CO2 emissions, you simply add them as negatives to productivity. Sure there will be a lot of debate over exactly how much a negative a pound of CO2 emission is. But ditching GDP entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
That isn't an American thing. It's a eastern/western thinking thing.
The eastern (Asian) way of thinking is that if it's important enough to keep secret, it's your responsibility to keep it secure, and your own damn fault if you fail to do so. In fact in many Asian countries it's considered the duty of competitors to try to steal those secrets, and you can be fired if your employer asks you to engage in corporate espionage and you refuse. A lot of western companies would be having second (and third and fourth) thoughts about doing business in China if they truly understood this.
The western (Euro-American) way of thinking is that if someone is trying to keep something secret, then it's rude at best, a crime at worst to try to steal that secret.
There are more layers to this which can complicate things. The Hainan spy plane incident would seem to subvert what I just listed above. But the Chinese were offended by the spying because of the Asian expectation that such attempts to steal secrets should themselves be secret. You're not supposed to do it openly and overtly - like flying spy planes in plain sight. Hiding the radio eavesdropping equipment in commercial flights flying near China probably would've gone over better with the Chinese people, whereas that would be considered unethical in the West and military reconnaissance flights the correct venue. The U.S. reaction that the spying was OK was because the West holds the law to be paramount, and the actions of the spy plane were completely legal (flying in International airspace just off China). In the West, if it's legal, then it's OK to do regardless of how nefarious your intent. (I'm first gen Asian-American, so it was interesting to watch the culture clash during that incident. Even the apology letters were classic eastern/western. The apology in Chinese had the U.S. vaguely "taking responsibility" for the incident, which your'e supposed to do for honor's sake even if it isn't your fault. The apology in English expressed sorrow that a life was lost but admitted no fault, which is a very legalistic approach.)
At a 9% incidence rate (p=0.09), a 95% confidence interval would be 1.96 * sqrt( p*(1-p) / n ) = 1.96 * sqrt(.09*.91/388) = 0.02847, or 2.8%.
So you would have expected 35 +/- 11 cases.
A 99% confidence interval would be 3.7%, or 35 +/- 14.5 cases. So these are very promising results. Though converting 657 people to 388 person-years may be a bit suspect. Maybe HIV isn't detectable in some people after just a half year post-infection? And I'm not sure how the fact that a person can only be infected once skews the distribution (e.g. a sample of 2 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 2 infections, while a sample of 200 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 200 infections.)
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That ship has sailed. Like email, SMS texts are sent unencrypted. And it's going to take a herculean effort coordinating thousands of companies servicing billions of people to change it to something more secure. We've been trying to do just that with email for 20+ years and it's gone nowhere.
I'm not sure what the solution is. This sort of stuff seems to happen all the time - PHP being the most egregious example I can think of (even its authors admit it's just a bunch of hacks tacked on every time someone needed new functionality). Maybe people need to stop coming up with half-assed implementations "just to get it working" thinking they can "fix it up later"?
The battery on my Nexus 5 began malfunctioning just shy of a year old. When new it would last me the entire workday with about 20% remaining by 10pm. But now it would drain normally to about 40% (about 2-3 pm in my workday), then drop to 0% in the next 45 minutes. I tried all sorts of battery reset and calibration apps, and various discharge/charge to full tricks to try to fix it. Finally I called Google. To make sure the problem wasn't being caused by an app, they asked me to boot the phone into safe mode and do another battery rundown test. In safe mode, only the apps which were originally installed on the phone are allowed to run.
Holy crap! Even with the bad battery it lasted 2 days 20 hours before dying.
IMHO that's a pathetic argument. Why the hell are you estimating ink usage when it's possible to directly measure remaining ink? The old Canon printers used transparent ink cartridges. A sensor shone a light through the ink reservoir (right side in the pic), and when the light was unimpeded, it knew the cartridge was empty. Every Canon cartridge I replaced was in fact completely empty (except for a little ink in the sponge material directly above the outlet.
This is a simple problem, made unnecessarily complex solely as a means to make customers buy more ink.
As I said last time this came up, current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel. That is, if you transmit your signal at -45 dB, then everyone else using that same channel sees -45 dB of noise. Your signal is noise to them, and interferes with their signal.
Beam-forming and MIMO (multipath) techniques being used in 802.11ac subvert this assumption. For a visual analogy, it's why you can see your smartphone display in the sunlight, even though the sun is much, much brighter (its signal strength at optical wavelengths far exceeds your phone display's signal strength). Although the sun is very bright, the light it gives off is highly directional. By using sensors (the lens structure of your eyes) which can "tune in" to light coming from a narrow angle, you can basically filter out all that sunlight noise and pull out a clear signal from the smartphone display.
So the way wifi is progressing, you're going to be able to transmit almost as if you were the only person transmitting on those wavelengths. The only time you'll get interference from other wifi transmissions is if a radio source is directly in line with your source. And even that can be overcome with multipath techniques (similar to how a wide-aperture camera lens can selectively blur the background while keeping the subject in sharp focus).
Speed, bandwidth, interference, and reliability won't be the issue. Security will be.
You're assuming a credit card transaction is between you and the merchant. It's not. It's actually two separate transactions - the first is between the credit card company and the merchant, the second between you and the credit card company. Just as you have the right to decide which credit card companies you wish to do business with, the credit card company has the right to decide which merchants it wishes to do business with.
The proper grocery store analogy would be Bob runs a grocery delivery service. You tell Bob you'd like some chips and beer from the ABC grocery store. Bob tells you he doesn't buy from the ABC grocery store, and declines to make that purchase for you.
The problem isn't that MasterCard is deciding not to service these (alleged) pirate merchants. The problem is there is so little competition in the credit card industry that a single actor making a decision like this is a huge deal. To the market, a boycott is simply an opportunity for someone else to make money. If Visa, MasterCard, and Amex didn't have a stranglehold on the credit card transaction industry, some other credit card company would simply swoop in and eagerly gobble up the business of servicing the blacklisted merchants. The copyright industry cannot enforce an industry-wide ban against certain merchants unless the government decides to do so, or they get all credit card processors to go along with it willingly. The latter is a lot easier with only 3 companies controlling most of the business.
Another fisherman put it best. There are basically two types of knots. Stop knots, where loops press up against each other to prevent slippage. These always break at less than the line's breaking strength due to the stresses at the sharp angles in and around the loops. The blood knot is a stop knot.
And friction knots - like a Chinese finger trap where increased friction from tension in the line keeps the knot from slipping. These usually have higher breaking strength than the line. The Bimini twist is a friction knot. Probably the best example of a pure friction "knot" is when you splice hollow braid. There is no knot per se. The friction of the weave in the hollow braid against the line inside it holds everything in place - exactly like a Chinese finger trap.
I think mathematicians and topologists are only interested in the first kind of knot, whereas the second kind is actually functionally superior especially when connecting lines of different diameter. All the best braid to mono knots are friction knots using multiple wraps to create the friction.
It's all about balance. If you've got socially well-adjusted programmers who are getting their sex/female contact fix outside of work, then your method works great.
But it seems these companies have figured out a way to tap into the (huge) supply of socially mal-adjusted male programmers who aren't getting that sex fix outside of work. These guys usually already spend their free time doing interesting work, so giving them more of it at their job doesn't really help. But they're getting little to no dating or sex. With a little "creative" motivation which balances out that imbalance in their lives, they make them as productive as socially well-adjusted programmers. Even if that balance is an illusion (although who knows, maybe the confidence they gain dealing with pretty girls at the workplace may help them land a real date).
That's Confucianism in a nutshell. The welfare of your group (be it family, clique, gang, school, company, city, province, or country) is more important than any individual's welfare. Once you grok that, a lot of Asian culture starts to make sense.
The concept is not alien to the West: The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one.
That's how I remember it. When I was at MIT, there wasn't really a centralized IT administration per se. I mean sure there was for the general campus-wide network and the public computer labs. But if your research lab wanted a block of IP addresses, it got it and was free to administer it any way it wanted. IT delivered the network access you requested, then got out of the way so you could do whatever it is you thought you needed to do with it. Once you got the IP block (or even a single IP address), it was your network, not IT's.
I'm pretty conservative when it comes to business. But if the points I've highlighted are true, then I completely agree with this ruling. I thought Uber was just running the equivalent of a dating service - hooking up drivers with passengers. But the more I read, the more it sounds like they're running a taxi company.
I don't disagree with the toxic dump example. But how exactly is a media publication which makes virtual goods in any way analogous to a physical dump whose detrimental physical effects can extend beyond the borders of your neighbor's yard? Or are there roving bands of geeky thugs I don't know about who kidnap you and force you to watch the Nat Geo channel, thus allowing its content to "spill over" onto unwilling people?
I gave up trying to comply with their requirements.
1) Checked baggage is for things like clothes, toothpaste, etc. Stuff that's easy to replace if it's stolen. The airline has been known to lose checked bags you know, even if TSA does their job perfectly.
2) Valuables go in my carry-on luggage. For me that's my laptop and all my camera gear. To save space, some of the cheaper accessories may go in my checked in bag (I put my laptop's mouse in my checked bag once because it was either that or a $700 lens - I can live with a trackpad for 8 hours).
3) Anything that's valuable and won't fit in my carry-on luggage gets shipped via a courier like FedEx who flies their own planes and doesn't have to deal with TSA. Insured. (This is not a 100% guarantee - FedEx, UPS, etc. sometimes put cargo on passenger airliners, where it's subject to TSA inspection. But hopefully the insurance will still cover any damage/theft.) This also saves you a ton of hassle getting into and out of the airport - normally I just have one carry-on bag and one carry-on sized suitcase that's checked. Sometimes shipping stuff like this is actually cheaper than the checked bag fee most airlines now charge.
That's the same kind of thinking that gives us a police state - assume everyone is guilty and act accordingly.
The "obvious" answer is one that allows ownership of poisons, knives, and axes, without having the state assume you're a murderer if you possess such items, and so they have the right to demand on a whim that you turn over all such items and records pertaining to said items. Yet still allow the state to have access to such records if they have reasonable evidence that a murder was committed with them.
Personally, I don't think the U.S. has any right to Microsoft's records stored overseas. If they have reason to believe Microsoft did something illegal and want access to data Microsoft is storing in Ireland, then they should present their evidence to Ireland, and Ireland can file the legal paperwork requiring Microsoft turn such records over to the U.S. The issue here is analogous to extradition - a crime (and evidence of it) was committed in one country, but the perpetrator is residing in another country. We already have extradition treaties to deal with such circumstances. We just need to update them to also cover digital records (evidence). The approach the U.S. is taking violates centuries of accepted legal precedent - a country cannot apply its laws outside its borders.
Yes this opens the possibility of some country like the Bahamas declaring they'll never "extradite" digital records to another country, and companies flocking to store their data their to hide it from government warrants. The proper response then would be for a country to ban companies storing data in the Bahamas from doing business in their country. The bigger headache is actually the criss-cross. Microsoft stores EU records in the U.S., and stores U.S. records in the EU, just to make it more difficult for both governments even if proper extradition treaties exist.
You're seriously misunderstanding the issue if you think this is about cloud storage. The data has to be stored somewhere, even if it's not accessible remotely. Even if Microsoft were only storing data pertaining to EU sales in the EU, the U.S. government's stance is that since Microsoft is a U.S. company, they can get access to that data. Even if giving the U.S. govt that data without an EU warrant violates EU privacy laws. Microsoft is put into a catch-22, where they must either violate U.S. law or violate EU law, and the only way to avoid the catch-22 is to do business in the U.S. or the EU, but not both. That's why the U.S. government's position on this is stupid. It's not a mere "inconvenience" as you seem to think it is.
Whether you believe in 4k or not, it's coming. It so happens that making a 4k TV is a lot more expensive than making a 4k camera sensor, so we're getting the cameras first. All that means is that the video you shot of your kid's first steps will be viewable in 1080p today, but will be viewable in 4k in the future when the 4k TVs come down enough in price that they become standard.
I seriously doubt the actual intent here is to help track down stolen electronics. When is the last time the police ever helped anyone recover their stolen electronics?
The real intent is probably to build up a database of MAC addresses and their locations at any given time. So later when they're investigating a homicide, they can cross-reference the database, and say "Ah hah, John Doe's phone was at the scene of the crime at the time the blurry surveillance camera video shows someone killing the clerk at the Kwik-E-Mart." Same thing they try to do with license plate scanners. If all they're looking for is stolen cars, then it just needs to scan and beep when a license plate matches a stolen car. But no, they store the location of every car scanned for months or years so they can retroactively track your movements.
The key is to strike some sort of balance. If the FBI has a court-issued warrant saying they can eavesdrop in real-time on a text conversation between two people's phones, then there's really not much room for one to argue that their privacy rights should override the warrant. Being able to eavesdrop in on conversations over a communications network after a warrant has been granted has been a well-established legal process for close to a century.
What you don't want is the FBI slurping up everything they can get their hands on, no warrant, just because it's unencrypted or they have the keys to the server room at Apple (or Verizon or AT&T). Which apparently is what the NSA did.
Android uses regular SMS for texts, which was never encrypted on any OS. The FBI would be asking the carriers for copies of those, unless it's over the Google Hangouts app using a Google Voice number, in which case they'd have to ask Google.
Apple runs the iPhone texts over their own iMessage service, which has a gateway to SMS for messages sent to non-iPhone users. (Which is also a problem since if you used to have an iPhone but switched to any other phone, Apple keeps iMessage texts sent to you within iMessage and blackholes them to a non-existant iPhone, instead of forwarding them over the SMS gateway to your new phone. Part of their user lock-in strategy. They're actually fighting in court for the right to keep doing this, instead of not being dicks and fixing it.)
The Apple II was expandable by adding in cards in the expansion slots. A formula which the IBM PC later copied to huge success. The Commodore 64, TRS-80, Atari 400/800, etc. were kinda like today's consoles - one size fits all. If you wanted a computer which could be specialized for what you were going to do, the Apple II was pretty much the only game in town.
Ironically, you show one of the other things Jobs was great at - causing people to give Apple credit for stuff they never did nor invented. Apple didn't give us USB. They gave us IEEE 1394. Also known as Firewire, which is probably familiar only to Mac users since its market was almost entirely limited to Macs. USB was a PC thing. I could dig up volumes of quotes from Mac fans explaining why USB sucked and Firewire was superior. (I use and fix both PCs and Macs, so always kept up to date on both platforms.)
Apple killed off the 3.5" floppy prematurely IMHO. The PC platform held onto it until CD-Rs became common. The Macs had a time gap where the need for external storage ended up being satisfied by Iomega Zip disks. The original version of my graduate thesis is on a Zip disk somewhere in storage. I'll probably never be able to read it again, while I can still read 3.5" floppies and CD-Rs. Though to be fair, there was a large time and space gap from 1.44 MB floppies to 682 MB CDs.
Apple tries to predict industry moves and shift their platform in that direction a year or two ahead of time. They've missed more than they've gotten it right. They got the 3.5" floppy right (replaced 5.25" and 8" floppies). I give them credit for Postscript even though it never caught on widely - because it could do a whole lot more than regular printer interfaces. They missed with Appletalk (Novell Netware and later Ethernet became the standard, which Apple later added). They missed with SCSI (PATA, aka IDE became the standard). They missed with Firewire (USB 1/2 became the standard, which Apple later added). They killed off the optical drive at about the right time. They got Displayport right, though it took nearly a decade for monitor resolutions to run up against the limits of DVI and HDMI. They missed with Thunderbolt (Lightning) as USB 3.0 became the standard, which Apple later added. USB-C seems like it'll be adopted by both Apple and the PC simultaneously, so I can't really give them credit for that one.
Unfortunately most Apple fans remember only the things they got right, and conveniently forget the things they got wrong.
Windows CE and phones were mostly orthogonal. An oversight by Microsoft which Palm and later Blackberry exploited to great success. WinCE (which later became Windows Mobile) was mostly a PDA platform. At the time (1990s) everyone know PDAs and smartphones were going to converge. They just didn't know if the PDAs would pick up phone capabilities, or if smartphones were going to become general enough computers to act as a PDA. Well, everyone except apparently Microsoft. They put little to no effort into adding phone capabilities to WinCE. HP tried, but it was a kludgy mess that never went anywhere because Microsoft refused to modify the
What else is new? Every couple months I have to deal with forms from my banks and credit cards asking if they can share my person info for marketing purposes. Never mind that I've told them no every single time. Every year they ask again, and require me to re-state "no", sign it, and stuff their irregularly-sized response sheet in one of my envelopes (no pre-addressed envelope provided), pay for postage, and take the time to drop it in a mailbox. And if I forget to do it, that is assumed to be equivalent to me giving them permission to sell my info to advertisers. Because the law says they're supposed to assume I want my private info to become public unless I explicitly tell them no every year.
Which flies straight in the face of the common (mis)belief that Apple hardware is better because it's more expensive.
Remember the quarterly smartphone sales numbers earlier this year which showed Apple making something like 90% of the profit in the industry? Most of the press spun it as Android phones having a profitability problem (they don't - their profit margin is exactly the same as the rest of the computer industry). Nobody bothered to crunch the numbers. If you do (profit / units sold), you'll find the "Apple tax" for buying an iPhone is $18.8 billion / 74.5 million = $252 per phone. That is, $252 of your purchase price doesn't pay for any better hardware or software or industrial designers or artists or even the guy in the mail room. It goes straight into the bank accounts of Apple and its stockholders as profit.
Let me preface this by stating that I think most programs to use computers in school are trash, and less effective than traditional teaching methods. Of course they make sense in specialized courses like intro to CS, but not for teaching regular courses.
That said, if you start with the assumption that having the kids use a computer is helpful, then "status" hardware will in fact mean a lot to the kids. Back in the 1990s I set up my aunt's household with a dialup Internet account. I picked AT&T as their ISP because at the time they had the most dialup nodes, best reliability, and lowest wait time for a free modem, all at a reasonable cost. When I visited the following week, I learned that the jr. high daughter had canceled the AT&T account and switched them to AOL (which was substantially worse). Because among her peer group, it was oh so important to have that @aol.com in her email address.
So if your premise is to try to get the kids to use the computers, then using status-symbol hardware is certainly one way to promote it. I should also point out though that Apple has had a very strong educational program since the 1970s. The computers in the "Computer Math" course I took in jr. high in the early 1980s were all Apple II+s. This is one niche Microsoft has mostly ignored, while they sought out higher profits in the business sector. Google is not ignoring it though, and a lot of schools are using inexpensive Chromebooks instead of Macs.
This is one of the problems with a rating system which allows dislikes. To quote from my earliesr posts on the topic: The average ranking is not rank = (up - down) like you'd think.. It's rank = p1*up - p2*down. Where p1 is the size of the population which would rank it up, and p2 is the size of the population which would rank it down. Unfortunately, p1 and p2 aren't perfect, and a certain percentage of them will vote stuff up/down just because it makes them comfortable/uncomfortable. If they canceled each other out, there would be no problem. But if the size of p2 is >> p1, then that small percentage of p2 can be larger than all of p1. A minority viewpoint consequently gets a disproportionate number of unfair downvotes simply because it's a minority viewpoint, and thus has to garner a lot more upvotes just to obtain an equal ranking to a majority viewpoint.
For an apolitical, non-religious example, consider Windows vs. Linux. Say Windows users outnumber Linux users 50:1. Now imagine if a search engine let you rate search results based on whether they were useful or not useful, which is then used to prioritize subsequent search results. In every population, there's going to be an idiot segment who votes stuff down simply because the search result was irrelevant it was to their query, not because they thought it was wrong. Consequently, if a search for hard disk repartitioning brings up four Windows sites and one Linux site as the top results, the Linux site is going to have 50x as many downvotes from those idiot users who never specified Windows in their search but were upset that an "irrelevant" Linux site was included in the search results. If the idiot segment of the Windows population exceeds 2% (numerically equivalent to 100% of the Linux population), that Linux site will end up with a negative rating regardless of how useful or informative it is.
In this case, if a % of p2 is a government-directed smear campaign in control of millions of voters, it can be sufficient to overwhelm p1 and bury a YouTube video with dislikes. (For similar reasons, it's folly to allow non-democratic nations to participate in democratic votes like in the UN. You end up with things the Commission on Human Rights controlled by a bunch of countries who don't respect human rights simply because they have the majority of votes.)
I suspect rating systems fall under similar limitations as Arrow's Impossibility Theorem, and there's no way to develop a perfect rating system. So you need to dispense with the notion that there is one "best" rating system. One is not better than another, they simply tell you different things about what the population is thinking.
To its credit, YouTube still allows you to see the raw number of likes and dislikes, so you can simply ignore the dislike count if you wish. It would be good though if they let you customize their search algorithm per individual account, so you could give more or less weight to certain things like number of likes or dislikes. That would dilute the impact of (purported) smear campaigns like this, as well as drive the SEO people nuts.
GDP is not bad. The reason it's commonly used is because you need a certain level of productivity to sustain a population. You need to be able to produce enough food, clothing, and shelter for each person, so a certain minimum level of productivity per capita is required. Productivity beyond that can go to a variety of uses, ranging from research into new medical procedures, development of new technology which increases productivity even more, or (on the flip side) materialistic things like solid gold toilet seats.
While happiness should be a goal, it can never be the primary goal because it is not self-sustaining. You can dope up the entire population on morphine and they will be extremely happy. They will also die within a month because nobody is producing the food they need to survive.
Productivity was easier to measure back in the hunter-gatherer days when each individual had to collect enough food to feed himself, and build his own clothing and shelter. The entire reason the modern economy developed is because having each person learn every trade like this is extremely inefficient. It's much better to have one person devote himself solely to farming, another solely to hunting, another solely to building homes, and another solely to making clothing. When you split tasks up like this, each person can concentrate on and learn more about their sole task in depth, improve upon it, and productivity per capita increases.
But then it's no longer possible to directly compare people's productivity. How many bushels of corn equals a house? That's where money and the market economy come in - those allow you to value different kinds of productivity using a common currency. A bushel of corn is worth $x, a house is worth $y, and now you can figure out how many bushels of corn equal a house. And when you add up the productivity of everyone in the country, you get GDP. Divide it by the number of people and you get productivity per capita, which is then comparable to productivity when each person had to be completely self-sufficient and do everything himself.
If you wish to factor in things like pollution and CO2 emissions, you simply add them as negatives to productivity. Sure there will be a lot of debate over exactly how much a negative a pound of CO2 emission is. But ditching GDP entirely is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
That isn't an American thing. It's a eastern/western thinking thing.
The eastern (Asian) way of thinking is that if it's important enough to keep secret, it's your responsibility to keep it secure, and your own damn fault if you fail to do so. In fact in many Asian countries it's considered the duty of competitors to try to steal those secrets, and you can be fired if your employer asks you to engage in corporate espionage and you refuse. A lot of western companies would be having second (and third and fourth) thoughts about doing business in China if they truly understood this.
The western (Euro-American) way of thinking is that if someone is trying to keep something secret, then it's rude at best, a crime at worst to try to steal that secret.
There are more layers to this which can complicate things. The Hainan spy plane incident would seem to subvert what I just listed above. But the Chinese were offended by the spying because of the Asian expectation that such attempts to steal secrets should themselves be secret. You're not supposed to do it openly and overtly - like flying spy planes in plain sight. Hiding the radio eavesdropping equipment in commercial flights flying near China probably would've gone over better with the Chinese people, whereas that would be considered unethical in the West and military reconnaissance flights the correct venue. The U.S. reaction that the spying was OK was because the West holds the law to be paramount, and the actions of the spy plane were completely legal (flying in International airspace just off China). In the West, if it's legal, then it's OK to do regardless of how nefarious your intent. (I'm first gen Asian-American, so it was interesting to watch the culture clash during that incident. Even the apology letters were classic eastern/western. The apology in Chinese had the U.S. vaguely "taking responsibility" for the incident, which your'e supposed to do for honor's sake even if it isn't your fault. The apology in English expressed sorrow that a life was lost but admitted no fault, which is a very legalistic approach.)
At a 9% incidence rate (p=0.09), a 95% confidence interval would be 1.96 * sqrt( p*(1-p) / n ) = 1.96 * sqrt(.09*.91/388) = 0.02847, or 2.8%.
So you would have expected 35 +/- 11 cases.
A 99% confidence interval would be 3.7%, or 35 +/- 14.5 cases. So these are very promising results. Though converting 657 people to 388 person-years may be a bit suspect. Maybe HIV isn't detectable in some people after just a half year post-infection? And I'm not sure how the fact that a person can only be infected once skews the distribution (e.g. a sample of 2 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 2 infections, while a sample of 200 people for 100 person-years has a maximum of 200 infections.)