Let's use the example of "not a Patent troll" NTP. A very friendly write up (in Businessweek, iirc) noted that this company wasn't a patent troll because they guy who'd had the idea of push e-mail and worked in telecom for years, had the idea and patented it, then put it in a drawer for "later use"
In this case, I think both RIMM and NTP were working very hard in that field and patented everything they could think of. One of them was commercially successful, the other wasn't. The successful one was sued. If NTP has been the successful one, RIMM would have sued them and would have won.
All the motion vectors or deltas are calculated against the closest previous base frame. Theoretically you can parallelize the decoding into the total number of base frames your video stream has. If you are decoding a 60 minute video encoded using a base frame every 1s you can split the job into 3600 independent tasks.
The problem is that you usually don't actually want to _decode_ a video stream, you want to display it. So having thread #3599 decode the frames that you want to see one hour from now is quite pointless. You will always have to keep decoded frames in RAM until they are displayed (and are not needed when decoding further frames), so that is limiting you.
1080p needs about 3 MByte per frame, that is 90MByte at 30 fps. Lets say you have two cores, each capable of decoding 20 fps. You'd start them both decoding the first and the second set of frames, and wait a while until you start displaying. You might have to stop decoding because you run out of memory to store more frames (and you wouldn't want them to be paged out; 90 MByte per second is a bit much for paging). I guess you need enough RAM to store the longest sequence of frames.
Now if you are transcoding from one format to another, that is a different matter.
I know you are trying to be funny, but you are wrong. The NDA itself is publicly available and can therefore be discussed freely. The iPhone SDK is what you cannot discuss in public.
So with this NDA issue, I can't buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application... So what the hell good is an SDK you can't talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?
Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There's no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone's been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?
You are, like Mr. Yager who published the article, and like the fine editor who had to use the words "Gag Order", talking out of your arse.
I have plenty of people who I can ask for help with iPhone coding problems - they work at the same company and have signed the same NDA. If I _really_ need help it will cost some money, but Apple will help me. But most of the problems come from the fact that some stupid kids want to write iPhone applications and they have never used Cocoa, and they have never used Objective-C. 99 percent of their problems can be solved by deleting the word "iPhone" from the problem description, and then it becomes a plain old MacOS X/Objective C/Cocoa question that can be discussed anywhere.
Oh...that's right, because it still has quite a ways to go for double digit status in base 16
Not at all. In base 16, one "percent" would be one part in 0x100, that is 1/256. 8.5 percent decimal = 8.5 / 100 decimal = 21.8 / 256 decimal = about 0x15.d / 0x100 hexadecimal = 15.d percent hexadecimal.
They can recall all they want I don't think the ones who bought the machine are obligate to return the unit. Correct me if I am wrong, but once a consumer buys a product it is theirs and the maker of that product doesn't really have any authority as to say what the consumer wants can and cannot do with it, not even ask them to return it (if it's not a safety issue) as the consumer paid for the product. At least that is the way I see it.
Let's say I sell a package consisting of a DVD player and ten DVDs. Unfortunately, the DVDs are all pirated. You buy a package. Then the copyright holders find out, sue me, and get a complete list of my customers. Do you think you have the right to keep the illegal copies?
This is going to turn out rather interesting. If Psystar hires even the most mediocre of lawyers, they simply need to argue that Apple is illegally typing their software to their hardware, which they are. Prior to Leopard, you couldn't by Mac OS X for intel without a computer so there was no issue. However, with Leopard this has changed. The fact that it runs in the first place on Psystar's hardware proves the illegal tying argument. The end result is Apple is going to be forced to deal with clones again, but it will be the best thing that ever happened to Apple but the worst for Jobs since he likes keeping things closed. Personally, I've been anticipating and awaiting this lawsuit since Apple went Intel.
You know what happens with that argument? It is completely irrelevant. Apple sues Psystar because Psystar is infringing on Apple's copyright. The only relevant questions are: Did Psystar make copies of Apple software? Did they have permission from Apple to do so? Does Apple own the copyrights? Anything else is completely irrelevant. Even if there were illegal tying, how would that in any way alter anything about copyright infringement?
It might go hand in hand, but downloading isn't the same as "making available" which is the angle they seem to be going for.
You are leaving out some words that are important. Copyright law makes it illegal to make a copyrighted work "available for distribution". But "making available for distribution" and "making available for download" are two completely different things: "Making available for distribution" means offering the work to a _distributor_ (like a wholesaler, a chain of record stores, Apple's iTunes Music Store etc. ) It is very, very unlikely that any file sharer is making anything "available for distribution".
So the suicide of this girl is the fault of another parent, not the girl's own parents?
Where were this girl's parents? Were they monitoring what she did online to make sure she was safe? Surely they knew (if they were in the least bit involved with her life) that she was upset.
If I follow your reasoning correctly, then Lori Drew should be thrown into jail and we all blame it on her lawyer.
I realize that this was likely a rhetorical question, but IMO, the rulemakers do not live in the same world as us slashdotters. I would bet that many of the lawmakers still have VCRs hooked up, and the clock has been blinking 12:00 for 10 years. The lawmakers are just like every other "old" person. They call thier son/nephew/grandson for technical support when thier computer isn't working. They do not have a myspace profile, instant messanger account, or any account for that matter beyond email.
Well, absolutely. We should leave important decisions to slashdotters with their huge level of life experience and maturity.
I would bet there are more judges who can remember what is like to be dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend than/.ers.
And it is a shame that your mum/dad/uncle/granddad didn't show you how to use a spelling checker. Maybe they forgot because they don't need it themselves.
And if you have the ability to "personally" check how one's vote counted, then your boss has the ability to "personally" check how you voted. If you have a private username or something that only you know, but your boss knows you have it, it is very easy to set up a "show me how you voted or you lose your job" scenario.
There are systems where this is impossible. A simple system goes like this: You fill out _three_ voting forms. In these three forms, you have to give one vote to each candidate, and two votes for the candidate you actually want to elect. After the forms are submitted, you pick _one_ that is printed out and given to you as a receipt, including a random identification number. If your boss wants you to vote for candidate X, you can show him the receipt with a vote for X and you can still vote any way you like. All votes with their random id numbers are then published on the Internet; if the counters wanted to forge a single vote there would be a chance of 1 in 3 that someone has a receipt that can prove fraud.
That is correct, yet it is what Apple was trying to do with the iPhone. If you did a jailbreak on the iPhone they were voiding your warranty. It was pointed out in a couple billion dollar class action suits that this is not permissible (to void a warranty if the work you did didn't contribute to damaging the actual unit).
Your warranty will be void if you replace the hard drive and damage the computer in the process of replacing the hard drive (at least to the degree of that damage). Your warranty will not be void if you replace the hard drive without causing any damage in the process. But when you "jailbreak" the iPhone, you are playing around with the firmware, and modifying the firmware _can_ lead to permanent damage. It can also happen that an Apple firmware upgrade hoses your iPhone if the firmware was not in the expected state. It is not the "jailbreaking" that voids the warranty, it is the damage to the firmware that you caused yourself in the process that does it.
The only potentially tricky part is moving the system to the new hard disk. I don't know how I would do this on a Mac off the top of my head. I assume I'd probably go and autopartition the new volume; on Linux I'd then boot single-user, mount the new volume(s) and start using tar | tar with the -p flag to preserve permissions. (On Linux I also create an exclude file to reference, to skip things like tmp, dev, proc, and sys.) So I could see that being difficult. But relatively few people actually upgrade laptops - most of the time, by the time you need an upgrade, you need (or at least could really use) a whole computer upgrade anyway.
The easiest way for MacOS X is if you bought a case for an external drive at the same time. Open the MacBook, remove old drive, put new drive inside, put old drive into external case. Boot from external drive. Start "Disk Utility" (comes with MacOS X), copy the whole external drive to the internal one. Another easiest way: If you use Time Machine for backups, put the new drive in, boot from the Leopard installer DVD, and tell it to restore the drive from the Time Machine backup.
Not unless they've recently changed the Macbooks. When I had one on loan for a short while I pulled the hard drive just to see how accessible it was, and IIRC it was held in place solely by friction and the little flap thing that covers the back of the drive and the memory slots. No sleds to speak of.
You have been tricked. The thing that you pulled out was a tiny hard drive screwed into a sled made of some rather thin metal. To swap hard drives, you have to remove it from that sled and put the new one in. A Torx screw driver would be nice, but since you have the best possible access to those screws and they don't have to do much you can get them out and back in repeatedly without the Torx.
Not really. We just need to enforce our existing antitrust laws. Apple gets away with this sort of stuff because the market is so broken. If there were multiple, practical alternatives for desktop OS's with fast paced innovation driven by competition, Apple would not even be able to bundle their OS and hardware without losing money. The only way they get away with charging as much as they do for some of their upgrades is by leveraging OS X. Fix the market and they'll unbundle those products out of economic necessity.
Now that is nonsense. You are absolutely free to buy memory and hard drives wherever you want, and they are easy enough to install yourself. Some models make it a bit harder, but you can buy different models. You can attach and monitor you want, and if you are looking for a graphics card and don't find what you want, complain to the graphics card manufacturers.
Yes, but are we talking the same model and production run of RAM? Some others are saying that Apple uses higher-quality parts, which would make their higher markup a little more equivalent, if not fully on-par.
RAM comes in two qualities: Good quality, and garbage. Quality RAM is a bit more expensive than cheap garbage, but not by much.
I think you're missing the point. Dell already charges a hefty markup on components -- a year back, I priced the same RAM as 2x more expensive at Dell than at Newegg. So this basically means that Apple's markup is that much beyond the conventional markup that comparable companies provide.
THe car analogy would be a do-it-yourself oil change for $14, a Ford and Toyota dealers charging $30 for the service, and Mercedes dealers charging $90 for the same service.
You priced Dell RAM one year ago? Since then, Dell has been convicted for consumer fraud, their sales have been dropping and HP is eating them for breakfast. Maybe that caused them to drop their RAM prices, to get their customers back? The other thing is that with Dell it is absolutely impossible to get reproducible prices. I'm in the UK; it is not even possible for me to check US prices so I have no chance to find out what they charge for RAM in the USA. If you see Apple offering something for a certain price then anyone in your country can get it for that price. If you quote a price from a Dell webpage, many people will find it impossible to get the same price.
Your NFCG is about 10 times more competent with a PC or PC laptop than with an Apple. Most of them would be lost if you asked them to upgrade your MacBook. You can pay the NFCG now and pay extra to fix their mistakes later or you can pay Apple service now.
Adding memory or replacing the hard drive on a MacBook is trivial (as long as you have a size 0 phillips screwdriver). Anyone who can hold a screwdriver and is not legally blind can do it.
Besides on the autobahn going 75 mph feels like you are in a traffic jam. 125 mph is pretty normal on the autobahn and 185 mph is not unheard of, of course you should not go those speed when the roads are busy.
Just a reminder: If you are involved in an accident going at 80mph (130 km/h) or more, it is deemed to be your fault unless you can prove that the accident was unavoidable even at lower speed. So if you go at 125 mph, passing other cars, and you crash into someone who pulls out without realizing you were coming, it is _your_ fault. Most likely it will be considered "gross negligence" instead of just negligence, which means your insurance doesn't pay. So you'll pay for the damage to your car out of your own pocket, and the insurance will do whatever they can to recover the damage to the other car from you.
Don't know where you live, but in the UK you can get complete sets of locations of bridges, nicely sorted into collections like "9 ft 6 inch", "9 ft 7 inch" etc. etc. Just take the right collection for your truck, copy it on your Tom Tom, and it will warn you ahead of every low bridge.
Uhh, what exactly, is the point, of encryption when you can't verify the key? If you haven't verified the key, there is no guarantee that your data isn't being seen by a Man-In-The-Middle, so the encryption might not be doing anything useful for you at all. With a self-certified certificate, the ones who can see your data are the receiver, and the Man-in-The-Middle. Without a certificate, the ones who can see your data are everybody and their dog. That makes some difference in how difficult it is to spy on you. With a self-certified certificate, spying on you is not impossible, but harder.
It gets worse when you are afraid of an attacker that doesn't target you specifically, but tries to target thousands of people. With self-certified certificate, spying on one person is difficult; spying on many is very, very hard. Without any encryption, spying on thousand persons is a lot, lot easier. It's like the difference between leaving your door wide open and having the door locked, with the key hidden under a stone.
I don't really see the difference between OS X privilege escalation using a password prompt and sudo or Vista using UAC. If you allow the program admin privileges you're screwed, and I believe it's just as easy to implement this on Vista as it is on OS X. On linux it might be a little bit harder because different distro's use different sudo configurations. Once the trojan runs, you are quite screwed anyway, whether it has root privileges or not. It's different if you have a server with hundred users; as long as root isn't vulnerable, only one out of the hundred users can get hosed. But if you are using a home computer with a single user, even with user privileges only the trojan has access to hundred percent of all user data and can delete it, modify it, encrypt it and blackmail the user, or mail it somewhere else. In that case I don't care about the system; all that can be easily restored. For home users, there isn't much difference between a root exploit and a user only exploit.
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Let's use the example of "not a Patent troll" NTP. A very friendly write up (in Businessweek, iirc) noted that this company wasn't a patent troll because they guy who'd had the idea of push e-mail and worked in telecom for years, had the idea and patented it, then put it in a drawer for "later use"
In this case, I think both RIMM and NTP were working very hard in that field and patented everything they could think of. One of them was commercially successful, the other wasn't. The successful one was sued. If NTP has been the successful one, RIMM would have sued them and would have won.
All the motion vectors or deltas are calculated against the closest previous base frame. Theoretically you can parallelize the decoding into the total number of base frames your video stream has. If you are decoding a 60 minute video encoded using a base frame every 1s you can split the job into 3600 independent tasks.
The problem is that you usually don't actually want to _decode_ a video stream, you want to display it. So having thread #3599 decode the frames that you want to see one hour from now is quite pointless. You will always have to keep decoded frames in RAM until they are displayed (and are not needed when decoding further frames), so that is limiting you.
1080p needs about 3 MByte per frame, that is 90MByte at 30 fps. Lets say you have two cores, each capable of decoding 20 fps. You'd start them both decoding the first and the second set of frames, and wait a while until you start displaying. You might have to stop decoding because you run out of memory to store more frames (and you wouldn't want them to be paged out; 90 MByte per second is a bit much for paging). I guess you need enough RAM to store the longest sequence of frames.
Now if you are transcoding from one format to another, that is a different matter.
This forum is in contempt of the NDA.
I know you are trying to be funny, but you are wrong. The NDA itself is publicly available and can therefore be discussed freely. The iPhone SDK is what you cannot discuss in public.
So with this NDA issue, I can't buy a book, read a forum, get any assistance at all with writing my iPhone application... So what the hell good is an SDK you can't talk about? Is this cellular fight club or something?
Apple, fix this shit. Really. Fix it now. There's no excuse for not letting the NDA go, no way that it protects you. The phone's been jailbroken, it _will_ be unlocked, so why stifle development?
You are, like Mr. Yager who published the article, and like the fine editor who had to use the words "Gag Order", talking out of your arse.
I have plenty of people who I can ask for help with iPhone coding problems - they work at the same company and have signed the same NDA. If I _really_ need help it will cost some money, but Apple will help me. But most of the problems come from the fact that some stupid kids want to write iPhone applications and they have never used Cocoa, and they have never used Objective-C. 99 percent of their problems can be solved by deleting the word "iPhone" from the problem description, and then it becomes a plain old MacOS X/Objective C/Cocoa question that can be discussed anywhere.
Oh...that's right, because it still has quite a ways to go for double digit status in base 16
Not at all. In base 16, one "percent" would be one part in 0x100, that is 1/256. 8.5 percent decimal = 8.5 / 100 decimal = 21.8 / 256 decimal = about 0x15.d / 0x100 hexadecimal = 15.d percent hexadecimal.
They can recall all they want I don't think the ones who bought the machine are obligate to return the unit. Correct me if I am wrong, but once a consumer buys a product it is theirs and the maker of that product doesn't really have any authority as to say what the consumer wants can and cannot do with it, not even ask them to return it (if it's not a safety issue) as the consumer paid for the product. At least that is the way I see it.
Let's say I sell a package consisting of a DVD player and ten DVDs. Unfortunately, the DVDs are all pirated. You buy a package. Then the copyright holders find out, sue me, and get a complete list of my customers. Do you think you have the right to keep the illegal copies?
This is going to turn out rather interesting. If Psystar hires even the most mediocre of lawyers, they simply need to argue that Apple is illegally typing their software to their hardware, which they are. Prior to Leopard, you couldn't by Mac OS X for intel without a computer so there was no issue. However, with Leopard this has changed. The fact that it runs in the first place on Psystar's hardware proves the illegal tying argument. The end result is Apple is going to be forced to deal with clones again, but it will be the best thing that ever happened to Apple but the worst for Jobs since he likes keeping things closed. Personally, I've been anticipating and awaiting this lawsuit since Apple went Intel.
You know what happens with that argument? It is completely irrelevant. Apple sues Psystar because Psystar is infringing on Apple's copyright. The only relevant questions are: Did Psystar make copies of Apple software? Did they have permission from Apple to do so? Does Apple own the copyrights? Anything else is completely irrelevant. Even if there were illegal tying, how would that in any way alter anything about copyright infringement?
It might go hand in hand, but downloading isn't the same as "making available" which is the angle they seem to be going for.
You are leaving out some words that are important. Copyright law makes it illegal to make a copyrighted work "available for distribution". But "making available for distribution" and "making available for download" are two completely different things: "Making available for distribution" means offering the work to a _distributor_ (like a wholesaler, a chain of record stores, Apple's iTunes Music Store etc. ) It is very, very unlikely that any file sharer is making anything "available for distribution".
So the suicide of this girl is the fault of another parent, not the girl's own parents?
Where were this girl's parents? Were they monitoring what she did online to make sure she was safe? Surely they knew (if they were in the least bit involved with her life) that she was upset.
If I follow your reasoning correctly, then Lori Drew should be thrown into jail and we all blame it on her lawyer.
I realize that this was likely a rhetorical question, but IMO, the rulemakers do not live in the same world as us slashdotters. I would bet that many of the lawmakers still have VCRs hooked up, and the clock has been blinking 12:00 for 10 years. The lawmakers are just like every other "old" person. They call thier son/nephew/grandson for technical support when thier computer isn't working. They do not have a myspace profile, instant messanger account, or any account for that matter beyond email.
Well, absolutely. We should leave important decisions to slashdotters with their huge level of life experience and maturity.
/.ers.
I would bet there are more judges who can remember what is like to be dumped by a boyfriend or girlfriend than
And it is a shame that your mum/dad/uncle/granddad didn't show you how to use a spelling checker. Maybe they forgot because they don't need it themselves.
And if you have the ability to "personally" check how one's vote counted, then your boss has the ability to "personally" check how you voted. If you have a private username or something that only you know, but your boss knows you have it, it is very easy to set up a "show me how you voted or you lose your job" scenario.
There are systems where this is impossible. A simple system goes like this: You fill out _three_ voting forms. In these three forms, you have to give one vote to each candidate, and two votes for the candidate you actually want to elect. After the forms are submitted, you pick _one_ that is printed out and given to you as a receipt, including a random identification number. If your boss wants you to vote for candidate X, you can show him the receipt with a vote for X and you can still vote any way you like. All votes with their random id numbers are then published on the Internet; if the counters wanted to forge a single vote there would be a chance of 1 in 3 that someone has a receipt that can prove fraud.
That is correct, yet it is what Apple was trying to do with the iPhone. If you did a jailbreak on the iPhone they were voiding your warranty. It was pointed out in a couple billion dollar class action suits that this is not permissible (to void a warranty if the work you did didn't contribute to damaging the actual unit).
Your warranty will be void if you replace the hard drive and damage the computer in the process of replacing the hard drive (at least to the degree of that damage). Your warranty will not be void if you replace the hard drive without causing any damage in the process. But when you "jailbreak" the iPhone, you are playing around with the firmware, and modifying the firmware _can_ lead to permanent damage. It can also happen that an Apple firmware upgrade hoses your iPhone if the firmware was not in the expected state. It is not the "jailbreaking" that voids the warranty, it is the damage to the firmware that you caused yourself in the process that does it.
The only potentially tricky part is moving the system to the new hard disk. I don't know how I would do this on a Mac off the top of my head. I assume I'd probably go and autopartition the new volume; on Linux I'd then boot single-user, mount the new volume(s) and start using tar | tar with the -p flag to preserve permissions. (On Linux I also create an exclude file to reference, to skip things like tmp, dev, proc, and sys.) So I could see that being difficult. But relatively few people actually upgrade laptops - most of the time, by the time you need an upgrade, you need (or at least could really use) a whole computer upgrade anyway.
The easiest way for MacOS X is if you bought a case for an external drive at the same time. Open the MacBook, remove old drive, put new drive inside, put old drive into external case. Boot from external drive. Start "Disk Utility" (comes with MacOS X), copy the whole external drive to the internal one. Another easiest way: If you use Time Machine for backups, put the new drive in, boot from the Leopard installer DVD, and tell it to restore the drive from the Time Machine backup.
Not unless they've recently changed the Macbooks. When I had one on loan for a short while I pulled the hard drive just to see how accessible it was, and IIRC it was held in place solely by friction and the little flap thing that covers the back of the drive and the memory slots. No sleds to speak of.
You have been tricked. The thing that you pulled out was a tiny hard drive screwed into a sled made of some rather thin metal. To swap hard drives, you have to remove it from that sled and put the new one in. A Torx screw driver would be nice, but since you have the best possible access to those screws and they don't have to do much you can get them out and back in repeatedly without the Torx.
Not really. We just need to enforce our existing antitrust laws. Apple gets away with this sort of stuff because the market is so broken. If there were multiple, practical alternatives for desktop OS's with fast paced innovation driven by competition, Apple would not even be able to bundle their OS and hardware without losing money. The only way they get away with charging as much as they do for some of their upgrades is by leveraging OS X. Fix the market and they'll unbundle those products out of economic necessity.
Now that is nonsense. You are absolutely free to buy memory and hard drives wherever you want, and they are easy enough to install yourself. Some models make it a bit harder, but you can buy different models. You can attach and monitor you want, and if you are looking for a graphics card and don't find what you want, complain to the graphics card manufacturers.
Yes, but are we talking the same model and production run of RAM? Some others are saying that Apple uses higher-quality parts, which would make their higher markup a little more equivalent, if not fully on-par.
RAM comes in two qualities: Good quality, and garbage. Quality RAM is a bit more expensive than cheap garbage, but not by much.
Don't you need a Torx #8 to get the drive off its sled?
Would be nice to have, but if you don't have one, then you don't need it :-)
I think you're missing the point. Dell already charges a hefty markup on components -- a year back, I priced the same RAM as 2x more expensive at Dell than at Newegg. So this basically means that Apple's markup is that much beyond the conventional markup that comparable companies provide.
THe car analogy would be a do-it-yourself oil change for $14, a Ford and Toyota dealers charging $30 for the service, and Mercedes dealers charging $90 for the same service.
You priced Dell RAM one year ago? Since then, Dell has been convicted for consumer fraud, their sales have been dropping and HP is eating them for breakfast. Maybe that caused them to drop their RAM prices, to get their customers back? The other thing is that with Dell it is absolutely impossible to get reproducible prices. I'm in the UK; it is not even possible for me to check US prices so I have no chance to find out what they charge for RAM in the USA. If you see Apple offering something for a certain price then anyone in your country can get it for that price. If you quote a price from a Dell webpage, many people will find it impossible to get the same price.
How the hell did i get modded as a troll for not wanting to void my warranty? Morons.
Probably because everyone knows that opening a Mac doesn't void the warranty.
Your NFCG is about 10 times more competent with a PC or PC laptop than with an Apple. Most of them would be lost if you asked them to upgrade your MacBook. You can pay the NFCG now and pay extra to fix their mistakes later or you can pay Apple service now.
Adding memory or replacing the hard drive on a MacBook is trivial (as long as you have a size 0 phillips screwdriver). Anyone who can hold a screwdriver and is not legally blind can do it.
I would like to make organ donation compulsory for these people. At least they can be of some use after they crash.
I like the idea of compulsory organ donation, but why wait until after they crash, when the organs might get damaged?
Besides on the autobahn going 75 mph feels like you are in a traffic jam. 125 mph is pretty normal on the autobahn and 185 mph is not unheard of, of course you should not go those speed when the roads are busy.
Just a reminder: If you are involved in an accident going at 80mph (130 km/h) or more, it is deemed to be your fault unless you can prove that the accident was unavoidable even at lower speed. So if you go at 125 mph, passing other cars, and you crash into someone who pulls out without realizing you were coming, it is _your_ fault. Most likely it will be considered "gross negligence" instead of just negligence, which means your insurance doesn't pay. So you'll pay for the damage to your car out of your own pocket, and the insurance will do whatever they can to recover the damage to the other car from you.
Don't know where you live, but in the UK you can get complete sets of locations of bridges, nicely sorted into collections like "9 ft 6 inch", "9 ft 7 inch" etc. etc. Just take the right collection for your truck, copy it on your Tom Tom, and it will warn you ahead of every low bridge.
It gets worse when you are afraid of an attacker that doesn't target you specifically, but tries to target thousands of people. With self-certified certificate, spying on one person is difficult; spying on many is very, very hard. Without any encryption, spying on thousand persons is a lot, lot easier. It's like the difference between leaving your door wide open and having the door locked, with the key hidden under a stone.