Exactly. Every time I get a new camera, I have no idea which way the rechargeable battery gets inserted. Yet I have no worries that I might be inserting it the wrong way, because I know the batteries are designed to only fit one way (or at least every one I've ever handled is designed that way). So my expectation is that if I try putting it in and it seems to fit, then it must be the right way, because only an idiot engineer would design it otherwise.
I expect AAA batteries to usually fit both ways. But I do expect a device with the batteries the wrong way round to stay undamaged and to just not work, so "insert batteries without looking", "try and it doesn't work", "remove batteries the other way round" should be a safe option.
Forgive me for being the odd duck out here, but what ever happened to "Personal Responsibility"? I, too, think it's wrong for the hackers to release that information. It sounds like a despicable act of misguided morality to me, but that's irrelevant.
I'm all for catching these hackers and holding each of them personally responsible to the maximum possible. I'm also all for holding the management of this f***ing company personally responsible.
Strange that some people apply "personal responsibility" only to people who don't have the power to influence the outcome.
Why do I tell this story? Well a 2 year old with down syndrome could design a better antenna than what is shipped with 90% of routers on the market. The vast majority of them emphasise form over function integrating their all in one antennas supposedly capable of the wide bands needed for wireless N as a little wire run around the inside of their modern looking cases.
What do you think makes an antenna _better_? You typically have 11 channels to chose, but only three can be used simultaneously without interference. Now anyone can design a _stronger_ antenna for their router, but that just means more interference with all the other routers in your neighbourhood. I don't want my neighbour's routers interfere with my home, so I shouldn't use WiFi that interferes with their homes.
What helps is for example a directional antenna, that aims at the device that is connected and gives a good connection with that device, without affecting anyone else.
If MS were selling routers everyone here would be screaming MURDER and SPYWARE etc. Google does... oh that is because they want to advance technology as they care about all of us and never do any evil. BS Google will always spy and sell your information and push ads. That is who they are and what they do.
Apple sells WiFi routers.
Actually, I bought one because the BT HomeHub 5 provided for free by British Telecoms is just absolute rubbish, trying to be "helpful" when it loses its internet connection and failing miserably. (The Apple Airport Express + BT modem doesn't seem to lose its connection, and if it does by unplugging the modem, it reports truthfully that the internet connection is gone).
What amazes me are some reactions to Google's marketing bullshit. So it picks a channel that is less congested. Which router hasn't done that in the last ten years? But can I attach a printer, a hard drive, does it have directional antennas that improve _your_ WiFi without starting a war with the neighbours, like the Airport Extreme? From what I have seen, it isn't anywhere near good value for money.
"An armed society is a polite society- Robert Anson Heinlein".
So if I see an armed person somewhere in the USA, and I tell him that in my opinion only idiots who try to compensate for their sexual inadequacies would carry guns, should I expect a polite answer?
To figure out exactly what model Macbook you're getting, you need the serial number.
Apple Menu, "About This Mac", shows you the OS version, the model name and year (for example "MacBook Pro Late 2010"), processor with clock speed, RAM, graphics card, serial number, and a button "System Report" which gives you more details than you likely want to know.
"The current maximum of two years is not enough to deter infringers, lawmakers argue." That's what torrentfreak claims. If you look at the actual text of the consultation, that is not true.
What we have here is actually a consultation. If you have anything to say about it, you are free to write to the UK government. If you manage to write down your thoughts in a coherent manner, responding to the question asked and not to what you image is asked, and to argue your case, chances are that your opinion will be heard.
But the main reason is not the lack of deterence, it is the fact that physical copyright infringement (like commercially producing and selling fake Gucci handbags or Rolex watches) has a maximum penalty of ten years jail, and there is no good reason why commercially producing and selling illegal copies of software, videos, music or books shouldn't have the same maximum penalties.
TEN years imprisonment for personal copyright infringement, what is actually a civil tort, when other actual crimes so often result in sentences less than that?
Well, no. Ten years prison for the worst possible cases of commercial and criminal copyright infringement. Let's say someone decides to start selling the complete Pink Floyd catalog without having any license to do so, and makes $20 million over the next years. To you think ten years in jail is too much for that? Absolutely not.
Instead of getting all excited about the headlines, you should read the actual text of the law and figure out what the suggested punishment for "personal copyright infringement" (say making a copy of a single CD and giving it to a friend, without payment) actually is.
I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day. There is a problem when soldiers on patrol in an active combat zone have more restrictive rules of engagement than police officers cruising down a city street. Stop being law enforcement officers. GO back to being peace officers.
Many years ago, I took an advanced first aid course. Eight hours training. Q. You are driving along a road. You see a car wrapped around a tree and a person outside of that car heavily bleeding. What is the first thing you do? A. The first thing you do is to take the warning triangle out of the boot of your car, open it up, and put it up 100 meters away from the accident, clearly visible, to avoid some idiot killing you while you give first aid. The bleeding victim doesn't come first. The safety of the helper comes first.
Safety of police officers must come first, or you run out of police officers rather quickly.
I drive on heavily congested roads for about 12 miles. My car says I average 22 mph....
I have two friends working within two miles of my place, and google maps says the distance is 25 minutes by car. I make that about 5 mph. You could save stress and probably gain a lot of time.
They shouldn't, but companies have discovered that if they state a patent as a machine that implements said algorithm, then any other machine that implements it, even if done in a completely different way, is considered to be infringing. An computers that run a program are considered machines that implement an algorithm.
My suggestion is something I would call "compulsory counter licensing". Let's say we have two video codecs A and B, each with some patents, and each using some feature that is patented by the other. Then the owner of A should be able to offer B the use of A's patents in exchange of A's use of B's patent, and that offer is compulsory - B has to accept. And likewise, B can use A's patents for free by allowing A the use of B's patents in exchange. Again, compulsory.
See how that would work out in the video codec market: Suddenly, everyone who invested some serious work and got patents is free to use the results of their work.
Why can't the GPU do the work? Or do video codecs require special kinds of processing that GPUs are bad at?
All video codecs require very specialised processing. It's rather trivial if the GPU is designed to do it, and quite awful if it isn't. Have a look here for example for the deblocking filter in h.264:
It doesn't require any very complicated hardware. But it requires hardware that does _exactly_ what the h.264 spec says, and if the hardware doesn't provide that, you're in trouble.
Even if he had proof that the murderer would be caught if they got into the phone, it wouldn't change anything. We could also prove that the murderer would be caught if every human was issued a body-cam and the penalty for not maintaining it properly was death. Just because something catches murderers doesn't mean it should be done.
There's also a good chance that there is nothing on these phones leading to the murderer. And there is a good chance that _if_ Apple and Google could decrypt the data, and it was known (which it would be after the first murder conviction), then people wouldn't leave incriminating evidence on their phones.
They're subsidizing the fares to gain market share. Customers are currently charged less than drivers are paid, so Uber's cut is negative. This makes it easier to grow because it lets them offer more aggressive pricing to customers, undercutting taxi fares, while still paying drivers high enough rates to rapidly grow their pool of drivers.
There was the story that in China, "drivers" ask their mates, friends and family to book drives, which they never perform. So mom books a drive, pays $10 to Uber, which pays $12 to the driver, and then the driver and his mom split the $2 profit, with no actual driving ever happening.
The point however is that in a closed source system, Samsung could not have found and fixed the bug themselves.
Says who? If a similar bug happened with Samsung SSD drives connected to Macintosh computers, Samsung as a highly esteemed supplier of parts would most likely be given any help needed to fix the problem. They can't just download the software, but one phone call from the right person at Samsung to the right person at Apple would fix that.
Some cases where websites work very badly with a password manager (in my case the one built into Safari):
One case where the stupid website didn't accept the password that Safari suggested. Because it had some "special character" in it. What's annoying is that Safari remembers the password and suggests it again, BEFORE the site rejects it. Bummer.
Another case where the password is used in different places, and Safari cannot figure out that the two different places belong to the same site and should use the same password. What happens: On the second site, Safari suggests a different password which obviously doesn't work...
Apart from not working because of some stupid websites, it seems to be safe. The problem mentioned with password use on some public computer doesn't happen, because the passwords can only be used on my Macs, iPads and iPhones (but on all of them), but not on a random third-party device.
...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.
It's because you want a standard to include the best possible technology, and a lot of that is patented. But most of the time that's fine, because a standard only becomes a standard if everyone accepts it as a standard, and that only happens if licensing conditions are acceptable to the huge majority of players in the market. That's what happened with MP3 and h.264; they are free for small companies, cheap for medium sized companies and relatively cheap for big companies.
And that's the problem here, some guys with patents wanting unacceptable amounts of money. So the expectation is that the potential licensors will say "f*** that, we stay with h.264" and the standard is dead in the water, until these patent holders irrevocably agree to cut down their license fee demands. And make more money by getting a small amount of money from everybody rather than getting a huge amount from nobody.
What does this have to do with software patents? It's about patents. There is nothing specific to software patents here. You have several patent holders, one set of patent holders who want to license their patents for cheap, and one set of patent holders who want to charge enormous amounts.
But on the other side, I bet that while some people will share robocars, most two car families will continue to own at least one robocar that they do not rent out. Renting a car out means it isn't always available and if you have two people + a family they will have sufficient need to keep one full time car.
Obviously if a family switches from two to one car they have already made 50% of the potential savings, so going from one to zero will save them less.
In many parts of the country, rust is what ends the life of a car. It doesn't really matter how much it is used, it will still rust away in your driveway. So in these parts of the country, it is best to extract as much use as you can from the car while you can.
It's not just the rust. Driving a cold engine causes much more wear and tear than a warmed up engine. If I drive three miles, and then the car takes nine more passengers one after the other and drives each for another three miles, it's not ten times the wear on the engine, because the nine other drive in perfect conditions with a warmed up engine. For the same reason, fuel consumption per mile goes down. Not that much, but the first three miles take twice as much fuel as the last three.
First off I own a car so I don't have to wait. No way in hell I'm waiting 1 minute when I want to go somewhere.
In the morning, instead of brushing your teeth, shaving, combing your hair and walking to the car, you call the car, brush your teeth, shave and comb your hair. And when you leave the house, there's the car waiting on the street, you don't even have to take it out of your drive.
And then there's the question how much that one minute wait is worth to you. Myself I think an attitude like that is quite anal.
here will ALWAYS be a full set of manual controls on EVERY car and truck, and you will ALWAYS be required to be trained, tested, licensed, and insured to operate one, so get over it! Ideas to the contrary are complete and total fantasy, and this Brad Templeton guy is just some jackass saying whatever he has to say to get free publicity.
Why? Let's start from the beginning: You have a computer, controlling engine and steering by wire. You can easily have a tiny remote control so you can do the steering by wire if the computer fails, or if it gets into a situation that it cannot handle (presumably short term). If the steering by wire fails, you send a pickup truck like you would now in case of a break down. If something goes wrong and there is no qualified driver, you call for help and a qualified driver arrives. These things are so rare that the slight inconvenience doesn't matter.
3. Legislators increase the minimum insurance requirements for *all* vehicles to match that of autonomous vehicles. Suddenly a $500/year policy isn't enough. It's now $5k.
You suffer from a huge misconception here, thinking that insurance with $10 million limit would have to be ten times more per year than one with a $250k limit. Not at all, as everyone driving in European countries with much higher limits will tell you.
The huge majority of accidents, but also the huge majority of total damage, is paid within the $250k limit. Whenever I had the choice between different limits (say 1 million or 2 million or 10 million Euros), the difference in cost is absolute peanuts.
Of course there may be a difference in the USA, because the amount of insurance cover is always equal to the amount that you get sued for. And again, European countries have very simple measures to prevent that from happening.
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Exactly. Every time I get a new camera, I have no idea which way the rechargeable battery gets inserted. Yet I have no worries that I might be inserting it the wrong way, because I know the batteries are designed to only fit one way (or at least every one I've ever handled is designed that way). So my expectation is that if I try putting it in and it seems to fit, then it must be the right way, because only an idiot engineer would design it otherwise.
I expect AAA batteries to usually fit both ways. But I do expect a device with the batteries the wrong way round to stay undamaged and to just not work, so "insert batteries without looking", "try and it doesn't work", "remove batteries the other way round" should be a safe option.
Forgive me for being the odd duck out here, but what ever happened to "Personal Responsibility"? I, too, think it's wrong for the hackers to release that information. It sounds like a despicable act of misguided morality to me, but that's irrelevant.
I'm all for catching these hackers and holding each of them personally responsible to the maximum possible. I'm also all for holding the management of this f***ing company personally responsible.
Strange that some people apply "personal responsibility" only to people who don't have the power to influence the outcome.
If you love someone, you don't hurt them by cheating behind their back.
That's the point of cheating behind someone's back: To avoid hurting them.
Why do I tell this story? Well a 2 year old with down syndrome could design a better antenna than what is shipped with 90% of routers on the market. The vast majority of them emphasise form over function integrating their all in one antennas supposedly capable of the wide bands needed for wireless N as a little wire run around the inside of their modern looking cases.
What do you think makes an antenna _better_? You typically have 11 channels to chose, but only three can be used simultaneously without interference. Now anyone can design a _stronger_ antenna for their router, but that just means more interference with all the other routers in your neighbourhood. I don't want my neighbour's routers interfere with my home, so I shouldn't use WiFi that interferes with their homes.
What helps is for example a directional antenna, that aims at the device that is connected and gives a good connection with that device, without affecting anyone else.
If MS were selling routers everyone here would be screaming MURDER and SPYWARE etc. Google does ... oh that is because they want to advance technology as they care about all of us and never do any evil. BS Google will always spy and sell your information and push ads. That is who they are and what they do.
Apple sells WiFi routers.
Actually, I bought one because the BT HomeHub 5 provided for free by British Telecoms is just absolute rubbish, trying to be "helpful" when it loses its internet connection and failing miserably. (The Apple Airport Express + BT modem doesn't seem to lose its connection, and if it does by unplugging the modem, it reports truthfully that the internet connection is gone).
What amazes me are some reactions to Google's marketing bullshit. So it picks a channel that is less congested. Which router hasn't done that in the last ten years? But can I attach a printer, a hard drive, does it have directional antennas that improve _your_ WiFi without starting a war with the neighbours, like the Airport Extreme? From what I have seen, it isn't anywhere near good value for money.
"An armed society is a polite society- Robert Anson Heinlein".
So if I see an armed person somewhere in the USA, and I tell him that in my opinion only idiots who try to compensate for their sexual inadequacies would carry guns, should I expect a polite answer?
To figure out exactly what model Macbook you're getting, you need the serial number.
Apple Menu, "About This Mac", shows you the OS version, the model name and year (for example "MacBook Pro Late 2010"), processor with clock speed, RAM, graphics card, serial number, and a button "System Report" which gives you more details than you likely want to know.
"The current maximum of two years is not enough to deter infringers, lawmakers argue." That's what torrentfreak claims. If you look at the actual text of the consultation, that is not true.
What we have here is actually a consultation. If you have anything to say about it, you are free to write to the UK government. If you manage to write down your thoughts in a coherent manner, responding to the question asked and not to what you image is asked, and to argue your case, chances are that your opinion will be heard.
But the main reason is not the lack of deterence, it is the fact that physical copyright infringement (like commercially producing and selling fake Gucci handbags or Rolex watches) has a maximum penalty of ten years jail, and there is no good reason why commercially producing and selling illegal copies of software, videos, music or books shouldn't have the same maximum penalties.
TEN years imprisonment for personal copyright infringement, what is actually a civil tort, when other actual crimes so often result in sentences less than that?
Well, no. Ten years prison for the worst possible cases of commercial and criminal copyright infringement. Let's say someone decides to start selling the complete Pink Floyd catalog without having any license to do so, and makes $20 million over the next years. To you think ten years in jail is too much for that? Absolutely not.
Instead of getting all excited about the headlines, you should read the actual text of the law and figure out what the suggested punishment for "personal copyright infringement" (say making a copy of a single CD and giving it to a friend, without payment) actually is.
I always get concerned whenever a police captains/spokemen/union reps says something to the effect of "our first priority is going home safely at night". Police's first priority should always making sure members of the public go home safely at the end of the day. There is a problem when soldiers on patrol in an active combat zone have more restrictive rules of engagement than police officers cruising down a city street. Stop being law enforcement officers. GO back to being peace officers.
Many years ago, I took an advanced first aid course. Eight hours training. Q. You are driving along a road. You see a car wrapped around a tree and a person outside of that car heavily bleeding. What is the first thing you do? A. The first thing you do is to take the warning triangle out of the boot of your car, open it up, and put it up 100 meters away from the accident, clearly visible, to avoid some idiot killing you while you give first aid. The bleeding victim doesn't come first. The safety of the helper comes first.
Safety of police officers must come first, or you run out of police officers rather quickly.
I drive on heavily congested roads for about 12 miles. My car says I average 22 mph....
I have two friends working within two miles of my place, and google maps says the distance is 25 minutes by car. I make that about 5 mph. You could save stress and probably gain a lot of time.
They shouldn't, but companies have discovered that if they state a patent as a machine that implements said algorithm, then any other machine that implements it, even if done in a completely different way, is considered to be infringing. An computers that run a program are considered machines that implement an algorithm.
My suggestion is something I would call "compulsory counter licensing". Let's say we have two video codecs A and B, each with some patents, and each using some feature that is patented by the other. Then the owner of A should be able to offer B the use of A's patents in exchange of A's use of B's patent, and that offer is compulsory - B has to accept. And likewise, B can use A's patents for free by allowing A the use of B's patents in exchange. Again, compulsory.
See how that would work out in the video codec market: Suddenly, everyone who invested some serious work and got patents is free to use the results of their work.
Why can't the GPU do the work? Or do video codecs require special kinds of processing that GPUs are bad at?
All video codecs require very specialised processing. It's rather trivial if the GPU is designed to do it, and quite awful if it isn't. Have a look here for example for the deblocking filter in h.264:
http://mrutyunjayahiremath.blo...
It doesn't require any very complicated hardware. But it requires hardware that does _exactly_ what the h.264 spec says, and if the hardware doesn't provide that, you're in trouble.
Even if he had proof that the murderer would be caught if they got into the phone, it wouldn't change anything. We could also prove that the murderer would be caught if every human was issued a body-cam and the penalty for not maintaining it properly was death. Just because something catches murderers doesn't mean it should be done.
There's also a good chance that there is nothing on these phones leading to the murderer. And there is a good chance that _if_ Apple and Google could decrypt the data, and it was known (which it would be after the first murder conviction), then people wouldn't leave incriminating evidence on their phones.
They're subsidizing the fares to gain market share. Customers are currently charged less than drivers are paid, so Uber's cut is negative. This makes it easier to grow because it lets them offer more aggressive pricing to customers, undercutting taxi fares, while still paying drivers high enough rates to rapidly grow their pool of drivers.
There was the story that in China, "drivers" ask their mates, friends and family to book drives, which they never perform. So mom books a drive, pays $10 to Uber, which pays $12 to the driver, and then the driver and his mom split the $2 profit, with no actual driving ever happening.
The point however is that in a closed source system, Samsung could not have found and fixed the bug themselves.
Says who? If a similar bug happened with Samsung SSD drives connected to Macintosh computers, Samsung as a highly esteemed supplier of parts would most likely be given any help needed to fix the problem. They can't just download the software, but one phone call from the right person at Samsung to the right person at Apple would fix that.
Some cases where websites work very badly with a password manager (in my case the one built into Safari):
One case where the stupid website didn't accept the password that Safari suggested. Because it had some "special character" in it. What's annoying is that Safari remembers the password and suggests it again, BEFORE the site rejects it. Bummer.
Another case where the password is used in different places, and Safari cannot figure out that the two different places belong to the same site and should use the same password. What happens: On the second site, Safari suggests a different password which obviously doesn't work...
Apart from not working because of some stupid websites, it seems to be safe. The problem mentioned with password use on some public computer doesn't happen, because the passwords can only be used on my Macs, iPads and iPhones (but on all of them), but not on a random third-party device.
...why any "standard" would include patented technology. Seems like a very stupid idea. About the same as copyrighting the spelling of words.
It's because you want a standard to include the best possible technology, and a lot of that is patented. But most of the time that's fine, because a standard only becomes a standard if everyone accepts it as a standard, and that only happens if licensing conditions are acceptable to the huge majority of players in the market. That's what happened with MP3 and h.264; they are free for small companies, cheap for medium sized companies and relatively cheap for big companies.
And that's the problem here, some guys with patents wanting unacceptable amounts of money. So the expectation is that the potential licensors will say "f*** that, we stay with h.264" and the standard is dead in the water, until these patent holders irrevocably agree to cut down their license fee demands. And make more money by getting a small amount of money from everybody rather than getting a huge amount from nobody.
Total number of lawsuits lost by Xiph for Vorbis, Opus, FLAC, Tarkin, Theora, etc.: 0
Total money that could be made by winning a lawsuit against Xiph: Zero. Why would anyone take them to court, when there is no money to be made?
Now if you convinced Netflix, Google, Apple, Microsoft etc. to replace all their codecs with Xiph codecs, you would see patent lawsuits rolling in.
This is the disadvantage of software patents.
What does this have to do with software patents? It's about patents. There is nothing specific to software patents here. You have several patent holders, one set of patent holders who want to license their patents for cheap, and one set of patent holders who want to charge enormous amounts.
But on the other side, I bet that while some people will share robocars, most two car families will continue to own at least one robocar that they do not rent out. Renting a car out means it isn't always available and if you have two people + a family they will have sufficient need to keep one full time car.
Obviously if a family switches from two to one car they have already made 50% of the potential savings, so going from one to zero will save them less.
In many parts of the country, rust is what ends the life of a car. It doesn't really matter how much it is used, it will still rust away in your driveway. So in these parts of the country, it is best to extract as much use as you can from the car while you can.
It's not just the rust. Driving a cold engine causes much more wear and tear than a warmed up engine. If I drive three miles, and then the car takes nine more passengers one after the other and drives each for another three miles, it's not ten times the wear on the engine, because the nine other drive in perfect conditions with a warmed up engine. For the same reason, fuel consumption per mile goes down. Not that much, but the first three miles take twice as much fuel as the last three.
First off I own a car so I don't have to wait. No way in hell I'm waiting 1 minute when I want to go somewhere.
In the morning, instead of brushing your teeth, shaving, combing your hair and walking to the car, you call the car, brush your teeth, shave and comb your hair. And when you leave the house, there's the car waiting on the street, you don't even have to take it out of your drive.
And then there's the question how much that one minute wait is worth to you. Myself I think an attitude like that is quite anal.
here will ALWAYS be a full set of manual controls on EVERY car and truck, and you will ALWAYS be required to be trained, tested, licensed, and insured to operate one, so get over it! Ideas to the contrary are complete and total fantasy, and this Brad Templeton guy is just some jackass saying whatever he has to say to get free publicity.
Why? Let's start from the beginning: You have a computer, controlling engine and steering by wire. You can easily have a tiny remote control so you can do the steering by wire if the computer fails, or if it gets into a situation that it cannot handle (presumably short term). If the steering by wire fails, you send a pickup truck like you would now in case of a break down. If something goes wrong and there is no qualified driver, you call for help and a qualified driver arrives. These things are so rare that the slight inconvenience doesn't matter.
3. Legislators increase the minimum insurance requirements for *all* vehicles to match that of autonomous vehicles. Suddenly a $500/year policy isn't enough. It's now $5k.
You suffer from a huge misconception here, thinking that insurance with $10 million limit would have to be ten times more per year than one with a $250k limit. Not at all, as everyone driving in European countries with much higher limits will tell you.
The huge majority of accidents, but also the huge majority of total damage, is paid within the $250k limit. Whenever I had the choice between different limits (say 1 million or 2 million or 10 million Euros), the difference in cost is absolute peanuts.
Of course there may be a difference in the USA, because the amount of insurance cover is always equal to the amount that you get sued for. And again, European countries have very simple measures to prevent that from happening.