But it is impossible to "not use any confidential information he had access to" without surgery. It's in your brain, you will use it if the situation arises.
That's, in general, nonsense. It's perfectly possible for me not to use information in my brain, if the situation arises. And this would only be about _confidential_ information. For example, anything that is in Amazon's official sales information is not confidential. And any information that is indeed confidential, it is entirely possible for me to keep my mouth shut, don't tell my colleagues, and don't act on it.
There are very few positions indeed where it could be judged that it would be inevitable to use such confidential information. Just because Amazon doesn't trust their employee (or because they just claim they don't trust that employee) doesn't mean he will rat out confidential information.
Well, "Apple co-founder buys Galaxy Gear watch" was news that made the Samsungphiles happy, so surely when the same Apple co-founder says the watch is worthless, that's just as newsworthy.
Perhaps Microsoft should be enjoined from distributing a OS that is responsible for most the the malware and spam that everyone's firewalls and filters are defending against.
Surely it's the creators of malware and spam that are primarily responsible?
I don't understand why the Ecuadorians don't make him a countryman and give him a diplomatic passport?
I wonder what percentage of the Ecuadorian embassy's budget goes on feeding Assange. And if they plan to send him a bill eventually. They must be kicking themselves.
Blaming firearms for suicide is blaming firearms for mental illness. Guns are a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Tools don't instigate anything. Going down that blame road does a severe disservice to what can actually help people in distress.
In the 1950's, lots of households in the UK used coal gas ovens. A coal gas oven makes it very easy to kill yourself - just turn the gas on without lighting the oven, stick your head in and wait. Easy, clean and painless. About 1/3rd of suicides in the UK were made that way. Then coal gas fell out of fashion and was replaced. The suicide rate fell by one third. The people who would have used coal gas ovens didn't switch to another method, they just didn't commit suicide.
On the Golden Gate Bridge, people observed a man who acted very strange and in an agitated way. They called the police. What they found: He had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge, but found himself on the right side. There is really no difference between both sides, but he had his mind set on the left side. And there were six lanes of traffic he had to cross to his suicide destination, and he was afraid that he would get killed crossing six lanes of traffic.
People attempting suicide are not thinking clearly. That's why they are attempting suicide in the first place. They have a Plan A, and if that fails, there is no Plan B. A gun makes it very easy to commit suicide. Take that easy way away, make it harder to commit suicide, and the suicide rate drops.
And then there's the clear statistic that in the USA, there are more women than men attempting suicide, but more men than women succeding - because men own more guns.
How about, "don't have evidence of crimes on your phone," because "you aren't a criminal."/. groupthink is, as usual, that all cops are dishonest and looking to railroad everyone, because there was a bad cop once, and since he wasn't instantly outed by co-workers, that all cops are part of his nefarious plan to subvert your rights at all junctions.
Contrary to popular belief, right to remain silent, right to a lawyer, right against unlawful searches, are not there to protect criminals, but to protect innocent citizens. For example, to protect innocent citizens from having their homes searched with a warrant, the law is that evidence against real criminals has to be thrown it if it is acquired that way - so police has no reason to do unlawful searches against people who might be innocent.
Now as a completely innocent citizen I have the right to have information on my phone that is completely legal but nobody's fucking business, including not the business of a police officer who stops me, and I want to be safe from this to be seen by anybody, including a policeman who has no search warrant.
Should a police officer get a justified search warrant (which is possible even when you are completely innocent), that's tough luck and cannot be avoided. But without such a warrant, my secrets should be safe.
Now I know you are trolling, since the median citizen commits an average of three felonies a day.
I heard that before, and it seems to be a quote from some book, but I have never ever heard any evidence of that. So tell me three things that an average citizen with no intent of breaking the law might do that would be felonies.
It occurs to me that knowing where a parking space is available would reduce time spent driving around, itself reducing pollution, excess expenditure on additional fuel, the clogging of streets, and other issues associated with tons of traffic driving in circles throughout the city.
It increases the time that people without this app take to find a parking spot. And by blocking the parking spaces, those using the app actually make it harder again.
You know, I find the digital screen display radio/gps/etc in my new car way more distracting. Trying to change stations, look at the map for directions etc has almost killed me twice now. They are at least as dangerous as my phone.
And how distracting would it be if your phone connection breaks up in the middle of an important conversation? Obviously you shouldn't be talking on the phone anyway, but I could imagine that someone who loses the connection would act even more distracted and stupid than normally. And if he was driving on the motorway, lots of people on phones coming towards would have that distraction for a short time.
Try doing a 100x100 double precision matrix inversion on one of those chips, and you'll stop yawning pretty quickly.
That should be easily done in a millisecond or so on a single core of any modern Intel processor. You could probably get it down to 100 microseconds on the latest ones.
What's to escalate? When the schedule flat out doesn't work, and your calls to customer service get handed over to a customer svc agent's voice mail, unless they want to talk to you, and they don't... that was what happened with us, I have no idea what happened with them... escalate doesn't help.
In that case, an intelligent man wouldn't just have called customer service. They would have called customer service and told them that if the software provider doesn't send help, twenty violent prisoners will get released, and the prison admin will give these prisoners the addresses of anyone they can find at software company to say "thank you" to them in person.
I don't think this article quite hits the nail. Specifically, its interpretation of the ruling is wrong (though IANAL). Having said that, this is certainly a positive ruling (if you are, like me, opposed to software patents), and in general my impression is that the trend is clearly against software patents. I'm not sure if there is any software patent the court would eventually uphold, but it generally prefers to avoid such sweeping rulings on matters that are not immediately before it. That is, the court is not entirely sure that no software patent can pass the muster, so it prefers to wait until it sees more credible software patents (like compression algorithms, apparently) to rule on those.
Let's say you come up with some clever idea. Not being a software developer, you come to me, explain your idea, and I say "it will take me 12 months to turn this idea into a program". It's a lot of work, and you need a developer who is good at his job, but in these twelve months I do nothing that would be considered inventive, just good, solid work. This ruling says that the software is not patentable.
But let's say there's a difficult part in that idea. Where your idea says "we have this information, and from that information we figure out that other information". And I say "look, I don't have any idea right now how to figure out that other information. It should be possible, but I don't know how to. I'll have to invent something to do this". And now let's say in the end I can't figure out that bit, you go to some other developer, and he manages to solve the problem and writes the software for you. Now there is a much better argument that this software should be patentable.
Sorry, no. All computer programs are math. Especially compression algorithms. They should not be entitled to patent protection. Most programs are exceptionally poor math, as well.
All computer programs are math. Everything else is quantum physics. Quantum physics isn't patentable, so nothing should be patentable.
Unless there is something wrong with your argument.
Since cryptographic and compression algorithms are mathematical in nature, would the "on a computer" apply to them so any cryptographic and compression related patent is invalid?
You are looking at it from the wrong point of view. Here is an unpatentable idea: "We take messages, mash them up in a way so that only the intended receiver can put them back together, and then the intended receiver turns it back into the original message, while anybody else can't read it". No patent. In this case, there is a huge gap between the idea and actually making it work. If that gap is big enough and solving the problem is not obvious and therefore inventive, then it can be patented. And that's the case here. Cryptography and compression can be patented.
The patent that this thread was about was an idea, and an implementation that didn't require any inventive step. No patent.
I mean, the stupid Arithmetic Coding patent is what killed bzip and replaced it with the less compact bzip2 using Huffman coding.
But then Arithmetic Coding _is_ very clever and the average programmer wouldn't have been able to come up with it. The average programmer wouldn't even be able to understand it, after it is explained to them. Huffman isn't _that_ easy either, but definitely easier. So I would not call this a "stupid" patent.
If I can use an existing software language to implement your 'patented' idea, then you shouldn't be able to patent that idea.
You can't patent an idea in the first place. Now if you can implement my idea just by being your job as a competent software developer, then the idea + software cannot be patented. But if there is some part of my idea that not every competent developer can do, that requires a non-obvious invention, then the product might be patentable.
Since these exploits are illegal, a _known_ group cannot perform them. And I'd say that if you have 51% of the bit coin mining capacity, you are a big group and can be identified.
... a court should and will assume that the information you didn't hand over would be speaking against you. That is common practice. So if the judge orders the DOJ to hand over documents, it doesn't really matter that much (in the court case) whether they do or don't. If a plaintiff says "they should hand over these documents because it will clearly show that X is true", and they don't hand them over, then the court will assume that X is indeed true.
The idea that you can make a company successful by not chasing short term monetary gain but by having long term (10+ years) goals and working continously towards achieving those goals.
Oops. The quality of poster on Slashdot is going down. Read the article. The real mac address is used once you attempt to join a network. Its only whilst the device is looking for networks that the randomised MAC is used. It won't impact DHCP leases etc.
It's worse than that. The quality of slashdot posts is _not_ going down:-(
So, basically, the device is doing something stupid (banging away hoping an AP will talk to it, when the USER has not indicated a need to do so), and Apple is just going to put on a fig leaf, of who knows how much transparency, rather than just stop doing the stupid thing? Are the few milliseconds it takes to connect to a network deliberately really going to ruin the the experience THAT much?
Basically, the "stupid" thing is what _all_ devices do. And you are free to call what Apple is doing "putting a fig leaf on", fact is that with any other device everyone interested gets a full frontal view of you in the nude. And of course eventually comes the point where your device _must_ check what WiFi devices are around, because without that it cannot find the one it wants to connect to.
That isn't used when devices scan for WiFi routers. Ever device using WiFi can see any WiFi router that is close enough, even those that you don't see in the UI, and even those that use whitelisting. When the device _connects_, that is where the WiFi router can reject the device due to the MAC address, but at that point Apple uses the correct MAC address.
Really, do you think they are complete idiots who break WiFi for about half their customers?
At least according to the prosecutors who went after Aaron Swartz. His laptop got locked out of a network so he changed the MAC address with the built-in MacOS GUI utility and they said that was like filing the serial number off a car. Now all iphones are going to change it randomly during network scan? OMG, that's like a car that files off its own serial number every time you go around the block! Alert the authorities!!!!! Sigh.
Sad that you don't understand enough about how WiFi works. There are two phases: In the first phase your device detects routers around it. In that phase, it must give out an MAC address so that the router can respond, but the MAC address is completely irrelevant. And no WiFi router will block out anyone during that discovery phase. The second phase is the connect phase, and in the connect phase, the device does indeed give its own MAC address.
In other words, what you are saying is complete bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
But it is impossible to "not use any confidential information he had access to" without surgery. It's in your brain, you will use it if the situation arises.
That's, in general, nonsense. It's perfectly possible for me not to use information in my brain, if the situation arises. And this would only be about _confidential_ information. For example, anything that is in Amazon's official sales information is not confidential. And any information that is indeed confidential, it is entirely possible for me to keep my mouth shut, don't tell my colleagues, and don't act on it.
There are very few positions indeed where it could be judged that it would be inevitable to use such confidential information. Just because Amazon doesn't trust their employee (or because they just claim they don't trust that employee) doesn't mean he will rat out confidential information.
Apple co-founder..."Galaxy Gear...worthless"
Well, "Apple co-founder buys Galaxy Gear watch" was news that made the Samsungphiles happy, so surely when the same Apple co-founder says the watch is worthless, that's just as newsworthy.
Perhaps Microsoft should be enjoined from distributing a OS that is responsible for most the the malware and spam that everyone's firewalls and filters are defending against.
Surely it's the creators of malware and spam that are primarily responsible?
I don't understand why the Ecuadorians don't make him a countryman and give him a diplomatic passport?
I wonder what percentage of the Ecuadorian embassy's budget goes on feeding Assange. And if they plan to send him a bill eventually. They must be kicking themselves.
Blaming firearms for suicide is blaming firearms for mental illness. Guns are a tool, nothing more, nothing less. Tools don't instigate anything. Going down that blame road does a severe disservice to what can actually help people in distress.
In the 1950's, lots of households in the UK used coal gas ovens. A coal gas oven makes it very easy to kill yourself - just turn the gas on without lighting the oven, stick your head in and wait. Easy, clean and painless. About 1/3rd of suicides in the UK were made that way. Then coal gas fell out of fashion and was replaced. The suicide rate fell by one third. The people who would have used coal gas ovens didn't switch to another method, they just didn't commit suicide.
On the Golden Gate Bridge, people observed a man who acted very strange and in an agitated way. They called the police. What they found: He had decided to kill himself by jumping off the left side of the Golden Gate Bridge, but found himself on the right side. There is really no difference between both sides, but he had his mind set on the left side. And there were six lanes of traffic he had to cross to his suicide destination, and he was afraid that he would get killed crossing six lanes of traffic.
People attempting suicide are not thinking clearly. That's why they are attempting suicide in the first place. They have a Plan A, and if that fails, there is no Plan B. A gun makes it very easy to commit suicide. Take that easy way away, make it harder to commit suicide, and the suicide rate drops.
And then there's the clear statistic that in the USA, there are more women than men attempting suicide, but more men than women succeding - because men own more guns.
How about, "don't have evidence of crimes on your phone," because "you aren't a criminal." /. groupthink is, as usual, that all cops are dishonest and looking to railroad everyone, because there was a bad cop once, and since he wasn't instantly outed by co-workers, that all cops are part of his nefarious plan to subvert your rights at all junctions.
Contrary to popular belief, right to remain silent, right to a lawyer, right against unlawful searches, are not there to protect criminals, but to protect innocent citizens. For example, to protect innocent citizens from having their homes searched with a warrant, the law is that evidence against real criminals has to be thrown it if it is acquired that way - so police has no reason to do unlawful searches against people who might be innocent.
Now as a completely innocent citizen I have the right to have information on my phone that is completely legal but nobody's fucking business, including not the business of a police officer who stops me, and I want to be safe from this to be seen by anybody, including a policeman who has no search warrant.
Should a police officer get a justified search warrant (which is possible even when you are completely innocent), that's tough luck and cannot be avoided. But without such a warrant, my secrets should be safe.
Now I know you are trolling, since the median citizen commits an average of three felonies a day.
I heard that before, and it seems to be a quote from some book, but I have never ever heard any evidence of that. So tell me three things that an average citizen with no intent of breaking the law might do that would be felonies.
It occurs to me that knowing where a parking space is available would reduce time spent driving around, itself reducing pollution, excess expenditure on additional fuel, the clogging of streets, and other issues associated with tons of traffic driving in circles throughout the city.
It increases the time that people without this app take to find a parking spot. And by blocking the parking spaces, those using the app actually make it harder again.
You know, I find the digital screen display radio/gps/etc in my new car way more distracting. Trying to change stations, look at the map for directions etc has almost killed me twice now. They are at least as dangerous as my phone.
And how distracting would it be if your phone connection breaks up in the middle of an important conversation? Obviously you shouldn't be talking on the phone anyway, but I could imagine that someone who loses the connection would act even more distracted and stupid than normally. And if he was driving on the motorway, lots of people on phones coming towards would have that distraction for a short time.
Try doing a 100x100 double precision matrix inversion on one of those chips, and you'll stop yawning pretty quickly.
That should be easily done in a millisecond or so on a single core of any modern Intel processor. You could probably get it down to 100 microseconds on the latest ones.
What's to escalate? When the schedule flat out doesn't work, and your calls to customer service get handed over to a customer svc agent's voice mail, unless they want to talk to you, and they don't... that was what happened with us, I have no idea what happened with them... escalate doesn't help.
In that case, an intelligent man wouldn't just have called customer service. They would have called customer service and told them that if the software provider doesn't send help, twenty violent prisoners will get released, and the prison admin will give these prisoners the addresses of anyone they can find at software company to say "thank you" to them in person.
I don't think this article quite hits the nail. Specifically, its interpretation of the ruling is wrong (though IANAL). Having said that, this is certainly a positive ruling (if you are, like me, opposed to software patents), and in general my impression is that the trend is clearly against software patents. I'm not sure if there is any software patent the court would eventually uphold, but it generally prefers to avoid such sweeping rulings on matters that are not immediately before it. That is, the court is not entirely sure that no software patent can pass the muster, so it prefers to wait until it sees more credible software patents (like compression algorithms, apparently) to rule on those.
Let's say you come up with some clever idea. Not being a software developer, you come to me, explain your idea, and I say "it will take me 12 months to turn this idea into a program". It's a lot of work, and you need a developer who is good at his job, but in these twelve months I do nothing that would be considered inventive, just good, solid work. This ruling says that the software is not patentable.
But let's say there's a difficult part in that idea. Where your idea says "we have this information, and from that information we figure out that other information". And I say "look, I don't have any idea right now how to figure out that other information. It should be possible, but I don't know how to. I'll have to invent something to do this". And now let's say in the end I can't figure out that bit, you go to some other developer, and he manages to solve the problem and writes the software for you. Now there is a much better argument that this software should be patentable.
Sorry, no. All computer programs are math. Especially compression algorithms. They should not be entitled to patent protection. Most programs are exceptionally poor math, as well.
All computer programs are math. Everything else is quantum physics. Quantum physics isn't patentable, so nothing should be patentable.
Unless there is something wrong with your argument.
Since cryptographic and compression algorithms are mathematical in nature, would the "on a computer" apply to them so any cryptographic and compression related patent is invalid?
You are looking at it from the wrong point of view. Here is an unpatentable idea: "We take messages, mash them up in a way so that only the intended receiver can put them back together, and then the intended receiver turns it back into the original message, while anybody else can't read it". No patent. In this case, there is a huge gap between the idea and actually making it work. If that gap is big enough and solving the problem is not obvious and therefore inventive, then it can be patented. And that's the case here. Cryptography and compression can be patented.
The patent that this thread was about was an idea, and an implementation that didn't require any inventive step. No patent.
I mean, the stupid Arithmetic Coding patent is what killed bzip and replaced it with the less compact bzip2 using Huffman coding.
But then Arithmetic Coding _is_ very clever and the average programmer wouldn't have been able to come up with it. The average programmer wouldn't even be able to understand it, after it is explained to them. Huffman isn't _that_ easy either, but definitely easier. So I would not call this a "stupid" patent.
If I can use an existing software language to implement your 'patented' idea, then you shouldn't be able to patent that idea.
You can't patent an idea in the first place. Now if you can implement my idea just by being your job as a competent software developer, then the idea + software cannot be patented. But if there is some part of my idea that not every competent developer can do, that requires a non-obvious invention, then the product might be patentable.
Since these exploits are illegal, a _known_ group cannot perform them. And I'd say that if you have 51% of the bit coin mining capacity, you are a big group and can be identified.
... a court should and will assume that the information you didn't hand over would be speaking against you. That is common practice. So if the judge orders the DOJ to hand over documents, it doesn't really matter that much (in the court case) whether they do or don't. If a plaintiff says "they should hand over these documents because it will clearly show that X is true", and they don't hand them over, then the court will assume that X is indeed true.
Name me one thing you ever invented.
The idea that you can make a company successful by not chasing short term monetary gain but by having long term (10+ years) goals and working continously towards achieving those goals.
For an alternative explanation in SF: "Lord of all Things" by Andreas Eschbach.
Amazon, Warner, Hachette and others seem determined to drive everyone to torrents.
What is your complaint about Warner and Hachette in this case?
Oops. The quality of poster on Slashdot is going down. Read the article. The real mac address is used once you attempt to join a network. Its only whilst the device is looking for networks that the randomised MAC is used. It won't impact DHCP leases etc.
It's worse than that. The quality of slashdot posts is _not_ going down :-(
So, basically, the device is doing something stupid (banging away hoping an AP will talk to it, when the USER has not indicated a need to do so), and Apple is just going to put on a fig leaf, of who knows how much transparency, rather than just stop doing the stupid thing? Are the few milliseconds it takes to connect to a network deliberately really going to ruin the the experience THAT much?
Basically, the "stupid" thing is what _all_ devices do. And you are free to call what Apple is doing "putting a fig leaf on", fact is that with any other device everyone interested gets a full frontal view of you in the nude. And of course eventually comes the point where your device _must_ check what WiFi devices are around, because without that it cannot find the one it wants to connect to.
What if you have a wifi client whitelist?
That isn't used when devices scan for WiFi routers. Ever device using WiFi can see any WiFi router that is close enough, even those that you don't see in the UI, and even those that use whitelisting. When the device _connects_, that is where the WiFi router can reject the device due to the MAC address, but at that point Apple uses the correct MAC address.
Really, do you think they are complete idiots who break WiFi for about half their customers?
At least according to the prosecutors who went after Aaron Swartz. His laptop got locked out of a network so he changed the MAC address with the built-in MacOS GUI utility and they said that was like filing the serial number off a car. Now all iphones are going to change it randomly during network scan? OMG, that's like a car that files off its own serial number every time you go around the block! Alert the authorities!!!!! Sigh.
Sad that you don't understand enough about how WiFi works. There are two phases: In the first phase your device detects routers around it. In that phase, it must give out an MAC address so that the router can respond, but the MAC address is completely irrelevant. And no WiFi router will block out anyone during that discovery phase. The second phase is the connect phase, and in the connect phase, the device does indeed give its own MAC address.
In other words, what you are saying is complete bullshit.