Pay attention. The issue I have with Apple is their not admitting iAds-blocking apps to the store. They are thus requiring you to view ads if you want to remain in their walled garden and enjoy the full range of apps.
God, you are so stupid. If an application shows iAds advertisements then it does that because the developer decided that it should do that, so that the developer makes some money. If the developer decides that you shouldn't see iAds advertisements then you don't see them. If you don't want to see these adverts, don't download apps that show advertisement. There is no f***ing way that Apple builds an infrastructure so that you see advertisements that are vetted from advertisers guaranteed to actually make payments to the developer and then allows some app to interfere with this. In addition, if Apple wanted to allow iAd blocking then it would be part of the OS. These ads come through an API provided by Apple, from servers under Apple's controls. Apple could easily enable users to turn iAds off. They don't because developers need money to produce apps. If you don't want apps, don't complain to Apple, buy a Windows 7 phone.
A mix CD is *NOT* infringement. That's an obvious case of Fair Use.
Copyright law disagrees with you. "Fair use" would be a CD on which you record your own one hour blog about the evolution of rock music from 1960 to 2010 and add a few ten second samples to clarify the points that you are making. A mix CD containing _complete_ songs or large parts of songs is definitely not "Fair use".
I guess this explains OSX Server walking away from ZFS because of "license issues". Since Apple walked away in the 11th hour, I wonder if there is some real validity to NetApp's argument (at least legally).
I think the question for Apple was: How many engineers are needed to implement ZFS in a quality that it can be shipped, how many Macs would Apple sell more because of this, are there things that these engineers could do that benefits Apple more, then take into account that shipping ZFS invites a legal battle which again costs money and wastes time that could be better used elsewhere.
In fact, combining two existing technologies is patent worthy if the combination is new, useful, nonobvious, and adequately described in the patent application.
It's just that the rules on nonobviousness have recently changed. If the two combined technologies do what one would expect that they should do, then combining them is obvious. It is now considered obvious that someone with ordinary skill trying to solve a problem would go through related patents and try to combine existing inventions that sound like they should fit the bill. Not patentable. Someone with more than ordinary skill would combine thinks where an ordinary skilled person would _not_ expect them to produce the desired result and come up with a patentable invention.
Now who wants to write a rasterizer for non-rectangular pixels... any takers?
I don't think that would be particularly difficult. A 3D rasterizer takes 3D triangles and transforms them onto the plane, then produces pixel coordinates within this triangle - that is, it finds pixels (of whatever shape, currently rectangular), assigns real (x, y) coordinates to each pixel, for example the center of each pixel, and transforms those back to 3D coordinates and starts calculating a color value. For hexagonal pixels the only difference is that the coordinates are (n, m) for even n and (n, m + 1/2) for odd n. No problem at all.
Well when reading the news item as in "no electronics needed" how many people on Slashdot came up with the same idea in their head before reading the article?
I personally found the idea quite obvious _after_ reading the article, but it never, ever occurred to me before, even though it is an obvious thing to want. Further, I don't think the patent was rewarded for the abstract idea of creating mechanical connections that work correctly with a battery plugged in either way, but for the actual implementation, which is likely not trivial. If it was as obvious as you think, why has no camera maker implemented it before? What about the slightly easier "put a picture somewhere that makes it really obvious which is the right way"? Even that is not commonly implemented.
They already own many senators. That's why they're upset - they bought the DCMA, and now they found out it's not entirely what they thought they were buying.
Maybe the politicians who wrote the DMCA actually _did_ know what they were doing. So far on Slashdot the DMCA has always be argued against as a simple way for people to prevent publication of things they don't want published. The way it really works is:
1. Anyone who thinks a copyrighted work of theirs is published without permission has to file a correct DMCA takedown notice.
2. A formally incorrect DMCA takedown notice can be ignored.
3. A formally correct DMCA takedown notice filed without having the copyright yourself opens the filer to severe legal problems.
4. An ISP has to react to a formally correct DMCA takedown notice, and that is enough to avoid all legal responsibility.
Corporations commit fraud every day. Hell my second-to-last job only paid me 51 weeks out of the 52 week contract. But when I challenged them, they claimed they had no timecard (even though I typed it in myself), and therefore owe me nothing since there's no proof I was present from January 4 to 8 (my last week). In other words my boss and some HR manager lied, and said they never saw me at my desk for those five days. (Which of course I was and my secretary can attest to that.)
In my first job (with a huge company in Germany), I worked for three months to make some money between school and university. They paid everything just fine. Then they told me that I hadn't taken any holiday, and since their employees got 24 days per year, I got six days holiday for my three months work. Then they told me that since I hadn't taken the holiday, these six days were overtime, so they paid 50% on top of that. Nine days paid, almost half a months salary that they paid me quite unexpectedly. Just a different attitude, I guess.
I call name collision. Please refer to the iPhone/iPad operating system as something other than IOS because Cisco used it first.
We are all glad that you noticed so quickly. However, the name of the iPhone and iPad operating system _is_ iOS and Apple is paying Cisco license fees for the use of the name. So since Cisco agrees with Apple's use of the name, I think that settles the matter. And all of this was known weeks ago:-(
What kind of distance are you talking about? Straight line distance (straight through the earth)? Distance on a great circle? In that case, just assuming some idealised shape of the earth or actual shape?
Despite what everyone thinks (and how it seems to the uninformed) it very likely was accidental. If I was tasked to correlate Access Points to their locations, the simplest way would be to dump raw wireless traffic to one file, and raw GPS data to another. Later, you can zip them both up and run some analysis, and get the data you want out
Your definition of "accidental" is very strange. You are saying that you would have, not accidentally but fully intentionally, chosen the simplest method which would be collecting all wireless traffic including private data that you are not allowed to collect. When laws make a difference between doing something intentionally or without intent, the question is not whether you intended to break the law or not, the question is whether you intended to do what you did. I would hope that these Google engineers had no intent to break the law, but they certainly had intent to collect the data. Sloppy programming doesn't matter. It was entirely foreseeable that software collecting WiFi data _might_ record private information, and that is illegal, so they should have taken care of it properly. And anyway, Google threw away all encrypted traffic.
Negatory, Ghost Rider. The $150,000 figure is the highest amount of statutory damages [wikipedia.org] available under the Copyright Act [copyright.gov] for willful infringement of a copyrighted work. Statutory damages have no bearing on actual damages. That's why commercially unsuccessful movie producers have gone around suing alleged infringers: the plaintiffs don't have to show any actual damages to get a huge payday.
To demonstrate how ridiculous that number is, in the case Apple vs. Psystar with Psystar selling hundreds of computers with illegal copies of MacOS X installed, Apple asked for $30,000 for copyright infringement by copying MacOS X 10.5, and another $30,000 for copying MacOS X 10.6. Not per copy, but for all copies made. Apparently Apple didn't see making computers, cracking OS X copy protection, duplicating the software, installing it, and then selling it, as "willful infringement", but just as ordinary infringement.
Knuth didn't get it wrong
on
Knuth Got It Wrong
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You should have read a bit further to the bit with B-trees and B*-trees.
No, they aren't. Two totally different things. JB advertises an item at a certain price, but they refuse to sell at that price... you must buy extra stuff. Apple has always said that the iPhone can only be used with AT&T, and OS X can only be purchased for a Mac, and that apps can only be purchased through their app store.
Say there are two stores side by side selling iPads. I go to the first store, they say "you can buy an iPad, but only if you buy all this other stuff that you don't want". So I go the the other store and buy the iPad there. That's what is called competition. Now say in the first store they say "you have to buy all this other stuff because it is Apple's policy". I believe it. No point to go to the second store because they would have the same policy, right? But the sales guy lied. They made me buy stuff I didn't want by lying to you. They got my money by lying to me. That's called fraud.
In the Apple case mentioned earlier it appears that Apple refused to give the person a refund unless he said he wouldn't discuss the issue. The person had all the rights in the world to trash on Apple and their product, but he wasn't going to be getting his refund if he did that. This is a prime case of Apple dickery but it isn't a breach of civil liberties.
Except that if he trashed Apple enough then Apple would probably have had a very, very close look at the iPod in question, and if the problems turned out to be caused by external damage blamed incorrectly on Apple, then he could have been in trouble. Look what happened to the epidemic of "exploding" iPods which strange enough didn't explode from the inside out, but with damage starting at the outside.
Probably why life insurance companies don't pay out on suicide.
I thought the reason would be that by killing themselves the insured person would intentionally create the situation where the insurance has to pay, same as a fire insurance won't pay if you set your own home on fire. Always wanted to know: When a person with life insurance is murdered, can the insurance company sue the murderer for the money they have to pay out?
actually, from the standpoint of getting results, I'm sure that stopping compensating people for committing suicide will reduce the suicide rate. And I agree that a much more effective strategy would be finding out why it is that being dead is better than working at your plant.
The idea behind stopping compensation is that people don't commit suicide because they think being dead is better than working at their plant, they commit suicide because they think being dead + huge compensation payment to their family is better than working at their plant + no compensation payment. Let's compare: Every day your wife tells you that you are a lousy dad and your salary doesn't feed her and the children, but if you killed yourself then they are even worse off -> no suicide. Every day your wife tells you that you are a lousy dad and your salary doesn't feed her and the children, but if you killed yourself they would be able to lead a decent life with the compensation money -> possible suicide.
Or how about "No, I'm not going to buy my kid a POS Mac."? I'm sure at least one Windows or Linux adminstrator's child goes to high school there.
Don't you think a Windows administrator would be very happy to know that they can put their feet up when they come home from work and don't have to administer their kid's computers as well?
Someone downloading 65GB per month needs to do over 2GB a day. Let's just say they can keep themselves in front of their phones and clicking away downloading for 12 hours a day ever day.
I would bet there are some idiots who are using iPlayer 24 hours a day and leave it running overnight while they are asleep, because they can. "Hey, I paid for unlimited data, so my phone can play movies 24 hours a day while nobody is watching".
If we are training kids for the future we should definitely have them use a windows/linux variant.
Is using Windows so hard that you need training to use it? In that case, we shouldn't be training the kids to use it, we should train them to say "no" if their boss wants them to use windows. But you may not have noticed a subtle change: While the CTOs still use their Windows PCs more or less unhappily, their CEO bosses use iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Airs. When these kids leave school, the change won't be so subtle anymore.
The resolution of the new iPhone isn't just 318 or whatever dpi. First, it uses antialiasing like probably everyone does, and then it can use the old LCD trick for black and white text that lets you position pixels with 1/3rd pixel precision because each pixel consists of separate red, green and blue pixels like most phones (some apparently save some money by using a sequence of green/red/red/green/blue/blue which reduces the resolution).
Not saying that this is better than what most other phones do, but it means that you can't just trust a quick calculation (which also assumes better than 20/20 view). You really have to look at the screen and decide for yourself.
According to TFA, they are saying that the break-in "incurred costs of $800,000."
Which is a blatant lie. His break-in wasn't what caused the cost. What caused the cost was that when some British idiot managed to break into military computers looking for information about UFOs, the military figured out that these computers were wide open to attacks by real criminals, and had to spend $800,000 to secure them. That was money that needed to be spent anyway, and they are lucky that the first person to break in was looking for UFOs and not for something else.
The guys problem is that he made the US military look like idiots, and they don't like that. That is his real crime, showing to the world that the US military IT is run by a bunch of muppets, and even though there is no official law against that, it is one of the worst crimes he could have committed.
How are we not affected by the dictatorship of Steve Jobs? We're not allowed to use GPL'd software;
It seems that some GPL'd software was available for the iPhone, with the developer giving source code to everyone asking for it, and everybody could port it to any other phone, and everybody who had the things needed to develop software for the iPhone could get the source code and improve on it and put it on their own phones or on the App store. And then the FSF complained to Apple, and instead of waiting for a lawsuit where Apple could prove the FSF wrong, they removed the application from the store.
Slashdot Mirror
Pay attention. The issue I have with Apple is their not admitting iAds-blocking apps to the store. They are thus requiring you to view ads if you want to remain in their walled garden and enjoy the full range of apps.
God, you are so stupid. If an application shows iAds advertisements then it does that because the developer decided that it should do that, so that the developer makes some money. If the developer decides that you shouldn't see iAds advertisements then you don't see them. If you don't want to see these adverts, don't download apps that show advertisement. There is no f***ing way that Apple builds an infrastructure so that you see advertisements that are vetted from advertisers guaranteed to actually make payments to the developer and then allows some app to interfere with this. In addition, if Apple wanted to allow iAd blocking then it would be part of the OS. These ads come through an API provided by Apple, from servers under Apple's controls. Apple could easily enable users to turn iAds off. They don't because developers need money to produce apps. If you don't want apps, don't complain to Apple, buy a Windows 7 phone.
A mix CD is *NOT* infringement. That's an obvious case of Fair Use.
Copyright law disagrees with you. "Fair use" would be a CD on which you record your own one hour blog about the evolution of rock music from 1960 to 2010 and add a few ten second samples to clarify the points that you are making. A mix CD containing _complete_ songs or large parts of songs is definitely not "Fair use".
I guess this explains OSX Server walking away from ZFS because of "license issues". Since Apple walked away in the 11th hour, I wonder if there is some real validity to NetApp's argument (at least legally).
I think the question for Apple was: How many engineers are needed to implement ZFS in a quality that it can be shipped, how many Macs would Apple sell more because of this, are there things that these engineers could do that benefits Apple more, then take into account that shipping ZFS invites a legal battle which again costs money and wastes time that could be better used elsewhere.
In fact, combining two existing technologies is patent worthy if the combination is new, useful, nonobvious, and adequately described in the patent application.
It's just that the rules on nonobviousness have recently changed. If the two combined technologies do what one would expect that they should do, then combining them is obvious. It is now considered obvious that someone with ordinary skill trying to solve a problem would go through related patents and try to combine existing inventions that sound like they should fit the bill. Not patentable. Someone with more than ordinary skill would combine thinks where an ordinary skilled person would _not_ expect them to produce the desired result and come up with a patentable invention.
Now who wants to write a rasterizer for non-rectangular pixels... any takers?
I don't think that would be particularly difficult. A 3D rasterizer takes 3D triangles and transforms them onto the plane, then produces pixel coordinates within this triangle - that is, it finds pixels (of whatever shape, currently rectangular), assigns real (x, y) coordinates to each pixel, for example the center of each pixel, and transforms those back to 3D coordinates and starts calculating a color value. For hexagonal pixels the only difference is that the coordinates are (n, m) for even n and (n, m + 1/2) for odd n. No problem at all.
Well when reading the news item as in "no electronics needed" how many people on Slashdot came up with the same idea in their head before reading the article?
I personally found the idea quite obvious _after_ reading the article, but it never, ever occurred to me before, even though it is an obvious thing to want. Further, I don't think the patent was rewarded for the abstract idea of creating mechanical connections that work correctly with a battery plugged in either way, but for the actual implementation, which is likely not trivial. If it was as obvious as you think, why has no camera maker implemented it before? What about the slightly easier "put a picture somewhere that makes it really obvious which is the right way"? Even that is not commonly implemented.
They already own many senators. That's why they're upset - they bought the DCMA, and now they found out it's not entirely what they thought they were buying.
Maybe the politicians who wrote the DMCA actually _did_ know what they were doing. So far on Slashdot the DMCA has always be argued against as a simple way for people to prevent publication of things they don't want published. The way it really works is:
1. Anyone who thinks a copyrighted work of theirs is published without permission has to file a correct DMCA takedown notice.
2. A formally incorrect DMCA takedown notice can be ignored.
3. A formally correct DMCA takedown notice filed without having the copyright yourself opens the filer to severe legal problems.
4. An ISP has to react to a formally correct DMCA takedown notice, and that is enough to avoid all legal responsibility.
Corporations commit fraud every day. Hell my second-to-last job only paid me 51 weeks out of the 52 week contract. But when I challenged them, they claimed they had no timecard (even though I typed it in myself), and therefore owe me nothing since there's no proof I was present from January 4 to 8 (my last week). In other words my boss and some HR manager lied, and said they never saw me at my desk for those five days. (Which of course I was and my secretary can attest to that.)
In my first job (with a huge company in Germany), I worked for three months to make some money between school and university. They paid everything just fine. Then they told me that I hadn't taken any holiday, and since their employees got 24 days per year, I got six days holiday for my three months work. Then they told me that since I hadn't taken the holiday, these six days were overtime, so they paid 50% on top of that. Nine days paid, almost half a months salary that they paid me quite unexpectedly. Just a different attitude, I guess.
I call name collision. Please refer to the iPhone/iPad operating system as something other than IOS because Cisco used it first.
We are all glad that you noticed so quickly. However, the name of the iPhone and iPad operating system _is_ iOS and Apple is paying Cisco license fees for the use of the name. So since Cisco agrees with Apple's use of the name, I think that settles the matter. And all of this was known weeks ago :-(
These phones are not for people like you or me. They are for our grandmothers.
And I thought they were for the grandchildren who don't know anything about how tech works.
What kind of distance are you talking about? Straight line distance (straight through the earth)? Distance on a great circle? In that case, just assuming some idealised shape of the earth or actual shape?
Then why is Apple suing HTC? Is this just another case of Apple picking on the little guy?
What "little guy" do you think Apple has been "picking on"?
Despite what everyone thinks (and how it seems to the uninformed) it very likely was accidental. If I was tasked to correlate Access Points to their locations, the simplest way would be to dump raw wireless traffic to one file, and raw GPS data to another. Later, you can zip them both up and run some analysis, and get the data you want out
Your definition of "accidental" is very strange. You are saying that you would have, not accidentally but fully intentionally, chosen the simplest method which would be collecting all wireless traffic including private data that you are not allowed to collect. When laws make a difference between doing something intentionally or without intent, the question is not whether you intended to break the law or not, the question is whether you intended to do what you did. I would hope that these Google engineers had no intent to break the law, but they certainly had intent to collect the data. Sloppy programming doesn't matter. It was entirely foreseeable that software collecting WiFi data _might_ record private information, and that is illegal, so they should have taken care of it properly. And anyway, Google threw away all encrypted traffic.
Negatory, Ghost Rider. The $150,000 figure is the highest amount of statutory damages [wikipedia.org] available under the Copyright Act [copyright.gov] for willful infringement of a copyrighted work. Statutory damages have no bearing on actual damages. That's why commercially unsuccessful movie producers have gone around suing alleged infringers: the plaintiffs don't have to show any actual damages to get a huge payday.
To demonstrate how ridiculous that number is, in the case Apple vs. Psystar with Psystar selling hundreds of computers with illegal copies of MacOS X installed, Apple asked for $30,000 for copyright infringement by copying MacOS X 10.5, and another $30,000 for copying MacOS X 10.6. Not per copy, but for all copies made. Apparently Apple didn't see making computers, cracking OS X copy protection, duplicating the software, installing it, and then selling it, as "willful infringement", but just as ordinary infringement.
You should have read a bit further to the bit with B-trees and B*-trees.
No, they aren't. Two totally different things. JB advertises an item at a certain price, but they refuse to sell at that price... you must buy extra stuff. Apple has always said that the iPhone can only be used with AT&T, and OS X can only be purchased for a Mac, and that apps can only be purchased through their app store.
Say there are two stores side by side selling iPads. I go to the first store, they say "you can buy an iPad, but only if you buy all this other stuff that you don't want". So I go the the other store and buy the iPad there. That's what is called competition. Now say in the first store they say "you have to buy all this other stuff because it is Apple's policy". I believe it. No point to go to the second store because they would have the same policy, right? But the sales guy lied. They made me buy stuff I didn't want by lying to you. They got my money by lying to me. That's called fraud.
In the Apple case mentioned earlier it appears that Apple refused to give the person a refund unless he said he wouldn't discuss the issue. The person had all the rights in the world to trash on Apple and their product, but he wasn't going to be getting his refund if he did that. This is a prime case of Apple dickery but it isn't a breach of civil liberties.
Except that if he trashed Apple enough then Apple would probably have had a very, very close look at the iPod in question, and if the problems turned out to be caused by external damage blamed incorrectly on Apple, then he could have been in trouble. Look what happened to the epidemic of "exploding" iPods which strange enough didn't explode from the inside out, but with damage starting at the outside.
Probably why life insurance companies don't pay out on suicide.
I thought the reason would be that by killing themselves the insured person would intentionally create the situation where the insurance has to pay, same as a fire insurance won't pay if you set your own home on fire. Always wanted to know: When a person with life insurance is murdered, can the insurance company sue the murderer for the money they have to pay out?
actually, from the standpoint of getting results, I'm sure that stopping compensating people for committing suicide will reduce the suicide rate. And I agree that a much more effective strategy would be finding out why it is that being dead is better than working at your plant.
The idea behind stopping compensation is that people don't commit suicide because they think being dead is better than working at their plant, they commit suicide because they think being dead + huge compensation payment to their family is better than working at their plant + no compensation payment. Let's compare: Every day your wife tells you that you are a lousy dad and your salary doesn't feed her and the children, but if you killed yourself then they are even worse off -> no suicide. Every day your wife tells you that you are a lousy dad and your salary doesn't feed her and the children, but if you killed yourself they would be able to lead a decent life with the compensation money -> possible suicide.
Or how about "No, I'm not going to buy my kid a POS Mac."? I'm sure at least one Windows or Linux adminstrator's child goes to high school there.
Don't you think a Windows administrator would be very happy to know that they can put their feet up when they come home from work and don't have to administer their kid's computers as well?
Someone downloading 65GB per month needs to do over 2GB a day. Let's just say they can keep themselves in front of their phones and clicking away downloading for 12 hours a day ever day.
I would bet there are some idiots who are using iPlayer 24 hours a day and leave it running overnight while they are asleep, because they can. "Hey, I paid for unlimited data, so my phone can play movies 24 hours a day while nobody is watching".
If we are training kids for the future we should definitely have them use a windows/linux variant.
Is using Windows so hard that you need training to use it? In that case, we shouldn't be training the kids to use it, we should train them to say "no" if their boss wants them to use windows. But you may not have noticed a subtle change: While the CTOs still use their Windows PCs more or less unhappily, their CEO bosses use iPhones and iPads and MacBooks Airs. When these kids leave school, the change won't be so subtle anymore.
The resolution of the new iPhone isn't just 318 or whatever dpi. First, it uses antialiasing like probably everyone does, and then it can use the old LCD trick for black and white text that lets you position pixels with 1/3rd pixel precision because each pixel consists of separate red, green and blue pixels like most phones (some apparently save some money by using a sequence of green/red/red/green/blue/blue which reduces the resolution).
Not saying that this is better than what most other phones do, but it means that you can't just trust a quick calculation (which also assumes better than 20/20 view). You really have to look at the screen and decide for yourself.
According to TFA, they are saying that the break-in "incurred costs of $800,000."
Which is a blatant lie. His break-in wasn't what caused the cost. What caused the cost was that when some British idiot managed to break into military computers looking for information about UFOs, the military figured out that these computers were wide open to attacks by real criminals, and had to spend $800,000 to secure them. That was money that needed to be spent anyway, and they are lucky that the first person to break in was looking for UFOs and not for something else.
The guys problem is that he made the US military look like idiots, and they don't like that. That is his real crime, showing to the world that the US military IT is run by a bunch of muppets, and even though there is no official law against that, it is one of the worst crimes he could have committed.
How are we not affected by the dictatorship of Steve Jobs? We're not allowed to use GPL'd software;
It seems that some GPL'd software was available for the iPhone, with the developer giving source code to everyone asking for it, and everybody could port it to any other phone, and everybody who had the things needed to develop software for the iPhone could get the source code and improve on it and put it on their own phones or on the App store. And then the FSF complained to Apple, and instead of waiting for a lawsuit where Apple could prove the FSF wrong, they removed the application from the store.
So who exactly is responsible?