The density of humans per car is already too low. I live in Mexico City, a 25 million people city. There has long been a campain to reduce the use of single-driver cars, but the campain is never strong enough.
I want to go to point X. Being too lazy to walk ten metres, I drive around for half an hour until I find a parking spot. With a self driving car, the car can drop me off exactly where I want to go and leave the area going somewhere where parking spaces are easier to find. Self driving cars can also park closely together because they don't need to leave space on the side for the driver to enter, and they can park blocking other self driving cars, because when the other car needs to leave, the blocking car can get out of the way.
According to passenger vehicle stats from NHTSA (2009) [dot.gov] and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], I calculate that there is a 1 in 49 chance that a particular passenger vehicle will be in an accident in a year (5.211 million accidents to 254.4 million registered vehicles). That means that the odds of any vehicle being in an accident in 23 years is close to half.
Actually, the number of cars involved in accidents is a lot higher than the number of accidents. My guess would be 60% to 80% higher.
For the download one, the calculation simply is, "How much of the download is done? How long did it take? Assume the rest will happen at the same rate and extrapolate."
That's what iTunes does when you download multiple items. And it's bloody stupid. If you buy five songs, and it downloads up to three simultaneously, it assumes that each download on its own will run at a constant rate. But that is of course wrong once it is down to two songs, and then to one song, because the speed _per download_ increases. It also doesn't display any time for those songs that are still queued up. All this could be predicted much better.
They are absolutely right. Free speech rights should allow them to tell any lies, misleading stories, and so on. On the other hand, consumer protection requires them to follow their free-speech-right guaranteed lies by factually correct statements.
Like: The cheque is in the post. No, it isn't, and you would be stupid if you believe it. Our network is the best in the country. No, it isn't. Our own numbers prove that it is the worst.
A sufficiently sized bomb drilled into the middle of the asteroid would with ease break it up into smaller chunks. All those chunks individually would still hit the planet, but if the chunks are sufficiently small you dramatically increase their surface area and the amount they burn up as they enter the atmosphere. The end result would be a few tsunamis eliminating a few coastal cities, maybe a nuclear disaster in Japan, and an otherwise enduring humanity.
They were talking about an object with a diameter of 1,000 km. That's bigger than the largest known asteroid (Ceres). And if you managed to split it into one billion pieces, you would have one billion pieces 1 km in size each. The Tunguska explosing was probably caused by an object less than 100 meters in size.
According to the DMCA process, the hosting company must take-down "claimed" infringing content. Then the victim has the right to respond and say "This does not infringe copyright. We are following the lending rules laid-down by Amazon, B&N, and the Authors Guild. This ie perfectly legal."
Let us clarify this: The hosting company doesn't have to do anything. However, they want to behave in such a way that they are not involved in any copyright disagreement. If they behave according to the DMCA process, then they are safe and neither side can sue them. If they don't behave according to the DMCA process, then they cannot be sued for not following the DMCA process, but they can be sued for copyright infringement - of course only if there was copyright infringement.
Slight problem: the Prada was referenced in the '677 patent [uspto.gov]. I.e. The patent was awarded with full awareness of the LG Prada phone, meaning that the LG phone must have been different enough so as not to invalidate the claims of Apple's design patent.
So that would mean that anybody could make an exact copy of the LG Prada phone, and Apple could not sue them (well of course you can sue for anything, but they couldn't possibly win). And of course LG could sue. Or you could pay LG some money for the right to make an exact copy of the LG Prada, and you would be safe.
It'd be quite entertaining if Scripps Local News did this entirely on purpose, to raise awareness of the abusability of these procedures.
If the NASA plays hardball, this "Scripps Local News" will be majorly f***ed. Slashdotters are complaining all the time about the DMCA act. However, sending a DMCA notice when you don't own the copyright and when you are not representing the copyright holder is a criminal offense.
Thought about the problem in the context of my MacBook. The (conflicting) goals would be: 1. I want to be able to wipe my MacBook remotely when it is stolen. 2. I want to be able to do this even when I forgot or lost important information to identify myself. 3. I don't want a hacker to remotely destroy the information on my Mac.
Obviously the first step is to have a backup. If you don't have a backup, you are f***ed. If you have a backup, worst case you buy a new MacBook, install the backup, and you're done. The problem is that Apple (or whoever controls remote wiping) cannot possibly distinguish between cases (2) and (3). So you have the choice of allowing thieves to empty your bank accounts even though Apple could have destroyed the info, or allowing hackers to remotely wipe your computer.
With encrypted hard drives, there would be a way around this (kind of). Apple's volume encryption uses a primary key that is stored on your hard drive in encrypted form, and a secondary key that is used to decrypt the primary key. You are given the secondary key when the hard drive is encrypted, and you can write it down and put it into your safe. And then you have the password that you enter, which is used to decrypt the secondary password. Remote wiping is easy: Just wipe the encrypted primary key, and there is no way to reconstruct it. Now the alternative: When you convince Apple to remotely wipe the computer, they could generate a key and store it at Apple, then encrypt the encrypted primary key again with that key. The hard drive cannot be read. To access it, you'd have to go to an Apple Store in person with proper ID, and then the can remove the second encryption. Inconvenient obviously, but not as bad as permanently wiped.
PJ addressed this in her post at Groklaw, but very basically information that is already in the public domain can not effect the court, as the jury has already been instructed to avoid news and any other external information source containing information about the trial. Samsung's press release didn't contain anything that wasn't already in the public domain.
Unfortunately, PJ and Groklaw stopped being an impartial source a while ago. Anyone who repeats the "rounded rectangle" nonsense cannot be considered impartial.
That mockup is based on something SONY told them. So it sure sounds like someone at sony had this idea as well.
Well, no. Jony Ive asked a fellow designer "what would the iPhone look like if Sony designed it"? There was no input from Sony on the design. The result was a combination of the iPhone design, as it existed at that time, plus what the designer believed would be typical for a Sony design.
Even more unsure how this evidence can be dismissed by a judge. It's important.
If it is important, then please explain why Samsung produced it after the deadline. There are three logical explanations: 1. This evidence was good evidence, but Samsung's lawyers are morons who didn't submit that evidence until it was too late. 2. This was evidence that Apple could have refuted if they did a careful search, so Samsung's lawyers tried to get the evidence in as late as possible so that Apple wouldn't have time to find out what's wrong with it. 3. This is evidence that Samsung always knew was rubbish, so they intentionally submitted it after the deadline, hoping that people would think that Samsung is treated unfairly when it is refused, and again not giving Apple a chance to refute it.
I can no longer push "play all" because it tries to play music that may not be on the device, if I'm on a wifi is just starts playing music that I might not want on my device at all or worse, burn up cell data with a switch buried far into the settings menu that makes it a pain to enable and disable freely.
Have you tried a smart playlist that filters by "download status"?
According to the article: "Like iTunes Match, Amazonâ(TM)s Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity."
Who would want 256 kilobyte per second, which turns a normal CD into more than a Gigabyte?
So you are going to criminalize thought crimes? Is it better to hold back all your anger until you snap and take out everyone in your office or is it better to get it off your chest and let people tell you it's wrong? If you criminalize hate speech people will hold on to it until they can no longer take it.
In that case, maybe someone like that should be preemptively shot, since they are not fit for human civilisation?
Who cares about Apple OS's? The whole company sucks and so do their overpriced products. I hear it sucks ass to work at Apple. Its very cutthroat and the company that makes their hardware, Foxconn, literally has nets outside the windows to save would-be jumpers from committing suicide.
But that's the IRS we're talking about, and if you dig a little deeper, it is quite scary what powers they have in various countries. But for normal companies, using this data would be a big no-no under the kind of data protection and privacy acts we have around here.
Since you are talking about German IRS, they have the duty and huge powers to find out what your income is. They don't have any right to use this information except to get the right amount of tax from you, and possibly fine you or prosecute you for cheating on your taxes. I don't quite know what you would find scary about that.
Sounds like a misunderstanding, in which the author is trying to profit from by complaining. There are a number of approved iBooks where Amazon in the main focus, rather than just a few mentions.
There is a paragraph in the AppStore guidelines that basically says "if your app is rejected and you complain, then we may reconsider. If you moan in public, that is not going to help." I would interpret it as "if you complain about the app store in public, then the app store will sadly learn how to live without you".
FTFY. Why would Apple want to hand a free phone to thieves to make legitimate customers buy another one?
To those who didn't quite understand what you said: If that happened, then Apple would have given out two phones (one to the thief, one to the customer) while getting only one payment. Not a good deal.
I agree, sandboxing has been a bitch. Should be able to turn it off for apps the user trusts...
The user can choose to install and run applications that are not sandboxed. Apple just doesn't sell or distribute such apps on the app store. Once an app works sandboxed, there is no point in being able to turn the sandbox off.
But sandboxing is not only about the user trusting an app. I may trust that an app is not intentionally malicious. That doesn't mean it can't have bugs that could be exploited by a hacker, and at that point sandboxing means that the hacked application is _still_ restricted by the sandbox.
And as a developer you can (and should) split your app into parts so that the complicated parts that are more likely to be attackable cannot actually do any harm. Like your image reading code that could be hacked by a maliciously designed image file would be sandboxed so that it can't do anything but return valid images, so an attacker would be stuck in a sandbox that can't actually do anything bad.
Back on-topic, you're point about it being all people, not just Americans, is spot-on. There is an international freedom movement growing. Did you know there are Italian "TEA Parties", as well as Serbian, Georgian, British, and about 15 other national TEA Party movements? There are reported to be 20 of them meeting this weekend in Dallas, TX.
At the meetings of Britsh "TEA Parties" you usually find rabbits, dormice and mad hatters. At the US meetings, the rabbits and dormice are missing.
The problem is when Apple is forbidding APIs to be used if you do not distribute the application on the Mac App Store.
These are APIs that allow the user to store things on servers that Apple is paying for. So it's not just "using an API", it is "using infrastructure that is paid for by Apple".
Slashdot Mirror
The density of humans per car is already too low. I live in Mexico City, a 25 million people city. There has long been a campain to reduce the use of single-driver cars, but the campain is never strong enough.
I want to go to point X. Being too lazy to walk ten metres, I drive around for half an hour until I find a parking spot. With a self driving car, the car can drop me off exactly where I want to go and leave the area going somewhere where parking spaces are easier to find. Self driving cars can also park closely together because they don't need to leave space on the side for the driver to enter, and they can park blocking other self driving cars, because when the other car needs to leave, the blocking car can get out of the way.
According to passenger vehicle stats from NHTSA (2009) [dot.gov] and Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], I calculate that there is a 1 in 49 chance that a particular passenger vehicle will be in an accident in a year (5.211 million accidents to 254.4 million registered vehicles). That means that the odds of any vehicle being in an accident in 23 years is close to half.
Actually, the number of cars involved in accidents is a lot higher than the number of accidents. My guess would be 60% to 80% higher.
I had to pull a numerical methods textbook off the shelf and show them the Newton-Raphson iterative method.
Challenge: Find a third degree polynomial and a starting point where Newton-Raphson fails.
For the download one, the calculation simply is, "How much of the download is done? How long did it take? Assume the rest will happen at the same rate and extrapolate."
That's what iTunes does when you download multiple items. And it's bloody stupid. If you buy five songs, and it downloads up to three simultaneously, it assumes that each download on its own will run at a constant rate. But that is of course wrong once it is down to two songs, and then to one song, because the speed _per download_ increases. It also doesn't display any time for those songs that are still queued up. All this could be predicted much better.
They are absolutely right. Free speech rights should allow them to tell any lies, misleading stories, and so on. On the other hand, consumer protection requires them to follow their free-speech-right guaranteed lies by factually correct statements.
Like: The cheque is in the post. No, it isn't, and you would be stupid if you believe it. Our network is the best in the country. No, it isn't. Our own numbers prove that it is the worst.
A sufficiently sized bomb drilled into the middle of the asteroid would with ease break it up into smaller chunks. All those chunks individually would still hit the planet, but if the chunks are sufficiently small you dramatically increase their surface area and the amount they burn up as they enter the atmosphere. The end result would be a few tsunamis eliminating a few coastal cities, maybe a nuclear disaster in Japan, and an otherwise enduring humanity.
They were talking about an object with a diameter of 1,000 km. That's bigger than the largest known asteroid (Ceres). And if you managed to split it into one billion pieces, you would have one billion pieces 1 km in size each. The Tunguska explosing was probably caused by an object less than 100 meters in size.
According to the DMCA process, the hosting company must take-down "claimed" infringing content. Then the victim has the right to respond and say "This does not infringe copyright. We are following the lending rules laid-down by Amazon, B&N, and the Authors Guild. This ie perfectly legal."
Let us clarify this: The hosting company doesn't have to do anything. However, they want to behave in such a way that they are not involved in any copyright disagreement. If they behave according to the DMCA process, then they are safe and neither side can sue them. If they don't behave according to the DMCA process, then they cannot be sued for not following the DMCA process, but they can be sued for copyright infringement - of course only if there was copyright infringement.
Slight problem: the Prada was referenced in the '677 patent [uspto.gov]. I.e. The patent was awarded with full awareness of the LG Prada phone, meaning that the LG phone must have been different enough so as not to invalidate the claims of Apple's design patent.
So that would mean that anybody could make an exact copy of the LG Prada phone, and Apple could not sue them (well of course you can sue for anything, but they couldn't possibly win). And of course LG could sue. Or you could pay LG some money for the right to make an exact copy of the LG Prada, and you would be safe.
It'd be quite entertaining if Scripps Local News did this entirely on purpose, to raise awareness of the abusability of these procedures.
If the NASA plays hardball, this "Scripps Local News" will be majorly f***ed. Slashdotters are complaining all the time about the DMCA act. However, sending a DMCA notice when you don't own the copyright and when you are not representing the copyright holder is a criminal offense.
Thought about the problem in the context of my MacBook. The (conflicting) goals would be: 1. I want to be able to wipe my MacBook remotely when it is stolen. 2. I want to be able to do this even when I forgot or lost important information to identify myself. 3. I don't want a hacker to remotely destroy the information on my Mac.
Obviously the first step is to have a backup. If you don't have a backup, you are f***ed. If you have a backup, worst case you buy a new MacBook, install the backup, and you're done. The problem is that Apple (or whoever controls remote wiping) cannot possibly distinguish between cases (2) and (3). So you have the choice of allowing thieves to empty your bank accounts even though Apple could have destroyed the info, or allowing hackers to remotely wipe your computer.
With encrypted hard drives, there would be a way around this (kind of). Apple's volume encryption uses a primary key that is stored on your hard drive in encrypted form, and a secondary key that is used to decrypt the primary key. You are given the secondary key when the hard drive is encrypted, and you can write it down and put it into your safe. And then you have the password that you enter, which is used to decrypt the secondary password. Remote wiping is easy: Just wipe the encrypted primary key, and there is no way to reconstruct it. Now the alternative: When you convince Apple to remotely wipe the computer, they could generate a key and store it at Apple, then encrypt the encrypted primary key again with that key. The hard drive cannot be read. To access it, you'd have to go to an Apple Store in person with proper ID, and then the can remove the second encryption. Inconvenient obviously, but not as bad as permanently wiped.
Goodbye RIM, no one will remember you in 3 years.
RIM will be remembered in text books for the next 50 years, as an example how to go from market leader to insignificant in a very short time.
PJ addressed this in her post at Groklaw, but very basically information that is already in the public domain can not effect the court, as the jury has already been instructed to avoid news and any other external information source containing information about the trial. Samsung's press release didn't contain anything that wasn't already in the public domain.
Unfortunately, PJ and Groklaw stopped being an impartial source a while ago. Anyone who repeats the "rounded rectangle" nonsense cannot be considered impartial.
That mockup is based on something SONY told them. So it sure sounds like someone at sony had this idea as well.
Well, no. Jony Ive asked a fellow designer "what would the iPhone look like if Sony designed it"? There was no input from Sony on the design. The result was a combination of the iPhone design, as it existed at that time, plus what the designer believed would be typical for a Sony design.
Even more unsure how this evidence can be dismissed by a judge. It's important.
If it is important, then please explain why Samsung produced it after the deadline. There are three logical explanations: 1. This evidence was good evidence, but Samsung's lawyers are morons who didn't submit that evidence until it was too late. 2. This was evidence that Apple could have refuted if they did a careful search, so Samsung's lawyers tried to get the evidence in as late as possible so that Apple wouldn't have time to find out what's wrong with it. 3. This is evidence that Samsung always knew was rubbish, so they intentionally submitted it after the deadline, hoping that people would think that Samsung is treated unfairly when it is refused, and again not giving Apple a chance to refute it.
I can no longer push "play all" because it tries to play music that may not be on the device, if I'm on a wifi is just starts playing music that I might not want on my device at all or worse, burn up cell data with a switch buried far into the settings menu that makes it a pain to enable and disable freely.
Have you tried a smart playlist that filters by "download status"?
According to the article: "Like iTunes Match, Amazonâ(TM)s Cloud Player keeps copies of songs at 256 kilobytes per second, even if the original version was lower-fidelity."
Who would want 256 kilobyte per second, which turns a normal CD into more than a Gigabyte?
So you are going to criminalize thought crimes? Is it better to hold back all your anger until you snap and take out everyone in your office or is it better to get it off your chest and let people tell you it's wrong? If you criminalize hate speech people will hold on to it until they can no longer take it.
In that case, maybe someone like that should be preemptively shot, since they are not fit for human civilisation?
Who cares about Apple OS's? The whole company sucks and so do their overpriced products. I hear it sucks ass to work at Apple. Its very cutthroat and the company that makes their hardware, Foxconn, literally has nets outside the windows to save would-be jumpers from committing suicide.
The jealousy. The utter jealousy.
But that's the IRS we're talking about, and if you dig a little deeper, it is quite scary what powers they have in various countries. But for normal companies, using this data would be a big no-no under the kind of data protection and privacy acts we have around here.
Since you are talking about German IRS, they have the duty and huge powers to find out what your income is. They don't have any right to use this information except to get the right amount of tax from you, and possibly fine you or prosecute you for cheating on your taxes. I don't quite know what you would find scary about that.
Sounds like a misunderstanding, in which the author is trying to profit from by complaining. There are a number of approved iBooks where Amazon in the main focus, rather than just a few mentions.
There is a paragraph in the AppStore guidelines that basically says "if your app is rejected and you complain, then we may reconsider. If you moan in public, that is not going to help." I would interpret it as "if you complain about the app store in public, then the app store will sadly learn how to live without you".
FTFY. Why would Apple want to hand a free phone to thieves to make legitimate customers buy another one?
To those who didn't quite understand what you said: If that happened, then Apple would have given out two phones (one to the thief, one to the customer) while getting only one payment. Not a good deal.
I agree, sandboxing has been a bitch. Should be able to turn it off for apps the user trusts...
The user can choose to install and run applications that are not sandboxed. Apple just doesn't sell or distribute such apps on the app store. Once an app works sandboxed, there is no point in being able to turn the sandbox off.
But sandboxing is not only about the user trusting an app. I may trust that an app is not intentionally malicious. That doesn't mean it can't have bugs that could be exploited by a hacker, and at that point sandboxing means that the hacked application is _still_ restricted by the sandbox.
And as a developer you can (and should) split your app into parts so that the complicated parts that are more likely to be attackable cannot actually do any harm. Like your image reading code that could be hacked by a maliciously designed image file would be sandboxed so that it can't do anything but return valid images, so an attacker would be stuck in a sandbox that can't actually do anything bad.
Back on-topic, you're point about it being all people, not just Americans, is spot-on. There is an international freedom movement growing. Did you know there are Italian "TEA Parties", as well as Serbian, Georgian, British, and about 15 other national TEA Party movements? There are reported to be 20 of them meeting this weekend in Dallas, TX.
At the meetings of Britsh "TEA Parties" you usually find rabbits, dormice and mad hatters. At the US meetings, the rabbits and dormice are missing.
The problem is when Apple is forbidding APIs to be used if you do not distribute the application on the Mac App Store.
These are APIs that allow the user to store things on servers that Apple is paying for. So it's not just "using an API", it is "using infrastructure that is paid for by Apple".
It also looks like ones I've seen from Peets, from Jittery Joes, and from McDonalds. My point is that there's only so many ways to make a coffee mug.
Among the idiotic things posted here, this is among the more idiotic ones. There are collectors who have thousands of totally different coffee mugs.