I read the story and my first reaction was "boo fucking hoo. You were inconvenienced while travelling by air with two computers in your backpack. You are, by any rational standards, one of the richest people on the face of the Earth. Either leave the USA or shut the f*ck up and stop complaining."
So you don't like him complaining? Well, either leave the USA, or shut the f*ck up complaining about him.
But actually, if something is wrong in a country, people shouldn't leave, they should do their best to improve things. Throw out the people who mess it up.
I don't advocate the hotel's position here for one minute, but I think they might have a case under willful defamation.... even though true, the facts were publicly presented with malicious intent to publicly discredit them, where they were presumably making every effort to resolve the situation once they became aware of it.
That's what happens if I make a claim that is factually true, with the intent that people will be misinterpreting it. For example, you may have been arrested for murder, but later proven innocent (because the real culprit was found). Telling people that you were arrested for murder, knowing fully that you are indeed innocent, would be willful defamation. This guy published his review so that people would get the _correct_ impression of the hotel. If the correct impression is bad, that's not his fault.
USB as a whole is already a silly design, having all these silly details and ambiguities. For example, where it has a minimum time (10ms in this case), it should also have a maximum time (for example 50ms). Devices should be able to communicate after that maximum time or they are broken. Actually, there should be a maximum time when powered up... how is a minimum even useful for anything.
There is a maximum time, which is 10ms. According to the spec, the kernel has to wait 10ms for the device to be ready. Say you have different kernels waiting 10, 20, 50 and 100 ms. A device that is ready after 15ms works on 3 kernels, but not on all 4, therefore it is broken. Actually, the device must be ready in 10ms, or it is broken.
"Minimum time the kernel has to wait" = "Maximum time the device is allowed to take to get ready".
That would be an ideal solution, but checking the car between each customer use is probably not going to be practical.
What's the problem? The next passenger checks it automatically. Worst case: You open the car, the smell of vomit hits you, you close the door, report it and pick up another car. The car registered that you never actually drove, just opened the door for two seconds.
And you could have a little moveable camera that takes closeup photos of all the seats etc. after a passenger leaves. That would also be useful if you forget your wallet and the next driver claims there wasn't one.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
Today, when a speed limit is set (in a civilised country, maybe not in the USA), it is set with the assumption that many people will drive a bit faster than the speed limit, and very few people will drive a lot faster, so you set it maybe 10 miles below the maximum speed that is safe, and that way keep everyone safe except some idiots. And you don't worry about people driving a bit too fast, because they are still safe.
With that assumption, you could increase the limit for driverless cars, where you can be sure that they will stay below that limit.
Driving a manually operated car through a hoard of autonomous cars. Splitting two lanes, step on the gas. The autonomous cars detect your car impinging on their lane, so they move out of the way, and the sea of autonomous cars parts like a wave in front of you.
They'll need a lot of algorithms to deal with the unexpected, and people who deliberately want to mess with them, heh.
That kind of driving would be dangerous and illegal; whether you can do it without a crash or not. I'd assume that driverless cars would have cameras to gather evidence in case of an accident, because the passengers might not be paying attention, so you'd probably have a dozen videos being sent to the police, enough for a conviction.
This "if you believe in what you're saying, then you'll sign your name to it" bullshit are just manipulative ploys used by elites to try to shame people whose speech they don't like,
There's also the question how common your name is. There are two people with my real name in Germany, eleven with my last name in all of Britain and none with the same first name. My wife's name is most likely unique in the world. Much easier for Joe Smith to post under his real name than me.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
There are certainly apps that are very, very useful but only to a very small number of people. Why would you discriminate against them?
I was looking to buy an SSD drive, so I tried amazon.co.uk. Entered "SSD" into search, restricted departments to "Computers and accessories".
There are 96,000 different SSD drives for sale. 95,500 are sold by the same company. Their list of drives are: Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 1. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 2. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 3..... Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Zenith obscure model 497.
Sorry, the name isn't assholecompany, it is "Arch Memory". They are basically performing a DOS attack against anyone else trying to sell SSD drives on Amazon.co.uk.
Calorie restriction ALWAYS works. There's no way for it not to. All the body reactions that can cause gains or reduce losses, are entirely temporary and rather short-term. And starving is never required... Just keeping yourself very slightly hungry for a few weeks, rather than stuffing your face at every opportunity.
Except that it never works, because your brain will keep telling you that you need more food, so eventually you stop your diet, all the weight comes back, and then some more because your brain remembers bad times with no food available so it makes sure you have some extra reserves for the next time food gets scarce.
Yet you're telling me that, if I try to bypass a blacklist for any reason, I'm committing fraud?
If _one_ person is blacklisted (lost their legal authorisation to access the site), and a blacklist blocks a whole bunch of people from accessing the site, then all but one of them are still legally authorised. Of course the site may say "we have so much trouble coming from that IP range, we blacklist all of them". Which is a bit unfair, but perfectly legal.
Imagine one person is banned from a shopping mall. If that person puts on a false beard and enters the shopping mall, they may not be recognised, but they are still trespassing. If _you_ put on a false beard, that doesn't make you a trespasser.
You cannot steal that which is freely given. Since craigslist immediately serves up its content to anyone who goes to their URL, you cannot claim it is not freely given. If they want it to be otherwise, they need to require authorization. It isn't as though this technology isn't readily available and easy to implement.
That's the geek speaking, confusing authorisation via some computer-implemented authorisation mechanism with legal authorisation. On a website like craigslist with no computer-implemented authorisation mechanism that keeps you out, you can assume that you have the legal authorisation to visit the site. Until you get violently kicked out, like in this case via a court order. Then you have no legal authorisation anymore. Whether the security mechanism employed are strong or weak, you have no authorisation.
Can the app modify itself by taking its hidden code from the images and actually execute it? Can you download "new" code from the internet, even if its steganographically hidden? It seems like you shouldn't be able to do this, like the apps should be sandboxed from modifying their own code just to prevent importing unapproved code.
It may be quite possible that you can create code on the fly. However, the app is still sandboxed. It has permissions, and it cannot do anything that it isn't permitted to do. Which _should_ be a protection against viruses (even if some virus or malware can attack your app, it cannot break out of the sandbox and do things that the app isn't allowed to do), but it also protects against the app maker doing naughty things himself.
1. The only people downloading the app were the developers. No "havoc" happened.
2. The app is sandboxed. It doesn't escape out of its sandbox. Therefore, it can only do things that it is allowed to do.
3. The identity of the developers was known to Apple. If malware was delivered to end users, Apple could get hold of the developer.
4. To actually attack an end user, you still have to create an app that does what it claims it does, and that does things interesting enough to make people download it.
5. If an app did "wreak havoc", then Apple could kill it dead on all iOS devices.
Perhaps they should pay him extra and thank him... he could have done much, much, worse, and from a dummy account. He quite obviously wanted to help. Being a dick to people trying to help you is not a great way to encourage others.
Hacking into someone's account is a criminal offence. So you are saying they should pay him and think him, because he committed a worse offence than he did?
In the US, if it's less than $600 in profits, I'm sure nothing applies to you. Regarding NSA and Bitcoins, a year ago I would have modded you a troll...
In Germany, the distinction is between professional and non-professional, and between speculative gains and non-speculative gains.
If you trade bitcoins professionally then you pay tax, but your cost is tax deductible. Whether you are doing it professionally is determined by what you are actually doing, not by what you claim you are doing. Speculative gains is simple: If you buy and sell within less than a year, that's speculative gains and is taxed. If you keep it for more than a year, that's just good luck if the value climbs, and no tax. But remember that _first_ is the determination whether you do it professionally.
Dealing with the IRS is no problem in Germany. Just put it into your tax return. You say what regular income you have, what tax deductions, and what over income. So you write "Profit from trading BitCoin: 365 Euros", and that's it. One line in your tax return.
"No. Alligators canâ(TM)t hurdle". What does "can hurdle" mean? Surely a horse can hurdle by any reasonable definition. Other animals can. I'm sure that if you dangle a nice piece of meat in front of an alligator, a few hurdles aren't going to stop it getting at that meat. Do the rules for hurdling mention that you have to jump over the hurdles? I don't know. Do the rules say you have to cross _over_ the hurdles, or are they just an obstacle that can be handled any way you like? Conclusion: Without precise knowledge of the rules of hurdling, which 99% of humans don't have, we can't answer the question for sure, and depending on the rules, the answer may very well be "yes".
Woz built the Apple 1 motherboard (interestingly, unlike products like Macintosh, iPod, iPad, Pentium and so on, the first Apple computer was actually called Apple 1 from the start). Jobs convinced Byte Shop to hand over $25,000 for 50 finished boards. How many would have been built without that first sale?
Let's not forget that, although he did have the excuse of desperation, he did use his wealth to put himself essentially at the top of the list for a transplant organ.
He didn't. He went on the list in another state, and waited his turn like everyone else in that state. And there are quite a few people doing the same thing. Anybody without money could have done the same thing, except they would have had to move to another state because once a transplant is ready, you have to be in the hospital in very short time.
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Three of these people on your list invented the transistor. Fine. What can I do with a transistor? 99.99% of the population couldn't do _anything_ with it. Somebody has to take an invention and find a use for it. Without that person, the invention is worthless.
It really amazes me how badly some people want history to read that Apple started the computer revolution. If there is any one group responsible for starting the home computing boom, it was the Homebrew Computer Club and the advent of the Altair .
Not really. That wasn't any "home computing" boom. That was a tiny "build your own computer" movement. "Home computing boom" started when you had computers that could be used without a soldering iron.
There were of course other companies involved like Commodore, but without someone building computers that the masses could use there would have been no boom.
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I read the story and my first reaction was "boo fucking hoo. You were inconvenienced while travelling by air with two computers in your backpack. You are, by any rational standards, one of the richest people on the face of the Earth. Either leave the USA or shut the f*ck up and stop complaining."
So you don't like him complaining? Well, either leave the USA, or shut the f*ck up complaining about him.
But actually, if something is wrong in a country, people shouldn't leave, they should do their best to improve things. Throw out the people who mess it up.
Yes, a huge percentage of Americans are actually quite proud of the version of the USA that exists in their heads. Just letting you know.
And elsewhere, people laugh hysterically when they hear an American blathering about the "freest country in the world".
I don't advocate the hotel's position here for one minute, but I think they might have a case under willful defamation.... even though true, the facts were publicly presented with malicious intent to publicly discredit them, where they were presumably making every effort to resolve the situation once they became aware of it.
That's what happens if I make a claim that is factually true, with the intent that people will be misinterpreting it. For example, you may have been arrested for murder, but later proven innocent (because the real culprit was found). Telling people that you were arrested for murder, knowing fully that you are indeed innocent, would be willful defamation. This guy published his review so that people would get the _correct_ impression of the hotel. If the correct impression is bad, that's not his fault.
USB as a whole is already a silly design, having all these silly details and ambiguities. For example, where it has a minimum time (10ms in this case), it should also have a maximum time (for example 50ms). Devices should be able to communicate after that maximum time or they are broken. Actually, there should be a maximum time when powered up ... how is a minimum even useful for anything.
There is a maximum time, which is 10ms. According to the spec, the kernel has to wait 10ms for the device to be ready. Say you have different kernels waiting 10, 20, 50 and 100 ms. A device that is ready after 15ms works on 3 kernels, but not on all 4, therefore it is broken. Actually, the device must be ready in 10ms, or it is broken.
"Minimum time the kernel has to wait" = "Maximum time the device is allowed to take to get ready".
That would be an ideal solution, but checking the car between each customer use is probably not going to be practical.
What's the problem? The next passenger checks it automatically. Worst case: You open the car, the smell of vomit hits you, you close the door, report it and pick up another car. The car registered that you never actually drove, just opened the door for two seconds.
And you could have a little moveable camera that takes closeup photos of all the seats etc. after a passenger leaves. That would also be useful if you forget your wallet and the next driver claims there wasn't one.
The people talking about self-driving cars taking away their "freedom" are afraid they'll no longer be able to drive 75 mph in a 55 mph zone, or run that red light, or tailgate that person who's got the sheer audacity to drive a few miles an hour under the speed limit when they need to get home to watch the game so close they leave paint on their bumper...!
Today, when a speed limit is set (in a civilised country, maybe not in the USA), it is set with the assumption that many people will drive a bit faster than the speed limit, and very few people will drive a lot faster, so you set it maybe 10 miles below the maximum speed that is safe, and that way keep everyone safe except some idiots. And you don't worry about people driving a bit too fast, because they are still safe.
With that assumption, you could increase the limit for driverless cars, where you can be sure that they will stay below that limit.
Driving a manually operated car through a hoard of autonomous cars. Splitting two lanes, step on the gas. The autonomous cars detect your car impinging on their lane, so they move out of the way, and the sea of autonomous cars parts like a wave in front of you.
They'll need a lot of algorithms to deal with the unexpected, and people who deliberately want to mess with them, heh.
That kind of driving would be dangerous and illegal; whether you can do it without a crash or not. I'd assume that driverless cars would have cameras to gather evidence in case of an accident, because the passengers might not be paying attention, so you'd probably have a dozen videos being sent to the police, enough for a conviction.
This "if you believe in what you're saying, then you'll sign your name to it" bullshit are just manipulative ploys used by elites to try to shame people whose speech they don't like,
There's also the question how common your name is. There are two people with my real name in Germany, eleven with my last name in all of Britain and none with the same first name. My wife's name is most likely unique in the world. Much easier for Joe Smith to post under his real name than me.
And once you've instituted that policy, then you can remove apps with a less than 100 downloads per year, or at whatever level you want. Apps need to be useful, and you need to trim the list of apps down every once in a while.
There are certainly apps that are very, very useful but only to a very small number of people. Why would you discriminate against them?
47,000 apps is nothing.
.... Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Zenith obscure model 497.
I was looking to buy an SSD drive, so I tried amazon.co.uk. Entered "SSD" into search, restricted departments to "Computers and accessories".
There are 96,000 different SSD drives for sale. 95,500 are sold by the same company. Their list of drives are: Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 1. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 2. Assholecompany 64 GB SSD drive for Acer obscure model 3.
Sorry, the name isn't assholecompany, it is "Arch Memory". They are basically performing a DOS attack against anyone else trying to sell SSD drives on Amazon.co.uk.
Calorie restriction ALWAYS works. There's no way for it not to. All the body reactions that can cause gains or reduce losses, are entirely temporary and rather short-term. And starving is never required... Just keeping yourself very slightly hungry for a few weeks, rather than stuffing your face at every opportunity.
Except that it never works, because your brain will keep telling you that you need more food, so eventually you stop your diet, all the weight comes back, and then some more because your brain remembers bad times with no food available so it makes sure you have some extra reserves for the next time food gets scarce.
Statistically woman attempt suicide more often than men. But men die at a much higher rate.
That's men in the USA. Because there are plenty of guns available.
Yet you're telling me that, if I try to bypass a blacklist for any reason, I'm committing fraud?
If _one_ person is blacklisted (lost their legal authorisation to access the site), and a blacklist blocks a whole bunch of people from accessing the site, then all but one of them are still legally authorised. Of course the site may say "we have so much trouble coming from that IP range, we blacklist all of them". Which is a bit unfair, but perfectly legal.
Imagine one person is banned from a shopping mall. If that person puts on a false beard and enters the shopping mall, they may not be recognised, but they are still trespassing. If _you_ put on a false beard, that doesn't make you a trespasser.
You cannot steal that which is freely given. Since craigslist immediately serves up its content to anyone who goes to their URL, you cannot claim it is not freely given. If they want it to be otherwise, they need to require authorization. It isn't as though this technology isn't readily available and easy to implement.
That's the geek speaking, confusing authorisation via some computer-implemented authorisation mechanism with legal authorisation. On a website like craigslist with no computer-implemented authorisation mechanism that keeps you out, you can assume that you have the legal authorisation to visit the site. Until you get violently kicked out, like in this case via a court order. Then you have no legal authorisation anymore. Whether the security mechanism employed are strong or weak, you have no authorisation.
That book might give you an idea why cryonics might not be a good idea. Even if it works.
Can the app modify itself by taking its hidden code from the images and actually execute it? Can you download "new" code from the internet, even if its steganographically hidden? It seems like you shouldn't be able to do this, like the apps should be sandboxed from modifying their own code just to prevent importing unapproved code.
It may be quite possible that you can create code on the fly. However, the app is still sandboxed. It has permissions, and it cannot do anything that it isn't permitted to do. Which _should_ be a protection against viruses (even if some virus or malware can attack your app, it cannot break out of the sandbox and do things that the app isn't allowed to do), but it also protects against the app maker doing naughty things himself.
1. The only people downloading the app were the developers. No "havoc" happened.
2. The app is sandboxed. It doesn't escape out of its sandbox. Therefore, it can only do things that it is allowed to do.
3. The identity of the developers was known to Apple. If malware was delivered to end users, Apple could get hold of the developer.
4. To actually attack an end user, you still have to create an app that does what it claims it does, and that does things interesting enough to make people download it.
5. If an app did "wreak havoc", then Apple could kill it dead on all iOS devices.
Perhaps they should pay him extra and thank him ... he could have done much, much, worse, and from a dummy account. He quite obviously wanted to help. Being a dick to people trying to help you is not a great way to encourage others.
Hacking into someone's account is a criminal offence. So you are saying they should pay him and think him, because he committed a worse offence than he did?
In the US, if it's less than $600 in profits, I'm sure nothing applies to you. Regarding NSA and Bitcoins, a year ago I would have modded you a troll...
In Germany, the distinction is between professional and non-professional, and between speculative gains and non-speculative gains.
If you trade bitcoins professionally then you pay tax, but your cost is tax deductible. Whether you are doing it professionally is determined by what you are actually doing, not by what you claim you are doing. Speculative gains is simple: If you buy and sell within less than a year, that's speculative gains and is taxed. If you keep it for more than a year, that's just good luck if the value climbs, and no tax. But remember that _first_ is the determination whether you do it professionally.
Dealing with the IRS is no problem in Germany. Just put it into your tax return. You say what regular income you have, what tax deductions, and what over income. So you write "Profit from trading BitCoin: 365 Euros", and that's it. One line in your tax return.
"No. Alligators canâ(TM)t hurdle". What does "can hurdle" mean? Surely a horse can hurdle by any reasonable definition. Other animals can. I'm sure that if you dangle a nice piece of meat in front of an alligator, a few hurdles aren't going to stop it getting at that meat. Do the rules for hurdling mention that you have to jump over the hurdles? I don't know. Do the rules say you have to cross _over_ the hurdles, or are they just an obstacle that can be handled any way you like? Conclusion: Without precise knowledge of the rules of hurdling, which 99% of humans don't have, we can't answer the question for sure, and depending on the rules, the answer may very well be "yes".
Woz is the legend. Jobs was the PR machine.
Woz built the Apple 1 motherboard (interestingly, unlike products like Macintosh, iPod, iPad, Pentium and so on, the first Apple computer was actually called Apple 1 from the start). Jobs convinced Byte Shop to hand over $25,000 for 50 finished boards. How many would have been built without that first sale?
Let's not forget that, although he did have the excuse of desperation, he did use his wealth to put himself essentially at the top of the list for a transplant organ.
He didn't. He went on the list in another state, and waited his turn like everyone else in that state. And there are quite a few people doing the same thing. Anybody without money could have done the same thing, except they would have had to move to another state because once a transplant is ready, you have to be in the hospital in very short time.
Well put. Non-techies go "ooh, ahh" because the end products are what they see. Meanwhile, how many people have heard of Nyquist, Bardeen, Brattain, Shockley, Shannon, Kilby, Noyce and all the other tech pioneers and inventors who made this stuff possible. Money? Sure, but there are others with more. Nor is Jobs even colorful enough to be interesting, like Howard Hughes. Please stop, this is getting worse than the 24x7 coverage of the OJ trial.
Three of these people on your list invented the transistor. Fine. What can I do with a transistor? 99.99% of the population couldn't do _anything_ with it. Somebody has to take an invention and find a use for it. Without that person, the invention is worthless.
It really amazes me how badly some people want history to read that Apple started the computer revolution. If there is any one group responsible for starting the home computing boom, it was the Homebrew Computer Club and the advent of the Altair .
Not really. That wasn't any "home computing" boom. That was a tiny "build your own computer" movement. "Home computing boom" started when you had computers that could be used without a soldering iron.
There were of course other companies involved like Commodore, but without someone building computers that the masses could use there would have been no boom.