And this is a clear case of Apple abusing their monopoly, blocking apps which have the same functionalities as their own (but better) from their store.. The reason Apple doesn't allow google to publish their map-app propably is because it people would use that instead of their crap-map-app so they cannot get the information anymore (because apple is collecting all information as much).
And this is a clear case of idiotically avoiding to read the article. Apple hasn't abused any monopoly. They haven't blocked any Google app. The reason why they haven't blocked any Google app is because Google doesn't actually have an app yet that would run on iOS, and they haven't submitted anything, so even if Apple really really wanted to block anything that Google submits, they didn't have a chance yet.
Google is just playing a cunning strategy... By pre-calling-apple-out as evil monopolistic bastards who won't let their app in the store, there's much much more pressure on apple to approve the app in the state it's in.
Here's what Apple might do and what I would do if I was in their place: When the app gets submitted, I would publicly announce that we received the app, but we would not even look at it because of Google's statements that they don't expect a fair approval process, which means any rejection would be tainted in the public eye. Only when Google publicly apologises and states that they expect a fair approval process, only then will the app be examined.
Perhaps in complaining Google hopes to swing enough public opinion their way to alter the expected decision?
One of the points in the App Store guidelines says: "Complaining publicly about an app rejection doesn't improve your chances of being accepted". Between the lines I read that complaining loudly about a rejection will actually reduce your chances of being accepted.
It appears that the hypervisor leaks data from one VM to another by not clearing a cache.
What is leaked is not actually the data in the cache; another virtual machine running on the same computer cannot access that data. What is leaked is some information about cache usage, which may then allow an attacker to find out what the other VM has been doing. The attacker fills the cache with data, switches to another VM, and when it gets control again, the attacker measures how long it takes to access the data that it put into the cache itself. If it's fast, then the attacker knows that the other VM hasn't touched that part of the cache. If it's slow, the attacker knows that the other VM touched this part of the cache.
Don't get me wrong though as I'm not defending the theatres either - we all know that a box of soda mix or popcorn costs a few cents/pennies and yet they still charge an arm and a leg for that. In the theatre I used to work in, the salsa and cheese used for the nachos used to come in giant tins that used to cost about £0.05 each and the nachos were £0.02 a bag and you'd get many many servings out of that.
If they don't get much money from the tickets, then they need some means to get money to pay for the actual theatre it self, for the investment, maintenance, staff, equipment, and so on.
You don't have to be right up on a semi's rear end for drafting either. A few car lengths still keeps you in the envelope.
Here's German traffic rules: The correct minimum distance in meters is your speed in kilometers per hour, divided by two. So at a speed of 100 km/h (about 62 mph), the correct distance is 50 meters. You can get fined if your distance is less than 50 percent, that is 25 meters. The fine increases as the distance decreases. What gets you into real trouble is claiming that what you do is right. It is totally accepted that people make mistakes and therefore sometimes drive to close. But as you say, intentionally and persistently driving at no more than half the correct distance means that you shouldn't have a driving license.
MPG depends immensely on driving style, so official figures are never going to be exactly right for everybody. I drive on empty roads in 5th gear at 30mph as much as possible, and my car has a total lifetime average of 71 British mpg(or 59mpg in US gallons) since I bought it 25k miles ago. It's an ordinary 5-seater estate car too, not some whacky-looking smart-car or fiat 500.
A colleague of mine used to do that as well, but he figured out finally that engines didn't last very long when driven like that.
How sad for you! I'm 50+, and still find coding to be "thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems"
Just saying... There was this guy named George Marsaglia. Occassionally posting on comp.lang.c and elsewhere with new algorithms for generating random numbers with a period of 10^45000 or so (ten to the fortyfifththousandth power). Then no posts for a bit, then someone posted he died aged 86.
I can only hope to be fit enough at 86 to come up with elegant solutions to interesting problems.
Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.
Thanks, Dell, for your 27 inch 1920 x 1200 display (I think they changed it 1920 x 1080 now, bastards!) Thanks, Apple, for a MBP with 1440 x 900 Retina display. Which _can_ be switched to higher resolution, but rarely is.
BTW, at the moment I have to take my glasses _off_ to read tiny crap on tiny devices. I know that will change.
Feigned outrage aside, if just about every man out there were in the same position they'd do the same (except showing the pics to customers), given the opportunity.
Anyone who is so weak-willed and untrustworthy that they make copies of a customer's photos doesn't meet my definition of "man".
The GPs point was that "assholeishness" is a subjective term, and some people are willing to label any appearance of an opinion that doesn't mesh with their own as "assholeishness". Nobody gets fired for talking about their weekend at work, despite that being a non-work related subject (unless they do it to a degree that they aren't doing their work any more). The danger is in allowing someone to get fired for talking about an unpopular non-work related subject.
You would get fired for talking about your weekend if you talked about it so much that people actively avoid you because they can't stand it anymore. If I had work to do, you came talking about your weekend, I said sorry man, I have no time for this, I have to get this job done today, and you said no, this is my weekend, it is really important to me, if you continue your work you really hurt my feelings, and I had to shove you out of my office door to get my job done, and then I complained, and a dozen other people complained, then you would get fired for talking what you did on your weekend.
I'll see people who rob or steal something then brag on Facebook publicly about it; at that point you might as well turn yourself in.
Here in England, some guy was in court for some crime, there wasn't very much evidence, and he posted on Facebook "I think I'm getting away with it". The judge took that as a confession and he was convicted.
I'd like to know what the definition of "generally used" computing hardware is. The PC is (for now) an open platform, so I could see it as being "generally used". But what about iPads? Car computers? Game consoles? Would this legislation lead to a paradigm shift of ever-more-closed systems to protect patents?
That's totally misunderstanding this proposal. The proposal is that "software running on a "generally used" computing hardware" doesn't infringe on any patent. So if I design and patent an algorithm, you are free to implement it on a PC, but not on some hardware that is so closed that it is not "generally used computing hardware".
Why should the judge conclude he deserves the maximum penalty, he only heard one side.
He heard all the arguments that were put forward in court. Everything that one side says and that the other side doesn't contradict is considered to be fact. The movie company said "$150,000 per movie is the damage we suffered". If the defendant had said "the damage was at most $10 per movie", then the judge would have heard that. The defendant wasn't there. Bad, bad decision.
Here is what Mr. Fisher neglected to do: He didn't turn up in court. The movie company appeared in court and said "Mr. Fisher distributed 10 movies that we made, and he should be the maximum fine of $150,000 per movie". The judge looked into the direction where Mr. Fisher was supposed to be sitting. Had he been sitting there, he could have put up all these defences. He wasn't, so the judge didn't hear any argument against what the movie company said, so he had to assume that everything they said was fact.
There's nothing non-obvious with just about any software.
A simple useful non-obvious one: Huffman coding with limited code length. Huffman coding is quite simple once you understand the maths behind it (which makes it non-obvious to many people, but to others it is still obvious). Huffman coding with limited code length asks for example for the best Huffman-like code where no code word is longer than 12 bits. Try writing software to do that. It is published, even _understanding_ the bloody thing is very, very difficult.
I have to say that I really, really dislike Stallman. And that said, his suggestion is actually a very sensible approach: You make a law that makes clear what is and what isn't allowed, and that simplifies things a lot.
There will be a bit of discussion about what "generally used computing hardware" is, but I would assume that any PC, Mac, Linux or Solaris box, IBM mainframe, iPad, playstation, would fall under that category. The software controlling your car engine, probably not.
An Android phone or iPhone as far as it is used to make phone calls, or software in your camera: Well, that's a tough one.
2.25% of what? An iPhone for example is first a phone. Then it's a photo camera. Then it's a film camera. Then it's a music player. Then it's a video player. Then it's an internet browser. And an email appliance. And a games console. And a dozen other things. Say 20 in total.
If you had twenty companies, each with an essential patent in one of these twenty areas that need FRAND licensing, should each get 2.25% of the total price? If Apple sold twenty separate products, one being a pure phone and nothing else, then one company would get 2.25% for a phone patent, and the other 19 get nothing. And if Apple sold a camera as well, someone would get 2.25% of the camera, and the other 19 would get nothing.
There are other things to complain about. For example, when converting music, it doesn't use multiple threads. There are no single core Macs, and lots of quad core Macs. (And I checked, the OS has no problems converting multiple music files at the same time). Annoying if your iPod is set to automatically convert music to 128 kbit.
You get one part of the picture, but you are missing a huge part. The "smartphone" market is changing. There have always been and there will always be people who buy cheap phones, and people who buy expensive phones. Useful numbers would be Apple's market share among all phones, and Apple's market share among expensive phones (since they only sell expensive phones). In the last years, a lot of people who bought a phone that is a bit better than the cheapest one have changed from non-smartphone to smartphone. That's why the smartphone market has been growing, and since all these people are not and never will be iPhone customers, Apple's share of the smartphone market has shrunk.
However, Apple's unit sales have been growing, Apple's market share in the total phone market has been growing, and actually Apple's revenue share in the smartphone market has been growing.
What we want to protect is not the speech itself, but your right to choose the contents of your speech, and to make sure that the contents of your speech has no unjustified consequences for you. Anonymous speech helps with that.
In this case, the content of the speech is totally irrelevant. It is suspected that the poster was a juror, who had no legal right at that point in time to read a newspaper, and the fact that he posted _anything_ is evidence. No matter what he posted.
In this case, it would be reasonable to demand that the court is given the name, and if it is not one of the jurors, the information about the name should be destroyed.
So they question is does an alert from a dog constitute evidence strong enough to meet the probal cause standard?
I thought the question was: If you have a dog that is trained well enough to actually smell which houses it passes contain drugs, is intentionally walking the dog on a public road past these houses already a search that requires a warrant? (If it is, what if the police officer just takes his dog for a walk, not planning anything, and the dog sniffs drugs? )
About detecting people growing drugs indoors, which is a HUGE problem in the UK, because a landlord will rent out a house completely innocently, it is turned into a plant growing place, and the damage to the property is _huge_), well, we try to make houses more energy efficient. So it makes total sense to go through a road with thermal imaging equipment to find houses with bad insulation and tell the residents to do something about it (you get money from the state to insulate your loft, for example). Now a well insulated house, a badly insulated house, and a house used for growing drugs will look different.
Your assumption is wrong. That is the entire point. An IP address is not probable cause. Court after court has been ruling exactly that.
Jane Q. Public, after the nonsense that you posted on a threat about the workings of GPS (I mean absolutely total nonsense), you are most definitely not a person that I would rely upon.
An IP address is surely not enough to identify a person, but it most definitely probable cause in case of a crime.
That's the point. If everybody opened their WiFi AP, then an IP address will become meaningless as a way of identifying a person to arrest or sue.
That's optimistic. Very optimistic.
First, the obvious thing is that you would need a router that supports guest access - giving others internet access, without giving them access to your network. Next, these guest users would want access in a way that is secure for them. No good using an open network if everything you do gets recorded.
But just because you think the IP address is meaningless, even if you are right, doesn't stop you from getting into enormous trouble, depending on what some stranger did on your network. The IP address isn't meaningless. It identifies the router in your home. If the router is involved in a serious crime, then you may be "presumed innocent", but you are still a first rate suspect and I would assume that the cops won't have any problems getting a search warrant. Best case they take your computer away, examine it carefully, and half a year later it is returned and the say "congratulations, we didn't find the slightest evidence against you, sorry that your hard drive broke while we examined it".
Slashdot Mirror
And this is a clear case of Apple abusing their monopoly, blocking apps which have the same functionalities as their own (but better) from their store.. The reason Apple doesn't allow google to publish their map-app propably is because it people would use that instead of their crap-map-app so they cannot get the information anymore (because apple is collecting all information as much).
And this is a clear case of idiotically avoiding to read the article. Apple hasn't abused any monopoly. They haven't blocked any Google app. The reason why they haven't blocked any Google app is because Google doesn't actually have an app yet that would run on iOS, and they haven't submitted anything, so even if Apple really really wanted to block anything that Google submits, they didn't have a chance yet.
Google is just playing a cunning strategy... By pre-calling-apple-out as evil monopolistic bastards who won't let their app in the store, there's much much more pressure on apple to approve the app in the state it's in.
Here's what Apple might do and what I would do if I was in their place: When the app gets submitted, I would publicly announce that we received the app, but we would not even look at it because of Google's statements that they don't expect a fair approval process, which means any rejection would be tainted in the public eye. Only when Google publicly apologises and states that they expect a fair approval process, only then will the app be examined.
Perhaps in complaining Google hopes to swing enough public opinion their way to alter the expected decision?
One of the points in the App Store guidelines says: "Complaining publicly about an app rejection doesn't improve your chances of being accepted". Between the lines I read that complaining loudly about a rejection will actually reduce your chances of being accepted.
It appears that the hypervisor leaks data from one VM to another by not clearing a cache.
What is leaked is not actually the data in the cache; another virtual machine running on the same computer cannot access that data. What is leaked is some information about cache usage, which may then allow an attacker to find out what the other VM has been doing. The attacker fills the cache with data, switches to another VM, and when it gets control again, the attacker measures how long it takes to access the data that it put into the cache itself. If it's fast, then the attacker knows that the other VM hasn't touched that part of the cache. If it's slow, the attacker knows that the other VM touched this part of the cache.
why would you provide your address when buying a tv ?!?
Because no store in the UK will sell you a TV without getting your address, which they will then pass on.
Don't get me wrong though as I'm not defending the theatres either - we all know that a box of soda mix or popcorn costs a few cents/pennies and yet they still charge an arm and a leg for that. In the theatre I used to work in, the salsa and cheese used for the nachos used to come in giant tins that used to cost about £0.05 each and the nachos were £0.02 a bag and you'd get many many servings out of that.
If they don't get much money from the tickets, then they need some means to get money to pay for the actual theatre it self, for the investment, maintenance, staff, equipment, and so on.
You don't have to be right up on a semi's rear end for drafting either. A few car lengths still keeps you in the envelope.
Here's German traffic rules: The correct minimum distance in meters is your speed in kilometers per hour, divided by two. So at a speed of 100 km/h (about 62 mph), the correct distance is 50 meters. You can get fined if your distance is less than 50 percent, that is 25 meters. The fine increases as the distance decreases. What gets you into real trouble is claiming that what you do is right. It is totally accepted that people make mistakes and therefore sometimes drive to close. But as you say, intentionally and persistently driving at no more than half the correct distance means that you shouldn't have a driving license.
MPG depends immensely on driving style, so official figures are never going to be exactly right for everybody. I drive on empty roads in 5th gear at 30mph as much as possible, and my car has a total lifetime average of 71 British mpg(or 59mpg in US gallons) since I bought it 25k miles ago. It's an ordinary 5-seater estate car too, not some whacky-looking smart-car or fiat 500.
A colleague of mine used to do that as well, but he figured out finally that engines didn't last very long when driven like that.
How sad for you! I'm 50+, and still find coding to be "thinking out elegant solutions to interesting problems"
Just saying... There was this guy named George Marsaglia. Occassionally posting on comp.lang.c and elsewhere with new algorithms for generating random numbers with a period of 10^45000 or so (ten to the fortyfifththousandth power). Then no posts for a bit, then someone posted he died aged 86.
I can only hope to be fit enough at 86 to come up with elegant solutions to interesting problems.
Right! I dunno how many times I have told UX designers (nearly always under 30 and just babies, really) that I cannot read their tiny crap on tiny devices. Cannot. Have to get out glasses. They always ignore it. Considering throwing away my crappy phone for this very reason.
Thanks, Dell, for your 27 inch 1920 x 1200 display (I think they changed it 1920 x 1080 now, bastards!) Thanks, Apple, for a MBP with 1440 x 900 Retina display. Which _can_ be switched to higher resolution, but rarely is.
BTW, at the moment I have to take my glasses _off_ to read tiny crap on tiny devices. I know that will change.
Feigned outrage aside, if just about every man out there were in the same position they'd do the same (except showing the pics to customers), given the opportunity.
Anyone who is so weak-willed and untrustworthy that they make copies of a customer's photos doesn't meet my definition of "man".
The GPs point was that "assholeishness" is a subjective term, and some people are willing to label any appearance of an opinion that doesn't mesh with their own as "assholeishness". Nobody gets fired for talking about their weekend at work, despite that being a non-work related subject (unless they do it to a degree that they aren't doing their work any more). The danger is in allowing someone to get fired for talking about an unpopular non-work related subject.
You would get fired for talking about your weekend if you talked about it so much that people actively avoid you because they can't stand it anymore. If I had work to do, you came talking about your weekend, I said sorry man, I have no time for this, I have to get this job done today, and you said no, this is my weekend, it is really important to me, if you continue your work you really hurt my feelings, and I had to shove you out of my office door to get my job done, and then I complained, and a dozen other people complained, then you would get fired for talking what you did on your weekend.
I'll see people who rob or steal something then brag on Facebook publicly about it; at that point you might as well turn yourself in.
Here in England, some guy was in court for some crime, there wasn't very much evidence, and he posted on Facebook "I think I'm getting away with it". The judge took that as a confession and he was convicted.
I'd like to know what the definition of "generally used" computing hardware is. The PC is (for now) an open platform, so I could see it as being "generally used". But what about iPads? Car computers? Game consoles? Would this legislation lead to a paradigm shift of ever-more-closed systems to protect patents?
That's totally misunderstanding this proposal. The proposal is that "software running on a "generally used" computing hardware" doesn't infringe on any patent. So if I design and patent an algorithm, you are free to implement it on a PC, but not on some hardware that is so closed that it is not "generally used computing hardware".
Why should the judge conclude he deserves the maximum penalty, he only heard one side.
He heard all the arguments that were put forward in court. Everything that one side says and that the other side doesn't contradict is considered to be fact. The movie company said "$150,000 per movie is the damage we suffered". If the defendant had said "the damage was at most $10 per movie", then the judge would have heard that. The defendant wasn't there. Bad, bad decision.
Here is what Mr. Fisher neglected to do: He didn't turn up in court. The movie company appeared in court and said "Mr. Fisher distributed 10 movies that we made, and he should be the maximum fine of $150,000 per movie". The judge looked into the direction where Mr. Fisher was supposed to be sitting. Had he been sitting there, he could have put up all these defences. He wasn't, so the judge didn't hear any argument against what the movie company said, so he had to assume that everything they said was fact.
There's nothing non-obvious with just about any software.
A simple useful non-obvious one: Huffman coding with limited code length. Huffman coding is quite simple once you understand the maths behind it (which makes it non-obvious to many people, but to others it is still obvious). Huffman coding with limited code length asks for example for the best Huffman-like code where no code word is longer than 12 bits. Try writing software to do that. It is published, even _understanding_ the bloody thing is very, very difficult.
I have to say that I really, really dislike Stallman. And that said, his suggestion is actually a very sensible approach: You make a law that makes clear what is and what isn't allowed, and that simplifies things a lot.
There will be a bit of discussion about what "generally used computing hardware" is, but I would assume that any PC, Mac, Linux or Solaris box, IBM mainframe, iPad, playstation, would fall under that category. The software controlling your car engine, probably not.
An Android phone or iPhone as far as it is used to make phone calls, or software in your camera: Well, that's a tough one.
2.25% of what? An iPhone for example is first a phone. Then it's a photo camera. Then it's a film camera. Then it's a music player. Then it's a video player. Then it's an internet browser. And an email appliance. And a games console. And a dozen other things. Say 20 in total.
If you had twenty companies, each with an essential patent in one of these twenty areas that need FRAND licensing, should each get 2.25% of the total price? If Apple sold twenty separate products, one being a pure phone and nothing else, then one company would get 2.25% for a phone patent, and the other 19 get nothing. And if Apple sold a camera as well, someone would get 2.25% of the camera, and the other 19 would get nothing.
That's not a bug, that's a missing feature.
There are other things to complain about. For example, when converting music, it doesn't use multiple threads. There are no single core Macs, and lots of quad core Macs. (And I checked, the OS has no problems converting multiple music files at the same time). Annoying if your iPod is set to automatically convert music to 128 kbit.
You get one part of the picture, but you are missing a huge part. The "smartphone" market is changing. There have always been and there will always be people who buy cheap phones, and people who buy expensive phones. Useful numbers would be Apple's market share among all phones, and Apple's market share among expensive phones (since they only sell expensive phones). In the last years, a lot of people who bought a phone that is a bit better than the cheapest one have changed from non-smartphone to smartphone. That's why the smartphone market has been growing, and since all these people are not and never will be iPhone customers, Apple's share of the smartphone market has shrunk.
However, Apple's unit sales have been growing, Apple's market share in the total phone market has been growing, and actually Apple's revenue share in the smartphone market has been growing.
What we want to protect is not the speech itself, but your right to choose the contents of your speech, and to make sure that the contents of your speech has no unjustified consequences for you. Anonymous speech helps with that.
In this case, the content of the speech is totally irrelevant. It is suspected that the poster was a juror, who had no legal right at that point in time to read a newspaper, and the fact that he posted _anything_ is evidence. No matter what he posted.
In this case, it would be reasonable to demand that the court is given the name, and if it is not one of the jurors, the information about the name should be destroyed.
So they question is does an alert from a dog constitute evidence strong enough to meet the probal cause standard?
I thought the question was: If you have a dog that is trained well enough to actually smell which houses it passes contain drugs, is intentionally walking the dog on a public road past these houses already a search that requires a warrant? (If it is, what if the police officer just takes his dog for a walk, not planning anything, and the dog sniffs drugs? )
About detecting people growing drugs indoors, which is a HUGE problem in the UK, because a landlord will rent out a house completely innocently, it is turned into a plant growing place, and the damage to the property is _huge_), well, we try to make houses more energy efficient. So it makes total sense to go through a road with thermal imaging equipment to find houses with bad insulation and tell the residents to do something about it (you get money from the state to insulate your loft, for example). Now a well insulated house, a badly insulated house, and a house used for growing drugs will look different.
Your assumption is wrong. That is the entire point. An IP address is not probable cause. Court after court has been ruling exactly that.
Jane Q. Public, after the nonsense that you posted on a threat about the workings of GPS (I mean absolutely total nonsense), you are most definitely not a person that I would rely upon.
An IP address is surely not enough to identify a person, but it most definitely probable cause in case of a crime.
That's the point. If everybody opened their WiFi AP, then an IP address will become meaningless as a way of identifying a person to arrest or sue.
That's optimistic. Very optimistic.
First, the obvious thing is that you would need a router that supports guest access - giving others internet access, without giving them access to your network. Next, these guest users would want access in a way that is secure for them. No good using an open network if everything you do gets recorded.
But just because you think the IP address is meaningless, even if you are right, doesn't stop you from getting into enormous trouble, depending on what some stranger did on your network. The IP address isn't meaningless. It identifies the router in your home. If the router is involved in a serious crime, then you may be "presumed innocent", but you are still a first rate suspect and I would assume that the cops won't have any problems getting a search warrant. Best case they take your computer away, examine it carefully, and half a year later it is returned and the say "congratulations, we didn't find the slightest evidence against you, sorry that your hard drive broke while we examined it".