I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.
Apple makes more profit selling PCs than all the other manufacturers together, and these profits are growing year after year after year. Why would they get out of that business?
Apple stopped selling music with DRM over six years ago. But it would seem that the problem is connecting to the Apple Store and purchasing (which hurts mostly Apple) and playing music and videos with DRM _on that computer_. Everything should continue to work phone on iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Anyone here who has actually listened to or viewed DRM protected content from Apple on Windows XP in the last year?
They already hold a lottery for WWDC, as it is far more popular than the number of people they can actually hold in the largest venue. And that too is a lottery to get the chance to purchase. So it's not a new thing.
They had to, after one developer conference was sold out within less than two minutes...
I'm not sure what exactly is going on with GÃbbel's family, but Hitler's works are owned by the state of Bavaria, and they do what they can to prevent any neo-nazis from copying it (other people don't seem to be very interested in these works). It might not be about the money, but about preventing publication. Which in this case would be understandable.
Why not? Isn't it like shrinkwrap licences on software where you can't review the terms until you've agreed to them?
Where do you see that? Usually what you get is that you don't have a valid license until you review the terms and agree to them, and if you disagree, you can return the product.
... and anything from iPhone 4 upwards can use iOS 7. There is practically no reason not to write for IOS 7 exclusively, since nobody with iOS 6 is going to buy any apps anymore.
Besides, who doesn't like a language which has the entire unicode character set available for variable names, including the symbols? Can make for some colorful code.
Actually, you can create completely invisible variable names. Shame that superscript 2 and superscript 3 are not valid for custom operators.
Short version: Man is added to Wikipedia with wrong name. While he tries to get it changed, a usually reputable newspaper copies his wrong name from the Wikipedia article. Result: The wrong name can now be verified from a reputable source.
Basically, Germany has refused to recognize Scientology as a religion,
To clarify: Nobody in Germany claims officially that Scientology isn't a religion, but it isn't a "religious organisation" that gives it any legal or tax advantages.
You can declare anything you want to be a religion. But for tax advantages, you need more. You need an organisation that tries to be beneficial to society. And that is where Scientology fails quite badly. A religion that said "I believe X, Y and Z and don't give a shit about anybody" wouldn't be a religious organisation the way German laws require it. And a religion that says "I believe X, Y and Z, I exploit people where I can, and I do what I can to hurt my perceived enemies" has no chance.
Yes, lottery is a tax on mathematically challenged.
My more generous interpretation is that a lottery sells you one week of hope that you might get rich for very little money. That's why the USA have these ridiculously high lottery winnings.
Imagine you were put in a room with 19 others. And they tell you "one of you has won the $200 million lottery. We'll give you a choice: You can all 20 each walk out with $10 million, or one walks out with $200 million and the rest with nothing". What would you pick?
I doubt it's actually possible to enforce encryption backdoors beyond a few major vendors. The result would be similar to exiting attempts to prohibit reverse engineering. It's impossible to outlaw debuggers, disassemblers, logic analyzers, and similar tools. It's like outlawing radios that can tune in to any station. It's been done, but it's not all that effective.
It's not a backdoor that they want, it's a key to the front door:-(
Here's what they can do: Download an open source package. Send an encrypted email to themselves. Check that they can decrypt it with keys supplied by the software. If not, use all the force that the US police can muster to stamp the supplier out of existence.
This exactly. Even IF somehow open source projects were "forced" to include a back door...then knowledgeable people could easily just remove the back door from their copy. And explain to others how to easily do it on some forum hosted outside the US.
It's quite obvious that if major companies had to give their keys to the NSA, then owning or distributing software that doesn't do this would be in itself made a serious crime.
If there is a legal requirement, then it is absolutely enforcable against open source software. If the NSA managed to get laws passed in their favour (which I very much doubt), and for example Apple had to hand over some encryption keys, and all the lawyers they could hire cannot prevent that, what kind of idiot would believe that an open source project would be exempt?
It is time to adopt a system similar to Finland, where fines for infractions such as speeding is proportional to income and ability to pay. For AT&T to pay $25 million for this kind of ridiculous breach in security is outrageous. Exactly what economic incentive does AT&T have to change their ways or improve security? If you answered "None. Zero. zip. Zilch.", you win the prize
You read an article on Slashdot and didn't understand it.
Bill Gates has tenthousand times more money than I have. That doesn't mean he eats tenthousand times more, drinks tenthousand times more, and will speed tenthousand times more often than I do. To influence his individual behaviour, you'd have to give him a bigger fine for one violation.
A big company might have a fleet of 10,000 cars. If their drivers behave exactly as good or as bad as I do, they will get 10,000 times as many speeding tickets than I do. So they spend 10,000 times as much on speeding tickets than I do, quite automatically.
Only in the fantasies of the submitter. They dodged taxes? "Dodging" taxes is a meaningless term. Companies can avoid taxes (perfectly legal) and evade taxes (perfectly illegal). While we can all be annoyed about tax avoidance, that's up to the politicians that made the tax rules and were too stupid to get it right. I very much doubt that you can pin any tax evasion on these companies.
In civilized countries, you don't get 18 years in prison for extortion of $30,000. In Scandinavia you'd get one or two.
So what is the punishment in Scandinavia to breaking the kneecaps of an extortionist in such a way that he will never, ever be able to walk again? I think a $30,000 fine would be an appropriate punishment. I think that should actually be turned into a law, that physical violence against an extortionist will not get a punishment other than a fine.
It appears the long sentence is because they brought 21 counts of identity theft against him, which are served consecutively. In many countries multiple crimes are served concurrently.
18 years... wow. Yes, that he did was morally reprehensible... but he got a sentence longer than many rapists. Obviously the $30K he supposedly pulled in didn't afford good legal assistance.
Parking problems go away. Parking is a problem because of proximity of the parking to the places that people want to be. With autonomous cars your car can park 10 mins away and what do you care? As you want to leave you trigger the pickup app and the car drives to your designated pickup point. Also since you don't have to depend on the skills of the driver, just capabilities of the car you can design car parks that cram vehicles in shorter areas and with no space to open doors and have a centralized drop off/pick up point at the garage.
Parking today also requires that you find a space where the car can stay for a while without obstruction. So on my road, you can't park your car in front of my garage and disappear for an hour, because I would be angry if I wanted to get into my garage. With a self driving car, no problem. It can park where it likes (within reason) and move to a different place if needed. That self driving car in front of my garage is no problem, because it disappears when I need to get in.
3. What happens when every pedestrian, cyclist, etc., knows that pretty much every car on the road, being automated, will run itself into a tree rather than hit you? How far is the urge to ride down the street on a skateboard and whack cars with sticks or newspapers as a prank to set off car alarms from the urge to jump in front of a car knowing you can force it to stop?
Driverless cars will by necessity have tons of cameras. A "prank" like that will be visible on multiple cameras, and you can bet that you are going to pay dearly for that bit of fun.
The increased use of surveillance, both inside the car and on our streets.
And the dire consequences if everyone uses shared driverless cares, and you are banned from using one because of bad behaviour. If driverless cars really take off, not being able to share a driverless car might be worse than not having a driving license today. Taxis with driver would be more rare and therefore much more expensive.
And for all those people who use operating systems written by Microsoft or Apple: Why the f*** would they care whether a Codec is royalty free or not? Apple and Microsoft are paying the royalties. And they defend against patent trolls who suddenly start demanding billions of dollars for mp3 codecs (Motorola and Google, I'm looking at you).
This is why it's important to have royalty-free codecs for the web that everyone is free to implement. You can choose to do your own implementation of a given codec and take direct responsibility for the security of the implementation, or ship your preferred choice of third-party implementation directly integrated with your product without any patent licensing hassle. I just hope Opus [opus-codec.org] audio and NetVC [tomshardware.com] video become ubiquitous sooner rather than later.
Lame, lame, lame. This is a bug. The same bug could happen with any codec. And as proven by OpenSSL, just because people _can_ look at code and find bugs, that doesn't mean they _do_ look at the code and find bugs.
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I could easily see Apple abandoning the PC market. As a business they make most of the money on mobile devices & iStore. They continue to make good hardware in their laptops but it would be easy to see them decide it wasn't worth it if the pc market deteriorated further in the future.
Apple makes more profit selling PCs than all the other manufacturers together, and these profits are growing year after year after year. Why would they get out of that business?
Apple stopped selling music with DRM over six years ago. But it would seem that the problem is connecting to the Apple Store and purchasing (which hurts mostly Apple) and playing music and videos with DRM _on that computer_. Everything should continue to work phone on iPod, iPhone and iPad.
Anyone here who has actually listened to or viewed DRM protected content from Apple on Windows XP in the last year?
They already hold a lottery for WWDC, as it is far more popular than the number of people they can actually hold in the largest venue. And that too is a lottery to get the chance to purchase. So it's not a new thing.
They had to, after one developer conference was sold out within less than two minutes...
I'm not sure what exactly is going on with GÃbbel's family, but Hitler's works are owned by the state of Bavaria, and they do what they can to prevent any neo-nazis from copying it (other people don't seem to be very interested in these works). It might not be about the money, but about preventing publication. Which in this case would be understandable.
Why not? Isn't it like shrinkwrap licences on software where you can't review the terms until you've agreed to them?
Where do you see that? Usually what you get is that you don't have a valid license until you review the terms and agree to them, and if you disagree, you can return the product.
... and anything from iPhone 4 upwards can use iOS 7. There is practically no reason not to write for IOS 7 exclusively, since nobody with iOS 6 is going to buy any apps anymore.
no, sorry but unless you are terminal, it is the weakest thing you can do
Even weaker is spouting nonsense about people who commit suicide, without the slightest clue why it happens.
Besides, who doesn't like a language which has the entire unicode character set available for variable names, including the symbols? Can make for some colorful code.
Actually, you can create completely invisible variable names. Shame that superscript 2 and superscript 3 are not valid for custom operators.
I can't believe that it takes over a gallon of water to grow a single almond. Maybe they should look at ways of improving that.
If they don't, terrorists will start buying almonds to destroy California.
As an example where "truth vs. verifiability" leads was actually discussed on Slashdot here: http://tech.slashdot.org/story...
Short version: Man is added to Wikipedia with wrong name. While he tries to get it changed, a usually reputable newspaper copies his wrong name from the Wikipedia article. Result: The wrong name can now be verified from a reputable source.
Basically, Germany has refused to recognize Scientology as a religion,
To clarify: Nobody in Germany claims officially that Scientology isn't a religion, but it isn't a "religious organisation" that gives it any legal or tax advantages.
You can declare anything you want to be a religion. But for tax advantages, you need more. You need an organisation that tries to be beneficial to society. And that is where Scientology fails quite badly. A religion that said "I believe X, Y and Z and don't give a shit about anybody" wouldn't be a religious organisation the way German laws require it. And a religion that says "I believe X, Y and Z, I exploit people where I can, and I do what I can to hurt my perceived enemies" has no chance.
Yes, lottery is a tax on mathematically challenged.
My more generous interpretation is that a lottery sells you one week of hope that you might get rich for very little money. That's why the USA have these ridiculously high lottery winnings.
Imagine you were put in a room with 19 others. And they tell you "one of you has won the $200 million lottery. We'll give you a choice: You can all 20 each walk out with $10 million, or one walks out with $200 million and the rest with nothing". What would you pick?
I doubt it's actually possible to enforce encryption backdoors beyond a few major vendors. The result would be similar to exiting attempts to prohibit reverse engineering. It's impossible to outlaw debuggers, disassemblers, logic analyzers, and similar tools. It's like outlawing radios that can tune in to any station. It's been done, but it's not all that effective.
It's not a backdoor that they want, it's a key to the front door :-(
Here's what they can do: Download an open source package. Send an encrypted email to themselves. Check that they can decrypt it with keys supplied by the software. If not, use all the force that the US police can muster to stamp the supplier out of existence.
This exactly. Even IF somehow open source projects were "forced" to include a back door...then knowledgeable people could easily just remove the back door from their copy. And explain to others how to easily do it on some forum hosted outside the US.
It's quite obvious that if major companies had to give their keys to the NSA, then owning or distributing software that doesn't do this would be in itself made a serious crime.
If there is a legal requirement, then it is absolutely enforcable against open source software. If the NSA managed to get laws passed in their favour (which I very much doubt), and for example Apple had to hand over some encryption keys, and all the lawyers they could hire cannot prevent that, what kind of idiot would believe that an open source project would be exempt?
It is time to adopt a system similar to Finland, where fines for infractions such as speeding is proportional to income and ability to pay. For AT&T to pay $25 million for this kind of ridiculous breach in security is outrageous. Exactly what economic incentive does AT&T have to change their ways or improve security? If you answered "None. Zero. zip. Zilch.", you win the prize
You read an article on Slashdot and didn't understand it.
Bill Gates has tenthousand times more money than I have. That doesn't mean he eats tenthousand times more, drinks tenthousand times more, and will speed tenthousand times more often than I do. To influence his individual behaviour, you'd have to give him a bigger fine for one violation.
A big company might have a fleet of 10,000 cars. If their drivers behave exactly as good or as bad as I do, they will get 10,000 times as many speeding tickets than I do. So they spend 10,000 times as much on speeding tickets than I do, quite automatically.
Only in the fantasies of the submitter. They dodged taxes? "Dodging" taxes is a meaningless term. Companies can avoid taxes (perfectly legal) and evade taxes (perfectly illegal). While we can all be annoyed about tax avoidance, that's up to the politicians that made the tax rules and were too stupid to get it right. I very much doubt that you can pin any tax evasion on these companies.
In civilized countries, you don't get 18 years in prison for extortion of $30,000. In Scandinavia you'd get one or two.
So what is the punishment in Scandinavia to breaking the kneecaps of an extortionist in such a way that he will never, ever be able to walk again? I think a $30,000 fine would be an appropriate punishment. I think that should actually be turned into a law, that physical violence against an extortionist will not get a punishment other than a fine.
It appears the long sentence is because they brought 21 counts of identity theft against him, which are served consecutively. In many countries multiple crimes are served concurrently.
Which I find incomprehensible.
18 years... wow. Yes, that he did was morally reprehensible... but he got a sentence longer than many rapists. Obviously the $30K he supposedly pulled in didn't afford good legal assistance.
He had more victims than the average rapist.
Parking problems go away. Parking is a problem because of proximity of the parking to the places that people want to be. With autonomous cars your car can park 10 mins away and what do you care? As you want to leave you trigger the pickup app and the car drives to your designated pickup point. Also since you don't have to depend on the skills of the driver, just capabilities of the car you can design car parks that cram vehicles in shorter areas and with no space to open doors and have a centralized drop off/pick up point at the garage.
Parking today also requires that you find a space where the car can stay for a while without obstruction. So on my road, you can't park your car in front of my garage and disappear for an hour, because I would be angry if I wanted to get into my garage. With a self driving car, no problem. It can park where it likes (within reason) and move to a different place if needed. That self driving car in front of my garage is no problem, because it disappears when I need to get in.
3. What happens when every pedestrian, cyclist, etc., knows that pretty much every car on the road, being automated, will run itself into a tree rather than hit you? How far is the urge to ride down the street on a skateboard and whack cars with sticks or newspapers as a prank to set off car alarms from the urge to jump in front of a car knowing you can force it to stop?
Driverless cars will by necessity have tons of cameras. A "prank" like that will be visible on multiple cameras, and you can bet that you are going to pay dearly for that bit of fun.
The increased use of surveillance, both inside the car and on our streets.
And the dire consequences if everyone uses shared driverless cares, and you are banned from using one because of bad behaviour. If driverless cars really take off, not being able to share a driverless car might be worse than not having a driving license today. Taxis with driver would be more rare and therefore much more expensive.
And for all those people who use operating systems written by Microsoft or Apple: Why the f*** would they care whether a Codec is royalty free or not? Apple and Microsoft are paying the royalties. And they defend against patent trolls who suddenly start demanding billions of dollars for mp3 codecs (Motorola and Google, I'm looking at you).
This is why it's important to have royalty-free codecs for the web that everyone is free to implement. You can choose to do your own implementation of a given codec and take direct responsibility for the security of the implementation, or ship your preferred choice of third-party implementation directly integrated with your product without any patent licensing hassle. I just hope Opus [opus-codec.org] audio and NetVC [tomshardware.com] video become ubiquitous sooner rather than later.
Lame, lame, lame. This is a bug. The same bug could happen with any codec. And as proven by OpenSSL, just because people _can_ look at code and find bugs, that doesn't mean they _do_ look at the code and find bugs.