1) Kuwait has introduced a law mandating DNA testing for everyone, already. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/... - it's required in order to get a government ID, and a government ID is required to live, basically.
2) In America, at least, the real problem with this code (and likely the real use case) is not blocking access to a website as an expression of "racism" (whatever that even means in this context), it would be using that profile to serve up content _selectively_. It's already been shown that Google gives different results to searches that include "black" names vs "white" ones: http://thevisualcommunicationg... - they could with perfect ease include this DNA data as an input signal to ad selection also. Searching for auto insurance? Your color blindness will cause the search to show worse deals.
It's axiomatic that you should never, ever make unchangeable information with abuse potential of this sort accessible to anyone, if it can possibly be prevented.
Your insurance company is radically different from mine. If I pay my entire insurance premium up front, it's about $800 per six months. If I choose to pay it in two installments, each of those installments is about $500; total, $1000. If I chose to pay it in six installments, each of those installments is about $250; total, $1500. For the exact same policy and coverage period, I save almost 50% if I pay upfront. This presumably reflects some kind of risk based pricing model. There ain't no $1 or $2 service charges here.
It must be nice to have the spare money to keep multiple cars on the road just for different purposes. Sort of the vehicular equivalent of day-of-the-week panties, I guess; and just as silly. Sure, my commute to work M-F is eminently EV-able (let's call it 20 miles of driving per day). However, two-ish times a month I need to drive either 98 or 206 miles roundtrip to an airport depending on my flight schedule; often at short notice. Three-ish times a month I drive ~190 miles roundtrip to a theme park, and that is way too goddamn close to the range limit for a "200 mile" EV. Once every couple of months I need to transport a large item (furniture, building materials, etc). A few times a year I take a drive that's much longer; several hundred miles. You people talk about how "I have an EV for my daily commute, and a gas vehicle for real work" like it's free to have multiple vehicles registered and insured. IT ISN'T. It would cost me about $600/yr to have an extra vehicle in my household. Renting a vehicle? You'll see I for one would need a real car several times a month, and that is a ginormous pain in the balls. Costly, and logistically really goddamn annoying to return it, get transport back from the rental place to my home, etc.
The sensible path for anyone who doesn't have money literally dripping out of their asshole to simply pick one vehicle that covers all their common use cases. And that vehicle is going to be a normal gasoline-powered car for the foreseeable future for the majority of people. Pretty much everyone who buys an EV is doing so to make a point. Most real people don't care about this political activism and simply need reliable transportation supported by nationwide infrastructure on every street corner when we need it.
And $12K is still outside the budget. The median income in Detroit is $26,000. Someone earning that much is looking for a $500 side of the road special.
Yeah. I wasn't exactly talking about that, but this is classic Barbara Ehrenreich stuff. If you're rich, you spend less on stuff that poor people get raped on. For instance, rich people can pay $500 every six months for their car insurance. Poor people who can't find $500 have to go on the installment plan which - for the exact same nominal premium - winds up being $1000 every six months because service charges. Etc etc.
However, this wasn't really what I was talking about - though it's related. I wasn't talking about "poor" people per se, but just average people in the middle of the income range. The median income American isn't looking to buy off the new lot, he or she is looking to buy off the used lot, and to maximize factors such as "hold a couple of kids comfortably", "drive to Grandma in Wisconsin a couple times a year in reasonable comfort", etc. EVs don't hit any of the high notes. They're frankly ridiculous.
And for the people who are constrained to buy used cars, for under $10K, or more usually well under $5K? Used vehicles are more accessible, and they're also more profitable for dealers. Electric vehicles are playthings for people who can afford to self-indulge in ecological fantasies and/or toys they don't need.
"With domain this makes sense because there is no real issues like with real estate."
Are you freebasing? If you are claiming that there is no real, monetary, physical cost and qualitative disruption associated with somebody effectively claiming eminent domain and uprooting you off a domain name - then you haven't thought this through.
There was a mess 20 years ago? I registered my domain with Network Solutions. I was living in Australia at the time. The only "mess" I encountered was the annoyance of currency conversion fees on my credit card, both for the registration and for the hosting - I had my site hosted in the USA because at the time any hosting in Australia was (a) at the end of a very very thin pipe, and (b) cruelly expensive.
... yeah. Castle doctrine doesn't apply to domain names, y'know. Besides, the entire transaction happens at some physically remote location. BigCo says to registrant "MINE" (just like the seagulls in Finding Nemo). Registrant hands the keys to BigCo. There's nobody for you to aim at.
The outcome isn't really uncertain; the richer party is guaranteed to win. Basically the way it tends to break down is: The original registrant is deemed to have "abandoned" the _trademark_ because they are not "doing business" with the trademark. And the challenger can show that they have been doing business with the same trademark; they can show invoices for advertising, copies of magazine advertisements, TV advertisements, press coverage of their product showing the name, etc.
In some cases, a settlement amount is set by the court to reflect that the original owner did "invest" in the name, sort of a cash reimbursement of imputed goodwill. But you're better off talking direct to the company that's challenging you and negotiating a cash price up front. ESPECIALLY once you take the bullshit factor into account - lawyers, paperwork, etc.
In summary: If you're an individual fighting a corporation, you're generally screwed. This advice applies to many facets of life, really; Erin Brockovitch notwithstanding.
This is an irrelevancy. We are not discussing cybersquatters. We are discussing the - not uncommon - case where a small entitity or individual legitimately owns a domain, and a large entity later comes and demands it because the scope of their trademark expands to include it.
The unfortunate fact is that it really doesn't matter if you establish prior use of the domain, because arguments of this sort only arise when there's an external trademark that already has multiple millions of dollars of "goodwill" competing for the use of the domain. The typical timeline for this sort of thing is: Joe Public registers boo.com because his daughter's nickname is Boo and he wants a cool place for showing off her baby pictures. 10 years later, someone builds the persona of their dog Boo into a huge franchise, and decides that they want an internet persona. They file to push Joe Public off the domain. Because they NOW have a huge investment in "boo", they beat Joe Public's use of the term even though, had they had a trademark battle initially, he would have won through prior ownership. And it's expensive to fight these battles.
I own a three-letter domain name, which I've had since the mid 1990s. Yes, I've owned this domain for 20+ years. I have had to fight off - fortunately at no great cost - a couple of people who wanted to use business names that had the same acronym as my domain. I'm getting sort of tired of it to be honest - three letter.com domains can fetch as much as $100K in the right markets, and I'd seriously consider an offer like that at this point, despite a huge load of my life being linked to that site.
You're so missing the point.
There are *ALREADY* about seventeen billion ways those artists can get their free, no-royalties-paid exposure to the public; Spotify's free tier, Youtube, various other Internet streaming/radio sites, etc. Apple is trying to muscle its way into the internet streaming music business and build credibility for its brand. They are trying to get their marketing budget for free by riding the artists.
It is APPLE that is trying to break into a new market, not the artists - it is Apple that should pay the royalties for those trial periods.
True enough. But I'm cynical enough to believe that pretty much everybody who's trying to get elected also believes that about their own voting bloc; they're just sheep to be herded or cajoled into the right voting pen.
Some would argue that Common Core and related nonsense is precisely doing that - training kids only to be "testing bees". And some would argue that the social attitudes forced on kids by school district policies (zero tolerance, for example) are training kids to be drooling government slaves. #justsayin.
If I wanted to run a dictatorship from within a nominally democratic political system, "proles voting idiots into power without understanding what those idiots' policies will do to them" is/exactly/ the voting bloc I'd want to target. And grow.
In 1985 when I was in 7th grade, the school I was attending (in Melbourne, Australia) had LOGO programming on Apple IIe and IIc computers as part of the math course (programming various geometry), and a language I don't recall on Mac 512Ke and Mac Plus computers as part of the 8th grade curriculum. It was a small part of the year (a couple of weeks? something like that?) but it was intended to teach using a programming language to model mathematical problems. Which it did.
Not sure if your comment is trolling, sarcasm, or just too deep for the average bear to understand. My first paid programming assignment was at the age of 10. And, it was in Australia. (Admittedly, it was just writing and modifying some bullshit educational software on the Apple II, but hey, it was software that other people used, and I was paid for it).
Same surface area? What sort of ruler are you using there; is it graduated in numbers or in unicorns? The RPi is a board-scale solution that's massive compared to an 8-bit PIC or AVR. You're aware that there are PICs in SOT223 packages, right? And even the very largest PIC is smaller than the combination of ROM and RAM and required support circuitry in the RPi.
> There are a few IoT devices that are WiFi based. You cherry-picked those. They are a temporary solution for legacy environments.
Actually no, WiFi solves specific networking needs such as "connect to the Internet without a special hub device being required". Until BTLE repeater support or Z-Wave/Zigbee is built into every domestic WiFi router [as given away by FriendlyCableCo, Inc], and probably not even then, WiFi will be a major force in home networking and it is assuredly the lowest common denominator technology today. There have been a great many advances in tricky WiFi implementations for battery powered sensors, by the way.
Cablecos won't pick a technology (unless they are selling a specific set of widgets that go with that technology) because there is no clear winner. There's probably _never_ going to be standardization on one radio technology for home automation, because of the strong desire for proprietary locked-in systems - having worked at a company that made, and makes, home automation equipment, and being in the meetings where technology is chosen, I can tell you any system that currently exists is a decade away from achieving critical mass for bulk consumer acceptance. This has always been the case for home automation, and always will be. The same comment goes for operating systems (at least two were released in just the last week),
Kinda missing the point. There is a step change in the system cost when you move from an all-in-one micro to external memories. So your micro is $5, and your DRAM is $3, and your external flash is $3, and some external bus logic is $1 and your PCB now needs to be six-layer or more to handle fanout of the uBGA packages, and you now have extremely high-speed signals on your PCB (previously confined within the micro), and... and... and... - it all goes hand in hand. You can't just say "micro X is cheap" because by itself, a micro without memories is useless. And, to continue down this line of thought, here's what our Atmel rep explained when I asked him "why can't you make a micro with 8MB of internal flash?": The silicon of a micro is complex (ESPECIALLY these mixed-signal chips we're talking about with radios and ADCs and so forth); they have many layers and process steps and consequently low process yield in terms of defects per square millimeter of die. So, the larger each chip on a wafer, the smaller the percentage of those dice that will be defect-free and saleable. If you just add a massive NOR flash array baked into the side of the artwork, you wind up with a die that's a) low yield because it's made on a process way too exotic for the simple flash array, b) consequently way too expensive. There is a complex break-even point calculated between the price the market will pay for a part with X amount of internal memory vs. die size, yield, the cost of packaging devices that have many pins, the possibility of stacking dice, and doubtless many other factors he didn't tell me about. So that's (part of) why manufacturers only make all-in-one chips up to some flash/RAM size.
In other words: don't expect to see a chip with 32MB flash and 512MB RAM internally any time soon. I'm sure you could put together a *system* that can run Brillo somewhere in the sub $10 BOM cost, but this is an order of magnitude more expensive than one would put in, say, a door sensor contact. So Brillo seems intended for the expensive side of the smart/connected device landscape, or for hub type devices, not cheap ubiquitous sensors.
Yeah, but that's hardly the whole story. That $5 RAM chip is LPDDR, so you need a micro with both an LPDDR controller, and enough address space to make use of that 32MB without contorted bank-switching bullshit. It's a very significant jump in both component and design cost when you from single-chip SoCs to ASSPs that require external ROM and RAM. Package size, pin count, EMI considerations.
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1) Kuwait has introduced a law mandating DNA testing for everyone, already. https://www.hrw.org/news/2015/... - it's required in order to get a government ID, and a government ID is required to live, basically. 2) In America, at least, the real problem with this code (and likely the real use case) is not blocking access to a website as an expression of "racism" (whatever that even means in this context), it would be using that profile to serve up content _selectively_. It's already been shown that Google gives different results to searches that include "black" names vs "white" ones: http://thevisualcommunicationg... - they could with perfect ease include this DNA data as an input signal to ad selection also. Searching for auto insurance? Your color blindness will cause the search to show worse deals. It's axiomatic that you should never, ever make unchangeable information with abuse potential of this sort accessible to anyone, if it can possibly be prevented.
Your insurance company is radically different from mine. If I pay my entire insurance premium up front, it's about $800 per six months. If I choose to pay it in two installments, each of those installments is about $500; total, $1000. If I chose to pay it in six installments, each of those installments is about $250; total, $1500. For the exact same policy and coverage period, I save almost 50% if I pay upfront. This presumably reflects some kind of risk based pricing model. There ain't no $1 or $2 service charges here.
It must be nice to have the spare money to keep multiple cars on the road just for different purposes. Sort of the vehicular equivalent of day-of-the-week panties, I guess; and just as silly. Sure, my commute to work M-F is eminently EV-able (let's call it 20 miles of driving per day). However, two-ish times a month I need to drive either 98 or 206 miles roundtrip to an airport depending on my flight schedule; often at short notice. Three-ish times a month I drive ~190 miles roundtrip to a theme park, and that is way too goddamn close to the range limit for a "200 mile" EV. Once every couple of months I need to transport a large item (furniture, building materials, etc). A few times a year I take a drive that's much longer; several hundred miles. You people talk about how "I have an EV for my daily commute, and a gas vehicle for real work" like it's free to have multiple vehicles registered and insured. IT ISN'T. It would cost me about $600/yr to have an extra vehicle in my household. Renting a vehicle? You'll see I for one would need a real car several times a month, and that is a ginormous pain in the balls. Costly, and logistically really goddamn annoying to return it, get transport back from the rental place to my home, etc. The sensible path for anyone who doesn't have money literally dripping out of their asshole to simply pick one vehicle that covers all their common use cases. And that vehicle is going to be a normal gasoline-powered car for the foreseeable future for the majority of people. Pretty much everyone who buys an EV is doing so to make a point. Most real people don't care about this political activism and simply need reliable transportation supported by nationwide infrastructure on every street corner when we need it.
I can only assume you're using powerful hallucinogenic drugs. Not that I disapprove, because hey freedom, but what are you actually talking about?
And $12K is still outside the budget. The median income in Detroit is $26,000. Someone earning that much is looking for a $500 side of the road special.
Yeah. I wasn't exactly talking about that, but this is classic Barbara Ehrenreich stuff. If you're rich, you spend less on stuff that poor people get raped on. For instance, rich people can pay $500 every six months for their car insurance. Poor people who can't find $500 have to go on the installment plan which - for the exact same nominal premium - winds up being $1000 every six months because service charges. Etc etc. However, this wasn't really what I was talking about - though it's related. I wasn't talking about "poor" people per se, but just average people in the middle of the income range. The median income American isn't looking to buy off the new lot, he or she is looking to buy off the used lot, and to maximize factors such as "hold a couple of kids comfortably", "drive to Grandma in Wisconsin a couple times a year in reasonable comfort", etc. EVs don't hit any of the high notes. They're frankly ridiculous.
And for the people who are constrained to buy used cars, for under $10K, or more usually well under $5K? Used vehicles are more accessible, and they're also more profitable for dealers. Electric vehicles are playthings for people who can afford to self-indulge in ecological fantasies and/or toys they don't need.
"With domain this makes sense because there is no real issues like with real estate." Are you freebasing? If you are claiming that there is no real, monetary, physical cost and qualitative disruption associated with somebody effectively claiming eminent domain and uprooting you off a domain name - then you haven't thought this through.
There was a mess 20 years ago? I registered my domain with Network Solutions. I was living in Australia at the time. The only "mess" I encountered was the annoyance of currency conversion fees on my credit card, both for the registration and for the hosting - I had my site hosted in the USA because at the time any hosting in Australia was (a) at the end of a very very thin pipe, and (b) cruelly expensive.
Lol. Actually I didn't go look at the domain - it was a purely hypothetical example.
... yeah. Castle doctrine doesn't apply to domain names, y'know. Besides, the entire transaction happens at some physically remote location. BigCo says to registrant "MINE" (just like the seagulls in Finding Nemo). Registrant hands the keys to BigCo. There's nobody for you to aim at.
The outcome isn't really uncertain; the richer party is guaranteed to win. Basically the way it tends to break down is: The original registrant is deemed to have "abandoned" the _trademark_ because they are not "doing business" with the trademark. And the challenger can show that they have been doing business with the same trademark; they can show invoices for advertising, copies of magazine advertisements, TV advertisements, press coverage of their product showing the name, etc. In some cases, a settlement amount is set by the court to reflect that the original owner did "invest" in the name, sort of a cash reimbursement of imputed goodwill. But you're better off talking direct to the company that's challenging you and negotiating a cash price up front. ESPECIALLY once you take the bullshit factor into account - lawyers, paperwork, etc. In summary: If you're an individual fighting a corporation, you're generally screwed. This advice applies to many facets of life, really; Erin Brockovitch notwithstanding.
This is an irrelevancy. We are not discussing cybersquatters. We are discussing the - not uncommon - case where a small entitity or individual legitimately owns a domain, and a large entity later comes and demands it because the scope of their trademark expands to include it.
The unfortunate fact is that it really doesn't matter if you establish prior use of the domain, because arguments of this sort only arise when there's an external trademark that already has multiple millions of dollars of "goodwill" competing for the use of the domain. The typical timeline for this sort of thing is: Joe Public registers boo.com because his daughter's nickname is Boo and he wants a cool place for showing off her baby pictures. 10 years later, someone builds the persona of their dog Boo into a huge franchise, and decides that they want an internet persona. They file to push Joe Public off the domain. Because they NOW have a huge investment in "boo", they beat Joe Public's use of the term even though, had they had a trademark battle initially, he would have won through prior ownership. And it's expensive to fight these battles. I own a three-letter domain name, which I've had since the mid 1990s. Yes, I've owned this domain for 20+ years. I have had to fight off - fortunately at no great cost - a couple of people who wanted to use business names that had the same acronym as my domain. I'm getting sort of tired of it to be honest - three letter .com domains can fetch as much as $100K in the right markets, and I'd seriously consider an offer like that at this point, despite a huge load of my life being linked to that site.
You're so missing the point. There are *ALREADY* about seventeen billion ways those artists can get their free, no-royalties-paid exposure to the public; Spotify's free tier, Youtube, various other Internet streaming/radio sites, etc. Apple is trying to muscle its way into the internet streaming music business and build credibility for its brand. They are trying to get their marketing budget for free by riding the artists. It is APPLE that is trying to break into a new market, not the artists - it is Apple that should pay the royalties for those trial periods.
True enough. But I'm cynical enough to believe that pretty much everybody who's trying to get elected also believes that about their own voting bloc; they're just sheep to be herded or cajoled into the right voting pen.
Some would argue that Common Core and related nonsense is precisely doing that - training kids only to be "testing bees". And some would argue that the social attitudes forced on kids by school district policies (zero tolerance, for example) are training kids to be drooling government slaves. #justsayin.
If I wanted to run a dictatorship from within a nominally democratic political system, "proles voting idiots into power without understanding what those idiots' policies will do to them" is /exactly/ the voting bloc I'd want to target. And grow.
In 1985 when I was in 7th grade, the school I was attending (in Melbourne, Australia) had LOGO programming on Apple IIe and IIc computers as part of the math course (programming various geometry), and a language I don't recall on Mac 512Ke and Mac Plus computers as part of the 8th grade curriculum. It was a small part of the year (a couple of weeks? something like that?) but it was intended to teach using a programming language to model mathematical problems. Which it did.
Not sure if your comment is trolling, sarcasm, or just too deep for the average bear to understand. My first paid programming assignment was at the age of 10. And, it was in Australia. (Admittedly, it was just writing and modifying some bullshit educational software on the Apple II, but hey, it was software that other people used, and I was paid for it).
Same surface area? What sort of ruler are you using there; is it graduated in numbers or in unicorns? The RPi is a board-scale solution that's massive compared to an 8-bit PIC or AVR. You're aware that there are PICs in SOT223 packages, right? And even the very largest PIC is smaller than the combination of ROM and RAM and required support circuitry in the RPi.
> There are a few IoT devices that are WiFi based. You cherry-picked those. They are a temporary solution for legacy environments. Actually no, WiFi solves specific networking needs such as "connect to the Internet without a special hub device being required". Until BTLE repeater support or Z-Wave/Zigbee is built into every domestic WiFi router [as given away by FriendlyCableCo, Inc], and probably not even then, WiFi will be a major force in home networking and it is assuredly the lowest common denominator technology today. There have been a great many advances in tricky WiFi implementations for battery powered sensors, by the way. Cablecos won't pick a technology (unless they are selling a specific set of widgets that go with that technology) because there is no clear winner. There's probably _never_ going to be standardization on one radio technology for home automation, because of the strong desire for proprietary locked-in systems - having worked at a company that made, and makes, home automation equipment, and being in the meetings where technology is chosen, I can tell you any system that currently exists is a decade away from achieving critical mass for bulk consumer acceptance. This has always been the case for home automation, and always will be. The same comment goes for operating systems (at least two were released in just the last week),
See my reply to FranTaylor. It's not the core that adds the cost.
Kinda missing the point. There is a step change in the system cost when you move from an all-in-one micro to external memories. So your micro is $5, and your DRAM is $3, and your external flash is $3, and some external bus logic is $1 and your PCB now needs to be six-layer or more to handle fanout of the uBGA packages, and you now have extremely high-speed signals on your PCB (previously confined within the micro), and... and... and... - it all goes hand in hand. You can't just say "micro X is cheap" because by itself, a micro without memories is useless. And, to continue down this line of thought, here's what our Atmel rep explained when I asked him "why can't you make a micro with 8MB of internal flash?": The silicon of a micro is complex (ESPECIALLY these mixed-signal chips we're talking about with radios and ADCs and so forth); they have many layers and process steps and consequently low process yield in terms of defects per square millimeter of die. So, the larger each chip on a wafer, the smaller the percentage of those dice that will be defect-free and saleable. If you just add a massive NOR flash array baked into the side of the artwork, you wind up with a die that's a) low yield because it's made on a process way too exotic for the simple flash array, b) consequently way too expensive. There is a complex break-even point calculated between the price the market will pay for a part with X amount of internal memory vs. die size, yield, the cost of packaging devices that have many pins, the possibility of stacking dice, and doubtless many other factors he didn't tell me about. So that's (part of) why manufacturers only make all-in-one chips up to some flash/RAM size. In other words: don't expect to see a chip with 32MB flash and 512MB RAM internally any time soon. I'm sure you could put together a *system* that can run Brillo somewhere in the sub $10 BOM cost, but this is an order of magnitude more expensive than one would put in, say, a door sensor contact. So Brillo seems intended for the expensive side of the smart/connected device landscape, or for hub type devices, not cheap ubiquitous sensors.
Yeah, but that's hardly the whole story. That $5 RAM chip is LPDDR, so you need a micro with both an LPDDR controller, and enough address space to make use of that 32MB without contorted bank-switching bullshit. It's a very significant jump in both component and design cost when you from single-chip SoCs to ASSPs that require external ROM and RAM. Package size, pin count, EMI considerations.